subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: thank you

body:
Lir,

Stop it. Stop acting like, "No matter how unpleasant I make myself to
the community, they have no right to get rid of me unless they prove to
_my_ satisfaction that I have broken a rule which applies equally to
everyone." Just stop doing this, or you'll never get back in the door.

I offered to help you, a year or so ago, when you got kicked out the
_first_ time. The issue hasn't changed: You can't be a member of this
community on _your_ terms. Nobody can, and ironically, this is a rule
that applies equally to everyone: if you want people to like you, start
by being likable.

If you want to be tolerated, you could be more tolerant. Anthere and
others have devoted a lot of time to helping you. They deserve genuine
thanks, not a sarcastic slap in the face.

If you want people to listen to you, try listening to _them_. Look for
at least one thing in each communication that you can agree with or
appreciate, and comment on _that_ instead of being so goldarn negative
all the time. I mean, really! :-(

If you want to be trusted, make every effort to _earn_ that trust.
There's a reason that a wealthy atheist (named Jimbo) trusted a "poor"
religious "nut" (named Ed) with awesome powers. The more responsibility
one shows, the more power others are willing to give them.

You could turn this whole thing around in a heartbeat. The ball's in
your court. Put community ahead of self, and you'll hit a home run! :-)

Uncle Ed
Member of mediation committee
Bureaucrat
... and Developer Emeritus

-----Original Message-----
From: Anthere [mailto:anthere9 at yahoo.com]
Sent: Monday, July 05, 2004 6:13 AM
To: C A S [name omitted for privacy reasons]
Cc: wikien-l at wikimedia.org
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: thank you

	Lir,

	I think that unfortunately, whatever the rules you might breach
or not breach, and whatever Jimbo wish that you be plainly welcome back
as a member with full editing rights, it is unfortunately a fact that
many members of the english wikipedia are not happy with you being a
participant. And admittedly, your attitude just does not help convince
them that the benefits you are bringing Wikipedia balance the drawbacks.
It might help that you adopt a more positive stance, perhaps not always
criticizing so much volunteers for being either too quick or too slow,
or too rude or too polite, or too bold or not daring enough. May I
suggest that if you want to be treated in an appropriate manner, you
might perhaps think carefully about what is appropriate and what is not.

	Your issue has everything to do with sockpuppets, as Guanaco
thought you were these sockpuppets (perhaps guidelines indicating how
the community decides that this one is a sock puppet or is not...though
we know nothing can really be proved), and as Guanaco also thought
sockpuppets were illegal (so perhaps guidelines indicating what is
illegal for a sock puppet to do, and what is legal would be good).

	Policies such as this one should be designed at community level.
This is *not* the board job to do so *at all*. There must be a
discussion on the wiki itself, with wikipedians, and I guess Sannse can
help on this. Or whoever feels that sock puppet management has become a
very painful matter now. Also, both Sannse and Ed are members of the MC,
and Ed proposed to help you. This was your choice not to accept the
proposal.

	I will add perhaps boldly that, regardless to rules and
policies, belonging to a community is essentially being "accepted" by
it, with defaults and qualities. It is more a feeling, a perception. But
qualities should always compensate defaults. Most of the time, there is
no need of crossing the name of a person on the membership list. Banning
is really the final indication that a community reject someone, and has
to do so officially, but before that happens, a few signs are meaningful
and may indicate to a "member" that he might consider just moving on.

	C A S [name omitted for privacy reasons] <a[name omitted for privacy reasons]@msn.com> wrote:

		*would like you to cool down and allow time for things
to proceed.
		**As if, you've had months and months to lift your
fingers -- you never intend to do anything.

		*This week end, we had a meeting in Paris, so
essentially, Angela, Jimbo and I were unavailable.
		**If you are too busy, resign from the board/mediation
committee and let someone else do the job.

		*Was that it had been a not very good move from Guanaco,
misunderstanding from his part, but mostly unclear policy with regards
to sock puppets.
		**It has nothing to do with sock puppets; no evidence
has been shown that Yuna or YES was a sockpuppet of mine. Regardless of
the rules regarding sockpuppets, I don't have one!

		*Sannse agreed to try to work with others on this
policy, so that things are clearer. I thought this was essentially your
request
		**I don't want "Sannse" working with others -- I want
the Wikimedia board to get off its ass and start demanding sysops
treating regular users in an appropriate manner.

		*I have no idea of the last events, and frankly, right
now, really no time to look at it.
		**Resign Anthere, resign -- nothing is getting done
because you don't have time, and nobody else can do it because you are
hogging too many important positions.

		*I suggest that you explain what happened to the
arbitration committee if you really feel that it is important.
		**The Arbitration Committee refuses to speak with me.

  _____

	Do you Yahoo!?
	New and Improved Yahoo! Mail
<http://us.rd.yahoo.com/mail_us/taglines/10/*http://promotions.yahoo.com
/new_mail/static/efficiency.html>  - Send 10MB messages!

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list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Christopher Mahan

subject: [WikiEN-l] Should Wikipedia endorse or oppose mass murder?

body:
--- Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> Christopher Mahan wrote
>
> > Does W oppose hatred? I don't think so. We're like journalists in
> a
> > war. We take neither side, and rather strive to give balanced and
> > non-point of view accounts of the events and circumstances.
>
> Hang on there.  David Gerard may be right to argue that if
> Wikipedia is to
> treat any postings as if they really constituted 'incitement', then
> the
> grounds have to be watertight in a way that is not so easy to be.
> That
> doesn't mean that we can't argue that in the text of Wikipedia
> there is an a
> fortiori reason or ten not to have anything promoting hatred.  The
> NPOV is
> for the text; one has to believe that promoting NPOV is what a
> conflict like
> say Northern Ireland's Troubles needs.  Otherwise WP would seem
> like a bad
> idea.  But none of that means that WP's collective values are
> 'relativist'
> or hands-off.  A scholar can be scrupulous but also a passionate
> believer in
> values that are not intentionally or propagandistically pushed in
> what he or
> she writes.

Charles,

If the W has a social goal to make the world a better place, it is
solely through the exposition of facts. The W should not, and indeed
does not by virtue of the NPOV policy, tell people how they should
behave (hate or not), how they should think, and how they should
interpret the information in the W.

Induvidual contributors answer to themselves, and have to decide for
themselves whether they want to contribute to the W. I strongly
support that contributors should be able to communicate and behave on
the site in the way which best fit their convictions.

The bit at the end about scholars being biased ultimately points to
my point: that you have to allow all to express themselves in order
to have a non-biased result.

=====
Chris Mahan
818.943.1850 cell
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
chris.mahan at gmail.com
http://www.christophermahan.com/

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list: wikitech-l

from_name: Jens Frank

subject: [Wikitech-l] Mediawiki on oracle...

body:
On Mon, Jul 05, 2004 at 03:36:33PM +0000, Volker Hetzer wrote:
> Hi!
> We are thinking of setting up a wiki in our department and are looking
> at the different wikis out there.
> However, one requirement is that it must run on oracle, for a variety
> of reasons. (I'd like to avoid a discussion of how I am supposed to
> convince my boss to install a second, isolated database in the department.)
> Has anybody already managed to get the mediawiki running on an oracle db?
> Can anybody think offhand of any problems that might arise?
> Right now the only thing that comes to my mind is BLOB handling, which
> is slightly different in oracle.
> Anything else?

MySQL has some strange "enhancements" to SQL that are not compatible to
the rest of the world. With dammit's port to PostgreSQL, these spots
were identified and using a global ($wgIsPg I think it's named) the
MySQL-specific instructions can be disabled. This should be a good
starting point for a port to Oracle. PostgreSQL handles sequences the
same way Oracle does, so that our usage of MySQL's auto_increment
columns has already been ported, too. The PostgreSQL port is in the
latest 1.3 betas.

Regards,

	JeLuF


from_name: Milan Selingr

subject: [WikiEN-l] Bad information

body:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_6#Deaths :
July 6
Deaths
  a.. 1189 - Henry II of England
  b.. 1249 - Alexander II of Scotland
  c.. 1415 - Jan Hus, reformer (burned for heresy)
  d.. 1476 - Regiomantus, astronomer and mathematician
  e.. 1535 - Sir Thomas More, writer and philosopher (executed for treason)
  f.. 1553 - Edward VI, king of England
  g.. 1762 - Peter III, tsar of Russia (murdered)
  h.. 1893 - Guy de Maupassant (Henry-Ren?-Albert-Guy de Maupassant), author
  i.. 1916 - Odilon Redon, painter
  j.. 1932 - Kenneth Grahame, author (The Wind in the Willows)
  k.. 1962 - William Faulkner, novelist
  l.. 1971 - Louis Armstrong, jazz musician
  m.. 1973 - Otto Klemperer, conductor
  n.. 1998 - Roy Rogers, cowboy actor, singer
  o.. 1999 - Joaquin Rodrigo, composer
  p.. 2004 - Bill Clinton, former US President !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Incorrect information.
Selingr

---
Odchoz? zpr?va neobsahuje viry.
Zkontrolov?no antivirov?m syst?mem AVG (http://www.grisoft.cz).
Verze: 6.0.716 / Virov? b?ze: 472 - datum vyd?n?: 5.7.2004
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from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: About the beta

body:
David Nguyen wrote:
> Hello,
>
> It seems that wikipedia is using the 1.3.0beta4, does
> it ? Or is it slightly different from this beta. When
> do you think there will be a release candidate ? And
> can i use it in a production env ? because if you use
> it, it should be enough stable to give a try.

The live site is running CVS HEAD, plus a few ad-hoc modifications for
task-based DB load balancing. Betas 1-4 have a serious problem with link
table updates that was causing problems on Wikipedia, it's now fixed in
CVS. It was a concurrent update problem, so you might not see it on a
low-traffic wiki.

Anyway, 1.3 has indeed been running on the live site for a while now, so
any feature that's used by Wikipedia is pretty well tested. We had
reports of installation problems on environments that are not like
Wikipedia's, but they should be mostly sorted out now. If you do have an
installation problem, we'd like to hear about it.

> I wonder if its possible to personnalized the left
> menu. I mean, integrating it in a portal for example ?
>
> I just need to had other possibility in the menu.
> Which files I should modify ?

It's possible, I don't have much experience with this though. To modify
the new "monobook" skin, the relevant files are includes/SkinPHPTal.php,
templates/xhtml_slim.pt and stylesheets/monobook/main.css

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Fennec Foxen

subject: [WikiEN-l] Paradigm

body:
On Mon, 5 Jul 2004 09:21:06 +1000, stephen mooney
<paradigm at westnet.com.au> wrote:
> I have discovered the Paradigm which integrates science, and which debunks
> physics of its misconceptions.

We're sorry, but Wikipedia does not allow original research; see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research for
details on this policy.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Paradigm

body:
On Tue, 6 Jul 2004 11:51:54 -0400, Fennec Foxen <fennec at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 5 Jul 2004 09:21:06 +1000, stephen mooney
> <paradigm at westnet.com.au> wrote:
> > I have discovered the Paradigm which integrates science, and which debunks
> > physics of its misconceptions.
>
>
> We're sorry, but Wikipedia does not allow original research; see
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research for
> details on this policy.
>

Don't you hate it when you get behind on a list and you're reading
chronologically in threaded mode and you come to a thread and think no
one has replied but in fact they've just changed the header and now
it's buried under something totally different later on in the big old
message list somewhere?

ANYWAY! :)


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Rick Boatright

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: About a new language...

body:
Of course it has an ISO Language code...  SHU...
http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=SHU

But I have no idea where the cyrillic characters part came from.  I can
find no information ANYWHERE that suggests there are arabic dialects
written in cyrillic.  I smell a spoof.

Rick

Timwi wrote:

> Desmond Tutu wrote:
>
>> I write to you because I think it would be important to make another
>> translation of Wikipedia. I would like to make a translation in Chadian.
>
>
> As far as my research indicates, Chadian is a dialect of Arabic. Do
> you think it's worth having a whole new Wikipedia in Chadian Arabic?
>
> It also doesn't seem to have an ISO language code; Arabic is 'ar', and
> the country code for Chad is 'td', so would that make it
> http://ar-td.wikipedia.org/?
>
> Timwi
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Timwi

body:
Desmond Tutu wrote:

> I write to you because I think it would be important to make another
> translation of Wikipedia. I would like to make a translation in Chadian.

As far as my research indicates, Chadian is a dialect of Arabic. Do you
think it's worth having a whole new Wikipedia in Chadian Arabic?

It also doesn't seem to have an ISO language code; Arabic is 'ar', and
the country code for Chad is 'td', so would that make it
http://ar-td.wikipedia.org/?

Timwi


from_name: Austin Hair

references:
<BAY15-DAV18ifDZmPro00016c25@hotmail.com>
	<cce1v8$o71$1@sea.gmane.org> <40EADE12.7070605@cjnetworks.com>
	<43ule0hcmkm1jcok07kb29uhta0pa5055j@4ax.com>

body:
> Arabic spoken in Chad, but a minor conlang with a confusingly similar
> name. (I say "minor" because I feel that if it were in any way notable,
> I would have heard of it by now.)
>
> So not a spoof, but simply a minor conlang with a confusing name, if I
> understand correctly.

"As important as Esperanto or Volapuk" should be a fairly obvious
tip-off--it says something when you go on the defensive in the same
sentence in which you introduce the language.

A reasonably extensive Google search hasn't produced a single reference,
leading me to believe that the original poster may have invented it
himself.

--
A. D. Hair <austin at austinhair.org>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Callidus
http://www.austinhair.org/
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list: foundation-l

from_name: Angela

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Finances

body:
I'd like to clarify what the situation on this is now following
discussions at the weekend. Daniel has been appointed Chief Financial
Officer, and will work closely with Anthere in this role as she is
interested in these financial issues as well. It is expected Michael
Davis will hold the role of Treasurer on the board, though Jimbo
hasn't spoken to him about this yet. We will likely be paying an
accountant to do the audit at the end of the financial year.

Angela.

On Fri, 25 Jun 2004 12:22:42 -0700 (PDT), Daniel Mayer
<maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> > ...
> > I think even if we did this, we'd still keep the books ourselves, and
> > just submit them once per year to an outside auditor for a stamp of
> > approval.  I have no idea how much paying such a person would cost.
>
> Jimbo has indicated to me that this is the plan. I'm not sure how much the
> yearly audit would cost though.
>
> --mav
>
> __________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
> http://mail.yahoo.com
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


list: wikimedia-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Finances


subject: [Foundation-l] 501(c)(3)

body:
Danny wrote:
>For fund-raising purposes, are we a qualified 501(c)(3) organization
with a valid IRS tax ID?

No, unfortunately we're not yet. The application is still being
completed by Alex.

Angela.


subject: [Foundation-l] 501(c)(3)


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] es.wikipedia to UTF-8

body:
Camille Constans wrote:
> It is possible.
> You need to use a bot to convert all windows caracters to iso-8859-1 before the conversion

Could you fix the conversion script to not have this requirement? Just
assume input is Windows-1252.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Jaime E. Villate

subject: [Wikitech-l] extending wiki-syntax

body:
Hi Enrico,

On Tue, Jul 06, 2004 at 01:45:17PM +0000, Enrico Weigelt wrote:
>
> But my article schema supports a little bit more than just text
> and headlines, i.e. outline, title, ext.linklists, etc.
>
> So I'm planning to extend the common wiki syntax by some additional
> elements, i.e. some block/section tags (as used by some template engines).
> An extendet wiki article could probably look like:
>
> {--ATTR--}
> Language:	de
> Translation-en:	foo
>
> {--TITLE--}
> Article Title
>
> {--OUTLINE--}
> This is the article outline
>
> {--TEXT--}

A couple of years ago I extended the UseMod wiki syntax and wrote a
perl script that will convert wiki pages into LaTeX, DocBook and
XHTML. We even used it to create the proceedings of the Hispalinux 2002
conference.

You can find it in Debian (package parsewiki) and in:
  http://villate.org/parsewiki/

(sorry for the name Reini. You're right this is a converter and not a parser)

The solution I used at that time was:

{title: Some Title}
{author: Authors list}
{date: Publication date}
{organization:...}
{address:...}
{abstract: any of these meta-fields\
    can take several lines.}
etc.

Later on, I went on to extend the system using Python, and I borrowed the
PostScript convention of placing the meta-information inside special
comments that start with two %% instead of just one. I used something such
as:
##author:...
##date:...

I just could not continue to developed a more complete system on my
own, and I did not succeed in attracting other Python developers, so I
have decided to join some strong wiki project to try to implement the
features that I miss in a wiki.

That's how I ended up in this list. I just discovered and install
Media Wiki today and I'm anxious to help with anything. Any
suggestions? Perhaps I can start by adapting my old perl conversion
script. I had to do some improvements to the UseMod perl code which
might also find some use here.

Cheers,
Jaime


body:
--- Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> But it is too
> sweeping to
> assume _no_ advice or ethical component, ever.

You're right. I only meant it was a goal, not what was actually
happening. And I certainly can't speak about the future will bring.

Yet, as an avowed NPOV international encyclopedia, it should be the
W's goal.

By W I mean Wikipedia, not any other project of wikimedia.

=====
Chris Mahan
818.943.1850 cell
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
chris.mahan at gmail.com
http://www.christophermahan.com/

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subject: [WikiEN-l] hate speech

body:
--- "steven l. rubenstein" <rubenste at ohiou.edu> wrote:

> But judging from the rest of his response, my assumption was
> correct.  Chris, you just do not understand the point.  I suggest
> you read
> Austin's book and perhaps take a couple of courses in the
> philosophy of
> language.

I do get your point, unfortunately, just not agree with it. Anyway,
I'll look it up someday in my spare time.

> It looks like few people have interest in the question of hate
> speech, so I
> will not belabor the point.  But for everyone besides Chris, I do
> want to
> add one more thing, to clarify my earlier points.  One of
> Wikipedia's key
> policies is to respect contributors, and an important behavioral
> guideline
> is to avoid personal attacks.  One reason I am so concerned about
> hate
> speech is that I do not feel it is strictly covered by this policy
> and this
> guideline -- because hate speech is impersonal.  Strictly speaking,
> I did
> not feel WHEELER was attacking me "personally," I felt he was
> attacking me
> "impersonally."  It was not directed at me personally (which is
> explicitly
> against our policy) because it was not about me, personally.  But
> it was
> about Jews, so since I am a Jew it is about me, just me,
> impersonally.  If
> this is not clear, all I can ask is that you read any of the
> countless
> explanations of the rationale behind hate speech legislation or
> hate crime
> legislation.  The point is not that you should agree that we need
> hate
> speech legislation, just to understand how hate speech is different
> from
> other forms of rude or insulting or disrespectful speech.  Perhaps
> all I
> have been asking for is recognition of another reason for mediation
> or
> arbitration beyond the ones listed.

I would like to add that I personally find that people who use ethnic
or group-based insults even less savory than those who direct curses
directly to individuals. I agree that any form of insult, be it
group-based or individual-based is generally in poor taste and does
little to foster a collegial environment where productive work can
take place.

As far as mediation or arbitration, perhaps others can best describe
the difference between disagreement on an article's content and
clashes of personalities.

There may be a "I don't want to work with this person" complain,
replete with a restaining order or two, as long as article content is
itself not an item of contention.

Thoughts?

=====
Chris Mahan
818.943.1850 cell
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
chris.mahan at gmail.com
http://www.christophermahan.com/

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subject: [Wikitech-l] Forbidden when retrieving metadata

body:
Nathan R. Yergler wrote:
> I'm a software engineer for the Creative Commons and am working on our
> on-line license/RDF validator.  We're currently working on adding <link>
> support for RDF retrieval, due in large part to Wikipedia's decision to
> use CC metadata to describe the FDL license.

Neat!

 >  We have intial support
> working, but when we test with Wikipedia, we get a 403: Forbidden.

We do block some specific user-agent strings due to past robot abuse; be
sure you're using a user-agent string that identifies your software
rather than a generic one.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] thank you

body:
This isn't a matter for the Wikimedia Board at this early stage, nor
for this mailing list. Please see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Dispute_resolution and follow
the procedures there, taking it to arbitration, not the Board, as a
last resort.

Angela.

Lir wrote:

>Id like to thank you, as members of the Wikimedia Board, as members of the
mediation committee, and as concerned citizens -- for being so rude as to not
even bother to respond to this issue. It is obvious that you feel I can be
banned by anyone, for any reason; regardless of Jimbo Wales request that I be
treated according to the rules of the website. Thank you for not caring, it
means a lot to me.


from_name: Robert

subject: [WikiEN-l] IP blocked, and e-mail is not being accepted

body:
I tried to edit an article on Wikipedia today, but I found
that my IP had been blocked due to the actions of an
anonymous user:

> The reason given is this: 24-hour block for blanking
> user page of user who submitted page to VfD, and then
> repeating this behavior from multiple IP addresses
> You can email The Anome
</wiki/Special:Emailuser/The_Anome>
> or one of the other administrators to discuss the block.

Ok. Someone was bad, and they got blocked. Here's the
problem. The Anome aparently has no e-mail address set up!
When I go to The Anome's User page to e-mail him, I get
this response:

> "This user has not specified a valid e-mail address,
> or has chosen not to receive e-mail from other users"

Kind of ironic, since the message says that e-mail should
be sent to him! :)

> If you believe that our blocking policy was violated,
> you may discuss the block publicly on the WikiEN-L
> mailing list

I don't have a problem with the blocking of this IP; if
that kind of problem appeared, then a 24 block is fine. The
policy is good; The problem is that some other contributors
(like me) can't edit, and we can't e-mail the Anome as we
are told to. So this is a situation that someone should
know about. (And many people in my city use my ISP, so many
people are potentially blocked.)

> Your IP address is 209.247.222.84. Please include this
> address in any queries you make.

Done. Any suggestions?

Could we come up with a way of people with known Wikipedia
accounts getting around such blocks? Or is such a solution
already extant?

Thanks for your time,

Robert (RK)

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subject: [WikiEN-l] proposal: rename "Votes for deletion" to "Triage"

body:
Robert Dodier wrote:
> It turns out that VfD is used as a general forum to
> determine what to do with an article...
> So I suggest renaming "Votes for deletion" to "Triage".

VfD should not be used as a general forum to determine what to do with
an article. VfD is for pages that should be deleted. If it needs
redirecting or whatever, list it on Cleanup,  discuss it on the talk
page, or just take the action required. If it's a copyvio, list it on
[[Wikipedia:Copyright problems]]. Misuse of VfD is a reason to change
the way people use it, not a reason to rename it.

Angela.


from_name: Phil Sandifer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: thank you

references:
<BAY11-DAV94oZTwHSpo0000c291@hotmail.com>	<8b722b80040706073276fec1b8@mail.gmail.com>
	<40EAD59E.6090803@thingy.apana.org.au> <40EB0BD3.9060104@yahoo.com>

body:
I did not request arbitration against Guanaco, nor do I intend to. If
you want that done, you'll have to do it yourself.

-Snowspinner

On Jul 6, 2004, at 3:30 PM, Anthere wrote:

> Was Guanaco presented as well ?
>
>
> David Gerard wrote:
>> On 07/06/04 14:32, Angela wrote:
>>> This isn't a matter for the Wikimedia Board at this early stage, nor
>>> for this mailing list. Please see
>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Dispute_resolution and follow
>>> the procedures there, taking it to arbitration, not the Board, as a
>>> last resort.
>> Lir has indeed been presented for arbitration on en. It's an
>> interesting
>> case.
>> - d.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: shizhao

subject: [Wikitech-l] Plese minnan WP move to poj.wikipedia.org

body:
In minnan.wikipedia.org, minnan not [[en:min-nan]], is [[en:Taiwanese
(linguistics)]](H?-l?-o?).

see http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%99%BD%E8%A9%B1%
E5%AD%97 , and http://lomaji.com/poj/specs/chart.html , (Unicode-encoded Peh-
oe-ji (Hakka and Holo) Characters).

Plese minnan move to poj. Thanks!


from_name: steven l. rubenstein

subject: [WikiEN-l] hate speech

body:
Chris Mahan wrote,

> > which begs the question, what do you mean by "communicative?"  I
> > assume you
> > mean that the only thing it does is to describe or express
> > something else,
> > but has not force in and of itself.
>
>
>Your assumption was incorrect.

But judging from the rest of his response, my assumption was
correct.  Chris, you just do not understand the point.  I suggest you read
Austin's book and perhaps take a couple of courses in the philosophy of
language.

It looks like few people have interest in the question of hate speech, so I
will not belabor the point.  But for everyone besides Chris, I do want to
add one more thing, to clarify my earlier points.  One of Wikipedia's key
policies is to respect contributors, and an important behavioral guideline
is to avoid personal attacks.  One reason I am so concerned about hate
speech is that I do not feel it is strictly covered by this policy and this
guideline -- because hate speech is impersonal.  Strictly speaking, I did
not feel WHEELER was attacking me "personally," I felt he was attacking me
"impersonally."  It was not directed at me personally (which is explicitly
against our policy) because it was not about me, personally.  But it was
about Jews, so since I am a Jew it is about me, just me, impersonally.  If
this is not clear, all I can ask is that you read any of the countless
explanations of the rationale behind hate speech legislation or hate crime
legislation.  The point is not that you should agree that we need hate
speech legislation, just to understand how hate speech is different from
other forms of rude or insulting or disrespectful speech.  Perhaps all I
have been asking for is recognition of another reason for mediation or
arbitration beyond the ones listed.

Steve

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Forget mentoring systems, we need a web of trust

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

> In the long term though, we need a web of trust system ...
> Somebody created a page in the Wikipedia namespace about this, but I can't find
> it. :(

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Trust_network maybe?

Angela.


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [Wikipedia-l] thank you

body:
On 07/06/04 14:32, Angela wrote:

> This isn't a matter for the Wikimedia Board at this early stage, nor
> for this mailing list. Please see
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Dispute_resolution and follow
> the procedures there, taking it to arbitration, not the Board, as a
> last resort.

Lir has indeed been presented for arbitration on en. It's an interesting
case.

- d.


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: thank you

body:
If there are two parties to a dispute, it would seem more sensible to
consider the matter from both sides.

Ec

Phil Sandifer wrote:

> I did not request arbitration against Guanaco, nor do I intend to. If
> you want that done, you'll have to do it yourself.
> -Snowspinner
>
> On Jul 6, 2004, at 3:30 PM, Anthere wrote:
>
>> Was Guanaco presented as well ?
>>
>> David Gerard wrote:
>>
>>> On 07/06/04 14:32, Angela wrote:
>>>
>>>> This isn't a matter for the Wikimedia Board at this early stage, nor
>>>> for this mailing list. Please see
>>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Dispute_resolution and follow
>>>> the procedures there, taking it to arbitration, not the Board, as a
>>>> last resort.
>>>
>>> Lir has indeed been presented for arbitration on en. It's an
>>> interesting
>>> case.
>>> - d.
>>


from_name: Nathan R. Yergler

body:
Hello,

I'm a software engineer for the Creative Commons and am working on our
on-line license/RDF validator.  We're currently working on adding <link>
support for RDF retrieval, due in large part to Wikipedia's decision to
use CC metadata to describe the FDL license.  We have intial support
working, but when we test with Wikipedia, we get a 403: Forbidden.

Our system parses the page and attempts to retrieve the metadata file
seperately; specifically,
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Main_Page&action=creativecommons
for the Main_Page.

Does Wikipedia have non-browser requests for the metadata blocked?  Is
there something we need to do in order to retrieve the metadata?  Thanks
for any help you can provide.

Nathan R. Yergler


from_name: Charles Matthews

body:
Christopher Mahan wrote

> Does W oppose hatred? I don't think so. We're like journalists in a
> war. We take neither side, and rather strive to give balanced and
> non-point of view accounts of the events and circumstances.

Hang on there.  David Gerard may be right to argue that if Wikipedia is to
treat any postings as if they really constituted 'incitement', then the
grounds have to be watertight in a way that is not so easy to be.  That
doesn't mean that we can't argue that in the text of Wikipedia there is an a
fortiori reason or ten not to have anything promoting hatred.  The NPOV is
for the text; one has to believe that promoting NPOV is what a conflict like
say Northern Ireland's Troubles needs.  Otherwise WP would seem like a bad
idea.  But none of that means that WP's collective values are 'relativist'
or hands-off.  A scholar can be scrupulous but also a passionate believer in
values that are not intentionally or propagandistically pushed in what he or
she writes.

Charles


list: textbook-l

from_name: Kit Langton

subject:
[Textbook-l] Fwd: Tues 7/13: Mass Mobilizing Meeting for RNC
	Protest!

body:
just passing along some info.. just in case ur interested

-Kit Langton

Begin forwarded message:

> From: "UFPJ NY Alerts" <listmaster at unitedforpeace.org>
> Date: July 6, 2004 4:57:56 PM EDT
> To: komputerkit at comcast.net
> Subject: Tues 7/13: Mass Mobilizing Meeting for RNC Protest!
>
>
> NY ACTION ALERT * UNITED FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE
> http://www.unitedforpeace.org | Temporary phone: 646-723-0980
> To subscribe, visit http://www.unitedforpeace.org/email
> ============================================
> WHAT: Mass mobilizing meeting for August 29 RNC protest
> WHEN: Tuesday, July 13 at 6:30PM
> WHERE: New UFPJ Office, 209 W. 38th Street, 9th floor (betw. 7th & 8th)
> ============================================
>
> Fed up with war and occupation?
> Outraged by the lies?
> Upset by the greed and hate?
>
> Then now is the time to take action! Help make August 29 ? when the
> Republican Convention comes to town -- the biggest demonstration in
> the history of New York. Let?s show the world that we reject Bush's
> Agenda and we won't stand for more war, lies, greed and hate.
>
> We only have eight short weeks to organize, mobilize, and spread the
> word to every community, neighborhood, constituency and organization.
> But as we have seen in the past, our anger and our convictions and our
> optimism can spread like wildfire so that people will be pouring into
> the streets on August 29, for the massive march and rally being
> organized by United for Peace and Justice.
>
> So please join us at a mass mobilizing meeting on Tuesday, July 13
> (postponed from July 6th) at 6:30 pm.
>
> ?	Pick up fliers and stickers to distribute.
> ?	Join a working group to participate in the mobilization for the RNC,
> as well as to build the movement to fight the Bush Agenda this fall.
> ?	Get an update on our ongoing struggle for an August 29 march and
> rally permit
> ?	Sign up to volunteer!
>
> The meeting will be held at the new UFPJ office, 209 W. 38th St., 9th
> Floor, between 7th and 8th Avenues. Note that, while phone service is
> being switched over, our temporary phone number is 646-723-0980. We
> will have our old number again beginning approximately July 15.
>
> Please send this announcement out to every listserv that you know of
> as well as to the mailing list of any organization to which you
> belong.
>
> ============================================
> AUGUST 29, THE WORLD SAYS NO TO THE BUSH AGENDA!
> March and Rally at the Republican National Convention, New York City
> ============================================
> Visit the new mobilizing section of our website for resources and to
> endorse the August 29 demonstration:
> http://www.unitedforpeace.org/rnc
> ============================================
> We need your financial support to make August 29 a success:
> http://www.unitedforpeace.org/donate
> ============================================
> To receive email updates on the August 29 RNC protest, visit:
> http://www.unitedforpeace.org/email
> ============================================
>
>
>
> --
> To unsubscribe from this list visit
> http://www.unitedforpeace.org/email4.php?p=unsubscribe&uid=902471
>
> To update your preferences visit
> http://www.unitedforpeace.org/email4.php?p=preferences&uid=902471
>
>
>
> --
> Powered by PHPlist, www.phplist.com --
>
>
>
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from_name: Henry H. Tan-Tenn

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Plese minnan WP move to poj.wikipedia.org

body:
> In minnan.wikipedia.org, minnan not [[en:min-nan]], is [[en:Taiwanese
> (linguistics)]](H?-l?-o?).

Please clarify what you mean by the above.  It does not seem to make sense.

> see http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%99%BD%E8%A9%B1%
> E5%AD%97 , and http://lomaji.com/poj/specs/chart.html , (Unicode-encoded Peh-
> oe-ji (Hakka and Holo) Characters).
>
> Plese minnan move to poj. Thanks!

I am a user on the Minnan Wikipedia.  There is absolutely no motion on
that Wikipedia to rename the subdomain to "poj", as you suggest.  I
would appreciate it if in the future you could, as a non-user on Minnan,
consult with the Minnan community first before unilaterally suggesting
such a radical change.

The document on lomaji.com (my domain, btw) merely describes one aspect
of the major orthography used to write Minnan in Taiwan and other
Minnan-speaking regions.  It is neither original nor normative.  More
importantly the term "POJ" describes not the Sinitic language (or if you
will, dialect) but a script.  To rename the Minnan Wikipedia to "POJ
Wikipedia" -- as suggested by the subdomain change you urged -- would be
akin to renaming the Russian (or for that matter, Ukrainian) Wikipedia
"Cyrillic Wikipedia".  That makes no sense, I'm afraid.

Regards,

~~~~


from_name: Mathias Schindler

subject: [Wikipedia-l] [Fwd: [nnm] CFP: Encyclopedia of Digital Government]

body:
| From: "=?iso-8859-1?Q?M=E4lki=E4_Matti_PAKK?="
<Matti.Malkia at pakk.poliisi.fi>
| Date: 5 Jul 2004 16:55:00 +0300
| Subject: CFP: Encyclopedia of Digital Government

****************************************************************

Please feel free to distribute this call for articles to colleagues
you think could be interested in contributing to this project.

********************************************************
                   Call for Articles
           ENCYCLOPEDIA OF DIGITAL GOVERNMENT
        http://www.uta.fi/laitokset/ISI/EnDigG/
********************************************************

Public administration, public governance and=20public sector
organizations all over the world face a major challenge.
The application of new knowledge and new digital
technologies are transforming the ways in which public
administrations are organized, governed and how they work
to serve their citizens and interact with various
stakeholders.

The Encyclopedia of Digital Government will be an important
new publication documenting the current trends and
developments, challenges, and future prospects of digital
government or e-government at different institutional
levels and in different parts of the world. It will
provide a broad basis for understanding the issues,
technologies, theories, applications, opportunities,
and challenges faced by public administrations and public
organizations today in their quest for better, more
effective, and more citizen-oriented government.

The Encyclopedia of Digital Government=20(in one or two
volumes) will feature short articles (1,500-3,500+ words)
authored by leading experts offering in-depth descriptions
of key issues, terms and concepts related to different areas
in digital government. In addition, the encyclopedia will
provide a compendium of terms, definitions and explanations
of concepts, models, and acronyms.

This important new publication will circulate worldwide
among academic and professional institutions and will be
instrumental in providing researchers, scholars, students
and professionals access to the latest knowledge on digital
government.

Invited Submissions:

To ensure that this publication has the most current
and relevant information possible, we are asking experts,
practitioners and scholars well known for their particular
area of research, to contribute short articles on
suggested topics (see the web site at
http://www.uta.fi/laitokset/ISI/EnDigG/) or other related
topics in their area of interest.

Individuals interested should submit an email to either
of the editors listing name, affiliation and background
information plus one or more topics on which a short article
could be contributed. A brief description of the suggested
article is appreciated. We encourage potential contributors
to consider also topics not included in our list of topics,
especially if the topic is related to the area of their
special expertise. If any of the proposals is closely
related to a previously published article, we ask
contributors to include the reference in the message.

Proposals will be accepted based on pertinence criteria
and topic balancing needs. First selections will be made
between 15th and 20th July 2004 and announced soon after.
After that new proposals will be processed once a=20month.

Upon acceptance of the proposal, contributors will have
two to three months to prepare their article including
7-10=20related terms and their appropriate definitions.
Guidelines for preparing your contributions, a suggested
list of topics and a sample article can be found at
http://www.uta.fi/laitokset/ISI/EnDigG/

All contributions will undergo a peer-review process
upon receipt. The book will be published by Idea Group Inc.
(http://www.idea-group.com/) and is tentatively scheduled
for publication in late 2005.

Inquiries and Submissions should be forwarded to:

Ari-Veikko Anttiroiko
Department of Local Government Studies,
FIN-33014 University of Tampere, Finland
Email: Ari-Veikko.Anttiroiko at uta.fi; Tel.: +358-3-215 7009

or

Matti M=E4lki=E4
The Police College of Finland, P.O. Box 13,
FIN-02151 Espoo, Finland
Email: Matti.Malkia at pakk.poliisi.fi; Fax: +358-9-8388 3500

Further details and updates to the CFP can be found at:
http://www.uta.fi/laitokset/ISI/EnDigG

**********************************************************


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Mediawiki on oracle...

body:
Jens Frank wrote:
> MySQL has some strange "enhancements" to SQL that are not compatible to
> the rest of the world. With dammit's port to PostgreSQL, these spots
> were identified and using a global ($wgIsPg I think it's named) the
> MySQL-specific instructions can be disabled. This should be a good
> starting point for a port to Oracle. PostgreSQL handles sequences the
> same way Oracle does, so that our usage of MySQL's auto_increment
> columns has already been ported, too. The PostgreSQL port is in the
> latest 1.3 betas.

I've rewritten most of the PostgreSQL port in my working copy, it hasn't
been committed yet. I'm also changing the way we call the database
throughout the codebase. I'm holding my breath hoping people don't make
too many commits, because at this stage pretty much any change will
cause conflicts. You can see where I'm up to at:

http://www.ph.unimelb.edu.au/~tstarling/half-completed_DB_OOP.patch

I've decided to cut short the OOP and table name modifications, do some
testing, and then commit it, before completing the conversion. It will
still work when it's half-converted.

The problem with $wgIsXxxx was that it would have required just as much
work to implement a port to a third DBMS as it did to implement the
second. Instead of DBMS-dependent conditions scattered throughout the
codebase, I'm working on having common functions which are efficient for
MySQL but can be emulated by any DBMS. I don't know exactly how Oracle
differs from PostgreSQL and MySQL, but hopefully the bulk of the work to
produce a port should be in the DatabaseOracle subclass rather than
throughout the code.

-- Tim Starling


subject: [Wikipedia-l] The Wisdom of Crowds

body:
I heard this guy on the BBCWS, a few weeks back--interesting stuff; he
goes so far as to suggest that a group will often be smarter than its
smartest member due to the dynamic created, and given a large enough
sampling over a long enough period of time will actually outperform the
best single experts in any given field, or something to that effect.

--
Austin D. Hair <austin at austinhair.org>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Callidus
http://www.austinhair.org/
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from_name: Robert Dodier

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: proposal: rename "Votes for deletion" to "Triage"

body:
Angela wrote:

> VfD should not be used as a general forum to determine what to do
with
> an article. VfD is for pages that should be deleted. If it needs
> redirecting or whatever, list it on Cleanup,  discuss it on the talk
> page, or just take the action required. If it's a copyvio, list it on
> [[Wikipedia:Copyright problems]]. Misuse of VfD is a reason to change
> the way people use it, not a reason to rename it.

Part of the point is that VfD has evolved into a forum for
general purpose review of an article. I really don't see
anything wrong with that. We could create a new page called
"General review" and then nag people not to use VfD for that,
but it's much simpler, and achieves the same purpose, to
simply rename VfD.

VfD became what it is today because it fills a need. When VfD
was created, the need wasn't foreseen.

Robert Dodier
(Wile E. Heresiarch)

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Address AutoComplete - You start. We finish.
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail


from_name: C A S [name omitted for privacy reasons]

from_email: a

subject: [WikiEN-l] User:Tim Starling/Password matches

body:
Not only does this page contain false accusations; not only does it represent an abuse of Tim Starling's administrative powers; but, it can be used to find out the passwords of various users. It should be deleted and Tim Starling and should be demoted.
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] User:Tim Starling/Password matches

body:
Not only does this page contain false accusations; not only does it represent an abuse of Tim Starling's administrative powers; but, it can be used to find out the passwords of various users. It should be deleted and Tim Starling and should be demoted.
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subject: [WikiEN-l] No need for hate speech policy per se

body:
Hello everyone,

About hate speech, I don't think Wikipedia needs any
specific policy about it. We really need two things:
(1) the ability to -effectively- ban trolls, and
(2) the will to use the ability.

I think (1) is more important right now. Blocking and banning
are easy to work around, since one need simply make a sock
puppet or edit without logging in. Item (2) is simply irrelevant
until WP can strongly enforce bans and blocks.

I really have no idea how to implement (1). I hope someone's
working on it. I'd be interested to hear out any proposals.

About (2): We don't need a hate speech policy, because we
should simply ban time wasting morons on sight. It doesn't
take months of agonizing to figure out who's a troll.
We should empower trustworthy people to ban trolls, and
then let them. This probably implies increasing the ranks of
the arbitration committee to, say, several hundred.

I don't recommend making rules about who's a troll.
Trolls love rules, as others have noted. I'd rather just
have a vote among enough (say a few dozen) of
the arbitrators. We don't have rules about what's a
keepable article, we vote on them. I don't see any
reason that voting can't work against trolls.

Frankly, I'm puzzled that WP is so tolerant of trolling.
I believe trolls are the biggest threat to WP, by far.
There are not very many, but they eat up time and resources
far out of proportion to their numbers. Worst of all, they
drive away real editors. We tolerate this at our own risk.

For what it's worth,
Robert Dodier
(Wile E. Heresiarch)

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers!
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: thank you

body:
Well, the arbitration committee request was rather broader than just
the issue with Guanaco. To the point where I don't really think that
there are two parties to the dispute with Lir as it stands.

-Snowspinner

On Jul 6, 2004, at 6:40 PM, Ray Saintonge wrote:

> If there are two parties to a dispute, it would seem more sensible to
> consider the matter from both sides.
>
> Ec
>
> Phil Sandifer wrote:
>
>> I did not request arbitration against Guanaco, nor do I intend to. If
>> you want that done, you'll have to do it yourself.
>> -Snowspinner
>>
>> On Jul 6, 2004, at 3:30 PM, Anthere wrote:
>>
>>> Was Guanaco presented as well ?
>>>
>>> David Gerard wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 07/06/04 14:32, Angela wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> This isn't a matter for the Wikimedia Board at this early stage,
>>>>> nor
>>>>> for this mailing list. Please see
>>>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Dispute_resolution and
>>>>> follow
>>>>> the procedures there, taking it to arbitration, not the Board, as a
>>>>> last resort.
>>>>
>>>> Lir has indeed been presented for arbitration on en. It's an
>>>> interesting
>>>> case.
>>>> - d.
>>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Philip Newton

references:
<BAY15-DAV18ifDZmPro00016c25@hotmail.com>
	<cce1v8$o71$1@sea.gmane.org> <40EADE12.7070605@cjnetworks.com>

body:
On Tue, 06 Jul 2004 12:14:58 -0500, Rick Boatright wrote:

> Of course it has an ISO Language code...  SHU...
> http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=SHU

Careful! SIL / Ethnologue codes are not ISO 639 codes.

Many languages have an Ethnologue code but not ISO 639 code, and some
languages have an ISO 639 code but not an Ethnologue code.

> But I have no idea where the cyrillic characters part came from.  I can
> find no information ANYWHERE that suggests there are arabic dialects
> written in cyrillic.  I smell a spoof.

I suspect that the "Chadian" the OP talks about is not the variety of
Arabic spoken in Chad, but a minor conlang with a confusingly similar
name. (I say "minor" because I feel that if it were in any way notable,
I would have heard of it by now.)

So not a spoof, but simply a minor conlang with a confusing name, if I
understand correctly.

Desmond Tutu: Are there any people with Chadian as their first language?

Cheers,
Philip


from_name: Ralesk Ne'vennoyx

references:
<BAY15-DAV18ifDZmPro00016c25@hotmail.com>	<cce1v8$o71$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<40EADE12.7070605@cjnetworks.com>
	<43ule0hcmkm1jcok07kb29uhta0pa5055j@4ax.com>

body:
Philip Newton wrote:
> I suspect that the "Chadian" the OP talks about is not the variety of
> Arabic spoken in Chad, but a minor conlang with a confusingly similar
> name. (I say "minor" because I feel that if it were in any way notable,
> I would have heard of it by now.)
>
I was thinking the same ? why else was Esperanto and Volap?k mentioned
and not some naturally developed languages?


body:
Christopher Mahan wrote

> If the W has a social goal to make the world a better place, it is
> solely through the exposition of facts.

Well, no, that's not really decided.  A successful wiki is a community with
an appropriate technology attached (and not  the other way round).  The
policy comes from the community end.  In time the policy approved of by most
users might not be that.  Of course, it might be problematic, and
detrimental to what WP has done well.  (Example: giving medical advice
rather than presenting facts about medecine.)  But it is too sweeping to
assume _no_ advice or ethical component, ever.

Charles


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: thank you

body:
Was Guanaco presented as well ?

David Gerard wrote:
> On 07/06/04 14:32, Angela wrote:
>
>> This isn't a matter for the Wikimedia Board at this early stage, nor
>> for this mailing list. Please see
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Dispute_resolution and follow
>> the procedures there, taking it to arbitration, not the Board, as a
>> last resort.
>
>
>
> Lir has indeed been presented for arbitration on en. It's an interesting
> case.
>
>
> - d.


from_name: Manuel Gomez Rojo

subject: [Wikitech-l] es.wikipedia to UTF-8

body:
Hello.

We, Spanish Wikipedia users, have recently approved in election
[[es:Wikipedia:Elecciones#UTF-8]] the will to switch to the UTF-8 encoding.

I have read the messages regarding the possible conversion of en: to
UTF-8. Es: is smaller (~24700 articles) and I hope it would be easier to
do the change.

We miss currently a person with database access so we would thank very
much to any developer making the conversion on es.wikipedia.

Would it be possible?

--
ManuelGR, administrator at es.wikipedia.


from_name: Camille Constans

subject: [Wikitech-l] es.wikipedia to UTF-8

body:
On Tue, 06 Jul 2004 22:33:44 +0200
Manuel Gomez Rojo <mgrojo at ya.com> wrote:

> Hello.
>
> We, Spanish Wikipedia users, have recently approved in election
> [[es:Wikipedia:Elecciones#UTF-8]] the will to switch to the UTF-8 encoding.
>
> I have read the messages regarding the possible conversion of en: to
> UTF-8. Es: is smaller (~24700 articles) and I hope it would be easier to
> do the change.
>
> We miss currently a person with database access so we would thank very
> much to any developer making the conversion on es.wikipedia.
>
> Would it be possible?

It is possible.
You need to use a bot to convert all windows caracters to iso-8859-1 before the conversion
After, some downtime to convert

Tell me when someone can help me to do it.
A Saturday or Sunday is usually fine for me.

Shaihulud


from_name: Michael Snow

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: WHEELER's anti-Semitism

body:
Christopher Mahan wrote:

>--- "steven l. rubenstein" <rubenste at ohiou.edu> wrote:
>
>
>>The ACLU opposes hate speech legislation on two grounds: first, it
>>considers hate speech one of the prices a society must pay for a
>>general right to freedom of speech, and second, it believes the best
>>response to hate speech is more speech.  I happen to sympathize very strongly, or just plain agree, with both of these.  I do not think the state should limit free speech.  WHEELER, for example, has a right to say whatever anti-Semitic thing he wants to, to anyone who wants to listen.
>>
>>
>
>
>
>>The question is, do I have to listen?  Do you, do we have to
>>listen?  And, more importantly, does Wikipedia have to be a medium through which anyone spews hate speech?  I don't think so.
>>
>>
>Incorrect. The Supreme Court has ruled (lawyers can dig the ref out)
>that restricting venue of speech is an infringement on the exercise
>of free speech. As long as a forum is public, they are allowed to
>speak.
>
Chris made a passing argument earlier that Wikipedia is legally a public
forum and therefore required to allow freedom of speech under the First
Amendment. Since he repeats the argument here, I felt a rebuttal was
necessary. Apologies in advance for focusing on US law and disregarding
relevant laws elsewhere.

The legal concept of a "public forum" applies specifically to government
property. In particular, it covers property like public streets,
sidewalks, and parks that have traditionally been used for civic
assembly and discussion. Wikipedia as a website is operated by a private
nonprofit organization, and Wikipedia as a community is a collection of
private individuals. The public can participate, and nearly all activity
happens "in public", but none of that makes this a public forum in a
legal sense, because it's not owned by the public.

The law in some states, notably California, protects a certain amount of
free speech on some private property, specifically the ability to
petition or solicit individuals in shopping centers that are open to the
general public. Maybe this is what gave Chris the idea that Wikipedia is
a public forum. But even if this principle applied to speech on
Wikipedia, I highly doubt it would cover anything resembling hate-speech.

Wikipedia currently is somewhat of a forum for speech, but it's not
legally obligated to provide a forum, or to remain open to the public,
or to permit unrestricted free speech. The website could shut down
tomorrow, or convert to read-only, thus stopping all speech. To the
extent that anyone has a "right to free speech" here, it consists of the
rights licensed to everyone under the GFDL, in conjunction with the
ability to fork the content.

>>For example, people have a right to advertise but we do not allow advertisements on Wikipedia.
>>
>>
>Actually they do. Others have a right to remove such advertising.
>They do not have a right to prohibit others from removing the
>advertising.
>
Please do not confuse having the ability to do something on Wikipedia
with having the right to do it. Wikipedia has every right to prohibit
advertising, or removal of advertising, depending on what policy the
Wikipedia community wants to follow with respect to advertising. Same
goes for hate-speech. The question is about what policy we want, and how
to define it.

Just a general reminder: editing Wikipedia is a privilege, not a right.
The privilege is granted liberally, but it can be restricted or taken
away, though that will usually happen only in extreme circumstances.

--Michael Snow
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: es.wikipedia to UTF-8

body:
Camille Constans wrote:
>
> It is possible.
> You need to use a bot to convert all windows caracters to iso-8859-1 before the conversion
> After, some downtime to convert
>
> Tell me when someone can help me to do it.
> A Saturday or Sunday is usually fine for me.
>

I can help you on Sundays, next one being good for me. What kind of help
do you need? I have used pywikipediabot that includes windows_chars.py
for doing that conversion. Is it the one you are referring to?

Thanks for your time.
--
ManuelGR


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: es.wikipedia to UTF-8

body:
On Tue, 06 Jul 2004 23:19:57 +0200
Manuel Gomez Rojo <mgrojo at ya.com> wrote:

> Camille Constans wrote:
> >
> > It is possible.
> > You need to use a bot to convert all windows caracters to iso-8859-1 before the conversion
> > After, some downtime to convert
> >
> > Tell me when someone can help me to do it.
> > A Saturday or Sunday is usually fine for me.
> >
>
> I can help you on Sundays, next one being good for me. What kind of help
> do you need? I have used pywikipediabot that includes windows_chars.py
> for doing that conversion. Is it the one you are referring to?

Should be ok for me on Sunday. Could you prepare a message to tell about the downtime ?

Yes, that is

Shaihulud


subject: [Wikitech-l] es.wikipedia to UTF-8

body:
On Tue, 06 Jul 2004 14:21:04 -0700
Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:

> Camille Constans wrote:
> > It is possible.
> > You need to use a bot to convert all windows caracters to iso-8859-1 before the conversion
>
> Could you fix the conversion script to not have this requirement? Just
> assume input is Windows-1252.

I'll ask the dev who wrote the c++ program. That would be an idea :)

Shaihulud


from_name: Angela

body:
On Tue, 6 Jul 2004 15:36:33 -0700 (PDT), Robert <rkscience100 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I tried to edit an article on Wikipedia today, but I found
> that my IP had been blocked due to the actions of an
> anonymous user...

I've unblocked this now. Please can other admins keep an eye on the
209.247.222.0/24 range to see if it needs reblocking.

> The problem is that some other contributors
> (like me) can't edit, and we can't e-mail the Anome as we
> are told to. So this is a situation that someone should
> know about. (And many people in my city use my ISP, so many
> people are potentially blocked.)

I proposed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Blocking_policy#Email_proposal
that all sysops should have a valid email address, though I'm not sure
now whether that was a worthwhile proposal.

> Could we come up with a way of people with known Wikipedia
> accounts getting around such blocks? Or is such a solution
> already extant?

Currently, the only solution is to email this list.

Angela.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: es.wikipedia to UTF-8

body:
Camille Constans wrote:
>
> Should be ok for me on Sunday. Could you prepare a message to tell about the downtime ?
>
Of course, it might be:

"Este domingo, 11 de julio, Wikipedia en espa?ol estar? desconectada
mientras se convierte a UTF-8"

In english:

"This Sunday, July 11, Spanish Wikipedia will be off-line while
converting it to UTF-8"

Will you display it on every page? Anyway, I will announce it on the
Main Page and the Village Pump (Caf?).

--
ManuelGR


from_name: David Gerard

body:
On 07/06/04 22:50, Angela wrote:

> I proposed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Blocking_policy#Email_proposal
> that all sysops should have a valid email address, though I'm not sure
> now whether that was a worthwhile proposal.

argh. I switched mine off to cut the crank mail down. (My address
is really easy to find, but I got nothing through the Wikipedia
'send an email' setup that didn't belong on a talk page.) I have
switched it on again, though the other factor is accidentally
deleting stuff that isn't obviously not spam ...

- d.


from_name: Andre Engels

body:
On Tue, 06 Jul 2004 17:01:51 -0500 "Nathan R. Yergler" <nathan at yergler.net>
wrote:

>Does Wikipedia have non-browser requests for the metadata blocked?  Is
>there something we need to do in order to retrieve the metadata?  Thanks
>for any help you can provide.

If I remember correctly, Wikipedia rejects requests that do not specify a
User Agent; this might be the cause of your problems.

Andre Engels


from_name: Phil Sandifer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: thank you

body:
I have no particular stance on the issue one way or another, as I said,
and encourage you to do what you feel is sensible to resolve it. I
don't really know the history of it. If you want to discuss it with
Guanaco, neat. if you want to bring it to Arbcom, well, I pity you,
because compiling a lot of evidence for Arbcom really sucks. Either
way, my point is that I have nothing to do with this one, nor do I
intend to, so it's all you.

-Snowspinner


body:
Keith Maxwell wrote:
> I have tried editing over the past week and have been told IP address 203.166.76.237 or similar has been banned for repeated vandalism ... for six months.

The whole range 203.166.96.232/29 was blocked. A history of the
vandalism can be seen at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:203.166.96.239 and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:203.166.96.236 which shows this
user, or users, were warned a number of times. However, I feel
strongly that six months is too long for a range block, particularly
one which is affecting other users. I have unblocked this now.

Angela.


from_name: James D. Forrester

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: User:Tim Starling/Password matches

body:
On Wednesday, 7th of July, 2004, at 01:41, Tim Starling wrote:

> C A S [name omitted for privacy reasons] wrote:
> >
> > Not only does this page contain false accusations; not only does it
> > represent an abuse of Tim Starling's administrative powers; but, it
> > can be used to find out the passwords of various users. It
> > should be deleted and Tim Starling and should be demoted.
>
> I'm ready as always to hear any criticism the community might
> have of my actions. For convenience, here is the URL of the
> page in question:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Tim_Starling/Password_matches
>
> See also the associated discussion at:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitratio
> n#Known_Lir_Accounts

For clarity, as the case has been opened, this is now at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Lir/Evidence
#Known_Lir_Sockpuppet_Accounts

(apologies for the length of line)

[Snip]

Yours,
--
James D. Forrester
Mail: james at jdforrester.org | jon at eh.org | james.forrester at orange.net
      csvla at dcs.warwick.ac.uk || [[en:User:Jdforrester]] on Wikipedia
IM  : ICQ:15108888 | MSN:jamesdforrester at hotmail.com | YM:Jdforrester


from_name: Fred Bauder

body:
Banning trolls on sight has been rejected as an enforceable rule by the
arbitration committee. Evidence as shown by edits is required before anyone
who makes a least a stab at editing can be negatively sanctioned.

We need a hate speech policy unless we intend to continue using the no
personal attacks policy as a surrogate.

Fred

> From: Robert Dodier <robert_dodier at yahoo.com>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Tue, 6 Jul 2004 19:42:59 -0700 (PDT)
> To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] No need for hate speech policy per se
>
> We don't need a hate speech policy, because we
> should simply ban time wasting morons on sight.


from_name: Nathan R. Yergler

body:
Thanks for the help; yes, adding a User-Agent seemed to do the trick.  I
have, however, come up with another somewhat related question.  Looking
at the source to the Main Page, I see the metadata referenced in the
following line:

<link title="Creative Commons" type="application/rdf+xml"
href="/w/wiki.phtml?title=Main_Page&action=creativecommons"
rel="meta" />

However, when I attempt to retrieve the URL specified by href, I just
get the main page again.  However, if I replace "&" with a simple &
(before action=...), I get the RDF.  Is this by design for some reason,
or a bug?  Thanks.

Nathan R. Yergler

Brion Vibber wrote:

> Nathan R. Yergler wrote:
>
>> I'm a software engineer for the Creative Commons and am working on
>> our on-line license/RDF validator.  We're currently working on adding
>> <link> support for RDF retrieval, due in large part to Wikipedia's
>> decision to use CC metadata to describe the FDL license.
>
>
> Neat!
>
> >  We have intial support
>
>> working, but when we test with Wikipedia, we get a 403: Forbidden.
>
>
> We do block some specific user-agent strings due to past robot abuse;
> be sure you're using a user-agent string that identifies your software
> rather than a generic one.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Forbidden when retrieving metadata

body:
Timwi wrote:

>
> That is how HTML works. Ampersands are escaped as &.

I knew that was the case in the body of a document, but wasn't aware it
applied to head elements as well.  Thanks.

NRY


from_name: Christopher Mahan

subject: [WikiEN-l] Public forum (Was WHEELER's anti-Semitism)

body:
--- Michael Snow <wikipedia at earthlink.net> wrote:

> Chris made a passing argument earlier that Wikipedia is legally a
> public
> forum and therefore required to allow freedom of speech under the
> First
> Amendment. Since he repeats the argument here, I felt a rebuttal
> was
> necessary. Apologies in advance for focusing on US law and
> disregarding
> relevant laws elsewhere.

Discussion open.

> The legal concept of a "public forum" applies specifically to
> government
> property. In particular, it covers property like public streets,
> sidewalks, and parks that have traditionally been used for civic
> assembly and discussion.

Ok.

> Wikipedia as a website is operated by a
> private
> nonprofit organization, and Wikipedia as a community is a
> collection of
> private individuals. The public can participate, and nearly all
> activity
> happens "in public", but none of that makes this a public forum in
> a
> legal sense, because it's not owned by the public.

Granted, in a purely legal sense, the W is a private not-for-profit
organization.

> The law in some states, notably California, protects a certain
> amount of
> free speech on some private property, specifically the ability to
> petition or solicit individuals in shopping centers that are open
> to the
> general public. Maybe this is what gave Chris the idea that
> Wikipedia is
> a public forum.

To a degree.

> But even if this principle applied to speech on
> Wikipedia, I highly doubt it would cover anything resembling
> hate-speech.

You're probably right.

> Wikipedia currently is somewhat of a forum for speech, but it's not
>
> legally obligated to provide a forum, or to remain open to the
> public,
> or to permit unrestricted free speech. The website could shut down
> tomorrow, or convert to read-only, thus stopping all speech.

Likewise the government can close a public park temporarily for
"renovation" or permanently for "budget considerations".

It's also not legally obligated to be successful and build an
international encyclopedia.

> To the
> extent that anyone has a "right to free speech" here, it consists
> of the
> rights licensed to everyone under the GFDL, in conjunction with the
>
> ability to fork the content.

There is one more concept to consider: the Wiki. A wiki is, by its
very nature, a cyber-place where speech is unusally unrestricted.
This creates a precedence (however tenuous) of allowing
near-unfettered speech. This concept is one of the reasons behind
this project's successes, and dear to many a contributor's heart.
Indeed, it is one of the safeties that the body of work will be
balanced, since all people, from all walks of life, with differing
opinions and points of view, experiences, and levels of knowledge can
participate in the process.

Should WP become an exclusive card-carrying members-only club, I
contend that it would fail rather quickly.

> >>For example, people have a right to advertise but we do not allow
> advertisements on Wikipedia.
> >>
> >>
> >Actually they do. Others have a right to remove such advertising.
> >They do not have a right to prohibit others from removing the
> >advertising.
> >
> Please do not confuse having the ability to do something on
> Wikipedia
> with having the right to do it. Wikipedia has every right to
> prohibit
> advertising, or removal of advertising, depending on what policy
> the
> Wikipedia community wants to follow with respect to advertising.
> Same
> goes for hate-speech. The question is about what policy we want,
> and how
> to define it.

It is not illegal to post commercial speech on wikipedia. You cannot
call the police, sue for damages, etc. Since no legislation exists,
it is retained as a right by the People.

There is no mandate from Jimbo that commercial speech will never be
used on W. It has even been tried by him. I will refer you to the
Amazon.com book referral program that was tried earlier this year. It
was discontinued partly because of feedback from users, and partly
from lack of financial interest.

> Just a general reminder: editing Wikipedia is a privilege, not a
> right.
> The privilege is granted liberally, but it can be restricted or
> taken
> away, though that will usually happen only in extreme
> circumstances.

Likewise there are laws governing speech in public places, that,
under extreme circumstances, may be used to remove certain
individuals from the population. (Try yelling "There's a bomb!" in
the street in front of an airport in the US.)

While I agree that conceptually editing W is a priviledge, it is and
has been so widely granted to all that it would be possible to argue
that to restrict an individual's right from participation would
unfairly restrict their ability to contribute to a body of knowledge
that is meant to benefit mankind, assuming that this individual had
maintained a civil demeanor. Past conduct has demonstrated indeed
demonstrates that barring uncivility, all people are allowed access
to view and edit the W, as long as they agree to the terms of the
GFDL and respect the work of other contributors.

=====
Chris Mahan
818.943.1850 cell
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
chris.mahan at gmail.com
http://www.christophermahan.com/

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Take Yahoo! Mail with you! Get it on your mobile phone.
http://mobile.yahoo.com/maildemo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: thank you

body:
Well, aside from Lir issueS (I put many S), there is a Guanaco issue as
well.

In the past 2 years and a half, I have always been bugged by potential
errors made by sysops. Most of these errors are done in good faith, and
probably most do not require a hard answer precisely because in good
faith. Also, most of the time, errors made are made because rules are
not very clear.

Still, errors are made. And it came as a habit to just discard these.
When an error is made, there are two steps

* recognising the error (based on facts). It is best to study the case
to see whether an error was made or not made. If the error was due to
unclear guidelines, then guidelines should be improved for the general
sake.

* then considering an error was made, take a decision regarding this
specific violation, taking into account the situation itself (ie,
perhaps quick and eroneous decision while fighting a vandal is easier to
forgive and forget. Also, when an error is made, it is a good idea to
admit it was made, even just to issue a *warning*. Because when a sysop
has received perhaps 10 warnings, there is probably something to discuss.

It certainly bugs me to see that when a sysop makes an error, the
reaction is to bury the error, put it under the carpet, as if it is
impossible to imagine a sysop *could* make an error. I think rules are
entirely useless if no reaction occurs when someone does not respect the
rules. I also think it is bad that someone make an error and do not
apology for it.

The issue is not to "punish" someone for the sake of punishing. Nor is
it to humiliate or hurt the person, it is just to admit that there are
rules, and that if people infringing the rules are never issued warning,
then the rules are useless.

Which is why I would like that this case is studied :-)

I also strongly regret that this has to go in front of an arbitration
committee to be discussed. Honestly, I think it could be discussed just
between people, but en really seem to be bureaucratic now :-)

Phil Sandifer wrote:
> Well, the arbitration committee request was rather broader than just the
> issue with Guanaco. To the point where I don't really think that there
> are two parties to the dispute with Lir as it stands.
>
> -Snowspinner
>
> On Jul 6, 2004, at 6:40 PM, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>> If there are two parties to a dispute, it would seem more sensible to
>> consider the matter from both sides.
>>
>> Ec
>>
>> Phil Sandifer wrote:
>>
>>> I did not request arbitration against Guanaco, nor do I intend to. If
>>> you want that done, you'll have to do it yourself.
>>> -Snowspinner
>>>
>>> On Jul 6, 2004, at 3:30 PM, Anthere wrote:
>>>
>>>> Was Guanaco presented as well ?
>>>>
>>>> David Gerard wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> On 07/06/04 14:32, Angela wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> This isn't a matter for the Wikimedia Board at this early stage, nor
>>>>>> for this mailing list. Please see
>>>>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Dispute_resolution and follow
>>>>>> the procedures there, taking it to arbitration, not the Board, as a
>>>>>> last resort.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Lir has indeed been presented for arbitration on en. It's an
>>>>> interesting
>>>>> case.
>>>>> - d.
>>>>
>>>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Wikipedia-l mailing list
>> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>>


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: thank you

body:
Fact is, I already discussed it with Guanaco :-(
As for evidence, well, I'll try.
This really has become a problem that we fear discussing a problem
because of the amount of work it will require...:-(

Phil Sandifer wrote:
> I have no particular stance on the issue one way or another, as I said,
> and encourage you to do what you feel is sensible to resolve it. I don't
> really know the history of it. If you want to discuss it with Guanaco,
> neat. if you want to bring it to Arbcom, well, I pity you, because
> compiling a lot of evidence for Arbcom really sucks. Either way, my
> point is that I have nothing to do with this one, nor do I intend to, so
> it's all you.
>
> -Snowspinner


body:
On Tue, 06 Jul 2004 18:14:34 -0400, "Henry H. Tan-Tenn"
<share2002nov at lomaji.com> wrote:

> > In minnan.wikipedia.org, minnan not [[en:min-nan]], is [[en:Taiwanese
> > (linguistics)]](H?-l?-o?).
>
> Please clarify what you mean by the above.  It does not seem to make sense.

I believe he means something like "There is a Wikipedia in the subdomain
'minnan.wikipedia.org'. However, this 'minnan' Wikipedia does not serve
the complete Southern Min family of languages that is described on
[[en:min-nan]], but specifically the Taiwanese language Ho-lo-oe."

Cheers,
Philip


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: WHEELER's anti-Semitism

body:
Michael Snow wrote:

> The legal concept of a "public forum" applies specifically to
> government property. In particular, it covers property like public
> streets, sidewalks, and parks that have traditionally been used for
> civic assembly and discussion. Wikipedia as a website is operated by a
> private nonprofit organization, and Wikipedia as a community is a
> collection of private individuals. The public can participate, and
> nearly all activity happens "in public", but none of that makes this a
> public forum in a legal sense, because it's not owned by the public.

That's an unduly narrow definition of "public forum" and appears
contrary to the generally held impression of that term.  Your particular
definition should be backed up with a source.  It is more common to
think of that expression as a space (including a virtual one) where
members of the general public can come to express their views, and hear
the views of others.  In some jurisdictions a privat company wanting a
zoning change can be required to sponsor a public forum at its own
expense.  This does not mean that public fora are completely without
rules; they're often needed to keep a meeting from descending into
complete chaos.

> Please do not confuse having the ability to do something on Wikipedia
> with having the right to do it. Wikipedia has every right to prohibit
> advertising, or removal of advertising, depending on what policy the
> Wikipedia community wants to follow with respect to advertising. Same
> goes for hate-speech. The question is about what policy we want, and
> how to define it.

Adequately defining advertising is much easier than defining hate speech
or NPOV.  The borderlands of these two can be very broad, but we still
need to look at it on a case by case basis.  We can list general
characteristics of hate speech that need to be considered, but the
presence of one or two of these characteristics need not be conclusive
proof that hat speech is being practised.

Holocaust denial has been regarded as a characteristic of anti-semitism,
but one must still have regard to the context.

> Just a general reminder: editing Wikipedia is a privilege, not a
> right. The privilege is granted liberally, but it can be restricted or
> taken away, though that will usually happen only in extreme
> circumstances.

We have all heard this stale distinction before in many different
circumstances.  It seldom rises above the status of word play, and does
not assist us in finding a constructive solution.  There likely would be
broad general support for banning hate speech, and that's why your
argument is useless.  The problem is in defining what we mean.

Ec


from_name: Keith Maxwell

body:
Folks,

I have the same problem. I have tried editing over the past week and have been told IP address 203.166.76.237 or similar has been banned for repeated vandalism by 21804 -whoever that is. As it wasn't due to my edits - presumably as I have never been warned for vandalism for edits.

Theresa Knott has done some investigation on my behalf and has found that this IP address has been blocked for six months. This is rather a long time.

I was wondering whether bans could be put in place for shorter periods to stop people who make positive contributions enduring lengthy bans together with the vandals.

Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, 6 Jul 2004 15:36:33 -0700 (PDT), Robert wrote:
> I tried to edit an article on Wikipedia today, but I found
> that my IP had been blocked due to the actions of an
> anonymous user...

I've unblocked this now. Please can other admins keep an eye on the
209.247.222.0/24 range to see if it needs reblocking.

> The problem is that some other contributors
> (like me) can't edit, and we can't e-mail the Anome as we
> are told to. So this is a situation that someone should
> know about. (And many people in my city use my ISP, so many
> people are potentially blocked.)

I proposed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Blocking_policy#Email_proposal
that all sysops should have a valid email address, though I'm not sure
now whether that was a worthwhile proposal.

> Could we come up with a way of people with known Wikipedia
> accounts getting around such blocks? Or is such a solution
> already extant?

Currently, the only solution is to email this list.

Angela.
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from_name: Andrew Lih

subject: [Wikipedia-l] The Wisdom of Crowds

body:
FYI, this book has been getting attention lately, so you may want to
take a look:

The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How
Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations
by James Surowiecki

To Wikipedians, this merely reinforces what we've all know and have
experienced firsthand.  But it is interesting that the theme of the
"power of many" is being picked up by the mainstream and it may prove
a useful reference for folks who just "don't get wiki."  It's a more
general book than Rheingold's "Smart Mobs," which could be dismissed
as too technocentric and focusing on mobile devices

Instead, Surowiecki's "Wise crowds" are described as having (1)
diversity of opinion; (2) independence of members from one another;
(3) decentralization; and (4) a good method for aggregating opinions.
(four points quoted from Amazon.com's review).

I'm sure Wikipedians will find these concepts quite familiar.
--
Andrew Lih (User:Fuzheado)
andrew.lih at gmail.com


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Paradigm

body:
Fennec Foxen wrote:
> Don't you hate it when you get behind on a list and you're reading
> chronologically in threaded mode and you come to a thread and think no
> one has replied but in fact they've just changed the header and now
> it's buried under something totally different later on in the big old
> message list somewhere?

I long since configured my newsreader to display these lists ordered by
date, rather than by thread. People constantly reply out of the thread
with a mail client that doesn't support references, and people
constantly start new topics by clicking "reply" and changing the
subject. The threading unfortunately does not give much information,
it's not worth using.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Timwi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: es.wikipedia to UTF-8

body:
Camille Constans wrote:

> Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
>
>>Could you fix the conversion script to not have this requirement? Just
>>assume input is Windows-1252.
>
> I'll ask the dev who wrote the c++ program. That would be an idea :)

An idea I've already posted here about three times.


body:
C A S [name omitted for privacy reasons] wrote:
>
> Not only does this page contain false accusations; not only does it
> represent an abuse of Tim Starling's administrative powers; but, it can
> be used to find out the passwords of various users. It should be deleted
> and Tim Starling and should be demoted.

I'm ready as always to hear any criticism the community might have of my
actions. For convenience, here is the URL of the page in question:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Tim_Starling/Password_matches

See also the associated discussion at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration#Known_Lir_Accounts

-- Tim Starling


body:
Angela wrote:

> Robert Dodier wrote:
>
>>It turns out that VfD is used as a general forum to
>>determine what to do with an article...
>>So I suggest renaming "Votes for deletion" to "Triage".
>
> VfD should not be used as a general forum to determine what to do with
> an article. VfD is for pages that should be deleted.

I suppose VfD is being used for loads of purposes because everyone knows
that everyone else watches VfD more closely than anything else (in all
honesty, significantly fewer people are interested in copyright problems).


from_name: Kaihsu Tai

subject:
[Wikitech-l] zh-min-nan for Holopedia@Wikipedia,
	please! [no forking]

body:
I am an admin on en:, but I hardly ever read this mailing
list, and only subscribed today.  The reason I subscribed is
because I am really quite upset and fed up about the
ridiculous treatment Holopedia at Wikipedia received -- the
free encyclopedia in the Taiwanese language
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_%28linguistics%29".

I came up with the idea of Holopedia
"http://weblog.holopedia.org/archives/holopedia.jpg".

The Most Serene Fellows Pektiong and Henry
"http://www.digitas.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/wiki/ken/ThoanKhe"
submitted an application to create Holopedia at Wikipedia.  The
intention was to prevent forking -- we could easily have run
MediaWiki somewhere else (and indeed we did, as a means of
testing -- but to prevent forking, I will not let you know
where we ran it).

We requested the hostname 'zh-min-nan', per RFC 3066
"http://www.iana.org/assignments/lang-tags/zh-min-nan".  I
registered the tag, so I should know.  Some silly person did
not honour our request, but created a syncretic monster
'zh-cfr' without consulting the community (to prevent
forking (and to prevent giving it any authority), I will not
let you know where the letters CFR came from).  Then, some
(other) silly person dictated 'minnan'.  Then, yet some
other person suggested the meaningless 'poj'.

Please honour our original, simple request and give us
"http://zh-min-nan.wikipedia.org/".  We are holding back
from editing at the moment because we still want to prevent
forking.  All the silly manoeuvre described above only works
against the non-forking -- a fundamental value of Wikipedia.
Please,
        CHANGE IT NOW to zh-min-nan!
        CHANGE IT NOW!
        CHANGE IT NOW!
Let's waste no more time.  Thank you very much.

        CHANGE IT NOW!
        CHANGE IT NOW!
        CHANGE IT NOW to zh-min-nan!  Have you changed it?

(Sorry for crossposting, but I found soon after sending to
mediawiki-l at Wikimedia.org that I should have sent it here.)


from_name: Alan Shields

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia subscription donation

body:
I note on http://wikimediafoundation.org/fundraising that you encourage
recurring donations. I've searched about but found no mention of where
to set up a subscription donation, such as through Paypal.

I donate through a Paypal subscription to the FreeNetProject on a
monthly basis and would like to set up the same for WikiMedia.

I'd post the question to the wiki, but I think this is something that a
financial admin would have to do, so I'm posting here. Redirect me if
need be.

Thanks for all your work,
Alan Shields


from_name: Rick

body:
I used to have my email address available, but I got so much abusive email I changed my preferences.

RickK

Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
I proposed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Blocking_policy#Email_proposal
that all sysops should have a valid email address, though I'm not sure
now whether that was a worthwhile proposal.

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from_name: Desmond Tutu

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: About "the" language

body:
Hello again :)

I read all your messages and the only ones who found the answer was Philip
and Ralesk. In English, the language has the same name of the Arabic
dialect spoken in Chad. In French, our language is called ?chadien? and the
Arabic dialect ?tchadien?... In English, it has a confusing
name. In "Chadian", the language name is written "??????". It's a created
language. It has appeared two years ago but since then, it's
more widespread everyday (I think, there's no statistics).

So, there's absolutely no link between the Arabic dialect and the Chadian
conlang. By the way, I know that there's a site (in construction)
who will be about Chadian. I don't know if there's people with Chadian for
mother tongue... Anyway, there's not a lot of translations in
this language. That's why I ask to all of you if it would be a nice idea to
have an encyclopedia in this language. There's a translation in
Latin but nobody has Latin for mother tongue :) It's nice anyway.

I don't know if it is more specific now ? I know, it wasn't very explicative
the first time ;) Bobby.


from_name: Mark Richards

subject: [WikiEN-l] Abusive email

body:
Not that I approve of it. but I think the amount of
abusive email one gets can be a useful bellweather of
the level of approval of actions.
Mark

--- Rick <giantsrick13 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I used to have my email address available, but I got
> so much abusive email I changed my preferences.
>
> RickK
>
> Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
> I proposed at
>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Blocking_policy#Email_proposal
> that all sysops should have a valid email address,
> though I'm not sure
> now whether that was a worthwhile proposal.
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------
> Do you Yahoo!?
> New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - 100MB free storage!>
_______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

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body:
Nathan R. Yergler wrote:

> <link title="Creative Commons" type="application/rdf+xml"
> href="/w/wiki.phtml?title=Main_Page&action=creativecommons"
> rel="meta" />
>
> However, when I attempt to retrieve the URL specified by href, I just
> get the main page again.  However, if I replace "&" with a simple &
> (before action=...), I get the RDF.  Is this by design for some reason,
> or a bug?  Thanks.

That is how HTML works. Ampersands are escaped as &.

Timwi


from_name: Henry H. Tan-Tenn

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: zh-min-nan for Holopedia@Wikipedia,
	please! [no forking]

body:
Tim Starling wrote:
> The reason for choosing zh-cfr can be summarised in one word: Aromanian.
> A wiki in the Aromanian dialect was requested, and it was agreed that we
> should have one, but there was a problem with choosing the subdomain.
> Aromanian does not have a distinct ISO 639 code, however it is listed in
> the Ethlnologue under the code RUP. We had used only ISO 639 codes up to
> that time.

I understand the line of thought re Aromanian.  My impression, though,
was that "tokipona" preceded the roa-rup construction in not following
ISO 639.  Perhaps there was/is a separate policy for conlangs, I don't
know -- or maybe there was a transitional (ongoing?) state of confusion.

> The solution we came up with was to use the group ISO 639 code followed
> by the SIL code. This allows us to specify most languages in the
> Ethnologue without conflicting with the ISO standard, since ISO 639
> codes do not contain hyphens.

My understanding is that RFC 3066 is backward compatible with ISO-639.
It much prefers ISO-639 whenever a tag exists.  I quote as an example:

"4. When a language has both an IANA-registered tag (i-something) and
       a tag derived from an ISO registered code, you MUST use the ISO
       tag.  NOTE: When such a situation is discovered, the IANA-
       registered tag SHOULD be deprecated as soon as possible."

Some related discussion on meta:
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_codes#RFC_3066

Now of course Wikipedia *could* stick to ISO-639 but it's so...um,
limiting, as we've discovered.

> Using the hyphenated language tags assigned by IANA, such as zh-min-nan,
> would conflict with this scheme. For example if we used zh-yue, it would
> be difficult to know what "yue" refers to. Is it an SIL code or an
> assigned code?

Well, zh-yue has been defined
(http://www.iana.org/assignments/lang-tags/zh-yue) so I'm not sure why
it'd be confusing to find out.  Even without a lookup, on the face of it
it's telling:  the zh (which is ISO-639) says it's some kind of Sinitic
variant.  The "yue" part is a well-known word for Cantonese; it's found
in words such as "??" (Yue Speech/Language), "??" (Yue Opera).
Although "yue" alone is not part of any standard I know of, the meaning
is clear.

To further argue from examples:  "zh-min-nan" is more intuitive than
"zh-cfr".  "min-nan" is again the transliteration of a common word in
Chinese.  Although one *could* look up "cfr", the former can be deduced
based on knowledge common to Internet-using speakers of the said language.

To sum up:  I think the IANA-assigned codes are (1) ISO-639 compatible
and (2) apparently easier to decipher than SIL tags (though there may be
counter examples).  Unlike "tokipona", "minnan" alone, IANA tags appear
to make use of ISO-639 to suggest genetic affiliation.  That's useful,
in my opinion.

As for the use of common names, that's something to consider.  I'd
prefer the Minnan Wikipedia not be used as a guinea pig, though :)

> If I understand correctly, Shizhao's problem is that holopedia.net, and
> by extension minnan.wikipedia.org, is written in a script peculiar to
> Taiwan. The writing there is thus not representative of min-nan
> generally. So wouldn't it be better to use the RFC 3066 code specific to
> Taiwanese, namely zh-min-nan-TW? Or indeed, in keeping with my earlier
> point about such language codes being cryptic and unnecessarily lengthy,
> why not use ho-lo-oe.wikipedia.org?

I have not seen Shizhao describe the issue, certainly not to Minnan
Wikipedians.  Now, I'm personally not opposed to "zh-min-nan-TW" (the
matter has not been discussed in Minnan), though as you know, Wikipedia
generally prefers to put same-language content together.  The most
prominent example of this is the zh Wikipedia (where Simplifed and
Traditional scripts coexist).  Various other languages also have
Latin/Cyrillic/Arabic di-/trigraphia.  (And I think the issue has not
been more prominent because those Wikipedias are fairly inactive or
merely reserved.)

To keep discussion short I'll just say, for now, that most variants of
Minnan are generally and historically *not* written and when written,
generally without reference to a standard (lots of words written
inconsistently).  The genra have also been limited to songs and other
poetic forms.  So it's difficult to talk about representativeness in
that context.  The current Minnan Wikipedia *is* the "state of the art"
to the extent that Minnan has been written and read historically.

~~~~