subject: [Foundation-l] Languages and education

body:
This is absolutely fascinating to me.  Just really fascinating.

I think this is the kind of knowledge we have to have, knowledge of
real conditions in real places, in order to be able to help
effectively.

--Jimbo

Anthere wrote:

> Hello,
>
> First of all, I wish a happy new year to all who may
> be concerned.
> This year, I spent Christmas and New Year Eve in an
> unusual way, since I was in the Sahara desert (south
> of Algeria) for 15 days, as an ecotourist.
> I had a real great time over there, which I will share
> with Wikipedia in trying to improve many articles
> related to the areas  I went to, as well as with many
> pictures.
>
> However, I wished to share a couple of additional
> things/thoughts with you. About languages and
> education.
>
> I spent a little while in Tamanrasset, and discussed
> with some of it inhabitants, men and women. It is a
> strange situation, as it cannot be said that people
> are "poor", in the sense that most have the basics
> which allow them to live quite happily. The city is
> growing pretty fast (50 000 unhabitants), but is not
> sustainable for its water, nor for its food, nor for
> most of its industrial goods. Most of it is imported
> from the north of Algeria. The city is essentially
> living from camels, goats and sheep... and tourism in
> the surroundings of course. While the city is shared
> by many ethnies and different nationalities, most
> people over there are muslims. They speak a mixture of
> Tuareg language (tamazight or tamahaq) and some local
> arab which can hardly be recognised by those of us
> French who learned classical arab in France.
>
> One thing surprised me greatly. I thought the majority
> of Algerians could be said to speak French (since
> Algeria was previously a french colony). Well, I
> discovered over there that if all adults have notions
> of french language, many of them are very very far
> from fluent. I could speak to no kids under 15, even
> though I was told that all of them start learning
> french language at school from the age of 8 (?). So, I
> went for a little check and discovered that according
> to statistics, about 62% of Algerian speak decent
> french (enough for communication), and this number
> have been increasing in the past years.
>
> Now, Tamanrasset is in the most southern part of
> Algeria, so rather far away from France, though there
> is still obviously strong French influence. People I
> met talked with one another in Tamahaq, talk with
> other Tamanrasset people in a southern arab, speak
> with us in french, and receive education in classical
> arab. Guys ! these people manage roughly 4 languages !
>
> When France left Algeria, the whole educational system
> was in french language; the algerian government tried
> to switch entirely to classical arab over the years,
> even though there were at that time not enough
> teachers knowledgeable in classical arab, even though
> most Algerians do not manage well classical arab, even
> though there were no educational books in classical
> arab to teach children. Over the years, the government
> has tried to impose more and more classical arab, to
> the dismay of all those speaking berberes languages
> (such as the Touareg). From my friends in Algers, I
> know that university education is still partly in
> french, in particular in scientific and technical
> domains. But from what I understood, the algerian
> educational system is in great part a failure, as it
> is taught in a language that many Algerian do not
> manage well, as it results in diplomas of little value
> on european or american market, and as many students
> end up secondary school with such a poor knowledge in
> french that they are unable to come to french
> universities or even to follow well algerian
> university classes. Possibly, knowing more of english
> language might help but it seems currently limited.
>
>
> Two things raised my attention greatly.
> First, a university is currently being built in
> Tamanrasset. For now, students usually go to Algers to
> follow upper studies (about 1500 km away, which
> evidently implies only quite wealthy people can afford
> this).
>
>
> Second, as we crossed villages in the mountains, we
> were surrounded by kids, from 6 to 12. Only the eldest
> could really communicate a bit with us. We had some
> pens for them, which we distributed. But it was not
> really what they were looking for. The youngest wanted
> paper mostly. But all asked for books. Only books. Not
> food, nor money, nor sweets, only books. And they
> wanted books in french language. I told them "but you
> can't read french". But this is what they wanted
> nevertheless.
>
> When I asked to my favorite guide, he told me "they
> learn french at school, a little bit, but they have no
> opportunity to practice. Except for a few tourists,
> who could they talk french to ? At least, with books,
> they can learn a bit".
>
> I suspect the school probably only has a couple of
> worn out ones. Possibly only a couple of worn out
> books in arab as well.
> I dig a couple of my son books to give them. Not much.
> If I had guessed, it would have been easy to bring a
> few more.
>
> As I understood, analphabetism is rising over there,
> especially among girls. If the kids do not speak
> french, their access to university is limited. And the
> main economical resource of the area is tourism, most
> tourists being french speaking.
>
> Computers in these villages is out of question. They
> have electricity but I doubt a computer could survive
> long in such an environment (I spent two hours in the
> local gendarmerie, they have desks, paper, pens and
> sand). However, most of our youngest guides had an
> email adress and went on the net thanks to cybercafes
> in Tamanrasset.
>
> There might be things to do no ?
>
>
>
>
>
>
> __________________________________
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>

--
"La n?fle est un fruit." - first words of 50,000th article on fr.wikipedia.org


list: wikimedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales

subject: [Foundation-l] Languages and education


list: wikien-l

from_name: actionforum at comcast.net

subject: [WikiEN-l] Evercat v. Libertas

body:
-------------- Original message --------------
> actionforum at comcast.net wrote:
> > Shall we say one abuse per month per sysop, use it strategically?
>
> Perhaps you could show me where that came from in "absent a pattern of
> abuse" ?

That comes from making excuses such as "being human" and he was "baited", which look quite reusable, since sysops will still be human in the future and may be "baited" again.  However, it wasn't just your statement, but the general sense of  "deference" to other sysops.  The sysop community should act as checks and balances upon each other, quickly correcting questionable actions.  Their job is protect the community, not just from disruptive behavior below, but from abuses by each other.
                                               -- Silverback


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Anthere

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: A Solution to Larry Sanger's Criticisms - Project
 Has Been Around For A While

body:
Pas d'inqui?tude Traroth. NSK est un gentil SDF couchant sous les ponts.

Ant

Traroth a ?crit:
> Does your proposition mean that only experts will be
> authorized to contribute ? That's a major change in
> the Wikipedia spirit, and I desagree totally.
>
>
> Traroth
>
> --- NSK <nsk2 at wikinerds.org> a ?crit :
>
>
>>But it's not enough: You should also limit somehow
>>the anon contributions and
>>employ maintainers for each article (this is what I
>>do on most of my
>>projects). The names (full names) of the authors and
>>maintainers must be
>>visible in the article, together with 1 or 2-line
>>short bios demonstrating
>>their expertise (degrees or work experience), as
>>well as a References section
>>(which should be long - very long).
>>
>>See my policy here:
>>
>>
>
> http://nerdypc.wikinerds.org/index.php/Help:Editing_process
>
>>--
>>NSK
>>The Wikinerds Community Federation of Science Wikis
>>Owner of the Wikinerds Portal
>>http://portal.wikinerds.org
>>Owner of the NerdyPC IT Wiki http://www.nerdypc.org
>>_______________________________________________
>>Wikipedia-l mailing list
>>Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>>
>
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
>>
>
>
>
> 				D?couvrez le nouveau Yahoo! Mail : 250 Mo d'espace de stockage pour vos mails !
> Cr?ez votre Yahoo! Mail sur http://fr.mail.yahoo.com/


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: stats Webalizer

body:
On Jan 5, 2005, at 5:44 AM, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
> I strongly support the idea of a machine for handling logs,
> statistics, and research into those things.  I think we could learn a
> lot about how the community really functions by studying logs, and the
> traffic stats are important for us to understand and project our
> growth patterns.
>
> My question to wikitech-l: what sort of machine should we use for
> this?  I am thinking that a fully loaded dual Opteron is overkill, but
> a typical apache is too small?

It doesn't have to run super fast, it just has to run independently and
therefore not kill our other, vital machines.

The problem we had before was that these things were run on Zwinger,
and it ate up all the memory, scarfed up all the disk bandwidth, and
went into swap for hours on end, sending everything into a downward
spiral of doom.

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

from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Foundation-l] Forking the Wiki

body:
--- Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:

> It could include victims of the Holocaust, Viet Nam War dead, Civil War
> dead, etc.

Or the recent tsunami disaster. Or just all your past ancestors. Wikipeople
would have room for all dead persons.

-- mav

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - Find what you need with new enhanced search.
http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250


subject: [Foundation-l] Forking the Wiki


from_name: Scott Nelson

subject: [Foundation-l] Forking the Wiki

body:
Can this be taken off list?

This conversation long since lost any relevance to the wiki project.

On Jan 5.2005, at 05:52, Traroth wrote:

> Sorry, but you totally misunderstood me. What I wanted
> to say is that I'm curious to see the reactions of
> americans. They seem very impatient to express all
> their pain about the evil world, and all what they had
> to suffer in Viet-Nam war (50 000 americans killed...
> and 3 000 000 Vietnamese) and Korea war and Gulf war,
> and so on. What could be their reaction if we let all
> human beings express the pain of war, including in all
> wars where americans behaved like butchers, like Irak,
> Afghanistan, Grenada, Somalia, Korea, Viet-Nam,
> Panama, Chile (not-exhaustive list. Oh no ! really
> not...). Hold in mind that a lot of contributors are
> americans...
>
> Traroth
>
>  --- Jens Ropers <ropers at ropersonline.com> a ?crit :
>
>> 1. I think Fallujah's survivors of siege warfare and
>> radioactive and
>> chemical weapons have more pressing needs right now
>> than logging on to
>> the Internet and editing some website.
>> 2. Do you think that Muslim residents of a
>> hitherto-branded "axis of
>> evil"-country would have better luck than
>> Christian-dominated US allies
>> in convincing the US American "Moral" Majority that
>> "Thou shalt not
>> kill" really DOES mean just that? Me neither.
>> 3. Adding to that, well, what do you think -- if a
>> foreign army lays
>> siege to, and napalm-bombs someone's hometown, would
>> it be unreasonable
>> to assume that the person so affected might rather
>> be WAY past
>> contributing friendly edits to a joint encyclopedia?
>> (Which is why I
>> reckon that the US has guaranteed itself one or two
>> sequels, al Qaeda
>> branded or otherwise. But then, that's just my hunch
>> and I could be
>> wrong.)
>> 4. Leaving aside the unlikeliness of seeing a lot of
>> Fallujan
>> contributors anytime soon, if you've given up on the
>> US as such and
>> only expect mere sordid entertainment -- yes, a
>> hypothetical advent of
>> Fallujan contributors would provide copious amounts
>> of that. Let the
>> games begin, but don't forget to duck and cover!
>>
>> -- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]]
>>      www.ropersonline.com
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> D?couvrez le nouveau Yahoo! Mail : 250 Mo d'espace de stockage pour
> vos mails !
> Cr?ez votre Yahoo! Mail sur http://fr.mail.yahoo.com/
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>
--
Skot Nelson
skot at penguinstorm.com


subject: [Foundation-l] Forking the Wiki


from_name: Domas Mituzas

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: French squids

body:
> That will be good enough for some testing. Hopefully squids can be configured to understand that http://fr.paris.wikipedia.org/ is indeed http://fr.wikipedia.org/
French squids can be configured to use Florida squids as round-robin parents.

Anyway, I might volunteer for setting whole squid thing up. We're dealing with recursive squid topologies here and there, so it would be quite interesting to do that for France as well.

Domas


subject: [Foundation-l] Forking the Wiki

body:
On Jan 5.2005, at 08:24, Traroth wrote:

> Just let me guess : you're american...

Not sure this is relevant, or that it has any place on the list
either....I mean - the point is you've long since stopped discussing
anything wiki related.

But no, I am not American. And you should be more careful about making
assumptions and jumping to conclusions.

Let me guess - you're French?

>  --- Scott Nelson <scott at penguinstorm.com> a ?crit :
>> Can this be taken off list?
>>
>> This conversation long since lost any relevance to
>> the wiki project.
--
Skot Nelson
skot at penguinstorm.com


subject: [Foundation-l] Forking the Wiki


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [Foundation-l] Forking the Wiki

body:
That should draw my relatives (and the rest of the Germans from Russia) into
the project. Sometimes that seems to be the only thing they are interested
in, other than reading the Bible and the Farm Journal.

There is a bunch of people who enthusiatically catalog ancesters.

Fred

> From: Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com>
> Reply-To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l at wikimedia.org>
> Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2005 07:47:15 -0800 (PST)
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l at wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Forking the Wiki
>
> --- Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
>
>> It could include victims of the Holocaust, Viet Nam War dead, Civil War
>> dead, etc.
>
> Or the recent tsunami disaster. Or just all your past ancestors. Wikipeople
> would have room for all dead persons.
>
> -- mav
>
>
>
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Mail - Find what you need with new enhanced search.
> http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l


subject: [Foundation-l] Forking the Wiki


from_name: Dr Zen

subject: [WikiEN-l] Evercat v. Libertas

body:
Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2005 09:48:13 -0800 (PST)
From: Robert Dodier <robert_dodier at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Evercat v. Libertas
To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
Message-ID: <20050104174813.47923.qmail at web41302.mail.yahoo.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

Robert Dodier wrote in reply to Fred Bauder:
>> Please don't. Just avoid being manipulated and provoked in the
>> future. Experience is a bit too good of a teacher, if this sort
>> of comedy of errors is to knock you out of the game completely.

>Agreed 100% -- no need for Evercat to resign over this incident.

>I'm puzzled that someone suggests resignation is appropriate,
and that Evercat apparently agrees. This incident is simply
being blown way out of proportion.

>Fwiw,
>Robert Dodier
>(Wile E. Heresiarch)

I think you're doing the right thing, Evercat. You acknowledged that
you misused your powers and that you should be relieved of them and
you plan to have the community judge and restore them if they think
it's fit.

I think that other editors, even ones such as Libertas, must have the
assurance that admins will not just block them on a whim.

Dr Zen


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: French squids

body:
Ah, more thoughts on how topology should be set up.

French squids would have such cache-peer configuration:

Cache_peer frsquid1 sibling 80 3130 proxy-only no-digest no-netdb-exchange
Cache_peer frsquid2 sibling 80 3130 proxy-only no-digest no-netdb-exchange
...
Cache_peer usasquid1 parent 80 3130 round-robin no-query no-digest no-netdb-exchange
Cache_peer usasquid2 parent 80 3130 round-robin no-query no-digest no-netdb-exchange
Cache_peer usasquid3 parent 80 3130 round-robin no-query no-digest no-netdb-exchange
...

The trouble with .paris. (or .tier2. or whatever) subdomain is that it would require either adding rewrite rules on Wikimedia servers, or it will require external rewrite agent on squids. I guess rewriting on Apache is much easier at this point.

Moreover. Florida setup should have 'Purge' service for recursive purges from all official squid caches (there might be more of those in future). Volunteers for that? :) Ok ;-)

And sure, object expiry timeouts could be reviewed here.

Domas


subject: [Foundation-l] Forking the Wiki

body:
On Jan 5.2005, at 08:57, Traroth wrote:

> Can you imagine
> Palestinians and Israelis, Iraqis and Americans
> writing about dead people, killed by the "other one" ?
> I can't...

Your discussion had long since left the original point, which had SOME
validity, and had degraded into a conversation about the specifics of
various military weapons and stores...

So either get it back on point, or take it off list. I could dispute
your original point (can you say: Editor!) but don't really feel like
it. I tend to see the world as full of greys, and this is an extremely
grey area.

Perhaps, for my benefit and that of the list, you could explain how
this has any relevance to the Wikimedia Foundation:

>> Just out of curiosity, when was Fallujah nuked and sprayed down? I
>> must have missed it, between eating my double-Supersized Big Mac and
>> filling up my 2-mile-per-gallon SUV.
>
> There's a difference between the terms "radioactive weapons" and
> "nuclear weapons".

Unless the foundation is considering getting into the radioactive
and/or nuclear weapon business? The French certainly do very well with
it, and you could probably fund the entire Foundation with a couple of
sales for quite some time.
--
Scott Nelson

Living in a nuclear free zone.


subject: [Foundation-l] Forking the Wiki


list: wiktionary-l

from_name: Pochung Chen

subject: [Wiktionary-l] Request for Amis Wiktionary

body:
Dear All,

  We would like to open a Wiktionary for the Amis language. Amis is an
Austronesian language used by the Amis -- one of the Austronesian
people in Taiwan. The Amis account for about one third of Taiwan's
indigenous population (i.e. 130 thousand), however, many of the younger
generation do not speak the language and till now there is still no
exact ststistic report of the number of real speakers.

  There are two prevailing writing systems of this language: the
Presbyterian Church system and the International Phonetic Symbol
system, the later is used only within the academic circle. We would
like to edit a Wiktionary which basically employs the Presbyterian
Church system but also notes the IPS so that readers can also know the
exact pronounciations.

  At this moment there are at least three people who are willing to
commit to this project. They are Nakao Eki, Afah Lisin, and Tai-ni
Tsou. The former two are native speakers and the later two as
ethnographers are also familiar with the academic Amis writing system.
Pektiong Tan (zh-min-nan:pektiong) will help those people to get
familiar with the wikipedia system.

  We would prefer to set the default interface language to be Mandarin
with traditional character used in Taiwan (zh-tw) since most of the
potential user of this wiktionary can read Mandarin with traditional
character.

  Proposed domain name:
  http://amis.wiktionary.org/

  Language tag for Amis:
  ISO 639-2: N.A.
  ISO 639-3 (Draft): Ami
  SIL: ALV
  RFC-3066: i-ami

  Sincerely,
  Nakao Eki,
  Afah Lisin,
  Tai-ni Tsou,
  Pektiong Tan

Some info about Taiwanese aborigine:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_aborigine


from_name: Muke Tever

subject: [Wiktionary-l] Greek pages disappearing

body:
Pages with Greek titles, that used to exist and are still listed in
[[special:allpages]], are coming up empty on load, and the wiki is marking
links to them as red.

I have seen this happening on la: and more intermittently on en: --
is this happening anywhere else, and is there a cause for it?

	*Muke!
--
website:     http://frath.net/
LiveJournal: http://kohath.livejournal.com/
deviantArt:  http://kohath.deviantart.com/

FrathWiki, a conlang and conculture wiki:
http://wiki.frath.net/


from_name: Joseph Reagle

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] FYI: A Case of Mutual Aid: Wikipedia, Politeness,
	and Perspective Taking

body:
On Tuesday 04 January 2005 17:22, Christopher Mahan wrote:
> Itself a subset of wikilove.

Ah, thanks!


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Stan's evolutionary concept

body:
On Wednesday 05 January 2005 08:53, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
> J.F. de Wolff wrote:
> > Articles develop Darwinistically. They emerge from primordial soup
> > (substubs, anon newbie edits) and evolve as more people add material.
>
> The essence of my talk in Berlin was to argue against this view of how
> wikipedia operates.  Obviously, there is something to it if we
> streeeeeeetch the "Darwinistic" metaphor to the breaking point.  But
> in the main, I think this analogy is one which misleads us into
> incorrect conclusions.

As an aside, and being a non-expert, that sounds right to me -- are the
slides from your talk available? To actually claim something as Darwinian
one should have variation, reproduction, and selection. In the Wikipedia
context there is variation and selection but I do not think one sees a
continuance of character in the articles themselves. To really think about
this in a Darwinian context one would need to ask what is the object of
selection and reproduction? It clearly is not the articles themselves, what
would more likely be the culture of Wikipedia itself as reproduced in the
socialization of newcomers. So the Wikipedia culture of friendliness,
populism, persistence, etc. is selected for given the collaborative
character of this work, its historical momentum, and reproduced via
socialization. A potential perspective on the question of "expertise" is
then why experts are not selected in this environment? A simple reason is
that they are used to competing and surviving in a different environment
with similar goals (knowledge production) but otherwise quite different:
simply, they lack patience -- or simply do not have the time -- when the
authority granted to them in that other environment does not translate to
this one.


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] A Solution to Larry Sanger's Criticisms - Project
	Has Been Around For A While

body:
Shaun MacPherson wrote:

> --- Stirling Newberry
>
>
>>References and a reference engine would be a
>>tremendous help, both for
>>readability, and for writing. I would like to
>>suggest a project:
>>wikicite which would list all available books and
>>create a simple tag
>>mechanism for citing them.
>>
>>Thus something like {{wikicite:Wealth of Nations}}
>>would expand out to
>>a canonical Smith, Adam etc.
>>
>>
>Wikicite is a very good idea.  Especially so since I
>believe the time will come when people will disagree
>what constitutes a good reference, people disagreeing
>on the reference formatting, trouuble in keeping track
>of the different editions and page numbers for a
>quotation, or different printing runs for books.
>
The fundamental idea is solid, but there should be no need for a
separate project.  It is really just a matter of good research
practice.  Defining a "good" reference is not always a productive
exercise.  We can end up with NPOV disputes and edit wars just as much
over the validity of references as over content.

>As well, if we are citing a public domain work there
>is no reason why the cite cannot bring us to the
>actual document and quotation on wikisource or
>wikicommons.
>
Ideally yes, but we have a long way to go before we get there.
Importing material from Project Gutenberg may be easy enough, but what
needs to be done is a mass digitization and OCR proofreading of a huge
body of works.  That's a _lot_ of tedious work.  After a little more the
year Wikisource is still working out a lot of its fundamental
procedures, but what you propose is certainly consistent with the
long-term vision that I have had of Wikisource since the day it started.

>>Getting journal articles would be next, and harder,
>>but could be worked
>>out over time. This would make entering sources and
>>bibliography easy,
>>standardised, and current. It would also keep the
>>burden of generating
>>citation lists down, and would be a generally useful
>>resource everywhere.
>>
At the risk of stating the obvious, journal articles are shorter than
books.  One Wikisource contributor has recently begun work on a 1917
National Geographic issue.  That should be an opportunity for getting
some of the bugs out of that approach, and developping standards for the
way we enter journal articles.  Some journal articles may be more
important than others to include. but the simple fact that they are each
individually shorter may be an encouragement.

>Wikicite might be able to keep track of all things
>published.  It would also be useful to keep track of
>books and their printing date to know when things
>enter the public domain to know when to put them on
>Wikisource/Wikicommons.
>
There is already a considerable overlap between Wikisource and Wikipedia
over the matter of bibliography.  For now I see it as fair game for
both.  I believe that Wikisource should be carrying the fundamental
information that helps in determining the copyright status, but that's
only going to be there if people put it there.  Whatever one might think
of long copyright terms it is still much easier to calculate expiry
based on the year of death than on the year of publication.  It's going
to be another 40 years before that becomes the norm for US
publications..  For them we still need to consider such issues as
copyright renewals.  A 1923 US publication whose copyright was not
properly renewed in 1951 is now in the public domain.  There is no need
for a new wedge project somewhere between Wikisource and Wikipedia.

Ec


from_name: Stirling Newberry

body:
On Jan 5, 2005, at 6:40 AM, Ronald Chmara wrote:
>
> My older brother despises some wikipedia sections that are written in
> his field (cultural anthropology, with specific emphasis on the paiute
> people), as he is an expert in that specific area, and finds the
> articles "shallow", "without depth and nuance", and "lacking in a
> deeper explanation". They are written by "non-experts", and thus make
> "factual and comprehension errors".
>
> The articles are also written for *use* by non-experts.... So, I asked
> my brother how many pages it would take to correct the errors, and he
> pointed me towards his latest body of work, over 500 pages, and that's
> just the historical *sites* of the paiute.
>
> So, what is wikipedia? Is it *meant* to be the equivalent of an
> encyclopedia, with terse explanations? Is it meant to be a vast
> repository of all that is known, without omissions of fact, or
> omissions of a given POV?
>
> -Bop
>

The solution is to get your brother to contribute. And one of my
activities is to encourage academics to contribute to wikipedia.

The emergent nature of wiki text is that it is very sensitive to
initial conditions, a given article will converge on an acceptable
form, very much based on the quality of the large inputs of expertise.
This is what is wonderful about Wikipedia - it is an active audience
for writing, constantly checking errors, pushing for readability,
asking questions, making demands. The more experts we can get to
contribute the large initial drafts of articles, the more that process
can go to work to turn them into linked and smoothly written material.
Given a good starting point the process produces higher and higher
quality over time, in no small part because the bar is upped
constantly, and the wiki community is there to make the changes needed.


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: A Solution to Larry Sanger's Criticisms -
	Project Has Been Around For A While

body:
On Jan 5, 2005, at 3:23 AM, Josh Gerdes wrote:

> Shaun McPherson wrote:
>>  --- Stirling Newberry
>>>
>> Wikicite might be able to keep track of all things
>> published.  It would also be useful to keep track of
>> books and their printing date to know when things
>> enter the public domain to know when to put them on
>> Wikisource/Wikicommons.
>> I don't mean to steal your idea, I just agree with it
>> a lot and added some suggestions :).  If you are
>> around you can mention Wikicite at
>> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:
>> WikiProject_Fact_and_Reference_Check)
>> the talk page here, I think many people would be
>> interested.
>> Bye,
>> ShaunMacPherson

Steal? Not at all, you are just taking it and running, which is the joy
of being in a community.

I will have something written up by later today.


from_name: Andre Engels

body:
This seems to be exactly the problem Larry Sanger talks about - We
don't care whether somebody is a renowned expert on a subject or has
just read a few lines related to a subject in the past. If they can
write it down, we consider them equal.

A second fallacy I see in this message is that it equates factual
correctness with credibility. There's more than just factual
correctness to make a good article, there is also balance. Getting
experts is not what helps here (although it helps a bit, because they
are supposed to know about the subject, and thus notice missing
portions), but we should recognize the problem as being one.

Andre Engels

> Sounds like an interesting idea, but why do we need
> 'experts' for?  Anyone can fact and reference check,
> and after facts have been verified with multiple
> sources they are then as 'credible' as credible can be
> in my thinking.
>
> It is time to apply the Wiki philosophy to not just
> providing the content, but to verifying it with
> reference checks from multiple sources.  It worked for
> content, I am sure it will work for verification if
> the community are given the tools (tools such as
> intelligent foot/end notes, autonumbering of
> citations, etc.).


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Old Norse

body:
Olve Utne wrote:

> Hello Vegard, Mark, etc.,
>
> An Old Norse project sounds fine with me -- either as a Wikipedia or
> as a Wiktionary. I am reasonably competent in Old Norse and can
> provide a bit of help along the way -- although I cannot promise to
> spend a lot of time on it, since there are so many other things I need
> to tend to also (including, first and foremost, the Nynorsk Wikipedia
> and the English one).
>
If you are interested in setting up content in Wiktionary, I am happy to
help you set this up. There are several strategies, you can be part of a
wiktionary in another language like any of the other Scandinavian
languages or you can set up as an independent wiktionary. When you set
up like part of another language, the Italian wiktionary is a model to
follow, it is really great to see the large body of words in Napolitan
(moving towards a 1000 words).

When you start to add words consider that in a wiktionary you would like
to have both writing systems; we have these for several languages
already. Chinese and Japanese are best developped on the cooperating
wiktionaries. This would make the content much more usefull. Regarding
different spellings you could either only select the preferred spelling
(and perhaps note the alternate spellings as well) or you could have
seperate entries with these spellings.

The wikimedia projects being ISO-639 oriented, a wikipedia project would
indeed be with an existing code for old Norse. However, in the 639-3.4
version there are two codes for old Norse, non and onz are the TWO codes
that are mentioned. It would be best to find out what the difference is
between "Norse, old" and "old Norse". It may just be an inconsistency in
this document that is in a "review and comment" phase.

As to Mark, I leave him alone as long as he keeps a civil tongue. I do
not appreciate it when he attacks people like Yann. Mark can and does
make good observations and, as I mentioned before discussions about
languages are best kept on this list as it is important for how the
wikipedia projects develop. So, as far as I am concerned, I will not
attack Mark as long as he keeps a civil tongue, his accusing people of
slander is not civil nor helpfull to his cause.

Thanks,
    GerardM


body:
Shaun MacPherson wrote:

> --- NSK <nsk2 at wikinerds.org> wrote:
>
>
>>On Tuesday 04 January 2005 17:55, Traroth wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Does your proposition mean that only experts will be
>>>
>>>
>>>authorized to contribute ? That's a major change in
>>>
>>>
>>>the Wikipedia spirit, and I desagree totally.
>>>
>>>
>>Non-experts contribute text, provided they give
>>their full legal name and
>>contact details. Experts contribute text and check
>>the non-experts' contributions.
>>
>>
>Sounds like an interesting idea, but why do we need
>'experts' for?  Anyone can fact and reference check,
>and after facts have been verified with multiple
>sources they are then as 'credible' as credible can be
>in my thinking.
>
>It is time to apply the Wiki philosophy to not just
>providing the content, but to verifying it with
>reference checks from multiple sources.  It worked for
>content, I am sure it will work for verification if
>the community are given the tools (tools such as
>intelligent foot/end notes, autonumbering of
>citations, etc.)
>
>
Technical issues aside, this has to do with systemic bias, not so much
in Wikipedia as in the society in general.  It is natural that as
society members we would bring our biases with us into Wikipedia.  A
bias perhaps becomes systemic when no-one recognizes it as a bias; it
takes some dumb little kid to yell out that the emperor has no clothes.

Objective truth has nothing to do with who is saying it. Many of us who
would write here have been around academic "experts" in the past, and it
is inevitable that some would have carried away a little of the idolatry
that comes from that association.  One of the most frequent idolatrous
statements that I see is "IANAL".  One should have surmised that
something was wrong 400 years ago when Shakespeare commented, "First
we'll kill the lawyers."  Society abounds with stories of lawyers and
politicians (many of whom are lawyers) as thieves and scoundrels, but
incredibly we continue to defer to their expertise with that short
disclaimer.

Ec


body:
On Jan 5, 2005, at 8:53 AM, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:

> J.F. de Wolff wrote:
>> Articles develop Darwinistically. They emerge from primordial soup
>> (substubs, anon newbie edits) and evolve as more people add material.
>
> The essence of my talk in Berlin was to argue against this view of how
> wikipedia operates.  Obviously, there is something to it if we
> streeeeeeetch the "Darwinistic" metaphor to the breaking point.  But
> in the main, I think this analogy is one which misleads us into
> incorrect conclusions.
>
> This is not to say that any of your particularly conclusions is wrong.
> I am just saying that I think that the "Darwinistic" model is more of
> a hindrance than a help in understanding how to improve things.
>
> --Jimbo
>
>

The math doesn't work for the Darwinian metaphor. But there is a
Hamiltonian way of representing the selection process at work on wiki.

Short form, we, the wikipedians, aren't the environment, we are the
organism.


from_name: Lars Alvik

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Harassing is not OK

body:
I totalty agree with this, but i also want to put some focus on
#wikipedia, a few months ago it accualy was a place that one could
debate with others, but now it's nothing but insults to people that has
other views of the world. (i'll again apoligze for my bad english.) It
doesn't serve as an neutral meetingplace for the entire project, no
matter what their views are on the war in iraq (for example).

mvh.

Lars Alvik

P? 5. jan. 2005 kl. 08.00 skrev <jneden at bellsouth.net>:

> All Wikipedians,
>
>> Olve Utne (who is starting to get a bit sick of this
>> peck-order-oriented
> list...)
>
> I have to agree with Olve. And that is largely why I have not felt
> like paying attention to wikipedia-l lately.  Sorry I haven't been
> around to voice my opinions against this idiocy. I do not have clearly
> defined convictions as to the interactions of both parties here
> (mainly Mark and YOU, harassment squad), but I am certain that this
> peck-order rudeness is not what Wikipedia needs to be. In fact, I dare
> say that this stuff needs to end here and now. If I were completely
> new to Wikipedia and signed up for wikipedia-l, I'd unsubscribe in a
> heartbeat. Leave Mark W. alone and get on with your lives.
>
> Ooh, and I abbreviated here. Sorry. (Referencing a rude, old e-mail
> from a certain party which I felt no urge to respond.)
>
> Have a great day. Takk, Ovne. Du forst?r Wikipedia-l vel, og jeg er
> glad i deg for det. N? skal jeg snakke norsk! (GOD it's been too long.
> Almost two years since I used Norwegian seriously. At least I can tell
> you something in Norwegian that people will not undertand literally in
> English. High five for Nordmenn -- we seem to get along well!)
>
> Mark, you take care. Sorry I haven't been around. You have my support.
>
>  ~ Jeremy
>
> Agidoda tsalag, kenv; hla yagiliya wigiquediya. (Funny how my identity
> is meddled with languages, isn't it?)
>
> ----------
>
> Dear Yann, Gerard & al.,
>
> I have noticed that some people find it amusing (or whatever it is) to
> harrass (!) Mark W. Please stop with it -- Wikipedia has bigger
> problems
> than some of you not agreeing with Mark W. Acceptance of escalated
> personal attacks is one of them -- and it is not exactly like Mark W.
> has
> been proven to have a monopoly on those...
>
>
> Respectfully,
>
> Olve Utne (who is starting to get a bit sick of this
> peck-order-oriented
> list...)
>
>
> At 12:17 04/01/2005 +0000, Yann Forget wrote:
>> Hi Mark, [...] Please stop spreading FUD. Requests are not well
>> received
>> when they are sent by YOU, that the point.
>
> Gerard Meijssen wrote:
>> You are like an old record, stuck in the same phrases time and again.
>> You
>> have annoyed and insulted many people and you are unappologetic about
>> it.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


subject: [Foundation-l] Forking the Wiki

body:
Christopher Larberg wrote:

>On Tue, 4 Jan 2005 21:37:30 +0100, Jens Ropers <ropers at ropersonline.com> wrote:
>
>
>>1. I think Fallujah's survivors of siege warfare and radioactive and
>>chemical weapons have more pressing needs right now than logging on to
>>the Internet and editing some website.
>>
>>
>Just out of curiosity, when was Fallujah nuked and sprayed down? I
>must have missed it, between eating my double-Supersized Big Mac and
>filling up my 2-mile-per-gallon SUV.
>
Jens' statement may have been stated a little too dramatically.  I
support the tone of his comments even though I haven't heard of chemical
weapons being used in that incident.  Siege warfare certainly took
place.  Radioactivity does not mean that someone was nuked.
Metallurgically, uranium metal is well suited for making armour piercing
weapons.  It incidentally happens to be radioactive, and these
radioactive shell shards will remain in the environment for centuries.
Mere excusable collateral damage.

>>3. Adding to that, well, what do you think -- if a foreign army lays
>>siege to, and napalm-bombs someone's hometown, would it be unreasonable
>>to assume that the person so affected might rather be WAY past
>>contributing friendly edits to a joint encyclopedia? (Which is why I
>>reckon that the US has guaranteed itself one or two sequels, al Qaeda
>>branded or otherwise. But then, that's just my hunch and I could be
>>wrong.)
>>
>>
>The U.S. military destroyed the last of its napalm a few years ago, if
>memory serves me right. I could be mistaken, though.
>
How does one distinguish between an ethical and an unethical weapon?

>This will probably do nothing except ignite an off-topic flame war,
>but I'm curious about these claims.
>
Not to worry!  The American military is just receiving the same
genrously warm reception that it would give to similar Iraqi visitors in
Nebraska. :-)

Ec


subject: [Foundation-l] Forking the Wiki


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Short summary of wikicite proposal

body:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:
WikiProject_Fact_and_Reference_Check#Proposal_Wikicite


subject: [Wikitech-l] enotif! :)

body:
Well, enotif code isn't mature yet. It does send queries to master it shouldn't send, it uses some strange integers for timestamps it shouldn't use, it handles anonymous users where it shouldn't and moreover, all database code does not check if this functionality is enabled or not. Moreover, it uses 0 as a timestamp value, does not use any timestamp abstraction when talking to database or for values. At least my devel wiki is broken ;-) Probably I'll be able to fix some parts here and there, but I would really ask for code review and fixes before making it live anywhere.

And last but not the least. For all that code it does not check if all that email notification stuff is turned on and off. Please give possibility to turn on experimental features. Cheers :)

Domas


from_name: Stan Shebs

subject:
Bibliography (was Re: [Wikipedia-l] A Solution to Larry Sanger's
	Criticisms - Project	Has Been Around For A While

body:
Stirling Newberry wrote:

>>>
>> The fundamental idea is solid, but there should be no need for a
>> separate project.  It is really just a matter of good research
>> practice.  Defining a "good" reference is not always a productive
>> exercise.  We can end up with NPOV disputes and edit wars just as
>> much over the validity of references as over content.
>
>
> It should be a separate project, it has its own technical challenges
> and it is clearly a separate database, since its content is more
> restricted, and its format different. More over, there is a need for
> lineages of sources in a way which there is not among wikipedia
> articles. It might well be piggybacked on wikisource - but the
> concerns are different. The major technical challenge for wikicite
> would be creating cards, creating descent for editions of the same
> book, and for then annotating those cards. As for administrative
> divisions, that I am not clear on the relative merits of creating a
> separate people structure for it, so will defer to others who know
> more than I, which on this point is almost everyone.
>
> It would be integrated in with wiktionary, wikipedia, wikiquote and
> wikisource - each one having citation needs - and therefore a
> community of users who would want to have access to a catalog, and to
> annotate the reliability of sources in it.

I've been designing something similar off-and-on, but waffled on
whether it should be a separate project. I was thinking of making
special pages in their own namespace, a la image files, which
would allow for better integration with articles, categorization,
backrefs ("who references this work?"), plus links to authors,
publishers, and an article on the work itself, since a number of
significant sources have articles in their own right.

In theory bibliography could go into commons, since most biblio
info is language-independent, and quite a few articles already list
foreign-language works in their references.

If WP is supposed to be a compendium of the world's knowledge, then
it seems reasonable to expect that every published book and article
will be cited somewhere eventually, which is a lot to manage. To
look at it another way, if a half-million WP articles do nothing
more than make two citations apiece, that's a million-entry
bibliography to manage; we need support infrastructure equal to
the task.

Stan


subject: [WikiEN-l] Evercat v. Libertas

body:
John Lee wrote:

> Furthermore, "one abuse per month" would formalise the possibility of
> sysops blocking people for frivolous reasons while still not
> accounting for genuine mistakes. I personally think overly specific
> regulations like these are ridiculous and open too many loopholes, but
> that's just me.

If I knew that I were allowed "one abuse per month" I would choose my
target carefully, and make that abuse as effective as possible. ;-)

Ec


from_name: Mark Horner

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Languages and education

body:
Hi everyone

I would like to add a little to this discussion.

I am from South Africa, which is one of the African
countries in better shape, though things are not
completely rosey.

Africa, in general, is in a bad way (really bad
depending on where you look, Darfur, Congo, Liberia,
etc.) but I think that for once there is really a glimmer
of hope. For the first time African's have been trying,
I'll admit success is still way off, to solve Africa's
problems. Its not possible to do it alone but the mindset
has finally changed. I am prepared to discuss this at length but
its not the purpose of my email - I just want to set a scene.

In Southern Africa there is peace for the first time. Angola's
civil war very recently ended, Namibia is peaceful, Botswana has no
prospects of war, Mozambique fought itself to a standstill and now
there is peace (peace != schools, money, infrastructure etc.), Swaziland
and Lesotho are also peaceful and so is South Africa. Zimbabwe has
some issues but largely Southern Africa is stable and so now is the
prime opportunity to lay a foundation for lasting peace which will hopefully
spread north.

How does this tie in with your discussion, well I feel that a key
area for solid peace is to stimulate education - Africa needs teachers,
doctors, engineers, nurses etc. and the best thing for Africa is that
they come from Africa and not be visitors as part of an international
aid program (I think that aid is very necessary but its just not a sustainable
solution).

So languages and education - well an organisation like wikimedia can help
a stack with education. No computers in rural villages I agree but I have shown
that (http://www.nongnu.org/fhsst) science textbooks can be reduced in cost
by an order of magnitude. This can only help stretch those limited education
budgets in Africa much further. The content we have written as part of FHSST
will be migrated into WikiBooks very soon - I am working on it but Latex2Wiki
isn't the simplest mapping I've ever seen.

Due to the colonies that once existed free textbooks in English, French and Portuguese
could make a huge impact across Africa. If they are cheap (we estimate $3 per copy of
our Physics book - hard colour cover and bound) then its easier to distribute
them, raise enough money and save money for training of teachers and other resources.

WikiBooks and its large user base could very quickly help to produce such texts which
could really make a difference ( I would start in Southern Africa where things are more stable
and then move North).

And we are workign from the inside - we are an organisation within AFrica
releasing books - its not a case of Europeans rocking up (again ;) and telling
everyone how its supposed to be done.

Just my 2 cents worth (well maybe a bit more).

Cheers,

Mark

>/ Anthere wrote:
/>/
/>>/ (...)
/>>/
/>>/ all asked for books. Only books. Not
/>>/ food, nor money, nor sweets, only books. And they
/>>/ wanted books in french language. I told them "but you
/>>/ can't read french". But this is what they wanted
/>>/ nevertheless.
/>>/
/>>/ (...)
/>>/
/>>/ Computers in these villages is out of question. They
/>>/ have electricity but I doubt a computer could survive
/>>/ long in such an environment (I spent two hours in the
/>>/ local gendarmerie, they have desks, paper, pens and
/>>/ sand). However, most of our youngest guides had an
/>>/ email adress and went on the net thanks to cybercafes
/>>/ in Tamanrasset.
/>>/
/>>/ There might be things to do no ?
/
On 5 Jan 2005, at 14:58, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:

>/ This is absolutely fascinating to me.  Just really fascinating.
/>/
/>/ I think this is the kind of knowledge we have to have, knowledge of
/>/ real conditions in real places, in order to be able to help
/>/ effectively.
/>/
/>/ --Jimbo
/
Seconded.

Caution may be advised however:
If, say, we get something going and distribute books ''from France'',
this could easily be seen by local (Algerian) politicians/nationalists
as "some French-American organization is trying to subvert our
education system by hijacking our children's literacy development."
Very bad mojo/karma/blood. Yes, I agree with Anthere's (implied)
suggestions, but if we even try to do something, we should be very
diplomatic about it and thread very carefully. Make sure our
non-affiliation and charitable nature is very much known and possibly
involve the (Algerian) national through local government and/or kindly
ask them for advice or even permission. Make sure our attitude does NOT
get to be: "What a crappy country and f*&ked-up government/education
system. Heck, we can do this SO much better." And make sure local (ie.
Algerian) people KNOW that that's not our attitude. Just asking people
nicely and showing them that we fully respect them will often work
wonders. And make sure that they know that they can become Wikipedians,
too.

-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]]
     www.ropersonline.com

--
--
Mark Horner
Jabber/AIM/Yahoo:   marknewlyn

Co-author:
http://www.nongnu.org/fhsst
http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/fhsst

"Life is but a seg-fault away ...

Life received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
0x42074d40 in calloc () from /lib/i686/liblife.so.6"


from_name: Giuseppe DAngelo

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: special characters

body:
I hate to interrupt important matters of state with a trivial concern, but while I was in the Catalan wikipedia today I went to use the special characters in the copyright area of the edit page and only managed to invoke some gobbledygook.  I ignored it at the time, but then found that it was doing the same thing in the Sicilian wikipedia.  Has anyone else come across this?  Has anyone got any tips?  Have both the Catalan and the Sicilians gone awry somewhere along the way or is this universal?  Appreciative of any helpful thoughts.  Salutamu.

pippudoz

---------------------------------
Nuovo Yahoo! Messenger E' molto pi? divertente: Audibles, Avatar, Webcam, Giochi, Rubrica
 Scaricalo ora!


from_name: Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales

subject: [Foundation-l] Forking the Wiki

body:
Scott Nelson wrote:
> Can this be taken off list?
>
> This conversation long since lost any relevance to the wiki project.

Absolutely.  The person who started it has already been warned in the
past for starting irrelevant political discussions on the mailing
lists.  The next time, I'll resolve it by kicking him off the list.

--Jimbo


subject: [Foundation-l] Forking the Wiki


body:
Snowspinner wrote:
> I think the two most telling things about Larry Sanger's criticisms are
> his unwillingness to contribute volunteer time to Wikipedia, and his
> seeming belief that Nupedia was the way to go, despite obvious factual
> evidence to the contrary.
>
> Which is to say, if he was right, I suspect it would have manifested in
> some actual success for Nupedia.

I think there's no question that you're right about both points,
however I also think that it is very important for us to think really
carefully about how we can be more expertise-friendly.  The thing that
annoyed me the most about Larry's essay was that he accused me of a
form of anti-expertise that I have always quite strongly denied.  He
should have known better.

Even so, I think it is fairly clear that we have in the past been too
"co-dependent" with trolls.  We don't want or need a brutal and random
crackdown, and I think we are already strongly drifting in the right
direction.  The recent arbcom elections suggested to me a community
desire for stricter standards of behavior.

--Jimbo


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wiktionary-l] Greek pages disappearing

body:
On Jan 5, 2005, at 8:17 AM, Muke Tever wrote:
> Pages with Greek titles, that used to exist and are still listed in
> [[special:allpages]], are coming up empty on load, and the wiki is
> marking
> links to them as red.
>
> I have seen this happening on la: and more intermittently on en: --
> is this happening anywhere else, and is there a cause for it?

Probably old non-normalized titles. Can you please prepare a complete
list?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
Andre Engels wrote:
> This seems to be exactly the problem Larry Sanger talks about - We
> don't care whether somebody is a renowned expert on a subject or has
> just read a few lines related to a subject in the past. If they can
> write it down, we consider them equal.

Some in the community surely do feel this way.  But I don't, and my
impression from talking to and meeting tons of wikipedia volunteers is
a very profound respect for learning, and a keen desire that we *get
it right*.

There is a certain amount of healthy skepticism about Nupedia-style
credentialism, and I think this is also valuable.

An example may help to illustrate what I mean.

Adam Carr isn't right about history because he has a PhD -- he's right
about history because he's a serious scholar to cares about getting it
right, and he's done his homework.  Herschelkrustofsky is a POV
pushing problem user.

What does this mean?  It means that Adam might be right or might be
wrong about any given thing, but we should listen to him and treat him
with due respect.  And if someone with no credentials shows up and
corrects some error of Adam's, with proper citations, then that's
great too.

> A second fallacy I see in this message is that it equates factual
> correctness with credibility. There's more than just factual
> correctness to make a good article, there is also balance. Getting
> experts is not what helps here (although it helps a bit, because they
> are supposed to know about the subject, and thus notice missing
> portions), but we should recognize the problem as being one.

Indeed.

--Jimbo


from_name: NSK

subject:
[Foundation-l] Re: [Wikitech-l] Re: licensing issues,
	BSD doc license vs GNU

body:
On Wednesday 05 January 2005 01:32, Edward Peschko wrote:
> I sincerely believe that the FreeBSD is a better fit for my wiki
> than the GnuFDL - especially because it can be sublicensed - but hesitate
> to do so if it would jeapordize having the wiki accepted as a sister
> project..

If your project is unique/unusual and is related to sciences and I like it, I
may be able to accept it as a project of my site, the Wikinerds Community <
http://portal.wikinerds.org >, which means that I will offer free hosting and
I will have control over the project's policies (practically this means
enforcing http://www.wikinerds.org/legal and having a link to Wikinerds.org
homepage and forum). If you are interested, send a detailed description of
the project and a link to a webpage where I can see your work, together with
the text of the license you want to use and a short introduction of yourself
including your full name and a link to your personal homepage at
info at wikinerds.org

--
NSK
The Wikinerds Community Federation of Science Wikis
Owner of the Wikinerds Portal http://portal.wikinerds.org
Owner of the NerdyPC IT Wiki http://www.nerdypc.org


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: licensing issues, BSD doc license vs GNU


body:
Ronald Chmara wrote:
> My older brother despises some wikipedia sections that are written in
> his field (cultural anthropology, with specific emphasis on the paiute
> people), as he is an expert in that specific area, and finds the
> articles "shallow", "without depth and nuance", and "lacking in a
> deeper explanation". They are written by "non-experts", and thus make
> "factual and comprehension errors".
>
> The articles are also written for *use* by non-experts.... So, I asked
> my brother how many pages it would take to correct the errors, and he
> pointed me towards his latest body of work, over 500 pages, and that's
> just the historical *sites* of the paiute.

O.k., but I would *love* to talk to your brother.  :-)

I think he would agree that there's a place in the world for an
encyclopedia article -- a general introduction to the non-specialist,
a nice overview that provides context for further learning, which will
involve perhaps digging into a 500 page tome.

Such an article can be "shallow" and "without depth and nuance" in two
different ways: one is that the article sucks, the other is that this
is inherent to the nature of an encyclopedia article, i.e. space is
limited, assumed background of the reader has to be limited, etc.

Could he fix the article?  Especially when there are factual and
comprehension errors, this seems easy enough to fix.  Fixing the
"lacking in deeper explanation" and so on, i don't know, but I don't
worry about it much, either.

--Jimbo


from_name: Jens Ropers

subject: [Foundation-l] Forking the Wiki

body:
On 5 Jan 2005, at 05:46, Christopher Larberg wrote:

> On Tue, 4 Jan 2005 21:37:30 +0100, Jens Ropers
> <ropers at ropersonline.com> wrote:
>> 1. I think Fallujah's survivors of siege warfare and radioactive and
>> chemical weapons have more pressing needs right now than logging on to
>> the Internet and editing some website.
>
> Just out of curiosity, when was Fallujah nuked and sprayed down? I
> must have missed it, between eating my double-Supersized Big Mac and
> filling up my 2-mile-per-gallon SUV.

There's a difference between the terms "radioactive weapons" and
"nuclear weapons".
Granted, there is also a fierce argument out there whether or not D.U.
also counts as a ''radiation'' and/or ''radiological'' weapon (or--to
some--even as a "nuclear" weapon). Statistics on the incidence of
cancers and malformed children born in places like Iraq would
reportedly seem to support the description of D.U. ammo as
"radiological/radiation weapons", but such claims/definitions are far
from universally accepted -- which is why I chose to be on the safe
side and said ''radioactive'' weapons and not ''radiation'' weapons.
NB: Search for Iraqi cancer statistics. Use "teratogenic" and "Iraq" as
Google search terms.
(
http://www.google.ie/search?hl=en&q=teratogenic+iraq&btnG=Search&meta=
)

I suppose your expression "sprayed down" refers to the US' continued
use of chemical weapons. See comment below. Note that I'm not buying
into the Mullarkey of denying napalm is a chemical weapon on grounds
that the incendiary effects of its CHEMICALS are even greater than
their direct CHEMICAL action. I know this one is a matter of dispute
but I have nothing but contempt for people who quibble on this point.

>> 3. Adding to that, well, what do you think -- if a foreign army lays
>> siege to, and napalm-bombs someone's hometown, would it be
>> unreasonable
>> to assume that the person so affected might rather be WAY past
>> contributing friendly edits to a joint encyclopedia? (Which is why I
>> reckon that the US has guaranteed itself one or two sequels, al Qaeda
>> branded or otherwise. But then, that's just my hunch and I could be
>> wrong.)
>
> The U.S. military destroyed the last of its napalm a few years ago, if
> memory serves me right. I could be mistaken, though.

Yes you are. As this article
<http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/08/08/1060145870882.html?
oneclick=true> will tell you, the difference between napalm of the
"Napalm-B" brand and napalm of the "Mark 77" brand is the use of
slightly different chemicals for thickening the inflammable fuel
(and--presumably--added oxidisers with Mark 77 -- which should make it
even MORE lethal)). We already had this discussion a while ago. Search
the list archives and/or use Google.
(
http://www.google.ie/search?
hl=en&q=Napalm+Mark+77&btnG=Google+Search&meta= )

Of course one might say that the Pentagon's relevant statements were
beyond pharisaic (in the "hypocritical" sense). But hey! -- You're
talking about a country that actively manufactures, stores and uses
WMD. The latter--"uses"--is meant to currently "only" pertain to WMD of
the "explosive" type; I'm following the US' own civil defense WMD
definition here. Of course US Gulf war vets have alleged US use of
tactical nuclear weapons as well, but I've not seen sufficient evidence
to support that claim. It wouldn't surprise me though. After all, the
US also manufactures, stores and uses stuff like cluster bombs and
landmines (condemned by the UN, Red Cross/Red Crescent, etc. etc.).

-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]]
     www.ropersonline.com


subject: [Foundation-l] Forking the Wiki


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: special characters

body:
Jens Ropers wrote:

> PS: Gobbledygook. I like saying that. Gobbledygook. :-)
>
> PPS: Actually, WordNet's entry is incomplete. From my work in (English
> language) IT telephone support, I recall that most contemporary Irish
> and UK business world PC users understand gobbledygook to mean "a
> bunch of garbled, seemingly random characters". (Which is what
> Giuseppe was referring to. But most of yers knew that anyway.)

According to Eric Partridge in "A Dictionary of Slang" it was coined in
1944 by Maury Maverick in the US for "pompous, long-winded,vague speech
or writing, heavily laced with jargon."  He apparently expanded on the
idea in his 1952 book "Chamber of Horrors".  (I don't have it, but it
seems like a good enough reason to find a copy.)  The verb "to gobble"
was imitative of the sound made by a turkey.

Although my source does not make the connection in "Gobbledygook",
"gook" has a proud tradition in American pejorative slang.  During WWII
it referred to the Japanese.  At an earlier time iit had reference to
the Philippino insurgents who dared to believe that the Spanish American
War had anything to do with their gaining independence.

Ec


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: special characters

body:
On Jan 5, 2005, at 11:29 AM, James R. Johnson wrote:
> I got that in the ang.wikipedia.org while using, but I am using Firefox
> right now, and there's not a problem.  Don't get me wrong, just about
> every piece of software I get I try to get Microsoft, but I have to
> use Firefox for the wiki...

It sounds like you might be using some version of Internet Explorer? If
so, it might be on some version of Windows? That's more than I got out
the previous poster, at least. :)

A quick test on ang.wikipedia.org in IE 6.0 on Windows XP SP2 shows
that some of the two-byte UTF-8 characters are incorrectly URL-decoded
by IE and are inserted as two characters composed of their individual
UTF-8 bytes interpreted as 8-bit Latin-1 characters.

This is pretty clearly an incorrect interpretation of the code by IE.
It can probably be worked around by skipping the URL encoding, but I'll
have to do more testing for scripting-attack safety and compatibility
in other browsers, so I don't have time to do it right now while I'm at
work. Would you mind filing a bug report on bugzilla.wikipedia.org to
make sure I don't forget? Thanks.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Ricky Beam

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Proposed order for Jan 5

body:
On Tue, 4 Jan 2005, Ashar Voultoiz wrote:
>For switches, I got a close friend working for a french ISP that order
>most of its stuff from brookers. Namely:
>
>  http://www.digitalwarehouse.com/
>  http://www.atlantixglobal.com/
>  http://www.networkhardware.com/

Not to nit-pick, but Network Hardware Resale doesn't sell new cisco
equipment -- or they didn't when I dealt with them 1-2 years ago.
(It would appear all 3 of those are used/referb equipment dealers.)

As for discounts, any authorized cisco dealer can get 30-40% off.

--Ricky


body:
On Wednesday 05 January 2005 07:07, Anthere wrote:
> Pas d'inqui?tude Traroth. NSK est un gentil SDF couchant sous les ponts.

Les murs ont des oreilles...

--
NSK
The Wikinerds Community Federation of Science Wikis
Owner of the Wikinerds Portal http://portal.wikinerds.org
Owner of the NerdyPC IT Wiki http://www.nerdypc.org


body:
>>
> The fundamental idea is solid, but there should be no need for a
> separate project.  It is really just a matter of good research
> practice.  Defining a "good" reference is not always a productive
> exercise.  We can end up with NPOV disputes and edit wars just as much
> over the validity of references as over content.

It should be a separate project, it has its own technical challenges
and it is clearly a separate database, since its content is more
restricted, and its format different. More over, there is a need for
lineages of sources in a way which there is not among wikipedia
articles. It might well be piggybacked on wikisource - but the concerns
are different. The major technical challenge for wikicite would be
creating cards, creating descent for editions of the same book, and for
then annotating those cards. As for administrative divisions, that I am
not clear on the relative merits of creating a separate people
structure for it, so will defer to others who know more than I, which
on this point is almost everyone.

It would be integrated in with wiktionary, wikipedia, wikiquote and
wikisource - each one having citation needs - and therefore a community
of users who would want to have access to a catalog, and to annotate
the reliability of sources in it.

This process will not end the need to search for consensus, the
problems of POV writing. What it will do is tie information in wiki
projects more closely to the sources, and therefore make users and
editors more capable of making decisions about those sources. After
all, the scholarly community has arguments, discussions, conversations
and fights over the validity of source material, we aren't going to end
that.

What we can do is making it much easier for people to have well cited
and comprehensively referenced articles, which tie information together
in ways that allow people to make judgments. By lowering the amount of
work to reference and cite, it will make new articles better cited,
make it easier to provide citations for existing articles, and allow
the body of published knowledge to be at least linkable, even if the
actual text is unavailable.

> At the risk of stating the obvious, journal articles are shorter than
> books.  One Wikisource contributor has recently begun work on a 1917
> National Geographic issue.  That should be an opportunity for getting
> some of the bugs out of that approach, and developping standards for
> the way we enter journal articles.  Some journal articles may be more
> important than others to include. but the simple fact that they are
> each individually shorter may be an encouragement.

But far more are published. Having a citation available for every
article published in every journal is probably out of our reach.
However, if we could get some kind of feed from the major journals,
that would dramatically improve the quality of citations on wiki
projects.

>> Wikicite might be able to keep track of all things
>> published.  It would also be useful to keep track of
>> books and their printing date to know when things
>> enter the public domain to know when to put them on
>> Wikisource/Wikicommons.
>>
> There is already a considerable overlap between Wikisource and
> Wikipedia over the matter of bibliography.  For now I see it as fair
> game for both.  I believe that Wikisource should be carrying the
> fundamental information that helps in determining the copyright
> status, but that's only going to be there if people put it there.
> Whatever one might think of long copyright terms it is still much
> easier to calculate expiry based on the year of death than on the year
> of publication.  It's going to be another 40 years before that becomes
> the norm for US publications..  For them we still need to consider
> such issues as copyright renewals.  A 1923 US publication whose
> copyright was not properly renewed in 1951 is now in the public
> domain.  There is no need for a new wedge project somewhere between
> Wikisource and Wikipedia.
>
> Ec
>

Wikicitations would not deal with the copyright issue, since the
citation is a card. That card might include the original source, if
available to wiki, but need not, the work of determining availability
should be wikisource, which wikicite uses. The best analogy is that
wikicite is to produce a card catalog on line, and a system by which
citations are made available live to other.

"Fair game for both" means substandard implementation for everyone.
Textual apparatus is fundamentally a different process than either
writing articles, or providing correct sources, instead, it ties these
two together. Currently there is no mechanism for providing textual
apparatus to written sources in wikiprojects - which is to some extent
why people often over-rely on web sources, because it is easy to link
to them. Lower the barrier to citing paper works in articles until it
is no higher than linking to a web site - that is search, copy, paste -
and this problem will be fixable with education and leading by example.


body:
> Technical issues aside, this has to do with systemic bias, not so much
> in Wikipedia as in the society in general.  It is natural that as
> society members we would bring our biases with us into Wikipedia.  A
> bias perhaps becomes systemic when no-one recognizes it as a bias; it
> takes some dumb little kid to yell out that the emperor has no
> clothes.
>
> Objective truth has nothing to do with who is saying it. Many of us
> who would write here have been around academic "experts" in the past,
> and it is inevitable that some would have carried away a little of the
> idolatry that comes from that association.  One of the most frequent
> idolatrous statements that I see is "IANAL".  One should have surmised
> that something was wrong 400 years ago when Shakespeare commented,
> "First we'll kill the lawyers."  Society abounds with stories of
> lawyers and politicians (many of whom are lawyers) as thieves and
> scoundrels, but incredibly we continue to defer to their expertise
> with that short disclaimer.
>
> Ec
>

Citation problem:  the statement first we kill all the lawyers is made
by the leader of the brigands trying to spread chaos. It is usually
cited exactly reverse of the way intended.

As for appeals to authority, certainly a problem, but the solution is
to provide people with the ability to authenticate the information they
use.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Request for Amis Wiktionary

body:
Hoi,
For your information the Amis language has a ISO-639 code of ami
therefore as the wikimedia projects follow this for its domain names it
will be ami.wiktionary.org. With the 1.4 version of the wikimedia
software, the interface can be selected by a user. This means that you
can create a user interface in native Amis and have people use
traditional Chines if they choose this as their personal default.

There are several ways in wich you can start a wiktionary project; when
you choose to use the methodology as used in the it:wikitonary and the
nl:wiktionary, it will be possible to share a lot of information from
other wiktionaries without much effort after the initial setup of your
wiktionary. This system uses templates that have a different content in
each wiktionary. As the definitions of the templates is the same in all
cooperating wiktionaries, content of articles can be copied to another
wiktionary without much effort.

Bots that people are working on, will then make it possible to copy Ami
words to the other wiktionaries and help create a Italian-Ami or a
Dutch-Ami or a Faris-Ami content in the respective wiktionaries.

When there are multiple writing systems, they can be both accomodated in
the wiktionary. This is done for Chinese where we have both the
traditional and simplified words when we know them. So it would be good
to have both the IPS and the PC system for Ami.

Thanks,
    GerardM

Pochung Chen wrote:

> Dear All,
>
>  We would like to open a Wiktionary for the Amis language. Amis is an
> Austronesian language used by the Amis -- one of the Austronesian
> people in Taiwan. The Amis account for about one third of Taiwan's
> indigenous population (i.e. 130 thousand), however, many of the
> younger generation do not speak the language and till now there is
> still no exact ststistic report of the number of real speakers.
>
>  There are two prevailing writing systems of this language: the
> Presbyterian Church system and the International Phonetic Symbol
> system, the later is used only within the academic circle. We would
> like to edit a Wiktionary which basically employs the Presbyterian
> Church system but also notes the IPS so that readers can also know the
> exact pronounciations.
>
>  At this moment there are at least three people who are willing to
> commit to this project. They are Nakao Eki, Afah Lisin, and Tai-ni
> Tsou. The former two are native speakers and the later two as
> ethnographers are also familiar with the academic Amis writing system.
> Pektiong Tan (zh-min-nan:pektiong) will help those people to get
> familiar with the wikipedia system.
>
>  We would prefer to set the default interface language to be Mandarin
> with traditional character used in Taiwan (zh-tw) since most of the
> potential user of this wiktionary can read Mandarin with traditional
> character.
>
>  Proposed domain name:
>  http://amis.wiktionary.org/
>
>  Language tag for Amis:
>  ISO 639-2: N.A.
>  ISO 639-3 (Draft): Ami
>  SIL: ALV
>  RFC-3066: i-ami
>
>  Sincerely,
>  Nakao Eki,
>  Afah Lisin,
>  Tai-ni Tsou,
>  Pektiong Tan
>
> Some info about Taiwanese aborigine:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_aborigine
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
>


subject: [Wiktionary-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Request for Amis Wiktionary


body:
>
> I've been designing something similar off-and-on, but waffled on
> whether it should be a separate project. I was thinking of making
> special pages in their own namespace, a la image files, which
> would allow for better integration with articles, categorization,
> backrefs ("who references this work?"), plus links to authors,
> publishers, and an article on the work itself, since a number of
> significant sources have articles in their own right.
>

As well as authors. My concern is that as wikipedia articles the level
of source protection is no higher than in a regular wikipedia article,
where as for citations, much of the information comes from an outside
source, and like the digits of pi, isn't really improved upon by
editting unsecurely.

> In theory bibliography could go into commons, since most biblio
> info is language-independent, and quite a few articles already list
> foreign-language works in their references.
>

Good idea, I like it.

> If WP is supposed to be a compendium of the world's knowledge, then
> it seems reasonable to expect that every published book and article
> will be cited somewhere eventually, which is a lot to manage. To
> look at it another way, if a half-million WP articles do nothing
> more than make two citations apiece, that's a million-entry
> bibliography to manage; we need support infrastructure equal to
> the task.
>
> Stan
>
>

Agreed, this is not a small project, but it is smaller than taking a
half million articles, each with a bibliography of 2 to 20 sources, and
unifying it later by hand. The sooner people have the tools, the faster
the project of upgrading the scholarly apparatus will be.


from_name: Traroth

subject: [Foundation-l] Forking the Wiki

body:
Sorry, but you totally misunderstood me. What I wanted
to say is that I'm curious to see the reactions of
americans. They seem very impatient to express all
their pain about the evil world, and all what they had
to suffer in Viet-Nam war (50 000 americans killed...
and 3 000 000 Vietnamese) and Korea war and Gulf war,
and so on. What could be their reaction if we let all
human beings express the pain of war, including in all
wars where americans behaved like butchers, like Irak,
Afghanistan, Grenada, Somalia, Korea, Viet-Nam,
Panama, Chile (not-exhaustive list. Oh no ! really
not...). Hold in mind that a lot of contributors are
americans...

Traroth

 --- Jens Ropers <ropers at ropersonline.com> a ?crit :

> 1. I think Fallujah's survivors of siege warfare and
> radioactive and
> chemical weapons have more pressing needs right now
> than logging on to
> the Internet and editing some website.
> 2. Do you think that Muslim residents of a
> hitherto-branded "axis of
> evil"-country would have better luck than
> Christian-dominated US allies
> in convincing the US American "Moral" Majority that
> "Thou shalt not
> kill" really DOES mean just that? Me neither.
> 3. Adding to that, well, what do you think -- if a
> foreign army lays
> siege to, and napalm-bombs someone's hometown, would
> it be unreasonable
> to assume that the person so affected might rather
> be WAY past
> contributing friendly edits to a joint encyclopedia?
> (Which is why I
> reckon that the US has guaranteed itself one or two
> sequels, al Qaeda
> branded or otherwise. But then, that's just my hunch
> and I could be
> wrong.)
> 4. Leaving aside the unlikeliness of seeing a lot of
> Fallujan
> contributors anytime soon, if you've given up on the
> US as such and
> only expect mere sordid entertainment -- yes, a
> hypothetical advent of
> Fallujan contributors would provide copious amounts
> of that. Let the
> games begin, but don't forget to duck and cover!
>
> -- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]]
>      www.ropersonline.com

D?couvrez le nouveau Yahoo! Mail : 250 Mo d'espace de stockage pour vos mails !
Cr?ez votre Yahoo! Mail sur http://fr.mail.yahoo.com/


subject: [Foundation-l] Forking the Wiki


body:
 --- Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> a ?crit :
> Pas d'inqui?tude Traroth. NSK est un gentil SDF
> couchant sous les ponts.
>
> Ant
>

Il ferait mieux d'acheter ? manger plut?t que de
glander dans les cybercaf?s, dans ce cas... :)

Traroth

D?couvrez le nouveau Yahoo! Mail : 250 Mo d'espace de stockage pour vos mails !
Cr?ez votre Yahoo! Mail sur http://fr.mail.yahoo.com/


from_name: Stephen Forrest

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Choosing interface?

body:
On Wed, 5 Jan 2005 20:31:42 +0100, James R. Johnson
<modean52 at comcast.net> wrote:
> I read in a recent e-mail (I think about Catalan or some other new language)
> that you can choose the interface for your wiki.  How so?  What kind of
> customizations are available?

Er, do you mean skins and the like?  If so, go to:

http://ang.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Preferences

(for example) and follow any of the links starting with "User data",
etc.  For example, select 'Scynn' (skin) and switch between Nostalgia
and Cologne Blue?  The latter is my favourite thus far.

Steve


from_name: Guillaume Blanchard

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Languages and education

body:
Anthere a ?crit :

>Hello,
>
>First of all, I wish a happy new year to all who may
>be concerned.
>This year, I spent Christmas and New Year Eve in an
>unusual way, since I was in the Sahara desert (south
>of Algeria) for 15 days, as an ecotourist.
>I had a real great time over there, which I will share
>with Wikipedia in trying to improve many articles
>related to the areas  I went to, as well as with many
>pictures.
>
>However, I wished to share a couple of additional
>things/thoughts with you. About languages and
>education.
>
>I spent a little while in Tamanrasset, and discussed
>with some of it inhabitants, men and women. It is a
>strange situation, as it cannot be said that people
>are "poor", in the sense that most have the basics
>which allow them to live quite happily. The city is
>growing pretty fast (50 000 unhabitants), but is not
>sustainable for its water, nor for its food, nor for
>most of its industrial goods. Most of it is imported
>from the north of Algeria. The city is essentially
>living from camels, goats and sheep... and tourism in
>the surroundings of course. While the city is shared
>by many ethnies and different nationalities, most
>people over there are muslims. They speak a mixture of
>Tuareg language (tamazight or tamahaq) and some local
>arab which can hardly be recognised by those of us
>French who learned classical arab in France.
>
>One thing surprised me greatly. I thought the majority
>of Algerians could be said to speak French (since
>Algeria was previously a french colony). Well, I
>discovered over there that if all adults have notions
>of french language, many of them are very very far
>from fluent. I could speak to no kids under 15, even
>though I was told that all of them start learning
>french language at school from the age of 8 (?). So, I
>went for a little check and discovered that according
>to statistics, about 62% of Algerian speak decent
>french (enough for communication), and this number
>have been increasing in the past years.
>
>Now, Tamanrasset is in the most southern part of
>Algeria, so rather far away from France, though there
>is still obviously strong French influence. People I
>met talked with one another in Tamahaq, talk with
>other Tamanrasset people in a southern arab, speak
>with us in french, and receive education in classical
>arab. Guys ! these people manage roughly 4 languages !
>
>When France left Algeria, the whole educational system
>was in french language; the algerian government tried
>to switch entirely to classical arab over the years,
>even though there were at that time not enough
>teachers knowledgeable in classical arab, even though
>most Algerians do not manage well classical arab, even
>though there were no educational books in classical
>arab to teach children. Over the years, the government
>has tried to impose more and more classical arab, to
>the dismay of all those speaking berberes languages
>(such as the Touareg). From my friends in Algers, I
>know that university education is still partly in
>french, in particular in scientific and technical
>domains. But from what I understood, the algerian
>educational system is in great part a failure, as it
>is taught in a language that many Algerian do not
>manage well, as it results in diplomas of little value
>on european or american market, and as many students
>end up secondary school with such a poor knowledge in
>french that they are unable to come to french
>universities or even to follow well algerian
>university classes. Possibly, knowing more of english
>language might help but it seems currently limited.
>
>
>Two things raised my attention greatly.
>First, a university is currently being built in
>Tamanrasset. For now, students usually go to Algers to
>follow upper studies (about 1500 km away, which
>evidently implies only quite wealthy people can afford
>this).
>
>
>Second, as we crossed villages in the mountains, we
>were surrounded by kids, from 6 to 12. Only the eldest
>could really communicate a bit with us. We had some
>pens for them, which we distributed. But it was not
>really what they were looking for. The youngest wanted
>paper mostly. But all asked for books. Only books. Not
>food, nor money, nor sweets, only books. And they
>wanted books in french language. I told them "but you
>can't read french". But this is what they wanted
>nevertheless.
>
>When I asked to my favorite guide, he told me "they
>learn french at school, a little bit, but they have no
>opportunity to practice. Except for a few tourists,
>who could they talk french to ? At least, with books,
>they can learn a bit".
>
>I suspect the school probably only has a couple of
>worn out ones. Possibly only a couple of worn out
>books in arab as well.
>I dig a couple of my son books to give them. Not much.
>If I had guessed, it would have been easy to bring a
>few more.
>
>As I understood, analphabetism is rising over there,
>especially among girls. If the kids do not speak
>french, their access to university is limited. And the
>main economical resource of the area is tourism, most
>tourists being french speaking.
>
>Computers in these villages is out of question. They
>have electricity but I doubt a computer could survive
>long in such an environment (I spent two hours in the
>local gendarmerie, they have desks, paper, pens and
>sand). However, most of our youngest guides had an
>email adress and went on the net thanks to cybercafes
>in Tamanrasset.
>
>There might be things to do no ?
>
>
I think the French Wikipedia have some categories good enough to become
WikiReaders.
(ie. India, Astronomy, Ancien Egypt, etc.)

Aoineko


subject: [Wikipedia-l] start a new Wikipedia / Wikinews

body:
On Sat, 1 Jan 2005 14:17:59 -0700, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> But then wouldn't these local pages start to become biased? There
> would undoubtedly be many more Canadian editors at the Canada article
> than Americans, not in small part because of the redirect.
>
> I really think there should be some way to integrate national news
> into the mainpage so it remains edited by all...

While I agree that the local pages would attract disporportionate
representation from people from the country in question, I don't think
this is a big problem.  Anyone can edit the pages in question, and I'd
hope that Wikinews would discourage any trend of only allowing, say,
Canadians to edit http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Canada.

My argument is that at some point, you have to specialize to be
useful.  Articles of global interest, like American foreign policy or
the Asian tsunami, obviously should be on the front page.  But there
are many stories of particular interest to specific groups of people
which wouldn't belong there.

For example: Canada's national news broadcaster (the CBC) is currently
running a story (see [1]) about some nurses at an English-speaking
hospital in the (mostly French-speaking) province of Quebec who were
fired for failing a French proficiency test.

The issue relates to a number recurring themes in Canadian politics:
language relations, controversy over the promotion of French by the
Quebec government, discontent in Quebec's anglophone minority.  While
this probably touches on analogous themes in other bilingual nations,
I wouldn't expect a lot of non-Canadians to care, so I it wouldn't
belong on the Wikinews front page.  But I would argue it's important
enough to Canadians to belong on the proposed
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Canada.

Steve

[1] http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/national/2005/01/05/quebec-nurses050105.html


from_name: Anthere

body:
pour cela que j'ai pr?cis? "gentil" ;-)

NSK a ?crit:
> On Wednesday 05 January 2005 07:07, Anthere wrote:
>
>>Pas d'inqui?tude Traroth. NSK est un gentil SDF couchant sous les ponts.
>
>
> Les murs ont des oreilles...
>


from_name: Pochung Chen

body:
Dear All,

  We would like to open a Wiktionary for the Amis language. Amis is an
Austronesian language used by the Amis -- one of the Austronesian
people in Taiwan. The Amis account for about one third of Taiwan's
indigenous population (i.e. 130 thousand), however, many of the younger
generation do not speak the language and till now there is still no
exact ststistic report of the number of real speakers.

  There are two prevailing writing systems of this language: the
Presbyterian Church system and the International Phonetic Symbol
system, the later is used only within the academic circle. We would
like to edit a Wiktionary which basically employs the Presbyterian
Church system but also notes the IPS so that readers can also know the
exact pronounciations.

  At this moment there are at least three people who are willing to
commit to this project. They are Nakao Eki, Afah Lisin, and Tai-ni
Tsou. The former two are native speakers and the later two as
ethnographers are also familiar with the academic Amis writing system.
Pektiong Tan (zh-min-nan:pektiong) will help those people to get
familiar with the wikipedia system.

  We would prefer to set the default interface language to be Mandarin
with traditional character used in Taiwan (zh-tw) since most of the
potential user of this wiktionary can read Mandarin with traditional
character.

  Proposed domain name:
  http://amis.wiktionary.org/

  Language tag for Amis:
  ISO 639-2: N.A.
  ISO 639-3 (Draft): Ami
  SIL: ALV
  RFC-3066: i-ami

  Sincerely,
  Nakao Eki,
  Afah Lisin,
  Tai-ni Tsou,
  Pektiong Tan

Some info about Taiwanese aborigine:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_aborigine


subject: [Foundation-l] Forking the Wiki

body:
Just let me guess : you're american...

Traroth

 --- Scott Nelson <scott at penguinstorm.com> a ?crit :
> Can this be taken off list?
>
> This conversation long since lost any relevance to
> the wiki project.
>

D?couvrez le nouveau Yahoo! Mail : 250 Mo d'espace de stockage pour vos mails !
Cr?ez votre Yahoo! Mail sur http://fr.mail.yahoo.com/


subject: [Foundation-l] Forking the Wiki


from_name: Nicholas Knight

subject: [WikiEN-l] User Irate here.

body:
Fred Bauder wrote:
> We need your user name.

He gave it to you. "Irate".

 From looking at it, I think Jfdwolff has misinterpreted the 3RR as
meaning *block* on third revert, not "max 3 reverts".


from_name: Sean Barrett

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Old Norse

body:
Mark Williamson stated for the record:

> Apparently you do not realise that Yann has indeed slandered against
> me. He attacked me verbally with no provocation.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

--
  Sean Barrett     | When I become evil overlord, I will
  sean at epoptic.com | dress in bright and cheery colors, and
                   | so throw my enemies into confusion.


from_name: jneden at bellsouth.net

subject: [Wikipedia-l] On ang:

body: I have to say that the ang: looks like it will be a very useful tool to understanding Old English, as the ,,w?sd?mb?c'' ties Old English into topics well familiar to modern English speakers. I commend it for existing. Finally, something other than Beowulf. :-)


subject: [WikiEN-l] User Irate here.

body:
Fred Bauder wrote:
> So is he unblocked now?

Uh, no. I don't have that ability. I'm not a sysop. Even if I were, I'd
be unlikely to have reversed the block so quickly without someone else
looking at it, too, or Jfdwolff confirming what (s)he thought (s)he was
doing.


subject: [Foundation-l] Forking the Wiki

body:
This was easy to guess looking my email... :)
And the point IS relevant : I think to do such a
"universal" memorial is not possible, because of the
sensitivity of the potential contributors, and to try
it will degenerate into a chaos. Can you imagine
Palestinians and Israelis, Iraqis and Americans
writing about dead people, killed by the "other one" ?
I can't...

Traroth

 --- Scott Nelson <scott at penguinstorm.com> a ?crit :
> On Jan 5.2005, at 08:24, Traroth wrote:
>
> > Just let me guess : you're american...
>
> Not sure this is relevant, or that it has any place
> on the list
> either....I mean - the point is you've long since
> stopped discussing
> anything wiki related.
>
> But no, I am not American. And you should be more
> careful about making
> assumptions and jumping to conclusions.
>
> Let me guess - you're French?
>

D?couvrez le nouveau Yahoo! Mail : 250 Mo d'espace de stockage pour vos mails !
Cr?ez votre Yahoo! Mail sur http://fr.mail.yahoo.com/


subject: [Foundation-l] Forking the Wiki


from_name: Mark Williamson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Old Norse

body:
Apparently you do not realise that Yann has indeed slandered against
me. He attacked me verbally with no provocation.

Mark

On Wed, 05 Jan 2005 10:31:58 +0100, Gerard Meijssen
<gerardm at myrealbox.com> wrote:
> Olve Utne wrote:
>
> > Hello Vegard, Mark, etc.,
> >
> > An Old Norse project sounds fine with me -- either as a Wikipedia or
> > as a Wiktionary. I am reasonably competent in Old Norse and can
> > provide a bit of help along the way -- although I cannot promise to
> > spend a lot of time on it, since there are so many other things I need
> > to tend to also (including, first and foremost, the Nynorsk Wikipedia
> > and the English one).
> >
> If you are interested in setting up content in Wiktionary, I am happy to
> help you set this up. There are several strategies, you can be part of a
> wiktionary in another language like any of the other Scandinavian
> languages or you can set up as an independent wiktionary. When you set
> up like part of another language, the Italian wiktionary is a model to
> follow, it is really great to see the large body of words in Napolitan
> (moving towards a 1000 words).
>
> When you start to add words consider that in a wiktionary you would like
> to have both writing systems; we have these for several languages
> already. Chinese and Japanese are best developped on the cooperating
> wiktionaries. This would make the content much more usefull. Regarding
> different spellings you could either only select the preferred spelling
> (and perhaps note the alternate spellings as well) or you could have
> seperate entries with these spellings.
>
> The wikimedia projects being ISO-639 oriented, a wikipedia project would
> indeed be with an existing code for old Norse. However, in the 639-3.4
> version there are two codes for old Norse, non and onz are the TWO codes
> that are mentioned. It would be best to find out what the difference is
> between "Norse, old" and "old Norse". It may just be an inconsistency in
> this document that is in a "review and comment" phase.
>
> As to Mark, I leave him alone as long as he keeps a civil tongue. I do
> not appreciate it when he attacks people like Yann. Mark can and does
> make good observations and, as I mentioned before discussions about
> languages are best kept on this list as it is important for how the
> wikipedia projects develop. So, as far as I am concerned, I will not
> attack Mark as long as he keeps a civil tongue, his accusing people of
> slander is not civil nor helpfull to his cause.
>
> Thanks,
>     GerardM
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: special characters

body:
On 5 Jan 2005, at 14:18, Brion Vibber wrote:

> What exactly does this "gobbledygook" look like?

Platoon,

As Gruppenfuhrerrr I mussst take exception to the "quoting out" of the
word gobbledygook.
This personal favorite of mine among all English words is a perfectly
valid member of the club, as any decent dictionary will prove
[http://gobbledygook.word.sytes.org/], and should not be discriminated
against.
Ai protest zis diskriminatshion in ze strongest possible terms ANT VILL
DEFENT gobbledygook's honor of TO TEH DAETH!!!

Thank you.
As you were, gentlemen.

-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]]
     www.ropersonline.com

PS: Gobbledygook. I like saying that. Gobbledygook. :-)

PPS: Actually, WordNet's entry is incomplete. From my work in (English
language) IT telephone support, I recall that most contemporary Irish
and UK business world PC users understand gobbledygook to mean "a bunch
of garbled, seemingly random characters". (Which is what Giuseppe was
referring to. But most of yers knew that anyway.)