Since that fund raising drive is now $50k above the budget shortfall, it's not a shortfall anymore. The present $200k raised in the fund drive is about twice what was raised by the same drive in February last year...
The shortfall was for Q4 of 2005. The current drive aims to get rid of that shortfall and put us in a good position for Q1 of 2006. That proposed budget, so far, is well above $500,000 and may need to be cut pending the outcome of this drive. Either way, we will still need to have another fund drive later this quarter to get rid of this quarter's shortfall and put us in a good position at the start of next quarter. Hopefully some large percentage of the huge increase in people using Wikipedia in the last month will have come to love Wikipedia enough by then to donate.
BTW, I'm Daniel Mayer.
First any offer of hosting by Google or anybody else for that matter will not make the 40 or so servers that the Wikimedia Founation already owns go away or stop the foundation from paying its own hosting costs for those servers. Nor will it stop donations from coming in so the foundation can buy more hardware and bandwidth. And the foundation is *not* going to just rely on any one hosting partner but will instead seek out and act upon multiple offers (this is in fact necessary due to the exponential growth of traffic to the sites it operates; such as Wikipedia.org).
The most glaring omission Dvorak makes is the simple fact that due to the license Wikipedia uses, that it would be impossible for any one company to control it. If the 'end' were really near, somebody with better intentions could just download the *whole* Wikipedia and host it. But it would never come to that because the foundation would not allow it ; its very mission is to ensure free access to the projects it runs.
I think EB has started to get beyond their dismissiveness stage concerning Wikipedia and are starting to come to the realization that Wikipedia, not Encarta, is their number 1 long term threat.
That said, it would be wonderful to compare the oldest version of EB's article on Alexandar Hamilton available to the Wikipedia version. Ideally their 3 year old version would be best to compare since that is the age of the Wikipedia version but let's look at their 11th edition version at http://14.1911encyclopedia.org/H/HA/HAMILTON_ALEXA NDER.htm (EB should have had an article on Hamilton for over a hundred years by that time).
Well, for one thing is has extaclty the same birth date issue (his major criticism)!
"People write on things they're interested in, and so many subjects don't get covered; and news events get covered in great detail. The entry on Hurricane Frances is five times the length of that on Chinese art, and the entry on the UK TV soap opera Coronation Street is twice as long as the article on Tony Blair."
Which is an odd comparison since EB does not have an article on Hurricane Frances or Coronation Street, and the Wikipedia article on Tony Blair has been longer than the EB version for well over a year. Oh, and the Coronation Street article on Wikipedia is not twice the size of the Tony Blair article (in fact, they are about the same size).
Oh, and the German Wikipedia won hands down in breadth, depth, and comprehensibility of content, in a head-to-head comparison between Brockhaus and Microsoft's Encarta (German version) conducted by the German nation-wide newspaper Die Zeit. See http://www.zeit.de/2004/43/C-Enzyklop_8adien-Test
I'm sure a similar study conducted on the English Wikipedia except against EB and Encarta, would have the same results.
Wikipedia has been around for less than 4 years. These other encyclopedias have been around for much, much longer.
The current plan is to move the nearly defunct Sep11wiki to Wikipeople.org and expand that project's focus to be a general genealogy wiki and memorial to the dead.
The different proposals are here *http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimorial *http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/GlobalFamilyTree *http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipeople
I you want to move the process along, then comment on the talk pages of the above Meta pages or just start work on the Sep11Wiki.
It is not currently possible to move FDL text to any CC license. It is, however, possible to move text under some CC licenses to the FDL (such as the CC-by license which only requires attribution) but oddly not from CC's own copyleft license, the CC-by-sa (attribution share-alike). This has been a major issue at Wikibooks and its older sister project Wikipedia.
CC founder Larry Lessig has recently been elected to the FSF's board of directors. Lessig, RMS and Wikimedia Foundation chairmen Jimmy Wales have informally talked about making changes to the FDL and CC-by/sa in order to make them compatible (invariant section-hindered FDL text would not be compatible) and wish to extend the dialogue. So there seems to be at least some indication that future versions of CC's and FSF's copyleft documentation licenses will be made compatible for all invariant-section-free text under either the FDL or the CC-by/sa (all Wikipedia and Wikibooks content is invariant section free).
Wikipedia.org_is_more_popular_than... for a more complete list and some explanations about the weakness of Alexa's ranking (see the bottom of the page that explains that sites like Slashdot and especially Wikipedia are probably more popular than their Alexa ranking indicates).
According to Alexa about 70% of Wikipedia.org traffic goes to the English Wikipedia. We know that is closer to 50% and therefore Alexa greatly undercounts hits to the non-English versions of Wikipedia (which together have more articles than the English Wikipedia).
I think it is great that Wikipedia exists, that it is free and will forever be free. It is also great that/anyone/ can contribute. This is, IMO, a revolution in how information is presented, controlled and distributed and is in-line with the true intended nature of the World Wide Web.
Combining the wiki concept with free content also creates something that is far more radical than even free software; truly anybody can contribute. That idea is astounding - especially given the fact that Wikipedia is such a shocking success.
Wikipedia is absolute proof that, left alone, groups of people tend to work together to build magnificent things instead of tearing them down. Locking things down, on-the-other-hand, leads to stagnation and, if anything, temps people to break-in and make a mess of the place. Since it is trivial to vandalize Wikipedia, there is very little reward for the vandal; especially since repairing damage by vandals is easier than creating the vandalism in the first place.
All this tends to ensure that Wikipedia will, on average, improve over time and self-heal. Wikipedia is Linus' Law on steroids; given enough eyeballs reading Wikipedia, all bugs are shallow since fixing/any/ error instantly is as easy as clicking "edit this page" and "Save".
I'm the Admin that 'his royal pain in the ass' Lord Kenneth is talking about (we are not on Wikipedia now, so Wikipedia's conduct rules don't apply).
1) There is a current vacuum of power due to the fact that Jimbo Wales (Wikimedia director) is no longer involved in user conduct disputes. We are in the process of working on procedures to deal with troublesome users like Lord Kenneth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_ re solution
2) The link you provided cited UK law, not U.S. law. Since the server, foundation, and I'm in the U.S. this does not apply (the link was also from a photographer's website so its validity is in question). Even if the photographer did retain copyright, then that would be negated by the fact that the image is a very low quality reproduction and is thus well covered by the fair use doctrine in the United States.
I think administration does need a little more bite when dealing with the problem users who insert bias into topics. Users like "Mr-Natural-Health" should be gagged on certain topics, at the very least.
In my experience, a lot of what's on wikipedia is copied out of other encyclopedias and reference sources. So if wikipedia does drive them out of business, it'll be shooting itself in the foot.
Do you have any evidence to back up that slander? We are very careful not to copy text since that would be a copyright violation and make Wikipedia less free (or worse could lead to a law suit that brings the project down). We only directly copy public domain text. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia :Possible_co pyright_infringements for a page we use to nix copyvios.
And yes we do have around 5,000 articles that have been copied, modified, fixed and expanded from the public domain 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica. We also use a fair amount of public domain text from the U.S. federal government. But again, we *improve* what would otherwise be static content. But most articles are written from scratch.
Unlike static sources, each Wikipedia article evolves; bad edits and incorrect information tends to get weeded out while good edits and correct information tends to get concentrated.
Our biggest problem is with controverial issues where different well-meaning people are simply blind to their own POV and therefore cannot really write toward a neutral point of view (our number 1 policy). We are developing a conflict resolution procedure to deal with those cases.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_re solution
But even so the number of articles that do have their neutrality or factual accuracy disputed is surprisingly small given the number of articles we have.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title= Special:Whatlinkshere&target=Wikipedia:Accuracy_dispu te
A large portion of Slashdot's readership uses browsers other than IE, so they can't have Alexa toolbar installed. Even the ones using IE are unlikely to have Alexa toolbar, because Slashdotters hate spyware/useless junk on their computers, and they know enough to remove it or not install it in the first place.
The Alexa toolbar is only available in English. Well over half of Wikipedia articles are not in English and about half our traffic comes from all other languages combined. Yet our Alexa rank indicates that over 70% of our traffic goes to the English Wikipedia. We know that is wrong.
Do you have on iota of proof that the person you are talking to is a plagarist? Is there a single sentence in the Encarta article that is the same as the one in the Wikipedia one?
How are paid authors and fact checkers any better at what they do than people who do those things for the love of it?
The same argugement is made against Free Software, and yet its quality speaks for itself.
When where? The Wikipedia Lithium article has been around for a long time. The most recent edit was an update, but was not at all plagiarization. The information was gleamed from three different sources and completely rewriten. Look at the history of the article and you will see that most of the information in the update isn't even in the Encarta article at all.
Information can't be copyrighted and it isn't possible to be guilty of plagarization for using that information so long as the presentation of that inforation is a unique expression.
So what? Encarta has been around a lot longer than Wikipedia and has spent many tens of millions of dollars on development. Linux hasn't so hot either at 2 years old - but look at it now. Many Wikipedia articles, in fact, are already about as good or better than their M$ counterparts. One example:
It was already demonstrated with your above post that the Wikipedia article was fixed quickly. Just like free software: Many eyes and enough time makes all bugs shallow.
And when was the last time you were able to fix an error or add to an article in any encyclopedia? Wikipedia gives the power to the users instead of keeping all the power in the hands of a select few. Knowledge of the by the people and for the people.
I am an ATT Broadband customer. And I just tested my connection speed and found that it is better than 3 mega-bits per second. It is always above 2 mega-bits per second -- even when I am downloading several isos at the same time. Even though capping is the official line of ATT, I haven't experienced it yet. (NOTE: My connection was in sub-ISDN speeds for about a week after switching to the new network, but that was the exception not the rule)
As soon as they form enough agreements with financial institutions to provide online banking (ie downloading of transactions & electronic bill pay) they should GPL Kapital (at least under a business-friendly dual license scheme -- see NOTE at bottom)
Then in order to generate revenue, they could charge the same amount per month for the service of downloading transactions as Quicken does (US$3/month), along with whatever Quicken charges for e-payments.
To generate more necessary revenue, they could also tack on a one-time (or 5-year renewable)'membership-fee' of 40-80 bucks too. That way, the people over at theKompany can eat, and the Stallmamites would hopefully be satisfied with the GPL licsensing.
So, if you didn't care about online banking at all, then you would still be able to use Kapital in all its glory for free. And since it would be GPL'd then it might find its way into every distribution. That would benefit the LInux community by providing a truely useable, KDE integrated finanacial program. And it would benefit theKompany because its soon to be flagship product (and major money maker) would be installed across the Linux/BSD world.
But anyway.... I am the last person to dictate how someone should license the fruits of their coding efforts. Kapital belongs to theKompany and what I have written is simply a suggestion on how to make its product that much better.
NOTE: The GPL would allow anyone to replicate the program, but this replication and use of code does not form the types of financial institution agrements necessary to set up a network -- also, small closed-sourced parts of Kapital would have to be downloaded and installed into the program upon service activation, so that Kapital can talk with theKompanies network (that's where the business-friendly dual-licensing comes in).
One other thing: the name of the product, "Kapital" should become a registered trademark of theKompany. In that way, they can exert their influence on anything that is called "Kapital" if the need arrises (Linus reserves this same right with his trademarking of "LInux")
First some clarification: The Earth will still be in the Habitable Zone of Sol for at least the next half billion years. During that time the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere will decrease as solar output increases in an anti-greenhouse fashion (more intense sunlight will yield greater photo-synthetic intake of CO2; along with more precipitation which causes more erosion; 2CO2 + H2O + CaSiO3 -> Calcium Carbonate & SiO2). This is what has occurred over the past 3 or so billion years so far. What this all means, is that the carbon cycle (of which Life is a major part) is the controlling factor of Terran climate.
However there are limits to this -- Plants need a certain amount of fixable carbon in the atmosphere in order to grow. A critical CO2 shortage will be reached 500 million to a billion years from now. But life will (knock on wood) have already averted such a potential crisis many millions of years before this. The Trump card will be dealt by either our descendents in a few thousand years or by another intelligent tool user in the next 50-100 million years (assuming intelligent life wasn't just a fluke). OK so what the hell am I talking about? A Dyson Shell of course.
A Dyson shell is a HUGE solar collector that would be dynamically positioned by a level K2 civilization so that the maximum amount of solar energy can be harvested from the sun. (It would be constructed as two opposing geodesic half spheres using Iron and Silicon from Mercury and be positioned at a radius halfway from Sol & Mercury -- outward pressure from the solar wind will cancel inward gravitational forces -- the geodesic configuration will dampen changes in solar wind pressure)
To visualize a Dyson Shell think about this; Take a good sized grape fruit, cut a 2 cm slice through the 'equator' of it, hollow out the two halfs, separate them by 2 cm and try to image the sun as a small marble suspended within the center.
Normally, a Dyson shell would not be visible in the daytime sky of any planet orbiting within the equatorial plane (i.e. the sun would still be a very bright disk surrounded by blue sky). However, the equatorial edges of each half of the shell can be extended to block out any desired portion of the sun as seen from earth.
Presto! Climate control is built into humanities push to populate the solar system.
NOTE: A K2 civilization, is one that has substantially tapped the power of a star. Right now, our civilization is at about K(0.7) -- To attain K1 status we still need to substantially tap the energy available on and around the planet -- without causing significant harm to the worlds ecosystems.
In its 4.5 billion year history, Terra has produced only one species capable of contemplating the question, ?Are we alone in the Universe??.
Our species has only been able to communicate by means of radio for less than 100 years. So our existence has been visible to at least one other star for a mere 2.2 X 10^-6 % of our planets history. Currently, any ET spaceship within 70 light years would have absolutely no problem determining our existence and location.
Each year the amount of Radio energy we send out at least doubles. So given the Law of Mediocrity and the fact that any other space-age civilization is more likely to be several million years older, we would expect to be awash in ET radio signals. When we look up into the sky with a radio telescope, we should be blinded by incoming reruns of alien sitcoms and documentaries.
And yet, all we see with our most powerful radio arrays is noise, all we hear is static. If a space age civilization is just 1000 years more advanced than we are, their star should shine more brightly in radio than in all other parts of the spectrum combined.
If just one of those ET civilizations managed to last a few million years, then they would have been able to colonize every solar system in the galaxy several hundred thousand years ago (all assuming an average expansion of 0.05 c/yr).
Furthermore our own existence on this planet is due to a list of exceptionally improbable events: Jupiter?s mass sucks up or slingshots out of the solar system, most space junk that would otherwise go into the inner solar system (also forms the asteroid belt); a Mars sized planetesimal smashes into the Earth during the Hadean (ca 4.3GA) which forms the moon, which in turn protects us from most incoming asteroids/comets that Jupiter misses = this allows for a more complex cycle of bacterial evolution that eventually leads to the explosive Cambrian Adaptive Radiation (ca 570 MA) ; a series of cooling events caused by Antarctica making splitsville with Australia in the Late Cretaceous (ca 70MA) and the formation of the Isthmus of Panama during the Pleistocene (ca 3MA), led to an expansion of savannas at the expense of woodlands = our ancestors finally had to get out of the trees. And since we didn?t have any talons, claws, fast legs or any type of natural protective gear to work with, we had to develop our brains in order to survive. Oh, I forgot to mention the Extinction of the Dinosaurs at ca 65MA.
Don?t get me wrong, I am a Strong Life proponent (Life at the bacterial and simple multicellular level probably exists on many millions of worlds for at least part of that worlds history); it just seems highly unlikely that there are many other lifeforms out there that could actually contemplate whether they are alone.
Slashdot Mirror
Since that fund raising drive is now $50k above the budget shortfall, it's not a shortfall anymore. The present $200k raised in the fund drive is about twice what was raised by the same drive in February last year... The shortfall was for Q4 of 2005. The current drive aims to get rid of that shortfall and put us in a good position for Q1 of 2006. That proposed budget, so far, is well above $500,000 and may need to be cut pending the outcome of this drive. Either way, we will still need to have another fund drive later this quarter to get rid of this quarter's shortfall and put us in a good position at the start of next quarter. Hopefully some large percentage of the huge increase in people using Wikipedia in the last month will have come to love Wikipedia enough by then to donate. BTW, I'm Daniel Mayer.
"The information in wikipedia should be available to everyone for free."
And it is and will always be. The license Wikipedia uses ensures that as well as the mission of the Wikimedia Foundation which runs it.
First any offer of hosting by Google or anybody else for that matter will not make the 40 or so servers that the Wikimedia Founation already owns go away or stop the foundation from paying its own hosting costs for those servers. Nor will it stop donations from coming in so the foundation can buy more hardware and bandwidth. And the foundation is *not* going to just rely on any one hosting partner but will instead seek out and act upon multiple offers (this is in fact necessary due to the exponential growth of traffic to the sites it operates; such as Wikipedia.org).
The most glaring omission Dvorak makes is the simple fact that due to the license Wikipedia uses, that it would be impossible for any one company to control it. If the 'end' were really near, somebody with better intentions could just download the *whole* Wikipedia and host it. But it would never come to that because the foundation would not allow it ; its very mission is to ensure free access to the projects it runs.
I'm very disappointed in Dvorak.
Er, I'm not a developer.
-- mav
I think EB has started to get beyond their dismissiveness stage concerning Wikipedia and are starting to come to the realization that Wikipedia, not Encarta, is their number 1 long term threat.
A NDER.htm (EB should have had an article on Hamilton for over a hundred years by that time).
i ne&o=140475&sa=106;
That said, it would be wonderful to compare the oldest version of EB's article on Alexandar Hamilton available to the Wikipedia version. Ideally their 3 year old version would be best to compare since that is the age of the Wikipedia version but let's look at their 11th edition version at http://14.1911encyclopedia.org/H/HA/HAMILTON_ALEX
Well, for one thing is has extaclty the same birth date issue (his major criticism)!
Or when the current editor-in-chief of EB said in a recent Guardian article at http://www.mg.co.za/Content/l3.asp?cg=Leisure-Onl
"People write on things they're interested in, and so many subjects don't get covered; and news events get covered in great detail. The entry on Hurricane Frances is five times the length of that on Chinese art, and the entry on the UK TV soap opera Coronation Street is twice as long as the article on Tony Blair."
Which is an odd comparison since EB does not have an article on Hurricane Frances or Coronation Street, and the Wikipedia article on Tony Blair has been longer than the EB version for well over a year. Oh, and the Coronation Street article on Wikipedia is not twice the size of the Tony Blair article (in fact, they are about the same size).
Oh, and the German Wikipedia won hands down in breadth, depth, and comprehensibility of content, in a head-to-head comparison between Brockhaus and Microsoft's Encarta (German version) conducted by the German nation-wide newspaper Die Zeit. See http://www.zeit.de/2004/43/C-Enzyklop_8adien-Test
I'm sure a similar study conducted on the English Wikipedia except against EB and Encarta, would have the same results.
Wikipedia has been around for less than 4 years. These other encyclopedias have been around for much, much longer.
Slashdot needs to enter the 21st century and support wiki links. Here is the HTML version of the links I gave:
* Wikimorial
*GlobalFamilyTree
*Wikipeople
And the Sep11Wiki
*Sep11Wiki
-- mav
You are in luck. But still need to wait a bit.
*http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/GlobalFamilyTree
*http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipeople
The current plan is to move the nearly defunct Sep11wiki to Wikipeople.org and expand that project's focus to be a general genealogy wiki and memorial to the dead.
The different proposals are here
*http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimorial
I you want to move the process along, then comment on the talk pages of the above Meta pages or just start work on the Sep11Wiki.
-- mav
see http://wiktionary.org
There plans for everything you mention. We are in the process of setting up a new website that will have several donation pages.
Daniel Mayer,
Wikimedia CFO
IANAL, but I will blab about this anyway.
It is not currently possible to move FDL text to any CC license. It is, however, possible to move text under some CC licenses to the FDL (such as the CC-by license which only requires attribution) but oddly not from CC's own copyleft license, the CC-by-sa (attribution share-alike). This has been a major issue at Wikibooks and its older sister project Wikipedia.
CC founder Larry Lessig has recently been elected to the FSF's board of directors. Lessig, RMS and Wikimedia Foundation chairmen Jimmy Wales have informally talked about making changes to the FDL and CC-by/sa in order to make them compatible (invariant section-hindered FDL text would not be compatible) and wish to extend the dialogue. So there seems to be at least some indication that future versions of CC's and FSF's copyleft documentation licenses will be made compatible for all invariant-section-free text under either the FDL or the CC-by/sa (all Wikipedia and Wikibooks content is invariant section free).
-- mav
No its not. Each time "Mostly Harmless" is put into our Earth article is it quickly removed.
--mav
See
Wikipedia.org_is_more_popular_than... for a more complete list and some explanations about the weakness of Alexa's ranking (see the bottom of the page that explains that sites like Slashdot and especially Wikipedia are probably more popular than their Alexa ranking indicates).
According to Alexa about 70% of Wikipedia.org traffic goes to the English Wikipedia. We know that is closer to 50% and therefore Alexa greatly undercounts hits to the non-English versions of Wikipedia (which together have more articles than the English Wikipedia).
--mav
Nice post. Can you use it to create a Wikipedia article about MediaWiki? It is way past time for that.
--mav
I think it is great that Wikipedia exists, that it is free and will forever be free. It is also great that /anyone/ can contribute. This is, IMO, a revolution in how information is presented, controlled and distributed and is in-line with the true intended nature of the World Wide Web.
/any/ error instantly is as easy as clicking "edit this page" and "Save".
Combining the wiki concept with free content also creates something that is far more radical than even free software; truly anybody can contribute. That idea is astounding - especially given the fact that Wikipedia is such a shocking success.
Wikipedia is absolute proof that, left alone, groups of people tend to work together to build magnificent things instead of tearing them down. Locking things down, on-the-other-hand, leads to stagnation and, if anything, temps people to break-in and make a mess of the place. Since it is trivial to vandalize Wikipedia, there is very little reward for the vandal; especially since repairing damage by vandals is easier than creating the vandalism in the first place.
All this tends to ensure that Wikipedia will, on average, improve over time and self-heal. Wikipedia is Linus' Law on steroids; given enough eyeballs reading Wikipedia, all bugs are shallow since fixing
What a wonderful concept!
-- mav
I'm the Admin that 'his royal pain in the ass' Lord Kenneth is talking about (we are not on Wikipedia now, so Wikipedia's conduct rules don't apply).
_ re solution
1 49 .png
_ fo r_comment/Lord_Kenneth
1) There is a current vacuum of power due to the fact that Jimbo Wales (Wikimedia director) is no longer involved in user conduct disputes. We are in the process of working on procedures to deal with troublesome users like Lord Kenneth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict
2) The link you provided cited UK law, not U.S. law. Since the server, foundation, and I'm in the U.S. this does not apply (the link was also from a photographer's website so its validity is in question). Even if the photographer did retain copyright, then that would be negated by the fact that the image is a very low quality reproduction and is thus well covered by the fair use doctrine in the United States.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_talk:Maveric
You have already admitted that I did not call you a troll on the Request for comments page about you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests
I think administration does need a little more bite when dealing with the problem users who insert bias into topics. Users like "Mr-Natural-Health" should be gagged on certain topics, at the very least.
This I can agree with.
-- mav
In my experience, a lot of what's on wikipedia is copied out of other encyclopedias and reference sources. So if wikipedia does drive them out of business, it'll be shooting itself in the foot.
a :Possible_co pyright_infringements for a page we use to nix copyvios.
e solution
= Special :Whatlinkshere&target=Wikipedia:Accuracy_dispu te
i al :Whatlinkshere&target=Wikipedia:NPOV_dispute
Do you have any evidence to back up that slander? We are very careful not to copy text since that would be a copyright violation and make Wikipedia less free (or worse could lead to a law suit that brings the project down). We only directly copy public domain text.
See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedi
And yes we do have around 5,000 articles that have been copied, modified, fixed and expanded from the public domain 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica. We also use a fair amount of public domain text from the U.S. federal government. But again, we *improve* what would otherwise be static content. But most articles are written from scratch.
Unlike static sources, each Wikipedia article evolves; bad edits and incorrect information tends to get weeded out while good edits and correct information tends to get concentrated.
Our biggest problem is with controverial issues where different well-meaning people are simply blind to their own POV and therefore cannot really write toward a neutral point of view (our number 1 policy). We are developing a conflict resolution procedure to deal with those cases.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_r
But even so the number of articles that do have their neutrality or factual accuracy disputed is surprisingly small given the number of articles we have.
See
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Spec
--mav
A large portion of Slashdot's readership uses browsers other than IE, so they can't have Alexa toolbar installed. Even the ones using IE are unlikely to have Alexa toolbar, because Slashdotters hate spyware/useless junk on their computers, and they know enough to remove it or not install it in the first place.
The Alexa toolbar is only available in English. Well over half of Wikipedia articles are not in English and about half our traffic comes from all other languages combined. Yet our Alexa rank indicates that over 70% of our traffic goes to the English Wikipedia. We know that is wrong.
-- mav
Do you have on iota of proof that the person you are talking to is a plagarist? Is there a single sentence in the Encarta article that is the same as the one in the Wikipedia one?
How are paid authors and fact checkers any better at what they do than people who do those things for the love of it?
The same argugement is made against Free Software, and yet its quality speaks for itself.
When where? The Wikipedia Lithium article has been around for a long time. The most recent edit was an update, but was not at all plagiarization. The information was gleamed from three different sources and completely rewriten. Look at the history of the article and you will see that most of the information in the update isn't even in the Encarta article at all.
Information can't be copyrighted and it isn't possible to be guilty of plagarization for using that information so long as the presentation of that inforation is a unique expression.
So what? Encarta has been around a lot longer than Wikipedia and has spent many tens of millions of dollars on development. Linux hasn't so hot either at 2 years old - but look at it now. Many Wikipedia articles, in fact, are already about as good or better than their M$ counterparts. One
example:
Encarta:
Lithium
Wikipedia: Lithium
It was already demonstrated with your above post that the Wikipedia article was fixed quickly. Just like free software: Many eyes and enough time makes all bugs shallow.
And when was the last time you were able to fix an error or add to an article in any encyclopedia? Wikipedia gives the power to the users instead of keeping all the power in the hands of a select few. Knowledge of the by the people and for the people.
--mav
I am an ATT Broadband customer. And I just tested my connection speed and found that it is better than 3 mega-bits per second. It is always above 2 mega-bits per second -- even when I am downloading several isos at the same time. Even though capping is the official line of ATT, I haven't experienced it yet. (NOTE: My connection was in sub-ISDN speeds for about a week after switching to the new network, but that was the exception not the rule)
Then in order to generate revenue, they could charge the same amount per month for the service of downloading transactions as Quicken does (US$3/month), along with whatever Quicken charges for e-payments.
To generate more necessary revenue, they could also tack on a one-time (or 5-year renewable)'membership-fee' of 40-80 bucks too. That way, the people over at theKompany can eat, and the Stallmamites would hopefully be satisfied with the GPL licsensing.
So, if you didn't care about online banking at all, then you would still be able to use Kapital in all its glory for free. And since it would be GPL'd then it might find its way into every distribution. That would benefit the LInux community by providing a truely useable, KDE integrated finanacial program. And it would benefit theKompany because its soon to be flagship product (and major money maker) would be installed across the Linux /BSD world.
But anyway.... I am the last person to dictate how someone should license the fruits of their coding efforts. Kapital belongs to theKompany and what I have written is simply a suggestion on how to make its product that much better.
NOTE: The GPL would allow anyone to replicate the program, but this replication and use of code does not form the types of financial institution agrements necessary to set up a network -- also, small closed-sourced parts of Kapital would have to be downloaded and installed into the program upon service activation, so that Kapital can talk with theKompanies network (that's where the business-friendly dual-licensing comes in).
One other thing: the name of the product, "Kapital" should become a registered trademark of theKompany. In that way, they can exert their influence on anything that is called "Kapital" if the need arrises (Linus reserves this same right with his trademarking of "LInux")
However there are limits to this -- Plants need a certain amount of fixable carbon in the atmosphere in order to grow. A critical CO2 shortage will be reached 500 million to a billion years from now. But life will (knock on wood) have already averted such a potential crisis many millions of years before this. The Trump card will be dealt by either our descendents in a few thousand years or by another intelligent tool user in the next 50-100 million years (assuming intelligent life wasn't just a fluke). OK so what the hell am I talking about? A Dyson Shell of course.
A Dyson shell is a HUGE solar collector that would be dynamically positioned by a level K2 civilization so that the maximum amount of solar energy can be harvested from the sun. (It would be constructed as two opposing geodesic half spheres using Iron and Silicon from Mercury and be positioned at a radius halfway from Sol & Mercury -- outward pressure from the solar wind will cancel inward gravitational forces -- the geodesic configuration will dampen changes in solar wind pressure)
To visualize a Dyson Shell think about this; Take a good sized grape fruit, cut a 2 cm slice through the 'equator' of it, hollow out the two halfs, separate them by 2 cm and try to image the sun as a small marble suspended within the center.
Normally, a Dyson shell would not be visible in the daytime sky of any planet orbiting within the equatorial plane (i.e. the sun would still be a very bright disk surrounded by blue sky). However, the equatorial edges of each half of the shell can be extended to block out any desired portion of the sun as seen from earth.
Presto! Climate control is built into humanities push to populate the solar system.
NOTE: A K2 civilization, is one that has substantially tapped the power of a star. Right now, our civilization is at about K(0.7) -- To attain K1 status we still need to substantially tap the energy available on and around the planet -- without causing significant harm to the worlds ecosystems.
Our species has only been able to communicate by means of radio for less than 100 years. So our existence has been visible to at least one other star for a mere 2.2 X 10^-6 % of our planets history. Currently, any ET spaceship within 70 light years would have absolutely no problem determining our existence and location.
Each year the amount of Radio energy we send out at least doubles. So given the Law of Mediocrity and the fact that any other space-age civilization is more likely to be several million years older, we would expect to be awash in ET radio signals. When we look up into the sky with a radio telescope, we should be blinded by incoming reruns of alien sitcoms and documentaries.
And yet, all we see with our most powerful radio arrays is noise, all we hear is static. If a space age civilization is just 1000 years more advanced than we are, their star should shine more brightly in radio than in all other parts of the spectrum combined.
If just one of those ET civilizations managed to last a few million years, then they would have been able to colonize every solar system in the galaxy several hundred thousand years ago (all assuming an average expansion of 0.05 c/yr).
Furthermore our own existence on this planet is due to a list of exceptionally improbable events: Jupiter?s mass sucks up or slingshots out of the solar system, most space junk that would otherwise go into the inner solar system (also forms the asteroid belt); a Mars sized planetesimal smashes into the Earth during the Hadean (ca 4.3GA) which forms the moon, which in turn protects us from most incoming asteroids/comets that Jupiter misses = this allows for a more complex cycle of bacterial evolution that eventually leads to the explosive Cambrian Adaptive Radiation (ca 570 MA) ; a series of cooling events caused by Antarctica making splitsville with Australia in the Late Cretaceous (ca 70MA) and the formation of the Isthmus of Panama during the Pleistocene (ca 3MA), led to an expansion of savannas at the expense of woodlands = our ancestors finally had to get out of the trees. And since we didn?t have any talons, claws, fast legs or any type of natural protective gear to work with, we had to develop our brains in order to survive. Oh, I forgot to mention the Extinction of the Dinosaurs at ca 65MA.
Don?t get me wrong, I am a Strong Life proponent (Life at the bacterial and simple multicellular level probably exists on many millions of worlds for at least part of that worlds history); it just seems highly unlikely that there are many other lifeforms out there that could actually contemplate whether they are alone.
Cool, a universe so hugely massive that we could never hope to explore even 0.0001 percent of it. All for us! Seems like overkill to me.