from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: One Chinese Wikipedia

body:
On Sep 13, 2004, at 1:49 AM, Vina Wang wrote:
>> Therefore, I think splitting into zh-tw isn't really too bad an idea.
>> Traditional Chinese users can build up their own database, while
>> some of the items can redirect to zh wp.
> How is this redirect going to work?  As far as I know, redirect only
> works within one wiki.

You can redirect to an interwiki link, but it's a bit awkward. The
usual "Redirected from" backlink isn't there and of course
whatlinkshere don't work

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

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Anthere

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Why Academics are Useful to Wikipedia

body:
Daniel Mayer a ?crit:
> --- Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>
>>I think that your stand on this is overly reactive, and not pro-active.
>>These responses are a sign of success, not of failure.   Your reaction
>>to the teacher and the librarian is premised on their being right.
>
>
> When they say that they do not trust Wikipedia, will not use it, and will go so
> far as warn others from using it, then they *are* right about that. I do not
> suppose that their reasoning behind those actions and positions are correct.
>
> -- mav

I am much more optimist than you on the topic. Some teachers are
terribly interested in the whole idea, while others just do not care and
  yet others will stay very conservative and give preference to old
traditionnal (and outdated) encyclopedia.
There is no one unique position, and things will move forward where the
"interested ones" are in position of making things move.

We are not yet 3 years old. We must give time to the most conservative
ones and rely on the others. It is not us to adapt and change the spirit
I think.


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikitech-l] Google doesn't index thousands of pages

body:
..even though it knows about them. Daniel Brandt explains the problem
here:
http://www.google-watch.org/dying.html

Of course that article is hyperbole, but you can see the problem if you
search for articles on Wikipedia that do not include the word "MediaWiki"
(which occurs on every page), e.g.:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aen.wikipedia.org+-mediawiki

This lists the pages on en.wikipedia.org that are not indexed, presently
255,000 (Google apparently has a list of URLs with no associated content).
That includes dynamic URLs, redirects and other duplicates, but it also
includes many pages that should be indexed. E.g. if I search for the text
of the English article "Potassium", I currently get plenty of mirrors, but
not Wikipedia itself.

I have a few questions, which someone with more Google-Fu than I may be
able to answer:
1) Why exactly doesn't Google index these articles?
2) Is there a way we can make them index them?
3) Is there a clever way to get a list of only the actual articles that
aren't indexed, as opposed to the redirects, edit pages and dupes? That
would help in estimating the scope of the problem.

It also to me makes it clear that we can't just rely on Google to do our
searching for us. It is not just outdated, it is also quite incomplete. We
really need to develop a working search infrastructure. In the meantime,
we might want to add some of our "good mirrors" to the Google search
query.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] Why Academics are Useful to Wikipedia

body:
Charles Matthews wrote:
> The second point carries more weight with me.  It's odd that people would
> pay money for _less_ information than they could have for free, online.

I just wanted to add that for me, a huge part of the motivation for
what we are doing is people who are not going to be able to get online
reliably for years or decades to come.  Paper is still the cheapest
way to distribute content in many parts of the world.

--Jimbo


from_name: tic at tictric.net

body:
> It also to me makes it clear that we can't just rely on Google to do our
> searching for us. It is not just outdated, it is also quite incomplete.
> We
> really need to develop a working search infrastructure. In the meantime,
> we might want to add some of our "good mirrors" to the Google search
> query.
>
> Regards,
>
> Erik

I know too little about software development and such to be a reliable
adviser but maybe a suggestion.

I use glimpse locally to search my server hd's for stuff.
I understand every page of wikipedia is held in a cache, or is it the
proxy?
Can't that cache or proxy be indexed by glimpseindex? Or the db even?
That one would be fast and reliable.

--tic


from_name: Thomas R. Koll

body:
On Mon, Sep 13, 2004 at 08:09:00AM +0200, Erik Moeller wrote:
> ..even though it knows about them. Daniel Brandt explains the problem
> here:
> http://www.google-watch.org/dying.html
>
> Of course that article is hyperbole, but you can see the problem if you
> search for articles on Wikipedia that do not include the word "MediaWiki"
> (which occurs on every page), e.g.:
>
> http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aen.wikipedia.org+-mediawiki
>
> This lists the pages on en.wikipedia.org that are not indexed, presently
> 255,000 (Google apparently has a list of URLs with no associated content).
> That includes dynamic URLs, redirects and other duplicates, but it also
> includes many pages that should be indexed. E.g. if I search for the text
> of the English article "Potassium", I currently get plenty of mirrors, but
> not Wikipedia itself.
>
> I have a few questions, which someone with more Google-Fu than I may be
> able to answer:
> 1) Why exactly doesn't Google index these articles?

first look at our robots.txt that will show you that edit-pages and such
aren't allowed to be searched. That's good so. The real articles that are
listed are mostly brand-new or badly-linked from other articles.

ciao, tom
--
== Weblinks ==
* http://shop.wikipedia.org - WikiReader Internet zu kaufen
* http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:TomK32
* http://www.hammererlehen.de - Urlaub in Berchtesgaden


from_name: Jens Frank

body:
On Mon, Sep 13, 2004 at 08:09:00AM +0200, Erik Moeller wrote:
>
> It also to me makes it clear that we can't just rely on Google to do our
> searching for us. It is not just outdated, it is also quite incomplete. We
> really need to develop a working search infrastructure.

The search servers have arrived and are currently being installed. So this
should improve soon.

Regards,

JeLuF


body:
On Mon, Sep 13, 2004 at 08:56:55AM +0200, tic at tictric.net wrote:
>
> I know too little about software development and such to be a reliable
> adviser but maybe a suggestion.
>
> I use glimpse locally to search my server hd's for stuff.
> I understand every page of wikipedia is held in a cache, or is it the
> proxy?
> Can't that cache or proxy be indexed by glimpseindex? Or the db even?
> That one would be fast and reliable.

As far as I know glimpse, it can't update documents on the fly.
Search index is updated in a batch run.

The current mysql based search engine updates on-the-fly, and using
the newly arrived servers, it should perform fine.

Regards,

JeLuF


from_name: KNOTT, T

body:
I'm not all that sure it is stated explicitly. Perhaps it should be
somewhere. But resetting the clock has occurred on other AC decisions.
Mr Natural health is a case in which I am familiar. He tried to avoid
his ban at first and had the clock reset.

Theresa

-----Original Message-----
From: Pedro Fortuny Ayuso [mailto:pfortuny at sdf-eu.org]
Sent: 11 September 2004 08:58
To: English Wikipedia
Subject: RE: [WikiEN-l] Censorship by China or bigots in Wikipedia?

Yeah, it looks like, but where is that stated? I am probably asking
for some well-known info, but...

Thanks anyway for answering,

		Pedro.


references:
<9GovMYaSpVB@erik_moeller> <opsd86w5xev3cvyb@hause.local>
	<20040913070222.GC982@jeluf.mine.nu>

body:
> As far as I know glimpse, it can't update documents on the fly.
> Search index is updated in a batch run.

yep it's a cronjob that runs every now and then.

--tic


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

body:
Thomas R. Koll wrote:

>On Mon, Sep 13, 2004 at 08:09:00AM +0200, Erik Moeller wrote:
>
>
>>..even though it knows about them. Daniel Brandt explains the problem
>>here:
>>http://www.google-watch.org/dying.html
>>
>>Of course that article is hyperbole, but you can see the problem if you
>>search for articles on Wikipedia that do not include the word "MediaWiki"
>>(which occurs on every page), e.g.:
>>
>>http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aen.wikipedia.org+-mediawiki
>>
>>This lists the pages on en.wikipedia.org that are not indexed, presently
>>255,000 (Google apparently has a list of URLs with no associated content).
>>That includes dynamic URLs, redirects and other duplicates, but it also
>>includes many pages that should be indexed. E.g. if I search for the text
>>of the English article "Potassium", I currently get plenty of mirrors, but
>>not Wikipedia itself.
>>
>>I have a few questions, which someone with more Google-Fu than I may be
>>able to answer:
>>1) Why exactly doesn't Google index these articles?
>>
>>
>
>first look at our robots.txt that will show you that edit-pages and such
>aren't allowed to be searched. That's good so. The real articles that are
>listed are mostly brand-new or badly-linked from other articles.
>
>ciao, tom
>
>
When you look for [[nl:Oostvaardersplassen]] in Google you will not find
it. Using the wikipedia google search for it. You will however find an
entry for nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oostvaardersplassen
<http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oostvaardersplassen> which is the article
in question however the format should have been like:
Oostvaardersplassen - Wikipedia NL <http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veluwe>
In the local ratings among the articles that contain the word
"Oostvaardersplassen" it has a low rating even though it is *the*
article about the subject.

This article is not new, there are no problems with the linking that I
can see. It has 39 references and was started on 21 jan 2004.

This information is just to show that there ARE problems with Google and
that it is not just with new and badly linked articles.

Thanks,
  GerardM


from_name: Delirium

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>What? How do you come to that conclusion? There *will* be no fork at *all* -
>the only thing that will be done is selecting one version of an article that is
>approved in some way. Any future approved version would be based on the
>development version (that is, a regular Wikipedia article which would be in
>perpetual development), not the last stable version.
>
>
I can imagine at least one scenario that would lead to a bit of a fork,
although whether it's a bad thing is not clear:

Imagine that we have experts of some sort working on an article.  They
hash out between them and the others editing an article something
reasonably neutral, and it becomes the "stable" version.  A few months
later, they come back, and the article has been editing by 500 people in
the meantime and become mostly a mess.  They decide to take a few of the
good facts and improvements from the new version and "backport" them to
the previous stable version rather than dealing with the mess of the
development version, because frankly the last stable version was better
(except for the few facts that were duly incorporated).  That'd be a
fork of sorts, I suppose.

Of course, something similar happens on occasion already, which has been
the subject of some revert wars...

-Mark


list: foundation-l

from_name: Walter Vermeir

subject: [Foundation-l] create new function; domain name administrator

body:
There are a lot of domain names for all the Wikimedia projects. Some are the
property of Wikimedia, some of friends of Wikimedia.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Domain_names

I have the impression that the dealing of requests regarding domains is done ad
hoc by diffrent people.

To make sure that the overview is not lost, the usernames and passwords for
those domains, it is not forgotten to renew domains, to be a contact person for
friends of Wikimedia who are willing to transfer a domain and for requests for
buying new domains,  it would be good if there where one person responsible.

[[w:nl:gebruiker:walter]]


list: wikimedia-l


from_name: Matt Brown

body:
On Mon, 13 Sep 2004 19:54:49 +0000, David Gerard
<fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> You're proposing adding a reified layer of appointed experts. I strongly
> suggest we are unlikely to go wrong by taking a much more gradual approach.
> e.g. the current proposal for reference tagging within the wiki markup,
> which would make articles far more checkable; the rating system already
> in play on test; approaches which would use the wiki method rather than
> seemingly invalidating it.

I certainly agree with David here.  I certainly do not think that we
should compromise the way Wikipedia works just to satisfy doubters.

As Wikipedia slowly improves, those voices will get quieter.  Over
time, more and more topic-specific experts will take an interest in
Wikipedia and will be monitoring articles on their topics.  Give it a
few years, and the quality will improve immensely.  There is no need
to run before we have mastered walking.

Some additional software support as David describes would definitely
help, but the biggest improvement will come with more eyes.

-Matt (User: Morven)


body:
Delirium wrote:
> Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
> >I just wanted to add that for me, a huge part of the motivation for
> >what we are doing is people who are not going to be able to get online
> >reliably for years or decades to come.  Paper is still the cheapest
> >way to distribute content in many parts of the world.
> >
> >
> Is that really true?

So I am told by people "on the ground" in Africa.  There is a
desperate need for books that kids can take home.  Many people have to
travel two hours or more to reach a location with a computer.  Don't
underestimate how bad things are there.

It is very likely that our content will be more useful as WikiReaders
on topics of specific interest to those customers than as a straight
general encyclopedia.

--Jimbo


list: wikipedia-l

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: One Chinese Wikipedia

body:
Mark Williamson wrote:
> Please realise I am not threatening anyone, just letting you know that
> this is going to happen no matter what, and that really what we are
> discussing here is whether it can be hosted by Wikipedia and be
> officially part of Wikipedia, or not.

Threatening is exactly what you are doing.  And such threats don't
strike me as a very helpful way to resolve this particular issue.

What we want to seek is a solution to this very real problem which is
mutually accomodative to all interested parties.  Whether this
ultimately means that a "two wiki" solution is best very much remains
to be seen.

A fork would only be successful or wise if the alternative solution
that we come up with is less desirable than the fork.

Will you agree to not threaten a fork while we all discuss rationally
how we might best deal with the issue technically?  That threat is a
power play which poisons the discussion, and makes it harder for
people to come to the right conclusions.

The new wiki was shut down because it would be irresponsible for us to
set off on such a major departure from present practice, against the
objections of what is a majority (as far as I can tell) of the
existing Simplified _and_ Traditional communities, just on your say-so
and threats.

Maybe we will end up with a two wiki solution.  Maybe we'll end up
with a single wiki solution.  Just relax a bit, and let's discuss it
further.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] History of simple english wikipedia

body:
Anthere wrote:
> I would be curious to know who started the simple english wikipedia.
> If it was discusssed/voted in the main english wikipedia...
>
> and mostly why it was set...
> whose public it is addressed to...

It is quite old; I rather doubt if there was a lot of
discussion/debate/vote in the way we do things now.  Someone asked for
it, it was created, I have no further recollection.

I do know that the audience it is addressed to is "adult learners of
English" or something of that nature.  That is to say, it is not
necessarily intended that the concepts be simple, only that the
language be kept easy to read.

--Jimbo


from_name: Daniel Mayer

body:
--- Walter Vermeir <walter at wikipedia.be> wrote:

> There are a lot of domain names for all the Wikimedia projects. Some are the
> property of Wikimedia, some of friends of Wikimedia.
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Domain_names
>
> I have the impression that the dealing of requests regarding domains is done
> ad hoc by diffrent people.
>
> To make sure that the overview is not lost, the usernames and passwords for
> those domains, it is not forgotten to renew domains, to be a contact person
> for friends of Wikimedia who are willing to transfer a domain and for
> requests for buying new domains,  it would be good if there where one person
> responsible.

I was doing this for the 8 or so domain names I bought for the foundation but
one day my password didn't work anymore. My request to Jimbo asking for the
password to my GoDaddy account was never acted upon (there are several domain
names controlled by that account that are not yet owned by the foundation -
such as Wikiveristy.org and WikiGIS.org). I'm sure this was just an oversight
since my password was near impossible to remember.

-- mav

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subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: When Powerful Jewish or Social-Marxist-PC Lobbies
 Censor the Internet....

body:
Daniel Mayer a ?crit:
> --- Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>>I am very aware of this. I know it is currently a proposition.
>>
>>But here, you claim that it has been the case from the very beginning,
>>and this is obviously very untrue.
>
>
> No it is not - that is a matter of some debate. The proposed rule is aimed at
> codifying what was obvious to begin with (that the ArbCom has jurisdiction over
> the English Wikipedia mailing list). Whether or not that means a ban on
> Wikipedia automatically extends to WikiEN-l is another issue.

You (Mav) are correct that there is a difference.
But, may I suggest that if there is no automatic extension, how will the
decision to extend be taken ? Usually, you (the arbcom) takes time
before banning someone. If the arbcom has juridication :
Will you (the arbcom) have to discuss it for 3 weeks before banning from
ml a banned user getting wild on the list ?
Or will it be the decision of one member of the arbcom only ?

Someone will have to take the decision somehow. If in the end the
moderator himself takes the decision to do so, that means the
juridication extension is symbolic.

Why would be the benefit then ?
What are teh arguments for not letting moderators do the job ?

>>On the other hand, we banned people from the list due to poor behavior
>>*on* the list.
>
>
> Yes and Paul Vogel demonstrated very clearly an inability to behave correctly
> *on* the list. Thus his hard ban was extended here as well.

I think Paul Vogel was banned here mostly because of his behavior here.
The moderators could have taken the responsability to ban him from here,
even though he was not banned on wikipedia.

I think possibly, what will happen if we decide the arbcom has
juridication here, the moderators could just be hands of the arbcom, and
possibly hesitate to ban without an arbcom official decision.

Would have a moderator banned him from here from his own decision ?

>>I consider the whole idea a very ***bad*** idea, and wonder what will be
>>next. Will you also claim that the arbcom have juridiction over irc ?
>
>
> No - I have argued *specifically* against that and I'm fairly annoyed by your
> insinuation that *I* am trying to conduct a power grab.

Not you (Mav) specifically. This is absolutely not your type Mav :-)
But that the arbcom propose to change the rules and ask to have
juridiction here as well, is in effect a power grab yes.

Whether it is good or not good is a matter of opinion definitly.

However, when a group change rules to have more power, it is in effect a
power grab attempt. No ?

>>Sorry, but this is really something I do not second *at all*.
>>At the most, I'd say that the english mailing lists moderator should
>>feel *very confident* to ban from the list a user banned from
>>en:wikipedia if he begin to be bugging everyone seriously.
>
>
> Just as an admin should feel *very confident* to block a person from the
> English Wikipedia if that user was under a hard ban. I don't see *any*
> difference at *all.*

You may not. But did a moderator felt confident he could ban the guy in
this case ?

>>Just in case, I will myself not recognise valid the juridication of the
>>arbcom over any mailing list other than the english mailing list. For
>>example, it should be the role of the moderator of wikipedia-l to ban a
>>user, and certainly not of the english arbcom.
>
>
> THIS IS THE ENGLISH MAILING LIST!!! :) And that is the *only* mailing list the
> ArbCom could possibly have jurisdiction over - as I stated already.
>
> -- mav

Anthere will wait patiently till the banned user Lir begins to mess on
wikipedia-l ;-)


body:
>> Yes and Paul Vogel demonstrated very clearly an inability to behave
>> correctly
>> *on* the list. Thus his hard ban was extended here as well.
>
>
> I think Paul Vogel was banned here mostly because of his behavior here.
> The moderators could have taken the responsability to ban him from here,
> even though he was not banned on wikipedia.

I meant

 > The moderators could have taken the responsability to ban him from
here, even if he had not been banned on wikipedia.


body:
Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:

>I just wanted to add that for me, a huge part of the motivation for
>what we are doing is people who are not going to be able to get online
>reliably for years or decades to come.  Paper is still the cheapest
>way to distribute content in many parts of the world.
>
>
Is that really true?  Computer equipment is becoming so incredibly cheap
that printing out (and shipping) a paper encyclopedia looks pretty
expensive in comparison.  Maybe if there is a lack of electricity paper
is still a good idea for now, but given how bulky paper is, and how
expensive printing is (especially if we do frequent print runs), I can't
see it being the case for too long that it's cheaper to distribute a
gigantic 20-volume set of books than to distribute a single DVD-ROM (or
possibly even a CD-ROM with compression of pre-rendered pages, and
perhaps some downsampling of images), *even* if we have to distribute a
way to read it too.  If you take into account periodic updates---mailing
out a single CD-ROM that can be read on the same device versus
distributing an entirely new 20-volume set of books---the books start to
look even more expensive.

I personally like paper, but digital stuff is just so much cheaper I
can't see paper being the *cheap* option, unless for some reason
donations of printing and shipping services turn out to be easier to
come by than donations of low-end computers.

-Mark


body:
--- Jens Ropers <ropers at ropersonline.com> wrote:
> Yes we do.
>
> But as I've explained here:
>
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2004-September/030521.html
>
> we do ''not'' need to give any preference to "experts" (ie. people who
> can demonstrate prior achievement) to make that happen.
> We ''can'' build a review club in the best Wikipedia spirit and it will
> work for the same reasons that Wikipedia works.

Each review club should have the ability to say what mix of certified experts
(that is, somebody with a relevant degree or lots of outside experience) vs
self-taught and trusted Wikipedians should review articles under the review
club's jurisdiction.

Either way, each person (expert or not) reviewing an article can veto the
opinion of the other reviewer about adding the stable tag. That way experts
have no more power than anybody else.

As already noted, there are strengths and weaknesses with trusting experts or
non-experts alone. So in many cases (esp in the sciences) a mix of the two will
be needed to judge whether or not an article is complete, presents the
consensus view of the relevant field, mentions outside views with the
appropriate detail, is reasonably complete, and does not contain any obvious
errors of fact.

-- mav

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from_name: Yann Forget

subject: [Foundation-l] Rewarding volunteers

body:
Hi,

Le Monday 13 September 2004 01:24, Erik Moeller a ?crit :
> John-
>
> > simple vision: a free encyclopedia where anyone could edit anything.
> > Now, sysops, developers etc are getting more power,
>
> That happened when?
>
> Sysops have no irreversible powers and are accountable to their own peers
> as well as the entire community. On the English Wikipedia, there is a
> ridiculously complex procedure for dealing with obvious problem users,
> which in most cases never amounts to anything. Trolls and morons violate
> policies with impunity on a regular basis. Just check the history of any
> controversial article on Wikipedia.
>
> Developer "powers" were actually recently reduced by creating a new class
> of privileged users trusted by the community, stewards. Developers have
> no privileges when it comes to policy decisions over normal users.
>
> Important policy decisions have been increasingly *democratized* in the
> last few months, and a board was elected in order to replace the previous
> benevolent dictator model. Before that, there even was a time when
> Wikipedia had an Editor in Chief who quite aggressively pursued a singular
> vision of building the project.
>
> So, given that the trend is the exact opposite of what you claim it is, I
> can either deduce that you know nothing about Wikimedia's history, or that
> you are living in a parallel universe superimposed over own where time
> runs in the opposite direction. Which is it?
>
> > anons less trusted,
>
> Anons were *never* trusted, and for good reason. Trust is based on
> experience, and you cannot build experiences with someone you don't know.
> Even so, using technological improvements like templates, people send
> polite messages to even vandals and spammers before they are blocked:
>
>      Thanks for experimenting with Wikipedia. Your test worked, and has
>      now been removed. Please use Wikipedia:Sandbox for any other tests
>      you want to do, since testing material in articles will normally
>      be removed quickly. Please see the welcome page if you would like
>      to learn more about contributing to our encyclopedia. Thanks.
>
> We have an almost masochistic relationship to abusers, we tolerate them
> until it starts to bleed. For every deletion, there is a debate, and when
> the debate becomes long, that usually means the content isn't deleted (no
> consensus!). We tolerate the crappiest articles you can imagine about the
> most insignificant fictional character in a minor video game franchise. If
> you suggested publicly that as a project with 1,000,000 articles we no
> longer need to allow people to edit who are not even willing to go through
> a 15-second-registration-process, the resulting outcry in the wikisphere
> would cause major floods and earthquakes.

I agree with Erik here.
We have the same problems in the French Wikipedia.
We needed four months to throw out a vandal who never really produced a single
good and NPOV article. During the summer, we had several bad users who
managed to create a suspicious atmosphere by insults, allegations, religious
attacks, etc. And for the last year and half, we have had a troll who,
althrough he created some good articles, attacked and insulted collectively
other contributors, especially sysops when they tried to correct the
situation. He was banned already twice temporarly, including once with a
direct permission from Jimbo after the community failed to deal with the
problem. He also used suck-puppets to generate support for him.
He apparently left last month after being blocked again for a day.

> > and there is talk of paying developers.
>
> Yes, we are actually thinking about running a trial to get certain
> features *which users ask for* or *which the Wikimedia Foundation and its
> democratically elected Board of Trustees deem useful* implemented. We
> might use money donated for that purpose to promote the development of
> open source software. We might give people who cannot directly contribute
> to software development the *choice* to contribute to the progress of the
> software by other means - the horror!

Yes, let the trial go, then we can see if it's beneficial or not.

Technically, I feel the system is still not as reliable as it should, although
the situation improved quite a lot. So maybe that an area where we want to
put some money.

> Of all the online projects I've ever been involved in, Wikimedia is the
> most paranoid about power and money. I prefer facts to paranoia, and
> progress to stagnancy.
>
> Regards,
>
> Erik

Regards,
Yann
--
http://www.non-violence.org/ | Site collaboratif sur la non-violence
http://www.forget-me.net/ | Alternatives sur le Net
http://fr.wikipedia.org/ | Encyclop?die libre
http://www.forget-me.net/pro/ | Formations et services Linux


subject: [Foundation-l] Rewarding volunteers


body:
--- Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> I can imagine at least one scenario that would lead to a bit of a fork,
> although whether it's a bad thing is not clear:
>
> Imagine that we have experts of some sort working on an article.  They
> hash out between them and the others editing an article something
> reasonably neutral, and it becomes the "stable" version.  A few months
> later, they come back, and the article has been editing by 500 people in
> the meantime and become mostly a mess.  They decide to take a few of the
> good facts and improvements from the new version and "backport" them to
> the previous stable version rather than dealing with the mess of the
> development version, because frankly the last stable version was better
> (except for the few facts that were duly incorporated).  That'd be a
> fork of sorts, I suppose.

If an article had drifted into becoming an utter mess, then doing exactly as
you state would be a *good thing* since it improves the article (the amount of
backporting is the key issue; better efforts to do that will result in less of
a chance for conflict).

But my point is that all the editing would still be on just one Wikipedia
version. The *only* time this would be different would be for final minor
formating changes needed for print; most of which could be automated:

Such as changing links to articles that are contained in the print version to
have (See: for-bar) at the end of the sentence the term is in and changing
links to articles *not* in the print version to plain text. Moving/removing
tables and images would also have to be done for print.

-- Daniel

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subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: When Powerful Jewish or Social-Marxist-PC Lobbies
	Censor the Internet....

body:
--- Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> You (Mav) are correct that there is a difference.
> But, may I suggest that if there is no automatic extension, how will the
> decision to extend be taken ? Usually, you (the arbcom) takes time
> before banning someone. If the arbcom has juridication :
> Will you (the arbcom) have to discuss it for 3 weeks before banning from
> ml a banned user getting wild on the list ?

If a banned user gets wild on this list, then any moderator should feel very
confident in banning said person without Jimbo having to ask, IMO. But I do not
think that an editing ban on the English Wikipedia should automatically mean a
posting ban to WikiEN-l *unless* that is *specifically* stated in an ArbCom
ruling.

> What are teh arguments for not letting moderators do the job ?

There are none. I'm just saying that WikiEN-l mailing list moderators should be
emboldened to more easily block troublesome posters if they are under a hard
ban on the wiki. This gives moderators *more*, not less power to act.

> I think Paul Vogel was banned here mostly because of his behavior here.

I agree. And since there was not a specific ArbCom ruling banning him from
posting here he could have done so indefinitely if he behaved. But since he was
not behaving and was already banned on the wiki, IMO, that means that the
WikiEN-l moderators should not extend to him the same amount of patience they
do to non-banned users.

> I think possibly, what will happen if we decide the arbcom has
> jurisdiction here, the moderators could just be hands of the arbcom, and
> possibly hesitate to ban without an arbcom official decision.

That would be a bad idea since it creates a bottleneck at the ArbCom level.
Moderators should do as they do now and use ArbCom rulings where appropriate to
give them more power to act for certain users.

> Not you (Mav) specifically. This is absolutely not your type Mav :-)
> But that the arbcom propose to change the rules and ask to have
> juridiction here as well, is in effect a power grab yes.

I was under the impression that this was the case from day one.

If a banned user makes trouble on another mailing list, then none of the above
applies since ArbCom rulings have no force beyond the English Wikipedia. Jimbo
is still king there (as well as here), so he'll take any action if needed.

-- Daniel

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subject: [Wikitech-l] Ticket system

body:
Without quite going so far as to request someone set this up for me,
*grin*, I merely note that if there were a mail alias of
info_en at wikipedia.org (or similar) which delivered email into an
installation of otrs (or similar, although I played with the demo of
otrs), then I would be able to significantly and quickly reduce my
personal email burden by forwarding emails that I get from people to a
ticket system where others could help me give proper answers.

The problem I have right now is that I get many many requests that are
not private to me, but not quite public either.  I generally answer
all these myself.  This is a lot of work, and other people exist who
would be glad to help with it.  But short of sending the request on to
a public mailing list (not always good), I have no convenient
mechanism to share the burden.

With an otrs system, not open to the public, I could invite specific
peopl who know enough about "the official wikipedia response" to
things to help me out with these emails.

If a first experiment seems to go well, we could publicize the address
on the website, and even set up sub-addresses for specific types of
inquiries.

--Jimbo

--
"La n??fle est un fruit."
 - first words of 50,000th article on fr.wikipedia.org


from_name: Bill Konrad

body:
----- Original Message -----
From: "Matt R" <matt_crypto at yahoo.co.uk>

> The scenario is that Wikipedia editors have found an expert with a proven
> track-record in the specific subject area of the article, and solicited
> his
> opinion. In this scenario, the expert's track-record provides some
> evidence
> that the expert has the expertise -- we wouldn't be relying on his or her
> self-evaluation. Such evidence could never be conclusive, but I think it's
> a
> lot better than none at all.

Who is it that would evaluate their "proven track-record" and how would such
a decision reached? And for how many articles would this process need to be
repeated (it sounds like you're suggesting an expert review is needed for
all)?

Personally, I'm much more comfortable with the earlier suggestion that
groups of conscientious Wikipedians could fairly review a large portion of
Wikipedia articles AND come to recognize when some outside referee might be
needed--and solicit assistance only where needed.

Bkonrad


subject: [Wikitech-l] Proposal for a Wiktionary proof of concept

body:
Hoi,
As discussed in [[The need for XML re: wiktionary]] and [[Tables for
Wiktionary]] on Meta and the wiktionary mailinglist, it is necessary to
structure the wiktionary content in order to be able to share the
content of wiktionary. The complexity of doing this is huge. Not only do
we need to describe all kinds of data to be able to include this in our
database. We have to watch and make it not too difficult for a would be
contributor. We also have to produce XML or something like it to publish
our content.

To do all this in one go is a bit much. So I propose to do something
that is simpler first. We may use the GEMET data for inclusion within
Wikimedia. This is a rich and important body of knowledge and we can use
it not only in wiktionary but also in wikispecies. We have been given
the SQL stuff from the GEMET relational database. So we can change this
to fit Wikimedia. GEMET has its own XML definition.

We have therefore these important components:
*We have a SQL definition to fit the data
*We have the complete data from the GEMET available in XML format
*It provides a subset of what is required in structuring Wiktionary

 It is an important resource in its own right; the GEMET data
 It gives us the ability to handle open content glossary/thesauri
 It gives us an idea how Wiktionary could/should evolve

The SQL defenitions are posted on Meta. I do not see how to add them on
bugzilla.
*[[:Image:Gemet.sql]]
*[[:Image:GEMET_status.sql]]
*[[:Image:GEMET relation type.sql]]

Thanks,
    GerardM


list: wiktionary-l

subject: [Wiktionary-l] Proposal for a Wiktionary proof of concept


from_name: Mark Williamson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: One Chinese Wikipedia

body:
>Threatening is exactly what you are doing.  And such threats don't
strike me as a very helpful way to resolve this particular issue.

No, threatening is *not* what I am doing. All I'm saying is that if
the solution eventually reached is *not* mutually accomodative, there
will be a fork.

>What we want to seek is a solution to this very real problem which is
mutually accomodative to all interested parties.  Whether this
ultimately means that a "two wiki" solution is best very much remains
to be seen.

I have yet to see a proposal that's actually doable in the near future
that would solve this problem to the satisfaction of all interested
parties.

>A fork would only be successful or wise if the alternative solution
that we come up with is less desirable than the fork.

Well, that's a bit obvious. Of course there would be no forking if the
solution was more desirable than the fork.

>Will you agree to not threaten a fork while we all discuss rationally
how we might best deal with the issue technically?  That threat is a
power play which poisons the discussion, and makes it harder for
people to come to the right conclusions.

As I said before I am not "threatening" a fork but merely stating that
if the end-result is not more desirable than a fork, that is what will
most likely happen.

>The new wiki was shut down because it would be irresponsible for us
to set off on such a major departure from present practice, against
the objections of what is a majority (as far as I can tell) of the
existing Simplified _and_ Traditional communities, just on your say-so
and threats.

Threats? Who did I threaten? Even if you count the fork thing as a
threat, that was only recently and the new wiki was shut down well
before that - the new wiki was created by accident, not as the result
of threats I made to anybody. You also fail to mention that I wasn't
the only registered user, and that there are well over 1000 pages,
over 600 of them "probably legitimate". This is much larger than many
existing Wikis, and much of it is original. If a solution doesn't
satisfactorily work this content in, and work it in *in Traditional
Chinese* rather than converting it, and to not allow additions to it
that aren't in Traditional, I will copy the content somewhere else.
That's *me* doing something with content of which *I* contributed
about 99% (as I said before, I wasn't the only registered user, and a
couple of anons made edits too).

Also, the only people from zh: who have weighed in so far are people
who are high up in the community (and it has been suggested before and
seems at least partially true that the opinions of those Traditional
users in the zh: bureaucracy don't nessecarily reflect those of the
average Traditional user), most of which are Simplified users; so far
only 4 primarily Traditional users have weighed in (iirc), 1 of which
seems to agree for the most part with me and one other who may or may
not agree (Fuzheado and Lorenzarius afaict do not support a two-wiki
solution). As was already noted by somebody else, the proposed
technical solutions so far that are actually workable in the near
future are all focused on a dual-language user interface, which
although important isn't nearly as big as the issue of separate
articles, template messages, redirects from Traditional to Simplified
articles (and as was noted, vice-versa), articles with a title in one
but content in the other, articles written partly in one and partly in
the other, talk pages (even for traditional articles, they're often
written in simplified), and so on.

I think the general standpoint of other Traditional users on zh: is
that continued unification is something that they'd like, but they are
beginning to find that it doesn't seem likely that a satisfactory
solution will be found in the near future.

If a solution really can be found that is satisfactory but does not
involve separate Wikis, of course I will support it and if anybody
ends up forking under those conditions I will not support it.

All I'm saying is that if independent Traditional content cannot exist
on Wikipedia under the solution, whether as part of zh: *or* as a
separate Wikipedia, chances are the solution won't be "satisfactory"
to all parties involved.

And I think that the idea that a separation will hurt NPOV isn't
entirely correct: en: doesn't include people from all the different
points of view, yet there are plenty who defend NPOV even if they have
a certain POV that agrees with whatever POV is being pushed. Just
because there would be a much much much smaller number of Mainland
users on a separate Traditional wikipedia doesn't mean all the
articles are going to have an anti-PRC slant.

>Maybe we will end up with a two wiki solution.  Maybe we'll end up
with a single wiki solution.  Just relax a bit, and let's discuss it
further.

I'm sure it wasn't intended, but one of the major problems I have with
closed-zh-tw: is that the namespaces were changed back to their
default, breaking loads of links and making it appear less functional
than it was before it was closed (other than the fact that it's now
read-only, of course, which I understand).

Anyhow, as I said before if a workable solution is reached, even if it
doesn't involve a separate wiki for Traditional, I will support it.

--Jin Junshu/Mark


body:
--- Jens Ropers <ropers at ropersonline.com> wrote:
> We positively DO want to get all the *expert knowledge* we can get.
> However we should NOT make the mistake of thinking that the only way we
> could get hold of *expert knowledge* was formally installing accredited
> experts and giving them more power than the next guy.

I'm certainly not advocating that. What I want is for experts on subject-area
article review boards to have an equal ability to veto adding a stable tag to
articles as non-experts on the board do - they *will not* have any more power
than any other reviewer (that is, non-experts on the board have can veto
experts and vice versa). Whether or not any particular subject-area review
board requires one or more experts to review an article in addition to
non-experts, is up to their best judgment of the review board on what is needed
for that subject area (and also the supply of volunteers).

As stated before, there are strengths and weaknesses with relying on experts
alone and on relying on non-experts alone. We need to play the strengths of
both off the weaknesses of both where appropriate.

-- Daniel

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subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Category links

body:
On Sep 13, 2004, at 3:06 PM, Stan Wiechers wrote:
>> That's how it's supposed to work. I suspect a caching trouble there
>> :o)
>> Be sure to clear your browser cache and refresh page.
>
> Oh that's how it is supposed to work?
>
> I'm not too familiar with the sourcetree, if I want to change that
> where can
> I disable that, I assume that his is a very simple change to the wiki
> code
> to do that.

The way it's supposed to work is that the link turns into a normal link
when the page is created. As Hashar said, it's probably a caching
problem, where the page with the link isn't being marked as updated so
you see the old version with the broken link.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Nick Triantos

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Wouldn't it be better to store Most of values
	in LocalSettings.php into database?

body:
You'll still need to have a LocalSettings.php for at least a few
settings, such as those for $wgDBserver, $wgDBname, $wgDBuser, and
$wgDBpass, plus whatever settings are needed by the scripts to read data
from the db.

Otherwise you'll have a chicken-and-egg problem of not knowing how to
actually read your preferences out of the database.

-Nick

Ashar Voultoiz wrote:

> Kiss All wrote:
>
>> I mean storing most local settings into database, and administrators
>> can modify it online via a dedicated configuration php page. Thus less
>> efforts are needed for administration and updating to new version of
>> mediaWiki.
>>    Most page interface messages can be stored in DB, why not to store
>> those essential configuration information?
>>   The best case would be to use newversion immediately after unpacking
>> mediawiki-x-x.tar to the original www root.
>>   I am tired of editing LocalSettings.php for already. :-)  It is like
>> programming, not administration.
>
>
> Hello,
>
> I am already thinking about it, unfortunatly I will not be able to
> code anything about it before november.
>
> Maybe some other developper will do it :p
>


list: textbook-l

from_name: Brolap

subject: [Textbook-l] State of the Union on Open Wiki Textbooks?

body:
I am new to this group, but am super duper interested
in supporting the "movement".

Would someone be kind enough to give me an update as
to the "State of the Union" for Open Wiki Textbooks?

I would love to know things like:

-- How many people are engaged?
-- Is the movement growing, or shrinking?
-- Are any Wiki textbooks "completed"?  If so, how
many?
-- Is there any record of any school or school
district anywhere in the U.S. that has agreed to use a
Wiki Textbook for official classes?
-- Is there another forum or alias or group where the
dialog is more active/involved?
-- Are there other open textbook initiatives outside
of this one that I should be aware of?

I can't wait to learn more!

John

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from_name: Guillaume Blanchard

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Egyptopedia mailing list

body:
Hi all,
Egyptopedia is the French WikiProject regarding Egyptology.
I like to get a mailing list for this project at:
egyptopedia-l at mediawiki.org
I don't ask to put "fr" on the address because I hope, in a near future,
this project will become international.
Someone can please create it.
Regards,

Aoineko


subject: [Wikitech-l] Egyptopedia mailing list


from_name: Stan Shebs

body:
Delirium wrote:

> Jens Ropers wrote:
>
>> Also, I would observe that the "minimum prize level" I mentioned
>> above is still totally out of reach of (to make up a number), say 90%
>> of the world population. They just can't spare that money,
>> ridiculously little though it may seem to us.
>> Let's not forget that.
>
>
> But they can't spare the money to pay for printing and shipping a
> 20-volume set of encyclopedias either.  Someone else (i.e. donors) is
> going to have to pay for it either way.  I was merely pointing out
> that it may be cheaper, in the long run, for us to ship people
> computers with CD-ROMs than for us to continually ship them paper
> encyclopedia sets every year or two.
>
Don't forget that some places only have electricity for 1-2 hours/day, and
battery-powered computers (aka laptops) are rather more expensive than
$500

The whole point of the "infrastructure" remark is sometimes a situation may
appear to be unduly expensive or inefficient, but it is the easiest
route because
of the overall context. Printing/paper technology has been around for enough
years that it has established infrastructure in areas where computers
are still
trying to get a foothold.

Stan


from_name: Henry H. Tan-Tenn

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: UTF-8 problem

body:
Tim Starling wrote:
>If you don't have a system capable of
> this automatic conversion, you could try one of the many client-side and
> web-based tools written for this purpose, e.g.
>
> http://users.wpi.edu/~aram/unicode.php

The JavaScript one is fast:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Unicode_numeric_converter_script

Btw, bug#65:
http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=65


from_name: Stan Wiechers

subject: [Wikitech-l] Category links

body:
hello

I just updated to 1.3.3 from 1.2.6 and have a question regarding the
category links. Categorizing an article seems to work fine. But when I
create document with a yet not existing category the link to the category
has the instruction "&action=edit" which makes sense. Problem is that that
link remains to have the "&action=edit" instruction even after the category
page is created. I have to open up the article make some change and save it,
then the edit instruction goes away.

Is there a way to change that the edit instruction will be only appended if
the category doesn't exist?

thanks a lot,
stan wiechers


from_name: List, Christian

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Converting danish Wikipedia to UTF-8

body:
"Camille Constans" <wikipedia at shaihome.net> wrote in message
news:<20040909221415.72601c2f.wikipedia at shaihome.net>...
> On Thu, 9 Sep 2004 15:59:24 -0400
> "Christian List" <list1974 at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> > We have agreed on the danish Wikipedia to switch to UTF-8, nobody
disagreed.
>
> I must convert sv.wiktionary, nl.wikipedia and da.wikipedia now :)
>
> I really dont know when I'll have free time.... Well, in your case if you
accept only I tell you a few minutes before starting, I could do it soon (I
hope.....)

It doesn't look like you had time to do it today.
I hope you get time to do it soon?

Christian


from_name: Charles Matthews

body:
Mav wrote

> Yes - we are getting slammed in the media (and by school teachers and
> librarians) for being an untrustable source *and* we want a way to approve
> content for publication.

Well, of course, on the first point, no one responsible is going to give out
advice to _trust_ WP if they know anything about the Internet, wiki, how
voluntary projects run.  Any more than 'believe something if you read it in
a newspaper' holds water.

The second point carries more weight with me.  It's odd that people would
pay money for _less_ information than they could have for free, online.  It
becomes less odd if egregious blunders have been cut away.  Yes, let's think
about filters.  I don't doubt that there are experts who would gladly take
money for reading WP articles.  Turning a profit on the resulting
publication would be another matter.

Charles


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: [patch] blog thru User_talk and enchanced rdf
	feed

body:
On Sep 12, 2004, at 7:22 PM, joel wrote:
> Yes perhaps "blogging" shouldn't be encouraged. I can only say
> having one set of formatting/linking constructs, one set of user
> accounts, one db to backup, one site to visit, etc. is valuable
> to my company. Basically, I just hacked out a better feed for
> aggregators and let people organize their user talk page by
> newest section first.
>
> I just wanted to make code available we are using internally as a way
> of saying thanks for mediawiki.

Fair enough. :)  Do you think you could work it into an extension?
There are a great many things that can be added to a wiki though we
certainly don't want to support and ship them all (and don't want to be
associated with some, probably... ;) but it's a shame to waste code
that works and serves a useful purpose for at least some people. If
more of these can be done as extensions that can be dropped in to
existing code with a minimum of fuss (and hopefully be more robust
against minor version upgrades, at least) that would likely be good for
everyone.

There are a few modules in the extensions module in CVS
(http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/wikipedia/extensions/). Please
feel free to make suggestions on improvements to the extension system
such as other places where hooks are needed.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Matt R

body:
 --- Jens Ropers <ropers at ropersonline.com> wrote:
> On 13 Sep 2004, at 15:47, wikien-l-request at Wikipedia.org wrote:
> > We need a way to select content for the print/stable version and to
> > make sure that that content is good quality and can be trusted.
>
> Yes we do.
> But as I've explained here:
>
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2004-September/030521.html
>
> we do ''not'' need to give any preference to "experts" (ie. people who
> can demonstrate prior achievement) to make that happen.
> We ''can'' build a review club in the best Wikipedia spirit and it will
> work for the same reasons that Wikipedia works.

You propose:
   "Review club members would need to be very aware of their limits and
   they should clearly say when they don't feel qualified enough to make
   a judgment on an article. This is where the review club ''could'' also
   solicit outside opinions, but only if the review club ''agrees'' it
   lacks the relevant knowledge to do the work alone."
     -- (the above linked post)

So, if the Review Club has sufficient expertise, it reviews the article itself.
If it feels unqualified, it solicits outside expertise. Forgive me if I've
butchered the intent of your post, but this sounds pretty close to a
requirement for expert knowledge to me. Moreover, a weakness of this system is
that the Review Club could easily make a mistake and not realise when it has
insufficient expertise -- people generally dislike admitting their limitations.
It seems much better to me to have mandatory input from some expert with
evidence of his or her achievement.

-- Matt (User:Matt Crypto)

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from_name: KNOTT, T

body:
>that the Review Club could easily make a mistake and not realise when
it >has
>insufficient expertise -- people generally dislike admitting their
>limitations.
>It seems much better to me to have mandatory input from some expert
with
>evidence of his or her achievement.
>
>-- Matt (User:Matt Crypto)

Um what's to stop the expert making a mistake and not realising that he
has insufficient expertise?

Theresa


from_name: Jens Ropers

body:
On 13 Sep 2004, at 15:47, wikien-l-request at Wikipedia.org wrote:

> Message: 6
> Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 02:06:08 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com>
>
> We need a way to select content for the print/stable version and to
> make sure
> that that content is good quality and can be trusted.
>
> -- mav

Yes we do.

But as I've explained here:

http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2004-September/030521.html

we do ''not'' need to give any preference to "experts" (ie. people who
can demonstrate prior achievement) to make that happen.
We ''can'' build a review club in the best Wikipedia spirit and it will
work for the same reasons that Wikipedia works.

-- Jens


body:
 --- "KNOTT, T" <tknott at qcl.org.uk> wrote:
> >that the Review Club could easily make a mistake and not realise when
> it >has
> >insufficient expertise -- people generally dislike admitting their
> >limitations.
> >It seems much better to me to have mandatory input from some expert
> with
> >evidence of his or her achievement.
> >
> >-- Matt (User:Matt Crypto)
>
> Um what's to stop the expert making a mistake and not realising that he
> has insufficient expertise?

The scenario is that Wikipedia editors have found an expert with a proven
track-record in the specific subject area of the article, and solicited his
opinion. In this scenario, the expert's track-record provides some evidence
that the expert has the expertise -- we wouldn't be relying on his or her
self-evaluation. Such evidence could never be conclusive, but I think it's a
lot better than none at all.

-- Matt (User:Matt Crypto)

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subject: [Wikitech-l] Sub-wikis?

body:
I've been looking at a way to make Mediawiki (or is it wikimedia?)
effectively create a few namespaces, for a few different departments
within my intranet.  Doing this would let us make a few different pages
called something like "faq".  At first, I thought namespaces would be
the perfect solution, but now, I'm thinking that doing some kind of
implicit name mangling might be a better solution.  What I mean by this
is that if you're on a page called, say, "Foo.Bar.SomePage", and you
link to [[Blah]], I'd perhaps augment the link indexing to first search
for [[Foo.Bar.Blah]],  then [[Foo.Blah]], and then finally just plain
[[Blah]].  Something like [[::Blah]] would let you pick names from the
topmost hierarchy.

Have there been any discussions about this before?  Any opinions /
pointers would be welcome.

thanks all!
-Nick


body:
On 13 Sep 2004, at 15:47, wikien-l-request at Wikipedia.org wrote:

> Message: 10
> Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 09:44:46 -0400
> From: Delirium <delirium at hackish.org>
>
> Daniel Mayer wrote:
>
>> What? How do you come to that conclusion? There *will* be no fork at
>> *all* -
>> the only thing that will be done is selecting one version of an
>> article that is
>> approved in some way. Any future approved version would be based on
>> the
>> development version (that is, a regular Wikipedia article which would
>> be in
>> perpetual development), not the last stable version.
>>
>>
> I can imagine at least one scenario that would lead to a bit of a fork,
> although whether it's a bad thing is not clear:
>
> Imagine that we have experts of some sort working on an article.  They
> hash out between them and the others editing an article something
> reasonably neutral, and it becomes the "stable" version.  A few months
> later, they come back, and the article has been editing by 500 people
> in
> the meantime and become mostly a mess.  They decide to take a few of
> the
> good facts and improvements from the new version and "backport" them to
> the previous stable version rather than dealing with the mess of the
> development version, because frankly the last stable version was better
> (except for the few facts that were duly incorporated).  That'd be a
> fork of sorts, I suppose.
>
> Of course, something similar happens on occasion already, which has
> been
> the subject of some revert wars...
>
> -Mark

This is precisely why I've insisted here

http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2004-September/030521.html

that

>> The review club would not edit. No editing would take place on the
>> stable branch. The job of the review club would only be to determine
>> whether "wiki" versions can be promoted to "stable". If an article
>> needs editing, the review club would say so on the talk page. Review
>> club members could edit ''in their other role of being regular
>> contributors'', but these edits would be treated ''the same as any
>> other contributor's edits''.

-- Jens


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: RE: no more PD satellite photos?

body:
Dan Drake wrote:

>Stan Shebs wrote:
>
>
>>I'm no conservative, but if a company has put up their own satellite
>>and network, I think they're as deserving of making a profit from it
>>as the portrait photographer down the street.
>>
>>
>Yes, people have rights even when organized into corportations. (Almost
>said that corporations have rights--a serious slip of the keyboard!)
>
Legally a corporation IS a person, and does have rights.

Ec


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Category links

body:
-----Original Message-----
From: wikitech-l-bounces at wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikitech-l-bounces at wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Ashar Voultoiz
Sent: Monday, September 13, 2004 4:14 PM
To: wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
Subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Category links

Stan Wiechers wrote:
>> hello
>>
>> I just updated to 1.3.3 from 1.2.6 and have a question regarding the
>> category links. Categorizing an article seems to work fine. But when I
>> create document with a yet not existing category the link to the category
>> has the instruction "&action=edit" which makes sense. Problem is that
that
>> link remains to have the "&action=edit" instruction even after the
category
>> page is created. I have to open up the article make some change and save
it,
>> then the edit instruction goes away.
>>
>> Is there a way to change that the edit instruction will be only appended
if
>> the category doesn't exist?

>That's how it's supposed to work. I suspect a caching trouble there :o)
>Be sure to clear your browser cache and refresh page.

Oh that's how it is supposed to work?

I'm not too familiar with the sourcetree, if I want to change that where can
I disable that, I assume that his is a very simple change to the wiki code
to do that.

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


subject: [Wikitech-l] A feature request

body:
On Sep 13, 2004, at 6:21 PM, M Atakan Gurkan wrote:
> Recently in Wikipedia's help desk another editor and I have asked how
> to count one's own and/or another editor's contributions. The answer
> given was to reload the page with different count limits and estimate
> that way. Somebody mentioned that this would strain the database.

This is more of a social than a technical issue. Quantity of edits
doesn't connote quality of edits, but it's all too easy for that kind
of post count to turn into a status symbol. This cheapens the community
and encourages clique formation.

So, while we _could_ make it very easy to look up a user's edit count
we haven't done so.

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

body:
Jens Ropers wrote:

> Also, I would observe that the "minimum prize level" I mentioned above
> is still totally out of reach of (to make up a number), say 90% of the
> world population. They just can't spare that money, ridiculously
> little though it may seem to us.
> Let's not forget that.

But they can't spare the money to pay for printing and shipping a
20-volume set of encyclopedias either.  Someone else (i.e. donors) is
going to have to pay for it either way.  I was merely pointing out that
it may be cheaper, in the long run, for us to ship people computers with
CD-ROMs than for us to continually ship them paper encyclopedia sets
every year or two.

A minimally cheap newly built computer system these days can be easily
had for under $500 (just buy the bottom line of everything, which will
still be 10x what you need to view static HTML pages).  I don't have
good numbers on dead-tree printing and distribution costs to compare
with though, which would influence the decision.

-Mark


from_name: Andre Engels

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: An urgent Proposal: A fair,	effective and
	free	rewarding system for WikiPedia volunteers

body:
On Sun, 12 Sep 2004 19:57:40 -0400 Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:

>I don't think many people will argue that psychology has a very good track
>record.  Up until just 30 years ago, psychologists and psychiatrists nearly
>uniformly agreed that homosexuality was, scientifically speaking, a mental
>illness, a finding they finally retracted only after people _outside_ the
>field attacked them continuously over a period of many years.

I think that that's a very bad thing to compare with, since the question
whether homosexuality is an illness is a matter of definition more than
something one could expect to get from research in the best of
circumstances.  It is not that there used to be research concluding that
homosexuality is an illness and that now that research has been invalidated.
It is that one used to define homosexuality as an illness and now one
doesn't.

Andre Engels


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: One Chinese [sic.] Wikipedia

body:
Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:

> Within a fairly wide range, though, such differences can be avoided in
> an encyclopedia.  It depends on how extreme the differences might be,
> of course, but mutual intelligibility is the standard that I would
> use.

At a textual level mutual intelligibility becomes less of an issue once
mutual readability (by way of a Traditional/Simplified converter) is in
place.  What's left is mostly mutual learning and acceptability at a
community level.  Will PRC users accept that a computer is known as an
"electronic brain" in Taiwanese Mandarin, and not as a "calculator"?
Will a Taiwanese Mandarin (or Japanese) user accept that what looks like
the term for "calculator" often refers to a "computer" in PRC Mandarin?
  Clearly such differences can not always be avoided, and one or another
or both have to be used without affecting intelligibility for one of the
user groups.  The evolution toward mutual textual intelligibility
(through learning) and mutual acceptability (through tolerance and/or
compromise) might *eventually* contribute to some kind of International
Mandarin.  Probably there are already transnational business incentives
to do so.

But what Google appears to do now is accomodate the reality of
(somewhat) diverged standards.  E.g. looking up "??" ("electronic
brain"/computer) one also gets results referring to "???"
("calculator"/computer).  More remarkably, Google is able to present
excerpts from Simplified pages in Traditional text, with ??? replaced
by ??.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&q=%E9%9B%BB%E8%85%A6


from_name: Ashar Voultoiz

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: mediawiki portability

body:
Edward Peschko wrote:
> everyone -
>
> I was wondering if the following list of files and directories sufficed to transfer
> a mediawiki installation from one machine to another..
>
> 	./LocalSettings.php
> 	./config/
> 	./images/
> 	./stylesheets/
> 	/var/mysql/  (assuming mysql is stored under /var
> 	/var/wikidb/ (assuming wikidb is the user name that you used to configure
>                        everything)
>
> And do you need to do any translation in going between two OSes (ie: is mysql
> the same binary format everywhere, or do you need to have a conversion script that
> unloads/loads the data?)
>
> And finally - if you need to move one mediawiki on top of another, is there a
> conversion script out there which allows you to deploy data, users, etc
> on top of another wikidb?
>
> Thanks much,
>
> Ed

Hello Ed,

I myseld moved my wiki from Windows 2000 to Debian GNU/Linux, both using
roughly the same apache and mysql versions.

The things I add to change:
  _ $IP
  _ Changed mysql data files extensions (myd|myi) -> (MYD|MYI)

--
Ashar Voultoiz


from_name: Dan Drake

body:
On Thu, 9 Sep 2004 18:03:15 UTC, Stan Shebs
<shebs at apple.com> wrote:

> One thing I noticed is that the article mentions images created by
> private companies and then bought for use by the government. It
> occurs to me that people might have been using FOIA as an endrun to
> avoid paying the companies for their images - find out that the
> government happens to be one of their customers, demand copies
> from the government under FOIA, and then use the images for free
> "because it's from the government".

Very interesting point, and that's probably what's involved. Now if
someone can teacht he government to say what it (supp0osedly) means on
those occasions when it's *not* making a power grab, things will really be
nice.

>
> I'm no conservative, but if a company has put up their own satellite
> and network, I think they're as deserving of making a profit from it
> as the portrait photographer down the street.

Yes, people have rights even when organized into corportations. (Almost
said that corporations have rights--a serious slip of the keyboard!)


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

subject: [Wiktionary-l] Chinese, traditional and simplified

body:
There is a big thing on the wikipedia-l about writing up Chinese. One
thing I gleaned from this discussion is that zh-tw and zh-cn are used to
indicate respectively traditional and simplified Chinese. As it is
relevant to wiktionary to have both correct spellings, I propose to use
these codes as well as the zh code to indicate Chinese words.

I hope someone has a good suggestion for Serbian, cyrillic and
alphabetic. There are more language that are written in different
charactersets. I am looking forward to suggestions.

Thanks,
    GerardM


from_name: David Gerard

body:
On 09/13/04 09:06, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> --- David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:

>>If you don't suppose they are correct, why do we need to throw a
>>spanner into the works of Wikipedia to mollify them? You haven't
>>demonstrated the burning need to follow a course of action you
>>here admit isn't actually necessarily justifiable.

> We need a way to select content for the print/stable version and to make sure
> that that content is good quality and can be trusted.

Yes, but, as I stated before, "we need to do something" and "this is
something" do not mean "we need to do this".

You're proposing adding a reified layer of appointed experts. I strongly
suggest we are unlikely to go wrong by taking a much more gradual approach.
e.g. the current proposal for reference tagging within the wiki markup,
which would make articles far more checkable; the rating system already
in play on test; approaches which would use the wiki method rather than
seemingly invalidating it.

- d.


from_name: M Atakan Gurkan

subject: [Wikitech-l] A feature request

body:
Hi,
Recently in Wikipedia's help desk another editor and I have asked how
to count one's own and/or another editor's contributions. The answer
given was to reload the page with different count limits and estimate
that way. Somebody mentioned that this would strain the database. I was
wondering if it would be possible to turn the lists in "User contributions"
and "My contributions" into numbered lists? This way people will not strain
the database by reloading those pages with different limits to determine
the number of contributions.

cheers,

ato

PS: I have written a similar note at meta's "MediaWiki feature request
and bug report discussion" page.


from_name: Matthew Larsen

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: A future for Nupedia?

references:
<20040912040747.17268.qmail@web51602.mail.yahoo.com>
	<4143DECA.8020007@apple.com>
	<slrnck9kc9.k2.zen19725@cabalamat.somewhere>

body:
whaa! Got a massive shock at number of replies when loaded into gmail

I'l print em off and read em on the bus 2morrow :P

Ok back on subject ...

On Sun, 12 Sep 2004 23:45:32 +0100, phil hunt <zen19725 at zen.co.uk> wrote:
> On Sat, 11 Sep 2004 22:29:46 -0700, Stan Shebs <shebs at apple.com> wrote:
> >Daniel Mayer wrote:
> >To trot out yet another GNU comparison, most components of GNU and
> >Linux have been disparaged by computer scientists and leading
> >technologists ("just a hobby system", "no one would ever use it
> >for anything important", etc). The interesting thing that happened
> >is that over time, some experts (like me) got pulled into the
> >projects, and in other cases, the less-expert simply tried
> >imitating what experts did, sometimes several times before
> >settling on something that worked in practice. The cumulative
> >result has shut up a lot of skeptics (and I've had the distinct
> >pleasure of some of them saying "Stan, you were right" - aaah...).
> >But it did take a long time - GNU is almost 20 years old, and Linux
> >is 13, at 3 1/2 years only the true believers worked on them.
>
> Some people seem to have a deep-seated psychological block regrading
> the possibility of an unpaid collaborative project over the Internet
> achiveing anying worthwhile I suspect they have fundamentally
> pessimistic beliefs about human nature: people aren't good at
> co-operating, and no-one would do anything worthwhile unless they
> are paid to do it. It's sad that people have these delusions,
> however, as you point out, over time and with sufficient evidence,
> many will change their minds.
>
> Is this a problem? The success of Wikipedia depends on Wikipedians
> creating articles. Those who don't like the Wikipedia concent aren't
> going to be creating articles anyway, so it is no loss. However, if
> they are in a position to sway others away from using Wikipedia,
> then some of those people who would eventually become Wikipedians
> won't do so, or will do so later.
>
> >Getting back to WP, one of the things I don't think people appreciate
> >is the number of bonafide experts already reviewing WP articles on a
> >daily basis. It would be very hard for someone to get something by me
> >in the GCC or GDB articles for instance; I know articles in other
> >areas also have experts' eyes watching intently.
>
> This is probably most true regarding software, particularly open
> source software. There's a degree of truth in the jibe that
> Wikipedia is an encyclopedia built by Slashdotters.
>
> > It would be a
> >pretty low impact simply to have a place to document the existing
> >experts (real names with CVs, no hiding behind pseudonyms). The
> >recognition alone, even without any special privileges, would attract
> >some experts, and the power structure works right - editors will
> >tend to defer to the known experts (that happens already) but
> >still be able to challenge those who get out of line.
>
> Good idea.
>
> >Going a little further, I could imagine pages having a link going
> >to a list of real-name editors who have publicly declared themselves
> >to be watching the article.
>
> Yes, in the same way we have a "talk" page attaching to a page.
>
> > Those seeking reassurance can then
> >peruse the list to see if they're sufficiently impressed. Conversely,
> >it's an incentive to the watchers, whose reputation will suffer if
> >the articles they're publicly watching are poor in some way.
> >
> >Stan
>
>
> --
> "It's easier to find people online who openly support the KKK than
> people who openly support the RIAA" -- comment on Wikipedia
> (Email: zen19725 at zen dot co dot uk)
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
Matthew Larsen
   > mat.larsen at gmail.com
   > 07739 785 249


from_name: Michael Snow

subject: [Foundation-l] Delay in press release

body:
In connection with the upcoming press release celebrating one million
Wikipedia articles, we are working to translate not only the press
release itself, but also make the Wikimedia Foundation website available
in languages other than English. This is needed for us to make the best
use of the publicity and also to help our fundraising efforts. However,
this project will carry us through the weekend.

Therefore, at the request of the Board of Trustees, I am delaying the
distribution of the press release until Monday, September 20. That will
be the day for the official announcement, although we may actually reach
the million-article milestone earlier. This will allow us sufficient
time to get things ready in as many languages as possible. Also, it may
be helpful to have the press release come at the beginning of the weekly
news cycle, as this may allow for better exposure over the course of the
week.

Please pass this on to your respective projects and anyone who is
planning to help with this effort. In the meantime, everyone who will
help distribute the press release could make good use of the time to
identify the right contact people at the media organizations you plan to
send the press release to.

--Michael Snow


subject: [Foundation-l] Delay in press release


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: no more PD satellite photos?

body:
Tim Starling wrote:

> Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>> Legally a corporation IS a person, and does have rights.
>
> As much as I hate to add to off-topic channel noise, I can't help but
> point out that a corporation is a legal entity, not a person.
> Corporations can own property, form contracts and be sued for
> negligence. But they can't vote, you can't assault them or murder
> them. They don't have a right to bear arms, or a right to free speech.
> Just a minor point of terminology, obviously corporations do have
> rights to creative works made by their employees.

I hope that the following will clear things up. A person may be a
natural person or an artificial person.

 From http://dictionary.law.com/default2.asp?selected=358&bold=||||

>
> corporation
> n. an organization formed with state governmental approval to act as
> an artificial person to carry on business (or other activities), which
> can sue or be sued, and (unless it is non-profit) can issue shares of
> stock to raise funds with which to start a business or increase its
> capital.
>

>From
http://www.nolo.com/lawcenter/dictionary/dictionary_listing.cfm/Term/288F640F-F004-41BD-9DA1C46501BFE4D3/alpha/C

> A legal structure authorized by state law that allows a business to
> organize as a separate legal entity from its owners. A nonprofit is
> often referred to as an "artificial legal person," meaning that, like
> an individual, it can enter into contracts, sue and be sued and do the
> many other things necessary to carry on a business.

 From http://www.duhaime.org/dictionary/dict-p.aspx

> Person
>     An entity with legal rights and existence including the ability to
>     sue and be sued, to sign contracts, to receive gifts, to appear in
>     court either by themselves or by lawyer and, generally, other
>     powers incidental to the full expression of the entity in law.
>     Individuals are "persons" in law unless they are minors or under
>     some kind of other incapacity such as a court finding of mental
>     incapacity. Many laws give certain powers to "persons" which, in
>     almost all instances, includes business organizations that have
>     been formally registered such as partnerships, corporations
>     <http://www.duhaime.org/dictionary/dict-c.aspx#corporation> or
>     associations.
>
 From Section 36 of the Interpretation Act (Queensland)

> ?person? includes an individual and a corporation.


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Bugs and feature request: submitting to Bugzilla
 or to Sourceforge ?

body:
Stephan Walter wrote:
> As you can read on sf.net:
>
> "We are moving bugs to bugzilla.wikipedia.org which is easier to search
> and not as cluttered and intimidating.
>
> Please file new bug reports there."

And the last open sourceforge bug ( #1013580 ) is:

   PLEASE USE BUGZILLA.WIKIPEDIA.ORG TO REPORT BUGS

:o)

--
Ashar Voultoiz


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Wouldn't it be better to store Most of values in
 LocalSettings.php into database?

body:
Kiss All wrote:
> I mean storing most local settings into database, and administrators
> can modify it online via a dedicated configuration php page. Thus less
> efforts are needed for administration and updating to new version of
> mediaWiki.
>    Most page interface messages can be stored in DB, why not to store
> those essential configuration information?
>   The best case would be to use newversion immediately after unpacking
> mediawiki-x-x.tar to the original www root.
>   I am tired of editing LocalSettings.php for already. :-)  It is like
> programming, not administration.

Hello,

I am already thinking about it, unfortunatly I will not be able to code
anything about it before november.

Maybe some other developper will do it :p

--
Ashar Voultoiz


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: create new function; domain name administrator

body:
Yo. Fully agree with you on this Walter.

Well, I have been seeing you taking care of such matters for perhaps 2
years now, as well as setting portal pages for country domain name.

I would be personnally delighted that you be this person responsible of
domain names.

What do you think ? Would you be interested ? What do other people think ?

Anthere

Walter Vermeir a ?crit:
> There are a lot of domain names for all the Wikimedia projects. Some are the
> property of Wikimedia, some of friends of Wikimedia.
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Domain_names
>
> I have the impression that the dealing of requests regarding domains is done ad
> hoc by diffrent people.
>
> To make sure that the overview is not lost, the usernames and passwords for
> those domains, it is not forgotten to renew domains, to be a contact person for
> friends of Wikimedia who are willing to transfer a domain and for requests for
> buying new domains,  it would be good if there where one person responsible.
>
> [[w:nl:gebruiker:walter]]


from_name: Muke Tever

body:
On Mon, 13 Sep 2004 19:37:56 +0200, Gerard Meijssen <gerardm at myrealbox.com> wrote:
> I hope someone has a good suggestion for Serbian, cyrillic and
> alphabetic. There are more language that are written in different
> charactersets. I am looking forward to suggestions.

The solution used so far is to link both the word in Cyrillic and its Latin transliteration.  This is done with Belarusian (Cyrillic and Lacinka), and presumably for other languages that have had different official scripts in the past.   I don't know how extensible such a solution would be for languages like Azeri which have changed scripts many times (it has had Arabic, Cyrillic, and two different Latin orthographies _officially_ over the past hundred years).

	*Muke!
--
website:     http://frath.net/
LiveJournal: http://kohath.livejournal.com/
deviantArt:  http://kohath.deviantart.com/

FrathWiki, a conlang and conculture wiki:
http://wiki.frath.net/


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Category links

body:
Stan Wiechers wrote:
> hello
>
> I just updated to 1.3.3 from 1.2.6 and have a question regarding the
> category links. Categorizing an article seems to work fine. But when I
> create document with a yet not existing category the link to the category
> has the instruction "&action=edit" which makes sense. Problem is that that
> link remains to have the "&action=edit" instruction even after the category
> page is created. I have to open up the article make some change and save it,
> then the edit instruction goes away.
>
> Is there a way to change that the edit instruction will be only appended if
> the category doesn't exist?

That's how it's supposed to work. I suspect a caching trouble there :o)
Be sure to clear your browser cache and refresh page.

--
Ashar Voultoiz


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Why Academics are Useful to Wikipedia

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>--- Geoff Burling <llywrch at agora.rdrop.com> wrote:
>
>
>>Last time I ventured my two cents concerning the print Wikipedia, the
>>response I got led me to conlcude that there was no support for forking
>>Wikipedia even in the slightest to make the content more acceptible -- which
>>is what any approval board would end up doing. Then the project seemed to go
>>into hibernation. Then it seemed that a group was working on it. Now it
>>appears we are back to discussing what should be done.
>>
>>
>What? How do you come to that conclusion? There *will* be no fork at *all* -
>the only thing that will be done is selecting one version of an article that is
>approved in some way. Any future approved version would be based on the
>development version (that is, a regular Wikipedia article which would be in
>perpetual development), not the last stable version.
>
If we adopt a formal approval system, the idea that all future approved
versions will be based on development versions, rather than the last
approved "stable" version, sounds naively idealistic to me. Even without
an approval system, this is already not the case on some of our more
contentious articles. When changes are not agreed on quickly, one side
or the other, and sometimes both, may adopt the tactic of reverting back
to an earlier version of which it "approves". However, since the sides
generally do not approve of the same version, the dispute continues and
often results in a revert war.

Any system that marks a particular revision as "approved" or "stable"
will inherently increase the temptation to blindly revert changes back
to the "stable" revision, instead of trying to work with those changes
and improve the article. This is already a problem in some places and
among some editors (no names, this is not an invitation for
finger-pointing). If we want to implement a system that lets people flag
specific article revisions, let's at least be aware of the possible
downsides to this as well.

--Michael Snow


subject: [WikiEN-l] Why Academics are Useful to Wikipedia

body:
>> Um what's to stop the expert making a mistake and not realising that
>> he
>> has insufficient expertise?
>
> The scenario is that Wikipedia editors have found an expert with a
> proven
> track-record in the specific subject area of the article, and
> solicited his
> opinion. In this scenario, the expert's track-record provides some
> evidence
> that the expert has the expertise -- we wouldn't be relying on his or
> her
> self-evaluation. Such evidence could never be conclusive, but I think
> it's a
> lot better than none at all.
>
> -- Matt (User:Matt Crypto)

This is NOT a choice between one single person's academic accreditation
vs. one single person's self-evaluation.
It's a choice between the ''collective'' wisdom and joint assessment of
a larger group of people** vs. one single person's academic
accreditation.

** some of them likely will just so happen to hold academic degrees
themselves, without that ever being an issue or getting mentioned

- Jens


from_name: Geoff Burling

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Why there Will be a Fork (Was: Why Academics are Useful
	to Wikipedia)

body:
On Mon, 13 Sep 2004, Daniel Mayer wrote:

> --- Geoff Burling <llywrch at agora.rdrop.com> wrote:
> > Last time I ventured my two cents concerning the print Wikipedia, the
> > response I got led me to conlcude that there was no support for forking
> > Wikipedia even in the slightest to make the content more acceptible -- which
> > is what any approval board would end up doing. Then the project seemed to go
> > into hibernation. Then it seemed that a group was working on it. Now it
> > appears we are back to discussing what should be done.
>
> What? How do you come to that conclusion? There *will* be no fork at *all* -
> the only thing that will be done is selecting one version of an article that is
> approved in some way. Any future approved version would be based on the
> development version (that is, a regular Wikipedia article which would be in
> perpetual development), not the last stable version.
>
By "fork", I mean a second version that is clearly different from the first.
Even if Wikipedia 1.0 is nothing more than a snapshop of Wikipedia on a given
date, it will be different from the dynamic, growing Wikipedia -- & thus
technically a fork.

But overlooking this case, there are other ways that Wikipedia 1.0 will
become a fork -- although a transient one. The most important one is thru the
process of review. The very fact that articles are being reviewed by a
group for that purpose implies that some articles will not make the cut; &
unless the review committee is willing to reject them without comment &
simply hope that contributors will expend the necessary work properly to
pass review, this process of rejection will inevitably lead to some
Wikipedia 1.0 material being different from the dynamic Wikipedia. (The
specific case I forsee is that some editors will feel that it is at least
as easy to make the desired revisions as to ask for them in the Talk
pages, make the changes to the 1.0 version, but forget to also make them
to the dynamic version. No matter how well intentioned, there will be
mistakes & slip-ups.)

And then there is the case where the January 1, 2005 version of an article
is flagged as approved, but changes are made so that the January 2 version
is clearly different. Will the review group then consider this new version,
or ignore it, justifiably assured that they are finished with that article?
We will then end up with a 1.0 version assembled from articles that were
never gathered together at one time.

Frankly, even if the changes to Wikipedia 1.0 are limited to correcting
misspellings, grammatical errors & other minor changes like these, there
will *still* be significant variation between 1.0 & the dynamic versions
to consider them branches of the same project.

Unless one & all is afraid to allow this possiblity to come to pass & either
(1) wait for the Featured Article project to produce enough material for a
Wikipeida 1.0, or (2) submit a snapshot of the dynamic Wikipedia as 1.0,
we have to accept as inevitable that we will have -- for a brief while --
a fork. Then after 1.0 is published, a number of Wikipedians will then
make the effort to fold back all worthwhile differences from 1.0 into the
dynamic branch -- from which 2.0 will emerge.

That is why I say that there will be a fork.

Geoff


body:
> Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 16:46:43 +0100 (BST)
> From: Matt R <matt_crypto at yahoo.co.uk>
>
> So, if the Review Club has sufficient expertise, it reviews the
> article itself.
> If it feels unqualified, it solicits outside expertise. Forgive me if
> I've
> butchered the intent of your post, but this sounds pretty close to a
> requirement for expert knowledge to me.

(Reference:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2004-September/030521.html
)

We positively DO want to get all the *expert knowledge* we can get.
However we should NOT make the mistake of thinking that the only way we
could get hold of *expert knowledge* was formally installing accredited
experts and giving them more power than the next guy. I'm getting
hoarse saying it, but: The idea is that all input should prevail by
it's own merit and NOT by merit of the person contributing it holding a
degree (=evidence of prior achievement). Letting EVERY contribution
prevail on its own merit will be MORE likely to lead to superior
results.

YES to *expert knowledge*.
YES to having people in our midst who ''could theoretically'' be
regarded as "experts".
NO to actually calling them "experts". (It would introduce bias, eg. it
would intimidate some contributors who might have something useful to
say and would choose to censor themselves because of false awe.)
NO to expressly installing "experts". (They will come automatically.)
NO to designating anyone an "expert" and
NO to associating privilege with such labels. (It would lead to less
scrutiny, because the "expert's" words would no longer have to prevail
on their own merit.)
"One man, one vote" will suffice.

YES to an ''additional option'' to seek outside help:
Only where the collective consensus of the review group gets to be that
the group doesn't know enough, then seek help from outside experts.
With this step, and ONLY with this step (and only as a last resort) the
relevant review board ''could'' also look for academic degrees to for
guidance of who might be competent. This last resort only becomes
necessary when seeking outside help -- and that's because the outside
world is not engaged in a Wiki process whereby it is possible only to
look at the actual merit of "what was said". Using the "who said
it"-principle when looking for outside expertise is a crutch, no doubt.
But it's the "next best thing" to the Wiki process and it may be the
only option left outside of the Wikisphere.

> Moreover, a weakness of this system is
> that the Review Club could easily make a mistake and not realise when
> it has
> insufficient expertise -- people generally dislike admitting their
> limitations.

An individual person might be tempted to oversell him/herself. Yet,
because we're looking at a group of people engaged in a process as
complete peers, that danger is minimized.

> It seems much better to me to have mandatory input from some expert
> with
> evidence of his or her achievement.

NO.
See above.

> -- Matt (User:Matt Crypto)

Thanks and regards,

-- Jens [[User:Ropers|Ropers]]
     www.ropersonline.com


body:
> Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 13:33:17 -0400
> From: Delirium <delirium at hackish.org>
>
> Computer equipment is becoming so incredibly cheap (...)
>
> <snip>
>
> -Mark

Only in ''relative'' terms. True, the ''price per [[megaflop]]'', or
''price per megabyte'' of RAM or HD space, etc. -- these have all
plummeted. However: in order to get a working computer system of ANY
performance level, you will be lucky to get below a certain minimum
price level. It doesn't even matter what computer generation we're
talking about -- whether 386 / PowerPC 601 or G5 / Opteron. Sure, there
always is that hiatus, that moment where people/companies who are
upgrading obsessively give away their PCs for nothing. But securing one
of these is sheer luck. As a check on ebay will tell you, there is a
bottom line where things don't get cheaper, regardless of what
generation of PC you're buying.

Ironically, if you wanted to buy a good mid-class PC system 10 years
ago, you probably had to spend, say, about $1200. If you want to buy a
good mid-class PC system today, you have to spend -- surprise -- $1200!
Yes, true, today you get "a lot more Mega" for your buck, but Joe
Random User trying to buy a good mid-class PC has probably been
spending the same amount for the last decade or so and the reason for
that is that after the design phase is over, it costs about the same to
fab an Opteron system today as it used to cost to fab a 386 system.
(Back in the very old days it was different, and PCs did indeed cost
$12000 and more instead of $1200. But you're getting my drift.)

Of course marketing suits tell us that things are really, totally
getting cheaper -- well, there probably is ''some'' truth in that as
well. But less than most would think.

Also, I would observe that the "minimum prize level" I mentioned above
is still totally out of reach of (to make up a number), say 90% of the
world population. They just can't spare that money, ridiculously little
though it may seem to us.
Let's not forget that.

-- Jens [[User:Ropers|Ropers]]
     www.ropersonline.com


body:
On 13 Sep 2004, at 22:11, Anthere wrote:

> Yo. Fully agree with you on this Walter.
>
> Well, I have been seeing you taking care of such matters for perhaps 2
> years now, as well as setting portal pages for country domain name.
>
> I would be personnally delighted that you be this person responsible
> of domain names.
>
> What do you think ? Would you be interested ? What do other people
> think ?
>
>
> Anthere

Support. ~~~~


from_name: Jens Frank

subject: [Wikitech-l] wikispecies.org

body:
Hi,

upon Jason's request, i set up a wiki for wikispecies.(org|com).

It's using the specieswiki MySQL DB and the document root is
/home/wikipedia/htdocs/species/

Best regards,

JeLuF


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Wouldn't it be better to store Most of values in
	LocalSettings.php into database?

body:
On Mon, Sep 13, 2004 at 09:54:41PM +0200, Ashar Voultoiz wrote:
> Kiss All wrote:
> >I mean storing most local settings into database, and administrators
> >can modify it online via a dedicated configuration php page. Thus less
> >efforts are needed for administration and updating to new version of
> >mediaWiki.
> >   Most page interface messages can be stored in DB, why not to store
> >those essential configuration information?
> >  The best case would be to use newversion immediately after unpacking
> >mediawiki-x-x.tar to the original www root.
> >  I am tired of editing LocalSettings.php for already. :-)  It is like
> >programming, not administration.
>
> Hello,
>
> I am already thinking about it, unfortunatly I will not be able to code
> anything about it before november.
>
> Maybe some other developper will do it :p

I've a UI for editing the site preferences, I'm just not yet sure how to
store the settings. one big blob, with old versions kept around, or
as a table with name=>value pairs? Probably have to replace all globals
by a $globalConfig[] array to make storing/retrieving faster/easier.

Any ideas?

JeLuF


from_name: Angela

body:
Having one person to contact for such matters would be really helpful,
and if Walter is prepared to do that, I fully support him having that
role.

Angela.

On Mon, 13 Sep 2004 22:11:47 +0200, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Yo. Fully agree with you on this Walter.
>
> Well, I have been seeing you taking care of such matters for perhaps 2
> years now, as well as setting portal pages for country domain name.
>
> I would be personnally delighted that you be this person responsible of
> domain names.
>
> What do you think ? Would you be interested ? What do other people think ?
>
> Anthere