subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Centralization of power: not a good idea

body:
I wrote:

>  > Have Jimbo appoint a governing committee. This would inevitably be a
>>  non-representative subset of the entire community, but having Jimbo as
>  > our benevolent dictator is also non-representative.

And Ed Poor responded:

>Sometimes Sheldon has good ideas, but this is not one of those times. He
>is otherwise a fine writer, and I've learned a lot from him.
>
>Centralizing power won't help us make an open-content encyclopedia. In
>fact, the very reason Jimbo and Larry gave up Nupedia was that having a
>central committee guiding all productive activity simply doesn't work.
>(It didn't work in the USSR or any other Marxist socialist state,
>either: no incentive for individual excellence, and no sufficiently
>incorruptible way to coordinate activity)

Thanks for the kind words, Ed, but I think you've misunderstood my
point. Right now power is ALREADY centralized. It's centralized in
the hands of Jimbo, who almost always makes appropriate decisions but
who simply doesn't have the time to adequately govern a community as
large and contentious as Wikipedia has become. Establishing a
committee would DECENTRALIZE power. I'm not proposing this as a
"final solution" to the problem of governance for Wikipedia, merely
as a transitional way of beginning the process of replacing Jimbo's
benevolent-dictatorial rule with something more representative.

A good example of what I mean by "Jimbo's benevolent-dictatorial
rule" was his recent handling of Plautus Satire. Jimbo didn't wait
for the arbitration committee to do more than wring its hands; he
simply reached a point of exasperation and said, "screw it, this
guy's outta here." He did it unilaterally, and I applaud him for
doing it. Nevertheless, he did it the way a dictator makes decisions:
unilaterally, without any pretense that he was acting as a
representative of the Wikipedia community.  And this is perfectly
understandable. In the absence of WikiDemocracy, Jimbo *has* to act
as a dictator.

All I'm saying is that establishing a "committee" could be a useful
first step toward establishing something more representative than we
have at present. It would also remove some of the burden from Jimbo.
I see no reason to expect that a "dictatorship by a benevolent
committee" would be any worse than "dictatorship by a benevolent
individual." And it wouldn't be "guiding all productive activity,"
except in the sense that Jimbo is ALREADY "guiding all productive
activity" on the Wikipedia. Jimbo doesn't review and approve every
article; he merely steps in when he sees a problem and fixes it. He
also occasionally issues pronouncements on general policy. That's all
we would want a governing committee to do. It shouldn't, wouldn't and
couldn't dictate all activity on the Wikipedia.  What I'm proposing
is therefore quite different from the "Marxist socialist state" you
describe.

>The thing that has propelled Wikipedia to greatness and will forever
>sustain it, is the ability for "anyone, any time" to update it. All we
>need are some simple community norms and a transparent, agreed-upon
>method of enforcing these norms.

There's a contradiction in your language. On the one hand, you're
saying that "anyone, any time" can update the Wikipedia. On the other
hand, you're talking about "enforcing" community norms, and
enforcement by definition means that some people are PREVENTED from
participating. If enforcement exists, then it's not true that
"anyone" can update the Wikipedia. The problem that keeps recurring
with users like Bird is that they take the first promise at its word.
Bird thinks he has a god-given, inherent right to post to the
Wikipedia, because "anyone, any time" can do so. He interprets
attempts to curb his vandalism as the use of "force to prevent free
speech."

I think Wikipedia needs to bite the bullet and realize that we really
DON'T want to allow "anyone, any time" to contribute. As Ed correctly
observes, we need a method of enforcing community norms. This isn't
an impossible task. The Internet is full of examples of discussion
fora that are generally open to the public while still enforcing
rules that keep out trolls and spammers.

--Sheldon Rampton


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Imran Ghory

subject: [WikiEN-l] Rethinking vandalism

body:
On Wed, 10 Mar 2004, Erik Moeller wrote:

> This would address several current problems and have several advantages.
>
> 1) Having users' IP numbers published all over the place is a quite
> serious privacy violation. It would be trivial to scan recent changes for
> hosts with open ports and security vulnerabilities. Furthermore, it
> reveals geographic information about anonymous editors which they may want
> to keep private (such information can be very specific, depending on the
> ISP).

If people want to hide their IP address they can do so by logging in, all
your system would do is force users to login (even if it is under an
assigned name). Also IP address are useful in identifying specific vandals
with dynamic IPs and also in copyvio/NPOV discussion where the users
contribution may relate to their IP address (for example a company IP
editing an article about that compant.).

> 1) "They will just delete the cookie and edit away." Yes, some users will
> do that. For these users, we should retain the ability to block by IP
> (without revealing that IP address to sysops). However, doing so requires
> an understanding of how the blocking mechanism works, which most users
> don't have.

That kind of vandal isn't really a serious problem we spend more time
dealing with persistent vandal with some basic skills then we do with
casual vandals.

While I don't disagree that cookies can be used to better deal with
vandalism, I don't see why they should replace the current methods. I
think the best solution would be a hybrid one allowing for a user to be
blocked either on the basis of IP or of cookie.

Incidently on the proxy issue, one way we could identify users who use
proxies is to deliver a graphic via ftp or https, as most web browsers
will simply bypass the proxy and download the image directly giving
away their IP address.

Imran
--
http://bits.bris.ac.uk/imran


list: wikitech-l

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: [WikiEN-l] Rethinking vandalism


list: wikipedia-l

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Creative Commons Licence

body:
On Thu, 11 Mar 2004, Guillaume Blanchard wrote:

> This statement is right?
>
>
>
> License compatible with GFDL:
>
> - Public Domain
>
> - GFDL
>
> - GPL
>
> - LGPL
>
> - CC-AS (share alike)
>
> - CC-BY-AS (attribution-share alike)
>

The only of the above licences compatible with GFDL are Public domain and
GFDL.

Imran
--
http://bits.bris.ac.uk/imran


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Yes,
	let's ban users with Hotmail and Yahoo addresses...

body:
Rick-
> As I've explained over and over again, for some reason on this mailing list
> (and almost exclusively on this list), Yahoo forces me to top post.  I hate
> it -- I consider it bad form.  Other things that are sent to me don't have
> this problem.  But if I post inside or below the post I'm responding to, it
> creates a ">" next to the line I'm typing, making it look as if it's part of
> the post I'm responding to.  This is the only way I have of making my
> posting stand out from the rest of what I'm responding to.

Have you looked at
http://yahoopops.sourceforge.net/ ?
It provides a POP3 interface to Yahoo mail. That means that you can use
any regular email client to access your mailbox. I haven't tested it, but
lots of people seem to be using it, so I presume it works. Note that you
can configure any good email client to not delete messages on the server,
so you can still use the webmail interface in addition to a client.

There are other scripts like fetchyahoo which just store the mail in a
local mailbox file that can only be read by some clients.

Lastly, there's the option of using Yahoo's pay service ($30/year), which
includes POP3 access. Seems like a reasonably good offer.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Ashar Voultoiz

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: bandwidth thieves blocked

body:
On Wed, 10 Mar 2004 19:42:21 +0100, Gabriel Wicke wrote:
<snip>
> right click -> save image as...

Hello,

As there is currently 87 000 pictures on wikipedia, I highly doubt anyone
will want to use that. Even a bot grabbing page will certainly be blocked
fast.

> I don't think the mirrors have a right to get free hosting, and it's not
> hard to save them really if somebody wanted to. If there's a concensus
> (and no copyright problem) to provide a big tar with all images for more
> convenience, then it's just a matter of adding it at
> download.wikimedia.org.

That leads to the problem of fair use and redistribution of the wikipedia
datas :(  That's the main reason I am against fair use : ease
redistribution.

cheers,

--
Ashar Voultoiz
http://fr.wikipedia.org/Utilisateur:Hashar
do not send mail to listme at listme.dsbl.org


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikipedia-l] [fviegas@media.mit.edu: Wikipedia: academic paper]

body:
----- Forwarded message from Fernanda Viegas <fviegas at media.mit.edu> -----

From: "Fernanda Viegas" <fviegas at media.mit.edu>
Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2004 00:32:01 -0500
To: "Jimmy Wales" <jwales at bomis.com>
Subject: Wikipedia: academic paper

Hello Jimmy,

I am a graduate student at the MIT Media Laboratory. I hope you remember me from last summer when I sent out a couple of messages to the Wikipedia mailing list about a visualization project I was working on, which looked at wiki sites. Martin Wattenberg from IBM and I built a visualization tool called "history flow" and we used this application to study some of the cooperation and conflict patterns among authors on Wikipedia.

We are happy to announce that the paper we wrote about this project has been accepted at a major academic conference (CHI 2004 - Computer Human Interaction). We will present the paper next month at the conference.

Here is a link to the paper:
http://web.media.mit.edu/~fviegas/papers/history_flow.pdf

Feel free to circulate this within the Wikipedia community. It would be great to hear from folks about what they think of the findings and whether these resonate with their experience of the community. Neither Martin nor I are on the mailing list anymore but, if anyone would like to get in touch with us, they can use these email addresses:
fviegas at media.mit.edu
mwatten at us.ibm.com

cheers,
- Fernanda Viegas

http://web.media.mit.edu/~fviegas/
sociable media group
mit media laboratory

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jimmy Wales" <jwales at bomis.com>
To: "Fernanda Viegas" <fviegas at media.mit.edu>
Sent: Thursday, August 14, 2003 12:44 PM
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] academic research on Wikis

> I can chat at any time, but preferably by email so I can compose my
> thoughts and answer questions coherently.  :-)
>
> If you send me email about this, be sure to put wikipedia in the
> subject line, as I get so much spam and random nonsense that I could
> easily overlook a generic subject line.
>
>
> Fernanda Viegas wrote:
>
> > Hello,
> >
> > I am a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab and this summer I'm working on a Wiki related project that uses visualization to understand how Wiki pages evolve over time.
> >
> > Because Wikipedia seems like such an interesting and thriving community, I would like to know whether any of you would be available to chat with me about how the community works and how consensus is achieved?
> >
> > Also, I would be very appreciative of any pointers you might have to other academic work being done on Wikipedia.
> >
> > thanks a lot,
> > Fernanda Viegas
> >
> > http://web.media.mit.edu/~fviegas/
> > sociable media group
> > mit media laboratory
>
----- End forwarded message -----


subject: [Wikitech-l] single point of faillure

body:
listen wrote:
> >Jimbo, if you can, try to move those things, or think about getting
> >another dual-opteron.
>
> What have you got in mind about raising the money that machine would cost?

First, we still have over $20,000 in the bank which could be used for
such things.

Second, geoffrin will be here soon.  I have heard that Penguin is doing
an extended burnin until Friday, as they want to get it right for us.

Third, there was an unfortunate breakdown in communication somewhere
on our end, as gunther has been installed and available for Brion to
use to setup a replicated db, and of course Gunther is suitable (5 gig
of RAM, dual Opteron) to run the database.  Until yesterday, though,
he did not know that.

Therefore, as of today, we have gunther available and perhaps running
in replication mode (if Brion had the chance to set it up).  Next week
we will get Geoffrin, I hope.

And money is in the bank to buy whatever we deem necessary.  I see no
reason to spend the money early if we don't need to spend it, but on
the other hand, we need not be cheapskates.  I asked the world for
$20,000 to get wikipedia to be fast and reliable, and the response was
overwhelming.  Our donors *want* us to spend the money, but wisely, to
give them what they want.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] db trouble

body:
Your English seems fine to me, and I welcome your participation here!

no lssi no lssi wrote:

> Well, im an EL admin (Enciclopedia Libre) and i have
> same problems with my server. I think in a possible
> scriptkiddie attack or something similar. Its very
> strange that this occurs in two different systems.
>
> I believe is a sql injection attack but maybe a DoS
> attack too. The result is overload of server.
>
> Im working in two ways:
>
> First, make a decent mod_rewrite rules to control url
> access againts bots and similar.
>
> Second, im studiying php secure programming to solve
> magic quotes sql injection attacks to control it, if i
> can ;P
>
> Or perhaps im a fucked lamer that doesnt knows what
> speak... :( im so noob in this type of development, i
> need more information to update my knowledge....
> Step by Step, Step by step...
>
> p.d.: excuse me for my poor english ;D
>
> --- Gabriel Wicke <groups at gabrielwicke.de> escribi?: >
> After being slow for most of the day suda has become
> > completely
> > unresponsive now, the shells are frozen, new ssh
> > connects get an error
> > message.
> >
> > We hope to get gunther up as a replacement, but this
> > will take a while as
> > it's not in sync.
> >
> > Brion- if you're around- we need you!
> > --
> > Gabriel Wicke
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikitech-l mailing list
> > Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
> >
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
> ___________________________________________________
> Yahoo! Messenger - Nueva versi?n GRATIS
> Super Webcam, voz, caritas animadas, y m?s...
> http://messenger.yahoo.es
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


subject: [Wikitech-l] Spambot

body:
Tim Starling wrote:
> Another much-requested feature is enhancement of the rollback function,
> especially to allow for page deletion. The bot created many pages,
> apparently by following red links. In my opinion, the ideal feature would be
> to allow the user to supply a list of IP addresses and usernames, and then
> to revert every edit from those users with a single click.

This sounds like a wonderful idea, but I see a big problem with it.
If we had such a feature some sysops would be tempted to use it as
punishment against some bad users.  There's a certain amount of
'vigilantism' that I've grumpily tolerated because it's very minor and
the people usually "deserve it" in some sense.  But this would open a
huge new can of worms.

> For now we've been dealing with this using filters and editor manpower.
> Filters are bad, they're against the wiki security model. I'd much rather
> put more power into the hands of users to deal with these situations, than
> to continue a filter-based arms race.

Yes, I understand what you're saying.

This is a new development, one that has been long anticipated, of course.

Here's one idea -- a switch to toggle a captcha.  When a wiki is under
a spambot attack, the captcha would be turned on.  Some captchas
aren't hard to defeat, but I doubt if the spammer is going to bother.

Unfortunately, I fear this will lead us down the path towards captchas
on all wikis on all edits, which would be unpleasant.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Transition to WikiDemocracy

body:
Sheldon Rampton wrote:
> My main point, though, is not about hotmail or yahoo accounts. The
> central thing I'm trying to say is that there's not much point in
> having policies regarding behavior if there's no way to enforce them,
> and there's no way to enforce policies when anyone can use an
> anonymizer and create a hundred sock-puppet identities for
> themselves.

But do we have any evidence that anyone has actually done this?

I mean, we do have problems with persistent vandals and trolls and
whatnot, and we ought to look for technical measures, including stuff
in the general area of what you're talking about.  But I'm not
convinced that people using anonymizers and creating sock-puppet email
accounts is a big part of that problem.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] Poll on 24 hour bans for revert wars

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
>... some people have proposed a neat alternative enforcement of the
>new 3-revert policy: If you revert the same article more than three
>times in one day, the page gets protected as the version you were
>reverting. Thus your version gets pushed into the article's history.

That's something I could enthusiastically support.

--Jimbo


from_name: dpbsmith at verizon.net

subject: [WikiEN-l] [OT]Yahoo, mail, "top-posting," etc.

body:
Just for the record: my inclusion of top-posters in the anathema list was
ironic. The suggestion that RickK or anyone else should pay $30/year simply
in order to avoid top-posting strikes me as absurd. Top-posting is like
infinitive-splitting: it's an imaginary, artificial rule made up recently for
the sole purpose of creating an artificial distinction between an out-group
and an in-group. It was originally loose recommendation _in the service of
making postings compact and comprehensible._ It wasn't until 1999 or
thereabouts that people regularly began getting flamed for it. Try a Google
"Advanced Groups" search on "top-posting" as exact phrase and limit the date
range from 1981 to 1997 and you'll see what I mean.

I generally don't top-post, just as I generally don't split
infinitives, for the same reason: because I don't like being yelled at by
people.

As for Yahoo mail... when we got our high-speed connection, the first thing I
did was, of course, was set up my email client to connect to (then)
bellatlantic.net's pop server. My wife was new to the Internet, wanted to do
everything herself. Her PC was preconfigured with the browser pointed at a
Gateway-flavored Yahoo, and she discovered and signed up for Yahoo browser-
based mail. I kept offering to get her up with "real" email, but she kept
saying no thanks. It pained me to see her clicking her way through the clumsy
web-based UI. But ultimately the joke was on me. Using Yahoo web mail, she
has enjoyed a high level of virus protection and spam filtering; has been
able to keep the same email address; has had reliable email while I've
experienced three or four multi-day outages on the part of Verizon's servers;
and has been able to check her email conveniently when away from home.


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: New schema part I: link tables

body:
On Mar 11, 2004, at 06:11, Timwi wrote:
> Brion Vibber wrote:
>> I've checked into the head branch some changes to the link tables.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Could you also let us know when it goes live on the site? :-)

Not for a few weeks at least. Big changes still coming...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: PGP.sig
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 186 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20040311/0411a422/attachment.pgp>


from_name: Charles Matthews

subject: [WikiEN-l] The 3-revert rule

body:
Nikola Smolenski wrote

>>Charles Matthews wrote:
>> Agree.  One day we might get faction-fighting, which would be a splitting
> issue.  But I don't see that yet as a serious danger.

>Factions fighting against single users are not a serious danger?

What I meant: group versus group fighting, as factions, could be schismatic.
If that did happen, it would be a threat at a level not seen on Wikipedia.
But for all the talk (basically as if there was left-right polarization) I
don't think that there is much risk of that happening.  A few people make
tendentious edits, that's all.

As I wrote in another posting here, I think there is some unpleasantness to
be found if you look hard.

Charles


from_name: Jussi-Ville Heiskanen

subject: [WikiEN-l] What's the word?  (was: Arbitration policy)

body:
On Wed, 2004-03-10 at 23:43, Peter Jaros wrote:

    On Monday, March 8, 2004, at 03:44 PM, Lee Pilich wrote:

    > "Completed" in quotes because while everything that needs to be
    > covered for us to function probably is covered in one way or another,
    > everything is still subject to change, and everything will likely be
    > tweaked as we deal with more cases, gain experience and whatnot.

    Is there a good word for this?  A word meaning that the subject has
    been covered completely, but changes are still sought/appropriate/etc.
    This concept seems to come up all the time in wiki-space, but no one
    seems to have the word for it.  It would be useful over on Wikibooks to
    label books which have achieved this status (green - see
    [[Wikibooks:Main Page]]).

    Peter

Certified?

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/attachments/20040311/536ded7b/attachment.htm


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: New sidebar poll

body:
Timwi wrote:

> Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>> Michael Snow wrote:
>>
>>> Since some people on this mailing list have previously asked to be
>>> made aware of polls on the wiki, here is a new one. It addresses
>>> what links to remove from the sidebar so we can add a link to the
>>> Community Portal page. It's actually a revised and restarted version
>>> of the old poll, which ended up being too confusing and did not have
>>> a clear result. Vote at:
>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Community_Portal#New_sidebar_poll
>>
>>
>> I hadn't followed this debate until now.  Some people have other
>> things to do.  But I see that the vote avoids the whole issue of
>> alternatives to having  a "Community Portal" page at all.
>
> Such as, for example?

Such as merging the community portal with the main page.  We don't need
the news section there; this is an encyclopedia, not a newspaper.

Ec


subject: [Wikitech-l] Document your features, please

body:
On Mar 11, 2004, at 09:04, Erchache2000 wrote:
> Im trying to pass from phase 2 to phase 3 and all script code are
> undocumented too.
> A good program has a cicle life and documentation is a part of this.
> When you download mediawiki you have a trivial pursuit install how to.
> Make this and this other and rest do-it-yourself.
> If i have a more documented source i will do a better job. :(
> Brion.....i need help with convertdb.php code....

It was really not meant to last, that conversion script was a temporary
hack. (All temporary things in computers become permanent though, we
should learn this. :)

I'd like to try fixing it up, but unfortunately I don't have a phase2
test database to work with. Do you have a dump of the Enciclopedia
database that I could download and test with? Otherwise I can try to
fix it up blind from the old table declarations.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: PGP.sig
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 186 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20040311/cbce4045/attachment.pgp>


from_name: Geoff Burling

subject: [WikiEN-l] The 3-revert rule

body:
On Thu, 11 Mar 2004, Charles Matthews wrote:

> Nikola Smolenski wrote
>
> >>Charles Matthews wrote:
> >> Agree.  One day we might get faction-fighting, which would be a splitting
> > issue.  But I don't see that yet as a serious danger.
>
> >Factions fighting against single users are not a serious danger?
>
> What I meant: group versus group fighting, as factions, could be schismatic.
> If that did happen, it would be a threat at a level not seen on Wikipedia.
> But for all the talk (basically as if there was left-right polarization) I
> don't think that there is much risk of that happening.  A few people make
> tendentious edits, that's all.
>
> As I wrote in another posting here, I think there is some unpleasantness to
> be found if you look hard.
>
It's not that hard to find: look at the page history for any topic touching
on Israel or Palestine.

Geoff


from_name: Guillaume Blanchard

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Creative Commons Licence

body:
This statement is right?

License compatible with GFDL:

- Public Domain

- GFDL

- GPL

- LGPL

- CC-AS (share alike)

- CC-BY-AS (attribution-share alike)

License witch compatibility with GFDL is discussed:

- Fair use

- CC-*-ND (no derivation)

License no compatible with GFDL:

- Copyright

- CC-*-NC (non commercial)

By the way, no one answer my question about if derivation is allowed with
fair use image and who decide the fairness of a picture?

Aoineko


from_name: no lssi no lssi

subject: [Wikitech-l] db trouble

body:
Well, im an EL admin (Enciclopedia Libre) and i have
same problems with my server. I think in a possible
scriptkiddie attack or something similar. Its very
strange that this occurs in two different systems.

I believe is a sql injection attack but maybe a DoS
attack too. The result is overload of server.

Im working in two ways:

First, make a decent mod_rewrite rules to control url
access againts bots and similar.

Second, im studiying php secure programming to solve
magic quotes sql injection attacks to control it, if i
can ;P

Or perhaps im a fucked lamer that doesnt knows what
speak... :( im so noob in this type of development, i
need more information to update my knowledge....
Step by Step, Step by step...

p.d.: excuse me for my poor english ;D

--- Gabriel Wicke <groups at gabrielwicke.de> escribi?: >
After being slow for most of the day suda has become
> completely
> unresponsive now, the shells are frozen, new ssh
> connects get an error
> message.
>
> We hope to get gunther up as a replacement, but this
> will take a while as
> it's not in sync.
>
> Brion- if you're around- we need you!
> --
> Gabriel Wicke
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

___________________________________________________
Yahoo! Messenger - Nueva versi?n GRATIS
Super Webcam, voz, caritas animadas, y m?s...
http://messenger.yahoo.es


from_name: limholt at excite.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: What's the word?

body:
Peter Jaros wrote:

> On Monday, March 8, 2004, at 03:44 PM, Lee Pilich wrote:
>
>> "Completed" in quotes because while everything that needs to be
>> covered for us to function probably is covered in one way or another,
>> everything is still subject to change, and everything will likely be
>> tweaked as we deal with more cases, gain experience and whatnot.
>
> Is there a good word for this?

---
If you must use another word, I'd suggest ''Intact'' or ''Integral''. We used to use integral in developing a product element. It means that this element, as reviewed, is a whole, self-contained, unit of work. It may need revision in future to tie correctly with other elements, and adjustments may occur during final testing. This is somewhat similar to Wiki, where nothing is ever final oe ''Complete''.

Actually, thre's nothing wrong with complete, even without the quotes. The Wiki philosophy inplies that anything can be changed if we collectively find a better way.

_______________________________________________
Join Excite! - http://www.excite.com
The most personalized portal on the Web!


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [WikiEN-l] Requests for review of admin actions

body:
I renamed [[Wikipedia:Requests for de-adminship]] to
[[Wikipedia:Requests for review of admin actions]].

I hope that this will lessen the general tension between "old hands" who
have sysop rights and "newbies" who don't.

The idea is to focus on the action itself, not the actor. And the remedy
if any would be to reconsider the decision, which is very easy and
non-threatening.

Thanks to Caroline (MySecretLondon) for sparking this idea.

Kindly ol' Uncle Ed


subject: [Wikitech-l] Spambot

body:
Evan Prodromou wrote:
>      http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edit_throttling
>
> It's not too effective against distributed attacks, though, since it
> only throttles a given user or IP address.

*nod*

Did you see my idea of a table like this?

user    page      throttle  expiration
jwales  DNA       2         (timestamps go here)
*       Israel    3
jwales  Turkey    0
plautus *         0
wik     *         3

The idea is that for user/page combos, which could possibly include
wildcards (or even regexp's, although simplicity is a virtue and the
power of regexps might be overkill), there could be a throttle which
would be the number of edits per whatever unit of time or similar.

What interests me about this way of looking at it is that it is a
generalization of what we already do, i.e. site bans and page protection
are both just special cases.

plautus * 0 says he can't edit anything.
* Ham 0 says that [[Ham]] is protected.

---

For a distributed spambot attack, I don't know if this is helpful.  I
just wanted lots of people to see it and tell me what's wrong with it.

Perhaps a spambot attack could be taken care of with a "special case"
ad hoc technique, for example "if the body of the article contains
this string (spammers url) on a save of an edit, then we enter this
ip number into the throttle table like this:

129.79.1.1 * 1

with an expiration of say 24 hours.

--Jimbo


from_name: David Gerard

body:
Gareth Owen (wiki at gwowen.freeserve.co.uk) [040311 00:51]:
> <dpbsmith at verizon.net> pens a modest proposal :

> > And then let's get rid of the top-posters.
> > And the people with more-than-four-line SIGs

> Actually, these two are fair enough.

"When they came for the Trekkies, I said 'Hey, you guys missed a couple.
See, there's one right over *there*.' When they came for the OS flamers, I
said 'Guess what they run in Hell, buddy!' When they came for the spammers,
I said 'Glad to see my tax money at work!' When they came for the MMFers, I
said 'I thought you got those guys last time you stopped by.' When they
came for the AOLers, I said 'October came late this year.' When they came
for the people who post their messages in HTML, I said 'So, you guys hiring
anytime soon?' When they came for the 3L1T3 Hacker D00dz, I bought them a
round of beer. When they came for Heaven's Gate, I said 'Can you get the
deposit back on those empty containers?'" - Jake Kesinger

- d.


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: bugs?

body:
Set all pages containing "{{msg:" on "not cached"?

Magnus

Brion Vibber wrote:

> On Mar 10, 2004, at 02:57, teun spaans wrote:
>
>> Does this caching also apply to the {{msg:xxx}} mechanism?
>> Though my IE options are set at "every visit to the page", I
>> repeatedly had
>> caching problems at our main page (which uses this mechanism).
>
>
> Presently the cache does ***NOT*** update when included messages are
> changed.
>
> This means the present Main Page layout on en is very problematic.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>_______________________________________________
>Wikitech-l mailing list
>Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Re: bugs?

body:
On Thu, 11 Mar 2004 11:19:49 +0100, Magnus Manske wrote:
> Brion Vibber wrote:
>
>> On Mar 10, 2004, at 02:57, teun spaans wrote:
>>
>>> Does this caching also apply to the {{msg:xxx}} mechanism?
>>> Though my IE options are set at "every visit to the page", I
>>> repeatedly had
>>> caching problems at our main page (which uses this mechanism).
>>
>>
>> Presently the cache does ***NOT*** update when included messages are
>> changed.
>>
>> This means the present Main Page layout on en is very problematic.
>>
>> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
> Set all pages containing "{{msg:" on "not cached"?
>
> Magnus

Or maybe refresh their cache version ? :p

--
Ashar Voultoiz
http://fr.wikipedia.org/Utilisateur:Hashar
do not send mail to listme at listme.dsbl.org


from_name: Gabriel Wicke

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: bugs?

body:
On Thu, 04 Mar 2004 01:31:03 -0800, Optim wrote:

> In some e-mail I received this from a user:
>
> "Lately Wikipedia is having serious technical
> difficulties where the article text and page
> history are not  in synch with each other."

History purging is enabled for two days now, so this problem should be
gone.

The message update is a bit harder to do, i'm not sure if there's a way to
get a list of paged a message is used in for the purging. If somebody
knows a query that returns an array of titles where the message is going
to be used this would be trivial to add.

I'm looking into a new skin system today. Using ESI for {{msg:}} would
scale much better than massive purging, however this depends on Squid3.
--
Gabriel Wicke


from_name: Evan Prodromou

body:
So, I amended the Development policy on meta:

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

...to the effect of: "Document new features in the User's Guide."

Every programmer in the world is too damn busy coding to communicate
what they're doing, true. But if you add a feature to MediaWiki, you
are the main person who knows about it.

We have a pretty darn good users' and admins' guide now. The more we
keep it up-to-date, the better. It's quite easy to add a little bitty
wiki page to meta.w.o saying what the feature is and how it works. It
doesn't have to be any more complicated than what you put in a
changelog summary. Others can then find your features, test em out,
expand the doc, etc.

~ESP

--
Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
Wikitravel - http://www.wikitravel.org/
The free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Re: bugs?

body:
Ashar Voultoiz wrote:

>On Thu, 11 Mar 2004 11:19:49 +0100, Magnus Manske wrote:
>
>
>>Brion Vibber wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>>On Mar 10, 2004, at 02:57, teun spaans wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>>Does this caching also apply to the {{msg:xxx}} mechanism?
>>>>Though my IE options are set at "every visit to the page", I
>>>>repeatedly had
>>>>caching problems at our main page (which uses this mechanism).
>>>>
>>>>
>>>Presently the cache does ***NOT*** update when included messages are
>>>changed.
>>>
>>>This means the present Main Page layout on en is very problematic.
>>>
>>>-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>>>
>>>
>>Set all pages containing "{{msg:" on "not cached"?
>>
>>Magnus
>>
>>
>
>Or maybe refresh their cache version ? :p
>
That would mean on changing a "MediaWiki:xyz" page, the database would
have to be searched for this, and all the cached would have to be
rebuild/invalidated. I don't think it would be practical to do this, not
unless there's a msg<=>cur table. If you volunteer to write the code and
alter the database accordingly, welcome! If not, setting pages
containing "{{msg:" on no-cache seems the only option to me.

Magnus


from_name: Arno M

subject: [WikiEN-l] I shot my bolt too soon again

body:
Hi.

Further to my 'Bird' posting of yesterday.

I see that Bird (and a few aliases) has been banned by Ed - I hadn't realised that sysops could do that
again. I didn't read all of the posting before I
put mine up.

Sorry about that.

____________________________________________________________
Find what you are looking for with the Lycos Yellow Pages
http://r.lycos.com/r/yp_emailfooter/http://yellowpages.lycos.com/default.asp?SRC=lycos10


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Re: Re: bugs?

body:
On Thu, 11 Mar 2004 12:02:08 +0100, Magnus Manske wrote:

> That would mean on changing a "MediaWiki:xyz" page, the database would
> have to be searched for this, and all the cached would have to be
> rebuild/invalidated. I don't think it would be practical to do this, not
> unless there's a msg<=>cur table. If you volunteer to write the code and
> alter the database accordingly, welcome! If not, setting pages
> containing "{{msg:" on no-cache seems the only option to me.

Not caching the front page isn't really an option. For the time being a
shift-reload purges it from the cache.

Rewriting {{msg:mymessage}} to <esi:include
src="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediawiki:mymessage?action=esi" /> or
similar ist not very hard to do.
Squid3 seems to have stabilized a bit since we last tested it, so this
might be be an option very soon.
--
Gabriel Wicke


subject: [Wikitech-l] single point of faillure

references:
<20040310205115.3e58b5d4.wikipedia@shaihome.net>
	<opr4nzr1qq0q8gma@mail.mislik.com>
	<20040311135401.GD20392@joey.bomis.com>

body:
On Mar 11, 2004, at 05:54, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Third, there was an unfortunate breakdown in communication somewhere
> on our end, as gunther has been installed and available for Brion to
> use to setup a replicated db, and of course Gunther is suitable (5 gig
> of RAM, dual Opteron) to run the database.  Until yesterday, though,
> he did not know that.
>
> Therefore, as of today, we have gunther available and perhaps running
> in replication mode (if Brion had the chance to set it up).

I copied the files over last night (not fully synced yet), but haven't
had a chance to set it up yet. This is somewhat complicated by Gunther
being in use as a MySQL server for Bomis stuff, which I believe I'm not
supposed to overwrite.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: PGP.sig
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 186 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20040311/d65c4451/attachment.pgp>


subject: [Wikitech-l] Spambot

in_reply_to:
<c2pq6h$s4u$1@sea.gmane.org> (Tim Starling's message of "Fri,
	12 Mar 2004 00:39:42 +1100")

body:
>>>>> "TS" == Tim Starling <ts4294967296 at hotmail.com> writes:

    TS> For now we've been dealing with this using filters and editor
    TS> manpower.  Filters are bad, they're against the wiki security
    TS> model. I'd much rather put more power into the hands of users
    TS> to deal with these situations, than to continue a filter-based
    TS> arms race.

+1

    TS> If anyone wants to help out with features such as these,
    TS> please speak up.

I've started work on doing edit throttling:

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

It's not too effective against distributed attacks, though, since it
only throttles a given user or IP address.

~ESP

--
Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
Wikitravel - http://www.wikitravel.org/
The free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide


subject: [WikiEN-l] Special:Recent Vandalisms

body:
Many have stated their concern about the inability of scanning the
Recent Changes page for vandalism, and dealing with it. On the other
hand, there was concern about cutting the freedom on wikipedia in the
wake of terror^H^H^H^H^H^Hvandalism.

I believe that we can improve security without restricting users by
focusing our attention through technical means, namely a "Recent
Vandalisms" page. (We can argue about that title, though).

This page would list
* edits from users that have been marked as "problematic" (was: vandals)
* edits on problematic (was: "edit war") pages
* edits that appear to be "suspect" utilizing some kind of filter (e.g.,
removal of larger text protions, certain keywords, etc.)

On Recent Changes, IPs and users can be marked as "problematic", but:
* anons can't mark anyone
* users can only mark IPs and user accounts that exist for less than a
week / have less than 20 edits (a potential "sock puppet" filter)
* sysops can mark anyone

A page can be marked as "problematic" by logged-in users.

This would help those who want to stop vandals to get a report on the
latest "problematic" issues at a glance. The restrictions above are to
prevent ill-minded users from flooding the page in order to render it
useless.

Magnus


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Re: Re: bugs?

body:
Gabriel Wicke wrote:

>On Thu, 11 Mar 2004 12:02:08 +0100, Magnus Manske wrote:
>
>
>
>>That would mean on changing a "MediaWiki:xyz" page, the database would
>>have to be searched for this, and all the cached would have to be
>>rebuild/invalidated. I don't think it would be practical to do this, not
>>unless there's a msg<=>cur table. If you volunteer to write the code and
>>alter the database accordingly, welcome! If not, setting pages
>>containing "{{msg:" on no-cache seems the only option to me.
>>
>>
>
>Not caching the front page isn't really an option. For the time being a
>shift-reload purges it from the cache.
>
>Rewriting {{msg:mymessage}} to <esi:include
>src="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediawiki:mymessage?action=esi" /> or
>similar ist not very hard to do.
>Squid3 seems to have stabilized a bit since we last tested it, so this
>might be be an option very soon.
>
>
That would be cool, especially if we can include user links (My page,
Preferences) and user inline styles the same way. The styles (e.g.,
links underlined or not) could be generated in advance (when saving
preferences) and stored in the user table; a tiny script could return
these, without having to load the parser etc.

The only problem would be red links vs. "links?".

Magnus


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Re: Re: Re: bugs?

body:
On Thu, 11 Mar 2004 13:05:41 +0100, Magnus Manske wrote:

> The only problem would be red links vs. "links?".

the ? could be either hidden with a css rule or appended with the dom wrap
function also used for the external link formatting in
http://wp.aulinx.de/test/. Similar with different content area editing
methods. Storing a single renderend html content area for both anons and
users would save a lot of work for the apaches of course.
--
Gabriel Wicke


from_name: Ivo Köthnig

body:
> While I don't disagree that cookies can be used to better deal with
> vandalism, I don't see why they should replace the current methods. I
> think the best solution would be a hybrid one allowing for a user to be
> blocked either on the basis of IP or of cookie.

Erik doesn't say that he wants to replace the IP-method by the coockie-method.
In fact he spoke of the hybrid method!?

He just wants to hide the ip-adresses, but in case we need it, the
admins can get it and block it.

--Ivo K?thnig


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Re: Re: Re: bugs?

body:
Gabriel Wicke wrote:

>On Thu, 11 Mar 2004 13:05:41 +0100, Magnus Manske wrote:
>
>
>
>>The only problem would be red links vs. "links?".
>>
>>
>
>the ? could be either hidden with a css rule or appended with the dom wrap
>function also used for the external link formatting in
>http://wp.aulinx.de/test/. Similar with different content area editing
>methods. Storing a single renderend html content area for both anons and
>users would save a lot of work for the apaches of course.
>
>
We tried the css trick once; it did hide the ? visually, but if you
copy'n'paste the text, the ? come haunting you...

Magnus


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikitech-l] cache ?

body:
Just in case...

2 days ago, I made an edit on Erik page, and later I was notified that
while doing my edit, I removed an edit made by Erik 2 hours sooner than
I. I had no edit conflict. I did not see Erik edit on his page when I
edited it.

Yesterday, the same thing happened to Patrick with another person edit,
just made a couple of minutes sooner. He erased it without knowing.

Also, I frequently had in the past couple of days notification of new
messages. Then, I went on my talk page, and saw nothing new. I went in
history and saw someone edited it. I have to reload the page to see the
message apppear.

I suppose these three cases are all cache problems. With the cache also
on the edit window. But why recently ? Has this been noticed by others ?

PS : this is embarassing, because some editors may believe the removal
of text was done on purpose :-(

ant


list: textbook-l

from_name: Karl Wick

subject:
[Textbook-l] convert .doc & .pdf into wiki format (and compile
	texts to print)

body:
Anyone know tools to convert ms.doc or adobe.pdf format
files to Wiki format? Like a script or website .. There is
a gentleman who would like to contribute his
German-language textbook to the project and has everything
ready in these two formats. It is 150 pages w- 100 images,
not a quick porting document.

Also, Sanford is asking about printing capabilities. Any
word there ? Such as from the Rice project?

Good will to all,
Karl

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Search - Find what you?re looking for faster
http://search.yahoo.com


from_name: Timwi

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> I've checked into the head branch some changes to the link tables.

Thanks!

Could you also let us know when it goes live on the site? :-)

Thanks a lot for your work, Brion!
Timwi


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: What's the word?

body:
Peter Jaros wrote:

> On Monday, March 8, 2004, at 03:44 PM, Lee Pilich wrote:
>
>> "Completed" in quotes because while everything that needs to be
>> covered for us to function probably is covered in one way or another,
>> everything is still subject to change, and everything will likely be
>> tweaked as we deal with more cases, gain experience and whatnot.
>
> Is there a good word for this?  A word meaning that the subject has been
> covered completely, but changes are still sought/appropriate/etc.  This
> concept seems to come up all the time in wiki-space, but no one seems to
> have the word for it.  It would be useful over on Wikibooks to label
> books which have achieved this status (green - see [[Wikibooks:Main
> Page]]).

Completed draft?


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: bugs?

body:
On Thu, 11 Mar 2004 14:01:43 +0100, Magnus Manske wrote:

> We tried the css trick once; it did hide the ? visually, but if you
> copy'n'paste the text, the ? come haunting you...

Yeah- that's what i thought as well. Better to dom-wrap it, shouldn't be
copied then.
--
Gabriel Wicke


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Re: bugs?

body:
On Thu, 11 Mar 2004 18:07:02 +0530, Arvind Narayanan wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 11, 2004 at 11:19:49AM +0100, Magnus Manske wrote:
>> Set all pages containing "{{msg:" on "not cached"?
>>
>> Magnus
> What about having a "refresh cached copy of this page" link for
> admins? Or having a Special:cache page where you can give the
> title of an article to refresh it?

In a second browser session (as anon), press shift-reload (moz) or
ctrl-reload(IE). That clears the squid cache for that page.

A small purge form is a good idea, i might put something together later
today.
--
Gabriel Wicke


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: New sidebar poll

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

> Michael Snow wrote:
>
>> Since some people on this mailing list have previously asked to be
>> made aware of polls on the wiki, here is a new one. It addresses what
>> links to remove from the sidebar so we can add a link to the Community
>> Portal page. It's actually a revised and restarted version of the old
>> poll, which ended up being too confusing and did not have a clear
>> result. Vote at:
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Community_Portal#New_sidebar_poll
>
> I hadn't followed this debate until now.  Some people have other things
> to do.  But I see that the vote avoids the whole issue of alternatives
> to having  a "Community Portal" page at all.

Such as, for example?


from_name: Andre Engels

body:
"Jimmy Wales" <jwales at bomis.com> schrieb:
> ----- Forwarded message from Fernanda Viegas <fviegas at media.mit.edu> -----
>
> From: "Fernanda Viegas" <fviegas at media.mit.edu>
> Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2004 00:32:01 -0500
> To: "Jimmy Wales" <jwales at bomis.com>
> Subject: Wikipedia: academic paper
>
> Hello Jimmy,
>
> I am a graduate student at the MIT Media Laboratory. I hope you remember me from last summer when I sent out a couple of messages to the Wikipedia mailing list about a visualization project I was working on, which looked at wiki sites. Martin Wattenberg from IBM and I built a visualization tool called "history flow" and we used this application to study some of the cooperation and conflict patterns among authors on Wikipedia.
>
> We are happy to announce that the paper we wrote about this project has been accepted at a major academic conference (CHI 2004 - Computer Human Interaction). We will present the paper next month at the conference.
>
> Here is a link to the paper:
> http://web.media.mit.edu/~fviegas/papers/history_flow.pdf
>
> Feel free to circulate this within the Wikipedia community. It would be great to hear from folks about what they think of the findings and whether these resonate with their experience of the community. Neither Martin nor I are on the mailing list anymore but, if anyone would like to get in touch with us, they can use these email addresses:
> fviegas at media.mit.edu
> mwatten at us.ibm.com
>
>
> cheers,
> - Fernanda Viegas
>
> http://web.media.mit.edu/~fviegas/
> sociable media group
> mit media laboratory
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Jimmy Wales" <jwales at bomis.com>
> To: "Fernanda Viegas" <fviegas at media.mit.edu>
> Sent: Thursday, August 14, 2003 12:44 PM
> Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] academic research on Wikis
>
>
> > I can chat at any time, but preferably by email so I can compose my
> > thoughts and answer questions coherently.  :-)
> >
> > If you send me email about this, be sure to put wikipedia in the
> > subject line, as I get so much spam and random nonsense that I could
> > easily overlook a generic subject line.
> >
> >
> > Fernanda Viegas wrote:
> >
> > > Hello,
> > >
> > > I am a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab and this summer I'm working on a Wiki related project that uses visualization to understand how Wiki pages evolve over time.
> > >
> > > Because Wikipedia seems like such an interesting and thriving community, I would like to know whether any of you would be available to chat with me about how the community works and how consensus is achieved?
> > >
> > > Also, I would be very appreciative of any pointers you might have to other academic work being done on Wikipedia.
> > >
> > > thanks a lot,
> > > Fernanda Viegas
> > >
> > > http://web.media.mit.edu/~fviegas/
> > > sociable media group
> > > mit media laboratory
> >
> ----- End forwarded message -----
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


body:
>>>>> "E" == Erchache2000  <erchache2000 at yahoo.es> writes:

    E> Im agree with you....  Im trying to pass from phase 2 to phase
    E> 3 and all script code are undocumented too.

Documenting code is good, too, but I was specifically talking about
documenting stuff that non-developers can actually see.

~ESP

--
Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
Wikitravel - http://www.wikitravel.org/
The free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide


body:
Sorry about that previous message, I hit the wrong button in my email
program.

I can agree with most of the material. Some remarks, though:
"In some cases the Wikipedia community itself cannot agree on whether
 an edit constitutes vandalism or not. In fact there is a vandalism-tracking
 page where users discuss and coordinate responses to specific instances
 of vandalism."

This makes it seem that the vandalism tracking page is for a large part
to discuss what is and what is not vandalism; it is not. Of the five types
of vandalism mentioned below, I would remove the fifth type - it would not
be considered vandalism, it is a different issue.

"On the other hand, there is also the possibility that a newcomer is someone
who may be unfamiliar with Wikipedia standards." - the word 'standards'
could easily be read wrong here, but I cannot find a good different one
either.

Regarding the 'first-mover advantage', I would like to put forward the
possibility that it is not the fact of being first, but the size of the
edit that makes these 'invulnerable' - if someone adds one or two lines to
an article, someone else may well come along and decide those can be
improved, but if someone adds 3 or 4 paragraphs, others will not as readily
edit them if there happen to be one or two lines they want to do something
about - if they even go so far as to read the whole edit.

Another issue could be that the first edit often will provide the 'core' of
the page, the first two paragraphs or so that give a general overview of
the subject. Later edits then add various sub-subjects. Someone who wants
to add something, will either add a new sub-subject or add it to the applicable
existing one. This would mean that this 'core' is a relatively stable part
of the page.

As a final, but for us most important point: Could you ask for the software
they developed to be made available to Wikipedia? It might be very useful
to check some Wikipedia pages using this software. For example, one could
use it to spot where articles have had major changes, enabling one to check
whether anything has been inadvertedly lost in such a major overhaul.

Andre Engels


from_name: Arvind Narayanan

in_reply_to:
<94bJtmNSpVB@erik_moeller>;
	from erik_moeller@gmx.de on Wed, Mar 10, 2004 at 07:51:00PM +0100

body:
On Wed, Mar 10, 2004 at 07:51:00PM +0100, Erik Moeller wrote:
> Gabriel-
> > I don't think the mirrors have a right to get free hosting, and it's not
> > hard to save them really if somebody wanted to.
>
> Well, we don't make it exactly easy either, what with blocking all the
> spiders ..
>
> > If there's a concensus
> > (and no copyright problem) to provide a big tar with all images for more
> > convenience, then it's just a matter of adding it at
> > download.wikimedia.org.
>
> If it's OK for us to host the images in the first place, then it's also OK
> to put them into a tarball.
>
I was under the impression that we can't redistribute the fair use images?

But if we're going to make a tarball, then bit torrent might be useful.

Arvind
--
Its all GNU to me


from_name: Tim Starling

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: Developers are very precious part of the global
	scheme

body:
Anthere wrote:

> So, there are people with a flag of developper, with extended bureaucrat
> powers, with no shell access
>
> And other people with a flag of developper, with shell access and
> extended bureaucrat power
>
> did I understand well ?

That's how it will be, yes.

> You do not mention rules.
> Would they have specific rules to follow ?
> New power should implies more rules to follow
>
> Right now, Erik is typically having this kind of power and
> administrative task.
> That means
> *he participates in setting the rules
> *he decides when the rules must be applied
> *he implement the decision
> *he eventually forget to report :-)
>
> I would like to suggest that at least two rules are necessary
>
> rule 1 : no decision alone : depending on the urgency, Jimbo decision,
> arbitration committee decision, full vote (like for sysoping someone),
> poll (like urgent desysoping)
> I think this rule is very important. No decision taken by a ''honorary
> developper alone''
>
> rule 2 : report mandatory. Depending on the action taken, on the mailing
> list, on the wikipedia sysop vote page, on the poll page
>
> Breaking of any of these two rules (without a damn good reason) means
> suspension of "honorary developer" position.
>
> No power should be entirely in a couple of people hands without rules.
> And the more power, the more the rules need to be enforced.
 >
 > Last : when there are questions about the actions of a "honorary
 > developer", the one questioning should be granted free speech and public
 >  place to talk.

That's all fine by me, as long as the decision to revoke developer
access on the basis of rule violation comes from Jimbo, the arbitration
committee or a community vote, rather than from a real developer.

-- Tim Starling


body:
Evan Prodromou wrote:

>So, I amended the Development policy on meta:
>
>    http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_policy
>
>...to the effect of: "Document new features in the User's Guide."
>
>Every programmer in the world is too damn busy coding to communicate
>what they're doing, true. But if you add a feature to MediaWiki, you
>are the main person who knows about it.
>
>We have a pretty darn good users' and admins' guide now. The more we
>keep it up-to-date, the better. It's quite easy to add a little bitty
>wiki page to meta.w.o saying what the feature is and how it works. It
>doesn't have to be any more complicated than what you put in a
>changelog summary. Others can then find your features, test em out,
>expand the doc, etc.
>
>~ESP
>
>
>
Im agree with you....
Im trying to pass from phase 2 to phase 3 and all script code are
undocumented too.
A good program has a cicle life and documentation is a part of this.
When you download mediawiki you have a trivial pursuit install how to.
Make this and this other and rest do-it-yourself.
If i have a more documented source i will do a better job. :(
Brion.....i need help with convertdb.php code....

turismundo:/usr/local/apache/htdocs/phase3/maintenance/archives# php
--with-mysql convertdb.php
PHP Fatal error:  Call to a member function on a non-object in
/usr/local/apache/htdocs/nuevo/User.php on line 294
This script is obsolete!It is retained in the source here in case some
of its
code might be useful for ad-hoc conversion tasks, but it is
not maintained and probably won't even work as is.Creating new tables.

perhaps my configure php has fail?


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: bugs?

body:
On Thu, Mar 11, 2004 at 11:19:49AM +0100, Magnus Manske wrote:
> Set all pages containing "{{msg:" on "not cached"?
>
> Magnus
What about having a "refresh cached copy of this page" link for
admins? Or having a Special:cache page where you can give the
title of an article to refresh it?

Arvind
--
Its all GNU to me


subject: [Wikitech-l] Spambot

body:
I think this is a good approach; for defeating a severe distributed
attack, it should also be possible to prevent both editing by *all* IPs
and the creation of new user accounts (to prevent a bot creating a sock
puppet, then spamming under that user name) for a limited time.

Additionally, during such an emergency, all prevented edits could be
cached and then manually approved. That would prevent having to clean up
a real flood, should the need ever arise.

Magnus

Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Evan Prodromou wrote:
>
>>     http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edit_throttling
>>
>>It's not too effective against distributed attacks, though, since it
>>only throttles a given user or IP address.
>
>
> *nod*
>
> Did you see my idea of a table like this?
>
> user    page      throttle  expiration
> jwales  DNA       2         (timestamps go here)
> *       Israel    3
> jwales  Turkey    0
> plautus *         0
> wik     *         3
>
> The idea is that for user/page combos, which could possibly include
> wildcards (or even regexp's, although simplicity is a virtue and the
> power of regexps might be overkill), there could be a throttle which
> would be the number of edits per whatever unit of time or similar.
>
> What interests me about this way of looking at it is that it is a
> generalization of what we already do, i.e. site bans and page protection
> are both just special cases.
>
> plautus * 0 says he can't edit anything.
> * Ham 0 says that [[Ham]] is protected.
>
> ---
>
> For a distributed spambot attack, I don't know if this is helpful.  I
> just wanted lots of people to see it and tell me what's wrong with it.
>
> Perhaps a spambot attack could be taken care of with a "special case"
> ad hoc technique, for example "if the body of the article contains
> this string (spammers url) on a save of an edit, then we enter this
> ip number into the throttle table like this:
>
> 129.79.1.1 * 1
>
> with an expiration of say 24 hours.
>
> --Jimbo
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


body:
- d.

A. Because it makes a hash of conversational flow.
Q. Why is top posting bad?

Actually, top-posting causes crabs. It's scientifically proven!

On 03/11/04 13:37, dpbsmith at verizon.net wrote:
> Just for the record: my inclusion of top-posters in the anathema list was
> ironic. The suggestion that RickK or anyone else should pay $30/year simply
> in order to avoid top-posting strikes me as absurd. Top-posting is like
> infinitive-splitting: it's an imaginary, artificial rule made up recently for
> the sole purpose of creating an artificial distinction between an out-group
> and an in-group. It was originally loose recommendation _in the service of
> making postings compact and comprehensible._ It wasn't until 1999 or
> thereabouts that people regularly began getting flamed for it. Try a Google
> "Advanced Groups" search on "top-posting" as exact phrase and limit the date
> range from 1981 to 1997 and you'll see what I mean.
>
> I generally don't top-post, just as I generally don't split
> infinitives, for the same reason: because I don't like being yelled at by
> people.
>
> As for Yahoo mail... when we got our high-speed connection, the first thing I
> did was, of course, was set up my email client to connect to (then)
> bellatlantic.net's pop server. My wife was new to the Internet, wanted to do
> everything herself. Her PC was preconfigured with the browser pointed at a
> Gateway-flavored Yahoo, and she discovered and signed up for Yahoo browser-
> based mail. I kept offering to get her up with "real" email, but she kept
> saying no thanks. It pained me to see her clicking her way through the clumsy
> web-based UI. But ultimately the joke was on me. Using Yahoo web mail, she
> has enjoyed a high level of virus protection and spam filtering; has been
> able to keep the same email address; has had reliable email while I've
> experienced three or four multi-day outages on the part of Verizon's servers;
> and has been able to check her email conveniently when away from home.
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Nicolas Weeger

subject: [Wikitech-l] Spambot

body:
> This sounds like a wonderful idea, but I see a big problem with it.
> If we had such a feature some sysops would be tempted to use it as
> punishment against some bad users.  There's a certain amount of
> 'vigilantism' that I've grumpily tolerated because it's very minor and
> the people usually "deserve it" in some sense.  But this would open a
> huge new can of worms.

What about something that'd require multiple sysop approval? Like, 5 sysops to
check something & click to confirm?
Even if it's harder to do, it sounds really more 'safe', as finding 5 sysops
willingly 'punishing' a user with this feature seems hard.
Also, there could be a strict policy on that: any sysop using this against
anything but a spambot gets unsysop right away (of course, i assume a sysop
doing this would in any case lose some respect from his community).

Nicolas 'Ryo'


from_name: Sheldon Rampton

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Spambot

body:
Jimbo wrote:

>Did you see my idea of a table like this?
>
>user    page      throttle  expiration
>jwales  DNA       2         (timestamps go here)
>*       Israel    3
>jwales  Turkey    0
>plautus *         0
>wik     *         3

That's a nice idea, but I'd suggest adding some more precision to the
throttle, similar to the way a cron job works, e.g.,

user     page     throttle.minute     throttle.hour     throttle.day
expiration
jwales  DNA     2     10     25     (timestamp)
wik     *     *     *     3

This would say that user jwales can make up to 2 edits per minute, up
to 10 per hour, and up to 25 per day on the DNA article, while user
wik can only make up to 3 edits per day on all articles combined.

--Sheldon Rampton


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Spambot

body:
>>>>> "TS" == Tim Starling <ts4294967296 at hotmail.com> writes:

    >> Here's one idea -- a switch to toggle a captcha.

That's an extremely good idea. Only one problem: I believe that there
are patent issues around captchas. Not saying that Wikipedia couldn't
get a patent license, but it'd have to stay out of the distributed
MediaWiki code.

I'm not sure about this and I'm not turning up any terribly
informative Google hits except this one:

   http://www2.parc.com/istl/projects/captcha/history.htm

~ESP

--
Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
Wikitravel - http://www.wikitravel.org/
The free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: cache ?

body:
On Thu, 11 Mar 2004 14:02:00 +0100, Anthere wrote:

> Just in case...
>
> 2 days ago, I made an edit on Erik page, and later I was notified that
> while doing my edit, I removed an edit made by Erik 2 hours sooner than
> I. I had no edit conflict. I did not see Erik edit on his page when I
> edited it.
>
> Yesterday, the same thing happened to Patrick with another person edit,
> just made a couple of minutes sooner. He erased it without knowing.

This is not cache-related.

> Also, I frequently had in the past couple of days notification of new
> messages. Then, I went on my talk page, and saw nothing new. I went in
> history and saw someone edited it. I have to reload the page to see the
> message apppear.

Might be a bug in the mediawiki code.

> I suppose these three cases are all cache problems. With the cache also
> on the edit window. But why recently ? Has this been noticed by others ?

The edit window is not cached. As soon as you do your first edit (or log
in), no server-side caching is done. Mediawiki allows your browser to use
a cached page after asking back if it has changed. If this response is
flawed you could get trouble. This wouldn't cause any editing conflicts
though.

When i edit the pump, i frequently get the conflict message, so i'm pretty
sure it worked recently.
--
Gabriel Wicke


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Document your features, please

body:
Evan Prodromou wrote:

> So, I amended the Development policy on meta:
>
>     http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_policy
>
> ...to the effect of: "Document new features in the User's Guide."
>
> Every programmer in the world is too damn busy coding to communicate
> what they're doing, true. But if you add a feature to MediaWiki, you
> are the main person who knows about it.

Speaking of which. Who made the image thumbnail feature? This feature
does not appear to be documented.

And in particular, it still has this bug that
[[Image:blah|thumb|''em'']] comes out as <em>em</em> rather
than em.

I believe whoever wrote this feature should really fix this, since (as
you said) they are bound to be the one who knows the feature best.

Timwi


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: New sidebar poll

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

> Timwi wrote:
>
>> Ray Saintonge wrote:
>>
>>> I hadn't followed this debate until now.  Some people have other
>>> things to do.  But I see that the vote avoids the whole issue of
>>> alternatives to having  a "Community Portal" page at all.
>>
>> Such as, for example?
>
> Such as merging the community portal with the main page.

This doesn't strike me as a particularly widely-wanted change.

> We don't need
> the news section there; this is an encyclopedia, not a newspaper.

The Main Page is specifically not an encyclopedic article. True, we are
not a newspaper, but there is no reason to not have a little section
that points at articles that are relevant to recent happenings. It shows
visitors how up to date we are!

Timwi


subject: [Wikitech-l] Spambot

body:
There's been a spambot active for the last few days. It uses a number (2-15)
of open proxies simultaneously to edit at a high rate, often on small
unattended wikis. It finds pages by spidering. Each anonymous proxy seems to
represent an autonomously spidering bot -- the bots often repeat each
others' work, adding the offending external link multiple times. Over the
last few days it's probably made over 1000 edits. The site in question is a
Chinese Internet marketing company called EMMSS.

The open proxy blocking code I've been developing since the discussion on
open proxies at wikien-l still has some teething problems. It should help if
it's tweaked somewhat for this particular situation (I originally intended
it for human vandals). However there's a few other features on my wishlist
which I think would help to deal with this sort of problem.

One is a combined recent changes, showing all wikimedia wikis. This would
allow people to watch for anomalous activity on usually quiet wikis. I
imagine this would share code with the socket-based IRC bot which is in
development.

Another much-requested feature is enhancement of the rollback function,
especially to allow for page deletion. The bot created many pages,
apparently by following red links. In my opinion, the ideal feature would be
to allow the user to supply a list of IP addresses and usernames, and then
to revert every edit from those users with a single click. People cleaning
up after this spambot often had to revert manually because the bot had
edited the same page with multiple IP addresses. For completeness it would
be nice to include page-move reversion.

For now we've been dealing with this using filters and editor manpower.
Filters are bad, they're against the wiki security model. I'd much rather
put more power into the hands of users to deal with these situations, than
to continue a filter-based arms race.

If anyone wants to help out with features such as these, please speak up.

In case anyone's wondering, the main response to this problem so far has
been to contact a developer, who makes then makes any willing editors
temporary sysops on the wikis under attack.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
Timwi-
> I believe whoever wrote this feature should really fix this, since (as
> you said) they are bound to be the one who knows the feature best.

Please always check CVS HEAD first, or at least test.wikipedia.org. Jens
has already fixed this bug, and also added the ability to use links and
other formatting in captions. This however necessitated some significant
code changes, that and other current happenings in the unstable branch
mean that it will probably still take a few weeks until these fixes/
features go live.

Regards,

Eirk


from_name: Jake Nelson

subject: [WikiEN-l] Special:Recent Vandalisms

body:
I like the idea, Magnus... though personally I suspect IPs by default, and
found myself wishing for a way (other than convincing them to log in) to
make the (seemingly about half) 'good' IPs not show up on 'hide logged-in
users' RC.

So working off that, I'd say a three-state setup: default, suspect, trusted.
Sysops start out trusted, everyone else at default.
Recent Vandalisms (Recent Suspect Changes? We do need a better name...)
would list all non-trusted IPs and all suspect logged-in users.

Just my thoughts.

-- Jake


body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

> Timwi-
>
>>I believe whoever wrote this feature should really fix this, since (as
>>you said) they are bound to be the one who knows the feature best.
>
> Please always check CVS HEAD first, or at least test.wikipedia.org.

I have. Both are broken.

> Jens
> has already fixed this bug, and also added the ability to use links and
> other formatting in captions.

Ah, good to hear. Thanks!

Timwi


from_name: Carl Witty

body:
On Thu, 2004-03-11 at 06:42, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Daniel Mayer wrote:
> >... some people have proposed a neat alternative enforcement of the
> >new 3-revert policy: If you revert the same article more than three
> >times in one day, the page gets protected as the version you were
> >reverting. Thus your version gets pushed into the article's history.
>
> That's something I could enthusiastically support.
>
> --Jimbo

This is vulnerable to vandals with sock-puppets:

sock-puppet A vandalizes page
sock-puppet B reverts to non-vandalized version
sock-puppet C reverts to vandalized version
sock-puppet B reverts to non-vandalized version
sock-puppet D reverts to vandalized version
sock-puppet B reverts to non-vandalized version -- oops, page is
protected as vandalized version

Carl Witty


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Spambot

body:
Evan Prodromou wrote:

>>>>>>"TS" == Tim Starling <ts4294967296 at hotmail.com> writes:
>
>     >> Here's one idea -- a switch to toggle a captcha.
>
> That's an extremely good idea. Only one problem: I believe that there
> are patent issues around captchas. Not saying that Wikipedia couldn't
> get a patent license, but it'd have to stay out of the distributed
> MediaWiki code.

LiveJournal uses CAPTCHA and I'm not aware that they are paying any
licenses for that. Knowing Brad, I'm pretty sure he wouldn't have done
it if that had been necessary.


from_name: Karl Eichwalder

in_reply_to:
<c2qthh$nvr$1@sea.gmane.org> (timwi@gmx.net's message of "Thu,
	11 Mar 2004 23:42:31 +0000")

body:
Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> writes:

> And in particular, it still has this bug that
> [[Image:blah|thumb|''em'']] comes out as <em>em</em> rather
> than em.

Also whitespace handling is dubious.  Code as follows may or may not
work:

    [[Image:blah | thumb | 300px | right | foo]]

Allowing spaces around "|" is important - otherwise lines get too long
and horizontal sliders are addding unnecessarily to the edit boxes.

--
                                                         |      ,__o
                                                         |    _-\_<,
http://www.gnu.franken.de/ke/                            |   (*)/'(*)


from_name: Ashar Voultoiz

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Re: Spambot

body:
On Thu, 11 Mar 2004 22:32:45 -0500, Evan Prodromou wrote:

>>>>>> "TS" == Tim Starling <ts4294967296 at hotmail.com> writes:
>
>     >> Here's one idea -- a switch to toggle a captcha.
>
> That's an extremely good idea. Only one problem: I believe that there
> are patent issues around captchas. Not saying that Wikipedia couldn't
> get a patent license, but it'd have to stay out of the distributed
> MediaWiki code.
>
> I'm not sure about this and I'm not turning up any terribly
> informative Google hits except this one:
>
>    http://www2.parc.com/istl/projects/captcha/history.htm
>
> ~ESP

Hello,

Although it's a good idea to prevent vandalism, it will also block harmless
block that solve disambiguation, correct typos, convert html tables to wiki
tables, updates interwikis ...

Since the migration end of 2002, our bot made more than 30 000 edits out of
the 300 000 (considering oldid in #frrc).

cheers,

--
Ashar Voultoiz
http://fr.wikipedia.org/Utilisateur:Hashar
do not send mail to listme at listme.dsbl.org


from_name: Jimmy Wales

body:
David Rodeback wrote:

> Gabriel Wicke <groups at ...> writes:
> >
> > No more image bandwidth used by the following sites:
> > # image theft acls
> > acl imgurl urlpath_regex -i \.(jpg|gif|png)$
> > acl badimgref referer_regex -i wikipedia.t-st.de
> > acl badimgref referer_regex -i worldhistory.com
> > acl badimgref referer_regex -i yourencyclopedia.net
> > acl badimgref referer_regex -i wordiq.com
> > acl badimgref referer_regex -i artpolitic.org
> > acl badimgref referer_regex -i ruv.net
> > # deny access
>
> Mr. Wicke,
>
> I speak only for WorldHistory.com in making the following comments and posing
> the following questions, but I suspect our situation is common to most or all
> of the sites you have labeled "bandwidth thieves."
>
> Comments:
>
> First, please note that WorldHistory.com would like to continue mirroring
> wikipedia content, but that content has considerably less appeal without the
> images.
>
> Second, please note that we linked directly to images at wikipedia's site not
> in an effort to steal bandwidth, but out of respect for your bandwidth. It
> seemed -- and to me still seems, I must confess -- a very respectful
> alternative to trying to spider all the images. After considerable exploration,
> we were able to find no available alternative at Wikipedia for obtaining
> images, and no clearly defined contact for making inquiries.
>
> Questions:
>
> PhatNav.com apparently has its own copy of all the images. By what mechanism
> might such a copy be obtained and regularly updated by others?
>
> de.freepedia.org links to wikipedia images in the same way WorldHistory.com
> does. Have they made some special arrangement to avoid being blocked? If so,
> what arrangements might the rest of us make? Whom should one contact to discuss
> such arrangements?
>
> Is there a downloadable archive of images in the immediate future?
>
> Thank you for your consideration. If you would prefer to discuss any of this
> privately, please e-mail me at DavidRodeback at att.net, and I will be happy to
> discuss this by e-mail or to telephone you.
>
> David Rodeback
> Technical Officer
> WorldHistory.com
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


body:
David Rodeback wrote:
> Second, please note that we linked directly to images at wikipedia's
> site not in an effort to steal bandwidth, but out of respect for
> your bandwidth. It seemed -- and to me still seems, I must confess
> -- a very respectful alternative to trying to spider all the
> images. After considerable exploration, we were able to find no
> available alternative at Wikipedia for obtaining images, and no
> clearly defined contact for making inquiries.

I'd like to ask that this block on worldhistory be dropped
immediately, as David has a point here, and he's being very courteous
to come here and chat about it.

Since I am paying for bandwidth, not the other Wikimedia Foundation
donors, and since I'm not worried about this right now, we can be lax
about it.  Perhaps we could even unblock the others on a theory of
"innocent until proven guilty".

Let's brainstorm about this problem, because it's increasingly common.

I think we should eventually (but sooner rather than later) have a
tarball of images.  Inside the tarball there should be a
README.Licensing that explains in plain English what's going on, and
we should include a copy of the GNU FDL and what not.  The license is
complicated and tricky to apply in a case like this, in my opinion.

The problem is *not* as some might suppose the "fair use" images.
Those are o.k. for us to distribute under the doctrine of fair use,
although it's only fair to warn re-users that they need to think about
how fair use might apply to whatever it is that they are doing.

The problem is possibly with the attribution and history requirements
of the license and so on.  It's too early in the morning for me to
really consider what would be involved exactly, but we all know the
drill.

--Jimbo


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] Bird and his "sock flock"

body:
We have not been considering this matter.

Fred

> From: "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2004 11:00:13 -0500
> To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Bird and his "sock flock"
>
> The 72-hour block on user:Bird and his flock of sock puppets expires
> today.
>
> Has the Arbitration Committee come to any decision? (I'm not planning to
> extend the block; I'd rather write articles than do this kind of stuff.)
>
> Ed Poor
> Bird-brained bureaucrat
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


subject: [Wikitech-l] Rethinking vandalism

body:
As usual, Erik has great insight.  I'm sure that there are some
drawbacks to be considered that he hasn't mentioned, but he makes a
very persuasive case.

I should point out that I personally regard cookie paranoia as
media-driven ignorance, and so while it's my job to be sympathetic to
the concerns of everyone, I find it hard to step into the shoes of
those who are anti-cookie, as I find their objections to be mostly
incoherent and ill-informed.  :-)

Cookies provide a great mechanism for increasing anonymity *and*
accountability, two issues that are often in tension against each
other.

Erik Moeller wrote:

> We should set permanent cookies on every pageview except saves, require
> cookies for saving pages, assign random account names (anon2349bx29s) to
> anonymous editors, and use cookies to block most users.
>
> We should do away with IP numbers in page histories, recent changes etc.
> completely.
>
> We should retain the ability to block by IP in emergencies.
>
> This would address several current problems and have several advantages.
>
> 1) Having users' IP numbers published all over the place is a quite
> serious privacy violation. It would be trivial to scan recent changes for
> hosts with open ports and security vulnerabilities. Furthermore, it
> reveals geographic information about anonymous editors which they may want
> to keep private (such information can be very specific, depending on the
> ISP).
>
> 2) Banning anonymous users by IP affects anyone who also uses the same IP.
> In case of proxies, this may be thousands of individuals. If the first
> message we send a new user - because they share a vandal IP - is "You are
> banned from editing for serious vandalism", that user is unlikely to
> become a regular contributor. Even regulars are frequently pissed off
> because they accidentally get blocked.
>
> 3) Banning users by IP is also ineffective, as for most users, it is
> trivial to get a new dynamic IP address.
>
> 4) For repeat vandals, we can set a very high or unlimited expiry without
> fear of blocking someone else.
>
> 5) Requiring cookies even for anons allows them to change their user
> preferences even without creating an account.
>
> 6) We can more easily attribute edits to users and easily change anon
> edits over to real accounts when people decide to create an account. This
> may also address some copyright issues.
>
> Now, regarding some possible criticisms:
>
> 1) "They will just delete the cookie and edit away." Yes, some users will
> do that. For these users, we should retain the ability to block by IP
> (without revealing that IP address to sysops). However, doing so requires
> an understanding of how the blocking mechanism works, which most users
> don't have. They will have to know how to *remove* cookies, not just
> disable them. The user will have to keep deleting the cookie every time it
> is re-blocked. And sysops don't have to be hesitant about blocking them,
> because no other users can be affected by it. So we can in fact make this
> a single-click operation, making it costly for the average user, and cheap
> for us.
>
> 2) "I have cookies disabled for privacy reasons!" Then you can't be
> editing Wikipedia non-anonymously. We already require cookies for signed
> in users. Most modern browsers allow enabling cookies on a case-by-case
> basis. If a user tries to edit a page without having cookies enabled, we
> will let them know that they need to enable them. If you are concerned
> about privacy, you should be more concerned about having IP addresses
> publicized everywhere, even stored permanently in the page history.
>
> 3) "This won't help us to deal with the most egregious vandals." Maybe,
> maybe not. A vandal using a script would have to do the same thing as a
> malicious user -- get a fresh cookie from a regular pageview, use that
> cookie to submit an edit, then discard the cookie. This isn't hard to do,
> but I doubt the average kiddie will be able to figure it out. On the other
> hand, we can build more extreme anti-vandalism measures on top of this,
> like disabling edits by any completely new contributor (= not setting any
> new cookies) for a few hours.
>
> All in all, I think this would greatly reduce the time spent on fighting
> vandalism, and allow us to focus on more important matters, like creating
> an encyclopedia.
>
> Regards,
>
> Erik
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


from_name: KNOTT, T

body:
I don't think one exists. Doing a web search for "pdf to wiki" reveals a loot of other people want one too. There are quite a lot of pdf to html converters, he could try one of those and upload the pages in html. Then we could all pitch in and  convert to wiki manually.

Theresa

-----Original Message-----
From: Karl Wick [mailto:karlwick at yahoo.com]
Sent: 11 March 2004 22:10
To: text
Subject: [Textbook-l] convert .doc & .pdf into wiki format (and compiletexts to print)

Anyone know tools to convert ms.doc or adobe.pdf format
files to Wiki format? Like a script or website .. There is
a gentleman who would like to contribute his
German-language textbook to the project and has everything
ready in these two formats. It is 150 pages w- 100 images,
not a quick porting document.

Also, Sanford is asking about printing capabilities. Any
word there ? Such as from the Rice project?

Good will to all,
Karl

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Search - Find what you're looking for faster
http://search.yahoo.com
_______________________________________________
Textbook-l mailing list
Textbook-l at wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/textbook-l


subject: [Wikitech-l] Rethinking vandalism

body:
Evan Prodromou wrote:
>     EM> All in all, I think this would greatly reduce the time spent
>     EM> on fighting vandalism, and allow us to focus on more important
>     EM> matters, like creating an encyclopedia.
>
> Or, y'know, fostering the community that's needed to create an
> encyclopedia.

Absolutely.  One of my biggest concerns is that problem users exhaust
good contributors and make them snap at each other.  Problem users
cause us to suspect the motives of good people too often.

Some people have a strong internal compass to guide their behavior in
a good way.  Others, many many others, are basically good people but
who will conform to whatever a culture has as norms.  A culture in
which vandals are allowed to pester people is a culture which will
cause more good people to dabble in vandalism and pranks.

One of the brilliant insights of the Wikipedia community is that soft
security can work, that most people are basically good.  So I'm always
in favor of anything that meets my "strict scrutiny" test of being
costly to bad behavior while not costing much for good behavior.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] Spambot

body:
Well, I think 5 is an unnecessarily high threshold, but yes I
absolutely can see the merit in having 2 sysops approve something like
this before it takes effect.  I'll have to think about that.

I'm just generally in favor of being cautious about hierarchy and
power, and doing just whatever is minimally necessary to accomplish
our goals.

Nicolas Weeger wrote:

> >This sounds like a wonderful idea, but I see a big problem with it.
> >If we had such a feature some sysops would be tempted to use it as
> >punishment against some bad users.  There's a certain amount of
> >'vigilantism' that I've grumpily tolerated because it's very minor and
> >the people usually "deserve it" in some sense.  But this would open a
> >huge new can of worms.
>
> What about something that'd require multiple sysop approval? Like, 5
> sysops to check something & click to confirm?
> Even if it's harder to do, it sounds really more 'safe', as finding 5
> sysops willingly 'punishing' a user with this feature seems hard.
> Also, there could be a strict policy on that: any sysop using this against
> anything but a spambot gets unsysop right away (of course, i assume a
> sysop doing this would in any case lose some respect from his community).
>
> Nicolas 'Ryo'
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Spambot

body:
Tim Starling wrote:
> Captchas could slow down the attack somewhat. Let's say he uses 10 IP
> addresses on 7 wikis. That means he would have to perform about 70
> captchas. If each captcha takes 10 seconds, then it would require about
> 11 minutes of human time to perform the attack. Of course, he spent far
> longer than 11 minutes developing the bot, but it does put a practical
> limit on the scale and speed of the attack.

It also means that he has to display what's going on in a browser,
rather than doing the whole thing from a perl script for example.  To
me, anyhow, that would be a daunting task, but then again, automating
a browser isn't something I know much about.

My thinking is just that when he sees the captcha and realizes that
his entire script has to be rewritten from scratch, he might just
realize that it's totally not worth it.

One good thing about spammers is that they are lazy and only in it for
the money, as opposed to an ideological opponent or random lunatic who
might spend a completely absurd amount of time trying to get around
something.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Spambot

body:
Good grief.  The patent system is out of control.

Actually, since the original captcha idea is in fact clever, and since
I'm not a totally anti-patent person, I could it being reasonable to
reward the inventors of the idea with a 2 year patent.  17 years is an
infinity.

I wonder if there are things that we've developed in house here at
Wikimedia that we should patent, just to license our patents freely
of course, and also to make fun of the patent system.

--Jimbo

Evan Prodromou wrote:

> >>>>> "TS" == Tim Starling <ts4294967296 at hotmail.com> writes:
>
>     >> Here's one idea -- a switch to toggle a captcha.
>
> That's an extremely good idea. Only one problem: I believe that there
> are patent issues around captchas. Not saying that Wikipedia couldn't
> get a patent license, but it'd have to stay out of the distributed
> MediaWiki code.
>
> I'm not sure about this and I'm not turning up any terribly
> informative Google hits except this one:
>
>    http://www2.parc.com/istl/projects/captcha/history.htm
>
> ~ESP
>
> --
> Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
> Wikitravel - http://www.wikitravel.org/
> The free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Spambot

body:
This is a nice extension, assuming it doesn't add a lot of programming
complexity.

Sheldon Rampton wrote:
> That's a nice idea, but I'd suggest adding some more precision to the
> throttle, similar to the way a cron job works, e.g.,
>
> user     page     throttle.minute     throttle.hour     throttle.day
> expiration
> jwales  DNA     2     10     25     (timestamp)
> wik     *     *     *     3
>
> This would say that user jwales can make up to 2 edits per minute, up
> to 10 per hour, and up to 25 per day on the DNA article, while user
> wik can only make up to 3 edits per day on all articles combined.

There may be some ambiguity here in the meaning of '*'.  To me, the
Wik line says "for each article, Wik may make up to 3 edits per day",
as opposed to "3 edits per day on all articles combined".

I'm not sure at the moment which interpretation is more natural or
more desirable in terms of our goals.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] Blocked usernames

body:
David Speakman wrote:
> Isn't there a "red flag" list of blocked troll-tempting or obviously
> inflamatory usernames to head off future disputes?

I don't think so, really.  It's sort of hard to come up with an a
priori list, and such a list might actually lead to even more
argument.

This is one of those areas where thoughtfulness, respect, care, love,
and all that gooey stuff can work well to resolve a complex issue.

There's no huge freedom of expression issue with usernames, since
username is not content.  Usernames are a matter of living together in
a co-operative community, and reasonableness all around is the way to
go.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Creative Commons Licence

body:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
> But fair use photos are also not GNU free.  And what about photos which
> are fair use *and* CC-ND?  Isn't this better than photos which are fair
> use with no license?  I should note that CC-ND explicitly places
> encyclopedias under the category of a collective work.  As long as you
> don't modify the image itself (beyond that allowed by fair use), you're
> fine.

I think that's a very interesting question, actually.  I'm very
inclined to say yes.

What I'm firmly against is any images that we can use because of our
special status.  That is, images licensed just to us for just our use
as an example.  Images licensed under non-free terms as another
example.

But if we're using it under fair use, and it meets our guidelines for
fair use (mainly that there's no possible free alternative, and that
fair use would be fair use for almost anyone) so that we're
comfortable using it, and it is *additionally* available under a
semi-free or nearly-free license, that sounds good to me.

What we want to avoid, though, is a reliance on CC-ND in cases where
if we tried, we could successfully "make the sale" to someone for a
reallly free license.

--Jimbo


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [WikiEN-l] When everything reminds you of Wikipedia

body:
I /really/ have to take some time off. I can't even read the funnies
without something reminding me of Wikipedia.

Ban the ban! Push the button! Down with hierarchy!

http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/luann/archive/images/luann200404880131
2.gif

Is it starting to get to me? No, it /got/ to me...

Why can't we just sit back quietly and write articles?

(signed)

Loston Lerrom, aka Ann Angram


subject: [WikiEN-l] Transition to WikiDemocracy

body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:
> The arbitration committee was created, not for vandals and
> troublemakers, but for long-running personality conflicts or
> style/content disputes. But when there's a troll loose in the dungeon,
> we need to the authority to act quickly and quarantine the problem.

You have that, and have had it for some time.  This certainly
qualified as an emergency.

> I did not plan to be the one to force the issue; I had hoped to avoid
> even the slightest hint of "unilateral action", but todays' crisis
> seemed to call for what we might call "citizen's arrest". Responding to
> repeated calls for help, I blocked a user and all his known puppet
> accounts. This action requires immediate review by the Arbitration
> Committee.

Well, unless someone has a beef, I see no reason for it to come to
that.

This is exactly why we gave sysops the technical ability to block
logged-in users.  We're cautious about using it, and it's sometimes
controversial, but in this particular case, I see no reason for it to
be so.  You acted out of good faith, and additionally it was obviously
to me the right thing to do.

There's no problem here, and no need for a policy change, because
policy already fully supports what you did.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] The bird squawks

body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:
> them to thier face they are a bunch of thugs with no legitimacy, no
> democratic foundation and no purpose but to exclude effective criticisms
> from this liberal propaganda effort.

That's really funny to me.  Ed Poor is well-known to be politically
conservative, so accusing him of supporting a liberal propaganda
effort is pretty rich.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] Bird

body:
Arno M wrote:
> So what is Jimbo's response to this little edict? Another "all you
>need is love" approach?

Sure, all you need is love of Special:Blockip.  :-)

Look, we do have to be tolerant of a wide variety of perspectives on
how editing should be done, how the course of the articles should go,
etc.  But we need not tolerate people who rant and curse at us and
accuse of authoritarianism because we won't accept their extreme bias
as being a neutral presentation.

--Jimbo