from_name: Rick

subject: [WikiEN-l] Question

body:
Funny how the only hits for Ariddia on Google are for NationStates and something called http://emiryang.net/ariddia/asp/intro/intro.asp, which wants me to download foreign script.  Not exactly a rousing endorsement.

RickK

aridd <aridd at wanadoo.fr> wrote:

Incorrect. It started off that way, but has evolved as more. It exists independantly from NS. It has its own web pages, outside NationStates. I do see your point not all micronations can be listed, and that Ariddia is far from a major one. I'm withdrawing request for it to be listed - though I do appreciate your replies. In future, perhaps Rick could bother to be a little more curteous, and to check up on what he's talking about. Just a friendly suggestion. All in all, keep up the good work in Wikipedia! Thank you for your time, and sorry for the bother.

Regards,

Adrian

Message du 07/12/03 08:38
De : Rick
A : aridd at wanadoo.fr, English Wikipedia
Copie ? :
Objet : Re: [WikiEN-l] Question
Ariddia is the creation of this user on NationStates, which is a GAME.  The creations at NationStates are not to be considered as even on the same level as the crackpot "nations" that crop up from time to time on [[List of microstates]].  *I* have a country on NationStates, and if you look at any of the informatoin on that page, you can see that NOBODY on NationStates take their creations seriously.  There are THOUSANDS of fake "nations" on NationStates.  If everybody there wanted to come to Wikipedia to add their fake country to it, we would be swamped (I know, "slipper slope argument").  But Ariddia is not a real place, it is not registered at a real place, it is not intended to be a real place, it is nothing but a place created to play the game.

RickK

aridd wrote:
Greetings.

I have a question, and I hope this is the right place to ask it... I saw that Wikipedia has a page listing micronations and with links to other pages containing information on each of those micronations. I contributed a page with a micronation. It was deleted, and I received an IP ban:

Your user name or IP address has been blocked by RickK. The reason given is this:
repeated creaton [sic] of nonsense articles
You may contact RickK or one of the other administrators to discuss the block.
Note that you may not use the "email this user" feature unless you have a valid email address registered in your user preferences.
Your IP address is . Please include this address in any queries you make.

My entry was a serious one, and I only made one (NOT repeated entries). I understand that Wikipedia might feel my contribution was not a useful one, and I will not repeat it. Obviously, not everything can be accepted. However, I would have appreciated that explanation being given me, rather than the above offensive message.

I apologise for the invconveniance, and also if this was not the right place to send this message.

Kind regards,
Adrian

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list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: rampant scientism

body:
I, for one, feel that ALMOST anything goes on the Talk page.  I did blank a racist rant once, and then someone came along behind me and deleted the Talk page (the rant was the only thing on the page.)  But other than that, I think Talk pages should be left alone.

If we're talking about a User's talk page, on the other hand, it's up to them how they want to deal with them.

RickK

Sheldon Rampton <sheldon.rampton at verizon.net> wrote:
Viajero wrote:

>I am the last person who want to see Wikipedia turned into a repository
>for flaky, New Age esotericisms, but at the same time the scientism which
>has manifested itself in the past few days in response to Mr Natural
>Health's questionable contributions is also profoundly disturbing and
>likewise a very insidious form of non-neutrality.
>
>Take for example this comment by user Snoyes on the [[Alternative
>medicine]] talk page:

Setting aside the question of scientism's merits, isn't the talk page
_supposed_ to be a place where POV statements are allowed?

Actually, what are the terms of allowed discourse on talk pages? I've
had a user recently on the Disinfopedia who hasn't done any damage to
actual articles, but he has made a number of nasty remarks on talk
pages, accusing other users of "paranoid ravings" and referring to me
personally as a fascist. I've been operating on the assumption that
even intemperate remarks like this should be acceptable if they are
limited to comments on talk pages. At what point do Wikipedians draw
the line on this sort of thing?
--
--------------------------------
| Sheldon Rampton
| Editor, PR Watch (www.prwatch.org)
| Author of books including:
| Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities
| Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
| Mad Cow USA
| Trust Us, We're Experts
| Weapons of Mass Deception
--------------------------------
_______________________________________________
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from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Wikipedia hierarchy

body:
> From: Matthew Woodcraft
> Toby Bartels wrote:
> >Another problem is our reliance on ''page'' deletion as a way of
> >deleting ''specific revisions'' that infringe copyright. Since this
is
> >only effective when the infringement is a page creation, it's not a
> >permanently workable method. That software may change too.
>
> It isn't really a workable method at all. If there's something we're
not
> allowed to distribute, we're not allowed to distribute it to anyone.
> Deleted pages are still available to sysops, and I think also in the
> backup dumps.

Actually, the law ends up being forgiving for internet hosts who have
copies of copyrighted material as long as it's clear that they're not
intending to publish; for example, even though deleted pages are
available to sysops and in the backup dumps, as they're well hidden
they're not a threat to the legitimate publisher/copyright owner.

Obviously, we need to make a good faith effort to respect copyright, but
we don't need to suffer from copyright paranoia. This is not to say that
the current system of dealing with copyrighted, unlicensed material on
Wikipedia isn't broken. But I don't believe that the only legally sound
solutions require total guaranteed erasure of any copyrighted text.

Think of Google and its cached copies of websites.

> >Ideally, all of these features would be available to everybody.
> >Deletion was made an admin-only process because undeletion was
> >impossible (check old talk history on deletion policies). Now it
might
> >be expanded.
>
> Yes, I think it's high time for this. Then discussion about an article
> can go on its talk page, and we can get rid of the flamewar-magnet
> 'Votes for Deletion'.
>
You can add my rah rah here. With the stub-marking feature, deletion of
entry histories just to get back the ? (or red) link is unnecessary.


subject: [WikiEN-l] talk pages policy (was rampant scientism)

body:
> From: Sheldon Rampton Monday, December 08, 2003 3:30 PM
> Jimbo wrote:
>
> >Sheldon Rampton wrote:
> >>  Setting aside the question of scientism's merits, isn't the talk
page
> >>  _supposed_ to be a place where POV statements are allowed?
> >
> >Allowed, yes.  Encouraged, no.
>
> That's different from my understanding of how things are intended to
> operate. I've been operating on the understanding that articles
> themselves strive to attain NPOV, but that in order to achieve that
> goal, individual users need a place to express their differing points
> of view so that they can work toward a satisfactory synthesis. It
> would seem therefore that expression of points of view is actually
> _necessary_ on the talk pages. Am I understanding things properly?

I suspect Jimbo interpreted "POV statements" as "comments about other
users", which would make what he said comprehensible.

This is why I will again promote the usage of readable English instead
of NPOV/POV jargon. For example, instead of "POV statements", "opinions"
works well and is less open to misinterpretation.

Actually, it's possible that Jimbo is hearkening back to another
old-school Wikipedia principle, which is that of release from the
concept of "owning" one's text in the Talk pages.

The Talk pages work best when every so often someone goes in and
synthesizes the relevant issues into an anonymous (and hopefully
neutral) summary.

This is nigh-impossible to do when people are possessive of their
comments on the Talk page and aren't particularly interested in working
toward a consensus. And by consensus I do not mean a majority or
supermajority vote. I mean a single statement which everyone agrees
captures the relevant issues, if imperfectly.


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [WikiEN-l]

body:
All trolls are members of the same tribe. The way to deal with them is
thus the same: don't feed them.

Uncle Ed


list: wikipedia-l

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Forget dmoz, viva "Wikirectory"!

body:
> From: Mark Krueger Monday, December 08, 2003 6:18 PM
>
> OK. What I have learnt about an editor-type responsibility model was
that
> dmoz and WP both stand on war feet. Fine. I can understand the
reasons.
> But
> then, why do not create a kind of "Wikirectory". The advantage: We get
rid
> of dmoz, and, we can link WP entries to directory (sub)categories
which
> will
> complete the contemporary understanding of the world how it is
represented
> in the WWW. (This is what I originally had in mind). Pls. think about
it.
>
I wholeheartedly agree with this vision. This is the exact right
approach to handling the categorization issue by hand.

The only problem is that there's some serious coding required.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Oh, I give up

body:
Toby wrote, incredulously:

> Given the context of this post, it would appear
> that Ed thinks that people are ganging up on RK,
> and then we're trying to excuse this because RK
> reacted badly.

No, Toby, you got the cart before the horse.

Rather, I think what happened the last time is that:
(1) People ganged up on RK (or it seemed that way to him)
(2) He defended himself (in a way people thought was inexcusably bad)
(3) They used his 'defensiveness' as an excuse to ban him

I am not saying that people used (2) to defend (1), but that they used
(2) to defend (3).

Oh, what's the use! No one listens to me anyway. Cunctator picks apart
everything I say and ignores my main points just because I don't start
right. Erik (on the talk page) puts words in my mouth.

I guess it's time for me to start threatening to "resign" again. How
long has it been since my last 'threat'? Mav, are you keeping track?

Ed Poor


body:
> From: Erik Moeller on Monday, December 08, 2003 6:29 PM
> To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Forget dmoz, viva "Wikirectory"!
>
> Cunc-
> > I wholeheartedly agree with this vision. This is the exact right
> > approach to handling the categorization issue by hand.
>
> What's wrong with Magnus' category system? Your code visibility
criticism
> has been refuted on wikitech-l.

I would say "misunderstood" rather than "refuted", but that's not
important.

1. Non-natural language text should be avoided at all costs. It goes
part and parcel with the principles of the simplicity of the wiki
syntax.

2. Any such meta-data scheme should not be stored within the article
text. If it's being parsed so that it displays in a separate edit
window, then it should be saved as a separate field/table in the
database.

That is to say, although I strongly think that such a categorization
scheme should be an explicitly separate project from the core Wikipedia
project--and in fact, a separate core project (let's call it Nupedia)
tied to the Wikipedia database which focussed on organization,
formatting, culling, etc. of the Wikipedia entries for such purposes as
creating paper versions sould be an excellent idea--if it is going to
happen as part of the core Wikipedia project, the scheme should at all
costs be separated from the article text and should be ignorable on both
the viewing and editing side if desired.

3. Any official sanction of a particular implementation for dealing with
categorization makes it orders less likely that the adoption of a better
scheme in the future will happen than the case in which we explicitly
design the system to be implementation-agnostic.

3. Another basic issue with the implementation of such a categorization
scheme, which could be a problem if not well recognized, and I haven't
seen any thoughtful recognition of it (yet--and I may be looking in the
wrong places) is that it provides an alternate method of interlinking
entries which could harm the quality of the construction of the entries.

Whenever you add stuff to a machine, you make it less efficient. You
can't just stick wings onto a car to make a super flying automobile. You
don't make a combination toaster-blender. Dictionaries and encyclopedias
are separate things. Web browsers make bad file browsers.

Etc.

It's so much easier to add stuff when you're dealing with code than when
you're dealing with physical machines that it's hard to remember that
the dangers of decreased utility are still there.


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Search engine. - HTDIG!!!

body:
On Dec 8, 2003, at 09:19, Stuardo Rodr?guez (StR) wrote:
> Hi! , i'm new in the list... and i didn't have the time to read all
> mails,
> but... with this search stuf ....
>
> Have anyone tried htdig?

ht://Dig uses a web spider to do its indexing, which is less than
ideal. It doesn't understand the structure of the wiki (don't index
"edit this page"; keep articles and talk pages in distinct categories;
doesn't understand which pages are redirects) and it has to spider the
site to perform updates. Consider that we've got over 300,000 pages on
the English Wikipedia alone (including talk pages, user pages,
redirects, etc). It could probably be tweaked to grab updates off of
Recentchanges and other improvements, but I'm not sure it's the best
way to go.

JeLuF has experimented with a search engine based on Lucene
(http://jakarta.apache.org/lucene/) a lone indexing/search engine which
lets you feed it data and updates however you like. This could include
keeping better track of wiki-specific data, and submitting the text in
the form we like it when we want it. Pages could be indexed immediately
on modification, or just the updated pages reindexed periodically.
JeLuF, how did that look? Promising or not?

Also of course we can switch the mysql search back on. The database
server will actually have all the CPU it wants now, so perhaps the
mysterious hanging threads won't plague us anymore. If it sucks again,
we can turn it back off until we figure it out or replace it.

--brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki 1.1.0 release

body:
Brion wrote:
>After a couple weeks of breaking it in on Wikipedia,
>the MediaWiki 1.1.0 release is now available. Various
>bug fixes, wiki-friendly table markup, and localization
>improvements top user-visible changes over the
>previous stable snapshots.

A one series indicates that the code is in enough shape for general
consumption. Is this so? I thought we had a lot more documentation to do and
the installation/configuration needed to to be streamlined.

IMO it would have been better to wait for that and then release our first 1.0
with a press release. That would have generated a good deal of interest in
the code.

Oh well.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: A

from_email: A

subject: [WikiEN-l] Mediation Committee

body:
I would like to become a mediator.

---------------------------------
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New Yahoo! Photos - easier uploading and sharing
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from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [Wikitech-l] List Items

body:
Evan Prodromou wrote:

>Is there a good reason this:

>---8<---
>#Item 1
>
>#Item 2
>
>#Item 3
>---8<---

>...should render to this:

>---8<---
>

Item 1

>

Item 2

>

Item 3

>---8<---

>...instead of this:

>---8<---
>

>
Item 1

>
Item 2

>
Item 3

>

>---8<---

>? If I file an RFE to do this, am I dumb?

Shouldn't it do this:

---8<---

Item 1

Item 2

Item 3

---8<---

?  On the one hand, the blank lines imply that the writer intended the items
to appear in different lists, like your first version; but on the other hand,
HTML will do this with the separate
 tags, without need for any
 tags,
as in your second version.

Although I doubt that anybody would really want to write this example,
the analogous example with
 is reasonably common.

-- Toby


from_name: Matthew Woodcraft

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Wikipedia hierarchy

body:
Toby Bartels wrote:
>Another problem is our reliance on ''page'' deletion as a way of
>deleting ''specific revisions'' that infringe copyright. Since this is
>only effective when the infringement is a page creation, it's not a
>permanently workable method. That software may change too.

It isn't really a workable method at all. If there's something we're not
allowed to distribute, we're not allowed to distribute it to anyone.
Deleted pages are still available to sysops, and I think also in the
backup dumps.

>Ideally, all of these features would be available to everybody.
>Deletion was made an admin-only process because undeletion was
>impossible (check old talk history on deletion policies). Now it might
>be expanded.

Yes, I think it's high time for this. Then discussion about an article
can go on its talk page, and we can get rid of the flamewar-magnet
'Votes for Deletion'.

-M-


from_name: Lauris Kaplinski

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [Sodipodi-list] Wikiclips (was Re: Map Symbols)

body:
Hello!

It may even work for things like clipart...
For software project, you want to keep it compilable and reduce
enthropy at all costs. Lot of such is not issue in case of
collaborative clipart project.

Best wishes,
Lauris Kaplinski

John Stracke kirjutas E, 08.12.2003 kell 13:48:
> On Sun, 2003-12-07 at 21:00, Evan Prodromou wrote:
>
>     What I wonder is whether a Wiki format might not work better for
>     collaboration than CVS. CVS requires setting up user permissions for
>     lots of people, and it can be a hassle. Wikis lower the bar for
>     participation considerably.
>
> But doesn't it also lower the bar for pranks and such--say, person A
> adds a piece of clipart that person B doesn't like, so B modifies it
> surreptitiously? CVS would log things like that.
--
Lauris Kaplinski <lauris at kaplinski.com>


from_name: Bryce Harrington

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [Sodipodi-list] Wikiclips

body:
On Mon, 8 Dec 2003, Brion Vibber wrote:
> In MediaWiki when you upload a new file with the same name as an
> existing file, the old version is archived and remains accessible. It
> can be viewed, saved locally and reuploaded with a new name, or
> reverted in-place. _Deleting_ an image revision would do so
> permanently, but this is now a restricted admin action.

I'd imagine this approach would nicely satisfy the principle
requirements of such a system.

> SVG is an interesting case though; being XML-based it would be possible
> to provide SVG files in human-readable -- and even human-editable --
> source form. That's something we don't currently provide for, but it
> would be possible to provide for a file upload form that stores data
> into a wiki page.

While I don't know many people that habitually hand-edit SVG files, I
could imagine something akin to this might be useful for templatified
graphics, such as street signs, language translatable signs, etc.

> OddMuse's file upload feature works like this, I believe.
> (http://www.oddmuse.org/)
>
> Also hypothetically a plugin- or java-based editor app could be
> launched directly from the page, but that's outside the scope of this
> stuff...

You should check this out:

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/11/19/svgwiki.html

Bryce


from_name: Pedro Fortuny

subject: [WikiEN-l] Mr-Natural-Health

body:
Sorry to meddle, but we may be forgetting that what *people* expect
from a doctor is not *science* ''stricto sense'' but healing...

But this may start a hotter debate?

My 2c.

Pedro
--
Pedro Fortuny Ayuso: http://pfortuny.sdf-eu.org
Colegio Mayor Pe?afiel, Universidad de Valladolid
C/ Estudios 6, 47005 Valladolid, Spain -->        www.cmpenafiel.org
pfortuny at sdf-eu.org                         Tfn. Nr. 34  983  298277


from_name: aridd

body:
Cunctator, that is the most widely accepted definition of a micronation, yes. They're also referred to as "fifth world nations". I'll bow out now. Thank you all for giving this some thought.

Kind regards,
Adrian

Message du 08/12/03 14:22
De : The Cunctator
A : English Wikipedia
Copie ? :
Objet : Micronation (was Re: [WikiEN-l] Question)
On 12/8/03 7:06 AM, "sannse" wrote: > Jake wrote: > >> I find people's use of "Micronation", especially as in the [[Micronation]] >> article, terribly inconsistent- the only way I've ever seen it used > outside >> of Wikipedia (Note the "I've seen", don't list Google results of other > uses, >> I'm sure they exist) is to refer to very small nations that actually exist >> and have some degree of legal recognition (even if it's just that they're >> islands outside any other nation's territory): [[Sealand]], North Dumpling >> (Dean Kamen's island, near Long Island- has a non-aggression pact with the >> US signed by then-President George H.W. Bush), and several dozen others. >> However, many people seem to use the term to describe entirely fictional >> entities with no territory. I would simply call these "Fantasy nations", >> "Imaginary nations", or something like that, as the prefix micro- makes no >> sense in that context. >> >> -- Jake > > The [[micronations]] article makes a distinction between "micronations" and > "microstates", but I've no idea if this is a common way of using the words. > I've never come across the concept before this, so am probably using it > wrong. The main promoter in print of the term "micronation" to refer to small nation-like groups without official recognition is this Wired Magazine article from March 2000: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.03/kingdoms.html Until a more precise term comes along, one might as well call Talossa a micronation. Micronations, also known as counternations and ephemeral states, consist of one or more people united by the desire to form and/or inhabit an independent country of their own making. All micronations have governments, laws, and customs; the main distinguishing factor is whether their citizens want to establish a physical home country and seek international recognition, or whether, as is the case with Talossa, they're happy just to pretend. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


subject: [WikiEN-l] Mr-Natural-Health

body:
>
> >Sorry to meddle, but we may be forgetting that what *people* expect
> >from a doctor is not *science* ''stricto sense'' but healing...
> >
> >
> Not to dictate what people should be discussing, but I think we may be
> entering into a philosophical debate the scope of which is somewhat
> wider than this mailing list ought to accomodate.  There's entire books
> written on the proper relationship between 'medicine', 'healing', and so on!

Yes, you are quite right...

Pedro.

--
Pedro Fortuny Ayuso: http://pfortuny.sdf-eu.org
Colegio Mayor Pe?afiel, Universidad de Valladolid
C/ Estudios 6, 47005 Valladolid, Spain -->        www.cmpenafiel.org
pfortuny at sdf-eu.org                         Tfn. Nr. 34  983  298277


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Proposal: Introduce Editor Responsibilities?

body:
Mark-
> I just came from the open directory project (ODP) http://dmoz.org/ , a kind
> of non-commercial Yahoo!, and was thinking about whether this model of
> responsible editorship (at ODP for certain subcategories) also can/should
> work for Wikipedia (application & resposibility for certain titles). Do not
> think that I am discontent with the quality of WP's entries. Just a (future)
> proposal for more relilability. For details on the ODP pls. check:
> http://dmoz.org/about.html. For details of the application process pls. go
> to http://dmoz.org/cgi-bin/apply.cgi?where=Science/Math/Research

Sure. I would be willing to assume editorship of the Mother Teresa article
immediately.

Regards,

Erik
</sarcasm>


from_name: Mark Krueger

body:
I just came from the open directory project (ODP) http://dmoz.org/ , a kind
of non-commercial Yahoo!, and was thinking about whether this model of
responsible editorship (at ODP for certain subcategories) also can/should
work for Wikipedia (application & resposibility for certain titles). Do not
think that I am discontent with the quality of WP's entries. Just a (future)
proposal for more relilability. For details on the ODP pls. check:
http://dmoz.org/about.html. For details of the application process pls. go
to http://dmoz.org/cgi-bin/apply.cgi?where=Science/Math/Research

Mark Krueger


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [WikiEN-l] Request for Arbitration

body:
"Fred Bauder" <fredbaud at ctelco.net> schrieb:

> Halloween is a major holiday, celebration, or whatever in the US, not quite
> as big as Christmas. It is an established fact, not subject to serious
> dispute. Removal of any known, well-established fact from an article where
> it clearly belongs is a serious matter. Hiding behind a claim of triviality
> is not a defense. It is like someone who shortchanges you a nickel every
> time you deal with them.

I hate this attitude. This is what stops some bad Wikipedia articles from getting improved - anything that has been written down once and is true should be kept, however trivial the fact is.

The 'October 2003' page gives news and special occurences during the month of October 2003. In what way is Halloween such? Halloween is each year on 31 October. There's nothing special or newsworthy about 31 October 2003 having been Halloween. 31 October 2003 also was a day that counted 24 hours. That's a known, well-established fact as well. So if I add that to the page it should stay as well?

Andre Engels


body:
Cunc-
> I wholeheartedly agree with this vision. This is the exact right
> approach to handling the categorization issue by hand.

What's wrong with Magnus' category system? Your code visibility criticism
has been refuted on wikitech-l.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Evan Prodromou

in_reply_to: Brion Vibber's message of "Mon, 8 Dec 2003 17:01:26 -0800"

body:
>>>>> "BV" == Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> writes:

    BV> Also hypothetically a plugin- or java-based editor app could
    BV> be launched directly from the page, but that's outside the
    BV> scope of this stuff...

Right now, MediaWiki has a way to do version-controlled image file
upload, and layout (through Wiki markup) for navigation to those
files. I think that's probably enough to start a clip-art collection.

Yes, it's not quite as easy to edit a file in MediaWiki as it is to
edit a page. That could definitely be improved. But it's still pretty
darn easy to collaborate on images.

~ESP

--
Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
Wikitravel - http://www.wikitravel.org/
The free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide


body:
>>>>> "BH" == Bryce Harrington <bryce at osdl.org> writes:

    BH> http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/11/19/svgwiki.html

That's about the coolest thing I've seen all week.

~ESP

--
Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
Wikitravel - http://www.wikitravel.org/
The free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide


from_name: John C. Penta

body:
Meanwhile, what are bits like Monaco, the Vatican, Nauru, etc etc etc called?

Microstates?

Then what's the micro-term for the other meaning of nation, as in an ethno-cultural group?

John

----- Original Message -----
From: aridd <aridd at wanadoo.fr>
Date: Monday, December 8, 2003 3:32 pm
Subject: Re: Micronation (was Re: [WikiEN-l] Question)

>
> Cunctator, that is the most widely accepted definition of a
> micronation, yes. They're also referred to as "fifth world
> nations". I'll bow out now. Thank you all for giving this some
> thought.
> Kind regards,
> Adrian
>
>
>
>
>
> Message du 08/12/03 14:22
> De : The Cunctator
> A : English Wikipedia
> Copie ? :
> Objet : Micronation (was Re: [WikiEN-l] Question)
> On 12/8/03 7:06 AM, "sannse" wrote: > Jake wrote: > >> I find
> people's use of "Micronation", especially as in the
> [[Micronation]] >> article, terribly inconsistent- the only way
> I've ever seen it used > outside >> of Wikipedia (Note the "I've
> seen", don't list Google results of other > uses, >> I'm sure they
> exist) is to refer to very small nations that actually exist >>
> and have some degree of legal recognition (even if it's just that
> they're >> islands outside any other nation's territory):
> [[Sealand]], North Dumpling >> (Dean Kamen's island, near Long
> Island- has a non-aggression pact with the >> US signed by then-
> President George H.W. Bush), and several dozen others. >> However,
> many people seem to use the term to describe entirely fictional >>
> entities with no territory. I would simply call these "Fantasy
> nations", >> "Imaginary nations", or something like that, as the
> prefix micro- makes no >> sense in that context. >> >> -- Jake > >
> The [[micronations]] article makes a distinction between
> "micronations" and > "microstates", but I've no idea if this is a
> common way of using the words. > I've never come across the
> concept before this, so am probably using it > wrong. The main
> promoter in print of the term "micronation" to refer to small
> nation-like groups without official recognition is this Wired
> Magazine article from March 2000:
> http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.03/kingdoms.html Until a more
> precise term comes along, one might as well call Talossa a
> micronation. Micronations, also known as counternations and
> ephemeral states, consist of one or more people united by the
> desire to form and/or inhabit an independent country of their own
> making. All micronations have governments, laws, and customs; the
> main distinguishing factor is whether their citizens want to
> establish a physical home country and seek international
> recognition, or whether, as is the case with Talossa, they're
> happy just to pretend.
> _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing
> list WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
OK. What I have learnt about an editor-type responsibility model was that
dmoz and WP both stand on war feet. Fine. I can understand the reasons. But
then, why do not create a kind of "Wikirectory". The advantage: We get rid
of dmoz, and, we can link WP entries to directory (sub)categories which will
complete the contemporary understanding of the world how it is represented
in the WWW. (This is what I originally had in mind). Pls. think about it.

Mark


subject: [WikiEN-l] Oh, I give up

body:
Ed-
> Oh, what's the use! No one listens to me anyway. Cunctator picks apart
> everything I say and ignores my main points just because I don't start
> right. Erik (on the talk page) puts words in my mouth.

I don't think I put words in your mouth. In any case, maybe you should
stop trying to be everywhere at the same time and understanding every
dispute that goes on. Don't take this mediation thing too seriously. The
idea is that there will be a central place - a message board, for example
- where people can go if they want help. I don't think mediators should
necessarily actively seek out disputes and try to help. Nobody can
complain that you are condescending if they ask you - or rather, the
mediation team - for help. I think your quick poll on Talk:Silesia was a
good idea.

One fundamental problem is also that if the person trying to mediate has
already established an opinion on the subject in question, they may not be
accepted in the same fashion as someone who approaches a dispute with
their hands clean. So you may make a comment and feel like everyone should
treat you like the unbiased mediator, while people perceive you as being
on either side of the dispute. Whether you anticipated that or not, I
believe the mediator function compels you to be even more careful with
expressing strong opinions.

Regards,

Erik


body:
Cunc-
> 1. Non-natural language text should be avoided at all costs. It goes
> part and parcel with the principles of the simplicity of the wiki
> syntax.

To me, wiki is not about natural language vs. "unnatural" language. It's
about getting things done fast ("wiki wiki", remember?). We say "[[dog]]"
because that's faster for the reader than "see dog" and for the writer
than Dog. Now before you
say that taken to an extreme, this would mean using a Perl-like syntax
with complex operators, the "fast" of course refers to both writing and
reading. A category system needs to retain easy source readability, but I
think "[[Category:Fruit]]" or "[[Category=Fruit]]" are both intuitive
enough.

> 2. Any such meta-data scheme should not be stored within the article
> text. If it's being parsed so that it displays in a separate edit
> window, then it should be saved as a separate field/table in the
> database.

Well, from an implementation perspective, it's nice to get a common diff
for both, I think, so I would prefer them to be in the same field. But I
agree with you that separate edit windows make sense, especially if those
who don't care about metadata can turn them off entirely. For now,
however, I think that the amount of metadata is so low that the present
scheme is sufficient.

> That is to say, although I strongly think that such a categorization
> scheme should be an explicitly separate project from the core Wikipedia
> project-

I believe that to be a bad idea, because editing content and editing
metadata are closely related. Someone who adds certain information about
President Bush's family history may also want to categorize this
information in the same step. Someone may add legitimate information
through metadata that doesn't find its way into the article because nobody
noticed it being added. Updating them gets harder the more separate data
and metadata are.

> 3. Any official sanction of a particular implementation for dealing with
> categorization makes it orders less likely that the adoption of a better
> scheme in the future will happen than the case in which we explicitly
> design the system to be implementation-agnostic.

Open source development typically happens in an evolutionary fashion, that
is, you build upon a solution that is imperfect and try to improve it
incrementally without usually altering its fundamental structure. That's
why vi and emacs are still around. It may not be the best model, but it's
a model that achieves results, including life itself.

> Whenever you add stuff to a machine, you make it less efficient. You
> can't just stick wings onto a car to make a super flying automobile. You
> don't make a combination toaster-blender. Dictionaries and encyclopedias
> are separate things. Web browsers make bad file browsers.

That's certainly a good point. There is a definite risk that too much
metadata will disturb the regular functioning of the encyclopedia editing
process. Already it can be a bit annoying to have interlanguage link edits
in RC. And what if people add huge blocks of categories to very small
articles, distracting from the content? I have thought about these
problems when I made my initial proposal. My conclusion is that there are
solutions for most, if not all, of them. We can filter RC. We can limit
the number of categories. We can use sub-categories. And so forth.

At this point I believe the best approach is to simply try if this scheme
works, and to then adjust it in an evolutionary fashion.

> Etc.

?

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikitech-l] Search engine. - HTDIG!!!

body:
On Dec 9, 2003, at 00:15, Magnus Manske wrote:
> Guillaume Blanchard wrote:
>> Yes, please switch the mysql search back on until you found better
>> solution.
>>
>>
> If there's doubt about the resources it would take, why not enable it
> for the larger non-EN languages first, see what happens (for a few
> days). If the server doesn't choke, turn it on everywhere.

I've turned it on for everything but en, where the index didn't quite
finish setting up because /tmp is on the tiny root partition and mysql
thought this would be a great place for a few hundred megs of
intermediate data. Adjusting...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Robert Graham Merkel

subject:
[WikiEN-l] "Rampant scientism" - actually reading too much into an
	edit summary

body:
>    1. rampant scientism (Viajero)
>
> > (cur) (last) . . 01:30, 7 Dec 2003 . . Robert Merkel (put a big fat
> "doctors think this stuff is bogus" sentence near the top of the article,
> where it belongs, rather than burying it at the bottom)
>
> This individual hasn't a shred of impartiality regarding the subject.
>

Whilst I would prefer not to have debates on specific articles taken to
the mailing list, seeing it is already there...

Whilst that edit summary may have been unwise, I don't think the edit I
made was unreasonable.  In fact, did you bother to read the edit that
comment was attached to?

Basically, I take the view that articles should generally be written in
"news style" with a very quick summary of the most pertinent facts at
the top, and then dealing with each point in more detail later.  As I
read the article at the time I made the edit, I judged that it would be
improved by making a brief statement of the majority medical view of the
topic in this introductory section.  I believed this to be important and
an improvement to the article.

Now, as it happens, the majority medical/scientific view on alternative
medicine, whether the proponents of alternative medicine like it or not,
is that most of it is at best ineffective New Age mysticism that generates
strong placebo effects, or at worst a particularly cruel fraud on
very sick people with nothing to lose.  They may be wrong, but I believe
that to be an accurate summary of a majority of doctors' views, and I don't
think there's terribly much dispute on that.

What I actually said in the article, in the fourth paragraph, was
something along the lines of
"mainstream Western medicine views most alternative medicine as either
[[pseudoscience]] or [[quackery]]".  In other words, a quick summary
of a sentiment expanded greatly later on in the article.

So, in essence, I think my edit was quite reasonable and in good
faith, and my edit summary was an accurate (if indelicate) summary of
the content of my edit and my reasoning.  Read the relevant edit in full
next time before making unjustified claims.


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject:
[Wikitech-l] [asad@cs.mcgill.ca: About starting a new wikipedia in
	language : Bengali]

body:
Shah,

What a great idea!  I'm forwarding your request to wikitech-l, as the people
there will be much more help to you than I can be.

----- Forwarded message from Shah Asaduzzaman <asad at cs.mcgill.ca> -----

From: "Shah Asaduzzaman" <asad at cs.mcgill.ca>
Date: Tue, 9 Dec 2003 00:28:26 -0500
To: <jwales at bomis.com>
Subject: About starting a new wikipedia in  language : Bengali

Hi Jimbo,

I am a regular user of the wikipedia, and for along time I was planning
for starting Bengali pages for wikipedia.

Now a days, several open source fonts and authoring tools are available
for Bengali, and it would be easier to start this.

But I could not start it following the instructions given in the "start
a new edition" page....

Is there anything special that I need...? First of all I could find
'edit this page' for the main page.

Plz inform...or let me know where can I find the info..

sincerely

Shah Asaduzzaman
PhD student, Computer Science
McGill University Canada
Native of Bangladesh, First language: Bengali

----- End forwarded message -----


from_name: Robert

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikibot, murder and Black Panther redirects

body:
Why is the Wikibot replacing all instances of the phrase
"Black Panther" with a redirect to the article on
[[murder]]?  This seems very unjustified.

http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Wikibot

Robert (RK)

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New Yahoo! Photos - easier uploading and sharing.
http://photos.yahoo.com/


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] Search engine. - HTDIG!!!

body:
Guillaume Blanchard wrote:

>From: "Brion Vibber"
>
>
>
>>Also of course we can switch the mysql search back on. The
>>database server will actually have all the CPU it wants now,
>>so perhaps the mysterious hanging threads won't plague us
>>anymore. If it sucks again, we can turn it back off until we
>>figure it out or replace it.
>>
>>
>
>Yes, please switch the mysql search back on until you found better solution.
>
>
>
If there's doubt about the resources it would take, why not enable it
for the larger non-EN languages first, see what happens (for a few
days). If the server doesn't choke, turn it on everywhere.

Magnus


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: Micronation (was Re: [WikiEN-l] Question)

body:
John asked:

> Meanwhile, what are bits like Monaco, the Vatican,
> Nauru, etc etc etc called?
>
> Microstates?

I think they're called "principalities" -- at least Monaco is.

I hope this ends up with an article explaining all the types of
political sovereignty, starting with the biggest (population and/or
area), and descending to the tiniest.

Last year someone started writing about [[enclave]]s and exclaves.

Your other question is interesting, too. See [[Kurdistan]] for an
ethno-cultural group with no sovereignty; even though /-stan/ means
"country", there is no country called Kurdistan; the Kurds are spread
out among northeast Iraq, and a couple of other adjoining areas.

It starts getting REALLY complicated when speaking of groups having
nationalistic aspirations.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Mediation Committee

body:
Lir wrote:

> I would like to become a mediator.

Get some experience at mediating.

You'd be extra good at it, because you know exactly the sorts of
verbiage that pisses people off; so you could coach users NOT to make
the same mistakes YOU made. (Note: that's my secret - I profit from my
mistakes, and use my never-ending history of failure as a source of
what-not-to's.)

Uncle Ed
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body:
I think it's pretty clear that the dmoz model, while aimed at
generating greater reliability, actually creates significantly less
reliability than the wiki model.

The problem was well put by Erik self-deprecating joke that he'd
assume responsibility for the Mother Theresa article.  The joke there
is that Erik has been involved with an ongoing controversy about the
content of that article.  Erik's strength is in knowing that
commitment to the Wikipedia ideals means commitment to openness, _even
when the articles might end up more like we'd like if we were in
charge_.

The wiki model provides good checks and balances, and it seems
unlikely that we'll ever want to modify it in any substantial way,
although of course I do think we can tweak it, and that it'll be
important for "Wikipedia 1.0" to be stable.

--Jimbo

Mark Krueger wrote:

> I just came from the open directory project (ODP) http://dmoz.org/ , a kind
> of non-commercial Yahoo!, and was thinking about whether this model of
> responsible editorship (at ODP for certain subcategories) also can/should
> work for Wikipedia (application & resposibility for certain titles). Do not
> think that I am discontent with the quality of WP's entries. Just a (future)
> proposal for more relilability. For details on the ODP pls. check:
> http://dmoz.org/about.html. For details of the application process pls. go
> to http://dmoz.org/cgi-bin/apply.cgi?where=Science/Math/Research
>
> Mark Krueger
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


subject: [Wikitech-l] Search engine. - HTDIG!!!

body:
On Mon, 8 Dec 2003, Brion Vibber wrote:

> Also of course we can switch the mysql search back on. The database
> server will actually have all the CPU it wants now, so perhaps the
> mysterious hanging threads won't plague us anymore. If it sucks again,
> we can turn it back off until we figure it out or replace it.

I see it has been switched on now... Will the special pages be normally
available soon too?

Andre Engels


subject: [WikiEN-l] User Leumi

body:
All I can suggest is mediation.

If you and Leumi /both/ agree, I will make a formal offer to mediate.

I've already begun a mediation re: [[Silesia]].

See:
* [[talk:Silesia]]
* [[Silesia (moderated)]] - a six word stub
* [[talk:Silesia (moderated)]]

Ed Poor, aka Uncle Ed


from_name: Peter Gervai

body:
On Mon, Dec 08, 2003 at 10:56:58PM +0100, Mark Krueger wrote:
> I just came from the open directory project (ODP) http://dmoz.org/ , a kind

I would like to inform you that many editors are well aware of the existence
of the dmoz, and being *highly* critical about its power structure,
hierarchical dictatorship, unflexibility, user unfriendliness, and other
positive words starting with "un-" and associated with Dmoz.

If you can search wikipedia lists, try the string "dmoz". May shed some
light on the possibility of your success (or your possible crucifixion).

Peter

ps: ...being editor at dmoz since, well, long ago.


subject:
[Wikitech-l] FW: [WikiEN-l] Wikibot,
	murder and Black Panther redirects

body:
Is someone's bot out of control?

Developers, please investigate this ASAP.  --Ed Poor

-----Original Message-----
From: Robert [mailto:rkscience100 at yahoo.com]
Sent: Tuesday, December 09, 2003 11:59 AM
To: wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikibot, murder and Black Panther redirects

Why is the Wikibot replacing all instances of the phrase
"Black Panther" with a redirect to the article on
[[murder]]?  This seems very unjustified.

http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Wikibot

Robert (RK)


from_name: Delirium

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>The wiki model provides good checks and balances, and it seems
>unlikely that we'll ever want to modify it in any substantial way,
>although of course I do think we can tweak it, and that it'll be
>important for "Wikipedia 1.0" to be stable.
>
>
This is probably something you and others already assume, but I think
it's important that whatever we do to make "Wikipedia 1.0" stable is
non-intrusive, and hopefully somewhat separate from the main Wikipedia.
The last thing we want is to discourage people from contributing to the
main, chaotic Wikipedia because we're in the midst of trying to
stabilize things for 1.0: that should go on in parallel without
interfering with the "be bold" style editing that we currently enjoy.
Of course, the opposite concern is that we don't want to make 1.0 a huge
fork of the main Wikipedia, requiring a ton of improvements to be
"back-ported" to the main branch.  So we'll just magically find the
ideal middle ground, I assume. =]

-Mark


from_name: Sascha Noyes

body:
On Tuesday 09 December 2003 11:59, Robert wrote:
> Why is the Wikibot replacing all instances of the phrase
> "Black Panther" with a redirect to the article on
> [[murder]]?  This seems very unjustified.
>
> http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Wikibot
>
> Robert (RK)
>

This bot is run by alexandros. I've had a quick glance over wikibot's edit
history and can only find one such "disambiguation" of [[black panther]]. (On
Ultra-Orthodox Judaism - which has been corrected.)

Strange none the less. Maybe the robot's equivalent to a freudian slip?

Best,
Sascha Noyes
--
Please encrypt all email. Public key available from
www.pantropy.net/snoyes.asc


from_name: Toby Bartels

references:
<87d6b03w7q.fsf@unicorn.bad-people-of-the-future.san-francisco.ca.us>
	<1070884124.2040.3435.camel@barrayar.local.thibault.org>
	<20031209002535.GN19356@math-rs-n03.ucr.edu>
	<36F9761C-29E3-11D8-8512-000A95DAA284@pobox.com>

body:
Brion Vibber wrote in part:

>Toby Bartels wrote:

>>However, the MediaWiki software, IIRC, had some failings in this respect
>>when it comes to images -- people were able to overwrite uploaded files
>>(which is how MediaWiki treats images) in a way that destroyed information.
>>Has that all been fixed?

>In MediaWiki when you upload a new file with the same name as an
>existing file, the old version is archived and remains accessible. It
>can be viewed, saved locally and reuploaded with a new name, or
>reverted in-place. _Deleting_ an image revision would do so
>permanently, but this is now a restricted admin action.

OK, this is what I was thinking of, and it was fixed.
So MediaWiki should work fine for showing images to one another,
and for writing things about them in wiki pages.
But if you want to modify the images' /sources/ then you want something
then lets you view diffs of the sources -- which may be SVGwiki
or something else, depending on what kind of images you use!

-- Toby (from Wikipedia), done talking


from_name: Stan Shebs

subject: [Wikitech-l] Conversion without a script

body:
Alfio Puglisi wrote:

>On Mon, 8 Dec 2003, Alfio Puglisi wrote:
>
>
>>On Mon, 8 Dec 2003, Brion Vibber wrote:
>>
>>
>>>On Dec 8, 2003, at 04:38, Erik Moeller wrote:
>>>
>>>>Then why not use the semi-working conversion script and let the users
>>>>do the rest of the work by hand?
>>>>
>>>That's what I was going to ask you! :) That's exactly what we've done
>>>for the Frisian, Finnish, and other wikis, on request.
>>>
>>I'm soliciting opinions on the wiki-it mailing list about the conversion,
>>and the associated manual work. In case it is decided to go ahead, would
>>it be possible to do it in the following days/weeks?
>>
>
>To follow up on the issue...
>The italian wiki is totally in favor of switching to the new software as
>soon as possible, whatever is the manual workload to fix things
>afterwards. So, since we already have over 4,000 pages and it will only
>get worse with time, please let's do this soon. To lessen the workload of
>Brion, is there any other developer capable of doing this?
>
I'm not a developer, but helping with the manual fixup seems like a good way
to improve my extremely limited knowledge of Italian. Is that plausible, and
if so, what exactly is the kind of fixup work required?

Stan


from_name: Guillaume Blanchard

subject: [Wikitech-l] Search engine. - HTDIG!!!

body:
From: "Brion Vibber"

> Also of course we can switch the mysql search back on. The
> database server will actually have all the CPU it wants now,
> so perhaps the mysterious hanging threads won't plague us
> anymore. If it sucks again, we can turn it back off until we
> figure it out or replace it.

Yes, please switch the mysql search back on until you found better solution.

Aoineko


subject: [WikiEN-l] Question

body:
RickK wrote:

>aridd (Adrian) wrote:

>>Incorrect. It started off that way, but has evolved as more. It exists
>>independantly from NS. It has its own web pages, outside NationStates. I do
>>see your point not all micronations can be listed, and that Ariddia is far
>>from a major one. I'm withdrawing request for it to be listed - though I do
>>appreciate your replies. In future, perhaps Rick could bother to be a little
>>more curteous, and to check up on what he's talking about. Just a friendly
>>suggestion. All in all, keep up the good work in Wikipedia! Thank you for
>>your time, and sorry for the bother.

>Funny how the only hits for Ariddia on Google are for NationStates and
>something called http://emiryang.net/ariddia/asp/intro/intro.asp, which wants
>me to download foreign script.  Not exactly a rousing endorsement.

Adrian is not trying to get Ariddia on Wikipedia anymore,
so we don't need to press the point.  But for the record,
the foreign script is Korean.  But I can't read Korean,
so I don't know if that's Adrian's Ariddia or not.
In any case, there are several pages at that site
(many more than Google realises), so it would validate Adrian's claim
if that is indeed his Ariddia.  (But Adrian is French, not Korean, right?)

Anyway, Adrian can tell us where his country's web site is if he likes;
but it's not necessary since the matter of Wikipedian content is resolved.

As for Wikipedia bans and block policy, however, I'm not sure that's resolved.
Was RickK right to block Adrian?  Was Adrian a vandal?  I don't think so.
But I'm not sure what the blocks justification was, since it's not in the log.

-- Toby


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia hierarchy

body:
sannse wrote:

>Sorry about that!  Yes, I misunderstood your point, somehow missing the
>earlier context.

No problem!

-- Toby


subject: [WikiEN-l] Is MNH somebody else?

body:
On Tue, Dec 09, 2003 at 12:22:14AM +0000, wikien-l-request at Wikipedia.org wrote:
>
> Which reminds me (to everybody):
> Has anybody with that power checked the IP logs for MNH's edits
> to see if this might be somebody that we've met before?
> He was quick to point to the weaknesses of our banning procedures
> and seemed to understand the political wisdom of focusing on RK.
>

I would like to echo this request.  He strikes me as sometbody who is
uncannily familiar with the subtleties of Wikipedia politics  for a
newbie.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Stylesheet update

body:
I have updated the wikistandard.css stylesheet on pliny and larousse
with the one from CVS, in order to get my table toys working ;-)

Now

{| class=rimage
| [[image:someimage.jpg]]
|--
| Caption
|}

will align the image to the right, choose a smaller font, etc.

Should we move these table classes to a separate tables.css file and
"include" it with its own statement into the HTML file? That would
ensure table classes working on all skins.

Magnus


from_name: The Cunctator

body:
> From: Delirium on Tuesday, December 09, 2003 3:10 PM
> To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Proposal: Introduce Editor
Responsibilities?
>
> Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
> >The wiki model provides good checks and balances, and it seems
> >unlikely that we'll ever want to modify it in any substantial way,
> >although of course I do think we can tweak it, and that it'll be
> >important for "Wikipedia 1.0" to be stable.
> >
> >
> This is probably something you and others already assume, but I think
> it's important that whatever we do to make "Wikipedia 1.0" stable is
> non-intrusive, and hopefully somewhat separate from the main
Wikipedia.
> The last thing we want is to discourage people from contributing to
the
> main, chaotic Wikipedia because we're in the midst of trying to
> stabilize things for 1.0: that should go on in parallel without
> interfering with the "be bold" style editing that we currently enjoy.
> Of course, the opposite concern is that we don't want to make 1.0 a
huge
> fork of the main Wikipedia, requiring a ton of improvements to be
> "back-ported" to the main branch.  So we'll just magically find the
> ideal middle ground, I assume. =]
>
I agree--I'm a supporter of the use of the excellent name "Nupedia" to
describe the project we're presently calling Wikipedia 1.0.


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] TomeRaider files

body:
On Dec 9, 2003, at 15:18, Erik Zachte wrote:
> TomeRaider files used to be at
>
> http://download.wikimedia.org/tomeraider/current/
>
> Have they been moved?

I forgot to copy them over, sorry. Just a sec... Okay, should be in.
Also directory indexes should be working.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Viajero

subject: [WikiEN-l] User Leumi

body:
Hi all,

I am not getting anywhere with recent arrival Leumi. Despite his
politeness and his good faith shown on Talk pages and his willingness to
negotiate, he continues to try to insert pro-Israel/anti-Palestine bias in
many of the articles he works on. He is either unwilling or unable to
learn NPOV. Normal channels of communication appear to work but have no
effect. (He is another young teenager with Asperger's; maybe this has
something to do with it.) Last night I spent more than five hours over two
articles [[The Holocaust Industry]] and [[Palestinian refugee]] endlessly
trying to convince him that his edits were unacceptable. Others including
Daniel Quinlan and Merv backed me up without our making any real progress.
Finally, mercifully, the articles were protected by Angela.

The two above along with [[West Bank]] are now protected. My feeling his
Leumi will continue to try to insert his POV as soon as they are free
again. I would like a joint community action on how to do deal with this,
before they are unprotected, because it is too tiring, too emotionally
exhausting to have to deal with this on one's own, article by article. We
have a user, Zero0000, who is the Real Thing, a historian with vast
knowledge of Middle East history from original sources, and he is also
spending far too much time have to protect articles from the infatigable
efforts of Leumi to slant them..

Please help out, people. See my my documentation at
[[User:Viajero/Leumi]]. Respond at [[User_Talk:Viajero/Leumi]]. Check
every edit this kid makes. Leave messages on his Talk page. We are going
to have to exert a vast amount of pressure on him if he is to become a
valuable contributor. Mr Natural Health is a court jester compared to
Leumi. If I end up having to hold the fort on my own, I'll get burnt out.
(And Angela will be furious with me if she has to add me to [[Missing
Wikipedians]] ;-))

Thanks.

V.


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Question

body:
Angela wrote:

>Toby Bartels wrote:
>
>>As for Wikipedia bans and block policy, however, I'm
>>not sure that's resolved. Was RickK right to block
>>Adrian?  Was Adrian a vandal?  I don't think so. But
>>I'm not sure what the blocks justification was, since
>>it's not in the log.
>>
>
>It is in the log. See [[Wikipedia:Block_log]], not
>[[Special:Ipblocklist]]):
>
>I'm not saying it was necessarily wrong to block this
>user, but it was certainly wrong to block him without
>warning. He had only made three edits to an existing
>article and created a new one twice. This isn't a huge
>number of edits and they were all easily reversible,
>so there was no emergency need to block him in my
>opinion.
>
I agree. When Sysops are too quick to use heavy-handed methods against
newcomers they are often more harmful than the problems that they
pretend to solve.  There was a time when everybody would be outraged
when Ed Poor was too quick to block pages or ban users.  From the little
that I've seen about Adrian, he has been more than willing to adapt when
the problem was explained to him.  Trying to impose excessive orthodoxy
just drives people away.

Ec


from_name: Evan Prodromou

body:
>>>>> "TB" == Toby Bartels <toby+wikipedia at math.ucr.edu> writes:

    TB> OK, this is what I was thinking of, and it was fixed.  So
    TB> MediaWiki should work fine for showing images to one another,
    TB> and for writing things about them in wiki pages.  But if you
    TB> want to modify the images' /sources/ then you want something
    TB> then lets you view diffs of the sources -- which may be
    TB> SVGwiki or something else, depending on what kind of images
    TB> you use!

You don't need to view diffs to modify the source files. You just need
to download the files, edit them, and upload the new versions. No, it
doesn't happen in the browser, but that's probably OK -- I don't
think a browser-based image editor could ever have the kind of
features that (say) Sodipodi has.

Diffing images is kinda hard. For vector image formats it's a little
easier, and for stuff like SVG it might actually be practical, but for
most purposes it's _extremely_ difficult to automatically detect the
"difference" between two images. I doubt it would be worth the effort.

~ESP

--
Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
Wikitravel - http://www.wikitravel.org/
The free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide


from_name: Andre Engels

body:
"Robert" <rkscience100 at yahoo.com> schrieb:
>
> Why is the Wikibot replacing all instances of the phrase
> "Black Panther" with a redirect to the article on
> [[murder]]?  This seems very unjustified.
>
> http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Wikibot

Could you please specify a page where this has happened? From
things like the edit summary I might be able to see what's going
on (a bug in the bot, misuse of the bot or human edits trying to
hide as bot edits).

Andre Engels


subject: [Wikitech-l] Search engine

body:
Well, we've had the search engine on for about a day, and so far things
seem good. Load on the database server is still fairly light; it's got
a lot of idle time and I've never seen the load average peak over 1.0.

I've just made some fixes to the search so it should try to match all
given search terms by default, which is what most people expect (google
has trained them well!) and it should do a better job of highlighting
search terms in the results than it was doing. It's still not perfect
though... I'd particularly appreciate feedback from people using
non-Latin scripts (Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, Arabic, Cyrillic, and the
Indic scripts) as to how well it can find things.

Note that the "go" button is usually the default if you hit enter in
the search field and "go" is very idiosyncratic, often sending people
to insanely unrelated pages. That also needs to be fixed up.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: [Intlwiki-l] format for interwiki-links

body:
Andre Engels wrote on <intlwiki-L>:

>I know at least:
>* alphabetical by code (amongst others, de:, nl:)
>* alphabetical by language name in the language itself (i.e. English for
>  English, Deutsch for German, Polski for Polish, etcetera) (fr:)
>* alphabetical by code, but with en: put first (hu:)
>* alphabetical by language name in the language on which the page is (pl:)

I believe that en: uses method #2, like fr:.
In any case, that's what ''I'' do.

[Crossposted to <wikiEN-L> so that readers there can verify this.
General discussion of Andre's point beyond the English wiki
should return to <intlwiki-L>.]

-- Toby


body:
"Sascha Noyes" <sascha at pantropy.net> schrieb:

> This bot is run by alexandros. I've had a quick glance over wikibot's edit
> history and can only find one such "disambiguation" of [[black panther]]. (On
> Ultra-Orthodox Judaism - which has been corrected.)
>
> Strange none the less. Maybe the robot's equivalent to a freudian slip?

Ah, that explains it. As an explanation, please look at the userpage of
[[User:Robbot]], it shows the working of the bot (Wikibot is the same bot,
but with another operator) when doing disambiguation.

There is a link 'murder' on the [[black panther]] page, and
so the bot chooses it as one of the possible disambiguators.
To be exactly, when 'Black panther is disambiguated, the
disambiguation options are:
 0 'Black Panther Party'
 1 'British'
 2 'Donald Neilson'
 3 'Israeli'
 4 'Jews'
 5 'Sephardic'
 6 'USA'
 7 'Ultra-Orthodox Judaism
 8 'black panther'
 9 'jaguar'
10 'leopard'
11 'murderer'
12 'wikipedia:disambiguation'

Apparently, Alexandros must have chosen 11, which is not just a bad, but a ridiculous choice to make in this case.

I checked some more, and the edit in question is among a list of four robot edits using the same program (the disambiguation one), and the other three are incorrect as well. I cannot see any evidence of the same program having been run for Wikibot before or after (Kchishol1970 later corrected one of these to what it _should_ have been, I reverted the other two being too lazy to actually correct). My guess is that Alexandros was kind of testing out the program, which on itself is a good idea, but he should at least have cleaned up after himself. It would have been even better to use the bot's option to work on another language to do everything on test.wikipedia.org.

I would advise Alexandros to not run solve_disambiguation.py or disamb_all.py anywhere but on test.wikipedia.org until he knows damn well how to use it.

Andre Engels


from_name: Rob Hooft

subject:
[Wikitech-l] FW: [WikiEN-l] Wikibot,	murder and Black Panther
	redirects

body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:
> Is someone's bot out of control?
>
> Developers, please investigate this ASAP.  --Ed Poor
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Robert [mailto:rkscience100 at yahoo.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, December 09, 2003 11:59 AM
> To: wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikibot, murder and Black Panther redirects
>
>
>
> Why is the Wikibot replacing all instances of the phrase
> "Black Panther" with a redirect to the article on
> [[murder]]?  This seems very unjustified.
>
> http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Wikibot

I didn't see this particular instance of wiki-violation, but I can say
that Alexandros as far as I know is the only active user of
pywikipediabot that, even though I asked him at least twice, is not a
member of the mailing list for the robot code. I also think he did not
discuss the use of the robot on en:. I am in favor of using robots
(especially the ones I help to code), but I am an advocate of only using
them after proper discussion of their merits. Alexandros does not seem
to be listening to reason.

Rob

--
Rob W.W. Hooft  ||  rob at hooft.net  ||  http://www.hooft.net/people/rob/


from_name: Geoff Burling

subject: [WikiEN-l] REPOST: Neutrality and the "majority" view

body:
On Mon, 8 Dec 2003, Poor, Edmund W wrote:

[I'm using Ed's email as a starting point for some thoughts I've been
attempting to put into an intelligible form over the last few weeks,
& perhaps add to the article on [[NPOV]].]

> In light of the Cunctator's keen observations....
>
> I wonder what people mean when they say "most scientists believe X".
> This has a bearing on how we write about non-mainstream ideas such as
> alternative medicine.
>
> 1. What is a majority view?
>
> If indeed 51% of scientists (or doctors holding a Western
> M.D. degree, or moviegoers, or Linux enthusiasts) BELIEVE A CERTAIN
> THING, then the article should simply report that the indicated
> proportion of the group in question adheres to that POV.
>
> If the majority is larger than 51% - say, 95% - we can
> safely call that an "overwhelming majority". If it is 99.8%
> we can say "virtually all". (Note that some published
> writers might considered 2/3 to be "overwhelming", but that
> is just THEIR POV! If as many as 1/3 of a group disagree
> with something, our readers are better served by telling
> them that 2/3 of the group believe it, and that 1/3 of the group
> disbelieve it).
>
> Having stated the general principle, I wonder how many are still with
> me? Getting bored? Angry? . . .
>
Despite my own populist & leftist sympathies, I can't help but be
suspicious of any argument that attempts to determine what is "truth"
by a vote. And I can't help finding any such statement worthless.

First, let me define one point here. When talking about any issue, I
think it is fair to say that the viewpoints expressed will come from
one of three groups:

*Professionals -- by this I mean scientists, scholars, medical doctors,
priests or pastors, accountants, &c. These are the people whose lives
revolve around researching, formulating & expressing opinions on issues.

*Informed non-professionals, or amateurs -- these are the folks who
don't make their living from researching, formulating & expressing opinions,
but do so on their own dime. The professional groups sneer at their
opinions, & condescendingly call them "amateurs" -- forgetting that the
original meaning of the word comes from describing people whose work is
a labor of love. Much like all of us on Wikipedia. (Well, me at least;
if Jimbo is distributing checks to everyone for their contributions,
mine have been consistently getting lost in the mail.)

*Uninformed non-professionals. These are the people who aren't informed
about a given issue, & tend to repeat what they hear without any significant
understanding. This is the realm of Urban Legends, Superstition, Crackpot
Theories, & similar ilk -- but it is also fair to say all of us in one
topic or another fit into this group. Can we be sure that, at any given
moment, we could defend our views on every conceivable topic? About
Abortion? About the existence of God? Concerning Israel? Whether or not
Democracy is the best form of government? If Tolstoy is a better author
than Mickey Spillone?

I think it is fair to say that ideas from this last group face the
hardest time from those of us who care about Wikipedia: unless it can
be shown that one of these ideas are held belongs to a significant group
or a tradition, it will get removed rather promptly from Wikipedia.
The consensus is that the ramblings of Joe Blow you might meet in a bar
is not as interesting as the opinions of Ayn Rand, Noam Chomsky or
Plato (to pick at random some examples), & labelled "quackery" & gets
voted off Wikipedia.

Okay, end of my digression concerning catagories; let me proceed to
my argument.

Too often on Wikipedia, it appears that we are looking for some kind
of ex cathedra decision of what the professionals think about
an issue. We want the professionals to say, "This is truth." Except
for those who want to be able to say, "The professionals think A, but
they are wrong & it is clear that the truth is B." But as I reflect
on how knowledge is achieved, this kind of paradigm rarely occurs.

Explaining the views of the professionals on an issue, I feel sometimes
that I am confronting a situation best explained by the decisions of
the US Supreme Court: sometimes they issue decisions unanimously, in
a single opinion; sometimes they make a decision where the vote is
8-1, 7-1, 6-3, or 5-4, & there are two opinions; sometimes the vote is
equally split, but where almost every justice issues her or his own
opinon about the case argued before them. In the latter case, for
Wikipedia to report that "55% percent of the professionals believe A"
grossly misrepresents the various POVs.

If you follow me so far, then you see how vital it is to explain the
reasons why there are different POVs in an article. Sometimes this
divergence is due to yet insufficient evidence; other times it is due
to other reasons (e.g., professional A vehemently argues for his POV
because that is the same POV of his employer; professional B argues
for her POV because it is the opposite of the POV of her ruling party).

So what I try to do is state what is the _consensus_ concerning a
given issue. The scientific consensus is that the Earth is round --
a fact even the Flat-Earthers will admit. The consensus of historians
is that Columbus made a voyage in 1492, & reported to the rest of Europe
the existence of a continent, which was later known to be the Americas,
& was widely known -- a fact even those who claim that the Vikings, the
Phoenicians, the Iberians or the aboriginal hunter-gathers who crossed
over the Bering Sea into those continents some 50 millenia before will
admit.

Every argument needs a starting point; no topic should be treated as a
game of Calvinball where the score is 23 to Q.

My POV on this matter is that we need to report the arguments of the
various POVs concerning an issue in understandable detail, rather than
count noses & report the result. And further, we should not restrict
ourselves to the consensus of the professionals; too often their consensus
is based on non-rational opinions. To quote the example of Lysenko on
the study of genetics in the Soviet Union is an extreme case, & too
many people are likely to say that it would never happen in a free
environment; more apt, & suggestive of just how wrong the consensus
on an issue could be is the case of deciphering Mayan inscriptions.
Due to the fiercely-held opinion of the pre-eminent (yet very learned)
Mayanologist Sir Eric Thompson, the understanding of these Native American
inscriptions made no headway until _after_ his death! Progess on this
problem could only be made outside of the professional establishment,
in this case, amongst scholars & professionals in the Soviet Union
who were isolated from the mainstream.

I remember a saying from the early 20th-century physicists: "The only
way to get a new theory accepted is to wait for all of the opponents
to die."

This is not to say that we must give more weight to evey anti-establishment
viewpoint than to that held by the establishment. Frankly, I feel it is
important to set forth what might be called the "convential thinking"
about a subject, just because it what any reader of Wikipedia expects
to find. Right now I'm attempting to set forth the consensus of Biblical
scholars on the actual dates when the various books of the New Testament
were written; & yet I feel the articles are not as strong as they could
be because I don't know (& frankly don't care to do the research to find
out) what the traditional views on authorship are. I don't feel it is
useful to have an article about the _Epistle to the Hebrews_ that states
that many religious writers since Origen doubted St Paul ever wrote that
work, without explaining why millions of Christians believed for centuries
that he had; it unfairly makes anyone who argues the later viewpoint
look stupid & ill-informed.

I could continue on, but I've already spent a couple hours writing the
text above. Is this a worthwhile extension of the concept of NPOV to
be worth discussion, or is this merely my peculiar historigraphic
approach to the subject, without much interest to anyone except myself?

Response on or off the list is welcome.

Geoff


from_name: daniwo59 at aol.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] User Leumi

body:
I've been following the Leumi debates with some interest without butting in,
and I actually find them quite interesting. Here is a determined contributor
who wants to ensure that another side of a very complex issue gets heard, yet
he manages to do so in a very civil and polite manner, accepting criticism and
showing willingness to compromise, while still standing up for his position
and his right to express it--even though most of the other people dealing with
the materials disagree resolutely with him. The fact that it is done civilly is
in itself commendable, and I believe that given time an acceptable compromise
will be reached.

Furthermore, when asked to give sources, he has done so. The fact that his
sources have been challenged is irrelevant--the fact is that there are plenty of
people who accept those sources, very often blindly, just as other people
accept the opposing sources, very often blindly. For example, how many of the
people who are discussing Finkelstein have actually taken the time to read
Finkelstein (lots of people admitted that they hadn't actually read the book)? Of
those that did read it, how many people really read it critically? By the way, I
would say the same thing about Peters, Pipes, or whatever sources Leumi
brings.

Unfortunately, when it comes to neutral point of view, we all tend to place
our positions somewhere near the middle ground. However, given the good nature
of the debate between the parties (and we all know how badly a bad-natured
debate can go), I think that this is a perfect venue for mediation. Regardless of
any issues of age or medical conditions (which I think are irrelevant and
border on the ad hominem), Leumi is defending his position admirably--even though
I might disagree with him on certain key points. I mean admirably not in
terms of his position but his demeanor.  I hope the mediators can work their magic
here.

My suggestion would be to have each side (Leumi and Viajero) pick a mediator
each and have them both agree on a third mediator. That way there can be no
claims of bias by either side over who the mediators are.

Good luck, guys,

Danny
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from_name: Rick

subject: [WikiEN-l] Question

body:
I think the block log only lasts for 24 hours, right?  At any rate, I did explain my justification when I blocked him, as is required.

RickK

Toby Bartels <toby+wikipedia at math.ucr.edu> wrote:
As for Wikipedia bans and block policy, however, I'm not sure that's resolved.
Was RickK right to block Adrian? Was Adrian a vandal? I don't think so.
But I'm not sure what the blocks justification was, since it's not in the log.

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard
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from_name: sannse

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia hierarchy

body:
> >Toby Bartels wrote:

> I think that you may be interpreting my remark out of context.
> The "undue" restriction on undeletion that I'm arguing against
> is to increase the requirement from 1 administrator to 2,
> ''while at the same time'' keeping deletion at only 1 admin.
>
> I'm ''not'' suggesting that undeletion be ''completely'' unrestricted,
> while keeping deletion restricted.  Although in another post,
> I mentioned the ideal of making ''both'' of the operation unrestricted,
> I do believe that this would require some software changes.
> At the moment, neither deletion and undeletion is handled very smoothly.

Sorry about that!  Yes, I misunderstood your point, somehow missing the
earlier context.

Thanks for clarifying.

Regards

sannse


from_name: Alfio Puglisi

body:
On Mon, 8 Dec 2003, Alfio Puglisi wrote:

>On Mon, 8 Dec 2003, Brion Vibber wrote:
>
>>On Dec 8, 2003, at 04:38, Erik Moeller wrote:
>>> Then why not use the semi-working conversion script and let the users
>>> do the rest of the work by hand?
>
>>That's what I was going to ask you! :) That's exactly what we've done
>>for the Frisian, Finnish, and other wikis, on request.
>
>I'm soliciting opinions on the wiki-it mailing list about the conversion,
>and the associated manual work. In case it is decided to go ahead, would
>it be possible to do it in the following days/weeks?

To follow up on the issue...
The italian wiki is totally in favor of switching to the new software as
soon as possible, whatever is the manual workload to fix things
afterwards. So, since we already have over 4,000 pages and it will only
get worse with time, please let's do this soon. To lessen the workload of
Brion, is there any other developer capable of doing this?

Ciao,
Alfio


body:
On Tue, 9 Dec 2003, Stan Shebs wrote:

>Alfio Puglisi wrote:
>
>>To follow up on the issue...
>>The italian wiki is totally in favor of switching to the new software as
>>soon as possible, whatever is the manual workload to fix things
>>afterwards. So, since we already have over 4,000 pages and it will only
>>get worse with time, please let's do this soon. To lessen the workload of
>>Brion, is there any other developer capable of doing this?
>>
>I'm not a developer, but helping with the manual fixup seems like a good way
>to improve my extremely limited knowledge of Italian. Is that plausible, and
>if so, what exactly is the kind of fixup work required?

Fixing up a just-imported wiki is mainly a matter of renaming many
articles (most of the multi-word titles are going to have their
capitalization wrong), and the links pointing to them. Pages that belong
to different namespaces (Talk:) must be moved as well. Also, I'm not sure
of what happens to user accounts and pages. At worst they will disappear
:-) Ah, and if the links table is not automatically rebuilt, all pages
must be re-saved at least once to rebuild it.

I'm not sure if this is a good exercise on Italian language, but any help
is welcomed! Of course, the actual transition date is in our kind
developers' hands. I hope i'm not bothering them too much :-)

Ciao,
Alfio


from_name: Angela

subject: [WikiEN-l] Question

body:
Toby Bartels wrote:
>As for Wikipedia bans and block policy, however, I'm
>not sure that's resolved. Was RickK right to block
>Adrian?  Was Adrian a vandal?  I don't think so. But
>I'm not sure what the blocks justification was, since
>it's not in the log.

It is in the log. See [[Wikipedia:Block_log]], not
[[Special:Ipblocklist]]):

04:01, 7 Dec 2003 RickK blocked "203.51.60.29"
(repeated creaton of nonsense articles)
05:00, 7 Dec 2003 Angela unblocked "203.51.60.29" (Was
blocked without warning. See
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-December/008819.html)

I'm not saying it was necessarily wrong to block this
user, but it was certainly wrong to block him without
warning. He had only made three edits to an existing
article and created a new one twice. This isn't a huge
number of edits and they were all easily reversible,
so there was no emergency need to block him in my
opinion.

Angela.

________________________________________________________________________
BT Yahoo! Broadband - Save ?80 when you order online today. Hurry! Offer ends 21st December 2003. The way the internet was meant to be. http://uk.rd.yahoo.com/evt=21064/*http://btyahoo.yahoo.co.uk


from_name: Erik Zachte

subject: [Wikitech-l] TomeRaider files

body:
TomeRaider files used to be at
http://download.wikimedia.org/tomeraider/current/

Have they been moved?

Erik Zachte

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body:
Geoff Burling wrote:

>On Mon, 8 Dec 2003, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
>
>In light of the Cunctator's keen observations....
>
>I wonder what people mean when they say "most scientists believe X".
>This has a bearing on how we write about non-mainstream ideas such as
>alternative medicine.
>
It's a fallacious argument.  It ascribes omniscience to all scientists.
 "Most scientists" keep busy in their own little corner of science, and
have no background or experience in controversial topics unrelated to
their little corner.

>>1. What is a majority view?
>>
>>If indeed 51% of scientists (or doctors holding a Western
>>M.D. degree, or moviegoers, or Linux enthusiasts) BELIEVE A CERTAIN
>>THING, then the article should simply report that the indicated
>>proportion of the group in question adheres to that POV.
>>
>>If the majority is larger than 51% - say, 95% - we can
>>safely call that an "overwhelming majority". If it is 99.8%
>>we can say "virtually all". (Note that some published
>>writers might considered 2/3 to be "overwhelming", but that
>>is just THEIR POV! If as many as 1/3 of a group disagree
>>with something, our readers are better served by telling
>>them that 2/3 of the group believe it, and that 1/3 of the group
>>disbelieve it).
>>
It's still playing a numbers game.

>Despite my own populist & leftist sympathies, I can't help but be
>suspicious of any argument that attempts to determine what is "truth"
>by a vote. And I can't help finding any such statement worthless.
>
And dangerous.

>First, let me define one point here. When talking about any issue, I
>think it is fair to say that the viewpoints expressed will come from
>one of three groups:
>
>*Professionals -- by this I mean scientists, scholars, medical doctors,
>priests or pastors, accountants, &c. These are the people whose lives
>revolve around researching, formulating & expressing opinions on issues.
>
So does their income.

>*Informed non-professionals, or amateurs -- these are the folks who
>don't make their living from researching, formulating & expressing opinions,
>but do so on their own dime. The professional groups sneer at their
>opinions, & condescendingly call them "amateurs" -- forgetting that the
>original meaning of the word comes from describing people whose work is
>a labor of love. Much like all of us on Wikipedia.
>
>*Uninformed non-professionals. These are the people who aren't informed
>about a given issue, & tend to repeat what they hear without any significant
>understanding. This is the realm of Urban Legends, Superstition, Crackpot
>Theories, & similar ilk -- but it is also fair to say all of us in one
>topic or another fit into this group. Can we be sure that, at any given
>moment, we could defend our views on every conceivable topic? About
>Abortion? About the existence of God? Concerning Israel? Whether or not
>Democracy is the best form of government? If Tolstoy is a better author
>than Mickey Spillone?
>
There is no single process to distinguish original from crackpot
thinking.  A fair review of an original thought requires a serious
amount of thought for which few of us have the time.  If the particular
thought threatens long held prejudices, we are also unwilling to spend
that time when we already have an easy response.

>I think it is fair to say that ideas from this last group face the
>hardest time from those of us who care about Wikipedia: unless it can
>be shown that one of these ideas are held belongs to a significant group
>or a tradition, it will get removed rather promptly from Wikipedia.
>The consensus is that the ramblings of Joe Blow you might meet in a bar
>is not as interesting as the opinions of Ayn Rand, Noam Chomsky or
>Plato (to pick at random some examples), & labelled "quackery" & gets
>voted off Wikipedia.
>
Rand's supporters often tend to label Chomsky's ideas as quackery, and
vice versa.

>Too often on Wikipedia, it appears that we are looking for some kind
>of ex cathedra decision of what the professionals think about
>an issue. We want the professionals to say, "This is truth." Except
>for those who want to be able to say, "The professionals think A, but
>they are wrong & it is clear that the truth is B." But as I reflect
>on how knowledge is achieved, this kind of paradigm rarely occurs.
>
Even more relevant to this point is the way some Wikipedians anticipate
that the mailing list or Jimbo will issue the definitive edict that will
prove them right.  This is also reflected in the wider society, when
proponents of "democracy" are apathetic to such a simple task as voting.

>Explaining the views of the professionals on an issue, I feel sometimes
>that I am confronting a situation best explained by the decisions of
>the US Supreme Court: sometimes they issue decisions unanimously, in
>a single opinion; sometimes they make a decision where the vote is
>8-1, 7-1, 6-3, or 5-4, & there are two opinions; sometimes the vote is
>equally split, but where almost every justice issues her or his own
>opinon about the case argued before them. In the latter case, for
>Wikipedia to report that "55% percent of the professionals believe A"
>grossly misrepresents the various POVs.
>
There's also a need to keep in mind the story of "Twelve Angry Men".

>If you follow me so far, then you see how vital it is to explain the
>reasons why there are different POVs in an article. Sometimes this
>divergence is due to yet insufficient evidence; other times it is due
>to other reasons (e.g., professional A vehemently argues for his POV
>because that is the same POV of his employer; professional B argues
>for her POV because it is the opposite of the POV of her ruling party).
>
And in certain subjects both claim to be objective scientists.

>So what I try to do is state what is the _consensus_ concerning a
>given issue. The scientific consensus is that the Earth is round --
>a fact even the Flat-Earthers will admit. The consensus of historians
>is that Columbus made a voyage in 1492, & reported to the rest of Europe
>the existence of a continent, which was later known to be the Americas,
>& was widely known -- a fact even those who claim that the Vikings, the
>Phoenicians, the Iberians or the aboriginal hunter-gathers who crossed
>over the Bering Sea into those continents some 50 millenia before will
>admit.
>
Before a consensus can be expressed we need to know what the subject is.
 The proponents need room to define what they're talking about before
the opponents jump in to discredit it.

>Every argument needs a starting point; no topic should be treated as a
>game of Calvinball where the score is 23 to Q.
>
What's Calviball?

>My POV on this matter is that we need to report the arguments of the
>various POVs concerning an issue in understandable detail, rather than
>count noses & report the result.
>
And to do it in an orderly manner.

>And further, we should not restrict
>ourselves to the consensus of the professionals; too often their consensus
>is based on non-rational opinions. To quote the example of Lysenko on
>the study of genetics in the Soviet Union is an extreme case, & too
>many people are likely to say that it would never happen in a free
>environment; more apt, & suggestive of just how wrong the consensus
>on an issue could be is the case of deciphering Mayan inscriptions.
>Due to the fiercely-held opinion of the pre-eminent (yet very learned)
>Mayanologist Sir Eric Thompson, the understanding of these Native American
>inscriptions made no headway until _after_ his death! Progess on this
>problem could only be made outside of the professional establishment,
>in this case, amongst scholars & professionals in the Soviet Union
>who were isolated from the mainstream.
>
Or there was the complex of games that led to an unconscionable in the
publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls, based partly on turf wars or even
fears that without "proper" professional guidance the public might use
the information to question established interpretations of the Bible.

>I remember a saying from the early 20th-century physicists: "The only
>way to get a new theory accepted is to wait for all of the opponents
>to die."
>
It was Max Planck:

>     An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by
>     gradually winning over and converting its opponents.... Its
>     opponents gradually die out and the growing generation is familiar
>     with the idea from the beginning.

>This is not to say that we must give more weight to evey anti-establishment
>viewpoint than to that held by the establishment. Frankly, I feel it is
>important to set forth what might be called the "convential thinking"
>about a subject, just because it what any reader of Wikipedia expects
>to find.
>
Certainly, but it needs to be made clear that it is conventional
thinking, and that there are often other ways of lookin at the matter.

>Right now I'm attempting to set forth the consensus of Biblical
>scholars on the actual dates when the various books of the New Testament
>were written; & yet I feel the articles are not as strong as they could
>be because I don't know (& frankly don't care to do the research to find
>out) what the traditional views on authorship are. I don't feel it is
>useful to have an article about the _Epistle to the Hebrews_ that states
>that many religious writers since Origen doubted St Paul ever wrote that
>work, without explaining why millions of Christians believed for centuries
>that he had; it unfairly makes anyone who argues the later viewpoint
>look stupid & ill-informed.
>
An old established lie is tougher to dispel than a recent one.  Few
contemporary Christians have ever heard of Origen, and you need to begin
by disambiguating him from "origin"  Establishing the cannon was a
political process.  I don't see anything unfair about making centuries
full of theologians appear ill-informed when in fact they were.  It goes
with the territory of being a professional.  At the same time I can
appreciate the position that Doestoevsky's grand inquisitor finds
himself in when, having realized that he is faced with a reincarnated
Christ, he concludes that he must do the same as was done to the
original Christ.

>I could continue on, but I've already spent a couple hours writing the
>text above. Is this a worthwhile extension of the concept of NPOV to
>be worth discussion, or is this merely my peculiar historigraphic
>approach to the subject, without much interest to anyone except myself?
>
>Response on or off the list is welcome.
>
If we're going to elevate the discussion it has to be on-line. :-)
Ec

>


from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [WikiEN-l] Question

body:
RickK wrote:

>I think the block log only lasts for 24 hours, right?  At any rate,
>I did explain my justification when I blocked him, as is required.

It's still listed in [[Wikipedia:Block log]], which goes back to Nov 24.
(Thanks to Angela for reminding me about that page -- I plum forgot!)

And I don't mean to imply that you kept your reason for blocking secret;
I just didn't remember exactly what had been said in that block
(assuming that Adrian even quoted it in his original post).

All things considered, it does seem to have been an unjustified block,
in the absence of a message on the user talk page (or similar contact).
No need to beat you up over it, however.

-- Toby


subject: [Wikitech-l] CVS notification mailing list

body:
New read-only mailing list which sends out notifications of commits to
the CVS repository:

http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-cvs

It's debatable whether it would be better to send these straight to
wikitech-l. That might be annoying.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
The Cunctator wrote:

>I agree--I'm a supporter of the use of the excellent name "Nupedia" to
>describe the project we're presently calling Wikipedia 1.0.

The name "Sifterpedia" has also come up in this vein,
to avoid any historical confusion with the earlier Nupedia.
But either would work fine IMO.

-- Toby


references:
<87d6b03w7q.fsf@unicorn.bad-people-of-the-future.san-francisco.ca.us>
	<1070884124.2040.3435.camel@barrayar.local.thibault.org>
	<20031209002535.GN19356@math-rs-n03.ucr.edu>
	<36F9761C-29E3-11D8-8512-000A95DAA284@pobox.com>
	<20031209214422.GA3010@math-rs-n03.ucr.edu>
	<87ad61k4tm.fsf@unicorn.bad-people-of-the-future.san-francisco.ca.us>

body:
Evan Prodromou wrote in part:

>You don't need to view diffs to modify the source files.

Not at all.  Losing the diffs just means losing one nice feature
of the Recentchanges avaiable with most wiki software (including MediaWiki).

>Diffing images is kinda hard. For vector image formats it's a little
>easier, and for stuff like SVG it might actually be practical, but for
>most purposes it's _extremely_ difficult to automatically detect the
>"difference" between two images. I doubt it would be worth the effort.

I was hoping that for SVG it would be practical and even useful,
and if one is using SVG images, then maybe svgwiki already does this.
But for PNGs and JPEGs?  Ha!  No, not worth the effort.

-- Toby


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Is MNH someone else?

body:
Bjorn Lindqvist wrote:

>I would like to unecho this request. Unless the following questions
>can be adequately answered:

>1. Does it make any difference at all, if he had an account before MNH
>or not?

>2. Exactly what has MNH done, that has a large majority of the
>involved people thinking he should be banned?

>3. Even if you think that he deserves to be banned, why does he
>deserve to be "outed"?

If MNH is somebody that's already been banned before,
then that simplifies the question of banning!
(I was specifically reminded of RK's troubles with EoT,
who AIUI eventually turned out to be banned user 142.)
Otherwise, there is not much point that I can see.

BTW, I don't know what's happened with MNH over the past day or so,
so this conversation may be completely out of date by now!

-- Toby