subject: [Wikipedia-l] !$*@ offline site slurpers

body:
Some jerk at 194.209.152.200 decided it would be a great idea to
download the entire contents of the Wikipedia site as fast as he
possibly could, several pages at a time.

Please don't do that, folks -- it slows the site for everyone to the
point where it's barely usable.

I have banned the user-agent 'Teleport' and the specific IP from the
site (temporarily, at least) to spare our poor l'il server. (Load
average went down from 22 to 5.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [WikiEN-l] Please revoke Isis' sysop status

body:
Given Isis'/Kay's continued legal threats against a valued member of the
Wikipedia community (Tarquin) for a misunderstanding (largely on her part), I
must insist that her sysop status be revoked. I cannot trust her to be fair in
the use of the sysop privileges any longer.

Jimbo, please take action in this matter ASAP.

Regards,

Erik

--
+++ GMX - Mail, Messaging & more  http://www.gmx.net +++
NEU: Mit GMX ins Internet. Rund um die Uhr f?r 1 ct/ Min. surfen!


from_name: Sheldon Rampton

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Challenge to Sheldon Rampton re: global warming

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Everyone take a deep breath.  It was pretty out of character for Ed to
>post a sharp remark like that, and I think he'll quickly make things
>right with Sheldon.

He hasn't done anything yet to make it right. The guy clearly has an
axe to grind about me. He's gone out of his way on more than one
occasion to insult me, without any provocation on my part. On this
occasion, he called me a liar on completely spurious grounds. I don't
think I should be expected to tolerate that without responding.

I wrote:

>  > It's clearly POV and a violation of Wikipedia policy to inject
>>  first-person commentary based on church gossip into the actual text
>  > of articles.

And Jimbo responded:

>Maybe, unless this gossip is documented somewhere as having actually
>happened.  I mean, asserting the content of the gossip as fact isn't
>good, but reporting on the gossip is fine, if it was important and
>widespread.

Take a look at it yourself. Here's the verbatim passage from Ed's
article on "Sun Myung Moon/tax case":

>The government offered to drop all the charges if Rev. Moon would
>give up his green card (permanent resident visa) and agree never to
>visit the US again. Rev. Moon preferred to go to trial, professing
>his belief in the fairness of American justice but saying that he
>would not have been prosecuted if "his skin had been white or his
>religion Episcopalian."
>
>Reference, please, for the government's offer and the quote (Sorry,
>I could not find documentation; it's a story circulated among us UC
>members -- Ed Poor .)

It's clear from this that Ed could *not* find any documentation to
support the assertions he made in the first paragraph. And since when
is it proper form for Wikipedians to insert themselves directly into
articles with first-person, signed asides? I thought that sort of
thing belonged on the Talk page.

If I were editing the above passage, I would write something along
the following lines:

>According to a version of events popular with members of Moon's
>church, the government offered to drop the charges against him if he
>would give up his permanent resident visa and leave the United
>States permanently. Rev. Moon preferred to go to trial but said that
>he would not have been prosecuted if his skin had been white or his
>religion Episcopalian.

I'm not going to make these edits, because I'm not interested in
working on articles about Rev. Moon or the Unification Church. The
point I'm making is simply that I find it hypocritical for Ed to
accuse *me* of dishonesty and bias over an article on global warming
that I had barely touched, when Ed himself has made no effort to
apply NPOV in his articles about his own church.

Jimbo also wrote:

>But I think this is a misreading.  I think that his idea is a very
>good one.  All of us, if we are writing in an area where we know we
>have some strong feelings, should try *hard* to formulate the
>arguments of the opponents as best we can.

I don't think I've misread Ed's intent. I think he went out of his
way to needle me and call me a liar. Ed stated that I was
"disingenuous" because I haven't written *his* beliefs into an
article on global warming -- an article that I didn't create and to
which I had only contributed a single minor edit. I agree with the
general principle that we should try to respect the arguments of
people whose viewpoints differ from our own. However, Ed's comments
about me did not arise from a discussion about those general
principles. They were gratuitous comments that had nothing to do with
anything I've contributed to Wikipedia or posted to this listserv. He
didn't make those comments in the spirit of educating us all about an
important general principle. He made them in the spirit of looking
for an excuse to attack me and call me a liar, based on any pretext
he could find, no matter how flimsy.

>There are at least two views of how wikipedia articles should be
>written -- the competitive view and the co-operative view.  Ed
>is merely (and correctly, I think) advocating for the co-operative
>view.

Actions speak louder than words. How is it "co-operative" for Ed to
look for pretexts with which to publicly impugn my character?
--
--------------------------------
|  Sheldon Rampton
|  Editor, PR Watch (www.prwatch.org)
|  Author of books including:
|     Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities
|     Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
|     Mad Cow USA
|     Trust Us, We're Experts
--------------------------------


from_name: Lee Pilich

body:
At 12:37 03/02/2003 +0100, Erik wrote:
>Given Isis'/Kay's continued legal threats against a valued member of the
>Wikipedia community (Tarquin) for a misunderstanding (largely on her part), I
>must insist that her sysop status be revoked. I cannot trust her to be fair in
>the use of the sysop privileges any longer.

Normally I'm all for handing out adminships quite liberally, but I do not
feel that Isis' actions (threatening tarquin with a court case simply
because he civilly disagreed with her interpretation of copyright law) is
the action of somebody with the best interests of the Wikipedia at heart.
As such, I too would like to see Isis' sysop rights revoked.

I also wouldn't mind if she was banned outright, but I think I'm just
saying that because I'm so bloody angry about all this.

The gory details incidentally, for those fortunate enough to have missed
them, can be found at http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Juliette_Binoche ,
with additional whining at http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales

lp (camembert)
WikiKarma: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridget_Riley


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Zoe

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Limited client-side caching

body:
Um, well, now Wikipedia is completely unaccessible.
Zoe
 Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:On dim, 2003-02-02 at 15:28, Zoe wrote:
> And I just wanted to let Brion know that I'm not hitting Refresh while
> the User contributions page is being accesed, it's only once I've
> gotten the "Page cannot be displayed" page.

I've managed to speed up the contribs display so that shouldn't be a
problem anymore. (But if it is, holler.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [WikiEN-l] User:Vera Cruz

body:
What technical issue?  She's still writing articles and causing trouble (at least, as of Saturday night.  I haven't been able to find out if anybody's doing anything for two days now.)
Zoe
 Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> wrote:She's banned. If she's on anyway, that's because of a technical
issue only.

Lee Pilich wrote:

> I thought that User:Vera Cruz was banned, yet s/he is making edits, and
> just made [[Laurel Clark]]. Am I mistaken, and she's not been banned at all?
>
> I don't much care whether she's banned or not, incidentally, but a lot of
> other people seem to, and I'm curious as to what's happened here.
>
> lp (camembert)
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [WikiEN-l] Isis -Tarquin dispute.

body:
So in other words, Clutch, if I disagree with what you have to say in a Talk page, you will sue me?
Zoe
 Jonathan Walther <krooger at debian.org> wrote:On Mon, Feb 03, 2003 at 03:20:25PM -0000, Eugene Gill wrote:
> I'm quite disgusted at Isis' behaviour to the extent that I've joined this
> mail list so that I can voice my wish (seconding Eloquence's) that Isis be
> removed from sysop status. Furthermore I think she should be banned for
> making ridiculous threats of legal action to a fellow Wikipedian (Tarquin)
> over a comment that as far as I can gather was merely a difference of
> opinion.

You seem ignorant of how the law works. Isis has brought up some valid
issues that the Wikipedia needs to deal with for it's own future safety
and continuance.

I really hope the Wikipedia will not be the type of project that shoots the
messenger when problems are pointed out. Isis is a valuable sysop, and
I would be sad to see his privileges taken away.

Wikipedia, not Ostrichpedia!

Jonathan

--
Geek House Productions, Ltd.

Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone: 604-435-1205
Email: djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC V5R2W2
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from_name: Oliver Pereira

subject: [WikiEN-l] User:MyPasswordIsHELLO

body:
On Mon, 3 Feb 2003, Jason Williams wrote:

> [[User:MyPasswordIsHELLO]] - I think this user account should
> be deleted, since it subverts the user account system.

Hmm. The existence of this account would seem to make banning people
impossible, since anyone could sign in under this name and make edits.
However, I suspect that the intention of whoever made the account was to
enable people to make truly anonymous edits. Simply not signing in at all
would probably allow one to do this for a while, but people might
eventually spot the pattern in one's edits and work out which IP address
corresonds to which user.

I'm not entirely comfortable with the idea of anonymous edits myself,
because of the difficulty in contacting contributors to check things with
them. However, if there is a consensus that anonymous edits are a good
idea, there could perhaps be a new check box on the "Edting" page, saying,
"Make this edit anonymous". I'm not necessarily recommending this, but I
suppose it might come in useful if someone wants to make a valid
contribution which they nevertheless would rather not be associated with.

Oliver

+-------------------------------------------+
| Oliver Pereira                            |
| Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science |
| University of Southampton                 |
| omp199 at ecs.soton.ac.uk                    |
+-------------------------------------------+


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [WikiEN-l] User:MyPasswordIsHELLO


list: wikitech-l

subject: [Wikitech-l] Fixes, subpage "slash trick"

body:
I've put in some more fixes of the user_talk code (it inserted duplicate
rows, which I didn't notice before because of the PRIMARY key; also, it
now does the promised regex match to see if the User talk: page is
really an anonymous IP).

I've also implemented something I call the slash trick, analogous to the
pipe trick: If you put a / at the *end* of a subpage link like this:

	[[/foo/]]

the / at the *beginning* (and of course the one at the end) is not
shown. This makes it slightly prettier to do stuff like Table of
Contents, while not hiding the subpage indicator by default.

Why not [[/foo|]] ? The pipe is already overloaded with many functions,
so we would have ambiguity in cases like [[/foo (bar)|]]. Besides, it
looks prettier ^_^

Regards,

Erik
--
FOKUS - Fraunhofer Insitute for Open Communication Systems
Project BerliOS - http://www.berlios.de


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

body:
Jan Hidders wrote:

> ...Everything is debatable.

I'm not sure I'd agree with that. In fact, -- oops! -- I guess even "everything is debatable" is debatable, because I'm, um, oh, never mind!

Ed


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: User:MyPasswordIsHELLO

body:
I am that "evil person", boowah hah hah hah!!

Ed

-----Original Message-----
From: Daniel Mayer [mailto:maveric149 at yahoo.com]
PS I just checked and some evil person has changed the
password to something other than "hello" or "HELLO."


from_name: Eugene Gill

subject: [WikiEN-l] Isis -Tarquin dispute.

body:
I'm quite disgusted at Isis' behaviour to the extent that I've joined this mail list so that I can voice my wish (seconding Eloquence's) that Isis be removed from sysop status. Furthermore I think she should be banned for making ridiculous threats of legal action to a fellow Wikipedian (Tarquin) over a comment that as far as I can gather was merely a difference of opinion.

Regards

Mintguy

Eugene Gill
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from_name: Jason Williams

subject: [WikiEN-l] User:MyPasswordIsHELLO

body:
On Mon, Feb 03, 2003 at 08:42:03AM -0800, Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Jason Williams wrote:
>
> >[[User:MyPasswordIsHELLO]] - I think this user account should
> >be deleted, since it subverts the user account system.
> >
> How?

Because with it, anonymous users no longer have their IP address
visible (and can't be banned by non-deities). If that's what is
wanted, then that is what the policy should be, and the software
modified accordingly.

--
jason at jasonandali.org.uk    http://www.jasonandali.org.uk/jason/


subject: [Wikitech-l] Fixed contri/email links; added edit comment to contri list

body:
I have fixed the contri/email links to not incorrectly show up on user
subpages or pages of non-existent users. Now a check is done if the user
exists or if it's an anonymous user page before the links are added.

To make this a bit faster (string comparison against user_name) I have
added an index to the user table, which should already be fairly large
on the en.wiki. The "patch" for that one is in maintenance as usual. I
suggest running it on en at least.

I'd like to show the links also on subpages, but to do this properly, we
should make sure that there are no user names with slahes in them. Right
now slashes in usernames are allowed. Do we have any slash-users?

I have also added the edit comment to the user contribution list, so you
can see what a specific edit was about, provided the user has specified
a reason.

As always, changes in CVS, not live yet.

Regards,

Erik

--
FOKUS - Fraunhofer Insitute for Open Communication Systems
Project BerliOS - http://www.berlios.de


from_name: Eric Demolli

subject: [WikiEN-l] IT'S BETTER TO SWITCH TO PRIVATE MAIL

body:
WE SHOULD NOT WRITE TO MUCH IN THE MAILING LIST  OR WIKIPEDIA
ABOUT ISIS/TARQUIN  IT'S BETTER TO SWITCH TO PRIVATE MAIL


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] Maintain language links, alpha version

body:
On the test wiki, I have created a special page to maintain
interlanguage links. These are stored in a new database (wiki-intl).
Please have a look at
    http://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special%3AIntl
and try the examples.

This is an early attempt at best. What will follow (if all of you
approve the basic concept :-) is a link from each article to the "add"
and "zoom" pages (see link above). For example, clicking on "Link
another language" (or something) will bring up the "add a link" page,
with source title and language filled in.

Then, there should be an option to automagically generate missing
language backlinks (probably on the "zoom" page).

I called the page "international issues" because I hope that it will
later hold the interface translation strings, as well as the user database.

Magnus

P.S.: I posted this to wikitech-l rather than wikipedia-l, as it seems
to be too technical and too alpha for the unwashed masses right now ;-)


from_name: daniwo59 at aol.com

body:
It's impossible to get on again. Is the site down?

Danny
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from_name: Lightning

subject: [Wikitech-l] Daily cron instead of realtime?

body:
> It strikes me that some of our nice "extra" features, like Most
> Wanted, are slow and could also be just as useful (or nearly so) if
> they were not generated 'realtime', but rather if they were generated
> only once per day.

i like this idea


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Grr...

body:
Server croaked at or about 2003-02-03 20:49:47 UTC. Logs look fairly
normal. Load average and memory usage recorded a few minutes earlier at
20:40 looked fine. Response times for wiki pages loaded right up to the
end are good. No obvious trigger so far, and damn is it annoying.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Richard Grevers

subject: [WikiEN-l] Kudos

body:
Can I just take a minute to congratulate Wikipedians on the articles on the
Columbia accident (
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaster ). The
coverage is better than anything I found on other internet media or print
media, and dispels many of the "jump to conclusions" storylines.
Wikijournalism beats standard journalism :-)

--
Richard Grevers
New Plymouth, New Zealand, New Year.


from_name: Jan Hidders

subject: [Wikitech-l] Getting rid of filesort?

in_reply_to: <1044258545.11902.887.camel@rdaneel.vibber.org>; from brion@pobox.com on Sun, Feb 02, 2003 at 11:49:05PM -0800

body:
On Sun, Feb 02, 2003 at 11:49:05PM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
>
> I've just put in a hacky manual sort (in CVS) for the page history; all
> rows are returned without sorting (so in ID order, usually but not
> always chronological) and then output in reverse order. It's *immensely*
> faster. Try loading up the history on the Village Pump or Votes for
> Deletion, and watch it actually come up! Kinda nice. :)
>
> I also took the opportunity to drop in the see next X links, so you
> don't have to load all 2500+ items at once on your (well, my) 56k modem.
> (These are used pretty generally, and the code really ought to be moved
> out of SearchEngine.php and into globalfunctions...)
>
> Of course, it would be *nicer* to do the ORDER BY and LIMIT in mysql.
>
> The old query:
> EXPLAIN SELECT old_id,old_namespace,old_title,old_user,
>     -> old_comment,old_user_text,old_timestamp,old_minor_edit FROM old
>     -> WHERE old_namespace=4 AND
>     -> old_title='Village_pump'
>     -> ORDER BY old_timestamp DESC;
> +-------+------+---------------+---------------+---------+-------------+------+----------------------------+
> | table | type | possible_keys | key           | key_len | ref         | rows | Extra                      |
> +-------+------+---------------+---------------+---------+-------------+------+----------------------------+
> | old   | ref  | old_namespace | old_namespace |     256 | const,const | 1900 | where used; Using filesort |
> +-------+------+---------------+---------------+---------+-------------+------+----------------------------+
>
> The new query:
> EXPLAIN SELECT old_id,old_namespace,old_title,old_user,
>     -> old_comment,old_user_text,old_timestamp,old_minor_edit FROM old
>     -> WHERE old_namespace=4 AND
>     -> old_title='Village_pump';
> +-------+------+---------------+---------------+---------+-------------+------+------------+
> | table | type | possible_keys | key           | key_len | ref         | rows | Extra      |
> +-------+------+---------------+---------------+---------+-------------+------+------------+
> | old   | ref  | old_namespace | old_namespace |     256 | const,const | 1900 | where used |
> +-------+------+---------------+---------------+---------+-------------+------+------------+
>
> Now, in an ideal world, it could do the sorting based on that handy
> index it has on old_timestamp. In the topsy-turvy world of MySQL,
> however, only the index used for the WHERE clause means anything. Other
> ways to speed it up?

Actually, that is not MySQL's fault but just a consequence of how indices
work; the only way in which an index can help with sorting is that it in
some sense presorts the records for you, but that is irrelevant if you also
use other indices (as you do here) because they will order the records in a
different way.

Anyway, there is actually a "trick" that you can use here to get always the
chronological order and that is to define an in index on (old_namespace,
old_title, old_timestamp) and forcing MySQL to use that index as in
(assuming that this indes is named old_namespace_2):

  SELECT old_id, old_timestamp
  FROM old
  USE INDEX (old_namespace_2)
  WHERE old_namespace=0 AND old_title='Village_pump'
  ORDER BY old_timestamp;

then EXPLAIN will give you:

+-------+------+-------------------------------+-----------------+---------+-------------+------+------------+
| table | type | possible_keys                 | key             | key_len | ref         | rows | Extra      |
+-------+------+-------------------------------+-----------------+---------+-------------+------+------------+
| old   | ref  | old_namespace,old_namespace_2 | old_namespace_2 |     256 | const,const |   29 | where used |
+-------+------+-------------------------------+-----------------+---------+-------------+------+------------+

As you can see there is no sorting and that is because it uses the fact that
the index already presorts the records for you. Because MySQL knows that
this index can also be used as an index on (namespace, title) and even on
(namespace) you can drop the indices on those combinations. I'm not sure if
you can actually omit the USE but I know that if the other index is still
around on (namespace, title) it will usually pick that index, and then it
still has to sort.

You can use this method in most cases where we sort on timestamp, and you
might even consider storing the timestamps negated (unfortunately MySQL
doesn't have descending indices) in an extra redundant column and use that
column for the index. Then you wouldn't even have to reverse the list and
could efficiently do a query that selects that last 100 or so without
reading the full list into memory.

-- Jan Hidders


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Optimizing and tuning

in_reply_to: <1044126620.2074.462.camel@rdaneel.vibber.org>; from brion@pobox.com on Sat, Feb 01, 2003 at 11:10:21AM -0800

body:
On Sat, Feb 01, 2003 at 11:10:21AM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
>
> Also, a vaguely related question on the watchlist query. Currently the
> return-whole-watchlist query looks like:
> SELECT DISTINCT
>   cur_id,cur_namespace,cur_title,cur_comment,
>   cur_user,cur_user_text,cur_timestamp,cur_minor_edit,cur_is_new
>   FROM cur,watchlist
>   WHERE wl_user={$uid} AND wl_title=cur_title
>         AND (cur_namespace=wl_namespace OR cur_namespace=wl_namespace+1)
>   ORDER BY cur_timestamp DESC {$dolimit}

I would suggest the same trick here as in my previous mail, but you would
have to split up the query for each namespace and then in PHP do some
postprocessing by merging the two lists and cutting it off if the total sum
is beyond the requested limit.

> > And I'm not sure if we really need the resulting cur_id. If we don't,
> > then indeed only the index is needed and that would really speed up the
> > query.
>
> 99% of the time, we don't; we're just checking for existence. It should
> be sufficient to just have a boolean 'exists/doesn't exist' field. When
> we're checking existence, is it most efficient to SELECT the indexed
> field, or COUNT(*), or what?

Just a SELECT 1 FROM ... wil do. And as I said, in that case only the index
is needed to answer the query and since the caching rate for the indices is
very high this should really speed up the queries for the links in the
documents.

-- Jan Hidders


from_name: Jimmy Wales

in_reply_to: <1044304240.1585.5.camel@rdaneel.vibber.org>; from brion@pobox.com on Mon, Feb 03, 2003 at 12:30:40PM -0800

body:
I know "Teleport" -- it is a pain-in-the-ass user agent for
downloading entire sites.  It's good to block it.

Brion Vibber wrote:

> Some jerk at 194.209.152.200 decided it would be a great idea to
> download the entire contents of the Wikipedia site as fast as he
> possibly could, several pages at a time.
>
> Please don't do that, folks -- it slows the site for everyone to the
> point where it's barely usable.
>
> I have banned the user-agent 'Teleport' and the specific IP from the
> site (temporarily, at least) to spare our poor l'il server. (Load
> average went down from 22 to 5.)
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Some deletions

body:
At her request, I am deleting pages associated with K. Kay
Shearin/Isis.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] Kudos

body:
(Sending from the subscribed address this time - moderator please ignore
last night's version of this)

Can I just take a minute to congratulate Wikipedians on the articles on the
Columbia accident ( http://www.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaster ). The coverage is better than
anything I found on other internet media or print media, and dispels many
of the "jump to conclusions" storylines.
Wikijournalism beats standard journalism :-)

--
Richard Grevers


subject: [WikiEN-l] Dwindling contributor base

body:
I don't know what's going on, but I was just asked to "remove" the username for Isis (actually, I only blocked it from logging in). And apparently Isis's user and talk pages have been deleted.

Let's see now, with Larry Sanger off sifting his notes somewhere, kq on sabbatical, etc., who's left now?

YOU HEAR THE HOLLOW, ECHOING SOUND OF VAST EMPTY CAVERN. YOU ARE IN THE MAIN HALL OF WIKIPEDIA, A ONCE-THRIVING ENCYCLOPEDIA PROJECT. NO CONTRIBUTORS REMAIN (TO SPEAK OF). I WILL BE YOUR EYES AND EARS. MANY TREASURES ARE HIDDEN HERE!

Hm, sounds like Don Woods' old Adventure game -- and we're ALL losing :-(

Wistfully,

"Uncle" Ed Poor


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: User:MyPasswordIsHELLO

body:
On Mon, 3 Feb 2003, Daniel Mayer wrote:

> >It is a little weird, but we can easily adjust to
> >it.  If someone starts using that account to do
> >naughty things, we will just ban
> >the account.  If someone keeps doing this, we'll have
> >to deal with
> >it when it comes up.
> >
> >Historically speaking, we haven't had a lot of
> >trouble with people
> >trying to subvert the system.
> >
> >--Jimbo
>
> I don't think that it is a good idea to allow this
> because it becomes impossible to track who is doing
> what if multiple different people are using the same
> user name at the same time. I know this also happens
> due to cheap-ass ISPs who use proxies but it is
> relatively rare that two people from the same IP edit
> at the same time. They also don't have a real choice
> in the matter.
>
> Being a logged-in user has many benefits - but it also
> has added accountability. This is subverted by having
> a full-featured 'guest account.'

I don't have much objections to it. The only thing I see is that other people
might make it seem that their changes were those of someone else. The 'special
rights' of being logged in can be got easily by subscribing oneself.

I have myself used the empty string as my password in the past; I changed it
to a 'real' password when I got admin rights.

Andre Engels


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Mailing lists & Wikipedia e-mail back up

body:
Okay, mailing lists should be back up -- they were down due to a thinko
in the firewall configuration (run on bootup) that
 a) didn't let it look up the IP addresses of other mail servers and
 b) wouldn't let it connect to them and send out mail anyway.

Fixed now. Backed-up messages should still be delivered.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Blocked user report

body:
Jimbo,

In addition to blocking Isis at your and her mutual request, I also blocked 5 "MyPasswordIs" usernames. See below.

P.S. I think the mailing list is down. I haven't gotten any messages since Mon 2/3 at 2:17 PM.

Ed Poor

user_name
user_id

MyPasswordIsHELLO
7961

MyPasswordIsHELLOW
7977

MyPasswordIsSCHMOOZE
7985

MyPasswordIsYELLOW
7973

MyPasswordIsYellow
7974


from_name: Giskart

subject: [Wikitech-l] redirect when Wikipedia is down

body:
Now when Wikipedia goes down all visitors of Wikipedia
get a error.

Wikipedians, the come back when the system is back up
but new visitors mayby not.And it gives a bad impression.

I would be very nice that when wikipedia.org goes down
all traffic goes to a page that says that Wikipedia is
down and will be back up as soon as possibel.

Giskart


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] User:MyPasswordIsHELLO

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>>As I understand the process, by choosing a user name, he is no  longer
>>anonymous.  This chosen name should function in the same way as any
>>other chosen name.  Unless this name has some hidden effect on the
>>operation of the software, the name may be a little weird, but not
>>offensive.
>>
>
>It is a little weird, but we can easily adjust to it.  If someone
>starts using that account to do naughty things, we will just ban
>the account.  If someone keeps doing this, we'll have to deal with
>it when it comes up.
>
>Historically speaking, we haven't had a lot of trouble with people
>trying to subvert the system.
>
It took a little while for me to understand where the potential problem
is.  Would it be a difficult technical fix to outlaw passwords that are
substrings of the user name?

Eclecticology


subject: [Wikitech-l] testing - please ignore


from_name: Bridget

from_email: Bridget

subject: [WikiEN-l] User:Zoe

body:
I was wondering if it would be possible to ask User:Zoe to clarify exactly what trouble I was causing.

---------------------------------
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Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now
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from_name: Zoe

subject: [WikiEN-l] Blocked user report

body:
Apparently.  I've received lots of flak on the list for being concerned about reverting vandalism.
Zoe
 Jason Williams <jason at jasonandali.org.uk> wrote:On Tue, Feb 04, 2003 at 02:52:47PM -0500, The Cunctator wrote:
> On Tue, 2003-02-04 at 11:28, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
> > Jimbo,
> >
> > In addition to blocking Isis at your and her mutual request, I also blocked 5 "MyPasswordIs" usernames. See below.
> >
> Please unblock these users. Blocking them just encourages the behavior.

And cleaning up vandalism encourages vandals?

--

jason at jasonandali.org.uk http://www.jasonandali.org.uk/jason/
_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

---------------------------------
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Editing on the Diff page

body:
We seem to have lost the capability to Edit once you're looking at a Diff.  You now have to click on Current version, then edit that.

Zoe

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from_name: Tom Parmenter

subject: [Wikipedia-l] ISBN links

body:
|From: Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com>
|Content-Disposition: inline
|Sender: wikipedia-l-admin at wikipedia.org
|Reply-To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
|Date: Mon, 3 Feb 2003 06:36:22 -0800
|
|Axel Boldt wrote:
|> I know that I have fought and lost this fight before. ISBN numbers are
|> evil and should not be used to identify books. They identify *editions*
|> of books, and in a couple of years all these editions will be out of
|> print and all ISBN links in Wikipedia will be completely useless. Right
|> now they are already useless if you are interested in buying used
|> books.
|
|I'm listening.  This sounds like a valid objection to this particular
|technical detail.

Should a system, flawed, dubious, that gives a fighting chance of
tracking down a book be replaced by no system at all?  If you click on
an ISBN and go to an online bookstore, you are in a position to not
only buy the edition of the book in question (different editions have
different contents, among other things, it may be ''that'' edition is
the one you want) , but you are also in a position to track down used
editions, alternate editions, etc.

If there is a better method, Library of Congress or whatever in the
future, then a 'bot can comb through the Wikipedia and replace all
those ISBNs with better references.  Why send a 'bot out now to remove
ISBNs when there is no replacement?  (Is there?)

None of the online bookstores stops the ISBN user from going
further. Of course, people can clip and paste the title to Google.
It's true that nothing would really lost by dropping the ISBN except
ease of use.  What is that worth?  A lot, to me.

Tom Parmenter
Ortolan88


from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [WikiEN-l] Dwindling contributor base

body:
On Tue, 2003-02-04 at 09:50, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
> I don't know what's going on, but I was just asked to "remove" the username for Isis (actually, I only blocked it from logging in). And apparently Isis's user and talk pages have been deleted.
>
> Let's see now, with Larry Sanger off sifting his notes somewhere, kq on sabbatical, etc., who's left now?
>
The encyclopedia is steadily growing, new contributors are steadily
contributing, the project is happily moving along. It's probably a
healthy thing that people have moved on.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Blocked user report

body:
On Tue, 2003-02-04 at 11:28, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
> Jimbo,
>
> In addition to blocking Isis at your and her mutual request, I also blocked 5 "MyPasswordIs" usernames. See below.
>
Please unblock these users. Blocking them just encourages the behavior.
If I'm not mistaken, you have not been granted authority to block those
usernames.

> user_name
> user_id
>
> MyPasswordIsHELLO
> 7961
>
> MyPasswordIsHELLOW
> 7977
>
> MyPasswordIsSCHMOOZE
> 7985
>
> MyPasswordIsYELLOW
> 7973
>
> MyPasswordIsYellow
> 7974
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [Wikipedia-l] ISBN links

body:
But it's not a valid objection, used books are easily located using the
ISBN.

Fred

> From: Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com>
> Reply-To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
> Date: Mon, 3 Feb 2003 06:36:22 -0800
> To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
> Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] ISBN links
>
> Axel Boldt wrote:
>> I know that I have fought and lost this fight before. ISBN numbers are
>> evil and should not be used to identify books. They identify *editions*
>> of books, and in a couple of years all these editions will be out of
>> print and all ISBN links in Wikipedia will be completely useless. Right
>> now they are already useless if you are interested in buying used
>> books.
>
> I'm listening.  This sounds like a valid objection to this particular
> technical detail.
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikitech-l] [Fwd: Fixed contri/email links; added edit comment to contri list]

body:
This appears not to have gotten through.
--
FOKUS - Fraunhofer Insitute for Open Communication Systems
Project BerliOS - http://www.berlios.de
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Subject: Fixed contri/email links; added edit comment to contri list
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Blocked user report

body:
On Tue, 2003-02-04 at 14:58, Jason Williams wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 04, 2003 at 02:52:47PM -0500, The Cunctator wrote:
> > On Tue, 2003-02-04 at 11:28, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
> > > Jimbo,
> > >
> > > In addition to blocking Isis at your and her mutual request, I also blocked 5 "MyPasswordIs" usernames. See below.
> > >
> > Please unblock these users. Blocking them just encourages the behavior.
>
> And cleaning up vandalism encourages vandals?
>
First: what's the connection between the above thread and your question?

Second: Calling it vandalism does. Cleaning it up doesn't.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Blocked user report

body:
On Tue, 2003-02-04 at 15:42, Erik Moeller wrote:
> Cunc-
> > Please unblock these users. Blocking them just encourages the behavior.
> > If I'm not mistaken, you have not been granted authority to block those
> > usernames.
>
> When Ed wrote "block", what he meant was "change the password". In this
> case, anyone could do that, so Ed did not need any special authority to do
> so. In fact, I will change the passwords of new accounts of this type
> myself if nobody else does. I have explained several times why these
> accounts are a bad idea and suggested alternatives, but the user who
> created them has ignored these suggestions.
>
If that's what he meant, then that's fine.


from_name: Eugene Gill

subject: [WikiEN-l] Why am I not getting any mails?

body:
I don't seem to be getting all of the mails coming through on this list. I can see what I've missed by looking at the archive. I've only had 2 mails come through instead of about 15. This means I have to post new threads rather than replies.

Mintguy
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body:
I don't seem to be getting all of the mails coming through on this list. I can see what I've missed by looking at the archive. I've only had 2 mails come through instead of about 15. This means I have to post new threads rather than replies

Mintguy

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from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [WikiEN-l] Apology to Sheldon Rampton

body:
Sheldon,

I'm sorry I needled you and I insulted you, and I don't think that you're dishonest in any way. Nor do I think you have any opposition to our "neutral point of view policy" (NPOV). On the contrary, I applaud the respect you have shown for the arguments of people whose viewpoints differ from your own.

Moreover, I appreciate the good-natured way you responded by placing on my user page a mirror image of the gratuitous comments I had placed on yours. With that and the help of a few friends, I quickly realized my mistake.

I really am sorry, and I look forward to working together with you in a cooperative spirit.

Ed Poor


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Clutch, Zoe, who else wants to ban?

body:
Is there anybody who supports the ban against me besides Clutch and Zoe? Im sure Isis does, but I guess she was banned for some reason?? To be honest I don't think Clutch's opinion matters, he seems to support a ban against me because he thought my user page was too cluttered and I misspelled too many words or something. As for Zoe...I don't know what problem she has against me and she won't talk about it, is there anybody else? Maybe Larry Sanger or mav or Brion Vibber? I don't really know, being banned was good for me since I taught myself c++ but, uh, I sorta need to get back to working on the articles.
 wikipedia-l-request at wikipedia.org wrote:Send Wikipedia-l mailing list submissions to
wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org

To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
wikipedia-l-request at wikipedia.org

You can reach the person managing the list at
wikipedia-l-admin at wikipedia.org

When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
than "Re: Contents of Wikipedia-l digest..."

Today's Topics:

1. Re: [WikiEN-l] User:MyPasswordIsHELLO (Oliver Pereira)
2. Re: ISBN links (Fred Bauder)
3. Re: ISBN links (Jimmy Wales)
4. Re: ISBN links (Jimmy Wales)
5. Re: ISBN links (Fred Bauder)
6. Re: [WikiEN-l] Please revoke Isis' sysop status (Jonathan Walther)
7. Re: [WikiEN-l] Isis -Tarquin dispute. (Jonathan Walther)
8. Re: Re: [WikiEN-l] Please revoke Isis' sysop status (Jimmy Wales)
9. Re: ISBN links (Axel Boldt)
10. Re: racialisme (Jimmy Wales)
11. banning is for goatse! not for lir! (Bridget [name omitted for privacy reasons])

--__--__--

Message: 1
Date: Mon, 3 Feb 2003 13:30:41 +0000 (GMT)
From: Oliver Pereira
To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
cc: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [WikiEN-l] User:MyPasswordIsHELLO
Reply-To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org

On Mon, 3 Feb 2003, Jason Williams wrote:

> [[User:MyPasswordIsHELLO]] - I think this user account should
> be deleted, since it subverts the user account system.

Hmm. The existence of this account would seem to make banning people
impossible, since anyone could sign in under this name and make edits.
However, I suspect that the intention of whoever made the account was to
enable people to make truly anonymous edits. Simply not signing in at all
would probably allow one to do this for a while, but people might
eventually spot the pattern in one's edits and work out which IP address
corresonds to which user.

I'm not entirely comfortable with the idea of anonymous edits myself,
because of the difficulty in contacting contributors to check things with
them. However, if there is a consensus that anonymous edits are a good
idea, there could perhaps be a new check box on the "Edting" page, saying,
"Make this edit anonymous". I'm not necessarily recommending this, but I
suppose it might come in useful if someone wants to make a valid
contribution which they nevertheless would rather not be associated with.

Oliver

+-------------------------------------------+
| Oliver Pereira |
| Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science |
| University of Southampton |
| omp199 at ecs.soton.ac.uk |
+-------------------------------------------+

--__--__--

Message: 2
Date: Mon, 03 Feb 2003 07:31:28 -0700
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] ISBN links
From: Fred Bauder
To:
Reply-To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org

Amazons prices are higher (and they are not politically correct), but the
listings on Amaazon often include reviews which are quite helpful. I
personally have never purchased a book from Amazon (always able to find a
cheaper book elsewhere) but frankly if you use the reviews, you might
consider buying there. At any rate I think it's a personal choice.

Anyway I hate polical correctness so much that I would dismiss that notion
out of hand just on that basis.

Fred (an ABE bookseller)

> From: Magnus Manske
> Reply-To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
> Date: Sun, 02 Feb 2003 23:18:34 +0100
> To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
> Subject: [Wikipedia-l] ISBN links
>
> Some people on the German wikipedia want to get rid of the amazon.de
> link on the ISBN page, because of the "one-click" patent thing. I told
> them it would be not-NPOV to do so. Now they want to make some two-level
> ISBN page, with some "all bookstores" and "good bookstores" groups. I'm
> not sure what exactly they imagine, but it would require a software change.
>
> Is there a policy on that? Should we exclude bookstores (the largest
> one, actually) from the list because some (many?) wikipedians don't like
> them? Or should we leave the choice where to order to the user? Jimbo?
>
> Magnus
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

--__--__--

Message: 3
Date: Mon, 3 Feb 2003 06:35:07 -0800
From: Jimmy Wales
To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] ISBN links
Reply-To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org

Magnus Manske wrote:
> Is there a policy on that? Should we exclude bookstores (the largest
> one, actually) from the list because some (many?) wikipedians don't like
> them? Or should we leave the choice where to order to the user? Jimbo?

Wow, I don't know. My first inclination is to list several sources,
and if people don't like some of them, then they shouldn't shop there.
It's really not a good idea for us to get involved in the particulars
of endorsing/not-endorsing particular shops.

--Jimbo

--__--__--

Message: 4
Date: Mon, 3 Feb 2003 06:36:22 -0800
From: Jimmy Wales
To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] ISBN links
Reply-To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org

Axel Boldt wrote:
> I know that I have fought and lost this fight before. ISBN numbers are
> evil and should not be used to identify books. They identify *editions*
> of books, and in a couple of years all these editions will be out of
> print and all ISBN links in Wikipedia will be completely useless. Right
> now they are already useless if you are interested in buying used
> books.

I'm listening. This sounds like a valid objection to this particular
technical detail.

--__--__--

Message: 5
Date: Mon, 03 Feb 2003 07:37:24 -0700
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] ISBN links
From: Fred Bauder
To:
Reply-To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org

Marvellously wrongheaded, most books published after 1970 have ISBN numbers
and are most easily found an purchased if you start with that number
(although it can get complicated as books are reprinted under diffent
numbers). The general practice in the bookselling business currently relies
on the ISBN number and will for the forseeable future.

Fred an ABE bookseller

> From: Axel Boldt
> Reply-To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
> Date: Sun, 2 Feb 2003 17:22:46 -0800 (PST)
> To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
> Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] ISBN links
>
> I know that I have fought and lost this fight before. ISBN numbers are
> evil and should not be used to identify books. They identify *editions*
> of books, and in a couple of years all these editions will be out of
> print and all ISBN links in Wikipedia will be completely useless. Right
> now they are already useless if you are interested in buying used
> books.
>
> If versions of a book are being published by different parties, as is
> true for many important books that are in the public domain, then
> ISBN's are furthermore inherently POV, since they pick out a single
> publisher.
>
> No reference work, encyclopedia, library catalog, bibliography, article
> or book ever refers to books by ISBN number. Because they are not book
> identifiers. Given properly formatted author and title, our software
> could and should query bookstores and libary catalogs.
>
> I think I said it before: meaningless numbers are worse than no
> numbers.
>
> Axel
>
> WikiKarma: http://wikipedia.org/wiki/UN_number
>
>
> __________________________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.
> http://mailplus.yahoo.com
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

--__--__--

Message: 6
Date: Mon, 3 Feb 2003 05:52:52 -0800
From: Jonathan Walther
To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [WikiEN-l] Please revoke Isis' sysop status
Reply-To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org

--UugvWAfsgieZRqgk
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On Mon, Feb 03, 2003 at 12:37:18PM +0100, Erik Moeller wrote:
>Given Isis'/Kay's continued legal threats against a valued member of the
>Wikipedia community (Tarquin) for a misunderstanding (largely on her part)=
, I
>must insist that her sysop status be revoked. I cannot trust her to be fai=
r in
>the use of the sysop privileges any longer.
>
>Jimbo, please take action in this matter ASAP.

I object to this request, and request that Isis sysop status be left
alone.

Isis has repeatedly asked for clarification, in very polite terms. I
have not seen attempts to answer him.

Isis is acting out of concern for his own legal liability. I think it
would be the right thing to do for you, Jimbo, or for Tarquin to give
Isis a brief note of assurance that he is not liable.

As you may or may not have noticed, Isis works as a paralegal. He has
experience of how things work in the law, so has a better idea than the
rest of us if he actually is in legal danger or not. Far better to have
him onside and working for us, than to snub him and lose his valuable
services.

Jonathan

--=20
Geek House Productions, Ltd.

Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone: 604-435-1205
Email: djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC V5R2W2

--UugvWAfsgieZRqgk
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--__--__--

Message: 7
Date: Mon, 3 Feb 2003 07:28:07 -0800
From: Jonathan Walther
To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [WikiEN-l] Isis -Tarquin dispute.
Reply-To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org

--5vNYLRcllDrimb99
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed
Content-Disposition: inline
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

On Mon, Feb 03, 2003 at 03:20:25PM -0000, Eugene Gill wrote:
> I'm quite disgusted at Isis' behaviour to the extent that I've joined t=
his
> mail list so that I can voice my wish (seconding Eloquence's) that Isis=
be
> removed from sysop status. Furthermore I think she should be banned for
> making ridiculous threats of legal action to a fellow Wikipedian (Tarqu=
in)
> over a comment that as far as I can gather was merely a difference of
> opinion.

You seem ignorant of how the law works. Isis has brought up some valid
issues that the Wikipedia needs to deal with for it's own future safety
and continuance.

I really hope the Wikipedia will not be the type of project that shoots the
messenger when problems are pointed out. Isis is a valuable sysop, and
I would be sad to see his privileges taken away.

Wikipedia, not Ostrichpedia!

Jonathan

--=20
Geek House Productions, Ltd.

Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone: 604-435-1205
Email: djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC V5R2W2

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--__--__--

Message: 8
Date: Mon, 3 Feb 2003 08:29:46 -0800
From: Jimmy Wales
To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [WikiEN-l] Please revoke Isis' sysop status
Reply-To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org

I'm responding to this one privately. Jonathan, I don't think
you've got the basic facts of the dispute straight at all.

I don't want us to discuss this one on the list too much right now,
and never unless it becomes absolutely necessary, but I did want to
say that Jonathan's factual summary is not even remotely correct.

Jonathan Walther wrote:
> Isis has repeatedly asked for clarification, in very polite terms. I
> have not seen attempts to answer him.
>
> Isis is acting out of concern for his own legal liability. I think it
> would be the right thing to do for you, Jimbo, or for Tarquin to give
> Isis a brief note of assurance that he is not liable.
>
> As you may or may not have noticed, Isis works as a paralegal. He has
> experience of how things work in the law, so has a better idea than the
> rest of us if he actually is in legal danger or not. Far better to have
> him onside and working for us, than to snub him and lose his valuable
> services.
>
> Jonathan
>
> --
> Geek House Productions, Ltd.
>
> Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
> QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
> General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998
>
> Phone: 604-435-1205
> Email: djw at reactor-core.org
> Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
> Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC V5R2W2

--__--__--

Message: 9
Date: Mon, 3 Feb 2003 09:30:35 -0800 (PST)
From: Axel Boldt
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] ISBN links
To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
Reply-To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org

--- Fred Bauder wrote:

>Marvellously wrongheaded, most books published after 1970 have ISBN
>numbers

I don't dispute that. Most books published after 500 BC have an author
and a title.

>and are most easily found an purchased if you start with that number
>(although it can get complicated as books are reprinted under diffent
>numbers).

Since many books are eventually reprinted under different numbers
(softcover, second edition), your second half sentence seems to
contradict the first. How is searching for a book by author and title
any more complicated than searching for it by ISBN? You will find all
editions by all publishers that way, hardcover and softcover, printed,
Braille or on tape, whatever.

>The general practice in the bookselling business currently relies
>on the ISBN number and will for the forseeable future.

Sure. ISBN's were invented by and for booksellers and serve a useful
purpose there, namely to identify a specific edition of a book so that
it can be ordered from a wholesaler and delivered to the customer. But
they don't serve a useful purpose for someone who wants to locate a
book in a (used) bookstore or library. These people are Wikipedia's
clientele.

Axel

__________________________________________________
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--__--__--

Message: 10
Date: Mon, 3 Feb 2003 09:24:28 -0800
From: Jimmy Wales
To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] racialisme
Reply-To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org

julien tayon wrote:
> Yes but shoud we present the fact that it is legitimate to think Shoah
> never existed, or shoud we state (arbitrary) that revisionism is a far
> rightist theory that Shoah never existed. Can you tell me which can be
> written in wikipedia, and why ?

I think we can (and should) say that the theory that "Shoah never
existed" is held only by a very tiny minority of people, and that no
notable historian takes such claims seriously.

We absolutely should _not_ act as if holocaust revisionism and
standard history are equally valid. To do so would itself be a
perversion of NPOV.

--Jimbo

--__--__--

Message: 11
Date: Mon, 3 Feb 2003 10:28:20 -0800 (PST)
From: Bridget [name omitted for privacy reasons]
To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] banning is for goatse! not for lir!
Reply-To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org

--0-1943413075-1044296900=:27526
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

I object strongly to DW being called an idiot. I resent the fact that it is considered ok to call him an idiot. He brought up some very legitimate complaints, not the least of which is that Zoe openly reverts changes based not on their merit, but merely because she doesn't like the user who made them. She is open about this, she has admitted it, she has argued, "But User:XX made the change, why should we listen to that idiot?"
It is true that wikipedia is full of argument and that this is a problem, but the problem is not merely those, like DW, TMC, or even myself the mongrel troll Vera Cruz, which engage in inappropriate behavior not because we are incorrigible, but because we honestly don't always know better. For example, DW does not know that informing JW that he has a system of approved ignorance is not going to come across well, nor did I know that arguing that it is racist to refuse to use forign spellings would be bad.
Certainly I have learned to be increasingly non-argumentative, and I am sure DW, TMC, 172, Danny, etc can definitely become even better contributors than they are. So no, I don't think we are the real problem, even if we can from time to time be offensive because we don't have a high enough level of class or protocol.
I think there is a serious problem with people such as Isis, who insults people (me others), refuses to discuss the problem with the people she hates, and then winds up threatening to sue somebody for libel, a crime she regularly commits herself!
There is an amazing difference between the two groups, the most notably difference being that Im no advocating banning anybody. Isis can call me names all day, I don't care. User:172 can go insane with insisting that his dry rambling articles are the ultimate nobel prize explanation of every subject every written. But I don't want to ban them.
Banning is for people that load goatse or change the dates of WWII to 1836-2321. Banning is not for somebody who writes, "Columbus was a slavetrader" or "The Israelis are actively conducting genocide in Palestine". Yes, anyone with brains know those statements are absolute truth, but it takes time to learn NPOV.
At this wiki, we have a group of people who are snide and elitist. They do not have perfect NPOV, they do not have perfect decisions, but they believe they do. They reinforce their belief because they are just about the only people who read or talk on the mailing list and they are arguing all over the wiki, thus making them feel that they are the wiki, and everybody else is a noobie or non-contributor.
Those people should not be banned, they should not lose their sysop privileges. But, at the same time, the bullshit has got to fucking stop. You don't sue somebody from England because they tell u that as a paralegal you don't know jack about law. You don't call people an idiot simply because they don't agree with anything u think.
Id like to talk about how I shouldn't be banned, its pretty obvious that Im somebody who is going to contribute valuable material. I don't think even my biggest opponents can deny the fact that just about every time I click submit I am adding something of value and just about everytime there is a problem, I back down or its eventually decided that I was correct.
I know Im not a problem, but I can't convince anybody of it. There is a reason that legal courts do not require a defendant to prove their innocence, its IMPOSSIBLE to prove one's innocence. It cannot be done no matter what the crime or no matter how innocent you are. Not a single one of you can prove that you were not Adolf Hitler who committed a genocide and then, via parapscyhological phenomena, teleported himself into the future.

=== message truncated ===

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from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

subject: [Wikitech-l] Recent changes auto-refresh

body:
Could we add an user preference option that if recent changes page is viewed
in "all changes since" mode, it will auto-reload after 5  minutes ?
(or 15 minutes, or whatever user puts into his preferences)

I think that it should be default behaviour in case of empty recent changes page,
with option to make it always behave that way.


from_name: daniwo59 at aol.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] banning is for goatse! not for lir!

body:
In a message dated 2/4/2003 5:35:08 PM Eastern Standard Time,
lapollutionestsimauvaise at yahoo.com writes:

> Certainly I have learned to be increasingly non-argumentative, and I am sure
> DW, TMC, 172, Danny, etc can definitely become even better contributors
> than they are. So no, I don't think we are the real problem, even if we can
> from time to time be offensive because we don't have a high enough level of
> class or protocol.
>
>

Huh? What did I do?

Danny
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from_name: Jason Richey

body:
Anybody have an idea of how to implement such a "redirect", assuming
that when we need the redirect most, we're in a situation where the machine
that answers to the ip that the name wikipedia.org resolves to is
totally incapable of doing anything, and we don't control the routers
that the request would pass through.

It's a difficult thing to do without adding some hardware, and that
money would need to come from somewhere...

Jason

Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

> On Tue, Feb 04, 2003 at 11:40:22AM +0000, Giskart wrote:
> > Now when Wikipedia goes down all visitors of Wikipedia
> > get a error.
> >
> > Wikipedians, the come back when the system is back up
> > but new visitors mayby not.And it gives a bad impression.
> >
> > I would be very nice that when wikipedia.org goes down
> > all traffic goes to a page that says that Wikipedia is
> > down and will be back up as soon as possibel.
>
> Even better would be to redirect to read only mirror,
> updated nightly.
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

--
"Jason C. Richey" <jasonr at bomis.com>


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikipedia-l] ISBN links

body:
On mar, 2003-02-04 at 14:10, Jan Hidders wrote:
> 2. The ISBN numbers would not link to a single book store but to a special
>    page that contains a list of links that each look the ISBN number up with
>    another on-line book store that provides such a service.

That's exactly what we do right now.

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

body:
On mar, 2003-02-04 at 17:38, Modemac wrote:
> On Wed, 5 Feb 2003 01:22:04 +0100 (CET), Chuck Smith:
> >I'm not some little jerk, but I think it would be cool
> >to have a copy of the Wikipedia on my hard drive.  Is
> >there a place where I can download just the text
> >(without all the older versions, etc.) ?
>
> There's a section especially for downloading a gzipped archive of
> Wikipedia at:
> http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3ADatabase_download

Chuck, the "cur" SQL dumps linked above is the core of what you want --
they contain just the current revisions of all articles in each
language. But, they're in the format of giant SQL statements that shove
all the data back into a database...

If you want it split into casually-accessible text files, a relatively
simple filter could be made to do that. If this would be useful, let me
know and I'll try to whip one up.

A while ago we had someone around the lists who had set up a conversion
to HTML files that could be stored on a disk and looked at in a browser.
I don't remember what became of that; check the archives...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
On mar, 2003-02-04 at 19:12, Jason Richey wrote:
> Anybody have an idea of how to implement such a "redirect", assuming
> that when we need the redirect most, we're in a situation where the machine
> that answers to the ip that the name wikipedia.org resolves to is
> totally incapable of doing anything, and we don't control the routers
> that the request would pass through.

Hmm, one could put a short TTL on the DNS entry, and swap it to point to
another machine in case of problems.

However that could be problematic in terms of hugely increasing traffic
for the DNS server.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Jason Williams

subject: [WikiEN-l] Blocked user report

body:
On Tue, Feb 04, 2003 at 02:52:47PM -0500, The Cunctator wrote:
> On Tue, 2003-02-04 at 11:28, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
> > Jimbo,
> >
> > In addition to blocking Isis at your and her mutual request, I also blocked 5 "MyPasswordIs" usernames. See below.
> >
> Please unblock these users. Blocking them just encourages the behavior.

And cleaning up vandalism encourages vandals?

--

jason at jasonandali.org.uk    http://www.jasonandali.org.uk/jason/


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] New language links, update

body:
I did some of the improvements I mentioned in my last post while the
mailing list was down. At the test site, all language links now come
from that new database. I already made some dummy entries to test on. So
please, try it. THose who have access to the server, please have a look
at the code (SpecialIntl.php, mostly), just so if the code goes live one
day, I will not be the only one to blame ;-)

Magnus


from_name: Modemac

subject: [Wikipedia-l] downloading Wikipedia

body:
On Wed, 5 Feb 2003 01:22:04 +0100 (CET), you wrote:
>I'm not some little jerk, but I think it would be cool
>to have a copy of the Wikipedia on my hard drive.  Is
>there a place where I can download just the text
>(without all the older versions, etc.) ?

There's a section especially for downloading a gzipped archive of
Wikipedia at:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3ADatabase_download

--
		      First Online Church of "Bob"
			http://www.modemac.com/


from_name: Axel Boldt

subject: [Wikipedia-l] ISBN links

body:
Fred Bauer writes:

> But it's not a valid objection, used books are easily located
> using the ISBN.

I'm interested in buying a used version of the book "Godel, Escher,
Bach" by Hofstadter. Which ISBN number do you suggest I use for
searching? Which ISBN number do you suggest we list in our Wikipedia
article? All of them? How many are there anyway?

--- Tom Parmenter <tompar at world.std.com> wrote:

> Should a system, flawed, dubious, that gives a fighting chance of
> tracking down a book be replaced by no system at all?

If that were the only alternative to the current system, then yes, I
would vote for removing all ISBN links, since they mislead people into
thinking that the identified version is the only one available.

> If you click on
> an ISBN and go to an online bookstore, you are in a position to not
> only buy the edition of the book in question (different editions have
> different contents, among other things, it may be ''that'' edition is
> the one you want),

True, but to make that decision, you would first have to know what
other versions and editions are out there. If you use the ISBN for the
Encyclopedia Britannica (0852297874), not even Amazon will tell you
that you can buy the same thing, fully searchable on DVD, for 5% of the
price.

> but you are also in a position to track down used
> editions, alternate editions, etc.

...and you would do that by cut-and-pasting the title and author into
the search field of bookstores, auction sites, Google, or maybe even
(gasp) libraries.

Why not facilitate this?

[[ref:book|title:Godel, Escher, Bach|author:Hofstadter]] is turned into
a properly formatted link to a special page which allows to search
library catalogs and (used) bookstores for a book with that title and
with that author. A couple more fields could probably be defined, such
as publisher, year, ISBN :-) etc., but they would be less useful for
searching.

[[ref:article|title:...|author:...]]  could automatically link to
searches on http://citeseer.nj.nec.com and http://arxiv.org until
there's something better.

Axel

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body:
We would have to initiate this from the machine that is not
responding, or we would have to have a router under our control
connected upstream.

The former, of course, won't work when the machine is not responding,
at least until we know why the machine stops responding (in which case
we don't need this solution anymore).  The latter exceeds our current
budget of $0.00.

Jason

Philipp W. wrote:

> >Hmm, one could put a short TTL on the DNS entry, and swap it to point to
> >another machine in case of problems.
> >
> >However that could be problematic in terms of hugely increasing traffic
> >for the DNS server.
>
> I tried this several times... i don't think it is a good idea.
> Isn't it possible to do a normal port-forwarding while doing some
> work on the server?
>
> Phil
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

--
"Jason C. Richey" <jasonr at bomis.com>


subject: [Wikitech-l] [brion@pobox.com: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Problem with "User Contributions"]

body:
> Forwaded from wikipedia-l... this seems like a good example to me of
> something that could be cached.  If someone requests "User
> Contributions" then if they've calculated it within the last 24 hours,
> say, then they should be given the cached version and told that a new
> one will be generated after midnight, or similar.

Brion has just fixed the contributions code, and now it's as fast as
recent changes (it uses the same table). Try it!

We're also making good progress on the other pages, and perhaps with Jan's
help we can do without caching even on the more complex queries.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [WikiEN-l] Blocked user report

body:
Cunc-
> Please unblock these users. Blocking them just encourages the behavior.
> If I'm not mistaken, you have not been granted authority to block those
> usernames.

When Ed wrote "block", what he meant was "change the password". In this
case, anyone could do that, so Ed did not need any special authority to do
so. In fact, I will change the passwords of new accounts of this type
myself if nobody else does. I have explained several times why these
accounts are a bad idea and suggested alternatives, but the user who
created them has ignored these suggestions.

Regards,

Erik


body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>It strikes me that some of our nice "extra" features, like Most
>Wanted, are slow and could also be just as useful (or nearly so) if
>they were not generated 'realtime', but rather if they were generated
>only once per day.
>
>
"Most Wanted" is already cached when invoked, and the cache is used in
"miser mode". That works good for Most Wanted, as the order of articles
doesn't change very fast, and created articles are clearly visible.

This will work less well on other "extra" features like "Orphaned
Pages". If one de-orphaned a page, it will still show on the cached version.

Magnus


from_name: Jan Hidders

subject: [Wikipedia-l] ISBN links

in_reply_to: <200302041937.OAA19913@TheWorld.com>; from tompar@world.std.com on Tue, Feb 04, 2003 at 02:37:31PM -0500

body:
On Tue, Feb 04, 2003 at 02:37:31PM -0500, Tom Parmenter wrote:
> |From: Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com>
> |Content-Disposition: inline
> |Sender: wikipedia-l-admin at wikipedia.org
> |Reply-To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
> |Date: Mon, 3 Feb 2003 06:36:22 -0800
> |
> |Axel Boldt wrote:
> |> I know that I have fought and lost this fight before. ISBN numbers are
> |> evil and should not be used to identify books. They identify *editions*
> |> of books, and in a couple of years all these editions will be out of
> |> print and all ISBN links in Wikipedia will be completely useless. Right
> |> now they are already useless if you are interested in buying used
> |> books.
> |
> |I'm listening.  This sounds like a valid objection to this particular
> |technical detail.
>
> Should a system, flawed, dubious, that gives a fighting chance of
> tracking down a book be replaced by no system at all?

I don't think that is exactly what Axel meant. He did not suggest that we
shouldn't use ISBN numbers at all but just that (1) we shouldn't use them as
the primary means of identifying books and (2) represent them as links that
lead to a certain book store. As an alternative we could do the following:

1. Give every book that we want to reference to its own page.

   That's probably a good idea anyway because it invites people to write a
   summary and perhaps a discussion of its relevance or whatever else is
   interesting to tell about it. A naming convention like "<title>,
   <author>" would probably be a good first approximation of a naming
   convention. On this page people can also put ISBN numbers if they know
   them.

2. The ISBN numbers would not link to a single book store but to a special
   page that contains a list of links that each look the ISBN number up with
   another on-line book store that provides such a service.

Note that this is not a big technical change, but largely a "style guide"
change. I believe that this is close to what Axel had in mind.

-- Jan Hidders


subject: [Wikipedia-l] ISBN links

body:
The ISBN number does not link to a single bookstore.  Try it.  It
links to two sites that survey apparently hundreds of online sources
as well as to the two biggest online stores.  Even if you don't want
to shop at Amazon or Barnes and Noble, these sites give lots of useful
information on the book so linked.

|From: Jan Hidders <jan.hidders at ua.ac.be>
|Mail-Followup-To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
|Content-Disposition: inline
|X-Spam-Flag: NO
|X-Spam-Status: Not checked, trusted sender
|X-Scanned-By: MIMEDefang 2.9
|Sender: wikipedia-l-admin at wikipedia.org
|Reply-To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
|X-Reply-To: hidders at uia.ua.ac.be
|Date: Tue, 4 Feb 2003 23:10:20 +0100
|
|On Tue, Feb 04, 2003 at 02:37:31PM -0500, Tom Parmenter wrote:
|> |From: Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com>
|> |Content-Disposition: inline
|> |Sender: wikipedia-l-admin at wikipedia.org
|> |Reply-To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
|> |Date: Mon, 3 Feb 2003 06:36:22 -0800
|> |
|> |Axel Boldt wrote:
|> |> I know that I have fought and lost this fight before. ISBN numbers are
|> |> evil and should not be used to identify books. They identify *editions*
|> |> of books, and in a couple of years all these editions will be out of
|> |> print and all ISBN links in Wikipedia will be completely useless. Right
|> |> now they are already useless if you are interested in buying used
|> |> books.
|> |
|> |I'm listening.  This sounds like a valid objection to this particular
|> |technical detail.
|>
|> Should a system, flawed, dubious, that gives a fighting chance of
|> tracking down a book be replaced by no system at all?
|
|I don't think that is exactly what Axel meant. He did not suggest that we
|shouldn't use ISBN numbers at all but just that (1) we shouldn't use them as
|the primary means of identifying books and (2) represent them as links that
|lead to a certain book store. As an alternative we could do the following:
|
|1. Give every book that we want to reference to its own page.
|
|   That's probably a good idea anyway because it invites people to write a
|   summary and perhaps a discussion of its relevance or whatever else is
|   interesting to tell about it. A naming convention like "<title>,
|   <author>" would probably be a good first approximation of a naming
|   convention. On this page people can also put ISBN numbers if they know
|   them.
|
|2. The ISBN numbers would not link to a single book store but to a special
|   page that contains a list of links that each look the ISBN number up with
|   another on-line book store that provides such a service.
|
|Note that this is not a big technical change, but largely a "style guide"
|change. I believe that this is close to what Axel had in mind.
|
|-- Jan Hidders
|_______________________________________________
|Wikipedia-l mailing list
|Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
|http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
|


body:
On Mon, Feb 03, 2003 at 05:51:23AM -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> It strikes me that some of our nice "extra" features, like Most
> Wanted, are slow and could also be just as useful (or nearly so) if
> they were not generated 'realtime', but rather if they were generated
> only once per day.

There's really still a lot we can do in terms of database optimization. I
have just installed Wikipedia at home again, and still have access with my
Sourceforge account (I think), so if Brion wants me to I could actually
start making my hands dirty again. :-) But when messing with the database
good coordination is extra important, so it should be very clear who is
working on what.

-- Jan Hidders


body:
> On Mon, Feb 03, 2003 at 05:51:23AM -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:
>> It strikes me that some of our nice "extra" features, like Most
>> Wanted, are slow and could also be just as useful (or nearly so) if
>> they were not generated 'realtime', but rather if they were generated
>> only once per day.

> There's really still a lot we can do in terms of database optimization. I
> have just installed Wikipedia at home again, and still have access with my
> Sourceforge account (I think), so if Brion wants me to I could actually
> start making my hands dirty again. :-) But when messing with the database
> good coordination is extra important, so it should be very clear who is
> working on what.

If you have a good connection, I suggest you import both the CUR and OLD
tables of the English Wikipedia. Some of the queries are dog slow even
when locally run.
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3ADatabase_download

Regarding coordination, you mostly need to check with Brion. Us others
primarily work on creating new problems ;-)

Thanks for helping out,

Erik


body:
> On the test wiki, I have created a special page to maintain
> interlanguage links. These are stored in a new database (wiki-intl).
> Please have a look at
>     http://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special%3AIntl
> and try the examples.

This page doesn't come up for me, nor do the add/edit links on the main
page.

Thanks for working on this, I'm excited to try it out.

Regards,

Erik


in_reply_to: <8fCNBwQhpVB@erik_moeller>; from erik_moeller@gmx.de on Tue, Feb 04, 2003 at 11:40:00PM +0100

body:
On Tue, Feb 04, 2003 at 11:40:00PM +0100, Erik Moeller wrote:
>
> If you have a good connection, I suggest you import both the CUR and OLD
> tables of the English Wikipedia. Some of the queries are dog slow even
> when locally run.
> http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3ADatabase_download

They are being downloaded as I type this, and yes, I have a fast connection.
:-) Thanks for the URL. Now let's hope my ISP doesn't think I'm downloading
DVDs. :-)

-- Jan Hidders


subject:
[Wikitech-l] [brion@pobox.com: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Problem with
	"User Contributions"]

body:
On mar, 2003-02-04 at 12:35, Erik Moeller wrote:
> > Forwaded from wikipedia-l... this seems like a good example to me of
> > something that could be cached.  If someone requests "User
> > Contributions" then if they've calculated it within the last 24 hours,
> > say, then they should be given the cached version and told that a new
> > one will be generated after midnight, or similar.
>
> Brion has just fixed the contributions code, and now it's as fast as
> recent changes (it uses the same table). Try it!

The problem was basically that for very active users, loading up a user
contribs list required sorting *thousands* of rows to pick just the last
50 and show them in timestamp order.

Right now I'm cheating by checking the recentchanges table first -- it
lists only the last few days' worth of edits, and even an active user
generally doesn't have too many edits in that time.

However a very active user who becomes inactive, and falls out of
recentchanges, would still be slow to query. Jan and Lars have suggested
using compound indexes which include the timestamp fields _and_ the user
fields so it can both select and sort using the index, and that sounds
reasonable in a sick sort of database-logic way. :)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
> On Mon, 3 Feb 2003, Jason Williams wrote:
> > [[User:MyPasswordIsHELLO]] - I think this user account should
> > be deleted, since it subverts the user account system.

Hmm, I'm wondering if we should make it clearer on the login page that
an e-mail address is *not* required to create an account.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Bug reports auto-notification

body:
Question: would anyone else like to receive automatic e-mail
notification of bug reports and feature requests filed at the tracker on
our SourceForge project?

If so, I can set up an alias address which will reflect to interested
parties and tell SF to send notices there instead of to me directly.

(Yes, people *do* file bug reports at the tracker.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [WikiEN-l] The disambiguation virus

body:
Hi,

the short version: Using the format e.g. "Java programming language" for
disambiguation is bad, because it leads to more links of the same style,
even where no disambiguation is needed. Since we have the "pipe trick", we
do not need this natural "disambiguation" at all.

The long version:

I've observed an effect which I call the disambiguation virus. As its name
suggests, it is a harmful effect that decreases the coherence of the wiki
by making linking harder.

The disambiguation virus requires another idea as its host: That "natural
disambiguation" is better than disambiguation in parentheses. An example:

        "Java programming language"

        vs.

        "Java (programming language)".

It is easier, this idea suggests, to link to [[Java programming language]]
in the text than to [[Java (programming language)]].

However, in many cases, this is not true. For example, when I write

"C++ has a clear speed advantage when compared with higher level languages
like [[Java programming language|Java]]."

I have to write more than when I write

"C++ has a clear speed advantage when compared with higher level languages
like [[Java (programming language)|]]."

What you see here is the "pipe trick", which removes rightmost text in
parentheses from the displayed link title.

But that idea is not the actual virus. The virus is far more dangerous.
Once someone starts a page with this "natural disambiguation", others
quickly add to it. I have already moved dozens of pages from "foo
programming language" to "foo". These pages did not require any
disambiguation! "COBOL" is obviously better as a page title than "COBOL
programming language".

The same is true for web browsers (so we get "MidasWWW web browser"),
languages ("Hamburger language", which is also inaccurate) and cheeses.
Once someone has started, other people use this format for all of the
links on the same page, whether they require disambiguation or not.

This is not the case with the "foo (bar)" format, which looks somewhat
uglier and is therefore avoided. But the "foo bar" format reads natural,
almost like we should always have this kind of qualifier in titles. After
all, it's nicer to know what the page is about by reading the title,
right? Wrong! Most pages that link to the title have already established
the context, there's no need for us to repeat that. This is evident from
e.g.

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabetical_list_of_programming_languages

This page actually uses only links of the form

[[foo programming language|foo]]

ARGH! Where context is really needed, it is better provided in the text
than in the link.

In conclusion, I suggest we avoid the "natural" format and move pages to
the "unnatural" one to reduce infection rate.

Regards,

Erik


body:
On mer, 2003-02-05 at 00:25, Andre Engels wrote:
> Ah! I found what's going on. The link does not work for anonymous users, but
> it does for logged-in users.
>
> Looks good, but there are some changes I would like to be made:
>
> * Do something about the error above - preferably make it work for
>   anonymous users; if that can't be done, remove the link.

Agreed! It's a little confusing, in that it doesn't come up. :)

> * Allow more than one link to be added to a single page

Yes; often (but not always) the link chain is fairly straightforward,
and a new article on 'Kofi Annan' in language X can be safely linked to
all other languages' 'Kofi Annan' equivalent. The 'Missing links'
function does this, but it's an extra step.

> * Show interlanguage links to existing and non-existing pages differently
>   from those to existing pages
>   (might be problematic because it needs information from several databases;
>    perhaps it's better to check this once a day or so, accepting that it will
>    sometimes be wrong)

Shouldn't be too hard to add an 'exists' field to the ilinks table...?

> * After a link has been added, don't go to the International issues main
>   menu, but to the 'edit interlanguage links' page of the original page.
> * Add a backlink to the page itself from its 'edit links' page.
>
> Thank you for your work on this!

Yes, go Magnus!!

Also, there are some weirdnesses with charsets. For sanity's sake, I
recommend that *all* data in the ilinks table be UTF-8. On the wikis
that remain in Latin-1 (hisss!), care should be taken to convert
appropriately.

As it is, the functions are a little broken; text input raw as latin1
will stay latin1, while text input with numeric char references turn
into UTF-8. (This is the situation with lang link interpretation at
present; it works under certain circumstances but is ultimately broken.)
The text is then dumped raw in the list-links page, so UTF-8 links will
look wrong on a latin1 wiki and vice-versa. Further, the outgoing UTF-8
links under this new system don't work yet, having gotten
double-converted somehow (so you visit a URL with a latin1-to-utf8
conversion of the UTF-8 bytes).

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject:
[Wikitech-l] [brion@pobox.com: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Problem
	with"User Contributions"]

references:
<8fCN50RxpVB@erik_moeller>
	 <1044432521.1054.3060.camel@rdaneel.vibber.org>
	 <006b01c2ccf2$7c0f3ac0$0101a8c0@arcsy.co.jp>

body:
On mer, 2003-02-05 at 00:42, Guillaume Blanchard wrote:
> Wikipedia re-create the recent change table at each querry of the recent
> change page ???
> If it is right, why not use a static table with the maximum length (500
> articles) updated only when articles are modify or when maintenance occur.
> Then display recent-change will just be to display this cached table.
> Am I wrong ???

We do have a table that caches just the last few days' worth of
recentchanges, so it's much quicker to query than the full 'cur' and
'old' revision tables.

Storing the HTMLized recentchanges would be of less help, as it changes
about as often as it is loaded...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
On mer, 2003-02-05 at 00:51, Andre Engels wrote:
> Might it be possible to store all changes _already sorted_ by date? Then one
> could just show the first 50 (or last 50 depending on sort order) hits
> without the need of any further selection or sorting.

I'm not sure that'd be reliable. Rows that are chronologically earlier
may be added to the database later -- undeletes, recombining histories
of broken articles, the great UseMod-Era History Restoration a few
months back. So the auto-increment per-row ID number isn't a reliable
indicator of chrono order. (Check some page histories on the English
wiki that date from 2001 for an example, the current hackish code does
just this and pays for it by sometimes being incorrect.)

Timestamp can't be the primary key alone, as we only have 1-second
resolution. Duplicate timestamps can, at least theoretically, happen.

If an index that both selects and sorts on all the criterea we need is
possible, that should do us well enough.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Temporally save page

body:
On mar, 2003-02-04 at 18:56, Pedro M.V. wrote:
> This is very interesting when there is a wikipedia server manteinance
> operation and the user cannot save it.

Hmm, at the very least the text should remain available in a textarea so
those using browsers that clear the form out when hitting 'back' can
still copy-paste and save to a text file on their machine.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
On lun, 2003-02-03 at 11:47, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Here's my WikiKarma: I spent the whole damn day trying to put out
> WikiFires and spread WikiLove, and managed to make virtually no
> headway with any of it.
>
> I'm *this damn close* to going on a banning spree.  But, I'll
> relax first.

There, there. We've all been having a tough WikiWeek (and it's only
Tuesday!) We'll pull through though...

Jimbo, I'd just like to thank you for continuing to support and host
this project, despite the enormous amount of crap you have to put up
with.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Chuck Smith

subject: [Wikipedia-l] downloading Wikipedia

body:
> Please don't do that, folks -- it slows the site for
> everyone to the
> point where it's barely usable.

I'm not some little jerk, but I think it would be cool
to have a copy of the Wikipedia on my hard drive.  Is
there a place where I can download just the text
(without all the older versions, etc.) ?

Thanks,
Chuck

=====
Interesting fact:  Google returns more
results for "Esperanto" than for "Catalan"
----------------------------------------
Learn Esperanto! - http://www.lernu.net/
Enciklopedio: http://eo.wikipedia.org/

___________________________________________________
Yahoo! M?viles
Personaliza tu m?vil con tu logo y melod?a favorito
en http://moviles.yahoo.es


from_name: Pedro M.V.

body:
My idea is create a http://GEN.wikipedia.com subdomain for international use ( gen : general ).

For example, one could see http://gen.wikipedia.com/wiki/Domobot and the web server would transport the user to http://ES.wikipedia.com/wiki/Domobot  ( imagining that the user has spanish like default language in the web browswer options).

So, the web  writers ( like  perhaps you and me ) can include the gen.wikipedia.com link in any page for all the (international ) users.

For this gen page it?s very important the [[lang:]]  links ( i.e. [[es:domobots]] indicates that the translation of english domobots in spanish is domobots too ).

If one user creates domobots in the german pages, s/he can add the links automatically to the page ( indicating: add the related links in another languages, in wikipedia ).

In the top of the german page would appear automatically [[en:domobot]] [[es:domobot]] and so on...

Regards.

BTW, I cannot use the "add language link" in the page.

---- Original Message -----
From: "Erik Moeller" <erik_moeller at gmx.de>
To: <wikitech-l at wikipedia.org>
Sent: Tuesday, February 04, 2003 11:50 PM
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Maintain language links, alpha version

> > On the test wiki, I have created a special page to maintain
> > interlanguage links. These are stored in a new database (wiki-intl).
> > Please have a look at
> >     http://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special%3AIntl
> > and try the examples.
>
> This page doesn't come up for me, nor do the add/edit links on the main
> page.
>
> Thanks for working on this, I'm excited to try it out.
>
> Regards,
>
> Erik
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


from_name: Jimmy Wales

in_reply_to: <20030203182820.28156.qmail@web40706.mail.yahoo.com>; from lapollutionestsimauvaise@yahoo.com on Mon, Feb 03, 2003 at 10:28:20AM -0800

body:
Bridget [name omitted for privacy reasons] wrote:
> I object strongly to DW being called an idiot.

So do I.

It's not always easy, but I think that the good people of wikipedia
should strive always for a higher plane of discussion than that of
people like DW.  If for no other reason than the purely practical --
if you leave me with a pristine "paper trail" that doesn't get us
involved in "who started it", it's a *lot* easier for me to identify
and neutralize troublemakers.

> Banning is for people that load goatse or change the dates of WWII
>to 1836-2321. Banning is not for somebody who writes, "Columbus was a
>slavetrader" or "The Israelis are actively conducting genocide in
>Palestine". Yes, anyone with brains know those statements are absolute
>truth, but it takes time to learn NPOV.

Well, banning actually *is* for people who write things like that.
Not if it's the first offense, because, as you say, it takes time to
learn NPOV.  But there are people who are disruptive because they
refuse to drop their POV and "competitive" writing tactics.

> Why? Why can't we all just get along? I don't see any reason we
>can't get along. I've obviously taken numerous steps to try and
>reconcile things,

But you've also taken numerous steps to alienate people further, such
as evading the ban by creating a new user name, and continuing to use
it even after I directly told you not to do so.

And then there's stuff like this:
> Oh, I almost forgot, for about the hundreth time, plz add some
>simple chatrooms like even the most moronic of websites have. You
>can't honestly expect to go another year without even one chatroom,
>can you?

You're not likely to get people's attention for requests when they
are phrased in such a hostile manner!

--Jimbo