Now that the info-en email address is on the "contact us" pages, the
amount of mail is increasing, and we need more help.
We are looking for a long-standing contributor with a good knowledge of
the English Wikipedia and its policies and procedures. You should also
have a working knowledge of other projects. You need to have infinite
patience to reply to the same newbie questions time after time, and a
friendly and helpful style of writing. Most important is the ability
not to laugh at people who write to tell us we have a massive security
hole - an edit link on each page!!!11!.
Being active on IRC is an advantage - it makes a real difference to be
able to talk over the tricky ones sometimes.
Pay is at the usual Wikipedia rate of lots of good feeling and all the
cookies you can eat.
Hopefully there will be a big rush of applicants for this wonderful job,
and I will ask those volunteering to answer a few mails to see if you
have the style we are looking for. Jimbo will have the final say though.
Please mail me directly rather than replying to the list if you are
interested.
Thanks,
sannse
p.s. I lied about the cookies
Based on a list collected by [[user:Bluemoose]], I have generated
link-lists at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Encarta_Encyclopedia_topics
There are 19 lists, with initially 2000 links each, *including existing
links*. The lists will have to be manually cleaned from links to
existing articles (due to naming problems, I would not recommend a bot).
I have already done two of these lists (one and a half, to be honest, as
#19 was only half full), but now it becomes a PITA ;-)
So please, assist in the effort. Each of the remaining 17 pages has 40
sections to ease editing. If just a few of you do some sections, the
lists will be usable pretty soon.
Thanks,
Magnus
There is some ethical validity to respecting Iranian copyright law
whether or not an obligation exists. Iran's failure to participate in
international treaties on the matter should not be a primary concern.
Infringement of Iranian copyrights are still infringements even if US
courts would not consider those laws. Copyright terms in Iran (life +
30) are still shorter than in most countries, so there would be no need
to extend them beyond that time. I'm not aware of any Iranian copyright
provision regarding the depiction of women, and you admit that you don't
know about that either. That aspect seems like a red herring.
Ec
Fastfission wrote:
>Well the English servers are in the USA, which means they are subject
>to US law, not Iranian law. If we *were* subject to Iranian law, I'm
>betting there are a number of other Iranian laws we are already
>breaking! I don't know the Iranian laws about depictions of women but
>I'm willing to bet they've got a few that we're well afoul of.
>
>FF
>
>On 8/8/05, Roozbeh Pournader <roozbeh(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>On 8/6/05, Fastfission <fastfission(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Why not make a special tag template for this? Something along the lines of:
>>>
>>>"This image, produced by the current government of Iran, are believed
>>>to not fall under U.S. copyright laws as Iran is not a member of WIPO.
>>>Should this change, though, the usage of this image is still believed
>>>to fall under the "fair use" clause of U.S. copyright law. Use in
>>>mediums other than on the servers of the English-language Wikipedia,
>>>hosted in the United States by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation,
>>>may not be exempt from either of these requirements."
>>>
>>>
>>There are problems with that:
>>1) I believe the Wikimedia Foundation would be breaking Iranian law by
>>distributing those material to Iran, that is, serving its pages to
>>Iranian readers. If it wishes to use the material, it should block
>>Iran from its readership.
>>2) It's not only the government, and other Iranians may wish to sue
>>the Wikimedia Foundation.
>>
>>
Well how about that.
Come into wikipedia IRC chat, get ambushed by NicholasT who's on his usual
rampage, get sworn at and called names and challenged to "prove" this, then
kickbanned before I can respond by jerks who scream "troll"?
Aren't you people real nice pieces of work, huh?
A. Nony Mouse
who's in the right even if the overinflated egos won't admit it.
On 8/10/05, A. Nony Mouse <mousyme(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Yes, I'll admit now. I'll own up. I violated [[WP:POINT]] in an amazing
> way.
>
> Amazing for one reason, that is.
>
> You see, my little social experiment, which was originally created
> just to see how Wikipedia's elites actually behaved, bore more fruit
> than I can count.
>
> A few months back, I created two accounts. One was named KaintheScion,
> a reference to a video game. Remember it?
>
> The other was named ElKabong. Named after the alternate identity of
> "Quick-Draw" McGraw, and a pun on how hot-tempered the Wikipedia high
> cabal muckymucks are.
>
> The experiment worked brilliantly. Unfortunately, it also created a
> bit of a monster named David Gerard and a whole lot of sub-Monsters
> who saw an opportunity.
>
> You see, ElKabong and KaintheScion were designed to break rules.
> Quickly. Painfully. They got everyone's attention. So much so that the
> actual procedures for dispute resolution were ignored. Nobody
> attempted to contact them. They went straight from a backwards, tilted
> RFC into a quick RFAR.
>
> And then of course there were no less than SIX innocent users who got
> drawn in. Yep, that's right. I didn't even DO anything with the
> situation, save for calling for leniency when it was obvious another
> user was caught up in it.
>
> Count 'em out.
> 1. Enviroknot
> 2. Kurita77
> 3. Existentializer
> 4. Ni-ju-Ichi
> 5. Devilbat
> 6. Pukachu
>
> SIX users caught up in the David Gerard witch hunt. And that doesn't
> even count his decision to Mod-by-default this user list while
> screaming "Enviroknot" as his excuse.
>
> And you all just went along with it. Now the name "Enviroknot" is like
> screaming "witch" in Salem while standing next to the Cotton Mather.
> And what's REALLY funny is that Enviroknot wasn't even one I created,
> he or she was just an innocent user that certain individuals decided
> to throw into the RFAR on a lark in order to get rid of an opponent on
> Islam-based pages.
>
> So yeah. I violated WP:POINT because this point needed making. And as
> luck would have it, Gerard was nice enough to abuse the hell out of
> his authority and make my point FOR me.
>
> Congratulations.
>
> P.S. I know damn well this message won't get through to the en-l list,
> because Gerard would never admit to being played like a sucker. So
> I've BCC'ed it to plenty of individuals as well. No point in it going
> to waste.
>
What is the prevailing etiquette on what to do with positive responses
to requests for confirmation of licensing permission?
I just received a confirmation of permission requests for [[Brown
Berets]], which had previously been listed as a possible copyvio.
Presumably we need to keep a copy of this authorisation, but I'm
reluctant to post it to the article's talk page because of privacy
issues and general netiquette.
Any ideas? I've given myself the job of working through the [[WP:CP]]
backlog, so I have a feeling I'm going to be doing a fair few permission
requests over the next few days.
Best,
N.
--
Nicholas Boalch
School of Modern Languages & Cultures Tel: +44 (0) 191 334 3420
University of Durham Fax: +44 (0) 191 334 3421
New Elvet, Durham DH1 3JT, UK WWW: http://nick.frejol.org/
I was looking for precedents for sanctioning creative disruption (as
described in [[WP:TROLL]]).
But didn't find any at: [[Wikipedia:Arbitration policy/Precedents]].
What if an editor does the following for a couple of months:
* removing all mesages from their talk page (and all the talk pages of
his user pages)
* creating user subpages about alleged misbehavior of his "enemies",
giving them "hypcorisy awards", accusing them of being members of a
cabal, etc.
* [[WP:POINT]], marking pages, categories for deletion in retaliation
* [[WP:TROLL]] (marking articles of his arch-enemy as stubs en masse,
starting stupid votes on policy changes, being a pain in the neck at
the village pump (but carefully))
* Adding provocative (but not necessarily very rude) comments in
article discussions and edit summaries
* Retaliative voting against anything the people on his hit list support
* Rallying troops on internet forums for a "freedom fight" in
Wikipedia to push a particular POV
So if a user learns to do all this without violating the "hard"
policies like [[WP:NPA]] and [[WP:3RR]] too much, can he go on
forever?
Can anyone point me to the closest precedent to this behavior and what
happened to such creative trolls?
Thanks, nyenyec
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Raul654/Raul%27s_laws - Raul's 6th law
of Wikipedia (formulated in November, 2004):
"Wikipedia's steadily increasing popularity means that within the next
year or two, we will begin to see organized corporate astroturfing
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing> campaigns."
Prediction confirmed - August 28, 2005 -
http://www.smh.com.au/news/icon/wikipedia-worries/2005/08/23/1124562860192.…
"However, the concern continues. One anonymous reader contacted
Boingboing telling them he worked at a marketing company that uses
Wikipedia for its online marketing strategies.."That includes planting
of viral information in entries, modification of entries to point to new
promotional sites or 'leaks' embedded in entries to test diffusion of
information. Wikipedia is just a more transparent version of [online
meeting place] Myspace as far as some companies are concerned. We love it."
--Mark
(User:Raul654)
and now that this fine-sounding investigation has
proved that innocent users get penalty decisions
slapped on them dictatorially on the spot without any
dispute resolution,
that means you are using stolen writing on article
pages. Any writing you keep there, that comes
originally from a wronged user. By not having any
properly applied rules and denying that a user right
to them exists, you cease to have any claim that
former contributions from those users are agreed not
to be copyright, and it is an act of ideas theft not
to remove every word. Remember all those copyright
worries you've been writing about in the Nazi topic?
This is further to them.
By a user whose talk page has just been locked to stop
me continuing to post onto it links to evidence of
unjust processes. It is a completely open act, that
anyone can see online, of suppression of evidence, and
done by one of the same admins whose actions were
originally involved in my case: Redwolf24. He openly
writes that if talk pages are used for protest instead
of for begging "to make us want" to unblock you, they
should be locked. I have saved a copy of the page in
case it gets totally deleted. Now, A Nony Mouse and
Skyring and anyone else interested in these things,
hurry up to look at Usertalk:Tern and record this.
>Message: 4
>Date: Tue, 30 Aug 2005 17:41:24 -0500
>From: "A. Nony Mouse" <mousyme(a)gmail.com>
>Subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Exercises in social
>engineering
> On 8/10/05, A. Nony Mouse <mousyme(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Yes, I'll admit now. I'll own up. I violated
[[WP:POINT]] in an
amazing
> way.
>
> Amazing for one reason, that is.
>
> You see, my little social experiment, which was
originally created
> just to see how Wikipedia's elites actually behaved,
bore more fruit
> than I can count.
... So much so that
the
> actual procedures for dispute resolution were
ignored. Nobody
> attempted to contact them. They went straight from a
backwards,
tilted
> RFC into a quick RFAR.
>
> And then of course there were no less than SIX
innocent users who got
> drawn in. Yep, that's right. I didn't even DO
anything with the
> situation, save for calling for leniency when it was
obvious another
> user was caught up in it.
___________________________________________________________
To help you stay safe and secure online, we've developed the all new Yahoo! Security Centre. http://uk.security.yahoo.com
> From: Anthony DiPierro <wikispam(a)inbox.org>
>
> Even then there is relatively little incentive for a traditional
> encyclopedia to attack Wikipedia in the first place.
I agree, but this assumes that the attacker is a) well-informed, b)
rational, c) primarily interested in his own business interests. My
personal interpretation is that the SCO business shows that this is
not always true.
> Besides, the support would come pouring in from all over
> the place. We'd probably get plenty of legal support donated to us.
Agreed. And that sort of thing probably helped get Dmitri Sklyarov
out of jail. But my point is, he was _in_ jail for a couple of months.
> in a case like this where we're
> actually in the right, the support would be tremendous.
> The only reason we should even consider backing down on this is if
> there's a serious legal argument that keeping this list would somehow
> taint the rest of the encyclopedia. I highly doubt this is true, but
> I'm not a lawyer, and if a lawyer says this is plausible it's
> something we should look at hard.
The context of my comments was Jimmy Wales' comment in regard to the
Encarta list:
>Opinions of our legal team are
>divided about the issue,.
Lawyers looked at it and said _they weren't sure._ This is a
discussion about what a prudent persons does when the lawyers say
_they're not sure._ You can interpret this to mean: "They're not sure
there's a problem, so let's not worry about it, and certainly lets
not worry about a list of _Britannica_ articles, or a _modified_ list
of Encara articles. Or you can interpret this to mean "That means
they're not sure this is OK so let's back away a bit?"
When the lawyers say they're not sure, the question is whether the
glass is half prudent or half paranoid,
> But otherwise, if it's just a list, I don't see the problem. The
> worst reasonable case scenario is that we have to take it down.
I think _that's_ a very good point.
> A long drawn out legal battle; a chance to set a precedent that can be
> used in the future; that'd probably be a good thing.
And that's where I part company with you. I am interested in helping
to write an encyclopedia, not help fight in long drawn out legal
battles.
--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith(a)verizon.net
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/