subject: No subject

body:
?You must also ensure that your assertions about
alternative uses are both significant and verifiable, using
appropriate attribution and citation.?

Now, applying this new technology of logic instead of that
common sense thing, if something must have something, yet
doesn?t, should it be allowed to remain?  If so, how long?
If indefinite (infinite), then that?s the same as saying
that articles do not require NPOV.  Any article can remain
as long as one likes regardless of what NPOV states.

~~Pro-Lick
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/User:Halliburton_Shill
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Pro-Lick
http://www.wikiality.com/User:Pro-Lick (now a Wikia supported site)

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list: wikien-l

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subject: No subject

body:
lately but being contentious in AfD.  Time to move back to the sciences, and
FACs.

It does help to join a Wiki project, though, that's how you get personal
stalkers who know you're likely to use turgid prose that should be corrected
even when you don't make a spelling error.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Brown_algae&diff=prev&oldid=103686635
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Don%27t_stuff_beans_up_your_nose&diff=prev&oldid=103676034
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Silas_Kopf&diff=prev&oldid=103078500

KP


subject: No subject

body:
"But there is a potential downside to hiring the likes of Dezenhall: If word gets out, you stand to be seen as on the ropes and willing to do anything to win."

Fred


subject: No subject

body:
ice, Wicked Wide Web"

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=3D9F0CE3DC1630F932A05751C1=
A9609C8B63

'As a Web 2.0 site or a blog becomes more popular, a growing percentage o=
f its reader contributions devolve into vitriol, backstabbing and name-ca=
lling (not to mention Neanderthal spelling and grammar). Participants add=
ress each other as ''idiot'' and ''moron'' (and worse) the way correspond=
ents of old might have used ''sir'' or ''madam."'

Fred


subject: No subject

body:
"One thing is clear, however: the uncivil participants are driving away t=
he civil ones. The result is an acceleration of the cycle, and an increas=
ing proportion of hostile remarks."

Fred


subject: No subject

body:
7. DEZENHALL TELLS PUBLISHERS: OPENNESS IS CENSORSHIP
http://www.prwatch.org/node/5672
  "A group of big scientific publishers has hired"
aggressive public relations executive Eric Dezenhall "to
take on the free-information movement," reports Jim Giles.
"Some traditional journals, which depend on subscription
charges, say that open-access journals and public databases
... threaten their livelihoods." Dezenhall "spoke to
employees from Elsevier, Wiley and the American Chemical
Society at a meeting arranged last July by the Association
of American Publishers." AAP subsequently hired his firm,
Dezenhall Resources. In emails obtained by Nature,
Dezenhall suggested the publishers claim that "public
access equals government censorship" and "equate
traditional publishing models with peer review." He
recommended they work with the Competitive Enterprise
Institute and gave his campaign fee as $300,000 to 500,000.
In another email, Wiley's director of corporate
communications said Dezenhall told the publishers they "had
acted too defensively" and "worried too much about making
precise statements."
SOURCE: Nature, January 24, 2007

9. A CO-OPERATIVE APPROACH TO FAKE NEWS
http://www.prwatch.org/node/5670
  When one satellite media tour (SMT) -- a sponsored,
canned TV "interview" -- promotes multiple products, it's
called a "co-op media tour." PR Week reports that "co-op
media tours are on the rise, and not just because they
spread the production costs among multiple brands." Michele
Wallace of the broadcast PR firm Medialink Worldwide says
that "numerous products centered around a theme ... can
provide a pretty strong news hook that may not be there
when you focus on one product." PR Week's tips include
making "sure your co-op tour doesn't appear too
commercialized." News Broadcast Network's Matthew Smith
says disclosure concerns haven't affected "the overall
interest in co-op tours," but adds that "stations want to
know if the spokesperson is being paid and by whom so they
can convey that to the audience." Whether TV stations
actually doprovide that disclosure to viewers is another
matter altogether.
SOURCE: PR Week (sub req'd), January 22, 2007

~~Pro-Lick
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/User:Halliburton_Shill
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Pro-Lick
http://www.wikiality.com/User:Pro-Lick (now a Wikia supported site)

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subject: No subject

body:
s
needed to help persons in the project experiencing periodic, situational
difficulties. Were are dealing with creative personalities here, and, like
it or not, this creativity comes with a certain degree of fragility, and,
yes, flakiness (very definitely, me included =AD in fact I=B9ve been called
things I had to look up).

To even suggest that if someone burns out, there are hundreds waiting in th=
e
wings to replace them is to dehumanize them.

I=B9m going to chew on this some more. But whatever proposal I come up with i=
s
probably going to require people to do some thinking outside the Wikibox;
but why the hell not =AD something=B9s not working within it.

Marc Riddell


subject: No subject

body:
Editors were there to lend expert advice on their subject area only,
in other areas they are just like Authors. They weren't meant to have
any power beyond that. There is certainly nothing there to suggest
that policy decisions will lie with the editors. Their expertise is in
their subject area, not policy making.

I have nothing to do with Citizendium because I don't like having the
jump through hoops signing up to a site before I can even read it. I
was considering getting involved once it was out of beta and it could
be read without signing up. I very much doubt I'll bother, now.


subject: No subject

body:
Academy Awards?
http://movies.msn.com/movies/oscars2007/?icid=ncoscartagline1


subject: No subject

body:
"Being right about an issue does not mean you're not being
a dick yourself! Dicks can be right =97 but they're still dicks;
if there's something in what they say that is worth hearing,
it goes unheard, because no one likes listening to dicks,
no matter how right they are."


subject: No subject

body:
register an account, then go to a page asking him whether the photo he's
going to upload was shot by himself or found on the net, and then he
should be sent to the appropriate upload page.

Regards,

	jens


subject: No subject

body:
in high school who can't even spell when I provide higher-level concepts  on
a subject that I have had a major interest, something's very wrong.
Moreover, I people use the ad hominems on me, but I get the extension to the  block,
and I've been reading Wikipedia for years, started the editing account in  late
'05, even began articles such as the GuideStar article.  Am I in COI  because
I began the GuideStar article but also was a major founder of a  nonprofit?
No, but I'm in COI because I talk knowledgeably about a  subject.  The
article's ruined right now.

I understand you're saying that with people of sufficient  honor, we can
hopefully get away with it. It's plausible to me, but I  can't see any
clear revision to the COI guidelines that will keep only the  honorable
people doing this, and -- just as important -- keep them from  being
eventually corrupted. We don't have the mechanisms to enforce  honesty
that a major research institution does, and I don't think we'll be  able
to afford to build them for a decade or more.

Well, Wikipedia's gotten a good deal of public support.   Now  it's coming at
me not only with anarchy, my complaint from before, but  totalitarianism.
LOL!

<snip>
>>> More similar, I think, would be to  compare historians who write works on
>>> commission.  These  are generally paid for by an interested party,[...]
>>>
>>>
>> I'd be  intrigued to read more about this, but my guess is that it would
>>  require several conditions for it to work:
>>
>>   1. The company would have to have a clear and special interest  in
>>       being seeing as completely  forthright.
>>    2. The historian would have to be  somebody with an established
>>       reputation  and solid credentials.
>>    3. The historian would do a  relatively small amount of work for the
>>        commissioning party. (E.g., they would not be a staff  historian.)
>>    4. The historian would not primarily do  commissioned work.
>>
>
> The last  three at least seem to be the case here---an established and
>  well-respected contributor is asking if writing the occasional article
> for a paid commissioner would be okay.  I think the first is  actually
> better to avoid having to decide, since the motives of  companies are
> rather difficult to discern---so long as the writer is  not a staff
> historian, and doesn't do this as their main living, then  whether the
> company is interested in forthrightness or not matters  little.
>

No slight intended to Jaap or any of our  contributors but I don't think
the comparison is even close. A  professional historian with an
established reputation and solid  credentials has put, what, two decades
into getting there? And getting  caught distorting the truth means they
throw that and their professional  future away. Even our very best
editors don't have anything like that on  the line. For those who are
pseudonymous, there is even less penalty for  ethical missteps.
Historians are human too.  I've had problems with them before, but I  still
end up with Bs in college history, not higher, not lower.  I'm  planning to go
back to college even, but in World War II, I should have done  better.  I've
studied it, along with the Civil War, since I was a  kid.

Why, there's complaint about the article on  the American  Civil War being
"long," and it bothers me.  There's not even a  definition of "First Defender" I
can find yet.

What about pseudonyms when you reveal your real name on your user page  then?
 I use that of my grandfather, John Wallace Rich, for example,  who was KIA
in World War II.

And those historians work in a field where academic norms of
intellectual independence and honesty have been built up over centuries,
with detection and enforcement mechanisms to match. Not to mention years
of training in research and writing for every person involved. We aren't
even close to having that kind of infrastructure.
As far as I'm concerned, there's too much of a lack of ethics in school as
well.  I've seen it firsthand, and though I've only read half of _The  Closing
of the American Mind_, I still think we need more checks and  balances.

As to item 1, again it comes back to conflict of interest. If  Intel pays
some professional technology journalist to expand our computer  science
articles, more power to them, as I don't see them as having an  interest
in distorting them. But as soon as they want changes to anything  where
there is a conflict of interest, we should say no.
Yes, but then you see the slippery slope.  Something's wrong here, and  I
think it's selfishness somewhat.  Moreover, I've seen problems with  Wikipedia
for a long time.  People troll articles, and provide sleeping-dog  information.
I can see them yawn in their pajamas on the last Monday in  May.  LOL!

What about the truth for the readers besides just  writing for them?  I don't
think writing for Nazis in 1941 would have been  a good approach.

Vincent

**************************************
 AOL now offers free
email to everyone.  Find out more about what's free from AOL at
http://www.aol.com.


subject: No subject

body:
in high school who can't even spell when I provide higher-level concepts  on
a subject that I have had a major interest, something's very wrong.
Moreover, I people use the ad hominems on me, but I get the extension to the  block,
and I've been reading Wikipedia for years, started the editing account in  late
'05, even began articles such as the GuideStar article.  Am I in COI  because
I began the GuideStar article but also was a major founder of a  nonprofit?
No, but I'm in COI because I talk knowledgeably about a  subject.  The
article's ruined right now.

>I understand you're saying that with people of sufficient honor, we  can
>hopefully get away with it. It's plausible to me, but I can't see  any
>clear revision to the COI guidelines that will keep only the  honorable
>people doing this, and -- just as important -- keep them from  being
>eventually corrupted. We don't have the mechanisms to enforce  honesty
>that a major research institution does, and I don't think we'll  be able
>to afford to build them for a decade or more.

Well, Wikipedia's gotten a good deal of public support.   Now  it's coming at
me not only with anarchy, my complaint from before, but  totalitarianism.
LOL!

<snip>
>>>> More similar, I think, would be to  compare historians who write works
on
>>>> commission.   These are generally paid for by an interested  party,[...]
>>>>
>>>
>>> I'd be intrigued to read more about this, but my  guess is that it would
>>> require several conditions for it to  work:
>>>
>>>    1. The company would have to  have a clear and special interest in
>>>        being seeing as completely forthright.
>>>    2. The  historian would have to be somebody with an established
>>>   reputation and solid credentials.
>>>   3. The historian would do a relatively small amount of work for  the
>>>       commissioning party. (E.g., they  would not be a staff historian.)
>>>    4. The historian  would not primarily do commissioned work.
>>>
>>
>> The last three at least seem to be the case here---an  established and
>> well-respected contributor is asking if writing the  occasional article
>> for a paid commissioner would be okay.  I  think the first is actually
>> better to avoid having to decide, since  the motives of companies are
>> rather difficult to discern---so long  as the writer is not a staff
>> historian, and doesn't do this as  their main living, then whether the
>> company is interested in  forthrightness or not matters little.
>>

>No  slight intended to Jaap or any of our contributors but I don't think
>the  comparison is even close. A professional historian with an
>established  reputation and solid credentials has put, what, two decades
>into getting  there? And getting caught distorting the truth means they
>throw that and  their professional future away. Even our very best
>editors don't have  anything like that on the line. For those who are
>pseudonymous, there is  even less penalty for ethical missteps.
>Historians are human too.  I've had problems with them before, but  I still
end up with Bs in college history, >not higher, not lower.  I'm  planning to
go back to college even, but in World War II, I should have done  >better.
I've studied it, along with the Civil War, since I was a  kid.

Why, there's complaint about the article on  the American  Civil War being
"long," and it bothers me.  There's not even a  definition of "First Defender" I
can find yet.

What about pseudonyms when you reveal your real name on your user page  then?
 I use that of my grandfather, John Wallace Rich, for example,  who was KIA
in World War II.

>And those historians work in a field where academic norms of
>intellectual independence and honesty have been built up over centuries,
>with detection and enforcement mechanisms to match. Not to mention years
>of training in research and writing for every person involved. We aren't
>even close to having that kind of infrastructure.

As far as I'm concerned, there's too much of a lack of ethics in school as
well.  I've seen it firsthand, and though I've only read half of _The  Closing
of the American Mind_, I still think we need more checks and  balances.

>As to item 1, again it comes back to conflict of interest. If Intel  pays
>some professional technology journalist to expand our computer  science
>articles, more power to them, as I don't see them as having an  interest
>in distorting them. But as soon as they want changes to  anything where
>there is a conflict of interest, we should say no.

Yes, but then you see the slippery slope.  Something's wrong here, and  I
think it's selfishness somewhat.  Moreover, I've seen problems with  Wikipedia
for a long time.  People troll articles, and provide sleeping-dog  information.
I can see them yawn in their pajamas on the last Monday in  May.  LOL!

What about the truth for the readers besides just  writing for them?  I don't
think writing for Nazis in 1941 would have been  a good approach.

Vincent

____________________________________
 AOL now offers free email to everyone. Find out more about what's free from
AOL  at _AOL.com_
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**************************************
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subject: No subject

body:
Rob Church's first law: There is no smoke without fire. There is no cry of unilateralism without an action rooted in common sense.

Charles

-----------------------------------------
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subject: No subject

body:
"Polls show that about twice as many Americans identify themselves as
"conservative" compared with "liberal", and that ratio has been
increasing for two decades.[1] But on Wikipedia, about three times as
many editors identify themselves as "liberal" compared with
"conservative".[2] That suggests Wikipedia is six times more liberal
than the American public. "

Yeah, that's how statistics work :)

> I don't doubt that our editors are more "liberal" than the average American
> - we're also probably better educated than the average American, more
> computer literate than the average American, better informed than the
> average American, and more likely to be non-American than the average
> American.  But how does claiming that "dinosaur" is a Latin-root word,
> discussing the amount of space on the ark
> http://www.conservapedia.com/Dinosaur
>
> and including pix of Jesus riding a dinosaur (gone now, but oh so amusing)
> http://www.conservapedia.com/index.php?title=Dinosaur&oldid=17255
>
> somehow balance the "liberal bias"?  Since when do conservatives believe
> that the opposite of liberal is nut?

Can I just make this point again: what did you expect? This is a
website with its POV right there in the name! Of course it has a
conservative bias, of course their arguements aren't going to make
sense, of course it's going to claim that dinosaurs was created on the
6th day! There isn't any logic to it, it's a bunch of people that are
100% certain of their beliefs, and they aren't going to let silly
stuff like "neutrality", "fairness" or "reason" stand in their way.

Have we learned nothing from the Time Cube guy?

--Oskar


subject: No subject

body:
Many years ago in a large city in the northeast USA, a man named John
(Jonbi) Scotland opened a new "free library". This library differed from
other public and community libraries in several ways.

  1. It required no registration to use its books, although
     registration was optional. Registered readers wore name tags to
     identify them, but sometimes some readers would forget their tags.
  2. The library building itself had no locks, though it did have doors
     to keep out the elements.
  3. The library had no paid librarians.
        1. Instead, every reader was considered a volunteer
           "librarian". They were to warn each disruptive reader at
           least 3 times to "shhhhhsh" before reporting them to
           "adlibs". This also applied to readers
        2. There was a small group of "administrative librarians"
           (called "adlibs") that would help "police" the library.
           These ablibs could ask disruptive visitors to leave, though
           the disruptive readers could come back in if they changed
           clothes.
  4. There was no time limit whatsoever on borrowing books, and readers
     could borrow as many books as they wanted at a time.
  5. Readers could also donate books to the library.
  6. There was one room in the library for special books which did have
     a lock, which was only open to registered readers. Registered
     readers could nominate books for protection, but only adlibs could
     place books in need of protection in the locked room.

For awhile, everyone was happy with the new library. Then, things began
to take unexpected turns.

New books began to turn up missing, with no record of who borrowed them.
Adlibs sent out notices to the registered readers (the only ones they
had addresses for), but most registered readers were fairly prompt about
returning borrowed books. In addition, many books, almost of of which
had been borrowed by unregistered readers, were returned in bad
conditions. Some were missing covers, or large chunks of pages (called
"book blanking", which these readers sometimes wrote on the book's
remaining front page).

At other times, unregistered readers would walk up and down the isles,
and write words in the books with large black markers. Most of these
readers were not very intelligent, and so found themselves limited to
writing such simple words and phrases as "poop", "penis" and "kATie
mCAwLipH is h0t".

Many registered readers attempted to report these "vandals", as they
were encouraged to do by the library's "guidelines". However, they had
to witness the vandal vandalizing at least four times within 24 hours,
and have spoken to the person asking them them to desist after each
witnessed occurrence. Even then, adlibs were hesitant to expel vandals,
as they did not want to discourage other unregistered readers from
visiting the library. Adlibs were even known to harass registered
readers who attempted to report vandals, encouraging them not to "bite
the new readers", but in actuality protecting the vandals, rather than
the books being vandalized.

Even when vandalized books were placed in the locked room for protection
by adlibs, other adlibs would promptly place them back on the main
shelves, saying that these books should ba available to everyone.

The library was close to several large schools, and this presented even
more problems. Each of these schools required school uniforms for their
students. Thus the students causing problems resembled other students
who were just in the library to read or borrow books. Because of this,
adlibs were hesitant to speak to these students, as they could not tell
one student apart from the other. The schools were not much help either,
often complaining if one of their students was caught vandalizing, say
it brought shame on the school, and so the vandalism should just be ignored.

The library soon gained a reputation among its registered readers for
having some very good books, many of whom spent much effort finding
books to donate. However, its reputation among the outside world was
considerably less golden. The library became known for its trashy,
unreliable books. Many registered readers would encourage non-members of
the library to come and check out some books. However, after finding
several trashy or vandalized books, most of these non-members would
never return.

Many registered users, fed up with the policies of the library, began
going to other libraries where registration was required to borrow
books, and where there were time limits on borrowing books. In fact,
most libraries today are of this type.

After several years, the library was forced to close, as it no longer
had any books that people wanted to read. Each time a good book was
donated, it was borrowed, and never returned.

It is said that Jonbi Scotland, when he died a few years later, still
did not understand why his vision of the "really-free library" had failed.


subject: No subject

body:
LONDON (Reuters) - If you think "wiki" doesn't sound like English, you
are right. But it's English now.

This word born on the Pacific Island of Hawaii finally got an entry
into the latest edition of the online Oxford English Dictionary along
with 287 other new words.

It has earned it.

"Words are included in the dictionary on the basis of the documentary
evidence that we have collected about them. A while ago this evidence
suggested that wiki was starting to make a name for itself," OED chief
editor John Simpson said in a statement.

"We tracked it for several years, researched its origins and finally
decided it was time to include it in the dictionary,"

But "Wiki Wiki", meaning "quick" in Hawaiian, has a very different
meaning in its new host language: a type of Web page designed so that
its contents can be edited by anyone who accesses it.

That the word acquired a new meaning is attributed to the fact that
commenting and editing on Internet Web sites became faster, the OED's
principle editor of new words, Graeme Diamond said.

"There was no delay in submitting a comment," Diamond said.

The most famous example is the popular Internet encyclopaedia
Wikipedia. Diamond said new Internet-age concept of "wiki" fits well
with the 120-year-old dictionary's own methods.

"Its long tradition of working on collaborative principles means it
has welcomed the contribution of information and quotation evidence
form the public over 150 years," he said.

(c) Reuters 2007. All Rights Reserved.

If you have access to OED, then it's here:
http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50293088?single=1&query_type=word&queryword=wiki&first=1&max_to_show=10

Gareth.

--
Gareth Hughes
garzohugo at gmail.com
public key ID: 0x9F32AF1E


subject: No subject

body:
As an adjective:
"Worthy of notice; remarkable; memorable; noted or distinguished."

As a noun:
"A person or thing of distinction"

Nobel laureates are, objectively speaking, "worthy of notice",
"remarkable", "distinguished" and "a person or thing of distinction".
As are heads of state, popes and winners of Wimbledon. These aren't
subjective opinions, these are *facts*. While there are many things
whose notability is entirely subjective, to suggest that there are no
categories of articles that aren't inherently notable is ludicrous.

The "philosophy" of wikipedia invites all sorts of debates about what
exactly notability is, and that can easily lead to these lines of
thinking. However, if the encyclopedia are to function at all, you
have to remain at some level pragmatic with your opinions. And the
fact is, both pragmatically and philosophically, there are categories
that are, objectively speaking, inherently notable.

--Oskar


subject: No subject

body:
isn't it a policy violation to post on behalf of banned users...? Isn't this
the exact same principle?

--
- Denny


subject: No subject

body:
http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/2007/03/the_wikipedia_factor_in_us_int.html

March 21, 2007

The Wikipedia Factor in U.S. Intelligence

The collaboratively written online encyclopedia Wikipedia, created in
2001, has steadily grown in popularity, credibility and influence to
the point that it is now used and referenced in U.S. Government
intelligence products.

A March 19 profile of Indian Congress Party Leader Rahul Gandhi
prepared by the Open Source Center (OSC) of the Office of Director of
National Intelligence is explicitly derived from "various internet
sources including wikipedia.org." A March 21 OSC profile of Rajnath
Singh, president of India's Bharatiya Janata Party, is likewise
"sourced from wikipedia.org."

An OSC report last year on the leader of the terrorist group
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, Velupillai Prabhakaran, noted that
he and his wife "have two children, a girl and a boy. According to
wikipedia.com, the boy is named Charles Anthony and the girl,
Duwaraha."

The relatively new attentiveness of U.S. intelligence agencies to
Wikipedia and other unorthodox sources (including fas.org) seems like
a healthy development. Of course, like any source and moreso than
some, Wikipedia cannot be used uncritically.

Last December, according to another OSC report, a participant in an
online jihadist forum posted a message entitled "Why Don't We Invade
Wikipedia?" in which "he called on other participants to consider
writing articles and adding items to the online Wikipedia
encyclopedia.... and in this way, and through an Islamic lobby, apply
pressure on the encyclopedia's material."

For various topics related to space physics, "Wikipedia was the most
complete source of information" compared to other highly ranked web
sites, according to an article in the American Geophysical Union's Eos
magazine (13 March 07) by Mark B. Moldwin, et al. But some Wikipedia
entries on space physics, the authors found, also contained mistaken
use of terminology, factual errors and omissions.

"Wikipedia lets anyone write or edit it, which of course makes it
vulnerable to vandalism--as when a picture of the evil Emperor
Palpatine from Star Wars briefly adorned the entry for the new Pope
[Benedict]," notes Eric Rauchway in The New Republic Online (March
21).


subject: No subject

body:
Larry Sanger: "The conclusion you are trying to establish is that we cannot
relicense our versions of Wikipedia articles with GFDL and CC.  Why not?
Does the GFDL explicitly forbid licensing works under another license in
addition?"

Is he seriously suggesting that they can basically just license our works
under whatever license they please as long as they also license it under the
GFDL?

I can't believe they've gone 'live' without even sorting out basic copyright
issues... CZ is a joke.


subject: No subject

body:
chilling.

Marc Riddell


subject: No subject

body:
early days of motion pictures, from the 1890s through the 1920s, but
faded out and went completely out of business by the 1930s.  Somebody
with no apparent true connection with the original company went into
business in the 1990s under that name (long after all of the original
company's copyrights and trademarks had lapsed into the public
domain), and is making questionable claims at being the legitimate
continuer of the original company's tradition, along with some other
wacky claims such as saying they have purchased land on the Moon on
which they soon will be filming movies.

Of course, Wikipedia is "evil" because it fails to take all of this
guy's claims at face value, and persists in having an article about
the classic original company (which is legitimately notable in the
early history of the movie industry) with only a brief paragraph
noting the existence of an unrelated new company of the same name.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Mutoscope_and_Biograph_Company

Naturally, this guy's claims and whines are getting a favorable
reception over on Wikipedia Review, where they see no anti-Wikipedia
rant they don't like.

--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/


subject: No subject

body:
===
"Asking the other parent"

On the other hand, it is very easy to create the appearance of a
changing consensus simply by asking again and hoping that a different
and more sympathetic group of people will discuss the issue. This,
however, is a poor example of changing consensus, and is antithetical
to the way that Wikipedia works. Wikipedia's decisions are based not
on the numerical fact of how many people showed up and voted a
particular way. It is based on a system of good reasons. Attempts to
change consensus must be based on a clear engagement with the reasons
behind the previous consensus - not simply on the fact that today more
people showed up supporting position A than position B.

A good sign that you have not demonstrated a change in consensus, so
much as a change in the people showing up, is if few or none of the
people involved in the previous discussion show up for the new one.
===

IMHO The admin who closes a renomination should look for people who
voted in the first afd who changed their vote from "keep" to "delete"
in determining if consensus really has changed. Lacking that, the
article should stay unless the article is substantially different from
what it was when the article was first nominated. Even that case there
is always the option of reverting it back to its pre-first-nomination
state.


subject: No subject

body:
--
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com


subject: No subject

body:
looking at Wikipedia as-is has to conclude that we're pretty close to
fundamentally and structurally broken.

I don't think he's right; he has a point, but experience has shown
that the thousands of monkeys we do have are creating some pretty good
Shakespeare.  That said, Larry's putting his energy where his mouth
is, and trying a restart of the WP concept remolded along the lines he
thinks fix the things he thinks are broken with WP, at no small
investment of his own effort.  He clearly isn't "over" his personal
issues with Wikipedia, but he's also moving past it.

I think I can see where Erik is coming from in taking this as a
percieved attack; I just think it's easier for us not to do that.

--
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com


subject: No subject

body:
Over-categorization

Over-categorization is what happens when an image is placed in several
categories within the same tree. The general rule is always place an
image in the most specific categories, and not in the levels above
those. An example:

We'll assume that yellow spheres are spheres with a yellow color. We
can think about Category:Yellow spheres and Category:Spheres. The
picture to be categorized shows yellow marbles. We categorize the file
in Category:Yellow spheres. Now, if we also categorize the image file
in Category:Spheres, this is over-categorization: because we already
know that the yellow marbles are spheres. This applies to most images:
As mentioned above files in Category:Paris should not also be in
Category:France, files in Category:Albert Einstein should not be in
Category:Physicists from Germany and so on.

[edit] Why is over-categorization a problem

It's often assumed that the more categories an image is in, the easier
it will be to find it. Another example: By that logic, every image
showing a man should be in Category:Men, because even if you know
nothing more about the person you're looking for than that he is a
man, you'll be able to find it. The result is that the top category
fills up, making it necessary to go through hundreds, or in this case
more likely thousands of images to find the one you want. You probably
won't find what you're looking for, and what's more, those who are
looking for a generic picture of a man to illustrate an article like
en:Man will find that they've drowned out among the movie stars,
scientists and politicians.

On lower levels, the problem becomes less acute, since the number of
images will be smaller =97 they can still easily reach into the
hundreds, though. But there is still a problem: Let's go back to
Einstein. I know that he's a physicist, so I'll look there. I find an
image among the hundreds in the category, which I'm not too happy
with, but it's the only one there. Since there was an image there, I
assume that there are no more hidden elsewhere, rather than look
further in Category:Physicists from Germany and thus find
Category:Albert Einstein where there might be a better one.

*** So over-categorization has led to two problems: The top category
is cluttered, and users will stop looking for the most relevant
category since they've reached one that has a relevant image. ***


list: wikipedia-l

subject: No subject

body:
We teach librarians how to evaluate sources, and how to teach
the students they will help how to evaluate.

For many years we've been
teaching how to evaluate web sources, and both students and
librarians have gotten fairly good at it.  It's even easier to
teach how to evaluate & use WP: paid advertising is not prominent
among the results, and a good deal of material present on the
web is filtered out: if you enter a city name you will not get
airline schedules, weather forecasts, and hotel advertisements.
Even the biases are more likely to be out in the open, and you
can check them by looking at related articles. At a more advanced
level, the edit histories make very good teaching examples.

What students (including library school students) are weak
at is evaluating print sources.

The material you linked to is about as good a statement as
I have seen. I would have emphasized even more the
use of WP as a starting point, and the use of external
links. WP is not primarily a web directory, but it is a useful
web directory nevertheless.

On 1/16/07, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> All,
>
> I received a message (below) from a librarian at a US high school who is
> considering writing a policy for their students regarding the use of
> Wikipedia in research papers. She asked for my input and whether I knew of
> any similar policies in schools -- either middle and high schools or
> colleges and universities. This:
> http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/lists_archive/Humanist/v20/0080.html
> is the kind of thing she's interested in  (this particular policy appears,
> by the way, to be completely sensible -- the main flaws I found were they
> missed the permanent link and citation features, and they called us "the
> world's blog").
>
> I pointed her towards
> * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Schools_FAQ
> * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_Wikipedia
> * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Researching_with_Wikipedia, and
> * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Academic_use
>
> which seem to be en:'s documentation on the subject of academic use. But I'm
> wondering if any of you:
>
> * know of such policies at specific institutions (and if so if you can send
> me a link)
> * know of commentary on, or a list of, such policies (either from our lists
> & sites or other places)
> * have comments about such policies and what should go into them.
> * if any of you are librarians or professors, if you have answers for the
> last question about how WP is handled at reference desks and in classes.
>
> Thanks!
> phoebe (brassratgirl)
>
> here's the message (with specific campus names taken out):
>
> >I am the head librarian at a college prep high school in California. We are
>
> >considering writing a school policy regarding the use of Wikipedia in
> >academic research. I am gathering as much information as I can from
> >universities because I would like our policy and instruction to reflect
> what
> >our students will be met with once they leave us.
> >
> >  Does the University of California have a policy about the use of
> Wikipedia or do professors to
> >set guidelines for its use?
> >
> >  In your opinion, based on your experience at various universities, are
> students allowed to cite it in academic research papers?
> >
> >  Do professors address it at all and how is it handled at the reference
> desk at university libraries.
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.


subject: No subject

body:
and unite to defend the right of be-x-old to exist (which I would personally
welcome if the atmosphere was that of a peaceful coexistence). The
Byelorussian language is quite in bad shape and needs all the help it can
get; wars do not help it, that's for sure.

Berto 'd Sera
Personagi dl'ann 2006 per l'arvista american-a Time (tanme tuti vojaotri)
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569514,00.html

-----Original Message-----
From: wikipedia-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikipedia-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Andrew Gray
Sent: Tuesday, March 27, 2007 5:34 PM
To: wikipedia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] New language

On 27/03/07, Berto 'd Sera <albertoserra at ukr.net> wrote:

> This is a bit pessimistic :) The normative Byelorussian wikipedia just was
> created and substituted the old version, the latter was renamed into
> be-x-old.

Is there any chance you could summarise the byelorussian issue for
those of us who haven't been following it? I've got a query about it
and I don't know where to start looking for details...

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

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


subject: No subject

body:
1) LangCom gave its recommendations,
2) the Board made a decision,
3) the domains have been renamed according to Board decision,
4) as per Board decision we wait for the setup of a Committee that will
decide whether be-x-old shall be shutdown or not.

LangCom scope of activity ended at step 1. We are currently at step 4.

IMHO, you should all stop considering this thing as an internal Byelorussian
fight, because it has long stopped being such. After 4) will come 5) and the
time you waste in internal quarrels is time you should use in preparing a
proper defense for be-x-old, if you care for it.

Let's be very clear: there is a suspect that political misuse *might* have
been larger than just a "stolen ISO code". If this is proved (archives are
archives, checking is easy) then the result of the process is obvious. If
ANY political party/group/sect in ANY linguistic entity needs a wiki for
their propaganda they are welcome to open one AT THEIR OWN EXPENSES but well
away from wmf trademark/resources.

In instead, step 5) might find that be-x-old is just a regular encyclopedia
(IMHO that's what it is, at least as far as I could read myself). Add to
this a peaceful end for this stupid everlasting civil war and although it
won't be me judging I believe that the conclusion would sound like "forget
it, false alarm".

Only do not expect codes to be used improperly. LangCom will oppose ANY
descriptive code; I'd rather drop dead than issuing one. If we issue one for
you today, tomorrow we will have all the separatist groups of the planet
standing in line to get a wiki and a code that will give them some sort of
international recognition + free propaganda. Are you crazy or what!? We will
apply just ANY ISO decision without discussing it, but we are not going to
issue/modify ANYTHING AT ALL ourselves.

My personal wish is that all this will end well and that we will eventually
hold a great social gathering of all Byelorussian wikipedians to share a
beer and celebrate a new period of friendship :) Life's too short to make a
tragedy of it, let's start to see things with a positive stance.

If everything ends well (and we all know that it will probably end well,
after all) both editions will have had 100 times more traffic than they ever
got before just because of this "scandal", which means some 10-15 new users
for both of them. Be positive ;)

DISCLAIMER: this is not a collective LangCom statement, but just my own
individual mail.

Berto 'd Sera
Personagi dl'ann 2006 per l'arvista american-a Time (tanme tuti vojaotri)
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569514,00.html

-----Original Message-----
From: wikipedia-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikipedia-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Yury
Tarasievich
Sent: Wednesday, March 28, 2007 4:41 PM
To: wikipedia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] belarusian wikipedia (be and be-x-old)

Ah, sorry forgot to add. You know, of course, I'm one if the
inititative group of the standard language Belarusian wiki.

So, *personally* I wouldn't mind if the alternative version Be:WP
would retain its previous be.wikipedia.org, AS LONG AS the standard
language Belarusian wiki gets ISO standard code, with no tails or
suffixes, too, -- here it would be *bel.wikipedia.org*. Shouldn't be
too hard to organise making of this small exception??

---

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


subject: No subject

body:
deletion process bites newcomers.

Come on,  I've been a Wikipedian since February last year and I still
don't know the speedy deletion criteria. Do you expect a newcomer to
know them?

Chen Liping is among Singapore's top actresses. In terms of fame,
success, etc. she is probably only matched by Zoe Tay and Fann Wong.
The last time I read her article, it mentioned that she had won
several awards, and I added a sentence about her starring in the movie
The Best Bet. Was this an insufficient assertion of notability, that
the article was speedied?

2007/4/13, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net>:
> Maury Markowitz wrote:
>
> >>Despite the objections raised from time to time about this, I fail to
> >>see the issue. I think it boils down to the generic mistrust of all
> >>administrators that certain people who are not administrators seem to
> >>harbour.
> >>
> >>
> >
> >I've been a contributer to the wiki for five years and an admin for three or
> >four. I object to this sort of behavor, and it has nothing to do with
> >"generic mistrust of all administrators".
> >
> It has everything to do with generic mistrust of administrators because
> it is what creates it.  These people who go ahead and delete things
> following no counsel but there own, and without any effort to correct
> the situation produce an atmosphere where no-one feels certain what an
> admin will delete next.  If we were confident that they were restraining
> themselves to deleting pure vandalism nobody would become concerned.
> Instead their laziness and impatience to have a high quota of deleted
> garbage prevents them from doing minimal searches or trying to start a
> dialogue with the contributor woh was likely acting in good faith.  I
> can't stress enough that it's likely the leading cause of generic
> mistrust of administrators.
>
> >Ok, here's my suggestions:
> >
> >In cases where tagging may result in an article, or significant portions of
> >it, being removed for reasons other than vandalism or similar, the tagger
> >must:
> >
> >1) place a note on the editor's talk page saying the article has been tagged
> >2) place a note (NOT templated) on the article talk page explaining what the
> >problem is. "failed notability" is not good enough
> >
> >Any tags placed that fail to meet these can be summarily deleted. If they
> >are not removed, at the admin's leisure, they are _not_actionable_ until
> >someone DOES meet these criterion or does remove them. Additionally,
> >incorrect tags, prods on NPOV or notability for instance, should be
> >summarily removed. These would fix the vast majority of cases I come across.
> >
> That sounds good, though it is probably less important when only
> significant portions of an article are deleted.  At least then the
> deleted material is easily available through the article's history.
>
> These lazy admins should be treated in the same way they treat
> contributors.  Persistent refusal to treat users with respect should be
> grounds to initiate a request to de-admin.
>
> Ec
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Rob Church

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki as a Wikimedia project

body:
On 07/01/07, GerardM <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> When the Wikimedia Foundation wants to make MediaWiki an official project,
> it has the potential to make this change happen. With this change, the WMF
> however assumes responsibilities that it currently does not have. It
> currently does not take responsibility for the way Brion has too much on his
> plate to finish the many things he did not finish. It can at this moment
> selfishly urge Brion to do whatever because of WMF priorities.

I agree that it is unfair that Brion's stack gets piled high (I should
point out that Tim isn't exactly stuck for things to do most of the
time, either) with projects that someone "official" promises at
Wikimania, but then bitches about when their arbitrary deadline is not
met.

> When the WMF takes responsibility for MediaWiki, it should take much more
> notice of all the other organisations that use MediaWiki and have developed
> their own changes to accommodate needs that the WMF does not feel for its
> projects. Doing this will bring the power of all the people who also
> developing MW, and it will bring the need for integration and support that
> has not really been addressed up to now.

Agreed; if Wikimedia is really serious about pushing wiki, then it
should continue to support MediaWiki in other environments, not just
its own. It is reasonable for us to keep the focus of the software, of
course - MediaWiki is a wiki engine - but it would be unreasonable to
turn around and deprive existing third parties of much of the support
and general community that's sprung up around MediaWiki itself.

I don't think, however, there's any danger of this not happening.

> If this move is intended to bring more volunteer developers to MediaWiki I
> am afraid that it is just window dressing. It will not make much of a
> difference because people come and stay as they like. If you TRULY want more
> developers, having someone dedicated to coaching the people who are new to
> the MediaWiki code would make much more of a difference. Having someone
> coach people who are doing projects and stuff in Universities would really
> help.

Absolutely! New developers come in all very excited about the thing -
they've submitted a few patches, we've generally used those to help
mould them into shape, and we've got a feel for them - but they're
still very "green" - I certainly was. It would make excellent sense if
a more experienced developer was assigned to "mentor" newbies, and I
don't mean that in the sense of being up their noses - I mean that in
a sense of giving their changes a quick eyeball, and being available
to answer the odd email about how something should be done.

Of course, we don't want to abandon eyeballing everyone else's work, either...

Rob Church


from_name: Andre Engels

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Entries for deletion.... issues from the Third
	World

body:
2007/1/7, Frederick Noronha <fred at bytesforall.org>:

I'm not contesting your point... just saying that there needs to be
> some discerning criteria. Thanks for your patience! FN
>

I don't think there can be any other criterium than common sense. The types
of subjects that come up on Wikipedia is too diverse to set a single rule
for all of them.

Google can be useful, but a single cut-off value is not. For some subjects a
single hit that proves existence is enough, for others 1000 hits are still a
very low number. For example, I once saved [[William Gott]] based on a
single Google hit of about 30 that existed then (4000 now) - he did indeed
exist, and that was enough. On the other hand, getting 800 hits for a
web-based program was a 'strong delete' vote.

Maybe even more important than the number of Google hits, is their nature.
Suppose you have a current painter. If they have many Google hits, but many
consisting of places where it seems the painter could have submitted the
material himself, it doesn't count for much. If you have the same number,
but with a number of those links being galleries in various countries
announcing their expositions, it is a clear reason for keeping the article.

--
Andre Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
ICQ: 6260644  --  Skype: a_engels


list: foundation-l

from_name: Michael Snow

subject: [Foundation-l] Fundraising and site notice

body:
Peter van Londen wrote:

> GerardM and community
>
> I do agree with your view. I also think that lack of funds is a serious
> issue and I don't thank the opposition to have achieved not doing more
> matching donations this fundraiser.
>
> I do disagree with you that there is no serious alternative. There is
> and it
> is brought up in a separate thread by Teun Spaans (
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2007-January/026545.html).
>
> It is a separate project aimed at publishing fanstuff with adds (which is
> now part a popular part of every Wikipedia), so that the other
> projects can
> do without adds and we still have money to fund all projects and indeed
> expand on some further ideas.
>
> I don't understand that not more persons seem to be willing to judge
> on this
> idea? I don't care if thorough consideration will have a negative
> outcome,
> if there would be enough reason no to have a Fanpedia, but it is an
> alternative!! And until know it seems to be discarded. Please think
> about it
> and comment on that idea, it is worth considering. It seems that Wikia is
> doing good with this way of funding.

Well, the original suggestion didn't seem to think that the "fanstuff"
is currently being discarded, it indicated that a lot of what we
currently have is "fancruft" and could be moved elsewhere with ads
placed on it. But either way, all this does is get into the problem that
one person's junk is another person's treasure. Imagine how this could
skew an Articles for Deletion process - not only is this stuff we need
to get rid of, we're passing up an opportunity to make money off of it.

Taken to its logical conclusion, the consequence of this idea is that
Wikimedia projects *should* have advertising, and that the advertising
should be used specifically to improve the content. And a very simple
solution presents itself. Anything that is tagged as being disputed,
controversial, needing cleanup, unsourced, original research, vanity, or
a host of other problems - using one of the many such templates on the
English Wikipedia, for example - automatically gets advertising space
added along with the tag. (I'd even include libelous and
copyright-infringing material, except that making money directly from
illegal content would significantly change the potential for liability.)
Furthermore, we no longer need to worry about advertising compromising
the quality of our content, because we're only putting it in places
where it's already compromised.

Once the content is fully compliant with our policies, the advertising
is then removed. The absence of advertising would be the indication that
the quality has been reviewed and meets our standards. In fact, we can
even stop trying to come up with the long-awaited revision-flagging
feature, since we'd already have solved the problem it's designed to
address.

Turning garbage into gold has been a fantasy since the alchemists.
There's a reason it's a fantasy.

--Michael Snow


list: wikimedia-l


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Why is MediaWiki so low-tech?

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

Virgil Ierubino wrote:
> The kind of MediaWiki advanced features I'm talking about could be something
> like instant editing.
[snip]
> What if you could just click next to the relevant
> paragraph, turning it into an edit box on the same page - no loading - edit
> it, save it, and never once have to switch page.
[snip]

I'd love to see this, but it's somewhat more difficult for MediaWiki
than for something like flickr or facebook where you're editing tiny
individual data fields like titles or comments.

The level of edit addressability we have currently is at the section
level (which currently runs you to another page rather than in-place but
it's still a huge improvement over searching through a 100kb
article-zilla). Even section editing, with the big easily-spotted
section lines in the source code, have has its share of bugs; it took a
year or two to shake most of them out.

Individual paragraphs, table cells, etc would be an even nicer
fine-grained level to do inline editing on, but this requires having a
reliable way to associate parts of rendered output with the parts of
source code which created them.

Not impossible, but fraught with difficulty in edge cases due to our
funky syntax, embedded HTML, template transclusions, conditional
formatting, etc.

> Obviously once you accept the usage of advanced elements like this there's
> no stopping how much easier you can make the site, and how user friendly.

It's really not a question of accepting it as an idea; section editing
already *is that* at the first level. Rather, moving it to more
finely-addressable parts of text will likely end up waiting on the
much-fabled rewrite of the parser in order to accomplish it reliably.

And that's not necessarily trivial; the parser needs to maintain a
pretty good degree of compatibility with our millions of articles, *and*
fix a bunch of problems, *and* make it easier to do these future sorts
of things.

Most effort currently is going to backend changes,
performance/scalability/reliabilty work, bugfixes and maintenance,
localization and user account support improvements, and simpler
frontend/UI tweaks as we try to get some longstanding 'big issues' done
and bring new volunteer developers up to speed.

What might more realistically happen in the near term is making section
editing work 'inline' more cleanly, with AJAXy goodness. This is hard to
guarantee (due to section boundaries being potentially in strange
places), but it might be possible to make it work mostly reliably,
perhaps falling back to separate page loads in unclean cases.

If you or someone you know wants to work on this, hop on over to
wikitech-l and introduce yourself there and in the #mediawiki channel on
irc.freenode.net.

> If
> the only grounds to not include this kind of feature are accessibility, just
> put each feature on a switch in user preferences.

Rather, it should just degrade gracefully.

- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Foundation-l] Auction (Was: alternatives)

body:
Neil Harris wrote:
> Why not auction off some of the older servers? They must now be too
> clapped-out for any real production use, and they're each a piece of
> Wikipedia history some wealthy or obsessive Wikimaniac might want on
> their shelf (or in their rack). The money from selling the old servers
> can go to buy new ones: possibly with the original names recycled, like
> battleships.
>
> Not the very oldest, of course -- they should be carefully kept for
> posterity and donated to a museum at some time in the future -- they're
> the free culture equivalent of the original printing press, or first
> steam engine.

The first Wikipedia server (ross?) was owned by Bomis and is probably
still in active service for Wikia. Larousse and pliny are out of
commission, and still in the possession of the Foundation, AFAIK. I
believe geoffrin was reclaimed by Bomis after we got our first batch of 9.
Most of that batch of 9 are still doing useful active service -- only
moreri is down. There are only maybe 7 named servers out of commission in
total, and it might be economic to repair some of them.

Moore's law is not what it used to be, these servers are largely as useful
as they were when we bought them. Give it a couple of decades, then maybe
your idea will be a good one.

-- Tim Starling


body:
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Hash: SHA1

Tim Starling wrote:
> Some might worry about Wikimedia taking control of MediaWiki, which is
> amusing considering the amount of influence MediaWiki developers have over
> Wikimedia affairs. They have as much to fear from us as we do from them ;)

I believe the term is "mutually assured destruction" ;)

- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)
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from_name: geni

subject:
[WikiEN-l] [Wikipedia-l] Entries for deletion.... issues from
	the Third World

body:
On 1/7/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
> Well, yes they can. But Andrew's point still stands. How can one make a
> well-balanced decision when you're tagging or deleting stuff every 20-30
> seconds? It usually takes me at least 2 minutes to read the entry, watch the
> history and do other related stuff and that's just on a short article. Also,
> the reasons given in the reason field by some administrators is totally not
> as helpful as it should be.
>

the article is new so there is not history and most are maybe two
lines. Yes it could be done.

--
geni


subject: [Wikitech-l] Special:Listinterwikis

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

JePe wrote:
> There is made a new special page "List interwikis", with some links to other
> wikimedia project, but also other external links. They all have a $1 parameter
> on the end.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Listinterwikis

Augh, it's seriously broken too.

I'll remove it for the moment.

- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Virgil Ierubino

subject: [Foundation-l] Why is MediaWiki so low-tech?

body:
To follow up some of the replies:

I'm not suggesting WYSIWYG. I don't like Wysiwyg personnally, I think it
makes content editing more difficult and less clear.

My point in its simplest form was that there ARE ways of doing VERY funky
stuff. And I don't mean flashing animations, I mean stuff that actually
makes MediaWiki run better, be easier to use, attract more users, etc.

Compatibility isn't that much of an issue because:
* The features can be opt-in via user preferences (could even be as simple
as selecting one of 3 modes, or something)
* This kind of funky stuff IS actually very stable, and can even detect the
browser it's being viewed in and turn itself off.
* Most people CAN run it without problems.

For the Somalians without Dell Dimensions, (interesting example!) there's
always the normal Wikipedia (before turning on these options), CDs, DVDs and
Print Encyclopedias.

If lack of developers and money is the only problem then why not be more
WIKI about it? Call to the Wikimedian community for volunteer coders to help
improve MediaWiki. Of course this is a lot more complex than I make it
sound, but the point is that somewhere out there will be a professional AJAX
coder willing to code free for Wikimedia. I know that if I knew the
language, I'd do it.


from_name: Thomas Dalton

body:
> Well, yes they can. But Andrew's point still stands. How can one make a
> well-balanced decision when you're tagging or deleting stuff every 20-30
> seconds? It usually takes me at least 2 minutes to read the entry, watch the
> history and do other related stuff and that's just on a short article. Also,
> the reasons given in the reason field by some administrators is totally not
> as helpful as it should be.

2-3 articles a minute might be a little too fast, but 1-2 articles a
minute is probably fine. Once you learn what to look for you can tell
which articles need a closer look and which can be deleted instantly.


from_name: Robert Scott Horning

subject: [Foundation-l] Mission/Vision Statement

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

>Our Board needs to be fully aware of where the economics of the Web are
>going in the next few years.  It would be nice to base our planning on
>the real per capita costs of the internet stripped of content production
>costs.
>
>

I'm curious about this issue in part due to a discussion I had on slashdot:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=214762&cid=17447596

Now the $5 million figure was simply something pulled out of the air,
assuming that the current geometric growth of Wikimedia projects
continue on its current course (not necessarily something good to assume
here).  In trying to defend the WMF in this situation, I have assumed
that server/bandwidth costs of displaying a read-only Wikipedia page are
pretty much identical (within a general margin of error) to simply using
a more conventional HTML server with static content.  Is there reason to
assume this is pretty much the case?

I just don't see how in the case of this (fairly informed and current
Wikimedia user) critic that a huge monitary savings could happen if
production of Wikipedia articles was instead moved to something akin to
the mailing lists, but a seperate mailing list for each Wikipedia
article ((the mind boggles at the thought of the suggestion in the first
place!))  Nupedia could have been able to get away with something like
this, but that is also why Wikipedia blew Nupedia away in the dust oh so
many years ago.

Certainly forecasting expenses for two or three years down the line is
going to be a bit of an archane art at the moment, even though there are
some hard statistics that at least can get you some rough idea of what
is going to be needed in terms of operating the server farm and bandwidth.

Out of curiosity, are there any projections of what it may cost the WMF
to maintian the current Wikimedia projects at current levels of response
time in two years?

I know there are a bunch of unknown factors that would make such an
estimate vary, such as disruptive technologies, local and international
politics, gifts, legal requirements, MediaWiki optimizations, and
changes to the makeup of Wikimedia editor/contributors.  Still, it is
something that I hope is being looked at.

--
Robert Scott Horning


subject: [Foundation-l] Mission/Vision Statement


from_name: xaosflux

subject: [WikiEN-l] New bot up for RFA

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

FYI: A proposal to grant sysop rights to an automated account is
currently being discussed at [[Wikipedia:Requests for
adminship/ProtectionBot]].

Thank you,
xaosflux

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from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

body:
On 1/7/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > My understanding was that even admins should tag, if there's anything
> > there that's at all subjective (anything much above
> > page-blanked-by-author, random text, whatever). It certainly seems
> > more sensible that way.
> >
> > (I usually try to, but...)
>
> [[WP:CSD]]:
>
> "The "Speedy deletion" policy governs limited cases where Wikipedia
> administrators may delete Wikipedia pages or media "on sight" without
> further debate. Non-admins can request deletion of such a page by
> adding an appropriate template (see below). The word "speedy" in this
> context refers to the simple decision-making process, not the length
> of time since the article was created."
>
> I interpret that as admins being able to delete without tagging. The
> whole point of CSD is that it's for uncontroversial deletions. If
> there is anything significantly subjective about it, it should go
> through PROD or AfD.
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

Well, yes they can. But Andrew's point still stands. How can one make a
well-balanced decision when you're tagging or deleting stuff every 20-30
seconds? It usually takes me at least 2 minutes to read the entry, watch the
history and do other related stuff and that's just on a short article. Also,
the reasons given in the reason field by some administrators is totally not
as helpful as it should be.

Mgm


list: wiktionary-l

from_name: Matthieu Barba

subject: [Wiktionary-l] Logo

body:
Hello all,

I already wrote something on the English Beer Parlour, but this list is probably more appropriate.

A new logo of the project Wiktionary has been voted at the end of October. But the old logo has not been replaced in any project I have visited (All the 1000+).

Why isn't it implemented now? Maybe because the logo is still incomplete, some issues are still discussed: which letter should be written? W (from Wiktionary) or A (from the alphabet)? Problems with the Japanese letters, etc.

By the pace is is going, there will never be a final version.

So, what do we do?

We could speed things up by forcing the remaining issues to be discussed (in the English Beer Parlour for example).
We could also "forget" about this logo and just keep the old one. Of course it has been voted, but it looks like nobody cares now. And some people complained about the vote procedure itself.

I would have supported this logo even though I dislike it (for many reasons), but the way things went and are going now, I would not anymore. Do we still need this logo? It doesn't add anything compared to the old one (maybe more solid, but that's all).

If I could, I would just ignore the vote and either keep the current one, or begin another procedure but this time with a proper preparation (there has been too much problems), with more time to propose versions, etc.
For example, if I organize a vote on fr: (the project where I work the most) with the question: "Do you want to change the logo with the new one or keep the current one?" I think there would be more votes for keeping the old. In the end, it is still the Wiktionary communities who decide, isn't it?

Here is a link to the new logo page on meta: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiktionary/logo

 I would like to know your opinion about that ^^

Thanks,
Darkdadaah, fr.wikt
 __________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
En finir avec le spam? Yahoo! Mail vous offre la meilleure protection possible contre les messages non sollicit?s
http://mail.yahoo.fr Yahoo! Mail


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

body:
Oldak Quill schreef:
> On 07/01/07, Florence Devouard <anthere at anthere.org> wrote:
>
>> Hello everyone.
>>
>> Just for a head up (or down)
>>
>> First, I wanted to announce to all that there will be no more matching
>> donors in that fundraiser.
>> This is due to a variety of reasons, including, but not limited to, the
>> reaction of some members in the community.
>>
>
> Regardless of whether I agreed with the Virgin notice or not, this is
> an excellent move on behalf of the Foundation. It demonstrates the
> Foundation's responsiveness to Wikimedians and that there is no
> bureaucratic disconnect (which is always a worry when a project like
> ours begins to organise into formalised institutions and structures).
>
> Thanks Florence and the rest of the team. You're doing an excellent job.
>
>
Hoi,
I am afraid you did not read the whole of Florence her e-mail, or you
only read what you want to read.. "Fourth, we'll go on with limited
funds. Limited means we'll go delaying certain issues. That's life !"

This means that things that are deemed necessary will not happen or will
not happen in the near future for lack of funds. There have been no
serious proposals on how the WMF can make the money that it requires.
And where you see responsiveness, I fail to see how our aim is indeed
best served when you consider our growth and our lack of current funding.

In my opinion this is at best a Pyrrhic victory.

Thanks,
    GerardM

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrhic_victory


from_name: Oldak Quill

body:
On 07/01/07, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Oldak Quill schreef:
> > On 07/01/07, Florence Devouard <anthere at anthere.org> wrote:
> >
> >> Hello everyone.
> >>
> >> Just for a head up (or down)
> >>
> >> First, I wanted to announce to all that there will be no more matching
> >> donors in that fundraiser.
> >> This is due to a variety of reasons, including, but not limited to, the
> >> reaction of some members in the community.
> >>
> >
> > Regardless of whether I agreed with the Virgin notice or not, this is
> > an excellent move on behalf of the Foundation. It demonstrates the
> > Foundatin's responsiveness to Wikimedians and that there is no
> > bureaucratic disconnect (which is always a worry when a project like
> > ours begins to organise into formalised institutions and structures).
> >
> > Thanks Florence and the rest of the team. You're doing an excellent job.
> >
> >
> Hoi,
> I am afraid you did not read the whole of Florence her e-mail, or you
> only read what you want to read.. "Fourth, we'll go on with limited
> funds. Limited means we'll go delaying certain issues. That's life !"
>
> This means that things that are deemed necessary will not happen or will
> not happen in the near future for lack of funds. There have been no
> serious proposals on how the WMF can make the money that it requires.
> And where you see responsiveness, I fail to see how our aim is indeed
> best served when you consider our growth and our lack of current funding.
>
> In my opinion this is at best a Pyrrhic victory.

IMO, the lack of funds is *not* a good thing. But that doesn't remove
from the perceived responsiveness of the Foundation. It seems to me
that the community was damaged/divided by the discussion last week:
there were alot of very emotive mails exchanged on this list. For this
reason, I think it was crucial that the Foundation demonstrate
responsiveness even at the cost of some funding. In doing so, the
community can, to an extent, heal.

I think that just announcing that that no matching donors would be
named in the SiteNotice would have been enough (I didn't object to the
anonymous matching donor). Still, too much is better than nothing.

--
Oldak Quill (oldakquill at gmail.com)


from_name: Felipe Ortega

subject: [Wikitech-l] Adequate place for new wikistats

body:
Hi all.

The Libresoft Group, at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (Madrid), has started to generate a bunch of interesting metric graphics about Wikipedia.

These graphics currently include histograms about article size. They will soon also include, for instance, caracterization of several important groups of authors and their evolution in time (much in the way Jimbo Wales exposed a few months ago).

We plan to extend these results to all language versions of Wikipedia.

As these graphics complement current wikimetrics info about the project, generated by Erik Zatche's scripts, we wonder about the better place to release them, in case Wikimedia is interested (under a GPL license).

Could we include them in an "official repository page" with metrics about Wikipedia? Should we place only a link to a server of our own? Which could be the better place to create those links?

Thanks a lot.

Regards.

Felipe Ortega.

 __________________________________________________
Correo Yahoo!
Espacio para todos tus mensajes, antivirus y antispam ?gratis!
Reg?strate ya - http://correo.yahoo.es


from_name: Anthere

body:
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> Oldak Quill schreef:
>
>>On 07/01/07, Florence Devouard <anthere at anthere.org> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Hello everyone.
>>>
>>>Just for a head up (or down)
>>>
>>>First, I wanted to announce to all that there will be no more matching
>>>donors in that fundraiser.
>>>This is due to a variety of reasons, including, but not limited to, the
>>>reaction of some members in the community.
>>>
>>
>>Regardless of whether I agreed with the Virgin notice or not, this is
>>an excellent move on behalf of the Foundation. It demonstrates the
>>Foundation's responsiveness to Wikimedians and that there is no
>>bureaucratic disconnect (which is always a worry when a project like
>>ours begins to organise into formalised institutions and structures).
>>
>>Thanks Florence and the rest of the team. You're doing an excellent job.
>>
>>
>
> Hoi,
> I am afraid you did not read the whole of Florence her e-mail, or you
> only read what you want to read.. "Fourth, we'll go on with limited
> funds. Limited means we'll go delaying certain issues. That's life !"
>
> This means that things that are deemed necessary will not happen or will
> not happen in the near future for lack of funds. There have been no
> serious proposals on how the WMF can make the money that it requires.
> And where you see responsiveness, I fail to see how our aim is indeed
> best served when you consider our growth and our lack of current funding.
>
> In my opinion this is at best a Pyrrhic victory.
>
> Thanks,
>     GerardM
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrhic_victory

It was not clear cut.
There was responsiveness to the logo issue. Some members were greatly
distressed at the logo, and many were not very happy with it. So, some
board members asked if we could avoid having the logo entirely.

However, the decision to not have the firm a matching donor was more
technical. They will not be called matching donor, but they will still
give a hand. So there is no loss of support.

I'll add that some people wrote to Virgin United to complain about them
being matching donors. I wonder if they will do the same with all next
matching donators, maybe even going as far as trying to publicly shaming
them for being matching donors. This will be certainly something to take
into account.

There is a board meeting next week, I will tell you more about it in a
few days. Discussion over our financial situation will be of course an
item of the agenda. As well as what we intend to do to increase our
revenue. Any solution aside from fundraising will require getting
professional help in any cases.

ant


from_name: Frederick Noronha

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Entries for deletion.... issues from the Third World

body:
Hi all, I'm from India, a contributor to the Wikipedia. In recent
times, the 'mortality' of new Wikipedia entries seems to be higher
than usual. While one can understand the need for abundant caution,
it's also important to allow for a diversity of concerns and issues in
this space.

Should we presume that because an initiative is not very visible in
cyberspace (okay, we are under-digitised societies!) that it is not
prominent or noteworthy? See as one example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vikalp This is a campaign against
censorship of documentary film in India, one which has the
participation of about 250 documentary film-makers.

There must be some way out. Your suggestions would be welcome. FN
--
FN M: 0091 9822122436 P: +91-832-240-9490 (after 1300IST please)
http://fn.goa-india.org  http://fredericknoronha.wordpress.com
http://www.goa-india.org http://feeds.goa-india.org/index.php


from_name: Simetrical

subject: [Wikitech-l] Special:Listinterwikis

body:
On 1/7/07, JePe <jepe at xs4all.nl> wrote:
> There is made a new special page "List interwikis", with some links to other
> wikimedia project, but also other external links. They all have a $1 parameter
> on the end.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Listinterwikis
>
> What is the meaning of this page?

It shows a list of all valid interwiki prefixes (e.g., [[pt:Quuz]]),
along with the URLs they're associated with.  Did *you* know that
[[acronym:mw]] makes a semi-internal link to
http://www.acronymfinder.com/af-query.asp?String=exact&Acronym=mw ?
Now you do!


subject: [Wikitech-l] MessageCache and MediaWiki namespace redesign

references:
<enlnmo$69l$1@sea.gmane.org> <45A0EB19.2030208@pobox.com>
	<enr1to$pvb$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
Ligulem wrote:
> On 07.01.2007 13:44, Brion Vibber wrote:
>> I've gone ahead and taken this live; the batch deletions are running in
>> the background.
>
> On en.wikipedia I currently (14:56, 7 January 2007 UTC) see
>
> <main page>
>
> in the sidebar (html entities appearing on the rendered page?). I'm
> using monobook.
>
> I've looked through recent changes in MediaWiki namespace on en but
> can't find anything that could explain this.
>
> So could that problem have something to do with this change here?
>
> Apologies for possibly asking stupid things in the wrong place.

It was reported on #wikimedia-tech at 15:08 UTC and I fixed it in under 5
minutes. That would have been the best place to report it -- the sooner we
hear about it, the sooner we can fix it.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Bogdan Giusca

body:
Sunday, January 7, 2007, 4:49:35 PM, Frederick wrote:

> Maybe you're using the wrong search-term. I tried "Vikalp + film" on
> Google, and got over 800. Results 1 - 10 of about 806 for Vikalp film.
> (0.16 seconds)

Looking at the ghits is useless. I think it's better to look for
newspaper references:

http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=%22Films+for+Freedom%22+Vikalp&sa=N&lnav=m&scoring=t


from_name: Rob Church

subject: [Wikitech-l] stop playing with bug 3509

body:
On 07/01/07, Ashar Voultoiz <hashar at altern.org> wrote:
> Please stop playing with bug #3509. Bugzilla is not a wiki where you can
> start an edit war. The bug is closed and should stay closed.

Please don't mischaracterise other people reopening bugs in good faith
as "playing", that's extremely ill-mannered.

Rob Church


from_name: Andrew Gray

body:
On 07/01/07, Royalguard11 <royalguard11 at gmail.com> wrote:

> NPWatcher is a newer VP-like program designed by User:Martinp23 to aid
> in new page patrolling. It's for .NET again, so it leaves us
> non-windows people out again, but from what I've seen it can be used
> to tag a new page with a CSD tag (like {{db-nonsense}}) and leave a
> warning on the persons talk page not to make silly articles like that.
> It can also be used by admins to help clear backlogs, such as CAT:CSD
> by deleting pages (believe me, it really helps). As an admin, I know
> that I check pages that are marked for speedy deletion before deleting
> them, with some being more obvious than others. It's almost always
> backlogged though, so it would be appreciated it editors would make
> sure they are sure when tagging articles, and don't make it any more
> bureaucratic. Sometimes you just need to let us do our jobs.

Perhaps I should provide some context to my original mutterings.

The case that drew my attention a little while back did so because it
had been tagged as {{db-empty}}, and then deleted despite containing a
{{hangon}} note, three external links, and 160 words of actual
honest-to-god coherent content. It was a little patchy, clearly
written by someone for whom English was not a first language and
wiki-syntax was not a second, but obviously a survivable stub on
something and certainly not an empty article. And the guy who wrote it
complained it had been deleted, so I looked into it.

Deletion summary was "(Deleting page - reason was: "Empty page" using
NPWatcher)"

It's an automatically generated edit summary (parsing the db tag?),
and I find it hard to credit anyone actually looked at that page as it
was being deleted. In that one-hour run of 182 semiautomated
deletions, the admin in question removed a grand total of four
deletion tags. 2% is somewhere very far south of our usual
falsely-labelled rate, by my reckoning; certainly whenever I look at
CSD more than one in fifty is a dodgy or spurious deletion request.

There are cases of clear-cut deletion, sure. And there are many more
that aren't. This sort of robotic script-assisted deletion is
mindless; the reason we don't have it performed by a robot is to have
human judgement in the loop. There are malicious requests; there are
mistaken requests; there are confused requests; there are all sorts of
cruft sneak in there, and we can't just glance at it, see there is
indeed a tag, and hope the tagger got it right.

If we didn't need that human judgement, we'd have coded a ten-line
script and given it admin rights.

I'm not naming names; I'm not pointing fingers; I'm trying to make
this as general a cry as possible. But I've done my time on the
coalface as well as you have, and I know what these routine tasks
entail. And there are clearly cases where the availability of easy
automation is making people lose track of their common sense and their
goals. We give people adminship because they are sane, because they
are trusted to be able to think and to do the sensible rational thing
when a problem arises. We don't give them it because they can fulfil a
Stakhanovite quota of meaningless routine tasks faster and better than
anyone else.

I am not demanding extra bureaucracy in a process; I am not demanding
extra process. I am not pretending I know better than "the admins"; I
am one. But it's a wiki. The cases where we need to ACT NOW ACT FAST
are few and far between; if there's a backlog, well, there's a
backlog; it'll clear. We can always take more time over something; we
set the pace of this project ourselves.

We should not be pressurising ourselves into running ahead of our own
common sense. It's an encyclopedia, not a race.

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


body:
> The case that drew my attention a little while back did so because it
> had been tagged as {{db-empty}}, and then deleted despite containing a
> {{hangon}} note, three external links, and 160 words of actual
> honest-to-god coherent content. It was a little patchy, clearly
> written by someone for whom English was not a first language and
> wiki-syntax was not a second, but obviously a survivable stub on
> something and certainly not an empty article. And the guy who wrote it
> complained it had been deleted, so I looked into it.
>
> Deletion summary was "(Deleting page - reason was: "Empty page" using
> NPWatcher)"

a) Which article?
b) Have you taken it to DRV?


from_name: Gordon Joly

body:
At 17:49 +0000 7/1/07, Virgil Ierubino wrote:
>To follow up some of the replies:
>
>I'm not suggesting WYSIWYG. I don't like Wysiwyg personnally, I think it
>makes content editing more difficult and less clear.
>
>My point in its simplest form was that there ARE ways of doing VERY funky
>stuff. And I don't mean flashing animations, I mean stuff that actually
>makes MediaWiki run better, be easier to use, attract more users, etc.
>
>Compatibility isn't that much of an issue because:
>* The features can be opt-in via user preferences (could even be as simple
>as selecting one of 3 modes, or something)
>* This kind of funky stuff IS actually very stable, and can even detect the
>browser it's being viewed in and turn itself off.
>* Most people CAN run it without problems.
>
>For the Somalians without Dell Dimensions, (interesting example!) there's
>always the normal Wikipedia (before turning on these options), CDs, DVDs and
>Print Encyclopedias.

Well, I am user in the UK and I have mobile phone.  I often edit
Mediawiki based wikis on the phone. Just basic stuff.

>If lack of developers and money is the only problem then why not be more
>WIKI about it?

Money pays for servers. Developers work for nothing.

>Call to the Wikimedian community for volunteer coders to help
>improve MediaWiki. Of course this is a lot more complex than I make it
>sound, but the point is that somewhere out there will be a professional AJAX
>coder willing to code free for Wikimedia. I know that if I knew the
>language, I'd do it.

AJAX? Are you serious? Most of these interfaces are way beyond what
Wikipedia calls for.

I have had one request from a wiki I run for a local history group -
a spell checker. Everything else they like (the group had TWiki
experience from another project).

Anyway, like somebody else, feel free to contribute...

--
Gordo (an amateur)

http://www.loopzilla.org/


subject: [Wikitech-l] [Foundation-l] Why is MediaWiki so low-tech?


body:
Maybe you're using the wrong search-term. I tried "Vikalp + film" on
Google, and got over 800. Results 1 - 10 of about 806 for Vikalp film.
(0.16 seconds)

Vikalp ("alternative") is a commonly understandable Indian term, and
hence this is the shortened name most often used. "Films for freedom"
is not the often-used term. I added the "film", just to make sure that
it doesn't draw some other unrelated Vikalps in the net.

On 07/01/07, Andre Engels <andreengels at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2007/1/7, Frederick Noronha <fred at bytesforall.org>:

> When I Google for:
>
> Vikalp "films for freedom"
>
> which would be a quite specific search, I still get 500+ hits. If it were
> notable,

The point I am trying to make is that mere cyber presence doesn't
imply prominence, and vice versa. In the Third World (a term I prefer
to use), there are still many who prefer to focus on the real world
rather than on cyberspace.

Also mere cyber presence would not necessarily mean prominence. For
instance "Results 1 - 10 of about 136,000 for "Frederick Noronha"."
Because my name draws 136,000 hits on Google, doesn't mean that I'm
notable or popular... it just probably means that I've been active in
cyberspace (for the past 12 years or so... 'early' by Indian standards
:-)).

I'm not contesting your point... just saying that there needs to be
some discerning criteria. Thanks for your patience! FN
--
FN M: 0091 9822122436 P: +91-832-240-9490 (after 1300IST please)
http://fn.goa-india.org  http://fredericknoronha.wordpress.com
http://www.goa-india.org http://feeds.goa-india.org/index.php


body:
On 07/01/07, Gordon Joly <gordon.joly at pobox.com> wrote:
> >My point in its simplest form was that there ARE ways of doing VERY funky
> >stuff. And I don't mean flashing animations, I mean stuff that actually
> >makes MediaWiki run better, be easier to use, attract more users, etc.

Nobody is adverse to implementing any AJAX in MediaWiki where it will
be genuinely useful. As an example, Simetrical recently committed some
code adapted from a patch which makes it possible to watch/unwatch
pages using AJAX. It's very neat, works superbly and is a nice little
time-saver. Pending some minor tweaking, it will probably make it
live.

> >Compatibility isn't that much of an issue because:

Compatibility is always an issue. Absolutely always.

> >If lack of developers and money is the only problem then why not be more
> >WIKI about it?

It's not a lack of developers or a lack of cash, although more of both
is always better.

> Money pays for servers. Developers work for nothing.

We have two paid developers.

> >Call to the Wikimedian community for volunteer coders to help
> >improve MediaWiki. Of course this is a lot more complex than I make it
> >sound, but the point is that somewhere out there will be a professional AJAX
> >coder willing to code free for Wikimedia. I know that if I knew the
> >language, I'd do it.

There is an established process for improving MediaWiki. We also have
most of the AJAX framework in place.

Rob Church


subject: [WikiEN-l] New bot up for RFA

body:
I agree. One of the better ideas to come along in the last while. Now
if some people would just get over the ZMOG! ADMIN-BOT! part and move
on with their lives and realize that wikipedia needs this type of
automation.

-Royalguard11

On 1/7/07, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
> On Sun, 7 Jan 2007 18:18:50 -0500, "xaosflux" <xaosflux at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> >FYI: A proposal to grant sysop rights to an automated account is
> >currently being discussed at [[Wikipedia:Requests for
> >adminship/ProtectionBot]].
>
> And a very fine idea it is, too.
>
> Guy (JzG)
> --
> http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
Oldak Quill schreef:
> On 07/01/07, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Oldak Quill schreef:
>>
>>> On 07/01/07, Florence Devouard <anthere at anthere.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>> Hello everyone.
>>>>
>>>> Just for a head up (or down)
>>>>
>>>> First, I wanted to announce to all that there will be no more matching
>>>> donors in that fundraiser.
>>>> This is due to a variety of reasons, including, but not limited to, the
>>>> reaction of some members in the community.
>>>>
>>>>
>>> Regardless of whether I agreed with the Virgin notice or not, this is
>>> an excellent move on behalf of the Foundation. It demonstrates the
>>> Foundatin's responsiveness to Wikimedians and that there is no
>>> bureaucratic disconnect (which is always a worry when a project like
>>> ours begins to organise into formalised institutions and structures).
>>>
>>> Thanks Florence and the rest of the team. You're doing an excellent job.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>> Hoi,
>> I am afraid you did not read the whole of Florence her e-mail, or you
>> only read what you want to read.. "Fourth, we'll go on with limited
>> funds. Limited means we'll go delaying certain issues. That's life !"
>>
>> This means that things that are deemed necessary will not happen or will
>> not happen in the near future for lack of funds. There have been no
>> serious proposals on how the WMF can make the money that it requires.
>> And where you see responsiveness, I fail to see how our aim is indeed
>> best served when you consider our growth and our lack of current funding.
>>
>> In my opinion this is at best a Pyrrhic victory.
>>
>
> IMO, the lack of funds is *not* a good thing. But that doesn't remove
> from the perceived responsiveness of the Foundation. It seems to me
> that the community was damaged/divided by the discussion last week:
> there were alot of very emotive mails exchanged on this list. For this
> reason, I think it was crucial that the Foundation demonstrate
> responsiveness even at the cost of some funding. In doing so, the
> community can, to an extent, heal.
>
> I think that just announcing that that no matching donors would be
> named in the SiteNotice would have been enough (I didn't object to the
> anonymous matching donor). Still, too much is better than nothing.
Hoi,
Well in my opinion the fact that people actually sabotaged the fund
raising is indeed damaging to our community. These people fail to
understand that the need for continually /more /funding is a function of
our growth. Where you see a community damaged/divided, I see a community
that was already divided. What I see is an organisation, our
organisation, that will increasingly find it problematic to balance its
books. An organisation that is not able to do the things it needs to do.
An organisations that as a consequence will be increasingly unable to
accommodate the growth that it could have.

I disagree that our community will heal because of this temporary
reprieve. If anything it polarises the positions between those who want
to see the Foundation accept the money it can get and therefore do an
even better job and those that hold personal positions that have nothing
to do with the stated aims of our organisation. What has happened is
deferring the problem to the future, the sad thing is that the need for
money will only be bigger at that time and this will make the struggle
even more damaging.

The fact that you do not consider the lack of funds a good thing makes
no material difference. It does not help as money would.

Thanks,
    GerardM


from_name: James Hare

subject: [WikiEN-l] I appeared to be banned from Wikipedia.

body:
wikispeaker at gmail.com isn't Jimbo's email address...

Or is there some underlying joke that I'm not getting because I'm
unbelievably daft?

On 1/6/07, RCTLocoWikiSpam <rctlocomotionwikipeida at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
> All I got is this from Jimbo Wales:
>
> "Cory,

>
> Reoving semi-protected tags when this article or articles is still
> protected
> that you're not allowed to do that is against Wikipedia policy.

>
> There are reasons:

>
> 1. Wikipedians who kept removing semi-protected tags will be banned
> permanently from interactivity on Wikipedia.

>
> 2. If you're firing Brad Patrick (permanently), I'll get Donald Trump, and
> he'll fire you for bothering him.

>
> Wikipedia enforces a zero tolerance policy in regards to wiki vandalism in
> Wikipedia. There is a possibilty that you will be banned from
> interactivity
> on Wikipedia if you continue to vandalize any wiki stuff. If you have
> questions,  mailto:wikispeaker at gmail.com email me.  It should be noted
> that
> replies to this email will go unanswered and your only course is emailing
> me!

>
> --Jimbo"
>
> In fact, they didn't request unbanning, in fact, you could get away with
> wiki vandalism, right? Then you say, "Oh, shit!"
>
>
> Dan Collins-2 wrote:
> >
> > MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
> >> Removing semi-protected tags when the article is still protected
> doesn't
> >> sound like it's a useful kind of editing.
> >> Why would you want to do that?
> >>
> >> Mgm
> >>
> >>
> >> On 12/30/06, RCTLocoWikiSpam <rctlocomotionwikipeida at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> If they didn't request unblocking i was banned permanently for
> removing
> >>> semiportected tags. It's against Wikipedia policy. I'm not spamming
> >>> anymore.
> >>>
> >>> "I have had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking
> >>> plane!"
> >>> --
> >>> View this message in context:
> >>>
> http://www.nabble.com/I-appeared-to-be-banned-from-Wikipedia.-tf2897550.html#a8095323
> >>> Sent from the English Wikipedia mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
> >>>
> >>> _______________________________________________
> >>> WikiEN-l mailing list
> >>> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> >>> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> >>> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> >>>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> WikiEN-l mailing list
> >> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> >> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> >> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> >>
> > forwarding the reply to the user
> >
> > --
> > GnuPG key ID is 0x84189146 on subkeys.pgp.net
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> >
> >
>
> --
> View this message in context:
> http://www.nabble.com/I-appeared-to-be-banned-from-Wikipedia.-tf2897550.html#a8196701
> Sent from the English Wikipedia mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Ashar Voultoiz

subject: [Wikitech-l] stop playing with bug 3509

body:
Hello Duncan Harris,

Please stop playing with bug #3509. Bugzilla is not a wiki where you can
start an edit war. The bug is closed and should stay closed.

Thanks.

--
Ashar Voultoiz - WP++++
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Hashar
http://www.livejournal.com/community/wikitech/
IM: hashar at jabber.org  ICQ: 15325080