from_name: Magnus Manske

body:
Karen AKA Kajikit wrote:

>>We could then have both "Random article" and "Random entry".
>>
>>
>
>That sounds better to me... I use the random button as a means of
>finding double redirects, year templates without any content, pathetic
>stubs, spelling mistakes that need correcting etc. If all of these were
>cut out, its usefulness to me would be slashed. When I come to a lengthy
>page with the random button I just move on, because I assume that the
>article doesn't need my sort of work on it anymore.
>
I am all for keeping the stubs in the "random article", or for creating
a second function (or maybe make that a user preference...). Just be
advised that you can find stubs with the "short pages" special page, and
double redirects with a database query you can find on
"wikipedia:Database queries".


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Imran Ghory

subject: [Wikipedia-l] A Three Way Split

body:
On 18 Sep 2002, at 17:49, Giskart wrote:

> Fred Bauder wrote:
>
> >I was watching ABC news and saw a believable statistic, that 40% of
> >the adult population can't read at the 5th grade level.
> >
> 40% of the adult population of what ?  The USA ?
>
> Perhaps the statistics of other English speaking countrys like Canada,
> New Zealand, Australia, England are better so the overal numbers are
> not so bad. -- giskart

For international statistics have a look at the summary,

http://www1.oecd.org/media/publish/pb00-9a.pdf

Or at the full 200 page report at,

http://www1.oecd.org/publications/e-book/8100051e.pdf

Imran


from_name: tarquin

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Whither bondage?

body:
An article on nose-picking has appeared today, complete with literary
quotations
Yes, I really should learn to keep my mouth shut!!!!!!

Toby Bartels wrote:

>tarquin wrote:
>
>
>
>>Sudden influx of pages on bondage today:
>>bondage magazine
>>bondage photographer
>>bondage artist
>>
>>
>
>
>
>>Yes, yes, I know, wikipedia is *wide*, wikipedia is *all-inclusive*,
>>wikipedia has room for everyone and everything.
>>Even so, I am feel mysteriously tempted to start writing a slew of
>>articles on the fine art of picking one's nose.
>>
>>
>
>Well, nose picking is much less of a social activity than bondage,
>and there probably aren't magazines, photographers, or artists dedicated to it.
>(Yes, there's surely a nose picking fetish out there, but it must be rare.)
>Still, if I'm wrong, and you know something about nose picking,
>then by all means, write away!
>
>
>
>


from_name: Brion VIBBER

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Incorrect search results

body:
Imran Ghory wrote:
> Could someone explain why searching for,
>
> George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
>
> results in articles without that name in it ?

Somehow "Aberigh-Mackay" matches all instances of "Mackay", whether an
"Aberigh-" is present or not.

This seems to crop up with other hyphenated searches too; try
"Indo-European" and you'll get some results that contain "European" but
no trace of "Indo".

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [Wikipedia-l] He's back!

body:
Anyone besides me notice 3 or 4 edits by the immortal LARRY SANGER recently? Hee-whack! (Check out Plato & Jesus Christ).

Ed


from_name: Khendon

subject: [Wikipedia-l] A Three Way Split

body:
On Wed, Sep 18, 2002 at 05:13:06PM -0400, Tom Parmenter wrote:
> You know, my granddaughter is in the sixth grade.  You can read plenty
> at that level.  I can read at the "got part of a master's degree"
> level, but I don't do it every day or all the time.  You can also
> write plenty at that level if you make the effort.  It's all in the
> attitude.  Are you writing to teach?  Or not?

For what it's worth, what *I* think the aspiration of wikipedia should
be is to be a self-contained body of information such that somebody
could take themselves from basic literacy and numeracy, through
school- and university-level education right up to the state of the
art in any field of human endeavour.

An impossible aspiration, almost certainly, but a good thing to
*aim* at in my opinion.

--
Khendon  (Jason Williams)
khendon at khendon.org.uk    http://www.jasonandali.org.uk/jason/


from_name: Robert Graham Merkel

subject: [Wikipedia-l] A Three Way Split

in_reply_to: <3D891CE6.960721F3@labyrinth.net.au>; from kaji@labyrinth.net.au on Thu, Sep 19, 2002 at 10:40:06 +1000

body:
On Thu, 19 Sep 2002 10:40:06 Karen AKA Kajikit wrote:
> As a former primary teacher and recovered dyslexic, I'm not at all
> surprised that 40% of the population are only up to a 5th grade level
> (if that).
>
> I'm a fluent adult, and there are some articles in the wikipedia that
> leave me going 'huh?!' because they're too complex and convoluted... I
> think a really good writer who knows what they're talking about can make
> complicated information seem simple, but a poor writer or someone overly
> involved in the subject can make the simple seem incredibly complex
> because they assume that everyone else has a certain level of
> understanding that they don't actually have.
>

My philosophy on article complexity is borrowed from Albert Einstein.

"Everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler".

Whilst I agree that a good writer can help simplify the complex, there
are some topics which are covered in the Wikipedia which simply *can't*
be covered fully without some complexity and a good deal of background
knowledge (most of which is included in the Wikpedia somewhere, but
discovering would take some time).

For instance, to take an example from the world of computer science,
if I wanted to describe the proof that SAT is NP-complete.  To understand
an article on this, you need to:

* understand the concept of a mathematical proof.
* understand Boolean logic, including the concept of satisfiability.
* understand the concept of an algorithm.
* understand the concept and workings of a Turing machine, and
the Church-Turing thesis.
* have a reasonably detailed understanding of the low-level workings
   of a computer, including the relationship between that and
   a Turing machine.
* understand what a decision problem is - and thus be clear on
what the SAT decision problem is.
* understand what a complexity class is an how problems can
be placed in them.
* understand nondeterminism in the context of a Turing machine.
* understand the classes P and NP.
* understand the concept of transforming problems into instances
   of other problems.
* given the above, appreciate what NP-complete means.

Once all those concepts have been grasped, then and only then
is it possible and useful to go through the proof, which still
requires a certain degree of mental agility to follow.  Some
of the above steps are easy to grasp and can be explained in
a couple of sentences.  Some take weeks to teach from
scratch.

I describe the above not to blow my own trumpet (anybody with a
computer science degree would be able to rattle off
the same stuff) but to demonstrate that some things simply aren't
explainable in terms your average fifth-grader (or even your average
university graduate in an unrelated field) can understand immediately.
I can think of lots of others in computer science, and the same
commentary applies to other areas of mathematics, physics, chemistry
and the rest of the sciences.

It's not just the sciences, either.  Musical theory, philosophy,
the entire social sciences, law, and so on, all have concepts that
take a great deal of background knowledge to explain succinctly
and precisely.

At this point, you might well wonder, "If these points
are so arcane, why is the Wikipedia covering them at all?"
My reply is that there's plenty of people who do have the background
to read this type of article who would find the Wikipedia a useful
reference, that given some time and determination all the information
needed to understand the underlying concepts should be placed in the
Wikipedia (including references to other sources to provide additional
perspectives on an issue where required),
and seeing that the Wikipedia has essentially unlimited room there
is no reason not to include them if somebody wants to write them.

However, I certainly agree that such articles should, in their introductory
paragraph(s), include a simple, easy-to-read explanation of the concept,
making any handwaves necessary to achieve comprehensibility, and referring
the reader back to a more general, accessible article on the broader topic.
Concepts should also be linked back to Wikipedia articles explaining them
to write articles about them.

After all that verbiage, I strongly disagree with the idea of splitting
Wikipedia up at this stage.  Make sure we provide comprehensible
introductions
to articles, readable overviews, and concentrate on clear writing, and
most of Wikipedia will be comprehensible to most people who try to read
it (perhaps with some help for younger children, but they're going to need
help with any other reference).  The topics that won't be comprehensible
are
unlikely to be read by them, anyway.

--
------------------------------------------------------------
Robert Merkel	                           rgmerk at mira.net

Node FLY on Melbourne Wireless : http://www.wireless.org.au
------------------------------------------------------------


from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Our officially anonymous software

body:
Stephen Gilbert wrote:

>Fellow Wikipedians, I want to say that I am thoroughly
>pleased with the current Wikipedia software. It is
>stable, speedy and useful. I think it's time we gave
>it a name other than "the Phase III software".

>I like the name "PhaseIII Wiki". It is in keeping with
>Wikipedia history, and people won't have to get used
>to a completely new name.

I don't think that it's reasonable
to have a name that says "Wiki" but not "Pedia".
We are not the only Wiki around, nor the original,
and I don't relish the prospect of one day, when we're famous,
explaining to people that "Wiki" does not mean just Wikipedia
(as I now have to explain that the "Internet" isn't just the Web).

My vote is for "PediaWiki".  We now have "PediaWiki version 3".
("3" as in "3.0", except that we're far beyond just 3.0 by now.)

-- Toby


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia:Top 10 Google hits

body:
Brion VIBBER wrote in part:

>And of course in the middle east department, we have links to:

>[[History of ancient Israel and Judah]] from
>  http://www.palestinefacts.org/pf_early_palestine_israel_antiquity.php

>[[Mohammed Atta]] from some site claiming 7 of the 9/11 hijackers are
>  still alive: http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/stf3.html

Seems fair.  One pro-Zionist site, one pro-Arab site.

-- Toby


from_name: Karen AKA Kajikit

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Article def for {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}}

body:
Neil Harris wrote:

> How about this: we call what the existing count measures "article
> entries" or "entries"  and articles that fit the new, more tightly
> defined count's rules are then called "substantial articles" or just
> "articles".
>
> So, the Main Page would say,
>
> "we already have 31522 substantial articles (out of a total of 43726
> article entries)"
>
> We could then have both "Random article" and "Random entry".

That sounds better to me... I use the random button as a means of
finding double redirects, year templates without any content, pathetic
stubs, spelling mistakes that need correcting etc. If all of these were
cut out, its usefulness to me would be slashed. When I come to a lengthy
page with the random button I just move on, because I assume that the
article doesn't need my sort of work on it anymore.

--

Karen AKA Kajikit

And on the seventh day, God said 'What my world needs is a creature
that will truly appreciate it in all its facets' -
and so He made the kitten.

Come and visit my part of the web:
Kajikit's Corner: http://Kajikit.netfirms.com/
Aussie Support Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AussieSupport
Allergyfree Eating Recipe Swap:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Allergyfree_Eating
Ample Aussies Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ampleaussies/

Love and huggles to all!


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Whither bondage?

body:
Kurt Jansson wrote:

> You might also want do make a google search for "Rhinotillexomania" (333
> hits!).

Does that mean that it's HALF evil? :)

--

Karen AKA Kajikit

And on the seventh day, God said 'What my world needs is a creature
that will truly appreciate it in all its facets' -
and so He made the kitten.

Come and visit my part of the web:
Kajikit's Corner: http://Kajikit.netfirms.com/
Aussie Support Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AussieSupport
Allergyfree Eating Recipe Swap:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Allergyfree_Eating
Ample Aussies Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ampleaussies/

Love and huggles to all!


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Incorrect search results

body:
Could someone explain why searching for,

George Robert Aberigh-Mackay

results in articles without that name in it ?

Imran


from_name: Adam Williamson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Incorrect search results

body:
On Fri, 2002-09-20 at 00:55, Imran Ghory wrote:
> Could someone explain why searching for,
>
> George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
>
> results in articles without that name in it ?
>
> Imran

Wikipedia search isn't very strict. I bet the articles you see don't
have *that* name in, but do have "George", or "Robert". The search will
pick up the most related articles first - the articles with the most
instances of *all* the target words (and maybe higher priority if they
occur together, I dunno) but lower down you'll get matches on just one
occurrence of any of the terms, and so on...since there's presumably no
articles with the whole name "george robert aberigh-mackay" in them,
you'll get articles with lots of "george", "robert", or "aberigh-mackay"
in them high on the list instead. I think.
--
adamw


from_name: Jimmy Wales

body:
Toby Bartels wrote:

> Brion VIBBER wrote in part:
>
> >And of course in the middle east department, we have links to:
>
> >[[History of ancient Israel and Judah]] from
> >  http://www.palestinefacts.org/pf_early_palestine_israel_antiquity.php
>
> >[[Mohammed Atta]] from some site claiming 7 of the 9/11 hijackers are
> >  still alive: http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/stf3.html
>
> Seems fair.  One pro-Zionist site, one pro-Arab site.

But at least the 'whatreallyhappened' site is completely demented.

And fairness is surely not a matter of counting.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] facts not conjecture

body:
Padreger at aol.com wrote:
> But since this is an encyclopedia I would expect to find an unbiased account
> of the background of the Palestinian/Israeli situation--"encyclopedia"
> suggests definition...if I want opinions I will turn to monographs or other
> sources clearly identifiable as opinion.

I think that's right.

> As a newcomer to Wikipedia I must say that I am highly impressed with the
> effort.
>
> Pat (Gradmama)

Welcome!


from_name: koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] facts not conjecture

body:
Vicki wrote:
>We're trying. It's very difficult, because each side insists that their
>version is
>unbiased, and there's little agreement even on the facts, let alone the
>meanings.

That's a great summary of it.

kq


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Mark Christensen

body:
I think they should live on a special mantinance page.

	-----Original Message-----
	From: Magnus Manske [mailto:magnus.manske at epost.de]
	Sent: Fri 9/20/2002 7:02 AM
	To: wikitech-l at nupedia.com
	Cc:
	Subject: [Wikitech-l] Please test new special pages

	There are two new special pages to be tried out at Lee's test site:
	* http://www.piclab.com/wikitest/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Disambiguations
	* http://www.piclab.com/wikitest/wiki.phtml?title=Special:DoubleRedirects
	They should be pretty self-explaining.
	Note: The DoubleRedirects page takes some time, but the same database
	query entered manually at the "live" site takes only about 3-4 seconds.

	Please gimme feedback! Are they working? Are they worthy for the live
	site? Should they (and others to come) rather be integrated on a single
	"Special:Maintnance" page?

	Magnus

	_______________________________________________
	Wikitech-l mailing list
	Wikitech-l at nupedia.com
	http://nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

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from_name: Padreger at aol.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] facts not conjecture

body:
But since this is an encyclopedia I would expect to find an unbiased account
of the background of the Palestinian/Israeli situation--"encyclopedia"
suggests definition...if I want opinions I will turn to monographs or other
sources clearly identifiable as opinion.

As a newcomer to Wikipedia I must say that I am highly impressed with the
effort.

Pat (Gradmama)

> > Seems fair.  One pro-Zionist site, one pro-Arab site.
>
> But at least the 'whatreallyhappened' site is completely demented.
>
> And fairness is surely not a matter of counting.
>

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from_name: Vicki Rosenzweig

subject: [Wikipedia-l] facts not conjecture

body:
At 08:19 AM 9/20/02 -0400, Pat wrote:

>But since this is an encyclopedia I would expect to find an unbiased
>account of the background of the Palestinian/Israeli
>situation--"encyclopedia" suggests definition...if I want opinions I will
>turn to monographs or other sources clearly identifiable as opinion.

We're trying. It's very difficult, because each side insists that their
version is
unbiased, and there's little agreement even on the facts, let alone the
meanings.

--
Vicki Rosenzweig
vr at redbird.org
http://www.redbird.org


subject: [Wikipedia-l] facts not conjecture

body:
  >
> This is very true!   Maybe the fact that there ARE two sides to the story,
neither completely right or wrong, is the point ?

 It is admittedly very difficult to write a completely unbiased paragraph
about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but the initial article-- [sorry, I'm
not up to snuff on semantics here with wikipedia]-- reached by an outsider
doing a casual search could be a statement that the conflict exists between
whom, where, when...etc. ...and certain factual info re treaties, etc.  then
a link to the individual sides' position?

Pat

>
> We're trying. It's very difficult, because each side insists that their
> version is
> unbiased, and there's little agreement even on the facts, let alone the
> meanings.
>
> >But since this is an encyclopedia I would expect to find an unbiased
> >account of the background of the Palestinian/Israeli
> >situation--"encyclopedia" suggests definition...if I want opinions I will
> >turn to monographs or other sources clearly identifiable as opinion.
>
>
> --
> Vicki Rosenzweig
> vr at redbird.org
> http://www.redbird.org
>

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from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Toby Bartels wrote:

>Stephen Gilbert wrote:
>
>I don't think that it's reasonable
>to have a name that says "Wiki" but not "Pedia".
>We are not the only Wiki around, nor the original,
>and I don't relish the prospect of one day, when we're famous,
>explaining to people that "Wiki" does not mean just Wikipedia.
>
>My vote is for "PediaWiki".  We now have "PediaWiki version 3".
>("3" as in "3.0", except that we're far beyond just 3.0 by now.)
>
I would be very careful about using any words beginning with "pedia-" or
anything similar.  The Greek root for this relates to children, and even
the slightest inadvertant suggestion that the name could have anything
at all to do with kiddy-porn may bring a whole lot of unwanted traffic.

Ec


body:
Toby Bartels wrote:

>Brion VIBBER wrote in part:
>
>>And of course in the middle east department, we have links to:
>>
>>[[History of ancient Israel and Judah]] from
>> http://www.palestinefacts.org/pf_early_palestine_israel_antiquity.php
>>
>>[[Mohammed Atta]] from some site claiming 7 of the 9/11 hijackers are
>> still alive: http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/stf3.html
>>
>Seems fair.  One pro-Zionist site, one pro-Arab site.
>
I'm sure that for a pro-Arab site much better could be found.  Saying
that 7 of the hijackers survived begins by challenging common sense;
this is bound to put its credibility in doubt for somebody who just
wants a basic understanding of broad pro-Arab views.

Ec


subject: [Wikitech-l] MySQL Configuration

body:
When I switched the config file, I forgot to add in the max_connections
setting. Apparently the default is a mere 100, and I didn't notice that
it didn't get set in my-large.cnf. I bumped it back to our previous
setting of 250.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


list: wikien-l

subject: [WikiEN-l] TMC account renamed

body:
As per Jimbo's request, the user account "Throbbing Monster Cock" on the
English wikipedia has been renamed to "TMC". TMC, you may need to
re-login under the new name.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] TMC account renamed


subject: [Wikitech-l] Changing TMC's username

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Could someone (perhaps Brion Vibber since he posted the code of how to
> do it) run the commands necessary to change TMC's username?
>
> I fear doing it myself.  I fear breaking something.

Great, done.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Please test new special pages

body:
There are two new special pages to be tried out at Lee's test site:
* http://www.piclab.com/wikitest/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Disambiguations
* http://www.piclab.com/wikitest/wiki.phtml?title=Special:DoubleRedirects
They should be pretty self-explaining.
Note: The DoubleRedirects page takes some time, but the same database
query entered manually at the "live" site takes only about 3-4 seconds.

Please gimme feedback! Are they working? Are they worthy for the live
site? Should they (and others to come) rather be integrated on a single
"Special:Maintnance" page?

Magnus


subject: [Wikipedia-l] facts not conjecture

body:
you make a good point here, Jason.

Pat

 >
> On Fri, Sep 20, 2002 at 09:11:46AM -0400, Padreger at aol.com wrote:
> >   >
> > > This is very true!   Maybe the fact that there ARE two sides to the
> story,
> > neither completely right or wrong, is the point ?
> >
> >  It is admittedly very difficult to write a completely unbiased paragraph
>
> > about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but the initial article-- [sorry,
> I'm
> > not up to snuff on semantics here with wikipedia]-- reached by an
> outsider
> > doing a casual search could be a statement that the conflict exists
> between
> > whom, where, when...etc. ...and certain factual info re treaties, etc.
> then
> > a link to the individual sides' position?
>
> I think the problem with the idea of a page for each position is that it
> will inevitably lead people into thinking they have a free rein to ignore
> NPOV, simply because the one page is "balanced" by the other - most
> likely ending up in a spiral of increasing bias. (Well, the other page
> says this horribly biased thing, I'm justified in saying something
> non-neutral on this page).
>
> --
> Khendon  (Jason Williams)
> khendon at khendon.org.uk    http://www.jasonandali.org.uk/jason/
> [Wikipedia-l]
> To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
> http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] facts not conjecture

body:
On Fri, Sep 20, 2002 at 09:11:46AM -0400, Padreger at aol.com wrote:
>   >
> > This is very true!   Maybe the fact that there ARE two sides to the story,
> neither completely right or wrong, is the point ?
>
>  It is admittedly very difficult to write a completely unbiased paragraph
> about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but the initial article-- [sorry, I'm
> not up to snuff on semantics here with wikipedia]-- reached by an outsider
> doing a casual search could be a statement that the conflict exists between
> whom, where, when...etc. ...and certain factual info re treaties, etc.  then
> a link to the individual sides' position?

I think the problem with the idea of a page for each position is that it
will inevitably lead people into thinking they have a free rein to ignore
NPOV, simply because the one page is "balanced" by the other - most
likely ending up in a spiral of increasing bias. (Well, the other page
says this horribly biased thing, I'm justified in saying something
non-neutral on this page).

--
Khendon  (Jason Williams)
khendon at khendon.org.uk    http://www.jasonandali.org.uk/jason/


from_name: lcrocker at nupedia.com

body:
> I wouldn't like to be a paediatrician if things are as bad
> as you suggest, then ;).

>> I would get rid of that smiley if I were you - see:
>> http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_49785.html

It's probably good that we call ourselves "Wikipedians", then,
and not "Pediaphiles".


from_name: Jim McKeeth

body:
I think we should take the "pedia" reference up a layer of
abstraction.  Maybe "Reference" Wiki.  Broaden the scope a little.  We
don't want to limit it to only people who want to make another
WikiPedia.  If that were the goal then we should just call it WikiPedia
software (to differentiate it from WikiPedia Data)

-Jim

> > Toby Bartels wrote:
> >
> > >Stephen Gilbert wrote:
> > >
> > >I don't think that it's reasonable
> > >to have a name that says "Wiki" but not "Pedia".
> > >We are not the only Wiki around, nor the original,
> > >and I don't relish the prospect of one day, when we're famous,
> > >explaining to people that "Wiki" does not mean just Wikipedia.
> > >
> > >My vote is for "PediaWiki".  We now have "PediaWiki version 3".
> > >("3" as in "3.0", except that we're far beyond just 3.0 by now.)
> > >


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Pre-January edit histories restored

body:
I've restored the UseMod-era (through January 2002) edit histories to
the database. (With a few caveats, notes and exceptions; please see
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AUsemod_article_histories )

The earliest edit retained in the database is [[UuU]] by an anonymous
user at eiffel.demon.co.uk from 8:08 pm PST on January 16, 2001:
   http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=UuU&oldid=291430

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Daniel Mayer

body:
On Friday 20 September 2002 12:01 pm, you wrote:
> I would be very careful about using any words beginning with "pedia-" or
> anything similar. ?The Greek root for this relates to children, and even
> the slightest inadvertant suggestion that the name could have anything
> at all to do with kiddy-porn may bring a whole lot of unwanted traffic.
>
> Ec

I thought the root was ped from the Latin pedis which means foot. I'm not
sure where "pedophila" came from. "Ped" is the root of many other words.
Shall we not use those either? Boy I thought I was paranoid about ultra minor
things. I vote for PediaWiki because it has a certain ring to it -- this
would just be the name of the software and any ref to it will be a couple
levels in from the main page.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: Axel Boldt

body:
> My vote is for "PediaWiki".

I don't like it, because Pediatrics is the branch of
medicine dealing with children, so the name implies a
Wiki for (or about) children.

Axel

__________________________________________________
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body:
Andre Engels wrote:

>>On Fri, 2002-09-20 at 17:28, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>>
>>>I would be very careful about using any words beginning with "pedia-" or
>>>anything similar.  The Greek root for this relates to children, and even
>>>the slightest inadvertant suggestion that the name could have anything
>>>at all to do with kiddy-porn may bring a whole lot of unwanted traffic.
>>>
>>I wouldn't like to be a paediatrician if things are as bad as you
>>suggest, then ;).
>>
>
>I would get rid of that smiley if I were you - see:
>http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_49785.html
>http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/wales/901723.stm
>
Never underestimate the intellectual persuasiveness of ignorance!


body:
On Fri, 2002-09-20 at 17:28, Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Toby Bartels wrote:
>
> >Stephen Gilbert wrote:
> >
> >I don't think that it's reasonable
> >to have a name that says "Wiki" but not "Pedia".
> >We are not the only Wiki around, nor the original,
> >and I don't relish the prospect of one day, when we're famous,
> >explaining to people that "Wiki" does not mean just Wikipedia.
> >
> >My vote is for "PediaWiki".  We now have "PediaWiki version 3".
> >("3" as in "3.0", except that we're far beyond just 3.0 by now.)
> >
> I would be very careful about using any words beginning with "pedia-" or
> anything similar.  The Greek root for this relates to children, and even
> the slightest inadvertant suggestion that the name could have anything
> at all to do with kiddy-porn may bring a whole lot of unwanted traffic.

I wouldn't like to be a paediatrician if things are as bad as you
suggest, then ;). I don't think paedophiles find their preferred
internet sites through googling for "pedia". Just can't see it myself. I
don't see that calling something pediawiki is going to get any
"unwanted" traffic, frankly...you're a bit too worried I think :)
--
adamw


from_name: Neil Harris

body:
Toby Bartels wrote:

>Stephen Gilbert wrote:
>
>
>
>>Fellow Wikipedians, I want to say that I am thoroughly
>>pleased with the current Wikipedia software. It is
>>stable, speedy and useful. I think it's time we gave
>>it a name other than "the Phase III software".
>>
>>
>
>
>
>>I like the name "PhaseIII Wiki". It is in keeping with
>>Wikipedia history, and people won't have to get used
>>to a completely new name.
>>
>>
>
>I don't think that it's reasonable
>to have a name that says "Wiki" but not "Pedia".
>We are not the only Wiki around, nor the original,
>and I don't relish the prospect of one day, when we're famous,
>explaining to people that "Wiki" does not mean just Wikipedia
>(as I now have to explain that the "Internet" isn't just the Web).
>
>My vote is for "PediaWiki".  We now have "PediaWiki version 3".
>("3" as in "3.0", except that we're far beyond just 3.0 by now.)
>
>
>-- Toby
>[Wikipedia-l]
>To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
>http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
>
>
>
>
I vote for "Phase III Wikipedia software" which is
* a good name,
* what it is currently being called, and
* self-descriptive

Neil


body:
On Fri, 2002-09-20 at 23:23, Andre Engels wrote:
> > On Fri, 2002-09-20 at 17:28, Ray Saintonge wrote:
> > > Toby Bartels wrote:
> > > I would be very careful about using any words beginning with "pedia-" or
> > > anything similar.  The Greek root for this relates to children, and even
> > > the slightest inadvertant suggestion that the name could have anything
> > > at all to do with kiddy-porn may bring a whole lot of unwanted traffic.
> >
> > I wouldn't like to be a paediatrician if things are as bad as you
> > suggest, then ;).
>
> I would get rid of that smiley if I were you - see:
> http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_49785.html
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/wales/901723.stm

Ah, well spotted, that's exactly the thing I was thinking of :). But I
was rather saying I don't think it'd be like that for an obscure
reference to the name "PediaWiki" somewhere.
--
adamw


body:
On Fri, 2002-09-20 at 23:40, lcrocker at nupedia.com wrote:
>
> > I wouldn't like to be a paediatrician if things are as bad
> > as you suggest, then ;).
>
> >> I would get rid of that smiley if I were you - see:
> >> http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_49785.html
>
> It's probably good that we call ourselves "Wikipedians", then,
> and not "Pediaphiles".

ROFL! Very true. I think i'll put "paediaphile" in all my descriptions
on messageboards, IM etc, and see what happens :)
--
adamw


from_name: Tom Parmenter

in_reply_to:
<20020921010506.XIZT28420.sccrmhc03.attbi.com@there> (message
	from Daniel Mayer on Fri, 20 Sep 2002 18:09:15 -0700)

body:
|Content-Type: text/plain;
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|From: Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com>
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|Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2002 18:09:15 -0700
|
|On Friday 20 September 2002 12:01 pm, you wrote:
|> I would be very careful about using any words beginning with "pedia-" or
|> anything similar. ?The Greek root for this relates to children, and even
|> the slightest inadvertant suggestion that the name could have anything
|> at all to do with kiddy-porn may bring a whole lot of unwanted traffic.
|>
|> Ec
|
|I thought the root was ped from the Latin pedis which means foot. I'm not
|sure where "pedophila" came from. "Ped" is the root of many other words.
|Shall we not use those either? Boy I thought I was paranoid about ultra minor
|things. I vote for PediaWiki because it has a certain ring to it -- this
|would just be the name of the software and any ref to it will be a couple
|levels in from the main page.
|
|-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
|[Wikipedia-l]
|To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
|http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
|

Both pediatrician and pedophile come from the Greek prefix paedo-
meaning "child".


from_name: Andre Engels

in_reply_to:
<1032558631.2414.3.camel@toy.local.net> from Adam Williamson at
 "Sep 20, 2002 10:50:30 pm"

body:
> On Fri, 2002-09-20 at 17:28, Ray Saintonge wrote:
> > Toby Bartels wrote:
> > I would be very careful about using any words beginning with "pedia-" or
> > anything similar.  The Greek root for this relates to children, and even
> > the slightest inadvertant suggestion that the name could have anything
> > at all to do with kiddy-porn may bring a whole lot of unwanted traffic.
>
> I wouldn't like to be a paediatrician if things are as bad as you
> suggest, then ;).

I would get rid of that smiley if I were you - see:
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_49785.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/wales/901723.stm

Andre Engels


subject: [Wikipedia-l] The meta question

body:
>As some of you may have noticed, meta.wikipedia.com is running on a
>version of the phase II wiki software from last December or so. It's
>kinda buggy, and not being maintained. It probably ought to be moved to
>the new server and upgraded to the current software at some point.

>Also, it's been suggested that it might be nice to have a way to move
>(non-)articles from the Wikipedia (English, or I suppose any language --
>I don't see any reason why meta shouldn't be multilingual) to the meta
>wiki with edit histories intact.

>Is this desireable?

This is all eminently desirable, IMO.

>What about redirects from the main wiki(s) to the meta wiki? I've seen
>people try to do it occasionally (it doesn't work, you just get a link
>following the mysterious and unhelpful "1. REDIRECT").

That would go with the moving, presumably.

-- Toby


subject: [Wikipedia-l] The 100,000 articles goal

body:
Eclecticology wrote:

>Axel Boldt wrote:

>>I vote for simply removing this "100,000 article" sentence.

>I can see your point, but I don't see it as much of a concern.  Building
>bulk is fine as a short term goal.  If the projections that I made a few
>days ago are at all meaningful we should reach that 100,000 early in
>2003.  Let's leave it in until we reach that goal then not replace it
>with any new numerical goal at that time.

But we will *not* reach that goal in 2003 or (I predict) any time soon!
The page says (in '' IIRC) 100,000 *complete* articles.
I think that it's a fine goal for the future (however arbitrary),
although I still think that it will only confuse newcomers,
who may not notice the crucial "complete" (however emphasised).
So I'm with Axel; remove it.

-- Toby


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Watchlist feature (Was: Silliness, and a "feature idea")

body:
Bryan Derksen wrote:

>Two fixes come to mind: making the autowatching trigger for major edits
>only, and giving the  autowatch a time duration. For example, I would love
>a feature that would automatically add pages I've made major edits to to my
>watchlist for 7 days (or 30 or whatever), after which they drop off the
>list (unless I've made a new major mod myself). That way, I'd be able to
>see what sort of responses and modifications are made immediately after
>I've made a major contribution to an article, but it's not there forever.
>Of course, manually-added page watches would have an indefinite duration,
>as currently happens.

Now *this* is a feature that I could definitely use!
7 days sounds right for me, please.

While we're on the subject, I'd dearly like a secondary watchlist
that listed all the pages that I'm watching, in alphabetical order,
with no further information about them (no database lookup necessary).
An analogy: [[Watchlist]] : [[Recentchanges]] :: my request : [[Allpages]].
For extra gratitude from me, include nonexistent but watched pages
(which breaks the analogy somewhat).

-- Toby


subject: [Wikipedia-l] order of lists of works & prizes

body:
tarquin wrote at last:

>IMO lists of prize awards or works are in a sense timelines, and as such
>should go forwards.
>what are your opinions?

Why must we choose a standard?
Since we're mixed up now, and either method is clearly usable,
let this be like British vs American spelling.
We could even add to the Manual of Style that either is OK,
to help head off edit wars and arguments in Talk pages.
(One can still argue in a Talk page why that particular article is special,
and needs to go one way or another.)

That said, I prefer going forward, if we do pick something.

-- Toby


body:
Maveric149 wrote in part:

>Could this be enacted before we hit our "50%" milestone of 50,000 "articles"?
>Hitting that number could very well get us undeserved media attention and
>subsequent media articles that are critical of our article count and average
>article quality (based on byte size). That is not the type of media attention
>we need.

Hardly anybody has a clue that we exist.
Frankly, we're at the stage where "Any publicity is good publicity.".
We could issue a press release claiming to surpass Britannic now,
and it would be an obvious lie, but still good publicity in the end.

Of course, there's something to be said for integrity,
and definitely something to be said for your proposal on those grounds.
But not, IMO, on PR grounds.  Consider whether what we say is true,
not whether it will look good in the headlines.

-- Toby


subject: [Wikipedia-l] facts not conjecture

body:
Gradmama wrote:

>Jimmy Wales wrote:

>>Toby Bartels wrote:

>>>Seems fair.  One pro-Zionist site, one pro-Arab site.

>>But at least the 'whatreallyhappened' site is completely demented.
>>And fairness is surely not a matter of counting.

Agreement on both counts.

>But since this is an encyclopedia I would expect to find an unbiased account
>of the background of the Palestinian/Israeli situation--"encyclopedia"
>suggests definition...if I want opinions I will turn to monographs or other
>sources clearly identifiable as opinion.

This is what our article has (or at least should;
it depends on how the edit wars are doing).
What's "fair" is that we're linked to by both sides,
which suggests some amount of success in this NPOV effort.

And to clear up any lingering confusion
(since there seems to be some on other replies):
These are web pages that link to us; we do *not* link to them.

>As a newcomer to Wikipedia I must say that I am highly impressed with the
>effort.

As the #31 editor since conversion to Phase II, I must say thanks!

-- Toby


body:
Eclecticology wrote:

>Toby Bartels wrote:

>>My vote is for "PediaWiki".  We now have "PediaWiki version 3".
>>("3" as in "3.0", except that we're far beyond just 3.0 by now.)

>I would be very careful about using any words beginning with "pedia-" or
>anything similar.  The Greek root for this relates to children, and even
>the slightest inadvertant suggestion that the name could have anything
>at all to do with kiddy-porn may bring a whole lot of unwanted traffic.

Kiddy-porn is spelled "pedophilia", not "pediaphilia".
They don't sound much alike to me.

-- Toby


body:
Karen AKA Kajikit wrote:

>Axel Boldt wrote:

>>Toby Bartels wrote:

>>>My vote is for "PediaWiki".

>>I don't like it, because Pediatrics is the branch of
>>medicine dealing with children, so the name implies a
>>Wiki for (or about) children.

>PediaWiki would be good for a 'junior' version :) I don't see what's
>wrong with calling it the 'Phase III software' like everybody already
>does - it's going to be replaced soon enough by the Phase IV software
>and then you'll just be scrambling for another name!

If we do, it'll only be because Axel deleted my next sentence above.
The Phase IV software will be called (in my proposal) PediaWiki 4.0.
What else?

-- Toby


from_name: Stephen Gilbert

body:
--- Toby Bartels <toby+wikipedia at math.ucr.edu> wrote:
> Stephen Gilbert wrote:
> >I like the name "PhaseIII Wiki". It is in keeping
> with
> >Wikipedia history, and people won't have to get
> used
> >to a completely new name.
>
> I don't think that it's reasonable
> to have a name that says "Wiki" but not "Pedia".
> We are not the only Wiki around, nor the original,
> and I don't relish the prospect of one day, when
> we're famous,
> explaining to people that "Wiki" does not mean just
> Wikipedia
> (as I now have to explain that the "Internet" isn't
> just the Web).

I have friends that call Wikipedia "wiki" right now,
despite my protests. :(

The software is not the same as the project, however.
When we're famous, non-technical people will only know
about Wikipedia, not the software that runs it.

Stephen G.

__________________________________________________
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New DSL Internet Access from SBC & Yahoo!
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Fwd: Adding Wikipedia to OneLook

body:
I just received this from the maintainer of OneLook, a
meta-search of dictionaries (and some encyclopedias).
Is there any way to produce a flat file of all our
articles? This would also allow Wikipedia to once
again work with Sunir Shah's MetaWiki search.

If you haven't tried OneLook before, give it a spin.
It's fantastic.

http://www.onelook.com/

Stephen G.

--- Doug Beeferman <doug at dougb.com> wrote:
> Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2002 13:16:10 -0400 (EDT)
> From: Doug Beeferman <doug at dougb.com>
> To: <canuck_in_korea2002 at yahoo.com>
>
>
> Hi Stephen,
>
> Thanks for your kind feedback on OneLook and sorry
> for the delay in
> responding to you.  I already have some familiarity
> with Wikipedia/Nupedia
> as a user and would love to add its headwords to
> OneLook.  Could you
> assist me in this?  In particular, do you know of a
> flat file that I could
> point OneLook's update engine to that lists
> Wikipedia's headwords (or
> topic names, or however they're called in
> Wiki-land)?
>
> Running the available SQL files through MySQL to
> dump these headwords on
> every update would be a bit unwieldy for various
> reasons.  One alternative
> would be a script that extracts the headwords from
> the .sql file, but I
> don't want to rewrite this if it's already been
> done.
>
> (I just spent fifteen minutes trying to figure out
> how to post this
> question on meta.wikipedia.com.  I was defeated.
> There's probaby
> something I'm missing or too lazy to read...)
>
> Thanks again for writing.  Are you involved actively
> in Wikipedia's
> maintenance?  If so, good luck with the project --
> it looks like it's
> really taking off!
>
> Doug
> (a canuck in America)
>
>
> ---     add     canuck_in_korea2002 at yahoo.com
> 2002-09-06 08:51:25     218.150.177.35  Mozilla/5.0
> Galeon/1.2.5 (X11; Linux i686; U;) Gecko/20020610
> Debian/1.2.5-1
>
> I just discovered One-Look and it has quickly found
> a much coveted space
> on my browser's Personal Toolbar. I especially
> appreciate  the lack of
> pop-up ads. Thanks for the great resource!
>
>
> I notice you have several encyclopedias in your
> database. I would like to
> suggest an encyclopedia called Wikipedia. It is an
> effort to build a
> complete encyclopedia from scratch, written by
> volunteers and released
> under the GNU Free Documentation License. Wikipedia
> is one and a half
> years old, and currently has about 40,000 articles,
> many of which are very
> good.
>
> Cheers!
>
> Stephen Gilbert
>
>

__________________________________________________
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New DSL Internet Access from SBC & Yahoo!
http://sbc.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikipedia-l] pedagogues?

body:
 pedagogue -- a teacher; school teacher; teaching

pedagogy -- 1) the function or work of a teacher; teaching; 2) the art of
science or teaching; education; instructional methods

[definitions Random House Webster's College Dictionary,1995)
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Block repeated copyright violator?

body:
I would say yes, given the offence is repeated and the
person has been warned and requested not to insert
material under copyright.

Stephen G.

--- Pierre Abbat <phma at webjockey.net> wrote:
> I blocked someone for repeatedly inserting text from
> a copyrighted website
> about Amiga operating systems. Should someone be
> blocked for that?
>
> phma
> [Wikipedia-l]
> To manage your subscription to this list, please go
> here:
> http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

__________________________________________________
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New DSL Internet Access from SBC & Yahoo!
http://sbc.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikipedia-l] beat Britannica!

body:
I just came upon Wikipedia less than a week ago, in a search for the
Underwood Tariff...but as I looked around I was so impressed with  the work
that I spent much of the last three days looking around; joined the email
list, and have been plowing through the  email and WikiPedia ever since.ever
since.

The point is that people ARE finding the site.

As for Toby's press release...it could state a GOAL of surpassing Britannica,
which might catch the attention of the big boys if for no reason than the
audacity of it.     Stranger things have happened!

Pat

> Hardly anybody has a clue that we exist.
> Frankly, we're at the stage where "Any publicity is good publicity.".
> We could issue a press release claiming to surpass Britannic now,
> and it would be an obvious lie, but still good publicity in the end.
>
>

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from_name: Pierre Abbat

body:
I blocked someone for repeatedly inserting text from a copyrighted website
about Amiga operating systems. Should someone be blocked for that?

phma


body:
On Sat, 2002-09-21 at 05:04, Tom Parmenter wrote:

> Both pediatrician and pedophile come from the Greek prefix paedo-
> meaning "child".

This is why those of us living in *EDUCATED* countries still spell them
"paediatrician" and "paedophile".

;)

I believe the root produced by "pedis", meaning "foot", is "podi" -
"podiatrics" being stuff to do with feet, and "podiatrist" being someone
who looks after your feet.
--
adamw


from_name: The Cunctator

body:
On 9/21/02 12:02 PM, "Rosa Williams" <aprilrosanina at charter.net> wrote:

> ----- Original Message -----
>> I blocked someone for repeatedly inserting text from a copyrighted website
>> about Amiga operating systems. Should someone be blocked for that?
>>
>> phma
>
> In my opinion?  Absolutely they should be blocked. This is not like my
> too-quick-on-the-draw proposal of earlier which was - I now think rightly -
> thoroughly criticized by the list participants. This situation conforms to
> the standard for calling something "vandalism":  *repeated* efforts to
> insert non-useful (and in this case actively harmful)  text.
>
> I mean, we have the blurb about not inserting copyright text in boldface on
> each edit page.  They had every opportunity to post something on a talk page
> if they thought the material was legitimately usable; instead they (I
> presume) just chose to repeat it rather than discuss it. I think your action
> completly appropriate.
>
Of course, it's somewhat situational. It depends on what the actual
background of "repeatedly" is. If someone inserts copyrighted material which
is then removed, with notification why (perhaps a mention in Talk), and the
person puts it back, then that's cause for concern.

Blocking is a last-ditch mechanism. Efforts should be made to find other
solutions. If there aren't other solutions, then temporary blocking is
appropriate.

It's important to remember that IP blocking is an imperfect tool. It's not
just the social implications that merit concern when considering whether to
use it.


from_name: Rosa Williams

body:
----- Original Message -----
> I blocked someone for repeatedly inserting text from a copyrighted website
> about Amiga operating systems. Should someone be blocked for that?
>
> phma

In my opinion?  Absolutely they should be blocked. This is not like my
too-quick-on-the-draw proposal of earlier which was - I now think rightly -
thoroughly criticized by the list participants. This situation conforms to
the standard for calling something "vandalism":  *repeated* efforts to
insert non-useful (and in this case actively harmful)  text.

I mean, we have the blurb about not inserting copyright text in boldface on
each edit page.  They had every opportunity to post something on a talk page
if they thought the material was legitimately usable; instead they (I
presume) just chose to repeat it rather than discuss it. I think your action
completly appropriate.

-- April


body:
On Saturday 21 September 2002 08:57 am, you wrote:
> >?I blocked someone for repeatedly inserting text from a copyrighted
> > website about Amiga operating systems. Should someone be blocked for
> > that?
> >
> >?phma
>
> In my opinion? ?Absolutely they should be blocked. This is not like my
> too-quick-on-the-draw proposal of earlier which was - I now think rightly -
> thoroughly criticized by the list participants. This situation conforms to
> the standard for calling something "vandalism": ?*repeated* efforts to
> insert non-useful (and in this case actively harmful) ?text.
>
> I mean, we have the blurb about not inserting copyright text in boldface on
> each edit page. ?They had every opportunity to post something on a talk
> page if they thought the material was legitimately usable; instead they (I
> presume) just chose to repeat it rather than discuss it. I think your
> action completly appropriate.
>
> -- April

I agree and have done the very same thing several times in the past. In my
opinion, persistent copyright violations are the /worst/ form of vandalism
since their presence threatens the legitimacy of the entire project and if we
have a lax attitude about it then the project itself may be legally liable.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] The meta question

body:
On Saturday 21 September 2002 03:31 am, you wrote:
>Brion wrote
> >Also, it's been suggested that it might be nice to have a way to move
> >(non-)articles from the Wikipedia (English, or I suppose any language --
> >I don't see any reason why meta shouldn't be multilingual) to the meta
> >wiki with edit histories intact.
> >
> >Is this desireable?
>
> This is all eminently desirable, IMO.

I agree. It would be /very/ nice to move 9/11 tribute pages and their
histories over to metapedia.

> >What about redirects from the main wiki(s) to the meta wiki? I've seen
> >people try to do it occasionally (it doesn't work, you just get a link
> >following the mysterious and unhelpful "1. REDIRECT").
>
> That would go with the moving, presumably.
>
>
> -- Toby

I /really/ don't think this would be a good idea at all. Metapedia is a more
or less a traditional wiki with few rules. Most notably there is no NPOV rule
for Metapedia. Therefore POV crap which is not at all appropriate for
Wikipedia will simply live at Metapedia and be seamlessly linked to and from
Wikipedia if interwiki redirects exist. This could only lead to confusion
after Wikipedia and metapedia are both on the same software -- the main
difference between the two would only be the logo.

In addition to /not/ having interwiki redirects to Metapedia I think it would
be a very good idea to have a light gray background for all unspecified
namespace pages (the equivalent of the article namespace in Wikipedia).

That way, the user is immediately notified that something is different while
on Metapedia.

If there are totally different rules then pages should be obviously different.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Phase IV software

body:
I would imagine that Phase III will last some time: the current software
base is very robust and extensible, and can take lots more features
without major re-architecture.

Even moving the database and various front-end servers to different
machines is still possible with the current Phase III software. (By the
way, this is a good reason not to consolidate all the national databases
in a single database, as we will only have to unpick them later on for
scaling reasons.)

Phase IV will presumably mark the  move to a distributed cluster
architecture to cope with the sort of load that overwhelmed Britannica
when they originally released their entire content for free.

Neil


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Pre-January edit histories restored

body:
On Saturday 21 September 2002 03:31 am, you wrote:
> I've restored the UseMod-era (through January 2002) edit histories to
> the database. (With a few caveats, notes and exceptions; please see
> http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AUsemod_article_histories?)
>
> The earliest edit retained in the database is [[UuU]] by an anonymous
> user at eiffel.demon.co.uk from 8:08 pm PST on January 16, 2001:
> ? ?http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=UuU&oldid=291430
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Coolness - many thanks!

Now if Andre can rerun the user edit stats again then maybe we can get a
better breakdown of stats. Hopefully at least Larry is close to my count --
if he isn't, then I must accept the fact that I really don't have a life
outside of Wikiland. But then there still is the issue of UseMod deleting old
histories, so we may never have an accurate tally.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


body:
On Saturday 21 September 2002 12:00, The Cunctator wrote:
> On 9/21/02 12:02 PM, "Rosa Williams" <aprilrosanina at charter.net> wrote:
> > ----- Original Message -----
> >
> >> I blocked someone for repeatedly inserting text from a copyrighted
> >> website about Amiga operating systems. Should someone be blocked for
> >> that?
> >>
> >> phma
> >
> > In my opinion?  Absolutely they should be blocked. This is not like my
> > too-quick-on-the-draw proposal of earlier which was - I now think rightly
> > - thoroughly criticized by the list participants. This situation conforms
> > to the standard for calling something "vandalism":  *repeated* efforts to
> > insert non-useful (and in this case actively harmful)  text.
> >
> > I mean, we have the blurb about not inserting copyright text in boldface
> > on each edit page.  They had every opportunity to post something on a
> > talk page if they thought the material was legitimately usable; instead
> > they (I presume) just chose to repeat it rather than discuss it. I think
> > your action completly appropriate.
>
> Of course, it's somewhat situational. It depends on what the actual
> background of "repeatedly" is. If someone inserts copyrighted material
> which is then removed, with notification why (perhaps a mention in Talk),
> and the person puts it back, then that's cause for concern.
>
> Blocking is a last-ditch mechanism. Efforts should be made to find other
> solutions. If there aren't other solutions, then temporary blocking is
> appropriate.
>
> It's important to remember that IP blocking is an imperfect tool. It's not
> just the social implications that merit concern when considering whether to
> use it.

He put nine articles on [[Workbench]] various versions in five minutes,
preceded by three other articles about Amiga. I replaced several of them with
violation notices, noticed that someone else was erasing the violations, and
blocked the address before putting notices on the rest of them.

phma


body:
Actually, I"m in two different places too.  And I had previous edits as "koyaanisqatsi," which are probably long gone.

kq

>It's not just Larry either - Jimbo only appears at #155 and
>again at #196.


from_name: Brion VIBBER

body:
Andre Engels wrote:
> Wondering how it's possible that Larry scores so low, my first guess is that
> the software considers his old edits as being anonymous. Either no user can
> be connected to those edits, or 'LMS' is not recognized by the software as
> being a user. It's not just Larry either - Jimbo only appears at #155 and
> again at #196.

Yeah, I forgot to take that into account. Login names that don't have an
exactly same named equivalent on the new system got imported marked as
anonymous (internal user id number = 0). I've redone the query to
include anonymous edits (we have some very active non-logged in users as
well!) However it still doesn't amalgamate multiple accounts for the
same person.

Larry_Sanger is at #31 with 2155 edits.

Also keep in mind that many early edits were automatically deleted by
the usemod software, so a lot of pre-Fall 2001 stuff is still going to
be underrepresented.

For the curious, the queries were:
SELECT count(*),cur_user_text FROM cur GROUP BY cur_user_text
SELECT count(*),old_user_text FROM old GROUP BY old_user_text

I then dropped them through a little perl script to add them, sort them
and spit out a table. Probably could be done more efficiently, but meh.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Karen AKA Kajikit

body:
Axel Boldt wrote:
>
> > My vote is for "PediaWiki".
>
> I don't like it, because Pediatrics is the branch of
> medicine dealing with children, so the name implies a
> Wiki for (or about) children.

PediaWiki would be good for a 'junior' version :) I don't see what's
wrong with calling it the 'Phase III software' like everybody already
does - it's going to be replaced soon enough by the Phase IV software
and then you'll just be scrambling for another name!

--

Karen AKA Kajikit

And on the seventh day, God said 'What my world needs is a creature
that will truly appreciate it in all its facets' -
and so He made the kitten.

Come and visit my part of the web:
Kajikit's Corner: http://Kajikit.netfirms.com/
Aussie Support Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AussieSupport
Allergyfree Eating Recipe Swap:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Allergyfree_Eating
Ample Aussies Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ampleaussies/


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Growth estimates again: some figures to check in a year's time

body:
A bit of twiddling with a ruler on a log-linear graph of the article
count vs. time appears to show a "natural" exponential growth rate of
between:

"Optimistic", based on  May 2001 - May 2002, ignoring the Great Slowdown,
and also fitting the most recent slope:

  exp(0.18 * months)

"Pessimistic", fitting May 2001 - present including the Great Slowdown:

  exp(0.125 * months)

This produces these extrapolations, assuming exponential growth.

Month,       optimistic,  pessimistic
Sep 2002,    45000,    45000  ) 50,000 is reached sometime
Oct 2002,    54000,    51000  ) in these two months
Nov 2002,    64000,    58000
Dec 2002,    77000,    65000

Jan 2003,    92000,    74000
Feb 2003,   111000,    84000 <--- optimistic 100,000
Mar 2003,   133000,    95000
Apr 2003,   159000,   108000 <--- pessimistic 100,000
May 2003,   190000,   122000
Jun 2003,   227000,   139000
Jul 2003,   272000,   157000
Aug 2003,   326000,   178000
Sep 2003,   390000,   202000
Oct 2003,   467000,   229000
Nov 2003,   559000,   259000 <--- optimistic 500,000
Dec 2003,   670000,   293000

Jan 2004,   802000,   333000
Feb 2004,   960000,   377000
Mar 2004,  1149000,   427000 <--- optimistic 1,000,000
Apr 2004,  1376000,   484000
May 2004,  1647000,   548000 <--- pessimistic 500,000
Jun 2004,  1972000,   621000
Jul 2004,  2361000,   704000
Aug 2004,  2826000,   798000
Sep 2004,  3383000,   904000
Oct 2004,  4051000,  1024000 <--- pessimistic 1,000,000
Nov 2004,  4850000,  1161000
Dec 2004,  5806000,  1315000


from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [Wikipedia-l] beat Britannica!

body:
Pat wrote in part:

>As for Toby's press release...it could state a GOAL of surpassing Britannica,
>which might catch the attention of the big boys if for no reason than the
>audacity of it.     Stranger things have happened!

We already have issued such a press release, haven't we?

-- Toby


body:
Pierre Abbat wrote:

>I blocked someone for repeatedly inserting text from a copyrighted website
>about Amiga operating systems. Should someone be blocked for that?

Conceivably.

I think that more tolerance should be given to such people
than to vandals that clearly have no intention of being helpful.
Such a person is more likely to be trying to do good.
And as The Cunctator said, banning is a serious measure.
IMO, it should be done when we've given up hope on somebody.

In this particular case, you seem to have acted well, AFAICT.
Each case needs to be looked at individually, after all.

-- Toby


body:
Stephen Gilbert wrote in part:

>The software is not the same as the project, however.
>When we're famous, non-technical people will only know
>about Wikipedia, not the software that runs it.

The way that I understood the original "PediaWiki" proposal,
the idea is that there is much Wiki software (UseModWiki, etc),
but ours is the Wiki software developed for the 'Pedia.
Someone that uses it for some other purpose
is not using it for Wikipedia anymore
but is still using the 'Pedia's Wiki ware.
Hence "PediaWiki".

-- Toby


from_name: Adam Williamson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] pedagogues?

body:
On Sat, 2002-09-21 at 14:33, Padreger at aol.com wrote:
>
>
>  pedagogue -- a teacher; school teacher; teaching
>
> pedagogy -- 1) the function or work of a teacher; teaching; 2) the art of
> science or teaching; education; instructional methods
>
> [definitions Random House Webster's College Dictionary,1995)

Uh...what was the point of this post?

And have you considered switching to plain-text email? HTML mail serves
no purpose beyond forcing people to read it how you choose to format it
(rather than how they choose) and making it far larger than it has any
need to be.
--
adamw


from_name: Giskart

subject: [Wikipedia-l] usenet and wikipedia

body:
Some posibel interesting numbers;

Usenet postings that contain the word "wikipedia"
before 01/2001 = 0
01/2001 = 0
02/2001 = 4
03/2001 = 0
04/2001 = 19
05/2001 = 19
06/2001 = 54
07/2001 = 27
08/2001 = 84
09/2001 = 152
10/2001 = 87
11/2001 = 133
12/2001 = 105
01/2002 = 161
02/2002 = 102
03/2002 = 112
04/2002 = 141
05/2002 = 149
06/2002 = 208
07/2002 = 305
08/2002 = 389

(source google)

Giskart


from_name: elian

subject: [Wikipedia-l] internationalization

body:
Hello,

In the german wikipedia some people are doing a hell of work in
internationalizing - linking to the english and esperanto wikipedia
mainly. (If someone wants to help out:
<http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Seiten%252C_die_nicht_ins_Englische_linken>
<http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Seiten%252C_die_nicht_zu_Esperanto_linken>
- it's more than 10 000 articles)

Therefore I thought about a tool for it, which would make this work a lot
faster and more comfortable. A demo (doing nothing, only
visualizing the idea) can be found at:
http://www.djini.de/Uploads/internationalisation.html

Please can someone implement something like this?

greetings and sorry for the horrible english,
elian


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [Intlwiki-l] internationalization

body:
>
> Hello,
>
> In the german wikipedia some people are doing a hell of work in
> internationalizing - linking to the english and esperanto wikipedia
> mainly. (If someone wants to help out:
> <http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Seiten%252C_die_nicht_ins_Englische_linken>
> <http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Seiten%252C_die_nicht_zu_Esperanto_linken>
> - it's more than 10 000 articles)
>
> Therefore I thought about a tool for it, which would make this work a lot
> faster and more comfortable. A demo (doing nothing, only
> visualizing the idea) can be found at:
> http://www.djini.de/Uploads/internationalisation.html
>
> Please can someone implement something like this?

I have been thinking about this kind of thing myself as well - at the moment
we have 2 Wikipedias where such links can be added, but in the near future
there will probably be 5 or 6. Having a simpler method than working in each
separately for adding links would be very much preferred.

However, I think that a bit more than this would still be good. In the first
place, the restriction to only 3 languages is quite strict in some cases, and
as soon as you want to get more in, the amount of work blows up.

Secondly, blindly inserting those in the page would cause disasters, IMO.
In my opinion the software should check for:
* Existence of the pages that are being included. If one of the pages does
  not exist, error message
* Whether the link already exists. If the link already exists, don't add
  another one
* Whether there already exists a link to another page in the same language.
  If it does, an 'are you sure?' question should be added.

In the third place, your choice of languages is rather small. Where are
Polish, Spanish and Dutch? And what about Norwegian, Portuguese, Swedish,
Danish, Italian, Catalan? Or all those smaller Wikipedias?

This is not to say the idea is a bad one, more to say what I would think would
be the best way to implement it.

---

For the long term, I think what we would like is to get those interlanguage
links out of the pages and instead have something like a separate Wiki where
all themes (or at least all themes that are on more than one Wikipedia) can
be found, with perhaps a stub of information but mostly an overview of all
pages on all Wikipedias that discuss the subject. The pages on the Wikipedias
would then be linked to one (or more) of these 'interwikipedia' pages, and get
information about what other language pages to link to there. Perhaps there
could also be information about what subjects are related.

But that's all something for the (far?) future - a tool like you propose would
not be as powerful, but a lot simpler to create.

Andre Engels


body:
On Saturday 21 September 2002 17:43, Toby Bartels wrote:
> Conceivably.
>
> I think that more tolerance should be given to such people
> than to vandals that clearly have no intention of being helpful.
> Such a person is more likely to be trying to do good.
> And as The Cunctator said, banning is a serious measure.
> IMO, it should be done when we've given up hope on somebody.
>
> In this particular case, you seem to have acted well, AFAICT.
> Each case needs to be looked at individually, after all.

I just checked the IP address. It belongs to ttd.es aka telefonica.es, and
looks up to 213-97-47-62.uc.nombres.ttd.es. Is that a DHCP or static address?
Anyone in Spain who can check?

phma


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Adam Williamson wrote:

>On Sat, 2002-09-21 at 05:04, Tom Parmenter wrote:
>
>>Both pediatrician and pedophile come from the Greek prefix paedo-
>>meaning "child".
>>
>
>This is why those of us living in *EDUCATED* countries still spell them
>"paediatrician" and "paedophile".
>
>;)
>
>I believe the root produced by "pedis", meaning "foot", is "podi" -
>"podiatrics" being stuff to do with feet, and "podiatrist" being someone
>who looks after your feet.
>
Foot doctoring is "podiatry" but "ped-" roots are just as common, e.g.
"pedal" and "pedicure".  The most interesting of the "pod" words though
is "antipodes".  The islands with this name, a part of New Zealand, are
about as far away on the globe as you can get from England.
 Ec


in_reply_to:
<20020921190516.MDHI8451.sccrmhc01.attbi.com@there> from Daniel
 Mayer at "Sep 21, 2002 12:09:29 pm"

body:
> Now if Andre can rerun the user edit stats again then maybe we can get a
> better breakdown of stats. Hopefully at least Larry is close to my count --
> if he isn't, then I must accept the fact that I really don't have a life
> outside of Wikiland. But then there still is the issue of UseMod deleting old
> histories, so we may never have an accurate tally.

I didn't need to do that, Brion already did it for me. And, no, Larry is not
coming close to you. In fact, he somehow managed to keep himself down to
number 200 on the list. You got 1000 extra edits behind your name, and it seems
that AxelBoldt is the only one who has significantly more than that (moving
him up from #4 to #2 on the list).

Wondering how it's possible that Larry scores so low, my first guess is that
the software considers his old edits as being anonymous. Either no user can
be connected to those edits, or 'LMS' is not recognized by the software as
being a user. It's not just Larry either - Jimbo only appears at #155 and
again at #196.

Andre


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Questionmark Links Considered Harmful

body:
--- Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> One design aspect that has always bothered me about
> Wikipedia and Usemod is
> the questionmark used to denote page creation:
>
>               page that does not exist?

You can change the default behaviour in your user
preferences. Check "Highlight links to empty topics",
and links to empty pages will be red, instead of the
little blue question mark.

An aside: I know it's been brought up before, but that
option is not clearly labeled.

Stephen G.

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New DSL Internet Access from SBC & Yahoo!
http://sbc.yahoo.com


from_name: Daniel Alston

subject: [Wikipedia-l] suggestion

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from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
One design aspect that has always bothered me about Wikipedia and Usemod is
the questionmark used to denote page creation:

              page that does not exist?

This is bad design for several reasons:

- It is non-obvious. A questionmark is associated with help and many sites
in fact use such notation to explain terms.
- It is easy to overlook. People not familiar with the way Wikipedia works
will probably tend to ignore it the first times they see it.
- It is ambigious. Since Wikipedia links are not underlined, it is not clear
whether the questionmark refers to the whole term or only part of it.

It's also annoying in print, but Wikipedia fortunately already hides it when
printing pages.

I encourage you to take a look at the design I have chosen for the
infoAnarchy wiki:

http://www.infoanarchy.org/wiki/

Here non-existent pages are linked to with red links on gray background.
This is non-ambigious, visible and intuitive, as I notice that many people
experiment with these links.

Now, there's of course a reason questionmarks were chosen for the original
design: accessibility. Questionmarks can be interpreted by text-to-speech
readers  so that blind and disabled users can interpret these links. Fortunately,
the W3C has done a lot of accessibility work and this scheme is now no
longer required. This page:

http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS-access

describes the features added to cascading style sheets specifically for
text-to-speech browsers. My suggestion would be a short beep before and after the
create-links (cue-before and cue-after properties). Note that these CSS
propreties are interpreted by many modern speech browsers:
http://www.w3.org/WAI/References/Browsing

This would be an easy way to improve usability for average users while not
sacrificing accessibility.

Regards,

Erik

--
Werden Sie mit uns zum "OnlineStar 2002"! Jetzt GMX w?hlen -
und tolle Preise absahnen! http://www.onlinestar.de


from_name: koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com

body:
>The question marks are ugly and uninformative. It "reads" as "Huh?"
>
>The highlight method is expressive and attractive.  It "reads" as
>"There should be an article on this, but there isn't yet."

I guess my aesthetic sensibilities aren't so refined.  I figured out on the first click what they meant, and can't recall thinking them ugly.  But, whatever.  :-)  Barring a bug, I wouldn't have any complaints if the default behavior were changed.

kq


from_name: Padreger at aol.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] html?

body:
Hi...if this message is in HTML please let me know.     adamw's comment came
as a surprise, as it is the only such complaint I have ever had.

thanks...Pat

In a message dated 09/21/2002 10:09:32 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
aw280 at cam.ac.uk writes:

> And have you considered switching to plain-text email? HTML mail serves
> no purpose beyond forcing people to read it how you choose to format it
> (rather than how they choose) and making it far larger than it has any
> need to be.
> --
> adamw
>

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from_name: Robert Graham Merkel

subject: [Wikipedia-l] beat Britannica!

body:
On Sun, 22 Sep 2002 07:40:52 Toby Bartels wrote:
> Pat wrote in part:
>
> >As for Toby's press release...it could state a GOAL of surpassing
> Britannica,
> >which might catch the attention of the big boys if for no reason than
> the
> >audacity of it.     Stranger things have happened!
>
> We already have issued such a press release, haven't we?
>

We did.  It was successful - a couple of stories got written about
it.

I'd like to suggest another occur at another milestone.
I realise the problems with the article number targets, but they
do serve as something useful to point to the media about.
If we did, we'd of course have to be careful *not* to claim that
"we have X number of articles, hence we're X/100,000 as good as
Britannica at this point".

--
------------------------------------------------------------
Robert Merkel	                           rgmerk at mira.net

Node FLY on Melbourne Wireless : http://www.wireless.org.au
------------------------------------------------------------


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Children's Wikipedia

body:
Daniel Alston wrote:

>There are other lnaguage wikipedias, so why not a childrens one?
>[Wikipedia-l]
>To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
>http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
Although there is commendable intent to this suggestion, the possible
problems make it unworkable.  This is without considering any possible
technical ones about which I claim complete ignorance.

What age level would this be aimed at, considering both content and
reading ability?

Who among us is competent to say what kind of vocabulary is readable by
children?

A single class in school often includes a wide variety of reading
abilities; how can we account for that?

How do we account for extreme variation in reading abilities between
countries, between states and even between school districts?

How do we account for children who are readers of English as a Second
Language?

How do we account for different views about the content that is
appropriate for children?  At one end of the spectrum are those people
who censor out anything questionable; at the other end are those who
feel that children should have everything available to them providing
there is appropriate guidance.

If there is a children's Wikipedia, what would prevent children from
visiting the regular Wikipedia?

For all the above my feeling is that a children's Wikipedia would be a
wasted effort, and a non-starter.

Eclecticology


subject: [Wikipedia-l] html?

body:
hmmm.......I don't know what to do about it.     I tried to talk to AOL but
to no avail.  Any suggestions?

Pat

>
>
>
> On Sun, Sep 22, 2002 at 08:41:43AM -0400, Padreger at aol.com wrote:
> >
> > Hi...if this message is in HTML please let me know.     adamw's comment
> came
> > as a surprise, as it is the only such complaint I have ever had.
>
> It's the same as the other one; in multipart/alternative form, with both
> plain text and HTML versions. Not as distasteful as pure HTML mail, but
> still bad in terms of bloated message size.
>
> --
> Khendon  (Jason Williams)
> khendon at khendon.org.uk    http://www.jasonandali.org.uk/jason/
> [Wikipedia-l]
> To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
> http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

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from_name: Tom Parmenter

body:
|From: Khendon <jason at jasonandali.org.uk>
|Date: Sun, 22 Sep 2002 13:33:45 +0100
|
|On Sun, Sep 22, 2002 at 02:24:20PM +0200, Erik Moeller wrote:
|> > You can change the default behaviour in your user
|> > preferences. Check "Highlight links to empty topics",
|> > and links to empty pages will be red, instead of the
|> > little blue question mark.
|>
|> Thanks, I didn't know that! Of course I still think this should be the
|> default..
|
|That'd get my vote, too...
|
|--
|Khendon  (Jason Williams)
|khendon at khendon.org.uk    http://www.jasonandali.org.uk/jason/

The question marks are ugly and uninformative. It "reads" as "Huh?"

The highlight method is expressive and attractive.  It "reads" as
"There should be an article on this, but there isn't yet."

Tom Parmenter
Ortolan88


subject: [Wikipedia-l] html?

body:
Padreger at aol.com wrote:

> hmmm.......I don't know what to do about it.     I tried to talk to
> AOL but to no avail.  Any suggestions?
>
> Pat
>
>> On Sun, Sep 22, 2002 at 08:41:43AM -0400, Padreger at aol.com wrote:
>> >
>> > Hi...if this message is in HTML please let me know.     adamw's
>> comment came
>> > as a surprise, as it is the only such complaint I have ever had.
>>
>> It's the same as the other one; in multipart/alternative form, with both
>> plain text and HTML versions. Not as distasteful as pure HTML mail, but
>> still bad in terms of bloated message size.
>>
>> --
>> Khendon  (Jason Williams)
>> khendon at khendon.org.uk    http://www.jasonandali.org.uk/jason/
>
Your earliest message had black on grey, and that was a bit annoying,
but your changes fixed that to my satisfaction.  The message to which I
am replying came through perfectly well.  Maybe Khendon is the one that
should be reviewing his settings.

Frankly I though AdamW was a little too aggressive in his approach on
the issue.  Your explanation about not knowing that it was happening is
very normal, and the simple explanation of the problem and how to fix it
is all it takes to correct it.

Anyway, welcome aboard, and I hope that the sometimes agressive approach
of a few of our colleagues doesn't scare you away.  I look forward to
seeing your contributions.

Eclecticology


from_name: Axel Boldt

body:
>
> The question marks are ugly and uninformative. It
> "reads" as "Huh?"
>
> The highlight method is expressive and attractive.
> It "reads" as
> "There should be an article on this, but there isn't
> yet."

I agree, the default behavior should be changed.
There's no question involved, so question marks are
illogical and out of place.

Axel

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Children's Wikipedia

body:
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from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] beat Britannica!

body:
On Sunday 22 September 2002 05:38 am, Robert Graham Merkel wrote:
> I'd like to suggest another occur at another milestone.
> I realise the problems with the article number targets, but they
> do serve as something useful to point to the media about.
> If we did, we'd of course have to be careful *not* to claim that
> "we have X number of articles, hence we're X/100,000 as good as
> Britannica at this point".

Exactly why I have mentioned several times now that we need to have a more
conservative definition of what we let the software detect as articles. There
seemed to be some consensus for this yet nothing has happened. I would write
the new code myself but I know exactly zippo about php and have zero time to
learn it.

We are already at 45,000+ "articles", which is way too close to the "50%"
mark for my taste. In order to preserve legitimacy, we should be
conservative in our total reporting of these numbers.

Living organisms requires a certain absolute minimum number of genes to be
considered to be alive at all (which is around 300, but for practical
purposes it is really a bit higher). I believe articles are similar and that
it is not really possible to have an encyclopedia article on any subject that
is less than 500 bytes (although for practical reasons this number is very
often, but not always, too low).

So can we at least add a 500 byte filter to the current article count spec?
As has already been suggested, we can also add a line to the stats page that
lists these "entries previously detected as being articles but are less than
500 bytes".

If we did have such a spec then there would be more reason than ever for
people to make sure sub-500 byte stubs are fleshed-out.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Questionmark Links Considered Harmful

body:
On Sunday 22 September 2002 05:38 am,  Erik Moeller wrote:
> One design aspect that has always bothered me about Wikipedia and Usemod is
> the questionmark used to denote page creation:
>
> ? ? ? ? ? ? ? page that does not exist?
>
> This is bad design for several reasons:
>
> - It is non-obvious. A questionmark is associated with help and many sites
> in fact use such notation to explain terms.
> - It is easy to overlook. People not familiar with the way Wikipedia works
> will probably tend to ignore it the first times they see it.
> - It is ambiguous. Since Wikipedia links are not underlined, it is not
> clear whether the questionmark refers to the whole term or only part of it.
>
> It's also annoying in print, but Wikipedia fortunately already hides it
> when printing pages.

Yep. I agree. I hate the default behavior and have been using the "highlight
empty links" option ever since I first noticed it months ago. The default for
all users and visitors should be set to this option. ?s are ugly and annoying
in the middle of sentences and much of the web-public are either too clueless
or too impatient when it comes to selecting the "printable page" feature.

> I encourage you to take a look at the design I have chosen for the
> infoAnarchy wiki:
>
> http://www.infoanarchy.org/wiki/
>
> Here non-existent pages are linked to with red links on gray background.
> This is non-ambiguous, visible and intuitive, as I notice that many people
> experiment with these links.

I like the red text idea as a default but the gray background may not be
needed here. Come to think of it, why not also have links to sub-500 byte
stubs display differently (maybe a yellowish-orange or another color that
works good on white - or whatever - backgrounds)? Truth in advertising is
always a worthwhile goal.

>....
> This would be an easy way to improve usability for average users while not
> sacrificing accessibility.
>
> Regards,
>
> Erik

The question mark thing has been bugging me for months and I'm glad you
brought it up.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] html?

body:
Eclecticology wrote:
>Anyway, welcome aboard, and I hope that the sometimes agressive approach
>of a few of our colleagues doesn't scare you away.  I look forward to
>seeing your contributions.

Yes, pat, welcome to the list.  :-)

kq


from_name: Khendon

body:
On Sun, Sep 22, 2002 at 02:24:20PM +0200, Erik Moeller wrote:
> > You can change the default behaviour in your user
> > preferences. Check "Highlight links to empty topics",
> > and links to empty pages will be red, instead of the
> > little blue question mark.
>
> Thanks, I didn't know that! Of course I still think this should be the
> default..

That'd get my vote, too...

--
Khendon  (Jason Williams)
khendon at khendon.org.uk    http://www.jasonandali.org.uk/jason/


subject: [Wikipedia-l] html?

body:
On Sun, Sep 22, 2002 at 08:41:43AM -0400, Padreger at aol.com wrote:
>
> Hi...if this message is in HTML please let me know.     adamw's comment came
> as a surprise, as it is the only such complaint I have ever had.

It's the same as the other one; in multipart/alternative form, with both
plain text and HTML versions. Not as distasteful as pure HTML mail, but
still bad in terms of bloated message size.

--
Khendon  (Jason Williams)
khendon at khendon.org.uk    http://www.jasonandali.org.uk/jason/


from_name: Pierre Abbat

body:
On Saturday 21 September 2002 06:24, Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Sat, 2002-09-21 at 05:04, Tom Parmenter wrote:
> > Both pediatrician and pedophile come from the Greek prefix paedo-
> > meaning "child".
>
> This is why those of us living in *EDUCATED* countries still spell them
> "paediatrician" and "paedophile".
>
> ;)
>
> I believe the root produced by "pedis", meaning "foot", is "podi" -
> "podiatrics" being stuff to do with feet, and "podiatrist" being someone
> who looks after your feet.

"pod-" and "ped-" both mean "foot", but in Greek and Latin respectively (the
nominatives are "pous" and "pes"). Neither has anything to do with "pais",
Greek for "child", or "paideia", "discipline, education, upbringing of a
child". The spelling "-paedia" comes from importing the Greek word into
Latin. "paediatrician" does not begin with the morpheme "paedia"; it's "pais"
plus "iatros", "doctor". Of course a Wikipediatrician...

phma


body:
> You can change the default behaviour in your user
> preferences. Check "Highlight links to empty topics",
> and links to empty pages will be red, instead of the
> little blue question mark.

Thanks, I didn't know that! Of course I still think this should be the
default..

Regards,

Erik

--
Werden Sie mit uns zum "OnlineStar 2002"! Jetzt GMX w?hlen -
und tolle Preise absahnen! http://www.onlinestar.de


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [Wikipedia-l] suggestion

body:
>There are other lnaguage wikipedias, so why not a childrens one?

This seems like a good idea when a child or group of children, perhaps with
the help of a teacher or parents decide to do it.  I doubt that the adult
crew at wikipedia should try it.

Fred


body:
On Sun, 2002-09-22 at 04:23, Ray Saintonge wrote:

> Foot doctoring is "podiatry" but "ped-" roots are just as common, e.g.

True...

> "pedal" and "pedicure".  The most interesting of the "pod" words though
> is "antipodes".  The islands with this name, a part of New Zealand, are
> about as far away on the globe as you can get from England.

Well, you often hear "antipodes" used in the UK just to refer to pretty
much the whole NZ / Australia system - if you say someone's "antipodean"
you're really saying "he's from NZ / Australia / somewhere round
there"...
--
adamw


subject: [Wikipedia-l] html?

body:
On Sun, 2002-09-22 at 14:22, Padreger at aol.com wrote:

> hmmm.......I don't know what to do about it.     I tried to talk to AOL but
> to no avail.  Any suggestions?

Quit using AOL?

;)

But seriously - can you not get AOL to give you the server names for
proper IMAP or POP3 email and then use a proper email client? Is that
not possible on AOL?
--
adamw


from_name: Vicki Rosenzweig

subject: [Wikipedia-l] difficulties of a kids' wikipedia

body:
I don't know if any of these would be show-stoppers, but they're points to
consider:

* Who counts as a "kid" for these purposes? I suspect 14-year-olds have more
in common--as Wikipedia users--with 44-year-olds than with 8-year-olds?\. If
someone wants to set up a Wikipedia based on age/reading level, they need to
define what that age and reading level are.

* It's a Wiki. That means *the users can edit it*. At a minimum, a kids'
wiki is
likely to be full of booger jokes and similar stuff that we'd immediately
edit out
on the English (and, I assume, the other language) Wikipedias. If this is
really
a kids' Wiki, can we-as-adults judge the proper content?

* I Am Not A Lawyer, but I believe there are real difficulties in having
even our
minimal-information registration for children under 13, since we're in the U.S.
There's nothing in theory to prevent an entirely-anonymous Wiki, but I suspect
it would change the environment.

Having thrown all this out, I'll note that I don't plan to work on this
project, if it
goes ahead, and my only *strong* feeling is that if it's going to happen,
it should have
its own defined namespace.
--
Vicki Rosenzweig
vr at redbird.org
http://www.redbird.org


subject: [Wikipedia-l] html?

body:
Padreger at aol.com wrote:

>
>
> hmmm.......I don't know what to do about it.     I tried to talk to
> AOL but to no avail.  Any suggestions?
>
> Pat

Look here; http://www.houghi.org
I am not sure of it usefull for AOL users.

Giskart


from_name: Stephen Gilbert

subject: [Wikipedia-l] html?

body:
--- Padreger at aol.com wrote:
>
>
> hmmm.......I don't know what to do about it.     I
> tried to talk to AOL but
> to no avail.  Any suggestions?
>
> Pat

I wouldn't worry too much about it, Pat. Another user
on this list tends to send HTML email as well, and it
isn't a huge problem. You might try asking AOL tech
support how to send only "plain text email". Getting
rid of AOL would also help, but that's a little more
extreme. :)

In any case, welcome to Wikipedia. I hope you have
fun!

Stephen Gilbert

__________________________________________________
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] html?

body:
--- Adam Williamson <aw280 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> On Sun, 2002-09-22 at 14:22, Padreger at aol.com wrote:
>
> > hmmm.......I don't know what to do about it.     I
> tried to talk to AOL but
> > to no avail.  Any suggestions?
>
> Quit using AOL?
>
> ;)
>
> But seriously - can you not get AOL to give you the
> server names for
> proper IMAP or POP3 email and then use a proper
> email client? Is that
> not possible on AOL?

It might be (does anyone know?), but perhaps Pat has
never delt with setting up an email client. Many
computer users don't know what IMAP and POP3 even
mean.

Stephen G.

__________________________________________________
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from_name: Jim McKeeth

body:
At 03:40 AM 9/21/2002 -0700, Toby Bartels wrote:
>Hardly anybody has a clue that we exist.
>Frankly, we're at the stage where "Any publicity is good publicity.".
>We could issue a press release claiming to surpass Britannic now,
>and it would be an obvious lie, but still good publicity in the end.

If there were a press release that said we surpassed Britannica and a whole
bunch of people came out and then someone makes a big fuss about how we
don't really pass Britannica then people will remember Wikipedia in a bad
way.  Then when 100,000 articles is released then everyone will say "Oh
yeah, I remember when they said they passed Britannica - what a
disappointment - I won't bother checking them out again."

You always want any publicity to be modest so when someone comes they will
be pleasantly surprised.  They will remember us as being more then they
expected which will keep us in a positive light.


from_name: Brion VIBBER

subject: [Wikitech-l] Why URLs that change content when loaded are bad

body:
Recently the image Great_Seal_of_the_United_States_(small).png vanished;
its image description page listed it as present and had a link to one
revision, but the image itself was gone.

After brief investigation, I found that the image file was still present
in the archives directory, and copied it back to where it belonged...
but there had also once been an earlier revision of the same file (a
non-transparent PNG), now missing both from the archive and the image page.

Grepping the access logs, it turned out that a spider had come across
the image description page and followed links to both revert and delete
the older revision of the image -- simply loading up these links caused
the wiki to move and permanently delete files.

Apparently telling it to both revert and delete the same revision
confused the poor wiki, and it ended up vanishing that revision entirely
_and_ leaving the newer one only in the archives.

As a workaround until a better way of handling these functions is
decided on, I've hacked Skin.php to not give the delete/revert links to
anonymous users (and therefore bots and spiders).

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Neil Harris

subject: [Wikipedia-l] beat Britannica!

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>If we did have such a spec then there would be more reason than ever for
>people to make sure sub-500 byte stubs are fleshed-out.
>
>-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
>
>
I agree completely: for some people the "game" of adding tiny stubs to
see the article count go up would be replaced by the "game" of enlarging
tiny stubs into 500-character mini-articles for the same reason.
Combined with the Wikipedia community as a quality-control mechanism,
this can only have a beneficial effect, leading to more development
towards useful content.

Neil


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Children's Wikipedia

body:
On Sun, Sep 22, 2002 at 11:59:23AM -0700, Daniel Alston wrote:
> The point is to have artciles that are not as sceintific. I eman i dotn know how many young children know what kelvin is? tehyw oudl be use to Celcius  or possibly faranheight. I dotn know how many of them are used to power noatation but not many i tell you.

The magic power of crossreferencing helps here, surely? Anybody who doesn't
know what Kelvin means can easily look it up...

--
Khendon  (Jason Williams)
khendon at khendon.org.uk    http://www.jasonandali.org.uk/jason/


from_name: Giskart

body:
Axel Boldt wrote:

>>The question marks are ugly and uninformative. It
>>"reads" as "Huh?"
>>
>>The highlight method is expressive and attractive.
>>It "reads" as
>>"There should be an article on this, but there isn't
>>yet."
>>
>>
>I agree, the default behavior should be changed.
>There's no question involved, so question marks are
>illogical and out of place.
>
>Axel
>
If  the Wikipedians of the English Wikipedia wants to change that, so be
it. But please do not change things like that on the other Wikipedia's
whitout advise of those Wikipedia's.  -- giskart


from_name: Larry Sanger

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Feature request

body:
Sorry if this is already in the hopper or (!) has already been done, but
it seems long overdue:

We need a way to compile, based on lists of links (I guess), "Recent
Changes" lists for all articles about a general topic.  I think this is
actually a very pressing need that should have been taken care of long
ago.  (For the record, I asked for it probably a year ago or more.)  The
idea is that we'd be able to maintain lists of all articles on a given
general subject, such as philosophy, and any changes made to any articles
on the subject would show up on the recent changes page for that subject.

Why do we need this?  At least one reason is it might help attract experts
to the project.  Just speaking for myself, I'm sure I'd spend more time on
Wikipedia if there were a philosophy recent changes page.  More
importantly, the recent changes page has *always* been huge.  It's now
more cumbersome than ever and makes it hard for people to focus their
attention, which would be a nice option.  Lack of the feature also makes
it hard to *monitor* goings-on in a general subject area.

With the relatively new mysql-driven software, this shouldn't be as
difficult as it might have been before.  One could compile personal lists
using the "watch this page" feature; what I suggest is that we have
publicly-editable and publicly-viewable lists of the same nature.

(Minor point: in a list of recent changes pages, I think there should be
automatically listed the number of topics that are listed under a given
subject.  That'd give us an idea of how much more work there is to be done
in adding to the list.)

I am not committed to any particular version of the feature, by the way.
I'd just like to see it done.  I don't want to have to wade through 5000
edits just to see all the recent philosophy edits.

Larry


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Feature request

body: P.S. I subscribed just so I could post that.  :-)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Feature request

body:
Larry Sanger wrote:
> We need a way to compile, based on lists of links (I guess), "Recent
> Changes" lists for all articles about a general topic.  I think this is
> actually a very pressing need that should have been taken care of long
> ago.  (For the record, I asked for it probably a year ago or more.)  The
> idea is that we'd be able to maintain lists of all articles on a given
> general subject, such as philosophy, and any changes made to any articles
> on the subject would show up on the recent changes page for that subject.

We already have a way to do exactly this: make a page that lists the
pages that you have decided are in the topic, and click "Watch links".
You get the interface of Recentchanges, showing only pages that are
linked to from the list.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)