Dealing with Wikipedia at a domain level.

[hutch--]

The solution for webmasters in dealing with Wikipedia is very simple, for educational institutions they can simply block access to Wikipedia so that students must make the effort to research technical data of a more reliable nature. At the opposite end if a webmaster is not willing to let an organisation like Wikipedia use his/her website to build their encycplopedia as a set of links to other people's content, all they need do is alter their ".htaccess" file and do a referrers block and it breaks the direct link. The end result is to force Wikipedia to provide their own content like everyone else has to do.

Once people realise the Wikipedia is "just another web site" they can routinely treate it like "just another web site" and if its content, actions and internal policy do not measure up to the criterion set by other web sites on the internet, then double end blocking it is the solution. Never be misled by the hype coming out of the place, behind the facade is a variant GPL licencing system that takes anything it can get and owns it. Anything you contribute to Wikipedia becomes their property and you become expendable once they own your work. Never contribute your own copyright data to them or even access to it as you have an army of backyard GPL lawyers geared to take what they can and you never get anything back.

Remember that Wikipedia is a privately owned organisation and while it sells the notion of being a non-profit organisation, the private ownership makes it vulnerable to commercial exploitation at a later date so the unwitting contributor ends up doing little else than lining someone elses pocket. The double ended block levels the playing field.

[oex]

Hey Hutch,

That is a considered and intelligent solution that will unfortunately be lost on the masses. It will likely result in people thinking the masm project no longer exists when they click the link and other organisations will not have the 'organisational intelligence' to implement the block or understand the reasons for blocking. Further, information posted will be even less accurate. Google and the corporate empire are continueing to circle looking for a profitable angle which will probably make things worse as it will potentially split the web in two, the fed accurate information and the fed bullshit groups, kinda like those with and without university education in the real world only that goes against the rebel 'fight the power' inclusive nature of the internet so someone will come along with a worse but inclusive idea everyone will signup to.

IMHO the best way to fight it, save the world economy and the minds of future generations is to convince enough people to use a sane licensing system, for what it's worth :bg

[hutch--]

Interesting comment. The masm32 project never needed them and is better off without any association as it is freeware for programmers, not amusement for the masses but my comments after having recently had some involvement are pointed far wider. It appears to be going through some consolidation stage at the moment in preparation for its next move which among other things involved putting it on a CD/DVD and selling it to educational institutions and its here where profitability raises its ugly head.

Through this consolidation stage it is now biting off the hand that fed it in the first place, that army of people with diverse expertise that wrote the core of the articles that it contains. While its own hype says that it aspires to be something else that ascends other sites on the internet, the construction of the internet has the solution for web masters running independent web sites and that goes for educational institutions as well as commercial and other web sites, if the web master or board that runs an educational institution do not approve of either the quality of the content or alternately being used to provide content for them by embedded links on the Wikipedsia web site, they can just block it from either direction to protect the interests they serve.

Encyclopedia Britannica is a real encyclopedia with a long history of published expertise as is in fact the case with many other well respected publishers but Wikipedia is none of these, its a reasonably recent internet web site with aspirations of hitting the heights on the back of a multitude of well intended people that it has made use of in the first place, chopping off their access so that they must provide their own content is the solution and its easy to do at the web site level.

[oex]

I do like the idea of this, it does make sense and would make still more sense if wiki was to promote it itself to websites listed. The idea that wiki doesnt rely on qualifications is a good one, but it should still rely on expertise, if people who want to contribute are forced to have a reasonable *on topic* website that backs up their expertise this makes more sense. The problem is twitter, facebook and the like, again IMHO.... If you make things too easy you dumb down the entire internet, people with any kind of authoritative position online should have a working knowledge of how things technically work.... You wouldnt get in a taxi if the driver couldnt drive or on a plane if the pilot couldnt fly.... Just because the taxi driver has a lot to say for himself doesnt mean jack sh*t....

[Magicle]

Hutch, on a witch hunt - are we?  :lol
However, I agree with you, and oex has made some very true comments.
And to add to all that, Wikipedia officially disrespects the individuals which made the information available in the first place (like JWASM case). If this were to happen - expect Wikipedia and its owners to be very much........useless in the future.

[donkey]

Remember that Wikipedia is a privately owned organisation

Can you back this up ? As far as I know it is owned by the Wikimedia foundation which is a non-profit foundation and under the law cannot be privately owned since its status is a "Public Charity".

And before you go on about how I should become an editor, I will once again note that I do not seem to have the same desire for wiki-notability that you demonstrate so I don't get particularly upset when the "just another web site" doesn't want the content I would provide (not that I would consider providing any).

Edgar

[donkey]

Never be misled by the hype coming out of the place, behind the facade is a variant GPL licencing system that takes anything it can get and owns it.

? that's a violation of copyright law and expressly against the terms of the content license.

There are plenty of things you can truthfully say against Wikipedia, making things up shouldn't be necessary.

[oex]

Never be misled by the hype coming out of the place, behind the facade is a variant GPL licencing system that takes anything it can get and owns it.

I think Hutch means the license owns it not the organisation which is worse because like software associated material gets dragged into the black hole license.... At least if I understand GPL correctly I am no expert.... So for example so I can be properly chastised if I'm wrong.... if you include an open source licensed piece of code in your app all your code has to be open source also.... This makes your code owned by the open source license.... ie it tells oyu you have no choice but to publish

[donkey]

Never be misled by the hype coming out of the place, behind the facade is a variant GPL licencing system that takes anything it can get and owns it.

I think Hutch means the license owns it not the organisation which is worse because like software associated material gets dragged into the black hole license.... At least if I understand GPL correctly I am no expert.... So for example so I can be properly chastised if I'm wrong.... if you include an open source licensed piece of code in your app all your code has to be open source also.... This makes your code owned by the open source license.... ie it tells oyu you have no choice but to publish

The license, by law, cannot abrogate the rights of the copyright holder, if you own it, you own it - period. It does not limit your right to use it nor does it deny you the right to later issue it under a different separate license. According to wikipedia:

By law the contributions are still owned by people who donated them. These people are not bound by the license and can use their property in the way they like. However media with multiple authors require permission from every contributor to use them differently from the terms of the Wikipedia license.

The Wikimedia Foundation does not own copyright on Wikipedia article texts and illustrations
...
For permission to use it, one must contact the owner of the copyright of the text or illustration in question; often, but not always, this will be the original author.

[donkey]

Hi oex,

Yes, the GPL is a viral license (and I'm the last one to support it) but under no circumstances does it change your rights over code you own. If you include code that you did not write or hold the copyright to and the author licensed it to you under the GPL then you are bound by the terms of that license as long as you use the GPL code. However, the author can have a separate license governing the terms of your use and that has nothing to do with the GPL and you would not be bound by the GPL nor would it infect your software. The key player in all of this is the copyright holder (normally the author), he can license his software in as many ways as he likes to as many different people as he likes. For example I can require that if you use a snippet of mine you are required to place a notice in the about box while at the same time require another to place a hyperlink, different licensing requirements for different users.

[hutch--]

The distinction is between word and object but to consumerise it, its the difference between principle and practice. While most of us have heard the pie in the sky GPL bullsh*t it is as a matter of fact that behind the platitudes is a licence that is after Copyright which it rigidly enforces so if you are connected to them or in any sense dependent on their content, your content is their content and their content is their content.

Now while the Wikipedia organisation may publish guidelines on copyright, because of the sheer size of the organisation, normal inertia factors and arse covering by combinations of editors and administrators, getting copyright violations removed is another matter entirely.

The topic is the effective way to solve the problem, treat Wikipedia like any other web site and block their access to your content so they have to actually write their own. Wikipedia editor "Apache" strikes again using the ".htaccess" method.

PS: Edgar, you really should become a Wikipedia editor trying to add content to their web site, it would be a fantasy shattering experience for you. Like Coleridges Ancient Mariner "A sadder but a wiser man he woke the morrow morn".  :bg

[donkey]

Steve,

I have no fantasies about Wikipedia, but I do like to be fair. They have rules and guidelines for submissions, it is their right to question whether something falls within their guidelines. The fact of the matter is that if I have something to publish regarding code I do it here, there is no better forum for me.

This is my take on Wikipedia, so we can put the editor question to rest:

Wikipedia is too general for my liking and I tend to frequent more targeted sites with in-depth information rather than get the watered down generalizations that Wikipedia offers. For example if I want to know something about IBM's research in quantum computers I will visit IBM's research site, not Wikipedia. Wikipedia is just like any encyclopedia, it has very general and factually dubious information that is useless for any real analysis nor does it offer any enlightenment. In my opinion Wikipedia is chewing gum for the mind and nothing else, it steps in when you are not interested in a subject enough to bother researching it.

The distinction is between word and object but to consumerise it, its the difference between principle and practice. While most of us have heard the pie in the sky GPL bullsh*t it is as a matter of fact that behind the platitudes is a licence that is after Copyright which it rigidly enforces so if you are connected to them or in any sense dependent on their content, your content is their content and their content is their content.

This can be said about any license, if you don't own it you have to live up to the terms of use. For example, in the MASM32 distribution there are snippets which the author has licensed for non-commercial use only (Ernie's COM stuff), if I was to use that code I would be bound by that agreement and limiting my own distribution rights. Not only that but if you used say BitmapFromPicture in your freeware application, no one would ever be allowed to use it in a commercial application, not even you. So would you say that by including Ernie's bitmap stuff MASM32 is as viral in some cases as the GPL ? You would be hard pressed to find anyone more anti-gpl than I am, I have even earned a special place in Betov's "asshole" list because of my vocal opposition to it but I am still a realist and every license places restrictions on you.

Edgar

[hutch--]

Edgar,

I am still much of the view that the experience would make you a sadder but wiser man. Without bothering to learn WikiSpeak create a new page on Wikipedia using their invitation for topics that don't exist and enjoy all of the crap that they don't tell you about, some imbecile tracking the new pages list comes flying in within hours and slaps a tag on it in terms of notability or relevance or whatever etc .... and you have no warning of this crap until it happens. Then if you question it the sh*t starts to fly, the arse covering begins and the tribal nature of collections of editors and administrators grinds into gear.

If they were honest in the first place and warned you of how contributions are treated, most people would tell them to shove their web site up their arse but they still grovel for contributions on one hand and sh*t on the contributors on the other. I offer you the chance to experience the place so you stop talking about the theoretical nature of licencing and see how it is done in real life, the distinction between word and object. You could waste your life and time wading through a set of conflicting and often contrdictory rules that the idiot fringe tearing around the place communicate with yet if you bother to have a look at their contributions, most of them have written almost no content, they are just pests vying for administrator status and trashing the place in the process.

The topic here is how you deal with it at a domain level, editor "Apache" treats Wikipedia like any other web site and the ".htaccess" method works fine. If they want an encyclopedia, then they can get off their arse and write their own content, not steal bandwidth from other web sites.

[MichaelW]

yet if you bother to have a look at their contributions, most of them have written almost no content, they are just pests vying for administrator status and trashing the place in the process

That is the way it looked to me after I checked the history of some of these clowns. The articles they choose to edit typically cover such a wide range of topics that they could not possibly have any significant grasp of the subject matter.

[hutch--]

Some links for interested parties to make themselves heard about the deletion of the JWASM page.

The instigator of the deletion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Elen_of_the_Roads

The seconder who also tried to delete half of the masm page.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:OrangeDog

His busom buddy covering his arse.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:SarekOfVulcan

Their partner in crime.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Pohta_ce-am_pohtit

The administrator who did the dirty work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:MLauba

I only ask this much, even though these people acted like a bunch of arseh*les I would ask that if and when you comment on their talk pages that you do not vandalise anything or use naughty words as they may not be able to cope with real world criticism. They appear to recoil in shock/horor if you suggest that they write the f*cking thing themselves.  :P