from_name: John R. Owens

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Countering the vandals who attack users (not just
 pages)

body:
On Mon, 26 May 2003, Toby Bartels wrote:

> Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 16:44:30 -0700
> From: Toby Bartels <toby+wikipedia at math.ucr.edu>
> Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Countering the vandals who attack users (not
>     just pages)
>
> Erik Moeller wrote:
>>The Cunctator wrote:
>>>Toby Bartels wrote:
>>>>>David A. Wheeler wrote:
>
>>>>>>At the least, why not let the User:NAME pages be ONLY editable
>>>>>>by NAME?  The "User_talk:" spaces need to be editable in some way,
>>>>>>but I don't see a need for others to "fix" the User: space of someone;
>>>>>>it's not critical that that content be fixed, and there's advantanges
>>>>>>to having some areas that are "precious" to each user.
>
>>>>>Your other suggestions were against Wikipedia's openness,
>>>>>and I'm happy to be confident that they will never happen.
>>>>>But I do think that read-only user pages *as*an*option*
>>>>>would be a useful idea.  There have been other problems before.
>
>>>>It is an option. Leave a message on a sysop's talk page and ask them to
>>>>protect your user page.
>
>>>Then the user himself would be unable to edit it.
>
>>You don't say? Well, these are the problems of read-only pages. ;-)
>
> Ah, I see.  Making a joke at the expense of my poor phrasing.  Very well.
>
> Luckily I included David's original text, so does anybody have a comment
> on what we were actually talking about?

I'd like to see it as an optional thing, maybe a user viewing something in
their own namespace could see a "protect this page" link in the sidebar
like sysops do for all pages. I'd also like to see it extended to some
kind of subpages, though I'm not sure whether that ought to go for
[[User:JohnOwens/Temp]], [[User:JohnOwens:Temp]], [[User:JohnOwens
(temp)]] pages, all of the above, or what.

--
John R. Owens http://www.ghiapet.homeip.net/
Marcus, this is the kind of conversation that can only end in a gunshot.
				--Dr. Stephen Franklin


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Dante Alighieri

subject: [WikiEN-l] Alternative to Blanking Pages

body:
At 06:09 PM 5/26/2003, you wrote:
>I was going to start doing this myself, but I figured it'd be better if
>people talked about it first, and more effective if they knew about it.
>
>Instead of blanking articles why not replace the article text with a
>redirect to a boilerplate text with something along the lines of "The
>content of this article is being disputed. It has been blanked for the
>time being, though older version are still accessible through the Page
>History. It may have been blanked because of blatantly false information,
>or non-encyclopedic garbage. This article may be awaiting [[votes for
>deletion]], or awaiting a sysop to delete it. Please use the Talk Page to
>discuss this dispute if necessary, and check [[Votes for Deletion]]"
>
>I wouldn't recommend that exact text be used, but basically, my idea is to
>redirect articles to a boilerplate text explaining what's going on rather
>than just blanking them.
>That way, Googlers and people who located the article in the index or
>search function will know what's going on.

Sounds reasonable enough to me. I support such a policy.

-----

Dante Alighieri
dalighieri at digitalgrapefruit.com

"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their
neutrality in times of great moral crisis."
    -Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/attachments/20030527/0ff44d55/attachment.htm


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Where should /temp pages go?

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>- Move them to [[Talk:article/temp]] of the article's talk page.

I think that this is the right thing to do.

Also, deleting temp pages that are eventually adopted is wrong,
since it destroys the edit history.
If nothing is being worked on anymore, then redirect.

-- Toby


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikitech-l] Unicode and polices

body:
--- Guillaume Blanchard <gblanchard at arcsy.co.jp>
wrote:
> > Brion.
> >
> > Aoineko suggested that it is my police which is
> wrong
> > and not my browser (err...browsers) in supporting
> > unicode. I understood from what you told me it was
> my
> > browser. I don't care I can't see international
> links,
> > but I do care when I can't read the content of
> > articles, or even the title of the articles.
> > So...perhaps I understood nothing, but do you
> think
> > Opera 5 is not accepting unicode because of
> missing
> > polices or does it just not tolerate it at all ?
> > Netcape 4.7 is not working either
> > Mozilla is better (I can see Lech Walesa), but
> still I
> > can't see the international links. IE is writing ?
> >
> > Is that worth that I try to import some polices ?
> >
> > Ant
>
> I think there are both problem. Even if your browser
> can handle unicode, you
> can't see caracters not defined in your font. I'm
> using MS Arial Unicode
> with IE6.0 and I still not be able to see 100% of
> unicode characters. In my
> case I think it's only a font problem. You can go to
> this page and look at
> what percentage of caracters you can see :
> http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/utf8.html (it's a
> UTF8 sample page).
>
> Aoineko

Well, at the top, I see characters numbers 1, 2, 4 and
5; None of the others...
ok, I'll try your link

ant

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikitech-l] Countering the vandals who attack users (not just pages)

body:
--- Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> Anthere-
> > That is great ! Just needs to be seeable by
> anyone.
> > The sysop status could be just necessary to hit
> the button
>
> And to view the text of the individual deleted
> revisions. I'm sure you
> meant to say that, instead of bringing up that old,
> long-answered question
> again.
>
> Regards,
>
> Erik

tsssseeee

I mostly thought it was a great idea. Fortunately our
deletion file is still quite small, but each time I
have to open it, and waiiiiiiiit for it to load, I
feel sorry for the performance.

Here is a nice direct way to access the file I didnot
know of.

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com


subject: [WikiEN-l] User Michael and ways to deal with him

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

Nod. Ok. You convinced me as far as Michael is
concerned. I shut up then.
I shall return to my articles. I have a [[local food]]
decaying somewhere.

> > Another good point in soft banning is that
> everyone
> > can participate (as Tannin pointed out, I think
> what
> > he did was proposing people to join the reversion
> > team, am I right ?).
>
> Wikipedia is not meant to be a group experience, it
> is meant to be an
> encyclopedia.

Interesting link there
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is_Wikipedia_an_experiment_in_anarchy

At some point, there were more discussions about this
that just your statement though.

> > You included, even if I disagree with you here.
> > However, my survival instinct forbid me to trust
> > everyone just because I am said I must trust them.
>
> Nobody's lives are at stake here.

Quite true. Nobody's lives. Not even Mav's one
perhaps.

> Regards,
>
> Erik

Yes. Amicalement. Ant

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikitech-l] Viewing deleted pages (Was: Countering the vandals who attack users (not just pages))

body:
Jens Frank wrote:

>Anthere wrote:

>>Toby Bartels wrote:

>>><http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special%3AUndelete&target=xxx>

>>That is great ! Just needs to be seeable by anyone.
>>The sysop status could be just necessary to hit the button

>I don't think this should be available to the public.
>Currently, copyrighted material is just deleted, but
>can still be reached by sysops for inspection or
>undeletion. We can't make those pages available.

If you really think that this can't be made viewable by just anybody,
then aren't you concerned about the many copyright infrigements
that remain visible all over Wikipedia in various pages' edit histories?

Deleted pages are not the same thing as copyright infringments.
Not all (or most) deleted pages are copyright infringements,
nor or all (or most?) copyright infringements on deleted pages.
If it's a problem that copyrighted material remains on Wikipedia,
albeit buried in rarely visited places that spiders don't archive,
then we should address *that* issue, which remains outstanding.
But it's irrelevant to Anthere's IMO reasonable desire
to view the text of deleted pages on wikis where she's not an admin.

I hope that our practice of simply burying copyrighted material,
when it's added to old pages, isn't really a problem,
since we can remove it by special actions on the database
if ever a complaint is lodged, thus avoiding liability.
The only problem should be if the material remains
on the current version of some page,
leading to its incorporation into future edits.
But if I'm wrong, then continuing to block ordinary users
from viewing the content of recently deleted pages
does little if anything to address the issue.

-- Toby


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Optimizing default prefs

body:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

>Stop that ! There is no such thing as browser defaults.

I can tell my browser whether to underline links or not.
CSS overrides this (unless I tell me browser not to let it).

>And anyway, colorblind people should be able to tell the difference
>between black and non-black on computer screen quite easily.

OK, that sounds fair.

-- Toby


body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>Anthere wrote:

>>That is great ! Just needs to be seeable by anyone.
>>The sysop status could be just necessary to hit the button

>And to view the text of the individual deleted revisions. I'm sure you
>meant to say that, instead of bringing up that old, long-answered question
>again.

That's just what *I* thought that Anthere was bringing up again.
What else would one expect a nonadmin to see on that page?

-- Toby


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Limits to the non-paperiness of Wikipedia?

body:
Oliver Pereira wrote in part:

>So we could include people and events that have not had significant impact
>on a global or even a national level, but which maybe only affected a
>small group of people. As long as there is some coverage in published
>sources, somewhere, we could use that to make an article on the subject.

Yeah, that sounds about right to me.
Of course, individual Wikipedia editors
may want to set priorities for themselves.

-- Toby


from_name: Jens Frank

body:
On Mon, May 26, 2003 at 06:18:53PM -0700, Anthere wrote:
>
> --- Toby Bartels <toby+wikipedia at math.ucr.edu> wrote:
> > Erik Moeller wrote in part:
> >
> > I'd like to remind administrators of my work-around
> > for this.
> > To view the deleted page [[xxx]], just go this URL:
> >
> <http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special%3AUndelete&target=xxx>
> > (or the equivalent on whatever language's wiki is
> > involved).
>
> That is great ! Just needs to be seeable by anyone.
> The sysop status could be just necessary to hit the button

I don't think this should be available to the public.
Currently, copyrighted material is just deleted, but
can still be reached by sysops for inspection or
undeletion. We can't make those pages available.

Regards,

JeLuF


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

body:
On Mon, May 26, 2003 at 05:20:22PM -0700, Toby Bartels wrote:
> Paul Ebermann wrote:
>
> >What about these three options?
> > ( ) underline links
> > ( ) use browser default
> > ( ) not underline links
> >Which one to be the default is
> >another question.
>
> If my worry about colourblind readers does turn out to be reasonable,
> then we should make "use browser default" the default,
> since hopefully a lot of people that like nude links
> will already have set their browser defaults that way.
> (Not Erik, however.)

Stop that ! There is no such thing as browser defaults.

And anyway, colorblind people should be able to tell the difference
between black and non-black on computer screen quite easily.


from_name: Richard Grevers

subject: [WikiEN-l] The principle of fair use

body:
On Mon, 26 May 2003 11:56:27 -0700 (PDT), Anthere <anthere6 at yahoo.com> gave
utterance to the following:

>

>
> Agreed. Wikipedia should have its own mapping system.
> Where I could put ecoregions too :-)
>
> Which could be discussed at http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipediatlas
>
Actually, the map in question would be interesting, because it appears to
be drawn using 20th Century outlines. Was not the shape of the Dutch coast
quite different in the 9th Century?
--
Richard Grevers
Employ the vernacular.


from_name: Thomas Corell

body:
Jens Frank wrote:
>
> I don't think this should be available to the public.
> Currently, copyrighted material is just deleted, but
> can still be reached by sysops for inspection or
> undeletion. We can't make those pages available.

But I think one case to eliminate that material is removing it from the
page, and it will still apear in the history. Do you realy think the
page is deleted and than goes back to the version before the material is
included? Not every page starts with copyrighted material.

Smurf
--
  --- Anthill Inside! ---


from_name: Axel Boldt

body:
--- cprompt <cprompt at tmbg.org> wrote:

> Instead of blanking articles why not replace the article text with a
> redirect to a boilerplate text with something along the lines of
> "The content of this article is being disputed. It has been blanked
> for the time being, though older version are still accessible through
> the Page History. It may have been blanked because of blatantly false

> information, or non-encyclopedic garbage. This article may be
> awaiting [[votes for deletion]], or awaiting a sysop to delete it.
> Please use the Talk Page to discuss this dispute if necessary, and
> check [[Votes for Deletion]]"

I disagree with this in the case of removing work by banned users, for
the following reasons:

* it is factually incorrect: the work was not removed because it is
"disputed", but because it was contributed by a person who is not
allowed to contribute.

* talking about "disputed" and "older version" implies that it may be a
good idea to look at the old material and check whether it is worth
restoring. But that is precisely what should *not* be done in the case
of a soft ban. Treating the banned user's contributions on their merits
just encourages him/her to contribute more.

Axel

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com


from_name: Claudine

subject: [WikiEN-l] addition to main page? Governor-General of Australia

body:
Yesterday, [[Peter Hollingworth]] resigned as [[Governor-General of
Australia]]. I have added an item to [[Current events]] and updated the
Hollingworth and G-G pages. Does this warrant an "In the news" listing
on the main page? I am not a sysop.

Claudine Chionh


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
Anthere-
> Another good point in soft banning is that everyone
> can participate (as Tannin pointed out, I think what
> he did was proposing people to join the reversion
> team, am I right ?).

Wikipedia is not meant to be a group experience, it is meant to be an
encyclopedia. If you itch to help clean up the mess Michael creates, drop
a message to this list and apply for sysop status which as we both know,
would be immediately granted. However, blanking pages only creates
additional work, since these blanked pages have to be later pruned
manually, whereas it is fairly quick and easy to go through Michael's
contributions list and just revert/delete everything.

> That is good to strenghtening a
> community.

No, in this case I'm afraid it might accomplish the exact opposite,
burdening sysops with unnecessary work for no reason.

> Please, would you explain which would be the best form
> to your opinion ?

I do think that in cases where a banned user is known to sometimes produce
acceptable work, we should try to reintroduce them into the community
(death threats are pretty much equivalent to burning down your bridges,
though). So in cases of petty vandalism or wikiquette violations I find it
acceptable to let the "good edits" remain. I think none of us would want
all of Lir's pages to be deleted simply because they were written by Adam
under one of his nyms.

But users like Michael are a different matter. Here the content is
actually a threat in itself, because it is so ridden with errors, but
looks like it has been written in good faith by an honest contributor.
Someone who comes across such a page would not expect it to be full of
errors, and would blame these errors on *us* if they locate them. "So you
know this was a user who produced such pages only? So why didn't you ban
him and delete everything he writes?"

I know, you are talking about blanking. But not only because of the
questionable "group experience", but also because you want to restore the
"good edits". I think this is a bad idea, because users not familiar with
Michael's "work" could easily mistake bad edits for good ones, and restore
them out of good faith. "If all the edits are bad, why didn't you just
delete them instead of blanking them" would be the likely reply if a sysop
then challenged that user. What should he respond? "It looked like a good
idea at the time" ?

In other words, the mass blanking is likely to generate more Michael-
related controversy and more Michael-related sysop work for no good
reason.

> I think blank pages do not need to be corrected for
> errors.
> Besides, my comment here was clearly not about content
> errors. You were saying that I would be responsible
> for degradation of relationships between sysops and
> non sysops. I stronly trust the majority of sysops.
> You included, even if I disagree with you here.
> However, my survival instinct forbid me to trust
> everyone just because I am said I must trust them.

Nobody's lives are at stake here. What is at stake, however, is the
accuracy of our encyclopedia. This is not endangered by blank pages per
se, but by those blank pages that are restored in good faith, in spite of
the fact that they are written by a known abuser and vandal. It would be
irresponsible by sysops towards non-sysops to allow this to happen -- non-
sysops have a right to expect that sysops do what they were assigned to
do, keep the vandals out. The only cases where blanking makes sense are
pages which contain offensive messages, but can not be deleted by the
person viewing them.

Regards,

Erik


body:
Anthere-
> That is great ! Just needs to be seeable by anyone.
> The sysop status could be just necessary to hit the button

And to view the text of the individual deleted revisions. I'm sure you
meant to say that, instead of bringing up that old, long-answered question
again.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Guillaume Blanchard

subject: [Wikitech-l] LanguageFr.php

body:
Bonjour,
Here the new version of LanguageFr.php.
The main change is the correction of the date form (removed odd character).
It's not critical, but all static date (with 4 ~) will be wrote incorrectly
until you update the french interface.
If you need to make some change before updating, please do it directly at
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip?dia:LanguageFr.php then you will not have
to do it each time.
Cheers,

Aoineko
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: LanguageFr.php
Type: application/octet-stream
Size: 48885 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20030527/34382065/attachment.obj>


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Rollback fix (and counters)

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

Je Mardo 27 Majo 2003 11:59, Lee Daniel Crocker skribis:
> > (Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com>):
> > I've also taken the $wgDisableCounters check out of
> > SiteStatsUpdate.php,
>
> Why remove the functionality instead of simply setting
> $wgDisableCounters to false?

Because that would re-enable the individual page view counters, putting
more update pressure back onto the much-abuse cur table. The
granularity on the option didn't match what we've been doing.

- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.2 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQE+07vIxVlOmwh1xjgRAuk9AJ98+g3uGfkzYyT75J+oVnku2Y0qEgCfeh62
9USzI7/LzbMC6g901zcAdjY=
=vc7F
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


from_name: Lee Daniel Crocker

body:
> (Tomasz Wegrzanowski <taw at users.sourceforge.net>):
> >
> > >What about these three options?
> > > ( ) underline links
> > > ( ) use browser default
> > > ( ) not underline links
> > >Which one to be the default is
> > >another question.
> >
> > If my worry about colourblind readers does turn out to be reasonable,
> > then we should make "use browser default" the default,
> > since hopefully a lot of people that like nude links
> > will already have set their browser defaults that way.
> > (Not Erik, however.)
>
> Stop that ! There is no such thing as browser defaults.
>
> And anyway, colorblind people should be able to tell the difference
> between black and non-black on computer screen quite easily.

I don't know what the hell Taw is thinking: of course there are
browser defaults, and of course that's the right thing to do in
many cases, because people can and do configure their browsers the
way they like. That doesn't mean we can't make some other setting
/our/ default, but using the browsers default should certainly be
an option.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


subject: [Wikitech-l] Unicode and polices

body:
> Brion.
>
> Aoineko suggested that it is my police which is wrong
> and not my browser (err...browsers) in supporting
> unicode. I understood from what you told me it was my
> browser. I don't care I can't see international links,
> but I do care when I can't read the content of
> articles, or even the title of the articles.
> So...perhaps I understood nothing, but do you think
> Opera 5 is not accepting unicode because of missing
> polices or does it just not tolerate it at all ?
> Netcape 4.7 is not working either
> Mozilla is better (I can see Lech Walesa), but still I
> can't see the international links. IE is writing ?
>
> Is that worth that I try to import some polices ?
>
> Ant

I think there are both problem. Even if your browser can handle unicode, you
can't see caracters not defined in your font. I'm using MS Arial Unicode
with IE6.0 and I still not be able to see 100% of unicode characters. In my
case I think it's only a font problem. You can go to this page and look at
what percentage of caracters you can see :
http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/utf8.html (it's a UTF8 sample page).

Aoineko


from_name: Daniel Ehrenberg

subject: [WikiEN-l] Alternative to blanking

body:
--- a.crossman at blueyonder.co.uk wrote:
> >Instead of blanking articles why not replace the
> article text with a
> >redirect to a boilerplate text with something along
> the lines of
> >"The content of this article is being disputed."
>
> Hmm. But this means links to the article won't be
> coloured as stubs.
>
> Evercat

I didn't vote in time, but I think that there should
have been a way to tell Wikipedia that the article is
a stub. Say, a checkbox next to the minor edit
checkbox that says "This article contains no
information whatsoever" that makes it be counted as a
stub for all links to it and article counting. But, I
guess it's too late.

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com


subject: [WikiEN-l] Mention that Bomis hosts Wikipedia

body:
--- Geoffrey Thomas <geoffreyerffoeg at yahoo.com> wrote:
> The bottom of [[fr:Accueil]], the French Wikipedia's
> home page, contains the text "Site
> gracieusement h?berg? par _Bomis_", with a link to
> the website. Loosely translated, it says, "Site
> graciously hosted by Bomis." Should we add something
> like this to the [[en:Main Page]], e.g.,
> "Thanks to [[Bomis]] (www.bomis.com) for hosting the
> Wikipedia!"? It's awfully nice of them to
> provide for what's probably the last big site on the
> Internet without banner ads and popups; we
> really ought to say thanks somehow, and at the least
> give them a bit of traffic.
>
> -Geoffrey

I agree in prinicple, but it would look somewhat
amateurish.
--LittleDan

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikimedia charter/bylaws

body:
we need to discuss Wiki(p|m)edia's official policy and
charter for when we become a nonprofit. To do that, I
created the following meta page:
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_charter

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com


body:
> (Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com>):
>
> I've also taken the $wgDisableCounters check out of SiteStatsUpdate.php,

Why remove the functionality instead of simply setting
$wgDisableCounters to false?

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


from_name: Christopher Mahan

subject: [WikiEN-l] is this the time to ask for intervention? edit skirmishes

body:
--- Julie Kemp <juleskemp at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hi all -
> Julie

Hi Back to you stranger :)

=====
Christopher Mahan
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
818.943.1850 cell
http://www.christophermahan.com/

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com


from_name: Daniel Mayer

body:
On Tuesday 27 May 2003 02:51 am, wikien-l-request at wikipedia.org wrote:
> The bottom of [[fr:Accueil]], the French Wikipedia's home page, contains
> the text "Site gracieusement h?berg? par _Bomis_", with a link to the
> website. Loosely translated, it says, "Site graciously hosted by Bomis."
> Should we add something like this to the [[en:Main Page]], e.g., "Thanks to
> [[Bomis]] (www.bomis.com) for hosting the Wikipedia!"? It's awfully nice of
> them to provide for what's probably the last big site on the Internet
> without banner ads and popups; we really ought to say thanks somehow, and
> at the least give them a bit of traffic.
>
> -Geoffrey

I don't have any problem with this so long as Jimbo agrees.

--mav


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Title characters

body:
> (Tomasz Wegrzanowski <taw at users.sourceforge.net>):
>
> Well, I'm more concerned about "UNIX" vs. "Unix".

Or more generally, acronyms. "CAT" is computer assisted tomography,
while "cat" is a furry creature.  But if we did go to complete
case-insensitivity, the problem would be merely another source of
title ambiguity, which we are already used to dealing with (i.e.,
the "cat" page would deal with the creature and the machine just
as the "Mercury" page deals with the metal, the planet, and the god),
so that's not a major impediment.

We'd have to canonicalize the URLs in some way (for example, by
making every character in the URL lowercase all the time), and then
make a guess about what actual title to create for new pages.

I don't know if it's possible to make every case easy, so we have
to settle for making the majority of cases easy. I think most page
titles are still such that they should be capitalized as titles but
not in running text, just like "cat". So the present system handles
the common case well. True, it doesn't handle some other cases, but
I'm not really sure we could do that without complicating the more
common case.

I'd need to see more argument about exactly how to handle this
before I'd be convinced to change it.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


body:
>> If this is all terribly wrong, can we come up with a more definite policy,
>> saying what the criteria are for an article to be allowed, and amend
>> [[m:Wiki is not paper]] and the policy pages accordingly?
>
> I agree for the most part, with one exception:
>
> Articles that are always likely to remain stubs should not have their own
> page, but be integrated into the main article. This is especially true for
> fictional realms. Yesterday I merged two-sentence articles about Gnasher,
> Gnipper, Rasher, Bea, and a bunch of other characters from "Dennis the
> Menace" into the main article;...

I don't see this as an exception, really, just an exercise of
editorial judgment about the best way to write about a subject.
When I wrote "Wiki is not paper", I was indeed of the opinion that
every subject no matter how trivial deserves coverage if someone is
willing to write a good article about it.

Part of the job of writing good articles is deciding what should
be split off into its own page, and what should be integrated as a
small mention in a larger article. That says nothing about what
subjects are or are not "significant" enough to write about at all:
just how one chooses to write about them.  I'm all for interesting
trivia, just write it well.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Where should /temp pages go?

body:
Toby wrote:
> Also, deleting temp pages that are eventually adopted is wrong,
> since it destroys the edit history.
> If nothing is being worked on anymore, then redirect.
>

Well I do this whenever I was the only one who edited the /Temp page but
whenever other people contributed to the /Temp page then I go through the
hackish process to merge the /Temp edit history with the parent page's edit
history.

It would /really/ be nice to have a "combine page histories" option for
Admins.

Just dreaming...

--- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: a.crossman at blueyonder.co.uk

subject: [WikiEN-l] Alternative to blanking

body:
>Instead of blanking articles why not replace the article text with a
>redirect to a boilerplate text with something along the lines of
>"The content of this article is being disputed."

Hmm. But this means links to the article won't be coloured as stubs.

Evercat
--
Allan Crossman
a.crossman at blueyonder.co.uk
http://dogma.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk


body:
On Tuesday 27 May 2003 02:51 am, wikien-l-request at wikipedia.org wrote:
> The bottom of [[fr:Accueil]], the French Wikipedia's home page, contains
> the text "Site gracieusement h?berg? par _Bomis_", with a link to the
> website. Loosely translated, it says, "Site graciously hosted by Bomis."
> Should we add something like this to the [[en:Main Page]], e.g., "Thanks to
> [[Bomis]] (www.bomis.com) for hosting the Wikipedia!"? It's awfully nice of
> them to provide for what's probably the last big site on the Internet
> without banner ads and popups; we really ought to say thanks somehow, and
> at the least give them a bit of traffic.
>
> -Geoffrey

Actually I just tried to go to http://www.bomis.com on my work's computer and
was blocked by our censorware because Bomis has sports content and/or porn in
its directory (we had to install this censorware to make sure state workers
don't spend half their day reading sports or looking at porn).

That is fine with me except for the possibility that by having such a link to
Bomis.com on en.wiki's Main Page we may get Wikipedia similarly blacklisted
(thus blocking about 100,000 California state workers from even reading
Wikipedia).

Something to think about at the very least...

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Two issues here:

body:
> Sean Barrett wrote:
>> The distinction is a simple one, and only those who are actively
>> working to eliminate privacy find it difficult to understand.

Anyone who calls privacy a "simple" issue doesn't know what he's
talking about. It is a common political cheap-shot tactic to accuse
those who do see the complexities of an issue of simply being the
enemy so no further thought is required, but if we are to deal with
the issues rationally, we must work to encourage discussion, not
foreclose it.

I see most issues of privacy today as necessary evils: the only
reason I keep some things private is because we live under a powerful
and intrusive government that will jail me for doing some things I
have every right to do, and also because common societal norms may
make me unpopular for doing those things.

I would certtainly prefer to solve those problems by fixing the
intrusive government and the irrational society; but I can't do
that overnight. I can, however, maintain some privacy while working
towards those ultimate solutions.

But nowhere in any of that do I confuse "privacy" with the totally
unrelated issue of "freedom" as many people do, nor do I pretend
that it is a simple issue.

See, for example,

<http://www.piclab.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?The_Benefits_Of_Transparency>

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia:Image use policy

body:
Bonjour,
I just finish to read [Wikipedia:Image use policy] but I didn't found the
information I searched.
Do we need to write the licence statute on a picture ?
All pictures I released for Wikipedia until now was marked on the
bottom-right by "Under GFDL".
I remeber someone tell me to do more that 1 year latter.
But main part of pictures I see on Wikipedia don't have such mark.
What is the policy about it ?
Regards,

Aoineko


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] Communitarianism

body:
Well, I can only suggest you jump in and edit.  The word communism was
appropriated by Marxists, but continues to have meaning, but it is, alas, a
spoiled word, right along with truth and love.

Fred

> From: "K Forstner" <kurt.forstner at chello.at>
> Reply-To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
> Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 21:50:32 +0200
> To: "WIKIPEDIA" <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Communitarianism
>
> Could those of you interested in, and knowledgeable about, political science
> and philosophy please have a look at
> http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communitarianism ? I have already objected to
> the content of that article on the talk page, but people seem to ignore it
> and add wrong information.
>
> Kurt Forstner aka KF
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


subject: [Wikitech-l] email AT pliny.wikipedia.org

body:
On Tue, 27 May 2003, Giskart wrote:
> I have recieved a spam. Nothing special. But the TO: adress is, I think.
>
> Is it normal that spam send to <email AT pliny.wikipedia.org> is forward to
> <wikinl-l-admin AT wikipedia.org> , the contact emailadress of Wikipedia
> NL?

The 'to' address actually has nothing to do with where the e-mail gets
sent to. :P  (And just as well, or mailing lists and BCC wouldn't work,
but it does get abused by a lot of spam too.)

I'll try to finish getting SpamAssassin installed when I get a chance...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Viewing deleted pages

body:
Toby-
> That's just what *I* thought that Anthere was bringing up again.
> What else would one expect a nonadmin to see on that page?

At most a mere list of previous revisions, so as to see who wrote them.
The text of deleted pages will remain hidden to non-sysops, for a variety
of reasons which have been discussed ad nauseum.

As for copyright infringements in article histories, this may be a reason
to have a "delete this revision" function.

Regards,

Erik


body:
--- Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> On Tuesday 27 May 2003 02:51 am,
> wikien-l-request at wikipedia.org wrote:
> > The bottom of [[fr:Accueil]], the French
> Wikipedia's home page, contains
> > the text "Site gracieusement h?berg? par _Bomis_",
> with a link to the
> > website. Loosely translated, it says, "Site
> graciously hosted by Bomis."
> > Should we add something like this to the [[en:Main
> Page]], e.g., "Thanks to
> > [[Bomis]] (www.bomis.com) for hosting the
> Wikipedia!"? It's awfully nice of
> > them to provide for what's probably the last big
> site on the Internet
> > without banner ads and popups; we really ought to
> say thanks somehow, and
> > at the least give them a bit of traffic.
> >
> > -Geoffrey
>
> Actually I just tried to go to http://www.bomis.com
> on my work's computer and
> was blocked by our censorware because Bomis has
> sports content and/or porn in
> its directory (we had to install this censorware to
> make sure state workers
> don't spend half their day reading sports or looking
> at porn).
>
> That is fine with me except for the possibility that
> by having such a link to
> Bomis.com on en.wiki's Main Page we may get
> Wikipedia similarly blacklisted
> (thus blocking about 100,000 California state
> workers from even reading
> Wikipedia).
>
> Something to think about at the very least...
>
> -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

How does the blocking software work? Does it review
the words in the page requested or just block a
database of sites? If it just blocks some sites
without reviewing current content, then it should  be
OK to put a link to  bomis. Or, you could put in some
kind of request to allow Wikipedia. When looking
randomly through wikipedia, I've found at least one
article on a pornography site, with a direct link to
it. That should be enough to get wikipedia banned,
anyway, but it isn't
--LittleDan

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com


from_name: Sean Barrett

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Two issues here:

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

Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
|>Sean Barrett wrote:
|>
|>>The distinction is a simple one, and only those who are actively
|>>working to eliminate privacy find it difficult to understand.
|
|
| Anyone who calls privacy a "simple" issue doesn't know what he's
| talking about. It is a common political cheap-shot tactic to accuse
| those who do see the complexities of an issue of simply being the
| enemy so no further thought is required, but if we are to deal with
| the issues rationally, we must work to encourage discussion, not
| foreclose it.

Please note that I never said -- nor do I believe -- that *privacy* is a
simple issue.  I said -- and believe -- that the difference between
Richard Nixon's situation (the example originally given) and a private
citizen's situation is simple.  It is a common political cheap-shot
tactic to accuse those who see the fallacy of a simplistic analogy of
simply being the enemy so no further thought is required.

- --
~ Sean Barrett     | Doesn't the fact that there are *exactly*
~ sean at epoptic.com | fifty states seem a little suspicious?
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.1 (MingW32)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQE+0/YJv/8xpnvE6M8RArP/AJ9g35s33q2tERALL4CNuSKmVnvcmgCdFJqQ
TUyYONwcCSe1j016efO2I2c=
=Qc4O
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikitech-l] [daniwo59@aol.com: [WikiEN-l] request for tech help]

body:
Since this happens often, and since Danny is good, I would support
hardcoding (if necessary) for Danny's special case.

Or, is Danny a sysop?  If not, why not?  Can't sysops edit even under
an ip ban?  If not, they should be able to, if for no other reason
than self-defense even if some bad person gains access to a sysop
account and tries banning other sysops.

----- Forwarded message from daniwo59 at aol.com -----

From: daniwo59 at aol.com
Date: Sun, 25 May 2003 15:49:55 EDT
To: wikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: [WikiEN-l] request for tech help

I am getting the "you are blocked" message again. Let me clarify. I am not
Michael. This is frustrating.

Danny

----- End forwarded message -----


in_reply_to: <20030527024639.2741.qmail@web11702.mail.yahoo.com>; from geoffreyerffoeg@yahoo.com on Mon, May 26, 2003 at 07:46:39PM -0700

body:
It isn't necessary, and may not be desirable, as Bomis isn't NPOV.  :-)

Geoffrey Thomas wrote:

> The bottom of [[fr:Accueil]], the French Wikipedia's home page, contains the text "Site
> gracieusement h?berg? par _Bomis_", with a link to the website. Loosely translated, it says, "Site
> graciously hosted by Bomis." Should we add something like this to the [[en:Main Page]], e.g.,
> "Thanks to [[Bomis]] (www.bomis.com) for hosting the Wikipedia!"? It's awfully nice of them to
> provide for what's probably the last big site on the Internet without banner ads and popups; we
> really ought to say thanks somehow, and at the least give them a bit of traffic.
>
> -Geoffrey
>
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
> http://search.yahoo.com
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


subject: [Wikitech-l] Title characters

body:
On Tue, 27 May 2003, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
> I confess ignorance here. Are there really languages for which the
> simplest canonical representation in Unicode requires combining forms?

Off the top of my head, one Aleutian language (Unangam Tunuu) uses
x-with-circumflex; Guarani apparently uses g-with-tilde. Tone marks for
Chinese Zhuyin phoenetic script are combining characters; I think the
Indian scripts are pretty dependant on this kind of thing as well.

Precombined characters are theoretically only included for round-trip
conversion with legacy character sets, so they're not really making new
ones for orthographies that are just getting started in the wonderful
world of character encoding.

> If so, then I remove the restriction, but we must then specify a
> specific canonical representation for titles in each language, as you
> suggest; perhaps something like a Stringprep profile would be needed.

They've thought of that already too, it seems. :)
See Unicode Standard Annex #15, "Unicode normalization forms":
http://www.unicode.org/unicode/reports/tr15/

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [WikiEN-l] A request from H. Jonat

body:
H. Jonat wrote me a nice letter, expressing concern that when her name
is searched for at google, the bulk of what is found is wikipedia talk
pages and wikipedia mailing list postings that are sharply critical of
her.  She resents the accusation that she is 'right wing' and in any
event doesn't like this turn of events.

Now, some might say, well, if you don't want your name to be
associated on the Internet with various things, then don't write in
thus-and-such a way, and they'd be right of course.

But since Helga requested nicely that perhaps we could do something
about this, I am thinking that perhaps we could refactor some pages.

This part is important: I presume, and I asked her, that if we did
this, she would agree to simply part company with us peacefully.  ALSO
IMPORTANT: She did not threaten to stay if we don't do this, she did
not make this as a tit-for-tat offer or request, she did not make any
kind of legalistic or other threat.

It sounds to me like she may regret ever getting mixed up with
wikipedia, and would like to simply go away.  It would be helpful to
this process if we refactored some pages.

Thoughts?

Wikipedia holds no grudges, of course, and if people who have been
controversial wish to end things peacefully, then that's great as far
as I am concerned.

--Jimbo


from_name: Julie Kemp

subject: [WikiEN-l] Triton or whoever he is -- and Helga's request

body:
Is there any way one of the folks who know how to do these things can
check and see if Triton is Elliot (not banned, I don't think, but
possibly an earlier version of DW) or in fact DW?  The arguments are the
same, and the picture uploads are, too, I think.  I am not trying to
spread false accusations; however, several wikipedians have noted the
similarities on my page and elsewhere.  I'd also like to thank everyone
who has stepped in and tried to tone things down.  His nastiness towards
me hasn't stopped (although I note that now, rather than having accused
him of being obtuse, etc., he now claims I accused someone else of that
and it drove that user off.  Frankly, at this point, I'm not sure who
said what, there is so much that is unsigned.

As for Helga, I know exactly how she feels.  Could we somehow replace
her name with something like User X?  I only ask because the arguments
she was involved in often include really good examples of methodology
and how wikipedians try to reach consensus.  Otherwise, unless anyone
else feels it's integral to the project, I suppose there would be no
harm and might help to maintain goodwill.  If people are worried about
the future, there could always be an archived copy.

Julie
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/attachments/20030527/1a99bd29/attachment.htm


from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [Wikitech-l] Viewing deleted pages

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>Toby Bartels wrote:

>>That's just what *I* thought that Anthere was bringing up again.
>>What else would one expect a nonadmin to see on that page?

>At most a mere list of previous revisions, so as to see who wrote them.

I think that this would be an improvement.
It's really up to Anth?re to say what she's looking for, however;
my interest is in her happiness (and that of users like her),
since I can see this stuff anyway on the only wiki that I participate in much.

>The text of deleted pages will remain hidden to non-sysops, for a variety
>of reasons which have been discussed ad nauseum.

I know that it came up before, but I only remember the copyright problems.
I think that there were more ... but I can't find it on the archives!
(Has anybody written a search engine for them yet? -- besides Google?)
Do you remember when this came up before?

>As for copyright infringements in article histories, this may be a reason
>to have a "delete this revision" function.

Yes, I think that this would be a good idea --
*if* we are in any danger from these infringements
(either legally or nonlegally).
Remember that <robots.txt> hides them from (most) spiders.

-- Toby


subject: [WikiEN-l] A request from H. Jonat

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote in part:

>But since Helga requested nicely that perhaps we could do something
>about this, I am thinking that perhaps we could refactor some pages.

A simple way might be to replace "Helga Jonat" with "HJ" --
she uses that signature sometimes anyway.
Then we know who that was all about, but it won't show up to outsiders.

-- Toby


body:
LittleDan wrote:

>I agree in prinicple, but it would look somewhat
>amateurish.

I don't see that such a link is necessary,
but I don't think that it's in any way amateurish either.

-- Toby


body:
>Since this happens often, and since Danny is good, I would support
>hardcoding (if necessary) for Danny's special case.

>Or, is Danny a sysop?  If not, why not?  Can't sysops edit even under
>an ip ban?  If not, they should be able to, if for no other reason
>than self-defense even if some bad person gains access to a sysop
>account and tries banning other sysops.

Danny is indeed a sysop (on [[en:]] at least).
For purposes of self defense, note that banned sysops can still unban people.
(This assumes that the ban is only by IP address, however.)

-- Toby


subject: [Wikitech-l] Title characters

body:
> (Brion Vibber <vibber at aludra.usc.edu>):
>
> > * Should not allow Unicode diacriticals, combining forms, display
> >   forms (ligatures), controls, and other specials.
>
> Waitaminute... that would seem to exclude the use of accented characters
> that do not have a precombined form. This could be seriously detrimental
> to some languages.
>
> (In any case, we ought to do a little fancier work with UTF-8 to make sure
> that canonical forms are used to prevent false non-matches. I don't know
> if there's a library we can link into PHP to do this or if we'd have to
> write something.)

I confess ignorance here. Are there really languages for which the
simplest canonical representation in Unicode requires combining forms?
If so, then I remove the restriction, but we must then specify a
specific canonical representation for titles in each language, as you
suggest; perhaps something like a Stringprep profile would be needed.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


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

Je Mardo 27 Majo 2003 14:28, Daniel Mayer skribis:
> Toby wrote:
> > Also, deleting temp pages that are eventually adopted is wrong,
> > since it destroys the edit history.
> > If nothing is being worked on anymore, then redirect.
>
> Well I do this whenever I was the only one who edited the /Temp page
> but whenever other people contributed to the /Temp page then I go
> through the hackish process to merge the /Temp edit history with the
> parent page's edit history.

Another way would be to _rename_ the 'live' page to the /Temp page to
work on it, and leave a protected copy in place at the old name. Then
when the updates are done, rename it back in place with all history
intact.

> It would /really/ be nice to have a "combine page histories" option
> for Admins.

I'm reluctant to do such as there's presently no way to extricate the
combined histories if one makes a mistake (or, hypothetically, a rogue
sysop goes on a rampage) short of checking backup archives and manually
reassigning the entries.

- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.2 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQE+1CWYxVlOmwh1xjgRApULAJwL7n8ZNgXrajkj1s6NTK4H/6k5ZwCgis3g
yFJtEiddzzY1gsBsVZdcB9Q=
=kkBd
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


from_name: Zoe

subject: [WikiEN-l] Helga re-banned

body:
As I've said before, MyRedDice has never met a vandal
he didn't like.

Zoe

--- Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Je Diman??o 25 Majo 2003 21:39, Erik Moeller
> skribis:
> > I would still like to know who unblocked her, just
> in case it was not
> > an accident. It should be determinable by looking
> up the URL
>
> See
>
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IP_probation_watchlist
>
> - -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
> Version: GnuPG v1.2.2 (GNU/Linux)
>
>
iD8DBQE+0ZwwxVlOmwh1xjgRAhLsAJ4wJNeTu+ZICqOGDCJ66BqvZMv5AQCfWv53
> Kq4y+83uat+//oQ4eAqDR8I=
> =M1Tq
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Calendar - Free online calendar with sync to Outlook(TM).
http://calendar.yahoo.com


from_name: Karim Moussally

subject: [WikiEN-l] French monarchs and other unsavory characters

body:
OK, I've been going through the gory details over at List of French
monarchs and Clovis I (the talk pages). It seems to me that whatever the
case may be, Triton is being deliberately confrontational... and not in a
good way. He is consistently abusive and uses language that I believe is
designed to worsen, not better, the situation. A few choice examples:

We now have someone calling themselves Slrubenstein reverting my facts. Why
is this vandalism going on?

To the User logged in calling himself Tannin - refrain from accusations
unless you have proof.

And by the way, Ms. Kemp, don't even infer plagiarism, you are far from
qualified in law

Don't you think it a bit childish, besides dishonest, to insert "Belgium"
after deleting Toxandria. Or did you not study any of this but decided to
hide it from others?

Act like an adult, behave like the professional you claim to be, and please
correct your improper deletions. And, I will indeed ask Jimbo Wales to look
at your deletions, assertions and derogatory remarks about other erstwhile
contributors to his website

you have deleted facts straight from the James book which you obviously
never read. I shall reverse your attempts to distort and cover up.

As an aside, Ms. Kemp intimidated some of these people who either now say
nothing or have left.

*****
In my opinion, this is not the language of a person who is seriously
engaged in a scholarly dispute in an attempt to arrive at factual
conclusions. It has been my experience that ad hominem attacks are
typically made by people who do not have a logical or reasonable argument
to make. I suggest that someone please look into this matter seriously.

Please note that I know very little about French monarchy, I'm dealing here
with what I see as an abusive user, whether or not his idea(s) about French
monarchy are valid.

-----

Karim Moussally
kmoussally at cal.berkeley.edu

"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre
minds. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly
submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his
intelligence."
    -Albert Einstein, attributed

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/attachments/20030527/487f0959/attachment.htm


from_name: Dante Alighieri

body:
Sending again, sent from the wrong address before:

OK, I've been going through the gory details over at List of French
monarchs and Clovis I (the talk pages). It seems to me that whatever the
case may be, Triton is being deliberately confrontational... and not in a
good way. He is consistently abusive and uses language that I believe is
designed to worsen, not better, the situation. A few choice examples:

We now have someone calling themselves Slrubenstein reverting my facts. Why
is this vandalism going on?

To the User logged in calling himself Tannin - refrain from accusations
unless you have proof.

And by the way, Ms. Kemp, don't even infer plagiarism, you are far from
qualified in law

Don't you think it a bit childish, besides dishonest, to insert "Belgium"
after deleting Toxandria. Or did you not study any of this but decided to
hide it from others?

Act like an adult, behave like the professional you claim to be, and please
correct your improper deletions. And, I will indeed ask Jimbo Wales to look
at your deletions, assertions and derogatory remarks about other erstwhile
contributors to his website

you have deleted facts straight from the James book which you obviously
never read. I shall reverse your attempts to distort and cover up.

As an aside, Ms. Kemp intimidated some of these people who either now say
nothing or have left.

*****
In my opinion, this is not the language of a person who is seriously
engaged in a scholarly dispute in an attempt to arrive at factual
conclusions. It has been my experience that ad hominem attacks are
typically made by people who do not have a logical or reasonable argument
to make. I suggest that someone please look into this matter seriously.

Please note that I know very little about French monarchy, I'm dealing here
with what I see as an abusive user, whether or not his idea(s) about French
monarchy are valid.

-----

Dante Alighieri
dalighieri at digitalgrapefruit.com

"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their
neutrality in times of great moral crisis."
    -Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/attachments/20030527/9db27f91/attachment.htm


body:
--- Anthere <anthere6 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> --- Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> >More respectful? Towards whom?
> > Michael, who has insulted
> > virtually every Wikipedian who has tried to talk
> to
> > him?
>
> You know quite well the "toward whom" is not only
> adressed to Michael.

"Only"?  Why had Micheal earned any respect
whatsoever?

> > I for one find it absolutely acceptable
> > to delete new Michael-
> > pages on sight and encourage sysops to do so --
> but
> > only if it is certain
> > that he is really the author.
>
> only if it is certain, right.
> And only if the edits are bad, right.

Wrong.  It's impossible to tell if any of Michael's
edits are bad unless you want to redo all of the
original research.  Sometimes he writes good things,
sometimes he writes absolute lies.  It's impossible to
tell which is which.

Zoe

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Calendar - Free online calendar with sync to Outlook(TM).
http://calendar.yahoo.com


subject: [WikiEN-l] A request from H. Jonat

body:
--- Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> wrote:
> H. Jonat wrote me a nice letter, expressing concern
> that when her name
> is searched for at google, the bulk of what is found
> is wikipedia talk
> pages and wikipedia mailing list postings that are
> sharply critical of
> her.  She resents the accusation that she is 'right
> wing' and in any
> event doesn't like this turn of events.
>
> Now, some might say, well, if you don't want your
> name to be
> associated on the Internet with various things, then
> don't write in
> thus-and-such a way, and they'd be right of course.
>
> But since Helga requested nicely that perhaps we
> could do something
> about this, I am thinking that perhaps we could
> refactor some pages.
>
> This part is important: I presume, and I asked her,
> that if we did
> this, she would agree to simply part company with us
> peacefully.  ALSO
> IMPORTANT: She did not threaten to stay if we don't
> do this, she did
> not make this as a tit-for-tat offer or request, she
> did not make any
> kind of legalistic or other threat.
>
> It sounds to me like she may regret ever getting
> mixed up with
> wikipedia, and would like to simply go away.  It
> would be helpful to
> this process if we refactored some pages.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Wikipedia holds no grudges, of course, and if people
> who have been
> controversial wish to end things peacefully, then
> that's great as far
> as I am concerned.
>
> --Jimbo

I really think that the mailing list pages should be
blocked from search engines.

Zoe

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Calendar - Free online calendar with sync to Outlook(TM).
http://calendar.yahoo.com


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Title characters

body:
On Tue, May 27, 2003 at 02:18:39PM -0500, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
> > (Tomasz Wegrzanowski <taw at users.sourceforge.net>):
> >
> > Well, I'm more concerned about "UNIX" vs. "Unix".
>
> Or more generally, acronyms. "CAT" is computer assisted tomography,
> while "cat" is a furry creature.  But if we did go to complete
> case-insensitivity, the problem would be merely another source of
> title ambiguity, which we are already used to dealing with (i.e.,
> the "cat" page would deal with the creature and the machine just
> as the "Mercury" page deals with the metal, the planet, and the god),
> so that's not a major impediment.
>
> We'd have to canonicalize the URLs in some way (for example, by
> making every character in the URL lowercase all the time), and then
> make a guess about what actual title to create for new pages.
>
> I don't know if it's possible to make every case easy, so we have
> to settle for making the majority of cases easy. I think most page
> titles are still such that they should be capitalized as titles but
> not in running text, just like "cat". So the present system handles
> the common case well. True, it doesn't handle some other cases, but
> I'm not really sure we could do that without complicating the more
> common case.
>
> I'd need to see more argument about exactly how to handle this
> before I'd be convinced to change it.

We need 2 canonical forms - database canonical form for linking,
always lowercase, and presentation canonical forms, which is by default
ucfirst(title_of_link_that_created_article), and can be overriden
by #CANONICALFORM iMac or something.


from_name: K Forstner

subject: [WikiEN-l] Communitarianism

body:
Could those of you interested in, and knowledgeable about, political science
and philosophy please have a look at
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communitarianism ? I have already objected to
the content of that article on the talk page, but people seem to ignore it
and add wrong information.

Kurt Forstner aka KF


subject: [WikiEN-l] the troll known as Triton

body:
I know it isn't nice to say, but I think this may be a case of serious
troll-ness.  I will try to stop feeding, but will continue to work on
any articles I feel, with the usual explanations for changes.  For the
record, though, considering the crap that this person says, implies,
insinuates, or otherwise communicates about me on this site, I'd like to
bop this wanker (it's the mildest thing I can think to say at the
moment) in the nose.

Jules
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/attachments/20030527/2cd297ef/attachment.htm


from_name: Giskart

body:
I have recieved a spam. Nothing special. But the TO: adress is, I think.

Is it normal that spam send to <email AT pliny.wikipedia.org> is forward to
<wikinl-l-admin AT wikipedia.org> , the contact emailadress of Wikipedia
NL?

--->

>From - Wed May 28 00:28:22 2003
X-UIDL: 969e3452ea8a1cd625306ddc2aad1fa5
X-Mozilla-Status: 0001
X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000
Return-Path: <wikinl-l-admin AT wikipedia.org>
X-Flags: 0000
Delivered-To: GMX delivery to giskart AT gmx.net
Received: (qmail 8046 invoked by uid 65534); 27 May 2003 22:20:06 -0000
Received: from efwd.dnsix.com (EHLO efwd.dnsix.com) (216.34.94.189)
  by mx0.gmx.net (mx028-rz3) with SMTP; 28 May 2003 00:20:06 +0200
Received: from [130.94.122.197] (helo=pliny.wikipedia.org)
	by efwd.dnsix.com with smtp (Exim 3.36 #1)
	id 19Kmnb-0001eh-00; Tue, 27 May 2003 15:20:03 -0700
Received: from pliny.wikipedia.org (localhost.localdomain [127.0.0.1])
	by pliny.wikipedia.org (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id h4RMK2132280;
	Tue, 27 May 2003 22:20:02 GMT
Received: from NETSCAPE.NET ([200.101.71.203])
	by pliny.wikipedia.org (8.11.6/8.11.6) with SMTP id h4RMJ4132225
	for <wikinl-l-admin AT wikipedia.org>; Tue, 27 May 2003 22:19:05 GMT
Received: from group21.345mail.com ([108.43.83.131])
	by nntp.pinxodet.net with SMTP; 28 May 2003 13:12:13 -1000
Received: from unknown (HELO qnx.mdrost.com) (102.165.97.188)
	by smtp18.yenddx.com with asmtp; 28 May 2003 03:03:55 -0500
Received: from relay.2yahoo.com ([92.180.109.121])
	by nntp.pinxodet.net with QMQP; Tue, 27 May 2003 21:55:37 -0000
Message-ID: <1c5501c32490$d6fde580$9552ba07 at kqyixcpmtdnmxkt>
Reply-To: <CustomPrintGoods at NETSCAPE.NET>
From: <CustomPrintGoods at NETSCAPE.NET>
To: email AT pliny.wikipedia.org
Subject: Giant Posters made from YOUR Images: $7.00 a square foot
Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 08:44:59 +1200
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
	boundary="----=_NextPart_0CF_B84F_A258DD21.449BEA57"
X-Priority: 3
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2615.200
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2615.200
Sender: wikinl-l-owner AT wikipedia.org
Errors-To: wikinl-l-owner AT wikipedia.org
X-BeenThere: wikinl-l AT wikipedia.org
X-Mailman-Version: 2.0.13
Precedence: bulk
List-Help: <mailto:wikinl-l-request AT wikipedia.org?subject=help>
List-Post: <mailto:wikinl-l AT wikipedia.org>
List-Subscribe: <http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikinl-l>,
	<mailto:wikinl-l-request AT wikipedia.org?subject=subscribe>
List-Id: De discussielijst van de Nederlandstalige Wikipedia <wikinl-
l.wikipedia.org>
List-Unsubscribe: <http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikinl-l>,
	<mailto:wikinl-l-request AT wikipedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
List-Archive: <http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/private/wikinl-l/>
X-GMX-Antivirus: -1 (not scanned, may not use virus scanner)
X-GMX-Antispam: 0 (Sender is in whitelist)

--
Contact: giskart AT wikipedia.be
Ook een artikeltje schrijven? WikipediaNL, de vrije GNU/FDL encyclopedie
http://www.wikipedia.be


from_name: james duffy

body:
>Since his articles are deleted
>on sight, it would be quite difficult for me to judge
>whether they can be salvaged or not. Right ?

That completely misses the point. Whether they can or cannot be salvaged is
irrelevant. It could be a 100% accurate, well written thought-provoking
masterpiece, but still it should be deleted. The content is irrelevant. The
issue is that this is a multiple banned user who has vandalised user pages,
issued threats and then sidesteps Jimbo's ban by getting on and doing the
same thing over and over again.

Leaving a single letter that he contributed to wikipedia undermines the
entire project, because it sends the message to him and to other banned
users that they can circumvent the ban and get away with it. Only a scorched
earth policy of 100% removal on sight will stop him. If he finds that the
hours he spends adding stuff are 100% wasted because everything he touches
is undone, every article he writes is binned automatically, that will force
him to do one of two things:

1. If he wants to be a serious contributor who can add things on to wiki and
have them left on wikipedia rather than deleted, he HAS to contact Jimbo,
discuss the situation with him and get the ban lifted.

2. If he is simply interested in screwing wiki around as a joke, a blanket
deletion policy will show him that he is wasting his time and effort. If he
is (a) ignored completely, and (b) everything he does is shot down and
binned on site, he will eventually give up in frustration. It may take a
week, a month but eventually this tiresome vandal with get the message.
There are only so many times he can devote hours and hours to working on
things only to find every minute was wasted because everything he did was
binned on sight.

Allowing anything he works on to be treated with the same respect as
everyone else's articles makes a mockery of the ban. Today's Michael article
may be 100% accurate. Tomorrow's 80% accurate, 20% complete bullshit. Next
Friday's 100% accurate, Saturday's 50% accurate 50% completely made up. In
the meantime serious contributors end up having to babysit this vandal,
double-checking everything he writes. And all the time he is laughing his
head off at our gullibility and wonder how many times in how many new
person? can he get onto wiki and plant rubbish in among the facts. We
already have DW back causing chaos in his behaviour, Adam/Lir/Vera
Cruz/Susan Mason/Dietary Fiber is back again pulling the same stunts as he
pulled elsewhere.

Unless a ban is 100% enforced, with 100% deletion of 100% of the
contributions of 100% of banned trolls (particularly those with a history of
muliple identities and multiple bans) you will never drive banned users away
or force them to contact Jimbo and get the ban lifted. To treat such users
in the same manner as we treat ordinary decent serious contributors is to
insult the 99% of users who are not banned and take this project seriously.
They, not Michael, should be our first concern. Wiki should be the home of
proper contributors, not a rest home for vandals and trolls whose behaviour
is simply encouraged by attempts at appeasement.

JT

_________________________________________________________________
MSN 8 with e-mail virus protection service: 2 months FREE*
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus


from_name: John R. Owens

body:
On 28 May 2003, Erik Moeller wrote:

> Date: 28 May 2003 06:19:00 +0200
> From: Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] French monarchs and other unsavory characters
>
> This is true, Triton is unnecessarily confrontational. But then, so were
> many others in the discussion so far. I'm sure things will cool down in
> the next few days.
>
> I haven't seen substantial evidence that Triton is DW yet. I find it
> problematic to guess identities based on edit styles. I have asked Triton
> to put some info about himself on his user page. We really have to stop
> being so suspicious *in public* until reasonable proof has been reached.
> Remember that talk pages are still public (yes, I know, I've speculated
> myself in public occasionally; that's why I say "we").

Also remember that mailing lists are still public too, as Triton has
already demonstrated.

P.S. Why do I feel this urge to put four tildes at the end of that?

--
John R. Owens http://www.ghiapet.homeip.net/
Marcus, this is the kind of conversation that can only end in a gunshot.
				--Dr. Stephen Franklin


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
Dante-
> In my opinion, this is not the language of a person who is seriously
> engaged in a scholarly dispute in an attempt to arrive at factual
> conclusions.

This is true, Triton is unnecessarily confrontational. But then, so were
many others in the discussion so far. I'm sure things will cool down in
the next few days.

I haven't seen substantial evidence that Triton is DW yet. I find it
problematic to guess identities based on edit styles. I have asked Triton
to put some info about himself on his user page. We really have to stop
being so suspicious *in public* until reasonable proof has been reached.
Remember that talk pages are still public (yes, I know, I've speculated
myself in public occasionally; that's why I say "we").

Regards,

Erik


from_name: sannse at delphiforums.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] User Mydogategodshat

body:
An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Url: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/attachments/20030528/a4c704f2/attachment.diff


from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [WikiEN-l] A request from H. Jonat

body:
On 5/28/03 12:10 AM, "Zoe" <zoecomnena at yahoo.com> wrote:

>
>
> I really think that the mailing list pages should be
> blocked from search engines.
>
I really think they shouldn't. The mailing list is not supposed to be secret
in any way.


subject: [WikiEN-l] The principle of fair use

body:
Jens Frank wrote:
> But I can't understand why this
> http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image%3A843-870_Europe.jpg
> is fair use. The map has been created for an encyclopedia
> or an history textbook. If this is fair use, is there any
> picture we may not use?

The image is annotated as "Adapted from Muir's Historical Atlas
(1911)".  If true, then it is *not* "fair use" but "public domain",
which is a *lot better* for our purposes.

--Jimbo


body:
Oliver Pereira wrote:
> As I interpret it,
> it's saying that pretty much any subject could be covered - within the
> usual constraints of NPOV and verifiability, of course.
>
> So we could include people and events that have not had significant impact
> on a global or even a national level, but which maybe only affected a
> small group of people. As long as there is some coverage in published
> sources, somewhere, we could use that to make an article on the subject.

That sounds about right to me.  For example, the current Mayor of
Athens, Georgia, U.S.  I doubt if we have an article about that
person, but I see no reason why we shouldn't.

I'm surprised we haven't had more fights about this sort of thing, but
'verifiability' seems to do a pretty good job of weeding out the
really badly obscure.

--Jimbo


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikipedia-l] hum hum : deletions

body:
To sum up the current state of the deletion topic.

Several users think it is a good idea that every user
be able to see a deleted page.
The reasons given are 1) transparency (as we claim
Wikipedia respects) and 2) possibility to reuse some
edits in deleted pages.

As already mentionned, it so happens that some banned
users edits are deleted very quickly, without going
through the process of vfd. However, I read several
times (or saw it myself) that parts of the edits of
banned users were good and might be of interest to
keep.
(see for example for Lir
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-May/003689.html)

I suggested that edits of banned users be kept for a
temporary time, either in a boilerplate, or in a
blanked page history...but for the reasons given by
Eloquence and others, I see this proposition is not
good (too much strain on sysop cleaning, not fitting
the requirements of either soft and hard banning). So,
this option can not be kept. And even if the edits
might be good, it is probably better to wait for a
while until picking the stuff up (until the vandal is
gone) and perhaps to put it back under another author
name.

Consequently, because of the good arguments given
against keeping stuff in the article space for longer
than necessary, the only option left, is, to permit
users to see the content of a deleted article.

In short, I think if Wikipedia wants to stay open and
transparent, the deleted stuff should be visible. That
is part of a feedback control which is important in
every system.

-----------

Three persons expressed negativity toward this
proposition.

Jimbo and JeLuf indicated it was not a good idea
because copyrighted material should not be seen from
outsiders. Eloquence indicated it was not good -
probably for this copyright reason, as well as for the
reason it has been already discussed ad nauseum (where
?).
(see
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2003-May/004028.html
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2003-May/004132.html
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2003-May/004143.html)

As far as copyrighted material is concerned, I plainly
agree it should not been seen by others than trusted
people (hence, developers and sysops). I agree it
would be potentially very damaging for Wikipedia that
such an information be visible by others, as it could
lead to legal troubles.

Then, I agree it is not a good idea that non-sysop
users see material that has been deleted because of cp
infringements.

However, as Toby mentionned, copyrighted material is
*not* the only material deleted. Far from it. No good
reasons were, till now, given to justify other-than-cp
deleted pages not to be seen by non-sysop users.

Besides, quite a number of people, including Toby,
Martin, Brion, Oliver, and I, think it would be good
that users see deleted pages
(See
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-May/003490.html
or
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-May/003755.html
or
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2003-May/004136.html
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2003-May/004154.html

Consequently, I think the solution is that somehow,
deletions for cp issues and for other issues are just
separated in the big black void (sorry, the deletion
area of the db).
This could be made possible if, when deleting the
page, the sysop was somehow proposed to check a little
box (say), which would automatically classify the
deleted page in the cp category.

Then, the deletion log would be grossly separated in
two types, cp stuff and other stuff.
(I also think it would nice to separate per namespaces
: deletion of encyclopedia article, deletion of users
pages, deletion of meta pages).

When accessing the special:page undeleted, all the
stuff with cp material will be invisible (as now) from
non-sysop users, while other stuff (non copyrighted)
is visible.

On top of that, I also think it is quite weird to keep
forever in this deletion db, all this copyrighted
material (or porn pictures perhaps :-)).
Such a separation might give the developer the
possibility to run a deletion query from time to time
(such as "deletion of all copyrighted articles been in
the deletion db for more than 2 months"). Hence,
Wikipedia liability toward cp, would be reduced.
(see also on similar topic
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2003-May/004121.html
and
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2003-May/004140.html)

Anthere

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Calendar - Free online calendar with sync to Outlook(TM).
http://calendar.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikitech-l] hum hum : deletions


from_name: Lee Daniel Crocker

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Disambiguation detector

body:
> (Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de>):
>> I hacked a small function that automatically shows what might be
>> disambiguation pages below the page subtitle. This works for all pages with
>> a " (" in the title.
>
> Very cool feature, Magnus! This will save us a lot of manual "Alternate
> meaning" links. Now all we need is some kind of template/transclusion
> system so the disambiguation text does not need to be edited on 20342
> pages if it changes ..

I'm not convinced. I generally dislike the idea of automatic
content of any kind--the content of Wikipedia should be created
by human editors, and even disambiguation pages should each be
crafted uniquely to suit the needs of the subject, not just stamped
out of a template.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Disambiguation detector

body:
I hacked a small function that automatically shows what might be disambiguation pages below the page subtitle. This works for all pages with a " (" in the title.

This function was requested (on the German mailing list, IIRC). It is running on the test wiki. Try
   http://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allotment_(gardening)
for an example (currently standard skin only!).

The feature has to be enabled for each language, so the Chinese won't suffer from bogus links :-)

I won't commit that to the CVS until Lee says the feature freeze is over...

Magnus
____________________________________________________________________________
Jetzt bei WEB.DE FreeMail anmelden = 1qm Regenwald schuetzen! Helfen
Sie mit! Nutzen Sie den Serien-Testsieger. http://user.web.de/Regenwald


from_name: Claudine Chionh

body:
[re-posted - I was previously not subscribed]

Yesterday, [[Peter Hollingworth]] resigned as [[Governor-General of
Australia]]. I have added an item to [[Current events]] and updated the
Hollingworth and G-G pages. Does this warrant an "In the news" listing
on the main page? I am not a sysop.

Claudine Chionh


from_name: Thomas Corell

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Disambiguation detector

body:
Magnus Manske wrote:
> I hacked a small function that automatically shows what might be disambiguation pages below the page subtitle. This works for all pages with a " (" in the title.
>
> This function was requested (on the German mailing list, IIRC). It is running on the test wiki. Try
>    http://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allotment_(gardening)
> for an example (currently standard skin only!).
>
> The feature has to be enabled for each language, so the Chinese won't suffer from bogus links :-)
>
> I won't commit that to the CVS until Lee says the feature freeze is over...

And I think I have the Specialpage:Maintainance update for qualifiers
ready until end of feature frezze, too. It only needs a better output.

Smurf
--
  --- Anthill Inside! ---


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Disambiguation detector

body:
Magnus Manske wrote:
> This function was requested (on the German mailing list, IIRC). It is running on the test wiki. Try
>    http://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allotment_(gardening)
> for an example (currently standard skin only!).

Because it's not in the CVS I can't say if it is a bug, but tring the
link I seen that it works even without the last bracket ")".

Smurf
--
  --- Anthill Inside! ---


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Disambiguation detector

body:
On Wednesday 28 May 2003 05:00 am, wikipedia-l-request at wikipedia.org wrote:
> I hacked a small function that automatically shows what might be
> disambiguation pages below the page subtitle. This works for all pages with
> a " (" in the title.
>
> This function was requested (on the German mailing list, IIRC). It is
> running on the test wiki. Try
> http://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allotment_(gardening)
> for an example (currently standard skin only!).
>
> The feature has to be enabled for each language, so the Chinese won't
> suffer from bogus links :-)
>
> I won't commit that to the CVS until Lee says the feature freeze is over...
>
> Magnus

Change "see also" to "Alternate meanings:" and place it directly below "Other
languages:" and I would be very happy.

IMO the current implementation looks a bit ugly and hackish (just like our
current way of replacing the "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia." with
the redirect notice).

Also, would this be a default setting?

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: Toby Bartels

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

>Daniel Mayer wrote:

>>It would /really/ be nice to have a "combine page histories" option
>>for Admins.

>I'm reluctant to do such as there's presently no way to extricate the
>combined histories if one makes a mistake (or, hypothetically, a rogue
>sysop goes on a rampage) short of checking backup archives and manually
>reassigning the entries.

OTOH, it's much more *likely* for somebody to make a mistake
using the current hackish process than through a programmed procedure.
That is, having only the hackish process makes this happen less often,
but it makes each given instance more prone to error.

I'm going to make a specific request to SourceForge:

"Have a method for administrators to combine edit histories.
"Also have a method to separate out histories to undo mistakes.
"Better yet, make undoing each of these processes easy enough
"that it'll be safe to allow any user to do them.

But we should discuss here how (or if) we want such a process to work,
and on <wikitech-l> how (or if) such a process could be built.

-- Toby


subject: [WikiEN-l] Clovis and such

body:
You know, the longer this goes on, the more I'm inclined to believe that
this may in fact be primarily a language issue. I think that Triton is
either getting very clever in the way he's modifying his behavior (if he's
a troll) or else he is genuinely understanding that he was coming across in
a way that was perhaps not what he intended (if he's sincere)... anyone
else care to weigh in?

-----

Dante Alighieri
dalighieri at digitalgrapefruit.com

"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their
neutrality in times of great moral crisis."
    -Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/attachments/20030528/8f1e65ae/attachment.htm


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Disambiguation detector

body:
> Because it's not in the CVS I can't say if it is a bug, but tring the
> link I seen that it works even without the last bracket ")".

I'm not sure I know what you mean...

On a page "bla (this)", it will show links to "bla (that)", "bla (etc)" and so on, as well as to "bla" itself (usually the main topic or disambiguation page).

I just expanded the function so it won't run on a page like "bla (this", and it won't show links to such pages (closing ")" is required).

Magnus
____________________________________________________________________________
Jetzt bei WEB.DE FreeMail anmelden = 1qm Regenwald schuetzen! Helfen
Sie mit! Nutzen Sie den Serien-Testsieger. http://user.web.de/Regenwald


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Disambiguation detector

body:
Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:

>Erik Moeller wrote:

>>Magnus Manske wrote:

>>>I hacked a small function that automatically shows what might be
>>>disambiguation pages below the page subtitle. This works for all pages with
>>>a " (" in the title.

>>Very cool feature, Magnus! This will save us a lot of manual "Alternate
>>meaning" links. Now all we need is some kind of template/transclusion
>>system so the disambiguation text does not need to be edited on 20342
>>pages if it changes ..

>I'm not convinced. I generally dislike the idea of automatic
>content of any kind--the content of Wikipedia should be created
>by human editors, and even disambiguation pages should each be
>crafted uniquely to suit the needs of the subject, not just stamped
>out of a template.

I agree with Lee, but I think that the idea can still be made to work.

To expand on Lee's point, if faced simply with a list of alternate articles
-- [[X]], [[X (Y1)]], [[X (Y2)]], [[X (Y3)]], etc. --
it may not be clear which article you really want,
at least if the various Ys are closely related.
A disambiguation page, if necessary, can offer explanations.
We usually don't need explanation, and a disambiguation page
is thus usually just a list -- but sometimes we do need explanation.

My idea is to link people directly to the disambiguation page,
which will (if well written) contain exactly what readers need --
human editing of the disambiguation page in the wiki way will see to that.
Here's a brief algorithm:

Given a page title [[X]] without parentheses or of the form [[X (Y)]]:
* Search for a page [[X (disambiguation)]]
** If it exists, add "See also: [[X (disambiguation)]]"
   (unless "Y" = "disambiguation", of course).
** If it doesn't exist, add "See also: [[X]]"
   (unless we're on [[X]] itself, of course).
We don't need to link to anything else;
the disambiguation page (either [[X]] or [[X (disambiguation)]])
will do so, and furthermore will have human-written text
explaining the nuances, if necessary.

As a bonus, we could add the complete list of parenthesised pages
as a "See also" on the disambiguation page itself
(as identified by the "unless"es in the previous paragraph).
That's not really necessary, but it could be convenient;
for example, it would highlight an incomplete disambiguation page.

Furthermore, this could solve the problem of formatting disambiguation blocks.
Larry, mav, and I have discussed this matter before
on [[en:Wikipedia talk:Disambiguation]] (look for "= Jimmy Carter =").
If, as mav suggested on the mailing list just now,
we put this "See also" directly underneath the language links,
then Larry, mav, and I, at least, should think that it looks good.
Human-written disambiguation blocks would be unnecessary;
but the human-written material would still be on [[X (disambiguation)]],
so Lee (and I) should be happy about that.

-- Toby

PS:  I can read German (standard Hochdeutsch) just fine,
     but I'll write my own comments in English since that's easier.


subject: [WikiEN-l] repeated vandalism, and LOTS of it

body:
The 205.188.xx.xx vandal is extremely prolific... suggestions? I can't sit
at my computer 24-7 and watch for this jerk just so I can revert him...

-----

Dante Alighieri
dalighieri at digitalgrapefruit.com

"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their
neutrality in times of great moral crisis."
    -Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/attachments/20030528/a88c1927/attachment.htm


subject: [Wikitech-l] Account on test wiki

body:
I was just looking at [[test:]] (because of that new disambiguation thing),
and I wasn't logged in, so I logged in, and there was no such user.
I thought that I'd created one there ... but apparently not,
so I went ahead and created a new [[User:Toby Bartels]] there.
But then I looked on my watchlist, and there was stuff there!
(Stuff that should have been there, since I'd added it before.)

This may just be a known side effect of some previous change to [[test:]],
perhaps even announced once ("Everybody must recreate their account.")
and forgotten.  But if the developers don't understand how this happened,
then perhaps somebody should look into it.

Summary: My account existed, complete with watchlist,
         but I couldn't log on until I created it anew.

-- Toby


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Disambiguation detector

body:
Magnus Manske wrote:
>>Because it's not in the CVS I can't say if it is a bug, but tring the
>>link I seen that it works even without the last bracket ")".
> I'm not sure I know what you mean...

Next time, send a "hae?", proper reply to hessian people. They not only
drivel during talk, they do it although in mails;)

> On a page "bla (this)", it will show links to "bla (that)", "bla (etc)" and so on, as well as to "bla" itself (usually the main topic or disambiguation page).
>
> I just expanded the function so it won't run on a page like "bla (this", and it won't show links to such pages (closing ")" is required).

That was what I mean. It previously worked also on "bla (this" pages.
And first off all I did't not seen that this was an empty page it was
showing me (it looked full, with all those links). Now it's working well.

Smurf
--
If you chase two rabbits, both will escape.
  --- Anthill Inside! ---


body:
> (The Cunctator <cunctator at kband.com>):
>
> I, for one, strongly disagree with the Long-Entrians. I am a Atomizer.
> Short, interlinked entries are most appropriate for the medium, both in
> reading and editing.

Ditto. A screenful or two is a fine article. 20-30k is huge.
Nor do I have any problem with articles about local celebs or
stories of local or otherwise limited interest, as long as they
are clearly identified as such.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


from_name: Fred Bauder

body:
I think there is room for hundreds of thousands of appropriately short
encyclopedia articles in the 100 to 1000 word range.

Fred

> However, Erik's constraint that articles shouldn't be such that they will
> always remain stubs would probably disqualify it, if we accept his wish
> for articles to be 20,000 to 30,000 characters in length. It is currently
> less than 2,000 characters long. It could be expanded using the news
> article and whatever is sufficiently trustworthy on the tribute site, and
> padded with some relevant background about the school and neighbourhood
> and so on, but it would probably still be under 10,000 characters.
>
> But isn't this length business just a matter of personal taste?
> Personally, I find long articles quite off-putting. [[Charles Darwin]],
> for example, only just barely qualifies as a decently sized article
> according to Erik, while I think it could do with being split into
> separate sections.
>
> Clearly I don't have Erik's attention span. :) But do we *really* want
> articles that are over 10,000 characters long? And if so, why? I'm sure
> I'm not the only one who finds it a daunting task to try to edit long
> articles, especially if there is major restructuring to be done. If we
> want Wikipedia to be open to everyone, and easy to edit, I think we should
> seriously consider aiming for shorter articles everywhere. A reader who
> wants to read 30K of information about a subject would still be able to;
> they'd have to read three articles instead of one, maybe, but it would
> only involve two clicks of the mouse...
>
> Oliver


from_name: Julie Kemp

subject: [WikiEN-l] Clovis and such

body:
Hi Dante - thanks so much for helping out.  I would like to agree, but
frankly, there was a similar "language" problem with HJ.  I would say
(and by the way, I will not be offended at all if you all want to take
this with a big grain of salt, but I *am* trying to be objective) that
the behavior is more trollish in that T. has offered a number of
(in)sincere-sounding apologies, but doesn't change his behavior
accordingly.  Moreover, I am very close to positive that he has changed
his user name a couple of times (although I think Zoe is correct about
his not being DW) - check out entries and attempted discussion near the
beginning of Clovis I and on MammaBear's talk page.  Also in this vein
is the fact that, when confronted by an argument he can't answer, he
just moves somewhere else and launches another attack.  I appreciate
that he *appears* to be contrite, but I might also point out his more
recent note to me on Talk:Clovis I - where he invites me to work nicely
together, but, after I answered in the same place, he snidely suggested
I reply 'on the proper page' as it were.  Again, of course, not willing
to answer specific questions or requests.  SO, I must respectfully
disagree with your generous assessment, Sr. Alighieri.

JHK
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/attachments/20030528/4fca80a0/attachment.htm


from_name: Dante Alighieri

subject: [WikiEN-l] Clovis and such

body:
At 03:08 PM 5/28/2003, you wrote:

>Hi Dante thanks so much for helping out.  I would like to agree, but
>frankly, there was a similar languageproblem with HJ.  I would say (and by
>the way, I will not be offended at all if you all want to take this with a
>big grain of salt, but I *am* trying to be objective) that the behavior is
>more trollish in that T. has offered a number of (in)sincere-sounding
>apologies, but doesnt change his behavior accordingly.  Moreover, I am
>very close to positive that he has changed his user name a couple of times
>(although I think Zoe is correct about his not being DW) check out entries
>and attempted discussion near the beginning of Clovis I and on MammaBears
>talk page.  Also in this vein is the fact that, when confronted by an
>argument he cant answer, he just moves somewhere else and launches another
>attack.  I appreciate that he *appears* to be contrite, but I might also
>point out his more recent note to me on Talk:Clovis I where he invites me
>to work nicely together, but, after I answered in the same place, he
>snidely suggested I reply on the proper pageas it were.  Again, of course,
>not willing to answer specific questions or requests.  SO, I must
>respectfully disagree with your generous assessment, Sr. Alighieri.
>
>JHK

Yeah, I reached the same conclusion when I saw the most recent Clovis I
talk comment from him. Also, see my discussion with him on his talk page.
He probably is a troll after all...

-----

Dante Alighieri
dalighieri at digitalgrapefruit.com

"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their
neutrality in times of great moral crisis."
    -Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/attachments/20030528/6cf865f8/attachment.htm


from_name: Christopher Mahan

body:
--- Oliver Pereira <omp199 at ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> But isn't this length business just a matter of personal taste?
> Personally, I find long articles quite off-putting. [[Charles
> Darwin]],
> for example, only just barely qualifies as a decently sized article
> according to Erik, while I think it could do with being split into
> separate sections.

As Olivier, I agree. Length of an article is dictated by the subject
matter of the article. I don't expect an article dealing with
architecture in Paris to be short. Nor do I expect an article about
Hollywood Blvd to be very long.

I think there is a trend here in the W to automate/codify most
mundane things. This, I feel, is a trap. The W is different *because*
it is written, edited, and massaged by humans beings.

I suggest also that while some rules might be good overall, some
article will fall outside of the norm, and will have to be dealt with
in a manner sensible to the subject.

=====
Christopher Mahan
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
818.943.1850 cell
http://www.christophermahan.com/

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Calendar - Free online calendar with sync to Outlook(TM).
http://calendar.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Disambiguation detector

body:
> I hacked a small function that automatically shows what might be
> disambiguation pages below the page subtitle. This works for all pages with
> a " (" in the title.

> This function was requested (on the German mailing list, IIRC). It is
> running on the test wiki. Try    http://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allotment_(g
> ardening) for an example (currently standard skin only!).

> The feature has to be enabled for each language, so the Chinese won't suffer
> from bogus links :-)

Very cool feature, Magnus! This will save us a lot of manual "Alternate
meaning" links. Now all we need is some kind of template/transclusion
system so the disambiguation text does not need to be edited on 20342
pages if it changes ..

BTW, we can probably all just speak German if the current trend continues
:-)

Regards,

Erik


body:
 Oliver Pereira wrote:
> Clearly I don't have Erik's attention span. :) But do we *really* want
> articles that are over 10,000 characters long? And if so, why? I'm sure
> I'm not the only one who finds it a daunting task to try to edit long
> articles, especially if there is major restructuring to be done. If we
> want Wikipedia to be open to everyone, and easy to edit, I think we should
> seriously consider aiming for shorter articles everywhere. A reader who
> wants to read 30K of information about a subject would still be able to;
> they'd have to read three articles instead of one, maybe, but it would
> only involve two clicks of the mouse...

I agree that the 20,000 - 30,000 size is a bit much for most situations. IMO
we should aim to have articles in the 10,000 to 20,000 range unless they are
a "history of" or similar daughter article where detail is expected. This, of
course, excludes tables (which can often add 5,000 or more bytes to an
article).

So in general, any article above 20,000 bytes of prose should be broken-up
into more digestible bits and pieces.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)