from_name: Earle Martin

subject: [WikiEN-l] Copyright Violation Bot

body:
On 26/11/06, Chris Picone <ccool2ax at gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't know anything about Perl, but I get this foreign error trying
> to run the script in my ocmmand line:
>
> Can't locate HTML/FormatText.pm in @INC [...]
>
> hope it's of any use and thanks a lot!

That means you don't have HTML::FormatText installed, which is a
prerequisite module. You also need HTML::TreeBuilder and
WWW::Mechanize. For information on installing Perl modules, see
http://www.cpan.org/misc/cpan-faq.html#How_install_Perl_modules .

--
Earle Martin
            http://downlode.org/
http://purl.org/net/earlemartin/


list: wikitech-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Mark Clements

subject: [Wikitech-l] Problem with whitelists

body:
"Edward Z. Yang"
<edwardzyang at thewritingpot.com> wrote in
message news:ekb6hl$r7k$1 at sea.gmane.org...
>
> Let's say example.com and example.net are blacklisted, but
> subsite.example.com is whitelisted.
>
> Then, subsite.example.com.example.net is allowed. Isn't this incorrect
> behavior? Too tired to file/check for a Bugzilla report...

Does a similar behaviour occur, if you have badsite.com blacklisted and
goodsite.com whitelisted?  i.e. would goodsite.com.badsite.com work?  If so
that is a lot more serious!

- Mark Clements (HappyDog)


list: wikien-l

from_name: Michiel Sikma

subject: [WikiEN-l] Copyright Violation Bot

body:
Not to mention there are other sources with licenses compatible to
that of the GFDL. I hope the copyvio bot won't be fooled by
Answers.com. :)

Op 24-nov-2006, om 19:32 heeft Sean Barrett het volgende geschreven:

> Absolutely true, but what is also distressing is the number of people
> (*cough* Trekphiler *cough*) who cannot get their minds around the
> concept that material explicitly released into the public domain
> (*cough* DANFS *cough*) is not copyright-reserved and its credited use
> is not plagiarism.

Michiel Sikma <michiel at thingmajig.org>
Web designer and programmer


from_name: Johannes Beigel

subject: [Wikitech-l] Problems w/dewiki pages-meta-history dumps

body:
Hello.

There seems to be a problem with the pages-meta-history dumps:

The latest complete .7z dump seems to be several months old and the .bz2
dump (which is labelled with "done" on
http://download.wikimedia.org/dewiki/20061105/) yields a corrupted
(truncated) .bz2 file with a size of only 729 MB (instead of > 20 GB)
when downloaded. In case the error was a networking problem on my side,
I tried the download three times and compared the files with cmp - they
were all identical.

Does someone know of any problems regarding these dumps? Is there a
place where to get a reasonably up-to-date page-meta-history dump of dewiki?

Thanks in advance and best regards,
Johannes Beigel


list: foundation-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia ne fonctionne plus en Tunisie

body:
Perhaps you can ask him if there was anything controversial going on
in Tunesia lately. Such as politicians or policemen involved in
scandals; if this is an act of censorship, then that's the alley we
need to be finding our answers in. It could otherwise have been a
decision that was made before, not in response to recent events,
which was only just recently put into effect. I think only Tunesians
will be able to tell us the reason.

Op 26-nov-2006, om 18:58 heeft Mohamed Ibrahim het volgende geschreven:

> can anything be done to see what's the reason behind that?

Michiel Sikma <michiel at thingmajig.org>
Web designer and programmer


list: wikimedia-l


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Fiction and Wikia

body:
On 11/13/06, Ryan Wetherell <renardius at gmail.com> wrote:
> I like this idea a lot.  Just an external link to a more relevant wiki
> isn't really as attention-getting as it should be if people really
> want to know more.

In general, we should be more selective with what external links we
provide, and how we present them. We should distinguish between:

- Sources of the information in the article
- Sites that are more informative than the article (particularly where
the article is very short)
- Sites that represent some example of what is described in the
article (eg, a ski resort, for an article about ski resorts...)
- Community/portal/forum sites, where people may want to go if they're
really interested in the topic..

I have no objection to us providing a link to Johnny's Sk8boarding
Forumz, but it shouldn't be mixed in with other, more "encyclopaedic"
links...

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] Non-stupid wikien-l thread

body:
On 11/26/06, Daniel P. B. Smith <wikipedia2006 at dpbsmith.com> wrote:
> (It's always annoyed me that people that quote "There ain't no such
> thing as a free lunch" don't understand that it is a specific
> reference to the "free lunches" offered by saloons).

Well, I didn't. But you can't know the derivation of *every* saying...

Do you say "the spitting image" or the "spit and image"?
Do you say "chomping at the bit" or "champing at the bit"?
Do you say "one foul swoop" or "one fell swoop"?

Steve


subject:
[WikiEN-l] (semi-OT) What to do with old but not old enough
	encyclopedias?

body:
On 11/26/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> I assume you're going to go through and see what our coverage is
> *really* like ;-)

I had in mind something more like offloading cargo from a sinking ship...

Steve


from_name: Anthony

subject: [WikiEN-l] Google Earth screenshots

body:
On 11/27/06, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:
> Wow.  That's very interesting.  I knew there was a lot of USGS
> data out there, but I didn't know there was *that* much.

Here's a list of most if not all of it.  Some of these are apparently
proprietary though (they are listed as for viewing only - no
downloading).

http://seamless.usgs.gov/website/seamless/products/listofortho.asp

Where the coverage is (only in the US, but starting to get a lot of
cities), the resolution is really good.  That shot from Los Angeles
was 0.3 meters (per pixel).  Some of the data is at 0.15 meters.
Geocover 2000, on the other hand, which covers the entire globe, is
14.25 meters.  So outside the US most of the public domain imagery is
not very good (I think, please prove me wrong!).


subject: [WikiEN-l] Copyright Violation Bot

body:
On 27/11/06, Michiel Sikma <michiel at thingmajig.org> wrote:
> Not to mention there are other sources with licenses compatible to
> that of the GFDL. I hope the copyvio bot won't be fooled by
> Answers.com. :)

As it stands I've coded in an ignore list to skip certain domains -
generally speaking, WP mirrors - one of which is answers.com.

--
Earle Martin
            http://downlode.org/
http://purl.org/net/earlemartin/


from_name: dmehkeri at swi.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] Non-stupid wikien-l thread

body:
>
> Come to this thread and be not stupid!
>

Yeah, bickering on the mailing list is all fun and games, isn't it, until some
country[1] CENZ0RS YUO !!!

> So ... written any good articles lately?
>

I've written some crappy stubby articles lately.

Cheers,
Dan

[1] Tunisia, as of about 4 days ago[2]. This is about when the thread really
blew up. Of course, this could be a total coincidence, but you know the
traditional saying. Troll me once, shame on me. Troll me twice, General ben Ali
censors you.

[2] Maybe. Some suspect we are the latest victim of [[:fr:Censure en
Tunisie#Internet|internet censorship in Tunisia]]. Someone suggested even we
ought to tone down some sensitive articles in response, [[:fr:project:Le
Bistro/27 novembre 2006|I am not kidding]]. Of course they were shouted down.


from_name: charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] Non-stupid wikien-l thread

body:
"Jim Schuler" wrote

> I'll play with it, if you don't mind.

Do you think you could possibly not do this, i.e. top post something glib or me-tooish? It's poor list etiquette, and this was supposed to be the sensible thread.

Charles

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Systemic bias wrt gender

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote

> Yes, but once a hypothetical equilibrium is achieved there is nothing
> left to do.  Stagnancy will have been accomplished ... just like in EB.

Ah, but I think that's exactly where people have different visions of the future. We have steering and non-steering folk, teleologists and those who just want to let it rip.

Charles

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from_name: George Herbert

subject: [WikiEN-l] Community Sanction

body:
On 11/27/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:

> The profile of Wikipedia is now such that we have a significant number
> of aggressively tendentious editors.  These go well beyond the
> occasional "characters" like SPUI and cause massive wasted time and
> effort.
>

Having them is just an indicator of the scope of Wikipedia; if you look back
at all the prior Internet interactive projects of note, they have all
attracted malcontents of various sorts over time.  Success attracts them.

The question is what is done about it.  The best solution I saw was benign
dictatorships where someone in power just booted troublemakers, and was
trusted by the rest to not boot good guys, and where social pressure
functioned and kept good guys having really bad days from becoming
troublemakers requiring the boot.

I don't think WP can do that; we have a form of that, but the scope is so
large that it's not a benign dictator; it's a benign oligarchy, with its own
internal politics and dynamics within the group and between the group and
elements of the group and the "normal editors" outside the group.  And it's
not just a benign oligarchy of uninvolved people; the admins largely but by
no means completely overlap the really active editors, which means that
active editor admin / active editor non-admin conflicts happen all the
time.  The successful benign dictators I have seen stayed out of the day to
day fray.  We can't possibly do that here.

I don't suggest replacing the current mechanism; I lack any good concepts
for a better approach.  It's just a hard problem, by the nature of the
project.  It's probably going to continue to be a hard problem, eventually
driving good people to frustration and exit from the project at a moderate
rate.  Avoiding admin burnout is going to be important over time.

--
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com


subject: [WikiEN-l] Systemic bias wrt gender

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote

> Private payments in support of private interests are less dangerous than
> direct subsidies from Wikimedia.

Or not.

>We know they are outsiders.

How?

>Direct
> payment can too easily suggest that the payee has the WMF stamp of
> approval, or somehow states the "official" POV for his selected topics.

Sorry, that's paranoid stuff. Why would the Board hypothetically spend money to undermine NPOV? Since when has the WMF had an official POV? Why would this sort of thing, which would have to appear transparently in budgets, be _worse_ than political, religious or corporate groups paying people to edit, deniably?

I'm against the concept of paid editors, but basically because support for the sites in other ways should have priority.

Charles

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body:
On 11/27/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> Now, now! EB is a fantastic book, one of the great nonfiction works of
> Anglophone culture. Their current marketing operation may seem to be
> spending far too much of its time working on running down Wikipedia
> rather than e.g. selling a good encyclopedia, but that doesn't lessen
> the respect Britannica is due.

It's a great encyclopaedia*, that's why I bought it. I just don't
think it's a viable product anymore - costs too much to produce, and
isn't worth enough money to enough people. Think of the paper version:
apart from the cuteness of a wall of encyclopaedia, what's it actually
worth to you? Would you ever use it? Could you really be bothered
opening it up and manually finding an article without a search
function? How about the electronic version: Wikipedia and the rest of
the web being free, how much would you spend for one more source?

Steve

* Or so I've heard.


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject:
[WikiEN-l] (semi-OT) What to do with old but not old
	enough	encyclopedias?

body:
geni wrote:

>On 11/26/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>
>
>>I can understand why they would delete the references.  Showing nothing
>>but pre-1911 references could reduce their credibility. ;-)
>>
>>Ec
>>
>>
>For someone who died in say 1890 I doubt that would be a problem.
>
But how many of their readers died before 1890? :-)

As for the article subjects, sometimes the juicier events in their lives
take longer than 20 years to become public.  Here in Canada for example
the standard holdback period for a lot of government records is 30 years.

Ec


from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

subject: [WikiEN-l] Community Sanction

body:
I'm with Luna Santin on this. If the user in question reforms there's no
reason to do a checkuser and they won't be found out. Indef blocking should
only be used in serious cases. Simple vandalism isn't one of them. And an
attempt at reforming the user should be made whenever possible.

Other than that, I see no problems, yet. Blocks can always be undone if
misplaced.

Mgm

On 11/27/06, Ryan Wetherell <renardius at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Assuming that those 15 edits aren't outright vandalism/trolling?
>
> --Ryan
>
> On 11/26/06, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at waterwiki.info> wrote:
> >
> > On Nov 26, 2006, at 6:53 PM, George Herbert wrote:
> >
> > > So far the proposed community bans haven't been that controversial,
> > > but it's going to happen eventually.
> >
> > Handing out indefinite bans to people who have made 15 edits is
> > controversial.
> >
> > Fred
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> >
> _______________________________________________
> 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: Rob Smith

subject: [WikiEN-l] Fwd: [Arbcom-l] Fwd: Example II

references:
<52a8cf060611261024q39e8c596ge405ef7b304ee442@mail.gmail.com>
	<oiujm2pkrbss90h8hdqbotbrsd0gvja46h@4ax.com>
	<52a8cf060611261525n31160f6ct30c25597f64b4715@mail.gmail.com>
	<hpbmm2dssdf6a0igo3l9b2pds4cdoueh4g@4ax.com>

body:
Yes. There are two issues (a) smearing a critic when a critic is
included for NPOV purposes; (b) smearing a critic by innuendo.  My
raising this issues 14 months ago resulted in (1) punitive action
against me (2) finally removing the unsubstaniated smears and innuendo
from another article.

Again the question, does it take a breaching experiment and the risk
of punitive action to get unsubstantiated smears removed ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Chip_Berlet&diff=prev&oldid=28689236#Laird_Wilcox

On 11/27/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
> On Sun, 26 Nov 2006 16:25:43 -0700, "Rob Smith" <nobs03 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> >Anti-communism = McCarthyism is like
> >saying  Communism = Stalinism.
>
> But that's not what it's saying.  I think you may be looking at it
> through the filter of past disputes.
>
> Guy (JzG)
> --
> http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Non-stupid wikien-l thread

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:

>On 11/26/06, Daniel P. B. Smith <wikipedia2006 at dpbsmith.com> wrote:
>
>
>>(It's always annoyed me that people that quote "There ain't no such
>>thing as a free lunch" don't understand that it is a specific
>>reference to the "free lunches" offered by saloons).
>>
>>
>Well, I didn't. But you can't know the derivation of *every* saying...
>
>Do you say "the spitting image" or the "spit and image"?
>Do you say "chomping at the bit" or "champing at the bit"?
>Do you say "one foul swoop" or "one fell swoop"?
>
Interesting questions!

It appears that "chomp" is a dialectical variation of the verb "champ",
and goes back at least to the 17th century.  Give "champ" a more British
pronunciation, and that becomes understandable. That "champ" could be
used to express two different types of biting adds to the confusion.
The reference to a succession of quick bites seems more indicative of
impatience.  "Coffee and opium are taken down, tobacco but in smoke, and
betel is but champed in the mouth with a little lime." Francis Bacon as
quoted in Johnson's Dictionary.

"Spitting image" seems to be a relatively recent variation.  See
http://alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxspitan.html .  The claim there
is that "spitting image" first appeared in 1901, yet a Google book
search gave me an entry from the "American Annals of the Deaf" dated
1886.  The earlier "fire-spitting image" (1846) appears to take us in a
different direction.

"Fell swoop" appears correct.  The adjective "fell" means "evil" even
though the evil denotation appears to have fallen away in recent years.
It's most famous use is in Shakespeare's Macbeth (Act IV, Scene III)
where Macduff comments "What, all my pretty chickens and their dam / At
one fell swoop?" upon hearing that his family had been murdered.

Ec


body:
Steve Bennett wrote:

>On 11/26/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>I assume you're going to go through and see what our coverage is
>>*really* like ;-)
>>
>>
>I had in mind something more like offloading cargo from a sinking ship...
>
>
A tea party?

Ec


body:
Steve Bennett wrote:

>On 11/27/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>Now, now! EB is a fantastic book, one of the great nonfiction works of
>>Anglophone culture. Their current marketing operation may seem to be
>>spending far too much of its time working on running down Wikipedia
>>rather than e.g. selling a good encyclopedia, but that doesn't lessen
>>the respect Britannica is due.
>>
>>
>It's a great encyclopaedia*, that's why I bought it. I just don't
>think it's a viable product anymore - costs too much to produce, and
>isn't worth enough money to enough people. Think of the paper version:
>apart from the cuteness of a wall of encyclopaedia, what's it actually
>worth to you? Would you ever use it? Could you really be bothered
>opening it up and manually finding an article without a search
>function? How about the electronic version: Wikipedia and the rest of
>the web being free, how much would you spend for one more source?
>
With winter coming it should be put against the outside walls of poorly
insulated old houses.

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] "Fair use" images of living people

body:
George Herbert wrote:

>On 11/24/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>
>
>>I feel more concerned about people who jump to conclusions on this sort
>>of thing.  I think that identifying the source should be needed for
>>immediate deletion.  For most other situations that lack urgency, having
>>the patience to wait for answers doesn't really hurt anything.  ... and
>>it keeps the temperature of events down.
>>
>I did post a comment to his talk page about a week ago stating that
>the images were obviously scanned copyright violations and that I had
>started reviewing the situation.
>
>I think that the niceties have been observed...
>
I agree.  Thanks for being polite about it, and understanding that the
niceties are important.

Some have raised the issue of banning such people, but that's really
pointless when we are dealing with someone who hasn't been seen for two
months.

Ec


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Problem with whitelists

references:
<ekb6hl$r7k$1@sea.gmane.org> <ekebr2$cii$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<ekfktj$7gi$1@sea.gmane.org>

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

Edward Z. Yang wrote:
> Mark Clements wrote:
>> Does a similar behaviour occur, if you have badsite.com blacklisted and
>> goodsite.com whitelisted?  i.e. would goodsite.com.badsite.com work?  If so
>> that is a lot more serious!
>
> Yes. Try it yourself.

As I mentioned before, this is presumably because you're using a
straight regex, with no anchor at the end, so it'll match subsets of a
hostname.

It's debatable whether that's actually ever desirable behavior, though.
It might be wise to assume that a whitelist/blacklist entry with no '/'
is meant to anchor at the end of the hostname and slip that in silently.

- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.2.2 (Darwin)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFFa2CgwRnhpk1wk44RAmknAKDFFxSOQDyo3ta8QndQnIb3caQLMwCfRPE2
I8EDliV81+hrCjFDXNSUnjk=
=vrWm
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


from_name: Andrew Gray

body:
On 26/11/06, Mohamed Ibrahim <mido.architect at gmail.com> wrote:
> Someone posted in Arabic Village pump confirming the blockage of Wikipedia
> in Tunisia

A quick question - is this just the Arabic wikipedia, all of
*.wikipedia.org, or all Wikimedia sites?

--
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk


subject: [WikiEN-l] Community Sanction

body:
So what good does an indefinite ban do in such circumstances?  A 24-hour
ban to forestall immediate damage is warranted, but an indefinite ban
means nothing when the person won't come back anyway.  Look at the
time-frame of his edits.  Someone whose 15 edits are all in a very short
period is not likely a long range problem.  Someone who has done them at
one per week for 15 weeks, despite attempts to contact him is a
different matter.

Ec

Ryan Wetherell wrote:

>Assuming that those 15 edits aren't outright vandalism/trolling?
>
>--Ryan
>
>On 11/26/06, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at waterwiki.info> wrote:
>
>
>>On Nov 26, 2006, at 6:53 PM, George Herbert wrote:
>>
>>
>>>So far the proposed community bans haven't been that controversial,
>>>but it's going to happen eventually.
>>>
>>>
>>Handing out indefinite bans to people who have made 15 edits is
>>controversial.
>>


from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [WikiEN-l] Fiction and Wikia

body:
I think it's bad business to get in the habit of setting up official
policies that exclude factual, referenced, neutral information from
inclusion in Wikipedia.

The natural extension of this tendency will lead to the typical elitist
exclusionism that all institutional media typically fall victim to.

Wikipedia is not paper.

On 11/27/06, charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com <
charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
>
> Steve Block wrote
>
> > Steve Bennett wrote:
> >   > In general, we should be more selective with what external links we
> > > provide, and how we present them.
> >
> > We already do.
> >
> > > We should distinguish between:
> > >
> > > - Sources of the information in the article
> >
> > These should be placed in the References section, not the External links
> > one.
>
> I looked at [[Wikipedia:Citing sources]] on this, and I don't think that
> guideline is optimal. It is much better, if you need a weblink as reference
> for something specific, to make an inline link or make a note. In fact a
> note is much superior, because you can attach a comment or point up some
> specific phrase used.
>
> If you just put raw weblinks in a References section, and don't specify
> the relevance, how can anyone tell that the link is playing a reference
> role?
>
> Charles
>
>
> -----------------------------------------
> Email sent from www.ntlworld.com
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> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Heimermann, Asher

subject: [Foundation-l] CISCO TV Commericals using Wikipedia Logo

body:
How much will the Wikimedia Foundation get from the use of the Wikipedia logo?

  Asher Heimermann

Danny Said....

To be a little more exact, the ad agency contacted us about using the logo
for the ad. We all discussed it in the office, and agreed that there should be
some compensation. I asked, and they agreed. Nothing too spectacular.

Danny

---------------------------------
Want to start your own business? Learn how on Yahoo! Small Business.


from_name: Sean Black

subject: [WikiEN-l] Fiction and Wikia

body:
Yes, but fiction is almost always widely released and seen, consumed,
noticed, and analysed by many people. If a large number of people are
interested in reading and writing about a work of fiction and/or it's
characters -- which is true of a vast majority of said works -- then
it isn't "indiscriminate", by definition.

~~ Sean
On 11/27/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/27/06, The Cunctator <cunctator at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I think it's bad business to get in the habit of setting up official
> > policies that exclude factual, referenced, neutral information from
> > inclusion in Wikipedia.
> >
> > The natural extension of this tendency will lead to the typical elitist
> > exclusionism that all institutional media typically fall victim to.
> >
> > Wikipedia is not paper.
> >
>
> Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of items of information.
> That something is 100% true does not mean it is suitable for inclusion
> in Wikipedia.
>
> Been policy for a long time.
> --
> 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
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Fwd: [Arbcom-l] Fwd: simple example

body:
On 11/25/06, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at waterwiki.info> wrote:

> I saw Kiko just the other day. What is this innocent person, living
> an ordinary life, doing on Wikipedia with false information about him?
>
> Fred
>

Wow Fred. Another extraordinary coincidence in this case (I count
about four now).  Turns out Kiko's papers are closer to where I've
been sitting and working the past few years than the bathroom I use.

http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:E2qQtWlea6gJ:libxml.unm.edu/rmoa/content/nmu/finished/nmu1mss640bc.html+Francisco+E.+Mart%C3%ADnez+Defense+Committee+(FEMDC),&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=3

Looks like I unwittingly may have become another unathorized
biographer of another activist.

Now we see it wasn't past associations with Chip Berlet, or the NLG,
why your transformed a Content Dispute into something it was not.  It
was a close and apparantly longtime personal friendship with Fransisco
I. Martinez.

Robert Smith,
aka nobs


from_name: Fred Bauder

body:
Begin forwarded message:

> From: Fred Bauder <fredbaud at waterwiki.info>
> Date: November 27, 2006 3:44:17 PM MST
> To: "Rob Smith" <nobs03 at gmail.com>
> Cc: Fred Bauder <fredbaud at waterwiki.info>
> Subject: Re: [Arbcom-l] Fwd: simple example
>
>
> On Nov 27, 2006, at 3:35 PM, Rob Smith wrote:
>
>> On 11/25/06, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at waterwiki.info> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> Kiko is still alive. What is this innocent person, who is leading an
>>> ordinary life, doing on Wikipedia with false information about him?
>>>
>>> Fred
>>>
>>>
>>
>> Wow Fred. Another extraordinary coincidence in this case (I count
>> about four now).  Turns out Kiko's papers are closer to where I've
>> been sitting and working the past few years than the bathroom I use.
>>
>> http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:E2qQtWlea6gJ:libxml.unm.edu/
>> rmoa/content/nmu/finished/nmu1mss640bc.html+Francisco+E.+Mart%C3%
>> ADnez+Defense+Committee+(FEMDC),&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=3
>>
>> Looks like I unwittingly may have become another unathorized
>> biographer of another activist.
>>
>> Now we see it wasn't past associations with Chip Berlet, or the NLG,
>> why your transformed a Content Dispute into something it was not.  It
>> was a close and apparantly longtime personal friendship with
>> Fransisco
>> I. Martinez.
>>
>> Nobs01
>>
>
> Interesting. "After he was exonerated, Martinez was reinstated to
> the bar. He continues to live and practice law in Alamosa,
> Colorado, where he remains involved in community and social
> activism." We are on speaking terms, but "longtime personal
> friendship" would be a gross exaggeration.
>
> Fred
>
>


from_name: Robert Scott Horning

subject:
[Foundation-l] [Wikipedia-l]
 contents	under	education/information licenses

body:
Delphine M?nard wrote:

>Let us not jump to conclusions too fast here. :-)
>What you call "European chauvinism" I will rather call "lack of
>means", "lack of human ressources to write the right contracts with
>the n number of national laws involved in the launching of this or
>that satellite and the building of this or that camera" etc. There are
>reasons for the ESA and other organisations not being able to release
>their pictures under a free license and they go far beyond a manichean
>"good people who release in the public domain what they produce with
>public money" vs "bad people who want to keep stuff for themselves". I
>don't think "pressure" as you put it, is the way to go.
>
>Let me also try to maybe tone down the questions that David was trying
>to get through here and give a different angle.
>
>The question is not that the ESA or these other organisations *do not*
>want to release their pictures for a wider use. As a matter of fact,
>it is the ESA who came to us (Wikimedia Deutschland and Wikimedia
>France) and asked us for advice on how to go about this, and how they
>could make their pictures (more) freely available. However, they have
>some conditions.
>
>Some of our licenses (the one I use, for example) also add conditions
>(CC-BY-SA - share alike is a pretty drastic condition, when you think
>about it).
>
>One of their condition is that those images can't be used for
>political propaganda, for example.
>
>Now let me try and shift the debate a little here. Let us consider
>that the ESA, or whatever other organisation, comes up with a licence
>of their own. Let us imagine they allow free use of their images (in
>our free sense) *except* for political propaganda. Would that in any
>way be an acceptable thing to go by? Or is that definitely something
>we can't accept? It's a real question, I have no real opinion about
>this.
>
>
>Delphine
>
>
I don't know how completely to answer this, except to note how NASA
images have been used in the past, and frankly for considerable benefit
for just about everybody who uses them.  The famous "Earthrise" photo
that was taken during the Apollo 8 flight in particular has been used
explicitly for political purposes.  (see [[w:Earthrise]]).  I don't
think that these political purposes to which the photo has been used
have been shown as an endorsement by NASA of those political groups that
use those photos... indeed it is exactly the opposite.  Because NASA has
been explicitly apolitical in the use of this and other photos, it has
been used by a very wide range of groups from the boy scouts, religious
groups, environmental activists, political campaigns, space advocacy
lobbies, science fiction conventions, and astronomical observatories.
 Political restrictions would make it available to almost none of these
groups and would have a huge impact on its distribution.

Another very good example of how some creative useage of "public domain"
photos is in the form of the also quite famous [[w:Image:Buzz salutes
the U.S. Flag.jpg]] that was later used by none other than MTV for
promotions of their television channel.  It has also been used in other
contexts as well, where the U.S. flag has been photoshopped to other
images.  Clearly this is a case where having public domain content can
be used creatively in manners that having copyright restrictions would
not normally allow such use.  Especially if you are manipulating images
for artistic purposes, it is essential to have some content that is in
the public domain to avoid having significant licensing problems and
relying on "fair use" as a very poor substitute.

It should be of note that the only image that NASA has a real problem
with people using is the official logos of NASA, especially if such
usage implies endorsement.

How this relates to the ESA, I am not entirely sure.  One huge problem
the ESA faces is that they have a committee of many nations to help
decide policy on this issue, each of which has their own unique cultural
background.  In contrast, the USA has had a long tradition of putting
all government publications into the public domain, so it was a
no-brainer when NASA decided to do the same with the space pictures.  It
wasn't even breaking tradition to do so.

I do hope that the WMF encourages the widespread use of GFDL-compatable
images and multi-media content, more than just simply for compatability
with Wikipedia.  It also allows ordinary people to have access to rich
media archives that would otherwise be locked up, or encourage
widespread "IP pirarcy".

It should be of note that those who choose to produce quality artistic
content (both text as well as multi-media content) under copyright and
propritary licensing arrangements are actually helped by having a large
quantity of public domain and free content available.  It forces those
of us who do so to prove that what we are making is of the highest
quality and does something original and unique.  In the long run, public
domain and free content will make a much richer artistic environment.

--
Robert Scott Horning


subject: [WikiEN-l] Fiction and Wikia

body:
Being 100% true and of general interest pretty much should mean it is
suitable for inclusion.

Fortunately the GFDLing of all this content allows some pretty good bleed in
the borders.

On 11/27/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 11/27/06, The Cunctator <cunctator at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I think it's bad business to get in the habit of setting up official
> > policies that exclude factual, referenced, neutral information from
> > inclusion in Wikipedia.
> >
> > The natural extension of this tendency will lead to the typical elitist
> > exclusionism that all institutional media typically fall victim to.
> >
> > Wikipedia is not paper.
> >
>
> Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of items of information.
> That something is 100% true does not mean it is suitable for inclusion
> in Wikipedia.
>
> Been policy for a long time.
> --
> 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: wikipedia-l

from_name: TSO1D From Wikpedia

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Moldovan Wikipedia (sry)

body:
First of all let me say that I appologize for mentioning this contoversial subject again, however I simply wanted to state my view on recent developments there.

  I have been opposed to the existence of this encyclopedia from its inception, as I felt that it would never garner sufficient support in order to become a valuable resource, and that it would only serve as a battleground for trolls and vandals. What I have seen in recent months has only strengthened my conviction of this. It is important to note, that since the opening of the encyclopedia, not one single native speaker of Moldovan has come forward to either work on the encyclopedia or express approval for its continuation. Although some users have made sporadic edits during some odd days, for a long period, there were about 10 edits per week with Escarbot (a bot adding interwikis) being the most active contributor. Nevertheless, whenever a vote on the encyclopedia's future opens a new barrage of vandalism and edits of low quality hit Mo as new users wish to become eligible to vote and others wish to create complete chaos.

  The recent vote there for an administrator has been a good indicator of how things are progressing. For a year now, not one single vote for an admin has succeeded either due to insufficient interest from qualitative users (which as I have said before are virtually non-existent) or too much activity from vandals and trolls. The last vote had to be closed by the steward Yann and the provisional administrator Pill is overwhelmed by an immense volley of vandalism (see for yourselves at http://mo.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Recentchanges&limit=500&namespace=0). Yann himself said: " If you asked me, I would close this wiki altogether, because it's just a big mess."  It is simply impossible to stabilize the situation at present and allow a continuation of constructive edits, but the prospect for either of those two things in the future is low in any case due to a lack of interested and knowledgeable users.

  Also I would like to note the vote on Meta where a majority of users have voted to shut down the encyclopedia. Although the vote is not officially closed (even though it passed its intially mandated duration of 2 weeks), I believe its results are an accurate display of the community's view on the subject. Of course the majority of the votes come from users on Ro or Ru as many users voted strictly for political considerations. Nevertheless, most non-partisan users voted against Mo and all Moldovan users voted against it.

  Lastly I would like to remind the community of Anthere's statement from the beginning of the year. He presented the view that most board members including Jimbo accepted the necessity to freeze the Moldovan Wikipedia and that only the technical details remained to be implemented. I do not truly know what caused this declaration to remain unfulfilled by I suggest that it be now, especially in the chaotic circumstances surrounding that encyclopedia now. If interest will rise, it will be possible to re-open Mo, and ideally at a new domain such as Mo-cyr and let work there continue. Nevertheless, in its current state, that resource cannot have any positive role as it is incapacitated by a lack of constructive users and an excess of destructive ones.

  Thanks You,
  TSO1D.

---------------------------------
Everyone is raving about the all-new Yahoo! Mail beta.


from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] Google Earth screenshots

body:
On 11/27/06, Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> Where the coverage is (only in the US, but starting to get a lot of
> cities), the resolution is really good.  That shot from Los Angeles
> was 0.3 meters (per pixel).  Some of the data is at 0.15 meters.
> Geocover 2000, on the other hand, which covers the entire globe, is
> 14.25 meters.  So outside the US most of the public domain imagery is
> not very good (I think, please prove me wrong!).

Depends on who you get your data from. US goverment is not the only
source. While most mondern ones are not going to be PD there are a few
historic ones around.

http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/upload/pdf/nmr_aerial_collections_overview.pdf

--
geni


subject: [Foundation-l] Cleaning vandalism on little-watched small wikis

body:
Guillaume Paumier wrote:

>Hello,
>
>To help cleaning the small wikis, people from the Small wikis monitoring
>team have thought about asking people from all projects to create a redirect
>from [[Template:Delete]] to the local speedy deletion template. The major
>wikis have already set this redirect, but it would be very useful on small
>projects where sysops don't come very often. Thus they could check the
>linked pages/the related category and deal with the pages containing
>nonsense or pages remaining after move vandalism.
>
>Please help spreading this request on your projects and forward this message
>to people I've forgotten (I haven't found any mailing list for wikiquote,
>for example). Thanks a lot.
>
>

I'm not entirely sure that this is the best approach to take for
something like this.  While I will admit that small wikis do tend to
invite vandalism because there may not be an active administrator
watching the content at all times, having a 'bot or an aggressive
deletionist purging all content in a speedy delete category isn't
necessarily the best thing either.  For myself as an administrator on a
couple smallish Wikimedia wikis, I do a review of any candidates that
get marked for speedy deletion and I don't always agree with the
decision.  Sometimes I will bring it up for a community discussion
instead (like a VfD or whatever) or try to fix the problems in the page.
 That means that you have to have a working knowledge of the target
language of that wiki, and perhaps even a strong feel for the goals and
"traditions" of the Wiki community that is participating.

Certainly there is some obvious spam going on and blatant vandalism that
is easily reverted or removed.  But on the very, very small wikis (like
to.wikipedia, to give an example)  the only problem is that vandalism
often goes unwatched for long periods of time, like weeks or even months
before it is reverted and deleted.  Still, if there is any active
"regular" Wikimedia user on that wiki who understands how to use the
basic tools of being even a registered user, almost all of that
vandalism can be easily cleaned up in a matter of just a few minutes.

I would also argue that while the content on those wikis might be
vandalized for long periods of time, the number of people who actually
see the vandalism is also correspondingly small as well, compared to the
number of people who might see blatant vandalism on en.wikipedia.

The only exception to this is for those projects that have a large but
novice user base.  This is either because there has been explosive
growth of the project or some other aspect has made for a whole bunch of
new users to sign up.  The presumption here is that these novice users
are all busy creating content that sometimes goes amok.  Hopefully when
this situation arises, there are some stewards who can offer a helping
hand to that community.  This is also a problem that fixes itself over
time, as these users get experience and can no longer be considered
novice users.

--
Robert Scott Horning


subject: [WikiEN-l] [Arbcom-l] Fwd: simple example

body:
On 11/27/06, Rob Smith <nobs03 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/27/06, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at waterwiki.info> wrote:
> >
> > On Nov 27, 2006, at 3:35 PM, Rob Smith wrote:
> >
> > > On 11/25/06, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at waterwiki.info> wrote:
> > >
> > >>
> > >> Kiko is still alive. What is this innocent person, who is leading an
> > >> ordinary life, doing on Wikipedia with false information about him?
> > >>
> > >> Fred
> > >>
> > >>
> > >
> > > Wow Fred. Another extraordinary coincidence in this case (I count
> > > about four now).  Turns out Kiko's papers are closer to where I've
> > > been sitting and working the past few years than the bathroom I use.
> > >
> > > http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:E2qQtWlea6gJ:libxml.unm.edu/
> > > rmoa/content/nmu/finished/nmu1mss640bc.html+Francisco+E.+Mart%C3%
> > > ADnez+Defense+Committee+(FEMDC),&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=3
> > >
> > > Looks like I unwittingly may have become another unathorized
> > > biographer of another activist.
> > >
> > > Now we see it wasn't past associations with Chip Berlet, or the NLG,
> > > why your transformed a Content Dispute into something it was not.  It
> > > was a close and apparantly longtime personal friendship with Fransisco
> > > I. Martinez.
> > >
> > > Nobs01
> > >
> >
> > Interesting. "After he was exonerated, Martinez was reinstated to the
> > bar. He continues to live and practice law in Alamosa, Colorado,
> > where he remains involved in community and social activism." We are
> > on speaking terms, but "longtime personal friendship" would be a
> > gross exaggeration.
> >
> > Fred
> >
> >
>
> Wikipedia says, "Ken Lay... best known for his role in the
> widely-reported corruption scandal... was found guilty on May 25,
> 2006, of 10 counts against him..."
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Lay
>
> And "Oliver North was...indicted on sixteen felony counts and ...
> convicted of three...", replete with a mugshot
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_North#Iran-Contra_affair
>
> One dead one living.  But in neither article are they refered to as "innocent".
>
> This source says, "Martinez was brought to trial by the Immigration
> and Naturalization Service ... and convicted ... ".
>
> So it appears, just as dispute resolution, it depends who your friends
> are in being able to push POV.
>
>
> Nobs01
>


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Moldovan Wikipedia (sry)

body:
Well I can't deny that I am against the existence of Mo as my previous message states, however I have no idea what you mean by an organized campaign agaisnt this Wikipedia. Yes, there have been other messages in the past, but as far as I know there is no organized insurgency against it :)

Oldak Quill <oldakquill at gmail.com> wrote:  On 28/11/06, TSO1D From Wikpedia wrote:
> First of all let me say that I appologize for mentioning this contoversial subject again, however I simply wanted to state my view on recent developments there.
>
> I have been opposed to the existence of this encyclopedia from its inception, as I felt that it would never garner sufficient support in order to become a valuable resource, and that it would only serve as a battleground for trolls and vandals. What I have seen in recent months has only strengthened my conviction of this. It is important to note, that since the opening of the encyclopedia, not one single native speaker of Moldovan has come forward to either work on the encyclopedia or express approval for its continuation. Although some users have made sporadic edits during some odd days, for a long period, there were about 10 edits per week with Escarbot (a bot adding interwikis) being the most active contributor. Nevertheless, whenever a vote on the encyclopedia's future opens a new barrage of vandalism and edits of low quality hit Mo as new users wish to become eligible to vote and others wish to create complete chaos.
>
> The recent vote there for an administrator has been a good indicator of how things are progressing. For a year now, not one single vote for an admin has succeeded either due to insufficient interest from qualitative users (which as I have said before are virtually non-existent) or too much activity from vandals and trolls. The last vote had to be closed by the steward Yann and the provisional administrator Pill is overwhelmed by an immense volley of vandalism (see for yourselves at http://mo.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Recentchanges&limit=500&namespace=0). Yann himself said: " If you asked me, I would close this wiki altogether, because it's just a big mess." It is simply impossible to stabilize the situation at present and allow a continuation of constructive edits, but the prospect for either of those two things in the future is low in any case due to a lack of interested and knowledgeable users.
>
> Also I would like to note the vote on Meta where a majority of users have voted to shut down the encyclopedia. Although the vote is not officially closed (even though it passed its intially mandated duration of 2 weeks), I believe its results are an accurate display of the community's view on the subject. Of course the majority of the votes come from users on Ro or Ru as many users voted strictly for political considerations. Nevertheless, most non-partisan users voted against Mo and all Moldovan users voted against it.
>
> Lastly I would like to remind the community of Anthere's statement from the beginning of the year. He presented the view that most board members including Jimbo accepted the necessity to freeze the Moldovan Wikipedia and that only the technical details remained to be implemented. I do not truly know what caused this declaration to remain unfulfilled by I suggest that it be now, especially in the chaotic circumstances surrounding that encyclopedia now. If interest will rise, it will be possible to re-open Mo, and ideally at a new domain such as Mo-cyr and let work there continue. Nevertheless, in its current state, that resource cannot have any positive role as it is incapacitated by a lack of constructive users and an excess of destructive ones.
>
> Thanks You,
> TSO1D.
>
>
> ---------------------------------
> Everyone is raving about the all-new Yahoo! Mail beta.
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

I'm starting to get the feeling that these messages to the mailing
list are an organised campaign against mo.wikipedia.

--
Oldak Quill (oldakquill at gmail.com)
_______________________________________________
Wikipedia-l mailing list
Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

---------------------------------
Everyone is raving about the all-new Yahoo! Mail beta.


from_name: Edward Z. Yang

subject: [Wikitech-l] Problem with whitelists

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

Mark Clements wrote:
> Does a similar behaviour occur, if you have badsite.com blacklisted and
> goodsite.com whitelisted?  i.e. would goodsite.com.badsite.com work?  If so
> that is a lot more serious!

Yes. Try it yourself.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (MingW32)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFFa1bvqTO+fYacSNoRAlmgAJ9jEZmTp/tXRvN1TAAh+B4RrK0qNwCdEsti
l9aOzK2Tt9TEaz2rBagWmC0=
=UyB1
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


subject: [WikiEN-l] Systemic bias wrt gender

body:
charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com wrote:

>Ray Saintonge wrote
>
>
>>Private payments in support of private interests are less dangerous than
>>direct subsidies from Wikimedia.
>>
>>
>Or not.
>
We know to hold them to the same standards as any unpaid writer.  The
average editor may be more reticent to question an officially paid writer.

>>We know they are outsiders.
>>
>>
>How?
>
By the simple expedient of knowing that we don't pay them.

>>Direct
>>payment can too easily suggest that the payee has the WMF stamp of
>>approval, or somehow states the "official" POV for his selected topics.
>>
>>
>Sorry, that's paranoid stuff. Why would the Board hypothetically spend money to undermine NPOV? Since when has the WMF had an official POV? Why would this sort of thing, which would have to appear transparently in budgets, be _worse_ than political, religious or corporate groups paying people to edit, deniably?
>
Perception is everything.  Repeatedly denying that we are run by a cabal
does nothing to convince those who believe it.  Spending money to
undermine NPOV does not imply that that is the intention.  Having good
articles is perfectly legitimate, and the paid writers would be
instructed to write from a NPOV, but the undermining is more subtle than
that.

Financial transparency?  Did I miss something the announcement that
financial reports were now available?

>I'm against the concept of paid editors, but basically because support for the sites in other ways should have priority.
>
So we really agree on that fundamental question.

Ec


body:
On Nov 27, 2006, at 4:18 PM, Rob Smith wrote:

>> This source says, "Martinez was brought to trial by the Immigration
>> and Naturalization Service ... and convicted ... ".

Funny, but I read that sentence:

"Martinez was brought to trial by the Immigration and Naturalization
Service for his 1980 border crossing incident and was convicted of
providing false information to a federal official. That conviction
was later overturned on appeal."

and a few sentences further:

  "He was eventually exonerated of all criminal charges"

Fred


from_name: Pedro Sanchez

subject: [WikiEN-l] Was: Google Earth screenshots

body:
On 11/24/06, Michiel Sikma <michiel at thingmajig.org> wrote:
>
> Op 24-nov-2006, om 14:51 heeft Thomas Dalton het volgende geschreven:
>
> > Some people will upload them without paying any attention to the
> > category - as the category won't affect them, we can ignore them when
> > considering the benefits of making the category. Other people will see
> > the category and upload more images - that's the main affect the
> > category will have, so that's what we need to consider.
>
> I think that the goal of the images should be put into consideration.
> Isn't it better conduct to categorize "satellite photos" as opposed
> to "images from Google Earth"? This would allow people to put free
> images in the category as well. I don't really see the use of
> categorizing images from Google Earth, because they aren't any more
> or less useful than equivalents from other sources.
>
> PS: I'm new to this list, and haven't seen the beginning of this
> discussion, so my apologies if this is off-topic or besides the point.
>
> Michiel Sikma <michiel at thingmajig.org>
> Web designer and programmer
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

There's no reason why [[Category:Google Maps images]] cannot be a
subcategory of both
[[Category:Fair use images]] and [[Category:Satellite images]]


from_name: Jim Schuler

subject: [WikiEN-l] Non-stupid wikien-l thread

body:
Glib?  Me-tooish?  Seems to me you're drawing the wrong inferrences.

On 11/27/06, charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com <
charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
>
> "Jim Schuler" wrote
>
> > I'll play with it, if you don't mind.
>
> Do you think you could possibly not do this, i.e. top post something glib
> or me-tooish? It's poor list etiquette, and this was supposed to be the
> sensible thread.
>
> Charles
>
> -----------------------------------------
> Email sent from www.ntlworld.com
> Virus-checked using McAfee(R) Software
> Visit www.ntlworld.com/security for more information
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
Jim
http://iacobomus.blogspot.com/


subject: [Wikitech-l] Problem with whitelists

references:
<ekb6hl$r7k$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<ekebr2$cii$1@sea.gmane.org>	<ekfktj$7gi$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<456B60A0.4000104@pobox.com>

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

Brion Vibber wrote:
> As I mentioned before, this is presumably because you're using a
> straight regex, with no anchor at the end, so it'll match subsets of a
> hostname.

I was thinking that too. It would be quite easy to fix on the whitelist
end by tacking on loads of $. However...

> It's debatable whether that's actually ever desirable behavior, though.
> It might be wise to assume that a whitelist/blacklist entry with no '/'
> is meant to anchor at the end of the hostname and slip that in silently.

That's what I think too. By default, whitelist definitions need to be a
bit stricter. No one really minds if badsite.com.newsite.com is blocked
(extremely strange subdomain conventions on newsite.com to say the
least), but the reverse can be manipulated by domain squatters who have
all their subdomains pointing at a generic home page.

Granted, it doesn't seem to be a pressing issue, but we may have just
violated [[WP:BEANS]].
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list: commons-l

from_name: damodar vinayak bale

subject: [Commons-l] SVG chessboard transparency

body:
 ?  Peace & Love,That's the Art Of Living.
    -Shyam.

On Mon, 27 Nov 2006 Erik Moeller wrote :
>The servers appear to be configured to render transparency in SVG
>using a chessboard pattern:
>http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:LithuanianHistory.svg
>
>Is that actually desired by anyone? It seems more useful for debugging
>purposes than for actually using images.
>
>--
>Peace & Love,
>Erik
>
>Member, Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees
>
>DISCLAIMER: Unless otherwise stated, all views or opinions expressed
>in this message are solely my own and do not represent an official
>position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.
>_______________________________________________
>Commons-l mailing list
>Commons-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
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subject: [Commons-l] SVG chessboard transparency

body:
 ?Peace & Love,that's The Art of Living.
  -Shyam.

On Mon, 27 Nov 2006 Erik Moeller wrote :
>The servers appear to be configured to render transparency in SVG
>using a chessboard pattern:
>http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:LithuanianHistory.svg
>
>Is that actually desired by anyone? It seems more useful for debugging
>purposes than for actually using images.
>
>--
>Peace & Love,
>Erik
>
>Member, Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees
>
>DISCLAIMER: Unless otherwise stated, all views or opinions expressed
>in this message are solely my own and do not represent an official
>position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.
>_______________________________________________
>Commons-l mailing list
>Commons-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
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subject: [Commons-l] SVG chessboard transparency

body:
 ?Peace & Love,that's The Art of Living.
  -Shyam.

On Mon, 27 Nov 2006 Erik Moeller wrote :
>The servers appear to be configured to render transparency in SVG
>using a chessboard pattern:
>http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:LithuanianHistory.svg
>
>Is that actually desired by anyone? It seems more useful for debugging
>purposes than for actually using images.
>
>--
>Peace & Love,
>Erik
>
>Member, Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees
>
>DISCLAIMER: Unless otherwise stated, all views or opinions expressed
>in this message are solely my own and do not represent an official
>position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.
>_______________________________________________
>Commons-l mailing list
>Commons-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
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from_name: Steve Block

subject: [WikiEN-l] Fiction and Wikia

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
  > In general, we should be more selective with what external links we
> provide, and how we present them.

We already do.

> We should distinguish between:
>
> - Sources of the information in the article

These should be placed in the References section, not the External links
one.

> - Sites that are more informative than the article (particularly where
> the article is very short)
> - Sites that represent some example of what is described in the
> article (eg, a ski resort, for an article about ski resorts...)

These should be in the External links section.

> - Community/portal/forum sites, where people may want to go if they're
> really interested in the topic..

These should generally not be included.

--
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.1.409 / Virus Database: 268.14.18/554 - Release Date: 27/11/06


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] Fiction and Wikia

body:
On 27/11/06, Steve Block <steve.block at myrealbox.com> wrote:
> Steve Bennett wrote:

> > - Community/portal/forum sites, where people may want to go if they're
> > really interested in the topic..

> These should generally not be included.

There are exceptions, e.g. *the* forum on an obscure subject.

- d.


from_name: Liz Kim

subject: [Wikitech-l] Passing variables to articles

body:
Is there a way to pass variables into pages?

For all my wiki articles, I have included some sort of a {{:navigationbar}}
on the left.
There is a page linked from many different places and depending on how the
page is called I want different page to be included as {{:navigation}}

For example,
I have two navigation articles (page1nav and page2nav) and two regular
articles (page1 and page2)
page1's content is
{|
|{{:page1nav}}
|some content
|}
page2:
{|
|{{:page2nav}}
|some content
|}
Both pages have links to a different page - page3.
{|
|{{:dynamicnav}}
|some content
|}
When page3 is called from page1, it passes in "page1nav" and inserts it into
the dynamicanav...
Is this possible in wiki?
Thanks!


from_name: Guillaume Paumier

body:
Hello,

To help cleaning the small wikis, people from the Small wikis monitoring
team have thought about asking people from all projects to create a redirect
from [[Template:Delete]] to the local speedy deletion template. The major
wikis have already set this redirect, but it would be very useful on small
projects where sysops don't come very often. Thus they could check the
linked pages/the related category and deal with the pages containing
nonsense or pages remaining after move vandalism.

Please help spreading this request on your projects and forward this message
to people I've forgotten (I haven't found any mailing list for wikiquote,
for example). Thanks a lot.

On 11/14/06, Guillaume Paumier <guillom.pom at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> Thanks to Tangotango's great work, there is now a working channel
> monitoring 20 small wikis. People willing to help can join us in
> #wikimedia-swmt on freenode
>

--
Guillaume Paumier
Disciplus Simplex
http://fr.wikipedia.org : Resistance is futile ? You will be assimilated.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Cleaning vandalism on little-watched small wikis


body:
My apologies.
I've been posting to wikitech-l this whole time and was not sure where to
send this.
Now I know - Thanks.

On 11/27/06, Rob Church <robchur at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 28/11/06, Liz Kim <lizkim270 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Is there a way to pass variables into pages?
> [snip]
>
> Please don't cross-post, it's rude, and it won't get the problem
> solved any quicker. The correct list for discussion on this is
> mediawiki-l.
>
>
> Rob Church
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


from_name: Rob Smith

body:
Yes Fred. Absolutely correct.  Kiko not only won on appeal, Kiko is
indeed an innocent man, as Oliver North and Ken Lay also are innocent
men.  You posted twice now that Kiko is innocent; however this ruling
by yourself,

"Nobs01 is banned for one year for personal attacks. The ban may be
renewed for additional years by any 3 administrators after its
expiration ..."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Nobs01_and_others#Nobs01_banned_for_personal_attacks

is a virtual lifetime ban if I tried to present the facts on the
Oliver North page, that Oliver North is indeed an innocent man.  Truth
is sometimes just too damn controversial.  I am now just restricted to
policy debates.  You know yourself, I was not given a fair hearing.
And the test of time as shown the bulk of my work has stood up.  Even
Ruy Lopez's most active sockpuppets now, not only acknowledge that
Venona documents & secondary sources exist, he has actually made some
very good, NPOV contributions using them.  This is an incredible
reversal.

Nobs01

On 11/27/06, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at waterwiki.info> wrote:
>
> On Nov 27, 2006, at 4:18 PM, Rob Smith wrote:
>
> >> This source says, "Martinez was brought to trial by the Immigration
> >> and Naturalization Service ... and convicted ... ".
>
> Funny, but I read that sentence:
>
> "Martinez was brought to trial by the Immigration and Naturalization
> Service for his 1980 border crossing incident and was convicted of
> providing false information to a federal official. That conviction
> was later overturned on appeal."
>
> and a few sentences further:
>
>  "He was eventually exonerated of all criminal charges"
>
> Fred
>
> _______________________________________________
> 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: Rob Church

subject: [Wikitech-l] [Bug 7948] importDump.php: warn no Recentchanges

body:
On 26/11/06, Dan Jacobson <jidanni at jidanni.org> wrote:
> RC> There's a script to rebuild recent changes, isn't there?
>
> Well, it, rebuildrecentchanges.php, says:
>  * Rebuild link tracking tables from scratch.  This takes several
>  * hours, depending on the database size and server configuration.

Looking at the code, it shouldn't take that long for most wikis.

> Therefore, one is forced to use Special:Import, lest one face hours of
> rebuilding from scratch as the price for just importing one or two
> pages. Therefore if one would like to do things in batch mode instead
> of being chained to a GUI, one must make a LWP::UserAgent script to
> interact with Special:Import.

Well, has one tested the script against one's database? One would hate
to think one was depriving oneself of the solution on the basis of a
comment one found in one's files, wouldn't one?

Rob Church


from_name: Guy Chapman aka JzG

body:
On Sun, 26 Nov 2006 16:25:43 -0700, "Rob Smith" <nobs03 at gmail.com>
wrote:

>Anti-communism = McCarthyism is like
>saying  Communism = Stalinism.

But that's not what it's saying.  I think you may be looking at it
through the filter of past disputes.

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


subject: [WikiEN-l] Community Sanction

body:
On Sun, 26 Nov 2006 17:23:39 -0800, Luna <lunasantin at gmail.com> wrote:

>I think the idea with community bans is that the person in question is
>believed to be *beyond* any significant hope of rehabilitation or
>compliance. In practice, though, is there really much difference between
>one-year and indefinite blocks? Few accounts return from either, and both
>can be evaded with socks.

Indefinite <> permanent.  The former can be lifted if there is
credible evidence of intent to reform, the latter comes I think only
from ArbCom or Foundation.  A community ban is defined for practical
purposes as a ban which no admin is prepared to lift; the real problem
here is RFA, which tends to ensure that the "cabal" remains a cabal
and is not diluted by "dangerous" inclusionists.

>Ultimately, though, I think that if somebody returns under a new alias and
>*avoids* the same sorts of disruptive behavior that led to their initial
>block, then nobody will even have a reason to check if they might be the
>same person, and they won't get "caught." If the person is truly reformed,
>they'll be able to get away with block evasion, because no one will even
>realize they're a problem user evading a block. Or something like that,
>anyway. You get the idea.

Sure.  And a new account which causes no problem *is* no problem, so
why would we care if it is the same individual.  All we want here is
to keep out those who are intent on abusing the project for their own
ends; clueless aggressive newbies who realise what the problem is too
late to save the account (or want a fresh start) are not, to my mind
anyway, a pressing problem.

The profile of Wikipedia is now such that we have a significant number
of aggressively tendentious editors.  These go well beyond the
occasional "characters" like SPUI and cause massive wasted time and
effort.

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


from_name: Rory Stolzenberg

body:
On 11/27/06, Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:
>
> Guillaume Paumier wrote:
>
> >Hello,
> >
> >To help cleaning the small wikis, people from the Small wikis monitoring
> >team have thought about asking people from all projects to create a
> redirect
> >from [[Template:Delete]] to the local speedy deletion template. The major
> >wikis have already set this redirect, but it would be very useful on
> small
> >projects where sysops don't come very often. Thus they could check the
> >linked pages/the related category and deal with the pages containing
> >nonsense or pages remaining after move vandalism.
> >
> >Please help spreading this request on your projects and forward this
> message
> >to people I've forgotten (I haven't found any mailing list for wikiquote,
> >for example). Thanks a lot.
> >
> >
>
> I'm not entirely sure that this is the best approach to take for
> something like this.  While I will admit that small wikis do tend to
> invite vandalism because there may not be an active administrator
> watching the content at all times, having a 'bot or an aggressive
> deletionist purging all content in a speedy delete category isn't
> necessarily the best thing either.  For myself as an administrator on a
> couple smallish Wikimedia wikis, I do a review of any candidates that
> get marked for speedy deletion and I don't always agree with the
> decision.  Sometimes I will bring it up for a community discussion
> instead (like a VfD or whatever) or try to fix the problems in the page.
> That means that you have to have a working knowledge of the target
> language of that wiki, and perhaps even a strong feel for the goals and
> "traditions" of the Wiki community that is participating.
> [snip]
> --
> Robert Scott Horning
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

The pages aren't going to be deleted by bots. The people of the small wiki
monitoring team (see [[m:SWMT]]), if they see spam or blatant vandalism
flagged by the IRC bots, would tag it with {{delete}}, then an admin of that
project would go through the speedy deletion category and delete it. The
benefit of having a redirect from [[Template:Delete]] is that the people
monitoring the wiki for spam don't have to actually know the language to tag
something (though they could go to [[m:Multilingual speedy deletions]].


from_name: charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] Fiction and Wikia

body:
Steve Block wrote

> Steve Bennett wrote:
>   > In general, we should be more selective with what external links we
> > provide, and how we present them.
>
> We already do.
>
> > We should distinguish between:
> >
> > - Sources of the information in the article
>
> These should be placed in the References section, not the External links
> one.

I looked at [[Wikipedia:Citing sources]] on this, and I don't think that guideline is optimal. It is much better, if you need a weblink as reference for something specific, to make an inline link or make a note. In fact a note is much superior, because you can attach a comment or point up some specific phrase used.

If you just put raw weblinks in a References section, and don't specify the relevance, how can anyone tell that the link is playing a reference role?

Charles

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Fiction and Wikia

body:
On 11/27/06, The Cunctator <cunctator at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think it's bad business to get in the habit of setting up official
> policies that exclude factual, referenced, neutral information from
> inclusion in Wikipedia.
>
> The natural extension of this tendency will lead to the typical elitist
> exclusionism that all institutional media typically fall victim to.
>
> Wikipedia is not paper.
>

Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of items of information.
That something is 100% true does not mean it is suitable for inclusion
in Wikipedia.

Been policy for a long time.
--
geni


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject:
[Wikitech-l] [MediaWiki-CVS] SVN: [17964]
	trunk/phase3/includes/SpecialContributions.php

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

nikerabbit at svn.wikimedia.org wrote:
> * Don't mess up diff link when revision is not deleted
>
> -	if( $rev->userCan( Revision::DELETED_TEXT ) ) {
> -		$difftext = '(' . $sk->makeKnownLinkObj( $page, $messages['diff'], 'diff=prev&oldid='.$row->rev_id ) . ')';
> -	} else {
> -		$difftext = '(' . $messages['diff'] . ')';
> +
> +	if( $rev->isDeleted( Revision::DELETED_TEXT ) ) {
> +		if ( $rev->userCan( Revision::DELETED_TEXT ) ) {
> +			$difftext .= '(' . $sk->makeKnownLinkObj( $page, $messages['diff'], 'diff=prev&oldid='.$row->rev_id ) . ')';
> +		} else {
> +			$difftext .= '(' . $messages['diff'] . ')';
> +		}

This change is... very very wrong, breaking all diff links.

Has been reverted.

For reference, Revision->userCan() checks whether the current user has
permission to see the requested item on that particular revision. In
this case checking for text, so it'll return true if either:

* the text is not marked as hidden/deleted
- -or-
* the text is marked as hidden/deleted, and the user has permission to
view revision-deleted text

Changing it to Revision->isDeleted() means that the link doesn't get
displayed if the text isn't marked as hidden/deleted... which ain't
right. :)

Further note: revision deletion markings currently aren't used as there
are some as-yet-unsolved problems.

- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: David Ashby

subject: [WikiEN-l] The new non-stupid wiki-en thread

body:
On 11/27/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> So, anyone greatly improved an article lately?
>
> Steve

I've deleted about 50 or so articles, does that count?

-humblefool


from_name: Delirium

subject: [WikiEN-l] Google Earth screenshots

body:
Anthony wrote:
> On 11/27/06, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:
>
>> Wow.  That's very interesting.  I knew there was a lot of USGS
>> data out there, but I didn't know there was *that* much.
>>
>
> Here's a list of most if not all of it.  Some of these are apparently
> proprietary though (they are listed as for viewing only - no
> downloading).
>
> http://seamless.usgs.gov/website/seamless/products/listofortho.asp
>
> Where the coverage is (only in the US, but starting to get a lot of
> cities), the resolution is really good.  That shot from Los Angeles
> was 0.3 meters (per pixel).  Some of the data is at 0.15 meters.
> Geocover 2000, on the other hand, which covers the entire globe, is
> 14.25 meters.  So outside the US most of the public domain imagery is
> not very good (I think, please prove me wrong!).

Is such satellite imagery copyrightable in the first place, in the U.S.
anyway?  Isn't it just mechanical imaging of the earth's surface, and
therefore no more copyrightable than a mechanical reproduction of the
Mona Lisa is?

-Mark


subject: [WikiEN-l] Fiction and Wikia

body:
"The Cunctator" wrote

> I think it's bad business to get in the habit of setting up official
> policies that exclude factual, referenced, neutral information from
> inclusion in Wikipedia.

I agree, but I don't see the sequitur from what I wrote.

Charles

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from_name: Yann Forget

subject: [Foundation-l] Vandalism and small wikis

body:
Hi,

Some wikis are plagued with vandalism, spams and non sense. Moldavan
Wikipedia seems the worst at this time, but there have been others too.
These projects do not bring any free knowledge to anybody, just a lot of
works for volunteers (hopefully there are great volunteers like Pill)
and stewards.

Regarding the Moldavan Wikipedia (http://mo.wikipedia.org), the
administrators election was already cancelled twice because of massive
attacks. Sincere editors have been discouraged and have left. So the
wiki is just a battle field for vandals, trolls and sockpuppets. There
is no expected improvement in the near future because the language
itself is in the middle of a political controversy.

I forsee the same situation for the Montenegrin Wikipedia if it is
created. These wikis only give a bad image of Wikimedia. I think that
the Foundation should take its responsibilities and take some decisions.

Regards,

Yann
--
http://www.non-violence.org/ | Site collaboratif sur la non-violence
http://www.forget-me.net/ | Alternatives sur le Net
http://fr.wikipedia.org/ | Encyclop?die libre
http://fr.wikisource.org/ | Biblioth?que libre
http://wikilivres.info | Documents libres


subject: [WikiEN-l] Community Sanction

body:
"George Herbert" wrote

> On 11/27/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
>
> > The profile of Wikipedia is now such that we have a significant number
> > of aggressively tendentious editors.  These go well beyond the
> > occasional "characters" like SPUI and cause massive wasted time and
> > effort.

> Having them is just an indicator of the scope of Wikipedia; if you look back
> at all the prior Internet interactive projects of note, they have all
> attracted malcontents of various sorts over time.  Success attracts them.
>
> The question is what is done about it.  The best solution I saw was benign
> dictatorships where someone in power just booted troublemakers, and was
> trusted by the rest to not boot good guys, and where social pressure
> functioned and kept good guys having really bad days from becoming
> troublemakers requiring the boot.

>From where I sit, the issue is not about having some different kind of constitution. It's about whether you have the 'police' or the 'judiciary' on top.

It is clear that people in the past have wanted judicial solutions. Problem users get their day (month) in court.

The current system of Arbitration doesn't go looking for 'aggressively tendentious editors'. It waits for cases to be brought. We hear quite a lot currently about possible vigilantism, by those without the time or the patience or the faith in the system of Arbitration to bring the cases it would need.

I actually doubt we have proportionately more of the really disruptive editors than in the past. That doesn't mean that there aren't the annoying characters. Some of the most tiresome definitely have been removed or have left or have been domesticated in 2006.

I think people should not be facile about this. Putting a problem editor out of circulation is worth the trouble of submitting evidence in a case. That's basic civics: be public spirited enough to go through the process.

Charles

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from_name: geni

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia ne fonctionne plus en Tunisie

body:
On 11/27/06, Mohamed Ibrahim <mido.architect at gmail.com> wrote:
> All Wikmedia projects are blocked, as he mentioned
> plus that Tunisian wikipedians didn't appear since then
> also when I tried to contact other Tunisians, one said to me that it's usual
> to block sites in Tunisia

Yes that was why some people considered it rather ironic that it paid
host to the World Summit on the Information Society:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4450474.stm

Tunisia is one of the countries we will always be at risk of being blocked from.

--
geni


from_name: Mark Williamson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Moldovan Wikipedia (sry)

body:
Apparently you've not been keeping up here. Nobody wants to hear about
it anymore. The issue has been hashed and rehashed dozens of times.
Any new messages on the topic are  ignored by most people now.

Nevertheless, I've formulated a short response to each of your points
below, for the sake of balance for what few users actually do read
this thread.

On 27/11/06, TSO1D From Wikpedia <tso1d at yahoo.com> wrote:
> First of all let me say that I appologize for mentioning this contoversial subject again, however I simply wanted to state my view on recent developments there.

Your view is predictable :-) You don't need to note anything unless
your opinions have changed, and they don't appear to have done so

>   I have been opposed to the existence of this encyclopedia from its inception, as I felt that it would never garner sufficient support in order to become a valuable resource, and that it would only serve as a battleground for trolls and vandals. What I have seen in recent months has only strengthened my conviction of this. It is important to note, that since the opening of the encyclopedia, not one single native speaker of Moldovan has come forward to either work on the encyclopedia or express approval for its continuation. Although some users have made sporadic edits during some odd days, for a long period, there were about 10 edits per week with Escarbot (a bot adding interwikis) being the most active contributor. Nevertheless, whenever a vote on the encyclopedia's future opens a new barrage of vandalism and edits of low quality hit Mo as new users wish to become eligible to vote and others wish to create complete chaos.

Native speaker participation has been deficient but not entirely
non-existant. Also, lack of participation can be blamed on the fact
that Bonaparte was allowed to continue his reign of terror and
constant vandalism for months, and the huge "GO AWAY" notice that was
on the front page for so long probably scared away any other potential
contributors.

>   The recent vote there for an administrator has been a good indicator of how things are progressing. For a year now, not one single vote for an admin has succeeded either due to insufficient interest from qualitative users (which as I have said before are virtually non-existent) or too much activity from vandals and trolls. The last vote had to be closed by the steward Yann and the provisional administrator Pill is overwhelmed by an immense volley of vandalism (see for yourselves at http://mo.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Recentchanges&limit=500&namespace=0). Yann himself said: " If you asked me, I would close this wiki altogether, because it's just a big mess."  It is simply impossible to stabilize the situation at present and allow a continuation of constructive edits, but the prospect for either of those two things in the future is low in any case due to a lack of interested and knowledgeable users.

Well, technically Epure's first vote passed. If you look at who voted,
it's obvious that everybody who actually voted against him before the
establishment of a second vote was not elligible to vote. Also,
Bogdan's vote passed (although his performance as an admin has been
mostly one of total absence), and my first vote passed (Anittas' was
the only oppose vote, and he hadn't registered yet). However, the
situation of the site is certainly improving because there is a
provisional admin now who has put an end to the total chaos imposed by
Bonaparte and his cadre.

>   Also I would like to note the vote on Meta where a majority of users have voted to shut down the encyclopedia. Although the vote is not officially closed (even though it passed its intially mandated duration of 2 weeks), I believe its results are an accurate display of the community's view on the subject. Of course the majority of the votes come from users on Ro or Ru as many users voted strictly for political considerations. Nevertheless, most non-partisan users voted against Mo and all Moldovan users voted against it.

"most non-partisan users"? What's that supposed to mean? The ones you
consider to be non-partisan, because they voted a certain way?

Also, the results from that vote are wholly irrelevant because
Wikimedia is not a democracy. The powers that be have decided to
maintain the status quo.

>   Lastly I would like to remind the community of Anthere's statement from the beginning of the year. He presented the view that most board members including Jimbo accepted the necessity to freeze the Moldovan Wikipedia and that only the technical details remained to be implemented. I do not truly know what caused this declaration to remain unfulfilled by I suggest that it be now, especially in the chaotic circumstances surrounding that encyclopedia now. If interest will rise, it will be possible to re-open Mo, and ideally at a new domain such as Mo-cyr and let work there continue. Nevertheless, in its current state, that resource cannot have any positive role as it is incapacitated by a lack of constructive users and an excess of destructive ones.

1) Anthere is a woman. 2) That was quite some time ago, opinion since
then has been almost exactly the opposite. See the e-mails from
GerardM. 3) Circumstances are no longer chaotic. When the 2nd round of
voting got out of control (thanks in no small part to Bonaparte's
sockpuppet, User:Smirnov), they were closed, and Smirnov was
temporarily blocked. Mo.wp is no longer a black hole with vandals and
trolls. Destructive users are quickly banned now. New pages are still
created, and our standard of page quality is still better than
ro.wiki's, whose pages are mostly stubs, POV, or otherwise requiring
fixing of some sort. Myself, Epure, and AdiJapan have been fixing
orthography, terminology, and grammar in articles. Quality is on the
rise.

In essence, what you are doing now amounts to little more than FUD.
The project is clearly on a good path and is under control.

Mark


from_name: MPerel

subject: [WikiEN-l] Systemic bias wrt gender

body:
On 11/22/06, Puppy <puppy at killerchihuahua.com> wrote:
>
>
> Speaking as a woman who does not even own a blowdryer or curling iron, I
> concur with Sarah - the cut is everything. I also am closer to losing my
> temper than at any other time ever on Wikipedia. Keitel, your entire
> email is insulting in the extreme. No one is claiming women handle all
> the "serious" articles and men edit only Beer and NASCAR articles. You
> are taking one tiny stereotype and applying it across the board. I
> personally use a computer, I am a programmer by trade, and have not
> touched a curling iron in 30 years. I know men who won't touch a
> computer. If "most of the women" you know actually have more interest in
> their hair than in current events, history, the rise and fall of
> nations, influential novels, paradigms which have reshaped society, etc,
> all I can say to you is that you need to meet some new women.
>
> --pissed puppy, who doesn't care for stereotypes

I've just read through some of these threads on gender bias and the low
numbers of women in arbcom and WP in general.

Like KC-Puppy, I too am a programmer.  I recall once at a company where I
worked, I was the senior programmer training a new junior programmer who was
male.  The newly hired vice president approached us to discuss a project and
it soon became obvious that he assumed the male programmer was my superior
and that I must be his secretary!

I've regularly experienced this sort of gender-bias attitude in a variety of
settings, and Wikipedia is not exempt.

Now at Wikipedia, even though gender is more hidden behind ambiguous
usernames, there still exists a bit of a boy's club.  Editors who don't know
me or neglect to notice the "This user is a mother" userbox on my user page
often tend to assume the "M" in MPerel likely stands for "Mike" and I get
the accompanying slap-on-the-back attempted male-bonding sort of treatment.
Often, I find it easier to let people assume I am a "dude", though in doing
that, I find myself holding back contributing since I realize of course that
I make quite a mediocre male and fall short of the ability to exhibit the
predominantly-valued male qualities.  For me it's not a matter of being
intimidated (I have healthy self-esteem), but it's just that my outlook and
approach to problem-solving doesn't fit the dominant male-oriented mold, and
I ask myself, why should I waste my time and effort in areas where it isn't
valued?

Occasionally an editor who has discovered I am female dismisses me as an
air-headed ditz.  I was going to provide a link to the most agregious
misogynistic example I personally experienced, but it has apparently been
deleted, perhaps since it outed my presumed location.  Basically I was
mercilessly mocked with demeaning sexist ridicule when I tried to address a
particular conflict on a talk page from what I consider my more female
perspective.

Even without the blatant misogynist trolls, subtle attitudes and assumptions
exist that are often presumptive, demeaning and dismissive of women and
female ways of looking at things. There is a bias favoring male
aggressiveness, although if a female editor exhibits assertiveness she is
often treated and labeled as queen bitch and is summarily harrassed and
persecuted.  I've seen the harrassment that the few prominent females have
endured and frankly it has deterred me from being a more active participant
or from pursuing any official leadership role as I don't see the need to
subject myself to that kind of treatment.  I've been a Wikipedian for years
but I still continue to regularly put off admin nomination offers because I
hesitate to make myself a target.

I think the gender bias problem is bigger (yet perhaps more subtle) than
some think.

~Miri not Mike! (MPerel)


from_name: Mohamed Ibrahim

body:
All Wikmedia projects are blocked, as he mentioned
plus that Tunisian wikipedians didn't appear since then
also when I tried to contact other Tunisians, one said to me that it's usual
to block sites in Tunisia
I'll try to get more info on this matter.

--
Mido

On 11/27/06, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 26/11/06, Mohamed Ibrahim <mido.architect at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Someone posted in Arabic Village pump confirming the blockage of
> Wikipedia
> > in Tunisia
>
> A quick question - is this just the Arabic wikipedia, all of
> *.wikipedia.org, or all Wikimedia sites?
>
> --
> - Andrew Gray
>   andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


body:
one of the Tunisian Wikipedians reported just now that Wikipedia
has been unblocked, I hope this doesn't happen again

--
Mido

On 11/27/06, Mohamed Ibrahim <mido.architect at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> All Wikmedia projects are blocked, as he mentioned
> plus that Tunisian wikipedians didn't appear since then
> also when I tried to contact other Tunisians, one said to me that it's
> usual to block sites in Tunisia
> I'll try to get more info on this matter.
>
> --
> Mido
>
>
> On 11/27/06, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On 26/11/06, Mohamed Ibrahim <mido.architect at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Someone posted in Arabic Village pump confirming the blockage of
> > Wikipedia
> > > in Tunisia
> >
> > A quick question - is this just the Arabic wikipedia, all of
> > *.wikipedia.org, or all Wikimedia sites?
> >
> > --
> > - Andrew Gray
> >   andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk
> > _______________________________________________
> > foundation-l mailing list
> > foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >
>
>

--
- Arabic Wikipedia: http://ar.wikipedia.org/  "Share your knowledge"
El koon kolo beydoor we e7na WAYAH bendoor....


references:
<52a8cf060611261024q39e8c596ge405ef7b304ee442@mail.gmail.com>
	<oiujm2pkrbss90h8hdqbotbrsd0gvja46h@4ax.com>
	<52a8cf060611261525n31160f6ct30c25597f64b4715@mail.gmail.com>
	<hpbmm2dssdf6a0igo3l9b2pds4cdoueh4g@4ax.com>
	<52a8cf060611271221w5a94dc1dud425dcad46a9d172@mail.gmail.com>

body:
On Mon, 27 Nov 2006 13:21:52 -0700, "Rob Smith" <nobs03 at gmail.com>
wrote:

>Yes. There are two issues (a) smearing a critic when a critic is
>included for NPOV purposes; (b) smearing a critic by innuendo.  My
>raising this issues 14 months ago resulted in (1) punitive action
>against me (2) finally removing the unsubstaniated smears and innuendo
>from another article.

So you say, but I didn't read it like that.

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


subject: [WikiEN-l] Community Sanction

body:
On Mon, 27 Nov 2006 11:56:35 -0800, "George Herbert"
<george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:

>Having them is just an indicator of the scope of Wikipedia; if you look back
>at all the prior Internet interactive projects of note, they have all
>attracted malcontents of various sorts over time.  Success attracts them.

For sure, yes.

>The question is what is done about it.  The best solution I saw was benign
>dictatorships where someone in power just booted troublemakers, and was
>trusted by the rest to not boot good guys, and where social pressure
>functioned and kept good guys having really bad days from becoming
>troublemakers requiring the boot.

Sadly that does not scale,  We now have a thousand of these
individuals, and hence the thread :-)

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


from_name: brion at pobox.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki automated test run failure 2006-11-28

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

Reading tests from "/home/brion/src/wiki/phase3/maintenance/parserTests.txt"...
Running test TODO: Table security: embedded pipes (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-April/034637.html)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Link containing double-single-quotes '' (bug 4598)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Template with thumb image (with link in description)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: message transform: <noinclude> in transcluded template (bug 4926)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: message transform: <onlyinclude> in transcluded template (bug 4926)... FAILED!
Running test BUG 1887, part 2: A <math> with a thumbnail- math enabled... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML bullet list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML ordered list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML nested bullet list, open tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML nested ordered list, open tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Parsing optional HTML elements (Bug 6171)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Inline HTML vs wiki block nesting... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Mixing markup for italics and bold... FAILED!
Running test TODO: 5 quotes, code coverage +1 line... FAILED!
Running test TODO: dt/dd/dl test... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Images with the "|" character in the comment... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Parents of subpages, two levels up, without trailing slash or name.... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Parents of subpages, two levels up, with lots of extra trailing slashes.... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Don't fall for the self-closing div... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Always escape literal '>' in output, not just after '<'... FAILED!

Reading tests from "/home/brion/src/wiki/phase3/extensions/Cite/citeParserTests.txt"...

Passed 449 of 469 tests (95.74%)... FAILED!