Slashdot Mirror

To quote from Wikipedia:

Scientists think that this asymmetry of lunar features was caused by the synchronization between the Moon's rotation and orbit about the Earth. This synchronization exposes the far side of the Moon to more asteroid and meteor impacts than the near, thereby allowing the maria on the near side to remain relatively undisturbed for many hundreds of millennia.

But, if you still feel strongly about it, then for the sake of science, we must travel many hundreds of millennia back in time, and rotate the moon!

To quote from Wikipedia:

Scientists think that this asymmetry of lunar features was caused by the synchronization between the Moon's rotation and orbit about the Earth. This synchronization exposes the far side of the Moon to more asteroid and meteor impacts than the near, thereby allowing the maria on the near side to remain relatively undisturbed for many hundreds of millennia.

But, if you still feel strongly about it, then for the sake of science, we must travel many hundreds of millennia back in time, and rotate the moon!

Actually there's quite a bit of free classical music out there; try http://www.classiccat.net/, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Music_s ound, http://hebb.mit.edu/FreeMusic/ and http://pan.zipcon.net/. The pan.zipcon.net site (functional but not pretty; try DOWNLOAD.html to get to the music) contains much of the catalog of now-defunct Pandora Records from Seattle, who appear to to have had the foresight and courtesy to place their material in the public domain when they closed up shop. I'm sure there's much more but this was just what I found in a brief couple of hours a few months ago.

Not to be confused with Walter Kurtz.

That's not true, of course.

Though I'm still not convinced that there are more Wikipedians in Europe than there are in the United States, given that server load is highest during US peak hours, not Europe peak hours.

I don't see a clear pattern that would confirm this assertion. Also, what are "peak" hours for Wikipedia? People use it during office hourse, edit it during their spare time.

Add your travel plans to the wiki: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania:Transport

I submitted it now so it's not too far ahead, and yet still give time for interested parties to register and/or submit research papers.

I submitted it now so it's not too far ahead, and yet still give time for interested parties to register and/or submit research papers.

Beastie is NOT going anywhere.
This is simply a logo for things like letterhead, marketing, conveying a "professional" corporate image, etc.

What's the first thing that pops into your head when you look at this logo?
What about this one?
And this one?
This too?

Anyways.......

But since there are no bullet trains fully crossing switzerland and since the swiss train grid is far more complicated in real life there is no chance to make it in 45 minutes right now.

So you are talking about a theoretical option while I just described the current status. I've been "exposed" to the metric system since first grade btw - I'm German...

Here is their servers list.

RTFA - it is the Wikipedia guys who are holding up Google's donation, not Google:

"Wikimedia's planned facilities in Amsterdam (The Netherlands), Belgium, and Asia are not online yet, so it would be premature at this juncture to ask Google for something specific when we don't yet have good technical knowledge of what we will need in the coming months following the introduction of these new facilities. Google are eager to help us, and Wikimedia are eager to accept their help, but the Board want to be good stewards of donor money, and this requires them to move carefully"

I wonder whether you could check out whether these are AMD Opteron - or AMD Athlon. I'll hazard a guess that you are referring to AMD Opteron, the really powerful ones Cray are now offering in their "Red Storm" supercomputers.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers

If you really mean Athlon then perhaps they have yet to be added to the breakdown in the above link.

For those interested in supercomputers based on Opteron then search engine submit for cray opteron red storm

The Universal Media Disc (UMD) is an optical disc medium developed by Sony for use on the PlayStation Portable. It can hold 1.8 gigabytes of data, which can include games, movies, or music.

Unlike the Minidisc, another proprietary Sony-developed format, blank media will not be commercially available, in order to avoid piracy. However, there has been recent discussion about the UMD movie and music formats being opened by Sony, although it is not clear if this will result in the development of UMD "burners" (through CD or DVD burners). Sony has said that it intends to keep the game-formatted UMD specifications to itself, in order to avoid competition (and presumably to profit from licensing fees).

It has recently been found out that if the disc is removed from its casing and shaved down to fit into the mini DVD slot in a DVD drive that it will register on your computer. However, no files are shown if the game disc has been written on.

* Dimensions: Approx. 65 mm (W) x 64 mm (D) x 4.2 mm (H)
* Diameter: 60 mm
* Maximum Capacity: 1.80GB (Single-sided, dual layer)
* Laser wavelength: 660 nm (Red laser)
* Encryption: AES 128-bit

Picture 1

Picture 2.

More info.

Editors: please add this links to the story. Thank you.

The Universal Media Disc (UMD) is an optical disc medium developed by Sony for use on the PlayStation Portable. It can hold 1.8 gigabytes of data, which can include games, movies, or music.

Unlike the Minidisc, another proprietary Sony-developed format, blank media will not be commercially available, in order to avoid piracy. However, there has been recent discussion about the UMD movie and music formats being opened by Sony, although it is not clear if this will result in the development of UMD "burners" (through CD or DVD burners). Sony has said that it intends to keep the game-formatted UMD specifications to itself, in order to avoid competition (and presumably to profit from licensing fees).

It has recently been found out that if the disc is removed from its casing and shaved down to fit into the mini DVD slot in a DVD drive that it will register on your computer. However, no files are shown if the game disc has been written on.

* Dimensions: Approx. 65 mm (W) x 64 mm (D) x 4.2 mm (H)
* Diameter: 60 mm
* Maximum Capacity: 1.80GB (Single-sided, dual layer)
* Laser wavelength: 660 nm (Red laser)
* Encryption: AES 128-bit

Picture 1

Picture 2.

More info.

Editors: please add this links to the story. Thank you.

This is already available here: http://download.wikimedia.org/ I heard there are plans to release a printed edition and other formats

and what exactly is stopping you from downloading? ok theres no torrents but still. im sure they will serve torrents too if the need would arise.

Your example was one of the reasons why the cooperation was made. As time goes by, a number of programms in and around the KDE project will use Wikipedia content more or less. Konversation, a really nice IRC client now has a feature that converts text like "Tomorrow I have an appointment in [[Bruxelles]]" into "Tomorrow I have an appointment in Bruxelles"

(so far, it does not fix spelling and grammar errors yet, my sentence might have been wrong but you might get the point.)

The services itself (all hail SOAP) will not be limited to KDE, of course but the idea just gets beyond a SOAP interface at wikipedia.org. As it is mentioned at meta, the KDE-library will be able to rely on a local mirror in case the computer is not online. From a application programmer's point of view, it will be much more comfortable.

I am sure that Danimo appreciates any feedback to his project Knowledge

Feel free to insert your suggestions how to integrate wikipedia content in your favourite applications.

the whole wiki will probably be repalced by "FR1ST PS0T"

Close.

A look at the article's history shows that within about 15 minutes of this /. story being posted, user 198.64.22.167 replaced all the content with the words "GNAA Fails It". The article was reverted within 3 minutes by registered user Get It.

the whole wiki will probably be repalced by "FR1ST PS0T"

Close.

A look at the article's history shows that within about 15 minutes of this /. story being posted, user 198.64.22.167 replaced all the content with the words "GNAA Fails It". The article was reverted within 3 minutes by registered user Get It.

the whole wiki will probably be repalced by "FR1ST PS0T"

Close.

A look at the article's history shows that within about 15 minutes of this /. story being posted, user 198.64.22.167 replaced all the content with the words "GNAA Fails It". The article was reverted within 3 minutes by registered user Get It.

the whole wiki will probably be repalced by "FR1ST PS0T"

Close.

A look at the article's history shows that within about 15 minutes of this /. story being posted, user 198.64.22.167 replaced all the content with the words "GNAA Fails It". The article was reverted within 3 minutes by registered user Get It.

>For many years, Photographers have used test shots
>of women, they nicknamed her Shirley for no reason
>I've ever been able to figure out.

There is also the Lenna picture, see the wikipedia for the background story.

The NeoOffice/J UI looks almost as good as interfaces for the last generation of high-end pro products such as QuarkXPress and Adobe *. Although http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/0a/S-co mp-sw-aid-work.jpg">InDesign CS isn't strictly a word processor...

There's some informative discussion at the Wikimedia Commons.

Example Front Page

Latest fad diet? Check.

Staple celebrity 'gossip'? Check.

Sensationalist headline? Check.

I wouldn't be too quick to distance the Daily Wail readers from those who enjoy Rupert Murdoch's finest. It's no surprise that these newspapers hold the two highest daily circulations for any English language publications. The Daily Mail is famous for its vicious stance on the issue of asylum seekers; paedophilia is not too far down the right wing checklist. I'd say the grandparent wasn't too far off.

The people that purpetrated the attack on the pediatrician were very, very unlikely to be Daily Mail readers; they can generally read and write

What do you read then? It can't be the Mail because you aren't particularly literate ('troglodite', 'purpetrated', 'pedeophiles'). Infact, by trying to sound intelligent by throwing around terms such as 'troglodite' while failing to grasp some simple spellings, I'd say you fit the profile of a DM reader perfectly.

Hell, at least Sun readers know they're reading trash and don't pretend otherwise or feign intellectual superiority.

To be clear, this isn't a case of Wikipedia "leaking" passwords or allowing some kind of exploit via technical means; this is Tim Starling deciding to specifically and literally publish a list of usernames that share the same password, ostensibly for the purpose of revealing trolls and flooders with multiple accounts.

From the looks of a few of the lists (RickK, RíckK, RìckK, RiÄkK, RïckK, RiÄkK; Mäximus Rex, Maximus Rex, MaximusRex; JíangSlumDawg, JiangFlungDung; LlortTheehtTroll, LlörtTheehtTröll; The Two Trolls,The Fellowship of the Troll,The Return of the Troll,The Trolls of Navarone,Troll Silent, Troll Deep,The Trolling Stones, RangelaND Visa CONtroll), it would appear that some of these are indeed obvious duplicate accounts (whether or not they're "trolls" is, I imagine, beside the point).

But it seems that he also caught a bunch of innocent folks who just happen to share the same password, not beyond the realm of comprehension for a password used for an "online" non-financial, non-critical site on a service with thousands of users. The submission makes it seem like Wikipedia knew about some kind of "exploit" and did nothing; rather, it seems like Wikipedia is content to let potential, and indeed confirmed in one case as admitted on the page, abuse of innocent users' privacy continue in the name of exposing possible (admittedly annoying) trolls. (That's my own take on the situation, anyway.)

Interestingly, Wikimedia's (draft?) Privacy Policy says:

Many aspects of the Wikimedia projects community interactions depend on the reputation and respect that is built up through a history of valued contributions. User passwords are the only guarantee of the integrity of a user's edit history. All users are encouraged to select strong passwords and to never share them. No one shall knowingly expose the password of another user to public release either directly or indirectly.

It appears that, in this case, Wikimedia itself is implicitly "knowingly" releasing passwords to the public. One of the many problems with a community site for which there is no central responsible authority. Anyone who hasn't yet would do themselves well to read the summary of the issue linked in the submission.

As an on-again, off-again Wikipedian responsible for countless edits as well as several full articles, I used to be happy to leave administrative matters there to others. Such was my bliss, anyway, until I stumbled upon something extremely troubling--something that forced upon me an awareness of the project's astonishingly careless attitude toward privacy and security. This is the product, apparently, of an obsession with countering vandalism so all-consuming that administrators are even willing to expose unlucky bystanders to identity theft.

This is what I discovered.

A Wikipedia developer, intending to catch sockpuppet accounts (multiple accounts created by the same individual), queried the user database for a list of accounts whose passwords matched passwords belonging to known vandals and trolls. Hoping the results would be useful to others, he published his findings on his user page. Of course, such a list necessarily included anyone who happened to be using, merely by coincidence, the same passwords as the targeted individuals. As a matter of fact, it seems likely that the dragnet caught at least some people by chance alone. But only the people on the list could know for sure.

That in itself sounds unfortunate, but none too dangerous. The horrifying punchline is this: in publishing the results of his query, the developer had effectively given these vandals and trolls a list of usernames with whom they shared a password. And once so equipped, the vitals of each compromised account--including the email address--were just a login away.

Leaking people's passwords, usernames, and email addresses to anyone is damaging enough, let alone to established miscreants.

Anywhere else, a mistake like this would be acknowledged, the offending information removed, and the potential victims notified. Not so on Wikipedia, where the list spawned nothing but a protracted debate and then a vote to remove the page. In a second blow to Wikipedia's reputability--the first being the mistake itself--the vote finally succumbed to addled logic and shortsightedness, as did a motion to restrict its visibility to site administrators. And so the page has remained linked and visible now for almost a full year, a threat to any innocents listed therein and an affront to anyone with an interest in their privacy and personal security.

Imagine if you were on that list. (In fact, maybe you are.) Wouldn't you wonder how it was possible for Wikipedia to expose your password to malicious users for the better part of a year? Wouldn't you marvel that no one had alerted you?

I don't mean to single anyone out here, which is why I've refrained from mentioning the name of the careless developer. The real indictment, in my view, is of the process that:

1. Allowed such an egregious breach of privacy;
2. Failed to correct it, even after it came to attention;
3. Failed to notify those whose passwords had been leaked.

It is my opinion that this incident is only symptomatic of a larger problem: Wikipedia's tradition of policymaking by ad hoc polling. It is also, perhaps, a harbinger of disasters to come. A draft privacy policy offers some hope, but interest in its adoption appears to have stagnated.

For the foreseeable future, then, it would be unwise for anyone to entrust their privacy to the Wikipedia site, when the project's developers and administrators have so clearly demonstrated a severe unfitness to guard it, to say nothing of a callous contempt for the real-world safety of contributors.

----
Note: If my anonymity gives you pause to question my credi

The other killer feature is, of course, SVG support by default -- unlike the crappy Adobe plugin, fast and reliable SVG support. A lot of stuff that is currently done in Flash can be done in SVG without any dependency on non-free software (or unstable, experimental open source players). Personally, I'm most excited about its possible uses in Wikipedia. Unlike a bitmap file, an SVG can be collaboratively edited: translate text, fix mistakes, and so on. Beyond illustrations, SVG is also useful for zoomable timelines, of which Wikipedia has quite a few, and which are already exported as SVG.

I think that Firefox support for SVG could be a major reason to switch from other browsers if we come up with cool SVG-based applications (not that we really need more reasons to switch!). One thing that would be neat is the ability to generally pan and zoom an SVG file even if there are no JavaScript controls for that, I haven't seen that functionality. Perhaps a bookmarklet or GreaseMonkey script could do the trick.

I can't wait for the final version, but I'd be happy to wait 3 months longer if that's how long it takes to get it ready for primetime. One thing is for sure: Firefox 1.1 will kick butt.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers This is how they do it.

You see the problem is George Lucas is inherantly evil, notice the striking similarilty between George Lucas and Sien Fienn's Gerry Adams:

Gerry Adams

George Lucas

Ok, ya'll gonna think I'm crazy, but the link to Wikipedia, "Onion routing" gave me a nice big picture of a woman's vagina, with the clitoris, labia minora, and the vaginal opening clearly identifed.

I don't need any of that information (just ask your mom!), but I think someone is playing a trick, because when I reloaded (while holding down Shift) it was gone and replaced with the right article.

Information about the image (from Firefox):

Location:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/32 /Clitoris-Vivero-Becker.jpg
Description:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Clitoris-Vivero -Becker.jpg

All right ... Edit history for the article shows that there is some vandalism taking place, but I'll still post this, mostly because of the "your mom" comment, which I think is ace.

I will post anonymously, though ...

If you want to contribute, you can submit a story right away, or you can learn more about writing news stories the wiki way.

Wikinews is run by a non-profit organization, the Wikimedia Foundation, which also runs Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, and the Wikimedia Commons, a media repository with almost 100,000 free content images, videos and sounds.

Something like...

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/b 2/200px-Atomic_blast.jpg

You mean like this?

How about a GPL Merit Badge?

Great idea! It would of course have the GNU Head as the picture. Maybe more appropriate would be a Copyleft symbol so as to include all open projects.

I don't know about Frist, it but sounds like Howard Dean might have something to do with it.

That's a good point - consumer electronics companies benefit from IP jsut as much as the copyright cartel. That's why they are ambivalent, at best.

I've been seeing the "market" for DRM-free content exploding recently. Our Media, dead-simple free blogs, and Wikimedia, Creative Commons is becoming downright trendy, and the library of share-alike content grows daily.

Currently, device makers are riding on the coattails of open (or at least unclosed) standards (mp3) in order to sell their DRM-encumbered alternatives (iTunes). No manufacturer is seriously going release a device that can only play closed-format content (Look at Sony)

As demand for unemcumbered content solidifies, demand for non-DRMed formats and players will likewise solidify. There's no way the market will buy a device that requires DRM, so long as there is enough popular content out there that doesn't need it.

So the solution is this: produce and release as much quality share-alike content as fast you possibly can.

For a better map of ocean currents, look here.
It looks to me like the shortest route is directly against the North Atlantic Drift.

Actually probably some truth in that.

You can see the leftism dripping off of this guy:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/19 /Jimbo_Wales_in_France_cropped.jpg

I've said it before, but it is important enough to be worth repeating.

The Wikimedia project that runs Wikipedia and other sites desperately needs more people to help [spymac.com] run the site. Both to develop the software and administer the servers. The growth of Wikipedia is phenomenal and traffic is increasing at a rapid pace. However, without proper planning, the system will not be able to keep up with demand. The site gets over 80 million hits a day, so it would certainly be an interesting project to work on from a technical standpoint. Oh, and did I forget to say it runs on Linux?

The other thing that Sanger misses in his "hey look I used to be important in this thing too" essay is that that what Wikipedia needs most is better referencing of facts. The only criticism left of Wikipedia is the percieved lack of reliability. The best (only?) way to combat this is to cite individual facts to the most authoritative source available. With that Wikipedia can be more reliable than any other single source available. Not perfect, because someone can dispute any fact, but Wikipedia might be able to be the best out there at it. There is certainly a lot of work going on in this area, but also many who write on Wikipedia fail to see the writing on the wall and reallize this really is the only valid criticism left. There are a number of projects working to organize and solve this problem, see the project on verifiability for one.

It might have something to do with the spam blacklist.

No details? Are you sure?

No details? Are you sure?

No details? Are you sure?

Okay, every Wikipedian on /. is going to reply to this one (and it's definitely +5, Interesting, which is why it needs a good response), so lemme give it a shot:

1. Moderation is tricky like hell. Slashdot has one of the best moderating systems out there, and you see how many mods-on-crack you still see. It might still work out, and it might be a good idea to try it out. Atleast part of the appeal of Wikipedia (atleast for me) is that I can go into the present article on, say, QBASIC, delete every single word that's been written on the subject, and start over. Of course, if my new version sucks, somebody will revert it back to their version. If its better, it stays. That kind of flexibility comes at a cost, and it's something we at Wikipedia patrol vigorously. But I think that is extremely cool. There have been attempts made to create a moderated encyclopedia. I think that would just take the fun out of Wikipedia very quickly.

2. Business has always been a tricky issue at Wikipedia - pretty famously, the Spanish Wikipedia forked into the Encyclopedia Libre because of worries that advertising might go up on Wikipedia. Even now, a lot of people are worried about whether advertising would affect the way we work. Right now, the status quo seems to be raising money for equipment from donation drives and merchandising.

3. It's been done.

This is about the Wikimedia Foundation , not Wikipedia Foundation which doesn't exist.
Both the article and the /. post are wrong.

As for contributing your ideas to a discussion of "Wikipedia 1.0", here is a discussion about that project on the Wikimedia Meta-wiki. Deciding which photographs and artwork to include, and how much text to include for each article, will be some of the interesting subprojects.

The main problem facing Wikipedia at the moment is lack of development resource. At FOSDEM last month Wales urged the assembled audience of open source developers to get involved with the work of the foundation.

The article doesn't mention how you can help out. Maybe might want to check this out:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Contents%23For _MediaWiki_hackers

Last time I checked, the current version of the English wikipedia dump, is around 585MB. It should comfortably fit on one CD. Where did this figure of two DVDs come from?