Re: [Foundation-l] Nokia, licensing agreement and cellphones
Then it is safe to assume that there is no special agreement between Wikimedia Foundation and Nokia that gives the later any kind of special rights? John Angela skrev: On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 3:41 AM, John at Darkstar vac...@jeb.no wrote: What is the present status on licensing of «Wikipedia» and exactly what does the current agreement with Nokia cover? It seems like ZDNet Australia and Angela Beesley isn't talking about quite the same, and I would like an clarification. I never said the new platform would be licensed to Nokia at all. As far as I know, they have nothing to do with it whatsoever, but one journalist makes this up and all the rest (including Wikipedia Signpost) just blindly copy the error. Angela ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
2009/2/2 phoebe ayers phoebe.w...@gmail.com: Which is fine if you're reprinting the whole article, but what if you're just reprinting the lede, or some other section of an article? Should a reuser still be required to reprint 2 pages of credits for a paragraph of article? That seems onerous. Note that just reprinting a *section* of an article is how many print reuse cases have worked to date (the German encyclopedia and our CafePress bumperstickers come to mind), and this case is not something that we've discussed much so far. Very few articles require a page's worth of credit. Remember even the German has an average of 23.65 edits per page and the midpoint is likely much lower. And having just actually done this, with a real book and a real publisher, in How Wikipedia Works, I can attest that it's a non-trivial amount of work to get author lists for articles -- removing duplication, IPs, formatting, etc is all a good deal of work -- and I like to think I understand how histories work. It would be a much bigger task for someone who didn't understand histories or the license. It is true we need an extension built into mediawiki to handle at least part of this. The Wikiblame tool, if it were made widely accessible and prominently integrated into the site, seems like a promising solution. In the meantime, I think we ought to consider what proper credit is for just reusing a part of an article, versus the whole thing. -- phoebe Legally you are required to credit every author who's work that section is a derivative of. -- geni ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
2009/2/1 Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.com: So far I have not heard any arguments why the CC-by-sa cannot do this. It can but can only do this when everyone agrees. Since wikipedia currently has 282,180,603 edits by people who have not agreed such a change is imposible. I have only heard a lot of FUD that I qualify as narcistic. FUD that does not contribute to more FREE colloaboration and re-use. I understand license text and copyright law can be considered FUD by some however it is FUD that is important. The one argument against the CC-by-sa that takes the prize is the notion that we will have less influence with Creative Commons ... yet another great narcissistic argument. Not really. The fact is experience shows that every free license has issues (for example CC-BY-SA 3.0 contains an invariant section clause although I doubt that was CC's intention). Wikipedia by it's very nature tends to hit these issues before anyone else. Having influence means we in theory have a better chance of getting such issues fixed. -- geni ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 3:29 PM, geni geni...@gmail.com wrote: So far I have not heard any arguments why the CC-by-sa cannot do this. It can but can only do this when everyone agrees. Since wikipedia currently has 282,180,603 edits by people who have not agreed such a change is imposible. False. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few and the [edits of the] minority who choose to disrupt the community will be quickly and efficiently purged from it (albeit wasting resources in the process that could have been better utilised elsewhere). It is clear that there is a small but vocal minority intent on spreading 'important' FUD and in my opinion these people can't see the forest for the trees. Fortunately it seems the leadership has a good grasp on community sentiment and sanity will prevail, with any luck sooner rather than later. Sam ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
2009/2/2 Sam Johnston s...@samj.net: False. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few and the [edits of the] minority who choose to disrupt the community will be quickly and efficiently purged from it (albeit wasting resources in the process that could have been better utilised elsewhere). I'm not talking about needs I'm talking about legal rights. Remember you can't use presumed consent in this situation so if you wanted to shift the credit to wikipedia you would need to track down and get agreement from every author (and whoever inherited in the cases where they have died). Given the amount of content we have from very occasional contributers this is impossible. It is clear that there is a small but vocal minority intent on spreading 'important' FUD and in my opinion these people can't see the forest for the trees. Please provide a halfway legal way to do what you propose. And no moveing wikipedia to Afghanistan is not a valid answer. -- geni ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikitech-l] second-class wikis
Everything takes time. The techs will handle it when they get around to it. From: Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.com To: Wikimedia developers wikitec...@lists.wikimedia.org; Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Monday, February 2, 2009 3:26:02 AM Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikitech-l] second-class wikis Hoi, Can someone please explain why this is ? Thanks, GerardM 2009/2/1 Marcus Buck w...@marcusbuck.org According to SiteMatrix we have 739 projects at the moment. There are three master partitions for the servers: s1 for enwiki only, s2 for 19 other projects and s3 for all the rest (that's 719 projects). My homewiki is one of those 719 projects. And I feel a bit neglected. Replication is halted since 34 days. LuceneSearch 2.1 is active on enwiki since October and on dewiki and some other big wikis since December. Most other wikis have still no access to the new features. Even the +incategory: feature which is active on enwiki since April 2008 is not active on most wikis as of February 2009. It seems, we are very low at the priority list. Marcus Buck ___ Wikitech-l mailing list wikitec...@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikitech-l] second-class wikis
On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 11:44 AM, Marcus Buck m...@marcusbuck.org wrote: That's a true answer, but at the same time as useless as it can be. If it's indeed only a matter of getting around to it (is it?), then the fact that they didn't came around to it since April 2008 would proove my accusation that the little projects are indeed regarded second-class. The reason s3 replication is halted on the toolserver and not s1 or s2 is apparently because Wikimedia deleted the needed s3 logs but not the s1 or s2 logs. The reason they did this is probably because the master database server for s3 ran out of disk space more quickly than the masters for s1 and s2, requiring more old logs to be deleted. It's not because of discrimination against the little projects, it's mainly just dumb luck that s3 is what got hit (maybe the server had less free disk space for some reason, or more logs). The reimport process could have started sooner. However, new servers were about to arrive, so River decided to postpone it until they did, for administrative convenience. I don't think any of this is some plot against the small wikis. I remember a very long period of time when s1 (and only s1, the English Wikipedia) was continuously lagged hours, days, or longer, while s2 (and s3, if that existed by then) was up-to-date. This, again, was for technical reasons, not political ones. This should really be on toolserver-l, though. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing
2009/2/1 Mike Godwin mgod...@wikimedia.org: Anthony writes: Actually, the difference is quite relevant in a courtroom, especially when dealing with constitutional issues. That's why I find it nearly impossible to believe that Mike doesn't understand this. How in the world can you defend people's constitutional rights if you think they're made up out of nowhere? Why defend free speech if it's just a couple words some guys made up and wrote down on paper? The very nature of the legal system in the United States of America is based upon natural rights. We hold these truths to be self-evident. Self-evident. Not created by congressmen. It is a common mistake... [snip] I'm confused... why have you sent a reply (twice) to an off-topic thread that died out over a week ago? Or did these get stuck in the moderation system somehow? (In which case - Mods: if you don't keep up to date with moderation, just delete emails that are no longer relevant [and let the author know], it rarely serves much purpose posting them a week late.) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing
On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 7:46 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/2/1 Mike Godwin mgod...@wikimedia.org: Anthony writes: Actually, the difference is quite relevant in a courtroom, especially when dealing with constitutional issues. That's why I find it nearly impossible to believe that Mike doesn't understand this. How in the world can you defend people's constitutional rights if you think they're made up out of nowhere? Why defend free speech if it's just a couple words some guys made up and wrote down on paper? The very nature of the legal system in the United States of America is based upon natural rights. We hold these truths to be self-evident. Self-evident. Not created by congressmen. It is a common mistake... [snip] I'm confused... why have you sent a reply (twice) to an off-topic thread that died out over a week ago? Or did these get stuck in the moderation system somehow? (In which case - Mods: if you don't keep up to date with moderation, just delete emails that are no longer relevant [and let the author know], it rarely serves much purpose posting them a week late.) As I explained to Mike already: It must have been a technical problem -- his mails are not and were never moderated. Michael -- Michael Bimmler mbimm...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Fwd: [Wikitech-l] second-class wikis
On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 5:26 AM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote: Hoi, Can someone please explain why this is ? Thanks, GerardM Also, some of the (to use the same language as the poster) first class wikis (top 10 on article count, on numbr of visits, wikipedia.org main page etc) are also on s3 and suffering the replag. So it's more a case of bad luck than a case of disdain for smaller wikis. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote: Ray Saintonge wrote: The only reason that moral rights is an issue is its inclusion in the statutes of various countries. It mostly stems from an inflated Napoleonic view of the Rights of Man that was meant to replace the divine rights of kings. Common law countries have been loath to embark in this direction. Moral rights are mentioned in the US law, but only as a toothless tiger. I would actually be interested to get the background for this interpretation of how moral rights came to happen as a legal idea. If there are such references. I couldn't find the reference that I recalled from a couple of years ago, but I did find some reference to the idea at http://www.ams.org/ewing/Documents/CopyrightandAuthors-70.pdf in the section Some philosophy. There are profound differences at a very deep level between the rights of authors in civil law countries and the right to copy in common law countries. In common law countries copyright has been primarily an economic right instead of a personal right. It used to be that copyright disputes were framed between two publishers or between publisher and author. To the extent that the law was a balance between interests it was the interests of publishers and authors that were being balanced. That the using public could have interests was unthinkable because these users flew below the radar of cost effectiveness. If it was not economical for a person to infringe copyrights in the first place, how could it be worthwhile to lobby politicians to have these rights for the general using public. Today we have a third party whose interests were never considered in the balance. Particularly as the legal reasons in at least Finnish legal manuals for laymen who have to deal with moral rights seem to focus on the utility moral rights have in terms of protecting the artisans reputation as being good at his craft. I don't know anything about the history of Finnish jurisprudence, but that statement seems to draw on the French model. Canada has provisions for moral rights, but the person claiming that his reputation has been damaged would have the burden of proving that as well as proving the amount of damages. If one made a claim for $1,000,000 in damages he shouldn't expect that it will be granted just because he says so. I have great difficulty understanding how the right to examine could be traced to some grandiose Rights of Man basis, since the argument presented for this particular moral right is clearly grounded on protecting the artisan/artists ability to examine their earlier work, to remind them self and refresh their memory on methods they had employed on those works, and thus enable them to not lose skills and methods they had mastered in earlier days. I seem to be misunderstanding something about your stated right to examine. Is someone claiming that authors are prevented from examining their own works? Ec ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Attribution made cleaner?
So, whatever way we decide to go with licenses or attribution requirements when this debate has settled, at some point our prospective reader will find themselves confronted with a long list of names, whether printed on the page or at the end of a URL or steganographically encoded into the site logo. :-) On this list, a minority will be real names (John Smith); the rest, if we discount the thousand variants on anonymous via our IP editors, are pseudonyms (WikiUser) or modified names (JohnSmith78). In some cases, users adopt pseudonyms out of a desire for privacy, but in many cases, it doesn't signify much more than a simple decision that a username is a lot easier to work with internally, or a general habit of using some kind of nickname online... or the fact that John Smith was taken. And many of *those* people would, no doubt, prefer to be credited by a real name (or at least a real-sounding nom de plume...). Similarly, some of those using pseudonyms who don't want to use real names, may prefer a different pseudonym... etc, etc, etc. It would be helpful to figure out some way of (automatically) being able to have a given username translate into a different name when a list of credits is generated - we would have a list which better reflects the attribution wishes of our users, and one which looks a little neater for the reuser to put in their Respectable Scholarly Publication. Win-win situation. So how could we do it? At a rough sketch, I'm envisaging: * each user has a credit field which they can (optionally!) set through preferences * when we generate the list of contributors to an article, in whatever way we end up deciding to do that, the system can be set to read off this credit name rather than simply using the normal internal username, if one is available. I note that MediaWiki already has a user_real_name field - could we use it for this sort of purpose? Would this be technically practical? -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
Ray Saintonge wrote: Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote: Ray Saintonge wrote: The only reason that moral rights is an issue is its inclusion in the statutes of various countries. It mostly stems from an inflated Napoleonic view of the Rights of Man that was meant to replace the divine rights of kings. Common law countries have been loath to embark in this direction. Moral rights are mentioned in the US law, but only as a toothless tiger. I would actually be interested to get the background for this interpretation of how moral rights came to happen as a legal idea. If there are such references. I couldn't find the reference that I recalled from a couple of years ago, but I did find some reference to the idea at http://www.ams.org/ewing/Documents/CopyrightandAuthors-70.pdf in the section Some philosophy. There are profound differences at a very deep level between the rights of authors in civil law countries and the right to copy in common law countries. In common law countries copyright has been primarily an economic right instead of a personal right. It used to be that copyright disputes were framed between two publishers or between publisher and author. To the extent that the law was a balance between interests it was the interests of publishers and authors that were being balanced. That the using public could have interests was unthinkable because these users flew below the radar of cost effectiveness. If it was not economical for a person to infringe copyrights in the first place, how could it be worthwhile to lobby politicians to have these rights for the general using public. Today we have a third party whose interests were never considered in the balance. Aye, that is the rub. We aren't really in the job for just helping different regimes interoperate. (if I am allowed my sly aside - some of are trying to pull a fast one to prevent interoperability) The important thing is, if this change of attribution *does* in fact go forward, there is no option of saying it was done out of ignorance. There have been a number of people who have spelled out the real legal issues involved. If they are ignored, rather than addressed, that is the responsibility of those doing it, not an apathetic community which did not point out that those issues were real. We have pointed out those issues, and if they are ignored, there is no way it can be blamed on an apathetic community who allowed it to happen. Particularly as the legal reasons in at least Finnish legal manuals for laymen who have to deal with moral rights seem to focus on the utility moral rights have in terms of protecting the artisans reputation as being good at his craft. I don't know anything about the history of Finnish jurisprudence, but that statement seems to draw on the French model. Canada has provisions for moral rights, but the person claiming that his reputation has been damaged would have the burden of proving that as well as proving the amount of damages. If one made a claim for $1,000,000 in damages he shouldn't expect that it will be granted just because he says so. Actually there is a more profound difference of legal systems at work. Finland works on the assumption that claims of damages are not paramount, but protections given by law are. So you can be fined, even if you cause no damage. On the other hand, no ridiculous claims of damage will give the aggrieved party an inflated compensation claim, because the Finnish system is not geared towards rewarding the victim, but only assuring everybodys rights are protected. I have great difficulty understanding how the right to examine could be traced to some grandiose Rights of Man basis, since the argument presented for this particular moral right is clearly grounded on protecting the artisan/artists ability to examine their earlier work, to remind them self and refresh their memory on methods they had employed on those works, and thus enable them to not lose skills and methods they had mastered in earlier days. I seem to be misunderstanding something about your stated right to examine. Is someone claiming that authors are prevented from examining their own works? The right to examine is a Moral Right that I feel really does not fit with your over-arching idea that they are aggrandizing rights and not only utilitarian ones. If you made a sculpture and sold it off, in many countries without moral rights, that would be the end of it. Hey, you were hired to do a job, what more do you want!? In Finland, you used some useful skills you had gained from apprenticeship, and study at art colleges, and even perhaps a sojourn in Paris or Venice. And you may have even made some hard decisions forced on you by the material you were sculpting itself. Wow! Now, picture yourself as the artist some 15 years later. You are at the doddering
Re: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing
Ray Saintonge writes Trying to cite the Declaration of Independence as the basis for your legal defense in a criminal case -- Hey, I was just exercising my right to resist a bad king! -- is a good way to guarantee going to jail. So much for the right to bear arms! :-) Oh, the Second Amendment can be invoked, sometimes even successfully, these days. But remember that's in the Bill of Rights to the Constitution. Anthony was citing the Declaration of Independence, incorrectly, as the basis of the American legal system. Actually, the Constitution is the basis for that. Incidentally, the Constitution does not guarantee either rights in copyright generally, or rights of attribution specifically. What it does do specifically is allow the Congress to *create* such rights -- a notion that natural-rights copyright theorists can't quite explain. --Mike ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution made cleaner?
Following this line of reasoning in both directions, many users who contribute to an encyclopedia that anyone can edit may not want their name reprinted on every conceivable medium that their contributions could be replicated on. In other words, many users probably don't care even a little bit about the attribution requirements of the CC-BY-SA. They contribute under the implicit assumption that their work is in the public domain. An argument can be made that printing their username all over the place is an invasion of their privacy, since with a bit of Googling its often possible to relate that to their real identity. I've got a collection of references to algorithms that show its possible to link users across social networking sites. Some of these methods would apply to a user's edits as well. My honest intrepretation of the 5 authors or less rule else a hyperlink is that it's silly. On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 1:24 PM, Andrew Gray shimg...@gmail.com wrote: So, whatever way we decide to go with licenses or attribution requirements when this debate has settled, at some point our prospective reader will find themselves confronted with a long list of names, whether printed on the page or at the end of a URL or steganographically encoded into the site logo. :-) On this list, a minority will be real names (John Smith); the rest, if we discount the thousand variants on anonymous via our IP editors, are pseudonyms (WikiUser) or modified names (JohnSmith78). In some cases, users adopt pseudonyms out of a desire for privacy, but in many cases, it doesn't signify much more than a simple decision that a username is a lot easier to work with internally, or a general habit of using some kind of nickname online... or the fact that John Smith was taken. And many of *those* people would, no doubt, prefer to be credited by a real name (or at least a real-sounding nom de plume...). Similarly, some of those using pseudonyms who don't want to use real names, may prefer a different pseudonym... etc, etc, etc. It would be helpful to figure out some way of (automatically) being able to have a given username translate into a different name when a list of credits is generated - we would have a list which better reflects the attribution wishes of our users, and one which looks a little neater for the reuser to put in their Respectable Scholarly Publication. Win-win situation. So how could we do it? At a rough sketch, I'm envisaging: * each user has a credit field which they can (optionally!) set through preferences * when we generate the list of contributors to an article, in whatever way we end up deciding to do that, the system can be set to read off this credit name rather than simply using the normal internal username, if one is available. I note that MediaWiki already has a user_real_name field - could we use it for this sort of purpose? Would this be technically practical? -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution made cleaner?
Any reason why? I can't seem to find anything on it. - Chris On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 9:22 PM, Chad innocentkil...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 4:20 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/2/2 Andrew Gray shimg...@gmail.com: It would be helpful to figure out some way of (automatically) being able to have a given username translate into a different name when a list of credits is generated - we would have a list which better reflects the attribution wishes of our users, and one which looks a little neater for the reuser to put in their Respectable Scholarly Publication. Win-win situation. So how could we do it? At a rough sketch, I'm envisaging: * each user has a credit field which they can (optionally!) set through preferences I note that MediaWiki already has a user_real_name field - could we use it for this sort of purpose? Would this be technically practical? Default MediaWiki has this as an option anyone who cares can set. On our work intranet wiki, it specifically says it's for giving credit under. I couldn't find it in my en:wp preferences, though ... what happened to it? - d. It's disabled on WMF wikis afaik. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution made cleaner?
* more than a handful of authors On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 2:45 PM, Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: Also, has it been discussed that the minimum number of authors rule effectually only applies to stubs and some starts? Even these have often been edited by many more than a handful of bots. It would be useful to have an SQL query that output the number of articles on en.wp with more than a handful of articles. It's probably fairly small. So the effectual rule is that attribution is done by a hyperlink. On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 2:41 PM, Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: Following this line of reasoning in both directions, many users who contribute to an encyclopedia that anyone can edit may not want their name reprinted on every conceivable medium that their contributions could be replicated on. In other words, many users probably don't care even a little bit about the attribution requirements of the CC-BY-SA. They contribute under the implicit assumption that their work is in the public domain. An argument can be made that printing their username all over the place is an invasion of their privacy, since with a bit of Googling its often possible to relate that to their real identity. I've got a collection of references to algorithms that show its possible to link users across social networking sites. Some of these methods would apply to a user's edits as well. My honest intrepretation of the 5 authors or less rule else a hyperlink is that it's silly. On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 1:24 PM, Andrew Gray shimg...@gmail.com wrote: So, whatever way we decide to go with licenses or attribution requirements when this debate has settled, at some point our prospective reader will find themselves confronted with a long list of names, whether printed on the page or at the end of a URL or steganographically encoded into the site logo. :-) On this list, a minority will be real names (John Smith); the rest, if we discount the thousand variants on anonymous via our IP editors, are pseudonyms (WikiUser) or modified names (JohnSmith78). In some cases, users adopt pseudonyms out of a desire for privacy, but in many cases, it doesn't signify much more than a simple decision that a username is a lot easier to work with internally, or a general habit of using some kind of nickname online... or the fact that John Smith was taken. And many of *those* people would, no doubt, prefer to be credited by a real name (or at least a real-sounding nom de plume...). Similarly, some of those using pseudonyms who don't want to use real names, may prefer a different pseudonym... etc, etc, etc. It would be helpful to figure out some way of (automatically) being able to have a given username translate into a different name when a list of credits is generated - we would have a list which better reflects the attribution wishes of our users, and one which looks a little neater for the reuser to put in their Respectable Scholarly Publication. Win-win situation. So how could we do it? At a rough sketch, I'm envisaging: * each user has a credit field which they can (optionally!) set through preferences * when we generate the list of contributors to an article, in whatever way we end up deciding to do that, the system can be set to read off this credit name rather than simply using the normal internal username, if one is available. I note that MediaWiki already has a user_real_name field - could we use it for this sort of purpose? Would this be technically practical? -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: [Wikitech-l] second-class wikis
Hoi, I had a word with Duesentrieb, he works for the German chapter, and he told me that the server issue is indeed a case of bad luck. He had some good news as well, Duesentrieb and some other Tool Server developers are looking into localisation for the tool server software. When the tool server tools are internationalised and localised, the tool server will get more users. With more users it becomes less acceptable that a service that has grown in importance is available for a third of our capacity. The localisation work will be done at Betawiki so that we keep our localisation and internationalisation effort focused. There has not been a satisfactory answer to the question why certain services are not equally distributed over the services. When the localisation and internationalisation of the tool server starts to kick in, the priority of providing an equal support will be raised because increased use will make these issues more visible and consequently it will not be as acceptable as it currently seems to be. Thanks, GerardM 2009/2/2 Pedro Sanchez pdsanc...@gmail.com On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 5:26 AM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote: Hoi, Can someone please explain why this is ? Thanks, GerardM Also, some of the (to use the same language as the poster) first class wikis (top 10 on article count, on numbr of visits, wikipedia.org main page etc) are also on s3 and suffering the replag. So it's more a case of bad luck than a case of disdain for smaller wikis. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 2:47 AM, Ray Saintonge sainto...@telus.net wrote: Anthony wrote: As for how sharing your name is better for everyone, I think it's fairly clear that a work of non-fiction is better if you know who wrote it, and further I think it's also clear that when someone creates a great work it is beneficial to know who created it so that one can find more works by that person. So that's how it benefits society. Whether you know who wrote a work or not it's still the same work. Maybe, but if a work lists its authors it's not the same work as if it doesn't. Following your line of reasoning we should all bow down before the Encyclopedia Britannica and give up Wikipedia because EB is better. Absolutely not. EB has not adapted its model to the Internet at all, and it's very unlikely it will. Just because there are some things EB does better doesn't mean it is overall better. Unless they decided to radically change their model and start over from scratch, EB will never be the size of Wikipedia. It will never be as up-to-date as Wikipedia. No, with regard to lack of attribution I think Wikipedia has to worry much more about Knol than EB. Of course, Wikipedia has about a 7 1/2 year head start on Knol. Pure momentum might be enough for it to win that race, if all you care about is being better than your nearest competitor. Sure, a person who likes the works of a particular author will seek out more of his works, but that can be much more about better marketing than a better book. Where's the benefit to society. Where's the benefit to society in marketing? It's only because of marketing that many of the products you use can be made, and this is especially true with intellectual products, which benefit tremendously from economies of scale. As you youself imply, just having a better book isn't enough. You have to convince people to try your better book. Life doesn't work like the Field of Dreams. Honestly promoting your work when you've done a great job benefits everyone. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] new LSS; and a request re: licensing discussion
Hi all, 1) There's a new list summary here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/LSS/foundation-l-archives/2009_January_16-31 2) Can someone *please* do a huge community service, and work on a page on Meta that summarizes some of the community concerns re: the licensing proposal, before voting starts? I have not seen such a page (did I miss it?). The talk page of the FAQ is a little spare, with virtually no participation from the people arguing on this list, and a dedicated page on the subject would be nice. There are many reasons for doing this: * Re-licensing all the projects is a Big Deal, and many people who haven't participated in the discussion yet will likely have the same concerns or ideas; these should be consolidated on a discussion page for reference. * This mailing list seems to have been the main venue for community discussion to date, but it's very difficult to participate in. With dozens of threads over the last few months (believe me, I know, having read all of them for LSS) it's very hard to know what has already been discussed, what hasn't, where answers to questions were posted, etc. Using the mailing list for active discussion requires that one be subscribed and have the time and English-language ability to read dozens of messages a day -- a high barrier for entry for an all-hands question. * The mailing list is also difficult to participate in because this conversation has been dominated by just a few people. While most all the points that have been made are valid and interesting, it's a little hard to tell when the same five people keep posting them. It's also difficult to get a post in edgewise. Please consider that if you've posted every other day on this topic for the past month, you're making a hostile environment for the rest of us who may not be as sure in our views on the subject. A (NPOV?) meta page that summarizes the various points that have been raised -- people who think that every author must be attributed, people who think a URL is sufficient, people who think that we must make our content easy for reusers, people who think that we have to stick to the GFDL on principle, etc. etc. -- would be super helpful as we progress into straw polls and voting. best, Phoebe -- * I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers at gmail.com * ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution made cleaner?
On Monday 02 February 2009 22:41:37 Brian wrote: Following this line of reasoning in both directions, many users who contribute to an encyclopedia that anyone can edit may not want their name reprinted on every conceivable medium that their contributions could be replicated on. In other words, many users probably don't care even a little bit about the attribution requirements of the CC-BY-SA. They contribute under the implicit assumption that their work is in the public Do you have anything to back your claims with? domain. An argument can be made that printing their username all over the place is an invasion of their privacy, since with a bit of Googling its often possible to relate that to their real identity. I've got a collection Are you arguing that we should not have page histories? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
Robert Rohde wrote: So where do things stand? By my rough count, the relicensing discussion has generated over 300 emails in the last month alone. At least within the limited confines of people who read this list, I suspect that everyone who has wanted to offer an opinion has done so. While, I mean no disrespect, much of what continues to be said strikes me as either repetitious of prior comments or simply off-topic. I very much agree. Certainly anything *I* wish to add, is very much best left off-list. Given that, I would like to ask Erik, Mike, or someone else with the WMF to comment on what the timetable and process for the next step will be? At the start of January, the BIG VOTE was tentatively scheduled to start February 9th. Is that still accurate, or have we talked ourselves into a delay? Will there be any more expansive effort to communicate with the various communities before the vote starts? Just put a move on; is what I say. Yours, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 9:23 AM, geni geni...@gmail.com wrote: Very few articles require a page's worth of credit. Remember even the German has an average of 23.65 edits per page and the midpoint is likely much lower. True. Although as a caveat remember that people aren't going to be publishing/printing a bunch of articles that are stubby or immature. The best articles, and the ones most like to be printed and distributed off of Wikipedia will likely be the ones that the most hands have touched. We aren't interested in the average case of all articles. A better metric would be the average number of edits from among the various good or featured articles, since these are the articles that people are going to want to print/distribute. --Andrew Whitworth ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Agreement between WMF and O'Reilly Media about Wikipedia: The Missing Manual on Wikipedia?
2009/2/1 Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonav...@gmail.com: Thomas Dalton wrote: The new GFDL license only allows relicensing under CC-BY-SA of things either published for the first time on the wiki or added to the wiki before the new license was announced. Since this was published in a book first and added to Wikipedia since the new license was announced, it isn't eligible (without explicit permission from the copyright owner - which shouldn't be difficult to get). I think this merits the question: would it be only necessary to accede to the relicensing? Or would it be necessary to also ask them to abide by any new terms of use of the site that would exceed the minimal requirements of the CC-BY-SA license? If there are additional terms then the whole relicensing is null and void, so this book would be the least of our worries. Any other content brought in from other sources would have to be deleted or the copyright owner contacted to give permission. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution made cleaner?
2009/2/2 Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu: Just that I am skeptical that people realize their pseudonyms will be printed on potentially any medium and that they are further aware that this pseudonym can be linked to their real identity. I can't say I agree with your general thrust here - I think that if people contribute to a massively open project, well, they have to accept massively open. Bending over backwards to retroactively provide anonymity gets impractical fast. However, this proposal could allow an effective opt-out from any form of downstream attribution - some kind of NOCREDIT magic word, perhaps. This would neatly sidestep the worry of people not wanting credited downstream... -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution made cleaner?
On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 4:39 PM, Chris Down neuro.wikipe...@googlemail.comwrote: Any reason why? I can't seem to find anything on it. - Chris On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 9:22 PM, Chad innocentkil...@gmail.com wrote: It's disabled on WMF wikis afaik. -Chad Not sure. There's no comment in the configuration files, but it ($wgAllowRealName) is set to false for all WMF wikis. You'd have to ask someone official for the reason. Privacy issues? -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution made cleaner?
I advocate a much more flexible attribution scheme than listing the authors or printing a url to the history page. I think a simple (Wikipedia) is a sufficient attribution for text. If you have the text it is trivial to find the original author of that text. It's not so trivial with images, but a link to the history page of an image can be embedded in its metadata. On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 3:54 PM, Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.ukwrote: 2009/2/2 Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu: Just that I am skeptical that people realize their pseudonyms will be printed on potentially any medium and that they are further aware that this pseudonym can be linked to their real identity. I can't say I agree with your general thrust here - I think that if people contribute to a massively open project, well, they have to accept massively open. Bending over backwards to retroactively provide anonymity gets impractical fast. However, this proposal could allow an effective opt-out from any form of downstream attribution - some kind of NOCREDIT magic word, perhaps. This would neatly sidestep the worry of people not wanting credited downstream... -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution made cleaner?
On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 1:45 PM, Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: Also, has it been discussed that the minimum number of authors rule effectually only applies to stubs and some starts? Even these have often been edited by many more than a handful of bots. It would be useful to have an SQL query that output the number of articles on en.wp with more than a handful of articles. It's probably fairly small. So the effectual rule is that attribution is done by a hyperlink. I can't speak for enwiki, but I did a similar thing for ruwiki (WMF's 10th largest wiki), and a very substantial fraction of articles had 5 or fewer editors. If one condenses IP editors to something like and 3 anonymous editors (as some people have suggested) rather than listing each IP, then the number of articles with 5 or fewer editors is roughly half of all articles. Of course there is also a significant fraction of articles with dozens of editors, which probably includes most of the well-developed and easily reusable content. Enwiki, with its larger articles and higher number of edits per articles, probably has a lower percentage of articles that would fall under the 5 or fewer rule, but I don't think it would be trivial. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution made cleaner?
I usually agree with the Mingus, but: On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 5:45 PM, Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 3:29 PM, Nikola Smolenski smole...@eunet.yu wrote: On Monday 02 February 2009 22:41:37 Brian wrote: Following this line of reasoning in both directions, many users who contribute to an encyclopedia that anyone can edit may not want their name reprinted on every conceivable medium that their contributions could be replicated on. True. One option should be Include attribution for non-minor edits to all articles? Y/N. Another should be Name for attribution -- this is not necessarily a Real Name, it can be a writing alias, which is again different from a username. In other words, many users probably don't care even a little bit about the attribution requirements of the CC-BY-SA. They contribute under the implicit assumption that their work is in the public [domain] Some don't. Some do. Another option should be Default license for your edits, in addition to CC-BY-SA : Public domain (and perhaps others) for people who want their work to continue to be available to projects/efforts using other licenses. A good database would track licensing by revision, in addition to a shared default license. The operating assumption is that the average pseudo-anonymous user to a wikimedia project understands and/or cares about the licensing issues and realizes their name will be printed everywhere that the text they contribute is printed. I wouldn't recommend changing from the current mechanism to one that blatantly shows all editor's names on every page whever displayed. But I would aboslutely lay the groudnwork for prpoer attribution by aggregating and caching the complete author list, without duplicates, in some reasonable order; tracking and displaying a non-nick name for attribution, and having the full author list with some basic metadata about the contributions of each author at most one click away from the article itself. Calling the current history interface attribution by hyperlink is misleading. Are you arguing that we should not have page histories? Just that I am skeptical that people realize their pseudonyms will be printed on potentially any medium and that they are further aware that this pseudonym can be linked to their real identity. Then make that clear in user preferences and when people sign up for an account. It's an important part of joining the community. We could start by turning off the include me in attribution by default in userperfs and seeing what happens -- people who literally want 'full' attribution could still dredge through page histories. The point is that listing the authors is a silly clause. I couldn't disagree more. SJ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
2009/2/2 Sam Johnston s...@samj.net: Nothing's impossible - where there's a will (and clearly there is[1]) there's a way. Mozilla managed to relicense to GPL years ago[2] (they had an FAQ too[3]) We have sought and obtained permission to relicense from almost everyone who contributed code to Mozilla up until the date of the new licensing policy on September 19th 2001. (After that date, contribution of code was contingent on giving permission to relicense, if the code was not immediately checked into a tri-licensed file.) Once we have obtained responses from all the individuals, companies and organisations concerned, we will relicense those files for which we have received permission from all copyright holders. If you think you can get permission from every wikipedia editor you are free to try. These moves are not easy and can be made significantly more difficult by individuals (like yourself) Nah. I'm a minor issue compared to the people who have been inconsiderate enough to die working against the spirit of the community. We are discussing copyright issues ad homs are unhelpful. As Mozilla said in the FAQ, by doing so you will make [the work] useful to more people, which may result in others improving [the work] to make it more useful to you, before going on to explain that the 'spirit' of the new license was in line with that of the old. The key difference is that they had only 450 contributors and the vast majority were contactable. We have orders of magnitude more contributors, many of whom are anonymous, aliased and/or without contact details. The best we can do in this case is contact those who we can, notify those who connect to the site and publish a notice of our intentions. The best we can do isn't then enough to meet the requirements of the law. So let's get this show on the road... there's been more than enough compelling debate, academic wankery and downright noise already. The past actions of those such as User:Ram-Man make it quite clear that you are free to ask wikipedians to relicense their content under any license terms you wish. See [[template:DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Tri-2.5]] Those who are so concerned about the opinion others hold of them and feel their right to self-aggrandisement is being trampled on can identify themselves (and their edits) so as the rest of us can get on with doing what we set out to do - building the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. I've known people argue that anyone should include those living under Napoleonic code legal systems. If you want to license your edits so that people can credit you with a ref to wikipedia feel free to do so. Just don't try and carry out such a change in the case of those who have not actively agreed to it. -- geni ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution made cleaner?
The point is that listing the authors is a silly clause. I couldn't disagree more. Just to clarify Sam, I am not suggesting the abolishment of the history page. Its just that if you are willing to agree that a url is sufficient attribution, I think you may as well follow the reductio on that argument and ask them to provide the minimum amount of information necessary to find the authors. In many cases this is just a single word, Wikipedia. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: [Wikitech-l] second-class wikis
Hoi, A conspiracy is wilful. I doubt that this is the case. If anything there is neglect. Other languages are just not given the same priority. What you hope for is that over time a language community will include developers that will take care for its language issues. In the mean time the Betawiki developers do what they can and I think they do a pretty good job. As I said earlier, there are moves to start localising the tools of the Tool Server. This will make a lot of difference. We learned a lot from just starting the Commonist extension. As a localisation project it is a success, the unresolved question is how to reliably get new builds that include the latest localisation. This takes resources that we do not have. What I hope for is that you, the developers, find this a reasonable assessment of the situation. Either way, the aim is to provide the best possible service and I hope you can agree that there is still much to do. Thanks, GerardM 2009/2/2 Chad innocentkil...@gmail.com On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 4:55 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.comwrote: There has not been a satisfactory answer to the question why certain services are not equally distributed over the services. When the localisation and internationalisation of the tool server starts to kick in, the priority of providing an equal support will be raised because increased use will make these issues more visible and consequently it will not be as acceptable as it currently seems to be. Thanks, GerardM Because enwiki requires a lot more resources by itself than most other wikis combined? That's why it gets its own cluster. Nobody is saying that the s3 replication is acceptable. Pretty much everyone who has said anything to the subject has agreed that yes, there is a problem. The fact that s3 died and s1 and s2 remained up is, as you and others have mentioned, is bad luck. If it had been s1 that died, we'd see similar complaints about a lack of support for the biggest wiki. When it is said that fixes are in the works and to please be patient, it serves no purpose to continue bringing it up. The horse is dead, stop beating it senseless. As to why the Lucene stuff hasn't been rolled out 100%, I cannot say (although Aryeh did bring up some good points I wasn't aware of). Perhaps there needs to be some more fine tuning before its more widely rolled out? As with most things: bugfixes and problem solving take precedence over new features (as well they should). Perhaps there've been issues with other things that have pulled time away from rolling out this new feature. I don't know what this thread expects. From the subject alone, I'm thinking the only acceptable answer is Yes, there's a massive conspiracy against smaller wikis. Now you've figured us out. What answer would you have developers give? -Chad OT: Shouldn't this be on toolserver-l and/or wikitech-l? It *hardly* involves the foundation. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution made cleaner?
On Monday 02 February 2009 23:45:29 Brian wrote: On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 3:29 PM, Nikola Smolenski smole...@eunet.yu wrote: On Monday 02 February 2009 22:41:37 Brian wrote: Following this line of reasoning in both directions, many users who contribute to an encyclopedia that anyone can edit may not want their name reprinted on every conceivable medium that their contributions could be replicated on. In other words, many users probably don't care even a little bit about the attribution requirements of the CC-BY-SA. They contribute under the implicit assumption that their work is in the public Do you have anything to back your claims with? The operating assumption is that the average pseudo-anonymous user to a wikimedia project understands and/or cares about the licensing issues and realizes their name will be printed everywhere that the text they contribute is printed. Do you have any evidence that this is true? That the Yes: * Contributors who do not have any understanding of copyright will usually attempt to copy copyrighted material to the project, that will then be deleted and they will be warned. This will lead them to at least understanding that they can't just copy any material anywhere without the author's permission, and logically this leads to the conclusion that other people can't do the same with their work. Similar thing will happen whenever someone tries to upload an image for the first time. * When someone is presenting Wikimedia projects, they usually mention free licences and what do they mean. * Practically all printed material today is printed with its author(s)' names; therefore it is obvious to assume that this material will be too, if printed. * In past, several books and DVDs were made from material from several Wikimedia projects, containing all the names of the contributors. They were marketed in and out of the projects, and I expect that a fair number of at least contributors of these projects know about them, yet I haven't heard of anyone expressing surprise about it. average pseudo-anonymous contributor has a fairly sophisticated understanding of copyright? Otherwise its quite similar to the ToS at the Understanding that your work should be attributed to you requires only the most rudimentary understanding of copyright, or none at all. bottom of every web page you visit, which you supposedly implicitly agree to, but which you rarely to never read and is actually a legal grey area. I'd say it is quite dissimilar, but anyway - a large amount of Wikipedia marketing specifies that Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia the content of which can be freely reused under certain conditions and so on. This is much more than your average website does. The point is that listing the authors is a silly clause. You have not proven your point. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution made cleaner?
2009/2/2 Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu: I advocate a much more flexible attribution scheme than listing the authors or printing a url to the history page. I think a simple (Wikipedia) is a sufficient attribution for text. If you have the text it is trivial to find the original author of that text. It's not so trivial with images, but a link to the history page of an image can be embedded in its metadata. There's two different issues, here, really, and I think you're chasing a different one to my original suggestion. I'm certainly not saying that this method for generating names is automatically a mandate to require they be used to top and tail every article - just that if someone does attribute that way, it'll help them do it better. *However* we decide that downstream reused material should be attributed, be it heavily or as lightly as possible, there's going to be a step in the process - perhaps only an optional one - where someone takes a Wikipedia article and tries to shake out some authors. Figuring out how to make that work efficiently and cleanly and helpfully is a good thing in and of itself, whatever conclusion the main debate comes to. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution made cleaner?
It's silly because it's arbitrary and only applies to the lowest quality articles - start and stub. I have a query running on the Toolserver which I hope to process into a percentage of articles that have 5 or less authors. But we already know that the large majority of articles are stubs, and somewhat fewer start. We also know that the quality of these articles is related to their popularity, and that an article of lower popularity is less likely to be quoted, by definition. If you are willing to accept that a URL is sufficient, then there is no reason to ever show the authors - it's only to accomodate the fact that the CC-BY-SA contains a clause which isn't really relevant to the projects. Better to change the CC-BY-SA or the attribution requirements than kludge this 5 authors or less statement in there, which just makes it harder to use the content. That is against the aims of the project, so I do consider the whole 5 authors or less thing silly. The point is that listing the authors is a silly clause. You have not proven your point. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikitech-l] second-class wikis
Hoi, Can someone please explain why this is ? Thanks, GerardM 2009/2/1 Marcus Buck w...@marcusbuck.org According to SiteMatrix we have 739 projects at the moment. There are three master partitions for the servers: s1 for enwiki only, s2 for 19 other projects and s3 for all the rest (that's 719 projects). My homewiki is one of those 719 projects. And I feel a bit neglected. Replication is halted since 34 days. LuceneSearch 2.1 is active on enwiki since October and on dewiki and some other big wikis since December. Most other wikis have still no access to the new features. Even the +incategory: feature which is active on enwiki since April 2008 is not active on most wikis as of February 2009. It seems, we are very low at the priority list. Marcus Buck ___ Wikitech-l mailing list wikitec...@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution made cleaner?
On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 6:13 PM, Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: I advocate a much more flexible attribution scheme than listing the authors or printing a url to the history page. I think a simple (Wikipedia) is a sufficient attribution for text. If you have the text it is trivial to find the original author of that text. It's not so trivial with images, but a link to the history page of an image can be embedded in its metadata. Could you implement a wikiblame extension? That would make attribution much cleaner. SJ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution made cleaner?
I actually suggested such a thing in another thread on this topic ^_^ It would require a monster search index (all revisions of all article text), but it wouldn't get a ton of use so wouldn't use too many resources. On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 4:39 PM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 6:13 PM, Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: I advocate a much more flexible attribution scheme than listing the authors or printing a url to the history page. I think a simple (Wikipedia) is a sufficient attribution for text. If you have the text it is trivial to find the original author of that text. It's not so trivial with images, but a link to the history page of an image can be embedded in its metadata. Could you implement a wikiblame extension? That would make attribution much cleaner. SJ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution made cleaner?
On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 6:29 PM, Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: If you are willing to accept that a URL is sufficient, then there is no reason to ever show the authors - it's only to accomodate the fact that the CC-BY-SA contains a clause which isn't really relevant to the projects. Better to change the CC-BY-SA or the attribution requirements than kludge this 5 authors or less statement in there, which just makes it harder to use the content. That is against the aims of the project, so I do consider the whole 5 authors or less thing silly. OK, now I understand better where you're coming from. The '5 authors or less' is indeed silly. A link to the history page does not satisfy my concept of 'a URL', and we can do much better than a URL on WP itself. For the purposes of reuse we should facilitate simple solutions; a URL would be sufficient there if a detailed attribution page is preserved, for that revision, at a permanent link (and any mirrors thereof). SJ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution made cleaner?
On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 12:13 AM, Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: I advocate a much more flexible attribution scheme than listing the authors or printing a url to the history page. I think a simple (Wikipedia) is a sufficient attribution for text. If you have the text it is trivial to find the original author of that text. It's not so trivial with images, but a link to the history page of an image can be embedded in its metadata. Precisely, and once you have this as a minimum standard you can still do whatever you like on top of it. As significant bonuses we're not diluting/drowning out the promotion of Wikipedia and we're avoiding situations where authors can go after [re]users for infringement; effectively the power of enforcement would be vested in Wikipedia (but not the copyright itself so we don't have to worry about WMF turning evil, only new license releases which must be 'similar in spirit' anyway). The attribution instructions could go something like: You must attribute Wikipedia, should reference the name of the article (with hyperlinks where appropriate) and may also credit the authors which can be found on the history tab. I've also been thinking more about the possibility of identifying key contributors for attribution and I've come to my own conclusion that it's a non-starter. If you start attributing some people but not others then those who are not attributed (who would otherwise not care had the attribution have been for Wikipedia) will get justifiably upset and may well seek to enforce their 'right' to attribution. The only way to shake out some authors reliably (as Andrew just said) is to do it manually, which is another avenue for conflict and resource wastage. Summary: author attribution is an all or nothing thing; either you attribute a boundless list of 'names' in 2pt font or you attribute nobody. Anyway I have to get back to writing 'AttriBot' so I can stamp my name on any article with 5 authors ;) Sam ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: [Wikitech-l] second-class wikis
Gerard Meijssen wrote: Hoi, A conspiracy is wilful. I doubt that this is the case. If anything there is neglect. Other languages are just not given the same priority. There's no language-dependence in our priorities here, except for Robert's initial decision, back in October, to pilot the new software on the largest wikis. The smaller wikis haven't been neglected since then, rather, the search engine has been neglected. The English Wikipedia has often been left out of toolserver replication, and it could have easily been the case this time around. What you hope for is that over time a language community will include developers that will take care for its language issues. In the mean time the Betawiki developers do what they can and I think they do a pretty good job. The Betawiki developers, as I believe you yourself have pointed out, are part of the community. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Licensing interim update
Since Robert raised the question where we stand and what our timeline looks like, I want to briefly recap: * Because the attribution issue is quite divisive, I want us to dedicate some more time to reconsidering and revising our approach. * I'm developing a simple LimeSurvey-based survey to get a feel on prevalent opinions regarding some of the attribution-relevant questions from a sample of contributors. * Our timeline will need to be pushed forward a bit, in part because of this, but also for a number of other unrelated reasons. That said, we want to move forward fairly aggressively given the constraints of the re-licensing clause. I think it's important to note that most other aspects of the proposed re-licensing have turned out to be remarkably uncontroversial. I'm very pleased that we've found so much common ground already. Even on the attribution question, it seems that there is wide agreement that for online re-use, hyperlinks to a page history or author credit page are an appropriate mechanism for attribution. It's sensible to me, and apparently most people, that other people's web use should be treated very similarly to our own. The fundamentally divisive question is whether principles of web use can be applied to some of the other real world use scenarios we've encountered: DVD, print, spoken versions, etc. Our established practices don't give us a huge amount of guidance in that matter, though many past and present GFDL-based offline uses support the case for stronger attribution, and when this hasn't been granted (as in the case of the SOS Children's DVD), it turned out to be controversial. Clearly, many people feel that these media lack the immediacy of access to authorship information that the web medium provides. An important counterpoint is that these media are among the ones which are the most important to reach disadvantaged communities - people without Internet access, blind users, etc. - and that any onerous requirements are arguably going to diminish our ability to spread free knowledge. So, there are moral arguments on both sides. Moreover, as I've noted, many names only really have meaning in the context of web presence in the first place. A compromise could acknowledge the principle that attribution should never be unreasonably onerous explicitly (a principle which, as Geni has pointed out, is arguably already encoded in the CC-BY-SA license's reasonable to the medium or means provision), commit us to work together to provide attribution records of manageable length using smart algorithms as well as documenting minimally complex attribution implementations, and permit by-URL attribution in circumstances where we don't have a better answer yet. I worry, in this scenario, about instruction and complexity creep over time, so the fundamental principles of simplicity would need to be articulated well. And I want to make sure that we don't embark on a compromise which achieves nothing: that the vocal minority who feel very strongly about attribution-by-name under all circumstances will continue to object, that we will increase complexity for re-users, and that we will not actually persuade anyone to support the approach who wouldn't otherwise do so. So, getting some more data on that question -- is a compromise necessary and possible -- should IMO be the next steps, after which we may revise our proposed attribution terms further. I hope that we'll be able get some first survey data this week, and move quickly after that. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing
On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 3:46 PM, Mike Godwin mnemo...@gmail.com wrote: Ray Saintonge writes Trying to cite the Declaration of Independence as the basis for your legal defense in a criminal case -- Hey, I was just exercising my right to resist a bad king! -- is a good way to guarantee going to jail. So much for the right to bear arms! :-) Oh, the Second Amendment can be invoked, sometimes even successfully, these days. But remember that's in the Bill of Rights to the Constitution. Anthony was citing the Declaration of Independence, incorrectly, as the basis of the American legal system. Actually, the Constitution is the basis for that. Since the moderators don't want us engaging in this discussion I'll keep my response short. You are misrepresenting what I said. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Licensing interim update
Erik Moeller wrote: A compromise could acknowledge the principle that attribution should never be unreasonably onerous explicitly (a principle which, as Geni has pointed out, is arguably already encoded in the CC-BY-SA license's reasonable to the medium or means provision), commit us to work together to provide attribution records of manageable length using smart algorithms as well as documenting minimally complex attribution implementations, and permit by-URL attribution in circumstances where we don't have a better answer yet. I worry, in this scenario, about instruction and complexity creep over time, so the fundamental principles of simplicity would need to be articulated well. I think it would help, when using algorithms or any form of wikiblame system that might get implemented, to make that an explicit part of the attribution documentation. For example, Authors of the current version of Article X, according to the wikiblame tool, include A, B, C, D, and E, for additional details and a complete list of contributors see http://ar.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Article Xaction=history. (Where current version means whatever revision is being reproduced. The language could easily be tweaked for derivative works.) Then if there are any questions, people can refer to, examine, and potentially improve the tool. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Licensing interim update
Erik Moeller wrote: A compromise could acknowledge the principle that attribution should never be unreasonably onerous explicitly (a principle which, as Geni has pointed out, is arguably already encoded in the CC-BY-SA license's reasonable to the medium or means provision), commit us to work together to provide attribution records of manageable length using smart algorithms as well as documenting minimally complex attribution implementations, and permit by-URL attribution in circumstances where we don't have a better answer yet. I worry, in this scenario, about instruction and complexity creep over time, so the fundamental principles of simplicity would need to be articulated well. And I want to make sure that we don't embark on a compromise which achieves nothing: that the vocal minority who feel very strongly about attribution-by-name under all circumstances will continue to object, that we will increase complexity for re-users, and that we will not actually persuade anyone to support the approach who wouldn't otherwise do so. Firstly let me say that I couldn't find one word of your posting that I disagreed with :-) My hat is really off to you for putting everything so pellucidly clearly and eloquently. And just to remove all doubt, I am being entirely earnest here, this is not sarcasm. Your posting really did you proud. I do want to underscore that last sentence though, just to clarify where I personally stand. My stance has ever been that what we should not do is break interoperability for a significant segment of jurisdictions where our work could reasonably be expected to be distributed to. I do not hold that we should satisfy even the legal requirements of all jurisdictions. I can easily envision that there might be a really stupid law somewhere, which made genuinely onerous demands. I would certainly suggest in that case that after careful consideration, WMF should just flip them the bird, and say: grow up, smell the internet age! In fact personally I'd hope that Intellectual Property laws around the world were much more internet age savvy than they are at the present. But we needs must live in the world we have got, and not the one we would wish existed. And just to very briefly recap what I have said about my own jurisdiction; my understanding is that here the laws are not that onerous, though they are a bit quirkily different from other jurisdictions (surprise!). We don't have fair dealing or fair use, but we do have citation rights. And the Moral Rights provision of inalienable Paternity to a work has a few in the fashion common to the field and in accordance with good manners outs to attribution in addition to a (far too complex, IMO) set of labyrinthine considerations as to what really is a work that one can have that paternity right to. There is even an explicit concept of shared paternity for collaborations, which would in many cases fit wikipedia splendidly; though not in the case of importing stuff previously published elsewhere under a compatible license, for instance. Yours, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
But since most of the contributors to Wikipedia are anonymous, this is one thing we do not and will never know, regardless of licensing. so to the extent Wikipedia has any authority it's precisely from the fact of community editing on a non-personal basis. Yes, within Wikipedia it's valuable to know who contributed what , and how the interplay of people (or pseudo-people) takes place. For the evaluation of Wikipedia from outside, it stands, for better or worse, on the quality of the community editing. On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 2:47 AM, Ray Saintonge sainto...@telus.net wrote: Anthony wrote: On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 7:21 PM, Ray Saintonge wrote Anthony wrote: On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 1:14 AM, David Goodman wrote I am proud of my work, not of my name being on my work. that's narcissism. In any case, I find it hard to see how, in this particular context, you could be proud of your work but not at least prefer your name to be on it. If you've achieved something of great value to yourself and to others, isn't it better for you, and for everyone, if people know you achieved it? I guess that some of us are nothing more than unrepentant altruists. We believe that free works belong to everybody. If something is of great value to you don't need for anyone to tell you that; you already know it. How does knowing that you produced something make the idea any better or worse than it would be without that knowledge. How is knowing that you did it better for everyone? Pride, after all, is one of the seven deadly sins. Well, David said he *is* proud of his work, so your seven deadly sins argument apparently isn't the one he was resting on. As for how sharing your name is better for everyone, I think it's fairly clear that a work of non-fiction is better if you know who wrote it, and further I think it's also clear that when someone creates a great work it is beneficial to know who created it so that one can find more works by that person. So that's how it benefits society. I wouldn't want to suggest that David was a fallen angel. Whether you know who wrote a work or not it's still the same work. It's a non-sequitur to draw the conclusion that you do. Following your line of reasoning we should all bow down before the Encyclopedia Britannica and give up Wikipedia because EB is better. Sure, a person who likes the works of a particular author will seek out more of his works, but that can be much more about better marketing than a better book. Where's the benefit to society. How it benefits the individual is even more obvious, to the point that I don't even think I have to explain it. We don't really have a difference about benefit to the individual. Ec ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
