A proposal follows that is commercial in nature. I am posting it to this
list per the instructions of one of the Wikimedia Foundation Board members.
*****************
I would like to encourage the Wikimedia Foundation to:
* Accept e-gold www.e-gold.com donations,
* Post a prominent link to the e-gold site, using syntax that would
enable the Foundation to capture referral incentives.
e-gold is an alternative payment system that mobilizes the value of
gold, as currency, for payments over the Internet. Online since 1996,
the e-gold system serves over 1.5 million users in 165 countries. In
2003 alone, the e-gold system processed 15 million payments, conveying
an aggregate value of $700 million. The e-gold website receives about
one million visits per week. There is over $26 million worth of e-gold
in continuous circulation, backed by 1.88 metric tonnes of physical gold
in appropriate custodial arrangements. The system is highly robust
technically and can scale readily.
It costs nothing to create an e-gold account. There is no obligation and
e-gold never sells/releases customer information (without a court
order). There is no fee for the payer who makes an e-gold payment. The
payment processing fee is deducted from the recipient. It is around 5%
for tiny micropayments but quickly falls below 1% for larger value
payments. The maximum fee is 5 centigrams of e-gold, equivalent to about
70 cents at current exchange rates.
Every e-gold account can pay or receive payment and there is no merchant
application process required to use the e-gold automation interfaces.
The pertinent automation interface is the e-gold Shopping Cart
Interface. It can be implemented in a simplified form in a few minutes.
The full spec is at http://sci.e-gold.com
The unique characteristics that would make e-gold advantageous for the
Wikimedia Foundation include:
* e-gold is truly global, enabling Wikimedia to receive donations
from China or anywhere else as readily as from the US,
* e-gold payments settle immediately and are irreversible.
The bits that sometimes confuse people...
* Since e-gold represents real gold, it is denominated in weight
units. This is best understood by thinking of e-gold as if it were
a foreign currency. Like any other currency, its exchange value
relative to the US dollar will continuously fluctuate. This is a
source of exchange rate risk, but can also be a good thing.
* People often ask "How do I get e-gold". The rigorously precise
answer is "just like you get any other money - you receive a
payment from someone who already has some". Practically speaking
though, what people generally mean by their question is "where can
I exchange dollars to get e-gold?". Well, for purposes of the
Foundation accepting e-gold payments, the answer is "Who cares?
The Foundation would be receiving donations and it doesn't matter
how the people clicking to the Foundation acquired their e-gold.
If there was a cost involved, none of that cost is passed through
or borne by the Foundation". But the answer you probably think you
are looking for is "Go to www.omnipay.com (OmniPay is a company in
Melbourne, FL that I'm CEO of) and use the exchange interface.
OmniPay has the most competitive spreads for exchanging USD for
e-gold and vice versa".
Sorry for such a long post. But one more thing in closing. e-gold is an
alternative that complements other payment systems. You would continue
to accept whatever modes of payment you already do. But in adding
e-gold, depending on the extent to which your website said nice things
about it and/or emphasized the links, you could benefit pretty
substantially by introducing your community of users to it. The e-gold
Referral Incentive Program is detailed at
http://www.e-gold.com/unsecure/incentive.htmeff.org and mozilla.org accept e-gold donations too.
sincere regards,
Dr. Douglas Jackson
Chairman, e-gold Ltd.
CEO, OmniPay
djackson(a)e-gold.com
Copyleft effectively kills any chance of it entering the mainstream press. It'll be effectively impossible for any mainstream publication to use any of the stories if there's a requirement that their work be released under a license incompatible with all of their existing licenses. That rules out any likely form of copyleft if the project is to achieve its major goal, though with sufficient studying of all of the contracts news publishers have with their new sources I suppose it's conceivable that some form of copyleft license could be written to be incompatible with a small enough set of them for small publishers to use stories.
Copyleft is only necessary when you want to limit the people who can use the work. That's the antipathy of the objective of Wikinews, which is to get the news published as widely as possible.
-----Original Message-----
From: Mathias Schindler <neubau(a)presroi.de>
To: Robin Shannon <robin.shannon(a)gmail.com>, Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Fri, 03 Dec 2004 13:22:13 +0100
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Wikinews Licensing
Robin Shannon wrote:
> Well i have contributed 2 articles to wikinews so far, and one of them
> i lifted (more or less) straight from wikipedia (from an article that
> was written about 5 minutes before i sat down to write). I can think
> that there would be plenty of times when lifting a paragraph or so
> from wikipedia would be useful in wikinews. Hence while i would like
> it to be PD, i think that GFDL (provided that becomes CC-BY-SA
> complient sometime) would be the most practical.
Yesterday, ddp, a medium sized news agency copied [[de:Misshandlung]]
from wikipedia 1:1 and sent it over their channel. They didn't even try
to stick to the GNU FDL and it took me some time to explain copyright to
them.
I will not participate in a PD wikinews that does not ensure that free
text remains free. CC-BY-SA does not block newspapers from using the
content and because of the <buzzword>synergy</buzzword> hopes regarding
wikipedia, i suggest a dual licensing of GFDL and CC-BY-SA (keeping in
mind that these two should merge some day...)
Mathias
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I'm trying to herd [[en:Xenu]] through Featured Articled Candidates. It's
getting general support and many useful suggestions have been made. One was
that if the thing about Hubbard's handwriting is mentioned, a scan of at
least that word should be put in.
So I've put the scan in as fair use for academic research purposes. Which
it blatantly is. And the full scanned page has been on Dave Touretzky's
site on the subject (http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/OTIII/) for nine years
without a legal threat. However, the Church of Scientology has threatened
others in the past.
I'm not keen to indulge in copyright paranoia - the tiny page fragment in
question is OBVIOUS fair use in a encyclopedia, of all places - but thought
it would be appropriate to at least mention it to the Foundation.
Particularly as Clearwater is just down the road from St.Petersburg in
Florida ;-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenuhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Xenuhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_article_candidates/Xenu
- d.
I have posted a brief summary of the first month of Wikinews operations
and my thoughts on where the project is going:
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/User:Eloquence/State_of_the_Wiki
This summary can also be used for the next WikiQuarto newsletter.
All best,
Erik
>Hi,>now that we're about to move demo.wikinews.org to en.wikinews.org, we have >to think about a procedure for setting up other language domains. If any >decision on this matter has already been made by the Board, please let me >know.
Not that I know.
I would like that we three have time to discuss this before decisions are taken please.
>It should be noted that on two of the language voting pages, no majority >was reached on starting the project. These are French and Chinese. Others >had very small participation.>In the original proposal, I suggested that Wikinews can be set up in any >accepted Wikimedia project language where there is at least one interested >participant, and that 4 more regulars are required for the language to be >recognized as "official", and for the firsts sysops to be created.
I do think that "not recognising something official" even though it exists is nice
but totally irrealistic. As soon as wikinews exists, then we could always try to pretend it only
is "okay" in one language, but not okay or not part of wikimedia in another language, that would be
just ink on paper. For editors and mostly for readers, it will be there.
So, instead of pretending it is not recognised, we could 1) have a temporary adress of the type fr.demo.wikinews.org
and 2) have a temporary logo rather than the official and 3) put a warning on top of it.
I would like to ask the Board if this procedure is acceptable.If it is not, one possible >alternative would be to immediately set up language domains for any language where there >are more than 10 votes on the respective voting page on Meta, and more than 50% in favor. >This would currently mean Japanese and German. The vote could be re-opened, and kept >open permanently.
I am opposed to this. There is little sense to set up a language just based on editors in this language supporting the global project. What should lead the creation of a language subdomain is presence of editors, not support at a global poll. If some people are interested, let's open the domain, if not, we do not need to let an empty wiki prey of vandals.
I also think that the vote was meant to be global, not to decide which language would be created versus which languages would not be.
---------------------------------
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I would like a few things to be decided/ clarified regarding GFDL,
partly because I received some complaint by another Wikipedian that GFDL
is so difficult to understand that there needs to be an unofficial
guide to how to use Wikimedia contents in compliance with GFDL.
1. Is Wikimedia Foundation the "Publisher" as in GFDL of Wikimedia contents?
2. When people modify documents, one of the requirements is to change the title,
as in 4-A. The publisher of the original version may permit the licensee to
use the same title. Does Wikimedia Foundation permit that?
3. Another requirement is 4-J, the preservation of network locations of
previous versions. Does Wikimedia Foundation give permission not to preserve
the network locations?
My understanding is that answers to all three questions are yes. But I am
a bit unsure about the last one.
People tend to think link to the live article is important, as I understand.
Some people, based on American law, think this is a good substitute for
the requirement 4-I, the preservation of History section. That aside,
link back to individual articles are important for us to keep google rank.
I personally think this is not the part of contract, because the live article
is not necessarily the "previous version." But Wikimedia Foundation's
enforcement policy would be that if live articles are linked back from
individual pages, and some other important conditions are met, WMF does not
make a big noise about violation of 4-I.
In other words, my understanding is that WMF does not change the terms of GFDL,
but simply has some policy as a publisher regarding what type of violations are
bad enough for WMF to take actions.
I am not a lawyer, so my guesses and assumptions could well be wrong. I
appreciate your comments and clarifications.
Thanks,
Tomos
Tim was relaying speculation of mine. Two of Google's problems are marketing companies which use very similar affiliate sites linked to a parent company and companies which use real content with marketing junk added, using the key words in the real content to artificially raise ranks. Again, such things commonly point to a master site somewhere.
It's speculation as to whether this has tripped Google filters in some way or not. There are alternative possible reasons in many cases, with some mirrors providing more internal links and possibly spreading rank around within their site better. Some simply offer nicer or more features.
Personally, I think that it is a factor, but only Google knows.
I'm not keen on any great attempts to interpret the GFDL. It's best left as close to that document and nothing else as possible, to avoid the possibility of arguments and upset if an interpretation proves to be wrong or someone argues that some particular interpretation is an implied contract of some sort. This is close to the approach taken by MySQL, which the head of the company says deliberately avoids trying to interpret what the GPL means when applied to their software.
-----Original Message-----
From: Robin Shannon <robin.shannon(a)gmail.com>
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Wed, 8 Dec 2004 13:04:00 +1100
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] WMF as publisher as in GFDL
> Wikipedia's policy (not Wikimedia's) has been to coerce mirrors and
> forks into providing a link back by huffing and puffing about license
> violations, even though a link back is not required by the license. All
> you need to do to fulfill 4-I is create a "History" section like this:
>
> HISTORY
> * Some Mirror, 2004, John Copier, http://somemirror.org
> * Wikipedia, 2000-2002, Wikipedia contributors, http://www.wikipedia.org
> * Marxists Internet Archive, 2002, MIA volunteers,
> http://www.marxists.org
> * Nupedia, 2000-2001, Nupedia contributors, http://www.nupedia.org
> (see Wikipedia:Nupedia and Wikipedia for a list of articles this applies to)
>
> That's taken from [[Wikipedia:GFDL History (unofficial)]]. Since it's
> unofficial, you could assume it doesn't exist and just start your own
> section, omitting the 3rd and 4th entries.
>
> Wikimedia doesn't have any policy on this. The link back policy appears
> to have destroyed our Google ranking, triggering spam heuristics. In
> many cases we are ranked below the mirrors. This has forced Google to
> consider a change to their ranking algorithm.
what? sorry, why has the link back destroyed our ranking? isnt it that
the more places that link to us the better our rating, and also what
do you mean by spam heuristics? Why are we ranked below our mirrors?
gah, im confused,
paz y amor,
rjs
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This work is licensed under the Creative Commons
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Scott Nelson wrote:
>> The two most ideal domains are wp.net and wp.org
>
> Why would we want to associate wikipedia with WordPerfect? They've got
> nothing to do with each other :)
Similarly, I wonder why so many emails seem to be referring to the World
Monuments Fund. For those who share my interest in Wikipedia as a
trademark, I would suggest that one helpful way to protect its trademark
status is to practice actually using the word (properly, of course), and
*not* constantly acronymize it. The same applies to helping the world at
large learn that the nonprofit organization behind all of this is the
Wikimedia Foundation (not Wikipedia Foundation).
--Michael Snow
sep11.wikipedia.org is a spam magnet, and not really an appropriate
project of its own:
* not educational: outside our mission
* not a community: scope too narrow
* not verifiable
* no NPOV
* improperly located: sep11.wikipedia.org suggests association with
Wikipedia - it even uses a Wikipedia logo
We're apparently so embarrassed by it that we hide it from most of our
"Sister Projects" lists.
Well, I won't be too negative - there are some valuable memories there
that deserve to be preserved, and volunteers have kept it in presentable
shape.
So here's my offer:
With Board authorization, I would go over these pages, and transform them
into a static website. This could be located at some URL which has yet to
be decided, maybe 911memories.org or something like that. I would prefer a
location that is not directly associated with Wikimedia, though it could
be labeled a Wikimedia publication.
Wikipeople has been brought up as a potential assimilation project, but
that strikes me as too vague, and there's no real thrust behind it, and
I'm not sure Wikipeople is a good idea in the first place, so the static
version seems like the best way forward for now. We would of course
preserve and make available the wiki database in case we ever want to
integrate it into something else.
Another option would be to host it at Jimbo's free wiki hosting service,
Wikicities.com. That would disassociate it from Wikimedia while still
allowing interested people to work on it.
Thoughts?
Regards,
Erik
Hi,
Le Monday 6 December 2004 06:59, Brion Vibber a écrit :
> commons.wikipedia.org is now running on REL1_4. Overall it's looking
> pretty good, but there may yet be surprises. Large categories full of
> images present a bit of a difficulty, as least with the thumbnails not
> all rendered yet...
Great! That's very much appreciated by non English users who can now choose
the language interface.
> We'll expand the beta onto the other Wikimedia wikis over the next week
> or so.
May I suggest to put REL1.4 on Wikisource first as many users requested a
localized language interface there.
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Thanks a lot, Brion.
Yann
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