We have been contacted by the assistant to the Manager
of Pirelli INTERNETional Award.
Website : http://www.pirelliaward.com
The Pirelli INTERNETional Award call for contributions
to the diffusion of scientific and technological
culture, with an overall budget prize of 135,000 Euros
(about US$ 170,000), plus 25,000 Euros for this year's
Pirelli Relativity Challenge, a special prize for the
centenary of the publication of the Special Relativity
Theory: http://www.pirelliaward.com/einstein.html
Submissions to the Pirelli INTERNETional Award must
be:
1. a multimedia work
2. for the spread of scientific and technological
culture
3. of maximum 150 Megabytes in size
4. in the English and Italian language
Applications should be done online
http://www.pirelliaward.com/ch5_intro.html and work
submited via FTP by December 31st, 2004.
---------
I made a page on meta :
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Pirelli_Relativity_Challenge_2005
Please, note that there are already articles in
english AND italian.
I think work is needed to get the best of the two
versions to make one common great article. And if
possible (in particular if WE WIN the award) to have
this article translated in many languages.
Of course, editors of all languages are welcome to
work on this challenge.
Berto, from it, has agreed to work on this, and help
provide a common best article.
Danny is also very excited by the idea, and will
coordinate the submission.
There is an issue on how it should be presented.
------
I also think this is a great opportunity for two
languages to cooperate, so I hope we can do this well
and in peace.
What do you all think ?
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Pirelli_Relativity_Challenge_2005
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Sadly, Rhobite is, for the most part, right about Reithy; though I agree
with Jimbo that threatening to write to a record label regarding album
art hardly rises to the level of a "legal threat."
Reithy joined us three weeks ago and has made over 500 edits.
The edits have been to roughly a dozen articles, most of them related to
[[United States Libertarian Party]], to talk pages of these articles and
those who oppose his edits, and to RFC/RFA related pages where he has
answered (after a fashion) various complaints about his behavior.
There really is no reason we should have to go through the slow,
deliberate [[Wikipedia:Dispute resolution]] process with someone who
has never been a good-faith contributor to the project. The safeguards
present therein are intended to provide a means of cooling off for
Wikipedians who have contributed in the past and are likely to do so in
the future.
The present arbitration framework is serving to do nothing but give this
joker another soapbox. Rhobite is being subject to undue scrutiny as a
result of his conflict with Reithy, and I imagine that the AC will, in
an effort to be evenhanded and "fair" find a bone to pick with one or
another of his comments or edit summaries.
If Reithy is banned, as seems likely to occur at some point, I imagine
he'll return with an army of sockpuppets, and those admins who seek out
fairness to accused sockpuppets will revert any attempts to block them.
This isn't some obscure corner of the 'pedia, folks, like [[Iridology]]
or [[Instructional capital]].
This is about the article on one of the largest minor political parties
in U.S. politics, on the 300th largest web site in the world.
Is it time to do something about bad-faith users yet?
UninvitedCompany
I apologize if this is the wrong place to go with this. The user
Reithy is becoming a real problem in terms of edit warring, locking
articles, and harassing users on talk pages. He pores through my edits
looking for ways to nitpick, his latest act was a veiled legal threat
on a fair use image I uploaded:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Image_talk:Doughty_Rockity_Roll.…
The image is a low-res album cover, clearly fair use, but he said "I
will send an email to the record company, if you like to ask whether
they agree with you." I take this as a legal threat.
He is of course the user who repeatedly vandalized libertarian-related
articles a couple weeks ago. He has since become more stealthy about
flagrant violations, but continues to harass me on my talk page. He
has a current open request for arbitration. No offense, but I'd like
to get things moving here. He's a troll. Everything he does is acting
in bad faith. He has even removed charges from his own RFAr, and
removed links from his evidence page. In my opinion, he should be long
gone.
Thank you,
Paul (User:Rhobite)
>An ironic thing about schools vs species is that I could write an
>article about a species that has only ever been observed by one
>scientist, has only one paper about it in an obscure journal, and
>only one specimen in a jar somewhere, and yet no one would dream of
>deleting the article for non-notability (in fact we have a number
>of such articles already), while an article about the largest high
>school in Cleveland would probably cause a furious VfD debate. Is
>the obscure species, which is of interest to maybe a few dozen
>specialists, really more notable than the high school and its
>thousands of students?
This is very interesting. I think it proves that the notability criterium is
out of whack. It seems like when "the deletionists" say "notability" of
information, they instead mean "usability" of information. Because noone can
claim that one specimen of one species documented in one academic journal is
more notable than any high school in Cleveland. However, the information
about the specimen might well be more useful than that about the school....
.... to biologists!
But not to anyone else. Is it so that the deletions is a symptom of the fact
that many wikipedians see the target audience as something else than many
other wikipedians see it? If we assume that Wikipedia HAS a limited number
of target audiences, then I can understand that people want to delete
factual, verifiable information. It doesn't make sense to have an article
about a school in Cleveland if Wikipedia's target audience is not
Clevelanders (or foreign exchange students..) It also makes sense to delete
[[Melissa Doll]] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melissa_Doll if Wikipedia's
target audience is not fans of Melissa Doll/people interested in porn
actors.
And so on. So maybe Wikipedia's *only* target audience is the target
audience that Encyclopaedia Brittanica has. But I don't think so. I'm a
member of the community and I has a say in what goes into Wikipedia too. So
does everyone else that has ever written something in Wikipedia. We are all
authors and contributors.
For every article ever witten someone has thought "I know this and I think
this is useful for someone else." Which means that everything ever written
has passed someones test of usability. That doesn't mean that it has to be
included in Wikipedia, but I think more thought should be spent on that fact
than currently is.
To summarize. Don't delete articles because they aren't "notable", delete
articles because they aren't usable. Delete information about someones bank
account number because, while it might be verifiable at an ATM machine, it
isn't usable to a large enough audience. Keep information about Cleveland's
high schools because that information is usable to thousands of students.
Delete information about some random street because nothing interesting has
ever happened there. Keep information about US President's dogs because
thousands of people do find that information useful.
-- Eric B. and Rakim
_________________________________________________________________
Don't just search. Find. Check out the new MSN Search!
http://search.msn.com/
I have watched over a period of months while the number of protected
user pages has grown. Recently, I requested that a number of them be
unprotected and Guanaco and several others were willing to do this.
There has been a backlash. Apparently there are a number of wikipedians
who believe in the patently non-wiki notion that they "own" their user
space and should be able to lock it up so that other users can't edit
it.
Others have taken the step further and there is (I'm not making this up
folks) a suggestion that we change the software to disallow all edits
to user pages except by their "owners." Discussion, including calls
for a "vote" on this change can be found at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Protection_policy
There is also discussion there of the lesser measure of changing policy
to permit any admin to protect their own user pages indefinitely for no
reason other than personal whim.
UninvitedCompany
Look What I just did below. I used a colon to indent my reply to Tim on
an email. At least I didn't sign my name ~~~~ (Which is something I
regularly do on emails including work and personal emails, but I usually
manage to spot it before I hit the send button.)
Theresa
-----Original Message-----
From: KNOTT, T
Sent: 04 November 2004 13:40
To: English Wikipedia
Subject: RE: [WikiEN-l] Re: Proposal: make user pages uneditable
I suggest we regularly edit each others' user pages in an attempt to
break this bizarre perception of ownership.
-- Tim Starling
:I agree. I actively encourage people editing my (my? It's wikimedia's
isn't it?) user page by stating a feel free to edit this page note on
it.
Theresa
_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l(a)Wikipedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
NSK wrote:
>Perhaps WP could disallow anonymous edits and require by people who
open an
>account to read a short policy and agree to it, for example with an "I
>Agree" checkbox.
I can't imagine that that would make any difference. People create stuff
without reading the policy now - you can force them to scroll over a
page of policy and click a checkbox at the bottom, but you can't force
them to read it (ever read an EULA when installing software?) and you
certainly can't force them to follow it.
>Anons that create useful content *will* create an account if they are
>serious in their wikiwork.
..and..
>I think you need to make account creation a bit more difficult:
>0. Anons aren't needed; disable anon editing.
>1. People will be required to validate their account through an e-mail
>address.
>2. New account holders will be denied editing until after 1-2 days.
>3. To make anons open an account you could make some pages readable
only by
>account holders, et cetera.
These ideas have been suggested before, but are so far out of alignment
with the philosophy that Wikipedia was founded under that they will
never be implemented. A "no anon editing" Wikipedia can only be done as
a fork, I think.
Cheers!
David...
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I sent this to the foundation list and CCed to WikiEN, but it was posted on
foundation-l twice. How can I avoid this behaviour?
----
On Tuesday 26 October 2004 22:26, David Gerard wrote:
> what was your Wikipedia username again?
The reason I have not answered that question is because it was first asked by
a person who offended me ("as faulty as your logic", 23 October 2004).
Although I have ignored his e-mail address, thanks to your webarchive it came
to my attention that he repeats his attacks:
http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2004-October/031751.html
Please note that I am a bit touchy and any kind of personal attack is not
compatible with my culture and my education. I have no problem with people
who disagree with me, but I have zero tolerance for things who engage in
personal attacks.
That said, I also don't understand why I need to answer this question. Is it
some kind of policy in Wikipedia to say your user names in emails? I notice
many people post without mentioning their usernames and I wonder why you
picked me specifically.
> Do you in fact edit on Wikipedia at all?
Does it matter? I cannot understand why you ask this question. Are your
mailing lists restricted only to your members? I don't think so, because it
was very easy for me to register (if that's not the intended behaviour, you
need to configure your Mailman installation).
You can find me in many mailing lists or fora, including FSF-GNU/GNOME/CC/AMD,
and I am lurking on many other mailing lists and communities, while I have
also joined projects such as Drupal.org and OpenFormats.org and very soon I
will join KDE. Slashdot has published stories written by me (KDE/FSF's
WIWO...) and my karma there is Good. My university dissertation is on wikis.
I notice some people refer to me as "he/she" and I wonder whether they have
noticed who am I.
I was lurking here for some time before I decided to start posting, so I had
accumulated many possible suggestions and ideas about Wikipedia. Since I
decided to start posting, I started remembering whatever I had thought about
all that time, so perhaps some people disliked me because of the initial
quantity of my postings. Although I have already asked whether anybody wants
me to stop posting, nobody said something like that, so I understand that I
should be welcome here - but I still notice that some participants seem to
dislike me and I cannot understand why.
I don't really have enough time to edit much on Wikipedia. I have my own
projects and soon/hopefully will have my own nonprofit organisation. So,
although my community website now is still very new (just opened this August,
but already serving more than 65 thousand hits per month), it will certainly
become very known and important in the near future. My interests in the
Wikipedia community are mostly establishing public relations, helping each
other to improve our community policies and sharing software development tips
and practices. I mostly want communication with Wikipedia decision makers,
the Board and the development team, so that we can find ways to cooperate as
independent separate projects. So, I think it should be obvious that I
participate in your mailing lists as a representative of a friendly website
which seeks to have relations, cooperation and knowledge sharing with
Wikimedia. But if WMF does not wish to cooperate or thinks I am a
"competitor", then you can just say so and I will leave.
I suspect that some people may dislike me because I have my own wikis. Please
try to understand that I am not a "competitor" of Wikipedia. I have written
interesting articles under the GFDL that you can copy if you like (by
providing proper attribution under all the terms of GFDL - please include the
authors' names in the article). See for example this article of NerdyPC.org,
my knowledge base wiki on computer hardware and the Information Technology
industry: http://nerdypc.wikinerds.org/index.php/AMD_Opteron - note the most
recent version under development is at
http://nerdypc.wikinerds.org/index.php/Test:AMD_Opteron
Finally, I would like to know how we can implement interwiki links to each
other and whether WMF is interested in this kind of linking.
--
NSK
Admin of http://portal.wikinerds.org
Project Manager of http://www.nerdypc.org
Project Manager of http://www.adapedia.org
The relentless discussion about deletion that I am just catching up with
on this mailing list prompted to review a deletion decision that got on
my nerves back in June. "Full nice handbag co" was a pathetic little
article about a textile company in Hong Kong. It was never much of an
article, but it was real, neutral, factual, verifiable. It was very
narrowly VfDed (with a small majority of about 55-60% voting delete) on
grounds of non-notability. Following deletion, I objected at VfU - my
grounds for undeletion were that the reasons for deletion were so
tenuous (see below) and the majority so small that we should have erred
on the side of caution and kept the article
Notability is extremely subjective. To my mind, a manufacturing company
of twelve years standing is more notable than a minor character in a
Lord of the Rings book. But others disagree. The VfU eventually failed -
both to get the article undeleted and to raise the issues about
systematic biases of domain of knowledge of editors affecting deletion.
Perhaps I shouldn't have, but I came to the conclusion that I would be
helping Wikipedia if I was bold and reinstated the article anyhow.
Unfortunately good old RickK got in a right tizz about this. Rick and I
have exchanged words that just about stay civil on our talk pages, and
Theresa Knott helpfully suggested I come here to the mailing list (a
kind of higher court than VfU if you will, and one arena more open to
more philosophical/esoteric debates) to see if I want did was reasonable.
So here I am, throwing myself open to community opinion,
Pcb21
