from_name: Sean Black

body:
> Message: 4
> Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2006 13:18:27 +0200
> From: "Steve Bennett" <stevagewp at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Does openness dull the bleeding edge?
> To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
> Message-ID:
> 	<b8ceeef70608310418q56ec67c1v54823a49f0f6bf59 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> On 8/31/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> > How would you feel about adding beautiful and insightful prose to an
> > article on a university, only to find that someone has later added:
> > "In a 1999 episode ("Lovers' Walk," Season 3, Episode 8) of Buffy the
> > Vampire Slayer, Joyce (Buffy's mother) says to Buffy, "[[Carnegie
> > Mellon]]has a wonderful design curriculum.""
> >
> [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Carnegie_Mellon_University&oldid=42368976#Carnegie_Mellon_in_fiction]
> > ... Delighted, no doubt!
>
> The solution isn't bad though:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_Mellon_University_in_popular_culture

Actually, I'd say that's worse, because it enforces the idea that all
references to fiction in an article on a "real" topic are on equal
footing and of equal importance, which simply isn't true.

Despite the poor quality and excess that many of these sections suffer
from, it /is/ possible to write a good section about a subject's
coverage and appearances in fiction. It just isn't done the way it
should be often enough.

~~Sean


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: David Gerard

subject: [Wikipedia-l] "Drive-by tagging" advice needed

body:
On 31/08/06, Akash Mehta <draicone at gmail.com> wrote:

>  there is a template
> you can use to tell people when wikification is not needed, see
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Wikify/wikified_wrongly
> (its for [[WP:WWF]] members, but that doesn't mean you can't use it).

That seems like extra procedure for no good reason. What on earth is
wrong with just removing the {{wikify}} tag when it's not needed? It's
a fairly subjective editorial judgement.

- d.


body:
On 31/08/06, Akash Mehta <draicone at gmail.com> wrote:

> Generally the best option is to just remove the tag, but to conform to
> WP:BITE, if a clearly inexperienced user is trying to do their best by
> tagging all the articles in the world, we give them a nudge with that
> template. Of course, I've never seen anyone use it, its just there in
> case its ever needed.

Yeah. Newbies who start being procedural obsessives are difficult to
deal with in general. Put six tags on an article, obsessively check
all PRODs you've ever placed and AFD *any* that someone just removes,
etc., etc.

The interesting bits of life are the grey areas. Wikipedia is not a
refuge from them. How to get this across to those who see the world
entirely in black and white, and think of grey as a kind of defective
stippling?

- d.


list: textbook-l

from_name: Andrew Whitworth

subject: [Textbook-l] Google Book Search

body:
Sounds like a good idea to me. Perhaps somebody should send google an email,
and see what their requirements are for including a book in the search
database? It would be a great help to our project.

--Andrew Whitworth

>From: "Piotr \"Derbeth\" Kubowicz" <derbeth at wp.pl>
>Reply-To: Wikimedia textbook discussion <textbook-l at wikimedia.org>
>To: textbook-l at wikimedia.org
>Subject: [Textbook-l] Google Book Search
>Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2006 11:49:22 +0200
>
>Today I found news about a new Google project - Google Book Search. This
>service, available at http://books.google.com/, allows users to search for
>books and browse some of them online. In most cases, only parts of books
>are available and the whole material is copyrighted. Google Book Search
>also offers long description of every book, links to online stores where
>the book is available, possibility to search words in a single books and
>more features.
>
>Currently I have not seen any books from Wikibooks there. I find this
>project as a real chance for Wikibooks to promote itself and its content;
>we should add our PDF versions there if it is possible. Google says it does
>not take any money for adding new books to its search engine, but I am not
>sure if they require ISBN number for each book.
>
>What is your opinion on this project?
>
>--
>Piotr 'Derbeth' Kubowicz
>Jabber id: derbeth at jabber.wp.pl
>
>Pom?? Wikibooks stworzy? najwi?kszy zbi?r otwartych podr?cznik?w!
>http://pl.wikibooks.org/
>
>Opera - the fastest browser on Earth! http://www.opera.com/
>_______________________________________________
>Textbook-l mailing list
>Textbook-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/textbook-l


list: wikien-l

from_name: Stephen Streater

subject: [WikiEN-l] Fighting over (R) and (tm) symbols

body:
On 30 Aug 2006, at 21:01, Steve Bennett wrote:

> On 8/30/06, Matt Brown <morven at gmail.com> wrote:
>> As far as I recall, there is no legal requirement to use either
>> symbol.  (r) and ? are used by trademark holders to inform you that
>> they consider the terms trademarks.  It is not commonplace to use
>> those symbols when you are NOT claiming trademark status on the terms
>> yourself.
>
> Yes, it's up to the person who owns the trademark to spray them around
> everywhere. If we do it, we're just being chumps.

It might be different in English law.

If you don't enforce your trademark here,
I think you lose it.


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Travis Derouin

subject: [Wikitech-l] Rating Articles Extension

body:
Awesome, thanks.

On 8/30/06, Nick Jenkins <nickpj at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I've put together an extension for rating articles if anyone is
> > interested. It's just a first version and hasn't been tested much, but
> > the details can be found here:
> >


from_name: Maury Markowitz

body:
>Generally the best option is to just remove the tag, but to conform to
>WP:BITE, if a clearly inexperienced user is trying to do their best by
>tagging all the articles in the world, we give them a nudge with that
>template. Of course, I've never seen anyone use it, its just there in
>case its ever needed.

I think I could have avoided a lot of the fallout that occured had I used
something like this. Well, maybe, hard to say.

But I do have a suggestion: could you make the template smaller? It's HUGE!
I'd actually feel bad putting this on someone's talk page. Perhaps something
that is much smaller and links to a page that has the content within?

Maury


body:
>Yeah. Newbies who start being procedural obsessives are difficult to
>deal with in general. Put six tags on an article, obsessively check
>all PRODs you've ever placed and AFD *any* that someone just removes,
>etc., etc.

Well this is precisely what happened to me. Things got nasty with a
newly-minted admin decided to take the newbie under his wing, and started
reverting. *sigh* Well, water under the bridge really.

But David, I was wondering if you would consider starting an article on
"procedural obsessives"? It seems that simply pointing people towards such
an article would be a much more neutral way to deal with it than posting a
personal message on their talk page. THAT can easily be misinterpreted as
someone trying to protect "their" article.

Maury


from_name: Tim Jenks

subject: [Wikitech-l] Apparent automatic merging (edit conflict) issue with

body:
Hi,

Having trawled around the archives of this and some other lists and
searching for a couple of hours, I have read that MediaWiki
automatically merges simple edit-conflicts.

In practice using two separate setups (both Win32 - not my choice,
work only uses windows systems):

    *  MediaWiki: 1.7.1
    * PHP: 5.1.6 (apache2handler)
    * MySQL: 5.0.19-community
   (apache 2.0.59 win32)

    *  MediaWiki: 1.6.5
    * PHP: 4.4.2 (cgi-fcgi)
    * MySQL: 5.0.19-community
   (IIS)

..even very basic edits do not auto merge and throw an edit conflict.

By very basic edits I refer to changes made to completely different
lines in a small file.

Is this the intended functionality of this? I find it hard to believe
considering all the "automatic merging" discussion and information I
have seen. If not, why are my basic edits not auto merging? Do I need
to configure anything? Is it related to win32 installation?

Cheers in advance
-Tim


from_name: Matt Brown

subject: [WikiEN-l] Does openness dull the bleeding edge?

body:
On 8/31/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> The solution isn't bad though:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_Mellon_University_in_popular_culture

While I think I'm on record as disliking 'in popular culture' spinoff
articles, I am beginning to see them as a perhaps necessary evil.
Keeping all that stuff a link away is generally an acceptable
solution.

-Matt


body:
On 8/30/06, stevertigo <vertigosteve at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Does the fact that Wikipedia is 1/10 Pokemon and sex/porn articles chase
> away scientists?

IMO, probably not, and if it is, I don't think it's a bias we can
change.  I think that it's way too easy to claim that - Pokemon et al
get too much blame for things that aren't their fault.  I do agree
with those further down the thread that pop-culture trivia spread into
serious articles IS a problem.

> What would WP look like if NOR was lifted for certain science
> articles?

Awful.  WP:NOT a dumping ground for new theories, and that's entirely
the point of NOR.  Any reputable scientific theory should already be
published.

I think that any issue with advanced physics articles is one common to
any specialist subject where it's hard to write about it without good
knowledge of the field.

-Matt


body:
On 31/08/06, stevertigo <vertigosteve at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Does the fact that Wikipedia is 1/10 Pokemon and sex/porn articles chase
> away scientists? What would WP look like if NOR was lifted for certain science
> articles?

No, no and furthermore definitely not. You've been around Wikipedia
long enough to know that NOR was specifically invented to keep the
physics cranks at bay. Anything that hasn't at least seen
referenceable peer-reviewed publication doesn't belong here.

- d.


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
On 8/31/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
...
> And I'm sure that chefs everywhere will feel honored when they find
> that they add their wisdom along side Marge Simpson's in our article
> on [[Pressure cooking]].

Nice examples. But what's the best way to deal with this? In the past,
when people created encyclopedia entries that were really dictionary
definitions, we set up Wiktionary. When they started pasting the text
of national constitutions, "Project Sourceberg" was set up. As
quotations accumulated at the end of articles, Wikiquote was created.

I don't think Wikipedia should be an encyclopedia that connects
everything to The Simpsons somehow. Do we need a "Wikitrivia" project
(or perhaps this idea can be abstracted in a more useful fashion) to
collect all the meaningless pop cultural crap, or is existing policy
sufficient to remove it?

Some related discussion from 2003 at:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiTrivia
--
Peace & Love,
Erik


subject: [Wikipedia-l] "Approved" versions on Wikipedia FAQ

body:
On 31/08/06, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:

> The exact details will depend on the community's discussion and decisions. Which
> of course is why a FAQ at this point is very hard to answer. ;) The question is
> still pretty open-ended.

The current wording of the FAQ, as far as I can understand it, appears
very much more definite than you (the person writing the feature) seem
to think it will be. I kept mine fairly vague on purpose, and from
what you're saying it should be made more vague rather than less. Is
this accurate from your view?

- d.


body:
On 31/08/06, Stephen Streater <sbstreater at mac.com> wrote:

> It might be different in English law.
> If you don't enforce your trademark here,
> I think you lose it.

Business: "We demand you cover your article in (R) and (tm)."
Wikipedia: "No. Bloody obvious academic fair use, any legal threat
would be obviously frivolous and probably sanctionable."
Business: "Well, we tried."

- d.


from_name: Nick Jenkins

subject: [Wikitech-l] Rating Articles Extension

body:
> I've put together an extension for rating articles if anyone is
> interested. It's just a first version and hasn't been tested much, but
> the details can be found here:
>
> [..snip..]
>
> I'd appreciate feedback if anyone has any.

Some technical feedback:

1) I think you may need to max the rating out at 5.

E.g. I entered this malicious input to try and ballot-stuff the ratings:

http://wiki16.wikidiy.com/Special:RateArticle?page_id=10743&rating=99999

And then the rating of the loan article comes out as 5 stars. I would expect it to come out at 4.1 (or something like that), based
on my prior ratings, if it was being capped at 5.

2) You might not want to show the "rate this article" bit when there is no article (e.g. non-existent
http://wiki16.wikidiy.com/FAKE-FAKE-FAKE page shows the ratings). Maybe something along these lines in wfRateArticleForm() function
in RateArticle.php :
	$page_id = $wgArticle->getID();
+        if (!$page_id) return;

3) Trivial stuff in wfSpecialRateArticle() function :

    $rat_page = $wgRequest->getVal("page_id");
    $rat_user = $wgUser->getID();
    $rat_user_text = $wgUser->getName();
    $rat_rating = $wgRequest->getVal('rating');

    $dbw =& wfGetDB( DB_MASTER );
    $dbw->insert( 'rating',
         array( 'rat_page' => $rat_page,
                'rat_user' => $rat_user,
                'rat_user_text' => $rat_user_text,
                'rat_rating' => $rat_rating),
         $fname);

Maybe getInt() instead of getVal() for the "page_id" and 'rating' fields? Maybe verify that the page_id corresponds to a valid
existing page?

4) Maybe a max of one rating per user per page? (Perhaps later votes overwrite/overrule earlier votes? Or just discard later votes?)

5) Fatal error on http://wiki16.wikidiy.com/Special:ListRatings (probably due to some of the bad input I introduced in doing the
above testing - Sorry). The special page should be ideally be robust against bad input though, e.g.:

     $t = Title::newFromID($row->rat_page);
+    if (is_null($t)) continue;
     $wgOut->addHTML("<li>" . $sk->makeLinkObj($t, $t->getFullText() ) . " ({$row->C}, {$row->R})</li>");

(or something along those lines).

All the best,
Nick.


body:
On 31 Aug 2006, at 10:19, David Gerard wrote:

> On 31/08/06, Stephen Streater <sbstreater at mac.com> wrote:
>
>> It might be different in English law.
>> If you don't enforce your trademark here,
>> I think you lose it.
>
>
> Business: "We demand you cover your article in (R) and (tm)."
> Wikipedia: "No. Bloody obvious academic fair use, any legal threat
> would be obviously frivolous and probably sanctionable."
> Business: "Well, we tried."

I think trying may be enough in English law.

Usually a big document will just say
"All trademarks acknowledged" once.
Perhaps Wikipedia could say that on a
page somewhere.


body:
On 8/31/06, niht-hr?fn <nihthraefn at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Aug 31, 2006, at 4:17, Erik Moeller wrote:
> > I don't think Wikipedia should be an encyclopedia that connects
> > everything to The Simpsons somehow. Do we need a "Wikitrivia" project
> > (or perhaps this idea can be abstracted in a more useful fashion) to
> > collect all the meaningless pop cultural crap, or is existing policy
> > sufficient to remove it?
>
> There's definitely a Simpsons wikia (http://simpsons.wikia.com/ -
> needs a good kick in the pants though), but I'm not sure what the
> community feels about linking to Wikia, etc. As far as I know/knew,
> Wikia is/was sort of meant to be a place for more... specialist...
> "encyclopedias", although it focuses more on communities, etc. It's
> also an entirely different can of worms, and often article quality
> is... less than good. But it's a thought. Maybe.

Well, I don't think the problem is specific to TS. The problem is
largely that once an article gets a bullet point list with random
crap, everyone feels justified to add their own random crap.
(Sometimes the crap also creeps into the main prose, but there it is
easier to remove as such -- trivia sections are tolerated and perhaps
seen by many Wikipedians as charming additions to articles.)

Perhaps the solution is to build a single big RCA (Random Crap
Aggregator) to prevent Wikipedia articles from turning into mini-RCAs.
Each page would essentially be a set of bullet point lists about a
topic where anyone can add their random facts. Some of those might be
Wikipedia-worthy and find their way back into the article.
--
Peace & Love,
Erik


from_name: stevertigo

body:
--- charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com wrote:

> "David Gerard" wrote
>
> > OTOH, I've often wondered if setting up an academic wiki would be
> > something to attract people.
>
> The concept is probably sound. The trouble would be that academia values
> (over-values, we might say) the expert in a strictly delimited area. So where would
> the good syntheses come from?

Well, assuming this was the right way to go to begin with (as opposed to soem kind of
trust metric heuristic) the synthesis of academic and public energy would come from
simply giving academics some measure of status - a science gateway for example.
Note that this is something that would be disastrous if applied to non-science
articles. Anything in the social sciences should be regarded as just below the cutting
point, etc.

Ultimately the idea is something meritocratic and not just credentialist; something
open and yet somewhat heirarchical; something integrated with the same data, and not
segregated.

sv.

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


from_name: Jay R. Ashworth

subject: [Wikitech-l] hitcount stats

body:
On Fri, Sep 01, 2006 at 12:05:16AM +1000, Tim Starling wrote:
> > Still the secret is there and it can be leaked, subpoenaed or just plain be
> > sent out by a SNAFU.
>
> Store the secret on flash memory embedded on a chip with a standalone
> processor, like a smart card. Have the processor do the hashes itself, don't
> provide any interface to obtain the secret. Put the processor in a box with
> a tamper switch and a small incendiary device, nothing but a serial line
> leading out. Easy.

Thank you, Tim.

I needed a laugh to start my morning.  :-)

Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

	The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.


subject: [Wikitech-l] On hit counters

body:
On Thu, Aug 31, 2006 at 11:21:14AM +0200, Brion Vibber wrote:
> Subject: [Wikitech-l] On hit counters

You forgot "and a plea for peace."

:-)

> Just a quick note; this fall we hope to have a system set up for
> sniffing page hits out of the network traffic to the squids and
> producing aggregate statistics from that.

Cool.

> In the meantime, I think we'd all appreciate a little less fighting in
> the JavaScript hit counter threads. :)

Fighting?  Us?  This is just sparring.  Working out.  You know: fun.  :-)

> This stuff is fun and useful but a) short-term and b) not that
> important wrt to spoofing. If someone pings the counter on some page
> a lot, well... who really cares? It's not as though we're doling out
> revenue based on hits.

We *aren't*?  Dammit.

Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

	The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.


from_name: Liz Kim

subject: [Wikitech-l] automated email

body:
Is there a way to set to send out an email to sys op when a specific page
has been updated?

For example, I have a FAQ page which when a user adds in a question - I
would have to answer it on the wiki page.
Instead of checking it every now and then it would be so much better if the
page alerts me whenever there is a new edit.

Thank you


from_name: Brion Vibber

body:
David Gerard wrote:
> Andrew Gray wrote:
>
>> You might want to clarify what "new and anonymous" means - is this
>> going to be a time-lapse job like sprotection, or a manually enabled
>> flag? Because people may well assume the latter, and SFAIK that isn't
>> being considered...
>
>
> O rly? I understood it would indeed be a "tick each and every edit
> before it shows by default" thing. I guess the feature isn't finished
> yet then.
>
> (I like the idea of it being queued for approval for a few days and
> passing through then if it hasn't already - but note me not working on
> the code.)

The exact details will depend on the community's discussion and decisions. Which
of course is why a FAQ at this point is very hard to answer. ;) The question is
still pretty open-ended.

But most likely there will be a combination of automated time delays,
vandalism-detection heuristics, and of course manual checking.

Most importantly, please remember that the latest versions on any
reviewed/approved/time-delayed/whatever page will *ALWAYS* be available to
everyone, at most one click away.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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subject: [Wikitech-l] On hit counters

body:
Just a quick note; this fall we hope to have a system set up for sniffing page
hits out of the network traffic to the squids and producing aggregate statistics
from that.

In the meantime, I think we'd all appreciate a little less fighting in the
JavaScript hit counter threads. :)

This stuff is fun and useful but a) short-term and b) not that important wrt to
spoofing. If someone pings the counter on some page a lot, well... who really
cares? It's not as though we're doling out revenue based on hits.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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subject:
[Wikitech-l] Apparent automatic merging (edit conflict) issue
 with

body:
Tim Jenks wrote:
> Having trawled around the archives of this and some other lists and
> searching for a couple of hours, I have read that MediaWiki
> automatically merges simple edit-conflicts.
>
> In practice using two separate setups (both Win32 - not my choice,
> work only uses windows systems):
[snip]
> ..even very basic edits do not auto merge and throw an edit conflict.

Automated conflict merging uses the GNU diff3 utility, which I suspect doesn't
ship on Windows by default. ;)

Find and install a copy (I'm sure it exists...) and set $wgDiff3 to the path to
the executable:

/**
 * Path to the GNU diff3 utility. If the file doesn't exist, edit conflicts will
 * fall back to the old behaviour (no merging).
 */
$wgDiff3 = '/usr/bin/diff3';

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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subject: [Wikitech-l] automated email

body:
Perfect!
Thank you :)

On 8/31/06, Rob Church <robchur at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 31/08/06, Liz Kim <lizkim270 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Is there a way to set to send out an email to sys op when a specific
> page
> > has been updated?
> >
> > For example, I have a FAQ page which when a user adds in a question - I
> > would have to answer it on the wiki page.
> > Instead of checking it every now and then it would be so much better if
> the
> > page alerts me whenever there is a new edit.
>
> * Switch on the option that allows users to receive email notification
> of changes to watched pages
> * Set this preference for the desired account
> * Make sure that account has a valid, confirmed email address set in
> their preferences
> * Add the FAQ page to that account's watchlist (hit the "watch" tab)
> * Test it :)
>
>
> Rob Church
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


body:
David Gerard wrote:
> On 31/08/06, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
>> The exact details will depend on the community's discussion and decisions. Which
>> of course is why a FAQ at this point is very hard to answer. ;) The question is
>> still pretty open-ended.
>
>
> The current wording of the FAQ, as far as I can understand it, appears
> very much more definite than you (the person writing the feature) seem
> to think it will be. I kept mine fairly vague on purpose, and from
> what you're saying it should be made more vague rather than less. Is
> this accurate from your view?

Yes.

In particular, the FAQ as you posted it seems to imply that this will be applied
equally to every page, but that is not certain.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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subject: [Wikitech-l] Rating Articles Extension

body:
> 4) Maybe a max of one rating per user per page? (Perhaps later votes overwrite/overrule earlier votes? Or just discard later votes?)

This point is interesting and it's something I've been considering.
Right now I think the best route is to capture the vote and ignore it
later if required. I think an appropriate rating system will be
weighted (with respect to time) and take into account that wiki pages
change frequently. The purpose of gathering ratings for us is to draw
attention to pages that need improvement and to appropriately sort
similar articles in search results based on quality, since our wiki
can have multiple articles on similar topics.

It might also be interesting to have a weighted system to weight votes
based on how much a page has changed over time. So, when a vote of 3
is submitted and the page changes by so many characters, or so many
times, and a vote of 5 comes along, the resulting rating is higher
than (3+5) /2 = 4.

Travis


from_name: Piotr "Derbeth" Kubowicz

subject: [Textbook-l] Google Book Search

body:
Today I found news about a new Google project - Google Book Search. This service, available at http://books.google.com/, allows users to search for books and browse some of them online. In most cases, only parts of books are available and the whole material is copyrighted. Google Book Search also offers long description of every book, links to online stores where the book is available, possibility to search words in a single books and more features.

Currently I have not seen any books from Wikibooks there. I find this project as a real chance for Wikibooks to promote itself and its content; we should add our PDF versions there if it is possible. Google says it does not take any money for adding new books to its search engine, but I am not sure if they require ISBN number for each book.

What is your opinion on this project?

--
Piotr 'Derbeth' Kubowicz
Jabber id: derbeth at jabber.wp.pl

Pom?? Wikibooks stworzy? najwi?kszy zbi?r otwartych podr?cznik?w! http://pl.wikibooks.org/

Opera - the fastest browser on Earth! http://www.opera.com/


list: commons-l

from_name: Brianna Laugher

subject: [Commons-l] Response from the USGS image purchaser

body:
On 31/08/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> Anyone know the status of Djvu support in mediawiki?  I know brion was
> working on it for Wikisource.
>
> Djvu would be the most correct format for the distribution of this data.

It was announced a few weeks ago that DJVu is an accepted file format now.

Brianna


body:
Raimond Spekking wrote:
> Gregory Maxwell schrieb:
>>> On 8/30/06, cohesion <cohesion at sleepyhead.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> Anyone know the status of Djvu support in mediawiki?  I know brion was
>>> working on it for Wikisource.
>>>
>>> Djvu would be the most correct format for the distribution of this data.
>
> There exists a testimplemantation for multipage viewing of DjVu on a
> testwiki: http://semantic.jeluf.mormo.org/index.php/Image:Test.djvu?page=16
>
> This code is implemented on Wikimedia servers too but not
> reviewed/activated. I will ask Jeluf and/or brion today.

The code's there, but I'm not sure if we've installed the required utilities for
it yet. Check with JeLuF...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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body:
Me:

> simply giving academics some measure of status - a science gateway for example.
> Note that this is something that would be disastrous if applied to non-science
> articles. Anything in the social sciences should be regarded as just below the
> cutting point, etc.

I should add that, given both the stated limitation to the hard sciences and the
normative rigour of those fields, there could be some allowable wiggle room in NOR
for experts in those areas. There probably already is anyway, as long as there is a
paper to link to, and the area qualifies as research. At least it might be interesting
to think about the potential mutual benefits and problems. Maybe this theorising will
go somewhere or otherwise it will only let us better appreciate how far WP has come
in just a few years.

-s.

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


subject: [Commons-l] Commons SumItUp

body:
On 31/08/06, Raimond Spekking <raimond.spekking at gmail.com> wrote:
> A very very nice tool. It's new to me and I will use it in the future.
>
> But we need on Commons a technique to show only those translations of
> the users language (stored in preferences) with a fallback option to
> englisch and/or all.
>
> Also usefull for the display of multilanguage descriptions in galleries.

This can be achieved via CSS, for individual users. Put this into your
monobook.css:

.description { display: none; }
.en { display: block; }
.de { display: block; }

This will hide all descriptions by default, then show any English or German.

The major problem with this is that the vast majority of text is
incorrectly or not at all tagged. This technique works for things
tagged like

{{en|Explanation or caption}}

It won't work for things like

{{English}} Explanation or caption

or

'''en:''' Explanation or caption

There is a technique being developed at Meta called "Language select"
( http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:Language_select ), which uses
Javascript and CSS, but is also not site-wide. (See that talk page for
discussion about using it on Commons)

I guess what we actually need is another entry in Special:Preferences
along the lines of 'show these languages' on multilingual sites.
Because for the interface, you can only set one language, whereas
there are many multilingual people who would be interested in having
multiple languages shown. There are also administrative types like
myself who are interested in seeing all languages, even though I can't
read most of them, to notice what kind of coverage we have, which
languages are needed, spot obvious vandalism, etc.

cheers
Brianna


from_name: Phil Sandifer

subject: [WikiEN-l] CITE

body:
On Aug 31, 2006, at 12:08 PM, David Gerard wrote:

> On 31/08/06, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I often go back to an article, and half of it is just *gone*, and
>> sometimes the information quoted names, dates etc. etc.. The
>> information can be usually checked with 10 seconds flat using google.
>> But there's *no* requirement to do even a half-assed check.
>> And they're completely within their rights to do that, in fact it's
>> POLICY THAT YOU CAN DO IT AT ANY TIME.
>> The remaining article typically ends up biased of course. They just
>> deleted stuff they didn't agree with, or 'sounded wrong'.
>
>
> They really should be putting it on the talk page.
>
> Leave a gentle note to that effect on the talk page of the user (you
> catch more flies with honey than vinegar), restoring the deletia to
> the talk page of the article.

Note also that unless it got changed again, you are specifically told
not to {{cite}} tag or remove information you don't actually think
might be erroneous.

Best,
Phil Sandifer
sandifer at english.ufl.edu

You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a
boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.

 >


body:
On 31/08/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yes, but do we support adding the embede tags for viewing with the
> DJVu plugin? or automagic conversion to png or jpeg for unequipted
> browsers?

I don't think so. See Brion's announcement:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-June/036562.html
He says

>For now there is no
>inline rendering (eg thumbnails), so it's only really suitable for
archival data
>such as the scans of books that go into Wikisource.

Brianna


subject: [Wikitech-l] hitcount stats

body:
On Thu, Aug 31, 2006 at 04:41:47PM +0100, Rob Church wrote:
> On 31/08/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> > On Fri, Sep 01, 2006 at 12:05:16AM +1000, Tim Starling wrote:
> > > > Still the secret is there and it can be leaked, subpoenaed or
> > > > just plain be sent out by a SNAFU.
> > >
> > > Store the secret on flash memory embedded on a chip with a
> > > standalone processor, like a smart card. Have the processor do the
> > > hashes itself, don't provide any interface to obtain the secret.
> > > Put the processor in a box with a tamper switch and a small
> > > incendiary device, nothing but a serial line leading out. Easy.
> >
> > Thank you, Tim.
> >
> > I needed a laugh to start my morning. :-)
>
> I thought it was a nice whimsical response to the thread. But Tim,
> you forgot the armed guards and the obvious but overlooked loophole
> which allows Tom Cruise and his unwashed hippie minions to retrieve
> the secret in Mission Impossible IV: Project Xenu.

Two!  Two laughs, ha, ha, ha, ha...

Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

	The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.


list: foundation-l

from_name: Aphaia

subject: [Foundation-l] Annoucement re: Mark Bergsma

body:
/msg mark are you? congrats!

On 8/31/06, Brad Patrick <bradp.wmf at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am pleased to announce that WMF has hired Mark Bergsma to serve as
> Networking Coordinator for the Foundation.  Due to Mark's continuing
> studies, the position will be part-time.  Mark has distinguished himself
> with his work on the Wikimedia infrastructure.  In light of the recent
> concerns about network reliability, network independence, etc.,
> dedicated manpower for this function is critical.  We welcome him and
> look forward to his work in the future.
>
> -Brad
>
>
> Brad Patrick
> General Counsel & Interim Executive Director
> Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
> bradp.wmf at gmail.com
> 727-231-0101
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>
>

--
Kizu Naoko
  Wikiquote: http://wikiquote.org
  * vivemus, mea Lesbia, amemus *


list: wikimedia-l


from_name: David Gerard

body:
On 31/08/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> David Gerard wrote:

> > The interesting bits of life are the grey areas. Wikipedia is not a
> > refuge from them. How to get this across to those who see the world
> > entirely in black and white, and think of grey as a kind of defective
> > stippling?

> Wait until Mediawiki 2.0, which will /finally/ have 40kV through the chair.

I thought that was set for the III Phase version of the software.

- d.


from_name: Gregory Maxwell

body:
On 8/31/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8/31/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> ...
> > And I'm sure that chefs everywhere will feel honored when they find
> > that they add their wisdom along side Marge Simpson's in our article
> > on [[Pressure cooking]].
>
> Nice examples.

Wikipedia makes it easy. :(

> But what's the best way to deal with this? In the past,
> when people created encyclopedia entries that were really dictionary
> definitions, we set up Wiktionary. When they started pasting the text
> of national constitutions, "Project Sourceberg" was set up. As
> quotations accumulated at the end of articles, Wikiquote was created.
>
> I don't think Wikipedia should be an encyclopedia that connects
> everything to The Simpsons somehow. Do we need a "Wikitrivia" project
> (or perhaps this idea can be abstracted in a more useful fashion) to
> collect all the meaningless pop cultural crap, or is existing policy
> sufficient to remove it?

I'm not sure about that..  Triva where the reader expects it is no problem.

Sub-trivia spread into random places, however, hurts our
professionalism (it's about self respect, as I've argued a lot
recently!), and is an easy target for vandalism (hard to cite
subtrivia except as references to difficult to check primary sources).

If you buy my argument (mostly unsubstantiated) that our systemic bias
towards popculture (and the trivia that goes along with it) is
encouraging people to spread subtrivia about the project... then yes,
a Wiki trivia *might* help.   But I'd argue that wiki-trivia would
best be served as a non-wikimedia project, and that wikimedia would
best be served by not hosting such a project.

Further, the creation of a trivia project would still leave us with a
hard situation... if it were easy to decide what belongs there (and
thus not in Wikipedia) and if it were easy to actually move this
content...    Then we wouldn't have the problem we have on enwiki
today.


subject: [WikiEN-l]  Does openness dull the bleeding edge?

body:
From: Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net>
> On Aug 31, 2006, at 12:55 AM, stevertigo wrote:

>> Noting certain deficiencies in areas of advanced physics
>> - bleeding edge stuff in particular seems to be a bit disorganised.
>> Few qualified editors and things are no doubt lonely at the top.
>> Does the fact that Wikipedia is 1/10 Pokemon and sex/porn articles
>> chase
>> away scientists? What would WP look like if NOR was lifted for
>> certain science
>> articles?

> That is the premise of Wikinfo, but those guys don't show up the
> way the cranks do.

You mean, you don't get the scientists but you do get the cranks?

A lot of that will be that Wikipedia has an incredibly powerful brand
name. (c.f. the New York Times comparing mathematics to Wikipedia, not
the other way around.) So even a friendly fork designed to take much
of the same material but operate on it with notably different policies
will have trouble getting contributors, because everyone will come
here first.

OTOH, I've often wondered if setting up an academic wiki would be
something to attract people. It could use Mediawiki and GFDL and have
similar content guidelines to Wikipedia, just use signed articles,
allow article ownership and allow original research. The academic
barrier would guard against non-accredited cranks if not the
accredited ones ;-) Such a thing even be usable as referenceable
source material for Wikipedia articles. I'm not saying this is a good
idea, for Wikipedia, for readers or for civilisation in general, but I
do wonder if and how it would work.

- d.


body:
On 8/31/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
> Well, I don't think the problem is specific to TS.

It's not, in fact.. last night was the first time I've run
what-links-here on the simpsons.. Prior to that my favorite target was
Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

> The problem is
> largely that once an article gets a bullet point list with random
> crap, everyone feels justified to add their own random crap.

Yes.  But it is worse than that... we have a social aversion to
removing material which isn't *clearly* wrong or forbidden.  Although
there are a number of loud users, most users really don't want to get
into edit wars... Especially over stuff like this, even if the result
is feeling ashamed of their own articles.

> (Sometimes the crap also creeps into the main prose, but there it is
> easier to remove as such -- trivia sections are tolerated and perhaps
> seen by many Wikipedians as charming additions to articles.)

Yes. Some Wikipedians see them as an example of how we're more
complete than other encyclopedias.

> Perhaps the solution is to build a single big RCA (Random Crap
> Aggregator) to prevent Wikipedia articles from turning into mini-RCAs.
> Each page would essentially be a set of bullet point lists about a
> topic where anyone can add their random facts. Some of those might be
> Wikipedia-worthy and find their way back into the article.

But who would move content to the RCA?
I'm just not convinced.. We do see some success with creating "List of
Foo in fiction" articles, but if people would be happy to place their
Simpsons subtrivia into RCAs then why are they adding it to academic
subjects rather than [[The Simpsons]]?


from_name: dmehkeri at swi.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] Policy across different languages

body:
> And besides, there's no point telling French people to "ignore all
> rules" - they do that by default anyway.

I notice there's no page on English Wikipedia titled "make up new rules", or
"tell other people what to do".

I'm just saying.

> <g,d,r>

Cheers.
Daniel


body:
On 31/08/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8/31/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:

> > How would you feel about adding beautiful and insightful prose to an
> > article on a university, only to find that someone has later added:
> > "In a 1999 episode ("Lovers' Walk," Season 3, Episode 8) of Buffy the
> > Vampire Slayer, Joyce (Buffy's mother) says to Buffy, "[[Carnegie
> > Mellon]]has a wonderful design curriculum.""
> > [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Carnegie_Mellon_University&oldid=42368976#Carnegie_Mellon_in_fiction]
> > ... Delighted, no doubt!

> The solution isn't bad though:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_Mellon_University_in_popular_culture

And it's even in [[Category:Education in popular culture]] !

- d.


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Asteroids

body:
On 8/30/06, Keith Old <keithold at gmail.com> wrote:
> Personally, I think that a comprehensive coverage of towns is one of our
> strengths at least in the first world. If there was verifiable concern in a
> town over the construction of a Walmart, I have no problem with our article
> saying it.
>
> If someone wants to write about the history and geography of their local
> area from reliable sources more power to their arm. We have had a number of
> Featured Articles on towns and things that wouldn't be listed in traditional
> encyclopedias. This, in my view, is a good thing.

I think you misunderstood what I was getting at. I *agree* with all of
this. What I don't enjoy is tabular data being misrepresented as prose
written by a human. And specifically, the *lack* of all the types of
information you're mentioning. There is a lot more to a town that
demographics.

> If someone wants to write articles on asteroids and other astronomical

Key point: If someone wants to write articles. But they don't. They
want to automatically generate thousands of pseudo-articles from
tables of data.

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] Asteroids

body:
On 8/31/06, ScottL <scott at mu.org> wrote:
>   Ok, this is an even better idea.  I am a strong believer in the idea
> that 50 articles that have no hope of ever becoming more than a stub can
> (sometimes) make a single good article.  We might want to add links to

I agree. People often go too far, though, merging articles that were
quite happy as two separate short articles. I'm starting to get a
preference for a short article that says "Fooville was a small hamlet
in Ireland that was integrated into Dublin in 1930. For more
information see the History of Dublin", rather than just #REDIRECT
[[History of Dublin]], and hoping that at the time you look, the small
reference to Fooville is still there.

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] USGS maps are liberated!

body:
On 8/31/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm bugging a friend who works at the Internet Archive for information on
> when these will be done uploading and how they will be available, though it
> might go faster if Jimmy asks Brewster Kahle directly...

Out of curiosity, what do maps have to do with the Internet Archive?
If they're public domain, why not just upload them to Commons?

Steve


from_name: Alphax (Wikipedia email)

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 8/30/06, Matt Brown <morven at gmail.com> wrote:
>> As far as I recall, there is no legal requirement to use either
>> symbol.  (r) and ? are used by trademark holders to inform you that
>> they consider the terms trademarks.  It is not commonplace to use
>> those symbols when you are NOT claiming trademark status on the terms
>> yourself.
>
> Yes, it's up to the person who owns the trademark to spray them around
> everywhere. If we do it, we're just being chumps.
>

Speaking of which, we SHOULD do it with Wikipedia(R)(TM).

[1] It's a registered trademark of the WMF, isn't it?

--
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] USGS maps are liberated!

body:
On 31/08/06, Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:

> I believe all that's left stopping people from making a copyright-free
> google maps would be the intersection/one-way street data.  AFAIK the
> only data that exists for that is proprietary.  Maybe it's time to
> push again for some sort of GIS-based Wikimedia project.

c.f. http://okfn.org/geo/ and similar pages. People who wander London
with a GPS and recorder. I remember the DorkBot I saw this discussed
at and a friend who works at MultiMap dismissing the idea as
ridiculous - I of course reminded her of a certain equally ridiculous
open encyclopedia project I have some involvement with.

- d.


body:
On 8/31/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> The solution isn't bad though:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_Mellon_University_in_popular_culture

Indeed, although it's leaked back into the CMU article a couple of times...

We have 428 in_fiction and in_popular_culture articles... so only
about a million to go!


body:
On 8/31/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> We need a task force with a neutral name who will give these articles
> some proper respect and make them not *just* dumping grounds. (See
> [[Nuclear weapons in popular culture]] for a fantastic example - it's
> all about the social effects.) Something like WikiProject Popular
> Culture Lists. That way those who like them and those who hate them
> can work together to make sure they at least don't suck.

Ha!  Because so many _in_popular_culture article are dumping
grounds... I had assumed that all were.

It's a good point though.  Popular culture deserves respectable
coverage too, it's not junk ... even if most junk is about popular
culture.


subject: [WikiEN-l] CITE

body:
On Aug 31, 2006, at 1:04 PM, David Gerard wrote:

> On 31/08/06, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 31/08/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>> Remember: process is important, but good sense is more important.
>
>> True, but policy also needs to be good sense.
>
>
> Or, to summarise the summary of the summary, people are a problem.
>

Can't we just ban their entire IP range?

Best,
Phil Sandifer
sandifer at english.ufl.edu

You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a
boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.

 >


from_name: Keith Old

subject: [WikiEN-l] Asteroids

body:
On 8/31/06, ScottL <scott at mu.org> wrote:
>
> David Gerard wrote:
> > On 30/08/06, Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Not a good idea since that is all we know about most asteroids and
> those data would be far more
> >> useful in a big table of asteroids, not on individual pages for each
> space rock.
> >> In fact, the basics are already in the List of asteroids tables.
> >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_asteroids_%2839001-40000%29
> >> We can just add to the table.
> >
> >
> > Excellent! So what we need then is a forest of redirects.
> >
> >
> > - d.
>
>   Ok, this is an even better idea.  I am a strong believer in the idea
> that 50 articles that have no hope of ever becoming more than a stub can
> (sometimes) make a single good article.  We might want to add links to
> the various online DB's that are essentially the primary sources for
> most of this as well.  I think most of the major astro catalogs are
> available online now days.
>
>
> SKL
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

Folks,

I would be happy with that if we don't have a lot  of information
about them.

I suspect that over time with researchers working on studies of these bodies
more information will become available about them and we will be able to
expand some of them into legitimate articles.

Regards

*Keith Old*


body:
On 31/08/06, Akash Mehta <draicone at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8/31/06, Richard Holton <richholton at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 8/31/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On 31/08/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:

> > > > Wait until Mediawiki 2.0, which will /finally/ have 40kV through the
> > > chair.

> > > I thought that was set for the III Phase version of the software.

> > **Groan!**---------------------------^

> I hope its in 2.0, but we must respect the roadmap (if any). Is there
> a mediawiki development mailing list I can join (slightly offtopic,
> sorry, but I couldn't find it anywhere)?

wikitech-l

Apparently there are some technical difficulties in implementing the
40kV through the chair.

- d.


from_name: Andrew Gray

body:
On 31/08/06, Stephen Streater <sbstreater at mac.com> wrote:
>
> On 31 Aug 2006, at 10:19, David Gerard wrote:
>
> > On 31/08/06, Stephen Streater <sbstreater at mac.com> wrote:
> >
> >> It might be different in English law.
> >> If you don't enforce your trademark here,
> >> I think you lose it.
> >
> >
> > Business: "We demand you cover your article in (R) and (tm)."
> > Wikipedia: "No. Bloody obvious academic fair use, any legal threat
> > would be obviously frivolous and probably sanctionable."
> > Business: "Well, we tried."
>
> I think trying may be enough in English law.
>
> Usually a big document will just say
> "All trademarks acknowledged" once.
> Perhaps Wikipedia could say that on a
> page somewhere.

FWIW, there's a couple of images which have text to the extent of:

"This image, and the work it represents, is in the public domain.
However, it is covered by trademark laws in some jusrisdictions, and
whilst it is free from any copyright restrictions, there may be legal
issues with reusing it in certain contexts"

Image trademarks are a bit of an odd case compared to CocaColaTM
scattered across the text, but I'm still not entirely sure what to do
with them.

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


body:
On 8/31/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> How would you feel about adding beautiful and insightful prose to an
> article on a university, only to find that someone has later added:
> "In a 1999 episode ("Lovers' Walk," Season 3, Episode 8) of Buffy the
> Vampire Slayer, Joyce (Buffy's mother) says to Buffy, "[[Carnegie
> Mellon]]has a wonderful design curriculum.""
> [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Carnegie_Mellon_University&oldid=42368976#Carnegie_Mellon_in_fiction]
> ... Delighted, no doubt!

The solution isn't bad though:

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

Steve


from_name: Sean Black

subject: [WikiEN-l] Does openess dull a bleeding edge?

body:
> Message: 7
> Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2006 12:59:31 -0400
> From: "Gregory Maxwell" <gmaxwell at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Does openness dull the bleeding edge?
> To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
> Message-ID:
> 	<e692861c0608310959l42cc7210nf00670afbde9d7ee at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> On 8/31/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> > We need a task force with a neutral name who will give these articles
> > some proper respect and make them not *just* dumping grounds. (See
> > [[Nuclear weapons in popular culture]] for a fantastic example - it's
> > all about the social effects.) Something like WikiProject Popular
> > Culture Lists. That way those who like them and those who hate them
> > can work together to make sure they at least don't suck.
>
> Ha!  Because so many _in_popular_culture article are dumping
> grounds... I had assumed that all were.
>
> It's a good point though.  Popular culture deserves respectable
> coverage too, it's not junk ... even if most junk is about popular
> culture.

A group of people who know what they're doing working on
in_popular_culture articles would be excellent (I might, ever so
humbly, suggest that I could be one such person... but maybe I'm just
a fancruft-adding idiot). The point is, these articles *could* be
something other than piles of feces. In some cases, just deleting them
and starting over might be the best solution... but most just need
pruning of subtrivia and otherwise cleaning up.

Part of the problem, of course, is a lack of people who know what
they're doing and have some expertise in the subject area... hey,
maybe Pokemon and particle physics articles aren't so different after
all. :P

~~Sean


from_name: Tim Jenks

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Apparent automatic merging (edit conflict) issue
	with

body:
Thanks very much, all up and running now.

As a note for anyone else with this issue, the cygwin port of diff3 works fine.

-Tim

On 8/31/06, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote
>
> /**
>  * Path to the GNU diff3 utility. If the file doesn't exist, edit conflicts will
>  * fall back to the old behaviour (no merging).
>  */
> $wgDiff3 = '/usr/bin/diff3';
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>


from_name: Jimmy Wales

body:
David Gerard wrote:
> On 31/08/06, Stephen Streater <sbstreater at mac.com> wrote:
>
>> It might be different in English law.
>> If you don't enforce your trademark here,
>> I think you lose it.
>
>
> Business: "We demand you cover your article in (R) and (tm)."
> Wikipedia: "No. Bloody obvious academic fair use, any legal threat
> would be obviously frivolous and probably sanctionable."
> Business: "Well, we tried."

We have also traditionally had good success with simply noting, upon
first use, the the term is a trademark held by so-and-so.  This is a
nice compromise because (a) it is encyclopedic information and (b) it
usually satisfies them.

When they want us to sprinkle (R) or (TM) everywhere, yeah, well, they
can just forget it, that's stupid.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] "Approved" versions on Wikipedia FAQ

body:
Anthony wrote:
>> Where did Jimbo "decide to restrict editing" and then "called it
>> becoming more open".
>>
> I have no idea where he did it, but one instance would be when
> creation of new articles was restricted.

How about we make a deal, Anthony?

If you can find where I said that the restriction on the creation of new
articles was an instance of Wikipedia "becoming more open" then I will
post a retraction publicly on my user talk page and on this mailing list.

And if you can't, then you will apologize to me publicly and leave this
list for a period of one year.

For the record: I have been philosophically committed for a very long
time to thinking about how to solve various problems with *more freedom*
and *more transparency* rather than *more control*.  Examples of how
this has been successful would include the innovation of semi-protection
rather than protection, and vandalism flagging rather than
semi-protection (the innovation currently being proposed for test in the
German wikipedia).

And preventing anons from creating new pages was an example of a
restriction that, as far as I am aware, has not been particularly
successful.  I think the lesson we should take away from this is: we
should continue to become more open.

--Jimbo


body:
On 31/08/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8/31/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> > OTOH, I've often wondered if setting up an academic wiki would be
> > something to attract people. It could use Mediawiki and GFDL and have
> > similar content guidelines to Wikipedia, just use signed articles,
> > allow article ownership and allow original research. The academic

> I think stuff like that already exists in certain fields. I seem to
> have already come across one for semantics when I was looking for the
> semanticwiki.
> It makes sense to split by fields too - there's really no reason for
> linguists to share a wiki with medical researchers. Except that since
> every field has a cross-over area with several other fields, and...you
> can see what I'm getting at.

arXiv.org (mathematics and physics) allows uploads of preprints.
Anyone can register to upload and submit an upload, but they need your
institutional affiliation and your institution's offical report
number. Presumably there is something arXiv-like for other fields.

I wonder if a wiki format would help. A culture of ownership of
articles can work on a wiki - where others may add or correct things
and the main author may overtly or tacitly approve.

- d.


body:
On 8/31/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> OTOH, I've often wondered if setting up an academic wiki would be
> something to attract people. It could use Mediawiki and GFDL and have
> similar content guidelines to Wikipedia, just use signed articles,
> allow article ownership and allow original research. The academic
> barrier would guard against non-accredited cranks if not the
> accredited ones ;-) Such a thing even be usable as referenceable
> source material for Wikipedia articles. I'm not saying this is a good
> idea, for Wikipedia, for readers or for civilisation in general, but I
> do wonder if and how it would work.

I think stuff like that already exists in certain fields. I seem to
have already come across one for semantics when I was looking for the
semanticwiki.

It makes sense to split by fields too - there's really no reason for
linguists to share a wiki with medical researchers. Except that since
every field has a cross-over area with several other fields, and...you
can see what I'm getting at.

Steve


body:
On 31/08/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 31/08/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 8/31/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > OTOH, I've often wondered if setting up an academic wiki would be
> > > something to attract people. It could use Mediawiki and GFDL and have
> > > similar content guidelines to Wikipedia, just use signed articles,
> > > allow article ownership and allow original research. The academic
>
> > I think stuff like that already exists in certain fields. I seem to
> > have already come across one for semantics when I was looking for the
> > semanticwiki.
> > It makes sense to split by fields too - there's really no reason for
> > linguists to share a wiki with medical researchers. Except that since
> > every field has a cross-over area with several other fields, and...you
> > can see what I'm getting at.
>
>
> arXiv.org (mathematics and physics) allows uploads of preprints.
> Anyone can register to upload and submit an upload, but they need your
> institutional affiliation and your institution's offical report
> number. Presumably there is something arXiv-like for other fields.
>
> I wonder if a wiki format would help. A culture of ownership of
> articles can work on a wiki - where others may add or correct things
> and the main author may overtly or tacitly approve.

It would certainly seem a sensible place to implement
flavour-of-the-month, stable revisions...

(you'd need a stronger form than the one Brion says we're looking at,
though - perhaps only allowing the original author or an assigned
coauthor to approve changes? But same concept)

I wonder if there's anyone who might be interested in trialling the idea.

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


from_name: charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com

body:
"David Gerard" wrote

> OTOH, I've often wondered if setting up an academic wiki would be
> something to attract people.

The concept is probably sound. The trouble would be that academia values (over-values, we might say) the expert in a strictly delimited area. So where would the good syntheses come from?

Charles

-----------------------------------------
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from_name: Anthony

subject: [WikiEN-l] USGS maps are liberated!

body:
On 8/31/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> Anthony wrote:
> > On 8/30/06, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> The United States Geological Service tends to limit its activities to
> >> the United States, for some funny reason.
> >>
> >> Kelly
> >>
> > Which branch of the US government releases the satellite images from
> > around the world?
> >
>
> NASA, although technically they're not a branch of the US Government,
> are they?
>
Well, they're definitely not a branch, as I used the wrong term :).  I
think they're considered a government organization though, and would
be subject to the same copyright limitations.

Anthony


body:
On 31/08/06, Maury Markowitz <maury_markowitz at hotmail.com> wrote:

> But David, I was wondering if you would consider starting an article on
> "procedural obsessives"? It seems that simply pointing people towards such
> an article would be a much more neutral way to deal with it than posting a
> personal message on their talk page. THAT can easily be misinterpreted as
> someone trying to protect "their" article.

*splutter* To say this is a contentious issue is an understatement.

See [[:en:Wikipedia:Ignore All Rules]] is one. Now, I'd like you to
read the talk page and the history of that page. A lot of people HATED
it passionately and did their best to kill it or at least neuter it.
But Jimbo has stated it's obviously policy, because product beats
process.

See [[:en:Wikipedia:Process is Important]]. Which, of course, it is.

See [[m:Instruction creep]]. And its history ... in which you can see
how it was instruction-crept.

See [[m:Don't be a dick]] and the attempts to kill that, most notably
by claiming it must be deleted because the translation would be
unacceptably rude in Japanese.

- d.


body:
On 31/08/06, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 31/08/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> > arXiv.org (mathematics and physics) allows uploads of preprints.
[...]
> > I wonder if a wiki format would help. A culture of ownership of
> > articles can work on a wiki - where others may add or correct things
> > and the main author may overtly or tacitly approve.

> It would certainly seem a sensible place to implement
> flavour-of-the-month, stable revisions...
> (you'd need a stronger form than the one Brion says we're looking at,
> though - perhaps only allowing the original author or an assigned
> coauthor to approve changes? But same concept)
> I wonder if there's anyone who might be interested in trialling the idea.

There is the 1.0 CD project, which is adding articles to the list one
article (or version) at a time. You don't need a separate wiki for
that - just a list of links.

- d.


body:
On 31/08/06, charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com
<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> "David Gerard" wrote

> > OTOH, I've often wondered if setting up an academic wiki would be
> > something to attract people.

> The concept is probably sound. The trouble would be that academia values (over-values, we might say) the expert in a strictly delimited area. So where would the good syntheses come from?

Other academics!!

arXiv.org is reputed to perform a useful role. How's it look from your
view as an academic mathematician?

- d.


from_name: Rob Church

subject: [Wikitech-l] UI text translation

body:
On 31/08/06, Aphaia <aphaia at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello developers,
> could you please update those two system messages until the Election
> begins (00:00 September 1, 2006, UTC)?
> MediaWiki:boardvote_notqualified & MediaWiki:boardvote_notloggedin. On
> all Wikimedia wikis, though personally I don't recommend you to vote
> from a closed/not public wikis ...
[snip]

If Tim is the election technical officer, or whatever the term is,
then there's no real need to flood the main wikitech-l list with these
requests, too.

(Note: I'm not sure that he is, but he was last time, and it's quite
possible, since he's been poking BoardVote this time 'round too.)

Rob Church


from_name: Delirium

body:
charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com wrote:
> "David Gerard" wrote
>
>
>> OTOH, I've often wondered if setting up an academic wiki would be
>> something to attract people.
>>
>
> The concept is probably sound. The trouble would be that academia values (over-values, we might say) the expert in a strictly delimited area. So where would the good syntheses come from?
>

I don't think all academics would be opposed to collaborating,
especially on syntheses.  Academia values narrow experts in coming up
with original research, but there's a widespread feeling, at least in
some of the sciences, that more summarization/review would be nice, if
done well.

Indeed I'm aware of at least one wiki set up for that purpose.  In this
particular case it's to summarize current work on reinforcement
learning, and set up by Satinder Singh (who is fairly well-known in the
academic RL community):
http://neuromancer.eecs.umich.edu/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Main/WebHome

-Mark


from_name: Mark Wagner

subject: [WikiEN-l] USGS maps are liberated!

body:
On 8/31/06, Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:

> 2) These maps that were bought are not satellite images, they are
> [[digital raster graphic]]s (i.e. topographic maps). (source:
> http://ransom.redjar.org/original_page.html)
> 3) They seem to cover only the United States (source:
> http://libre.redjar.org/maps/data/ and
> http://topomaps.usgs.gov/drg/duplicate_drg.html)
> 4) "USGS aerial photographs covering the United States since the
> 1950's and worldwide satellite data from the early 1970's to the
> present can be ordered directly from the USGS."
> (http://erg.usgs.gov/isb/pubs/booklets/aerial/aerial.html)  I have no
> idea how detailed these are.

It's the entire set of 1:24,000-scale USGS topo maps.  These maps
include every road, most hiking trails, and most buildings.  They're
possibly the most detailed maps of the United States available
anywhere.

--
Mark
[[User:Carnildo]]


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

body:
On 12/7/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> The Cunctator wrote:
> > What annoys me particularly is pretending that this is an experiment.
> > It's not. It's a permanent policy change.
> >
> > Who's willing to bet that I'm wrong?
>
> I bet it is a permanent policy change because (a) it seems to be working
> quite well and (b) it is consistent with our commitment to remain open.
>
> --Jimbo

Still want to make this bet?

Anthony


from_name: Akash Mehta

body:
Anyone can {{prod}}, but prod is for uncontroversial deletions; which
is why anyone can remove the tag. If you feel an article need not be
wikified, remove the tag and mention why not in the edit summary. I
regularly wikify as part of [[WP:WWF]] and we find a lot of articles
tagged for wikification since april/may have been fixed long since, or
have not needed wikification in the first place - there is a template
you can use to tell people when wikification is not needed, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Wikify/wikified_wrongly
(its for [[WP:WWF]] members, but that doesn't mean you can't use it).
I'm wikifying the Mirror Fusion article anyway, it doesn't need much
work, just some of the bolding is unneccessary.

Akash
a.k.a Draicone

On 8/31/06, ScottL <scott at mu.org> wrote:
> Maury Markowitz wrote:
> > I recently got into a minor squable that started with another example of
> > what I refer to as "drive-by tagging". Basically someone comes by an article
> > and inserts a whole bunch of tags without any comment. Some of these may be
> > valid, others less so, but very often its impossible to know one way or the
> > other without the original "tagger" pointing out the problems.
> >
> > For instance, consider this example I came across recently: Mirror Fusion
> > Test Facility. The "tagger" inserted a needs cats and needs wikification.
> > The cats one was entirely valid and I added one, but I can't for the life of
> > me even imagine what needs additional wikification. It seems to follow the
> > style guide perfectly. I wrote to the tagger, but he responded saying "by
> > following the link within the tag for all you need to know about wikifying
> > an article", which is a non-answer.
> >
> > I would like to hear any comments you all may have on this topic. Is it OK
> > to simply remove vague tags if the article in question does not appear to
> > have a problem related to the tag and there is no comment? I ask because, as
> > I noted, the last time I removed tags the tagger then stamped the article
> > with a PROD, their argument being that removing tags is PRODable.
> >
> > Maury
>
>    I think procedure for most of these is tag the article AND leave a
> note on the talk page.  This may not apply to {{wikify}} but then I
> don't there there is any "burden of prof" to removing {{wikify}}.  If
> you remove it then and they put it back then you have a legatimate
> content dispute which policy says shoudl be discussed.  Either way you
> get them on the talk page.
>
>    As for PROD is that not {{PROD}} which simply if I am not mistaken
> says that ANYONE can remove it with only the reason that they disagree?
>   The template itself says "If this template is removed, it should not
> be replaced."
>
> SKL
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


subject: [Wikitech-l] hitcount stats

body:
On 31/08/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 01, 2006 at 12:05:16AM +1000, Tim Starling wrote:
> > > Still the secret is there and it can be leaked, subpoenaed or just plain be
> > > sent out by a SNAFU.
> >
> > Store the secret on flash memory embedded on a chip with a standalone
> > processor, like a smart card. Have the processor do the hashes itself, don't
> > provide any interface to obtain the secret. Put the processor in a box with
> > a tamper switch and a small incendiary device, nothing but a serial line
> > leading out. Easy.
>
> Thank you, Tim.
>
> I needed a laugh to start my morning.  :-)

I thought it was a nice whimsical response to the thread. But Tim, you
forgot the armed guards and the obvious but overlooked loophole which
allows Tom Cruise and his unwashed hippie minions to retrieve the
secret in Mission Impossible IV: Project Xenu.

Rob Church


subject: [Wikipedia-l] [Wmfcc-l] "Approved" versions on Wikipedia FAQ

body:
Yes, its certainly worth clarifying such an important issue. I'm
personally looking forward to the feature; Wikipedia is blocked at
various educational institutions in my area because of the unreliable
information. However, four days seems a bit ineffective, although I
suppose manual validation would be inefficent and tedious. Is it
possible to extend this to, say, four days without vandalism warnings
but with at least one edit?

On 8/31/06, Andrew Lih <andrew.lih at gmail.com> wrote:
> David, thanks for the thoughtful evaluation and creating the meta
> page. Glad to see comcom addressing these things with rapid speed in
> helping to flesh out the specifics of these initiatives.
>
> -Andrew (User:Fuzheado)
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: maru dubshinki

body:
On 8/31/06, Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> On 12/7/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> > The Cunctator wrote:
> > > What annoys me particularly is pretending that this is an experiment.
> > > It's not. It's a permanent policy change.
> > >
> > > Who's willing to bet that I'm wrong?
> >
> > I bet it is a permanent policy change because (a) it seems to be working
> > quite well and (b) it is consistent with our commitment to remain open.
> >
> > --Jimbo
>
> Still want to make this bet?
>
> Anthony

I doubt he does. I'm pretty sure he already said that he's not so
enamoured of it now. It'd fit, since banning anons from creating
articles is a "hard" restriction, and Jimbo has said he prefers "soft"
restrictions, like semi-protection is supposed to be.

~maru


from_name: Ian Woollard

subject: [WikiEN-l] CITE

body:
On 18/08/06, Daniel P. B. Smith <wikipedia2006 at dpbsmith.com> wrote:
> >  Calls to CITE are too often just smokescreen for a weak
> > or incivil or POV argument,
>
> And objections to CITE are sometimes just smokescreens for
> disagreement with the verifiability policy itself.

It's worse than that. Currently the citation policy is that anything
not cited can be removed at any time, without giving a reason. Given
the low level of citing currently, this is a *massive* problem.

I often go back to an article, and half of it is just *gone*, and
sometimes the information quoted names, dates etc. etc.. The
information can be usually checked with 10 seconds flat using google.
But there's *no* requirement to do even a half-assed check.

And they're completely within their rights to do that, in fact it's
POLICY THAT YOU CAN DO IT AT ANY TIME.

The remaining article typically ends up biased of course. They just
deleted stuff they didn't agree with, or 'sounded wrong'.

I'm considering going postal and go on a rampage through the wikipedia
arbitrarily deleting stuff; you know, entire articles, paragraphs,
sentences. It's not vandalism if it's a POLICY, right? ;-)

--
-Ian Woollard

"Victory can be perceived but not created."
For your own security, the Department of Homeland Security is watching you.


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] CITE

body:
On 31/08/06, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com> wrote:

> I often go back to an article, and half of it is just *gone*, and
> sometimes the information quoted names, dates etc. etc.. The
> information can be usually checked with 10 seconds flat using google.
> But there's *no* requirement to do even a half-assed check.
> And they're completely within their rights to do that, in fact it's
> POLICY THAT YOU CAN DO IT AT ANY TIME.
> The remaining article typically ends up biased of course. They just
> deleted stuff they didn't agree with, or 'sounded wrong'.

They really should be putting it on the talk page.

Leave a gentle note to that effect on the talk page of the user (you
catch more flies with honey than vinegar), restoring the deletia to
the talk page of the article.

> I'm considering going postal and go on a rampage through the wikipedia
> arbitrarily deleting stuff; you know, entire articles, paragraphs,
> sentences. It's not vandalism if it's a POLICY, right? ;-)

Sorry, that's covered by [[WP:POINT]] ;-)

- d.


body:
On 8/31/06, maru dubshinki <marudubshinki at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8/31/06, Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> > On 12/7/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> > > The Cunctator wrote:
> > > > What annoys me particularly is pretending that this is an experiment.
> > > > It's not. It's a permanent policy change.
> > > >
> > > > Who's willing to bet that I'm wrong?
> > >
> > > I bet it is a permanent policy change because (a) it seems to be working
> > > quite well and (b) it is consistent with our commitment to remain open.
> > >
> > > --Jimbo
> >
> > Still want to make this bet?
> >
> > Anthony
>
> I doubt he does. I'm pretty sure he already said that he's not so
> enamoured of it now. It'd fit, since banning anons from creating
> articles is a "hard" restriction, and Jimbo has said he prefers "soft"
> restrictions, like semi-protection is supposed to be.
>
Yeah, he said it doesn't seem to be working, and it's not open.  So
when is this policy change going to be reverted?


subject: [WikiEN-l] CITE

body:
On 31/08/06, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> Note also that unless it got changed again, you are specifically told
> not to {{cite}} tag or remove information you don't actually think
> might be erroneous.

That's inward facing though, to the person. There's way more
information on the internet than in any one persons head and some of
the true things will sound wrong, and they're often the very things we
want to keep in the encyclopedia the most; we *want* people to learn
things.

My point is that the policy should encourage at least a half-assed
check. Right now it amounts to 'if it sounds wrong to me, it's ok to
delete'.

(I exagerate, but not a lot.)

It's just *begging* for POV bias, conscious or unconscious.

I think we need to encourage people to check more, and add references
more. It's the only way to build a better encyclopedia.

> Best,
> Phil Sandifer
> sandifer at english.ufl.edu
>
> You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a
> boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.

--
-Ian Woollard

"Victory can be perceived but not created."
For your own security, the Department of Homeland Security is watching you.


from_name: Matt Brown

body:
On 8/31/06, Stephen Streater <sbstreater at mac.com> wrote:
> It might be different in English law.
>
> If you don't enforce your trademark here,
> I think you lose it.

There's nothing in that that requires that others put silly symbols
after trademarks.  Just that they don't use them to describe other
than the trademarked goods or services.

-Matt


subject: [WikiEN-l] CITE

body:
On 31/08/06, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com> wrote:

> My point is that the policy should encourage at least a half-assed
> check. Right now it amounts to 'if it sounds wrong to me, it's ok to
> delete'.

I think the problem is that if someone's inclined to act that way,
what the actual words say isn't going to affect their actions a whole
lot. Read [[m:Instruction creep]] to understand the fallacy of telling
things to people who aren't in the mood to listen. Then ask nicely on
their talk page and see if that works better to sway their opinion.

Remember: process is important, but good sense is more important.

- d.


body:
On 31/08/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8/31/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:

> > The solution isn't bad though:
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_Mellon_University_in_popular_culture

> Indeed, although it's leaked back into the CMU article a couple of times...
> We have 428 in_fiction and in_popular_culture articles... so only
> about a million to go!

We need a task force with a neutral name who will give these articles
some proper respect and make them not *just* dumping grounds. (See
[[Nuclear weapons in popular culture]] for a fantastic example - it's
all about the social effects.) Something like WikiProject Popular
Culture Lists. That way those who like them and those who hate them
can work together to make sure they at least don't suck.

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] USGS maps are liberated!

body:
OK then, I've been finding a lot more out about this.

1) NASA "is an agency of the United States Government". [source:Wikipedia]
2) These maps that were bought are not satellite images, they are
[[digital raster graphic]]s (i.e. topographic maps). (source:
http://ransom.redjar.org/original_page.html)
3) They seem to cover only the United States (source:
http://libre.redjar.org/maps/data/ and
http://topomaps.usgs.gov/drg/duplicate_drg.html)
4) "USGS aerial photographs covering the United States since the
1950's and worldwide satellite data from the early 1970's to the
present can be ordered directly from the USGS."
(http://erg.usgs.gov/isb/pubs/booklets/aerial/aerial.html)  I have no
idea how detailed these are.

Anthony


body:
Generally the best option is to just remove the tag, but to conform to
WP:BITE, if a clearly inexperienced user is trying to do their best by
tagging all the articles in the world, we give them a nudge with that
template. Of course, I've never seen anyone use it, its just there in
case its ever needed.

On 8/31/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 31/08/06, Akash Mehta <draicone at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >  there is a template
> > you can use to tell people when wikification is not needed, see
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Wikify/wikified_wrongly
> > (its for [[WP:WWF]] members, but that doesn't mean you can't use it).
>
>
> That seems like extra procedure for no good reason. What on earth is
> wrong with just removing the {{wikify}} tag when it's not needed? It's
> a fairly subjective editorial judgement.
>
>
> - d.
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] CITE

body:
On 31/08/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> Remember: process is important, but good sense is more important.

True, but policy also needs to be good sense.

> - d.

--
-Ian Woollard

"Victory can be perceived but not created."
For your own security, the Department of Homeland Security is watching you.


subject: [WikiEN-l] CITE

body:
On 31/08/06, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 31/08/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> > Remember: process is important, but good sense is more important.

> True, but policy also needs to be good sense.

Or, to summarise the summary of the summary, people are a problem.

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] CITE

body:
Phil Sandifer wrote:

>Note also that unless it got changed again, you are specifically told
>not to {{cite}} tag or remove information you don't actually think
>might be erroneous.
>
>
There should also be some sort of sanity check on how much the
information matters.  If someone is accused of being a pedophile with no
citation, it makes sense to remove it pending one appearing.  Removing
something like a random uncited date of birth is quite different.

-Mark


body:
On 8/31/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 31/08/06, Maury Markowitz <maury_markowitz at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> > But David, I was wondering if you would consider starting an article on
> > "procedural obsessives"? It seems that simply pointing people towards
> such
> > an article would be a much more neutral way to deal with it than posting
> a
> > personal message on their talk page. THAT can easily be misinterpreted
> as
> > someone trying to protect "their" article.
>
>
> *splutter* To say this is a contentious issue is an understatement.
>
> See [[:en:Wikipedia:Ignore All Rules]] is one. Now, I'd like you to
> read the talk page and the history of that page. A lot of people HATED
> it passionately and did their best to kill it or at least neuter it.
> But Jimbo has stated it's obviously policy, because product beats
> process.
>
> See [[:en:Wikipedia:Process is Important]]. Which, of course, it is.
>
> See [[m:Instruction creep]]. And its history ... in which you can see
> how it was instruction-crept.
>
> See [[m:Don't be a dick]] and the attempts to kill that, most notably
> by claiming it must be deleted because the translation would be
> unacceptably rude in Japanese.

And a bit related, [[en:Wikipedia:Wikilawyering]] which (quote) "clearly
exploits and perpetrates a host of biased and derogatory stereotypes"

:)

Garion96


from_name: Daniel Mayer

body:
--- Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> And preventing anons from creating new pages was an example of a
> restriction that, as far as I am aware, has not been particularly
> successful.  I think the lesson we should take away from this is: we
> should continue to become more open.

I prefer to say that our openness is a means to an end and we should continue to experiment with
technical and social tools that hopefully help us reach our goals. Being too closed will harm us
by slowing our growth in depth, breadth and currentness. Being too open will harm our usefulness
by overwhelming our quality-control mechanisms and even divert us from our mission.

A balance is needed. But let?s not forget your key-note address at Wikimania that expressed a need
to concentrate more on quality vs quantity for the larger wikis.

Preventing anons from creating new pages was an attempt to balance these competing forces by
reducing the number of crap pages created by anons. However, much of the problem was moved to new
users. Does that mean the experiment was a failure? Maybe. Then, it might just mean that creating
a user account is too low of a bar to the creation of new pages.

I would like to see a much better analysis of this experiment that weighed the pros vs the cons.
Only after that analysis is complete, should we decide to change the parameters of the experiment
(such as adding more days to the age of an account before page creation is allowed) or to scrap
the whole thing.

-- mav

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subject: [WikiEN-l] CITE

body:
On 31/08/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 31/08/06, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com> wrote:
> > True, but policy also needs to be good sense.
>
> Or, to summarise the summary of the summary, people are a problem.

Always, but at least I should have a decent policy to beat them with darnit!

> - d.

--
-Ian Woollard

"Victory can be perceived but not created."
For your own security, the Department of Homeland Security is watching you.


subject: [Wikitech-l] automated email

body:
On 31/08/06, Liz Kim <lizkim270 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Is there a way to set to send out an email to sys op when a specific page
> has been updated?
>
> For example, I have a FAQ page which when a user adds in a question - I
> would have to answer it on the wiki page.
> Instead of checking it every now and then it would be so much better if the
> page alerts me whenever there is a new edit.

* Switch on the option that allows users to receive email notification
of changes to watched pages
* Set this preference for the desired account
* Make sure that account has a valid, confirmed email address set in
their preferences
* Add the FAQ page to that account's watchlist (hit the "watch" tab)
* Test it :)

Rob Church


from_name: Alphax (Wikipedia email)

body:
Stephen Streater wrote:
> On 31 Aug 2006, at 10:19, David Gerard wrote:
>
>> On 31/08/06, Stephen Streater <sbstreater at mac.com> wrote:
>>
>>> It might be different in English law.
>>> If you don't enforce your trademark here,
>>> I think you lose it.
>>
>> Business: "We demand you cover your article in (R) and (tm)."
>> Wikipedia: "No. Bloody obvious academic fair use, any legal threat
>> would be obviously frivolous and probably sanctionable."
>> Business: "Well, we tried."
>
> I think trying may be enough in English law.
>
> Usually a big document will just say
> "All trademarks acknowledged" once.
> Perhaps Wikipedia could say that on a
> page somewhere.
>

It should probably be on [[Wikipedia:Copyrights]]:

"All trademarks are the property of their respective owners"...

--
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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body:
David Gerard wrote:
> On 31/08/06, Akash Mehta <draicone at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Generally the best option is to just remove the tag, but to conform to
>> WP:BITE, if a clearly inexperienced user is trying to do their best by
>> tagging all the articles in the world, we give them a nudge with that
>> template. Of course, I've never seen anyone use it, its just there in
>> case its ever needed.
>
>
> Yeah. Newbies who start being procedural obsessives are difficult to
> deal with in general. Put six tags on an article, obsessively check
> all PRODs you've ever placed and AFD *any* that someone just removes,
> etc., etc.
>
> The interesting bits of life are the grey areas. Wikipedia is not a
> refuge from them. How to get this across to those who see the world
> entirely in black and white, and think of grey as a kind of defective
> stippling?
>

Wait until Mediawiki 2.0, which will /finally/ have 40kV through the chair.

--
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: Aphaia

subject: [Wikitech-l] UI text translation

body:
Hello developers,
could you please update those two system messages until the Election
begins (00:00 September 1, 2006, UTC)?
MediaWiki:boardvote_notqualified & MediaWiki:boardvote_notloggedin. On
all Wikimedia wikis, though personally I don't recommend you to vote
from a closed/not public wikis ...

It would be great, if you avoid override some newly updated version on
some projects, but overwritten might be better than having the
outdated version.
/me confesses the lack of foresight on this matter, (again) as techno-laity

... and not all wiki can be expected to be properly updated by sysop
hands. (I'm a pessimist in some occasions, don't you know?)

See also: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Election_UI_text_2006
Thank you for your help, always!

P.S. Or you perfer to get like the above on bugzilla? I am not sure on
your preferences ...

On 8/29/06, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> The board vote interface is going to be the same as last year, except
> for the requested change in qualifications. We now require that the
> first edit occurred more than 90 days before August 1, which by my
> calculations is May 3. I'm proposing that the boardvote_notqualified
> message is changed so that $4 is the date of the first edit and $5 is
> "May 3, 2006" in the user's language. Also, boardvote_notloggedin will
> have $3 available as "May 3, 2006". So the text could be:
>
> boardvote_notqualified: You are not qualified to vote in this election.
> You need to have made $3 edits before $2, you have made $1. Also, your
> first edit was at $4, it needs to be before $5.
>
> boardvote_notloggedin: You are not logged in. To vote, you must use an
> account with at least $1 contributions before $2, and with a first edit
> before $3.
>
> -- Tim Starling
>

--
Kizu Naoko
  Wikiquote: http://wikiquote.org
  * vivemus, mea Lesbia, amemus *


body:
On 8/31/06, Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> On 8/31/06, maru dubshinki <marudubshinki at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 8/31/06, Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> > > On 12/7/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> > > > The Cunctator wrote:
> > > > > What annoys me particularly is pretending that this is an experiment.
> > > > > It's not. It's a permanent policy change.
> > > > >
> > > > > Who's willing to bet that I'm wrong?
> > > >
> > > > I bet it is a permanent policy change because (a) it seems to be working
> > > > quite well and (b) it is consistent with our commitment to remain open.
> > > >
> > > > --Jimbo
> > >
> > > Still want to make this bet?
> > >
> > > Anthony
> >
> > I doubt he does. I'm pretty sure he already said that he's not so
> > enamoured of it now. It'd fit, since banning anons from creating
> > articles is a "hard" restriction, and Jimbo has said he prefers "soft"
> > restrictions, like semi-protection is supposed to be.
> >
> Yeah, he said it doesn't seem to be working, and it's not open. So
> when is this policy change going to be reverted?

A good question. There seems to be a slight majority in favor of
repealing that change (if I may be permitted to make a totally
unscientific and biased estimate) on this list.

That said, I think most are either waiting for the year (and more
importantly, [[Eternal September|September]]) to end, to turn over a
fresh lear; or they are waiting for the long promised statistical
analyses.

~maru


subject: [WikiEN-l] CITE

body:
On 31/08/06, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 31/08/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 31/08/06, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com> wrote:

> > > True, but policy also needs to be good sense.

> > Or, to summarise the summary of the summary, people are a problem.

> Always, but at least I should have a decent policy to beat them with darnit!

I found the following Arbitration Committee finding earlier this year
most heartening (and not just because I was involved):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Pedophilia_userbox_wheel_war

Admins who got deadminned for doing jawdroppingly dumb things, despite
having arguably followed written process all the way. Process is
important - the right amount does keep us all from killing each other
- but not so important as to be an excuse for stupid.

- d.


from_name: Daniel R. Tobias

subject: [WikiEN-l] CITE

body:
On 31 Aug 2006 at 18:04, "David Gerard" <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> Or, to summarise the summary of the summary, people are a problem.

The world would be such a better place if they were all exterminated,
wouldn't it?

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


subject: [WikiEN-l] USGS maps are liberated!

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 8/31/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I'm bugging a friend who works at the Internet Archive for information on
>> when these will be done uploading and how they will be available, though it
>> might go faster if Jimmy asks Brewster Kahle directly...
>
> Out of curiosity, what do maps have to do with the Internet Archive?
> If they're public domain, why not just upload them to Commons?
>

The [[Internet Archive]] is more than just the Wayback Machine. Check
out http://www.archive.org/ sometime.

--
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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body:
"David Gerard" wrote
>
> arXiv.org is reputed to perform a useful role. How's it look from your
> view as an academic mathematician?

Experts writing for experts. Even within the field this stuff is hardly readable.

Charles

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from_name: stevertigo

body:
> "David Gerard" wrote
> > arXiv.org is reputed to perform a useful role. How's it look from your
> > view as an academic mathematician?

> charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com wrote:
> Experts writing for experts. Even within the field this stuff is hardly readable.

There are a few [[Open access]] repositories out there.
But is it really the case that "this stuff is hardly readable" or is
it the case that this stuff isnt linkable and therefore hard to
corroborate with other current research, as well as authoritative
references (like Wikipedia)?

Ive always thought that reading PDFs would be exponentially easier
if we could select> right-click>>google text just as we can in
Firefox. (Somebody tell Ghostview and Adobe).

But even then the synergetics are as limited as the fields are
specialised. Therefore there is a need for areas to be somewhat
inacessible to disruption. Perhaps as it should be for ideas
which Grandma doesnt want to hear another word about, and Bubba
just plain dont like (or understand).

~sv~

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