"Andrew Lih" <andrew.lih(a)gmail.com> wrote: Yep, but this was before "forking" WikiNews or at the very beginning of that project. Shouldn't we draw a line now and leave the news to WikiNews, only remerging into Wikipedia once importance is clearer and deeper analysis is available from secondardy sources? [[User:Pjacobi]] -- NEU: GMX DSL Sofort-Start-Set - blitzschnell ins Internet! Echte DSL-Flatrate ab 0,- Euro* http://www.gmx.net/de/go/dsl

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Peter Jacobi wrote: Just because something happened recently doesn't mean it should be included in Wikipedia. Granted, Wikipedia will generally have less information on a current event than Wikinews (given WP's greater emphasis on verifiability) but that doesn't mean that no article is better than a short article. Besides which, these sorts of articles are generally plastered with WN links to provide the more up-to-date, less verifiable information. Cynical

On 9/20/06, David Alexander Russell <webmaster(a)davidarussell.co.uk> wrote: Typically a Wikipedia article has much *more* information than a Wikinews article, since the editing "workforce" on Wikipedia is larger, and there is no "deadline" in Wikipedia and is constantly morphing. Verifiability doesn't mean the WP article will be shorter either. If you provide an external link to a new source, then - boom, it's verified. And it can be included in the article. Yes, there will be often be a WN article linked to from the relevant WP article. But the WP article will also have tons of links to external news sources, which are tough for Wikinews to keep up with. FYI, German Wikipedia is more in line with the idea that "not every news event deserves an article." They are much more selective and are not shy in telling you so. :) -Andrew (User:Fuzheado)

Peter Jacobi wrote: I guess as a reader I don't see the benefit in *not* covering everything. I agree there is a slant towards more coverage of recent news events, but that's simply because they're easier to cover. The solution, IMO, is not to cover recent events less, but to cover older events more. I want to know the equivalent of this stuff for other time periods! Were there short-lived but at the time massively-covered events in the 1890s, equivalent to today's frenzies over child kidnappings? What about the thousands of political scandals, major and minor, that have at various times shortened governments' tenures, forced cabinet reshuffles, etc., etc.? It's all good info we're missing! -Mark

On 20/09/06, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote: It'll come, it'll come. Dumping everything onto disk scans in the first instance. Just under two years doubling time. You won't be *able* to buy a disk smaller than a petabyte in twenty years. (Googling "hard disk" "moore's law" leads me to [[Moore's Law]], which points me to [[Kryder's Law]], which is a useful study in hideous self-reference and Wikipedia editorial decisions forming neologisms. I'm so glad [[analogue disc record]] was moved before achieving any currency anywhere else.) - d.

On 21/09/06, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote: Some dedicated fools, I expect. There *must* be efforts to this end. If not, it'd be an ideal project for Wikimedia UK to look at when it's operational. [cc to wmuk-l] - d.

On 9/23/06, David Alexander Russell <webmaster(a)davidarussell.co.uk> wrote: Posible in theory but requires a lot of scans per map which increases the required time a lot. -- geni

Ray Saintonge wrote: The approach used by Google and the Internet Archive is to chuck them into a right-angle frame with glass sheets and cameras. -- Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia "We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

On 9/25/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax(a)gmail.com> wrote: That's a workable setup for books where you need to avoid cracking the spine, but for large formats what you really want is drum scanning. Would be nice to organize an effort to have institutions donate some time on their scanners for Wikipedians to use. -Andrew (User:Fuzheado)

On 23/09/06, Fastfission <fastfission(a)gmail.com> wrote: We'd try to get the best scans we could. But I suspect that if you put up the raw scans and any of it could be turned to an actual use, volunteers to do the tedious labour would turn up. I'm amazed at the tedious jobs people do for Wikimedia projects in the cause of getting information into the public domain. See also discussion on wikimediauk-l (to which this is cc'd). - d.

On 9/22/06, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: A while back I heard how Amazon.com scans entire books. 1. Some books are scanned in North America using, IIRC (foggy memory), a homemade page-turning apparatus that somehow works together with a scanner. It is fully automatic. 2. Some books are scanned in India. It is cheap to hire manual workers there, so they hire people to run the scanners. It seems that most of the Wikimedia Foundation's budget goes towards buying hardware, but I wonder if it'd be practical for us to hire people to do either of these things. Cheers, [[User:Unforgettableid]]

On 9/25/06, [[User:Unforgettableid]] <unforgettableid(a)gmail.com> wrote: For non-rare books, they actually feed the entire book to a machine that cuts of the spine of the book and loads the book page by page. That way they can very rapidly scan large amounts of text. WMF is strapped for cash, that money is needed elsewhere. The servers are very expensive. Besides, WP has always been about volunteers, for virtually every aspect of it's operation and for all of it's content creation. It shouldn't be any different for this, even though this is a lot harder. --Oskar

On 21/09/06, Fastfission <fastfission(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On 21/09/06, Fastfission <fastfission(a)gmail.com> wrote: Non-institutional UK users have the entire /Times/ archive (1790ish on) via local libraries, which is a similar situation. Goodness only knows what you can get if you *pay* for it. (And then, of course, there's actual printed contemporary sources. I'm doing a lot of work at the moment by paraphrasing material in old almanacs, rewriting it to be slightly more comprehensible, slap on a couple of contextual sentences at the beginning and end... and, bingo, a biographical stub on a contemporary politican, or a short article summarising some 1840s law, or the like. No microfilm required...) -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

Ray Saintonge wrote: While it would certainly be nice to have it all scanned, I don't think it's necessary. We already cite lots of sources that aren't available on the internet---recently published books, journal articles, etc.---so I don't see why it would be a bigger problem that old news articles are only available in archives, on microfilm, or via digital subscription. Ain't nothin' wrong with citing sources that require a visit to a library to access. -Mark

I've crossposted my response to the Foundation and Wikisource lists since it could interest people there. Delirium wrote: This is certainly a fair comment. Of course the recent publications have copyright constraints that are a block to any kind of scanning. Certainly, for the sake of discussion I am limiting my comments to material where the public domain status is unquestioned. That's enough material to keep us busy. Some of my old bound volumes of "McClure's", "Scientific American", "Popular Science", and other odd volumes have library markings and indications that they were discarded by some public or college library. I have no objection to people visiting libraries, but there's no guarantee that a nearby library will have the material sought. Project Gutenberg already includes 6 issues of "McClure's, a far but complete but substantial number of "Scientific American" when it was a weekly, and no "Popular Science". ("Popular Science" in the 19th century had far more in-depth articles than its present incarnation.) In general, I don't think we should be duplicating the efforts of PG; there's more than enough work for everybody to do. Other important magazines like [[The Smart Set]], where H. L. Mencken wrote, are much more difficult to find. We do need to stay within the realm of the possible. Making information freely available is not a simple task; it will likely take the co-operation and co-ordination of many players who will each establish where they can work best. I would love to be able to create direct links from a WMF project to a specific spot in a book that has been digitized by another player without having to contend with a lot of proprietary restrictions being applied to public domain books. The task is enormous. Ec

On 9/21/06, Carl Peterson <carlopeterson(a)gmail.com> wrote: At Wikimania 2006, I described this phenomenon - Wikipedia uniquely fills the gap between "the news" and the history books. It's an instantaneous cumulative view of the state of the world, given the best information at that point in time. Rather than shedding this function, we should be embracing and celebrating it. Back in 1995, when I was teaching journalism, I pondered when a "rolling memory" system might be realized given the development of the Internet. That's why I was captivated by Wikipedia back in 2003. Wikipedia has accomplished this, whether by design or fluke. And it's been revolutionary. I'm curious if there is a reasonable reason against Wikipedia serving this function, other than "encyclopedias are not news", which I would argue is old-style thinking (and something I've heard from more than one so-called "academic" committee.) -Andrew (User:Fuzheado)

"Stephen Bain" <stephen.bain(a)gmail.com> wrote: If a Wikipedia article is "the best source available", it has become original research. [[User:Pjacobi]] -- Der GMX SmartSurfer hilft bis zu 70% Ihrer Onlinekosten zu sparen! Ideal für Modem und ISDN: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/smartsurfer

On 21/09/06, Peter Jacobi <peter_jacobi(a)gmx.net> wrote: Not automatically. The problem is, you have a big and fast-breaking story, you have everyone covering it. Everyone brings n points of information to the table, but there are 2n points out there in total - whilst there's a lot of overlap they don't all quote the same people, they don't all have a reporter in this place or that. Because we're stripmining the news sources rather than relying on our own primary work, we can quote all 2n. As long as we avoid drawing inferences or making synthesis by juxtaposition, we're okay at keeping away from original research. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

Stephen Bain wrote: In avoiding original research we create a composite. With thousands of eyes watching the development of a topic from different angles we are in a better position to represent multiple sources. A for-profit media outlet can't possibly afford to take into account whether its sources are independent of each other. In the interest of getting the information out quickly, or at least more quickly than its competitors it needs to go with what it considers reliable sources,. like the wireservices. Once the story is public it can't unprint the newspapers. The opportunities for broadcast media are a little better. We (especially in Wikinews) are in a position where we can more easily adapt our report based on evolving information. Not only that, but our article histories are able to chronicle how the story developed. Background information can be tracked down almost on demand. Ec

Peter Jacobi wrote: I don't think that's true at all. The entire point of Wikipedia is to produce a good reference that didn't previously exist. We take the huge amount of information out there and produce high-quality, reliable, referenced summaries. If we do that, we become the best reference on a number of things---not because we're conducting original research, but because we've summarized widely-spread information into a readable summary all in one place. -Mark

On 9/19/06, Peter Jacobi <peter_jacobi(a)gmx.net> wrote: Where exactly would one draw a line? And how could one draw one in a case like this that would not put huge amounts of beloved material on the wrong side of it? What advantage would that have over just letting things work out the way they always have so far? Is there any great reason to undertake a policy which would potentially 1. lead to the removal of articles which had been heavily worked on by many contributors and contained copious footnotes and references, 2. create arbitrary barriers to the creation of new articles, 3. only acknowledge an academia-centric POV over what is relevant or not? FF