body:
>On 6/6/06, Raphael Wegmann <raphael at psi.co.at> wrote:
>
> I just looked up on [[User:Metta_Bubble]]:
>
> [[User:Metta_Bubble]] has been engaged in edit-warring on the
> [[Wikipedia:Wikiethics]] proposal. By looking at the main issue
> of this edit-war it becomes clear, why you're so sorry about
> his/her departure.

This editor as well, please?

Jay.


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Guy Chapman aka JzG

subject: [WikiEN-l] Are lists subject to WP:NOR?

body:
On Tue, 06 Jun 2006 15:12:23 +0200, you wrote:

>> Yes, and in the usual sense: if you cannot provide a reliable source
>> for each individual case (and here that would mean referencing each
>> one explicitly as it is likely to be contentious) then the entry must
>> be removed.  If none of them are sourced the list is empty - delete.
>> If none of them *can* be sourced, the list is unverifiable - delete.

>Mmmh. That's (IMHO) the entire problem: The single entries
>are -- in a sense -- all sourced. Minus some drive-by-additions
>to the list, it is usually indeed verifiable, that
>* X said 19YY the group Z is a cult [of]
>But the question is, does it matter?
>Is X an expert on Z? Is his opinion isolated? Which of
>the several meanings of "cult" is implied?

That's where we need to read and understand the intent of [[WP:RS]]. A
reliable source for an allegation of cult status would need to be a
recognised authority on cults, or perhaps multiple independent
statements by mainstream news media, or cited articles in respected
peer-reviewed journals.  Certainly a one-man crusade is not a reliable
source for the cult status of a group, only for the opinions of that
individual (which can therefore only be stated in their own article).
Unless, of course, one man in question was a world-renowned expert on
cults - but in that case it is usually trivially easy to find others
coming to the same conclusion.

Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


from_name: Anthony DiPierro

subject: [WikiEN-l] Types of categories

body:
On 6/6/06, Roger Luethi <collector at hellgate.ch> wrote:
> I see two major problems with the status quo:
> * multi-concept categories (American child actors) force us to maintain a
>   complex system of subcategories (but they paper over shortcoming in the
>   software). The German WP shows it doesn't have to be this way, but
>   it might be difficult to convince people on WP:en until Mediawiki can
>   create intersections

Convincing people won't just require that intersections can be created
by hand, but that the common intersections can be kept easily at hand.

The benefit would be great, though.  You could get to "Polish female
nobel prize winners" by navigating "People -> Polish people -> Female
Polish People -> Polish female nobel prize winners" or "People ->
Females -> Polish females -> Polish female nobel prize winners" or any
of the other combinations.

> * categories with unclear relations that are used for everything
>


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Platonides

subject: [Wikitech-l] customizing namespace

body:
Claudi Meneghin wrote:

> 3) duplicating 'category' feature, to deal with the fragmentation of
> Lombard tongue into two major dialect groups.
> 3) cannot be dealt with by creating, say : 'category/west' and
> 'category/east', since the word 'Category' itself has two slightly
> different translations.
> Thus an additional namespace is needed, like in case 2).
>
 No, not as in case 2, as case 2 are normal pages with a prefix. Case 3 also
wants a special functionality.
Would it be ok if 'category/west' were an alias for 'category/east'? That's
it: 'category/east:Foo' contents are the same as 'category/west:Foo', and
viceversa.


from_name: Rotem Liss

subject: [Wikitech-l] customizing namespace

body:
Claudi Meneghin wrote:

> Hello,
> we will soon need to customize namespaces at Lombard wikipedia; this is mainly due to three reasons (3 is most important):
> 1) translating English names
>

You should create a language file, LanguageLmo.php, and a messages file,
MessagesLmo.php. Then you will be able to translate the English
namespaces, and also you will be able to translate other important
things, including the messages (should not be translated locally in
Wikipedia, as other wikis written in the same language won't include the
translated messages).

> 2) creating a 'portal' namespace
>

Just ask for that in Bugzilla (http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org), giving
the names of the portal namespace and its talk namespace, and the
developers with shell access will create it.

> 3) duplicating 'category' feature, to deal with the fragmentation of Lombard tongue into two major dialect groups.
>

It's just impossible.

> As to 1) I guess that local Mediawiki should be enough;

Just right, but you should create one first.

> as to 2) it seems to me yet obscure;

See above.

> 3) cannot be dealt with by creating, say : 'category/west' and 'category/east', since the word 'Category' itself has two slightly different translations.
> Thus an additional namespace is needed, like in case 2).
>

Case 2 is another case, as a custom namespace cannot be a category
namespace whatsoever. You will have to find another way ? creating
another wiki for the second dialect, or ignoring one of them, or
something like that.

> I read this:
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Custom_namespaces
> Best regards,
>
> Claudi
>

--
#define Name RotemLiss
#define Mail mailSTRUDELrotemlissDOTcom
#define Site www.rotemliss.com


subject: [WikiEN-l] Types of categories

body:
On 6/6/06, Roger Luethi <collector at hellgate.ch> wrote:
> On Tue, 06 Jun 2006 07:54:27 -0400, Anthony DiPierro wrote:
> > That brings up another, longer term, to-do for categories: they should
> > be language independent.  For instance [[Marie Curie]] is in de: and
> > en: (they happen to have the same title, but even if they don't they
> > are linked via interwiki links).  [[Kategorie:Pole]] is linked to
> > [[Category:Polish people]].  So there should be no need to categorize
> > Marie Curie twice (multiply by the actual number of languages which
> > have a Polish people category and an article on Marie Curie).
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata
>
>From what I know of that project, it's a lot more extravagant than
what I'm talking about.  Infoboxes are a lot more complicated than
categories.  Categories are just sets of articles, and the interwiki
links are already there.  Infoboxes have multiple types of fields,
with various constraints on each of them, and various translation
issues most of which haven't even been begun.

> > This is pretty simple theoretically.  The only real problem is getting
> > the multiple category schemes in sync.  Considering your point about
> > how the German categorization scheme differs from the English one,
> > this might be a lot harder in practice than it is in theory.
>
> Right. You _could_ make it work on some categories, say "Women" or
> "Nobelprize winners".
>
> It cannot possible work for all categories, though, because different
> languages know different categories. For instance, security and safety is
> the same word in German: Sicherheit. Thus, [[de:Lifebelt]] is in the German
> category that is linked to the English category Security.
>
I'd say then that either the German [[Kategorie:Sicherheit]] should be
disambiguated into two different categories, or that
[[Kategorie:Sicherheit]] shouldn't be linked to [[Category:Security]],
because they don't define the same set.  Maybe an English
[[Category:Security and Safety]] could be made, with "Security" and
"Safety" as subcats - then [[Kategorie:Sicherheit]] could link to
[[Category:Security and Safety]].

But maybe this is a common enough thing that that's not going to be
reasonable.  At some point someone should look at how the en
categories differ from the de ones.  I figure there will be 5 major
points of difference:

1) Things being categorized at different levels ([[Category:Polish
women]] vs. [[Kategorie:Frau]].
2) Interwiki links between articles on different things.
3) Interwiki links between categories defining different sets.
4) Articles categorized where they shouldn't be.
5) Articles missing from categories where they should be.

1) is the reason why I call this a "longer-term solution".  2 and/or 3
are what you describe above.  4 and 5 are the reason why it would be
useful to coordinate things.

It'd be interesting to get a decent size sample and sort the
differences into those 5 categories.  If 2 and/or 3 were significant,
then I suppose this idea fails, at least initially.  If 1 is
significant, and I think it might be, then the idea rests upon
reaching a consensus among the different Wikipedias as to what level
to put things.  And that's probably going to be dependent on having
on-the-fly intersection categories.

> Numbers are much easier to share. Population of a country. Weight of a
> molecule.
>
> > Personally I don't see the difference between taxonomies and
> > attributes, as described.  But I suppose one (taxonomies?) could be
> > described as partitioning (an article can only be in one taxonomy
> > category) whereas attributes can be mixed.  Under that definition
>
> I suspect this is impossible. But it's hard to tell if you're not even sure
> what counts as a taxonomy.
>
> Roger

Yeah, I don't know.  I'm not the one who made the initial distinction
between taxonomies and attributes.  I was just trying to make sense of
it, rather poorly I guess.  :)

Anthony


from_name: Michael Bimmler

subject: [Wikitech-l] ch.wikimedia.org - close please

body:
we moved everything from ch.wikimedia.org to our own wikis/websites.
Could somebody close/lock/delete/make inaccessible/whatever the
ch.wikimedia.org wiki?
Thanks

--
Regards
Michael Bimmler
Secretary
Wikimedia CH - Verein zur F?rderung Freien Wissens
Wikimedia CH - Association for the advancement of free knowledge
www.wikimedia.ch


from_name: Kelly Martin

subject: [WikiEN-l] To: Jimmy Wales - Admin-driven death of Wikipedia

body:
On 6/6/06, Conrad Dunkerson <conrad.dunkerson at worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> * Kelly Martin wrote:
> > On 6/5/06, Mark Gallagher <m.g.gallagher at student.canberra.edu.au> wrote:
> >> In any case, the general thrust of Selina's comment was spot-on, so
> >> let's try not to jump on her for one clause.
> >
> > No, indeed, let us give the hypocrite a fair trial.  Then we can hang her.
>
> What was that I was saying about the need for admins to maintain civility
> even with 'bad' users? Oh well... probably wasn't important anyway, right?

Well, considering that Ms. "Racism-is-illegal" has been spouting some
pretty ugly and bigoted crap over on her little pet playground (and
some of it directed at me personally), I think she's just about run
out of rope.

Kelly


from_name: Conrad Dunkerson

body:
* Kelly Martin wrote:
> On 6/5/06, Mark Gallagher <m.g.gallagher at student.canberra.edu.au> wrote:
>> In any case, the general thrust of Selina's comment was spot-on, so
>> let's try not to jump on her for one clause.
>
> No, indeed, let us give the hypocrite a fair trial.  Then we can hang her.

What was that I was saying about the need for admins to maintain civility
even with 'bad' users? Oh well... probably wasn't important anyway, right?


from_name: Essjay

subject: [Wikitech-l] Template HTML fixups coming this week

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> Just a heads-up, folks:
>
> Later this week I'm going to be installing a fix for some longstanding bugs with
> HTML in wiki pages. One of the issues is a difference in rendering of templates
> that improperly nest HTML tags, which caused certain badly-written templates to
> render in one way on Wikipedia but wildly broken on most other wikis.
>
> (Don't forget that an important part of what Wikipedia & its sister projects are
> about is making information sharable and reusable. If the code breaks when
> copied to another site, that's Bad.)
>
> Once the fix is in, templates should render about the same on Wikipedia and
> other wikis where the "HTML Tidy" plugin isn't being used. The bad news is that
> some of these templates will be broken; so it would be great if we can make sure
> they get cleaned up.
>
> Problem templates are mostly those which start an HTML tag in one template, then
> finish it in another. For instance if {{table-header}} contains a <table>, and
> then the table rows and final </table> are in another template entirely. These
> have always broken on regular MediaWiki -- the template is required to close its
> own tags -- though they sometimes appeared to work on Wikipedia due to bugs with
> our HTML handling when Tidy is enabled.
>
> I've done some automated checks on templates on en.wikipedia.org to make a list
> of likely problem candidates:
>
> http://leuksman.com/misc/templates/html-table-start.txt
> http://leuksman.com/misc/templates/html-table-end.txt
> http://leuksman.com/misc/templates/html-table-row.txt
>
>
> If you've got a template that you're not sure if it will work, try copying it to
> my test wiki at http://test.leuksman.com/ . This has the fix installed with the
> corrected behavior, so you can see about how it will render on Wikipedia next week.
>
>
> Please make sure this information is disseminated to the various other language
> and project wikis people are working on; I don't want to hear "waah! all my
> templates broke and no one told me!" next week. :)
>
> For the moment the same kind of construct with wiki tables ({| ... |}) will
> still work, but note that some time in the future we're going to have to look at
> 'fixing' that too. (This might require some enhancements to how templates work
> to make it easier to fill in long tables.)
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Will this also apply to the archived discussion tags, like those for RFA
and AFD? They open a <div> at the top to impose a background color, then
close it with a separate template at the bottom. For the most part,
they're subst:'d, but if there are any that aren't (maybe the old VFD
tags), we need someone to run a subst: bot on them before this happens,
so we don't end up with 900 RfAs and 100,000 VFD's with broken tags.

Essjay

--
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Essjay
Wikipedia:The Free Encyclopedia
http://www.wikipedia.org/


list: foundation-l

from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [Foundation-l] Would you consider being on the Board?

body:
On 6/5/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/5/06, Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
> > With the talk on this list recently of jobs that need doing, I'm
> > interested to know whether there are many people who would be
> > interested in being a member of the Board if there were more seats
> > available.
>
> I probably would throw my hat into the ring once more, especially now
> that the Board is shifting towards strategic long-term thinking and
> planning. I might also be interested in working within an ExecCom,
> depending on its roles and responsibilities. However, this should all
> be decided through open processes.
>
> I think the more relevant discussion is the one about outsiders or
> semi-insiders who have important qualifications and whom we might want
> to invite to serve in a board role or an advisory one.
>
I'm also interested.


list: wikimedia-l


subject: [WikiEN-l] Category translation

body:
On 6/6/06, Elisabeth Bauer <elian at djini.de> wrote:
> Anthony DiPierro schrieb:
>
> > Jimbo and others have also made it clear that any cultural distinction
> > between different language Wikipedias is accidental and in fact goes
> > against the intention (this in the context of which languages should
> > have a Wikipedia, but the idea carries here as well).  We don't have a
> > British Encyclopedia and an American one, because we can both
> > understand each other well enough to communicate.  If it were
> > *possible* to automatically translate all articles into every language
> > while keeping the content the same, we'd do so.  It just isn't, at
> > least not with current technology.
>
> Yes, the original plan was to write all articles in Esperanto and then
> have them autotranslated to all the other languages of the world. But
> somehow, this didn't work out so well.
>
> The rest of your posting is sort of new to me (I wasn't aware that
> cultural distinctions between different language Wikipedias were to be
> regarded as accidental and against the intention of Wikipedia proper)
>
> --elian

Take a look at the thread from July 2005 entitled "Policy
clarification: separate Wikipedias for cultures, peoples, and
countries, or for languages?"

Anthony


subject: [WikiEN-l] Types of categories

body:
On 6/6/06, Roger Luethi <collector at hellgate.ch> wrote:
> On Tue, 06 Jun 2006 17:36:07 -0400, Anthony DiPierro wrote:
> > I'd say then that either the German [[Kategorie:Sicherheit]] should be
> > disambiguated into two different categories, or that
> > [[Kategorie:Sicherheit]] shouldn't be linked to [[Category:Security]],
> > because they don't define the same set.  Maybe an English
> > [[Category:Security and Safety]] could be made, with "Security" and
> > "Safety" as subcats - then [[Kategorie:Sicherheit]] could link to
> > [[Category:Security and Safety]].
>
> These are all possible solutions. However, Sicherheit is not exactly
> security+safety. It's just much closer than to security alone. I picked
> that example because it's rather extreme. Here's another one: there are
> two German words for technology: Technik and Technologie (each has
> a separate category in the German WP).
>
[[Kategorie:Technologie]] isn't very full, and I didn't dive into
enough that I can say for sure which solution would be best, but this
seems to be just the reverse of the previous example.

> More importantly, though, many translated words mean almost the same, but
> not exactly, and some articles will be the corner cases that will make the
> category in one language but not in the other.
>
> You would need a mechanism to exclude categories that won't translate well
> enough even though an interwiki link exists between them. Opt-in or
> opt-out, I don't know.
>
Well, for the moment I'll accept these criticisms, because I simply
don't have any solid numbers to throw back.

> > But maybe this is a common enough thing that that's not going to be
> > reasonable.  At some point someone should look at how the en
> > categories differ from the de ones.  I figure there will be 5 major
> > points of difference:
> >
> > 1) Things being categorized at different levels ([[Category:Polish
> > women]] vs. [[Kategorie:Frau]].
> > 2) Interwiki links between articles on different things.
> > 3) Interwiki links between categories defining different sets.
> > 4) Articles categorized where they shouldn't be.
> > 5) Articles missing from categories where they should be.
> >
> > 1) is the reason why I call this a "longer-term solution".  2 and/or 3
> > are what you describe above.  4 and 5 are the reason why it would be
> > useful to coordinate things.
> >
> > It'd be interesting to get a decent size sample and sort the
> > differences into those 5 categories.  If 2 and/or 3 were significant,
> > then I suppose this idea fails, at least initially.  If 1 is
>
> 2) is significant if only because the German WP tends to merge subjects
> into one article, so you have several English articles pointing to the
> same German one.
> 3) Extremes are rare, but subtle differences are pretty much inevitable.
> 6) Different understanding of what categories should exist.
>
> Roger

Regarding 2), I assume the accepted solution is to wikilink the merged
article to all the individual ones?  Wouldn't it make more sense to
wikilink the redirect, which covers the individual concept?  Are
wikilinks between redirects and articles even allowed (I guess I
should just test this one)?

6) isn't a problem in the scheme I'm considering, because categories
which exist in one language but not in another simply wouldn't be
translated.

In any case, I guess it's back to the drawing board unless I can get
some solid numbers that suggest it isn't as big a problem as you say.

Anthony


subject: [WikiEN-l] Category translation

body:
Well, I said I'd reply to this, so I suppose I will, even though it's
going to be short and sweet.

On 6/6/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/6/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> > I don't understand that.  Interwiki links are the hard and fast
> > en:Article <-> de:Artikel relationship.  Are you unaware of iw links,
> > or am I misinterpreting what you're saying?  Maybe you could give an
> > example?
>
> They're not always 1:1. One topic might be given a whole article on
> one Wikipedia and only a paragraph on another. I'm not aware of any
> convention for handling that atm actually.
>
Looking a bit into this, I agree it'll be a hurdle.  How big of a
hurdle I still don't know.

> > For those situations where we *don't* have an article on the same
> > topic in multiple languages, we don't have an interwiki link, and we
> > wouldn't link the categories.
>
> I suspect categories are much less comparable across languages than
> articles are, due to different conventions etc. But I don't really
> know.
> > OTOH, interwiki links already give us the automatic translation in
> > terms of category information.  Yes, there will probably be some
> > article titles and category titles which don't translate well, but
> > that's the exception and for those few titles we wouldn't have any iw
> > links anyway.
>
> More research needed.
>
> Steve

Yep, more research is definitely needed.


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Aww, so cute,
	a banned user is trying to take us down with a DMCA notice
	(Forwarded email)

body:
On 6/5/06, Philip Welch <wikipedia at philwelch.net> wrote:
> It's still against the rules to give legal advice for free, because
> the rules are made by lawyers, and lawyers' business is giving legal
> advice.
>
Fortunately here in the US there's that rule about free speech which
would trump any such law against stating facts about the law.

Giving *bad* legal advice (for free or for a price), pretending to be
a lawyer, or practicing law, on the other hand...  That's trickier.

This is not legal advice.  I am not a lawyer.  :)

Anthony


from_name: Alphax (Wikipedia email)

subject: [WikiEN-l] "refactoring" signatures

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 6/6/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 6/6/06, Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> How about this: {{subst:User:AUserName/sig}}? That little trick would
>>> pretty much guarantee that any limit on nicks is useless.
>> I'm sure the smart people who put hard limits on sigs can prevent
>> transclusion and substing.
>
> Unless you meant that people would stop using ~~~~ and start using
> some firefox extension to subst in a custom sig. You're quite right,
> but probably not many will bother.
>

Any informative comment that I could make on this matter would violate
[[WP:BEANS]]...

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

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subject: [Foundation-l] Where we are headed

body:
On 6/5/06, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> Jimmy Wales wrote:
> >> And when it comes to inviting an outside
> >> member, how is that member going to be chosen? Will there be a public
> >> dialogue about who the best figure is for this role, or will they
> >> simply be appointed?
> >>
> >
> > It would be absolutely fine to start a public dialogue about it right
> > now.  Who do you recommend we approach?
> >
> [snip]
> Bruce Perens is somewhat well-known for free software
> advocacy, and is well-connected with tech companies if that's the sort
> of thing we're after.
>
That would certainly be interesting considering this statement he
made: "I object to the GFDL license applied to the wikipedia, and
believe that - because of the flaws in the license - it is unlawful to
host the wikipedia on a computer running any contemporary operating
system."  See [[Talk:Bruce Perens]].

Personally I think all the members of the Wikimedia board should be
members of the Wikimedia community.  To pick an outsider for such a
position makes no sense to me.

Anthony


subject: [Foundation-l] Where we are headed


from_name: Roger Luethi

subject: [WikiEN-l] Types of categories

body:
On Tue, 06 Jun 2006 13:51:33 +0200, Steve Bennett wrote:
> Ok. I suspect rules like "Express X by doing Y and Z" are going to
> work better than "Don't do X".

Right. But more importantly, the way categories are used is thorougly
entrenched and I suspect your chances to change it are close to zero even
assuming you could make it a policy.

It would be easier to create clean trees in a parallel namespace. Say,
leave [[Category:Bridges]] alone and create [[is a:Bridge]] (or, without
software changes, [[Category:is a Bridge]]).

That said, it seems that you are overestimating the importance of one type
of relationships at the expense of others.

Some hierarchies are perfectly natural and useful but are not "is a"
relationships (Europe - France - Paris, Family - Genus - Species).

Many attributes are perfectly natural and useful but they tend not to fit
hierarchies well. You starting using them as soon as you sketched out the
supposedly taxonomic category women. There simply is no natural taxonomic
hierarchy for women, just a bunch of attributes.

Now _if_ you want to draw a natural hierarchy with women in it, try
genealogy. But guess what? That's another type of relationship that we
can't deal with (X is ancester of Y, Y is ancestor of Z).

> Would it be credible to say that for 90% of the time the new system is
> better, and for the other 10% we leave it the way it is?

Not without supporting evidence :-).

> > Unfortunately, I'm not aware of a good method for presenting and editing
> > the kind of graphs we're talking about in a wiki.
>
> No. I'd like to try doing some experiments though. We don't necessarily
> need "graphs". Tables and hierarchical lists may be a start, depending on
> what you're talking about.

Yes. The example Anthony posted today in another thread was useful:

---------------------------- snip ----------------------
Coastal_construction
*Ports_and_harbours
**Port_cities
***Edinburgh
****Education_in_Edinburgh
[...]
---------------------------- snip ----------------------

> > article. An American movie may be "set in France", or a movie set in the US
> > may be "shot in France". And people may be "born in France" or have "died
> > in France".
>
> Yeah, I know. But I would actually rather see a film article labelled
> "Films", "Made in France", "Made in US" rather than labelled "Films
> made in France", "Films made in the US".

Agreed. But the long-term goal should be for "Made in US" to be dynamically
generated. It's just a bunch of relationships ("made in", "died in") and a
list of attributes -- hierarchical even, in this case ("New York", "US",
"North America"). You can have all kinds of fun with that, until someone
adds a relationship like "was named after" and your software concludes
that if people named after London are also named after Great Britain :-).

> > I guess the reason I am only mildly interested in hierarchies is that many
> > interesting attributes (dead/alive, colors, professions) don't fit well
> > into hierarchies. I think the real power comes from combining attributes.
>
> Yep. But there's no software support for that atm.

But you have to deal with them anyway. Your suggested something like this:

women
*real women
*-living women
*-dead women
*fictional women

You _are_ using attributes here. So what if I'm looking for the biography
of a female Polish chemist but don't know whether that woman is still
alive? Do I have to check both categories, or do we maitain trees for
every possible order of attributes (which is pretty much what we are
doing right now, manually)?

> What would actually be good would be being able to define categories
> in terms of attributes. Stick a {{Category:Polish chemists}} template
> on an article, which substitutes [[Attribute:Polish]] and
> [[Attribute:Chemists]], as well as containing a link to the category
> "Polish chemists". This category would be nothing more than a
> description and some sort of link to the two attributes, causing all
> articles with both attributes to be displayed.

Where's {{Category:Polish chemists}} coming from? Defined on a separate
page? And do we also add {{Category:Female chemists}} and {{Category:Polish
physicists}} and {{Category:Polish women}} to the same article?

Roger


from_name: sean at epoptic.com

body:
On 6 Jun 2006 at 15:38, Raphael Wegmann <raphael at psi.co.at> wrote:

> The discussion is not about thoughtcrimes. It is about hate *speech*
> which is a different matter. The U.S. is actually violating an UN
> resoltion by not passing hate speech laws.

If we can't say "hate," how can we say "we fucking hate the UN"?

(My apologies to Mr. Carlin....)

--
 Sean Barrett     | Five parts ammonium nitrate, two parts hydrazine.
 sean at epoptic.com |


from_name: Kirill Lokshin

subject: [WikiEN-l] Template HTML fixups coming this week

body:
On 6/6/06, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:

> I've done some automated checks on templates on en.wikipedia.org to make a list
> of likely problem candidates:
>
> http://leuksman.com/misc/templates/html-table-start.txt
> http://leuksman.com/misc/templates/html-table-end.txt
> http://leuksman.com/misc/templates/html-table-row.txt

Looks like the third list is largely composed of templates that use
raw HTML table markup inside {{#if}} (which, coincidentally, includes
a great many of the most widely-used infoboxes).  This is going to be
fun! ;-)

--
Kirill Lokshin


subject: [Foundation-l] Where we are headed

body:
On 6/6/06, Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- Michael Snow <wikipedia at earthlink.net> wrote:
> > One
> > use of interest to us is that if a company has a charitable giving
> > program in which employees can have an amount withheld from their
> > paychecks to the charity of their choice, the company would need the
> > charity's EIN. I'm not aware of any serious problem for a nonprofit
> > publishing this number (the American Red Cross publishes theirs on their
> > website). In fact, I've suggested putting ours out there in order to
> > make it easier for companies to add us to gift-matching programs, but
> > I'm not aware that this has been done yet.
>
> Our EIN has been on the foundation wiki for some time now:
>
> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Deductibility_of_donations
>
> Of course, that whole set of pages needs to be re-done so finding things like that are easy.
>
Not to mention that the number is wrong.

The EIN for Wikimedia is 20-0049703 (according to the Florida Division
of Corporations [1], the 990-EZ filed by Wikimedia [2], and the
501(c)(3) letter [3]).  The page you gave says the EIN is 20-0049733.

[1] http://www.sunbiz.org/scripts/cordet.exe?a1=DETFIL&n1=N03000005323
[2] http://www.guidestar.org/FinDocuments/2004/200/049/2004-200049703-01b74bb2-Z.pdf
[3] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/a/aa/501%28c%29%283%29_Letter.png

Anthony


subject: [Foundation-l] Where we are headed


from_name: Raphael Wegmann

subject: [WikiEN-l] [[WP:OURS]] - A proposal for admin-user relations

body:
Scott Stevenson wrote:
> On 6/6/06, Raphael Wegmann <raphael at psi.co.at> wrote:
>> Steve Bennett wrote:
>>> On 6/6/06, Scott Stevenson <wikinetscott at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Resid, [[WP:OURS]] was speedy deleted because it fell under
>>>> [[WP:CSD#General_criteria]] (general criteria 5), which states as a
>>>> valid reason for speedy deletion : "Pages created by banned
>>>> users<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_banned_users>while
>>>> they were
>>>> banned <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Banning_policy>."
>>>
>>> This is a much better reason for deleting something than concerns
>>> about copyright.
>>>
>> It would be a better reason, if it wouldn't be just plain wrong.
>> Neither [[User:Rgulerdem/Wikiethics]] nor [[User:Raphael1/Wikiethics]]
>> has been created by banned users while they were banned.
>>
>> Netscott claims, that there had been some edits on
>> [[User:Rgulerdem/Wikiethics]] from an IP-address he
>> alleges to be Rgulerdems. IIRC I have made a copy of
>> that page to [[User:Raphael1/Wikiethics]] before
>> Rgulerdem even had been banned.
>>
>> Anyway, even if Netscotts allegations are true,
>> neither [[User:Rgulerdem/Wikiethics]] nor [[User:Raphael1/Wikiethics]]
>> has been created by banned users while they were banned.
>>
 > My allegations? Raphael Wegmann you're so quick to tell a half truth.

Am I? Actually I was referring to your last email, when I called
them your allegations. How could I know, that you are just "reporting"
an allegation by Metros232, when you don't even mention his name?

 > This MfD started by [[User:Metros232]] which you were pefectly aware
 > of illustrates this:
 >
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion/User:Rgulerdem/Wikiethics

What about that
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Metros232&diff=prev&oldid=56134195

I'd say, that we shouldn't hide the motives for your actions either:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:Wikiethics&diff=44356438&oldid=44356340

It seems rather odd to me, that you now claim, that you are not engaged
in this "remove all traces from now indef-banned Rgulerdem" agitation.
Actually you have repeated yourself so many times, that I almost believe
to be a disruptive proxy myself.

 > Move along now and cease from acting as a proxy for a banned user.

Please stop accusing me of "acting as a proxy". I consider this a
personal attack, since it completely disregards my individuality
and the work I've put in WP:OURS before I've created that page.

--
Raphael


subject: [WikiEN-l] Types of categories

body:
On Tue, 06 Jun 2006 07:54:27 -0400, Anthony DiPierro wrote:
> That brings up another, longer term, to-do for categories: they should
> be language independent.  For instance [[Marie Curie]] is in de: and
> en: (they happen to have the same title, but even if they don't they
> are linked via interwiki links).  [[Kategorie:Pole]] is linked to
> [[Category:Polish people]].  So there should be no need to categorize
> Marie Curie twice (multiply by the actual number of languages which
> have a Polish people category and an article on Marie Curie).

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata

> This is pretty simple theoretically.  The only real problem is getting
> the multiple category schemes in sync.  Considering your point about
> how the German categorization scheme differs from the English one,
> this might be a lot harder in practice than it is in theory.

Right. You _could_ make it work on some categories, say "Women" or
"Nobelprize winners".

It cannot possible work for all categories, though, because different
languages know different categories. For instance, security and safety is
the same word in German: Sicherheit. Thus, [[de:Lifebelt]] is in the German
category that is linked to the English category Security.

Numbers are much easier to share. Population of a country. Weight of a
molecule.

> Personally I don't see the difference between taxonomies and
> attributes, as described.  But I suppose one (taxonomies?) could be
> described as partitioning (an article can only be in one taxonomy
> category) whereas attributes can be mixed.  Under that definition

I suspect this is impossible. But it's hard to tell if you're not even sure
what counts as a taxonomy.

Roger


body:
Scott Stevenson wrote:
> On 6/5/06, Raphael Wegmann <raphael at psi.co.at> wrote:
>> Jimmy Wales wrote:
>>> Resid Gulerdem wrote:
>>>>    The admins are only part of the community now and
>>>> will stay like that in the future, as far as I can
>>>> see. Are some modifications needed in your opinion? I
>>>> believe the answer is yes. I do not know if you could
>>>> see the proposal [[WP:OURS]] I posted on this list
>>>> recently. I think it can be useful and can be
>>>> developed further. I tried to outline some important
>>>> points which may reduce the conflicts between the
>>>> admins and the users. If you saw it, do you think it
>>>> is feasible?
>>> I see no reference to WP:OURS in google, so I am unable to comment.  Can
>>> you send it to me?
>>>
>> I've just created the proposed policy on [[Wikipedia:OURS]].
>>
 > Permanently blocked editors formulating policy on Wikipedia is BAD.
 > I've submitted this policy for deletion:
 >
 >
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion/Wikipedia:OURS
 >

Congratulations Netscott!

You've successfully killed this proposal on the first day
merely for personal reasons rather than its own merits.
Did you even bother to read the proposal?

You are really good in your smear campaigning. Why don't
you write a guide so everybody can learn how to do that?
If you continue, you'll probably get me indef-banned
for being another meat-puppet of Resid.

Just one thing: As you might know, I have to read your texts
as well, so would you please refrain from repeating yourself
so many times. It really gets boring to read the same words
over and over again. Please try to be a little bit more
creative. I.e. you could try to use words like "disruption"
or "proxy" only once in your messages.

--
Raphael


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Category translation

body:
On 6/6/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> I don't understand that.  Interwiki links are the hard and fast
> en:Article <-> de:Artikel relationship.  Are you unaware of iw links,
> or am I misinterpreting what you're saying?  Maybe you could give an
> example?

They're not always 1:1. One topic might be given a whole article on
one Wikipedia and only a paragraph on another. I'm not aware of any
convention for handling that atm actually.

> For those situations where we *don't* have an article on the same
> topic in multiple languages, we don't have an interwiki link, and we
> wouldn't link the categories.

I suspect categories are much less comparable across languages than
articles are, due to different conventions etc. But I don't really
know.

> Jimbo and others have also made it clear that any cultural distinction
> between different language Wikipedias is accidental and in fact goes
> against the intention (this in the context of which languages should
> have a Wikipedia, but the idea carries here as well).  We don't have a
> British Encyclopedia and an American one, because we can both
> understand each other well enough to communicate.  If it were
> *possible* to automatically translate all articles into every language
> while keeping the content the same, we'd do so.  It just isn't, at
> least not with current technology.

Is there an official or even unofficial policy on this? I have
wondered. IMHO, the Wikipedias should *not* be precise translations
though. For example, [[en:Personal pronoun]] should give descriptions
of personal pronouns in all languages, but with emphasis and examples
from English. [[fr:Pronom personnel]] should similarly have an
emphasis on French, because that is the most helpful for French
readers. Whether that extends to cultural matters (should French
articles on cartoons draw more on examples from French cartoons such
as Asterix than on manga for instance) is up for debate.

> OTOH, interwiki links already give us the automatic translation in
> terms of category information.  Yes, there will probably be some
> article titles and category titles which don't translate well, but
> that's the exception and for those few titles we wouldn't have any iw
> links anyway.

More research needed.

Steve


subject:
[WikiEN-l] "refactoring" signatures (was: cancelation of the
	deletion review of the satanism userbox)

body:
On 6/6/06, Guettarda <guettarda at gmail.com> wrote:
> Well, I'd say that only holds if they expressed on.  If I were to write a
> stub and use no words that differ between BE and AE, and someone else comes
> along and writes an article using AE, the "first user preference" is
> their's, not mine.  Anyway, expressing a preference ("prefers BE" or
> "prefers AE") is fine.  Saying that they "contribute" in AE/BE says "I don't
> want to compromise".  If I write an article about an American topic, I
> should use AE, not matter how much it grates.

Hmm, all I can say is, if the AE/BE userbox is the most offensive
that's left, then let's break out the champagne.

Steve


from_name: Scott Stevenson

body:
<snip>
>Actually you have repeated yourself so many times, that I almost believe to
be a disruptive proxy myself.
</snip>

Now you are talking sense!

<snip>
I'd say, that we shouldn't hide the motives for your actions either:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:Wikiethics&diff=44356438&oldid=44356340
</snip>

Who's hiding anything? That diff is illustrative of the very first inkling
of Resid Gulerdem's long record of disruption on the project.

You must realize that apart from Resid Gulerdem's history of disruptiveness
wheverever he goes on Wikipedia (English and Turkish WP) and how his
disruption made a Wikipedia contributor in very good standing leave the
project [[User:Metta Bubble]], the insulting comments that he's made towards
myself (calling me a vandal, troublemaker, etc.) has me somewhat motivated
to see his FULL departure from Wikipedia.
Now with you acting as a proxy for him to further his ends and with your own
disruptiveness (making a list of admins who've committed "Persecution of
Muslims"?) I am beginning to think that you are following his path towards
leaving the project. I would recommend that you refrain from continuing to
act as a proxy on his behalf and that you return to being a positive
contributor for the Encyclopedia before the community's patience is
exhausted.

Sincerely,
-Scott Stevenson [[User:Netscott]]

On 6/6/06, Raphael Wegmann <raphael at psi.co.at> wrote:
>
> Scott Stevenson wrote:
> > On 6/6/06, Raphael Wegmann <raphael at psi.co.at> wrote:
> >> Steve Bennett wrote:
> >>> On 6/6/06, Scott Stevenson <wikinetscott at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>> Resid, [[WP:OURS]] was speedy deleted because it fell under
> >>>> [[WP:CSD#General_criteria]] (general criteria 5), which states as a
> >>>> valid reason for speedy deletion : "Pages created by banned
> >>>> users<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_banned_users
> >while
> >>>> they were
> >>>> banned <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Banning_policy>."
> >>>
> >>> This is a much better reason for deleting something than concerns
> >>> about copyright.
> >>>
> >> It would be a better reason, if it wouldn't be just plain wrong.
> >> Neither [[User:Rgulerdem/Wikiethics]] nor [[User:Raphael1/Wikiethics]]
> >> has been created by banned users while they were banned.
> >>
> >> Netscott claims, that there had been some edits on
> >> [[User:Rgulerdem/Wikiethics]] from an IP-address he
> >> alleges to be Rgulerdems. IIRC I have made a copy of
> >> that page to [[User:Raphael1/Wikiethics]] before
> >> Rgulerdem even had been banned.
> >>
> >> Anyway, even if Netscotts allegations are true,
> >> neither [[User:Rgulerdem/Wikiethics]] nor [[User:Raphael1/Wikiethics]]
> >> has been created by banned users while they were banned.
> >>
> > My allegations? Raphael Wegmann you're so quick to tell a half truth.
>
> Am I? Actually I was referring to your last email, when I called
> them your allegations. How could I know, that you are just "reporting"
> an allegation by Metros232, when you don't even mention his name?
>
> > This MfD started by [[User:Metros232]] which you were pefectly aware
> > of illustrates this:
> >
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion/User:Rgulerdem/Wikiethics
>
> What about that
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Metros232&diff=prev&oldid=56134195
>
> I'd say, that we shouldn't hide the motives for your actions either:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:Wikiethics&diff=44356438&oldid=44356340
>
> It seems rather odd to me, that you now claim, that you are not engaged
> in this "remove all traces from now indef-banned Rgulerdem" agitation.
> Actually you have repeated yourself so many times, that I almost believe
> to be a disruptive proxy myself.
>
> > Move along now and cease from acting as a proxy for a banned user.
>
> Please stop accusing me of "acting as a proxy". I consider this a
> personal attack, since it completely disregards my individuality
> and the work I've put in WP:OURS before I've created that page.
>
> --
> Raphael
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Philip Welch

body:
On 6 Jun 2006 at 15:38, Raphael Wegmann <raphael at psi.co.at> wrote:

> The discussion is not about thoughtcrimes. It is about hate *speech*
> which is a different matter. The U.S. is actually violating an UN
> resoltion by not passing hate speech laws.

Free speech used to be a human right. Whatever happened to it?

--
Philip L. Welch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Philwelch


subject: [WikiEN-l] Types of categories

body:
On Tue, 06 Jun 2006 14:07:23 +0200, Steve Bennett wrote:
> I'm inclined to think that in practice they pretty much work the same
> way. However, semantically, I would really like to distinguish
> concrete, significant, basic categories like "Ships" from much less
> salient, significant facts like "Born in 1793" or "Winners of Golden
> Raspberries".

Significant? Salient? You don't want to go there.

I'd argue the most significant thing about the Titanic is "major disaster"
("Shipwrecks in the Atlantic Ocean", actually). It's not significant or
salient for being a ship, but for taking 1500 people down.

And what is more salient about Halle Berry, being a women (or actress, for
all I care) _or_ having won a "Worst Actress Razzie"? Well?

I'm afraid your "I know it when it see it" approach to identifying
taxonomic categories is hopelessly POV.

> However, I suspect that even the most basic taxonomies will have bastard
> children with two parents: Something could be both a sport and a
> television show. Someone could be both a musician and a scientist. But
> maybe the "one taxonomy per article except in strange cases" goal is
> reasonable?

Hardly. For starters, many people have held several jobs in their life.
Halle Berry is also a model. Albert Einstein was also a Patent Clerk. Duke
Ellington was a composer, bandleader, and pianist. Etc. pp.

Roger


body:
Raphael Wegmann,

 There's a reason that speedy deletion general criteria #5 exists.
[[WP:CSD#General_criteria]] You can be sure that such a rule is equally
applicable even when such a page is created by a proxy for a banned user.

<snip>
>Please try to be a little bit more creative. I.e. you could try to use
words like "disruption" or "proxy" only once in your messages.
</snip>

I understand why you are resorting to [[ad hominem]] attacks as it is
evident that you haven't got much else to argue with.

<snip>
>If you continue, you'll probably get me indef-banned for being another
meat-puppet of Resid.
</snip>

There's only one individual who'll get themselves indef-banned here
Raphael... and that's yourself.

Sincerely,

-Scott Stevenson [[User:Netscott]]

Congratulations Netscott!
>
> You've successfully killed this proposal on the first day
> merely for personal reasons rather than its own merits.
> Did you even bother to read the proposal?
>
> You are really good in your smear campaigning. Why don't
> you write a guide so everybody can learn how to do that?
> If you continue, you'll probably get me indef-banned
> for being another meat-puppet of Resid.
>
> Just one thing: As you might know, I have to read your texts
> as well, so would you please refrain from repeating yourself
> so many times. It really gets boring to read the same words
> over and over again. Please try to be a little bit more
> creative. I.e. you could try to use words like "disruption"
> or "proxy" only once in your messages.
>
> --
> Raphael
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Andrew Lih

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikia's new CEO

body:
FYI,

Wikia taps eBay exec as CEO
San Francisco Business Times - 2:41 PM PDT Monday

Wikia Inc., a for-profit company founded 18 months ago by Wikipedia
founder Jimmy Wales, hired Gil Penchina as its CEO on Monday.

Penchina was vice president and general manager at eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY).

Wales and Angela Beesley started Menlo Park-based Wikia to allow for
subscription and advertising supported "wikis" or user-created
communities similar to Wikipedia, which is based in St. Petersburg,
Fla.

Popular communities created on the site include several devoted to
analyzing and discussing television shows, particularly those with
Byzantine plots like ABC's "Lost."

Wikia has about eight employees and raised $4 million from Bessemer
Venture Partners in March. Jeremy Levine of Bessemer sits on the
company's board.

http://sanfrancisco.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/stories/2006/06/05/daily9.html?jst=m_ln_hl&surround=lfn


body:
Scott Stevenson wrote:
<snip/>
> You must realize that apart from Resid Gulerdem's history of disruptiveness
> wheverever he goes on Wikipedia (English and Turkish WP) and how his
> disruption made a Wikipedia contributor in very good standing leave the
> project [[User:Metta Bubble]], the insulting comments that he's made towards
> myself (calling me a vandal, troublemaker, etc.) has me somewhat motivated
> to see his FULL departure from Wikipedia.
<snip/>

Please try to keep this personal vendetta out of Wikipedia.
You are truly harming this project, if you agitate to get
all of Rgulerdems contributions removed. Even if he might
have insulted you, many of his contributions are valuable.

--
Raphael


body:
Scott Stevenson wrote:
> Raphael Wegmann,
>
>  There's a reason that speedy deletion general criteria #5 exists.
> [[WP:CSD#General_criteria]] You can be sure that such a rule is equally
> applicable even when such a page is created by a proxy for a banned user.
>
> <snip>
>> Please try to be a little bit more creative. I.e. you could try to use
> words like "disruption" or "proxy" only once in your messages.
> </snip>
>
> I understand why you are resorting to [[ad hominem]] attacks as it is
> evident that you haven't got much else to argue with.
>

Quid pro quo.

Let me make a suggestion:
I apologize for this personal attack and you stop calling me a proxy.

--
Raphael


body:
Sorry Raphael but you are wrong this isn't about a personal vendetta but
moreso about an editor who was just bad for Wikipedia. Seeing [[User:Metta
Bubble]] ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Metta_Bubble ) depart the
project as a result of Resid Gulerdem's bad influence on Wikipedia really
sealed my view that he was indeed bad. Your continued support of him really
puzzles me and I really can't understand it. The only thing that makes me
think you are so inclined to support him is that he like yourself supports
altering the display characteristics of the Jyllands-Posten cartoons
(censoring them) and you're not keen to see a supportive view go away
(meaning you have personal reasons for him staying on). Such continued
support is less than logical in view of Resid Gulerdem's repeated and
independently natured Wikipedia violations that saw him become banned.

-Scott Stevenson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Netscott

On 6/6/06, Raphael Wegmann <raphael at psi.co.at> wrote:
>
> Scott Stevenson wrote:
> <snip/>
> > You must realize that apart from Resid Gulerdem's history of
> disruptiveness
> > wheverever he goes on Wikipedia (English and Turkish WP) and how his
> > disruption made a Wikipedia contributor in very good standing leave the
> > project [[User:Metta Bubble]], the insulting comments that he's made
> towards
> > myself (calling me a vandal, troublemaker, etc.) has me somewhat
> motivated
> > to see his FULL departure from Wikipedia.
> <snip/>
>
> Please try to keep this personal vendetta out of Wikipedia.
> You are truly harming this project, if you agitate to get
> all of Rgulerdems contributions removed. Even if he might
> have insulted you, many of his contributions are valuable.
>
> --
> Raphael
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Types of categories

body:
On 6/6/06, Roger Luethi <collector at hellgate.ch> wrote:

You ask some good questions here!

> Right. But more importantly, the way categories are used is thorougly
> entrenched and I suspect your chances to change it are close to zero even
> assuming you could make it a policy.

It depends whether it can be done in an evolutionary rather than
revolutionary way.  Slowly migrating hardcoded "Polish scientist"
categories to some more advanced method should work - once critical
mass is achieved (assuming that people can be convinced that it's a
better method), it could become the dominant method. Suddenly wading
in and reorganising category hierarchies is probably doomed, otoh.

> It would be easier to create clean trees in a parallel namespace. Say,
> leave [[Category:Bridges]] alone and create [[is a:Bridge]] (or, without
> software changes, [[Category:is a Bridge]]).

Or even {{isa|bridge}} ? Can anything useful be done with templates'
"what links here"?

> That said, it seems that you are overestimating the importance of one type
> of relationships at the expense of others.

I think I agree. Let me try something: say we make a shallow
"taxonomy" tree (or not even tree?) and allow attributes instead to be
hierarchical:

Paris "isa city" +in France   ("isa city" is the taxonomy, +in France
is the attribute)
Now, +in France can be a subattribute of +in Europe (and it could have
been made +in Ile de France or whatever)

Britney Spears "isa person" +female +singer +alive
+singer could be a subattribute of +entertainer

Pont du Gard "isa aqueduct" +in France, +Roman-built
"isa aqueduct" can be a subcategory of "isa bridge" and "isa construction"

This seems to be relatively clean, despite the fact that the attribute
hierarchies have different meanings: "in" as opposed to "is a
specialisation of".

Basically what I'm proposing now is keeping taxonomies quite strict,
and allowing greater flexibility in attributes. So we'll always know
whether an item is a soccer team or a city, but we may lose
information on the finer details if the attributes aren't managed
carefully. Still a better situation than currently not being able to
distinguish between a rock band and a person..

More examples to try and break things?

> Some hierarchies are perfectly natural and useful but are not "is a"
> relationships (Europe - France - Paris, Family - Genus - Species).

I don't quite understnd your second example. "Rattus rattus" "is a"
"Rattus" is ok isn't it?

> Many attributes are perfectly natural and useful but they tend not to fit
> hierarchies well. You starting using them as soon as you sketched out the
> supposedly taxonomic category women. There simply is no natural taxonomic
> hierarchy for women, just a bunch of attributes.

Yeah, I see that. So, we stop the taxonomy at "person", and instead
have hierarchical attributes? Is this actually far from the current
situation? Hmm.

> Now _if_ you want to draw a natural hierarchy with women in it, try
> genealogy. But guess what? That's another type of relationship that we
> can't deal with (X is ancester of Y, Y is ancestor of Z).

I think overall, having objects in a hierarchy is not the goal in
itself - the goal is organising information, being able to group
related information, and being able to make meaningful statements such
as "43% of our articles are about people".

> Agreed. But the long-term goal should be for "Made in US" to be dynamically
> generated. It's just a bunch of relationships ("made in", "died in") and a
> list of attributes -- hierarchical even, in this case ("New York", "US",
> "North America"). You can have all kinds of fun with that, until someone
> adds a relationship like "was named after" and your software concludes
> that if people named after London are also named after Great Britain :-).

Heh, yeah attention has to be paid to what meaning can be extrapolated
from a supercategory/superattribute relationship.

> But you have to deal with them anyway. Your suggested something like this:
>
> women
> *real women
> *-living women
> *-dead women
> *fictional women
>
> You _are_ using attributes here. So what if I'm looking for the biography
> of a female Polish chemist but don't know whether that woman is still
> alive? Do I have to check both categories, or do we maitain trees for
> every possible order of attributes (which is pretty much what we are
> doing right now, manually)?

Yeah, that doesn't work well. Better to use semantic attributes,
possibly with antonym relationships built in (not sure of the
immediate use, but it's probably helpful to distinguish between
living/not living/unknown. So, to look for your female polish chemist,
you simply look for person (or possibly, chemist), +female +polish.

> Where's {{Category:Polish chemists}} coming from? Defined on a separate

Defined on a separate page by someone who thought it was a meaningful
and useful category, and worth spending 2 minutes making.

> page? And do we also add {{Category:Female chemists}} and {{Category:Polish
> physicists}} and {{Category:Polish women}} to the same article?

You could, and the software (small matter of programming) would be
smart enough to take the superset of all these things:

Person +chemist +Polish
Person +female +chemist
Person +physicist +Polish
Person +female +Polish

Net result: Person +chemist +physicist +female +Polish

Alternatively if you knew the attributes directly you could just do
{{Polish chemists}} +female +physicist

Steve


body:
Raphael,

I didn't consider what you wrote as a personal attack but was just
illustrating that rather than try to argue in support of what you were
saying relative to this entire series of discussions you chose to try and
argue about myself and how I have supported my own arguments. Nevertheless
your good faith gesture is appreciated. You should know as well that my
referring to you as a proxy in these discussions is not a personal attack
but is a descriptive noun relative to your actions.
The defintion of proxy that is most applicable to my utilization of the word
from http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=proxy is:
n.

   1. A person authorized to act for another; an agent or substitute.

In effect through discussions here, Resid Gulerdem authorized you to act on
his behalf and create his policy proposal [[WP:OURS]]. Therefore, when you
created [[WP:OURS]] you became his proxy. Do you see how that isn't a
personal attack?

Sincerely,
Scott Stevenson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Netscott

On 6/6/06, Raphael Wegmann <raphael at psi.co.at> wrote:
>
> Scott Stevenson wrote:
> > Raphael Wegmann,
> >
> >  There's a reason that speedy deletion general criteria #5 exists.
> > [[WP:CSD#General_criteria]] You can be sure that such a rule is equally
> > applicable even when such a page is created by a proxy for a banned
> user.
> >
> > <snip>
> >> Please try to be a little bit more creative. I.e. you could try to use
> > words like "disruption" or "proxy" only once in your messages.
> > </snip>
> >
> > I understand why you are resorting to [[ad hominem]] attacks as it is
> > evident that you haven't got much else to argue with.
> >
>
> Quid pro quo.
>
> Let me make a suggestion:
> I apologize for this personal attack and you stop calling me a proxy.
>
> --
> Raphael
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Jay R. Ashworth

body:
On Tue, Jun 06, 2006 at 02:48:26PM -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:
> Please make sure this information is disseminated to the various other
> language and project wikis people are working on; I don't want to hear
> "waah! all my templates broke and no one told me!" next week. :)

Couldn't/shouldn't something this big be put in the skin for the week,
with a pointer to somewhere useful?

Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

     A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
     Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?

     A: Top-posting.
     Q: What is the most annoying thing on Usenet and in e-mail?


body:
Scott Stevenson wrote:
> Raphael,
>
> I didn't consider what you wrote as a personal attack but was just
> illustrating that rather than try to argue in support of what you were
> saying relative to this entire series of discussions you chose to try and
> argue about myself and how I have supported my own arguments. Nevertheless
> your good faith gesture is appreciated. You should know as well that my
> referring to you as a proxy in these discussions is not a personal attack
> but is a descriptive noun relative to your actions.
> The defintion of proxy that is most applicable to my utilization of the word
> from http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=proxy is:
> n.
>
>    1. A person authorized to act for another; an agent or substitute.
>
> In effect through discussions here, Resid Gulerdem authorized you to act on
> his behalf and create his policy proposal [[WP:OURS]]. Therefore, when you
> created [[WP:OURS]] you became his proxy. Do you see how that isn't a
> personal attack?
>

I consider it a defamation to suggest, that I'd need anybodies
authorization to create a policy proposal.

--
Raphael


body:
Raphael,
This discussion is now beyond the scope of this mailing list. If you want to
continue this I suggest you write me on my talk page.

Sincerely,

-Scott Stevenson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Netscott

On 6/6/06, Raphael Wegmann <raphael at psi.co.at> wrote:
>
> Scott Stevenson wrote:
> > Raphael,
> >
> > I didn't consider what you wrote as a personal attack but was just
> > illustrating that rather than try to argue in support of what you were
> > saying relative to this entire series of discussions you chose to try
> and
> > argue about myself and how I have supported my own arguments.
> Nevertheless
> > your good faith gesture is appreciated. You should know as well that my
> > referring to you as a proxy in these discussions is not a personal
> attack
> > but is a descriptive noun relative to your actions.
> > The defintion of proxy that is most applicable to my utilization of the
> word
> > from http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=proxy is:
> > n.
> >
> >    1. A person authorized to act for another; an agent or substitute.
> >
> > In effect through discussions here, Resid Gulerdem authorized you to act
> on
> > his behalf and create his policy proposal [[WP:OURS]]. Therefore, when
> you
> > created [[WP:OURS]] you became his proxy. Do you see how that isn't a
> > personal attack?
> >
>
> I consider it a defamation to suggest, that I'd need anybodies
> authorization to create a policy proposal.
>
> --
> Raphael
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
George Willaim Herbert,

While I understand your concerns about "thougthcrime" the only precedent
that might exist here is that a page created by a banned user through proxy
was deleted. Pages created by banned users can be speedy deleted under
[[WP:CSD#General_criteria]] general criteria #5. Discussion about a proposal
isn't verboten (and in fact on one of the the original threads started by
Resid Gulerdem there is indeed a very lively ongoing discussion).
Hope that helps you to better understand this.
Sincerely,
-Scott Stevenson

I am worried about the apparent precedent here, that because some idea or
> proposal originated with a now-banned user, it must be permanently
> verboten
> as a point for ongoing discussion.
>
> I neither agree with Resid's actions that got him banned, nor with
> WP:OURS,
> but I don't like the precedent.  See other thread and thoughtcrime...
>
>
> --
> -george william herbert
> gherbert at retro.com / george.herbert at gmail.com
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
Scott Stevenson wrote:
> George Willaim Herbert,
>
> While I understand your concerns about "thougthcrime" the only precedent
> that might exist here is that a page created by a banned user through proxy
> was deleted. Pages created by banned users can be speedy deleted under
> [[WP:CSD#General_criteria]] general criteria #5. Discussion about a proposal
> isn't verboten (and in fact on one of the the original threads started by
> Resid Gulerdem there is indeed a very lively ongoing discussion).
> Hope that helps you to better understand this.

It is very unfortunate, that you reject my good faith gesture and
continue to call me a proxy.

[[WP:OUR]] has not been a cut&paste copy of Resids email.
Instead I've tried to incorporate the whole discussion,
which has taken place here on this mailing list.

--
Raphael


body:
There is no GFDL issue relative to [[WP:OURS]] that is a seperate issue
having to do with a sser page that Resid Gulerdem was editing on via anon
IPs despite his blocked status. [[WP:OURS]] was proposed here on the mailing
list by Resid Gulerdem, shortly afterwards Raphael Wegmann posted Resid
Gulerdem's policy proposal entitled Wikipedia:OURS [[WP:OURS]]. Raphael did
mention adding some text to it but the fact remains that the policy was
created by Resid Gulerdem so in creating the policy proposal on Wikipedia,
Raphael created a page on Resid Gulerdem's behalf (he acted as his proxy).
The question of what Raphael Wegmann would have to do to make the policy
proposal truly his own is a bit esoteric. But naming it the same thing as
what Resid Gulerdem named it and it having primarily text in it that Resid
Gulerdem himself added is essentially a proxy maneuver on Wegmann's part.
Any other questions?

-Scott Stevenson

On 6/6/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 6/6/06, Scott Stevenson <wikinetscott at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > George Willaim Herbert,
> > While I understand your concerns about "thougthcrime" the only precedent
> > that might exist here is that a page created by a banned user through
> > proxy
> > was deleted. Pages created by banned users can be speedy deleted under
> > [[WP:CSD#General_criteria]] general criteria #5. Discussion about a
> > proposal
> > isn't verboten (and in fact on one of the the original threads started
> by
> > Resid Gulerdem there is indeed a very lively ongoing discussion).
> > Hope that helps you to better understand this.
> >
>
> I understand the policy, but the effect is apparently to limit that
> discussion to Wikien-L and not on WP itself.
>
> Is that the (big picture) right thing to do?
>
> Would Raphael paraphrasing the whole WP:OURS page instead of just cutting
> and pasting it get around the current GFDL issue, or is the very existence
> of a WP:OURS page forbidden forever now since Resid got himself banned,
> requiring a retitle as well?  If Raphael retitled and paraphrased/rewrote
> from scratch the proposal, would that still be banned in your
> interpretation?
>
> Again, this commentary is NOT any kind of support for WP:OURS.  I'm just
> uncomfortable with how the proposal's being treated at the moment.
>
>
> --
> -george william herbert
> gherbert at retro.com / george.herbert at gmail.com
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Daniel R. Tobias

body:
On 6 Jun 2006 at 15:38, Raphael Wegmann <raphael at psi.co.at> wrote:

> The discussion is not about thoughtcrimes. It is about hate *speech*
> which is a different matter. The U.S. is actually violating an UN
> resoltion by not passing hate speech laws.

Fuck the UN.

(Is that hate speech?)

--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/


from_name: Guy Chapman aka JzG

body:
On Tue, 06 Jun 2006 22:44:13 +0200, you wrote:

>On April 8th both Rgulerdem and Metta_Bubble got warrantedly blocked
>for 3RR violation by [[User:Dmcdevit]]. Metta_Bubble felt treated
>unfairly and left.

I'm not crying.  Editors who cannot follow the rules even after they
are warned, and who cannot tolerate enforcement of the rules, are not
the kind of editors who make good Wikipedians.  Even when something is
wrong a good editor will take it to talk after one or two reversions.

Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


subject: [WikiEN-l] Are lists subject to WP:NOR?

body:
On Tue, 6 Jun 2006 16:43:02 +0200, you wrote:

>The problem is basically that "referred to as cult" sounds like
>"everyone thinks it's a cult", but the actual criterion for inclusion
>is apparently "some nut once said it was". Solution: Up the stakes for
>inclusion to require labelling by some relatively authoritative
>authorities

Surely that is the standard which should already be applied, per
[[WP:V]], [[WP:RS]], [[WP:NPOV]] (undue weight) and [[WP:NOR]]? That's
how I would read it, anyway.

Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


subject: [WikiEN-l] Types of categories

body:
On 6/6/06, Roger Luethi <collector at hellgate.ch> wrote:
> Significant? Salient? You don't want to go there.
>
> I'd argue the most significant thing about the Titanic is "major disaster"
> ("Shipwrecks in the Atlantic Ocean", actually). It's not significant or
> salient for being a ship, but for taking 1500 people down.

But at the end of the day, it's a ship. Indisputably so. You would
certainly want to put an attribute "shipwrecked" on it, and possible
"shipwrecked in 1903" or whatever. Instead of "significant" and
"salient" how about "concrete"? The fact that it's a ship is concrete
and essential. The fact that it shipwrecked is ancillary.

(why do I feel like I'm getting talked into trying to reinvent the
field of semantics from scratch)

> And what is more salient about Halle Berry, being a women (or actress, for
> all I care) _or_ having won a "Worst Actress Razzie"? Well?

I didn't know she had. Woman.

> I'm afraid your "I know it when it see it" approach to identifying
> taxonomic categories is hopelessly POV.

Not many people are going to deny that Halle is a women, or that
Titanic was a ship.

> Hardly. For starters, many people have held several jobs in their life.
> Halle Berry is also a model. Albert Einstein was also a Patent Clerk. Duke
> Ellington was a composer, bandleader, and pianist. Etc. pp.

Halle Berry is primarily an actress. Einstein was primarily a
physicist. Ellington was primarily a jazz musician. But I see your
point, maybe the taxonomies should stop at "person", and the rest can
be attributes.

Steve


from_name: Sam Spade

subject: [WikiEN-l] The admin problem

body:
On 6/5/06, Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:
> Though I'm having trouble finding the exact diff again, the BBC study
> you cite on the talk page of the article is only for 10 countries. One
> of those omitted is the most populous country in the world, which
> happens to generally be pretty low on the whole monotheistic thing.
>
> I don't want to imply you're being unfaithful in your use of
> statistics, but the inadequacy of these citations as justifying your
> statements was pointed out by others on the page as well. According to
> one of the pages there
> (http://adherents.com/Religions_By_Adherents.html) monotheists make up
> only a relatively slim majority. I think your "believed by the
> majority" gives somewhat of a different impression as to the actual
> split.
>
> In any case, Sam, in the end the content of the article is not up to
> YOU, personally, but a process of work and compromise. I'll add my
> voice to the large number of people who prefer a more neutral
> definition, the one which currently exists, and doesn't play any games
> about the numbers.
>
> It's stuff like this which makes people pretty suspicious of your
> ability to recognize your own biases, Sam.
>
> FF
>
> On 6/5/06, Sam Spade <samspade.thomasjefferson at googlemail.com> wrote:
> > It was three cites, 2 of american, the third a BBC international
> > survey. Not that the facts make any difference, when you already have
> > your mind made up. I expected encyclopedia readers to be better than
> > this...
> >
> > SS

Here is the link again:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=God&oldid=46819733

SS


body:
Scott Stevenson wrote:
> Sorry Raphael but you are wrong this isn't about a personal vendetta but
> moreso about an editor who was just bad for Wikipedia. Seeing [[User:Metta
> Bubble]] ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Metta_Bubble ) depart the
> project as a result of Resid Gulerdem's bad influence on Wikipedia really
> sealed my view that he was indeed bad.
<snip/>

I just looked up on [[User:Metta_Bubble]]:

[[User:Metta_Bubble]] has been engaged in edit-warring on the
[[Wikipedia:Wikiethics]] proposal. By looking at the main issue
of this edit-war it becomes clear, why you're so sorry about
his/her departure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Wikiethics&diff=prev&oldid=47524698

On April 8th both Rgulerdem and Metta_Bubble got warrantedly blocked
for 3RR violation by [[User:Dmcdevit]]. Metta_Bubble felt treated
unfairly and left.

I consider it very unfortunate how many editors (incl. Rgulerdem)
either got indef-banned or left out of frustration, but I don't think,
that your endless denouncements, which are only creating a negative
atmosphere, will help in that matter.

--
Raphael


body:
To others on this mailing list,

I'm through with these discussions involving Resid Gulerdem and Raphael
Wegmann.

I apologize to my fellow list subscribers. I admit that I let myself become
too involved in these discussions (to the point that they've almost become
spam-like).
Such behavior is not very becoming of a Wikipedian and I now recognize that.

Again my apologies.

Sincerely,

-Scott Stevenson
[[User:Netscott]]

On 6/6/06, jayjg <jayjg99 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >On 6/6/06, Resid Gulerdem <resid_gulerdem at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > Dear Raphael,
> >
> > I am so sorry that The Troublemaker is using my name
> > to attack you personally. As a very kind and
> > thoughtful person and a gentleman, it should be hard
> > for you to deal with the people at the very opposite
> > end.
>
> List moderators, can this individual *please* be put on moderation at
> this point?
>
> Jay.
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Types of categories

body:
On Tue, 06 Jun 2006 21:06:57 +0200, Steve Bennett wrote:
> better method), it could become the dominant method. Suddenly wading
> in and reorganising category hierarchies is probably doomed, otoh.

Yes, something to keep in mind. Finding a better system is not trivial, but
it is the easiest part.

> > leave [[Category:Bridges]] alone and create [[is a:Bridge]] (or, without
> > software changes, [[Category:is a Bridge]]).
>
> Or even {{isa|bridge}} ? Can anything useful be done with templates'
> "what links here"?

Not as far as I can tell. It would only distinguish relation types. Plus
it's a hack.

> > That said, it seems that you are overestimating the importance of one type
> > of relationships at the expense of others.
>
> I think I agree. Let me try something: say we make a shallow
> "taxonomy" tree (or not even tree?) and allow attributes instead to be
> hierarchical:
>
> Paris "isa city" +in France   ("isa city" is the taxonomy, +in France
> is the attribute)
> Now, +in France can be a subattribute of +in Europe (and it could have
> been made +in Ile de France or whatever)

With the current software, that could be implemented as:

[[Paris]]
	[[Category:is a city]]
		[[Category:is a (is there a name for "city or town or
			village or some other place"?)]]
	[[Category:in France]] (or [[Category:located in France]])
		[[Category:in Europe]]

Okay.

> Britney Spears "isa person" +female +singer +alive
> +singer could be a subattribute of +entertainer

What i see is (I added more information for illustration):

[[Britney Spears]]
	[[Category:is a singer]]
		[[Category:is an entertainer]]
			[[Category:is a person]]
	[[Category:is a child actor]]
		[[Category:is an entertainer]]
			[[Category:is a person]]
	[[Category:is alive]]
	[[Category:is female]]
	[[Category:born 1981]]
	[[Category:born in McComb, Mississippi]] (that kind of category
			would be hard to maintain manually)
		[[Category:born in Mississippi]]
			[[Category:born in the United States]]

Here are some other fun (existing!) categories from said article:

Worst Actress Razzie: "won a Worst Actress Razzi"
Soubrettes: "is a soubrette", I guess!?
American child actors: ...? "is a child actor" or "was a child actor?"
Hollywood Walk of Fame: Ugh.
High school dropouts: Ahm?

> Pont du Gard "isa aqueduct" +in France, +Roman-built
> "isa aqueduct" can be a subcategory of "isa bridge" and "isa construction"

[[Pont du Gard]]
	[[Category:is an aqueduct]]
		[[Category:is a bridge]]
			[[Category:is a construction]]
	[[Category:in France]]
	[[Category:built by Romans]] (?)

> This seems to be relatively clean, despite the fact that the attribute
> hierarchies have different meanings: "in" as opposed to "is a
> specialisation of".

Agreed.

> Basically what I'm proposing now is keeping taxonomies quite strict,
> and allowing greater flexibility in attributes. So we'll always know
> whether an item is a soccer team or a city, but we may lose
> information on the finer details if the attributes aren't managed

Examples?

> > Some hierarchies are perfectly natural and useful but are not "is a"
> > relationships (Europe - France - Paris, Family - Genus - Species).
>
> I don't quite understnd your second example. "Rattus rattus" "is a"
> "Rattus" is ok isn't it?

It is. But "species" is not a genus. Like city is not a country.

> > Many attributes are perfectly natural and useful but they tend not to fit
> > hierarchies well. You starting using them as soon as you sketched out the
> > supposedly taxonomic category women. There simply is no natural taxonomic
> > hierarchy for women, just a bunch of attributes.
>
> Yeah, I see that. So, we stop the taxonomy at "person", and instead
> have hierarchical attributes? Is this actually far from the current
> situation? Hmm.

I see two major problems with the status quo:
* multi-concept categories (American child actors) force us to maintain a
  complex system of subcategories (but they paper over shortcoming in the
  software). The German WP shows it doesn't have to be this way, but
  it might be difficult to convince people on WP:en until Mediawiki can
  create intersections
* categories with unclear relations that are used for everything

We can fix both problems without changes to the software (but it still
comes at a cost). However, we are dangerously close to inventing a poor
man's version of a semantic wiki.

> I think overall, having objects in a hierarchy is not the goal in
> itself - the goal is organising information, being able to group
> related information, and being able to make meaningful statements such
> as "43% of our articles are about people".

My impression is that the German WP is pretty close to that. But categories
are also an important navigation aid, and that's where WP:de falls short.

> Yeah, that doesn't work well. Better to use semantic attributes,
> possibly with antonym relationships built in (not sure of the
> immediate use, but it's probably helpful to distinguish between
> living/not living/unknown. So, to look for your female polish chemist,
> you simply look for person (or possibly, chemist), +female +polish.

Yup.

> > Where's {{Category:Polish chemists}} coming from? Defined on a separate
>
> Defined on a separate page by someone who thought it was a meaningful
> and useful category, and worth spending 2 minutes making.

Number of countries: > 200
Occupations: hundreds

Not every country has people in every occupation, but these are just two
attributes. That's many times 2 minutes. We should not have to do this
manually.

> > page? And do we also add {{Category:Female chemists}} and {{Category:Polish
> > physicists}} and {{Category:Polish women}} to the same article?
>
> You could, and the software (small matter of programming) would be
> smart enough to take the superset of all these things:
>
> Person +chemist +Polish
> Person +female +chemist
> Person +physicist +Polish
> Person +female +Polish
>
> Net result: Person +chemist +physicist +female +Polish
>
> Alternatively if you knew the attributes directly you could just do
> {{Polish chemists}} +female +physicist

_Or_ editors could simply add all the attributes and forget about the
template. Attributes on [[de:Marie Curie]] (I'm not making this up):

woman chemist physicist polish (+ some more)

I guess splitting woman into person and female seemed too awkward to the
Germans. Wimps.

Roger


body:
Scott Stevenson wrote:
> There is no GFDL issue relative to [[WP:OURS]] that is a seperate issue
> having to do with a sser page that Resid Gulerdem was editing on via anon
> IPs despite his blocked status.

A separate issue, where you are as well on your mission towards
Rgulerdems "FULL departure" (as you call it).

IMHO it is truly astonishing how much rejection even
a policy draft in user space can create:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:DRV#User:Rgulerdem.2FWikiethics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:DRV#User:Raphael1.2FWikiethics

--
Raphael


from_name: Roman Nosov

subject: [Wikitech-l] New diff feature for Wikipedia

body:
Hi all,

I've been directed here by Brion, Robchurch and others on #wikimedia-tech.
So I propose a new feature for Wikipedia which people on
#wikimedia-tech mostly refer as blame page or blame map. I would
prefer to call it something like "Track contributions mode" (because
of similarity with MS Word track changes mode) or "Hall of fame" but
whatever. I have live prototype written in PHP&MySQL at
http://217.147.83.36:9000/ Example of "blame map" can be seen at
http://217.147.83.36:9000/history::171 two blame maps compared
http://217.147.83.36:9000/history::171=169

For some reason folks at #wikimedia-tech. were mainly concerned with
speed and almost nothing else so I'll try explaining performance
issues as best as I can.

First of all, I DO NOT propose to recalculate diffs for all zillions
of edits Wikipedia already has. Diffs would only be calculated for a
new edits.
Next, I want to explain in detail how I see this working. So first I
propose to modify revision table and add a flag with following
possible values: "Revision is too old to be diffed", "Revision is
awaiting to be diffed", "Revision has been diffed". Also another table
should be added that will store blame maps for each revision. Blame
map for each subsequent revision will be calculated incrementally. So
it doesn't really matter whether article has 10 or 1000 revisions. We
would only need last blame map.

I also propose to have separate dedicated diff server(s) with sole job
to calculate diffs in background. I.e. diff server grabs revision with
"Revision is awaiting to be diffed" flag and last blame map from
database, calculates diff and finally stores new blame map in the
database and also changes revision flag to "Revision has been diffed".
Repeat.

In addition, article display logic should be altered. The module that
displays article should check diff flag. If diff flag is set to
"Revision is too old to be diffed" no further changes needed. If diff
flag is set to "Revision is awaiting to be diffed" then Credits
section should be created that only contains message "Calculation in
progress". If diff flag is set to "Revision has been diffed" then
Credits section should be created that contains list of contributors
ordered by contribution size. The list of contributors in correct
order can be generated with a single select to blame map table. In
addition this select can be cached. Direct link to blame map should be
displayed too. If user clicks on this blame map link corresponding
blame map should be presented. Every blame map can be generated with a
single select and can be placed in cache. Yawn

If you are still awake by now more thoughts on fault tolerance here.
Should diff server die, crash, fail or whatever the only side effect
end user will see is "Calculation in progress" message right after
article body. That's it. No slowdown or anything. If user still wants
see some kind of diff he/she can still use old diff engine. Because
blame maps aren't calculated in real time this feature is impractical
target for DoS attacks. However I should point out that any real time
diff algorithm is one big fat target for DoS attacks on other wikis
which are run on single server without some sort of acceleration.

There is also small Unicode issue. Due to crappy utf-8 support in PHP
all non-latin characters are currently ignored. I believe this could
be solved either by enabling proper Unicode support in PHP or writing
custom code to separate words. But before that I propose to test on
English Wikipedia first because if it will works for English it should
work for other languages.

So I offer following practical steps. Dedicate one of servers to be
diff playground. I will need a shell account on this server. Install
mediawiki on it alongside with diff logic running in background.
Create read only mysql account on live database server. So as a result
this diff server can grab new revisions from live database, diff them
and store results locally. This way we can find out how many edits
single server can process and see how many servers this feature will
require in total (I don't think it will be more than 2-3 though).

In conclusion, I'd like to say that in my opinion this feature will be
useful and practical if implemented. It also can be crucial building
block for other interesting features. However, I want to stress that
I'm not interested in doing this *unless* it is used in English
Wikipedia and I'm given appropriate credit. I can give a reason why I
want that in private e-mail.

Thank you for reading this long and boring e-mail.


from_name: Minh Nguyen

subject: [Wikitech-l] customizing namespace

body:
Platonides wrote:
> Claudi Meneghin wrote:
>
>> 3) duplicating 'category' feature, to deal with the fragmentation of
>> Lombard tongue into two major dialect groups.
>> 3) cannot be dealt with by creating, say : 'category/west' and
>> 'category/east', since the word 'Category' itself has two slightly
>> different translations.
>> Thus an additional namespace is needed, like in case 2).
>>
>  No, not as in case 2, as case 2 are normal pages with a prefix. Case 3 also
> wants a special functionality.
> Would it be ok if 'category/west' were an alias for 'category/east'? That's
> it: 'category/east:Foo' contents are the same as 'category/west:Foo', and
> viceversa.

I haven't looked at the Language.php files for awhile, but I remember
that the English names for these namespaces were included as aliases for
the native names, so that "Image:Wiki.png" redirects to
"Imagen:Wiki.png" etc. I'd imagine that's also possible for the
Category: namespace.

Another possibility: I'm not sure what the two translations are, but if
they can be abbreviated the same way (that is, if they start similarly),
you could just use the abbreviation as the Category: namespace's name.

--
Minh Nguyen <mxn at zoomtown.com>
AIM: trycom2000; Jabber: mxn at myjabber.net; Blog: http://mxn.f2o.org/


subject: [WikiEN-l] Types of categories

body:
On Tue, 06 Jun 2006 22:09:28 +0200, Steve Bennett wrote:
> "salient" how about "concrete"? The fact that it's a ship is concrete
> and essential. The fact that it shipwrecked is ancillary.

That is POV. My POV is that Titanic is remembered as a tragic disaster. Now
the Titanic _is_ of course a ship and not a disaster, but that has nothing
to do with significant, salient, or concrete.

> (why do I feel like I'm getting talked into trying to reinvent the
> field of semantics from scratch)

Alternatively, you can read the pertinent literature and come back with a
solid proposal :-P.

> > And what is more salient about Halle Berry, being a women (or actress, for
> > all I care) _or_ having won a "Worst Actress Razzie"? Well?
>
> I didn't know she had. Woman.

POV. There are billions of women. Only a few people got a Razzie. It's much
more remarkable. In my opinion, anyhow.

> > I'm afraid your "I know it when it see it" approach to identifying
> > taxonomic categories is hopelessly POV.
>
> Not many people are going to deny that Halle is a women, or that
> Titanic was a ship.

Not many will deny either that the Titanic disaster was one of the most
remarkable shipwrecks in history, nor that Halle Berry won a Razzie. What's
your point?

What I'm trying to show here is that I don't think I could spot with some
certainty what you consider taxonomy in articles we haven't talked about.
It seems you really mean everything of type "is a"; "Winners of Golden
Raspberries" should really be "won a Golden Raspberry".

The basic "is a" categories I see on Berry's article: actor (including Bond
girls, etc., maybe Worst Actress Razzie), model (including Beauty pageant
contestants, Versace models, etc.), African-American(?). Of course you
could say that occupations are "works as" relationships and everything
falls apart.

> Halle Berry is primarily an actress. Einstein was primarily a
> physicist. Ellington was primarily a jazz musician. But I see your
> point, maybe the taxonomies should stop at "person", and the rest can
> be attributes.

What does "stopping" entail? I mean, how would WP be different if we did,
or didn't stop at person?

Roger


from_name: Elisabeth Bauer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Category translation

body:
jkelly at fas.harvard.edu schrieb:

>   On a related note, some kind of translation system for Categories is
> desperately needed for Commons, as the Category system in place now is only of
> benefit to English speakers.  It is a source of some frustration.

A patch is already submitted in bugzilla:
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5638

greetings,
elian


from_name: Michael Snow

subject: [Foundation-l] Where we are headed

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>--- Michael Snow <wikipedia at earthlink.net> wrote:
>
>
>>One
>>use of interest to us is that if a company has a charitable giving
>>program in which employees can have an amount withheld from their
>>paychecks to the charity of their choice, the company would need the
>>charity's EIN. I'm not aware of any serious problem for a nonprofit
>>publishing this number (the American Red Cross publishes theirs on their
>>website). In fact, I've suggested putting ours out there in order to
>>make it easier for companies to add us to gift-matching programs, but
>>I'm not aware that this has been done yet.
>>
>>
>Our EIN has been on the foundation wiki for some time now:
>
>http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Deductibility_of_donations
>
>Of course, that whole set of pages needs to be re-done so finding things like that are easy.
>
>
Thanks for pointing me in the right direction, I'm glad to know that
this did get done after all. I agree about reworking the site as well.
One of the Communications committee's plans, which I need to do more
work on, is trying to develop a better idea of what should actually be
on the Foundation website as opposed to being on Meta.

--Michael Snow


subject: [Foundation-l] Where we are headed


body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> Just a heads-up, folks:
>
> Later this week I'm going to be installing a fix for some longstanding bugs with
> HTML in wiki pages. One of the issues is a difference in rendering of templates
> that improperly nest HTML tags, which caused certain badly-written templates to
> render in one way on Wikipedia but wildly broken on most other wikis.
>
> (Don't forget that an important part of what Wikipedia & its sister projects are
> about is making information sharable and reusable. If the code breaks when
> copied to another site, that's Bad.)
>
> Once the fix is in, templates should render about the same on Wikipedia and
> other wikis where the "HTML Tidy" plugin isn't being used. The bad news is that
> some of these templates will be broken; so it would be great if we can make sure
> they get cleaned up.
>
> Problem templates are mostly those which start an HTML tag in one template, then
> finish it in another. For instance if {{table-header}} contains a <table>, and
> then the table rows and final </table> are in another template entirely. These
> have always broken on regular MediaWiki -- the template is required to close its
> own tags -- though they sometimes appeared to work on Wikipedia due to bugs with
> our HTML handling when Tidy is enabled.
>
> I've done some automated checks on templates on en.wikipedia.org to make a list
> of likely problem candidates:
>
> http://leuksman.com/misc/templates/html-table-start.txt
> http://leuksman.com/misc/templates/html-table-end.txt
> http://leuksman.com/misc/templates/html-table-row.txt
>
>
> If you've got a template that you're not sure if it will work, try copying it to
> my test wiki at http://test.leuksman.com/ . This has the fix installed with the
> corrected behavior, so you can see about how it will render on Wikipedia next week.
>
>
> Please make sure this information is disseminated to the various other language
> and project wikis people are working on; I don't want to hear "waah! all my
> templates broke and no one told me!" next week. :)
>
> For the moment the same kind of construct with wiki tables ({| ... |}) will
> still work, but note that some time in the future we're going to have to look at
> 'fixing' that too. (This might require some enhancements to how templates work
> to make it easier to fill in long tables.)
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

What about high-use templates like [[Template:Multi-listen start]] and
[[Template:Multi-video start]]? These templates open <ul> tags but don't
close them (or vice-versa). Would it be possible to transclude
{{int:Open list}}, where [[MediaWiki:Open list]] has code similar to
[[MediaWiki:Cite references prefix]]?

--
Minh Nguyen <mxn at zoomtown.com>
AIM: trycom2000; Jabber: mxn at myjabber.net; Blog: http://mxn.f2o.org/


subject: [WikiEN-l] Category translation

body:
Anthony DiPierro schrieb:

> Jimbo and others have also made it clear that any cultural distinction
> between different language Wikipedias is accidental and in fact goes
> against the intention (this in the context of which languages should
> have a Wikipedia, but the idea carries here as well).  We don't have a
> British Encyclopedia and an American one, because we can both
> understand each other well enough to communicate.  If it were
> *possible* to automatically translate all articles into every language
> while keeping the content the same, we'd do so.  It just isn't, at
> least not with current technology.

Yes, the original plan was to write all articles in Esperanto and then
have them autotranslated to all the other languages of the world. But
somehow, this didn't work out so well.

The rest of your posting is sort of new to me (I wasn't aware that
cultural distinctions between different language Wikipedias were to be
regarded as accidental and against the intention of Wikipedia proper)

--elian


from_name: Stephen Bain

body:
On 6/6/06, Lord Voldemort <lordbishopvoldemort at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The UN does not make the laws for the U.S.  And besides, the U.S.
> 'does' have certain laws and precedents that limit the freedom of
> speech (including "hate speech").  And while Americans can say and
> hold racist things, enciting people to violence based on these things
> is prohibited.

See [[fighting words]]. A judicially recognised limitation to freedom
of speech under the US Constitution.

--
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com