subject: [Foundation-l] a crazy idea...

body:
On 30/08/05, Elisabeth Bauer <elian at djini.de> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> When I thought about some of the latest discussions on the list and
> meta-wiki here, I had a little crazy idea.
>
> The Wikimedia Foundation website was created a few months ago because we
> wanted something clean and clear to present to outside visitors. People
> shouldn't have to dive in the mess on meta-wiki for getting information
> about Wikimedia.
>
> However, this plan didn't work out in my opinion. WMF wiki isn't
> regularly updated, people aren't sure what should be on meta and what on
> wmf, content is duplicated on meta-wiki, translations have to be
> regularly moved from meta to the wmf wiki and so on.
>
> In my opinion, there are three options:
> * we can continue like this and try to make the best out of it
> * we can drastically reduce the number of pages on WMF, limit the
> translations and make it a very simple information site (similar to what
> was done on http://www.wikimedia.de, the german associations site)
> * or we can reunify meta-wiki and the WMF wiki under
> http://www.wikimedia.org
>
> Before some of you call now "impossible", I'd like you to think about
> it. We've managed to build an encyclopedia which is visited by thousands
> of people daily in a wiki. Of course, sometimes you find goatze on the
> main page - that's wikipedia. If an open wiki is acceptable for the most
> famous encyclopedia on the internet, it isn't for the little
> organization behind? Do we really need a classical website, with all its
> failures? Can't we just be proud of what we do and say: Yes, we build an
> encyclopedia in a wiki - and our organisation website is a wiki, too.
>
> and as wikipedia proves, you can organize a wiki in a way that visitors
> are able to find the stuff they want to know - professional looking
> mainpage etc. It just has to be done, and I think the community of
> wikimedians which is populating meta-wiki is now big enough to do this.
>   Important and official pages can be protected, inofficial opinion
> pages can be marked with templates...
>
> If we want something not to be known, it should be done in a closed wiki
> anyway - as the google case has shown, the press isn't able to
> differentiate anyway between something said officially on the WMF
> website and something on a page on meta. There are multiple ways to make
> clear what is official or not, to lead the press to specifically
> dedicated pages while also providing different information for the wiki
> experienced community. And if a reporter finds the "List of wikipedians
> by favoured ice-cream flavour", so what? that's our community.
>
> Test wikipedias would be moved from meta to somewhere else, as well as
> the mediawiki documentation (there is now a dedicated mediawiki wiki) to
> not clutter up recentchanges anymore.
>
> Unifying meta and wmf would also help to bridge the slowly growing gap
> between the community and the organisation Wikimedia. Since Wikimedia
> depends on the work of volunteers, I see this as a rather dangerous
> thing. It more and more becomes "they and us" while it should be "we".
>
> Last but not least I have to admit, that I feel that there are simply
> too many wikis and websites to keep track. On my list (incomplete):
> * german wikipedia, english wikipedia, commons, mediawiki wiki,
> developer wiki, meta-wiki, german board wiki, german wikimedia website,
> wikimedia foundation website, chapter wiki, grants wiki (as good as
> closed), otrs
>
> So, I propose this for consideration and for discussing the idea to
> death, as usual ;-)
>
> greetings,
> elian

An excellent analysis with good ideas. However, I sense a general
feeling of apathy about these matters, so I expect to see little done.

The situation is quite bizarre - there are probably around a dozen
different sites or pages of sites giving information about Wikimedia
and the MediaWiki software. Some have been abandoned and some haven't.
It's practically impossible to tell which is correct and up-to-date,
and which is fossil.

Part of this is of course down to the fact that if anyone did try and
change anything, someone else would revert straight away. It's a bit
like instruction creep: people have added their own little sites and
ideas on how things should be over time, and now we have the sprawling
network outlined above.

Possibly the only group with enough clout to resolve this issue is the board.

Dan


list: wikimedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Dan Grey

subject: [Foundation-l] a crazy idea...


list: wikien-l

from_name: Alphax

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: One Where We Blew It

body:
J.F. de Wolff wrote:
>
>
> I agree with Phil's observation, but it's not just the
> [[profanity|****]] deletionists that are to blame. There are honestly
> too many people so hungry for attention that they continuously seek to
> make Wikipedia aware of their unnotability. These characters are an
> undesired effect of being completely open, and cause pollution of good
> material with their own vanity. It is them we should blame to a large
> degree for our failure to distinguish between bona fide and shockingly
> unnotable.
>
> When it comes to webcomics, it is extremely hard (for a non-insider) to
> make a judgment between notable and non-notable, which is exactly the
> point in having guidelines. I know this is elitist, but in these matters
> an uninformed opinion is a potentially destructive one.
>

Don't forget, we only deleted the articles *about* the comics, not the
comics themselves...

People (especially those who frequent a particularly evil site which I
won't name, but whose community has created their own particularly
unfunny wiki - people on #wikipedia, you might know who I mean) often
fail to see this fact, saying "don't delete my pride and joy! this thing
really exists! save my baby" - and yet they fail to realise the key
issue at stake:

Wikipedia is a general purpose encyclopedia.

Wikipedia is *not* the internet. You can't put whatever you want to on
it. We have guidlines. We have standards. We don't include every single
piece of fancruft minutae about everything (although sometimes I wonder
about that). We are not the place to advertise your newest book/TV
show/movie/religion/invention, or yourself.

Wikipedia stores articles about things. It does not store the things
themselves. If something has become notable outside of whatever
community associated with it (unless that community is sufficiently
large), it is possibly deserving of an article about it.

If, however, you decide "I want people to love me! I will go make a
website about $(randomtopic) and write about it on Wikipedia!", you are
sore out of luck.

Wikipedia does not exist to inflate your precious little ego.

I am a member of the Association of Wikipedians Who Dislike Making Broad
Judgements About the Worthiness of a General Category of Article, and
Who Are In Favor of the Deletion of Some Particularly Bad Articles, but
That Doesn't Mean They are Deletionist.

When someone says on VFD/AFD/Whatever it's called now "non-notable",
they mean:

"The subject of this particular article is not notable outside of it's
own community to warrant an article of its own."

Now if the webcomics community feels wronged by the Wikipedia community,
I am sorry. But we cannot help it if we find an article on our
encyclopedia which fails our notability guidlines. It is not the job of
Wikipedia, *and never will be*, to make things notable.

We are here to document the state of things, nothing more. That is the
essence of NPOV, the policy which (along with Freedom of content)
Wikipedia is founded upon.

--
Alphax                      |   /"\
Encrypted Email Preferred   |   \ /     ASCII Ribbon Campaign
OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613  |    X   Against HTML email & vCards
http://tinyurl.com/cc9up    |   / \


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Marco Chiesa

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Project: This wikipedia-related article is a stub...

body:
Alfio Puglisi wrote:

> On Tue, 6 Sep 2005, Walter van Kalken wrote:
>
>>>
>> The Poles are on their way to 100.000 as well by botway that create a
>> lot of stubs. So are the Italian and Portugese which to my surprise
>> are gaining on nl: very rapidly ... probably also by bot-stub-adding
>> ... I wish them good luck and I hope that having more info in their
>> own languages available will attract more contributors :)
>
>
> Italian will go in about a month from 60,000 to 100,000 mostly by bots
> adding stubs about geographical places. There is already a project to
> expands those stubs to reasonable quality, translating whatever info
> is available in the town's native language wikipedia - and from other
> languages, of course. In the meantime, the usual 4,000 new
> articles/month rate has not changed much.
>
> The popularity of bots, due to the rapid increase, has also promoted
> the development of many bots dedicated to fix ortography and layout
> issues, so existing pages are rapidly improving.
>
> Alfio
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
And, also, on it.wikipedia we are proposing for deletion a lot of
articles that we consider sub-stubs (one line or less); the nice thing
is that most of them are expanded, so the quality of  it.wiki is
increasing. And a few other wikis have asked our databases for the
geographical places, so the project is not just ours

Cruccone


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Edward Z. Yang

subject: [Wikitech-l] Willy on Wheels legal action

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

See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Vandalism_in_progress/Willy_on_Wheels#Willy_on_Wheels_legal_action.3F

It appears that Jimbo Wales has given authorization for at least
compiling information here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Jimbo_Wales&diff=22648925&oldid=22644597

So... what can the developers do?

- --
 Edward Z. Yang      Personal: edwardzyang at thewritingpot.com
 SN:Ambush Commander Website: http://www.thewritingpot.com/
 GPGKey:0x869C48DA   http://www.thewritingpot.com/gpgpubkey.asc
 3FA8 E9A9 7385 B691 A6FC B3CB A933 BE7D 869C 48DA
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (MingW32)

iD8DBQFDHiUbqTO+fYacSNoRApBWAJ9C9kFSuvE6TO9+xLDp6i18yTb+RACfbraJ
C8XqFD2NDNFqPaV8233VjV8=
=y6Cz
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


list: foundation-l

from_name: Anthere

subject:
[Foundation-l] Re: Donation drive stopped early with insufficient
	funds collected

body:
Tim Starling wrote:

> I'm wondering why the donation drive was stopped early, before the
> enough money was collected to cover the Foundation's Q3 budget of
> $198,000. After our discussion in August about the German chapter, I
> thought it was fairly clear that those funds could not be used for the
> general operating expenses of the Florida Foundation.
>
> So the fundraising drive raised $220,849 - $36,866 = $183,983 towards
> the operating costs of the Foundation. This leaves a shortfall of
> $198,000 - $184,983 = $14,017.
>
> The Verein has nominated a few things that they would like to spend
> money on, such as hardware within Germany, and that's all very well, I'm
> sure it will help with our general mission. But those costs are not part
> of the Florida Q3 budget, they are part of the Verein budget. So the
> shortfall still remains.
>
> This is really just an accounting error. What needs to be done now is
> the Florida budget needs to be revised downwards, by cutting out items
> that might instead be purchased by the Verein. Then the Verein needs to
> produce their own budget. Only then will we have a consisent story to
> tell to our generous donors.
>
> -- Tim Starling

I spill it ?

Right, I spill it.

This is a flood issue.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_talk:Sitenotice#Time_to_replace_the_second_line
will clarify things probably.

Anthere


from_name: Tim Starling

body:
rfrangi at coopetition.it wrote:
> I understood that this foundation drive was going to last until it's
> end date (sept. 9th) even in case of an earlier achievement of our
> goal. Did I miss something?

The site notice, at least on en, states that the fundraising drive is
complete, and no longer provides a link to the donation page.

| You did it! Over US$220,000 has been raised. Thank you for your
| generosity!
|
| "Celebrate by purchasing Wikipedia merchandise or fulfilling a
| year-old article request."

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Timwi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Assisting Google's language recognition?

body:
Angela wrote:
>
> <http://www.google.com/search?q=inurl%3A%22Adolf+Hitler%22+site%3Ahu.wikipedia.org>
>
> This makes it seem like they haven't indexed the page at all, not that
> they've marked it as the wrong language.

Uhm... URLs cannot contain spaces, so this query is never going to
return anything.

Instead, you probably meant
<http://www.google.com/search?q=inurl%3AAdolf_Hitler+site%3Ahu.wikipedia.org>,
which does return two search results (the article and its talk page),
although they do not have a snippet or even the page title. This means
that Google knows that these pages are linked to from somewhere, but
hasn't indexed them yet. I find that surprising because the page has
existed for 4 months now; even at only 1 page crawl per second, you can
crawl over 10 million pages in that time.

Timwi


from_name: Angela

subject: [Foundation-l] What? Why? Who?

body:
> Sorry, I should've been clear. I forwarded the mail in its entirety.
> There was no "extended reply".

No, the extended reply was sent to me after I asked for one from the
right people. :)

Angela.


subject: [Foundation-l] What? Why? Who?


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Grammar for mediawiki markup?

body:
Jeremy Dunck wrote:
>
> Is there a document of all the supported markups (past and present),
> or is the PHP code all there is to go off of?

Well... kind of. You see, I wrote a parser for wiki syntax in lex/yacc
(or rather, flex/bison). This does, in a way, define a formal grammar
for the wiki syntax.

However, it does not parse HTML tags yet. This is the main reason it's
not in use, and also the main reason I have lost interest in developing
it further. Maybe other syntax elements are missing too, but I can't
think of any just now.

     http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/wikipedia/flexbisonparse/

Timwi


from_name: Vít Zvánovec

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Repeated abusing of me by Mr. Vrba

body:
As I wrote on 23 August 2005, 12:57 at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comments/Cswiki_issues, Mr Vrba
arbitrarily, for no clear violation of rules, bans many users, that's why he
should be *immediately* desysopped. Unfortunately, no action was taken and he
continues in his behaviour: He pressed me not to edit my second home page under
pain of banning me and last days he even banned me forever. He has written this
reason: "D?vod "nechce psat encyklopedii, ale provokovat ostatni".. " which
means: "He doesn't wish to write the encyclopedia, but to provoke others." This
I deny. I used my altnernative account
(http://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedista:Z) not to "provoke" others by using
my ordinary account
(http://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedista:V%C3%ADt_Zv%C3%A1novec). As a result
of mediation with Mr. Posp??il and Mal? ?ten?? I very limited my edits of
dissusion pages. But to no avail.

Mr. Vrba ignores consequences of his actions. He wrote: "If somebody share with
him IP address, it vexes me, but nothing can be done." He lied. He had known
very well that he blocked my second account, I personally called his attention
to that and he signed his knowledge of this. It doesn't matter too much sharing

IP address (I know how to bypass it), but the fact I cannot violate Sock puppet
policy. Everything could be done, RfC, anything. Not to unilaterarily ban me
forever.

After that I was charged with many other wikicrimes. Since I am banned forever
I was denied right to defend myself. Therefore I present my defence at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:V%C3%ADt_Zv%C3%A1novec/My_defence

Since the Czech sysops are intimidated not to unblock me (Tom Pecina was
already proposed to be desysopped for unblocking me), interference of someone
not connected with cs: is heavy needed.

	Yours truly,
		V?t Zv?novec


from_name: Fastfission

subject: [WikiEN-l] One Where We Blew It

body:
Well, recognizing that Wikipedia itself is becoming a cultural object,
wouldn't it make sense at the very least to say "When it is more notable
than its inclusion in Wikipedia would be"? ;-)

Put more simply, if I were in EB, it would be pretty amazing and the most
notable thing about me ("Otherwise unnotable man included in Encyclopedia
Brittanica," the headlines would proclaim). However if I was more notable
than my inclusion into EB would be, then it wouldn't be any big deal if they
had an article on me -- it might even be expected, if they specialized in
breadth.

Of course, the problem with this is that it is self-reinforcing policy! That
is, if the standard for inclusion to Wikipedia went down, then the
likelihood of having a Wikipedia article about something would go up, which
would in turn affect a standard for inclusion based on the likelihood of an
article being in Wikipedia... and so on.

FF

On 9/6/05, Michael Turley <michael.turley at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 9/6/05, Travis Mason-Bushman <travis at gpsports-eng.com> wrote:
> > On 9/6/05 2:22 PM, "Sam Korn" <smoddy at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > This is a question to which I don't know the answer. If we can get an
> > > answer (and I doubt we will), then it would determine the whole future
> > > of Wikipedia.
> > >
> > > The question is fundementally "what is more important, wiki-, or
> -pedia?"
> >
> > Our social policies are not a suicide pact. They are in place to help us
> > write the encyclopedia... We need to take due process seriously, but we
> also
> > need to remember: this is not a democracy, this is not an experiment in
> > anarchy, it's a project to make the world a better place by giving away
> a
> > free encyclopedia.
> > --Jimbo Wales
> >
> > That says it all to me.
> >
> > -FCYTravis @ en.wikipedia
>
> "Imagine a world in which every person has free access to the sum of
> all human knowledge. That's what we're doing. And we need your
> help."
>
> The line between knowledge and trivia is becoming smaller. As the
> power of computers to store, sort, retreive, and present information
> in meaningful ways increases, our need for exclusivity, born in the
> days of chiseled stone slabs, clay tablets, and painted pottery, fades
> rapidly.
>
> Something revolutionary has begun.
>
> Until we face media shortage, a real relevant question is "At what
> point does a combination of data become knowledge worth recording?"
>
> --
> Michael Turley
> User:Unfocused
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Recherche decaractères accentués

body:
TRANSLATION OF Roth Philippe's POSTING

Hi all,

First of all, many thanks for your help which I appreciate a lot.

I have a question concerning the issue of searching for accentuated
characters:
- In the help pages, it says that searching for "?glise" and "eglise"
should give the same result.
- In our configuration, MediaWiki 1.4.5, searching for "cr?er" returns
17 articles, but searching for "creer" returns nothing...

What do I have to do to make the two searches return identical results?
What setting in which configuration file?

Thanks in advance,
Philippe Roth


from_name: Andre Engels

body:
On 9/6/05, V?t Zv?novec <Zvanovec.Vit at cmkos.cz> wrote:
> As I wrote on 23 August 2005, 12:57 at
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comments/Cswiki_issues, Mr Vrba
> arbitrarily, for no clear violation of rules, bans many users, that's why he
> should be *immediately* desysopped. Unfortunately, no action was taken and he
> continues in his behaviour:

(...)

> Since the Czech sysops are intimidated not to unblock me (Tom Pecina was
> already proposed to be desysopped for unblocking me), interference of someone
> not connected with cs: is heavy needed.

As a Steward, I state that we do not take actions on requests of
single persons, but only at the request of communities. Unless you can
show me evidence that your request is carried by a broader group
within the Czech Wikipedia, I will not take any action, and I am quite
convinced that my colleagues have the same opinion on this.

Andre Engels


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: a crazy idea...

body:
Dan Grey wrote:

> On 30/08/05, Elisabeth Bauer <elian at djini.de> wrote:
>
>>Hi all,
>>
>>When I thought about some of the latest discussions on the list and
>>meta-wiki here, I had a little crazy idea.
>>
>>The Wikimedia Foundation website was created a few months ago because we
>>wanted something clean and clear to present to outside visitors. People
>>shouldn't have to dive in the mess on meta-wiki for getting information
>>about Wikimedia.
>>
>>However, this plan didn't work out in my opinion. WMF wiki isn't
>>regularly updated, people aren't sure what should be on meta and what on
>>wmf, content is duplicated on meta-wiki, translations have to be
>>regularly moved from meta to the wmf wiki and so on.
>>
>>In my opinion, there are three options:
>>* we can continue like this and try to make the best out of it
>>* we can drastically reduce the number of pages on WMF, limit the
>>translations and make it a very simple information site (similar to what
>>was done on http://www.wikimedia.de, the german associations site)
>>* or we can reunify meta-wiki and the WMF wiki under
>>http://www.wikimedia.org
>>
>>Before some of you call now "impossible", I'd like you to think about
>>it. We've managed to build an encyclopedia which is visited by thousands
>>of people daily in a wiki. Of course, sometimes you find goatze on the
>>main page - that's wikipedia. If an open wiki is acceptable for the most
>>famous encyclopedia on the internet, it isn't for the little
>>organization behind? Do we really need a classical website, with all its
>>failures? Can't we just be proud of what we do and say: Yes, we build an
>>encyclopedia in a wiki - and our organisation website is a wiki, too.
>>
>>and as wikipedia proves, you can organize a wiki in a way that visitors
>>are able to find the stuff they want to know - professional looking
>>mainpage etc. It just has to be done, and I think the community of
>>wikimedians which is populating meta-wiki is now big enough to do this.
>>  Important and official pages can be protected, inofficial opinion
>>pages can be marked with templates...
>>
>>If we want something not to be known, it should be done in a closed wiki
>>anyway - as the google case has shown, the press isn't able to
>>differentiate anyway between something said officially on the WMF
>>website and something on a page on meta. There are multiple ways to make
>>clear what is official or not, to lead the press to specifically
>>dedicated pages while also providing different information for the wiki
>>experienced community. And if a reporter finds the "List of wikipedians
>>by favoured ice-cream flavour", so what? that's our community.
>>
>>Test wikipedias would be moved from meta to somewhere else, as well as
>>the mediawiki documentation (there is now a dedicated mediawiki wiki) to
>>not clutter up recentchanges anymore.
>>
>>Unifying meta and wmf would also help to bridge the slowly growing gap
>>between the community and the organisation Wikimedia. Since Wikimedia
>>depends on the work of volunteers, I see this as a rather dangerous
>>thing. It more and more becomes "they and us" while it should be "we".
>>
>>Last but not least I have to admit, that I feel that there are simply
>>too many wikis and websites to keep track. On my list (incomplete):
>>* german wikipedia, english wikipedia, commons, mediawiki wiki,
>>developer wiki, meta-wiki, german board wiki, german wikimedia website,
>>wikimedia foundation website, chapter wiki, grants wiki (as good as
>>closed), otrs
>>
>>So, I propose this for consideration and for discussing the idea to
>>death, as usual ;-)
>>
>>greetings,
>>elian
>
>
> An excellent analysis with good ideas. However, I sense a general
> feeling of apathy about these matters, so I expect to see little done.
>
> The situation is quite bizarre - there are probably around a dozen
> different sites or pages of sites giving information about Wikimedia
> and the MediaWiki software. Some have been abandoned and some haven't.
> It's practically impossible to tell which is correct and up-to-date,
> and which is fossil.
>
> Part of this is of course down to the fact that if anyone did try and
> change anything, someone else would revert straight away. It's a bit
> like instruction creep: people have added their own little sites and
> ideas on how things should be over time, and now we have the sprawling
> network outlined above.
>
> Possibly the only group with enough clout to resolve this issue is the board.
>
>
> Dan

I have not been able to make up my mind. So I wait for feedback :-)

ant


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: a crazy idea...


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Upload overwrite restrictions

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> Due to popular demand (and my general dislike of interaction between
> image changes and caching, plus a rash of vandalism of a certain type)
> I've added two new permission keys to limit uploads that overwrite
> existing images.
>
> Disabling the 'reupload' right will prevent any upload of a file which
> already is present, either locally or on the shared repository (Commons).
>
> Disabling the 'reupload-shared' right will prevent overwrites of images
> which are present on the shared repository but _not_ on the local wiki.
> (A pre-existing local image overrides the Commons image.)

Just so I understand this right --

If an image exists in BOTH locations, then I can overwrite it freely,
but if someone then deletes the LOCAL one, then suddenly everyone loses
the right to upload that image because the shared one is now used?

It seems a bit weird, but it also makes sense. :)

Timwi


subject: [WikiEN-l] Quality tags

body:
On 9/6/05, Poor, Edmund W <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:
>
> * "accurate" (i.e. "I am personally convinced that Everything
> this article says is true and correct."
>

I don't want to start a thread about epistemology, but personally there are
NO articles where I am personally convinced that *everything* the article
says is true and correct (and by "true" and "correct", I don't even mean in
an ontological sense -- just the standard "this is what is generally thought
to be true" subjective sense). Even on the topics I know very well -- even
the articles I myself have written -- I would never consider my faith in an
article higher than "This article contains nothing which I know to be
blatantly incorrect, though it's always possible that various errors have
snuck in one way or another." Typos, thinkos, misinformed sources, etc. all
can lead to accidental and unintentional errors, much less ones deliberately
introduced for whatever reason. But there's little on my watchlist which I
think contains blatantly false information, which is something, at least...
just my two cents.

FF


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Implementing a multi-language support website like
	DevMo

body:
Mathieu Jondet wrote:
>
>  The setup I want is to have uri in the form :
> * http://www.mywebsite.com/en/ for english
> * http://www.mywebsite.com/fr/ for french
> * http://www.mywebsite.com/es/ for spanish
> * etc ...
>
>  I'm afraid the only way to do this is to set-up as much mediawiki
> install as I have languages and then generate interwiki links.

You can always just call your pages [[en/Article]], [[fr/Article]],
[[de/Artikel]], etc.


body:
Jeremy Dunck wrote:
> On 9/6/05, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
>
>>However, it does not parse HTML tags yet. This is the main reason it's
>>not in use, and also the main reason I have lost interest in developing
>>it further. Maybe other syntax elements are missing too, but I can't
>>think of any just now.
>
> Thanks Timwi.  Is this because of tag soup?  No offense, but what was
> the challenge?

The challenge is getting the parser to match up nested start and end
tags correctly without having to add each permissible tag as a separate
token to the lexing file. I couldn't find a way to do this yet. I did
actually start an attempt at adding every tag as an extra lexical token,
and maybe it would have worked, but it proved laborious and boring.

Timwi


body:
> As a Steward, I state that we do not take actions on requests of single
> persons, but only at the request of communities.
OK. Three persons is not enough, isn't it? How can I get request of the
community when I am blocked?

> Unless you can show me evidence that your request is carried by a broader
> group within the Czech Wikipedia, I will not take any action, and I am quite
> convinced that my colleagues have the same opinion on this.
OK. What else I should have do? Ask ArbCom at en:? On cs: there's none. Or
directly Wikimedia's Board of Trustees?

	Yours faithfully,
			V?t Zv?novec


body:
On 9/6/05, V?t Zv?novec <Zvanovec.Vit at cmkos.cz> wrote:
> > As a Steward, I state that we do not take actions on requests of single
> > persons, but only at the request of communities.
> OK. Three persons is not enough, isn't it? How can I get request of the
> community when I am blocked?

Well, you could try to personally mail users who would agree with you,
and have them bring it up.

> > Unless you can show me evidence that your request is carried by a broader
> > group within the Czech Wikipedia, I will not take any action, and I am quite
> > convinced that my colleagues have the same opinion on this.
> OK. What else I should have do? Ask ArbCom at en:? On cs: there's none. Or
> directly Wikimedia's Board of Trustees?

I have no idea. The ArbCom is only for en:, as far as I know.

Andre Engels


body:
> > OK. Three persons is not enough, isn't it? How can I get request of the
> > community when I am blocked?
> Well, you could try to personally mail users who would agree with you,
> and have them bring it up.
	In my place I would consider this as a spam. So I won't use it.

> > > Unless you can show me evidence that your request is carried by a broader
> > > group within the Czech Wikipedia, I will not take any action, and I am quite
> > > convinced that my colleagues have the same opinion on this.
> > OK. What else I should have do? Ask ArbCom at en:? On cs: there's none. Or
> > directly Wikimedia's Board of Trustees?
> I have no idea. The ArbCom is only for en:, as far as I know.
	OK. I will not appeal to ArbCom, but directly to BofT.

		Yours faithfully,
				V?t Zv?novec


from_name: David

subject: [WikiEN-l] One Where We Blew It

body:
Fastfission wrote:

>Well, recognizing that Wikipedia itself is becoming a cultural object,
>wouldn't it make sense at the very least to say "When it is more notable
>than its inclusion in Wikipedia would be"? ;-)
>
>Put more simply, if I were in EB, it would be pretty amazing and the most
>notable thing about me ("Otherwise unnotable man included in Encyclopedia
>Brittanica," the headlines would proclaim). However if I was more notable
>than my inclusion into EB would be, then it wouldn't be any big deal if they
>had an article on me -- it might even be expected, if they specialized in
>breadth.
>
>Of course, the problem with this is that it is self-reinforcing policy! That
>is, if the standard for inclusion to Wikipedia went down, then the
>likelihood of having a Wikipedia article about something would go up, which
>would in turn affect a standard for inclusion based on the likelihood of an
>article being in Wikipedia... and so on.
>
>FF
>
>
So that's the ultimate standard?  As soon as nobody is surprised that we
have an article on a subject, we need the article?

I love it! :)

-[[en:User:Humblefool]]


from_name: Kovács Endre János

body:
Take a look at this query, then:
http://www.google.com/search?q=inurl%3A%22Adolf+Hitler%22+site%3Awikipedia.org

Cheers,
Endre

----- Original Message -----
From: "Timwi" <timwi at gmx.net>
To: <wikitech-l at wikimedia.org>
Sent: Tuesday, September 06, 2005 8:57 PM
Subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Assisting Google's language recognition?

> Uhm... URLs cannot contain spaces, so this query is never going to
> return anything.


from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] One Where We Blew It

body:
> I move:
>
> 1. VFD or AFD or whatever it's called be shut down entirely. No article
>    deletion other than CSD, copyvios and similar. VFD is sufficiently
>    damaging that *nothing at all* would be better than it existing in
>    any present form.
I don't see much damage. but then I avoid the place if at all posible

> 2. A month to discuss new deletion mechanisms. 1 should get the keen
>    deletionists very interested indeed.
> 3. A vote. Nothing passes with under 75% support.

nothing will pass
--
geni


body:
The Board's role is not to interfere in user disputes. Two members of
the Board, myself and Anthere, have already commented on this matter,
on Meta, but in our position as members of the community, not as
members of the Board. The Czech Wikipedia has 14 admins, which seems
to me enough people to watch over each other's actions and reverse
unfair blocks if those occur. I don't see what the Board could do if
the community there has decided that you should be de-adminned or
blocked. Do you have dispute resolution mechanisms in place on that
Wikipedia? Is there another user you trust who could try to mediate
for you?

Angela.


from_name: Thomas Koll

subject: [Wikitech-l] Skinning A wiki

body:
Am 06.09.2005 um 21:42 schrieb Matt Mozer:
> I was wondering if anyone here has any experience or has any
> information on
> skinning wiki's.
> I am looking for perhaps some white papers and or a tutorial. I am
> surprised
> not to find more on the web on it since it is no easy task for
> those not
> already tempered with the daunting task.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Skins and
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Gallery_of_user_styles

ciao, tom

--
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:TomK32
http://www.tomk32.de


subject: [Wikitech-l] Skinning A wiki

body:
Am 06.09.2005 um 21:52 schrieb Ryan Bobko:
> That said, I found I got the biggest bang for my buck (by far) simply
> changing the stylesheets. If you look at the page source for
> MediaWiki,
> you'll find that pretty much everything has a CSS class associated
> with
> it, which makes hiding/showing/moving things on the page very easy.
> I'm
> continually impressed with this aspect (as well as others, of
> course) of
> the software.

did you see the CSS Zen Garden yet? They do everything with CSS only,
no changes in HTML allowed and the results are beyond my skills.

ciao, tom

--
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:TomK32
http://www.tomk32.de


subject: [Wikitech-l] Skinning A wiki

body:
Am 06.09.2005 um 22:00 schrieb Bass, Joshua L:
> To get a header, I inserted a table at the top of the center table
> cell
> and gave it dimensions required for my header (i.e. height="150").
> There
> I put my site menu and logo.

That's so 90ies.

Better solution (untested):
give #logo position: absolute; left: 0; top: 0; width: 100%
use background-image in #logo to display your image.
for the three menus, put them into the sidebar where the should be and
use position: absolute; right: 0; top: 0; to position them.
make sure that #column-content and #column-one have a fitting margin-top

(found a nice hint for the margin: and padding: values : TRouBLe ;-)

ciao, tom
--
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:TomK32
http://www.tomk32.de


from_name: Walter van Kalken

body:
>
>It seems to me that Swedish Wikipedia is quite the opposite - they
>have over 100,000 articles mostly because of the huge amount of
>substubs...
>
>
>
The Poles are on their way to 100.000 as well by botway that create a
lot of stubs. So are the Italian and Portugese which to my surprise are
gaining on nl: very rapidly ... probably also by bot-stub-adding ... I
wish them good luck and I hope that having more info in their own
languages available will attract more contributors :)

Waerth/Walter


from_name: Sam Korn

subject: [WikiEN-l] One Where We Blew It

body:
On 9/6/05, Ryan Norton <wxprojects at comcast.net> wrote:

> Also, I do wish we could do David's #1. I think the real question is
> how much of the original wikiway does wikipedia want to follow....

This is a question to which I don't know the answer.  If we can get an
answer (and I doubt we will), then it would determine the whole future
of Wikipedia.

The question is fundementally "what is more important, wiki-, or -pedia?"

I think I believe that the encyclopedia should trump all else.  But I
am by no means sure of this.  It may in fact be in the encyclopedia's
very interest that a pure wiki philosophy is kept.  I don't know.  I
would, however, be interested to hear what others think.

Sam


from_name: Jack Lynch

subject: [WikiEN-l] One Where We Blew It

body:
VFD certainly won't pass, why don't we put ''it'' to a vote? ;)

Jack (Sam Sp;ade)

On 9/6/05, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I move:
> >
> > 1. VFD or AFD or whatever it's called be shut down entirely. No article
> >    deletion other than CSD, copyvios and similar. VFD is sufficiently
> >    damaging that *nothing at all* would be better than it existing in
> >    any present form.
> I don't see much damage. but then I avoid the place if at all posible
>
> > 2. A month to discuss new deletion mechanisms. 1 should get the keen
> >    deletionists very interested indeed.
> > 3. A vote. Nothing passes with under 75% support.
>
> nothing will pass
> --
> geni
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Andrew Gray

subject: [WikiEN-l] One Where We Blew It

body:
On 06/09/05, Sam Korn <smoddy at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/6/05, Ryan Norton <wxprojects at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> > Also, I do wish we could do David's #1. I think the real question is
> > how much of the original wikiway does wikipedia want to follow....
>
> This is a question to which I don't know the answer.  If we can get an
> answer (and I doubt we will), then it would determine the whole future
> of Wikipedia.
>
> The question is fundementally "what is more important, wiki-, or -pedia?"

The one is a means to a the other. The goal of the project is to
provide a free encyclopedia; a wiki is the way chosen with which to do
it. And the process should not trump the project...

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


from_name: Lars Aronsson

body:
Pawe? Dembowski wrote:
> It seems to me that Swedish Wikipedia is quite the opposite - they
> have over 100,000 articles mostly because of the huge amount of
> substubs...

I agree that this is embarrasing and should be addressed. I think
that the Danish Wikipedia, with 30,000 articles, has an even
higher percentage of (sub-)stubs than the Swedish one, but this is
just a feeling and I have no numbers to prove this.  We need a
statistic for the amount of (sub-)stubs, so we can talk verifiable
numbers (and set goals) instead of guestimates.  How do we define
that?  Is the ">200 ch" count ("alternative" article count, [1])
in Erik Zachte's Wikistats a good metric?  Or the percentage of
articles longer than 0.5 kilobytes [2]?  I think 200 characters is
an OK stub, but perhaps a substub is less than 70 characters?
This leaves us with the Special:Shortpages page.  That page has
the advantage of being instantly updated, which Wikistats is not.

The Swedish Wikipedia has 421 articles (0.4% of 102K) shorter than
70 bytes and the Danish has 351 (1.1% of 31K).  As a comparison,
the Dutch Wikipedia has 79 (0.08% of 89K) and the Polish has 387
(0.4% of 93K).  This makes the Polish look just as bad as the
Swedish, since both have 0.4% of articles shorter than 70 bytes.
But perhaps a substub should be defined at 50 bytes instead?
Or 100 bytes or 150?

[1] Article count (alternate), longer than 200 bytes,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/TablesArticlesTotalAlt.htm

[2] Articles over 0.5 Kb or 500 bytes,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/TablesArticlesGt500Bytes.htm

As of July 2005,
                 [1]    [2]
  All languages  1.6 M  62%
  English        595 K  73%
  Japanese       129 K  52%
  French         122 K  72%
  Dutch           75 K  74%  75K is more than Swedish's 68K
  Polish          68 K  65%
  Italian         47 K  76%
  Swedish         68 K  42%  Low percentage
  Spanish         53 K  70%
  Portuguese      48 K  52%
  Chinese         33 K  38%  Even lower percentage
  Hebrew          20 K  75%
  Norwegian       25 K  52%
  Finnish         24 K  64%
  Russian         20 K  58%
  Esperanto       22 K  51%
  Danish          20 K  45%  Almost as low percentage

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


from_name: Paweł Dembowski

body:
> The Swedish Wikipedia has 421 articles (0.4% of 102K) shorter than
> 70 bytes and the Danish has 351 (1.1% of 31K).  As a comparison,
> the Dutch Wikipedia has 79 (0.08% of 89K) and the Polish has 387
> (0.4% of 93K).  This makes the Polish look just as bad as the
> Swedish, since both have 0.4% of articles shorter than 70 bytes.
> But perhaps a substub should be defined at 50 bytes instead?
> Or 100 bytes or 150?

Does this include disambiguation pages? If so, it's not a very good
estimate, since they *should* be short...

--
Ausir
Wikipedia, wolna encyklopedia
http://pl.wikipedia.org


from_name: Alfio Puglisi

body:
On Tue, 6 Sep 2005, Lars Aronsson wrote:

>  All languages  1.6 M  62%

>  Italian         47 K  76%

Not bad :-) The recent bot articles, once one removes the html comments
for the template, are just on the 0.5 threshold.

Alfio


from_name: Alphax

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: One Where We Blew It

body:
Snowspinner wrote:
>
> On Sep 6, 2005, at 5:21 AM, Alphax wrote:
>
>>
>> Now if the webcomics community feels wronged by the Wikipedia  community,
>> I am sorry. But we cannot help it if we find an article on our
>> encyclopedia which fails our notability guidlines. It is not the  job of
>> Wikipedia, *and never will be*, to make things notable.
>
>
> Which notability guidelines are these? The terrible webcomic ones  that
> I outlined the problems of? Or the ones at [[WP:NOT]] where it  says
> there are "no practical limit to the number of topics we can  cover
> other than verifiability and the other points presented on this  page?"
>

Maybe you want to check [[WP:N]]. Just because something exists doesn't
make it notable.

> I mean, we're not talking about someone's garage band with a single
> self-released EP here. Articles are getting deleted that are  verifiable
> articles on webcomics with substantial readerships. Elf  Only Inn was
> picked up by the biggest webcomic syndicate online.  Deleted.
>

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Undelete/Elf_Only_Inn,
there are 13 deleted edits - you can restore them if you wish. Elf Only
Inn is a webcomic that I would call notable, even back in April. Other
webcomics, not so.

> And what on Earth does it mean to be notable outside its community?  For
> a webcomic to be notable outside its own fans? Outside of  webcomics
> fans in general? We're willing to have an article on each  individual
> Simpsons episode (Explicitly - it's on the meta page  "Wikipedia is not
> paper"). Are these notable outside of Simpsons  fans? Or is the judgment
> that Simpsons fandom is somehow more notable  than webcomics fandom? And
> if so, who's making that judgment?
>

It means "Just because fans of a particular (whatever) love this thing
to bits, doesn't mean we should have an article on it". There are video
games that are notable in their own right, and the storylines of those
video games are very notable amongst the fan community, but that doesn't
mean that we need articles on any of the events or characters from said
storylines.

--
Alphax                      |   /"\
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OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613  |    X   Against HTML email & vCards
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from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

body:
On Tue, Sep 06, 2005 at 11:52:21PM +0200, Lars Aronsson wrote:
> Pawe? Dembowski wrote:
> > It seems to me that Swedish Wikipedia is quite the opposite - they
> > have over 100,000 articles mostly because of the huge amount of
> > substubs...
>
> I agree that this is embarrasing and should be addressed. I think
> that the Danish Wikipedia, with 30,000 articles, has an even
> higher percentage of (sub-)stubs than the Swedish one, but this is
> just a feeling and I have no numbers to prove this.  We need a
> statistic for the amount of (sub-)stubs, so we can talk verifiable
> numbers (and set goals) instead of guestimates.  How do we define
> that?  Is the ">200 ch" count ("alternative" article count, [1])
> in Erik Zachte's Wikistats a good metric?  Or the percentage of
> articles longer than 0.5 kilobytes [2]?  I think 200 characters is
> an OK stub, but perhaps a substub is less than 70 characters?
> This leaves us with the Special:Shortpages page.  That page has
> the advantage of being instantly updated, which Wikistats is not.
>
> The Swedish Wikipedia has 421 articles (0.4% of 102K) shorter than
> 70 bytes and the Danish has 351 (1.1% of 31K).  As a comparison,
> the Dutch Wikipedia has 79 (0.08% of 89K) and the Polish has 387
> (0.4% of 93K).  This makes the Polish look just as bad as the
> Swedish, since both have 0.4% of articles shorter than 70 bytes.
> But perhaps a substub should be defined at 50 bytes instead?
> Or 100 bytes or 150?

Numbers like 0.4% of articles tell more about effectiveness
of the wikicleaning process than about the typical article.
(and by the way, Special:Shortpages is not updated live
on WikiMedia servers)

Just take a look at the list of shortest pages on Polish
Wikipedia - they're almost all:
* Redirects (what are they doing on the list ?)
* Disambiguation pages without descriptions for the links.
  Sometimes articles have titles so obvious that {{disambig}} +
  list of the links is enough.
* A few cases of things that look like leftovers of the
  past technical problems
* A few cases of things that should be immediately deteled,
  but have been missed or are simply too recent and will
  be deleted soon


from_name: Kate Turner

subject: [Foundation-l] technical issues management

body:
hello.

we currently have some problems with identifying current issues on the site, and
knowing what needs to be done, and so on.  i've decided it would be a good idea
to spend some time on 'management' stuff like this, so i'm trying to come up
with a suitable procedure to make sure things work smoothly.

as such, i'd like to propose a new way to manage issues:

the primary point of contact for site issues will be the existing NOC ticket
system, noc at wikimedia.org.  users should mail this address with any technical
issues *relating to the Wikimedia sites* (i.e., it does not replace bugzilla for
MediaWiki).  confirmed issues will be moved to the new "issues" queue by the
"issues manager" (well, you know everyone needs a title).  this will also apply
to requests from developers; for example, things that need to be done by the
on-site developer (previously Chad), and other developers (paid developers in
particular).

the issues manager can then formulate a list of tasks required to resolve each
issue, and place them on a wiki page somewhere (probably split by particular
people, and tasks for all developers).  there's then a central place to look to
know what needs to be done.  further, this can be used to produce a list of
open and resolved problems on the site, and what was done to fix them, to keep
users and the board better informed of what's going on.  (for example, a weekly
'issues summary' mail to the list).

this can also be used as central point of contact for communications with
outside partners, such as Kennisnet and Lost Oasis (although purely for
technical matters, not negotiations).

unless anyone has strenuous objections to this, i'd like to try it immediately;
we can see how well it works, or whether anything needs to be changed.  as i'm
not doing much actual developer work recently, i'll probably take on the role of
issues manager...

any comments appreciated.

regards,
kate.


subject: [Wikitech-l] technical issues management


subject: [WikiEN-l] Block on false (and never even reported) 3RR

references:
<acaea92f363ff02d647060c4dff96c8d@gnosis.cx>
	<431C14AC.20504@gmail.com>
	<431C4DA9.3000104@student.canberra.edu.au>

body:
Mark Gallagher wrote:
>
> G'day Alphax,
>
>> David Mertz, Ph.D. wrote:
>> <snip>
>>
>>> (I wouldn't be so petty as to report it to mediation if it is not
>>> repeated).
>>
>>
>> And you took it to the mailing list because...?
>
>
> Well, everyone needs the chance to whinge, right?
>
>

That's what #wikipedia is for :P

--
Alphax                      |   /"\
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OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613  |    X   Against HTML email & vCards
http://tinyurl.com/cc9up    |   / \


body:
> It's the only wiki of such a size to have the vast majority of its
> growth in giant leaps like that, which is indicative of a bot or some
> other fast, low-quality article adding technique.
> Mark

Well, bot-made town articles are often better than man-made stubs...

--
Ausir
Wikipedia, wolna encyklopedia
http://pl.wikipedia.org


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject:
[Foundation-l] Donation drive stopped early with insufficient
	funds collected

body:
--- Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> My recommendation is that the German chapter continue to work closely
> with the Foundation and NOT go out and randomly accept a hosting offer
> and buy random servers.

I did not suggest that they randomly accept a hosting offer or buy random
servers. Of course they need to work closely with the foundation and developers
on these issues. But, we?ve all been in the *exact* same situation since our
first co-organized fund drive in October 2004.

> The building of a coherent global network is a significant technical and
> organizational challenge that many good people are working hard on,

The German chapter has been in limbo for almost a year now as to how they can
help globally. It has been my observation that the trustees of that chapter
want to help globally but the issues relating to what can and can?t be done
with that money outside of Germany has been a major reason why little has been
done with that money outside that nation. Please correct me if I?m wrong.

So I simply suggested that everybody consider setting aside the issues that
have been stopping action for nearly a year. I did *not* suggest that any rash
decisions be made or that things get decided unilaterally or randomly. But I
did suggest that issues relating to legal ownership (a major bottleneck - in my
observation - so far) can be worked out in due time. As is, the great majority
of the money is just sitting there.

> I do not think it is wise to give advice like this.

Then can you suggest a way for the process to be moved along?

Either the German chapter can help us with global issues, or their fundraising
page needs to be changed to tell exactly what money donated to the German
chapter can be used on and what it can?t. So far, everything seems to give the
impression that money donated to the German chapter can be used to help with
global needs. *That* is why I?ve been drafting budgets and coordinating fund
drives that include the German chapter as a means to help us attain global
goals. So I merely suggested a way that that could be done.

As more and more chapters get tax exempt status, this will be more and more of
an issue. This issue needs to be worked out ASAP, before over half the money
generated in fund drives goes to chapters instead of directly to the
foundation.

-- mav

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


subject: [Foundation-l] Wikijunior as a new Sister Project

body:
--- Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:
> I'm reposting here a comment that was posted in [[b:Talk:Wikijunior]]:
>
>     During the upcoming September 18 Wikimedia Foundation board meeting,
>     the Board will discuss registering a seperate domain for Wikijunior,
>     presumably wikijunior.org. Presumably Wikijunior will still be
>     developed on Wikibooks, but it will go live on a seperate site.
>     Alternatively, we could have en.wikijunior.org for viewing, and
>     en2.wikijunior.org for editing, which would allow for a greater ease
>     in developing pages, as they could be part of a freeform
>     encyclopedia (on limited topics), rather than the isolated books
>     they are now. If we were to develop off Wikibooks, I'd like us to
>     retain most, if not all of the structure of Wikibooks, it's worked
>     well so far. -- user:zanimum http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/User:Zanimum

So long as development continues on Wikibooks, it will continue to be a
WikiProject of that project. The existence of a separate stable copy on the
Internet would not make it a separate project. Projects are where development
occurs. The idea of having a separate stable copy elsewhere is little different
than the reuse of Wikipedia content on other websites. The only real difference
is that the foundation would own and control the WikiJunior static version.

But yeah, having *editing* on a separate wiki would be the creation of a
separate project and needs community approval before a board vote. I don?t see
any need for separate development. What I do see a need for are significant
changes to MediaWiki to allow for book-like features on Wikibooks. Each and
every book on Wikibooks suffers from this lack of functionality. WikiJunior is
not special in that regard.

-- mav

______________________________________________________
Click here to donate to the Hurricane Katrina relief effort.
http://store.yahoo.com/redcross-donate3/


from_name: Robert Scott Horning

body:
I'm reposting here a comment that was posted in [[b:Talk:Wikijunior]]:

    During the upcoming September 18 Wikimedia Foundation board meeting,
    the Board will discuss registering a seperate domain for Wikijunior,
    presumably wikijunior.org. Presumably Wikijunior will still be
    developed on Wikibooks, but it will go live on a seperate site.
    Alternatively, we could have en.wikijunior.org for viewing, and
    en2.wikijunior.org for editing, which would allow for a greater ease
    in developing pages, as they could be part of a freeform
    encyclopedia (on limited topics), rather than the isolated books
    they are now. If we were to develop off Wikibooks, I'd like us to
    retain most, if not all of the structure of Wikibooks, it's worked
    well so far. -- user:zanimum <http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/User:Zanimum>

What I'm asking is why such a proposal is not going through the normal
vetting process required of any new project proposal or is Wikijunior
already considered to be a Wikimedia sister project already?  I
appreciate the efforts of Zanimum, but I certainly think that before a
new project domain is started, the full extent of an idea like this
should be fully vetted, and even a formal vote should take place, like
happened to Wikinews and is going to happen soon with Wikiversity.  The
purpose of the vote is to mainly get a show of support for the project
(I have no doubt that there is some major support from several people on
Wikibooks, for instance, regarding Wikijunior).  The vote also help
critics to try and correct major problems with the proposal.  In
particular, there doesn't even seem to be any movement at all on
Wikibooks to get rid of Wikijunior, and it pretty much stays in its own
little corner of Wikibooks quietly undergoing a metamorphisis, such as
the current content clean-up campaign on the Wikijunior Solar System at
the moment.

This amounts to, IMHO, another stealth new project proposal that is
going through the back door.  I've complained enough about the new
project proposal process here that I've had people telling me to
essentially shut up and don't bug people on this list about it.  At the
same time, I think projects like this need more work on how everything
is going to be put together before it should be started on its own
seperate wiki, and I've seen no reason why Wikijunior should get any
special attention other than it seems like a pet project of some board
members.

--
Robert Scott Horning


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] One Where We Blew It

body:
Snowspinner (Snowspinner at gmail.com) [050906 06:07]:

> And it's not enough to say, "Oh,  [[Gossamer Commons should have been
> kept." The point is that there shouldn't be endless deletion debates
> on articles where people wave guidelines around that are
> transparently crap. Deletionists should not be running rougshod over
> a substantial group of people who want to contribute on a topic.
> There should not be a webcomics fork born out of frustration about
> how unfriendly we are to people who want to contribute on webcomics.
> A fork born of a desire to have even more detailed coverage than is
> appropriate for Wikipedia, and that wants to supplement Wikipedia's
> coverage? Fine. Neat. That would be cool. But this isn't that. This
> is a fork. This is good people taking their ball and going home,
> because of the toxic culture on VfD.
> We blew this one.

Tch! And I remember you ranting on IRC about how rude the inclusionists
were on VFD and how the deletionists would never be so obnoxious ...

Note, by the way, that the spurious deletion criteria for webcomics is a
symptom of the spurious criterion of "notability". Which has repeatedly
been rejected as policy.

I move:

1. VFD or AFD or whatever it's called be shut down entirely. No article
   deletion other than CSD, copyvios and similar. VFD is sufficiently
   damaging that *nothing at all* would be better than it existing in
   any present form.
2. A month to discuss new deletion mechanisms. 1 should get the keen
   deletionists very interested indeed.
3. A vote. Nothing passes with under 75% support.

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Looking at the real world

body:
Skyring (skyring at gmail.com) [050905 18:20]:

> [[user:jtdirl]]

You know, I distinctly recall saying that jtdirl was off-topic for this
list, particularly for Skyring. My apologies to all for this thread having
made it to the list. I've unsubscribed Skyring.

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Protecting nonexistent pages

body:
ABCD (en.abcd at gmail.com) [050904 16:39]:
> On 9/4/05, Ryan W. (Merovingian) wrote:

> > [[User:Lucky 6.9]] and I have been discussing this possibilty: What if
> > one was able to proect a deleted/nonexistent page?  The same page would
> > not be created over and over if it has no place in Wikipedia.  When the
> > clueless newbie/troll/vandal goes away, it can be unprotected, just
> > like normal.  The best defense for this is the fact that the
> > {{deletedpage}} template would become obsolete.  In addition, it would
> > be a relief on the servers (even if it's minor).  Any thoughts?

> Submitted to bugzilla as  bug# 3357
> <http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3357>.

We already do this in some cases, in the form of creating a blank page and
protecting the blank page for a while. I'm not sure we need to add a
feature to MediaWiki.

- d.


from_name: Ryan Delaney

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: One Where We Blew It

body:
Alphax wrote:

>As you can see from what you quoted, I never said it was a policy. You
>asked for guidlines, so I provided you with one, official or not.
>
>As for your love of [[Elf Only Inn]], I see that (as of 11:00 UTC, 7th
>September 2005]] you have made a grand total of ZERO edits to that
>article. Stop bitching about the fact that an article was deleted, and
>expand the thing.
>
>
>
While we're talking about policies and guielines, would you say that
[[WP:CIVIL]] applies to the mailing list, or is this a free for all...? ;-)

- Ryan


subject: [WikiEN-l] Quality tags

body:
[people on wikien-l wanting the article rating feature switched on]

Magnus Manske (magnus.manske at web.de) [050907 00:40]:

> I know, Brion is busy with the XML export/import and a zillion other
> things, but if you find a few minutes, maybe you could give it a quick
> check and turn it on? If it drags the servers down, it can always be
> turned off again...

I understand he didn't like it pulling in all revisions (that being the
aspect which would bring the DB to a grinding halt). Perhaps pull in
just the last ten, and let people page back through earlier revs ten at a
time? And if rating articles is HUGELY popular, change that to five revs at
a time ;-)

    http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2005-June/030325.html

- the second and third problems there can be worked around by requiring
steward or wikisysop-level access to mess with stuff; changing rating
categories would presumably be a fantastically rare action.

- d.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: [WikiEN-l] Quality tags


from_name: Violet/Riga

subject: [WikiEN-l] One Where We Blew It

body:
"Comixpedia.org <http://Comixpedia.org> is under the GNU license" ... "This
is important so that we can share articles with the wikipedia and vice
versa"
 Doesn't look like it's a massively problem, to be honest.
 violet/riga


from_name: Ashar Voultoiz

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: technical issues management

body:
Kate Turner wrote:
> hello.
>
> we currently have some problems with identifying current issues on the site, and
> knowing what needs to be done, and so on.  i've decided it would be a good idea
> to spend some time on 'management' stuff like this, so i'm trying to come up
> with a suitable procedure to make sure things work smoothly.
>
> as such, i'd like to propose a new way to manage issues:
>
> the primary point of contact for site issues will be the existing NOC ticket
> system, noc at wikimedia.org.  users should mail this address with any technical
> issues *relating to the Wikimedia sites* (i.e., it does not replace bugzilla for
> MediaWiki).  confirmed issues will be moved to the new "issues" queue by the
> "issues manager" (well, you know everyone needs a title).  this will also apply
> to requests from developers; for example, things that need to be done by the
> on-site developer (previously Chad), and other developers (paid developers in
> particular).

Hi,

As I understand your plan, 'Wikimedia web' product on bugzilla will be
closed/deleted and bug moved to otrs. What about an issue reported to
the noc that then need to be moved to bugzilla ?

Looks like dev/sysadmin will have to look at both interfaces if they
want to get the full history of the problem.

You can probably set up bugzilla to have several virtual admin teams
(dns, squids, apaches, hardware, kennisnet). All new messages could be
assigned to the issue manager with an 'unconfirmed' status he will then
give out the bug to one of the virtual teams that can then deal with the
problem.

> the issues manager can then formulate a list of tasks required to resolve each
> issue, and place them on a wiki page somewhere (probably split by particular
> people, and tasks for all developers).  there's then a central place to look to
> know what needs to be done.  further, this can be used to produce a list of
> open and resolved problems on the site, and what was done to fix them, to keep
> users and the board better informed of what's going on.  (for example, a weekly
> 'issues summary' mail to the list).

Isn't what http://wp.wikidev.net/ is for ? Some troublechecking guide
would probably be useful.

> this can also be used as central point of contact for communications with
> outside partners, such as Kennisnet and Lost Oasis (although purely for
> technical matters, not negotiations).
noc at wikimedia.org looks like the 'normal' way to contact netadmins :)

> unless anyone has strenuous objections to this, i'd like to try it immediately;
> we can see how well it works, or whether anything needs to be changed.  as i'm
> not doing much actual developer work recently, i'll probably take on the role of
> issues manager...
Maybe you can start writing some documentation about the server farm,
the kennisnet cluster, the way stats are generated ... That should ease
the issue management.

Just one last thing: what about issues being reported on IRC ? Should
users be redirected to the new interface ? If so we might as well
moderate the channel.

cheers,

--
Ashar Voultoiz - WP++++
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Hashar
http://www.livejournal.com/community/wikitech/
IM: hashar at jabber.org  ICQ: 15325080


from_name: Geoff Burling

subject: [WikiEN-l] One Where We Blew It

body:
On Tue, 6 Sep 2005, David wrote:

> Fastfission wrote:
>
> >Well, recognizing that Wikipedia itself is becoming a cultural object,
> >wouldn't it make sense at the very least to say "When it is more notable
> >than its inclusion in Wikipedia would be"? ;-)
> >
> >Put more simply, if I were in EB, it would be pretty amazing and the most
> >notable thing about me ("Otherwise unnotable man included in Encyclopedia
> >Brittanica," the headlines would proclaim). However if I was more notable
> >than my inclusion into EB would be, then it wouldn't be any big deal if they
> >had an article on me -- it might even be expected, if they specialized in
> >breadth.
> >
> >Of course, the problem with this is that it is self-reinforcing policy! That
> >is, if the standard for inclusion to Wikipedia went down, then the
> >likelihood of having a Wikipedia article about something would go up, which
> >would in turn affect a standard for inclusion based on the likelihood of an
> >article being in Wikipedia... and so on.
> >
> So that's the ultimate standard?  As soon as nobody is surprised that we
> have an article on a subject, we need the article?
>
> I love it! :)
>
I guess this is an application of a rule that Jimbo mentions in his
emails from time to time: the Principle of Least Astonishment. That is,
if you consider Wikipedia's coverage of a given topic definitive,
authorative, &/or exhaustive, it would reasonably astonish the reader
if there was not an article about a specific subject.

After all, I haven't seen anyone argue on VfD that a village of 100
people in Africa or Asia is not notable: that's difficult to claim
when there are so many existing articles about communities of that
size -- or smaller -- in the U.S.

Geoff


from_name: charles matthews

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: One Where We Blew It

body:
Snowspinner wrote

> And what on Earth does it mean to be notable outside its community?  For a
> webcomic to be notable outside its own fans? Outside of  webcomics fans in
> general?

I have no difficulty at all assenting to the idea that VfD can get it
wrong - happens daily, I imagine.  I think we should be concerned if any
area is treated with inherent prejudice, and this may be a prime example.

The way these points are posed, though, suggests weaknesses elsewhere.  If
there are awards, ratings, a community voice, document them on WP first.
That is, develop the supporting articles on webcomics, so that those
articles posted do not appear simply to be URLs in a vacuum of context.

Charles


subject: [WikiEN-l] Quality tags

body:
Ed Poor wrote

>*We* must decide that we want some means of assuring readers that they
are getting reliable information.

Simple - just protect decent, informative versions of pages.  True, this
turns a wiki into a standard static web site; but hey, people will be
mightily assured.

I'm sort of amazed that the category system has't already been adapted to
give some sort of 'marks out of 10' to articles.  If there were real
community pressure to rate articles, I think that might have happened
already.  What I see is only the skeleton of such as system: stub tags,
featured-article status, and the reprehensible use of POV tags as comment
rather than trying to sort out disputes.

Trying to think laterally for the moment.  If articles were rated on a scale
of 1 to 100 for excellence, the lower rungs of the ladder would correspond
to poor articles, of various types: stubby, badly written, failing when
judged by policy (NPOV, NOR, CYS), non-encyclopedic.  This could be the
basis of an automated clean-up/deletion mechanism also, but would need
perhaps one other ingredient (to make a kind of 2-d plot).  What should that
be?

Charles


from_name: Domas Mituzas

subject:
[Foundation-l] Donation drive stopped early with
	insufficientfunds collected

body:
Hi,

> That is a technical issue, not a policy one. My suggestion is for the
> German chapter to act on one of their hosting offers, buy a bunch of
> servers to use as squids and then we can work out the ownership
> issues later.

A bunch of squids? We have a bunch of squids in Europe.
We do not need more. Serving the web site is not just about caching :)

> Not a shortfall. A squid in Germany will negate the need for
> buying one in Florida. The budget is based on needs;
> it is even likely that if the Yahoo! servers go online this quarter,
> then that will negate the need for buying a whole bunch of servers.
> The money saved would then roll-over into the next quarter's budget.

We do not buy more squids for Florida. We buy more database and
application servers. Squids ain't any magic, they cache what is cachable,
all other web content has to be generated. Including your stub colors.
On the other hand, we're growing much faster than we could ever split.

Korea would be our testbed for splitting (at least we would not understand
user troubles in their native languages :) off Asian wikis.

Please note, that there are different load patterns out there. Instead of
having multiple sines (local load patterns) covering each other, we'd
have to maintain separate sines, with lots of unused capacity. We
have to really understand how splitting our website would affect our
performance. And how manageable it would be afterwards.

The only way to really start e.g. European deployment, is to
put at least 200k$ in there. But that won't be worth 200k$ spent in
Florida. Or maybe even 100k$. Wikimedia cluster is already a
platform of scale. We just do not want to have more resource-bound
Deployments, as they are real PITA to manage.

Or as I told before - we may establish quarterly performance goals and limit that.
We may explain concepts of SLA and stuff. You would not want that. And it is
impossible to try out new concepts for wikis at all while operating in
maxed out environment.

It was rather difficult for me to express what we need
for the site with current budgeting practices. But I'd really love to go
towards such hardware purchase:

200 dual opteron multi-purpose servers, ~2.5k$ each.
20 data management servers, ~15k$ each.
Additional networking/support gear, ~50k$

So by the end of this year we could have a nicely functioning cluster.
And I hope it wouldn't be that loaded until then. Or else we'll come up
with multi-million budget.

We are running a website after all. A big website. A complex website.
There is no magic in there, there are resources and resource shortages.
And... We're still growing. If anyone comes with a nice optimization idea
(we have heard some, ..), they can sure tell it. But for a while we will need
resource expansion, whatever 20% or 50% wins are gained. So, if we can,
let us not forget that.

Cheers,
Domas


from_name: Snowspinner

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: One Where We Blew It

body:
On Sep 7, 2005, at 7:00 AM, Alphax wrote:
>
> As for your love of [[Elf Only Inn]], I see that (as of 11:00 UTC, 7th
> September 2005]] you have made a grand total of ZERO edits to that
> article. Stop bitching about the fact that an article was deleted, and
> expand the thing.

A) I actually hate the comic
B) Since when is contributing to an article a necessary element in
thinking it should be kept?

-Snowspinner


from_name: Vít Zvánovec

body:
	Dear Mark,
> From what I can tell, the situation had already been resolved with the
> agreement that Vit would only edit on talkpages, and there was an
> agreement in place which he did not break, but he was banned anyways.
	It was somehow different. I agreed to reduce my editing of *talk pages* and I
fulfilled this. But it is doubtful if this is the binding agreement, since the
other party has not accepted the mediator.

> When another admin unbanned him, someone somehow started the process
> of desysopping that person
	It was somehow different. I was at first desysopped, and only after that I was
several times banned.

> now any other people who may support him have been intimidated.
	This is correct.

			Yours sincerely,
						V?t Zv?novec


body:
> The Board's role is not to interfere in user disputes.
	I don't consider this is the user dispute. The problem is more serious. In my
opinion there's no edit war with me. The problem lies in behaviour. There are
repeated personal attacs & injuries towards me never punished and I am
repeatedly banned for no clear reason, last time for indefinitive period.

> Two members of the Board, myself and Anthere, have already commented on this
> matter, on Meta, but in our position as members of the community, not as
> members of the Board.
	Yes, but this was just a part of the problem: my desyssoping after one year
long successful term. Now it is another question: banning of mine.

> The Czech Wikipedia has 14 admins, which seems to me enough people to watch
> over each other's actions and reverse unfair blocks if those occur.
http://cs.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Speci%C3%A1ln%C3%AD%3AListusers&group=
sysop
   	Yes, but -jkb-, Dodo, Mormegil, Radouch, and Vrba are directly involved in
the case as the opposite side.
	Daniel Mayer is a foreigner with no contributions (
http://cs.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Speci%C3%A1ln%C3%AD:Contributions&targ
et=Daniel_Mayer)
	Ludek, Mojza, Michal Jurosz, Miroslav MALOVEC, and Wikimol are not active at
all or just a little.
	I consider Karakal, Mal??ten??, Tompecina as my friends and they would be
endangered by -jkb- and his non-sysop allies if they did something for me. For
example, Tompecina unbanned me after a few days, but I was immediately banned
again (with no edits meanwhile) a Tompecina was warned that if he did it again,
he would be desyssoped.

> I don't see what the Board could do if the community there has decided that
> you should be de-adminned or blocked.
	Reverse this decission.

> Do you have dispute resolution mechanisms in place on that Wikipedia?
	There's none.

> Is there another user you trust who could try to mediate for you?
	Yes, there was attempts to mediate:
1. by Jan Posp??il. It was not accepted by the opposite site.
2. by Karalal. I think it won't be accepted by the opposite site as well. The
reason I cannot tell publicly.
3. by Wikimol. It was rejected by the opposite site.


from_name: Amruta Lonkar

subject: [Wikitech-l] treating references as first class objects in wiki

body:
Quoting Magnus Manske <magnus.manske at web.de>:

> Amruta Lonkar schrieb:
>
> >Hi,
> >
> >I am trying to enhance the wikimedia syntax to include a simple easy to use
> >citation format.
> >
>
> Did you look at my citation extension ("extensions" module in CVS)? It
> lists citations/footnotes/etc at the end of the page.
>
> Magnus

I looked at it, what i was thinking of doing was adding a new gui from where
users could do reference selection/addition. I wanted to add a separate
reference page where in all the references would be listed and then clicking
on any reference would pull up a talk page for that reference.

I wanted to start with creating a separate tab which says 'Referencs', as the
last tab in the article,discussion,watch tab list.

According to what i have been able to grasp from the source code till now, do
i have to make additions to the skins files?. Which file actually lists all
the tab names and the cases for their display?.

Thanks,
Amruta

--
Amruta


from_name: Evan Martin

body:
On 9/3/05, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> Evan Martin wrote:
> > I believe this is correct.  We've had problems in the past with
> > overloading wikipedia so the crawl has been throttled way back.
>
> Throttled back to what? I remember having problems in late 2003 and
> early 2004, but we have 30 times as much hardware now, so we could
> handle a proportionally higher crawl rate, say 10 or 20 requests per
> second. That is, unless one of the other system administrators wants to
> disagree.

We've upped the rate a bit.  Please let me know if it causes any problems.

(Also, is there an official contact for this sort of thing?  That is:
who knows / gets to make the final decision of whether wikipedia can
handle more load?)


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Wiki dump organization

body:
Doro?y?ski Janusz wrote:
> So, is any chance that people can take from
> download.wikimedia.org .sql dumps? Xml dumps are completely
> useless for them.

No you can't get SQL dumps. :)

* The schema and compression formats keep changing, which breaks things
for people trying to get at the data.
* There is no longer any equivalent to the "cur table" for
current-revision-only SQL dumps.
* The page database now includes deleted page text, which can't be
publically redistributed.
* The databases as we have them contain a lot of indirection, with
custom site-specific alternate tables.
* A lot of text isn't even in there but is stored on another server
cluster MAKING A RAW SQL DUMP USELESS IF YOU'RE NOT ON OUR SERVERS.

So straight SQL dumps for the public are not possible.

If you like you can use the mwdumper tool to convert the XML dumps to
local-import-friendly SQL instead of using importDump.php (which as you
note needs a bug fix). This is still experimental for that purpose and
is in CVS:
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/wikipedia/mwdumper/

When it's a little more tested I'll make a public release package for it.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Time spent in page rendering

body:
Jeremy Dunck wrote:
> According to the hardware orders page[1], a major bottleneck is page rendering.
>
> Does any phase of this stand out?  DB fetch?  Text parse?
> Request/Response bandwidth?

Depends on the page. On most pages the biggest chunks of rendering time
are in handling links. (On most pages most of the markup is links, so...)

On pages with lots of eg tables or whatever that can end up eating some
time as well of course.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Travis Mason-Bushman

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: One Where We Blew It

body:
On Sep 7, 2005, at 11:37 AM, Fastfission wrote:

> I think it is worth reiterating that it is the job of the *article
> content* to establish
> notability, not the job of the voters. In an ideal VfD world, one would
> blame the articles for how they were voted, not the voters.
>
> In this case, VfD was actually a positive process in article
> improvement --
> something not too uncommon, I think, and an aspect of VfD which has
> been
> somewhat underemphasized in the calls for deletion reform.

In fact, I personally think this is the *only* way to call attention to
such questionable articles. As I've pointed out on Talk pages, there is
a backlog of something like 30-50,000 articles tagged for {{cleanup}}.
Simply tagging something questionable for {{cleanup-importance}} only
adds to the hidden pile. If an article may not be important enough,
putting it up on AFD brings it to the attention of hundreds of
Wikipedians - "Hey, look, there's this article I can't make heads or
tails of and it may not be encyclopedic. What do y'all think?"

Is this is the *best* way to do that? Probably not. But as long as the
{{cleanup}} process is hopelessly broken, AFD is the only effective
means of getting a questionable article in the limelight.

-FCYTravis

Travis Mason-Bushman
Public Relations Director
GAINSCO/Blackhawk Racing
travis at gpsports-eng.com


from_name: Magnus Manske

body:
David Gerard wrote:

>[people on wikien-l wanting the article rating feature switched on]
>
>Magnus Manske (magnus.manske at web.de) [050907 00:40]:
>
>
>
>>I know, Brion is busy with the XML export/import and a zillion other
>>things, but if you find a few minutes, maybe you could give it a quick
>>check and turn it on? If it drags the servers down, it can always be
>>turned off again...
>>
>>
>
>
>I understand he didn't like it pulling in all revisions (that being the
>aspect which would bring the DB to a grinding halt). Perhaps pull in
>just the last ten, and let people page back through earlier revs ten at a
>time? And if rating articles is HUGELY popular, change that to five revs at
>a time ;-)
>
>
I thought I fixed this?

Magnus
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subject: [WikiEN-l] One Where We Blew It

body:
On Wed, 7 Sep 2005, Andrew Gray wrote:

> On 07/09/05, Geoff Burling <llywrch at agora.rdrop.com> wrote:
>
> > After all, I haven't seen anyone argue on VfD that a village of 100
> > people in Africa or Asia is not notable: that's difficult to claim
> > when there are so many existing articles about communities of that
> > size -- or smaller -- in the U.S.
>
> I have a vague recollection of having seen a small Eastern European
> town or two be VfDed, though I suspect that was more through it being
> a substub and contextless than it being "nn. little foreign place."
>
I missed that -- but I'm not surprised. My primary complaint about
VfD is that there are so many articles to wade thru: just to read
the articles listed for one day can take the better part of an hour,
& should I decide to add to the discussion or even research a given
entry . . .

But FF put it quite well elsewhere in this thread. It is the duty of
the original author of an article to make a case for notability.
A contributor needs to be her/his own stringent critic, & always offer
as many reasons to convince the rest of us keep a given article, rather
than assume we'll accept any contribution. I still don't why I did a
Google search on [[Asrat Woldeyes]], & was able to take an article
that clearly failed to establish notability (it merely said his father
had been killed by the Italian occupation forces), & add an entry to
Wikipedia about a man who was not only a major activist in Ethiopian
medicine, but also an important opposition leader whom Amnesty
International had classified a "prisoner of conscience" -- but I'm
glad that I did.
orphaned

Geoff


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Repeated abusing of me by Mr. Vrba - the amendment

body:
As Wikimol just informed me, he finds any future mediation impossible.

V?t Zv?novec


from_name: Jeremy Dunck

body:
According to the hardware orders page[1], a major bottleneck is page rendering.

Does any phase of this stand out?  DB fetch?  Text parse?
Request/Response bandwidth?

I assume profiling on this has been done quite a lot...

[1]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hardware_ordered_August_30%2C_2005


from_name: MAURICE FRANK

body:
> Message: 4
> Date: Tue, 6 Sep 2005 07:42:52 EDT
> From: Bruynsf at cs.com
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Zoe's Abuse of Power as a Sysop
> To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
> Message-ID: <216.871626d.304edabc at cs.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
>
> Zoe, a Sysop on Wikipedia, has seriously abused her
> position of
> authority and
> responsibility at my expense. ...
> In clear
> violation of
> the "assume good faith" Wikipedia policy, however,

That's right. There are a long trail of contributors
who have found that autocratic admins never assume
good faith, they assume the axiomatic bad of whatever
you are doing in an article and axiomatic good of
their view against it. Even when they punish only one
side of a 2-sided fight over links, for "link spam",
when both sides have behaved identically. It's only
their own good faith that they demand to have assumed.

> Zoe
> sent me an
> official
> warning accusing me of deliberate vandalism. I
> responded by telling her
> that I
> would seek arbitration if she continued to lodge
> such
> accusations
> against me.
> She, in turn, blocked me from Wikipedia and claimed
> that my editing
> problems
> could not possibly have been accidental (Again, See:
> User Talk:
> Moriori). Her
> official reasons for blocking me were the vandalism
> that I never
> committed and my
> warnings that I would seek arbitration, which she
> termed "threats".
> Furthermore, finding that I could not reach the
> administrative
> noticeboard to plead my
> case and not having an individual e-mail address, I
> resorted to
> attempting to
> start new accounts,

That's right, you weren't spamming or trying to break
rules, you were trying to get around an unfairness to
access a page that in name you are entitled to use!!
You are frustrated by the extreme corruption that a
block imposed arbitrarily by 1 person blocks your
access to the community issues pages where you could
contest it and whatever issue caused it.

> "I  have a
> very low opinion of spammers. Besides, I'm in the
> middle of several
> brush fires
> and am quite irritable right now." (User talk:
> Dragons
> flight). This
> clearly
> indicates that her abusive behavior towards me is
> unprofessional and
> irresponsible and that she allows her moods to
> determine her decisions
> in her very
> important role as a sysop, which I assert to be
> unacceptable.

Yes, it does.

> Message: 8
> Date: Tue, 6 Sep 2005 12:51:31 -0500
> From: Guettarda <guettarda at gmail.com>
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Zoe's Abuse of Power as a Sysop
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
> Message-ID:
> <47683e9605090610511e5acbf5 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> Felix
>
> You really need to look at how you address people
> and
> address conflict.
> Your
> complaint about Moriori was posted, verbatim, in
> dozens of separate
> places.
> Posting the same message in a
> whole lot of places is considered spamming.

Isn't it also considered doing his best to resolve his
issue by maximising its reach in the community and the
feedback it can get?

> Other users do not constitute "official channels",

That proves it unfair that blocks block use of the
various types of dispute-res page.

> This is a
> community, not a
> structured bureacracy. Yelling at people never
> helps.
> You say that when
> you
> told Zoe that you would "seek arbitration" she
> called
> it a "threat". It
> is a
> threat.

Now, this is key. If you announce you are going to try
to stand up for yourself, in terms of the rules
indeed, in any way at all,  - that counts as a threat.
But when an admin threatens you with ban unless you
kowtow to his POV over an article, that doesn't count
as a threat. That is this project exploded, once and
for all.

> Creating new accounts to bypass a block is strictly
> forbidden. What's
> the
> point of blocking someone for misconduct if they can
> just come back
> under a
> new name? You have asked that "punitive action" be
> taken against Zoe,
> but
>  Inserting hard
> returns into people's
> comments is considered vandalism.

What are "hard returns"?

> If you had come here and pleaded your
> case,

PLEADED!! PLEADED!!!! Listen to this.

>accepted
> responsibility for what you had done wrong,

He didn't think he had done anything wrong. In the
real world you don't confess unproved guilt as the
first round of "pleading" to make anything happen at
all.

> Your
> actions met the definitions of "vandalism" and
> "spamming", even if you
> did
> not intend them to.

So did he know they did? The definitions aren't made
obvious on a level plane to everyone, as per the open
policy that all rules are warpable in the project's
interests.

> And a word to the wise - people
> who
> want to get into
> vendettas should really start with an easier target
> than Raul/Mark.
> Other
> than Jimbo and the Stewards, I dount there is anyone
> more
> powerful/influential in En.

This is a clear statement that differences of personal
influence affect the outcomes of cases. Is that any
basis for presenting the public with written information?

___________________________________________________________
To help you stay safe and secure online, we've developed the all new Yahoo! Security Centre. http://uk.security.yahoo.com


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Foundation-l] What? Why? Who?

body:
Angela wrote:
>>Sorry, I should've been clear. I forwarded the mail in its entirety.
>>There was no "extended reply".
>
>
> No, the extended reply was sent to me after I asked for one from the
> right people. :)

I should point out that Angela and I know people at the BBC; we spent
two weeks there last fall.  That's how Angela already knew the answer to
this before you asked. :-)

--Jimbo


subject: [Foundation-l] What? Why? Who?


body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> That is a technical issue, not a policy one. My suggestion is for the German
> chapter to act on one of their hosting offers, buy a bunch of servers to use as
> squids and then we can work out the ownership issues later.

My recommendation is that the German chapter continue to work closely
with the Foundation and NOT go out and randomly accept a hosting offer
and buy random servers.

The building of a coherent global network is a significant technical and
organizational challenge that many good people are working hard on, and
I do not think it is wise to give advice like this.

--Jimbo


from_name: Roger Luethi

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Project: This wikipedia-related article is a stub...

body:
On Tue, 06 Sep 2005 16:31:02 +0200, Boris Lohnzweiger wrote:
> > The German WP doesn't keep articles
> > just because the subject is notable. If an article is too short, it
> > will get deleted unless someone expands it (IIRC a time limit of a few
> > days is quite common).
>
> This is not correct. There are a number of two or three line articles
> that have been on the German Wikipedia for at least a year and nobody is
> planning to delete them. According to German WP deletion rules shortness
> doesn't justify a deletion and deletion is only a means of last resort
> ("letztes Mittel") if other measures fail. If it weren't that way, would
> we have almost 300,000 articles then?

You are correct that many short articles have remained in WP:de. However,
short articles do get put up for deletion regularly based on that
criterion.

The respective German guidelines are indeed written in a fairly similar
spirit to the English ones. They don't seem to advocate the deletion of
small stubs. But the folks who frequent [[de:Wikipedia:L?schkandidaten]]
tend to have a different view.

I don't hang out on WP:de that often but if you deny that the German
WP deletes article solely due to shortness you can't be a [[de:WP:LK]]
regular, either.

Mind you, I'm not complaining. It is just something to keep in mind if
you ever plan to write a stub for the German WP.

Roger


from_name: Mark Williamson

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Assisting Google's language recognition?

body:
The "official contact" would probably be this mailing list, or an
individual developer (you can tell who they are here because they
speak more authoritatively about things).

Having said that, I hope you don't mind if I stray quite a bit from
the TaH and ask if you know what's up with the Google in Your Language
program? It seems that queries have not been being responded to for
quite some time now except occasionally by seemingly-automated
responses, and whoever is currently coordinating the program doesn't
seem to check the Usenet group for Google translators anymore as they
once did.

Also, the group is getting EXTREMELY difficult to sift through, with
the hundreds of posts by people asking for gmail invites, or wanting
to translate gmail into their language -- is there a way to hide those
annoying messages so that we can read about more expedient issues?

Cheers
Mark

On 07/09/05, Evan Martin <evanm at google.com> wrote:
> On 9/3/05, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> > Evan Martin wrote:
> > > I believe this is correct.  We've had problems in the past with
> > > overloading wikipedia so the crawl has been throttled way back.
> >
> > Throttled back to what? I remember having problems in late 2003 and
> > early 2004, but we have 30 times as much hardware now, so we could
> > handle a proportionally higher crawl rate, say 10 or 20 requests per
> > second. That is, unless one of the other system administrators wants to
> > disagree.
>
> We've upped the rate a bit.  Please let me know if it causes any problems.
>
> (Also, is there an official contact for this sort of thing?  That is:
> who knows / gets to make the final decision of whether wikipedia can
> handle more load?)
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

--
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POSSIT MATERIARI
ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE


from_name: Jack Lynch

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: One Where We Blew It

body:
This thread is a very good argument for getting rid of VfD. The main
thing I (and everyone I know who reads it) like about the wikipedia is
the access to detailed information on absurdly obscure info. If
someone searches for a web comic, it instantly becomes notable and
encyclopedic. What are the deletionists thinking??? Wiki is not paper,
and if you keep deleting, it won't be anything special as far as
encyclopedias go, either.

Jack (Sam Spade)


from_name: Guettarda

subject: [WikiEN-l] Zoe's Abuse of Power as a Sysop

body:
Maurice - please go back and look through the whole issue, if you are
interested in what really went on. Read some of the posts - not just between
Felix and Zoe, but also Moriori, Raul, Dunc, Dmcdevit, Flcelloguy, WP:AN...
Felix may or may not have had a point, but he went about it in such a way
that if Zoe didn't block him, someone else would have. The purpose of the
project is to write an encyclopaedia. We are all volunteers here. No one is
getting paid. If someone's main purpose is to get recompense for a past
wrong, to extract apologies from Moriori and Raul, to tell El_C that his
poem on his user page is obscene... and to get upset when Dunc fails to
address his complaint about DESpeigel's post to his (Felix's) user page...
We have (foolishly?) donated thousands of hours to this project. With any
troublesome user, you need to consider two things - does the user's value to
the project outweigh the trouble of dealing with them, and does the cost (to
the community) of an admin acting in the spirit of the law rather than the
letter of the law outweigh the benefit of a "simple" solution. Dictatorship
would kill Wikipedia. Having every problem wind its way sloooooooowly
through a hidebound bureaucracy would do so too.

Anyway, creating sockpuppets to evade a block is forbidden. That should be
apparent to anyone. Otherwise a block is meaningless.

Ian


from_name: steve v

subject: [WikiEN-l] Quality tags

body:
Spot on.

But theres also real issue of ranking particular
edits, relative to others. IAUI, this is a lot more
processor and data intensive - a lot of metadata can
be applied or drawn from each article.

SV

--- charles matthews <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com>
wrote:

> Ed Poor wrote
>
> >*We* must decide that we want some means of
> assuring readers that they
> are getting reliable information.
>
> Simple - just protect decent, informative versions
> of pages.  True, this
> turns a wiki into a standard static web site; but
> hey, people will be
> mightily assured.
>
> I'm sort of amazed that the category system has't
> already been adapted to
> give some sort of 'marks out of 10' to articles.  If
> there were real
> community pressure to rate articles, I think that
> might have happened
> already.  What I see is only the skeleton of such as
> system: stub tags,
> featured-article status, and the reprehensible use
> of POV tags as comment
> rather than trying to sort out disputes.
>
> Trying to think laterally for the moment.  If
> articles were rated on a scale
> of 1 to 100 for excellence, the lower rungs of the
> ladder would correspond
> to poor articles, of various types: stubby, badly
> written, failing when
> judged by policy (NPOV, NOR, CYS), non-encyclopedic.
>  This could be the
> basis of an automated clean-up/deletion mechanism
> also, but would need
> perhaps one other ingredient (to make a kind of 2-d
> plot).  What should that
> be?
>
> Charles
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

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from_name: Fastfission

subject: [WikiEN-l] One Where We Blew It

body:
Curses, I thought I had come up with something original! ;-)

FF

On 9/7/05, Geoff Burling <llywrch at agora.rdrop.com> wrote:
>
> I guess this is an application of a rule that Jimbo mentions in his
> emails from time to time: the Principle of Least Astonishment. That is,
> if you consider Wikipedia's coverage of a given topic definitive,
> authorative, &/or exhaustive, it would reasonably astonish the reader
> if there was not an article about a specific subject.
>