"de:Nürnberg", that's http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%FCrnberg ,
features some <!-- == commented sections == --> and this obiously
confuses the embedded "edit" ("bearbeiten") commands.
Click on "5 Stadtgliederung [bearbeiten]" and "== Politik ==" will
pop up.
--
| ,__o
| _-\_<,
http://www.gnu.franken.de/ke/ | (*)/'(*)
>If I overlooked anyone in my appointments, don't be insulted and don't
>hesitate to ask about it. It was unintentional. I tried to appoint
>everyone who volunteered. Anyone who is left over and would still
>like to be appointed will be appointed to mediation.
Yes. I volunteered for mediation over conflict involving non-english speaking people, as I think my lack in english culture may help me understand the seeds of some conflicts :-)
(I thank those who understand that I do not understand everything, whatever my capacity to handle humour :-))
In particular should there be any issues with french users of course, such as "the one who must not be named" (because he requested to have his name and contributions disappear on all wikipedias, english included), or our famous chaterring box, Papotages (who is banned on fr, but not banned on en:) or perhaps JacquesD (who is perhaps a user ban on en:, but not on fr: )
:-)
-------
For information, I recently exchanged many private emails with a user called HeKeIsDa (and likely Sayeya as well), over posting little understandable articles on meta and fr: (and I saw recently on en: as well). The user was also trying to set up a new wikipedia on meta itself.
Though this was not a conflict really, it could have become one. If the user had insisted in going on setting his wikipedia on meta, he could have ended banned :-)
I am half seriously mentionning this, because a spanish person told me privately that if there was discussion over banning this user on meta, likely no spanish user would oppose the ban => that means he considered it an option. The user is a problematic user on the es: wikipedia. But no banned as spanish people wish to solve the issues they have with HeKeIsDa amicably. He is however, banned on the spanish encyclopedia fork.
HeKeIsDa and I do not share a common language (to say the least :-)), so that was a bit tough.
Actually, it is not even obvious he shares a language with spanish people.
I was embarassed because HeKeIsDa was only communicating through private emails, and I felt I should not take a decision alone on the topic. I felt I had no right to do so alone.
For this reason, I posted copies of some of his mails on meta so that other people could give me their opinion over those. I also found myself embarassed to do so, as these were private mails, but felt any decision over this should be public. I blanked the content for less visibility. I also talked about this to other people by private mail, on fr and on irc. Several people volunteered to bring very valuable information to help understand what it was all about, and some indicated their unfavorable opinion over the creation of the wild spanish wikipedia.
Practically, it was a sort of mediation commitee, where some users were providing input in a semi-public semi-private way (but not on meta itself, so these discussions were *invisible* to HeKeIsDa himself, while most discussions between HeKeIsDa and I were private as well).
However, no public opinion but mine was offered to him on meta itself.
Since no one made any comment, I boldly deleted HeKeIsDa articles
(Incidentally, I noticed that recently I am getting perhaps too bold in deletion on meta these days, if some people think I am being so, please do tell me).
I tried to explain HeKeIsDa the decision. Fortunately, he has stopped insisting, and limits himself to posting google-translated articles on fr: now (this will also have to be adressed...).
If HeKeIsDa had decided to go on in creating a wild spanish wikipedia on meta, I would have routinely deleted his articles (and talked to him again), in practice considering his posting vandalism, as he was told not to do it.
Though this would not have been a hard ban pronounced by Jimbo, it would have in effect sort of a ban that would have decided somehow on HeKeIsDa, for not respecting the goal of meta.
My point is : I feel like I did not do anything alone. I asked people opinion, and either they were neutral, or they were unfavorable to that new wikipedia.
But to HeKeIsDa or any external viewer, it certainly does look as if I took the decision myself alone. It does look as if I deleted his stuff on my own opinion. And if he post again articles, and I delete them again, it will look like I act as an arbitration commitee, and decided to out the guy myself.
Did I do well ? I think I did. In effect, I think I was honest and fair, and I do not think I offended the guy.
The important points I will keep from that case, are
: how will people feel if they find me routinely deleting articles with seemingly no discussion ?
: what will happen if someone feel like saying I abused my sysop powers in deleting unilaterally HeKeIsDa articles :-) ?
: how could I support my case given that a good deal of the discussion took place on volatile support (irc) ?
: do I have the right to make it appear that I took a decision myself, that was not mine to take as I am not representing community decision ?
: is that ok that I copied some private mails on meta, which is a breach in etiquette, in order to easily share the information with other people ?
: Should I delete that page ? Since that is a user page, on which the user has never written anything, may I do so ?
: How can we deal with similar matters on meta, which are likely to occur more and more often, given that there are a limited number of users for each language but english ?
To me, these questions are important; Is it to you ?
---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard
tc wrote:
>They're obviously skeptical of doing so, but as statistically
>the only website to use the GFDL, our opinions and needs
>have validity.
No - we aren't the only website to use the GFDL, but we are almost certainly
the largest content-creating website to use that license.
Perhaps that is what you meant?
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
>But the English Wikipedia isn't NPOV at all !
>Especially on anything related to Middle East
>conflict, it almost invariantly has Israeli bias,
>probably because of relatively large number
>of American Jewish contributors, compared to
>hardly any Arab contributors.
This is more of a side-effect of the fact that our continued overwhelming
reliance only on informal methods of conflict resolution results in the
selection of POV by people who are very motivated about certain subjects and
the selecting out or marginalizing of the POV of people who are less
motivated.
We could handle that when we were small (everybody could help with the handful
of slow-moving disputes we used to have), but it is much more difficult to do
this now that we are large (there seems to be dozens of disputes at any
moment now and people are generally less civil and more quick to revert than
they were when all the heavy users knew each other).
Thus we need to set-up mediation and arbitration procedures to deal with the
caseload.
Growing pains, that's all.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
tc wrote:
>What we can do, what we can measure, is what is the
>direction of Wikipedia's coverage of a subject. If the
>coverage is becoming more comprehensive, more
>grounded in references, more based on detail and
>reportage and fact, then we can say that the coverage
>is approaching a neutral point of view.
Yep. I view NPOV like I view my pragmatic perfectionism: It is not as a
destination, it is a journey.
--mav
Hi!
I am a) writing a student research paper and b) going to have a lecture on a
german linux-congress about Wikipedia. Has there anybody done this before?
I know the lecture of Kurt Janson last year on 19C3 in Berlin but is there no
newer stuff? Well I know what to write and talk but I am just wondering why
there are so little (=practically no) scientific publications or conference
papers (=everything but simple newspaper articles) on Wikipedia yet. On the
other hand I don´t mind if I am the first one ;-)
The only references I found (up to now):
http://wiki.wizards-of-os.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Wikipedia_And_Friends
Thanks a lot
Jakob Voss / nichtich
A user of the German Wikipedia, Ulrich Fuchs, has threatened to take legal
action against any third party who makes commercial use of their material
without following a very narrow interpretation of the FDL "five author"
requirement, which reads as follows:
"B. List on the Title Page, as authors, one or more persons or entities
responsible for authorship of the modifications in the Modified Version,
together with at least five of the principal authors of the Document (all
of its principal authors, if it has fewer than five), unless they release
you from this requirement."
Our recommendation for third parties using Wikipedia material so far has
been that it is completely sufficient in the spirit of the FDL to point to
the original Wikipedia article on which the copy is based, because that
page contains the history and therefore the list of *all* authors. Ulrich
claims that this is not sufficient because it does not meet the conditions
of modification set forth in the FDL.
This is not just theoretical. There is a new commercial German project
called "Flexicon" which uses Wikipedia material. Currently they don't give
any credit whatsoever, but since Flexicon itself is a wiki, some
Wikipedians have added links to the original Wikipedia articles in order
to meet the conditions of the FDL. Ulrich now threatens anyone with legal
action who copies material to Flexicon from the German Wikipedia which he
has worked on without having the unworkable "list of five principal
authors" on the target page.
This would place an unacceptable burden on third parties as they would
have to carry along the complete history of every page thtey use (since
there is no automated way to determine who is a principal author), a
history which on the English Wikipedia is now so large that we can't even
store it in a single file anymore (over 2 gigabytes). Not to mention that
having such a list in articles is cumbersome and annoying.
In my opinion, legal threats like these are dangerous to this project and
to the very idea of open content. They also show once again that the FDL
is a fundamentally flawed, overly complex license with lots of loopholes
for pedants who want to get their way instead of working with the
community.
There may be a solution to prevent this problem from escalating. We could
amend the edit notice on Wikipedia to require the author to release third
parties from the need to maintain a list of five "principal authors" per
page, since such a release is explicitly provided for in the FDL..
Regards,
Erik
IMHO we should use CSS classes in the new table markup, where
appropriate (e.g., chemical elements), to simplify markup. These would
go into the existing CSS file, or maybe a new one just for table markup.
Suggestions? Examples? Counter-arguments?
Magnus
Delirium wrote:
>So I guess my question is: do people think it is likely that
>Wikipedias in languages that are spoken almost exclusively
>by people of one particular national background can ever
>hope to achieve anything even remotely resembling the
>NPOV on the Wikipedias in languages that are spoken by a
>wide range of people? Is having contributors from a wide
>range of backgrounds a necessary prerequisite for NPOV
>(as I suggest)?
Very interesting insight! But since you touch on philosophical issues, I
recommend you copy your post and put in on meta (otherwise this thread will
get lost in the mailing list archives).
I'll respond there.
--- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
Brion wrote:
>To link between projects to a particular language in
>Wikipedia, use eg [[Wikipedia:fr:Une page]]. This puts
>the maintenance burden in a much smaller area (a
>single configuration file on one server) and should
>work in also interwiki links from other wikis that we
>don't control and can't spontaneously add interwiki
>prefixes too, such as MeatballWiki (where it would be
>WikiPedia:fr:Une_page since you need CamelCase on
>InterWikis there).
OK, that makes sense. I thought you were getting rid of explicit in-line links
without devising a replacement. Your syntax does make a lot more sense than
the (now depreciated) XxWikipedia syntax.
As I said before I really only care about results, not the details needed to
attain those results (I do often provide suggested ways to attain those
results but that is just to move things along by at least sparking debate).
-- mav