from_name: Anthere

body:
Hello everyone,

There has been a bit of discussion recently about Non Profit Foundations
and their organisation. Michael Davis has been discussing a lot in the
past few days with a lawyer we are working with, and amongst various
conclusions, it was recommanded that we try to anticipate the best we
could our growth curve and to get a strong legal framework in place
asap. Which seems to involve good functioning structure... and sticking
a bit more to traditional board governance procedures, with some
evolution in the way we handle agendas, minutes, bylaws, resolution,
board manual, insurance and so on.

We are currently working on all this very much. Each according to its
own ability.
Some of this can only be done by board members proper, other tasks can
also be supported by officers, and some can involve anyone who is
serious and supportive.

Amongst the tasks I will try to take care of in the next few weeks (or
months...) is documentation, such as typically board manual. Michael has
provided us with some documentation (such as
http://www.boardsource.org/FullAnswer.asp?ID=98) and I gathered some
more as well. Most of what is typically required on a board manual, we
already have, but it is dispersed on at least 3 different wikis and
poorly organised. This is unfortunate.

Board governance is not something new and there is no reason for us to
reinvent the wheel. When I looked at some of these pages, I recognised
areas where we have indeed tried to reinvent the wheel... other areas we
have never explored at all, areas where we found our own balance and
areas which are still a mess :-)

I invite you to join and help the way you can if you have such a desire.
Either help to organise the structure of the future document (and more
generally Foundation website), help to gather what already exist, help
write what does *not* exist, help fix poor english, help translate (much
later) some of the pages.

If you are interested, please, let's talk about this on meta or by irc.
I presume this will be very boring for most editors here, so it will
probably rarely be mentionned on the list, but if you wish to help,
please jump in any time.

thanks

Ant


list: wikimedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

subject:
[Foundation-l] board manual and where information about the WMF
	should really be


list: wikien-l

from_name: slimvirgin at gmail.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] David Hager is listed as convicted rapist

body:
On 12/5/05, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> slimvirgin at gmail.com wrote:
> >Jay, it would be original research to claim that someone is a
> >"criminal" even though they haven't been convicted.
> >
> We're not in a position to make the judgment ourselves, but we *are* in
> a position to summarize judgments other people have made.  Courts are
> one obvious source, but there is no reason they must be the only
> one ...
>
Yes, that's true, Mark, but it would be very unusual for a reputable
publication to come right out and say someone was guilty of something
they had been acquitted of. There have been some high-profile cases
where that has happened (or where newspapers have strongly hinted at
it), but usually news organizations go along with court rulings to
keep themselves safe from legal action. But even so, quoting someone
else wouldn't allow us to put someone not convicted of a crime in the
"criminals" category, which I think was the point being raised.

Sarah


from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: A bold fix needed to the "omg backlog" problem

body:
On 12/5/05, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> We can tell fairly easily whether a page will be an orphan before it is
> created, it's an indexed query. So we could, say, prevent creation of
> orphans by anons. I'm not sure what the effect would be. I can tell you that
> currently, 205 of the 1498 articles in [[Category:Articles that need to be
> wikified]] are orphans, I don't know how many were orphans when they were
> created.
>

Technicaly It is pretty simple (just makeing some alterations to the
text in the mediawiki namespace would be enough to stop most cases).
The problem is the few cases where there may be a legit reason to
create orphans.

> I guess this would prohibit the creation of articles that are created
> casually, a few sentences about something the author cares about. But I
> think the effect would be smaller for larger junk -- text copied from
> homework essays or personal webpages for example. The contributors are
> probably more motivated in that case.
>
> -- Tim Starling

No so much. The idea is to limit the creation of articles no one cared
about. If an article is not an orphan then hopefully it means that at
least one other person though wikipedia should have the article.

--
geni


list: foundation-l

from_name: Delirium

subject:
[Foundation-l] Jihad in Defense of Objectivity (Was: Enforcing
	WP:CITE)

body:
Jonathan Leybovich wrote:

>To those who thus maintain that greater standards of
>objectivity will damage community within Wikipedia, I
>ask you to explain the [[Jihad]] article on the
>English language site.  This is not an obscure
>article; it has gone through 100's, if not 1000's, of
>edits and is in the top-10 results list when Googling
>on its keyword.  Yet this article is a perfect example
>of community dysfunction; it is reverted constantly;
>it is locked almost weekly; and yet despite all this
>activity it is getting worse over time.  Because there
>is no agreement on what this term even means, the
>article is getting shorter and shorter as more and
>more of its "controversial" material is shunted off to
>sub-articles, where the process repeats itself (see
>[[Rules of war in Islam]], under a neutrality alert as
>I write).  The problem here (leaving aside anonymous
>vandals), is not community, it is objectivity.  The
>warring editors behave unconstructively not because
>they mean badly, necessarily, but because they're
>trapped in an epistemological hell.  It's not only
>that there's not enough objective evidence provided
>for each assertion, it's that people have no idea
>where to find such evidence, or even have the basis
>with which to recognize it as such.  Thus the
>impossibility of consensus, and a continuing edit war
>until the article is whittled down to a links page.
>Yet isn't the damage done to community, here- in terms
>of anger and frustration, in terms of factionalism, in
>terms of loss of goodwill and trust- even greater than
>that done to knowledge?
>
>
I would submit that, while citations may improve things somewhat, they
aren't the primary problem on articles like [[jihad]].  There is *some*
disagreement, it is true, over what has actually been claimed by
people.  Citations would help this.  The bigger disagreement, though, is
over which claims are notable enough to be included, what order they
ought to be included in, how they ought to be phrased, and so on.  On
especially controversial subjects, such as what the primary causes of
terrorism are, it is possible to dig up a published reference that takes
nearly any point of view on the subject; on very controversial ones it
will even be possible to find peer-reviewed journal articles taking each
of those points of view.  The difficult part is figuring out which ones
to cite and how to summarize and relate them.

That's not to say citations won't help, but I think we ought to be
careful not to fall into the trap of letting citations obfuscate
things.  *Especally* problematic are citations to primary sources, which
can slide into original research---the mess of articles on the 2004
election controversy had citations to election results thrown in by the
bucketfull, for example.

-Mark


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] NPOV trainwreck

body:
He is referring to my disclosure that I may have briefly encountered
Chip Berlet when I was in the National Lawyers Guild. I did not
recuse on that basis as there was very little if any actual
connection between us. I don't think membership or even active
participation in the National Lawyers Guild  forms a basis for
recusal as there are a number of reasons why people join the National
Lawyers Guild and participate in it. Other than involvement in legal
work there is absolutely no test for membership. Successful
participation is another story. I soon found out that since I did not
support the Gang of Four I was considered chopped liver.

Fred

On Dec 5, 2005, at 10:57 AM, JAY JG wrote:

> Please don't try to re-direct the questions, Jack, and please don't
> try to make them about me.  You made insinuations about the
> Arbitration Committee, please clarify.  I'll repeat the questions:
>
> 1. Do you think that the Commitee is trying to "purge right wingers"?
> 2. Do you imagine that there are no "right wingers" on the
> committee itself?
> 3. Why would you insinuate that Cberlet is any more the "friend and
> colleague" of members of the Arbitration Committee than are any of
> the other parties to the case?
>
> Jay.


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Sources and sourceability

body:
Brian wrote:

> Danny originally brought this fact up because he is writing a
> reference book as part of a series of books to be published. Every
> single one of the statements he made in the book had to have a source.
> He said it took several months for every one of his facts to be
> checked against every single source. This is how it works in the world
> of publishing. We have simply side-stepped this out of laziness, in my
> opinion.

This may happen with some higher-profile and better-funded works, but
I'm also an academic, and I'm quite certain that this isn't normal
practice.  I know for a fact that MIT Press does not hire CS and
Engineering experts to meticulously review every line of the books they
publish, for example, and even with textbooks quality-control is often
directed primarily by the author (this is part of why there are *always*
lengthy lists of errata discovered within a week of a new textbook's
release).  Even journal peer-review is often much more spot-checking
than one might think, with the exception of a few very high-profile (and
well-funded) journals like _Nature_ and _Science_.

-Mark


list: commons-l

from_name: Delphine Ménard

subject: [Commons-l] [fr] Changement de licence Creative Commons

body:
On 12/5/05, Jacques <maurice7 at cegetel.net> wrote:
> Bonjour,
>
> Je suis nouveau sur Wikimedia Commons. Pour la question concernant les licences, je suis all? un peu vite. Avant d'importer 2 fichiers audio, je suis all? sur le site de Creative Commons o? j'ai choisi des licences trop restrictives ( Pas d'utilisation commerciale, pas de modifications). Sur le site Wikimedia Commons, j'ai compris que ?a n'allait pas et j'ai chang? les licences des 2 fichiers en CC-BY-SA 2.5.
> Je viens de r?pondre aux 2 mails de Creative Commons en leur demandant d'annuler ces licences qui ?taient trop restrictives.
> Si j'ai bien compris, ? l'avenir, si j'importe un fichier audio, je n'ai qu'? choisir une des licences propos?es par la page Upload de Wikimedia Commons et n'ai donc m?me pas besoin d'aller sur le site de Creative Commons.
> Qu'en pensez-vous?
> Merci par avance d'?clairer ma lanterne!

C'est exactement ?a. Lorsque tu t?l?charges un fichier, tu as le choix
entre plusieurs licences dans un menu d?roulant. Tu as une liste
compl?te des licences autoris?es sur cette page :

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Messages_de_statut_des_images

en int?grant lors de ton upload le mod?le {{licence de ton choix}}
(voir les mod?les propos?s sur la page pr?-cit?e) tu peux choisir la
licence qui te convient.

Par ailleurs, tu peux trouver des contributeurs sur commons parlant
fran?ais en fouillant ici :
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:User_fr

A bient?t et bonne continuation,

Delphine
--
~notafish


from_name: A. Nony Mouse

subject: [WikiEN-l] A note on how the list moderation works

body:
In other words, it's a perfect way to keep ACTUAL debate from happening.
And when messages don't arrive for five days, don't worry - it doesn't
"mean" anything. Because they "poor, overworked" moderators like DG (who
instituted this mindless policy in a quest to stop criticism of his own
behavior) actually disallow a post so that anyone gets the message their
post was rejected, or not after DG's expletives were forwarded back to the
list. They just leave them in limbo forever.

Then again, this message will never see the list. He'll see to that. Unless
the only decent mod of the lot gets to it first, that is.

Your local voice for common sense,
A. Nony Mouse

> We don't have a moderators' rota, it's pretty ad-hoc. But if one of the
> others could check the queue Saturday and Sunday that'd be helpful ;-)
>
> This is more work than it should be. But moderating people's first posts
> has been fantastically useful in keeping the trolls at bay, particularly
> the ones kicked off the list repeatedly.
>


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] Experiment on new pages

body:
SPUI wrote:
> Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
>> Today, as an experiment, we will be turning off new pages creation for
>> anonymous users in the English Wikipedia.
>
>
> Does this apply to all pages, or just articles? It seems that IPs should
> still be able to create talk pages, both for articles and for users.

We'll have to ask Brion, but what you say sounds perfectly reasonable to me.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: The difficulty of retaining volunteer writers

body:
slimvirgin at gmail.com wrote:
> On 12/2/05, Carbonite <carbonite.wp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>On 12/2/05, Poor, Edmund W <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:
>>
>>>By defending SlimVirgin against what FuelWagon HIMSELF conceded
>>>was an "accusation" (his words), I find myself hauled before the
>>>arbitration committee.
>>
>>For what its worth, FuelWagon has now turned Jayjg's ArbCom candidate
>>question page into his own personal battleground. FuelWagon's
>>"questions" span five sub-sections, have dozens of diffs and are filled with
>>endless rhetorical statements. However, this doesn't even begin to compare
>>with the 16 section response to his RfC a while back: (
>>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/FuelWagon_2).
>>
>>Ed's right, the system's not working here.
>>
>
> I want to describe some of what FuelWagon has been doing so that
> people can see how hard it is to deal with this within the existing
> dispute-resolution structure.
>
> FuelWagon has been harassing Ed and myself, and a couple of others to
> a lesser extent, since July. It started because I blocked him for 3RR
> and then because I made a copy edit he didn't like of an article he
> had edited a lot. He responded with a stream of invective and
> talk-page disruptive, which Ed blocked him for, and that made Ed his
> victim too.
>
> I hate to think how many personal comments he has posted about Ed and
> me since then, but it amounts to thousands of words. He filed an RfC
> against me, which was deleted because he failed to show prior efforts
> at dispute resolution. He promptly copied and pasted it into his user
> subspace, so that he can still link to his various claims. He also
> created an "attack page" on me, where he makes a note of anything I do
> that he feels he can use against me. Carbonite opened an RfC against
> him, but he hijacked it and turned it into another attack page. He
> tried to intervene in the arbcom case against Ed, writing to Jimbo to
> have it re-opened when it had closed, then tried to have some kind of
> black mark put on Ed's mediation record.
>
> It has been very upsetting to be on the receiving end of it. I tried
> ignoring him, responding with reason, responding firmly. I stayed away
> from pages he edits, but he stalked me to pages I edit and began to
> revert me, so that I had to either let him have his own way, or get
> into a revert war with him and look as bad as he is.
>
> It changed the whole way I interact with people on Wikipedia. I found
> myself becoming sharper with people than I had previously been,
> because I was on edge all the time. I felt embarassed at having
> someone pursue me with accusations, because most people looking at it
> will think there's no smoke without fire. And yet when I tried to
> correct some of what he was saying, I ended up looking as silly as
> him, so mostly I had to let him get away with it.
>
> Several editors and admins have intervened and tried to persuade him
> to stop, including Ed Poor, Ann Heneghan, El C, Carbonite, Jayjg,
> Bishonen, Willmcw, Marskell, Aaron Brenneman, Mel Etitis, and
> Viriditas.
>
> FuelWagon's response was that he would leave me alone if I did 12
> things that he listed on his talk page
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:FuelWagon&oldid=25272763#ideal
> including that I make, in the "first-person narative [sic] form" an
> unqualified and unconditional apology in relation to the copy edit he
> didn't like, and he listed the various talk pages that the apology had
> to be posted on. He had a similar list of apologies that Ed had to
> make before he'd be satisfied.
>
> He also teamed up with other known trolls like Zephram Stark, Marsden,
> and Vizcarra, so that a gang of people began to pursue his various
> victims.
>
> I've resisted taking this to the arbcom because he will turn it into a
> circus, and also because I couldn't face going through all the diffs
> and having the whole thing repeated yet again. I've been on the verge
> a couple of times of writing to Jimbo for help, but didn't because
> that puts him on the spot. I've also been on the verge of leaving, but
> I don't want to let someone like that drive me away.
>
> Now, because Ed Poor recently blocked FuelWagon for three hours over a
> personal attack on me, FuelWagon has seized his chance and has taken
> Ed to the arbcom, where he will hold court for several weeks, perhaps
> several months, and all the allegations will have to be responded to.
> The only way I can defend Ed now is to present the case that I've not
> been able to face putting together. It's probably going to take me a
> week or more to put all the diffs together in a way that gets the full
> force of his behavior across without being unreadable for the
> arbitrators.
>
> There has to be a better way to deal with users like this. For
> example, we could set up a small committee of experienced editors, a
> subcommittee of the arbcom and subject to the arbcom's jurisdiction,
> whose job it is to identify when a user is trolling, stalking, or
> harassing, and we give that committee the power to deal with it there
> and then, using blocks of increasing length for each instance of it. I
> know this has drawbacks (accusations of cabalism), but I feel the
> benefits would greatly outweigh them.
>
> Sarah

Good day Sarah

When I read your report, I have the feeling to read what I have been
seeing happening hundred of times. Which is not good news :-( But I fear
it is part of the game.

What really strikes me in what you explain is this :

 > It changed the whole way I interact with people on Wikipedia. I found
 > myself becoming sharper with people than I had previously been,
 > because I was on edge all the time. I felt embarassed at having
 > someone pursue me with accusations, because most people looking at it
 > will think there's no smoke without fire. And yet when I tried to
 > correct some of what he was saying, I ended up looking as silly as
 > him, so mostly I had to let him get away with it.

And I think this is actually the worse point. The "victim" thinking he
is alone (or nearly alone) in the boat, knowing that most people
consider there is no smoke without fire, and as a result, the victim
behaving in a less relaxed fashion... which will further fuel comments
from those happy to tickle conflicts. A rolling ball...

I feel there is a general direction for failing to support the "victim"
during the conflict, either by lack of time, or by lassitude (because we
have seen that happening so many times) or by fear, to support her only
at the last point (when she is threatening to leave).

Sadly, most editors actually support the person inside themselves, but
do not say so either because they believe the "victim" is strong enough,
or because they fear becoming targets themselves.

Maybe the problem is not so much the trouble makers; maybe the problem
is that editors fail to show support to victims at the *right* time.


body:
slimvirgin at gmail.com wrote:

>Jay, it would be original research to claim that someone is a
>"criminal" even though they haven't been convicted. Committing a crime
>is not just the apparent performance of a prohibited act, but is also
>(usually) connected to the actor's state of mind at the time,
>something a court rules on based on the available evidence. Wikipedia
>editors are not in a position to judge what a court would have ruled,
>no matter how obvious the case might seem (e.g. a public figure
>admitting they once stole something from a store).
>
>
We're not in a position to make the judgment ourselves, but we *are* in
a position to summarize judgments other people have made.  Courts are
one obvious source, but there is no reason they must be the only
one---if it were, in fact, widespread consensus that someone who was
acquitted was actually guilty (perhaps they were acquitted on a
technicality, and everyone agrees they actually committed the crime), we
can cite a published source claiming that, which would not be original
research.

-Mark


from_name: JAY JG

body:
>From: Kirill Lokshin <kirill.lokshin at gmail.com>
>
>On 12/5/05, JAY JG <jayjg at hotmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > People also falsely confess to crimes; there have been many famous cases
>of
> > this which have actually been later overturned (and one must assume even
> > more cases which have not been overturned).  If we start trying to
>second
> > guess legal systems, then all we'll be left with is original research to
> > determine if someone is a criminal.
> >
> > Jay.
>
>The problems is that you're trying to apply a fundamentally
>20th-century view of legal systems across the board.  Only recently
>have the majority of criminals begun to appear before courts; in
>earlier periods, it was quite common for them to simply be killed, or
>to kill themselves.
>
>What about cases like [[Marcus Junius Brutus]]?  There is little, if
>any, doubt about his role in Ceasar's death; should we then refrain
>from adding him to the Assassins category merely because he was never
>convicted in a court?

I hate to make a slippery slope argument, but they are not always invalid.
If we start with "obvious" criminals who were merely never convicted of
anything, soon we end up with Categories of Criminals that include Bill
Clinton, George W. Bush, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Henry Morgentaler, etc.

Jay.


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Travis Derouin

subject: [Wikitech-l] Squid configuration problem

body:
Hey,

Does anyone have any suggestions about configuring Squid in reverse proxy
for MW? We're seeing that our articles aren't being cached and Squid is
still making several requests per second for the same article, despite
configuring Squid as instructed at meta.wikimedia.org. Here are our
settings:

 $wgUseSquid = true;
 $wgUseESI = false;
 $wgInternalServer = $wgServer;
$wgSquidMaxage = 18000;
$wgSquidServers = array('10.234.169.202');
$wgSquidServersNoPurge = array();
$wgMaxSquidPurgeTitles = 400;
$wgSquidFastPurge = true;

Squid and Apache are running on different machines, and we're seeing several
200 response codes for unchanged articles from Apache, even in a small time
span of a few minutes. While the apache load has been reduced, we should be
seeing Squid handling more of the serving of normal article pages, instead
of forwarding the request to Apache almost 100% of the time.

Any suggestions would be appreciated,
Travis


subject: [WikiEN-l] NPOV trainwreck

body:
Please don't try to re-direct the questions, Jack, and please don't try to
make them about me.  You made insinuations about the Arbitration Committee,
please clarify.  I'll repeat the questions:

1. Do you think that the Commitee is trying to "purge right wingers"?
2. Do you imagine that there are no "right wingers" on the committee itself?
3. Why would you insinuate that Cberlet is any more the "friend and
colleague" of members of the Arbitration Committee than are any of the other
parties to the case?

Jay.

>From: Sam Spade <samspade.thomasjefferson at googlemail.com>
>
>Are you saying your my friend or colleague? Are you a member of the
>USAF? Just what exactly do we have in common, outside of our long
>history of bitter conflict?
>
>Sam Spade
>
>On 12/5/05, JAY JG <jayjg at hotmail.com> wrote:
> > >From: Sam Spade <samspade.thomasjefferson at googlemail.com>
> > >
> > >Please, ArbCom, review the evidence and rethink your
> > >results. This purging of the "right wingers" is not what the ArbCom is
> > >for.
> >
> > Do you think that the Commitee is trying to "purge right wingers"?  Do
>you
> > imagine that there are no "right wingers" on the committee itself?
> >
> > >I understand Cberlet is your friend and colleague, but for the
> > >sake of integrity, please hold us to the same standard.
> >
> > Yes, this is exactly the kind of innuendo which has tainted this (and
> > related) cases - the implication being that the Committee is making
> > decisions based on alleged friendships.  Why would you insinuate that
> > Cberlet is any more the "friend and colleague" of members of the
>Arbitration
> > Committee than any of the other parties to the case?
> >
> > Jay.
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> >
>_______________________________________________
>WikiEN-l mailing list
>WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
>To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


from_name: Anthony DiPierro

body:
On 12/5/05, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/5/05, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> > I think it'd be a good feature to have, though I don't think it'd
> > solve many of the problems this thread is talking about.  There really
> > isn't any point in having an orphaned article.  If you can't find
> > *somewhere* to create a link from (at least a list or something), then
> > why have an article in the first place?  Making contributors more
> > motivated - that's *usually* a good thing, right?
> >
>
> > One caveat, though.  This would probably be best implemented only in
> > the article namespace.  Orphaned user pages, for instance, make a lot
> > more sense.
> >
> > Anthony
>
> Due to the way history works it would be quite hard to create a truely
> orphaned user page.
>
> --
> geni

Due to the way the mediawiki database is set up, it'd be extremely
difficult to check whether or not there were links from the history,
though.  The only practical definition of orphaned I can think of
would be "containing no links in the 'what links here' section".

Anthony


body:
On 12/5/05, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I feel there is a general direction for failing to support the "victim"
> during the conflict, either by lack of time, or by lassitude (because we
> have seen that happening so many times) or by fear, to support her only
> at the last point (when she is threatening to leave).
>
> Sadly, most editors actually support the person inside themselves, but
> do not say so either because they believe the "victim" is strong enough,
> or because they fear becoming targets themselves.

Hello Anthere, I agree with you very much, and I'd like to try to come
up with a solution. Following on from Steve Rubenstein's idea
yesterday, I'm thinking it might be good to have a page where people
can go to report harassment, and where editors can sign up if they're
willing to be part of a fast-response team. Like bullying of any kind,
the best thing is to nip it in the bud before the behavior becomes
entrenched and before, as you say, the victim starts responding in a
way that might make things worse.

There are two difficulties. First, we need to come up with a working
definition of "harassment". Often, editors who are subject to admin
action claim they're being harassed, and editors whose contributions
are being closely watched because of editing problems often feel the
same. There's a page about it here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Harassment  that describes some
of the behavior, but I'd like to write something about the effect it
can have on the victim.

Secondly, I want to avoid pages that are made available to support
victims turning into platforms for more attacks by the perpetrators,
who may turn up to defend themselves in a way that in fact causes more
grief. I know that the person who was following me around turned every
query and every objection to his behavior into another opportunity to
write a several-thousand-word essay repeating all his allegations. So
the team of editors who sign up to help victims would have to be able
to tell the difference between a genuine defense and an excuse for
further attack.

For both these reasons, it may take some time to get it right, but
I'll let you know if I make progress, and thank you for your input,
Anthere.

Sarah


from_name: Jean-Baptiste Soufron

body:
daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I can just provide my personal history here. I appear in the credits of
> several popular reference works as everything from contributor to assistant
> editor-in-chief (a horrible title, I might add, but then again, so was the  book).
> I have worked on these books for Simon and Shuster, Facts on File,  Macmillan
> (before it was gobbled up by Simon and Shuster), Reader's Digest,  Henry Holt,
> and Continuum. In each book, the facts were checked as Brian  describes. In
> fact, I remember one senior editor at Simon and Shuster boasting  about how
> they would pay grad students a certain amount of money for every  mistake they
> found. They were eager to find errors. I now have a manuscript of a  book that I
> wrote for Marshall Cavendish sitting on my desk. Every sentence was  numbered
> and checked. I have been asked to help source the material. I will be  happy
> to provide the email exchange.

I must add my similar experience there. I wrote several reports and
studies for institutions and academic fora, I always have to add the
maximum of elements to source it, and it's rarely enough.

I would enjoy using Wikipedia for my studies, but it's not possible as
of today. I would love if it could evolve the right way.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Experiment on new pages

body:
Delirium wrote:
> That makes sense, although I prefer to view it as incrementally
> improving what already works, rather than ditching processes and
> bringing in new stuff.  For example, "in the beginning", we just looked
> at every edit on recent changes by someone we didn't recognize.  Now
> there are far too many edits, so we need some better way of organizing
> them, and marking which edits have been checked and which still need to
> be looked at.  Not really a fundamental shift in how Wikipedia works,
> just adding some tools to help us deal with things.

Absolutely.  We agree completely on that.

> Slightly more fundamental would be displaying to users that a particular
> revision has a certain level of confidence.  This is already implicit
> for experienced Wikipedians---I think most of us know almost immediately
> whether a particular article is trustworthy or not, based on patterns
> like what the prose looks like, how wikified it is, how many people have
> edited it, what subject area it's in, etc.  But formalizing that a bit
> and making it explicit for newcomers and casual readers can't hurt---we
> all know that an unwikified page just created by 1 person and not edited
> by anyone else should be read with a grain of salt, but we can point
> that out to others in some automated way.  Again, just kind of
> incrementally improving how things work.

The problem with this is figuring out how to do it in a way that doesn't
lead to game playing, karma whoring, etc.  Any automated tool would
embody some a priori assumptions that might not match the rich fabric of
our actual experience.

> For the most part, I think we're doing pretty well, and there are lots
> of good ways to incrementally improve what's already gong well, it's
> just that period media frenzies kind of catch us when we're not yet ready.

David Gerard has a nice way of saying this... we've reached public
popularity when we're still barely out of alpha and into beta, if that.
 With software this seldom happens.

--Jimbo


from_name: Chris Jenkinson

subject: [WikiEN-l] Anons banned from creating articles

body:
John Lee wrote:
> http://news.com.com/Growing+pains+for+Wikipedia/2100-1025_3-5981119.html?tag=cd.top
>
>
> "Thus, to avoid future problems, Wales plans to bar anonymous users from
> creating new articles; only registered members will be able to do so.
> That change will go into effect Monday, he said, adding that anonymous
> users will still be able to edit existing entries."
>
> Why were Wikipedians the last to know about this? I only saw some
> discussion on the mailing list about this, but nothing final. Why do we
> have to learn of this from the media instead of straight from Jimbo?
> This is really disturbing.

It's like Celera Genomics and the Human Genome Project. It's policy by
press release!

Chris


from_name: Tim Starling

body:
geni wrote:
> On 12/1/05, Alex Schenck <linuxbeak at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>Now, with that said, I need feedback. Please provide.
>>
>>--Linuxbeak
>
>
> Well as a deltionist admin even I feel you are going a little far.
> While I seem to recall that uncyclopedia did have a few weeks in which
> they cleared out at lot of rubish by allowing the admins to delete
> anything they felt was not up to par I don't think this would work on
> wikipedia.
>
> My personal answer is that we should make it harder to create new
> articles in the first place. Probably by restricting the creating of
> orphans. Don't ask me how to do that though.

We can tell fairly easily whether a page will be an orphan before it is
created, it's an indexed query. So we could, say, prevent creation of
orphans by anons. I'm not sure what the effect would be. I can tell you that
currently, 205 of the 1498 articles in [[Category:Articles that need to be
wikified]] are orphans, I don't know how many were orphans when they were
created.

I guess this would prohibit the creation of articles that are created
casually, a few sentences about something the author cares about. But I
think the effect would be smaller for larger junk -- text copied from
homework essays or personal webpages for example. The contributors are
probably more motivated in that case.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Peter Mackay

body:
> From: wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org
> [mailto:wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of JAY JG
> Sent: Monday, 5 December 2005 09:43
> To: wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] David Hager is listed as convicted rapist
>
> >From: Matt Brown <morven at gmail.com>
> >
> >I responded to this user previously on the helpdesk.  The
> issue is that
> >David Hager was accused of marital rape by his former wife,
> who got an
> >article published in The Nation about this, among other places.
> >  Thus the allegations, true or not, are documented and citable, and
> >thus cannot be removed as unsourced attacks.
> >
> >However, he should NOT be listed in any categories that imply he has
> >been convicted of a crime, because he has not.
>
> I've been have a months-long debate with another editor on
> this topic.  I've been stating that we include people in
> "Criminals" categories if they have been convicted of a crime
> by an independent judiciary.  The other editor insists that
> we have to decide (by some means) whether or not they have
> actually committed a crime, conviction is not enough a good
> enough yardstick.  I'd be interested in other thoughts here.

Prisons are full of innocent people. Just ask them.

If a person has not admitted a crime, then it may be that they did not do it
and the legal system made a mistake. It happens. Or that the prosecution
case accepted by judge and jury was inaccurate. Or the defence was
incompetent. Or that the convicted criminal has rationalised his crime in
his own mind to something else, something justifiable.

How can we possibly know?

If a person had admitted guilt, then there is no problem. We may describe
them as a criminal. But if they maintained their innocence and were found
guilty instead of pleading guilty, then we should use conventional phrasing
to indicate this, by describing someone as a convicted rapist, rather than a
rapist.

In a case like marital rape, where much of the evidence would neccesarily
revolve around the conflicting statements of the two participants of an act
presumably performed in private, then how could we know what did or did not
take place? We know that he was found guilty of rape, we don't know if he
did it. Best to stick to the facts.

Peter (Skyring)


from_name: Kelly Martin

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Experiment on new pages

body:
On 12/5/05, Martin Richards <Martin at velocitymanager.com> wrote:
> Should we have a page where anons can request a page be started? Otherwise
> it might lead to some frustration.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requested_articles

Kelly


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Experiment on new pages

body:
On 12/5/05, Steve Block <steve.block at myrealbox.com> wrote:
> Martin Richards wrote:
> > Should we have a page where anons can request a page be started?
> > Otherwise it might lead to some frustration.
>
> We do, [[Wikipedia:Requested articles]].  I would expect that a link
> will be included in whatever text shows up when an anon tries to create
> a page.

I've added links to [[Special:Userlogin]] and [[Wikipedia:Requested
articles]] to [[Mediawiki:Nocreatetext]].

Kelly


body:
On 12/5/05, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> One suggestion. Unless I am wrong, the only page on which some one can
> rather easily remove comments from another without backfiring (being
> called a censor for example)... is one of his subpages, in particular
> talk page. On a community page, it is far too easy for a harasser to get
> support and get a voice, and turn the support page in yet another
> harassing page. On one of your subpage, you may protect yourself better
> and remove the crap with far less troubles.
>
Very good idea.

Sarah


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Foundation-l] Anons cannot create pages on english wikipedia?

body:
--- Sam Korn <smoddy at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/5/05, Walter van Kalken <walter at vankalken.net> wrote:
> > What is this:
> >
> > "This site has restricted the ability to create new pages. If you wish
> > to create a new page, you must first create an account or log in
> > <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Userlogin>.
> >
> > If you'd rather not create an account or log in, consider listing a
> > request for someone else to create the page here
> > <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requested_articles>."
> >
> > Since when is this wikimedia policy to restrict this?
>
> Since a few hours ago. It is more of a test than anything else.  Brion
> implemented it today on Jimbo's request a few hours ago, so that some
> kind of results can be obtained.  There is certainly not consensus
> support for it in the community, though a large faction certainly do
> agree.  I think this is "wait and see" time.

For the record, I very strongly support this. This is due to the fact that almost all, not just
most, new pages created by anons on the English Wikipedia are borderline to complete crap. Thus it
is sad, but necessary to limit the amount of needless clean-up work that those on new page patrol
have to do. Now they can concentrate more effort checking for other things on new pages instead of
tagging so many speedies. I?d also like to say that this should be decided on a per wiki basis
since letting anons create new pages still has more good than bad points for smaller wikis. But
the larger a wiki gets, the more overwhelming anon clean-up work is.

Anons will still be able to edit existing articles. This is fine since existing articles are much
more likely to be watched by users and decently linked from other pages.

It is also my hope that this will help push the English Wikipedia, however little, a bit from
emphasizing growth and a bit more toward emphasizing quality.

-- mav

__________________________________
Start your day with Yahoo! - Make it your home page!
http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Field Nothing

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Why MO.wikipedia. - Moldovan,
	are written in cyrillic ?

body:
>You probably don't know the history of the language well. In fact both
>Romanian and Moldovans has been Orthodox Christians and used Cyrillic
>script for several ages.

Alexandru Niculescu: "Romanian is the only Romance language which has
developed in the Eastern part of Latin Europe"
Niculescu, Alexandru. Outline History of the Romanian Language. Bucharest:
1981

The first known text appeared in writing in 16th century  (1521) which was
written in a _variant_ of old cyrillic alphabet and it was used in Walachia
and Moldova until the Re-Latinization in 1850s. Note that in the rest of
Romania starting from the late 16th century, _LATIN_ alphabet was used with
Hungarian spelling conventions (and switched to Italian spelling in 18th).

So let me count it...Uhm...It seems just in Walachia and Moldova until 1850
what you said is true, as for the rest of Romania - false, it has used latin
script since the 16th century. So even for Moldova region of Romania it has
been over 150 years since a variant of cyrillic alphabet has been used.

>The modern Latin script is relatively a news in both lands.

Oy vey, 150 years is new for sure. So I guess that makes my mobile phone as
modern as one could possibly imagine.

>So one can's speak in such a self-confindent way about
>Moldovan Cyrillics as "decreed in the unfree days". By the way, do you
>know much about the unfree days? They were not totally that "unfree".
>:) Be more neutral. ;)

I know about those days, we've studied about them in school, I've talked to
older people about them as well as discussed the matter with some professors
from university, they were forced to know russian, the only books they had
access to were russian, go figure how free and open is that.

>Maybe it would be a good choice just to move the whole thing to
>__mo-cyr.wikipedia.org__, leaving at [[:mo:]] the two links -- to the
>Romanian and to the old-fashioned Cyrillic-written Moldovan.

No, people from Moldova should have control over mo.wikipedia.org, having a
link on the main page to cyrillic is not acceptable, it's not our language,
why should we put links to another language on the main page ? Let them have
their weirdlanguage.wikipedia.org , but we shouldn't have any obligations to
put a link to it.

>Esperu cxiam!

Saluton.

_________________________________________________________________
Don?t just search. Find. Check out the new MSN Search!
http://search.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200636ave/direct/01/


from_name: Gregory Maxwell

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Question about Size of Wikipedia

body:
On 12/5/05, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> Martina Greiner wrote:
> >> Shouldn't the database size be roughly the size of the uncompressed
> >> xml file? You can look at that and see if it is similar.
> >
> > The size of the uncompressed files is roughly 100 GB.
>
> The actual database will include indexes, padding, etc which increases the
> amount of space used.
>
> Currently the dump importer doesn't support compressed text storage in the
> database; if added this could reduce the amount of disk space required (but of
> course it'll be harder to work with).

Ah, this explains why the mysql imports are so huge for me.

FWIW, the only metric I can provide is how much full takes in
PostgreSQL, .. its about 91gb  in my past expirence (a dump or two
ago), this is with all indexes, link tables, etc.  But it's not
directly compariable because PG autocompresses fat fields (over about
2k) and the importer doesn't compress....


subject: [WikiEN-l] NPOV trainwreck

body:
No, we will finish the case and close it. If the dispute continues
after the case is closed we will reopen it. Whoever is making the
most trouble will be the focus of attention.

Fred

On Dec 5, 2005, at 2:43 PM, Sam Spade wrote:

> I tell you guys what I'd like, and what I'd be perfectly happy w.
>
> How about we put this case on hold until after the "elections", or
> whatever. That will give Nobs a chance to ruin or redeem himself (so
> you can ban him for a month or a year/lifetime as appropriate). It
> will also force Cberlet to interact on a civil basis ''before'' the
> case is over. And it will give an end to any complaints of
> impropriety. It strikes me as an "everybody wins" situation.
>
> Sam Spade


from_name: Alfio Puglisi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Messages

body:
On 12/5/05, Ben Garney <beng at garagegames.com> wrote:
> Alfio Puglisi wrote:
>
> >Tortoise CVS works very well, but for diffs and other cvs features on
> >windows you need to install the windows port of binutils (for example
> >from http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=2435 ).
> >
> >
> Or just use the built-in Tortoise versions of those features
> (potentially replacing TortoiseMerge with something like Beyond Compare
> if you do a lot of it)...

My copy of TortoiseCVS didn't seem to be able to do diffs by itself...
maybe more recent versions can.

Alfio


body:
On 12/5/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Anthony DiPierro wrote:
>
> >On 12/4/05, JAY JG <jayjg at hotmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> >>What about, say, a criminal was killed before conviction by a court - say
> >>[[Michael Robert Ryan]]?
> >>
> >>Regards,
> >>
> >>Jay.
> >>
> >>
> >If the person is dead, they certainly can't sue us for libel (of
> >course, they can't sue *us* for libel anyway, only the person who
> >actually added the libelous statement).
> >
> That's a poor criterion for justifying our actions.  It may be legally
> correct, but ethically it sucks.
>
> Ec

Perhaps you should have read the following paragraph (quoting people
out of context sucks too).

Anthony


from_name: Martina Greiner

subject: [Wikitech-l] Question about Size of Wikipedia

body:
Hi again,

I finally got importDump.php to run and it runs and already
imported _161_ GB of the english Wikipedia into the database!

That seems to be far too much.

Here is the row count:
page:204876
revision:8263577
text:22768801
user:1
interwiki:124

Does this seem to be reasonable???
161 GB and still running?
22 millions text entries?
Only 1 user entry?

I would appreciate if someone could give me a hint whether
those number are correct!

One final comment: the 161 GB are in the innoDB database
(when you look in mysql/data).

Thank you and best regards,

Martina


body:
  David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:

  >* When we go through the mod queue (I hit it most weekdays), we take any
>first posts and (in general) accept the post and unmoderate the poster.

  Really? I've posted twice and was told both times my message had to go through the mod queue (waiting to see if this one does).

  -Hermione1980

---------------------------------
 Yahoo! Personals
 Skip the bars and set-ups and start using Yahoo! Personals for free


body:
On 12/5/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Tim Starling wrote:
> > We can tell fairly easily whether a page will be an orphan before it is
> > created, it's an indexed query. So we could, say, prevent creation of
> > orphans by anons. I'm not sure what the effect would be. I can tell you that
> > currently, 205 of the 1498 articles in [[Category:Articles that need to be
> > wikified]] are orphans, I don't know how many were orphans when they were
> > created.
>
> I would say that whether or not the experiment beginning today on
> preventing anons from creating *any* articles works, we might try this
> one as well (after a couple of weeks, say) as a "softer" solution.

I'd say the proper "soft" solution is simply to be less forgiving with
anonymous contributions that aren't properly references.  If an
anonymous contributor puts facts into the encyclopedia without
sourcing them, then any user should feel free to remove those facts.
I really don't see this as taking a significant amount of time for
people working on the new page patrol.

With logged in users, especially ones with well established
reputations of editing, you have to be more forgiving than this, of
course.

But as this is all being done as an experiment I don't mind waiting a
few weeks to see if it really does work miracles.

Anthony


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Why do we not make it clear that Wikipedia is a work
	in progress?

body:
Why is there not a big, fat, clear warning at the top of every article that this
is a work in progess, has not been formally reviewed, may contain factual
inaccuracies or vandalism, and *should not* be used for reference without a very
large grain of salt?

I've gotten tired of having to remind people (even Wikipedians) that Wikipedia
is still a draft, and that we have *ZERO* reviewed-and-vetted-for-the-public
pages yet. We don't even have a review system in place yet.

The "Disclaimer" on en.wikipedia.org, such as it is, isn't even *visible*. You
have to scroll down to the *very bottom* to see a tiny "Disclaimers" link, and
then follow *that*. The other languages, do they even all *have* disclaimer pages?

Every time somebody discovers some bit of inaccurate or embarrassing something
in an article and trumps it up in their blog/magazine/international TV news
network, the hoo-hah is because we're seen as pretending to be a reliable or
respectable information source. *WE ARE NOT SUCH YET* and we need to make sure
that we're not seen to be claiming that.

We're not just a bunch of geeks hacking together articles anymore; we get
umpteen bajillion page views from random folks who probably don't have a clue
what we're about, and we get waaaayy too much attention that's based on the
impression that we're serving the public directly already. The recent affair is
just one in a long series of small and large fusses because we're not being
clear about what we are.

Wikipedia is a draft, and drafts that are circulated in public need to be
explicitly marked as such.

</rant>

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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from_name: geni

body:
On 12/5/05, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> I think it'd be a good feature to have, though I don't think it'd
> solve many of the problems this thread is talking about.  There really
> isn't any point in having an orphaned article.  If you can't find
> *somewhere* to create a link from (at least a list or something), then
> why have an article in the first place?  Making contributors more
> motivated - that's *usually* a good thing, right?
>

> One caveat, though.  This would probably be best implemented only in
> the article namespace.  Orphaned user pages, for instance, make a lot
> more sense.
>
> Anthony

Due to the way history works it would be quite hard to create a truely
orphaned user page.

--
geni


from_name: Andrew Gray

body:
On 05/12/05, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
>
>
> But the NPOV issues are more serious.  I don't see how a category such
> as "criminals" can possibly be NPOV.  "Convicted criminals" maybe.
> "Indicted criminals" might be possible.  "Alleged criminals" would
> probably be way too broad (might as well redirect it to "List of
> people").
>
There was some discussion on this list about [[Category:Soviet spies]], a
month or so ago; might be worth having a glance at that in this context. A
proposed change there was shot down mainly for reasons unique to the
situation there, and IMO somewhat tangential ones at best.

The thing is, in many cases we implicitly state "convicted" but don't
include it; many of our existing categories of criminals are already
stipulated to contain those either convicted or where the commission of the
crime is essentially uncontested.

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


from_name: Mathieu Amo

subject: [WikiEN-l] Experiment on new pages

body:
2005/12/5, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com>:
> Today, as an experiment, we will be turning off new pages creation for
> anonymous users in the English Wikipedia.

I totally disagree with this.
Disabling the creation of pages by anonymous contributors will not
solve the problems of "nonsense pages" ; those pages will only be more
difficult to track and to delete if they are created by registered
users. The fact that some of the vandals will be annoyed by the need
of creating an account and simply wander away is negligible compared
to the increase of the workload created by this. And here, I'm only
talking about the bad things ; we will also loose a lot of good new
pages.

Simply, the fact is you're not looking at the right place. This is a
problem we cannot solve locally ; by doing this, you are only trying
to settle the symptoms instead of going directly to the reason of the
problem. We should inform people ; we should warn them about the
danger of writing lies.
Internet users are not stupid. We should put a warning, that, when an
anonymous create a new article, will explain that he is entirely
responsible for what he writes ; that he can be traced down ; that he
may be sued if he writes slanderous content.
We're Wikipedia. We do not forbid people to do something. We explain
to them why it's bad.

But, as you said, it's an experiment, so we'll see the results. Keep us posted.

Solensean.

--
He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was
mad. And that was all his patrimony.
Sabatini, Rafael.

Wikip?dia, l'encyclop?die libre.
http://fr.wikipedia.org


body:
On 12/5/05, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/5/05, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> > Due to the way the mediawiki database is set up, it'd be extremely
> > difficult to check whether or not there were links from the history,
> > though.  The only practical definition of orphaned I can think of
> > would be "containing no links in the 'what links here' section".
> >
> > Anthony
>
> You forget there is a way to do this that doesn't involve any database
> quires. Simply change [[MediaWiki:Nogomatch]]. Makes it pretty much
> imposible to create an orphan without messing with the address.
>
>
> --
> geni

I didn't forget about it.  This is actually the way it's set up on
jnanabase, which is one of the wikis I use regularly.  I've found that
I usually just type in the address manually to start a new article
there, though.  It's easier to "mess with the address" than it is to
add a link to the article from somewhere else.

It'd probably be useful to put something in the software to actually
force people to make the link, first.  Of course, then people will
just put it in the sandbox or on their user page or something.  Maybe
a force to put a link *from article space* when creating a page in
article space.  I can't think of any example where you wouldn't want
to have such a link.  This would slightly increase the difficulty of
creating a new page, but that could be seen as a feature rather than a
bug.

Anthony


from_name: JAY JG

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: The Wiki meritocracy

body:
>From: Sam Spade <samspade.thomasjefferson at googlemail.com>
>
>Are you saying that now that I have a F.A. I have a chance to become an
>admin?
>
>Sam Spade

That all depends on whether or not you've stopped doing the things that
caused Wikipedia's editors to reject your previous applications.

Jay.


subject: [WikiEN-l] NPOV trainwreck

body:
>From: Sam Spade <samspade.thomasjefferson at googlemail.com>
>
>I answered your question in good faith before, but now I will ignore
>it as poisonous. I appreciate Guettarda's good faith comment, btw.
>

Responding to questions with unrelated questions isn't really "answering"
them, much less "in good faith".  I think you know that.

Jay.


subject: [WikiEN-l] NPOV trainwreck

body:
>From: Sam Spade <samspade.thomasjefferson at googlemail.com>
>
>I am demanding community outrage (which is growing, btw) at the
>biases, appointees, and lack of recusals.

Where is your evidence that "community outrage" is "growing" over the
"biases, appointess, and lack of recusals".  I know the level of "outrage"
is usually fairly high in every person sanctioned by the Committee, but
that's pretty much par for the course, don't you think?

Jay.


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Why do we not make it clear that Wikipedia is a
	work	in progress?

body:
David Gerard wrote:
> Perhaps make the puzzle-globe covered in the letter "beta"!

Then they'll be sure we're in bed with Google! ;)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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subject: [WikiEN-l] NPOV trainwreck

body:
No, Fred, he's making a much broader accusation; in fact a series of broad
accusations unsupported by any evidence.

Jay.

>From: Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net>
>
>He is referring to my disclosure that I may have briefly encountered  Chip
>Berlet when I was in the National Lawyers Guild. I did not  recuse on that
>basis as there was very little if any actual  connection between us. I
>don't think membership or even active  participation in the National
>Lawyers Guild  forms a basis for  recusal as there are a number of reasons
>why people join the National  Lawyers Guild and participate in it. Other
>than involvement in legal  work there is absolutely no test for membership.
>Successful  participation is another story. I soon found out that since I
>did not  support the Gang of Four I was considered chopped liver.
>
>Fred
>
>On Dec 5, 2005, at 10:57 AM, JAY JG wrote:
>
>>Please don't try to re-direct the questions, Jack, and please don't  try
>>to make them about me.  You made insinuations about the  Arbitration
>>Committee, please clarify.  I'll repeat the questions:
>>
>>1. Do you think that the Committee is trying to "purge right wingers"?
>>2. Do you imagine that there are no "right wingers" on the  Committee
>>itself?
>>3. Why would you insinuate that Cberlet is any more the "friend and
>>colleague" of members of the Arbitration Committee than are any of  the
>>other parties to the case?
>>
>>Jay.
>


body:
On 12/5/05, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
> Edit screens also tell people to use reliable sources.
> I would equally unforgiving with someone who adds unsourced edits as
> someone who starts unsourced articles.
>
Absolutely.  There are some differences though.  Article deletion is
much harder to revert.  That's probably the biggest one.  Also, people
often revert changes to an article which changes it from a massive
unreferenced one to a short factual stub.  I used to do that a lot
with articles on VFD, I'd change long articles on people with
absolutely no sources to "Blah Whoever might be a person." and I'd
find that some long time editor would revert me.  Maybe that's just a
VFD thing, though.  Then there are the other issues, like the fact
that New Page Patrol is possible whereas New Edit Patrol isn't (at
least not without some technical resources).  Watchlists are effective
for edits but not as effective for new pages.  It's the same
principles, but it's a different beast.

It really depends on how you look at eventualism.  The way I see it,
it's fine to remove information as long as its still in the edit
history.  If some logged in user wants to actually go through the
trouble of looking up the information and adding it back, that's
great.  If not, well, it's still there for someone to find eventually.
 But if an article is reduced to a single verifiable sentence (which
would be easy for a new page patroller to do), is it going to get
speedy deleted, and the information lost forever?

> If anyone can verify it. Go ahead. But if it can't be verified, we
> shouldn't be leaving it in Wikipedia. It breaks basic policy.
>
> Mgm

Well, there's also the talk page.  It's OK to leave most unverified
information there.  But that's another difference with new pages.  For
some reason most admins insist on deleting the talk page when they
delete an article.  I think it's even a speedy criterion.

Anthony


from_name: Stan Shebs

subject:
[WikiEN-l] [[Wikipedia:Articles for creation]] for anonymous
	creation of articles

body:
Sam Korn wrote:

>On 12/5/05, M. Creidieki Crouch <creidieki at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>Since anonymous users have been experimentally prevented from adding
>>new articles, I have created [[Wikipedia:Articles for creation]].
>>This allows users to request that a page be created, and list initial
>>content.  I hope that this will dampen the effect of this policy
>>change on the creation of legitimate articles.  I hope that others
>>will consider adding this to their watchlist and helping out with this
>>task; any registered user can fulfill these requests, or state why
>>they think a request should not be fulfilled (article already exists
>>under different name, etc.).
>>
>
>Um, in what way is this easier than, well, creating an account?
>
It's not, but there are a remarkable number of longtime good editors
who apparently do not want to create accounts (I've come to recognize
some familiar IPs). Part of the experiment is to see what anons decide
to do when a restriction is applied - for instance, if we get a surge
in throwaway logins and no benefit in content quality, that might
suggest the problem is with pseudonymy rather than anonymity.

Stan


from_name: Sean Barrett

subject: [WikiEN-l] NPOV trainwreck

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

Sam Spade stated for the record:

> So you deny a history of conflict with me?
>
> Sam Spade

I deeply admire the basic concept at work here.

1. Troublemaker makes a career of causing conflict.

2. Troublemaker's career of conflict leaves a wake: a history of
conflict with those charged with stopping conflict.

3. Troublemaker then cites his career of conflict as a reason why those
charged with stopping conflict cannot stop the conflict he is making a
career of causing.

4. ???

5. Profit!

It should be needless to say, but, alas, is not, that the ArbComm has
not accepted this argument any of the dozen or so previous times it's
been offered, and don't seem to be interested in it this time, either.
Inciting conflicts with the ArbComm is not an effective way of
preventing the ArbComm from ruling against you.

- --
 Sean Barrett     | We will chant in Old Nahuatl
 sean at epoptic.org | As we pray to Quetzalcoatl
                  | Who gave us chocolatl
                  | And that's good enough for me!
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
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T3loV0jOZvHqoMmGKn0mp5g=
=5P/3
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body:
Jan Kulveit wrote:
> I'm affraid it only pushes us from SoftSecurity which works to
> HardSecurity which can not work for us.

Actually, this *is* an example of SoftSecurity in action.

SoftSecurity is about using minor speedbumps to discourage bad action in
combination with making it very easy to make a good action to undo a bad action.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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body:
Jan Kulveit wrote:
> I'm affraid it only pushes us from SoftSecurity which works to
> HardSecurity which can not work for us.

Actually, this *is* an example of SoftSecurity in action.

SoftSecurity is about using minor speedbumps to discourage bad action in
combination with making it very easy to make a good action to undo a bad action.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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body:
Jan Kulveit wrote:
> I'm affraid it only pushes us from SoftSecurity which works to
> HardSecurity which can not work for us.

Actually, this *is* an example of SoftSecurity in action.

SoftSecurity is about using minor speedbumps to discourage bad action in
combination with making it very easy to make a good action to undo a bad action.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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body:
Jan Kulveit wrote:
> I'm affraid it only pushes us from SoftSecurity which works to
> HardSecurity which can not work for us.

Actually, this *is* an example of SoftSecurity in action.

SoftSecurity is about using minor speedbumps to discourage bad action in
combination with making it very easy to make a good action to undo a bad action.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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body:
> Shouldn't the database size be roughly the size of the uncompressed
> xml file? You can look at that and see if it is similar.

The size of the uncompressed files is roughly 100 GB.


from_name: Kai Kumpf

subject: [Wikitech-l] the road to stability

body:
this is a forwarded (and typo-cleaned) version of an earlier posting to the general list (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2005-November/042901.html)
maybe the developers want to have a word in that, too...

i know this topic keeps reoccuring and so my point may not be very
original.
it has been said that wikipedia is "work in progress" and will probably
continue to do so. on the other hand it ails from the fact that at no
given point in time you can be certain to have a 1. consistent , 2.
unvandalized and 3. correct throughout wikipedia. (compared to those
three points the shortcoming of non-completeness dwindles to almost
nothing.)
let me draw your attention to the fact that the construction plans for
roads to stability - or at least local optima - have long been laid out
by physics. heat a dynamic system quickly then let it cool down in a
slower and controlled fashion, allowing less and less dramatic changes
to take place as time passes. simulated annealing
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing) is the magic spell
that might work for wikixyzs in a way similar to that in the real world.
the rationale behind my suggestion is of course that articles that have
matured over time are statistically speaking less likely to improve when
large modifications are made than relatively new ones. some of the
articles have reached a stage where well-meant editing effectively mucks
up the inner structure and logic. what i think reasonable is to lift the
threshold for substantial edits, maybe not by limiting access but by
asking for more substantial background information from the authors
(references, printed, electronic,...) than the simple comment line.
there is to much unproven and partially unprovable information in the
wp. that could have been prevented long ago by obliging the authors to
give references for their information. besides, this task would make it
successively harder to simply put established statements upside down.
whereas scientific journals have peer review, wp only offers the weak
weapons of discussion pages and reverts - by others, mostly admins, i
guess. why not confer a little bit more of  responsibility to the
authors? he/she could be aided by predefined lists, checkboxes,
comboboxes (for ref. type, etc.)
i find myself increasingly involved in hunting down vandals and their
work - partly due to the ease of use wp offers for non-serious edits,
too, and i can't help feeling that a larger and larger part of wp keeps
a larger and larger part of the community busy with just keeping up the
existing standard.
comments?
best
kai (kku)


from_name: Brock Batsell

body:
M. Creidieki Crouch wrote:

>Since anonymous users have been experimentally prevented from adding
>new articles, I have created [[Wikipedia:Articles for creation]].
>This allows users to request that a page be created, and list initial
>content.  I hope that this will dampen the effect of this policy
>change on the creation of legitimate articles.  I hope that others
>will consider adding this to their watchlist and helping out with this
>task; any registered user can fulfill these requests, or state why
>they think a request should not be fulfilled (article already exists
>under different name, etc.).
>
>-- Creidieki
>
>
Perhaps I'm missing something, but what is the difference between this
and [[Wikipedia:Requested articles]], which is well-established and has
been around for a very long time?  It is even linked to from the warning
anon editors see.

--bbatsell


from_name: Jimmy Wales

body:
JAY JG wrote:
> I've been have a months-long debate with another editor on this topic.
> I've been stating that we include people in "Criminals" categories if
> they have been convicted of a crime by an independent judiciary.  The
> other editor insists that we have to decide (by some means) whether or
> not they have actually committed a crime, conviction is not enough a
> good enough yardstick.  I'd be interested in other thoughts here.

I have a simple thought.  My simple thought is that of course you are
right. :-)

--Jimbo


from_name: Christopher Mahan

body:
--- Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:

> Kim Bruning wrote:
> > Correlation!=Causation.
> >
> > Because this concentrates on a particular symptom of vandalism
> > -as opposed to the actual cause- I'm expecting new pages patrol
> to
> > become more difficult as the easy telltales are now hidden.
>
> Well at least so far, it seems that there have been two effects:
>
> 1. fewer crappy pages created
> 2. the ones that are create are as easy to identify as ever, since
> some
> of the anons are converting into 'anonymous redshirts' (i.e. users
> with
> no userpage).
>
> It will be interesting to try and gather some statistics about all
> this,
> so we can proceed with actual data.

There's a guy standing over my shoulder, from 40 feet from my cube,
who walked over, and saw the "Page creation limited" when clicking on
"MPX" from the "PowerPC G4"  .

He came to me "frustrated" and feeling "postal" (bang!) and
complained to me.

Now, I'm not saying one way or the other on the issue. I just think
the wording could be a little less forbidding.

Chris Mahan
818.943.1850 cell
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
chris.mahan at gmail.com
http://www.christophermahan.com/

__________________________________________
Yahoo! DSL ? Something to write home about.
Just $16.99/mo. or less.
dsl.yahoo.com


from_name: Sam Spade

subject: [WikiEN-l] NPOV trainwreck

body:
I'm sorry to say, you appear to be making my case "you can't
legitimately argue about
something you can't or won't look at."

Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Nobs01_and_others/Evidence#Cberlets_POV_forks_.2F_incivility

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk%3ARight-wing_politics&diff=29933639&oldid=29931256

When asked for cites, I provided them. They were of course ignored. I
didn't ignore Cberlets cites, I explained to him that by his own
words, they failed to justify his claims. Even if I lived in NYC and
had access to every book he mentions, I only have so much time in the
day. I assume good faith regarding his excerpts and such, but he never
claimed evidence that [[Extreme right]] is different enough a term, w
a specific enough a meaning to justify a fork from far-right.

As far as Nobs, I have gotten to know him by email due to this case.
He is a man w a legitimate vendetta against Cberlet. He feels Cberlet
is guilty of treason and complicit in murder, based on his work with
the Covert Action Information Bulletin outing of CIA agents (some of
whom were killed shortly thereafter). I think Nobs could have been
made less angry, and less a threat to Chip Berlet by a fair hearing on
the wikipedia. I get the impression he will be spending the time he
used to spend editing exposing Chip's objectionable past, attempting
to have him audited and etc... A different sort of trial might have
had a more calming effect. Nobs is not concerned about wiki-verdicts
against him, but would likely have responded better to a different
approach.

I, for my part, made an error on Political correctness. I didn't
understand that this error had occurred until just recently, because
it had never been properly explained to me. Apparently after having
read and cited William Lind, I inadvertently quoted him without clear
attribution in the 1st sentence of [[Political correctness]]. That was
unfortunate, but not in my opinion ''as'' unfortunate as the
incoherent and unhelpful way it was responded to. The matter is a
complex one, w many easily misunderstood subtleties.

I am also willing to admit that at least one of my statements to
Cberlet was incivil. I insist however that these minor infractions
(out of some 30,000 edits on my part) are not notable enough for a
RfC, much less ArbCom censure. Additionally, they wither before the
scale of Cberlets POV pushing, ignoral of consensus, and incivility
(he has personal attacks less than a week old). I am not saying he
should be "more" NPOV than me (lol!), I am saying he should obey the
NPOV policy! Please, ArbCom, review the evidence and rethink your
results. This purging of the "right wingers" is not what the ArbCom is
for. I understand Cberlet is your friend and colleague, but for the
sake of integrity, please hold us to the same standard.

Sam Spade

On 12/5/05, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
> You need to look no further then Talk;Chip Berlet and User:Nobs01 to
> see that Nobs01 is not being railroaded but being sanctioned for
> personal attacks. Talk:Chip Berlet has been spammed with a large
> volume of material regarding other people and other activities based
> on Chip's membership in the National Lawyer's Guild. It is like
> blaming any one who is a member of the Democratic Party for Clinton's
> sex adventures. User:Nobs01 starts off: "The Extremist Personality"
> then proceeds to link the "twenty-two common traits of extremists" to
> edits of Cerlet. The policy of the arbitration committee is not to
> carefully investigate the truth of personal attacks but to sanction
> the attacker. The reason a lengthy ban is proposed in the case of
> Nobs01 is that when it seemed he would be sanctioned with a one month
> ban for one attack he responded with another lengthy attack.
>
> No one is giving authority to Cberlet to make thing ups and then cite
> them. He would probably be wise not to cite himself extensively, but
> anyone else is free to, as in a limited area, right wing and
> totalitarian movements in the United States, he is a generally
> recognized expert.
>
> As to the article, Chip Berlet: he has been criticized, for example
> by David Horowitz, and under our NPOV policy, reports of those
> criticism may be legitimately included in the article on him.
> Deciding what criticisms and how extensive they ought to be is up to
> the normal editing process.
>
> Chip Berlet is no more neutral than Sam Spade and he need not be. As
> a Wikipedia editor the requirement is that he respect our policies
> and abide by them which he more or less does.
>
> He did initiate the arbitration case, but that is trouble which we
> welcome as opposed to endless edit warring and personal attacks. When
> his claims were investigated, we found no conspiracy but a lot of
> piling on by various POV editors with a right wing perspective.
> Looked at individually, they were engaged in a number of combative
> activities which are mentioned in the proposed decision. Sam Spade,
> for example, seems to not have access to adequate sources but is
> inclined to argue about the sufficiency of sources put forward by
> others. This is a dead end because you can't legitimately argue about
> something you can't or won't look at.
>
> Fred
>
> On Dec 4, 2005, at 8:46 PM, Sam Spade wrote:
>
> > The results are one sided. There is a mountain of evidence. Nobs is
> > being railroaded, and Cberlet appears about to be given authority to
> > cite himself whenever and wherever he might find an opinion, based on
> > his "expert" status. I don't contest that he merits an article (altho
> > it is a bit of a resume), but I do contest his neutrality and range of
> > expertise. That, combined w the mountains of evidence against him and
> > the conflict he has fostered (5 people he rounded up and shoved
> > together just in this one case!) should provide all the proof you need
> > of the difficulty he presents.
> >
> > Sam Spade
> >
> > On 12/4/05, Matt Brown <morven at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >>> From what I can see, the arbitrators are doing quite well with a
> >>> difficult case.
> >>>
> >>
> >> -Matt
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> WikiEN-l mailing list
> >> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> >> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> >> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> >>
> >>
> > _______________________________________________
> > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> >
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: M. Creidieki Crouch

body:
Since anonymous users have been experimentally prevented from adding
new articles, I have created [[Wikipedia:Articles for creation]].
This allows users to request that a page be created, and list initial
content.  I hope that this will dampen the effect of this policy
change on the creation of legitimate articles.  I hope that others
will consider adding this to their watchlist and helping out with this
task; any registered user can fulfill these requests, or state why
they think a request should not be fulfilled (article already exists
under different name, etc.).

-- Creidieki


body:
On 12/5/05, Martina Greiner <martina.greiner at gmx.de> wrote:
> Hi again,
>
> I finally got importDump.php to run and it runs and already
> imported _161_ GB of the english Wikipedia into the database!

Shouldn't the database size be roughly the size of the uncompressed
xml file? You can look at that and see if it is similar.

Are you using the pages_full.xml dump, or the pages_current.xml ? The
former contains all the history for all pages, while the latter only
has the latest version and should be on the order of 1 million entries
(articles+images+other namespaces).

Alfio


from_name: Sam Korn

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Translators needed for fund drive

body:
On 12/4/05, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> We have accepted credit card donations for years, via PayPal's interface.

So we have.  Clearly I am confused...

--
Sam


from_name: ABCD

body:
On 12/5/05, Anthony DiPierro wrote:
> I can't think of any example where you wouldn't want to have such a link.

What about creating a new redirect from a misspelling?

ABCD


subject: [WikiEN-l] NPOV trainwreck

body:
I don't dispute any of that. My concern is that Chip is not being held
to the same standard as others in this case. His NPOV violations and
personal attacks are prolific. The evidence is overwhelming. I could
spend a year investigating his edits, and write you a book on Cberlet
and his intense POV. That said, I think the few scraps (During exams
and a trip to france no less) I came up w are pretty clear. If not,
please give us more time to gather more evidence, if you feel its
needed...

Sam Spade

On 12/5/05, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
> We briefly crossed paths, maybe, 30 years ago. Other than editing
> Wikipedia we have no current contact or connection. It is proposed
> that he use caution in editing the article on himself and to avoid
> personal attacks. When he asked to have you banned from the articles
> you are currently in dispute with him over he was told, "Negotiate
> politely".
>
> Fred
>
> On Dec 5, 2005, at 8:59 AM, Sam Spade wrote:
>
> >  I understand Cberlet is your friend and colleague, but for the
> > sake of integrity, please hold us to the same standard.
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] NPOV trainwreck

body:
Jack, in my experience when editors involved in a case doesn't see it going
the way they want, they almost inevitably claim that one or more of the
arbitrators is biased against them, based on some long-standing (but
undocumented) hatred for them.  It's not quite as common for them to claim
there is a vast community consensus supporting their viewpoint - I give you
credit for having the chutzpah to do the latter.

Regards,

Jay.

>From: Sam Spade <samspade.thomasjefferson at googlemail.com>
>
>I am making a very specific accusation: Due to a long history of
>conflict with myself, JAYJG has no ability to be neutral in this case.
>His lack of recusal is far more striking than that of Fred Bauder.
>Both of them, along w other obvious concerns (Kelly Martin) makes this
>case a very bad precedent regarding recusals.
>
>Sam Spade
>
>On 12/5/05, JAY JG <jayjg at hotmail.com> wrote:
> > No, Fred, he's making a much broader accusation; in fact a series of
>broad
> > accusations unsupported by any evidence.
> >
> > Jay.
> >
> > >From: Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net>
> > >
> > >He is referring to my disclosure that I may have briefly encountered
>Chip
> > >Berlet when I was in the National Lawyers Guild. I did not  recuse on
>that
> > >basis as there was very little if any actual  connection between us. I
> > >don't think membership or even active  participation in the National
> > >Lawyers Guild  forms a basis for  recusal as there are a number of
>reasons
> > >why people join the National  Lawyers Guild and participate in it.
>Other
> > >than involvement in legal  work there is absolutely no test for
>membership.
> > >Successful  participation is another story. I soon found out that since
>I
> > >did not  support the Gang of Four I was considered chopped liver.
> > >
> > >Fred
> > >
> > >On Dec 5, 2005, at 10:57 AM, JAY JG wrote:
> > >
> > >>Please don't try to re-direct the questions, Jack, and please don't
>try
> > >>to make them about me.  You made insinuations about the  Arbitration
> > >>Committee, please clarify.  I'll repeat the questions:
> > >>
> > >>1. Do you think that the Committee is trying to "purge right wingers"?
> > >>2. Do you imagine that there are no "right wingers" on the  Committee
> > >>itself?
> > >>3. Why would you insinuate that Cberlet is any more the "friend and
> > >>colleague" of members of the Arbitration Committee than are any of
>the
> > >>other parties to the case?
> > >>
> > >>Jay.
> > >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> >
>_______________________________________________
>WikiEN-l mailing list
>WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: The Wiki meritocracy

body:
On 12/5/05, Sam Spade <samspade.thomasjefferson at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Are you saying that now that I have a F.A. I have a chance to become an admin?
>
> Sam Spade
>

You always had a statisticaly non zero chance.

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] NPOV trainwreck

body:
Are you saying your my friend or colleague? Are you a member of the
USAF? Just what exactly do we have in common, outside of our long
history of bitter conflict?

Sam Spade

On 12/5/05, JAY JG <jayjg at hotmail.com> wrote:
> >From: Sam Spade <samspade.thomasjefferson at googlemail.com>
> >
> >Please, ArbCom, review the evidence and rethink your
> >results. This purging of the "right wingers" is not what the ArbCom is
> >for.
>
> Do you think that the Commitee is trying to "purge right wingers"?  Do you
> imagine that there are no "right wingers" on the committee itself?
>
> >I understand Cberlet is your friend and colleague, but for the
> >sake of integrity, please hold us to the same standard.
>
> Yes, this is exactly the kind of innuendo which has tainted this (and
> related) cases - the implication being that the Committee is making
> decisions based on alleged friendships.  Why would you insinuate that
> Cberlet is any more the "friend and colleague" of members of the Arbitration
> Committee than any of the other parties to the case?
>
> Jay.
>
>
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: The Wiki meritocracy

body:
Are you saying that now that I have a F.A. I have a chance to become an admin?

Sam Spade

On 12/5/05, Phil Boswell <phil.boswell at gmail.com> wrote:
> "J.F. de Wolff" <jfdwolff at doctors.org.uk> wrote in
> message news:6.2.3.4.0.20051204201345.02894650 at mail1.doctors.org.uk...
> [marvelous stuff snipped with a heavy heart]
> > Wikipedia is not wiki. Indeed it is not. It is not a wiki like usemod and
> > Ward's wiki etc. It has ceased being egalitarian. The reason is: because
> > it is an encyclopedia. It aims at being an encyclopedia, not just a
> > collection of information for everyone to wade through without any
> > moderation, guidelines, structure or policy. [...] Because in the end the
> > main aim of Wikipedia is to produce an encyclopedia. Neutral. Verifiable.
> > Referenced. Coming to a mirror near you.
>
> Hear, hear! Throw that editor a peanut! Heck, a bucket of peanuts :-)
> --
> Phil
> [[en:User:Phil Boswell]]
>
>
>
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body:
On 12/5/05, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> Due to the way the mediawiki database is set up, it'd be extremely
> difficult to check whether or not there were links from the history,
> though.  The only practical definition of orphaned I can think of
> would be "containing no links in the 'what links here' section".
>
> Anthony

You forget there is a way to do this that doesn't involve any database
quires. Simply change [[MediaWiki:Nogomatch]]. Makes it pretty much
imposible to create an orphan without messing with the address.

--
geni


from_name: SJ

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Experiment on new pages

body:
On 12/5/05, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Martin Richards wrote:
> > Thats not what I mean. If an anon wants to make a article, putting it on
> > that page won't be much help, as that is where people request that
> > someone else makes an article, we need a page where anons can say "I
> > want to write an article about foobar but I need someone to start it off
> > so I can actually make it".
>
> You are correct.
> I suggest we hire someone to start pages requested by anons.

This is a great idea.  Also someone to create accounts for them once
anons aren't allowed to make new accounts.

++SJ


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Experiment on new pages

body:
--- Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:

> On a similar topic -- are there any tool for automatic monitoring new
> page creation?
>
> I was thinking about this in the shower today, and it didn't seem that
> it would be very technically difficult (for a guy who knows some VB
> and PHP) to hook up an (external) program which would monitor the
> Special:Newpages RSS feed, then check the page content itself and
> potentially flag it as something to attend to if it met a set of
> variable characteristics -- i.e., is it less than 5 words long, does
> it contain the word "fart" or "gay" or "penis", was it created by an
> anon, is it wikified, and so forth. More complicated though still
> quite feasible operations could involve automatically putting a sample
> of the content through Google and seeing if anything comes up, or
> potentially checking for incoming links, etc. At the end of the day
> you could ideally run something which would check all of those marked
> as "potential problems" to see if they had been edited extensively or
> deleted, and then make it easy for the editor running the program to
> take a look at what remained. All in all it wouldn't put any more
> stress on the servers than a user who actually checked these things
> manually, and would potentially catch things that were missed by other
> diligant admins.
>
> Anything like this exist? If not, I might try to cobble one together
> in my (meager) spare time, though I warn you it'll be written in
> Visual Basic... Seems like it would help with at least one problem in
> relation to new pages, if not the more insidious one of false claims
> disguised as encyclopedia articles.

I don't think anything like that exists yet, so please code it! We may even be able to convice
Google to exceed the 1000 search a day limit per IP.

-- mav

__________________________________________
Yahoo! DSL ? Something to write home about.
Just $16.99/mo. or less.
dsl.yahoo.com


from_name: Anthony DiPierro

body:
On 12/5/05, ABCD <en.abcd at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/5/05, Anthony DiPierro wrote:
> > I can't think of any example where you wouldn't want to have such a link.
>
> What about creating a new redirect from a misspelling?
>
> ABCD

Good point.  If this were going to be implemented, you'd have to make
an exception for redirects...  And that would significantly complicate
things.

Anthony


from_name: Liviu Andronic

body:
>  - When an internet user from the Republic of Moldova visits Wikipedia's homepage, he finds
>  among others links to Wikipedia editions in "Rom?nă" and in "Moldovenească".
>
>  - There are people who think that Moldovan is a distinct language. There are people who think that Moldovan is simply different name for the Romanian. Everybody knows however that both
>  Romanian and Moldovan are generally written in Latin script.
>
>  - Nevertheless,  on Wikipedia's homepage "Moldovenească" in not written in Latin script, like the Moldovan society has determined but in Cyrillic script like it was decreed in the unfree days of the Soviet union when the people of Moldova was not allowed to decide for themselves.
>
>  - This gives the Moldovan internet user a bad impression of Wikipedia and irritates him or her because they can think that Wikipedia ignores what the independent nation of Moldova decides and rather goes by the standard from the Soviet era.
>
>  - Now, if that user clicks on that cyrillic "Moldovenească", he is taken to a page that tells him to make a decision if he prefers the Latin or the Cyrillic script.
>
>  - What happens next is the following: If that user choses Latin (i. e. the standard script), he is told that his language is now considered Romanian by Wikipedia and taken to the Romanian Wikipedia. If, however the user should decide for some reason that he prefers Cyrillic (official script during the Soviet era),  Wikipedia  _now_  considers  his language Moldovan and he is taken to a Wikipedia named "Moldovenească".
>
>  - And finally he realizes that this wiki that uses the Soviet standard which became suspended one and a half decades ago is given the subdomain "mo" (code reserved for Moldovan which is by default written in Latin script) by Wikipedia!
>
>  Now I would like ask everybody who has had the patience to read this far:
>
>  Is there anybody who does _not_ understand why a large number of users from the region are upset by this weird arrangement?
>
>  When, a few weeks ago, a couple of Wikipedians from the former Yugoslavia were telling us that they were feeling insulted and offended by the mere existence of an edition in Serbo-Croatian I was not able to comprehend that.
>
>  But I do understand the irritation here and think it is well-justified.
>
>  In a nutshell, Wikipedia currently delivers this message to users from Moldova:
>  "If you're using the Latin script (like your national constitution says and like the majority of your compatriots do) we'll call your language Romanian but in case you should use Cyrillic, then we'll consider your language Moldovan".
>

I believe Arbeo's description of the current situation is quite
accurate. As a Moldovan I feel - let us say - upset when viewing
Wikipedia present Moldova as a reminiscent of the USSR. What upsets me
most is when, in a foreign country, I am almost as a rule obliged to
explain that I am not Russian. That contrary to Ukrainians or
Belorussians, we are not descendants of Slavic People. That we are not
native speakers of Russian (even though there are a lot of us who
freely speak and others that master it). That we speak Romanian.
Although I consider myself Moldovan, I have Romanian origins. I am
somehow trapped between both.

In Moldova we are not using Cyrillic script from ages (as it was
mentioned, one decade and a half ago it was abolished). As soon as we
got our independence, we got Cyrillic Moldovan changed for Romanian
written with Latin script. Nowadays, in Moldova Cyrillic script is
used only for Russian. There are no newspapers in "Cyrillic Moldovan".
http://mo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page is one of the rare pages on the
net containing "Cyrillic Moldovan". Television journalists are
desperately trying to present news or whatever using a correct and
fluent Romanian (following Romanian guidelines of usage; as there are
no such Moldovan guidelines). All the official documentation is in
Romanian. Yes, we may call it Moldovan, there, in the Government, but
I personally know a reviser working in the Moldovan Government that
uses the Explicative Dictionary of the Romanian Language (Dictionarul
Explicativ al limbii Romane) in order to edit official documentation.
This is just because we do not have Moldovan Explicative Dictionaries.
They do not exist  (not to my knowledge). There are few intelligent
enough to publish such pearls. We have tried even to publish a
Moldovan - Romanian Dictionary (Dictionarul Moldovenesc-Romanesc);
even this, not taking into account all the aberrations that it
contained - a very good collection of archaisms, the least to say -,
it was not written in Cyrillic. It used plain Latin. So, apart from
retired people, that need to make a small note in their old telephone
book, or anything similar, I do not imagine myself people writing
Romanian with the Cyrillic script. OK, in villages, maybe, but only as
exceptions. Transnistria - there, like in good old Communist times, it
is imposed. I have seen news showing parents protesting against the
use of Cyrillic script in educational purposes (schools, manuals, etc)
and going to jail because of this. Otherwise, it is Russian that is
mainly used there: administration, radio, television, press and so on.

All this just to try to demonstrate that Cyrillic script is not used
in Moldova, or that at least it is by no means representative of
Moldova. I do not know what other examples to cite here.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: The Wiki meritocracy

body:
Maybe I'll start shootin' the dice again after my current ARbCom case is up

Sam Spade

On 12/5/05, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/5/05, Sam Spade <samspade.thomasjefferson at googlemail.com> wrote:
> > Are you saying that now that I have a F.A. I have a chance to become an admin?
> >
> > Sam Spade
> >
>
> You always had a statisticaly non zero chance.
>
> --
> geni
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Anons cannot create pages on english wikipedia?

body:
--- Nicholas Moreau <nicholasmoreau at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'd personally recommend extending this to a week long trial.

I recommend extending the test to the end of the year.

> Currently, an IP is either banned or unbanned. What if we had a middle
> ground for problem IPs, which didn't allow them to create new articles, only
> edit existing ones. It wouldn't be a cure-all, but it might be interesting
> concept to play with.

By far the biggest problem has been with anons who create a junk article or two and leave never to
return. So the middle ground you mention really won't help much.

-- mav

__________________________________________
Yahoo! DSL ? Something to write home about.
Just $16.99/mo. or less.
dsl.yahoo.com