On Sunday 28 July 2002 03:00 am, The Cunctator wrote:
> What are the articles this person has been changing?
For 66.108.155.126:
20:08 Jul 27, 2002 Computer
20:07 Jul 27, 2002 Exploit
20:07 Jul 27, 2002 AOL
20:05 Jul 27, 2002 Hacker
20:05 Jul 27, 2002 Leet
20:03 Jul 27, 2002 Root
20:02 Jul 27, 2002 Hacker
19:59 Jul 27, 2002 Hacker
19:58 Jul 27, 2002 Hacker
19:54 Jul 27, 2002 Principle of least astonishment
19:54 Jul 27, 2002 Hacker
19:52 Jul 27, 2002 Trance music
19:51 Jul 27, 2002 Trance music
For 208.24.115.6:
20:20 Jul 27, 2002 Hacker
For 141.157.232.26:
20:19 Jul 27, 2002 Hacker
Most of these were complete replacements with discoherent statements.
Such as "TAP IS THE ABSOLUTE DEFINITION OF THE NOUN HACKER" for Hacker.
For the specifics follow http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Special:Ipblocklist
and look at the contribs.
--mav
Dear all,
Most of you would be aware of some of the discussions that have occurred
around Wikipedia in the Norwegian languages. Since the last round of
discussions on this list, there has been a lot of internal debate, as
well as what seems to be a fairly widely accepted agreement following
voting.
This e-mail intends to, after a brief recap on Norwegian language and
wikipedia issues, take those interested through the latest development
and will stake out the road ahead. It is also intended to inform the
international community about the current agreement on no.wikipedia, so
as to prevent misunderstandings in the future.
Finally, we will mention an unfortunate reaction to the vote by a small
number of users at the Norwegian Bokmål/Riksmål (no:) wikipedia who want
to disregard the result of the voting and are planning to create a
_third_ Norwegian wikipedia with the sole mission of mixing the contents
of the two current Norwegian versions.
== A short language history of Norway ==
Spoken Norwegian ("norsk") (ISO 639-2 alpha-2 code "no") is in a fairly
unique situation compared to most other languages of the world in that
it has two widely accepted written standards, Bokmål (ISO 639-2 alpha-2
code "nb") and Nynorsk (ISO 639-2 alpha-2 code "nn"). By national
legislation they are both regarded as official written forms of
Norwegian. In addition, many people still make a distinction between
Bokmål and its precursor which still is in use, Riksmål.
Briefly speaking, Bokmål and Riksmål are descendants of the Danish
written language. Until the 1800s, Danish was the only widely used
written language in Norway as a result of four centuries of union with
Denmark. With increasing independence came a wish to norwegianise the
Danish standard, with Knud Knudsen at the forefront for changing parts
of the vocabulary and orthographics. Thus, Riksmål, and later Bokmål,
resulted. These forms together are today probably used by about 90% of
Norway's population, or somewhere around 3,500,000 people.
Parallel to this development, a new written standard was created by Ivar
Aasen. He travelled extensively throughout Norway, and based his new
language, landsmål, on the grammar and vocabulary of dialect samples
from around the country. This was later renamed Nynorsk. Modern Nynorsk
differs significantly from modern Bokmål, and may be linguistically
looked upon as as different (or as similar if you like) as Swedish is to
Danish. For English or Dutch/German speakers, the differences may be
likened to those between (Lowland) Scots and English or Low German and
Dutch. Today it is estimated that about 500,000-600,000 people have
Nynorsk as their first written language.
More information about the Norwegian language history can be found in
English, German, French, Spanish or Portuguese on the website of the
Norwegian Language Council:
http://www.sprakrad.no/templates/Page.aspx?id=653
== A short history of Wikipedia in Norwegian ==
The first Norwegian wikipedia started 26 November 2001 on the subdomain
no.wikipedia.org. As most wikipedias, its contributor and article count
started really picking up around the end of 2003. At the time, it
accepted all written standards of Norwegian, although the amount of
Nynorsk was minimal. There were already several debates about the
feasibilty and appropriateness of keeping the two languages united on
one Wikipedia. On 31 July 2004 a Wikipedia for Nynorsk was created.
The creation of nn:, however, split the community at no: wikipedia. Many
felt that given that Nynorsk now had its own wikipedia, no: should
become a Bokmål/Riksmål Wikipedia only. Others disapproved and claimed
that there was no need to change and that it should continue its
language policy of accepting all and keep its interwiki link name of
"Norsk".
Nynorsk Wikipedia soon proved a success, as it within the next few
months gathered several people who had felt uncomfortable in the
(mainly) Bokmål environment at no:. The name displayed in interwiki
links became "Norsk (nynorsk)" (languages are not spelt with upper case
in Norwegian). To date it continues to be one of the fastest growing
wikipedias, with a steady article increase, now at over 6000 articles
and >50 editors with more than 10 edits since arrival.
== Votes ==
The issue of no:'s language policy has come up time and again, and a
vote was held in March ([[:no:Wikipedia:Målform]]) as to which policy to
adapt. Independent of the method of the tally (whether or not to include
new contributors etc.) there was a majority for switching to a
Bokmål/Riksmål only language policy (50% for Bokmål/Riksmål, 43.2% for
Bokmål/Riksmål/Nynorsk/Høgnorsk, and 6.8% for the official variants
Bokmål/Nynorsk only).
Following this result, there is now going to be a vote on which
interwiki link name will most appropriately reflect the current language
policy of no:. The result of this vote will most likely be either "Norsk
(bokmål)" or "Norsk (bokmål/riksmål)".
Understandably, there has also been a debate as to whether the subdomain
should change from "no" to "nb", as this is the correct representation
of Bokmål according to ISO 639-2. However, there is some resentment
towards such a move and currently a general acceptance in letting the
Bokmål wikipedia stay at "no". The alternative some have suggested is a
server-side redirect from "no" to "nb", in the same way that "nb" today
is a server-side redirect to the equivalent page on "no".
== Summary of the problem ==
Unfortunately, a small group of users (who all write Bokmål/Riksmål) are
ignoring the results from the vote, and are claiming they want to
re-establish a wikipedia for all written standards of Norwegian. They
claim they have been in touch with people centrally in Wikimedia
(developers? stewards?) and that they have so far received positive
comments. With this email, we would like to state the fact that there
have been no official decisions about creating a third Norwegian
wikipedia containing both Bokmål and Nynorsk, it is merely an unofficial
initiative from a small group of users which started a sign-on list at
[[:no:Bruker:Norsk_Wikipedia]]. A spontaneous list with signatures
against this activity was immediately created at
[[:no:Wikipedia-diskusjon:Fellesnorsk]]. The process of creating a third
Norwegian wikipedia has not gone through a voting process in any of the
two existing Norwegian wikipedias (no: and nn:) and can not be
considered as a decision by the Norwegian Wikipedia community.
We believe the creation of a third wikipedia under the Wikimedia
foundation would have a serious and unfortunate impact on the existing
wikipedias in Norwegian, no: and nn:, and would undermine Wikipedia's
reputation in Norway. This being said, we are all for extensive co-
operation between the four Scandinavian language wikipedias (including
Swedish and Danish), as evident by the recent creation of
[[:meta:Skanwiki]], the Scandinavian meta-pages, and the use of featured
articles from neighbour wikipedias.
== Conclusion ==
Hopefully, this letter will help people better understand the
complicated language situation of the Norwegian Wikipedia community, so
as to give a background on which discussion can take place on this list
in the future, such as the inevitable debate following a possible
request for a re-establishment of the common (and third!) Norwegian
Wikipedia.
>From the community of no.wikipedia.org and nn.wikipedia.org,
Bjarte Sørensen [[:meta:User:BjarteSorensen]] (Administrator/bureaucrat on nn:)
Lars Alvik [[:no:User:Profoss]] (Administrator/bureaucrat on no:)
Øyvind A. Holm [[:no:User:Sunny256]] (Administrator on no:)
Onar Vikingstad [[:no:User:Vikingstad]] (Administrator on no:)
Jon Harald Søby [[:no:User:Jhs]] (Administrator on no:)
Chris Nyborg [[:no:User:Cnyborg]] (Administrator on no:)
Guttorm Flatabø [[:no:User:Dittaeva]] (Administrator on nn:)
Gunleiv Hadland [[:meta:User:Gunnernett]] (Administrator on nn:)
Jarle Fagerheim [[:nn:User:Jarle]] (Administrator on nn:)
Øyvind Jo Heimdal Eik [[:en:User:Pladask]] (Administrator on nn: and no:)
Kristian André Gallis [[:nn:User:Kristaga]]
Vegard Wærp [[:no:User:Vegardw]]
Nina Aldin Thune [[:no:User:Nina]]
Thor-Rune Hansen [[:no:User:ThorRune]]
Claes Tande [[:no:User:Ctande]]
Arnt-Erik Krokaa [[:no:User:AEK]]
Rune Sattler [[:no:User:Shauni]]
I have been thinking it over and decided to face reality. I have lost
all my believe in the wikimediaprojects. So much even that I am now
adding content to places outside of the wikimediaprojects instead of
having to deal with all the 100000000000000's of procedures and rules
being implemented by people who do not even know how to write an article.
The projects have been taken over by a group of people, mostly
teenagers, whom apparently have lost all sight of realism and have taken
other people's work hostage, without creating one bit of content
themselves. Who feel that adding templates, writing rules and policing
(the process) is more important than what we set out to do. Also there
is a very very very strong western bias in the projects. Ideas and
processes are launched which might work perfectly in a western world
(like the rules for verification) but which fall flat on their face when
applied to non-western items. When someone actually rises this point on
the lists (me) it is ignored.
Also Jimbo's statement that en: wikipedia has covered most subjects
disappoints me. This might be true for subjects on developed countries.
But the projects are heavily lacking in the same sort of content with
regards to the developing world. While every lake in the US probably has
an article. Most Asian / African / South American countries have barely
got articles describing these kind of features. And if someone does
write an article about it, it gets deleted as non-encyclopedic. Also
wikipedia's become very nationalistic like the nl: wikipedia where a
fairly large group feels non-Dutch and non-Belgian topics should not be
covered in the Dutch language edition! And they actually wrote rules to
enforce this.
The amount of people who only care about their own backyard (the west)
and wanna delete everything they do not understand has grown to big.
Also other idiocism like on nl: wikipedia where procedure is 100x more
important than the smooth running of the project, resulting in an
everyone can insult everyone situation and no-one get's actually blocked
is taking to much time and stress.
Jimbo invented the wheel with the wikimedia projects. Unfortunately the
wheel never evolved, nor will it in the current climate. Every form of
progress of the projects in something meaningfull and working gets
blocked or grinded in bureaucracy by a group of people who want to be
the boss.
Meanwhile on the boardlevel politicians rule who only give a shit about
themselves and about political games. I have seen many of these games
played out over the years. Also the projects diversify to much and to
much new niches where new small groups start that take their particular
niche hostage (commons being a prime example) are started. Instead of
looking at how things can co-operate people start their own new kingdoms
and fiefdoms (like wikitionaryz, which is GerardM's fiefdom) into things
that are not our core imho. We are about creating content, not spreading
it, let other people do that job.
On some projects I still have moderating bits, I hereby ask the stewards
to take these bits away as I do not wish to spend to much time anymore
on the projects, I might shout a bit from the sideline. The wikimedia
projects will always exist, and the original idea was great.
Unfortunately Winston Churchill was right .... democracy works in theory
only. When the masses take over like on our project, the sum gets
lowered to the level of the masses. Which means herd thinking.
Waerth
I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you
would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of
generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be
purchased and freed.
Dream big. Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase
copyrights to be made available under a free license. What would you
like to see purchased and released under a free license?
Photos libraries? textbooks? newspaper archives? Be bold, be specific,
be general, brainstorm, have fun with it.
I was recently asked this question by someone who is potentially in a
position to make this happen, and he wanted to know what we need, what
we dream of, that we can't accomplish on our own, or that we would
expect to take a long time to accomplish on our own.
--Jimbo
http://www.ioltechnology.co.za/article_page.php?from=rss_IOLTechOpenSource&…
China 'eases restrictions' on Wikipedia
20 October 2006 at 08h46
Washington - China has eased restrictions on access to the United
States-based online encyclopedia Wikipedia after blocking the site for
nearly a year, a researcher says.
Andrew Lih, a Chinese-American researcher who has worked at Columbia
University and Hong Kong University, said in his blog this week that
Beijing authorities began opening up access October 10.
Lih said the English language version of Wikipedia was "widely
accessible" while the Chinese version had "spotty access."
--
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Frederick Noronha http://fn.goa-india.org 9822122436 +91-832-240-9490
http://fredericknoronha.wordpress.comhttp://www.flickr.com/photos/fn-goa/
Free Software gives you the freedom to run, study, copy and improve software!
Hello all,
At the start of this month, I started to summarise the foundation-l
mailing list. This weekend, I'm starting to summarise wikipedia-l as
well. You may find the summaries at:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/LSS
---
Pat Gunn
mod: csna, bmcm, bmco, cooa, cona, clpd, coom
http://dachte.org
When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if
it is called "the People's Stick"
-- Mikhail Bakunin
Yesterday National Public Radio featured an interview on Talk of the Nation
with Jimmy about this question, including input from listeners on what they
would want freed.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6387888
Also, a reminder that the wishlist and links to all the various threads is
here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Copyright_wishlist
-- phoebe
On 10/15/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote:
>
>
> I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you
> would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of
> generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be
> purchased and freed.
>
> Dream big. Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase
> copyrights to be made available under a free license. What would you
> like to see purchased and released under a free license?
>
>
Jimmy Wales wrote:
> I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you
> would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of
> generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be
> purchased and freed.
>
> Dream big. Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase
> copyrights to be made available under a free license. What would you
> like to see purchased and released under a free license? ...
>
> I was recently asked this question by someone who is potentially in a
> position to make this happen, and he wanted to know what we need, what
> we dream of, that we can't accomplish on our own, or that we would
> expect to take a long time to accomplish on our own.
Although this is not associated with text in any manner, I strongly
recommend that the rights and metal parts for all the pre-1942 sound
recordings now held by Sony BMG (which includes just about everything
recorded in the U.S. before 1942, including the Columbia/ARC and RCA
Victor catalogs) be purchased and "freed". I don't know the exact
number of recordings, but this collection definitely comprises over a
million "sides."
Although I'm not certain Sony BMG would entertain an offer, there is
some reason to believe they might, especially if linked in with some
potential tax write-offs and the positive publicity that this would
give Sony BMG.
For background information on the unusual copyright status of early
U.S. sound recordings (which is surprising!), and whether or not Sony
BMG might even be interested, refer to the article I wrote about the
topic of freeing the older sound recordings:
http://www.projectgramophone.org/TeleRead-Article-01Nov2003.html
(Especially refer to the section entitled: "A Note To The Major Media
Companies: Why Not Donate Your Older Sound Recording Catalogues?")
Note that this is serious. I have close ties to Brewster Kahle at the
Internet Archive (we've explored how to get many of the older
recordings digitized and placed online and have even talked about
acquiring a large collection of 78 rpm records), plus I have close
connections with the Association for Recorded Sound Collections:
http://www.arsc-audio.org/
I'll be happy to discuss this further with the person in the position
to potentially make the purchase.
Jon Noring
This is one of the more interesting IP initiatives I've heard of,
even simply as an intellectual exercise. Even better if it actually
happens.
I'll add two suggestions to the wish list. First a purely selfish
plea for content lost: the Voyager Company catalog of electronic
media. This is almost a recursive request since several Voyager
titles were themselves exercises in freeing legacy works. I'll lose
access to the titles on my shelf whenever Apple ceases support for
OS-9. Some, like "With Open Eyes", are great works by the standards
of any medium. Presumably there are many other publishers from the
early, perhaps pre-internet, days of electronic media whose
historically significant content is at risk.
A more revolutionary suggestion is to open up the technical standards
process. Many international standards are proprietary, such as
ISO-8601 that any of you who were engaged in Y2K remediation efforts
must surely be familiar with. Familiar with, but perhaps have never
seen a copy of, because they charge real bucks. Another example just
from the area of timekeeping is ITU-R TF.460-6. What is this you
say? The internationally recognized (e.g., by our State Dept.)
definition of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). UTC underlies
standard civil time throughout the world. Here is a theater-of-the-
absurd quote from the minutes of a recent ITU meeting of their
working party 7A:
"After the introduction of the document the WP-7A counsellor
informed WP-7A that a preliminary document i.e. the PDRR,
could not be circulated beyond WP-7A according to ITU-R
resolutions nor could the currently in effect Recommendation
ITU-R TF.460-6, be attached to the SRG report with an
explanation of proposed changes since all ITU-R
Recommendations are only sold by the ITU-R."
To give you a sense of the kind of service opening this standard up
would provide, the ITU (International Telecommunications Union) is
debating removing any connection between UTC (i.e., the time on your
wall, your wrist, your cell-phone and your laptop) and the motion of
the Sun in the sky, by eliminating leap seconds. Small in the short
term. World-changing in the long term.
Vast number of other standards documents that underlie the
infrastructure of the modern world are similarly protected behind
proprietary walls. I recall a piece from the early days of Wired
magazine describing one noble soul's fruitless efforts to convince
ISO to loosen their proprietary policies. Actually, there is a third
suggestion – buy up the rights to back issues of Wired and other
"popular" journals, not just the academic literature. Anybody who
has tried to navigate wired.com to find their rare precious nuggets
would thank you!
Rob Seaman
National Optical Astronomy Observatory
It is possible that article about Belgrade passes featured article
nomination (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_article_candidates/Belgrade).
My question is: May we target some date, so we can make some promotion
here in Belgrade/Serbia as Wikimedia Serbia?
Also, it opens similar questions about other featured articles on
en...? (Also, it is not related only to English Wikipedia.) May we
have some coordination?