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Not a copyvio

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Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Richard Arthur Norton (1958- )/Evidence/William Joseph Hammer was probably not a copyvio, it was taken from text written by an employee of the Smithsonian Institution as part of his job, and is therefore almost certainly probably {{PD-USGov}}. Rich Farmbrough, 20:16, 30 March 2013 (UTC).[reply]

Hi, Rich. I saw link to this comment elsewhere and just wanted to let you know that SI claims copyright, as an independent trust instrumentality. :) publicdomainsherpa.com explains a bit more. --Moonriddengirl (talk) 23:30, 31 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
It's actually a little more subtle than that. Except for the bit about SI giving the impression that everything is copyright. That is why I said "probably" (I have changed the second part of my statement to match). I was aware of the trust, and I will attempt to find the reference I was using, as it has relevance from the point of view of content. From the point of view of Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) it should be considered at the very least not an indictment that he used this source. Rich Farmbrough, 01:37, 1 April 2013 (UTC).[reply]
I'll look forward to seeing your source. According to Fishman's Public Domain, the only works of SI that are PD gov are those that are produced by staff paid directly by the U.S. Government; content by staff paid by the SI itself and outside contractors is copryighted to SI.(Fishman, Stephen (16 April 2010). The Public Domain: How to Find & Use Copyright-Free Writings, Music, Art & More. Nolo. p. 49. ISBN 978-1-4133-1512-7.) I didn't actually follow the ArbCom hearing here - did Richard claim somewhere that he believed the copyright tag on that source was fraudulent? --Moonriddengirl (talk) 01:59, 1 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
(Just to add - I have been trying to find any information to confirm the employment status of the author of that work, but so far no luck. :/ --Moonriddengirl (talk) 02:18, 1 April 2013 (UTC))[reply]
Indeed, that is the distinction (though whether it has been tested in court I don't know), the work of "Federal Employees" is PD-US-Gov and the work of "Instrumentality Employees" is (effectively) cc-by-nc. Misra v. Smithsonian Astronomical Observatory indicates that the SI is considered Federal regardless of the source of funds (citing Expeditions Unlimited Aquatic Enters. v. Smithsonian Inst.). I can't find the source, but the distinction between Federal and Instrumentality funds is the key, so it would add little. Rich Farmbrough, 02:26, 1 April 2013 (UTC).[reply]

A kitten for you!

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Sorry about the confusion about my semi-protection of Five Ws. I never meant to take sides in your dispute, nor impune anybody. See my comments at User_talk:Jimbo_Wales#As_to_my_motives.

Bearian (talk) 14:40, 1 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

So he's not blocked then after all? Cool. Basket Feudalist 14:47, 1 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Sadly that's not what Bearian is referring to. Rich Farmbrough, 22:13, 1 April 2013 (UTC).[reply]
It's not a problem, I am not in dispute over the article and wasn't even aware of the page protection - or the revert - until they were brought up elsewhere. Thanks fo the kitten Rich Farmbrough, 22:13, 1 April 2013 (UTC).[reply]

-kittens--

Nomination of UUA (disambiguation) for deletion

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A discussion is taking place as to whether the article UUA (disambiguation) is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/UUA (disambiguation) until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. Emmette Hernandez Coleman (talk) 15:46, 1 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Closed Keep. Rich Farmbrough, 00:32, 2 April 2013 (UTC).[reply]

Thanks to Sjö

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This "short story" is very reminiscent of what can happen on Wikipedia. Rich Farmbrough, 05:20, 2 April 2013 (UTC).[reply]

Look further afield?

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Without automation, you were wasting your potential here anyways.

Based on your skill set, you have options others do not...

  • Build, make available, and maintain tools at toolserver
  • Join Round Two of the Individual Engagement Grants. It begins August 13, 2013.
  • Or help the Round One grant recipients who submitted software development proposals:
  • Fork Wikipedia, or a subject from it of your choice.
  • Build the next generation wiki platform
  • Expand the wiki-paradigm
  • Build wiki-tools
  • Increase wiki-automation
  • Extend Firefox's wiki-functionality by creating new add-ons
  • Run for the Wikimedia foundation board of directors
  • Develop a Jarvis-like browser (ala Tony Stark, aka Iron Man)
  • Create a mindmap program for site map creation and viewing
  • Make a script or program that creates tag cloud views of a subject or webpage content
  • Automated web-page design

You've outgrown Wikipedia. Now would be a good time to transcend it.

In a project of your own, you can make the rules. The Transhumanist 01:28, 31 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

i agree. i would add:
  • an upload wizard or tool for texts to wikisource. i recently got some feedback from an archivist, that they are swamped with handwritten texts that they would love to upload, but are deterred by the opaque process. anything would be an improvement.
let the incompetent have their small pond, there's work to be done. slowkingFarmbrough's revenge †@1₭ 02:34, 31 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Let me chime in and concur as well. Meanwhile we shall continue to tell them at every opportunity how truly stupid the decision was to invoke a 1 year block over something so minor. Kumioko (talk) 02:45, 31 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
And there have got to be better ways to access or view the material on Wikipedia. The encyclopedia has grown so extensive that its navigation systems cannot keep up.
Which reminds me, the sister projects also provide relevant information, but it is not well integrated with Wikipedia. If you want to survey them all, you've got to click 20 or 30 times just to get to and from each of them. A program to view the treatment of a subject by all the Wikimedia projects would be a very useful viewer. Something as simple as entering a subject name, and then the program loads the matching entry from each into a separate tab. That would be much faster than following links to each one.
Rich, based upon your ability in building bots, you should be able to blow minds in the overall wiki-arena, relevant to Wikipedia and the rest of the wiki-community. It certainly would be a way to make time pass more quickly during your block. The Transhumanist 06:14, 31 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
How about creating an app or extension that allows us to create a global watchlist? Or maybe just have some way (through wikidata or elsewhere) to have a centralized userpage without having to create/update one on each project individually? Maybe even update the new pages app with some improvements. There are countless things that can/need to be done. Although personally I think I would use my time off wiki but you should try and remember that although there are a few powerful editors that are controlling your block, they are not the only editors here and there are a lot of us that wish you were here editing. Kumioko (talk) 12:50, 31 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
i believe that's the idea behind the liquid threads [1] flow [2] work. but there's lots to supplement, tool requests that users need. slowkingFarmbrough's revenge †@1₭ 18:19, 31 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

There are some great ideas here, the universal user page would have been achievable with Mirror Bot. Another area I am interested in is redesigning Checkuser to be more public in its logs: at the very least showing who preformed each checkuser action, and under what category (here on en:wp that would currently be WMF/SPI/Own initiative/private request/checkuser abuse), and in some cases more detail. Rich Farmbrough, 22:28, 31 March 2013 (UTC).[reply]

H'm! Nice ideas indeed. Lots of human processes lacking better automation and transparency. – SJ + 17:48, 2 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Just stumbled onto Wikipedia:Editor engagement/Echo. I guess my Watchlist suggestion is being worked on already. Kumioko (talk) 02:08, 3 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

A random calendar for you!

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A random calendar for you!
365 days is a bit too drastic... Nevertheless, I still trust that you can knock Koavf off the top! Stay strong ☯ Bonkers The Clown \(^_^)/ Nonsensical Babble04:47, 3 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks: maybe I'll be using the Newgate Calender for a while... Rich Farmbrough, 16:55, 3 April 2013 (UTC).[reply]

Talkback

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Hello, Rich Farmbrough. You have new messages at Template talk:Fix.
Message added 19:33, 3 April 2013 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Jason Quinn (talk) 19:33, 3 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Absolutely agree, this change is a WP:SNOWBALL obvious improvement. Rich Farmbrough, 22:55, 3 April 2013 (UTC).[reply]

Template:DoD detainees ARB has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Tom B (talk) 15:09, 3 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

If someone could kindly add to the discussion on my behalf:
Keep helps guard against link-rot, see this update for example. Rich Farmbrough, 16:53, 3 April 2013 (UTC).[reply]

 Done. Nice template – Wbm1058 (talk) 17:04, 4 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 01 April 2013

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Wikidata weekly summary #52

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Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • The first year is over. Thank you everyone for being amazing and helping to build Wikidata and making it more than we could possibly have hoped for already. <3
    • Put a lot of work into improved support for Internet Explorer 8
    • Worked on improving recent changes code in client
    • Finished valueview refactoring. Created new extension “ValueView”
    • Implemented string formatter
  • Discussions/Press
  • Events
    • upcoming: GLAM-Wiki 2013
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • Deployment of phase 2 on English Wikipedia is currently planned for April 8. The remaining Wikipedias are scheduled for April 10. As usual this might change if we run into problems along the way.
    • There is now a page showing the current lag for changes propagating to the Wikipedias so they can show up in watchlists and recent changes for example. This should ideally be in the range of a few minutes. Right now it is higher because of some abnormally high bot activity but decreasing. Should be down to a few minutes soon.
    • There’s now a badge you can add to Wikipedia articles to indicate there is data about it on Wikidata
    • We hit Q10000000
    • A Wikidata item in the wild ;-)
  • Did you know?
  • Open Tasks for You

Based on feedback for last week’s call for comments we will continue this newsletter. However more community help will be needed. From now on they’ll be drafted at d:Wikidata:Status updates/Next and your help is very welcome.

Mail

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You have mail. —Neotarf (talk) 08:30, 6 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Rich Farmbrough, we moved your Teahouse host profile

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Hello Rich Farmbrough! Thank you for being a host at the Teahouse. However, we haven't heard from you lately, so our bot has moved your Host profile from the host landing page to the host breakroom. No worries; you can always just Check in and our bot will move your profile back. Editing any Teahouse-related page will do the same thing for you. If you would prefer not to receive reminders like this, you can unsubscribe here. Thanks for your help at the Teahouse! HostBot (talk) 03:50, 9 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Category:Cowboy halls of fame inductees

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Category:Cowboy halls of fame inductees, which you created, has been nominated for possible deletion, merging, or renaming. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the Categories for discussion page. Thank you. DexDor (talk) 05:19, 9 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 08 April 2013

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Arbitration amendment request

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Hi Rich, this is a coutesy notice to inform you that the Arbitration Committee has declined the amendement request you submitted. You can view the archived request here, or the orginal version here. For the Arbitration Committee, Callanecc (talkcontribslogs) 03:24, 5 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This makes me very sad. The comments from arbitrators seem to say "block him, we're not going to change the sanction" (T. Canens) and "we're not going to change the sanction because he's blocked" (Cacheroth and Risker). This is on a par with previous decisions, but I had hoped for better. Moreover, as usual, any discussion has been held in secret. Rich Farmbrough, 03:45, 5 April 2013 (UTC).[reply]
Hi Rich, well I feel bad for your decline, unfortunately it was kept in secret, because people like to hide stuff here... Either way I should be quiet now, because I was under a gun.--Mishae (talk) 01:03, 11 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
This is typical. I wish you were here too Rich, now Fram has turned his attentions on me.:-( I am not nearly the gentlemen you were though. I am getting to the point I don't even care if I get blocked anymore. The community wants to keep bullies and miscreants but wants to block the ones doing all the work. And the WMF wonders why spending $4 million anually (roughly 10% of their annual budget) to recruit new users doesn't seem to help. Kumioko (talk) 01:11, 11 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
What, you are blocked too? Either way, I heartly agree with the fact that they do keep bullies in, look at the Russian Wikipedia for example. In other words, Wikipedia is buroucratic dictatorship (thats as far as I can tell from your point of view)! Its funny how no one realiases that Wikipedia have become a center for breakaway Wiki projects, which most Wikipedia users hate (again, Russian example). Further more, I think Jimbo Wales will turn in his grave one day, when he will realise that his dream of "perfect society" have failed!:) I don't want to insult the founder, but even Hitler had a dream of "perfect society", and then look what happened to that guy.:( I do appreciate him for creating a site though, what I sometimes don't appreciate is that people need to donate money to a site that hires bullies most of the time! Question: Does any of you donate this project even a cent or pence?--Mishae (talk) 03:25, 11 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Wikikids

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Hi Rich Farmbrough, you droped your name on m:Wikikids#People interested in 2012. I've been updating and expanding the proposal (which runs in French and Dutch right now), are you still interested in it ? Bye ! Astirmays (talk) 19:53, 11 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

question about time bot uses

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Hi, I noticed this edit to the article Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Police Department from March 2010 back when the bot was still named Smackbot. The revision time of that edit was "23:22, 31 March 2010" but the bot was dating templates as "date=April 2010". This is probably because the bot was using local time instead of UTC time. It ought to use UTC time and for this particular edit caused the month itself to be different than the actual month of the tag. Anyway, I'm not sure if this bug still exists in the present form of the bot but it's the kind of thing that can go unnoticed for a long time so I thought I'd mention it. Does it still exist? Do you agree with me that it's a bug? Jason Quinn (talk) 17:19, 12 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This is a complex question which contains a bit of bot history to answer fully, but the three key points are:
  • Revision as of 03:22, 1 April 2010 - you are using local time, not the bot.
  • It would be a bug but not a significant one, I.E. I would fix it, but I wouldn't worry if someone else's bot was doing it, the important thing is to a) Allow careful evaluation of which tagged problems are unlikely to be fixed b) Support workflow and prevent (ideally) problems remaining unfixed in perpetuity c) Provide management information that shows the scale of the backlogs. Note that a good portion of this has been thrown away with the deletion of Expand and Wikify and others. If a few articles move across a bucket boundary it is not important. (Arguably this belongs in March because that's when the tag was added - we've discussed this at length and in some cases retroactive dating was used when a tag became categorised by date for the first time, in other cases not - again, in general, it's not ciritcal.)
  • The bot has used various dating mechanisms, a plaintext date, {{CURRENTMONTH}}, a recompile of the AWB settings, and now (having moved from AWB in 2010) the internal UTC time.
Rich Farmbrough, 18:19, 12 April 2013 (UTC).[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #53

[edit]
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Got some external professional review of our code and architecture and started working on their feedback
    • Worked on reducing the dispatch lag (the time it takes for changes on Wikidata to be sent to the Wikipedias for display in watchlist, recent changes and to purge affected pages)
    • Worked on using Redis for job queue to improve the lag situation even further
    • Created new Wikibase Query extension for phase 3 functionality
    • Autocomments & Autosummaries for SetClaim module
    • Worked on the GeoCoordinate parser
  • Events/Press
    • right now: GLAM-WIKI 2013
  • Discussions
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • Deployment of phase 2 on the remaining Wikipedias was delayed because of a high lag of changes being propagated to the Wikipedias. The lag has been reduced considerably now and is going down even more. The new date for deployment will not be next week because there are other large changes on Wikimedia infrastructure scheduled that we do not want to interfere with. It will hopefully happen very soon after that though.
    • Next code update on wikidata.org is planned for Wednesday. This should include qualifiers and bugfixes.
    • There will probably be a short outage/read-only for wikidata.org on Tuesday (database is being switched to MariaDB)
    • If you're a student and interested in coding on Wikidata consider applying for Google Summer of Code.
    • There is a new user right: property creators
    • There is now a page to request deletion of a property
    • We now have Bureaucrats
    • Reasonator was improved and extended (1 2)
  • Open Tasks for You

Based on feedback for last week’s call for comments we will continue this newsletter. However more community help will be needed. From now on they’ll be drafted at d:Wikidata:Status updates/Next and your help is very welcome.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 23:28, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

Come to Commons

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Hi Rich, I see that you have foolishly been all but declared persona non grata on this project. Why don't you come across to Commons where I am sure that we would be able to utilise your bot skills to our benefit, and you won't have to worry about being bound by a ridiculous decision as you are here on this project. If you want some suggestions on how we could benefit from you on Commons, feel free to get in touch. Russavia (talk) 19:48, 12 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Rich, I do not think going to commons is a good idea. See, on commons admin russavia is as abusive as admin sandstein here, maybe even more. Better forget about wikipedia, go out and have some fresh air. Let risker to write articles. Maybe then he would think twice before marking your request as "moot".199.241.30.239 (talk) 00:15, 13 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Delta function (disambiguation) listed at Redirects for discussion

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An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Delta function (disambiguation). Since you had some involvement with the Delta function (disambiguation) redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion (if you have not already done so). RockMagnetist (talk) 04:28, 14 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

 Done Speedily kept as it should be. Rich Farmbrough, 14:51, 15 April 2013 (UTC).[reply]

Helpful Pixie Bot: ISBN

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Helpful Pixie Bot is adding {{Please check ISBN}} to the 'isbn' field of citation templates. This function is no longer needed as the Citation Style 1 templates now test the ISBN and will show an error. Placing the template in the 'isbn' field corrupts the display and always has:

{{cite compare | mode=book |no-tracking=true |last=Trager |first=James |year=2005 |title=The People's Chronology: A Year-by-Year Record of Human Events from Prehistory to the Present |edition=3 |location=Detroit |publisher=Gale |isbn= 1-4144-0140-9 [[Category:Articles with invalid ISBNs]]}}

--  Gadget850 (Ed) talk 00:35, 14 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

  • Hasn't run for a year.
  • Good.
  • I know and no it hasn't always. The over-linked ISBN is a relatively new bug.
Rich Farmbrough, 19:40, 14 April 2013 (UTC).[reply]
You may care to fix
  • Patterson, Lyman Ray (1968). Copyright in Historical Perspective. Vanderbilt University Press. ISBN 0-8265-1373-5. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |unused_data= ignored (help)
on the Copyright page. Rich Farmbrough, 15:14, 15 April 2013 (UTC).[reply]

The Signpost: 15 April 2013

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Wikidata weekly summary #54

[edit]
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Dispatch lag is now down to 0 so changes should show up very quickly on the Wikipedias in watchlists and recent changes
    • wikidata.org now always redirects to www.wikidata.org. This should among other things solve the issue where people were not able to edit when on wikidata.org (bugzilla:45005)
    • Fixed weird blocked-user/protected-page handling in UI (bugzilla:45140)
    • Final meetings for the external professional review of our code and architecture. They were quite happy with the quality of the codebase and gave useful tips for improvements
    • Worked on automatic summaries for editing claims
    • Investigation of different JavaScript frameworks dealing with date and time
    • Worked on using Redis and the job queue for change notifications to clients
    • Work on the storage code for answering queries
  • Events/Press
    • GLAM-WIKI 2013
    • upcoming: office hour on IRC about sources
    • upcoming: Opensource Treffen
    • upcoming: intro to Wikidata at the British Library
  • Discussions
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Open Tasks for You
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 22:53, 19 April 2013 (UTC)

The Signpost: 22 April 2013

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Wikidata weekly summary #55

[edit]
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 21:54, 26 April 2013 (UTC)

Category:Imperial Roman senators

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Category:Imperial Roman senators, which you created, has been nominated for possible deletion, merging, or renaming. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the Categories for discussion page. Thank you. ❤ Yutsi Talk/ Contributions ( 偉特 ) 12:17, 29 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]