User talk:UninvitedCompany/archive4

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Old talk archived 1 2 3

Contents 1 New talk 2 Our recent interactions 3 Lilypond 4 RfA - Ruhrjung 5 Jeronimo 6 Request for Arbitration Against UninvitedCompany 7 Election endorsements problem 8 Reithy and Chuck's candidacies 9 Need administrative help 10 Barnstar 11 Statistics question 12 About administration 13 Acceptance of consideration for adminship (Wernher) 14 Acceptance of nomination (Malcolm Farmer) 15 Future of my Wikipedia status 16 259 Reversion 17 Blocking 18 Blocking policy 19 Arbitration Committee election 20 Article Licensing

[edit] New talk

[edit] Our recent interactions

I am uncomfortable with a couple if interactions we have had recently. You are a user I highly respect, someone whose integrity is without question. Early upon coming here you made some very friendly and thoughtful comments to me on IRC which convinced me not to leave the project. You are also one of the core personalities here, and for that reason as well I strongly prefer not to engage in any sort of personality conflict with you. If there are things which concern you, I am willing to discuss. I think there are some meta-issues which we see differently, but I assure you I do not desire to be disruptive nor antagonistic to the best interests of the project. Cheers, Sam Spade

Hi, Sam. I have a good deal of respect for you and your contributions here, as well, and am pleased to see that you've continued to contribute. I seek out no conflict, and strive to bear no grudge against you or anyone. I do respond to particular questions or situations on their merits, and it is unfortunate that we seem to have been at opposite purposes in some recent matters. If you are concerned about any particular matter, please feel free to contact me here or via email. The Uninvited Co., Inc. 16:36, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Actually I am mightilly less concerned than I was when I left the above note. At the time, we had disagreed about two matters in the space of a few hours. At this point, nearly a week later, we still likely disagree about the same two matters, but nothing especially unfortunate has come of it, and no other disagreements have come up. At the time I was worried we may have been getting into an unfortunate pattern, and since at this point that is clearly not the case, I hope you will take the above as an act of excessive civility and caution, and nothing more. If you'd like to discuss signatures, RfA#LGagnon, or Talk:Stephen King (or anything else for that matter ;) I welcome it, but I feel what was concerning me at the time is more than resolved, it was likely nonexistant. Nice to hear from you as always, [[User:Sam Spade|Sam Spade Arb Com election]] 18:09, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Lilypond

I agree that Lilypond is likely to be the best free-software score typesetting solution for the forseeable future, but I'd still prefer if we avoided simply wholesale embedding Lilypond code into Wikipedia articles, like we do with LaTeX math code. IMO, wikitext ought to remain as close to semantically-relevant as possible, so it can be rendered in a number of ways. LaTeX is so far the only external language that can be directly embedded, and it's not a particularly bad one, because only a subset is allowed anyway, and it's well-defined and, for the most part, semantically meaningful (perhaps not ideal, but not horrendous).

My preferred solution would be to start with a simple markup that would be rendered through Lilypond, but which would be semantically clear enough to be conceivably converted to some other format if others wish to render through a different backend. I guess my main issue is that I think we ought to store notational information in some sort of notation-markup language rather than a typesetting language. Lilypond may be slightly better than rendering with your own preferred software and uploading the PNG, but only slightly, IMO. --Delirium 01:18, Nov 18, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] RfA - Ruhrjung

Thank you for your kind proposal.

Now is not the best time. Due to changes in my professional life, in recent months I've had considerably fewer days each month with opportunity to sleep and eat at home, than I've got used to in the last years — not to mention opportunity for computerized recreation. :-)

Additionally, I think I would be dishonest, if I didn't mention that I'm distressed by what I perceive as Wikipedia's vulnerability for campaigns from determined and energetic Wikipedians with an agenda that only ostensibly recognizes fundamental principles of Wikipedia. This surely contributes to my limited motivation.
--Ruhrjung 08:16, 2004 Nov 18 (UTC)

You might, by the way, want to browse the contributions by User:Johan Magnus. I'm particularly impressed by his ways at talk pages, where his presence seems to defuse disputes, often before they've reached the stadge of potential conflicts. I have intended (I still intend) to nominate him, but I seem to be runing short of time again, and have not yet understood the present methodology for additions at RfA. See: User talk:Johan Magnus#Adminship and User talk:Whiskey#Continuation War where he acknoledge to have what appears to be a decade of experience of internet discussions and diverging views on matters of North-European history and contemporary societies. I know the actual usenet forum, but am not particularly impressed by its appearance. Somewhat more impressing the FAQ at http://www.lysator.liu.se/nordic/ is, that Johas has been one of two editors of. This experience clearly shows in his judgements with regard to recent, possibly controversial, additions.
--Ruhrjung 08:42, 2004 Nov 18 (UTC)

[edit] Jeronimo

The user has not been especially active, which brings up the question of their ability or willingness to execute admin responsibilities, unless we feel that adminship is simply an honorific, and I and many others do not. The user has been on Wikipedia during the time frame on the nomination but has not paid attention to this for whatever reason. The RfA page states:

Note: Nominations have to be accepted by the user in question. If you nominate a user, please also leave a message on their talk page and ask them to reply here if they accept the nomination.

and the instructions for promotion say:

1. If [the nomination] is not a self-request, check the user has accepted the nomination

I respect your desire for inclusiveness, but if seven days is sufficient time for 24 Wikipedians to vote for the nomination, it is sufficient time for the candidate to be aware of what's going on. To this end I posted a request on Jeronimo's talk at the same time I extended the nomination. If he/she does not respond, the nomination can always be reposted.

I would ask also that you inform your nominees that they must accept their nominations on the RfA page. It is simple respect for the community, in addition to being a rule. As of the moment, three of your nominees have not accepted or rejected their nominations after being posted for 24-72 hours. I left a message earlier today on each nominee's talk. Cheers, -- Cecropia | explains it all ® 01:08, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)

To acknowledge your point, of course Jeronimo may simply be unaware that he was supposed to formally accept, which is why I posted a note to him and extended the nomination. I will see if he logs in during the next 24 hours to determine whether he is likely to be aware of this. Kind regards, Cecropia | explains it all ® 01:23, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Well, UC, to be blunt, I am not imposing a 24-hour anything. Jeronimo had seven days to accept the nomination. Now he has eight days'. The rules clearly state that the nomination must be accepted for promotion. You say: "The purpose of requiring nominees to accept a nomination is to prevent unwanted or frivilous nominations. I don't believe that insisting that a nomination be accepted in a certain manner and within a certain timeframe is required, nor should it be. If the candidate wants the nomination, that's good enough for me. I believe that it is quite sufficient that candidates either give permission in advance or accept after being nominated. We joke about this being a bureaucracy, but let's try not to live up to that overmuch." But you, as I, are one person; you have an activist view of adminship. I don't have an argument with your core belief that adminship should be open, but you appear to be willing to oppose any procedure whatever.

As to my "moratorium," note that I asked editors to respect it. I ran a poll when there was opposition, and I respected the result. The whole process was over in a couple of days. -- Cecropia | explains it all ® 16:56, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Request for Arbitration Against UninvitedCompany

You are hereby notified of the request for arbitration made against you in light of your:

1) improper removal of my nomination for ArbCom election 2) vandalism of my user page

Reithy 12:44, Nov 19, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Election endorsements problem

Hi, since you're apparently helping administer the Arbitration Committee election, I think an opinion would be called for to settle the dispute over how to structure the endorsements page. --Michael Snow 19:40, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Reithy and Chuck's candidacies

Another user pointed out to me that Chuck F is a candidate for the arbitration committee. It's hard for me to disagree with your handling of the Reithy situation, as Reithy is a very abusive user, but I think that Chuck and Reithy have to be handled equally here. My opinion is that the spirit of their temp injunction doesn't prevent them from running for the arbcom. I believe Chuck's statement should stay. And I think you should reinstate Reithy's candidacy statement, but truncate it to the 250-word limit and remove personal attacks. I think his block should continue, since Reithy has violated the injunction from so many sockpuppet accounts. But above all, Chuck and Reithy must be treated equally on the Arbcom candidacy page. Thoughts? Rhobite 19:56, Nov 19, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Need administrative help

I'm not sure if you an admin or not, but I'm assuming you are since you have been nominating so many people. User:Dr Zen has been flaming me on both Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/LGagnon and Talk:Stephen King for the past few days. He has tried putting words in my mouth (which I definitely did not say) in an attempt to discredit my performance on Wikipedia. This is not only disrupting a conversation on Talk:Stephen King but also putting my status as a admin candidate at risk by misleading voters. I am asking you to please stop him from harassing me so that I can continue on with my work in peace. -- [[User:LGagnon|LGagnon]] 04:18, Nov 20, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Barnstar

I award you this barnstar. Enjoy!

[edit] Statistics question

UninvitedCompany, are you aware of a source that allows one to determine how many active editors are currently working on Wikipedia? Say within the last week, the last month, and the last six months?

Some users are throwing around claims that imply that they know the sentiment of the average editor, and I would like to be better informed as to how many editors there really are, actively making contributions to articles.

I am really surprised the developers of the Wiki software didn't see fit to build a polling mechanism into the client front end, because given the number of editors I think there may be, the error in almost every poll I've seen must be huge (as to how representative it is of the actual opinions of the editors out there).

If this is not your area of expertise, I would be indebted to you if you would pass this query along to the proper individual whom you think would best be able to provide some answers.

Per a recommendation by Theresa Knott, I will cross post this message to Danny and Elian, in the hopes that one of you will know the answer.

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

--DV 03:44, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Hi David. I think your question is an interesting one and very much worthy of some analysis time. At present there is no source for accurate information about user editing patterns. I have downloaded a copy of the Wikipedia database and have run some queries here locally to come up with what information is available. The queries are lengthy and would place a substantial load on the Wikimedia database if they were run there. You have probably seen Wikipedia:Another list of Wikipedians in order of arrival, which answers a different question but is based on the same data.

I believe from what data I have seen that the number of casual contributors to the project, who either contribute anonymously or log in and make a few dozen edits before losing interest, is far greater than is widely realized.

I will run some queries and try to get some facts for you. The data will now be a month or two old, because it has been that long since I downloaded the "old" table, a process that requires some days even with a high-speed internet connection.

The Uninvited Co., Inc. 16:01, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Is this database you refer to something that anyone can download? I have friends with access to extremely high-speed connections (don't ask), so I could download it fairly quickly if it is available to an average joe like myself.

There are too many people running around Wikipedia making unsupported claims about the sentiments of the editing community. I would like to get my hands on some objective demographic data, and I am willing to put in some effort to making use of that data.

I really think a polling mechanism should be built into the main editing page, to make it easy to poll all the editors about various questions - it would just be a simple, one or two word link, discreetly placed somewhere near the edit box - what do you think? I think the existing polling pages are fundamentally flawed because they rely on self-selection (which makes them statistically invalid when there are few participants) and if a discreet polling link was built into the editing page, you could find out all sorts of demographic information that would lead to better understanding of the editing community.

(I'm fascinated how many of the experienced users on Wikipedia don't realize how important link placement and nesting is - in the commercial web, companies pay thousands and sometimes millions of dollars for optimal link placement, or to have their content placed higher up in a page hierarchy. I don't think anyone realizes what a strong self-selection impact there is for each additional link one has to click to get to a poll, or to get to a policy discussion. Having a polling link right near the editing box would help to mitigate those effects.)

By the way, your mention of users who edit for a short time and then leave indicates that a better effort needs to be made at retention. I've read with great interest the writings of Dr. Adam Carr on how to improve Wikipedia, and if none of his proposals are implemented, I am convinced a fork will rise up to compete with Wikipedia.

I have thought quite a bit about putting together a venture capital plan to obtain funding to put together an improved version Wikipedia - the big concession any VC person would want to fund this is that there would have to be more flexibility to add corporate sponsorship (hopefully more similar to the way Public Television is partially funded in the U.S., rather than animated gifs blinking on every page!).

I read some of the history on why Wikipedia rejects corporate funding, and it seems clear that a lot of "open source forever" fanatics fail to realize what the real benefits would be if they were willing to compromise on this point. I'm fascinated that no one has simply taken all of the site, added commercial sponsorship to it, and opened up a lightly commercialized version with the types of controls envisioned by Dr. Carr.

However, before seriously pursuing a commercial fork, I would like to get objective demographics about the active editors, to find out just how many of them are hardcore open source fanatics, and therefore would not edit on a commercial site at all, now matter how discreet the commercialism was. And I've done enough startup companies in my time to know that it would be a pain in the ass for a lot of other reasons I won't bore you with here.

Suffice to say, it would be so much better if Wikipedia could be improved, to the point that it would be much less attractive for anyone to even consider making a competitor, don't you think?

If you can point me to other serious thinkers who want to improve Wikipedia I'd appreciate that as well.

Finally, do you happen to know how the back-end of Wikipedia is structured, i.e., what operating system is used, its implementation languages, and so forth? I've only been able to find out a little bit about the front end, but the back end seems to be rather mysterious. I haven't asked Tim Starling because I don't want to distract him from the important preparations he is making for the vote. Are there other developers besides Tim Starling who I could write to?

Thanks for your assistance with my questions.

Cheers,

--DV 08:11, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

David,

The entire database including all history is available for download. See Wikipedia:Database download for details. At present the compressed data is approximately 12 GB, which would theoretically take about an hour to download using a T3 connection. However, due to bandwidth limitations at the Wikipedia end of things, it may take considerably longer. I downloaded my copy using a T1 line over the course of about ten days.

The Wikipedia back-end runs on Linux using MySQL, Apache, and PHP for database, web, and logic components respectively. All the software is available for download and is GPL licensed, see Wikipedia:MediaWiki, and there are a number of private mirrors out there in addition to mine, along with one or two public forks and some dozens of sites using the MediaWiki software for unrelated content.

Wikipedia editors are a diverse bunch, and while some are blissfully unaware of link placement and scope-of-conflict issues involved in voting and governance, there are also some who are fully cognizant of them. With the exception of the board and arbcom elections, there are no actual "votes" that take place, and such polls as do occur are really only supposed to be intended to gauge community sentiment as a guide to discussion. There is a Quaker-like concept of the "sense of the meeting," but just as in Quaker communities, there is far more politics to the decisionmaking than meets the eye. There is a great deal of self-selection in that people unhappy with the status quo just leave, or at least don't get involved in policy discussions.

The "open source forever" philosophy is a foundation issue for the project and one where there is unlikely to be any compromise. There are, however, editors who would prefer or at least tolerate licensing of content under terms other than the GFDL, with the various Creative Commons licenses having at least some following here. Because these licenses were not in widespread use at the time Wikipedia adopted the GFDL, they did not receive serious consideration.

Retention of the best editors is crucial to the project's success. When I become aware of editors who are upset with the community, I invest considerable time, thought, and in some cases political capital to address their concerns and encourage them to stay. There are others who do the same thing.

The Uninvited Co., Inc. 13:48, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Thank you very much for your technical assistance and other insights.

I just finished downloading the current database for en.wikipedia. I also downloaded the software from MediaWiki. There appears to be some helpful documentation supplied with the software as well.

As for the GFDL, I find the text of that license to be clearly written, and also find that it does not seem to impose any special hardships on commericial use of covered content. From my first couple of readings of the GFDL, it appears that a free access site with corporate sponsorship is perfectly acceptable, such that it is not necessary to make any changes in the licensing scheme. The only substantial requirements of GFDL appear to be the requirement of pointing out where the source content can be obtained for free, and that certain notices be prominently displayed.

It's quite amazing that I was able to download the entire thing just like that. It's curious that so few sites are wrapping this content as a commercial sponsorship platform. (Perhaps it hasn't been widely publicized that this is even possible?)

Thanks again for your assistance.

And good luck with the upcoming election!

--DV 06:45, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)

We have a list of known mirrors somewhere. There are a dozen or more. There are a couple of things to watch with licensing. First of all, there is the matter of the images, which are not included in the database dumps but can be downloaded seperately. Some of these are encumbered by copyright and are presumed to be fair use here. They may not be fair use for other, more commercial, undertakings; further, there may be problems in certain jurisdictions with locally copyrighted material whose local protections extend beyond the Berne convention. Second of all, there the matter of attribution. The GFDL requires five major authors to be listed. The majority opinion at Wikipedia is that attribution is required to be seperate for each article. I disagree, and believe that the encyclopedia as a whole is a single work, and hence from a licensing standpoint requires attribution only in aggregate, with five major authors for the entire work being listed. I am not an attorney and would suggest that you seek legal counsel on these two points.

The Uninvited Co., Inc. 04:14, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I wouldn't dream of hiding the extensive number of authors of the articles - it's one of the selling points, so I would certainly make sure that all of the authors are credited on each article page.

As for the images, thanks for the tip about the separate download. I already grabbed those from the separate link at the bottom of the download page.

I finally found a couple of pages that list all the mirrors, here and here. Sheesh, I'd sure be pissed off at a lot of them if I was a long time contributor here. The number of mirrors and forks which don't even bother to link back, or obscure the links, or which have attempted to hot link to the images, is fairly long (and somewhat depressing.)

None of the above shortcuts are necessary for what I have in mind, and I would be perfectly willing to accede to anyone's requirements for adhering to the licenses once I have a site up and running, so no lawyering will be required. (It always takes the air out of any talk of lawyers when one agrees to do whatever is required.)

As for the images, I can see how it would make sense to only host images that have a GFDL tag on them, and leave the remaining image refs in articles with a short "image being reviewed" tag, and then investigate the remaining images one at a time to determine their status.

By the way, I continue to be impressed by the extensive documentation and references that are posted to help developers ramp up on how everything works here. It's amazing that so many of the developers appear to work for free around here. Reviewing the software download package, I am really impressed by their noble efforts.

Thanks again for taking a moment to lend your insights and knowledge. I hope I will have the opportunity to pay you back for your kind assistance.

Regards,

--DV 14:41, 27 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] About administration

Before I start, let me say I am not writing this because I lost, but because I lost without a fair election. If I had lost through a fair election, I would accept it and move on. But unfortunately this election was allowed to be trashed by a troll. Somehow, the adminitration saw no reason to stop libel, a problem that not only hurts the community but could potentially put Wikipedia in legal trouble. Dr Zen continued to throw around lies about me and convinced some editors to vote against me with those lies, and no matter how many times I pointed it out nothing was done.

And the problem here is not just the troll, but the administration. It was becoming obvious to me early in the election that Dr Zen's libel was going to ruin the election without intervention by admins, but rather than make this statement then I decided to give them a chance to pull through before the end. But unfortunately they never did. Despite having rules against personal attacks, the rules went unenforced. The admins, for whatever reason, chose not hold together the community. With an event like this ignored, it's obvious that the administration is flawed. Not only that, but the method for choosing admins is flawed as well. The election ended up being more of a witch hunt than an actual election. We could have avoided this if the admins had done something, but they didn't.

So, if you are considering nominating me again, don't bother. Whether or not I am up to par to be part of the administration is besides the point; whether or not the administration as it is is up to par is a more important question to ask now. A real community has rules and enforcement of the rules so that no one will be harmed; this proto-community that we have here is missing these essential aspects. Instead, my reputation was trashed and another editor was allowed to harass me.

So please, don't bother to nominate me again unless the administration improves, because the election is supposed to be run by a community, not an anarchy. -- [[User:LGagnon|LGagnon]] 04:40, Nov 25, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Acceptance of consideration for adminship (Wernher)

OK, I've slept on, and pondered, the issue, and have decided to accept the invitation to be considered for adminship. Too bad categories can't be renamed/moved, though -- that would certainly be a feature for admins to make good use of. BTW, if you though my editing your user page (re my acceptance) to be rude, I apologise. :-) --Wernher 05:42, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Please do not consider this as nagging, but I could really use the adminship (if voted in, of course) to do reverts here and there. It's a little inconvenient to have to do this 'manually' all the time. And such routine work is an important admin chore, isn't it? I do it compulsively, as I'm sure many other contributors do as well. --Wernher 20:58, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for the nomination! I have answered some of the candidate Qs. Some more info to come when I have twisted my sleep-deprived little grey ones a tad. --Wernher 06:58, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Acceptance of nomination (Malcolm Farmer)

I see you aked me if I'd liked to be nominated fro Adminship. It's OK by me. I can live without the status if people don't see fit to give it to me, but I can see the admin powers could be useful at times. So yes, nominate me if you wish. -- Malcolm Farmer 10:10, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Future of my Wikipedia status

I will continue to contribute to Wikipedia, though I will not guarantee that I will continue to partake in the "community" aspect. I find anarchy disgusting and opposite to the concept of community, and with a negligent administration that is all we can expect. If they will not work to hold together the community, then we won't have one. Thus, it is not likely that I will bother to continue partaking in a page discussion if it starts to get out of hand and, once again, the admins do nothing. And that is if I do bother with discussions to begin with; I'm not too interested in taking the risk of having my reputation further wrongfully tainted by obvious yet uncontrolled trolls.
As for future attempts at adminship, that depends on the admins themselves. They may have expectations from me, but I have expectations from them as well. After all, they are already holding a higher resposibility than me, and ought to make use of it when obviously needed rather than allow injustices to go on. In the words of Edmund Burke, "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." -- [[User:LGagnon|LGagnon]] 08:02, Nov 26, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] 259 Reversion

Hi! I've no doubt your intentions are good in reverting the crap 259 put on my talk page, but my inclination was to let it stand there so the evidence would be as available as possible. So i'd like to understand what you have in mind.

I'm not much of a WP policy wonk; is there a specific policy to delete threats of litigation? I personally regard that as a pretty definite one (and the more so in light of what he said in his recent (confusing!) edit to his own talk page). But i don't yet understand why it should be obscured.
--Jerzy(t) 15:45, 2004 Dec 2 (UTC)

Tnx for yr clarification at my talk; i've taken the liberty of responding there. --Jerzy(t) 19:59, 2004 Dec 2 (UTC)

[edit] Blocking

Hello! You wrote to me "Tom, I apologize for the block and will correct it shortly. You ran afoul of the "autoblocker," a software component that blocks people who share an IP address with someone who is blocked. Apparently you are editing from the same IP also used by User:259. By the way, the page where he changed the signed comment was Talk:Carleton College, I spelled the page name wrong when I set the block. The Uninvited Co., Inc. 03:31, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)"

I'm no computer whiz, so am a little unsure what exactly an "IP address" is. I'm assuming IP = Internet Provider (in my case, AOL) . . . are you saying that if User:259 subscribes to AOL, by blocking him ALL AOL subscribers are automatically blocked? Isn't there a way for Wikipedia to circumvent this from happening? When I initially was welcomed, I was given a User ID number, which I assume is mine alone - isn't there a way to block using that? Thanks for your original response and for any further claification you can offer. TOM 15:36, Dec 3, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Blocking policy

Hello. You said: "I suppose we could do the same thing with 3rr blocks, since without doing so, the effectiveness of blocks as a tool to affect user behavior is lost."

I blocked User:HistoryBuffEr for a violation of the 3RR. I left a detailed note on his talk page here explaining my action. He has continued to edit while not logged on, signing his name to these edits.[1] He has now filed a Request for Arbitration against me, while still under this block. I feel it would be inappropriate of me to roll back this change, since it involves me, but I would appreciate it if another sysop would do this for me.

Thanks, – Quadell ^{(talk) (help)}[[]] 21:22, Dec 3, 2004 (UTC)

I have reviewed the matter, and based on your summary above and my own review, have rolled back the the edits by the anon and blocked the anon for 24 hours. The Uninvited Co., Inc. 21:38, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Arbitration Committee election

Dear Arbitration Committee election organizer:

Fred Bauder has likened me to Holocaust deniers on the Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2004/Candidate statements/Endorsements page (by adding this link on top of his original statements [2]). [3] I am a professional historian; and most of my family was murdered in Nazi death camps. So I find this statement intolerable. I will no longer contribute to Wikipedia if this slander is allowed to stand, given that it is coming from someone with the stature in the community of a member of the Arbitration Committee.

Regards,

172 09:20, 4 Dec 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Article Licensing

Hi, I've started a drive to get users to multi-license all of their contributions that they've made to either (1) all U.S. state, county, and city articles or (2) all articles, using the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (CC-by-sa) v1.0 and v2.0 Licenses or into the public domain if they prefer. The CC-by-sa license is a true free documentation license that is similar to Wikipedia's license, the GFDL, but it allows other projects, such as WikiTravel, to use our articles. Since you are among the top 2000 Wikipedians by edits, I was wondering if you would be willing to multi-license all of your contributions or at minimum those on the geographic articles. Over 90% of people asked have agreed. For More Information:

• Multi-Licensing FAQ - Lots of questions answered
• Multi-Licensing Guide
• Free the Rambot Articles Project

To allow us to track those users who muli-license their contributions, many users copy and paste the "{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}" template into their user page, but there are other options at Template messages/User namespace. The following examples could also copied and pasted into your user page:

Option 1

I agree to [[Wikipedia:Multi-licensing|multi-license]] all my contributions, with the exception of my user pages, as described below:

{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}

OR

Option 2

I agree to [[Wikipedia:Multi-licensing|multi-license]] all my contributions to any [[U.S. state]], county, or city article as described below:

{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}

Or if you wanted to place your work into the public domain, you could replace "{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}" with "{{MultiLicensePD}}". If you only prefer using the GFDL, I would like to know that too. Please let me know what you think at my talk page. It's important to know either way so no one keeps asking. -- Ram-Man (comment| talk)