Re: [Foundation-l] AbuseFilter to be enabled on all Wikimedia wikis by default today
Admins are once again given even more extensive content powers ? And that's a good thing right Captain Kirk? It's a good thing right? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] AbuseFilter to be enabled on all Wikimedia wikis by default today
Let me rephrase in a slightly less trollish manner. Admins should never be given powers over content. Not now, not then, not ever. Admins have no business being involved in content of any type ever :) In every possible universe. Will -Original Message- From: Wjhonson wjhon...@aol.com To: foundation-l foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Wed, Aug 24, 2011 9:17 am Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] AbuseFilter to be enabled on all Wikimedia wikis by default today dmins are once again given even more extensive content powers ? nd that's a good thing right Captain Kirk? t's a good thing right? __ oundation-l mailing list oundatio...@lists.wikimedia.org nsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] AbuseFilter to be enabled on all Wikimedia wikis by default today
Extreme cases can be used to justify any action Victor. Why live in a country where every month new powers are being given to the police to control the population? Who wants to live in that country? -Original Message- From: Victor Vasiliev vasi...@gmail.com To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Wed, Aug 24, 2011 9:44 am Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] AbuseFilter to be enabled on all Wikimedia wikis by default today On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 8:21 PM, Wjhonson wjhon...@aol.com wrote: Admins should never be given powers over content. Not now, not then, not ver. Admins have no business being involved in content of any type ever :) In every possible universe. Oh, sure. Especially when the content is HELLO I CAN EDIT THIS PAGE OU ARE PEDOPHILES. --vvv ___ oundation-l mailing list oundatio...@lists.wikimedia.org nsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] AbuseFilter to be enabled on all Wikimedia wikis by default today
Give me permission. I am volunteering to head up the abuse filter team. Thomas don't mistake my point for some other point. I am not suggesting that admins AS EDITORS should veer away from content creation, but rather that admins using their clubs should not be given more clubs with which to club. -Original Message- From: Thomas Morton morton.tho...@googlemail.com To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Wed, Aug 24, 2011 10:10 am Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] AbuseFilter to be enabled on all Wikimedia wikis by default today Let me rephrase in a slightly less trollish manner. Admins should never be given powers over content. erhaps fittingly, the abuse filter has been active on English Wikipedia for ome time. And even better, it is not a sysop group right. Instead it has ts own group. If you are volunteering to head up the abuse filter team and work to mplement filters to filter out the mass of junk and long term abusers, lease let me know and I will be happy to give you the permission! Otherwise.. perhaps get off the high horse? ;) Not now, not then, not ever. Admins have no business being involved in content of any type ever :) In every possible universe. That sucks, I was trying to sort out the dire lack of coverage of my local istory, but I guess you are right. Sorry - you won't find me near content ver again. Sorry! ;) Tom __ oundation-l mailing list oundatio...@lists.wikimedia.org nsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] copyright issues
Litigation under the rules of plagiarism Can you cite that law for me? -Original Message- From: Robin McCain ro...@slmr.com To: foundation-l foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Tue, Aug 16, 2011 7:43 pm Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] copyright issues On 8/16/2011 2:50 PM, Wjhonson wrote: The year of publication applies to published material. The year you make it public, to the public, for public consumption. of course, that is the definition of publication But look at http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/303.html Unpublished works (in the United States at least) have copyright protection. If nothing else, the creator(s) has/have moral rights to the work. Usually they also have legal rights. (I'm no lawyer, but my entertainment attorney told me to assume everything has rights unless you find a specific exemption under the law) Unpublished material, if it enjoys copyright protection at all, would be based on the year of creation. That however might be a red herring if it, in fact, does not enjoy any copyright protection. Does copyright protect material not published? Yes it can. For example: Members of the Beatles recorded some material and did not publish it. According to the layers of copyright, the creator(s) owned it from the moment it was recorded, the recording studio and producers (if any) also had rights dated back to that time. Since it wasn't published there were no publishers rights. Whoever was given a copy of the recording also had the tangible right of ownership of a copy. Many years later it was published as part of Anthology 1. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beatles%27_recording_sessions for details. For the US, also see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act Plagiarism and copyright are seperate issues and should not be conflated, as different approaches apply to each. True. In the case cited below, the Manuscript Story would have had copyright protection under current US law but had no such protection under the 1790 law. It wasn't until the 1976 law that protection was extended to unpublished works. As such, the only litigation possible at that time would have been under the rules of plagiarism and such litigation was considered. -Original Message- From: Robin McCain ro...@slmr.com To: foundation-l foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Tue, Aug 16, 2011 2:36 pm Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] copyright issues On 8/16/2011 12:51 PM,wjhon...@aol.com mailto:wjhon...@aol.com wrote: I don't believe your claim that you can take something which is PD, make an exact image of it, slap it up in a new work of your own (enjoying copyright protection automatically) and then claim copyright over that PD image in your work. Copyright applies to the presentation of your work, showing creativity. An image that you reproduce faithfully shows no creativity and can enjoy no new copyright, no matter how hard you push your view. That's it. Period. So I can freely copy any PD image, from any source, and not need to worry about copyright violation. PD doesn't change simply because a PD item is republished. The presentation of the item is copyright, not the item itself. I personally agree with that. However, it often costs more to prove your right to use something in court than to knuckle under if an aggressive rights owner comes after you. This is especially true when you are planning to distribute your own work worldwide - just getting a letter from the publisher telling you that they either give you the right to use an image or have no rights over that image is necessary before your work will be accepted by a publisher or distributor. An additional minor quibble. At least in the US a person does*not* need to reapply for copyright each time they revise an item. Copyright is an automatic process, merely by the fact of presenting something in a fixed media. You*can* file a copyright. You do not*need* to file a copyright, in order to enjoy copyright protection under the law. I also agree with you - except that the registered version has an ironclad protection you can protect in court while revised versions afterwards may not be so easy to protect unless they are also registered. It becomes a kind of chain of custody issue. If I were to create something original and show it to no one else for 50 years until I published it and died 5 years later, which would apply to the copyright expiration date - date of author's death, date of creation or date of publication? In the real world there are many examples of published books and screenplays that could clearly be seen as derivative - even plagiarized works from one or more unpublished sources. This is a big deal within the Writer's Guild and the reason for their online system of protecting manuscripts by registering before a work is shown
Re: [Foundation-l] copyright issues
For plagiarism to cause injury you have to specify the type of injury in your suit. And then the case is not about laws about plagiarism per se, of which there are none, but laws about the type of injury you are claiming. For example unfair trade as in I made all these designs and posted them to my website, company X stole my work by creating the actual products without the need to do any design work. That sort of thing. But that's not a law about plagiarism. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] copyright issues
Robin there are no laws (in the US) about plagiarism, that's what I'm saying. None. Zero. They don't exist. Why? Because plagiarism does not de facto create any injury. Wikipedia and the foundation operate under U.S. law so that's what is germane to this list, not what some other country including other Berne signatories do or don't do. The U.S. does not recognize moral rights in the way that Germany or France do, but rather claims under this umbrella are tried under defamation or unfair competition laws. However some editors throw plagiarism around and shout illegal illegal, because they are trying to make some sheded point more concrete. It's not concrete in the U.S., you have to show what specific sort of actual injury occurred. -Original Message- From: Robin McCain ro...@slmr.com To: Wjhonson wjhon...@aol.com Cc: foundation-l foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Wed, Aug 17, 2011 9:44 am Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] copyright issues On 8/17/2011 9:20 AM, Wjhonson wrote: For plagiarism to cause injury you have to specify the type of injury in your suit. And then the case is not about laws about plagiarism per se, of which there are none, but laws about the type of injury you are claiming. For example unfair trade as in I made all these designs and posted them to my website, company X stole my work by creating the actual products without the need to do any design work. That sort of thing. But that's not a law about plagiarism. Wow! you opened a can of worms... I'm sure at least one of my lawyer friends who specialize in intellectual property could respond in great detail about this. According to the Berne Convention authors have moral rights as well as legal rights. We aren't talking about student work here, but the real world where a lot of money at stake. It doesn't even matter if the issue is laughed out of court - you have still spent many thousands of dollars just getting to that day. (this is why companies often settle rather than go to court) I can assure you that no reputable publisher or distributor would knowingly accept work that has been extensively plagiarized on the basis that there is potential for a lawsuit of some sort unless they had deep pockets and were knowingly doing this as a marketing strategy. All I'm trying to say here is that plagiarism often accompanies copyright infringement, and that there can be a very fine line between the two. In real world terms - you don't want to go there. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] foundation-l Digest, Vol 89, Issue 44
I don't believe your claim that you can take something which is PD, make an exact image of it, slap it up in a new work of your own (enjoying copyright protection automatically) and then claim copyright over that PD image in your work. Copyright applies to the presentation of your work, showing creativity. An image that you reproduce faithfully shows no creativity and can enjoy no new copyright, no matter how hard you push your view. That's it. Period. So I can freely copy any PD image, from any source, and not need to worry about copyright violation. PD doesn't change simply because a PD item is republished. The presentation of the item is copyright, not the item itself. An additional minor quibble. At least in the US a person does *not* need to reapply for copyright each time they revise an item. Copyright is an automatic process, merely by the fact of presenting something in a fixed media. You *can* file a copyright. You do not *need* to file a copyright, in order to enjoy copyright protection under the law. W. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] copyright issues
The year of publication applies to published material. The year you make it public, to the public, for public consumption. Unpublished material, if it enjoys copyright protection at all, would be based on the year of creation. That however might be a red herring if it, in fact, does not enjoy any copyright protection. Does copyright protect material not published? Plagiarism and copyright are seperate issues and should not be conflated, as different approaches apply to each. -Original Message- From: Robin McCain ro...@slmr.com To: foundation-l foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Tue, Aug 16, 2011 2:36 pm Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] copyright issues On 8/16/2011 12:51 PM, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: I don't believe your claim that you can take something which is PD, make an xact image of it, slap it up in a new work of your own (enjoying copyright rotection automatically) and then claim copyright over that PD image in your ork. Copyright applies to the presentation of your work, showing creativity. An mage that you reproduce faithfully shows no creativity and can enjoy no new opyright, no matter how hard you push your view. That's it. Period. So I can freely copy any PD image, from any source, and not need to worry bout copyright violation. PD doesn't change simply because a PD item is epublished. The presentation of the item is copyright, not the item itself. personally agree with that. However, it often costs more to prove your ight to use something in court than to knuckle under if an aggressive ights owner comes after you. This is especially true when you are lanning to distribute your own work worldwide - just getting a letter rom the publisher telling you that they either give you the right to se an image or have no rights over that image is necessary before your ork will be accepted by a publisher or distributor. An additional minor quibble. At least in the US a person does*not* need to eapply for copyright each time they revise an item. Copyright is an automatic rocess, merely by the fact of presenting something in a fixed media. You*can* ile a copyright. You do not*need* to file a copyright, in order to enjoy opyright protection under the law. also agree with you - except that the registered version has an ronclad protection you can protect in court while revised versions fterwards may not be so easy to protect unless they are also egistered. It becomes a kind of chain of custody issue. If I were to reate something original and show it to no one else for 50 years until published it and died 5 years later, which would apply to the opyright expiration date - date of author's death, date of creation or ate of publication? In the real world there are many examples of published books and creenplays that could clearly be seen as derivative - even plagiarized orks from one or more unpublished sources. This is a big deal within he Writer's Guild and the reason for their online system of protecting anuscripts by registering before a work is shown to others. One of the most (in)famous books in American Religion is The Book of ormon, parts of the first edition of which were (alleged to be) lagiarized from the Manuscript Story and arguably violated the 1790 opyright Act. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_Spalding The work as been revised at least nine times (not counting translations) to make t fit the theology of the modern day church. ttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Mormon __ oundation-l mailing list oundatio...@lists.wikimedia.org nsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] We need to make it easy to fork and leave
Feedback: Approval based systems only work on a tiny subset of articles as they disenfranchise the vast majority of contributors who don't have a multi-tiered content approach at all. -Original Message- From: Tom Morris t...@tommorris.org To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Mon, Aug 15, 2011 2:04 am Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] We need to make it easy to fork and leave On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 08:26, Nikola Smolenski smole...@eunet.rs wrote: On 15/08/11 08:16, David Richfield wrote: It's not just financial collapse. When Sun was acquired by Oracle and they started messing about with OpenOffice, it was not hard to fork the project - take the codebase and run with it. It's not that easy for Wikipedia, and we want to make sure that it remains doable, or else the Foundation has too much power over the content community. I'm fairly confident it would be much easier to fork Wikipedia than OpenOffice. Technically, it's much easier to fork code than it is to fork wikis specially now in an era of distributed version control systems (Git, g, bzr) where everyone who checks the code out of a repository has a ull copy of the repository. The only technical infrastructure you eed is some hosting space for the repo and the other common bits you eed for software dev (mailing list, bug tracker etc.) One thing I've been thinking about from the failure of Citizendium is ow an expert community could set up their own external version of ending changes: basically a simple database of stable versions, so ny individual or group could set up a server with stable versions of rticles, then you could subscribe to a set of stable version sets - o, say, the International Astronomical Union mark a bunch of evisions of astronomy articles as stable, and if you've got the rowser plugin installed with their dataset installed, when you visit ne of those pages, it'd show you the stable version they chose. And he flipside is that if you are (in my humble opinion) a cold fusion ut or a homeopathy nut, you could find some crazy person who believes n those things to come up with his or her own set of crank stable ersions. And the stable version could be marked as checked by a particular erson from a particular institution with their real name if that is he practice in that community: perhaps in physics or philosophy or sychology or some other academic subject, having a real name person ign off on a particular stable version is fine and dandy, but in, ay, the Pokémon fan community, they don't really have the same ssumptions. (Again, one of the failures of Citizendium: you don't eed a guy with a Ph.D to approve the articles on Pokémon in the way ou might want a credentialed expert to sign off on, say, an article n cancer treatment.) The essential thing is to separate out the things that people want: ome people want distributed Wikipedia, but why? Well, one good eason seems to be so you can have stable versions with expert versight (like Citizendium) - well you can get most of the desiderata hat led to Citizendium by having a third-party distributed approval ayer and browser plugins etc. A little bit of hacking provides a lot f opportunity for different communities to take Wikipedia and run ith it in the ways they want to. This kind of proposal would provide lot of what Citizendium was shooting for but without the oordination problem of trying to get disparate communities of people o work together in a way the CZ community kind of failed to do. onsider for instance the ethnic studies/women's studies people who idn't find Citizendium a welcoming environment.[1] Under this kind of roposal, if there is a community of people involved in ethnic studies ho want to participate in Citizendium-style expert approval, they can et up some very lightweight software and organise their approvals in hatever way fits best with their academic community norms. Essentially, in software terms, this would be like a 'packager', omeone who takes Wikipedia's output on a certain topic and marks pecific revisions or whatever as good or bad. They'd still be welcome and indeed encouraged) to participate in editing on Wikipedia in the raditional way, and ideally the community wouldn't take participation n such an enterprise against them as an editor (just as they urrently don't or shouldn't take participating in Wikinfo or itizendium or even Conservapedia against someone), and any comments hat come up in the 'packaging' process could be taken as feedback in he normal way just as if packager at Debian finds a bug with a piece f software, he or she can point that out the upstream maintainer. Feedback? [1] see http://cryptome.info/citizendium.htm and ttp://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Citizendium -- om Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ oundation-l mailing list oundatio...@lists.wikimedia.org nsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Oral Citations project: People are Knowledge
The logical flaw here comes between use and translate. Although Wikipedians may and probably sometimes do, translate Wikipedia pages, from English to French etc, translating a source citation is something quite different. I would agree with Ray that we should quote Latin texts in Latin, Spanish texts in Spanish no matter what language-page we are using. IF the text is that important to English speakers then there should be or probably will soon be, a verifiable English language translation *not* created in-project, but rather by a reputable author publishing just such a translation. -Original Message- From: Ray Saintonge sainto...@telus.net To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Fri, Jul 29, 2011 12:03 am Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Oral Citations project: People are Knowledge LOL. If that's the case it would be a good reason for changing the OR olicy. It would also make sense to quote non-English sources in their riginal language unless the translation itself is verifiable. Ray On 07/27/11 4:36 PM, M. Williamson wrote: Well then, Ray, en.wp would not be able to use non-English sources since all translation is interpretation and would therefore be considered OR which is not allowed at Wikipedia. 2011/7/27 Ray Saintongesainto...@telus.net On 07/27/11 12:42 PM, Wjhonson wrote: David how is an exact quote a summary or interpretation? An exact quote, backed up by the actual audio track is... exact. You are not summarizing it, and you are not interpreting it either. You are presenting it. If that is to be the case the exact quote MUST be in its original language. All translations require interpretation. Ray __ oundation-l mailing list oundatio...@lists.wikimedia.org nsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Oral Citations project: People are Knowledge
Yes of course translating documents has been practiced in academia for a very long time. We however are not a first publisher of translations. We are an aggregator of sources. That is the point of RS. We don't publish first. -Original Message- From: M. Williamson node...@gmail.com To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Fri, Jul 29, 2011 10:59 am Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Oral Citations project: People are Knowledge And what if readers don't understand Spanish? As a translator, I have to say am strongly against the idea that a translation counts as original esearch. Translating quotes has been practiced in academia for a very long ime, and just in the last month I must've read several papers with quotes n languages I didn't understand well enough to read without the translation y the author (German, Latin, etc). If I want to quote an academic paper in panish for an article where there are few or no English-language sources vailable, I should be able to quote directly from the paper but provide a ranslation so that English speakers who do not speak Spanish can benefit rom the quote. The great thing about the wiki process is that if someone isagrees with my translation, it can be fixed (I have fixed a few ranslations on en.wp myself). 011/7/29 Wjhonson wjhon...@aol.com No that's not what it would mean. It would mean that if a Spanish language source is used on an English language page, we should quote that source in Spanish, and not quote it using our OWN translation. As editors we should not be creating publications, only quoting publications. -Original Message- From: David Gerard dger...@gmail.com To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Fri, Jul 29, 2011 10:37 am Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Oral Citations project: People are Knowledge On 29 July 2011 17:39, Wjhonson wjhon...@aol.com wrote: I would agree with Ray that we should quote Latin texts in Latin, Spanish exts in Spanish no matter what language-page we are using. IF the text is that mportant to English speakers then there should be or probably will soon be, a erifiable English language translation *not* created in-project, but rather by reputable author publishing just such a translation. his would mean that only English-language references are acceptable n en:wp, which is of course false. Your statement takes a useful idea no original research), extrapolates it until it really obviously reaks, and then puts forward the broken version as a good thing. You appear to be mixing up policy, guidelines, practice and how you ersonally think things should be, without distinguishing which you re describing at any given time; this leads only to confusion. d. ___ oundation-l mailing list oundatio...@lists.wikimedia.org nsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l __ oundation-l mailing list oundatio...@lists.wikimedia.org nsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Oral Citations project: People are Knowledge
Nope, never said that. I disagree with the idea that this is usually done however I have no objections to it's being done. Never did. My point is, and was that the source should be quoted in its original language. -Original Message- From: David Gerard dger...@gmail.com To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Fri, Jul 29, 2011 11:26 am Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Oral Citations project: People are Knowledge On 29 July 2011 19:19, Dan Rosenthal swatjes...@gmail.com wrote: Why can't you do both? Provide the original text in the original language in the citation, followed y a translation. Any bickering over the quality of the translation can be dealt ith through consensus on the talk page, while the original is still there for hose who want the original to do their own verification of the translation. his is what is usually done at present. Hence my boggling at Johnson's bizarre suggestion to overuse a rule to break usefuless to he reader. d. ___ oundation-l mailing list oundatio...@lists.wikimedia.org nsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Oral Citations project: People are Knowledge
All sources can be cited without falling afoul of original research Original research only covers claims without sources at all, or claims made from yourself as the source. Any source, including citing to a video interviews, is never original research. I don't really get by the way, why this is considered revolutionary. These aren't oral citations in the standard sense, these are citations to a published video. -Original Message- From: Thomas Morton morton.tho...@googlemail.com To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Wed, Jul 27, 2011 2:33 am Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Oral Citations project: People are Knowledge This is a really interesting and thoughtfully complete project. As an editor I am cautious of how well these could be used as citations ithout falling afoul of original research. The first problem I see is that presentation becomes difficult: Interviews with members of the Sk8r tribe in 2011 indicated that they have a deep animosity towards the neighbouring Emos Clearly marks the source, but does not clarify who made the interviews, here the indication came from (i.e. did they say this outright, or did they ust moan about the Emos constantly - the latter, of course, being a roblematic conclusion), or who drew the interpretation (if applicable). On op of that it is not a *great* way to write content - better to stick to traight facts where possible (the Sk8r tribe have a deep animosity toward he Emos). This can probably be addressed by working out a good way to cite oral aterial. The second issue I touched on above; in that editors may have difficulty rawing purely factual material from the source, rather han making interpretations. Whilst I could see an argument for a little eeway on oral material being interpreted, I also think it is a bad idea to ncourage too much. Of course, material from academically qualified people (as much of this articular project seems to be) could happily be treated in the same way as, ay, an academic writing a book or an article (with the slight caveat of no ndependent review). But from unqualified people - who is going to draw it ogether? I've always been in favour of giving experts in a field some eeway in how they record/report/source/present material in Wikipedia. owever shifting that to an oral citation is not necessarily a simple task. *What I do think is incredibly important though is that this material has uge value in itself - and every effort to encourage more of the same should e taken! * In fact we should get as much material such as this as possible, host it, ranslate it, make it accessible - and encourage secondary academic sources o make use of it. This could work both as a hack to get around the issues f citing oral material directly as well as contributing to the effort to xpand knowledge of these areas of study. I'm excited to see the next step for this... is there going to be more of his work? Can we get some publicity for this in the relevant academic ircles? Is there potential for the foundation to fund efforts to collect ore and more material? Can we look at expanding it to other areas (for xample - although I appreciate the focus is areas not covered by written aterial, this would be equally valuable in some parts of the global north; ven in the UK I could see advantages to recording interviews with different eople). Long term we could perhaps even consider a new project that is intended pecifically to collect oral evidence, host it (through commons), translate t and make it easy to cite/use. Such a project would be horrendously aluable and provide insight into all manner of cultures. Tom __ oundation-l mailing list oundatio...@lists.wikimedia.org nsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Oral Citations project: People are Knowledge
You should not create your own videos and then publish them on Wikipedia. You should create videos or audio tracks of oral interviews, and then publish them. Then allow others to add that material to Wikipedia where appropriate. That's my two cents. -Original Message- From: Sarah Stierch sarah.stie...@gmail.com To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Wed, Jul 27, 2011 6:06 am Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Oral Citations project: People are Knowledge Hi all - I came across a lighter version of this conversation on another Wikimedia ist, and felt the need to share my similar thoughts and statements that I ade previously. For the past year, I have been examining opportunities involving Indigenous ommunities of North America and opportunities to utilize Wikipedia and elated websites as an affordable, unique and global form of cultural reservation. I have my undergraduate in Native American Studies, and I am btaining my masters currently. My final paper (not quite a thesis) for raduation will be a strong examination of the opportunities related to ndigenous communities and opportunities/pros/cons related to Wikipedia. I'm ctually presenting on my preliminary observations and concerns at ikimania, you can learn a bit more here: http://wikimania2011.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/Wikimedia_%26_Indigenous_Peoples:_Pros,_Cons_and_Community In the United States, as far as I am aware, I am the only person thinking bout this on a higher level. While right now I am quite busy with other atters, come this Fall I will be diving head first into my research. I will e serving as Wikipedian in Residence at the National Museum of the American ndian, where I will be working with staff to examine these concerns. One f our biggest concerns lies with *oral history*. We have had countless onversations about the struggles with no original research however, in ral history based societies, we will have a very hard time moving beyond nything else. As stated previously, the majority of content created related o Indigenous communities in North America was often written by (and still s) Anglo anthropologists - some of that data is highly out of date and is till being utilized on Wikipedia as a source today. This project, Oral Citations, follows closely with the type of work I am eeking to do. I have been planning to examine Wikipedia (English at first) esearch policies and consider proposals or changes in relation to serious esearch and Indigenous communities. Of course, it all comes down to unding, and Native people of North American are often the first overlooked roup - it will take a lot of work, years of effort, and a lot of buy in hat is needed to be gathered from inside the community itself. I'm babbling right now, but, this is a very passionate topic for me. I see ikipedia as providing an affordable and unique way for Indigenous ommunities to not only learn valuable skills - many of the communities here n America are among the poorest in the world, you'd think you were in a eveloping country, and kids barely receive beyond an elementary school ducation - but to have a broad arena to share stories (that the community hooses to share of course), beliefs, cosmologies, and traditions so that hey are accessible and *vetted* for researchers and community members round the world. I do hope that some of you are attending Wikimania, I'd like to be able to ave a break out session of sorts or an unconference to discuss this topic urther. I'm hoping in the next year to have an international conference of orts that brings together Indigenous people, open source gurus, and iki-folks to examine opportunities, processes, and belief systems in egards to opportunities. Feel free to email me directly, again, right now I am unable to move quickly n any major projects due to my already big work load, but, I'm hoping that his will be large part of my career work as an advocate for Native rights, scholar, and an open source-lover. -Sarah [w:en:User:SarahStierch]] On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 8:32 AM, CasteloBranco ichelcastelobra...@gmail.com wrote: And why does the people who speaks Malayalam, Hindi and Sepedi need to write in English in order to have those oral citations published? English is not as universal as some people think. I guess we need to find an answer in their own language, so the solution won't be another barrier. Also, the escope of this project is much more important for the projects on these languages, and for speakers of these languages, rather than the English Wikipedia or its readers. But that's just me. Castelo Em 26/07/2011 16:16, whothis escreveu: Looks like an excellent waste of effort. Maybe the problem of publishing non-publishable oral sources occurred to someone on the team. Anyway the english wikipedia seems to be the appropriate place for your original research. I can't wait to read all about it. I still think a research project in
Re: [Foundation-l] Oral Citations project: People are Knowledge
For actual quotations from sources, you should quote the source exactly. Then you will never be using original research. You are going the next step and summarizing and interpreting. Don't do that. -Original Message- From: Thomas Morton morton.tho...@googlemail.com To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Wed, Jul 27, 2011 11:19 am Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Oral Citations project: People are Knowledge All sources can be cited without falling afoul of original research Original research only covers claims without sources at all, or claims made from yourself as the source. Any source, including citing to a video interviews, is never original research. Ideally of course, yes. However it is quite hard to work with primary ources of this nature (i.e. ones that are not summarising a subject) and void interpretation (which is at the core of OR). It is perfectly possible o cite an iron clad reliable source and still end up doing original esearch :) It's just that the risk is greater with these forms of sources. I don't really get by the way, why this is considered revolutionary. These aren't oral citations in the standard sense, these are citations to a published video. eliability depends on a number of factors; for a video it depends on things ike the identity of the person speaking, the publishing body, etc. Raw footage of this sort is very much primary sourcing ith potential reliability problems. The key thing for reliable sources is the idea of *fact checking or peer eview*. This is why the very best sorts of sources are those published in espected scientific journals - because they have been reviewed for istakes, bias, etc. Ideally these videos would be published as a primary resource, interested arties would synthesise material and write papers (or give lectures, or ublish a book) - secondary sources - which could then be cited by tertiary ources, such as us :) Currently you would have to treat these videos with a modicum of care, under he usual guidelines for primary source material. Tom __ oundation-l mailing list oundatio...@lists.wikimedia.org nsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Oral Citations project: People are Knowledge
Achal I was responding to Thomas not to you. However yes, if you are quoting what an interviewee is saying, you should use quotation marks to offset their statements. Or even use the blockquote markup for a lengthy quotation. If you do something like decide that because three people said King Makambo ruled from 800 to 840 that you can simply state this in an article and cite the video, I would suggest that is a decision not well-founded on our editing principles. Citations to primary sources should, in my opinion, always use quotation marks. And never fail to do so. -Original Message- From: Achal Prabhala aprabh...@gmail.com To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Wed, Jul 27, 2011 11:53 am Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Oral Citations project: People are Knowledge Hallo, (responses inline) On Wednesday 27 July 2011 11:57 PM, Wjhonson wrote: For actual quotations from sources, you should quote the source exactly. Then you will never be using original research. I don't actually understand what this means. If you look at the articles reated: ttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Oral_Citations#Articles.2F_Discussions_.28in_development.29 you can see exactly how the citations are used. In the articles, each tatement that can be attributed to a particular audio interview is ited to that audio interview. Do you mean also using quotes for actual ords in the text of the article itself? You are going the next step and summarizing and interpreting. Don't do that. Actually, no. We are not summarizing or interpreting, merely reporting he content of the cited audio interviews (and the accumulated reports, ometimes conflicting, gathered in the course of several audio nterviews) in exactly the same way one would do if the sources were ournal articles instead. But if I haven't understood your questions correctly, please elaborate nd explain further. Thanks, chal -Original Message- From: Thomas Mortonmorton.tho...@googlemail.com To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing Listfoundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Wed, Jul 27, 2011 11:19 am Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Oral Citations project: People are Knowledge All sources can be cited without falling afoul of original research Original research only covers claims without sources at all, or claims made from yourself as the source. Any source, including citing to a video interviews, is never original research. Ideally of course, yes. However it is quite hard to work with primary ources of this nature (i.e. ones that are not summarising a subject) and void interpretation (which is at the core of OR). It is perfectly possible o cite an iron clad reliable source and still end up doing original esearch :) It's just that the risk is greater with these forms of sources. I don't really get by the way, why this is considered revolutionary. These aren't oral citations in the standard sense, these are citations to a published video. eliability depends on a number of factors; for a video it depends on things ike the identity of the person speaking, the publishing body, etc. Raw footage of this sort is very much primary sourcing ith potential reliability problems. The key thing for reliable sources is the idea of *fact checking or peer eview*. This is why the very best sorts of sources are those published in espected scientific journals - because they have been reviewed for istakes, bias, etc. Ideally these videos would be published as a primary resource, interested arties would synthesise material and write papers (or give lectures, or ublish a book) - secondary sources - which could then be cited by tertiary ources, such as us :) Currently you would have to treat these videos with a modicum of care, under he usual guidelines for primary source material. Tom __ oundation-l mailing list oundatio...@lists.wikimedia.org nsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ oundation-l mailing list oundatio...@lists.wikimedia.org nsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Oral Citations project: People are Knowledge
So you wish to claim that you can make factual statements, based on oral interviews which are primary sources. I find that position troubling. I would suggest, should you actually present such a theory at our policy pages, you'd find strong opposition to this unique perspective. Our policy does not mimic the policy of a print journal. Wikipedia is not a secondary source in that sense. It has rather been described as a tertiary source. Encyclopedias in a general sense summarize and interpret multiple secondary sources with some primary source as well. However this appears to be a leap that we should not make, IMHO. I don't think requiring the use of quotations when you are quoting is much of a leap. I do think, presenting facts, conclusions and positions based on a few data points only is irregular. -Original Message- From: Achal Prabhala aprabh...@gmail.com To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Wed, Jul 27, 2011 12:09 pm Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Oral Citations project: People are Knowledge Hallo, (responses inline) On Thursday 28 July 2011 12:27 AM, Wjhonson wrote: Achal I was responding to Thomas not to you. However yes, if you are quoting what an interviewee is saying, you should use uotation marks to offset their statements. Or even use the blockquote markup for a lengthy quotation. My own understanding is that this is not a requirement of a print rticle (say, a journal essay or a NYTimes report). If you do something like decide that because three people said King Makambo uled from 800 to 840 that you can simply state this in an article and cite the ideo, I would suggest that is a decision not well-founded on our editing rinciples. t is therefore not clear why on the oral citations we make (linked to he audio interview source) we should therefore do that. Two quick larifications again, because I fear that these are causing some confusion: 1) We don't have any video citations, only oral citations, linked to udio interviews. 2) None of the articles created (or in creation) are about things elated to fictional Kings Queens in the 9th century AD. In short: e're not wading into the murky territory of rewriting events that appened 13 centuries ago. I think the distinction is important because here is an underlying feeling one gets here - and from a few other osts - that somehow this experiment with oral citations opens up the pportunity to write fictionalised accounts of the history of the world, hich would make for good science fiction, which is in itself a good hing - but also far above our pay grade. :) Citations to primary sources should, in my opinion, always use quotation arks. And never fail to do so. hile this is a possibility, there is no policy on citation of primary ources on Wikipedia. In academia, field work and interviews are often araphrased; they definitely do not have to be reported inside quotes, hough of course, they may be. -Original Message- From: Achal Prabhalaaprabh...@gmail.com To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing Listfoundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Wed, Jul 27, 2011 11:53 am Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Oral Citations project: People are Knowledge Hallo, (responses inline) On Wednesday 27 July 2011 11:57 PM, Wjhonson wrote: For actual quotations from sources, you should quote the source exactly. Then you will never be using original research. I don't actually understand what this means. If you look at the articles reated: ttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Oral_Citations#Articles.2F_Discussions_.28in_development.29 you can see exactly how the citations are used. In the articles, each tatement that can be attributed to a particular audio interview is ited to that audio interview. Do you mean also using quotes for actual ords in the text of the article itself? You are going the next step and summarizing and interpreting. Don't do that. Actually, no. We are not summarizing or interpreting, merely reporting he content of the cited audio interviews (and the accumulated reports, ometimes conflicting, gathered in the course of several audio nterviews) in exactly the same way one would do if the sources were ournal articles instead. But if I haven't understood your questions correctly, please elaborate nd explain further. Thanks, chal -Original Message- From: Thomas Mortonmorton.tho...@googlemail.com To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing Listfoundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Wed, Jul 27, 2011 11:19 am Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Oral Citations project: People are Knowledge All sources can be cited without falling afoul of original research Original research only covers claims without sources at all, or claims ade from yourself as the source. Any source, including citing to a video interviews, is never original research. Ideally of course, yes. However it is quite hard to work
Re: [Foundation-l] Oral Citations project: People are Knowledge
David how is an exact quote a summary or interpretation? An exact quote, backed up by the actual audio track is... exact. You are not summarizing it, and you are not interpreting it either. You are presenting it. -Original Message- From: David Goodman dgge...@gmail.com To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Wed, Jul 27, 2011 12:39 pm Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Oral Citations project: People are Knowledge On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 2:27 PM, Wjhonson wjhon...@aol.com wrote: For actual quotations from sources, you should quote the source exactly. Then you will never be using original research. You are going the next step and summarizing and interpreting. Don't do that. But selecting what quotations to use, what parts of them to use, and n what context one uses them, and the language one uses to present hem, is a not a mechanical or necessarily neutral endeavor. It cannot e done without summarizing and interpreting. Certainly in Wikipedia and everywhere else the world also, nrepresentative of partial quotations are used to propagandistic or ontroversial effect--sometimes even deliberately, but more often ecause the particular quotation and manner fits what the editor esires to express. A person in the course of a long career will say any things on their main interests, and some will be at least artially contradictory. Selecting what represents the person's true iews, what represents a true change of opinion, what represent rratic misstatements --all of this require decisions which amount to hat we call original research and synthesis. It is not possible to rite any but the most trivial article without research and synthesis. reparing a summary of the state of a question intrinsically requires t. Deciding of the balance of an article necessarily involves having POV--if one approaches a subject where one has none initially, by he time the article has been finished, one or the other position is ure to have been found more appealing, and a non-neural POV is sure o have developed. The writing of secondary and tertiary works are inevitably ssociated with bias. The way by which we avoid its worst anifestations in Wikipedia is not by being free from bias, but by aving articles written collectively by a diverse group of people. hat we lose in elegant prose we gain in objectivity. This is why it s important to continually increase the number of active ditors--not just to increase the scope, but to ensure adequate eyes n the articles. But even so, the different Wikipedias will be inevitably different. Attention has recently been called on the list to ttp://manypedia.com/.) We need in particular more people with ultiple language ability to incorporate the diversity in the ndividual encyclopedias.This is one reason why it is critically mportant to develop Wikipedias in the non-Western languages, so their iews too can be represented not just in their own language, but hroughout the project. -- avid Goodman DGG at the enWP ttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DGG ttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG ___ oundation-l mailing list oundatio...@lists.wikimedia.org nsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Oral Citations project: People are Knowledge
Linking the full audio allows the user to dig into the material without trusting your selection. Then other editors can select other pieces, or remove your selection. I personally don't equate Selection with Interpretation. To me interpretation is modifying the original source using other words. -Original Message- From: Thomas Morton morton.tho...@googlemail.com To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Wed, Jul 27, 2011 12:45 pm Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Oral Citations project: People are Knowledge David how is an exact quote a summary or interpretation? An exact quote, backed up by the actual audio track is... exact. You are not summarizing it, and you are not interpreting it either. You are presenting it. he point David is making is that you are selecting material to quote and dd. This is a problem that happens a lot anyway; you might have a lengthy piece f audio, video or text that discusses material - picking a few points to uote is in itself interpreting what it important. This is why secondary ources are better - because they do the selection for us :) Tom __ oundation-l mailing list oundatio...@lists.wikimedia.org nsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Oral Citations project: People are Knowledge
Yes I agree that primary sources should ONLY be cited-quoted, in their original language. A translation can be *published* but that publication cannot be in Wikipedia solely. It must live somewhere else as well, published by a reliable source. In this case of an audio file, we should have a transcription, than a translation. However having Wikipedians translate primary sources and then citing and quoting those *translations* in-project is a recipe for disaster and fraught with the potential for abuse, as well as being original research. In this case the original research is *your unpublished translation used as the actual source*. That's no good. -Original Message- From: Ray Saintonge sainto...@telus.net To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Wed, Jul 27, 2011 4:36 pm Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Oral Citations project: People are Knowledge On 07/27/11 12:42 PM, Wjhonson wrote: David how is an exact quote a summary or interpretation? An exact quote, backed up by the actual audio track is... exact. You are not summarizing it, and you are not interpreting it either. You are presenting it. If that is to be the case the exact quote MUST be in its original anguage. All translations require interpretation. Ray ___ oundation-l mailing list oundatio...@lists.wikimedia.org nsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Greg Kohs and Peter Damian
Although he reneged on his offer to buy http://knol.google.com/k/bose-201-series-ii-direct-reflecting-bookshelf-speakers# The Speakers Which Almost Destroyed Knol I as well as others support welcoming Kohs back to this list by unbanning him. I agree with the sentiment that the ban was over reaching and inappropriate. Will Johnson ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Greg Kohs and Peter Damian
Well maybe you can point out what exactly he did to get himself banned from this list? When it occurred I also had the same reaction that I still have. It didn't make sense to me. It still doesn't. His presence here was not disruptive to me. -Original Message- From: Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Sun, Jul 24, 2011 2:00 pm Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Greg Kohs and Peter Damian Although he reneged on his offer to buy http://knol.google.com/k/bose-201-series-ii-direct-reflecting-bookshelf-speakers# The Speakers Which Almost Destroyed Knol I as well as others support welcoming Kohs back to this list by unbanning him. I agree with the sentiment that the ban was over reaching and inappropriate. Will Johnson He has a long track record of trashing any limit of constructiveness or civility set. Kind of like inviting an alligator to a birthday party. Fred ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] They do make or break reputations
Something better than Wikipedia ? I can think of something right off the bat. Kill the copyright police who do nothing useful and harm the project immensely. Go back to the more transparent rationale that copyright infringement rests solely upon the person who uploaded the copyrighted item, not on people who merely link to it. That would allow us to link to YouTube videos for example (not host them, just link to them). Why read an article on Wikipedia about say Shirley Temple, if someone else has an identical article AND video streaming as well so you can watch one of her movie or a newsreel interview. Re-hosters will eventually figure this out, grab all of our content and improve upon it. We should get there before they do. Will ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] They do make or break reputations
Again you are referring to the hosting or presentation of non-free content and I am not. I am not referring to the DISPLAY of videos within Wikipedia. Only the LINKING of videos from Wikipedia. 99.% of Youtube videos have no licensing information at all so there is no way to tell if they are being uploaded by the copyright holder. The Wikipedian copyright police take a worst-case position and disallow all such linking. I am suggesting that linking itself should be a moot issue. By the way Thomas this thread is for suggesting ways to move forward. -Original Message- From: Thomas Morton morton.tho...@googlemail.com To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Tue, Jul 12, 2011 12:45 pm Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] They do make or break reputations Go back to the more transparent rationale that copyright infringement rests solely upon the person who uploaded the copyrighted item, not on people who merely link to it. That would allow us to link to YouTube videos for example (not host them, just link to them). Why read an article on Wikipedia about say Shirley Temple, if someone else has an identical article AND video streaming as well so you can watch one of her movie or a newsreel interview. Re-hosters will eventually figure this out, grab all of our content and improve upon it. We should get there before they do. trongly disagree. Wikipedia is built on the principle that freely licensed ontent rocks and is the future. Making use of non-freely licensed content akes that goal hypocritical and awkward. (by the way; there is not necessairily an issue with linking to Youtube ontent - if it is correctly licensed, then it is fine) Besides; no one has managed to make use of Wikipedia content and build on it n a way that you suggest - if it were so clear an advantage I am sure omeone would have done it by now! Wikipedia but with extra non-free images and videos is not a Wikipedia with ignificant extra value. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but we ave millions :) Tom __ oundation-l mailing list oundatio...@lists.wikimedia.org nsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] They do make or break reputations
If you don't see the significant value in including video content, then I would suggest that you don't see the significant value in including photographic content either. I would suggest that's an outdated value system. A picture is worth a thousand words, an audio is worth ten thousand, a video is worth a million. Will Johnson ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] They do make or break reputations
Links by themselves are not copyrightable, and are not unfree. So your argument, which you keep repeating is not germane to this point. The point is, the copyright police have taken a fear (of something which has never occurred in actual law), and made it a point of battle. We are arbiters of information content, should not be acting as the police and judge over what is on YouTube. We cannot know is something loaded is under copyright or not and should not be attempting to know. It's none of our business. Our business should be merely to decide what is useful for our project. The links themselves, I repeat, are free. The point of contention is whether a link by itself IS a copyright violation. And on the presumption that it MIGHT be (which is itself ridiculous) our project suffers immense harm by a handful of u persons. All that is beside the point, my point, which is that a link cannot be a copyright violation, and cannot be licensed. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] They do make or break reputations
Pick a spot that you think is appropriate. But you are missing the point. The point in not to continue forward *under the current restrictions and requirements*, that is a dead horse. The glamour is off the rose. -Original Message- From: Thomas Morton morton.tho...@googlemail.com To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Tue, Jul 12, 2011 1:27 pm Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] They do make or break reputations The point is, the copyright police have taken a fear (of something which has never occurred in actual law), and made it a point of battle. This is, I think, the wrong forum for our disagreement. I mostly rose to our nasty casting of copyright police, which was a mistake. Sorry to veryone else :) But my final comment is thus; you have misconstrued, I think, the point of he argument against such links. In fact; pretty much all cases I have ever een have been unambiguous in one way or another. So while I would entertain he notion that such a policy is limiting our ability to link to egitimately licensed/hosted content I suggest you kinda need to demonstrate hat with specifics. Perhaps an on-wiki discussion is the way to progress this. Tom __ oundation-l mailing list oundatio...@lists.wikimedia.org nsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Call for referendum
One type of image being Image of Muhammad ? -Original Message- From: Philippe Beaudette phili...@wikimedia.org To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Wed, Jun 29, 2011 1:35 pm Subject: [Foundation-l] Call for referendum *Please distribute widely* Call for referendum*: The Wikimedia Foundation, at the direction of the oard of Trustees, will be holding a vote to determine whether members of he community support the creation and usage of an opt-in personal image ilter, which would allow readers to voluntarily screen particular types of mages strictly for their own account. Further details and educational materials will be available shortly. The eferendum is scheduled for 12-27 August, 2011, and will be conducted on ervers hosted by a neutral third party. Referendum details, officials, oting requirements, and supporting materials will be posted at ttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image_filter_referendum shortly. For the coordinating committee, hilippe (WMF) brown1023 isker ardetanha eterSymonds obert Harris ___ hilippe Beaudette ead of Reader Relations ikimedia Foundation, Inc. 415-839-6885, x 2106 (reader relations) phili...@wikimedia.org __ oundation-l mailing list oundatio...@lists.wikimedia.org nsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request: WMF commitment as a long term cultural archive?
Because Commons is to be used by the world, not just sister projects. If the New York Times Online links a picture in from Commons (and credits it properly) are we going to make their later-historical story useless by deleting the picture ? -Original Message- From: Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Thu, Jun 2, 2011 11:01 am Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Request: WMF commitment as a long term cultural archive? On 2 June 2011 14:21, Fae fae...@gmail.com wrote: Briefly responding to a couple of points raised so far: Yes, there is a need for a policy as otherwise the WMF would have no long term operational archive plan. Why would we have an archive plan? Archives are for things that aren't expected to needed on a regular basis any more but may need to be referred to in the future. We're not going to archive things on Commons, they'll just stay on Commons indefinitely. If an image is hosted on Commons for 100 years and NEVER used by any other Wikimedia project would we, or why should we, retain it? Fred ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Scheduled intermittent downtime on all Wikimedia projects ...
In a message dated 5/25/2011 3:33:57 AM Pacific Daylight Time, midom.li...@gmail.com writes: There're lots of great ideas around the world, feeding the hungry and curing the cancer among them. Domas your responses are not helpful at all. You are simply stirring the pot to no point. Please stop. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Scheduled intermittent downtime on all Wikimedia projects ...
In a message dated 5/25/2011 11:01:24 AM Pacific Daylight Time, midom.li...@gmail.com writes: You forgot to tell if all of my responses or just some, and if there's really no point at all, or there might be some. Anyway, thanks for this helpful contribution! Refactoring my comments : Domas some or at least one of your comments are not helpful at all. (Although some or even most of your other comments are helpful.) Will ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Interesting legal action
In a message dated 5/22/2011 1:35:51 AM Pacific Daylight Time, wiki-l...@phizz.demon.co.uk writes: There are many core problems that affect this issue. One of which is 'Verifiability not truth' which seems a laudable concept when applied to hearsay, and to allow articles on the paranormal etc. But is often used in BLP articles to justify including untruths, rumours, and to repeat slurs about someone, that happen to have a source that can be verified. Truth is elusive. Many people define Truth to suit themselves. We're not in a position to be judge, defense and jury. So we should not try. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] No rights to participate
In a message dated 5/22/2011 8:23:33 AM Pacific Daylight Time, morton.tho...@googlemail.com writes: But the idea that I have a right to edit Wikipedia or You have no right to do that is incorrect, because WP is a private website. You make the word private have no meaning. What would be a public website in that case? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 1.3 billion of humans don't have Wikipedia in their native...
In a message dated 5/22/2011 4:38:09 AM Pacific Daylight Time, smole...@eunet.rs writes: Aren't these languages written with Chinese characters and thus their speakers can read and write the Chinese Wikipedia? All the Latin languages: Italian, French, Spanish, English, and so on are written with Latin characters: a, b, c, d, e and so on. And yet the French cannot pick up a book in Spanish and read it. Just because a language is written with Chinese characters does not mean that the words and meanings are spoken or comprehensible by any other language user using those same characters for other words and meanings. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] No rights to participate
In a message dated 5/22/2011 9:31:30 AM Pacific Daylight Time, fredb...@fairpoint.net writes: Legally, Wikipedia is private property belonging to a nonprofit corporation. If the United States government, or some other government, owned it and regulated it in such a way as to guarantee public access it would be a public website. My point Fred, is there is no such animal. So calling something a private website is redundant, since all websites are private, there are no public websites. Certainly there are websites owned by governments, but they are not public in the sense above that there is guaranteed access to *modify* their contents. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 1.3 billion of humans don't have Wikipedia in their native...
In a message dated 5/22/2011 9:53:08 AM Pacific Daylight Time, li...@caseybrown.org writes: Indeed, it doesn't mean that necessarily. However, your analogy doesn't apply in this situation and Nikola was right. Many of the Chinese languages share a common writing system and only differ in the way the language is spoken. You're missing my point. All the Latin languages share a common writing system and only differ in the way the language is spoken. Address the point that the words within the system have the same semantic *meaning* and are formed with the same syntactic rules. If Bo Dow Kah means your dog is dead in one language or dialect, but Bo Dow Kah means your mother is pretty in another, than the fact that the spelling is the same, has no relevance to the issue at hand. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 1.3 billion of humans don't have Wikipedia in their native...
In a message dated 5/22/2011 10:39:56 AM Pacific Daylight Time, andreeng...@gmail.com writes: In Chinese writing a character shows a word, irrespective of how the word is pronounced. So if we would use a Chinese style writing system, you could write [your] [dog] [is] [dead], and a Frenchman would write exactly the same, even though he would pronounce [your] [dog] [is] [dead] as Votre chien est mort. Thus, different languages might write the same sentence the same in Chinese script. This does not mean that there are no differences - someone who spoke Latin would probably spell this line as [dog] [your] [dead] [is], and perhaps in yet another language this would be immensely crude, and the right thing to say would be [prepare for bad news] [honorific person] [your] [dog] [is] [not] [alive], but the mere difference of being in a different language with totally different sounds is not enough to conclude that in Chinese writing the actual written text will be different. How a word is pronounced has nothing to do with the issue at hand. Secondly, the orthography (spelling) of a word could be identical but the meaning very different. Just look at the differences between British English and American English and then multiply that by every word. The dictionaries might contain the exact same words spelled exactly the same way, and yet the meanings of every word is quite different. Thirdly, syntactic rules do not follow spelling variations, nor even meaning variations. They are yet another layer of meaning or usage. The main thrust here is, are we underserving populations which cannot adequately use any of the projects in their own *native* language whatever that may be. Forcing people to utilize a secondary language is really colonialism disguised. If the only issue here were pronounciation, then there would be no issue, as the Chinese are reading the project, not speaking it. So perhaps people could stop waving that red herring here. So if you are claiming that the sole differences are pronunciation, then this language should be removed from the list of ones lacking a project. I'm not certain however that that claim can be supported. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Interesting legal action
Publish means to make public. To make available to the public. Telling your buddies in the locker room is not publishing. No it isn't. Telling one mate down the pub might but multiple people is kinda dicey. I assume more than one person has access to the User:Oversight feed. Exactly what is and isn't considered a private communication is a complex area though. -Original Message- From: geni geni...@gmail.com To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Fri, May 20, 2011 3:28 pm Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Interesting legal action On 20 May 2011 23:13, Thomas Morton morton.tho...@googlemail.com wrote: Ah. No thats not accurate. Fortunately even the British courts can't stamp On private communication. The injunction is on publishing the info. Telling your mates down the pub is fine. No it isn't. Telling one mate down the pub might but multiple people is kinda dicey. I assume more than one person has access to the User:Oversight feed. Exactly what is and isn't considered a private communication is a complex area though. -- geni ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Interesting legal action
{{fact}}
I dispute that private communications are public.
Err you are aware that the courts regard sending the information on a
postcard counts as publishing?
-Original Message-
From: geni geni...@gmail.com
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Sent: Fri, May 20, 2011 3:34 pm
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Interesting legal action
On 20 May 2011 23:33, Thomas Morton morton.tho...@googlemail.com wrote:
It's not publishing the info. It's fine.
Err you are aware that the courts regard sending the information on a
postcard counts as publishing?
The point is to stifle mass media.
That doesn't mean that they are the only people the law applies to.
--
geni
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Re: [Foundation-l] Interesting legal action
It is not up to us to decide that something is private. If it's been published, then it is public. If it's been published in a reliable source, than it's useable in our project. We routinely suppress disclosure of private information. When do the details of an affair become public? And how? Decisions by media editors is the short answer, but what criteria do they use? If the subjects are mere celebrities, as opposed to persons with political responsibilities, does intense public interest transmogrify private affairs to public? Fred ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Copyright problems of images from India
As you say any photograph of a person obviously living, and yet who died before 1941 is in the Public Domain in India.? This is true regardless of any other point raised about the source of the photograph as you again say. The first step is to get agreement on those points for the Indian portion of Wikimedia Commons. -Original Message- From: Shiju Alex lt;shijualexonl...@gmail.comgt; To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List lt;foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.orggt;; Discussion list on Indian language projects of Wikimedia. lt;wikimediaindi...@lists.wikimedia.orggt; Sent: Tue, May 10, 2011 3:37 am Subject: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Copyright problems of images from India Dear All, I am forwarding the below mail on behalf of a Malayalam wikipedian who is very active in Wikimedia Commons. Of late it is becoming very difficult for many Wikimedians from India to contribute to Wikimedia Commons especially if they are uploading historical images which are in PD. We are facing lot of issues (and many a times unnecessary controversies also) with the historic images in PD, images of wall paintings and statues, and so on. Please see the below mail in which Sreejith citing various examples. It is almost impossible for the uploaders from India to show proof of the century old images of Hindu Gods and Goddesses. The current policies of Commons are not permitting many of the PD images from India citing all sorts of policies which might be relevant only in the western world. With these type of policies we are going to have serious issues when we try to go for GLAM type events. But I also do not know the solution for this issue. Requesting constructive discussion. Shiju Alex -- Forwarded message -- From: Sreejith K. lt;sreejithk2...@gmail.comgt; Date: Thu, May 5, 2011 at 12:03 PM Subject: Copyright problems of images from India To: Shiju Alex lt;shijualexonl...@gmail.comgt; Shiju, As you might be aware already, we are having trouble keeping historical images about India in Wikimedia commons. This pertains mostly to images about Hindu gods and people who died before 1947. Please see the below examples: - File:Narayana Guru.jpglt;http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Narayana_Guru.jpggt; - This is the image of Sree Narayana Gurult;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narayana_Gurugt;, a Hindu saint, social reformer and is even considered a god by certain castes in Kerala. This image has been tagged as an image with No source. Narayana Guru expired in 1928 and considering the conditions in which India was in during that period and before, it is very difficult to get an image source online. Most active Wikipedians does not have access or information on how old the image is or where a source of it can be found. Any photograph published before 1941 in India is in public domain as per Indian copyright act. Common sense says that this image meets this criteria because the person was long lead before 1941, but we still need proof of the first publishing date. Deleting this image on grounds that no source could be found will only reduce the informative values of all the articles which this image is included in. - File:Aravana.JPG: This image has already been deleted, but you can see the amount of discussion that went in before deleting it. See Commons:Deletion requests/File:Aravana.JPGlt;http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/File:Aravana.JPGgt;. (An almost similar image can be found herelt;.)This target=_blankhttp://www.flickr.com/photos/anoopp/5706721852/in/photostream/gt;.)This image as put for deletion because it had the image of Swami Ayyappanlt;in target=_blankhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swami_Ayyappangt;in it. Ayyappan, a popular god of Kerala, has his image circulated everywhere on the plant with no proof of copyrights. It makes sense to believe that this image is not eligible for copyright because Hindu deities are all common property, but again, Commons need proof that the image is in public domain. This is the same case with all Hindu gods/goddesses. The images can only be kept in Commons if the uploader can provide proof that the images are in public domain. - File:Kottarathil sankunni.jpglt;http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kottarathil_sankunni.jpggt;: This is a picture of Kottarathil Sankunnilt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kottarathil_Sankunnigt;, the author of the famous book Aithiyamaalalt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aithihyamalagt;. Kottarathil Sankunni died in 1937 and so it makes sense to believe that this image was created on or before 1937 and thus falls in Public Domain. But some people in Commons is refusing to believe that and is asking for proof. Now it becomes the responsibility of the uploader to show proof that this image was published 60 years before
Re: [Foundation-l] foundation-l Digest, Vol 85, Issue 52
It's my understanding that sweat of the brown does not create a copyright at all. That was the entire argument behind the claim that phonebooks had no copyright protection. Similarly pure indexes have no copyright protection since they exhibit no creativity at all. Bad news for indexers. In a message dated 4/25/2011 10:58:23 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time, thomas.dal...@gmail.com writes: I would expect that to vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. For example, jurisdictions that includes some kind of sweat of the brow doctrine would probably protect translations. What jurisdiction are you referring to? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] foundation-l Digest, Vol 85, Issue 52
In a message dated 4/26/2011 12:08:42 AM Pacific Daylight Time, smole...@eunet.rs writes: Translation is not sweat of the brow. Copyright law of Germany, for example, explicitly states that translations are copyrighted: http://bundesrecht.juris.de/urhg/__3.html . Copyright law of Serbia, for another example, does the same. This doesn't exactly address the point. A work is copyright, a translation enjoys that *same* copyright. It doesn't create an additional independent copyright. This was the situation when Harriet Beecher Stowe tried to sue for people translating her work. That's why the US law changed IIRC. A translation, under US law, as I understand it, is a derivative work, and thus can be made, under the same copyright protection, but does not create an additional copyright distinct from the original work. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] foundation-l Digest, Vol 85, Issue 52
In a message dated 4/26/2011 4:42:50 AM Pacific Daylight Time, waihor...@yahoo.com.hk writes: Baidu do not translate anything copy from English Wikipedia or Japanese Wikipedia, but just keep the full content without attribution and changing anything. There are totally about 50 articles copy from Eng Japanese WP. HW How bout just tell them, please add this line of attribution If they've only copied 50 articles, it sounds to me more like what we routinely encounter, people just don't understand the license. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] foundation-l Digest, Vol 85, Issue 52
In a message dated 4/25/2011 9:34:16 AM Pacific Daylight Time, jrg...@gmail.com writes: My interest in a legal opinion is not to know if what they do is legal or not. My interest is to know for example what can they do if I copy the content they previously have translated from an English Wikipedia article I have previously written. How do they put a dollar figure on the damages suffered if the income they get from that content is obtained from my work they have translated without my permission? They only have my permission to publish derived works under same license. Then I have the right to copy the derived works back. So any damage they could claim is exactly the same damage I suffer for not being able to do those copies. I don't believe you could make the case that individual contributors have any standing to sue for copyright violations. Similarly, when you contribute to the project, you are intrinsically giving up any rights you may think you possess in what you have written. Your permission is a non-existent entity in the case of what you give to Wikipedia. Will Johnson ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] foundation-l Digest, Vol 85, Issue 52
I always thought that translations were considered wholely derivative, that is that a new copyright is *not* created, by translating. In a message dated 4/25/2011 1:57:34 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time, sainto...@telus.net writes: On 04/25/11 9:33 AM, Joan Goma wrote: My interest in a legal opinion is not to know if what they do is legal or not. My interest is to know for example what can they do if I copy the content they previously have translated from an English Wikipedia article I have previously written. The translation would give rise to a new copyright *in addition* to yours. You would be infringing their copyright. This all assumes that it was a human translation. If it was a machine translation the argument could be made that as a mechanical process it lacked the originality needed to acquire copyright. How do they put a dollar figure on the damages suffered if the income they get from that content is obtained from my work they have translated without my permission? In principle damages are evaluated on the basis of market activity. If the quantum of damages is the issue the burden of proof is on the person seeking damages. They only have my permission to publish derived works under same license. Then I have the right to copy the derived works back. So any damage they could claim is exactly the same damage I suffer for not being able to do those copies. No, because the translation is not identical to the work you produced. This still does not account for how different jurisdictions will handle the matter. At first glance it would seem more convenient for them to have the case heard in a Chinese court and for you in a Spanish court. Ray Date: Mon, 25 Apr 2011 01:11:25 -0700 From: Ray Saintongesainto...@telus.net On 04/24/11 11:45 PM, Joan Goma wrote: As Ray saids legal prosecution to claim for formal accomplishing of the copyright terms is expensive and difficult. But the same happens the other way around. I would like to have a clear legal opinion about applying the terms without going to court. They have copied articles from Chinese Wikipedia and translated articles from English and Japanese Wikipedia so in my opinion their work is a derivative one and according to the CCSA terms it is also CCSA no mater what they say. What about creating a bot to copy from Baidu all the articles not yet existing in Chinese wikipedia. Could Geoff Brigham provide us his legal advice? Getting a legal opinion that what they are doing is illegal would be the easy part. The challenge is what can you do with that opinion once you have it. Copyright, and least in common law countries, is primarily an economic right. In that context courts would be more concerned with the measure of economic damage. How do you put a dollar figure on the damages suffered when the original authors weren't seeking to make money from it? Whoever starts the fight still needs to fund prosecuting the battle, and that could be very expensive. Ray ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Plea for candidates: WMF Movement Communications Manager
In a message dated 4/5/2011 6:08:21 PM Pacific Daylight Time, bnewst...@wikimedia.org writes: Another quick note on the Movement Communications Manager posting that we are hoping to fill at WMF. We have a number of applicants, but very, very few are from the Wikimedia community. We would really love to fill this role with a strong Wikimedian, so if you are interested or know someone who may be interested, please apply or reach out to Jay Walsh or myself. http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings/Movement_Communications_Ma nager The job is written in such a narrow way that it's not very likely you're going to get many candidates from within the community sorry. You want someone with a communications degree, who is a native English speaker, can also communicate in a non-English language, and has experience in CSS, and templates, and Wikimedia projects in general. Sorry all of those things just do not go together in my mind. Even tech savvy people do not necessarily know much to anything about CSS, and those that do are not journalists and writers in general. So that's your first strike out. People who are journalists with degrees in communications or that sort of field, do not gravitate toward the Wikimedia projects at all. The few that do, are very very unlikely to be able to create or even understand templates. So that's your second strike out. 99% of native English speakers, perhaps even 99.9% can not communicate even minimally in any other language whatsoever. So that's your third strike-out. It seems the job requirements were written by a computer science degree-holder who thinks somehow knowing how to use IRC is a requirement of communications outreach I see the deadline is in two days for submissions :) I prophecy doom. Dubya the artist formerly known as Will Johnson ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Plea for candidates: WMF Movement Communications Manager
Sarah I understand your point, but the required qualification just above the non-English states : Exceptional English writing is critical for this role, including the ability to write time-sensitive, efficient, compelling, and clearly understandable communications products for a wide range of audiences. To me personally, I cannot see a person for whom English is not a first language being able to pass that requirement at all. Many second-language learners can communicate in English, but I can count on one hand people I've met who can communicate in a way which is compelling. And those who can are more-than-likely not going to be available for a position like this. Sorry to say. So it still sounds to me like the requirements include English as a first language, and also fluent in a second language. Will Johnson ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Board Resolution: Openness
While I am all about openness and journalism, I had a recent incident which made me re-think something on these lines. I had a few years back, started creating an open visible search-indexed index to ArbCom proceedings. Some editors however edit using their real names, not something I would necessarily recommend if you end up at ArbCom and then a search on your name, get's a top Goog because of an index like mine. People will common names could simply say it's someone else, but people with rare names like Dror Kamir for example, might have some intrepid employer say, Oh Gee you were involved in that whole versus big controversy in Wikipedia, I don't think your personality would be a good fit here I can see it happening in this connected age, I have done it myself when propositioning a new client, to see what's out there on them. I decided to make my index invisible temporarily while I mull this over more. Will Johnson -Original Message- From: Dror Kamir dqa...@bezeqint.net To: foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Fri, Apr 8, 2011 1:16 pm Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Board Resolution: Openness Hello, This resolution is a very positive step. I hope we will soon be updated about practical steps to implement it. Two such practical steps that are easy to implement and would make a significant difference, in my opinion: (1) Administrators' decisions about bans, sanctions etc. should be made more public. They are, of course, accessible to anyone as a policy of all projects, but they are often hidden in many pages with non-intuitive titles (for detailed analysis of the problem, see Ayelet Oz's presentation in Wikimania 2009 http://wikimania2009.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proceedings:149). Had someone followed the administrators' decisions on the biggest projects, and publish a monthly newsletter with copies of the most prominent decisions about bans and sanctions, it would increase transparency and make administrators much more careful about checking cases and providing justifications for their actions, especially in what concerns treatment of new users. It would also give a better picture about disruptive behaviors of users. (2) Appealing sanctions should be made much easier. I would even go as far as opening a special small wiki for such complaints. Reply should be provided within a limited period of time, and refer specifically to the new user's arguments. This may sound trivial, but projects often fail to do so. Dror K ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Storyteller job opening
In a message dated 3/1/2011 12:08:25 PM Pacific Standard Time, wikipe...@frontier.com writes: If people actually understood how collaboration on a wiki works, it would be much easier for them to accept the projects for what they are, rather than creating drama about things they aren't. Then we could focus more on dealing with the drama on the projects themselves. I think you miss the ball. It's not about understanding on a cerebral level. We all have collaborated IRL on various things. Very few of us, previously, have collaborated in a massively multi-player video game. Most of the time you fight each other, or the orcs, you don't collaborate on building a house or something. It's a new experience for most persons, and I don't think you can get the full flavor with charts and graphs. You're going to need to document and recount some of the drama itself, without downplaying what actually occurred and why. Some personality types are not suited for MMORG collaboration, and we shouldn't make it seem like all are. W ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Storyteller job opening
-Original Message- From: Michael Snow wikipe...@frontier.com To: foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Tue, Mar 1, 2011 3:49 pm Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Storyteller job opening On 3/1/2011 2:41 PM, Pronoein wrote: Thank you for your answer Michael. However: «Note that this survey was aimed at less experienced editors. » I remember for example that many administrators quit during the sexual content controversy because of the decision of Jimbo. Those people were driven by a vision of a certain type of governance and felt betrayed or disappointed. I acknowledge the limitations of the survey, and as always would be thrilled if we had more and better data. But since you were connecting your thesis to a broad systemic trend, I considered it more useful to look at evidence of systemic trends, not anecdotal reactions to a single incident. In terms of volunteer motivation, I'd have to think being driven by a vision of a certain type of governance has to rank pretty low, considering that our mission has nothing to do with promoting any particular vision in that field. A survey of former administrators or something like that might be informative, certainly, if somebody is available to drive that. My guess is that compared with other former volunteers, their responses would have more similarity than difference. --Michael Snow - I think you two are talking at cross purposes here. It's not that volunteers are motivated to contribute *based* on the governance model. It's that they decide to *quit* based on the governance model. The police are your friends until they screw with you. Then they are not. Can a person who has been screwed with, ever be reconciled again to the project? The project has situations encoded into it, which don't go away simply because they are ignored. W ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
In a message dated 2/26/2011 6:12:10 AM Pacific Standard Time, dger...@gmail.com writes: So, for WIkibooks: what's the tuna? What's the compelling attraction that will keep people lured in? I will go one step further. What is Wikibooks at all? The scope, content, purpose were really poorly defined. Something to large for Wikipedia doesn't really cut it in my mind. When our Wikipedia article on Marilyn Monroe can be 25 screen pages long, than who needs a book and how much bigger would a book be anyway? I'm not sure it makes sense on the Internet to call anything a book. The other problem I have is who writes the book? I surely don't want to write a book on Obama, but I can contribute a *chapter* perhaps of course I'd want to be the editor-in-chief of my own chapter but allow contributors. But heck, if I'm going to go to that much trouble, why not just throw it up on my own web site ? W ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness: a radical proposal -- some proposed details ...
The problem with the approach that we can let the welcoming and friendliness be an emergent behaviour, is that we're already many years into this and it's simply... not. However the admin bit is an officially sanctioned method of enforcing rules. This is a lop-sided approach. To counter-balance the officially sanctioned rule enforcement, we need an *equally weighted* officially sanctioned welcoming committee type role that operates *on the level* of the editors exactly as an admin operates. A person well-suited to be an admin, is not necessarily and sometimes diametrically opposed to a person well-suited to be a welcomer. Whatever happened to the push to encourage editors to come back? W ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
In a message dated 2/27/2011 12:26:22 PM Pacific Standard Time, dger...@gmail.com writes: The scope was supposedly textbooks - how-to books. The problem I see with free books is just that you really need something that says... this is WHY you, the contributor would put in this amount of effort here. With Wikipedia, I can contribute a word here, a sentence there, parse some grammar over there, fix a bad phrasing, add a source... all to seven articles and call it a day. A book takes an awful lot of effort. And then I give it away free to the world. Sorry I'm just not seeing that. Some has been some effort on Knol to create books and collections. The books are not official but the collections are an official tool, even if the results are not. So on Wikibooks for example, I could create my own How-To Home Repair, and collect *chapters* contributed by a dozen people into a *book*. So what we should have created it not Wikibooks with which to start, but Wiki...How or WikiChapter or something small, that a person could actually accomplish. I suppose... maybe I'm just rambling. But just the name Wikibooks doesn't sound to me like How To, it sounds like 150 to 1000 pages on an overarching topic of some kind. W ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
In a message dated 2/25/2011 3:12:17 PM Pacific Standard Time, jay...@gmail.com writes: At the moment, we need admins who press buttons more than we need to welcome new users. It is unfortunate, but that is how it is. We need to find ways of reducing the amount of work needed, or radically increase the number of admins. I have to respectfully disagree with John. IMHO we need a more welcoming environment to new editors. The idea that the vast majority of new contributors contribute nonsense, or vandalize is in my opinion, not a well-founded claim. I would agree with a statement like the vast majority of new contributors don't really understand the now-Byzantine rule system in place, which is a completely different situation. I also agree that our templates make the I.R.S. appear friendly, and that our user outreach is close to non-existent. Whatever happened to the Please Come Back campaign which was seemingly moribund before even getting launched ? It's fine to say nothing's wrong as the Titanic sinks, but it's still sinking. W ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
In a message dated 2/25/2011 9:56:26 AM Pacific Standard Time, smole...@eunet.rs writes: To my knowledge, no one has ever tried it, but why not? In reality, some people don't do what they know to do, but choose to become teachers. Maybe there are people who know how to edit Wikipedia and would want to teach new users rather than actually edit. Well if you mean Wikipedians, yes there was a Welcoming committee at one time which died due to lack of participation. It was maybe five years ago or something. W ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
In a message dated 2/22/2011 10:16:25 PM Pacific Standard Time, sjkl...@hcs.harvard.edu writes: There's a shortage of core developers. There are quite a lot of PHP developers who have built some sort of MediaWiki extension, or otherwise hacked on it to make their own fork, however. We have some opportunities here to recruit more of them as well -- some way of encouraging each downloader to get involved, or one-click sharing of their local hacks with a global community? I'm not sure; but this is certainly another case of how can we embrace people who take the first step to join us worth solving. AdSense Integration. The ability for a MediaWiki install (retroactive to earlier releases) to stick Adsense ads in where they want. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
In a message dated 2/23/2011 11:16:00 AM Pacific Standard Time, sgard...@wikimedia.org writes: To belabour the videogame analogy a little further: Zack Exley and I were talking about new article patrol as being a bit like a first-person shooter, and every now and then a nun or a tourist wanders in front of the rifle sites. We need patrollers to be able to identify nuns and tourists, so that they don't get shot :-) New Article Patroller Fatigue or NAPF is that disease characterized by bleary-eyed snipers jacked up on caffeine and cheetos attacking the slimy monsters they imagine are in their sights. Each NAP should be instructed that after every day or week of patrol they are required to take an equal amount of time ... off. W ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Missing Wikipedians: An Essay
Ral I know you'd like to give the benefit of good faith to all admins. However, if we actually have admins who are deleting articles so quickly that they fat-finger the *reasons* then we have a serious problem. No thinkee is quite close to admin abuse. As a community we should be bending over backward to *at any cost* (any, any, at any) avoid the creation of more vandals. At.. Any... Cost. We want more productive editors. We do not want to create more people feeling wounded ego. If we have to put up with stubs, nonsense, and similar things for a tiny bit, it's well worth the effort of inclusiveness. The net is not paper. W In a message dated 2/20/2011 1:22:07 A.M. Pacific Standard Time, wjhon...@aol.com writes: In a message dated 2/19/2011 4:18:52 PM Pacific Standard Time, thewub.w...@googlemail.com writes: Deletion log for Makmende: * 00:37, 24 March 2010 Flyguy649 (talk | contribs) deleted “Makmende” ? (CSD G3: Pure Vandalism) * 22:53, 23 March 2010 Malik Shabazz (talk | contribs) deleted “Makmende” ? (G12: Unambiguous copyright infringement (CSDH)) * 18:30, 23 March 2010 JoJan (talk | contribs) deleted “Makmende” ? (G1: Patent nonsense, meaningless, or incomprehensible) The entire content of the first version to be deleted? Makmende. Kenyan Superhero. Spawned. Not born. Amphibious. Breaths underwater. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Missing Wikipedians: An Essay
In a message dated 2/19/2011 4:18:52 PM Pacific Standard Time, thewub.w...@googlemail.com writes: Deletion log for Makmende: * 00:37, 24 March 2010 Flyguy649 (talk | contribs) deleted “Makmende” ? (CSD G3: Pure Vandalism) * 22:53, 23 March 2010 Malik Shabazz (talk | contribs) deleted “Makmende” ? (G12: Unambiguous copyright infringement (CSDH)) * 18:30, 23 March 2010 JoJan (talk | contribs) deleted “Makmende” ? (G1: Patent nonsense, meaningless, or incomprehensible) The entire content of the first version to be deleted? Makmende. Kenyan Superhero. Spawned. Not born. Amphibious. Breaths underwater. I have a problem with this admin comprehending what exactly Vandalism means. In what way is the initial version vandalism. If I cared enough I would suggest that re-training might be appropriate here. W ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] WikiRoll
Something must be wrong with this stat counter. Back in 2009, Main Page was getting two million views per month, more or less http://knol.google.com/k/will-johnson/most-popular-wikipedia-pages/4hmquk6fx 4gu/191#view This counter show an amazing drop off if its now only getting about 12,000 views per month based on this weekly figure here http://www.wikiroll.com/popularity_en.cgi?lang=enday_first=15008; day_count=7 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Questions about new Fellow
You are mistaking the problem. It's not that a piece of knowledge is not googleable. It's that a piece of knowledge is not published whatsoever. Never published. Anywhere. At any time. Ever. That's quite a different animal. -Original Message- From: CherianTinu Abraham tinucher...@gmail.com To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Fri, Jan 21, 2011 8:17 pm Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Questions about new Fellow Come on friend, History of India and many other civilizations of world started thousands of years even before that. As somebody already said earlier, It is not something that everyone can easily comprehend.. Every knowledge is NOT on the internet and Google searchable :) Sorry, No pun intended. Regards Tinu Cherian On Sat, Jan 22, 2011 at 6:59 AM, geni geni...@gmail.com wrote: On 21 January 2011 05:59, CherianTinu Abraham tinucher...@gmail.com wrote: Knowledge in olden times of India are transferred orally from Gurus ( Teachers) to students/disciples . They are not necessarily recorded. We are talking about the ages even before manuscripts paper are invented. Paper has been around for 1800 years. The odds of orally transmitted information remaining accurate over that kind of time period are limited. In any case the who Guru thing has taken a bit of a hammering lately from the likes of Sanal Edamaruku and Basava Premanand. -- geni ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Questions about new Fellow
In a message dated 1/20/2011 11:37:00 AM Pacific Standard Time, dger...@gmail.com writes: There's a lot of knowledge in fields which everyone assumes, and which are transmitted academically, but not in a format that teenage en:wp admins can grasp in five seconds. Knowledge transmitted academically, but not actually ever published? For example? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Template Overkill
One fix that developers could do, and which would address 93.6% of the problem is to move the template editing out-of-normal-editing-space. Disentangle the template code, from the editable text. W ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia / Wikipedia Statistics
In a message dated 12/15/2010 9:57:31 PM Pacific Standard Time, ezac...@wikimedia.org writes: Technical problems: First the dump server needed fixing , now the wikistats server is broken: power unit is no longer. Replacement is on order. Erik Zachte Is there any other way to get a table of the number of new articles being created in en-WP each day or week or month? Will ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia / Wikipedia Statistics
In a message dated 12/16/2010 2:14:01 AM Pacific Standard Time, z...@mzmcbride.com writes: Erik Zachte wrote: On 12/16/2010 0:12, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: Why are these tables so out of date? http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesArticlesNewPerDay.htm Technical problems: First the dump server needed fixing , now the wikistats server is broken: power unit is no longer. Replacement is on order. I don't follow. The latest stats at that link currently are from June 2009. MZMcBride What don't you follow? That they are out of date? Or that something is broken? Can you be more clear. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Old Wikipedia backups discovered
Is the current CC license retroactive to all of the old versions from the beginning to now? W ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikis analysed
In a message dated 12/14/2010 2:55:59 PM Pacific Standard Time, v...@fct.unl.pt writes: The Wikimedia projects power structure is definitely a serious candidate for such analysis. What is this? Link ? Will ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Wikimedia / Wikipedia Statistics
Why are these tables so out of date? http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesArticlesNewPerDay.htm ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Old Wikipedia backups discovered
In a message dated 12/14/2010 8:21:09 AM Pacific Standard Time, steven.wall...@gmail.com writes: This is fantastic, and the timing could not be better. If anyone finds anything noteworthy, please add it to the timeline of Wikipedia that we're building at the 10th anniversary wiki,[1] as well as the other tools for cataloging interesting tidbits from our history.[2] 1. http://ten.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_timeline 2. http://ten.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share Hmm I wonder if some things can be added there (sound of feathers ruffling) Btw how does one *open* this tarball thing (on Windows) ? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 2010 Wikimedia Study of Controversial Content
In a message dated 12/10/2010 12:45:46 AM Pacific Standard Time, jayen...@yahoo.com writes: Apart from summarising COM:PORN*, all that the draft sexual content policy was meant to do, actually, was to address two cases: * Material that is illegal to host for the Foundation under Florida law * Sexual images of people uploaded without their knowledge and consent I would think from the voting, that it's now apparent that this was not conveyed in the draft policy, as simply as you express it here. How long is the draft policy, and how short is your summary here. Apparently something else got added or substracted in the meanwhile. W ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wiki[p/m]edia
In a message dated 12/10/2010 6:52:05 AM Pacific Standard Time, zvand...@googlemail.com writes: It is difficult to say how many people refuse to donate to Wikimedia because they want to donate to Wikipedia. People should know that you can't donate to a website itself but only to the institution behind it. You also can't sue Ebay the website, only Ebay the company. However like all fund-accounting, you can donate to a fund set-aside exclusively for items related to WikiPedia, and not for any other WikiMedia activity. I would be very surprised if a non-profit were not using fund accounting as their accounting system. W ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] excluding Wikipedia clones from searching
In a message dated 12/9/2010 11:06:30 PM Pacific Standard Time, jamesmikedup...@googlemail.com writes: Google does it, archive.org (wayback machine) does it, we can copy them for caching and searching i assume. we are not changing the license, but just preventing the information from disappearing on us. You are thinking of refs which are out-of-copyright. Google books only gives snippet views of some books still under copyright for which they've not gotten permission to show an entire page at a time (which is preview mode). archive.org as well has copies of works out-of-copyright (or otherwise in the public domain) Your original statement was that we should copy refs. Many or most of our refs are under copyright still. We would not be able to do what you suggest imho. W ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 2010 Wikimedia Study of Controversial Content
In a message dated 12/10/2010 12:08:37 PM Pacific Standard Time, jayen...@yahoo.com writes: Suggest you read the draft policy, rather than the votes. You're suggesting that all the no votes are simply trolls then? That's a lot of no votes to just cast them off as people who didn't read the draft, isn't it? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] excluding Wikipedia clones from searching
In a message dated 12/10/2010 2:12:44 PM Pacific Standard Time, jamesmikedup...@googlemail.com writes: Well, lets backtrack. The original question was, how can we exclude wikipedia clones from the search. my idea was to create a search engine that includes only refs from wikipedia in it. then the idea was to make our own engine instead of only using google. lets agree that we need first a list of references and we can talk about the details of the searching later. thanks, mike I search for Mary Queen of Scots and I want to exclude Wikipedia clones from my results, because I'm really only interested in... how many times she appears in various Wikipedia pages. Why would I not just use the Wikipedia internal search engine then? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] excluding Wikipedia clones from searching
In a message dated 12/10/2010 1:31:20 PM Pacific Standard Time, jamesmikedup...@googlemail.com writes: If we prefer pages that can be cached and translated, and mark the others that cannot, then by natural selection we will in long term replaces the pages that are not allowed to be cached with ones that can be. My suggestion is for a wikipedia project, something to be supported and run on the toolserver or similar. I think if you were to propose that we should prefer pages that can be cached and translated you'd get a firestorm of opposition. The majority of our refs, imho, are still under copyright. This is because the majority of our refs are either web pages created by various authors who do not specify a free license (and therefore under U.S. law automatically enjoy copyright protection). Or they are refs to works which are relatively current, and are cited, for example in Google Books Preview mode, or at Amazon look-inside pages. I still cannot see any reason why we would want to cache anything like this. You haven't addressed what benefit it gives us, to cache refs. My last question here is not about whether we can or how, but how does it help the project? How? W ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] excluding Wikipedia clones from searching
In a message dated 12/10/2010 1:10:26 PM Pacific Standard Time, jamesmikedup...@googlemail.com writes: My point is we should index them ourselves. We should have the pages used as references first listed in an easy to use manner and if possible we should cache them. If they are not cacheable because of some restrictions, the references should be marked somehow as not as good and people might find better references. In the end, like citeseer you will find that pages that are available and open and cachable will be cited and used more than pages that are not. Right now, I dont know of a simple way to even get this list of references from wp. There is alot of work to do, and if we do this, it will benefit the wikipedia. Another thing to do is to translate the pages referenced. mike I understand your point, but you're avoiding answering the points I raised. They are archived at archive.org by permission. You tell archive.org to archive your site, and they do. You tell them to stop, and they do. What advantage would we have to repeat the caching yet again that archive.org is already doing? You haven't answered that. No matter what occurs, you're going to have trouble retrieving the list of refs from a WP page (or any web page), without knowing some programming language like PHP. Using PHP it's a fairly trivial parsing request. It's that's your only problem, I can write you a script to do it, for twenty bucks. You cannot translate a work, which is under copyright protection, without violating their copyright. Copyright extends to any effort that substantially mimics the underlying work. A translation is found to violate copyright. You could however make a parody :) W ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] excluding Wikipedia clones from searching
In a message dated 12/10/2010 2:58:08 PM Pacific Standard Time, jamesmikedup...@googlemail.com writes: my idea was that you will want to search pages that are referenced by wikipedia already, in my work on kosovo, it would be very helpful because there are lots of bad results on google, and it would be nice to use that also to see how many times certain names occur. That is why we need also our own indexing engine, I would like to count the occurances of each term and what page they occur on, and to xref that to names on wikipedia against them. Wanted pages could also be assisted like this, what are the most wanted pages that match against the most common terms in the new refindex or also existing pages. Well then all you would need to do is cross-reference the refs themselves. You don't need to cache the underlying pages to which they refer. So in your new search engine, when you search for Mary, Queen of Scots you really are saying, show me those external references, which are mentioned, in connection with Mary Queen of Scots, by Wikipedia. That doesn't require caching the pages to which refs refer. It only requires indexing those refs which currently are used in-world. W ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] excluding Wikipedia clones from searching
In a message dated 12/9/2010 2:51:39 AM Pacific Standard Time, jamesmikedup...@googlemail.com writes: yes it would be great. As i said, it could just include all pages listed as REF pages and that would allow people to review the results and find pages that should not belong. We also need to cache all these pages, best would be with a revision history. It should be similar to or using archive.org. We would not be able to do that for copyright reasons. Some if not most of the refs are still under copyright, we cannot make copies of those pages. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Foundation-L Mirrors
What is the perceived limitation(s) on mirroring this email list ? That is, making copies of it, on other sites. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Brazilian Portuguese Wikipedia
Is this like the difference between colour in Great Britain and color in the U.S. ? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Use Wikipedia as a Marketing Tool
In a message dated 12/7/2010 9:38:23 AM Pacific Standard Time, przyk...@o2.pl writes: The more mentions you have in the press, and the more visibility you have in social media and blogs, the more likely you are to seem legitimate and “notable” -- a precondition for inclusion. legitimate and notable by facebook, twitter and blogs? przykuta There is a great disconnect between the belief and the practice. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Re: [VereinDE-l] Bericht zur Verleihung der Zedler-Me...
In a message dated 12/4/2010 6:50:38 AM Pacific Standard Time, geni...@gmail.com writes: Actually we have at least 3. Editor, admin bureaucrat, steward, dev. everyone, arbcom Everyone, foundation, foundation board. Not three Geni, one. Has anyone become Arbcom without being an admin? Has anyone become Bureaucrat without being an admin? Has anyone become Foundation Board without being an admin? It's all one ladder. Sure it's *possible* for a non-admin to be elected to Arbcom, but when it's never happened, the truth should be apparent. W ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Moderation (was: should not web server logs (of requests) ...
In a message dated 11/30/2010 11:47:48 PM Pacific Standard Time, aph...@gmail.com writes: After I mentioned Wikimedia troll, Will thought it meant him and sent me some mails. I told him it was an in-joke (Bostonian Maniacs may remember that) but not further. Besides annotation to a joke is dull, apparently he was caught in a bad faith and no further words might work I foresaw. I wish people would stop assuming what is in my mind. I asked you what you meant, you said it was an in-joke and I asked you again what you meant. I was not caught in a bad faith. I was asking you... what you meant. And that is all that occurred. Will ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] should not web server logs (of requests) be published?
In a message dated 11/30/2010 11:11:10 AM Pacific Standard Time, birgitte...@yahoo.com writes: And like everyone who contributes to this list, they also send other messages to the list that are useful or contribute a perspective that would otherwise be absent from the list. They should definitely not be banned, but it is clear that trolling and personal attacks do not bring about moderation. Trolling seems to be defined however any person wishes to define it. I've been accussed of trolling simply because I espouse a point-of-view that is critical. To me critcism is not trolling. Trolling would be, when you do not actually believe what you're saying, but you say it only to generate some dramatic effect. People who believe their own criticism are critics, and are one of the cornerstones of our society, without whom, we would sink into the morass of stagnancy. Personal attacks to me, are attacks against the character of a person, not the character of their argument. If I say you are being foolish, that is not the same thing as saying you are a fool. The Troll attack is launched, from my experience, whenever a person espouses a line of argument, with which you not only don't agree, but you find offensive in some manner to your ideals. That is not a troll, that is a critic. W ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] should not web server logs (of requests) be published?
In a message dated 11/30/2010 11:58:07 AM Pacific Standard Time, birgitte...@yahoo.com writes: Your recent postings have definitely been foolish. You seem to be going out of the way to misinterpret everyone's words in the worst possible light. Why should you assume the phrase donor is meant to be restricted to monetary donations? Why must you approach responses that are not full agreement with you as combat? You obviously aren't on my ignore list, but frankly I am not sure how representative this thread is of your general behavior. I guess I will know in a year or so. I disagree with your characterization You seem to be going out of the way to misinterpret everyone's words in the worst possible light. Don't you find a sentence like that a bit extreme? Have I really responded to everyone ? Have I really put every word in the worst light? In U.S. English donor in the content of a foundation means monetary. We don't call volunteers who give their *time* donors, we simply call them volunteers. If you are implying that donor in terms of a foundation, means anyone who donates anything, I would suggest that is a non-standard definition. Are you presuming that in the case of the original message donor meant something else? I would suggest it did not. I do not approach responses that are not full agreement with [me] as comba t. When a person directly attacks me, I respond. That is a normal attitude in my opinion. I did not directly attack you, and yet you directly attacked me. You mischaracterized my responses as combat, a provocative word meant to illicit negative responses and attitudes in the readership. Yet you probably perceive this as a fair charge. My responses to attacks are defensive responses, hardly fair to term these combat. Does your above response, seem like a logical course toward your goal? Does it seem likely to lead to an outcome that you would consider fair and just and rational? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] should not web server logs (of requests) be published?
In a message dated 11/30/2010 4:46:02 PM Pacific Standard Time, z...@mzmcbride.com writes: The phrase you're looking for is, An ounce of prevention is a pound of cure. Either be an active part of this mailing list and moderate as appropriate or give up the damn post already. The current system is clearly and desperately ineffective. MZMcBride Yes I agree. It's pointless to actually allow people to speak freely, when you can easily silence your critics by stuffing a sock in their mouth. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] should not web server logs (of requests) be published?
In a message dated 11/29/2010 2:14:38 AM Pacific Standard Time, midom.li...@gmail.com writes: This isn't Wikipedia, this is Wikimedia. You can cite me, if you want. Go on record, then I'll cite you. An email list is not a citable source, per our policy. However a page on the server is citable. So put your reputation up for view, then you'll be citable :) W ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] should not web server logs (of requests) be published?
If that's the case, I would suggest, if it does not do so already, that the server also grab details about How did you get here? such as keywords used, or page-come-from and so on. Also I would want it to grab geographic location (where known), which would help us to know, for example, if we're getting a lot of readers from Nigeria, or none. W ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] should not web server logs (of requests) be published?
In a message dated 11/29/2010 11:33:05 AM Pacific Standard Time, midom.li...@gmail.com writes: Hi! Go on record, then I'll cite you. An email list is not a citable source, per our policy. Why would I care about your policy? Which policy is 'our' policy? Why does it apply to anything here? However a page on the server is citable. So put your reputation up for view, then you'll be citable :) http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-November/062730.html Domas It's isn't my policy, it's our policy. If you don't know to what I refer, then perhaps you can read up on it. As far as citing the archives of an email list, that is also not a citable source. If Foundation staff and supporters themselves, are *not prepared* to go on the record with their claims, then why should anyone trust anything they say on an email list? That is the very nature of *false authority*, the bane of our project. I must say, I'm quite surprised that some people here don't grasp this concept yet, after the projects being in existence for so many years now, almost a decade right? It is a fundamental principle, that we should be citing actual authorities, not false claims to authority. W ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] should not web server logs (of requests) be published?
In a message dated 11/29/2010 8:48:40 PM Pacific Standard Time, russnel...@gmail.com writes: Those with the passwords are accountable to the foundation, which is accountable to the donors. The foundation needs to make sure that the money donated to it is spent wisely, and not frittered away on frivolous requirements. If the foundation does a bad job of that, it will be replaced by some party which CAN do a good job of being responsible to donors. So it is your belief, that the WMF is not accountable at all to it's volunteers, such as editors? Just to its donors? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] should not web server logs (of requests) be published?
In a message dated 11/29/2010 9:34:40 PM Pacific Standard Time, russnel...@gmail.com writes: Huh?? Editors are donors as well, as are people who contribute to mailing lists, as are you. On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 12:13 AM, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: In a message dated 11/29/2010 8:48:40 PM Pacific Standard Time, russnel...@gmail.com writes: Those with the passwords are accountable to the foundation, which is accountable to the donors. The foundation needs to make sure that the money donated to it is spent wisely, and not frittered away on frivolous requirements. If the foundation does a bad job of that, it will be replaced by some party which CAN do a good job of being responsible to donors. So it is your belief, that the WMF is not accountable at all to it's volunteers, such as editors? Just to its donors? Is it your belief, that the WMF is not accountable at all, to the thousands or perhaps millions of volunteers who are not also financial contributors i.e. not donors ? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] should not web server logs (of requests) be published?
In a message dated 11/29/2010 10:00:38 PM Pacific Standard Time, pbeaude...@wikimedia.org writes: To suggest that the WMF (which means what, exactly, in this context? Staff? Mailing list participants?) does not feel accountable to anyone but donors is to make a careless generalization, and one that borders on trolling. The people who make up the staff and the volunteers of our projects are driven and give tremendously of their time. I defy anyone to find me a single one of them who only feels accountable to donors. You can't. I guarantee it. Exactly the reason why I called that generalization into question. If you read the thread you will see who made it, and who questioned it. Will ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] should not web server logs (of requests) be published?
I'm afraid our Tatar is correct in some senses and others in this thread are in a failing or failed mode. Each web server, of which the WMF has a few, collects details on the behaviour of IPs, in logs. Those logs can be and probably have been requested by certain government officials, most likely for the purpose of tracking down who is behind a certain Bad posting to a BLP. In addition, courts can make such orders in order to determine an otherwise John Doe named in a suit, such as for libel, etc. It's happened it will continue to happen, the WMF does keep such logs. Knowing the IP, it can then be tracked back to that user's ISP and a log again requested to determine the exact person, or at least business or household, who used the IP at that exact time. So playing with words, doesn't let us get around that point. I'm still not clear why we would want to know the IP exactly for analytical purposes. Some intrepid programmer could write a program which would simply collect detailed analysis of a person's in-world behaviour and call them Bob992 instead of 13.42.204.192 or whatever. Making the information packets anonymous. That would still allow any sort of analysis the Tatars want to make, and not reveal any private information. W ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] should not web server logs (of requests) be published?
My belief is that this is not so. Checkuser logs are not the same thing as IP logs. Are you suggesting that should a court, three months-and-a-day after a logged in user made a libelous edit, order the WMF to release the IP address of that user, they would not be able to do so? I suggest they would and probably have. I would like to see a clear citation to where, when and how the WMF retains logs of user activity. Is there actually such an official statement somewhere? And could anyone cite it with a link? The issue with the AOL Search Scandal is a red herring. People are not going to be searching for their own phone number or Social Security numbers within Wikipedia. And even if someone searches for such a thing, there is no way to know that they are looking for details on themselves, or on someone else. Our entry on that regardless notes a lawsuit *four years old* with no resolution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_data_scandal Indicative I suggest of it being a non-story. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] should not web server logs (of requests) be published?
In a message dated 11/28/2010 2:34:37 PM Pacific Standard Time, erikzac...@infodisiac.com writes: Repost with shortened url: WJhonson: The issue with the AOL Search Scandal is a red herring. People are not going to be searching for their own phone number or Social Security numbers within Wikipedia. And even if someone searches for such a thing, there is no way to know that they are looking for details on themselves, or on someone else. Our entry on that regardless notes a lawsuit *four years old* with no resolution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_data_scandal Indicative I suggest of it being a non-story. Many people did search for their own name occasionally, and relatively often did search for local shops and local news. Each of these clues were ambiguous and insignificant by themselves, but once put together often did paint a unique picture of one single person. Apparently de-anonimization is a nice pursuit for some would-be detectives, and quite possibly also for government officials in some parts of the world where privacy is considered a risk to a state's stability. The AOL data were taken offline very quickly (and the research team disbanded), but copies had already been made, and you can still find the data online now. http://www.gregsadetsky.com/aol-data/ The following article paints a rather graphical picture of how search terms came to haunt back their author. http://tinyurl.com/322a5pk Erik Zachte You ignored my point. Regardless of what occurred with the AOL details, that is a Red Herring as I said, because such an event would not and could not occur with Wikipedia details. People regardless of whether or not they searched their own personal details within the AOL search engine... would not search their own personal details within the Wikipedia engine. Do you know understand my point? What this thread is about is releasing details of activity *within* Wikipedia. We have no control over details of activity *outside* Wikipedia. Thus, the event described here as the atom bomb of personal exposure, is moot (not relevant, not related, a red herring) to this thread. W ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] should not web server logs (of requests) be published?
In a message dated 11/28/2010 3:36:34 PM Pacific Standard Time, russnel...@gmail.com writes: You misbelieve. Listen to Aude. She knows what she's talking about. I'd rather have Aude cite a reliable source. People are not reliable sources. No living person is such an authority that we should listen to that person. Not even on their own biography, much less anything else. The role of the expert is not to spout dogma, but rather to build a case using citable sources. No one is immune from this diction. The Archangel Gabriel told me so. W On a side-note you completely ignored what I actually stated. Aude mentioned the checkuser logs. I pointed out that IP server logs are *not* the same thing as checkuser logs. The privacy policy states that these exist, that they are kept. It states or at least implies that as I said, they are not the same thing as the checkuser logs. It does not state for how long, either is kept. So there. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] should not web server logs (of requests) be published?
How exactly do config files tell us what the WMF is retaining? That the error logs are manually purged tells us that they are in fact retaining details. What I asked was an official statement of what and for how long. The config files do not answer that question. At any rate you didn't link to them anyway, not in this thread. In a message dated 11/28/2010 5:37:18 P.M. Pacific Standard Time, aude.w...@gmail.com writes: The WMF server config files are there for everyone to see. Do you not consider them reliable source? Do you not believe they are in fact the server config settings used by WMF? There are apache error logs (notice LogLevel) that are collected. Those are manually purged, as of 2008. (source: Tim Starling http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2008-September/045811.html ) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] should not web server logs (of requests) be published?
Again Aude, this is your statement only. This is not an official statement of what the policy is or isn't, nor what is or isn't done under any policy which may or may not exist. You may be satisfied that you are right, but I would rather have a citable source. Humans are not citable sources, per our policy. W In a message dated 11/28/2010 4:24:14 P.M. Pacific Standard Time, aude.w...@gmail.com writes: Under the policy, WMF is permitted to collect and keep apache and squid logs but the policy gives more leeway than what is done in practice. WMF does collect squid logs but quite sure it's only 1/1000 sample. They don't keep apache access logs. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
