Re: [Foundation-l] Proposed revised attribution language
2009/3/16 Michael Snow wikipe...@verizon.net: Anthony wrote: For offline copies, that would likewise be no attribution at all. Can we please drop the nonsense that a URL is no attribution at all in an offline context? I've made this point before, but URLs do not suddenly become devoid of meaning just because you're using a medium where you can't follow a hyperlink. I could just as soon say that print media aren't acceptable sources for Wikipedia articles because you can't check them by following a hyperlink, it's the same logic. We allow references that adapt the conventions of other media to our context, we should allow people using other media the same privilege in adapting our conventions to their context. Indeed. The claim is meaningless and querulous noise. Printed objects commonly have a URL on them these days. Listing a source or history short URL would do the job it's intended to. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Proposed revised attribution language
2009/3/16 Andre Engels andreeng...@gmail.com: On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 1:59 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: Indeed. The claim is meaningless and querulous noise. Printed objects commonly have a URL on them these days. Listing a source or history short URL would do the job it's intended to. True, but those are not URLs that contain information that they are contractually obliged to provide to you together with the object. You have failed to establish how that makes any difference - it doesn't. The reason for it being there makes no difference as to whether people know what a URL is when they see it in print. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Proposed revised attribution language
2009/3/14 Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonav...@gmail.com: The only thing *on* wikimedia websites that does satisfy that currently is the history of articles; a direct link into the history is sadly the only option available. I think it is way cool that people are thinking of innovative ways of formatting that information (in ways that would for instance cut out the often inflammatory edit summaries), but that is for the future. Here's an idea: nice URLs for the history. So we don't end up with stupid things peppered with ? and and = printed on mugs, travel guides, etc. e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/history/Xenu for the history of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenu . Something to point at for CC-by-sa attribution is an actual reason to put this into MediaWiki. cc to wikitech-l - is this something suitable for Wikimedia use? Shall I file an enhancement bug? See also: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1450 . - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Proposed revised attribution language
2009/3/14 geni geni...@gmail.com: 2009/3/14 David Gerard dger...@gmail.com: Here's an idea: nice URLs for the history. So we don't end up with stupid things peppered with ? and and = printed on mugs, travel guides, etc. If the people producing the mugs want that they are free to produce a version of the history on their servers or more legally more solid include a sheet of paper with a complete list of authors with the mug. That's true. OTOH, non-pukey history URLs would be good to have anyway. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Proposed revised attribution language
2009/3/14 David Gerard dger...@gmail.com: 2009/3/14 geni geni...@gmail.com: 2009/3/14 David Gerard dger...@gmail.com: Here's an idea: nice URLs for the history. So we don't end up with stupid things peppered with ? and and = printed on mugs, travel guides, etc. If the people producing the mugs want that they are free to produce a version of the history on their servers or more legally more solid include a sheet of paper with a complete list of authors with the mug. That's true. OTOH, non-pukey history URLs would be good to have anyway. I figure a regular URL which will survive speech is a good thing. The best way to compliance is to make it really easy. Bug filed: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=17981 - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Wikimedia too centralised? (was Re: Attribution by URL reasoning?)
[I've changed the subject line.] 2009/3/11 Lars Aronsson l...@aronsson.se: If the content is free, people don't need to drink from our watertap. It's the water that's important, not the tap. We could have a minimal webserver to receive new edits. Serving replication feeds to a handful of media corporations (who might pay for it!) should be far cheaper than to receive all this web traffic. Some universities might serve up ad-free mirrors. We could be the Associated Press instead of the New York Times, the producer instead of the retailer. Or is the fact that we spend so much to maintain the 7th most visited website an admission to the fact that the space between the copies actually has a great value to us? A value that will be strengthened by cementing its URL and/or the name Wikipedia (attributing the project) into the new license? I'm not against that. I will go with whatever. I'm very flexible and I still think this is a very fun technical experiment. But I think the change is worth some consideration. This is somewhat true. MediaWiki still needs a bloody huge central database server (or three) and so it has them. I suppose the place to ask your question is on wikitech-l. Being able to duplicate the infrastructure is necessary for forking to be meaningful: http://davidgerard.co.uk/notes/2007/04/10/disaster-recovery-planning/ I'm not sure anything listed there has meaningfully changed in the last two years. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution survey, first results
2009/3/9 Milos Rancic mill...@gmail.com: On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 9:28 PM, geni geni...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/3/9 Milos Rancic mill...@gmail.com: Should we treat such persons systematically or it is better to add some exceptional rules? Something like to give a mandate to WMF to solve problems of types like giving a formal permission to the government of Central African Republic (or to some NGO which operates there) to print Wikipedia editions in English and Swahili without any attribution (even they don't need it). Or for spoken editions for education of blind persons? There is no legal way to do that nor is there any real benefit in doing so. If the present options are between linking to the history of article at Wikipedia up to the full attribution, I don't see any reason why the whole range can't be applied in the ToS. (And, yes, I made a mistake with mentioning no attribution at all.) In copyright law and the terms of the CC by-sa, WMF can't actually promise something like that in terms of what they own and don't own. Remember that licenses are not merely a game of Nomic, but responses to a given legal threat model. In this case, the threat model is: what if some raving and/or malicious lunatic who has copyright on a piece of this thing drags someone into court over it? The reason for the license is so that the defendant can point at the license and say I can do this per the license. (And probably and per common practice, because law is squishier than Nomic.) So the aims of the suggested terms for relicensing will not be to achieve some theoretical outcome that makes everyone as happy as possible, but to provide sufficient results to be usable in terms of: 1. giving reusers confidence they can defend themselves against a raving and/or malicious lunatic in court; 2. not pissing off so much of the community they fork. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Simple English Wikipedia on xkcd
2009/3/8 Aphaia aph...@gmail.com: I would like to encourage Simple English Wikipedia fans to blog about it ... particularly if you are non-English native speakers. The wiki is just not known. They might know their mother tongue Wikipedia and English one but not Simplewiki. I find it surprising how often people are only aware of the English Wikipedia and barely aware of their native language Wikipedia ... so I'm not surprised Simple is not well known. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] BBC News on BLP vandalism
2009/3/6 Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com: 2009/3/6 Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.com: When the English Wikipedia is the only Wikipedia with BLP issues, I completely agree. It's the only Wikipedia where BLP issues significantly affect UK politicians, which are the subject of the article. Note that en:wp is more British than might be expected - according to a 2007 statistics run (by Greg Maxwell?), 50% of edits on en:wp are from the US and 25% are from the UK, even though the population ratio is 5:1. So UK residents edit 2.5x as much as US residents per capita. (I use this stat to correct UK journalists who think of Wikipedia as an American thing.) - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
2009/3/5 Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.com: It is not that I am not able to look up words in a dictionary.. When an excess of dificult word is used, the message is lost. None of these were excessively difficult, and now you know more English words. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
2009/3/5 Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.com: My English is considered to be quite good. I have not learned any new words and I do not mind to have an occassional word. For me this was excessive and it stopped my reading and my interest. You didn't notice your original response was to someone whose first language wasn't English either? - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
2009/3/4 Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk: 2009/3/2 David Gerard dger...@gmail.com: (My usual answer: Email info at wikimedia dot org, that's wikimedia with an M. It'll get funneled to the right place. All other ways of contacting us end up there anyway. This seems to work a bit.) Ha. Tie this into Thomas's suggestion... ...print up a sheaf of business cards, with Got a problem? info @ wikimedia.org in nice clear bold lettering, the puzzle-globe at one edge; the other side just WIKIPEDIA writ large. Distribute them to everyone who does PRish stuff... Best. Idea. Ever. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
2009/3/4 Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk: I did a headcount the other week of all the OTRS simple vandalism and uncomplicated BLP tickets I handled - ie, all the ones not needing digging and arguing with people and so on. 80-90% of them would have been avoided by flagged revisions. Please say this REALLY LOUD to the objectors this time around. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
2009/3/4 quiddity pandiculat...@gmail.com: http://www.onelook.com/?w=encomium a formal expression of praise http://www.onelook.com/?w=hagiography a biography that idealizes or idolizes the person (especially a person who is a saint) http://www.onelook.com/?w=saccharine overly sweet *cough* you mean, of course: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/encomium http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hagiography http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/saccharine - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
2009/3/4 KillerChihuahua pu...@killerchihuahua.com: I cannot stress enough how strongly I agree with this assessment. If NPOV, V, and RS were followed - as they should be by normally intelligent adults wishing to write good articles - BLP isn't even needed at all. I support BLP existing, although I've seen it misused a good bit - but IMO it wouldn't hurt a bit if someone IAR'd and gutted a lot of the other policies that have grown up like weeds over the last couple of years. More will only make matters worse. Not quite - the important difference with BLPs is that we cannot be eventualist (start with an awful article and let it improve with time) - we do not have the luxury of eventualism. With BLPs, we must be immediatist - we must not have a live version that violates the content rules. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Report a problem link
2009/3/4 Jim Redmond j...@scrubnugget.com: I'm working on that now. I've half a mind to increase the point size on the phrase Wikipedia has no editorial board and put it in blink tags; if people could actually grok that, then much of the rest of that text could become unnecessary. I just put big tags around it in both places ;-) I'm working on the assumption that someone with a bad article about them is upset and angry and won't read clearly - large print, simple directions. All the pages still feel too long. They could be shorter if there was a Special:Contact page set up (wtih nice dropdowns, etc) - people are used to those. (Offer an or email directly to this address link of course ;-) But OTRS' load would go *way up*. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
2009/3/3 Ting Chen wing.phil...@gmx.de: yes I think the english and the german wikipedias are two models and examples that are often used for the other language versions. I remember the talk from Harel in Taipei about the Hebrew Wikipedia and had the impression that they orient themselves more on the german model. Personally I believe that if German is more bigger language it this model would be used more often. I have spoken to a few editors who speak both German and English, and they say the German Wikipedia is better ... but they actually use the English one more. Because it covers so much more. So German may be better per an internal ideal, but English is actually more useful in any practical sense. (This is of course anecdotal. If anyone wants to compile a list and do a survey of editors who contribute to both en:wp and de:wp ...) - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
2009/3/3 Michael Snow wikipe...@verizon.net: I've made this observation before, but I think it bears repeating. At least on the English Wikipedia, a frequent practice is to start a section called Criticism and controversy or some variation thereof. This indicates to me an utter failure to write an actual biographical article. If we can't figure out how to integrate something into the overall picture of someone's life, then we're definitely failing to provide the context to actually understand the controversy, probably giving it distorted emphasis, and possibly lacking the material to treat the person as the subject of an independent article. Quite often, of course, the back-and-forth in that section ends up overwhelming any other content instead. If bad writing were curable by guidelines and policies, English Wikipedia would be brilliant prose from end to end. It isn't - there's a discernible Wikipedia style which is flat, grey and neutralised. Useful for spotting plagiarism of it. Good writers are thin on the ground - most editors are more skilled at researching and referencing, and can write a decipherable sentence. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
2009/3/3 Sue Gardner sgard...@wikimedia.org: Can I ask: does anyone reading this thread 1) think raising the notability threshold is a bad idea, 2) believe defaulting to deletion upon request is a bad idea, or 3) disagree with the notion that other Wikipedias should shift closer to the German Wikipedia's generally-less-permissive policies and practices, particularly WRT BLPs? Deletion upon request is a terrible idea. It will lead to only hagiographies - violations of NPOV - being kept. (This has been discussed at length on wikien-l, fwiw.) Raise the threshold in a manner that does not violate fundamental content policies. Any BLP policy that violates fundamental content policies will be unworkable. Think of it as unconstitutional. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
2009/3/3 Sue Gardner sgard...@wikimedia.org: Can I ask: does anyone reading this thread 1) think raising the notability threshold is a bad idea, 2) believe defaulting to deletion upon request is a bad idea, or 3) disagree with the notion that other Wikipedias should shift closer to the German Wikipedia's generally-less-permissive policies and practices, particularly WRT BLPs? And yes, I think 3. is a very bad idea - en:wp's greatest strength is its breadth of coverage. As I noted, de:wp seems to fit people's ideals of an encyclopedia more, but en:wp is actually more useful in any practical sense. 1. is an idea to be approached with profound caution - far too many BLP policy proposals get a bit close to throwing out neutrality, i.e. violating Wikipedia's greatest innovation in the encyclopedia space. This thread has a bit of an air of something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do this. That is a logical fallacy. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
2009/3/2 Mike Godwin mnemo...@gmail.com: I'm unclear as to how it seems inconsistent to you. Can you explain what you think is unreconciled? I assume you recognize that NPOV has been adopted by the Wikipedia community and is enforced by it (and not by the Foundation). That statement is actually false - Wikipedias have been shut down by the Foundation for being grossly negligent of NPOV (Siberian, Moldovan). - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Report a problem link
2009/3/3 David Gerard dger...@gmail.com: 2009/3/3 Birgitte SB birgitte...@yahoo.com: I there is simpler way to solicit these reports this without all the false positives that might come from a report a problem link. I imagine that all these people who have issues must click on the Help link in the sidebar while looking contact information. Why not have a banner on that page saying If you have a problem with information about yourself that is on Wikipedia report it here. And send it to a specific email address. 195468 hits on [[Help:Contents]] in Feb 2009 rank #466 - it's well worth a try. Propose it on [[Help talk:contents]] referring back to this discussion and those agreeing can support it there. Proposed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help_talk:Contents#Link_to_article_problems_page_or_.22Contact_Wikipedia.22_at_top Please add yea or nay on this specific proposal there - consensus on the talk page is the usual requirement before a change to a major portal. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Cabal?
2009/3/3 Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com: A sub-cabal within the board? Now, what colour would *their* helicopters be? We're a charity. They flap their arms really hard. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
2009/3/3 Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net: With respect to biographies of living persons, unless there is sufficient reliable published information about a person to flesh out a well balanced article we shouldn't have one. The question them becomes reliable. Reliable sources usually print whatever the subject tells them, even if it's a damn lie. (See the Polish example earlier in this thread.) - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
2009/3/3 Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonav...@gmail.com: Sure, the persons themselves can not be harmed, but our deep understanding of the forces of history, and what force personality, heredity, cultural context and up-bringing play within it, is immeasurably impoverished by getting a view that is faulty. In which case it's an important issue, but it's not *this* important issue. At all. Even a bit. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
2009/3/3 Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonav...@gmail.com: Bear with me. I started with that, because that is something at the periphery, easily overlooked. I will focus on the meat of the issue in due time. Then I ask you to get to the point and stay on it, because this needs to be a thread focused on this specific issue, not one susceptible to being hijacked for other causes. Whether that's your intention or not. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
2009/3/3 Matthew Brown mor...@gmail.com: I see no reason why having an article on someone need include information not published in reliable sources. If they're well-known for something in the public eye but details of their life elsewhere are not prevalent, then that's how our article should be as well. This will promptly become a your source is great/no yours sucks mine rules battle. When we started requiring references, that became the target of the querulous. And everyone is convinced the term reliable sources is actually (a) objectively definable (b) invariant for all topics. And never mind that people who know about the construction of ontology and how it works usually have a degree or two in the subject, I'm sure a bunch of people who've been on a wiki for a few months can make up something that passes all muster, and if it doesn't then reality is wrong. And the New York Times is gospel, but anything in the subject's own blog must be first assumed to be a tissue of lies, and the subject themselves buried in initialisms. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
2009/3/4 Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net: How about something a little more helpful? Uh, I think pointing out obvious problems counts, particularly when the solution offered is to do the same things that are already problematic twice as hard. The hard part is to lead the community to a standard of living bio that is suitable. * What makes a valid research source is not something teenagers on a website can make up off the top of their heads and expect to get right, but that's what WP:RS is. See the talk page if you don't believe me. Hubris and enthusiasm don't make competence, unfortunately. * No guideline or policy will protect against stupidity or malice, and those that try to will be a millstone for good faith editors. But time and time again, the community reaction has been to add more policies and guidelines in the hope these will protect against stupidity or malice, and blame the good faith editors for not following the bad guidelines hard enough. See the current arbitration case on the matter. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
2009/3/2 Tomasz Ganicz polime...@gmail.com: Two recent examples from Polish Wikipedia: *A sportsmen had anitdoping case around 5 years ago, when he was 18. There is good source of this information (his own interwiev in sport's magazine in which he appologises for taking an illegal drug). Now the guy is saing that it was all forgotten by mainstream media, he was already punished for this (6 months break) but he is now trying to get new contract and Wikipedia entry on him may destroy the deal. Therefore he ask for removing this info or his entire bio... *A pop singer manager wants to remove the birthday of his starllet, because she is (probably) around 30 but her current image show her as almost teenager. The birhtday is sourced by Who is Who in Poland, paper eddtion - but it was removed from electronic version, and they also manged to remove it from all other web-pages. If those were answered any way other than no, go away (however politely phrased), then that's just wrong. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
2009/3/2 Lars Aronsson l...@aronsson.se: What you could do is to ask Polish journalists how they operate newspaper websites under this law, and how they (as guardians of the freedom of the press) would react if the Polish Wikipedia was censored in this way. Perhaps they should write a newspaper article about how this musical artist tries to hide her real age. Yes. It's the sort of issue custom-crafted to backfire really badly. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
2009/3/2 David Gerard dger...@gmail.com: I don't say that lightly, but I can't see any other way things could be. I have a pile of special superpowers on en:wp, but if I were being legally required to exercise them for reasons other than the good of the encyclopedia, I'd be fervently hoping someone would take them away without me actually asking them to. BTW, this is why, when concerns are raised with a BLP on a UK citizen, I tend *not* to edit the article, but to forward the concern to someone not UK-based. UK libel law is *insane*. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
2009/3/2 Anthony wikim...@inbox.org: What is the current OTRS process? When I contacted them a couple years ago I was referred to arb com, and didn't hear from them again. I certainly wasn't satisfied. Pray tell, what was the actual substance of your dispute? (Note that this is speaking of a project on which you say you no longer contribute and on which you claim to have withdrawn rights to all your contributions by emailing foundation-l saying so.) - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
2009/3/2 Anthony wikim...@inbox.org: No. In fact, a member of ArbCom had referred me to OTRS. However, I don't want to get into the specifics of this on a public mailing list. As a general rule: if you've been formally penalised on a wiki for your behaviour thereon, and want that concealed, then that's really not in the same class as *anything* this thread is talking about. Just saying. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
2009/3/2 Anthony wikim...@inbox.org: On Mon, Mar 2, 2009 at 2:16 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: As a general rule: if you've been formally penalised on a wiki for your behaviour thereon, and want that concealed, then that's really not in the same class as *anything* this thread is talking about. Just saying. Thanks for the comment, David, but bringing up off-topic hypotheticals in order to say that they're off-topic is not appropriate. So that quite definitely isn't what you're talking about as the matter concerning you? Good to know. I'm still interested to know what it actually was, then. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Cabal?
2009/3/2 Chris Down neuro.wikipe...@googlemail.com: Ipatrol has just came on IRC claiming that he has been told that the WMF is hiring people to validate articles, and that the foundation is doing it in secret by using thousands of IPs and academics. He claims that the WMF has contracted colleges all across the US have been recruiting academics to validate articles, and states that admins are involved in this 'cabal', or whatever. o_0 If we were doing such a thing: 1. we wouldn't be paying anyone 2. we'd be shouting it from the rooftops. Nice idea, actually. Anyone feel they could put together a serious programme to recruit academics to such a cause? - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Cabal?
2009/3/2 Nathan nawr...@gmail.com: If we're being technical, the helicopters are no longer black. They're invisible. And they have Illuminati logos written invisibly. If you translate Wikimedia into Aramaic, write it backwards, translate that into Latin, remove every other letter and translate that to Cyrillic... When translated back to English, it spells Illuminati. True story. This is the origin of the supposedly erroneous glyphs on the puzzle globe. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
2009/3/2 Joe Szilagyi szila...@gmail.com: As an easy start for BLPs to contact us for help, why not have the global footer of all WMF sites include a prominent and very visible link to a simple mail form they can use to mail OTRS or the Foundation for help? Because no-one reads the footer (or we wouldn't have so many people surprised we're a charity). Hardly anyone reads the sidebar, but at least it's there. We changed the link on en:wp from Contact us to Contact Wikipedia to make it clear we weren't talking about how to contact the article subject ... We could put an email link to i...@wikimedia.org in the footer. Shall we do so? Superfluous? - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
2009/3/2 Joe Szilagyi szila...@gmail.com: Since BLP is so important--and Sue is wrong, not because of the coverage of Wikimedia over it, which is distantly secondary to the negative effects of a bad BLP situation on a Wikimedia site--then let's put a big prominent Report A Problem link on the top of every page, WMF-wide. I can see Report a problem with this page going in the sidebar of en:wp without controversy. We might even make it red. The main thing would be to make sure we have the back end in place. Something like the Special:Contact page would be a good idea. At the very least, a mailto:i...@wikimedia.org link. (But first, it'd be good to know just what will be done with editorial notes - just throwing them away wouldn't be good. OTRS is rather understaffed as is. It'd be easy to look like we can deal with lots of complaints, but I'm not sure we can just yet.) - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
2009/3/2 Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com: I may be missing it due to not speaking Dutch, but it doesn't seem to be linked to from anywhere... Does it include the details of the article and revision in the default text? That's a key feature for what I'm suggesting. The code: http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/extensions/ContactPage/SpecialContact.php?view=markuppathrev=36793 Doesn't appear to: http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciaal:Contactpagina Note that getting to that page from any other page is three clicks. I'm not sure how you'd add it. One to ask on wikitech-l or mediawiki-l. Duesentrieb wrote and maintains it. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Cabal?
2009/3/2 Wily D wilydoppelgan...@gmail.com: I am happy to take over control of articles for $1000/month. I can suggest a list of ~500 or so. Who should I send the list to? Should I also forward them my P.O. Box? Send your money to me: David Gerard c/o Ayn Landers, Wikiality, Florida. Make cheques payable to the Charlotte Amchip Schizophrenics Hospice, or its initials, C.A.S.H. I'll make sure it's used wisely. No US currency, yuan cheques only please. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
2009/3/2 P. Birken pbir...@gmail.com: One of my reasons to develop Flagged Revs was an incident with blatant vandalism in an article about a well known german politician that persisted for several months until we got an email from his office. That is plain unacceptable. Flagged revisions work very well in these cases. However, flagged revisions are not the complete solution, in particular they do not help persistently against clever POV pushing or against making articles more unbiased. But: I really like the test proposal on en-WP to try flagged revs out on BLP articles. Turn it on for those as soon as possible. As far as I can make out, the present situation on en:wp is: a proposal was put which got 59% support. That's not a sufficiently convincing support level. So Jimbo is currently putting together a better proposal, with the aim of at least 2/3 support and hoping for 80% - it'll be more robust. Timeframe, er, I just asked him as well. i.e. we're getting there! Inch by inch! - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Report a problem link
2009/3/3 Birgitte SB birgitte...@yahoo.com: I there is simpler way to solicit these reports this without all the false positives that might come from a report a problem link. I imagine that all these people who have issues must click on the Help link in the sidebar while looking contact information. Why not have a banner on that page saying If you have a problem with information about yourself that is on Wikipedia report it here. And send it to a specific email address. 195468 hits on [[Help:Contents]] in Feb 2009 rank #466 - it's well worth a try. Propose it on [[Help talk:contents]] referring back to this discussion and those agreeing can support it there. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Simple English Wikipedia on xkcd
http://xkcd.com/547/ - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] dumps
2009/2/23 Newyorkbrad (Wikipedia) newyorkb...@gmail.com: However, one question that I have is whether the dump includes, or should conclude, all namespaces, or only articles. In the past, there have allegedly been instances in which database dumps have been utilized for purposes such as harvesting oversighted edits in userspace and utilizing the information for purposes of harassment. I am not sure whether there is value to providing dumps of other than the content spaces. Comments? The value of providing good dumps is forkability, in case WMF is hit by a meteor, hit by a legal meteor, goes collectively insane, etc. Imagine trying to fork Wikipedia without being able to take the project spaces with you. It's too easy for a nominally open project to effectively be proprietised by just not providing the data/code/etc. (We will gloss over the idea that has occurred to me and several others that a nuke-and-pave of the project spaces might be the only way to fix en:wp's terminal instruction creep.) See my blog post of a coupla years ago on the subject: http://davidgerard.co.uk/notes/2007/04/10/disaster-recovery-planning/ - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Report to the Board of Trustees: Davos
2009/2/19 Michael Snow wikipe...@verizon.net: I'm likely going to put the general issue of biographies on the board's next agenda, for what that's worth. Though as I say, there's no simple blanket solution, and I don't know if we can promise anything beyond more discussion and more awareness of the issues. What's the schedule on the flagged revisions trial on en:wp? (cc: to wikitech-l) - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Report to the Board of Trustees: Davos
2009/2/19 Jimmy Wales jwa...@wikia-inc.com: I think a deeper point is that there are a lot of very problematic BLP's on Wikipedia, and this is an ongoing problem that we all have to be very serious about. In my anecdotal experience (as a UK phone contact), BLPs are our biggest public relations problem. I'm really really really hoping for the flagged revs on BLPs trial to work out well. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Free Culture vs Fear Culture vs Fee Culture
Why one small project changed from CC-by-nc-sa to CC-by-sa: http://zak.greant.com/free-culture-vs-fear-culture-vs-fee-culture - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Licensing interim update
2009/2/7 Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com: 2009/2/7 David Gerard dger...@gmail.com: There is no legal question over the very relicensing itself. You trying to spread FUD here doesn't count. There's no question in the US. I'm not convinced by We believe that licensing updates that do not fundamentally alter the spirit of the license and that are permitted through the license itself are legally valid in all jurisdictions. (the FAQ) I don't hold much stock by belief, I'd rather here from somebody that actually knows about each jurisdiction (at least, the ones where we have a major presence, every single one would be impractical). Anyone can take any idiot question to court. That doesn't count as a reason to assume that there must therefore be a substantive reason to believe that the or later language doesn't apply. Nor does being unable to prove a negative. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Licensing interim update
2009/2/4 Anthony wikim...@inbox.org: Add in the legal questions over the very relicensing itself, and a reuser really isn't in any better of a position than they were when things were GFDL. There is no legal question over the very relicensing itself. You trying to spread FUD here doesn't count. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] FW: [Wikinews-l] Increased incivility at wikinews [en] warning: contains rant
2009/2/5 Marc Riddell michaeldavi...@comcast.net: I have been trying for over two years to bring this issue to the serious attention of the powers that be in the English Wikipedia. My messages are met either with a there he goes again attitude, or are not acknowledged at all. Where does one go from there if not the Foundation itself? If you mean posting to wikien-l about it, the people there have suggested that you have to take it to the wiki. You demurred from this. The Arbitration Committee might be a point of approach. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] FW: [Wikinews-l] Increased incivility at wikinews [en] warning: contains rant
2009/2/5 George Herbert george.herb...@gmail.com: Civility, or more properly abusive editors, is not a petty problem. If I had Jimbo's God-Emperor powers several existing WP users would be walked out the door and invited to not come back, on the grounds that they are persistently abusive and disruptive to other users. If Jimbo had Jimbo's God-Emperor powers this would happen too. It hasn't, because he doesn't. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Are model releases required for 'Free' content? (was: Sexual Content on Wikimedia)
2009/1/31 Peter Jacobi pjacobi...@googlemail.com: David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: I didn't add (or are supposed to be). Now I'm wondering if I was thinking of the personality rights tag. Can you please give an example link to the tag you are talking about? This is the personality rights tag: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Personality_rights This is the category of restrictions templates: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Restriction_tags Possibly I was thinking of the note about model rights in the reuse page: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/COM:REUSE So if there isn't a tag warning in general about model rights (assuming reusers aren't reading all of Commons, they're just looking at an image page, seeing the licence and going ooh I can use that as Virgin did with the CC-by-sa pic they reused) - is a tag warning that, duh, you have to take care with pictures of people worthwhile? (cc to commons-l) - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Are model releases required for 'Free' content? (was: Sexual Content on Wikimedia)
2009/1/30 Sam Johnston s...@samj.net: I'm sure it's not the first time this subject has been raised, but now the French chapter has dragged us into the world of commercial publishing it's probably worth [re]considering. Perhaps it is enough initially to tag images lacking releases accordingly, with a view to having them released or replaced? I note that this would also dispense with many concerns about minors by requiring a minor release by parents or guardians[5]. At the moment pictures with people in are tagged with a warning that a reuser may have to consider model release and personality rights, and Commons guarantees nothing. It's not clear from your message why this is inadequate. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Are model releases required for 'Free' content? (was: Sexual Content on Wikimedia)
2009/1/30 Peter Jacobi pjacobi...@googlemail.com: David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: At the moment pictures with people in are tagged with a warning that a reuser may have to consider model release and personality rights, and Commons guarantees nothing. It's not clear from your message why this is inadequate. I don't see this tag at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Topless_Barcelona.jpg and in other pages discussed here. Are talking about an effort to add these tags which just has started? I didn't add (or are supposed to be). Now I'm wondering if I was thinking of the personality rights tag. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikia leasing office space to WMF
2009/1/24 geni geni...@gmail.com: 2009/1/24 Sue Gardner sgard...@wikimedia.org: I would also say that I am happy we're talking about this, and I hope the people asking questions are finding the answers reasonably reassuring :-) Depends. The wikia is a large user therefor we should work with them argument is somewhat worrying because well we know the CIA is also a large user. If the CIA send their changes back and they're of suitable quality, I expect they'll go in. The NSA contributes lots to Linux! - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikia leasing office space to WMF
2009/1/24 Gregory Kohs thekoh...@gmail.com: Please, in your rush to judgment about the character of my attacks here, take some time to actually explore and learn about United States law. The Foundation could be in serious trouble here, and you're spending an awful lot of energy railing against the messenger. You're a troll. You spend tremendous time and effort around the blogosphere posting attacks on Wikipedia and Wikimedia wherever you can. Your comments get deleted from the WMF blog when they're trolling, and it so happens they almost always are. You're *still* furiously sockpuppeting on en:wp as well. Given this, of course I'll assume you're trolling here as well, because, well, you are. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
2009/1/24 The Cunctator cuncta...@gmail.com: I'm not sure why we're so stressed out about getting things exactly legally right, since once edit histories for anything created before 2002 / late 2001 were wiped out, any of those articles don't have an accurate author list. If you take out the subthreads of Anthony trolling and being fed with responses, you'll see there's much less to this thread than it seems at first glance. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] CIA/NSA development of mediawiki (was: Wikia leasing office space to WMF)
2009/1/25 Dan Rosenthal swatjes...@gmail.com: Yeah, agreed. While on-topic for the list, it's off-topic for this thread. U.S. intelligence agency involvement in the development of open source products, especially media wiki, however *IS* a topic I am very much interested in seeing further discussion about; to that end I would much rather fork this thread into a different title than see it be killed totally. Well, SELinux is widely-available and no-one's found the s3kr1t code that funnels your keystrokes back to the NSA, and you bet they've looked. The main reason people know about SELinux in practice is how to switch it off, but anyway ... Has anyone actually asked the CIA for MediaWiki extensions and enhancements? It'd be worth asking. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] CIA/NSA development of mediawiki (was: Wikia leasing office space to WMF)
2009/1/25 geni geni...@gmail.com: 2009/1/25 David Gerard dger...@gmail.com: Has anyone actually asked the CIA for MediaWiki extensions and enhancements? It'd be worth asking. We don't know much about what they have done but most of their developments are more likely to be of interest to corporate wikis than wikipedia. That'd still be damn fine for MediaWiki and its adoption. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
2009/1/22 Andrew Whitworth wknight8...@gmail.com: On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 9:58 AM, Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote: As Thomas said, it requires Internet access, which might not be available. I think it's a bit more than that, though. The credit should be part of the work itself, not external to the work. When you're talking about a website, it's hard to define where the work begins and where it ends, clearly a work can span multiple URLs, and it's essentially meaningless whether or not those URLs have different domain names (at least assuming they are both kept nearly 100% reliable). None of these three things are true with books, T-shirts, or movies (for a movie a URL would be especially obnoxious). As a contributor to these 'ere projects myself, I personally would prefer the less reliable but more informative URL for attribution myself. That's a personal preference only, and I don't see any need to push that on others. Use my stuff, that's why I write it! I dual-licensed all my article space text and pictures as CC-by-sa any a while ago anyway. More people should do this IMO. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing
2009/1/22 Anthony wikim...@inbox.org: On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 6:20 PM, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: The attribution issue is so divisive, however, that I increasingly wonder whether it wouldn't be sensible to add at least a set of preferences to the licensing vote to better understand what people's preferred implementation would look like, within the scope of what we consider to be legally defensible parameters. If more than 10% or so of voters want direct attribution, it'll probably be enough of a critical mass to support a fork, licensed under the GFDL 1.2 only. I don't know if it's going to be that high or not, though. I look forward to you leading it. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Why is the software out of reach of the community?
2009/1/11 Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu: Keep in mind regarding my Semantic drum beating that I am not a developer of Semantic Mediawiki or Semantic Forms. I am just a user, and as Erik put it, an advocate. Semantic MediaWiki's syntax is disastrously horrible and intended for ontology geeks, not the mere humans for whom the tag soup nature of wikitext is a *feature*, not a bug. It's really not clear how you can condemn the present parser and consider SMW not awful. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Remembering the People (was Fundraiser update)
2009/1/10 Marc Riddell michaeldavi...@comcast.net: on 1/10/09 6:59 AM, David Gerard at dger...@gmail.com wrote: I note that I have asked you before if you've actually attempted to work directly with the community on-wiki, and you demurred: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2009-January/097693.html You claim to be defending the community in the abstract, but don't appear to want to put in the effort to actually work directly with the people in said community. David, if you mean the endless, circular, defensive battles that go on in the Talk Pages of the English Wikipedia, no; I am not willing to put what time I have there. The objective in such warfare seems to be to win at any cost; not a discussion to resolve issues in a cause both sides of the argument supposedly believe in and want to improve. There needs to be a better mechanism for such discussions; or, at least, a culture more skilled in the process of arbitration and decision making. Yes, people are difficult to work with and remain the key problem in dealing with them. What do you propose to deal with this? (I submit that something that absolves you of actually having to work with them and convince them is not likely to work.) - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] GFDL QA update and question
2009/1/10 Anthony wikim...@inbox.org: I care to prevent the relicensing *of my content* to CC-BY-SA. Remove my content, and you won't hear from me on the license issue again (unless you choose to read my blog or the blog of the non-profit Internet Review Corporation). If you licensed it under or later, you can't take that back. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] GFDL QA update and question
2009/1/10 Anthony wikim...@inbox.org: On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 1:47 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/1/10 Anthony wikim...@inbox.org: I care to prevent the relicensing *of my content* to CC-BY-SA. Remove my content, and you won't hear from me on the license issue again (unless you choose to read my blog or the blog of the non-profit Internet Review Corporation). If you licensed it under or later, you can't take that back. Tell it to the judge. How's the legal track record on trying to take back rights released under a free licence? - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] GFDL QA update and question
2009/1/9 Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com: But they aren't violating GFDL 1.3, since they aren't using it, so what was you complaint about? Being querulous? - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Why is the software out of reach of the community?
2009/1/9 Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu: I am skeptical of the current development process. That is because it has led to the current parser, which is not a proper parser at all, and includes horrifying syntax. Er, that would be a direct descendant of UseModWiki. That this has been a hair-tearing nightmare ever since is largely because of the huge corpus of text that needs to remain parseable - that doesn't support your argument at all, and calls into question that you even have one. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] GFDL QA update and question
2009/1/8 Anthony wikim...@inbox.org: No, the requirement for me to inform you of the violation was just introduced in GFDL 1.3. Presumably the legally safe thing to do would be to (b) remove all edits contributed by Anthony to any Wikimedia project, but firstly (a) ban him in perpetuity from all Wikimedia projects, to ensure against further violations or attempts to entrap us with such. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Fwd: Happy 2009 from ibiblio
From another provider of data, information and even knowledge. Thank you for ibiblio notes to UNC are in order. - d. Subject: Happy 2009 from ibiblio I'm jumping in between Christmas and New Year's to thank you for your contributions to ibiblio and for your support in the past year. We've had a period a great growth over the past few years especially as seen here: 200220062008 800 Collections 1600+ Collections 2500+ Collections 3 million ftp+www/day 15+ million 16+ million ftp+www/day 1 terabyte of data 8 terabytes of data 13 terabytes of data 1 large server 22 www/vhost servers25 www/vhost servers 2 database servers 5 database servers 7 database servers 4 radio stations6 radio stations6 radio stations In fact, the 2008 figures were taken at mid-year and we've grown since then! ibiblio is lways eclectic as our newest contributors, The African Elephant Experts Group http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http://www.african-elephant.net%2F and Pachyderm - the Journal of the African Elephant, African Rhino and Asia Rhino Specialist Groups http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http://www.pachydermjournal.org%2Findex.php%2Fpachy%2Fissue%2Fcurrent%2FshowToc show. We, you and ibiblio, offer granular bits of everything to everybody in the world; that is our strength and your gifts, a combined independently managed set of miscellanies for a loosely connected world. At the same time, we face new challenges. Some are obvious; the economy and budgets everywhere have taken a nosedive since September of this year. Some are less so; we will have a new Dean (the search is just opened at the School of Information and Library Science) and a new Chancellor at UNC (Holden Thorp who does understand what ibiblio is about, but will be feeling budget pressures immediately). Much of our ability to support you comes from your support of ibiblio. That need not be in for form of money, which is of course always welcomed and encouraged; it could be in the form of thanking UNC and NC officials for ibiblio services and for the university's support of ibiblio. Thanks for your part of making ibiblio wonderful for over 16 years and happy 2009. Paul ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] New project proposal: Soviet Repressions Memorial
2008/12/25 Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net: Can you and Kurt come up with a proposal that doesn't abandon our fabulously useful and marketable air of neutrality? Yes, good thought, I think we could. After all, it is a sort of cemetery. I suspect it would turn into a universal biographical dictionary. But that's useful too. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] New project proposal: Soviet Repressions Memorial
2008/12/25 Ian A. Holton poe...@gmail.com: I do however believe that such a project is a good idea and also believe that it being hosted outside of the WMF might even be benefitial and might even be worth an organisation itself if the scope is extended to cover more than just the victims of one regime, others have been already pointed out in previous messages. Yes. I don't want to imply it's a bad idea, it's a good one and could be done very well. I'm just not convinced it fits WMF. It could be done very badly indeed, of course. A comparison would be the network of critic of Scientology websites that formed in the late 1990s (including my own). These are long on factual detail, but are often so bitterly pissed-off as to be all but unreadable if you don't already agree. And there's little educational point to a resource that only targets those who already agree. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Jimmy Wales donation appeal
2008/12/24 Robert Rohde raro...@gmail.com: So, if not visibility, then what is really going on. In my opinion, if you want someone to read something, personalizing it is a very good idea. I think describing it as a personal message and putting a face to it, provides engagement and gets people to pay attention. That Jimbo has excellent name recognition helps (if it were Sue or Michael Snow, for example, I don't think it would do as well). Jimbo applying his rock star factor is one of his most useful jobs for WMF :-) - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Europeana
2008/12/24 Milos Rancic mill...@gmail.com: Europeana (http://www.europeana.eu/) is working again. I think that it has a lot of useful (PD) materials. Looks like it *could* be an interesting project. Any pointers to good places to start looking? - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikistats is back
2008/12/25 Erik Zachte erikzac...@infodisiac.com: Hi Brian, Brion once explained to me that the post processing of the dump is the main bottleneck. Compressing articles with tens of thousands of revisions is a major resource drain. Right now every dump is even compressed twice, into bzip2 (for wider platform compatibility) and 7zip format (for 20 times smaller downloads). This may no longer be needed as 7zip presumably gained better support on major platforms over the years. Apart from that the job could gain from parallelization and better error recovery. 7zip is readily available as free software for Unixlike platforms, though it's pretty much never installed by default. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] New project proposal: Soviet Repressions Memorial
2008/12/25 Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net: If we stood for something, it might serve to invigorate. You mean, taking a particular political position? I don't see that in the mission. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] New project proposal: Soviet Repressions Memorial
2008/12/25 Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net: Each of the millions who were starved, imprisoned, tortured, or killed has a unique story. Each story is more significant and educational than a Wikipedia article on Hitler or Stalin. The same applies to the Sep11 wiki. Why was that moved offsite? - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] New project proposal: Soviet Repressions Memorial
2008/12/25 Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net: Oh, but we are, just by what we do. And the mass murders of the twentieth century would have made short work of us. In fact, in the last regime controlled by them Wikipedia is blocked. Controlled by the Soviets, who I understand were the subject of the proposed wiki? I believe you have conflated two Communist dictatorships that hadn't been on particularly good terms since the 1960s. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] New project proposal: Soviet Repressions Memorial
2008/12/25 geni geni...@gmail.com: 2008/12/25 Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net: Well where will it stop? If we have a project, we should have a memorial project for all disasters. I echo Mr. Bimmler in his concerns about the motives behind this proposal. I think half a dozen might do, one for the victims of Hitler, one for the victims of Stalin, one for the victims of Pol Pot, one for the victims of Mao, one for victims of the inquisition, etc, What about Carthage? What about the native Americans (general estimates are we managed to kill off about 90% of them without really meeting them)? An Shi Rebellion? Mongol Conquests? Shaka's conquests? They we get the political fun ones. The islamic invasion of india. Arab slave trade. The Muslims killed of in china. Nanking Massacre. Anticommunist purge in Indonesia. The various post independence Pakistan /India/Bangladesh stuff. I submit that a wiki that could almost have been custom-designed to attract the worst of the interminable ethnic arguments of en:wp would have limited ability to produce educational content, but would be of vast educational use for sociological study. I'm not sure that *entirely* squares with the mission either. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikistats is back
2008/12/25 Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu: But at least this would allow Erik, researchers and archivers to get the dump faster than they can get the compressed version. The number of people who want this can't be 100, can it? It would need to be metered by an API I guess. Maybe we can run a sneakernet of DLTs. The Florida sysadmins run off a stack of tapes, they send those to someone to run off copies of and distribute to the next layer, and so on ... - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Britannica became free
2008/12/23 Mathias Schindler mathias.schind...@gmail.com: On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 11:06 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: Britannica is notoriously antagonistic toward Wikipedia in its advertising, but Brockhaus for instance isn't anywhere near as obnoxious (they're not *fans* of Wikipedia, but they have more class than to trash a perceived competitor the way Britannica try to). What other important language encyclopedias of comparable renown are there? Well. The BIFAB AG (Bibliographic Institute F. A. Brockhaus inc.) has announced last week (happy x-mas) to sell the usage rights and brand name of Brockhaus to Bertelsmann (section Arvato, subsection inmedia one, business unit wissen media Group). The remaining staff of 60 editors of Brockhaus at Leipzig was not bought and will receive pink slips. Brockhaus might be transformed into an imprint of various content for door-2-door sales people. Eek! What's happening to the content? - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Fwd: [WikiEN-l] Image tagging: 33 months later
FYI, the state of local image uploads on en:wp. How's your wiki doing?
-- Forwarded message --
From: Mark Wagner carni...@gmail.com
Date: 2008/12/23
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Image tagging: 33 months later
To: English Wikipedia wikie...@lists.wikimedia.org
Back in March of 2006, I did a check of image uploading. The results
were, to put it bluntly, appalling.
I've re-done the check with a new batch of 1,945 images. This covers
a little over two days' uploading, where the original set was 1,866
images uploaded in a little over 24 hours.
For 1,945 images uploaded and not later deleted, 1,960 license tags
were applied.
858 images, or 44%, were tagged with a non-free content tag, up from
40% in 2006. with album covers and logos making up slightly more than
half. The vast numbers of promotional photos that were uploaded in
2006 are nowhere to be seen: only 20 images were so tagged.
At least 917 images (47%) were tagged with a free-content license tag,
up from 41% in 2006. The most popular tags are PD-Self (334 images),
GFDL (250 images), and Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike (221
images)
Only 176 images (9%) did not have a license tag, a vast improvement
over 2006, when 26% were untagged.
500 of the images were checked for tag correctness. Things are
looking *much* better than they were in March 2006: of the 494 tags
applied, 35 (7%) were clearly incorrect, and 34 invalid fair-use
claims were made. In 2006, the error rates were 22% incorrect and 16%
invalid fair-use claims.
The most-misused tag by count is the self-creation tag (at least 21
images were not self-created), with the GFDL/CC-BY-SA-3.0 dual-license
tag especially problematic. By proportion, it's CC-BY-3.0 (5 out of
12 incorrect).
On the non-free content side of things, the problematic tags are
{{non-free television screenshot}} (6 out of 10 used to illustrate a
person's biography), {{non-free audio sample}} (3 out of 4 samples
were over-long), and {{non-free promotional}} (2 out of 3 images were
clearly replaceable). As before, album covers and logos tended to be
used correctly (74 out of 84 and 46 out of 57, respectively).
28 out of 254 free-content tags were incorrect, compared to 7 out of
205 non-free-content tags. Breaking non-free content down by type of
media and getting rid of the generic fair use tags (promotional,
fair use, etc.) seems to have worked wonderfully.
We still need to do something about people uploading images with
incorrect information, but it's far less of a problem than it used to
be.
--
Mark
[[User:Carnildo]]
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Re: [Foundation-l] Britannica became free
2008/12/22 Milos Rancic mill...@gmail.com: Then, I wanted to see what is the value of Britannica; without success. It is a private company (in US sense of that meaning; public companies in European sense are just companies owned by some local or state government; and in some specific circumstances). It is owned by Jacqui Safra, a billionaire [citation needed] [1], who may be an interesting partner to WMF. So, if it is not possible to buy it, I think that it is possible to make some deal to work together. I don't know. He appears to have bought it to keep it going, as a valuable entity in itself. So maybe what we need to do is talk to him about Wikipedia ;-D And I think that it shouldn't be just about Britannica. There are a lot of high quality encyclopedias all over the world. WMF may think about some kind of cooperation with them. It is not possible anymore to have encyclopedia as a profitable company, so I think that the institutions which own encyclopedias will be more open for cooperation; including giving the content under the same license(s) as under Wikipedia content is. Britannica is notoriously antagonistic toward Wikipedia in its advertising, but Brockhaus for instance isn't anywhere near as obnoxious (they're not *fans* of Wikipedia, but they have more class than to trash a perceived competitor the way Britannica try to). What other important language encyclopedias of comparable renown are there? - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Britannica became free
2008/12/22 Tomasz Ganicz polime...@gmail.com: I don't like guys from Wikmedia projects speaking in some sort of supremacy language. Our goal is to create: a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. so if the Britannica or PWN or any other commercial provider of the knowlegde is making their content free we should be simply happy. And it is not very clever to say that it is just because they feel the pressure from us (which in fact might be the true anyway :-) ). They have many values and advatages which we should still learn from them. Yes. As I said, just because Britannica is rude about Wikipedia is no reason to be rude in return. It's good to see we're catching up in many areas, but they remain the gold standard that en:wp works to in many ways. The Wikipedia writing style is different - Britannica is not NPOV, it's authoritative - but at our best we do very well indeed. But at our worst we're still terrible. Lots of work for the future! :-D (A tangential note: I consider NPOV to be our most important innovation - much more radical than merely letting anyone edit your encyclopedia. The concept of neutrality has existed in various guises, but not like Wikipedia does it, with the consequences it has as a source of information for the world.) - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Britannica became free
2008/12/22 Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com: On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 5:38 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: (A tangential note: I consider NPOV to be our most important innovation - much more radical than merely letting anyone edit your encyclopedia. The concept of neutrality has existed in various guises, but not like Wikipedia does it, with the consequences it has as a source of information for the world.) Full agreement. My view on WP innovations: (1) NPOV information resource. I'm thinking of things like areas that never got NPOV coverage *ever*. Scientology is a good example - pro-Scientology sources are saccharine and tend to leave out bits of great concern to the critics, and the critical sources have lots of well-sourced information but are so *bitter* they're all but unreadable. en:wp has some of the very best information available on the topic. (2) Website with a permanent historical record (we're not the first, but the first popular). What others are there? (3) Large scale free-content useful reference. I'd put that below anyone can edit - (3) wasn't true until the last two or three years. In 2004, when I started, en:wp was a somewhat-useful source on computing topics, but very much one big stub on most things. Now it's actually useful in all sorts of places. (During the recent IWF/[[:en:Virgin Killer]] furore, our crappy work proxy blocked *all* Wikipedia reading because of the block on the page. And we felt the effects, because Wikipedia is such a good first reference work on computing topics.) (4) Website anyone can edit. There are all sorts of interdependencies between these and other differentiators— It's easy to argue that without (4) the rest wouldn't be possible… but in terms of the lasting impact on society and our own uniqueness I think those are ordered about right. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] and what if...
2008/12/12 Anthony wikim...@inbox.org: The IWF said that contextual issues are important in the decision of whether or not they will keep the webpage on their list. They specifically reiterated that they still consider the image to be potentially illegal. The head of the IWF is potentially a fabulous drag queen. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Foundation applauds IWF decision to reverse Wikipedia censorship in the United Kingdom
2008/12/11 Cary Bass c...@wikimedia.org: And sometimes even pluralized, like I was searching through your internets intarwebs, get it right! - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] WP edit/access blocking in the UK - statement from the WMF
2008/12/8 Jay A. Walsh [EMAIL PROTECTED]: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Censorship_of_WP_in_the_UK_Dec_2008 http://www.boingboing.net/2008/12/07/how-the-great-firewa.html How the Great Firewall of Britain works - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Annual Fundraiser 2008 update
2008/12/8 Rand Montoya [EMAIL PROTECTED]: 1) A quick update of the community giving stats (gifts less than $10,000) for the first 35 days of the fundraiser: How many donations in the name of The Scorpions? ;-D - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: [Commons-l] Making Wikimedia Commons less frightening
2008/12/6 Thomas Dalton [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Discussions please. (Not denial that this problem is a problem, thanks.) If you want to encourage discussion, don't start by restricting the discussion to only people that agree with you. You won't get any useful results that way. Are you speaking hypothetically, or don't you think this is a problem? - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Making Wikimedia Commons less frightening
2008/12/6 Bryan Tong Minh [EMAIL PROTECTED]: I can think of two solutions here. One is to simply have more multi-project admins. Wikimedia ought to be one big community with a commons goal. Unfortunately (but not unsurprisingly) Wikimedia has been separated into many different islands separated by language borders, which are very hard to open up. Commons was born as a multilingual project, but in that aspect has failed I believe. Relations between Commons and en:wp are clunky at the best of times, so it's certainly not just a language issue at all. It's Commons forgetting it's a service project or Commons admins actively working against being a service project, because they want to be regarded as a completely independent project. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Handholding for new articles (Was: Re: 80% of our projects are failing)
2008/12/5 George Herbert [EMAIL PROTECTED]: I think these are valid concerns about my idea. I would respond with But you can always create pages the existing way 8-) But some new users won't want that much framework either. I don't know how many different methods/paths we can set up for different levels and expectations of users (and being aware of things like screen real estate, etc). I've occasionally over the years suggested on wikien-l that we prefill article pages with an article template, e.g. ---O---cut here---O--- First sentence explaining your '''article topic''' with the topic in bold. Second sentence introducing it more. Explain to the reader why this is important enough to need an article. == Subheading == Some text explaining the subheading. Add more subheadings and text as needed. == References == What sources back up the information you've written above? Please list them here. Be able to back up everything you've written. == External links == List here the one or two very best web links possible in the world on this topic. ---O---cut here---O--- Unfortunately, the idea's never gotten any traction, and discussion has rapidly gone all bikeshed [1] on the precise content of the hypothetical template and how this is horribly restrictive of established editors and the Man's keeping them down, etc. A pity, as I think new en:wp contributors seeing the above when they start an article would lead to a lot less articles being shot on sight. [1] http://bikeshed.org/ - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Handholding for new articles (Was: Re: 80% of our projects are failing)
2008/12/5 Nathan [EMAIL PROTECTED]: This [1] is the sort of thing I'm thinking about. David, has this been proposed, discussed, modeled and rejected in the past? (It seems like it must have, for something that is pretty common around the web). [1]: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Add_an_article_-_basic.JPG Not that I know of. A preloaded text box would do much the same job, I expect. Note how I don't say anything about format of references, etc - just enter the content. Unfortunately, getting community consensus for any change whatsoever on en:wp is all but impossible these days. Happenstance conditions are treated as rock-solid intention. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Stanton Foundation $890K Usability Grant
2008/12/3 Erik Moeller [EMAIL PROTECTED]: As per Michael's earlier e-mail: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikipedia_to_become_more_user-friendly_for_new_volunteer_writers http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Lolcat2.jpg - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Trouble in Ireland
2008/11/27 Geoffrey Plourde [EMAIL PROTECTED]: If we could get something that reads the searches and tabulates the most frequently not found articles, we could better target our account creation efforts. Hence my suggestion on wikitech-l :-) Logging referers as well as the name of the page hit wouldn't load the current logging significantly. Only logging referers that are in article space or Special:Search (with the search) would guard against most possible privacy problems. (Greg Maxwell noted that people may enter private identifying data into Special:Search which would then be logged. Possibly might warrant a warning note on Special:Search.) What it needs now is someone writing code to log and to analyse and present the logs, and the code being approved ;-) - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Site Notices Phase 2 - Annual Fundraiser 2008
2008/11/27 Geoffrey Plourde [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Preserve History, Donate Now! Preserve History, Buy Us A Better Backup Infrastructure! - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Site Notices Phase 2 - Annual Fundraiser 2008
2008/11/27 Ziko van Dijk [EMAIL PROTECTED]: So the phrase Wikipedia is a non-profit projecthttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Edu_Notice_2008_1.pnghad rather poor results. Maybe because it contains two words that sound negative to many people, non and profit, and maybe many people do not understand at first glance what it means. Wikipedia is a charity ? - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Site Notices Phase 2 - Annual Fundraiser 2008
2008/11/27 Thomas Dalton [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Wikipedia is a charity ? People always say non-profit when describing WMF, is it a charity? The two terms are different. (In the UK, the WMF would probably be considered charitable, I don't know what the requirements are in the US.) The bottom of every page on en:wp says it's a charity! (I put that text there, after precise phrasing was worked out on the comcom list. If it's wrong we should change it ...) - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Site Notices Phase 2 - Annual Fundraiser 2008
2008/11/27 Robert Rohde [EMAIL PROTECTED]: On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 1:40 PM, Thomas Dalton [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: And, in fact, wikimediafoundation.org says nonprofit charitable organization. I don't know why people generally say non-profit instead of charity, then - charity would be more precise and would probably be better perceived. I agree that the WMF fits the legal definition of a charity, but when one says charity the first thing that comes to my mind are organizations that take donations (often including food or clothes) for the primary purpose of redistributing most of them to the needy. You know, the Red Cross, United Way, Goodwill, food banks, etc. Obviously the WMF's mission and the use of their income is somewhat different from that, even though promoting the dissemination of knowledge is ultimately a charitable purpose. So at least in my mind calling the WMF a charity feels less precise and more confusing. Just my two cents. Your reaction may vary. Same in Australia, really. A wider meaning for the word charity is common in the UK, though. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] wikipedia.de shut down
2008/11/16 David Gerard [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Donations to WMDE are apparently coming in very fast because of this: http://wiwowo.blogspot.com/2008/11/internet-cannot-be-censured.html I'm reluctant to advocate upset politicians as a fundraising tool, but ... Here's the list. Dig the comments: https://secure.wikimedia.de/spenden/list.php - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
