from_name: advert

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Blocked after making several edits - accused
	of	"vandalism"?!

body:
Kat,

Thank you for unblocking me. It's good to know that at least one admin has a sense of fairness here. It is very frustrating as a newbie to be told to jump right in and to "be bold!" with editing, but then to be blocked for not having known the rules. I wasn't even aware beforehand that there was a "neutral point of view" rule.

When I get a chance I'll try to read through the rules in order to understand how I can be allowed to make changes to the parts which I don't think are at all "neutral" in the entry as it was (even before I tried editing it).

-advert

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Kat Walsh [mailto:mindspillage at gmail.com]
> Sent: Monday, May 30, 2005, 4:41 PM
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Blocked after making several edits - accused of
> 	"vandalism"?!
>
> On 5/30/05, Sean Barrett <sean at epoptic.org> wrote:
> > advert stated for the record:
> >
> > > I would like to be unblocked and be allowed to add a feminist perspective
> to the entry which I edited. I don't think the entry as it stands is
> "neutral".
> >
> > Your edits were not vandalism, but they were not acceptable.  Stating as
> > a fact that "[p]ornography ... is the representation of the human body
> > or [[human sexual behaviour]] mainly from a male supremacist
> > perspective" is highly opinionated.  That statement represents an
> > extreme point of view that most editors and readers will not agree with
> > and will quickly edit away.
> >
> > Something along the lines of "many feminists feel that pornography
> > represents a male supremacist perspective" would be slightly better, but
> > would require a definition of "male supremacist perspective."
> >
> > Also, we are not interested in your personal definitions of
> > "pornography" and "erotica."  If those definitions were created
> > elsewhere, please provide references.
> >
> > You may want to suggest changes on the article's talk page and ask for
> > help in wording them so as to conform to the (obligatory) neutral point
> > of view.
>
> Looking at the page history and the block log, I am going to unblock
> this user. I don't think s/he was adequately warned, and we can't
> expect all newbies to know about restrictions on edit warring without
> being informed. (However, advert, you've now been informed: discuss
> big changes to contentious articles on talk, always, and more than 3
> reverts in one day will merit a 24-hour block; further advice will be
> left on user talk page.)
>
> I'm all for blocking deliberate vandals, but this appears to be
> editing made in good faith, just without knowledge of policy.
>
> -Kat
> [[User:Mindspillage]]
>
> --
> http://www.mindspillage.net *** IM: LucidWaking
> "There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily
> escaped the chronicler's mind."  --Douglas Adams
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

subject:
[WikiEN-l] And the bad faith continues from Wikipedia. ALL ADMINS
	are Rogue Admins

body:
> I am not going to swear at you, despite SlimVirgin's lies and David Gerard's
> profanity.
>
> But I hope you are happy. I now know why Wikipedia isn't worth anything.
> It's because Wikipedia policy isn't worth the electrons used to store it.
>
> All Wikipedia Admins ARE Rogue Admins.
>
David and profanity? Maybe I missed it. I can't keep up with all these emails.
What did he say?

--Mgm


list: wikitech-l

from_name: John Prieur

subject: [Wikitech-l] link to within referenced article wanted

body:
I would like wiki to have the capability to create a [[link]] to a specific point inside another (or the same) article.  This would be analogous to the HTML syntax as in...   href="www.somewhere#specificPointInside".  As a Wiki feature, this could support two ways to specify the #specificPointInside.
  (1) use a hidden anchor (as in HTML <a> tags),
or (2) use a construct similar to XPointer, but using notation such as == or * to denote nodes.  It would be great if this Wiki construct supported regular expressions and nesting.

For example,  [[javaArticle#==history.*/*[2]  ]], would mean:
 link to the 2nd bullet in the title starting with "history" of the javaArticle article.
  (Explanation:  the # means that the following is a link to a point inside the article.
   The "==history" refers to the wiki title construct.  The " .* " after hister is the regular expression code for "skip any number of characters to the end of the line."
   The "/" after that indicates that the following code is a narrowing navigation within the construct just seen on the left of the /.
   Finally, the "*[2]" means match the bullet "*" nodes and return the 2nd one found.
  )

This XPointer-like approach would make the links flexible and eliminate the need for a new article to edit an already-existing article just to put in a link to a point inside that article.  This feature would be useful when long articles contain a number of key facts in a subject that new articles on the subject would like to reference conveniently.

Thanks in advance for any comment such as (1) it's already available, (2) how to get such things implemented by the Wiki developers, or (3) how to become a Wiki developer and so be able to implement it yourself, (4) why its a terrible idea.

John2000


subject:
[WikiEN-l] And the bad faith continues from Wikipedia. ALL
	ADMINSare Rogue A

body:
There's what was it - 500-600 admins? Surely you can't accuse them all
of not caring about the rules? Sure, sometimes people get blocked by
mistake.

I once blocked someone (Sam Spade I think) for a 3RR violation.
Technically speaking I was wrong, but instead of calling me a liar,
Sam engaged in a civil and friendly discussion with me. He pointed out
the differences in the diffs and ended up temporarily not editing the
article in question after he was unblocked.

What I'm trying to say is that you will probably reach a lot more by
not calling ALL admins rogue and saying SlimVirgin is a liar.

--Mgm

On 5/31/05, Cranston Snord <wikipediaisstupid at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Isn't hypocrisy grand?
>
> "Anyone can edit" - but if Admins don't agree with your edits they will
> block you upon a whim.
>
> "If you believe the block is unwarranted email the one who blocked you" -
> which will of course be completely useless when you have an admin pushing a
> particular POV.
>
> "Or else you can email the Wikien-l mailing list" - except you really can't,
> because it's a clique of admins who couldn't care less about the rules, just
> slapping each other on the back for making sure they're the only ones in
> Wikipedia. And actually making complaints will get you banned.
>
> YOU ARE ALL A BUNCH OF SORRY HYPOCRITES.
>
> >From: Christopher Larberg <christopherlarberg at gmail.com>
> >Reply-To: Christopher Larberg <christopherlarberg at gmail.com>,English
> >Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> >To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
> >Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] And the bad faith continues from Wikipedia. ALL
> >ADMINSare Rogue Admins
> >Date: Mon, 30 May 2005 18:34:14 -0700
> >
> >On 5/30/05, Cranston Snord <wikipediaisstupid at hotmail.com> wrote:
> > > All Wikipedia Admins ARE Rogue Admins.
> >If all Wikipedia admins are rogue admins, what constitutes a non-rogue
> >admin?
> >
> >Does this mean I get to call myself "The Rogue"? I've always wanted a
> >cool nickname.
> >
> >--Slowking Man
> >_______________________________________________
> >WikiEN-l mailing list
> >WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> >http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> Don't just search. Find. Check out the new MSN Search!
> http://search.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200636ave/direct/01/
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: JAY JG

subject: [WikiEN-l] Recent goings-on

body:
>From: "A Nony Mouse" <tempforcomments at hotmail.com>
>In the case of Jack, there was a question of a block war. Administrators
>were fighting over what to do with him. This is not a good thing for
>Wikipedia editors no matter who they are. It indicates that the user is
>less of a concern than something between the two Administrators.

It was hardly a block war; you're making a mountain out of a molehill.

>As for his complaints about being blocked, the dismissiveness on this board
>hurt me. No matter who it is making a complaint, we have a duty to
>investigate it. We are listed as the last resort for users who have been
>wronged. I took the time to investigate SlimVirgin's blocking of
>Enviroknot, and I believe that it is not valid.

I took the time to investigate, and as far as I can tell it obviously is
valid.

>By the time I got to the discussion, it was a good series of emails long,
>and despite the number of list members who had posted, none save SlimVirgin
>had bothered to address Enviroknot's concerns on the block in any way.
>SlimVirgin herself made a bad judgement call.

In your opinion.

>An edit made in good faith should never be considered a reversion, even if
>it contains some content that is included in a later reversion.

Nonsense; who are you to judge "good faith"?  I'm sure every editor who
reverts thinks he or she has a good reason for doing so.

>Instead of acknowledging this fact, the list members were universally
>dismissive of Enviroknot from the first email.

They were universally dismissive because the "fact" you cite is not fact at
all.

>We have a problem with administrators exceeding their authority on
>Wikipedia.

There is no evidence for this.

>We have a problem with administrators not applying policy correctly.

There is no evidence for this.

>And we have a problem with arrogance on these lists, with administrators
>believing that they are somehow better than others.

On the contrary, the problem on this list is people being incredibly
accomodating to obviously disruptive e-mails and posters.

>There are a number of administrators who are failing in that
>responsibility, and they are present on this list.

Name them.  Take them to ArbCom.

Jay.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Recent goings-on

body:
>From: "A Nony Mouse" <tempforcomments at hotmail.com>

>Whether he is "barely" deserving of a fair treatment or otherwise, nobody
>here has given him a fair treatment by any stretch of the imagination.

You must have a limited imagination.

>I also have Phil's "circle the wagons" rant up above.

Rant?  Phil's statement was right on.

>Expansion kills online communities because of people like Phil who won't
>admit that they need to let go and they need to deal with the new people
>coming in fairly. People like Phil who think that "shoot them all unless
>they are exactly like us and make no noise whatsoever" is the way to go
>about dealing with newbies.

Strawman arguments.

>Now you know why I went anonymous. If I didn't Phil would be leading a
>charge to have me removed right now for saying that.

LOL! What nonsense.

>David and SlimVirgin's behaviour in this matter has been sub-par. So has
>the behaviour of the rest of you on this list.

David and Slim's behaviour has been highly commendable; yours, on the other
hand, has been sub-par.

>The only offense I can see in the Enviroknot profile is a pair of 3RR
>violations. The one SlimVirgin put in tonight is totally unjustified.

You're obviously unfamiliar with the 3RR rule.

>The one earlier when people were claiming Enviroknot was also another IP
>address is pushing your luck.

Huh?

>Meanwhile, editors and administrators alike have been hounding that profile
>looking for any excuse to attack it. None of you bothered to set aside your
>feelings long enough to look at the situation.

Look in a mirror.

>That isn't right. The behaviour of all of you in this scenario is making me
>sick to my stomach.

Found your own Wiki then, you need to look after your health.

>If the rest of you share that attitude, then Wikipedia is doomed.

If admins shared *your* attitued Wikipedia would be doomed. Fortunately most
don't.

Jay.


from_name: Karl A. Krueger

subject: [WikiEN-l] Recent goings-on

body:
Phil Sandifer wrote:
> Expansion kills online communities. Fundamentally, eternal growth is
> a perpetual strain. We understand this from a technical perspective,
> but we don't understand it socially. We are continually wasting our
> breath and energy debating things that need to be slam dunks. If
> every Cranston Snerd gets this much debate - hell, if one Cranston
> Snerd out of 10 gets this much debate, it's a disaster. We're only
> going to get more Cranston Snerds. Just like we'll get more Lirs,

A Nony Mouse wrote:
> Expansion kills online communities because of people like Phil who won't
> admit that they need to let go and they need to deal with the new people
> coming in fairly. People like Phil who think that "shoot them all unless
> they are exactly like us and make no noise whatsoever" is the way to go
> about dealing with newbies.

Here's the problem:  You're both partly right.  Any project that becomes
popular will attract abusive users -- crackpots and kooks who want to
take it over to push their Time Cube, sociopaths and power-trippers who
want to dominate others, spammers who want to turn the world into one
big billboard, flamers and trolls who are there to fight with others,
and so on.

But it's also true that *because* there are so many abusers, long-time
users and administrators can get jaded.  It becomes easy to interpret
any newbie behavior that looks out-of-place as abusive conduct.  This
isn't unique to community projects, either.  The same is true in the
network security world:  because there is so much malicious activity,
paranoids take to interpreting any out-of-place ping as a sign of
imminent attack.

This doesn't mean that the jaded administrators and the paranoid network
operators are evil, malicious, or "rogue".  It makes them sometimes --
occasionally! -- wrong.

But here's the hell of it -- they're usually *right*.

Almost all of the behavior that looks suspicious is indeed harmful.

Most of the time, when someone portscans your system, they're not just
curious -- they're malicious, or a virus.  On Wikipedia, the amount of
vandalism, spam, flaming, trolling, and patent nonsense is astounding.
The fact that the community (and it *is* the community, not just the
administrators) are able to stifle almost all of it and produce a usable
encyclopedia project is equally astounding.

It is unfortunate and regrettable that newbies get bitten once in a
while.  It is regrettable, and we should each take steps to avoid doing
it.  We must assume good faith wherever possible.

But we can't ask that users (including administrators) assume good faith
*against substantial evidence to the contrary*.  There is a point where
we have to recognize that a person isn't just a newbie but rather a
troll seeking to disrupt the project; or isn't just an argumentative
contributor but actually a flamer who gets off on putting other people
down.

Likewise, we have to recognize that certain bits of evidence are going
to show incontrovertibly that someone is an abuser.  Playing at
sockpuppets or coming to this list with an email address that says
"wikipediaisstupid" are simply not things that anyone with legitimate
intentions is going to do.

We cannot, for the sake of not biting newbies, allow demonstrated
abusers to tear the project apart.

--
Karl A. Krueger <kkrueger at whoi.edu>


from_name: Ed W

subject: [Wikitech-l] Feature addition to the gallery

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> Ed W wrote:
>
>> Any suggestions on the cleanest way to implement this?  Will it be
>> accepted for inclusion...?
>
>
> Look at the patch in bugzilla on parameters for parser hooks and clean
> it up.

Do you mean this bug:
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=684

What's wrong with the code as is?  Looks great to me?

Please advise what's wrong and I will fix it up - seems great for my purpose

Thanks

Ed W


from_name: Joel Konkle-Parker

subject: [Wikitech-l] Wiki changesets

body:
I've used wikis before, but I'm new to trying to set one up. I have a somewhat
conceptual question.

I understand that wikis deal with articles and diffs to those articles. Can
MediaWiki (or any other wiki system) deal with groups of related diffs that get
applied to multiple articles all at once? This would be similar to changesets
in BitKeeper or subversion repositories.

Thanks for your help.

--
Joel Konkle-Parker
Webmaster  [Ballsome.org]

E-mail     [jjk3 at msstate.edu]


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Paid-for-articles WPs in smaller languages

body:
Hi Amikeco,

I have been thinking it would be a good idea that you summarize your
experience with os: on meta. Could it be possible that you write for us
a text to explain it and which could be read by a person external to
wikipedia ? Something like
* "short summary" about ossetia and its language (possibly economic
situation, number of speakers etc...)
* History and current state of its wiki
* your currently action, with number of people contacted, number of
donators, amount of donation, which actions are intended...

this sort of things.

I'd like the talk page of it to be a place where we could comment on
such actions, and possibly explore how the foundation could help.

Would that be okay ? I hope so...

Another point is whether you consider coming to Wikimania and possibly
talk about this experience ?

Cheers

Anthere

V. Ivanov a ?crit:
> 2005/5/30, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com>:
>
>>Do you have any plans for any other Russian minority languages?
>>Obviously the Tatar Wikipedia doesn't exactly need such a boost, but
>>the Chuvash Wikipedia could use it (60-something articles right now I
>>think), as could the Chechen, Abkhaz, etc.
>
>
> I've been trying to change things about the Komi WP (kv), sending
> letters to the local university, etc. The activity had now respond,
> though. :)
>
> I've also advertised the Caucasian wikipedias (ab, av, az, ce, hy, ka,
> os)  at several Caucasian fora, but the effect was not that great,
> accept more often changes at ab and some stupid vandalism at av.
>
> Surely, the whole thing is worth trying on.
>
> Sl. / Amikeco
>


list: foundation-l

from_name: Przykuta

subject: [Foundation-l] 2M articles

body:
What do you think about promotion Wiki in global media by send info
about two millions Wikipedia articles? It (2M) will be perhaps first
half of July or end of June. IMHO this promotion will be good before
Wikimania 2005.

Przykuta


list: wikimedia-l

subject: [Foundation-l] 2M articles


subject: [WikiEN-l] Recent goings-on

body:
>From: "A Nony Mouse" <tempforcomments at hotmail.com>
>
>I'm sorry, I am not assuming from the silence of other users.
>I am assuming from their completely disrespectful, dismissive, and
>insulting attitude towards Enviroknot.

As opposed to your completely disrespectful, dismissive, and insulting
attitude towards the admins here?

>This is a user who has been wronged repeatedly.

Nonsense.

>Even if a sockpuppet, his account has committed no crimes against
>Wikipedia.

Well, except 3RR violation.  You keep forgetting that.

>His user page has been repeatedly vandalized

Whose fault is that?  Not the admins here.

>and he has been repeatedly accused of being a sockpuppet based on where he
>edits.

No, based on his IP address, and his editing styie.  You seem not to
comprehend that.

>From the very first email he sent to this list I saw nothing but list
>members being dismissive and rude.

It's not the first time "Cranston" has e-mailed this list.

>Good Faith was NEVER assumed concerning this user. The entire list broke
>its own rules and refused to deal straightforwardly with a user who was
>being harassed and abused.

Nonsense.  As I said above, it's not the first time "Cranston" has e-mailed
this list.

>We should be above this sort of behavior. The point of Wikipedia policy is
>to rehabilitate editors if at all possible, not harass newcomers into
>leaving.

No, the point of Wikipedia policy is to create a great encyclopedia, not to
rehabilitate editors who break policy.

Jay.


from_name: A Nony Mouse

subject: [WikiEN-l] Recent goings-on

body:
I'm sorry, I am not assuming from the silence of other users.
I am assuming from their completely disrespectful, dismissive, and insulting
attitude towards Enviroknot.

This is a user who has been wronged repeatedly. Even if a sockpuppet, his
account has committed no crimes against Wikipedia. His user page has been
repeatedly vandalized and he has been repeatedly accused of being a
sockpuppet based on where he edits. From the very first email he sent to
this list I saw nothing but list members being dismissive and rude.

I saw Enviroknot explain the IP question, and I saw a number of list members
talk about how he "had to" be lying. Good Faith was NEVER assumed concerning
this user. The entire list broke its own rules and refused to deal
straightforwardly with a user who was being harassed and abused.

Yes he spammed the list, but only after seeing emails from you that I would
have been tempted to send abusive emails back to as well. Emails that were
clearly designed not to solve the problem and get back to what is important,
but to make degrade and insult him.

We should be above this sort of behavior. The point of Wikipedia policy is
to rehabilitate editors if at all possible, not harass newcomers into
leaving.

>From: <ultrablue at gmail.com>
>Reply-To: ultrablue at gmail.com,English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
>To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Recent goings-on
>Date: Tue, 31 May 2005 15:43:14 +0800
>
>On 5/31/05, A Nony Mouse <tempforcomments at hotmail.com> wrote:
> > By the time I got to the discussion, it was a good series of emails
>long,
> > and despite the number of list members who had posted, none save
>SlimVirgin
> > had bothered to address Enviroknot's concerns on the block in any way.
> > SlimVirgin herself made a bad judgement call. An edit made in good faith
> > should never be considered a reversion, even if it contains some content
> > that is included in a later reversion.
>
>The 3RR provides an electric-fence against continuing revert wars.
>Most of the administrators who enforce the 3RR (and even the
>[[WP:AN/3RR]] page) request that as little circumstantial information
>be provided. Good faith or bad faith does not come into whether a user
>has violated the rule. Your interpretation of the meaning of
>"reversion" is not the one accepted in the Wikipedia community. There
>are simple reverts and complex reverts (where something is
>surreptitiously sneaked back into an article). Every reversion is a
>"good faith" reversion to someone in an article content dispute.
>
>Do not assume from the silence of users on the concerns of Enviroknot.
>Before I first replied to the list about this situation, I examined
>all the relevant diffs, and concluded in my own mind that there is a
>clear-cut violation of the 3RR here.
>
>The 3RR does allow administrators some discretion, such as the ability
>to unblock people where they have shown remorse for breaking the rule.
>Enviroknot has not expressed any such remorse, and has not addressed
>the allegations of sockpuppetry. Instead, he or she has spammed the
>mailing list and attacked Wikipedia Administrators as a whole. Had
>Enviroknot come up with a good explanation for sharing IPs with other
>users, expressed some sort of remorse for breaking a very basic rule
>and agreed to work collaboratively on the relevant article's talk page
>to reach consensus, I have little doubt the ban would have been
>happily lifted by a number of administrators.
>
>~Mark Ryan
>_______________________________________________
>WikiEN-l mailing list
>WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

_________________________________________________________________
Create a cute, funny or sexy Meego - click for more info!
http://meegos.msn.ie


from_name: Tony Sidaway

subject: [WikiEN-l] Recent goings-on

body: Okay, the troll has had his fun.  Could we block all his email addresses now?


from_name: Rick

subject: [WikiEN-l] Recent goings-on

body:
--- JAY JG <jayjg at hotmail.com> wrote:
> >From: "A Nony Mouse" <tempforcomments at hotmail.com>
> >If the rest of you share that attitude, then
> Wikipedia is doomed.
>
> If admins shared *your* attitued Wikipedia would be
> doomed. Fortunately most
> don't.
>
> Jay.

It's highly unforutnate that Everyking is an admin.
His opinion of every other admin and every member of
the arbitration committee, and his attacks on all of
us at every opportunity are not exercises in community
building.

RickK

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Small Business - Try our new Resources site
http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/resources/


from_name: Richard Rabinowitz

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: User:Sam Spade/Report rogue admin

body: I looked it up. Page didn't exist.


body:
This is well beyond the point where Snord should have been blocked.
Permitting him to troll like this can only encourage other trolls.


from_name: Angela

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: 2M articles

body:
> Our last milestone-related press release (en 500K) received virtually no
> attention. Most major newspapers and magazines have already run stories
> on us, it's not like we need to tell them we exist. Why not save the
> press releases for when we actually have news?

No, the last milestone-related press release was the Commons reaching
100,000 uploads, which, despite not being sent out to many places
(<http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Press_releases/100K/log-en>),
did see some press coverage, mostly in Germany
(<http://news.google.com/news?hl=de&q=wikimedia>)

Also, as Przykuta notes, the milestone will be shortly before
Wikimania, so the release need not focus only on the milestone, but
include details of the conference, since we should know by then who
most of the speakers are, meaning we will have something other than a
new milestone to announce.

Angela.


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: 2M articles


subject: [Wikitech-l] Wiki changesets

body:
Quoting Rowan Collins <rowan.collins at gmail.com>:

> On 31/05/05, Joel Konkle-Parker <jjk3 at msstate.edu> wrote:
> > I understand that wikis deal with articles and diffs to those articles. Can
> > MediaWiki (or any other wiki system) deal with groups of related diffs that
> get
> > applied to multiple articles all at once? This would be similar to
> changesets
> > in BitKeeper or subversion repositories.
>
> MediaWiki? No. Other wikis? Who knows, someone might be crazy enough
> to implement it, but it's not a "standardly wiki" thing to want to do,
> if that makes any sense. The principle interface of a
> ("normal"/"traditional") wiki is a single-page-at-a-time web
> interface, whereas what you're referring to sounds more like a "submit
> a whole bunch of changes" interface. Not that there aren't advantages
> to that, but not for the "many users doing many things" nature of
> wikis.

Yeah, I realize it's not a standard wiki way of doing things, but this type of
thing would be perfect for what I have in mind. Thanks for the thoughtful
reply.

Anyone happen to know of something that can do this?

--
Joel Konkle-Parker
Webmaster  [Ballsome.org]

E-mail     [jjk3 at msstate.edu]


subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Re: 2M articles

body:
 Most major newspapers and magazines have already run stories
> on us, it's not like we need to tell them we exist.

That right, but I think rather not about en:wiki, but about other
Wikipedias. In Poland for example we need to awake newspapers before
Wikimania. For others - ukrainian, hungarian, vietnamese... info
about 2M IMHO propably will allow more new wikipedians that info
about Wikimania. So, one event + second event... and sleeping will
be awaken :)

Przykuta


subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Re: 2M articles


from_name: V. Ivanov

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Ossetic again (bugs, bugs, bugs...)

body:
There are still some bugs that rest to be fixed in the Ossetic WP:

2005/5/5, V. Ivanov <amikeco at gmail.com>:
> PS: {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}} and similar things still don't work at
> [[:os:]]. See http://os.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics

Neither work the interwikies to [[av]], [[cv]], [[nn]] and some other newer WPs.

Sl.

--
Esperu cxiam!


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] Persistent MySQL error

body:
Since yesterday evening, on different machines, I keep getting MySQL
errors on de.wikipedia for some pages. Others are fine.

	"1053: Server shutdown in progress (10.0.0.2)"

Looks like some broken reboot?

Magnus


from_name: Wouter Steenbeek

body:
Guaka scripsit:
> >From my experience with both the Limburgish and the Bambara Wikipedia
>nearly all existing institutes won't really bother as long as there's
>not a basic amount of articles.

Well, in the case of the Limburgic wikipedia: the institutions were simply
ignorant of the project. Recently we started contacting some of them,
receiving positive reactions and some beginning edits, even though they
hadn't yet informed their members.

Wouter

_________________________________________________________________
Nieuw: Beeld en geluid met MSN Messenger 7.0 http://messenger.msn.nl/


from_name: ultrablue at gmail.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] Recent goings-on

body:
On 5/31/05, A Nony Mouse <tempforcomments at hotmail.com> wrote:
> By the time I got to the discussion, it was a good series of emails long,
> and despite the number of list members who had posted, none save SlimVirgin
> had bothered to address Enviroknot's concerns on the block in any way.
> SlimVirgin herself made a bad judgement call. An edit made in good faith
> should never be considered a reversion, even if it contains some content
> that is included in a later reversion.

The 3RR provides an electric-fence against continuing revert wars.
Most of the administrators who enforce the 3RR (and even the
[[WP:AN/3RR]] page) request that as little circumstantial information
be provided. Good faith or bad faith does not come into whether a user
has violated the rule. Your interpretation of the meaning of
"reversion" is not the one accepted in the Wikipedia community. There
are simple reverts and complex reverts (where something is
surreptitiously sneaked back into an article). Every reversion is a
"good faith" reversion to someone in an article content dispute.

Do not assume from the silence of users on the concerns of Enviroknot.
Before I first replied to the list about this situation, I examined
all the relevant diffs, and concluded in my own mind that there is a
clear-cut violation of the 3RR here.

The 3RR does allow administrators some discretion, such as the ability
to unblock people where they have shown remorse for breaking the rule.
Enviroknot has not expressed any such remorse, and has not addressed
the allegations of sockpuppetry. Instead, he or she has spammed the
mailing list and attacked Wikipedia Administrators as a whole. Had
Enviroknot come up with a good explanation for sharing IPs with other
users, expressed some sort of remorse for breaking a very basic rule
and agreed to work collaboratively on the relevant article's talk page
to reach consensus, I have little doubt the ban would have been
happily lifted by a number of administrators.

~Mark Ryan


from_name: Skyring

subject: [WikiEN-l] Recent goings-on

body:
On 5/31/05, Phil Sandifer <sandifer at sbcglobal.net> wrote:

> That's it. That's all that's going to work. If we do not learn to
> come down on Cranstons with fury and speed, over time, this community
> will implode. One need only look at nearly every other Internet
> community to figure that one out.

Why not look at the Internet communities that DO work? I'm a member of
two such communities that have been running for years, and include the
sort of members who are well-educated, well-spoken, intelligent and
fun to be with.

Both of them have very few rules and are largely run by the members.
And above all, they are polite. Both of them are large communities
that have dealt with growth in a plain common sense fashion, by
recognising that new users don't have the same knowledge as "the old
guard" and finding ways to deal with this.

Somewhere along the way, Wikipedia seems to have lost something
valuable. I look at this list and just about everything I see is one
group of editors bickering with another group.

For what it's worth, I'm an admin on one of these communities, a
community with hundreds of thousands of members, and though I have
power to add, delete, or modify just about anything on the site, my
duties don't involve settling disputes or acting as an umpire, because
there is very little of that to be done - my job mainly involves
sorting out forgotten passwords or tracking down and correcting
incorrectly entered information. It's a large but polite community,
and I cannot help but contrasting it with the often poisonous
atmosphere here on Wikipedia.

I'm also a moderator on a list very much like this, but again, I don't
have to deal with members throwing bricks at each other - I mainly
work at keeping out the spam merchants.

On the face of it, Wikipedia should be a place where co-operation and
sharing drive an atmosphere of comradeship, where admins exist to help
members rather than act as corporate police, and where the atmosphere
is that of Utopia rather than 1984.

--
Peter in Canberra


from_name: Stephen Bain

body:
On 5/31/05, Cranston Snord <wikipediaisstupid at hotmail.com> wrote:
> But I hope you are happy. I now know why Wikipedia isn't worth anything.
> It's because Wikipedia policy isn't worth the electrons used to store it.
>
> All Wikipedia Admins ARE Rogue Admins.

He's just angry because all the databases are belong to us. So
somebody set him up a joke hotmail account.

--
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com


from_name: Puddl Duk

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Copyright violations at download.wikimedia.org

body:
On 5/31/05, Roger Luethi <collector at hellgate.ch> wrote:
>
> So I guess there is no need to ever flag a copyvio, then. Should some
> copyright holder ever complain, we will just change change some words
> in his text and the problem will go away. Well, that sure makes life
> a lot easier.

The biggest reason for tagging and a one week listing is review, some
pages are mistakenly tagged.

It also gives time and space for copyright holders to give permision.
And time to re-write the article before the offending pages are
deleted

>
> Roger


from_name: Mark Williamson

body:
Same with fur.wikipedia - links to certain other Wikipedias don't work.

Mark

On 31/05/05, V. Ivanov <amikeco at gmail.com> wrote:
> There are still some bugs that rest to be fixed in the Ossetic WP:
>
> 2005/5/5, V. Ivanov <amikeco at gmail.com>:
> > PS: {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}} and similar things still don't work at
> > [[:os:]]. See http://os.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics
>
> Neither work the interwikies to [[av]], [[cv]], [[nn]] and some other newer WPs.
>
> Sl.
>
> --
> Esperu cxiam!
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
SI HOC LEGERE SCIS NIMIVM ERVDITIONIS HABES
QVANTVM MATERIAE MATERIETVR MARMOTA MONAX SI MARMOTA MONAX MATERIAM
POSSIT MATERIARI
ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE


body:
On 5/31/05, Roger Luethi <collector at hellgate.ch> wrote:
> On Mon, 30 May 2005 09:02:12 +1000, David Gerard wrote:
> > Our proactive approach, though, does stand us in good stead should we ever
> > end up in a courtroom. Generally the copyvio page is *rabid* and that's
> > good. Even if on many occasions the author of a given text has to point out
> > they're the editor that added it to Wikipedia ;-)
>
> Based on my experience in patrolling WP.en I think you are a tad
> over-optimistic. What you see on WP:CP may only be the tip of the
> iceberg.
>
> I find plenty of copyvios that are several days old, and I've had to
> undo the work of weeks or months because some people just copy and
> paste stuff from other web sites (no, not WP mirrors) without being
> caught. That is a very unpleasant experience for everyone involved,
> especially if other editors kept working on the text in good faith.
>
> The longer a copyvio remains unchallenged, the harder it becomes to
> catch it after several copyedits changed bits and pieces of it. That
> doesn't fix the copyvio, though. I had a case just yesterday where
> my reverting a copyvio was reverted again, and editors started
> "refactoring" the text to "mitigate" the problem.
>
> <rant>
> Some comments on [[m:Avoid Copyright Paranoia]] ain't exactly helping.
> </rant>
>
> Roger
> _______________________________________________

I have been informally surveying new pages, about 9% are copyvios (out
of 253 checked).


from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] Recent goings-on

body:
On 5/31/05, Phil Sandifer <sandifer at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> May I ask what communities these are? Particularly the one with
> hundreds of thousands of members.
>
> -Snowspinner

There are probably quite a few 100,000 active memebers in anouther matter.

--
geni


from_name: Phil Boswell

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: cool it

body:
"Cranston Snord" <enviroknot at hotmail.com> wrote
in message news:BAY12-F29A002E2BAD455A01FD77BD8040 at phx.gbl...
[in reply to Matt Brown (User:Morven) wishing he would simply go away]
> Well, there's a vote for Wikipedia policy meaning nothing.
> I bring complaints to this list because it is my only recourse under
> Wikipedia policy. The fact that you are talking about blocking me off
> indicates only that you are a Rogue Admin as well.

So I skip over to [[en:user:Morven]] and discover that if Matt is indeed a
Wikipedia Admin, he's not exactly advertising it far and wide.

Are you an Admin at all Matt, rogue or otherwise?
--
Phil
[[en:User:Phil Boswell]]
Reminds me of the time I joined the illustrious list of people flamed as
paedophiles by the uber-geek John Grubor simply by asking a question :-) Now
**there's** someone who deserves a Wikipedia article :-)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Rogue Admin Syndrome

body:
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Tue, 31 May 2005 03:51:37 +0100
> From: "A Nony Mouse" <tempforcomments at hotmail.com>
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Recent goings-on
> To: wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
> Message-ID: <BAY18-F208BD9D4BEDD1DD4C87D44B8040 at phx.gbl>
> Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed
>
> I have been watching the last week's events with dismay. I have been
trying
> to compose this email for two hours, but every time I get close,
something
> else comes up.
>
> I have decided to make this anonymous. I do not know how some of you
would
> react and I do not wish to take any chance that I would be harassed for
> this.

Good idea, I think.
>
> There are two cases that bother me. Jack Lynch aka Sam Spade and
Cranston
> Snord aka Enviroknot. Both of these cases scare me because of the
precedent
> that they have set.
>
> In the case of Jack, there was a question of a block war. Administrators
> were fighting over what to do with him. This is not a good thing for
> Wikipedia editors no matter who they are. It indicates that the user is
less
> of a concern than something between the two Administrators.
>

Maybe we should refer this case to an arbitration committee or -if it gets
really bad - to Jimbo himself. However, Jimbo (being a head honcho) is
probably a busy man, so referring to someone below is probably preferable
before sending it off to Jimbo.

> It is the case of Cranston Snord aka Enviroknot that worries me more.
This
> is the case that has made me take the drastic step of sending an email
to
> the list anonymously. I had originally been trying to type up a response
to
> Cranston's concerns about being blocked. I believe that SlimVirgin
violated
> policy by doing so. Unfortunately for me, such an email would likely now
be
> a day late and a dollar short.
>
> Cranston was a disruption to the list, but much of that disruption was
> caused by other people on this list treating him with incredible
disrespect.
> I was taken aback by his accusations against administrators but having
> looked at the cases in hand I believe that he has a point.
>There were emails on this list asking whether anyone was taking him
> seriously. This is the height of arrogance, and it is something that
> frightens me. Administrators should never be acting as if ordinary
editors
> do not matter.
>
> As for his complaints about being blocked, the dismissiveness on this
board
> hurt me. No matter who it is making a complaint, we have a duty to
> investigate it. We are listed as the last resort for users who have been
> wronged. I took the time to investigate SlimVirgin's blocking of
Enviroknot,
> and I believe that it is not valid.
>
> By the time I got to the discussion, it was a good series of emails
long,
> and despite the number of list members who had posted, none save
SlimVirgin
> had bothered to address Enviroknot's concerns on the block in any way.
> SlimVirgin herself made a bad judgement call. An edit made in good faith
> should never be considered a reversion, even if it contains some content
> that is included in a later reversion.

Okay, but how do we distinguish an edit made in good faith from a
"reversion"? What if this edit contains mainly stuff from an earlier
revision that had been superseded, along with some new info? That could be
a reversion, one might argue, but it has a hint of fresh editing, too.

>
> Instead of acknowledging this fact, the list members were universally
> dismissive of Enviroknot from the first email. One went so far as to
demand
> that the term "rogue admin" not be used, without addressing the reasons
that
>it had been brought up in multiple cases recently.
>

Suppose that rogue admins DO exist. What do we do about them?

> We have a problem with administrators exceeding their authority on
> Wikipedia. We have a problem with administrators not applying policy
> correctly. And we have a problem with arrogance on these lists, with
> administrators believing that they are somehow better than others.
>
> With the increased power of administrator access comes a responsibility
to
> use it fairly and adhere to the established procedures and policies. The
> actions of an Administrator should themselves be NPOV. We have stated
policy
> that when a user is found to be violating policy, if they return and do
not
> break policy, their previous transgressions should not be held against
them.
>
> There are a number of administrators who are failing in that
responsibility,
> and they are present on this list. One of them, rather than addressing
> Enviroknot's concerns in a calm tone and actually going over policy,
chose
> to kickban Enviroknot entirely.
>
Oops. That's something called "laziness", or "impatience", or sometimes,
just plain being forgetful. In such cases, we should stop, take a breath,
rethink what we are doing for a moment, and review the cases of folks such
as Enviroknot. Dealing with admins fairly will go a LONG way towards
improving Wikipedia.


subject: [WikiEN-l] What Wikipedia Admins are, anyway

body:
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 5
> Date: Mon, 30 May 2005 21:04:15 -0700
> From: Stan Shebs <shebs at apple.com>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] And the bad faith continues from Wikipedia.
>       ALL ADMINS      are Rogue Admins
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Message-ID: <429BE23F.9050600 at apple.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed
>
> Cranston Snord wrote:
>
> > Apparently, for following Wikipedia policy and bringing my complaints,
> > I have been blocked.
> >
> > I am not going to swear at you, despite SlimVirgin's lies and David
> > Gerard's profanity.
> >
> > But I hope you are happy. I now know why Wikipedia isn't worth
> > anything. It's because Wikipedia policy isn't worth the electrons used
> > to store it.
> >
> > All Wikipedia Admins ARE Rogue Admins.
>
> Personally I favor being a Barbarian Admin, although
> Archaeologist Admin is good for a change of pace, and
> Valkyrie Admin has its equipment advantages at lower
> levels.
>
> Stan

How about Viking Admin? :-)


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Foundation-l] 2M articles

body:
Przykuta:
> What do you think about promotion Wiki in global media by send info
> about two millions Wikipedia articles? It (2M) will be perhaps first
> half of July or end of June. IMHO this promotion will be good before
> Wikimania 2005.

Wikimania should get a dedicated press release when we have finalized
the programme. We can mention the "2 million articles" number in that,
but it shouldn't be the focus. It seems unlikely that anyone who would
not care about Wikimania itself would care about yet another Wikipedia
milestone. The next Wikipedia-specific press release, in my opinion,
should be about peer review, perhaps when we put the validation tool in
operation.

Best,

Erik


subject: [Foundation-l] 2M articles


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] server maintenance on June 1,
	3 a.m. UTC

body:
Jens Frank wrote:
> We'll create some new indexes that should improve site
> performance. To do this, we need to set the wikis to
> read only at 3 a.m. UTC (5a.m. Berlin/Paris, about
> 10 p.m. Chicago). The downtime will take about 2 hours.

While we're on this, that would be a good time to run the password hash
salting.

We'd originally held off on that because a migration to shared user
accounts could change user IDs (and thus the salt), breaking all
password hashes. However it looks like the type of shared account system
we'll end up with is going to be a central account + local accounts, and
a mass migration isn't necessary: people will 'upgrade' their accounts
and be able to punch in their password for confirmation at the time.

For that type of scheme the salt will not be an issue, so we've got no
excuse not to do it.

(For those who didn't notice, Slashdot ran a scaremongering "story"
today about a list of troll accounts Tim made almost a year ago by
comparing password hashes under the title "Wikipedia Leaks Some Users'
Passwords". Slashdot's fun, but it's not journalism; don't expect to
ever get an e-mail from a Slashdot editor asking for comment or
confirmation on facts... Anyway, at least it reminded us we haven't
finished the salted hash transition.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject:
[WikiEN-l] Rogue Admin SlimVirgin Lying About Content in
	justifying her block...

body:
On 5/31/05, Cranston Snord <enviroknot at hotmail.com> wrote:
> And now the Rogue Admin Slimvirgin lies some more...
>
> "Actually, the four reverts had the same exact wording.Yuber(talk) 22:00, 30
> May 2005 (UTC)
> * Blocked for 24 hours. Yuber, thanks for providing the first edit as well
> as the first revert, which was very helpful. SlimVirgin (talk) 22:05, May
> 30, 2005 (UTC)"
>
> If you click the two links, it is patently obvious that they are different:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dhimmi&diff=14439874&oldid=14428678
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dhimmi&diff=14451571&oldid=14451162

Maybe so, but these four were all the same:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dhimmi&diff=14451571&oldid=14451162
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dhimmi&diff=14457787&oldid=14457661
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dhimmi&diff=14458809&oldid=14458393
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dhimmi&diff=14461199&oldid=14459180

That's clearly more than three reverts. Please stop debating this.

--
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com


subject: [Foundation-l] Official Positions

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
> In addition, there are a number of positions where it would be
> extremely useful to the Foundation to have a key person the Board can
> maintain contact with, and as such, I would like to appoint the
> following people, subject to them being happy with these positions:
>
> Chief Technical Officer (servers and development): Brion Vibber

In case anybody was wondering otherwise, I do humbly accept. :)

Right now I'm engaged primarily in cleaning up MediaWiki 1.5 and
readying it for release and use on our servers. Performance testing, bug
fixes, final schema tweaks, and of course confirming that the upgrader
system works.

Actually taking the new system live will depend on a) it being ready ;)
and b) the database servers having sufficient space to work in. Right
now our master server Ariel is running very close to full; JeLuF and
others on the team are doing excellent work on tweaking things up and
setting up the external bulk text storage so we'll have room to
manipulate the data tables.

Probably we'll take a weekend to run conversions, a week or two from
now. It's not totally clear yet whether we'll have to take everything to
read-only during conversion, or if we'll be able to do a wiki at a time
without disruption.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Foundation-l] Official Positions

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
> In addition, there are a number of positions where it would be
> extremely useful to the Foundation to have a key person the Board can
> maintain contact with, and as such, I would like to appoint the
> following people, subject to them being happy with these positions:
>
> Chief Technical Officer (servers and development): Brion Vibber

In case anybody was wondering otherwise, I do humbly accept. :)

Right now I'm engaged primarily in cleaning up MediaWiki 1.5 and
readying it for release and use on our servers. Performance testing, bug
fixes, final schema tweaks, and of course confirming that the upgrader
system works.

Actually taking the new system live will depend on a) it being ready ;)
and b) the database servers having sufficient space to work in. Right
now our master server Ariel is running very close to full; JeLuF and
others on the team are doing excellent work on tweaking things up and
setting up the external bulk text storage so we'll have room to
manipulate the data tables.

Probably we'll take a weekend to run conversions, a week or two from
now. It's not totally clear yet whether we'll have to take everything to
read-only during conversion, or if we'll be able to do a wiki at a time
without disruption.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Foundation-l] Official Positions

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
> In addition, there are a number of positions where it would be
> extremely useful to the Foundation to have a key person the Board can
> maintain contact with, and as such, I would like to appoint the
> following people, subject to them being happy with these positions:
>
> Chief Technical Officer (servers and development): Brion Vibber

In case anybody was wondering otherwise, I do humbly accept. :)

Right now I'm engaged primarily in cleaning up MediaWiki 1.5 and
readying it for release and use on our servers. Performance testing, bug
fixes, final schema tweaks, and of course confirming that the upgrader
system works.

Actually taking the new system live will depend on a) it being ready ;)
and b) the database servers having sufficient space to work in. Right
now our master server Ariel is running very close to full; JeLuF and
others on the team are doing excellent work on tweaking things up and
setting up the external bulk text storage so we'll have room to
manipulate the data tables.

Probably we'll take a weekend to run conversions, a week or two from
now. It's not totally clear yet whether we'll have to take everything to
read-only during conversion, or if we'll be able to do a wiki at a time
without disruption.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Foundation-l] Official Positions

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
> In addition, there are a number of positions where it would be
> extremely useful to the Foundation to have a key person the Board can
> maintain contact with, and as such, I would like to appoint the
> following people, subject to them being happy with these positions:
>
> Chief Technical Officer (servers and development): Brion Vibber

In case anybody was wondering otherwise, I do humbly accept. :)

Right now I'm engaged primarily in cleaning up MediaWiki 1.5 and
readying it for release and use on our servers. Performance testing, bug
fixes, final schema tweaks, and of course confirming that the upgrader
system works.

Actually taking the new system live will depend on a) it being ready ;)
and b) the database servers having sufficient space to work in. Right
now our master server Ariel is running very close to full; JeLuF and
others on the team are doing excellent work on tweaking things up and
setting up the external bulk text storage so we'll have room to
manipulate the data tables.

Probably we'll take a weekend to run conversions, a week or two from
now. It's not totally clear yet whether we'll have to take everything to
read-only during conversion, or if we'll be able to do a wiki at a time
without disruption.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Banned users

body:
>Message: 1
>Date: Tue, 31 May 2005 00:27:47 -0400
>From: Phil Sandifer <sandifer at sbcglobal.net>
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Recent goings-on
>To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
>Message-ID: <6E61B93E-C5B9-4FE1-8191-DC6C2BD1FE0C at sbcglobal.net>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; delsp=yes; format=flowed

>Oh for god's sake.

>The technical evidence against Cranston is a slam dunk. He's a troll.
>He's a vicious, sockpuppeting troll who uses sockpuppets to try to
>generate fake consensus. He's the sort of user we routinely shoot on
>sight, and it's a good thing we do, because we have too damn many of
>them, and every time one manages to generate the headache that this
>has become, good users get driven off. Kudos to every admin who
>blocked him, everyone who called for his removal from this list, and
>everybody who tried to shut this mess down.

Oh, sure. Gun down the barbarians from the windows of our railroad train
out of laziness. In cold blood, too. Is this ethical? Sure, it's the
convenient thing to do. But it's kinda lazy, and, besides, some folks like
to have vandalish fun. Let 'em. Sure, it might mean more work for those of
us who staff Wikipedia, but, let's face it, we all have a prankstering
vandal under our tough, matter-of-fact, researching, teaching exteriors.
That being said, there ARE cases in which trolls should be banned, such as
when they go on the warpath against other Wikipedians, or pull
hard-to-undo crap such as deleting pictures or stuff like that.

>As for those who want to plead for more leniency and say that people
>were dismissive of him, wake up. This project is huge. Huge projects
>attract idiocy. They attract idiocy of the page vandal sort, and
>idiocy of the far more insidious sort. People who come to the project
>for their own ego, people who come to the project to advance their
>own agendas, and people who want to cause the project harm and who
>are actually good at doing it.

So? It's mainly the folks who want to harm our project - and the folks who
are good at harming our project - who ought to be banned, obviously. Other
idiocy can be dealt with by editing, or invoking the 3RR rule (temporary
bans), or other stuff like that.

>This doesn't mean we don't welcome new users. It doesn't mean we
>treat everybody with suspicion. But it means that we learn to call a
>spade a spade, and we stop feeling bad about coming down like a ton
>of bricks on people who are disrupting the project. We do not need to
>care why. We need to be willing to make social decisions with the
>same dispassionate "What will make this situation better" eye that we
>handle our articles with. If a user is breaking articles and making
>it so people can't edit, we shoot them.

Ahem. If a user is breaking articles, give him or her a pause to catch his
or her breath. If he or she is making it so folks can't edit, THEN we
should shoot. We should be fair to both Wikipedians and Wikipedia.

>That's it. That's all that's going to work. If we do not learn to
>come down on Cranstons with fury and speed, over time, this community
>will implode. One need only look at nearly every other Internet
>community to figure that one out.

Umm, okay, especially if the "Cranstons" are here to be trolls, and not to
be constructive. Bear in mind, however, that many of us probably do like
to contribute to BJAODN now and then.

>Good job David. Good job SlimVirgin.

>-Snowspinner

If the banned user deserved to be banned, then, yeah, I agree. Did the
banned user deserve to be banned? I dunno.

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


subject: [Foundation-l] 2M articles

body:
David Gerard wrote:
> Erik Moeller (erik_moeller at gmx.de) [050601 06:27]:
>>I wasn't thinking of an announcement like "Wikipedia is now the greatest
>>thing ever, thanks to article validation!" but something more along the
>>tune of "Wikipedia launches article quality survey", as an invitation
>>for outside individuals to participate. Such a press release could
>>clearly point out the nature of the experiment.
>
> I'd rather wait until we're at least past the experimental phase. But
> perhaps I'm being overly cautious ... others' opinions?

Well, if "we're not going to use the ratings for anything anyway" why
not? ;)

> (It'd certainly give the feature one hell of a beta test ;-)

Wiki*edia _is_ one big fat beta test. C'mon world, load test our servers! :P

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Foundation-l] 2M articles

body:
David Gerard wrote:
> Erik Moeller (erik_moeller at gmx.de) [050601 06:27]:
>>I wasn't thinking of an announcement like "Wikipedia is now the greatest
>>thing ever, thanks to article validation!" but something more along the
>>tune of "Wikipedia launches article quality survey", as an invitation
>>for outside individuals to participate. Such a press release could
>>clearly point out the nature of the experiment.
>
> I'd rather wait until we're at least past the experimental phase. But
> perhaps I'm being overly cautious ... others' opinions?

Well, if "we're not going to use the ratings for anything anyway" why
not? ;)

> (It'd certainly give the feature one hell of a beta test ;-)

Wiki*edia _is_ one big fat beta test. C'mon world, load test our servers! :P

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Foundation-l] 2M articles

body:
David Gerard wrote:
> Erik Moeller (erik_moeller at gmx.de) [050601 06:27]:
>>I wasn't thinking of an announcement like "Wikipedia is now the greatest
>>thing ever, thanks to article validation!" but something more along the
>>tune of "Wikipedia launches article quality survey", as an invitation
>>for outside individuals to participate. Such a press release could
>>clearly point out the nature of the experiment.
>
> I'd rather wait until we're at least past the experimental phase. But
> perhaps I'm being overly cautious ... others' opinions?

Well, if "we're not going to use the ratings for anything anyway" why
not? ;)

> (It'd certainly give the feature one hell of a beta test ;-)

Wiki*edia _is_ one big fat beta test. C'mon world, load test our servers! :P

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Foundation-l] 2M articles

body:
David Gerard wrote:
> Erik Moeller (erik_moeller at gmx.de) [050601 06:27]:
>>I wasn't thinking of an announcement like "Wikipedia is now the greatest
>>thing ever, thanks to article validation!" but something more along the
>>tune of "Wikipedia launches article quality survey", as an invitation
>>for outside individuals to participate. Such a press release could
>>clearly point out the nature of the experiment.
>
> I'd rather wait until we're at least past the experimental phase. But
> perhaps I'm being overly cautious ... others' opinions?

Well, if "we're not going to use the ratings for anything anyway" why
not? ;)

> (It'd certainly give the feature one hell of a beta test ;-)

Wiki*edia _is_ one big fat beta test. C'mon world, load test our servers! :P

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Przykuta

subject: Re: [Foundation-l] 2M articles

body:
 IMHO this promotion will be good
before
> > Wikimania 2005.
>
Eh, mea culpa.

...this promotion will be good before promotion Wikipedia by info
about Wikimania. ;)


subject: Re: [Foundation-l] 2M articles


subject: [WikiEN-l] Anonymouse's Response to Phil

body:
------------------------------

>Message: 2
>Date: Tue, 31 May 2005 06:30:01 +0100
>From: "A Nony Mouse" <tempforcomments at hotmail.com>
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Recent goings-on
>To: wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
>Message-ID: <BAY18-F21419B701F9DFC9A665781B8040 at phx.gbl>
>Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed
>Whether he is "barely" deserving of a fair treatment or otherwise, nobody
>here has given him a fair treatment by any stretch of the imagination.

>That won't do.

I wouldn't know. I'm not acquainted with the banned user.

>I also have Phil's "circle the wagons" rant up above. He thinks expansion
>kills online communities. I think he's right.

>Expansion kills online communities because of people like Phil who won't
>admit that they need to let go and they need to deal with the new people
>coming in fairly. People like Phil who think that "shoot them all unless
>they are exactly like us and make no noise whatsoever" is the way to go
>about dealing with newbies.

Heck, expansion kills other communities, too, when people happen to be
bigots about either the newcomers or the old-timers. Phil, not all
newcomers are like you. Some newcomers like to have fun, but they aren't
necessarily out to be trolls. Anony,  people like Phil are all over the
place, not just on Wikipedia. There are probably numerous open-minded
chaps on Wikipedia nonetheless. (Phil, if you want to be viewed as
open-minded, well, open up your mind, I guess unless, of course, you ARE
open-minded, in which case, try not to rush to conclusions on every Newbie
that comes within your reach.

>Now you know why I went anonymous. If I didn't Phil would be leading a
>charge to have me removed right now for saying that.

If Phil did that, that would be unnecessary and POV censorship.

>David and SlimVirgin's behaviour in this matter has been sub-par. So has
the
>behaviour of the rest of you on this list.

Anony: What behavior? I didn't act before because I was busy and because I
didn't know very much about the issue. Therefore, I shouldn't be accused
of sub-par behavior, for I hadn't performed ANY behavior at the time of
your letter. No doubt there are others. Here's a case of POV on
Anonymous's part.

>This doesn't just affect that one
>user. It affects everyone they tell about Wikipedia. It affects everyone
who
>agreed with them on one topic or another at Wikipedia. I've only looked
at
>the Enviroknot profile for any length of time but based on its list of
>contributions there was potential for a good editor. Solid edits were
made
>and backed up on talk pages, edit summaries and wikipedia policies were
>properly referenced.

If that's the case, then Enviroknot shouldn't have been banned right away;
he should've been WARNED beforehand, at least once or twice, or given a
time-out period.

>The only offense I can see in the Enviroknot profile is a pair of 3RR
>violations. The one SlimVirgin put in tonight is totally unjustified. The
>one earlier when people were claiming Enviroknot was also another IP
address
>is pushing your luck.

I wouldn't know about those offenses. Don't ask me - I'm no admin.

>Meanwhile, editors and administrators alike have been hounding that
profile
>looking for any excuse to attack it. None of you bothered to set aside
your
>feelings long enough to look at the situation.

If that is true, then it's stupid.

>That isn't right. The behaviour of all of you in this scenario is making
me
>sick to my stomach. I thought you were better than this. If that's really
>Phil's attitude, then there's no way he should be given power at
Wikipedia.
>If the rest of you share that attitude, then Wikipedia is doomed.

>A.Nony.Mouse, for the purpose of this conversation.

WIKIPEDIA IS NOT DOOMED, OK? I fail to see how being a bit trigger-happy
necessarily dooms Wikipedia, although I recognize it as being somewhat bad
policy if it can be avoided.


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Roger Luethi wrote:

>On Tue, 31 May 2005 11:03:44 -0700, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>
>>Refactoring may completely remove the problem, not just mitigate it.
>>
>>
>So I guess there is no need to ever flag a copyvio, then. Should some
>copyright holder ever complain, we will just change change some words
>in his text and the problem will go away. Well, that sure makes life
>a lot easier.
>
Do you have statitics on how many have complained?

>>Copyright applies to the way something is expressed, and not to what is
>>expressed.  So what's the difference between a copyvio text that has
>>been refactored, and the same refactored text being added from the
>>beginning?
>>
>>
>Why do we delete pages that start as copyvios, rather than refactoring
>them?
>
I really can't answer that, since I would never have preferred that as a
first option.  The important step is taking prompt action when the
copyvio is identified.

Ec


subject: [Wikipedia-l] An idea

body:
In some situations however it would be a good thing for the person
with the degree in astrophysics to tell the person without to stfu.

Edo Nyland and those few who agree with his crackpot theories
(http://www.highspeedplus.com/~edonon/linguist.htm) - ie, that all the
modern languages of the world with the exception of Basque, Ainu, and
the Dravidian languages were all invented by Benedictine monks as part
of a conspiracy.

In addition to sloppy and inaccurate work (ie, not all of his rules
apply all of the time, and he doesn't seem to realise that
statistically any word, even one made up at random, you could find the
"etymology" of by using his almost-too-large Basque dictionary and his
system for deconstructing 'invented' words), his theories are just so
astronomically stupid that nobody who spent 4 years studying
linguistics (let alone somebody who has a PhD in linguistics) would
buy any of his crap.

Without the makeshift credential system we already have in place to
idiotproof the language-related articles of Wikipedia (see the
response when some guy tried to add crap to the Finno-Ugric article
about how it hasn't been proven as conclusively as it really has, and
that most linguists disagree which they most certainly do not), he
could add his theories all over Wikipedia.

Short of that, he could add shortcomings of the comparative method
(the way REAL linguists find which languages are related) which don't
really exist (there are shortcomings, but the ones he gives are
extremely na"ive and show a complete lack of understanding of the
complex statistical reasons why his own ideas do _not_ make any
sense).

Without knowing something in advance about languages and linguistics
or at least being able to recognise the mathematical problems with his
ideas (not just any mathematician would be able to do that by looking
at his ideas - you'd have to consider how many phonemes there are in
language X, how many phonemes there are in Basque, how many words
there are in the Basque dictionary he uses, and what the chances are
he will find a match for a randomly-constructed non-word, which are
about 100% because if he can't get a match using his normal rules, he
ignores them and reaches outside of them for a match)... most
non-linguists (or people without some advanced knowledge of languages
and linguistics) do not notice the shortcomings of his ideas.

And his theory seems simpler and makes more sense from the POV of most
non-linguists than the comparitive method.

In fact, it's so believable that his page on Yiddish etymology (ie,
how it is an invented language derived from Basque rather than a
language descended ultimately from Proto-Indo-European) received some
sort of best-of-the-web award.

A few examples from Yiddish:
"ashkenazim" - Nyland derivation: axola ' kena-azima Nyland
translation (not actual Basque meaning usually): Worried about losing
our identity; Actual origin: Hebrew "ashk at naaziim" actual translation
of the origin: Germans
"bar mitzvah" - Nyland derivation: ibarretshe imini itzaba Nyland
translation:He has a work obligation at the house in the valley;
Actual origin: 1. bar > Aramaic "bar" (son) form of "b at raa" >
Proto-Semitic *bn 2. mitzvah > Hebrew "mitswah" (commandment) noun
form of "tsiwwa" (to command) > Proto-Semitic *tswy
"blintse" - N.d.: balintz ehotza N.t.: must be eaten; A.o.: Belarusian
"blintsy" diminuitive-plural of "blin" (pancake) > Old Russian
"blinue"/"mlinue" > Proto-IE *mlii (thing which has been ground up)
extended form of *mel@ (to grind)

One from English:
"eat" - N.d.: ea atondu N.t.: Especially prepared; A.o.: Middle
English "eten" > Old English "etan" > Common Germanic "etan" > Proto
IE *ed-

Mark

On 31/05/05, Joseph Reagle <reagle at mit.edu> wrote:
> On Tuesday 31 May 2005 03:46, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> > > I personally don't like the idea, because it does create a sense of
> > > "I have a PHD in Astrophysics and you don't so stfu" that I don't
> > > think would be conducive to the exercise of wikilove.
> >
> > I do agree that this is a danger to be considered.
>
> Another possible outcome is that it helps make it clear the extent to which
> "non-experts" make useful contributions. For much of their history
> encyclopedias were compiled by the learned, but not necessarily "experts"
> -- the very notion is a modern innovation. In any case, even then, useful
> contribution were made by folks outside of their field [1], such as Thomas
> Young [2].
>
> [1] [[ Unpublished
> However, to claim that reputation motivated contributions is not to state
> that all participants were simply seeking fame. In fact, Thomas Young, the
> natural philosopher who worked on the wave theory of light while also
> deciphering the Rosetta Stone by 1840, agreed to contribute to the
> Britannica, but required anonymity in any subject "not immediately
> medical"; Young did not want scientific controversies to weaken the
> confidence the public had in his capacities as a physician (Yeo 2001:265).
> ]]
> [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Young_(scientist)
>
> In fact, I think the compilation of materials by the competent but
> non-expert has a usefulness related to what I call the Feynman notion of
> simplicity: "His principle was that if a topic could not be explained in a
> freshman lecture, it was not fully understood yet" [3].
>
> [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
SI HOC LEGERE SCIS NIMIVM ERVDITIONIS HABES
QVANTVM MATERIAE MATERIETVR MARMOTA MONAX SI MARMOTA MONAX MATERIAM
POSSIT MATERIARI
ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE


body:
...

But there is already a basic amount of articles.

I had already informed the institutions and it seems my e-mails were
ignored. (this is back when there were 0 articles)

Mark

On 31/05/05, Wouter Steenbeek <musiqolog at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Guaka scripsit:
> > >From my experience with both the Limburgish and the Bambara Wikipedia
> >nearly all existing institutes won't really bother as long as there's
> >not a basic amount of articles.
>
> Well, in the case of the Limburgic wikipedia: the institutions were simply
> ignorant of the project. Recently we started contacting some of them,
> receiving positive reactions and some beginning edits, even though they
> hadn't yet informed their members.
>
> Wouter
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> Nieuw: Beeld en geluid met MSN Messenger 7.0 http://messenger.msn.nl/
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
SI HOC LEGERE SCIS NIMIVM ERVDITIONIS HABES
QVANTVM MATERIAE MATERIETVR MARMOTA MONAX SI MARMOTA MONAX MATERIAM
POSSIT MATERIARI
ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: recent goings-on

body:
>Message: 1
>Date: Mon, 30 May 2005 22:58:29 -0700
>From: Matt Brown <morven at gmail.com>
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Recent goings-on
>To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
>Message-ID: <42f90dc005053022581c5bcaf0 at mail.gmail.com>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

>It's very hard for someone like Enviroknot to gain any sympathy when
>they are obviously, blatantly lying.  The odds that two unrelated
>people would get the same IP address and decide to edit the same
>Wikipedia articles one after the other are vanishingly slim.  If
>Enviroknot is not the same person as KaintheScion/ElKabong - something
>I personally doubt - the two of them are very closely related.  Yet
>Enviroknot denies even that.

>Someone who dives into Wikipedia and instantly goes to a contentious
>article is either a sockpuppet or someone who is responding to a call
>to arms by someone else.  Someone who instantly knows all the rules
>and how to skirt them is not some innocent.

>-Matt (User:Morven)

Morven makes some pretty good points. Enviroknot is apparently up to no
good. All the same, that doesn't mean he shouldn't be given the rights to
due process of law before banning him.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: cool it

body:
"Phil Boswell" <phil.boswell at gmail.com> wrote
in message news:d7hv3r$tsl$1 at sea.gmane.org...
[snip]
> So I skip over to [[en:user:Morven]] and discover that if Matt is indeed a
> Wikipedia Admin, he's not exactly advertising it far and wide.
> Are you an Admin at all Matt, rogue or otherwise?

Answering my own question, once [[Special:ListAdmins]] finally decided to
crawl over the threshold of our proxy server, yes, he is. He's simply not
trumpeting it to the skies.

Actually most of the really good Admins are subtle...you only know they are
when you catch them at it (which is obviously more fun when you're not the
subject of their negative attention :-)
--
Phil
[[en:User:Phil Boswell]]
going back to sleep now...


subject: [WikiEN-l] So-called Rogue Admin Slimvirgin Telling the Truth...

body:
Message: 2
Date: Tue, 31 May 2005 16:35:53 +1000
From: Stephen Bain <stephen.bain at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Rogue Admin SlimVirgin Lying About Content in
        justifying her block...
To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
Message-ID: <f30e42de050530233563ef4ada at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

On 5/31/05, Cranston Snord <enviroknot at hotmail.com> wrote:
> And now the Rogue Admin Slimvirgin lies some more...
>
> "Actually, the four reverts had the same exact wording.Yuber(talk)
22:00, 30
> May 2005 (UTC)
> * Blocked for 24 hours. Yuber, thanks for providing the first edit as
well
> as the first revert, which was very helpful. SlimVirgin (talk) 22:05,
May
> 30, 2005 (UTC)"
>
> If you click the two links, it is patently obvious that they are
different:
>
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dhimmi&diff=14439874&oldid=14428678
>
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dhimmi&diff=14451571&oldid=14451162

Maybe so, but these four were all the same:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dhimmi&diff=14451571&oldid=14451162
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dhimmi&diff=14457787&oldid=14457661
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dhimmi&diff=14458809&oldid=14458393
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dhimmi&diff=14461199&oldid=14459180

That's clearly more than three reverts. Please stop debating this.

--
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com

Mr. Bain also has a good point.


body:
2005/5/31, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com>:
> I have been thinking it would be a good idea that you summarize your
> experience with os: on meta. Could it be possible that you write for us
> a text to explain it and which could be read by a person external to
> wikipedia ? Something like
> * "short summary" about ossetia and its language (possibly economic
> situation, number of speakers etc...)
> * History and current state of its wiki
> * your currently action, with number of people contacted, number of
> donators, amount of donation, which actions are intended...
> this sort of things.

It's a really good idea, but could you please find an apropriate place
at meta fot that, create a "stub" with the structure of the
presentation you want, and then give me the link. I'll fill the
structure in -- and this way we'll have the report.

Thank you in advance,
Sl.
--
Esperu cxiam!


subject: [WikiEN-l] Good reasons for blocking Enviro

body:
>Message: 4
>Date: Tue, 31 May 2005 15:43:14 +0800
>From: <ultrablue at gmail.com>
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Recent goings-on
>To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
>Message-ID: <a4a707705053100431977d076 at mail.gmail.com>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

>On 5/31/05, A Nony Mouse <tempforcomments at hotmail.com> wrote:
>> By the time I got to the discussion, it was a good series of emails
long,
>> and despite the number of list members who had posted, none save
SlimVirgin
>> had bothered to address Enviroknot's concerns on the block in any way.
>> SlimVirgin herself made a bad judgement call. An edit made in good
faith
>> should never be considered a reversion, even if it contains some
content
>> that is included in a later reversion.

>The 3RR provides an electric-fence against continuing revert wars.
>Most of the administrators who enforce the 3RR (and even the
>[[WP:AN/3RR]] page) request that as little circumstantial information
>be provided. Good faith or bad faith does not come into whether a user
>has violated the rule. Your interpretation of the meaning of
>"reversion" is not the one accepted in the Wikipedia community. There
>are simple reverts and complex reverts (where something is
>surreptitiously sneaked back into an article). Every reversion is a
>"good faith" reversion to someone in an article content dispute.

Okay, thanks for clarifying what a "reversion" is.

>Do not assume from the silence of users on the concerns of Enviroknot.
>Before I first replied to the list about this situation, I examined
>all the relevant diffs, and concluded in my own mind that there is a
>clear-cut violation of the 3RR here.

Okay, but you should've explained your reasons beforehand; those reasons
could've saved us much agita!

>The 3RR does allow administrators some discretion, such as the ability
>to unblock people where they have shown remorse for breaking the rule.
>Enviroknot has not expressed any such remorse, and has not addressed
>the allegations of sockpuppetry. Instead, he or she has spammed the
>mailing list and attacked Wikipedia Administrators as a whole. Had
>Enviroknot come up with a good explanation for sharing IPs with other
>users, expressed some sort of remorse for breaking a very basic rule
>and agreed to work collaboratively on the relevant article's talk page
>to reach consensus, I have little doubt the ban would have been
>happily lifted by a number of administrators.

>~Mark Ryan

Agreed. Here is someone who has clear, thought-out, and well-displayed
(now, anyway) reasons for blocking Enviroknot. Anyone who wants to counter
those reasons should go ahead and do so this is what debate is all about,
folks.


subject: [WikiEN-l] He speaks sooth about Wikipedia

body:
------------------------------

>Message: 5
>Date: Tue, 31 May 2005 08:28:04 +0100
>From: "Charles Matthews" <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com>
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Recent goings-on
>To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
>Message-ID: <000001c565b8$67ee3760$c57d0450 at Galasien>
>Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset="iso-8859-1";
> reply-type=original

>Skyring wrote

>>Somewhere along the way, Wikipedia seems to have lost something
>>valuable. I look at this list and just about everything I see is one
>>group of editors bickering with another group.

>We gained ... an encyclopedia: 500000 articles in March, 10% added
smoothly
>since then.

>Nobody should kid themselves that there was ever a golden time when there
>was no 'bickering'.  If you look at the traffic numbers you see huge
growth.
>Every month or so an asocial user kicking up a fuss about the way things
are
>handled... it's the price we pay for being a radically open community.
>Remember, this is a big volunteer project; all that happens is that some
>people simply make it too hard for them to be accepted as volunteers.

>Charles

How true that is.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedians and the F word

body:
------------------------------

>Message: 8
>Date: Tue, 31 May 2005 20:15:59 +1000
>From: David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au>
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] And the bad faith continues from Wikipedia.
>        ALL ADMINS      are Rogue Admins
>To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
>Message-ID: <20050531101559.GT9978 at thingy.apana.org.au>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

>MacGyverMagic/Mgm (macgyvermagic at gmail.com) [050531 20:13]:

>> David and profanity? Maybe I missed it. I can't keep up with all these
>>emails.
>> What did he say?

>I called him a "lying fuck". Which he is, but it's still unseemly. I have
>taken away my biscuit.

>- d.

When is a person a "fuck", rather than just being a person who has told
lies? Or are you just annoyed at the person and want to call him a "fuck"?


subject: [WikiEN-l] Recent goings-on

body:
Bryan Derksen wrote:

> Charles Matthews wrote:
>
>> "Skyring"  wrote.
>>
>>> I don't really care if most of the inhabitants of a large city live
>>> their lives free from crime - it's the assaults and murders that get
>>> on the front pages, and Wikipedia seems to have rather a lot of this
>>> compared to some other online communities.
>>
>>   Suddenly you have my full attention.  Who has been murdered?
>
> Maveric149. But his death was reverted just a few minutes later and
> then he was protected against further killing, so no biggie.

Dr. Who has done this several times, and is still alive and well.
Should he now be known as Maveric 150

Ec


from_name: Charles Matthews

subject: [WikiEN-l] Recent goings-on

body:
"JAY JG" wrote

> It was hardly a block war; you're making a mountain out of a molehill.

A mystery out of a mousehole?

Charles


from_name: Richard Holton

subject: [Wikitech-l] Wiki changesets

body:
On 5/31/05, Joel Konkle-Parker <jjk3 at msstate.edu> wrote:
> I've used wikis before, but I'm new to trying to set one up. I have a somewhat
> conceptual question.
>
> I understand that wikis deal with articles and diffs to those articles. Can
> MediaWiki (or any other wiki system) deal with groups of related diffs that get
> applied to multiple articles all at once? This would be similar to changesets
> in BitKeeper or subversion repositories.
>
> Thanks for your help.
>

Not exactly what you're looking for, but have you considered
MediaWiki's template capability? This allows one page to be inserted
into other pages upon rendering. A later change to the template page
is then reflected on all pages that use the template page. See
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Template

-Rich Holton

[[W:en:User:Rholton]]


from_name: Bryan Derksen

subject: [WikiEN-l] Recent goings-on

body:
Charles Matthews wrote:

> "Skyring"  wrote.
>
>> I don't really care if most of the inhabitants of a large city live
>> their lives free from crime - it's the assaults and murders that get
>> on the front pages, and Wikipedia seems to have rather a lot of this
>> compared to some other online communities.
>
>  Suddenly you have my full attention.  Who has been murdered?

Maveric149. But his death was reverted just a few minutes later and then
he was protected against further killing, so no biggie.


body:
Mark Williamson wrote:

>Same with fur.wikipedia - links to certain other Wikipedias don't work.
>
>
Ack. For one brief, glorious and horrifying moment I thought perhaps we
had a Wikipedia specifically for furries. :)


from_name: Nicolas Weeger

subject: [Wikitech-l] Trophees du libre prizes

body:
> Well, it would make sense to make use of this for Wikimania: we're
> planning a developers hackathon before the main convention and if
> somebody's missing a laptop it could come in rather handy. If nobody
> needs direct use of it, we could reserve it for infrastructure / use by
> the NIC.
>
> After Wikimania it'll need to go somewhere.... ?

Ok, I'll keep it stored under my bed, and bring it to Wikimania.
I may test it to make sure it works, but that's all.

> Dunno what to do with this...

Host a test site? Or simply decline the offer :)

> That could be fun. :)

Means people want to be subscribed? :)

> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Nicolas


from_name: David Gerard

body:
Christopher Larberg (christopherlarberg at gmail.com) [050531 11:34]:

> Does this mean I get to call myself "The Rogue"? I've always wanted a
> cool nickname.

No, just *a* rouge.

- d.


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [WikiEN-l] Be nice to your admins

body:
<sermon>

Nobody better be picking on SlimVirgin or any one else I know. Don't
make me come back there swinging a big stick.

Sheesh, I leave you guys alone for a few weeks, and what happens?

C'mon, act like grown-ups. At least half you actually ARE grown-ups,
right?

This is serious project to create an excellent, reliable and free
encyclopedia. Try not to make fun of each other too much, and definitely
stay away from stupid stuff like mean-spirited name-calling.

I've seen it before, the teasing, the name-calling, pretty soon you've
hounding out one of the best contributors. Well, I don't want to see
that happen again.

You want the moral high road? Then act civilized.

</sermon>

Uncle Ed


from_name: Tony Sidaway

body:
On copyvios, I was surprised today to find that someone had removed the
article J. C. Penney on English Wikipedia as a copyvio.  The article was
not a copyvio from September, 2003 until March of this year, when someone
pasted in a big screed from an external site.  Instead of just reverting
the screed, someone deleted the whole article as a copyvio.  This strikes
me as very bad practice.  I only noticed this because someone else started
a new article, and I thought it incredible that there had not already been
such an article.


from_name: Rowan Collins

body:
On 31/05/05, John Prieur <john2000 at ijsolve.com> wrote:
>   (1) use a hidden anchor (as in HTML <a> tags),
> or (2) use a construct similar to XPointer, but using notation such as == or * to denote nodes.  It would be great if this Wiki construct supported regular expressions and nesting.

As already mentionned, the simplest level of this is already available
- every heading automatically has an HTML <a> element next to it, and
internal links can be constructed to refer to these in the standard
way ([[foo#bar]]).

The main problem with this is that in a wiki document, headings are
subject to frequent change, so if the anchor is tied to the precise
wording of a heading, links will frequently be invalidated (and become
links to the top of the page instead). The XPointer-style approach you
suggest just makes this more complicated - the regex might remain
valid longer, but is still very dependent on the whims of editors, and
creating anchors for points other than headings just multiplies the
opportunities for links not behaving as intended.

A way round this would be to create some markup for "insert an anchor
here" - giving users direct control over the content being a pretty
fundamental concept in wikidom. Of course, there's also a
*presentation* issue here - if you're dumped in the middle of a
paragraph, you could be forgiven for thinking your browser had gone
screwy, so it's probably best to stick to only having anchors on
headings. Which, in a rather-long-winded-cos-I'm-tired way, is why I
like the suggestion at
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1521 to allow
alternative anchors to be defined manually for a heading - which would
allow invisible "sticky" anchors to outlast the wording or even
*structure* of sections.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Roger Luethi

body:
On Mon, 30 May 2005 09:02:12 +1000, David Gerard wrote:
> Our proactive approach, though, does stand us in good stead should we ever
> end up in a courtroom. Generally the copyvio page is *rabid* and that's
> good. Even if on many occasions the author of a given text has to point out
> they're the editor that added it to Wikipedia ;-)

Based on my experience in patrolling WP.en I think you are a tad
over-optimistic. What you see on WP:CP may only be the tip of the
iceberg.

I find plenty of copyvios that are several days old, and I've had to
undo the work of weeks or months because some people just copy and
paste stuff from other web sites (no, not WP mirrors) without being
caught. That is a very unpleasant experience for everyone involved,
especially if other editors kept working on the text in good faith.

The longer a copyvio remains unchallenged, the harder it becomes to
catch it after several copyedits changed bits and pieces of it. That
doesn't fix the copyvio, though. I had a case just yesterday where
my reverting a copyvio was reverted again, and editors started
"refactoring" the text to "mitigate" the problem.

<rant>
Some comments on [[m:Avoid Copyright Paranoia]] ain't exactly helping.
</rant>

Roger


subject: [Wikitech-l] Wiki changesets

body:
On 31/05/05, Joel Konkle-Parker <jjk3 at msstate.edu> wrote:
> I understand that wikis deal with articles and diffs to those articles. Can
> MediaWiki (or any other wiki system) deal with groups of related diffs that get
> applied to multiple articles all at once? This would be similar to changesets
> in BitKeeper or subversion repositories.

MediaWiki? No. Other wikis? Who knows, someone might be crazy enough
to implement it, but it's not a "standardly wiki" thing to want to do,
if that makes any sense. The principle interface of a
("normal"/"traditional") wiki is a single-page-at-a-time web
interface, whereas what you're referring to sounds more like a "submit
a whole bunch of changes" interface. Not that there aren't advantages
to that, but not for the "many users doing many things" nature of
wikis.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Gregory Maxwell

body:
On 5/31/05, Roger Luethi <collector at hellgate.ch> wrote:
> Based on my experience in patrolling WP.en I think you are a tad
> over-optimistic. What you see on WP:CP may only be the tip of the
> iceberg.

I would agree.

> I find plenty of copyvios that are several days old, and I've had to
> undo the work of weeks or months because some people just copy and
> paste stuff from other web sites (no, not WP mirrors) without being
> caught. That is a very unpleasant experience for everyone involved,
> especially if other editors kept working on the text in good faith.
>
> The longer a copyvio remains unchallenged, the harder it becomes to
> catch it after several copyedits changed bits and pieces of it. That
> doesn't fix the copyvio, though. I had a case just yesterday where
> my reverting a copyvio was reverted again, and editors started
> "refactoring" the text to "mitigate" the problem.

My favorite en.wikipedia copyvio story:  Marked an image as copyvio on
the wp:cp page, two weeks later nothing was done, so I replaced the
image with a cruddy sketch just to get it out of the current
version... A few days later another wikipedian replaced my cruddy
sketch with another drawing (the first hit for the subject on GIS at
the time) and tagged as PD, saying in the summery that it came from a
state university webpage and was thus PD (!!?!). The image actually
came off some students home page, I contacted the student.. and the
image was not PD nor was the student the copyright holder. :)   ... So
far, every single copyright tag I've checked out on en has been
incorrect, although I've only checked out the suspicious ones, so it's
not a fair assessment.

With text it's even worse because our public editing process make it
much easier for someone to prove that our text was a derived work,
where in a more traditional medium a sufficient amount of refactoring
would usually manage to hide the violation.

With images I plan on just replacing all the ones with suspect
copyright (i.e. everything that isn't CC* or GFDL and uploaded by the
author, or with an actual letter attached that explicitly says PD or
an acceptable license) over time... but I have no idea how to solve
text.


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: 2M articles

body:
Nod

Przykuta is absolutely right. Big milestones do not have much effects on
very large languages right now, but they are
a rare opportunity for other languages with still little media attention.

I would also remind that we should (could) very possibly have a new
fundraising drive soon... and it might be a good idea
to reflect in which order to do the three events
* fundraising
* 2M
* wikimania

Ant

Przykuta a ?crit:
>  Most major newspapers and magazines have already run stories
>
>>on us, it's not like we need to tell them we exist.
>
>
> That right, but I think rather not about en:wiki, but about other
> Wikipedias. In Poland for example we need to awake newspapers before
> Wikimania. For others - ukrainian, hungarian, vietnamese... info
> about 2M IMHO propably will allow more new wikipedians that info
> about Wikimania. So, one event + second event... and sleeping will
> be awaken :)
>
> Przykuta


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: 2M articles


references:
<mailman.0.1117502522.25295.wikien-l@Wikipedia.org>
	<BAY12-F26DA5E194C6A6AA86ED35FBF040@phx.gbl>
	<fb7fdd9c0505310313c6924d@mail.gmail.com>

body:
MacGyverMagic/Mgm (macgyvermagic at gmail.com) [050531 20:13]:

> David and profanity? Maybe I missed it. I can't keep up with all these emails.
> What did he say?

I called him a "lying fuck". Which he is, but it's still unseemly. I have
taken away my biscuit.

- d.


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Blocked after making several edits - accused of
	"vandalism"?!

body:
On 5/31/05, advert <advert at ziplip.com> wrote:
> Kat,
> Thank you for unblocking me. It's good to know that at least one admin has a sense of fairness here. It is very frustrating as a newbie to be told to jump right in and to "be bold!" with editing, but then to be blocked for not having known the rules. I wasn't even aware beforehand that there was a "neutral point of view" rule.
>
> When I get a chance I'll try to read through the rules in order to understand how I can be allowed to make changes to the parts which I don't think are at all "neutral" in the entry as it was (even before I tried editing it).

Hi Advert,

Actually I suspect that there are very many people who would have
unblocked you, were they aware of what happened. ... We can't be
perfect, but we do try! Thanks for your patience.

As far as being bold goes, the *vast* majority of new users don't edit
a potentially controversial subject, and if they do and their changes
are reverted, then they usually don't notice or don't care.... So they
never get into a revert war, and thus they don't get blocked. Because
of this our 'be bold' advice is good in almost all cases.

For the most part on wikipedia you can be a perfectly happy editor
even if you ignore all rules.  There is only one rule beyond really
basic common sense which is enforced in any material way, and that is
the Three Revert Rule (3RR).  Actually, a great many wikipedians would
rather the 3RR not exist, but without it there are endless revert wars
with no mechanism in place to get the disagreeing parties to calm down
and talk out their changes. I hope you can understand why such a rule
is needed.

If you avoid editing controversial subjects, it is very likely that
you will not need to know much of our rules and policy. I would
*highly* suggest that you avoid those articles until you are well
familiarized with Wikipedia... sometimes it is very challenging to
edit those articles, and it really can make editing unfun. There is an
enormous number of articles in wikipedia which really could use your
love and attention, so why not start there?    Best of luck!