from_name: Axel Boldt

subject: [WikiEN-l] My proposal

body:
--- Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:

> What I think we should do, and could do, is implement a basic voting
> system in the Wikipedia engine that would allow people to create
> polls  (ideally offering different voting methods -- if you just
> have yes/no as  choices, first past the post seems fine). These could

> be used to collect data informally in various situations, like the
> recent moderation debate.
> They would NOT be accepted, by policy, as a way to assert that X or Y
> should be done, just a method to tabulate/quantify opinions.

That's unrealistic: in reality, once an issue has been put up for a
vote and one side has lost, the issue would be considered pretty much
settled and anybody arguing further would be considered a sore loser.
This is why many people rush to ad-hoc votes: they want the debate to
end.

After all, what is the point of "collecting data informally and to
tabulate/quantify opinions", if not to make a decision? The fact that
56.4% of all Wikipedians favor XYZ is clearly no substantial argument
for or against XYZ.

> What I think we should resist is the temptation to avoid changing our
> process because of fear of change itself.

I don't think the motive fear-of-change has been expressed in this
debate, so this is a strawman. The argument voting-is-bad has been
expressed repeatedly in this debate, by various people.

Axel

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list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] My proposal

body:
Although I remain for now an opponent of voting, I can play devil's
advocate and answer some of Axel's concerns, I think.

Axel Boldt wrote:
> That's unrealistic: in reality, once an issue has been put up for a
> vote and one side has lost, the issue would be considered pretty much
> settled and anybody arguing further would be considered a sore loser.
> This is why many people rush to ad-hoc votes: they want the debate to
> end.

This could be alleviated to a significant extent by having long time
periods of discussion before the vote is finalized.  We've been
talking about some kind of moderation for some of the mailing lists,
and it seems like the discussion has already died down.  If I were
to set January 31st as the date of the vote, with voting to be
conducted until February 15th, this would be plenty of time for lots
of discussion.

>  After all, what is the point of "collecting data informally and to
> tabulate/quantify opinions", if not to make a decision? The fact
> that 56.4% of all Wikipedians favor XYZ is clearly no substantial
> argument for or against XYZ.

Right, but this is where voting proponents say that other voting rules
might be better.  For example, we might say that we're adopting a
position of rough conservatism and that any proposal for a major
change requires a win by a certain percentage, not just 50% win in a
simple majority.

It might be argued "Who is to decide what we're voting on, and what
counts as a major issue, and what the alternatives are, and how they
are worded?"  Those might be good questions, but the answer could
remain essentially the same as now: right now, ultimately, *I* decide,
after listening to everyone and trying to modify a proposal until
there is little disagreement.

I have no intention of giving up benevolent dictatorship anytime soon,
and with regard to really big issues (i.e. Wikipedia is an
encyclopedia, not a humor site), things will never change.

If 99% of wikipedians decided, for example, that the Wikipedia should
become a pro-American pro-libertarian POV reference work, I'd just
say: fine, go away, and the 2 people who are left with me will
continue to work on wikipedia.

But if 99% of wikipedians have an opinion counter to mine on virtually
any less central issue, I'll go along.  That's what happens now.

--Jimbo


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Timeout!

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>I seriously think we should start thinking about organizing some road
>trips and get-togethers.  This could be done informally or formally.
>
>We could do a few of these -- one on the east coast, one on the west
>coast, and one in a central location in Europe.  Or they could be
>smaller, regional things with only a few people.
>
I hesitated to answer this because I didn't want to give the impression
of being the first one to the bar.  I guess it says something when
people are no longer enthused about getting together to settle the
world's problems over a beer.  So far it looks like Jimbo and I are
ready to have the east and west coast meetings as meetings of 1.  If we
each do this at our local pubs we'll save on travel expenses, and buying
a round for everybody that shows up won't be costly either. :-)

Eclecticology


subject: [WikiEN-l] Timeout!

in_reply_to: <3E024ABA.4090509@telus.net>; from saintonge@telus.net on Thu, Dec 19, 2002 at 02:39:54PM -0800

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
> I hesitated to answer this because I didn't want to give the impression
> of being the first one to the bar.  I guess it says something when
> people are no longer enthused about getting together to settle the
> world's problems over a beer.  So far it looks like Jimbo and I are
> ready to have the east and west coast meetings as meetings of 1.  If we
> each do this at our local pubs we'll save on travel expenses, and buying
> a round for everybody that shows up won't be costly either. :-)

Hell, I work from home, so I just have to walk to the fridge...

Seriously, Larry and I used to be bitter email and Usenet enemies
until we met in person.  Then we realized, uh, we're very similar and
like each other.  I think meeting people in person does wonders to
defuse email flame wars.

--Jimbo


from_name: Jonathan Walther

subject: [WikiEN-l] Timeout!

body:
On Thu, Dec 19, 2002 at 02:39:54PM -0800, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>people are no longer enthused about getting together to settle the
>world's problems over a beer.  So far it looks like Jimbo and I are
>ready to have the east and west coast meetings as meetings of 1.  If we
>each do this at our local pubs we'll save on travel expenses, and buying
>a round for everybody that shows up won't be costly either. :-)

Since Ray is in Vancouver, I second that motion, and suggest we hold
one in some Vancouver bar.  Anyone up for a few drinks together in a
secret, hidden, radical activist bar in a residential neighborhood?

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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list: wikitech-l

from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Error at Login

body:
On Thu, 2002-12-19 at 15:01, Andre Engels wrote:
> > One of the users on the Dutch Wikipedia (ArthurKing) is complaining that he
> > is unable to log in, getting the following error messages:
>
> The problem seems to have been solved, the user is now  logged in again.

Yes, there were a couple missing commas in the file; if someone was
unlucky enough to try to log in during the few seconds before I fixed
them, they would have seen exactly that error.

If the message persists, the usual refresh / reload / clear cache drill
should clear it.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Timeout!

body:
> Jimmy Wales wrote:
> >I seriously think we should start thinking about organizing some road
> >trips and get-togethers.  This could be done informally or formally.
> >
> >We could do a few of these -- one on the east coast, one on the west
> >coast, and one in a central location in Europe.  Or they could be
> >smaller, regional things with only a few people.

There will be at least three[1] Esperanto Wikipedians at the 'Esperanto
che Interreto'[2] conference in Boston this coming April. If any
east-coaster English Wikipedians are interested, we can probably have a
joint Wikipedia event and cultural exchange. ;)

Meanwhile, Wikipedia Day 2003 is less than a month away (and Magnus
Manske Day not long after!) -- a west coast get-together for the
occasion might be entertaining.

[1] Assuming this starving college student can scrape up airfare.
Donations welcome!
[2] An organization promoting the use of Esperanto on the Internet and
the Internet in Esperanto; http://www.ikso.net/echei/

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Error at Login -> problem whit the "External
	book sources" page

references:
<200212192301.gBJN1Wj28340@chakotay.uni-koblenz.de>
	<1040339492.2061.17.camel@rdaneel.vibber.org>  <attlee$p3i$1@main.gmane.org>

body:
On Thu, 2002-12-19 at 15:43, Giskart wrote:
> There is also a problem whit the "External book sources" page on the
> Dutch wikipedia. (boekwinkels)

Looks like there wasn't a bookstore list included! I added a copy of the
English list:

/* private */ $wgBookstoreListNl = array(
"AddALL" => "http://www.addall.com/New/Partner.cgi?query=$1&type=ISBN",
"PriceSCAN" => "http://www.pricescan.com/books/bookDetail.asp?isbn=$1",
"Barnes & Noble" => "http://shop.barnesandnoble.com/bookSearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=$1",
"Amazon.com" => "http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=$1"
);

Please feel free to customize it with some local sites.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Zoe

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia is under attack

body:
Someone with ip addresses beginning with 152.163 is deleting article, vandalizing, modifying, and variously randomly changing whatever articles they happen to encounter.  The IP address changes with each change.  We need to do something quick.

Zoe

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia is under attack

body:
On Thu, Dec 19, 2002 at 07:44:42PM -0800, Zoe wrote:
>   Someone with ip addresses beginning with 152.163 is deleting article,
>   vandalizing, modifying, and variously randomly changing whatever articles
>   they happen to encounter.  The IP address changes with each change.  We
>   need to do something quick.

fsck. Looks like wikipedia has attracted a vandal who has enough skill
to spoof his IP's.  No ideas on how to deal with that one.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia is under attack

body:
On 12/19/02 10:46 PM, "Jonathan Walther" <krooger at debian.org> wrote:

> On Thu, Dec 19, 2002 at 07:44:42PM -0800, Zoe wrote:
>>   Someone with ip addresses beginning with 152.163 is deleting article,
>>   vandalizing, modifying, and variously randomly changing whatever articles
>>   they happen to encounter.  The IP address changes with each change.  We
>>   need to do something quick.
>
> fsck. Looks like wikipedia has attracted a vandal who has enough skill
> to spoof his IP's.  No ideas on how to deal with that one.
>
Just wait a while. It's not a big deal.


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikitech-l] Error at Login

body:
One of the users on the Dutch Wikipedia (ArthurKing) is complaining that he
is unable to log in, getting the following error messages:

Parse error: parse error, expecting `')'' in /usr/local/apache/htdocs-nl/w/LanguageNl.php on line 81

Fatal error: Cannot instantiate non-existent class: languagenl in /usr/local/apache/htdocs-nl/w/Setup.php on line 26

Could someone please look what these error messages actually mean?

Andre Engels


subject: [Wikitech-l] Error at Login

in_reply_to:
<200212192254.gBJMsTO28272@chakotay.uni-koblenz.de> from Andre Engels
 at "Dec 19, 2002 11:54:28 pm"

body:
> One of the users on the Dutch Wikipedia (ArthurKing) is complaining that he
> is unable to log in, getting the following error messages:

The problem seems to have been solved, the user is now  logged in again.

Andre Engels


from_name: Giskart

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Error at Login -> problem whit the "External book sources" page

body:
There is also a problem whit the "External book sources" page on the
Dutch wikipedia. (boekwinkels)

Just see;
http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciaal:Booksources

Giskart


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikitech-l] User/Talk pages for anons

body:
Hi,

one of our problems in dealing with vandals is that we can't reliably talk
to them. They may read the changelog, but it's quite possible that they
don't. They may see the article Talk page, but it's quite probable that
they have already moved on to the next one.

We already have a user talk page change notification mechanism in place,
but we currently don't use it for anons. How about this: next to the IP
number in recent changes, we would make a link to User
Talk:xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx. This would be created if it doesn't exist. Anonymous
users would then by default get notifications when their Talk pages have
been changed.

This isn't reliable, because several users can share an IP. But that's not
a problem -- it's really not a big deal if someone reads a message not
intended for them, and we could include a standard disclaimer: "Please
note: Sometimes several users share one IP address. These messages might
not be addressed to you -- in that case, please ignore them." At least it
would allow us to talk to anons, which I believe would help in many cases,
or keep them busy.

I also suggest changing the somewhat unfriendly "*" indicator to something
more obvious, like

        (Talk)

when there are no new messages and

        (Talk - new messages)

when there are.

What do you think? The only problem I see is that these talk pages might
be obsolete after a day or so, but if that ever becomes a problem, we
could clean them up automatically.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikitech-l] User/Talk pages for anons

in_reply_to:
<8cCFfGUCpVB@erik_moeller> from Erik Moeller at "Dec 20, 2002 01:42:00
 am"

body:
> We already have a user talk page change notification mechanism in place,
> but we currently don't use it for anons. How about this: next to the IP
> number in recent changes, we would make a link to User
> Talk:xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx. This would be created if it doesn't exist. Anonymous
> users would then by default get notifications when their Talk pages have
> been changed.

(...)

> What do you think? The only problem I see is that these talk pages might
> be obsolete after a day or so, but if that ever becomes a problem, we
> could clean them up automatically.

The problem I see, is that most anonymous users would not follow that link
even after your change of indicator.

Andre Engels


from_name: Jens Frank

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia is under attack

body:
On Thu, Dec 19, 2002 at 07:46:00PM -0800, Jonathan Walther wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 19, 2002 at 07:44:42PM -0800, Zoe wrote:
> >  Someone with ip addresses beginning with 152.163 is deleting article,
> >  vandalizing, modifying, and variously randomly changing whatever articles
> >  they happen to encounter.  The IP address changes with each change.  We
> >  need to do something quick.
>
> fsck. Looks like wikipedia has attracted a vandal who has enough skill
> to spoof his IP's.  No ideas on how to deal with that one.
>

He's not spoofing. He's just an AOL user and AOL has a farm of web proxies.
The IP you see is the IP of AOL's proxy server, not that of his PC.
Please don't ban these IPs.

	JeLuF


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia is under attack

body:
Christopher Mahan wrote:
> > He's not spoofing. He's just an AOL user and AOL has a farm of web
> > proxies.
> > The IP you see is the IP of AOL's proxy server, not that of his PC.
> > Please don't ban these IPs.
>
> How would everyone feel if proxy isp users were required to log in to
> make changes? They can chose their ISP, and if they don't like it,
> they can go Earthink.

I'd prefer if we didn't do that.

It might be useful to rate-limit edits from certain known "problem
proxies".


from_name: Christopher Mahan

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia is under attack

body:
--- Jens Frank <JeLuF at gmx.de> wrote:

> He's not spoofing. He's just an AOL user and AOL has a farm of web
> proxies.
> The IP you see is the IP of AOL's proxy server, not that of his PC.
> Please don't ban these IPs.

How would everyone feel if proxy isp users were required to log in to
make changes? They can chose their ISP, and if they don't like it,
they can go Earthink.

=====
Christopher Mahan
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
http://www.christophermahan.com/

__________________________________________________
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Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Extending Wikipedia

body:
You could do what you want by creating two new namespaces; one for
organizations or front groups or campaigns, another for individuals.
You would have to write your own custom code to make sure that articles
in a particular namespace were properly put in the database, or
retrieved from the database, etc.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia is under attack

body:
It's a big deal to those of us who keep reverting all of the idiot's changes, especially since this isn't the first time he's done this.  It's the third.
Zoe
 The Cunctator <cunctator at kband.com> wrote:On 12/19/02 10:46 PM, "Jonathan Walther" wrote:

> On Thu, Dec 19, 2002 at 07:44:42PM -0800, Zoe wrote:
>> Someone with ip addresses beginning with 152.163 is deleting article,
>> vandalizing, modifying, and variously randomly changing whatever articles
>> they happen to encounter. The IP address changes with each change. We
>> need to do something quick.
>
> fsck. Looks like wikipedia has attracted a vandal who has enough skill
> to spoof his IP's. No ideas on how to deal with that one.
>
Just wait a while. It's not a big deal.

_______________________________________________
Wikipedia-l mailing list
Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia is under attack

body:
Then what do you suggest be done?
Zoe
 Jens Frank <JeLuF at gmx.de> wrote:On Thu, Dec 19, 2002 at 07:46:00PM -0800, Jonathan Walther wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 19, 2002 at 07:44:42PM -0800, Zoe wrote:
> > Someone with ip addresses beginning with 152.163 is deleting article,
> > vandalizing, modifying, and variously randomly changing whatever articles
> > they happen to encounter. The IP address changes with each change. We
> > need to do something quick.
>
> fsck. Looks like wikipedia has attracted a vandal who has enough skill
> to spoof his IP's. No ideas on how to deal with that one.
>

He's not spoofing. He's just an AOL user and AOL has a farm of web proxies.
The IP you see is the IP of AOL's proxy server, not that of his PC.
Please don't ban these IPs.

JeLuF
_______________________________________________
Wikipedia-l mailing list
Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

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from_name: Sheldon Rampton

subject: [Wikitech-l] Extending Wikipedia

body:
Hi all...I'm a new subscriber to this list. I just learned about
Wikipedia for the first time a couple of weeks ago and think it's an
impressive new step in the evolution of the web as an information
commons. I have some thoughts about directions in which I think it
could be taken further, and I hope that some people here could offer
your reactions and advice.

I'll begin by giving some particulars that explain my personal
interest in Wikipedia, after which I'll touch on ways that my
specific interests might have more general relevance.

I edit a publication called "PR Watch" (www.prwatch.org) that
monitors deceptive and manipulative public relations campaigns. My
particular interest in Wikipedia stems from my long-standing desire
to develop an information base about PR firms, PR campaigns and
deceptive PR front groups -- organizations that claim to represent
some public interest while actually serving the agenda of a client or
industry whose sponsorship of the organization is often hidden. For
example, the APCO PR firm set up a front group called "The
Advancement of Sound Science Coalition" (TASSC), whose stated mission
was to promote science-based decision-making about public health
policies. In reality, TASSC was a front group for the Philip Morris
tobacco company, whose primary mission was to attack the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency's risk assessment of secondhand
cigarette smoke.

A number of organizations, including PR Watch, have tried over the
years to develop databases, printed directories or other systems for
tracking PR campaigns, front groups or industry-sponsored "think
tanks." Typically, however, these efforts have run up against
limitations of time and staffing. There are thousands of think tanks
in the United States alone, with new ones forming all the time and
ever-changing personnel. Awhile back we added a section to the PR
Watch web site called the "Impropaganda Review" that serves as a
"rogues gallery" of a few notable examples, but the Impropaganda
Review remains in what Wikipedians might call the "Nupedia stage of
development." We've developed a handful of articles, but nothing
approaching a comprehensive directory. Rather than attempt the
impossible task of trying to expand the Impropaganda Review all by
ourselves, it seems to me that the Wikipedia model would be a great
way to invite the world at large to contribute.

There are, however, a few issues with this idea:

First, the nature of the work we do at PR Watch is inherently
controversial. Not everyone would agree with our characterization of
TASSC as an "industry front group," and I'm wondering if attempting
to develop an open-source directory of information on controversial
topics could succeed.

Second, the type of directory I'm interested in developing requires
the imposition of a bit more structure than Wikipedia imposes. Each
organizational profile in the "Impropaganda Review" contains the
following sections:
* A general description
* Personnel
* History
* Funding
* Case studies
* Contact information
* Related information resources

It isn't possible to obtain all of that information about every
organization (for example, some groups don't disclose the identity of
their funders), but I would want to strongly encourage contributors
to try to follow that framework.

Thirdly, I think it would be ideal if the information I want to
develop could be structured as a relational database. For example,
there would be a separate article for each ORGANIZATION, but also a
separate article for each PERSON, with a many-to-many relationship
linking the two categories. In other words, each article on a person
would include a list of the organizations with which that person has
been affiliated, while the article on an organization would include a
list of all its related personnel.

That's my basic concept. Now, here are my thoughts that might be of
more general relevance to Wikipedians:

(1) The Wikipedia model could be applied to a number of other uses if
the software could be modified to support something that users
experience as "relational databases of structured objects." Right now
users experience it as a non-relational database of ONE type of
object, namely an "article." The ability to insert hyperlinks to
other articles provides a quasi-relational capability, but it's not
truly relational. If, for example, I put a hyperlink in the "Leon
Trotsky" article that points to the "Mensheviks" article, the
software doesn't automatically create a corresponding link pointing
back from "Bolsheviks" to "Leon Trotsky." For certain types of
knowledge databases, it would be nice if the software could be
configured to do this automatically. Moreover, the structure of each
"article" is entirely free-form, and many knowledge databases try to
impose some sort of structure. For example, scientific articles are
typically structured to include an abstract and footnotes in addition
to the main text. If the Wikipedia software could be configured to
impose this sort of structure on individual articles, it could be
used to host a number of valuable, specialized knowledge bases in
addition to the general-purpose encyclopedia for which it was
designed. Moreover, that information could be extracted in a variety
of formats for different presentations. A database of "people," for
example, could be sorted in different ways according to different
fields, such as date of birth or city of residence.

(2) Supporting this sort of relational database structure may also
become important as Wikipedia continues to grow. One of the great
virtues of Wikipedia is that it supports collaborative synthesizing
and summarizing of information. Most of the information in
Wikipedia's articles can be found elsewhere on the web, but doing a
"Google" search often forces users to wade through mountains of
irrelevant information before they can find what they're looking for.
As the number of articles on Wikipedia continues to grow, the sheer
volume of information may also become daunting for users. Comments
are already being made to the effect that there are "too many
articles" about certain topics, and suggestions are being made to
split off certain topics into separate "sister" wiki projects such as
a Wikiteer (gazetteer) or a Wikipediatlas. However, creating separate
sister projects also leads to information fragmentation and
redundancy. If the Wikipedia software could support structured
information objects in addition to simple text articles, it might be
possible to encompass a number of "sister" projects as parts of a
single whole, while letting users decide what types of objects they
are looking for. For one user, it might be a general-purpose
"encyclopedia"; for another, a "gazetteer" (an encyclopedia of
locations); for another, a "who's who" (an encyclopedia of people).

Anyway, those are my thoughts for the moment. I'd appreciate
feedback, and especially advice on how I might go about starting a
Wikipedia-style open source information base on PR firms, PR
campaigns and front groups.
--
--------------------------------
|  Sheldon Rampton
|  Editor, PR Watch (www.prwatch.org)
|  Author of books including:
|     Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities
|     Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
|     Mad Cow USA
|     Trust Us, We're Experts
--------------------------------


subject: [Wikitech-l] User/Talk pages for anons

body:
Andre Engels wrote:

>>We already have a user talk page change notification mechanism in place,
>>but we currently don't use it for anons. How about this: next to the IP
>>number in recent changes, we would make a link to User
>>Talk:xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx. This would be created if it doesn't exist. Anonymous
>>users would then by default get notifications when their Talk pages have
>>been changed.
>>
>The problem I see, is that most anonymous users would not follow that link
>even after your change of indicator.
>
Would it help if "Talk" were made to flash?  That usually annoys people
enough to get their attention.

Eclecticology


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Somebody needs to intervene in the Swedish wiki

body:
See http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=User_talk:Brion_VIBBER&diff=0&oldid=0

Dan Koehl and Liftarn are in an edit war, and Dan Koehl seems to be using his admin powers against Liftarn.

Zoe, who doesn't speak Swedish

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body:
Well, it is Friday, so our timeout is over and we can fight again on
the list.  :-) Except, as usual, I won't be logged in over the
weekend.

I support cool heads trying to help them resolve the problem.  Liftarn
sounds like a real piece of work to me, to the point that a ban is
probably in order.  So Liftarn using his admin powers against Liftarn
may not be as problematic there as it is here, since I am not
effective (due to speaking on English) as final arbiter there.

(Heh, no jokes about me not being effective here, either.)

Zoe wrote:

>
> See http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=User_talk:Brion_VIBBER&diff=0&oldid=0
>
> Dan Koehl and Liftarn are in an edit war, and Dan Koehl seems to be using his admin powers against Liftarn.
>
> Zoe, who doesn't speak Swedish
>
>
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------
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> Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now


subject: [Wikitech-l] User/Talk pages for anons

body:
On Fri, Dec 20, 2002 at 11:39:46AM -0800, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>Would it help if "Talk" were made to flash?  That usually annoys people
>enough to get their attention.

That is a nifty idea; any way we could make it flash, say, 5-8 times,
and then stop?  Flashing is totally annoying, but if it just flashes a
few times then stops, it gets my attention without annoying me out of my
skull.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Please, no flashing text

body:
Why not just a big ugly huge font text message: "Yo, baby, you have a
message.  Read it by clicking HERE!"

Let's keep it simple.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] 152.163 is back

body:
And the first thing he did was to vandalize my User page.

Since you all think he's no big deal, you can all revert his vandalism, I'll sit this one out.

Zoe

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia is under attack

body:
On Fri, 2002-12-20 at 13:09, Zoe wrote:
>
> It's a big deal to those of us who keep reverting all of the idiot's changes, especially since this isn't the first time he's done this.  It's the third.
> Zoe

If it bothers you, then don't revert the changes. Let someone else do
it. There are more of us than there are of him.


from_name: Pierre Abbat

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia is under attack

body:
On Thursday 19 December 2002 22:44, Zoe wrote:
> Someone with ip addresses beginning with 152.163 is deleting article,
> vandalizing, modifying, and variously randomly changing whatever articles
> they happen to encounter.  The IP address changes with each change.  We
> need to do something quick.

It's a bunch of AOL proxies. I complained to abuse at aol.net and got an answer
(below) that suggested that I should complain to one of several other
addresses beginning with "tos" but gave me no clue that it actually tossed
the message at any of them.

phma
---
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Will send your issue to "tosemail1 at aol.com".

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Will send your issue to "tosusenet at aol.com".

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Will send your issue to "tosgeneral at aol.com".

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v20000425


from_name: youssefsan at altern.org

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia at FOSDEM (international meeting) ?

body:
Hello all Wikipedians.

As mav suggested to me, I am writing to the mailing list (even if I don't read it carefully).

I am living in Brussels (Belgium,Europe) and each year the FOSDEM

* Free and Open Source Software Developers' Meeting
* http://www.fosdem.org
* 8-9 February

take place. It is an international meeting in English.

Usually Richard Stallman attends this meeting. A lot of well known devellopers working in the Linux world comes also.
For exemple, the original author of PHP came last year or a couple of years ago. This year, Debian, KDE, Gnome devellopers are to come.

I thing it would be good if contributors of Wikipedia and Wiktionay attendit so we can perhaps exchange vieuws and possibly collaborate ...

An other good option, is to make a speech, yes I know it is a bit late, but for next year it would be great.

I wonder if people are interested in it (I mean especially English speakers)

Sorry for my long mail.

Regards,

Youssefsan, a contributor of the French wiki.

PS: I will try to glance weekly at a possible threat


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

subject: [Wikipedia-l] TeX support done

body:
TeX support done.
Code is on http://test.wikipedia.org/

Changes since last version posted to wikitech-l:
* texvc judges HTML to be either conservative (renders on most browsers, likely to look good)
  or liberal (renders on recent Mozilla and probably on other new browsers, should be readable,
  but no warrancy about how will it look like)
* boolean math_conservative column added to math table
* There are 4 options in preferences:
    * Always PNG
    * Conservative HTML or else PNG (default)
    * Any HTML or else PNG
    * Leave as Pseudo-TeX (for text browsers mostly)
  Thanks to this <math> can be used for both inline (which will usually end as HTML)
  and displayed (which will usually end as PNG) math.
* HTML does italics right, and correctly supports \mathit and \mathrm
* Support for other formating options removed in HTML
    (but maybe \mathbb wouldn't be such a bad idea)
* Font size changed from 140 to 120.

Criterium of conservativeness is using nothing more than:
* ASCII
* greek literals
* subscripts, superscripts
* \mathit (also \it \textit)
* \mathrm (also \rm \textrm)
* \mbox (also \hbox \vbox)

Todo:
* add "math" => 1 to default preferences in all language files (done for En
  and It only now).
* add math_conservative column and the rest of math table to default db
    creation script and add some db upgrade script which adds math table.

Please test it.


subject: [Wikitech-l] TeX support done


from_name: Derek Moore

subject: [Wikitech-l] Request for Comments: Wikitax

body:
I've been workin' on a plaintext markup syntax for the purpose of providing
rich
formatting capabilities in article submission to laypeople.  A syntax
similar to
the variants used in wikies, but much more consistent, much more coherent,
and
(I would say) much more intelligently designed.  I'll start implementing the
begins of logic and regular expressions for parsing the syntax very soon.  I
just want to get some preliminary feedback on what I've come up with thus
far.
There is a lot about Wikitax where I'm still not set in stone, or where I'm
questioning myself, or where I just haven't thought much about how to solve
that
particular problem.  I could use other minds in helpin' to flesh out the
final
stages of Wikitax.  Anybody wanna take a look and offer ideas, suggestions,
additions, etc.?  I've put quite a lot of thought into the syntax, and why
things should be the way they are.  Hopefully it's pretty obvious to
everybody,
but I would really appreciate input and help.  I figure the more minds that
attack this problem, the better the solution will be.

Out of all the wiki syntaxes, I enjoy Wikipedia's syntax the most.  I
remember
the first time I came across a WikiWikiWeb.  The early syntax was just shit.
And most wikies still have really crappy syntax.  Even though Wikipedia has
evolved the syntax in a number of nice ways, it still feels lacking in many
areas.  It would also be nice to have a specification to standardize
plaintext
markups: a syntax so consistant, other projects will pick it up and use it.

I started work on this because I'm doing a lot of development on a second
generation community-developed/organized open publishing content management
system for Independent Media Centers.  The particular codebase I'm working
on is
going to be a sort of Wikipedia + scoop + multimedia galleries/archives +
weblogs + newswire + Kronolith + etc.--all tightly rolled into one nice,
easy-to-use, and consistent package.

You'll find an attached text/plain, Wikitax.txt.  The preliminary
specification
is contained therein.

If you're sincere about contributing, see also:
<http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikitax>

Peace out, g-money homey lokes,

Derek

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body:
It appears Hotmail may have messed up the text file I attached to the
original email.  Stupid Hotmail.  My server's down, so I'm stuck with
Hotmail temporarily.  I can't wait to be back home with pine and vi.

In any case, if Wikitax.txt looks all sorts o' messed up, with lines wrapped
unintelligibly, just head over to:

http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikitax

Okay, I'm done now,

Derek

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body:
>Two things:
>* openings and closings of tags should not be the same ('' and ''),
>   and they should not prefix-overlap (like '' and ''').
>   You're just asking for troubles by introducing more such
>   tags.

Well, the whole single quotes syntax for emphasis is something I've haven't
liked much from the get-go.  But are you also saying that '!!...!!' and
'//...//' and others are bad choices?  What are some good, simple
alternatives?  I tend to think that if the wiki syntax is going to be more
than something simple like '!!' or '==', we might as well forget about a
special wiki syntax, and just have people use the basic HTML markup.

But I see what you mean...  Maybe something similar to [!bold!], [/italic/],
[=monospace=], [-strike-], etc., for text formatting and other similar tags?
  Or {!bold!}, |!bold!|, (!bold!), `!bold!`, ~!bold!~, etc.  Hell, I dunno.
Anyways, that's why I came to this list with these issues.  *smile*

>* don't do it with regular expresions. Be a real man and write
>   LALR syntax. It will be order of magnitude faster, much easier
>   to change, and correct (current wikipedia parser fails under some
>   more complex cases) that way.

Okay.  *grin*  I was just thinkin' regexes, 'cause I'm familiar enough with
'em.  And because I'd know how to distinguish between '//' in a URL and '//'
in italicizing words, or '!!' in making stuff bold and '!!' at the end of a
sentence, etc.  But I'll definately check into LALR.  I just love learnin'
new crap.

Thanks for the input, yo.

Derek

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Vandalism

body:
Well, since nobody else seems interested in vandalism, I guess I won't bother to try to revert any that happen in the future.

Zoe

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body:
>And third thing:
>Could we make it an official rule that no change in markup will
>be even considered without considering how would it affect CJK and
>right-to-left languages ?

I'd never thought specifically about that, but I suppose you're right.  I
don't know jack about CJK or Hebrew or anything other than English (and a
wee bit o' French), so I wouldn't really know how to be sympathetic to
issues raised by those languages (until someone educates me on the topic, at
least).

In any case, I would agree.  The markup should be comfortable for all
languages.

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Vandalism

body:
On Sat, Dec 21, 2002 at 09:29:10PM -0800, Zoe wrote:
>   Well, since nobody else seems interested in vandalism, I guess I won't
>   bother to try to revert any that happen in the future.

It's Christmas.  We're tired, and hung over, and snuggling up for a warm
winters sleep with our hoochie coochies.  Get back to us when the
holiday is over, the sun has returned, and the new year has begun :-)

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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body:
>I couldn't agree more - I've always felt that wiki markup should
>resemble well organised (and maybe slightly quirky) .txt "nomarkup"
>formatting.

Exactly.  That was the line of thought I used while organizing my ideas.  In
emails, I'll often employ forward slashes to /emphasize/ a word or /two/.
Or if I really need to create good emphasis, I'll !yell! or *accent* the
word.  In the plaintext world, the three tend to be more equal than  and
, though.  My original thought was, "Why can't wikies just use these
normal conventions?"  After a bit more investigation, I convinced myself
that while it's a good idea to base the syntax on these conventions, it'd be
too confusing for the software if you didn't provide something more.  You'd
definately need something about the syntax that says, "Look at me, I'm a
wiki markup."

For example, say we wanted to use /slashes/ for italics.  How would the
following line be rendered:

"In UNIX-style operating systems, services' configuration files are located
in /etc/.  The X Window System's configuration files, for example, are in
/etc/X11/."

How exactly is the software gonna know when
/[word-boundary]...[word-boundary]/ is to be italicized text, or a
UNIX-style path, or anything else where forward slashes are normally
employed and aren't meant to italicize?  It'd be possible to work up some
logic so the software /could/ distinguish between paths and something that's
to be italicized...  But what if you wanted to employ italics like this:

"/anti/dis/establishment/arianistically"

You might mean for it to render:

"antidisestablishmentarianistically"

But how does the software know if it's a path or not?  Plus, it looks really
confusing to the human eye.  At a quick glance, one might easily assume that
'dis' was supposed to be italicized as well.  Even the double forward slash
(//) syntax I orginally proposed is confusing in this way:

"//anti//dis//establishment//arianistically"

Much better is:

"[/anti/]dis[/establishment/]arianistically"

> > I started work on this because I'm doing a lot of development on a
>second
> > generation community-developed/organized open publishing content
>management
> > system for Independent Media Centers.
> > [...]
>
>I'll be VERY interested to see this...

Yeah, me too!  *grin*  It's still in the early stages.  Some of the other
second generation projects are much further along, but they're also much
less ambitious.  I'm hopefully gettin' a 5 PM to 5 AM night job where I'll
have a lot of free time to develop.  If that's the case, a usable
pre-release should be out sooner than later.  Right now I'm working a lot of
the conceptual stuff, the framework, the integration of components, etc.
You have to create a consistent theory before you can create a consistent
product.  <g>

>As part of my plans for this, I've been designing my own "nomarkup"
>wiki-style markup for it's use. Currently I've only really got the basic
>wiki markup stuff done, and nothing for more advanced handling of CMS
>and multimedia handling.

I knew I wasn't the only one thinkin' about this stuff.  *smile*

>Nevertheless, I think we share similar goals.

Absolutely.  That's why I think we should all put our heads to together to
create a consistent standard for us all.  Something so we won't have to
learn 23 dialects of wiki syntax just to contribute to our favorite
websites.

>So, I invite you to look over my markup ramblings on my own wiki:
>http://www.nut.house.cx/cgi-bin/nemwiki.pl?NEWS/TextFormatting

I'm sure your ideas are invaluable.  And I'm sure I'll be incorporating your
best ideas into Wikitax.

Peace outside,

Derek

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body:
On Sat, Dec 21, 2002 at 05:02:30PM -0600, Derek Moore wrote:
> It appears Hotmail may have messed up the text file I attached to the
> original email.  Stupid Hotmail.  My server's down, so I'm stuck with
> Hotmail temporarily.  I can't wait to be back home with pine and vi.
>
> In any case, if Wikitax.txt looks all sorts o' messed up, with lines
> wrapped unintelligibly, just head over to:
>
> http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikitax

Two things:
* openings and closings of tags should not be the same ('' and ''),
  and they should not prefix-overlap (like '' and ''').
  You're just asking for troubles by introducing more such
  tags.
* don't do it with regular expresions. Be a real man and write
  LALR syntax. It will be order of magnitude faster, much easier
  to change, and correct (current wikipedia parser fails under some
  more complex cases) that way.


body:
On Sun, Dec 22, 2002 at 12:15:37AM +0100, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> Two things:
> * openings and closings of tags should not be the same ('' and ''),
>   and they should not prefix-overlap (like '' and ''').
>   You're just asking for troubles by introducing more such
>   tags.
> * don't do it with regular expresions. Be a real man and write
>   LALR syntax. It will be order of magnitude faster, much easier
>   to change, and correct (current wikipedia parser fails under some
>   more complex cases) that way.

And third thing:
Could we make it an official rule that no change in markup will
be even considered without considering how would it affect CJK and
right-to-left languages ?

And I can tell you how will it affect CJK - it will look much much worse.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Request for Comments: Wikitax

body:
On Sunday 22 December 2002 09:00, Giskart wrote:
> Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> > So quick and rather simplified guide to CJK:
>
> What is "CJK" ?

Chinese Japanese Korean.

phma


body:
On Sunday 22 December 2002 08:39, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
li'o
> Now, I'd like to have someone knowing Arab, Hebrew, or some other
> right-to-left language describe problems involving them.

Hebrew is written right-to-left. Latin is written left-to-right. Both start
at the top of the page. When a Hebrew sentence is quoted in a page written in
the Latin alphabet, and a few phrases of Russian are quoted inside the
Hebrew, and the line breaks in the middle of the Russian, it gets tricky.

Arabic numerals, unlike Arabic letters, are written left-to-right. Hebrews
use Arabic numerals too (they use the European version). Hebrew numerals,
which are letters assigned numerical values, are written right-to-left. So
numbers quoted in Hebrew have the same problem as Russian quoted in Hebrew.

When written in the bare abjad, as it usually is, many Hebrew words (usually,
but not always, different forms of the same word) look the same. Many Hebrew
words have variant spellings. For an example of the latter, look up [[Bible
Code]] and follow the "abulafia" link. There's a picture of the Abulafia
Synagogue with three different spellings of "Abulafia" in one picture!

Yiddish, which is written in the Hebrew alphabet, has its own oddities. Two
yoden can act as one letter and take one vowel, for instance.

phma


from_name: Nemo - earth native

body:
On Sat, Dec 21, 2002 at 04:45:37PM -0600, Derek Moore did utter:
> formatting capabilities in article submission to laypeople.  A syntax
> similar to
> the variants used in wikies, but much more consistent, much more coherent,
> and

I couldn't agree more - I've always felt that wiki markup should
resemble well organised (and maybe slightly quirky) .txt "nomarkup"
formatting.

> I started work on this because I'm doing a lot of development on a second
> generation community-developed/organized open publishing content management
> system for Independent Media Centers.  The particular codebase I'm working
> on is
> going to be a sort of Wikipedia + scoop + multimedia galleries/archives +
> weblogs + newswire + Kronolith + etc.--all tightly rolled into one nice,
> easy-to-use, and consistent package.

I'll be VERY interested to see this... (and here we get to the bulk of
my reply) ...since I've been having vague plans of creating (that would
be frankencreating, to anyone who has seen my software creations)
something along those lines you describe for the next generation of my
own personal website. (which is currently a mixture of a home-made CMS
hacked onto a pre-existing bloggish system (SIPS), gallery, and UseMod
wiki).

As part of my plans for this, I've been designing my own "nomarkup"
wiki-style markup for it's use. Currently I've only really got the basic
wiki markup stuff done, and nothing for more advanced handling of CMS
and multimedia handling. Nevertheless, I think we share similar goals.

So, I invite you to look over my markup ramblings on my own wiki:
http://www.nut.house.cx/cgi-bin/nemwiki.pl?NEWS/TextFormatting

(this is a UseMod wiki btw, so it should be fairly familiar to wikipedia
folks if anyone wants to edit in their own comments. :)

.../Nemo

--
  Why, do you think I ought to have /\/         <nemo at nut.house.cx>
 one? It seems odd to give a bundle \                    ...
of vague sensory perceptions a name /  DISCLAIMER:  Use of advanced messaging
                ...                 \ technology does not imply an endorsement
   http://www.nut.house.cx/~nemo  /\/    of western industrial civilization


subject: [Wikitech-l] TeX

body:
On Sun, 2002-12-22 at 12:32, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> texvc is done, testing found no bugs.
>
> Please install it on all production Wikipedias.

Can you put it into CVS or send a diff?

I don't want to just copy the test.wikipedia.org files since that's got
other not-fully-tested code in it.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Extending Wikipedia

body:
Thanks to Jonathan Walther and Lars Aronsson for their responses.

Jonathan wrote:

>You could do what you want by creating two new namespaces; one for
>organizations or front groups or campaigns, another for individuals.
>You would have to write your own custom code to make sure that articles
>in a particular namespace were properly put in the database, or
>retrieved from the database, etc.

This sounds like a possible solution that might accomplish 70% or
more of what I have in mind. Is there a limit on the number of
namespaces that I can create? Also, how dicey would it be to
customize data entry and retrieval for each different namespace?

Lars wrote:

>That was an interesting background about PR Watch and APCO.  If APCO
>were to join the Wikipedia project, this could get exciting.  If
>misinformation is their specialty and they are good at it, they might
>get away with writing stuff that noone here knows how to question...

In fact, there are a number of PR firms that specialize in monitoring
Internet discussions and trying to influence content, sometimes even
using false identities to post messages to newsgroups and chat rooms.
See, for example, the articles in our 2nd Quarter 2002 issue of "PR
Watch":
http://www.prwatch.org/prwissues/2002Q1/index.html

I don't know if any PR firms are currently targeting Wikipedia, but
as the project grows in influence, it seems reasonable to expect that
this might happen. Here, as elsewhere, your best protection against
disinformation is the fact that you have numerous individuals
watching out to correct errors.

Once I launch my own project (which I've tentatively termed a
"Disinfopedia"), it will be interesting to see how it fares against
similar attempts at manipulation.

By the way, yesterday I tried installing the Wikipedia scripts at a
temporary location on my own web site so that I could start to
experiment with them, and I'm pleased to say that it went remarkably
smoothly. For comparison's sake, installing a "plug and play"
wireless networking card in my fiance's computer recently took me
several days, a $40 charge for technical support, and multiple phone
calls to both her ISP and the card manufacturer. My biggest challenge
during the installation of Wikipedia was figuring out CVS (which I've
never used previously). All totaled I probably spent a couple of
hours installing the scripts, creating the database, and tweaking my
local settings. I could have installed Wikipedia 20 times over in the
time it took me just to get that damn wi-fi card working!
--
--------------------------------
|  Sheldon Rampton
|  Editor, PR Watch (www.prwatch.org)
|  Author of books including:
|     Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities
|     Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
|     Mad Cow USA
|     Trust Us, We're Experts
--------------------------------


body:
On Sat, Dec 21, 2002 at 10:42:07PM -0600, Derek Moore wrote:
> >And third thing:
> >Could we make it an official rule that no change in markup will
> >be even considered without considering how would it affect CJK and
> >right-to-left languages ?
>
> I'd never thought specifically about that, but I suppose you're right.  I
> don't know jack about CJK or Hebrew or anything other than English (and a
> wee bit o' French), so I wouldn't really know how to be sympathetic to
> issues raised by those languages (until someone educates me on the topic,
> at least).
>
> In any case, I would agree.  The markup should be comfortable for all
> languages.

So quick and rather simplified guide to CJK:
* They generally use fixed-width fonts that occupy a square.
  Some simple characters like katakana exist in full-width and
  half-width versions, where half-width version occupies halfsquare,
  like Latin fixed-width characters. This sometimes includes
  Latin (Arabic) numbers and Latin characters, but sometimes not.
* They don't use italics, bold, or other such font modifications.
  Fonts aren't meant to be modified in any way.
* They don't use underline. Idea of using underline for links is not good,
  it makes some distinct characters look the same.
  I think it would be better to use some colors instead.
* They don't use spaces, and their concept of "word" is different than
  Western, so search engine must be fixed too.
* They don't use Western punctuation for normal text (they may be using it for
  numbers and other things), or they use fixed-width versions that look
  completely different.
* They are sometimes writted vertically top-down then right-left,
  and sometimes horizontally like in Latin script.
* For pronunciation they usually use Furigana/Ruby (small font on top of word
  in horizontal or on right in vertical text), not parenthesis.
* Western punctuation for formatting looks really ugly when inserted
  into CJK text.

Now, I'd like to have someone knowing Arab, Hebrew, or some other
right-to-left language describe problems involving them.

It's not really surprising that we do't have many CJK or right-to-left
contributors, as our interface is very inconvenient for them.


body:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
>
> So quick and rather simplified guide to CJK:

What is "CJK" ?


body:
On Sun, Dec 22, 2002 at 03:00:50PM +0100, Giskart wrote:
> Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> >
> >So quick and rather simplified guide to CJK:
>
> What is "CJK" ?


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] New Recent Changes

body:
I have updated the improved (?) RC at test.wikipedia.org. These are new:
* "total diff" for a diff of all changes that happened on an article today
* correct diff from each version to current version
* correct diff from each version to prior version
* direct link to the old version

The "history" link for multiple edits is now in "changes"; like it used
to be, a long time ago, in a software far, far away ;-)

Please go and test it so I can implement it as a user option in the CVS.

Magnus


subject: [Wikipedia-l] LOTR flood

body:
User 213.123.19.25 has added some articles about parts of the Lord of
the Rings story which look - well, enthusiastic, but they don't say
"this is located in the LOTR universe" or something. Also, the texts are
awfully close to those at http://www.glyphweb.com/arda

Someone please come to the rescue ;-)

Magnus


subject: [Wikitech-l] New recent changes

body:
I just went ahead and checked it into the CVS (for en and de).

Magnus


subject: [Wikitech-l] TeX

body:
texvc is done, testing found no bugs.

Please install it on all production Wikipedias.


subject: [Wikitech-l] [Fwd: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Please test math markup support  on http://test.wikipedia.org/]

body:
X-Original-Date: Sat, 21 Dec 2002 20:08:38 +0100
Xref: main.gmane.org gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.nederlands:115

>Oh, and for translators.
Oh, en voor vertalers.

>The following messages should be translated:
De volgende berichten zouden vertaald
moeten worden.

>(preference page):
Voorkeurspagina/bladzijde

>"Rendering math"
Weergave/Afbeeldingswiskunde?

> "Aways render PNG"
(aannemende: Aways=Always)

Beeld altijd PNG af.

>"Try HTML first, fallback to PNG if too complex"

Probeer eerst in HTML af te beelden en indien te moeilijk doe het dan in
PNG.

>"Leave it as TeX (for text browsers)"

Houd het in TeX (voor tekst-blader-programma's).

>What looks like:
Wat er uit ziet als:

>=== Rendering math ===
>(*) Aways render PNG
>( ) Try HTML first, fallback to PNG if too complex
>( ) Leave it as TeX (for text browsers)
>
>(errors)

(fouten)

>   "Failed to parse"
Kon niet ontleden

>"unknown error"

Onbekende fout

>"unknown function "

onbekende funktie

>"lexing error"

kon niet lex-en

> "syntax error"

schrijfwijzefout


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Year in music

body:
Someone's creating articles like "1974 in music".Can't that just go
under [[1974]]?

Magnus
<http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/1974_in_music>


subject: [Wikitech-l] TeX

body:
On Sun, Dec 22, 2002 at 12:56:26PM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
> On Sun, 2002-12-22 at 12:32, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> > texvc is done, testing found no bugs.
> >
> > Please install it on all production Wikipedias.
>
> Can you put it into CVS or send a diff?
>
> I don't want to just copy the test.wikipedia.org files since that's got
> other not-fully-tested code in it.

Here it is. Patch against most recent CVS.
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from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Vandalism

body:
I'm concerned about it.  I would support that the ip numbers in
question be banned, at least through the holidays until we are back in
full strength.  It's a pain that these are AOL proxies, and so we
should try to unban them as soon as we can, but the cost to us of
having this headache is much higher than the cost of losing a few
edits from a few AOLers.

Zoe wrote:

>
> Well, since nobody else seems interested in vandalism, I guess I won't bother to try to revert any that happen in the future.
>
> Zoe
>
>
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now


subject: [Wikitech-l] A few questions

body:
Hi all...I'd like a bit of advice. I've now got a test version of my
"Disinfopedia" running at the following URL:

http://www.prwatch.org/wiki/phpwiki/newcodebase/wiki.phtml

If you want to play around with it, feel free to enter any text you'd
like. (This version is purely for experimentation; once I've got
everything figured out and modified the way I want, I'll erase the
dummy version entirely and do a second install at a different URL.)

My test version is currently identical to Wikipedia, except that I've
changed all instances of the word "Wikipedia" to "Disinfopedia" and
created my own logo. Also, I've added a line of code to the
bottomLinks function in "Skin.php", so that the bottom links now
include a section saying:

INFORMATION RELATED TO [page title]:
People | Organizations | Activities | Funders | Issues ... etc.

Right now the hyperlinks associated with this section are
non-functioning dummy links, but I want to add code so they will take
people to related pages on each of these topics. I'd like it to
function similarly to the "Discuss this page" link. For example, if I
had an article about an organization called "APCO," the "People" link
could take people to the following URL:

http://www.prwatch.org/wiki/phpwiki/newcodebase/wiki.phtml?title=People:APCO

If, however, the page doesn't yet exist, the hyperlink would be:

http://www.prwatch.org/wiki/phpwiki/newcodebase/wiki.phtml?title=People:APCO&action=edit

So here are my questions:

(1) Should I have separate namespaces for "people," "organizations,"
"activity," etc.? If so, I'd have to add code to the
$wgNamespaceNamesEn array in "Language.php". I think I'd also have to
revise "Namespace.php" and create some new functions in "Skin.php".
Where else would I have to modify code? (I'd like to make as few
modifications as possible so that as future revisions are made to the
Wikipedia code, I can incorporate them with a minimum of pain.

(2) Should I also have separate "talk" namespaces for each of the new
category namespaces I'm creating (e.g., "people_talk,"
"organizations_talk")?

(3) If I don't create separate namespaces, is there some other
recommended way of getting the functionality I want?
--
--------------------------------
|  Sheldon Rampton
|  Editor, PR Watch (www.prwatch.org)
|  Author of books including:
|     Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities
|     Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
|     Mad Cow USA
|     Trust Us, We're Experts
--------------------------------


body:
On Sat, Dec 21, 2002 at 11:20:17PM -0600, Derek Moore did utter:
>
> For example, say we wanted to use /slashes/ for italics.  How would the
> following line be rendered:
>
> "In UNIX-style operating systems, services' configuration files are located
> in /etc/.  The X Window System's configuration files, for example, are in
> /etc/X11/."
>
> How exactly is the software gonna know when
> /[word-boundary]...[word-boundary]/ is to be italicized text, or a
> UNIX-style path, or anything else where forward slashes are normally
> employed and aren't meant to italicize?  It'd be possible to work up some
> logic so the software /could/ distinguish between paths and something
> that's to be italicized...  But what if you wanted to employ italics like
> this:
>
> "/anti/dis/establishment/arianistically"

In my NEWS markup notes, you'll see that while I set the "/" to be the
italic control character, a single "/" is not the delimiter for starting
and stopping italic. Rather, a startline, whitespace or punctuation,
followed by "/" and then followed by a non-punctuation character - will
trigger the start of italic. Reverse for end-of-italic delimiter. (might
need some tweaking for usage - especially with regards to punctuation).

> You might mean for it to render:
>
> "antidisestablishmentarianistically"

My system would currently have rendered it as
"/anti/dis/establishment/arianistically" exactly ;)

Sure, this means in-word italicing (and bold, etc) isn't possible - but
I think given the 10/90 rule (10 percent of features will satisfy 90% of
needs), this is a reasonable tradeoff. I'd maybe suggest allowing pure
HTML for any remaining cases?

Regarding file paths which could be italicised? I think throwing a
simple no-wiki syntax around it would be the best way to keep a path
clean of wiki markup :)

> Much better is:
>
> "[/anti/]dis[/establishment/]arianistically"

I think you're in danger of reinventing a html1.0 shaped wheel, however,
and losing the simplicity of .txt "nomarkup". I'd rather lose a feature
(or only provide it as html - eg, for italicing parts of words) than
overly complicate the markup. The thought-experiment I use is "could I
send this raw code to a non-geek friend, and be confident that they'd
not find the markup confusing, but rather, find it obvious?"

> pre-release should be out sooner than later.  Right now I'm working a lot
> of the conceptual stuff, the framework, the integration of components, etc.
> You have to create a consistent theory before you can create a consistent
> product.  <g>

Indeed - which is why I've been theorising my NEWS markup already.
You're further along than I am though. (and when it comes to product
development of my ideas, I'm astoundingly lax :/

> I'm sure your ideas are invaluable.  And I'm sure I'll be incorporating
> your best ideas into Wikitax.

And similarly I'll likely nab wikitax ideas for NEWS. Ultimately, I hope
we find a single compromise between read/learn/use-ability and
features/complexity needed to power what we want :)

.../Nemo
--
  Why, do you think I ought to have /\/         <nemo at nut.house.cx>
 one? It seems odd to give a bundle \                    ...
of vague sensory perceptions a name /  DISCLAIMER:  Use of advanced messaging
                ...                 \ technology does not imply an endorsement
   http://www.nut.house.cx/~nemo  /\/    of western industrial civilization


from_name: Axel Boldt

subject: [Wikitech-l] TeX

body:
--- Tomasz Wegrzanowski <taw at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
> texvc is done, testing found no bugs.
>
> Please install it on all production Wikipedias.

Tomasz, could you please also implement a <tex>...</tex> which goes
straight to TeX, so that matrices, commutative diagrams, chess
diagrams, chemical structure formulas, music notes and flow charts can
be typeset conveniently? Or would you prefer that I do it?

Has the issue of non-specific error messages been resolved?

Axel

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subject: [Wikitech-l] Translation for Wikipedia NL about the Text-stuff

body:
A:

(preference page):
(Voorkeurspagina):

B:

"Rendering math"
"Weergave wiskunde"

C:

"Aways render PNG"

If Aways=Always

"Beeld altijd PNG af"

D:

"Try HTML first, fallback to PNG if too complex"
"Probeer eerst in HTML af te beelden en indien te moeilijk doe het dan in
PNG."

E:

"Leave it as TeX (for text browsers)"
"Houd het in TeX (voor tekst-blader-programma's)."

F:

What looks like:
Wat er uit ziet als:

G:

(errors)
(fouten)

H:

"Failed to parse"
"Kon niet ontleden"

I:

"unknown error"
"Onbekende fout"

J:

"unknown function "
"onbekende funktie"

K

"lexing error"
"kon niet lex-en"

L

"syntax error"
"schrijfwijzefout"

Thanks to Jaap.

Giskart


from_name: tarquin

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Shortcut interlanguage links

body:
I have an idea for a shortcut for interlinks --
could an interlink with no article name be taken to mean "the same title
as this page"?

eg:
On the french page "Milan Kundera", a link that's just "[[en:]]
would mean "the equivalent english language page has the same name, ie
it is [[en:Milan Kundera]].

(... or is this one of those cool things the dev team have already
thought of but not told us mortals? ;-)


subject: [Wikitech-l] TeX

body:
On Mon, Dec 23, 2002 at 05:06:39PM -0800, Axel Boldt wrote:
> --- Tomasz Wegrzanowski <taw at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
> > texvc is done, testing found no bugs.
> >
> > Please install it on all production Wikipedias.
>
> Tomasz, could you please also implement a <tex>...</tex> which goes
> straight to TeX, so that matrices, commutative diagrams, chess
> diagrams, chemical structure formulas, music notes and flow charts can
> be typeset conveniently? Or would you prefer that I do it?

No. I'm not going to implement that and I'm strongly against such
feature. http://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_we_can't_just_use_LaTeX

texvc supports matrices.

> Has the issue of non-specific error messages been resolved?

Yes.


subject: [Wikitech-l] TeX

body:
> No. I'm not going to implement that and I'm strongly against such
> feature. http://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_we_can't_just_use_LaTeX

I tend to agree here, let's stick with the current solution until we find
a problem we cannot solve otherwise. This addition was primarily intended
for mathematics, and while other creative uses are possible, I think this
leads us into dangerous territory. Do we really *want* people to draw
diagrams etc. in LaTeX? Or shouldn't they just upload them as images? Many
people in the field of Maths are familiar with TeX, but for most others,
it's just gibberish, and I'm afraid people might start using it as a
replacement for things that are currently not supported by our wiki-
syntax. One of these things is a powerful table and image layout syntax.

I think the attack strategy argument is especially strong. You can see
texvc as a kind of firewall for code, we can adjust its settings, but it's
good to have it.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikitech-l] A few questions

body:
Whoa,

now that's a surprise -- a guy whose work I like to reference on Wikipedia
and elsewhere shows up on, of all places, the Wikipedia tech mailing list.
Welcome, Sheldon, and thanks for your excellent work with John Stauber on
exposing the corporate PR machinery.

I've often wanted to have more online material of yours that I could point
people to, and perhaps Disinfopedia can become that. Of course, I would
also appreciate it if you could contribute info, when you find the time,
to the "real" Wikipedia. Have you thought about the license you want to
use for your project yet? It's hard to operate a wiki under traditional
copyright, and more beneficial to society not to.

As for your namespace links: It's possible - I would try to reduce the
number of topical namespaces to 3 or 4 to avoid ambigiousness ("where do I
need to go to get information X? case studies? issues? hmm .."). Also, try
to think about good names. People:George W. Bush? Is that a page about
George Bush or a page with links to people related to George Bush? (IMHO
only the latter makes sense, as the page about George Bush should not have
its own namespace, but this is not intuitively clear.)

You will probably also get some redundancy and occasionally irrelevant
links, but that's probably acceptable. Make clever use of redirects to
avoid redundancy.  I recommend creating Talk namespaces for every
namespace -- if pages are not large enough to discuss them separately, it
makes no sense to separate them in the first place.

One other way to get the functionality would be to implement HTML anchors
in wiki syntax. That way you could link to [[George W. Bush#people]] to
get to the specific article section. You could also implement page
templates to get a default structure for articles.

On Wikipedia, we have tried to avoid too mechanical categorization
schemes, and so far that works well, too - you just have to structure your
site consistently. Linking is easy on a wiki. With "What links here" and
"Related changes" you can easily get more context for a specific page.

Let me know if you decide to implement the namespace idea and I can
hopefully provide some more detailed recommendations.

All best,

Erik

PS: "Toxic Sludge is Good for You" should really be available as a GNU FDL
e-book. We need to get this book into schools :-)


from_name: Zoe

subject: [Wikipedia-l] User 172

body:
User 172 is continually deleting other people's comments on [[Talk:Soviet Union]], even though he has been asked not to do so.

Zoe, not involved in the debate

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Proposal: make summary mandatory

body:
I would like to propose that we make filling out the summary field
mandatory on ever edit. Reasons:

* it makes the job of vandals and vandal bots harder, since they have
to come up with a meaningful summary each time.
* it makes the history page of an article vastly more useful; now I
often find myself employing the bisection method to find out when a
particular bit of information was inserted.

Edits without summaries are like emails with empty subject line: not
nice.

I posted this to wikien-l, since this feature would best be implemented
as an option that other language wikis could switch on if desired.

Happy holidays everybody,
  Axel

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subject: [Wikitech-l] A few questions

body:
>now that's a surprise -- a guy whose work I like to reference on Wikipedia
>and elsewhere shows up on, of all places, the Wikipedia tech mailing list.
>Welcome, Sheldon, and thanks for your excellent work with John Stauber on
>exposing the corporate PR machinery.

Tehehe, me too, actually!  I was pretty impressed for wikitech-l when
Sheldon appeared.  You's a pseudo-celebrity amongst radicals, Sheldon.

>I recommend creating Talk namespaces for every namespace -- if pages are
>not large enough to discuss them separately, it makes no sense to separate
>them in the first place.

I just thought I'd bring up something about talk pages that I've always
thought was kinda stupid.  Now, I don't know how this works for the internal
code, and why you guys decided to implement talk namespaces the way you did.
  Maybe there's a technical reason of some sort.  But anyways...

Why isn't the talk namespace just namespace-aware?  Then you'd only have one
talk namespace instead of having to create a talk namespace for every normal
namespace, and then a talk page could be automagically inherent in every
article, without having to explicitly create a talk namespace first.  For
example, instead of

    [[user_talk:jizzbug]]

if talk were namespace-aware, it would be much more straight forward to
allow

    [[talk:user:jizzbug]]

or instead of

    [[Wikipedia_talk:Copyrights]]

it'd be

    [[talk:Wikipedia:Copyrights]]

I would think that this would actually make the program logic much simpler.
Am I wrong?  Then what gives?

Peace out,

Derek

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from_name: Jonathan Walther

body:
On Tue, Dec 24, 2002 at 09:28:30PM -0500, Pierre Abbat wrote:
>On Tuesday 24 December 2002 16:53, Axel Boldt wrote:
>> I would like to propose that we make filling out the summary field
>> mandatory on ever edit.
>
>I agree. The most frequent contributor to the mispeeling page, for instance,
>has been an IP who never leaves a summary, and I have to diff the page to
>figure out what he did.

I prefer to diff peoples changes anyway; a vandal isn't going to
voluntarily put in the summary "I VANDALIZED THIS PAGE!", so I don't see
how requiring a summary will change anything.  A vandalbot could easily
put "various spelling fixes" or some such in the summary.  Unless those
issues are addressed, I can't endorse any change of the sort proposed
here.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
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subject: [Wikitech-l] music typesetting (was Re: TeX)

body:
>Tomasz, could you please also implement a <tex>...</tex> which goes
>straight to TeX, so that matrices, commutative diagrams, chess
>diagrams, chemical structure formulas, music notes and flow charts can
>be typeset conveniently? Or would you prefer that I do it?

Regardless of the "should we allow full LaTeX" debate, I tend to think that
some means of typesetting music could greatly benefit Wikipedia.  Music
theory is certainly a huge topic, and one that Wikipedia ought to be able to
document and cover properly.

One part of music theory is math, and for the math we now have Tomasz's
texvc module.  But most of music theory requires being able to typeset
notes, chords, music, etc.

Music typesetting could be provided by GNU LilyPond, <http://lilypond.org/>.
  (It's part of the GNU project, folks, so Wikipedia should support GNU
LilyPond, if for no other reason than to promote wider use and adoption of
Free and Open standards and software.)

LilyPond is a plaintext syntax, very TeX-like.  It ought to be pretty
trivial to create a texvc-like module for Wikipedia that renders LilyPond
notation into PNGs.  The LilyPond syntax could be put within <music> ...
</music> tags, or something similar.

Anyways, it's certainly something to look into!

Peace out,

Derek

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body:
>Music typesetting could be provided by GNU LilyPond,
><http://lilypond.org/>.  [...]
>
>LilyPond is a plaintext syntax, very TeX-like.  It ought to be
>pretty trivial to create a texvc-like module for Wikipedia that
>renders LilyPond notation into PNGs.  The LilyPond syntax could
>be put within <music> ... </music> tags, or something similar.

I forgot a few things:

1) LilyPond can also render its input into MIDI files, which might
   be a cool feature for Wikipedia.

2) LilyPond is already being used by the Mutopia Project,
   <http://www.mutopiaproject.org/>.  Mutopia is to music what
   Project Gutenburg <http://gutenberg.net/> is to literature.

Okay, I'm done now,

Derek

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body:
On Tuesday 24 December 2002 16:53, Axel Boldt wrote:
> I would like to propose that we make filling out the summary field
> mandatory on ever edit.

I agree. The most frequent contributor to the mispeeling page, for instance,
has been an IP who never leaves a summary, and I have to diff the page to
figure out what he did.

phma


from_name: Brion Vibber

body:
Derek Moore wrote:
>     Music typesetting could be provided by GNU LilyPond,
>     <http://lilypond.org/>.  [...]
[..]
> 1) LilyPond can also render its input into MIDI files, which might
>   be a cool feature for Wikipedia.

I think I speak for all of us whose grasp of music notation ends shortly
after "notes higher on the scale have higher pitch" when I say that that
would be a *huge* help for a layman's comprehension of any article about
music.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Giskart

subject: [Wikitech-l] Webbased IRC client to irc://opennet/wikipedia for Wikipedia

body:
Can somebody take a look of this  http://cgiirc.sourceforge.net can be used
to provide a webbased IRC access to #wikipedia?

Giskart


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
> I would like to propose that we make filling out the summary field
> mandatory on ever edit.

This has been brought up before and rejected, don't bother us again.

Just kidding, to let you know what a warm, fuzzy feeling this kind of
reaction creates :-). It actually was debated earlier either on one of the
mailing lists or policy pages and considered harmful for several reasons.
It's not necessarily a bad idea, but I suggest the following
modifications:

- allow an empty summary line for minor edits
- disallow minor edits for users who are not logged in.

Also, I believe we should keep our policies as consistent as possible over
all Wikipedias. If other Wikipedias don't want it, we should ask why and
try to find a solution they can agree to (or hold a vote ;-).

All best,

Erik


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: A few questions

body:
Eric Moeller wrote:

>Whoa,
>
>now that's a surprise -- a guy whose work I like to reference on Wikipedia
>and elsewhere shows up on, of all places, the Wikipedia tech mailing list.
>Welcome, Sheldon, and thanks for your excellent work with John Stauber on
>exposing the corporate PR machinery.

Thanks! (I'm blushing.)

>I've often wanted to have more online material of yours that I could point
>people to, and perhaps Disinfopedia can become that.

I'm assuming that you've seen the PR Watch web site. We have a fair
amount of material there, including archives of PR Watch dating back
almost to its founding, plus our "Spin of the Day" feature (which
typically includes 10-15 new items each week).

I'm envisioning the "Disinfopedia" as an open source extension of our
"Impropaganda Review" section, which you can find at the following
URL:
http://www.prwatch.org/improp/

Once I have the wiki software tweaked and functioning the way I want,
I'll seed the Disinfopedia with our existing articles from the
Impropaganda Review plus some other similar information, and offer it
under the GNU General Public License. At some future point, we may
choose to do the same thing with other parts of our web site.

>  Of course, I would
>also appreciate it if you could contribute info, when you find the time,
>to the "real" Wikipedia. Have you thought about the license you want to
>use for your project yet? It's hard to operate a wiki under traditional
>copyright, and more beneficial to society not to.

I've already made a few minor contributions to the "real" Wikipedia,
and I plan to continue doing so. You've touched here on one of the
questions that I've been wondering about: Should we set up a separate
"Disinfopedia," or just use the "real" Wikipedia as a repository for
the knowledge base I'm trying to develop?

On balance, I think setting up a separate "Disinfopedia" is the way
to go, for the following reasons:

(1) A "Disinfopedia" is likely to be more controversial and contested
than Wikipedia, and the differences are significant enough to raise
compatibility questions. (For example, Wikipedia's ethos regarding a
"neutral point of view" may be harder to maintain in a
"Disinfopedia.")

(2) There isn't a good way to clearly mark off a "Disinfopedia" as a
subset of Wikipedia, and simply posting our material there would
dilute and diffuse its specific focus.

(3) Having a separate Disinfopedia makes it easier for us to offer
guidance on article format and content. For example, I want to
encourage contributors to the Disinfopedia to follow the model we
used in the Impropaganda Review, where each organizational profile
consists of the following sections:
* A general description
* Personnel
* History
* Funding
* Case studies
* Contact information
* Related information resources

>As for your namespace links: It's possible - I would try to reduce the
>number of topical namespaces to 3 or 4 to avoid ambigiousness ("where do I
>need to go to get information X? case studies? issues? hmm .."). Also, try
>to think about good names. People:George W. Bush? Is that a page about
>George Bush or a page with links to people related to George Bush? (IMHO
>only the latter makes sense, as the page about George Bush should not have
>its own namespace, but this is not intuitively clear.)

Excellent points. I'm envisioning the extra namespaces as places for
lists of related links, so People:George W. Bush would be a page with
links to people related to Bush. Also, you're right that we don't
need a separate namespace for "issues."

Perhaps the thing to do would be to simply have ONE additional
namespace, titled "relationships" (plus, of course,
"relationships_talk"). At the bottom of an article on "George W.
Bush," there would be a link to an article on Bush's "Relationships
to People, Organizations, Funders, etc." Assuming the article hasn't
yet been created, the URL would read:
http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Relationships:George_W._Bush&action=edit

Clicking on that page would take people to a textedit form, but
instead of the start text saying "Put your text for the new page
here," it would contain a template, e.g.:

>>Lists of people, events, funding, case studies and information
>>resources related to [[George W. Bush]].
>>
>>== People ==
>>
>>* [[Name1]]
>>* [[Name2]]
>>
>>== History ==
>>
>>* [[Event1]], date
>>* [[Event2]], date
>>
>>== Financial ==
>>
>>* [[Funder1]]
>>* [[Funder2]]
>>
>>== Case Studies ==
>>
>>* [[Article1]]
>>* [[Article2]]
>>
>>== Documentation ==
>>* [[Author]], [[Title]], [url], name of publication, pub date, page

Yet another possibility would be to forego extra namespaces
altogether, and simply post prominent guidelines explaining the kind
of structure we're envisioning. I would hope that people would TRY to
follow our recommended structure, but it would be okay if they
sometimes deviate from it.

>One other way to get the functionality would be to implement HTML anchors
>in wiki syntax. That way you could link to [[George W. Bush#people]] to
>get to the specific article section. You could also implement page
>templates to get a default structure for articles.

Are HTML anchors currently implemented in wiki syntax? Also, how do
you envision implementing page templates? Are you thinking of
something along the lines of the example I gave above?

And what about the idea of creating "pseudo-namespaces"? What I'm
envisioning here is a way of object-typing prospective articles so
that page templates could be customized according to object type. For
example, [[person:George W. Bush]] might create a template with
sections such as date of birth, career highlights, etc., whereas
[[organization:Cato Institute]] might create a template with sections
such as personnel, funders, publications. Has there been much
discussion about ways of integrating Wiki's free-form approach with
XML-style object-typing and data-structuring?

>PS: "Toxic Sludge is Good for You" should really be available as a GNU FDL
>e-book. We need to get this book into schools :-)

Personally, I'd be interested in seeing this happen, but "Toxic
Sludge" was published by a commercial press, and I don't know how
they'd feel about releasing it into GNU space.

On a related tack, I've been toying with the idea of writing my NEXT
book as an open source project from start to finish. We would begin
by posting a chapter outline and letting anyone edit, contribute and
annotate while we write. Do you think this would work? Would it be
possible to publish the book commercially and get it into bookstores
if the writing process took place within a GNU framework? Would the
GNU license be necessary to attract collaborators?
--
--------------------------------
|  Sheldon Rampton
|  Editor, PR Watch (www.prwatch.org)
|  Author of books including:
|     Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities
|     Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
|     Mad Cow USA
|     Trust Us, We're Experts
--------------------------------


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: A few questions

body:
>On a related tack, I've been toying with the idea of writing my NEXT book
>as an open source project from start to finish. We would begin by posting a
>chapter outline and letting anyone edit, contribute and annotate while we
>write. Do you think this would work? Would it be possible to publish the
>book commercially and get it into bookstores if the writing process took
>place within a GNU framework? Would the GNU license be necessary to attract
>collaborators?

Wow!  That'd be really keen.  With you and whoever else as editors and/or
primary authors, you'd obviously have veto power over what changes get
included, what changes get reversed, etc.  If you managed to draw enough
people to the project, I can't even begin to imagine the possible quality of
the end result.  When I'm reading books, I seem to find /all/ the typos,
misspellings, and punctuation errors.  I guess most books don't get very
meticulous proofreadings (I have to read and digest every single word fairly
slowly when I read, so my reading of a book does equal an insanely
meticulous proofreading).  Plus, I imagine such a project would likely
attract fairly intelligent individuals.  Having a number of acute minds
contribute to the text would likely bring to the project more depth and
scope, with people suggesting nuances, perspectives, and angles that the
authors probably wouldn't have thought of otherwise.

I'd certainly be interested in meaningfully contributing.  And if you
managed to advertise the project in the right channels, imagine the people
that might drop by to throw in their two cents: Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn,
Ralph Nader, Jello Biafra, Greg Palast, Naomi Klein, Michael Parenti, RMS,
countless anti-globalization kiddies (I use 'kiddie' in a good sense here,
as I'm one of 'em), old peaceniks, numerous academics from around the world,
etc.  I don't see how you could go wrong.

So long as a history of all changes is kept, and so long as the
authors/editors review all changes, I don't see how anything bad could come
of the venture.  (The part about authors/editors reviewing all changes
shouldn't be too bad, as such a project certainly wouldn't have the volume
of contributions as Wikipedia.)

And I don't think a GNU license would specifically be necessary.  I,
personally, would like to see a GNU license, 'cause I'm a big fan of RMS,
and I've been a GNU kiddie since I was 15 or so.  But there are plenty of
good GPL-ish (or at least BSD-ish) licenses out there that people respect:
Open Content License, Open Publishing License, Artistic License, or roll
your own, etc.

Peace out,

Derek

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Proposal: make summary mandatory

body:
[to:wikien-l, to:wikitech-l]
Axel Boldt wrote:
> I would like to propose that we make filling out the summary field
> mandatory on ever edit. Reasons:
>
> * it makes the job of vandals and vandal bots harder, since they have
> to come up with a meaningful summary each time.
> * it makes the history page of an article vastly more useful; now I
> often find myself employing the bisection method to find out when a
> particular bit of information was inserted.

Filling in the summary field is in general a good thing to do, but
sometimes I find it stupid because the work it put in writing the notice
for the summary field is more work than the change of the article.

A pulldown menu whit some default comments seems a good way.

More options to follow close the actions of not registerd users would be
very nice. So that you can put a namelabel to a IP-adress, for those
IP-users who you can trust be have the bad idea to not login. You can
also use it to label proxyservers, so you see directly in RC that a
ip-adress is a proxyserver. Now you have to look every ip up, but it are
mostly the same who come back and give trouble.

> I posted this to wikien-l, since this feature would best be implemented
> as an option that other language wikis could switch on if desired.

I think all Wikipedia's would like more options to better view what is
happening.

Giskart


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Proposal: make summary mandatory