excuse me pal, but if someone is unable to tell apart obvious and unobvious signs of vandalism in a subject s/he is interested in, they should not be on the internet, talking anyway.
The purpose of the new system is not to prevent vandalism (idiots will still add their crap anyway), but to ensure that ordinary people won't see pages that include "xyz is a fag" or other such crap. Because it's shit like that that could give WP a bad reputation among the ordinary non-techy people.
Most people are of course able to identify such obvious vandalism. But only a small percentage of people reading Wikipedia actually realizes that everyone can edit the articles just by clicking the "edit" button. And even fewer know how to browse through the version history to access an unvandalized version or even restore this version. And while tech-savy slashdotters know how Wikipedia works and probably won't care, the IT-handicapped peeps are driven away from the site by such vandalism.
And there's a rather huge gap between 19th century editors that could decide what they wanted to see printed in their books/newspapers and what not; and "Sighters" (or whatever they will be called on the English WP) that only verify whether a new version (which is still viewable by everyone, just one mouseclick away) is vandalized or not. Especially if there are thousands of users with that status.
> many edits by anonymous users are just corrections of typos, linkfixes, layout changes, etc
Got a link/statistics for this claim?
Unfortunately, no. Just my own experience. I'm not sure if there are any meaningful statistics that include information about trivial/non-trivial contributions ratio.
There are of course lots of big, non-trivial edits by anonymous users, but I just wanted to point out that lots of changes can be checked for vandalism rather fast just by looking at the diff page.
You only read it and use it as a reference? So why are you against this system that lets you link to articles that are guaranteed to not include any obivous vandalism? You even can still read and link the newest version that is not yet checked for vandalism, if you want. I don't see your problem.
That's because the Sighted Versions system in the German Wikipedia is only used to verify that edits don't include obvious vandalism ("Bob's mohter is gay!!eleven"). You don't need any expertise to identify such obvious vandalism. Checking the accuarcy of those the newly added facts is done the same way it was done before this system was implemented (watchlists, wikiprojects, casual readers/editors, etc..)
And many edits by anonymous users are just corrections of typos, linkfixes, layout changes, etc.. those can be checked in a glance and flagged as "sighted". And edits by users with the sighter status (older than 60 days, more than 300 edits, clean block log) are flagged as "sighted" automatically. At the moment, there are about 5800 users with this status.
Saxon... handheld devices... Sounds like a masterplan. What are they going to do next? Shoot some satellites into orbit and start an earth-wide mobilephone satellite network?
Huh? Do you hear that sound? Kinda sounds like drums!?
That reminds me of a tourist boat trip on the river Spree through central Berlin a few years back. The ship travelled along buildings like the Bundeskanzleramt (seat of the German chancellor) and lots of old and rebuild buildings.
On the first part of the tour, the tour guide told the tourists a lot about the history of those buildings and talked alot about how badly Berlin in general and those specific buildings were damaged during WW2 and how much it had cost to rebuild them. All this stuff was told in German language. On the return trip, the tour guide was talking in English. But curiously, he talked about lots of things, but hardly ever mentioned WW2 or how much destruction it had caused.
They probably didn't want to constantly remind tourists of those dark times... And I can't blame them for that.
>100 years old doesn't necessarily mean that the image is out of copyright. In Germany (just like in the rest of the EU) copyright expires 70 years after the death of the author. So if someone took some photos in 1890 at the age of 20 and died in 1960, copyright wouldn't expire until January 1st 2031.
Take the works of Leni Riefenstahl for example. She created many Nazi propaganda movies, like Triumph of Will. She died in 2003, so her works won't be in the public domain until January 1st 2074.
22nd century actors are sent to a fantasy world (called Overworld) where wizards, knights, gods and all kind of other fantasy stuff exists, while viewers on earth watch their adventures through the actors' eyes. So it's a fantasy world mixed with a bit of sci-fi technology, and unlike most other popular fantasy novels, it's pretty dark, violent and bloody.
So there's a huge open world to explore and the books have already established that the actors go on adventures (arranged by the studio on earth) that are set in a certain place where actors have to do certain things (search a treasure, fight an evil enemy, murder the king), which fits very well into a quest-based MMO.
According to Wikipedia:
In November 2004 article Magnitude and causes of visual impairment, the WHO estimated that in 2002 there were 161 million (about 2.6% of the world population) visually impaired people in the world, of whom 124 million (about 2%) had low vision and 37 million (about 0.6%) were blind.
The real problem comes when Government finds out that robot police are so cheap they can put one every ten metres along every street in the city. No, the real problem comes after that, when some geek hacks into the control program and sends the robots marching towards Redmond...
Walk up to 100 random people on the street, and ask them if they've heard of a video game, called Counterstrike.
I really advise slashdot users not to do this. I wouldn't take long until the cops arrive to investigate the calls about this pale, strange person talking about killer games...
Everyone is overlooking the rather large elephant in the room. What is time, anyway?
Well, according to the latest Doctor Who episode:
People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff.
I think that's as good as any other explanation (until some senator finally reveals the truth: that time is actually a series of temporal tubes...)
Heck, for half that price you could buy a little router and carry it with you! And in many parts of the world you could even get a little guy to carry it for you too!
Slashdot Mirror
excuse me pal, but if someone is unable to tell apart obvious and unobvious signs of vandalism in a subject s/he is interested in, they should not be on the internet, talking anyway.
The purpose of the new system is not to prevent vandalism (idiots will still add their crap anyway), but to ensure that ordinary people won't see pages that include "xyz is a fag" or other such crap. Because it's shit like that that could give WP a bad reputation among the ordinary non-techy people.
Most people are of course able to identify such obvious vandalism. But only a small percentage of people reading Wikipedia actually realizes that everyone can edit the articles just by clicking the "edit" button. And even fewer know how to browse through the version history to access an unvandalized version or even restore this version. And while tech-savy slashdotters know how Wikipedia works and probably won't care, the IT-handicapped peeps are driven away from the site by such vandalism.
And there's a rather huge gap between 19th century editors that could decide what they wanted to see printed in their books/newspapers and what not; and "Sighters" (or whatever they will be called on the English WP) that only verify whether a new version (which is still viewable by everyone, just one mouseclick away) is vandalized or not. Especially if there are thousands of users with that status.
> many edits by anonymous users are just corrections of typos, linkfixes, layout changes, etc
Got a link/statistics for this claim?
Unfortunately, no. Just my own experience. I'm not sure if there are any meaningful statistics that include information about trivial/non-trivial contributions ratio. There are of course lots of big, non-trivial edits by anonymous users, but I just wanted to point out that lots of changes can be checked for vandalism rather fast just by looking at the diff page.
You only read it and use it as a reference? So why are you against this system that lets you link to articles that are guaranteed to not include any obivous vandalism? You even can still read and link the newest version that is not yet checked for vandalism, if you want. I don't see your problem.
That's because the Sighted Versions system in the German Wikipedia is only used to verify that edits don't include obvious vandalism ("Bob's mohter is gay!!eleven"). You don't need any expertise to identify such obvious vandalism. Checking the accuarcy of those the newly added facts is done the same way it was done before this system was implemented (watchlists, wikiprojects, casual readers/editors, etc..)
And many edits by anonymous users are just corrections of typos, linkfixes, layout changes, etc.. those can be checked in a glance and flagged as "sighted". And edits by users with the sighter status (older than 60 days, more than 300 edits, clean block log) are flagged as "sighted" automatically. At the moment, there are about 5800 users with this status.
Saxon... handheld devices... Sounds like a masterplan. What are they going to do next? Shoot some satellites into orbit and start an earth-wide mobilephone satellite network?
Huh? Do you hear that sound? Kinda sounds like drums!?
A ball of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff?
That reminds me of a tourist boat trip on the river Spree through central Berlin a few years back. The ship travelled along buildings like the Bundeskanzleramt (seat of the German chancellor) and lots of old and rebuild buildings.
On the first part of the tour, the tour guide told the tourists a lot about the history of those buildings and talked alot about how badly Berlin in general and those specific buildings were damaged during WW2 and how much it had cost to rebuild them. All this stuff was told in German language. On the return trip, the tour guide was talking in English. But curiously, he talked about lots of things, but hardly ever mentioned WW2 or how much destruction it had caused.
They probably didn't want to constantly remind tourists of those dark times... And I can't blame them for that.
>100 years old doesn't necessarily mean that the image is out of copyright. In Germany (just like in the rest of the EU) copyright expires 70 years after the death of the author. So if someone took some photos in 1890 at the age of 20 and died in 1960, copyright wouldn't expire until January 1st 2031.
Take the works of Leni Riefenstahl for example. She created many Nazi propaganda movies, like Triumph of Will. She died in 2003, so her works won't be in the public domain until January 1st 2074.
Party balloons full of gasoline have all the same advantages without being expensive.
I think Boba Fett would disagree.
Maybe Matthew Stover's Caine novels?
22nd century actors are sent to a fantasy world (called Overworld) where wizards, knights, gods and all kind of other fantasy stuff exists, while viewers on earth watch their adventures through the actors' eyes. So it's a fantasy world mixed with a bit of sci-fi technology, and unlike most other popular fantasy novels, it's pretty dark, violent and bloody.
So there's a huge open world to explore and the books have already established that the actors go on adventures (arranged by the studio on earth) that are set in a certain place where actors have to do certain things (search a treasure, fight an evil enemy, murder the king), which fits very well into a quest-based MMO.
Considering the typical technical skills of German policemen and state agencies, you will likely see Win 3.1 on your machine...
According to Wikipedia: In November 2004 article Magnitude and causes of visual impairment, the WHO estimated that in 2002 there were 161 million (about 2.6% of the world population) visually impaired people in the world, of whom 124 million (about 2%) had low vision and 37 million (about 0.6%) were blind.
Then jam their cameras http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceballsLone Starr style. It's even cheaper than paintball markers.