from_name: Daniel Kinzler

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> There's been some sample code submitted for running uploads
> through the clamav virus scanner; I'll try and get this integrated this
> weekend, and we can then enable a bunch of formats with greater confidence.

that would be great, thank you! If anyone else wants to have a look, the
sample code can be tested here:
http://area23.brightbyte.de/checkfile-test.php

I would however like to add another suggestion: Show an extra warning on
the description-page of media in a potentially dangerous format (or
rather for any non-image, non-sound format). The message could read
something like this:

  "This file may contain executable code that might damage your system.
  If you download this file and open it on your computer, potentially
  harmfult contents may be run. Please make sure you know what you
  are doing. The Wikimedia Foundation does not take any resposibility for
  the contents of this file or any harm it may do to your system."

This is not only aimed at macro-viruses hidden in doc-fiels etc (which
the virus scanner will hopefully find on upload), but maily at "trivial
trojans" like batch files containing a "format C:" or some such.

In that context, it meight also be good to block all files with the
extensions .exe, .bat, .cmd, .reg, .js as well as any files starting
with a she-bang (#!), regardles of the guessed mime-type. That is, there
should be a list of forbidden extensions in addition to a list of
forbidden mime-types (or does that already exist?), and an additional
check for the she-bang. If you like, i could add that to the sample
code, but it's trivial.

Thank you,
daniel


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Tim Starling

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Learn PHP (was Re: ABC News: Silicon Insider on
	Robert McHenry)

body:
Nicholas Knight wrote:
> Call me when you're using a sane programming language. I'll be happy to
> help.

Great! We already have three working modules in C++ (wikidiff, UTF-8
normalisation and waikiki) one in C (Chinese word splitting) one in
Ocaml (texvc), one in Perl (EasyTimeline), a bot written in Python, plus
Lee's incomplete test suite in Java, Timwi's incomplete parser in bison
and Magnus' incomplete parser in C++.

If you're interested in C/C++, completing Timwi's parser module would be
really great.

An interesting project amenable to C++ or just about any other language
would be writing a differential storage engine. Something to store
consecutive revisions efficiently. If you write the low-level part, I'll
write the PHP interface.

Really the possibilities are unlimited. My point was that PHP is not a
very good excuse for avoiding MediaWiki, despite being often cited. It's
easy to learn, but if it's against your religion or something, you can
always code in something else.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: John Lee

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Learn PHP

body:
I agree with Sheldon. When I first picked up PHP, the only programming
language (or something resembling it) I knew was HTML. I had dabbled
with Perl and C, but they were too complicated to pick up, especially
for programming on the web. Perl and C are great for use on real
applications, but PHP is a language designed with the web in mind.

I haven't contributed to any MediaWiki development, sadly, because I'm
still picking up the language; every time I stare at the code for a
major PHP application, I get a dreadful headache. Usually it's because
they use object-oriented PHP, which I haven't really learned yet.

John Lee
([[User:Johnleemk]])

Sheldon Rampton wrote:

> Nicholas Knight wrote:
>
>> Months? It takes me a few *hours* to be able to create useful code in a
>> new language. A few days and I can embark on significant projects. This
>> isn't about difficulty or time (though I'd not be happy about wasting
>> the time), it's about not wanting to subject myself to the horror that
>> is PHP just to be able to do a couple things with MediaWiki, probably
>> never to touch the code again.
>
>
> Well, it only took *me* a few hours to learn how to create useful code
> in PHP, and my programming skills are strictly hobbyist level. I
> worked through a couple of online tutorials, and that was all I
> needed. PHP is actually a lot like Perl, with somewhat more
> conventional syntax and a little less emphasis on text processing. I
> love the way you can use it to drop code right into the middle of
> HTML. With just a few lines of code you can create an interactive form
> that queries a database and returns a result. To do the same thing in
> Perl, you'd typically need one static HTML page and a separate page
> for the CGI script that processes the form data and returns the
> result. It can be done, but it's more work. Once I discovered PHP, I
> stopped using Perl and haven't looked back.
>
> --Sheldon Rampton


list: wikipedia-l

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Baseldytsch Wikipedia: Who can put it online?

body:
Mark Williamson wrote:
> I was unable to find als in a list of ISO 639-2 language codes.

Fine. Make that...

New subdomains may be either:

* An ISO 639-1 language code (e.g. en)
* An ISO 639-2 language code (e.g. cho)
* An RFC 3066 language code (e.g. zh-min-nan)
* A descriptive name longer than 3 letters (e.g. tokipona)

Some subdomains that existed before these rules were established may be
kept at their current locations for the time being.


from_name: csherlock at ljh.com.au

subject: [WikiEN-l] [[Abu Graib prisoner abuse (no pictures)]] on VfD

body:
I have placed [[Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse (no pictures)]] on VfD because
this it sets a very bad precedent. There is absolutely no way of keeping
the articles in sync properly (not everyone who edits will be willing to
edit two pages, especially if there Internet connection is slow or
Wikipedia is running slowly).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion/Abu_Ghraib_prisoner_abuse_%28no_pictures%29

I think people are going to have to come to a better solution than this,
or the software will need some modification (for instance, flagging
images as potentially offensive and giving users a setting to see/not
see these images).

I really hope that other articles won't take up this, for instance
[[clitoris]] might decide to fork over disputes over the image of a
women's vagina on the page (I personally think that these people need to
just get over it, but I'm not everyone). My concern, however, is how to
keep the articles in sync once they have been duplicated.

Further: it's a slipperyly slope when we start allowing dupes: we have a
similar situation where we had [[Zionist revisionism]] and
[[Israeli-Palestinian history denial]]. Two seperate articles, yet both
talking about very similar things. Perhaps not quite the same, but you
can see how messy things get when we allow duplication of articles!

Ta bu shi da yu


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Learn PHP

body:
Gerrit wrote:
> I think a lot more people have this "PHP-religion-problem", really (I
> know at least three people in my immediate environment with this
> problem: a Pythonist, a Rubyist and a Perlist). If the modularisation of
> PHP is of a degree that it would indeed be possible to code new parts in
> other languages, I'd be happy to dive into a task that could be
> fulfilled in Python (I'm already an active pywikipediabot-developer).

If it was written in Python you'd just find some other way to avoid
contributing. And then we'd have lots of people complaining that they
can't code in Python, and that we should be using Java or Ruby or
something. You can't satisfy every programmer, everyone has their own
preferences.

> PHP *can* be a valid reason to refrain from MediaWiki. Some people care
> about things like language design, and since MediaWiki is of course OSS,
> those people will not get involved in a PHP project. Nicholas and I
> apparantly are two of them, I'm sure there are many others.

I'd code for Wikipedia regardless of what language it used. I had never
looked at PHP before I started on Wikipedia. If it was in Python, I'd be
there. It wouldn't have mattered if it was in Ruby, C, Haskell or x86
assembly, I'd dive in. Because Wikipedia needs programmers and Wikipedia
is a worthy cause.

Unfortunately it seems most programmers on Wikipedia would rather think
of excuses, complain about the lack of progress and file bug reports.

-- Tim Starling


body:
Andreas Br?ndle wrote:
> As I see you have already decided to set up a Baseldytsch Wikipedia,
> since you are looking for a language code. Didn't you wonder why there
> isn't a language code?

No, I was sick of all the endless chatter about linguistics and thought
I might contribute something solid to the conversation -- if there is
such a wiki, it can't be at bsd. I cared about linguistics when the
zh-min-nan issue was current, I read up about Norwegian long before the
no/nn/nb thing broke out, but now I'm sick of linguistics making up 80%
of the posts to this list.

I'm not going to take sides in this tedious debate, or the constant
stream of similar debates. I'll defer judgement to the Board.

In the meantime, it would be nice if these debates could find a home off
the general project-wide list -- either on meta or on their own mailing
list.

-- Tim Starling


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Learn PHP

body:
Matt R wrote:
>  --- Tim Starling wrote:
>
>
>>Unfortunately it seems most programmers on Wikipedia would rather think
>>of excuses, complain about the lack of progress and file bug reports.
>
>
> There's an unfortunate tendency on Wikipedia to suppose that if you identify a
> problem that you can fix, then you have an obligation to fix it. Even if you
> have the capability, there is no moral imperative for volunteers to do anything
> at all on Wikipedia, and documenting a problem is already a positive
> contribution, albeit a comparatively minor one. Of course, to grumble or whine
> about a problem that you've identified is churlish, as you have no right to
> expect that others fix things on your behalf.
>
> But to get to the point: I'm very grateful to the developers. I would quite
> like to hack on Mediawiki myself some day, but right now I prefer to spend my
> time contributing to the content of articles -- this is not an *excuse*; this
> is a choice, and I (only mildly!) resent any such implication.

I'm sorry if I caused offence, I just wanted to impress on everyone that
Wikipedia has barely any developers. If you're ever wondering why some
feature hasn't been written yet, it's because there's been no-one around
to write it. Most of the active developers seem to be more interested
writing features for a general audience than for Wikimedia projects.
There's more editors on the Old English Wikipedia than there are
developers overall. Maybe Matt doesn't want to help, and that's fine. I
get the feeling Gerrit doesn't either. But is there anyone? Every second
Wikipedian seems to know a programming language. We just need, say, two
or three developers willing to put in a few hours per week.

-- Tim Starling


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Erik Zachte

subject: [Wikitech-l] How to enable EasyTimeline in MediaWiki ?

body:
I received about 10 inquiries so far about how to enable EasyTimeline in
MediaWiki.

I have to answer I don't really know.
I always point them to the link below, but noone takes the trouble to report
succes or failure, either out of laziness or frustration.
(spam filter might be partial explanation, my provider is known for this)

Can someone give me foolproof instructions on how to enable ET ?
I will add those to my support page. Thanks.

Erik Zachte

http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/*checkout*/wikipedia/extensions/timeli
ne/Timeline.php?rev=1.6

Comment at the top says:

# Timeline extension
# To use, include this file from your LocalSettings.php
# To configure, set members of $wgTimelineSettings after the inclusionpoint
them to


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Learn PHP

references:
<cnkg0a$ngn$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<20041119105127.46318.qmail@web25009.mail.ukl.yahoo.com>
	<cnkori$i6j$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
Tim Starling (t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au) [041119 23:27]:

> I'm sorry if I caused offence, I just wanted to impress on everyone that
> Wikipedia has barely any developers. If you're ever wondering why some
> feature hasn't been written yet, it's because there's been no-one around
> to write it. Most of the active developers seem to be more interested
> writing features for a general audience than for Wikimedia projects.
> There's more editors on the Old English Wikipedia than there are
> developers overall. Maybe Matt doesn't want to help, and that's fine. I
> get the feeling Gerrit doesn't either. But is there anyone? Every second
> Wikipedian seems to know a programming language. We just need, say, two
> or three developers willing to put in a few hours per week.

Hmm. I am tempted to learn PHP just for my favoured features (though I
haven't written anything more complicated than a shell script with a loop
and a condition for over a decade) - as if I haven't got enough things
using my time ;-)

A suggestion: would it be worth putting an ad in the top line of the
article pages? The place where donation beg notices go. "Wikipedia needs
volunteer developers. PHP and Python. No fortune, a small amount of fame.
Your MediaWiki needs You!" With the last sentence being a link to
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/How_to_become_a_MediaWiki_hacker .

- d.


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] 400000 up

body:
Charles Matthews wrote:

>Those not having their nose in a PHP manual might want to mark in some way
>the 400,000th wiki-en article.
>
>
To this I should add that in the next few days en:wiktionary is expected
to reach 50,000.

Ec


from_name: Kiss All

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki + phpBB ?

body:
The solution may be mambo (http://mamboserver.com/). It is a flexible
component based Web site platform from my personal point of view.  A
large group of people are working on it to integrating existing
popular web functionalities into it. ( http://mamboforge.net/ )

For example, a site can be built on top of mambo platform with any
choices from lots of popular components like gallery, survey, Docman,
blog, phpBB, .....though some are not yet very good integrated.

Mambo also has a plan to develop a wiki component for it. But no
significant efforts have been seen so far. Maybe somebody can build it
based on mediawiki. I am dreaming of it. :-)

Kissall

On Mon, 15 Nov 2004 10:26:40 +0100, peter <peter at wa.se> wrote:
>
> PHPBB does not today support LDAP authentication but version 2.2 will. There
> are several mods for LDAP to install though.
>
> Keep us updated on your work, it seems to be more people than me that could use
> something like that.
>     /peter
>
>
>
>
> Victor Fari?a wrote:
> > Hi all ...
> > Well i am working on a simple solution on this way for my own
> > applications ...
> > The autehntication will be used to a LDAP Server , and when a user logs
> > in, a check
> > on the LDAP tree must be set to TRUE, them all applications using the
> > same LDAP
> > can find the user authenticated or not.
> >
> > When a user signs in on an application, a LDAP attribute must be set to
> > TRUE.
> > and before sign in, the application must look for this attribute to see
> > if the user
> > are logged in.
> >
> > I dont know PHPBB but iam sure it has a module to authenticate to a LDAP
> > server ...
> >
> >
> > regards
> >
> > Bram de Jong - MTG wrote:
> >
> >> Hi everyone,
> >>
> >>
> >> (Hi! First post here)
> >>
> >> for a site I'm building I'm trying to use one generalised login system
> >> for everything on the site (forum / wiki / ftp / ...). I was wondering
> >> if anyone has done any work on joining phpBB and MediaWiki.
> >>
> >> In a perfect world people would log into PhpBB and an account would be
> >> made for MediaWiki with the same login/pass. Whenever a user logs into
> >> the site, he should automatically be logged into MediaWiki.
> >>
> >> So - has it been done? Google didn't really help me this time.
> >>
> >>
> >> thanks a lot,
> >>
> >>
> >>  - bram
> >>
> >
> >
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

--
Be good....


list: foundation-l

from_name: Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales

subject: [Foundation-l] Arbitration committe and content

body:
Jean-Christophe Chazalette wrote:
> So in the same time I'm trying to make things clear on the French Village
> pump, I'd  like to have some feedback from everybody in the foundation,
> especially from the wiki veterans, not to mention Jimbo himself of course.

Of course I am sympathetic to the desires that would underlie a "yes"
vote to having the Arbitration Committee allowed to make some
decisions about the content of articles in some cases.  It is tempting
and in *some* cases would be very helpful.

But in my experience and estimation, it would cause more problems than
it solves.  The problems are at least these:

1. Arbitration can gain the support of the entire community if it is
focussed on behaviors.  Good people of all sides of all issues can agree
that working together in a kind and thoughtful manner is worthwhile.  But
good people may not agree about the exact content of an article, and it
seems unwise to have an ArbCom vote which is binding on such things.

2.  If the ArbCom can settle issues of content, then the elections for
ArbCom may end up being about voting to make sure that a certain POV
is represented.  This might be unpleasant and unhelpful.  ArbCom
members should be kind and thoughtful judges, not politicians.

---

At the same time, I think that the advantages would be minimal.  If
the problem users are got out of the way, then good users can find the
right answer for an article.  Almost never is the *content* the
problem, the problem is *people* with poor social skills, poor editing
skills, etc.  So if the ArbCom resolves the behavior issue, then the
article content can be taken care of by other others acting in the
normal wiki way.

--Jimbo


list: wikimedia-l


from_name: Hauke Zuehl

subject: [Wikitech-l] How to add a picture to portlet?

body:
Hello all :)

We are running a software catalogue with MediaWiki and the wiki is sponsored
by a company. Now the company wants us to place a picture with the company's
logo under the wiki logo.

I added

Sponsored by

in xhtml_slim.pt and it results in an error. Currently I work with a text link
but that's not what the company wants.

Any ideas how to fix it?

The URL of the wiki is http://www.tuxfutter.de/en/wiki/Main_Page

Btw: MediaWiki 1.3.3 :)

Thanks and kind regards,
Hauke
--
> Sitze ich vor einer Winkiste bekomm ich hier die Kriese.
Ja, Windows ist wie Sackhuepfen ohne Beine.
----
diskless und valencia im Heise-Forum


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Learn PHP / Python / Something

body:
Christopher Mahan wrote:
> I would personally like that the number of programmers remain small,
> otherwise there will be an need for project managers, documenters,
> and, well, overhead. And overhead just kills developer productivity.
> (trust me on that one).

I would say that I would personally like for Brion, Tim, and all the
rest to get whatever they like, right?  And if they say they need more
help, then let's all go out and recruit them some more help, or try to
find time ourselves if we can.

--Jimbo


subject: [Foundation-l] Single login - decision 2004

body:
It is quite important to give the option for people to block a name in
all other projects.  This is important for people to be able to have a
global identity.  Forcing people to do this by hand is silly.

No one else can be [[User:Jimbo Wales]] in any language or project,
for obvious reasons.  But I am not special.  Everyone deserves to be
able to create and maintain a global identity.

It should be the default in all *new* cases where there is no
conflict, and it should be sought (socially and peacefully) in all old
cases.

--Jimbo


body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Having the option to automatically reserve your name in all projects should
> address my concerns. The default setting of this option would be set not to
> reserve the names - thus the great majority of accounts will not have
> cross-project names.
>
> Is this acceptable?

I think the default should be set the other way around.

--Jimbo


subject: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia trademark being used incorrectly

body:
Rowan Collins wrote:
> I think the main reason this hasn't been done, is that there is no
> such thing as *internationally* registering a trademark, and because
> registration costs money. Thus there was some concern that proper
> research be made into with whom it would be most appropriate to
> register it (whether, for instance, it was possible to register in one
> go for all EU countries) before setting off on the potentially very
> costly course of registering it anywhere and everywhere.

This paragraph is wrong on virtually all counts.  First, international
trademark registrations are done under the terms of the Madrid
Protocol and Madrid Agreements.  This is something that I'm in the
process of doing, but it is time consuming of course.  (And will cost
money, and judgment calls do need to be made.)

> Oh, and not to mention which trademarks to register - there's not just
> Wikipedia, there's Wikimedia, Wikiquote, Wiktionary, Wikisource; and
> alternate spellings used in some languages, like Vikipedio in
> Esperanto and Wicipedia in Welsh (these would probably be covered by
> their similarity to the original, but it all needs careful
> consideration)

Indeed, some of these have been registered, and some not.  It's a
judgment call, and something that is improving steadily as I register
more and more of them.

--Jimbo


body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> That is easy to fix. Just put "A Wikimedia project" below the logo of each of
> our projects.

I support that we add the global wikimedia logo on all the projects,
in the place of the GNU FDL button.  We already say "GNU FDL" in the
text portion.  The global wikimedia logo should be linked to the
foundation website.

--Jimbo


from_name: Rick

subject: [WikiEN-l] blocking policy violated?

body:
The IP address you were using, 62.252.0.4, has a long history of nothing but vandalism.  The IP has been warned time and time again.  Your addition of the weasel words "It is claimed that members of the [[al-Qaida]] militant [[Islamism]] group hijacked four aircraft." and "The '''attacks of September 11, 2001''', are described by the Ubited States Government to be a series of coordinated [[terrorism|terrorist]] attacks against the [[United States]] " was read as more of the same.

I don't know if you also edited the [[Playboy]] article earlier today, but the same IP was used to insert the words "gay gay gay" into the article.

The problem is that you were using an anonymous IP address with a long history of vandalism.

RickK

R E Broadley <20041111 at stardate.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
Hi,

I recently discovered Wikipedia, and I am very impressed by the vast
range of information, and by the neutrality of many of the definitions.

I have only today started to contribute to Wikipedia, and made a few
additions of links to some of the articles.

I noticed that the definition of the September 11 attacks was claiming
as fact some information that is widely disputed, and so a few minutes
ago inserted information making it clear who claims these facts, and I
was going to elaborate further with information on which facts are being
disputed and by who, only to find that my IP address had been blocked by
a user "Flockmeal".

This user was claiming the reason for the block was "repeated vandalism".

I went on to check what the blocking policy was, and then the Wikipedia
definition of vandalism, to discover that by input was in no way
anything close to vandalism. I was stating nothing than the facts, with
no bias whatsoever. The entries I made were made entirely in good faith,
and I am very disappointed that such abuse of the blocking policy has
been made.

Since the block, I have registered and now have a username and am
contactable at my email address. I would ask that the IP address block
be removed, and a discussion started as to why elaborating on facts and
remaining factual can be classed as vandalism.

Many thanks,
Edmund Broadley

_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
 Discover all that?s new in My Yahoo!


from_name: Christopher Mahan

body:
--- "Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales" <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:

> I would say that I would personally like for Brion, Tim, and all
> the
> rest to get whatever they like, right?  And if they say they need
> more
> help, then let's all go out and recruit them some more help, or try
> to
> find time ourselves if we can.

Heck Jimbo, I agree. Whatever your developer needs, make sure they
get it.

I just don't want to have 30 people bickering about whether
documentation should be in UTF-8 or 16, and how to split the meager
budget.

By the way, if the devs want help with documentation of the code, I
can do some.

=====
Chris Mahan
818.943.1850 cell
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
chris.mahan at gmail.com
http://www.christophermahan.com/

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The all-new My Yahoo! - Get yours free!
http://my.yahoo.com


from_name: Rowan Collins

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Learn PHP

body:
On Sat, 20 Nov 2004 16:48:56 +0100, Gerrit <gerrit at nl.linux.org> wrote:

> > And then we'd have lots of people complaining that they
> > can't code in Python, and that we should be using Java or Ruby or
> > something. You can't satisfy every programmer, everyone has their own
> > preferences.
>
> This is only partially true.
>

> To put it easily: each language has a group of lovers, a group of
> haters, and a lot of people in between. I would not be surprised if the
> group of people in between is relatively small for PHP. I do not know
> for sure, however.

I think you may just be assuming that your feelings are those of a
majority here. There are plenty of people who hate PHP, but there are
also plenty of people who love it; the same is true of Perl, Java,
C++, etc, etc. That you don't like the 'feel' of PHP is fine, but I
think it's a mistake to imagine that this is some kind of consensus
view (and I'm not trying to blame or insult you, by the way, it's a
natural psychological tendency to do that, I believe).

> > Unfortunately it seems most programmers on Wikipedia would rather think
> > of excuses, complain about the lack of progress and file bug reports.
>
> Nobody needs an "excuse" not to contribute to Mediawiki. Mediawiki is
> OSS. Nobody is obliged to contribute. If nobody contributes, nothing
> happens. That's Open Source.

Indeed. I think Tim is talking about those who say "we really must
have a such-and-such feature, but I'm not going to code it,
because..." There are a lot more people generating even quite
well-designed ideas than people actually implementing them, and I
think the existing developers find that rather tiring. I'm probably
guilty of this kind of excuse myself, although I do have a go at the
odd bit of code occasionally.

> Finally, I'd like to ask you to stay polite. You are implicitly accusing
> me of lying, because you do not believe that my reason to refrain from
> contributing is PHP. You are free to disagree with me. However, I think
> it would be best for everyone to keep the discussion fair.

I may be wrong, but I don't think such an accusation was intended. The
point is that there's not a lot anyone can do about the fact that
people will not contribute because of language preferences, etc,
because there are always an infinite number of configurations, and
they'll always provide *somebody* with a valid excuse not to
contribute. So, yes, not liking PHP is a valid reason not to code in
it, but that's to do with *your* preferences, and doesn't really
reflect on the project or what anyone else should do.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Gerrit

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Learn PHP

body:
Tim Starling wrote in reply to Gerrit:
> If it was written in Python you'd just find some other way to avoid
> contributing.

What makes you think that?

I contribute to Pywikipediabot, because it's written in Python.

> And then we'd have lots of people complaining that they
> can't code in Python, and that we should be using Java or Ruby or
> something. You can't satisfy every programmer, everyone has their own
> preferences.

This is only partially true.

My complain is not that I cannot code in PHP. I can learn. But I don't
*want* to learn. I would want to learn Ruby, or perhaps something less
known. My complain is that I do not *want* to code in PHP.

To put it easily: each language has a group of lovers, a group of
haters, and a lot of people in between. I would not be surprised if the
group of people in between is relatively small for PHP. I do not know
for sure, however.

Indeed. In Python, Java or Ruby there would be people refraining from
contributing because they hate the language. I think the group would be
much smaller than for PHP, however.

> >PHP *can* be a valid reason to refrain from MediaWiki. Some people care
> >about things like language design, and since MediaWiki is of course OSS,
> >those people will not get involved in a PHP project. Nicholas and I
> >apparantly are two of them, I'm sure there are many others.
>
>
> I'd code for Wikipedia regardless of what language it used. I had never
> looked at PHP before I started on Wikipedia. If it was in Python, I'd be
> there. It wouldn't have mattered if it was in Ruby, C, Haskell or x86
> assembly, I'd dive in. Because Wikipedia needs programmers and Wikipedia
> is a worthy cause.
>
> Unfortunately it seems most programmers on Wikipedia would rather think
> of excuses, complain about the lack of progress and file bug reports.

When I contribute to Wikipedia, I do not do so out of some mission I
have given myself in life to make the World a Better Place. I do so for
fun. I do not find PHP or Java fun. Hence, I will not contribute to
Mediawiki core.

Nobody needs an "excuse" not to contribute to Mediawiki. Mediawiki is
OSS. Nobody is obliged to contribute. If nobody contributes, nothing
happens. That's Open Source.

I do find programming Python fun. Because of this, I contribute to
Pywikipediabot. Meanwhile, I also do something that might be useful.

Finally, I'd like to ask you to stay polite. You are implicitly accusing
me of lying, because you do not believe that my reason to refrain from
contributing is PHP. You are free to disagree with me. However, I think
it would be best for everyone to keep the discussion fair.

regards,
Gerrit Holl.

--
Weather in Lulea / Kallax, Sweden 20/11 15:20:
	-10.0?C Overcast overcast wind 5.4 m/s N (34 m above NAP)
--
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of
unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the
military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of
misplaced power exists and will persist.
    -Dwight David Eisenhower, January 17, 1961


from_name: Charles Matthews

subject: [WikiEN-l] 400000 up

body:
Those not having their nose in a PHP manual might want to mark in some way
the 400,000th wiki-en article.

Charles


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Learn PHP

body:
Rowan Collins wrote:
> > To put it easily: each language has a group of lovers, a group of
> > haters, and a lot of people in between. I would not be surprised if the
> > group of people in between is relatively small for PHP. I do not know
> > for sure, however.
>
> I think you may just be assuming that your feelings are those of a
> majority here. There are plenty of people who hate PHP, but there are
> also plenty of people who love it; the same is true of Perl, Java,
> C++, etc, etc. That you don't like the 'feel' of PHP is fine, but I
> think it's a mistake to imagine that this is some kind of consensus
> view (and I'm not trying to blame or insult you, by the way, it's a
> natural psychological tendency to do that, I believe).

I don't think it is a consesus, and I would image people loving PHP to
be over-represented among Mediawiki hackers. My 'feeling' that I think
the feeling for PHP is stronger is not

> Indeed. I think Tim is talking about those who say "we really must
> have a such-and-such feature, but I'm not going to code it,
> because..." There are a lot more people generating even quite
> well-designed ideas than people actually implementing them, and I
> think the existing developers find that rather tiring. I'm probably
> guilty of this kind of excuse myself, although I do have a go at the
> odd bit of code occasionally.

I can understand it might be tiring for existing developers.
On the other hand, I can also understand not everyone with a good idea
has the time, resources, energy and wish to implement it.

> > Finally, I'd like to ask you to stay polite. You are implicitly accusing
> > me of lying, because you do not believe that my reason to refrain from
> > contributing is PHP. You are free to disagree with me. However, I think
> > it would be best for everyone to keep the discussion fair.
>
> I may be wrong, but I don't think such an accusation was intended.

OK. Let's close it now. Tim didn't mean it as such, as is clarified by
his later post, and I don't want to have a language war. I'll contribute
to Pywikipediabot: I know some features I'd like to see that I might be
able to implement.

> The
> point is that there's not a lot anyone can do about the fact that
> people will not contribute because of language preferences, etc,
> because there are always an infinite number of configurations, and
> they'll always provide *somebody* with a valid excuse not to
> contribute. So, yes, not liking PHP is a valid reason not to code in
> it, but that's to do with *your* preferences, and doesn't really
> reflect on the project or what anyone else should do.

There might be an infinite number of configurations, major ones and
minor ones. Here, I define major ones the ones that cannot be bridged,
and minor ones the one that can. For me, PHP is a major one. The coding
style in Pywikipediabot was a minor one.

Let's close this discussion, it's bringing us nowhere. I should have
read Tim's second post before replying, and maybe Tim could have phrased
things a bit differently - let us put those differences aside and edit
Wikipedia. We had our 400.000th article today - let's celebrate that!

kind regards,
Gerrit Holl.

--
Weather in Lulea / Kallax, Sweden 20/11 16:20:
	-10.0?C Overcast overcast wind 4.0 m/s N (34 m above NAP)
--
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of
unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the
military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of
misplaced power exists and will persist.
    -Dwight David Eisenhower, January 17, 1961


from_name: Scott Nelson

body:
On Nov 19.2004, at 08:54, Rowan Collins wrote:

> No, the key difference is that there is already a word for wikis:
> "wiki", and this is not the same as the name of our site. Why should
> we give up all rights over the name of our site just because people
> don't know that term yet?

Actually, the order of events matters. Your earlier comment about
Google trying to register "B Blogger" illustrates this; they know whey
would probably not succeed with Blogger - had they tried to register
Blogger 4 years ago, they wouldn't have had the problem.

> I'm going to end with a repeat of a point I already made: if we don't
> claim "Wikipedia" as a trademark - and that means being seen to
> discourage its use as a generic term - anyone can use it for a rival
> product. So, to put it bluntly, would you be happy to let Microsoft
> rename "Encarta" to something like "MSN Wikipedia"? If you would, then
> fine, we'll agree to differ; I know I wouldn't.

If Microsoft decided to launch an MSN encyclopedia that was developed
using Wiki software, then MSN Wikipedia would be a perfectly good name
for it, in my view. Many (you included, I suspect) would argue
otherwise - quite vigorously in all probability.

I'm looking at this from a slightly different perspective I think:
treat the Wikipedia name as the banner marquee sample project for the
Wiki software. I can tell you that I know several people who are aware
of Wikipedia and nobody that I can think of who has any knowledge of
Wikimedia, Wiki (in general) or any of the other projects.

Rather than try to protect Wikipedia, let it spread and flourish.
Wikipedia is the Wiki software's flag on the moon.

But that's just one man's opinion.
--
Skot Nelson
skot at penguinstorm.com


from_name: R E Broadley

subject: [WikiEN-l] blocking policy violated?

body:
Hi,

I recently discovered Wikipedia, and I am very impressed by the vast
range of information, and by the neutrality of many of the definitions.

I have only today started to contribute to Wikipedia, and made a few
additions of links to some of the articles.

I noticed that the definition of the September 11 attacks was claiming
as fact some information that is widely disputed, and so a few minutes
ago inserted information making it clear who claims these facts, and I
was going to elaborate further with information on which facts are being
disputed and by who, only to find that my IP address had been blocked by
a user "Flockmeal".

This user was claiming the reason for the block was "repeated vandalism".

I went on to check what the blocking policy was, and then the Wikipedia
definition of vandalism, to discover that by input was in no way
anything close to vandalism. I was stating nothing than the facts, with
no bias whatsoever. The entries I made were made entirely in good faith,
and I am very disappointed that such abuse of the blocking policy has
been made.

Since the block, I have registered and now have a username and am
contactable at my email address. I would ask that the IP address block
be removed, and a discussion started as to why elaborating on facts and
remaining factual can be classed as vandalism.

Many thanks,
Edmund Broadley


from_name: Allan Crossman

subject: [WikiEN-l] blocking policy violated?

body:
R E Broadley wrote:

> I noticed that the definition of the September 11 attacks was
> claiming as fact some information that is widely disputed

Come off it now. You went from:

   The attacks of September 11, 2001, were a series of coordinated
   terrorist attacks against the United States

To:

   The attacks of September 11, 2001, are described by the Ubited
   States Government to be a series of coordinated terrorist attacks
   against the United States

This is more than a bit silly. The attacks meet any sane definition of
terrorism, and were certainly coordinated. What's the problem? NPOV only
applies when there is serious dispute. Silly disputes can be ignored.

The other bit you claimed was disputed was that Al Qaeda was involved.
Contesting this might have made sense prior to the latest bin Laden tape...

All that said, the block was a bit harsh. I'll undo it.

--
Allan Crossman - a.crossman at blueyonder.co.uk
The Moon is Waxing Gibbous (68% of Full)


subject: [WikiEN-l] blocking policy violated?

body:
I wrote:

 > All that said, the block was a bit harsh. I'll undo it.

Actually, no, I won't. As RickK has noted, there's a long history of
vandalism from your IP...

--
Allan Crossman - a.crossman at blueyonder.co.uk
The Moon is Waxing Gibbous (68% of Full)


from_name: Steven Melenchuk

subject: [WikiEN-l] blocking policy violated?

body:
Hi. The one major fact that your comment is lacking is an IP address; as
soon as you provide us with one we'll be happy to look into this more
fully. As it stands, I am inclined to believe that the IP you're using
may be in use by more than one person in some fashion; we'll be able to
tell you more as soon as you get back to us with an IP.

Thanks for your concern.

~Grunt (Steven Melenchuk)

R E Broadley wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I recently discovered Wikipedia, and I am very impressed by the vast
> range of information, and by the neutrality of many of the definitions.
>
> I have only today started to contribute to Wikipedia, and made a few
> additions of links to some of the articles.
>
> I noticed that the definition of the September 11 attacks was claiming
> as fact some information that is widely disputed, and so a few minutes
> ago inserted information making it clear who claims these facts, and I
> was going to elaborate further with information on which facts are being
> disputed and by who, only to find that my IP address had been blocked by
> a user "Flockmeal".
>
> This user was claiming the reason for the block was "repeated vandalism".
>
> I went on to check what the blocking policy was, and then the Wikipedia
> definition of vandalism, to discover that by input was in no way
> anything close to vandalism. I was stating nothing than the facts, with
> no bias whatsoever. The entries I made were made entirely in good faith,
> and I am very disappointed that such abuse of the blocking policy has
> been made.
>
> Since the block, I have registered and now have a username and am
> contactable at my email address. I would ask that the IP address block
> be removed, and a discussion started as to why elaborating on facts and
> remaining factual can be classed as vandalism.
>
> Many thanks,
> Edmund Broadley
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] blocking policy violated?

body:
Moments after I sent my initial reply here, my attention was drawn to
other replies here, making most of my reply pointless. Don't panic;
you've done the right thing by contacting us. :)

~Grunt (Steven Melenchuk)

R E Broadley wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I recently discovered Wikipedia, and I am very impressed by the vast
> range of information, and by the neutrality of many of the definitions.
>
> I have only today started to contribute to Wikipedia, and made a few
> additions of links to some of the articles.
>
> I noticed that the definition of the September 11 attacks was claiming
> as fact some information that is widely disputed, and so a few minutes
> ago inserted information making it clear who claims these facts, and I
> was going to elaborate further with information on which facts are being
> disputed and by who, only to find that my IP address had been blocked by
> a user "Flockmeal".
>
> This user was claiming the reason for the block was "repeated vandalism".
>
> I went on to check what the blocking policy was, and then the Wikipedia
> definition of vandalism, to discover that by input was in no way
> anything close to vandalism. I was stating nothing than the facts, with
> no bias whatsoever. The entries I made were made entirely in good faith,
> and I am very disappointed that such abuse of the blocking policy has
> been made.
>
> Since the block, I have registered and now have a username and am
> contactable at my email address. I would ask that the IP address block
> be removed, and a discussion started as to why elaborating on facts and
> remaining factual can be classed as vandalism.
>
> Many thanks,
> Edmund Broadley
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] blocking policy violated?

body:
> As it stands, I am inclined to believe that the IP you're using may
> be in use by more than one person in some fashion

Yes, fair enough. I've gone ahead and unblocked the IP, despite
saying I wouldn't...
--
Allan Crossman - a.crossman at blueyonder.co.uk
The Moon is Waxing Gibbous (68% of Full)


from_name: Andre Engels

body:
Jimbo Wales:

> At the same time, I think that the advantages would be minimal.  If
> the problem users are got out of the way, then good users can find the
> right answer for an article.  Almost never is the *content* the
> problem, the problem is *people* with poor social skills, poor editing
> skills, etc.  So if the ArbCom resolves the behavior issue, then the
> article content can be taken care of by other others acting in the
> normal wiki way.

I disagree. In many cases the *content* is the big problem, the poor
social skills etcetera just happen to surface because there is a
conflict. Perhaps not in the cases going to the arbitration committee,
but I think it is such in most of the cases that don't go to the
arbitration committee, but do not get resolved either except by one
party giving up hope and putting the page on their list of "pages that
I prefer not looking at above improving".

There must be some way to decide that certain POVs are simply so far
out that they are not going to be mentioned, or at least if they are
going to be mentioned then not on the main page. Theories about the
pyramids having been built by aliens do not belong on [[Egyptian
pyramid]] (not that I remember anyone putting it there, but...) and
telling both parties to stop yelling will not resolve that.

Wiki-editing _often_ gets us out of conflicts. But to think it
_always_ does so, other than by tiring one party to dead, is
hopelessly naive. Ten times more naive than thinking that Wikipedia
could actually work.

Andre Engels


from_name: Brion Vibber

body:
On Nov 20, 2004, at 5:41 AM, Hauke Zuehl wrote:
> We are running a software catalogue with MediaWiki and the wiki is
> sponsored by a company. Now the company wants us to place a picture
> with the company's logo under the wiki logo.
>
> I added
[snip]
>
[snip]
> in xhtml_slim.pt and it results in an error.

The template code needs to be valid XML/XHTML. Two things to fix:
first, you need a closing quote on the src attribute. Second, since
 doesn't take a closing tag () you need to use the short
closing tag form:

That ought to work.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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list: wiktionary-l

from_name: Gerard Meijssen

subject: [Wiktionary-l] conjugation of verbs

body:
Hoi,
The conjugsation of verbs is not my favourite subject; I can remember
how I hated my grammar lessons in secondary school .. Anyway, when
working on a dictionary they have to be treated with equal attention as
nouns or what have you.

On several wiktionaries, some brilliant people have created templates to
create beautifull list of all the forms that a verb can have in a
language. I have been busy copying them to the nl:wiktionary and to, as
we say in Dutch, "make some chocolate out of it". After some
consultation with others, I came up with the following modus operandi.

*The name of a template has to indicate which language it is about.
*The text of the template is completely in the language that the verb is in.
*The grammatical terms are wikis and they translate the word to the
local language.
*The explanation of a grammatical term is best kept in the wikipedia

I have been busy creating the texts for the grammar terms in the
nl:wiktionary; I have copied them to other wiktionaries as well like es
and it. It would really help if the terms were defined in the local
language and, if I had more translations for these terms.

An example of a template I have been working on:
    http://es.wiktionary.org/wiki/Plantilla:W.es.v.conj.zar from the
Spanish wiktionary.
    http://it.wiktionary.org/wiki/Template:it-conj-reg-are-avere from
the Italian wiktionary

Thanks,
    GerardM


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: unusual revert on Article: George W Bush

body:
Quotess hould be put on Wikipedia's sister project, Wikiquote.

RickK

R E Broadley <20041111 at stardate.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
After looking around the Internet, I found a full transcript of
President Bush's speech at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/attacked/transcripts/bushaddress_092001.html

It certainly appears that the article was wrongly reverted. I would
correct the mistake, but the article was protected from changes shortly
after the revert was applied, and so far has not been unprotected.

Might it be possible to allow registered users to still be allowed to
make changes to this article? At least that way only people who can be
held accountable will be able to make changes.

Regards,
Edmund

R E Broadley wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I notice that the George W Bush article was reverted by Violetriga on
> 11th November 2004. The revert caused a George Bush quote that had a
> source (Sunday Times?) to be replaced with an apparently incorrect
> quote with no source.
>
> This surprised me, as I would expect the quote with a source to be
> favored over an unverified quote.
>
> Or am I missing something?
>
> Rather than the revert, wouldn't it have been more appropriate to
> acknowledge the existence of multiple quotes, with perhaps some
> additional research, or at least mention reasons for the revert.
>
> Apologies in advance if reasons for the revert were given - I'm new to
> Wikipedia, and I might not have figured out yet how to view the
> reasons for reverts (if such a feature exists).
>
> Cheers,
> Edmund
>

_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
 Discover all that?s new in My Yahoo!


subject: [WikiEN-l] blocking policy violated?

body:
Allan,

Thanks for your reply, and thanks for removing the block. The block was
actually blocking all users of several UK Internet service providers, as
it is actually the IP address of their web cache, which they force all
users to go through.

Regarding my changes as being silly, I would have to disagree. In a
recent documentary on BBC1 it was shown that the term "Al Qaeda" was
only adopted by Osama Bin Laden AFTER the September 11 attacks, and
therefore the article as it is currently worded is misleading.

It is also widely debated on Wikipedia as to when the term "terrorist"
should be used, as this implies a political stance and as such does not
constitute a NPOV. I am British, and favor neither Al Qaeda nor the
current US government, and therefore consider myself to be in a good
position to write about September 11 in a neutral way. To some people
"freedom fighters" are "terrorists" and vice versa. It is important we
remember that, and remember that Wikipedia is intended for a world wide
audience, who may research subject more than simply believing what they
see on television programs such as Fox News.

In addition to this, there is much evidence that the CIA is or has been
protecting the Bin Laden family, as had also been recently "documented"
in the film Fahrenheit 911, and also in numerous BBC documentaries recently.

BBC being the British Broadcasting Corporation.

Therefore the changes I made were reasonable, as these are widely
disputed issues, and should not be being stated as fact. This is
according to Wikipedia's own NPOV policies, which I have been reading
last night and this morning.

I look forward to discussing this further if you so wish.

Edmund

Allan Crossman wrote:

> R E Broadley wrote:
>
>> I noticed that the definition of the September 11 attacks was
>> claiming as fact some information that is widely disputed
>
>
> Come off it now. You went from:
>
>   The attacks of September 11, 2001, were a series of coordinated
>   terrorist attacks against the United States
>
> To:
>
>   The attacks of September 11, 2001, are described by the Ubited
>   States Government to be a series of coordinated terrorist attacks
>   against the United States
>
> This is more than a bit silly. The attacks meet any sane definition of
> terrorism, and were certainly coordinated. What's the problem? NPOV
> only applies when there is serious dispute. Silly disputes can be
> ignored.
>
> The other bit you claimed was disputed was that Al Qaeda was involved.
> Contesting this might have made sense prior to the latest bin Laden
> tape...
>
> All that said, the block was a bit harsh. I'll undo it.
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] unusual revert on Article: George W Bush

body:
Hi,

I notice that the George W Bush article was reverted by Violetriga on
11th November 2004. The revert caused a George Bush quote that had a
source (Sunday Times?) to be replaced with an apparently incorrect quote
with no source.

This surprised me, as I would expect the quote with a source to be
favored over an unverified quote.

Or am I missing something?

Rather than the revert, wouldn't it have been more appropriate to
acknowledge the existence of multiple quotes, with perhaps some
additional research, or at least mention reasons for the revert.

Apologies in advance if reasons for the revert were given - I'm new to
Wikipedia, and I might not have figured out yet how to view the reasons
for reverts (if such a feature exists).

Cheers,
Edmund


body:
On Sat, 20 Nov 2004 22:45:14 -0800, Scott Nelson <scott at penguinstorm.com> wrote:
> If Microsoft decided to launch an MSN encyclopedia that was developed
> using Wiki software, then MSN Wikipedia would be a perfectly good name
> for it, in my view. Many (you included, I suspect) would argue
> otherwise - quite vigorously in all probability.

I think my main concern, if this happened, would be what we would then
call the original Wikipedia, since anything we could well find
ourselves with the word "Wikipedia" becoming associated *first* with
the rival version. So we'd have to highlight that this was the
"Wikimedia Wikipedia" or something equally ugly, in order to avoid
just giving someone else all our publicity.

You are also assuming that Wikipedia would only ever be used to refer
to a wiki-based encyclopedia, not just, say, some vaguely
collaborative online one. If we're not going to take control of the
term, people can use it for *whatever they like*. I don't think it's
all that unlikely that a service like MSN or AOL or Yahoo! would
decide that what you and I would think of as a "real" wiki was just
too open to put their name to, but some "watered down" version would
capitalise on our work nicely.

> Rather than try to protect Wikipedia, let it spread and flourish.
> Wikipedia is the Wiki software's flag on the moon.

The other thing that you're not considering here is that there's a lot
more to the ideal of Wikipedia than the fact that it runs on wiki
software. In fact, some people would argue that the Wiki is just a
means to an end, and what the project is really about is creating a
freely available, neutrally compiled, comprehensive collection of
information. And even if you think the concept of "The Wiki Way"
itself is more central than that, it's still possible to have
something that resembles a wiki in many ways, but doesn't adhere to
the same ideals as are traditionally attached to them.

I guess what I'm saying is that it would be a shame to voluntarily
give up control of our name, only to find it being applied to
something we'd want to distance ourselves from - or even something
against which we would feel fundamentally opposed - and then being
powerless to change our minds.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


body:
On Sat, 20 Nov 2004 15:28:33 -0800, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales
<jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Rowan Collins wrote:
> > I think the main reason this hasn't been done, is that there is no
> > such thing as *internationally* registering a trademark...
>
> This paragraph is wrong on virtually all counts.

Oops! Either I was misremembering an ealry discussion of this, or I
was remembering parts of a discussion that were themselves factually
incorrect. Either way, my apologies.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


body:
After looking around the Internet, I found a full transcript of
President Bush's speech at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/attacked/transcripts/bushaddress_092001.html

It certainly appears that the article was wrongly reverted.  I would
correct the mistake, but the article was protected from changes shortly
after the revert was applied, and so far has not been unprotected.

Might it be possible to allow registered users to still be allowed to
make changes to this article? At least that way only people who can be
held accountable will be able to make changes.

Regards,
Edmund

R E Broadley wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I notice that the George W Bush article was reverted by Violetriga on
> 11th November 2004. The revert caused a George Bush quote that had a
> source (Sunday Times?) to be replaced with an apparently incorrect
> quote with no source.
>
> This surprised me, as I would expect the quote with a source to be
> favored over an unverified quote.
>
> Or am I missing something?
>
> Rather than the revert, wouldn't it have been more appropriate to
> acknowledge the existence of multiple quotes, with perhaps some
> additional research, or at least mention reasons for the revert.
>
> Apologies in advance if reasons for the revert were given - I'm new to
> Wikipedia, and I might not have figured out yet how to view the
> reasons for reverts (if such a feature exists).
>
> Cheers,
> Edmund
>


from_name: Arne Klempert

body:
On Sunday, November 21, 2004 12:30 AM
Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:

> Daniel Mayer wrote:
>> That is easy to fix. Just put "A Wikimedia project" below the logo
>> of each of our projects.
>
> I support that we add the global wikimedia logo on all the projects,
> in the place of the GNU FDL button.  We already say "GNU FDL" in the
> text portion.  The global wikimedia logo should be linked to the
> foundation website.

This sounds like a good idea, so I made two drafts for such a banner:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Logos

-Arne (akl)


body:
> That is easy to fix. Just put "A Wikimedia project" below the logo of each of
> our projects.

Thinking about this, I came up with another idea: use a distinctive
colour scheme. The colours in the Wikimedia logo are actually quite
distinctive, and we already have one other logo using them (the
commons, although no-one's got round to colouring the arrows green
yet, which would make it even more consistent).

And one of the problems is that other projects using the MediaWiki
software have a default look more-or-less identical to the Wikimedia
sites. So what I was thinking, is perhaps we could have a
"Wikimedia-monobook" skin that just had subtle shadings of that
particular blue, green, and red; this could then not be distributed
with the software [and we could probably even claim it as a trademark
;)] I tried to do a mockup of what I mean with the GIMP, but didn't do
very well. What do people think, as a concept?

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
Christopher-
> By the way, if the devs want help with documentation of the code, I
> can do some.

Well, it would help to have a decent user documentation as well. The help
is being maintained at Meta, but there's really not enough people there
who work on it:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Contents

This is something everyone with some understanding of how the wiki works
can help with. It is essential for new projects like Wikinews, which rely
on these pages, as well as for other users of MediaWiki outside the
Foundation framework.

Much of what currently is there is out of date or inaccurate. It also
doesn't follow consistent guidelines for interwiki linking, images etc.,
which is key to portability. So any participation would be greatly
appreciated.

If there are any questions, there's usually someone on #mediawiki
(irc.freenode.net) who can help.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Shaun MacPherson

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Learn PHP

body:
 --- Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au>
wrote:
> Matt R wrote:
> >  --- Tim Starling wrote:
> >
> >
> >>Unfortunately it seems most programmers on
> Wikipedia would rather think
> >>of excuses, complain about the lack of progress
> and file bug reports.
> >
> >
> > There's an unfortunate tendency on Wikipedia to
> suppose that if you identify a
> > problem that you can fix, then you have an
> obligation to fix it. Even if you
> > have the capability, there is no moral imperative
> for volunteers to do anything
> > at all on Wikipedia, and documenting a problem is
> already a positive
> > contribution, albeit a comparatively minor one. Of
> course, to grumble or whine
> > about a problem that you've identified is
> churlish, as you have no right to
> > expect that others fix things on your behalf.
> >
> > But to get to the point: I'm very grateful to the
> developers. I would quite
> > like to hack on Mediawiki myself some day, but
> right now I prefer to spend my
> > time contributing to the content of articles --
> this is not an *excuse*; this
> > is a choice, and I (only mildly!) resent any such
> implication.
>
> I'm sorry if I caused offence, I just wanted to
> impress on everyone that
> Wikipedia has barely any developers. If you're ever
> wondering why some
> feature hasn't been written yet, it's because
> there's been no-one around
> to write it. Most of the active developers seem to
> be more interested
> writing features for a general audience than for
> Wikimedia projects.
> There's more editors on the Old English Wikipedia
> than there are
> developers overall. Maybe Matt doesn't want to help,
> and that's fine. I
> get the feeling Gerrit doesn't either. But is there
> anyone? Every second
> Wikipedian seems to know a programming language. We
> just need, say, two
> or three developers willing to put in a few hours
> per week.
>
> -- Tim Starling

I currently have some time on my hands and I'd love to
be able to learn how to contribute.  What do you need
exactly, only people who know PHP?

I little about PHP but I would be willing to learn
from scratch :).  Hopefully there are other people who
want to learn, we can form a little group and go
though a few tutorials.  This way people who know PHP
could help multiple people at once learn saving time.
How long would you guess it take before a person would
learn enough PHP to be useful on MediaWiki?

ShaunMacPherson

______________________________________________________________________
Post your free ad now! http://personals.yahoo.ca


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Foundation-l] Liberation

body:
http://www.liberation.fr/page.php?Article=255781

Hi everyone.

I am proud to announce that Wikipedia is featured in an article of liberation.fr, one of the major french news media (paper and web). The article is listed on liberation main page, so we can expect some good feedback (visitors) for the site. I mention it because this is our FIRST front page article in a major media, and hopefully, the first of a long list now. This is a stone for french speaking people.

There are a couple of rather inexact points in the article, but nothing problematic.
The most curious is probably that there is no link to the encyclopedia itself... I hope people will spontaneously look in google ;-)

Many thanks to Yann who made it possible in keeping in touch with the author of the article.

-------------

Aside from this point, I am yet to be connected to the real/virtual world with a phone and internet connexion.
Meanwhile, I try to organise my new home, clean the old one, and planted some rose bushes yesterday. I also highjacked an university old computer for 2 hours, it broke after 45 mn, I had to switch to an even older computer, on which the only navigator was netscape 4.5. For those who wonder, no, it is not possible to edit wikipedia with Netscape 4.5. And no, installing new software on collective computers is not allowed either.

I am currently fully realising how addictive Wikipedia can be. I try to make it easier in reading private mails (thank you for those keeping me up to date with current Wikipedia gossip, more is welcome ;-)) and updating my blog (for those who read french, please see http://anthere.shaihome.net for opinions on the political goal of Wikipedia).

I think my next thoughts will be oriented toward what French call "fracture num?rique", ie, the great gap currently widening between those who have access to the net versus those who do not (or have a very limited net access). We might think about what we are *currently* doing : we are certainly improving the amount and quality of information of those who already have access to information. But we are not bringing information to those who do not really have access to information.

I miss you all :-(

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
 Meet the all-new My Yahoo! ? Try it today!


subject: [Foundation-l] Liberation


subject: [Wikitech-l] 1.4 benchmarks and parser cache

body:
I did some quickie benchmarks of a couple of types of page view,
comparing 1.3 with 1.4 under a small variety of option variations.

See the fun:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.4_benchmarks

Since the speed benefit of a parser cache hit is so great on
non-trivial pages, I've also tweaked the parser cache to work without
requiring memcached. It's now enabled by default.

When running without memcached, parser cache drops will be kept in the
objectcache table, where until now we've just been keeping the message
cache. Zlib will be used if available to compress the size of the
dumps. It's possible that on a relatively active site the objectcache
garbage collection will conflict too much; if anyone notices any such
problems it can be adjusted.

I've also been working on squeezing extra milliseconds out of the fixed
per-page costs (initialisation, skin rendering, etc). These do add
up...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject:
[Foundation-l] Re: Regarding: This is a stone for french speaking
	people

body:
ahlalalala,

I am hopeless ;-)

Well, in French, we say "graver un ?v?nement avec une pierre blanche"
to "engrave an event with a white stone"

Thanks Fred ;-)

Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
Hi,

It's "milestone"

This is a stone for french speaking people.

Fred

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
 Discover all that?s new in My Yahoo!


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] blocking policy violated?

body:
Rick (giantsrick13 at yahoo.com) [041121 10:34]:

> The IP address you were using, 62.252.0.4, has a long history of nothing but vandalism.  The IP has been warned time and time again.  Your addition of the weasel words "It is claimed that members of the [[al-Qaida]] militant [[Islamism]] group hijacked four aircraft." and "The '''attacks of September 11, 2001''', are described by the Ubited States Government to be a series of coordinated [[terrorism|terrorist]] attacks against the [[United States]] " was read as more of the same.

That IP address is glfd-cache-1.server.ntli.net - a proxy for NTL, a huge
cable broadband provider in the UK. Blocking NTL proxies is not quite as
broad in its effects as blocking an AOL proxy - it tends to be per
geographical area, rather than possibly almost any user and not necessarily
the one you blocked - but does take out rather a lot of people as
collateral damage.

So such blocks, when necessary, should (I suggest) be applied for 24 hours
maximum and, most importantly, with a clear reason to explain the problem
to anyone blocked inadvertently.

- d.


from_name: Nicolas Weeger

subject: [Foundation-l] Liberation

body:
> Hi everyone.
>
> I am proud to announce that Wikipedia is featured in an article of liberation.fr, one of the major french news media (paper and web). The article is listed on liberation main page, so we can expect some good feedback (visitors) for the site. I mention it because this is our FIRST front page article in a major media, and hopefully, the first of a long list now. This is a stone for french speaking people.
>
> There are a couple of rather inexact points in the article, but nothing problematic.
> The most curious is probably that there is no link to the encyclopedia itself... I hope people will spontaneously look in google ;-)

The only wrong thing is that they seem to imply only sysops can remove
bad paragraphs lol. Could be meaning only they can correct mistakes, weird.
Apart that, nice article!

> Many thanks to Yann who made it possible in keeping in touch with the author of the article.

Thanks to Anthere & Yann & Vincent for that great article.

> I miss you all :-(

*hugs* we miss you too :)

Ryo


subject: [Foundation-l] Liberation


from_name: Shane King

subject: [WikiEN-l] WP:3RR

body:
On Thu, Nov 18, 2004 at 10:37:51PM -0800, Ray Saintonge wrote:
> The reference to a tiny marginal minority only confuses the issue when
> it comes to creationism.  Whether we agree with what they say or not we
> can't ignore the fact that a lot of people do believe that way.

Eh? I was the one arguing that creationists should be heard, wasn't I?
My reference to a tiny minority wasn't intended to mean only a tiny
minority of people are creationists (I'm quite aware that there are 100
million Americans who believe every word of the Bible to be literally true),
but if the views they're putting forward are held by a tiny minority,
they should not go in.

I'm not fully versed in the subtleties of creationist views, but I'm
sure that there are different schools of thoughts and minority opinions.
That's what I was referring to.

Maybe creationism was a poor example, but hey, I didn't choose it, I
only responded to it.

Shane.


from_name: Daniel Mayer

body:
--- "Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales" <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> I support that we add the global wikimedia logo on all the projects,
> in the place of the GNU FDL button.  We already say "GNU FDL" in the
> text portion.  The global wikimedia logo should be linked to the
> foundation website.

That works as well.

-- mav

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Meet the all-new My Yahoo! - Try it today!
http://my.yahoo.com


from_name: Gerrit

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Bayesian filtering to find suspicious new pages and
	changes

body:
[resent, wrong address for wikipedia-l]
[FUP: wikipedia-l, CC: pywikipediabot-users]

Hello,

I have recently been thinking again how wonderful my bayesian
spamfilter, implemented by Spambayes[1], is working to filter my e-mail.
For an explanation of Bayesian spamfiltering, see the Spambayes homepage.
I was thinking whether it would be possible to do something like that
for Newpages. It could reduce human work and might prove a very
interesting experiment as well.

The bot I am thinking of would follow Newpages live. It fetches each
page, and checks it against it database. If it's classified as ham, then
continue. If it's classified as unsure, ask the user whether it is
{{delete}}-material: if yes, train as spam and prepend {{delete}} to the
article. If no, train as ham. It could add a comment to the article or a
message to the talk page: <!-- classified by ... as ... with score ...  -->
If it's classified as spam, show the user (part of) the content to
confirm that it's really true (if not, treat as unsure-ham).
If it already contains '{{delete}}', train as spam and continue.
When no user is using the program, create a stack of articles to work
through when a user starts with the program again.

This would be implemented using an enhanced Pywikipediabot and the
library coming with Spambayes. I foresee some problems. For example,
each user would have its own 'hammy.db'. As we are all working on the
same thing, we would want to have a central hammy.db, probably one per
language. This would be at a central server (need not to be Wikipedia: I
volunteer with my server for this task). Initially, it would be a
command-line tool, although a web interface might prove very useful as
well.

Additional to the contents of the page, clues can also be given by the
user contributing, whether the user is logged-in or anonymous, the range
of the IP, name of the page, and, why not, the time of day, although the
latter might have less value than the former ones.

Perhaps it could also be done for RecentChanges. It would then be fed
the diffs. This would require a lot more work, because there is a major
difference between removing a line and adding a line (in fact, when one
would be a spam-hint, the inverse would be a ham-hint with clue 1-other).
This is much more difficult and I do not have the knowledge to write
such a thing. It does not seem impossible, though.

What do you think?

kind regards,
Gerrit Holl.

[1] http://www.spambayes.org/

--
Weather in Lulea / Kallax, Sweden 22/11 09:50:
	-19.0?C   wind 0.9 m/s NW (34 m above NAP)
--
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of
unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the
military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of
misplaced power exists and will persist.
    -Dwight David Eisenhower, January 17, 1961


from_name: Jim Vanderveen

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: external authentication hook (was: WHO was
	developing LDAP-Authenfication)

body:
On 2 Nov 2004, at 12:36, Ashar Voultoiz wrote:
> Thomas Gries wrote:
>> Please could the developer who recently posted that he/she is
>> finalising an LDAP-interface -->
>> --> contact me please ?
>> Thanks in advance
>> Tom Gries
>
> Hello,
>
> Ryan Lane posted a patch at:
>   http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=814

Great work, Ryan! This patch is the "missing link" that has kept me
from adopting MediaWiki as our Program's wiki.

Brion, in comment #5 on this patch, you mention adding an external
authentication hook. Do you expect to implement this Real Soon Now? I
can live with or without it--I only wanted to know if I should pursue
this patch as-is, or wait for the plugin.

Jim Vanderveen, IT Manager
Office of Water Programs, Calif State University Sacramento
jim.vanderveen at owp.csus.edu -- PGP key 0x4F449230
PGP info at http://www.owp.csus.edu/~vanderveenj/pgp/


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: [Mediawiki-l] Re: external authentication hook
	(was: WHO was developing LDAP-Authenfication)

body:
On Nov 22, 2004, at 12:06 PM, Jim Vanderveen wrote:
> Brion, in comment #5 on this patch, you mention adding an external
> authentication hook. Do you expect to implement this Real Soon Now? I
> can live with or without it--I only wanted to know if I should pursue
> this patch as-is, or wait for the plugin.

A stub plug-in interface is in CVS right now (see
includes/AuthPlugin.php in the main phase3 module and
auth/SampleAuth.php in the extensions module) but probably needs some
more work before it's really usable to adapt the LDAP patch. (For
instance the patch as posted adds a 'domain' selector to the login
page, which there isn't yet a hook for.) If someone wants to hack on
that that would be great, otherwise I'll take another pass at it after
I've done some more optimization and upload-scanning work.

We're planning to take 1.4 into beta within the next week, with a 1.4.0
release sometime in December.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Mark Richards

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikisource, wikiquote, meta, simple....

body:
Yes, this is annoying. It would be much better to
merge them all into one, with different namespaces for
each.
Mark

--- R E Broadley <20041111 at stardate.freeserve.co.uk>
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I notice there seem to be lots of different
> wikipedias. (Sorry I'm new).
> I was surprised to see that I need to register a
> usercode on each one
> separately. Why is this please? Where do I go to
> access wikisource and
> wikiquote please? And would I be helping by
> relocating all quotes from
> all articles over to wikiquote? ...Or would some
> people object to this
> being done?
>
> Cheers,
> Rebroad
>
>
> John Lee wrote:
>
> > Full transcripts should be placed on Wikisource,
> if I'm not mistaken.
> >
> > John Lee
> > ([[User:Johnleemk]])
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

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


from_name: Hauke Zuehl

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: How to add a picture to portlet?

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

>    <img src="/en/MediaWiki/stylesheets/images/Logo-nct.png" />
>
> That ought to work.

Thanks, Brion, it works ;)

Regards,
Hauke
--
> Sitze ich vor einer Winkiste bekomm ich hier die Kriese.
Ja, Windows ist wie Sackhuepfen ohne Beine.
----
diskless und valencia im Heise-Forum


from_name: Rowan Collins

body:
On Sat, 20 Nov 2004 15:19:04 -0800, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales
<jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> It is quite important to give the option for people to block a name in
> all other projects.  This is important for people to be able to have a
> global identity.  Forcing people to do this by hand is silly.
[...]
> It should be the default in all *new* cases where there is no
> conflict, and it should be sought (socially and peacefully) in all old
> cases.

I'd agree with this, and I think it's important in this discussion to
remember why it is that people want a unified login in the first
place. The number one reason is *not to need to register and login
seperately for each wiki*. Things like global watchlists, and talk
page notifications, come a close second, while global preferences
[with the ability for at least some to then be over-ridden project by
project] are essentially a pleasant side effect. (With a bigger
advantage once it's possible to pick your own language for the
interface).

Now, given that registration and login aren't exactly hard to begin
with, this means going to a new wiki has got to require an *absolute
minimum* of effort under the new system, else we've lost the main
advantage. Thus, a system where your name is just global, no matter
what, is ideal: you go to a new wiki, your name works; any system
which allows different names per project should probably allow opting
out of this (i.e. an off-by-default option "confirm my desired
username when I visit a new wiki"). If the user *does* want different
names, they can be given a form, pre-filled with their default name,
as a kind of "quick registration".

Ideally, the check for globally-logged-in status [i.e. on a site they
haven't used this session, and may *never* have used] should happen as
soon as a user loads a page from a new wiki, or at the very least when
they first edit. There is, however, a technical problem, which I don't
think I've seen mentioned elsewhere: identification cookies belong for
security to one domain, and different Wikimedia projects have
different domains - so, e.g., en.wikipedia.org and en.wiktionary.org
can't access the same cookies. [See
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Single_login/IMSoP2#Cookies for more]

This may mean, unless I'm missing something, that we'll need a "quick
login" button - one click, and the site knows who you are because you
already filled in your password on a different wiki. An additional
touch might be to have a "...and log me in" box on the edit screen -
so if you've done your edits, it will look up your global login and
save the change in one go. Indeed, something like this (w/ boxes for
name and passwd) might be nice *anyway* (Livejournal has it, for
instance)...

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: John Lee

body:
Full transcripts should be placed on Wikisource, if I'm not mistaken.

John Lee
([[User:Johnleemk]])

Rick wrote:

>Quotess hould be put on Wikipedia's sister project, Wikiquote.
>
>RickK
>
>R E Broadley <20041111 at stardate.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
>After looking around the Internet, I found a full transcript of
>President Bush's speech at
>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/attacked/transcripts/bushaddress_092001.html
>
>It certainly appears that the article was wrongly reverted. I would
>correct the mistake, but the article was protected from changes shortly
>after the revert was applied, and so far has not been unprotected.
>
>Might it be possible to allow registered users to still be allowed to
>make changes to this article? At least that way only people who can be
>held accountable will be able to make changes.
>
>Regards,
>Edmund
>
>R E Broadley wrote:
>
>
>
>>Hi,
>>
>>I notice that the George W Bush article was reverted by Violetriga on
>>11th November 2004. The revert caused a George Bush quote that had a
>>source (Sunday Times?) to be replaced with an apparently incorrect
>>quote with no source.
>>
>>This surprised me, as I would expect the quote with a source to be
>>favored over an unverified quote.
>>
>>Or am I missing something?
>>
>>Rather than the revert, wouldn't it have been more appropriate to
>>acknowledge the existence of multiple quotes, with perhaps some
>>additional research, or at least mention reasons for the revert.
>>
>>Apologies in advance if reasons for the revert were given - I'm new to
>>Wikipedia, and I might not have figured out yet how to view the
>>reasons for reverts (if such a feature exists).
>>
>>Cheers,
>>Edmund
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>WikiEN-l mailing list
>WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
>
>---------------------------------
>Do you Yahoo!?
> Discover all that's new in My Yahoo!
>_______________________________________________
>WikiEN-l mailing list
>WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
>
>


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Bayesian filtering to find suspicious new pages
	and	changes

body:
I think this should be on Wikitech-l, and as such am CCing it there.

John Lee
([[en:User:Johnleemk]])

Gerrit wrote:

>[resent, wrong address for wikipedia-l]
>[FUP: wikipedia-l, CC: pywikipediabot-users]
>
>Hello,
>
>I have recently been thinking again how wonderful my bayesian
>spamfilter, implemented by Spambayes[1], is working to filter my e-mail.
>For an explanation of Bayesian spamfiltering, see the Spambayes homepage.
>I was thinking whether it would be possible to do something like that
>for Newpages. It could reduce human work and might prove a very
>interesting experiment as well.
>
>The bot I am thinking of would follow Newpages live. It fetches each
>page, and checks it against it database. If it's classified as ham, then
>continue. If it's classified as unsure, ask the user whether it is
>{{delete}}-material: if yes, train as spam and prepend {{delete}} to the
>article. If no, train as ham. It could add a comment to the article or a
>message to the talk page: <!-- classified by ... as ... with score ...  -->
>If it's classified as spam, show the user (part of) the content to
>confirm that it's really true (if not, treat as unsure-ham).
>If it already contains '{{delete}}', train as spam and continue.
>When no user is using the program, create a stack of articles to work
>through when a user starts with the program again.
>
>This would be implemented using an enhanced Pywikipediabot and the
>library coming with Spambayes. I foresee some problems. For example,
>each user would have its own 'hammy.db'. As we are all working on the
>same thing, we would want to have a central hammy.db, probably one per
>language. This would be at a central server (need not to be Wikipedia: I
>volunteer with my server for this task). Initially, it would be a
>command-line tool, although a web interface might prove very useful as
>well.
>
>Additional to the contents of the page, clues can also be given by the
>user contributing, whether the user is logged-in or anonymous, the range
>of the IP, name of the page, and, why not, the time of day, although the
>latter might have less value than the former ones.
>
>Perhaps it could also be done for RecentChanges. It would then be fed
>the diffs. This would require a lot more work, because there is a major
>difference between removing a line and adding a line (in fact, when one
>would be a spam-hint, the inverse would be a ham-hint with clue 1-other).
>This is much more difficult and I do not have the knowledge to write
>such a thing. It does not seem impossible, though.
>
>What do you think?
>
>kind regards,
>Gerrit Holl.
>
>[1] http://www.spambayes.org/
>
>
>


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Bayesian filtering to find
 suspicious new pages and	changes


from_name: R E Broadley

body:
Hi,

I notice there seem to be lots of different wikipedias. (Sorry I'm new).
I was surprised to see that I need to register a usercode on each one
separately. Why is this please? Where do I go to access wikisource and
wikiquote please? And would I be helping by relocating all quotes from
all articles over to wikiquote? ...Or would some people object to this
being done?

Cheers,
Rebroad

John Lee wrote:

> Full transcripts should be placed on Wikisource, if I'm not mistaken.
>
> John Lee
> ([[User:Johnleemk]])


from_name: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason

subject: [WikiEN-l] Interwiki links for the Icelandic decade articles.

body:
The Icelandic wikipedia currently has no interwiki links on its
century and decade articles, this is because Icelandic uses a system
for decades and centuries which probably not alot (if any) languages
use, at least not the ones i've surveyed, our decades and centuries
are "off" by one year from "conventional" systems, we therefore cannot
link to them since the two articles would not describe the same
period.

A decade in Icelandic starts at x where x is a number ending in one
and ends nine years later, so for example the period 1991?2000 is the
"tenth decade" of the twentieth century. This is unlike English where
a decade would be the period from 1990 to 1999 and be called the
"1990s" or "nineties" for short.

Similarly, the "twentieth century" begins in 1901 and ends in 2000,
unlike the English twentieth century which begins in 1900 and ends in
1999.

This system is at least not used in Danish, Norwegian, Faroese,
Swedish, German, English, Spanish, french, Italian, Dutch, polish.

So, if any of you know another language which uses the same info reply
to this email, and we can then link to it.


body:
On Mon, 22 Nov 2004 20:26:47 +0000, R E Broadley
<20041111 at stardate.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
> I notice there seem to be lots of different wikipedias. (Sorry I'm new).

To be precise, there are multiple language versions of Wikipedia, and
various other projects run by the same organisation (the Wikimedia
Foundation), some of which are also split into multiple language
variants. (Some, like 'meta' and 'Wikisource' combine multiple
languages within one site). See
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Complete_list_of_Wikimedia_projects for
a (rather overwhelming) list.

> I was surprised to see that I need to register a usercode on each one
> separately. Why is this please?

Each project is currently housed in a seperate database, and has a
seperate copy of the software to run it. This makes some things easier
(e.g. keeping things like software settings and translations, and
indeed articles, seperate) but, obviously, has drawbacks.

There are currently plans underway to create a unified login system
for all these projects, but there are problems still to be sorted out
- not least, that the same name will currently be in use by different
people on different projects. See
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Single_signon_transition for some more
details; also, there is currently a discussion on the "foundation-l"
mailing list, which you can read at
http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2004-November/thread.html

> Where do I go to access wikisource and
> wikiquote please?

http://en.wikisource.org (for the English version) and http://wikiquote.org

> And would I be helping by relocating all quotes from
> all articles over to wikiquote? ...Or would some people object to this
> being done?

I'm not sure what exact decisions have been reached (you might want to
look around and see what previous discussions you can find) but
removing "all quotes from all articles" sounds like going a bit too
far. I think the idea is that Wikiquote should form a Dictionary of
Quotations, and Wikipedia, as an encyclopedia, should contain only
those quotes relevant to encyclopedic articles.

So quotes included in Wikipedia articles *just for the sake of
including them* should probably be relocated to Wikiquote, and
replaced with a link to the relevant page there; but quotes that are
included to illustrate a point in the article, or which are so
noteworthy that you would expect to find them in an encyclopedia
article, can be left where they are. Or, that would be my opinion,
anyway.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Tim Starling

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Bayesian filtering to find suspicious new pages
	and changes

body:
> Gerrit wrote:
>> The bot I am thinking of would follow Newpages live. It fetches each
>> page, and checks it against it database. If it's classified as ham, then
>> continue. If it's classified as unsure, ask the user whether it is
>> {{delete}}-material: if yes, train as spam and prepend {{delete}} to the
>> article. If no, train as ham. It could add a comment to the article or a
>> message to the talk page: <!-- classified by ... as ... with score
>> ...  -->

I was thinking about Bayesian filters too, but as a means of marking
changes in RC for users to deal with them, not as a bot. As for marking
diffs, well, my idea would be to mark reductions in article size as
such, and to run the filter only on added text.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Nathaniel Krause

subject: [WikiEN-l] ArbCom election method discussion

body:
Hey, I wanted to direct everyone's attention to ongoing discussion of what
election system to use for Wikipedia elections such as the upcoming one.
See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Arbitration_Committee_Elections_December_2004#Voting_method_redux
.  Discussing topics such as switching to Condorcet or the Single
Transferable Vote.


body:
On Mon, 22 Nov, ?var Arnfj?r? wrote:
> [...] our decades and centuries
> are "off" by one year from "conventional" systems, we therefore cannot
> link to them since the two articles would not describe the same
> period.

Far be it from me to comment on a policy of the Icelandic Wikipedia,
but wouldn't it make more sense just to link to the nearly-equivalent
articles *anyway*, especially for the Centuries? I mean, if the
article at the [[en:...]] link for [[is:20. ?ldin]] contains
information about 1900, and none about 2000, but has the other 99
years in common, is that not better than no link at all?

Like I say, apologies if this is something that has been discussed to
death on the Icelandic wiki, but as a general principle, I think we
are always going to have imperfect matches like this in the
'translation' system - articles which contain stubs for multiple
topics, or just differences in what is deemed part of the "same
topic". Indeed, the very nature of translation will lead to these:
apparently, if I understood correctly, the English "penguin" has two
translations in French, so an article in English titled "penguin" will
never have a French link that is 100% equivalent. By leaving out such
links completely, we lose the integration that the interwiki links are
there to provide.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Custom Namespaces

body:
On Nov 23, 2004, at 3:40 AM, Randy Becker wrote:
> I've attempted to follow the directions on meta, but they seem to be
> out of date. The variable mentioned seems to no longer be in the code.
> Where and how can I add a custom namespace?

You don't say which page had the directions you tried to follow, so I'm
going to point you to a page which does, in fact, have correct
directions:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Custom_namespaces

If you'll let us know where the page with incorrect directions is, we
might be able to fix it. (Or, you can fix the page yourself once you
know the correct directions.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
Yes, we should document popular math errors too, and
popular misconceptions about how gravity works! ;)
Mark

--- Stuart Orford <sjorford at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

>  --- Zoney <zoney.ie at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Yep, the 1st of January, 2001 was the beginning of
> > the 21st century!
> > Hence the amusement of the better educated at the
> > big celebrations on
> > 31st December 1999! Not to mention the fact that
> > it's a tad odd anyway
> > even to mark the true change of millenium. (A
> rather
> > arbitrary date,
> > especially considering the re-jigging of our
> > oft-times dubious Western
> > calendar system!)
> >
> > However, are the English Wikipedia articles
> > currently set up according
> > to the correct system, or the incorrect one?
>
> What is this "correct" and "incorrect"? Either
> system
> is an arbitrary division of time, and it only
> becomes
> important which you prefer when you get to year 0
> (because it doesn't exist). In the real world, the
> vast majority of people these days celebrate the
> change of a decade/century/millennium when the last
> digit changes to a zero, and so Wikipedia should
> certainly mention that to be the case. NPOV!
>
> However, it probably does make sense to use the
> "traditional" rather than the "popular" definitions
> for decades etc., as that's the way they would have
> been most often referred to historically. There's
> certainly no problem linking to the Icelandic
> articles
> either, even if they would be a year out.
>
> -- a clearly very poorly "educated" sjorford
>
>
>
>
___________________________________________________________
>
> Win a castle for NYE with your mates and Yahoo!
> Messenger
> http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Meet the all-new My Yahoo! - Try it today!
http://my.yahoo.com


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Broken mathematical representation at [[Knuth's
	up-arrow notation]]

body:
On Nov 23, 2004, at 4:10 AM, Gerrit wrote:
> Some of the mathematical representation on [[Knuth's up-arrow
> notation]]
> is broken. There is too much whitespace. See:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/math/a62fcfaa06f5fa6052ab4b8bf292f7fd.png
>
> I don't know what causes this, but it doesn't look nice.

Have you tried removing some of the quad-spaces? The terms are arranged
like this (pardon my ASCII art):

             XYZ
... =      -----       = ...
       ______ABC_bizbax

where the _ here represents literal spaces in. Presumably this is meant
to align things just so, but it creates, well, a bunch of whitespace.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Randy Becker

subject: [Wikitech-l] Custom Namespaces

body:
I've attempted to follow the directions on meta, but they seem to be
out of date. The variable mentioned seems to no longer be in the code.
Where and how can I add a custom namespace?

-Randy


from_name: Abigail Brady

body:
On Mon, 2004-11-22 at 19:33, ?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason wrote:
> A decade in Icelandic starts at x where x is a number ending in one
> and ends nine years later, so for example the period 1991?2000 is the
> "tenth decade" of the twentieth century. This is unlike English where
> a decade would be the period from 1990 to 1999 and be called the
> "1990s" or "nineties" for short.

This is indeed true.

> Similarly, the "twentieth century" begins in 1901 and ends in 2000,
> unlike the English twentieth century which begins in 1900 and ends in
> 1999.

However, this is not true.  Traditionally "twentieth century" means
1901-2000 in English.

> So, if any of you know another language which uses the same info reply
> to this email, and we can then link to it.

--
Abi


from_name: James D. Forrester

body:
On Mon, 22nd November 2004, at 19:34, ?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason
<avarab at gmail.com> wrote:

[Snip]

> Similarly, the "twentieth century" begins in 1901 and ends in
> 2000, unlike the English twentieth century which begins in 1900 and
> ends in 1999.

Umm. Actually, this is oft a point of confusion; although decades do, indeed
start in xyz0 and continued until xyz9, centuries, millenia, and longer
periods of time start from xy01 and continue to x(y+1)00. Hence the
beginning of this millennium was on the 1st of January 200*1*, although the
first decade primarily within said millennium had started the year
beforehand, and the end thereof is to be the 31st of December 3000, not
2999.

[Snip]

Yours, confusingly,
--
James D. Forrester -- Wikimedia: [[W:en:User:Jdforrester|James F.]]

Mail: james at jdforrester.org | jon at eh.org | csvla at dcs.warwick.ac.uk
IM  : (MSN) jamesdforrester at hotmail.com


from_name: Delirium

body:
Mark Richards wrote:

>Yes, we should document popular math errors too, and
>popular misconceptions about how gravity works! ;)
>
Except that these aren't errors.  Dividing time in such ways is
completely arbitrary either way you do it.  "The 20th century" is
1901-2000, and an arbitrary span of 100 years.  "The 1900s" is
1900-1999, and an arbitrary span of 100 years.  Neither is particularly
"correct".  The only thing I could possibly see as incorrect is if you
were to refer to 1900-1999 as "the 20th century" or to 1901-2000 as "the
1900s".

-Mark