from_name: Anthere

body:
mingli yuan wrote:
> Hi, buddies. The Chinese Wikimedia users need some technical help from
> the developers at the Foundation.
>
> As everyone here believes, the government of P.R. China has blocked
> access to all Wikimedia sites using its "Great Firewall"; Wikimedia
> contributors and users in Mainland China have to use proxies to visit
> Wikimedia sites. However, most of these proxies are unstable, so
> CNBlog.org (a famous and prominent advocacy of blogosphere in China
> operated by Social Brian Foundation, which hosted the First Chinese
> Blogger Conference last year) has setup a stable proxy for Chinese
> users.
>
> With this service, Mainland Chinese users can access Chinese Wikipedia
> using http://wikipedia.cnblog.org, and Chinese Wikinews using
> http://wikinews.cnblog.org. There are over 16,000 visits and over
> 110,000 page requests per day this month. CNBlog.org has been very
> helpful to Chinese users, and it is planning to expand its proxy
> service to cover all Chinese Wikimedia projects, which is really great
> news.
>
> Unfortunately, Chinese Wikimedia administrators are frowned upon an
> issue that came up recently: lots of vandalism is done using the
> CNBlog proxy. Currently, the IP of the CNBlog proxy is displayed and
> logged in edit history on Wikimedia. If an administrator blocks this
> IP (CNBlog proxy), all Mainland Chinese users who are using CNBlog
> proxy, either logged-in or not, will be blocked as well and not be
> able to contribute.
>
> Some Chinese Wikipedians discussed this issue with CNBlog.org, and we
> believe that a technical solution should be feasible. We also
> discussed some technical details, and I will send another e-mail to
> wikitech-l regarding the details. Basically, we would like to have
> users' real IP (IP used to access CNBlog proxy) displayed and logged
> at Wikimedia.
>
> We send this e-mail to here on behalf of many Chinese users. We hope
> to have kind attention and help from the Foundation. Thank you very
> much.
>
> [[User:Shizhao]]
> [[User:R.O.C]]
> [[User:Yongxinge]]
> [[User:Mountain]]

Hiya.

Agreed. We must do our best so that inland users really succeed to
access the projects. I am not sure I understood the method you plan to
use to ensure CNBlog proxy users will have access. Can you clarify ? I
will read the wikitech as well...

Ant


list: wikimedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

subject: [Foundation-l] Problems on block ip user in Chinese Wikipedia


list: wikien-l

from_name: Andrea Forte

subject: [WikiEN-l] CBS evening news

body:
those of you on the east coast, CBS news is about to air a thing on
the EB/Wikipedia debate. :-) I'm sure it will be available all over
the internet within the hour anyhow.


subject: [WikiEN-l] CBS evening news

body:
err.. the *US* east coast. :-)

On 3/28/06, Andrea Forte <andrea.forte at gmail.com> wrote:
> those of you on the east coast, CBS news is about to air a thing on
> the EB/Wikipedia debate. :-) I'm sure it will be available all over
> the internet within the hour anyhow.
>


list: foundation-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Meta:MetaProject to Overhaul Meta

body:
Alex Schenck wrote:
> Okay, apparently, we have a few problems here.

Apparently :-)

There are two very important pages on meta. Check
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deletionist
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Inclusionism

I think you run into this.

> Despite praise from various sources, several other Meta people have
> complained that this project is doing more harm than good. While I of course
> completely disagree with that notion, I feel that I ought to let out some
> steam.

I think most of us are supportive with the idea of "categorizing" and
"organising".

However, a couple of things do not have support, such as
* deleting historical articles (of course, newbies can not understand
the importance dinosaurs give to these pages. Note that for myself, a
newbie may be someone who joined the projects less than 3 years ago)
* deleting redirections (many pages are linked from other projects or
outside websites). Redirections may seem to come from nowhere, but they
are actually useful
* Qualifying as "foreign" languages everything that is not english. Mind
you, for the majority of editors on meta, "english" is "foreign". In
short, you take a very biaised stance, of saying meta is english, the
rest of it is foreign. Touchy...

> Meta right now is horrible. Really, it is. People need to stop kidding
> themselves and understand that the way that it is in right now is akin to a
> trash heap. Sure, there are some good things on Meta, but the vast majority
> is unorganized rubbish that could probably be put away in an archive and
> forgotten about until cyber-archaeologists come along and sift through it
> and thing that they're artifacts.

Another very touchy point my dear.
The place has been used by some of us for 3 years or even more. The
point is that when you say the place is trash, this is not very nice to
all those who have been trying to keep the place a bit organised at least.

Another point is that a group of editors who go to meta and say they are
gonna reorganised everything, change policies, fix rules, set up
procedures.... especially when several in this group are actually not
meta editors (or extremely recent meta editors).... will necessarily
come to meet the local more lazy population.

You've got to be careful that there are inhabitants over there; they
support that you come clean the home. But necessarily that you delete
their village to make an entire new town. I hope you see what I mean :)

I mean, come on. Sure, this place has a
> lot of history of Wikimedia, but if things need to be kept, why can't they
> be kept in a more orderly fashion?

We support more order. Order does not necessarily mean put things in the
trash. That is the problem.

> Another thing: people have been complaining about speedy deletions and that
> they violate Meta policy. Can I be brutally honest? Meta is a ghost wiki and
> the policies aren't nearly as important as they are on local projects. When
> people start complaining that deletion of unused images such as pornography
> is out of process, I cringe. No one is going to miss some of these things.

I would absolutely support deletion of pornographic images. But
generally, yes, be careful that the meta policies are NOT necessarily
your project policies. And should not be.

> I understand that some people have objected to some things which I have
> deleted. However, those things can get restored, and besides, any project
> which requires a massive overhaul will experience errors.

Again, I do not support keeping pornographic images. But do not forget
that images CAN NOT be restored.

> Frankly, I've got better things to do than completely overhaul Meta. I'm
> doing this for the greater good of Wikimedia's projects. People are afraid
> to touch Meta because it is a massive unorganized heap. I'm trying to change
> that, and I've gotten a go-ahead from the top.

Ahhhhh; the go-ahead of the top. I will be equally brutal. The go-ahead
of the top has no authority on meta. The community has.

  If people are going to
> complain that a policy on a nearly abandoned wiki is not followed over
> getting things, you know... accomplished (gee, what a thought), then why am
> I and thirteen other editors (two of which have decided to quit the project)
> wasting our time like this?

I do not think meta qualifies as a nearly abandoned wiki...

> For the meantime, I will continue this project, but I would like to propose
> a solution: an archive wiki of Meta. Move *everything* on Meta over to this
> archive. Start fresh. The archive will contain all things that Meta used to
> have, so nothing will just disappear, and someone else can go through the
> archive if they really feel like it and find whatever they're looking for. I
> promise I won't touch that archive. Plus, anything that is current can be
> kept on Meta as is. Let Meta be useful again instead of a depository of crap
> dotted with worthwhile discussions and essays.

Possibly. But absolutely all pages which are deleted from meta should
have redirections to the archive meta, so that information link is not
broken.

> --Alex

I want to be clear that I support your project of organisation and
categorization. What I do not support is blind deletion and generally
the feeling of a squad investing meta and telling us what they do is for
our own good. Could we find an agreement in between ?

Ant


body:
Robert Scott Horning wrote:

> I will agree that there is a tendancy to dump some stuff on Meta that
> doesn't quite fit on any other Wikimedia project, such as the wikimania
> proceedings that are on Meta at the moment.  Admins on meta have been
> justifiably concerned when many other projects dump stuff on them in
> this manner, and I appreciate that sentiment.

Hello,

By the way, where is the discussion about the test wiki for new
languages start up ?

Ant


from_name: Michael Snow

subject: [Foundation-l] Semi-protection on April Fools

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>The problem
>is mostly with users who will insert nonsense into articles as a joke,
>but have no idea (and will not care enough) to remove it later. I'm
>also quite sure that many people will find things funny which we would
>normally consider to be cases of aggressive vandalism. People have
>very different senses of humor. For some, April 1 is the one day of
>the year where they feel they have an obligation to do something
>funny, while they really aren't. Funny. At all.
>
>
Part of the reason they're not funny is that most of the time, they're
also not very original. As Wikipedia has now been through a few April
Fool's Days, I've seen quite a variety of jokes, pranks, and hoaxes, and
I'm sure those with more experience and longer memories know of even
more. I would be hard-pressed to come up with something truly original
and funny, but if someone could I'd enjoy it and have no objection.
Perhaps simply declaring off-limits the stuff that's been done already
would go a long ways toward cutting down on unfunny April Fools.

--Michael Snow


from_name: Alphax (Wikipedia email)

subject: [WikiEN-l] Britannica quote of the day

body:
Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
> On Mon, 27 Mar 2006 17:45:06 +0200, you wrote:
>
>
>>If there is a need for labelling such images "bare woman's arms", then
>>we'll use the appropriate tag. Or do you mean, John Travolta is
>>offensive?
>
>
> "Warning: may contain 1980s hairstyles"

*goes to tag [[Category:1980s music groups]]*

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Britannica quote of the day

body:
geni wrote:
> On 3/28/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>
>>They have nothing to worry about from us until we can start producing
>>printed single volumes.
>
>
> That would be the general idea of the Wikijunior project. We are still
> looking for an expert in dead tree technology for the final phase.
>

*points at de:*

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP
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from_name: Chip Berlet

subject: [WikiEN-l] Neal Horsley explains:  "Why I Am Suing Wikipedia "

body:
Neal Horsley explains:  "Why I Am Suing Wikipedia "

Dateline March 28, 2006

   Wikipedia, the online "encyclopedia," has for at least two years

   contained an extensive article about me.  For those of  you not

   familiar with Wikipedia, it is becoming a primary Internet research

   source, accessed by millions of people looking for the "facts"

   concerning all aspects of reality.

   Search Wikipedia for Neal Horsley and you will see the article.

   The article contains a libelous accusation that I advocate terrorism.

   Obviously such an accusation at a time when this nation is fighting a

   War Against Terrorism can lead to fatal consequences, not only for

   myself but for those near me.

   I have tried over the last few months to get the Wikipedia

   organization to delete the libelous accusation.   The Wikipedia staff

   ignored me.  Yesterday I posted the following statement in the

   "Discussion" section of the article:

   "The content of this article is not only patently false on numerous

   details of fact (for example I was born in Bremen not Bowdon, Georgia;

   I was in the USAF, not the Army), but contains libel per se when it

   accuses me of advocating terrorism. I have on two occasions contacted

   Wikipedia and told them to remove the libelous statement. I have been

   ignored.

   It is a matter of public record that in the recent past, I spent over

   three years suing Planned Parenthood, NOW, and Geraldo Rivera when

   they libelously accused me of assassinating the abortionist Barnett

   Slepian. Even though I lost, it cost the various parties well over

   $1,000,000 to deal with the litigation.

   Wikipedia and the authors of the libelous statements on this

   "encyclopedia" should prepare to deal with the same process unless

   they retract the libelous accusation that I have advocated terrorism.

   I will give them (whether the "them" be Wikipedia staff or the lying

   author of the article about me) two weeks to get that statement out of

   this article. If it is still there in two weeks from March 27, 2006, I

   will initiate a defamation complaint in federal court.

   Neal Horsley

   Whether Wikipedia is allowed to contain patently false libel per se

   against me will determine whether others can be so treated.  Given

   Wikipedia's growing influence in this world, unless Wikipedia is

   forced to monitor its content for factual accuracy, the online

   "encyclopedia" becomes a dangerous tool of confusion disseminating

   falsehoods across the globe.  The Spirit of Truth moves to combat such

   vessels, and those who follow Him help.

   One way you can help is to email all your local news outlets about the

   threatened litigation against Wikipedia.

   Over the past year or so there has been a fairly extensive media

   coverage of Wikipedia and the news media--local, national and

   international--will be interested in what is happening here.  While

   they will probably not cover this phase of the story, they will

   certainly want to know what is happening.  I don't have a current

   world media email list, so your help in contacting your local media

   will provide that service.

   I will keep you posted as this situation progresses.

   Neal

====================

Found on the web.

-Cberlet


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Mark Williamson

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Language versions' popularity vs. number of articles
	(vs. number of speakers)

body:
Hi everybody,

While it's sort of obvious, given the digital divide, that the number
of articles in Wikipedias is not proportional to the number of
speakers, for example Hindi has a much smaller number of articles
compared to speakers than most active Wikipedias; German has more.

However, something that people may not notice as much is the
incongruency between popularity of a particular language version and
the number of articles in that version.

The most visited Wikipedias, in order, are:

1 English (65%)
2 German (10%)
3 Japanese (6%)
4 Spanish (3%)
5 French (2%)
6 Polish (2%)
7 Chinese (2%)
8 Arabic (2%)
9 Italian (1%)
10 Hebrew (1%)
11 Turkish (1%)
12 Dutch (1%)
13 Portuguese (1%)
(all others combined total 1% of visits)

On the other hand, the list of Wikipedias ranked by number of articles is:
1 English (1048.7K)
2 German (376.9K)
3 French (261.1K)
4 Polish (223.8K)
5 Japanese (196.3K)
6 Dutch (156.9K)
...
8 Italian (146.8K)
9 Portuguese (123.8K)
10 Spanish (105.0K)
...
12 Chinese (61.48K)
...
17 Hebrew (34.35K)
...
29 Turkish (19.94K)
...
37 Arabic (12.03K)

What this says to me is that these Wikipedias are not attracting new
pages proportional to views when compared with other Wikipedias. This
may be because people don't want to write new pages, but it seems to
me more likely that people simply don't know they can.

How can this be fixed? Perhaps a site notice inviting people to write
quality pages or register, or a drive to recruit new Wikipedians from
the academic community.

Mark

--
"Take away their language, destroy their souls." -- Joseph Stalin


subject: [WikiEN-l] How to get around AOL proxies?

body:
Tim Starling wrote:
> Chris Jenkinson wrote:
>
>>Tim Starling wrote:
>>
>>
>>>There's a simple, non-invasive way to determine the IP address of an AOL client, which I've been
>>>looking into recently: use SSL sign-on. Make the login links go to https://secure.wikimedia.org, and
>>>redirect them back when they're logged in. SSL requests skip the proxy cluster. We would store the
>>>IP address at login in the session, and then continue to use that IP address for the user after they
>>>return to the unsecured part of the site. And of course there are security benefits for all users.
>>>
>>>This would mean requiring that AOL users log in before edit. Sad, but more open than many proposed
>>>solutions.
>>
>>
>>While we're at it, why not have everyone sign in securely? If the
>>technology is in place to allow this, we should take advantage of it.
>
>
> ...that was the general idea. Sorry if I didn't make that clear.
>

http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=225 - secure login on
wikimedia via ssl

IIRC Tim hinted in #wikimedia-tech that this /might/ also have something
to do with single login...

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP
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from_name: Delirium

subject: [WikiEN-l] Britannica quote of the day

body:
Fastfission wrote:

>Personally, I'd rather it be an either/or choice. I don't want to help
>people enforce arbitrary limits on knowledge (if you don't think it is
>arbitrary, consider the difference in which a partially-exposed female
>breast is considered on American television in comparison to images of
>gratuitous violence). I think the principle stands whether it is
>pornography or subversive politics, whether the censor is a school
>board in Ohio or the Ayatollah.
>
>
I think actively censoring Wikipedia is a problem, yes, but providing
more accurate metadata to our reusers, and ideally using some of it to
give visitors to wikipedia.org more options, serves a number of purposes.

I wouldn't turn any filtering on by default, but I have often wished for
some way to filter which images are shown, usually simply because I find
them distracting than because I'm actually offended by them.  For
example, on occasion I've looked up species of insects on Wikipedia, and
if I already know what they look like, I don't usually want to have to
read the whole article while staring at a close-up view of a mandible.
I of course would like images to be available, but I'd like to be able
to say, "don't show me insect pictures unless I ask for them", because I
find it distracting.  Others might want them shown, but it would be nice
if logged-in users had some options.  As it stands now, I have to screw
around with firefox to turn off images, which is a hassle.

-Mark


body:
Chip Berlet wrote:

>   It is a matter of public record that in the recent past, I spent over
>
>   three years suing Planned Parenthood, NOW, and Geraldo Rivera when
>
>   they libelously accused me of assassinating the abortionist Barnett
>
>   Slepian. Even though I lost...
>
So his argument for why we should remove the statement is: He sued
someone else for publishing it, and a court ruled that it was not libelous?

-Mark


from_name: Guy Chapman aka JzG

subject: [WikiEN-l] Britannica quote of the day (Johntex)

body:
On Tue, 28 Mar 2006 17:44:36 +0100, you wrote:

>What we have
>is 'knowledge wants to be free', and a few semi-permeable membrances put up
>on the wiki will not suffice to counter the osmotic pressure.

For some values of knowledge.  I don't really see the merit in copying
and pasting the one-sentence "biography" of a minor porn actor from a
website which already acts as a repository for such crap if one were
needed.
Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Angela

subject:
[Wikitech-l] [Foundation-l] Problems on block ip user in
	Chinese Wikipedia

body:
Forwarding to the technical list where this might get more attention
from the people who can help with this.

Angela

On 3/28/06, mingli yuan <mingli.yuan at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi, buddies. The Chinese Wikimedia users need some technical help from
> the developers at the Foundation.
>
> As everyone here believes, the government of P.R. China has blocked
> access to all Wikimedia sites using its "Great Firewall"; Wikimedia
> contributors and users in Mainland China have to use proxies to visit
> Wikimedia sites. However, most of these proxies are unstable, so
> CNBlog.org (a famous and prominent advocacy of blogosphere in China
> operated by Social Brian Foundation, which hosted the First Chinese
> Blogger Conference last year) has setup a stable proxy for Chinese
> users.
>
> With this service, Mainland Chinese users can access Chinese Wikipedia
> using http://wikipedia.cnblog.org, and Chinese Wikinews using
> http://wikinews.cnblog.org. There are over 16,000 visits and over
> 110,000 page requests per day this month. CNBlog.org has been very
> helpful to Chinese users, and it is planning to expand its proxy
> service to cover all Chinese Wikimedia projects, which is really great
> news.
>
> Unfortunately, Chinese Wikimedia administrators are frowned upon an
> issue that came up recently: lots of vandalism is done using the
> CNBlog proxy. Currently, the IP of the CNBlog proxy is displayed and
> logged in edit history on Wikimedia. If an administrator blocks this
> IP (CNBlog proxy), all Mainland Chinese users who are using CNBlog
> proxy, either logged-in or not, will be blocked as well and not be
> able to contribute.
>
> Some Chinese Wikipedians discussed this issue with CNBlog.org, and we
> believe that a technical solution should be feasible. We also
> discussed some technical details, and I will send another e-mail to
> wikitech-l regarding the details. Basically, we would like to have
> users' real IP (IP used to access CNBlog proxy) displayed and logged
> at Wikimedia.
>
> We send this e-mail to here on behalf of many Chinese users. We hope
> to have kind attention and help from the Foundation. Thank you very
> much.
>
> [[User:Shizhao]]
> [[User:R.O.C]]
> [[User:Yongxinge]]
> [[User:Mountain]]


from_name: wiki.pedia.WiseFool at spamgourmet.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] Overly lengthy blocks

body:
Fred Bauer @ Sat Mar 25 15:21:55 UTC 2006:
 >Who blocked you? What is the stated reason?
 >Fred

Hall Monitor blocked this IP way back in January. His block message said
to "have your system administrator contact me," but it's the whole
state's IP, so I had no idea who to contact.

Phil Sandifer @ Sun Mar 26 00:09:15 UTC 2006:
 >There is. On the other hand, if we clearly see only bad contributions
 >from an IP, we might block it before we realize what we've blocked.
 >Our bad. Has someone fixed this now?
 >-Phil
Yes, it's been unblocked now. (btw: Thanks to JDoorjam for doing that.)


from_name: Benjamin Webb

subject:
[Foundation-l] Rodovid.org, family tree wiki,
	wishes to become a wiki project

body:
What do people think of the current
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Rodovid.org page? I doubt I have included
everything I could do. Your opinions and anything that I have missed out
would be apreciated.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Redirects?

body:
I don't know if it's vandalism or just a very confused user. Either
way, there's no need to keep it and interwiki redirects don't work
anyway.

Angela

--
Angela Beesley
Wikimedia.org || Wikia.com
Aim/MSN/Yahoo/Jabber: Wikiangela
Gmail/Skype: Beesley


from_name: Robert Scott Horning

subject: [Foundation-l] Violations of Wikimedia copyright

body:
I would like to know what the current policy is (if any) for people who
are strongly suspected of violating copyright of content that was
produced on Wikimedia projects.  I'm not talking about people dumping
copyrighted content onto a Wikimedia project, but somebody thinking that
the content is free and therefore is in the public domain and they are
free to use it in any way they want.

I guess we should feel flattered that this is happening, and I'm going
to give a specific example:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Lord_of_the_Flies

This Wikibook has been slightly modified and copied onto a number of
websites, including some very commercial sites that are actually
charging even for access to this content. See:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=%22During+an+unnamed+time+of+war%2C+a+plane+carrying+a+group+of+British+schoolboys+is+shot+down+over+the+Pacific.%22

This was marked as a copyright violation, and I think it is... of
Wikibooks material.

What is interesting here is that it is not a wholesale mirror of
Wikibooks (there are some of those), but rather a slight modification to
the content and trying to pass it off as original compositions.  These
websites are quite sleazy as well anyway, because they are selling term
papers for lazy students, but it is still interesting that they would
pick content that originated on a Wikimedia website.  As this Wikibook
has been around for a couple of years and the full edit history is
available to show each edit and change, I think it is obvious that the
content was created at en.wikibooks originally, at least to veteran
Wikimedia users.

I suspect this is going to be a larger problem in the future.

--
Robert Scott Horning


from_name: charles matthews

body:
> For some values of knowledge.  I don't really see the merit in copying
> and pasting the one-sentence "biography" of a minor porn actor from a
> website which already acts as a repository for such crap if one were
> needed.

> Guy (JzG)

OK, just don't tell me we could take out all references to zoophilia on the
site, and still have a mythology coverage.

Charles


from_name: Jtkiefer

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
> I'd like to put in the open the notion of semi-protecting all
> Wikimedia projects [*] during April Fool's Day, that is, making them
> editable only to registered users with accounts more than a few days
> old. I have little hope that such an option will be seriously
> considered for this year (at least not without an emergency decree
> from above right about, well, now), but I think in a few days, after
> you will all see the damage we'll have to deal with again this year,
> you might be more inclined to agree with me. We could phrase it
> positively by declaring April 1 "Wikimedia Spring Cleaning Day" (and
> it would not preclude us from having a few jokes on each project). The
> site notice could be used to highlight maintenance pages like Cleanup
> or the Wikiwork Brigade (sorry for being en.wp-centric).
>
> I'd also like to highlight a policy draft I worked on last year:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Rules_for_Fools&oldid=11835505
>
> Yes, I know, it's all awfully unfunny, but when everyone tries to be
> funny, it starts becoming a problem. Wikis are built on the model of
> assuming good faith; the wiki model breaks down when everyone starts
> acting like a jerk. April 1 is really unique in this way. The problem
> is mostly with users who will insert nonsense into articles as a joke,
> but have no idea (and will not care enough) to remove it later. I'm
> also quite sure that many people will find things funny which we would
> normally consider to be cases of aggressive vandalism. People have
> very different senses of humor. For some, April 1 is the one day of
> the year where they feel they have an obligation to do something
> funny, while they really aren't. Funny. At all.
>
> I think not descending into complete anarchy once a year is a
> desirable outcome. A yearly 24 hour timeout might also be a good idea
> for entirely different reasons.
>
> And no, this is not a joke. :)
>
> Erik
>
> [*] At least in those languages which are predominantly accessed from
> countries where April Fool's Day is a recognized cultural concept.
>
Good idea, you never know what the dumbasses will do to mess us up on
April fool's day.

-Jtkiefer


from_name: Han Dao

subject: [WikiEN-l] Neal Horsley explains: "Why I Am Suing Wikipedia "

body:
They will cost money. And that money might be a lot.
On 3/28/06, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>
> Chip Berlet wrote:
>
> >   It is a matter of public record that in the recent past, I spent over
> >
> >   three years suing Planned Parenthood, NOW, and Geraldo Rivera when
> >
> >   they libelously accused me of assassinating the abortionist Barnett
> >
> >   Slepian. Even though I lost...
> >
> So his argument for why we should remove the statement is: He sued
> someone else for publishing it, and a court ruled that it was not
> libelous?
>
> -Mark
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
On Tue, 28 Mar 2006 11:59:19 -0800, you wrote:

>I'd support having a verifiable stub on both the porn actress and the
>b-movie actor.

Depends what you mean by verifiable, doesn't it?  As far as the porn
community goes, the vast majority are sourced from primary sources
(video covers) or unreliable secondary sources (IADB), and the
inclusion of what I would consider minimum biographical data - name
and date of birth, for example - is sometimes reverted as "too
dangerous" because of stalkers.  The idea of coverage in non-trivial
reliable sources seems to be waived in these cases.
Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Britannica quote of the day (Johntex) (charles
	matthews) (Johntex)

body:
On Tue, 28 Mar 2006 12:16:43 -0800, you wrote:

>I disagree that the goal is to get an encyclopedia written.  The goal is to
>produce an encyclopedia that is as useful as possible to the biggest set of
>people possible.  Taking small steps to make the reference more usable in
>schools and work-places is consistent with that goal.

Yebbut you can always fork.
Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Britannica quote of the day (Johntex)
	(charlesmatthews) (Johntex)

body:
"John Tex" wrote

> I disagree that the goal is to get an encyclopedia written.  The goal is
> to
> produce an encyclopedia that is as useful as possible to the biggest set
> of
> people possible.  Taking small steps to make the reference more usable in
> schools and work-places is consistent with that goal.

> Deciding which images might deserve a spoiler warning is no more a
> violation
> of NPOV than deciding what fact is important enough to include, or
> deciding
> what reference is worthy enough to cite.  All of these are judgement
> calls.
> We will continue to debate them for as long as the project is editable, no
> doubt.

The archives of this list will show the continuing consensus in favour of
Getting the Encyclopedia Written, with the smart-aleck ideas that the
process can be fine-tuned falling away in the face of the sheer fact that It
Is Being Written, and its content reflects pretty much a consensus view of
those who are doing the work.

Charles


body:
"Steve Bennett" wrote

>> It's good to know that the fine old tradition of monolingual Anglo-Saxons
>> is
>> in such good shape.
>
> It's in excellent shape. And it's pretty much monolingual anglosaxons
> who have driven Wikipedia thus far.

Oh, to hell with that as a comment.  Sheer ignorance of the contributions of
many German, Dutch, Scandinavian, French and Spanish native speakers.  And
particularly when Wikipedia was a babe in arms.

Charles


from_name: Steve Bennett

body:
On 3/28/06, charles matthews <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> I would call it a complete change from five years of getting the
> encyclopedia written.  It bears repetition: the mission is to get the
> encyclopedia written, the free NPOV encyclopedia.  Not to try to gather
> plaudits from classroom teachers.  It's an old discussion here: GFDL means
> _someone else_ can perfectly well make the fork that is more child-safe.

Wait, where did anyone mention plaudits? You want to get the
encyclopaedia written. I want the encyclopaedia to be useful to
people. These goals are not incompatible.

> With any luck, they revise their views on the Internet as a whole.  The
> place is not 'safe for minors'.  I don't know where they might have got the
> idea that it is.

You could hope for that.

> It's good to know that the fine old tradition of monolingual Anglo-Saxons is
> in such good shape.

It's in excellent shape. And it's pretty much monolingual anglosaxons
who have driven Wikipedia thus far.

Of course, if you were trying to insult me, you missed your target :)

> But the whole concept of a 'safe' Wikipedia is just crocked.  What we have
> is 'knowledge wants to be free', and a few semi-permeable membrances put up
> on the wiki will not suffice to counter the osmotic pressure.

How about a "safer" Wikipedia? We have spoiler tags on articles about
movies and TV shows, and that didn't seem to cause anyone a
philosophical crisis. How would content tags be vastly different?

Answer: They would be invisible to most users.

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] Philosophical question re sources

body:
Ok, I think my work at [[Safe Speed]] is done. Feel free to admire, oh
innocent bystanders. It's about half the size it was a week ago :)

(PS keep up the good work on [[University of Melbourne Student
Union]], but don't forget [[University of Melbourne student
organisations]] :))

Steve

On 3/27/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> Sweet. Actually you have life easy - all the main edit warriors are
> currently blocked pending arbitration.
>
> Steve
>
> On 3/27/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
> > On Mon, 27 Mar 2006 17:49:29 +0200, you wrote:
> >
> > >On 3/27/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
> > >> I thought so.  And he applied a {fact} tag to something which is
> > >> stated in the footnotes of one of the currently linked sources, which
> > >> struck me as a bit bizarre.
> >
> > >Ok, I'll swap you. You work on [[University of Melbourne Student
> > >Union]] and [[Melbourne University student organisations]] for a
> > >while, I'll take [[Safe Speed]]. In a week, we'll swap back?
> >
> > Looks like you got you a deal :-)
> > Guy (JzG)
> > --
> > http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG
> > _______________________________________________
> > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> >
>


from_name: Samuel Klein

body:
On Tue, 28 Mar 2006, Michael Snow wrote:

> Perhaps simply declaring off-limits the stuff that's been done already
> would go a long ways toward cutting down on unfunny April Fools.

Brilliant.  With a high-quality [[Wikipedia:List of April Fools jokes
carried out on Wikipedia]].

SJ


from_name: Matt Brown

body:
I note someone's already removed the word 'terrorism' from the
article.  Correctly so, IMO.

-Matt


from_name: Gregory Maxwell

body:
On 3/28/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'd like to put in the open the notion of semi-protecting all
> Wikimedia projects [*] during April Fool's Day, that is, making them

Can you cite links showing an especially troublesome increase in
damaging edits last year?  I certainly don't recall seeing anything
terrible first hand.

Without more concrete information this just sounds like the same sort
of wild speculation about increased vandalism that we used to get when
slashdot linked to us that was later shown to be misplaced since being
linked by slashdot had no statistically significant impact on the
article vandalism rates in the vast majority of cases.

Obviously there will be some 'jokes'. But I don't see any reason to
expect the portion of them that would come from complete outsiders
would be especially above the noise floor of the typical vandalism
read...  I also don't see how if we were to agree that this was needed
why we shouldn't just turn it on every day.. but if thats the goal we
should state it outright.

Since this thread, thus far, has been devoid of any useful
measurments... I'll inject some now:

The below counts don't include deleted revisions, but most vandalism
on enwiki isn't deleted.
(times are GMT, which is why I included apr1/2)
Mar 24 2005 (thurs) - 26928 main namespace edits on enwiki
Mar 25 2005 (friday) - 28545 main namespace edits on enwiki
Mar 26 2005 (saturday) - 25140 main namespace edits on enwiki
Mar 31 2005 (thurs) - 28890 main namespace edits on enwiki
Apr 01 2005 (friday) - 27512 main namespace edits on enwiki
Apr 02 2005 (saturday) - 30539 main namespace edits on enwiki
Apr 07 2005 (thurs) - 30663 main namespace edits on enwiki
Apr 08 2005 (friday) - 32796 main namespace edits on enwiki
Apr 09 2005 (saturday) - 32120 main namespace edits on enwiki
Apr 15 2005 (friday) - 37182 main namespace edits on enwiki.
Apr 16 2005 (saturday) - 33344 main namespace edits on enwiki

Not really much room for an amazing influx of vandalism there...

How about edit summaries?
I'll post some of those in a bit, answers delayed due to mysql being stupid.


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] Problems on block ip user in Chinese Wikipedia

body:
mingli yuan wrote:
> Basically, we would like to have
> users' real IP (IP used to access CNBlog proxy) displayed and logged
> at Wikimedia.

Done. Tell me if you have any problems.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: brion at pobox.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki automated test run failure 2006-03-29

body:
An automated run of parserTests.php showed the following failures:

Running test Magic Word: {{NUMBEROFFILES}}... FAILED!
Running test BUG 1887, part 2: A <math> with a thumbnail- math enabled... FAILED!

Passed 298 of 300 tests (99.33%) FAILED!


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Spambot attacking GeoWiki test wiki

body:
Andreas Hoerstemeier wrote:
> Who is responsible for the Wiki at yf1019.yaseo.wikimedia.org? That one
> has been filled with many spamlinks, including the current "gayholmes"
> massive spambot run. Why does that wiki not use the antispam list from
> meta? Who is the resonsible admin there? I have just cleaned all the
> spam I could find, but as the bots keep running there needs to be some
> more permanent action.
>
> [[en:User:Ahoerstemeier]]

I switched off anonymous editing and account creation, that should fix the problem. In answer to
your questions, it's a test wiki with an independent source tree and configuration. It hasn't been
maintained for the last 6 months or so.

-- Tim Starling


body:
On 3/28/06, charles matthews <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> Oh, to hell with that as a comment.  Sheer ignorance of the contributions of
> many German, Dutch, Scandinavian, French and Spanish native speakers.  And
> particularly when Wikipedia was a babe in arms.

Ok, I've obviously offended you. My remark was intended as a vague
sympathetic sigh agreeing that there are vast numbers of monolingual
anglosaxons in the US, that do indeed have a great deal of influence,
being as numerous as they are.

I think "driven" was a pretty poor choice of words - I didn't mean to
imply that they were somehow the leadership of the Wikipedia effort,
but rather, the meat and potatoes or something. Not that I really have
any idea.

My apologies again.

Steve (only claim to fame is that I'm bilingual and living in France)


from_name: Anthere

subject:
[Foundation-l] Fwd: Wikimedia Foundation: invitation to the
	iCommons Summit - 23-25 June, Rio

body:
> Dear members of the Wikimedia Foundation,
>
> I'm very pleased to extend a very warm invitation to
> you all to attend
> the annual iCommons Summit taking place this year in
> the heart of free
> culture - Rio de Janeiro, Brazil - from the 23rd to
> the 25th of June.
> We're hoping to have very strong participation by
> the Wikimedia
> Foundation in the event - along with communities
> from Creative
> Commons, Science Commons, Ubuntu, open access and
> others.
>
> This year's Summit is set to be one of the most
> exciting events for
> creative and knowledge commons pioneers from around
> the world and is
> structured around three major themes:
>
> 1. Tools. Developing effective, relevant tools to
> assist other
> creators, authors, scientists and researchers to
> develop and showcase
> their creativity and innovation.
>
> 2. Policy. Strategies to ensure international,
> regional and local
> policy fora that are conducive to the development
> and nurturing of the
> commons.
>
> 3. Practice. Learning from the experience of others
> to develop
> effective models for the development of open content
> in societies
> around the world.
>
> The goals of iCommons are to build the Summit into a
> launch-pad for
> global cooperation around commons projects and to
> provide an open,
> creative space for practitioners to learn from best
> case practices and
> to showcase new ideas. With iCommons' strong
> institutional
> partnerships, we will continue to nurture these
> alliances throughout
> the year, providing the tools and spaces for
> commoners to build on the
> friendships and shared experience of the event, and
> building a united
> global commons community.
>
> The three-day program will have a mix of formal
> presentations,
> roundtable working groups, practical workshops and
> community-driven
> program slots that enable participants to gain
> strategic insights and
> practical techniques as well as play a critical role
> in shaping the
> emerging global commons movement.
>
> With keynote speakers including Larry Lessig, Jimmy
> Wales, Joi Ito and
> James Boyle who will inspire participants with a
> vision of a living,
> thriving commons, to members of the expanding
> iCommons community
> showcasing their ideas and inviting participation in
> key projects,
> this year's Summit is proving to be a must-attend
> for anyone engaged
> in the growth and development of the digital commons
> of the future.
>
> We sincerely hope that as many Wikimedia Foundation
> members can attend
> as possible - and I look forward to receiving your
> suggestions for
> presenting the work of the Foundation at the event.
>
> I will send more details when we launch the website
> later this week,
> but please diarise in the meantime :)
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Heather.
>
> --
> Heather Ford
> Acting Executive Director: iCommons

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com


subject: [Foundation-l] Meta:MetaProject to Overhaul Meta

body:
Robert Scott Horning wrote:
> Anthere wrote:
>
>
>>Robert Scott Horning wrote:
>>
>>
>>>I will agree that there is a tendancy to dump some stuff on Meta that
>>>doesn't quite fit on any other Wikimedia project, such as the wikimania
>>>proceedings that are on Meta at the moment.  Admins on meta have been
>>>justifiably concerned when many other projects dump stuff on them in
>>>this manner, and I appreciate that sentiment.
>>>
>>>
>>
>>Hello,
>>
>>By the way, where is the discussion about the test wiki for new
>>languages start up ?
>>
>>Ant
>>
>>
>
> What about simply starting up a bunch of test wikis called test.*.org
> for all of the projects to hold content for new languages proposals
> instead?  Or perhaps the general "seed wiki" to hold content like this?
>
> I wasn't aware of any thread about this issue before now.
>

It was discussed now and then. Usually refered to as "seed wiki".

ant


subject: [Foundation-l] Semi-protection on April Fools

body:
On 3/28/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> How about edit summaries?
> I'll post some of those in a bit, answers delayed due to mysql being stupid.

Edits whos summary matches the regex '^Revert.*' in the main namespace
of enwiki:

04/01/2005 -  587
04/02/2005 -  507
04/08/2005 -  707
04/09/2005 -  550

I hope this puts this nonsense thread to bed.


from_name: Mark Williamson

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Language versions' popularity vs. number of
	articles (vs. number of speakers)

body:
Alright, if it's quality you're after (which I certainly agree with),
there's another statistic that can be used, total database size.

Of course, you could fill a database with 3 gigabytes of stub pages,
but it would be many, many, more stub pages and a much more "complete"
Stub-Wikipedia than if you were to fill it with 3 gigabytes of HQ
non-stub articles. It also doesn't take linguistic considerations into
effect (texts in one language may be longer than equivalent texts in
another)

It goes (stats from December)

1 English - ~2500mb
2 German - ~1000mb
3 Japanese - ~550mb
4 French - ~550mb
5 Polish - ~300mb
6 Italian - ~300mb
7 Dutch - ~250mb
8 Spanish - ~225mb
9 Portuguese - ~175mb
...
12 Chinese - ~125mb
13 Hebrew - ~125mb
...
26 Turkish - ~33mb
...
32 Arabic - ~26mb

The biggest divorce seems to be with the Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, and
Turkish Wikipedias.

This may or may not have something to do with it, but take a look at
the Spanish vs French mainpages -- the French one mentions very, very
prominently that anyone can edit, the Spanish one does not. The
Chinese WP does mention it, I'm not 100% sure about the Arabic or
Turkish.

Erik Moeller also has some good points.

Mark

On 28/03/06, ??? <chamdalae at dreamwiz.com> wrote:
> Mark,
> I don't agree with all of your conclusions here....
>
> >What this says to me is that these Wikipedias are not attracting new
> >pages proportional to views when compared with other Wikipedias. This
> >may be because people don't want to write new pages, but it seems to
> >me more likely that people simply don't know they can.
>
> There are all kinds of possible reasons for this. It isn't necessarily because non-Europeans (and the wikipedias you seem to be referring to are mostly non-European wikipedias) are less likely to know that they can write new articles. Perhaps people are less interested in writing new articles, perhaps they're content with the articles that are there, or perhaps they have other ways to spend their time. Perhaps they _are_ increasingly writing new articles - some of the wikipedias you listed might still be small, but they are growing rapidly.
>
> >How can this be fixed? Perhaps a site notice inviting people to write
> >quality pages or register, or a drive to recruit new Wikipedians from
> >the academic community.
>
> I think here you're confusing the issues of quantity and quality. Writing 'quality pages', or inviting academics to do so, isn't the way to boost page count quickly. And I'm sure many academics would be less interested in the number of articles a wikipedia has than the quality of those articles anyway. Perhaps it would be better to forget about page count and focus on improving the overall quality of wikipedia.
>
> Hyunsung
>
> >
> >Mark
> >
> >--
> >"Take away their language, destroy their souls." -- Joseph Stalin
> >_______________________________________________
> >Wikipedia-l mailing list
> >Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> >http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
>
>
>
>
>
>
> -------------------------------------------------
> Your Life on the Net
> DreamWiz Free Mail @ http://www.dreamwiz.com/
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
"Take away their language, destroy their souls." -- Joseph Stalin


body:
On 3/29/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
> For someone who values empirical data, you are very quick to reject a
> hypothesis using very little data. I suspect that this is because you
> are predisposed towards a particular conclusion. Furthermore, that
> there will be an increase in vandalism is not the only relevant
> hypothesis.

I do not reject the idea that April fools causes some vandalism.
I reject the hypothesis that the vandalism is to such an enormous
extent that it would necessitate a dramatic change in operations.

I did not fail to consider the below points,

> We need to consider many different factors:
> 1) What types of vandalism are there? A simple page blanking is very
> different from a subtle alteration of facts. Double edit vandalism
> (two vandal edits in a row) is harder to detect than single edit
> vandalism. And so forth.
> 2) Accordingly, what is the persistency of the vandalism on April
> Fools vs. the persistency of vandalism on other days of the year?
> 3) How much vandalism is committed by regular users? How much by
> anonymous users? What is the availability of regular users and
> administrators to fix vandalism?
> 4) What is the situation in other projects/languages than en.wp? How
> about WM wikis with small communities that aren't used to dealing with
> vandalism?
> 5) How will the rate of vandalism this year be impacted by the
> Seigenthaler incident and other media coverage about vandalism in
> Wikipedia?

But I can not accept their relevance. The bulk editing patterns for
April 1/2 last year both in terms of total edits and obviously
reverted edits were well within the normal deviation at the time.

I have no doubt that there will be specific articles which see a
somewhat elevated level of vandalism, but I can't support the notion
that we should change sitewide policy on the basis of events which
were not numerous enough to impact the project wide statistics.

> I also remember excellent examples were discussed last year of serious
> vandalism that was particular to April Fools and that was a lot of
> work to clean up after. But, unless there is a clear sign from above
> that a fast and radical decision is likely given enough convincing
> reasons, I am skeptical as to whether it makes sense to dig up these
> threads, and to expand upon the above points. We will all find out in
> 3 days. You should be happy - more data for you to chew on.

Where are these examples?  If there were such examples which are so
much worse than our typical vandalism I would expect someone to
produce links pretty much off the top of their head...

Without hard data human perception and memory are poor analysis
devices.. "It's april first and I saw vandalism, oh no, april first
must be a heavy vandalism day".

So again, I'm not rejecting the notion that april first causes some
harm... only that, given the basic data I provided and without a solid
smoking gun, I consider the likelihood of the harm being significant
enough to warrant a substantial behavioral change to be low enough to
be laughable.


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject:
[Foundation-l] Rodovid.org, family tree wiki,
 wishes to become a wiki project

body:
This strikes me as somewhat irresponsible.  Some GEDCOM files are huge.
Are you suggesting that we just accept them as valid without any
standards for verifiability?  We also need to address the privacy
issues.  The copyright question may turn out to be a less critical problem.

Ec

Benjamin Webb wrote:

>To be honest, I don't really know either. I only really know from certain
>discussions on Wikipedia. The best thing to do, in my opinion, is to let
>people import GEDCOMs from anywhere until we get some sort of complaint, and
>then think about what we are going to do from there.
>
>On 27/03/06, Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:
>
>
>>Benjamin Webb wrote:
>>
>>
>>>When you import a GEDCOM to the Rodovid database, the information is
>>>extracted and stored as wikipages, not as the GEDCOM, so the
>>>copyrightability of the GEDCOM doesn't matter.
>>>
>>>
>>Any patents or copyright claims on the GEDCOM file format itself is not
>>really the point.  This is an open international data format standard
>>that has widespread support and usage from many geneological computer
>>users, including many for profit and non-profit groups.  Royalties have
>>never been assessed for using the data format itself and likely won't be
>>either.  Trust me when I say that the internal politics of the LDS
>>church would simply not allow formal royalties to be charged for it
>>either, and there are geneological groups involved with the development
>>of that data standard that have nothing to do with the LDS church
>>either, although that is who has organized conferences and groups to
>>discuss development of this standard.
>>


body:
What is it that you want meta to be? And how would moving content to a
different site (in many cases for a second time since a lot of this
was already moved off Wikipedia) help? Wouldn't that just break links
from many pages on Wikipedia and externally?

It's possible to organise the site without deleting (especially
redirects which aren't in the way of anything).

I appreciate the attempt to clean the place, and I think, on balance,
you are doing more good than harm, but I would prefer if the cleanup
would be done in a way that does not break links (especially via
deletion of redirects) and in a way that respects the history of the
community (<http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?NoRespectForHistory>).

It's not only cyber-archaeologists who find this interesting or
useful, but anyone joining Wikimedia and wanting to know what's
happened there. Adding {{historical}} tags or categories will prevent
any issues with people thinking old discussions are up to date whereas
deleting them will just lead to conflict.

Angela


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
I'd like to put in the open the notion of semi-protecting all
Wikimedia projects [*] during April Fool's Day, that is, making them
editable only to registered users with accounts more than a few days
old. I have little hope that such an option will be seriously
considered for this year (at least not without an emergency decree
from above right about, well, now), but I think in a few days, after
you will all see the damage we'll have to deal with again this year,
you might be more inclined to agree with me. We could phrase it
positively by declaring April 1 "Wikimedia Spring Cleaning Day" (and
it would not preclude us from having a few jokes on each project). The
site notice could be used to highlight maintenance pages like Cleanup
or the Wikiwork Brigade (sorry for being en.wp-centric).

I'd also like to highlight a policy draft I worked on last year:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Rules_for_Fools&oldid=11835505

Yes, I know, it's all awfully unfunny, but when everyone tries to be
funny, it starts becoming a problem. Wikis are built on the model of
assuming good faith; the wiki model breaks down when everyone starts
acting like a jerk. April 1 is really unique in this way. The problem
is mostly with users who will insert nonsense into articles as a joke,
but have no idea (and will not care enough) to remove it later. I'm
also quite sure that many people will find things funny which we would
normally consider to be cases of aggressive vandalism. People have
very different senses of humor. For some, April 1 is the one day of
the year where they feel they have an obligation to do something
funny, while they really aren't. Funny. At all.

I think not descending into complete anarchy once a year is a
desirable outcome. A yearly 24 hour timeout might also be a good idea
for entirely different reasons.

And no, this is not a joke. :)

Erik

[*] At least in those languages which are predominantly accessed from
countries where April Fool's Day is a recognized cultural concept.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Britannica quote of the day

body:
On 3/29/06, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> I wouldn't turn any filtering on by default, but I have often wished for
> some way to filter which images are shown, usually simply because I find
> them distracting than because I'm actually offended by them.  For
> example, on occasion I've looked up species of insects on Wikipedia, and
> if I already know what they look like, I don't usually want to have to
> read the whole article while staring at a close-up view of a mandible.
> I of course would like images to be available, but I'd like to be able
> to say, "don't show me insect pictures unless I ask for them", because I
> find it distracting.  Others might want them shown, but it would be nice
> if logged-in users had some options.  As it stands now, I have to screw
> around with firefox to turn off images, which is a hassle.

There are extensions, bookmarklets, user javascript hacks, rewrite
proxies and greasemonkeys for these kinds of things, but I also agree
that making good metadata available in standard formats is a sensible
thing to do -- as long as it's not specifically limited to
"potentially offensive" content. That would be POV. While some say
that this kind of filtering is an evil we have to accept to make
people happy, and I've shared this view in the past, I am now utterly
convinced that there are very valid slippery slope concerns.

The kind of people who want offending material to be filtered will
take every little gesture we make as a concession to ask for ever more
filtering. And they don't want it to be filtered just for themselves.
They want it to be filtered for _everyone_. Tolerance for different
points of view is very alien thinking to many of the people who would
install NannySitter, CyberPest or whatever they are called. What you
might see as a reasonable compromise, they would see as a step on the
road towards a better, cleaner InterWeb.

Erik


body:
On 3/29/06, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> How can this be fixed? Perhaps a site notice inviting people to write
> quality pages or register, or a drive to recruit new Wikipedians from
> the academic community.

The site notice can indeed be a useful instrument, especially when
used for specific campaigns, I think. On the English Wikinews I
proposed the idea of a community-approved site notice of the week (in
this case, it would only be shown to registered users):
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Site_notice_of_the_week

Make sure there are enough entry points. The hard distinction between
"community" and "content" is not as important for a young project -- I
think it's fine to have red links on a frontpage of a Wikipedia that
is still in the growth stage, for example. Also stuff like
"collaboration of the week". Stub notices might also help, though some
people hate them.

What also makes a huge difference is press coverage. People who only
discover Wikipedia through their regular Internet searches may never
understand how it works. The German Wikipedia has had _gigantic_ media
coverage in the last few years -- more hype than even the English one,
in my opinion. Even events like Wikimania were covered in national
newspapers. Arguably, in the case of de, it was even a little too much
for the community to deal with.

The new Communications Committee might be able to help with raising
Wikipedia-awareness in specific countries:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications_committee

By now, a general "Wikipedia is great, everyone can edit it" story
doesn't work so well anymore. ;-) But finding an interesting regional
hook should make things interesting -- if there's one thing media
everywhere seem to have in common, it's that they will happily accept
any excuse to write about Wikipedia. One story angle many media are
choosing now is the "Meet the Wikipedians" type, with lots of
individual portraits (kudos to Wired for pioneering this form). The
community can help in obvious ways in laying the groundwork for such
stories.

But, importantly, don't worry too much about these issues. The key
factor are likely cultural reasons which we cannot change. Wikimedia
is like a forest, and some trees just grow faster than others -- but
they all grow. Worry more about the issue of access (both because of
censorship and lack of technology). Wikimedia can do a lot more in
this area.

Erik


body:
On 3/29/06, Michael Snow <wikipedia at earthlink.net> wrote:
> Perhaps simply declaring off-limits the stuff that's been done already
> would go a long ways toward cutting down on unfunny April Fools.

Yea, that should be one of the "rules for fools". The last thing we
want is people edit warring because one guy says it's a funny joke and
the other says it's been done. Scarily enough, we have had edit wars
about jokes last year. But given the huge amount of potential
anonymous pranksters out there who have an especially heightened
awareness of Wikipedia in the year 1 AS (After Seigenthaler), I think
something more effective is needed. For people outside the community,
any appeal may only have a "Don't touch that button" effect (or "Don't
bite that apple" if we want to stick to religious metaphors -- but if
vandalism is the original sin, does that mean I get to nail Jimbo to
the cross? ;-).

Erik


from_name: Fred Bauder

body:
On Mar 29, 2006, at 12:41 AM, Steve Bennett wrote:

> Are there reliable sources that he advocates terrorism?

I haven't found any yet, but haven't looked that hard. I had never
heard of the guy before, which I find quite agreeable. I think his
advocacy is based on inference, not direct evidence of advocacy
statements. He does things which an advocate of terrorism would do,
but does not say he advocates terrorism in so many words. This sort
of proof was once used in prosecuting the leaders of the Communist
Party USA but the thinking was rejected by Yates v. United States. We
have a brief article on that.

I think though, in terms of choice of plaintiff, he would make a good
one. I would hate us to be so chickenshit that we could not
truthfully say that this is a very bad man.

Fred


from_name: Lars Aronsson

body:
Alex Schenck wrote:

> Okay, apparently, we have a few problems here.
>
> Despite praise from various sources, several other Meta people
> have complained that this project is doing more harm than good.
> While I of course completely disagree with that notion, I feel
> that I ought to let out some steam.
>
> Meta right now is horrible.

I think you could benefit from trying to write an NPOV description
of what the problem is, that you're trying to fix.  The
oversimplified view that "meta is horrible" is apparently not
shared by everybody.  You're too fast to your conclusions and the
community cannot keep up with you at that pace.

For me meta is an archive of old ideas, some implemented, others
not, with the arguments for and against.  Six months ago I
organized the [[category:books]], which was very useful to me. The
way you summarize your frustration, I cannot know if you think
that my work was all rubbish, or if it could be allowed to stay.
Should I support your initiative, or try to stop it? I don't know.

--
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se


body:
Noble savage?

Fred

On Mar 29, 2006, at 6:50 AM, Steve Bennett wrote:

> On 3/29/06, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
>
>> I think though, in terms of choice of plaintiff, he would make a good
>> one. I would hate us to be so chickenshit that we could not
>> truthfully say that this is a very bad man.
>>
>
> Shall we just call him a freedom fighter and be done with it?
>
> Steve
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Mathias Schindler

subject: [WikiEN-l] CBS evening news

body:
Andrea Forte wrote:
> err.. the *US* east coast. :-)
>

Here is the Video:

http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/videoplayer/newVid/small_player/vplayer2.shtml?clip=/media/2006/03/28/video1449453.rm&sec=3420&vidId=3420&title=Britannica$@$Vs$@$Wikipedia&hitboxMLC=eveningnews


from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] Most "fair use" images in one article

body:
KISS (band) 13

Can anyone top that (and diging out the [[Amber Smith]] article before
I killed the "fair use" gallery doesn't count)?

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] Chatroom libel ruling

body:
Philip Welch wrote:

>On Mar 27, 2006, at 8:14 AM, jayjg wrote:
>
>
>>I would imagine it would have implications for all countries with
>>legal
>>systems based on British Common Law, which I would think would look
>>at  the
>>ruling in this case when deciding similar cases.
>>
>>
>It would depend--the American legal system is based on English common
>law, but American courts rarely, if ever, take into account English
>court precedents after the colonial period. Commonwealth countries
>may still take into account contemporary English precedents, however.
>
Other Commonwealth and even US decisions are often taken into account,
but they are not binding precedents.

Ec


from_name: Sean Barrett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Britannica quote of the day (Johntex)

body:
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charles matthews stated for the record:

> "Steve Bennett"  wrote
>
>
>>And notice that my example was objective: "naked breasts".
>>Yours is subjective: "offensive". Kind of logical that a subjective
>>term is hard to apply objectively.
>
>
> Naked breasts - the last thing young kids should be exposed to.  No, wait.
> The first thing young kids should be exposed to.  No, wait, the breasts
> should be exposed to the kid, but one at a time.  Good thing newborns have
> good enough grasp of subjectivity and objectivity not to be confused.  Or
> offended.  No wait, they grasp fingers, but I think they don't really grasp
> ... never mind, the confusion seems to lie elsewhere ...
>
> Charles

Charles, Charles, Charles.  That is such a straw man.  Everyone knows
that it is (are?) only pert, young, virginal breasts that kids must not
see.  It is perfectly all right to expose children to breasts (or vice
versa) /as long as they are lactating/ (the breasts, not the children).

/me goes to see what [[fetish]] has to say about the subject.

- --
 Sean Barrett     | The other side to the Wikipedia that nobody really
 sean at epoptic.org | likes to talk about... is that a large portion of
                  | the content is fairly pornographic, and actually
                  | quite lewd. --Encyclopedia Britannica spokesman
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from_name: charles matthews

body:
 "Steve Bennett" wrote

> Ok, I've obviously offended you. My remark was intended as a vague
> sympathetic sigh agreeing that there are vast numbers of monolingual
> anglosaxons in the US, that do indeed have a great deal of influence,
> being as numerous as they are.

Just remember that the guy editing next to you has better English, and she's
Swedish.

Charles


body:
For someone who values empirical data, you are very quick to reject a
hypothesis using very little data. I suspect that this is because you
are predisposed towards a particular conclusion. Furthermore, that
there will be an increase in vandalism is not the only relevant
hypothesis.

We need to consider many different factors:
1) What types of vandalism are there? A simple page blanking is very
different from a subtle alteration of facts. Double edit vandalism
(two vandal edits in a row) is harder to detect than single edit
vandalism. And so forth.
2) Accordingly, what is the persistency of the vandalism on April
Fools vs. the persistency of vandalism on other days of the year?
3) How much vandalism is committed by regular users? How much by
anonymous users? What is the availability of regular users and
administrators to fix vandalism?
4) What is the situation in other projects/languages than en.wp? How
about WM wikis with small communities that aren't used to dealing with
vandalism?
5) How will the rate of vandalism this year be impacted by the
Seigenthaler incident and other media coverage about vandalism in
Wikipedia?

I also remember excellent examples were discussed last year of serious
vandalism that was particular to April Fools and that was a lot of
work to clean up after. But, unless there is a clear sign from above
that a fast and radical decision is likely given enough convincing
reasons, I am skeptical as to whether it makes sense to dig up these
threads, and to expand upon the above points. We will all find out in
3 days. You should be happy - more data for you to chew on.

Erik


body:
Do I think that April Fools will in any way irreversibly damage the
Wikimedia project family? Of course not - we've dealt with it last
year, we'll survive it this year. Do I believe that the combination of
admins, regular users and anons hammering away on different pranks
will make our site look amateurish and unprofessional in the eyes of
some visitors? Most definitely. Do I consider the extent to which
vandalism was dealt with using admin rollback last year over a period
of a few days following April 1 a particularly useful metric in
estimating the extent of the _actual problem_ this year? Not really.

It also seems to me that a radical solution like the one I propose has
certain side benefits -- it emphasizes the nature of the project (in
the case of Wikipedia) as an encyclopedia rather than a community
where everyone is free to do whatever they want; it gives a serious
undertone to any appeals to the community of registered users to
behave; it gives us one day of the year to focus on cleaning up all
the mess everyone else makes during the rest of the year. ;-)

On the other hand, I'll already be happy with _some_ regulations. For
example, admins last year changed the user interface all over the
place, including parts of it which are visible to regular users. That,
in my opinion, goes way too far as it impairs normal access to
information.

Erik


body:
Is it true that he contacted the Foundation and was ignored (sounds
unlikely)? Are there reliable sources that he advocates terrorism?

Might a solution to cases such as these be to simply remove the
material, and replace it with the relevant text from the email,
warning the reader that the content may not be accurate or NPOV, and
that's why?

Steve


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Mediametry survey (was )Re: Language versions'
 popularity vs. number of articles...)

body:
Miguel Chaves wrote:
> Hi, I wonder if wikipedia only relies on this sort of external statistics
> (like Alexa) to gather information about visits to the sites.
> Aren't there statistcs collected on wikipedia servers itself? This would be
> more useful and reliable.

Not at this time. At our traffic level, web server logs are too large to handle
comfortably without a dedicated infrastructure, and we've been forced to simply
disable them until something easier to handle gets set up.

(If we were an ad-supported site, such statistics would be much much more
important and we'd have put in the time and money for it a lot sooner.)

> BTW, if we want to know the popularity of an specific article (not a
> specific wikipedia), is there a tool for that?

Not really, sorry.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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body:
I think we all agree that the best way to deal with such accusations
is to write comprehensive, neutral, well-sourced articles.
Incidentally, that is also what someone like Neal Horsley should be
most afraid of. So, what he is doing is very stupid, but then again,
he is a stupid man.

Of course Wikimedia will face lawsuits. Our question should never be
if a battle is worth fighting, but only if the article that someone
complains about is sound from a legal and policy point of view. If it
is, finding the money to pay for legal expenses is not going to be the
problem. We'll just have to ask.

Erik


from_name: Steve Bennett

body:
On 3/29/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
> Of course Wikimedia will face lawsuits. Our question should never be
> if a battle is worth fighting, but only if the article that someone
> complains about is sound from a legal and policy point of view. If it
> is, finding the money to pay for legal expenses is not going to be the
> problem. We'll just have to ask.

Dunno about you, but being threatened by a guy who's proud that he
cost the other side $1,000,000 in a lawsuit that he lost works very
well with me. The word "terrorist" (even if it was true) is not worth
a million big ones to us.

Steve


body:
Andrew Gray wrote:
> Is that "keep recording but ignore them", or disable in the sense of
> turn off logging totally? Just curious...

After a few months of having logs that you're not reading fill up the servers'
hard disks every few days, you turn them off. :)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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from_name: Mark Wagner

body:
On 3/28/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> KISS (band) 13
>
> Can anyone top that (and diging out the [[Amber Smith]] article before
> I killed the "fair use" gallery doesn't count)?

I spot larger uses on a regular basis from checking up on OrphanBot's
work.  Most often, it's an article on a game or gaming console where
someone's included a screenshot gallery.

--
Mark
[[User:Carnildo]]


body:
On 3/29/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dunno about you, but being threatened by a guy who's proud that he
> cost the other side $1,000,000 in a lawsuit that he lost works very
> well with me.

Then you're easily intimidated, because the first thing anyone who is
seriously trying to threaten you with legal action will do is pull $
amounts out of their rear end. I think the word "terrorist" should
generally be avoided for totally different reasons: It is ambiguous
and has strong emotional connotations. We can use it if we attribute
it to someone else, but for Wikipedia to adopt such a term as fact is
always problematic. There are good reasons it is listed on
[[Wikipedia:Words to avoid]].

This is not a matter of giving in to Horsley's threats, it's a matter
of rigorously applying policy, which we should always do when facing
such threats. Many will not see the difference, but it will become
more visible as the article evolves over the years.

Erik


body:
On 3/29/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Wait, where did anyone mention plaudits? You want to get the
> > encyclopaedia written. I want the encyclopaedia to be useful to
> > people. These goals are not incompatible.
> >
>
> You want Wikipedia to be "safe for work", where "work" includes in
> classrooms. The logical conclusion is that being "classroom-safe" will
> earn us plaudits from teachers. "Wow, a free encyclopedia, which doesn't
> include all the naughty things which are illegal to teach in
> Texas/Kansas/North Korea!"

Yeah, sorry, I'm just not seeing where you're getting "plaudits"
(praise, accolades) out of all this. There are other motivations for
doing useful things than wanting a pat on the back.
> > You could hope for that.
>
> That an openly editable, largely unmoderated, uncensored website will be
> "safe for minors"? OTRS gets enough complaints from *adults* about
> "pornographic vandalism". Why should we offend minors any less?

I suspect adults complain because the content is there. Teachers etc
know that the web is filthy, they just (afaik) want a reference site
where their kids aren't going to be looking at porn.

> Odd, I could have sworn that it was the German language Wikipedia which
> had produced three hardcopies of its content...

I retract the comment.

> A spoiler warning indicates the *fact* that an article contains "plot or
> solution details" on the subject of the article. Content warnings would
> be incredibly objective and POV - once you start putting up "offensive
> content" tags, it's a slippery slope to...

So, plot details are facts, but naked breasts are subjective. I
disagree completely. If anything, I think what is a spoiler is very
subjective - no distinction is made between details of unaired
episodes, minor plot points and character deaths, soapies and suspense
thrillers, for example. Whereas, as we've seen, the examples where
content ratings are contentious are fairly contrived, and mostly come
down to whether nude art is pornographic or not.

> "Warning: This article contains graphic descriptions of electron flow"
> in [[electricity]].

Sure, that's a great example. No, really.

> > Answer: They would be invisible to most users.
> >
>
> Really? So, if they're "invisible to most users", what's the point of
> having them? Why not just leave them out altogether?

Presumably you would make the same argument for removing braille
markings from food products in supermarkets.

Steve


body:
On 3/29/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:

> So, you're willing to tag *all* articles based on their content?
>
> Are you then willing to tag the list of tags?
>
> "Warning: this set of articles have been identified of being of a
> biologically accurate/theologically dubious/unscientific nature"? (sex,
> evolution, and creation respectively)

Why stop at articles? "Warning:This talk page contians geni's spelling"

--
geni


subject:
[Wikitech-l] [MediaWiki-CVS] phase3/includes Parser.php, 1.602,
 1.603

body:
Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
> I'd like to get maybe 75-80% of the pertinent parts of the parser glued
> into WebGUI as a replacement for it's current article markup
> facilities, but that will entail rewriting it in perl.

You might take a look at existing attempts, I think a couple are perl-ish:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Alternative_parsers

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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body:
On 3/29/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
> Then you're easily intimidated, because the first thing anyone who is

Sure. But then, I avoid edit wars too. :)

> seriously trying to threaten you with legal action will do is pull $
> amounts out of their rear end. I think the word "terrorist" should
> generally be avoided for totally different reasons: It is ambiguous
> and has strong emotional connotations. We can use it if we attribute
> it to someone else, but for Wikipedia to adopt such a term as fact is
> always problematic. There are good reasons it is listed on
> [[Wikipedia:Words to avoid]].

Yep. Totally agree with that policy in general.

> This is not a matter of giving in to Horsley's threats, it's a matter
> of rigorously applying policy, which we should always do when facing
> such threats. Many will not see the difference, but it will become
> more visible as the article evolves over the years.

Well, *we* should definitely do that. What the Foundation does in the
face of continued threats is, of course, up to them ;)

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] Chatroom libel ruling

body:
Mark Gallagher wrote:

>G'day Phil,
>
>
>>On Mar 27, 2006, at 5:26 PM, Mark Gallagher wrote:
>>
>>
>>>G'day Phil,
>>>
>>>
>>>>It would depend--the American legal system is based on English common
>>>>law, but American courts rarely, if ever, take into account English
>>>>court precedents after the colonial period. Commonwealth countries
>>>>may still take into account contemporary English precedents, however.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>AIUI, that's due to bog-standard insecurity --- "we can't let those
>>>dirty forners tell us what to do!"
>>>
>>>The Australian High Court recently (well, fifteen years ago ...)  looked
>>>to Zimbabwe and Canada (IIRC) for guidance.  I believe the argument  goes
>>>something like: "our law was the same up until X date, therefore ---
>>>barring decisions that drastically change this area of law --- we're
>>>likely to be expected to come to similar conclusions".
>>>
>>>
>>The United States went to war twice to ensure that the English  weren't
>>in charge of our laws. Other former colonies don't seem to  appreciate
>>that :)
>>
>>
>Heh, fair point.
>
Or unfair point depending on your POV. :-)    Now some elements of US
justice arrogate jurisdiction on US courts whenever they feel that a US
citizen has been harmed by events committed extraterritoriallyby a
foreigner.

>(In 2001, the Govt ran an ad campaign: "Our nation was started with a
>treaty, *not* a war", or words to that effect, to say that while
>Federation may not have been as glamarous as the American Revolution, it
>didn't cost as many lives, and also everyone got free "I attended the
>Constitutional Convention of 189mumble" souvenir mugs.  I've often
>wondered how Americans would feel about this campaign.)
>
>
>>Do the Commonwealth nations grant to English rulings stare decisis
>>standing as court precedents, or do they simply look to them for  guidance?
>>
>>
>I only know about Australian law (and even then, it was an elective
>subject for just four semesters :)), but I assume the other Cth
>countries follow similar procedures.
>
>Precedent theoretically applies up until Federation, colony court
>decisions notwithstanding.  A case decided after Federation would not be
>binding on Australian courts, however, since our courts share a common
>background with, say, Scottish courts, their reasoning can be used for
>guidance.
>
Canada did not have an supreme court at the time of confederation in
1867.  The British North America Act did provide for one to be set up,
and this happened in 1875.   In 1888 Parliament passed a law to abolish
appeals in criminal cases to the Judicial Committee of the Privy
Council.  The Privy Council declared this invalid in 1926 in Nadan v. R.
because it sought to overule an Imperial statute  That precipitated the
Second Balfour Declaration later that year, and led to the Statute of
Westminster in 1931.  Shortly after that Canada re-enacted the 1888
statute.  The right of appeal to the Privy Council in other matters was
repealed in 1949.

The Supreme Court of Canada has not had the occasion to rule on whether
it would be bound by its own decisions, but the top judicial bodies in
the US, UK and Australia have all ruled that they can do so.

Ec


body:
Mark Williamson wrote:
> Hi everybody,
>
> While it's sort of obvious, given the digital divide, that the number
> of articles in Wikipedias is not proportional to the number of
> speakers, for example Hindi has a much smaller number of articles
> compared to speakers than most active Wikipedias; German has more.
>
> However, something that people may not notice as much is the
> incongruency between popularity of a particular language version and
> the number of articles in that version.
>
> The most visited Wikipedias, in order, are:
>
> 1 English (65%)
> 2 German (10%)
> 3 Japanese (6%)
> 4 Spanish (3%)
> 5 French (2%)
> 6 Polish (2%)
> 7 Chinese (2%)
> 8 Arabic (2%)
> 9 Italian (1%)
> 10 Hebrew (1%)
> 11 Turkish (1%)
> 12 Dutch (1%)
> 13 Portuguese (1%)
> (all others combined total 1% of visits)
>
> On the other hand, the list of Wikipedias ranked by number of articles is:
> 1 English (1048.7K)
> 2 German (376.9K)
> 3 French (261.1K)
> 4 Polish (223.8K)
> 5 Japanese (196.3K)
> 6 Dutch (156.9K)
> ...
> 8 Italian (146.8K)
> 9 Portuguese (123.8K)
> 10 Spanish (105.0K)
> ...
> 12 Chinese (61.48K)
> ...
> 17 Hebrew (34.35K)
> ...
> 29 Turkish (19.94K)
> ...
> 37 Arabic (12.03K)

Hi

By the way, I have wondered for a long time how it could be that the
french wikipedia be the third largest (which is a fact)... and only
supposingly 2% of the visits. I also remember that meta had very
significantly more visits than the french wikipedia. Which.. to me... is
not something I *believe*.

Answer : these values are collected strictly thanks to the use of the
Alexa bar...; which is apparently very little used at least in France.
Hence possibly messing up the statistics. It might well be the same for
other languages, in particular those for which the Alexa bar... is
simply not working/translated. So... be careful with the use of the
Alexa data. They are a very interesting feedback... but also to take
with a pinch of salt.

By the way, there was recently a study by Mediametry (a statistical
agency, making polls. In France, probably the largest and most famous one).

The study showed this

	d?c. 2004	avr. 2005	ao?t 2005	d?c. 2005
USA	4 544 000	6 753 000	11 874 000	17 498 000
Germany	1 707 000	2 956 000	4 502 000	5 529 000
France	681 000		1 169 000	1 429 000	2 421 000
UK	540 000		766 000		1 525 000	2 298 000

Please see that :
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=mediametrie+wikipedia&btnG=Google+Search

anthere


from_name: Robert Scott Horning

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

>This strikes me as somewhat irresponsible.  Some GEDCOM files are huge.
>Are you suggesting that we just accept them as valid without any
>standards for verifiability?  We also need to address the privacy
>issues.  The copyright question may turn out to be a less critical problem.
>
>Ec
>
>
The best privacy policy I've seen regarding geneological information is
to not list anybody who is currently alive, or in other words does not
have a listed death date and is less than 110 years old, under the
assumption that people over 110 years of age are so unusual that they
deserve special mention anyway, or can be generally assumed to be dead.
 I think it might be safer for 120 years instead, but that is a fine
point to quibble here.

Some exceptions might happen for very famous people, but that is
certainly something to express concern over.  It is also something that
can be automated directly in the software if a policy is set up, where
the information can be added but not displayed if it fails the living
person criteria.

A good point to raise, however.

--
Robert Scott Horning


from_name: michael_irwin at verizon.net

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>Do I think that April Fools will in any way irreversibly damage the
>Wikimedia project family? Of course not - we've dealt with it last
>year, we'll survive it this year. Do I believe that the combination of
>admins, regular users and anons hammering away on different pranks
>will make our site look amateurish and unprofessional in the eyes of
>some visitors?
>
>
Too bad the general wikiversity URLs are not setup yet.

Perhaps the April fools could be usefully (pragmatically, efficiently,
efficaceously, simply) diverted to an environment designed/intended for
interaction between participants in learning processes rather than
checking and delivering precisely correct information.

After all an April fool is likely looking for immediate human reactions
and interactions.   Other students/participants are also likely to be at
wikiversity expecting human interaction.  Surely those seeking
authoritative reference texts absent goofball influences are more likely
to start at the premier Wikibooks showcase shelf or perhaps even
Wikipedia itself?  (After engaging the read only interlock safeties of
course!)

April fool's might even be useful in building the initial Wikiversity
community fabric vs. detrimental to the public perception of the awesome
tome that Wikipedia has become in these few short years of
professionalism on public parade.

Consider our nefarious goal to break Hank Aaron's home run records.

Is it best to:

1.  Restrict all professional and amateur batters to official gametime
batter boxes under paying public scrutiny and on their best politically
correct behavior at all times as per rulings relayed from the on high
commissioner says cabal?

2.  Create little leagues, locker rooms, off season sandlot pickup, nerd
baseball nintendo, practice cages, college playoffs, all star games,
drug labs, drug czars, etc. in the possibly vain hope that a few minutes
of professionalism will emerge at appropriate times under the bright
lights and professional camera crews of the world's professional sports
industries.

3.  Pray to the allmighty for special deliverance and personal success
in our newfound mission.

4.  Relax and check back online in a decade or two.

5.  Not disclose secret/proprietary strategies to the community at large
until commercial potentials have been explored exhaustively with
potential partners and/or allies.

or

6.  Bask in the glow of past success, serene in the knowledge that Hank
Aaron's accomplishment is the pinnacle of all human achievement.  All
that remains is to Ebay the paraphernalia.

Perhaps this year for our community April Fools joke we could send
representatives or self selected volunteers to various professional
conferences exploring the use of public wikis in freeing the
curriculum.  Then we could leave the URLs inactive or temporary and
subject to constraints imposed by other ad hoc project teams and
committees.   Confused new arrivals could also be referred to commercial
competitors.  This might protect Wikiversity indefinitely from the
overly explosive growth that did such tremendous damage to the original
Wikipedia puddle.

Of course, this unprofessionalism might also backfire and reflect poorly
on Wikipedia or Wikimedia itself within professional academic circles.
Perhaps some academic somewhere will choose to free the curriculum by
convincing his/her information technology staff to first mirror and then
later fork portions of the awesome Wikimedia products applicable or
useful to students of his/her discipline.   Better to initialize from
scratch or wade through the attributions and weed the crapola?   "Disk
space is cheap," replies the perky uncredentialed web administrator.
"We can only mandate so many student effort hours.  Therefore we need
some strange attractors.  The Bio informatics guys are looking for ways
to demonstrate the power of genetic algorythms to the Pentagon again.
Let's set it up in all six orthogonal permutations and reinforce the
ones that successfully attract volunteer learning communities when the
future waves of grant monies roll in."

Obviously such an exploit would inevitably be tainted by academic
rivalries and lose the valuable neutrality that Wikiversity's prefounder
and original proponent (Mav149) has identified as a potentially valuable
differentiating feature of our Wikimedia branding strategy.

Therefore DO NOT PANIC!  There is no rush or urgency!  The world has
waited thousands of years for near universal free access to human
knowledge and can certainly wait a few more decades.   If some stodgy
academics choose to compete or initiate activity independent of the
Wikimedia Foundation then our local communities should have no trouble
absorbing them back into the NPOV fold.  No one truly needs our free
information products for anything of any real importance anytime sooner
than yesterday.

Does anyone know offhand exactly what the current holdups on activating
the official wikiversity URLs is or have pointers to applicable minutes
newer than Jan 2006?

Well, gotta go play tiddly winks and maybe help develop our April Fool's
joke for Wikimania 2006, 2007, .... 2010.   Say .... I wonder if that
monolith followed proper black body theory as articulated in proposed
foundation policy or if Jimmy said they could do something else for 2005.

Regards,
lazyquasar


subject: [Wikitech-l] What is the wpSummary for ?

body:
If I fill out the wpSummary field, nothing seems to be done with it.
What is this feild for ?


from_name: Birger

subject: [Wikitech-l] Hierarchical navigation bar? - part of the answer

body:
Thanks a lot for the help! The hierarchical navigation bar is working now
;-)

While playing around with the menu, I encountered some strange behavior
though:

   1. Whatever I put before the sublevel, is placed automatically above
   the navigationbox. For example:

'sidebar' => '
* [[Mainpage|Main Page]]
* [[Special:Recentchanges|Recent Changes]]
* [[Current_events| News]]
* [[Help|Help]]
* Cases
** [[Technicalcase|Tcase]]
** [[Businesscase|Bcase]]
',

MediaWiki puts then the word "Cases" above the navigationbox. I have tried
to put "*navigation" right above "* [[Mainpage|Main Page]] " but
unfortunately this does not help. MediaWiki keeps putting the word that is
placed right above the sublevel above the box. Why is this done
automatically? How could i possibly change this?
       2.  I wanted to make a second box beneith the navigation box and
therefore i had put
            <?php $this->msgWiki( 'sidebar' ) ?>
            <?php $this->msgWiki( 'casebar' ) ?>
in monobook.php with 'casebar' => '
* Cases
** [[Technicalcase|Tcase]]
** [[Businesscase|Bcase]]
',
Unfortunately, MediaWiki joins the two bars together into one box. Is it
possible to create two separate boxes? I could separate boxes before (when i
did not apply the
hack<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Layout_customization#How_do_I_add_an_editable_Left_Menu.3F>),
by just putting "*" before the word that had to appear above the box. I
don't see how it is possible to figure that out while applying the hack...

Thanks again for any help!

Birger.

2006/3/28, wilinckx < wilinckx at willempen.org>:
>
> On Tue, 28 Mar 2006 14:36:08 +0200
> Birger <bweynants at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > A hierarchical navigation bar can be implemented by changing code in
> > monobook.php (
> >
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Customization#How_do_I_add_an_editable_Left_Menu.3F
> ).
> > Unfortunately this only works in case $wgUseDatabaseMessages in
> > defaultsettings.php is set to "true".
> >
> > In my case, this variable is set to false, in order to be able to use
> > another language (Dutch instead of English) in our wiki. BUT by
> > setting $wgUseDatabaseMessages=false,
> > the mediawiki-namespace (into which the navigation bar has to be
> changed) is
> > not read anymore.
> >
> > To change the content of the navigation bar, I had to adapt the
> > language.phpfile:
> >
> > 'sidebar' => '
> > * navigation
> > ** mainpage|mainpage
> > ** portal-url|portal
> > ** currentevents-url|currentevents
> > ** recentchanges-url|recentchanges
> > ** randompage-url|randompage
> > ** helppage|help
> > * Cases
> > ** Businesscase|Business
> > ** Technicalcase|Technical
> > ',
> >
> > but i cannot implement a hierarchical menu by changing e.g. **
> > Technicalcase|Technical  into *** Technicalcase|Technical. Does anyone
> know
> > how to solve this problem so that I can implement a hierarchical menu
> > while $wgUseDatabaseMessages=false?
> > Do I have to change code in the language.php file or in the
> monobook.phpfile?
> >
> > Thanks in advance!
> > Birger
>
> If you're using $wgUseDatabaseMessages=false, MediaWiki just gets his
> messages from Language.php and (in your case) LanguageNl.php.  So if you
> want to change the messages, you can just edit these files.
> In this case you need to edit the message "Sidebar".  Because you're not
> using database-messages, you can just edit this message in Language.php.
>
> The hack at
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Customization#How_do_I_add_an_editable_Left_Menu.3F
>
> does not care where the messages come from.  If the messages come from
> the database or from the Language??.php files, both cases work.  But only
> if you've applied the hack of course.
>
> > In my case, this variable is set to false, in order to be able to use
> > another language (Dutch instead of English) in our wiki.
> Hint: To fill the database with Dutch messages instead of English
> messages, you can run maintainance/rebuildMessages.php.   (keep in mind
> this does not change the language preferences of the user (every user can
> set in his/her preferences his/her prefered language, so it's best to
> test such things as anonymous user).
> You don't have to, you can just continue using Language??.php files.  It
> makes MediaWiki faster.
>
> Succes,
> Wilinckx.
>
> --
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>