Re: [WikiEN-l] serious fallacies
Hi Nathan and Kathleen, On Tue, 16 Apr 2013 09:31:05 -0400 Nathan wrote: > Hi Kathleen, > > If you don't mind, please maintain the threading of the posts. Each > time you change the subject line it creates a new thread, which makes > it harder for people to follow the conversation (both in e-mail, and > in threaded view via gmane etc.). > > ~Nathan I agree with your sentiments. This is one of the major offences I have with GMail.com which makes the user-experience of people using E-mail worse - not only for the people using it, but for everyone. Another thing I find it to offend me is that it hides the signatures (which it often interprets as a much larger part of the message due to some bugs) behind a fold, and as a result people don't read what I have placed in my signature which also includes a warning to always reply to the list, or explicitly mention that they are doing that and that trips them. Google -= and https://duckduckgo.com/ and https://www.projectwonderful.com/ for the win (and for great justice). Regards, Shlomi Fish [SNIPPED] -- ----- Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ My Aphorisms - http://www.shlomifish.org/humour.html An original philosopher knows the right combination of ideas to steal. Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply . ___ 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] Fw: [Christina Grimmie] Please provide a photo of Ms. Grimmie under a licence suitable for Wikimedia Projects ( e.g: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christina_Grimmie )
Hi Thomas,
thanks for your comment.
On Wed, 3 Apr 2013 11:27:46 +0100
Thomas Dalton wrote:
> Are you sure the person you are emailing understands what free licenses
> are? I would include a short explanation and a link to a more detailed one.
The person in question is the management E-mail of the artist in question. Not
sure if they understand it, but I was trying to keep the E-mail brief. Anyway,
hopefully they will return to me, and if they ask a question about what a free
licence and/or Creative Commons and/or etc. are all about, then I can give them
the relevant links (if you can recommend any on the Meta Wiki or wherever,
then it would be great).
But it's a good point that I (and everyone else) should keep in mind for the
future.
Regards,
Shlomi Fish
P.S: I am saddened to learn that the article about another YouTube artist that
I like and admire is considered for deletion -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiffany_Alvord ; there is of course
http://tiffanyalvord.wikia.com/ , but Wikia is not enough for that. Personally,
as a mostly anti-deletionist, I think that articles should be improved rather
than deleted, and the Tiffany Alvord article had a very painful history, and
Ms. Alvord is certainly notable. Guess I'll have to flame, err.. comment on the
deletion request.
P.P.S: my comment signature may unfortunately require a virtal correction
according to the first "P.S.". :-(
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The English Wikipedia: now you don't see it — now you do.
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[WikiEN-l] Fw: [Christina Grimmie] Please provide a photo of Ms. Grimmie under a licence suitable for Wikimedia Projects ( e.g: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christina_Grimmie )
Sent this message now. Comments are welcome, after the fact, as a way to learn
from my mistakes.
Begin forwarded message:
Date: Wed, 3 Apr 2013 13:18:33 +0300
From: Shlomi Fish
To: br...@lh7management.com
Subject: [Christina Grimmie] Please provide a photo of Ms. Grimmie under a
licence suitable for Wikimedia Projects ( e.g:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christina_Grimmie )
Dear sirs or madams,
I am an editor of the English wikipedia and other wikimedia projects and
currently we have this page about Ms. Christina Grimmie:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christina_Grimmie
( Christina is my favourite YouTube artist, and Team Grimmie rocks! )
However, one thing lacking from there is a photograph, and I was unable to find
any good photograph of Ms. Grimmie under a suitable licence (e.g: Creative
Commons CC-by-sa, CC-by, Public Domain, etc.) on Flickr. I know some localised
wikipedias (where Ms. Grimmie also has some presence - see the translations)
require photos to be under a liberal licence).
If you, or Ms. Grimmie can provide us with a good, representable photo of her,
that would be a great gesture and a wonderful way to promote her in Wikimedia
projects and other collaborative projects such as http://wikia.com/ , and other
people and I would be incredibly grateful for that. I am not a lawyer (IANAL)
but I think that you can license a lower resolution version of the photo under a
liberal licence, and keep the original photo as "All-Rights-Reserved". It can
also be a one-off photo dedicated for Wikipedia.
Please let me know of what you think.
Best regards,
Shlomi Fish
P.S: I realise the page about Ms. Grimmie could use more work, and is somewhat
out-of-date, but I'd like to tackle one issue at a time.
--
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Perl Humour - http://perl-begin.org/humour/
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a “War” on it? -- Rich Thomson, talk.politics.misc
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Chuck Norris doesn’t commit changes, the changes commit for him.
— Araujo
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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Gendergap] presentation about MediaWiki's participation in Outreach Program for Women
Hi Sumana, [CCing the English Wikipedia mailing list]. sorry for the late response. On Fri, 08 Feb 2013 08:03:11 -0500 Sumana Harihareswara wrote: > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings/2013-02-07 > > Yesterday I gave a 3-minute presentation about the Outreach Program for > Women at the monthly Wikimedia Foundation all-hands meeting. My slides > are up on Commons: > > https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Opw-presentation-feb7-2013.pdf > > More about our participation in OPW: > > https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Outreach_Program_for_Women > Thanks for making the slides available, but I was annoyed by the fact that I had to switch to every page individually, and could not figure out a way to download the .pdf itself (but there should be). Your talk seems like a good initiative, and I will encourage it. Like I said earlier, I think part of the problem is that many people (predominantly women, but naturally not only those) have very thin skin and lack persistence and will give up after every social obstacle they encounter. So what I suggest is: 1. Make sure to phrase the issues you have using constructive criticism, telling what should be done instead of what is wrong. Leave comments on the page, etc. 2. Make sure to contact the person who did the change and instruct them that there is a problem, even using E-mail if necessary. 3. Tell people that have not followed this to have to know better and come to the defence of people who are trying to contribute. 4. Thanks contributors of worthy changes (even small ones) for their changes on their talk pages. 5. Enlighten people whose changes have been labelled as bad as to the correct way. 6. Avoid mentioning too many acronyms and weird jargon in your comments, and instead explain in plain English. - All of this seems like much more work, but it will eventually pay in spades in much less resentment and less hard feelings, more contributors, better happiness and joy from all parties, and eventually much more useful edits. I think we should change the templates on wikipedia to read something more like “Please find citations from reliable sources for this article.” instead of the much less constructive and more frightening “This article lacks citations from reliable sources. It may be challenged and removed.”. Does anyone agree? Regards, Shlomi Fish -- ----- Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ "Humanity" - Parody of Modern Life - http://shlom.in/humanity Trust in God, but tie your camel. — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_helps_those_who_help_themselves Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply . ___ 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] [Foundation-l] sad news
Hi,
On Wed, 14 Mar 2012 19:42:05 -0700
phoebe ayers wrote:
> Those of you who have been around for a few years may remember
> user:Tlogmer, aka Ben Yates -- co-author with Charles Matthews and I
> on "How Wikipedia Works."
>
> I got an email from his mother this morning with the very sad news
> that Ben passed away yesterday. I do not know the details. He was in
> his 20s and lived in Michigan, USA.
>
I have not known Mr. Yates (though the name rings a bell) but I am saddened to
hear that. My condolences go to everyone who knew him.
Regards,
Shlomi Fish
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sub id { my $self = shift; $json_parser_for{ $self }
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Why we need a good WYSIWYG editor
On Monday 04 Jan 2010 16:23:29 David Gerard wrote: > Edit completion rate - someone not merely clicking "edit", but > actually editing and hitting save - goes *way* up. Based on Wikia's > experience: > > http://wikiangela.com/blog/end-of-2009/#comment-26732 > http://twitter.com/joshuaclerner/status/3602544810 > > Wikitext used to be a lot simpler. Now it's impenetrable computer > code. This is not good enough. > > There are all sorts of reasons why WYSIWYG editing in Mediawiki is a > Hard Problem. But FCKeditor is really very good these days and I'd > strongly recommend it for any fresh wikis. Turning it loose on > existing piles of wikitext such as, ooh, en:wp, is probably a > different matter. > I personally detest all WYSIWYG web-based editors. They are slow and clunky and produce broken markup, and just get in the way. I'm also not fond of WYSIWYG word processors and prefer using XHTML or DocBook/XML or other non- WYSIWYG markup languages. If you are going to enable such a feature, please make it optional. Regards, Shlomi Fish -- - Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ Best Introductory Programming Language - http://shlom.in/intro-lang Bzr is slower than Subversion in combination with Sourceforge. ( By: http://dazjorz.com/ ) ___ 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] Is Wikipedia dying?
On Thursday 05 Nov 2009 21:06:08 Ryan Delaney wrote: > On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 9:19 PM, Sage Ross > > > > wrote: > > > > This article by Evgeny Morozov, nominally a review of Andrew Lih's > > book "The Wikipedia Revolution", is worth reading: > > > > http://www.bostonreview.net/BR34.6/morozov.php > > > > -Sage > > I've long puzzled over why journalists constantly post editorials > criticizing Wikipedia and proclaiming that it will never take off. I > thought that eventually we'd win them over. > > Then I realized why this will never happen. > > News media is a business. We are a threat to their model. Therefore, it's > important to them to convince their readers that Wikipedia is unreliable, > whether it is or not. They will never stop criticizing and attacking us as > long as we undermine their bottom line. > > As such I have no interest in news print or journalist opinions of > Wikipedia. Their paychecks depend on our failure. Pay them no heed. > Wow! This is what I call a "conspiracy theory", where people claim that another entity has an interest to do something out of his implicit nature so they do it on purpose. However, I wouldn't put a lot of faith in it. First of all, if someone criticises the wikipedia (and it doesn't matter whether they are the president of the United States, or someone who wrote a blog comment that few people have read), what he said may be factual, partly true, or completely false, and we need to determine whether it is the case according to logic and evidence. Immediately dismissing something someone said based on its origin is an ad hominem fallacy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem Secondly, it is the job of media reporters and journalists (as well as less official forms of civil reporters such as bloggers) to point that something is wrong in the Wikipedia or wherever (e.g: the government, a school, a crime being committed somewhere, etc.). If something bad happens in something that interests me or affects me, I'd like to know about it. I am a Wikipedia contributor, but I also wrote a parodical (and naturally critical) piece about the wikipedia here: http://www.shlomifish.org/humour/bits/How-many-Wikipedia-Editors/ And I've seen other bloggers and/or Wikipedia contributors being critical of the wikipedia inside or outside it. So I think a journalist who reports something wrong with the Wikipedia is: 1. Doing their job. 2. May not act out of fear for their livelihood. This is as long as what they said has some merit - if it's just FUD / dis-information / twisted facts etc. we should provide a rational response to the contrary and dismiss it as a falsehood. I don't think the Wikipeders should fear criticism from journalists or anyone. It's a bit far-fetched to believe that it will convince anyone to stop using the Wikipedia, which is a bit hard to miss given that Google and other search engines tend to favour it in most common searches and from what are usually good reasons. We should still be self-critical and try to improve the Wikipedia and the way it is managed as best as we can, but we shouldn't make a fuss over some petty, external, negative, criticism (whether by the mainstream media or by a fool-on-the-hill blogger) against the Wikimedia projects because such criticism is very unlikely to do a lot of damage. The Wikipedias and open-content and/or collaborative sites in general face much graver problems, both external and internal. Regards, Shlomi Fish ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Shlomif ) -- - Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ Understand what Open Source is - http://shlom.in/oss-fs Chuck Norris read the entire English Wikipedia in 24 hours. Twice. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
