Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:
>Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>
>>Another interesting possibility would be a use-it-or-lose-it provision.
>>If there has been no properly authorized publication of a copright work
>>in the last 10 years, any reprinting is fair use.
>>
>>
>Wasn't copyright originally intended to be blanket 25 years, regardless
>of how alive or otherwise the author was?
>
>
Less than that, or slightly more depending on how you look at it. It was
originally 14 years from the time of publication, with a one-time right
of renewal for an additional 14.
--Michael Snow
For...the...love...of...God.
How many times do we have to go through this? This is at least the fourth
round of "The CVU is the most evil creation since Willy on Wheels," and I
for one am getting sick of it. People didn't like that we had directors, so
we got rid of our directors. People didn't like that there was an
implication that the Foundation might possibly on a rare Tuesday in May if
it is raining approve of the work that we do, so we added a disclaimer to
show that we aren't Foundation supported. People didn't like the way our
logos looked, so we redesigned them. Now that we've been willing to
accomodate on everything else, we're taking fire because we have two images
out of dozens of unsanctioned derivatives (yeah, that includes things like
the COTW's logo) when we actually took the time to ask for the Board's input
on them.
If you don't like the images, IfD them. If you don't like the CVU, then MfD
us. However, you'd better be fair: You'd better IfD every other image that
fits the same criteria, and you'd better MfD every other page that smells
anything like us.
I for one, as the last Director of the CVU, appreciate the support that has
been expressed for us: Thank you all for recognizing what we are about and
supporting our desire to make Wikipedia a better place.
Finally, it has been asked whether we're actually making Wikipedia better;
I'd like to ask the contrapositive: Is alienating a dedicated corps of
recent changes patrollers what you were looking for? Were you trying to make
us feel unappreciated? Will Wikipedia be a better place if we decide to stop
doing RC patrol? If that isn't what you were going for, then you failed to
look ahead, because that is exactly what this is doing. Everytime we have to
stop our RC patrol work and defend ourselves, it is one more time that we
have to ask ourselves: "Is it worth doing this when we keep taking fire at
every turn?"
Essjay
--
Essjay
-----
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Essjay
Wikipedia:The Free Encyclopedia
http://www.wikipedia.org/
This is an interesting one. An article "List of state-named Avenues in
Washington, D.C." was listed for deletion recently but kept because of
no consensus. Someone thought "dang it, AfD is supposed to be a
discussion, not a vote", and went to Wikipedia:Deletion review (DRV)
to try to overturn the result for what he thought were weak arguments
to keep.
Well that's all very well, but DRV (perhaps uniquely in all Wikipedia
forums) does not operate by consensus but by majority vote. So it
looks to me like we've got a possible loophole where someone
dissatisfied with an AfD result can go and have the article deleted
anyway on a straight majority vote. As it happens a lot of people who
looked at the article in DRV thought it should be deleted (which isn't
unusual--it's part of the culture in DRV)
So, I thought I'd give a second AfD a go. If the first AfD wasn't
clear enough, let's try for a second. I accordingly relisted the
article for deletion, explaining the circumstances and recommending
keep.
Six people promptly said "keep".
Whereupon someone involved in the attempt to overturn the first
deletion discussion and delete the article "unlisted* the article from
AfD.
This is quite a quandary.
I've no doubt that this fellow is acting in good faith and genuinely
believes that we cannot have a second AfD while the first is being
reviewed, but I cannot see why not especially if (as seems here) it's
clarifying that yes, Wikipedians really do want this article to be
kept.
However he's not really granting good faith, is he? He's removed the
second AfD listing. I restored once but I don't edit war so I'm not
going to get into that stuff.
So I turn to you, dear readers.
How am I to ensure that, if this article is deleted, it is only
deleted on the basis of consensus?
Delirium wrote:
> Stan Shebs wrote:
>
>> Actually, it's sort of interesting that this is news. While it's
>> common practice to have peer review for scholarly books, the "peer"
>> part of the term should be a hint that it's not the publisher doing
>> the checking! My guess is that our reverence for the printed page
>> is such that we just assume no one would dare to print without
>> being certain of its correctness.
>
> In many fields the peer-review of even scholarly books is not all that
> high. In the sciences, journal articles hold much more weight than
> books, because there's a perception that anybody can get a book published.
I'm not so sure that the peer review of journal articles is necessarily
that much better. I recently dealt with a situation in which the
submitter of an article was able to specifically request that his
article not be forwarded to one of the logical candidates for
peer-reviewing it, because he anticipated that this person would give an
unfavorable review. Cherry-picking your reviews hardly counts as
rigorous scholarship in my book.
The theory of peer review is nice, but even in academia the execution is
often shoddy and politically skewed. Practices at different journals
vary, of course, so the reputation of the journal needs to be considered
beyond just the question of whether it qualifies as peer-reviewed.
--Michael Snow
Okay, I'll make one now: invite-only IRC chats don't seem like the
right way to take actions with sufficient transparency and goodwill.
Apparently you haven't done your research: Invite-only was recinded within
48 hours of implementation.
And I'm not a fan of the invite-only status either; I forget whose decision
it was, but it was unilateral and makes everything a lot more cumbersome
than it needs to be.
It was my decision, the decision of the channel owner. Freenode policy says:
Channels on freenode are owned and operated by the groups which register
them. I registered it, I own it. It does not belong to the CVU, or to
Wikipedia, it belongs to me, and I set the policy for the channel. If you
register your own channel, you'll be able to set whatever policies you like
for it.
The reason the channel is no longer open to unconfirmed users is to prevent
the discussions in the channel (discussions about current vandalism to
Wikipedia, about how vandals are able to vandalize the site, information
that is practically a bootcamp for would-be vandals) from being used against
Wikipedia. Established Wikipedia users are still welcome in the channel, and
no user with an established Wikipedia account has been denied access to the
channel. Any user who is denied is welcome to appeal the denial directly to
me; the how-to page makes that quite clear.
As for unilateral, wrong. The decision was mine to make, and I was not
required to consult with anyone, but I did consult with the
high-access-level long-term users of the channel, and we agreed on how to
proceed. As for cumbersome, anyone who finds taking 10 seconds to write "My
IRC nick is XYZ. ~~~~" too cumbersome to bear is welcome to use
#wikipedia-en-vandalism2, where the same bot reports can be found, without
the chatter.
As far as I'm concerned, this is just one disgruntled user looking for
something to criticize. It has been one thing after another; when one
baseless criticism is deflated, another takes its place. Allow me to deflate
the most recent one: How I run my channel is quite frankly none of your
business. If you're so worried about it, feel free to take the bot source
(which is freely published) and start your own channel. Now, I'm sure you
have a new baseless criticism to hurl, please, be my guest.
Essjay
--
Essjay
-----
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Essjay
Wikipedia:The Free Encyclopedia
http://www.wikipedia.org/
Dear all,
I am happy to announce that submissions are currently being accepted
for the second annual Wikimedia Conference. The primary deadline for
submitting an abstract is April 15, 2006. The conference will be held
from August 4-6, 2006 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, on the Harvard
Law School campus.
http://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/Call_for_papers <-- full text of the CfP
http://cfp.wikimania.wikimedia.org/ <-- where to submit abstracts
If you have an idea for speakers, tutorials, or panels, please add
them to the list:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2006/Program_ideas
=== Please translate this notice and distribute it widely. ===
Looking forward to an amazing conference,
SJ
Tony Sidaway wrote:
>Although vandalism has been slashed by semi-protection on that
>article, non-vandalism edits also seem to be down by about 60%. Does
>that mean that semi-protection is wrong for George W. Bush? I think
>the jury is still out, but it appears that there is considerable
>collateral damage associated with semi-protection.
As examples of bad cases making bad rules, [[George W. Bush]] is the
winner. It is *the* most edited article on en.wikipedia, by what? 5:1
over the next one? It pretty clearly has *too many* editors for the
live version ever to be a usable encyclopaedia article.
Remember that *most articles are not controversial*. And that Kim
Bruning and Gmaxwell's data indicates there are only a couple of
hundred articles out of 900,000 that have more than a hundred editors.
Kim's idea that we should just declare those couple of hundred
articles prima facie pathological until proven otherwise strikes me as
an *excellent* one.
Saying anything about the value of semiprotection based on such
articles only really applies to such articles. And semiprotection
should be thought of as an extreme measure, but [[George W. Bush]] is
a pathological article.
- d.