So, here's the dilemma: should one use non-free but objective Encarta or free but biased Wikipedia?
What makes you think that Encarta is not biased?
Back in 2002, we had a certain amount of discussions about Encarta's texts about some middle-eastern country and its population. Have you ever tried to fix an error in the Encarta?
well, I don't see the crazy point. The next plausible step would be to ask a lawyer if it is possible to forward the bill to the landlord.
Since Germany is no police state, noone could have known that you moved away. The right not to have to tell the police about your whereabouts every week is the one I would prefer over an automatic unsubscribing:)
a) is correct. The government is providing an independent bunch of TV and rasio stations to provide basic support with news, culture, and so on. This is the result of the assumption that private TV stations would never broadcast high-quality programme for minorities. (I think I shortened the argumentation...)
b) those kids don't have to pay at all. If they can't afford it, they are propably qualified for a exemption.
If your PC's video card has an TV tuner, you have to pay anyway. There is no change.
The GEZ (see other post) is collecting is you "keep a functional" TV set. Even if you put glue in the Antenna-IN because you only need a SCART-IN for you Nintendo, you have to pay. This has been tested before court.
An international hotel with English-only audience tried to get exempted from these fees because all they wanted to show was CNN. They failed.
This is actually a boomerang for the GEZ, because if you watch TV through a http stream, your computer still lacks any capacity to receive TV signals and therefore, you don't have to pay (unless there is an additional TV set next to your PC).
zentrale=center Einzug=collection Gebühr=fee the -en Gebühren is a plural form, the s after einzug makes it easier to pronounce this monster of a word (if a German word has more than 15 or even 20 chars, it's likely a legal or burocratic word.
Does my attemt of a translation to "center for the collection of [TV] fees" make any sense to the English audience?
The number of people in Germany without a TV set but with a "internet-capable" PC (RS 232?:) ) is incredible low and only for these people there will be any change to notice.
If your income is below a certain line, you can be freed to have to pay anything.
In toto, this is not an Internet tax but just a closure of a gap for those people who have abolished their TV set in order to get the TV stream via http.
If they are using just the content under the terms of the GFDL, they don't have to share their revenue (and they don't share their business risk in losing a zillion dollars).
However, they shouldn't miss the opportunity to donate money to wikimedia.
It's not the online version of an established, well-researched traditional encyclopedia. Instead, Wikipedia is a do-it-yourself encyclopedia, without any credentials. [...] One of these skills is to evaluate the authority of any information source. The Wikipedia is not an authoritative source. It even states this in their disclaimer on their Web site." (quoting of Sue Stagnitta)
I'm a wikipedian from de.wikipedia.org and I was very busy reading all the comments on various blogs during the last week. I emailed to the Syracuse Post-Standard guy (without reply) and to Sue Stagnitta, the librarian who started the whole debate. I read the comment from Alex and his experiment and the new one.
Well, my first reaction is to say "nonono, don't do this." but this is more complex.
Inserting errors is one part but I certainly prefer Felten's way: Take articles about topics you really know and look for errors. Collect these, feel free to correct them.
The next step would be to think of means of more sophisticated quality checks (hint: try to use the category scheme for a well distributed set of articles).
Wikipedia has to deal with various kinds of vandalism, ranging from people who can't believe that this wiki-thing lets them edit the articles to people who try to make wikipedia unusable.
However, I think that people who take time to make these experiments are everything but evil. It should be important to point out that this way might not be the best one to prove or disprove something.
If you read this/. post and one of your thoughts was "Hmm, let me try this", please come to the discussion into wikipedia and try to find/create an experimental situation which leads to results with any value.
Your observations appear correct to me but I'm getting less and less surprised to see an entry for Thomas Klestil on the Chinese or Japanese wikipedia for example.
2 or 3 decades is not a large time frame for an encyclopedia.
India still might have those problems of a developing country but at the same time, it is the country with the highest output of English speaking engineers.
Even if the average Indian citizen won't drive an SUV for a long time, he might get Internet access in the near future. And that would be the first step towards becoming a wikipedia author.
"Wikipedia Hits 300,000 Articles" is not accurate.
There is no doubt about that the English edition of wikipedia (which is the largest one by a huge margin) has reached 300K articles yesterday as the result of a great collaborative effort.
However, Wikipedia reached 300K articles a while ago and the text itself is correct to take not that all languages put together are now around 800K more or less.
Most communication is done in English, sure but I consider the fact that wikipedia is an international, multilingual project much higher than this single number.
We might see a point in the future where other languages might catch up regarding the size (or quality) of the English one. I would not be surprised to see a language like Hindi or Mandarin gaining speed sooner or later.
Some work has been done on predicting Wikipedia's growth and others are already planning for the 500,000 article press release.
Well, actually this is not something far in the future. Just try to add up all the article numbers from all the international wikipedia sisters. In 10 days (ETA), we will be celebrating our 50K-article count.
last time I checked, there was a story about Udo, the Mandelbrot Monk von www.freezone.co.uk/rgirvan/udo.html. It might have been covered by Slashdot as well. However, it was a brilliant kind of hoax, the one I really love.
While the text appears to be the kind of English it was spoken back in 1390 (haven't been there, yet) and the Latin particles also seem to be authentic, some last suspicion remains, IMHO. It would be nice to hear any kind of statements from you if I'm just paranoid or if this thing is too obvious that nobody has mentioned it.
Last week was an excellent example to see if geeks in Saudia Arabia work similar.
As a part time team member of the (imho:)) excellent phpMyFAQ, I am eager to (let) translate them into as many languages as possible (actually, I'm working on a Latin translation right now).
Last time we got to know that someone from the Arabic community has done this already.
Unfortunatly, my Arabic is still far too broken to be used in daily conversation or even letters. It took some time and attempts to get into contact with them. Well, it seems that this week, the phpmyfaq will be shipped as a version 1.3.9-pl2, introducing Arabic support, thanks to these great people.
If someone speaks this beatiful language, he/she might check out these forum threads:
Slashdot Mirror
Plankalkül was developed in the first half of the 1940ies by Konrad Zuse.
Wikipedia has(as usual) for more information.
What makes you think that Encarta is not biased?
Back in 2002, we had a certain amount of discussions about Encarta's texts about some middle-eastern country and its population. Have you ever tried to fix an error in the Encarta?
http://www.klick-nach-rechts.de/gegen-rechts/20
I'm a student
so under normal circumstances, you wouldn't have to pay anything at all.
www.ard.de
www.tagesschau.de
www.tagesthemen.
www.zdf.de
www.phoenix.de
www.kika.de
www.a
www.heute.de
www.hr-online.de
www.md
and so on.
well, I don't see the crazy point. The next plausible step would be to ask a lawyer if it is possible to forward the bill to the landlord.
:)
Since Germany is no police state, noone could have known that you moved away. The right not to have to tell the police about your whereabouts every week is the one I would prefer over an automatic unsubscribing
try googleing for "Privatkopie". :)
I already can see that
a) is correct. The government is providing an independent bunch of TV and rasio stations to provide basic support with news, culture, and so on. This is the result of the assumption that private TV stations would never broadcast high-quality programme for minorities. (I think I shortened the argumentation...)
b) those kids don't have to pay at all. If they can't afford it, they are propably qualified for a exemption.
If your PC's video card has an TV tuner, you have to pay anyway. There is no change.
The GEZ (see other post) is collecting is you "keep a functional" TV set. Even if you put glue in the Antenna-IN because you only need a SCART-IN for you Nintendo, you have to pay. This has been tested before court.
An international hotel with English-only audience tried to get exempted from these fees because all they wanted to show was CNN. They failed.
This is actually a boomerang for the GEZ, because if you watch TV through a http stream, your computer still lacks any capacity to receive TV signals and therefore, you don't have to pay (unless there is an additional TV set next to your PC).
the GEZ is the Gebühreneinzugszentrale
zentrale=center
Einzug=collection
Gebühr=fee
the -en Gebühren is a plural form, the s after einzug makes it easier to pronounce this monster of a word (if a German word has more than 15 or even 20 chars, it's likely a legal or burocratic word.
Does my attemt of a translation to "center for the collection of [TV] fees" make any sense to the English audience?
The number of people in Germany without a TV set but with a "internet-capable" PC (RS 232? :) ) is incredible low and only for these people there will be any change to notice.
If your income is below a certain line, you can be freed to have to pay anything.
In toto, this is not an Internet tax but just a closure of a gap for those people who have abolished their TV set in order to get the TV stream via http.
I'm from Frankfurt and was at the book fair yesterday. I'll be there today and there is no sign where exactly this press confernce of google will be.
There is no entry in the events-database.
And google's press slav^wspokesman does not respond to calls. They could do better.
I could do better to find that press conference...
Any suggestions?
If they are using just the content under the terms of the GFDL, they don't have to share their revenue (and they don't share their business risk in losing a zillion dollars).
However, they shouldn't miss the opportunity to donate money to wikimedia.
Try this page for example. There is an english translation as well.
And, i might add, there are several other projects for CD/DVD distributions as well (all on meta.) HTH.
Librarian: Don't use Wikipedia as source
Journalist: Wikipedia is "outrageous," "repugnant" and dangerous"
and
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20040825/0238210
Actually, I like this Syracuse Post Standard-rant because it led into a quality check by Edward Felte.
2500 articles is the current growth, not the overall average growth in the last three years.
:)
Maybe this page will be useful to you. And there are of course Erik Zachte's amazing stats
Hi,
/. post and one of your thoughts was "Hmm, let me try this", please come to the discussion into wikipedia and try to find/create an experimental situation which leads to results with any value.
I'm a wikipedian from de.wikipedia.org and I was very busy reading all the comments on various blogs during the last week. I emailed to the Syracuse Post-Standard guy (without reply) and to Sue Stagnitta, the librarian who started the whole debate. I read the comment from Alex and his experiment and the new one.
Well, my first reaction is to say "nonono, don't do this." but this is more complex.
Have you read Ed Felten's great blog entry on quality check on wikipedia?
Inserting errors is one part but I certainly prefer Felten's way: Take articles about topics you really know and look for errors. Collect these, feel free to correct them.
The next step would be to think of means of more sophisticated quality checks (hint: try to use the category scheme for a well distributed set of articles).
Wikipedia has to deal with various kinds of vandalism, ranging from people who can't believe that this wiki-thing lets them edit the articles to people who try to make wikipedia unusable.
However, I think that people who take time to make these experiments are everything but evil. It should be important to point out that this way might not be the best one to prove or disprove something.
If you read this
I could have look at kde.org but there is a certain suspicion that the next release will be something like "Kollege".
Don't mod me up or down, just stick to the facts: How does this beta perform, does it do well, do the developers feel comfortable and so on...
Your observations appear correct to me but I'm getting less and less surprised to see an entry for Thomas Klestil on the Chinese or Japanese wikipedia for example.
2 or 3 decades is not a large time frame for an encyclopedia.
India still might have those problems of a developing country but at the same time, it is the country with the highest output of English speaking engineers.
Even if the average Indian citizen won't drive an SUV for a long time, he might get Internet access in the near future. And that would be the first step towards becoming a wikipedia author.
"Wikipedia Hits 300,000 Articles" is not accurate.
There is no doubt about that the English edition of wikipedia (which is the largest one by a huge margin) has reached 300K articles yesterday as the result of a great collaborative effort.
However, Wikipedia reached 300K articles a while ago and the text itself is correct to take not that all languages put together are now around 800K more or less.
Most communication is done in English, sure but I consider the fact that wikipedia is an international, multilingual project much higher than this single number.
We might see a point in the future where other languages might catch up regarding the size (or quality) of the English one. I would not be surprised to see a language like Hindi or Mandarin gaining speed sooner or later.
Actually, there has been an interview years ago (/. seems to be an early adopter :))
here is the announcement and here's the interview.
Well, It could be time for an update on what has happened within the last three years.
Well, actually this is not something far in the future. Just try to add up all the article numbers from all the international wikipedia sisters. In 10 days (ETA), we will be celebrating our 50K-article count.
500K-worldwide is very close
last time I checked, there was a story about Udo, the Mandelbrot Monk von www.freezone.co.uk/rgirvan/udo.html. It might have been covered by Slashdot as well. However, it was a brilliant kind of hoax, the one I really love.
While the text appears to be the kind of English it was spoken back in 1390 (haven't been there, yet) and the Latin particles also seem to be authentic, some last suspicion remains, IMHO. It would be nice to hear any kind of statements from you if I'm just paranoid or if this thing is too obvious that nobody has mentioned it.
Thanks.
Maybe some people will set up a bit-torrent or edonkey directory...
F B6 F5BE58E8E3DDEDA051717D1EA3DFD|/a ccessibility-3.1.95.tar.tar|12998 24|7CD4E97460899BBB40832AC0905FC28B|/l e|kdeaddons-3.1.95.tar.tar|1362993|C8E7 49B68FF5AB73E04104286B169ADB|/d min-3.1.95.tar.tar|1604464|3DF83 500A2B2D411511249DD2196FF0A|/
ed2k://|file|kde-i18n-3.1.95.tar.tar|161190315|
ed2k://|file|kde
ed2k://|fi
ed2k://|file|kdea
and so on...
Last week was an excellent example to see if geeks in Saudia Arabia work similar.
:)) excellent phpMyFAQ, I am eager to (let) translate them into as many languages as possible (actually, I'm working on a Latin translation right now).
As a part time team member of the (imho
Last time we got to know that someone from the Arabic community has done this already.
Unfortunatly, my Arabic is still far too broken to be used in daily conversation or even letters. It took some time and attempts to get into contact with them. Well, it seems that this week, the phpmyfaq will be shipped as a version 1.3.9-pl2, introducing Arabic support, thanks to these great people.
If someone speaks this beatiful language, he/she might check out these forum threads:
swalif
or alqafelah
This is one of the arabic phpmyfaqs: ksavb.com. Pretty interesting style imho.
The arabic language file was first spotted on albakr
Doesn't this look like the cute Arabic sister of freshmeat.net?