Re: [Wikitech-l] [Foundation-l] Proposed revised attribution language

2009-03-16 Thread Andrew Cates
Hmm. There is an issue which has been raised before by Duncan Harris
on the en list:

>>"The way I see it the Document referred to in the GFDL cannot be an 
>>individual Wikipedia article. It has to be the whole of Wikipedia. If the 
>>Document were an individual article then Wikipedia would be in breach of its 
>>own license. Every time people copy text between articles then they would 
>>create a Modified Version under the GFDL. They mostly do not comply with GFDL 
>>section 4 under these circumstances on a number of points. So the only 
>>sensible interpretations are the whole of English Wikipedia or the whole of 
>>Wikipedia as the GFDL Document. This has the following implications for GFDL 
>>compliance: - only need to give network location of Wikipedia, not individual 
>>articles - only need to give five principal authors of Wikipedia, not of 
>>individual articles - no real section Entitled "History", so no requirement 
>>to copy that"


I think this is right: article history in practice fails the license
terms. I had a look at a couple of articles which was itself a labour
of love. In particular you find immediately drafting is not generally
done in an article, except first time around for new stubs. For
existing articles being reworked, a lot of content is generated/worked
out/negotiated on various different talk pages, often not the main
article talk page, before moving onto the actual article page using
copy and paste. There is also a fair amount of copy and paste when
sections are spun out to their own article or articles merged into a
main article. In none of these cases does the article history
correctly attribute authorship. Main author is even worse as content
gets deleted by vandalism and restored so often finding original main
contributors is practically impossible.

I think Wikipedia is so far from compliant in the interpretation of
the license if we take "one article as a document" that we have to
accept that the whole thing is the document in license terms and no
history is available.

BozMo
=
On Sat, Mar 14, 2009 at 9:22 PM, Thomas Dalton  wrote:
> 2009/3/14 Magnus Manske :
>> IIRC one reason to use wiki/ and w/ instead of "direct" URLs
>> (en.wikipedia.org/Xenu) was to allow for non-article data at a later
>> time (the other reason was to set noindex/nofollow rules). Looks like
>> we will use that space after all :-)
>
> That may be one reason, but I think the main reason is to avoid
> problems with articles called things like "index.php". /wiki/ is a
> dummy directory, there's nothing actually there to conflict with, the
> root directory has real files in it that need to accessible.
>
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Re: [Wikitech-l] [Foundation-l] Proposed revised attribution language

2009-03-14 Thread Thomas Dalton
2009/3/14 Magnus Manske :
> IIRC one reason to use wiki/ and w/ instead of "direct" URLs
> (en.wikipedia.org/Xenu) was to allow for non-article data at a later
> time (the other reason was to set noindex/nofollow rules). Looks like
> we will use that space after all :-)

That may be one reason, but I think the main reason is to avoid
problems with articles called things like "index.php". /wiki/ is a
dummy directory, there's nothing actually there to conflict with, the
root directory has real files in it that need to accessible.

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Re: [Wikitech-l] [Foundation-l] Proposed revised attribution language

2009-03-14 Thread David Gerard
2009/3/14 Magnus Manske :
> On Sat, Mar 14, 2009 at 3:25 PM, David Gerard  wrote:
>> 2009/3/14 MinuteElectron :
>>> 2009/3/14 David Gerard :

 Here's an idea: nice URLs for the history. So we don't end up with
 stupid things peppered with ? and & and = printed on mugs, travel
 guides, etc.
 e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/history/Xenu for the history of
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenu .

>>> This is already possible in MediaWiki, using a feature called "action

>> Oh, I know it's not hard (though mod_rewrite rules resemble alchemy
>> more than anything deterministic or logical). So I suppose the
>> question is: can we get this into the Wikimedia settings?

> IIRC one reason to use wiki/ and w/ instead of "direct" URLs
> (en.wikipedia.org/Xenu) was to allow for non-article data at a later
> time (the other reason was to set noindex/nofollow rules). Looks like
> we will use that space after all :-)


Kewl! Submitted as
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=17981 - comments
welcome. Any devs like it/dislike it? A Simple Matter of mod_rewrite
rules?

It'd be nice if it went into the base MediaWiki whenever short URLs
are enabled, but as long as the /history/ link works that's fine for
these purposes: to have reasonably obvious URLs that won't die in
speech.


> What might /really/ be cool would be
> http://en.wikipedia.org/authors/Xenu
> or even
> http://en.wikipedia.org/main_authors/Xenu
> filtering out minor contribs and IPs...


We can save that for another bug if this one is accepted ;-)


- d.

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Re: [Wikitech-l] [Foundation-l] Proposed revised attribution language

2009-03-14 Thread Magnus Manske
On Sat, Mar 14, 2009 at 3:25 PM, David Gerard  wrote:
> 2009/3/14 MinuteElectron :
>> 2009/3/14 David Gerard :
>
>>> Here's an idea: nice URLs for the history. So we don't end up with
>>> stupid things peppered with ? and & and = printed on mugs, travel
>>> guides, etc.
>>> e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/history/Xenu for the history of
>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenu .
>
>> This is already possible in MediaWiki, using a feature called "action
>> paths". It simply needs Apache rewrites setting up and a configuration
>> variable within MediaWiki altering, there may be other implications in
>> terms of internal organisation, robot functionality and caching
>> though.
>
>
> Oh, I know it's not hard (though mod_rewrite rules resemble alchemy
> more than anything deterministic or logical). So I suppose the
> question is: can we get this into the Wikimedia settings?

IIRC one reason to use wiki/ and w/ instead of "direct" URLs
(en.wikipedia.org/Xenu) was to allow for non-article data at a later
time (the other reason was to set noindex/nofollow rules). Looks like
we will use that space after all :-)

What might /really/ be cool would be
http://en.wikipedia.org/authors/Xenu

or even
http://en.wikipedia.org/main_authors/Xenu
filtering out minor contribs and IPs...

Magnus

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Re: [Wikitech-l] [Foundation-l] Proposed revised attribution language

2009-03-14 Thread David Gerard
2009/3/14 MinuteElectron :
> 2009/3/14 David Gerard :

>> Here's an idea: nice URLs for the history. So we don't end up with
>> stupid things peppered with ? and & and = printed on mugs, travel
>> guides, etc.
>> e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/history/Xenu for the history of
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenu .

> This is already possible in MediaWiki, using a feature called "action
> paths". It simply needs Apache rewrites setting up and a configuration
> variable within MediaWiki altering, there may be other implications in
> terms of internal organisation, robot functionality and caching
> though.


Oh, I know it's not hard (though mod_rewrite rules resemble alchemy
more than anything deterministic or logical). So I suppose the
question is: can we get this into the Wikimedia settings?


- d.

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Re: [Wikitech-l] [Foundation-l] Proposed revised attribution language

2009-03-14 Thread David Gerard
2009/3/14 Jussi-Ville Heiskanen :

> The only thing *on* wikimedia websites that does
> satisfy that currently is the history of articles; a direct
> link into the history is sadly the only option available. I
> think it is way cool that people are thinking of innovative
> ways of formatting that information (in ways that would
> for instance cut out the often inflammatory edit summaries),
> but that is for the future.


Here's an idea: nice URLs for the history. So we don't end up with
stupid things peppered with ? and & and = printed on mugs, travel
guides, etc.

e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/history/Xenu for the history of
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenu .

Something to point at for CC-by-sa attribution is an actual reason to
put this into MediaWiki.

cc to wikitech-l - is this something suitable for Wikimedia use? Shall
I file an enhancement bug?

See also: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1450 .


- d.

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