Hello,
I would like to have a discussion with someone in the foundation team
about setting up a new project around travel.
How might I take the discussion forward?
Kind regards
Wayne Samuel
As a part of my effort to enrich www.memorywiki.org, I would like to
take some of the personal memoir content from 9/11wiki and posting it to
the site. I think my audience would benefit from the memoirs, and that
the memoirs would be more widely read (eventually).
As I understand it, this sort of borrowing is allowed by the GNU
license. I will, of course, attribute the memoirs to the authors, and
say that they are borrowed from Wikipedia. In any event, I wanted to
ask the community for advice in this matter before I moved forward.
Thanks in advance, MP
Marshall Poe, Ph.D.
The Atlantic Monthly
600 New Hampshire Ave. NW
Washington, DC 20037
202-266-6511
mpoe(a)theatlantic.com
FYI, strange...
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2005/10/prweb303823.htm
The Great Wiki Raid of '05
Futurists from around the world conduct a 24 hour "knowledge assault"
on Wikipedia.org for the purpose of demonstrating how knowledge is
created in a digital world.
(PRWEB) October 30, 2005 -- The Great Wiki Raid of '05 begins at 12:01
A.M. 31 October. For 24 hours futurists from around the world will
mount a "knowledge assault" on Wikipedia.org, the world's largest
collaborative online encyclopedia. Their goal is simple: to improve
public knowledge about the field of futures studies.
The World Futures Studies Federation is the organizing force behind
The Great Wiki Raid. WFSF "raiders" will endeavor to add as much
information as they can, in multiple languages, regarding the topic
"futures studies" over the course of one day. Choosing Wikipedia as
their "target" acknowledges the dramatic way in which digital
technology is transforming knowledge creation and distribution.
Wikipedia, "The free Encyclopedia that anyone can edit," has grown in
less than five years to include editions in 200 languages. The English
language version alone contains over 790,000 articles. Articles from
Wikipedia have been quoted by the media, referenced in scholarly
journals and books, and even appeared as sources in governmental
debates. As its popularity continues to grow collaborative knowledge
making will become the norm. In the future, knowledge raids like this
one, and even knowledge wars might be frequent occurrences. How these
changes might impact the larger issues of culture, academics, and
politics are just a few of the topics that futurists are working to
better understand.
Those interested in observing the wiki raid as it takes place should
visit www.wikipedia.org. From the main page type "future studies" in
the search box and click on "go." The raid will be taking place from
00:01 GMT on 31 October until 00:01 GMT 1 November.
Contact:
Dr. Wendy L. Schultz
Wiki Raid Organizer
Ph number: +44-1865-284377
On 10/30/05, Ting Chen <Wing.Philopp(a)gmx.de> wrote:
>
> This is what stands in their own site as of:
> http://www.wikicn.com/wiki/维客中国
>
> The original site was named sopai.org. It was started at April 12, 2005. The
> three companies running it is named dopai.com, bokee.com and internet
> labratories (互联网实验室,
> chinalabs.com). At October 20, 2005 it changed its name to Wiki China.
FYI, bokee.com is a one of the more famous "blog" companies in China,
but it also has a reputation for commercializing blogs that has peeved
lots of grassroots bloggers. We should keep that in mind.
I also agree with Wing (who presented at Wikimania about the Chinese
Wikipedia) that the timing of the Wikipedia block and this site going
up seem like an interesting coincidence.
-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)
Jean-Baptiste Soufron <jbsoufron(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Actually, most laws only require us to record connection informations
> for a limited amount of time. I know that the delay is not established
> in France as of today, but 1 year is commonly accepted. Still, many
> lobbyists are asking for a 3 years delay in the next legislations.
>
In Italy ISP are still required to keep logs for several years.
The situation for other people is, as usual difficult to understand.
This means that also other people in Italy, to avoid any possible problems,
should preafear to keep logs for years. Many law are making requirements
more and more strictly. Everyone who process mail should keept a lot
of logs nowday in Italy, and things are going worse and worse.
AnyFile
Chris Jenkinson wrote on Privacy concerns
> Hi all,
>
> We had a rather large discussion today on privacy and its application on
> Wikipedia (specifically anonymous editing and the checkuser tool which
> is the subject of much debate at the moment).
>
> I am curious to whether the Wikimedia Foundation's privacy policy is
> compatible with EU legislation on privacy (which is tightly regulated),
> and whether it is obliged to be, as the Foundation hosts servers in the
> European Union (which are presumably subject to EU law).
Are any server located in the UE? Are only Paris and Amsterdam squid
present in UE or something more?
As a fist answer (actully problem in answering to this question) is
that there *NOT* exists a UE law on privacy, UE has approvved a law
about that but it is not a law in the strict sense. Every state of UE
has approved its own law about that basing that on the rights
explained in the UE decisions (yes, I know it is a very difficult
thing, very difficult to understand).
I have read the UE law years ago an I do not rember it well at the
moment. I remember the Italian legislation. It is very lacking and
fill of a lot of burocratic obbligation but with a lot of exception,
exemption, waivers and lacks in many important expects (even tese
expects were previously declared important)
The main important point of the Italian legislation is that (it may be
not an exaustive list, may be I am forgetting something)
1) you should inform people when you are gathering peronal information
(note that the law is about personal data only of people, there is no
protection on data of society, bussiness firm and so on) and who is
managing the data, in what matter and why and the instruction to use
their right about their data
2)You should give the right to people (and give them instruction on
how to obtian them) to know what datas you hold about them and to
required them to be delete on request. (Note that this rights are not
respect even by public and statal organization with the excuse of
being in duties of keeping datas by some other laws).
3) You should inform if datas will be keept on the state or if they
are going to be transitted abroad
Point 2 could be a little be problematic. Can we delete some datas if
people request it?
But the law is difficult to interpret and to understand what does it
mean. What really does personal information rellay mean? It certanly
includes the case when you ask people to give you personal date (e.g.
when you ask their name and address to mail them) and this apply even
if this is done on the web. But is just logging internet acess a
gathering of personal informations? Is it gathering of
nickname/username among personal datas? What if the user give as
username his/her real name?
On the other hand collectiong of e-mail address is a personal data
collectiong (even if you do not know the real name becouse you can
contact him/her with this data). One problem I have notice is that in
the login/registration page the user is not informed that if e-mail
address is given by default every user could send e-mail to it via the
"e.mail user interface" (even if without knowing the address and even
if this feature can be disable in options)
It is my opinion (but it just just this) that IP numbers are not a
personal informations (since they are just numbers.
Thake note that many different laws make compulsory to ISP service to
log and keep for a very long time much more information. The real
part of information that make possible to connect one IP to a person
(well actually even this is obiectable) is the part of datas hold by
the ISP (and how they could gather and keep them in violation of
people rights is a big problems are politicians are just ignoring
...as usual)
But the important and very difficult part to understand is about the
limit of the law about the geographic position. Are people outside EU
in the need to respect this law? If someone access to some personal
data on a server in EU (or Italy) from a different state is this a
trasfert of personal data. A tipical example of data trasfert is if
someone collect persoanl data in one state (say for exaple Italy) and
then send them to a society abroad to have them statistically analyzed
or for using them as a mailing lists address. In these example the
collector actively send the whole of the datas aborad. But is
accessing to some data from abroad the same thing or not? If data are
kept on a server in the same state and someone access to this server
from abroad can this be qualified as an abroad transfert or not?
But a crucial point is if gathering data about access to server is or
not a personal data (keep in mind that law is about only to personal
data, thing such knowing that the user who accessed the web server
today is the same of yesterday without knowing who the user is (e.g.
with a cooky) is *IN MY opinion* not compleately qualifing as personal
data)
On the other hands I strongly see the need that an editor of a page is
*STRONGLY* informed that everifing he/she send to the wiki... will
became immediately visible by every people accessing to the page and
so he/she should do it only if accept this (in particular, but not
limited to, personal data). I have found some people (even if I put
many rilevant note on that) send story on the Italian wikinews giving
their persoanl data (such as real name, mobile phone number and so on)
acting us they belive that the message will be only visible by the
"journalist" (like when you send a letter to a newspaper)
>
> I would also like to propose that any person with access to server logs
> (which include IP addresses), including people with access to the
> checkuser tool, should sign a legal agreement of some sort with the
> Wikimedia Foundation concerning non-disclosure of this information.
>
The more important part is not about disclusure, but that they act on
personal data in respect on the people's legal right and use them just
for the porpuse stated in the information given to people.
> I am unsure whether or not an IP address qualifies as "personal
> information" under EU law and I have contacted the UK Information
> Commissioner's Office asking them for their opinion.
>
> Thoughts on the legal agreement proposal, and answers to the question of
> legal obligations are much appreciated.
>
I am strongly in favor, if we want to expand ourselvese in EU, to
strongly search for EU support. Beside of economical support we can
also gather cosuling about these thing from EU
(Usaully the hardest part is to find out where to apply for a request
of support)
Brion Vibber wrote on Privacy concerns
> Chris Jenkinson wrote:
> > We had a rather large discussion today on privacy and its application on
> > Wikipedia (specifically anonymous editing and the checkuser tool which
> > is the subject of much debate at the moment).
>
> That's two distinct issues:
Completely agree
> > I am curious to whether the Wikimedia Foundation's privacy policy is
> > compatible with EU legislation on privacy (which is tightly regulated),
> > and whether it is obliged to be, as the Foundation hosts servers in the
> > European Union (which are presumably subject to EU law).
>
> I've been asking this for years... Check South Korea's laws as well, as
> we have servers there too.
This European squid server are a particular case. I do not know how
the legislation will consider it. The log on the squid about the squid
are surelly pertinent to UE, but what about the datas that just
transit on the squid to be delivered to the Florida server? People
belive that data are just sent to the wikipedia server well actually I
do not know where people belive it is)
Of course here there is a serious lacking in legislation on what and
who should be competent over the internet.
The squid case anyway is very similar to the cache server case and I
suppose that this case should be already discussed somewhere.
Chris Jenkinson wrote on Privacy concerns
> Brion Vibber wrote:
> > * If you contribute to the wiki without creating an account, your edits
> > are publicly identified with your network location instead of a name.
>
> Is this information made known to an anonymous contributor before they
> actually make the edit?
>
Well I have noticed that it is not really clear
AnyFile
Interested in wiki research and practice?
If you want to learn more, please check out the conference
proceedings of the 2005 International Symposium on Wikis, the first
of its kind, at: http://www.wikisym.org/ws2005/proceedings .
If you missed the conference, you can still read up on the talks of
the likes of Ward Cunningham, father of the wiki, and Jimmy Wales,
founder of Wikipedia, at http://ws2005.wikisym.org . The whole
symposium has been documented on a wiki, so you can learn about the
results of workshops and BoFs, and how the talks, panels, etc. went!
Wikis are are a new breed of (web-based) content management system,
primarily used to support collaborative work. (But not just that; the
fundamental flexibility of wikis has found its applications in
software development, workflow management, knowledge management,
education, and more.)
If you are curious now, we would like to invite you to join the
wikisym-announce mailing list at
www.wikisym.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/wikisym-announce . The list
is moderated and will be the primary place to announce WikiSym 2006,
the 2006 International Symposium on Wikis, to be held in the 2nd half of 2006.
WikiSym 2005 is an archival, peer-reviewed conference, sponsored by the ACM.
For the WikiSym 2005 committee,
Dirk Riehle
Chair, WikiSym 2005
Interested in wikis? Please go to http://www.wikisym.org!
Take a Geek's Tour of Silicon Valley! http://www.ageekstour.com
Dirk Riehle | +49 172 184 8755 | http://www.riehle.org
Dear all,
Wikimania this past August was a joyous and wonderful event. It was
remarkable above all for the geographic diversity of its attendees.
Help make the next Wikimania just as wonderful, and even more
international and multilingual. Please translate this message and
pass it on to your respective mailing lists and wikis.
How to get involved :
1. Come to an IRC meeting next week. We will be discussing conference
dates, among other things. Note what times you can make it, or add to
the agenda, here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2006:Planning#Meetings
2. Volunteer your time, language skills, and enthusiasm:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2006:Planning#Volunteering
3. Sign up for yet another mailing list (wikimania-l). It is
currently low-traffic and primarily English-language; two things you
can help change.
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimania-l
4. Plan carpools or offer crash space for the event. (harder to do
before the date is fixed, of course)
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2006:Venue#Attendees
Organizing Wikimania is at once demanding and rewarding; and a chance
to learn about the inner workings of a large conference. Please join
us on IRC, or on the wiki, to find out more.
++SJ
>[[User:Anonymous editor]] is contesting for Adminship. Many votes in his
>support are by usernames created in the last couple of days, and their only
>contribution to wikipedia has been that vote. When I pointed that out,
>[[User:Anonymous editor]] deleted my comments, marking his deletions as a
>"minor edit", and his close admin friend [[User:Slimvirgin]] blocked me.
>This pair is known for misusing wikipedia policies and admin powers in the
>past, for example, with reference to the [[Islamophobia]] article.
>Kindly look into the past credentials of [[User:Anonymous editor]], and cast
>your vote.
I have to get around to doing a pile of sockchecking [*] on this
precise matter. If you see an edit from me placing strikes through a
pile of the "Oppose" votes, you'll know why.
It may be necessary for bureaucrats to look very closely at these
votes or kill the RFA and restart it or try again later, in case
supporters have been swayed by the apparent mass of 'oppose' votes.
- d.
[*] The problem is I don't scale. We need more users with checkuser
access; how to arrange this is a vexed question, because the Board has
the willies about the privacy policy issue. It's not a matter to put
to a vote, any more than root access is. I discussed this with Tim
Starling last night and will hopefully send an email to the Board
tonight. It needs sorting out properly and correctly, but soon. I have
a couple of prospects in mind on en:.
[cc'ed to foundation-l]