Re: [WikiEN-l] Future of this mailing list
Leave the list open! There are lots of important people subscribed, and you never know when an interesting conversation will pop up. I'm the present moderator of a mailing list that's been active since 1988. When an interesting conversation starts, it's fascinating to see all the famous people chime in. That could happen here. Best, On Thu, Aug 13, 2015 at 7:18 AM, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote: I've given this some thought, and pretty much come to the conclusion that it would be better to make this list historic rather than keep it open. This is a reflection on the fact that almost none of the subscribers seem to use it, that there are almost no posts to it, that it can easily become a black hole where a new subscriber is unaware that the likelihood they'll get a response to their email, or one that is accurate or actionable, is very small. In an ideal world, this list would be active and lively and chock full of interesting discussions. That's not happening at all. It is better to consider this legacy communication and to lock it down (thus relieving the responsibilities of the probably one or two list admins who are actually moderating through the one real message out of thousands of spam messages). It is obvious that this list is no longer serving the purpose it once had. I'm not sure exactly where people are going to communicate now - there are lots of comments for a lot of blog posts, I understand facebook gets a fair number of responses, and some of the on-wiki noticeboard are quite active. But this list is no longer reaching the target community. Risker/Anne On 11 August 2015 at 17:16, Pine W wiki.p...@gmail.com wrote: I don't see much harm in keeping this list alive in a low-activity state. Pine On Tue, Aug 11, 2015 at 2:15 PM, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote: Time to once again consider the future of this list and maybe also that of Wikipedia-L (as David suggested back in December)? I think I'm right in saying that apart from this list being used for some discussion of block appeals, nothing was posted here for all of June and July? https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/ Yup. June 2015 and July 2015 join September 2014 as 'dead' months in the archives. :-) On 12/2/14, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 2 December 2014 at 10:12, Amir E. Aharoni amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il wrote: I kinda like the separation between cross-project and cross-language issues on Wikimedia-L and the discussion about English Wikipedia, but if nobody is interested in the existence of this list, I won't be very sad if it shut down. Despite the lengthy moderator list, I'm about it for actually bothering. Not that there's much to do. In the world of mailing lists, en:wp discussion tends to happen on wikimedia-l, if at all. I'd shut down Wikipedia-L first, however - that one is really dead, except occasional people who pop in by mistake every few months. +1 - d. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Privacy Study Looking for Volunteers
I propose we run a study. We will survey random editors and ask them if they realize that there is a chance they are leaking enough information for their identity to be revealed. *Even if they are logged in.* Regarding comparisons - institutions have structure, and if there is a structure mapping, then it's a matter of fact. A given mapping will have strengths and weaknesses. You may prefer one mapping to another. If you have reasons for preferring one mapping (other than that it offends you), I'm all ears. But be aware: simply changing the vocabulary that you use to describe the space doesn't mean that two different descriptions of institutions aren't in fact describing a construct that is more similar than different, or that is similar in important ways. This is all to say, there are often reasons that institutions like the NSA and WMF are structured the way they are. Given the investment in the topic, it's probably worth exploring how the institutional structures emerged. But given the investment, confirmation bias may prevail in this case: even if there are important similarities, nobody wants to look like a hypocrite. That's OK, though. Much as I am invested in Wikipedia and appreciate the WMF, if I turn out to be a hypocrite, *I* will call myself one. Just as I will do it to others. Best, Brian *Other dogs bite only their enemies, whereas I bite also my friends.* - Diogenes the Cynic On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 10:32 AM, Oliver Keyes oke...@wikimedia.org wrote: Or perhaps you're reading far too much into it, and in the process, being incredibly rude to the WMF employees reading this thread, who are people too, and don't particularly appreciate being compared to the NSA. If you're trying to have a constructive discussion, you should pick a better format and attitude. On 29 March 2015 at 19:02, Brian J Mingus brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: The notice just says that the IP is public. Most people have no idea what that means. It will absolutely make those problems harder. Perhaps it is the Foundation's trusted role to hide that information from the public and be trusted with it on the backend. This institutional design sounds similar to another institution in certain ways.. On Sun, Mar 29, 2015 at 6:58 PM, Dustin Muniz dah...@bsugmail.net wrote: People are made aware with each edit as an I am that their information is publicly available. What concerns me about removing IP information is that it'll remove our ability to fight spam, detect socks, and respond to emergency@ issues, unless I've missed something? Sent from Samsung Mobile Original message From: Brian J Mingus Date:03-29-2015 4:36 PM (GMT-05:00) To: David Carson Cc: English Wikipedia Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Privacy Study Looking for Volunteers Wikipedia is set up such that if you don't take the measures mentioned in the OP, you are dox'ing yourself. Users are not aware of this. On Sun, Mar 29, 2015 at 4:33 PM, David Carson carson63...@gmail.com wrote: Wikipedia:Free speech ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Free_speech) is probably worth a read. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Free_speech It's not directly about privacy but I think it clearly covers the ground that Wikipedia is a project to create an online encyclopedia, not an experiment in radical free speech. The system is set up to facilitate that goal. If you think that recording IP addresses is invasive, then you should probably be publishing your content on your own website, not Wikipedia. Cheers, David... On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 5:10 AM, Brian J Mingus brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: In general people do not read privacy policies, nor do they understand what IP addresses are or what you can do with them. But if you recall, I simply stated that recording IP addresses is invasive. And it is. This is especially true when you know that your recordings are faciliating the active de-anonymization of people who are editing Wikipedia. Not just de-anonymization, but often public shaming. For WMF, the principle of neutrality clearly trumps the principles of privacy and free speech. For the NSA, substitute security for neutrality. It's hypocritical. Luckily, it's easy to fix. Just stuff the ip fields with random numbers and deal with the fallout. Stop tracking people. On Sun, Mar 29, 2015 at 2:02 PM, Oliver Keyes oke...@wikimedia.org wrote: In order: 1. Yes, the WMF is suing the NSA. There are a few threads/blog posts about this people here can point you to. 2. Brian: The NSA needs to store data without the permission or consent of the people generating it, sometimes through forcible interception, decryption and the introduction and maintenance of software exploits that allow them to do
Re: [WikiEN-l] Privacy Study Looking for Volunteers
Just like the Netflix Prize, knowing which topics an entity is interested in, and having access to text they have written, is, in many cases, enough information to reveal who that person is, where they live, etc. You just plug the data into Google and correlate away. On Sun, Mar 29, 2015 at 7:19 PM, David Carson carson63...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Brian, I'm still not entirely clear on your complaint. Are you talking about Wikimedia (not random users, nor Wikipedia Administrators) having access to IP addresses from system logs? Or something else? What does The IP address is helpful, but not necessary mean? Cheers, David... On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 10:14 AM, Brian J Mingus brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: Hi David, It is a bit of hyperbole, but reductio arguments have their role in helping to make certain things clear. If you force users to log in, you can still identify them. The IP address is helpful, but not necessary. On Sun, Mar 29, 2015 at 7:12 PM, David Carson carson63...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Brian, Dox'ing yourself? That's a pretty wild hyperbole. But just to clarify: are you taking issue with the fact that not-logged-in users have their IP addresses publicly visible? Or with the fact that all edits have IP addresses privately recorded? I originally thought you were talking about the latter, but now I'm not sure. If it's actually the former, I've got no disagreement with you. Given that anyone can edit without making their IP public simply by registering a pseudonym and logging in, and given that many new editors might not be aware of the implications of revealing their IP (if they're editing from a static address at work, for instance), it seems to me that the easiest solution - and one which I think would cause absolutely zero astonishment in the minds of new users - would simply be to require users to register a pseudonym and log in in order to edit. But if you're concerned about the effect that this would have on casual drive-by fixes and improvements by people who aren't invested enough in the project to register, then sure, encrypt or hash the IP address before displaying it publicly. I don't think randomizing it on every edit would be a good idea, because I think it's important to be able to tell whether a succession of edits were from the same editor. Cheers, David... On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 7:36 AM, Brian J Mingus brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: Wikipedia is set up such that if you don't take the measures mentioned in the OP, you are dox'ing yourself. Users are not aware of this. On Sun, Mar 29, 2015 at 4:33 PM, David Carson carson63...@gmail.com wrote: Wikipedia:Free speech ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Free_speech) is probably worth a read. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Free_speech It's not directly about privacy but I think it clearly covers the ground that Wikipedia is a project to create an online encyclopedia, not an experiment in radical free speech. The system is set up to facilitate that goal. If you think that recording IP addresses is invasive, then you should probably be publishing your content on your own website, not Wikipedia. Cheers, David... On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 5:10 AM, Brian J Mingus brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: In general people do not read privacy policies, nor do they understand what IP addresses are or what you can do with them. But if you recall, I simply stated that recording IP addresses is invasive. And it is. This is especially true when you know that your recordings are faciliating the active de-anonymization of people who are editing Wikipedia. Not just de-anonymization, but often public shaming. For WMF, the principle of neutrality clearly trumps the principles of privacy and free speech. For the NSA, substitute security for neutrality. It's hypocritical. Luckily, it's easy to fix. Just stuff the ip fields with random numbers and deal with the fallout. Stop tracking people. On Sun, Mar 29, 2015 at 2:02 PM, Oliver Keyes oke...@wikimedia.org wrote: In order: 1. Yes, the WMF is suing the NSA. There are a few threads/blog posts about this people here can point you to. 2. Brian: The NSA needs to store data without the permission or consent of the people generating it, sometimes through forcible interception, decryption and the introduction and maintenance of software exploits that allow them to do this but also allow any other reasonably technical nation or non-nation actor who is paying attention to exploit the same vulnerability, keeping this data for an indefinite period, with very little legal or political oversight, in order to stop terrorism, where very little evidence exists that this has helped in any way. The WMF needs to store data for a 90 day period, which is explicitly set down in a privacy policy that is transparent, human-readable, linked from every edit interface, written
Re: [WikiEN-l] Privacy Study Looking for Volunteers
I think now that we are suing the NSA that it's deeply hypocritical to be surveilling users. A quick fix: stuff the ip field with random numbers. On Sat, Mar 28, 2015 at 8:38 AM, James Alexander jalexan...@wikimedia.org wrote: The idea of the IP being more private in the history/ public logs (for example a unique hash so that you know it's an IP but not where/what IP ) is one that I know has been discussed and is desired by a good number within the foundation including within legal. I'll try to look for the phabricator task about it tomorrow. I think that's something that is likely to happen, it isn't easy though and requires a fair number of resources to be pointed at it to get it done so it's a question of priorities and convincing those who decide those things that it should be higher. I believe it's something, privacy wise, that legal would really like. I think it is unlikely in the short to medium term, however, to get rid of the IPs in the backend (in server logs and in the checkuser system for example) because the replacements just aren't there. I've spent a good amount of time thinking of a way to make the checkuser system as usable as necessary without revealing IPs for example (including a consultant who looked a lot but didn't really come up with anything we didn't know already). I think it's doable, but it would be a very difficult and long design process and I think it's unlikely in the near future. James Alexander Community Advocacy Wikimedia Foundation (415) 839-6885 x6716 @jamesofur On Fri, Mar 27, 2015 at 10:17 PM, Kyanos someanon...@gmail.com wrote: I don't believe a different license is needed. CC licenses can be used for anonymous works: The author is not given and does not have to be credited, but everything else (attribution of the work and share-alike) would stay the same. So a change in the terms of use to the effect of, Unregistered edits are considered to have no named author, would be sufficient. Kyanos On 03/27/2015 06:41 AM, WereSpielChequers wrote: Perhaps we should move to a different licensing model for future IP edits. CC0 for IP edits would be a more sensible license for edits by an IP where in many cases no-one could attribute the edit to the individual who made it. If people don't want to release their edits as CC0 they can always create an account. Regards Jonathan Cardy On 27 Mar 2015, at 10:28, Elias Friedman elipo...@gmail.com wrote: It's actually required so as to provide attribution as per the Creative Commons and other licenses we operate under. Sent from my Droid 4 Elias Friedman A.S., CCEMT-P אליהו מתתיהו בן צבי elipo...@gmail.com יְהִי אוֹר ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Privacy Study Looking for Volunteers
Do you see the irony here? The NSA needs to keep harvesting metadata in order to stop terrorism. The WMF needs to keep harvesting metadata in order to stop vandalism. On Sun, Mar 29, 2015 at 9:16 AM, Oliver Keyes oke...@wikimedia.org wrote: .at which point it can no longer be used for checkuser or for rangeblocks. I really don't see the hypocricy there. Are we: 1. Taking user data; 2. Storing it and not saying for how long; 3. Not telling the user we're taking it in the first place, and; 4. Not tellning anyone what we're using it for? If yes to all of the above, the NSA is broadly analogous. If no...a better analogy is needed. On 28 March 2015 at 11:44, Brian J Mingus brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: I think now that we are suing the NSA that it's deeply hypocritical to be surveilling users. A quick fix: stuff the ip field with random numbers. On Sat, Mar 28, 2015 at 8:38 AM, James Alexander jalexan...@wikimedia.org wrote: The idea of the IP being more private in the history/ public logs (for example a unique hash so that you know it's an IP but not where/what IP ) is one that I know has been discussed and is desired by a good number within the foundation including within legal. I'll try to look for the phabricator task about it tomorrow. I think that's something that is likely to happen, it isn't easy though and requires a fair number of resources to be pointed at it to get it done so it's a question of priorities and convincing those who decide those things that it should be higher. I believe it's something, privacy wise, that legal would really like. I think it is unlikely in the short to medium term, however, to get rid of the IPs in the backend (in server logs and in the checkuser system for example) because the replacements just aren't there. I've spent a good amount of time thinking of a way to make the checkuser system as usable as necessary without revealing IPs for example (including a consultant who looked a lot but didn't really come up with anything we didn't know already). I think it's doable, but it would be a very difficult and long design process and I think it's unlikely in the near future. James Alexander Community Advocacy Wikimedia Foundation (415) 839-6885 x6716 @jamesofur On Fri, Mar 27, 2015 at 10:17 PM, Kyanos someanon...@gmail.com wrote: I don't believe a different license is needed. CC licenses can be used for anonymous works: The author is not given and does not have to be credited, but everything else (attribution of the work and share-alike) would stay the same. So a change in the terms of use to the effect of, Unregistered edits are considered to have no named author, would be sufficient. Kyanos On 03/27/2015 06:41 AM, WereSpielChequers wrote: Perhaps we should move to a different licensing model for future IP edits. CC0 for IP edits would be a more sensible license for edits by an IP where in many cases no-one could attribute the edit to the individual who made it. If people don't want to release their edits as CC0 they can always create an account. Regards Jonathan Cardy On 27 Mar 2015, at 10:28, Elias Friedman elipo...@gmail.com wrote: It's actually required so as to provide attribution as per the Creative Commons and other licenses we operate under. Sent from my Droid 4 Elias Friedman A.S., CCEMT-P אליהו מתתיהו בן צבי elipo...@gmail.com יְהִי אוֹר ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l -- Oliver Keyes Research Analyst Wikimedia Foundation ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Privacy Study Looking for Volunteers
In general people do not read privacy policies, nor do they understand what IP addresses are or what you can do with them. But if you recall, I simply stated that recording IP addresses is invasive. And it is. This is especially true when you know that your recordings are faciliating the active de-anonymization of people who are editing Wikipedia. Not just de-anonymization, but often public shaming. For WMF, the principle of neutrality clearly trumps the principles of privacy and free speech. For the NSA, substitute security for neutrality. It's hypocritical. Luckily, it's easy to fix. Just stuff the ip fields with random numbers and deal with the fallout. Stop tracking people. On Sun, Mar 29, 2015 at 2:02 PM, Oliver Keyes oke...@wikimedia.org wrote: In order: 1. Yes, the WMF is suing the NSA. There are a few threads/blog posts about this people here can point you to. 2. Brian: The NSA needs to store data without the permission or consent of the people generating it, sometimes through forcible interception, decryption and the introduction and maintenance of software exploits that allow them to do this but also allow any other reasonably technical nation or non-nation actor who is paying attention to exploit the same vulnerability, keeping this data for an indefinite period, with very little legal or political oversight, in order to stop terrorism, where very little evidence exists that this has helped in any way. The WMF needs to store data for a 90 day period, which is explicitly set down in a privacy policy that is transparent, human-readable, linked from every edit interface, written with the involvement of the people whose data is being stored, administered by a committee of people who come from this population of editors, and explicitly sets out what the data may or may not be used for, even within the Wikimedia Foundation, in order to stop vandalism, where multiple scientific studies have validated the hypothesis that being able to make rangeblocks and prohibit sockpuppetry is beneficial to the community we are all a part of and the wider population of readers. That's what's actually going on, here. If you thing these situations are roughly analogous, that's your prerogative. If you think the storage of this data is unnecessary, I recommend you go to your local project and explain to them that being able to checkuser potential sockpuppets or hard-block users is not needed: gaining consensus there would be a good starting point to changing this. On 29 March 2015 at 11:57, James Farrar james.far...@gmail.com wrote: Wikipedia is suing the NSA? Seriously? On 28 Mar 2015 11:23, Brian J Mingus brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: It has worked up to now, but I'm thinking that, especially given Wikimedia is suing the NSA, it is no longer justifiable. If the NSA can't track citizens, Wikimedia shouldn't be tracking them either. Seems simple :) On Thu, Mar 26, 2015 at 2:56 PM, Francesco Ariis fa...@ariis.it wrote: On Wed, Mar 25, 2015 at 01:19:35PM -0400, Brian J Mingus wrote: I think it's rather curious that edits to Wikipedia aren't private. Why log the IP address? Why log anything? It's invasive. I guess it's a sensible choice against abuse (vandalism) while still allowing non registered users editing rights ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l -- Oliver Keyes Research Analyst Wikimedia Foundation ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Privacy Study Looking for Volunteers
Somewhat off topic? That means we're somewhat on topic then, right? It sure seems like we're on topic. I would prefer it of the WMF took the initiative and asked the community what they think about this issue as a whole. The discussion seems to have lacked transparency up to now. We're suing the NSA for something we're doing. Yes, we're aware of that, and we'd like to do something about it, but it's a low priority and that's the final word. I'm not sure everyone will agree with that. Best, On Sun, Mar 29, 2015 at 2:58 PM, Oliver Keyes oke...@wikimedia.org wrote: At this point we're really getting somewhat off-topic; Brian, if you want to continue this discussion about the trade-offs around privacy and oversight, feel free to drop me an email. In the meantime, we should probably leave the thread for the original subject ;) On 29 March 2015 at 14:55, Oliver Keyes oke...@wikimedia.org wrote: Yes, you did state that, but you equated the explanation and circumstances with the NSA's behaviour, when in actual fact they are very different. I note that while you've argued that privacy policies aren't read, that's as far as your rebuttal goes. There's no trump of one principle over another, and this is nothing to do with content neutrality; again, I invite you to surface your proposal on enwiki. It will completely eliminate the utility of checkuser or hard-blocks or range blocks, but if the community wants it as much as you seem to think I'm sure they'll support the idea. On 29 March 2015 at 14:10, Brian J Mingus brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: In general people do not read privacy policies, nor do they understand what IP addresses are or what you can do with them. But if you recall, I simply stated that recording IP addresses is invasive. And it is. This is especially true when you know that your recordings are faciliating the active de-anonymization of people who are editing Wikipedia. Not just de-anonymization, but often public shaming. For WMF, the principle of neutrality clearly trumps the principles of privacy and free speech. For the NSA, substitute security for neutrality. It's hypocritical. Luckily, it's easy to fix. Just stuff the ip fields with random numbers and deal with the fallout. Stop tracking people. On Sun, Mar 29, 2015 at 2:02 PM, Oliver Keyes oke...@wikimedia.org wrote: In order: 1. Yes, the WMF is suing the NSA. There are a few threads/blog posts about this people here can point you to. 2. Brian: The NSA needs to store data without the permission or consent of the people generating it, sometimes through forcible interception, decryption and the introduction and maintenance of software exploits that allow them to do this but also allow any other reasonably technical nation or non-nation actor who is paying attention to exploit the same vulnerability, keeping this data for an indefinite period, with very little legal or political oversight, in order to stop terrorism, where very little evidence exists that this has helped in any way. The WMF needs to store data for a 90 day period, which is explicitly set down in a privacy policy that is transparent, human-readable, linked from every edit interface, written with the involvement of the people whose data is being stored, administered by a committee of people who come from this population of editors, and explicitly sets out what the data may or may not be used for, even within the Wikimedia Foundation, in order to stop vandalism, where multiple scientific studies have validated the hypothesis that being able to make rangeblocks and prohibit sockpuppetry is beneficial to the community we are all a part of and the wider population of readers. That's what's actually going on, here. If you thing these situations are roughly analogous, that's your prerogative. If you think the storage of this data is unnecessary, I recommend you go to your local project and explain to them that being able to checkuser potential sockpuppets or hard-block users is not needed: gaining consensus there would be a good starting point to changing this. On 29 March 2015 at 11:57, James Farrar james.far...@gmail.com wrote: Wikipedia is suing the NSA? Seriously? On 28 Mar 2015 11:23, Brian J Mingus brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: It has worked up to now, but I'm thinking that, especially given Wikimedia is suing the NSA, it is no longer justifiable. If the NSA can't track citizens, Wikimedia shouldn't be tracking them either. Seems simple :) On Thu, Mar 26, 2015 at 2:56 PM, Francesco Ariis fa...@ariis.it wrote: On Wed, Mar 25, 2015 at 01:19:35PM -0400, Brian J Mingus wrote: I think it's rather curious that edits to Wikipedia aren't private. Why log the IP address? Why log anything? It's invasive. I guess it's a sensible choice against abuse (vandalism) while
Re: [WikiEN-l] Privacy Study Looking for Volunteers
The notice just says that the IP is public. Most people have no idea what that means. It will absolutely make those problems harder. Perhaps it is the Foundation's trusted role to hide that information from the public and be trusted with it on the backend. This institutional design sounds similar to another institution in certain ways.. On Sun, Mar 29, 2015 at 6:58 PM, Dustin Muniz dah...@bsugmail.net wrote: People are made aware with each edit as an I am that their information is publicly available. What concerns me about removing IP information is that it'll remove our ability to fight spam, detect socks, and respond to emergency@ issues, unless I've missed something? Sent from Samsung Mobile Original message From: Brian J Mingus Date:03-29-2015 4:36 PM (GMT-05:00) To: David Carson Cc: English Wikipedia Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Privacy Study Looking for Volunteers Wikipedia is set up such that if you don't take the measures mentioned in the OP, you are dox'ing yourself. Users are not aware of this. On Sun, Mar 29, 2015 at 4:33 PM, David Carson carson63...@gmail.com wrote: Wikipedia:Free speech ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Free_speech) is probably worth a read. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Free_speech It's not directly about privacy but I think it clearly covers the ground that Wikipedia is a project to create an online encyclopedia, not an experiment in radical free speech. The system is set up to facilitate that goal. If you think that recording IP addresses is invasive, then you should probably be publishing your content on your own website, not Wikipedia. Cheers, David... On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 5:10 AM, Brian J Mingus brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: In general people do not read privacy policies, nor do they understand what IP addresses are or what you can do with them. But if you recall, I simply stated that recording IP addresses is invasive. And it is. This is especially true when you know that your recordings are faciliating the active de-anonymization of people who are editing Wikipedia. Not just de-anonymization, but often public shaming. For WMF, the principle of neutrality clearly trumps the principles of privacy and free speech. For the NSA, substitute security for neutrality. It's hypocritical. Luckily, it's easy to fix. Just stuff the ip fields with random numbers and deal with the fallout. Stop tracking people. On Sun, Mar 29, 2015 at 2:02 PM, Oliver Keyes oke...@wikimedia.org wrote: In order: 1. Yes, the WMF is suing the NSA. There are a few threads/blog posts about this people here can point you to. 2. Brian: The NSA needs to store data without the permission or consent of the people generating it, sometimes through forcible interception, decryption and the introduction and maintenance of software exploits that allow them to do this but also allow any other reasonably technical nation or non-nation actor who is paying attention to exploit the same vulnerability, keeping this data for an indefinite period, with very little legal or political oversight, in order to stop terrorism, where very little evidence exists that this has helped in any way. The WMF needs to store data for a 90 day period, which is explicitly set down in a privacy policy that is transparent, human-readable, linked from every edit interface, written with the involvement of the people whose data is being stored, administered by a committee of people who come from this population of editors, and explicitly sets out what the data may or may not be used for, even within the Wikimedia Foundation, in order to stop vandalism, where multiple scientific studies have validated the hypothesis that being able to make rangeblocks and prohibit sockpuppetry is beneficial to the community we are all a part of and the wider population of readers. That's what's actually going on, here. If you thing these situations are roughly analogous, that's your prerogative. If you think the storage of this data is unnecessary, I recommend you go to your local project and explain to them that being able to checkuser potential sockpuppets or hard-block users is not needed: gaining consensus there would be a good starting point to changing this. On 29 March 2015 at 11:57, James Farrar james.far...@gmail.com wrote: Wikipedia is suing the NSA? Seriously? On 28 Mar 2015 11:23, Brian J Mingus brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: It has worked up to now, but I'm thinking that, especially given Wikimedia is suing the NSA, it is no longer justifiable. If the NSA can't track citizens, Wikimedia shouldn't be tracking them either. Seems simple :) On Thu, Mar 26, 2015 at 2:56 PM, Francesco Ariis fa...@ariis.it wrote: On Wed, Mar 25, 2015 at 01:19:35PM
Re: [WikiEN-l] Privacy Study Looking for Volunteers
Hi David, It is a bit of hyperbole, but reductio arguments have their role in helping to make certain things clear. If you force users to log in, you can still identify them. The IP address is helpful, but not necessary. On Sun, Mar 29, 2015 at 7:12 PM, David Carson carson63...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Brian, Dox'ing yourself? That's a pretty wild hyperbole. But just to clarify: are you taking issue with the fact that not-logged-in users have their IP addresses publicly visible? Or with the fact that all edits have IP addresses privately recorded? I originally thought you were talking about the latter, but now I'm not sure. If it's actually the former, I've got no disagreement with you. Given that anyone can edit without making their IP public simply by registering a pseudonym and logging in, and given that many new editors might not be aware of the implications of revealing their IP (if they're editing from a static address at work, for instance), it seems to me that the easiest solution - and one which I think would cause absolutely zero astonishment in the minds of new users - would simply be to require users to register a pseudonym and log in in order to edit. But if you're concerned about the effect that this would have on casual drive-by fixes and improvements by people who aren't invested enough in the project to register, then sure, encrypt or hash the IP address before displaying it publicly. I don't think randomizing it on every edit would be a good idea, because I think it's important to be able to tell whether a succession of edits were from the same editor. Cheers, David... On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 7:36 AM, Brian J Mingus brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: Wikipedia is set up such that if you don't take the measures mentioned in the OP, you are dox'ing yourself. Users are not aware of this. On Sun, Mar 29, 2015 at 4:33 PM, David Carson carson63...@gmail.com wrote: Wikipedia:Free speech ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Free_speech) is probably worth a read. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Free_speech It's not directly about privacy but I think it clearly covers the ground that Wikipedia is a project to create an online encyclopedia, not an experiment in radical free speech. The system is set up to facilitate that goal. If you think that recording IP addresses is invasive, then you should probably be publishing your content on your own website, not Wikipedia. Cheers, David... On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 5:10 AM, Brian J Mingus brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: In general people do not read privacy policies, nor do they understand what IP addresses are or what you can do with them. But if you recall, I simply stated that recording IP addresses is invasive. And it is. This is especially true when you know that your recordings are faciliating the active de-anonymization of people who are editing Wikipedia. Not just de-anonymization, but often public shaming. For WMF, the principle of neutrality clearly trumps the principles of privacy and free speech. For the NSA, substitute security for neutrality. It's hypocritical. Luckily, it's easy to fix. Just stuff the ip fields with random numbers and deal with the fallout. Stop tracking people. On Sun, Mar 29, 2015 at 2:02 PM, Oliver Keyes oke...@wikimedia.org wrote: In order: 1. Yes, the WMF is suing the NSA. There are a few threads/blog posts about this people here can point you to. 2. Brian: The NSA needs to store data without the permission or consent of the people generating it, sometimes through forcible interception, decryption and the introduction and maintenance of software exploits that allow them to do this but also allow any other reasonably technical nation or non-nation actor who is paying attention to exploit the same vulnerability, keeping this data for an indefinite period, with very little legal or political oversight, in order to stop terrorism, where very little evidence exists that this has helped in any way. The WMF needs to store data for a 90 day period, which is explicitly set down in a privacy policy that is transparent, human-readable, linked from every edit interface, written with the involvement of the people whose data is being stored, administered by a committee of people who come from this population of editors, and explicitly sets out what the data may or may not be used for, even within the Wikimedia Foundation, in order to stop vandalism, where multiple scientific studies have validated the hypothesis that being able to make rangeblocks and prohibit sockpuppetry is beneficial to the community we are all a part of and the wider population of readers. That's what's actually going on, here. If you thing these situations are roughly analogous, that's your prerogative. If you think the storage of this data is unnecessary, I recommend you go to your local project
Re: [WikiEN-l] Privacy Study Looking for Volunteers
Just like the Netflix Prize, knowing which topics an entity is interested in, and having access to text they have written, is, in many cases, enough information to reveal who that person is, where they live, etc. You just plug the data into Google and correlate away. On Sun, Mar 29, 2015 at 7:19 PM, David Carson carson63...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Brian, I'm still not entirely clear on your complaint. Are you talking about Wikimedia (not random users, nor Wikipedia Administrators) having access to IP addresses from system logs? Or something else? What does The IP address is helpful, but not necessary mean? Cheers, David... ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Privacy Study Looking for Volunteers
A very precise timestamp would seem to suffice for attribution. Anyone caring to prove they wrote something could take a video of them making the edit, thus confirming the timestamp is them. On Fri, Mar 27, 2015 at 6:28 AM, Elias Friedman elipo...@gmail.com wrote: It's actually required so as to provide attribution as per the Creative Commons and other licenses we operate under. Sent from my Droid 4 Elias Friedman A.S., CCEMT-P אליהו מתתיהו בן צבי elipo...@gmail.com יְהִי אוֹר On Mar 27, 2015 4:15 AM, Francesco Ariis fa...@ariis.it wrote: On Wed, Mar 25, 2015 at 01:19:35PM -0400, Brian J Mingus wrote: I think it's rather curious that edits to Wikipedia aren't private. Why log the IP address? Why log anything? It's invasive. I guess it's a sensible choice against abuse (vandalism) while still allowing non registered users editing rights ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Privacy Study Looking for Volunteers
I don't see a need to change the copyright. Just switch from the IP address to something that doesn't allow you to personally identify the user, but allows the user to claim ownership over the post if they want to, by recording some bit of information. I think a cryptographer could design a nice scheme here. This scheme should be such that neither WMF nor the public can identify the editor, but the editor can prove that they are the one who wrote the post. On Fri, Mar 27, 2015 at 9:59 AM, Elias Friedman elipo...@gmail.com wrote: Nice on paper, but the wiki-drama from the switch from GFDL was bad enough for me. Sent from my Droid 4 Elias Friedman A.S., CCEMT-P אליהו מתתיהו בן צבי elipo...@gmail.com יְהִי אוֹר On Mar 27, 2015 9:41 AM, WereSpielChequers werespielchequ...@gmail.com wrote: Perhaps we should move to a different licensing model for future IP edits. CC0 for IP edits would be a more sensible license for edits by an IP where in many cases no-one could attribute the edit to the individual who made it. If people don't want to release their edits as CC0 they can always create an account. Regards Jonathan Cardy On 27 Mar 2015, at 10:28, Elias Friedman elipo...@gmail.com wrote: It's actually required so as to provide attribution as per the Creative Commons and other licenses we operate under. Sent from my Droid 4 Elias Friedman A.S., CCEMT-P אליהו מתתיהו בן צבי elipo...@gmail.com יְהִי אוֹר On Mar 27, 2015 4:15 AM, Francesco Ariis fa...@ariis.it wrote: On Wed, Mar 25, 2015 at 01:19:35PM -0400, Brian J Mingus wrote: I think it's rather curious that edits to Wikipedia aren't private. Why log the IP address? Why log anything? It's invasive. I guess it's a sensible choice against abuse (vandalism) while still allowing non registered users editing rights ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Privacy Study Looking for Volunteers
It has worked up to now, but I'm thinking that, especially given Wikimedia is suing the NSA, it is no longer justifiable. If the NSA can't track citizens, Wikimedia shouldn't be tracking them either. Seems simple :) On Thu, Mar 26, 2015 at 2:56 PM, Francesco Ariis fa...@ariis.it wrote: On Wed, Mar 25, 2015 at 01:19:35PM -0400, Brian J Mingus wrote: I think it's rather curious that edits to Wikipedia aren't private. Why log the IP address? Why log anything? It's invasive. I guess it's a sensible choice against abuse (vandalism) while still allowing non registered users editing rights ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Privacy Study Looking for Volunteers
I think it's rather curious that edits to Wikipedia aren't private. Why log the IP address? Why log anything? It's invasive. On Wed, Mar 25, 2015 at 12:53 PM, Andrea Forte andrea.fo...@gmail.com wrote: Hi all, I'm representing a team of researchers from Drexel University who are researching privacy practices among Wikipedia editors. If you have ever thought about your privacy when editing Wikipedia or taken steps to protect your privacy when you edit, we’d like to learn from you about it. The study is titled “Privacy, Anonymity, and Peer Production.” Details can be found on meta where the project was discussed before beginning recruitment here: ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Anonymity_and_Peer_Production). If you would like to help us out, you need to read and complete the online consent form linked here and we will get in contact with you: http://andreaforte.net/wp.html. We are planning to conduct interviews that will last anywhere from 30-90 minutes (depending on how much you have to say) by phone or Skype and we can offer you $20 for your time, but you do not need to accept payment to participate. I have been researching Wikipedia since 2004 and have conducted many studies, most of which have resulted in papers that you can find here: http://andreaforte.net. Thanks for considering it, please contact me if you have questions! Andrea Forte http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Andicat and Rachel Greenstadt Nazanin Andalibi ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] ❄ English Wikipedia, Ron Ritzman left a message for you
Isn't this list moderated? On Dec 27, 2014 8:59 PM, Alan Liefting alieft...@ihug.co.nz wrote: Thanks for that. I usually reach for google or wp to answer questions but forgot in this case. So how did they get hold of this list. Is Ron on Badoo??? And did Badoo get hold of Ron's email contacts??? A On 28/12/2014 2:46 p.m., Elias Friedman wrote: See the second item under controversies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badoo Sent from my Droid 4 Elias Friedman A.S., CCEMT-P אליהו מתתיהו בן צבי elipo...@gmail.com יְהִי אוֹר On Dec 27, 2014 8:38 PM, Alan Liefting alieft...@ihug.co.nz wrote: ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Future of this mailing list
What is there to say? On Mon, Dec 1, 2014 at 5:26 PM, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote: If the moderators of this mailing list are around, would they or anyone else subscribed to the list be able to throw up some statistics about how much the traffic has declined over the past few years? I'm asking because looking at the archives, I think that last month (November 2014) was the first month since the mailing list started in September 2001 that there were no posts to the this mailing list (the wiki-en-l mailing list for discussion of matters related to the English Wikipedia). Admittedly, the list has been moribund for a long time, but I'm not sure exactly when the tipping point was reached (most meta-discussion seems to take place either on-wiki, at meta, or on the Wikimedia-l mailing list). What is the general view in the Wikimedia universe on maintaining low-traffic lists like this? It might be time to discuss what future this mailing list has. https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/ https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l Actually, looking at the list of moderators, how many of them are still around? Carcharoth ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Help finding photos on Flickr
Can you set the parameters of a search to only return openly licensed content? Yes you can.. https://www.google.com/search?site=tbm=ischsource=hpbiw=1920bih=983q=world+war+IIoq=world+war+IIgs_l=img.3..0l10.1355.2641.0.2846.12.11.0.1.1.0.120.997.8j3.11.00...1ac.1.51.img..0.12.987.bGbyYx_-U3Qgws_rd=ssl#q=world+war+Itbm=ischtbs=sur:fc On Tue, Aug 12, 2014 at 10:24 AM, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote: Thanks for the tips. Can you set the parameters of a search to only return openly licensed content? The viewing stats are interesting: http://stats.grok.se/en/latest/Centenary_of_the_outbreak_of_World_War_I A peak of 11,000 views yesterday. But the main WWI article (not surprisingly) got large numbers of views: http://stats.grok.se/en/latest/World%20War%20I 376,450 views on 28 July and another peak at 112,239 on 4 August. Reached number three in the most-viewed list for the week of July 27 to August 2, 2014 (and was still at number 15 the following week): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Top_25_Report/July_27_to_August_2,_2014 On 8/11/14, Brian J Mingus brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: You can use Google image search to search for openly licensed content. This includes images from Flickr. On Mon, Aug 11, 2014 at 6:14 AM, Richard Symonds richard.symo...@wikimedia.org.uk wrote: Of course Carcharoth. Cany promise anything but happy to try! On 11 Aug 2014 13:02, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote: Would anyone subscribed to this mailing list have time to help finding suitably licensed photos on Flickr (or elsewhere) for an article I worked on recently? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centenary_of_the_outbreak_of_World_War_I Currently there are four commemoration events listed on that page at which photos were taken, but I'm struggling to find photos from those events on Commons or Flickr under a free license. On Commons I found this image: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Liege-Cointe-Tour_Memorial_Interallie-20060605.jpg Which is the venue for one of the events, but ideally any images used would be taken at the events themselves. Carcharoth ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Help finding photos on Flickr
You can use Google image search to search for openly licensed content. This includes images from Flickr. On Mon, Aug 11, 2014 at 6:14 AM, Richard Symonds richard.symo...@wikimedia.org.uk wrote: Of course Carcharoth. Cany promise anything but happy to try! On 11 Aug 2014 13:02, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote: Would anyone subscribed to this mailing list have time to help finding suitably licensed photos on Flickr (or elsewhere) for an article I worked on recently? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centenary_of_the_outbreak_of_World_War_I Currently there are four commemoration events listed on that page at which photos were taken, but I'm struggling to find photos from those events on Commons or Flickr under a free license. On Commons I found this image: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Liege-Cointe-Tour_Memorial_Interallie-20060605.jpg Which is the venue for one of the events, but ideally any images used would be taken at the events themselves. Carcharoth ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon is now well-known because it's been on Wikipedia for so long
I don't see why this script shouldn't be permanently installed into Common.js assuming it works. On Fri, Mar 28, 2014 at 10:03 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 28 March 2014 01:02, Richard Farmbrough rich...@farmbrough.co.uk wrote: On 08/03/2014 09:20, David Gerard wrote: I recall finding a list somewhere of article titles that got lots of hits but didn't have articles, but don't recall where. I may be misremembering of course. - d. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Most_missed_articles Yeah, that's the list I was thinking of. Possibly someone should run a report again ... - d. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon is now well-known because it's been on Wikipedia for so long
*Most often requested* nonexistent articles per day (based on *149* days in year *2008*). ? On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 7:02 PM, Richard Farmbrough rich...@farmbrough.co.uk wrote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Most_missed_articles On 08/03/2014 09:20, David Gerard wrote: I recall finding a list somewhere of article titles that got lots of hits but didn't have articles, but don't recall where. I may be misremembering of course. - d. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon is now well-known because it's been on Wikipedia for so long
The reason the name stuck is that Baader-Meinhof is a weird name, and one would not expect to see it multiple times independently in short succession. Hence the name Baader-Meinhof phenomenon (which is also the name of a book) is analogous to onomatopoeia in that both represent the thing they are describing in some way - this is also similar to homoiconicity. It's a perfect name - much better than frequency illusion - and a substantial number of people now know it by this name, in part due to its longstanding and interesting history of existence on Wikipedia, which has advertised it to hundreds of thousands of people and generated tens of thousands of websites which use it by that name. The article should clearly stay! On Sat, Mar 8, 2014 at 2:25 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 8 March 2014 09:20, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 5 March 2014 22:04, Brian J Mingus brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: The article should reinstated, a section concerning the unique nature of its notability should be added. This argument doesn't seem to convince (though that does resemble reasonable popularity). The fourth AFD notes the problem in this case: really crappy sources. The sort of thing that would lead me to !vote delete without prejudice. linkto:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baader-Meinhof_phenomenon in Google shows that it hits Reddit and apparently 4chan a bit. Apparently StumbleUpon likes it too. This would account for the hit rates - it's an amusing thing people would like there to be a name for, c.f. The Meaning Of Liff - but still doesn't supply us with sufficient material to base a solid article on. - d. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
[WikiEN-l] The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon is now well-known because it's been on Wikipedia for so long
I notice that the article on the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon has recently been deleted, and it has in fact been deleted many times over the years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baader-Meinhof_phenomenon However, according to stats.grok.se, this article is quite popular, having been viewed *around 350 thousand times since 2007*. Here's the script I wrote: for i in $(wget --quiet -O- http://stats.grok.se/en/200712/Baader-meinhof%20phenomenon | grep '2' | cut -f2 -d'' | cut -f1 -d'');do wget --quiet -O- http://stats.grok.se/en/$i/Baader-meinhof%20phenomenon | grep 'has been viewed' | sed 's/.*viewed//;s/ //g';done 201402: 67419 201401: 20892 201312: 19924 201311: 5886 201310: 757 201309: 1801 201308: 756 201307: 1019 201306: 1153 201305: 3548 201304: 1092 201303: 1565 201302: 746 201301: 2291 201212: 586 201211: 612 201210: 1062 201209: 586 201208: 360 201207: 326 201206: 238 201205: 277 201204: 286 201203: 298 201202: 392 201201: 743 201112: 392 20: 566 201110: 571 201109: 460 201108: 778 201107: 1735 201106: 452 201105: 368 201104: 409 201103: 336 201102: 649 201101: 475 201012: 295 201011: 274 201010: 373 201009: 325 201008: 363 201007: 609 201006: 844 201005: 751 201004: 810 201003: 522 200712: 454 Total: 348201 Wikipedia's policies are irrelevant: This phenomenon has entered the lexicon, and is now well known simply due to its existence in Wikipedia. Since the phenomenon didn't have a well known name, I've been telling people about it for quite some time now, and it has recently enjoyed a huge surge in popularity, *due to its existence on Wikipedia*. The article should reinstated, a section concerning the unique nature of its notability should be added. Cheers, Brian Mingus ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia article on [[Santorum (neologism)]]
On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 11:47 AM, George Herbert george.herb...@gmail.comwrote: On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 10:28 AM, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote: On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 8:53 AM, Ken Arromdee arrom...@rahul.net wrote: [...] You can't neutrally discuss how a person is compared to shit. Not in any real-world sense. I don't agree for a moment that we can't neutrally discuss how a person is compared to shit. We can and in my opinion we have and do. This is not a more sensitive topic than numerous genocides, racism, sexism, etc. Santorum has handled the situation more maturely than several people on the list here. He is clearly not pleased, but neither is he making any attempt to suppress the incident. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com He has no responsibility for using the resources of a non-profit corporation for political purposes. We do. We are not using the resources for political purposes. The article is NPOV and does not show Santorum in a negative light. George, Your arguments fail to account for the fact that the article is curated by biased anti-Santorum contributors, that the article is covered in too much depth to be neutral, and that the article is being as a launchpad for the campaign against Santorum. As I described in my OP, the use of this article has revealed a boundary condition in our notability guidelines. I believe that what many people find distasteful about this article is that it is a *reductio ad absurdum *case that sets the following precedent for others to follow on Wikipedia: - Person A dislikes Person B. Both persons have name recognition. - Person A creates an offensive definition for Person B's last name. - Person A documents said definition in Wikipedia. - Person A uses Wikipedia's intrinsically high Google ranking, in conjunction with in-bound link-spamming to said article, to *cause* it to appear high in Google's rankings. - When people search for Person B's last name they find a discussion of the smear campaign rather than the BLP. - Wikipedia is now the lauchpad for a smear campaign, and this launchpad's existence is justified by Wikipedian's because documenting the previous five steps is considered encyclopedic according to the guidelines. Suffice it to say that *many* people do not want to see Wikipedia abused in this manner. Additionally, some people, such as myself, find the existence of this article to be *morally wrong.* I find the following counter-arguments unsatisfying: - We have no control over Google. This is actually not true for a number of reasons, some of which have already been elucidated. - The article is NPOV, factual, cites sources and notable, therefore it should exist. This is unsatisfying because it exists only because of anti-Santorum pro-Savage contributors. If it were not for them the article would not have 100 sources, would not be so long, and would not be of such high quality. These several factors have been put there precisely in order to increase its relevance in Google results. This point is not contested to my knowledge. In other words, the quality of the article is not consistent with the historicity, or notability, of the topic. If you can reply to these points in sum, I think we might make some progress. I believe that you should at least agree that the article should be no more than 2-3 paragraphs in length, with a small handful of citations to truly authoritative, and perhaps even academic, discussions of the subject. - Brian ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia article on [[Santorum (neologism)]]
On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 5:34 PM, Rob gamali...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 2:56 PM, Brian J Mingus brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: Your arguments fail to account for the fact that the article is curated by biased anti-Santorum contributors, Well, you lost me right there. This is a terrible slur on both the editors of the article as well as all the uninvolved editors who have examined the article and found it compliant with Wikipedia policies. Surely if this broad slur that you've made is true, then uninvolved editors on both sides of this issue would have noticed this rampant bias and its effect on the article. This kind of thing, as well as earlier emails here from another editor with dark hints about how the creator of this article also started an article about a gay porn company, is really distasteful. And ironic that the bold defenders waving the banner of BLP would defend a living individual by slurring other living individuals. I believe you will have a hard time justifying your claim that my comment is false (not to mention that it is a slur). It should be easy to show that the article is curated by at least one, and probably several, biased anti-Santorum contributors. - Brian ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia article on [[Santorum (neologism)]]
On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 5:52 PM, Rob gamali...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 7:44 PM, Brian J Mingus brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: I believe you will have a hard time justifying your claim that my comment is false (not to mention that it is a slur). It should be easy to show that the article is curated by at least one, and probably several, biased anti-Santorum contributors. The onus is on you to prove that such a broad slur on other Wikipedia editors is true. Even if we accept this as truth, the solution to such problems is typically the eyes of more editors and not deletion. This strikes me as indirection. If someone claims that an article is biased then they are also claiming that the process governing its creation is biased. Such a claim is not a slur, it is a purported statement of fact. However, you would say that the claim is invalid because to claim that an article is biased is to necessarily not assume good faith. Following your line of indirection, it isn't possible to claim that an article is biased because you would necessary violate the principle of good faith, ie, implicitly or explicitly claiming that particular editors are biased. I believe you would rather follow this line of reasoning because it directs attention away from the real issues at hand. - Brian ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia article on [[Santorum (neologism)]]
On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 6:50 PM, George Herbert george.herb...@gmail.comwrote: On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 5:27 PM, Brian J Mingus brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 5:52 PM, Rob gamali...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 7:44 PM, Brian J Mingus brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: I believe you will have a hard time justifying your claim that my comment is false (not to mention that it is a slur). It should be easy to show that the article is curated by at least one, and probably several, biased anti-Santorum contributors. The onus is on you to prove that such a broad slur on other Wikipedia editors is true. Even if we accept this as truth, the solution to such problems is typically the eyes of more editors and not deletion. This strikes me as indirection. If someone claims that an article is biased then they are also claiming that the process governing its creation is biased. Such a claim is not a slur, it is a purported statement of fact. However, you would say that the claim is invalid because to claim that an article is biased is to necessarily not assume good faith. Following your line of indirection, it isn't possible to claim that an article is biased because you would necessary violate the principle of good faith, ie, implicitly or explicitly claiming that particular editors are biased. I believe you would rather follow this line of reasoning because it directs attention away from the real issues at hand. I do not read the article as anti-Santorum or biased. If it were anti-Santorum and biased, this discussion would likely have taken place on the article talk page, with specific examples of paragraphs, sentences, sections, quotes, source selection etc. which were improper or unbalanced. The actual discussion has included essentially none of this. It's somewhat of a jump of faith to extrapolate from this that there's nothing wrong at the detail level with the article, but that claim could be made and defended credibly. The claims of things wrong with it that are being made are, in Wikipedia terms, novel interpretations. BOLD allows us to take wider views, but it does not allow one to merely assert a particular wider view to be absolute and unchallengeable truth. Yes, several people here believe that it's a problem. No, not everyone does. No, you do not appear to have a consensus on your side, much less a majority. Under those conditions, BOLD fails, and we revert to the details and to standard interpretations. About which no detailed problems have been asserted so far... -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com If only there were a way to quantify notability I believe this problem would be much easier to tackle. I am personally not inclined to go through the article point by point and try to figure out what ought to be there. In general I think we can show that the article is too long and ought to be rewritten in a shorter, more concise form without also having to debate every sentence there. As was previously stated, Wikipedia is not the end-all-be-all of information on a topic, but in this case it comes pretty close. That's not how it's supposed to be.. - Brian ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia article on [[Santorum (neologism)]]
On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 4:25 PM, George Herbert george.herb...@gmail.comwrote: On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 3:21 PM, Ken Arromdee arrom...@rahul.net wrote: Again - I am not Cirt, and I find the article reasonably balanced. Having an article that associates someone with human waste be reasonably balanced is like claiming that an article about the Richard Gere gerbil rumor (as long as it stated the rumor was false) would be reasonably balanced. The association of a living person with shit is inherently unbalanced; it spreads a negative POV towards that person, no matter how many disclaimers we add saying that we don't think he's really like shit. You are conflating the term (which associates someone with human waste) and our coverage of the term (which describes the term, descriptively, historically, and cultural and political contexts). Our coverage of the term is NPOV and balanced, in my opinion. You seem to wish that the term did not exist. That's a fair wish, but not relevant to Wikipedia. What's relevant to Wikipedia is that it does exist, has numerous reliable sources, has had real-world impact, and therefore is at least arguably notable and an appropriate subject for a WP article. We cannot fix the fact that the term exists and was damaging to Mr. Santorum. Censoring Wikipedia to attempt to right wrongs done in the real world is rather explicitly Not the Point. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com George, Can you please address a couple of points that I believe have been brought up in this thread. You may want to read the previous emails that more clearly elucidated the points first, or not. They are as follows: 1) This term deserves a Wiktionary entry at best, not a Wikipedia entry. 2) Wikipedia is being used as a platform to damage Santorum. Thanks, Brian ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia article on [[Santorum (neologism)]]
Hi all, I'm not sure about the history of this article, but it it was recently brought to my attention via Facebook. My take on this article is that it is an abuse of Wikipedia's notability guidelines. The article goes out of its way to cite lots of sources, but I do not believe that being mentioned in the mainstream media is both a necessary and sufficient condition for notability. In this particular case it sounds like someone with a lot of name recognition used that name recognition to get media attention for their smear campaign. This media attention was then used to justify a Wikipedia article. This is an excellent reductio ad absurdum case that brings a boundary condition of our notability guidelines to light. It is, quite frankly, manufactured notability and IMO it does deserve an article. When you Google for Santorum's last name this Wikipedia article is the second result. This means that people who are looking for legitimate information about him are not going to find it right away - instead we are going to feed them information about a biased smear campaign rather than the former Senators BLP. Please discuss. -- Brian Mingus Graduate student Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab University of Colorado at Boulder ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia article on [[Santorum (neologism)]]
On Sun, May 22, 2011 at 7:24 PM, Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: Hi all, I'm not sure about the history of this article, but it it was recently brought to my attention via Facebook. My take on this article is that it is an abuse of Wikipedia's notability guidelines. The article goes out of its way to cite lots of sources, but I do not believe that being mentioned in the mainstream media is both a necessary and sufficient condition for notability. In this particular case it sounds like someone with a lot of name recognition used that name recognition to get media attention for their smear campaign. This media attention was then used to justify a Wikipedia article. This is an excellent reductio ad absurdum case that brings a boundary condition of our notability guidelines to light. It is, quite frankly, manufactured notability and IMO it does deserve an article. When you Google for Santorum's last name this Wikipedia article is the second result. This means that people who are looking for legitimate information about him are not going to find it right away - instead we are going to feed them information about a biased smear campaign rather than the former Senators BLP. Please discuss. Major typo there, sorry. It does *not* deserve an article. Thanks:) ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Rating the English wikipedia
On Sun, Feb 13, 2011 at 8:16 PM, Ian Woollard ian.wooll...@gmail.comwrote: I therefore award the Wikipedia class C: Considering that 55% of articles are stubs and 21% are start awarding Wikipedia a C overall is quite generous. -- Brian Mingus Graduate student Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab University of Colorado at Boulder ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] References bookmarklet?
On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 3:44 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 5 January 2011 22:40, geni geni...@gmail.com wrote: Basically no If you look at even [[Template:Cite web]] it requires stuff that you have to go hunting for (author). You could construct something for popular websites (BBC say) which have a standard format. Sounds like something we could add really quite a lot of special cases to. I wonder how many we would need to have decent coverage in practice. Has anyone done a survey of what sources we actually use in references? The long tail will be *huge*, but does the en:wp community have any favourites? - d. I have created a tool called WikiPapers that my lab has used for several years that does something similar to this. It is designed around scientific papers. It allows you to highlight the title of an article on any web page and then click it a bookmarklet and it will use various APIs on the web to get the associated metadata and add it to your wiki. It can optionally pass the URL to one of many URL scrapers such as Connotea and CiteULike. I am currently refactoring the code for use in a new project called WikiScholar. The old code supports PubMed, Google Scholar, Connotea and CiteULike, whereas the new code only supports PubMed right now. The new code, however, makes it much simpler to add new importers with its class-based infrastructure. If anyone is interested in this project and can code in Python or PHP please let me know. I am actively developing it now. I'm interested in folks who would like to dedicate some time to writing importers for specific APIs. Cheers, Brian ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] References bookmarklet?
On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 3:50 PM, Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 3:44 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 5 January 2011 22:40, geni geni...@gmail.com wrote: Basically no If you look at even [[Template:Cite web]] it requires stuff that you have to go hunting for (author). You could construct something for popular websites (BBC say) which have a standard format. Sounds like something we could add really quite a lot of special cases to. I wonder how many we would need to have decent coverage in practice. Has anyone done a survey of what sources we actually use in references? The long tail will be *huge*, but does the en:wp community have any favourites? - d. I have created a tool called WikiPapers that my lab has used for several years that does something similar to this. It is designed around scientific papers. It allows you to highlight the title of an article on any web page and then click it a bookmarklet and it will use various APIs on the web to get the associated metadata and add it to your wiki. It can optionally pass the URL to one of many URL scrapers such as Connotea and CiteULike. I am currently refactoring the code for use in a new project called WikiScholar. The old code supports PubMed, Google Scholar, Connotea and CiteULike, whereas the new code only supports PubMed right now. The new code, however, makes it much simpler to add new importers with its class-based infrastructure. If anyone is interested in this project and can code in Python or PHP please let me know. I am actively developing it now. I'm interested in folks who would like to dedicate some time to writing importers for specific APIs. Cheers, Brian PS: The Google Code url is: http://code.google.com/p/wikipapers/ ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Help Beat Jimmy! (The appeal, that is....)
On Wed, Oct 6, 2010 at 7:23 PM, Deniz Gultekin dgulte...@wikimedia.orgwrote: Wikipedians and Jedi-themed special effects?! *gets popcorn* But yes, I agree, it'd be fantastic to have even more high quality videos of editors *and* readers, with or without lightsabers. On 10/6/10 6:05 PM, Carcharoth wrote: On Wed, Oct 6, 2010 at 11:26 PM, Casey Brownli...@caseybrown.org wrote: On Wed, Oct 6, 2010 at 6:15 PM, Carcharothcarcharot...@googlemail.com wrote: Maybe a video clip montage of lots of different Wikipedia contributors talking for a very short time? Haha, like http://blog.wikimedia.org/blog/2010/09/24/four-videos-of-wikipedias-volunteers/ ? ;-) Something like that yes, but even better, and with Jedi special effects! :-) Carcharoth ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l -- Deniz Gültekin Community Associate Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge http://donate.wikimedia.org/ I would like to add to this that I think the key factor is the personal appeal. You should definitely pick a random Wikimedian and give them a high falutin message akin to the one in Jimmy's appeal and see how it stacks up. Chances are it's going to work very well. After all, people don't know who Jimmy Wales is, and yet his appeal causes them to donate. That boils it down to the personal nature of the appeal and the content of the message. If this turns out to be correct you should, pronto, start making LOTS of these. - Brian ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Annual fundraiser: which banners work
On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 4:14 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/12/11/annual-fundraiser-checking-banner-results/ - d. I am very happy that the Foundation has finally decided to make data driven decisions, both in fundraising and the usability initiative. This has been my largest critique over time. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] WIKIPEDIA FOREVER
On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 3:38 AM, Oleg Alexandrov oleg.alexand...@gmail.comwrote: I have been a Wikipedian for five years. I am an administrator, I have written tens of articles, created hundreds of pictures, and made tens of thousands of edits. I love Wikipedia and all that it represents. I find the current WIKIPEDIA FOREVER banner to be creepy. I don't have good words to express it, but it does not feel the right way of soliciting donations. I would call upon the Wikipedians responsible for the banner to give it a deep thought about what message they want to convey to the millions of visitors to the site. Thank you. I believe the banner will be judged, not based on the almost universally bad impressions of it that I have seen from Wikipedians, but based on how much money it makes. I don't think it's surprising that the banner rubs many Wikipedians the wrong way. It was created by a PR agency with the express purpose of raking in as much cash as possible. It's supposed to hit all the right chords of the hundreds of millions of visitors that will see it, of whom we long time Wikipedians are a miniscule fraction. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Jimmy Wales post on Huffington Post
On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 3:17 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: An objectivist in a liberal blog? It happens. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jimmy-wales/what-the-msm-gets-wrong-a_b_292809.html (It's a piece about our remarkably accuracy-deficient coverage in the media in the last month or so. What happens when there's nothing to write about and people like me end up on telly.) - d. Wasn't the order of operations here like so: * BLP issues. Anyone can say anything about anyone alive on one of the most popular websites in the world and it gets published. * Foundation pays tens of thousands of dollars to develop a technology that allows edits to be reviewed before being posted * Some negative press and complaints, but not that much since it hasn't been widely publicized. * Community discussion starts on en.wp with lots of involvement by JW * More and more press, people start noticing that it's actually quite a big shift from the original encyclopedia that anyone could edit *in realtime* * Further community discussion with lots of critics and negative press. It becomes necessary to spin the conversation in the direction of not only increased responsibility, but also increased openness. * Conversation eventually turns mostly towards convincing people that this actually makes wikimedia more open, while also making it more responsible. It's hard to follow everything that goes on here, but I distinctly remember when FlaggedRevisions was developed, and per my recollection openness was not one of the original arguments that caused the foundation to contract its development. If anyone knows more than me and cares to clear up my misconceptions, that'd be great. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Jimmy Wales post on Huffington Post
On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 3:44 PM, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: 2009/9/21 Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu: It's hard to follow everything that goes on here, but I distinctly remember when FlaggedRevisions was developed, and per my recollection openness was not one of the original arguments that caused the foundation to contract its development. If anyone knows more than me and cares to clear up my misconceptions, that'd be great. Flagged Revisions type systems were discussed back in 2002-2003, long before BLPs became a focal point of concerns, as a method of sifting articles from Wikipedia into stable versions. The idea that flagging could increase openness for some pages is also not just some recently applied spin. I wrote an essay three years ago when the discussion about a specific implementation became more serious, detailing my own recommendations for some of the functional requirements of a flagging system: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Eloquence/WikiQA However, as noted above, a global setting to show sighted revisions in preference to unsighted ones should not be enabled unless and until it is found to scale sufficiently well, and to not have a dramatic negative impact on the user experience. Instead, revision preference should first be enabled on a per-page level, allowing administrators to quality protect pages. This would be an alternative to full protection or semi-protection, and allow edits to be made where it is currently impossible. The criteria for quality protecting pages could be expanded over time, allowing for community-directed application of the functionality, rather than an a priori assumption of scalability. The group of users on the German Wikipedia favoring a flagging system preferred a more conservative implementation, which was my primary motivation for writing the essay. As a Board member at the time, I shared my recommendations with Jimmy and others, and we agreed back then that a model that allowed an increase in openness on pages that are currently semi-protected would be preferable for en.wp. This is ultimately also what the en.wp community concluded. It's only fair to acknowledge, of course, that a significantly larger number of pages may end up being flagged protected than are currently semi-protected, resulting in an experience of reduced openness/immediacy for the pages not previously included in the set. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate I'm not sure that your essay discusses openness. It mentions that the new model will help with quality and could reduce participation (which could be viewed as openness). I think many people have a hard time with the logic that Jimmy is asking us to follow, which is essentially, by becoming more closed, we are becoming more open. When I read his Huffington Post essay it did occur to me that it's not exactly true that high profile articles that are usually locked aren't able to be edited by anonymous users. They can and do edit these articles by arguing for, or suggesting, a valuable edit on the talk page. An admin can then come along and make the edit, or briefly unlock the page, etc.. If we compare this model to the FlaggedRevisions model, the difference is really that these anons can edit locked pages without discussion. However, this only increases the chance of the edit being accepted proportionally to the quality and importance of the edit. The best way to increase the chances of getting an edit to stick in both models is to stop by the talk page and make the case for a change in the content of the article. That aspect will remain unchanged. My view of the current system is that we already have a primitive version of Flagged Revision that emerged out of more primitive wiki technologies. So as Joseph Reagle has said in this thread, and as you mention in your essay, the question is really how much of the encyclopedia will be closed on top of what we've already got closed. From your essay: For the worse, because they could reduce the level of participation, cause frustration, and lead to a shift towards a much more restricted model of editing and reviewing articles than is currently practiced. I think this thread would benefit from some reasonable estimates of the number of articles that will be locked under the new model, that way we know exactly what we're dealing with when we discuss whether or not the new perspective we are being asked to take of Flagged Revisions making the encyclopedia more open is spin, or not spin. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia: the Journal
On Sun, Sep 13, 2009 at 3:32 AM, Gwern Branwen gwe...@gmail.com wrote: http://www.wittylama.com/2009/09/wikipedia-journal/ Wikipedia currently has no way of addressing any of these issues due to the very nature of it being an “anyone can edit” wiki. This alienates a large number of academics who are already very interested in learning about and contributing to Wikipedia but have difficulty justifying it as legitimate work. Quite simply, academics in many countries/institutions must earn “points” each year to prove they’ve been working and thereby justify to government why their institution should continue to receive funding...One thing that certainly doesn’t earn points is helping to maintain the quality of the content on Wikipedia in the academic’s area of expertise - this is despite the fact that that is precisely where 90% of their students will turn to first to get some background information. Proposal: The creation of peer-reviewed scholarly e-journal. Academics would be commissioned to write encyclopedic articles on their area of expertise in accordance with our editorial principles (including Neutral POV, Verifiability and No Original Research) and the Wikipedia manual of style. Their article would be submitted to blind peer-review, as per the best-practices of any academically-rigorous journal, by both relevant academics and also a Wikipedian who had been a major contributor to a Featured Article on a similar topic. The final articles would be published in an edition of the “Wikipedia Journal” ready to merge into the existing Wikipedia article on that topic. [Note: this proposal is not the same as WikiJournal on Meta (the purpose of which is to encourage Original Research scholarship) or Wiki Journal on WikiVersity/Wikia (the purpose of which is to publish articles about Wiki-related scholarship).] Articles, once published, could then be merged into the existing Wikipedia article (or a new article created if one did not exist before) and appropriate attribution placed in the external links section of the Wikipedia article to the Author and journal edition. Also, it might be nice to have a talkpage template indicating that an academic had made substantial contributions to the article. *Hopefully* the newly refurbished Wikipedia article could then be taken to Featured Article candidacy relatively quickly. Not a terrible idea. It'd be kind of like the union of specialist online encyclopedias written by single authors, such as the Stanford Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. But I suspect the author is a little too sanguine about how easy it would be to incorporate these big new articles into actual WP articles - and if they don't get integrated, then they're not serving their purpose. -- gwern Since nobody has pointed to Scholarpedia yet, here is a link: http://www.scholarpedia.org/ Scholarpedia is a project to have the currently leading expert in a field, preferably the original researcher or inventor, write up that topic in a reasonably accessible format. The project is wildly successful. The authors get to choose the copyright status, whether copyright, GFDL, or BY-NC-DC. Each article has curators. Anyone (including you) can become a curator. Eligibility for curatorship is based on several factors including your scholar index, which is a measure of your contributions to the encyclopedia. Clearly, this information will not be ported back to Wikipedia. From the site: *The approach of Scholarpedia does not compete with, but rather complements, that of Wikipedia: instead of covering a broad range of topics, Scholarpedia covers a few narrow fields, but does that exhaustively.* A WikiJournal project would have to compete with Scholarpedia for the attention of academics, and from the perspective of an academic I have a hard time seeing why Scholarpedia is not preferable. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia: the Journal
On Sun, Sep 13, 2009 at 4:07 PM, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: In a message dated 9/13/2009 2:48:48 PM Pacific Daylight Time, brian.min...@colorado.edu writes: Clearly, this information will not be ported back to Wikipedia. Why is this clear? It isn't clear to me. Will Scholarpedia was designed to give academics credit for their work and it makes reasonable guarantees about the accuracy of its content. The accuracy guarantee is a benefit not only to readers, but to the authors as well. You sometimes see Scholarpedia articles in academic CVs. After the curatorship is turned over to the community only those who have demonstrated their expertise on the topic by making high quality contributions are allowed to edit. As experts pass away there is competition among leaders in the field to take over curatorship of the topic. From the perspective of a scientist who cares about whether their work is being represented correctly this is vastly preferable to having your writing mercilessly edited by people who may or may not have any clue what they are talking about, or who may have hidden agendas. Additionally, you are in good company at Scholarpedia. Academics want to publish their work in the same place as their contemporaries. After the community votes on which living expert should be an author, they work hard to invite that author to write the article and to help them out in any way they can. It was designed by academics, for academics. It will be tough to beat. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia: the Journal
On Sun, Sep 13, 2009 at 4:20 PM, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: Brian, scholarpedia doesn't work as a replacement for wikijournal (or whatever we decide to call it) because they require each editor to have a PhD or MD. There is no such requirement. It is a correlation only. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia: the Journal
On Sun, Sep 13, 2009 at 4:20 PM, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: That is how I envision this WikiJournal prospective. Not as another university-driven nowheresville which gets no traction because the vast majority of the world doesn't really care to read highly scientific and technical articles. Another example might be, let's say that you write a piece on intricate details of the Watergate scandal, as an investigative journalist. It's not news but I would think WikiJournal (or whatever) might be a perfect venue to have such an article peer-reviewed. WikiNews is not peer-reviewed. How is this different than the peer review at Wikipedia? ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia: the Journal
On Sun, Sep 13, 2009 at 4:29 PM, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: My question Brian was to your remark that this would not pass into Wikipedia. Your response didn't address why you think that. By pass into I mean cited in, quoted in, not *COPIED* obviously. We don't allow copy-paste right now. So all I can think is that you meant, that we should not cite any scholarpedia articles from within Wikipedia, and so I asked why. If you did not mean that, than what did you mean? I'm not sure what you're replying to, but I did contrast Scholarpedia and WikiJournal based on whether their content can be copied into Wikipedia, which is based on this quote from the OP:* The final articles would be published in an edition of the “Wikipedia Journal” ready to merge into the existing Wikipedia article on that topic.* ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia: the Journal
On Sun, Sep 13, 2009 at 4:32 PM, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: In a message dated 9/13/2009 3:21:51 PM Pacific Daylight Time, brian.min...@colorado.edu writes: There is no such requirement. It is a correlation only. There is. Right on the main sign-up page An editor of Scholarpedia should satisfy the following requirements: Have a PhD or MD. I take the usage of the word should here to mean must. In addition, by the way, another should requirement is to be recommended by 2 other curators ! How exclusive. Makes me sick to my stomach. When the revolution comes, the first thing I'm going to do is execute all the university scholars. Well that's been done Will Okay, clearly you are an extremist and this is not a good use of my time. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wired: Wikipedia to Color Code Untrustworthy Text
On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 6:24 PM, Keith Old keith...@gmail.com wrote: Folks, http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/08/wikitrust/ Wired reports: *Starting this fall, you’ll have a new reason to trust the information you find on Wikipedia: An optional feature called “WikiTrust” will color code every word of the encyclopedia based on the reliability of its author and the length of time it has persisted on the page.* *More than 60 million people visit the free, open-access encyclopedia each month, searching for knowledge on 12 million pages in 260 languages. But despite its popularity, **Wikipedia* http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/08/wikitrust/www.wikipedia.org * has long suffered criticism from those who say it’s not reliable. Because anyone with an internet connection can contribute, the site is subject to vandalism, bias and misinformation. And edits are anonymous, so there’s no easy way to separate credible information from fake content created by vandals.* *Now, researchers from the **Wiki Lab* http://trust.cse.ucsc.edu/* at the University of California, Santa Cruz have created a system to help users know when to trust Wikipedia—and when to reach for that dusty Encyclopedia Britannica on the shelf. Called **WikiTrust*http://wikitrust.soe.ucsc.edu/index.php/Main_Page *, the program assigns a color code to newly edited text using an algorithm that calculates author reputation from the lifespan of their past contributions. It’s based on a simple concept: The longer information persists on the page, the more accurate it’s likely to be.* *Text from questionable sources starts out with a bright orange background, while text from trusted authors gets a lighter shade. As more people view and edit the new text, it gradually gains more “trust” and turns from orange to white.* More in story *Regards* ** *Keith* What's interesting about WikiTrust is that a trust score is computed for each individual. I wonder if these will be made public, and if so, how they will change the community of editors. It seems likely that they will not be made public. However, since the algorithm is published and I believe the source code as well anyone with the hardware could compute and publish how trusted each community member is. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wired: Wikipedia to Color Code Untrustworthy Text
On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 7:42 PM, FT2 ft2.w...@gmail.com wrote: Agree - trust scores are likely to be divisive and easily gamed. I do not think trust score league tables will help the project. However as they are also good ways to spot problems and see the reliability profile of an article on review, perhaps some way might be found to make some of their results available, in some limited manner? Admin only?? On the assumption admins are trusted anyway so they don't have such a vested interest in numbers, but they might be interested in problem editorship. The other view is if you can see the aging or trust profile of the article, that's all you need. low trust-score users may simply be legitimate but inexperienced, bold and reverted, etc. There are other ways to ID problem editors, and if you need to know who wrote a specific sentence you can always use WikiBlame to check the history. So overall I would say you don't need to publish trust scores of users, and even telling a user their own trust score is merely a toehold into self promotion/gaming at best. People should edit, not be encouraged to keep scorecards. FT2 Playing devils advocate, isn't there far too little information available about your average editor? How do you determine at a glance the reputation of an editor whose edits you are reviewing, or with whom you are having a conversation? Further, since the full history dump is publicly available and the given algorithm is just one of many related measures that could be computed, is it pointless to try and stop the information from being released? Lastly, in the interest of transparency should the information not be made available? Shouldn't the goal be to create an algorithm that can't be gamed? It may actually be the case that this one is not very subject to manipulation. The authors are very astute and it would take an awful lot of effort. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wired: Wikipedia to Color Code Untrustworthy Text
On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 7:48 PM, Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 7:42 PM, FT2 ft2.w...@gmail.com wrote: Agree - trust scores are likely to be divisive and easily gamed. I do not think trust score league tables will help the project. However as they are also good ways to spot problems and see the reliability profile of an article on review, perhaps some way might be found to make some of their results available, in some limited manner? Admin only?? On the assumption admins are trusted anyway so they don't have such a vested interest in numbers, but they might be interested in problem editorship. The other view is if you can see the aging or trust profile of the article, that's all you need. low trust-score users may simply be legitimate but inexperienced, bold and reverted, etc. There are other ways to ID problem editors, and if you need to know who wrote a specific sentence you can always use WikiBlame to check the history. So overall I would say you don't need to publish trust scores of users, and even telling a user their own trust score is merely a toehold into self promotion/gaming at best. People should edit, not be encouraged to keep scorecards. FT2 Playing devils advocate, isn't there far too little information available about your average editor? How do you determine at a glance the reputation of an editor whose edits you are reviewing, or with whom you are having a conversation? Further, since the full history dump is publicly available and the given algorithm is just one of many related measures that could be computed, is it pointless to try and stop the information from being released? Lastly, in the interest of transparency should the information not be made available? Shouldn't the goal be to create an algorithm that can't be gamed? It may actually be the case that this one is not very subject to manipulation. The authors are very astute and it would take an awful lot of effort. I would also point out that competition can be a very healthy thing and it could very well be a motivating tool. Assuming an algorithm that is difficult to game editors might well be very interested in improving their reputation scores. It could even give some credibility to the encyclopedia. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wired: Wikipedia to Color Code Untrustworthy Text
On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 8:28 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.comwrote: 2009/8/31 Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu: I would also point out that competition can be a very healthy thing and it could very well be a motivating tool. Assuming an algorithm that is difficult to game editors might well be very interested in improving their reputation scores. It could even give some credibility to the encyclopedia. Yes, competition is a good motivator, but that is only useful if it is motivating people to do something desirable. We don't actually want people to try and avoid being reverted - WP:BOLD is still widely accepted as a good guideline, isn't it? From the perspective of building an excellent encyclopedia you might want people to be bold. This is an inherently inclusionist perspective where we assume that bold editors who write awful, inaccurate or mediocre stuff are still making valuable contributions. They are either contributing cruft which is easy to get rid of, or they are contributing seeds for some future editor to improve, or seeds for conversations on the talk page that will in time result in high quality content. Or if we're lucky, they are not only bold but really smart and only capable of producing brilliant prose. In short, in the limit of time any contribution is a good contribution. Even the worst contribution you can think of (which is probably engineered to stick but blatantly false) is going to eventually be tagged as vandalism and will help contribute to future intelligent algorithms that automatically weed out vandalism. From the perspective of an editor whose reputation is at stake, they are going to want to think more carefully about their contribution. On average they want all of their edits to remain in the encyclopedia for a long time. They might not want to be bold and thoughtless because that means they are simply planting a seed for another editor to improve on, making it easier for that other editor to improve their reputation at the stake of your reputation. You might want to start your seed of an edit as a draft and improve it over time, only finally submitting it to the encyclopedia after it is already high quality and likely to stick. I tend to think that the latter version is healthier than encouraging everyone to contribute every thought that they have. Similar to the [[Foot-in-the-door technique]], first we convinced you to edit this page, now we'd like to ask you to spend some time thinking about your edit before you submit it. If you do, your reputation will improve and your peers will respect your edits more in the future. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wired: Wikipedia to Color Code Untrustworthy Text
On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 9:31 PM, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.comwrote: On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 4:10 AM, Brianbrian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 9:08 PM, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote: snip Is it not more likely that most long-term editors who have been active for years have had most of their text mercilessly edited into oblivion and have very low average trust levels? And more recent editors may have higher trust levels? With the disclaimer that I haven't read the paper since the 2006 Wikimania, no, the algorithm is smarter than that. Simply having your edits overwritten at some point in the future is not going to detract from the period of time that your edit lasted. Additionally, if some but not all of your words persist through rewrites that would contribute to your reputation. If you merely revert vandalism that removes a persistent piece of text, doesn't that unfairly contribute to your reputation as the text continues to persist and the algorithm thinks that anyone who added it was doing so independently? Carcharoth If you have questions like that you should probably look into the website and the paper. I think that you'll find they realized most of these issues and incorporated them into the algo. They already detect reverts so it doesn't make sense to punish the reverter. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] SmartWikiSearch, a similarity search engine for Wikipedia
On Sat, Aug 22, 2009 at 12:05 PM, Gwern Branwen gwe...@gmail.com wrote: I tried this out the other day; it's a very cool idea, but by and large, it seems that this hacker doesn't have enough CPU power to extract the really good wikilinks, the ones that aren't already linked inside the article. (eg. if I try it on [[Encyclopedia of the Brethren of Purity]], I have to go all the way down to find a suggestion which isn't already linked by the article.) Perhaps in a decade we'll have enough computing power on the servers that this could be a plugin - we'd then have auto-generated See Alsos, which would be really cool. -- gwern A fancy technique called Latent Dirichlet Allocation can be used to find links that aren't already linked in the document themselves. I did this for a class project. Here is an expert from the paper which also shows you the latent connections it found for the Simple article on hippies. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/meta/2/25/LDA-Wiki-Search.png I note that Google has released parallel lda so its not feasible to run it on all of wikipedia using an ordinary Beowulf cluster. http://code.google.com/p/plda/ ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] SmartWikiSearch, a similarity search engine for Wikipedia
On Sat, Aug 22, 2009 at 12:24 PM, Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: On Sat, Aug 22, 2009 at 12:05 PM, Gwern Branwen gwe...@gmail.com wrote: I tried this out the other day; it's a very cool idea, but by and large, it seems that this hacker doesn't have enough CPU power to extract the really good wikilinks, the ones that aren't already linked inside the article. (eg. if I try it on [[Encyclopedia of the Brethren of Purity]], I have to go all the way down to find a suggestion which isn't already linked by the article.) Perhaps in a decade we'll have enough computing power on the servers that this could be a plugin - we'd then have auto-generated See Alsos, which would be really cool. -- gwern A fancy technique called Latent Dirichlet Allocation can be used to find links that aren't already linked in the document themselves. I did this for a class project. Here is an expert from the paper which also shows you the latent connections it found for the Simple article on hippies. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/meta/2/25/LDA-Wiki-Search.png I note that Google has released parallel lda so its not feasible to run it on all of wikipedia using an ordinary Beowulf cluster. http://code.google.com/p/plda/ * now feasible ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Report a Problem hack
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 9:08 AM, Jay Litwyn brewh...@freenet.edmonton.ab.ca wrote: The problem with popups is that even Explorer Six can completely disable them or enable them for specific sites. Unlikely, it's not a real popup. They use javascript to float a div which contains a form on top of the article. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
[WikiEN-l] Special:Statistics data
This spreadsheet has all of the data recorded and plotted from Special:Statistics by Archive.org, 2004-2009. http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=tkEhxjLanb4hCHAZiS91_MQoutput=html ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Request for help: Strategic Planning
On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 4:08 PM, Casey Brown li...@caseybrown.org wrote: On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 5:25 PM, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: This main page of strategy.wikimedia.org is merely a icon-listing of all the projects. There is no obvious link to drill down into the strategy wiki itself. No links except to other projects. And the main page can't be edited. Sorry, but what do you mean by drill down? To me, the Main Page seems to give a great deal of links (and explanations of what those pages are). Was there something missing that you noticed? -- Casey Brown Cbrown1023 Apparantly there is still dome dns propagation occuring. What I see at strategy.wikimedia.org is not what I saw when I received the first e-mail. I saw what whjohnson saw - a portal. Now it resolves to the wiki. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
[WikiEN-l] Copyright of newly found image of Phineas Gage from 1850
A daguerreotype of a well adjusted [[Phineas Gage]] holding the rod that impaled his frontal lobes was recently discovered. It will be published in The Journal of the History of the Neurosciences imminently. It was, in my opinion, correctly uploaded to Commons under the Public Domain. It is, after all, an uncreative photograph of a daguerreotype made in the 1850s by an unknown photographer. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Phineas_Gage.jpg That said, have a look at the copyright text of the image claimed by the gallery that took the photo. http://brightbytes.com/phineasgage/index.html **NOTE* We are not claiming copyright to the work of an anonymous 1850s photographer but to the photograph we made of this object in our possession. Since you can't upload a daguerreotype to the internet and no one else could possibly have photographed this object for over 30 years, the only photographs available are the ones we have made.* *For several years we have had an informal business supplying images in our collection http://brightbytes.com/past_tense/index.html to publishers, film, and television producers. We often grant permission for educational and non-profit usage.* *High resolution photographs without a watermark are available for reproduction. Contact us for information on usage fees.* * *My reading of this is that they claim copyright of the image and that they often allow educational and non-profit institutions to use versions of the images that contain watermarks. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
[WikiEN-l] MediaWiki is getting a new programming language
They are going to add something like PHP/Python/Lua so that you can program the encyclopedia. If you want to participate in the conversation you should join wikitech-l. Cheers ;) ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] MediaWiki is getting a new programming language
On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 10:19 PM, stevertigostv...@gmail.com wrote: You provide no context The title says it all - MediaWiki is getting a new programming language. no direct link to a substantive wikitech-l post I assume, having signed up to this list, that you understand what wikitech-l is and where it is located (more to the point) you gave no indication that the techies actually want non-technical input. The fact that the techies do not actively seek out community input is why we ended up with ParserFunctions. Furthermore these changes are supposed to be 'community' decisions. The 'techies' are also not the people who edit Wikipedia articles the most. They write code, fix servers etc... Anyone interested by MediaWiki's new programming language will have no problem finding the conversation based on the information I provided. It is wholly sufficient. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] MediaWiki is getting a new programming language
On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 10:36 PM, Thomas Daltonthomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: I don't see how any of that would be fixed by community discussion. I'm not even sure what community would discuss it - the core Mediawiki code is used by far more than just the English Wikipedia (or even the whole of the Wikimedia movement). I have not forgotten what many of you have. Any changes to the software must be gradual and reversible. We need to make sure that any changes contribute positively to the community, as ultimately determined by everybody in Wikipedia, in full consultation with the community consensus. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jimbo_Wales ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] MediaWiki is getting a new programming language
On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 10:43 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.comwrote: 2009/7/1 Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu: You haven't responded to either of the points you quoted... Yes, I did. Your comments demonstrate my points. More technically minded folks believe that they can sit down and powwow about the technically best solution to a problem and can't even imagine what sort of input the community could possibly provide. It's totally backwards. The conversation should start on WikiEN-l, not wikitech-l. You have to first adequately characterize a problem before you start implementing solutions. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] MediaWiki is getting a new programming language
On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 10:52 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.comwrote: That's better done by surveying the community, not a community discussion. Yeah, still waiting for that survey. Or that community discussion. Or that usability study. Something tells me that without any griping I will wait forever. I wonder what it is. Oh that's right - precedence. I dug through all of the conversations around ParserFunctions. There wasn't much. It takes a lot of diligence to fully consult the community consensus. It's hard work that developers, historically speaking, haven't card one iota about. Whoever finishes their implementation first and is best friends with a core dev wins. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] NY Times: Wired Editor Apologizes for Copying from Wikipedia in New Book
It's hard to imagine someone thinking I bet no one will notice if I just paste in this paragraph from a Wikipedia article. At the same time, some users, perhaps even some apparently sophisticated users, may misunderstand just what exactly is meant by free encyclopedia. And not to his credit directly, but certainly somewhat in his favor, it is simply not possible to cite an article such that you refer to it exactly the way it looked on a particular day. This is because there is no software that can use the revision number to pull in the correct revision of templates etc. There really isn't any excuse though. A URL suitable for use in a book can be as short as Wikipedia.org/Article (you're redirected to the article after 5 seconds). That's really, minimal attribution - who wouldn't be able to agree on that??:) On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 4:53 PM, phoebe ayers phoebe.w...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 2:40 PM, Joseph Reaglerea...@mit.edu wrote: On Thursday 25 June 2009, Angela wrote: http://en.wikipedia.org/?oldid=6042007 also works. For book purposes, this is already shorter than most URLs, so shouldn't need to be shortened anymore which would remove information about where the link goes. I did not know that, that's great. Perhaps this could be included as an output format under cite this page? Provide the full permanent URL, then the short version for citation purposes. As an aside, what bugs me the most about this is that according to the note reproduced in this story: http://www.vqronline.org/blog/2009/06/23/chris-anderson-free/ Anderson said that All those are my screwups after we decided not to run notes as planned, due to my inability to find a good citation format for web sources… We give people a lovely pre-made citation on each and every page! Every major style manual includes explicit directions on how to cite websites! Every academic paper ever published about Wikipedia has grappled with this problem and come up with some sort of solution! Sheesh. -- Phoebe ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Google thinks Wikipedia is a news source
I can't imagine why they would add Wikinews as a source - it has no authority, whereas Wikipedia does. On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 10:47 AM, Andrew Turvey andrewrtur...@googlemail.com wrote: - Joe Anderson computer...@gmail.com wrote: From: Joe Anderson computer...@gmail.com To: wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Monday, 8 June, 2009 17:18:29 GMT +00:00 GMT Britain, Ireland, Portugal Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Google thinks Wikipedia is a news source On 2009-06-07 08:48:26 +0100, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com said: http://www.flickr.com/photos/chiropractic/3601011581/ Could someone speak to Google? Surely isn't this entering Wikinews' territory somewhat? Why? The more Wikimedia content is made available to others the better, surely? This is a great endorsement of our material. If anyone complained, all they'd do is take Wikipedia off their list. They wouldn't necessarily add Wikinews. Andrew ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Google thinks Wikipedia is a news source
PageRank authority. People-actually-read-it authority. People believe what they read there authority. A de facto authority. On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 12:51 PM, AGK wiki...@googlemail.com wrote: I can't imagine why they would add Wikinews as a source - it has no authority, whereas Wikipedia does. What type of authority, Brian? Reliability? Based on original reporting? AGK ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] [WIKIEN-l] It's probably nothing, but ...
I got the same message from user 'Rx StrangeLove' the other night. To whom, if anyone, should it be reported to? Brian On Sun, May 24, 2009 at 1:05 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/5/24 Gwern Branwen gwe...@gmail.com: I doubt it. All the old admin accounts seem to be getting _Batman_ related emails from phantom accounts; mine, for example, was just a lengthy quote of Joker's 'Why so serious?' speech. It's been positively identified by the checkusers as one of the most stupidly persistent cross-wiki troll-vandals and is best ignored. - d. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Citizendium vs. Wikipedia
Many of these very constraints are exactly what are likely to stop Citizendium from reaching critical mass. Whatever that phrase means Wikipedia has it and Citizendium does not. I think it's an interesting question whether Wikipedia would have been successful had these influences prevailed early on in its history (post-Nupedia). Many people are easily discouraged by barries to participation. That doesn't mean that the information contained inside their brains ceases to be useful to the project, it just means you'll have to come up with ways to help them participate in a constructive manner. These two constraints seem to be at odds - how can we get people who have information that is useful to us, but are perhaps a bit fickle when it comes to technology, to contribute that information without hurting the encyclopedia? The answer is not to weed them out - that would be to avoid the challenge entirely. The trick is to use that very technology to lower the barrier to participation to a level low enough to get them hooked. On Wikipedia this means allowing them to go ahead and submit their ideas and allow several thousand more technically minded contributors - or other anons - to clean up and polish the contribution. So far this technique has worked really, really well. Even fairly reasonable independent academic reviews show that Wikipedia's content is actually not that bad - definitely a good place to start. If we go by numbers of articles then its true that most of the encyclopedia is low quality. But if we look at the actual popularity of subjects we find that quality does indeed scale with public interest. This is not very surprising since we show an edit box to every member of the public. We expect that the articles that get looked at more get edited more as well and that quality might scale with number of edits. And this is true. So we see how Wikipedia and Citizendium are different: Citizendium thinks that fewer high quality edits made by exactly the right people is better than many low quality edits made by anyone who wishes. In this regard its hard for me to see a distinction between the relationships between Nupedia/Wikipedia and Citizendium/Wikipedia. Both of these less successful projects have gone to some length to weed out contributors, whereas Wikipedia takes a *totally* different approach to acceptance - everyone except the GDs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:PBAGDSWCBY These are both projects to build an encyclopedia and despite the different approaches that Wikipedia and Citizendium take it seems reasonable to compare them on their successes and failures. So far Citizendium is not even close to Wikipedia's quality despite the hullaboo made by its community. In fact, it's not clear how it could possibly catch up given their choice of weeding out contributors. On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 12:43 PM, Chet Hoover chet.hoo...@yahoo.com wrote: Here's why Citizendium is far better: * It's more open... everyone's identities are known, there are no sockpuppets, there is none of the absurd overhead that anonymity entails. * It's more serious... vital articles come first... Pokemon comes last. Only in many years from now will we begin to see trivial articles surface: obscure films, unknown actors etc. *This seriousness attracts Academics. Citizendium's slow growth is actually an incentive to serious-minded writers. It means the place is clear of the nutters and fans that Wikipedia has. *The place is in the hands of writers and not an army of 1600 administrators. Can you imagine writing for Wikipedia as an expert and knowing that your bosses are in high school, maybe university, and only occasionally over 35 years old? *Because real identities are used, less rules and guideline creep exists. It's more about the material. *All the computer guys are at Wikipedia because they like the technical aspects of Wikipedia where you have to master a lingo and comply with MOS (don't ask!). These guys see everything in terms of percents anyhow, and don't have the kind of discerning mind that understands concepts and themes etc. With them out of the way, you get a healthier bunch of writers who show up at Citizendium. *Citizendium's difficult entrance exam is not really all that difficult. It's a sure-fire way of keeping out those who are not prepared to edit an encyclopedia and frankly, I love that! Citizendium can just hang on, and stick around, because it's far less about its success over Wikipedia than it is about an environment in which serious-minded people with the werewithal can write about important subjects. Chet ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list,
Re: [WikiEN-l] An open letter to Jimmy Wales
Lets just be clear that this is an IMHO that has nothing to do with my point - the source of authority on the subject. All primary sources are biased in that respect. On Sat, Apr 11, 2009 at 12:24 AM, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: -Original Message- From: Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Fri, 10 Apr 2009 10:54 pm Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] An open letter to Jimmy Wales In my opinion what Wikipedia says about this matter is entirely irrelevant. Wikipedia is not a source of authority on the matter - the Wikimedia Foundation is. - Foundations like companies are mostly the worst possible historians. They have a vested interest in rewriting history to match their current goals. Will Johnson ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] An open letter to Jimmy Wales
But you know there can only be one benevolent dictator, right? On Thu, Apr 9, 2009 at 6:20 AM, Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: Honestly, it's important enough that the Foundation should take an objective look at the facts and make a statement about Wikipedia's history. On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 7:36 PM, Larry Sanger sanger-li...@citizendium.org wrote: All, Earlier today, I had no joy in trying to post this open letter to Jimmy Wales on Jimmy's own user talk page: the man himself deleted it. That is not the sort of behavior I would have expected of the head of an allegedly open, transparent community devoted to free speech. I would like Wikipedians in general to be apprised of my concerns. I believe they are serious and well-justified, and they should not be dismissed without a careful hearing. I do not ask that Jimmy Wales reply here on this list. But I do ask that the powers that be--including the Wikipedia community, the Wikimedia Board, and the media--hold Jimmy responsible for his very shabby behavior toward me. Let me be clear. This is not just an attempt to tell my side of the story. It is me confronting Jimmy Wales publicly for lying about my involvement in the project after many private requests to stop. You might disagree with me about many things, but we need not disagree about the facts as they can be found in various Internet archives, nor about the necessity of keeping our leaders honest. A readable copy, with some updates, can be found here: http://blog.citizendium.org/2009/04/08/an-open-letter-to-jimmy-wales-copy/ http://blog.citizendium.org/2009/04/08/updates-re-open-letter-to-jimmy-wales / The letter itself follows. --Larry Sanger === Jimmy, I don't know a better place than this for an open letter to you [i.e., than on your user talk page on Wikipedia]. I recently read the Hot Press interview with you. The lies and distortions it contains are, for me, the last straw, especially after http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/xodp/message/1720 this came to light, in which you described yourself as co-founder in 2002. I've reached out to you on a couple of occasions to coordinate our versions - well, my version and your fanciful inventions - about how Wikipedia got started. Last year I read about a speech in which you represented me as being more or less opposed to Wikipedia from the start - despite it being my own baby, really - and I wrote to you saying that if you keep this up, I will speak out. Well, I'm finally speaking out. In Wikipedia's first three years, it was clear to everyone working on it that not only had I named the project, I came up with and promoted the idea of making a wiki encyclopedia, wrote the first policy pages and many more policy pages in the following year, led the project, and enforced many rules that are now taken for granted. I came up with a lot of stuff that is regarded as standard operating procedure. For instance, I argued that talk should go on talk pages and got people into that habit. Similarly, after meta-discussion started taking up so much of Wikipedia's time and energy, I shepherded talk about the project to meta.wikipedia.org - and after that, to Wikipedia-L and WikiEN-L. I insisted that we were working on an encyclopedia, not on the many other things one can use a wiki for. I came up with the name Wikipedian and other Wikipedia jargon. I had devised a neutrality policy for Nupedia, and I elaborated it in a form that stood for several years on Wikipedia. I did a lot of explaining and evangelizing for Wikipedia - what it is about, why we are here, and so forth - for example, in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Our_Replies_to_Our_Critics%22 Wikipedia:Our Replies to Our Critics and a couple of well-known posts on kuro5hin.org http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/7/25/103136/121 like this one and http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/9/24/43858/2479 this. I also recall introducing many specific policy details, the evidence for which is in archives (such as on archive.org) and no doubt in the memories of some of the more active early Wikipedians. These are only some examples of ways in which I led the project in its first 14 months; after I left, there was a lot of soul-searching in the project about what would happen now that it was leaderless (see the quotations linked from http://www.larrysanger.org/roleinwp.html this page). When I was involved in the project, I was regarded as its chief organizer. As you can still see in the archives, I called myself Chief Instigator and Chief Organizer and the like (not editor). I also want to correct you on something that tends to harm me: your repeated insinuations that I was fired. In the Hot Press interview, you said I left Wikipedia because you didn't want to pay him any more. You know - and so does everyone else who worked at Bomis, Inc., around a dozen people - that at the end
Re: [WikiEN-l] Earth Deletion Discussion
So far each april fools thread I've seen has had at least one buzzkiller in it. On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 8:34 AM, Ken Arromdee arrom...@rahul.net wrote: Generally, I'm not a fan of this sort of joke. They give the impression of we get to break the rules when we want to, as long as it's funny. Meanwhile, everyone else has to follow them. (And WP:COI really does seem to say it's a conflict of interest for an article about the Earth to be made by Earthlings. It's easy to invoke IAR and say that that's not what it's supposed to mean, but it's not all that different from other examples that we're supposed to take seriously as being COI.) ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Automatic death flagging?
This subject is one of the reasons that Semantic MediaWiki was designed.
For example, in the article for [[Marilyn Monroe]] there is an infobox
and it contains a template parameter with this code:
deathdate = {{death-date and age|August 5, 1962|June 1, 1926}}
In order to give the article [[Marilyn Monroe]] the semantic property
deathdate you would write the exact same thing as above in the
article. The difference is that in template {{death-date and age}} you
would also write [[Died on::{{{1}}}]] which means [[Died on::August 5,
1962]].
The alternate method is to insert this semantic property inline with
the article text. For example, Marilyn Monroe died on [[Died
on::August 5, 1962]]. This renders as Marilyn Monroe died on August
5, 1962.
The great benefit to this is that you can now ask semantic queries to
output this information. For example, to print out the date that
Marilyn Monroe died, you would write an ask parser function: {{#ask:
[[Marilyn Monroe]] | ?Died on}}. This prints August 5, 1962.
In order to print a list of all actors who recently died in table
format, you might write: {{#ask: [[Category:Actors]] | ?Died on |
sort=ascending }}.
Of course you can also manually maintain a list of recent deaths,
which I think is done.
You can ask these sorts of questions using DBpedia as well:
http://wiki.dbpedia.org/OnlineAccess
On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 5:27 PM, K. Peachey p858sn...@yahoo.com.au wrote:
It's not automatic but if the person's talk page has the WP Biography
banner on it, it has a switch called living which will put them in
one of the following three categories (not word for word naming):
1. Living People
2. Dead People
3. People missing Living statement
That combined with the death categories that different infoboxes put
them into should give you a pretty good coverage.
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia, the overly standarised Encyclopedia you wouldn't dare edit
For whatever it's worth, Wikipedia has become a complex and byzantine bureaucracy...it's a maze of process and rules and editors that never get tired of enforcing either. It'll never happen but we should start kicking people out of project space. -Original Message- From: wikien-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikien-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of White Cat Sent: Thursday, February 05, 2009 11:16 PM To: English Wikipedia Subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia, the overly standarised Encyclopedia you wouldn't dare edit I am a bit weary about the over standardization of the site. There seems to be a one correct version philosophy. I was hoping it to self-destruct but it seems like that aint gonna happen. We are now forced to use US style dates... Thus it is the American Encyclopedia internationals (non USians) should feel uncomfortable in visiting let alone editing. We are now forced to use a certain specific template when an alternate is available... Self righteous people will deprecate the other one without even bothering to discuss... We are now forced to not link to dates on list articles... There are tens of other similar changes. Even more trivial issues are dictated by either a guideline or a wikiproject. Are we a bureaucracy now? In the past we had multiple correct ways. For example the use of ISO dates (aka [[-mm-dd]] dates) were encouraged. Users could alter their settings to display the dates in any way they please. The ISO dates were drafted as a compromise to the international versus US date war. Now US dates are hard coded. You do not get to alter it. The site is becoming increasingly hostile. Oh and yes I know this mailinglist post will most certainly not fix anything. There isn't a better median though. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Announcing Epistemia, a new wiki encyclopedia
Epistemology hearkens to the very early days. Nupedia failed because of the 7 tenets of proper epistemology. On Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 6:28 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/1/17 Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com: On Sat, Jan 17, 2009 at 1:18 AM, Thomas Larsen larsen.thoma...@gmail.com wrote: snip Epistemia aims to provide something better. How did you come up with the name, and what does it mean? :-) See http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/epistemology ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Announcing Epistemia, a new wiki encyclopedia
It's not a split, but Scholarpedia has been fantastically successful. http://www.scholarpedia.org/ They've gotten authors whose names you will recognize but did not realize were alive to write up the articles on their discoveries. Thats the project goal - to get THE living expert on the subject to write the article. On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 5:21 PM, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: In a message dated 1/15/2009 4:17:21 PM Pacific Standard Time, larsen.thoma...@gmail.com writes: - civil and polite conduct is required, and no tolerance is shown for those people whose intention is to cause disruption or damage; - This brings up an interesting point. Is there any analysis of the history of the splitting of Wikis, by whom, when, for what reason, and the longer term result? Might make an interesting bit of research to chart these all. Will **A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above. See yours in just 2 easy steps! ( http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/10075x1215855013x1201028747/aol?redir=http://www.freecreditreport.com/pm/default.aspx?sc=668072%26hmpgID=62%26bcd=De cemailfooterNO62http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/10075x1215855013x1201028747/aol?redir=http://www.freecreditreport.com/pm/default.aspx?sc=668072%26hmpgID=62%26bcd=DecemailfooterNO62 ) ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] JarlaxleArtemis/Grawp
[[Non-credible threat]] If you do go overboard and call the cops please send them a link to this thread. On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 2:32 AM, Sarah Ewart sarahew...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 4:02 PM, [[User:Thinboy00]] thinboy00+wikipedial...@gmail.com thinboy00%2bwikipedial...@gmail.com thinboy00%2bwikipedial...@gmail.comthinboy00%252bwikipedial...@gmail.com wrote: so are we calling the police or not? No, we aren't; it's up to the people who have been targets of death, rape and violence threats and whose children have been threatened with rape and murder to decide for themselves if they want to take that step or not. I would personally support people who wanted to do so and I hope the Foundation would, too, but it's a decision those people have to make for themselves. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l -- You have successfully failed! ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] JarlaxleArtemis/Grawp
What percentage of his page moves were not picked up automatically by a bot? What percentage of this users vandalism is not picked up by a bot? Why is the ISP responsible for what he dumps into Wikipedia, rather than Wikipedia, as it allows itself to be a dumping ground? The Viacom/Youtube lawsuit demonstrates that this is a legal grey area, thus, I see little ground on which to punish the entire ip range of the ISP. Why are machine learning bots that are trained on previous vandalism in order to detect new vandalism not being used? They have been developed. Why is the Foundation not funding their further development? I believe the direction of this thread has been all wrong. Peace, On Mon, Dec 29, 2008 at 4:07 PM, Soxred93 soxre...@gmail.com wrote: The problem with that is that many articles we have would not be found in any dictionary. X! On Dec 29, 2008, at 6:02 PM [Dec 29, 2008 ], Ian Woollard wrote: On 29/12/2008, Joe Szilagyi szila...@gmail.com wrote: Allow blocking on a more granular level, if we know his ISP, and lock out moves and redirects for the whole damn ISPs, and specifically point the finger back in the block message: Blocked because of JarlaxleArtemis/Grawp with a nice shiny link to his long-term abuse page. It probably wouldn't work because of proxies and people that would emulate/help him. Still, ideas that would affect less people rather than more like that are almost certainly IMO the way to go; for example restricting the range of characters and checking that the move title consists of words in a dictionary before permitting non admins or users with a small number of edits to complete a move might be desirable. - Joe -- -Ian Woollard We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. Life in a perfectly imperfect world would be much better. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l -- You have successfully failed! ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] JarlaxleArtemis/Grawp
Potthast, Stein, Gerling. (2008). Automatic Vandalism Detection in Wikipedia. http://www.uni-weimar.de/medien/webis/publications/downloads/papers/stein_2008c.pdf Abstract. We present results of a new approach to detect destructive article revi- sions, so-called vandalism, in Wikipedia. Vandalism detection is a one-class clas- sification problem, where vandalism edits are the target to be identified among all revisions. Interestingly, vandalism detection has not been addressed in the In- formation Retrieval literature by now. In this paper we discuss the characteristics of vandalism as humans recognize it and develop features to render vandalism detection as a machine learning task. We compiled a large number of vandalism edits in a corpus, which allows for the comparison of existing and new detection approaches. Using logistic regression we achieve 83% precision at 77% recall with our model.* Compared to the rule-based methods that are currently applied* *in Wikipedia, our approach increases the F -Measure performance by 49% while* *being faster at the same time.* Open the PDF, scan to page 667. This bot outperforms MartinBot, T-850 Robotic Assistant, WerdnaAntiVandalBot, Xenophon, ClueBot, CounterVandalismBot, PkgBot, MiszaBot, and AntiVandalBot. It outperforms the best of those (AntiVandalBot) by a very wide margin. So why are you wasting the ISPs time and the police's time when the best of the passive technology routes have not been explored? Using machine learning *you pit the vandals against themselves. *Every time they perform a particular kind of vandalism, it can never be performed again because the bot will recognize it. Cheers, ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] JarlaxleArtemis/Grawp
This is preposterous. On Mon, Dec 29, 2008 at 4:36 PM, Sarah Ewart sarahew...@gmail.com wrote: On 12/30/08, Marc Riddell michaeldavi...@comcast.net wrote: Hey, guys! This whole thing could go away rather quickly if one (or more) of the persons who feel victimized by him simply made a formal complaint to the police. Marc Riddell I agree, Marc. I think we would find that most of this talk about blocking the ISP, bots and so on would quickly become unnecessary once a couple of complaints were made to the police and he and his family were dealing with the FBI or the police on their doorstep ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l -- You have successfully failed! ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] JarlaxleArtemis/Grawp
Your standards are far too high. Rules + automatic classification + human eyes converges on 100%. On Mon, Dec 29, 2008 at 6:28 PM, Ian Woollard ian.wooll...@gmail.comwrote: On 29/12/2008, Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: Using logistic regression we achieve 83% precision at 77% recall with our model.* Compared to the rule-based methods that are currently applied* *in Wikipedia, our approach increases the F -Measure performance by 49% while* *being faster at the same time.* In my experience and reasonably expert knowledge of spam fighting, these are not very good statistics. If they had achieved over 99% then I would have been impressed, with if they did that with even fewer false positives then I would have been thoroughly impressed. And I don't consider it either-or. We should fight spammers of all kinds with all techniques that work. -- -Ian Woollard We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. Life in a perfectly imperfect world would be much better. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l -- You have successfully failed! ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Expanded diff options
I mean that you are are correct:) On Sun, Dec 28, 2008 at 10:30 PM, Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: No No :) I am simply pointing out that the developers (the tool was written by Brion) clearly think the OP is correct. On Sun, Dec 28, 2008 at 10:26 PM, Mackan79 macka...@gmail.com wrote: Ugh, is this a tool I would install myself? I'm pretty sure my SVN commits got run through the dryer, if so. On Sun, Dec 28, 2008 at 8:59 PM, Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: You mean something like Extension:CodeReview for Wikipedia edits? :) http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:CodeReview On Sun, Dec 28, 2008 at 8:50 PM, Mackan79 macka...@gmail.com wrote: Has anyone floated the idea of a second diff' button on Special:Watchlist to cover a slightly longer period? I was just thinking this could do two things: 1.) Make it easier to catch vandalism, and 2.) Promote review of changes in general. I don't do much vandalism patrol, but I think one reason pages lose quality in general is that tracking long watchlists is too difficult. You either check every edit, or if you don't, then you have to navigate through page histories which requires a.) several clicks and b.) recalling when you were last up to date. If so, a longer one-click option would seem beneficial. Something like 10 or 20 edits, maybe (or even adjustable, like the watchlist's length). Thoughts? Mackan79 ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l -- (Not sent from my iPhone) ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l -- (Not sent from my iPhone) -- (Not sent from my iPhone) ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] JarlaxleArtemis/Grawp
He's wasted some time, but he hasn't hurt anyone. Give him one last chance. Ensure that he sees this thread, and if it stops, let him go. Cheers:) Brian ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
