subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wiktionaries for all!

body:
Tim Starling wrote:

> An extra feature
> has been added to MediaWiki allowing "diagonal" linking, with the help
> of redirects. A link reading [[wikt:fi:kukkala]] on the German Wikipedia
> will link to http://de.wiktionary.org/fi:Kukkala, which will redirect to
> http://fi.wiktionary.org/Kukkala .

I'm not sure that is such a good idea, performance-wise... ideally, it
should go straight to the correct URL. People would otherwise constantly
use "Copy link to clipboard" on these links and fill the web with
nonsense links like http://de.wiktionary.org/fi:Kukkala, and we would
forever have to keep the redirects working. They are starting to become
a little difficult to keep track of, and I'm afraid it's only a matter
of time until we will inadvertantly create an infinite loop of redirects
somewhere.

In general, redirecting mechanisms should probably be revised to
redirect straight to the correct place.

What is the longest chain of redirects we have so far?...
        http://wikipedia.com/wiki/de:a
302 -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/de:a
302 -> http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/a
301 -> http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/A

So there are three things I see that are wrong here:

1. Those redirects should all be 301s, not 302
2. All of those URLs should 301 directly to
    http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/A
3. Nothing should link to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/de:a (but a
    [[Wikipedia:de:a]] link on en.wiktionary.org would, according to what
    you said, causing two unnecessary redirects for every visitor that
    clicks on the link).

For those who don't already know what's so bad about redirects: (1) Even
just one redirect doubles(!) the server's response time. That is
extremely noticeable when the servers are slow, which they are almost
always. (2) They cost Wikimedia an extra bit of bandwidth. I know this
is pretty miniscule, but at the rate that we seem to be creating new
redirects, it's going to make quite a difference pretty soon. (3) I'm
not sure about this one, but I would imagine that they are detrimental
to the Google ranking of the linked-to page.

Greetings,
Timwi


list: wikitech-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Erik Zachte

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Webalizer stats missing or way too low every now and
	then

body:
Gabriel Wicke wrote:

"Webalizer can't analyze logs out of order, so it just discards them when
they arrive the next day."

Server outages may be a partial explanation, yet low figures occur on
different dates for different wikipedias and some were not effected at all.
I'm not yet quite convinced that figures near but unequal zero on 5 days in
April for en: (April 11-13 and 28-29) can be explained this way. Certainly
outages did not occur 5 times around 00.15 AM.

http://en.wikipedia.org/stats/usage_200404.html#DAYSTATS

Erik Zachte


from_name: Gabriel Wicke

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Webalizer stats missing or way too low every now
	and then

body:
On Mon, 2004-05-10 at 01:30 +0200, Erik Zachte wrote:
> Server outages may be a partial explanation, yet low figures occur on
> different dates for different wikipedias and some were not effected at all.
> I'm not yet quite convinced that figures near but unequal zero on 5 days in
> April for en: (April 11-13 and 28-29) can be explained this way. Certainly
> outages did not occur 5 times around 00.15 AM.

Curly didn't transfer the logs for something like two weeks an the
squids ask each other about things, so there will always be some sibling
hits in the logs.
--
Gabriel Wicke


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Timwi

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: language limited funding/donation

body:
Alex Regh wrote:

> Hello!
>
> On Sat, 8 May 2004 10:30:43 +0200, Thomas R. Koll wrote:
>
>>Google is NOT read-only after it crawls the whole world wide web.
>>A search engine is naturally a whole different and more distributable
>>(see grub) thing that a database-centric wiki.
>
> There is a company namend Akamai out there, and as far as I know, they
> distribute websites like CNN and Microsoft

and (part of) LiveJournal ;-)

>, which are (especially the first)
> updated frequently, and have some feedback features etc.

I can't claim any expertise on this, but as far as I understood it,
Akamai specialises on serving static content. In the case of
LiveJournal, this is mainly the user pictures - if you delete one and
upload a new one, it will get a new URL, but if you edit an entry, it
still has the same URL, so LiveJournal entries are saved on the central
DB and not on Akamai.

On Wikipedia nothing is immutable under a given URL (not even images),
except perhaps for small things like the stylesheet, but they are not
worth it.

> So theoretically it
> might be possible to use distributed servers for the WP.

No, I don't think that would be possible.

> And in the long term it might be a good idea, too; all the Wikipedias
> are growing fast, and have users from all over the world.

Fast growth and international users are both no reason to employ
distributed servers. They are, however, a reason to employ new and good
hardware and to improve/optimise the software. :-)

Timwi


body:
Alex Regh wrote:

> After all, why should chinese and arabian (for example) entries have to
> cross an ocean to get edited, those WPs are probably read there a lot more
> than in America or Europe, too.

I don't understand this opposition to the ocean? ... It doesn't make it
any slower, you know.

Timwi


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: frames

references:
<c7lk4d$jlp$1@sea.gmane.org> <c7lp9l$307$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<c7lr1l$848$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
Antony Lewis wrote:

>>You should also avoid using "here" or "click here" as a link text. It
>
> I agree, where did you find it?

I'm sorry... I probably should have written that down. Now I can't find
it anymore. There's one at the bottom of http://wordweb.info/, maybe
that's the one I found, but now I'm not so sure if this is also part of
your site or not (you should probably also avoid using different domains
if it's the same site; better use subdomains).

Timwi


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: similar pages

body:
Volkan HATEM wrote:

> What we want to do is to pre-process wiki URLs so that we
> can redirect the request even if it was not typed using
> proper Turkish characters.

You can create redirects yourself:

     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Redirect

Admittedly, it's a bit of work to create such a redirect for every page
whose title has diacritics, but once you've done it, you only need to
make one redirect for every new page created.

Timwi


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Wiktionaries for all!

body:
Erik Zachte wrote:

>>For those who don't already know what's so bad about redirects: (1) Even
>>just one redirect doubles(!) the server's response time.
>
> If redirects are that costly, would it be useful to run a bot say once a
> month to replace links to redirects by the final destination?

I'm sorry, you got things mixed up here. This is *NOT* talking about
redirects of the kind  #REDIRECT [[somewhere]].  This is talking about
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently.  It is not talking about internal links
in articles (they are always fine); this is about inter-wiki links as
well as obsoleted URLs (like wikipedia.com).

Timwi


from_name: Lars Aronsson

subject: [Wikitech-l] similar pages

body:
Volkan HATEM wrote:
> Because of these reasons many Turkish speakers living abroad
> tend to substitute Turkish characters with other similar characters
> (omitting umlauts for example).

Among the Javascript buttons above the edit window, Mediawiki should
present a line of that language's most commonly used umlaut
characters, like this page, http://www.visit-sweden.com/

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


from_name: Aaron Peterson

subject: [Wikitech-l] security vulnerability

body:
the admin password is stored as plain text.

it is protected by a die()
command

most any user on your system can probably just read that file in a text
editor..

and anybody in the world can read it if if your mod_php stops working!!!

passwords need to be stored in a more secure fassion

--
509 332 7697
ICQ 2302806


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wiktionaries for all!

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> Timwi wrote:
>
>> I'm not sure that is such a good idea, performance-wise... ideally, it
>> should go straight to the correct URL. People would otherwise
>> constantly use "Copy link to clipboard" on these links and fill the
>> web with nonsense links like http://de.wiktionary.org/fi:Kukkala, and
>> we would forever have to keep the redirects working. They are starting
>> to become a little difficult to keep track of, and I'm afraid it's
>> only a matter of time until we will inadvertantly create an infinite
>> loop of redirects somewhere.
>
> One chief reason for making these links available is to allow interwiki
> linking from *non-wikimedia* wikis as well.  By using a single
> established prefix (WikiPedia:) you can link to any of our languages
> without begging third party site admins to add three hundred prefixes to
> their interwiki maps.

This is a fair point, but nonetheless an implementation that I'm not
entirely comfortable with. (Admittedly, I can't think of a better one
other than to encourage the entire wiki community to go entirely
multi-lingual and have all wikis standardise on a
[[<sitename>:<langcode>:<pagename>]] syntax for links to other wiki
sites...)

Another major disadvantage I thought of just now is that it poisons our
namespace. Suppose some silly company makes some sort of product and (to
be cool) calls it "fr:ea:ky". How would we name our article on it? It's
only a matter of time until this will be an actual problem.

>> For those who don't already know what's so bad about redirects: (1)
>> Even just one redirect doubles(!) the server's response time.
>
> That's not exactly true; the redirect bounce doesn't require rendering,
> and if appropriately set up can be cached at the squid level.

At the time I wrote the previous message, my experiments with Telnet
showed that the server took several seconds to reply with the redirects,
but returned an actual article quite quickly. (Both are pretty quick
now; maybe load has gone down since?) This leads me to believe that
these redirects are not currently handled by the squids, and
furthermore, that the load on the server is slowing them down
significantly even though, as you say, they do not require rendering.

I'm assuming by "rendering" you are referring to turning Wiki-markup
into HTML. While such a redirect doesn't need rendering, it still needs
processing of an HTTP request. I'm wondering what proportion of the CPU
power spent on a single HTTP request (including TCP handling, HTTP
request decoding, PHP parsing and execution, and generating the HTTP
response) goes to rendering. If CPU usage is the current performance
bottleneck, then determining that a link to [[a]] should actually go to
[[A]] might be quite as noticeable as a page rendering, as it is
overheaded by the entire HTTP request handling and PHP stuff.

These kinds of redirects, admittedly, do not require access to the DB.
This point is only significant if DB access is the current performance
bottleneck.

Greetings,
Timwi


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: similar pages

body:
Lars Aronsson wrote:

> Volkan HATEM wrote:
>
>>Because of these reasons many Turkish speakers living abroad
>>tend to substitute Turkish characters with other similar characters
>>(omitting umlauts for example).
>
> Among the Javascript buttons above the edit window, Mediawiki should
> present a line of that language's most commonly used umlaut
> characters, like this page, http://www.visit-sweden.com/

No, it shouldn't. It is absolutely completely trivial for users of
Microsoft Windows 2000 or newer to install a Turkish keyboard layout.
Wikipedia could provide a tutorial on how to do that, and link to it on
the Turkish edit page (or that of any other language that uses
diacritics), but other than that, I think excessive aid in inputting
these characters might be offensive to the bulk of regular Turkish users
who perfectly normally type their characters every day and have never
seen any problem with it.

Alternatively, we could come up with a Wiki syntax for special
characters (e.g. {'s} for ?) that is replaced with the correct character
upon save, but I think that would be pretty cumbersome to input.

Timwi


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] security vulnerability

body:
Aaron Peterson wrote:
> the admin password is stored as plain text.

Yup. See below.

> it is protected by a die()
> command

Not sure what you're referring to here.

> most any user on your system can probably just read that file in a text
> editor..
>
> and anybody in the world can read it if if your mod_php stops working!!!
>
> passwords need to be stored in a more secure fassion

Ultimately, there *is no more secure fashion*. The password has to be
sent to the MySQL server in cleartext, and must be accessible to PHP
running under the web server's permissions. If your MySQL server is set
up in a sane fashion, it won't allow connections from the public
internet in any case, and your files shouldn't be accessible by other
users regardless of permissions (ie, running in a chroot'ed environment
or with PHP safe_mode & similar restrictions with no way to circumvent
them).

Any attempt to obscure the password in a potentially accessible location
would fail because the obscured version must by definition be
transformable into cleartext, and you gain only illusion.

If you like, you can move the password to a file in a location outside
your web-accessible tree, and require() it from LocalSettings.php, but
most of the same concerns apply. It still has to be accessible by PHP
and be cleartext or equivalent.

If you've got any better suggestions, though, I'd love to hear them.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Wiktionaries for all!

body:
> For those who don't already know what's so bad about redirects: (1) Even
> just one redirect doubles(!) the server's response time.

If redirects are that costly, would it be useful to run a bot say once a
month to replace links to redirects by the final destination?

The en: wikipedia contains over 5 million internal links. Over 500,000 or
10% are links to redirects. (the stats show 155 K redirect links but that is
the number of redirect pages)

Erik Zachte


references:
<409C1461.9030200@bayazidi.net>	<003701c4349e$49869390$0a00a8c0@PERSONAL>	<20040508083043.GA21411@tomk32.homelinux.org>	<49bp90t8jguvnug1v1cjgjgp65bv2b2fgk@4ax.com>	<409CBD09.10301@bayazidi.net>	<409CBEEA.2070308@pobox.com>	<rrkp909h3g347vck335m8dm7blp7op9pkl@4ax.com>	<c7mjd9$19j$2@sea.gmane.org>
	<jrnt90pegmmutu3ou0s9rljti6qttlqp0k@4ax.com>

body:
Alex Regh wrote:

> On Mon, 10 May 2004 01:46:16 +0100, Timwi wrote:
>
>>I don't understand this opposition to the ocean? ... It doesn't make it
>>any slower, you know.
>
> Depends a lot on the connection; some servers in the US are quite a lot slower
> in Europe, or some ISPs in Europe, and my guess is that this is not all that
> different from other parts of the world.

I do not have the impression that European servers tend to be faster for
me than American (or Asian or Australian) servers (haven't tried many
African ones...). The number of hops is approximately the same no matter
what. The only servers that are noticeably faster for me are those
within the University, but that should be obvious.

Additionally, notice that Google seems to be entirely US-based too
(judging from traceroutes). google.co.jp, google.de, google.fr, etc. all
seem to have the same rotating set of IPs. And I'm pretty sure they have
quite an order of magnitude more traffic than Wikipedia. :)

Timwi


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wiktionaries for all!

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> Timwi wrote:
>
>> Another major disadvantage I thought of just now is that it poisons
>> our namespace. Suppose some silly company makes some sort of product
>> and (to be cool) calls it "fr:ea:ky". How would we name our article on
>> it? It's only a matter of time until this will be an actual problem.
>
> This is a non-starter; you can't link to such titles within the wiki,
> because they are interwiki links.

Ah, yes. I haven't thought of that. Thanks.


list: foundation-l

from_name: Anthere

subject: [Foundation-l] "officials"

body:
Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
Anthere-
> I do not think that putting officially the
> responsability in the hand of *one* person
> specifically is the best option. It is not empowering
> people. Rather, people will tend to rely on the *head*
> to do things.

We also need to be careful not to let too many people speak in the name of
the Foundation whenever they feel like it. This is after all a community
of several thousands of members, and I think some screening needs to take
place before we decide that person X can be an official press contact, or
person Y can be a content partnership coordinator -- because our
reputation may be hurt, because people may make deals which the Foundation
does not want (and later has to undo), because people may neglect their
position and fail to respond to inquiries (hurting our reputation),
because people may fail to sufficiently communicate about what they are
doing, and so forth.

I don't think our positions are that far apart, though, especially since
you yourself mention that people would have an opportunity to object. So
if they object, what happens then? Will the person be unable to hold the
position they are interested in beacuse of a single objection? At this
point the natural solution is again to have a vote. I believe that at the
very least, any assumption of an official title needs to be prominently
announced, with a certain timeframe to raise objections, and a defined
process for resolving them.

I also tend to believe that such an assignment shouldn't cover very short
periods of time, to avoid communication problems of the type "I'm not the
content coordinator, anymore, try contacting Paul." - "Sorry, I resigned
last week, try contacting Amy." etc. If one only wants to assume an
official title for a *single* transaction, it is better to contact
whomever is currently holding that title.

I have no problem with multiple people filling a certain role, in fact I
support it, but the number of people should be limited. For example we
could say "one press officer for every country, or for every 40 million
inhabitants of a country", so the US would end up with 6 press officers,
Germany with 2, etc.

Regards,

Erik
_______________________________________________

Thank you Erik and Mav for the feedback.

Erik raises fair comments. Yes, screening should be done. Yes, reasonable duty time is necessary. Yes, proportionality of representation seems correct.

A couple of comments

I think we should be very careful not to change drastically the business model upon which Wikipedia is built. Currently, what makes it work is

* that it is open and fair. Ie, anyone is free to participate, and help in any area he feels like helping. Currently, if we are now known,  it is also because any editor may at any time contact a newspaper for example, and make an article on Wikipedia. Evidently, some articles are not so good, some are buggy. But most are helpful nevertheless. Anyone is empowered PR activities. They won?t be fired in case of a mistake.  They learn to improve each time. We do not have to wait for an official PR to decide for us what we should do. This results, perhaps, in a bit anarchic PR activities, but not so bad all things considered :-)

* it is not (too much) bureaucratic. Anyone can do PR activities without having to require an authorization from anyone.

Let us be careful not to change this too much. Voluntary PR works because users have freedom to do so. If authorization becomes required, or worse, if spontaneous activity is not welcome any more, than PR activity will drop tremendously.

I would like that we separate those holding somehow the role of a coordinator or a legal position (such as treasurer) from other roles which may perhaps not ?officially? speak ?in the name? of the Foundation, but are trusted by the Foundation to conduct a collection of activities.

The Foundation needs official positions, but what I was suggesting was not so much
PR Coordinators
France : Yann
Germany : Erik Mo?ller
US : Maverick
etc?

Than
PR activities

French language
Coordinator : Yann
Delegates (or whatever name is fit) : Anthere, Semnoz, Ryo

German language
Coordinators : Erik Mo?ller, Elian
Delegates : Fantasy, Fire

English language
Coordinator : Maverick
Delegates : Fuzheado, Jtdirl, Eclecticology etc?

The first group (coordinator) has to be officially approved (or appointed) by the Foundation, while the second group is more a collection of people trusted to send press releases, and approved (or not opposed) by their respective project.
Even if these people should try to coordinate with their coordinator(s), they are trusted to do PR activities.

Now, no big deal about PR things. But transpose this to looking for funding.

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Win a $20,000 Career Makeover at Yahoo! HotJobs
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subject: [Foundation-l] "officials"

body:
Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
Anthere-
> I do not think that putting officially the
> responsability in the hand of *one* person
> specifically is the best option. It is not empowering
> people. Rather, people will tend to rely on the *head*
> to do things.

We also need to be careful not to let too many people speak in the name of
the Foundation whenever they feel like it. This is after all a community
of several thousands of members, and I think some screening needs to take
place before we decide that person X can be an official press contact, or
person Y can be a content partnership coordinator -- because our
reputation may be hurt, because people may make deals which the Foundation
does not want (and later has to undo), because people may neglect their
position and fail to respond to inquiries (hurting our reputation),
because people may fail to sufficiently communicate about what they are
doing, and so forth.

I don't think our positions are that far apart, though, especially since
you yourself mention that people would have an opportunity to object. So
if they object, what happens then? Will the person be unable to hold the
position they are interested in beacuse of a single objection? At this
point the natural solution is again to have a vote. I believe that at the
very least, any assumption of an official title needs to be prominently
announced, with a certain timeframe to raise objections, and a defined
process for resolving them.

I also tend to believe that such an assignment shouldn't cover very short
periods of time, to avoid communication problems of the type "I'm not the
content coordinator, anymore, try contacting Paul." - "Sorry, I resigned
last week, try contacting Amy." etc. If one only wants to assume an
official title for a *single* transaction, it is better to contact
whomever is currently holding that title.

I have no problem with multiple people filling a certain role, in fact I
support it, but the number of people should be limited. For example we
could say "one press officer for every country, or for every 40 million
inhabitants of a country", so the US would end up with 6 press officers,
Germany with 2, etc.

Regards,

Erik
_______________________________________________

Thank you Erik and Mav for the feedback.

Erik raises fair comments. Yes, screening should be done. Yes, reasonable duty time is necessary. Yes, proportionality of representation seems correct.

A couple of comments

I think we should be very careful not to change drastically the business model upon which Wikipedia is built. Currently, what makes it work is

* that it is open and fair. Ie, anyone is free to participate, and help in any area he feels like helping. Currently, if we are now known,  it is also because any editor may at any time contact a newspaper for example, and make an article on Wikipedia. Evidently, some articles are not so good, some are buggy. But most are helpful nevertheless. Anyone is empowered PR activities. They won?t be fired in case of a mistake.  They learn to improve each time. We do not have to wait for an official PR to decide for us what we should do. This results, perhaps, in a bit anarchic PR activities, but not so bad all things considered :-)

* it is not (too much) bureaucratic. Anyone can do PR activities without having to require an authorization from anyone.

Let us be careful not to change this too much. Voluntary PR works because users have freedom to do so. If authorization becomes required, or worse, if spontaneous activity is not welcome any more, than PR activity will drop tremendously.

I would like that we separate those holding somehow the role of a coordinator or a legal position (such as treasurer) from other roles which may perhaps not ?officially? speak ?in the name? of the Foundation, but are trusted by the Foundation to conduct a collection of activities.

The Foundation needs official positions, but what I was suggesting was not so much
PR Coordinators
France : Yann
Germany : Erik Mo?ller
US : Maverick
etc?

Than
PR activities

French language
Coordinator : Yann
Delegates (or whatever name is fit) : Anthere, Semnoz, Ryo

German language
Coordinators : Erik Mo?ller, Elian
Delegates : Fantasy, Fire

English language
Coordinator : Maverick
Delegates : Fuzheado, Jtdirl, Eclecticology etc?

The first group (coordinator) has to be officially approved (or appointed) by the Foundation, while the second group is more a collection of people trusted to send press releases, and approved (or not opposed) by their respective project.
Even if these people should try to coordinate with their coordinator(s), they are trusted to do PR activities.

Now, no big deal about PR things. But transpose this to looking for funding.

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Win a $20,000 Career Makeover at Yahoo! HotJobs
-------------- next part --------------
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URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/attachments/20040510/897cd3fb/attachment-0001.htm


subject: [Foundation-l] "officials"

body:
Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
Anthere-
> I do not think that putting officially the
> responsability in the hand of *one* person
> specifically is the best option. It is not empowering
> people. Rather, people will tend to rely on the *head*
> to do things.

We also need to be careful not to let too many people speak in the name of
the Foundation whenever they feel like it. This is after all a community
of several thousands of members, and I think some screening needs to take
place before we decide that person X can be an official press contact, or
person Y can be a content partnership coordinator -- because our
reputation may be hurt, because people may make deals which the Foundation
does not want (and later has to undo), because people may neglect their
position and fail to respond to inquiries (hurting our reputation),
because people may fail to sufficiently communicate about what they are
doing, and so forth.

I don't think our positions are that far apart, though, especially since
you yourself mention that people would have an opportunity to object. So
if they object, what happens then? Will the person be unable to hold the
position they are interested in beacuse of a single objection? At this
point the natural solution is again to have a vote. I believe that at the
very least, any assumption of an official title needs to be prominently
announced, with a certain timeframe to raise objections, and a defined
process for resolving them.

I also tend to believe that such an assignment shouldn't cover very short
periods of time, to avoid communication problems of the type "I'm not the
content coordinator, anymore, try contacting Paul." - "Sorry, I resigned
last week, try contacting Amy." etc. If one only wants to assume an
official title for a *single* transaction, it is better to contact
whomever is currently holding that title.

I have no problem with multiple people filling a certain role, in fact I
support it, but the number of people should be limited. For example we
could say "one press officer for every country, or for every 40 million
inhabitants of a country", so the US would end up with 6 press officers,
Germany with 2, etc.

Regards,

Erik
_______________________________________________

Thank you Erik and Mav for the feedback.

Erik raises fair comments. Yes, screening should be done. Yes, reasonable duty time is necessary. Yes, proportionality of representation seems correct.

A couple of comments

I think we should be very careful not to change drastically the business model upon which Wikipedia is built. Currently, what makes it work is

* that it is open and fair. Ie, anyone is free to participate, and help in any area he feels like helping. Currently, if we are now known,  it is also because any editor may at any time contact a newspaper for example, and make an article on Wikipedia. Evidently, some articles are not so good, some are buggy. But most are helpful nevertheless. Anyone is empowered PR activities. They won?t be fired in case of a mistake.  They learn to improve each time. We do not have to wait for an official PR to decide for us what we should do. This results, perhaps, in a bit anarchic PR activities, but not so bad all things considered :-)

* it is not (too much) bureaucratic. Anyone can do PR activities without having to require an authorization from anyone.

Let us be careful not to change this too much. Voluntary PR works because users have freedom to do so. If authorization becomes required, or worse, if spontaneous activity is not welcome any more, than PR activity will drop tremendously.

I would like that we separate those holding somehow the role of a coordinator or a legal position (such as treasurer) from other roles which may perhaps not ?officially? speak ?in the name? of the Foundation, but are trusted by the Foundation to conduct a collection of activities.

The Foundation needs official positions, but what I was suggesting was not so much
PR Coordinators
France : Yann
Germany : Erik Mo?ller
US : Maverick
etc?

Than
PR activities

French language
Coordinator : Yann
Delegates (or whatever name is fit) : Anthere, Semnoz, Ryo

German language
Coordinators : Erik Mo?ller, Elian
Delegates : Fantasy, Fire

English language
Coordinator : Maverick
Delegates : Fuzheado, Jtdirl, Eclecticology etc?

The first group (coordinator) has to be officially approved (or appointed) by the Foundation, while the second group is more a collection of people trusted to send press releases, and approved (or not opposed) by their respective project.
Even if these people should try to coordinate with their coordinator(s), they are trusted to do PR activities.

Now, no big deal about PR things. But transpose this to looking for funding.

---------------------------------
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list: wikimedia-l

subject: [Foundation-l] "officials"

body:
Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
Anthere-
> I do not think that putting officially the
> responsability in the hand of *one* person
> specifically is the best option. It is not empowering
> people. Rather, people will tend to rely on the *head*
> to do things.

We also need to be careful not to let too many people speak in the name of
the Foundation whenever they feel like it. This is after all a community
of several thousands of members, and I think some screening needs to take
place before we decide that person X can be an official press contact, or
person Y can be a content partnership coordinator -- because our
reputation may be hurt, because people may make deals which the Foundation
does not want (and later has to undo), because people may neglect their
position and fail to respond to inquiries (hurting our reputation),
because people may fail to sufficiently communicate about what they are
doing, and so forth.

I don't think our positions are that far apart, though, especially since
you yourself mention that people would have an opportunity to object. So
if they object, what happens then? Will the person be unable to hold the
position they are interested in beacuse of a single objection? At this
point the natural solution is again to have a vote. I believe that at the
very least, any assumption of an official title needs to be prominently
announced, with a certain timeframe to raise objections, and a defined
process for resolving them.

I also tend to believe that such an assignment shouldn't cover very short
periods of time, to avoid communication problems of the type "I'm not the
content coordinator, anymore, try contacting Paul." - "Sorry, I resigned
last week, try contacting Amy." etc. If one only wants to assume an
official title for a *single* transaction, it is better to contact
whomever is currently holding that title.

I have no problem with multiple people filling a certain role, in fact I
support it, but the number of people should be limited. For example we
could say "one press officer for every country, or for every 40 million
inhabitants of a country", so the US would end up with 6 press officers,
Germany with 2, etc.

Regards,

Erik
_______________________________________________

Thank you Erik and Mav for the feedback.

Erik raises fair comments. Yes, screening should be done. Yes, reasonable duty time is necessary. Yes, proportionality of representation seems correct.

A couple of comments

I think we should be very careful not to change drastically the business model upon which Wikipedia is built. Currently, what makes it work is

* that it is open and fair. Ie, anyone is free to participate, and help in any area he feels like helping. Currently, if we are now known,  it is also because any editor may at any time contact a newspaper for example, and make an article on Wikipedia. Evidently, some articles are not so good, some are buggy. But most are helpful nevertheless. Anyone is empowered PR activities. They won?t be fired in case of a mistake.  They learn to improve each time. We do not have to wait for an official PR to decide for us what we should do. This results, perhaps, in a bit anarchic PR activities, but not so bad all things considered :-)

* it is not (too much) bureaucratic. Anyone can do PR activities without having to require an authorization from anyone.

Let us be careful not to change this too much. Voluntary PR works because users have freedom to do so. If authorization becomes required, or worse, if spontaneous activity is not welcome any more, than PR activity will drop tremendously.

I would like that we separate those holding somehow the role of a coordinator or a legal position (such as treasurer) from other roles which may perhaps not ?officially? speak ?in the name? of the Foundation, but are trusted by the Foundation to conduct a collection of activities.

The Foundation needs official positions, but what I was suggesting was not so much
PR Coordinators
France : Yann
Germany : Erik Mo?ller
US : Maverick
etc?

Than
PR activities

French language
Coordinator : Yann
Delegates (or whatever name is fit) : Anthere, Semnoz, Ryo

German language
Coordinators : Erik Mo?ller, Elian
Delegates : Fantasy, Fire

English language
Coordinator : Maverick
Delegates : Fuzheado, Jtdirl, Eclecticology etc?

The first group (coordinator) has to be officially approved (or appointed) by the Foundation, while the second group is more a collection of people trusted to send press releases, and approved (or not opposed) by their respective project.
Even if these people should try to coordinate with their coordinator(s), they are trusted to do PR activities.

Now, no big deal about PR things. But transpose this to looking for funding.

---------------------------------
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subject: [Foundation-l] "officials"

body:
Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
Anthere-
> I do not think that putting officially the
> responsability in the hand of *one* person
> specifically is the best option. It is not empowering
> people. Rather, people will tend to rely on the *head*
> to do things.

We also need to be careful not to let too many people speak in the name of
the Foundation whenever they feel like it. This is after all a community
of several thousands of members, and I think some screening needs to take
place before we decide that person X can be an official press contact, or
person Y can be a content partnership coordinator -- because our
reputation may be hurt, because people may make deals which the Foundation
does not want (and later has to undo), because people may neglect their
position and fail to respond to inquiries (hurting our reputation),
because people may fail to sufficiently communicate about what they are
doing, and so forth.

I don't think our positions are that far apart, though, especially since
you yourself mention that people would have an opportunity to object. So
if they object, what happens then? Will the person be unable to hold the
position they are interested in beacuse of a single objection? At this
point the natural solution is again to have a vote. I believe that at the
very least, any assumption of an official title needs to be prominently
announced, with a certain timeframe to raise objections, and a defined
process for resolving them.

I also tend to believe that such an assignment shouldn't cover very short
periods of time, to avoid communication problems of the type "I'm not the
content coordinator, anymore, try contacting Paul." - "Sorry, I resigned
last week, try contacting Amy." etc. If one only wants to assume an
official title for a *single* transaction, it is better to contact
whomever is currently holding that title.

I have no problem with multiple people filling a certain role, in fact I
support it, but the number of people should be limited. For example we
could say "one press officer for every country, or for every 40 million
inhabitants of a country", so the US would end up with 6 press officers,
Germany with 2, etc.

Regards,

Erik
_______________________________________________

Thank you Erik and Mav for the feedback.

Erik raises fair comments. Yes, screening should be done. Yes, reasonable duty time is necessary. Yes, proportionality of representation seems correct.

A couple of comments

I think we should be very careful not to change drastically the business model upon which Wikipedia is built. Currently, what makes it work is

* that it is open and fair. Ie, anyone is free to participate, and help in any area he feels like helping. Currently, if we are now known,  it is also because any editor may at any time contact a newspaper for example, and make an article on Wikipedia. Evidently, some articles are not so good, some are buggy. But most are helpful nevertheless. Anyone is empowered PR activities. They won?t be fired in case of a mistake.  They learn to improve each time. We do not have to wait for an official PR to decide for us what we should do. This results, perhaps, in a bit anarchic PR activities, but not so bad all things considered :-)

* it is not (too much) bureaucratic. Anyone can do PR activities without having to require an authorization from anyone.

Let us be careful not to change this too much. Voluntary PR works because users have freedom to do so. If authorization becomes required, or worse, if spontaneous activity is not welcome any more, than PR activity will drop tremendously.

I would like that we separate those holding somehow the role of a coordinator or a legal position (such as treasurer) from other roles which may perhaps not ?officially? speak ?in the name? of the Foundation, but are trusted by the Foundation to conduct a collection of activities.

The Foundation needs official positions, but what I was suggesting was not so much
PR Coordinators
France : Yann
Germany : Erik Mo?ller
US : Maverick
etc?

Than
PR activities

French language
Coordinator : Yann
Delegates (or whatever name is fit) : Anthere, Semnoz, Ryo

German language
Coordinators : Erik Mo?ller, Elian
Delegates : Fantasy, Fire

English language
Coordinator : Maverick
Delegates : Fuzheado, Jtdirl, Eclecticology etc?

The first group (coordinator) has to be officially approved (or appointed) by the Foundation, while the second group is more a collection of people trusted to send press releases, and approved (or not opposed) by their respective project.
Even if these people should try to coordinate with their coordinator(s), they are trusted to do PR activities.

Now, no big deal about PR things. But transpose this to looking for funding.

---------------------------------
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subject: [Wikitech-l] tokipona inter-wiki links still not working

body:
Hi,

I mentioned this here 2? days ago, but nobody did anything about this.
tokipona inter-wiki links have stopped working. Please could someone fix
this?

Thanks,
Timwi


subject: [Foundation-l] "officials"

body:
Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:

I've already stated, several times in the past, that the roles of trustee and
the roles of corporate officers should be divorced from one another. This is
needed in order to provide proper checks and balances (the board oversees the
officiers and the foundation membership oversees the board).

Ant : I agree

> I view this as fairly loose. Let's have a page on
> meta. People interested list themselves there. The
> community then approve or does not approve to give
> this "official" title. Finally, the board approve or
> not.

I strongly feel that it should be the other way around; the board appoints
officers and the foundation membership either approves or disapproves the
appointees. This provides a check against merely popular people being appointed
to positions they are not qualified to perform. The board members themselves
are the ones that are directly elected. Thus they are the ones legally
responsible for their appointees.

Ant :

I admit that the legal responsibility and qualification is a major issue.

However, I must say I would be troubled that the management would be done in such a top down approach, as I feel it could raise issues of fairness and transparency. In particular if those ?coordinators? are a mandatory path for subsequent activities.

 Situation 1

   a candidate makes himself known to the board
   the board checks the candidate credentials (or whatever is thought necessary to guarantee the candidate suitability)
   the board then appoint the candidate (or rejects it)
   the nomination is announced to the community

Potential issues
* Fairness issue : another candidate might have been suitable
* Transparency issue : the community does not know on which credentials the candidate was chosen
* Possible other issue : the community might generally not approve the candidate.
In such case, do we consider the board has last word or do we consider the community could reject an appointment ?

Situation 2 : What I understand you propose is

   a candidate makes himself known to the board
   the board check the candidate credentials (or whatever is thought necessary to guarantee the candidate suitability)
   the board then appoint the candidate (or rejects it)
   the nomination is announced
   the membership votes to approve or disapprove the appointed.

 Potential issues
* Fairness issue : another candidate might have been suitable
* Transparency issue : the community does not know on which credentials the candidate was chosen
* Lack of efficiency : in case the community rejects the candidate

Situation 3

   a candidate makes himself known to the board
   the board then make a call for more candidacy for the position
   the board check the candidates credentials
   the board then appoint one (or several) of  the candidates, reject others
   the nominations are announced
   the membership votes to approve or disapprove the appointed.

Potential issues
* Lack of efficiency : in case the community rejects the candidate

Situation 4

   a candidate makes himself known to the board
   the board then make a call for more candidacy for the position
   the board check the candidates credentials
   the board propose some of  the candidates, reject others
   the approved candidates are announced
   the membership votes to approve or disapprove and nominate people

Potential issues
* The board is more an organ of screening than decision, it mostly ensures that no bad decision may be offered to the community. Some may regret this.

Situation 5

   a candidate makes himself known to the community
   the membership then make a call for more candidacy for the position
   the membership approve or disapprove candidates
   the board check the approved candidates credentials
   the board appoints one (or several) of the candidates
   the approved candidates are announced

Potential issues
* The membership may exclude some people, and base itself more on popularity than on ability as Mav pointed out.

Are they other options ? Are they other potential issues ?

Perhaps the question is
what is the role of the board ?

*To take decision for the community (and consider that the decision is good since people were elected for this, hence relieving some pressure of some decision making from the community)

*Or to guarantee that good decisions are taken by the community (and have a sort of veto when the decision appears to be bad).

Typically, the first case is the model of the current arbitration committee, and the second case is a lot of what Jimbo is doing in many cases.

---------------------------------
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subject: [Foundation-l] "officials"

body:
Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:

I've already stated, several times in the past, that the roles of trustee and
the roles of corporate officers should be divorced from one another. This is
needed in order to provide proper checks and balances (the board oversees the
officiers and the foundation membership oversees the board).

Ant : I agree

> I view this as fairly loose. Let's have a page on
> meta. People interested list themselves there. The
> community then approve or does not approve to give
> this "official" title. Finally, the board approve or
> not.

I strongly feel that it should be the other way around; the board appoints
officers and the foundation membership either approves or disapproves the
appointees. This provides a check against merely popular people being appointed
to positions they are not qualified to perform. The board members themselves
are the ones that are directly elected. Thus they are the ones legally
responsible for their appointees.

Ant :

I admit that the legal responsibility and qualification is a major issue.

However, I must say I would be troubled that the management would be done in such a top down approach, as I feel it could raise issues of fairness and transparency. In particular if those ?coordinators? are a mandatory path for subsequent activities.

 Situation 1

   a candidate makes himself known to the board
   the board checks the candidate credentials (or whatever is thought necessary to guarantee the candidate suitability)
   the board then appoint the candidate (or rejects it)
   the nomination is announced to the community

Potential issues
* Fairness issue : another candidate might have been suitable
* Transparency issue : the community does not know on which credentials the candidate was chosen
* Possible other issue : the community might generally not approve the candidate.
In such case, do we consider the board has last word or do we consider the community could reject an appointment ?

Situation 2 : What I understand you propose is

   a candidate makes himself known to the board
   the board check the candidate credentials (or whatever is thought necessary to guarantee the candidate suitability)
   the board then appoint the candidate (or rejects it)
   the nomination is announced
   the membership votes to approve or disapprove the appointed.

 Potential issues
* Fairness issue : another candidate might have been suitable
* Transparency issue : the community does not know on which credentials the candidate was chosen
* Lack of efficiency : in case the community rejects the candidate

Situation 3

   a candidate makes himself known to the board
   the board then make a call for more candidacy for the position
   the board check the candidates credentials
   the board then appoint one (or several) of  the candidates, reject others
   the nominations are announced
   the membership votes to approve or disapprove the appointed.

Potential issues
* Lack of efficiency : in case the community rejects the candidate

Situation 4

   a candidate makes himself known to the board
   the board then make a call for more candidacy for the position
   the board check the candidates credentials
   the board propose some of  the candidates, reject others
   the approved candidates are announced
   the membership votes to approve or disapprove and nominate people

Potential issues
* The board is more an organ of screening than decision, it mostly ensures that no bad decision may be offered to the community. Some may regret this.

Situation 5

   a candidate makes himself known to the community
   the membership then make a call for more candidacy for the position
   the membership approve or disapprove candidates
   the board check the approved candidates credentials
   the board appoints one (or several) of the candidates
   the approved candidates are announced

Potential issues
* The membership may exclude some people, and base itself more on popularity than on ability as Mav pointed out.

Are they other options ? Are they other potential issues ?

Perhaps the question is
what is the role of the board ?

*To take decision for the community (and consider that the decision is good since people were elected for this, hence relieving some pressure of some decision making from the community)

*Or to guarantee that good decisions are taken by the community (and have a sort of veto when the decision appears to be bad).

Typically, the first case is the model of the current arbitration committee, and the second case is a lot of what Jimbo is doing in many cases.

---------------------------------
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subject: [Foundation-l] "officials"

body:
Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:

I've already stated, several times in the past, that the roles of trustee and
the roles of corporate officers should be divorced from one another. This is
needed in order to provide proper checks and balances (the board oversees the
officiers and the foundation membership oversees the board).

Ant : I agree

> I view this as fairly loose. Let's have a page on
> meta. People interested list themselves there. The
> community then approve or does not approve to give
> this "official" title. Finally, the board approve or
> not.

I strongly feel that it should be the other way around; the board appoints
officers and the foundation membership either approves or disapproves the
appointees. This provides a check against merely popular people being appointed
to positions they are not qualified to perform. The board members themselves
are the ones that are directly elected. Thus they are the ones legally
responsible for their appointees.

Ant :

I admit that the legal responsibility and qualification is a major issue.

However, I must say I would be troubled that the management would be done in such a top down approach, as I feel it could raise issues of fairness and transparency. In particular if those ?coordinators? are a mandatory path for subsequent activities.

 Situation 1

   a candidate makes himself known to the board
   the board checks the candidate credentials (or whatever is thought necessary to guarantee the candidate suitability)
   the board then appoint the candidate (or rejects it)
   the nomination is announced to the community

Potential issues
* Fairness issue : another candidate might have been suitable
* Transparency issue : the community does not know on which credentials the candidate was chosen
* Possible other issue : the community might generally not approve the candidate.
In such case, do we consider the board has last word or do we consider the community could reject an appointment ?

Situation 2 : What I understand you propose is

   a candidate makes himself known to the board
   the board check the candidate credentials (or whatever is thought necessary to guarantee the candidate suitability)
   the board then appoint the candidate (or rejects it)
   the nomination is announced
   the membership votes to approve or disapprove the appointed.

 Potential issues
* Fairness issue : another candidate might have been suitable
* Transparency issue : the community does not know on which credentials the candidate was chosen
* Lack of efficiency : in case the community rejects the candidate

Situation 3

   a candidate makes himself known to the board
   the board then make a call for more candidacy for the position
   the board check the candidates credentials
   the board then appoint one (or several) of  the candidates, reject others
   the nominations are announced
   the membership votes to approve or disapprove the appointed.

Potential issues
* Lack of efficiency : in case the community rejects the candidate

Situation 4

   a candidate makes himself known to the board
   the board then make a call for more candidacy for the position
   the board check the candidates credentials
   the board propose some of  the candidates, reject others
   the approved candidates are announced
   the membership votes to approve or disapprove and nominate people

Potential issues
* The board is more an organ of screening than decision, it mostly ensures that no bad decision may be offered to the community. Some may regret this.

Situation 5

   a candidate makes himself known to the community
   the membership then make a call for more candidacy for the position
   the membership approve or disapprove candidates
   the board check the approved candidates credentials
   the board appoints one (or several) of the candidates
   the approved candidates are announced

Potential issues
* The membership may exclude some people, and base itself more on popularity than on ability as Mav pointed out.

Are they other options ? Are they other potential issues ?

Perhaps the question is
what is the role of the board ?

*To take decision for the community (and consider that the decision is good since people were elected for this, hence relieving some pressure of some decision making from the community)

*Or to guarantee that good decisions are taken by the community (and have a sort of veto when the decision appears to be bad).

Typically, the first case is the model of the current arbitration committee, and the second case is a lot of what Jimbo is doing in many cases.

---------------------------------
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subject: [Foundation-l] "officials"

body:
Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:

I've already stated, several times in the past, that the roles of trustee and
the roles of corporate officers should be divorced from one another. This is
needed in order to provide proper checks and balances (the board oversees the
officiers and the foundation membership oversees the board).

Ant : I agree

> I view this as fairly loose. Let's have a page on
> meta. People interested list themselves there. The
> community then approve or does not approve to give
> this "official" title. Finally, the board approve or
> not.

I strongly feel that it should be the other way around; the board appoints
officers and the foundation membership either approves or disapproves the
appointees. This provides a check against merely popular people being appointed
to positions they are not qualified to perform. The board members themselves
are the ones that are directly elected. Thus they are the ones legally
responsible for their appointees.

Ant :

I admit that the legal responsibility and qualification is a major issue.

However, I must say I would be troubled that the management would be done in such a top down approach, as I feel it could raise issues of fairness and transparency. In particular if those ?coordinators? are a mandatory path for subsequent activities.

 Situation 1

   a candidate makes himself known to the board
   the board checks the candidate credentials (or whatever is thought necessary to guarantee the candidate suitability)
   the board then appoint the candidate (or rejects it)
   the nomination is announced to the community

Potential issues
* Fairness issue : another candidate might have been suitable
* Transparency issue : the community does not know on which credentials the candidate was chosen
* Possible other issue : the community might generally not approve the candidate.
In such case, do we consider the board has last word or do we consider the community could reject an appointment ?

Situation 2 : What I understand you propose is

   a candidate makes himself known to the board
   the board check the candidate credentials (or whatever is thought necessary to guarantee the candidate suitability)
   the board then appoint the candidate (or rejects it)
   the nomination is announced
   the membership votes to approve or disapprove the appointed.

 Potential issues
* Fairness issue : another candidate might have been suitable
* Transparency issue : the community does not know on which credentials the candidate was chosen
* Lack of efficiency : in case the community rejects the candidate

Situation 3

   a candidate makes himself known to the board
   the board then make a call for more candidacy for the position
   the board check the candidates credentials
   the board then appoint one (or several) of  the candidates, reject others
   the nominations are announced
   the membership votes to approve or disapprove the appointed.

Potential issues
* Lack of efficiency : in case the community rejects the candidate

Situation 4

   a candidate makes himself known to the board
   the board then make a call for more candidacy for the position
   the board check the candidates credentials
   the board propose some of  the candidates, reject others
   the approved candidates are announced
   the membership votes to approve or disapprove and nominate people

Potential issues
* The board is more an organ of screening than decision, it mostly ensures that no bad decision may be offered to the community. Some may regret this.

Situation 5

   a candidate makes himself known to the community
   the membership then make a call for more candidacy for the position
   the membership approve or disapprove candidates
   the board check the approved candidates credentials
   the board appoints one (or several) of the candidates
   the approved candidates are announced

Potential issues
* The membership may exclude some people, and base itself more on popularity than on ability as Mav pointed out.

Are they other options ? Are they other potential issues ?

Perhaps the question is
what is the role of the board ?

*To take decision for the community (and consider that the decision is good since people were elected for this, hence relieving some pressure of some decision making from the community)

*Or to guarantee that good decisions are taken by the community (and have a sort of veto when the decision appears to be bad).

Typically, the first case is the model of the current arbitration committee, and the second case is a lot of what Jimbo is doing in many cases.

---------------------------------
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Win a $20,000 Career Makeover at Yahoo! HotJobs
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subject: [Foundation-l] "officials"

body:
Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:

I've already stated, several times in the past, that the roles of trustee and
the roles of corporate officers should be divorced from one another. This is
needed in order to provide proper checks and balances (the board oversees the
officiers and the foundation membership oversees the board).

Ant : I agree

> I view this as fairly loose. Let's have a page on
> meta. People interested list themselves there. The
> community then approve or does not approve to give
> this "official" title. Finally, the board approve or
> not.

I strongly feel that it should be the other way around; the board appoints
officers and the foundation membership either approves or disapproves the
appointees. This provides a check against merely popular people being appointed
to positions they are not qualified to perform. The board members themselves
are the ones that are directly elected. Thus they are the ones legally
responsible for their appointees.

Ant :

I admit that the legal responsibility and qualification is a major issue.

However, I must say I would be troubled that the management would be done in such a top down approach, as I feel it could raise issues of fairness and transparency. In particular if those ?coordinators? are a mandatory path for subsequent activities.

 Situation 1

   a candidate makes himself known to the board
   the board checks the candidate credentials (or whatever is thought necessary to guarantee the candidate suitability)
   the board then appoint the candidate (or rejects it)
   the nomination is announced to the community

Potential issues
* Fairness issue : another candidate might have been suitable
* Transparency issue : the community does not know on which credentials the candidate was chosen
* Possible other issue : the community might generally not approve the candidate.
In such case, do we consider the board has last word or do we consider the community could reject an appointment ?

Situation 2 : What I understand you propose is

   a candidate makes himself known to the board
   the board check the candidate credentials (or whatever is thought necessary to guarantee the candidate suitability)
   the board then appoint the candidate (or rejects it)
   the nomination is announced
   the membership votes to approve or disapprove the appointed.

 Potential issues
* Fairness issue : another candidate might have been suitable
* Transparency issue : the community does not know on which credentials the candidate was chosen
* Lack of efficiency : in case the community rejects the candidate

Situation 3

   a candidate makes himself known to the board
   the board then make a call for more candidacy for the position
   the board check the candidates credentials
   the board then appoint one (or several) of  the candidates, reject others
   the nominations are announced
   the membership votes to approve or disapprove the appointed.

Potential issues
* Lack of efficiency : in case the community rejects the candidate

Situation 4

   a candidate makes himself known to the board
   the board then make a call for more candidacy for the position
   the board check the candidates credentials
   the board propose some of  the candidates, reject others
   the approved candidates are announced
   the membership votes to approve or disapprove and nominate people

Potential issues
* The board is more an organ of screening than decision, it mostly ensures that no bad decision may be offered to the community. Some may regret this.

Situation 5

   a candidate makes himself known to the community
   the membership then make a call for more candidacy for the position
   the membership approve or disapprove candidates
   the board check the approved candidates credentials
   the board appoints one (or several) of the candidates
   the approved candidates are announced

Potential issues
* The membership may exclude some people, and base itself more on popularity than on ability as Mav pointed out.

Are they other options ? Are they other potential issues ?

Perhaps the question is
what is the role of the board ?

*To take decision for the community (and consider that the decision is good since people were elected for this, hence relieving some pressure of some decision making from the community)

*Or to guarantee that good decisions are taken by the community (and have a sort of veto when the decision appears to be bad).

Typically, the first case is the model of the current arbitration committee, and the second case is a lot of what Jimbo is doing in many cases.

---------------------------------
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Wiktionaries for all!

body:
After being corrected twice, I sure got the message.
I'll redirect myself to other matters for the rest of the day :)

Erik Zachte


from_name: Alex Regh

body:
Hi!

On Mon, 10 May 2004 01:46:16 +0100, Timwi wrote:

>I don't understand this opposition to the ocean? ... It doesn't make it
>any slower, you know.

Depends a lot on the connection; some servers in the US are quite a lot slower
in Europe, or some ISPs in Europe, and my guess is that this is not all that
different from other parts of the world.

However, I consider this a long-term question, anyway, because right now it's
not the lines that are the bottleneck.

Greetings from Cologne
Alex
--
If you don't go over the top,
you can't see what's on the other side.
        --- Jim Steinman ---

Alex' Assorted Homepages: www.alexsite.de


from_name: Ashar Voultoiz

body:
Timwi wrote:
> Alex Regh wrote:
<snip>
>> There is a company namend Akamai out there, and as far as I know, they
>> distribute websites like CNN and Microsoft
>
> and (part of) LiveJournal ;-)
>
>> , which are (especially the first)
>> updated frequently, and have some feedback features etc.
>
> I can't claim any expertise on this, but as far as I understood it,
> Akamai specialises on serving static content. In the case of
> LiveJournal, this is mainly the user pictures - if you delete one and
> upload a new one, it will get a new URL, but if you edit an entry, it
> still has the same URL, so LiveJournal entries are saved on the central
> DB and not on Akamai.
>
> On Wikipedia nothing is immutable under a given URL (not even images),
> except perhaps for small things like the stylesheet, but they are not
> worth it.
<snip>

Hello,

Akamai own servers at almost every single ISPs hosting rooms. A customer
(yahoo, amazon, cnn ...) give akamai the content they want to be serve
mainly pictures and video. Akamai put them on ALL of their server.

Then the customer need to change it's images / videos domains url to
something like :  d304-a5ea-custname.akadns.net or a custom domain name.
  When someone want the picture, the dns entry will be resolved by the
akamai dns servers to the nearest server available. As akamai got
servers everywhere, most of the time the user will download heavy
content from a server directly at is ISPs instead of oversea / far.

This service does cost A LOT of money, and I don't think that's the
point right now.

Simple example:
pics.ebaystatic.com is a cname to a1654.g.akamai.net wich resolve for me
to 193.45.10.72 (hosted at telia, the main peer of my isp) but it
resolve to 212.155.193.143 (hosted at uunet fr for the uunet dns server).
So I download ebay pictures from telia, while uunet france customers
download pictures from uunet :o)

Sorry if it was too technical.

cheers,

--
Ashar Voultoiz
fr:Hashar


list: wikien-l

from_name: Andrew Zito

subject:
[WikiEN-l] RICKK IS ABUSIVE AND EVEN DELETES DISCUSSION HE HAS NO
	PROPER BASIS FOR HIS ACTIONS AND IS UNRATIONAL

body:
ADDING TO THE VOTE TALK PAGE I ASKED THE AHOLES LIKE RICKK WHY DON"T THEY ADD AN EXPLANATION OF THE WIKI VOTING PROCESS AND INSTEAD OF RATIONAL DISCUSSION OR HE DELETED IT O AS TO DENY OTHERS OPPORTUNITY FOR THOUGHT AND CONSIDERATION.... HE HAS HAD A LOVE WIKIPEDIA OR LEAVE IT ATTITUDE AND TOLD ME NUMEROUS TIMES TO LEAVE RATHER THAN DISCUSS THE ISSUES. IN THAT HE AND OTHERS HAVE TREATED NEWBIE WIKIS LIKE ME LIKE THIS THEY COMPETELY NOT ONLY DISCOURAGE  US BUT OBSTRUCT US AND CREATE HOSTILE CONDITIONS WHICH THEY THEN USE AS PRETEXTS OFR WRONGFUL ACTIONS AGAINST US... IN RAISING THESE CONCERNS TO WIKI INDIVIDUALS WE ARE IGNORED AND UNAIDED AND ACCUSED WRONGFULLY AND ATTACKED.

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from_name: Constans, Camille (C.C.)

body:
me

>-----Message d'origine-----
>De : wikitech-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org
>[mailto:wikitech-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org]De la part de Gabriel Wicke
>Envoy? : lundi 10 mai 2004 00:45
>? : wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
>Objet : [Wikitech-l] old revisions on test.wikipedia.org
>
>
>There's a weird phenomenon on test.wikipedia.org with 1427 old
>revisions
>only holding the text 'abc'. If it was just a flawed manual mysql query
>done around may 4 then we could be sure it's not a bug- if not
>we'd have
>to do a fair bit of investigation.
>
>This problem didn't appear in any other wiki running the cvs code, but
>to know is better than to guess in this case. Would be a serious
>bug/security problem otherwise.
>
It's not a bug, I told to Tim, I broke test history during my test to make a php script to uncompress old tables (needed if we want de, nl and others wikis to go to utf-8)

Shiahulud


subject: [Wikitech-l] zwinger raid 1

body:
>>
>> What gives hdparm -t /dev/hdc now ?
>
># hdparm -tT /dev/hdc
>
>/dev/hdc:
>  Timing buffer-cache reads:   128 MB in  0.20 seconds =640.00 MB/sec
>  Timing buffered disk reads:  64 MB in 12.65 seconds =  5.06 MB/sec

5MB/sec for a system that should be able to do more than 50MB/sec.... And dma on would slow down less the system.

I forgot to tell that Tim tryed to set up dma on curly as well, on the 250G drive, and same error. And it's a 2.6.5 kernel and not the same drive (WDC on curly vs Maxtor on zwinger).

Shaihulud


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: The fun never stops

body:
Yes, that sounds reasonable.

Did I miss Mother's Day ??? I don't remember I got flowers...

Brion Vibber a ?crit:
> Brion Vibber wrote:
>
>> I'd like to schedule a little downtime, about an hour (hopefully much
>> less) circa 0200 UTC Monday morning (7pm PDT Sunday night). Should be
>> reasonably low traffic and people will have plenty of warning if it's
>> announced ahead of time.
>
>
> The stunning lack of "yes, that sounds reasonable" or any movement
> towards putting up a notice 24 hours in advance (and also Mothers' Day
> scheduling mishaps ;) have lead to this downtime being CANCELED.
>
> How does the same time Tuesday night/Wednesday morning sound?
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikitech-l] The fun never stops

body:
A general question about mysql replication...

Is this a valid summary of how this works?

1.  To go from a single db server to a db+slave, downtime is required.
2.  To go from a db+slave to db+2 slaves, downtime is not required.
3.  For a variety of reasons, slaves are prone to sometimes fall out of sync.

If that's more or less right, then it seems that although db+slave
helps guard against catastrophic failure (loss of a ton of edits since
the last db dump), it ironically leads to more total downtime.

And so it also seems that once we have our new big db machine, we
ought to plan to have something like this:

'new geoffrin' - primary db server
'suda' - secondary db server
'machine x' - slave not really used except to help maintain/re-establish sync.

But perhaps I have misunderstood the issue entirely?

--Jimbo


subject: [Foundation-l] "officials"

body:
Ulrich Fuchs <mail at ulrich-fuchs.de> wrote:
> We also need to be careful not to let too many people speak in the name of
> the Foundation whenever they feel like it.

What I believe to be more important is to not let the foundation speak in the
name of the people, whenever they feel like it, unless the Foundation is
properly democratically organized.

Uli

-----------------

Agreed.

The Foundation is there in particular because there is a need for a legal entity to own things like servers. There is need of a legal entity to be able receive donations and use funds. And the Foundation is there to ensure that the spiritual lead of Jimbo is preserved.

All activities, be they of gathering, of organising, or of distribution of the knowledge should be in the hands of the wikimedians first of all. Not of the Foundation. The Foundation is there to provide a legal platform. The Board is there to ensure that the legal platform works properly, stimulate perhaps the natural evolution of the project toward getting more funds for functionning, toward proper use of these funds, according to the needs expressed by wikimedians, and toward distribution as perceived good by wikimedians.
But imho, it is not to take decisions for participants, nor to remove participants opportunity to do what they have been doing so well for three years.

To preserve the core principles of the project, the Board should just have some veto power for some critical decisions, but that is about it.

I would dare to say (but that only my opinion) that what is *most* required in the following months, is not PR activity from the Foundation, maybe even not distribution organised by the Foundation, but is just setting the bases of the organisation, so that it is fair to all participants, preserving opportunity to get involved in any activity as it has been till now, as transparent as possible in its financial activity and, please oh please, as unbureaucratic as possible.

All participants have the opportunity to speak in the name of Wikipedia right now. Though there are a couple of cases when we are not so happy this is so, in the very very large majority of cases, facts have shown that it was really worth to trust any participant per default to speak *well* in the name of Wikipedia. No reason why this should change.

Ant

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subject: [Foundation-l] "officials"

body:
Ulrich Fuchs <mail at ulrich-fuchs.de> wrote:
> We also need to be careful not to let too many people speak in the name of
> the Foundation whenever they feel like it.

What I believe to be more important is to not let the foundation speak in the
name of the people, whenever they feel like it, unless the Foundation is
properly democratically organized.

Uli

-----------------

Agreed.

The Foundation is there in particular because there is a need for a legal entity to own things like servers. There is need of a legal entity to be able receive donations and use funds. And the Foundation is there to ensure that the spiritual lead of Jimbo is preserved.

All activities, be they of gathering, of organising, or of distribution of the knowledge should be in the hands of the wikimedians first of all. Not of the Foundation. The Foundation is there to provide a legal platform. The Board is there to ensure that the legal platform works properly, stimulate perhaps the natural evolution of the project toward getting more funds for functionning, toward proper use of these funds, according to the needs expressed by wikimedians, and toward distribution as perceived good by wikimedians.
But imho, it is not to take decisions for participants, nor to remove participants opportunity to do what they have been doing so well for three years.

To preserve the core principles of the project, the Board should just have some veto power for some critical decisions, but that is about it.

I would dare to say (but that only my opinion) that what is *most* required in the following months, is not PR activity from the Foundation, maybe even not distribution organised by the Foundation, but is just setting the bases of the organisation, so that it is fair to all participants, preserving opportunity to get involved in any activity as it has been till now, as transparent as possible in its financial activity and, please oh please, as unbureaucratic as possible.

All participants have the opportunity to speak in the name of Wikipedia right now. Though there are a couple of cases when we are not so happy this is so, in the very very large majority of cases, facts have shown that it was really worth to trust any participant per default to speak *well* in the name of Wikipedia. No reason why this should change.

Ant

---------------------------------
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subject: [Foundation-l] "officials"

body:
Ulrich Fuchs <mail at ulrich-fuchs.de> wrote:
> We also need to be careful not to let too many people speak in the name of
> the Foundation whenever they feel like it.

What I believe to be more important is to not let the foundation speak in the
name of the people, whenever they feel like it, unless the Foundation is
properly democratically organized.

Uli

-----------------

Agreed.

The Foundation is there in particular because there is a need for a legal entity to own things like servers. There is need of a legal entity to be able receive donations and use funds. And the Foundation is there to ensure that the spiritual lead of Jimbo is preserved.

All activities, be they of gathering, of organising, or of distribution of the knowledge should be in the hands of the wikimedians first of all. Not of the Foundation. The Foundation is there to provide a legal platform. The Board is there to ensure that the legal platform works properly, stimulate perhaps the natural evolution of the project toward getting more funds for functionning, toward proper use of these funds, according to the needs expressed by wikimedians, and toward distribution as perceived good by wikimedians.
But imho, it is not to take decisions for participants, nor to remove participants opportunity to do what they have been doing so well for three years.

To preserve the core principles of the project, the Board should just have some veto power for some critical decisions, but that is about it.

I would dare to say (but that only my opinion) that what is *most* required in the following months, is not PR activity from the Foundation, maybe even not distribution organised by the Foundation, but is just setting the bases of the organisation, so that it is fair to all participants, preserving opportunity to get involved in any activity as it has been till now, as transparent as possible in its financial activity and, please oh please, as unbureaucratic as possible.

All participants have the opportunity to speak in the name of Wikipedia right now. Though there are a couple of cases when we are not so happy this is so, in the very very large majority of cases, facts have shown that it was really worth to trust any participant per default to speak *well* in the name of Wikipedia. No reason why this should change.

Ant

---------------------------------
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subject: [Foundation-l] "officials"

body:
Ulrich Fuchs <mail at ulrich-fuchs.de> wrote:
> We also need to be careful not to let too many people speak in the name of
> the Foundation whenever they feel like it.

What I believe to be more important is to not let the foundation speak in the
name of the people, whenever they feel like it, unless the Foundation is
properly democratically organized.

Uli

-----------------

Agreed.

The Foundation is there in particular because there is a need for a legal entity to own things like servers. There is need of a legal entity to be able receive donations and use funds. And the Foundation is there to ensure that the spiritual lead of Jimbo is preserved.

All activities, be they of gathering, of organising, or of distribution of the knowledge should be in the hands of the wikimedians first of all. Not of the Foundation. The Foundation is there to provide a legal platform. The Board is there to ensure that the legal platform works properly, stimulate perhaps the natural evolution of the project toward getting more funds for functionning, toward proper use of these funds, according to the needs expressed by wikimedians, and toward distribution as perceived good by wikimedians.
But imho, it is not to take decisions for participants, nor to remove participants opportunity to do what they have been doing so well for three years.

To preserve the core principles of the project, the Board should just have some veto power for some critical decisions, but that is about it.

I would dare to say (but that only my opinion) that what is *most* required in the following months, is not PR activity from the Foundation, maybe even not distribution organised by the Foundation, but is just setting the bases of the organisation, so that it is fair to all participants, preserving opportunity to get involved in any activity as it has been till now, as transparent as possible in its financial activity and, please oh please, as unbureaucratic as possible.

All participants have the opportunity to speak in the name of Wikipedia right now. Though there are a couple of cases when we are not so happy this is so, in the very very large majority of cases, facts have shown that it was really worth to trust any participant per default to speak *well* in the name of Wikipedia. No reason why this should change.

Ant

---------------------------------
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subject: [Foundation-l] "officials"

body:
Ulrich Fuchs <mail at ulrich-fuchs.de> wrote:
> We also need to be careful not to let too many people speak in the name of
> the Foundation whenever they feel like it.

What I believe to be more important is to not let the foundation speak in the
name of the people, whenever they feel like it, unless the Foundation is
properly democratically organized.

Uli

-----------------

Agreed.

The Foundation is there in particular because there is a need for a legal entity to own things like servers. There is need of a legal entity to be able receive donations and use funds. And the Foundation is there to ensure that the spiritual lead of Jimbo is preserved.

All activities, be they of gathering, of organising, or of distribution of the knowledge should be in the hands of the wikimedians first of all. Not of the Foundation. The Foundation is there to provide a legal platform. The Board is there to ensure that the legal platform works properly, stimulate perhaps the natural evolution of the project toward getting more funds for functionning, toward proper use of these funds, according to the needs expressed by wikimedians, and toward distribution as perceived good by wikimedians.
But imho, it is not to take decisions for participants, nor to remove participants opportunity to do what they have been doing so well for three years.

To preserve the core principles of the project, the Board should just have some veto power for some critical decisions, but that is about it.

I would dare to say (but that only my opinion) that what is *most* required in the following months, is not PR activity from the Foundation, maybe even not distribution organised by the Foundation, but is just setting the bases of the organisation, so that it is fair to all participants, preserving opportunity to get involved in any activity as it has been till now, as transparent as possible in its financial activity and, please oh please, as unbureaucratic as possible.

All participants have the opportunity to speak in the name of Wikipedia right now. Though there are a couple of cases when we are not so happy this is so, in the very very large majority of cases, facts have shown that it was really worth to trust any participant per default to speak *well* in the name of Wikipedia. No reason why this should change.

Ant

---------------------------------
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subject: [Wikitech-l] zwinger raid 1

body:
Camille Constans wrote:
> Zwinger use now a raid1 setup with 2 250G drive IIRC.

Someone probably already said so, but this is not actually true (yet).

We moved everything from the 80g drive to the 250g drive last week,
but there is significant question as to whether it will now be
possible to move everything to 2x250g.  My belief is that it is not
possible.

Right now, I have in the office here a 3WARE SATA RAID card (tested by
me under linux, it works fine) and 1x250g drive.  I will be buying
another 250g drive to match, and then when the new machines come in, I
will installed the RAID CARD and 2x250g into one of them as a RAID 1,
and this will become our new NFS machine.  We will then migrate the
NFS off of zwinger and repurpose it in whatever way makes sense.

This means that we have an extra 250g drive, but these are not so
expensive and given our growth, it is clear that we can use it
somewhere soon enough.

--Jimbo


from_name: Ingrid

subject: [Wikitech-l] change wiki image

body:
Hallo,
i would change the wiki logo, with my logo.
It?s possible?
Thanks for all your help

In italiano:
Vorrei tanto riuscire a cambiare il logo wiki con un logo mio personale,
purtropop non ho ancora capito cosa devo modificare..qualcuno pu? aiutarmi?
Grazie mille.

Saluti Ingrid


from_name: Thomas R. Koll

subject: [Wikitech-l] zwinger raid 1

body:
On Sun, May 09, 2004 at 01:10:14PM -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:
> # lspci | grep IDE
> 00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corp.: Unknown device 24d1 (rev 02)
>
> An updated kernel with a more specific driver might help, but it'd be
> surprising if DMA was working on the old drive then.

Yepp,
My system worked at 2-3MB/s for months or even years but with
2.6 I motivated myself to improve that and enabled some options
in "ATA/ATAPI/MFM..." and now I'm at 25MB/s.
You gotta try out what IDE-chip fits best for the motherboard.

ciao, tom
--
== Weblinks ==
* http://www.tomk32.de - just a geek trying to change the world
* http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:TomK32 - Free Knowledge
* http://tinyurl.com/27c88 - WikiReader Internet: bald im Druck
* http://tomk32.bookcrossing.com - Free Books


from_name: Philippe Elie

subject: [Wikitech-l] zwinger raid 1

body:
On Mon, 10 May 2004 at 06:20 +0000, Constans, Camille (C.C.) wrote:

First are you sure the raid array is setup correctly, output of dmesg doesn't
show the 3ware card nor lspci, am I missing something ?

Assuming the raid card is ok:

>
> >>
> >> What gives hdparm -t /dev/hdc now ?
> >
> ># hdparm -tT /dev/hdc
> >
> >/dev/hdc:
> >  Timing buffer-cache reads:   128 MB in  0.20 seconds =640.00 MB/sec
> >  Timing buffered disk reads:  64 MB in 12.65 seconds =  5.06 MB/sec

I missed the start of this thread so I add information here: page on
meta says the raid controler is 3ware 8006, from 3ware site:

<quote>
Q10476 - Software Configuration: How to change hdd DMA mode in linux
when hdd is connected to 3ware escalade controller (7500-12) ?

You cannot change the DMA mode of the disk drives.  The DMA mode is
set to the maximum performance that the disk drive will support.
</quote>

I guess this is correct for 8006 controler too.

Another part of the doc says the controler choose the best transfer
mode available for the drive ...

> 5MB/sec for a system that should be able to do more than 50MB/sec....
> And dma on would slow down less the system.

yups, it's the difference between 50 MB/sec using 5 to 10% of cpu time
and 5 MB/sec using 100% cpu time. No wonder than wiki was very slow during
shai nfs split.

Can someone try 3ware tools (need root prolly) to check if something seems
wrong. Documentation available at http://www.3ware.com/support/userdocs.asp

As a general note, maintainer of these box would do something sensible
about HW description, it must be always available (mobo model/chipset etc.)
also someone should setup a script which at each boot do a: date >> logfile;
dmesg >> logfile; cat /proc/interrupt >> logfile; lspci -vv >> logfile; etc.
logfile must be copied to another box after boot completed.
Looxix, am I missing some usefull information ?

btw, are these disks SATA or PATA ?

regards,
Phil


subject: [Wikitech-l] zwinger raid 1

body:
Ricky Beam wrote:
> On Mon, 10 May 2004, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> >We moved everything from the 80g drive to the 250g drive last week,
> >but there is significant question as to whether it will now be
> >possible to move everything to 2x250g.  My belief is that it is not
> >possible.
>
> Yes, it is.  That's how I build RAID1 systems.

I think this depends on the exact card.  The one that we have says in
the manual that you can't do this, and James Day called the
manufacturer on the phone and they confirmed this.

I should add that the manual also says some other confusing things
that seem to suggest that maybe you could do this.

But, my current belief is that it is not possible with the card we
have.  If I'm wrong, that's good news.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: similar pages

body:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

> On Mon, May 10, 2004 at 02:55:28AM +0100, Timwi wrote:
>
>>Alternatively, we could come up with a Wiki syntax for special
>>characters (e.g. {'s} for ?) that is replaced with the correct character
>>upon save, but I think that would be pretty cumbersome to input.
>
> Or maybe we should switch the remaining Wikipedias to UTF-8,
> so that it's possible to input correct characters ...

Turkish is on UTF-8. You missed the point.


body:
Ashar Voultoiz wrote:

> Akamai own servers at almost every single ISPs hosting rooms. A customer
> (yahoo, amazon, cnn ...) give akamai the content they want to be serve
> mainly pictures and video. Akamai put them on ALL of their server.
[etc.etc.etc.]

I know all of that. You missed the point. The question was whether
Akamai can be used to serve constantly-changing dynamic content, not how
Akamai works.

Timwi


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: similar pages

body:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

> On Mon, May 10, 2004 at 08:40:00AM +0100, Timwi wrote:
>
>>Turkish is on UTF-8. You missed the point.
>
> It's not Turkish, but [[en:Wikipedia|certain other Wikipedia]] where
> inputting characters is a problem.

Originally from Volkan HATEM:
>
> At Turkish Wikipedia (tr)  [...]

 From Lars Aronsson:
>
> Among the Javascript buttons above the edit window, Mediawiki should
> present a line of *that language's* most commonly used umlaut
> characters, like this page, http://www.visit-sweden.com/
   (emphasis mine)

When I say "you missed the point", what I mean is that you missed the
point. This is not about UTF-8 at all.

Greetings,
Timwi


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: change wiki image

body:
Ingrid wrote:

> Vorrei tanto riuscire a cambiare il logo wiki con un logo mio personale,
> purtropop non ho ancora capito cosa devo modificare..qualcuno pu? aiutarmi?
> Grazie mille.

(Translation: I would like to change the Wiki logo to a logo of my own,
but unfortunately I haven't quite understood what I need to do... can
someone help me?)

You should probably be more specific than that. What logo are you trying
to change? You certainly can't change Wikipedia's. If you are talking
about a MediaWiki installation of your own, this is the wrong mailing
list - try MediaWiki-L (or whatever it was called), or replace the file
$IP/upload/wiki.png.

Timwi


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: similar pages

body:
On Mon, May 10, 2004 at 02:55:28AM +0100, Timwi wrote:
> Alternatively, we could come up with a Wiki syntax for special
> characters (e.g. {'s} for ?) that is replaced with the correct character
> upon save, but I think that would be pretty cumbersome to input.

Or maybe we should switch the remaining Wikipedias to UTF-8,
so that it's possible to input correct characters ...


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wiktionaries for all!

body:
Tim Starling wrote:

> > [about links from wikipedia to wiktionaries]
> >
> > How am I supposed to link from hu.wikipedia to hu.wiktionary? I'd say
> > [[wiktionary:word]] but it links to http://wiktionary.org/..word
> instead.
> >
> > Additionally [[wiktionary:fi:kukkala]] should redirect to fi.wiktionary
> > which it doesn't do yet.
>
> All this is fixed now. The "Wiktionary:" prefix still links to the
> English Wiktionary, but a new "wikt:" prefix has been introduced which
> links laterally to the wiktionary of the same language. An extra
> feature has been added to MediaWiki allowing "diagonal" linking, with
> the help of redirects. A link reading [[wikt:fi:kukkala]] on the
> German Wikipedia will link to http://de.wiktionary.org/fi:Kukkala,
> which will redirect to http://fi.wiktionary.org/Kukkala .

Why would that intermediate step be needed?  The default to the English
Wiktionary should only apply when the target language cannot be easily
ascertained.  This would often be the case where the source project is
not divided into separate projects for each language.  At this time this
would be from everthing except the Wikipedias and Wiktionaries.  Other
projects with such a structure are easily conceivable, but there is no
clamour to have them.  If such a possibilty can be accomodated without
extraordinary measures, so much the better.

Ec


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wiktionaries for all!

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> One chief reason for making these links available is to allow
> interwiki linking from *non-wikimedia* wikis as well. By using a
> single established prefix (WikiPedia:) you can link to any of our
> languages without begging third party site admins to add three hundred
> prefixes to their interwiki maps.

This is a very benevolent approach. :-)   Still, the priority should be
to make things work within the Wikimedia family.  Making it easier for
outside should never be more than an incidental byproduct arising out of
making things easier for ourselves.

> It would be nice to use the "real" URLs directly on our own wikis, of
> course, for the reasons you mention.

We already have noticeable opposition to using any kind of HTML; I don't
see that these people would be made any happier by the need to write out
full URLs. :-)

Ec


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: similar pages

body:
On Mon, May 10, 2004 at 08:40:00AM +0100, Timwi wrote:
> Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
>
> >On Mon, May 10, 2004 at 02:55:28AM +0100, Timwi wrote:
> >
> >>Alternatively, we could come up with a Wiki syntax for special
> >>characters (e.g. {'s} for ?) that is replaced with the correct character
> >>upon save, but I think that would be pretty cumbersome to input.
> >
> >Or maybe we should switch the remaining Wikipedias to UTF-8,
> >so that it's possible to input correct characters ...
>
> Turkish is on UTF-8. You missed the point.

It's not Turkish, but [[en:Wikipedia|certain other Wikipedia]] where
inputting characters is a problem.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wiktionaries for all!

body:
Timwi wrote:

> This is a fair point, but nonetheless an implementation that I'm not
> entirely comfortable with. (Admittedly, I can't think of a better one
> other than to encourage the entire wiki community to go entirely
> multi-lingual and have all wikis standardise on a
> [[<sitename>:<langcode>:<pagename>]] syntax for links to other wiki
> sites...)

I very much agree with this, but I would make it even simpler.  It needs
to be uniform and easily understood by non technical users.  It should
also be usable in the same way from any project.  I would promote the
format [[wwLLL:pagename]] where the ws represent the project, and the Ls
(not necessarily capitalized) represent the language.  The language part
may be reduced to two letters, as would be the case with most major
languages.  All top level projects would have a w code.  (There should
be enough to go around unless we outdo ourseves in the development of
entirely new projects.)
Default situations can be easily defined, and allowances can be made for
intrawiki namespaces.

> Another major disadvantage I thought of just now is that it poisons
> our namespace. Suppose some silly company makes some sort of product
> and (to be cool) calls it "fr:ea:ky". How would we name our article on
> it? It's only a matter of time until this will be an actual problem.

It's a losing battle to try to accomodate every "fre:aky" broadband
troll; they're always ready to throw another spammer in the machinery. :-)

Ec