from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

body:
So all he needs to do is bully people out of editing certain pages.
Giving out personal details on the net is dangerous, giving out other
people's details is criminal and should be stopped.

Can't we (or rather the people who keep getting threatened by him)
step to the police and get something done?

Mgm

On 4/25/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 4/25/06, Rob <gamaliel8 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Just got this charming missive.  If we're not going to do anything
> > about Brandt, I'll just stop editing the article like he wants because
> > I don't need to spend the rest of my life being hounded by a crazy
> > man.
> >
>
> Not much we can do. If he is starting to cause real world hassel
> probably best that you walk away and enjoy the other parts of
> wikipedia.
>
> --
> geni
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] Checkuser verification errors

body:
Make a claim that there was an error and request a second opinion at
Wikipedia:Requests for CheckUser. Our competence varies.

Fred Bauder

On Apr 25, 2006, at 9:03 PM, Cheney Shill wrote:

> How does one resolve errors in checkuser results?~~~Pro-Lick
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------
> Love cheap thrills? Enjoy PC-to-Phone  calls to 30+ countries for
> just 2?/min with Yahoo! Messenger with Voice.
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
Explain what you have done, in detail, in your request at
Wikipedia:Requests for CheckUser, especially if you have created
another account.

Fred Bauder

On Apr 25, 2006, at 10:11 PM, Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:

> Cheney Shill wrote:
>
>> How does one resolve errors in checkuser results?~~~Pro-Lick
>>
>>
>
> Just create another sockpuppet and ask for checkuser to be run again.
>
> --
> Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
> Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
> "We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
> Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Lars Aronsson

subject: [Wikitech-l] Define and Formalize wiki markup

body:
William Allen Simpson wrote:

> Actually, Jay, you must not go back in usenet far enough,
> because those actually *WERE* the old markup.  Underscores are
> _underlines_ and slashes are /italics/ (probably because of the
> association with slant).

Either way, I think this was discussed within the Wikipedia
community in 2001, when the project was less than a year old, and
the conclusion was that it could well have been the right thing to
do, but it was too late to change because there were already more
than 10,000 articles or something like that.

Nothing really stops you from downloading the latest dump, convert
it to your own favorite format, and set up your own fork.  But I
don't think any discussions will lead wikipedia.org to change.

You could even start alt.dumps.wikipedia where you post an article
(converted to Usenet markup) each hour for the next 125 years.

--
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se


from_name: Sarah Ewart

subject: [WikiEN-l] Unjustifiably blocked

body:
Your "detractors" were attempting to edit according to a consensus achieved on the talk page. You were attempting to ram through your personally preferred version and wear everyone else down until they gave up and submitted to you. You were told many times that your behaviour was not appropriate and you were  warned many times by many people for several weeks and despite what you say, at least two of the people who warned you are administrators. You just ignored everyone and continued editing against consensus. Your contributions show that you have contributed little to Wiki outside of trying to enforce you preference for the wording of one sentence in one article.

As for 3RR, it was explained to you at least once that you do not have to break the letter of that rule to break the spirit of it.

I can't believe you are genuinely surprised that the other editors on that page had had enough and sort administrative intervention after you ignored numerous appeals to stop. Seeking administrative intervention was discussed openly on the article's talk page. But you ignored that, too.

On 26/04/2006 4:40:26 AM, "Ricky Reno" <juice2122 at hotmail.com> wrote:
>First of all Guy, I've
>stated that I have not violated the 3rr and I also made a point of
>explaining that my detractors were doing what I was doing and much more as
>well as in a more aggressive manner.


list: foundation-l

from_name: Essjay

subject: [Foundation-l] Bot flagging, stewards, & bureaucrats

body:
Apologies if Rob has already posted this elsewhere, but I wanted to make
sure this was announced as widely as possible:

Developer Rob Church has enabled the [[Special:Makebot]] feature for
Wikimedia wikis; this feature allows local bureaucrats to flag and
deflag bot accounts on their projects.

Discussion on this proposal went on for quite a while, with almost
unanimous support from both stewards and bureaucrats alike; it was
approved by Jimbo (in March, I believe) for implementation.

A big thanks to Rob for working up a great extension (I've already used
it on en.wiki, and it works beautifully), and to those who supported
it's implementation.

As a side note, I suppose this means that stewards will be getting out
of the bot flagging business on projects with local bureaucrats? (I've
started a thread on [[m:Talk:Requests for bot status]] on the subject,
if anyone would like to comment.) I may be being a bit bold in doing so,
but I encourage those who read the list to make the communities on their
respective wikis aware of this new responsibility for bureaucrats.

Essjay

--
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Essjay
Wikipedia:The Free Encyclopedia
http://www.wikipedia.org/


subject: [Foundation-l] [Wikipedia-l] Bot flagging, stewards, & bureaucrats

body:
Apologies if Rob has already posted this elsewhere, but I wanted to make
sure this was announced as widely as possible:

Developer Rob Church has enabled the [[Special:Makebot]] feature for
Wikimedia wikis; this feature allows local bureaucrats to flag and
deflag bot accounts on their projects.

Discussion on this proposal went on for quite a while, with almost
unanimous support from both stewards and bureaucrats alike; it was
approved by Jimbo (in March, I believe) for implementation.

A big thanks to Rob for working up a great extension (I've already used
it on en.wiki, and it works beautifully), and to those who supported
it's implementation.

As a side note, I suppose this means that stewards will be getting out
of the bot flagging business on projects with local bureaucrats? (I've
started a thread on [[m:Talk:Requests for bot status]] on the subject,
if anyone would like to comment.) I may be being a bit bold in doing so,
but I encourage those who read the list to make the communities on their
respective wikis aware of this new responsibility for bureaucrats.

Essjay

--
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Essjay
Wikipedia:The Free Encyclopedia
http://www.wikipedia.org/

_______________________________________________
Wikipedia-l mailing list
Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


list: wikimedia-l


list: wikipedia-l

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Bot flagging, stewards, & bureaucrats


from_name: Daniel P. B. Smith

subject: [WikiEN-l] the verifiability of articles we already HAVE

body:
A fire hydrant which appeared in the background of a picture of me
published in the local weekly newspaper, which is a published, print
source and arguably a reliable source.

Before we put too much energy into hairsplitting as to whether this
fire hydrant is verifiable and therefore encyclopedic, click the
"random page" article and look at the article we already _have_.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fath_Jang_Mir_Osman_Ali_Khan_Asif_Jah_VII
--a biography with NO references at all

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renishaw_Hall
--OK assuming we accept the official website and a "gardenvisit"
website as reliable sources, which I do

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arde?en
--A substub with NO references at all

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustaf_Skarsg?rd
--OK assuming we accept imdb as a reliable source, which I do

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_storm
--a long, well-written article about a scientific subject that has
_no_ explicit sources for any items in it. Could subtle vandalism be
detected in this article by anybody but the contributors of the
information? There are nine books under "suggested reading" and four
"see also" web references which probably could source most of the
information, but there's no way to locate which is the source, for,
say, the biology section, which is probably somewhat controversial.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MapleStory
--a long article about an MMORGP with no explicit references for any
particular facts in it, but a slew of external links to official
websites and fansites

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essequibo_Islands-West_Demerara
--A geography article with NO references at all

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clement_A._Evans
--A biography article with a single book listed as reference, but
apparently one would need to skim through the whole book to find the
sources for any of the facts in the article.

...and on and on it goes.

Probably less than 5% of Wikipedia's content actually meets [[WP:V]],
[[WP:CITE]], and [[WP:RS]]. P

robably much less than half of Wikipedia's content meets it even by
the most charitable interpretation, in which one a) assumes that
external links to websites run by organizations that are not
disinterested in their subject matter are reliable sources (I'm
thinking of things like websites about historic-house museums and the
like, which are probably mostly sorta-kinda-OK but probably are
inclined to present the "authorized-biography" view of things), and
b) assumes that most of the facts in the article could be found in
the externally linked websites.

Spot-checking, by the way, shows that that is often NOT the case.
Articles of that kind often start out as, well, paraphrases of
external website content, then gradually acquire an accumulation of
interesting things that, I believe, people think they know about the
topic and add to it, without bothering to add any supporting references.


from_name: Pete Bartlett

body:
On Wed, 26 Apr 2006 06:11:55 -0400, Guy wrote:
>DPB Smith
>>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MapleStory
>>--a long article about an MMORGP with no explicit references for any
>>particular facts in it, but a slew of external links to official
>>websites and fansites

>Sometimes I think I'm in the wrong project.  That article is well over
>*three times* the size of the one on Robert Hooke, and then there's a
>listcruft of monsters as well.

As long as your instinct is to see what you can do to improve the Hooke article,
rather than castrate the MMPORG one, you're in the right project :)


from_name: Anthony DiPierro

body:
On 4/26/06, Daniel P. B. Smith <wikipedia2006 at dpbsmith.com> wrote:
> A fire hydrant which appeared in the background of a picture of me
> published in the local weekly newspaper, which is a published, print
> source and arguably a reliable source.
>
> Before we put too much energy into hairsplitting as to whether this
> fire hydrant is verifiable and therefore encyclopedic, click the
> "random page" article and look at the article we already _have_.
>
I'd imagine as long as there are people putting their energy into
removing verifiable and encyclopedic content from Wikipedia there will
also be people putting their energy into keeping it in there.  Nothing
you say is going to change that.  The only thing that's going to stop
the waste of energy is for true consensus to be reached.

Anthony


body:
>It is just so tempting to add all five volumes of Gunther into the
>Hooke article :-)
>Guy (JzG)

I don't know much about the publishing history of that work (or indeed the work itself til about five minutes ago)
but you could be sitting on a small fortune there: http://www.antiqbook.com/boox/cum/212364.shtml .

Also Gunther Sr died in 1940, so not long til public domain ... you'd better get scanning :)


from_name: William Allen Simpson

subject: [Wikitech-l] odd behaviour of {fullurl:...}

body:
Rob Church wrote:
> On 26/04/06, William Allen Simpson <william.allen.simpson at gmail.com> wrote:
>> And speaking of syntax, why {{fullurl: instead of {{#fullurl: to match
>> the latest parser syntax?
>
> Because the "latest" syntax comes from an extension written a long
> time after the first magic words were.
>
Sorry, my query wasn't sufficiently explicit.

What are the technical reasons for the syntax "{{fullurl:"?

What are the technical reasons for the syntax "{{#if:"?

My underlying question: are these planned differences or arbitrary?

And this may be related to my lack of understanding of the difference
between "magic words" and "parser extensions"....

Could somebody please explain?


body:
Locke Cole wrote:
> Agreed. And I've entered what I believe to be an accurate (or at
> least, accurate enough to diagnose and fix the issue) bug report at--
>
> http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5720
>
> Vote/comment/etc. as you see fit. =)
>
A fine report.  And disconcerting to find that this has been a problem
since http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=839 (2004-11-07).

Meanwhile, I'm still hoping that somebody can remember why the escaping
stopped at the pipe, while the piped '|' arguments are properly converted
to '&' arguments.  This must have been a deliberate design decision.

And, while I'm thinking about it, what exactly the difference is between
fullurl and fullurle?  I haven't been able to find any documentation.


from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] 18 months

body:
On 4/26/06, Pete Bartlett <pcb21 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> You also note that other projects are stumbling along and that they
> are cause a sub-division of effort. We should change things so that
> projects collaborate routinely. You can click on any word in Britannica
> Online and get a dictionary definition for example. Why not have this in
> Wikipedia?
>
> Why not have extensions that auto-detect the existence of quotations
> or source material by or about a person and even drag a snippet of it
> into the sidebar?
>

Because our Devs are already hopelessly overloaded with feature requests.

--
geni


body:
I ran into this problem with [[BatMUD]]. Anything I write is from
personal experience or is drawn from material written by group which
controls the game. This makes it impossible to resolve content
conflicts as each party has a perfect reason for deleting the content
of the other. Original research or autobiographical writing. So the
article does not contain the sharp criticisms it might, nor does it
fully satisfy those who would promote the site. I gave up struggling
over this due to my position as an arbitrator. Not seemly to get into
a dirty edit war when I'm in the wrong from edit one even if the
other party is too.

Fred

On Apr 26, 2006, at 7:30 AM, Erik Moeller wrote:

> The real problem is not that we have an extremely detailed article
> about MapleStory. In fact, that is a good thing. Who will describe the
> cultural artifacts of the early 21st century in detail, if not us?
> Academia can never catch up with the pace of development of these
> games. Incidentally, I was recently trying to learn more about the
> MMORPG phenomenon, and guess what my best source of information was?
> Wikipedia, of course.


from_name: Stan Shebs

subject: [WikiEN-l] 18 months

body:
Pete Bartlett wrote:

>
>Why is de: better than en: is a great question. They appear to have
>covered classic encyclopedic topics much better than en: and
>their proportion of Exzellente Artikeler is double that of our FAs, despite
>standards. How to learn from de would be a great thing to discuss.
>
In a word: "Ordnung".

The full range of connotation is not easily translated into English,
but the disambig for de:'s [[Ordnung]] connects to lots of telling
things, such as en:'s [[social structure]] and the like. At the risk
of playing amateur sociologist and offending everybody, I'll opine
that while the German cultural liking for "Ordnung" sounds to USians
and Brits an awful lot like a compulsion to "follow orders", in
the WP context I think it translates to a greater sense of duty to
help achieve communal goals.

For instance, while I will likely will get tired of writing about a
proper topic like fish anatomy and impulsively shift over to something
trivial like old D&D modules, the German editor will tend to feel
bound to finish with the fish anatomy first. Multiply that by
thousands of editors, and you can see where the one would end up
with lots of good articles, and the other with lots of new articles.

So I think the difference is reflective of some deep cultural
differences, and not easily changed. Still, it wouldn't hurt to
use de: as a real-life example of how en: can do better - it's not
the wiki software or process that is limiting us, but our own lack
of discipline.

Stan


from_name: Rob Church

body:
On 26/04/06, William Allen Simpson <william.allen.simpson at gmail.com> wrote:
> And speaking of syntax, why {{fullurl: instead of {{#fullurl: to match
> the latest parser syntax?

Because the "latest" syntax comes from an extension written a long
time after the first magic words were.

Rob Church


from_name: Fastfission

subject: [WikiEN-l] Fair use image galleries in articles

body:
On 4/25/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> It's also important to remember that works published before 1989 in the
> US had to have a copyright notice.  Without that they were and continue
> to be in the public domain.  Copyright then was not automatic.

Just to be picky (as one should be, I suppose, with legal things) --
works published in the US between 1923 and 1977 without a copyright
notice are in the public domain; works published between 1978 until
March 1, 1989 without a copyright notice and *without subsequent
registration* are in the public domain.

FF


subject:
[WikiEN-l] One the Virtues of protecting one's pseudonymity,
	WAS: More legal threats from Brandt

body:
On 4/25/06, Rob <gamaliel8 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Too bad you couldn't go back in time to give that particular advice to
> myself as a college freshman.

I think the "Infinite Archive" effect will affect three main classes
of people the most:

1. People with very distinctive names (people with names like "John
Smith" have little to worry about, since Google is flooded with
entries on them).
2. People who get interested in the internet at an age where they
don't care about or realize the consequences of having tons of public
records about them sitting out in the open (difficult to retract most
of them), or didn't realize that Usenet and Yahoo Groups and other
such services kept archives which are then googleable.
3. People who have/had strong interests in anything who also fall into
one of the above groups.

I personally meet all three of the above characteristics, much to my
present annoyance.

FF


from_name: Robert Rapplean

subject: [Wikitech-l] Dumps

body:
You're looking at a few technical challenges in accomplishing this.  The
first is finding time to do a back up of the MySQL database.

Question: does that already happen?  I would hope so.  If so, you can
produce a dump of the backup at no loss of time to the main server.

Second, there's the issue of getting the dump to the duplicate site.  How
big is the dump of 1.1 million articles?  Probably too large for a normal
download.  This leaves you with a few options.

1. You can burn it to multiple DVD's once and ship it, and he can live with
the increasingly out of date version.
2. He can pay for a subscription, and you can pay someone to burn DVD's of
the backup on a regular basis.
3. If you wind up with enough demand for it to pay for a separate server,
you can set up a bittorrent feed on a regular (weekly or monthly) basis.

Getting it loaded shouldn't be too much trouble.  Essentially it would be no
different than restoring a backup on crash.  It would even be fairly easy to
automate for a subscription basis.

Seriously, folks, the guy wants to hand someone cash money to get this
done.  Why are you psychoanalyzing him?  I'm certain that the Wikipedia
project could put any profit from said cash money to good use.


from_name: Evan Martin

subject: [Wikitech-l] how to find out: "double" users and administrators

body:
On 4/26/06, Neil Harris <usenet at tonal.clara.co.uk> wrote:
> A shared writing style, including the use of characteristic idioms,
> spelling mistakes and punctuation foibles, is often a dead giveaway in
> these cases.  It's hard to consistently disguise one's writing style
> over a long period of time without serious effort. This is best spotted
> by the experienced human eye -- at the moment, there's no automated
> support for this kind of analysis in MediaWiki.

There were some interesting studies that found that a machine learning
based system could distinguish male from female authors based solely
on the writing style.  Maybe this would be a good SoC project for a
computer science student?


from_name: Reinhardt WIEWE @ torg.is

body:
On Tue, 25 Apr 2006 19:38:55 -0400
 William Allen Simpson <william.allen.simpson at gmail.com> wrote:
> A couple of us were trying to figure out the syntax to add a working
> link to Special:Log in a template.
>
>   [{{fullurl:Special:Log|page={{{1}}}{{{2}}}}} log]
>
> Works fine as long as parameter 2 is only one word.  With a space in 2,
> only the first word shows up in the URL.
>
> Tried wrapping {{fullurl:{{{1}}}{{{2}}}}}, but page= won't take a full
> page name.
>
>   [{{fullurl:Special:Whatlinkshere/{{{1}}}{{{2}}}|limit=999}} links]
>
> Always works.

As far as I know this will fail if Special:Whatlinkshere/{{{1}}}{{{2}}} is
longer then 255 characters. In such case one should / might use "&target=".

> Is there some reason that fullurl stops encoding spaces to underscores
> when it runs into a pipe?
>
> And speaking of syntax, why {{fullurl: instead of {{#fullurl: to match
> the latest parser syntax?

regards reinhardt [[user:gangleri]]


from_name: Magnus Manske

body:
Timwi schrieb:
> Hello everybody. I haven't participated on this list for a while, but I
> have been drawn attention to this thread.
>
>
>> With that said, I am interest in such project if it involves coding.
>> To make this change into a valid summer of code project, I propose to
>> do a wiki parser, for which I have already designed some draft rules
>> in a yacc/bison manner.
>>
>
> I am interested in continuing developing my parser (flexbisonparse) if
> other people are interested in helping me. I am happy to explain what I
> remember of how it works, because I know it's really hard to figure out,
> but I'm sure it's not that hard to explain.
>
> I am disappointed that people are *still* trying to re-start the effort
> from scratch. Surely the plethora of existing parsers has shown that
> every new effort will end up the same, especially if no effort is made
> to understand the existing unfinished products and to recognise their
> flaws and faults. You'll just make the same mistakes again and again.
>
As this is probably aimed at me :-) I tried to improve the
flexbisonparse software, but I don't have that much experience with the
matter, so I failed to understand the inner workings, especially of the
lexer, which frankly looks like crypto to me ;-)

My wiki2xml acually rebulids the workings of a "real" parser, except it
is not generated by a compiler-compiler but manually. While this
potentially adds another error source, it is not that different from a
real parser IMHO.
> My mistake was to fail to recognise the importance and complexity of
> HTML and HTML-like tags in the wiki mark-up. My parser can parse
> everything non-HTML/SGML-based that was part of the syntax at the time I
> wrote it. With co-operation, I'm sure we can do the rest. Without, I'm
> sure no-one can.
>
I think you'll also find that "template hell" has gotten worse since the
day. While improving wiki2xml, I found lots of constructs that cannot be
resolved by putting the template name and paramaters in a neat XML tag.
Live transclusion and changing of the very text that is parsed is IMHO
the only solution to generate valid XML while maintaining the indended
result. This might prove hard to do in bison, though.

Magnus

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from_name: Rob

subject: [WikiEN-l] Verifiability equating to notability

body:
On 4/25/06, Philip Welch <wikipedia at philwelch.net> wrote:
  >  . I don't think poor Mr. Hitler deserves mention in
> Wikipedia, however.

Does he know Brian Peppers?


from_name: Chad Perrin

body:
On Wed, Apr 26, 2006 at 05:55:17PM +0100, Timwi wrote:
> Chad Perrin wrote:
> >
> > My impression is that it's aimed at "everybody" -- which includes me.
>
> It is definitely not aimed at _pleasing_ everybody, especially not
> minorities like programmers.

Hopefully it's not aimed at disenfranchising "minorities", either --
especially since minorities like programmers aren't as much of a
minority at Wikipedia as they are at, say, the Coopersmith's bar
downtown.

--
Chad Perrin [ CCD CopyWrite | http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
"It's just incredible that a trillion-synapse computer could actually
spend Saturday afternoon watching a football game." - Marvin Minsky


from_name: Travis Derouin

subject: [Wikitech-l] Hacking days at Wikimania this summer?

body:
Hey,

I haven't seen anything on the Wikimania site, is there going to be a
Hacking Days session this summer?

Thanks,
Travis


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] Blocked

body:
The possibility exists of resolving the "legal dispute" so we could
hear this appeal at the arbitration committee level. Perhaps it was
just a misunderstanding

Fred

On Apr 26, 2006, at 12:36 PM, charles matthews wrote:

> "Robert Isherwood" wrote
>
>
>> I would like to formally appeal against being banned.  I want my case
>> looked at again. Can someone please advise me how to go about
>> this. User
>> Robert I
>>
>
> An appeal lies to Jimmy Wales, from the Arbitration Committee decision
> concerning [[User: Robert I]].
>
> When you have raised this before, there has been a spectre of legal
> action.
> This is not helpful, to put it mildly.
>
> Charles
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Guy Chapman aka JzG

subject: [WikiEN-l] Unjustifiably blocked

body:
On Wed, 26 Apr 2006 05:24:40 +1000, you wrote:

>I can't believe you are genuinely surprised that the other
>editors on that page had had enough and sort administrative
>intervention after you ignored numerous appeals to stop.
>Seeking administrative intervention was discussed openly on
>the article's talk page. But you ignored that, too.

I agree.  On the other hand, I also agree that putting *also known as
"The King of Pop" or "Wacko Jacko"* in the first para is absurd.  This
is supposed to be an encyclopaedia.  I have no time whatsoever for POV
pushers and edit warriors (oh, wait, that would be me, I guess) but
given that these are informal usage only, I would be surprised if
other encyclopaedias included it in the lead like that.  Sure, have it
in the article, but not in the first para.
Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


body:
On Tue, 25 Apr 2006 16:28:01 -0500, you wrote:

>My point regards ANY POV-pushing source. Rightest rags don't work either.
>-- Chris (Gudsthegn)

Sure.  But if you're making strong statements about the kinds of
sources which should be excluded per NPOV, it's best not to do it in
pejorative partisan terms.  As far as I'm concerned anything on Faux
News is considered false until proven correct :-)
Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Christopher Erickson wrote:

>My beef is this ... What counts as a reliable source?  Does a mention of a
>POV-pushing political phrase in heresy-hunting leftist rag count as a
>reliable source, such that said phrase could be used to label people and
>parties that may go 10 or 20% in the general direction claimed, but not the
>100% claimed by the label applied to them?  Lately I've had such run-ins.
>POV-pushing publications (even if respected by otherwise respectable people)
>do not count as verifiability.
>
Rewrite the above substituting only "rightist" for "leftist" and the
results come to the same thing.  If you get away from political
philosophies we'll have the same problem with other word pairs.

If in striving for NPOV we need to depend on a POV that determines a
"reliable source" we haven't got NPOV at all.  The best we can do is
link to an article about the publication in question where hopefully
there will be enough objective criteria to allow the reader to decide
for himself.  If we quote some article titles from  the publication
itself it will be evident that the articles, "Economic Gains of the
Socialist Revolution," and "Human Rights Violation of the Socialist
Revolution," will represent magazines with conflicting perspectives.
How can we possibly come to the conclusion that any publication is
POV-pushing  without engaging in Original Research about that publication?

Ec


from_name: Kyle Anderson

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Strange behaviour opening an article
	on	en.wikipedia

body:
I'll be there tonight in at about 5:00UTC.

On Tue, 2006-04-25 at 15:45 -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:
> Tjipke de Vries wrote:
> > Warning: fopen(/tmp/mediawiki/messages-enwiki) [function.fopen]: failed to
> > open stream: Read-only file system in
> > /usr/local/apache/common-local/php-1.5/includes/MessageCache.php on line 105
> > (10.0.5.3)
>
> srv20 remounted its filesystem read-only after some disk errors. I've shut it
> down, Kyle can pull it for disk replacement when he's next on site.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


body:
Pete Bartlett wrote:

>----- Original Message ----
>From: Philip Welch
>
>
>>>I had a bash at creating a proposal which would define notability on
>>>wikipedia as meaning that an article or topic is mentioned in a third
>>>party reliable source.
>>>
>>>
>I can provide multiple third party reliable sources as evidence that
>there is a four way stop on the intersection between Merman Drive and
>Terre View Drive in Pullman, Washington. Does that mean that
>aforementioned four way stop is worthy of mention in Wikipedia?
>
>
>Recalling Jimbo's "Ten Things That Should Be Free"
>(http://many.corante.com/archives/2005/08/05/jimbos_problems_a_free_culture_manifesto.php)
>
>in particular number 7: Free the Maps!
>
>I would say absolute yes that information should be in a Wikimedia project that
>seamlessly integrates into Wikipedia.
>
Perhaps when we are faced with information about such an obscure
intersection the question should be, "Where does it belong?" and not
"Wat's the quickest way to get rid of it?"

Ec


from_name: Rowan Collins

body:
On 26/04/06, William Allen Simpson <william.allen.simpson at gmail.com> wrote:
> And, while I'm thinking about it, what exactly the difference is between
> fullurl and fullurle?  I haven't been able to find any documentation.

As noted on http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Variable
"Localurle and its counterpart fullurle perform additional character
escaping on the resulting link, are intended for internal use only,
and work in wikitext only for backwards-compatibility reasons. The
unescaped versions should always be used in wikitext."

As I remember it, {{fullurle}} was implemented purely for the sake of
completeness - since {{fullurl}} is just {{SERVER}}{{localurl}}, it
seemed logical to create a counterpart for {{SERVER}}{{localurle}},
even though it's never actually used, and never has been.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wars on wheels

body:
Philip Welch wrote:

>On Apr 23, 2006, at 12:33 AM, Steve Bennett wrote:
>
>
>>In other words: If the person you reverted accuses you of wheel
>>warring, then you wheel warred.
>>
>>
>And the only way of knowing that for sure before you revert is to
>contact the other admin before you do anything.
>
>In both cases, there's the admin absentee problem. Solution? Silence
>+ external consensus = consent to go-ahead. We're enough of a
>community that you can seek out another admin for a third opinion if
>the admin you're reverting isn't around.
>
It should be easy to look through the list of thosoe who voted for you
when you became a sysop for one who shares your Point of View, and can
help to guarantee the objectivity that you want.  ;-)

Ec


from_name: Alphax (Wikipedia email)

subject: [WikiEN-l] More legal threats from Brandt

body:
Rob wrote:
> Just got this charming missive.  If we're not going to do anything
> about Brandt, I'll just stop editing the article like he wants because
> I don't need to spend the rest of my life being hounded by a crazy
> man.
>
<snip>

The irony in all this is that Brandt started out claiming that he wanted
to protect people's privacy on the internet. How making everyone reveal
their names and IPs helps achieve this, I'm not exactly sure.

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

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from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Foundation-l] Use of spam blacklist

body:
As most of you are aware, there is a list of bad URL patterns which
cannot be added as links to any Wikimedia wiki. It is known as the
"spam blacklist" because its original purpose was to fight
bot-orchestrated spam attacks. There are currently some open and
recent discussions on

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Spam_blacklist

about some additions or possible additions to the spam blacklist of
sites which are not spam(med) in the traditional sense. This includes:

* Wikipedia Review, an anti-Wikipedia board. Note that WR has posted
personal information about some Wikipedia admins, and is generally
full of flames and personal attacks.
* Daniel Brandt's sites (Namebase, Google Watch etc.). Brandt has been
redirecting all incoming requests from Wikipedia to any of his sites
to Wikipedia Review. Brandt also runs his own "Hive Mind" page where
several Wikipedia admins are listed with their real world identities,
photos, locations, etc.
* Wikitruth. This is currently under discussion because it contains
content which has been deleted from Wikipedia, often for legal
reasons.
* Kapitalism.net, Lir's site, which also contains a lengthy
anti-Wikipedia rant. Lir has apparently been subverting some blocks to
add it to a few articles in Wikipedia.

Not expressing an opinion on this matter, I'd like to simply invite
more people to join the discussion on the talk page. One idea that has
been expressed is to have a separate list of sites which are not spam,
but which are blacklisted for other reasons.

It is worth pointing out that:
* The spam blacklist is used by quite a few non-Wikimedia wikis. This
may bolster arguments for separate lists, rather than simply separate
sections in the same file.
* The spam blacklist is designed to fight spam. It will not trigger on
normal mentions of a string of characters like "www.kapitalism.net"
(without the "http://").
* Even if you were to blacklist the string of characters, humans are
generally good at coming up with permutations that break filters.

That being said, please post your opinion of how to deal with these
sites on the talk page above.

Thanks,

Erik


subject: [Foundation-l] Use of spam blacklist


subject: [Wikitech-l] Use of spam blacklist


from_name: Death Phoenix

body:
On 4/26/06, Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 4/25/06, Rob <gamaliel8 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Too bad you couldn't go back in time to give that particular advice to
> > myself as a college freshman.
>
> I think the "Infinite Archive" effect will affect three main classes
> of people the most:
>
> 1. People with very distinctive names (people with names like "John
> Smith" have little to worry about, since Google is flooded with
> entries on them).
> 2. People who get interested in the internet at an age where they
> don't care about or realize the consequences of having tons of public
> records about them sitting out in the open (difficult to retract most
> of them), or didn't realize that Usenet and Yahoo Groups and other
> such services kept archives which are then googleable.
> 3. People who have/had strong interests in anything who also fall into
> one of the above groups.
>
> I personally meet all three of the above characteristics, much to my
> present annoyance.
>

Definitely 2 and 3 for me. My name is probably about as common as a "Mark
Harrison" (no, that's not my name) - not as common as John Smith, but common
enough for my identity to be safe.

An old work email address I used to (among other things) post to various
anti-spam newsgroups and to vote on the creation of new alt.* newsgroups is
*still* listed in some spammer's hatelists, even though that email address
is no longer active. I'm sure that notices from the FBI saying they are
investigating my online activities are still going to that address.


body:
Cheney Shill wrote:
> How does one resolve errors in checkuser results?~~~Pro-Lick
>

Just create another sockpuppet and ask for checkuser to be run again.

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

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Wheel warring

body:
Stephen Bain wrote:

>On 4/23/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>So, clearly a definition of "reverting any administrative action counts
>>as wheel-warring" doesn't work.
>>
>>
>It's because it focuses on the "what" - it needs to look at the "why".
>
>Take the example above of A blocking and B unblocking. Why did B
>unblock? Was it because the block was some sort of mistake (blocking
>the wrong range, or blocking an AOL proxy for too long, etc) or was it
>because B disagreed with A's interpretation of the user's edits? If
>there was such a disagreement, then why did B not discuss the block
>with A? It's that part which most people find problematic, the attack
>on someone's judgement, not the actual action of unblocking.
>
I would expect B to give a brief explanation of why he unblocked.  But
nuance the issue a bit more: A blocks for 1 week; B reduces the block to
24 hours.  Do you consider that to be a revert?

Ec


from_name: Mark Wagner

body:
On 4/26/06, Daniel P. B. Smith <wikipedia2006 at dpbsmith.com> wrote:
> Probably less than 5% of Wikipedia's content actually meets [[WP:V]],
> [[WP:CITE]], and [[WP:RS]].

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Carnildo/The_100
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Carnildo/The_100_Biography

It's not that bad.  Based on my "random article" surveys,
approximately one article in six has some form of referencing
(counting cited books, inline links, etc., but not anything in an
"external links" section), and about one article in ten has a formal
"references" section.

> Probably much less than half of Wikipedia's content meets it even by
> the most charitable interpretation, in which one a) assumes that
> external links to websites run by organizations that are not
> disinterested in their subject matter are reliable sources (I'm
> thinking of things like websites about historic-house museums and the
> like, which are probably mostly sorta-kinda-OK but probably are
> inclined to present the "authorized-biography" view of things), and
> b) assumes that most of the facts in the article could be found in
> the externally linked websites.

Under that criteria, about four articles in ten are sourced.

--
Mark
[[User:Carnildo]]


subject: [WikiEN-l] Babel template en-5

references:
<e2lm8l$qcc$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<f5238c30604251105x3b87e6ffr2b4a10e9529ecd6b@mail.gmail.com>
	<e2ma01$thj$2@sea.gmane.org>
	<f5238c30604251725h7dda9475w93b86cf6f1d37632@mail.gmail.com>
	<e2oa7m$hql$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
I don't use it, but I suspect en-5 was originally supposed to be used to
denote those who write English professionally, such as journalists, writers,
and editors. My own profession would probably qualify. However, I only use
the native English one to point out that, yes, I know English as a native,
but I find it really unnecessary from a Babel point of view to point out
that I can write professionally (especially when my quality of edits on
Wikipedia is often subpar).

I don't really see a need for en-5, but I don't begrudge those folks who
want to use it.


body:
On Wed, 26 Apr 2006 06:11:55 -0400, you wrote:

>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MapleStory
>--a long article about an MMORGP with no explicit references for any
>particular facts in it, but a slew of external links to official
>websites and fansites

Sometimes I think I'm in the wrong project.  That article is well over
*three times* the size of the one on Robert Hooke, and then there's a
listcruft of monsters as well.
Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


from_name: Ricky Reno

subject: [WikiEN-l] Blocked by Alkivar without Justification

body:
There has been no explanation as to how this alleged consensus has taken
place. It?s because there is no actual consensus on this. The only consensus
that exists is merely between the people on one side of the dispute. .
Alkivar has certainly abused his power on this occasion.  I have tried to
find out how to contact Alkivar however I?ve found it to be exceedingly
obscure to contact and reason with him. Can anyone help me in this regard.

_________________________________________________________________
FREE pop-up blocking with the new MSN Toolbar ? get it now!
http://toolbar.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200415ave/direct/01/


body:
On Wed, 26 Apr 2006 06:27:24 -0700 (PDT), you wrote:

>As long as your instinct is to see what you can do to improve the Hooke article,
>rather than castrate the MMPORG one, you're in the right project :)

It is just so tempting to add all five volumes of Gunther into the
Hooke article :-)
Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


from_name: Ivan Krstic

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki API (SoC)

body:
Ben Francis wrote:
> The suggestion of writing a
> programmable REST/XML-RPC/SOAP API that exposes MediaWiki domain objects
> is really quite exciting and I plan to apply with this project in mind.
> [...]
> It would be great to work with the pywikipediabot, perlmediawikiclient,
> and java mediawikiclient guys

I've decided a while back to have an API panel at Wikimania's Hacking
Days. The core MediaWiki hackers will all be there, and I'm hoping to
also bring out one of the core pywikipediabot guys.

FWIW, I'd discourage this being taken on as a SoC project this summer,
since it's a complicated problem that needs significant up-front
discussion with a variety of people before any code should be written.

--
Ivan Krstic <krstic at fas.harvard.edu> | GPG: 0x147C722D


body:
On Wed, 26 Apr 2006 15:30:06 +0200, you wrote:

>The problem I have seen, aside from the fact that many of these
>articles about games and movies are written by teenagers and read
>accordingly, is that they often focus entirely on the content of a
>game, movie, etc. The parts which are emotional are described in
>detail. However, little attention is given to aspects such as history,
>production, commercial success, critical reception. That is true for
>the MapleStory article as well. It is full of screenshots and details
>about gameplay. However, there is virtually no history or additional
>information to put the game into context.

Absolutely.  Many of them verge on howto or FAQ articles.
Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


from_name: Brion Vibber

body:
Ivan Krstic wrote:
> As an open reminder to the list: if you're doing something of interest
> to the core MediaWiki hackers and other deeply technical folk, and would
> want to present the work at Hacking Days, shoot me an e-mail and we'll talk.

Will there be separate registration for hacking days?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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body:
On 4/26/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
> On Wed, 26 Apr 2006 06:11:55 -0400, you wrote:
>
> >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MapleStory
> >--a long article about an MMORGP with no explicit references for any
> >particular facts in it, but a slew of external links to official
> >websites and fansites
>
> Sometimes I think I'm in the wrong project.  That article is well over
> *three times* the size of the one on Robert Hooke, and then there's a
> listcruft of monsters as well.

That shouldn't come as a surprise. MMORPGs are known for their
addiction potential. Players spend hundreds of hours in these games.
They form emotional attachments with the game and the players. Writing
about the game allows them to re-experience some of the positive
emotions they associate with it. The same goes for movies, fictional
realms, and so forth.

The real problem is not that we have an extremely detailed article
about MapleStory. In fact, that is a good thing. Who will describe the
cultural artifacts of the early 21st century in detail, if not us?
Academia can never catch up with the pace of development of these
games. Incidentally, I was recently trying to learn more about the
MMORPG phenomenon, and guess what my best source of information was?
Wikipedia, of course.

The problem I have seen, aside from the fact that many of these
articles about games and movies are written by teenagers and read
accordingly, is that they often focus entirely on the content of a
game, movie, etc. The parts which are emotional are described in
detail. However, little attention is given to aspects such as history,
production, commercial success, critical reception. That is true for
the MapleStory article as well. It is full of screenshots and details
about gameplay. However, there is virtually no history or additional
information to put the game into context.

Getting back on topic, perhaps one thing that would help is a "School
of Wikipedia" where new contributors can find mentors for different
aspects of editing, with rewards on completion of different courses
(the final exercise being to get an article to featured status). Has
such a thing already been tried? It seems one of the things that has
really worked well is the "barn star" reward model. Perhaps we could
also learn a lesson or two from MMORPGs, as long as it happens within
a very limited context such as such a School of Wikipedia.

Erik


body:
Travis Derouin wrote:
> I haven't seen anything on the Wikimania site, is there going to be a
> Hacking Days session this summer?

There certainly will; Aug 1-3 at the MIT Media Lab.

As an open reminder to the list: if you're doing something of interest
to the core MediaWiki hackers and other deeply technical folk, and would
want to present the work at Hacking Days, shoot me an e-mail and we'll talk.

--
Ivan Krstic <krstic at fas.harvard.edu> | GPG: 0x147C722D


list: commons-l

from_name: Felipe Micaroni Lalli

subject: [Commons-l] GIF antialiasing

body:
What happens with the GIF antialiasing? It don't work a lot of time. Why? It
never come back? Anyboby know about it?

thanks, hugs,
     Felipe.
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from_name: wiwo wowi

subject: [Wikitech-l] crear plantilla

body:
He visto en la wikipedia en espa?ol, en la palabra calamar, que hay una
especie de plantilla y dentro hay unos datos.

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calamar

Yo tengo unas cuantas plantas y me gustar?a crearme una wiki de ellas para
uso personal, me gustar?a que me dijerais como puedo crearme una plantilla
parecida con los campos que yo quiero.


from_name: Timwi

body:
Chad Perrin wrote:
>
> My impression is that it's aimed at "everybody" -- which includes me.

It is definitely not aimed at _pleasing_ everybody, especially not
minorities like programmers.


body:
> As this is probably aimed at me :-)

No, it wasn't aimed at anyone in particular. The criticism was general
and not aimed at your particular attempt. I know far too little about it
to even say whether I would consider it a parser or not.

Timwi


from_name: Robert Isherwood

subject: [WikiEN-l] Blocked

body: I would like to formally appeal against being banned.  I want my case looked at again. Can someone please advise me how to go about this. User Robert I


subject: [WikiEN-l] Babel template en-5

body:
maru dubshinki wrote:
> On 4/25/06, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
>
>>>Really? That's odd, because most of the non-native speakers I've met
>>>on Wikipedia were noticeably worse than native speakers.
>>
>>Those that aren't noticeably "bad" will not stick out to you as
>>non-native speakers.
>
> That would be true, except that I have a pretty good idea of the
> nationalities of various editors, and the non-native ones are
> noticeably worse. And besides, as others have pointed out, a crappy
> native speaker's writings are just plain *different* (as I know all
> too well from their frequent contributions to Star Wars pages) than a
> crappy non-native speaker's. To me, the difference is fairly striking.

I don't see how that difference is in any way relevant to this thread. A
crappy native speaker is no more useful to Wikipedia than a crappy
non-native speaker.

Timwi


from_name: Tels

body:
Moin,

On Wednesday 26 April 2006 01:27, William Allen Simpson wrote:
> Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
> > On Tue, Apr 25, 2006 at 07:21:37PM +0200, Tels wrote:
> >> Wouldn't that be *bold*, _underlined_ and /italics/? :-P
> >
> > In general, no.  Handwritten underlines are customarily rendered in
> > print as italics, hence that mapping.  You're right; the extra
> > flexibility would be nice, but it doesn't match what I most commonly
> > see people do, and that was my goal.  It makes no sense changing
> > markup just for fun; mine was an Installed Base attempt to conform
> > with the Principle of Least Astonishment.
>
> Actually, Jay, you must not go back in usenet far enough, because those
> actually *WERE* the old markup.  Underscores are _underlines_ and
> slashes are /italics/ (probably because of the association with slant).

Thats what I remember, too, but with so many new people rushing on the net
and everybody trying to do something clever, the original markups go
lost.

> Much to my surprise, I see that Thunderbird displays them!  So, we have
> both Installed Base and Least Astonishment.

Wow, didn't know that :)

Best wishes,

Tels

--
 Signed on Wed Apr 26 18:21:44 2006 with key 0x93B84C15.
 Visit my photo gallery at http://bloodgate.com/photos/
 PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email.

 "Eat, eat, eat, eat the delicious sandwich!" -- Elan the Bard (Order of
 the Stick)

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from_name: Platonides

body:
"William Allen Simpson"
> Locke Cole wrote:
>> William Allen Simpson wrote:
>>>   [{{fullurl:Special:Whatlinkshere/{{{1}}}{{{2}}}|limit=999}} links]
>>>
>>> Always works.
>>
>> Because it's part of the full URL generated (see below).
>>
> Look it is carefully.  It uses a / to indicate the parameter, yet when
> you use the navigation bar, it generates:
>   http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=
>   Special:Whatlinkshere&target=User%3AWilliam_Allen_Simpson
>
> I just tried hand typing:
>   http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=
>   Special:Whatlinkshere/User%3AWilliam_Allen_Simpson
>
> So, both forms work, and I'm guessing that the slash form was created as
> a workaround for the parsing issue.

Have into accont that you can use the slash form with a simple wiki link
[[Special:Whatlinkshere/User:William_Allen_Simpson]] while {{fullurl is
intended to use when you need to pass extra parameter which cannot be
created with wiki links, so you need a full url syntax.

>
>>> And speaking of syntax, why {{fullurl: instead of {{#fullurl: to match
>>> the latest parser syntax?
>>
>> Probably because the latter would break existing pages relying upon
>> {{fullurl: ...}}. Also, my understanding of {{# was that it was only
>> used for parser extensions (not built-in magic words/functions).
>>
> The "{{#if:" started using the standard PHP "if", although it now is
> a variant more like CPP #ifdef.
>
> I'm not clear on the difference between parser extensions and magic
> functions.  But I've not really looked at the code yet....

Magic words are like environment variables. Parser extensions are functions
called by a spell-word.

>> Anyways, getting back to the problem of spaces in parameters, I don't
>> think URL encoding parameters would work. A better solution (IMO)
>> would be to add two new magic words:
>>
>> {{urlencode:<string>}}
>> {{urldecode:<string>}}
>>
>> Which would allow us to encode/decode URL parameters as necessary. Now
>> if a dev could be convinced this is wise, we'd be set. =)
>>
> But urlencode and urldecode (and rawurlencode and rawurldecode) are PHP
> functions.  They don't work the way we'd like, they encode spaces as '+'
> "for historical reasons" (that is, M$ visual basic), while we need '_'.

You can use then str_replace(urlencode(<whatever>), "+", "_");
If there were plus signs into whatever they would've been %aged so  you're
using a urlencode-like function which replaces spaces into underscores.

What does MS VB have to do into it? The + sign is defined as a valid space
encoding at RFCs.

AFAIK, at the beginning, a way to encode a space was needed in order to
avoid it mistanding with the separator for the HTTP version field on the
request. Then more symbols needed escaping, thus developing the more
advanced %hex way, having the + form a %20 synonim.


from_name: Ilya N.

body:
hmm? I seemed to miss this! Good news

On 4/26/06, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Essjay wrote:
> > Apologies if Rob has already posted this elsewhere, but I wanted to make
> > sure this was announced as widely as possible:
> >
> > Developer Rob Church has enabled the [[Special:Makebot]] feature for
> > Wikimedia wikis; this feature allows local bureaucrats to flag and
> > deflag bot accounts on their projects.
>
> THANKS ROB !!!
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
~Ilya N.
http://ilya.nepfamily.com (My website; DarkLordFoxx Media)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ilyanep (on Wikipedia)
http://www.wheresgeorge.com - Track your money's travels.


from_name: maru dubshinki

subject: [WikiEN-l] Babel template en-5

body:
On 4/26/06, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> I don't see how that difference is in any way relevant to this thread. A
> crappy native speaker is no more useful to Wikipedia than a crappy
> non-native speaker.
>
> Timwi

You've completely missed my point. My point was that the distinction
was valid because on average native speakers are better than
non-native speakers for whatever language we are talking about, an
observation that meshes with common sense and my personal
observations.

~maru


body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> Will there be separate registration for hacking days?

Yes, there will. I will announce it here when we sort out exactly how
we're going about it.

--
Ivan Krstic <krstic at fas.harvard.edu> | GPG: 0x147C722D


from_name: Guy Chapman aka JzG

body:
On Wed, 26 Apr 2006 07:05:03 -0700 (PDT), you wrote:

>I don't know much about the publishing history of that work (or indeed the work itself til about five minutes ago)
>but you could be sitting on a small fortune there: http://www.antiqbook.com/boox/cum/212364.shtml .

My father is very keen on Hooke, and the five volumes I have (which
were bought for him as a birthday present by my mum.  They were
previously owned by Margaret 'Espinasse, who wrote an authoritative
biography of Hooke also cited as a source in the article.

We paid, I think, ?300 around 1985, but we don't have the other 11
volumes, and they are not a matched set.
Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


subject: [Wikitech-l] template

body:
I have seen in the spanish wikipedia, in the entry "calamar", that there is
some kind of template on the right-hand side.

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calamar

I have some plants and I would like to create a wiki for them to my personal
use. I would like you tell me how could I create a similar template as the
one displayed in the above wikipedia entry with the fields I want.


from_name: charles matthews

subject: [WikiEN-l] Blocked

body:
"Robert Isherwood" wrote

>I would like to formally appeal against being banned.  I want my case
>looked at again. Can someone please advise me how to go about this. User
>Robert I

An appeal lies to Jimmy Wales, from the Arbitration Committee decision
concerning [[User: Robert I]].

When you have raised this before, there has been a spectre of legal action.
This is not helpful, to put it mildly.

Charles


body:
On 4/26/06, Magnus Manske <magnus.manske at web.de> wrote:
...
> Sounds vaguely familiar. Let's see...
>
> * Avatars (user names) ... check
> * Thousands of players online at any time ... check
> * Highly addictive ... check
> * Players can engage in alliances (user page templates) ... check
> * Extreme players can become super-players (admins) ... check
> * Trolls ... check
> * (Edit) wars ... check
>
> Wikipedia - largest MMORPG *ever*!
>
>
> Magnus

Nah... I prefer the analogy of CCGs. One's deck corresponds to one's
watchlist. Every turn (or "day"), one goes through one's deck, drawing
certain edits. Careful strategic choice of edits allows one to
accumulate edits (one can choose to use one's limited time/number of
edit selections to revert vandalism, getting a moderate number of
riskfree additions to one's edit counts, or one can choose to revert
or add text, possibly starting a battle with the other player- a risky
ploy, but with the chance of reaping many additions to one's edit
count).

Once the draw phase is over, one then lays out one's policy cards
(each of which costs a certain number of edit points), and finally one
summons one's "monsters"- or editors, I should say. IE, one could
start with a lowly cheap anon editor, upgrading to a new registered
user. With the passage of three or four turns (or "days"), one's
registered editor evolves into a regular user. Regular users' stats
can be boosted.

If a player invests some policy cards and a healthy number of edit
points into a particular editor, he can activate the RFA policy card,
and flip some coins. If successful, the editor then becomes a dreaded
Administrator, with devastating powers of deletion and
stasis-inducing.

When the attack phase comes, such an editor will be a powerful asset
for a player (but expensive!). Of course, one can shun
the-few,-the-proud,-the-expensive strategy, and go for more of a
Zergling rush attack, or a "sock puppet strategy".

Of course, there is more to it than just editors and policy cards. One
has field bonuses, like Wikiprojects (ex: if a player has the Star
Wars Wikiproject on the field, and the current battle is over a Star
Wars-related article, the player's editors could get defense bonuses
or special summons), or magic cards like semi-protection (stops
lower-level editors cold).  And what would a CCG be without special
cards, such as (with apologies to Yu-Gi-Oh) "Limb of Wales"- assemble
all the pieces on the field, and you summon the God-King himself?

Victory of course comes when certain conditions relating to the
articles are met, or you destroy all the "tolerance points" of the
other player with your editors and the other person is indef banned.

~maru


from_name: Ben Francis

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki API (SoC)

body:
Hi,

Apologies for this dupe of a wiki discussion page, but this appears to
be where all the action is.

It's fantastic news that the WikiMedia Foundation has been accepted as a
mentor for Google Summer of Code 2006! The suggestion of writing a
programmable REST/XML-RPC/SOAP API that exposes MediaWiki domain objects
is really quite exciting and I plan to apply with this project in mind.

Do you think that this project suggestion is likely to make the final
cut? I'm starting to really set my heart on the idea but I don't want to
spend too much time thinking about it if it's unlikely to be used. I'm
not entirely clear on how the applicaiton process works (even after
reading the Google FAQ).

I commented on the wiki discussion page that there appears to be a third
party API run by Ontok (http://www.ontok.com/wiki/index.php/Wikipedia) -
I assume they have no direct affliation with the WikiMedia Foundation?
Will there be any need to contact those people?

Also, someone has linked to the alpha version of a query interface that
directly accesses the wiki database
(http://en.wikipedia.org/w/query.php), but like "IndyGreg" on the
discussion page I don't think this constitutes an API in the same sense
described here, would you agree? Perhaps eventually this code could be
integrated into the same extension.

It would be great to work with the pywikipediabot, perlmediawikiclient,
and java mediawikiclient guys to create something that they could all
use too, and the possibilities for the use of this API are endless!

Best Wishes

Ben

--
Ben "tola" Francis
http://hippygeek.co.uk


from_name: Rotem Liss

subject: [Wikitech-l] crear plantilla

body:
If you use the English language, more of us will understand you and will
be able to help you.

wiwo wowi wrote:

>He visto en la wikipedia en espa?ol, en la palabra calamar, que hay una
>especie de plantilla y dentro hay unos datos.
>
>http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calamar
>
>Yo tengo unas cuantas plantas y me gustar?a crearme una wiki de ellas para
>uso personal, me gustar?a que me dijerais como puedo crearme una plantilla
>parecida con los campos que yo quiero.
>_______________________________________________
>Wikitech-l mailing list
>Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>
>


from_name: Magnus Manske

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
> That shouldn't come as a surprise. MMORPGs are known for their
> addiction potential. Players spend hundreds of hours in these games.
> They form emotional attachments with the game and the players.
Sounds vaguely familiar. Let's see...

* Avatars (user names) ... check
* Thousands of players online at any time ... check
* Highly addictive ... check
* Players can engage in alliances (user page templates) ... check
* Extreme players can become super-players (admins) ... check
* Trolls ... check
* (Edit) wars ... check

Wikipedia - largest MMORPG *ever*!

Magnus


subject: [Wikitech-l] crear plantilla

body:
Esta pregunta est? fuera de lugar en esta lista.
Puedes ver http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template para entender un poco
como funcionan las plantillas. La taxobox en concreto es bastante
complicada.
Para consultas sobre c?mo 'funciona' la wikipedia, te aconsejo que vayas al
Caf? http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Caf%C3%A9

"wiwo wowi" <wiwowowi at gmail.com> escribi? en
el mensaje
news:dedc8c50604260822q501d1741j9614708ed7dad528 at mail.gmail.com...
He visto en la wikipedia en espa?ol, en la palabra calamar, que hay una
especie de plantilla y dentro hay unos datos.

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calamar

Yo tengo unas cuantas plantas y me gustar?a crearme una wiki de ellas para
uso personal, me gustar?a que me dijerais como puedo crearme una plantilla
parecida con los campos que yo quiero.


body:
On Wed, 26 Apr 2006 14:17:55 -0400, you wrote:

>There has been no explanation as to how this alleged consensus has taken
>place. It?s because there is no actual consensus on this. The only consensus
>that exists is merely between the people on one side of the dispute. .
>Alkivar has certainly abused his power on this occasion.  I have tried to
>find out how to contact Alkivar however I?ve found it to be exceedingly
>obscure to contact and reason with him. Can anyone help me in this regard.

Not unless you are going to give an undertaking to discuss all edits
on the Talk page and not simply wade in and revert war as you have
consistently done on this article.  For what it's worth I actually
agree that the items to which you object should not be in the first
para, but edit-warring is absolutely not the way to go about it.
Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


from_name: Rich Morin

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki API (SoC)

body:
At 3:16 PM -0400 4/26/06, Ivan Krstic wrote:
> FWIW, I'd discourage this being taken on as a SoC project
> this summer, since it's a complicated problem that needs
> significant up-front discussion with a variety of people
> before any code should be written.

I would love to see a first-cut API get developed, to take
the place of Pywikipedia.  I think that waiting until the
"correct" API has been determined is inappropriate.  Get
something usable, robust, and reasonably speedy in place;
then look for ways to refine and/or replace it over time.

-r
--
http://www.cfcl.com/rdm            Rich Morin
http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/resume     rdm at cfcl.com
http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/weblog     +1 650-873-7841

Technical editing and writing, programming, and web development


from_name: brion at pobox.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki automated test run failure 2006-04-27

body:
An automated run of parserTests.php showed the following failures:

Running test Table security: embedded pipes (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-April/034637.html)... FAILED!
Running test Magic Word: {{NUMBEROFFILES}}... FAILED!
Running test BUG 1887, part 2: A <math> with a thumbnail- math enabled... FAILED!

Passed 300 of 303 tests (99.01%) FAILED!


from_name: brian

subject: [WikiEN-l] Autoblock problem: not working, not right

body:
Hi, I was recently blocked by a great admin who seems to of gotten a little jaded.  The block was related to my alledged motives, which in reality were quite good!  Anyways, my block was supposed to end about 8 or 9 hours ago, so if someone with the know how would like to look into it, please give me a hand!

If you want to know why I was unjustly blocked (which I know you really do) please read on! PLEASE!

Well I had given up on wikipedia a few months ago, and had left my user:colle account to gather some dust.  But then you know what happens, I ended up coming crawling back---but I was only going to edit one article (Cuba).  I read the article before I went to Cuba, so it has a bit of sentimental value to me, but I digress.  So I made a new account rather than dig up the old password. Over a day or two I did some edits, worked on a sandbox, and signed a RFC. Unfortunatly I was labled a sockpuppet by an avatar and another user because I had unfortunatly appeared minutes after a high-profile editor was banned indefinatly.  So... I went and found my old accounts password (very lucky), and then used that account to prove I wasn't a sockpuppet by removing the "suspected sockpuppet of.." template from my new userpage, and replacing it with one stating "this user is the legitimate sock puppet of Colle."  The next day Sarah indef banned my legitimate sockpuppet, and gave me a 12
 hour break from editing.  I've tried to explain the situation, but I haven't had much progress getting back from her lately.  I really don't want people thinking I intentionally mess around with the system --it is just how it happened.  Also, I really didn't break any rules that I know of.  Thanks a bunch!

Brian

---------------------------------
Have a question? Yahoo! Canada Answers. Go to Yahoo! Canada Answers


from_name: Molu

body:
That's brilliant :Dlol:D

  Message: 9
Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2006 20:16:07 +0200
From: Magnus Manske
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] the verifiability of articles we already HAVE
To: English Wikipedia
Message-ID: <444FB8E7.7020701 at web.de>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

Erik Moeller wrote:
> That shouldn't come as a surprise. MMORPGs are known for their
> addiction potential. Players spend hundreds of hours in these games.
> They form emotional attachments with the game and the players.
Sounds vaguely familiar. Let's see...

* Avatars (user names) ... check
* Thousands of players online at any time ... check
* Highly addictive ... check
* Players can engage in alliances (user page templates) ... check
* Extreme players can become super-players (admins) ... check
* Trolls ... check
* (Edit) wars ... check

Wikipedia - largest MMORPG *ever*!

Magnus

---------------------------------
Talk is cheap. Use Yahoo! Messenger to make PC-to-Phone calls.  Great rates starting at 1¢/min.


from_name: Jochen Magnus

subject: [Wikitech-l] Dumps

body:
Well, here's "lexikon.rhein-zeitung.de" speaking ;-)

Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
> Yeah, but the *traffic* is part of the reason why the 'pedia is
> *useful*; it's Metcalfe's Law incarnate.  Pinching it off, and
> particularly to be "just another feature" on some other website...?

Our mirror is (I hope so) perfectly linked with the original Wikipedia.
Editing article by hyperlink into Wikipedia and creating new articles by
clicking on a "red" link is all realized. I think we are part of the
*traffic* and  therefore no obstruction of Metcalfes Law.

> And that's a perfectly good justification for an off-line copy.
> The keyword is, of course, "off line".

I don't think so. Off line copies are expensive and slow. We load every
recent "pages-articles.xml.bz2" dump from the mirror: one or twice a
month (475 MB for the german version at the moment). We check our
mirrored pictures against the recent images table and load only new(er)
images down.

We don't do this because it's nice to have. Our goal was and still is a
fully and performant integration of the encyclopaedia into the news
environment and layout of our online magazine. Beside an ordinary search
forms, our readers can retrieving the Wikipedia content by
doubleclicking each word in each text (most suitable for nouns). For
performance reasons and perfect layout integration, we need a mirror and
not only links to wikipedia.org.

Our Wikipedia mirror is also part of the intranet of some schools in the
county where internet access is restricted.

I hope that dumping wikis data will be handled as carefully in the
future as in the past -  and will be available *online* without snail
mail or mounted messengers :-)

Cheers

jo


body:
He he, that's even better :D How do you think of these things? Put this in the wikipedia namespace.

  Message: 8
Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2006 19:47:52 -0400
From: "maru dubshinki"
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] the verifiability of articles we already HAVE
To: "English Wikipedia"
Message-ID:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

On 4/26/06, Magnus Manske wrote:
...
> Sounds vaguely familiar. Let's see...
>
> * Avatars (user names) ... check
> * Thousands of players online at any time ... check
> * Highly addictive ... check
> * Players can engage in alliances (user page templates) ... check
> * Extreme players can become super-players (admins) ... check
> * Trolls ... check
> * (Edit) wars ... check
>
> Wikipedia - largest MMORPG *ever*!
>
>
> Magnus

Nah... I prefer the analogy of CCGs. One's deck corresponds to one's
watchlist. Every turn (or "day"), one goes through one's deck, drawing
certain edits. Careful strategic choice of edits allows one to
accumulate edits (one can choose to use one's limited time/number of
edit selections to revert vandalism, getting a moderate number of
riskfree additions to one's edit counts, or one can choose to revert
or add text, possibly starting a battle with the other player- a risky
ploy, but with the chance of reaping many additions to one's edit
count).

Once the draw phase is over, one then lays out one's policy cards
(each of which costs a certain number of edit points), and finally one
summons one's "monsters"- or editors, I should say. IE, one could
start with a lowly cheap anon editor, upgrading to a new registered
user. With the passage of three or four turns (or "days"), one's
registered editor evolves into a regular user. Regular users' stats
can be boosted.

If a player invests some policy cards and a healthy number of edit
points into a particular editor, he can activate the RFA policy card,
and flip some coins. If successful, the editor then becomes a dreaded
Administrator, with devastating powers of deletion and
stasis-inducing.

When the attack phase comes, such an editor will be a powerful asset
for a player (but expensive!). Of course, one can shun
the-few,-the-proud,-the-expensive strategy, and go for more of a
Zergling rush attack, or a "sock puppet strategy".

Of course, there is more to it than just editors and policy cards. One
has field bonuses, like Wikiprojects (ex: if a player has the Star
Wars Wikiproject on the field, and the current battle is over a Star
Wars-related article, the player's editors could get defense bonuses
or special summons), or magic cards like semi-protection (stops
lower-level editors cold). And what would a CCG be without special
cards, such as (with apologies to Yu-Gi-Oh) "Limb of Wales"- assemble
all the pieces on the field, and you summon the God-King himself?

Victory of course comes when certain conditions relating to the
articles are met, or you destroy all the "tolerance points" of the
other player with your editors and the other person is indef banned.

~maru

---------------------------------
Blab-away for as little as 1?/min. Make  PC-to-Phone Calls using Yahoo! Messenger with Voice.


from_name: Anthere

body:
Essjay wrote:
> Apologies if Rob has already posted this elsewhere, but I wanted to make
> sure this was announced as widely as possible:
>
> Developer Rob Church has enabled the [[Special:Makebot]] feature for
> Wikimedia wikis; this feature allows local bureaucrats to flag and
> deflag bot accounts on their projects.

THANKS ROB !!!


from_name: Pete Bartlett

subject: [WikiEN-l] CNN: Campaign manager resigns amid Wikipedia flap

body:
The campaign manager of a candidate in the Georgia (*)
gubernatorial election has resigned after someone in his
office changed the bio of her opponent.

Full story at:
http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/04/26/cox.wikipedia/

Another reminder to us and our fellow editors of the huge
responsibilty we all bear these days to edit well.

Pcb21

*that's the American one, in case you were wondering


from_name: Michael Lindeen

body:
Yes. And as we get larger and more prominent, this will become more
common, not less. Mike

On 4/27/06, Pete Bartlett <pcb21 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> The campaign manager of a candidate in the Georgia (*)
> gubernatorial election has resigned after someone in his
> office changed the bio of her opponent.
>
> Full story at:
> http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/04/26/cox.wikipedia/
>
> Another reminder to us and our fellow editors of the huge
> responsibilty we all bear these days to edit well.
>
> Pcb21
>
> *that's the American one, in case you were wondering
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Elisabeth Bauer

subject: [WikiEN-l] 18 months

body:
Stan Shebs schrieb:
> Pete Bartlett wrote:
>
>>Why is de: better than en: is a great question. They appear to have
>>covered classic encyclopedic topics much better than en: and
>>their proportion of Exzellente Artikeler is double that of our FAs, despite
>>standards. How to learn from de would be a great thing to discuss.
>
> In a word: "Ordnung".
>
> The full range of connotation is not easily translated into English,
> but the disambig for de:'s [[Ordnung]] connects to lots of telling
> things, such as en:'s [[social structure]] and the like. At the risk
> of playing amateur sociologist and offending everybody, I'll opine
> that while the German cultural liking for "Ordnung" sounds to USians
> and Brits an awful lot like a compulsion to "follow orders", in
> the WP context I think it translates to a greater sense of duty to
> help achieve communal goals.

As a german Wikipedian, I would dispute this. It is definitely not
Ordnung and a sense of duty which makes the difference between English
and German Wikipedia. And even if this claim comes up again and again,
I'm not even sure that German Wikipedia is really better than English
Wikipedia. They are different and have different strengthes.

Now...let me collect some differences, I leave it to the reader to draw
his own conclusions.

On 2nd April 2006 the category:Living people on en contained 81.930
entries while the number of _all_ german articles tagged with
Personendaten (=almost all wikified biographies) was 86.830. I was
surprised.

When I compare RfA on en and de, I count support votes on en:
31, 53, 45, 48, 61, 81, 28, 76, 50
on de:
72 (loosing candidate), 6 (loosing candidate), 93, 143 (loosing
candidate!), 92, 55
It seems rather strange to me that the bigger community has less
participation on such an important topic as is "who should become admin".
I didn't look at the criteria voters use on en, but they might be also a
bit different. On de candidates who really do a lot of useful cleanup
work are regularly turned down if they are not able to show that they
are also good authors. Other no-nos are bad behaviour, ignorance and
especially ignorance and wrong actions in image right questions.

Social structure. The german wikipedia has a geographical advantage here
 because it covers a smaller area than the english. I may be a bit
exceptional but my estimate is that I've met at least 150 wikipedians in
person. Those 150 wikipedians know others who know others... there is a
rather close network of personal relationships among german wikipedians
(including of course the wikipedians from Austria and Switzerland). This
becomes especially important in case of conflicts: a good editor in
wikistress, deleting his userpage and quitting? He'll be flooded with
emails and maybe a calm discussion with one of his friends on the phone
will sort the problem out.

Let's look at the structure of the IRC channels now. English wikipedia
has the general channel #wikipedia with an extremely low signal to noise
 ratio, the a bit more quiet #wikipedia-en and - I may be mistaken on
the following: a closed admin channel, a bootcamp, mediation, probation
and esperanza (whatever this is).

German wikipedia has: the general channel #wikipedia-de for socializing,
coordinating general work on the wiki, discussing events on wp, calling
an admin for quick vandal bans etc. Rarely people who chat too much off
topic (=not wikipedia related) receive a friendly kick.
Other channels: #hist.wikipedia where most historians hang out.
#phil.wikipedia - meeting channel for the philosophers. #bio.wikipedia -
 home of the biologists. Some people frequent only the topic channels
and not the general one. The biology channel was the first topic channel
set up and reflects the strength of the german wikipedia in biology. The
Projekt:Lebewesen (living beings) is the most active project on de and
they fill one whole column on featured articles alone (the historians
are catching up).

General atmosphere. It's difficult to get hard data on this, but the
thing I hear most often is: atmosphere on the English Wikipedia is much
more relaxed and people are friendlier and politer. There are even a few
users who left the German Wikipedia with this reason and work only on
en. So it might be true. This feeling is often connected to the
behaviour on AfD. Hurtful comments are frequent there, combined with a
much lower threshold for AfD: articles which are tagged as stub on en
are usually proposed for deletion on de (and either expanded or deleted).

One group of prominent editors sticks to the maxims on the page "Be
cruel" (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sei_grausam ). This is
not meant literally, but in the sense of Larry Sanger:
  To attract and retain the participation of experts, there would have
  to be little patience for those who do not understand or agree with
  Wikipedia's mission, or even for those pretentious mediocrities who
  are not able to work with others constructively and recognize when
  there are holes in their knowledge (collectively, probably the most
  disruptive group of all). A less tolerant attitude toward disruption
  would make the project more polite, welcoming, and indeed open to
  the vast majority of intelligent, well-meaning people on the Internet.
                                             --Larry Sanger

Refering to this "meme" (it's not a guideline), users have - undisputed
by the community - been blocked for "disturbing good authors from
writing articles". Leads to blocking and banning customs. The german
wikipedia has no arbitration committee. A poll to establish one has not
reached a necessary majority, the community divided about the question.
Long term bans are decided by a community vote, short term bans are
pronounced at the individual admin's own discretion. If another admins
thinks a ban too harsh, he may shorten or lift it. Wheel wars about such
issues are rare, though.

Wikipedia namespace. This topic probably comes closest to Stan's
assumption of "Ordnung".  Personally, I love the Wikipedia namespace in
the English Wikipedia. There is so much to discover, so many obscure,
interesting or funny pages. However, without counting, I have the
impression that en has many many more pages in this namespace than de.
 When I look in
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_style_guidelines I find
a huge number of good advices, guides for almost everything (hey, even a
whole page for how to set dashes). The number of german pages is much
lower. Pages in the Wikipedia namespace are routinely scrutinized if
they are really necessary and often merged into existing ones or
deleted.
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProjekt_Usability/?bersicht
is a rather complete overview of all important documentation pages.

Last point of this long mail: the impressive german projects like the
printed wikireaders, the DVD, the writing contest with big media echo
etc. In my opinion, these are due to several factors:
1) the independence of the german community from Jimbo and the Wikimedia
Foundation. The English Wikipedia is very much a monarchy, with people
looking to Jimbo for advice and guidance. The german wikipedia had and
has nobody with Jimbo's authority. People had to deal with the fact that
there is no ultimate appeal. This has consequences for the social
structure (which evolved to what I'd characterize as a meritocracy with
a few prominent and influential editors) but also for the possibility to
realize such projects. People had to act on their own, so they did it.
2) Personal dedication and leadership of individual Wikipedians. Most
projects were team work, but there was usually one person who invested
much more work than the others. The driving force behind Wikipedia
academy in June is one editor, Frank. The driving force behind many
successful initiatives like the writing contest is Achim Raschka. The
driving force behind the Wikipedia exhibition were Frank for the
organisation and me for the realization. The WikiReaders were produced
by individuals. etc.
3) For the DVD and WikiPress: the luck to find a good partner company
which is crazy enough to take up the accompanying risks and whose bosses
and employees "grok" the Wiki way. The first thing Vlado, one of the
Directmedians, did after the first CD was finally ready for production
was to expand the article Reggae to double its size - at 3 o'clock at
night. Just to relax...

So much for a comparison between English and German Wikipedia. I noticed
that I wrote much more about de, as I know the project much better.
Maybe someone else could add more facts about en. I'm placing this text
also on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Elian/comparison - feel free
to edit and add comments there (and of course fix my bad english ;-).

greetings,
elian


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [WikiEN-l] 18 months

body:
First, I dispute the notion that the German Wikipedia is "better" than
the English one in terms of overall quality. Featured article count on
de: reflects, to a large degree, a much stronger drive on de: to that
particular process (which was on de: first - I copied it to en: from
there) from various pages. en: is also more inclusive, meaning many
more articles on obscure subjects which will never get featured. de:
tends towards agglomeration where en: maintains separate articles.
This all obviously affects the FA ratio in de's favor.

There's no doubt that de: has been very innovative when it comes to
quality drives and similar measures; however, en: has adopted most of
these and invented some new variants. There are some good ideas which
we should take from de: (and the other way around -- it was the
redesign of the en: Main Page that led many others to redesign theirs
in a similar fashion, including de:), but there are also ideas which I
definitely do not want to see copied because of some fallacious notion
of "de: is better than en:".

I want to comment on three specific points Elian made:

> German wikipedia has: the general channel #wikipedia-de for socializing,
> coordinating general work on the wiki, discussing events on wp, calling
> an admin for quick vandal bans etc. Rarely people who chat too much off
> topic (=not wikipedia related) receive a friendly kick.
> Other channels: #hist.wikipedia where most historians hang out.
> #phil.wikipedia - meeting channel for the philosophers. #bio.wikipedia -
>  home of the biologists.

This is an excellent idea which should be copied in all languages. Right now.

> One group of prominent editors sticks to the maxims on the page "Be
> cruel" (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sei_grausam ).

Bad meme; die, die, die. If that gets copied to en:, I will do
whatever I can to get rid of it. It is the opposite of WikiLove and
promotes an atmosphere of suspicion -- whatever the page text says,
the title invites usage to justify any violation of policy.   There's
a reason for all that wiki culture of "Assume good faith", "Don't bite
the newbies", etc. No reason to throw it out the window just yet.

We have "Be bold" as a way to add flexibility, and "Don't disrupt" as
a general policy to deal with troublemakers. There's no need for "Be
cruel".

> The german  wikipedia has no arbitration committee. A poll to establish
> one has not reached a necessary majority, the community divided about the
> question.

As a consequence, there is very little flexibility in dealing with
problem users, and when you have one, you often end up with an
indefinite block. My observation is that you have more sock puppetry
and more extreme aggression as a result. It's a simple fact that bad
users can and will evade blocks, so indefinite blocks against the
worst ones often accomplish very little indeed. And those who respect
blocks may be amenable to reason, so they should not be indef blocked
either.

The flexibility of admins you mention may have led de: to become the
leader in long term page protections, with some articles being
protected as stubs for almost a year. At least that was the situation
when I last ran a query on page protections:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Longest_page_protections%2C_September_2005

de: is, I think, a good example of the consequences some extreme
proposals in the "wheel warring" thread would have. Having an admin
class that becomes increasingly reluctant to question itself can be
just as problematic as one which is constantly flighting over what to
do.

I welcome this discussion. We need to understand better what
consequences certain decisions had in the histories of different
Wikipedias. Like Carl Sagan touted Venus and Mars as examples of
climate developments that could affect Earth, Wikipedias in other
languages have a lot to teach us.

Erik


subject: [WikiEN-l] 18 months

body:
---- Original Message ----
From: Peter Jacobi <peter_jacobi at gmx.net>

>(A) On de: the argument "no real (convential) encyclopedia
>would write this" is by and large honored (or at least considered).
>On en: this argument is ignored, or even considered trollish.

As detail to include in a particular topic, or whether to include a
particular topic area at all?

They must have some cruft right, after all they have nigh on 400k
articles :-) However it does fit with my colloquial observation
from working on the missing topics project that time and again
de: (and perhaps more oddly sv: and sl:) will have article on
fairly famous historical British and American figures that we don't,
but I don't see the converse that often. Not sure how to reconcile
this Elisabeth's data about [[Category:Biographies]] and Persondata
though.

>(B) On de: all articles are expected to be accessable to a general
>audience (the horrible and horribly named "Oma-Test" -- "grandmother
>test").

That is one idea I prefer we _didn't_ import.

>On en: there are a lot of articles in mathematics and physics
>addressed to users definitively having some education in the area.
>I assume most experts are flocking to en: anyway, as it seems
>pointless to have advanced articles in other languages than English

Well English being the "global language" has some effects.
Not least that it becomes a hub for ideas for other languages to
choose from. As Erik said, kust need to make sure we pick the best ideas
from all the others too!


from_name: Jay R. Ashworth

subject: [Wikitech-l] Dumps

body:
On Thu, Apr 27, 2006 at 12:44:14AM +0200, Jochen Magnus wrote:
> Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
> > Yeah, but the *traffic* is part of the reason why the 'pedia is
> > *useful*; it's Metcalfe's Law incarnate.  Pinching it off, and
> > particularly to be "just another feature" on some other website...?
>
> Our mirror is (I hope so) perfectly linked with the original Wikipedia.
> Editing article by hyperlink into Wikipedia and creating new articles by
> clicking on a "red" link is all realized. I think we are part of the
> *traffic* and  therefore no obstruction of Metcalfes Law.

Hmmm...

So, I go to your site, and I see a problem with a page, and I click on
the Edit link, and I make the change, and I go back to...

1) not your site and the change is there.

2) your site, and the change is *not* there.

Neither of those seems perfect.

> > And that's a perfectly good justification for an off-line copy.
> > The keyword is, of course, "off line".
>
> I don't think so. Off line copies are expensive and slow. We load every
> recent "pages-articles.xml.bz2" dump from the mirror: one or twice a
> month (475 MB for the german version at the moment). We check our
> mirrored pictures against the recent images table and load only new(er)
> images down.

So, the only reason I *do* like for an offline mirror, you don't like.

Those people completely off the grid shouldn't have Wikipedia at all?

> We don't do this because it's nice to have. Our goal was and still is a
> fully and performant integration of the encyclopaedia into the news
> environment and layout of our online magazine.

And my assertion, based on the either/or above, is that you don't
actually *have* that.

> I hope that dumping wikis data will be handled as carefully in the
> future as in the past -  and will be available *online* without snail
> mail or mounted messengers :-)

And, again, I wasn't trying to agitate against this, by any means, and
I hope that's clear.

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

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

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


subject: [Wikitech-l] Define and Formalize wiki markup

body:
On Thu, Apr 27, 2006 at 01:47:02PM +0100, Timwi wrote:
> Chad Perrin wrote:
> > On Wed, Apr 26, 2006 at 05:55:17PM +0100, Timwi wrote:
> >
> >>Chad Perrin wrote:
> >>
> >>>My impression is that it's aimed at "everybody" -- which includes me.
> >>
> >>It is definitely not aimed at _pleasing_ everybody, especially not
> >>minorities like programmers.
> >
> > Hopefully it's not aimed at disenfranchising "minorities", either --
> > especially since minorities like programmers aren't as much of a
> > minority at Wikipedia as they are at, say, the Coopersmith's bar
> > downtown.
>
> Yeah, so let's design MediaWiki so it's useful only to the programmers,
> since no-one else would be helpful in writing the encyclopedia anyway.
> Especially since programmers know everything.

This thread has gotten so dense that I can no longer discern what the
topic is, much less who's on which side.  If anyone sees fit to
continue it, I suggest they start by enumerating those two things.

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

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

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


from_name: Ivan Krstic

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki API (SoC)

body:
Timwi wrote:
> You can start off with some basic functions (retrieve
> an article, edit an article, retrieve article history) and later move on
> to more complex ones.

I thought about this some more yesterday, and I've changed my mind. A
first pass at a *very* simple API, if done with care, might actually
help frame later API discussions, such as the one at Hacking Days.

Too much of MediaWiki has traditionally been plagued by the "just sit
down and spit out some code" approach to development, which led to an
unseemly growth by agglomeration, and a codebase that's only recently
been getting less horrid. Given the context -- volunteer coders,
non-profit organization, etc -- some code is better than no code, so I'm
not passing judgment here. But given a tangible opportunity to get a
serious component like the API right (for some value of 'right' that's
more than what one would obtain just by sitting down and hacking),
waiting another couple of months to get everyone in a room and hash this
out seems to be by far the best approach.

The API will be used by programs, not people. People can quickly adapt
to changes in the UI, but every mistake that ends up in the API will
probably become an incredible PITA that will need to be supported for
some time going forward. So I'd still discourage the API being a SoC
project. Of course, I'm not affiliated with the Foundation, so Ben is
more than welcome to still submit his application for it.

--
Ivan Krstic <krstic at fas.harvard.edu> | GPG: 0x147C722D


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Faulty breaker replaced

body:
J?rgen Herz wrote:
> Adrian wrote:
>> Shouldn't it have been replaced the first time?
>
> That was also my thought.
>
> I guess they act according to the motto "One time is never, two times is
> always".

The first time they had the manufacturer running diagnostics on it and such.
Apparently it failed a second time before they were able to get the replacement
done. (Sure hope it's not part number AE-35...)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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from_name: Steve Bennett

body:
On 26/04/06, Magnus Manske <magnus.manske at web.de> wrote:
> Wikipedia - largest MMORPG *ever*!

50,000 active editors? That's tiny by MMORPG standards.

Steve


body:
On 26/04/06, Daniel P. B. Smith <wikipedia2006 at dpbsmith.com> wrote:
> Probably less than 5% of Wikipedia's content actually meets [[WP:V]],
> [[WP:CITE]], and [[WP:RS]]. P

That's a pessimistic view, but even still, it gives us more than
50,000 verifiable articles. Definitely in the same league as
Britannica.

Steve