from_name: GerardM

body:
Hoi,
At this moment there is a controversy around Debian and Firefox. The
dogmatic stance of Debian in this is enough to for me to consider Debian not
to be that great a model. In some aspects it is like our situation with the
WMF logos in Commons ..

Definitely this whole thing makes the Debian model a disputed model.

Thanks,
    Gerardm

http://ze-dinosaur.livejournal.com/12083.html

On 9/25/06, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>
> Daniel Mayer wrote:
> > --- Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> >
> >> I don't think that these special prerequisites for being on the Board
> >> are necessary.  The treasurer should not need to do the bookkeeping
> >> himself; we are big enough that we can hire someone to keep the books,
> >> and prepare preliminary financial statements.  The treasurer should be
> >> able to understand the statements and discuss them with the rest of the
> >> Board, and with an expanded Board it is certainly more likely that
> there
> >> would be a person who can do this.
> >>
> >
> > With all due respect, a board of a non-profit needs to know how a
> non-profit should be run in
> > order to perform their oversight and guidance roles. At least some board
> members also need to know
> > a fair deal about how to do professional fundraising; others need legal
> expertise since the
> > foundation is a legal entity; yet others need to know about finances so
> they could not be easily
> > misled by incorrect or fraudulent financial statements from staff (not
> that would ever happen, but
> > it is possible).
> >
> > There are some fairly serious legal, financial and privacy issues that
> the board (on the whole)
> > needs to have some training and experience to deal with. A group of
> people whose only
> > qualification is that they are popular community members, is not
> necessarily going to have the
> > needed skill-set. Of course, part of the board should consist of that,
> but not the whole board, or
> > even a majority of it. And, where possible, all board members should be
> from the community (plenty
> > of experts there).
> >
>
> I take the Debian model as a pretty good example of foundation
> governance in free-culture projects, and they don't seem to have found
> this necessary.  The board of Software in the Public Interest, the
> foundation that owns the Debian assets, is composed primarily of Debian
> developers, including mainly former project leads or major sub-project
> leads.  They do retain a legal advisor to sift through matters they
> aren't personally qualified to examine, but the counsel is not actually
> a board member.
>
> It doesn't seem to have become a major problem, and that organization
> has made SPI very well-respected in the community---certainly nobody
> thinks SPI is some corporate entity trying to hijack Debian or
> anything.  So I wonder why we must go a different route.
>
> -Mark
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


list: wikimedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

subject:
[Foundation-l] The Foundation is not a wiki (was Re: RfC: Key
	priorities for my work)


list: wikitech-l

from_name: brion at pobox.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki automated test run failure 2006-09-26

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

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

Passed 412 of 429 tests (96.04%) FAILED!


from_name: Mike O

subject: [Wikitech-l] Mediawiki table use

body:
Hi,

Is there a document somewhere that explains how the page, text, and revision tables are used to keep track of articles? I found the schema and that explains a lot as for field use, but I still don't understand what's happening under the hood.

Mike

--
_______________________________________________
Surf the Web in a faster, safer and easier way:
Download Opera 9 at http://www.opera.com

Powered by Outblaze


list: foundation-l

from_name: geni

body:
On 9/26/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> I agree. A public ballot is a BAD IDEA.
>

I'm not sure one way or the other. I just want to have the option on
the table (more I want to know if I will have it on the table or not.

> Minimum suffrage requirements would be good too.

They exitisted last time (which was what the near edit war was about)

--
geni


from_name: oscar

body:
On 9/25/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
> Angela wrote:
> > I'm not saying the Board should monitor everything. I'm saying they
> > should never be denied access to information when they need it. There
> > is no justification for the current situation when Board members are
> > explicity denied the right to read private wikis.
>
> Just for the record, I disagree strongly with the idea that Board
> members are explicitly denied the right to read private wikis.  Any wiki
> Angela, or any other board member, wants access to, they have my full
> backing to just get it done.

i have another, more general, question, as to the ''who has access to
what'':

who is responsible for keeping track of the registration of the status of
all these privileges: the community? chapters? the board? the office?

in case of the community: then access lists in general should be published
on the metawiki of all more or less ''private platforms'' that can be
accessed on our servers: of private wikis, otrs including queues, mailing
lists, mailing list passwords, masterpasswords etcetera (what did i
forget?), including dates of the passwords given and changed, and access
''granted since'', ''revoked on''. afaik such pages exist but are possibly
neither up to date nor complete.

in case this is not left to the community, this info could also be collected
somewhere more private: if not in public, then nevertheless preferrably in a
publically known secure and trusted place, such as the office, or more
decentralized like in the offices of chapters perhaps?

with our growth continuing, this may very well prove to be a wise thing to
not postpone now, from an administrative point of view.

best,
oscar


subject: [Foundation-l] Oscars photographer?

body:
nice going, at first i mistook it for you trying to find someone to take my
picture :-P

On 9/26/06, Nicholas Moreau <nicholasmoreau at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> <foundation-l at wikimedia.org>Are you interested in red carpet photography,
> or reporting on the Academy Awards? I'm trying to get one reporter for
> Wikinews, and one photographer for Wikimedia Commons/Wikinews/Wikipedia
> into
> the whole red carpet/backstage stuff. Press credentials for the Oscars are
> being released '''now''', so we need to act fast.
>
> I'm looking for someone that is clearly reliable, if not skilled with the
> camera. Being an entertainment buff with a good memory for famous faces is
> a
> big plus (so you don't miss stars, and shoot photos of random people), and
> living in or around California, particularly in or around Los Angeles are
> also big pluses. The photographer is my main concern, the reporter is less
> critical
>
> Post your reply info and a sample <gallery> of four photos, at least one
> has
> to be of a human, and at least one has to have been taken in natural
> light,
> and at least one photo has to have been taken in artificial light. Don't
> want to upload to Wikipedia? Email me the samples. Submit your interest or
> questions to http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/user_talk:zanimum
> <foundation-l at wikimedia.org>Nick
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


subject: [Foundation-l] Oscars photographer?


from_name: Łukasz Garczewski

subject: [Foundation-l] 5th Birthday of the Polish Wikipedia

body:
[Argh... Reposting this, since the first mail apparently didn't reach
the list... :/]

Dear All,
a quick report from the 5th Birthday of the Polish Wikipedia, which
took place last Saturday.

We met at the Warsaw School of Economics around 5 p.m. After a brief
introduction by Justyna (Creative Commons Poland) Jimbo gave his talk
on Wikipedia and wikis in general, Polish Wikipedia and Wikia Poland.
After that there was a session of questions and answers (a bit too
long, perhaps, but quite interesting at times even to a long time
Wikipedian such as myself).

Next, we move to two very brief presentations by Wikimedia Poland
members: Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz outlined plwiki's first days and
history, I talked a bit about the future (as in the future of the
project and the future moves and goals of WMPL).

After that it was time to... party! We had a beautiful cake (see [1],
[2]) and champagne (see [3]). There was time for a few interviews and
some socializing. We also sung "Sto lat" ("Happy birthday").

Later we moved to a nearby pub for even more socializing, this time
without the media. You know, the usual geeky gathering - linux jokes,
the latest trolls on wikipl and all that stuff wikipedians like to
chat about. Alek (CCPL) even got Jimbo to drink something we call
"w?ciek?y pies" (Polish for "rabid dog" - vodka with raspberry juice).
Don't worry, Jimmy survived it and only coughed for a little while. ;)

It was a very nice and cheerful event. The only downside was
attendance - we had thought more people would come. I can only hope that
next year there will be more interest.

[1] *The* Cake
<http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:5._urodziny_polskiej_Wikipedii_-_Wikitort_01.JPG>
[2] Jimbo with *The* Cake
<http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:5._urodziny_polskiej_Wikipedii_-_Jimbo_Wales_%28krojenie_tortu%29_01.JPG>
[3] Champagne... and a lot of it
<http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:5._urodziny_polskiej_Wikipedii_-_Szampany.JPG>
[4] Wikimedians (and a few CC guys and gals ;))
<http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Pi%C4%85te_urodziny_pl_wiki_rodzina_wikipedyst%C3%B3w.jpg>

More photos here:
<http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/5th_birthday_of_Polish_Wikipedia>

--
Lucas "TOR" Garczewski
President of Wikimedia Poland


from_name: Ragib Hasan

subject:
[Foundation-l] Bengali Wikipedia Reaches 10,
	000 articles: 50th language to do so!

body:
Hi Everyone,
Bengali Wikipedia (http://bn.wikipedia.org ) has reached the milestone
of 10,000 articles today. This is the 50th language to reach the
milestone, and the 2nd language from South Asia to do so.

Bengali is spoken by almost 220-250 million people, making it the 7th
largest language in terms of total speakers. Bengali Wikipedia has
seen a growth from 500 articles in March 2006 to 10,000 as of now.

There are now 20-25 active editors who edit Bengali wikipedia on a
regular basis. These editors are mainly from Bangladesh, and also from
West Bengal (India). The main thrust has been the Bangladesh Open
Source Network (BDOsn), and the Bangla Wiki project, which has raised
awareness, involved the media, and recruited more editors to work on
Bengali Wikipedia.

We also have article improvement projects, aiming at having at least
1000 or so Good articles (similar to English wikipedia) by May 2007.

Thanks

Ragib

bn:User:Ragib
en:User:Ragib

--
Ragib Hasan
PhD Student
Dept of Computer Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
201 N Goodwin Avenue
Urbana IL 61801

Website:
http://www.ragibhasan.com
http://netfiles.uiuc.edu/rhasan/www


list: wikipedia-l

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Bengali Wikipedia Reaches 10,
	000 articles: 50th language to do so!


from_name: Andrew Leonard

subject: [Foundation-l] Asturian page for Donations is in Spanish

body:
OTRS just got a notice about this - the Asturian page linked from the
Donations page (http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donativos) has
identical text to the Spanish page
(http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donaciones), and my untrained eye
says that the text is in Spanish.

- Andrew


from_name: Birgitte SB

subject:
[Foundation-l] [Wikimediauk-l] Royal Society archives online
	until December

body:
Someone left a note on Wikisource about these going
offline in December.  I know at least one editor has
begun downloading these.  If anyone would like to
help, I am sure we could use it.  Of course don't get
yourself in trouble if you fall under UK legal
jurisitiction.

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Scriptorium#Royal_Society_Journals_free_only_until_December

Birgitte SB

--- David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 26/09/06, James Hardy <wikimediauk at weeb.biz>
> wrote:
>
> > Uploading the original PDFs to a publicly
> accessable website would most
> > likely be a copyright violation, so we wouldn't
> want to do that anyway.
>
>
> In the UK, not in the US.
>
>
> > Another question is what to do about about
> diagrams (assuming that there are
> > some), I would imagine that if the the RS claims
> copyright of the scans we
> > can't just extract them and use them. Simple ones
> I imagine we can (and
> > probably should) convert to SVG, but for more
> detailed ones, that could be
> > tricky.
>
>
> So no-one in the UK should do this, but someone in
> the US may say "you
> claim you own a scan of a diagram from 1720 and
> no-one else can touch
> it? O rly. Sue and be damned." This is something we
> would need to be
> *quite* clear that we were or were not going to say
> ahead of time, of
> course.
>
> (Though put like that, it looks very like the
> National Portrait
> Gallery issue. Have they ceased the vague attempts
> at legal
> intimidation after Jimbo indicated Wikimedia's
> attitude would in fact
> be "sue and be damned"?)
>
> cc: to foundation-l on this issue.
>
>
> - d.
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

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


from_name: daniwo59 at aol.com

subject: [Foundation-l] Conflict of interest policy

body: I have already signed.


body: I have already signed.


list: wikien-l

from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] Process wonkery

references:
<s7lah2pihqs0vqiecpaifbaphj43urt5a5@4ax.com>
	<fbad4e140609230946g1506a024g26e2447a3c584abb@mail.gmail.com>
	<47683e960609241202h58eebc8fua913fdc8802ae10c@mail.gmail.com>
	<ef754g$jmb$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
On 24/09/06, Constantine Evans <constantine at evanslabs.org> wrote:

> Note that notability is not the policy. Verifiability is. Even if a
> school is notable "by default", as some claim, if there is no verifiable
> information about it, there should be no article.

Correct.

"I can prove, by breathtaking querulousness, that the school in my
front room fit that rule."
"Well done. Cookie for you! Third-party verifiability? No? So sad."

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Schools, notability, inclusionism, deletionism, etc.

body:
On 25/09/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:

> There will have to be a line short of "all things that have any record
> claiming they may be a school of some sort".
> The first place that line seems logically to go, on first inspection, is
> "Paid teachers".

Third-party verifiability would be the first line.

- d.


body:
On 25/09/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:

> The elections for arbcom will most likely be run again this year
> precisely as last year.

eegh. That's really horrible.

- d.


from_name: Peter Danenberg

subject: [Wikitech-l] wikitex (was: is texvc still under development?)

references:
<87zmcnxa1k.fsf@riemann.quim.ucm.es>
	<DEA8CE87-133F-41C8-8442-2AA9EC542A01@gmail.com>
	<87hcyuyhu8.fsf_-_@riemann.quim.ucm.es>

body:
> Do you know about is wikitex, which also does not seem to be too
> active..

     That's  just  the  organic  cadence of development; and
yes: WikiTeX can do equation numbering (with a little hack).

Best, Peter


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Extension to [[MediaWiki:Bad image list]]

body:
On 26/09/06, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> In fact, I've been thinking about writing
> some general guidelines for template performance optimisation that editors
> can follow. Editors can do quite a lot for the performance of the site, if
> their efforts are properly informed. I've even edited articles myself, for
> the sole purpose of making them render faster. Others could do the same.

Please make them vaguer than you might, to discourage robotic zealotry
from people who see "guideline" and think "COMMAND FROM ON HIGH. MUST
IMPLEMENT! PART OF THE COMPLETE PROCESS FOR EVERYTHING!!"

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Process wonkery

body:
On 26/09/06, Mark Gallagher <m.g.gallagher at student.canberra.edu.au> wrote:

> > Note that notability is not the policy. Verifiability is. Even if a
> > school is notable "by default", as some claim, if there is no
> > verifiable information about it, there should be no article.

> Fuck policy.  Get into the habit of saying "notability is not the basis
> for my argument", rather than quoting policy as if it's the Last Word.

Or start using the word 'process' for the variety of policy that's
encrusted process. Verifiability is a hard policy of en:wp and one of
the very few to be kept in your head while working.

> You're right either way, but by following the Sensible Route instead of
> the Process Wonk Route you get the prestigious Fuddlemark Thumbs Up Of
> Approval, and that's worth its weight in gold!

This is important also, of course.

(WP:RFFTUOA?)

- d.


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] is texvc still under development?

body:
David Harvey wrote:
> Blahtex has always done PNG export. It's much faster than texvc
> because it uses dvipng instead of the slower imagemagick/dvips
> pipeline.

texvc currently uses dvipng as well.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Foundation-l] Proposal re: sep11.wikipedia.org

body:
On 9/25/06, Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:
> BTW, offers have been made in the past to privately host this content
> (the sep11.wikipedia) but those offers are all more than a year old and
> circumstances have indeed changed.  I'm not exactly sure where to go
> with it, but closing it down completely just doesn't seem right to me.
>  I do support the "freeze" on the database, as I think the effort to add
> substantial quantities of content has essentially run its course.

I don't think sep11.wikipedia.org falls within the mission of the WMF,
or ever did. It has been perceived, and mentioned, as a "sister
project," but really is not. Cleaning it up and moving it to a
dedicated domain name, then abandoning the relationship with the WMF
does not delete the history; to the contrary, it shows our dedication
to preserving even off-topic content of historical interset. A
volunteer has now been found and a dedicated domain name has been
registered for this purpose.

This proposed process reflects many many past discussions on the
matter and I'd like to close it relatively quickly now.
--
Peace & Love,
Erik

Member, Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees

DISCLAIMER: Unless otherwise stated, all views or opinions expressed
in this message are solely my own and do not represent an official
position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.


from_name: Steve Summit

subject: [Wikitech-l] new dumps ?

body:
Brion wrote:
> FlaBot wrote:
>> i am waiting for new Dumps ? What happend to the dump-batch ?
>
> Waiting for Mark to confirm that the machines will not be shut down to be
> moved from one rack to another during the dump run.

And in case no one's made the observation: after just a couple
of initial hiccups (affecting, not surprisingly, only the
biggest wikis), it seems to be working very well, with all
dumps successfully up-to-date, on a cycle of just a few days.
http://download.wikimedia.org/ is a very pretty picture now.
Well done!


from_name: Alphax (Wikipedia email)

subject:
[Foundation-l] The Foundation is not a wiki (was Re: RfC: Key
 priorities for my work)

body:
geni wrote:
> On 9/25/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>> The elections for arbcom will most likely be run again this year
>> precisely as last year.
>>
>
> You want to use the system that people kept complaining about last
> year? The one that was literaly finalised in the hours leading up to
> the election under edit war conditions?
>
> So those on en can't even consider useing special:boardvote?
>

I agree. A public ballot is a BAD IDEA.

>
> The elections will not be the same whatever. To start with I'm gonna
> try and get minium candidate requirements in.
>

Minimum suffrage requirements would be good too.

> Incerdentaly how are you justifying your involvement this time?
>

He doesn't have to. He's Jimbo and we accept that he is wise enough to
Do The Right Thing.

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

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 569 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
Url : http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/attachments/20060926/1061c87d/attachment.pgp


body:
geni wrote:
> On 9/25/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>> The elections for arbcom will most likely be run again this year
>> precisely as last year.
>>
>
> You want to use the system that people kept complaining about last
> year? The one that was literaly finalised in the hours leading up to
> the election under edit war conditions?
>
> So those on en can't even consider useing special:boardvote?
>

I agree. A public ballot is a BAD IDEA.

>
> The elections will not be the same whatever. To start with I'm gonna
> try and get minium candidate requirements in.
>

Minimum suffrage requirements would be good too.

> Incerdentaly how are you justifying your involvement this time?
>

He doesn't have to. He's Jimbo and we accept that he is wise enough to
Do The Right Thing.

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

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 569 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
Url : http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/attachments/20060926/1061c87d/attachment-0001.pgp


body:
geni wrote:
> On 9/25/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>> The elections for arbcom will most likely be run again this year
>> precisely as last year.
>>
>
> You want to use the system that people kept complaining about last
> year? The one that was literaly finalised in the hours leading up to
> the election under edit war conditions?
>
> So those on en can't even consider useing special:boardvote?
>

I agree. A public ballot is a BAD IDEA.

>
> The elections will not be the same whatever. To start with I'm gonna
> try and get minium candidate requirements in.
>

Minimum suffrage requirements would be good too.

> Incerdentaly how are you justifying your involvement this time?
>

He doesn't have to. He's Jimbo and we accept that he is wise enough to
Do The Right Thing.

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

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 569 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/attachments/20060926/1061c87d/attachment.pgp>


body:
geni wrote:
> On 9/25/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>> The elections for arbcom will most likely be run again this year
>> precisely as last year.
>>
>
> You want to use the system that people kept complaining about last
> year? The one that was literaly finalised in the hours leading up to
> the election under edit war conditions?
>
> So those on en can't even consider useing special:boardvote?
>

I agree. A public ballot is a BAD IDEA.

>
> The elections will not be the same whatever. To start with I'm gonna
> try and get minium candidate requirements in.
>

Minimum suffrage requirements would be good too.

> Incerdentaly how are you justifying your involvement this time?
>

He doesn't have to. He's Jimbo and we accept that he is wise enough to
Do The Right Thing.

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

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 569 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/attachments/20060926/1061c87d/attachment-0001.pgp>


from_name: effe iets anders

subject: [Foundation-l] Oscars photographer?

body:
Hehehe, same here :) Just that you always claim that oscar should be
with a small o, and the Oscars should be with a big O ;-)

2006/9/26, oscar <oscar.wiki at gmail.com>:
> nice going, at first i mistook it for you trying to find someone to take my
> picture :-P
>
> On 9/26/06, Nicholas Moreau <nicholasmoreau at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > <foundation-l at wikimedia.org>Are you interested in red carpet photography,
> > or reporting on the Academy Awards? I'm trying to get one reporter for
> > Wikinews, and one photographer for Wikimedia Commons/Wikinews/Wikipedia
> > into
> > the whole red carpet/backstage stuff. Press credentials for the Oscars are
> > being released '''now''', so we need to act fast.
> >
> > I'm looking for someone that is clearly reliable, if not skilled with the
> > camera. Being an entertainment buff with a good memory for famous faces is
> > a
> > big plus (so you don't miss stars, and shoot photos of random people), and
> > living in or around California, particularly in or around Los Angeles are
> > also big pluses. The photographer is my main concern, the reporter is less
> > critical
> >
> > Post your reply info and a sample <gallery> of four photos, at least one
> > has
> > to be of a human, and at least one has to have been taken in natural
> > light,
> > and at least one photo has to have been taken in artificial light. Don't
> > want to upload to Wikipedia? Email me the samples. Submit your interest or
> > questions to http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/user_talk:zanimum
> > <foundation-l at wikimedia.org>Nick
> > _______________________________________________
> > foundation-l mailing list
> > foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


subject: [Foundation-l] Oscars photographer?


from_name: Tim Starling

body:
Yoni Weiden wrote:
> 10KB Limit?
> 1) How do I know when I have reached the limit?

Paste it into a text editor. But it's not a limit, it's a recommendation.
I'm working on the (naive?) assumption that sysops care about performance too.

> 2) Why is the limit so small - the link-black-list is way over 10KB, or so I
> believe.

It's stored in the message cache, a single blob containing pretty much
everything in the MediaWiki namespace. This blob is loaded and unserialized
on every request. Currently on enwiki it is about 280KB. I wouldn't want to
see this single feature take up a significant proportion of it.

Also there's the fact that this is implemented on the page view side, so
it's called much more often than the spam blacklist, which only filters
saves. The spam blacklist would be far too slow to work on the parser side.
wfIsBadImage is currently profiling at 0.8ms per call, wfSpamBlacklistFilter
is taking 505ms per call (it's very badly optimised at the moment).

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Ivan Krstić

body:
Fredrik Johansson wrote:
> Hopefully texvc will be replaced by Blahtex (http://www.blahtex.org/).
> Please help bug David Harvey to continue working on it :-)

It's never been a problem of David not wanting to continue to work on
it, but a problem of the developers still not finding time to look at
enabling blahtex on WM sites, even after months of requests for review
by a number of people. Developers tend to be over-constrained and focus
on keeping the site running, which causes non-critical enhancements to
fall by the wayside more often than not.

Uwe Brauer wrote:
> But blahtex uses mathml exclusively no?

No, it should do PNG export any day now (maybe already does -- David?).

--
Ivan Krsti? <krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> | GPG: 0x147C722D


from_name: Anthere

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> Anthere wrote:
> [snip]
>
>>This policy applies to the Foundation?s board members, officers, and
>>executives.
>>
>>I will consequently ask that
>>* all 5 board members
>>* all staff members
>
>
> Does this include Danny, me, Tim, and Mark? We're staff, but not afaik officers
> or executives in that sense.
>
> The pledge talks about being a member of the board of trustees. Have we been
> promoted? ;)
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Yup. Overnight. We needed to expand the board :-)

Yeah, it is no perfect as of today. The mention of staff and officers
was added at the last moment, and we apparently did not re-re-read the
whole text well. Original mention was board+manager. Manager being an
awfully fluttery word...
I'll list all the little points to be fixed and will propose an minor
update soon (before 45 days :-)).

For now, spirit of the law please.
Pledge and questionnaire for board members.
Questionnaire for staff (Brad, Brion, Mark, Tim, Danny and whoever else
there is as of today)
Replace "member of the board of the Foundation" by "employee of the
Foundation".

ant


from_name: David Harvey

references:
<87zmcnxa1k.fsf@riemann.quim.ucm.es>	<3d0cebfb0609260449o35894efaq58fa94e6e2431ee4@mail.gmail.com>
	<878xk6ycy6.fsf@riemann.quim.ucm.es>
	<45192F4E.3060304@solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu>

body:
On Sep 26, 2006, at 9:46 AM, Ivan Krsti? wrote:

> Fredrik Johansson wrote:
>> Hopefully texvc will be replaced by Blahtex (http://
>> www.blahtex.org/).
>> Please help bug David Harvey to continue working on it :-)
>
> It's never been a problem of David not wanting to continue to work on
> it, but a problem of the developers still not finding time to look at
> enabling blahtex on WM sites, even after months of requests for review
> by a number of people. Developers tend to be over-constrained and
> focus
> on keeping the site running, which causes non-critical enhancements to
> fall by the wayside more often than not.
>
> Uwe Brauer wrote:
>> But blahtex uses mathml exclusively no?
>
> No, it should do PNG export any day now (maybe already does --
> David?).

Blahtex has always done PNG export. It's much faster than texvc
because it uses dvipng instead of the slower imagemagick/dvips
pipeline. It also knows how to get vertical alignment of the PNGs
correct (aligning the baseline), which does wonders for the final
visual quality. And it knows plenty of tex/latex/amslatex commands
that texvc doesn't know. And it can do Cyrillic and Japanese (these
were test cases for more general multi-script support). So I think
its PNG support is *much* better than that of texvc.

I am not planning on maintaining the C++ version of blahtex any more.
I am about halfway through a port to Python. It will be almost 100%
compatible in terms of command line input/output, so it should be a
drop-in replacement for the C++ version.

However, I haven't been working seriously on blahtex for a while now.
I have other projects going on, and a life as well. It's encouraging
to me to hear a few people showing some interest, perhaps this will
make me spend more time on it again :-)

David


subject: [Foundation-l] Accelerating chapter creation

body:
Wikimedia projects exist in over 100 languages. Many of those
languages are spoken in countries which do not have chapters yet.

Would it be a worthwhile experiment, for every wiki that is in a
language without a chapter in the country/countries where it is
spoken, to put a note in the _registered user_ site notice, such as:

 "If you are interested in starting a Wikimedia Foundation chapter in
  [country/countries], please go to [page on Meta]"?

The process could be similar to the Wikinews language creation
process, i.e., there would have to be a minimum number of supporters,
who might also have to do some grunt work to prove commitment. Then
they would get their own chapter mailing list.

Unregistered readers would not see this notice.

We might define some preconditions for this:

1) Single login to make it easier to switch over to Meta
2) Logo / trademark agreements fully sorted out with existing chapters
3) Best practices document in place
4) Dismissable site notice so users won't be permanently annoyed by it.

But in general, do you think it's an idea worth exploring?

--
Peace & Love,
Erik

Member, Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees

DISCLAIMER: Unless otherwise stated, all views or opinions expressed
in this message are solely my own and do not represent an official
position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.


from_name: George Herbert

subject: [WikiEN-l] Process wonkery

body:
On 9/26/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 26/09/06, Zoney <zoney.ie at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Surely the thing to do is to concatenate entries of a related nature?
> Here
> > in Ireland even reasonably small towns have several schools. Surely a
> single
> > article can cover all the schools, with the individual schools getting
> their
> > own articles if there is too much content for that parent article? If
> there
> > are details added to Wikipedia for just one or two schools in an area,
> > surely they can be added to a related more important article such as the
> > town or area?
>
>
> Oh, yeah. If the name isn't a redirect to a list of schools, it could
> be a redirect to the town. I believe there's quite a bit of this
> already.
>
> There's a lot of ardent school includeletionists, but they're
> thrashing out the problem and hopefully wearying of the debate and
> editing other articles ;-)
>
>
> - d.
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

There would be nothing wrong, in my opinion, with district-by-district, or
town-by-town, summary articles covering a set of schools for schools which
aren't by themselves entirely completely highly notable.  Including schools
info in a small town's main article would also be a fine solution for
smaller schools.  A forest of redirects from a standardized school name
format location to be named later to the town articles would work.

Perhaps, starting with a "Schools of (insert location name)" set of articles
for each of the US city/town/CDP articles?

Perhaps, a workable policy that if a school article would truly be not much
more than a stub, that it should live in a section of such a summary
article, and that once it is established that it has sufficient notable
characteristics that the section grows to the size that it would make a
valid standalone article, it can be separated at that time?

I am not wedded to the idea of needing a separate article for each and every
school in the US.  I do think that the info should be included here,
somewhere.  A realistic policy that balances including the info and using
fairly normal article size management process would be fine.  But it would
be terrible to do it in a messy hodgepodge manner; we should identify a
pattern and establish a guideline, if that's going to happen.

--
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com


body:
On 26/09/06, James Hardy <wikimediauk at weeb.biz> wrote:

> Uploading the original PDFs to a publicly accessable website would most
> likely be a copyright violation, so we wouldn't want to do that anyway.

In the UK, not in the US.

> Another question is what to do about about diagrams (assuming that there are
> some), I would imagine that if the the RS claims copyright of the scans we
> can't just extract them and use them. Simple ones I imagine we can (and
> probably should) convert to SVG, but for more detailed ones, that could be
> tricky.

So no-one in the UK should do this, but someone in the US may say "you
claim you own a scan of a diagram from 1720 and no-one else can touch
it? O rly. Sue and be damned." This is something we would need to be
*quite* clear that we were or were not going to say ahead of time, of
course.

(Though put like that, it looks very like the National Portrait
Gallery issue. Have they ceased the vague attempts at legal
intimidation after Jimbo indicated Wikimedia's attitude would in fact
be "sue and be damned"?)

cc: to foundation-l on this issue.

- d.


body:
On 26/09/06, effe iets anders <effeietsanders at gmail.com> wrote:

> Not
> because they felt that the foundation apeprently felt that every wiki
> should have at least one chapter,

I thought the reason for chapters was because tax deductibility tends
to work in units of national borders - if UK donors could get
deductibility for donations to the WMF in the US, I doubt anyone would
have bothered with Wikimedia UK. Presumably I am well behind on
current thinking.

- d.


body:
On 9/25/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 25/09/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > There will have to be a line short of "all things that have any record
> > claiming they may be a school of some sort".
> > The first place that line seems logically to go, on first inspection, is
> > "Paid teachers".
>
>
> Third-party verifiability would be the first line.
>
>
> - d.
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

In the US, due to the existing Department of Education (I started to type
DOE and fortunately stopped myself) and related databases, I can verify the
existence of all the schools in the country as of 2 years ago, and in most
cases as of the beginning of this last school year.

--
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com


from_name: Tomasz Ganicz

body:
2006/9/26, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org>:
> Wikimedia projects exist in over 100 languages. Many of those
> languages are spoken in countries which do not have chapters yet.
>
> Would it be a worthwhile experiment, for every wiki that is in a
> language without a chapter in the country/countries where it is
> spoken, to put a note in the _registered user_ site notice, such as:
>
>  "If you are interested in starting a Wikimedia Foundation chapter in
>   [country/countries], please go to [page on Meta]"?
>
> The process could be similar to the Wikinews language creation
> process, i.e., there would have to be a minimum number of supporters,
> who might also have to do some grunt work to prove commitment. Then
> they would get their own chapter mailing list.
>
> Unregistered readers would not see this notice.
>
> We might define some preconditions for this:
>
> 1) Single login to make it easier to switch over to Meta
> 2) Logo / trademark agreements fully sorted out with existing chapters
> 3) Best practices document in place
> 4) Dismissable site notice so users won't be permanently annoyed by it.
>
> But in general, do you think it's an idea worth exploring?
>
> --
> Peace & Love,
> Erik
>

The problem is that chapters are rather country oriented than language
oriented. There is one very multiligual chapter (Swiss) and you may
consider UK and Candian chapters as multilingual as well. On the other
hand why not to create chapter in New Zeeland or South Africa? So you
should put that notice on English Wikipedia as well.

--
Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz
http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek
http://www.poli.toya.net.pl
http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html


body:
On 9/26/06, Tomasz Ganicz <polimerek at gmail.com> wrote:
> The problem is that chapters are rather country oriented than language
> oriented. There is one very multiligual chapter (Swiss) and you may
> consider UK and Candian chapters as multilingual as well. On the other
> hand why not to create chapter in New Zeeland or South Africa? So you
> should put that notice on English Wikipedia as well.

I actually wouldn't have a problem with that, if the notice is
dismissable and only shown until a "seed group" of people has been
found.
--
Peace & Love,
Erik

Member, Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees

DISCLAIMER: Unless otherwise stated, all views or opinions expressed
in this message are solely my own and do not represent an official
position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.


body:
On 9/26/06, Aphaia <aphaia at gmail.com> wrote:
> Not always. If a wiki powered by MediaWiki lacks anonnotice, both
> unregistered users and registered get the same message put on
> [[MediaWiki:Sitenotice]].
> My sketchy touch-n-go during the Election period suggested fourtyeight
> of fiftith (so presumably 95 or -6% of our all wikis) of our projects
> provide the same message both to anon and registered.

That's good to know.

> Another considerable thing is those meta-newcomers may need the
> description what the chapter is and is not. [[m:Wikimedia Japan]]
> seemed to be a horrible example what unknowledgeable & not involved
> editors can think out. An anon created this page and later registered
> him- or herself as "Wikimedian" (in kana). Until today, most sane and
> involved people of Japanese speaking projects seem to avoid being
> involved to that discussion.

Absolutely. I think we need to move much further along in the process
of defining both the role of the Foundation and its Chapters before
trying such an experiment.
--
Peace & Love,
Erik

Member, Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees

DISCLAIMER: Unless otherwise stated, all views or opinions expressed
in this message are solely my own and do not represent an official
position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.


from_name: Mark Ryan

body:
Last I heard, the bad image list only had autofellatio on it. Do we
really expect the list to go beyond 10Kb in the near future? So long
as users don't restrict their user page images to just their user
page, and fair use images don't get lumped under it, I can't see it
growing too much.

~Mark Ryan


references:
<87zmcnxa1k.fsf@riemann.quim.ucm.es> <"3d0cebfb0609260449o35894ef
	aq58fa94e6e2431ee4"@mail.gmail.com>
	<878xk6ycy6.fsf@riemann.quim.ucm.es>
	<45192F4E.3060304@solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu>
	<BB490267-A74C-4E23-97BD-B82904A2168D@math.harvard.edu>
	<877izqn1sf.fsf@riemann.quim.ucm.es>

body:
On Sep 26, 2006, at 10:24 AM, Uwe Brauer wrote:

> it is really a pity that there at least 3 programs floating around:
>
>     -  Texvc
>
>     -  Blatex
>
>     -  Wikitex
>
> To return to my original question, can blahtex easily deal with
> numeration/references and labels?

No. It has no support. I don't plan any support either. The
difficulty is the following: the way that image caching is designed
in mediawiki, the PNG output must depend only on the input *for that
single equation*. So for example, if you have a numbered equation,
and then add another equation *before* that one, then the numbering
on the later equation must change. This makes caching images much
more difficult, because for example the input "x = y \label{eq:my-
equation}" could correspond to two different images on two different
pages. There are various ways you could get around this, but all
would require a lot more work, and numerous changes to mediawiki
itself which I'm not prepared to dive into.

Blahtex is designed to render one equation at a time, no more, no
less. The problem of numbering equations is more a problem of
*document markup*, which is a problem that should be solved by the
enclosing document model, in this case mediawiki itself. I'm thinking
something more like using <math label="abc">x = y</math> in the
wikitext itself, and then <mathref>abc</mathref> later on to refer to
it. This would be a much better solution, and would be completely
independent of the mathematics rendering engine.

Perhaps Wikitex has worked out how to solve this problem.

> Just from a pragmatic point of view, sites like
>
> http://tosio.math.toronto.edu/wiki/index.php/Wave_equations
>
> are very interested to include such a functionality.
>
> I don't hope to start a flame war, but may be the authors of wikitex
> and blahtex could outline the differences of features of their
> programs?
> Or does such a comparison already exit?

I don't think there's any danger of a flame war... we're all
reasonable people :-)

No-one has done a detailed comparison as far as I know. I haven't
actually tried wikitex. From what I understand, it implements a much
fuller subset of tex/latex than blahtex will ever do. From the
beginning I wrote blahtex to use the same security model as texvc
(i.e. whitelist a set of commands, fully parse the input before
sending it off to tex/latex). Wikitex uses a different security
model, it somehow allows much lower-level stuff through. I don't
fully understand how they ensure this is a safe thing to do, although
I believe they claim that it is safe, and I'm sure they can explain
this in detail.

A consequence of Wikitex doing things at this lower level is that
they can apparently use just about any latex package they like.
Whereas blahtex needs to be told explicitly which commands to let
through, and how to translate them to MathML.

Blahtex does MathML output, I don't think Wikitex does, but I could
be mistaken. I think that when the STIX fonts are released, there
will be a flurry of activity and MathML will soon become a much
better way of distributing mathematics on the web than via PNG
graphics. But that's still some time off. And even then, there are
still plenty of things that can't be done with MathML (for example
even simple commutative diagrams can be painful). Although I should
point out that a committee was recently convened to start work on
MathML 3.0, which may address some of these issues.

David


from_name: Uwe Brauer

body:
Hello

Could somebody tell me please whether texvc is still under development
and who is the author(s), whom I could contact?

Thanks and regards

Uwe Brauer


subject: [WikiEN-l] Process wonkery

references:
<s7lah2pihqs0vqiecpaifbaphj43urt5a5@4ax.com>
	<fbad4e140609230946g1506a024g26e2447a3c584abb@mail.gmail.com>
	<47683e960609241202h58eebc8fua913fdc8802ae10c@mail.gmail.com>
	<ef754g$jmb$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<38a7bf7c0609251729ob376bc7mdbacc4236611a6ff@mail.gmail.com>

body:
On 26/09/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:

> Verifyability is not a problem; there are nationwide school databases out on
> the Internet with the basic particulars, and in many cases fairly extensive
> information, on every legitimate school nationwide.  Some of these are
> things like US Department of Education annual reports, which are both
> available on the web and available in printed form.  There are equivalents
> from state Boards of Education as well.
> This information is extremely widely available because parents use it in
> selecting where they want to move to, based on educational strength, and
> because public oversight of schools is a generally accepted positive thing.

So rambot usable lists of the data, and create a forest of redirects.

School articles do need some sort of canonical naming format. [[School
name, Town, State, Country]] or something equivalent - something like
the naming format for cities and towns with school name on the front.

This will (a) include all verifiable schools (b) having the entry be a
redirect to a list until there's something real to write an article
about will save on people coughing up their own skulls in disgust.

- d.


body:
On 26/09/06, Tomasz Ganicz <polimerek at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2006/9/26, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>:

> > So no-one in the UK should do this, but someone in the US may say "you
> > claim you own a scan of a diagram from 1720 and no-one else can touch
> > it? O rly. Sue and be damned." This is something we would need to be
> > *quite* clear that we were or were not going to say ahead of time, of
> > course.

> According to my experience as a scientist writing sometimes a review
> articles you have to '''always''' ask for permission to use graphs
> which are copyrighted or included in a copyrighted publications or
> databases.

US copyright law. Scanning does not create a new copyright, and the
notion is in any case odious.

- d.


body:
A nice idea, when you want to focus on the creation of chapters. But I
think creating chapters shound not be a goal on itself. When you put
such a notice, you create certain expectations, people will expect you
to accept their proposal, their chapter, and will have probably have
no idea what kind of work it will bring to them.

I think it is very important that the group of people knows what they
start with, and that they are motivated, and really see the advantages
and want to do it themselves. not because they saw it, thought it
would be nice, and did it in a whelm, and found bound to the idea. Not
because they felt that the foundation apeprently felt that every wiki
should have at least one chapter, not because *we* think it would
work. I think there are enough countries and communities who can work
very well without chapter, or who don't feel the need to it. I would
rather like to open the discussion in general, have an IRC-meeting
with explanations, and invite key people from the communities to think
with us.

Greetings, Lodewijk

2006/9/26, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org>:
> Wikimedia projects exist in over 100 languages. Many of those
> languages are spoken in countries which do not have chapters yet.
>
> Would it be a worthwhile experiment, for every wiki that is in a
> language without a chapter in the country/countries where it is
> spoken, to put a note in the _registered user_ site notice, such as:
>
>  "If you are interested in starting a Wikimedia Foundation chapter in
>   [country/countries], please go to [page on Meta]"?
>
> The process could be similar to the Wikinews language creation
> process, i.e., there would have to be a minimum number of supporters,
> who might also have to do some grunt work to prove commitment. Then
> they would get their own chapter mailing list.
>
> Unregistered readers would not see this notice.
>
> We might define some preconditions for this:
>
> 1) Single login to make it easier to switch over to Meta
> 2) Logo / trademark agreements fully sorted out with existing chapters
> 3) Best practices document in place
> 4) Dismissable site notice so users won't be permanently annoyed by it.
>
> But in general, do you think it's an idea worth exploring?
>
> --
> Peace & Love,
> Erik
>
> Member, Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees
>
> DISCLAIMER: Unless otherwise stated, all views or opinions expressed
> in this message are solely my own and do not represent an official
> position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


from_name: Angela

references:
<ef7fe6$94n$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<f3fedb0d0609250506y400ad5ccr6032ec8ff84973d8@mail.gmail.com>
	<fb833ae70609250515l5b08e1aamd5a58d8a93b5a693@mail.gmail.com>
	<ef9o5s$qvf$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
On 9/26/06, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> I'm working on the (naive?) assumption that sysops care about performance too.

Wouldn't that be violating the "don't worry about performance" guideline? :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Don't_worry_about_performance

Angela.


body:
2006/9/26, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>:
> On 26/09/06, James Hardy <wikimediauk at weeb.biz> wrote:
>
> > Uploading the original PDFs to a publicly accessable website would most
> > likely be a copyright violation, so we wouldn't want to do that anyway.
>
>
> In the UK, not in the US.
>
>
> > Another question is what to do about about diagrams (assuming that there are
> > some), I would imagine that if the the RS claims copyright of the scans we
> > can't just extract them and use them. Simple ones I imagine we can (and
> > probably should) convert to SVG, but for more detailed ones, that could be
> > tricky.
>
>
> So no-one in the UK should do this, but someone in the US may say "you
> claim you own a scan of a diagram from 1720 and no-one else can touch
> it? O rly. Sue and be damned." This is something we would need to be
> *quite* clear that we were or were not going to say ahead of time, of
> course.
>
> (Though put like that, it looks very like the National Portrait
> Gallery issue. Have they ceased the vague attempts at legal
> intimidation after Jimbo indicated Wikimedia's attitude would in fact
> be "sue and be damned"?)
>
> cc: to foundation-l on this issue.
>
>

According to my experience as a scientist writing sometimes a review
articles you have to '''always''' ask for permission to use graphs
which are copyrighted or included in a copyrighted publications or
databases. However, the source scientific data which was used for
preparing graph is not a subject of the copyright law, so you can
simply draw a new graph using the data from the original one and put
the citations of a source.

--
Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz
http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek
http://www.poli.toya.net.pl
http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html


from_name: Mohammad Rastgaar

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Gileki wikipedia is waiting for a provider to get
	started

body:
Hello,

  Gileki language has been supported by many, and there are some organizations which want to promote the Gileki wiki once it get started. I have contacted few providers but did not get any response. Does any body know how I can find a provider to work on this case?

  thanks,
  Rastgaar

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
 Get on board. You're invited to try the new Yahoo! Mail.


from_name: Łukasz Garczewski

body:
Erik Moeller napisa?(a):
> Wikimedia projects exist in over 100 languages. Many of those
> languages are spoken in countries which do not have chapters yet.
>
> Would it be a worthwhile experiment, for every wiki that is in a
> language without a chapter in the country/countries where it is
> spoken, to put a note in the _registered user_ site notice, such as:
>
>  "If you are interested in starting a Wikimedia Foundation chapter in
>   [country/countries], please go to [page on Meta]"?

The idea is nice. But as a chapter president and ChapCom member I'd
strongly advise against it for the time being.

Firstly, from what Tomek told me, there were still some misconceptions
about what a chapter should be (i.e. paid positions, confusion about
chapter-WMFboard interaction, etc.). And please note that all this is
around despite the fact we have a plain and simple (IMO) FAQ on meta. We
either have to make it even plainer and simpler or more prominent in
some way.

Second, sad as it may be, at this time we are not able to handle a
larger group of new chapters and give them all the attention they need.
And there is nothing worst for a new chapter than being put on hold for
a month.

So, the preconditions list should be a bit longer...
5) General trademark agreement ready
6) Clear division of responsibilities within WMF
7) An extremely plain-and-simple "Chapter Creation FAQ", maybe a
step-by-step overview in place

Possibly there is an 8, 9 and 10 I haven't thought about.

However, this is certainly a wonderful idea to be implemented in the not
so distant future. Possibly even since January.

--
Best,
TOR


from_name: Domas Mituzas

body:
Uwe,

> Could somebody tell me please whether texvc is still under development
> and who is the author(s), whom I could contact?

It had one hack lately, but nobody is actively developing it.
Probably because it is written in OCaml. ;-)

BR,
--
Domas Mituzas -- http://dammit.lt/ -- [[user:midom]]


from_name: Luiz Augusto

subject:
[Foundation-l] [Wikimediauk-l] [Fwd: Royal Society Digital
	Journal Archive]

body:
Possible all issues of this [1] magazine are in PD. Or not? o.0

[1] Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London (1776-1886)
http://www.journals.royalsoc.ac.uk/(jsvx5u45yc5wc42ndessfljn)/app/home/journal.asp?referrer=parent&backto=linkingpublicationresults,1:120135,1<http://www.journals.royalsoc.ac.uk/%28jsvx5u45yc5wc42ndessfljn%29/app/home/journal.asp?referrer=parent&backto=linkingpublicationresults,1:120135,1>

On 9/26/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 9/26/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> > ... so are we allowed to upload them to Commons while we're waiting?
> >
>
> wikisource would be more logical for the most part. You should be sure
> something is public domain where you are and in theUS before uploading
> though and in the UK currently caselaw that I know about says it
> isn't.
>
>
> --
> geni
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


body:
2006/9/26, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>:
> On 26/09/06, effe iets anders <effeietsanders at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Not
> > because they felt that the foundation apeprently felt that every wiki
> > should have at least one chapter,
>
>
> I thought the reason for chapters was because tax deductibility tends
> to work in units of national borders - if UK donors could get
> deductibility for donations to the WMF in the US, I doubt anyone would
> have bothered with Wikimedia UK. Presumably I am well behind on
> current thinking.
>

This is one of the reasons, but there are many others. For example,
for us the main reason to create a chapter was to have a bank account
which is usefull for organising meetings. You can for example pay for
a lecture theatre or book a hotel rooms in advance. The second reason
was to have a some sort of quasi-formal representation of Wikipedia
community in Poland, with whom journalists and goverment officials may
speak.

--
Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz
http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek
http://www.poli.toya.net.pl
http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Finding moved/redirected pages

body:
Mike O wrote:
> Can someone explain how to programatically find the current text of a
> redirected article? I can't seem to figure this out. Say for example 'article
> A' is created, then moved to 'article B' then moved again to 'article C'. The
> Page table has an entry for 'article C' (and 'article B' for that matter)
> with the original page_id assigned when the article was first created as
> 'article A' along with a page_latest pointer to the record in the Revision
> table as rev_id. In the Revision table record there is rev_text_id which has
> a record number pointer to the actual article content in the Text table. But,
> since the article was moved twice, the record in the Text table isn't the
> right record - it's the original record, not the current record.

That is indeed the right record.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: geni

subject:
[Foundation-l] The Foundation is not a wiki (was Re: RfC: Key
	priorities for my work)

body:
On 9/26/06, Aphaia <aphaia at gmail.com> wrote:
> Well, as for Boardvote, I expect developers are aware of, however for
> the record I would like to stress that anyone who are granted
> boardvote right can access to the detailed data of the global
> Election. I think a local election is never the board/foundation issue
> rather offtopic on this list,

Jimbo aparently wants us to use a rather unpopular voteing system. The
board are the people who are  most likely to be able to prevent him
from inforceing that.

> and don't mind if a certain project uses
> Boardvote extention (I know another certain Wikipedia which some
> people would have liked to use this for local sysop votes ... ),
> however, I stress that they can be given the access * only * after the
> results of this Election flashed.

Elections will probably start on December the 4th with acess needed
from the second.

--
geni


body:
Hum.. sure.

Anyway, now I'm trying to download with HTTrack the most oldest magazines
and most oldest issues to my personal computer. But I don't have conditions
to share this backup copy to someone, this is a personal computer in a ISP
that don't allow running of server softwares.

On 9/26/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 9/26/06, Luiz Augusto <lugusto at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Possible all issues of this [1] magazine are in PD. Or not? o.0
> >
> > [1] Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London
> (1776-1886)
>
> Some of the newer stuff may not be.
> --
> geni
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


from_name: David Gerard

body:
To what extent is this true under US law?

The claim to ownership of a scan from 1665 is odious. Perhaps it's just me.

- d.

On 26/09/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: "Hurst, Phil" <Phil.Hurst at royalsoc.ac.uk>
> To: <jwales at wikia.com>
> Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2006 11:34:56 +0100
> Subject: Royal Society Digital Journal Archive
>
>
> Dear Jimmy
>
> It has come to our attention that there is some confusion regarding the
> copyright status of the Royal Society's digital journal archive.
>
> The entire digital archive is covered by copyright. This mean that
> systematic downloading and hosting by third parties is prohibited.
>
> Thank you for your attention.
>
> Regards
>
>
>
>     Phil Hurst
>     Publisher
>
>     tel +44 (0)20 7451 2630
>     fax +44 (0)20 7976 1837
>     web http://www.pubs.royalsoc.ac.uk
>
>     The Royal Society
>     6-9 Carlton House Terrace
>     London SW1Y 5AG
>
>     Registered Charity No 207043
>     The Royal Society - excellence in science
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ******************************************************************************
> The information contained in this e-mail is confidential and may also be
> subject to legal privilege. It is intended only for the recipient(s) named
> above. If you are not named above as a recipient, you must not read, copy,
> disclose, forward or otherwise use the information contained in this e-mail.
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikimedia UK mailing list
> wikimediauk-l at wikimedia.org
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_UK
> http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l
>
>
>


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
On 9/26/06, effe iets anders <effeietsanders at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think it is very important that the group of people knows what they
> start with, and that they are motivated, and really see the advantages
> and want to do it themselves.

True. What I think is essential in this process is showcasing what
chapters _already_ do. This can be a way to generate genuine interest
beyond the "It would be cool" effect. For instance, Frank sent a
report about the "Wikipedia in schools" training project of the German
chapter; Michael described the Swiss Wikipedia Day; the Dutch chapter
also recently organized a conference. There was Wikipedia Academy in
G?ttingen, the 5 year Wikipedia exhibit, and the digitization project
initiated by the German chapter. And so on, and so forth.

Do we have a page describing these use cases, one to two paragraphs
each, with pictures? If not, is someone willing to volunteer to
coordinate this? (CCing Elisabeth Bauer, who has done amazing work on
promotion materials.)

I agree with what TOR said regarding additional preconditions for my
proposal. I hope to have a telconf with Delphine soon to get a better
picture of the chapter situation.

I also agree with you that IRC (or real-life) meetings can be an
excellent way to have honest discussions about the future direction of
a wiki community. Effe, if you are interested in running/organizing
such meetings, can you contact me privately and we'll try to work out
the details.

--
Peace & Love,
Erik

Member, Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees

DISCLAIMER: Unless otherwise stated, all views or opinions expressed
in this message are solely my own and do not represent an official
position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.


from_name: Aphaia

body:
Hello,
Back online. (Mainly due to 'Mania 2007; I promised KJ to give a help
once. Would you sent me your expectations of potential guest/keynote
speakers, KJ?)

Thank you for your kind words and apologies for my rant. Following
advices, I'll take a break - after we've done post-mortem. For several
reasons I would like to keep a distance from the Wikimedia project for
a while. My availability will decrease but I'll be around there, not
completely leave.

Well, as for Boardvote, I expect developers are aware of, however for
the record I would like to stress that anyone who are granted
boardvote right can access to the detailed data of the global
Election. I think a local election is the board/foundation issue hence
rather offtopic on this list, and don't mind if a certain project uses
Boardvote extention (I know another certain Wikipedia which some
people would have liked to use this for local sysop votes ... ),
however, I stress that they can be given the access * only * after the
results of this Election flashed. No local votetaker are allowed per
se to access the private data of over 2300 editors around the world.

On 9/26/06, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> geni wrote:
> > On a related note will special:boardvote be available?
>
> The source code is available in our SVN repository along with other extensions.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

--
Kizu Naoko
  Wikiquote: http://wikiquote.org
  * vox populi, vox dei *


from_name: Andrew Gray

body:
On 26/09/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> To what extent is this true under US law?
>
> The claim to ownership of a scan from 1665 is odious. Perhaps it's just me.

Do remember, of course, that only a trivial proportion of these works
are from 1665! Nothing published in the last seventy years is likely
to be safely out of copyright (as new scientific material is rarely
posthumous, and scientific journals don't tend to go in for reprints
of old stuff), and you have to go back to about 1860-70 before you're
safe assuming PD without checking the author's details.

(Before that, or for any where you can be sure as to when the author
died - transcribe away, Macduff...)

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


from_name: Peter Danenberg

subject: [Wikitech-l] wikitex

references:
<87zmcnxa1k.fsf@riemann.quim.ucm.es>
	<DEA8CE87-133F-41C8-8442-2AA9EC542A01@gmail.com>
	<87hcyuyhu8.fsf_-_@riemann.quim.ucm.es>
	<20060926120441.GA21149@wikitex.org>
	<87d59iydk3.fsf@riemann.quim.ucm.es>

body:
> The issue is that recently some mathematical orientated wikis [...]
> have been founded, which would strongly need such a feature.

     If  that's a needed feature, then I should introduce it
into WikiTeX followingly:

     <amsmath style="numbered"></amsmath>

The ugly hack, on the other hand, follows:

     <amsmath>
     \end{displaymath}
     \begin{equation}
     % Numbered equations here
     \end{equation}
     \begin{displaymath}
     </amsmath>

I may be able to graft it into 1.1 beta; lets keep in  touch
on Wikitex-l.

Best, Peter


body:
On 9/26/06, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 26/09/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> > To what extent is this true under US law?
> >
> > The claim to ownership of a scan from 1665 is odious. Perhaps it's just me.
>
> Do remember, of course, that only a trivial proportion of these works
> are from 1665! Nothing published in the last seventy years is likely
> to be safely out of copyright (as new scientific material is rarely
> posthumous, and scientific journals don't tend to go in for reprints
> of old stuff), and you have to go back to about 1860-70 before you're
> safe assuming PD without checking the author's details.

We could go back to 1800 and there would still be a fair bit of stuff
which is what we are interested in.

--
geni


from_name: Robert Scott Horning

body:
James Hare wrote:

>"I mean, do we really need to read some of
>Jimbo's early edits to Wikipedia from over five years ago that are now
>completely rewritten?  At least this is something to think about if hard
>drive space is becoming a substantial issue, as even the most obscure
>and neglected project or even article is likely to get at least some
>attention by somebody over the course of two years to revert any major
>vandalism requiring edits going back any further."
>
>1) Hard drive space is not an issue. It's the fact that we no longer have a
>need to keep the wiki open.
>2) According to the GFDL, yes, we are required to keep the entire history of
>articles.
>
>
Where in the GFDL is this stated?

You do not need to keep a running history of every edit and every
possible version that was added.  All you need to do is list all of the
contributors to the article, which isn't the same thing as keeping the
full edit history.  I guess an edit count would be nice as well, but it
is not strictly necessary, nor is preserving in the edit history
anything that was completely reverted due to being a troll.  This simply
isn't factual based on any legal requirement of the GFDL.  This is
simply old-time Wiki practices that have been assumed over the years.

Think about this.  When Wikipedia is over 100 years old, is it really
going to be necessary to preserve each and every edit to every article?
 If the hard drive space is available, I guess it wouldn't hurt, but
this does approach the level of absurdity when there are decades of edit
history to revert to.  While I find it very interesting to read some
very early versions of some articles, it is not written in stone that
these early versions must always be available.

I'm just suggesting that for some articles that this massive back
history isn't necessary and if hard drive is really an issue, that
culling all of the early edits from en.wikipedia alone would be more
than enough to perhaps give room for almost all of the rest of the
Wikimedia projects combined.  Or at least it would be an interesting
question to research and certainly would do far more to save hard drive
space than shutting down one very, very obscure Wikimedia project that
really doesn't take up that much hard drive space anyway.

I'm also suggesting that the advocates of shutting down sep11.wikipedia
completely are doing so based on irrational fears or emotional
justifications, not based on any technical need or hardship to the
Wikimedia Foundation.

--
Robert Scott Horning


body:
>>>>> "Domas" == Domas Mituzas
>>>>> <midom.lists at gmail.com> writes:

   Domas> Uwe,
   >> Could somebody tell me please whether texvc is still under development
   >> and who is the author(s), whom I could contact?

   Domas> It had one hack lately, but nobody is actively developing it.
   Domas> Probably because it is written in OCaml. ;-)

I see, the issue is (automatically) numbering of equations, which is
the feature I miss most (and automatically referencing and labeling)

Do you know about  is wikitex, which also does not seem to be too
active..

Uwe


from_name: Fredrik Johansson

body:
On 9/26/06, Uwe Brauer <oub at mat.ucm.es> wrote:
> Hello
>
> Could somebody tell me please whether texvc is still under development
> and who is the author(s), whom I could contact?
>
> Thanks and regards
>
> Uwe Brauer

Hopefully texvc will be replaced by Blahtex (http://www.blahtex.org/).
Please help bug David Harvey to continue working on it :-)

Fredrik


body:
On 9/26/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> ... so are we allowed to upload them to Commons while we're waiting?
>

wikisource would be more logical for the most part. You should be sure
something is public domain where you are and in theUS before uploading
though and in the UK currently caselaw that I know about says it
isn't.

--
geni


body:
Luiz Augusto wrote:

>On 9/26/06, Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:
>
>
>>James Hare wrote:
>>
>>
>
>
>(...)
>
>
>
>>I'm also suggesting that the advocates of shutting down sep11.wikipedia
>>completely are doing so based on irrational fears or emotional
>>justifications, not based on any technical need or hardship to the
>>Wikimedia Foundation.
>>
>>
>
>
>Stop imediatle with [[WP:XFD]] if this is the problem. Wikimedia is a global
>organization or a organization for United States of America?
>sep11.wikipedia(wikipedia??) isn't a global memorial wiki... This is
>the point.
>
>
>
I'm not trying to suggest that new projects of similar scope be created
here.  Far from it, and I would be against any similar project from
being created.  But the point here is that the project has been created
and does have a community of participants that have been working on it
for some time.

I'm also not advocating that this project be left on as a fully editable
public wiki, but I am saying that it appears from the responses and
comments that have been offered on this mailing list that it is a
foregone conclusion that this project is not only to be put into
inactive read-only mode but that it is to be completely removed from the
Wikimedia Foundation servers.  I am merely trying to raise an objection
and try to find out exactly why this is being done and instead I'm
getting emotional responses rather than objective quantifiable
justifications.

As for objective quantifiable justifications for shutting down
completely and removing this project from the servers, I mentioned
network bandwidth and hard drive space.  Since neither of these are
being used as justification for culling this from Wikimedia servers, I
leave the rest to other neutral observers to come to their own
conclusion as to why this is being removed, such as anti-American
attitudes.  A project that is in a read-only has no need for admins to
revert vandalism nor is there need to even put the project into the cron
cycle for the database dumps.  Those are also objective quantifiable
justifications for culling that also don't seem to be a problem at the
moment.  That developers would have to perhaps explicitly add some small
amount of code to the project database processes to make sure it doesn't
go through the dump process that the rest of Wikimedia project go
through would be an annoyance, but dealing with broken links going into
the sep11.wikipedia would also be as much of an issue if it were removed
completely.

Another very reasonable objection would be to help pay for domain costs,
such as wikipedia.org, wikibooks.org, etc.  Only there isn't an
objective monitary cost involved in keeping sep11.wikipedia.org as a
domain beyond the costs of keeping wikipedia.org, which I don't see as
being a problem.

I guess there isn't any other advocate to see that this information is
simply kept and otherwise ignored on Wikimedia servers.  The only reason
why I'm bringing this up at all is that there is a larger issue involved
here about what to do with any Wikimedia project that has been closed
down and otherwise deemed to be "unworthy" of continued support,
whatever that reason may be.  This includes the Klingon Wikipedia, for
instance, which is also in read-only mode.  Whatever happens to the
sep11.wikipedia is going to set a preceedent for all future Wikimedia
projects that enjoy a similar fate.

--
Robert Scott Horning


from_name: Mark Wagner

body:
On 9/25/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 25/09/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > There will have to be a line short of "all things that have any record
> > claiming they may be a school of some sort".
> > The first place that line seems logically to go, on first inspection, is
> > "Paid teachers".
>
>
> Third-party verifiability would be the first line.

But where's the second line?  The Michigan homeschools are verifiable:
since they're treated as private schools, they need to be registered
with the Michigan Department of Education.

--
Mark
[[User:Carnildo]]


from_name: Birgitte SB

subject: [Foundation-l] A Wikimedia sidebar box for wikipedia.org

body:
I think this is a reasonable idea.  But I would
definately like to see fully fleshed out versions of
the pages this would link to before giving a definate
opinion.

And let's try and remember all the advice from the
translators when delveloping these pages as they will
need to be heavily translated.

Birgitte SB

Birgitte SB

--- Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> As you may know, MediaWiki:Sidebar supports defining
> little boxes that
> contain navigation links. de.wikipedia.org has used
> this to customize
> its sidebar, for example.
>
> Should we have a sidebar with the heading
> "Wikimedia" containing links
> to wikimediafoundation.org for things like:
> - About Wikimedia
> - Projects
> - Volunteer (info about committees, mailing lists,
> etc.)
> - Jobs (those we chooose to publicly advertise)
> - Chapter information
>
> This is partially a follow-up to my earlier mail re:
> sitenotice for
> chapters. I think this might be a slightly less
> aggressive way to
> raise awareness of chapters, sister projects, and
> the work of the
> Foundation in general.
>
> Thoughts?
> --
> Peace & Love,
> Erik
>
> Member, Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees
>
> DISCLAIMER: Unless otherwise stated, all views or
> opinions expressed
> in this message are solely my own and do not
> represent an official
> position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of
> Trustees.
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

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


body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>As you may know, MediaWiki:Sidebar supports defining little boxes that
>contain navigation links. de.wikipedia.org has used this to customize
>its sidebar, for example.
>
>Should we have a sidebar with the heading "Wikimedia" containing links
>to wikimediafoundation.org for things like:
>- About Wikimedia
>- Projects
>- Volunteer (info about committees, mailing lists, etc.)
>- Jobs (those we chooose to publicly advertise)
>- Chapter information
>
>This is partially a follow-up to my earlier mail re: sitenotice for
>chapters. I think this might be a slightly less aggressive way to
>raise awareness of chapters, sister projects, and the work of the
>Foundation in general.
>
>Thoughts?
>
>

This is a very interesting idea, and on the surface I don't have any
strong objection, other than trying to figure out how you are going to
reasonably implement this sidebar onto each and every project.

I've been involved with modifying the sidebar for en.wikibooks and
en.wikiversity, so I do have a little experience with both doing the
actual changes as well as trying to deal with gaining a concensus from a
larger community over what sorts of things ought to go into
modifications of this nature.  Generally speaking, as long as the links
prove to be of substantial value and are maintained, the community
reaction to these changes has been rather positive and supportive.

I would also strongly recommend that any general "Wikimedia" sidebar
changes ought to be at the very bottom of any other sidebar items for a
particular project.

A major concern about doing this is that you had better make sure that
in this situation, especially since these links will be on practically
each and every web page served up with Wikimedia servers, that the web
pages linked in this manner are very nearly "professional" quality and
have people who are willing to keep them fresh and updated regularly.
 There is nothing worse than a highly advertised link of this nature
that goes to what is essentially just a stub or something that is
horribly out of date.  Both of those have been criticisms of much of
what is found on http://wikimediafoundation.org

The other major issue I see is dealing with the multi-lingual issues
that are going to inevitably rear their head for this as well.  **IF**
there are related pages in the same language as the wikimedia project
that has this sidebar section being added, it would be reasonable to
include the link.  Otherwise, I would strongly recommend that you simply
remove the link altogether and for most languages link only to the
"About Wikimedia" page.  Do not link to the English language version of
the page as the "default" setting.  Of course this is just a recommendation.

--
Robert Scott Horning


from_name: Bogdan Giusca

subject: [WikiEN-l] blocked for a week for these edits

body:
Saturday, May 20, 2006, 5:08:43 PM, Sarah wrote:

> I personally don't mind if it's a positive association, or a very
> interesting one, though again you have to be careful. Pointing out
> that someone is a British Muslim mathematician sounds a bit odd. And
> we wouldn't say a person was a Celtic scientist, so why a Jewish one?

> I prefer to add it only when it's relevant to their bio. For example,
> saying that Freud was a Jewish psychoanalyst would be okay because his
> background in Judaism played a large part in the development of his
> ideas (though the current intro doesn't mention it).

I think we should have categories in fields in which Judaism and
Jewish heritage could have had some influence over their work, for
example, Jewish writers, Jewish comedians and Jewish psychologists,
but NOT Jewish mathematicians, Jewish bankers or Jewish criminals

Yeah, we had lists for the last two:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/List_of_Jewish_bankers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/List_of_Jewish_criminals

But having categories like British Jews or British Muslims seems OK to
me.


body:
On 26/09/06, Birgitte SB <birgitte_sb at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Someone left a note on Wikisource about these going
> offline in December.  I know at least one editor has
> begun downloading these.  If anyone would like to
> help, I am sure we could use it.  Of course don't get
> yourself in trouble if you fall under UK legal
> jurisitiction.
> http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Scriptorium#Royal_Society_Journals_free_only_until_December

I should stress I have no intention of downloading these to save to
Wikisource or Commons myself.

- d.


from_name: Uwe Brauer

subject: [Wikitech-l] wikitex

references:
<87zmcnxa1k.fsf@riemann.quim.ucm.es>
	<DEA8CE87-133F-41C8-8442-2AA9EC542A01@gmail.com>
	<87hcyuyhu8.fsf_-_@riemann.quim.ucm.es>
	<20060926120441.GA21149@wikitex.org>

body:
>>>>> "Peter" == Peter Danenberg
>>>>> <pcd at wikitex.org> writes:

   >> Do you know about is wikitex, which also does not seem to be too
   >> active..

   Peter>      That's  just  the  organic  cadence of development; and
   Peter> yes: WikiTeX can do equation numbering (with a little hack).

Thanks  also that is a little off topic, how to do that, I asked on
the wikitex mailing list, but the answer I got seemed to indicate that
it is not that simple (may be we could continue that discussion
privately).

The issue is that recently some mathematical orientated wikis (mostly
based on mediawiki) have been founded, which would strongly need such
a feature.

   Peter> Best, Peter

Uwe


body:
Yep, that's clearly Spanish. Unfortunately, I don't know Asturian to be able
to translate it appropriately...

Titoxd.

-----Original Message-----
From: foundation-l-bounces at wikimedia.org
[mailto:foundation-l-bounces at wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Andrew Leonard
Sent: Tuesday, September 26, 2006 1:05 AM
To: foundation-l at wikimedia.org
Subject: [Foundation-l] Asturian page for Donations is in Spanish

OTRS just got a notice about this - the Asturian page linked from the
Donations page (http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donativos) has
identical text to the Spanish page
(http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donaciones), and my untrained eye
says that the text is in Spanish.

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


from_name: Zoney

subject: [WikiEN-l] Process wonkery

references:
<s7lah2pihqs0vqiecpaifbaphj43urt5a5@4ax.com>
	<fbad4e140609230946g1506a024g26e2447a3c584abb@mail.gmail.com>
	<47683e960609241202h58eebc8fua913fdc8802ae10c@mail.gmail.com>
	<ef754g$jmb$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<38a7bf7c0609251729ob376bc7mdbacc4236611a6ff@mail.gmail.com>
	<fbad4e140609260317j5c3b0be3t196b17d78b845a91@mail.gmail.com>

body:
On 26/09/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 26/09/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> So rambot usable lists of the data, and create a forest of redirects.
>
> School articles do need some sort of canonical naming format. [[School
> name, Town, State, Country]] or something equivalent - something like
> the naming format for cities and towns with school name on the front.
>
> This will (a) include all verifiable schools (b) having the entry be a
> redirect to a list until there's something real to write an article
> about will save on people coughing up their own skulls in disgust.
>
>
> - d.
>
>
I realise the opinion of just one person doesn't count for much here, but
I'd like to suggest the following for schools and all other "it exists,
therefore it should be on Wikipedia" items. I do to some extent subscribe to
that view. But I think there are far more logical ways in dealing with the
situation than "an article for every school" or "delete anything that isn't
nationally/regionally/historically notable".

Surely the thing to do is to concatenate entries of a related nature? Here
in Ireland even reasonably small towns have several schools. Surely a single
article can cover all the schools, with the individual schools getting their
own articles if there is too much content for that parent article? If there
are details added to Wikipedia for just one or two schools in an area,
surely they can be added to a related more important article such as the
town or area?

I'm not suggesting there wouldn't be awkward instances not covered by this,
but the concatenation approach should be used more widely on Wikipedia in my
opinion. If nothing else, it would ensure that we have decent "parent"
articles when very narrow topics later have their own articles. There are
far too many situations where we have articles on the minuitia of things,
and poorly scratched together ones, or non-existent ones for the broader
topic (often such articles don't even do something quick and cheap to
improve things, like scraping the introductory paragraph from the
sub-articles).

Zoney

--
~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...


from_name: Hsiang-Tai Chien

body:
Yes, you can take a "inside room" in the Grand Hotel. BTW, it should be
called as "Budget Room".

http://www.grand-hotel.org/newsite/html/e/ci01.htm

Also there are many nice hotels nearby CTOYAC and they can be easily reached
from Jian-Tan station by using the Metro Rapid Transportation of Taipei.

Best regards,
H.T.
EN:WP:User:Htchien
ZH:WP:User:Htchien

-----Original Message-----
From: foundation-l-bounces at wikimedia.org
[mailto:foundation-l-bounces at wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Ray Saintonge
Sent: Tuesday, September 26, 2006 2:23 PM
To: valdelli at bluemail.ch; Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Taipei chosen to host Wikimania 2007

valdelli at bluemail.ch wrote:

>Good news,
>considering that all is paid by sponsorship (Halls and rooms,
>accomodations, catering) I think that these strong opportunities could
>offer to the wikipedians the incentive to make a long journey in a
>pleasant town.
>
>In any case I don't understand if only 450 beds are paid for
>sponsorship or if the sponsors will pay all 889 beds (http://meta.
>wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2007/Taipei#Accommodation) because a room
>in a Grand Hotel is expensive.
>
I saw the hotel room quotes for the Grand Hotel.  I stayed there in 1981
after being advised to ask for an "inside room"; the price for that was
quite reasonable compared to the regular price.  Are any of the given quotes
for an inside room?

Ec

___________________________________________________
 ??????? ? ????????????????
 http://messenger.yahoo.com.tw/


subject: [Foundation-l] Taipei chosen to host Wikimania 2007


body:
>>>>> "Fredrik" == Fredrik Johansson
>>>>> <fredrik.johansson at gmail.com>
>>>>> writes:
   >>
   >> Thanks and regards
   >>
   >> Uwe Brauer

   Fredrik> Hopefully texvc will be replaced by Blahtex
   Fredrik> (http://www.blahtex.org/). Please help bug David Harvey to
   Fredrik> continue working on it :-)

But blahtex uses mathml exclusively no? That could cause problems with
certain browsers, my mozilla does not display all the symbols
correctly and downloading the relevant fonts seems not to work.

Uwe


subject: [WikiEN-l] Process wonkery

body:
On 26/09/06, Zoney <zoney.ie at gmail.com> wrote:

> Surely the thing to do is to concatenate entries of a related nature? Here
> in Ireland even reasonably small towns have several schools. Surely a single
> article can cover all the schools, with the individual schools getting their
> own articles if there is too much content for that parent article? If there
> are details added to Wikipedia for just one or two schools in an area,
> surely they can be added to a related more important article such as the
> town or area?

Oh, yeah. If the name isn't a redirect to a list of schools, it could
be a redirect to the town. I believe there's quite a bit of this
already.

There's a lot of ardent school includeletionists, but they're
thrashing out the problem and hopefully wearying of the debate and
editing other articles ;-)

- d.


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Korean servers to be shuffled: ja, ko, ms,
	th Wikipedias moving

body:
Just a heads-up; we're planning to move the backend hosting for Japanese,
Korean, Malay, and Thai Wikipedias from our Korean server cluster (yaseo) back
to the main servers in Florida (pmtpa) later this week.

They were hosted on the Korean servers for about a year as an experiment in
multi-cluster hosting, but in the end we're going to move them back. There are
several reasons for this:

* More reliable management.

Experience has shown that software updates and other issues are more likely to
have problems on the second cluster, which receives less attention from sysadmins.

These wikis will no longer be second-class citizens where math or timelines sit
broken for weeks after a change.

* More efficient use of resources.

As traffic increases, the limited number of servers we have in the yaseo cluster
are less able to handle the load. They now frequently overload during peak
access hours in Asia, and we can't add new servers as easily as we can in Florida.

Sharing the larger pool of application servers in Florida, and reusing the
remaining Korean machines for additional proxy caches, should provide better
performance during peak hours in Asia.

* Single-login preparation.

Hosting all the wikis together will let our unified login system work for these
wikis along with the others when we finally start it up.

Expected changes and disruptions:

There will be some read-only time for the wikis being moved later this week
during the actual transition, but other wikis should not be affected. We will
try to do this during off-peak hours in Asia.

URLs for uploaded images will change to use upload.wikimedia.org as on other
wikis; old URLs will redirect for compatibility so this should not disrupt anything.

Performance for the moved wikis should be better overall, though off-peak access
for logged-in users may be slightly slower due to lightspeed delays between
Korea and Florida.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Korean servers to be shuffled: ja, ko, ms,
	th Wikipedias moving


from_name: Tim Starling

body:
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Don't_worry_about_performance
>
> Hey, wow. Thanks. :)
>
> I was going to raise that point... but I figured I'd catch Tim in IRC.
>
> In any case, I agree here.. the issue is that for every valid case
> where it might be good to be performance minded there are 10 other
> cases where people will use uninformed performance oriented arguments
> to support whatever policy measure they prefer... The end result is a
> lot of silly actions in the name of performance .. or a lot of
> needless performance questions. :)

Sure, using poorly informed performance-oriented arguments to win whatever
argument you're having is a bad thing. But it's not an issue when I am
telling you EXACTLY WHAT TO DO. In fact, I've been thinking about writing
some general guidelines for template performance optimisation that editors
can follow. Editors can do quite a lot for the performance of the site, if
their efforts are properly informed. I've even edited articles myself, for
the sole purpose of making them render faster. Others could do the same.

-- Tim Starling


body:
Oops. I realized I really need a vacation.

On 9/26/06, Aphaia <aphaia at gmail.com> wrote:

> I think a local election is the board/foundation issue hence
< I think a local election is never the board/foundation issue

*never*
Hopefully no one was misled.

--
Kizu Naoko
  Wikiquote: http://wikiquote.org
  * Man ist eben so gut Zeitbuerger, als man Staatsbuerger ist; *


body:
No, that could be Asturian (I don't know it, so I cannot confirm that)...
albeit the rest of page is in perfect Spanish, which I do speak natively.
Reading the page in more detail, only the tagline is translated, as well as
a few other words, such as "ye" after "La Fundaci?n Wikimedia", but entire
sections of text are not.

However, I do believe that the reason could be that the translators were
translating the Spanish page to Asturian, as you suggested. This diff does
suggest that:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?title=Donativos&diff=next&oldid=1
3719. Considering, though, that the translation edit was made only today, I
guess that we can cut them some slack... ;)

Titoxd.

-----Original Message-----
From: foundation-l-bounces at wikimedia.org
[mailto:foundation-l-bounces at wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Damian Finol
Sent: Tuesday, September 26, 2006 3:44 PM
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Asturian page for Donations is in Spanish

Titoxd at Wikimedia wrote:
> Yep, that's clearly Spanish. Unfortunately, I don't know Asturian to be
able
> to translate it appropriately...
>
> Titoxd.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: foundation-l-bounces at wikimedia.org
> [mailto:foundation-l-bounces at wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Andrew Leonard
> Sent: Tuesday, September 26, 2006 1:05 AM
> To: foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> Subject: [Foundation-l] Asturian page for Donations is in Spanish
>
> OTRS just got a notice about this - the Asturian page linked from the
> Donations page (http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donativos) has
> identical text to the Spanish page
> (http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donaciones), and my untrained eye
> says that the text is in Spanish.
>
> - Andrew
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
Hello,

Yes, it's in spanish, albeit a weird spanish 'Formes de donar' instead
of 'Formas de donar' and "Imaxina un mundu nel cual cada persona tien
accesu gratuitu a la suma de too'l conocimientu humanu. Eso ye lo que
tratamos de facer."

Maybe they are using the Spanish Donation page because it's easier to
translate from spanish to asturian.

Regards,

Ing. Damian Finol
Maracaibo -Venezuela
_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l at wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l


subject: [Foundation-l] Asturian page for Donations is in Spanish


body:
On 9/26/06, Luiz Augusto <lugusto at gmail.com> wrote:
> Possible all issues of this [1] magazine are in PD. Or not? o.0
>
> [1] Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London (1776-1886)

Some of the newer stuff may not be.
--
geni