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Hosting switch, hosting co-op 13 May 2006

Posted by Zach in Uncategorized.
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As the site front page explains, we recently switched hosts, from wikidev.net to hcoop.net, largely thanks to the initiative and expertise of NTK. There are a number of very positive effects that this switch will or should have:

  • Cost: it should now cost only 5 bucks a month or so to host instead of about 15.
  • Democracy: if you've seen [[wikiveg constitution]] you may know (and may have been justifiably upset about) my unwiki desire to keep a certain amount of monarchical control over the site. A big part of this has been that I haven't been able to bring myself to turn the site over to community control when I've been coughing up 45 bucks every three months to pay for the damn thing – it's not a ton of money, but it has sure felt like a lot to this poor student. But I feel a lot more comfortable having it be community controlled now, even if no one is chipping in yet.
  • Greater control: until now we've had to ask our host Gabriel at wikidev.net to do most things for us, which takes time and sometimes extra money. But hcoop.net is geared towards the power-user, so we can do anything to the site we want ourselves (assuming we know how to do it). 
  • "Ethical purchasing": We're supporting what appears to be a really great and unique project.

There are a few downsides, though I think the above outweigh them:

  • We lost a few edits on the switch, because when NTK and I were doing it, it was much easier to user an older installation that we had done a week or so before as a test than to start a new one, and since we were (and I still am!) in the middle of final exams and other final schoolwork, we went for the quicker option. (And we had to get it done then, since the wikidev.net hosting that had been paid for was going to run out the next week.) I don't think we lost many (any?) substantial edits, and if we did it shouldn't be hard to redo them.
  • We lost the images, until I have time to re-upload them, which won't be until late May, because…

I'm heading to the Adirondacks on Monday for a wilderness expedition that I have to do to satisfy my final graduation requirement. I'm looking forward to it actually, despite the fact that we won't be able to use shampoo or deodorant for two weeks (though I'm going to see if I can smuggle in some of the latter). See ya'll in June..

Bad medicine in New Jersey 25 February 2006

Posted by Zach in SHAC, legal.
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I went down to Trenton Wednesday night to observe the SHAC 7 trial, as I said I might. We saw the defense lawyers’ entire case Thursday, and Friday was reserved for some finagling between the lawyers about the documents that will be given to the jury later. Closing statements are happening Monday, and jury deliberations shortly after.

It ain’t over till it’s over, but I’m afraid it may not go well for them. I talked to Josh Harper (one of the defendants) after the defense ended, and he indicated they weren’t very optimistic. He called it “mind-numbing” that he very well may be going to jail over some emails and speeches, and even more mind-numbing that there are laws on the books making that possible.

I think the big problem was that the defense lawyers weren’t doing so hot. (“Sleeping on the job” is how one defendant described it.) Most of them seemed competent, but it just seems not quite right, not quite right at all, for the prosecution to take ten days making its case, and the defense lawyers to be finished all in one day. I mean, they originally thought the case would last 12-18 weeks; then six weeks; this is just three and a half!

I’m guessing the problem is that all but one of the attorneys are court-assigned and don’t have a lot of time to devote to the case, or deep interest in it. The money people have raised for the legal fund has, I believe, gone to the remaining attorney, whose name I forget. Perhaps we just didn’t raise enough to get him to really invest himself in the case?

Another big problem was that the judge, Anne Thompson, was gagging everyone from talking about what can happen to animals inside HLS. People would start to refer to “the video of the workers punching—”, for example, and get cut off by her or prosecutor Charles McKenna. I think her official reason was that it’s just “hearsay”; the footage, for example, “could be from anywhere”. I think there must be more to it than that though: one witness, Janine Motta of the New Jersey Animal Rights Alliance, started to say, “There’s this one test that they do, where they—” before she was cut off by the judge. But she wasn’t talking about HLS, or even implying that the procedure happens or could happen at HLS; she was just answering a question about what information made her become an animal rights activist. I don’t think it’s uncharitable to suggest that the judge probably just didn’t want to allow anything graphic enough to make people ashamed of how our society treats animals.

If they get some prison time, and only Darius is expecting not to I believe, Josh said an appeals process might exonerate some of them, especially Jake Conroy and Lauren Gazzola; hopefully we can raise enough funds to make that happen. But in the meantime they’d be in custody for at least a year or so. And I heard the max figure for one of the defendants is 23 years; hopefully that’s wrong and the news article that said 13 years is right.

A tiny silver lining: the mainstream news articles, I think, making them look good and HLS and the government bad for a change.

(Note: I wrote this Friday but it didn’t post for some reason. There’s also been an official update since then; they still want people to come to court Monday and Tuesday.)

Issues on the future of the wiki 22 January 2006

Posted by Zach in blogs, meta, spam.
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Existence: I just saw some questions on the future security of the wiki that TheChin! asked back in November on the Community portal page. Basically he was wondering if the wiki was going to keep existing and if the founder was still interested.

It most definitely is, and I most definitely am – which was a big part of the point of starting this blog.

So that answers the gist of his questions I think, but I wrote a more detailed response (financial, hosting, why I was gone), which you can read there.

Blog: This blog should be moved onto wikiveg.org soon, but where should it go? I lean towards having it on the front page. Discussion here. (Note: We’re definitely customizing the skin; I would customize this one but wordpress.com doesn’t give you that option.)

Spam: It might be too soon to tell, but it seems like the spam is dropping off a bit(?), perhaps as the spammers realize the wiki is active again…

License: Currently we are using a dual GFDL and Creative Commons “by-sa” license. My thinking was this:

  • Advantage: This allows us or other people to export content to both CC-by-sa and GFDL wikis.
  • Disadvantage: This doesn’t allow us to import any content unless it is already license as *both* CC-by-sa and GFDL.
  • Advantage: However, we have the flexibility to “switch” from the dual license to a single GFDL or CC-by-sa license, if we ever feel like the above disadvantage outweighs the above advantage.

I realize the last point seems counterintuitive, because it seems like that would be changing the license, which you can’t do according to the “share alike” (“sa”) clauses in the CC-by-sa and the GFDL. But as long we continued to make the old content available under both licenses (which we could do by just saying on the license page that “Content before [date of switch] is released under both the GFDL and the CC-by-sa”), we wouldn’t be relicensing any content; we’d just be releasing, from that point on, any new content under the one license as opposed to both.

A contributor just added a link to the licensing discussion on Embodiment Wiki (which I just added to our WikiNode), which contains the interesting idea of having different licenses for different kinds of content. That’s something we could probably do if people wanted to; for example, having an “Essay:” namespace where each page would have whatever license the author wanted. I think the basic structure of the license though (most content as dual GFDL and CC-by-sa) should stay the way it is for now. More of my feedback if you want to read it is on the Community portal.

Point of view: There’s an ongoing discussion on the Community portal about what POV the wiki should have. (E.g. Wikipedia’s policy is NPOV, neutral point of view.) The most obvious choice seems to be “vegan point of view” (VPOV). But the question is, does that mean we exclude anyone who someone thinks is not vegan enough, e.g. vegetarians, or people who think used leather is vegan?

For that reason, I suggested “tolerant vegan point of view”, i.e. VPOV but not being too iron-handed on dissenting opinions. Tim suggested multiple point of view, i.e. not specifically VPOV. Now a new contributor has said that they think it should definitely have VPOV, but allow if not encourage dissent as to what counts as VPOV.

To me this seems pretty close to my suggestion of tolerant VPOV. It seems like so far then, there’s a faint consensus to have the POV be VPOV but not overzealously so. I think we can just leave it at that until some issue comes up, and we can discuss and clarify it more then.

Sweeping out the cobwebs 4 January 2006

Posted by Zach in meta, spam, visuals.
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I haven’t done any serious editing of pages yet – the first item of business has been to clear up all the wikispam that has accumulated on the wiki while I’ve been away. Wikispam is a form a spamming that consists of putting lots of links on a wiki page to try to increase their ranking with search engines. I’ve seen wikis where this happens very blatantly; where a spammer just deletes a page and replaces it with links. This isn’t super effective since it’s really obvious to the next person who comes along that something needs to be fixed. On wikiveg though, the spammers cleverly put all the links under an HTML tag that made them *not* show up on the page unless you viewed the wikicode for the page. (Here is an example; the spam is at the bottom.)

I first noticed that this was happening a month ago I think, and I was expecting to have to spend a good hour tracking it all down and removing it. Thankfully though, another user, TheChin! had come by and eliminated pretty much all of it. He (or she?) was around as recently as December 29. I hope he or she comes back.

The next thing I’d like to do, though it’ll have to wait until I learn more CSS, is get rid of the (IMHO) godawful CSS skin/visuals I’ve got up there. I just threw together a few customizations of the standard MediaWiki skin back in May, probably between sleep-deprived essay-writing sessions. Originally I thought it would be a good thing to have a skin structurally very similar to the standard skin, for the sake of continuity with many of the well-known wikis (esp. Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects), so that the learning curve would be minimal for people coming to the site. But I don’t think that’s a big issue anymore. I recently came across another MediaWiki installation using a highly customized skin, and while I’m not crazy about the skin itself, it still made me realize that the skin for wikiveg can look like whatever the hell we want. So, I’m going to try to learn some CSS in the next few months and come up with something really bold and nice-looking.

What this is about 4 January 2006

Posted by Zach in blogs, meta.
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Around last May I started a wiki called wikiveg, for anything and everything having to do with veganism, animals, animal rights activism, and related concerns. The project stalled as I got too busy with school, and was preoccupied with other things over the summer. I’m hoping to get it going again this year.

I was partly inspired by the way Food Fight’s site has a blog on the front page… blogs are just much more interesting than a static page. Wikipedia manages to have an interesting front page by having lots of things that are constantly being updated (featured articles, news, “did you know?” bits), but you can’t really do that until you have a community of people working on the wiki. Hence this blog. I’ll largely be writing about what’s going on on the wiki and what’s gong on in the worlds of veganism and animals, which will be connected most of the time.

The guy I’m hosting with, Gabriel Wicke, said he could get a blog set up to load on the front page for me, but that probably won’t be for another couple weeks.

I’ve felt pretty sad about not working on wikiveg for the past several months. It got to the point where I knew it wasn’t growing and that I had a ton of work I had to do, which made me avoid it more, which worsed the problem. I especially felt bad about letting other contributors down, especially Tim from the German-language VeganWiki, and a man named David who wrote a completely kick-ass amazing article on kosher slaughter. I hope I can win them and contributors like them back in the coming year. I think I’m mostly through the problems that caused me to be a spotty, unreliable, AbsentLeader for the past half year; mostly I’ve just had way too much on my hands either in terms of academic work, or the emotional turmoil that comes with being a college student whose worldview gets drastically changed or reinvented every three months. (Seriously, it’s exhausting.) But I’m mostly at the end of the academic pressures, and I think finally I’m finished with having energy- and time-consuming worldview changes.

Right now I’m in Florida till Saturday and then Honduras until the 16th. I’ll probably do a little work on the wiki and another blog post or two before Honduras.