from_name: Gregory Maxwell

body:
On 6/30/05, Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> Your disagreement doesn't make a lot of sense to me. There is no
> "special right" inherent in saying "This article was originally written
> by members of the Wikipedia community", and it does not preclude anyone
> from forking. It is a historical statement that is much more practical
> than "This article was written by these 250 people:...", or much more
> wiki-like than "This article was originally started by Erik" (as CC-BY
> would require).
>
> I strongly support the CC-WIKI license. It is the most practical
> solution to the attribution problem. If you're worried about forking
> being difficult, then you haven't read the GFDL very carefully, as it is
> probably the most forking-unfriendly license there is in the field of
> free content.

I am well aware of the terms of the GFDL. Just because I do not agree
with you does not me I do not understand. If you'd like to discuss
anything specifically, please be my guest... I may be able to clear up
any misunderstanding you have related to it.

The important difference you've missed here is that CC-wiki grants
special rights to the originating wiki.  As things currently are, the
Wikimedia Foundation has the same obligations under the GFDL as I
would have if I were to make a fork.  So if I grabbed the databases,
setup media wiki, and fixed the graphics so that I wasn't walking on
any trademarks my position would be just as legal as the Wikimedia
Foundations position. That's pretty fair and friendly: if I do the
same things I'm all good.

With CC-wiki this wouldn't be the case at all. My fork would be a
second class citizen. Even if all the editors moved to edit on
Gregpedia, people would still need to credit www.wikipedia.org for the
material.

The content of Wikipedia is not the property of the Wikimedia
Foundation. The content of Wikipedia is the creation and property of
the contributors and thus the community and it was created for the
benefit of the entire world.  As such the right and control of our
content must rest in the hands of the community, and creating special
grants for the Foundation removes that control from the community.

I agree that GFDL conformant attribution is an issue in some media
(although I disagree that it is an issue for electronic sources, if
you can mirror the ~2ish GB of text in cur, then you could also manage
the contributor names).  These issues can be addressed in ways which
do not create a new form of ownership for the originating wiki's site
operators as the CC-wiki license does.


list: foundation-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Dariusz Siedlecki

subject: [Foundation-l] Elections 2005 - First and second day

body:
Okay, so here is a very short report on the first two days of the
elections. I'm counting the end of every day as UTC-3. Sorry, but I
have to sleep, too ;).

On the first day we had a total of 635 votes, and more than 60% came
from the English Wikimedia projects.

On the second day we had 213 votes.

Over the two days the English community (excluding special projects,
such as Meta and Commons) totals to 59% of all the participants.

I think that's all for the first report... If there are any questions,
the Election Officials will be happy to answer them.

--
Best regards,
Dariusz "Datrio" Siedlecki


list: wikimedia-l


list: wikipedia-l

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: The elections are on, but I cast a blank ballot!

body:
On 6/29/05, Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
> In practice, this is already being done as I mentioned above. The
> section at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights#Example_notice
> seems to be widely supported by the community at the English
> Wikipedia, and a similar statement exists on other projects (see
> <http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lizenzbestimmungen#Praktische_Anwendung_in_Online-Medien>
> for example). If this is not the case, then the community needs to
> make a decision to change the wording, which all contributors are
> currently agreeing to (since that copyrights page is linked from the
> edit page).

Some how I managed to omit part of my reply to this... I had also
intended to quote from the copyrights page which you say all
contributors are currently agreeing to: "The English text of the GFDL
is the only legally binding document".


from_name: Wouter Steenbeek

subject: [Wikipedia-l] interface once again

body:
Brion Vibber wrote in a message I did not receive:

This sometimes happens as a temporary glitch (message cache breaks and
some requests use the defaults for a few minutes; those then may be
cached so they're visible longer).

Can you check if it's still doing it? (Try logging out/in.)

- This has been going on for a few days now and still occurs. Actually, the
right and outdated versions alternate and we seem to receive them /ad
random/. It could of course be temporary, but it is getting galling now...

Wouter

_________________________________________________________________
Nooit ongewenste berichten ontvangen: gebruik MSN Messenger
http://messenger.msn.nl/


body:
On 6/30/05, Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> > With CC-wiki this wouldn't be the case at all. My fork would be a
> > second class citizen. Even if all the editors moved to edit on
> > Gregpedia, people would still need to credit www.wikipedia.org for the
> > material.
>
> Material written on Wikipedia would be credited to the Wikipedia
> community. Material written on Gregpedia would be credited to the
> Gregpedia community. This seems perfectly fair and reasonable to me and
> does nothing to preclude you from running and operating your fork, it
> simply notes the historical fact that your content was originally
> created by a different community, rather than misrepresenting it as
> originating with you.

But you can't draw nice little boxes around 'communities', in effect
trying to achieve this additional restriction in our licensing will
grant the right to the site operators, not to the community.

> You are correct that under the terms of the GFDL, I do not have to
> mention Wikipedia with a single word. I can, in fact, import the author
> histories into my Foopedia and create a new site that seems to have
> written 610,000 articles out of nowhere. I can even pretend that all
> these users have accounts on my site and import their user pages (if
> they have added "originally from .." templates, I can remove those).
> Many users will go to Foopedia and get the impression that I, as founder
> and operator, have made this thing happen, and that thousands of people
> have worked for/with me. They might even get the impression that all
> these people are right-wingers because I have Republican party
> advertising all over Foopedia.

Of course, this was part of the intention of invariant sections in the
GFDL which we quite rightfully realized were not good things to
include in our work... But yet here we go, wishing to reinvent them.

It's a silly argument to claim that someone could claim to be the
actual author of the work, the contributions are right there.. Many
people edit with their offline names (and hopefully those who don't
should realize the weaker attribution representation it gives them).

I agree that freedom can bring unfavorable things, this is
unfortunate, but it is not a reason to eschew freedom.

> Now, I would argue that this would be a gross misrepresentation of the
> historical facts, and that, if you want any licensing at all, a fair and
> reasonable license should acknowledge the community origins of the
> content, rather than allowing implicit or explicit false attribution to
> an entirely different community.

So how do you address this situation: Wikimedia loses its mind, puts
porno spam all over wikipedia. I create a fork called FreePedia, and
the entire community moves to FreePedia. ... Now we have to credit
Wikipedia? But why? the community is here?

There is no clear way to credit the community, it's dishonest to claim
that by building in a credit to the Wikimedia Foundation operated site
that you are crediting the community.

Sure that example is far out, but things like that are possible.. For
a more realistic scenario, what happens if a substantial part of the
community leaves and the community has split in two.  This certainly
has been seen on other wikis.

> Wikipedia, however, is not just a bunch of random people doing things
> that they would be doing anyway if Wikipedia didn't exist. It is people
> collaborating in a specific framework, working together as members of a
> specific community under specific rules. CC-WIKI is not about granting
> special rights to an organization, it is about acknowledging the
> community identity over the identity of individual writers.

Right, but to suggest that the work wouldn't be possible without the
Wikimedia Foundation is silly. There is a reason why copyright applies
to a specific work and not to similar works of independent origins. It
isn't like Jimbo was the first and only person to think of a GFDLed
free content encyclopedia. (although, wow, what an amazing job
everyone has done making it happen... Which is why we have a
community)

> As long as the emphasis is on community, rather than on organization, I
> think CC-WIKI is exactly the right approach.

I like crediting the community. But the community isn't a single
object we can credit. To claim that we can is a gross
oversimplification at best.

> Many mirrors and forks are set up by people who are either not
> knowledgeable about licensing, or who do not have the resources to
> comply with the technical requirements (we do not make this easy for
> them).

I agree that we do not make it easy for them, we have even disabled
features in our software which make it easier (credits at the bottom,
though I presume for technical reasons rather than to discourage
compliance). We make it easy to make illegal forks and suggest
hyperlinks as a bandaid... while we slowly back away and disclaim all
liability.  It is not pretty.

Our webpages clearly say that other sites must follow the GFDL, and
that our little bandaid isn't legal protection. We muddle the
otherwise straightforward waters (to be legal, do what we do) by
trying to get people to do the respectable thing and link back to us
as well..  We don't even manage to give a consistant story on our
webpages:  Compare,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights#Users.27_rights_and_obligations
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verbatim_copying#History_Section

The latter is far more clear that our recommendation is legally questionable.

Some of the emails we send out to places asking for advice even omit
the instructions for actual compliance entirely.  We claim this is
because it is too hard, but it really isn't "Do what we do" is
sufficient.

> It's fine if you argue that you feel individual authors deserve
> attribution over the community as a whole -- that is a legitimate
> position to hold, although I disagree with it. But if you claim that you
> want to make forking and mirroring easier, then you are misrepresenting
> your position, because it does the exact opposite. CC-WIKI makes forking
> simpler and acknowledges the work of the community as a whole rather
> than that of individual contributors.

Fundamentally *forking* is already easy, you grab our complete
database dumps (rather than just one part of them).  The storage
requirements for the entire dumps are large, but a small amount of
time with an awkscript can extract just the attribution data if the
wish is only to provide that.  Considering the amount of
advertisements that some of the forks manage to cram in... I doubt
they would have any troubles doing what they need to do.

CC-Wiki doesn't make forking harder, it makes making a completely
equal fork impossible. It grants part of the essences of the exclusive
copyright (the right to be credited) to another party simply by virtue
of hosting a site.  It grants nothing to the community, because there
is no unambiguous way to even define what the community is...

On the other hand, changes to attribution requirements would make some
forms of reproduction much easier. It is an interesting area to
explore, but we shouldn't go down the road of creating special rights
for site operators, or reinventing invariant sections.


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] German Wikipedia upgraded

body:
de.wikipedia.org is our second-biggest wiki. It's fortunate enough to
not only be not too big to upgrade overnight, but to have an 'overnight'
in the first place. ;)

The upgrade process itself went quite smoothly.

This weekend we'll want to switch database masters to one of the new
machines, which has more disk space available. That will involve a brief
lock of all wikis to read-only while things are switched around.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Mark Williamson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Mongolian Script

body:
You mean, why the text is to the right of the globe? Or why the globe
is flipped?

The flipped globe is an oversight. The text to the right of the globe
(rather than under it) is on purpose, as this is the logical order for
Mongolian. Globe first, text second.

Similarly, if you had a before-and-after ad in Arabic, the before
picture goes on the right, rather than the left because in Arabic this
is "logical order".

Mark

On 30/06/05, Craig Franklin <craig at halo-17.net> wrote:
> Scr?obh Mark Williamson:
>
> >A representation of what a proper implementation of Mongolian script
> >protocols on mn.wiki should look like can be found here:
> >http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cd/Mongolian_wikipedia_prev
> iew.png
> >(it's pretty neat, actually)
>
> Is there any particular reason that the Wikipedia logo is flipped here?  I
> can understand the rest of it, but I don't see why the graphics on the page
> should be shifted away from normal.
>
> - Craig
>
> -------------------
> Craig Franklin
> PO Box 764
> Ashgrove, Q, 4060
> Australia
> http://www.halo-17.net - Australia's Favourite Source of Indie Music, Art,
> and Culture.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
SI HOC LEGERE SCIS NIMIVM ERVDITIONIS HABES
QVANTVM MATERIAE MATERIETVR MARMOTA MONAX SI MARMOTA MONAX MATERIAM
POSSIT MATERIARI
ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE


list: wikien-l

from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Categories and NPOV

references:
<98dd099a0506261256ec30b9d@mail.gmail.com>
	<da0veq$dn0$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<98961323-7A6B-47BC-8ED3-0FDCC0214FD8@sbcglobal.net>

body:
I've always though that the pseudoscience  (and protoscience)
catogries were far more trouble than they were worth.

--
geni


from_name: Timwi

subject: [WikiEN-l] Thoughts on the process of requesting adminship

body:
I was going to post this as a reply to another posting, but my thoughts
have become somewhat general, and so I'm posting this as a new entry.

I have come to realise that our current process of requesting adminship
is at a sharp contrast to the wiki model in general. I have come to
believe that we are not following our own principles that we so highly
value.

Why do we let anyone edit? Because we believe that assuming good faith
is a good thing. We let people edit because they can't do any lasting
damage anyway; if they turn out to be editing in bad faith, we can still
revert their edits and block them later. No permanent damage done. We
also let people edit because we believe that they are innocent until
they show themselves guilty.

Incidentally, with admin powers, we handle it quite differently. Not
only does becoming an admin require majority support, but it is even the
case that many people vote "oppose" on the grounds of lack of
dedication, lack of a minimum number of edits, or lack of involvement in
community issues. They can apparently get away with an argument that
essentially amounts to saying "we can't really be sure they're innocent,
so we'll have to assume they're guilty for now". As a result, there are
people who are not admins even though they would never be doing anything
wrong if they were. Those people should be admins.

If we disregard for a moment that admins can delete images permanently,
which surely can be rectified in a future software update, admins cannot
do any lasting damage, just like editors. As such, their situation is a
quite close analogy to the case of the editors. If we applied the
current request-for-adminship philosophy to editing, we would have to
vote on everybody's right to edit before allowing them to edit!

Suppose for a moment that users were to start out as admins, and only
lose the admin powers when they abuse them. (No, I'm not suggesting
this, but let's explore this hypothetical scenario.) Suppose also that
if admin powers are removed from an account, all accounts that are
editing from the same IP also lose admin powers. Of course many of you
will object to this model, because users could just open a new account
from another IP to re-gain the administrative privileges. But if you
think about it, editors are in exactly the same position: If they're
blocked, they only need to edit from another IP to evade the block. We
already have the societal mechanics (policies and procedures) in place
to deal with this. The situation is exactly analogous.

However, I am not suggesting such a radical change.

As a first step, I would like to suggest to make it policy that "oppose"
votes must be accompanied by reasoning indicating the nominee's past
wrongdoing or potential for wrongdoing. It should not be permitted to
vote "oppose" just because someone has "only a few hundred edits", as
this is neither a crime nor a sign of bad faith. As a safeguard against
crackpots nominating themselves straight after their first edit,
however, I suggest that candidates must be nominated by an existing admin.

In the long-term, my suggestion is to abolish the requirement for
majority vote. Anyone who is already an admin is trusted; I think
someone nominated by an existing admin should therefore be given a
certain "initial trust" too. Thus, admins should be able to just appoint
other admins. As for removing adminship, ideally I would like to see the
process closely resemble that for blocking users. The things we have
collected at [[Wikipedia:Blocking policy]] have evolved over time; a
similar "deadminning policy", containing various behaviours that warrant
deadminning without a vote, is surely conceivable. In particular, I can
imagine the 3RR apply to page-protection, deletion/undeletion, or
blocking/unblocking other users. Having more admins, and therefore more
sensible admins ;-), makes this much easier to keep under control by the
community.

What if tens of people gang up, all become admins and then do lots of
bad stuff? Well, it is already possible for people to gang up -- and
indeed, gangs of web forum users have done so in the past.

Please discuss! :)
Timwi


body:
>  I suggest that candidates must be nominated by an existing admin.

hell does not appear to be frozen over

> Having more admins, and therefore more
> sensible admins ;-), makes this much easier to keep under control by the
> community.

It is the percentage not the absolute numbers that matter. We are very
close to 500 admins they are some of the most active members of the
comunity. Can you show me where the views of admins have been that
different from those of the community?

--
geni


from_name: Chris Jenkinson

body:
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Timwi wrote:

[...]

> Please discuss! :)
> Timwi

I am broadly in favour of your proposal, its really what I've been
trying to say with the two proposals I have made recently.

There's some interesting discussion about opposing votes with good
points raised on both sides of the argument:
 -->
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_adminship#Remove_blank_oppose_votes.3F

Chris

- --
Chris Jenkinson
chris at starglade.org
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from_name: Jack Lynch

subject: [WikiEN-l] Further Wladk madness

body:
This is the sort of thing I'd like to see more of here. I'm glad to
help you clean up these contributions.

You have my utmost respect Charles, and deserve it. Lets get back to
writing an encyclopedia, and leave all the rhetoric and theatrics at
the door.

Jack (Sam Spade)

On 6/27/05, Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> I have posted about this before, namely the unkind reception often given to
> User:Wladk, usually posting as an IP number 200.46.++.  He has identified
> himself as Wellington Perez Ishikawajima, Peruvian of Japanese extraction.
> He has now initiated 100 pages or so; these exhibit almost all possible
> problems, beginning with poor English.  Only User:Wikibofh seems to have
> recognised, as I do, that this prolific contributor is posting material that
> includes real gems, and is expanding the East Asia coverage in a way for
> which Wiki-en should be grateful.  Plenty of really quite nasty comments
> have been seen at VfD.
>
> To give an example of the value: a recent high profile biography of Mao
> Zedong argues that the Chinese Communists only came to power after they were
> handed factories in ex-Manchukuo (which Japan overran in 1931), by the
> Soviets who invaded right at the end of WWII.  Reading that, I realised that
> I knew chapter and verse about that, from the WP articles I had been
> cleaning up about Japanese heavy industry there.
>
> So - please can I have some help in my campaign to have these articles
> cleaned up first, before rushing them to VfD?  I think some Wikipedians'
> comments (such as 'contribute to the WP in your native language') are
> completely out of order.  I see no reason to believe that the wiki process
> does not work, with these articles as for all else.  There is a listing I
> maintain at
>
> [[User:Charles Matthews/Imperial Japan]].
>
> I should be grateful to be notified of more such - I found around ten major
> ones this morning alone, while the database was locked.
>
>
> Charles
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Angela

subject: [WikiEN-l] The sandbox incubator

body:
On 6/30/05, Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:

> In other words, I would strongly argue in favor of shutting down the
> sandbox as a VfD-resistant incubator for games which distract from the
> purpose of building an encyclopedia.

Th latest Wikigame to be created is Checkers. This started in the
Wikipedia namespace and, following Danny's attempt to speedy delete
it, has been undeleted and is now on VfD. However, most voters seem to
be supporting the idea that this should be moved to the sandbox rather
than deleted from there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion/Checkers

Angela.


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [WikiEN-l] Creationism is not horse-shit, it's pseudo-science

body:
Jtkiefer:

>    Creationism is a prickly problem, wikipedia can't really take either
> side due to the fact that no matter what you write on it it's almost
> impossible to avoid POV pushing.

Stating that creationism is pseudoscience is not POV-pushing. Maybe
Intelligent Design, which is a bit more controversial -- but creationism
as in "God created the World", where it makes "scientific" claims, is
pretty much universally regarded as pseudoscience by people from
existing scientific disciplines.

Erik


body:
Gregory Maxwell:
>>I don't feel that the draft license at
>><http://creativecommons.org/drafts/wiki_0.5> which has the requirement
>>to attribute the original site gives that site any special rights. It
>>isn't actually a new license, but a re-branded version of the cc-by-sa
>>with the only major difference being that the wiki is attributed
>>rather than the authors.
>
>
> This is a substantial change, I'm quite aware of the license and what it is...
> I disagree very strongly with the nature of the altered attribution.
>

Your disagreement doesn't make a lot of sense to me. There is no
"special right" inherent in saying "This article was originally written
by members of the Wikipedia community", and it does not preclude anyone
from forking. It is a historical statement that is much more practical
than "This article was written by these 250 people:...", or much more
wiki-like than "This article was originally started by Erik" (as CC-BY
would require).

I strongly support the CC-WIKI license. It is the most practical
solution to the attribution problem. If you're worried about forking
being difficult, then you haven't read the GFDL very carefully, as it is
probably the most forking-unfriendly license there is in the field of
free content.

Erik


from_name: BJörn Lindqvist

body:
While frequenting Wikipedia, web forums and IRC channels I have
noticed a strange correlation between the number of administrator
users and the strictness of that communitys behavioural guidelines.
Take IRC, for example. In IRC channels there are between 20 to 800
users, a number of them are supervisor users who are able to kick and
ban other users.

Enter a channel with 50 users whereof 10 are administrators. Say "fuck".
Enter a channel with 50 users whereof 5 are administrators. Say "fuck"
and observe what happens.

Assuming both channels are English language channels, in which channel
are you more likely to get kicked/banned from? That's right - the one
with 10 administrators!

Remember when the most important rule was "ignore all rules"? I agree
that the Request for Adminship procedure is cumbersome but not sure
that bringing more admins in will make Wikipedia better. Or that it
will solve the real dilemma of an exclusive group in an open
community.

Sorry if this is not entierly relevant, but you said _please_ discuss. :)

--
mvh Bj?rn


from_name: Leif Knutsen

subject: [WikiEN-l] Creationism and pseudoscience

body:
I think that if a field of inquiry, or a theory if you will, is to be called "pseudoscience," then it has to be explained by what criteria it is distinct from "real" science or protoscience.  And then the rebuttal from those who believe it is real science must be presented as well.

The argument for creationism (which I don't buy) is that the fossil record and other physical evidence leaves unanswered questions in the "theory" of evolution.  Hence, they argue, you can't reject creationism as a valid form of scientific inquiry.  The fallacy is that if one explanation doesn't explain everything, then all other explanations are equally valid.

I think it is important to have an article about pseudoscience, but it would be more interesting and readable, and less contentious, if we omitted examples altogether.  Tom Cruise recently characterized psychiatry as a "pseudoscience" and would undoubtedly list it as an example here.  There'd be a big argument, and the article wouldn't improve much.


body:
Gregory Maxwell:
> As things currently are, the
> Wikimedia Foundation has the same obligations under the GFDL as I
> would have if I were to make a fork.  So if I grabbed the databases,
> setup media wiki, and fixed the graphics so that I wasn't walking on
> any trademarks my position would be just as legal as the Wikimedia
> Foundations position. That's pretty fair and friendly: if I do the
> same things I'm all good.
>
> With CC-wiki this wouldn't be the case at all. My fork would be a
> second class citizen. Even if all the editors moved to edit on
> Gregpedia, people would still need to credit www.wikipedia.org for the
> material.

Material written on Wikipedia would be credited to the Wikipedia
community. Material written on Gregpedia would be credited to the
Gregpedia community. This seems perfectly fair and reasonable to me and
does nothing to preclude you from running and operating your fork, it
simply notes the historical fact that your content was originally
created by a different community, rather than misrepresenting it as
originating with you.

You are correct that under the terms of the GFDL, I do not have to
mention Wikipedia with a single word. I can, in fact, import the author
histories into my Foopedia and create a new site that seems to have
written 610,000 articles out of nowhere. I can even pretend that all
these users have accounts on my site and import their user pages (if
they have added "originally from .." templates, I can remove those).
Many users will go to Foopedia and get the impression that I, as founder
and operator, have made this thing happen, and that thousands of people
have worked for/with me. They might even get the impression that all
these people are right-wingers because I have Republican party
advertising all over Foopedia.

Now, I would argue that this would be a gross misrepresentation of the
historical facts, and that, if you want any licensing at all, a fair and
reasonable license should acknowledge the community origins of the
content, rather than allowing implicit or explicit false attribution to
an entirely different community.

> The content of Wikipedia is not the property of the Wikimedia
> Foundation.

Wikipedia, however, is not just a bunch of random people doing things
that they would be doing anyway if Wikipedia didn't exist. It is people
collaborating in a specific framework, working together as members of a
specific community under specific rules. CC-WIKI is not about granting
special rights to an organization, it is about acknowledging the
community identity over the identity of individual writers.

As long as the emphasis is on community, rather than on organization, I
think CC-WIKI is exactly the right approach.

> I agree that GFDL conformant attribution is an issue in some media
> (although I disagree that it is an issue for electronic sources, if
> you can mirror the ~2ish GB of text in cur, then you could also manage
> the contributor names).

Many mirrors and forks are set up by people who are either not
knowledgeable about licensing, or who do not have the resources to
comply with the technical requirements (we do not make this easy for
them). It's fine if you argue that you feel individual authors deserve
attribution over the community as a whole -- that is a legitimate
position to hold, although I disagree with it. But if you claim that you
want to make forking and mirroring easier, then you are misrepresenting
your position, because it does the exact opposite. CC-WIKI makes forking
simpler and acknowledges the work of the community as a whole rather
than that of individual contributors.

Erik


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] Pseudoscience and pseudohistory

body:
Fred Bauder (fredbaud at ctelco.net) [050701 04:06]:

> Likewise [[cold fusion]] may be included in the Category Pseudo-
> science, without us knowing whether or not it can occur. It is enough
> that a the category is a useful guide to the reader. That can mean
> that articles may fall into contradictory categories, as it is not an
> exercise in logic but in finding information.

Actually, [[Cold fusion]] is in all the categories "Pseudoscience",
"Protoscience" and "Pathological science". And aspects of it are arguably
all of these, and I see no problem with that.

- d.


body:
Gregory Maxwell:

> But you can't draw nice little boxes around 'communities', in effect
> trying to achieve this additional restriction in our licensing will
> grant the right to the site operators, not to the community.

The community is identified by its name. As long as you are writing on
Wikipedia.org, you are writing as a member of the Wikipedia community.
If you leave that community and start writing somewhere else, this
doesn't change the fact that the material you wrote in the past was
written as a member of that community.

So, I disagree, you can very much draw a box around the community by
identifying it with its given name.

> Of course, this was part of the intention of invariant sections in the
> GFDL which we quite rightfully realized were not good things to
> include in our work... But yet here we go, wishing to reinvent them.

If you don't want any requirements, use the public domain as I do. But
if you do want requirements, these should be a reasonable reflection of
the interests of the community as a whole. I think CC-WIKI is the best
effort to date to address this.

> So how do you address this situation: Wikimedia loses its mind, puts
> porno spam all over wikipedia. I create a fork called FreePedia, and
> the entire community moves to FreePedia. ... Now we have to credit
> Wikipedia? But why? the community is here?

First of all, no license grant precludes you from granting permission to
any partcular site to do what it likes. For instance, FreePedia in its
sign up form could ask users to put their past and present contributions
udner a particular license. If indeed the entire community moves,
everything is fine. Furthermore, such a scenario wouldn't alter the fact
that the content was originally written by members of the Wikipedia
community. So, stating that "originally this was written by members of
Wikipedia, but now many of them have split away from Wikipedia and
formed Freepedia, for [[these reasons]]" would be a historically
accurate statement, informative, and sufficient to comply with the
license. The achievements of the Wikipedia community, in its present
incarnation, should not be denied credit because of potentially
undesirable future incaranations.

> There is no clear way to credit the community, it's dishonest to claim
> that by building in a credit to the Wikimedia Foundation operated site
> that you are crediting the community.

I don't think it's dishonest at all, I think it's very accurate, even if
that community should fundamentally change in the future -- in the
present it is very much identified as "Wikipedia". Even if that should
change, this identification would still be a historical fact.

> Sure that example is far out, but things like that are possible.. For
> a more realistic scenario, what happens if a substantial part of the
> community leaves and the community has split in two.  This certainly
> has been seen on other wikis.

Acknowledging historical facts doesn't take anything away from anyone.

All that being said, I think it is completely reasonable to try to
improve the way in which CC-WIKI credits the community, and to trace the
community history as best as possible without placing onerous
requirements on third parties. I suggest you work with the Creative
Commons folk to make this happen:
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC_Wiki

> CC-Wiki doesn't make forking harder, it makes making a completely
> equal fork impossible.

I think that's a reasonable thing to do. Forks are *not* completely
equal. They take the work produced by thousands and try to do something
new with it.

 > It grants nothing to the community, because there
> is no unambiguous way to even define what the community is...

That's what you say. I say starting by identifying it by name, and
trying to ease community transitions, is the way to go for wiki licensing.

Erik


subject: [WikiEN-l] e-mails to wikien-l being dropped

body:
Nathan J. Yoder (njyoder at energon.org) [050701 06:26]:

> It appears that my e-mails to this list are being dropped by the
> moderator, just so people know why I haven't been able to respond. In
> case this one isn't dropped too, you should know that David Gerard,
> one of the arbs on my RfA is the one who is censoring me.
> How can arbitrators not claim bias when they're engaging in active
> censorship?  I can't respond on Wikipedia now and now not even on this
> list.

I dropped your messages for the attacks contained therein; I let this one
through for having a lot fewer of them. The remaining readers of wikien-l
are largely sick of fifty-message threads of querulous ranting, so they're
not being encouraged. You don't have some sort of intrinsic right to rant
as you please here; you can be sure at least a few of the many admins
reading this list will have looked into the incidents upsetting you.

And I must point out that you always have the option of not making personal
attacks in your posts.

You appear to take anything said about you that you don't like as an
attack, yet are unable to perceive your own attacks on others. The
reference to [[Wikipedia:No personal attacks]] should be all a reasonable
person needs; that you don't seem to get it should not ultimately be anyone
else's problem.

The wikien-l admins really don't like work, so try to avoid it as far as
possible. But letting the list turn to querulous ranting is leading to
(fairly justified IMO) complaints. So we'll be trying harder to stop the
rubbish at a sensible point.

- d.


from_name: Nathan J. Yoder

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: (fwd) bishonen exercises abuse of admin power

body:
> Bishonen did nothing wrong with the autoreblock -- it is an
> _intentional_ feature of the system.  Equally, she is not obligated to
> unblock you.  Nevertheless, she has.  That seems quite fair to me.

She is obligated to abide by the injunction, which means making it a
24 hour block.  You don't understand what happened.  It is NOT an
intentional feature of the system to auto-reblock for someone hitting
'edit' under their regular account that they were blocked under.  It's
a bug.

That wouldn't even make sense as a feature even if it were
intentional (which it's not), because that would mean if someone
didn't know they were blocked yet and went to hit 'edit', their block
would automatically be reset.  IT also means that if they wanted to
check if their block was over or wanted to see the block page again
their block would also be reset.

----------------------------------------------
Nathan J. Yoder
http://www.gummibears.nu/
http://www.gummibears.nu/files/njyoder_pgp.key
----------------------------------------------


body:
> This is specifically left up to the discretion of the blocking
> administrator, and you were specifically warned against wikilawyering
> on this issue, so I'm afraid you won't be getting much sympathy from
> me.

That still doesn't answer my question and doesn't address how unjust
the issue is.  A rule that allows an admin to ban for some undefined
thing is inherently unjust.  You might as well make a policy that says
"you're not allowed to be a floobit" and then leave it up to the
discretion of the admin to define what a floobit is.

Your entire argument here is just "you knew it was up to the admin,
therefore you are wrong."  That's just plain absurd and is incredibly
ridiculous.  "Well you knew it was illegal to speak out against the
government under the 'bad things are illegal' law which doesn't define
bad things, so it's your fault for going to jail."

SHouldn't a requirement of being an arbitrator be that they are able
to defend their actions without resorting to "because we say so"
logic?

----------------------------------------------
Nathan J. Yoder
http://www.gummibears.nu/
http://www.gummibears.nu/files/njyoder_pgp.key
----------------------------------------------


from_name: Joseph Reagle

body:
On Thursday 30 June 2005 21:56, Jtkiefer wrote:
> > Stating that creationism is pseudoscience is not POV-pushing. Maybe
> > Intelligent Design, which is a bit more controversial -- but
> > creationism as in "God created the World", where it makes "scientific"
> > claims, is pretty much universally regarded as pseudoscience by people
> > from existing scientific disciplines.

As an aside: I find Perakh and Young's (2004) definition of pseudoscience to
be useful:

[[ Results for 'Perakh and Young 2004'
          + Is intelligent design science?
               o ch=12 p=Rutgers University press bt=Why Intelligent
                 Design Fails y=2004 e=Matt Young, Taner Edis a=New
                 Brunswick r=20050209
               o intelligent design is not bad science like cold fusion
                 or wrong science like Lamarckian inheritance (Perakh
                 and Young 2004:185)
               o some features of pseudoscience
                    # denial of established fact (e.g., homeotherapy and
                      young earth creationists) (Perakh and Young
                      2004:186)
                    # untestable hypotheses: a theory that explains
                      everything explains nothing (e.g., astrology)
                      (Perakh and Young 2004:187)
                    # tries to "prove that": "a pseudoscientist tries to
                      prove that something is true; a good scientist
                      tries to find out whether it is true." (Perakh and
                      Young 2004:188)
                    # everyone is wrong but us (Perakh and Young
                      2004:188)
                    # other features: never admit to mistakes, made-up
                      terms and vague concepts (Perakh and Young
                      2004:189)
]]


body:
On Friday 01 July 2005 07:43, Dan Grey wrote:
> What's the problem of saying that creationsim is psuedoscience, and
> then just pointing to all the books by well-regarded scientists that
> state that as the reference? (I have one on my book shelf :-), and I'm
> sure there's more ).

Huh? I don't understand. I'm not advocating for a psuedoscience category,
only that those who do may find that reference interesting and useful. Are
you objecting to the title of the book (shouldn't we instead look at the
substance of the content), or the attempt by scientists (and philosophers
thereof) to define their field? The article is quite useful in
distinguishing pseudoscience on the basis of methodological naturalism
(e.g., the publication of the Bible Codes in Statistical Science and the
resulting discussion, critique, and consensus) . Some creationists and
IDers object to methodological naturalism, but that is straightforward:
methodological supernaturalism isn't science -- if there is such a thing.


body:
> particularly as these changes do not
> seem to be at all for the purpose of making a better encyclopedia.

Exactly, these suggestions are obviously for the sole purpose of
allowing a certain clique to perpetually stay in power.  These ideas
aren't just bad, they're ridiculous and clearly don't represent the
best interest of Wikipedia in the slightest.  I'd say any admin who
actually thinks these ideas are good should have their admin status
removed, since it is quite obvious that they are only interested in
perpetuating their power status.  Sadly, apologists will defend this
to the end despite the motives behind it being patently obvious.

It also ignores history too, under what historical context has
something like this ever been a good idea?

> Assuming both channels are English language channels, in which channel
> are you more likely to get kicked/banned from? That's right - the one
> with 10 administrators!

Exactly true and the proponents of this absurd idea don't have the
slightest understanding of internet sociology, this definitely falls
under the "too many cooks" category.  I have yet to encounter a
medium-large sized channel with a dispropotionately large number of
ops that wasn't full of power tripping morons.

In any case, this policy is a bit too outlandish even by WikiHerd
standards, so it won't ever get voted in.  The only thing I'm worried
about is that the admins will act on it as policy even though it's
never been voted in, acting under their own personally appointed
authority.  Sadly, that's a likely possibility considering they
already interpret real policies and imaginary policies as they see fit
and freely get involved in content disputes.  All it really would
accomplish is making Wikipedia a laughing stock since, as I've said,
the idea isn't just wrong, it's clearly insane.

----------------------------------------------
Nathan J. Yoder
http://www.gummibears.nu/
http://www.gummibears.nu/files/njyoder_pgp.key
----------------------------------------------


from_name: Pat Carr

subject: [WikiEN-l] Watchlist not showing anything

body:
This has been reported as a bug
(http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2647),
and I'd consider it to be fairly serious. It takes a
lot longer to revert vandalism without current
watchlists.

Carbonite

--- Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 01/07/05, Phil Boswell <phil.boswell at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > My watchlist is refusing to admit anything has
> changed since 12:29
> >
>
(http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=House_M.D.&curid=1273596&diff=0&oldid=0).
> >
> > More recently-changed watched items are showing up
> emboldened on Recent
> > Changes.
>
> Hmm... I've got this as well, where the latest
> timestamp is 12.05.
> Hadn't noticed until now, though.
>
> --
> - Andrew Gray
>   andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

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


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia is *already* written from a scientific POV

body:
Delirium (delirium at hackish.org) [050701 07:55]:

>   Saying, as Wikipedia, that Creationism is pseudoscience
> is across the line of good taste I think.

Saying Intellient Design is pseudoscience wouldn't be, though, as imitating
science is its precise purpose. So how would you categorise creationism?
Mythology, like [[Xenu]]?

- d.


from_name: Skyring

subject: [WikiEN-l] OK, You're Busted!

body:
"William sauntered slowly down the road towards school. His person was
freely decorated with bandages that were the results of a skirmish
between William and a new geyser that his family had lately had
installed.

"The man who installed it had said in answer to Mrs Brown's enquiries:
'No, Madam, it's a new model and it can't possibly explode. I defy
anyone,' he had added, 'to make this geyser explode.' It was a very
foolish thing to say in the hearing of William, but then, of course,
he did not know William. William had accepted the statement as a
challenge, and had worked hard and conscientiously on the new geyser
till he made it explode. When finally they picked him up from the
debris (after ascertaining that the house still stood!) his first
remark had been a triumphant: 'There! And he said it couldn't
explode!'"

The story goes on to say how William saw himself as a seeker of truth
and justice, and his conscience was clear, even if he was covered with
bandages and he could tell little girls that his whole face had been
burnt off, except for his eyes.

Well, like William, I put truth and justice above geysers, and perhaps
I'm being foolish in pointing out loopholes in the system, but here
goes.

Purely as a hypothetical, let's say that I've been hauled up before
the Grand Jury, found to be a naughty Wikipedian and banned. I don't
agree with the decision, in fact I think the Grand Jury has its head
up its bum, but that's not important. The effect of banning an editor
is akin to being pulled over by the cops, but instead of putting the
driver in prison or fining him or taking away his licence, they take
away his licence plate. He can still drive, but now he's not
identifiable!

Doesn't this encourage bad behaviour instead of good?

Yeah, I know that the IP address can be blocked, but IP addresses are
easy to come by in these days of internet cafes, wifi hotspots and
cheap dialup. When I'm on the road I don't have access to my ADSL, so
I tend to go down to Starbucks and have a cuppa while I check my
email, or duck into whatever internet shop I'm passing and buy an hour
or so. Libraries and universities are another good place for free
Internet.

The bottom line is that if I know a certain Irish editor is an
arrogant idiot, then I can correct his stupid mistakes, fix his
wretched grammar, and adjust his spelling to conform to dictionary
standards, and what are you gunna do? Revert obvious improvements?

And if I know that a certain Melbourne editor is a bully with a short
fuse, then just how can anyone stop me from lighting it? Getting an
abusive editor out of Wikipedia seems like a bloody good idea to me.

All with the firm intention of improving Wikipedia, of course. And
giving myself a glow of righeousness.

--
Peter in Cyberspace


body:
On 7/1/05, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:

> > When we say "Homeopathy is a pseudoscience."
> > we are also providing information by writing
> > down a true statement. If I may paraphrase
> > a couple of sentences from a certain sci-fi
> > franchise:
> > "The first duty of every Wikipedian is to the truth,
> > scientific truth, historical truth and personal truth.
> > It is the guiding principle of Wikipedia."
>
> This quotation may exist somewhere, but a Google search results in
> this return:
> 'Your search - Wikipedia "historical truth and personal truth" - did
> not match any documents'
>
> Who says that and in what context?

It's easily found in Google, and the OP indicated it was a paraphrase:
"The first duty of a Wikipedian is to the truth--be it scientific
truth, historical
truth, PERSONAL truth.  It is the guiding principle on which Wikipedia was
founded!"

--
Peter in Canberra


from_name: Thomas Gries

subject: [Wikitech-l] German Wikipedia upgraded

body:
Brion:
thanks.

I have updated the German translations (message texts in LanguageDe.php)
yesterday. They are available as attachment
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/attachment.cgi?id=655
to http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2619

It has currently some more texts than needed (because I use it in
EnotifWiki), but should work fine.

I ask JeLuF or someone else to double-check and upload it at their
discretion.
Tom

Brion Vibber schrieb:

> de.wikipedia.org is our second-biggest wiki. It's fortunate enough to
> not only be not too big to upgrade overnight, but to have an 'overnight'
> in the first place. ;)
>
> The upgrade process itself went quite smoothly.
>
> This weekend we'll want to switch database masters to one of the new
> machines, which has more disk space available. That will involve a brief
> lock of all wikis to read-only while things are switched around.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>_______________________________________________
>Wikitech-l mailing list
>Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

body:
I think admin is a position of trust and we should be careful who to
hand this to because revoking adminship is something only a few people
could do. As of now, I think there's enough administrators to fufill
the jobs we have, so I don't see how having more is going to help the
project. It's only going to side-track administrators into blocking
problem users that gained admin status.

--Mgm

On 7/1/05, BJ?rn Lindqvist <bjourne at gmail.com> wrote:
> While frequenting Wikipedia, web forums and IRC channels I have
> noticed a strange correlation between the number of administrator
> users and the strictness of that communitys behavioural guidelines.
> Take IRC, for example. In IRC channels there are between 20 to 800
> users, a number of them are supervisor users who are able to kick and
> ban other users.
>
> Enter a channel with 50 users whereof 10 are administrators. Say "fuck".
> Enter a channel with 50 users whereof 5 are administrators. Say "fuck"
> and observe what happens.
>
> Assuming both channels are English language channels, in which channel
> are you more likely to get kicked/banned from? That's right - the one
> with 10 administrators!
>
> Remember when the most important rule was "ignore all rules"? I agree
> that the Request for Adminship procedure is cumbersome but not sure
> that bringing more admins in will make Wikipedia better. Or that it
> will solve the real dilemma of an exclusive group in an open
> community.
>
> Sorry if this is not entierly relevant, but you said _please_ discuss. :)
>
> --
> mvh Bj?rn
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


list: wiktionary-l

from_name: Gerard Meijssen

subject:
[Wiktionary-l] Re: [Wikitech-l] en.wiktionary.org temporarily
	broken

body:
Muke Tever wrote:

> Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> The reason for this is that like in a paper dictionaray we only want
>> correct
>> spellings and an incorrect spelling should result in a "not found"
>> message.
>
>
> In the US, and probably in other places where spelling is not phonetic,
> one of the most common uses for a dictionary (if not the most common)
> is to find what the correct spelling of a word is.  If there is not
> "spell check" in the form of redirects or see-unders, then the Wiktionary
> is useless for this.
>
>     *Muke!

Hoi,
When a word is correctly spelled in several ways, every alternative is
as good as the other and deserve its own article. It should therefore be
abundantly clear that they are correct. As a consequence of the massive
rename action many thousands of redirects have been created words like
"Lightbulb" are now correct because there is a redirect ?? So the
spelling of a sentence like: "A Lightbulb Is Typically Found In A
Lamp."  is apparantly correct?? I think not.

Redirects are not an appropriate tool for spell checks.

Thanks,
    GerardM


body:
Timwi (timwi at gmx.net) [050701 09:43]:

Indeed. The present RFA procedure is horribly topheavy and
instruction-crept.

> As a first step, I would like to suggest to make it policy that "oppose"
> votes must be accompanied by reasoning indicating the nominee's past
> wrongdoing or potential for wrongdoing. It should not be permitted to
> vote "oppose" just because someone has "only a few hundred edits", as
> this is neither a crime nor a sign of bad faith. As a safeguard against
> crackpots nominating themselves straight after their first edit,
> however, I suggest that candidates must be nominated by an existing admin.

Sounds good to me.

> In the long-term, my suggestion is to abolish the requirement for
> majority vote. Anyone who is already an admin is trusted; I think
> someone nominated by an existing admin should therefore be given a
> certain "initial trust" too. Thus, admins should be able to just appoint
> other admins.

I'd like to work our way to that stage slowly ;-)

> As for removing adminship, ideally I would like to see the
> process closely resemble that for blocking users. The things we have
> collected at [[Wikipedia:Blocking policy]] have evolved over time; a
> similar "deadminning policy", containing various behaviours that warrant
> deadminning without a vote, is surely conceivable. In particular, I can
> imagine the 3RR apply to page-protection, deletion/undeletion, or
> blocking/unblocking other users. Having more admins, and therefore more
> sensible admins ;-), makes this much easier to keep under control by the
> community.

Temp deadminning in the software? Hmm ...

- d.


from_name: Sam Korn

body:
Bishonen did nothing wrong with the autoreblock -- it is an
_intentional_ feature of the system.  Equally, she is not obligated to
unblock you.  Nevertheless, she has.  That seems quite fair to me.

Sam

On 6/30/05, Nathan J. Yoder <njyoder at energon.org> wrote:
> > Oh, btw, I also see your next post to the
> > mailing list, where you have "figured out why it's doing it". Is that
> > your idea of an apology?
>
> I wonder how many times I'll have to resend this totally on-topic
> e-mail before it finally gets through (not censored by the mod).
>
> Let's put this response in a numerical list clearly outlining every
> totally relevent statement.
>
> 1.  It's not an apology.
> 2.  It's an acknowledgement that either your did something wrong or
> there is a bug with the system.
> 3.  Are you going to apologize for your false accusation against me?
> The _only_ account under which I hit 'edit page' was njyoder.  Knowing
> this, you must retract your accusation.
> 4.  Since I have not actually violated the block, will you now remove
> it 24 hours from when it was originally issued (as you are obligated
> to)?
> 5.  I'd like specific examples of what personal attacks I used that
> warrant this block.  Note that no one has attempted to define personal
> attack yet because they know if they did the accusation and blocked
> would become completely unwarranted and make you look bad, as well as
> the other arbtrators in my case who _flat out refused_ to define it.
>
> Simplying describing someone's behavior--calling them a hypocrite, is
> NOT a personal attack.  This has been a matter of debate on the no
> personal attacks talk page, especially considering the policy does not
> state what constitutes a personal attack.  The examples given on the
> "no personal attacks" page (the closest thing to a definition) are
> very different things from what I've said and you'd either have to be
> either incredibly stupid or very dishonest to state otherwise.
>
> I expect a direct apology from you and a removal of the block
> immediatly.
>
> ----------------------------------------------
> Nathan J. Yoder
> http://www.gummibears.nu/
> http://www.gummibears.nu/files/njyoder_pgp.key
> ----------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] The sandbox incubator

body:
> What an easy solution might be would to have a wipe every 12 hours of
> the sandbox main page that also deletes any subpages (except any used
> for offical uses regarding the sandbox).

letting a bot use admin powers is generaly dissaproved of.

--
geni


body:
On 7/1/05, Nathan J. Yoder <njyoder at energon.org> wrote:

> >  The
> > reference to [[Wikipedia:No personal attacks]] should be all a reasonable
> > person needs; that you don't seem to get it should not ultimately be anyone
> > else's problem.
>
> You have seriously got to be kidding me.  Have you read the talk page
> for "no personal attacks"?  There is a lot of debate going on about
> what constitutes a personal attack and what should/shouldn't be
> allowed.  There is no clear consensus and you suggesting that it's
> just what a reasonable person needs just a way for you to continue
> being evasive and avoiding defining it.

Going by the reality, personal attacks are condoned if the person
making the attacks is "a good editor".

Get together a few like-minded souls and you can pretty much do what
you want in Wikipedia. The policies are optional.

--
Peter in Canberra


subject: [Foundation-l] Access Wikipedia through SMS

body:
david at bruehlmeier.com:
> Dear Wikipedians,
>
> a few weeks ago, my wife and I were hiking through the beautiful Swiss Alps and
> had a lively discussion about the definition of some absurd term. All we had
> with us was a cell phone. This was the birth of our idea: Wouldn't it be great
> if the Wikipedia content was accessible sending a simple SMS?

Yes, though of course it requires compressing information a lot, even
when concatenating multiple messages. [[World War I]] intro presently is
3465 characters by my count, 22 concatenated SMS messages with 160
characters max.

One project that is presently in the planning stage (as in, actual
planning, not just on hold) is called MobiLed. We discussed this when
Angela and I were in South Africa. The idea here is slightly different,
namely, based on sending actual audio versions (spoken or
machine-generated) to the user for free.

From
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Conference_reports/FLOSS%2C_South_Africa_2005

- - - - -

Audio Wikipedia by cell phone

Interestingly enough, many areas of Africa have relatively high cell
phone coverage. For example, according to a person working on cell phone
services in Nigeria, there are 6-7 million users in that country alone.
These are very simple devices without Internet access, but with SMS support.

It therefore seems like a good idea to make Wikipedia accessible to
these devices. One obvious approach would be to send articles by SMS.
However, SMS is very limited in size, and long articles would have to be
split up into tens or even hundreds of messages. Teemu Leinonen of the
University of Art and Design Helsinki is working on a project to create
another access possibility: The user sends an SMS with the article title
to a phone number. A few seconds later, they get a call on their cell
phone with a spoken version of the article they requested. In most
cases, this would be generated by text-to-speech software like Festival
(which is free software), though a version spoken by a Wikipedian could
be used if available. While listening to the spoken version, the user
could use the keypad to navigate (fast-forward, skip to next/previous
section, read only tabular data, etc.).

If the article does not exist, the user would be given a special
message: "An article on this subject is not available. Would you like to
record one?" These audio submissions would be automatically uploaded to
the Commons and could be vetted and transcribed by volunteers.

The most important aspect of this idea is that it would make all of
Wikipedia (and potentially other projects) immediately accessible,
almost for free, to anyone with a cell phone. In order for it to work,
the callback would have to be funded somehow. Teemu is seeking funding
from major companies and institutions for this project as part of a
larger project centering on Mobile Phones in Formal and Informal
Learning. CSIR were interested in this project since they are developing
open source speech recognition programmes to deal with African languages
in the field of telephony. If the project does get funding, Wikimedia
will be given the opportunity to be involved in terms of development,
operation and organization.

- - - - -

In developed countries, the callback could be paid for by the user, of
course. (One idea is that users in developed countries could sponsor
users in developing ones.) If you want to be involved, drop me or Angela
a line and we'll get you in touch with the relevant people.

Erik


body:
Phil Sandifer (sandifer at sbcglobal.net) [050701 10:12]:
> On Jun 30, 2005, at 6:09 PM, Fred Bauder wrote:

> >Right, but we ought not declare one viewpoint or another "the
> >truth." At least not within Wikipedia.

> True enough, but it should be noted that the NPOV policy is also not
> a demand that we be ACTIVELY WRONG.

Indeed. Despite the cries of people who think that it must be an NPOV
violation *because* they don't like an accurate categorisation.

Pseudoscience is an actual concept: something that presents itself as
scientific but isn't. To the offended: "Too bad."

- d.


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

body:
I don't mind a bit of science creeping into Wikipedia, but let's not
exalt it or enshrine it. Science can make mistakes.

If a bunch of scientists agree on something, that doesn't make it true.
If they change their minds later, that doesn't make it false.

If a hypothesis is true, but scientists refuse to accept it, that
doesn't make it false. And if they eventually decide to accept it, that
ACCEPTANCE does not MAKE IT become true.

What bothers me is when some contributors insist that Wikipedia endorse
a particular point of view (see [[Wikipedia:POV]]) on the grounds that
"scientists believe it" or that "it is scientific". Much ink has been
spilled (or phosphor illuminated) to show that, e.g., the runaway
greenhouse theory (aka Global Warming) enjoys consensus support of the
world's climatologists and that THEREFORE this encyclopedia should stop
dicking around and just ENDORSE it.

I have pretty much decided to stay away from the climate pages, because
I'm tired of this battle. But I'm never going to drop the subject
completely: the subject being,

* "How shall Wikipedia describe unsettled scientific questions?"

1. Perhaps my first error is to assume that global warming has not been
settled. The United Nations' climate panel makes it sound like there's
virtually no other hypothesis being entertained. Only nuts like Singer,
Lindzen and Balunias think otherwise (and they're obviously on the
industry payroll, so they can safely be ignored).

2. Or perhaps even if it's been "settled" (in the sense of all but an
inconsiderable percentage of the world's scientists endorsing it),
Wikipedia should still remain neutral on the question - saying only that
XX% of the world's scientists endorse the theory, according to surveys
conducted by P, Q, and R.

Ed Poor
Great-grandson of the notable astronomer Charles Lane Poor


from_name: Geoff Burling

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Categories and NPOV: Libraries?

body:
On Thu, 30 Jun 2005 dpbsmith at verizon.net wrote:

> How do libraries handle it?
>
[snipping example]
>
> Anyway, it seems to me that librarians must deal with this sort of thing all
> the time. And the many public libraries that use the Dewey Decimal system
> can't just fall back on the Library of Congress. Although perhaps there's
> some central authority that recommends Dewey classifications. But in any
> case, someone has to decide whether Velikovsky is science or science fiction.
> Who does? and how?
>
Based on conversation with a couple of friends who are librarians (one
with a degree from UC Berkeley), & from working in the college library
while I was at school, I understand cataloging books is a chore no one
wants to do from scratch: 99+% of the time, the Library of Congress (LC)
decision is adopted without a second thought because it's the lowest
cost solution to the problem -- & it supplies both the LC & Dewey
classifications.

In fact, the research of book cataloging systems was a dead science until
Yahoo came along some ten years ago; one friend who is a book cataloging
geek (he actually tried to convince me to let him assign catalog numbers
based on his own scheme to my personal library), sadly remarked no new
research had been done since the 1930s. It's a case that in the
English-speaking world, both the Dewey or LC systems are "good enough"
for their needs. (Those that don't use one of these either follow a
home-brewed system created in the 19th century, or, as in the case of
the British Library -- avoid the issue of cataloging, & simply assign
a shelf number to their books.) And migrating to a new system is an
unnecessary cost most libraries -- which are perennially short on
funds -- want to avoid.

Geoff


from_name: David Friedland

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Watchlist frozen

body:
As a workaround, you can edit your whole watchlist, copy and paste the
list of articles to another page. Then make them all [[links]]. Then
save the page and click "related changes".

- David [[User:Nohat]]

Stacey Greenstein wrote:
> My watchlist appears to be frozen at 6:47am EDT. Is there a remedy for this?
>
> en:UtherSRG


body:
On 7/1/05, Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> Jtkiefer:
>
> >    Creationism is a prickly problem, wikipedia can't really take either
> > side due to the fact that no matter what you write on it it's almost
> > impossible to avoid POV pushing.
>
> Stating that creationism is pseudoscience is not POV-pushing. Maybe
> Intelligent Design, which is a bit more controversial -- but creationism
> as in "God created the World", where it makes "scientific" claims, is
> pretty much universally regarded as pseudoscience by people from
> existing scientific disciplines.

Nobody is attempting to denigrate personal belief or faith by
labelling Creationism as psuedoscience. It's just that Creationism is
not science.

Saying that it's psuedoscience because scientists say so doesn't do
much to help. Perhaps if we say that scientists test and confirm
theories by experiment and change what they believe to be true going
by the results, but adherents of psuedoscience make no such changes -
they reject or ignore evidence contrary to their existing beliefs, and
it is the *appearance* rather than the reality of scientific method
which is important to them.

Creationism (and other psuedosciences) may well contain many beliefs
that are true and accurate and testable. For example, a Creationist
might point out in all sincerity that the first Neanderthal remains
were discovered to be merely those of an old man with arthritis. True
enough, but the old man was a Neanderthal old man. If only one side of
the story is being told, it is NOT science.

--
Peter in Canberra


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Différence de recherche Wikimedia 1.3.13 et 1.4.5

body:
Philippe Roth wrote:
> Nous avons install? une version 1.4.5 de mediawiki sur la m?me
> machine
> avec les m?mes version de EasyPHP, Apache, Php et MySQL.
> Nous avons r?cup?r? la base de la version 1.3.13 et si nous faisons
> une recherche sur le m?me mot "prob*", aucun article n'est trouv?...:o(

Ajouter dans includes/SearchMySQL4.php cette fonction, devant le } final:

        function legalSearchChars() {
                return parent::legalSearchChars() . "*";
        }

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
> What bothers me is when some contributors insist that Wikipedia endorse
> a particular point of view (see [[Wikipedia:POV]]) on the grounds that
> "scientists believe it" or that "it is scientific". Much ink has been
> spilled (or phosphor illuminated) to show that, e.g., the runaway
> greenhouse theory (aka Global Warming) enjoys consensus support of the
> world's climatologists and that THEREFORE this encyclopedia should stop
> dicking around and just ENDORSE it.

That depends on what you mean by 'endorse.'  It's very possible to
endorse a theory without ever once saying something like "this theory
is the correct one."  It's unavoidable when presenting evidence for a
certain theory not to inadvertenly 'endorse' it unless you plaster the
article with silly disclaimers like 'under this widely agreed upon
theory, it is said...'

Global warming is a bad example.  That's an area that involves
considerable controversy and contention among scientists, there really
is no scientific consensus on it.  Also, all sides are at least
capable of being scientific (as they are very falsifiable) and there
is science being practiced , to some extent, on both sides.

This is quite a bit different than well-established, non-controversial
theories for which there is near unanimous consent in the scientific
community.  Especially in cases where the only opposition is religious
and/or political in nature.  I'll note this applies to to theories
that only work within contraints as well as long as the article
clarifies that it only works within those contraints (e.g. general
relativity has various situations where it doesn't work).

When you're dealing with something like "creation science"
though, it's quite a bit different.  It is not actually falsifiable,
there is no level of science involved with it and it's based entirely
on religion.  There is pretty much unanimous agreement among
scientists that evolution is the most likely theory save a few
religious zealots who only went into science to proseletize.

----------------------------------------------
Nathan J. Yoder
http://www.gummibears.nu/
http://www.gummibears.nu/files/njyoder_pgp.key
----------------------------------------------


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Watchlist frozen

body:
Just use search and replace--that's what I did. :-)

Stacey Greenstein wrote:
> Yeah... with over 1300 articles in my watchlist, that's not practical...
>
> On 7/1/05, David Friedland <david at nohat.net> wrote:
>
>>As a workaround, you can edit your whole watchlist, copy and paste the
>>list of articles to another page. Then make them all [[links]]. Then
>>save the page and click "related changes".
>>
>>- David [[User:Nohat]]
>>
>>Stacey Greenstein wrote:
>>
>>>My watchlist appears to be frozen at 6:47am EDT. Is there a remedy for
>>
>>this?
>>
>>>en:UtherSRG
>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>WikiEN-l mailing list
>>WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
>>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>>


body:
On Fri, 1 Jul 2005, David Gerard wrote:

> Timwi (timwi at gmx.net) [050701 09:43]:
>
> Indeed. The present RFA procedure is horribly topheavy and
> instruction-crept.
>
> > As a first step, I would like to suggest to make it policy that "oppose"
> > votes must be accompanied by reasoning indicating the nominee's past
> > wrongdoing or potential for wrongdoing. It should not be permitted to
> > vote "oppose" just because someone has "only a few hundred edits", as
> > this is neither a crime nor a sign of bad faith. As a safeguard against
> > crackpots nominating themselves straight after their first edit,
> > however, I suggest that candidates must be nominated by an existing admin.
>
> Sounds good to me.
>
I was unaware that one could oppose a nomination without providing a reason.
Doing so seems to me an act of bad faith, or stirring up trouble for no
reason.

I believe that self-nominations should still be permitted. It's very easy
to contribute to Wikipedia & not know more than a few Wikipedians; some
folks deserving of our trust can get overlooked quite easily.
>
> > In the long-term, my suggestion is to abolish the requirement for
> > majority vote. Anyone who is already an admin is trusted; I think
> > someone nominated by an existing admin should therefore be given a
> > certain "initial trust" too. Thus, admins should be able to just appoint
> > other admins.
>
> I'd like to work our way to that stage slowly ;-)
>
I had assumed that adminship was by consensus: get enough endorsements, &
you became an admin. If a nominee was controversial (e.g., a history of
"POV-pushing" over [[Lower Elbonia]]), then those opposed -- no matter
how fewin number -- would have to persuade the others that this was a
bad choice.

I've been uninvolved in the RFA process for a long time now, assuming
that anyone who's been on Wikipedia for a couple of months & has made
a few hundred edits gets adminship -- unless there's a good reason not
to grant it. I've been more concerned in spending my time on making
contributions, not in meeting new Wikipedians or the politics of
Wikipedia; & since I haven't gotten to know the latest nominees, &
feel that adding "support" to them is an endorsement of character for
people I don't know, I've assumed that other Wikipedians have been
doing the job correctly. If this part of Wikipedia has become the
province of a group or clique of members who are not doing the work
correctly, then that information should be made public.

As for de-adminning, the only thing I have to add is that admins who
leave Wikipedia, & fail to make prior arrangements, should lose their
admin rights after 3-6 months. I see this as just a janitorial action,
intended to help keep things simpler; & if you leave Wikipedia without
saying "good-by" or letting anyone know that you'll be back, then
I feel that person doesn't deserve our trust.

Geoff


from_name: Muke Tever

body:
Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Muke Tever wrote:
>> In the US, and probably in other places where spelling is not phonetic,
>> one of the most common uses for a dictionary (if not the most common)
>> is to find what the correct spelling of a word is.  If there is not
>> "spell check" in the form of redirects or see-unders, then the Wiktionary
>> is useless for this.
>
> When a word is correctly spelled in several ways, every alternative is
> as good as the other and deserve its own article. It should therefore be
> abundantly clear that they are correct. As a consequence of the massive
> rename action many thousands of redirects have been created words like
> "Lightbulb" are now correct because there is a redirect ?? So the
> spelling of a sentence like: "A Lightbulb Is Typically Found In A
> Lamp."  is apparantly correct?? I think not.

Capitalization is separate from spelling (though both are parts of
orthography). Your sentence is spelled correctly, though capitalized
unusually.

In any case, free capitalization of words is quite common--it occur in
titles of works ("Antique Lightbulbs of the Early 19th Century"), in
advertising ("Save Today on Great Unbeatable Prices"), in any case
where a word is given a special kind of emphasis ("it wasn't just a
smell, it was a Smell"), is used as a title of address ("you're not
listening to me, Mother"), is made into a proper noun ("he was a
Zealot"), etc., and formerly also optionally of nouns in general.

One of the most venerated documents in our country begins:
      We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more
      perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity,
      provide for the common defence [sic], promote the general Welfare,
      and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,
      do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States
      of America.

The only words never take normal capitalization are those that are decreed
to be so from technical context, such as "pH" or 'sinensis' in "Alligator
sinensis."

On these grounds first-letter case-folding should never have been turned
off; but, since it has been so done, redirects from capitalized forms
should ALWAYS exist, because all other words may be found either capitalized
or not capitalized, and a user, seeing an unfamiliar capitalized word in
a text, does not know whether it is properly capitalized or not (and here
we come again to the problem of users going to the dictionary to ascertain
a word's orthography, and the need for redirects to establish same).

In other words I think the whole move was nonsense, but you already knew
that.

> Redirects are not an appropriate tool for spell checks.

Then what do you suggest would replace it, so the dictionary
can be useful?

	*Muke!
--
website:     http://frath.net/
LiveJournal: http://kohath.livejournal.com/
deviantArt:  http://kohath.deviantart.com/

FrathWiki, a conlang and conculture wiki:
http://wiki.frath.net/


from_name: Stacey Greenstein

subject: [WikiEN-l] Watchlist frozen

body:
My watchlist appears to be frozen at 6:47am EDT. Is there a remedy for this?

en:UtherSRG


from_name: Karl A. Krueger

body:
On Fri, Jul 01, 2005 at 05:24:49AM -0400, Leif Knutsen wrote:
> The argument for creationism (which I don't buy) is that the fossil
> record and other physical evidence leaves unanswered questions in the
> "theory" of evolution.  Hence, they argue, you can't reject
> creationism as a valid form of scientific inquiry.  The fallacy is
> that if one explanation doesn't explain everything, then all other
> explanations are equally valid.

The argument for (Christian) creationism is "The Bible says so."  That
is where creationists ground their beliefs -- not in the fossils; not in
radiocarbon dating; not in taxonomy; not in molecular biology; but first
and foremost in the Bible.  Creationism is a profoundly and centrally
religious belief; trying to understand it as an attempt at scientific
explanation is not going to get you very far.

I do not think you will find a creationist who says, "I believe in
creationism _because_ the fossil record leaves unanswered questions in
the theory of evolution."  After all, if someone merely doubted
evolution they would have no particular reason to jump on the bandwagon
of creationism.  They could instead believe in a steady-state Earth
(uncreated and eternal), or simply say, "I don't know how the species of
Earth came to be."

Creationism cannot be understood as simply "doubting evolution", as if
there were only two possibilities.  Creationism is not simply an absence
of belief in evolution; it is, rather, an asserted belief in creation.
It is also not a belief rooted in science, in evidence or observation,
but rather in faith.  It is a fundamentally religious belief; that is,
it is directly tied up in the believer's belief in and concept of the
divine.

For these reasons, I do not think that we can accurately describe
creationism itself as "a form of scientific inquiry" of any sort --
neither scientific nor pseudoscientific.  The religious beliefs
themselves are no more an attempt at science than are religious beliefs
in karma, angels, salvation, or miracles.

However, it sometimes happens that people who have particular beliefs
make up "science-ish" arguments in favor of them.  This is not unique to
religious beliefs -- political and nationalistic beliefs sometimes
attract this very same behavior.  This is where pseudoscience comes in.
The pseudoscientific arguments conjured up to defend creationism are
usually called "creation science" or "intelligent design"; and they are
every bit as pseudoscientific as Lysenkoism.

--
Karl A. Krueger <kkrueger at whoi.edu>


from_name: Laura K Fisher

body:
On Jul 1, 2005, at 10:24 AM, Karl A. Krueger wrote:

> Creationism cannot be understood as simply "doubting evolution", as if
> there were only two possibilities.  Creationism is not simply an
> absence
> of belief in evolution; it is, rather, an asserted belief in creation.
> It is also not a belief rooted in science, in evidence or observation,
> but rather in faith.  It is a fundamentally religious belief; that is,
> it is directly tied up in the believer's belief in and concept of the
> divine.
>
> For these reasons, I do not think that we can accurately describe
> creationism itself as "a form of scientific inquiry" of any sort --
> neither scientific nor pseudoscientific.  The religious beliefs
> themselves are no more an attempt at science than are religious beliefs
> in karma, angels, salvation, or miracles.
>
> However, it sometimes happens that people who have particular beliefs
> make up "science-ish" arguments in favor of them.  This is not unique
> to
> religious beliefs -- political and nationalistic beliefs sometimes
> attract this very same behavior.  This is where pseudoscience comes in.
> The pseudoscientific arguments conjured up to defend creationism are
> usually called "creation science" or "intelligent design"; and they are
> every bit as pseudoscientific as Lysenkoism.

Yes, exactly.  Creationism in and of itself is not science or
pseudoscience, but Creation Science is pseudoscience because it tries
to sound like science without producing any testable predictions by
which to disprove it.  It is fundamentally faith masquerading as
science.

Laurascudder


from_name: Dan Grey

subject: [WikiEN-l] Intention of Rollback

body:
This query isn't related to the current discussions over requesting
rollback powers, nor is it in regards to an issue on Wikipedia - it's
about something on another project.

What was the original purpose of the Rollback - purely to revert
vandalism? And is it considered bad form to use it to revert
good-faith edits by other editors (not troublemakers)?

Dan


body:
Meeeeoooooowwwmmmm, incoming naive person alert

What's the problem of saying that creationsim is psuedoscience, and
then just pointing to all the books by well-regarded scientists that
state that as the reference? (I have one on my book shelf :-), and I'm
sure there's more ).

Surely that's all that's required under WP:NPOV and WP:CS.

Dan

On 01/07/05, Joseph Reagle <reagle at mit.edu> wrote:
> On Thursday 30 June 2005 21:56, Jtkiefer wrote:
> > > Stating that creationism is pseudoscience is not POV-pushing. Maybe
> > > Intelligent Design, which is a bit more controversial -- but
> > > creationism as in "God created the World", where it makes "scientific"
> > > claims, is pretty much universally regarded as pseudoscience by people
> > > from existing scientific disciplines.
>
> As an aside: I find Perakh and Young's (2004) definition of pseudoscience to
> be useful:
>
> [[ Results for 'Perakh and Young 2004'
>           + Is intelligent design science?
>                o ch=12 p=Rutgers University press bt=Why Intelligent
>                  Design Fails y=2004 e=Matt Young, Taner Edis a=New
>                  Brunswick r=20050209
>                o intelligent design is not bad science like cold fusion
>                  or wrong science like Lamarckian inheritance (Perakh
>                  and Young 2004:185)
>                o some features of pseudoscience
>                     # denial of established fact (e.g., homeotherapy and
>                       young earth creationists) (Perakh and Young
>                       2004:186)
>                     # untestable hypotheses: a theory that explains
>                       everything explains nothing (e.g., astrology)
>                       (Perakh and Young 2004:187)
>                     # tries to "prove that": "a pseudoscientist tries to
>                       prove that something is true; a good scientist
>                       tries to find out whether it is true." (Perakh and
>                       Young 2004:188)
>                     # everyone is wrong but us (Perakh and Young
>                       2004:188)
>                     # other features: never admit to mistakes, made-up
>                       terms and vague concepts (Perakh and Young
>                       2004:189)
> ]]
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Phil Sandifer

body:
You're correct - the second block is an IP address block, designed to
prevent people from just creating a new account.

The only odd thing here is that Nyjoder's parole is phrased as
"block," whereas the standard personal attack parole is usually a
ban. This merits a request for clarification, I think.

-Snowspinner

On Jul 1, 2005, at 12:45 PM, Sam Korn wrote:

>> She is obligated to abide by the injunction, which means making it a
>> 24 hour block.  You don't understand what happened.  It is NOT an
>> intentional feature of the system to auto-reblock for someone hitting
>> 'edit' under their regular account that they were blocked under.
>> It's
>> a bug.
>>
>> That wouldn't even make sense as a feature even if it were
>> intentional (which it's not), because that would mean if someone
>> didn't know they were blocked yet and went to hit 'edit', their block
>> would automatically be reset.  IT also means that if they wanted to
>> check if their block was over or wanted to see the block page again
>> their block would also be reset.
>>
>
> As far as I recall (and if I am wrong, please correct me with
> evidence) that the idea is to encourage problem users (and that is not
> to call you thus) to stay away from wikipedia until their block has
> expired.  I believe it is mostly intended for bans.  I think it is
> also true that it looks at IP addresses, to stop people evading
> blocks.  Forgive me if I am wrong, but I believe that is how it works.
>
> Sam
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Nathan J. Yoder

body:
> You're correct - the second block is an IP address block, designed to
> prevent people from just creating a new account.

Yes, which why this isn't functioning properly.  It should only renew
it if the person tries it while not logged in or if they create/use
another account (a sock puppet) to try to edit (in other words--if
they try to evade the block). That's not what I was doing though, I
was logged in as User:Njyoder the entire time and didn't realize until
later that by hitting 'edit' it automatically renewed it.

> The only odd thing here is that Nyjoder's parole is phrased as
> "block," whereas the standard personal attack parole is usually a
> ban. This merits a request for clarification, I think.

What's the difference?  It's a 24-hour period in which I can't edit
anything in response to an alleged personal attack.

----------------------------------------------
Nathan J. Yoder
http://www.gummibears.nu/
http://www.gummibears.nu/files/njyoder_pgp.key
----------------------------------------------


from_name: James Gibbon

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Proposal: Requests for rollback

body:
On Thu, 30 Jun 2005 11:22:41 -0700
Sean Barrett <sean at epoptic.org> wrote:

> > The current situation seems to be that the people who frequent
> > [[Wikipedia:Requests for adminship]] are quite paranoid with giving
> > out adminship status. Anyone who isn't obviously completely
> > dedicated and who doesn't think of nothing else than Wikipedia's
> > well-being day and night, can't possibly be a suitable admin.
>
> So we should give admin privileges to people who aren't dedicated and
> don't think about Wikipedia's well-being? Huh?

I think you're overlooking the critical phrases "nothing else" and
"day and night".

James

--
Dig It: a forum for European Beatles fans - http://beatles.dyndns.org/


subject: [WikiEN-l] The sandbox incubator

body:
On 7/1/05, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> > What an easy solution might be would to have a wipe every 12 hours of
> > the sandbox main page that also deletes any subpages (except any used
> > for offical uses regarding the sandbox).
>
> letting a bot use admin powers is generaly dissaproved of.
>
>
> --
> geni

I haven't heard anyone complaining about AllyUnions Sandbot.
Technically it doesn't really delete anyway. The sandbox should be
aimed at temporary stuff. There should be no use in storing stuff
there permanently to exploit its "vfd status"

--Mgm


from_name: Anthere

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikimedia Quarto

body:
Hello,

The third Wikimedia Quarto is fully available in english (though not yet
moved to Foundation website :-)). You may find it at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_requests/WQ/3/En/1.
Please do not hesitate to fix typos you might meet :-)

You will find the usual essays, Jimbo's letter, reports of the
Foundation, conference summaries, and updates from the developing
projects. As always, we are open to your suggestions and submissions;
please send letters to newsletter-at-wikimedia.org, or leave comments on
the meta-wiki.

Special thanks to the translators who continue to make this effort such
a far-reaching success, and to the designers who have helped produce the
current clean look.

Anthere


from_name: Rebecca

body:
On 7/1/05, Nathan J. Yoder <njyoder at energon.org> wrote:
> Simplying describing someone's behavior--calling them a hypocrite, is
> NOT a personal attack.  This has been a matter of debate on the no
> personal attacks talk page, especially considering the policy does not
> state what constitutes a personal attack.  The examples given on the
> "no personal attacks" page (the closest thing to a definition) are
> very different things from what I've said and you'd either have to be
> either incredibly stupid or very dishonest to state otherwise.

This is specifically left up to the discretion of the blocking
administrator, and you were specifically warned against wikilawyering
on this issue, so I'm afraid you won't be getting much sympathy from
me.

-- ambi


from_name: Gregory Maxwell

body:
On 7/1/05, Nathan J. Yoder <njyoder at energon.org> wrote:
> Exactly, these suggestions are obviously for the sole purpose of
> allowing a certain clique to perpetually stay in power.

You act like the admins have any real power.. They don't.
The abilities of an admin are fairly limited in scope, and none are
permanent.  Most admins do not derive great joy from the enhanced
access, because every use of it is a chance to be called out and need
to answer to your actions. The community can see how an admin uses
their abilities. People have been deadmined.
There are over 500 admins. Any can undo the action of any other. It
would be ludicrous to claim there was a single large group of this
size that conspired against someone.

In short, adminship *is* no big deal.. even though we make a big deal
of it sometimes.  As a result, don't expect anyone to get to worked up
over your rant. If you've spotted something broken that only an admin
can fix (such as a mistaken administrative action), assume good
faith.. point it out.. and we'll all work together to make things run
better.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Watchlist frozen

body:
Yeah... with over 1300 articles in my watchlist, that's not practical...

On 7/1/05, David Friedland <david at nohat.net> wrote:
>
> As a workaround, you can edit your whole watchlist, copy and paste the
> list of articles to another page. Then make them all [[links]]. Then
> save the page and click "related changes".
>
> - David [[User:Nohat]]
>
> Stacey Greenstein wrote:
> > My watchlist appears to be frozen at 6:47am EDT. Is there a remedy for
> this?
> >
> > en:UtherSRG
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
On 7/1/05, Geoff Burling <llywrch at agora.rdrop.com> wrote:
> As for de-adminning, the only thing I have to add is that admins who
> leave Wikipedia, & fail to make prior arrangements, should lose their
> admin rights after 3-6 months. I see this as just a janitorial action,
> intended to help keep things simpler; & if you leave Wikipedia without
> saying "good-by" or letting anyone know that you'll be back, then
> I feel that person doesn't deserve our trust.

Eh, you don't have to put it like that.. Sometimes duty calls
elsewhere in life.. We're not paid to be here.. However, in active
admin accounts are a bad thing... someone who cracks a few admin
accounts could cause enough damage to keep the developers busy for
days. So we should revoke admin powers on such accounts, but only for
that reason.. not due to a lack of trust.. And we should be liberal in
returning the powers if the user becomes active again.


from_name: Klaus-Eduard Runnel

body:
On 6/30/05, Klaus-Eduard Runnel <klaus.eduard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Maybe someone can think of a way to create automatic links to pages with
> titles differing just by the case of the first letter? E.g. it would be
> helpful to have link to "aa" from the article titled "Aa". I have had no
> success trying to accomplish something like that using the available means
> of mediawiki. That's by the way one of the reasons why not-yet-so-big
> Estonian wiktionary has not switched over to case-sensitivite first letters
> yet.
>
> There could be use for a magic word similar to PAGENAMEE which would
> return the page title with spaces substituted by '+' characters.

Ok, no need for that. Special:Search is the answer to my question. Somehow I
had no idea it existed. The code I was looking for is that simple:

[[{{ns:special}}:Search/{{PAGENAME}}|Search for {{PAGENAME}}]]

Klaus


from_name: Angela

subject: [WikiEN-l] Intention of Rollback

body:
On 7/1/05, Dan Grey <dangrey at gmail.com> wrote:

> What was the original purpose of the Rollback - purely to revert
> vandalism? And is it considered bad form to use it to revert
> good-faith edits by other editors (not troublemakers)?

I asked a similar question (a very long wikitime ago)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Administrators/Archive_4#Question_on_use_of_Rollback_button>

Brion replied:
    "Its intent is solely to be a timesaving shortcut for reverting
mass vandalism."

Reverting good faith edits without explanation shouldn't be done, and
the rollback prevents any explanation, giving the impression that you
are viewing the other person's edits as vandalism, so I would suggest
that it is bad form to use it in that way.

Angela.


body:
On Jul 1, 2005, at 11:46 AM, Geoff Burling wrote:

> In fact, the research of book cataloging systems was a dead science
> until
> Yahoo came along some ten years ago; one friend who is a book
> cataloging
> geek (he actually tried to convince me to let him assign catalog
> numbers
> based on his own scheme to my personal library), sadly remarked no new
> research had been done since the 1930s. It's a case that in the
> English-speaking world, both the Dewey or LC systems are "good enough"
> for their needs. (Those that don't use one of these either follow a
> home-brewed system created in the 19th century, or, as in the case of
> the British Library -- avoid the issue of cataloging, & simply assign
> a shelf number to their books.) And migrating to a new system is an
> unnecessary cost most libraries -- which are perennially short on
> funds -- want to avoid.

I've been in libraries that organized their books by date of
publishing.  While I'm sure that made their lives easier as new books
simply got added to the newest set of shelves, it made finding any
related books a pain.  There's definitely some poorly thought out
systems out there still because no one has the funds or motivation to
do a massive reorganization.

Laura


from_name: Philippe Roth

body:
Bonjour,

Nous utilisons une base wiki 1.3.13 sous Windows 2003, EasyPHP 1.8, Apache 1.3.33, Php 4.3.10 et MySQL 4.1.9.

Nous avons diff?rents articles contenant le mot "probl?me".
Si dans cette base nous faisons une recherche sur "prob*", nous trouvons tous les articles contenant le mot "probl?me".
Bien ;o)

Nous avons install? une version 1.4.5 de mediawiki sur la m?me machine avec les m?mes version de EasyPHP, Apache, Php et MySQL.
Nous avons r?cup?r? la base de la version 1.3.13 et si nous faisons une recherche sur le m?me mot "prob*", aucun article n'est trouv?...:o( Il faut taper le mot en entier "probl?me" pour trouver les articles correspondants...
- M?me en cr?ant une nouvelle base ? z?ro avec de nouveaux articles, le probl?me est identique...
- En utilisant une version 1.4.0, le probl?me apparait aussi...

Nos questions:
- Quel est la diff?rence de gestion de la recherche entre les version 1.3.x et 1.4.x?
- Comment permettre sous une version 1.4.x de faire une recherche sur des mots contenant "*"?
- Faut-il autoriser un agent externe pour effectuer une recherche sous 1.4.x
- Comment configurer?
- Ou peut-on trouver de la doc sur ce probl?me? J'ai cherch?, rien trouv?...

Merci d'avance pour toute information permettant d'?clairer ce probl?me sur lequel nous buttons depuis un bon moment....
Philippe Roth