from_name: Delirium

body:
Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:

>Andre Engels wrote:
>
>
>>This seems to be exactly the problem Larry Sanger talks about - We
>>don't care whether somebody is a renowned expert on a subject or has
>>just read a few lines related to a subject in the past. If they can
>>write it down, we consider them equal.
>>
>>
>
>Some in the community surely do feel this way.  But I don't, and my
>impression from talking to and meeting tons of wikipedia volunteers is
>a very profound respect for learning, and a keen desire that we *get
>it right*.
>
>
I haven't seen this either---especially in areas that would benefit from
(or even, arguably, require) strong expertise to do well, like technical
articles on mathematics, there is a tendency to defer to those who have
demonstrated they know what they're doing.  If [[User:Michael Hardy]]
says something about mathematics that is contrary to my understanding, I
won't change it unless I'm *very* certain and discuss it first, while if
it's a random user, I may well assume I'm probably right and go ahead
and change it.

Perhaps what some experts dislike is that being an expert is only one
criterion the community uses to evaluate people.  Not all experts are
good at writing articles for a general-audience encyclopedia, or working
with others on a collaborative project, and those are also criteria we
use.  Which is as it should be---we're writing an encyclopedia, so we
need good encyclopedia writers, which is a different sort of work than
writing journal articles is.

I think you will find, though, that there will be a lot of deference
given to people who: have expertise in a field, write readably for
people outside their field, don't try to push particular controversial
viewpoints, and work well with others.

I do agree that better review systems are needed, but frankly, I'm not
sure how much we should pay attention to Larry Sanger on this matter.
He has, to my knowledge, not edited Wikipedia at all except for those
times when he was paid a salary to do so.  When he stopped being paid,
he immediately left and seems to have spent most of his time since
attacking Wikipedia.  If I recall correctly, he wrote his first "what
Wikipedia needs to do" manifesto approximately the day after he stopped
being paid.

Perhaps more importantly, (some of) his articles are a good case in
point for why we shouldn't give undue weight to experts in a field.
Take a look at [[en:Physicalism/Larry's text]], for example.  This is a
philosophy article, a field in which Dr. Sanger has a PhD.  By contrast,
I've taken a grand total of six undergraduate courses in the field, but
I could already write a better article than this in about an hour off
the top of my head.

The most severe problem is that it mis-defines physicalism within the
first paragraph, which is a rather inauspicious start.  Dr. Sanger
defines physicalism as the position that the mental is reducible to the
physical, which is actually known as "reductive physicalism".  There are
other physicalist positions, collectively known as non-reductive
physicalism, which happen to be among the more active areas of research
in recent years.  (These positions claim supervenience of the mental on
the physical, but not reduction.)  Dr. Sanger was either completely
unaware of this large body of work, and so wrote an inaccurate article,
or deliberately ignored it, and so wrote a biased article.

By comparison, the replacement article at [[physicalism]], which does
not appear to have been written by PhDs in philosophy, is a sparse but
accurate summary of the various strains of physicalism (which ought to
clear up the above paragraph for those left befuddled by my summary).

-Mark


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Sean Barrett

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

body:
Sj stated for the record:

> On Thu, 6 Jan 2005 14:03:42 -0500, Stirling Newberry
> <stirling.newberry at xigenics.net> wrote:
>
>>
>>[micro essay on 'poves']
>
>
> That slithy word will haunt my dreams.

Gyring and gimballing until you wabe up?

--
  Sean Barrett     | What was the best thing before sliced bread?
  sean at epoptic.com |


from_name: Stirling Newberry

body:
On Jan 6, 2005, at 1:41 PM, Daniel Mayer wrote:

> --- Andre Engels <andreengels at gmail.com> wrote:
>> And even where NPOV is concerned, an expert is much more useful than
>> just someone off the street. A non-expert POV-warrior will easily blow
>> away a non-expert NPOV-fighter, simply because he is the one who has
>> read at least something about the subject. An expert POV-warrior will
>> have a much harder time fighting an expert NPOV-fighter.
>
> And that is why we have a dispute resolution process. RfC is used to
> expose a
> conflict to a wider audience. That increases the chance that other
> NPOV-minded
> and at least semi-knowledgeable people get to voice their view and add
> their
> contribution. If that gets the attention of an expert in the field,
> then all
> the better (so long as that person adheres to NPOV). And you
> incorrectly assume
> that the non-expert POV warrior knows more than the non-expert
> NPOV-minded
> person or group (if the later are really in the right, then they will
> garner
> more support in the end and win).
>

Most academics are poves, that is why they became academics in the
first place. The POV problem isn't going to go away any time soon,
because it is a feature of the society we live in. In a micro
broadcasting world of scarcity, there is a very large economic niche
for being an expert Pove, recruiting lesser poves, and
producing*confirmation* rather than *information*. NPOV is a more
revolutionary concept than most people realize, because it is precisely
not how academia operates.

What is happening on wikipedia is fundamentally different from the old
knowledge system, and one which is systematically addressing many of
the problems of that old system - such as the high rent to participate
in it. However, it means that what you see, is what you get for a very
long time in terms of social dynamics. Academic and expert Poves are
merely trolls who have been taught how to do it without upsetting the
other pove trolls that they have coffee with, and have been given
permission to Povetroll so long as they do some level of useful work to
earn their keep. (see Thomas Kuhn).

Fundamentally expertise means something very different in the wikipedia
verse - it means not being able to frame competing ideas out, but being
able to draw a large enough frame so that readers can reasonably weigh
the competing ideas available.

This is why tools are needed that will make creating a wide frame
possible, and why I propose we have a system for making citations easy,
clear, annotable, and in their own namespace with macros.


list: wikien-l

subject: [WikiEN-l] Illegitimate block.

body:
JAY JG wrote:

> Perhaps the confusion here is the assumption that the first time one
> adds information to (or deletes information from) an article, it is
> not a "revert", but the subsequent 3 additions (and deletions) are
> "reverts".  Thus "3 reverts in 24 hours" can mean 1 edit, then 3
> reverts to it.

This is an interesting issue, and with any chosen number will influence
the dynamics of the situation.

If the first addition is counted as a "revert", then this means that in
a one-on-one dispute, the person who reverts the addition "wins" the
edit war. A adds (1), B reverts (1), A reverts (2), B reverts (2), A
reverts (3), B reverts (3) -- B wins

On the other hand, if the first addition *isn't* a revert, then the
person who makes the new addition "wins" the edit war: A adds, B reverts
(1), A reverts (1), B reverts (2), A reverts (2), B reverts (3), A
reverts (3) -- A wins

So do we want to bias this towards people who are trying to make changes
to articles, or towards people who are trying to prevent them?

-Mark


from_name: nas ral

subject: [WikiEN-l] Definition of 'near-revert'? was Illegitimate block.

body:
Posting a warning on a users talk page is a good idea. It also gives the
admin time to really think whether they have to block someone or not.

I don't think placing a message on a users talk page is too onerous a
task for an admin to do. Much less annoying and embarassing than
unblocking an editor blocked foolishly and in haste.


from_name: Theresa Knott

body:
>
> I don't think placing a message on a users talk page is too onerous a
> task for an admin to do. Much less annoying and embarassing than
> unblocking an editor blocked foolishly and in haste.

Afterall admins warn vandals before blocking them. A revert war
participant deserves at least the same as a vandal.

Theresa


body:
NSK stated for the record:

> I once saw a professor visiting a Wikipedia article on maths found from a
> Google search, but he abandoned it just after a few seconds. Another
> professor has advised us never to cite material not hosted on .edu or .ac.uk
> or other educational domains.
>
> If Wikipedia does not change its attitudes, it will eventually die from brain
> drain: New, more expertise-friendly and intellectual wikis will emerge and
> WP's knowledgeable users will just immigrate there.

For someone so contemptuous of Wikipedia, you sure do like our mailing
list a lot.

--
  Sean Barrett     | What was the best thing before sliced bread?
  sean at epoptic.com |


from_name: Stan Shebs

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Bibliography

body:
Caroline Ewen wrote:

>Hi all,
>
>Don't get me wrong but why would there be a need for a tool to create a
>bibliography ? It's all quite simple: Surname, NAME, Title in italic, Edited
>by..., City, Year.
>
>Or did I misunderstand the whole "technology for bibliographical
>records"-thing ?
>
Ah, an innocent wandering into the brambly briers of
bibliography... :-)

Think of different styles (some do first name first), different
names for the same person (middle initial vs spelled-out),
journal articles, book chapters in a multi-author book, translations,
multiple editions with different content, annotated works,
uppercase/lowercase, and so on.

Even though only a minority of our articles have references now,
there is a remarkable randomness among them.  Wouldn't you rather
be able to type in "[[Biblio:Wealth of Nations]]" and have it
expand into a correctly-formatted reference to Adam Smith's book,
mentioning original publication date, ISBN for a good recent
reprint, and URL for an online text at the most reliable website?

Even better, some dedicated bibtexers and others have built
giant bibliographies online, and we would like to just reuse
them instead of typing all in ourselves.

Stan


from_name: Sj

body:
On Thu, 6 Jan 2005 14:03:42 -0500, Stirling Newberry
<stirling.newberry at xigenics.net> wrote:
>
> On Jan 6, 2005, at 1:41 PM, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> > And you incorrectly assume that the non-expert POV warrior knows more
> > than the non-expert NPOV-minded person or group (if the later are really in
> > the right, then they will garner more support in the end and win).
>
> [micro essay on 'poves']

That slithy word will haunt my dreams.

> Fundamentally expertise means something very different in the wikipedia
> verse - it means not being able to frame competing ideas out, but being
> able to draw a large enough frame so that readers can reasonably weigh
> the competing ideas available.

Yes, this.  Being a field expert helps in being competent to draw such
frames, and helps even more in filling in the frames with all
available ideas, but is neither necessary nor sufficient to make an
expert contributor.

--
+sj+


list: foundation-l

from_name: Traroth

subject: [Foundation-l] Forking the Wiki

body:
That's easy : I haven't written that...

Traroth

Scott Nelson <scott at penguinstorm.com> wrote:

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

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

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

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

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

subject: [Foundation-l] Forking the Wiki


from_name: Mark Williamson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Request for Amis Wiktionary

body:
> > Second of all, I think it will be a good idea to divide efforts
> > between a Wikipedia and a Wiktionary. There are many similarities
> > between the projects, but on Wikipedia you can give much more
> > information about a subject, while in Wiktionary you give information
> > about the word itself (ie pronunciation, translations, definition).
> > Perhaps it would be a good idea to get a "head start" with the
> > Wiktionary until you have a "working lexicon" of 500 words, and then
> > split efforts and start more on a Wikipedia.

> I disagree; in my opinion it would be better to start just one of the
> two, whichever the organisers are more interested in. There's just a
> few people working on the language, and it might be some time before
> there are more. Splitting efforts in a situation like that seems to me
> to be detrimental to the project. Of course this does not mean I would
> be in favor of blocking one or the other, I just want to advise the
> Amis Wikipedians/Wiktionarians against it.

Perhaps you are right. In this regard I think the best idea is this:
get a small number of good articles in Wikipedia, and then change to
working primarily on Wiktionary (or, for that matter, the other way
around).

> As another issue, is any of you experienced in Wikipedia? If not, it
> would be good to have someone from another Wikipedia (the Chinese one
> seems to be the obvious choice), preferably a sysop and preferably
> someone with passive knowledge of Amis, to help in setting up your
> wiki. And of course an announcement should be made in the Chinese (and
> perhaps Min-nan? I don't know enough about the Taiwanese linguistic
> situation to judge that) Wikipedia and Wiktionary when this is
> started.

"Pektiong Tan (zh-min-nan:pektiong) will help those people to get
familiar with the wikipedia system."

Mark


from_name: Skyring

subject: [WikiEN-l] STill not back,

body:
On Thu, 06 Jan 2005 01:25:01 -0000, John Bradley <john at ontobus.co.uk> wrote:
> I still have not hear from your administrator jdfwolff about why he's blocked
> me.
>
> For every minute I am blocked for I demand that Jdfwolff be blocked for 10
> minutes and that he have his privileges withdraw he is obviously triger
> happy and unfit to be left in charge of anything.

Perhaps you could follow him around and correct his speling...

--
Peter in Canberra


subject: [Foundation-l] Forking the Wiki

body:
When we just speak about non-relevant bullshit...

Traroth

Scott Nelson <scott at penguinstorm.com> wrote:

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

Living in a nuclear free zone.

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subject: [Foundation-l] Forking the Wiki


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Choosing interface?

body:
Of its own interface, yes, that would be a nightmare.

The issue with LanguageXX.php is this: two ways to translate the
interface exist (in practice). With one, translations are activated on
that Wikipedia as soon as they are submitted (Mediawiki namespace).
With the other, a developer has to be asked to activate it,
adjustments are more difficult to make, and activation is entirely at
the developer's leisure.

Many more recent translations have been exclusively namespace because
people didn't forsee the problems that might be caused by not using
LanguageXX.php.

It's fairly simple to export the MediaWiki namespace translations into
a LanguageXX.php file, and a bot could probably be made for it, but
even then it would probably be a while before anybody activated them.
(I can't do that because my programming skills are limited to qbasic,
html, and unl)

Mark

On Thu, 6 Jan 2005 17:55:08 +0000, Rowan Collins
<rowan.collins at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 5 Jan 2005 18:43:29 -0700, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Nope, you can choose an interface language now.
> >
> > Unfortunately for many Wikipedias, this uses the LanguageXX.php file
> > and NOT whatever might be in the mediawiki namespace on that Wikipedia
> > - thus you can't view the interface in Kannada, or Navajo, or etc...
>
> For obvious reasons, it would be a bit of a nightmare if every wiki
> could include a seperate customised version of its interface in every
> language; and the different wikipedias will customise things in ways
> dependent on their *community*, not just the language.
>
> Presumably (I hope I'm not reopening a can of worms here) the
> languages you mention can become available to whoever wants them as
> soon as somebody creates an appropriate LanguageXX.php, so it's not so
> much a problem of how the interface selection works, as the status of
> those translations.
>
> --
> Rowan Collins BSc
> [IMSoP]
>


subject: [Foundation-l] Forking the Wiki

body:
I think the little flame war between Scott Nelson and me is the perfect illustration of what will happen continously : What could possibly happen when you ask to people in conflict (and i mean real conflict, nothing to do with something like a Wikipeda revert war...) to write on what happened to them and there family, in a media where the other side can read it and react to it ? What could be the reaction of a palestinian, who have just lost his son in an israeli bombing, when he read complaints from an israeli who just lost his wife in a palestinian bomb attack ? The fundamental problem is that you ask for reactions about subjects which just cannot be treated calmly, and especially not by the victims.

Traroth

Robin Shannon <robin.shannon at gmail.com> wrote:
So, um, no matter how fun french/american/little green men from mars
bashing may be; how about we go back to the idea of wikipeople, what's
wrong with it? Its been around for quite a while and hasnt got up yet.
Why? We already have content to put into it (11/09wiki) and it could
tie up some loose ends, so what are the objections to it? The only
objection i have heard so far is that it would turn into one big flame
war (something i disagree with). Any other objecitons?

---------------------------------
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subject: [Foundation-l] Forking the Wiki


from_name: Robin Shannon

subject: [Foundation-l] Forking the Wiki

body:
So, um, no matter how fun french/american/little green men from mars
bashing may be; how about we go back to the idea of wikipeople, what's
wrong with it? Its been around for quite a while and hasnt got up yet.
Why? We already have content to put into it (11/09wiki) and it could
tie up some loose ends, so what are the objections to it? The only
objection i have heard so far is that it would turn into one big flame
war (something i disagree with). Any other objecitons?

On Wed, 5 Jan 2005 12:03:33 -0800, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Scott Nelson wrote:
> > Can this be taken off list?
> >
> > This conversation long since lost any relevance to the wiki project.
>
> Absolutely.  The person who started it has already been warned in the
> past for starting irrelevant political discussions on the mailing
> lists.  The next time, I'll resolve it by kicking him off the list.
>
> --Jimbo

--
hit me: robin.shannon.id.au
jab me: saudade at jabber.zim.net.au

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons
Recombo Plus License. To view a copy of this license, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/sampling+/1.0/


subject: [Foundation-l] Forking the Wiki


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Rowan Collins

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Do we have the analog of MS word template in
	mediawiki?

body:
On Mon, 3 Jan 2005 10:21:39 -0800, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> > Do we have the analog of MS word template in mediawiki?
>
> No.

See also http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1045

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Joseph Reagle

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Bibliography

body:
On Thursday 06 January 2005 14:46, Karl Eichwalder wrote:
> Make sure to use proper technology for bibliographical records;
> http://www.indexdata.dk offers good tools under GPL or other free
> licenses.  For storage id-zebra (zebra) and for retrival over Z39.50 the
> YAZ toolkit is available.

A bibtex format would be nice too...

--
Regards,          http://www.mit.edu/~reagle/
Joseph Reagle     E0 D5 B2 05 B6 12 DA 65  BE 4D E3 C1 6A 66 25 4E


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Choosing interface?

body:
On Wed, 5 Jan 2005 18:43:29 -0700, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> Nope, you can choose an interface language now.
>
> Unfortunately for many Wikipedias, this uses the LanguageXX.php file
> and NOT whatever might be in the mediawiki namespace on that Wikipedia
> - thus you can't view the interface in Kannada, or Navajo, or etc...

For obvious reasons, it would be a bit of a nightmare if every wiki
could include a seperate customised version of its interface in every
language; and the different wikipedias will customise things in ways
dependent on their *community*, not just the language.

Presumably (I hope I'm not reopening a can of worms here) the
languages you mention can become available to whoever wants them as
soon as somebody creates an appropriate LanguageXX.php, so it's not so
much a problem of how the interface selection works, as the status of
those translations.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


subject: [WikiEN-l] Are legal threats blockable offenses?

body:
Rhobite stated for the record:

> Wikipedia doesn't have a clear policy on the proper response to legal
> threats. According to [[Wikipedia:No legal threats]], legal threats
> against Wikipedia by editors are a violation of policy, but there does
> not seem to be consensus to block or ban users who engage in this
> practice. Nevertheless, many admins do routinely block people for
> making legal threats. I don't believe these blocks are justified by
> policy. Whether or not you believe blocking should be allowed, the
> policy is currently inconclusive. Maybe someone could clarify this, or
> if necessary, we could have a vote about it. Cross-posted to [[Village
> Pump (policy)]].

Legal threats are personal attacks and should be treated the same way.

--
  Sean Barrett     | What was the best thing before sliced bread?
  sean at epoptic.com |


from_name: j.levrel at free.fr

subject: [Wikitech-l] A work on data

body:
Hello every wikipedians,

My name is Julien Levrel and I'm studying sociology in France. I started a PhD
on cooperation and collaboration using wiki for leading project. Some french
wikipedians know me cause I interview them during my first approach and now I
try to modelize cooperation between contributors using graph and technical
methodology to improve my view of the social and thematic network of the Wp fr
(firstly).

After a discussion on the chan IRC #wikipedia.fr, I try here to get some more
information. I would like to download the data of Wp fr (cur and old). I don't
think there is the totally of Wp fr (like discussions, personnal pages, help
pages, ...). Is it possible to get these pages for working not connected ?

I think I am not alone to work on this project in a sociological view, so maybe
it will be really interesting to have these data or maybe to have a different
access to these and not use servers (thing I will never do alone without
permissions)

be cool with my english :) I'm sorry for him.
thank you for your time and party on dudes!
Julien Levrel

Sorry if there is already a thematic on this in archive, I will check after.


body:
On Jan 6, 2005, at 5:16 PM, NSK wrote:

> On Thursday 06 January 2005 21:03, Stirling Newberry wrote:
>> Most academics are poves, that is why they became academics in the
>> first place.
>
> Anti-Intellectualism at its best.
>

Nonsense, anti-academicism yes, but to say that academia is
intellectual is to defy its own admission that the set of professors
and the set of dullards have a far from null intersection.

You are engaging in appeal to authority, which has been a logical
fallacy for quite a little while.


from_name: Alfio Puglisi

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: special characters

body:
It's already on bugzilla:

http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1247

Alfio

On Wed, 5 Jan 2005, Brion Vibber wrote:

>A quick test on ang.wikipedia.org in IE 6.0 on Windows XP SP2 shows
>that some of the two-byte UTF-8 characters are incorrectly URL-decoded
>by IE and are inserted as two characters composed of their individual
>UTF-8 bytes interpreted as 8-bit Latin-1 characters.
>
>This is pretty clearly an incorrect interpretation of the code by IE.
>It can probably be worked around by skipping the URL encoding, but I'll
>have to do more testing for scripting-attack safety and compatibility
>in other browsers, so I don't have time to do it right now while I'm at
>work. Would you mind filing a bug report on bugzilla.wikipedia.org to
>make sure I don't forget? Thanks.
>
>-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>


from_name: Bryan Derksen

body:
At 12:16 AM 1/7/2005 +0200, NSK wrote:
>I once saw a professor visiting a Wikipedia article on maths found from a
>Google search, but he abandoned it just after a few seconds. Another
>professor has advised us never to cite material not hosted on .edu or .ac.uk
>or other educational domains.
>
>If Wikipedia does not change its attitudes, it will eventually die from brain
>drain: New, more expertise-friendly and intellectual wikis will emerge and
>WP's knowledgeable users will just immigrate there.

Alternately, you seem to be suggesting that Wikipedia needs to do is get an
.edu or .ac.uk domain name.


from_name: Domas Mituzas

subject: [Wikitech-l] A work on data

body:
Hey,

> After a discussion on the chan IRC #wikipedia.fr, I try here to get some more information. I would like to download the data of Wp fr (cur and old). I don't think there is the > totally of Wp fr (like discussions, personnal pages, help pages, ...). Is it possible to get these pages for working not connected ?

http://download.wikimedia.org/

Cheers,
Domas


from_name: Rhobite

body:
Wikipedia doesn't have a clear policy on the proper response to legal
threats. According to [[Wikipedia:No legal threats]], legal threats
against Wikipedia by editors are a violation of policy, but there does
not seem to be consensus to block or ban users who engage in this
practice. Nevertheless, many admins do routinely block people for
making legal threats. I don't believe these blocks are justified by
policy. Whether or not you believe blocking should be allowed, the
policy is currently inconclusive. Maybe someone could clarify this, or
if necessary, we could have a vote about it. Cross-posted to [[Village
Pump (policy)]].

Rhobite


from_name: Jean-Baptiste Soufron

body:
Well the thing is that wikipedia is an encyclopedia. Would'nt it be
best for experts to set up their own wikis full of boring informations
and crappy details ?

I am not that sure that encycopedia should be written by experts. It
must give state-of-the-art information but I know plenty of people able
to write very good articles about subject they are not experts in...
and that the work journalist do everyday.

Plus, second argument, who will choose experts and on what basis ? Just
as you said, a PhD means nothing when it comes to your knowledge level.
So, how will you choose experts ? Who ? etc.

For all these reasons, it's quite clear that wikipedia should not be a
"public fora" for experts. If they want one, it's much better to
install their own mediawiki on some server to build a knowledge base on
any subject they want to talk about.

Jean-Baptiste Soufron, Doctorant
CERSA - CNRS, Paris 2
http://soufron.free.fr

Le 6 janv. 05, ? 11:02, Andre Engels a ?crit :

> Daniel Mayer:
>> I respect Larry and what he did to help Wikipedia along in its first
>> year. But
>> I will never just assume that somebody with a PhD is right since many
>> PhDs all
>> too often are not; I've come across and know of a good many PhDs who
>> have axes
>> to grind and who have pet theories to push.
>>
>> NPOV is a much better guarantee of accuracy than trusting a supposed
>> expert
>> (although I do highly value feedback from field experts - I just
>> don't take
>> their ideas as the last word).
>
> I disagree. NPOV does not in any way guarantee accuracy. At best it
> stops the most extreme cases of theory-pushing, at worst it leads to a
> ridiculous degree of relativism.
>
> And even where NPOV is concerned, an expert is much more useful than
> just someone off the street. A non-expert POV-warrior will easily blow
> away a non-expert NPOV-fighter, simply because he is the one who has
> read at least something about the subject. An expert POV-warrior will
> have a much harder time fighting an expert NPOV-fighter.
>
> I think there's a large area between "valuing feedback" and "giving
> the last word". It would be worthwhile to explore it. And it would be
> worthwhile to make a decision whom we DO give the last word.
>
>> Many in academia are used to being the gatekeepers and stewards of
>> information. Wiki opens those gates to anybody with an Internet
>> connection. So
>> many in academia will always recoil in horror at the mere concept -
>> that is
>> their problem, their failing, not ours.
>
> Maybe it should be our problem. Maybe we should be listening to what
> others see as problems with our methods, rather than closing our ears
> and shouting how great it is. Wikipedia is great, but that should not
> stop us from trying to find ways to make it even better.
>
> Andre Engels
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Stirling Newberry

body:
On Jan 6, 2005, at 7:15 PM, Sean Barrett wrote:

> NSK stated for the record:
>
>> I once saw a professor visiting a Wikipedia article on maths found
>> from a Google search, but he abandoned it just after a few seconds.

Some sections of wikipedia are a horror, and the only way to fix that
is to contribute. It was the state of the economics section which
finally got me to contribute. Particularly the lack of a good
explanation of the IS-LM model.

>> Another professor has advised us never to cite material not hosted on
>> .edu or .ac.uk or other educational domains.

I think the New York Times has engaged in some poor reporting, but to
catagorically deny citing them seems, extreme.

>> If Wikipedia does not change its attitudes, it will eventually die
>> from brain drain: New, more expertise-friendly and intellectual wikis
>> will emerge and WP's knowledgeable users will just immigrate there.
>>

First you accuse me of anti-intellectualism for saying that academics
are poves, and then you prove my point.

Thank you I could not have done a better job.

But to get back to seriousness: Wikipedia does need to get more
friendly to a higher level of information integrity, and it does need
to get to a higher level of citation, and it does need to recruit many
more people from academia to contribute articles - more specifically,
it needs more people who write in their area of profession to
contribute. One need not be a professor to write a good explanation of
a star scheme, but actually having implemented one a few times will
generally be a huge help in writing about them.


from_name: NSK

subject: [Wikitech-l] A work on data

body:
On Thursday 06 January 2005 19:27, j.levrel at free.fr wrote:
> My name is Julien Levrel and I'm studying sociology in France. I started a
> PhD on cooperation and collaboration using wiki for leading project.

Hey :) I am also doing dissertation research on wikis! I mainly work on the
software and theoretical aspects of it, but I also pay some attention to
sociological implications.

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


from_name: Frank v Waveren

subject: [Wikitech-l] Why www.wikipedia.org => en.wikipedia.org ?

body:
On Thu, Jan 06, 2005 at 10:38:49AM +0100, Gr?goire Colbert wrote:
>   $alh = trim( $_SERVER["HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE"] );
This would be a horrible abuse of HTTP. You should only present the
same content in different languages based on the Accept-Language
field, never to different content. Having links point to different
things based on browser settings would be a nightmare.

--
Frank v Waveren                                      Fingerprint: BDD7 D61E
fvw@[var.cx|stack.nl] ICQ#10074100                      5D39 CF05 4BFC F57A
Public key: hkp://wwwkeys.pgp.net/468D62C8              FA00 7D51 468D 62C8


from_name: Karl Eichwalder

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Bibliography

body:
Stan Shebs <shebs at apple.com> writes:

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

Make sure to use proper technology for bibliographical records;
http://www.indexdata.dk offers good tools under GPL or other free
licenses.  For storage id-zebra (zebra) and for retrival over Z39.50 the
YAZ toolkit is available.

--
http://www.gnu.franken.de/ke/                           |      ,__o
                                                        |    _-\_<,
                                                        |   (*)/'(*)
Key fingerprint = F138 B28F B7ED E0AC 1AB4  AA7F C90A 35C3 E9D0 5D1C


from_name: JAY JG

subject: [WikiEN-l] Illegitimate block.

body:
>JAY JG wrote:
>
>>Perhaps the confusion here is the assumption that the first time one adds
>>information to (or deletes information from) an article, it is not a
>>"revert", but the subsequent 3 additions (and deletions) are "reverts".
>>Thus "3 reverts in 24 hours" can mean 1 edit, then 3 reverts to it.
>
>This is an interesting issue, and with any chosen number will influence the
>dynamics of the situation.
>
>If the first addition is counted as a "revert", then this means that in a
>one-on-one dispute, the person who reverts the addition "wins" the edit
>war. A adds (1), B reverts (1), A reverts (2), B reverts (2), A reverts
>(3), B reverts (3) -- B wins
>
>On the other hand, if the first addition *isn't* a revert, then the person
>who makes the new addition "wins" the edit war: A adds, B reverts (1), A
>reverts (1), B reverts (2), A reverts (2), B reverts (3), A reverts (3) --
>A wins
>
>So do we want to bias this towards people who are trying to make changes to
>articles, or towards people who are trying to prevent them?
>
>-Mark

We should bias towards the actual revert policy; what exactly is that,
though?

Jay.


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Are legal threats blockable offenses?

body:
--- "csherlock at ljh.com.au" <csherlock at ljh.com.au> wrote:
> I will continue to block users for making legal threats, after giving
> them a warning.

Good for you. And as an ArbCom member I will not vote to censure any admin who
does the same in good faith. Although it would be bad form to block a person
for making a threat at you - let some other admin do it.

-- mav

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - 250MB free storage. Do more. Manage less.
http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250


body:
--- Robin Shannon <robin.shannon at gmail.com> wrote:
> Are we talking permanent blocks or 24/48/foo hours blocks? I think
> there is a very big difference between the two.

Admins do not have the authority to indefinitely block users (vandals are
different). Simply making a legal threat is not vandalism in itself. Any
pattern of bad behavior should be dealt with through the dispute resolution
process.

-- mav

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


from_name: John Lee

body:
David Gerard wrote:

>Tony Sidaway (minorityreport at bluebottle.com) [050106 20:31]:
>
>
>
>>I have drafted a clarification for WP:3RR.  It now reads:
>>'''If you violate the three revert rule, after your fourth revert in 24
>>hours sysops may block you for up to 24 hours. In the cases where multiple
>>parties violate the rule, sysops should treat all sides equally.'''
>>The added text is "after your fourth revert in 24 hours".
>>Please check and copy edit.
>>
>>
>
>
>Looks like an obvious clarification to me.
>
>Does anyone have a good working definition of 'near-revert'? It seems to be
>consensus that not-quite-reverts count as reverts for 3RR purposes, but I
>notice [[WP:3RR]] is actually silent on the matter.
>
>
>- d.
>
>
Precisely what I'd like to know, too. This is the most troubling part of
enforcing the 3RR; admins have to make a judgement call, and they may
very well be damned if they do and damned if they don't.

John Lee
([[User:Johnleemk]])


from_name: Anthere

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] A portal page for www.wikipedia.org (was Re: Why
	www.wikipedia.org => en.wikipedia.org ?)

body:
Walter Vermeir a ??crit:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I want to know why the address
http://www.wikipedia.org redirects
>> automatically to http://en.wikipedia.org... Is
Wikipedia an english
>> project with translations, or is it a real
international project?
>
>
> I asked myself that same question many years ago. I
think I posted the
> first question about this on some wikipedia list at
the end of 2001.
> Always a lot of objections. It would break links,
English is the lingo
> franca of the internet. At the time of the change
from wikipedia.com to
> wikipedia.org used to a opportunity to do it but it
has not be done.
>
> Wikipedia is a international project. But only the
English may use the
> front entrance.

I was among those who objected more than 2 years ago.
I believe most of the objections raised at that time
do not make any more sense. A lot was written on the
mailing list, and some discussion may be found here :
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/What_to_do_with_www.wikipedia.org.

I do not think there were be links broken now. We
switch the adress more than 2 years ago, the
encyclopedia is so much bigger now, and we had truely
become international (which was not true 3 years ago
at all).

It is high time we finally get a portal page.

There were other solutions mentionned 2 years and a
half ago, but I think portal is the solution chosen
for all our projects, so best to stick with it
probably.

However, it might be nice to try to do something good
looking and not necessarily wiki (we do not need the
left menu for example).

I suggest that some people try to come up with some
good designs and that we get done with this. For
example, this might be a conceptual proposition
(http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/What_to_do_with_www.wikipedia.org-mav%27s_Prop)
but it could need a graphist to polish it.

I hope someone come up with a good idea :-)

Could someone set up a contest page, where we could
add considerations to respect and where wikipedians
could link their proposal ?

Anthere

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Meet the all-new My Yahoo! - Try it today!
http://my.yahoo.com


subject:
[Wikitech-l] A portal page for www.wikipedia.org (was Re: Why
	www.wikipedia.org => en.wikipedia.org ?)


body:
On Thu, 06 Jan 2005 18:10:39 -0800, Sean Barrett <sean at epoptic.org> wrote:
> Legal threats are personal attacks and should be treated the same way.

We don't block people for isolated personal attacks. Some
administrators do block people for single instances of legal threats.


from_name: Black Fox

body:
On Thu, 6 Jan 2005 20:10:32 +0100, Frank v Waveren
<fvw.wikipediaml at var.cx> wrote:
> This would be a horrible abuse of HTTP. You should only present the
> same content in different languages based on the Accept-Language
> field, never to different content. Having links point to different
> things based on browser settings would be a nightmare.

It's realy horrible for the user such a thing. It's already a
nightmare with google sometimes -- If google.com want to be displayed
in french because it's my default language in the browser, OK but when
he begin to auto-limit my search to "french pages" he change what i
expect --- so please not this on the wikipedia. A portal describing
the project if you want -- maybe using the HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE field
for sorting the links -- but not that.


from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] Illegitimate block.

body:
On Thu, 06 Jan 2005 14:57:03 -0500, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> JAY JG wrote:
>
>
> So do we want to bias this towards people who are trying to make changes
> to articles, or towards people who are trying to prevent them?
>
> -Mark
>

Bias towards people making changes is good since if the contributions
are any good at all it posible to modify them and if they are not it
should be posible to find help to put in the final revert.

--
geni


body:
>
> If Wikipedia does not change its attitudes, it will eventually die
> from brain
> drain: New, more expertise-friendly and intellectual wikis will emerge
> and
> WP's knowledgeable users will just immigrate there.

Why would it die from brain drain when every facts are showing that
wikipedia is currently ATTRACTING more and more brains ?


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Sanger response and rating system experiment

body:
Daniel Mayer (maveric149 at yahoo.com) [050106 19:22]:

> NPOV is a much better guarantee of accuracy than trusting a supposed expert
> (although I do highly value feedback from field experts - I just don't take
> their ideas as the last word).

Absolutely.

> Many in academia are used to being the gatekeepers and stewards of
> information. Wiki opens those gates to anybody with an Internet connection. So
> many in academia will always recoil in horror at the mere concept - that is
> their problem, their failing, not ours.

I particularly favour Clay Shirky's description of the process, in
http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2005/01/03/k5_article_on_wikipedia_antielitism.php :

   It's been fascinating to watch the Kubler-Ross stages of people
   committed to Wikipedia's failure: denial, anger, bargaining,
   depression, acceptance. Denial was simple; people who didn't think it
   was possible simply dis-believed. But the numbers kept going up. Then
   they got angry, perhaps most famously in the likening of the Wikipedia
   to a public toilet by a former editor for Encyclopedia Brittanica.
   Sanger's post marks the bargaining phase; "OK, fine, the Wikipedia is
   interesting, but whatever we do, lets definitely make sure that we
   change it into something else rather than letting the current
   experiment run unchecked."

   Next up will be a glum realization that there is nothing that can stop
   people from contributing to the Wikipedia if they want to, or to stop
   people from using it if they think it's useful. Freedom's funny like
   that.

   Finally, acceptance will come about when people realize that
   head-to-head comparions with things like Brittanica are as stupid as
   comparing horseful and horseless carriages -- the automobile was a
   different kind of thing than a surrey. Likewise, though the Wikipedia
   took the -pedia suffix to make the project comprehensible, it is
   valuable as a site of argumentation and as a near-real-time reference,
   functions a traditional encyclopedia isn't even capable of. (Where,
   for example, is Brittanica's reference to the Indian Ocean tsunami?)

> That said, we can and should continue to find ways to make our articles better.
> Milestone snapshots (aka Wikipedia 1.0) selected via a credible process would
> help a great deal toward that (as the FAC/featured article process already has
> for the best articles we have).

Absolutely. Is Magnus Manske's experimental rating software (active on
test:) any closer to going into the running build?

As Jimbo has said a couple of times (to me at the last London meet, and
reported at a previous meet), the best thing to do with a rating system at
the moment is ... nothing. Run the rating system for a time period, gather
the data, *don't reveal it yet* for fear of affecting the rating
experiment, *then* release the data for scrutiny and ideas. how people rate
things given a simple system, see if the results of that rating accord with
common sense, see if they approximate the desired Rating System That Scales
(the way FAC doesn't quite).

I assume the devs would prefer we shake the worst bugs out of 1.4b3
first and get a handle on the hardware situation (since the charitable
would presently be tapped out by tsunami donations ;-), but is there
anything stopping it then?

- d.


from_name: Jens Ropers

body:
On 6 Jan 2005, at 22:29, Sj wrote:

> That slithy word will haunt my dreams.
>

http://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Slithy&action=edit


from_name: Rowan Collins

subject: [Wikitech-l] RSS feed for user's watch list (feature suggestion)

body:
On Wed, 5 Jan 2005 03:22:06 +0100, DIG <dig.mediazilla at telkel.net> wrote:
> It would be useful for the wiki contributor to have a RSS feed, containing fresh information about articles from his/her watch list.

You are certainly not the first person to suggest this, although you
are to be commended for spotting the requirements of the feature
quicker than some. For one lot of earlier discussion, see
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2004-December/026558.html
and its replies, but basically this is a feature waiting for someone
to volunteer and actually code it - we have lots of those...

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


body:
Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales (jwales at wikia.com) [050106 07:13]:

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

"Harsh but fair"? I've also been discussing this with people of late on
[[User talk:Dante Alighieri]] and [[User talk:David Gerard]].

One essential point to keep in mind is that Wikipedia isn't an experiment
in Internet community democracy - it's a project to write an encyclopedia.

Visible fairness of process is essential to not pissing off the volunteers
(I have many years' experience in managing volunteers; you'll get ten times
the work from a volunteer that you'd get from any paid employee, but they
must feel good about the enterprise), but disruptive behaviour causes
serious problems with the volunteer work environment. That's why I'm so
down on personal abuse, for example - one stroppy arsehole can make a
quiet, friendly editor quit an article and never come back. The stroppy
editor wins but the project loses.

- d.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] FT on Wikipedia (requires subscription)

body:
Stirling Newberry (stirling.newberry at xigenics.net) [050106 10:43]:

> http://news.ft.com/cms/s/1670d184-5f52-11d9-8cca-00000e2511c8.html

Is that today's or yesterday's? I'll see if I can grab a copy.

- d.


body:
Tony Sidaway (minorityreport at bluebottle.com) [050106 20:31]:

> I have drafted a clarification for WP:3RR.  It now reads:
> '''If you violate the three revert rule, after your fourth revert in 24
> hours sysops may block you for up to 24 hours. In the cases where multiple
> parties violate the rule, sysops should treat all sides equally.'''
> The added text is "after your fourth revert in 24 hours".
> Please check and copy edit.

Looks like an obvious clarification to me.

Does anyone have a good working definition of 'near-revert'? It seems to be
consensus that not-quite-reverts count as reverts for 3RR purposes, but I
notice [[WP:3RR]] is actually silent on the matter.

- d.


body:
On Thursday 06 January 2005 21:03, Stirling Newberry wrote:
> Most academics are poves, that is why they became academics in the
> first place.

Anti-Intellectualism at its best.

I once saw a professor visiting a Wikipedia article on maths found from a
Google search, but he abandoned it just after a few seconds. Another
professor has advised us never to cite material not hosted on .edu or .ac.uk
or other educational domains.

If Wikipedia does not change its attitudes, it will eventually die from brain
drain: New, more expertise-friendly and intellectual wikis will emerge and
WP's knowledgeable users will just immigrate there.

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


subject: [Foundation-l] Forking the Wiki

body:
Scott Nelson (scott at penguinstorm.com) [050106 19:32]:

> Why would these people not just be included in the Wikipedia?

Read [[WP:VFD]] and note the talk of the spurious requirement of
'notability', which is not actually in the [[Wikipedia:Deletion policy]].
Imagine how long the stuff would last.

(A lack of notability will often indicate *problems* in verifiability or
encyclopedicness as per [[Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not]], but isn't
actually a primary criterion in itself.)

- d.


subject: [Foundation-l] Forking the Wiki


subject: [Foundation-l] Forking the Wiki

body:
Fred Bauder (fredbaud at ctelco.net) [050106 22:37]:

> While there are families, and certain ethnic groups who are into this kind
> of thing, indeed almost a mass movement, those folks are already doing their
> thing in other established venues and may not come over to our new project
> in sufficient numbers to make it viable.

How about pointing some of these genealogists at Wikicities, if they're
willing to use GFDL? Then the stuff could be ported to a future Wikipeople
if it looks workable.

- d.


subject: [Foundation-l] Forking the Wiki


body:
On Thursday 06 January 2005 11:38, Gr?goire Colbert wrote:
> I want to know why the address http://www.wikipedia.org redirects
> automatically to http://en.wikipedia.org...

I agree with you that www should not redirect to en.

>    $alh = trim( $_SERVER["HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE"] );

No, please no! Google.com does the same thing and ***I never use
Google.com***. I use Google.co.uk or Google.ca instead. Even on my website
wikinerds.org where I use Google SiteSearch, I have configured it to use the
Google.co.uk domain!

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


body:
On Thursday 06 January 2005 20:44, Brion Vibber wrote:
> The old domain names redirect to the new
> locations to avoid breaking old links.

It is very very easy to avoid breaking old links and refrain insulting
non-English users.

A link to www.wikipedia.org will just land in the international portal page.

But a link to www.wikipedia.org/anything will be processed to land in
en.wikipedia.org/anything.

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


from_name: Walter Vermeir

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Why www.wikipedia.org => en.wikipedia.org ?

body:
> Hello,
>
> I want to know why the address http://www.wikipedia.org redirects
> automatically to http://en.wikipedia.org... Is Wikipedia an english
> project with translations, or is it a real international project?

I asked myself that same question many years ago. I think I posted the
first question about this on some wikipedia list at the end of 2001.
Always a lot of objections. It would break links, English is the lingo
franca of the internet. At the time of the change from wikipedia.com to
wikipedia.org used to a opportunity to do it but it has not be done.

Wikipedia is a international project. But only the English may use the
front entrance.

 > We can
> use this PHP program to solve this problem :
[cut]

No. That is a very bad way to do it. There is no problem to solve. You
make a page that contains links to all the wikipedias in all the
languages. No browser magic.

Like;
http://wikimedia.org/ch-portal/
http://fds.wikipedia.org/
http://europa.eu.int/

It even does not have to look nice. Look how ugly
http://www.wikimedia.org is.

> I did not subscribe to the list, because this is my only proposition.

Are you saying that you post this but will not take the effort the read
the responds?

--
[[w:nl:gebruiker:walter]]


from_name: Caroline Ewen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Bibliography

body:
Hi all,

Don't get me wrong but why would there be a need for a tool to create a
bibliography ? It's all quite simple: Surname, NAME, Title in italic, Edited
by..., City, Year.

Or did I misunderstand the whole "technology for bibliographical
records"-thing ?

Cheers from LB

Caroline aka Bris?is.

-----Message d'origine-----
De : wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org] De la part de Joseph Reagle
Envoy? : jeudi 6 janvier 2005 23:34
? : Karl Eichwalder
Cc : wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
Objet : Re: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Bibliography

On Thursday 06 January 2005 14:46, Karl Eichwalder wrote:
> Make sure to use proper technology for bibliographical records;
> http://www.indexdata.dk offers good tools under GPL or other free
> licenses.  For storage id-zebra (zebra) and for retrival over Z39.50
> the YAZ toolkit is available.

A bibtex format would be nice too...

--
Regards,          http://www.mit.edu/~reagle/
Joseph Reagle     E0 D5 B2 05 B6 12 DA 65  BE 4D E3 C1 6A 66 25 4E
_______________________________________________
Wikipedia-l mailing list
Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


body:
Fred Bauder (fredbaud at ctelco.net) [050107 01:09]:
> From: John Lee <johnleemk at gawab.com>

> > Precisely what I'd like to know, too. This is the most troubling part of
> > enforcing the 3RR; admins have to make a judgement call, and they may
> > very well be damned if they do and damned if they don't.

> I don't think anyone needs to be damned in either case. They should be
> thanked for trying to deal with a difficult matter.

Thanked if they do, thanked if they don't ;-)

There's been some productive discussion of the matter on [[WP:AN]] lately.
Anyone feel like abstracting something workable and consensus from that?
Or perhaps leave it cooking a bit longer.

- d.


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
nas ral wrote:

> Posting a warning on a users talk page is a good idea. It also gives
> the admin time to really think whether they have to block someone or not.
>
> I don't think placing a message on a users talk page is too onerous a
> task for an admin to do. Much less annoying and embarassing than
> unblocking an editor blocked foolishly and in haste.

Also the warning should come from someone who is not a party to the
dispute, and who can use a little common sense in the matter.

Ec


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Bibliography

body:
Two things:
1. "different styles": I did realise that this depends a LOT on the country.
Of course there's a slight change when you have an article of a newspaper
than when you're citing a book. And I do agree that it would be simple just
typing "[[Biblio:Wealth of Nations]]". The thing with the different styles
is, how to you get them all under one style ? I do study in France actually,
and I noticed that some of the german Erasmus-students I met here looked at
my bibliography once and where astonished by the way it was written. I told
them that that's just the french style of writing it. They do have some
minor differences when writing theirs. As for the multiple editions: in
France, you tend to state the most recent edition (because revised, mistakes
have been corrected etc). Do you want to "impose" one style for all ? :-)

2. "just reuse them instead of typing all in ourselves": I do object to
that. I don't know about other Wikipedians but when I write articles, I
usually have some of my books on my desk, I don't know all that stuff by
heart (would be nice though :-) ) And I NEVER put any books in my own
bibliography I haven't used. The reason is simple: by only adding the books
I used, because I know what's IN the books. I could easily say "oh the
english Wiki has some more books than we do, let's just add them too". Not
saying that the books in the english wiki article aren't good, but how can I
know ? I haven't read them, maybe never heard of them. You could say that
maybe I WILL know them since they're stated there and out of curiosity, if
I'm interested in the subject of the article, I will look into them, but I
still dislike the fact to simply use what's there :-)

Caroline, the innocent :-)

-----Message d'origine-----
De : wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org] De la part de Stan Shebs
Envoy? : vendredi 7 janvier 2005 01:19
? : wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
Objet : Re: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Bibliography

Caroline Ewen wrote:

>Hi all,
>
>Don't get me wrong but why would there be a need for a tool to create a
>bibliography ? It's all quite simple: Surname, NAME, Title in italic,
>Edited by..., City, Year.
>
>Or did I misunderstand the whole "technology for bibliographical
>records"-thing ?
>
Ah, an innocent wandering into the brambly briers of bibliography... :-)

Think of different styles (some do first name first), different names for
the same person (middle initial vs spelled-out), journal articles, book
chapters in a multi-author book, translations, multiple editions with
different content, annotated works, uppercase/lowercase, and so on.

Even though only a minority of our articles have references now, there is a
remarkable randomness among them.  Wouldn't you rather be able to type in
"[[Biblio:Wealth of Nations]]" and have it expand into a correctly-formatted
reference to Adam Smith's book, mentioning original publication date, ISBN
for a good recent reprint, and URL for an online text at the most reliable
website?

Even better, some dedicated bibtexers and others have built giant
bibliographies online, and we would like to just reuse them instead of
typing all in ourselves.

Stan

_______________________________________________
Wikipedia-l mailing list
Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


body:
csherlock at ljh.com.au wrote:

> IMO, legal threats are attempts to stifle debate, and are rarely (if
> ever) backed up. In fact, most threats of legal action are not even
> legally actionable! I believe they should be a blockable offense as
> they make Wikipedia a very hostile place. Legal threats are bullying
> when you are losing an argument or your POV is being challenged.

I don't worry about them, and don't feel bullied at all.  I just dare
them to try. 8-)

Ec


body:
slimvirgin at gmail.com (slimvirgin at gmail.com) [050107 02:07]:

> Could it be added that admins must place a warning on the editor's
> talk page before blocking for a 3RR violation? That would get round
> any confusion over partial and complex reverts. An editor who
> continues to revert (partially, complexedly or otherwise) after a
> warning is showing contempt for the rules, but an editor who is
> blocked without warning may genuinely not have realized that their
> edits counted as reverts.

Possibly. Being wary of [[m:Instruction creep]], of course.

- d.


from_name: Fred Bauder

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

body:
Dispute resolution with respect to POV pushers may work if you focus on What
Wikipedia is not, the clause about propaganda and advocacy. For evidence you
need to show repeated removal of well referenced information which the POV
pusher is trying to remove and repeated insertions of poorly or unreferenced
information the POV pusher is trying to add.

This is not "content arbitration". Under our NPOV policy all well referenced
material is admissible. Subtle matters such as which comes first, what gets
its own section in the article, etc remain. POV pushers, in my experience,
focus on keeping out negative information regarding their cause, attempting
to attack the legitimacy of information sources others advance while
simulaneously advancing lame references of their own.

Fred

> From: Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au>
> Reply-To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> Date: Fri, 07 Jan 2005 17:55:58 +1100
> To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
> Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: A Solution to Larry Sanger's Criticisms - Project
> Has Been Around For A While
>
> I think the experience of academics on Wikipedia is much the same as the
> experience of non-specialists on Wikipedia, or of academics acting as
> non-specialists. Academics, as well as other non-insane people, must
> fight with various kinds of looneys if they want the Wikipedia article
> in question to be accurate and neutral. Dispute resolution only works
> where the POV-pushers also break rules of behaviour, otherwise the only
> solution is to fight forever. Put the article on your watchlist, revert
> and argue for as long as you both shall live. In the case of popular
> articles, there's a constant stream of new POV-pushers, so you have to
> keep arguing and fighting even after the original warriors have gotten
> bored and left.
>
> Larry Sanger wants a shortcut out of this process for experts. I would
> prefer having a shortcut even for non-experts. Various models have been
> proposed in the past, "content arbitration" is a particularly neat term
> for it.
>
> -- Tim Starling
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


from_name: Pierre Abbat

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Programming dates in the Lojban interface

body:
Previously the Lojban Wikipedia was using date abbreviations like "7 knb 2005"
both in recent changes and history lists and in the expansion of "~~~~". This
is fine for recent changes and history lists, which are full of other
abbreviations, but in "~~~~" expansion it should be written "de'i li
2005-01-07 ti'u li 03:54". Also, some people use "pavma'i ... pavrelma'i" and
some use "kanbyma'i ... celma'i", but dates with the day in the middle are
not used in Lojban. Can someone help me program this?

phma
--
Mes r?gles mensuelles ont lieu une fois par an.
	-Les Perles de la m?decine


from_name: Jack Lutz

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] A portal page for www.wikipedia.org (was Re:
	Whywww.wikipedia.org => en.wikipedia.org ?)

body:
> I once had a demo site (somewhere...) that would display all languages
> like the above page, *but* highlight the language(s) from the HTTP
> language settings. So, for me, en and de would be highlighted, but all
> would be displayed. Makes it easier to find what you're likely to look
> for, but still possible to find everything you want.
>
> Magnus

Regarding language settings, isn't it possible to have a portal
automatically redirect to the appropriate language subdomain based on these?


subject: [WikiEN-l] Evercat v. Libertas

body:
Fred Bauder (fredbaud at ctelco.net) [050107 04:30]:

> They are, unless a depraved heart is thus revealed.

Fortunately, the Arbitration Committee have been issued with advanced
scientific utterly infallible Depraved Heart detectors which work at all
times in all circumstances. Otherwise we might have problems. So even if
you think you're right, you MIGHT BE WRONG!

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] about Wikipedia's subjects

body:
I have a doubt : What if I invent something, like a word,  and someone
outside my country dosn't know it and changes it from the wikipedia ?
I want to create something, and put it in Wikipedia so the people can
create the idea with me.


body:
In cases of expert academic POV pushing their efforts remain obvious, but
definitely the ante is upped, perhaps beyond our current ability to deal
with. However we must develop this capacity or accept a mediocre product. In
such fields as Soviet studies (the area I have interest and experience with
on Wikipedia) books are written about the state of the discipline and about
the orientation of the workers in the field who produce the articles and
books. An expert POV pusher will fight to exclude this information or to
minimize it.

One must keep in mind that the viewpoint of these academic experts is
properly included. What is not within our policy is their insistance that
other viewpoints be excluded. Sometimes the alternative viewpoint does not
have the authoritative status of a university chair but may nevertheless be
substantial. For example, while a professor at Columbia may deny that
millions died during the famine in the Ukraine in the 1930s there may also
be hundreds of eyewitness accounts and thousands of graves as well as
contradictory academic and journalistic authority.

Fred

> From: Stirling Newberry <stirling.newberry at xigenics.net>
> Reply-To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2005 07:58:04 -0500
> To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Re: A Solution to Larry Sanger's Criticisms -
> Project Has Been Around For A While
>
>
> On Jan 7, 2005, at 5:49 AM, Fred Bauder wrote:
>
>> Dispute resolution with respect to POV pushers may work if you focus
>> on What
>> Wikipedia is not, the clause about propaganda and advocacy. For
>> evidence you
>> need to show repeated removal of well referenced information which the
>> POV
>> pusher is trying to remove and repeated insertions of poorly or
>> unreferenced
>> information the POV pusher is trying to add
>
> In articles of current interest, there are many poves who are not well
> informed but have very strongly held opinions, and will fit this
> profile. The other pove profile however, is that of a person advocating
> the viewpoint of a particularly group or point of view. It may be the
> orthodox academic view, or it can range all the way out into the far
> fringes of fruit loopery. But one can be sure he's got documentation.
> Lots of it. It's his holy book, and he can quote chapter and verse why
> you aren't right, and he has websites that repeat, over and over again,
> basic dogma. They compile references and create arguments for their
> evangelists.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Copyright Infringement, was Are legal threats
	blockable offenses?

body:
Of course not. Such a person may have created a user page and done some
editing in order to communicate. Hopefully we will be responsive to their
concerns.

How should this communication be properly handled by someone complaining and
by us?

Blocking seems inappropriate, who should they be referred to?

Fred

> From: BJ?rn Lindqvist <bjourne at gmail.com>
> Reply-To: BJ?rn Lindqvist <bjourne at gmail.com>, English Wikipedia
> <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2005 14:27:06 +0100
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: Are legal threats blockable offenses?
>
> What if someone who is the copyright holder of an image that is used
> in Wikipedia under the Fair Use clausul threatens to sue Wikipedia? Do
> you think that should be illegal? Personal threat how?
>
> --
> mvh Bj?rn
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


from_name: Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales

subject: [Wikipedia-l] [Note: Obscene language on Tsunami Article]

body:
I am anonymizing this complaint, but I wanted to point it out to
people and to point out that complaints of this type are increasingly
common.  As we get more and more popular, vandalism of popular
articles, though corrected very very quickly, is also seen by more and
more people.

My technical proposal to deal with this (and I did not invent this
idea, I don't know who did, but it has been floating around) is a new
form of page semi-protection for extremely popular/important articles.

Basically, pages in this case will have a published form and a working
form.  The working form automatically becomes the published form
whenever one of two conditions is satisfied:

1.  X minutes has passed with no new edits
2.  A sysop forces publication immediately

'X' can be left variable, but for most cases I think 10 minutes would
suffice.  We might experiment with longer pauses for articles in cases
other than "popular + vandalism", for example as a new approach to
dealing with traditional edit wars in at least some cases.

For the user interface, when an article is in such a state, it looks
totally normal at the usual url.  But instead of 'edit this page' you
see 'live version'.  Click on that, and you're at the live version,
warts and all, and you can operate normally from there.

I think this solution is softer than our current solution, which is
just to protect the article.  George W. Bush was protected for 8 days
during the height of the election season because pranksters kept
putting goatse.cx images, etc., on the article.

This option would give us 10 minutes to deal with vandalism, and would
give us the opportunity to keep working on the article as well.

--Jimbo

p.s.  In case someone thinks the 'sysop forces publication
immediately' is somehow unfair, note that it is necessary to prevent a
denial of service attack once a bit of vandalism *does* slip through,
which is inevitable.  That is, if someone managed to get vandalism on
an important page, they could prevent others from removing it by
simply repeatedly touching the page within the 10 minute window.

The 'sysop force' means that responsible people can get a sensible
version back live.  We can make clear that sysops are only supposed to
do this in the case of vandalism, not just because they don't like the
way the article is written.

----- Forwarded message from heather hudak <heatherhudak at yahoo.com> -----

From: heather hudak <heatherhudak at yahoo.com>
Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2005 06:52:46 -0800 (PST)
To: jwales at wikia.com
Subject: Note: Obscene language on Tsunami Article

Hi Jimmy,

I often visit Wikipedia for info. I find it reasonably
credible and it has a large amount of information.
This morning, I was looking for a quick bite about
Tsunamis. I was greeted by the used of the word
"f*ckers" etc., numerous times throughout the text all
the way to end of the article. It seems someone is
playing a bit of a nasty gag on your site. It also
takes away from the credibility Wikipedia has
achieved. The following is the link at which I found
this information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Indian_Ocean_earthquake

This is disturbing to find at any site, about any
topic, but expecially a topic that encompasses so much
devastation.

While I am a young, reasonable business woman, I am
not necessarily offended by this, I just think it is
highly inappropriate and will likely deter me from
trusting Wikipedia information in the future. I use
the site very frequently (daily), and I can't imagine
that will continue. Prior to this, I was unaware that
Wikipedia received submissions from outside sources.
This situation encouraged me to learn more and trust
less. I hope you will look into ways to prevent this
sort of obscene language from penetrating the
information on your web site.

Sincerely,
Heather Hudak

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

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

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


body:
Stirling Newberry wrote:
> What about merely having a logged in user force publication? If a login
> repeatedly forces vandalizations in, then that would be grounds for
> banning.

If a login even *once* vandalizes or forces a vandalization through,
then that's grounds for immediate banning, I would say.  In some cases
of course good judgment is necessary (was it really vandalism, or just
sandboxing by a new user?) but the kinds of cases I'm talking about
are just goofy.  (Replacing George Bush's photo with Hitler is good
for a 3rd grade laugh, but, *ahem*, people are trying to do something
useful around here. :-))

> In many CMS's there is the concept of a "trusted user", who has
> privileges to do such things, but is far from being a sysop. It might
> well be worth looking at a similar idea for wikipedia - which would
> allow such "judgment calls" to be made by users who have put the time
> in on wikipedia, but who aren't interested in, and do not need, full
> sysop privileges.

Agreed.  I think this makes perfect sense.  It does mean that a vandal
can still force through vandalism now and again, but it is more clicks
for them to do it, and anyway this option is "softer" and therefore
should be tried first.  The harder option of restricting 'force
publication' to sysops would still be available at a later date.

--Jimbo


body:
Jack Lutz wrote:
> > I once had a demo site (somewhere...) that would display all languages
> > like the above page, *but* highlight the language(s) from the HTTP
> > language settings. So, for me, en and de would be highlighted, but all
> > would be displayed. Makes it easier to find what you're likely to look
> > for, but still possible to find everything you want.
> >
> > Magnus
>
> Regarding language settings, isn't it possible to have a portal
> automatically redirect to the appropriate language subdomain based on these?

It is, but Magnus's idea is much better for usability.  The problem
with redirecting based on these is that it's completely annoying for
various reasons. :-)

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] anonymizing that email

body:
Some of you may have noticed that I said I was going to anonymise
the email but I screwed up and didn't.  I wrote to apologize to the
author, and she responded:

"In regard to publishing the e-mail, I am not concerned about my name
being included."

Even so, I offer my public apologies as well for this error.

--Jimbo

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


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

body:
Daniel Mayer a ?crit:
> --- Shaun MacPherson <shaun_macpherson2001 at yahoo.ca> wrote:
>
>>Larry Sanger believes that the solution to make
>>Wikipedia more credible are with experts.  You can see
>>a good article descriping his criticisms here (
>>http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/03/144207&tid=95&tid=1
>>) posted on Jan 3, 2004.
>
>
> I respect Larry and what he did to help Wikipedia along in its first year. But
> I will never just assume that somebody with a PhD is right since many PhDs all
> too often are not; I've come across and know of a good many PhDs who have axes
> to grind and who have pet theories to push.
>
> NPOV is a much better guarantee of accuracy than trusting a supposed expert
> (although I do highly value feedback from field experts - I just don't take
> their ideas as the last word).
>
> Many in academia are used to being the gatekeepers and stewards of
> information. Wiki opens those gates to anybody with an Internet connection. So
> many in academia will always recoil in horror at the mere concept - that is
> their problem, their failing, not ours.

I totally agree here.
Wikipedia relies on this concept that no one knows everything but
everyone knows something he can teach others. It recognises that
knowledge and rightfullness is not only due when you made upper studies.
It wonderfully succeed to give power to the lay man, to turn him from
being a passive reader of news to someone involved. It is SO empowering.


body:
Black Fox wrote:
> It's realy horrible for the user such a thing. It's already a
> nightmare with google sometimes -- If google.com want to be displayed
> in french because it's my default language in the browser, OK but when
> he begin to auto-limit my search to "french pages" he change what i
> expect --- so please not this on the wikipedia.

What google does is actually even more annoying than this.  When I
travel in Europe, Google redirects me to the site they think I want
based on my *geographical location*.  So when I'm in Germany, they
assume I speak German, when I'm in Italy, they assume I speak Italian,
etc.

This is disconcerting and unpleasant for me.

Better by far would be for them to combine information from my default
browser language and my location to offer me options that are likely
to make the most sense.

If I'm in Germany, but with English as my default language, why not
offer me a German/English hybrid page?

Instead of a link to *either* 'Images' *or* 'Bilder' they could say:
"Hmm, his browser wants English, but he's in Germany, so let's give
him: 'Images (Bilder)'.

In our case, we don't have (to my knowledge) the technical ability to
make a good guess of where people are in a timely fashion.  So we can
just do what Magnus suggested: give a page that highlights
alternatives based on people's default browser language.

I agree completely that serving different *content* based on anything
automatic is a bad idea.  It can be extremely annoying.

--Jimbo


body:
Walter Vermeir wrote:
> I asked myself that same question many years ago. I think I posted the
> first question about this on some wikipedia list at the end of 2001.
> Always a lot of objections. It would break links, English is the lingo
> franca of the internet. At the time of the change from wikipedia.com to
> wikipedia.org used to a opportunity to do it but it has not be done.

Never from me.  I think an international portal is a fantastic idea.

There are some challenges as to what that main page should look like,
but I think we have a very very good mechanism for evolving the look
of such a site: wiki.

> http://wikimedia.org/ch-portal/
> http://fds.wikipedia.org/
> http://europa.eu.int/
>
> It even does not have to look nice. Look how ugly
> http://www.wikimedia.org is.

I think it should look nice, but I think if we have it be a wiki page,
it will evolve sensibly.

It does not make any sense for us to feature all 200 languages equally
on this critical "first impression" page.  It doesn't make sense for
us to accept an ugly page.  So, there is a design challenge, but I
think we are up to it.

I think the main thing is, we have to do it.

--Jimbo


from_name: Stirling Newberry

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: bibliography

body:
On Jan 7, 2005, at 4:37 AM, Giuseppe DAngelo wrote:

> For a babe in the woods, Caroline makes a lot of sense.   A huge
> percentage of articles currently lack references, and we're worried
> about whether someone leaves out the middle name on an otherwise
> reasonable reference?   The chances of ambiguities arising are one in
> a million.  Referencing is the preferred practice, and whether it is
> done has less to do with the availability of a bells-and-whistles
> add-on, and more to do with the character of the scribe.
> This mother-of-all-bibliographies might have Adam Smith, but will it
> have Giuseppe Pitre or Santi Correnti or the Funk and Wagnalls
> Encyclopedia or the New Junior Encyclopedia (which is now extremely
> old) or the Hansard?
> Salutamu
> pippu d'angelo, canberra

One lesson of the internet is that people time is expensive, and
computer time ultimately gets cheaper.  Technical fixes, while they
sink development time, scale.

Another lesson of the internet is that lowering the barrier to doing
the right thing makes many more people do the right thing.

A third lesson of the internet is that linked "live" information is
more trustworthy, and better updated.

A fourth lesson of the internet is that people will work for free, but
not for nothing.

Thus, providing tools for fast, linked, and generally useful annotation
will dramatically increase the level and utility of references. Since
the cost of annotating the existing base is the same either way, it is
better to develop tools and then annotate, rather than annotate once
dead, and then do it again live.

As for the content of this bibliography, that's why we would have to
get the MARC records (write our own Z39.50 or subscribe to a service,
since most of the data is available for free, just in many separate
places, there are commercially available tools, not even expensive, for
searching for citation data.

A wiki version of Endnote is out of reach at this time, but is,
eventually where we should be able to get to.


from_name: Sean Barrett

body:
BJ?rn Lindqvist stated for the record:

> What if someone who is the copyright holder of an image that is used
> in Wikipedia under the Fair Use clausul threatens to sue Wikipedia? Do
> you think that should be illegal? Personal threat how?

We will not try to stop anyone from seeking judicial redress, but we
will not allow them to continue to edit Wikipedia while they try to harm us.

--
  Sean Barrett     | Is that why they're so slow? --Joanna, upon
  sean at epoptic.com | learning that one of the Stepford Wives
                   | programmers used to work at AOL.


body:
On Jan 7, 2005, at 5:49 AM, Fred Bauder wrote:

> Dispute resolution with respect to POV pushers may work if you focus
> on What
> Wikipedia is not, the clause about propaganda and advocacy. For
> evidence you
> need to show repeated removal of well referenced information which the
> POV
> pusher is trying to remove and repeated insertions of poorly or
> unreferenced
> information the POV pusher is trying to add

In articles of current interest, there are many poves who are not well
informed but have very strongly held opinions, and will fit this
profile. The other pove profile however, is that of a person advocating
the viewpoint of a particularly group or point of view. It may be the
orthodox academic view, or it can range all the way out into the far
fringes of fruit loopery. But one can be sure he's got documentation.
Lots of it. It's his holy book, and he can quote chapter and verse why
you aren't right, and he has websites that repeat, over and over again,
basic dogma. They compile references and create arguments for their
evangelists.


from_name: Kate Turner

subject: [Wikitech-l] RE: Re: French squids

body:
Gabriel Wicke wrote in gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical at
Friday 07 Jan 2005 07:44:

> On Wed, 2005-01-05 at 08:44 +0200, Domas Mituzas wrote:
>> > That will be good enough for some testing. Hopefully squids can be
>> > configured to understand that http://fr.paris.wikipedia.org/ is indeed
>> > http://fr.wikipedia.org/
>> French squids can be configured to use Florida squids as round-robin
>> parents.
>
> They should be configured that way already, missing two of the current
> squids though. The purge is just more ips in the array. If it's not yet
> done i can help with the setup this weekend.

I'm not sure this is the most scalable way to do it.  I spoke with Domas
about this on IRC briefly and the best solution seems to be some kind of
purge daemon which can handle purging without putting more strain on the
apaches; or failing that, some kind of recursive purge which would allow
the fl squids to purge the French squids themselves.

Doing it via MediaWiki is likely to cause slow edits & other problems if
there are network issues between the two sites...

Kate.


from_name: J.F. de Wolff

subject: [WikiEN-l] Irate and Cookiecaper

body:
Irate and Cookiecaper are now unblocked. I take strong issue with Irate's
over-the-top accusations of trigger-happiness and demands that I be blocked
for what is no more than poor understanding of accepted policy.
I have explained to Irate that as a professional I am not continuously
watching my inbox. The problem was dealt with amicably by Fred, without
accusations, name-calling and draconian demands.
With the new reading, we are now actually dealing with is a 4-Revert Rule.
In my view, three reverts would be fine as a blockable offense. Ideally,
every revert should be explained & discussed on the article's talk page. To
revert haphazardly without a good explanation is a policy crime in itself.
I demand that Irate is blocked for 1 day for every angry message on the
mailinglist and my inbox etc. etc. etc. :-)

Jfdwolff


from_name: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason

subject: [Wikitech-l] Date format in signitures and history pages

body:
Is it possible to change the date format in signitures and history
pages (among others) which is currently something like "08:24, 7 jan
2005" to somehing else using the MediaWiki namespace?


body:
David Gerard wrote:
> I would however advise taking *extreme care* to be sure it's actually
> vandalism - a lot of it will just be sandboxing, i.e. "I can edit this
> page? Huh? Let's see ... uh. I can. Um, what do I do now?"

Well said.  Sandboxing is *good*, I mean, *ahem* it would be nice if
people had a clue to try it somewhere other than a hugely popular
page, but we can't hardly blame people for it.  I mean, most of them
probably don't *believe* they can edit the page.

Hmm, "edit this page"?  What?  <click> edit box?  That's weird.
"blah blah blah"
<click>
Whoaaaa!

Wikipedia is insane, so of course people don't believe it.

> Showing viewers who aren't logged in the 10-minute-delay version and
> logged-in users the current version would be an obvious step as well.
> Casual users who've read that [[2004 Indian Ocean earthquake]] is a
> fantastic article will get the 10-minute-delay version, but logged-in
> editors will understand what vandalism or sandboxing is and that they
> should fix it.
>
> I suppose the edit message for anon users should say something like "As an
> anonymous editor, your edits will take up to 10 minutes to show on the live
> wiki. If you were just experimenting, click _here_ to revert to the version
> before your experiment, and try experimenting in the _Sandbox_."

Excellent suggestion.

> The up-to-10-minute delay would I hope not hurt our Wiki nature too much.
> Is there anyone who disagrees, or has qualms?

A valid point here is that the 10 minute delay should actually be
viewed as a step *back* to wiki nature.  Because what we end up doing
right now is protecting pages.. a very brutal measure if we can think
of something more creative and open.

--Jimbo


from_name: Gabriel Wicke

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: French squids

body:
On Wed, 2005-01-05 at 08:44 +0200, Domas Mituzas wrote:
> > That will be good enough for some testing. Hopefully squids can be configured to understand that http://fr.paris.wikipedia.org/ is indeed http://fr.wikipedia.org/
> French squids can be configured to use Florida squids as round-robin parents.

They should be configured that way already, missing two of the current
squids though. The purge is just more ips in the array. If it's not yet
done i can help with the setup this weekend.
--
Gabriel Wicke
MediaWiki hosting, support and development
http://wikidev.net wicke at wikidev.net
Tel(SIP) +49 (0)1801-7775555258, Mob +49 (0)177 2065127
Eckernf?rder Str.58, 24116 Kiel


from_name: Robin Shannon

subject: [Foundation-l] Forking the Wiki

body:
I would think that wikipeople/memorial/foo wouldnt have a NPOV policy,
but rather a "sympathetic to the subject" policy (since that is what
memorials ARE). I really can not imagine many flame wars occuring for
"non-notable" poeple. Everyone has got an opinion on <insert world
leader here> or <insert any war here>, but does any one really have
strong feelings on bob black who died on 11/09? Here in Australia our
greatest military event was in WW1 on the Gallipoli peninsular. We
were fighting the Ottoman (turkish) empire. Now every anzac day
Australians/Kiwis and Truks get together to commemorate the event.
Even though we were the invaders, the turkish goverment welcomes
hundreds/thousands of Aussie/Kiwi diggers to mark the occasion in
Turkey, and we commemerate both the Aussie/Kiwi deaths as well as the
turkish deaths.

The loss of any life is a tradgedy, no matter the actions of the
person when they were alive.

As to starting it on wikicities first, i think jimbo has been preety
clear that he doesnt want any blurring of the lines between his stuff,
and wikimedia's stuff.

On Thu, 6 Jan 2005 17:07:47 +0100 (CET), Traroth <traroth at yahoo.fr> wrote:
> I think the little flame war between Scott Nelson and me is the perfect illustration of what will happen continously : What could possibly happen when you ask to people in conflict (and i mean real conflict, nothing to do with something like a Wikipeda revert war...) to write on what happened to them and there family, in a media where the other side can read it and react to it ? What could be the reaction of a palestinian, who have just lost his son in an israeli bombing, when he read complaints from an israeli who just lost his wife in a palestinian bomb attack ? The fundamental problem is that you ask for reactions about subjects which just cannot be treated calmly, and especially not by the victims.
>
> Traroth
>
> Robin Shannon <robin.shannon at gmail.com> wrote:
> So, um, no matter how fun french/american/little green men from mars
> bashing may be; how about we go back to the idea of wikipeople, what's
> wrong with it? Its been around for quite a while and hasnt got up yet.
> Why? We already have content to put into it (11/09wiki) and it could
> tie up some loose ends, so what are the objections to it? The only
> objection i have heard so far is that it would turn into one big flame
> war (something i disagree with). Any other objecitons?

--
hit me: robin.shannon.id.au
jab me: saudade at jabber.zim.net.au

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons
Recombo Plus License. To view a copy of this license, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/sampling+/1.0/


subject: [Foundation-l] Forking the Wiki


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Request for Amis Wiktionary

body:
T?n PekTiong wrote:

> Dear wikipedians,
>
> * About ISO 639 codes
> There is NO ISO 639-1, 639-2 language code for Amis. There is ISO
> 639-3 language code for Amis, which is ami.
> But ISO 639-3: (Alpha-3 code for comprehensive coverage of language)
> is still in draft and is not finalized/official yet.
> I personally think the current ISO 639-3 draft is stable enough that
> wikipedia/wiktionary should use it when necessary.
>
Important is that it is specifically said that codes that are discarded
will not be re-used. So for all intents and purposes once a code is
given to a language, it will not reapear for a different language. It is
also important to note that the number of languages covered is much
bigger. This poses a problem for the codes we made up like "als" for
Alsatian, "als" is the ISO-639-3 code for "Gheg Albanian".

> ....
> * Wikipedia/Wiktionary
> I personally think wiktionary will be more useful to the Amis people
> at this stage. I don't think there are too many Amis dictionary around.

Typically I can help setup the template structure for many languages as
they are used on many wiktionaries. However as I do not have any Amis
words yet let alone the translations for languages, I cannot set it up
for you. I am more than happy to help set this up for the Amis wiktionary.

Thanks,
    GerardM


from_name: JAY JG

subject: [WikiEN-l] Illegitimate block.

body:
>Jay wrote:
> > Perhaps the confusion here is the assumption that the first time one
>adds
> > information to (or deletes information from) an article, it is not a
> > "revert", but the subsequent 3 additions (and deletions) are "reverts".
> > Thus "3 reverts in 24 hours" can mean 1 edit, then 3 reverts to it.
>
>Yes, technically a revert is a restoring of the article to a previous
>state.  So a new edit/addition does not count.  The first edit if a
>deletion does count, unless it is a novel deletion to a state that did not
>previously exist.

What if someone does 3 reverts, waits a full 24 hours, then does his "edit"
again, and reverts to it 3 times - has he violated the 3RR or not?  Does the
clock always start ticking *after* the first edit?

Jay.


from_name: Christopher Mahan

subject: [Wikipedia-l] On 10 minutes delay, banning, and patrolling.

body:
Team,

My thoughts:

The 10 minutes thing is no good, because if someone is on the page
and sees a typo and wants to change it, then they get dumped to the
newer page, that has completely different text, and they don't want
to do the typo...

On vandalism: I think that there should be a
Recent unpatrolled anon changes  (RUAC) link for logged in users
under the Recent Changes on the menu. Then it's a lot easier (and
easier on the db) to get the last x unpatrolled items.

Also, when clicking the "this page has been patrolled", one should be
returned immediately to the recent changes, or RUAC.

Finally, articles that currently have unpatrolled anon edits when
viewed by an logged in user should have something to indicate that in
the article display.

One more thing:

I think that in view of the tsunami tragedy and the fact that we're
at war and that W is a "work in progress", we can cut new users some
slack. They might come in and say "WTF" and click submit just for
fun, but might also become a great contributor long term.

On the other hand, anons that put really obscene things, I go for 48
hrs immediate ban, no questions asked.

(You spit at a cop in public, you do not pass go, do not collect
$200, and get an unconfortabe backseat ride to the station)

Ok, now I'm done. Whew!

=====
Chris Mahan
818.943.1850 cell
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
chris.mahan at gmail.com
http://www.christophermahan.com/

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body:
On Jan 7, 2005, at 8:23 AM, Fred Bauder wrote:

> In cases of expert academic POV pushing their efforts remain obvious,
> but
> definitely the ante is upped, perhaps beyond our current ability to
> deal
> with. However we must develop this capacity or accept a mediocre
> product.

I am in absolute agreement that we must expand the number of "experts"
contributing to wikipedia - even one or two can make a huge difference
in an section of articles, particularly if they create a project, and
serve as a contact point. We also must develop resources to encourage
it - and citations are big part of getting experts "into the loop".


subject: [WikiEN-l] Illegitimate block.

body:
>JAY JG (jayjg at hotmail.com) [050108 01:29]:
>
> > What if someone does 3 reverts, waits a full 24 hours, then does his
>"edit"
> > again, and reverts to it 3 times - has he violated the 3RR or not?  Does
> > the clock always start ticking *after* the first edit?
>
>David Gerard replied:
>
>If it's 24h 5 min and they do it consistently, they're pretty obviously
>gaming the system. I don't see how they could stay on a reverting quest
>like this without violating other policies along the way.

I don't think that fully answers the question.  Yes, they're gaming the
system, but apparently fully within the rules as being proposed by some
editors here.  And some editors are smart enough to do these things without
violating other rules.  Can they be blocked for doing this alone?   And
finally, I must point out that many admins have been viewing any 4 identical
edits in a 24 hour period as being violations of th 3RR; rightfully, in my
view.

Jay.


body:
On Jan 7, 2005, at 10:02 AM, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
>
> p.s.  In case someone thinks the 'sysop forces publication
> immediately' is somehow unfair, note that it is necessary to prevent a
> denial of service attack once a bit of vandalism *does* slip through,
> which is inevitable.  That is, if someone managed to get vandalism on
> an important page, they could prevent others from removing it by
> simply repeatedly touching the page within the 10 minute window.
>
> The 'sysop force' means that responsible people can get a sensible
> version back live.  We can make clear that sysops are only supposed to
> do this in the case of vandalism, not just because they don't like the
> way the article is written.
>
>

What about merely having a logged in user force publication? If a login
repeatedly forces vandalizations in, then that would be grounds for
banning.

In many CMS's there is the concept of a "trusted user", who has
privileges to do such things, but is far from being a sysop. It might
well be worth looking at a similar idea for wikipedia - which would
allow such "judgment calls" to be made by users who have put the time
in on wikipedia, but who aren't interested in, and do not need, full
sysop privileges.


from_name: Magnus Manske

body:
Anthere schrieb:

>I suggest that some people try to come up with some
>good designs and that we get done with this. For
>example, this might be a conceptual proposition
>(http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/What_to_do_with_www.wikipedia.org-mav%27s_Prop)
>but it could need a graphist to polish it.
>
>
I once had a demo site (somewhere...) that would display all languages
like the above page, *but* highlight the language(s) from the HTTP
language settings. So, for me, en and de would be highlighted, but all
would be displayed. Makes it easier to find what you're likely to look
for, but still possible to find everything you want.

Magnus


from_name: Ribamar Santarosa de Sousa

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] A portal page for www.wikipedia.org (was
	Re:	Whywww.wikipedia.org => en.wikipedia.org ?)

body:
> I'd like the Magnus' solution:
> I don't like to be automatically redirected to the Italian subdomain,
> because I'm working (even if only occasionally) on the Swahili one, and
> I'm interested to the Esperanto version, too. So according to the
> Magnus' idea I would have the IT (my HTTP setting) highlighted, but with
> the other languages at hand.

This is not a great problem. One could have in preferences the best wiki for
him/her.  Note i don't say that the jack's solution is better than the
magnus' one.  But the option for select the first wiki should exist for
any solution adopted by wikipedia (since maybe active users could prefer
enter direct into wiki without passing by portal).

-Riba.