from_name: Aphaia

body:
Thank you for your interesting analysis, Andre

On 5/1/05, Andre Engels <andreengels at gmail.com> wrote:
>  (top 16 Wikipedia languages;
> numbers are number of editors, number of voters, and the second as a
> percentage of the first):

I would like to add another (more recent) index, caliculated by
BjarteSorensen from Erik Zachte's stats: square (active editors [5+
edits in a month] * article counts). I call it "WMF activity index",

> French  321  89  28% 9425.6
> Finnish 33   5   15% 1754.4
> Norse 27  3  11% 1590.6
> Italian 69  7 10% 3174.9
> German 1613 145 9% 25048.5
> English 2746 238 9% 61466.5
> Dutch 191 16 8% 5118.8
> Chinese 143 11 7% 2579.9
> Esperanto 44 3 7% 994.5
> Polish 124 8 6% 4989.5
> Swedish 98 6 6% 3824.4
> Danish 67 4 6% 1359.4
> Japanese 360 18 5% 8693.8
> Spanish 123 6 5% 4133.8
> Hebrew 69 3 4% 1691.7
> Portuguese 67 0 0% 2791.1

The order of high score projects are a bit differe from rank by
article numbers. Remarkable differences are on this index
-Fr is over Ja (9425.6pt vs 8693.8)
-Es is over Sv (4133.8 vs 3824.4)
-Ru with 17K articles and He with 18K over four projects with over 20K
articles; more over Ru doesn't appear in the Andre's original list.

Generally we can say active projects are more involved into grobal
matters. There are some exception, of course. I expect some of them
will volunteers to organize translation to involve more users than in
the last year.

Besides those, there are some projects or language communities which
seem to be possible to be more involved. Specially I think so for less
than 5% vote rate projects; that is, Japanese, Spanish, Hebrew and
Portuguese. I would like to add Russian because they are relatively
rare in our grobal community. Is any Japanese, Spanish, Hebrew or
Prtuguese editors who would like to oversee the translaion?

Now we call for translators and their coordinators on meta.
Translation cooridnators will care for
-Notice translation
-Candidate profile translation  (I agree Erik; profile up to 1000
words seems fine)
-FAQ from/to their favorite language

If you are interested in supporting vote organisation and promotion,
please list yourself on meta,
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Election_notice_translations_2005
and please don't be suprise if the organiser team will contact you
personally. when nobody apply this task. ;-)

Cheers,

--
Aphaea@*.wikipedia.org
email: Aphaia @ gmail (dot) com


list: wikimedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

subject: [Foundation-l] Board elections : some thoughts


list: foundation-l

from_name: Anthere

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: board elections : some thoughts

body:
David Gerard a ?crit:
> Erik Moeller (erik_moeller at gmx.de) [050501 04:12]:
>
>
>>I'd like the allowed length of the candidate statements to be clearly
>>defined, and the length limit to be enforced. (I suggest 1000 characters
>>of rendered text total.) Every candidate will of course be allowed to
>>link to a detailed statement without a length limit. I'd also like the
>>1000 character statements to be fairly free-form, i.e. every candidate
>>should be able to decide for themselves how to use that space.
>
>
>
> So I can write a statement in 1000 Chinese characters, and get that
> translated back to English... you sure about this one?
>
>
> - d.

good point ;-)

ant


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Board elections : some thoughts

body:
Sj a ?crit:
> On 4/30/05, Andre Engels <andreengels at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>On 4/30/05, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Second, the participation rate of languages have been very diversed.
>>>English participants represented a huge number of voters.
>>>German were second and french third. Other languages had basically not
>>>participated but for a very few people.
>>>Link : http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image%3AElection_participation2.png
>>
>>I don't agree with the conclusion you draw from this graph. The
>>English and German Wikipedias are much larger than those in other
>>languages, so it's only to be expected there will be more votes coming
>>from those. Taking the number of active editors in April 2004 as my
>>measure, I find that French participation is remarkably large, but
>>English and German is not much more than would be expected from a fair
>>division over the languages. In numbers (top 16 Wikipedia languages;
>>numbers are number of editors, number of voters, and the second as a
>>percentage of the first):
>>
>>French  321  89  28%
>>Finnish 33   5   15%
>>Norse 27  3  11%
>>Italian 69  7 10%
>>German 1613 145 9%
>>English 2746 238 9%
>>Dutch 191 16 8%
>>Chinese 143 11 7%
>>Esperanto 44 3 7%
>>Polish 124 8 6%
>>Swedish 98 6 6%
>>Danish 67 4 6%
>>Japanese 360 18 5%
>>Spanish 123 6 5%
>>Hebrew 69 3 4%
>>Portuguese 67 0 0%
>
>
> Very interesting.  Thanks for that analysis!  Fr: users are also
> unusually well integrated with IRC.  Clearly the conclusion is that
> eating well makes you productive.
>
> SJ

I suggest that Erik and Andr?'s numbers (voters/very active users and
voters/user numbers) be added on meta for numbers analysis.

Though this can not be proved by numbers, I think these participation
rates recover two realities.
First involvement in meta topics. And if we consider number of editors
involved on meta, numbers of people in #wikimedia, numbers of people on
board related list, I think the high and lower percentage of
participation are clearly reflected. Typically spanish editors are not
very widespread on meta related issues while french are.

The second relaty is the existence of a candidate or not. When there was
no candidate in one language, this language did not participated much.
It is my understanding there is a candidate on nl wiki this year, so we
can probably expect higher participation rate. I however think
participation rates of es or ja will not be high :-(

ant


list: wikien-l

from_name: Jack Lutz

subject: [WikiEN-l] Critics & weak articles

body:
How do validation ratings age and handle sudden, mass replacement of
content?


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Travis Derouin

subject: [Wikitech-l] Apache Rewrite Stopped Working For Nice URLs... strange

body:
Hi,

We have been using these rewrite rules now for nicely formatted URLs for a
few months now:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/(stylesheets|images|skins)/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/(redirect|texvc|index).php
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/sitemap.xml
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/error/(40(1|3|4)|500).html
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/favicon.ico
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/robots.txt
RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [L,QSA]

But today the RewriteRule stopped working and Apache could no longer find
/index.php/Main_Page anymore:

File does not exist: /var/www/html/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

It seems pretty weird, the only thing I can think of is that something
changed with our Apache configuration? What usually prevents users from
being able to use the /index.php/$1 configuration? What keeps Apache from
attempting to recognize index.php as a directory?

I switched it to:

RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ /index.php?title=$1 [L,QSA]

And it seems to work, but I'm curious as to why it changed all of a sudden.
I couldn't find anything on Google or the meta-wiki, so I thought I'd post
it here.

Thanks,
Travis


from_name: Sj

subject: Fwd: [Foundation-l] board elections : some thoughts

body:
Would anyone object to an incentive for more people to write in
Chinese?  ;-)  That might not be so bad...

SJ

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de>
Date: May 1, 2005 5:22 AM
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] board elections : some thoughts
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l at wikimedia.org>

David Gerard:

> So I can write a statement in 1000 Chinese characters, and get that
> translated back to English... you sure about this one?

I'm not sure it's a good way to start a campaign by deliberately looking
for loopholes in the rules ;-). I don't think this will be a problem in
practice, but if you want, you can define that the most commonly used
language is used for the count, or you can retain some flexibility in
the enforcement. I'll leave it to the organizers to decide this. What is
important is that there is at least a basic requirement so that people
don't go overboard.

Erik
_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l at wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

--
+sj+
 _ _ :-------.-.--------.--.--------.-.--------.--.--------[...]


from_name: Jean-Baptiste Soufron

subject: [Foundation-l] (legal) mysic.org and wikipedia's trademarks

body:
> (apologies if this is the wrong list: wikilegal-l doesn't appear to
> exist anymore)

the good list is juriwiki-l

>
> Someone pointed me to http://mysic.org/ and asked how they could join
> Wikipedia's "affiliates program".
>
> Unless someone has approved this I'm guessing mysic's use of
> wikipedia's non GFDL logo, and use of the trademark in this manner,
> may be infringing.
>
> --
> John Fader
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikitech-l] Pywikipediabot

body:
I'd be interested in having you aboard. Rob is considered lead
developer, but he has little time for it at the moment (work and
family taking most of it).

Could you please specify me:
* Your Wikipedia/wiktionary/whatever identity (preferably showing that
you have already used the bot more or less extensively)
* Your Sourceforge login-name
* Perhaps an indication of your knowledge of Python.

And yes, getting included on the mailing list as Brion proposes would
be strongly recommended if you want to be a developer.

Andre Engels

On 5/1/05, mbecker ? <wikimb at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm trying to get in touch with the developers of Pywikipediabot
> I've e-mailed the lead developer as listed on the sourceforge project
> website a couple times about bug fixes and improvements I've made to
> the code.
> I'm interesting in getting developer access to the project so I can
> commit some of them.
> Please send me an e-mail if you can help me with this.
> Thanks,
> Michael Becker
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Faraaz Damji

subject: [Wikipedia-l] GFDL works inside other published works

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

Sj wrote:
> Someone in Boston is publishing a book in which he would like to
> include a few entire Wikipedia articles...

Just out of curiousity, which articles is (s)he using?

- --
Blog: http://frazzydee.ca

- -----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GCS d? s:- a--- C+++ UL++ P+ L+ E---- W++ N+ o+ K+ w+
O? M-- V? PS++ PE Y PGP++ t 5-- X+ R tv b++ DI++ D+
G++ e- h! !r !z
- ------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.5 (MingW32)

iD8DBQFCdRcIT65h0kZaRnYRAtRqAJ0ZvBtEXcJqfUEO+QTFinYqSAy50QCfcCRI
jQJRtv17b3dIMDri6UasEPQ=
=3/k3
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Foundation-l] board elections : some thoughts

body:
David Gerard:

> So I can write a statement in 1000 Chinese characters, and get that
> translated back to English... you sure about this one?

I'm not sure it's a good way to start a campaign by deliberately looking
for loopholes in the rules ;-). I don't think this will be a problem in
practice, but if you want, you can define that the most commonly used
language is used for the count, or you can retain some flexibility in
the enforcement. I'll leave it to the organizers to decide this. What is
important is that there is at least a basic requirement so that people
don't go overboard.

Erik


from_name: Gregory Maxwell

body:
On 4/30/05, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> My guess is that on the page near the beginning of the book where it
> gives copyright information, it should say "some portions of this book
> are (C) Wikipedia, and are released under the GNU Free Documentation
> licence" or something of the sort.

Excuse me?
My contributions to wikipedia are MOST CERTAINLY not owned by
wikipedia and are thusly not '(C) Wikipedia'.


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [WikiEN-l] Critics & weak articles

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

BJ?rn Lindqvist schrieb:
>>Personally, all I really want out of a sifter-type process is "this has
>>been checked and is not blatantly vandalized or currently an active
>>battleground, and the spelling looks okay to me." IMO a sifter like this
>>would take a lot of stress off of editors who, rightly or wrongly, feel
>
>
> But we already have that! We have the NPOV warning, the Cleanup
> warning and two dozen more tags editors slap onto articles. It is only
> in a few areas that Wikipedia suffers - the articles about the
> Israeli-Palestinian conflict is particularily atrocious. But compare
> those articles against articles on the same subject in Britannica and
> you'll see that Wikipedia isn't any worse than it. Wikipedia is good
> enough as it is IMHO.
>

Wikipedia is good, no doubt about that :-)

The (main) difference between a "sifter" function and warning templates
is that with the template system, the *absence* of a template means either
* this is OK
or
* noone saw this, or cared enough to put a warning tag there

A "sifter" (or as I call it, "validation") function allows to actively
mark a revision as "good" or "bad". Warning templates can only mark it
as "bad".

Magnus
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Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

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yXVN3JdSiSEFJmzhvYiSgrI=
=ptw+
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from_name: Edward Z. Yang

subject: [Wikitech-l] Redirect Pages: Text on them -> Text on article

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

A while ago, there was a topic on Wikitech-l that discussed "Redirect to
Anchor". Noting that this is technically impossible, but also concerned
without redirects such as:

Blood Agar --> Agar Plate

where the relevant information is tucked away very far down in the
article, the following feature is requested:

Current behavior of Redirects totally masks any text that comes after
the #REDIRECT [[]] declaration. Feature would modify behavior, where now
this extra text (provided there is text at all), is placed at the top of
the article people are redirected to, perhaps, in some way, reformatted
to be prominent.

The earlier example cited could be rectified in this manner:

- ----
#REDIRECT [[Agar plate]]

'''Blood agar''' is a special type of agar plate. See [[Agar
plate#Types_of_agar_plates]]
- ----

The following text would be inserted at the top of the article, so:

- ----
:<i>'''Blood agar''' is a special type of agar plate. See [[Agar
plate#Types_of_agar_plates]]</i>

An '''agar plate''' is a sterile [[Petri dish]] that... (continue main
content)
- ----

IMHO, I think this is an elegant way of solving the "Irrelevant
Redirect" problem. I also do not think that it would be very difficult
to implement (although I'm no programmer for Mediawiki, so I can't
really make any statements on this).

- --
 Edward Z. Yang      Personal: edwardzyang at thewritingpot.com
 SN:Ambush Commander Website: http://www.thewritingpot.com/
 GPGKey:0x869C48DA   http://www.thewritingpot.com/gpgpubkey.asc
 3FA8 E9A9 7385 B691 A6FC B3CB A933 BE7D 869C 48DA
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VP/jtoWO7nAO3k3KkslrmVk=
=j2Zw
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


from_name: Lars Aronsson

body:
Mark Williamson wrote:
> My guess is that on the page near the beginning of the book where it
> gives copyright information, it should say "some portions of this book
> are (C) Wikipedia, and are released under the GNU Free Documentation
> licence" or something of the sort.

Will this be possible?  If this was not text, but free software
released under the GPL, the entire book would be have to be
released under GPL.  That's the "viral effect" of GPL, as intended
by its creator Richard Stallman (and hated by Microsoft).  Is
there no such viral effect at all in GFDL?

Would there be any difference in this respect if Wikipedia had
used a Creative Commons Share-Alike license instead?

(I'm fully aware that CC didn't exist in 2001, when Wikipedia was
launched.  I've been following this discussion since then.  I'm
not yet aware of any case law or court cases where the
consequences of Wikipedia's GFDL status has been tried.)

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


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Apache Rewrite Stopped Working For Nice URLs...
	strange

body:
Travis Derouin wrote:
> But today the RewriteRule stopped working and Apache could no longer find
> /index.php/Main_Page anymore:
>
> File does not exist: /var/www/html/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
>
> It seems pretty weird, the only thing I can think of is that something
> changed with our Apache configuration?

Well, has it? :) Do you run this server yourself, or are you at the
mercy of some diabolical sysadmin who changes things without notice? If
diabolical sysadmin, ask them what they've changed...

 > What usually prevents users from
> being able to use the /index.php/$1 configuration? What keeps Apache from
> attempting to recognize index.php as a directory?

If PHP's configured as a CGI or FastCGI module, or apache2filter, this
type of URL usually returns a 404 Not Found error.

If PHP's configured as apache or apache2handler it should work.

Special:Version will display the server API configuration that your PHP
is set up as; you can also make a script that runs the phpinfo()
function to dump a lot of configuration information.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Critics & weak articles

body:
David Gerard wrote:

>Jack Lutz (jack-lutz at comcast.net) [050502 01:37]:
>
>
>
>>How do validation ratings age and handle sudden, mass replacement of
>>content?
>>
>>
>
>
>[[m:Article validation feature]]
>
>
This is not covered on the Meta page.


from_name: John Fader

body:
On 5/1/05, Travis Derouin <tderouin at gmail.com> wrote:
> What keeps Apache from
> attempting to recognize index.php as a directory?

The DirectoryIndex directive tells apache what kind of files it should
use for indices.  Mine reads:

DirectoryIndex index.html index.html.var index.php

--
John Fader


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: board elections

body:
Sj a ?crit:
 > On 4/26/05, Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de>
wrote:

 >>If Sj is not going to stand, I think he would make an excellent
 >>organizer for this. Getting longer platform statements translated could
 >>remain within an individual candidate's responsibility.
 >
 >
 > Thank you, Erik, you are kind to suggest me.  I am sure that most of
 > this list would like to see the upcoming elections showcase the
 > projects' many languages and projects.  Perhaps the organization can
 > be distributed more broadly than a single person.  I would like to see
 > coordinators on each project engaged to help out; see my separate
 > email about election translations.

Good point Erik.

I may answer on this.

Why is not Sj one of the organisers ?

Well, first, and that might be the best reason of all : because he did
not candidate when I asked :-)

But even if he had asked, I think I would not have put him in.

Why so ?

Well... a team must not be build uniquely based on what one think a
person will be good at doing.

A team is more than that.

Each person individually must be good at something useful.
Each person individually must feel motivated to do precisely what he is
good at doing.
At least one person of the team must be able to take care of an
absolutely required task (while keeping that number low).

However, on top
Each person must be in a cooperative mood and ready to work with
happiness with each of the other team members
As much as possible, the work done should be more than the addition of
each individual member work.

All this requires to know people as much as possible. And to my belief,
this is true not only for the election organisation, but for most of the
board activities.

At least when one considers it a team work, not a one man show :-)

So, in this case...

I think we needed to keep a core of organisers to run the elections, and
a core must be small to be workable. I thought of 3 to 4 people. We
finally have 4 people and this is a good number. Britty was asked to
help though she did not volunteer, because of her skills on managing
translations and her easiness to communicate (plus, she is a woman :-)).

This absolutely does not mean no one else should help. Quite the
opposite. We need help from people to translate statements. We need help
to inform everyone. We need some people to ask us questions (including
the unconfortable ones). And we need people to comment on organisation
itself.

Second, I know Sj will participate in his way even if he is not in the
list of organisers. I know he will ask questions. To ask these
questions, it is actually best that he is not in the team. Sj is great
(imho) but I do not think organising the elections would be his best
work. He holds a different inner truth. Which has more to do with
creativity, energy, cheerfulness.

Third because Sj is already busy with other things, such as the Quarto.
Hopefully, the issue number 3 will be out before the elections and Sj is
  extremely important here. Aphaia will already not be so much
available, removing another pillar would not have been wise.

I think the way Sj can help best is by making people understand more
what board activities are. Most of what Angela and I did all year long
is totally unknown by most editors. Quarto helps to clarify this a
little bit, for editors as well as for current board candidates. Angela
and I made the board be a certain thing, which only few people could see
(those involved in meta issues). Maybe the next board will do its job in
a totally different way.

Fourth reason for not having Sj in the organisation committee is because
I love very very very much both Sj and Danny, but know they both have
not so easy relationships together. I think elections will be a tensed
time for some of us, and I have no desire to do anything that might
cause more troubles. I do not think making them team there would be wise
:-)

Just knowing people, right ? :-)

Hope not to disturb anyone here. Do not want to.

Ant


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: board elections


from_name: Delphine Ménard

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: board elections

body:
On 5/1/05, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
[snip]

> Each person individually must be good at something useful.
> Each person individually must feel motivated to do precisely what he is
> good at doing.
> At least one person of the team must be able to take care of an
> absolutely required task (while keeping that number low).

I find it excellent that Danny and others have volunteered to do the
work, and the more I see *us* working and the more I analyze in my own
little way the way we work, I support this point of view. In a
volunteer-based community, there is nothing more important than to let
people step forward to do the things that interest them, and which
they are good at. Not everything can be done by just one person, and
nothing should be either. I was not around at the times of elections
last year, so as a *newbie* I find it reassuring that someone who's
gone through the whole process of organizing those is still here this
year and can give "inside" kind of input.

[snip]

> I think we needed to keep a core of organisers to run the elections, and
> a core must be small to be workable. I thought of 3 to 4 people. We
> finally have 4 people and this is a good number. Britty was asked to
> help though she did not volunteer, because of her skills on managing
> translations and her easiness to communicate (plus, she is a woman :-)).

 I am glad Britty agreed, for indeed she has proven her value in that
task on many many occasions.

>
> Second, I know Sj will participate in his way even if he is not in the
> list of organisers. I know he will ask questions. To ask these
> questions, it is actually best that he is not in the team. Sj is great
> (imho) but I do not think organising the elections would be his best
> work. He holds a different inner truth. Which has more to do with
> creativity, energy, cheerfulness.

And he has proved that already, by questioning and answering this
thread and its clone). We ned to talk about the good food though. /me
thinks it's really the wine that does the trick ;)

> Third because Sj is already busy with other things, such as the Quarto.
> Hopefully, the issue number 3 will be out before the elections and Sj is
>   extremely important here. Aphaia will already not be so much
> available, removing another pillar would not have been wise.

An we need him for Wikimania also, he can't be everywhere ;-).

This said, I wish tons of courage to those who have volunteered to
coach those elections, as I believe (but can only imagine) this is no
small task.

Cheers,

--
Delphine
~notafish


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: board elections


from_name: Wira Andrian

subject: [WikiEN-l] database error

body:
I've installed MediaWiki to use in my campus, and i've
got some problem here. When I edit and save the
content i've changed, there's an error appears
"Database Error - Internal error", but actually the
saving is succeed.
When I use search, the same error appears.
Anyone help please ^_^.

============
    SNfR
============

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com


from_name: Dovi Jacobs

subject: [Foundation-l] Ogg Vorbis versus Chinese Wikinews

body:
I recently stumbled upon the mailing-list discussion of the Chinese Wikinews. When I found the discussion, I couldn't believe what I was reading. Is this the Wikimedia Foundation that believes in free projects creating free content, "free" as in both "free beer" and "free speech"?

While neutrality (NPOV) is a central policy at Wikimedia (and probably its very best policy!), the Wikimedia Foundation is not neutral about *everything*. There are some things about which it takes a very clear stance, and one of those things is freedom.

When it came to the issue of audio file formats, for instance, Jimbo Wales made a very clear and correct decision that only file formats that could legally be used in free software would be allowed. Many tens of thousands of Wikimedia users would probably have liked to have been allowed to upload MP3 files. If an open vote had been held, MP3 would probably have been allowed. But no vote was held, because this is a fundamental Wikimedia policy.

On a practical level, the decision may have been more about promoting Ogg Vorbis that about real legal worries about MP3. But that is valid as well. Personally, I agree completely with Jimbo's principled decision to disallow MP3. That is because "free content" is a fundamental, non-negotiable policy of Wikimedia.

For details, see http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Sound#File_formats and http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2004-July/011514.html.

When it comes to the Chinese Wikinews, however, the Wikimedia Foundation has not stood up (so far) for free content.

Here the problem is not "free beer" but "free speech." To dely or deny setting up *any* Wikimedia project because of the fear or threat of censorship is something that the Foundation should be ashamed of. This is not a "community" issue, and to call it such is to misrepresent the problem. This is an issue about the fundamental policies of Wikimedia.

Do we really believe in free speech? Or is the only policy Wikimedia really cares about one of "free beer" (i.e. in the case of Ogg Vorbis, the legal technicalities of open source software)? Open software is terribly important, but it is no more important that providing an outlet for people to write free news stories in Chinese.

Far more than enough users have already requested the Chinese project. See http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikinews/Start_a_new_edition#Chinese.28zh.29. Some are mainland Chinese, others are part of the Chinese diaspora numbering tens of millions, people who have no worries about government censorship. All have been jointly denied, up to now, a useful project, only because of fears of censorship.

Are those fears justified? Perhaps. But the more relevant question is: Even if the fears are justified, does that allow Wikimedia to be untrue to its value of "free" projects (which includes "freedom of speech")? Furthermore, because *some* Chinese users fear censorship, should the project be delayed or denied to all?

This is also an issue of power. Yes, power. Do we believe in our own strength? Wikimedia has become, quite unexpectedly, a very well-known, well-respected, and influential organization all over the world. That means that even if the threats censorship are real, and even if there is some censorship in the short term, there is every reason to believe that such censorship will not stand for long. Just as blocking was lifted from the Chinese Wikipedia, it will be lifted, eventually, from Wikinews. The Chinese government will not be able, for long, to justify its opposition to Wikimedia projects. But we have to believe in ourselves, and in the fundamental value of free speech.

To conclude (and I apologize for this being so long), Wikimedia today is a project that is "free" as in free beer. But as long as Chinese Wikinews is delayed or denied, Wikimedia is *not* free as in free speech.

The Wikimedia Foundation must take an absolutely clear, non-negotiable position that the fear or threat of censorship will not be allowed to interfere with any existing or proposed Wikimedia Project. "Free speech" is no less important that "free beer."

Dovi Jacobs

__________________________________________________
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from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] Critics & weak articles

body:
On 5/1/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> Jack Lutz (jack-lutz at comcast.net) [050502 08:40]:
> > David Gerard wrote:
> > >Jack Lutz (jack-lutz at comcast.net) [050502 01:37]:
>
> > >>How do validation ratings age and handle sudden, mass replacement of
> > >>content?
>
> > >[[m:Article validation feature]]
>
> > This is not covered on the Meta page.
>
> Sorry, the page does (or should) mention that the planned feature is to be
> per revision, not per page - so sudden mass replacement of content creates
> a new version, which gets a different rating.
>
> (Expect vote spamming and calling out the vote on contentious articles and
> voting teams on less popular articles.)
>
>

Articles on schools are going to be fun.
--
geni


from_name: Elisabeth Bauer

subject: [Foundation-l] wiki representatives

body:
Hello,

Since we are holding a big election anyway, I want to suggest a second
election which could be held together with this one.

Currently, the exchange among the wikis and between wikis and the
foundation happens in an informal way. When there's need, announcements
are sent to the mailing list and one hopes that someone feels
responsible to take care of forwarding it to his
wikipedia/wikibooks/wikiquote.... Sometimes it happens, sometimes not.
Things like the privacy policy may be translated, may be transfered to a
wiki, but there's no guarantee at all.

I'd like to suggest a concept of wiki representatives: each community
elects two persons (or maybe one for very small wikis and three for the
really large) who act as the official contact persons and take care of
communication, approach the foundation if there are problems etc pp.

The larger our projects become, the more we need such a concept IMO.

greetings,
elian


subject: [Foundation-l] wiki representatives


from_name: Chris Nyborg

subject:
SV: SV: [Wikipedia-l] Language policy agreement in
	theNorwegianWikipedia community

body:
-----Opprinnelig melding-----
Fra: wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org]P? vegne av Mark Williamson
Sendt: 1. mai 2005 05:07
Til: wikipedia-l at wikimedia.org
Emne: Re: SV: [Wikipedia-l] Language policy agreement in
theNorwegianWikipedia community

>I'm still curious re: Riksmal and Hognorsk.

>Mark

Mark, the Bokm?l-Wikipedia includes Riksm?l. There is an ongoing vote to
decide the name used in language links, which may or may not include
Riksm?l; no matter how that turns out, Riksm?l is welcomed.

H?gnorsk is still welcomed on nn:; there are only a few hundred users of
H?gnorsk, and although one or two of those found their way to Wikipedia,
there hasn't been any contributions in the last months, as far as I can
tell.

I might also add that the accepted policy on no: is to not aggressively go
after articles in Nynorsk and translating them to Bokm?l. In fact, several
contributions have been made in Nynorsk after the new language policy was
decided upon, and no one has been yelling about it. It's more a matter of
having the right to translate them if you're a Bokm?l or Riksm?l user and
want to work on the articles (ensuring first that the Nynorsk version or a
better version exists at nn:), and to use Bokm?l/Riksm?l for all article
names and Bokm?l for category names (it's accepted that categories should be
in the majority form, since redirects don't work for categories). If we can
keep things this way, it won't be as much a ban against Nynorsk on no: as a
guarantee that where a Nynorsk article exists at nn:, there can also be a
Bokm?l article at no:.

Chris Nyborg
[[:no:User:Cnyborg]]


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Ogg Vorbis versus Chinese Wikinews

body:
"However, you also argue that till now, many chinese have asked for the wikinews and that we are denying them a useful project. So... you fall back on an argument based on user request...""This is a tricky issue. Either we consider it fully a fundamental policy and the fact part of users support and part of users oppose the creation should NOT be taken into account... or we decide it is important, but require clearer community support. Not so easy to all agree on what should be done :-)"

Thanks for your reply, Anthere! (That was fast, I was just about to go offline.)

As far as I understand, normally when there is enough interest in a language version of Wikinews, the language is launched.

That is normal policy, so I have not fallen back on "community" in my argument.

Rather, the point is that *not* to act on normal policy here conflicts with a fundamental policy of freedom.

What you hint at is a slightly different issue, one which makes the *discussion* a bit more "tricky" as you say, but not the gut issue.

Namely: What if there is "opposition" to a new language wiki? Should there be a way not just to express interest in building one, but also to vote against one? Intuitively, the answer is "no", because anyone who doesn't want to work on that project in that language simply doesn't have to!

I understand that this latter question caused problems for the French Wikinews, though I don't know the details.

However, whatever happened with French Wikinews is connected only to the secondary policy question, namely, should the policy for creating new languages, when the languages are legitimate Wikimedia languages, also allow for opposition? Though I think in normal circumstances probably not, this is completely unconnected to Chinese Wikinews!

My point is to completely disengage the two issues: Whether or not "opposition" should be allowed to creating a new language in a project is one question, and it is a completely legitimate question (though I personally think the answer should be "no" in normal circumstances).

But when such "opposition" is based on the threat or fear of censorship - there cannot even be a question at all. Censorship is not a valid reason to oppose a Wikimedia project, if the project stands for free speech.

---------------------------------
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from_name: Anthere

subject: [Foundation-l] wikiholidays

body:
Hello

I will be away (with no phone, no computer, no internet and likely no
watch since I do not wear any) from next wenesday till tuesday the 10th.
I will be in Agadir (Marocco) and surroundings.

Cheers

Anthere


subject: [Foundation-l] wikiholidays


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] Critics & weak articles

body:
Jack Lutz (jack-lutz at comcast.net) [050502 01:37]:

> How do validation ratings age and handle sudden, mass replacement of
> content?

[[m:Article validation feature]]

(Is this running on Brion's test wiki?)

- d.


from_name: Alex Krupp

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia, Emergence, and The Wisdom of Crowds

body:
I think all Wikipedians would enjoy the book The Wisdom of Crowds by
James Surowiecki. The basic premise is that crowds of relatively
ignorant individuals make better decisions than small groups of experts.
I'm sure everyone here agrees with this as Wikipedia is run this way and
Wikipedia is a success, but until reading this book it was a total
mystery why Wikipedia worked the way it did. And judging by the press
we've gotten, I'm not the only one who feels with way. If you'll
remember, the mystery of how Wikipedia works has been compared to
sausage, bumble bees, public bathrooms, etc.

Although the coolest part of the book is probably the studies and
anecdotal evidence for the above, the big takeaway is that Surowiecki
explains how to get the most 'emergence' out of a given system. That is,
a given group can either make worse decisions than the dumbest member or
make better decisions than the smartest member could, and he gives tips
for achieving the latter. Some of these can potentially be applied to
this project.

So after finishing this book I have been thinking a lot about emergence
in general. Wikipedia displays emergent properties because each article
is better than the contribution of each individual. Similarly, ants
display emergence because an ant colony can accomplish things that each
individual ant cannot even conceive. One commonality between virtually
all forms of emergence, whether artificial or natural, is that they have
evolved to provide answers and solutions. An interesting experiment
would be to see whether questions can also be emergent. The idea being
that some people are good at coming up with questions, and others are
good at coming up with answers, but currently you need both skills in
order to do research; this leaves out all of the people who can ask
questions they can't find the answers to, and those who could find the
answers if only they knew the questions.

So my thought experiment is, if a wiki project were created with just
questions that can be answered non-trivially by science but which
haven't bet answered yet, could it improve the efficiency at which
science was carried out? Furthermore, could questions be emergent, in
that if a bunch of questions are combined then can we think of new
questions that no single person could think of on their own? I think it
is easy to see how society benefits when every person has access to the
sum of all human knowledge, but is there also a benefit to each person
having access to the sum of all human ignorance?

Alex "pHatidic" Krupp
http://www.alexkrupp.com


from_name: Delirium

body:
Sj wrote:

>Someone in Boston is publishing a book in which he would like to
>include a few entire Wikipedia articles; he wrote me recently to ask
>whether this had been done before, and precisely how he should go
>about including the GFDL where, to clarify which sections of the
>published work it covers, and how he should most perfectly comply with
>the license (should he list main authors himself?  all non-anon
>authors?  should he use pseudonyms or full names of both are
>available? Do IP contributors ever include their real name on their
>user page?  Will it look funny to list pseudonyms as authors in what
>is otherwise a scholarly text?).
>
>If there are precedents, please point me to them.  If anyone can
>advise on this matter, please respond!  Perhaps I should I contact the
>FSF directly, but I thought I'd check with this list first.
>
>
I would definitely contact the FSF about this, regardless of what other
opinions you get.  Not only do they have lawyers on staff, but it would
be helpful to make them aware of any issues that come up when trying to
use GFDL'd texts in practice, since it's fairly widely assumed that they
will eventually draft a new version of the GFDL to take into account
problems that have come up with the initial draft.

-Mark


subject: [Foundation-l] Chinese wikinews and fundamentals

body:
>>However, you also argue that till now, many chinese have asked for the wikinews and that we
>>are denying them a useful project. So... you fall back on an argument based on user >>request...""This is a tricky issue. Either we consider it fully a fundamental policy and the >>fact part of users support and part of users oppose the creation should NOT be taken into >>account... or we decide it is important, but require clearer community support. Not so easy >>to all agree on what should be done :-)"

>Thanks for your reply, Anthere! (That was fast, I was just about to go offline.)

Hello ;-)

>As far as I understand, normally when there is enough interest in a language version of >Wikinews, the language is launched.

>That is normal policy, so I have not fallen back on "community" in my argument.

It is "normal" policy only as far as "normal" indicates a "habit" and that this habit is supported. Note that the fact something is usually done does not mean it will be done forever.

Example : if you noticed, the "freedom" to open new wikipedia languages is actually more restricted today than it was in the past. Typically, we try not to be hasty in decisions regarding sublanguages versions, or artificial languages. It is very likely a language such as Klington could not be launched today. Why so ? Because what was once a "habit" (a sort of policy then) has changed.

Why did it changed ?
Mostly because many users expressed their disapproval with regards to some languages or sub languages. And felt it impacted the perception our audience could have of our work.

>Rather, the point is that *not* to act on normal policy here conflicts with a fundamental policy >of freedom.

>What you hint at is a slightly different issue, one which makes the *discussion* a bit more >"tricky" as you say, but not the gut issue.

>Namely: What if there is "opposition" to a new language wiki? Should there be a way not just >to express interest in building one, but also to vote against one? Intuitively, the answer is >"no", because anyone who doesn't want to work on that project in that language simply >doesn't have to!

>I understand that this latter question caused problems for the French Wikinews, though I >don't know the details.

>However, whatever happened with French Wikinews is connected only to the secondary >policy question, namely, should the policy for creating new languages, when the languages >are legitimate Wikimedia languages, also allow for opposition? Though I think in normal >circumstances probably not, this is completely unconnected to Chinese Wikinews!

>My point is to completely disengage the two issues: Whether or not "opposition" should be >allowed to creating a new language in a project is one question, and it is a completely >legitimate question (though I personally think the answer should be "no" in normal >circumstances).

You make a very good point here.

I would like to make a precision which might have escaped you. In your previous mail, you seem to consider the Foundation as being in sole responsability of the project not being started.

It is not really fair to say the project does not currently exist JUST because the Foundation opposed it. At some point, the chinese decided to express their desire that the project exist and voted. Whether people should be allowed to oppose or only to express support is a different issue; but generally, on wikipedia, people are allowed to oppose things. I think freedom of speech is a bit impaired if people are only allowed to support or to abstain. But well... anyway, the result of the chinese vote is .... unconclusive if one counts both support and opposition.

Since it was unconclusive, the board was asked to take the decision for the chinese community. This step in itself is interesting. Should we necessarily have the role of taking a decision when others can not find a consensus themselves ? Should it be our responsability ?

In any cases, we were requested to decide for others :-)

And just as others have been inconclusive, we have not been able to reach an agreement either :-) You say we oppose it... while amongst ourselves,
* one did not answer
* one opposed
* one thought the decision should be global community one
* one thought the decision should be local community one
* one supported

However, if the chinese community had globally supported it, there is no doubt in my mind that the above opinions voiced would not have mattered.

>But when such "opposition" is based on the threat or fear of censorship - there cannot even >be a question at all. Censorship is not a valid reason to oppose a Wikimedia project, if the >project stands

As explained above, our position is not opposition.

Which leaves the question : should it be a fundamental rule ? And should we enforce it ?

Ant

__________________________________________________
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from_name: Aphaia

body:
On 5/2/05, Sj <2.718281828 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Would anyone object to an incentive for more people to write in
> Chinese?  ;-)  That might not be so bad...
>
> SJ

???SJ??????????????????????Font?????(30 characters in Kanji, two
foreign words, two punctuations)

I agree on SJ's idea is good, but I am also afraid most of
Euro-american Wikipedian has no PC on which they can read Chinese
characters. (26 words)

Back to the topic, I have no reason to oppose a candidate profile
written with 1,000 Chinese characters (or letter),. If it would be
translated into English or other European language, there would be no
huge difference like the above, I assume.
--
Aphaea@*.wikipedia.org
email: Aphaia @ gmail (dot) com


body:
Travis Derouin wrote:
> Thanks for the reply. It does look like we are using it as a filter.
>
> There doesn't seem to be much documentation on apache2filter vs
> apache2handler on the PHP site, are there any differences between the two?
> Is there any benefit to running one over the other?

Main difference seems to be that apache2filter doesn't work right. :D

There may be some super duper benefit to the 'filter' version but unless
you know what that is and really need it, I'd recommend you stick with
the handler.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki 1.5alpha1 coming soon

body:
I was going to test an upgrade from 1.4 before releaseing the first 1.5
alpha today, but it's taking a while to import that darn database and
now I need sleep. :)

Coming soon, anyway...

There are still plenty of rough edges, and some changes will yet be made
before the end.

Among the changes I've just checked in, I've expanded the namespace
fields from tinyint to int, so custom namespaces don't have to be
compressed in a miniscule space from 100 to 127. This has been asked for
a while, and it recently has bitten meta where a few extra localized
help namespaces have been added and it bumped the limit.

Before the end, we may or may not also change timestamp formats around.
Scaaaary.

Tim's been working on fixing up the user permissions / groups system
which has languished a bit, though that may not be totally done for this
alpha.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [Wikitech-l] correctly formed ISBNs?!

body:
Amazon assigns these numbers to used books that do not have an ISBN. They
are good only on Amazon.

Fred

> From: Kai Kumpf <kai.kumpf at scai.fraunhofer.de>
> Reply-To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l at wikimedia.org>
> Date: Mon, 02 May 2005 13:27:48 +0200
> To: wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> Subject: [Wikitech-l] correctly formed ISBNs?!
>
> sorry if i dare to contradict the advocates (thomas r. koll, etc.)  of
> the one and only correct isbn format:
> *ISBN:* B0000BS018
> found in:
> http://www.amazon.de/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0000BS018/qid=1115032560/sr=8-9/ref=sr_
> 8_xs_ap_i9_xgl/302-6992089-0180846
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


subject: [WikiEN-l] Critics & weak articles

body:
Jack Lutz (jack-lutz at comcast.net) [050502 08:40]:
> David Gerard wrote:
> >Jack Lutz (jack-lutz at comcast.net) [050502 01:37]:

> >>How do validation ratings age and handle sudden, mass replacement of
> >>content?

> >[[m:Article validation feature]]

> This is not covered on the Meta page.

Sorry, the page does (or should) mention that the planned feature is to be
per revision, not per page - so sudden mass replacement of content creates
a new version, which gets a different rating.

(Expect vote spamming and calling out the vote on contentious articles and
voting teams on less popular articles.)

- d.


body:
Dovi Jacobs a ?crit:
> I recently stumbled upon the mailing-list discussion of the Chinese Wikinews. When I found the discussion, I couldn't believe what I was reading. Is this the Wikimedia Foundation that believes in free projects creating free content, "free" as in both "free beer" and "free speech"?
>
> While neutrality (NPOV) is a central policy at Wikimedia (and probably its very best policy!), the Wikimedia Foundation is not neutral about *everything*. There are some things about which it takes a very clear stance, and one of those things is freedom.
>
> When it came to the issue of audio file formats, for instance, Jimbo Wales made a very clear and correct decision that only file formats that could legally be used in free software would be allowed. Many tens of thousands of Wikimedia users would probably have liked to have been allowed to upload MP3 files. If an open vote had been held, MP3 would probably have been allowed. But no vote was held, because this is a fundamental Wikimedia policy.
>
> On a practical level, the decision may have been more about promoting Ogg Vorbis that about real legal worries about MP3. But that is valid as well. Personally, I agree completely with Jimbo's principled decision to disallow MP3. That is because "free content" is a fundamental, non-negotiable policy of Wikimedia.
>
> For details, see http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Sound#File_formats and http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2004-July/011514.html.
>
> When it comes to the Chinese Wikinews, however, the Wikimedia Foundation has not stood up (so far) for free content.
>
> Here the problem is not "free beer" but "free speech." To dely or deny setting up *any* Wikimedia project because of the fear or threat of censorship is something that the Foundation should be ashamed of. This is not a "community" issue, and to call it such is to misrepresent the problem. This is an issue about the fundamental policies of Wikimedia.
>
> Do we really believe in free speech? Or is the only policy Wikimedia really cares about one of "free beer" (i.e. in the case of Ogg Vorbis, the legal technicalities of open source software)? Open software is terribly important, but it is no more important that providing an outlet for people to write free news stories in Chinese.
>
> Far more than enough users have already requested the Chinese project. See http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikinews/Start_a_new_edition#Chinese.28zh.29. Some are mainland Chinese, others are part of the Chinese diaspora numbering tens of millions, people who have no worries about government censorship. All have been jointly denied, up to now, a useful project, only because of fears of censorship.
>
> Are those fears justified? Perhaps. But the more relevant question is: Even if the fears are justified, does that allow Wikimedia to be untrue to its value of "free" projects (which includes "freedom of speech")? Furthermore, because *some* Chinese users fear censorship, should the project be delayed or denied to all?
>
> This is also an issue of power. Yes, power. Do we believe in our own strength? Wikimedia has become, quite unexpectedly, a very well-known, well-respected, and influential organization all over the world. That means that even if the threats censorship are real, and even if there is some censorship in the short term, there is every reason to believe that such censorship will not stand for long. Just as blocking was lifted from the Chinese Wikipedia, it will be lifted, eventually, from Wikinews. The Chinese government will not be able, for long, to justify its opposition to Wikimedia projects. But we have to believe in ourselves, and in the fundamental value of free speech.
>
> To conclude (and I apologize for this being so long), Wikimedia today is a project that is "free" as in free beer. But as long as Chinese Wikinews is delayed or denied, Wikimedia is *not* free as in free speech.
>
> The Wikimedia Foundation must take an absolutely clear, non-negotiable position that the fear or threat of censorship will not be allowed to interfere with any existing or proposed Wikimedia Project. "Free speech" is no less important that "free beer."
>
> Dovi Jacobs

You make a very good point and I thank you for your very clear mail.

There is a little thing disturbing me in your argumentation.
You explain Jimbo took the good decision with regards to the use of
.ogg, while hinting that if a vote had taken place, it is likely MP3
would have been accepted. You consider then that Jimbo or the Foundation
  had to take *this* decision, because it was a fundamental one. Hence
to be taken, whatever the position of the community on it.

As you say "This is not a "community" issue, and to call it such is to
misrepresent the problem. This is an issue about the fundamental
policies of Wikimedia."

However, you also argue that till now, many chinese have asked for the
wikinews and that we are denying them a useful project. So... you fall
back on an argument based on user request...

This is a tricky issue. Either we consider it fully a fundamental policy
and the fact part of users support and part of users oppose the creation
should NOT be taken into account... or we decide it is important, but
require clearer community support. Not so easy to all agree on what
should be done :-)

ant


from_name: Travis Derouin

body:
Hi,

Thanks for the reply. It does look like we are using it as a filter.

There doesn't seem to be much documentation on apache2filter vs
apache2handler on the PHP site, are there any differences between the two?
Is there any benefit to running one over the other?

Thanks,
Travis

On 5/1/05, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
>
> Travis Derouin wrote:
> > But today the RewriteRule stopped working and Apache could no longer
> find
> > /index.php/Main_Page anymore:
> >
> > File does not exist: /var/www/html/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
> >
> > It seems pretty weird, the only thing I can think of is that something
> > changed with our Apache configuration?
>
> Well, has it? :) Do you run this server yourself, or are you at the
> mercy of some diabolical sysadmin who changes things without notice? If
> diabolical sysadmin, ask them what they've changed...
>
> > What usually prevents users from
> > being able to use the /index.php/$1 configuration? What keeps Apache
> from
> > attempting to recognize index.php as a directory?
>
> If PHP's configured as a CGI or FastCGI module, or apache2filter, this
> type of URL usually returns a 404 Not Found error.
>
> If PHP's configured as apache or apache2handler it should work.
>
> Special:Version will display the server API configuration that your PHP
> is set up as; you can also make a script that runs the phpinfo()
> function to dump a lot of configuration information.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com <http://pobox.com>)
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>
>


from_name: Jimmy Wales

body:
Alex Krupp wrote:
> I think all Wikipedians would enjoy the book The Wisdom of Crowds by
> James Surowiecki. The basic premise is that crowds of relatively
> ignorant individuals make better decisions than small groups of experts.
> I'm sure everyone here agrees with this as Wikipedia is run this way

It's probably interesting to note that a central theme when I give
public talks is precisely that Wikipedia is _not_ run this way, and that
wikipedia is _not_ an instance of "The Wisdom of Crowds".

That's not to say that there isn't a lot to the notions of how a group
collaboration can improve on what an individual can do.  My point is
just that Wikipedia functions a lot more like a traditional organization
than most people realize -- it's a community of thoughtful people who
know each other, not a colony of ants.

--Jimbo


from_name: Cormac Lawler

subject: [Foundation-l] wikiholidays

body:
On 5/2/05, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hello
>
> I will be away (with no phone, no computer, no internet and likely no
> watch since I do not wear any) from next wenesday till tuesday the 10th.
> I will be in Agadir (Marocco) and surroundings.
>
> Cheers
>
> Anthere

A *real* holiday! Bon voyage..

Cormac


subject: [Foundation-l] wikiholidays


from_name: Stirling Newberry

body:
On May 2, 2005, at 8:54 AM, Jimmy Wales wrote:

> Alex Krupp wrote:
>> I think all Wikipedians would enjoy the book The Wisdom of Crowds by
>> James Surowiecki. The basic premise is that crowds of relatively
>> ignorant individuals make better decisions than small groups of
>> experts. I'm sure everyone here agrees with this as Wikipedia is run
>> this way
>
> It's probably interesting to note that a central theme when I give
> public talks is precisely that Wikipedia is _not_ run this way, and
> that wikipedia is _not_ an instance of "The Wisdom of Crowds".
>

Let us hope it stays that way.


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
Anthere:

> This is a tricky issue. Either we consider it fully a fundamental policy
> and the fact part of users support and part of users oppose the creation
> should NOT be taken into account... or we decide it is important, but
> require clearer community support. Not so easy to all agree on what
> should be done :-)

Dovi makes an important point which I also made in my "State of the
Wiki" summary, which is that there are millions of Chinese speakers who
would not be affected by censorship in mainland China. So, effectively,
there are two communities: one that would feel the censorship, and one
that wouldn't. The question is, should lack of support in one of them be
sufficient to deny the project to the other?

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Brent 'Dax' Royal-Gordon

subject: [Wikitech-l] correctly formed ISBNs?!

body:
John Fader <jfader at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/2/05, Kai Kumpf <kai.kumpf at scai.fraunhofer.de> wrote:
> > sorry if i dare to contradict the advocates (thomas r. koll, etc.)  of
> > the one and only correct isbn format:
> > *ISBN:* B0000BS018
>
> Kai,
>     In order for mediawiki to support this format, someone needs to
> find the document that specifies it.  It doesn't comply with the ISBN
> standard format as documented at
> http://www.isbn-international.org/en/manual.html.  Simply showing that
> online booksellers use another format doesn't help write the mediawiki
> code that would spot one of these; clearly the number has some
> standard format, and we need to know what that format is.

These are Amazon Standard ID Numbers.  They are nonstandard (despite
the name) and utterly useless outside of Amazon's properties.

I do *not* suggest MediaWiki add support for these; non-Amazon sites
can't do anything with them, and I don't think we want to tie
ourselves to Amazon.

--
Brent 'Dax' Royal-Gordon <brent at brentdax.com>
Perl and Parrot hacker

"I used to have a life, but I liked mail-reading so much better."


from_name: Joseph Reagle

body:
On Monday 02 May 2005 08:54, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Alex Krupp wrote:
> > I think all Wikipedians would enjoy the book The Wisdom of Crowds by
> > James Surowiecki. The basic premise is that crowds of relatively
> > ignorant individuals make better decisions than small groups of
> > experts. I'm sure everyone here agrees with this as Wikipedia is run
> > this way
>
> It's probably interesting to note that a central theme when I give
> public talks is precisely that Wikipedia is _not_ run this way, and that
> wikipedia is _not_ an instance of "The Wisdom of Crowds".

It's important to understand *why* he argues there is wisdom in crowds. I
don't know if you've read it and disagree with the fundamentals, but it
requires three specific conditions: diversity, independence, and
decentralization within the group. This seems very appropriate to WP.
Excerpts from my mindmap [1] on this particular note are below:

[[[
   The wisdom of crowds
     * p=Doubleday y=2004 a=USA  r=20040921
       An argument that groups of people can make very good decisions
       when there is diversity, independence, and decentralization within
       the group. This is augmented by case studies in traffic, science,
       committees, companies, markets and democracy.
       The wisdom of crowds
          + 4 In Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, the audience got it right
            91 percent of the time, the friend/expert at right 65 percent
            10 the stock market identified Morton Thiokol because: the
            diversity of opinion, independence, decentralization, and
            aggregation
            22 bookies, Google, IEM (election's), HSX (box-office), are
            all successful decision markets
       Diversity
          + 30 smaller groups need to actively pursue diversity
            31 March: stale groups (without an influx of new naive
            members) spend too much time exploiting and not enough time
            exploring
            34 experts aren't just wrong; they don't know how wrong they
            are
            36 Irving Janis identified "Group think" in small homogeneous
            communities
            38 Solomon Asch found that people often go with the wrong
            answer in a group -- but at least one confederate of a
            dissentor increases their autonomy
       Independence
          + 41 Independence isolates errors and garners more information
            43 Milgram et al put increasingly large groups of men on the
            street corner looking up, others did the same, but not
            because of conformity, but of "social proof"
            49 herding: no one ever got fired for buying IBM
            53 information cascade: following a leader and with imperfect
            information, people stop looking to their own local knowledge
            64 Hung and Blott performed an experiment with 2 urns, one
            with 50% more white or black marbles respectively. When an
            individual correct choice was awarded, people incorrectly
            cascaded; yet, when collectively rewarded, it was best to
            reveal one's own marble color
       Decentralization
          + 78 the problem with U.S. intelligence was not
            decentralization, but a bad form which didn't permit good
            filtration and aggregation
            87 Brian Arthur "El Farol" problem: should one go to a bar
            that might be too crowded or empty?  No easy solution , but
            it demonstrates that we used inductive processes in
            considering problems.

[1] http://reagle.org/joseph/2003/freemindbrowser.html


body:
On May 2, 2005, at 10:01 AM, Joseph Reagle wrote:

> On Monday 02 May 2005 08:54, Jimmy Wales wrote:
>> Alex Krupp wrote:
>>> I think all Wikipedians would enjoy the book The Wisdom of Crowds by
>>> James Surowiecki. The basic premise is that crowds of relatively
>>> ignorant individuals make better decisions than small groups of
>>> experts. I'm sure everyone here agrees with this as Wikipedia is run
>>> this way
>>
>> It's probably interesting to note that a central theme when I give
>> public talks is precisely that Wikipedia is _not_ run this way, and
>> that
>> wikipedia is _not_ an instance of "The Wisdom of Crowds".
>
> It's important to understand *why* he argues there is wisdom in
> crowds. I
> don't know if you've read it and disagree with the fundamentals, but it
> requires three specific conditions: diversity, independence, and
> decentralization within the group. This seems very appropriate to WP.
> Excerpts from my mindmap [1] on this particular note are below:
>
> [[[

I've read it, it is the "Dow 36,000" for the 90s. Some of his specific
examples I know, for a fact, are bunkum. He confuses cause and effect
consistently. Crowds aren't smart, it is that if a system is set up
where most people do the wrong thing, the system breaks. Wikipedia,
when and where it works (which is most of it at the moment) works
because it is guided towards people making the right, rather than the
wrong, decisions.


from_name: Rahul Sinha

body:
Might I say, this is a great idea!
Would this be easier (technically speaking) if there were some sort
of markup to indicate the text to append? It doesn't seem necissary
except that it might help with formatting issues.

#REDIRECT [[Agar Plate]] [EXPLANATION|Blood Agar is a type of Agar
Plate...]
-RS

On 1 May 2005, at 4.49 PM, Edward Z. Yang wrote:

> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> A while ago, there was a topic on Wikitech-l that discussed
> "Redirect to
> Anchor". Noting that this is technically impossible, but also
> concerned
> without redirects such as:
>
> Blood Agar --> Agar Plate
>
> where the relevant information is tucked away very far down in the
> article, the following feature is requested:
>
> Current behavior of Redirects totally masks any text that comes after
> the #REDIRECT [[]] declaration. Feature would modify behavior,
> where now
> this extra text (provided there is text at all), is placed at the
> top of
> the article people are redirected to, perhaps, in some way,
> reformatted
> to be prominent.
>
> The earlier example cited could be rectified in this manner:
>
> - ----
> #REDIRECT [[Agar plate]]
>
> '''Blood agar''' is a special type of agar plate. See [[Agar
> plate#Types_of_agar_plates]]
> - ----
>
> The following text would be inserted at the top of the article, so:
>
> - ----
> :<i>'''Blood agar''' is a special type of agar plate. See [[Agar
> plate#Types_of_agar_plates]]</i>
>
> An '''agar plate''' is a sterile [[Petri dish]] that... (continue main
> content)
> - ----
>
> IMHO, I think this is an elegant way of solving the "Irrelevant
> Redirect" problem. I also do not think that it would be very difficult
> to implement (although I'm no programmer for Mediawiki, so I can't
> really make any statements on this).
>
> - --
>  Edward Z. Yang      Personal: edwardzyang at thewritingpot.com
>  SN:Ambush Commander Website: http://www.thewritingpot.com/
>  GPGKey:0x869C48DA   http://www.thewritingpot.com/gpgpubkey.asc
>  3FA8 E9A9 7385 B691 A6FC B3CB A933 BE7D 869C 48DA
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
> Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (MingW32)
>
> iD8DBQFCdUDRqTO+fYacSNoRAsNzAJ9nobid8CawGv1WPfNDo5UUi+wxbACfa+rt
> VP/jtoWO7nAO3k3KkslrmVk=
> =j2Zw
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


from_name: Andre Engels

body:
On 5/1/05, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:
> Mark Williamson wrote:
> > My guess is that on the page near the beginning of the book where it
> > gives copyright information, it should say "some portions of this book
> > are (C) Wikipedia, and are released under the GNU Free Documentation
> > licence" or something of the sort.
>
> Will this be possible?  If this was not text, but free software
> released under the GPL, the entire book would be have to be
> released under GPL.  That's the "viral effect" of GPL, as intended
> by its creator Richard Stallman (and hated by Microsoft).  Is
> there no such viral effect at all in GFDL?

Yes, there is a 'viral effect', but it can be circumvented by
considering the book a compilation rather than a single work. This is
not different with the GPL. The GPL says:

"In addition, mere aggregation of another work not based on the
Program with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a
volume of a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other
work under the scope of this License."

In written text it is much less clear what is an aggregation of
separate works and what is a single derived work, and I would not mind
people taking a broad view of 'aggregate works'. In my opinion, it
should be possible to include a text derived from one or more
Wikipedia articles as a chapter of a book, and consider only that
chapter to be under the GFDL.

Andre Engels


from_name: Finne Boonen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Sanger's memoirs

body:
On 4/27/05, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> Andrew Lih wrote:
>
> >On 4/27/05, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> >
> >
> >>Anthere wrote:
> >>The US is now among the world's largest producers of
> >>premium/specialty beers---just California alone produces more
> >>top-quality microbrews than most countries, and if current trends hold,
> >>the US will in not too long produce more Belgian beer than Belgium does.
> >>
> >>
> >
> >As much as I love US microbrews, this is not quite a valid comparison.
> >They've produced lots of good pale ales and stouts. However, Chimay,
> >Duvel and other Trappist-style beers have a taste and appeal all their
> >own that have no equivalent in the States.
> >
> >
> There's actually quite a lot of quite good Trappist-style beers produced
> in the U.S., and it's one of the fastest-growing parts of the U.S. beer
> industry (since they're expensive beers that command high profit
> margins).  Whether they are "equivalent" or not depends on your taste I
> suppose.... I've had very good and very bad Belgian-style beer in both

hijacking, but what exactly is Belgian style beer? (since I know at
least 4 different styles in Belgium :))

--
"Maybe you knew early on that your track went from point A to B, but
unlike you I wasn't given a map at birth!" Alyssa, "Chasing Amy"


body:
On Monday 02 May 2005 10:11, Stirling Newberry wrote:
> > It's important to understand *why* he argues there is wisdom in
> > crowds. I
> > don't know if you've read it and disagree with the fundamentals, but it
> > requires three specific conditions: diversity, independence, and
> > decentralization within the group. This seems very appropriate to WP.

> I've read it, it is the "Dow 36,000" for the 90s. Some of his specific
> examples I know, for a fact, are bunkum. He confuses cause and effect
> consistently. Crowds aren't smart, it is that if a system is set up
> where most people do the wrong thing, the system breaks. Wikipedia,
> when and where it works (which is most of it at the moment) works
> because it is guided towards people making the right, rather than the
> wrong, decisions.

I don't feel as if I need to defend Surowiecki, and I don't understand your
point, but I think he's made a useful contribution as your own example
demonstrates. If the asynchronous and bite-sized character of Open
contributions contribute to their success (Benkler "fine-grained", Sproull
"microcontributions"), is that all?  What *kind* of micro-contributions are
necessary? *If* the contributions are crap, if they they aren't coming from
diverse participants (e.g., not "group think"), independent (e.g., not
"herding"), and decentralized and filtered/aggregated well (e.g., not "US
intelligence" ;) ) then they might be useful.


body:
On 5/2/05, Dovi Jacobs <dovijacobs at yahoo.com> wrote:

> When it came to the issue of audio file formats, for instance, Jimbo Wales made a very clear and correct decision that only file formats that could legally be used in free software would be allowed. Many tens of thousands of Wikimedia users would probably have liked to have been allowed to upload MP3 files. If an open vote had been held, MP3 would probably have been allowed. But no vote was held, because this is a fundamental Wikimedia policy.

Now, that's an interesting point. IF this were really the point, I
MIGHT just give up. You say that MP3 cannot be "legally used in free
software". So, what is going on? Is it indeed not used in free
software? In that case I agree with not including it. Or is it used,
but do we say that's illegal? In that case I still think we should
shut up and just allow it. The issue should be availability, not
politics. Especially not politics that noone else seems to care about.

Andre Engels


from_name: Brion Vibber

body:
Edward Z. Yang wrote:
> Current behavior of Redirects totally masks any text that comes after
> the #REDIRECT [[]] declaration.

The main reason this is done is that extra text containing links will
foul up the link database: the single outgoing link from a redirect is
used to keep track of where that redirect leads to.

Redirect pages really oughtn't to be stored the way they are, it's a
nasty hack. This should be recorded properly as metadata listing the
exact target as a cleanly machine-readable field.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Marco Krohn

body:
On Monday 02 May 2005 11:01, Andre Engels wrote:

> Now, that's an interesting point. IF this were really the point, I
> MIGHT just give up. You say that MP3 cannot be "legally used in free
> software". So, what is going on? Is it indeed not used in free
> software?

FWIW: SuSE as well as RedHat removed the mp3 codecs from their recent
distributions.

best regards,
   Marco


body:
On 2 May 2005, at 12.03 PM, Rowan Collins wrote:

> On 02/05/05, Rahul Sinha <quidire at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> #REDIRECT [[Agar Plate]] [EXPLANATION|Blood Agar is a type of Agar
>> Plate...]
>>
>
> I can't say I'm keen on having things that aren't links bracketted
> like links

Makes sense; I hadn't put much thought into the syntax of the
additional markup so much as the need for it.

> #REDIRECT [[Foo]] BECAUSE For info on Foo, see [[#Foo]]
> or maybe
> #REDIRECT [[Foo]] #BECAUSE For info on Foo, see [[#Foo]]
> to make it more clear that "#because" is a magic word, not part of the
> explanation.

Makes sense; I had thought the syntax should allow for arbitrarily
long "because" explanations... thus an end delimiter would be of use...

>
> The text would then be displayed below (and formatted with) the
> "redirected from" message (which should maybe be more obvious).
>
> As a shortcut, there could be a default text inserted for things of
> the form #redirect [[Foo#Bar]], making it equivalent to #redirect
> [[Foo]] #because For information on <name of redirect>, see the
> section headed [[#Bar|Bar]] below.

Shortcuts are always good :-)


from_name: John Fader

subject: [Wikitech-l] correctly formed ISBNs?!

body:
On 5/2/05, Kai Kumpf <kai.kumpf at scai.fraunhofer.de> wrote:
> sorry if i dare to contradict the advocates (thomas r. koll, etc.)  of
> the one and only correct isbn format:
> *ISBN:* B0000BS018

Kai,
    In order for mediawiki to support this format, someone needs to
find the document that specifies it.  It doesn't comply with the ISBN
standard format as documented at
http://www.isbn-international.org/en/manual.html.  Simply showing that
online booksellers use another format doesn't help write the mediawiki
code that would spot one of these; clearly the number has some
standard format, and we need to know what that format is.

--
John Fader


from_name: Kai Kumpf

subject: [Wikitech-l] correctly formed ISBNs?!

body:
sorry if i dare to contradict the advocates (thomas r. koll, etc.)  of
the one and only correct isbn format:
*ISBN:* B0000BS018
found in:
http://www.amazon.de/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0000BS018/qid=1115032560/sr=8-9/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i9_xgl/302-6992089-0180846


subject: [Foundation-l] wiki representatives

body:
On 5/2/05, Elisabeth Bauer <elian at djini.de> wrote:
> Currently, the exchange among the wikis and between wikis and the
> foundation happens in an informal way. When there's need, announcements
> are sent to the mailing list and one hopes that someone feels
> responsible to take care of forwarding it to his
> wikipedia/wikibooks/wikiquote.... Sometimes it happens, sometimes not.
> Things like the privacy policy may be translated, may be transfered to a
> wiki, but there's no guarantee at all.

Agreed: Would you let me introduce current translation status, which I
find importance ...

*Privacy policy
Translations: ??????? | ?esky | cymri | Deutsch | English | Espa?ol |
italiano| netherlands | portugu?s | ??
*WMF Home (Latest news)
 Currently updated or preparing to update: De, En, Es, Fr, It, Zh
*WQ3
 On-going: En, Es, Fr, It, Pt, Sr, Zh

We can easily find only  a few languages appear in every line: En, Es,
It, Zh. Except En, they seem not to be very involved on meta things
currently, but I think the current situation will change thanks to
such a high interest. On the other hand, it is a hard thing to know
why, biggest wikis seem not to have a full interest in those matters,
specailly an issue directly related to users, Privacy policy issue.

> I'd like to suggest a concept of wiki representatives: each community
> elects two persons (or maybe one for very small wikis and three for the
> really large) who act as the official contact persons and take care of
> communication, approach the foundation if there are problems etc pp.

Generally agreed and in the future there would be election
projectwide, but for a soon coming big election, I prefer to start
with self-nominated representatives with a short term - a half year or
less until each wiki will elect their representative(s). Of course, I
have no opposition to local election if they would elect their reps
before the election would have ended (yes, I would like to see the
list of new embassy members who will help the Board election).

As for number of reps, based on my impression on ranslation issues I
suggest as the below:
Wiki with over 250 active editors (like enwp,  de, ....es or zhwp) 3 reps
Wiki with over 100 active editors (like svwp, ruwp, hewp ... or nowp) 2 reps
Others: 1reps

It is generally good even for small wikis to have their reps who pay
attention on projectwide issue, but perhaps we haven't to say they
must have a rep; or they could have a rep if want.

Currently Wikimedia  Embassy seems  not to be vividly work. Some wiks
have no active members, some have no Embassy. It is good to revive it
and keep the group of Wikipedians who willingly coordinate between
projects vivid and active.

Cheers,
--
Aphaea@*.wikipedia.org
email: Aphaia @ gmail (dot) com


subject: [Foundation-l] wiki representatives


subject: [Wikitech-l] committing to CVS

body:
Thomas Gries wrote:
> If possible and and supported by you,
> I would like to ask, whether I can apply for developers rights
>
>   for committing changes for a limited time.
>
> Then I can upload my http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=454
> changes easily.

Tom, to be perfectly honest your patches require extensive review and
correction and you have always had great difficulty communicating with
the rest of the team. I would definitely not consider giving you CVS
checkin rights at this time.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
Peter Harkins wrote:
> On Mon, May 02, 2005 at 06:41:17AM -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:
>>>There are still plenty of rough edges, and some changes will yet be made
>>>before the end.
>
> What's the context for "before the end": before 1.5 alpha 1 is out or
> before 1.5 proper is out?

Before 1.5.0 final, currently scheduled for circa June 1. Might do a
couple more little tweaks yet before alpha1, though.

> I'm starting a wiki and considering grabbing
> 1.5 now to start rather than have to deal with the 1.4 -> 1.5 upgrade in
> the future. Would I be signing up for more pain by doing this?

Depends on how brave you are. :)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Mathias Schindler

subject: [Wikitech-l] correctly formed ISBNs?!

body:
Kai Kumpf wrote:
> sorry if i dare to contradict the advocates (thomas r. koll, etc.)  of
> the one and only correct isbn format:
> *ISBN:* B0000BS018

Sorry to interrupt you but this is Amazon's ASIN (which is usally the
same as the ISBN).

In this Case, the book is from a GDR-publisher. I don't know if the GDR
was also using the ISBN system back in the 70ies.

Mathias


subject: [Wikitech-l] uploading picture_s_

body:
On 5/2/05, Pavol Cupka <pavol.cupka at gmail.com> wrote:
> Try this tool
>
> http://tiredbrain.com/wikimedia/commonplace/

That's interesting, thanks.

Do we have a catalog somewhere listing all the mediawiki associated
programs (like commonplace) that various people have worked on?  I
searched meta and couldn't find anything.

If there isn't such a thing, maybe I'll compile one (bots, browser
extensions, scripts, stats programs, etc.)

--
John Fader


from_name: Pavol Cupka

subject: [Wikitech-l] uploading picture_s_

body:
Try this tool

http://tiredbrain.com/wikimedia/commonplace/

--
Palica
http://sk.wikipedia.org/User:Palica
Nezabudni si vzia? svoje Wikam?ny. / Don't forget to take your
Wikamins today. - Palica
http://sk.wikipedia.org - slobodn? encyklop?dia, ktor? m??e ka?d?
upravova? - AJ TY


from_name: Timwi

body:
Hi.

I haven't seen the original discussion about a Chinese Wikinews, so this
is the first time I hear why it was disallowed.

If I understand this right... and please correct me if I don't... you
are "afraid" that censorship might happen, and so you preempt it by
censoring it yourself?...


body:
Dovi Jacobs wrote:
>
> What if there is "opposition" to a new language wiki? Should there be
> a way not just to express interest in building one, but also to vote
> against one? Intuitively, the answer is "no", because anyone who
> doesn't want to work on that project in that language simply doesn't
> have to!

Taking as an example the infamous Klingon Wikipedia, it was pretty clear
that a majority of people felt they were entitled to "vote against" it,
even though the argument you mentioned had already been brought up at
the time.


from_name: Jeremy Dunck

subject: [Wikitech-l] Uses of download files

body:
Is there a page describing uses people are finding for the wikipedia
db downloads?

Otherwise, does anyone want to give examples?

This is mostly curiousity, but I'm planning a project based on
wikipedia data, and would like to learn what others are doing in the
area.

Thanks,
  Jeremy Dunck


from_name: Travis Derouin

subject: [Wikitech-l] Reloading WIKI database

body:
Hi Joe,

Do you see any errors in your MySQL server log?

You might need to increase the maximum size of an allowed packet, try adding
this to your my.cnf in the mysqld section:

set-variable = max_allowed_packet=32M

Also, it's possible your Innodb tablespace is too small for the file you're
trying to import, for example in your my.cnf file you might have to set the
size of the innodb data file to be something larger like:

innodb_data_file_path = ibdata1:7800M

Beware of doing this though if you already have information stored in inno
db table, you'll have to export the data, change the size of the tablespace
and then reimport the data.

Travis

On 5/2/05, Joe Flowers <jflowers45 at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> I am trying to use
>
> mysql.exe --username=xxx -password=xxx myDatabaseName < LoadFile.sql
>
> to restore the wikipedia database from the .sql files that they provide.
> However, I am running into issues restoring the data. I've been able to
> restore from a file as large as 70mb but anything bigger than that seems
> to
> fail. It doesn't give any notification of failure but if it runs overnight
> it
> appears to just stop, and I have to manually close the command prompt
> window.
> This is on a windows server 2003 box.
>
> Does anybody know of any tools that can help handle larger .sql files? I
> am
> planning on trying to load the cur database, which is a 2.5gb .sql file,
> and
> I'd rather not have to split it into 50 different files.
>
> Thanks!
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


from_name: Delirium

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

> Alex Krupp wrote:
>
>> I think all Wikipedians would enjoy the book The Wisdom of Crowds by
>> James Surowiecki. The basic premise is that crowds of relatively
>> ignorant individuals make better decisions than small groups of
>> experts. I'm sure everyone here agrees with this as Wikipedia is run
>> this way
>
>
> It's probably interesting to note that a central theme when I give
> public talks is precisely that Wikipedia is _not_ run this way, and
> that wikipedia is _not_ an instance of "The Wisdom of Crowds".
>
> That's not to say that there isn't a lot to the notions of how a group
> collaboration can improve on what an individual can do.  My point is
> just that Wikipedia functions a lot more like a traditional
> organization than most people realize -- it's a community of
> thoughtful people who know each other, not a colony of ants.

This might be the case in some portions, and on smaller Wikis, but in
general I don't think it is.  When I edit articles, 90%+ of the time the
other editors are people I have never conversed with, and often people I
have never seen edit other articles before.  We work together in ad-hoc
fashion on a single article for maybe 10 minutes, and then never see
each other again.  When I write an article, it's usually improved in a
similar way by people I have never seen, and often never see again after
they've made their contributions, often on the order of a single sentence.

That seems a lot more like the "wisdom of crowds" thing... a few people
stopping by and adding a sentence, fixing a punctuation mark, etc., and
then disappearing.  Well, not literally disappearing, but there are
enough people editing the en: Wikipedia that it might as well be the same.

In a few areas where there are prolific editors, you run into the same
people over and over (a few of the history areas are like this, as is
math), but the vast majority of articles don't have any recognizable
editors.

-Mark


from_name: Peter Harkins

body:
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Hash: SHA1

On Mon, May 02, 2005 at 06:41:17AM -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:
> I was going to test an upgrade from 1.4 before releaseing the first 1.5
> alpha today, but it's taking a while to import that darn database and
> now I need sleep. :)
>
> Coming soon, anyway...
>
> There are still plenty of rough edges, and some changes will yet be made
> before the end.

What's the context for "before the end": before 1.5 alpha 1 is out or
before 1.5 proper is out? I'm starting a wiki and considering grabbing
1.5 now to start rather than have to deal with the 1.4 -> 1.5 upgrade in
the future. Would I be signing up for more pain by doing this?

- --
Peter Harkins    -    ph at malaprop.org    -    http://malaprop.org

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from_name: Faraaz Damji

subject: [WikiEN-l] database error

body:
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Hash: SHA1

Wira Andrian wrote:
> I've installed MediaWiki to use in my campus, and i've
> got some problem here. When I edit and save the
> content i've changed, there's an error appears
> "Database Error - Internal error", but actually the
> saving is succeed.
> When I use search, the same error appears.

I think you should try MediaWiki-l
(http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l), which is aimed
at people who are running (or trying to run) MediaWiki.

This mailing list is specifically for the english Wikipedia, so most
people here aren't technically knowledgable about the software that runs
Wikipedia.

Hope you figure out how to fix your problem!

- -Faraaz Damji
- --
Blog: http://frazzydee.ca
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from_name: Chad Perrin

body:
On Mon, May 02, 2005 at 03:06:36AM -0400, Alex Krupp wrote:
> I think all Wikipedians would enjoy the book The Wisdom of Crowds by
> James Surowiecki. The basic premise is that crowds of relatively
> ignorant individuals make better decisions than small groups of experts.
> I'm sure everyone here agrees with this as Wikipedia is run this way and
> Wikipedia is a success, but until reading this book it was a total
> mystery why Wikipedia worked the way it did. And judging by the press
> we've gotten, I'm not the only one who feels with way. If you'll
> remember, the mystery of how Wikipedia works has been compared to
> sausage, bumble bees, public bathrooms, etc.
>

I think you'll find that making assumptions on what everyone can agree
will only get you in trouble, particularly when you haven't asked anyone
what they think on the matter.  I, for one, disagree with the "Wisdom of
Crowds" concepts as they are presented, and find most of the reasoning
therein to be flawed.  Granted, I have my information on it only from
secondary sources, but these sources include both agreement and
disagreement, and include some fairly intelligent treatments of the
subject.

In short, though, you'll probably find pretty quickly that "everyone
here" does NOT in fact agree with that, or that Wikipedia is run that
way, as several responses to your email have already illustrated.

If you really want to know why Wikipedia works, you should probably
start reading some of the more scholarly treatments of why open source
software development works -- and yes, they're written by "experts".

In truth, it seems to me that what makes Wikipedia work is exactly what
the book you mention claims is invalid: the input of experts.  We are
all experts in some things, and we all know where to find the words of
experts online.  Within our realms of knowledge, and within realms of
the knowledge we can find that is contributed to public circulation by
others, we contribute to the aggregate that is Wikipedia.  There's
nothing "emergent" about that aside from the simple fact that when a lot
of time and effort is put into collecting expert data a nice collection
of expert data emerges.  Meanwhile, there's nothing distributed about
the intelligence involved -- only about the way work is accomplished.

--
Chad Perrin
[ CCD CopyWrite | http://ccd.apotheon.org ]


from_name: Lee Daniel Crocker

body:
On Sun, 2005-05-01 at 16:49 -0400, Edward Z. Yang wrote:

> (Suggested redirection feature)

Why add a complicated feature for what is simply a misuse
of a current one?  The article you cite should simply be a
one-sentence article with a link, not a redirect.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with one-sentence articles.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com>
<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/>


from_name: David

subject: [WikiEN-l] Critics & weak articles

body:
geni wrote:

>On 5/1/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
>
>
>>Jack Lutz (jack-lutz at comcast.net) [050502 08:40]:
>>
>>
>>>David Gerard wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>Jack Lutz (jack-lutz at comcast.net) [050502 01:37]:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>How do validation ratings age and handle sudden, mass replacement of
>>>>>content?
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>[[m:Article validation feature]]
>>>>
>>>>
>>>This is not covered on the Meta page.
>>>
>>>
>>Sorry, the page does (or should) mention that the planned feature is to be
>>per revision, not per page - so sudden mass replacement of content creates
>>a new version, which gets a different rating.
>>
>>(Expect vote spamming and calling out the vote on contentious articles and
>>voting teams on less popular articles.)
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>Articles on schools are going to be fun.
>
>
So that means that *every single edit* resets the counter?  I can see
edit wars resulting from that.

-[[en:User:Humblefool]]


from_name: Rowan Collins

body:
On 02/05/05, Rahul Sinha <quidire at gmail.com> wrote:
> Might I say, this is a great idea!
> Would this be easier (technically speaking) if there were some sort
> of markup to indicate the text to append? It doesn't seem necissary
> except that it might help with formatting issues.

Yes, I do quite like this idea; I seem to remember somebody hacked up
a trial version of it ages ago, but it had a few unironed problems and
was shelved. One reason why extra markup would be nice is that
occasionally redirects already include extra information which
*wouldn't* be appropriate for display in this way.

> #REDIRECT [[Agar Plate]] [EXPLANATION|Blood Agar is a type of Agar
> Plate...]

I can't say I'm keen on having things that aren't links bracketted
like links - IIRC, the previous implementation had things like
#redirect [[Foo|is a kind of]], which was just confusing. My
suggestion would be
#REDIRECT [[Foo]] BECAUSE For info on Foo, see [[#Foo]]
or maybe
#REDIRECT [[Foo]] #BECAUSE For info on Foo, see [[#Foo]]
to make it more clear that "#because" is a magic word, not part of the
explanation.

The text would then be displayed below (and formatted with) the
"redirected from" message (which should maybe be more obvious).

As a shortcut, there could be a default text inserted for things of
the form #redirect [[Foo#Bar]], making it equivalent to #redirect
[[Foo]] #because For information on <name of redirect>, see the
section headed [[#Bar|Bar]] below.

I'd still like to see
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1521 implemented first
though, or some other way of creating more stable section anchors.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Tim Starling

body:
Dovi Jacobs wrote:
> I recently stumbled upon the mailing-list discussion of the Chinese
> Wikinews. When I found the discussion, I couldn't believe what I was
> reading. Is this the Wikimedia Foundation that believes in free
> projects creating free content, "free" as in both "free beer" and
> "free speech"?

I think you're getting actual free speech confused with the paradoxical
terminology used by Richard Stallman to describe software with
restricted rights of use and distribution. Wikimedia supports the latter
but has never supported the former. Rightly or wrongly, Wikimedia
projects have been complicit in censorship of various kinds. I don't
think the discussion of censorship is aided by conflating these two
concepts.

-- Tim Starling


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Date Formats

body:
On 30/04/05, James R. Johnson <modean52 at comcast.net> wrote:
> I was wondering more along the lines of a tag, like the geo, so that we can
> format the date within the article, such as [[date:10-24-2005;us;md]] or
> [[date:24-10-2005;iso;dm]] to tell the computer to display in the first case
> the date October 24th, 2005 in the US format, with only the month and day,
> thus "October 24" and in the second case in the ISO format, with only the
> day and month, so "24 October" with the month names coming from the System
> messages.

I don't understand - why would you want to force a particular format
in this way, and if you did, what would be wrong with just writing it
out yourself? Surely the aim is to have dates, however entered, appear
uniformly in the format chosen by the user *reading* the page. This is
exactly what Tim's DateFormatter does, but rather than having to
specifically tag it as a date, you just have to make the parts of the
date into links. (Of course, this has disadvantages - such as a lot of
fairly irrelevant links into pages to do with dates - but it makes it
very easy to use)

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Michael Keppler

subject: [Wikitech-l] uploading picture_s_

body:
John Fader schrieb:
> Do we have a catalog somewhere listing all the mediawiki associated
> programs (like commonplace) that various people have worked on?  I
> searched meta and couldn't find anything.

[[en:Wikipedia:Tools]] maybe?

Ciao, Michael.