On 12/11/06, Michael Noda <michael.noda(a)gmail.com> wrote: They are doing batch updates from dumps. .. I can find out exactly what their update schedule looks like. In the meantime, we should do some work making our georeferencing more consistent. They capture many of the ways which we geocode, but not all of them. As someone who has tried to do stuff with out geodata previously, I can sympathize with the challenges Google has faced in this project. You can see my post on the subject at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Geographical_coordi…

Steve Summit schreef: Note that it is not always a bug to have more than one set of coordinates in an article. See for example [[Carnac stones]] or [[List of cities, towns and villages in Utrecht]]. Perhaps there should be a "noindex" parameter, which would enable Google and others to exclude these from their databases? By the way, if you are impressed with the new Google Earth layer, you may also want to take a look at Stefan Kuehn's GE data files at http://www.webkuehn.de/hobbys/wikipedia/geokoordinaten/index.htm . Eugene

On 12/12/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote: Well, that answers an OTRS complaint I spotted last night about vandalism in one of the enGoogled articles! Any idea how often they're likely to update? (On the plus side, vandalism like this shouldn't be too much of a problem - our geotemplated articles are likely to have a smidgen more competent attention than the average) Good luck... -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

Michael Noda wrote: No to the latter, I dunno about the former. I was checking a bunch of these yesterday, and fixing them as necessary, and it was pretty easy, until Magnus's GeoHack broke (which may not have been coincidental!). We (and they) are in a rock-and-a-hard-place situation. It's good that they're working from their own stashed copy instead of hitting us live, because I doubt our servers could handle their users' load. But of course on the other hand it's supremely annoying that they're working from their own stashed copy, because (as you note and I emphatically agree) our lovely instantaneous wiki-quick edit-save-test loop is broken. As to updating their stashed copy more often, there's not much way we can ask them to do that when our own dumps only come out on a 2-4 week cycle. :-(

On 12/12/06, Steve Summit <scs(a)eskimo.com> wrote: I don't believe in that kind of coincidence. :-) I agree that having live updating would be well outside the realm of what we or Google want or are willing to pay for. Maybe we can do something to get back to a weekly dump schedule? Preferably on Google's dime? ;-)

Greg Maxwell wrote: For a while yesterday it was displaying the latitude (only) at the top of an otherwise blank page. But yes, it's working again now.

Is it even legal for them to use the stashed copy? That seems to potentially violate the GFDL in any number of ways. On 12/13/06, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:

geni wrote: Absolutely, and quite adequately, IMO. I've placed a screenshot at http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/GEWiki.jpg for those who are curious.

On 12/13/06, The Cunctator <cunctator(a)gmail.com> wrote: image pages. They are only truncating the pages.. no material changes to the text, to whatever extent you could call their display a change, the output on your screen would be the preferred form. They also omit unfree images, at least in so far as they can identify them as such. The use of the logo was negotiated. As Thomas Dalton suggested earlier in the thread, their behavior is similar to any of the more conformant mirrors.

On 12/13/06, Steve Summit <scs(a)eskimo.com> wrote: It doesn't seem right to me giving special permission to a company which makes proprietary software and distributes watermarked proprietary maps, some of which are just public domain maps with a watermark and a spurious claim of copyright on them. Give the special permissions and assistance to the people who make World Wind. Down with Google Earth. Anthony

On 12/13/06, The Cunctator <cunctator(a)gmail.com> wrote: It's not like it's that much money, though. Royalty income doesn't even make its own category on the financials (presumably it's included in the $56 thousand of other income), and with half a million dollars sitting in a bank account earning little or no interest (some of it not even FDIC insured), it's not like the money is desperately needed. I say get behind World Wind and/or some other free software. Make it a point to *not* support Google Earth. That's worth more in my opinion. And if you're gonna sell out, at least make a decent amount doing so :). I think it's just that Google has a certain blind love from a certain community which overlaps with the former members of Wikimedia. I can understand it, I respect Google and its founders, and I think a lot of the things Google does are great and revolutionary. But I'm also the kind of person who can respect a company but still believe I have a duty to fight against certain things it's doing. Anthony

On 12/14/06, Andrew Gray <shimgray(a)gmail.com> wrote: And more to the point, they could have done this without asking, except for the use of the logo. Instead they were willing to negotiate use of the logo, and have made an effort to be compliant like other mirrors, following our own instructions for mirrors. -- Stephen Bain stephen.bain(a)gmail.com

On 12/13/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote: I think the term "selling out" is quite appropriate when an organization dedicated to helping out the free content movement "negotiates" to put its name on software like Google Earth (proprietary software used to distribute proprietary content). That's probably the difference of opinion I have which you hostilly call "trolling", but if not feel free to point to which part it is. Anthony (*) If Gregory Maxwell is correct that the use of the logo was "negotiated", which hasn't yet been confirmed.

On 12/13/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote: In the sentence I used the phrase "sell out", I did put a smiley at the end. I dunno, reading it over again it wasn't meant to be inflammatory, and that actual sentence was meant to be humorous more than anything ("if you're gonna sell out, at least make a decent amount doing so"). Anyway, apology accepted, and since I could have phrased things more nicely I apologize for that. I don't have a problem with Google using the free content in Google Earth. I'd like to say hey, if you use the free content then everything you package with it has to be free as well, but the GFDL almost surely doesn't say that, so it's irrelevant. What I was specifically commenting on was the use of the Wikipedia logo. While you could argue that the logo should be free for anyone to use to identify Wikipedia content, that's not the reality of the situation. So the logo is more than just an identifier, it's a stamp of approval, and I don't think Google Earth deserves Wikipedia's stamp of approval. When there was a similar discussion regarding Answers Corporation I think the best argument against the partnership was based on the fact that the One-Click Answers software was proprietary and therefore not worthy of the Wikipedia name. At the time I still supported giving Answers a trial period while it became more clear whether or not anyone was interested in creating an open source competitor, but in hindsight even that was probably a mistake as it fails the "if you're gonna sell out, at least make a decent amount doing so" test. Other than the logo, if all Google is doing is downloading the exact same dumps that are available to everyone else, then I don't have any problem with that part. Google is most likely in violation of the GFDL for various reasons, some of which were already mentioned (like having no history section), but so is pretty much everyone else, so that part I've avoided discussing (the next version of the GFDL will fix many of these issues anyway, and if the GNU Wiki License ever gets implemented it might solve all of them). Finally, you say that Google is "identifying and promoting [the] free source" of the content. But to that I'd say Wikipedia isn't the source of the content, the individual authors are, and Google isn't identifying or promoting us at all. To quote you: "The foundation does not own the copyright to the content of Wikipedia, the editors do, the foundation did not create this encyclopedia the editors did, this project could continue without the foundation but not without the editors." As far as not being able to figure me out, that's my fault I'm sure, since it's something I hear over and over again. I'll let you know about the meetup thing I guess. And thanks for all the images you've contributed under a free license. Most of them are way better than anything I've ever done. Anthony

Gregory Maxwell schrieb: The problem is the google maps hype >> within wikipedia << - nearly everyone got adictted. HeinzJ

Why do they need a copy? It doesn't matter where the history is hosted, as long as it is linked to.

The Cunctator wrote: Our own information on reuse suggests that a link back is sufficient [1]. Whether that's how the GFDL would be interpreted in court or not I can't say, but it hardly seems like something to fault Google for if they're doing precisely what we ask of them. -Mark [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights#Example_notice

On 12/13/06, Ben Yates &lt;bluephonic(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: technicaly creates problems since you can't rely on the history always being there. -- geni

On 12/24/06, HeinzJ &lt;h-j.luecking(a)t-online.de&gt; wrote: No you need permission to use the logo. -- geni

On 12/13/06, Thomas Dalton &lt;thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: They have to credit the authors. -- geni

I like the way it is now. Google's servers load the articles faster than wikipedia servers do, at least for me in Europe. Using the live articles would cause longer load times. (first post for me in this list, I hope I posted correctly) On 12/13/06, Thomas Dalton &lt;thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

Thomas Dalton wrote: No, that's just what I doubt we could handle. We're on the edge of our capacity a lot, these days, I think, and while I don't know how many Google Earth users there are out there and how often they're going to be clicking on these new Wikipedia placemarks, it could be a *lot*.

On 13/12/06, Thomas Dalton &lt;thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: You'd think that. We regularly block "live mirrors" and so forth, because we're having enough trouble handling our own load much less anyone else's. The exceptions are usually either low-traffic and vital (there's a smallish email-webpages service operating in Africa which we let grab stuff on demand, IIRC) or paid for (people like answers.com) -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk