subject: [Wikipedia-l] school articles : enough

body:
On 29/01/07, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:

> What can we really do to contact the nebulous "community", though?
> David and I and others have been bitching and moaning about this at
> the slightest provocation for six months, but the project is big and
> you can only chat to so many people. Short of putting out quarterly
> Signpost announcements saying "The following seven areas of coverage
> are the ones that piss our readers off the most. Please make them less
> crap, we'd all live happier lives", I'm not sure we can easily do much
> about it.

A weekly OTRS report in the Signpost would be a really good idea,
actually, and would probably help a lot.

> A common but less worrying issue is a simple lack of context and scale
> - many of these articles are seized by one enterprising student or
> another to write about the school as they see it; these usually aren't
> *so* bad, but they tend to have a very blurred line as to what is and
> isn't appropriate material, which then leads into articles that the
> school is understandably annoyed by the existence of simply because,
> well, they're linked with this amateurish, hit-and-miss, erratically
> accurate and conceptually blinkered article. (These are often the
> hardest to deal with, in many ways)

The main problem with our school articles is that they're largely
crap, and therefore "non-notable" has been used as the excuse to
delete them.

- d.


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Marc Riddell

subject: [WikiEN-l] Freedom of Speech in WP

body:
on 1/30/07 11:24 AM, charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com at
charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com wrote:

> That I would like to treat Wikipedians I encounter on the site as colleagues,
> and to be so treated by them. Is there any particular epithet or slur you feel
> ought to be allowed, as helping in this?

Perhaps I should have said this in my original post: I am not here to argue
with anyone about anything, or to advance a particular agenda. I have been
doing minor editing in WP for a year now and, time permitting, would like to
participate more actively in the project. And, like anything a person is
considering becoming a part of, I want to get a sense of its beliefs and
values.

My work and passion has been, is now, and probably always will be, persons
and their interactions. That is why this issue is so important to me.

And, as always, I?m learning.

Marc


list: foundation-l

from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Foundation-l] Fair Use (again)

body:
2007/1/30, Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net>:

> One of the problems with fair use for images is that they don't normally
> follow the traditions and practices of fair-use textual quotations.
> This is also why the doctrines divirge so much from one country to the
> next for these items.
>
> Still, I would like to point out that while fair-use doctrine may only
> be an American concept (largely), similar concepts do exist in virtually
> all other countries, even if to a significantly lesser extent.  There
> may be some images that are not strictly available for any purpose under
> the GFDL, but may under certain circumstances be legitimately used in
> GFDL'd content.  Trying to draw the line between what is acceptable
> content and stuff that simply needs to be deleted is where the problem
> comes in.  Erring on the side of caution and exclude fair-use content
> altogether may be one solution on some projects where fair use content
> isn't so critical.
>
> What I find amazing is the philosophy of some en.wikipedia users that
> are now pushing to allow content on Wikipedia even if it invalidates the
> GFDL when it is included in a Wikipedia article.  It is this expansion
> of the range of images being permitted that surprises me, where the only
> limit to allowed content is only what is strictly legal in the USA, and
> trying to take fair use to the ultimate limits in U.S. Common Law and
> asserting educational and non-profit justifications for its inclusion.
>
> I believe there is some middle ground that can be found between this
> free-for-all philosohpy and complete exclusion of fair use that would be
> easy to understand, work in nearly every country with significant
> numbers of Wikimedia users, and be simple enough to see a policy that is
> just a couple of paragraphs long about the topic.  Perhaps I'm overly
> optimistic here.
>

In my opinion the point of departure of such a 'middle ground' should be
that the inclusion of the fair use image should not hinder the publication
possibilities of the article as a whole, that is, downstream users should be
able to take the article including the picture, and publish it, under the
GFDL, commercially, with modifications. Perhaps I should restrict that by
adding that their modifications do not change significantly the way the
image is used - taking a Wikipedia article and dropping everything but the
picture, then publishing that under GFDL as a derived work from the
Wikipedia article is not the kind of thing that should necessarily be
possible, but taking the single paragraph to which the picture is most
connected, making some minor changes to the text and then putting it and the
image in a different GFDL document and publishing that either commercially
or non-commercially should be.

--
Andre Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
ICQ: 6260644  --  Skype: a_engels


list: wikimedia-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Fair Use (again)


from_name: Marco Chiesa

subject: [Foundation-l] Sigh, problems with non-Latin usernames again

body:
David Gerard wrote:

>On 30/01/07, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen a gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>>What you call unrealistic is basically something that is something that
>>people do not do anyway. People on the English Wikipedia can read my
>>name easily enough, they cannot pronounce it properly, they do not know
>>if there is a meaning to my name. The only thing they need to do is
>>register that the characters in my name exist. That is all that is required.
>>
>>
>
>
>Yes, but that's easy for users of Latin characters because your name
>is written in Latin characters. That's not an example of the problem.
>
>
>- d.
>
>

Let's make some practical examples of users with bona fide non-latin
usernames (choosing a different script only to look cool may be another
issue):

Some (maybe most) will practically only add interwikis - they may or may
not speak English, they won't care about the community, maybe in the
past they would have put the interwikis anonimously and with SUL they
find a reason to edit with a username. Basically they just help, they
don't cause trouble and pretty much who cares if you don't recognise
them. If they add at a vaguely fast rate, patrollers will easily realise
that it's always the same guy. If you use CDVF you may just whitelist
them so you won't be bothered in future.

A few (very few, hopefully) are vandals, they will just vandalise pages
like any other vandal. You block them indefinitely, there's nothing
racist in it.

Some of them will occasionally contribute a bit more substantially, they
may occasionally put a signature on some talk pages. You may ask them to
do something to be recognisable, they may or may not do it.

Finally, some of them will be really active contributors. I would find
rather fair that these people are asked to put something that makes them
recognisable in their signature. If they're active users, the request
would probably seem quite reasonable.

Now, I guess it would be more useful to have something that makes
usernames recognisable from the Recentchanges or Histories, rather than
signatures. If you want to appear as someone else, you would make your
signature very similar - and with non-Latin characters it's even easier.
ID Numbers are pretty ugly, it would still be quite hard to recognise
12345678 from 12354678. Automatic transliteration is not really an
option AFAIK, and ask the user to provide a version of the username in
another script is unrealistic (I wouldn't have a clue on how to write my
username in Arabic or Chinese - nor I would actually see a reason to do
so, although I occasionally have added a couple of interwikis on these
projects). Personally, as soon as they don't choose the local equivalent
of User:F**k, I don't really care how they call my username in a funny
script.

Marco (Cruccone)


body:
David Gerard wrote:

>On 30/01/07, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>>What you call unrealistic is basically something that is something that
>>people do not do anyway. People on the English Wikipedia can read my
>>name easily enough, they cannot pronounce it properly, they do not know
>>if there is a meaning to my name. The only thing they need to do is
>>register that the characters in my name exist. That is all that is required.
>>
>>
>
>
>Yes, but that's easy for users of Latin characters because your name
>is written in Latin characters. That's not an example of the problem.
>
>
>- d.
>
>

Let's make some practical examples of users with bona fide non-latin
usernames (choosing a different script only to look cool may be another
issue):

Some (maybe most) will practically only add interwikis - they may or may
not speak English, they won't care about the community, maybe in the
past they would have put the interwikis anonimously and with SUL they
find a reason to edit with a username. Basically they just help, they
don't cause trouble and pretty much who cares if you don't recognise
them. If they add at a vaguely fast rate, patrollers will easily realise
that it's always the same guy. If you use CDVF you may just whitelist
them so you won't be bothered in future.

A few (very few, hopefully) are vandals, they will just vandalise pages
like any other vandal. You block them indefinitely, there's nothing
racist in it.

Some of them will occasionally contribute a bit more substantially, they
may occasionally put a signature on some talk pages. You may ask them to
do something to be recognisable, they may or may not do it.

Finally, some of them will be really active contributors. I would find
rather fair that these people are asked to put something that makes them
recognisable in their signature. If they're active users, the request
would probably seem quite reasonable.

Now, I guess it would be more useful to have something that makes
usernames recognisable from the Recentchanges or Histories, rather than
signatures. If you want to appear as someone else, you would make your
signature very similar - and with non-Latin characters it's even easier.
ID Numbers are pretty ugly, it would still be quite hard to recognise
12345678 from 12354678. Automatic transliteration is not really an
option AFAIK, and ask the user to provide a version of the username in
another script is unrealistic (I wouldn't have a clue on how to write my
username in Arabic or Chinese - nor I would actually see a reason to do
so, although I occasionally have added a couple of interwikis on these
projects). Personally, as soon as they don't choose the local equivalent
of User:F**k, I don't really care how they call my username in a funny
script.

Marco (Cruccone)


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Webmaster

body:
Thanks. That explains it. Also, the IP shown is not enciclopedia.tiosam.com nor ebaita.com: it is www.tiosam.com where I just included the English version a couple of weeks ago (http://www.tiosam.com/Ingles/encyclopedia ). The load was probably google indexing the pages in English, not what we already have cached for the Portuguese version.
Anyway, I apologize for my ignorance. I'm downloading the dump and will start coding as soon as I find out how it works. Thanks guys.

-----Original Message-----
From: wikitech-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikitech-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Ivan Krstic
Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2007 11:40 AM
To: Wikimedia developers
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Our IP was blocked by mistake

Tim Starling wrote:
> No faked user agent string? So I suppose you were using "save as" in IE?
> Mozilla/4.0%20(compatible;%20MSIE%207.0;%20Windows%20NT%205.2;%20.NET%
> 20CLR%201.1.4322;%20.NET%20CLR%202.0.50727)

No, he was using the Microsoft.XMLHTTP object from ASP, as he indicated in a previous message. Said object identifies itself as MSIE and gives the .NET CLR version in the User-Agent.

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

_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

body:
Delirium schreef:
> Gerard Meijssen wrote:
>
>> Delirium schreef:
>>
>>
>>> Anders Wegge Jakobsen wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>  Tough for you then. Grow up and learn coping with the globalized
>>>> world.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>> But this is directly contrary to the spirit of Wikipedia, which is to
>>> give everyone knowledge in *their own language*.  A user of [language x]
>>> should only have to be familiar with [language x] in order to contribute
>>> to their local Wikipedia, not also familiar with all other languages.
>>> Usually English is the worst offender in this regard (people should
>>> *not* have to know English, or even necessarily be familiar with Latin
>>> script, in order to contribute to a non-English Wikipedia), but it's no
>>> better when it goes the other way either.
>>>
>>> -Mark
>>>
>>>
>> Hoi,
>> With people using their own script for their user name, it does not
>> detract a thing from the information being in English on the English
>> language Wikipedia.
>>
>>
>
> No, but it detracts from people who only speak English being able to
> productively work on the English-language Wikipedia.
>
> I see this as pretty much common courtesy.  I currently use a
> Latin-alphabet name on the Greek Wikipedia, because I wasn't really
> thinking much when I chose it.  In retrospect, I should have chosen a
> Greek-alphabet name.  I'll probably keep my current name via inertia if
> nobody complains, but if it did cause problems for a significant portion
> of the community, and they asked me to change it to a Greek-alphabet
> name, I would of course do so.  Why wouldn't I?  What possible
> justification would there be for forcing a foreign script upon them?
> Would it really be defensible to be a jackass and tell them, "Tough for
> you then. Grow up and learn coping with the globalized world."?
>
> -Mark
Hoi,
Using words like jackass in this contexts implies calling those who do
not agree with you being a jackass.
Thanks,
   GerardM

I prefer to being called a jackass by you than considering my behaviour
to be discriminatory by myself.


list: commons-l

from_name: Bryan Tong Minh

subject:
[Commons-l] Finding the description page of an image on Flickr
	with its static address

body:
Ok, I won't answer e-mails when i am just awake....

On 1/30/07, Bryan Tong Minh <bryan.tongminh at gmail.com> wrote:
> Take for example
> http://farm1.static.flickr.com/145/370027865_d72262821b_s.jpg. The
> first digits of the filename is the so called photo_id: 370027865. The
> goto [http://www.flickr.com/services/api/explore/?method=flickr.photos.getInfo]
> and enter the photo_id there. You will then find at the tail of the
> xml that is being output: <url
> type="photopage">http://www.flickr.com/photos/bryan-tongminh/370027865/</url>.
> And that is where the picture is located :)
>
> Bryan
>
> On 1/30/07, Guillaume Paumier <guillom.pom at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > One problem when checking licenses of images coming from Flickr is some
> > users provide the static link to the image on Flickr, instead of the
> > description page showing the license. That makes the verification very
> > difficult because you have to search Flickr images hoping you'll find the
> > good tag that will lead you to the good image.
> >
> > I've contacted the Flickr support team to know if there was a tool or a
> > special page to help finding the description page from the static link.
> > Their answer is below and it seems to work. I hope it will help.
> >
> > Cheers!
> > Guillaume
> >
> > ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> > From: Flickr Support <case202439 at support.flickr.com >
> > Date: 29 Jan 2007 20:41:51 +0000
> > Subject: [Flickr Case 202439] Re: Other Issues
> > To: guillom.pom at gmail.com
> >
> > Hi there,
> >
> > Sorry for the delay in getting back to you -- we're
> > swamped!
> >
> > You can find the original photo page thusly:
> >
> > http://farm1.static.flickr.com/153/357298706_b406a56e06.jpg
> >
> > to:
> >
> >  http://www.flickr.com/photo.gne?id=357298706
> >
> > Hope this helps!
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Ben
> >
> > --
> > Guillaume Paumier
> > [[m:User:guillom]]
> >  http://www.wikimedia.org
> > _______________________________________________
> > Commons-l mailing list
> > Commons-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> > http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
> >
> >
> >
>


body:
David Gerard schreef:
> On 29/01/07, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>> Do you really believe that people remember who they worked with last
>> year on an article? Given the sheer multitude of people only a tiny core
>> of people are known. They are the "power users" of a project.
>>
>
>
> Actually, to a large extent they do. Remember that most articles in
> en:wp have been shown (Greg Maxwell ran the numbers in January 2006)
> to be largely written by only a few users.
>
>
>
>> Come on, so you can call them thingybobs, the right name for this
>> attitude is discrimination. People are demanding things; they want to be
>> known by their own user ID.
>>
>
>
> I remember that you were the sole voice against having them
> identifiable to other users who did not happen to be able to read that
> script.
>
> It is not realistic to require of all editors on the English Wikipedia
> to be able to read every script in all of Unicode to be able to work
> with others on a project written in a Latin script language.
>
>
> - d.
Hoi,
I do not have a problem to be a lonely voice that identifies
discrimination where I see it. I prefer to be seen as someone who does
make himself heard than someone who mutters in the background.

What you call unrealistic is basically something that is something that
people do not do anyway. People on the English Wikipedia can read my
name easily enough, they cannot pronounce it properly, they do not know
if there is a meaning to my name. The only thing they need to do is
register that the characters in my name exist. That is all that is required.
Thanks,
    GerardM


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Mark Williamson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] [Foundation-l] Moldavian

body:
Besides the idea of cooperation and potential (or even definite)
eventual merger, I'm not sure what would be different about the
proposed plan you have outlined.

Vandalism has always been a problem on mo.wp, yes, but thankfully
there was recently appointed an admin, a German named Pill, who was
very good at deleting vandalism and blocking the vandals.

In the past, vandalism has been done by various people through
sockpuppet accounts, but within the last few months the only that
anyone did who was not an anon was Bonaparte, who is banned
permanently on en.wp, ro.wp, meta, as well as possibly other projects
(I know he caused quite a disturbance at roa-rup.wp, I would not be
surprised if he were to have been banned there too or other various
Wikis), and the user Euthymios, however Euthymios is not a "bad user"
so I am sure if given a warning he will back off (he was already
banned from mo.wp anyways).

As long as Pill is still active and willing to temporarily admin for
the mo.wp, I'm not sure what would prevent it from being re-opened
today along with the release of a new policy regarding the Wiki.

Mark

On 30/01/07, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Andre Engels schreef:
> > On the Moldavian Wikipedia it says for over a month "This wiki has been
> > closed for now." Is there any outlook on whether 'for now' means 'for ever'
> > or that it will be re-opened at some time? I am asking because I want to
> > know what to do with the interwiki for the bot. If the wiki is closed down
> > for good, I intend to remove them silently; if it will be opened up again
> > some time soon, I want to keep them in the same way as to 'normal'
> > Wikipedias.
> Hoi,
> The closure was done without the consent of the board. The language
> committee was asked to formulate an opinion, it is not of the opinion
> that the current situation is good. We proposed that this wiki would be
> reopened and that discussions would start on how the Moldovan and the
> Romanian Wikipedia can work together. An essential part of the time
> frame that will exist before this merger is that any vandalism will
> result in a ban for all the projects that such a person is involved in.
>
> It is particularly the vandalism that made the huha around the Moldovan
> Wikipedia so unpalatable.
>
> Thanks,
>     GerardM
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
Refije dirije lanm? yo paske nou posede pw?p bato.


body:
David Gerard schreef:
> On 30/01/07, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>> There is no requirement, of course, that SUL means "have the username
>> display the same way everywhere". Even if any given username only has
>> one person behind it, it doesn't stop us declaring the "real user" to
>> be an arbitrary database code and hanging a dozen visible usernames
>> off that... ;-)
>> [I would utterly love a hack which allowed you to ask for any
>> non-Latin username - or perhaps any username - to have an arbitrary
>> User-ID appended to the back of it - "foobar" or "foobar (123456)" -
>> whenever it showed up in logs. Those who find it useful can flip a
>> switch and on it comes; those who don't, well, it'd be off by default)
>>
>
>
> Remember that in the previous thread, it was CONCLUSIVELY PROVEN that
> even giving the option to hang the database UID number off a handle
> makes you indistinguishable from a NAZI!
>
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-December/026128.html
>
>
> - d.
Hoi,
So you lost this argument by referring to Nazis for the first time.
Thanks,
    GerardM


from_name: Robert Scott Horning

subject: [Foundation-l] Fair Use (again)

body:
Marco Chiesa wrote:

>rfrangi at libero.it wrote:
>
>
>Just to make an example of how fair use is not allowed in Italy, a
>couple of weeks ago an Italian amateur website about contemporary art
>was sued and forced to pay about 5.000 ? because it displayed a few
>photographs of work of arts. The website is non-profit and was using the
>images to illustrate what it was talking about, pretty much in the same
>way that Wikipedia uses fair use images. I guess this would easily
>qualify as fair use in the US, but this is not the case in Italy. The
>article (in Italian, I don't know if English-language press had talked
>about it) is at http://punto-informatico.it/p.aspx?id=1858783&r=PI
>
>Marco (Cruccone)
>
I should note that fair use representations of art works are one of the
areas that I would like to see removed from en.wikipedia, but making
such a request seemed to landed with such overwhelming support that I
didn't even get a single reply on the topic until I posted a request for
comments about the idea on the fair-use talk page (after seeking
comments on the Copyrights talk page and the Village Pump first).  And
all I seemed to have recieved on the fair-use talk page was ad hominum
attacks suggesting that I was clueless about copyright and fair use, and
didn't know what I was talking about to even suggest there might be a
copyright infringement issue here on Wikipedia for any use of the images
as they are currently being displayed.

I see no reason why this same line of reasoning that you mention here
isn't going to be used with American website owners, especially with the
current trend of the SCOTUS to be using legal opinions of foriegn courts
in their briefs, and the homoginzation of IP law around the world.

--
Robert Scott Horning


subject: [Foundation-l] Fair Use (again)


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [Wikitech-l] What is in the "page extracts for Yahoo" file?

body:
http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20070124/ - "page abstracts for
Yahoo" - what is this file?

(I could download and look, except it's 1.3GB ...)

- d.


subject: [Wikitech-l] FW:  Our IP was blocked by mistake

body:
Just something that came to my mind...
Google caches the wikipedia pages just like we were doing. Are you blocking Google as well?

-----Original Message-----
From: Webmaster [mailto:webmaster at tiosam.com]
Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2007 12:27 PM
To: 'Wikimedia developers'
Subject: RE: [Wikitech-l] Our IP was blocked by mistake

Thanks. That explains it. Also, the IP shown is not enciclopedia.tiosam.com nor ebaita.com: it is www.tiosam.com where I just included the English version a couple of weeks ago (http://www.tiosam.com/Ingles/encyclopedia ). The load was probably google indexing the pages in English, not what we already have cached for the Portuguese version.
Anyway, I apologize for my ignorance. I'm downloading the dump and will start coding as soon as I find out how it works. Thanks guys.

-----Original Message-----
From: wikitech-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikitech-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Ivan Krstic
Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2007 11:40 AM
To: Wikimedia developers
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Our IP was blocked by mistake

Tim Starling wrote:
> No faked user agent string? So I suppose you were using "save as" in IE?
> Mozilla/4.0%20(compatible;%20MSIE%207.0;%20Windows%20NT%205.2;%20.NET%
> 20CLR%201.1.4322;%20.NET%20CLR%202.0.50727)

No, he was using the Microsoft.XMLHTTP object from ASP, as he indicated in a previous message. Said object identifies itself as MSIE and gives the .NET CLR version in the User-Agent.

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

_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


subject: [Wikitech-l] FW: Our IP was blocked by mistake

body:
No -- I don't know the particulars, but I imagine pages are not cached
by Google in a single burst that puts such a huge load on the server,
if this were the case most large sites would have blocked Google
(myspace, livejournal, ebay) and it would be much less useful.

Mark

On 30/01/07, Webmaster <webmaster at tiosam.com> wrote:
>
>
> Just something that came to my mind...
> Google caches the wikipedia pages just like we were doing. Are you blocking Google as well?
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Webmaster [mailto:webmaster at tiosam.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2007 12:27 PM
> To: 'Wikimedia developers'
> Subject: RE: [Wikitech-l] Our IP was blocked by mistake
>
> Thanks. That explains it. Also, the IP shown is not enciclopedia.tiosam.com nor ebaita.com: it is www.tiosam.com where I just included the English version a couple of weeks ago (http://www.tiosam.com/Ingles/encyclopedia ). The load was probably google indexing the pages in English, not what we already have cached for the Portuguese version.
> Anyway, I apologize for my ignorance. I'm downloading the dump and will start coding as soon as I find out how it works. Thanks guys.
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: wikitech-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikitech-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Ivan Krstic
> Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2007 11:40 AM
> To: Wikimedia developers
> Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Our IP was blocked by mistake
>
> Tim Starling wrote:
> > No faked user agent string? So I suppose you were using "save as" in IE?
> > Mozilla/4.0%20(compatible;%20MSIE%207.0;%20Windows%20NT%205.2;%20.NET%
> > 20CLR%201.1.4322;%20.NET%20CLR%202.0.50727)
>
> No, he was using the Microsoft.XMLHTTP object from ASP, as he indicated in a previous message. Said object identifies itself as MSIE and gives the .NET CLR version in the User-Agent.
>
> --
> Ivan Krsti? <krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> | GPG: 0x147C722D
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

--
Refije dirije lanm? yo paske nou posede pw?p bato.


list: wiktionary-l

from_name: Tomasz Sienicki

subject: [Wiktionary-l] ru.wikt and empty templates

body:
[2007-01-30 08:59] Matthieu Barba wrote:

> I agree with GerardM : these entries are useless and should be deleted. Stopping interwiki links will not resolve the problem :-/

I agree of course that removing these entries would be the best solution.
I've written in the Village Pump at ru: and invited their editors to discuss it here.

--tsca


from_name: Platonides

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Important Issue to Hebrew Wikipedia and Admin
	Abuse

body:
David Fuchs wrote:
> It's impossible to
> have a vote within the community to revoke the admins' rights as
> people who have opposed them have either been banned or aren't going
> to vote against them because if they do and the rights aren't revoked
> they'll be picked on".

If there's really such problem about being incapable to held a
democratic vote, i'm sure a special page to anonymous voting could be
arranged, like the board voting. (Arbitred by a neutral party)


body:
David Gerard schreef:
> On 30/01/07, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>> What you call unrealistic is basically something that is something that
>> people do not do anyway. People on the English Wikipedia can read my
>> name easily enough, they cannot pronounce it properly, they do not know
>> if there is a meaning to my name. The only thing they need to do is
>> register that the characters in my name exist. That is all that is required.
>>
>
>
> Yes, but that's easy for users of Latin characters because your name
> is written in Latin characters. That's not an example of the problem.
>
>
> - d.
Hoi,
Indeed I can not make people see what is in front of there eyes. Even in
Latin script people do not perceive what is actually written. It is not
a matter of seeing it is a matter of perceiving. When people are
unwilling to do so, it does not follow that their argument is a just one.
Thanks,
    GerardM


body:
David Gerard schreef:
> On 30/01/07, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> David Gerard schreef:
>>
>
>
>>> Remember that in the previous thread, it was CONCLUSIVELY PROVEN that
>>> even giving the option to hang the database UID number off a handle
>>> makes you indistinguishable from a NAZI!
>>> http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-December/026128.html
>>>
>
>
>> Hoi,
>> So you lost this argument by referring to Nazis for the first time.
>>
>
>
> Of course! I should just have said "In the Netherlands in the second
> world war" as you did, and thus just *imply* it.
>
>
> - d.
Hoi,
Actually that is a misinterpretation; what was asked and what I
explained there was why there is such an aversion to using numbers to
deal with people. Now let us forget about this as it is not productive
and I think we both want to do good. We do not agree on what is good but
this does not make either of us a Nazi.
Thanks,
    GerarM


subject: [WikiEN-l] Autoconfirmed threshold

body:
According to Simetrical:
"It is now possible for wikis to require a certain number of edits, as well
as a certain registration time period, for users to become autoconfirmed.
Thus, for instance, accounts that have existed for several weeks but have
made fewer than five edits might be prevented from moving pages or so on. If
a particular wiki would like this enabled for them, it can file a bug report
after community agreement."

I think we should enable this with a threshold of 10 edits.  10 edits is
reasonable for a vandal to go through the whole warning system and get
blocked, while at the same time not too much so as to discourage new
contributors.
--Mets501


from_name: Brianna Laugher

subject:
[Commons-l] Commons search engine ranking,
	Was: Killing the main namespace?

body:
On 30/01/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> There are a lot of things we could do to enhance the popularity of
> commons, but the page name issue really should be solved first.
>
> It's in the long term plans for mediawiki to support filenames which
> are unrelated to the file type.... but even using that will require
> massive renames on commons.  Does anyone have any suggestions?   There
> are a lot of possibilities.

I would imagine some renaming thing would be part of the transition,
don't you? Even if it was just Foo.jpg to Foo-jpg or 'Foo jpg'.

I am pretty sure the file storage transition thing will also allow
image renaming as a consequence.

The limited details I have found about it are at
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_roadmap ("Expand FileStore to
all image storage for filename reform, better cache/mirroring
ability")
and http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/FileStore .

> Another question is.. are we ready to handle an increase in public visibility?

IMO that's a pretty clear "of course not".

Anyway, just wanted to say that I strongly oppose disallowing
anon-page creation, at least until SUL has been implemented. After
that, I will re-evaluate my position.

Just delete the crud. It's not a disaster, it's just the fact in the
life of a completely open wiki.

cheers
Brianna


from_name: spectre at ivixor.net

subject: [Wikipedia-l] tajik language on the main page

body:
Hi,

The Tajik Wikipedia has around 5,000 articles but it doesn't appear on the
main page. Could this be rectified at the earliest possible convienience,

Thanks!

Fran

PS. I have bought this up at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Www.wikipedia.org_template aswell.


from_name: Deathphoenix

subject: [WikiEN-l] An obscene example of remote loading

body:
I first became interested in contributing to Wikipedia as a direct result of
looking at answers.com articles.

On 1/29/07, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
> William Pietri wrote:
> > Say, are there examples of people who do this well, contributing back to
> > Wikipedia or to the general public? The examples I've seen are all a bit
> > disappointing, but perhaps that's just because the outrageous ones
> > generate more attention.
>
> Answers.com is an excellent example.  They license Wikipedia content and
> also license content from many other more traditional sources, and offer
> it up to people who search on their site.  They have always been a
> strong supporter of Wikimedia and have been traditionally the #1 sponsor
> of the annual Wikimania conference.
>
> So they benefit from our work, and they give back to the community as
> well.
>
> --Jimbo
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: teun spaans

subject: [Foundation-l] Fair Use (again)

body:
Does this imply that an Italian chapter could be sued for fair use images on
the english wiki?
Does this mean that the english wiki could potentially be blocked in Italy
if "fair use" images are of italian origin?

On 1/30/07, Marco Chiesa <chiesa.marco at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> rfrangi at libero.it wrote:
>
> >I beg you all, please consider that a considerable part of the
> contributors to Wikimedia projects (and possibly a considerable part of
> people willing to reuse commercially its contents) cannot embrace fair use,
> simply because fair use does not exist in their legislation.
> >
> >And once again, if the point is to stick to the GFDL, fair use contents
> is not compliant.
> >
> >If the ponit is "articles look better with... whatever", some go for fair
> use, some others go for NC images. And even if I don't want neither, I have
> to say that fair use is something decided by the user (possibly wrongly), NC
> is something decided by the author (thus safer from the point of view of a
> legal action).
> >
> >Roberto (Snowdog)
> >
> >
> Just to make an example of how fair use is not allowed in Italy, a
> couple of weeks ago an Italian amateur website about contemporary art
> was sued and forced to pay about 5.000 ? because it displayed a few
> photographs of work of arts. The website is non-profit and was using the
> images to illustrate what it was talking about, pretty much in the same
> way that Wikipedia uses fair use images. I guess this would easily
> qualify as fair use in the US, but this is not the case in Italy. The
> article (in Italian, I don't know if English-language press had talked
> about it) is at http://punto-informatico.it/p.aspx?id=1858783&r=PI
>
> Marco (Cruccone)
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


subject: [Foundation-l] Fair Use (again)


body:
Or was it some other reuser? My memory is quite spotty these days.

On 1/30/07, Deathphoenix <originaldeathphoenix at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I first became interested in contributing to Wikipedia as a direct result
> of looking at answers.com articles.
>
> On 1/29/07, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> >
> > William Pietri wrote:
> > > Say, are there examples of people who do this well, contributing back
> > to
> > > Wikipedia or to the general public? The examples I've seen are all a
> > bit
> > > disappointing, but perhaps that's just because the outrageous ones
> > > generate more attention.
> >
> > Answers.com is an excellent example.  They license Wikipedia content and
> > also license content from many other more traditional sources, and offer
> >
> > it up to people who search on their site.  They have always been a
> > strong supporter of Wikimedia and have been traditionally the #1 sponsor
> > of the annual Wikimania conference.
> >
> > So they benefit from our work, and they give back to the community as
> > well.
> >
> > --Jimbo
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> > http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> >
>
>


from_name: Cheney Shill

subject:
[WikiEN-l] "Articles that do not cite reliable published
	sources will be deleted."

body:
Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:

> Marc Riddell wrote:
> >on 1/29/07 10:13 AM, Cheney Shill at
> >>Is this not sufficiently explanatory or reliable?
> >>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primacy_effect
> >>
> >It could use some work. But my question is: What do you
> make of it?
> >
> The real irony here is that a person who has put himself
> forth as a
> strong advocate for reliable sourcing is relying on an
> article that is
> completely lacking in such sources to make his point. :'(

To understand the irony, one must understand Marc Riddell
requested I explain the primacy effect instead of relying
on Wikipedia:
"By all means, do explain further."

Why would I bother to adjust what I know and base it upon
an unsourced article written by people of unknown
expertise?  Apparently the same question occurred to Marc
and he decided to request the view of someone that can
actually apply it.  Maybe if I get unblocked one of these
days, I'll consider working on the article.  Apparently
irony could use a little work too.

~~Pro-Lick
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/User:Halliburton_Shill
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Pro-Lick
http://www.wikiality.com/User:Pro-Lick (now a Wikia supported site)

--spam may follow--

____________________________________________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Everyone is raving about the all-new Yahoo! Mail beta.
http://new.mail.yahoo.com


subject:
[Commons-l] "Did you know?" ... The family tree of
	[[Category:Copyright statuses]] and our broken category system.

body:
On 30/01/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Unless I find huge opposition here, I'm going to begin changing the
> commons instruction pages to reflect this use of categories rather
> than our historic use.

Hold up just a tiny bit. You are not paying attention to the reason
that narrow categories developed in the first place. It's because the
support for working with categories is incredibly poor. Categories
with over 200 items find half their subcats go missing (from the first
page) because subcat paging is not separate to article(/media)
paging.(bug 1211)

Narrow categories developed because there was no means to perform
category intersections. They are manual category intersections. I
wouldn't suggest changing that at least until this category
intersection thing is implemented and we can see its utility.

Secondly, is this category intersection thing really not going to
include an option to automatically search subcats as well? (a la
http://tools.wikimedia.de/~daniel/WikiSense/CategoryIntersect.php?&wikilang=en&wikifam=commons.wikimedia.org
see "depth=3") That seems like a pretty vital basic functionality that
will be needed, even if we switch to using broad cats.

Thirdly, your proposal is going to massively increase the average
number of categories for each file. (Although they will typically have
shorter names.) How far "up" the tree do you propose it will be
reasonable to go? For a portrait of a woman, we should put
[[category:women]]
[[category:homo]]
[[category:Hominidae]]
[[category:primates]]
[[category:Mammalia]]
[[Category:Vertebrata]]
[[Category:Chordata]]
[[Category:Animalia]]
[[Category:Eukaryota]]
?
They're all true, are they not?

Instead of doing that, I think it would be more sensible to continue
the tradition of only putting the most specific cat that applies, and
adjusting the software to have an option to display subcategory items
into the current category (like "flatten" I think) when desired. (bug
2725)

regards
Brianna
user:pfctdayelise


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Foundation-l] Fair Use (again)

body:
teun spaans wrote:

>In the Netherlands, a gallery had hired a photographer to make photos of art
>works for their hand out to vistors. The photographer was duely paid for his
>services.
>
>The gallery holder put the images also on their website, upon which the
>photographer sued the gallery holder.
>
>The judge condemned the gallery holder, she had only permission for hte
>handout, and she had to pay the photographed 1000 euro for every day the
>photos had been on the website - some 40K.
>
>I am not sure if the gallery holder refused to take them off line or got
>sued for just putting them up. This was a lawsuit by an individual
>photographer, not by Dutch equivalenst of RIAA  or similar copy protection
>agencies.
>
A key factor in such a case is the contract between the photographer and
the gallery.  This is very different from a situation where an unrelated
third party has posted the pictures.

Ec


subject: [Foundation-l] Fair Use (again)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Courts [selectively] using Wikipedia

body:
Keitei <nihthraefn at gmail.com> wrote:

>
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/29/technology/29wikipedia.html?_r=1&ref=business&oref=slogin
>
> Wikipedia, the unreliable source for students,
> journalists, and US courts.

A little deceptive subject as compared to the article.  One
might say lacking NPOV.  The only citations holding up seem
to be for defining things like beverage and booty music.

January 29, 2007
Courts Turn to Wikipedia, but Selectively
By NOAM COHEN

"The reaction from the court above her, the United States
Court of Federal Claims, was direct: the materials ?culled
from the Internet do not ? at least on their face ? meet?
standards of reliability."

?Wikipedia is a terrific resource,? said Judge Richard A.
Posner ... But, he added: ?It wouldn?t be right to use it
in a critical issue.?

"... currently a visiting professor at Harvard Law School.
?I love Wikipedia, but I don?t think it is yet time to cite
it in judicial decisions,? he said, adding that ?it doesn?t
have quality control?"

"... Wikipedia is best used for ?soft facts? that are not
central to the reasoning of a decision."

~~Pro-Lick
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/User:Halliburton_Shill
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Pro-Lick
http://www.wikiality.com/User:Pro-Lick (now a Wikia supported site)

--spam may follow--

____________________________________________________________________________________
The fish are biting.
Get more visitors on your site using Yahoo! Search Marketing.
http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/arp/sponsoredsearch_v2.php


from_name: Rajesh Olafson

subject: [Wikitech-l] Removing "Disclaimers" link from footer

body:
Hello,

How can I remove the "Disclaimers" link in the footer? I can't find any
reference to it in the LocalSettings.php file.

Thank you.


from_name: Simetrical

subject: [Wikitech-l] Major flaws of Mediawiki in mutilingual wikis

body:
First of all, in general, there will always be a risk of breaking
unusual stuff with our development model, because the testing phase
depends on developers noticing stuff in their local copies.  This not
only is kind of shallow, it also totally ignores some options that
might be very important to some wikis.  Particularly relevant to this
is that I assume every developer's local wiki is in their preferred
language, and since they're the only user, it seems likely that they
wouldn't have a different language from the default.  Maybe someone
runs a wiki with the content language different from their user
language, but I at least don't (right now!).

A few things I'd like to comment on.

On 1/30/07, Daniel Arnold <arnomane at gmx.de> wrote:
> The Monobook skin hardcodes first letter lower case for certain UI-messages
> (CSS: .portlet h5, .portlet h6). This is a totally bad idea considering
> languages that use upper case a lot in order to differentiate different words
> and meanings. German is probably the most common example for such a language.
> As long as you use a monolingual (German) wiki a hackish solution works; see
> MediaWiki:Monobook.css/de in your wiki of choice for the CSS code. As CSS
> files can't be (and shouldn't need to be) localisable using the sub page
> style the solution doesn't work in mutilingual wikis as now people of all
> other languages complain that their interface strings are upper case, since
> it seems to be "good style" starting every interface string affected by
> the  ".portlet h5, .portlet h6"-rule with upper case and later forcing it
> again to lower case. So the solution is: Drop the forced lower case in
> Monobook and if you don't like your UI strings starting with upper case in
> your language of choice make these strings lower case right from the start in
> vanilla MediaWiki. There is no other good solution.

Perhaps.  The problem is that your solution affects other skins as
well.  It would be possible to add classes for the content and
interface languages to body, but that won't necessarily work if some
of the relevant messages are inheriting from some other language.  I'm
not sure how to best deal with this.

> Interface string problems:
> * Above interface strings were already covered a bit. There is a second
> problem with link targets pointing into nowhere. Vanilla Mediawiki strings
> contain hardcoded localised link targets. For example have a look at
> MediaWiki:Blockedtext (if you want to get all (?) affected messages grep for
> {{ns:project}}). Well again in monolingual wikis no problem. These linked
> pages are supposed to exist but now consider a multilingual wiki... People
> using $non-default-language get pointed into nowhere and as we have quite a
> lot languages supported in Mediawiki this means a lot of pages you'd need to
> create in previous or if you don't wat that touching a huge number of
> interface strings. So in vanilla Mediawiki please do not hardcode any wiki
> page in message strings. . . .

Note that English-language special page names will work on wikis in
any language.  However, that's probably bad to rely upon from an
interface perspective, because some poor Chinese user or whatnot will
see a bunch of Latin gibberish as the link target, I guess.  Perhaps
it would be ideal if all special-page names were universal, assuming
that causes no conflicts.  Then everyone could see the special page
names in their own language in the interface.

> * Furthermore there is a big inherent communication problem with interface
> related changes in mutilingual wikis. If you changed an let us say legal
> message string in the default language people using another language won't
> notice it. Currently you'd need to overwrite every language-code sub page by
> hand in order to make people aware of the change (more than 80 edits needed
> for just one single message in order to cover every supported language). This
> specific problem has been covered as well by
> http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8188 and is a severe
> showstopper to the success of projects like Wikimedia Commons. Several
> solution ideas and solution-side-effect problems have been discussed in this
> bug (my proposed solution with the changed message string resolution order
> would work now much better, as default messages are now deleted in mediawiki
> namespace).

I've already commented there, of course.

> All these problems are currently big problems for multilingual wikis but can
> be solved in Mediawiki without need for some revolutionary magic code mix-up,
> just step by step with fairly small code changes. Fixig these issues would be
> a great leap forward for multilingual wikis.
>
> You'd help some struggeling Wikimedia wikis a lot.

I agree, most of these wouldn't be terribly difficult to do and would
be a big help.  Maybe I'll keep them (at least the easier ones :) ) in
mind for some rainy day in the future.


body:
On 1/30/07, Rajesh Olafson <rolafson at gmail.com> wrote:
> How can I remove the "Disclaimers" link in the footer?

Change the MediaWiki:Disclaimers message to the single character '-'
(i.e., a hyphen).


subject: [Wikitech-l] Our IP was blocked by mistake

body:
On 30/01/07, Webmaster <webmaster at tiosam.com> wrote:

> You are probably talking about some other mirror. No faked User-Agent string
> here. If I wanted to hide something, I'd use a proxy. Ebaita.com and
> enciclopedia.tiosam.com share the same cache in the same server, with more
> than 200 thousand cached pages, as you can see when you google
> "site:enciclopedia.tiosam.com". As pages are cached for 30 days from the
> date they are requested, you can easily verify that the pages are being
> served by us.

If you're just caching a regular snapshot, what's wrong with the
database dumps which are created specifically to make a regular
snapshot available?

- d.


body:
On 1/30/07, Andre Engels <andreengels at gmail.com> wrote:
> Can't you just change it text (in [[MediaWiki:Disclaimer]] to empty? Or does
> that do bad with the layout of this bottom part?

Empty messages are currently treated as nonexistent, so the default
message is used.

Why is this anyway?  Why can't deleted = nonexistent, empty = empty?
It would be a good bit simpler.


from_name: Brion Vibber

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

Simetrical wrote:
> First of all, in general, there will always be a risk of breaking
> unusual stuff with our development model, because the testing phase
> depends on developers noticing stuff in their local copies.  This not
> only is kind of shallow, it also totally ignores some options that
> might be very important to some wikis.

Note that we can't really test things that *we don't know exist*; when
people rely on unintended interactions and side-effects they may break. ;)

- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)
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Version: GnuPG v1.4.2.2 (Darwin)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFFv5e5wRnhpk1wk44RAh9hAJ4j2tG9GmdrBP10w0hklOGXKKWUsgCeJlcF
fFhLOuwoqpYwENtBKmhb7uY=
=FUnn
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


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

Daniel Arnold wrote:
[snip]
> In the past MediaWiki was changed several times without checking back wether
> the change affects language presentation in multilingual wikis:
> * One sudden change for example was that "MediaWiki:Monobook.js" stopped from
> being localisable via MediaWiki:Monobook.js/$ISO-Language-code.

That was a bug! Don't rely on unintended bugs -- and if they do break,
let us know. We can't read minds and might not know that you're using
the bug. ;)

> The interface points to several internal pages

<very long issue of some kind>

Can you summarize this? It's a page long and has no paragraph breaks.

<many other issues>

Can you treat these in separate mails perhaps so they can be discussed
individually? A big megathread is not easy to read or contribute to.

- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)
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Version: GnuPG v1.4.2.2 (Darwin)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFFv5inwRnhpk1wk44RAt7IAKC8Tr1fm+AWlduXgfYhTSA4vrBqyQCfZVDb
cO76LUADLaek9PWjChYhuDs=
=MUW8
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


body:
On 1/30/07, Daniel Arnold <arnomane at gmx.de> wrote:
>
> On Tuesday 30 January 2007 19:53:50 Rajesh Olafson wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > How can I remove the "Disclaimers" link in the footer? I can't find any
> > reference to it in the LocalSettings.php file.
>
> Write in MediaWiki:Disclaimers just the following character (and remove
> everything else):
> -

Excellent.

Thank you all.

That's it. The string will disapear in the interface. This works with every
> UI
> string.
>
> Cheers,
> Arnomane
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


from_name: Rob Church

body:
On 30/01/07, Webmaster <webmaster at tiosam.com> wrote:
> Where can we find them?
> Thanks

http://download.wikimedia.org

In general, we discourage people remote loading content from our
sites, in part because it causes extra load on our servers which
hasn't come from one of our direct users, and in part because a vast
number of such sites end up violating one or more of the terms of the
content licence, usually the attribution side of things.

We provide regular database dumps to make the information freely
available in a manner that is friendlier to our servers, and that is
usually easier to process and import - it's much more convenient for
both parties to import all the revision text at once, rather than
crawling for it.

Even a "periodic cache update" is not particularly acceptable, as it
implies a burst of load, such as the one Tim mentioned. We have the
logs, we know what goes on.

Rob Church


from_name: Keitei

subject: [WikiEN-l] Freedom of Speech in WP

body:
On Jan 30, 2007, at 14:27, Thomas Dalton wrote:

>> I bring this up because, when I first came to WP, the one policy I
>> found
>> most disturbing was the one concerning ?incivility?. Most
>> especially the
>> practice of banning (punishing) members of the WP community for
>> using words
>> and phrases considered by whoever made up the policy to be
>> ?offensive?.
>> This, to me, made WP free in every thing but speech.
>
> You misunderstand the policy. It's not about words, it's about
> behaviour. Using a particular word is not, in itself, incivil. It's
> what use you put the word to that is important, not what word it is.
> You can be incivil without cursing, and you can curse without being
> incivil - they are completely independent.

In the context of the news story he supplied, I think the point is
not to go, "OMG WIKIPEDIA IS NOT LIKE THAT," but instead to consider
the inherently "offensive" nature of certain words and whether the
mindset of "some words are so offensive that nobody should be allowed
to say them" has permeated our culture. Also, where does one draw the
line? "Nigger" has been rendered inoffensive in limited contexts, but
what of other racial epithets? Where and why does one draw the line?

I think that Wikipedians have enough common sense to recognize that
words are independent of their intentions. However, some are more
sensitive about racial epithets or even references to race. While we
strive to be collegial, slang certainly creeps into talk page and
user talk pages. If one were of the mindset that some words are just
so divisive that they shouldn't be used, how would one factor in
slang use? Or would one just chalk it up to "they think it's slang,
but they're actually racist"?

While WP:CIVIL does not say that the use of certain words merits a
ban, I do see accusations flying left and right due to certain words
in mediation and arbitration cases from time to time. So where is
community feeling? Certain words shouldn't be used, but it's far too
subjective for policy and better for a lot of people to object first?
Do the loudest objectors win? (Well, they will, but do we want them to?)

I think it's an interesting topic, certainly not something which
should be dismissed as a misunderstanding of policy.
--keitei


from_name: Webmaster

body:
Google indexes and caches around 20,000 pages a day from our website, which I consider a small to medium to volume/traffic website. They do offer an option for slower indexing speed if the load hurts the server, though. However, we all know Google indexing and caching our pages is a necessary evil. Our site? Not so much :D

-----Original Message-----
From: wikitech-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikitech-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Mark Williamson
Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2007 2:42 PM
To: Wikimedia developers
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] FW: Our IP was blocked by mistake

No -- I don't know the particulars, but I imagine pages are not cached by Google in a single burst that puts such a huge load on the server, if this were the case most large sites would have blocked Google (myspace, livejournal, ebay) and it would be much less useful.

Mark

On 30/01/07, Webmaster <webmaster at tiosam.com> wrote:
>
>
> Just something that came to my mind...
> Google caches the wikipedia pages just like we were doing. Are you blocking Google as well?
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Webmaster [mailto:webmaster at tiosam.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2007 12:27 PM
> To: 'Wikimedia developers'
> Subject: RE: [Wikitech-l] Our IP was blocked by mistake
>
> Thanks. That explains it. Also, the IP shown is not enciclopedia.tiosam.com nor ebaita.com: it is www.tiosam.com where I just included the English version a couple of weeks ago (http://www.tiosam.com/Ingles/encyclopedia ). The load was probably google indexing the pages in English, not what we already have cached for the Portuguese version.
> Anyway, I apologize for my ignorance. I'm downloading the dump and will start coding as soon as I find out how it works. Thanks guys.
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: wikitech-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org
> [mailto:wikitech-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Ivan
> Krstic
> Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2007 11:40 AM
> To: Wikimedia developers
> Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Our IP was blocked by mistake
>
> Tim Starling wrote:
> > No faked user agent string? So I suppose you were using "save as" in IE?
> > Mozilla/4.0%20(compatible;%20MSIE%207.0;%20Windows%20NT%205.2;%20.NE
> > T%
> > 20CLR%201.1.4322;%20.NET%20CLR%202.0.50727)
>
> No, he was using the Microsoft.XMLHTTP object from ASP, as he indicated in a previous message. Said object identifies itself as MSIE and gives the .NET CLR version in the User-Agent.
>
> --
> Ivan Krsti? <krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> | GPG: 0x147C722D
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

--
Refije dirije lanm? yo paske nou posede pw?p bato.
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

body:
Delirium schreef:
> Gerard Meijssen wrote:
>
>> I do not have a problem to be a lonely voice that identifies
>> discrimination where I see it. I prefer to be seen as someone who does
>> make himself heard than someone who mutters in the background.
>>
>>
> You mean you don't have a problem with poisoning debate by attacking
> good-faith Wikipedia contributors as bigots.  Welcome to the killfile.
>
> -Mark
Hoi,
Even when people propose thing with the best of intentions, it does not
make that what they propose is right. It is exactly when you do not
listen to arguments any more that bigotry is shown. The problem for me
is that the very basis of what is proposed is wrong. At issue is that
people want a policy that insists on people renaming themselves for
their convenience. You can ASK people to do this, but you can not INSIST
on this. This is the fine line that we walk.

Given how bigot is defined: "A bigot is a prejudiced person who is
intolerant of any opinions differing from their own. " I might qualify
because I am prejudiced because to me this /is /discrimination pure and
simple and I do have little tolerance for that. Given that you
apparently use use a killfile, you may indeed nominate yourself as well.
Then again, when you indeed do use a killfile, you may never learn that
you do.

Thanks,
    GerardM


subject: [Foundation-l] Fair Use (again)

references:
<45BCAEB4.70606@netzero.net>	<45BCF1E6.9080203@wolfmountaingroup.com>
	<45BD03F1.3020000@netzero.net>

body:
Robert Scott Horning wrote:

>I am being told that the one and only way that these images are going to
>possibly be removed from Wikipedia is through a WP:OFFICE action.  I
>think that is one of the most ridiculous sentiments ever made.  For
>example, see the "disclaimer" that was thrown onto this image:
>
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image%3AHand_with_Reflecting_Sphere.jpg
>
>It basically says that if M.C. Escher objects (BTW, he is dead.... so I
>guess that is his estate here), then he should contact the "Designated
>agent" of Wikipedia (aka Brad) in order to remove this image.
>
>IMHO, this disclaimer by itself is almost proof by itself that this
>particular image is a copyright violation, and I would argue that the
>other 40,000 images also in [[en:w:Category:Fair use images of art]]
>also are very likly to be copyright violations.  That is not a trivial
>number of images to be removing.
>
I looked at that "disclaimer", and found it excessively
confrontational.  I was tempted to at least edit off the rough edges,
but though it better not to meddle with what you are trying to do..  I
saw no mention of WP:OFFICE.

Ec


subject: [Foundation-l] Fair Use (again)


from_name: SonOfYoungwood at aol.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] Consensus vs "groupthink"

body:
In a message dated 1/29/2007 8:28:34 AM Central Standard Time,
guy.chapman at spamcop.net writes:

>Seeing how a few detractors here have been throwing around the  term
>"groupthink" I have to ask, is there any real difference between  the
>two or does it depend on which side of a "consensus" decision you  are
>on? That is, if an article you wrote/are involved with survives  AFD,
>then it's "consensus", if it gets deleted, it's "groupthink".  Of
>course it's the other way around if it's an article you don't  like.

Consensus is where people discuss and agree on something, usually  after
hearing all options. Consensus is often modified. On the other hand,  groupthink
is where people shut themselves off from minority ideas or  ammendments,
because they believe everything is already "just fine". In other  words: consensus
means constantly being open to new discussions and change,  whereas groupthink
shuts the valve for new ideas. And if you don't comply to  groupthink, you are
shut out instead of looked on respectfully.

Most companies fail because of groupthink.

| Tyler | Zorin Deckiller |
| Wikipedia Administrator |  Former SWU member |
| _http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Deckiller_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Deckiller)   |
| _http://www.myspace.com/redsectora_ (http://www.myspace.com/redsectora)   |


from_name: Alex Powell

subject: [Wikitech-l] Performance of loading custom style sheets

body:
Hi,

No not that. I have a 2 GHz core duo at both ends, runnning no AV software
(!), or anything else. The machine is "sufficient". Wiki pages without those
two (stripped them out) take 180millis by Firebug.

Testing against the wikipedia, it took 200millis on first hit, and then 16
millis on subsiqent. I suspect the squid caches had it in their mits at that
point. The page is pulled with some unusual parameters, I was wondering if
that was pushing the code down an unusual path...

Alex

On 1/29/07, Ashar Voultoiz <hashar at altern.org> wrote:
>
> Alex Powell wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > Mediawiki's performance has improved substantially over the versions.
> and
> > 1.9 seems the snappiest yet. When I upgraded I found I had some slow
> stuff
> > being loaded in addition to MW. Using Firebug beta (v cool BTW) I
> noticed
> > something odd. The index.php for the page loads blindingly fast, but the
> > following:
> >
> > /index.php?title=-&action=raw&smaxage=0&gen=js<
> http://www.exscien.com/internal/index.php?title=-&action=raw&smaxage=0&gen=js
> >
> > /index.php?title=MediaWiki:
> Common.css&usemsgcache=yes&action=raw&ctype=text/css&smaxage=18000<
> http://www.exscien.com/internal/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Common.css&usemsgcache=yes&action=raw&ctype=text/css&smaxage=18000
> >
> > /index.php?title=User:Alexp/monobook.css&action=raw&ctype=text/css<
> http://www.exscien.com/internal/index.php?title=User:Alexp/monobook.css&action=raw&ctype=text/css
> >
> >
> /index.php?title=-&action=raw&gen=css&maxage=18000&smaxage=0&ts=20070129214411<
> http://www.exscien.com/internal/index.php?title=-&action=raw&gen=css&maxage=18000&smaxage=0&ts=20070129214411
> >
> >
> > ... seem to run very slowly (one was taking 2 seconds and each take over
> > .5secs, on a page that took 16ms to render). What can be done to speed
> them?
> > As far as I can see they are just simple js direct from the DB. Am I
> missing
> > something or is there a performance hole there?
>
> Get a better computer. Seriously, I suspect firebug is timing the
> firefox rendering time (for css) and execution time (for js). Try using
> wget, it will be faster (or disable javascript).
>
>
> --
> Ashar Voultoiz - WP++++
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Hashar
> http://www.livejournal.com/community/wikitech/
> IM: hashar at jabber.org  ICQ: 15325080
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


body:
Thanks, Eike. I brought your reply back to the list so it can benefit other people. I hope you don't mind.
And you are right - I am not Google, unfortunately.
Tony

-----Original Message-----
From: Eike Frost [mailto:ei at kefro.st]
Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2007 2:28 PM
To: Webmaster
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] FW: Our IP was blocked by mistake

Hi,

note that I don't speak for Wikimedia.

On Tuesday 30 January 2007 18:41, Webmaster wrote:
> Just something that came to my mind...
> Google caches the wikipedia pages just like we were doing. Are you
> blocking Google as well?

You are not Google. You are not a search engine. Even if you were, Google takes great care not to overwhelm the servers it is crawling, and Google does not "frame" Wikipedia in ads when caching it. You're going to be hard-pressed to find ads on
http://google.com/search?q=cache:-L-LvI3XPXcJ:en.wikipedia.org/+wikipedia&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2
for instance. So no, Google is not doing what you are doing.

Wikipedia's license allows you to use the content in that manner. This does not mean it also allows you to overwhelm and/or abuse the servers, especially since you are not the ones paying for them. The downloadable wikimedia database snapshots have been there for years for precisely the purpose you are using Wikipedia's content for.

So please use that instead of trying to argue that you should be allowed to crawl all of Wikipedia with an abusive ASP script where the benefit to Wikipedia is pretty much exactly nil (And I categorize the script as abusive purely by what has been said on the mailinglist). You're not paying for the content and are making plenty of money plastering ads all over it, the least you can do is do research on how to do that without harming Wikipedia's infrastructure and using the resources made available for precisely those purposes. If your website ever becomes as important as Google's then maybe you can ask Wikimedia to generate special files especially for you (like they do for Yahoo) of pay them to do so.

My $0.02, anyway. And the dumps are really nice to work with, too. I've used them in the past :-)

--Eike


from_name: David Goodman

subject: [Wikipedia-l] school articles : enough

body:
We might try having specific guideline for what is *not* enough:
Infobox data:
 | name = Bronx High School of Science
| native_name =
| logo =
| motto =
| established = (unless pre 1880 )
| city =
| state =
| province =
| country = USA
| campus =
| type =
| affiliation =
| president =
| principal =
| headmaster =
| rector =
| dean =
| founder =
| chaplain =
| chairman =
| head_label =
| head =
| faculty =
| students =
| enrollment =
|  grades =
| address =
| district =
| oversight =
| accreditation =
| mascot =
| colors =
| newspaper =
| yearbook =
| Phone
| Email
| admission
|Tuition
| website =
| picture =
    as well as:
size of building
date of building unless pre-1880
names of teaches and coaches
names of sports & athletic teams (unless unusual for type)
names of other groups (unless unusual for type)
typical daily schedule:
typical pattern of courses:
names & masters of houses or other divisions
subjects offered (unless unusual for type)
 events held nearby not connected with school

(unless  any of these should be exceptionally notable, which
  still gives some wiggle-room--etc.
Problem areas, % going to further ed, SAT scores, Advanced Placement
Classes rank in district,
--all these are notable above some level, but the level will depend on
area and type

-----
I've tested it on public & private high schools in NYC & suburbs: it
fits, except of course that some schools I know to be notable have not
taken the opportunity to put anything about their notability in the
article.

(and some notable ones have inserted long paragraphs about their
perfectly ordinary parking lots--we will also need a std for material
that does not belong.

How does it work elsewhere?

On 1/30/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 29/01/07, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > What can we really do to contact the nebulous "community", though?
> > David and I and others have been bitching and moaning about this at
> > the slightest provocation for six months, but the project is big and
> > you can only chat to so many people. Short of putting out quarterly
> > Signpost announcements saying "The following seven areas of coverage
> > are the ones that piss our readers off the most. Please make them less
> > crap, we'd all live happier lives", I'm not sure we can easily do much
> > about it.
>
>
> A weekly OTRS report in the Signpost would be a really good idea,
> actually, and would probably help a lot.
>
>
> > A common but less worrying issue is a simple lack of context and scale
> > - many of these articles are seized by one enterprising student or
> > another to write about the school as they see it; these usually aren't
> > *so* bad, but they tend to have a very blurred line as to what is and
> > isn't appropriate material, which then leads into articles that the
> > school is understandably annoyed by the existence of simply because,
> > well, they're linked with this amateurish, hit-and-miss, erratically
> > accurate and conceptually blinkered article. (These are often the
> > hardest to deal with, in many ways)
>
>
> The main problem with our school articles is that they're largely
> crap, and therefore "non-notable" has been used as the excuse to
> delete them.
>
>
> - d.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.


from_name: Rob Smith

subject: [WikiEN-l] Consensus vs "groupthink"

body:
The common thread throughout groupthink is that it leads to colossal errors
and failure in a project.  If I may politely present a critical view, I
noticed the symptoms the day I registered my account, 23 April 2005.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink#Symptoms_of_groupthink

nobs01


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] Freedom of Speech in WP

body:
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Marc Riddell [mailto:michaeldavid86 at comcast.net]
>Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2007 08:11 AM
>To: 'Wiki-EN-L (new topics)'
>Subject: [WikiEN-l] Freedom of Speech in WP
>
>Hello,
>
>Recently the Mayor of a small town in Texas tried to pass an ordinance
>making it against the law to use the ?N? word within the city limits. Fine:
>$500 for each offense.
>
>He went into this believing the ordinance?s passage would be a slam dunk ?
>it wasn?t. The vast majority of the multiracial citizens of the town
>protested to such a degree that he finally gave up and abandoned the idea.
>The citizens' basic argument: what word is next?
>
>I bring this up because, when I first came to WP, the one policy I found
>most disturbing was the one concerning ?incivility?. Most especially the
>practice of banning (punishing) members of the WP community for using words
>and phrases considered by whoever made up the policy to be ?offensive?.
>This, to me, made WP free in every thing but speech.
>
>I know this issue has been touched upon several times in this Mailing List
>just since I started participating in it, but I wanted to speak directly to
>the policy and its practice at this time.
>
>If a particular word or phrase offends you hit delete and move on.
>
>What are your thoughts and feelings about this?
>
>Marc Riddell

Absent the policy, things would be much nastier than they are. This is the general pattern which occurs in other venues which do not have the minimal controls we have. The result is a wild west atmosphere where tough talk rules, in a sense. We have enough of that now.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Freedom of Speech in WP

body:
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Marc Riddell [mailto:michaeldavid86 at comcast.net]
>Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2007 08:11 AM
>To: 'Wiki-EN-L (new topics)'
>Subject: [WikiEN-l] Freedom of Speech in WP
>
>Hello,
>
>Recently the Mayor of a small town in Texas tried to pass an ordinance
>making it against the law to use the ?N? word within the city limits. Fine:
>$500 for each offense.
>
>He went into this believing the ordinance?s passage would be a slam dunk ?
>it wasn?t. The vast majority of the multiracial citizens of the town
>protested to such a degree that he finally gave up and abandoned the idea.
>The citizens' basic argument: what word is next?
>
>I bring this up because, when I first came to WP, the one policy I found
>most disturbing was the one concerning ?incivility?. Most especially the
>practice of banning (punishing) members of the WP community for using words
>and phrases considered by whoever made up the policy to be ?offensive?.
>This, to me, made WP free in every thing but speech.
>
>I know this issue has been touched upon several times in this Mailing List
>just since I started participating in it, but I wanted to speak directly to
>the policy and its practice at this time.
>
>If a particular word or phrase offends you hit delete and move on.
>
>What are your thoughts and feelings about this?
>
>Marc Riddell


body:
OK - so I got the Disclaimers label fixed. Thank you.

But how do I change another footer string: "Content is available under ..."

I see that the languages/Messages*.php contains this string. However, when I
change it for English [Messages.php] I see no change in the UI.

Also, when I change my language preference to say French, then this string
remains the same, while other footer/nav strings appear translated.... ?

Help would be appreciated.

On 1/30/07, Daniel Arnold <arnomane at gmx.de> wrote:
>
> On Tuesday 30 January 2007 19:53:50 Rajesh Olafson wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > How can I remove the "Disclaimers" link in the footer? I can't find any
> > reference to it in the LocalSettings.php file.
>
> Write in MediaWiki:Disclaimers just the following character (and remove
> everything else):
> -
>
> That's it. The string will disapear in the interface. This works with
> every UI
> string.
>
> Cheers,
> Arnomane
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


body:
Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com> wrote:

> inherently
> | unstable source such as Wikipedia can undermine the
> foundation not only
> | of the judicial opinion in which Wikipedia is cited,
> but of the future
> | briefs and judicial opinions which in turn use that
> judicial opinion as
> | authority".
> `----
>
> Oy! As if we didn't have a nice system to link to
> specific revisions -
> which is more than most websites can claim - and don't
> mention it *all the time*.

Yeah, given that it has reasonably obvious citation and
perm-link tools, the inherently unstable is just naive and
not related to quality or reliability.  There's no shortage
of books or magazines providing a stable source of crap.
Maybe the guy is thinking more along a technical risk, such
as the storage system being compromised and modified.

~~Pro-Lick
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/User:Halliburton_Shill
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Pro-Lick
http://www.wikiality.com/User:Pro-Lick (now a Wikia supported site)

--spam may follow--

____________________________________________________________________________________
Never miss an email again!
Yahoo! Toolbar alerts you the instant new Mail arrives.
http://tools.search.yahoo.com/toolbar/features/mail/


from_name: Stan Shebs

subject: [WikiEN-l] Freedom of Speech in WP

body:
Marc Riddell wrote:
> But, in the context of WP, how does this apply? How does what two people say
> to each other on their personal Talk Pages disrupt the Project? For that
> matter, in that two-way conversation, if it is one person flailing at the
> other, can?t that other person simply not respond? How does what one person
> writes in this Mailing List disrupt the progress of an issue being
> discussed? Simply ignore it ? or, as computer challenged as I am, even I
> know where the DELETE button is :-).
>
I suppose if someone had a note on their user page - "no need to be
civil here", then it could be an exception to the general rule. I don't
think there are very many people in that category though. One of the
interesting aspects of online communication is that body language and
nonverbal cues seem to be more important than anybody ever realized -
misunderstandings in online interaction happen far more, and are more
likely to spiral out of control. For instance, somebody could be saying
something nasty-sounding in person, but they're smiling and relaxed
while saying it, so you know they're probably leading up to a sardonic
joke. Satire without a smiley face is routinely taken seriously, no
matter how well-written. People who are good editors, but take other
people's statement to heart, can get so upset that they no longer want
to work in WP, and that's certainly a loss to the project. So the
civility rule is partly about backing down to a level that reduces hurt
and misunderstandings across a broad range of individuals.

The civility rule is also for one's own self-protection - everything you
say online is publicly visible and recorded forever. I don't know about
other people, but I've had things I've written online quoted back at me
in job interviews - fortunately they were good things!

Stan


body:
On 1/30/07, Rajesh Olafson <rolafson at gmail.com> wrote:
> OK - so I got the Disclaimers label fixed. Thank you.
>
> But how do I change another footer string: "Content is available under ..."
>
> I see that the languages/Messages*.php contains this string. However, when I
> change it for English [Messages.php] I see no change in the UI.

Do not edit the Messages*.php files.  Edit the messages in-wiki as
described for the disclaimer link.  You can see a full list of
messages at the Special:Allmessages page.  Edits to Messages*.php will
be overwritten on upgrade and may not work in the first place.

> Also, when I change my language preference to say French, then this string
> remains the same, while other footer/nav strings appear translated.... ?

Exactly what should happen with customized messages and translations
is currently up in the air.  If a message is customized, the
customization may contain important information on local policy, for
instance, in which case it should be used instead of translated
defaults, but if it's just a typo or formatting issue, the default
translated message should be used.  As I recall, default translated
messages are currently used in preference to customized untranslated
messages.


from_name: Brianna Laugher

subject:
[Commons-l] Fwd: "Did you know?" ... The family tree of
	[[Category:Copyright statuses]] and our broken category system.

body:
On 30/01/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/29/07, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Instead of doing that, I think it would be more sensible to continue
> > the tradition of only putting the most specific cat that applies, and
> > adjusting the software to have an option to display subcategory items
> > into the current category (like "flatten" I think) when desired. (bug
> > 2725)
>
> I thought I provided some pretty clear examples of why flattening is no good.
> Is there a reason you ignored that point?
> :)

It works poorly if you expand all the way, and the higher up in the
tree you start, the worse it works. In my experience using
Duesentrieb's tool, it works quite well when you specify a low depth
(depth=1,2,3). Often 1 is appropriate.

As is obvious to anyone who works with categories on a regular basis,
several types of relationships are encoded in category relations (3
examples: is type of, is component of, is related to).

Simply using broad categories instead of narrow ones, as you suggest,
will not stop  unexpected results because not every category link is a
"is type of" which is what is needed for it to work.

some examples.
[[category:Hominidae]] is type of [[category:primates]] (I think all
TOL stuff would be like this)
[[category:wheels]] is component of [[category:automobiles]]
[[category:Culture, People, Geography, States, etc of Country X]] is
related to [[Category:Country X]].

I don't think you are suggesting we should stop including links like
these are you?

insert blah blah Semantic MediaWiki blah blah... until there is
something extra available to us to distinguish between itypeof and
isrelatedto category links, and the rest of them, the tree will ALWAYS
be "broken". That doesn't mean it's not useful in its current status
though. Ways to improve it are always welcome. But I am not certain
this will be one of them.

cheers
Brianna


body:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download

Wikipedia limits crawling to 1 page per second in its robots.txt

-----Original Message-----
From: wikitech-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikitech-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Mark Williamson
Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2007 2:42 PM
To: Wikimedia developers
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] FW: Our IP was blocked by mistake

No -- I don't know the particulars, but I imagine pages are not cached by Google in a single burst that puts such a huge load on the server, if this were the case most large sites would have blocked Google (myspace, livejournal, ebay) and it would be much less useful.

Mark

On 30/01/07, Webmaster <webmaster at tiosam.com> wrote:
>
>
> Just something that came to my mind...
> Google caches the wikipedia pages just like we were doing. Are you blocking Google as well?
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Webmaster [mailto:webmaster at tiosam.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2007 12:27 PM
> To: 'Wikimedia developers'
> Subject: RE: [Wikitech-l] Our IP was blocked by mistake
>
> Thanks. That explains it. Also, the IP shown is not enciclopedia.tiosam.com nor ebaita.com: it is www.tiosam.com where I just included the English version a couple of weeks ago (http://www.tiosam.com/Ingles/encyclopedia ). The load was probably google indexing the pages in English, not what we already have cached for the Portuguese version.
> Anyway, I apologize for my ignorance. I'm downloading the dump and will start coding as soon as I find out how it works. Thanks guys.
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: wikitech-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org
> [mailto:wikitech-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Ivan
> Krstic
> Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2007 11:40 AM
> To: Wikimedia developers
> Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Our IP was blocked by mistake
>
> Tim Starling wrote:
> > No faked user agent string? So I suppose you were using "save as" in IE?
> > Mozilla/4.0%20(compatible;%20MSIE%207.0;%20Windows%20NT%205.2;%20.NE
> > T%
> > 20CLR%201.1.4322;%20.NET%20CLR%202.0.50727)
>
> No, he was using the Microsoft.XMLHTTP object from ASP, as he indicated in a previous message. Said object identifies itself as MSIE and gives the .NET CLR version in the User-Agent.
>
> --
> Ivan Krsti? <krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> | GPG: 0x147C722D
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

--
Refije dirije lanm? yo paske nou posede pw?p bato.
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


body:
I see...
Can you please unblock our IP so we can download the dumps directly to the
server? I removed the updating part of the script already.

-----Original Message-----
From: wikitech-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikitech-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Tim Starling
Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2007 2:56 PM
To: wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] FW: Our IP was blocked by mistake

Webmaster wrote:
>
> Just something that came to my mind...
> Google caches the wikipedia pages just like we were doing. Are you
blocking Google as well?

Of course not, it's our biggest referrer.

-- Tim Starling

_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


from_name: Marc Riddell

subject: [WikiEN-l] Freedom of Speech in WP

body:
on 1/30/07 2:24 PM, Thomas Dalton at thomas.dalton at gmail.com wrote:

> You don't have the right to vanish, you have the right to leave.
> Vanishing is something we allow out of courtesy, and only where
> practical.

:-)

Marc


from_name: charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] Freedom of Speech in WP

body:
Marc Riddell wrote

> I bring this up because, when I first came to WP, the one policy I found
> most disturbing was the one concerning ?incivility?.

<snip>

> If a particular word or phrase offends you hit delete and move on.
>
> What are your thoughts and feelings about this?

That I would like to treat Wikipedians I encounter on the site as colleagues, and to be so treated by them. Is there any particular epithet or slur you feel ought to be allowed, as helping in this?

Bear in mind also that it is not possible to assume that (American) colloquialisms will be taken as intended.

Charles

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body:
aha! Now I get it.

Thank you for your time.

On 1/30/07, Simetrical <Simetrical+wikitech at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 1/30/07, Rajesh Olafson <rolafson at gmail.com> wrote:
> > OK - so I got the Disclaimers label fixed. Thank you.
> >
> > But how do I change another footer string: "Content is available under
> ..."
> >
> > I see that the languages/Messages*.php contains this string. However,
> when I
> > change it for English [Messages.php] I see no change in the UI.
>
> Do not edit the Messages*.php files.  Edit the messages in-wiki as
> described for the disclaimer link.  You can see a full list of
> messages at the Special:Allmessages page.  Edits to Messages*.php will
> be overwritten on upgrade and may not work in the first place.
>
> > Also, when I change my language preference to say French, then this
> string
> > remains the same, while other footer/nav strings appear translated.... ?
>
> Exactly what should happen with customized messages and translations
> is currently up in the air.  If a message is customized, the
> customization may contain important information on local policy, for
> instance, in which case it should be used instead of translated
> defaults, but if it's just a typo or formatting issue, the default
> translated message should be used.  As I recall, default translated
> messages are currently used in preference to customized untranslated
> messages.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Freedom of Speech in WP

body:
on 1/30/07 2:27 PM, Thomas Dalton at thomas.dalton at gmail.com wrote:

> It's not about words, it's about
> behaviour. Using a particular word is not, in itself, incivil. It's
> what use you put the word to that is important, not what word it is.

This is very slippery reasoning. If this person were speaking to you in
person would you look at it the same way?

Marc


from_name: Tim Starling

body:
Webmaster wrote:
> Tim,
> You are probably talking about some other mirror. No faked User-Agent string
> here. If I wanted to hide something, I'd use a proxy. Ebaita.com and
> enciclopedia.tiosam.com share the same cache in the same server, with more
> than 200 thousand cached pages, as you can see when you google
> "site:enciclopedia.tiosam.com". As pages are cached for 30 days from the
> date they are requested, you can easily verify that the pages are being
> served by us.
> Tony

No faked user agent string? So I suppose you were using "save as" in IE?

sq25.wikimedia.org 8575224 1169671516.598 1 65.111.167.50 TCP_MISS/200
13139 GET http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Maria_delle_Grazieaction=edit
SIBLING_HIT/66.230.200.134 text/html - -
Mozilla/4.0%20(compatible;%20MSIE%207.0;%20Windows%20NT%205.2;%20.NET%20CLR%201.1.4322;%20.NET%20CLR%202.0.50727)

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Gwern Branwen

body:
Cheney Shill <halliburton_shill at yahoo.com> writes:
> Keitei <nihthraefn at gmail.com> wrote:
> http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/29/technology/29wikipedia.html?_r=1&ref=business&oref=slogin>
>> Wikipedia, the unreliable source for students,
>> journalists, and US courts.
>
> A little deceptive subject as compared to the article.  One
> might say lacking NPOV.  The only citations holding up seem
> to be for defining things like beverage and booty music.
>
> January 29, 2007
> Courts Turn to Wikipedia, but Selectively
> By NOAM COHEN
>
> "The reaction from the court above her, the United States
> Court of Federal Claims, was direct: the materials ?culled
> from the Internet do not ? at least on their face ? meet?
> standards of reliability."
>
> ?Wikipedia is a terrific resource,? said Judge Richard A.
> Posner ... But, he added: ?It wouldn?t be right to use it
> in a critical issue.?
>
> "... currently a visiting professor at Harvard Law School.
> ?I love Wikipedia, but I don?t think it is yet time to cite
> it in judicial decisions,? he said, adding that ?it doesn?t
> have quality control?"
>
> "... Wikipedia is best used for ?soft facts? that are not
> central to the reasoning of a decision."
>
> ~~Pro-Lick

That's not even the most annoying part. There's still the misconception
that Wikipedia is not stable enough:
,----
| In a recent letter to The New York Law Journal, Kenneth H. Ryesky, a tax
| lawyer who teaches at Queens College and Yeshiva University, took
| exception to the practice, writing that "citation of an inherently
| unstable source such as Wikipedia can undermine the foundation not only
| of the judicial opinion in which Wikipedia is cited, but of the future
| briefs and judicial opinions which in turn use that judicial opinion as
| authority".
`----

Oy! As if we didn't have a nice system to link to specific revisions -
which is more than most websites can claim - and don't mention it *all the time*.

--
Gwern
Inquiring minds want to know.


from_name: river at zedler.knams.wikimedia.org

subject: [Wikitech-l] live mirror report

body:
from someone on IRC not subscribed to the list:

< CiaranG> Is there a better place than the village pump to report a live content leecher for blocking? Here is a sample url: http://www.thinkingaustralia.com/thinking_australia/wikipedia/default.php?title=Special:RecentChanges

	- river.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Freedom of Speech in WP

body:
on 1/30/07 12:18 PM, Andrew Gray at shimgray at gmail.com wrote:

> The (conceptual) reasoning for a civility rule translates to:
>
> "This is a collaborative project. Civility is needed in order to work
> collaboratively with others. Not being civil rules out effective
> collaboration; ruling out effective collaboration means you're not
> working for the good of the project"
>
> Basically, if someone doesn't play nice, they're not helping the
> project - indeed, there's a good chance they're harming it, as a
> combative and offensive attitude drives off contributors faster than
> anything. And if they're not helping the project, well, please tell
> them to bugger off. (in as many words...)

WP and its various interaction pages is my first exposure to this type of
dialogue between and among persons. The whole of my past experience has
been, in person, face-to-face communication.

Yes, it?s all about context. I can see being in a meeting about a particular
issue, when two of the participants stray from the subject, and begin
hurling personal attacks at each other that has nothing to do with the
subject at hand. Their physical and verbal behavior is making it impossible
for anyone else to be heard, and is, in fact, very much getting in the way
of things. I can see turning to them and saying: ?If you?re going to insist
on that bullshit ? take it outside; it has no place here.?

But, in the context of WP, how does this apply? How does what two people say
to each other on their personal Talk Pages disrupt the Project? For that
matter, in that two-way conversation, if it is one person flailing at the
other, can?t that other person simply not respond? How does what one person
writes in this Mailing List disrupt the progress of an issue being
discussed? Simply ignore it ? or, as computer challenged as I am, even I
know where the DELETE button is :-).

The only reason words are ever banned is out of fear of the consequence of
their use.

Marc

--
The culture's gonna get us before the climate ever does.


from_name: George Herbert

subject: [WikiEN-l] Freedom of Speech in WP

body:
On 1/30/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
> on 1/30/07 7:00 PM, Stan Shebs at stanshebs at earthlink.net wrote:
>
> > People who are good editors, but take other
> > people's statement to heart, can get so upset that they no longer want
> > to work in WP, and that's certainly a loss to the project. So the
> > civility rule is partly about backing down to a level that reduces hurt
> > and misunderstandings across a broad range of individuals.
>
> Isn't this a rather paternalistic attitude? "We are censoring this for your
> protection" is the first reason given by powers that would be.

There's censorship, and then there's a social contract.

Civility should be about the social contract... we agree not to abuse
each other in the course of discussing things about which we may
disagree greatly.

If someone shows up who refuses to buy in to the social contract, then
we can ask them to behave or in extremis to leave.  No forum which is
a complete anarchy survives.

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