LSS/foundation-l-archives/2006 10 15-21

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This issue covers (roughly) 2006 October 15-21

Threads

• [1]An accidental post by Erik Zachte to foundation-l regarding a font for use on Wikipedia was [2]shaped by Gregory Maxwell into a discussion on what kinds of things the foundation should encourage funding sources to spend money to make freely available. GMaxwell suggested recordings of classical music. Phillip Berken noted that classical music that requires a full orchestra was particularly difficult due to various parties (musicians, music publishing companies) each having seperate kinds of ownership/rights to a performance. GerardM suggested using amateur musicians and some other solutions to make use of money more cost effective. Ray Saintonge suggested that much of this may already be free, suggesting more research into what's presently available. Conversation drifted into a conversation on using TeX markup in MediaWiki to display notes.
• [3]Anthere, following precedent set by Erik, sent to foundation-l a conflict of interest statement.
• [4]Erik Möller suggested a policy whereby Wikinews editions that become inactive for 8 weeks recieve a notice and more votes than normal to return to active status. Reception was generally positive.
• [5]Brion Vibber gave the foundation notice that unless anyone objected, he was going to change MediaWiki defaults on all projects so anon blocks would not prevent logged-in users from contributing. Discussion continued, reception was positive.
• [6]Erik Möller noted that Aphaia and Michael Snow now have the ability to create FoundationWiki accounts. [7]Aphaia followed up with a question on how to use Special:Import. Effe Iets Anders reminded the list of earlier discussion on content that should remain on FoundationWiki versus things that should be moved to Meta, offering lists of ideas on each.
• [8]Michael Snow announced that for the upcoming fundraising, PayPal will allow donations in more currencies, and asked for help in getting started on translation of the fundraising pages.
• [9]GerardM provided a link to a news story reporting that a Cambridge University project has digitised the complete works of Charles Darwin, placing them online. Geni took issue with the title of his announcement, noting that the works, while available, were under a restrictive license. Discussion followed on the legality and enforcability of that license.
• [10]Brad Patrick noted that in Internet Explorer 7.0, Wikipedia can be set as the default search tool. Alphax followed up with note that the same can be done in Firefox as a registry tweak. (Commentary: A better way to do this is to visit here)
• [11]David Monniaux announced that the domain wikitheque.fr was reserved to act as a French front-end to Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource. (Commentary: This is intended to deal with a long-term usability issue with Wikimedia Commons/Wikisource -- that their organisation tools are in English and therefore difficult for people affiliated with Foundation projects in other languages to use.)
• [12]Jakob Voss pointed at the struggle between the Debian Project (which maintains a distribution of Linux closely tied to the GNU project) and Mozilla Corporation over use of trademarks in Firefox and other Mozilla projects. Debian decided to rename Mozilla for their distribution in order to avoid including content that had trademark restrictions. Jakob noted that the same principle may apply to Wikipedia as well given Foundation positions on use of the Wikipedia logo. Discussion on the fine details of this followed.
• [13]David Gerard announced that he gave Alphax listmod status on the checkuser-l' mailing list.
• [14]Luke Brandt asked about the status of getting information on the GNU Wiki license.
• [15]Mingwangx posted the status of the efforts to prepare for Wikimania 2007.