from_name: Platonides

subject: [Commons-l] Deletion of still-used images

body:
"Brianna Laugher" wrote:
> Another easy and obvious way is to get [[User:Orgullobot]] delinking
> for us.....

Returning to the idea of how to delete, and the problem communities have
against  'intruder bots' i propose the following:
Both if deletions are no source/license or at COM:DEL, real deletion will
wait at least 7 days, so a bot would:
-Wait two days as the uploader may read the message on its discussion and
fix it. I have found Orgullobot removing images too early.
-The third day the bot posts a {{WarningCommonsDelete|BadImage}} on the
articles discussion. if someone watches that article, should notice it and
be able to manually fix it. These templates would be per-project translated,
as the CommonsTicker's.
The following templates would be used:
*Image lacks source/license.
*Image has been listed for deletion, see [[...]]
*Superseeded image.
They would at the end explain the bot behaviour if no action is taken.

-Now the community an join to the discussion, change the article, etc.

-The sixth/seventh day the bot removes/replaces the image from the page. The
community can't really complain as it ahs been warned.
-The seventh day the the image is unliked (summary in the corresponding
lang: Image to be deleted, see discussion) and ready to del. :-)

I find it better than CT in the way that it's not the duty of those
"watching the CT " to fix them, than it's of article's users. If they don't
found the warning, they wouldn't also notice vandalism... And the bot is at
last setting the 'presumed good action'.

I'm sure Orgullomoore, Duesentrieb, and a few others would kindly do it. I
include myself in the list :-) But before doing a bot, do we want it? Some
points to dicuss:
*What to do with copyvios? What should be the bot action?
*Should the bot check on the discussion for a template parameter to 'avoid
bot action'? (i.e. the community wants to keep the image even when it's
going to be deleted :S)
*What should do the bot if it doesn't find the image? (e.g. the image is
generated through template syntax).
*The bot probably may need a 'suggested replacement' template. If it's said
on COM:DEL can't figure.
*Add a user syntax to 'undo image x removal' ?
*Should it be an opt-in bot, like the CommonsTicket, or should we run it for
everywiki from start? Beta testing on a project-only will be needed, but i'd
vote for the second. There's no much need to be done logged in, as there
will be a text warning so ips could do it. Do as a user preferred, though.
*Should the bot remove the warning template when the job is done?
  Pros: -There's no a increasing warning list with nobody reading
           -If users discuss it and want it to stay, can set a template
parameter, so the bot doesn't remove it.

  Couns: -It hides the discussion message we wanted to add.

Any more steps suggested? Comments? Merciless critiques?


list: wikitech-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Sebastian Moleski

subject: [Wikitech-l] Categories

body:
Bill,

I'm not aware of any such discussions but I can tell you that these two
categories, and categories like it, are not a local problem. On German
Wikipedia, we have these very same discussions over and over again without
much of a resolution. If you find anything, let us know because we're
looking for solutions too.

Good luck!

sebmol

On 8/10/06, Bill Clark <wclarkxoom at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> I'm involved in a debate about the pseudoscience and pseudoscientists
> categories, that seems to be at an impasse because of the differences
> between categories and lists.
>
> One side argues that these two categories are inherently problematic,
> and that a list would be more appropriate because it allows for
> annotation of entires and referencing of sources.
>
> The other side insists that a list is not acceptible and that a
> category is required, for reasons that don't seem particularly clear
> to me but which they feel strongly about.
>
> Clearly this problem isn't restricted to just those two categories.
> There are several guidelines that deal with controversial categories,
> and this debate seems to come up whenever there is a vaguely defined
> or otherwise "sensitive" category.  A more general solution seems to
> be in order.
>
> Rather than continue the debate (which from the archives on the talk
> page for the pseudoscience category I can see has been continuing on
> and off for years) I thought it might be best to simply change how
> categories work, so that they can support the features of lists that
> are desired.  (Yes, I'm using "simply" in an ironic manner :)
>
> I've tried looking through the mailing list archives and on meta to
> see if this has been discussed before, but could not find anything
> relevant.  Since there are many other problems with the category
> implementation (big DB hit for category page loads, inability to cache
> the results, etc.) I thought I should put together a comprehensive
> list of features, bugs, suggestions, and so forth before I begin
> development work.
>
> I'd also like suggestions as to the best place to discuss this topic
> on either WP or meta.
>
> -Bill Clark
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


list: commons-l

body:
"Andre Engels" wrote:
> I am willing to offer my services here. I am an admin (even
> bureaucrat) on Commons, but have not been active recently simply
> because there's so much more to do; however, I think I can be of much
> use here because I already have logins on basically all Wikipedia
> languages, so I can act as if single logon already exists. If you can
> inform me of images that should be deleted but currently are not
> because they are still in use, I'd be happy to go around and unlink
> them. Letting me do so would I think be better than having a bot for
> it, because I will go and check whether there is any replacement
> available, and replacing is much harder than delinking to do by bot
> (because one has to check whether the subtitle is still applicable).

You may find my image-unlinking monobook useful. Just link at
http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usuario:Platonides/Imagenes.js (it requires
http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usuario:Platonides/reemplazar.js).
It will list the used images on the bottom, near the used-templates, with a
link to 'unlink-all'
As always, use freely but please feedback. I haven't tested it but in
Firefox so it may give surprises ;-)


list: foundation-l

from_name: Walter Vermeir

subject: [Foundation-l] Emergency on Wiktionary

body:
Ray Saintonge schreef:
[cut]
> While it is also possible that there can be rogue bureaucrats, these
> will be proportionally rarer than rogue admins.  Anyone who has become a
> bureaucrat has a very high degree of trust in the community, and
> especially in relatively larger communities there is sufficient
> oversight to prevent the abuses that may be more common with the
> untested bureaucrats of tiny communities.  Speaking arbitrarily, one
> could define a larger community, as one with at least 50,000 articles
> and/or 2 active bureaucrats.
>
> Ec

Not all wikis are the same. You can not project the situation of EN to
all other wikis.

I have just done a de-sysop/de-bureaucrat on the Serbian Wikpedia. There
the have (now) 40 sysops and of those 25 are bureaucrat.

That is from my POV an irresponsible number of bureaucrats. I do not
know how many active user there are. The have 34700 articles.

--
Contact: walter AT wikizine DOT org
Wikizine.org - news for and about the Wikimedia community


list: wikimedia-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Emergency on Wiktionary


from_name: Daniel Kinzler

body:
On a related note: the next version of CommonsTicker will (optionally)
post warnings on the talk pages of articles that use "endangered" or
recently deleted images.

-- Daniel

--
Homepage: http://brightbyte.de


from_name: Filip Maljkovic

subject:
[Foundation-l] Serbian admin desysopped (was: Emergency on
	Wiktionary)

body:
Walter Vermeir wrote:
> Not all wikis are the same. You can not project the situation of EN to
> all other wikis.
>
> I have just done a de-sysop/de-bureaucrat on the Serbian Wikpedia. There
> the have (now) 40 sysops and of those 25 are bureaucrat.
>
> That is from my POV an irresponsible number of bureaucrats. I do not
> know how many active user there are. The have 34700 articles.
>
Walter, what you did with desysopping that guy was wrong. Everything was
falsified and I have a reason to believe it was all a deed of
Bormalagurski (Wiki Serbia @ meta) whom we had recently desysopped. If
you do a checkuser for the guys two accounts, you'll see a Canadian and
a Spanish IP (the first on meta, the second on sr:). Slaven (who
erroneously got desysopped) never claimed to want to be desysopped and
this is just Boris' vendetta for his own dethronement. I'm a bureaucrat
at sr: wikipedia but I don't want to do the honors of redoing what's
already been done. I think Walter should return the rights. Evidence to
purport my claims is the following:
The account on meta was created a couple of days ago and Slaven is known
to have gone to a vacation at about the same time. He's blocked himself
because he couldn't stand the situation our community was in at that
moment, but he never wanted his rights taken away. Please correct this asap

Filip


from_name: brion at pobox.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki automated test run failure 2006-08-11

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 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 413 of 429 tests (96.27%) FAILED!


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
On 8/8/06, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 08/08/06, Artur Fija?kowski <wiki.warx at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I fully agree - every day I'm trying to see all newimages on
> > special:newimages and I try to delete all copyvio-looking images. I
> > know that it's a bit agressive, but I think, that blanking user's
> > upload is the best method of saying ''hi, something is wrong with your
> > images''.

> Er, I hope you write them a note explaining what they're doing wrong?!
> Simply deleting someone's images tells them nothing about what
> mistakes they're making, and therefore does not help them to avoid
> making them in the future.

I subst [[Template:Speedywhat]] on the user's talk page when
speedy-deleting copyvios. I think obvious copyvios and unacceptable
licenses should be deleted on sight, while all non-obvious cases need
to pass through Deletion Requests. As for checking usage, in obvious
copyvio cases, it's a nice thing to do, but IMHO not the admin's
responsibility -- someone will remove the red link soon enough.

Erik


from_name: Paweł Dembowski

body:
> Walter, what you did with desysopping that guy was wrong. Everything was
> falsified and I have a reason to believe it was all a deed of
> Bormalagurski (Wiki Serbia @ meta) whom we had recently desysopped. If
> you do a checkuser for the guys two accounts, you'll see a Canadian and
> a Spanish IP (the first on meta, the second on sr:). Slaven (who
> erroneously got desysopped) never claimed to want to be desysopped and
> this is just Boris' vendetta for his own dethronement. I'm a bureaucrat
> at sr: wikipedia but I don't want to do the honors of redoing what's
> already been done. I think Walter should return the rights. Evidence to
> purport my claims is the following:
> The account on meta was created a couple of days ago and Slaven is known
> to have gone to a vacation at about the same time. He's blocked himself
> because he couldn't stand the situation our community was in at that
> moment, but he never wanted his rights taken away. Please correct this asap
> Filip

I fixed it. Sorry for the mix-up.

--
Pawe? 'Ausir' Dembowski
Wikipedia, wolna encyklopedia
http://pl.wikipedia.org


from_name: Simetrical

subject:
[Wikitech-l] 404 on en.wikipedia.org: Server-side HTTP header
	instead of client-side meta-refresh?

body:
On 8/11/06, Nick Jenkins <nickpj at gmail.com> wrote:
> Well if http://en.wikipedia.org/XYZ redirects to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XYZ , and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XYZ either is
> the real content (or a redirect to the real content in the future event of a URL system change, so as to maintain stable URLs), then
> wouldn't that be okay?

No, because then people get used to entering it like that . . . and
they happily go on entering it like that . . . and then one day,
they're interested in looking up info about the Robot Exclusion Policy
Protocol and type in http://en.wikipedia.org/robots.txt . . . and WTF?
 There's not really much mileage in encouraging people to continue
using such links.  Who knows what files and directories someone might
want to put in the root directory of enwiki?


from_name: Plyd

subject: [Wikitech-l] Categories

body:
Several months ago, I proposed some extra-informations for categories.
The data I proposed was to help making an RSS feed with the last
articles added into a category. The data could be a short description
put inside the category tag like
[[Category:XXXXX | SortTag | The XXXXX is the qsdj o fjqipsdf psqiodf.]]
An other idea was to be able to read this tag in a page for last added
articles, to avoid manualy updating lots of lists.

I did not have the time to work on sthg like it, but, even if it's not
really related to Bill's question, I still think it would be one of
the numerous good functionalities to add to mediawiki :)

Plyd


list: wikien-l

from_name: Stephen Bain

subject: [WikiEN-l] Norman Technologies AfD

body:
> On 8/10/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > uses a heap of weasel words/buzzwords/business jargon ("global trade
> > initiatives") which don't really mean much; and what is the

I would have said "corporate wankery".

On 8/10/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I agree. I'm curious as to what they actually do :)

Something to do with "value transfer systems" apparently.

This article makes an interesting test case, because it is well
written and structured, using references and an infobox. The problem
is it's essentially nothing more than what one would expect to find on
the "about" page of any corporate website.

--
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com


from_name: Samuli Lintula

subject: [Commons-l]  Deletion of still-used images

body:
Sorry about the quoting. I just joined and I'm copying this from the
archives. The issue is important so at the risk of breaking quoting
netiquette I just have to argument with the practical points which Brianna
brought up.

Brianna Laugher:

"One way which might help a bit, would be to create a tag (possibly
invisible) that would trigger a notice on CTs that said, 'please delink
this image now or risk redlinks!'"

Me:

This already exists. From simple: "+VfD Conscious puts deletion marker
Duplicate on Image:IC_(400x).jpeg" and "+VfD Wikipeder puts deletion
marker Copyvio on Image:H?siode.jpg". CommonsTickers should have
instructions on what to do in these cases. And some do:

 From de-wiki on +VfD (translated loosely): Check the image and if
necessary comment on Commons. If the image is properly marked for a speedy
deletion, remove the image from use and, if possible, replace with a free
alternative.

 From fi-wiki on +VfD (translated loosely): Check the image and if
necessary comment on Commons. Specifically:
"puts deletion marker": replace the image
"copyvio, logo, noncommercial, speedydelete": If valid, take image out of
use.

Note, that I have specifically adviced against removing images marked with
subst:nsd or what ever. If the deletion request is removed and proper
source is given, no one in fi-wiki could know it if someone had delinked
the image. In fi-wiki I have adviced to remove images only in the two
cases mentioned above and naturally also after the image really is gone.

The problem is that less than 10 tickers have any instructions.

Brianna Laugher:

"So on one hand we have local projects upset at us for deleting images in
use and on the other we have projects who seem not to even care when we
notify them. It is a difficult balance to walk."

Me:

On the third, the largest, hand we have projects that are just fine. I've
never heard a complaint from most of the wikis and not even from fi-wiki -
although they have had the opportunity. And do we have projects upset at
us, or just induhviduals from them? I actually find it very strange that
some users (like two ever) come to Commons to blame the admins. They
should go yell at the person who uploaded an image or who took it in use
in a local project.

All in all, I don't see a reason to change anything in the way we delete
images and I don't think that anyone should remove links to images marked
with subst:nsd/nld/delete/deletionrequest/deletebecause. However, I don't
oppose to having a bot that removes links to images *after* an image has
been deleted.

--
Yst?v?llisin terveisin,
Samuli Lintula


body:
On 8/11/06, Nick Jenkins <nickpj at gmail.com> wrote:
> Look, I'm not trying to be obtuse, but I sincerely think that a redirect is better, and pointing to corner-cases as a reason not to
> make things better in the general-case doesn't make much sense to me.

It makes sense because there's practically no cost to the alternative
that avoids such corner cases.  People will rarely leave out the
/wiki/ part, because they'll learn that it gets them the soft
redirect, but if they don't leave it out there's no harm anyway, and
so we don't have to worry about the corner cases.

This is especially important in the context of any kind of automated
procedure ? say if someone writes a Firefox extension that will give
you the appropriate Wikipedia page for selected text from a context
menu, and sees that the shorter URL works.  Out of thousands of people
looking up tons of stuff every day, somebody's going to become totally
confused at some point ? some things, like "wiki", aren't as minor as
robots.txt.

Frankly, I think it makes pretty much no difference, but we may as
well stay on the safe side.


from_name: Walter van Kalken

subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies

body:
I personally feel that one of the big issues is that people are required
to spend their own money for things. This means that if you life outside
of the US, even outside of Florida that your costs will be prohibitively
high. I personally find that one of the most prohibitive requirements.
Many people whom would have the time and the enthousiasm do not have a
bankaccount for that. And that is one of the reasons I have a lot of
respect for Angela and Anthere. They are willing to spend their personal
savings for the betterment of the projects. People should realize that
the next time they start complaining with them.

Walter

>I completely agree,
>when I have seen the candidatures, I have had this first feeling:
>"a lot of candidates only english speaking (with a little knowledge
>of another language)".
>
>The board should have a good communication and should be
>representative...  this don't mean that the members should be
>polyglot, but these are little signs... how many languages has got
>Wikipedia? Why?
>
>Ilario
>
>----Messaggio originale----
>Da: notafishz at gmail.com
>Data: 10.08.06 19.58
>A: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List"<foundation-l at wikimedia.org>
>Oggetto: Re: [Foundation-l] board candidacies
>
>On 8/10/06, Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
>
>
>>On 8/10/06, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>
>
>
>>Internationally, it means that countries where the English
>>
>>
>languages
>
>
>>is widespread are probably going to have a greater
>>
>>
>representation.
>
>
>>Changing this would be likely be extremely difficult and/or
>>
>>
>expensive.
>
>
>> And it's somewhat of a catch-22: Wikimedia probably won't have
>>
>>
>very
>
>
>>much representation from non-English speakers until it's easy
>>
>>
>for
>
>
>>Wikimedians of different languages to communicate with each
>>
>>
>other, but
>
>
>>until Wikimedia has more representation from non-English
>>
>>
>speakers
>
>
>>translation issues will probably remain a relatively low
>>
>>
>priority.
>
>
>>As for project representation, I don't think board members should
>>
>>
>be
>
>
>>representing individual projects in the first place.  Wikipedia
>>
>>
>is by
>
>
>>far the largest and most successful project, so it doesn't
>>
>>
>surprise me
>
>
>>that board candidates use that project for their discussion
>>
>>
>pages.
>
>I think you are missing the point entirely.
>What we are asking is for this election to be representative of
>the
>Wiki*m*edia community in its entirety, ie. all languages and all
>projects. Being on the board of the Wikimedia Foundation as
>Florence
>pointed out, does not mean changing policies in the English
>Wikipedia,
>no more than in Wikisource or the Chinese Wikipedia for that
>matter.
>It means seeing the greater vision, understanding, or be ready to
>understand what's at stake in all projects and all languages,
>making
>sure the projects are able to flourish regardless of their size or
>fame in the outside world. It means taking the right decisions as
>to
>where Wikimedia will use the money it has, the right decision on
>which
>partners to choose so as to allow to pursue our mission, ie.
>support
>free and open knowledge and access to information.
>
>
>
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>foundation-l mailing list
>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>
>


subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [WikiEN-l] A busy article!

body:
On 8/10/06, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> One source alone is a bad idea, yes, but there's no need to cite eight
> instead of two. I'll have a hack at the article tomorrow and
> rationalise some of the sources.

If you're talking about citing some particular factoid, then yeah,
citing more than 2 sources would be unusual. For an example of a
situation where I did it, see [[Kate McTell]] - there's a bit where I
list like 3 sources that say Ruby Glaze was a pseudonym, and 3 that
say they were separate people. Similarly if you have something really
controversial, then there are times that 10 footnotes for one sentence
might be appropriate...

(but in general, 1's good! :))

Steve


subject: [Wikitech-l] Apple's Wiki Server brings WYSIWYG to wiki

body:
On 8/10/06, Simetrical <Simetrical+wikitech at gmail.com> wrote:
> Some are, some aren't.  Note "beyond what actually needs to be parsed
> beyond sanitization".  Internal links must be parsed beyond
> sanitization, e.g., to generate what-links-here.  Since they're so
> common, it might make sense to keep them separate from the HTML that
> they generate.  That would be a specific decision that would have to
> be made.  But the following can certainly all be dispensed with in
> favor of XHTML:
<snip>
Sounds sensible.

> The above list consists exclusively of things that have a one-to-one
> mapping with HTML tags.

We should examine this proposal in more detail, it's kind of interesting...

> The problem is the complexity of the wikimarkup.  Look at
> http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Markup_spec for how many rules are
> needed on top of the SGML parsing that we need anyway.  A Javascript
> app that could parse all that in real time without noticeable lag
> would probably be very difficult to impossible to write.  And it's
> also led pretty directly to the slowness and complexity of our current
> parser, too.  It's all unnecessary: the markup doesn't need to be
> easily human-readable if we have WYSIWYG.

I think what I was proposing would not necessarily require a
javascript parser. I think? Instead, it would work something like
this:

1. Engine simultaneously presents rendered output and wikitext, with
synchronisation points between them
2. User edits some rendered output, transforming it purely at the
appearance level
3. Page sends rendered text back, engine compares it somehow with what
it sent, and works out the wikitext transformations required.

Or something.

Steve


subject: [Wikitech-l] Categories

body:
On 8/10/06, Bill Clark <wclarkxoom at gmail.com> wrote:
> One side argues that these two categories are inherently problematic,
> and that a list would be more appropriate because it allows for
> annotation of entires and referencing of sources.
>
> The other side insists that a list is not acceptible and that a
> category is required, for reasons that don't seem particularly clear
> to me but which they feel strongly about.

There's a similar end result problem with a totally different cause at
Commons. It's easy to tag images with a category. It's easier to link
to a list. End result: half of the images for some topic are in a
category with that name, half are on a list.

The easiest solution to me would be to use the text space of a
category as the list. You would end up with every entry listed twice:
once by some arbitrary sort order (eg, year), and once alphabetically.
In the list part at the top, you can put your annotations. The
category listing at the bottom basically serves to check that the list
part is up to date and that there aren't any stray additions.

Steve


body:
On 8/11/06, Simetrical <Simetrical+wikitech at gmail.com> wrote:
> I see.  Yes, that would be quite possible, given an HTML-to-wikitext
> converter, but also quite pointless, at least IMO.  Just ditch the
> wikitext altogether ? it's served its purpose.

If you "ditched the wikitext" you would end up storing metadata in
some other form, like additional XHTML attributes, comments or
something. Meaning a whole new grammar to define?

Steve


from_name: Tels

subject: [Wikitech-l] Categories

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

Moin,

On Friday 11 August 2006 00:03, Bill Clark wrote:
> On 8/10/06, Sebastian Moleski <sebmol at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I'm not aware of any such discussions but I can tell you that these two
> > categories, and categories like it, are not a local problem. On German
> > Wikipedia, we have these very same discussions over and over again
> > without much of a resolution. If you find anything, let us know because
> > we're looking for solutions too.
[snip sensible ideas]
> These are just my initial thoughts and I'm certainly open to
> suggestions or objections.

I am way past bedtime, so please take that with a barrel or two of salt. But
perhaps these things could be implemented in an extension, to toy around
and try them out?

For instance, my own slides extension (shameless plug :D is basically such
an "index page".  (er its a bit incomplete in the formatting options, but
that could of course be possible, its just for presentations the current
way made more sense :-D

(Linky: http://bloodgate.com/wiki/Wiki-Presentations_-_About :-)

You have one central template where to store which pages are part of it, and
on each page you include that template. That included template then morphs
on each page where it is included into a navbar, which is different for
each page (thats what categories dont give you, the backlink to the
category is always the same. Also I think that mechanism could replace all
these huge templates that are used to generate navigation boxes by unifying
them - thats on my todo :).

Whats basically missing is the "Index page". I always wanted to add such
afunctionality, aka the included template should not only morph according
to on which page it was included, but also accoding to what output you
want. (e.g.

{{mypresentation}}	  		(generates navbar)
{{mypresentation|output=pagenr}}	(1, or 2 etc)
{{mypresentation|output=pages}}	(7 e.g. number)
{{mypresentation|output=toc}}	(table of contents bascly. your index page)

So what you want is:

* have one template with an extension tag like
  <list> (whatever)
  pagename|pagetitle|pagenametosortunder (or whatever format you want)
 </list>
* in each item in the list, include the template, this means each member of
  the list gets a nice backlink to the list (what you usually do with
  [[category:foo]]

Since this works with templates, you already got rid of the cache
problem. :)

The index page is only updated when one of the member pages, _or_ the list
(inside the template) changes. Likewise, whenever you change the master
list, all pages that include the template get their navbar updated.

You also can have pages in the list that aren't existing yet.

The only downside I see is that just including the template into a new page
doesnt update the list of pages in the main template. (unlike putting a page
into a category) But that could be worked around by having the template
instead display a big red "thispage is not yetin the lis,t please edit
here" button. Heh, thats agood idea for my extension anyway...

Sorry if this ia bit incoherent, but if you want, I look into how to
modify/enhance my extension to implement the functionality you want/need.

After sleep, that is :D

Best wishes,

Tels

- --
 Signed on Fri Aug 11 02:04:17 2006 with key 0x93B84C15.
 Visit my photo gallery at http://bloodgate.com/photos/
 PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email.

 "Spammed if you do, spammed if you don't." - Murphy's Law

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subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikipedia Suggest

body:
On 8/11/06, Nick Jenkins <nickpj at gmail.com> wrote:

> It's possible to have the JavaScript search for " → " and stop any string
> at that point, but it feels a bit ugly, so I have omitted that.

What would happen if someone was genuinely looking for
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%E2%86%90%E2%86%93%E2%86%91%E2%86%92&redirect=no

:P


subject: [Commons-l] Stats on deletion

body:
Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:
> Patrick-Emil Z?rner wrote:
>
>> I do not even understand what the hell you are talking about.
>>
>
> You claim that German law applies; I claim that Iranian law applies. Who
> is more correct?
>
Neither. Commons server is in the US. Case dismissed. ;)

Filip


from_name: mboverload

body:
I'm afraid my message may have been lost in the postings, but I think it's
an important point:

What does Wikipedia need WYSIWYG?  We already have noobs writing POV
articles, now you want

* Large red text
* tons of bold
* Large purple text

?

I honestly don't see the point.

mboverload


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies

body:
Erik Zachte wrote:
> I concur with this entirely. We have enough dot com millionaires on the
> Board, and the Advisory Board might add some.
>
? We do not have any dot com millionaires on the board.
> What 'saddens' me however is the way Anthere was treated during the Board
> session last Sunday when the issue of paying board members was brought up.
> Jimbo made a casual remark to the effect of "(I'm not sure) we want to pay
> board members, besides it is not allowed by the bylaws" (paraphrasing here).
>
Well, it is not allowed, not just by our bylaws as I understand it, but
by the law.  This is not a matter of anyone treating Anthere in any bad way.

She mentioned specific expenses, expenses which the foundation can and
should reimburse.  She should request reimbursement for those.

--Jimbo


subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies


from_name: daniwo59 at aol.com

subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies

body:
I am confused by this thread. It is starting with false assumptions (Board
members are required to spend their own money for things) and builds on that to
 create further false assumptions (we have enough dot com millionaires on the
 Board).

To the best of my knowledge:
1. The expenses of Board members relating to Foundation work are covered by
the Foundation. They do not come from the individual Board members' "personal
savings."
2. We currently have no dot com millionaires on the Board.
3. Paying Board members for Board-related activities can be perceived  as a
potential conflict of interests.
4. In many non-profit organizations in the US--but not the WMF--Board
membership is actually contingent upon making a significant donation to the
organization.

Please get the facts right when complaining about the Board and its  members.

Danny

In a message dated 8/11/2006 1:25:49 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
erikzachte at infodisiac.com writes:

Walter  van Kalken:
> I personally feel that one of the big issues is that  people are required
> to spend their own money for things. This means  that if you life outside
> of the US, even outside of Florida that your  costs will be prohibitively
> high. I personally find that one of the  most prohibitive requirements.
> Many people whom would have the time  and the enthousiasm do not have a
> bankaccount for that. And that is  one of the reasons I have a lot of
> respect for Angela and Anthere.  They are willing to spend their personal
> savings for the betterment of  the projects. People should realize that
> the next time they start  complaining with them.

I concur with this entirely. We have enough dot  com millionaires on the
Board, and the Advisory Board might add  some.
This is not personal to anyone, those concerned probably just got  their
priorities right.

What 'saddens' me however is the way Anthere  was treated during the Board
session last Sunday when the issue of paying  board members was brought up.
Jimbo made a casual remark to the effect of  "(I'm not sure) we want to pay
board members, besides it is not allowed by  the bylaws" (paraphrasing here).
Easy to say in his position. Then someone  made a witty but badly timed joke
about the situation, the chairman of the  Board might have intervened at that
moment. I feel it was humiliating for  Anthere. Maybe the bylaws allow other
board members than Jimmy to accept  well paid invitations for keynote
speeches?

Erik  Zachte


subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies


subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies

body:
Walter van Kalken wrote:
>  I personally feel that one of the big issues is that people are
>  required to spend their own money for things.

Board members are not required to spend their own money for things.  I
am unaware of any board member ever being turned down for reimbursement
of any expenses.

>  This means that if you life outside of the US, even outside of
>  Florida that your costs will be prohibitively high. I personally find
>  that one of the most prohibitive requirements. Many people whom would
>  have the time and the enthousiasm do not have a bankaccount for that.
>  And that is one of the reasons I have a lot of respect for Angela and
>  Anthere. They are willing to spend their personal savings for the
>  betterment of the projects. People should realize that the next time
>  they start complaining with them.

Absolutely right!  They have not been required to spend their own money
for things, but in many cases they have (as I have).

--Jimbo


subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies


from_name: tim at greenscourt.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] Where are the Extensions

body:
I fixed the link that had me looking in the wrong place. Not sure if
there are other bad links out there or not...

Tim

> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Where are the Extensions
> From: Timwi <timwi at gmx.net>
> Date: Fri, August 11, 2006 8:35 am
> To: wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
>
> Jens Frank wrote:
> > On Mon, Aug 07, 2006 at 02:53:25PM -0700, tim at greenscourt.com wrote:
> >
> >>I am looking for the "Reviews" extension which I believe was written by
> >>Magnus Manske and feel lost in a maze.
> >>
> >>Several messages posted to the MediaWiki-L mailing list refer to updates
> >>to this code as follows:
> >>  Update of /cvsroot/wikipedia/extensions/Review
> >>  In directory sc8-pr-cvs1.sourceforge.net:/tmp/cvs-serv22161
> >>
> >>The page at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_extensions links to
> >>http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/wikipedia/extensions/#dirlist, but
> >>this location just times out for me.
> >>
> >>I've tried going to http://sourceforge.net/projects/wikipedia/ but I
> >>can't seem to find where the extensions are hiding there.
> >
> > We don't use sourceforge's CVS any more. Check our SVN repository at
> > http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/extensions/
>
> Maybe someone should actually fix the links then? :-p
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


body:
At the recent Wikimania Conference, Jimmy Wales said that, contrary to
some opinions, barriers to participation are *not* good. We still get
vandals, but we're probably missing out on some really good content
creators who are not technologically savvy. This is one reason why WM
is now working with SocialText to integrate Wikiwyg.

Tim

> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Apple's Wiki Server brings WYSIWYG to wiki
> From: Christiaan Briggs <christiaan at yurkycross.co.uk>
> Date: Fri, August 11, 2006 7:58 am
> To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l at wikimedia.org>
>
> Yeah, fair points. Couldn't agree more.
>
> Christiaan
>
> On 11 Aug 2006, at 1:30 PM, Steve Bennett wrote:
>
> > On 8/11/06, Christiaan Briggs <christiaan at yurkycross.co.uk> wrote:
> >> On 11 Aug 2006, at 11:51 AM, mboverload wrote:
> >>
> >>> What does Wikipedia need WYSIWYG?  We already have noobs writing
> >>> POV articles, now you want ...
> >>
> >> And there's an example of the attitude I was talking in my first
> >> post. It's curious in that it accepts that wiki markup is barrier
> >> to participation but that this is somehow a good thing.
> >
> > Sometimes barriers to participation *are* a good thing. Various
> > online communities have noticed that the harder you make it to
> > participate, the better quality participants you get.
> >
> > OTOH, Wikipedia explicitly wants contributions from *everyone*,
> > even if they are 14 and have trouble spelling Pok?mon...
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


subject: [WikiEN-l] MyWikiBiz

body:
Death Phoenix wrote:
> Hey Jimbo, can you confirm that you tried to unblock MyWikiBiz but had
> problems with your browser, per [[User talk:MyWikiBiz]]?
> _______________________________________________
>
Yes, I and I did manage to unblock him properly just now.


from_name: Erik Zachte

subject: [Foundation-l]  board candidacies

body:
Walter van Kalken:
> I personally feel that one of the big issues is that people are required
> to spend their own money for things. This means that if you life outside
> of the US, even outside of Florida that your costs will be prohibitively
> high. I personally find that one of the most prohibitive requirements.
> Many people whom would have the time and the enthousiasm do not have a
> bankaccount for that. And that is one of the reasons I have a lot of
> respect for Angela and Anthere. They are willing to spend their personal
> savings for the betterment of the projects. People should realize that
> the next time they start complaining with them.

I concur with this entirely. We have enough dot com millionaires on the
Board, and the Advisory Board might add some.
This is not personal to anyone, those concerned probably just got their
priorities right.

What 'saddens' me however is the way Anthere was treated during the Board
session last Sunday when the issue of paying board members was brought up.
Jimbo made a casual remark to the effect of "(I'm not sure) we want to pay
board members, besides it is not allowed by the bylaws" (paraphrasing here).
Easy to say in his position. Then someone made a witty but badly timed joke
about the situation, the chairman of the Board might have intervened at that
moment. I feel it was humiliating for Anthere. Maybe the bylaws allow other
board members than Jimmy to accept well paid invitations for keynote
speeches?

Erik Zachte


subject: [Foundation-l]  board candidacies


from_name: Gregory Kohs

subject: [WikiEN-l] MyWikiBiz

body:
Quote:

Death Phoenix wrote:
>* Hey Jimbo, can you confirm that you tried to unblock MyWikiBiz but had
*>* problems with your browser, per [[User talk:MyWikiBiz]]?
*>* _______________________________________________
*>*
*> > Yes, I and I did manage to unblock him properly just now.

I'm here to say that the MyWikiBiz account and IP addresses ever used are
STILL BLOCKED.  My recommendation to Jimbo by direct e-mail is to "release
the hounds" -- let some of the Admins try to unblock me.

Kindly,

 Gregory Kohs


list: wiktionary-l

from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wiktionary-l] Mediawiki search is not finding parts of words

body:
An el wrote:
> Hi,
>
> our problem is we have 2 articles in our mediawiki one contains
> ...intranet... in the title and the other one ...intranets... in the title.
>
> If I enter "intranet" into the search I will only recieve the first article
> as a result but not the second on although "intranet" is a part of
> "intranets".

That's normal. Even google works this way. :)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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from_name: Amgine

subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies

references:
<ebfkoi$bup$1@sea.gmane.org>	<ebflq6$fkg$1@sea.gmane.org>	<44DB66B3.8010205@wolfmountaingroup.com>	<44DB659D.5020407@typhon.org>
	<44DB70A5.8030102@wolfmountaingroup.com>
	<44DC99E8.1020203@typhon.org>

body:
On 11-Aug-06, at 7:53 AM, Jean-Denis Vauguet wrote:

> It's now live, a nice, simple system of templates which streamline
> translation process. Many candidates created a Talk page on Meta
> for the
> elections.
>
> If you find something broken, write on my Talk page and I'll fix it.

Just so everyone is aware, Jean-Denis is currently [[m:User:Meanos]],
but has requested a user name change to [[m:User:Jd]] (to match his
[[w:fr:User:Jd]]).

Amgine


subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies


subject:
[Wikitech-l] 404 on en.wikipedia.org: Server-side HTTP header
 instead of client-side meta-refresh?

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> Would this be an appropriate time for me to ask that if you go to a
> redirected article (say, George Walker Bush), then you would properly
> redirected to end up at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W_Bush,
> rather than http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Walker_Bush with
> content from the George W Bush page (and the words "redirected from").
>
> I'm sure I had a good reason for requesting this, but it escapes me at
> the moment. If anyone knows...:)

We should have a FAQ for this. :)

/me digs up an old response

http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2005-November/032619.html

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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from_name: maru dubshinki

subject: [WikiEN-l] Are TV screencaps reputable sources?

body:
On 8/11/06, Joe Anderson <computerjoe.mailinglist at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Cool Cat recently created an article called Starfleet
> Uniforms<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfleet_Uniforms>,
> and it was nominated for deletion as cruft and OR.
>
> The screencaps/promo photos in the article, IMO, acted as a reputable
> source. I mean, how else (canonically) are you going to know about the
> uniform switch between TOS and TNG? Using a book is not canonical, and
> therefore is surely not [[WP:V]].

But wouldn't that specific example be better handled by an entry in
TNG with two images and "As one can see looking at the screenshots,
the uniform in TNG differs from the classic uniform of TOS..." than an
entire article?

> As for fancruft, how is an article about Starfleet uniforms fancruft. In
> some people's opinion, any article to do with any fictional is fancruft. But
> is the article on Jean-Luc Picard fancruft? I think not.
>
> Your thoughts?
>
> --
> Joe Anderson

~maru


from_name: Magnus Manske

body:
Edward Z. Yang schrieb:
> Simetrical wrote:
> >> (For those who don't quite get what XML is, it basically means that
> >> instead of [[Target page|displayed text]] we'd have something like
> >> <wikilink target="Target page">displayed text</wikilink>.  Of course,
> >> you won't have to look at it.  ;) )
>
> More like <mw:a href="Main Page">Main Page</mw:a> with namespaces,
> because we'd want to mix it with XHTML.
>
> Heck, we should have done that for <mw:nowiki>
For a working XML schema and wiki-to-xml converter, see:
http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/wiki2xml/w2x.php

Magnus

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from_name: Anthony

subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies

body:
> > What 'saddens' me however is the way Anthere was treated during the Board
> > session last Sunday when the issue of paying board members was brought up.
> > Jimbo made a casual remark to the effect of "(I'm not sure) we want to pay
> > board members, besides it is not allowed by the bylaws" (paraphrasing here).
> >
> Well, it is not allowed, not just by our bylaws as I understand it, but
> by the law.  This is not a matter of anyone treating Anthere in any bad way.
>
Nonprofit directors can legally be compensated, barring rules (such as
bylaws) to the contrary.  Not that this is a good idea.

http://www.legalzoom.com/law_library/non-profit/Directors-and-Officers-of-the-Non-Profit-Corp.html

Anthony


subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies


from_name: Alphax (Wikipedia email)

subject: [Commons-l] Stats on deletion

body:
Patrick-Emil Z?rner wrote:
> I do not even understand what the hell you are talking about.

You claim that German law applies; I claim that Iranian law applies. Who
is more correct?

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

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from_name: Julien Lemoine

subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikipedia Suggest

body:
* Nick Jenkins <nickpj at gmail.com> [2006-08-11 16:19:18 +1000]:

> Actually, even better would be to:
> * change to JSON format ( http://www.json.org/ )
> * omit the "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/" bit (and let the web UI add this instead)
> * use a different array for each element, rather than 3 different arrays for the different fields (thus grouping all the fields for
> one element together).
> * use the [] notation instead of array notation (which is part of the JSON spec anyway).
>
> In other words, using a real example, if the TcpQuery results for a search on "cat" were changed from this current result:
>
> sendRes("cat", new Array("Catholics → Roman Catholic Church", "Catholic Archibishop → Bishop", "Catholic", "Catholic Pope
> → Pope",
> "CATV → Cable television", "Catalogue astrographique → Star catalogue", "Catholic Encyclopedia", "Catalonia", "Cattle",
> "Catholicism"),
> new Array("7505", "4484", "4200", "3269", "2347", "2095", "1956", "1740", "1604", "1527"), new
> Array("http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Catholic_Church",
> "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bishop", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope",
> "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_television", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_catalogue",
> "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Encyclopedia",
> "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalonia", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholicism"));
>
> To this:
>
> ["cat",
> ["Catholics", 7505, "Roman Catholic Church"],
> ["Catholic Archibishop", 4484, "Bishop"],
> ["Catholic", 4200, ],
> ["Catholic", 3269, ],
> ["CATV", 2347, "Cable television"],
> ["Catalogue astrographique", 2095, "Star catalogue"],
> ["Catholic Encyclopedia", 1956, ],
> ["Catalonia", 1740, ],
> ["Cattle", 1604, ],
> ["Catholicism", 1527, ]
> ]
>
> Then it would have the following benefits:
> * Less data is transmitted (by my count approximately 840 bytes versus 322 bytes, or a saving on 62%).
> * The data can still be passed to an JS eval() to evaluate it.
> * The redirects are in a different field, instead of merged into the first field.
> * It's in a standard data format, so if other services wanted to talk to TcpQuery, this would make that easier.
> * To me, the second of those data formats seems simpler (but this may just be my personal preference).

I am agree to use this format instead of the previous one, it is better. But the url need to be
added since it is different of the title(but without the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/).

I will give modifiy the TcpQuery to give result in json with an array of 4 entry :
[url, name, frequency, redirect]
for example :
["cat",
["Roman_Catholic_Church", "Catholics", 7505, "Roman Catholic Church"], ...

Did you used json in EMCAsript/javascript ?

Best Regards.
Julien Lemoine


subject: [Commons-l] Stats on deletion

body:
Daniel Kinzler wrote:
> (This mail is in response to a thread on Commons-l; I'm cross posting it
>  to the toolserver list, because it seems relevant there. Ultimately,
> this should probably be discussed with the WMF and its local associates)
>
> Please note that publishing "intelligence" obtained from analyzing
> person-related data may be considered a violation of that person's
> privacy, even if the analyzed data is publicly available - at least
> under German law and, afaik, EU guidelines. Data mining can expose
> things about a person that are not easily found out by looking straight
> at the raw data - this is often problematic, especially since the
> results can be quite misleading, as per the nature of the methods used.
>

For some value of "intelligence", yes.

> If this is stupid or not is besides the point. We have been asked
> explicitly by the German Wikimedia e.V. not do make any analysis of user
> data available on the toolserver, so we won't (although i find it a bit
> hard to draw a line). If it would be legal for the US based foundation
> to do it, is a different question. A different question still is if it
> would be wise and desirable. To quote Wau Holland and the "hacker
> ethics" of the Chaos Computer Club: "utilize public data, protect
> private data". Information wants to be free - but so do people. In the
> end, the latter are more important.
>

The data we are dealing with *IS* public data.

> I personally feel that any analysis that exposes information that is not
>  *relevant* to activity on the project should be strictly opt-in. An
> example would be a breakup of user activity be time of days or day of
> the week. I'm not sure about things like the number of untagged images a
> user has uploaded, for example - that does seem relevant to me. If it's
> legal or wise to expose such an analysis is an open question to me
> (actually, I'd like to have some input on this, since my tools can give
> that statistic).
>

It's all relevant. Who we should make it available to is possibly a
different manner.

> On the other hand, I believe that admins should expect to be subject to
> "public oversight". This is in my opinion an important part of an
> informal "watch the powerful" mechanism. We already have the ability to
> see a list of "admin action" an admin has performed. I'm a bit unsure
> about consolidating that log data into a statistics of deletions per
> week or whatever - I think we should ask ourselves how useful that would
> really be. In any case it should be made more obvious to people what
> "data trails" they leave when working on Wikimedia projects, as a
> "normal" user and as an admin.
>
> General statistics about admin activity - i.e. sum of all admins, not
> per person, would be quite interesting, though, and unproblematic.
>

How about a compromise here? Make the sum totals available to anyone,
and the individual breakdowns only available to admins?

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

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from_name: Brad Patrick

subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies

body:
The issue of board reimbursements for legitimate expenses is being
discussed.  There is a difference between asking people to be reimbursed
for costs and being paid a salary for being a board member.  If your
life circumstances are such that you can make ends meet, the most
demanding issue for your involvement in Wikimedia issues is time, not
money.  Moving forward, based on the board's improving financial
stability, the issue raised by Anthere will not be as significant a
problem, if not eradicated completely.

Erik Zachte wrote:
> Walter van Kalken:
>
>> I personally feel that one of the big issues is that people are required
>> to spend their own money for things. This means that if you life outside
>> of the US, even outside of Florida that your costs will be prohibitively
>> high. I personally find that one of the most prohibitive requirements.
>> Many people whom would have the time and the enthousiasm do not have a
>> bankaccount for that. And that is one of the reasons I have a lot of
>> respect for Angela and Anthere. They are willing to spend their personal
>> savings for the betterment of the projects. People should realize that
>> the next time they start complaining with them.
>>
>
> I concur with this entirely. We have enough dot com millionaires on the
> Board, and the Advisory Board might add some.
> This is not personal to anyone, those concerned probably just got their
> priorities right.
>
> What 'saddens' me however is the way Anthere was treated during the Board
> session last Sunday when the issue of paying board members was brought up.
> Jimbo made a casual remark to the effect of "(I'm not sure) we want to pay
> board members, besides it is not allowed by the bylaws" (paraphrasing here).
> Easy to say in his position. Then someone made a witty but badly timed joke
> about the situation, the chairman of the Board might have intervened at that
> moment. I feel it was humiliating for Anthere. Maybe the bylaws allow other
> board members than Jimmy to accept well paid invitations for keynote
> speeches?
>
> Erik Zachte
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>


subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies


from_name: Jay R. Ashworth

body:
On Thu, Aug 10, 2006 at 07:58:09PM +0100, Christiaan Briggs wrote:
> On 10 Aug 2006, at 7:13 PM, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
> > Well, I dunno; I've made a reasonably comfortable living for the
> > last two decades exercising professional judgement about software
> > design, so I suspect my opinions are neither *merely* opinions, nor
> > worthless.
>
> I meant that your opinion doesn't change people's experience. Their
> experience is what it is. It doesn't matter to me or anyone else that
> you think our experience is "bullshit." To say such a thing is
> meaningless and indicates that you live in a self-aggrandising
> fantasy world. I can't help that.

It may not change their experience.  But I certainly think it has
something useful to say about the objective interpretation of their
experience.

I'm sure lots of people would be pleased if they could commute to work
in a NASCAR stock car -- it's faster.  But in the real world, there are
dozens of reasons why it's not practical.

I make a living believing that not everyone is equipped to have useful
opinions on some topics, and whether it squicks you or not -- or you
think it makes me a purveyor of self-aggrandizing fantasy or not -- I
don't plan to stop any time soon.

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

	The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.


body:
On Thu, Aug 10, 2006 at 10:21:24PM +0200, Steve Bennett wrote:
> The interesting thing about this conversation is that I'm employed
> precisely to stop people like Christiaan and JRA from having to talk
> to each other.

Hee.

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

	The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.


from_name: Kelly Martin

subject: [Foundation-l] Emergency on Wiktionary

body:
On 8/10/06, Walter Vermeir <walter at wikipedia.be> wrote:
> Not all wikis are the same. You can not project the situation of EN to
> all other wikis.
>
> I have just done a de-sysop/de-bureaucrat on the Serbian Wikpedia. There
> the have (now) 40 sysops and of those 25 are bureaucrat.
>
> That is from my POV an irresponsible number of bureaucrats. I do not
> know how many active user there are. The have 34700 articles.

I have long been concerned about srwiki, ever since I had one of their
admins try to get me deadminned on English for refusing to support the
"consensus of admins on srwiki" with regard to a content issue on
enwiki.  It disturbs me that srwiki's admins act as judge and jury on
content, and especially since (to my untrained eye) they seem to be
acting to push a pro-Serbian point of view.  Perhaps the situation is
not as unsavory as my brief encounter suggests, but I do think that it
is unacceptable for ANY language edition of Wikipedia to abrogate
NPOV, especially in the interest of nationalistic politics.

Kelly


subject: [Foundation-l] Emergency on Wiktionary


from_name: Aerik Sylvan

subject: [Wikitech-l] Wysiwyg debate

body:
A lot of comments have been made about whether wiki markup is a barrier to
entry, and if it is, whether it (the barrier to entry) is a good thing or
not.

On the first part, it would be interesting to measure edit attempts - how
many people clicked edit, but did not click save or preview.  Of course this
does not tell you if the markup is a barrier to entry, but it may be some
kind of rough indicator.  The experience of editing a well developed page
can be like looking at source code:  if you don't know the language, there's
an awful lot of gobbledygook in there, and I'd think it intimidates some
people.

So... it would just be an interesting figure, to hold up next to other
figures, like completed edits.

Aerik


from_name: Steve Bennett

body:
Would this be an appropriate time for me to ask that if you go to a
redirected article (say, George Walker Bush), then you would properly
redirected to end up at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W_Bush,
rather than http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Walker_Bush with
content from the George W Bush page (and the words "redirected from").

I'm sure I had a good reason for requesting this, but it escapes me at
the moment. If anyone knows...:)

Steve

On 8/11/06, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> I nixed that because then you've got scary unstable URLs being linked to. The
> URL system may change, potentially dramatically so, and they'll no longer work.
> (But I'm a bit of a stickler about stable URLs on articles.)
>
> The PHP manual example is particularly dangerous because they don't even issue
> an HTTP redirect, it just spits the content right back. Bad for caching and for
> linking.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>
>


body:
On Thu, Aug 10, 2006 at 04:31:13PM -0400, Simetrical wrote:
> Jay, with all due respect, you're a programmer.

But I'm not.  I hate writing code.  That's what coders are for.

I'm primarily an analyst/designer, and that's what I've done for the
last 20 years.  The last year or so, to, I suspect, everyone's
surprise, I've done helpdesk.  Quite successfully.  So I'm not at all
unequipped to spend extensive time talking to non-computer-savvy users.

>                                                   You're comfortable
> with codes and so on.  You'd probably be fairly comfortable with HTML
> too.  You're probably also comfortable with command lines.  Most
> people are not.  It doesn't matter how simple you make it--many people
> are going to be put off by markup of any kind.  I know many such
> people: anything resembling codes makes them instantly uncomfortable.
> "Screw them" is not a productive answer.

And indeed, it's not the answer I'd give *them*.

The answer I'd give *them* is the one I gave Christiaan *first*, and
which ties directly into your next comment:

> As for the problem at hand: quite simply, a WYSIWYG editor that
> implements all of our wikisyntax is totally impossible.  It's way, way
> too complicated to implement smoothly in Javascript.  But you know,
> the entire *point* of using wikisyntax rather than HTML is to make
> editing *easier*.  If it stands in the way of creating an
> easier-to-use interface, don't you think it's outlived its usefulness?

If indeed it does, yes.

But the data is completely anecdotal: we have people who complain about
it.  Great.  But we have *hundreds of thousands* of editors who have
created, literally, millions of pages on Wikipedia.

So clearly, it's not unusable.

> So how about this.  Design a WYSIWYG editor that works with cleaned
> HTML, plus whatever syntaxes aren't replicable in HTML.  Make sure
> this editor is high-quality, and then make it the default editor.
> Then, anytime someone requests a section or page, just convert all the
> wikisyntax (tables, bold, italics, headers, etc.) into HTML before
> sending it, so it will work with the WYSIWYG.  Then, the user saves
> it, and the wikisyntax is converted irreversibly to HTML.

I don't think that will round-trip successfully.

>                                                            But the
> underlying representation will no longer be important to most users;

This is not as important as other aspects of this.

> anyone who wants to edit it directly is probably hardcore enough to
> deal with HTML in any case.

Who said anything about HTML?

And I rather strongly suspect that you'd find that *lots* of the
editors we have now would much prefer to stay in wikitext.  I'm damned
sure I would.

>                                This would have a side benefit of greatly
> simplifying wikitext parsers, ours included (we can even assume that
> the submitted HTML is XML-compliant!).

Oh.  You're planning to toss wikitext entirely.

I can guarantee you, without even asking, that that will never, ever,
happen.

> So does anyone see any reason to keep wikisyntax at this point, beyond
> what actually needs to be parsed beyond sanitization?

I can't *wait* to read the other answer to *this*.  :-)

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

	The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.


body:
On Thu, Aug 10, 2006 at 05:09:55PM -0400, Simetrical wrote:
> The problem is the complexity of the wikimarkup.

<inarticulate shriek of frustration>

Wikitext is one of the simplest markup schemata -- for it's power --
that I have *ever* seen, in 20 years of staring at markup languages.

I'm perfectly happy to characterize as a strawman argument anything
that starts with the premise "wikitext is too complicated".

Certainly, there are high-powered things you might want to do for which
the syntax is more complex; that's true of anything.

But for day to day editing -- certainly 80-90% of the content of en.wp
-- wikitext is *horrifically* simple.

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

	The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.


from_name: Jimmy Wales

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> Sometimes barriers to participation *are* a good thing. Various online
> communities have noticed that the harder you make it to participate,
> the better quality participants you get.
>
> OTOH, Wikipedia explicitly wants contributions from *everyone*, even
> if they are 14 and have trouble spelling Pok?mon...
>

Well, actually, no we do not want those.  I agree with you about
barriers to participation.

But the problem is: wikitext as a barrier to participation is not
particularly effective: it is too broad, and too narrow.

It does not generally exclude the wired generation of 14 year old
pokemon fans who grew up on the web.
It does generally exclude scholars of ancient Chinese poetry.

Better to use a different filter, like the "block" function in the
software, I think.


body:
On Thu, Aug 10, 2006 at 08:03:17PM -0400, Simetrical wrote:
> On 8/10/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> > If you "ditched the wikitext" you would end up storing metadata in
> > some other form, like additional XHTML attributes, comments or
> > something. Meaning a whole new grammar to define?
>
> A whole new *grammar* to define, to a point, but no need to define a
> *syntax*, because it would all use XML syntax.  Not only is that
> simple (and, ergo, fast) to parse, there are parsers available for it
> in virtually any language you want.

And for a) those of us who *want* to work in raw text and b) those who
want to write simple automation code, in saw, perl, you've just
sextupled the workload.

Great.

Thanks.

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

	The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.


body:
On Fri, Aug 11, 2006 at 01:29:09PM +0200, Steve Bennett wrote:
> * We haven't specifically talked about Wikipedia - MediaWiki is used
> by lots of other sites, businesses etc, which would definitely benefit
> from being more "noob"-friendly.

No, but it's been suggested that *major* (replacing wikitext entire
with XML is 'major') structural changes be made to MediaWiki *which
would likely make things harder for Wikipedia, for the benefit of those
non-WMF users of MW.

It's been said before (check the archives) that changes in that
category just aren't gonna hunt.

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

	The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.


body:
On Fri, Aug 11, 2006 at 12:41:43PM +0100, Christiaan Briggs wrote:
> And there's an example of the attitude I was talking in my first
> post. It's curious in that it accepts that wiki markup is barrier to
> participation but that this is somehow a good thing.

Well, ok; let's talk to that topic.

Yeah, it *is* good.

Go ahead, call me an elitist again.

For Wikipedia, specifically, any cost which much be paid by potential
editors -- within reasonable limits -- is a *good* thing, as it weeds
out an increasingly larger pool of potential vandals.

This is less of an issue on non-WMF sites, but I really *do* think it's
a good thing for wp, et al, yes.  It *is* possible for vandalism to
outstrip the capability of the active userbase to clean it up; negative
feedback is useful.

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

	The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.


body:
On Thu, Aug 10, 2006 at 08:39:32PM +0200, Steve Bennett wrote:
> MediaWiki does *not* have a great user interface. It's ok, and it's a
> hell of a lot better than the shots I've seen of the original
> Wikipedia. But it could be a lot better. I don't have many
> constructive suggestions to make for the moment, but I could start by
> suggesting that getting metadata about pages out of the page text
> itself (categories, interwikis and redirects come to mind), would be
> an improvement.

That would make versioning *much* more complex, Steve.

Why, *specifically*, do you think it would be a win?

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

	The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.


body:
Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
> For Wikipedia, specifically, any cost which much be paid by potential
> editors -- within reasonable limits -- is a *good* thing, as it weeds
> out an increasingly larger pool of potential vandals.
>
> This is less of an issue on non-WMF sites, but I really *do* think it's
> a good thing for wp, et al, yes.  It *is* possible for vandalism to
> outstrip the capability of the active userbase to clean it up; negative
> feedback is useful.
>
>
I am not so sure that "difficult editing" is an appropriate filter, though.

First, to be a vandal, one need not learn the nuances of the table syntax.
Second, most vandals are young and web savvy... we are probably slowing
them down less than we are slowing down wise and thoughtful people who
are not web savvy.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] Break out links-How are they done?

body:
On Thu, Aug 10, 2006 at 11:11:47PM +0200, Warhog (aja Julian Fleischer) wrote:
> in firefox and konqueror it is possible, i think it should be possible
> this way in MSIE too, but i guess very few people are aware of it.
>
> you can dran and drop any link to any tab/window where you want it to be
> opened. That way you can override "open in new window". In MSIE i thin
> kyou have to drag it to the adressbar or the title-bar of the window,
> i'm not sure. in KOnqueror and Firefox you simply pull it onto the
> current tab. If you configured firefox to not show only one tab i don't
> know what to do. I think pull it to the locationbar will help there to.

Yeah, Steve pointed that out too, immediately after.

And it's correct, but sort of esoteric.

Much more annoying, though, as I noted, is that Firefox seems to have
last the status bar "(opens in a new window)" that Netscape used to
provide.  Don't know why.

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

	The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.


body:
On Thu, Aug 10, 2006 at 07:18:42PM -0400, David Spencer, MediaWiki User wrote:
> 1. I feel it is a shame that the wiki publisher does not have the option
> to code break out links to external web sites. It is very easy for those
> new to computers to head to a new link and forget what they originally
> were looking for on the original wiki. Then they leave our wiki.
>
> 2. When I send someone to an external link from my wiki, I am not
> responsible for the content of that external site. Sometimes "newbies"
> may think that I created the external link page too.

There's a maxim in the design field that you can get yourself in
trouble by over-optimising for 1) untrained users or 2) too-slow
hardware.

Ok; I just synthesized that now from things lots of other, smarter
people than me have said.  But it's still true.  People have a tendency
to try to make things easier for 'dummies' :-) while make much more
important things much harder for 'smart people'.

On balance, it's probably much better for the entire audience to *train
the non-savvy users*.  If they can't be bothered to learn, then they're
not *entitled* to have everyone else's work made more difficult on
their behalf.

> 3. FYI... I am a Mac user using FireFox. To make a break out link, all I
> have to do is hover over the link, press lightly and choose "Open link
> in new window".

Mac mice have click-*pressure* sensors?  Wow!

> 4. The wiki I am developing is here  http://www.christianmedia.ca

Interesting.  I don't think I've seen anyone run a primarily-MW site
where the front page *wasn't*.

> Thanks again for all of your comments and words of wisdom. This is a
> very helpful listserv!

<pedant>
"listserv" is a registered trademark of a mailing list software company
whose products we aren't using.  :-)

http://www.lsoft.com/corporate/legal.asp
</pedant>

Glad we could help.  And that we didn't scare you off.  :-)

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

	The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.


from_name: Nick Jenkins

body:
Hi All,

If I go to http://en.wikipedia.org/Tokyo (note the missing "/wiki"), I get a 404 page that contains a 5 second-client side refresh
tag like so:
<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="5; URL=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo">

Is there any chance we could follow the great example of the PHP folks, and immediately give the user what they really want (e.g.
http://php.net/date , which instantly shows the user the content of the http://php.net/manual/en/function.date.php page) ?

In other words, use a server-side HTTP redirect/location header, rather than a client-side refresh?

This would be quicker for the user, friendlier, more forgiving, and just generally a nice touch.

All the best,
Nick.


body:
On Fri, Aug 11, 2006 at 11:07:09AM -0400, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
> > For Wikipedia, specifically, any cost which much be paid by potential
> > editors -- within reasonable limits -- is a *good* thing, as it weeds
> > out an increasingly larger pool of potential vandals.
> >
> > This is less of an issue on non-WMF sites, but I really *do* think it's
> > a good thing for wp, et al, yes.  It *is* possible for vandalism to
> > outstrip the capability of the active userbase to clean it up; negative
> > feedback is useful.
> >
> I am not so sure that "difficult editing" is an appropriate filter, though.

Yeah, I saw your comment just after I got done writing mine.

"Difficult" is a word with many connotations, of course.

> First, to be a vandal, one need not learn the nuances of the table syntax.
> Second, most vandals are young and web savvy... we are probably slowing
> them down less than we are slowing down wise and thoughtful people who
> are not web savvy.

True.

But "complexity as a filter" was, truly, the least of my arguments
against replacing wikitext with something much more complex as support
for more WYSIWYG front-endry.

Christiaan had merely made that point separately, and I was replying.

I suspect this topic is reaching maximum density anyway, and I was
about to sit down.

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

	The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.


from_name: Jan-Åke Larsson

subject: [Wikitech-l] Using dvipng in texvc

body:
I have taken a look at render.ml and have written a patch that will
enable the use of the PNG-rendering program dvipng. This would reduce
load on the server, and also enable full-alpha transparency (but I
havent included that yet, IE has problems with full-alpha PNGs).

There is already a patch somewhere, but in this attempt I have tried to
make sure that the old dvips->convert renderer is used in the case
dvipng fails (or indeed, is not present on the system). Unfortunately I
do not have a server to test it on. Does anyone want to try it?

The patch is small, so I suppose there is no real harm in including it here.

/Jan-?ke
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references:
<NABBJGECPILFNLFEAPIKOEGEIKAA.nickpj@gmail.com>
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	<f1c3529e0608110152t78a10babpde43b8fe8443bd27@mail.gmail.com>
	<44DCA33F.40906@pobox.com>

body:
On Fri, Aug 11, 2006 at 08:33:19AM -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:
> Steve Bennett wrote:
> > Would this be an appropriate time for me to ask that if you go to a
> > redirected article (say, George Walker Bush), then you would properly
> > redirected to end up at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W_Bush,
> > rather than http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Walker_Bush with
> > content from the George W Bush page (and the words "redirected from").
> >
> > I'm sure I had a good reason for requesting this, but it escapes me at
> > the moment. If anyone knows...:)
>
> We should have a FAQ for this. :)
>
> /me digs up an old response
>
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2005-November/032619.html

I'm glad Steve did it.  I was gonna do it, but -- and I thought you
might actually be quoting me, til I looked -- I remembered already
*having* done it once.

Steve, there's one in the archive where he explains it to me too, and
(thanks, brion) in more detail than the one he links, IIRC.  You might
hunt that one down too...  I wasn't entirely convinced, I don't think,
but enough to shut me up at least.  ;-)

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

	The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.


from_name: Joe Anderson

body:
Cool Cat recently created an article called Starfleet
Uniforms<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfleet_Uniforms>,
and it was nominated for deletion as cruft and OR.

The screencaps/promo photos in the article, IMO, acted as a reputable
source. I mean, how else (canonically) are you going to know about the
uniform switch between TOS and TNG? Using a book is not canonical, and
therefore is surely not [[WP:V]].

As for fancruft, how is an article about Starfleet uniforms fancruft. In
some people's opinion, any article to do with any fictional is fancruft. But
is the article on Jean-Luc Picard fancruft? I think not.

Your thoughts?

--
Joe Anderson

[[User:Computerjoe]] on en, fr, de, simple, Meta and Commons.


body:
On Fri, Aug 11, 2006 at 05:54:22PM +0200, Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 8/11/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> > Ok; I just synthesized that now from things lots of other, smarter
> > people than me have said.  But it's still true.  People have a tendency
> > to try to make things easier for 'dummies' :-) while make much more
> > important things much harder for 'smart people'.
>
> In the context of Wikipedia, we don't so much have "dummies" as we

I *did* quote it.  :-0

> have "passers-by". You can't train someone who is only willing to
> spend 5 minutes of their life on your site. Your comments may be
> appropriate for contexts such as business wikis etc.

I'm not sure they're necessary on WP, either.

*What percentage* of our edits are from non-users?

I apologize, but I *still* am just not getting what's so damned
difficult.

> > On balance, it's probably much better for the entire audience to *train
> > the non-savvy users*.  If they can't be bothered to learn, then they're
> > not *entitled* to have everyone else's work made more difficult on
> > their behalf.
>
> That's kind of a commitment-heavy long-term approach. You're basically
> advocating forcing people to commit to your software for the long term
> before the software has done anything for them. You're more likely to
> succeed if the software gives them immediate warm fuzzy feelings.

Were the software *Interleaf*, yeah, I would understand that.

> "Wow, I just clicked that, and that, and that, and look what I've got!
> I can't wait to find out how to other cool stuff!"

That's how *I* started on Wikipedia.

And to hark back to Jimbo's comments, and those of whomever suggested
that our current position effectively self-selects for geeks --
Christiaan, I think -- that may not be as bad a thing as it appears on
first blush either, to the extent that you believe that anoraks are
more likely to *care about the quality of the information they put in*
than 'civilians'.

Cause that the thing we *really* want to select for, right?

> > > 3. FYI... I am a Mac user using FireFox. To make a break out link, all I
> > > have to do is hover over the link, press lightly and choose "Open link
> > > in new window".
> >
> > Mac mice have click-*pressure* sensors?  Wow!
>
> Time-sensitive.

"press lightly"

:-)

> > <pedant>
> > "listserv" is a registered trademark of a mailing list software company
> > whose products we aren't using.  :-)
> >
> > http://www.lsoft.com/corporate/legal.asp
> > </pedant>
>
> I'm strongly in favour of abusing trademarks wherever possible.
> [[Trademark genericization]] is totally in the interests of the
> consumer. But noone seems to grasp the fact that it's only the company
> itself who stands to benefit by stamping TM or (R) around
> everything...

I disagree.  I have no problem with flipping off companies who Try Too
Hard (the Disney preschool incident being my favorite) -- Mark
McCormack was right: never let the lawyers *run your company*.

But being able to distinguish the product you want from pretenders
seems to me a useful capability.

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

	The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.


from_name: George Herbert

subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies

references:
<44DC5C85.7030405@wikia.com>
	<NMENLBGDKAFGBDHEPOBNKEKPDCAA.erikzachte@infodisiac.com>
	<44DCD134.5030800@yahoo.com>

body:
On 8/11/06, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> What would we do if B. Gates Foundation gave us 1 000 000 dollars ?
>
> (that's a serious question)

Not serious response: race to semi- or fully protect the Bill Gates
Foundation and Bill Gates articles, before the vandals accusing them of
trying to buy Wikipedia could hit?

Serious answer: I have been watching how Bill is donating money; he seems to
be very selective and very engaged in the decision process of who to give
money to, but conversely isn't (that I can recall) generally insisting on
becoming engaged in the management of organizations he is funding.

That is not to minimize the question - if we generalize, if Joe Random
Billionare comes to the WMF with a million dollar donation check and asks
for a board seat in return, it's still a completely valid policy question.
And could well be a realistic problem.

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


subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies


body:
On Fri, Aug 11, 2006 at 04:59:19PM +0100, Christiaan Briggs wrote:
> Judging from my own experience I find it far less taxing to click on
> a button that says "bold" or "list" etc. than to learn (and often
> relearn) a special language that I need to mix in with the text in
> order to achieve the same thing.

We don't even have *that* much yet?  I thought we had buttons for at
least that level of editing...

[ looks ]

I see that we have Bold, but not "List Template".  I suspect adding the
latter would be pretty trivial.

>                                     For me, to click on a button that
> says "list" is far more intuitive than adding some arbitrary
> characters in amongst my content. I also find it quite taxing looking
> at a sea of monospaced text intermixed with arbitrary characters that
> have nothing to do with my content.

Ah, but they *do* have to do with your content.  This is a "level"
problem.

But you remain correct: an overlay WYSIWYG editor, perhaps within the
contstraints Steve mentioned in an earlier message, will serve the
requirements you have, without requiring much (if any) underlying
modification.

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

	The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.


from_name: Steve Summit

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
>On 8/11/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
>> People have a tendency to try to make things easier for 'dummies' :-)
>> while make much more important things much harder for 'smart people'.
>
> In the context of Wikipedia, we don't so much have "dummies" as we
> have "passers-by". You can't train someone who is only willing to
> spend 5 minutes of their life on your site

That's true, but unless I missed something, in the case of
"break-out links" we're not talking about visitors to Wikipedia;
we're talking about users of the World-Wide Web.

One of the fundamental original principles of the web was that
links were cheap and could take you anywhere.  People understood
this, and in fact they thought nothing of it, because what we now
call "external links" were essentially the norm.  The concept of
an integrated web "site" that you either wandered around within,
or made some kind of a conscious decision to "break out" of,
hadn't been developed yet.

The related notions of

	* I must control my user and not let him leave My Domain.

	* It is easy for someone new to computers to head to a.
	  new link and forget what they originally were looking for.
	  Then they leave our wiki.

	* When I send someone to an external link, I am not
	  responsible for the content of that external site.
	  Sometimes newbies may think that I created the external
	  pages, too.

are all comparatively recent, and although mechanisms like
target=_blank or target=new do address at least the second two,
they can also be wildly annoying to people who do understand how
the web works and do know how to use their Back button.  (I know
y'all know this; I'm just stating the obvious.)

(On the other hand, though, I have to confess that a well-chosen
target=new can be really handy sometimes, when a page designer
"got it right" in terms of using it just where I would have
wanted a new window anyway...)


from_name: Christiaan Briggs

body:
On 11 Aug 2006, at 11:51 AM, mboverload wrote:

> What does Wikipedia need WYSIWYG?  We already have noobs writing
> POV articles, now you want ...

And there's an example of the attitude I was talking in my first
post. It's curious in that it accepts that wiki markup is barrier to
participation but that this is somehow a good thing.

Christiaan


from_name: Fredrik Josefsson

subject: [Commons-l] Stats on deletion

body:
--- Patrick-Emil Z?rner <paddyez at yahoo.de> skrev:

> I see no argument for not
> respecting other
> peoples behaviour in the internet/in public. Give an
> argument why
> these statistical evaluations are so important for
> the project and why
> we can not do without. Otherwise I would like to see
> the page deleted.
>

I had the vision of creating a list for the amusement
of the administrators, where there would be monthly
awards (a ribbon) to those three that delete the most
images, and userboxes one could use saying e.g. "this
user has deleted over 4k images". I had hoped this
would encourage deletions.

The fierce restistance naturally takes the amusement
away from the vision. If anyone else wants to fulfil
my intention, go ahead.

Fred
aka Fred-Chess


body:
On Fri, Aug 11, 2006 at 12:27:08PM -0400, Steve Summit wrote:
> Steve Bennett wrote:
> >On 8/11/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> >> People have a tendency to try to make things easier for 'dummies' :-)
> >> while make much more important things much harder for 'smart people'.
> >
> > In the context of Wikipedia, we don't so much have "dummies" as we
> > have "passers-by". You can't train someone who is only willing to
> > spend 5 minutes of their life on your site
>
> That's true, but unless I missed something, in the case of
> "break-out links" we're not talking about visitors to Wikipedia;
> we're talking about users of the World-Wide Web.

Well, in the context of the current discussion, we were talking about
visitors to some website running MediaWiki.

> One of the fundamental original principles of the web was that
> links were cheap and could take you anywhere.  People understood
> this, and in fact they thought nothing of it, because what we now
> call "external links" were essentially the norm.  The concept of
> an integrated web "site" that you either wandered around within,
> or made some kind of a conscious decision to "break out" of,
> hadn't been developed yet.

Is that really true?

I've been using the web since, like, 1995 or so, and I don't recall
that it was ever quite like that.  Websites weren't quite as *big*,
granted, but...

> The related notions of
>
> 	* I must control my user and not let him leave My Domain.

I hate these people.

> 	* It is easy for someone new to computers to head to a.
> 	  new link and forget what they originally were looking for.
> 	  Then they leave our wiki.

Yes, they do.  If no one taught them about Back and History, tough.

And this one really only makes any sense in the context of the previous
one anyway, which is crap.

> 	* When I send someone to an external link, I am not
> 	  responsible for the content of that external site.
> 	  Sometimes newbies may think that I created the external
> 	  pages, too.

That one's a slightly bigger issue, but only slightly.  I liken it to
people having to understand how roads and signs work to be able to
drive.  Why we enable such people who proudly decline to learn how to
use their tools completely eludes me.

> are all comparatively recent, and although mechanisms like
> target=_blank or target=new do address at least the second two,
> they can also be wildly annoying to people who do understand how
> the web works and do know how to use their Back button.  (I know
> y'all know this; I'm just stating the obvious.)

And very nicely.

> (On the other hand, though, I have to confess that a well-chosen
> target=new can be really handy sometimes, when a page designer
> "got it right" in terms of using it just where I would have
> wanted a new window anyway...)

Correct.  Mostly, this is "Web apps" typs stuff.

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

	The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.


body:
On 8/11/06, mboverload <mboverload at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm afraid my message may have been lost in the postings, but I think it's
> an important point:
>
> What does Wikipedia need WYSIWYG?  We already have noobs writing POV
> articles, now you want
>
> * Large red text
> * tons of bold
> * Large purple text

Two clarifications:
* No one has yet proposed any difference to the end result: if you can
do red text now (you can) then you will be able to do it with wysiwyg,
but we're not talking about adding new features.
* We haven't specifically talked about Wikipedia - MediaWiki is used
by lots of other sites, businesses etc, which would definitely benefit
from being more "noob"-friendly.

Steve


subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies

references:
<44DC5C85.7030405@wikia.com>
	<NMENLBGDKAFGBDHEPOBNKEKPDCAA.erikzachte@infodisiac.com>
	<44DCD134.5030800@yahoo.com>
	<38a7bf7c0608111207j5f37fd52h6847e3e2d87a196f@mail.gmail.com>
	<44DCE1B4.5020101@wikia.com> <44DCE4DC.5070309@wikia.com>

body:
On 8/11/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
> Let me clarify, that did not say what I wanted it to say.
>
> Jimmy Wales wrote:
> > George Herbert wrote:
> >>
> >> That is not to minimize the question - if we generalize, if Joe Random
> >> Billionare comes to the WMF with a million dollar donation check and
> >> asks
> >> for a board seat in return, it's still a completely valid policy
> >> question.
> >> And could well be a realistic problem.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> > Well, for us today, $1 million is not very much money.
>
> In the early days of Wikipedia, I worried a lot about how we might
> survive.  It seemed to me that if someone came
> and offered $1 million, then of course we would offer them a seat on the
> board.  Nowadays, we are strong, we are strong because
> we have broad support from the general public and from ourselves, our
> own community.  We do not fear about surviving.  Therefore, to give
> up any of our independence for $1 million would be a bad decision.
>
> I did not mean to imply that $1 million is not a lot of money.
> Obviously it is. :)  But our principles are worth more.
>
> --Jimbo

The question of whether it would really be giving up independence is valid,
though.

If it really were Bill Gates and he really did demand a board seat, there
are certainly a lot of people who would worry about his motives: though they
could be benign, it would certainly be controversial.

What if it was (purely random example) Elon Musk, though, and he just said
that he wanted to make sure that the organization was being run well after
he donated that much money?  What if it was Mitch Kapor, also saying that he
just wanted to make sure it was spent well?  Or Sergei or Larry from Google?

Part of the reason for large donators to want involvement is to get
assurance as to the continuing management of the organization.  Which is
legitimately a concern, not in particular to Wikimedia, but generally
regarding nonprofits.  Some donations are structured as a committment over
time, with the ability to back out of future donations if the organization
fails to continue to perform well.  With others, the donator just prefers to
have a board seat level of involvement.

Is it in the best interests of the Wikimedia foundation and the various
subprojects that the policy now be that the board has to stay completely
independent?

Some benefactors have helped the management and productivity of nonprofits
significantly, when they engaged and spent a lot of time helping with
management and planning and such.  There is value beyond money (management
skills, contacts and additional in-kind resource donations that they can
generate, etc) in some of these people who might conceivably be interested.

I think it's worth thinking about and talking about.  It's hypothetical now,
but if it stopped being hypothetical some day, making those decisions on the
fly would probably be bad decisionmaking process.

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


subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies