That said, I found it to be a somewhat disconcerting notion that basic geographical information added en masse by a bot would be considered to be a negative thing simply because of a “data management” issue. From an ideal point of view, I see this to be analagous to making a dictionary but leaving out all of the words that start with X because they are used less and would take extra work to find.

To summarize, I think that the amount of entries on Wikipedia is its key greatness–for a resident of Smalltown in Tinyland to find a preexisting entry will allow that resident to add that, say, it recently opened a school, and the article becomes all the better. However, the same casual user might be ignorant to creating a new article, thus the information goes unadded.

Again, this point of view is idealistic, and I certainly bow to practical voices who say that otherwise.

First, your information about what this proposed bot would do is a little out-of-date. After many editors expressed their concerns, the bot owner announced he would work closely with the relevant WikiProjects. I don’t know how this will work with some countries without related WikiProjects (for instance, Somalia), but this is a good move.

Second, of some 530 woredas, or local districts, & the 300 (out of 930) towns in Ethiopia, I’ve been surprised (both in a positive & negative way) of what I have been able to find. For instance, one fellow editor, Yom, who knew of my personal effort directed me to a useful compendium of material at the website of the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala — which I reference in many of my articles. I would be surprised if similar resources don’t exist manhy of other countries.

Geoff

RE +34:51 Album cover and fair use

I have the idea when I listen to this item that the point that Gerard is trying to make clear why some Wikipedia’s are not using the nude album cover is not understand or at least not like it is intended.

The including or not including of certain possible offensive pictures or what ever type of illustration is always a local
decision made by the community of that wiki.

But before you can possibly include a certain illustration that image must have an acceptable license regardless about what it is about. That is step 1.

Going back to the album cover issue of the nude girl;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Virgin_Killer.jpg

There is a reason why it is uploaded to EN Wikipedia and not commons. It is used as “fair use”. Fair use, as an US law concept to use copyrighted material is in direct violation of the core mission of Wikipedia to create a free encyclopedia that can be freely used, spread and modified because it contains copyrighted content; the fair use content.

Because most non-English languages Wikipedia still believe in the original mission of Wikipedia to create a truly free encyclopedia the do not allow the inclusion of copyrighted material on there wiki. Especially because using it with be in violation of the local laws regarding copyright. Despite the beliefs of certain people US laws are not applicable in Europa for example.

The end result is off cource that this album cover is not used on most Wikipedias. Not because what is depicted on it but because it is illegal to use it by law and in violation of the objective of the Wikipedia mission.

Yes, the panel was right, Volapuk was the work of a bot run amok. The bot operator ‎Smeira (the only active member of the Volapuk community) said that he wanted to ‎artificially inflate his numbers to advertise the Volapuk language. Please note there are an estimated 20 speakers of this language world-wide.‎

The bot-operator essentially took databases of geographic data combined it with data out ‎of the various wikis, and fed them to his bot and out spat a bunch of articles. ‎Unfortunately, last I checked, the bot wasn’t well-controlled, and many of the pages were ‎filled with leftover vestiges of text and broken templates where the article was stolen ‎from. So, yes, there are 115000 stubs there, but they probably wouldn’t be considered ‎quality stubs by the other 19 Volapukists of the world.‎

Since the guy started there have been a couple of failed attempts to get him to stop ‎puffing up the scores in the form of Requests for Deletion at Meta. In the second ‎proposal, Jimmy Wales himself has asked them to stop it and play nice, but stopped short ‎of declaring an edict to close it down. I think both of those proposals were defeated by ‎Smeira’s bringing in outside voters to support his position, and browbeating everyone ‎that disagreed with him.‎

Essentially, the Volapuk Wikipedia is chock-full of geography stubs. 97% of their ‎activity supports the bot-made cookie-cutter geography stubs. ‎

The only good that I’ve seen come out of this is the Esperanto Wikipedia giving up bot-‎creation of articles cold-turkey. We have called a moratorium on new articles by bot, and ‎we’re now creating articles the good old fashioned way. Yes, it’s slower, but there’s a big ‎difference in quality.‎

I appreciate some of Erik Moelle ideas but I fear things are cascading towards a Cathedral Model. I could be wrong, it may be just my own fears speaking ! But I think there is still a tendency for 1. “Experts” to take control saying that they are being beneficial … 2. Users to become subjugated to those experts because “they know best”. It’s a sort of insidious drip drip effect. Are there enough people involved in the debate ? Why am I the only comment here? Maybe I’m missing where the discussion is ?

DJ Barney

that would have made more sense if you’d said, “every user would have to download the 133gigabyte full-edit-history dump, in order for a program to analyze any part of it.”

One of the problems I could see w/ a distributed structure is the need for a box in any case to distribute the chunks of the 130GB or so dump and control the whole thing.

That, and we’d need a client. Anyone care to write one?

if you need such a great amount of CPU power to do the statistics for the wikipedia, why don´t you split the CPU Power an a lot aff computers, like the SETI project. Distributet computing is the name for it. That would be a cheap way to get anough CPU power

You know i’ve been buzzing around “getting a few things in place”. Can i just point you at this forum’s thread at Gizmo. http://forum.gizmoproject.com/viewtopic.php?t=8884

Gizmo won’t mean much to yu, but it’s a Skype look-alike which is open.i.e It can talk to other IP networks, which Skype never will. So you’ll understand why I’ve shied off talking so far.

So could I ask that you download & have a play with it, and we get together for a quiet chat below the radar soon. I’m looking at going to HP for funding to broaden the conversations outside the usual WMF world (and stuffed if I’m going to do that for nothing as well, or expect you to).

P.S. Liam, Will probably be meeting your mates at DoS on Thursday, so we’ll see what they (and the National Library) say. regards.

This Flagged Revisions discussion would have been greatly improved if everyone was familiar with the actual proposals on en-wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Flagged_revisions/Sighted_versions
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Flagged_revisions/Quality_versions

There are separate proposals for “sighted versions” and “quality versions”. Marking “sighted versions”, which just means free of vandalism and is essentially a more open replacement for semi-protection (although the requirement for sighter status is currently proposed as somewhat higher than autoconfirmation) is proposed as the first step.

The more radical change is to actually certify versions according to quality, which will require a more serious introduction of a ‘higher’ form of editor.

The test wiki doesn’t reflect the en-wiki proposals as they currently stand.

But overall my feedback is still basically the same,… MOAR PLZ!

Your point about return to basic principles like WP:DONTBITE and WP:BOLD is well-made. Wikipedia grew to be what it is because of these principles. However, as you also correctly say, what we need now is a different type of editor: experts willing to contribute from their field of knowledge, not hobbyists typing out some stuff they heard on Discovery Channel. The problem is that WP:BITE etc. attract weirdos as much as they attract experts, and weirdos tend to have a lot more free time on their hands. I think that a newbie expert editor understands the need for WP:CITE (after all, similar requirements are made for academic papers). Such an expert will not find it difficult to write a good article about, say, communism and religion in sub-Saharan Africa (to use your example). The problem will be to get the expert to put the article on his watchlist and keep fixing the inaccuracies placed by religious or communist POV-pushers. I have seen several expert users become exasperated with this and leave. We will have to find the golden path between the two parts of WP’s slogan: “the free encyclopedia” and “that anyone can edit.” That golden path may well have to change as WP grows and becomes more professional.

I have lots to contribute and would have a new application on my iPod Touch (iPhone with out the phone and surf the internet by wi fi) which is wikipedia. i would like to talk about where wikipedia will go in WEB 3.0 with iPhone.

I think Andrew’s main argument about future growth is dead on… the numbers don’t lie, but projecting them forward relies on the assumption of things (the social and technological context of editing) basically staying the same. To approach anywhere near “the sum of all human knowledge”, there will have to be major changes that make it more appealing to contribute, especially for professional knowledge workers.

Take a look at my new blog post, part of which is a response to the “future of Wikipedia” discussion: http://ragesossscholar.blogspot.com/2008/03/future-of-wikipedia-my-take-part-1.html

I have to agree with Yaron here, Fuzheado. Perhaps I misunderstood you but I was really dumbfounded by your suggestion Wikipedia already has a majority of the relevant content covered. I come across what I consider to be important gaps all the time. For example, the coverage of philosophy, politics, the social sciences, and especially history is really skimpy. There’s a very large amount of important material in these disciplines with no articles at all, let alone articles approaching acceptable quality or completeness. And this has a bearing on other areas of WP as well. So for example contemporary science is well covered while the history of science is not so well covered. And as a historian Roy Rosenzweig has pointed out, the history which does exist on WP is very factualist in its orientation, whereas a majority of history as a discipline is based on not simply catalogueing discrete events but evaluation their significance in relation to one another.

Fuzheado, you make the comment that we’re approaching a point where most new content will be oriented towards keeping up with current events as time goes on. Well in some sense the same thing has to be done with the past, and that’s a huge undertaking.

Wikipedia Weekly frequently discusses websites and projects that are not from the foundation and/or are commercial. This is hardly promotional ’special treatment’. The Search discussion was relevant in three ways:
1) The context was recent developments in Wikia
2) It set aside confusion about the relationship of using it on-wiki
3) It was an open source project within the sphere of interest of many wikipedians.

As for the No-Follow - I’m not so sure. It won’t make any difference on the grand scale, but I for some commercial organisations to be getting something whilst others don’t just because they’re wikis seems to go in the face, somewhat, of the neutrality concept…

Liam I am kind of surprised you would bring up the nofollow link issue. To me that is the biggest non-issue brouhaha raised by SEO-obsessors ever.

otherwise, interesting as usual

I find it disappointing that different free information movements find it so hard to work together. GFDL and CC are so close in spirit that one would have thought any incompatibilities should have been resolved years ago.

I think I heard one of you guys was a sysop. I was wondereing why wikipedia doesn’t have back to top links at the begining or end of each portion of an article.

Tnx

Some links

Philip Greenspun illustration project
Philip Greenspun’s website
Inkscape
greenspun-illustrations mailing list

Erik Moeller’s mail: CC-BY-SA migration checklist
CC-BY-SA legal code
GFDL text

Sometimes reality is more boring than fiction (or is this fiction more boring than meta-fiction?).

OT: Gore and truth? Like some others, his former membership of this untruthful group has been swept under the rug.

sounds like you guys are getting good flow.

If you do decide to make it try to make it easily translatable.

Just so you know, WikiChix is still active, and Florence didn’t organise the table at that Wikimania lunch — she just sat at it.

(There is no comment preview here, please enable it if possible

Do you happen to know where an audio recording of Joi Ito’s presentation might be available? After listing to your show, I am eager to hear it.

Thanks.

Ditto to Stian: *please* press them for audio at least!

ps: most iriver mp3 players support Ogg Vorbis, and they are nice to use aside from that too.

About the copyright issue on the book and the movie - it’s certainly their right and prerogative to use whatever copyright, and the outtakes thing is good, but I’d still point out that it _is_ possible to make money with open licenses too… The Pirkinning is an example of an opensource movie that is CC NC and has made a lot of money being bought by tv channels and even getting DVD distribution… there are numerous books that are available on the net and still sell well, etc… Not saying this is easy, but for such a huge topic, it should be possible.

I see only a Itunes link and a RSS mp3 feed.

Anyway, the USB stick with all of Wikipedia had me really interested. I’d love something like that on my computer. Could someone who got one please upload an iso so we can all use it - unless the technology they use is proprietary (which would be sad). Also, from my experience, by cutting out the talk, image and wikipedia namespace pages, you can cut about 50% of the space, so that it would be able to fit onto a DVD. I guess most hardcore English language wikipedians are surrounded by cheap and fast internet, but having lived in Indonesia for a year, I can tell you this would be godsent.

Davey, exactly HOW MANY slides is this thing?

I’m jealous. I wish I could be in Taipei with everyone.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that it’s dual-licensed under the GFDL and Creative Commons, since that’s what our logo is under. So, go ahead and use the content.