from_name: Jonathan Leybovich

subject: [Wikitech-l] Some WiktionaryZ updates

body:
Thanks for the update, Erik.  I am in the process of designing my own
Wikidata dataset and have some questions which I'll discuss with you
offline.

There are several issues which I've found, though, that are of general
concern so I'll post them here.  All of this is based upon the
WiktionaryZ tarball you released a couple months back, so sorry if some
of this is no longer applicable:

1. Wikidata uses a single set of tables for storing all multilingual
content: shorttext , translated_content .  The problem with this
approach is that it will not scale: small multilingual tables with
limited ("seed data") content will be forced to do lookups on these
gigantic and ever-growing tables, and exporting a single dataset will
bog-down unnecessarily doing lookups (or even worse, full-table scans!)
on these generic tables.  I have put a page on Meta- [[m:Multilingual
Wikidata]]- which discusses an approach for striping tables with
multilingual content

2. The tables for defining languages and language groups seem to be
shared between multilingual Mediawiki (the software) and WiktionaryZ
(user data).  I think this is not only conceptually incorrect, but also
a security hole.  See my comments from a while back:
[[m:Talk:Ultimate_Wiktionary_data_design#.22Dog_Food.22]]

Anyway, it would be much appreciated if you could post more Wikidata
designs as you come up with them.  Thanks, and keep up the good work.


list: commons-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Commons-l] Safe Deletion

body:
Brion Vibber schrieb:
> 4) Wait a day or two, and click the regular "delete" tab.
>

Yes. The fully integrated solution is of course better than my hackish
one (which is better than no solution, respectively;-)

I will not work on safe_delete anymore, and deactivate it once Brion's
implementation is live. The safe-deleted files will still be around,
though, at least for a few month.

I will continue development on bad_old_ones, of course. Until the stars
are right again, that is ;-)

Magnus

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list: wikitech-l

from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [Wikitech-l] Recent thumbnails and CAPTCHAS broken

body:
On 6/14/06, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> > Over the last 2 days or so, there seems to have been a huge increase
> > in the number of broken thumbnails on the Commons, especially PNG and
> > GIFs.

Fwiw, I have been noticing some problems like that on en (probably
images coming from Commons). In particular I noticed that the larger I
made the thumbnail, the more likely it was to break. In one case, I
couldn't get a thumbnail larger than or equal to 700px - but maybe
that's a known hard limit?

Steve


list: wikien-l

from_name: Matt Brown

subject: [WikiEN-l] Delete Daniel Brandt

body:
Joseph Hiegel: It'd really help if your words weren't in one
indigestible lump of a paragraph (and without linebreaks).  Makes it
hard to comprehend, and all that.

I'd agree that the last thing I'd want is a crowd of well-meaning
Wikipedians trying to help me without waiting for my saying I needed
help or telling them how.  There are a lot of circumstances where
unguided 'help' would harm.  Wikipedians should refrain from knee-jerk
complaining to anyone (e.g. an employer) seen to be giving a
Wikipedian trouble - it might not be in that Wikipedian's best
interests.

Also agreed that there are a lot of circumstances where someone's
behaviour is distressing but not criminal (or even civilly
actionable).  I would, however, argue that we retain the right to
consider behaviour morally reprehensible even if totally legal.  The
law is not designed to be a guide to moral behavior - this neither
means that staying on the right side of the law makes you a moral
person, nor that we should be persuaded to not criticise someone
simply because their actions are legal.

Daniel Brandt's actions, I believe, have been reprehensible in this,
as have some others'.  It seems likely that most if not all of his
actions have been wholly within the law.  The one field in which they
possibly have not is that he persisted in editing Wikipedia, through
sockpuppet accounts, even after being told to leave.

It seems to me that because you see Brandt's actions as wholly legal
(probably correctly), you enjoin us to consider them /moral/ - with
which I disagree.  I don't think we have to consider this a war in
which any tactics are fine, so long as they breach no law.

I do agree with you that Wikipedia should not bow to any pressure to
'help' users who have been harrassed by changing content to appease
their harassers.  Better indeed that we lose contributors than bend in
this way.

However, I don't see why the project or its contributors should be
constrained from assisting those who are harassed in other ways.

And yes, Phil should be more annoyed at the University's law
enforcement, who were quite willing to use a baseless complaint as
grounds to harass him.  Brandt and those who have worked with him are
simply taking advantage of flaws in the way organisations like this
handle complaints - that a baseless complaint may be taken seriously
and cause someone trouble if the complaint arrives in the hands of
someone placed highly enough in the organisation, and the wording of
the complaint 'pushes buttons' in regards to issues that may be given
undue emphasis.

That doesn't mean that the action of lodging that complaint was
anything other than a malicious attempt to get Phil in trouble, and it
disturbs me that you consider it moral to do so.

-Matt


from_name: Bryan Derksen

subject: [WikiEN-l] Another (rare) category type

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> Came across this one:
>
> [[Category:Football (soccer) terminology]]
>
> The items in the category are not, as you might think, articles about
> soccer terms themselves. Rather, they are all concepts related to
> soccer, that have been put into this category for the (IMHO dubious)
> goal of producing an automatic "glossary" of soccer terms.

I've noticed some of these sorts of categories before, and in a vain
attempt to keep them in check I added a guideline to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Terminology that in theory would
prevent them from becoming like this. In practice, of course, sigh... :)

I did manage to get [[Category:Computer terminology]] deleted and its
contents merged into [[Category:Computing]] back then, though, perhaps a
good approach for the more egregious examples that remain.

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subject: [Commons-l] some statistics

body:
Brianna Laugher schrieb:
> BTW to Magnus: having a link directly to the en.wp page would be
> really handy (we have it as one of our 'extra tabs' now).
>
Sorry, what en page? On commons [[category:Unknown]], I see "tree" and
"catscan" tabs. You mean one of these?

Magnus

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Transclusion of formatting templates (again?)

body:
On 6/13/06, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> Myself, I never understood the point in it at all. Why do you ever want
> to clear floating elements? It creates ugly stretches of empty space. If
> you feel that you need it in some particular situation, then surely that
> is an indication that the floating elements are positioned badly, and
> using "clear:both" only adds to it by also positioning the section
> headers badly.

I use it frequently. The "ugly stretches of empty space" are often
better than images crossing headings, images piling up on each other
etc. And hell, that empty space might just inspire someone to fill it
in :)

> If there are too many images on the page, surely the page would look
> better if they were turned into a gallery or removed entirely, instead
> of stacking floating elements left and right.

As far as layout goes, to me an image gallery is a total abdication:
"There's some text up there. There are some images down here". Images
carefully chosen and well spaced out and laid out throughout the text
is vastly preferable. Some principles I tend to follow, which
obviously conflict:

- No images on the same level as a heading
- Don't start paragraphs with images on the left
- Alternate images on the left and right sides
- Don't centre images except for large panoramas
- Make high-quality, important images, bigger. Make diagrams smaller.
- Make all image widths multiples of 50px.
- Attempt to align images vertically.
- Place images close to the most relevant text.
- Start the article with a large (300px) image on the right hand side.

I would love some formal guidelines for the layout of images. Hell,
some more formal guidelines for layout in general wouldn't go astray.

Steve


list: foundation-l

from_name: Lord Voldemort

subject: [Foundation-l] Fundraising ideas - bursting the bubble

body:
On 6/14/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> In the Tampa Bay area, say a 50 mile radius of the main office.  Or
> say the USF campus, to make it even simpler.

Actually, that's a great idea. Hit up some college or university
campus, find a group of 5-10 people, tell 'em you'll give 'em a few
bucks (20-40... depending on how many you recruit) for stuffing
envelopes for WMF for a couple of hours.  Most college kids are
strapped for cash and would eagerly participate.  While the speed of
the work may not be that of a professional company, it would be
cheaper, and perhaps even spark interest in Wikimedia projects if the
university newspaper ran a little story about students helping out WMF
(like we need more university student contributors 8^ ) ). I don't
know, just throwing out some thoughts. --LV


list: wikimedia-l


from_name: Daniel Mayer

body:
--- Lord Voldemort <lordbishopvoldemort at gmail.com> wrote:
> Actually, that's a great idea. Hit up some college or university
> campus, find a group of 5-10 people, tell 'em you'll give 'em a few
> bucks (20-40... depending on how many you recruit) for stuffing
> envelopes for WMF for a couple of hours.  Most college kids are
> strapped for cash and would eagerly participate.  While the speed of
> the work may not be that of a professional company, it would be
> cheaper, and perhaps even spark interest in Wikimedia projects if the
> university newspaper ran a little story about students helping out WMF
> (like we need more university student contributors 8^ ) ). I don't
> know, just throwing out some thoughts. ?LV

Which reminds me - I have a standing offer from a professor at a university in the Tampa area to
have his students help in just such an effort. All I think we would be expected to give the
students is lunch, refreshments and maybe a ride.

-- mav

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com


body:
On 6/13/06, Kirill Lokshin <kirill.lokshin at gmail.com> wrote:
> It's quite useful on templates, since you can use a combination of
> "clear" and <noinclude> to add usage notes directly to the template
> page.  If "clear" isn't used and the notes contain an example use of
> the template (this tends to come up with infoboxes), the example
> (which is presumably "float: right") will overlap with the actual
> rendered template.
>
> (This is, admittedly, a rather obscure example.)

There are plenty of less obscure ones. Here's one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio

At the end of the section "Aesthetic uses", the {{-}} prevents the
large image hanging down into the next section, overlapping the
section title line. And it doesn't produce a huge amount of excess
space, either.

FWIW, it also comes in handy for WP:FPC, where you can be sure of
keeping any images from the previous section from hanging over into
the next section.

I would probably use it less if it wasn't for the ugly way images tend
to cut off that line.

Steve


from_name: Mark Wagner

references:
<f1c3529e0606130126h5ed937e2tccc587d91b6aa89a@mail.gmail.com>
	<e6mit6$e15$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<b8ceeef70606140127q5c0bbf7bt5390e69130cdafcb@mail.gmail.com>

body:
On 6/14/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> As far as layout goes, to me an image gallery is a total abdication:
> "There's some text up there. There are some images down here". Images
> carefully chosen and well spaced out and laid out throughout the text
> is vastly preferable. Some principles I tend to follow, which
> obviously conflict:
>
> - No images on the same level as a heading
> - Don't start paragraphs with images on the left
> - Alternate images on the left and right sides
> - Don't centre images except for large panoramas
> - Make high-quality, important images, bigger. Make diagrams smaller.
> - Make all image widths multiples of 50px.
> - Attempt to align images vertically.
> - Place images close to the most relevant text.
> - Start the article with a large (300px) image on the right hand side.
>
> I would love some formal guidelines for the layout of images. Hell,
> some more formal guidelines for layout in general wouldn't go astray.

[[Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Images]]?

--
Mark
[[User:Carnildo]]


from_name: Brianna Laugher

body:
Hello,

Over the last 2 days or so, there seems to have been a huge increase
in the number of broken thumbnails on the Commons, especially PNG and
GIFs.

eg.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Help_desk#regular_image_not_displaying
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump#Thumb_mode_doesn.27t_work.21.3F
(and the topic below it)

The CAPTCHAS not showing up are a bit of a concern, especially since
it's hard to collect information about what happened.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/COM:HD#Can.27t_create_account_to_upload_image
also a couple of days ago I noticed an anon user inserting a URL with
big spaces in it to avoid the CAPTCHA and they commented they couldn't
see the CAPTCHA (it was a legitimate URL).

I can open a bug report if that's preferable but these seem so vague
it's hard to pin down how you would solve them.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Brianna
commons:User:pfctdayelise


from_name: Anthony DiPierro

body:
On 6/14/06, Lord Voldemort <lordbishopvoldemort at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/14/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> > In the Tampa Bay area, say a 50 mile radius of the main office.  Or
> > say the USF campus, to make it even simpler.
>
> Actually, that's a great idea. Hit up some college or university
> campus, find a group of 5-10 people, tell 'em you'll give 'em a few
> bucks (20-40... depending on how many you recruit) for stuffing
> envelopes for WMF for a couple of hours.  Most college kids are
> strapped for cash and would eagerly participate.  While the speed of
> the work may not be that of a professional company, it would be
> cheaper, and perhaps even spark interest in Wikimedia projects if the
> university newspaper ran a little story about students helping out WMF
> (like we need more university student contributors 8^ ) ). I don't
> know, just throwing out some thoughts. --LV

If you're going to go that route, you should at least pay minimum
wage.  I rounded up to $10/hour in my estimate.

Of course I think you could probably get 5-10 people from the USF
campus just by offering them free pizza and soda and telling them it's
for a good cause.  And more than 5 people is probably too much unless
we're talking about a volume much greater than 1000.  Those paper
folding machines are an enormous time-saver, and just one inexpensive
one probably isn't going to support more than 5 workers.

Anthony


body:
On 6/14/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> If you're going to go that route, you should at least pay minimum
> wage.  I rounded up to $10/hour in my estimate.
>
> Of course I think you could probably get 5-10 people from the USF
> campus just by offering them free pizza and soda and telling them it's
> for a good cause.  And more than 5 people is probably too much unless
> we're talking about a volume much greater than 1000.  Those paper
> folding machines are an enormous time-saver, and just one inexpensive
> one probably isn't going to support more than 5 workers.

Well, I was thinking more along the lines of a stipend in exchange for
helping out a good cause (rather than an hourly wage... as I have
found, that _sometimes_ leads to people dragging out the work). Or do
pizza and soda with a small cash "prize" of like 25 bucks for the one
who stuffs the most. I just ran by the Office Depot website and priced
a few decent looking paper folders in the range of USD 150-1500 that
fold between 1800 and 10,300 pages an hour. Just in case you cared.
Although, my guess is that these could be found cheaper if you know
who to go to (or have some connections) ;-)  --LV


from_name: Jay R. Ashworth

subject: [Wikitech-l] Transclusion of formatting templates (again?)

body:
On Tue, Jun 13, 2006 at 10:26:43AM +0200, Steve Bennett wrote:
> Can someone tell me how important this last reason is? How bad is it
> to transclude frequently used templates? Could it be improved? Is this
> going to go away? Permanently substing a large number of templates to
> solve a short-term performance problem is, well, bad.

That's roughly the same argument adduced to explain why WAP sucks, and
it's just as cogent here as it is there.

Never permanently "fix" performance problems by translating them out of
existence; it will bite you when the machines catch up.

ObWikitech: I've Wikipediizing from my spandy used Blackberry lately.

Reading works nicely; the page layout is pretty well taken for non-CSS
devices.  Writing less so, though I forget precisely what broke.

Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

     A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
     Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?

     A: Top-posting.
     Q: What is the most annoying thing on Usenet and in e-mail?


body:
On 6/14/06, Lord Voldemort <lordbishopvoldemort at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/14/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> > If you're going to go that route, you should at least pay minimum
> > wage.  I rounded up to $10/hour in my estimate.
> >
> > Of course I think you could probably get 5-10 people from the USF
> > campus just by offering them free pizza and soda and telling them it's
> > for a good cause.  And more than 5 people is probably too much unless
> > we're talking about a volume much greater than 1000.  Those paper
> > folding machines are an enormous time-saver, and just one inexpensive
> > one probably isn't going to support more than 5 workers.
>
> Well, I was thinking more along the lines of a stipend in exchange for
> helping out a good cause (rather than an hourly wage... as I have
> found, that _sometimes_ leads to people dragging out the work). Or do
> pizza and soda with a small cash "prize" of like 25 bucks for the one
> who stuffs the most.

I'm not very familiar with minimum wage law, so I don't know whether
or not calling it a stipend would work.  I do hate minimum wage laws
because of exactly this type of situation, though.  And,
unfortunately, Florida did just pass one recently.

> I just ran by the Office Depot website and priced
> a few decent looking paper folders in the range of USD 150-1500 that
> fold between 1800 and 10,300 pages an hour. Just in case you cared.
> Although, my guess is that these could be found cheaper if you know
> who to go to (or have some connections) ;-)  --LV

That price range sounds about right (a little on the high side, but
not much).  The thing you have to remember though is that these
letters are almost surely going to be personalized.  So if you plan on
processing them first and then stuffing them later, you have to
consider how you're going to maintain order.

As for connections, I live in Tampa and I *might* be able to borrow
one of these for a couple days.  Let me know when and if there are
definite plans as to when this is going to be done.

These machines really are a time saver.  Back when I was a volunteer
firefighter we used to fold our donation request letters manually, and
it took a *lot* longer.

Anthony


from_name: Aphaia

subject:
[Foundation-l] Hiring of Interim Executive Director and Legal
	Counsel

body:
On 6/13/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:

> I agree completely.  I resist very strongly any separation of foundation
> and community.

How about a different point of view? Separated in concept, but united
in practice. I am aware it sounds very inclining to a certain cultural
background, but still daresay this idea itself can be applied to many
cases, specially we need to cooperate with each other.

Separation itself is nothing wrong. Separation without communication
nor collaboration is bad, or useless at best, assuredly.

If there is no separation, we require never two words or concepts: in
practice the community isn't involved into a certain matter which the
foundation cares for, and vice versa, I assume. If that sounds too
metaphisical or awkward, we might need another terminology, like
distinction, instead of separation.

--
Aphaia
aka
Kizu Naoko
email: Aphaia @ gmail (dot) com


from_name: Delphine Ménard

references:
<NMENLBGDKAFGBDHEPOBNOEGPDBAA.erikzachte@infodisiac.com>
	<448E32B7.1030107@wikia.com>
	<35be2a710606131952y712f204fk39477a186d6630a@mail.gmail.com>

body:
On 6/14/06, Aphaia <aphaia at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/13/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
> > I agree completely.  I resist very strongly any separation of foundation
> > and community.
>
> How about a different point of view? Separated in concept, but united
> in practice. I am aware it sounds very inclining to a certain cultural
> background, but still daresay this idea itself can be applied to many
> cases, specially we need to cooperate with each other.
>
> Separation itself is nothing wrong. Separation without communication
> nor collaboration is bad, or useless at best, assuredly.
>
> If there is no separation, we require never two words or concepts: in
> practice the community isn't involved into a certain matter which the
> foundation cares for, and vice versa, I assume. If that sounds too
> metaphisical or awkward, we might need another terminology, like
> distinction, instead of separation.

Thank you for that. This is exactly what I think we should tend towards.

Delphine

--
~notafish


subject: [Commons-l] some statistics

body:
On 14/06/06, Essjay <essjaywiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> Could someone catch me up on exactly where we are with this? I've been
> gone since Saturday (my last post here was the last thing I did) and
> there has obviously been great progress while I was away. Could someone
> send me a summary of exactly where we are (especially, where and how to
> use Magnus' tool)?

This is how I would use them:
"Hmm, I feel like deleting masses of files, I'll go to
Category:Unknown and find a suitable subcategory..."
e.g. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Images_with_unknown_source_as_of_15_March_2006
  (best to work with a medium-sized category, < 200 items)

so then I would hook that category name up to bad_old_ones to get a URL like
http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/bad_old_ones.php?category=Images%20with%20unknown%20source%20as%20of%2015%20March%202006
(just copy and paste the cat name, it will convert the spaces to "%20")
(at some stage we would hook this into the interface)

then this page gives us a lovely overview, so we can see the image
itself, its summary, its usage, and quick links to delete or safe
delete.

So the beauty of this, is that you can pick out "easy" cases to
delete, i.e. images that aren't being used. (Unfortunately you still
need to check en.wp by hand, can't wait until that's fixed.) You can
also pick "obvious" copyvios (bandpromo shots, logos, etc) and it's
also reasonably easy to see where the uploader has themselves tagged
the image NLD (by choosing "License unknown" in the license selector
at Special:Upload).

Just give the safe_delete a try, it's pretty straightforward I reckon.
I also wouldn't use it for most of these cases, but if you're
squeamish, go ahead. :)

BTW to Magnus: having a link directly to the en.wp page would be
really handy (we have it as one of our 'extra tabs' now).

Brianna


from_name: Andrew Dunbar

subject: [Wikitech-l] Changing accesskey for wpDiff

body:
On 6/14/06, Rotem Liss <mail at rotemliss.com> wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Andrew Dunbar wrote:
> > The English Wiktionary has the same accesskey, "d" for the Delete tab
> > and for the Show changes button. Unlike many other accesskeys, this
> > one is not set in MediaWiki:Monobook.js - is there another file I can
> > edit to change the accesskey to "v" like on the English Wikipedia?
> >
> > (Google and Wiki searches turned up nothing)
> >
> > Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail)
> >
>
> The message is MediaWiki:Accesskey-diff.

Thanks. In here the key is actually set to 'v' but with the mouse
hovering over the button
we were seeing "Show which changes you made to the text. [alt-d]". This was in
MediaWiki:Tooltip-diff
I don't know how the got out of synch and I don't know why searching
for the hover
text in the MediaWiki namespace couldn't find it. But it's fixed now.

Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail)

> - --
> #define Name RotemLiss
> #define Mail mailSTRUDELrotemlissDOTcom
> #define Site www.rotemliss.com
>
> #define KeyFingerPrint 4AFD 8579 A449 4267 BED9 38E5 6EF8 5B1F EBDE 7AC0
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
> Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (GNU/Linux)
> Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
>
> iD8DBQFEj+orbvhbH+veesARAiXdAJ4/2LWn9H/Ay9p+t/usZgNIMF1zZwCgtngx
> zcgNWK6aAKyhUr0gKw/HtGU=
> =89Yl
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

--
http://linguaphile.sf.net


from_name: Delirium

subject: [WikiEN-l] "refactoring" signatures

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Steve Summit wrote:
>
>
>> (The problem's just as bad over on Wiktionary, where there are
>> stubbornly, defiantly distinct pages for `color' and `colour'.
>> Huge, repetitive, internecine arguments regularly erupt, whenever
>> anyone has the temerity to suggest that the two entries be merged
>> somehow since they're "obviously" just two spelling variants
>> for "the same" word.)
>>
>>
> It's not a problem.  The reasonable people understand that it needs to
> be on two separate pages.
>
Standard practice of dictionaries, though, is to collapse trivial
variants into one entry.  Even the OED, quite possibly the most thorough
English-language encyclopedia in existence, does this.  What's the point
of duplicating information?

-Mark


from_name: Theresa Knott

subject: [WikiEN-l] Request for the unblocking of PatCheng

body:
On 6/13/06, Richard Fan <richardfanx at gmail.com> wrote:
> I feel that my block by Blnguyen is extremely unfair and based on hearsays
> outside of Wikipedia. I would like to contest the block.

I am concerned about revert warring, for example you were revert
warring on Talk:The Epoch Times. Do you think revert warring on  talk
page the best way to edit cooperatively?

Theresa


from_name: Rotem Liss

body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Andrew Dunbar wrote:
> The English Wiktionary has the same accesskey, "d" for the Delete tab
> and for the Show changes button. Unlike many other accesskeys, this
> one is not set in MediaWiki:Monobook.js - is there another file I can
> edit to change the accesskey to "v" like on the English Wikipedia?
>
> (Google and Wiki searches turned up nothing)
>
> Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail)
>

The message is MediaWiki:Accesskey-diff.

- --
#define Name RotemLiss
#define Mail mailSTRUDELrotemlissDOTcom
#define Site www.rotemliss.com

#define KeyFingerPrint 4AFD 8579 A449 4267 BED9 38E5 6EF8 5B1F EBDE 7AC0
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Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFEj+orbvhbH+veesARAiXdAJ4/2LWn9H/Ay9p+t/usZgNIMF1zZwCgtngx
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from_name: Gerard Meijssen

body:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
> On 6/13/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> But before we do this, I would like to clearly distinguish between the
>> _legal_ requirements and what we _want_ to do. Anthony said:
>>
>>
>>> Just to clarify what mav said, emails are considered "written"
>>> communications.  From Publication 1771: "An organization can provide
>>> the acknowledgement electronically, such as by an e-mail addressed to
>>> the donor."
>>>
>> Is that correct? What is Brad's opinion on the legal requirements? In
>> some EU countries, we have also gradually introduced digital
>> signatures as a valid definition of "written communications". I would
>> like to be absolutely clear on what we have to do. If we can use
>> digitally signed e-mails, we should do so, even if it requires an
>> initial investment in know-how and a certificate.
>>
>>
> Publication 1771 is available at
> http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p1771.pdf if anyone wants to read it.
> And to clarify, there's no requirement for the email to be digitally
> signed.
>
> Of course, if you have the person's address, I agree the point is
> rather moot.  Even if it costs $1 to send a letter to someone donating
> $250, that's only four tenths of one percent.    Email would be more
> useful if there are donors making that size donation who don't want to
> release their address.
>
> I suppose it might cost more than $1 to send a letter outside the
> United States, but then again how many people living outside the
> United States donate more than $250 to Wikimedia and then file a US
> tax return where they itemize deductions?  Probably 0.
>
> Anthony
How,
I do not know how you arrive at that $1. It typically is substantially
more. It is not only postage, you are sending something that is printed,
there is the handling, there is a certain percentage that returns. You
do want to maintain your database and register those RTS. You then have
to consider how to follow up, do you want to find out what is wrong with
the address. On average it costs over $5 to handle a RTS. When you do
not handle this well, you get yourself on the wrong side of
organisations that monitor charities that ask for money. This can cost
you your license in the first place but worse, it can give a
organisation a bad name.

Once you decide to do professional marketing, you have to ensure that
you maintain your database. This should mean that you commit to doing it
well. The benefits can be huge and given our brand recognition it is
likely to be huge. But please do this well or do not do it all.
Thanks,
     GerardM


from_name: Michael R. Irwin

subject: [Foundation-l] aWheeler #00 - by the grace of Wikimedia

body:
Zack Clark wrote:

>In-Reply-To: <50174.82.45.205.32.1149878975.squirrel at webmail7.pair.com>
>on Fri, 9 Jun Alison Wheeler wrote:
>
>
>
>>On Fri, June 9, 2006 17:57, Anthony DiPierro wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>>The thing is, the vast majority of those tens of thousands of
>>>participants don't really care about the foundation.  They just want
>>>to work on a free encyclopedia/free news reporting service/free image
>>>repository/whatever.
>>>It'd be interesting if nothing else to see just what percentage of
>>>Wikipedians have any desire at all of being Wikimedians.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>except that the real thing is, you can't separate the two. Wikipedia (and
>>Wikibooks, Wiktionary, etc) all exist not by the grace of god, but by the
>>grace of Wikimedia (Foundation). If someone wants to play rough with a
>>Wikipedia entry they don't go after the individual editors and try and
>>trace all the IP addresses, but look to the legal body responsible for
>>that entry, WMF. As such, whether they are aware they "care about the
>>foundation" or not, we need to educate them better that they need to.
>>.............
>>
>>
>
>Alison raises a crucial point here (even if tangent to Anthony's).
>So, if WMF attracts rough play by being the legal body responsible
>for entries - what can be done to eradicate said responsibility??
>
>
As Kelly and others have pointed out get and stay legal.  The policies
under which content is released by clicking the edit button has always
made this clear from way back.

A professer at Wikiversity who does research in neurology professionally
has proposed that an early focus of Wikiversity be a class/project
assisting new Wikipedia editors with learning better editing and
technical writing skills.   This should help the neophytes making honest
mistakes vs. troublemakers if it ever gets off the ground.

Perhaps we need a bit better knowledge of Wikipedia's editors and
neophytes to help reduce this phenomen.  It is my understanding that
people with knowledge of each other sort out into cliques or teams and
tend to train and regulate each other while huge crowds of strangers are
easily turned into mobs.

>Backing up to Anthony's post.  I readily admit that there are plenty of
>Internet services which I enthusiastically & respectfully employ without
>ever really caring about their foundations.  WP is a whole other animal
>however, and it is difficult to see how anyone who's been made aware of
>the phenomenon could fail to be extremely interested in all its aspects.
>But gawd knows, this is the exact type of thing I can be so wrong about.
>Therefore, who has some good ideas on how to estimate what percentage of
>Wikipedians are interested in WMF?
>
>
Count the number of different handles or email addresses in the archive
that have posted to Wikimedia Foundation mailing lists vs project
mailing lists then divide by the number of handles the system or
wikistats report as active in a recent time period.

regards,
lazyquasar


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Another (rare) category type

body:
Came across this one:

[[Category:Football (soccer) terminology]]

The items in the category are not, as you might think, articles about
soccer terms themselves. Rather, they are all concepts related to
soccer, that have been put into this category for the (IMHO dubious)
goal of producing an automatic "glossary" of soccer terms. It would
seem to me that this category could be easily constructed by compiling
all the entries of:

Football (soccer) laws
Football (soccer) culture
...and probably lots of other categories that *should* exist.

I note that entries that are *only* in this category, and in no other
soccer-related articles, are probably missing something. For example,
[[Captain (football)]] really should be in some kind of
"Category:Football (soccer) roles" or something.

Anyway, just something to bear in mind to extend my previous
collection of category types. It could be just a type of thematic
category, but this idea of building a glossary from a category is new
to me.

Taxonomic/attributes (soccer laws)
Thematic (soccer)
Meta-attributes (stubs, 1911 etc)
+Terminology (soccer terminology)

Steve


body:
Gregory Maxwell wrote:

>You seem have odd notions about how much work, beyond babysitting
>their pet article and windbagging on lists, that a majority of our
>volunteers are willing to perform.
>_______________________________________________
>
>
Part of the problem attracting interest in what others choose to define
as "work" is this mindset of telling others to shut up and get back to
work or attempting to shut down information flow by calling others
"windbags" or implying if they will not volunteer for your personally
defined most important task they should minimize the impact on the
mailing list.

This was chanted early and often by our lead editors and founding
members.   I arrived at 39k and counting.   Now the English wikipedia
has well over a million articles and counting and a few people on this
list, which as I understand it is not the wikipedia english list, are
presenting issues around the quality of articles throughout the english
Wikipedia as a possibly generic problem with wiki data products built by
internet volunteers.  Shutting up and adding another article to the pile
will not resolve this or many other issues which the Wikimedia
Foundation is experiencing.

Feel free to ignore my posts.  It will reduce the wind for the next few
days, weeks, or months substantially.

I intend to particpate heavily in this list until it becomes time to
initialize wikiversity and I shall vamoose for a while until in my
perception it becomes advantageous to my pet project with wikiversity to
show up and absorb some more information regarding the politics,
organization, and procedures that seem to be impacting my preferred
tasks in less than optimal ways.

I know little of your background but I will share with you in case it
has escaped your attention that even when you are paying people it is
usually counter productive to "yell shut up and get back to work" unless
you are running an old style sweatshop or have very specific well
defined tasks and plenty of supervisors standing around playing gestapo.

Modern business practice in the U.S. has generally concluded the
getstapo overhead is too high to remain competitive.   Perhaps this is
true even when not paying some or most of the work force?

Have a nice day.

regards,
lazyquasar


body:
Lord Voldemort wrote:

>On 6/14/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
>
>
>>In the Tampa Bay area, say a 50 mile radius of the main office.  Or
>>say the USF campus, to make it even simpler.
>>
>>
>
>Actually, that's a great idea. Hit up some college or university
>campus, find a group of 5-10 people, tell 'em you'll give 'em a few
>bucks (20-40... depending on how many you recruit) for stuffing
>envelopes for WMF for a couple of hours.  Most college kids are
>strapped for cash and would eagerly participate.  While the speed of
>the work may not be that of a professional company, it would be
>cheaper, and perhaps even spark interest in Wikimedia projects if the
>university newspaper ran a little story about students helping out WMF
>(like we need more university student contributors 8^ ) ). I don't
>know, just throwing out some thoughts. --LV
>_______________________________________________
>
>

Better check out local labor laws.   It is my understanding that
occasionally tasks may be completed like this but if it becomes a
regular thing then it is frowned upon as avoiding minimum wage laws and
there can be substantial fines.

regards,
lazyquasar


from_name: Matt Brown

subject: [WikiEN-l] No big deal?

body:
On 6/14/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> No but historicaly most admins have had a background in vandle
> fighting. Always been tricky for non vandle fighters to get through.

This shows an extremely short-range view of 'always' I was hitherto unaware of.

-Matt


list: textbook-l

from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Textbook-l] Block against

body:
Lord Voldemort wrote:
> Where did Kernigh write this?  Zephram Stark will not be unblocked in
> the near future.  --LV

I should point out that, in general, blocks on en.wikipedia do not
extend to other projects, and the English Wikipedia ArbCom has
specifically declined to get involved in other places.

At the same time, we are still thank goodness not so hyperlegal about
cross-project matters that we can't exercise good judgment in individual
cases.  Blocking Zephram Stark from Wikibooks *before* he causes trouble
is more or less a no-brainer.

In other cases, of course, a block on en.wikipedia need not also extend
to wikibooks, depending on the judgment of the community.

--Jimbo

--
#######################################################################
#    Office: 1-727-231-0101       |  Free Culture and  Free Knowledge #
#    http://www.wikipedia.org     |     Building a free world         #
#######################################################################


list: wikipedia-l

subject: [Wikipedia-l]  moving forward on article validation

body:
Well, there already is a backbone system developed to fill some of those
needs. At [[WP:1.0/I]], a few WikiProjects rate articles on basis of
quality, which is fed to a category, and then is picked up by a bot to have
a record of which articles are assessed and when. Also, it provides a
revision which can be used to check future edits against. One example of
such a page would be
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Tropical_c
yclone_articles_by_quality/1.

Titoxd.


subject: [Textbook-l] the importance of writing to standards

body:
At the university level, professors generally have a fair amount of
discretion as to what textbooks to offer, and there do not generally
exist detailed curriculum standards.  Even here, though, if one wishes
to produce a textbook for an Introductory German course, one ought to
follow more or less the sorts of things that professors will expect to
find covered there.

But at the grammar school level, adherence to standards is of crucial
importance.  If a book does not adhere to standards, then school
teachers MAY NOT use it.  Such work will then be a wasted effort in
large part.

There can of course be reasoned exceptions to the idea of writing to
standards, but in general, it is a very good idea.  As it turns out, it
is also quite helpful to generating and sustaining some consensus about
what a book is to contain.

What should a high school chemistry book cover?  Well, we could argue
until the end of time about what would be a good idea from a
philosophical point of view, and it would not be harmful to have several
different variants.  But at the same time, if the goal is to make
something that people will find actually useful, then adherence to
various official standards for what belongs in such a book is a great idea.

California and Florida publish very detailed standards.  I am sure many
other US states do as well.  In the UK, I believe there are similar
published standards.  I would assume that more or less the same thing is
true in almost all languages.

--Jimbo

--
#######################################################################
#    Office: 1-727-231-0101       |  Free Culture and  Free Knowledge #
#    http://www.wikipedia.org     |     Building a free world         #
#######################################################################


from_name: Alphax (Wikipedia email)

subject: [Commons-l] Safe Deletion

body:
David Benbennick wrote:
> Magnus, is there any plan to deal with files that have multiple
> revisions?  Two possibilities:
>
> 1) Save all the revisions to a randomized directory name (e.g.
> http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/commons_images/ea6e6a5a74/) which is
> either listable with all the versions, or has an auto-generated
> index.html file that lists the versions
>
> or
>
> 2) At least warn about this case, since currently the old versions
> aren't backed up.
>

There's a rather hackish solution to this:

1. Use safe delete and use the auto-edit thing to save the URL.
2. If there are any old revisions left, delete the latest revision only.
3. Goto 1.

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

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from_name: Guy Chapman aka JzG

body:
The following was mailed to me directly by User:TJive when I asked
Blnguyen to post details of the block to WP:AN
----
Hi, I noticed your comment on the matter of PatCheng.  This is an
aggressive and hostile user who has been "wikistalking" me for months
to revert my contributions and post ugly, racist insults (not only to
me but others).  A short description of the matter can be found here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:TJive/Wikistalking

More detailed information is archived here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:TJive/Fenriswolf

And the matter was taken up on ANI, and has since been archived.  He
waited until it died down to start contesting his block:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/IncidentArchive107#User_proclaiming_sockpuppetry

Several administrators agreed with his block, and he has since
repeatedly been caught using more sockpuppets:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&type=block&page=User:PatChan
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&type=block&page=User:139.168.71.93

TJive

Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


from_name: Netocrat

subject: [Wikitech-l] Section numbering

body:
On Tue, 13 Jun 2006 11:41:57 +0200, Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 6/13/06, Phil Boswell
> <phil.boswell at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I forgot: one major difference would be that the numbering would appear
>> in the anchor, so if you wanted to link to a section it would have to
>> be [[example#A. Section]]

So did I.

Unchecking the "Auto-number headings" option also has no effect - the
manual numbering is displayed in non-TOC headings either way.

> IMHO, this kind of linking isn't that great anyawy. We should use proper
> anchors, as section names change so quickly (much more so than article
> names, at any rate), and there isn't (afaik) any way of finding out what
> links exist to a given section.

And it causes unmemorable and long urls that are unsuited to Usenet
articles and emails.

It's possible to use this form - here in combination with __NOTOCNUM__:
=== [[#shortid|1.1]] Heading and TOC entry ===

This gets rendered as:
1.1 Heading and TOC entry
where the TOC entry links as usual to the section heading as
#1.1_Heading_and_TOC_entry, and the section heading links the "1.1" to
itself as #shortid.

The only drawbacks that I've noticed are that when editing the section,
the /*...*/ summary includes the unparsed html, requiring manual pruning
of the ..., and that the page returned after saving an edit
to the section starts out unscrolled because the url uses a non-existent
internal anchor:
Article_title#.5B.5B.23shortid.7C1.2.5D.5D_Heading_and_TOC_entry.3F.

Otherwise this all works as expected on the MediaWiki versions that I've
tried it under.

It could be automated so that the ... is instead a
wiki-interpreted syntax, and so that "shortid" replaces the regular anchor
in the TOC.  It could also be more worthwhile to store this somewhere in
the database to keep track of links to the section, because these anchors
change less often than the long, automated anchors.

--
http://members.dodo.com.au/~netocrat


from_name: Robert Scott Horning

subject: [Textbook-l] Block against

body:
Lord Voldemort wrote:

>On 6/13/06, Michael R. Irwin <michael_irwin at verizon.net> wrote:
>
>
>>Kernigh wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>>[[en:User:Zephram Stark]] was recently blocked:
>>>
>>>* 13:18, 8 May 2006 Jimbo Wales blocked "Zephram Stark (contribs)" with an
>>>expiry time of infinite (trolling, banned user on en.wikipedia)
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>snip
>>
>>
>>
>>>It appears that the only reason for this block concerns trouble on
>>>en.wikipedia, and of such trouble I have no knowledge. (Maybe someone
>>>could describe to me what happened?)
>>>
>>>I think that this user should be unblocked immediately or the block be
>>>shortened to 1 week or less. What does everyone think?
>>>-- [[en:User:Kernigh]]
>>>  http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/User:Kernigh
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>I suppose this depends on whether one views the wikis as subprojects of
>>one big project and community hosted by Wikimedia or as separate projects.
>>
>>Personally I think the individual projects have separate communities and
>>identies, so I agree with you.   If this user has caused no problems on
>>wikibooks then this is a case of unnecessary persecution probably
>>intensifying problems in the future.
>>
>>However, there are a large number of people who have chimed in that
>>Wikiversity should be defined around the other existing projects so
>>there is absolutely no duplication.   In this view we essentially have a
>>single project.  So once a handle or puppet is banned in one place
>>perhaps the ban should be in force everywhere else.
>>
>>Regards,
>>lazyquasar
>>
>>
>
>Where did Kernigh write this?  Zephram Stark will not be unblocked in
>the near future.  --LV
>
>
I would be curious over what sort of problems this user has made on
Wikibooks.  While he has done some things that I think approach the
limits of "original research", he has not been a vandal on Wikibooks nor
has caused any other signficant problems.  Certainly being banned on
Wikipedia should not be cause to be banned on Wikibooks by itself.  This
is a disturbing development to me in this sense.  Show me damage that
this user has done on Wikibooks, including perhaps the alleged trolling,
and I might support a ban.  In addition, try to demonstrate (even though
I think it is likely) that this is even the same user on Wikibooks that
it is on Wikipedia.

--
Robert Scott Horning


from_name: John Pozniak

subject: [Textbook-l] Block against

body:
I agree. Unless this user was blocked from all
Wikimedia projects by the board, a block on one
project shouldn't mean a block on all. After all, we
have very few enforced policies, and one of them is
"Wikibooks is not Wikipedia".

John (Gentgeen)

--- Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net>
wrote:

> Why did Jimbo have to get involved on this level?
> This wasn't needed on
> Wikibooks.  Period.  Unless you can point to a
> discussion to try and
> block this user on Wikibooks because of his action
> on Wikibooks.
>
> --
> Robert Scott Horning
>
>

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com


subject: [Textbook-l] Power to dictate policy (Was: Game Guides)

body:
Kernigh wrote:

>Cormac Lawler wrote:
>
>
>>As far as I see it: the community has control over the content, and
>>the board bears the legal liability for the content. Jimbo's unique
>>part in this is that he retains the power to dictate policy where he
>>deems necessary, and when he thinks a project has veered off course
>>significantly from its goals or the goals of the foundation. I'm not
>>sure of what other times he has exercised this power, apart from the
>>recent debate about the content of Wikibooks - maybe someone else,
>>perhaps Jimbo himself, can clarify this.
>>
>>
>
>Excuse me, can you clarify?
>
>How does [[User:Jimbo Wales]] "retain the power to dictate policy"?
>Retention requires that you already have the power. When did [[User:Jimbo
>Wales]] obtain the power to dictate policy "where he deems necessary"?
>
>I understand that someone in the Wikimedia Foundation can dictate policy in
>exceptional cases where that is required, but I do not understand how the
>Wikimedia Foundation is organised.
>
>-- [[User:Kernigh]]
>   http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/User:Kernigh
>
>
>
The power that Jimbo possessed was the power of the switch on the
server.  If the community was simply getting out of hand, he could have
simply pulled the plug and stopped whatever was happening right then and
there.  It was also the "golden rule", where he who has the gold makes
the rules.  I know this sounds harsh, but is pretty much the real power
of Jimbo in the beginning.  That and the fact that he was co-founder of
Wikipedia and garnered a bunch of support, where regardless of what he
thought there would also be huge numbers of supporters to agree with
whatever actions he has made.

One of the problems with the creation of the Wikimedia Foundation is
that Jimbo's power has been tempered quite a bit.  This is good in the
sense that he is no longer the absolute god over Wikimedia projects, and
instead has to answer to not only the WMF board, but also to the state
of Florida and the IRS in terms of proper conduct for a non-profit
corporation.  Still, by being chairman of the board, and his co-founder
status means that his opinion on many matters carries a substantial
amount of weight and a good number of people still listen to him.  And
he only has to convince two other board members to agree with him to
make it fully legal as an action of the WMF.  In theory, he doesn't even
need the agreement of the elected members of the WMF board.

The problem here is that a number of users on Wikibooks now seem to feel
that a "Jimbo says..." edict is more than sufficient justification to
perform certain actions, even though it is not necessarily something the
rest of the Wikibooks community has agreed to, or even digested to see
if it is something worth while.  Any users that say "Whoa!  Wait one
minute!  I think this is happening too fast and I don't necessarily
agree!" are dismissed and belittled, and ignored.  The only thing to do
at that point is to get into a wheel war of policy decisions.  That is
not a good thing, and by itself is likely to get the WMF board to get
involved formally.  Or that people have to give up and leave.  This is
not good for Wikibooks either.

For some of the specific policy issues that are facing Wikibooks, some
of them are legitimate issues that have needed to be addressed.  Others
are from a bunch of people yelling at Jimbo to come in and resolve the
issue because they are making it an issue on his talk page or direct
e-mails to Jimbo rather than trying to gain a concensus on the Staff
Lounge or other Wikibooks forums.  Of these individuals, I have especial
contempt as a compromise is always a more reasonable solution, as should
engagement with the community.  Only if there is a genuine deadlock
should outside intervention even be considered, and I think legitimate
arbitrators could still be found to help out besides appealing directly
to the top of the WMF.

I don't mind Jimbo coming in and weighing in his opinion on these issues
either, as if he were another normal Wikibooks user.  Indeed I welcome
that, and want to encourage his input.  The problem is when he starts
changing policy pages without even a discussion, and acting as if it was
always written that way doesn't sit well with me.  And I chewed out
Jimbo personnally when he tried to delete a Wikibook when all he did was
delete the front page, and left the rest of the sub-pages in place.
 That just leaves garbage floating around Wikibooks that admins have to
deal with later.  I can understand if he feels a book is far too
offensive, but I have little doubt as well that if Jimbo simply added a
VfD to a Wikibook, it would likely disappear anyway.  Every Wikibook
that has gone to a VfD so far with disapproval by Jimbo has been
deleted.  I can't say the same thing about any other admin on Wikibooks.

--
Robert Scott Horning


from_name: Rob Church

body:
On 14/06/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> Also, is it true to say that the transclusion only takes place the
> next time the page is modified and resaved?

When an uncached form of the parsed markup is needed, or when the
cache expires next, the entire page will be re-parsed, during which
time the transclusion will be parsed as well.

An edit or purge before that time will cause invalidation of all the
cached forms for that page.

Rob Church


body:
On 6/14/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 13, 2006 at 10:26:43AM +0200, Steve Bennett wrote:
> > Can someone tell me how important this last reason is? How bad is it
> > to transclude frequently used templates? Could it be improved? Is this
> > going to go away? Permanently substing a large number of templates to
> > solve a short-term performance problem is, well, bad.
>
> That's roughly the same argument adduced to explain why WAP sucks, and
> it's just as cogent here as it is there.
>
> Never permanently "fix" performance problems by translating them out of
> existence; it will bite you when the machines catch up.

So, we're still yet to hear how bad it is to have, say, 5 transcluded
templates on each of, say, 50,000 not particularly popular pages.
Compared to substituting them all.

Also, is it true to say that the transclusion only takes place the
next time the page is modified and resaved?

Steve


from_name: SJ

subject: [Commons-l] some statistics

body:
On 6/14/06, Magnus Manske <magnus.manske at web.de> wrote:
> Brianna Laugher wrote:
> > No, you will see an "en" tab on any Image: namespace page. It's just a
> > link to the same image name at English Wikipedia, because that's the
> > page we need to check to see if the image is being used in that wiki.
> >
> Oh ... done :-)
> > I also have another idea :) which will be fantastic for
> > [[category:duplicate]] and [[category:incorrectly named]] (which is
> > still not being used much, hm).
> Done :-)
> http://127.0.0.1/toys/commons_dupes.php?category=Duplicate
>
> So far looking for templates "duplicate", "bad name", and "badname". Any
> others?
>
> >
> > Just some thoughts to keep you on your toes ;)
> >
> Keep 'em coming! ;-)

Fantastic.

A link to editing the description would also be useful -- that way if
you check an image that looks suspicious, but turns out to be fine (or
if it turns out to be used on en:wp), you can leave a comment to that
effect with one fewer page+image load.

SJ


from_name: Tels

body:
Moin,

On Wednesday 14 June 2006 18:07, Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 6/14/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> > On Tue, Jun 13, 2006 at 10:26:43AM +0200, Steve Bennett wrote:
> > > Can someone tell me how important this last reason is? How bad is
> > > it to transclude frequently used templates? Could it be improved?
> > > Is this going to go away? Permanently substing a large number of
> > > templates to solve a short-term performance problem is, well, bad.
> >
> > That's roughly the same argument adduced to explain why WAP sucks,
> > and it's just as cogent here as it is there.
> >
> > Never permanently "fix" performance problems by translating them out
> > of existence; it will bite you when the machines catch up.
>
> So, we're still yet to hear how bad it is to have, say, 5 transcluded
> templates on each of, say, 50,000 not particularly popular pages.
> Compared to substituting them all.
>
> Also, is it true to say that the transclusion only takes place the
> next time the page is modified and resaved?

Yes. The nice things about templates is that you can do tricks like
editing this page:

	http://bloodgate.com/wiki/index.php?title=Template:Slides

And all the presentation slides will be updated automatically.

So, I probably missed half of the argumentation, but why is the
performance problem more important than the saved human work?

best wishes,

tels

--
 Signed on Wed Jun 14 18:18:36 2006 with key 0x93B84C15.
 Visit my photo gallery at http://bloodgate.com/photos/
 PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email.

 "If you want to travel around the world and be invited to speak at a lot
 of different places, just write a Unix operating system." -- Linus
 Torvalds

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from_name: maru dubshinki

subject: [WikiEN-l] No big deal?

body:
On 6/14/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
> Just when you think you've seen it all...
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_adminship/Herostratus
>
> One editor opposes adminship on the grounds that Herostratus has some
> nicely executed fake "categories" on his user page:
>
> Categories: Wikipedians who have a crowbar embedded in their skull |
> Wikipedians who insist that the word "lobster" be included in every
> article | Carbon-based life forms | Wikipedians who are Floyd Alvis
> Cooper | Delightfully insouciant Wikipedians | Animated cartoon
> squirrels
>
>
> Others think that his use of non-standard warnings means he doesn't
> take vandalism seriously enough (does every admin have to be at the
> forefront of the fight against vandalism?)
>
> I can understand people choosing not to vote for admins they don't
> admire, but opposing on these weird grounds is... well, weird.
>
> Guy (JzG)

Those fake cats are awesome!
/me scurries off to add'em to userpage. They won't work under blue
cologne, but unfortunately not that many people use it, anyway.

~maru


from_name: Cormac Lawler

body:
On 6/13/06, Michael R. Irwin <michael_irwin at verizon.net> wrote:

> Regarding Wikiversity .... there are still some of us advocating that
> Wikiversity be a standalone project for developing and delivering
> educational materials of all kinds.  When a textbook is ready for
> Wikibooks or a multimedia animation is ready for wikicommons then the
> participants at Wikiversity can be trusted to migrate the materials if
> it is appropriate.

Absolutely. I hope Wikiversity will be able to complement other
Wikimedia projects, and that participants of both/all projects work
out ways of sharing (possibly even slightly overlapping content)
between projects. But I'm not sure what you mean exactly here - I
personally think Wikiversity shouldn't be developing an encyclopedia,
a collection of textbooks, a media repository etc _on Wikiversity
itself_ - does that mean that, in your eyes, I'm arguing for a
Wikiversity which *won't* be a "standalone project for developing and
delivering educational materials of all kinds"?

>
> It should not be dictated by outsiders to Wikiversity participants what
> materials they can control in their own project space for maximun
> educational efficiency.

I certainly wouldn't want that to happen. That's why I'm trying to
develop as broad a scope for the project as possible, while still
giving it a clear focus and rationale (ie. to combat the argument:
"keep Wikiversity at Wikibooks").

>
> The typical argument concerns duplication of data on hard drives and
> duplication of effort.   Regarding the first I hope we can ignore it
> given Moore's law, the current price of hard drives and the liklihood
> that Wikiversity will be approved in two or three decades.   Regarding
> the second, writing, studying and wikis are all about duplicated efforts
> and integration/separation of the same.

I don't know to what extent of shared content you're arguing for here
- I agree that it'll probably be a bit messy, but I still think that
we should be encouraging people to build materials where they're most
likely to survive. In my mind, at least, Wikiversity will be a hub for
learning, which could then be consolidated by creating content for
other projects.

>
> It will be a serious damper on Wikiversity's community to routinely have
> groups showing up insisting local materials be relocated and deleted
> locally only to find out that the other projects have inappropriately
> modified the material or otherwise damaged their easy utility by
> newcomers to Wikiversity.

Not sure I understand this. If other projects, say, Wikibooks, made
the material into a textbook from what was a collection of learning
sheets, well, the learning sheets would surely be always kept at
Wikiversity. If material was modified into a more advanced level, then
the more basic version would be always retrievable from the history
and forked into a new book. It's a wiki, right? Or have I completely
misunderstood your point?

>
> Personally I think that the anticipated Wikiversity participants can be
> trusted to work with other projects to locate mature materials
> effectively.    There should be no inflexible mandate built into the
> project ground rules.   To establish an effective pleasant learning
> environment (the only kind that will prosper) the participants need
> maximum freedom with minimal effective core guidelines.
>
> regards,
> lazyquasar
>
>

I think "minimal" is right - but I'm also continually aware that we
need to provide the rationale to get Wikiversity going (btw, what do
you think of the current proposal?). We also need (at some stage) to
develop policies that will keep Wikiversity as stable as possible,
avoiding the kind of fuss that the Wikibooks debate on 'gaming guides'
(etc) has made. Still, Wikibooks has always had policies on its
content (though, as this case shows, they needed to be be given
further detail), and Wikiversity will have to do likewise - otherwise,
there will continue to be uncertainty, and potentially end up with an
intervention from Jimbo - which is far from ideal.

Regards,
Cormac


body:
On 6/14/06, Tels <nospam-abuse at bloodgate.com> wrote:
> So, I probably missed half of the argumentation, but why is the
> performance problem more important than the saved human work?

I'm not sure which human work you're talking about. The argument is
that for templates which change rarely (or never), the performance hit
is more important than other, mostly intangible, benefits.

Steve


subject: [Wikipedia-l] moving forward on article validation

body:
Delirium wrote:
<snip>
> Proposal #2: Institute a rating and trust-metric system
> ---
> Wikipedians rate revisions, perhaps on some scale from "complete crap"
> to "I'm an expert in this field and am confident of its accuracy and
> high quality".  Then there is some way of coming up with a score for
> that revision, perhaps based on the trustworthiness of the raters
> themselves (determined through some method).  Once that's done, the
> interface can do things like display the last version of an article over
> some score, if any, or a big warning that the article sucks otherwise
> (and so on).
>
> Some pros: Distributed; no duplicated effort; good revisions are marked
> good as soon as enough people have vetted them; humans review the
> articles, but the "process" itself is done automatically; most articles
> will have some information about their quality to present to a reader
>
> Some cons: Gameing-proof trust metric systems are notoriously hard to
> design.
<snip>

Ever taken a look at <http://advogato.org/trust-metric.html>?

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

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from_name: Brianna Laugher

subject: [Commons-l] some statistics

body:
On 14/06/06, Magnus Manske <magnus.manske at web.de> wrote:
> Brianna Laugher schrieb:
> > BTW to Magnus: having a link directly to the en.wp page would be
> > really handy (we have it as one of our 'extra tabs' now).
> >
> Sorry, what en page? On commons [[category:Unknown]], I see "tree" and
> "catscan" tabs. You mean one of these?

No, you will see an "en" tab on any Image: namespace page. It's just a
link to the same image name at English Wikipedia, because that's the
page we need to check to see if the image is being used in that wiki.

I also have another idea :) which will be fantastic for
[[category:duplicate]] and [[category:incorrectly named]] (which is
still not being used much, hm). images in these categories should have
templates like this:

{{duplicate|Image:Otherimage.jpg}}
{{bad name|Image:Bettername.jpg}} (or {{badname|...}}, there's a RDR)

So it would be awesome if we had something similar to bad_old_ones
where it pulled up the duplicate and put them side by side (so you can
confirm that they are the same image), and also gave you usage stats
on the old one. That would make deleting them super easy and super
safe.

I guess this is much more prone to user mistakes, but I had a quick
look and all the ones I looked at had been done correctly.

The other thing is it would be good to have res stats (300x400) below
each one so you could make sure they weren't nominating a thumbnail
for deletion. And also a warning if the file types are different,
since this template shouldn't really be used (sometimes it's ok, but
if it's PNG > SVG usually they should use {{superseded}} which is not
a deletion tag).

Just some thoughts to keep you on your toes ;)

Brianna


subject: [Textbook-l] Block against

body:
Lord Voldemort wrote:

>On 6/14/06, Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:
>
>
>>In addition, try to demonstrate (even though
>>I think it is likely) that this is even the same user on Wikibooks that
>>it is on Wikipedia.
>>
>>
>
>Are you now just playing coy?  --LV
>
>
Why did Jimbo have to get involved on this level?  This wasn't needed on
Wikibooks.  Period.  Unless you can point to a discussion to try and
block this user on Wikibooks because of his action on Wikibooks.

--
Robert Scott Horning


body:
Cormac Lawler wrote:

>On 6/13/06, Michael R. Irwin <michael_irwin at verizon.net> wrote:
>
>
>
>
snip

>
>
>
>>It will be a serious damper on Wikiversity's community to routinely have
>>groups showing up insisting local materials be relocated and deleted
>>locally only to find out that the other projects have inappropriately
>>modified the material or otherwise damaged their easy utility by
>>newcomers to Wikiversity.
>>
>>
>
>Not sure I understand this. If other projects, say, Wikibooks, made
>the material into a textbook from what was a collection of learning
>sheets, well, the learning sheets would surely be always kept at
>Wikiversity. If material was modified into a more advanced level, then
>the more basic version would be always retrievable from the history
>and forked into a new book. It's a wiki, right? Or have I completely
>misunderstood your point?
>
>

Yes you have completely misunderstood my point.   All of the other wikis
are attempting to converge on high quality reference works.   They are
all evolving organizational structures which create control points on
access to the current and past versions of materials.   Ultimately to
meet their mission they must control what they serve to the public
routinely.   This will inevitably complicate their sites and
organizational structures.   Our wikiversity participants cannot
reasonably be expected or required to learn an ever expanding
constellation of virtual social spaces to access their learning
materials in learning groups that will inevitably be more cross
disciplinary than a standard physical learning environment.

All of them wish to capture markets and materials and levy outside
influence or control upon the wikiversity learning environment and
attract local users.  There is a wide range of "buyin" activities which
can be levied and undoubtedly all of them will be tried at some point or
another.

Personally I do not think wikiversity will thrive if it puts up with
this nonsense.   Self motivated learners will not put up with this
unless there is an overwhelming benefit available.

Initially there will be no overwhelming benefit because we will be
learning what works.   We will be lucky to provide sufficient benefit
such that a few of the people who check us out can afford or wish to
stick around and help us develop initial materials and environments.

The most likely result initially of material relocated to other wikis
will be votes for deletion by other participants who do not like alien
material coming in or feel it is not ready yet.   Our newcomers arriving
there will make neophyte mistakes and be likely to get slammed by poorly
socialized adminstrater or uses that have not been integrated adequately
into the local project.   Wikiversity has no control of the quality of
interaction on other sites yet our participants are required to
experience this if we cannot have a local copy of a book or a article or
a definition or an index list or a whatever.

Meanwhile wou   nevermind.

Saying it is a wiki does change the way people interact in groups and
with their environment.  If people encounter too many obstacles or too
much frustration from the initial environment they will leave and tell
all their aquaintenances Wikiversity is a waste of time.   It is
extremely frustrating to have to go to a hostile foreign environment
looking for materials you were told were located in a friendly local
environment and then have to deal with the local know it alls who
control the disposition and access to the materials.

In a few years when wikiversity can deliver high value for time expended
our participants might put up with some of this.   Initially it will be
a large drain on retention of interest or belief in Wikiversities'
viability.

In the virtual environment all other knowledge is only a click away and
all other students can shift to and from the focus they are interested
in.  For example:  This mean a group studying automobile modification
for racing is likely at times to spread out and find all the factors
involved say in designing a breakaway racing frame for the survivability
of the driver:

If this band of neophytes finds that the previous classes materials have
all be declared high quality and broken up and moved to eight different
sites, four of which delivers the material with a smile, two of which
require registration for download, one which flashes a request for
donation and requires only for the next few days filling out a
questionaire, and the fourth does not have the data up yet because it
requires installation or upgrade of utilities such as for pdf or a
proprietry graphics format but the data has not been shifted back by the
poaching volunteer .....  multiply that by thousands of courses in
varying states of development!   Consider Wikipedia's retention rate of
first time editor's measured by subsequent edits.   I think it is in low
single digits last time I checked.  That is a single fairly carefree
environment with the provision that initial edits are more likely to be
reverted than those by veterans.

What is a Wikiversity newcomer likely to do when faced with a problem in
one of four or five sites where class materials have been archived?   I
suspect a very high percentage will leave and likely not come back soon.

We need to plan for success and minimize local difficulties.   It is
fundamental in complex systems that clean well known interfaces which
compartmentalize or encapsulate problems or critical action or products
or services are required to get and keep them working well.

This insistence that Wikiversity be treated as a junior subordinate
"partner" from which by policy any other wiki project participant can
drop in and shout "good enough finally!" and demand relocation of the
materials is designing in a huge group of unneccessary problems that
will drain scarce resources from actual challenges that must be met and
overcome for success.

>
>
>>Personally I think that the anticipated Wikiversity participants can be
>>trusted to work with other projects to locate mature materials
>>effectively.    There should be no inflexible mandate built into the
>>project ground rules.   To establish an effective pleasant learning
>>environment (the only kind that will prosper) the participants need
>>maximum freedom with minimal effective core guidelines.
>>
>>regards,
>>lazyquasar
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>I think "minimal" is right - but I'm also continually aware that we
>need to provide the rationale to get Wikiversity going (btw, what do
>you think of the current proposal?). We also need (at some stage) to
>develop policies that will keep Wikiversity as stable as possible,
>avoiding the kind of fuss that the Wikibooks debate on 'gaming guides'
>(etc) has made. Still, Wikibooks has always had policies on its
>content (though, as this case shows, they needed to be be given
>further detail), and Wikiversity will have to do likewise - otherwise,
>there will continue to be uncertainty, and potentially end up with an
>intervention from Jimbo - which is far from ideal.
>
>
Intervention from Jimbo is the least of our problems or concerns.    Why
do you think he is slow rolling it?   He has "god-king" control of a
reasonable sane project once and only once at the moment at that is
until he says go a head.   The nonsense with the nazi books and the game
programming guides is nothing but poor judgement or floating a balloon
to see how much personal authority and appeal he still has or possibly
served some other purpose.  He is a fast learner will find different
mistakes to make in the future.

You really think Jimbo is going to be dumb enough to show up and shout
no original research!!!! if a P'hd is showing a few interested students
how neurons works by comparing his current results with published
results elsewhere?   When it starts to resemble an active lab journal in
progress with 30 active neophytes running around doing something useful
while watching an actual groundbreaking paper be polished prior to
formal submittal to peer reviewed journal what do you think a healthy
reaction from the wikiversity at large will be when somebody from
another project shouts "no original reseach!!!" then deletes all copies
using his stewardship account derived from Wikipedia?

Consider computer software.   Are we to tell students they cannot
publish code snippets locally under the FDL or GPL to look over because
it is orginal material and can be potentially patented?

There are thousands of such issues that will be faced by a general
public learning facility and solutions will have to be generated locally
based upon what appears useful to the current participants.

As I have stated before wikiversity should not be a place to tell others
what they cannot do to establish learning capabilities.   The local
participants can be trust to shout no no! at any fringe or questionable
groups show up with shady or dubious purposes.

You asked what I thought.   I already told you six weeks ago I thought
the proposal was as ready as it could for submittal.

I saw a few minor changes I disagree with.  You are familar with my
opinion of hardcoding cozying up to the other projects methods at the
onset to ease the political problem of approval.   It is buying a whole
lot of hassle in the future and it is unnecessary.

The foundation mailing list is continuing to yack yack about their
quality control problems and possible approaches to improvement.   It
will not escape the savvy there that education must be a component of an
overall approach to improvement and maintenance as in the long term it
is the only approach that help get thing correct in the first place.

Has the committee had a vote yet on when to submit the URL to the
revised proposal?

Is there a firm date upon which the committee will have an initial vote
upon whether they should schedule a vote on whether to submit?

Is there an active agenda or tasklist which details what the committee's
group savvy has determined must be completed before a decision can be
made on scheduling a series of votes upon when to review the current
task and discrepancy lists and suspenses?

Let me pose you a different perspective.   What happens when a newly
arriving group forks a wikibook so they part it out in pieces for
individuals who will not initially understand the material to review and
begin researching so they can prepare lists of questions, charts,
animated illustrations, topical papers, lists of online links to more in
depth materials, list of online links to primer materials, google search
for solution or discussion of the examples or homework problems
provides, check the math of the examples, prepare a phonic vocabulary
list and glossary of key terms,  do a high school class term paper on a
key concept or subject, and fifteen other bizarre activities a couple of
them have aggreed might be useful to experiment with for pedagogical
purposes ...... and the whole group starts at chapter one a few weeks
later, spends a couple of weeks studying chapter one with each other and
editing the forked wikibook ..... this goes on for eight months and
another smaller group is emulating this practice starting at the beginning.

After two years enough is enough.   The original three authors at
wikibooks become aware of this and when the "current participants of the
learning trail" refuse to drop everything and merge not replace back
into the original wikibook and delete the "forked" book from wikiversity
because of the wasted 50cents worth of hard drive and "duplication of
effort" the students fire back a few catcalls and return to their
studies.   One of the original authors decides this is in violation of
wikilove as codified in the wikiversity charter and takes the issue the
newly formed Wikimedia Wide Arbcom.   The arbcom agrees with the author
but the students continue studying and ignoring these extraneous
irritants.   The highly respected (within some wiki cliqui or community)
demands action!!!

How does your committee of proposal designers propose to address the
above or similar issues you are inviting by going along with the idiotic
contention that there can be only one copy for multiple purposes within
the Wikimedia panarama of online volunteer activities?

Should wikiversity establish adequate funding, infrastructure, and value
to the online world at large how would you propose to deal with
something similar twenty times a year?

When the students get tired of top down and sidewise bureacracy and
stage a publicity drive to encourage the donating public to stop and
request a hearing from all large grant organization to pitch their case
for a fifth fork to try to get it right ...... who should we have make
the counter presentations?   The Wikimedia Foundation Board?   The
Wikiversity Board of Regents?  Ten volunteers from the honorary elected
"Department Heads"?

We want a self organizing and regenerating community, not a series of
hassles with external groups or forces with their own interests at
stake.   A library or encyclopedia is a very different animal from a
wikiversity (all online pedagogical methods and students welcome).

I have said it before:  If the Wikimedia Foundation does not want the
hassle or expense of providing useful reliable robust friendly
infrastructure for a viable Wikiversity then we should organize a non
profit and establish our own infrastructure.   It would be better to
start within the existing wiki community ..... access to wiki
knowledgeable participants, instant infrastructure, etc but if external
forces insist on regulatory access to Wikiversity participants efforts
then I think we are wasting our time.   People get enough of that hassle
in physical environments.  They are not going to seek out Wikiversity
and help it thrive if the nonsense thresholds get to high.

Try it another way.  What is the big deal from wikibooks being hosted at
Wikiversity that doe no meet Wikibooks criteria somehow or forked
wikibooks being modified and used locally?   The entire rest of the
planet is authorized to fork a book from wikibooks and modify as long as
they insert a pointer back to the origin at Wikibooks.   Are they afraid
that the various professors around the web who have started posting
FDL'ed textbook on university or other web space might relocate in mass
to Wikiversity instead of Wikibooks?  If so then they obviously have
problems that need to be fixed.    If I was a prof or class with a draft
book ready to go faced with this situation I would be tempted to first
place the draft book at Wikiversity and encourage as much use and
feedback as possible and then place the more mature product at Wikibooks
under their obviously soon to arrive configuration management system.
Get the best of both worlds.   A stable mature product web accessible to
passive readers and an actively reviewed and improve draft which can be
periodically proofed and a next edition placed in the premier spot at
wikibooks.  So why the concern from an online library that an online
university will establish its own library rather than deal with them?
Suppose we call them Wikiversity's library  ..... why do they insist no
other copies of books can exist on campus?   Do they want our
participants highlighting or editing their proof copies that are
presented to the world?   Wikipedia has that and they are finding they
have a severe configuration management problem which must be addressed
somehow if they are to move from the existing quality plateau to the next.

Take another case:
Term papers or research papers.
Eventually a popular subject has groups of aproximately 5 moving through
the learning trail approximately every  3 months with some overlap.
Each participant is given the opportunity to write a paper and  two or
three of each five do.   About half are high quality while the other
half are valiant efforts.    After  three or four years Wikiversity has
a file on this subject of 5X3X4/2 of thirty papers .... fifteen high
quality to mediocre and fifteen mediocre ranging downward to poor.

Perhaps this is a growing trend and files are being established in
multiple increaing subjects as high schoolers and masters degree
researchers arrive for occasional use of Wikiversity assets.

It comes to Wikipedia's attention that this material is not being merged
back into Wikipedia and the Wikiversity participants have increasingly
started consulting the files.   Wikipedia is losing some correctional
proofing from these high quality candidate users and worse losing a big
part of their neophyte recruitment pool or "new blood"  that helps the
project maintain its high quality and funding donations.   Someone
insists that "Wikiversity is not an Encyclopedia" and that these poor
(in comparision to Wikipedia article on same subject) topical papers
should be deleted so vulnerable students are not exposed to poor
material but move on or back to Wikipedia's high grade single page
integration and explanation of the entire topic.

Sure enough ... right there in the approved project proposal or charter
is the promise to the Wikimedia Foundation that: "Wikiversity is not an
Encyclopedia".   Two members of the Wikimedia Foundation Board insist
that all term papers must be deleted or restricted somehow from the
public,  only merging Wikipedia editors should have access to a topical
paper published at Wikiversity as of two years after its final
publishing date.    Seven others of the expanded board roll their eyes
and cannot be reached for comment.   The Wikiversity Board of Regents
has been stacked by experienced Wikipedians or Wikimedians who think
Wikiversity as the junior partner project must appease cash cow senior
Wikipeda.

So .... who or where should this kind of mess be arbitrated?   This kind
of crap is exactly what we are inviting with the committe's current
proposal which is getting lengthier with each edit.

So ... turn it in if it cannot be minimalized to retain maximal future
freedom of action and lets get started.

What the hell are we waiting for?  Nobody except the committee has
tweeked the online presentation or documentation for months.    Let's
try something, in permaent project wiki space so we can attract
participants and start growing communities and intellectual property
assets and find out what works.

Stability.
We are so far from stability being an issue it is laughable.   We will
be lucky to find techniques that work well to establsh stable zones
.....  local group working guidelines that have stabilized well enough
to publish and adopt as inital standard procedures.    A wikiversity is
a complex place compared to an encyclopedia or a book shelf.

How are we going to enforce local mandates that safety materials must be
absorbed and some sort of screening passed to get the chemistry lab
section or the GPL'ed DNC data or the design software for alcohol/lox
rockets?    Are we?  Is it appropriate?  Is it responsible enough not
to?  Are we restricted to just pointing at the above types of
information to other web sites with appropriate local controls or if
such cannot be found or established at least shifting the legal liability?

If we refuse to implement any kind of reasonable local controls do we
lose access to the knowledgeable professionals in that field who think
wildcatting is too dangerous when dealing with .... cell biology,
nuclear physics, earth moving equipment, food preparation, bathroom
cleaning, etc.?

We can publish the best and file the rest for future reference or even
toss or transfer it as local consensus advises or dictates if we ever
attract particpants.   Without participants we are wasting our time
trying to write policy.

A project proposal is sufficient information to get started.   Not a
detailed pre design before any knowledge particpants or detailed
designers show up.    That is true in "stable" field of endeaver such as
engineering sewage facilities.

If the Board is requiring detailed policy from your committee before we
can get started finding out what works it is a sign of their
incompetence or hostility to the project and we may as well get a firm
no and move on.

If they want budgeting estimates or contingency plans that is a
different issue.

If they give us detailed feedback instead this "no online class" crap
then we can generate what is needed to explain how we intend to proceed
or get started.   "No online classes" is an unenforceable requirement
that will be ignored by most of our participants.   Groups interacting
always find it useful to have a scope, schedule, known task lists, etc.
etc.  What can you call that but a class?   When a random group finds a
mentor and asks him to take the lead what is that but an instructor?
BTW Budget estimates and contingency plans are seldom put into mission
statements.   It is rarely a good idea and it always pisses of a project
team to be handed a failure mode from above or the customer.   The
results are seldom pretty.

If they throw standard project management shit back you informally ....
scope, budget, schedule .... Remind them Wikiversity is an experimental
project and orginal research.   We are not proposing to build
toasters.   We have a lot of flexibility in we proceed if they are
legitimately concerned about our resource consumption impacting other
projects.   Legitimate means they have detailed information to provide
we which can analyze to produce solutions.

Consider the kneejerk "No original research".  That was put into effect
because it was appropriate for an encyclopedia and a dictionary or
thesaurus.   For them it is brilliant policy ... it makes it easy to
deal with the fringe and POV people who show up claiming divine
inspiration or alien toasters inscribed on invisible pyramids.   It
makes zero sense for a broad center of learning or a simple repository
of orginal materials for the educational field.  People learning things
have plans to use the knowledge and they are often creative people.
This means original results are inevitable and there must be a way to
manage it through our organization or it will create large problems.

What the the hell.   Bring it on.  We can always dig in or fork as
appropriate.

See if all the above crap and the "proposal" debates were on our own
wiki at stable URLs we could be marking it up and revising and revoting
every someone showed up to make them feel important and recruiting.

We might have a viable experiment evolving into something that could
show us what will work for a Wikiversity.   Instead we have a committee
and designated troll and possibly a few editors wandering around the
barren link maze at Wikibooks.

If the powers that be send back some comments when you  submit or
present our proposal point out to them the efficiencies of working in
our own wiki with stable URLs so there is not a bunch of rework
migrating the materials and we are no longer cluttering meta and
wikibooks.   Point out that in the event the project is determined non
viable locally this clean approach will make it possible to easily back
up the data for possible future sale to the forks or simply a clean delete.

Simple pay me now or later proposition.   Admin wiki setup time now,
clean backup and delete later or a screwed mess at Wikibooks and Meta
with an arduous cleanup later.   When they respond we already have the
screwed up mess point out the transfers and cleanup could be made by
project proponents while they continue to stall.   Our advantage is we
have chance to attract our early participants back to assist with the
fork.    You would be amazed at much more synergy, expertise, contacts,
etc. a group of tens people can generate over single digits.

regards,
lazyquasar


subject: [Foundation-l] moving forward on article validation

body:
Note that the "Wikipedia 0.5" WikiProject on en:wp is tackling this
issue with some energy, and could use more input and nominations:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Version_0.5_Nominations

On 6/13/06, Michael Snow <wikipedia at earthlink.net> wrote:
> Delirium wrote:
>
> > We've discussed on and off that it'd be nice to vet specific revisions
> > of Wikipedia articles so readers can either choose to read only
> > quality articles, or at least have an indication of how good an
> > article is.  This is an obvious prerequisite for a Wikipedia 1.0 print
> > edition, and would be nice on the website as well.
> >
> > There is a lengthy list of proposals here:
> > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Article_validation_proposals
> >
> > I wanted to try to rekindle the process by summarizing some of the
> > proposals, which I think can be grouped into three main types, and
> > then suggest some ideas on where to go from there.
>
> Thank you for taking the time to address this.

Ditto.

> > Proposal #1: Fork or freeze, then bring up to our quality standards.
<
> > Some cons: Either disrupts normal editing through a freeze, or results
> > in duplicated effort with a fork.  Also is likely to result in a
> > fairly slow process, so the reviewed version of each article may be
> > replaced with an updated version quite infrequently; most articles
> > will have no reviewed version, so doesn't do much for increasing the
> > typical quality of presentation on the website.

Duplication of effort is bad.  Branching, rather than forking, for a
very limited time duration, makes sense for various end uses.  For
instance, a single good revision of an article might support a dozen
branches each of which pared it down to a different length.  We will
need a better notion of 'article revision history' that supports
branching, or non-linear revisions, to properly allow for this.  I
believe there is some theoretical work being done on distributed
version control for text...

Michael Snow writes:
> This option would work well, I think, for two possible uses. One is for
> offline distribution, since there's less point in creating a fork that
> will just be another online variation on the same theme.

It will be helpful to distinguish between branching (which ends after
a point and either remerges with the main trunk or is at least never
modified again) and forking (starting a separate revision history with
different end goals, to continue indefinitely).

Each offline copy gets modified slightly for format reasons, anyway.
The question is whether to provide for such branching within a central
wikipedia database.

< The second possibility I think we would benefit from is the "freeze" option of
> presenting stable, reviewed versions by default to users who do not log in.

This seems a poor and less-scalable way to present stable versions to
users; see other methods below.

Delirium:
> > Proposal #2: Institute a rating and trust-metric system
> > ---
> > Wikipedians rate revisions, perhaps on some scale from "complete crap"
> > to "I'm an expert in this field and am confident of its accuracy and

Naive, single-scale ratings have many problems that I don't see being
overcome.  (The advogato suggestions are no panacaea.)  Allowing
groups of editors (self-selecting, auto-selected by user properties)
to provide revision metadata that others can choose to see or not see
as they please would be more scalable and less gameable.  Some of
these groups could provide metadata of the form 'decent and not
vandalized content'.

> > Proposal #3: Extend a feature-article-like process

I'm not sure what you meant by your example -- for instance by 'work
on revisions rather than articles', as the goal is still a better
article (you can't change a historical revision) -- but this is
effectively what the en:wp validation effort is attempting.  This
scales in that it can be split up among topic-centered WikiProjects.
See for instance this list:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/WikiProject_full_article_list

Avoiding hard-coded metrics for quality, and encouraging editors
active within a topic to work together to reach quality decisions,
seems in line with how editing has evolved.  This is like peer review
and FAC review that already takes place, but can be applied to a wider
spectrum of quality.

--SJ


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] [Foundation-l] moving forward on article
	validation


from_name: Lord Voldemort

subject: [Textbook-l] Block against

body:
On 6/14/06, Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:
> In addition, try to demonstrate (even though
> I think it is likely) that this is even the same user on Wikibooks that
> it is on Wikipedia.

Are you now just playing coy?  --LV