User talk:Dwheeler
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Hello there, welcome to the 'pedia! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. If you need any questions answered about the project then check out Wikipedia:Help or add a question to the [[wikipedia:Village pump|Village pump]]. BTW, I see you placed your name next to an external link in secure computing. Are you the main author of the linked work? Cheers! --maveric149
Yes. I've contributed some, but I won't contribute more until the database dump is working. -- Dwheeler
Per your comment on my talk page: OK cool -- There is no reason not to have your name next to the link since you are the author. Also, newer database tarballs can be found at [[Wikipedia:Database download]]. I'm not sure if they are updated daily yet but that is the plan. I do know that there was one made at least a few days ago for sure since one developer accidently deleted the Main Page and had to recover it from a database tarball. See Wikipedia:Copyrights for specifics but the lowdown is this; Each contributor owns the copyright to their own contributions but by clicking "save" they agree to license those contributions under the terms of the GNU FDL (they also promise that the material is their own, in the public domain, or is covered by a compliant license or author permission). Jimbo Wales of Bomis, our sponsor, "owns" the collection copyright for legal reasons but this too is licensed under terms of the GNU FDL. The reason we allow this is practical; if somebody were to download the entire, or a large part of the database and either claim a proprietary copyright on the material or otherwise use it in a way in non-conformance with our license, then Bomis has the legal ability to ask for compliance and sue if denied. Some people, including Jimbo are still a bit uneasy about this so the long-term plan is to have Wikipedia become a non-profit and to transfer the collection copyright to that entity. Jimbo has already given the project a spify new server and when we go non-profit he will continue to give us bandwidth. However, if something did happen to upset this relationship there are plenty of people who would pony up 20 bucks or more a month (including me) to pay for bandwidth or other charges. All these costs really are minimal for what we have here and there are no paid participants -- even the Wikipedia PHP/MySQL software is developed by volunteers and is licensed under the GNU GPL. --mav I forgot to mention that it would be impossible for any company, person or group of people (including contributors) to change the license of the project. We have had many thousands of people contribute to the project in one way or another over the last year and a half and any license change would have to be agreed to by each and every one of them to use the database as-is. Even if a substantial majority of those people could be contacted (near impossible for those not logged-in) AND they agreed to a change then we would have to spend many months, if not years, doing tedious version control by removing the contributions of people who could not be contacted or refused re-license their own copyrighted Wikipedia work. But that would never happen since the people who contribute the most, including me, would rot in hell before they agreed to relicense their work under a proprietary license. --mav
- me too. <g> --KQ
First - let's keep the conversation here at User talk:Dwheeler so it's all in one place, I find it confusing to bounce back and forth between pages. Thanks.
Yes, I can tell very well where the downloads are supposed to be, i.e., Wikipedia:Database download and http://www.wikipedia.com/tarball . The problem is that until late today, there's been NOTHING there. Today I see that there's text there (good sign!), including a note about generating HTML (very good sign!), but still no database. I'm very well aware of what the GFDL and the lack of copyright signover permits; I actually have read the GFDL, US Code, etc. However, possession is 9/10ths of the law. GFDL documents are usually distributed in a manner that lets then be easily reconstituted if necessary, and that's harder to do with the Wikipedia. I don't want to be in the position of trying to sue a company just to get the material that I'm legally entitled to; court cases are difficult, expensive, and don't always turn out like you'd expect. Not having the downloads available puts me at a disadvantage; I'm not interested in risking a lot of my time if I can't get out of it what I want (a libre encyclopedia).
As far as I can tell, Bomis isn't that kind of organization. In fact, from all I've seen, I'm impressed. It appears to be just a matter of getting things working again. But I want to be sure.
So, if you look at SourceForge, you'll find I'm making an offer to "sweeten the pot". I'll provide a GPL'ed program that will convert HTML into wikipedia's Wiki format, if the Wikipedia admins can get automated downloads working again. With that tool, people will be able to upload HTML's, and in fact could also upload Word .doc, .rtf, and Docbook (because there are translators to HTML from those formats). With a little coding, it could be hooked in to do the translation automatically. Seem like a fair trade?
-- Dwheeler
Hmm. This has been proposed before and was deemed to to counter to what we are doing here. Besides, how could there be any sort of version control between a previous version and a new uploaded one? There is no reason not to edit text in a text editor with spellcheck but there is no need to have such and upload of text ability. That is the magic of wiki - you can edit any page right now. No need to upload anything (esp. evil Word files that introduce non-standard characters). One of the reasons why we have a minimal interface is for simplicity -- copy and paste works fine (so long as no copyrights are violated). If you want more info please post a message on Wikipedia:Village pump or join the wikipedia:Mailing list. BTW, could you post messages to my talk page instead of my homepage?
No biggie. Cheers! --mav
Ah, but that assumes you're composing new text using a blank Wiki screen. There's a lot of existing material that, if the copyright is compatible, you could upload (translating to Wiki) and then edit in Wiki. That's already happened (e.g., the country information from the CIA database). Cut-and-paste works, but it loses links, emphasis, headings, etc., etc. Adding an HTML translator doesn't eliminate Wiki. It just does an initial translation from an existing document in HTML into Wiki, and then you edit using Wiki. I wasn't planning to round-trip it (where you actually edited in HTML and then did translations back and forth). Instead, my theory was: if the page was empty, the HTML is converted to Wiki and then you can edit it. If the page isn't empty, the HTML is converted to Wiki and then appended to the current text (again, so you can edit it).
By the way, I'm happy to post to your talk page instead. Your home page text led me to believe that you wanted people to post directly to your home page, so I was just trying to do what I thought you'd asked. My apologies.
--Dwheeler
These are my own opinions and not necessarily those of the project;
I still don't like it; because such a thing would make it too easy to upload loads of stuff that would cause more work in the long run. This would especially be true if content were amended to an existing article or is from a hopelessly outdated, biased and OCR error filled source (such as from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica). This forces a human to do version control and heavy copyediting -- sometimes taking more time than building an article from scratch. We also have a strong neutrality policy here -- again, this is not something a computer can do. I am of the strong belief that we should be making something unique here and not just become a mirror of public domain info (most of which is garbage BTW) and that most articles should be built by contributors. Another thing is copyright; oftentimes a public domain work will have formatting added to it later. That formatting would not technically be public domain, so directly translating it we could be violating somebodies copyright.
There simply is too many areas where we could get in trouble with such a facility. That's not to say that it isn't an interesting idea -- which it is. We are in no hurry here -- the project is a little more than a year and a half old and we already have over 35,000 articles -- most of these are unique to Wikipedia and are completely homegrown. But it sounds like what you propose is a valid feature request and may reach the ear of a developer. --mav
- It has; but I'm with you. What's unique and valuable about Wikipedia is its human editors and editorial process. Just mass-moving data from one place to another accomplishes nothing. On the other hand, a facility for more easily converting HTML to wiki syntax would be nice--as soo as we have a wiki syntax to translate into. That's my next big project. --LDC
Sorry to intrude into a discussion late on in the piece, but as I understand it there's two points of discussion - 1) where's the database dump, and 2) a request for a facility for automated bulk uploads. As far as 1) goes, I hope the developers can get that working again ASAP. WRT 2), I don't think that's a good idea. Whilst material has been mass imported into the Wikipedia in the past (notably the CIA world factbook) it's a problematic thing to do as we have different policies and conventions to other bodies of work, and it's much easier to edit them into conformance if the person importing them does it as they are imported, and, equally importantly, if they come in at a measured pace so that people can review them. Mass bulk importation interferes with this process. --[[user:Robert Merkel|Robert Merkel]]
Great! Thanks for the pointer to Wikipedia:Database download - the help file's pointer was wrong. I've fixed the reference, too.
Okay, as promised, I've developed a program that translates
HTML into Wikipedia's Wiki format. It's available at
http://www.dwheeler.com/html2wikipedia
under the GPL plus a requirement - web sites have to provide updates
of their databases, no less than 1/month, to incorporate.
Of course, I don't know if they want to incoroporate it, but that's
a different question.
Moreover, thank you for creating the article on iraqi playing cards. Kingturtle 21:39 May 5, 2003 (UTC)
I just want to thank you for creating Law of Demeter article. I was the one who requested that article since I had little knowledge about it. The article now seems great!. -- Taku 01:30 26 May 2003 (UTC)
Thanks for fixing up Maori Wars. You are aquite right about bellich, it is a comprehensive account but very biased, pro Maori, Maxwell in Frontier tries to redress the balance, I intend, some time to move him to the top f the list also. Ping 22:33 27 May 2003 (UTC)
Congratulations, you have just been made a sysop! You have volunteered for boring housekeeping activities which normal users sadly cannot participate in. Sysops basically can't do anything: They cannot delete pages arbitarily (only obvious junk like "jklasdfl,öasdf JOSH IS GAY"), they cannot protect pages in an edit war they are involved in, they cannot ban signed in users. What they can do is delete junk as it appears, ban anonymous vandals, remove pages that have been listed on Votes for deletion for more than a week, protect pages when asked to by other members, and help keep the few protected pages there are, among them the precious Main Page, up to date.
Note that almost everything you can do can be undone, so don't be too worried about making mistakes. You will find more information at Wikipedia:Administrators, please take a look before experimenting with your new powers. Drop me a message if there are any questions or if you want to stop being a sysop (could it be?). Have fun! --Eloquence 21:16 14 Jul 2003 (UTC)
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html2wikipedia
What's the current situation in respect of getting this running on Windows? I've installed Cygwin in order to play with Lilypond but I seem to have broken it somehow :( --Phil 09:20, Jan 29, 2004 (UTC)
Hi David -- I've heard some good things about your html2wikipedia tool. Though I'm not fond of wheel-reinventing, I built my own Perl version from scratch, and was hoping that you'd comment. The tool is available from my CPAN directory [1] (http://cpan.org/modules/by-authors/id/D/DI/DIBERRI/) or via the CPAN shell using install HTML::WikiConverter. I've also provided an online interface at [2] (http://diberri.dyndns.org/html2wiki.html) in case you don't wish to install the module. Your comments are especially appreciated. --Diberri | Talk 01:44, May 18, 2004 (UTC)
invite
dw, I noticed an edit at MD5 and, not recogizing the user, looked at your page. I'm glad you're aboard.
As you may be aware, there is an active crypto corner on WP (see WikiProject:Cryptography for lots of links) and we would be pleased to have you as a member (however active). If nothing else, you may have some fun watching over shoulders as we struggle with the material, less than fully informed participants, and even spelling (see the pointer to discussions cypher vs cipher). Some of it may raise a smile or two.
Anyway, I'm glad to have noticed your activity. ww 18:47, 17 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Thanks! I'm very time-limited, so no promises. But I like Wikipedia, so I try to contribute when I can.
Article Licensing
Hi, I've started a drive to get users to multi-license all of their contributions that they've made to either (1) all U.S. state, county, and city articles or (2) all articles, using the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (CC-by-sa) v1.0 and v2.0 Licenses or into the public domain if they prefer. The CC-by-sa license is a true free documentation license that is similar to Wikipedia's license, the GFDL, but it allows other projects, such as WikiTravel, to use our articles. Since you are among the top 2000 Wikipedians by edits, I was wondering if you would be willing to multi-license all of your contributions or at minimum those on the geographic articles. Over 90% of people asked have agreed. For More Information:
- Multi-Licensing FAQ - Lots of questions answered
- Multi-Licensing Guide
- Free the Rambot Articles Project
To allow us to track those users who muli-license their contributions, many users copy and paste the "{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}" template into their user page, but there are other options at Template messages/User namespace. The following examples could also copied and pasted into your user page:
- Option 1
- I agree to [[Wikipedia:Multi-licensing|multi-license]] all my contributions, with the exception of my user pages, as described below:
- {{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}
OR
- Option 2
- I agree to [[Wikipedia:Multi-licensing|multi-license]] all my contributions to any [[U.S. state]], county, or city article as described below:
- {{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}
Or if you wanted to place your work into the public domain, you could replace "{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}" with "{{MultiLicensePD}}". If you only prefer using the GFDL, I would like to know that too. Please let me know what you think at my talk page. It's important to know either way so no one keeps asking. -- Ram-Man (comment (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=User_talk:Ram-Man&action=edit§ion=new)| talk)
MW:Copyrightwarning
Please see that talk page. Thanks. --[[User:Whosyourjudas|Whosyourjudas\talk]] 20:45, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)
- Looks wonderful. Thanks. --Whosyourjudas\talk 04:53, 29 Dec 2004 (UTC)