Mailing List Archive

No, its not the same. WM Foundation represent the community in some
aspects, but they are not responsible for the users in the community.

John

David Gerard skrev:
> 2008/10/22 John at Darkstar <vacuum@jeb.no>:
>
>> Sorry, you place the board of WM Foundation whereby they are responsible
>> for all users on Wikimedias projects.
>
>
> That's like saying a community can decide to repudiate the GFDL on
> their project. They can, but it won't be a Wikimedia project much
> longer.
>
> [*] apart from Wikinews of course.
>
>
> - d.
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

2008/10/22 John at Darkstar <vacuum@jeb.no>:

> No, its not the same. WM Foundation represent the community in some
> aspects, but they are not responsible for the users in the community.


Then I'm completely unclear on what you mean, and/or you're completely
unclear on what I mean.


- d.

_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

Anthony wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 11:48 AM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki@gmail.com>wrote
>> It seems to me that this is
>> such a loose concept that might be interpreted so differently by
>> various editors that the reprinter is pretty much stuck with an
>> all-or-nothing approach -- either you print all the editors in tiny
>> type, which actually obscures the major contributors to an article, or
>> you use some sort of metric or value judgment in picking out
>> significant contributors, which seems like will always be wrong in
>> some way.
>>
> Life (especially with regard to the law and ethics) works that way some
> times. But just because it's difficult for you to determine exactly where
> the line is, that doesn't excuse you from clearly crossing it.
>
>
That's a self-contradictory statement. If you can't determine exactly
where the line is there is nothing clear about having crossed it.

Ec

_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

phoebe ayers wrote:
> 1. cite everybody who ever touched the article
> 2. cite some of the people who touched the article
> 3. provide a link back to a comprehensive list of everyone who ever
> touched the article, which also has the benefits of handy diffs so you
> can see who added what, etc.
>
...
> There may be other problems and advantages that I haven't thought of
> yet. I'll leave other people to hash out the moral, ethical, and legal
> advantages of each approach. But these are the practical
> considerations faced by a reprinter of content. It's also important to
> remember, I think, that if we are trying, in general, to make
> reprinting and reuse not just possible but smooth and easy that adds a
> consideration to the problem. For my part, I think we need to think
> carefully about this problem and come up with a good solution for the
> sake of free content distribution in general -- producing content that
> can be reused is a fundamental part of Wikimedia's mission, so let's
> do it right.
It all comes down to the risk tolerance of the person doing the
printing. I would be satisfied with including a printed link to the
relevant Wikipedia history page. This would satisfy what I believe to be
my ethical responsibilities in the matter.

When you bring it down to basics you arrive at the core issue, producing
re-usable content. On the way there we get diverted by trying to have
the language just right, but each elaboration of language brings new
vulnerabilities to the fundamental principle. People seem to read laws
in a way that puts them at maximum disadvantage. In an attempt to abide
by the literal word of the law (which includes private rules) they
imagine circumstances that can only remind us of the boys in the George
Carlin skit trying to befuddle the aging priest with hypothetical sins.
We tie ourselves in knots trying to find legal countermeasures to
aspects of the law whose interpretation is tenuous at best.

Maybe it just takes a plain language statement of what we believe.

Ec

_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

David Gerard wrote:
> 2008/10/22 Michael Snow <wikipedia@verizon.net>:
>
>> I might add that the attribution requirement of the GFDL talks about
>> listing at least five principal authors, "unless they release you from
>> this requirement." A fairly straightforward argument can be made that
>> existing and accepted practice on Wikipedia, and for that matter on
>> nearly all wikis, amounts to releasing subsequent distributors from this
>> requirement. If the authors can make this implicit release, then you
>> have to look at whatever attribution is customary in a given context,
>> along with any moral rights issues.
>>
> In any case, this discussion has already reached the stage of counting
> angels dancing on the heads of pins and assuming that law is as
> brittle as computer code. It just ain't so.
>
> The threat model we're taking about is: what does a reuser say if
> taken to court by an insane and obsessive author? Would a judge
> consider the reuser's actions reasonable, given accepted behaviour
> regarding said licence to date? That sort of squishy, arguable, grey
> area thing.

There is no inoculation to prevent insanity and obsession. Whatever
model is chosen can provide opportunities for the litigious. Thus if we
go with the five principal authors, what's to prevent number six from
arguing that he should be in the top five.

In the general case I think that any reuser who exercises a modicum of
good faith and due diligence will likely be safe Accepted behaviour
will also be influenced by past practice including the chronic failure
of rights owners (not WMF) to protect their own rights

Ec

_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 12:46 AM, Ray Saintonge <saintonge@telus.net> wrote:

> Anthony wrote:
> > On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 11:48 AM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki@gmail.com
> >wrote
> >> It seems to me that this is
> >> such a loose concept that might be interpreted so differently by
> >> various editors that the reprinter is pretty much stuck with an
> >> all-or-nothing approach -- either you print all the editors in tiny
> >> type, which actually obscures the major contributors to an article, or
> >> you use some sort of metric or value judgment in picking out
> >> significant contributors, which seems like will always be wrong in
> >> some way.
> >>
> > Life (especially with regard to the law and ethics) works that way some
> > times. But just because it's difficult for you to determine exactly
> where
> > the line is, that doesn't excuse you from clearly crossing it.
> >
> >
> That's a self-contradictory statement. If you can't determine exactly
> where the line is there is nothing clear about having crossed it.


Sure there is. There's clearly right, there's clearly wrong, and then
there's a grey area in-between. You know the line is in the grey area, but
you're not sure exactly where.
_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 2:39 AM, Ray Saintonge <saintonge@telus.net> wrote:

> David Gerard wrote:
> > 2008/10/22 Michael Snow <wikipedia@verizon.net>:
> >
> >> I might add that the attribution requirement of the GFDL talks about
> >> listing at least five principal authors, "unless they release you from
> >> this requirement." A fairly straightforward argument can be made that
> >> existing and accepted practice on Wikipedia, and for that matter on
> >> nearly all wikis, amounts to releasing subsequent distributors from this
> >> requirement. If the authors can make this implicit release, then you
> >> have to look at whatever attribution is customary in a given context,
> >> along with any moral rights issues.
> >>
> > In any case, this discussion has already reached the stage of counting
> > angels dancing on the heads of pins and assuming that law is as
> > brittle as computer code. It just ain't so.
> >
> > The threat model we're taking about is: what does a reuser say if
> > taken to court by an insane and obsessive author? Would a judge
> > consider the reuser's actions reasonable, given accepted behaviour
> > regarding said licence to date? That sort of squishy, arguable, grey
> > area thing.
>
> There is no inoculation to prevent insanity and obsession. Whatever
> model is chosen can provide opportunities for the litigious. Thus if we
> go with the five principal authors, what's to prevent number six from
> arguing that he should be in the top five.
>

> In the general case I think that any reuser who exercises a modicum of
> good faith and due diligence will likely be safe Accepted behaviour
> will also be influenced by past practice including the chronic failure
> of rights owners (not WMF) to protect their own rights


Going with "the five principal authors" is a terrible idea both from the
standpoint of avoiding litigation and from the standpoint of protecting the
right to attribution. Of course, the GFDL doesn't mention "the five
principal authors", it mentions "five of the principal authors", which may
seem like a small difference in English language, but it represents an
enormous difference in terms of meaning. Of course, this phrasing is even
worse from the standpoint of protecting the right to attribution, because it
means essentially that no one writing an article with six principal authors
has a right to attribution. But really, setting a limit to the number of
principal authors is meaningless anyway, because *anyone can modify the text
without permission*, so even if you work your ass off and produce a 10,000
word text, all a reuser has to do is take 5 other 10,001 word texts, append
it to the end, and now you get no attribution at all.

Of course, the phrase "five of the principal authors" only occurs in the
GFDL when talking about the title page. This whole section should probably
be eliminated, because it offers no protection to authors and only invites
litigation - maybe it could be turned into a strong suggestion.
Fortunately, there is at least an argument that all authors need to be
included in the section entitled History. Of course, there's still the
problem, which is fairly specific to wikis, of how to define "all authors".
I'd say here that the most expansive view of this would be all logged-in
authors who have contributed more than a de minimus amount of copyrightable
expression to the final end-product. That's a real-life definition, which
maximizes the protection of the right to attribution, but perhaps invites
litigation. Even then I'm not so sure. I think most judges would handle a
borderline case of this nature and award nominal damages if any. Of course,
the drop-off-the-cliff clause of the GFDL that any violation of it results
in an immediate revocation of the license needs to be removed.

Maybe that definition is too expansive for Wikipedia, but I'm not going to
say this for sure until I see some hard numbers on it. What is the ratio of
characters of attribution to characters of text if we include the names of
any logged-in non-reverted authors?

Only attributing "the five principal authors" is utterly unacceptable. Only
attributing "five of the principal authors" is utterly unacceptable. Any
attribution clause which doesn't ensure the attribution of *all* significant
contributors, is unacceptable. Within that framework I think there are a
lot of reasonable solutions.

Anthony
_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 1:58 PM, Anthony <wikimail@inbox.org> wrote:
> has a right to attribution. But really, setting a limit to the number of
> principal authors is meaningless anyway, because *anyone can modify the text
> without permission*, so even if you work your ass off and produce a 10,000
> word text, all a reuser has to do is take 5 other 10,001 word texts, append
> it to the end, and now you get no attribution at all.
> ...
> Only attributing "the five principal authors" is utterly unacceptable. Only
> attributing "five of the principal authors" is utterly unacceptable. Any
> attribution clause which doesn't ensure the attribution of *all* significant
> contributors, is unacceptable. Within that framework I think there are a
> lot of reasonable solutions.

I was reading this thread (more or less) carefully and I was wondering
how it is possible that the direction of the discussion was toward
attribution only five persons for the whole Wikipedia (or to some part
of it, no matter). So, thanks for mentioning this.

I just may imagine an ironic smile of one my friend, a copyright
lawyer from Serbia, with the question: Would it pass at the court? :)
At least in Serbia, it would be treated as a typical example of trying
to make a fraud based on a weird interpretation of a license (or
whichever legal document) or "false contracts" (something in the
sense: "See, I killed him because we signed a contract that I may kill
him!").

However, I really think that we would come into a dead end if we
insist that every ~300 pages book has to print 100 (or 1000) more
pages of contributors. It is not a questionable issue, it is just a
matter of time: it is, maybe, true even today, it could be no true for
the next 5 years, but it will become our reality for sure.

So, some way for solving this problem has to be find. I mentioned in
my first post of this thread that some kind of "hard copy links", like
web links to the history of the page on Wikipedia, may be used instead
of writing all names inside of the book. Maybe it should be defined
that if the list of authors is longer than 10% of the book size, for
the rest of them, book has to refer to the (mentioned) bibliography.

And this is something which license has to solve. After solving that
issue inside of the license, we would have to convince continental
legal systems that such kind of solution is reasonable.

And, of course, I am sure that others have some other ideas how to
address this problem.

_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 8:57 AM, Milos Rancic <millosh@gmail.com> wrote:

> However, I really think that we would come into a dead end if we
> insist that every ~300 pages book has to print 100 (or 1000) more
> pages of contributors. It is not a questionable issue, it is just a
> matter of time: it is, maybe, true even today, it could be no true for
> the next 5 years, but it will become our reality for sure.
>

No, it really isn't possible. For a 300 page book to require 100 pages of
authors, each author could only have contributed 3 times as many characters
as their user name. Unless you're going to count vandals or
vandal-reverters as authors, it just isn't going to happen.

Anthony
_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 3:35 PM, Anthony <wikimail@inbox.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 8:57 AM, Milos Rancic <millosh@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> However, I really think that we would come into a dead end if we
>> insist that every ~300 pages book has to print 100 (or 1000) more
>> pages of contributors. It is not a questionable issue, it is just a
>> matter of time: it is, maybe, true even today, it could be no true for
>> the next 5 years, but it will become our reality for sure.
>
> No, it really isn't possible. For a 300 page book to require 100 pages of
> authors, each author could only have contributed 3 times as many characters
> as their user name. Unless you're going to count vandals or
> vandal-reverters as authors, it just isn't going to happen.

Imagine that someone is making a 300 pages book about countries in the
world, based on Wikipedia articles. All basic Wikipedia articles about
countries have (~200) have, of course, much more than 300 pages. It
may have even 2000 pages. But, someone wants to use Wikipedia articles
to make a shorter book about the issue. Author of the book would use,
probably, introductions, as well as some other parts of the articles.
So, the author is not able even to try to count who contributed to the
introduction, but he has to count on article as a whole.

If I counted well, article about France has between 8.000 and 9.000
edits up to this moment. I think that it is reasonable to suppose that
this article will have 100 distinctive and significant authors -- if
not now -- then in 5 or 10 years.

I am reading now a B5 format book with ~40x70=2800 characters per page.

One name has, let's say, 15 characters (btw, I am sure that we will
demand listing the names if they are available, not just user names;
as I said before, some kind of user boxes may be used for that). 100
names would consume 1500 characters (let's say, 1400, a half of the
page). 200 articles about countries with 100 distinctive names per
article means that the list will be 100 pages long. Even 50 is a lot
(if we assume that not all articles about countries would have such
number of contributors, like article about France would have).

And, numbers will just be raising.

Of course, we may tell to such authors to make a research for every
single page and to find which contributions are still inside of the
article and which are not. So, instead of working on the matter,
author would have to analyze contributions for more than year (I am
not sure that I am able to make analysis of the article about France
in one working day; even if I assume a number of [existing and
non-existing] tools for that).

It is, simply, not reasonable; as well as it is not toward our goal to
spread free knowledge.

However, I really agree with you that all significant contributors
should be attributed.

_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 4:29 PM, Milos Rancic <millosh@gmail.com> wrote:

> Of course, we may tell to such authors to make a research for every
> single page and to find which contributions are still inside of the
> article and which are not. So, instead of working on the matter,
> author would have to analyze contributions for more than year (I am
> not sure that I am able to make analysis of the article about France
> in one working day; even if I assume a number of [existing and
> non-existing] tools for that).
>
> It is, simply, not reasonable; as well as it is not toward our goal to
> spread free knowledge.
>
> However, I really agree with you that all significant contributors
> should be attributed.

Although it would not solve the problem for your hypothetical writer,
I think for the general case it would be good for us to _provide_ this
information with the article - either on the article page, or on the
history page, or maybe somewhere else (but I would prefer the first,
or if that doesn't work, the second). The information could be created
automatically from the history file, and a kind of bot could slowly go
over the articles to update it, giving each user's contribution to a
page a number, stored in the database. When a page (or history page)
is then shown, all users with either more than X contribution, or more
than Y% of the total contribution, or among the Z (5) largest
contributors would be shown (with a quick-and-dirty version of the
algorithm to get a 'maximum' contribution for those who contributed to
the page after the last time the information was updated). It might
not be that much use to your writer, who still would have 200 lists of
10 or 20 names to deal with (still, 4000 names, many of them
duplicates is much more manageable than 20.000 of them), but for more
reasonable cases where whole pages or large portions of pages are
used, it could give a good indication of which names to include and
not to include.


--
André Engels, andreengels@gmail.com
_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 6:57 PM, Andre Engels <andreengels@gmail.com> wrote:
> Although it would not solve the problem for your hypothetical writer,
> I think for the general case it would be good for us to _provide_ this
> information with the article - either on the article page, or on the
> history page, or maybe somewhere else (but I would prefer the first,
> or if that doesn't work, the second). The information could be created
> automatically from the history file, and a kind of bot could slowly go
> over the articles to update it, giving each user's contribution to a
> page a number, stored in the database. When a page (or history page)
> is then shown, all users with either more than X contribution, or more
> than Y% of the total contribution, or among the Z (5) largest
> contributors would be shown (with a quick-and-dirty version of the
> algorithm to get a 'maximum' contribution for those who contributed to
> the page after the last time the information was updated). It might
> not be that much use to your writer, who still would have 200 lists of
> 10 or 20 names to deal with (still, 4000 names, many of them
> duplicates is much more manageable than 20.000 of them), but for more
> reasonable cases where whole pages or large portions of pages are
> used, it could give a good indication of which names to include and
> not to include.

Yes, it would be good to have such tool as the first step. It would be
useful to have it even during this discussion to get a figure about
what do we demand from authors who would write books based on
Wikipedia.

So, as I hope that you are interested in making that 0:-) may you give
numbers for, let's say, countries [1] of the world and species Felidae
[2].

And, of course, we need lists of contributors:
1. Every contributor [let's say, without bots, while it may be
disputable, too] with an account and with immediately not reverted
edits. -- as the largest group of authors.
2-n. Other ideas which you mentioned.

It would be, also, good to have an approximation of the sizes of the
books based on full article size (without templates and images).

[1] - Let's say, this list lists them inside fo the table:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_outlying_territories_by_area
[2] - This template is good enough:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Felidae_nav

_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 8:15 PM, Milos Rancic <millosh@gmail.com> wrote:
> And, of course, we need lists of contributors:
> 1. Every contributor [.let's say, without bots, while it may be
> disputable, too] with an account and with immediately not reverted
> edits. -- as the largest group of authors.

"with immediately not reverted edits" -> with more than immediately
not reverted edits

_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 8:45 PM, Milos Rancic <millosh@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 8:15 PM, Milos Rancic <millosh@gmail.com> wrote:
>> And, of course, we need lists of contributors:
>> 1. Every contributor [.let's say, without bots, while it may be
>> disputable, too] with an account and with immediately not reverted
>> edits. -- as the largest group of authors.
>
> "with immediately not reverted edits" -> with more than immediately
> not reverted edits

Ah, I realized now that the first construction was good :)

_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 10:29 AM, Milos Rancic <millosh@gmail.com> wrote:

> If I counted well, article about France has between 8.000 and 9.000
> edits up to this moment. I think that it is reasonable to suppose that
> this article will have 100 distinctive and significant authors -- if
> not now -- then in 5 or 10 years.
>
> I am reading now a B5 format book with ~40x70=2800 characters per page.
>
> One name has, let's say, 15 characters (btw, I am sure that we will
> demand listing the names if they are available, not just user names;
> as I said before, some kind of user boxes may be used for that). 100
> names would consume 1500 characters (let's say, 1400, a half of the
> page).


Half of a page for the list of authors of France. Now, I just checked, and
a printed copy of the article on France takes up about 25 pages. So
attribution takes up about 2% overhead, if indeed there are 100 authors like
you say.


> 200 articles about countries with 100 distinctive names per
> article means that the list will be 100 pages long.


200 articles the size of [[France]], which would be a 5000 page book. I
take it this is going to be split into volumes.

I'm sorry, your numbers are pulled too wildly from the air to be useful. A
300 page book about 200 countries? You're better off rewriting everything
"ab initio" than copying from Wikipedia for that. The work to cull down the
information into that small of a format is going to far outweigh the savings
from plagiarizing the content anyway.
_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

2008/10/23 Ray Saintonge <saintonge@telus.net>:
> David Gerard wrote:

>> The threat model we're taking about is: what does a reuser say if
>> taken to court by an insane and obsessive author? Would a judge
>> consider the reuser's actions reasonable, given accepted behaviour
>> regarding said licence to date? That sort of squishy, arguable, grey
>> area thing.

> There is no inoculation to prevent insanity and obsession. Whatever
> model is chosen can provide opportunities for the litigious. Thus if we
> go with the five principal authors, what's to prevent number six from
> arguing that he should be in the top five.


Precisely - would the reuser's behaviour and demonstrable good faith
and actions in accordance with common practice be sufficient for the
judge to say "haha no" and throw the case out, possibly awarding costs
against the plaintiff? If "yes" then all is well.


- d.

_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 1:22 PM, Anthony <wikimail@inbox.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 10:29 AM, Milos Rancic <millosh@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> If I counted well, article about France has between 8.000 and 9.000
>> edits up to this moment. I think that it is reasonable to suppose that
>> this article will have 100 distinctive and significant authors -- if
>> not now -- then in 5 or 10 years.
>>
>> I am reading now a B5 format book with ~40x70=2800 characters per page.
>>
>> One name has, let's say, 15 characters (btw, I am sure that we will
>> demand listing the names if they are available, not just user names;
>> as I said before, some kind of user boxes may be used for that). 100
>> names would consume 1500 characters (let's say, 1400, a half of the
>> page).
>
>
> Half of a page for the list of authors of France. Now, I just checked, and
> a printed copy of the article on France takes up about 25 pages. So
> attribution takes up about 2% overhead, if indeed there are 100 authors like
> you say.

And *I* just checked that, and there are in fact 4077 authors (2100 IP
addresses) for [[France]] on en:wp currently, according to
http://vs.aka-online.de/cgi-bin/wppagehiststat.pl. This whole argument
is off by an order of magnitude if you assume that only 1 in 4 authors
is significant. And how do you tell precisely which of these 4000
authors is, in fact, significant?

-- phoebe

_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 3:37 PM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 1:22 PM, Anthony <wikimail@inbox.org> wrote:
>> On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 10:29 AM, Milos Rancic <millosh@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> If I counted well, article about France has between 8.000 and 9.000
>>> edits up to this moment. I think that it is reasonable to suppose that
>>> this article will have 100 distinctive and significant authors -- if
>>> not now -- then in 5 or 10 years.
>>>
>>> I am reading now a B5 format book with ~40x70=2800 characters per page.
>>>
>>> One name has, let's say, 15 characters (btw, I am sure that we will
>>> demand listing the names if they are available, not just user names;
>>> as I said before, some kind of user boxes may be used for that). 100
>>> names would consume 1500 characters (let's say, 1400, a half of the
>>> page).
>>
>>
>> Half of a page for the list of authors of France. Now, I just checked, and
>> a printed copy of the article on France takes up about 25 pages. So
>> attribution takes up about 2% overhead, if indeed there are 100 authors like
>> you say.
>
> And *I* just checked that, and there are in fact 4077 authors (2100 IP
> addresses) for [[France]] on en:wp currently, according to
> http://vs.aka-online.de/cgi-bin/wppagehiststat.pl. This whole argument
> is off by an order of magnitude if you assume that only 1 in 4 authors
> is significant. And how do you tell precisely which of these 4000
> authors is, in fact, significant?

To follow up, that's 2.5 pages of non-duplicated names, when you run
them together in 10pt font.
-- phoebe

_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 4:06 PM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 3:37 PM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 1:22 PM, Anthony <wikimail@inbox.org> wrote:
>>> On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 10:29 AM, Milos Rancic <millosh@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> If I counted well, article about France has between 8.000 and 9.000
>>>> edits up to this moment. I think that it is reasonable to suppose that
>>>> this article will have 100 distinctive and significant authors -- if
>>>> not now -- then in 5 or 10 years.
>>>>
>>>> I am reading now a B5 format book with ~40x70=2800 characters per page.
>>>>
>>>> One name has, let's say, 15 characters (btw, I am sure that we will
>>>> demand listing the names if they are available, not just user names;
>>>> as I said before, some kind of user boxes may be used for that). 100
>>>> names would consume 1500 characters (let's say, 1400, a half of the
>>>> page).
>>>
>>>
>>> Half of a page for the list of authors of France. Now, I just checked, and
>>> a printed copy of the article on France takes up about 25 pages. So
>>> attribution takes up about 2% overhead, if indeed there are 100 authors like
>>> you say.
>>
>> And *I* just checked that, and there are in fact 4077 authors (2100 IP
>> addresses) for [[France]] on en:wp currently, according to
>> http://vs.aka-online.de/cgi-bin/wppagehiststat.pl. This whole argument
>> is off by an order of magnitude if you assume that only 1 in 4 authors
>> is significant. And how do you tell precisely which of these 4000
>> authors is, in fact, significant?
>
> To follow up, that's 2.5 pages of non-duplicated names, when you run
> them together in 10pt font.
> -- phoebe

Whoops! I made a mistake. The 2.5 pages is only the first 1000 authors
(I got the list from
http://vs.aka-online.de/cgi-bin/wppagehiststat.pl, again). So the
whole list of authors would be between 9-10 pages for the 25-page
article.

Pity the person who wants to reprint [[George W. Bush]] from en:wp...
it has 13228 authors (6366 IP addresses!) Sure, most of them are
vandalism, but I haven't seen any tool to pull out significant
revisions. Does anyone know of such a tool or script?

--phoebe

_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 6:37 PM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 1:22 PM, Anthony <wikimail@inbox.org> wrote:
> > On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 10:29 AM, Milos Rancic <millosh@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> >> If I counted well, article about France has between 8.000 and 9.000
> >> edits up to this moment. I think that it is reasonable to suppose that
> >> this article will have 100 distinctive and significant authors -- if
> >> not now -- then in 5 or 10 years.
> >>
> >> I am reading now a B5 format book with ~40x70=2800 characters per page.
> >>
> >> One name has, let's say, 15 characters (btw, I am sure that we will
> >> demand listing the names if they are available, not just user names;
> >> as I said before, some kind of user boxes may be used for that). 100
> >> names would consume 1500 characters (let's say, 1400, a half of the
> >> page).
> >
> >
> > Half of a page for the list of authors of France. Now, I just checked,
> and
> > a printed copy of the article on France takes up about 25 pages. So
> > attribution takes up about 2% overhead, if indeed there are 100 authors
> like
> > you say.
>
> And *I* just checked that, and there are in fact 4077 authors (2100 IP
> addresses) for [[France]] on en:wp currently, according to
> http://vs.aka-online.de/cgi-bin/wppagehiststat.pl. This whole argument
> is off by an order of magnitude if you assume that only 1 in 4 authors
> is significant.


Seems like a poor assumption, considering more than half of the authors are
essentially anonymous. I'd bet that less than 250 of those authors are
significant.


> And how do you tell precisely which of these 4000
> authors is, in fact, significant?


Precisely? You'd have to go through each edit one by one.

Anthony
_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 8:15 PM, Milos Rancic <millosh@gmail.com> wrote:

> Yes, it would be good to have such tool as the first step. It would be
> useful to have it even during this discussion to get a figure about
> what do we demand from authors who would write books based on
> Wikipedia.
>
> So, as I hope that you are interested in making that 0:-) may you give
> numbers for, let's say, countries [1] of the world and species Felidae
> [2].

I have already made one once (my goal being to compare a few different
algorithms to see which one most corresponds to people's ideas of who
actually is the author), but it seems to have gotten lost in a
computer crash or something like that.

> And, of course, we need lists of contributors:
> 1. Every contributor [.let's say, without bots, while it may be
> disputable, too] with an account and with immediately not reverted
> edits. -- as the largest group of authors.
> 2-n. Other ideas which you mentioned.

Regarding the bots, my idea would be to exclude not by being a bot,
but by only looking at the actual text and images on the page. Much
bot work would then be excluded because changing interwiki or changing
the target of an internal link would not be counted.


--
André Engels, andreengels@gmail.com
_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

David Gerard wrote:
> 2008/10/23 Ray Saintonge:
>
>> David Gerard wrote:
>>
>>> The threat model we're taking about is: what does a reuser say if
>>> taken to court by an insane and obsessive author? Would a judge
>>> consider the reuser's actions reasonable, given accepted behaviour
>>> regarding said licence to date? That sort of squishy, arguable, grey
>>> area thing.
>>>
>> There is no inoculation to prevent insanity and obsession. Whatever
>> model is chosen can provide opportunities for the litigious. Thus if we
>> go with the five principal authors, what's to prevent number six from
>> arguing that he should be in the top five.
>>
> Precisely - would the reuser's behaviour and demonstrable good faith
> and actions in accordance with common practice be sufficient for the
> judge to say "haha no" and throw the case out, possibly awarding costs
> against the plaintiff? If "yes" then all is well.
That course of action presupposes that there is someone foolish enough
to take the thing to court in the first place, and that that person has
the resources to mount a credible case That credible case must include
an estimate of monetary damage.

I would love it if we could find such a fool. That would give us a
decision to wave under the noses of the paraniacs.

Ec

_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

On Thursday 23 October 2008 22:22:26 Anthony wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 10:29 AM, Milos Rancic <millosh@gmail.com> wrote:
> > If I counted well, article about France has between 8.000 and 9.000
> > edits up to this moment. I think that it is reasonable to suppose that
> > this article will have 100 distinctive and significant authors -- if
> > not now -- then in 5 or 10 years.
> >
> > I am reading now a B5 format book with ~40x70=2800 characters per page.
> >
> > One name has, let's say, 15 characters (btw, I am sure that we will
> > demand listing the names if they are available, not just user names;
> > as I said before, some kind of user boxes may be used for that). 100
> > names would consume 1500 characters (let's say, 1400, a half of the
> > page).
>
> Half of a page for the list of authors of France. Now, I just checked, and
> a printed copy of the article on France takes up about 25 pages. So
> attribution takes up about 2% overhead, if indeed there are 100 authors
> like you say.
>
> > 200 articles about countries with 100 distinctive names per
> > article means that the list will be 100 pages long.
>
> 200 articles the size of [[France]], which would be a 5000 page book. I
> take it this is going to be split into volumes.
>
> I'm sorry, your numbers are pulled too wildly from the air to be useful. A
> 300 page book about 200 countries? You're better off rewriting everything
> "ab initio" than copying from Wikipedia for that. The work to cull down
> the information into that small of a format is going to far outweigh the
> savings from plagiarizing the content anyway.

He's referring to possibility to create a book that would have only the
introduction from each article, yet it would have to list all authors
(because you can't determine who was writing in the introduction and who
wasn't).

_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

On Friday 24 October 2008 01:19:20 phoebe ayers wrote:
> Pity the person who wants to reprint [[George W. Bush]] from en:wp...
> it has 13228 authors (6366 IP addresses!) Sure, most of them are
> vandalism, but I haven't seen any tool to pull out significant
> revisions. Does anyone know of such a tool or script?

On Wikitech-l we just had thread WikiTrust and authorship that discussed how
such a tool could be made. It is doable.

_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 7:40 PM, Anthony <wikimail@inbox.org> wrote:
>> And *I* just checked that, and there are in fact 4077 authors (2100 IP
>> addresses) for [[France]] on en:wp currently, according to
>> http://vs.aka-online.de/cgi-bin/wppagehiststat.pl. This whole argument
>> is off by an order of magnitude if you assume that only 1 in 4 authors
>> is significant.
>
>
> Seems like a poor assumption, considering more than half of the authors are
> essentially anonymous. I'd bet that less than 250 of those authors are
> significant.

I'd be surprised if it were even that many. Significant at some point
in time, yes, but for any particular version?

More importantly: You've picked a extreme corner case. Extreme corner
cases shouldn't be neglected completely, but they are bad places to
start policy discussions. The overwhelming majority of WP articles are
very few authors and even fairly few accounts who have edited them.

_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l