from_name: Dori

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia for Cell Phones - see kwickee.com as
	well

body:
On Mon, 19 Jul 2004 15:55:52 +0100, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
>
> > I don't know the solution, but it sure would be sweet to have some
> > means of bulk uploading, for example ftp or something like that.
>
> Personally, I would very much like to see a textbox where one can enter
> a URL that Wikipedia will then fetch automatically. In order to allow
> bulk upload, one might as well have a textarea where one can enter
> several URLs. (I might actually do that myself if no-one beats me to it.)
>
> Yes, I do realise that this makes it easy to upload copyrighted images
> from websites. But I don't think that's a problem: The wiki way is not
> to make things impossible, but to make things back-tracable and
> undoable, so all it needs is to put the URL in the image description,
> and everyone can check if it's on a website that has copyrighted images.

Any bulk uploading should probably be limited to admins as its
potential for abuse is pretty evident.

--
[[en:User:Dori]]


list: foundation-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject:
[Foundation-l] Re: Rethinking Meta (was- Wikiquote now
	has	subdomains)

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>--- Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
>
>
>>... which was woefully incomplete. I am completely in favor of properly
>>internationalizing MediaWiki and putting a bounty on the implementation.
>>However, such an implementation should be generic, i.e. it should allow us
>>to migrate Wikipedia itself into that system. This requires some way to
>>deal with namespace conflicts - e.g. wikimedia.org/en/Merchandising vs.
>>wikimedia.org/de/Merchandising (the current Merchandising page on Meta is
>>actually German), and we would have to set up automatic redirects for
>>subdomain access. Given that, setting subdomains up now while we don't
>>have this advanced code will put us well on the road to a nice general
>>solution for all Wikimedia projects once we have it.
>>
>>
>
>If there is a problem with naming conflicts, then that is a very good reason to
>have separate wikis. That problem does not really exist for meta, wikisource,
>and wikibooks. In short, I think we should only divide things up if there is a
>compelling reason. Meta in *particular* is there for multiproject and
>multilingual coordination. How is that coordination going to happen on separate
>wikis?
>
>Sorry, I will not support balkanization of Meta. We should work on improving
>the interface situation instead.
>
I really don't like engaging in me-too-ism, but I also don't llike it
when only a couple people are left to carry the can.

I too oppose balkanization of Meta and other projects.  People would
certainly feel more at ease working in their own language groups, but
always at the risk of not seeing what others are doing.  Once the
languages are separated there would never be any incentive to get them
back together again, even if the right software were developed.

So far having all languages in one project has worked fine in
Wikisource, which is not to say that it doesn't have interesting
challenges.  Contributions have already been made in a significant
number of languages, most of which I can't read at all.  There is a need
to respect other languages, especially on the part of those who speak an
imperializing language like English.  Speakers of other languages are
aware of the dominant role of English, and it really doesn't require a
huge effort of Wikilove for English speakers to exercise sufficient respect.

Ec


list: wikimedia-l


list: wikien-l

from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [WikiEN-l] Stop the bus: threats are out of line

body:
I placed the following warning on the user talk page of Stopthebus18:

"You aren't allowed to threaten other Wikipedians, in case you didn't
know. Your remarks on my user talk page were out of line. Kindly confine
your comments to the topic of improving the Wikipedia, or failing that
just be friendly. Otherwise, I'll have to ask the arbitration committee
to look into this matter. --Uncle Ed 16:56, 19 Jul 2004 (UTC)"

This was in response to

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=User_talk:Ed_Poor&diff=472917
3&oldid=4729140

...the latest in a series of increasingly hostile remarks.

Ed Poor


from_name: Mark Richards

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Should MP3 files be allowed on wikipedia - Current
	ongoing discussion.

body:
I thought so too, but it's sometimes difficult to know
what comes out of the box when you are running a whole
lot of installed stuff.
Mark

--- "Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales" <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Mark Richards wrote:
> > I agree, there is no compelling reason not to use
> ogg
> > or something else that is free. Is there a
> > 'mainstream' player (wmp, real or something) that
> > plays ogg these days?
>
> I am under the impression that it's trivial for
> people to play
> ogg in all the major players.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogg_Vorbis#Software
>
> --Jimbo
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

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list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Stan Shebs

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia for Cell Phones - see kwickee.com
	as	well

body:
Caroline Ford wrote:

>The time in adding images is in preparing them for publication (cropping etc) and adding them
>to articles.
>
>
Amen. Gotta think about file size, contrast, sharpness. If WP aims
to compete with EB, we need to get our pictures as close to a
professional look as possible.

>Special:Unusedimages says that we have 26,121 unused images. I am aware than mediawiki
>1.3 has a problem in this area but we don't have a grip on image use at the moment.
>
It must be a lot less than 26,000. Everytime I randomly sample, almost
all of the images are in some article somewhere already. Looking at
the list is basically a waste of time until the corrupted data
tables get fixed.

Stan


from_name: Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales

subject: [Foundation-l] How could information flow ?

body:
Jerome Jamnicky wrote:
> Maybe these are stupid ideas or maybe not, but I'd like to be able to
> brainstorm on IRC without having to worry about doing damage control on the
> mailing list as a result.

While I don't agree with the ideas at all, I do very strongly support
you on the idea that we should all be able to brainstorm without
worring about damage control.  A culture which is too quick to chop
people's heads off for stating unpopular ideas is a culture where
people may tend to self-censor to avoid getting in trouble.

--Jimbo


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: How could information flow ?

body:
Anthere wrote:
> >As a matter of practicality, it is not possible to conduct high-level
> >policy discussions in any other language than English.  And this is
> >not just because of the board being English, ...
>
> Uh ?
>
> :-)

:-)

I meant, well, again I put my foot in my mouth.  I should have written
"the most common language spoken by the board is English".

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] Some links to look at

body:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Kim_Jong-il&action=history
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Fidel_Castro&action=history

I really have no comment about this, other than "good grief".

--Jimbo


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Foundation-l] splitting meta in sub domains

body:
Translation for french people

Erik propose de faire une collection de sous domaines
pour meta.
Il soutient que nous serons plus efficace dans notre
collaboration globale en b?n?ficiant d'un sous site
personnel, chacun restant d?sormais bien gentillement
dans son domaine perso. Les pages de d?cision et
r?gles communes pourront ?tre traduites.

Anthere n'est pas d'accord et pr?f?rerait que le
language de l'interface puisse ?tre choisi dans les
pr?f?rences, et un syst?me de navigation entre langues
mis au point.

Erik Moeller wrote:
> Anthere-
>
>>Meta is the only place where we can really meet, and
find information
>>that someone else left.
>
>
> Can you give me a single example where splitting
Meta by subdomain would
> do any harm in bringing people together? I would
like to move this
> discussion from the general, emotional "Don't split
us up!" to the
> specific, rational "This is where it would cause
problems" level. What
> recent policy discussion or vote would have been
harmed by this approach?

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Membership_fees and
related pages
A lot of it was the result of online discussions, more
by email, and more on meta. I cannot really figure
spreading the result of these on 150 subwikis, and I
cannot really figure following discussion about it on
150 subwikis either. A central place is the only
option.

A central place where everyone is allowed to give his
opinion.

> Let's take the "Stewards" discussion and vote as an
example. The whole
> discussion was mostly English as was the voting
page. If we used
> subdomains, we could have made it a requirement that
the page be
> translated into the main languages before we vote.
We could have
> aggregated the votes from the different language
Wikimedias so that each
> community could express their preferences in their
language. We could have
> translated important arguments from the discussion
in realtime (in the
> form of localized "pro" and "cons" lists, for
example).

We could have

Did we ?

> This is a lot better than having a single page with
the occasional piece
> of untranslated French or Japanese between a couple
of participants. In
> that case, the main part of the page is English -
excluding those who
> don't speak it - and some parts of the discussion
are not - excluding
> those who don't speak that language. It's a
lose-lose situation.

Spreading the discussion in 150 subwikis is the
lose-lose situation.

>>In my experience, it does bring people together,
provided that you
>>welcome the interaction.
>
>
> I can't interact with someone whose language I do
not speak, unless
> someone translates it for me. A Wikipedia-style
setup facilitates that.

No. You will not be able to interact with the others
in both cases, but in the current case, you will at
least see that they make effort to communicate. Or you
at least give them the opportunity to try. When they
are parked in a submetawiki, you will not even know
they tried to communicate.

>>Plus, there are japanese and chinese people
currently over there. We
>>have Tomos, Suisui, Britty etc...
>
>
> Exactly - the people on Meta are mostly the ones who
speak some amount of
> English. Someone who doesn't speak any English won't
even understand the
> user interface.

Correct.
Then what about fixing the interface so that we could
choose the interface language ? This would be the
win-win situation, not packing people in another
place.

We could also find a way to navigate between
languages.

>>This is what is happening on the multinlingual
mailing lists, because
>>each time someone DARE putting a word in a language
different than
>>english, he is severely told that "of course, he
could write in english,
>>because really, no one can understand him".
>
>
> First, I must remind you that my main objection in
the last debate on this
> matter was using a different language in order to
exclude others from a
> certain comment. This is a completely separate
issue, and I would have the
> same objection on Meta.

> Second, if you want to reach the *largest number* of
people, you should
> either use English or make sure that what you say
gets translated into
> English. That should be very obvious, no? It would
be helpful if you could
> acknowledge this simple point.

I acknowledge this point.

But this is not a valid argument to technically
separate people.

> This is about giving non-English projects a larger
voice instead of
> relying on multilingual people like you to act as
mouthpieces for those
> who don't speak English.

Ah, the mouthpiece is back :-)
You have not been much on meta and mediawiki these
days Erik. Or you would have seen that now two french
people are now part of the developers, and on meta,
people like Villy, Looxix, Yann just to cite a few,
are very regularly participating. And we definitly do
not always agree. They participate to wikimedia wide
issues by being on *common* mailing list, and *common
meta*. Park us on separate meta, and on separate
mailing list, our interaction with you all will stop.

It just make no sense to try to maintain most pages on
meta in 150 languages. What makes our force is to make
them together. It would be great that they are
translated, and I intend to have a french version of
the wikimediafoundation website the more I can.
However, there are just not enough people interested
to do the translation. This is a structural issue we
can not go against, however hard we try.

Just like there is a Wikipedia community for
> every language, there should be a Wikimedia
community for each. Once you
> have something like ja.wikimedia.org, the creation
of a Japanese Wikimedia
> chapter becomes more likely as well because people
will find it far easier
> to interact when there is no constant interference
by what is *effectively
> indistinguishable from random noise* to them. The
problem of creating
> project-wide policies is addressed through board
review and voting
> standards.
>
> It may be a good idea to put this issue to a
Wikimedia-wide vote if we
> fail to reach consensus.
>
> Regards,
>
> Erik

Ah voting !

Yes, sure.

Well, you are welcome :-)
But I would be happy that this vote is not a 3 days
sampling this time, but really a wikimedia-wide vote.
With say 1 month of discussion, translation of all
relevant argument in all major languages, and at least
2 week long vote.

My, this would really be a major decision for our
future as a global community. It deserves that.

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body:
--- "Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales" <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Anthere wrote:
> > >As a matter of practicality, it is not possible
> to conduct high-level
> > >policy discussions in any other language than
> English.  And this is
> > >not just because of the board being English, ...
> >
> > Uh ?
> >
> > :-)
>
> :-)
>
> I meant, well, again I put my foot in my mouth.  I
> should have written
> "the most common language spoken by the board is
> English".
>
> --Jimbo

But seriously Jimbo, given my bad english and my
horrible accent, I *really* read that as a compliment
!

;-)

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from_name: Erik Moeller

subject:
[Foundation-l] Re: Rethinking Meta (was- Wikiquote now has
	subdomains)

body:
Daniel-
> If there is a problem with naming conflicts, then that is a very good reason
> to have separate wikis.

The distinction between "separate wikis" and "one wiki" is a lot blurrier
than you describe it. Having proper multilanguage support within a single
installation would lead to a setup very similar to our current one from
the user POV, but with a lot of advantages which come with having a single
database (e.g. it becomes very easy to have combined RC, watchlists,
single sign-on etc.).

> That problem does not really exist for meta, wikisource, and wikibooks.

Naming conflicts are largely independent of the purpose of the wiki; the
larger a wiki gets the more likely they will become. Right now you could
have a "Merchandising (German)" and a "Merchandising (English)" page, for
example, but that is really just a workaround for a proper design and it's
going to bite us in the ass sooner or later (e.g. template names are
usually short and likely to cause conflicts).

The current MediaWiki design - separate installation for each language -
was flawed from the start. It has served us reasonably well, but if we
redesign it, we should do it properly.

> In short, I think we should only divide things up
> if there is a compelling reason. Meta in *particular* is there for
> multiproject and multilingual coordination. How is that coordination going
> to happen on separate wikis?

The only compelling reason for having separate wiki installations is that
it is the only way for the current setup to achieve
- see only the language you care about
- different language user interfaces (including MediaWiki: namespace)
- standard interlanguage links
- no naming conflicts

These things would be important on Meta as well to encourage international
cooperation and reduce English dominance, hence my support for subdomains.
With a properly designed system, we don't need to use separate installs
for Meta, Wikipedia or any other wiki - they are all going to behave the
same; you only see the languages you care about. (Emphasis on plural
here.)

So, for example, when you would go to www.wikimedia.org, it would take the
preferred language from your browser and show you, e.g.,
www.wikimedia.org/de/, but prominently show the other languages as well.
You could set the order in your user prefs if you want. If you create a
regular link from under de/, it would point to a German page. If you
create a link from under en/, it would point to an English page. In your
recent changes view, you would see only the RC for the languages which you
have set in your browser or MediaWiki prefs.

The only thing that would change about the effective user experience on
Meta is that it would become a lot more convenient, and that you could
easily move only in your local language if you want (this is already
possible in a half-assed way through the localized Main Pages). The
balkanization you speak of does not exist here. And if you're afraid of
too much language separation, there's no reason not to allow languages to
be used liberally, e.g. on discussion pages, even in the subspace which is
technically French, German or English.

Now, with a separate install, you lose certain functionality, which I
agree is important, such as having multiple languages in one RC view, and
having a single login. As Angela pointed out, the current interlanguage
link system is also needlessly redundant. I can agree that this creates
more trouble in the short term than it is worth, and that it leads to a
certain amount of balkanization, although I think that this is being
exaggerated for dramatic effect.

But then, if you agree that doing a proper multilingual setup for all
wikis is a good and necessary thing, we should set a sizable bounty on it
ASAP and do it the right way rather than have ever larger inconsistencies.
This can be combined with single sign-on at least on a project level,
something which a lot of people have been waiting for. I would be willing
to write up a bounty proposal which specifies the necessary functionality
if there is general agreement that this is what we should do.

Regards,

Erik


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Enrico Weigelt

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Announce: Going to start phase4

body:
* Thomas Luft <tluft at web.de> wrote:

<snip>
> could you implement the deletion of single reversions so that copyright
> violations can be purged easily? This is a long time request especially for the
> German WP.
hmm, I'd also implement deletion of whole (old) articles.
I'm using wiki as internal knowledge base and there'e often things that
are really expired and should be removed ...

cu
--
---------------------------------------------------------------------
 Enrico Weigelt    ==   metux IT service

  phone:     +49 36207 519931         www:       http://www.metux.de/
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from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki fork

body:
Dori wrote:
> I don't know if you already have done this, but before starting on any
> major changes, I would suggest you talk to some of the core developers
> (Brion, Tim, etc.) to make sure that such changes will not be so
> detrimental to performance as to be useless.

Enrico is free to "start a forkoff" without the approval of the existing
development team and without CVS access, after all MediaWiki is licensed
under GPL. I'll do my best to make the main line of MediaWiki
development outcompete it in terms of features, stability and
performance. Choosing which branch to use for Wikipedia could then be
left up to the users and the Board of Trustees.

-- Tim Starling


list: wiktionary-l

subject: [Wiktionary-l] UTF-8 and converting all wiktionaries

body:
Gerard.Meijssen wrote:

>On the beer parlour of en:wiktionary, Tim Starling says that it would be helpfull if all wiktionaries work in the same way.  The article was about UTF-8.
>
>The opportunity now is to have all wiktionaries transfer to UTF-8. This is the only way to have articles with titles like ?????????? or ???????????? or ?????. As the purpose of wiktionaries is to have articles of words in any language, it should be obvious that this is the way to go.
>
>PS I would like these articles in nl:wiktionary :) GerardM
>
>
English Wiktionary shifted to UTF-8 at a very early stage of its
development.  There are still a few minor problems left over from the
transfer, but none important enough to make us rush to clean them up.
nl ended up with something else because the software was copied from the
nl Wikipedia in the interest of having something workable available
quickly.  I don't think that there is much opposition to having all the
Wiktionaries on UTF-8.

It is only speculation on my part to say that Tim would favour having
every project on UTF-8 (he can speak best for himself), but the Beer
Parlour context had to do with first letter capitalization.  See
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Beer_parlour/case-sensitivity_vote
at the very end.

Please don't confuse the two issues.

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] Some links to look at

body:
I think the real problem here, though, is 172 just reverting over and
over and over.  That's bad behavior, and he should know better.

We can argue about whether it is POV to call these two dictators
dictators.  But getting into an edit war lasting that long over a
change that amounts to a single word... strikes me as unwise.

>The user adding dictator has been ignoring comments on their talk page and blanking it.

The user is by no means a model user.  He vandalized Adolf Hitler,
clearly out of protest for how he was being treated (badly) by 172.
That was wrong.

But, accusing him of "ignoring comments" is pretty much mistaken, I
think.  There were only a couple of comments there; one he responded
to, the other was just a threat from 172.

> He's also only editing on articles relating to marxist rulers/dictators.

So what?  Is there any rule which says that people have to edit a wide
array of topics?

> Our articles could really do without people adding in random prejudices. For many people
> NPOV in politics articles is impossible to comprehend.

I hardly think it's a "random prejudice" to suppose that Kim Jong-Il
is a dictator.  In my opinion, it's a valid edit.  I don't agree with
the edit, ultimately, but it's a valid edit nonetheless.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] Announce: Going to start phase4

body:
* Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org> wrote:
> >awaiting you comments :)
>
> Sure. Who are you? Do you have CVS access?
no.

<snip>
> Why are you doing a unilateral re-write?
There are some things I really require.

> Why aren't the rest of the developers invited?
This *was* an invite.

<snip>
> Why should your unilateral re-write become THE mediawiki?
It shouldn't. I just want some improvements and I'm going to implement them.
If this someday becomes "THE mediawiki" is really irrelevant for me.
The only point that matters is that I'm going to implement my wishes
and it would be nice if others also enjoy them and perhaps some could
help a little bit.

I never had the intention to replace the existing wiki and will
never have. If people enjoy my work they may use it, if not then
they should stay on current wiki.

cu
--
---------------------------------------------------------------------
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  phone:     +49 36207 519931         www:       http://www.metux.de/
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from_name: Rowan Collins

subject: [Wikitech-l] RFC: Labels [WAS: Announce: Going to start phase4]

body:
> BTW: lets make some wiki page for new feature requests.

Take a look at:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_feature_request_and_bug_report_discussion

And, of course, also at:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=34373&atid=411195

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


body:
* Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org> wrote:

forgotton to anwser:

<snip>
> Why are you using the obsolete "phase N" naming convention
> rather than the current MediaWiki 1.x (or 2.x) versioning scheme?
Because due the major changes it probably won't be an clear
descendant in the way that the newer version is completely
(backwards) compatible with the current on.

I'll never release some higher version of some software which
is not backwards compatible. In that case it is another branch,
so another package.

cu
--
---------------------------------------------------------------------
 Enrico Weigelt    ==   metux IT service

  phone:     +49 36207 519931         www:       http://www.metux.de/
  fax:       +49 36207 519932         email:     contact at metux.de
  cellphone: +49 174 7066481
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Sorting interwiki links

body:
Andre Engels wrote:

> On Mon, 19 Jul 2004 13:25:38 +0100 Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
>
>> Andre Engels wrote:
>>
>>> In the Pywikipediabot, it is now specified to use alphabetical order
>>> by language name
>>
>> How do you alphabetically sort ??, ???, etc.?
>
> Using the most common transliteration into the Latin alphabet.
> However, I know that on nl: exactly this problem was the reason to use
> alphabetic by code instead. The same might hold for de:, I don't know
> about them.

To be more correct it should be "romanization" instead of
"transliteration".  It has to do with how a set of non-alphabetical
symbols in a language are represented with the Latin alphabet.  Pinyin
representation may be close to the pronunciation of Chinese in some
European languages, but that is not an essential element of
romanization.  It should be valid for use in contexts of all languages.
That would make everyone's life much simpler.  The difficulty may be in
attempting to determine what is "most common".  At one times the
Wade-Giles system prevailed for the romanization into English, but that
has rapidly become obsolete.  I imagine that there is a similar
situation for other languages.  Japanese romanji may be in a similar
situation.

Ec


from_name: Domas Mituzas

body:
> Some things I've already done:
> * rewriting some parts to run over patTemplate

What are the pros/cons against current mediawiki development line and phpTAL?

> * splitted off the wiki into a (system-wide) library part and
>  some very little stub for index.php -> allows multiple instances
>   to share the same code and so ease updates.

Well, that's where the mediawiki development is heading.

> What I'm going to do:
> * database/storage abstraction (i.e. postgresql backend)

Nice idea. Though, the main idea is to separate data processing
code from UI, the data abstraction isn't too difficult to implement.
And even now we've got working versions of PostgreSQL mediawiki.
Possibly a working feature in 1.4 or later 1.3 versions :)

> * wiki middleware (for article storage, wiki-syntax parsing, ...)

Well, with object-oriented design mediawiki already has
classes for article storage (Article) and parsing (Parser).
What is going to be else?

> * support multiple parsers and converters (also xml<->wiki)

Parsing human text into computer text is a nice task.
Especially if your XML would be usable with XSLT.

> * frontend completely patTemplate-based
> * integration into contentbuilder2/baseTemplate2 framework
>   (so the wiki is just a box and can be easily imported into
>   some other application

I don't wear UI-hat, so I won't be able to measure the value of
theese additions. Still, I've got a question. What is your motivation?
Why do you write about theese features? Why is it called phase4
instead of someotherwiki? Does it really have the best value for project?

Cheers,
Domas


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] Article validation

body:
Of course, I can add a text field. I take it a summary-like field
(VARCHAR 255) would be sufficient?

Magnus

Sj wrote:

>Hi, Mangus!  This is good news.  Would it be possible not to name
>this table "validate", if this is all it will contain, and instead something
>like "article_votes"? Otherwise, could there also be a text field
>associated with each vote?
>
> I hold out hope that a validation table will be associated with some
>form of 'validation' which associates a text field with each
>"validation"/"review"
>(perhaps a numerical vote like this; perhaps distinct from such votes).
>
>--Sj--
>
>
>On Sun, 18 Jul 2004 22:54:42 +0200, Magnus Manske <magnus.manske at web.de> wrote:
>
>
>>I have put some preliminary code for article validation into CVS HEAD.
>>
>>You'll need to add the table "validate" (tables.sql) to the DB. Then,
>>(for "Main Page", as example) go to
>>   index.php?title=Special:Validate&article=Main_Page
>>
>>Every logged-in user can "vote"
>>* for every article
>>* in multiple versions
>>* in multiple categories
>>* in a variable range (so far, 1-5 points per category)
>>This offers maximum flexibility, but can be "dumbed down" to a single
>>yes/no decision. No database entry equals the "no opinion" choice.
>>
>>I hard-coded the available choices into SpecialValidate.php, but that
>>can be moved to the language files,
>>
>>So far, *no* way of extracting that information exists. Some statistic
>>output is likely to be my next attempt.
>>
>>The special page is also *not* linked from the articles yet. I'd prefer
>>a "tab" like edit, history and the like instead of the special page, but
>>I didn't look into the coding just yet.
>>
>>That's it for today :-)
>>Magnus
>>_______________________________________________
>>Wikitech-l mailing list
>>Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
>>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>>
>>
>>
>_______________________________________________
>Wikitech-l mailing list
>Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>


from_name: Rick

subject: [WikiEN-l] Some links to look at

body:
"Clearly from the US"?  Why is that?  Your comment shows prejudice on your part.

And why is no one complaining about 172's part in this fiasco?  Why aren't both of them blocked for 24 hours for multiple reverts?

RickK

Caroline Ford <caroline at secretlondon.me.uk> wrote:

It'll probably be a young kid, clearly from the US.

Our articles could really do without people adding in random prejudices. For many people NPOV in politics articles is impossible to comprehend.

Caroline/Secretlondon

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from_name: Timwi

body:
Emmanuel Engelhart wrote:

> Is somebody against the idea of sorting interwiki links in the alphanumerical
> order (by language: en always before fr) ? It will be easier to find a
> corresponding article in a specific language thus.

On the English Wikipedia we've already been doing it that way (sorting
by the language code), but on the Hungarian Wikipedia (for example) they
seem to think that English should always come first.


body:
Stan Shebs wrote:

> Caroline Ford wrote:
>
>> The time in adding images is in preparing them for publication
>> (cropping etc) and adding them to articles.
>
> Amen. Gotta think about file size, contrast, sharpness. If WP aims
> to compete with EB, we need to get our pictures as close to a
> professional look as possible.

It would not be a serious blot on 1.0 if it had fewer images than some
people want.  This is probably an area where significant sacrifices can
be made for the sake of getting the book out.  Images can always be
added back in future editions.

Ec


from_name: Dan Miller

subject: [WikiEN-l] Secretlondon's summary of edit wars

body:
> It'll probably be a young kid, clearly from the US.

Of course. Because the U.S. clearly has a monopoly on
cranks of all stripes, especially the right-wing
variety. Please avoid this type of blanket
condemnation in the future--it's insulting and
unbecoming, esp. from an editor whom I admire.

Meelar

=====
In one of a series of interviews since teaming up on Tuesday, Kerry and Edwards predicted they would win the political fight over which party best exemplifies the values and ethics of most Americans, but Kerry said they would wage that battle on their terms and not what he called the Republican Party's "little political, hot-button, cultural, wedge-driven, poll-driven values."

--Washington Post, July 11, 2004

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body:
Andre Engels wrote:

> In the Pywikipediabot, it is now specified to use alphabetical order by
> language name

How do you alphabetically sort ??, ???, etc.?


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] Some links to look at

body:
I'm not real clear about the current status of this rule. One thing is
certain though, 172 is throughly familiar with the rule and breaking it with
impunity.

Fred

From: Rick <giantsrick13 at yahoo.com>
Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
Date: Mon, 19 Jul 2004 12:00:52 -0700 (PDT)
To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Some links to look at

Why aren't both of them blocked for 24 hours for multiple reverts?

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subject: [Wikitech-l] Compare selected versions javascript

body:
Can someone explain to me the purpose of the "Compare selected
versions" Javascript?  It makes no sense to me, and it really slows
down the page for me.  When I try to compare two versions, I have to
wait a long time for the page to change to reflect my selections.

Conceptually, I don't see the purpose.  It is perfectly legal to
compare any two versions of the article.  So turning on and off radio
buttons adds nothing to the functionality of the page, as far as I can
understand anyway.

I think I understand the difficulty with having a single line of
checkboxes or radio buttons... when you have 2 checked already, and
the user clicks a 3rd, how to interpret what they want?  Presumably
they want to have unchecked one of the others, but which one?

But the current solution strikes me as inelegant.

--Jimbo


from_name: Robert

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Internal criticism of a religious movement: What should
	our policy be?

body:
On the Unitarian-Universalist article, a subject came up
that would be of interest (I believe) to anyone working on
any religion articles. I recently added an internal
criticism of a religious movement"

  Rev. Earl K. Holt III, minister of King's Chapel in
  Boston, the nation's first Unitarian church has recently
  been at the lead of offering internal criticism of the
  direction of the UU Church. In a recent interview with
  the Boston Globe he stated "I'm ready to defend now the
  hypothesis that Unitarian Universalism as it presently
  exists is not in any meaningful way...a continuity of
  either of the traditions" [Christian and monotheistic
  from which it originated from]. He notes that the
  UU Church now officially has no theological beliefs that
  adherents must have, and it is tolerant of nearly any
  belief system. He concludes that "at some point,
  pandering would not become too strong a word" his
  church has lost unity.
  Source: ''Revisiting Unitarian Universalism''
  Rich Barlow, The Boston Globe, July 17, 2004

In response, UtherSRg removed this addition of mine, and he
noted:

"While I agree that Rev Holt's criticism has merit, I
wonder why this was placed in the article as a direct
quote. I don't believe other religions have such direct
criticisms on their articles. I could understand a brief
summary of various criticisms."
[[User:UtherSRG|UtherSRG]] 06:27, 18 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I gave the following response, and would like the viewpoint
of others here. This may be about a general policy question
that warrents Wiki-En, or even the main Wiki list,
attention.

My reply:

Your comment and question is fair enough!  It turns out
that other Wikipedia articles ''do'' have substantial
sections on internal criticisms. Within the [[Judaism]] and
related articles, there is plenty of dicusion of internal
criticism; the same is true for many of our articles on
Islam (see especially the sections on Shiite versus Sunni
forms of Islam.) I think that all of our religions and
social movement articles should include sections on
internal criticism, especially when such internal criticism
is openly discussed among many adherents of that movement.
Some examples that I think should be discussed include:

:Why some members of the UU movement have criticised it, as
it has broadened to the point where it includes nearly any
faith, or none at all.

:Why many members of Conservative Judaism have criticised
their own movement for not cultivating an observant layity.

:Why many members of Reform Judaism have criticised their
own movement for creating a new definition of who is a Jew,
thus creating a schism that may create two separate Jewish
peoples.

:Why many members of Orthodox Judaism have criticised their
own movement for not taking seriously the role of women as
equals, the way that Orthodoxy understands homosexuality,
or the increasing uses of churmras (legal stringincies).

:Why many members of Catholic Christianity have criticised
their own movement for not allowing priests to marry, and
for not policing their own priesthood enough vis-a-vis the
child abuse scandal.

Including external criticisms are another issue entirely,
and I think we should avoid this whenever feasible. I am
sure that one could write a long section full of polemics
on why Christians think that Jews and Muslims are wrong,
and why pagans are worse than wrong; similar, one could
write a long section full of polemics on why Muslims think
that Christians and Muslims are wrong, and why pagans are
worse than wrong! Generally, any well-known religion has
been the subject of a vast critical and polemical attack
from many people outside that religion. We need to
extremely careful about this. But the subject of internal
constructive criticism is a different issue altogether.

As long as we make sure that all info is written in an NPOV
fashion, what do you think?

Robert (RK)

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from_name: Brion Vibber

body:
Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
> Can someone explain to me the purpose of the "Compare selected
> versions" Javascript?   It makes no sense to me, and it really slows
 > down the page for me.  When I try to compare two versions, I have to
 > wait a long time for the page to change to reflect my selections.

Presumably, it's to automatically submit the form instead of requiring
the user to hunt down a "submit" button that might be 100 lines away.

...

Since last I really looked, though, somebody has turned it into a
nighmarish concoction of evil that magically appears and disappears
radio buttons, and removed the auto-submit. (It was annoying when it was
auto-submit after clicking checkboxes, because checkboxes don't normally
behave that way, but this is even worse.) And yes, it takes *forever* in
Safari at least.

Any objection to ripping it out and replacing it with good old fashioned
normal radio buttons?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Dan, Zero, NPOV and the Israel Shahak article

body:
Dan Keshet writes:
> Please don't personalize the issue as if Zero were the
> only one who disagrees with your text.  It is wrong on
> many accounts, accounts which I have described on the
> talk page.

Huh? I haven't seen any errors noted by you in the article
text. All I have seen is your personal support for Israel
Shahak's claims about the Jews. (i.e. you haven't disputed
the views of anyone mentioned.)

You repeatedly claim that YOUR OWN READING of Jewish texts
leads you to conclude that Israel Shahak attacks on Jews
are correct, and that people who disagree with him are in
error. But that is YOUR OPINION. This article is not about
your opinion, it is not about Zero's opinion, nor is about
my opinion. (Nor, for that matter, are you qualified to be
an expert on interpreting 2,000 years of rabbinic
literature.)

We are obligated to follow NPOV policy, which states that
we phrase things like this: Israel Shahak claims X, other
groups disagree claiming Y.  You and Zero, however, keep
insisting that Shahak is correct, and you are not allowing
the article to fully mention Shahak's views, nor are you
allowing the views of other people to be cited. That
behaviour is a serious violation of Wikipedia NPOV policy.

Both you and Zero have failed to identify a single error in
the text that you keep deleting. Rather, both of you merely
claim that IN YOUR OWN VIEW it is wrong for people to
disagree with Shahak.

You and Zero need to re-read our NPOV article. If we write
an article on "Dan Keshet", in that article we can mention
your views on Shahak and on the Jews. If we write an
article on "Zero000", in that article we can mention Zero's
views on Shahak and on the Jews. But none of your personal
views on this issue should be included in the article on
Israel Shahak.

> I have repeatedly indicated my willingness to use
> mediation to try to improve the discussion, in an
> attempt to lead to a better article.  Zero was hesitant,
> but said he would try it.  Will you join us?

Zero has stated that I am a lunatic who should be banned,
and he uses non-stop reversions to censor every fact that
he doesn't want people to learn about. He refuses to allow
any contributor to use NPOV terminology to mention people
who disagree with Shahak. This is harassment.  Zero is
acting in bad faith, and needs to learn that our articles
include info *whether or not we feel comfortable* with such
info.

Robert (RK)

=====
"No one is poor except he who lacks knowledge....A person who has knowledge has everything.  A person who lacks knowledge, what has he? Once a person acquires knowledge, what does he lack?  [Babylonian Talmud, Nedarim, 41a]

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from_name: Ricky Beam

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki fork

body:
On Mon, 19 Jul 2004, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
>...  (That's the editorial
>"we", of course, I'm personally useless.)

(And now I get to use my favorite line...) "Well, not entirely..."  You
do write the checks :-)

--Ricky


from_name: Jason Richey

subject: [Wikitech-l] DNS changes

body:
I made changes to the DNS servers for these domains:

wikibook.com
wikibooks.com
wikibooks.org

wikisource.com
wikisource.org

Zwinger is the primary, gunther.bomis.com is a slave to zwinger.
The zone files are /var/named/master/wikibooks.zone and
wikisource.zone

As I understand it, there are several other domains that should have
DNS set up on Zwinger and Gunther...

--
"Jason C. Richey" <jasonr at bomis.com>


from_name: Dan Keshet

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Dan, Zero, NPOV and the Israel Shahak article

body:
RK, I disagree with your summary of my comments on the talk page, but this
is not the appropriate place to discuss them.

>> I have repeatedly indicated my willingness to use
>> mediation to try to improve the discussion, in an
>> attempt to lead to a better article.  Zero was hesitant,
>> but said he would try it.  Will you join us?
>
> Zero has stated that I am a lunatic who should be banned,
> and he uses non-stop reversions to censor every fact that
> he doesn't want people to learn about. He refuses to allow
> any contributor to use NPOV terminology to mention people
> who disagree with Shahak. This is harassment.  Zero is
> acting in bad faith, and needs to learn that our articles
> include info *whether or not we feel comfortable* with such
> info.

You didn't answer my question.  Do you want to try mediation or not?

--dk


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Gerard.Meijssen wrote:

>Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>
>>Gerard.Meijssen wrote:
>>
>>
>>>On the beer parlour of en:wiktionary, Tim Starling says that it would be helpfull if all wiktionaries work in the same way.  The article was about UTF-8.
>>>The opportunity now is to have all wiktionaries transfer to UTF-8. This is the only way to have articles with titles like ?????????? or ???????????? or ?????. As the purpose of wiktionaries is to have articles of words in any language, it should be obvious that this is the way to go.
>>>
>>>PS I would like these articles in nl:wiktionary :) GerardM
>>>
>>>
>>English Wiktionary shifted to UTF-8 at a very early stage of its development.  There are still a few minor problems left over from the transfer, but none important enough to make us rush to clean them up.  nl ended up with something else because the software was copied from the nl Wikipedia in the interest of having something workable available quickly.  I don't think that there is much opposition to having all the Wiktionaries on UTF-8.
>>
>>It is only speculation on my part to say that Tim would favour having every project on UTF-8 (he can speak best for himself), but the Beer Parlour context had to do with first letter capitalization.  See http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Beer_parlour/case-sensitivity_vote at the very end.
>>
>>Please don't confuse the two issues.
>>
>>Ec
>>
>>
>
>When you read the post, you will find that in the post about the case sensitivity vote, UTF-8 was mentioned. In that context quote "I'd really much prefer it if all the Wiktionaries were converted, or none of them." and later "... asked me to switch of first letter capitalisation for de.wiktionary.org, but I refused. ..."
>
>Please read the article and you will see that the first part has to do with UTF-8 .  Read the effing article..
>
The first unsigned entry in that thread by Polyglot read

> When this was first proposed, it was said it was going to be
> implemented across all Wiktionaries. Wiktionary DE had asked for it,
> but we had to agree on Wiktionary EN, since the impact was going to be
> the biggest due to the amount of pages we already have. I think the
> other Wiktionaries and certainly NL have to implement this change as
> well, especially now that it is possible to get a clean start over there.

What has that got to do with UTF-8?  You introduced that off-topic
reference later to whinge about nl:Wiktionary not having UTF-8.  This
was (as Timwi pointed out) an unfair criticism of the developers.

>>From a professional IT point of view having many environments all different is a disaster waiting to happen. To prevent them, all situations should be/have to be tested. This requires scarce resources. Silly backward compatability for no good reason makes the work of developpers and system management people needlessly complicated.
>
I don't know where you're quoting this from.

>PS I am AS/400 certified CISSP, MCP, CNE, Tivoli certified and know little of this environment but basically the more different configurations the bigger the headache.
>GerardM
>
So?  Who cares about the alphabet soup certification?

>When you read the post, you will find that in the post abou
>
Yes, I read it ... including your attempts to change the topic.

Ec


from_name: Andre Engels

body:
On Mon, 19 Jul 2004 12:18:16 +0100 Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
>Emmanuel Engelhart wrote:
>
>> Is somebody against the idea of sorting interwiki links in the
>>alphanumerical
>> order (by language: en always before fr) ? It will be easier to find a
>> corresponding article in a specific language thus.
>
>On the English Wikipedia we've already been doing it that way (sorting by
>the language code), but on the Hungarian Wikipedia (for example) they seem
>to think that English should always come first.

Also, there is no agreement of what alphabetical order to choose. In the
Pywikipediabot, it is now specified to use alphabetical order by language
name for en:, fr:, pl: and simple:, and alphabetical order by code for the
other languages (where hu: puts en: first). Given that en: and de: here are
different, any choice will surely get some big opposition I think...

Andre Engels


body:
Relatively easy, you use the UTF-8 order for the non alphabetical stuff (I think it works like that). Anyway, the result is consistent :)
GerardM

-----Original Message-----
From: Timwi <timwi at gmx.net>
To: wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
Date: Mon, 19 Jul 2004 13:25:38 +0100
Subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Sorting interwiki links

Andre Engels wrote:

> In the Pywikipediabot, it is now specified to use alphabetical order by
> language name

How do you alphabetically sort ??, ???, etc.?

_______________________________________________
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Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


from_name: Emmanuel Engelhart

body:
Selon Andre Engels <andrewiki at freemail.nl>:

> On Mon, 19 Jul 2004 12:18:16 +0100 Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> >Emmanuel Engelhart wrote:
> >
> >> Is somebody against the idea of sorting interwiki links in the
> >>alphanumerical
> >> order (by language: en always before fr) ? It will be easier to find a
> >> corresponding article in a specific language thus.
> >
> >On the English Wikipedia we've already been doing it that way (sorting by
> >the language code), but on the Hungarian Wikipedia (for example) they seem
> >to think that English should always come first.
>
> Also, there is no agreement of what alphabetical order to choose. In the
> Pywikipediabot, it is now specified to use alphabetical order by language
> name for en:, fr:, pl: and simple:, and alphabetical order by code for the
> other languages (where hu: puts en: first). Given that en: and de: here are
> different, any choice will surely get some big opposition I think...
>

My opinion is that the type of sort isn't significant. My goal is only to
provide an interlink list always in the same order. But if this feature meets a
lot of oppositions, maybe an option to un/acctivate the feature is necessary.
Maybe this feature isn't a good idea ?

Emmanuel


body:
On the beer parlour of en:wiktionary, Tim Starling says that it would be helpfull if all wiktionaries work in the same way.  The article was about UTF-8.

The opportunity now is to have all wiktionaries transfer to UTF-8. This is the only way to have articles with titles like ?????????? or ???????????? or ?????. As the purpose of wiktionaries is to have articles of words in any language, it should be obvious that this is the way to go.

PS I would like these articles in nl:wiktionary :) GerardM


from_name: Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> Presumably, it's to automatically submit the form instead of requiring
> the user to hunt down a "submit" button that might be 100 lines away.

Right, that was the old way.  This was not evil.  As you note below,
it was annoying but understandable.

> Since last I really looked, though, somebody has turned it into a
> nightmarish concoction of evil that magically appears and disappears
> radio buttons, and removed the auto-submit.

"nightmarish concoction of evil" :-) Well, at least I am not alone.
My usual style of course is to be more reserved than that with
criticisms, but sure, since you said it first... ;-)

> Any objection to ripping it out and replacing it with good old fashioned
> normal radio buttons?

None from me, but there probably are some user interface subtleties
here.  What we want to do is allow people to pick exactly 2 items from
a list, and to my knowledge, no standard user interface item does
exactly that.

--Jimbo


body:
On Mon, 19 Jul 2004 13:25:38 +0100 Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:

>Andre Engels wrote:
>
>> In the Pywikipediabot, it is now specified to use alphabetical order by
>> language name
>
>How do you alphabetically sort ??, ???, etc.?

Using the most common transliteration into the Latin alphabet. However, I
know that on nl: exactly this problem was the reason to use alphabetic by
code instead. The same might hold for de:, I don't know about them.

For your information, Pywikipediabot currently defines the order 'alphabetic
by name' to be:

               'af','ar','roa-rup','om','bg','be','bn','bs',
               'ca','chr','co','cs','cy','da','de','als','et',
               'el','en','es','eo','eu','fa','fr','fy','ga','gv',
               'gd','gl','ko','hi','hr','io','id','ia','is','it',
               'he','jv','ka','csb','ks','sw','la','lv','lt','hu',
               'mk','mg','ml','mi','mr','ms','zh-cfr','mn','nah','na',
               'nl','ja','no','nb','oc','nds','pl','pt','ro','ru',
               'sa','st','sq','si','simple','sk','sl','sr','su',
               'fi','sv','ta','tt','th','tlh','ur','vi','tokipona',
               'tpi','tr','uk','vo','yi','yo','za','zh','zh-cn',
               'zh-tw'

Andre Engels


body:
Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
> Brion Vibber wrote:
>>Any objection to ripping it out and replacing it with good old fashioned
>>normal radio buttons?
>
> None from me, but there probably are some user interface subtleties
> here.  What we want to do is allow people to pick exactly 2 items from
> a list, and to my knowledge, no standard user interface item does
> exactly that.

The easiest way is to just rip out the javascript bit: use two plain
columns of radio buttons, as UseMod does, without worrying too much.
It's impossible to select more than two, and we can handle zero or one
relatively gracefully with a last-version diff or error message.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> The easiest way is to just rip out the javascript bit: use two plain
> columns of radio buttons, as UseMod does, without worrying too much.
> It's impossible to select more than two, and we can handle zero or one
> relatively gracefully with a last-version diff or error message.

Yay!  I like it.

I'll only be happy when the web gets back to 1997, anyway.

--Jimbo


from_name: Philippe Teuwen

subject: [asbl-libre] Re: [Wikipedia-l] And now a bit of fun... (fwd)

body:
> Wikipedia by itself: 11,200,000
> Roll over, John Lennon, Wikipedia is more popular than Jesus and the
> Beatles combined.

Mm this is not fair ;-)
Wikipedia pages are of course referring to wikipedia itself...
Let's try:
wikipedia
-> 11,400,000 (hey, +200,000!)
wikipedia -site:wikipedia.org
->  2,420,000

Phil

PS: sorry if sth similar was already posted on the wikipedia ML,
I'm not member of it, just got a forward.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Compare selected versions javascript

body:
Rowan Collins wrote:
> * it was possible to select more than two articles if a) you were
> quick enough or b) you clicked the browser's back button

This happened to me a lot.  I usually only use the feature when I am
investigating some quarrel, and that usually requires me to compare
many different versions so that I can understand what happened.  To
get around this, I often had to deselect everything and start over, or
reload the page.

So clearly, it is desirable that hitting the back button doesn't lead
to anything annoying like this.

> * it was impossible to use in any browser that did not have JavaScript
> enabled (including old ones, text-based ones, ones belonging to the
> security paranoid, etc)

*nod*

> * a self-submitting form gives you no chance to change your mind, or
> even work out what the boxes mean, before it starts processing your
> "selection"

*nod*

> * check-boxes don't normally work like that, so people won't be
> expecting that to happen [OK, so this point's more subjective than the
> others]

Sure, I agree, even with your "backing off" point.  It is a little bit
astonishing to people, but I'm not sure if this was really really bad.

> The current system uses a far more standard set of UI elements - a set
> of radio buttons is defined as only having one selected at a time, and
> people are used to that behaviour.

Agreed.

It seems like radio buttons are the right way to go, but the
"interface sugar" should go away.  That's what Brion has suggested,
and I like it.

I think people do expect radio buttons in this case, and I think
people do not expect radio buttons to magically appear and disappear.
It makes me want to cry, anyway.

--Jimbo


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia for Cell Phones - see kwickee.com as
	well

body:
Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:

> I don't know the solution, but it sure would be sweet to have some
> means of bulk uploading, for example ftp or something like that.

Personally, I would very much like to see a textbox where one can enter
a URL that Wikipedia will then fetch automatically. In order to allow
bulk upload, one might as well have a textarea where one can enter
several URLs. (I might actually do that myself if no-one beats me to it.)

Yes, I do realise that this makes it easy to upload copyrighted images
from websites. But I don't think that's a problem: The wiki way is not
to make things impossible, but to make things back-tracable and
undoable, so all it needs is to put the URL in the image description,
and everyone can check if it's on a website that has copyrighted images.

Timwi


from_name: Rowan Collins

body:
> > I never had the intention to replace the existing wiki and will
> > never have. If people enjoy my work they may use it, if not then
> > they should stay on current wiki.
>
> In that case can you take the feature discussions to another location?
> According to the list info page, wikitech-l is for discussing the
> technical organisation of the Wikipedias, not for organising the
> development of every single fork.

More specifically, perhaps this thread would have created less
confusion and negative reactions all round if it had been posted to
the mediawiki-l list as an announcement of a new project, forking from
the MediaWiki codebase (and discussing, among other things, where this
project will be organised). I must admit, I found the distinction
between those two lists to be somewhat subtle at first, but Tim's
right, this doesn't, technically, belong here...

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Forming an action plan for 1.0

body:
Tim Starling wrote:

> Sj wrote:
>
>> Please remember that we '''do not need developer effort''' to move
>> towards Wikipedia 1.0.
>
>
> Yeah I've heard that before. Coding features is vastly easier than
> organising Wikipedians. If someone puts some pretty buttons on
> Wikipedia saying things like "review this article" and "mark for
> concise version", then people will start clicking them. Policies will
> emerge out of the chaos that ensues, and everything will come
> together. If someone wrote the feature 6 months ago, we'd be ready to
> print by now.
>
I'm on it, I'm on it! :-)

Magnus


from_name: Caroline Ford

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia for Cell Phones - see kwickee.com
	as	well

body:
I disagree - we have way too many dodgy images as it stands. I've asked for another SQL
query to find out what percentage of our images are untagged and what percentage are tagged
as non-free.

The time in adding images is in preparing them for publication (cropping etc) and adding them
to articles.

Special:Unusedimages says that we have 26,121 unused images. I am aware than mediawiki
1.3 has a problem in this area but we don't have a grip on image use at the moment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Unusedimages&limit=500&offset=26000

Caroline


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia for Cell Phones - see
	kwickee.com as	well

body:
On Mon, 19 Jul 2004 09:58:23 -0500 Dori <slowpoke at gmail.com> wrote:

>Any bulk uploading should probably be limited to admins as its
>potential for abuse is pretty evident.

Not necessarily. Wikipedia-style soft security will work for that _provided
that_ bulk undoing of uploads is even easier than the bulk uploads
themselves.

Andre Engels


from_name: moink

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Internal criticism of a religious movement: What
	should our policy be?

body:
> Including external criticisms are another issue entirely,
> and I think we should avoid this whenever feasible. I am
> sure that one could write a long section full of polemics
> on why Christians think that Jews and Muslims are wrong,
> and why pagans are worse than wrong; similar, one could
> write a long section full of polemics on why Muslims think
> that Christians and Muslims are wrong, and why pagans are
> worse than wrong! Generally, any well-known religion has
> been the subject of a vast critical and polemical attack
> from many people outside that religion. We need to
> extremely careful about this. But the subject of internal
> constructive criticism is a different issue altogether.
>
> As long as we make sure that all info is written in an NPOV
> fashion, what do you think?

I don't think it's useful to have different policies on "external" and
"internal" criticism.  While I understand your point of view, since
the latter is often much better informed, I think as long as the
criticism is balanced and either important or representative of a
wider group (i.e. not random Joe thinks Jews are ugly, but a quote
that represents a section of society, or a famous person whose
criticism is taken seriously) we shouldn't necessarily discriminate on
the basis of whether the critic is or is not a practitioner of the
religion.  That said, I can see your fears about, for instance, the
Judaism article becoming overwhelmed by, for instance, Islamic views.
Perhaps that can be best dealt with by including just a brief comment
on it with a link to [[Islamic views of Judaism]].

moink


from_name: Creative Chemistry

body:
On Jul 19, 2004, at 5:51 PM, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:

> Brion Vibber wrote:
>> Presumably, it's to automatically submit the form instead of requiring
>> the user to hunt down a "submit" button that might be 100 lines away.
>
> Right, that was the old way.  This was not evil.  As you note below,
> it was annoying but understandable.
>
>> Since last I really looked, though, somebody has turned it into a
>> nightmarish concoction of evil that magically appears and disappears
>> radio buttons, and removed the auto-submit.
>
> "nightmarish concoction of evil" :-) Well, at least I am not alone.
> My usual style of course is to be more reserved than that with
> criticisms, but sure, since you said it first... ;-)
>
>> Any objection to ripping it out and replacing it with good old
>> fashioned
>> normal radio buttons?
>
> None from me, but there probably are some user interface subtleties
> here.  What we want to do is allow people to pick exactly 2 items from
> a list, and to my knowledge, no standard user interface item does
> exactly that.
>

not to be evil, but how about this... a javascript that automatically
disables the other checkboxes when 2 or more are checked... not
siappears them, but merely grays them out?? is that possible to do in a
cross-platform way? maybe even a pop up dialog explaining whats goin on
(this sounds annoying though)/

Will

> --Jimbo
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


from_name: Nikola Smolenski

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Announce: Going to start phase4

body:
On Monday 19 July 2004 09:10, Leonard Vertighel wrote:
> Am Montag, 19. Juli 2004 07:39 schrieb Anthere:
> > Leonard Vertighel wrote:
> > > Could you give me an example of a sentence where you would disclose
> > > your gender as a female, but not as a male? I really can't think of
> > > one.
> >
> > Je suis ing?nieur
> >
> > Je suis ing?nieure
>
> Nonsense ;-)
>
>   if (! female) { male }
>
> There can't possibly be an example simply due to "tertium non datur".
>
> (I'll stop spamming the list now before I get banned)

I think that what Anthere wants to say is that ing?nieur applies oftenly to
both male and female engineers while ing?nieure always applies only to
female. So, if you are male, you can never speak thrutfully and disclose your
gender while, if you are female, you can choose whether you want to disclose
your gender or not.


from_name: Anthere

body:
Nikola Smolenski wrote:
> On Monday 19 July 2004 09:10, Leonard Vertighel wrote:
>
>>Am Montag, 19. Juli 2004 07:39 schrieb Anthere:
>>
>>>Leonard Vertighel wrote:
>>>
>>>>Could you give me an example of a sentence where you would disclose
>>>>your gender as a female, but not as a male? I really can't think of
>>>>one.
>>>
>>>Je suis ing?nieur
>>>
>>>Je suis ing?nieure
>>
>>Nonsense ;-)
>>
>>  if (! female) { male }
>>
>>There can't possibly be an example simply due to "tertium non datur".
>>
>>(I'll stop spamming the list now before I get banned)
>
>
> I think that what Anthere wants to say is that ing?nieur applies oftenly to
> both male and female engineers while ing?nieure always applies only to
> female. So, if you are male, you can never speak thrutfully and disclose your
> gender while, if you are female, you can choose whether you want to disclose
> your gender or not.

Oui :-)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Some links to look at

body:
For the first one: "second dictator" vs "ruler" - I don't think dictator is NPOV - people can pick
up the nature of the state from the article.

The second is the addition of "dictator" again.

The user adding dictator has been ignoring comments on their talk page and blanking it.

He's also only editing on articles relating to marxist rulers/dictators. He's now adding a random
quote on Iraq to the article on Ali Khamenei.

One to watch - alas.

It'll probably be a young kid, clearly from the US.

Our articles could really do without people adding in random prejudices. For many people
NPOV in politics articles is impossible to comprehend.

Caroline/Secretlondon
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Sorting interwiki links

body:
Emmanuel Engelhart <emmanuel at engelhart.org> wrote:
> Is somebody against the idea of sorting interwiki links in the alphanumerical
> order (by language: en always before fr) ? It will be easier to find a
> corresponding article in a specific language thus.

There is quite a long running poll at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Language_order_poll. Views on
the English Wikipedia are fairly evenly split between "By order of
alphabet, based on two letter code" and "By order of alphabet, based
on local language".

Angela.


from_name: Matthew Trump

body:
I absolutely detested the old way, of automatic loading On Netscape
6.2 on Linux, it loaded pages automatically upon checking/unchecking
(any action). I always got page loads when I didn't want them, having
to stop the many autoloads of diffs I didn't want while swearing
outloud. I was *very thankful* for the new interface where a
button-press was required.. The auto-switching of radio buttons is a
little freaky though. That I can certainly do without.

Timwi said:
> Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
>
> We used to have a system where we had just a row of checkboxes, and
> as
> soon as you had clicked two, it would load the diff, without
> requiring
> you to click a button. I wonder why we didn't keep that? I preferred
> that. Then again, it is conceivable that it might not have worked in
> older browsers, or some people might have thought it was unintuitive?


subject:
[Foundation-l] Re: Rethinking Meta (was- Wikiquote now has
	subdomains)

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
> Anthere-
>
>
>>The reason of wikimediafoundation site is to present a unified front to
>>outside. It should be clean, with no dispute, and it should be
>>consistent with the Foundation frame of mind. It should also contain a
>>whole bunch of data, which should not be modified too easily by anyone
>>(like financial issues).
>
>
> This can be done using rights management and page approval. Having a
> combined wiki helps in collaborating as a community on matters such as
> press releases and general news.

Right management do not exist, but I think they could be very useful here.

>>Now, I remember very well your CPOV proposition, which aimed at strongly
>>limiting access to meta, by requesting that people identify themselves
>>by real names to have the right for their edits to be claimed
>>trustworthy, when the edits of non real people were labelled "untrusted
>>or non representative of a so-called community point of view" by default.
>
>
> Wow. This is a gross misrepresentation of what I said. I am frankly
> flabbergasted. See:
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_point_of_view
>
> In the *discussion* I suggested that *personal essays which deviate from
> the CPOV* (such as our favorite troll pages) should be signed, and that
> unsigned pages could be refactored or removed. This was a compromise
> proposal towards you to not have to completely exclude such pages. Next
> time you "remember something very well", you may want to look it up first.

Tatata, we already fought enough on this Erik.

You wrote to me :

But if you want to write a paper or essay on a subject related to
Wikipedia, and do not want it to be edited into CPOV form, then you
should have the courage and conviction to stand for it with your real
name. Alternatively, put it on your user page. -Eloquence 13:28, 29 Apr
2004 (UTC)

Given the number of editors who accept to edit under their real name,
and given the risks associated with using our real name on the net,
***requesting*** from people to sign their comments and participation
with their real name in order to have those allowed in the main space is
just something bad.

We are allowed to write fabulous article under ip, why would not we be
allowed to write what we think of Wikipedia under the same procedure ?

I say, if we request from editors on meta to sign their participation
with their real name, then we'll cause dramatic drop down in collaboration.

>>This CPOV proposition will have to happen over my dead body :-)
>
>
> Fortunately, Wikimedia is democratically governed.
>
> Regards,
>
> Erik

Oh, yes, thank god, it is democratically governed :-)

------

Btw, how are the new projects building going on ?

ant


from_name: Karl Eichwalder

body:
"Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales" <jwales at wikia.com> writes:

> I don't know the solution, but it sure would be sweet to have some
> means of bulk uploading, for example ftp or something like that.

uploading isn't the problem, using the pyhton bot it is easily
scriptable.

the time consuming job are all the preparation steps: "washing" the
picture, choosing a good filename, providing a sensible description and
adding similar picture to the description for comparison, and, finally,
connect the images with the articles.

--
                                                         |      ,__o
                                                         |    _-\_<,
http://www.gnu.franken.de/ke/                            |   (*)/'(*)


from_name: Enrico Weigelt

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki fork

body:
* Tim Starling <ts4294967296 at hotmail.com> wrote:

<snip>
> Enrico is free to "start a forkoff" without the approval of the existing
> development team and without CVS access, after all MediaWiki is licensed
> under GPL. I'll do my best to make the main line of MediaWiki
> development outcompete it in terms of features, stability and
> performance.
Thats the right way.

> Choosing which branch to use for Wikipedia could then be
> left up to the users and the Board of Trustees.
This is the correct way for wikipedia. Other mediawiki user will also
decide on their own upon their needs.

I dont think that my fork will soon be suitable for wikipedia, since
I'm doing some quite huge changes, most of them are only interesting
for use in companies, but meaningless for the wikipedia community
(i.e. access control, multiple sections, ...).

I'd also see phase4 as an development project for new, quite
experimental features, which of course later may also be implemented
in current mediawiki, i.e. XML export/import interface, etc.

cu
--
---------------------------------------------------------------------
 Enrico Weigelt    ==   metux IT service

  phone:     +49 36207 519931         www:       http://www.metux.de/
  fax:       +49 36207 519932         email:     contact at metux.de
  cellphone: +49 174 7066481
---------------------------------------------------------------------
 -- DSL ab 0 Euro. -- statische IP -- UUCP -- Hosting -- Webshops --
---------------------------------------------------------------------


subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki fork

body:
* Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:

<snip>
> So while of course it's true that Enrico doesn't _need_ anyone's
> approval, wouldn't it be better if he approached the main developers
> (in IRC, for example, or on this list) to gather support and ideas, so
> that we could all pitch in on this together?  (That's the editorial
> "we", of course, I'm personally useless.)
Maybe you're right.

But from other similar projects (i.e. some weeks ago I've nearly
completely rewritten phpPgAdmin to be completely based on patTemplate -
something which will someday also happen w/ mediawiki ...), I've seen
that it doesnt make much sense to try to do this in the main branch
(and is often not wanted, since the maintainers do not see any
need for such huge changes).

Of course it would be great, if we could backport some interesting
improvements, but at the moment I really dont want to be limited
by compatibility requirements. Once I've implemented an proper
XML interface, also the database layout may undergo some huge changes.

IMHO its better to cleanly separate the new work from the current branch.

cu
--
---------------------------------------------------------------------
 Enrico Weigelt    ==   metux IT service

  phone:     +49 36207 519931         www:       http://www.metux.de/
  fax:       +49 36207 519932         email:     contact at metux.de
  cellphone: +49 174 7066481
---------------------------------------------------------------------
 -- DSL ab 0 Euro. -- statische IP -- UUCP -- Hosting -- Webshops --
---------------------------------------------------------------------


from_name: Mark Ryan

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia for Cell Phones

body:
Wikipedia is already browsable on my GPRS Nokia 6610 phone, when
accessed through Google. But you can't edit or log in (or search).


subject: [Wiktionary-l] UTF-8 and converting all wiktionaries

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

> Gerard.Meijssen wrote:
>
>> On the beer parlour of en:wiktionary, Tim Starling says that it would be helpfull if all wiktionaries work in the same way.  The article was about UTF-8.
>> The opportunity now is to have all wiktionaries transfer to UTF-8. This is the only way to have articles with titles like ?????????? or ???????????? or ?????. As the purpose of wiktionaries is to have articles of words in any language, it should be obvious that this is the way to go.
>>
>> PS I would like these articles in nl:wiktionary :) GerardM
>>
>>
> English Wiktionary shifted to UTF-8 at a very early stage of its development.  There are still a few minor problems left over from the transfer, but none important enough to make us rush to clean them up.  nl ended up with something else because the software was copied from the nl Wikipedia in the interest of having something workable available quickly.  I don't think that there is much opposition to having all the Wiktionaries on UTF-8.
>
> It is only speculation on my part to say that Tim would favour having every project on UTF-8 (he can speak best for himself), but the Beer Parlour context had to do with first letter capitalization.  See http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Beer_parlour/case-sensitivity_vote at the very end.
>
> Please don't confuse the two issues.
>
> Ec
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wiktionary-l mailing list
> Wiktionary-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiktionary-l
>
>

When you read the post, you will find that in the post about the case sensitivity vote, UTF-8 was mentioned. In that context quote "I'd really much prefer it if all the Wiktionaries were converted, or none of them." and later "... asked me to switch of first letter capitalisation for de.wiktionary.org, but I refused. ..."

Please read the article and you will see that the first part has to do with UTF-8 .  Read the effing article..

>From a professional IT point of view having many environments all different is a disaster waiting to happen. To prevent them, all situations should be/have to be tested. This requires scarce resources. Silly backward compatability for no good reason makes the work of developpers and system management people needlessly complicated.

PS I am AS/400 certified CISSP, MCP, CNE, Tivoli certified and know little of this environment but basically the more different configurations the bigger the headache.
GerardM

When you read the post, you will find that in the post abou


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: Rethinking Meta (was- Wikiquote now has
	subdomains)

body:
I would prefer Meta to be kept as a single site. If the content is
kept on one site and someone chooses to write in Hindi, for example,
then other people will at least see that comment and someone will be
able to translate it into English or their own language. If it was on
a different wiki, translation is far less likely to occur, so the
discussion would involve only the few people active on the Hindi
Wikipedia.

Having 150 different Metas for each language might sound a nice idea
in theory, but Meta has far too low traffic already. Splitting it up
is going to decrease participation even more. What would be the point
of a Meta in Italian if no one is participating there and things
happening on the other language Metas are not being disseminated to
the other ones? With 150 sites, who is going to take Wikimedia-wide
news to each separate language? If the other languages are still
supposed to watch the English one to know what is going on, what is
the benefit of splitting them?

Erik wrote:
> Let's take the "Stewards" discussion and vote as an example. The whole
> discussion was mostly English as was the voting page. If we used
> subdomains, we could have made it a requirement that the page be
> translated into the main languages before we vote. We could have
> aggregated the votes from the different language Wikimedias so that each
> community could express their preferences in their language. We could have
> translated important arguments from the discussion in realtime (in the
> form of localized "pro" and "cons" lists, for example).

Why would you need subdomains to do that? You can force such
requirements whether Meta is on one site or not. In fact, having it
all on one site makes it easier as you can see when pages have been
translated.

Look at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation/New_upload_form for
example. If the page had been only on the German Meta, how would
people who speak other languages know to translate it? At least this
way you can see which links are still red and which have been
translated.

> This is a lot better than having a single page with the occasional piece
> of untranslated French or Japanese between a couple of participants. In
> that case, the main part of the page is English - excluding those who
> don't speak it - and some parts of the discussion are not - excluding
> those who don't speak that language. It's a lose-lose situation.

If it's on one site, it is far more likely not to remain untranslated.
If a discussion on Meta is in Esperanto, it's far more likely to be
translated into the languages other users want to translate it into
that it would be if it was hidden away on the Esperanto Meta.

> This requires some way to deal with namespace conflicts - e.g.
> wikimedia.org/en/Merchandising vs.
> wikimedia.org/de/Merchandising (the current Merchandising page on
>  Meta is actually German), and we would have to set up automatic
> redirects for subdomain access.

We already have a way of dealing with title conflicts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Disambiguation

My comments above are based on what is available with the current
software. Obviously, if anyone wants to code a way to avoid needing to
check dozens of different recent changes to know what is going on,
that would be great, but until then, they should not be split just in
the hope that one day the software will make it easy to check all of
them.

-- Angela


from_name: Philip Newton

body:
On Sun, 18 Jul 2004 21:43:51 +0200, Leonard Vertighel
<leonard.vertighel at web.de> wrote:

> Am Sonntag, 18. Juli 2004 20:54 schrieb Nikola Smolenski:
> > In Serbian, for example, "I was here".
>
> ...will disclose the gender in both cases, obviously. I'll admit that you'd
> need a rather clumsy expression to avoid that (I guess that something along
> the lines of "I spent [the last weekend] here" should do)

Not as I understand it; as soon as you need a past tense, you're out of
luck, since you're either going to use -l or -la depending on your
gender (in Russian; the endings are slightly different in other Slavic
languages, e.g. I believe Serbian has -o and -la).

Cheers,
Philip


from_name: Timwi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Fwd: Multiple categories

body:
Nikola Smolenski wrote:

>>I see what you mean, but with the category system you envision, none of
>>the categories would be very useful to browse by eye, and that happens
>>to be a very fruitful way of browsing wikipedia. And all articles would
>
> You are right that most categories would have a lot of articles; but I don't
> think that that's not fruitful. If someone needs a list of all cities
> featured on WIkipedia, there it is; if someone needs a list of all cities in
> Germany, it could be made. With current system, one is fine with a list of
> all cities in Germany but there is no way at all of getting a list of all
> cities.

This argument is fallacious. You say "if someone needs a list of all
cities in Germany, it could be made", referring to a hypothetical future
feature. Then you say "there is no way at all of getting a list of all
cities", but it is obviously possible for there to future feature for
that too (display a category and all sub-categories).

Timwi


body:
Leonard Vertighel wrote:

> *In some (all?) Romance languages you can avoid disclosing your gender, though
> you'd have to be rather carful.

I suppose in a Romance-language country, then, it would be advantageous
to be a multi-storey car park?


from_name: Leonard Vertighel

body:
Am Montag, 19. Juli 2004 21:45 schrieb Philip Newton:
> On Sun, 18 Jul 2004 21:43:51 +0200, Leonard Vertighel
> Not as I understand it; as soon as you need a past tense, you're out of
> luck, since you're either going to use -l or -la depending on your
> gender (in Russian; the endings are slightly different in other Slavic
> languages, e.g. I believe Serbian has -o and -la).

Right, I should have looked this up before in my Czech grammar (it's too many
years ago since I tried to learn Czech, and unfortunately I didn't get very
far). So I guess we can say:
*In some (all?) Germanic languages you normally don't need to disclose your
gender.
*In some (all?) Romance languages you can avoid disclosing your gender, though
you'd have to be rather carful.
*In some (all?) Slavic languages you need to disclose your gender at least in
order to say something about yourself in the past tense.


body:
Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:

> Can someone explain to me the purpose of the "Compare selected
> versions" Javascript?  It makes no sense to me, and it really slows
> down the page for me.  When I try to compare two versions, I have to
> wait a long time for the page to change to reflect my selections.

Well, I don't know why it would be slow for you (it's fine for me), but
I do agree that the whole making radio buttons appear and disappear is
probably quite superfluous.

We used to have a system where we had just a row of checkboxes, and as
soon as you had clicked two, it would load the diff, without requiring
you to click a button. I wonder why we didn't keep that? I preferred
that. Then again, it is conceivable that it might not have worked in
older browsers, or some people might have thought it was unintuitive?

I can't think of any better methods. The only other possibilities I see
are pretty rubbish.

Timwi


from_name: Tim Starling

body:
Enrico Weigelt wrote:
>>Why should your unilateral re-write become THE mediawiki?
>
> It shouldn't. I just want some improvements and I'm going to implement them.
> If this someday becomes "THE mediawiki" is really irrelevant for me.
> The only point that matters is that I'm going to implement my wishes
> and it would be nice if others also enjoy them and perhaps some could
> help a little bit.
>
> I never had the intention to replace the existing wiki and will
> never have. If people enjoy my work they may use it, if not then
> they should stay on current wiki.

In that case can you take the feature discussions to another location?
According to the list info page, wikitech-l is for discussing the
technical organisation of the Wikipedias, not for organising the
development of every single fork.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Luc Van Oostenryck

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: Rethinking Meta (was- Wikiquote now
	has	subdomains)

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
> Daniel-
>
>>>How about a setup like this:
>>>de.wikimedia.org
>>>en.wikimedia.org
>>>fr.wikimedia.org
>
>
>>Absolutely not! We need ONE place where we can all come together. That place
>>is currently meta. I'm therefore very strongly opposed to balkanizing the
>>only common place we all can edit. The interface issues need to be fixed and
>>Meta should be made into a truly multilingual wiki.
>
>
> Having multiple languages in one wiki doesn't help people to come
> together.

And having multiple wikis in one language will help people to come together ?

> In fact, in my experience, it does the exact opposite.
> Parcipation on Meta by people from languages like Chinese or Japanese is
> minimal. I'm afraid Meta is perceived as an extension of the English
> language Wikipedia.
>
> You can't eliminate the language barrier by throwing all languages into
> one big pot.

And separate the language into different smaller pot will help to eliminate
the language barrier?
How it can be?

> That only means that the most popular common one - English -
> will dominate and small pockets of non-English discussions will form. This
> is what has happened on the multilingual mailing lists and it is what will
> continue to happen on Meta if we stay on the current path.
>
> The reality is that because of the language barrier, there *are* different
> communities. Because of national barriers, there *are* different Wikimedia
> interests. And there's no reason why an interesting global policy
> discussion shouldn't be started by people who speak no English whatsoever,
> and then be translated into the main languages if there is a vote.
>
> While I would prefer it if all languages of a project were handled with a
> single database and codebase, this requires quite substantial changes to
> the current code, and is unlikely to happen anytime soon. And if it
> happens, we can port all the existing wikis over to that new system. But I
> think we should strive for a consistent approach.
>
> Regards,
>
> Erik

Meta is growing a lot.
People of different language come to meta (not enough probably but they come).
They read it when they don't express themself on it,
they also give feedback to the local wikis.

There is already more than enough place to look at it,
split meta into separate language will only make thing worse
and will certainly not help people to come together.

-- ~~~


from_name: Alexandre Dulaunoy

body:
On Mon, 19 Jul 2004, Luc Van Oostenryck wrote:

> There is already more than enough place to look at it,
> split meta into separate language will only make thing worse
> and will certainly not help people to come together.

I fully  agree on  that. Meta is  more a  central point (or  a meeting
point) for the  various people behind the scene work.  I would tend to
consider that one single interface and language is more efficient.

Just my 0.02 EUR,

adulau

--
** Alexandre Dulaunoy (adulau) **** http://www.foo.be/ **** 0x44E6CBCD
**/ "To  disable the  Internet to  save EMI  and Disney  is  the moral
**/ equivalent of burning down the library of Alexandria to ensure the
**/ livelihood of monastic scribes." Jon Ippolito.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Sorting interwiki links

body:
Angela_ wrote:
> Emmanuel Engelhart <emmanuel at engelhart.org> wrote:
>
>>Is somebody against the idea of sorting interwiki links in the alphanumerical
>>order (by language: en always before fr) ? It will be easier to find a
>>corresponding article in a specific language thus.
>
>
> There is quite a long running poll at
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Language_order_poll. Views on
> the English Wikipedia are fairly evenly split between "By order of
> alphabet, based on two letter code" and "By order of alphabet, based
> on local language".
>
> Angela.

And of course, other languages might have a different split :-)


subject: [Foundation-l] Many thanks to Walter

body:
I'd like to thank Walter, who manage to fix that very annoying bug on
foundation-l. He contacted gmane to report the problem, and the
newsgroup for the legal list is now closed. Gmane is fully working again :-)

ant


subject: [Foundation-l] Many thanks to Walter


from_name: Fennec Foxen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] IBM wiki history visualization tool

body:
Some of us have seen this:
http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/history/

Some have not. It's cool, and it's about us. What's cooler is the
response to my message sent about a few trivial things on the website
and a query or two:
> Thanks for the notes... I am working on updating the web site and will
> incorporate your suggestions. I'm also working on getting clearance to
> release the "history flow" tool!

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


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wiktionary-l] Re: changing the subject

body:
Gerard Meijssen wrote:

> Ray,
> My point today was that it would be good if all wiktionarie are
> converted to UTF-8. When you read what was said by Tim Starling, it
> refers to UTF-8. That you think that I winge is beside the point, the
> point is that UTF-8 will solve issues. My alphabet soup I acquired the
> hard way, I worked for it and it allows me to say things from
> experience about maintaining data in an IT environment..
>
> If you want to discuss anything meaningfull, talk about UTF-8. The
> rest is bullshit. Argument for: it eases programming and maintenance.
> It allows for the creation of articles with names like ?????????? or
> ???????????? or ?????. The only drawback is that these characters
> will not be seen in an URL.
>
> Please be constructive and keep to what is at issue. If you think
> conversion to UTF-8 is not a good move, let us please know why not.
>
> Thanks,
> GerardM

Nobody is seriously arguing against UTF-8, so please don't make up a
story about my being against it.  Just curb your impatience.

UTF-8 was not mentioned in Tim's comments.  Do I need to qute his entire
comment for you to understand that?  My complaint is about a discussion
on one subject which is hijacked to pretend to be something completely
different.

Ec


from_name: Yann Forget

body:
Hi,

I think that projects in different languages should have their own subdomain,
but meta is different.
I think it's better to have only one domain with many languages.

Yann

--
http://www.non-violence.org/ | Site collaboratif sur la non-violence
http://www.forget-me.net/ | Alternatives sur le Net
http://fr.wikipedia.org/ | Encyclop?die libre
http://www.forget-me.net/pro/ | Formations et services Linux


body:
Am Montag, 19. Juli 2004 23:03 schrieb Timwi:
> Leonard Vertighel wrote:
> > *In some (all?) Romance languages you can avoid disclosing your gender,
> > though you'd have to be rather carful.
>
> I suppose in a Romance-language country, then, it would be advantageous
> to be a multi-storey car park?

I don't think that any car can hold a multi-storey car park.
http://www.webster-dictionary.org/definition/carful


from_name: Rowan Collins

body:
Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> We used to have a system where we had just a row of checkboxes, and as
> soon as you had clicked two, it would load the diff, without requiring
> you to click a button. I wonder why we didn't keep that? I preferred
> that. Then again, it is conceivable that it might not have worked in
> older browsers, or some people might have thought it was unintuitive?

As one of the people who was far from happy with that previous system,
I will outline some of the things that were wrong with it:
* it was possible to select more than two articles if a) you were
quick enough or b) you clicked the browser's back button
* it was impossible to use in any browser that did not have JavaScript
enabled (including old ones, text-based ones, ones belonging to the
security paranoid, etc)
* a self-submitting form gives you no chance to change your mind, or
even work out what the boxes mean, before it starts processing your
"selection"
* check-boxes don't normally work like that, so people won't be
expecting that to happen [OK, so this point's more subjective than the
others]

The current system uses a far more standard set of UI elements - a set
of radio buttons is defined as only having one selected at a time, and
people are used to that behaviour. So to select two of them, you have
two columns - easy! When somebody [Gabriel?] made a working
implementation of this, they added a bit of interface sugar where you
don't see both columns of radio buttons at the same time - but it's
not actually essential to the working of the interface, thus giving
the smooth degradation without JavaScript that the previous
implementation lacked.

In other words, the "evilness" is just somebody's idea of how to make
the solution *look* nicer. Functionally, it is the same as, say,
UseMod's equivalent [1], and the looks would be almost identical too,
if you turned off JavaScript (or, probably, if you did some clever
user-sub-page override). In my opinion, this is about as elegant a
solution (technically) as standard UI elements (and portable HTML)
allow. At first, I thought the disappearing radio buttons were a bit
odd, then I came to like the idea, but if they slow down browsers
(presumably because they're having to re-render large parts of the
page, and aren't very good at it) then we may need to look at
disabling the JavaScript part and just letting people see both columns
all the way down.

[1]:e.g. http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?action=history&id=MeatballWiki

> I can't think of any better methods. The only other possibilities I see
> are pretty rubbish.

No... If you were dead-set on check boxes I suppose you could have
manual submission, and a fall-back to a message complaining that you'd
selected too many or too few (with JavaScript making that impossible,
if enabled). But that's quite a bit more complex than just having a
standard HTML form that essentially lets the browser do all that for
you.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Walter Vermeir

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Many thanks to Walter

body:
Anthere wrote:
> I'd like to thank Walter, who manage to fix that very annoying bug on
> foundation-l. He contacted gmane to report the problem, and the
> newsgroup for the legal list is now closed. Gmane is fully working again
> :-)
>
> ant

I only send a email Anthere :)

But why not make this a thank you thread?

I like to thank the developers for that fantastic system for setting up
a new WikiQuote wiki. Enter the url of the wikiquote of your disere and
you get the message that it does not exist. But you get a button for
"create new wiki" and it even works! I have now a brand new wiki to play
whit.

I hope there will come more of those automatic functions like activating
the function for updating the logo of a wiki by use of uploading Wiki.png

--
Contact: walter AT wikipedia PUNT be
Ook een artikeltje schrijven? WikipediaNL, de vrije GNU/FDL encyclopedie
http://www.wikipedia.be


subject: [Wikitech-l] Compare selected versions javascript

body:
On Mon, 19 Jul 2004 15:19:13 -0700, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:

> The easiest way is to just rip out the javascript bit: use two plain
> columns of radio buttons, as UseMod does, without worrying too much.
> It's impossible to select more than two, and we can handle zero or one
> relatively gracefully with a last-version diff or error message.

By way of summarising my rather verbose post: it's even easier than
you imply, since all that needs doing is removal of the
display-related JavaScript - the rest will carry on working fine.
There's even HTML attributes to tell the browser which ones should
start checked, so unless someone *really* tried they couldn't select
less than two anyway. The only error condition is selecting the same
one twice, and that doesn't actually cause the software any pain, it
just reports that there aren't any differences!

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]