body:
Elisabeth Bauer wrote:
> Anthere wrote:
>
>
>>As far as I (as a board member) is concerned, I consider the Foundation
>>to be there to "support" the projects. Absolutely not to govern them.
>>By support, I mean "provide infrastructure", "provide legal frame", help
>>set up collaborations to collect/create content, help distribution of
>>the content created. Not govern. Not manage.
>
>
> What you mention here are of course the most important tasks of the
> foundation. However, my position is a bit different to yours. IMO the
> foundation has also the duty to step in as an emergency government in
> case the self government of a projects doesn't work. But this should
> always be a temporary measure and restricted to single actions.
>
> I'm thinking here for example of cases like the quran quote in the site
> notice of the urdu wikipedia. If the community in a wiki acts against
> the core principles of Wikimedia, for example violates the neutrality,
> it needs someone external to set it right. Of course this is something
> which could also be done by the international community except that this
> is not a body with any authority but a bunch of loosely connected
> individuals with diverse opinions.

Oh, yes. I absolutely agree with you.
But note that it is not see much "governing" that "ensuring that the
basic principles of our projects" are respected. It is not setting up
new rules, but an ultimate barrier of protection. See the Foundation as
a mom rather than a dad :-)

>>Some editors try to push us in "governing the project", and I can not
>>blame them. When decisions are tough to take collectively, it is quite
>>easy to ask a small group of people to take the responsability of making
>>a decision.
>>But imho, pretty often, this should not be the job of the Foundation.
>
>
> And in rare cases, it should be - or the foundation decides to delegate
> these cases to a "Wiki Emergency response team" (WERT ;-) which takes
> care of cases like
> * HELP, all sysops of our Wikipedia are quitting and there is a big
> fight over the ban of an editor!!!
> * Why disturb readers of our Wiki with a sitenotice about some
> irrelevant board elections? Let's rather display the football results there
> * We want to know more about our readers - let's just record every page
> view on an external logfile via the global javascript...
> * ...
>
> This team could take over the task individual board members do now: find
> out what's going on, talk to the involved parties, try to moderate
> conflicts and find solutions.
>
>
>>The problem with this is that one of the board members (Jimbo) not only
>>is on the board, but also the foundator and for the english wikipedia
>>the visionary/leader guy. Quite naturally, Jimbo has a lot of influence
>>on how things are organised and on policies. This influence is much more
>>limited in non english languages. The enwikipedia is governed by Jimbo
>>because it accepts to be governed. But it is not governed by the board.
>
>
> good explanation.
>
>
>>Seems like just "chatting" to you ? Seems not important ?
>>
>>Then, give a thought to editors trying to publish a wikijunior on
>>internet (activity plainly allowed by our licence), to see it removed
>>within 24 hours after announcement on this very list.
>
>
> Could you be a bit less cryptic here, please, and explain what you are
> refering to?

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks_talk:Publication_of_the_Month
Should explain it. Ask Robert for more if necessary.

But let me just give a few word to talk about a fear I have. It is just
a fear right now, but I feel we are rather heading in that direction,
rather than not.

The content is produced with in mind, maximum reusability. If, to
publish the content, editors have to previously obtain the authorization
of the Foundation, then, we are failing our goals. If to publish the
content, publishers have to pay the Foundation indirectly, for the use
of the brand, we are failing our goals. Of course, the brand is a pretty
cool way for the Foundation to monetize the content, hence to support
the projects. But it should not impair reusability.

So, I'd say, when a group of editors try to publish a wikijunior on
which *they* have given hundreds of hours, for which *they* are authors
and which *they* publish purposefully under a free licence, immediatly
taking down the printed wikijunior
(http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-July/008191.html)
without prior discussion, strike me as being a move preventing precisely
what the licence meant our projects to be. I'll mention it even more
confortably that at that point, Wikijunior was not a trademark of the
Foundation (Brad has since then started the registration).

I am bordering a situation where I am meeting an ethical limitation. As
a board member, I am supposed to be fully dedicated to the foundation
and to support it to the best of my abilities. Loyalty. So, in this
case, to "protect" the brand we do not own yet, and which could need to
be protected to prevent anyone from monetizing it later in the future.

On the other hand, my heart is more in the projects themselves, which I
believe were set up so that the content could be reused, which involved
printing. In which case, removing the wikibooks from Lulu, until
discussion and agreement has been made with the Foundation... is clearly
perceived as a move preventing publishing and reuse. Hence against our
original mission.

Where should my loyalty stand ? How to assume the fact that if Robert et
al went an agreement from the Foundation, they are likely to wait
"months" before getting it. How to accept the fact the authors
themselves might have the PAY for the right to publish a work THEY wrote
and offered as a common good ? And how to accept the fact that one
person has the power to simply prevent publishing the work done by
others, by a simple email ?

(PS: I know that later explanations were that the take down notice given
to Lulu was meant to be because of a mix in who was author and
responsable. But I also know this was the explanation given afterwards.
If you look at the original email, it was taken down because of the
brand use).

I hope this clarify my crytic comment :-)
I didnot think it was cryptic myself.

> greetings,
> elian


list: wikimedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Anthere

subject: [Foundation-l] How not to manage opensource project


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Central bibliography

body:
On 9/3/06, Bogdan Giusca <liste at dapyx.com> wrote:
> I think Wikipedia really needs a central bibliography,
> because there are many books who are used in more than
> one article, some in dozens or even more.

There's a well thought-out proposal for this already:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikicat

There's also a related discussion:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-July/008724.html
(and responses)

The most realistic way this project may happen in the near future is
through the related WikiAuthors project that has been promoted by
Miguel Andrade and others:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiAuthors

I discussed WikiAuthors with a group of scientists at a workshop in
Bloomington a few days ago:
http://vw.indiana.edu/places&spaces/meeting_060830.php

There was very broad support for the idea of a central wiki for the
purpose of author disambiguation, as many existing databases do not
assign unique IDs per author.  It is likely that funding for this will
come through in the coming months, which may also facilitate some of
the broader ideas described in the Wikicat proposal linked to above.

The general technology for building wiki-based ontology repositories
is part of the WiktionaryZ project and under heavy development:
http://wiktionaryz.org/

Let me know if you have further questions, or want to be actively
involved in this project.
--
Peace & Love,
Erik


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Frederic Bayer

subject: [Wikitech-l] Weird block message

body:
Hello,
I once had a similar problem, I never bothered to tell someone about it:

I logged in to de.wikip as Abzt. The message was: You are now logged in
as !bzt. That was strange, and I just thought, "probably a bug, let's go
to the main page. I was suddenly logged in as Elian, and I had all
rights which elian had. I logged out immediately, and the message was
"You are now logged in as Abzt". How could this be?
> Hello,
>   At en wikipedia, I clicked edit on Talk:British Isles (terminology)
> and received this message:
>
> --
> User is blocked
>
> 	Your user name or IP address has been blocked from editing.
> You were blocked by Pathoschild for the following reason (see our
> blocking policy):
> Autoblocked because your IP address has been recently used by
> "Ilikesheeeeeeeeeeep". The reason given for Ilikesheeeeeeeeeeep's
> block is: "Violation of the Username policy (too long, confusing,
>
> Your IP address is 72.14.192.5.
>
> ...etc.
> --
>
> This was obviously some kind of database fart because it disappeared
> when I tried again, and because that IP address isn't close to mine :)
> Anyway, just thought I'd mention it.
>
> Steve
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Central bibliography

body:
Hoi,
There are several projects that want to achieve similar aims.
Wikiauthors, Wikicat are two of them. The initial approach of these two
is different; one starts of with scientific publications and wants to
start with disambiguation of authors the other wants to start with
bibliographic information from the position of librarians. The cool
thing is, that the people representing these two approaches are talking
and, that it is feasible to merge many if not all of the ideas for both
projects. Both projects have people behind them to make this work,
combined the result will provide us with a central bibliography that is
based on Wikidata functionality.

There are two things to understand; first the database should be usable
for all projects and it needs to be usable in many languages and second
after having set up such a project it still needs integration in the
Wikipedia and other projects.

Thanks,
    GerardM

Bogdan Giusca wrote:
> I think Wikipedia really needs a central bibliography,
> because there are many books who are used in more than
> one article, some in dozens or even more.
>
> Currently, a book reference is done this way:
>
> <ref>[[Istvan Vasary]] (2005) ''Cumans and Tatars'',
> [[Cambridge University Press]]. ISBN 123546958695,
> page 22</ref>
>
> with a central bibliography, it would be like this;
>
> <book n="Cumans and Tatars" p="22"/>
>
> and the book database would fill in the details in the
> page displayed to the viewer.
>
> I suggest that we use the name instead of the ISBN, because
> it can be seen more clearly in the text, when reading the
> wiki-text. Also, there are many books (especially older
> books, but not only), which have no ISBN number and some
> which have many different editions with different ISBNs.
>
> There is still the problem with two books with the same title,
> in which case we need to add the author, too, for disambiguation,
> but I think this problem is less on the kind of books we use for
> reference. Shorter titles are used especially for fiction.
>
> There could be some benefits for having a central bibliography,
> other than not having to copy-paste the publishing house/ISBN,
> like knowing which articles refer to a certain book.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
>


list: commons-l

from_name: Brianna Laugher

subject: [Commons-l] Some stats and info

body:
Fred, first I would establish an on-wiki opt-in page. Ask Orgullomoore
to drop a line on all admin's talk pages, ask them to go to a page and
sign if they consent to being identified with statistics about their
admin activities.

Brianna

On 02/09/06, Fredrik Josefsson <fred_chessplayer at yahoo.se> wrote:
>
> --- Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> skrev:
>
> > On 9/1/06, Fredrik Josefsson
> > <fred_chessplayer at yahoo.se> wrote:
> > [snip]
> > > Finally, I am still looking for someone who runs
> > Linux
> > > and understands MySql to make a specific
> > > administrator-list. A complete tutorial is
> > available!
> >
> > What exactly do you want? I don't quite understand
> > the question, but I
> > can almost certainly generate whatever info you
> > desire.
>
> It concerns the list of administrators by number of
> deletions.
>
> A user made a list, but after some disputes on the
> mailinglist he didn't want to maintain it. He also
> heavily truncated the page. I am looking for someone
> who can maintain it and update it monthly.
>
> If anyone is interested, I will provide the tutorial
> that the user generously wrote for me.
>
> / Fred-Chess
> _______________________________________________
> Commons-l mailing list
> Commons-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
>


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Central bibliography

body:
maru dubshinki wrote:
> On 9/3/06, Bogdan Giusca <liste at dapyx.com> wrote:
>
>> I think Wikipedia really needs a central bibliography,
>> because there are many books who are used in more than
>> one article, some in dozens or even more.
>>
> ................
>
> If a book is being used for dozens of articles, doesn't that show that
> it's really important and so should have at least a stub for it? Using
> articles would seem to fulfill most of your desiderata.
>
> ~maru
Hoi,
When a book is used quite often, it may mean that someone is pushing a
particular point of view.. When a book is relevant you want to annotate
that book. But it does not follow that it needs a Wikipedia article of
it's own.
Thanks,
    GerardM


list: foundation-l

from_name: Jean-Denis Vauguet

subject: [Foundation-l] Resignation as CFO

body:
Daniel Mayer a ?crit :
> In July 2004 I (...)

Thank you Daniel, and welcome back :)

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subject: [Foundation-l] Resignation as CFO

body:
Daniel Mayer a ?crit :
> In July 2004 I (...)

Thank you Daniel, and welcome back :)

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subject: [Foundation-l] Resignation as CFO

body:
Daniel Mayer a ?crit :
> In July 2004 I (...)

Thank you Daniel, and welcome back :)

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subject: [Foundation-l] Resignation as CFO

body:
Daniel Mayer a ?crit :
> In July 2004 I (...)

Thank you Daniel, and welcome back :)

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from_name: Bogdan Giusca

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Central bibliography

body:
I think Wikipedia really needs a central bibliography,
because there are many books who are used in more than
one article, some in dozens or even more.

Currently, a book reference is done this way:

<ref>[[Istvan Vasary]] (2005) ''Cumans and Tatars'',
[[Cambridge University Press]]. ISBN 123546958695,
page 22</ref>

with a central bibliography, it would be like this;

<book n="Cumans and Tatars" p="22"/>

and the book database would fill in the details in the
page displayed to the viewer.

I suggest that we use the name instead of the ISBN, because
it can be seen more clearly in the text, when reading the
wiki-text. Also, there are many books (especially older
books, but not only), which have no ISBN number and some
which have many different editions with different ISBNs.

There is still the problem with two books with the same title,
in which case we need to add the author, too, for disambiguation,
but I think this problem is less on the kind of books we use for
reference. Shorter titles are used especially for fiction.

There could be some benefits for having a central bibliography,
other than not having to copy-paste the publishing house/ISBN,
like knowing which articles refer to a certain book.


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Search index update status

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> Started the test build again, I'll look in on it in the morning...

Not seeing any error or exceptions in the log this time, so I've set up the sync
job. With luck ;) German wikipedia should be updated this evening, and English
Wikipedia sometime in the next couple days.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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from_name: Greg Sabino Mullane

subject:
[Wikitech-l] [MediaWiki-CVS] SVN: [16352]
	trunk/phase3/config/index.php

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

> Shouldn't that be a regular Unix newline character, i.e. "\n"? It
> makes no major difference, since the line below it forces a
> conversion, but it seems odd to me.

Yeah, I had a single "\n" at first, but didn't want the line
below to feel left out and have no work to do. :) I'm surprised
you noticed; glad to see that people are actually reading the
commit emails. I should have had a prize available of something...

- --
Greg Sabino Mullane greg at turnstep.com
End Point Corporation
PGP Key: 0x14964AC8 200609031414
http://biglumber.com/x/web?pk=2529DF6AB8F79407E94445B4BC9B906714964AC8
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----

iD8DBQFE+xvdvJuQZxSWSsgRAk/cAKDpnCLTYcJXTieJNhObxvOHyOO7vACfTYeH
6MDjtNi8ZavoK321sEZXVV8=
=GDSU
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


from_name: Berto

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Central bibliography

body:
Hi!

> I think Wikipedia really needs a central bibliography,
> because there are many books who are used in more than
> one article, some in dozens or even more.

Can't do that unless you use some form of wikidata. It makes little sense to
reinvent filesystems based on templates when dbs are used for that stuff
some 20 years already. The smarter solution would be to use ISBN code in the
actual wiki version, hacking the "find books" function to reach an external
repository based on wikidata. At that point you could also trace the
quotations coming in from the main wiki and build cross-reference tables,
relevance of authors per subject... that is, you'd have a real bibliography.

But it makes sense to keep this thing external, as most users are not going
to need it and it would add overtime during execution.

B?rto


from_name: Tuvic

subject: [Foundation-l] Use of Wikimedia-Logo's in articles

body:
Because of an ongoing editwar in the Dutch wiki, I have a question about the
use of the Wikimedia logo's.

Like most Wikipedia's, we have an article about Wikipedia itself (
http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ). Recently, this article was the
center of an editwar.
The discussion is about the logo's:  some editors say the content of
Wikipedia is GFDL, and the logo is not, so the logo should not be in the
article.
Others think the use is allowed, because the logo's are the
Wikipedia-logo's, and if we themselve can't use them, they are just
obsolete.
Eve other just say: it's on Commons, so it's alright.

I've been looking for a policy on meta and on the foundation's site, but I
really can't find any clear and definite policy: only that they are looking
into it 'now', and that the board is talking about it.

Does anyone have a solid and conclusive answer on the question if the logo's
may be used in the articles or not. Also, is there some official policy of
the board about this, and if not, can a policy be written about this matter.

We really need solid answers on this question, to stop this kind of editwars
once and for all.

Greetings, Tuvic (nl-wiki)

(P.S. Apologies for any typo's, or for incorrect spelling or bad grammar)


list: wikien-l

from_name: Akash Mehta

subject: [WikiEN-l] More Wikipedia Review Idiocy

body:
Well, the upload page wouldn't complain, just the image wouldn't
display. I don't think MIME types are embedded in the file as well as
being stated in the file extension. When the image is loaded, it would
be treated as an image, so harmful code couldn't really be executed.
However, I've heard that through a combination of .htaccess to php-ify
.gif/.jpg/.whatever you can send the batch file mime type while hiding
in a .gif and have the user run it as a batch file, which can be
malicious, but that doesn't happen for ordinary image uploads on WP.

On 9/3/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/3/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
> > The external links are a good point, but they say our images are infected
> > with viruses and trojans. I don't think that's possible as any program
> > altered to have an image extension would be rejecte by the upload page,
> > right?
>
> If you upload an image with file magic that doesn't match its
> extension you get an ominous warning on the image page that the
> content might be infectious. ... this is likely what they are talking
> about.
>
> And yes, its possible that a user could manage to execute such a file
> if it were actually harmful.
> _______________________________________________
> 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: geni

subject: [Foundation-l] [Election] Notice on duplicate votes

body:
On 9/3/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> When someone's qualification to vote is so thin that it depends on this
> his time would be better spent doing more editing.
>
> Ec

Maybe not. I have an account that has a very large number of deleted
edits (dealing with false fair use claims stuff like that).

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] Fwd: Dealing with a famous photographer

body:
It would make sense to have a system like that actually, but how
regularly would it be used? I can't imagine a significant uptake of
this 'internet res : high res' 'try before you buy' style release of
images. Most people would be using the image in a school assignment /
for a work publication etc. and could do perfectly fine with a 72dpi
image.

On 9/3/06, Neil Harris <neil at tonal.clara.co.uk> wrote:
> Stephen Streater wrote:
> > On 2 Sep 2006, at 20:00, Fastfission wrote:
> >
> >
> >> On 9/2/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >>> Nice attempt to overrule Jimbos edict against 'with permissions'
> >>> images.
> >>>
> >>>
> [snip]
> >>> Please don't encourage a regression to a point where we permit images
> >>> that others couldn't claim fair use for simply because people will
> >>> give us permission to display them on their website.
> >>>
> >> Regression? This is the status quo, as far as I can see.
> >>
> >
> > A significant number of people will be willing to release
> > images for free if asked.
> >
> > Perhaps in this case the owner could release an internet
> > resolution image with the presumption that someone who
> > wanted to print it would want much higher resolution and
> > would still pay for this.
> >
> > And of course he may lose no income from internet
> > images anyway in practice.
> >
> >
>
> How about encouraging the use of suitable boilerplate wording for use in
> the image copyright notice, that says something like:
>
> "This low resolution version of a copyrighted image is used under by
> permission from its copyright owner, Example Corporation, who have made
> it available for use under the GFDL: please see [[WP:GFDL]] for license
> terms."
>
> "High-resolution versions of this image are available for use under
> commercial license terms directly from the copyright owner; please
> contact Example Corporation for more details, at
> http://www.example.com/image-licencing/example-image-reference-code."
>
> generated by:
>
> {{subst:low-res under GFDL|Example
> Corporation|http://www.example.com/image-licencing/example-image-reference-code}}
>
> -- Neil
>
> _______________________________________________
> 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: Delphine Ménard

body:
On 9/3/06, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Someone can express pretty strongly a disagreement, without it
> necessarily leading to a fork. However, yes, that should be seen as a
> sign of anxiety. I recommand avoiding "fixing the issue" by saying "they
> did not understand me well, they should make the effort to really
> understand what I mean".
*nods*

"In a drama, there are always two people involved, otherwise it is not
a drama" (anonymous)

And in miscommunication, there is always what you meant to say, what
you said, what the other heard, and what the other understood
(multiply the obstacles by two when different languages and cultures
are involved)

When someone expresses their "not understanding", a better answer
might be : "Ah, this is not what I meant,  I must have expressed
myself the wrong way, let me try to explain differently". More
constructive than "I am right, you understood that all wrong".

> At least, if we want to develop internationally :-)

Indeed.

Delphine

--
~notafish


from_name: Aphaia

body:
Hello Wikimedians,
Please note that users can vote only once across all Wikimedia wikis,
even if they have the technical ability to use the voting system on
more than one wiki. Multiple votes will be removed by the Election
Officials.

Sincerely,
The Election Officials

To translators: please translate this message and put it to your
Village pump or the equivalent on your wiki. (Village pump is a
general discussion page on the English Wikipedia). You may want to
work at meta:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_requests/quick_translation

--
Kizu Naoko
  Wikiquote: http://wikiquote.org
  * vivemus, mea Lesbia, amemus *


subject: [WikiEN-l] Consensus is dying...

body:
But what did you intend as a definitive threshold? To ensure accuracy
for any important decision it would have to be around 90%. Surely if
one person raises a valuable point, and one that is worth voting 'not
yet' for, at least 10% will follow. But 90% will help reduce the
effect of mild sockpuppet use etc. Then again, if we allow experienced
users to strike votes, we should be going for 95%...

On 9/3/06, Cheney Shill <halliburton_shill at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >On 9/1/06, Angela wrote:
> >> On 9/1/06, Cheney Shill wrote:
> >> > User voting, whether by poll or by discussion until one side stops
> >> > discussing (aka, into the ground), is original research. So, yes,
> >> > consensus applied this way should die.
> >>
> >> Perhaps consensus polling should be tried instead.
> >>
> >> http://icannwiki.org/Consensus_Polling
> >>
> >Perhaps we should stop calling it consensus in those places where
> >there is no desire to find a solution everyone can agree upon.
>
> The main problem is that it is still original research.  That's fine for a group of experts deciding whether to call Pluto a planet, call it something else, or to simply describe it without any name.  In terms of the encyclopedia, it leaves the decision to the editors, not the sources.
>
> I do like the Yes/Not Yet concept.  I wish that a definitive yes/not yet threshold would be defined in determining whether something is sourced (and therefore can be included in the article) or not yet adequately sourced (and therefore left out).
>
>
>
> ~~Pro-Lick
> http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/User:Halliburton_Shill
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Pro-Lick
> http://www.wikiality.net/index.php?title=User:Pro-Lick
>
>
> --spam may follow--
>
> ---------------------------------
> Get your email and more, right on the  new Yahoo.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: valdelli at bluemail.ch

body:
You could find the solution here:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Wikipedia-logo-af.png

it seems to be under guidelines: http://wikimediafoundation.
org/wiki/Wikimedia_visual_identity_guidelines

and you should ask a permission, but it is also strange look for a
permission for a Wikipedia logo in Wikipedia contents: it is a
paradox.

Ilario

----Messaggio originale----
Da: tuvic.tuvic at gmail.com
Data: 03.09.06 18.36
A: <foundation-l at wikimedia.org>
Oggetto: [Foundation-l] Use of Wikimedia-Logo's in articles

Because of an ongoing editwar in the Dutch wiki, I have a question
about the
use of the Wikimedia logo's.

Like most Wikipedia's, we have an article about Wikipedia itself (
http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ). Recently, this article
was the
center of an editwar.
The discussion is about the logo's:  some editors say the content
of
Wikipedia is GFDL, and the logo is not, so the logo should not be
in the
article.
Others think the use is allowed, because the logo's are the
Wikipedia-logo's, and if we themselve can't use them, they are
just
obsolete.
Eve other just say: it's on Commons, so it's alright.

I've been looking for a policy on meta and on the foundation's
site, but I
really can't find any clear and definite policy: only that they are
looking
into it 'now', and that the board is talking about it.

Does anyone have a solid and conclusive answer on the question if
the logo's
may be used in the articles or not. Also, is there some official
policy of
the board about this, and if not, can a policy be written about
this matter.

We really need solid answers on this question, to stop this kind of
editwars
once and for all.

Greetings, Tuvic (nl-wiki)

(P.S. Apologies for any typo's, or for incorrect spelling or bad
grammar)
_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l at wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l


from_name: Daniel Arnold

subject: [Foundation-l] Angela, a little word on the en:wp CVU ...

body:
Hi,

Although there is no official decission yet wether these images will be authorized by the Foundation some Wikimedians felt unhappy with them and they thus were speedy deleted by commons:User:AlisonW with the reason that they are unauthorized.

As this affects many "unauthorized" images sitting below
* Category:CopyrightByWikimedia
* and as the situation is unclear

I have restored the files, did overwrite them with a cross (so that it can't be used in a way the Foundation potentially could harm, as they are still linked a lot on many pages) and transformed the matter into a normal deletion request. That way we can come to a more general solution on that matter in Commons for the future (I don't want to have that debate again and again) and everyone interested can have a look in order to be able making an own decission.

As well that speedy deleted images are still used a lot and people would have probably uploaded them (or very similar images) locally without knowing that there is a debate going on and so the matter would have come up again locally. With the help of the CommonsTicker local people will hopefully be alerted as well that there are certain things that need to be taken care of and can give feedback (Note: I never did participate in the w:en:Wikipedia:Counter_Vandalism_Unit and never did care about it).

So please join:
 http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests#Wikipedia:Counter_Vandalism_Unit_images

Cheers, Arnomane
--

Der GMX SmartSurfer hilft bis zu 70% Ihrer Onlinekosten zu sparen!
Ideal f?r Modem und ISDN: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/smartsurfer


from_name: Ruud Koot

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Britannica on Wikipedia

body:
Britannica has an article on Wikipedia
<http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9433599> (maybe they've had it for
a while, I can't remember finding anything when I looked a few months ago).

-Ruud


from_name: Richard Holton

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Central bibliography

body:
On 9/3/06, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 03/09/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 03/09/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> >
> > > I have never been keen on ISBNs either.  In addition to older works
> that
> > > never had an ISBN in the first place, works with a long history of
> > > different editions can have any number of ISBNs, and at some point it
> > > would be helpful to be able to compare various editions.
> >
> >
> > Yes. ISBNs are useful indeed, but they were created for the use of the
> > publishing industry and are per *edition* rather than per *book*.
>
> Strictly, it's not even "per edition" - it's a sort of odd fusion of
> edition and production run. (Trade paperback and hardcover "editions"
> will often be textually identical editions - printed from the same
> plates, so the text and layout is identical - but just bound and
> marketed differently)
>
> --
> - Andrew Gray
>   andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk
>
>
But isn't the edition of the book crucial in a bibliographic entry? Page
numbers can change between editions, not to mention actual content.

-Rich

--

[[W:en:User:Rholton]]


body:
David Gerard wrote:
> On 03/09/06, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
>>> Does it mean that the foundation is involved in every little decision?
>>> Of course not, but that is not what "governs" and "manages" means.
>>>
>
>
>> I think... governing and managing have a significant different sens in
>> english and french.
>>
>
>
> Apart from all else, they're related but different languages. So the
> words "govern" and "manage" may appear to mean the same thing in both
> (adjusting to each other's spelling conventions) but not. So if the
> French readers are reading the words "governing" and "managing" and
> thinking they have the French meaning when they don't, then all they
> need to do is ASSUME BAD FAITH and then we get pages like that one.
>
> Note that errors of translation combine badly with assumption of bad
> faith. Wikimedia has had blowups recently caused by precisely this.
> And I blame the groundless assumptions of bad faith.
>
>
> - d.
Hoi,
Words are known to be problematic; awareness about this can be deduced
by the fact that a book on this topic is doing the rounds. It becomes an
added responsibility to be careful with using problematic concepts when
you are aware of these issues. I have seen several great examples where
people where given a message that did not arrive because the way in
which it was put did not convey the message. Many people are not plain
spoken.

When assuming bad faith is seen as the problem of the person listening
and the person speaking is "innocent", you paint a picture where
absolute understanding of the English language is expected. It is easy
to understand that this is not what happens in real life even among
those that speak some form of English. The French and the English
language are in different language families and thereby not really
related, the French and the British share a long history of mutual
opposition and distrust.

There is a word for words that seem to mean the same but do not; they
are false friends.

Thanks,
    GerardM


from_name: David Gerard

body:
On 03/09/06, Tuvic <tuvic.tuvic at gmail.com> wrote:

> We really need solid answers on this question, to stop this kind of editwars

It would depend I think on nl:wp policy on corporate logos in general.
Does nl: allow fair use images? On en:, corporate logos in articles
about a corporation are allowed as fair use - it's clearly academic
fair use to use the logo when talking about a company in an article
about the company.

Saying "it's on Commons so we can use it" is specious - Wikimedia
copyright logos are the one variety of image on Commons that is *not*
free content.

> once and for all.

That trick *never* works. ;-p

- d.


from_name: Ian Woollard

subject: [WikiEN-l] Hypothetically speaking

body:
Say you found an editor that was using cites, but inverting them and
using them to support their own OR. And they did this repeatedly,
several times reverting corrections when their 'error' was pointed
out/corrected; to the point where the person they were misquoting
actually came on to the wikipedia to complain about it. What exactly
would the process be? Should the editor be suspended for bring the
wiki into disrepute or something? Who would one talk to about this
kind of thing?

--
-Ian Woollard

"Victory can be perceived but not created."
For your own security, the Department of Homeland Security is watching you.


from_name: Stephen Bain

subject: [Wikitech-l] Readable and easy to remember passwords

body:
On 9/3/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Heh, check the passwords that most people use, I bet you find they're all
> "puppy" and "susie".

IIRC, either Brion or Tim did some checking a while ago and found that
many people did indeed have very short passwords. I can't find the
message however, it may have had something to do with single sign-in
stuff.

I do know that the ability to have an empty password was only switched
off in January this year:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-January/033833.html

--
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 9/2/06, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> There is a difference between if MediaWiki could generate passwords and
>> if it should. When there is an engine that generates passwords, this
>> same engine could be used to generate passwords for an attack. Choosing
>> passwords is the end-users responsibility. It is exactly by choosing a 1
>> in stead of an l that a brute force attack becomes slightly more
>> problematic.
>>
>
>
>
> Heh, check the passwords that most people use, I bet you find they're all
> "puppy" and "susie".
>
> Steve
Hoi,
No, they are all "secret".
GerardM


from_name: Guillaume Paumier

subject: [Foundation-l] Some news from Wikiversity Beta

body:
[ crossposting on foundation-l, wikiversity-l & translators-l ]

Hello,

Wikiversity Beta is now 10 days old and I think the time has come to give
some news. I have decided to organize it as a list of FAQ. Feel free to ask
questions I have not thought about. This page is available in English at
http://beta.wikiversity.org/wiki/Help:FAQ/En and will be available in French
soon.

* What is Wikiversity?
--- Wikiversity is a new Wikimedia project [1] exploring ways to use the
power of wiki to support online learning. This new project will be in beta
phase during the first six months [2].

* What is Wikiversity Beta?

--- Wikiversity Beta is a global platform aiming at coordinating Wikiversity
projects in several languages [3]. This multilingual coordination intends to
deal with Wikiversity's mission and general guidelines of the project's
scope (for example, about original research). Wikiversity Beta is also a
place where Wikiversity projects which don't have a subdomain yet can
develop.

--- In a nutshell, Wikiversity is both a meta-wiki and an incubator for
Wikiversity projects.

* How is it possible to have so many languages coexisting on Beta without it
becoming a mess?

--- Wikiversity Beta intends to take advantage of the input of its many
members (not only English-speakers). Multilingual discussions should not
only coexist, but live in symbiosis. A multilingual discussion system has
been proposed to manage them [4] so non-English speakers can take part in
discussions. Moreover, Beta is using the Language select feature [5]
developped on Meta, which allows users to hide foreign languages on
multilingual pages.

* What about separate Wikiversity projects which already have their own
subdomain?

--- Those separate projects [6] are growing their way. However, their
participants are strongly encouraged to take part into discussions about
general guidelines that will apply to all Wikiversity projects. Moreover,
they are encouraged to post reports [7] about their projects to let
everybody know about how it grows.

* What's next?

--- Now we need people to take part in the discussions on Wikiversity Beta.
People from existing separate projects and people willing to contribute to a
future separate project should join the discussions and work together.
People who do not speak English are encouraged to take part in discussions
but we also need volunteer translators to translate the talk summaries [4].

* Your multilingual system will never work. It requires too many
translators.

--- If people really sum up their discussions, not only this will help them
to focus on important things but it will not take much time to translate
them. Ten days after Beta opening, its main page is already available in
five languages.

--- By the way, it is just a proposal. Hey, if everybody speaks english,
very well, we won't have anything to translate. If the system does not work,
at least we can say we tried.

* For a coordination project, it would be much more practical if a single
language of discussion is chosen.

--- Of course it would be more practical; the question is: should we manage
Beta the way that is easier for us English speakers or should we manage it
the way everybody can take part in discussions about guidelines that will
apply to all projects?

* Wikiversity Beta Motto?

--- The shorter, the better. If you want your ideas to reach people speaking
other languages, write short and understandable summaries.

Please feel free to ask questions and to make constructive comments. I would
also like to thank Sebmol & JWSchmidt for their help.

g.

[1] Board resolution:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution_Wikiversity
[2] Anthere's mail about Wikiversity:
http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-August/009074.html
[3] Wikiversity Beta URL: http://beta.wikiversity.org
[4] Multilingual discussion proposal:
http://beta.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity:Multilingualism
[5] Language selection system:
http://beta.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity:Language_select
[6] List of separate Wikiversity projects:
http://beta.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity:Separate_projects
[7] Reports from separate projects:
http://beta.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity:Reports

--
Guillaume Paumier
Disciplus Simplex
http://fr.wikipedia.org : Resistance is futile ? You will be assimilated.


body:
On 9/3/06, Leon Weber <leon.weber at leonweber.de> wrote:
>
> They shouldn't be able to check this, since passwords are stored as
> md5-hashes in the DB, no?

I believe that it was some basic dictionary checking, conducted by a
script that simply reported whether or not a given common word was
being used as a password. The data produced was not linked to any
accounts.

--
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com


from_name: Robert Treat

body:
On Sunday 03 September 2006 14:18, Greg Sabino Mullane wrote:
> > Shouldn't that be a regular Unix newline character, i.e. "\n"? It
> > makes no major difference, since the line below it forces a
> > conversion, but it seems odd to me.
>
> Yeah, I had a single "\n" at first, but didn't want the line
> below to feel left out and have no work to do. :) I'm surprised
> you noticed; glad to see that people are actually reading the
> commit emails. I should have had a prize available of something...

Convert his installation to PostgreSQL for free?  ;-)

--
Robert Treat
Build A Brighter LAMP :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL


subject: [WikiEN-l] Subject: More Wikipedia Review Idiocy

body:
For me to mention that they mentioned that you've mentioned that
they've mentioned what you said about what they said about wikipedia?
Bear with me guys... Although, to WR's credit, all but one of the
users are on wikimedia's side and they've got technical details to
back up their facts, as opposed to this one 'joel'.

On 9/3/06, Daniel R. Tobias <dan at tobias.name> wrote:
> On 2 Sep 2006 at 22:44, "Daniel R. Tobias" <dan at tobias.name> wrote:
>
> > I don't know why I ever bother to look at the Wikipedia Review
> > site... the antics of the malcontents and morons there always make my
> > blood boil.  But the latest stupid accusation they're making against
> > Wikipedia is that we're supposedly infecting people with viruses:
> >
> > http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=3362
>
> Now somebody on that thread has "responded" to my message here,
> saying that I should be ashamed of myself.
>
> I guess it's time for them to mention that I've mentioned that
> they've mentioned what I've said about what they said about
> Wikipedia.  Can we try for a few more levels of recursion?
>
> --
> == 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/
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> 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: Alphax (Wikipedia email)

subject: [WikiEN-l] Subject:  More Wikipedia Review Idiocy

body:
Daniel R. Tobias wrote:
> On 2 Sep 2006 at 22:44, "Daniel R. Tobias" <dan at tobias.name> wrote:
>
>> I don't know why I ever bother to look at the Wikipedia Review
>> site... the antics of the malcontents and morons there always make my
>> blood boil.  But the latest stupid accusation they're making against
>> Wikipedia is that we're supposedly infecting people with viruses:
>>
>> http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=3362
>
> Now somebody on that thread has "responded" to my message here,
> saying that I should be ashamed of myself.
>
> I guess it's time for them to mention that I've mentioned that
> they've mentioned what I've said about what they said about
> Wikipedia.  Can we try for a few more levels of recursion?
>

Reminds me of the scene in, er, that movie... oh yes, Under Seige 2.

"We know this. The Chinese know that we know. But we make-believe that
we don't know and the Chinese make-believe that they believe that we
don't know, but know that we know. Everybody knows."

--
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: [Wikipedia-l] Very minor technical suggestions

body:
Maury Markowitz wrote:
> Where do I post about bugs in the MediaWiki software?
>

wikitech-l () wikimedia ! org

> The bug I have noticed is that when you click on "my contributions" it does
> not turn bold, unlike the other items in the "menu bar". Yes, piquane, I
> know.
>

You could probably do it with javascript...

--
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: [Wikipedia-l] Central bibliography

body:
On 03/09/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:

> I have never been keen on ISBNs either.  In addition to older works that
> never had an ISBN in the first place, works with a long history of
> different editions can have any number of ISBNs, and at some point it
> would be helpful to be able to compare various editions.

Yes. ISBNs are useful indeed, but they were created for the use of the
publishing industry and are per *edition* rather than per *book*.

- d.


from_name: Samuel Wantman

subject: [Wikitech-l] Category intersection

body:
I'm writing to ask a developer to take a look at a proposal being developed
at English Wikipedia at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Category_intersection

There are some long festering basic conflicts in how people use categories
that we think could be solved if a category intersection feature were
implemented. We are aware that this has been discussed quite a bit in the
past, and that code to do category intersections has even been written
(DynamicPageList2).

Rick Block and I have been working on a design and policy proposal for a
MediaWiki category intersection feature that would allow categories to be
defined as the intersection of other categories and would also provide a
simple interface for creating "on the fly" intersections. We think this
would solve may categorization headaches, while also providing a generally
useful new feature.  Rick and I are both admins, and software designers who
have been very involved in categorization policy for a couple of
years.   We've shown the proposal to select members of the community who
have been very involved with categorization and have gotten a favorable
response.

Before we go any further with this proposal we'd like feedback from
developers. Do you think what we are proposing is feasible? If so, do you
have any suggestions for improving it? If not, what makes it unfeasible,
and do you have any ideas about how to make it feasible? Please reply on
the talk page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Category_intersection

Thanks very much for your time.

-- Sam


subject: [WikiEN-l] Hypothetically speaking

body:
On 03/09/06, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com> wrote:

> Say you found an editor that was using cites, but inverting them and
> using them to support their own OR. And they did this repeatedly,
> several times reverting corrections when their 'error' was pointed
> out/corrected; to the point where the person they were misquoting
> actually came on to the wikipedia to complain about it. What exactly
> would the process be? Should the editor be suspended for bring the
> wiki into disrepute or something? Who would one talk to about this
> kind of thing?

[[WP:RFC]] in theory. You need at least one other person who has tried
and failed to solve the dispute.

In practice, [[WP:AN]] asking for advice and help, with actual
non-hypothetical details, may be helpful in reassuring yourself and
others and providing a useful sanity check.

I know that messing around with citations and references, if it
reaches the ArbCom, is considered possibly worse than personal attacks
- in that personal attacks harm the project, but that sort of thing
harms the encyclopedia itself.

- d.


body:
On 03/09/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:

> You miss the point completely.  Even if Anthere, as a very involved and
> very plugged in person, can be convinced that the wording "govern and
> manage" is an innocent variation of what is really intended, she is
> still only one person.  You belittle the problem by relegating it to
> "spelling conventions".  Are you suggesting that all the French who,

No, I'm talking about people who explode at others because, rather
than check that what they thought the person meant was what they
actually meant, they assume bad faith and make a ridiculous public
fuss, e.g. Anthere at the Wikimedia press conference - which it turned
out was because she had understood the situation to be the precise
opposite of what it was, but couldn't be bothered to clarify this; or
the present case, where differences in usage of  "govern" and "manage"
lead to the person on that page assuming bad faith and throwing around
legal threats, rather than first asking. Is that any clearer?

- d.


body:
On 03/09/06, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:

> When assuming bad faith is seen as the problem of the person listening
> and the person speaking is "innocent", you paint a picture where
> absolute understanding of the English language is expected.

No, what I meant was when someone hears something in another language
that sounds bad to them, and, rather than ask, immediately assumes bad
faith of the speaker and makes a big public fuss. What is the hard
part about bothering to verify first?#

- d.


body:
On 03/09/06, Delphine M?nard <notafishz at gmail.com> wrote:

> When someone expresses their "not understanding", a better answer
> might be : "Ah, this is not what I meant,  I must have expressed
> myself the wrong way, let me try to explain differently". More
> constructive than "I am right, you understood that all wrong".

In the present case, it appears they did not bother to express their
"not understanding", but instead went straight to publicly insinuating
legal threats. I find it hard to see this as the fault or the
responsibility of the speaker.

- d.


body:
On 9/3/06, Daniel Arnold <Arnomane at gmx.de> wrote:
> As well that speedy deleted images are still used a lot and people would have probably >uploaded them (or very similar images) locally without knowing that there is a debate >going on and so the matter would have come up again locally. With the help of the >CommonsTicker local people will hopefully be alerted as well that there are certain things >that need to be taken care of and can give feedback (Note: I never did participate in the >w:en:Wikipedia:Counter_Vandalism_Unit and never did care about it).
>
> So please join:
>  http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests#Wikipedia:Counter_Vandalism_Unit_images
>

arch this really isn't a good time what with the other issues around
the CVU at the moment.

--
geni


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Central bibliography

body:
On 03/09/06, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> David Gerard wrote:
> > On 03/09/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:

> >> I have never been keen on ISBNs either.  In addition to older works that

> > Yes. ISBNs are useful indeed, but they were created for the use of the
> > publishing industry and are per *edition* rather than per *book*.

> Librarians are aware of this, that is one reason why the notion of the
> Wikicat, to follow the conventions of librarians has merit.

Ah, of course, we can reduce it to a previously solved problem!

- d.


from_name: Andrew Gray

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Central bibliography

body:
On 03/09/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 03/09/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>
> > I have never been keen on ISBNs either.  In addition to older works that
> > never had an ISBN in the first place, works with a long history of
> > different editions can have any number of ISBNs, and at some point it
> > would be helpful to be able to compare various editions.
>
>
> Yes. ISBNs are useful indeed, but they were created for the use of the
> publishing industry and are per *edition* rather than per *book*.

Strictly, it's not even "per edition" - it's a sort of odd fusion of
edition and production run. (Trade paperback and hardcover "editions"
will often be textually identical editions - printed from the same
plates, so the text and layout is identical - but just bound and
marketed differently)

--
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Daily-article emails

body:
Hi all.

You may or may not know that the English Wikipedia offers a mailing
list which sends out an email each day with the daily front-page
featured article (or at least the introduction of it and a link).
Recently, I dealt with an email at OTRS asking if we offered this in
any other languages (specifically Japanese); I didn't think so, but
said I'd check.

Does anyone know of other language editions which do this?

--
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk


body:
On 03/09/06, Delphine M?nard <notafishz at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/4/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> > In the present case, it appears they did not bother to express their
> > "not understanding", but instead went straight to publicly insinuating
> > legal threats. I find it hard to see this as the fault or the
> > responsibility of the speaker.

> I am afraid I do not understand where you see legal threats. Can you
> please be more precise?

Looking again, I'm completely wrong to characterise the discussion of
possible legal issues this way. I must apologise to Bradipus for
having done so.

That said, it still strikes me as odd to see that amount of
speculative text before, er, asking what the words legally mean as
used.

- d.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Central bibliography

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Gerard Meijssen wrote:
>
>
>> Hoi,
>> There are several projects that want to achieve similar aims.
>> Wikiauthors, Wikicat are two of them. The initial approach of these two
>> is different; one starts of with scientific publications and wants to
>> start with disambiguation of authors the other wants to start with
>> bibliographic information from the position of librarians. The cool
>> thing is, that the people representing these two approaches are talking
>> and, that it is feasible to merge many if not all of the ideas for both
>> projects. Both projects have people behind them to make this work,
>> combined the result will provide us with a central bibliography that is
>> based on Wikidata functionality.
>>
>> There are two things to understand; first the database should be usable
>> for all projects and it needs to be usable in many languages and second
>> after having set up such a project it still needs integration in the
>> Wikipedia and other projects.
>>
>>
> Sure, but trial and error is also important.  That's often how we find
> out what works and what doesn't.
>
> Ec
Hoi,
Indeed, we tried we erred. Can we move on ?
NB we will not stop learning ..
Thanks,
   GerardM


subject: [WikiEN-l] "Approved" versions on Wikipedia FAQ

body:
On 03/09/06, Peter Ansell <ansell.peter at gmail.com> wrote:

> What version would new editors be editing if they found an error on a
> page and attempted to edit what they thought was that page?

Hmm, I think they'd be editing the current version, not the version
they could see at first.

> Semantically I would think they would have to update in turn from the
> latest available version in the database. There could quickly be
> problems with multiple versions of the page branching, and being hard
> to combine, if they were not editing the latest version.

I doubt there are any plans to support branching.

But yes, this initiative would make things easier for *regular*
editors but somewhat more difficult for *casual* editors. One of the
de: people involved in the initiative pointed this one out to me when
I was writing the above, and so I think we can assume they are very
aware of it and will be watching carefully.

Note that the above FAQ is now pretty much superfluous - there's a
much more detailed one on meta:

    http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2006_proposed_approval_for_anonymous_edits

and Jimbo has written a piece on the subject that got onto Slashdot:

    http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/31/2224230

- d.


body:
On 9/3/06, Daniel Arnold <Arnomane at gmx.de> wrote:
> This is a very important aspect that wasn't considered at the speedy deletion. What >would it help if you have found a decission on the CVU in en.wikipedia but there are some >more in other languages around that  quickly would reupload the logo locally or would >create a much similar logo just because there was no way/time for them to get alerted? >Thus the regular deletion with proper debate will save us a lot of time in any case, >regardless of the particular >decission on the en.wikipedia CVU.
>
> Arnomane

I'm worried that the current en situation could mess up what happens on commons

--
geni


from_name: Angela

body:
On 9/3/06, Rob Church <robchur at gmail.com> wrote:
> I recall coming across a page somewhere where Tim posted a list of all
> users who appeared to be using the same password; this was a long time
> ago, before salted hashing, I guess...

Mostly users suspected of being Lir's sockpuppets, not all users.
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/31/172233

Angela.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Central bibliography

body:
David Gerard wrote:
> On 03/09/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>
>
>> I have never been keen on ISBNs either.  In addition to older works that
>> never had an ISBN in the first place, works with a long history of
>> different editions can have any number of ISBNs, and at some point it
>> would be helpful to be able to compare various editions.
>>
>
>
> Yes. ISBNs are useful indeed, but they were created for the use of the
> publishing industry and are per *edition* rather than per *book*.
>
>
> - d.
Hoi,
Librarians are aware of this, that is one reason why the notion of the
Wikicat, to follow the conventions of librarians has merit.
Thanks,
   GerardM


from_name: brion at pobox.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki automated test run failure 2006-09-04

body:
An automated run of parserTests.php showed the following failures:

Running test TODO: Table security: embedded pipes (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-April/034637.html)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Link containing double-single-quotes '' (bug 4598)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Template with thumb image (with link in description)... FAILED!
Running test Template infinite loop... FAILED!
Running test TODO: message transform: <noinclude> in transcluded template (bug 4926)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: message transform: <onlyinclude> in transcluded template (bug 4926)... FAILED!
Running test BUG 1887, part 2: A <math> with a thumbnail- math enabled... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML bullet list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML ordered list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML nested bullet list, open tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML nested ordered list, open tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Parsing optional HTML elements (Bug 6171)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Inline HTML vs wiki block nesting... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Mixing markup for italics and bold... FAILED!
Running test TODO: 5 quotes, code coverage +1 line... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML Hex character encoding.... FAILED!
Running test TODO: dt/dd/dl test... FAILED!

Passed 412 of 429 tests (96.04%) FAILED!


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
David Gerard wrote:

>That said, it still strikes me as odd to see that amount of
>speculative text before, er, asking what the words legally mean as
>used.
>
Normally in law words have their regular dictionary definition unless
the statute provides a more specific definition.

Thus according to the 2001 New Oxford Dictionary of English:
    "govern": conduct the policy, action and affairs of; control,
influence or regulate.
    "manage": be in charge of, administer, run, regulate; maintain
control or influence over.

This is much closer to the meaning that the French speakers are
concerned about.  If somehow certain Americans believe that these words
should have a more benign interpretation there should be some legal
basis for that.  One deals with these ambiguities before they become
real problems.  When the dispute goes so far that the courts are left to
decide they will do so on the basis of what they have in front of them.
Judges tend to be unmoved when people complain that they thought the
opponent differs from what is on paper.

Ec


from_name: Delphine Ménard

body:
On 9/4/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 03/09/06, Delphine M?nard <notafishz at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > When someone expresses their "not understanding", a better answer
> > might be : "Ah, this is not what I meant,  I must have expressed
> > myself the wrong way, let me try to explain differently". More
> > constructive than "I am right, you understood that all wrong".
>
>
> In the present case, it appears they did not bother to express their
> "not understanding", but instead went straight to publicly insinuating
> legal threats. I find it hard to see this as the fault or the
> responsibility of the speaker.

I am afraid I do not understand where you see legal threats. Can you
please be more precise?

Thank you,

Delphine
--
~notafish


from_name: THD

subject: [Foundation-l] Resignation as CFO

body:
Thank you!

THD

2006/8/28, Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com>:


subject: [Foundation-l] Resignation as CFO


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Central bibliography

body:
Richard Holton wrote:

>On 9/3/06, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>On 03/09/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>On 03/09/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>I have never been keen on ISBNs either.  In addition to older works that
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>never had an ISBN in the first place, works with a long history of
>>>>different editions can have any number of ISBNs, and at some point it
>>>>would be helpful to be able to compare various editions.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>Yes. ISBNs are useful indeed, but they were created for the use of the
>>>publishing industry and are per *edition* rather than per *book*.
>>>
>>>
>>Strictly, it's not even "per edition" - it's a sort of odd fusion of
>>edition and production run. (Trade paperback and hardcover "editions"
>>will often be textually identical editions - printed from the same
>>plates, so the text and layout is identical - but just bound and
>>marketed differently)
>>
>>
>But isn't the edition of the book crucial in a bibliographic entry? Page
>numbers can change between editions, not to mention actual content.
>
Yes and no.  The original citer works with what he has; the Wikipedian
who undertakes to verify the source has another edition with a different
ISBN, or the one may have the hardbound and the other  a softbound
edition with a different ISBN, or the ISBNs may differ because one is
the American and the other is the British printing.  It's not a simple
problem.

With Wikipedia we can trace the evolution of a text, but that is not so
easy with paper books.

Ec


from_name: Daniel Arnold

body:
> arch this really isn't a good time what with the other issues around
> the CVU at the moment.
>
> --
> geni

I don't want to interfere with recent en.wikipedia issues on CVU. One of the problems with these logos is that they are no en.wikipedia only thing as mistakenly thought by some people. Have a look at the usage of these images over all these different wikpedia languages (that's why I did came to the CheckUsage idea in order to make that visible) in other language CVU projects.

This is a very important aspect that wasn't considered at the speedy deletion. What would it help if you have found a decission on the CVU in en.wikipedia but there are some more in other languages around that  quickly would reupload the logo locally or would create a much similar logo just because there was no way/time for them to get alerted? Thus the regular deletion with proper debate will save us a lot of time in any case, regardless of the particular decission on the en.wikipedia CVU.

Arnomane

--

Der GMX SmartSurfer hilft bis zu 70% Ihrer Onlinekosten zu sparen!
Ideal f?r Modem und ISDN: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/smartsurfer


from_name: Kelly Martin

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Edits by project and country of origin

body:
Some interesting demographic data for main space edits to our largest
Wikipedia projects may be found at
http://meta.wkimedia.org/wiki/Edits_by_project_and_country_of_origin.

My thanks to Greg Maxwell for his invaluable assistance generating this data.

Some observations
* NL and BE are language sluts.
* ptwiki gets quite a bit more edits from BR than from PT, although
almost 75% of edits from PT are to ptwiki.
* MX has a depressingly low participation in eswiki.

Not reported in the data on the page, but possibly of interest: US
accounts for 27.61% of edits to the projects sampled, followed by DE
at 10.01% and GB at 8.15%.

Kelly


from_name: Felipe Sanches

subject: [Wikitech-l] Want to collaborate on writing a feature?

references:
<ecmt43$qgt$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<NABBJGECPILFNLFEAPIKGEBPIMAA.nickpj@gmail.com>
	<ecuksf$sd1$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<e92136380608280711i24a8847cmd3b8e008634a4e00@mail.gmail.com>

body:
After all these 42 messages, is there anybody working on this feature at all?

juca


subject: [Foundation-l] Edits by project and country of origin


from_name: maru dubshinki

body:
On 9/4/06, GerardM <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> HoI,
> Thanks for the positive apreciation of the Dutch and Belgian effort. There
> is no positive meaning to the word slut.. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/slut
>
> Thanks,
>  GerardM

I think it was meant to be humorous, since normally *English* is the
slut of languages, as has been pointed out because of its
indiscriminate importation of words. At least, that's how I read it.

~maru


from_name: daniwo59 at aol.com

body:
What I find especially interesting is not the native Asutralian languages,
which have a handful of speakers only, but the fact that in India, over 99
percent of people prefer to edit in English than in their native languages. It
would be interesting to see the results once native languages are included in
the sample.

Danny


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] [Foundation-l] Edits by project and country of
	origin


subject:
[Foundation-l] [Wikipedia-l] Edits by project and country of
	origin

body:
In a message dated 9/4/2006 7:49:40 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
dgerard at gmail.com writes:

It'll be  amusing when US contributors are a minority on en:, they'll
find out how UK  contributors sometimes feel ;-p

The real problem is the possibility  of English-as-a-second-language speakers
(or third or fourth language)  becoming a majority of users on en.wiki and
the impact that this would have  on the basic quality of writing. It has already
becoming an issue in  some areas of content related to India, where the prose
requires inordinate  cleanup just to make it legible.

To be clear, I am *not* saying that these contributions should be
discouraged--only that they come at some cost.

Danny
(who has already spent some time adding spaces after  punctuation)


from_name: Eugene Zelenko

subject: [Commons-l] Time to Seek Professional Lawyers Advice?

body:
Hi!

I have not good feelings about several recent discussions on Deletion
requests: trademarks and PD-Soviet. Discussions are more like politics
where more important is number of supporters, not arguments of sides.
And they are more like pack vs. pack fights, since supporters opinions
are defined by project where they are participating.

Professional lawyer advice could resolve such conflicts. So may be
it's good idea to seek such advice in such cases?

Eugene.

PS

{{PD-Polish}} could become next hot topic.


from_name: Peter Ansell

body:
On 31/08/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> This is in response to the somewhat silly English-language press we've
> had lately. I'll be sending copies of this out to the sources of
> recent articles on the subject that got it precisely backwards.
>
> The following is, I understand, technically accurate, based on text
> from Amgine, Phillipp Birkin (de:wp), Jimbo and Mathias Schindler (I
> think), and comcom discussions (press relations being part of that
> job). Corrections welcomed - you have about five minutes.
>
> (and geni, I expect you to ask how this makes the new patrollers' jobs
> easier - by having what's effectively a feed of new-editor and
> anonymous edits, is what I was thinking of.)
>
>
> - d.
>
>
> "Approved" versions on Wikipedia FAQ
>
>
> * What is changing?
>
> We want to open up editing without damaging the reader's experience.
>
> We want to be more wiki and let editors edit freely, which is where
> all the good things come from. At present a small percentage of
> articles (a few hundred out of 1.5 million on the English language
> Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/) are locked or partially locked
> from editing. We want to open these up. But Wikipedia is a top 20
> website (Alexa ratings, no. 17 on 3 month average; no. 15 on 30 August
> 2006 - http://www.alexa.com/), so we must keep it good for the
> readers.
>
> The new feature will mean that edits from new or anonymous editors
> will be delayed before being shown to readers - they will see a
> 'flagged OK' version by default, with a link to the live version. The
> idea is to enhance the *reading* experience, and free us to enhance
> the *editing* experience. If vandalism can't be seen by the general
> public, there will be less motivation to vandalise.
>
> Anonymous or new-editor edits will need to be approved by a logged-in
> editor. Of the thousands of editors on the large Wikipedias, many
> concentrate on checking revisions and dealing with odd changes and
> vandalism - this will assist their work and we do not expect new
> delays.
>
> We are also considering a related feature to flag particular versions
> of articles as being of high quality. This is to a different end: a
> high-quality finished product. This will likely be tested first on the
> German language Wikipedia (http://de.wikipedia.org/), which has
> already had three stable editions released on CD and DVD, which have
> sold quite well. If the feature works there, it may be used on other
> language Wikipedias.
>
> These features are not finished, so we don't have a lot of fine detail
> as to how it will all work as yet. But we hope this change will allow
> us to do things such as open up the George W. Bush article or even the
> front page itself to full unrestricted editing.
>
>
> * When was this proposed?
>
> Jimmy Wales asked for a time-delay feature for casual readers in late
> 2004; after very fast editing on the Indian Ocean tsunami produced a
> very high-quality article
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Indian_Ocean_earthquake) very
> quickly, but with some highly visible vandalism; we've hotly discussed
> how to achieve stable high-quality editions of Wikipedia since almost
> the start of the project, in 2001.
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

What version would new editors be editing if they found an error on a
page and attempted to edit what they thought was that page?

Semantically I would think they would have to update in turn from the
latest available version in the database. There could quickly be
problems with multiple versions of the page branching, and being hard
to combine, if they were not editing the latest version.

Peter Ansell


body:
Here are some of the less egregious examples. In many cases, I can't  correct
them because I have no idea what they are talking about.

_http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chintada_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chintada)

_http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kutiyana_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kutiyana)

_http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanaka_Durga_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanaka_Durga)

_http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kottapadi_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kottapadi)

_http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kotkapura_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kotkapura)

_http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manpur_ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manpur)


body:
On 9/4/06, daniwo59 at aol.com <daniwo59 at aol.com> wrote:
> What I find especially interesting is not the native Asutralian languages,
> which have a handful of speakers only, but the fact that in India, over 99
> percent of people prefer to edit in English than in their native languages. It
> would be interesting to see the results once native languages are included in
> the sample.

We haven't sampled the Indian native languages yet.  Please read the
disclaimers at the top of the page. :)

Kelly


from_name: Steve Summit

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Translation of "A Wikimedia project" and "Powered
	by MediaWiki" images

body:
Rob Church wrote:
> It is not technically possible to translate the "powered by MediaWiki"
> logo at present.

So many things that need to be parameterizable, so little time... :-)

> I'm not from the Foundation, but I think that translating the "powered
> by MediaWiki" logo will lead to inconsistencies with other uses of the
> software; that button brands all MediaWiki wikis, and should be kept
> as such.

I'm not from the Foundation, either (and know less about it than
Rob does), but it seems to me that retaining the image part of
each image, and the names "Wikimedia" and "MediaWiki", and the
background shading and the text font and color and the overall
look and feel and everything, while changing only the words
"A ... project" and "Powered By" to proper translations in a
wiki's local language, ought to be perfectly acceptable (if it
was technically possible).


body:
These stats are not yet regularily updated; generating them is still a
manual process.  We might automate it in the future.

Note that the data collection process does not sample "small" projects
yet; we don't yet know how many edits AU editors make to small
languages.  If and when we successfully automate the process, we may
start doing regular runs against all projects.

Kelly

On 9/4/06, Akash Mehta <draicone at gmail.com> wrote:
> 90% of australians edit on the enwiki only :( I'm sure there are many
> more than 10% of AUS wiki users who are fluent in a second language of
> which there is a wiki (frankly you'd be hard pressed to find a
> language spoken by Australians that didn't have a wiki). How regularly
> are the stats updated?
>
> On 9/4/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 04/09/06, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > http://meta.wkimedia.org/wiki/Edits_by_project_and_country_of_origin.
> >
> >
> > or perhaps http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Edits_by_project_and_country_of_origin
> > ;-)
> >
> >
> > - d.
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


body:
On 9/4/06, GerardM <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> HoI,
> Thanks for the positive apreciation of the Dutch and Belgian effort. There
> is no positive meaning to the word slut.. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/slut

Hehe.  It is a jest of sorts, yes: it merely means that the Dutch and
Belgians don't appear to be very picky who they converse with. :)

Kelly


from_name: FlaBot

subject: [Wikitech-l] new dumps ?

body:
i am waiting for new Dumps ? What happend to the dump-batch ? When will it
be started ?

--
[[:de:Benutzer:Flacus]][[:de:Benutzer:FlaBot]]
http://tools.wikimedia.de/~flacus/IWLC/


from_name: Ligulem

subject: [Wikitech-l] Off topic: Just wondering...

body:
I'm wondering who posted this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28technical%29&diff=prev&oldid=73576948

Seems to be a person that knows what she/he is talking about. I would
like to know who this is. Why is this kind of language needed?

Sorry for that off topic post. I'm just baffled.

--Ligulem


from_name: Guillaume Paumier

subject:
[Foundation-l] Translation of "A Wikimedia project" and "Powered by
	MediaWiki" images

body:
Hello,

Some French-language Wikipedians would like to translate the text of the two
images at the bottom of each page: "A Wikimedia project" and "Powered by
MediaWiki". To answer them I would like to know:
* if it is technically possible;
* what people from the Foundation think about it.

Thanks for your answers.

g.

--
Guillaume Paumier
Disciplus Simplex
http://fr.wikipedia.org : Resistance is futile ? You will be assimilated.


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Translation of "A Wikimedia project" and "Powered by
	MediaWiki" images


from_name: Simetrical

body:
On 9/4/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> The IP range is BT Central Plus, which I think is not actually on the
> fast-changing wide-ranging DHCP BT Openworld is.

Well, from looking over some IRC logs (a good microcosm of IP
addresses if anything is . . .) I can tell you that people whose
reverse DNS is btcentralplus.com tend to have different IP addresses
every few days, at least, although possibly not every time they log
on.  It would probably be unwise to try connecting the post to any
particular person based solely on IP and tone.

This is by the same IP at about the same time, incidentally.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28technical%29&diff=next&oldid=73576948>


body:
It depends on what you mean by a simple language.  English is second
only to Chinese in its simplicity.

Ec

Akash Mehta wrote:

>That would make sense at the least. English has always been seen as
>overcomplicated, as opposed to simple languages like German (maybe
>thats why de wiki has so many contributors?).
>
>On 9/4/06, maru dubshinki <marudubshinki at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>On 9/4/06, GerardM <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>HoI,
>>>Thanks for the positive apreciation of the Dutch and Belgian effort. There
>>>is no positive meaning to the word slut.. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/slut
>>>
>>>Thanks,
>>> GerardM
>>>
>>>
>>I think it was meant to be humorous, since normally *English* is the
>>slut of languages, as has been pointed out because of its
>>indiscriminate importation of words. At least, that's how I read it.
>>


body:
daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:

>What I find especially interesting is not the native Asutralian languages,
>which have a handful of speakers only, but the fact that in India, over 99
>percent of people prefer to edit in English than in their native languages. It
>would be interesting to see the results once native languages are included in
>the sample.
>
I agree.  The Indian situation is far more significant than the
Australian one.  It is understandable that there would be very little
participation from speakers of Australian Aboriginal languages because
each has such a tiny speaker base.  It is less understandable that
Indian languages with a million or more speakers have had so little
development.

When a person from India looking at Australian edits in other languages
than English presumes that we are talking about other European languages
this suggests that the influence of the Raj is still alive and well, and
that the educated people of India have bought into the idea that their
own native languages are somehow inferior.

Ec


subject:
[Foundation-l] [Wikipedia-l] Edits by project and country of
 origin

body:
David Gerard wrote:

>On 04/09/06, daniwo59 at aol.com <daniwo59 at aol.com> wrote:
>
>
>>What I find especially interesting is not the native Asutralian languages,
>>which have a handful of speakers only, but the fact that in India, over 99
>>percent of people prefer to edit in English than in their native languages. It
>>would be interesting to see the results once native languages are included in
>>the sample.
>>
>>
>It'll be amusing when US contributors are a minority on en:, they'll
>find out how UK contributors sometimes feel ;-p
>
In case you hadn't noticed there are more than two English speaking
countries in the world. :-(

Ec


from_name: Guettarda

subject: [WikiEN-l] This list

body:
On 9/4/06, Daniel R. Tobias <dan at tobias.name> wrote:
>
> Why's this list so quiet all of a sudden?  You can hear the crickets
> chirping and the tumbleweeds tumbling.  Is nobody posting here, or is
> there some technical problem that's holding up message distribution?

It's a holiday weekend in the US.  That might explain some of the
inactivity.  Here in Oklahoma it's also finally cool enough to go outside
(ie, below 38 C/100 F)

--
> == Dan ==
> Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
> Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
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>
>
> _______________________________________________
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body:
daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:

>Here are some of the less egregious examples. In many cases, I can't  correct
>them because I have no idea what they are talking about.
>
>_http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chintada_
>(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chintada)
>
>_http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kutiyana_
>(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kutiyana)
>
>_http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanaka_Durga_
>(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanaka_Durga)
>
>_http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kottapadi_
>(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kottapadi)
>
>_http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kotkapura_
>(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kotkapura)
>
>_http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manpur_ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manpur)
>
I remember the debate whe the only thing in the article about Tucson was
"Tucson is a city in Arizona."  India is a huge country with many, many
such small town.  Attention to details about them is more recent.  Give
it time.

Ec


from_name: Dan Li

subject: [Wikitech-l] a simple Q -> Database

body:
On 9/4/06, HeinzJ <h-j.luecking at t-online.de> wrote:
> Witch table in mediaqiki 1.71 holds the actual text?

text holds text, surprisingly. Refer to maintenance/tables.sql.

Regards,
  - Dan Li


subject: [Wikitech-l] Category intersection

body:
On 9/4/06, Samuel Wantman <wantman at earthlink.net> wrote:
> I'm writing to ask a developer to take a look at a proposal being developed
> at English Wikipedia at:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Category_intersection
>
> There are some long festering basic conflicts in how people use categories
> that we think could be solved if a category intersection feature were
> implemented. We are aware that this has been discussed quite a bit in the
> past, and that code to do category intersections has even been written
> (DynamicPageList2).
>
> Rick Block and I have been working on a design and policy proposal for a
> MediaWiki category intersection feature that would allow categories to be
> defined as the intersection of other categories and would also provide a
> simple interface for creating "on the fly" intersections. We think this
> would solve may categorization headaches, while also providing a generally
> useful new feature.  Rick and I are both admins, and software designers who
> have been very involved in categorization policy for a couple of
> years.   We've shown the proposal to select members of the community who
> have been very involved with categorization and have gotten a favorable
> response.
>
> Before we go any further with this proposal we'd like feedback from
> developers. Do you think what we are proposing is feasible? If so, do you
> have any suggestions for improving it? If not, what makes it unfeasible,
> and do you have any ideas about how to make it feasible? Please reply on
> the talk page:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Category_intersection
>
> Thanks very much for your time.

See http://bugs.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5244 and the various
things duped to it.  I'm pretty sure performance would be a major
issue here; for instance, finding the first 200 pages in a category is
limited to iterating over 200 members of the category, and likewise
for all other operations currently supported by categories (as well as
unions), but finding the first 200 pages in the intersection of two
categories has no upper bound on the number of iterations required:
you have to go through every page in each category in the event that
they have fewer than 200 shared pages and neither is a subset of the
other.

Has anyone written code that can handle this efficiently?  Is such
code even possible?  Storing and updating expensive and often-used
intersections as sort of "virtual" categories would probably be a good
idea to begin with, but I'm not exactly knowledgeable on either
databases or caching.  When I mentioned it on IRC, Domas (database
person, works for MySQL) was pessimistic.  In addition to what I noted
above about an unbounded number of checks, he also pointed out that
intersection tends to make categories larger, which also affects
performance.

So, as someone who has little personal knowledge of the issue, I'd
hazard a guess that if one of the few devs who are knowledgeable
enough about efficiency and databases and the MediaWiki schema (most
likely Tim, I'd imagine) were willing to write the code, it could
maybe be good enough to be acceptable, but otherwise I doubt this will
be implemented.


from_name: John Lyden

subject: [WikiEN-l] Leaving the project

body:
Hey gang,

I'm pretty burned out on Wiki, and I don't anticipate coming back
anytime soon, if at all. Please desysop me (and yes, it was me who
blanked my User and Talk pages).

Thanks,
John "RasputinAXP" Lyden

--
John Lyden - rasputinaxp at gmail.com
"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to
live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same
time..." -Kerouac


from_name: Jacky PB

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Central bibliography

body:
If you want to do this, you should first take a look
at [[:en:bibtex]]. This is what scientists use to
write papers/books, and they have experience with
handling large databases. The main idea is that you
need some form of reference. Neither the title, nor
the ISBN are good enough.

If interested, I can point you in this direction.

Yours,
Dpotop1

--- Bogdan Giusca <liste at dapyx.com> wrote:

> I think Wikipedia really needs a central
> bibliography,
> because there are many books who are used in more
> than
> one article, some in dozens or even more.
>
> Currently, a book reference is done this way:
>
> <ref>[[Istvan Vasary]] (2005) ''Cumans and Tatars'',
> [[Cambridge University Press]]. ISBN 123546958695,
> page 22</ref>
>
> with a central bibliography, it would be like this;
>
> <book n="Cumans and Tatars" p="22"/>
>
> and the book database would fill in the details in
> the
> page displayed to the viewer.
>
> I suggest that we use the name instead of the ISBN,
> because
> it can be seen more clearly in the text, when
> reading the
> wiki-text. Also, there are many books (especially
> older
> books, but not only), which have no ISBN number and
> some
> which have many different editions with different
> ISBNs.
>
> There is still the problem with two books with the
> same title,
> in which case we need to add the author, too, for
> disambiguation,
> but I think this problem is less on the kind of
> books we use for
> reference. Shorter titles are used especially for
> fiction.
>
> There could be some benefits for having a central
> bibliography,
> other than not having to copy-paste the publishing
> house/ISBN,
> like knowing which articles refer to a certain book.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

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from_name: Matt Brown

subject:
[Foundation-l] Fwd: [Commons-l] Time to Seek Professional
	Lawyers Advice?

body:
On 9/4/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> Just what *is* the status of {{PD-Soviet}}? Is it bogus or not? Having
> a bunch of wiki users vote on legal status doesn't strike me as
> legally sound ...

IMO, as an educated layman, {{PD-Soviet}} is bogus.  The arguments are
contradictory, half of them seem to boil down to 'nobody is going to
sue us over these anyway', and the interactions between
poorly-understood Soviet-era law, modern Russian etc. law, and
international treaties seem to indicate that while in Russia certain
works MAY be out of copyright protection, there is no sane reason to
believe this means a damn thing anywhere else in the world.  The works
that may be out of copyright protection in Russia seem, in fact, to be
FOREIGN works from the period, not Soviet works, and even then it's
quite probable that this does not apply to new copies made in the
present day.

IOW, if you're Russian, this may be of interest in terms of what you
can do inside Russia.  For the rest of us, IMO, standard
Berne-convention copyright law applies.  This applies to any other
version of the argument; Poland, Iran, or wherever.  In the Iran case,
people argue since Iran is not a Berne signatory, we can treat any
Iranian works as PD.  I don't think this is a sound policy morally
even if a lawyer could win with the argument.

-Matt


from_name: Daniel R. Tobias

subject: [WikiEN-l] This list

body:
Why's this list so quiet all of a sudden?  You can hear the crickets
chirping and the tumbleweeds tumbling.  Is nobody posting here, or is
there some technical problem that's holding up message distribution?

--
== 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: Lars Aronsson

subject: [Foundation-l] How not to manage opensource project

body:
Anthere wrote:

> We may use the same words (managing, governing), but these words
> do not have the same sense in my country and in yours. Saying
> your sense is the "correct" one, while our sense is the "wrong"
> one, would be a very wrong approach.

As long as the discussion is in English, the English meaning of
the words is the correct one.  When the text is translated to
French, other words that have the same meaning must be chosen.
Sorry, I don't speak French so I can't help out with details.

But in this case, the cultural difference seems to be about how
much importance is given to a single word.  I haven't seen the
French participants explain exactly which practical problems or
consequences they see from Jimbo's statement, or how they suggest
he should have phrased it instead.  Without this explanation,
their apparent anger seems irrational.  Perhaps this is a sign
that something else is wrong?  Perhaps they want to be angry?

In January 2001 Jimbo was careless enough to say Wikipedia might
have advertising in the future, or something to that end.  You can
of course interpret words such as "advertising", "might" and
"future" very differently, but the practical problem is that many
would dislike the non-commercial wikipedia.org (then .com) to look
like normal commercial websites.  The consequence at that time was
that the Spanish user community forked and moved to their own
website, not because this problem had occurred, but because they
feared it might occur, perhaps in the near future.  (There could
of course have been other reasons for the fork, and maybe this
statement was used only as an excuse. I don't know that, but I
happen to know that setting up your own server can be great fun.)
Jimbo later clarified that he saw advertising as a possible last
resort, i.e. a much weaker interpretation of "might" and "future",
but then the Spanish fork had already taken place.

Really, all that is required is to "assume good faith".  When a
statement sounds like terrible news, perhaps there was a simple
mistake in translation.  It is better to ask for a clarification
before starting to get angry.

Hmm... there is no French interwiki link for
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Assume_good_faith

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


from_name: Aphaia

subject: [Foundation-l] [Election] Notice on duplicate votes

body:
Sorry, no.

It has been disputable, specially about our beloved developers, the
past discussion however reached the conclusion we Election Officials
would not be appropriate enough evaluate users in heuristic methods.

On 9/4/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> James D. Forrester wrote:
>
> >geni wrote:
> >
> >
> >>Are you doing anything about deleted edits?
> >>
> >>
> >"Doing anything"? Deleted edits do not count towards a user's edit count
> >as far as Special:Boardvote cares; note that moves count as edits in
> >this regard nowadays.
> >
> When someone's qualification to vote is so thin that it depends on this
> his time would be better spent doing more editing.
>
> Ec
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

--
Kizu Naoko
  Wikiquote: http://wikiquote.org
  * vivemus, mea Lesbia, amemus *


from_name: David Gerard

body:
On 04/09/06, Ligulem <ligulem at pobox.com> wrote:

> I'm wondering who posted this:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28technical%29&diff=prev&oldid=73576948
> Seems to be a person that knows what she/he is talking about. I would
> like to know who this is. Why is this kind of language needed?
> Sorry for that off topic post. I'm just baffled.

The IP range is BT Central Plus, which I think is not actually on the
fast-changing wide-ranging DHCP BT Openworld is. en:User:Irate used to
come in from BT Central Plus, though he's been using Bulldog's
Manchester ranges of late - he's certainly this obnoxious, but his
spelling tends to go bad as his rage increases. So the answer to your
question is, "some dick."

- d.


body:
On 04/09/06, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:

> http://meta.wkimedia.org/wiki/Edits_by_project_and_country_of_origin.

or perhaps http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Edits_by_project_and_country_of_origin
;-)

- d.


body:
On 04/09/06, Akash Mehta <draicone at gmail.com> wrote:

> > or perhaps http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Edits_by_project_and_country_of_origin

> 90% of australians edit on the enwiki only :( I'm sure there are many
> more than 10% of AUS wiki users who are fluent in a second language of
> which there is a wiki (frankly you'd be hard pressed to find a
> language spoken by Australians that didn't have a wiki).

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 12.7% of people in
the 2001 Census speak a language other than English at home. Full
stats:

http://www.abs.gov.au/websitedbs/D3310116.NSF/85255e31005a1918852556c2005508d8/c47ad86d67c1466bca256ce0007e8d6b/$FILE/ATTH23CO/Exstatic%202%202005,%20Australia.xl
(Excel spreadsheet ... I shudder to think what they're using for a CMS
to get URLs like that)

> How regularly
> are the stats updated?

Yes, we need dates on the dataset. I want to refer to this page for
press reasons - en:wp editors by country is something they're
interested in for some reason.

- d.