subject: [WikiEN-l] All information?

body:
On 15/09/05, Alphax <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dan Grey wrote:
> > On 15/09/05, dpbsmith at verizon.net <dpbsmith at verizon.net> wrote:
> >
> >
> >>I thought that there was consensus that Wikipedia a) is an encyclopedia, and
> >>b) is not "an indiscriminate collection of information."
> >
> >
> > I must say, I'm sure I've read: "Imagine a world where every single
> > person is given free access to the sum of human knowledge. We don't
> > have to imagine it. We're doing it" attributed to Jimbo, and I have
> > never squared that with "Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection
> > of information."
> >
>
> Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I think Jimbo said the second one as well.
>
> > Personally, I don't mind indiscriminate information - that's what the
> > whole world wide web is. Search engines like Google have made it their
> > mission to make it usable, and I don't see why Wikipedia need be any
> > different in our little web-within-the-web. (Tagging - which is what
> > our categorisation could be seen as - seems to be the other approach,
> > but as far as I can tell that's more hype than useful).
> >
>
> That violates [[WP:NOT]].

You miss my point. I'm not quite sure why we have WP:NOT, or what
people feel the need for it.

Put it this way: I have the hypothesis that "[[WP:NOR]] and [[WP:V]]
dictate perfectly what should and should not be in WP". Someone prove
that wrong, and I'll come up with a new hypothesis based on that
result :-).

Dan


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Dan Grey

subject: [WikiEN-l] All information?

body:
On 15/09/05, Dan Grey <dangrey at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 15/09/05, Alphax <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Dan Grey wrote:
> > > On 15/09/05, dpbsmith at verizon.net <dpbsmith at verizon.net> wrote:
> > >
> > >
> > >>I thought that there was consensus that Wikipedia a) is an encyclopedia, and
> > >>b) is not "an indiscriminate collection of information."
> > >
> > >
> > > I must say, I'm sure I've read: "Imagine a world where every single
> > > person is given free access to the sum of human knowledge. We don't
> > > have to imagine it. We're doing it" attributed to Jimbo, and I have
> > > never squared that with "Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection
> > > of information."
> > >
> >
> > Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I think Jimbo said the second one as well.
> >
> > > Personally, I don't mind indiscriminate information - that's what the
> > > whole world wide web is. Search engines like Google have made it their
> > > mission to make it usable, and I don't see why Wikipedia need be any
> > > different in our little web-within-the-web. (Tagging - which is what
> > > our categorisation could be seen as - seems to be the other approach,
> > > but as far as I can tell that's more hype than useful).
> > >
> >
> > That violates [[WP:NOT]].
>
> You miss my point. I'm not quite sure why we have WP:NOT, or what
> people feel the need for it.
>
> Put it this way: I have the hypothesis that "[[WP:NOR]] and [[WP:V]]
> dictate perfectly what should and should not be in WP". Someone prove
> that wrong, and I'll come up with a new hypothesis based on that
> result :-).

*!#& I wish e-mail had an "edit" tab. I meant "why people feel the
need for it", of course.

Dan


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Alphax

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia page protection report

body:
Sam Korn wrote:
> On 9/14/05, Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
>
>>* limit protections by policy
>>* add an automated or template-based visible marker to protections in
>>the article namespace
>>* add an "expiry" feature for page protection similar to blocks
>
>
> All three would be highly welcomed by me, speaking as an en admin.
>
> 2 shouldn't be that major a feature, as the code to change "edit this
> page" to "view source" already exists. 1, at least on en, seems to be
> active and working well.  3 would be very welcome indeed, as it is
> very easy to forget a page that you have protected yourself.
>
> I hope someone could code these changes in for 1.6, or whatever the
> next upgrade is going to be.
>

Also, asking for a reason for protection and auto-insert the relevant
"this page is protected because..." template would be nice.

--
Alphax                      |   /"\
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from_name: Tony Sidaway

subject: [WikiEN-l] On notability and speedies

body:
Keith Old writes:

"After all, one of the reasons for Speedy Deletion is that an article has not
established notability of the subject."

No.  Lots of our articles don't *establish* notability, and they're not
speediable at all.  The A7 CSD is for articles that don't *assert*
notability.  If an article contains a (reasonably credible) claim of
notability, that is enough to take it out of the category.  The criterion
is somewhat elastic, but there is apparently some ongoing work to tighten
it, by providing illustrative examples or otherwise.  So if you write an
article "Bobby Moore, a player for West Ham, was the captain of the 1966
World Cup winning England football team", it stop far short of
establishing notability (no references) but it does undeniably *assert*
notability.


list: foundation-l

from_name: Nicholas Moreau

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikisource not working; hopefully all is not lost

body:
Hopefully we have backups of Wikisource's content...

I went to Wikisource to archive some press releases, got this message when I
clicked on the link from the en.wikisource.org
<http://en.wikisource.org>mainpage

The database did not find the text of a page that it should have found,
named "Press".

This is usually caused by following an outdated diff or history link to a
page that has been deleted.

If this is not the case, you may have found a bug in the software. Please
report this to an administrator, making note of the URL.
I tried clicking on other pages, like "Historical documents" and "The Jewish
State", all came up with page specific variants of this message.

Nick Moreau/Zanimum


list: wikimedia-l


from_name: Robert Scott Horning

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikiversity vote for creating a new sister project

body:
I'm not entirely sure if I've done the best job here to get this going,
but at least I'm trying.  As per the schedule that I proposed to earlier
(and got absolutely no objection or notice of any kind about the time to
start this vote) the voting is starting today and will last through
November 1st (that is about six weeks of voting).  We have the
"required" minimum of five different languages for this vote, but it
would be nice to add a couple of other languages for this process as
well... especially Spanish.  If you can help translate especially the
voting page, it would be appreciated.  This is just a simple yes or no
vote if you want to see this project started.  Voting can be done
through this page on meta:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiversity/Vote
(find the language you are most comfortable with)

Please add discussion about the proposal on the main Wikiversity page on
Meta, or in the respective "beta" project pages that have already started.

The following announcement was also translated, so it can be added to
the "water cooler" sections of each sister project, as appropriate for
each language.  I'll try to do it as time permits, and I'm trying to
disseminate this announcement as far and as wide as I can:

    Wikiversity Abstimmung

Die Abstimmung <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiversity/Vote/de> ?ber
das neue Wikimedia Schwesterprojekt Wikiversity
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiversity> hat begonnen. Dies ist ein
Aufruf an alle Interssierten ihre Stimme f?r oder gegen diesen neuen
Projektvorschlag. Das Ergebnis der Abstimmung wird entscheiden, ob
dieses Projekt auf einer eigenen Gruppe von wikis als Wikimedia
Schwesterprojekt gestartet wird (vorausgesetzt, das Board gibt seine
Zustimmung). Diskussionen ?ber den Vorschlag sollten auf der Wikiversity
Diskussionsseite <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikiversity>
stattfinden.

    Wikiversity Vote

Voting <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiversity/Vote/en> has started
for a new Wikimedia sister project proposal called Wikiversity
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiversity>. This is a request for
anybody that is interested to cast a vote either in support or
opposition to this new project proposal. The results of this vote will
determine if this project will be started on its own seperate group of
wikis as a Wikimedia sister project, together with approval from the
Wikimedia Foundation Board. Discussion about this proposal should take
place on the Wikiversity discussion page
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikiversity>.

    Vote Wikiversit?

Un vote a commenc? pour un nouveau projet Wikim?dia qui s'appelle
Wikiversit? <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiversity>. Si vous
approuvez ou opposez ce projet, veuillez exprimer votre suffrage
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiversity/Vote/fr>. Le r?sultat de ce
vote, ainsi que la d?cision du Conseil d'administration, d?terminera si
ou non ce projet commencera comme projet Wikim?dia. D?bat sur la
proposition se trouve sur sa page de discussion
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikiversity>.

    Voto per Wikiversity

Una votazione <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiversity/Vote/it> ?
iniziata per la proposta di un nuovo progetto di Wikimedia chiamato
Wikiversity <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiversity>. Questa ? una
richiesta pet chiunque sia interessato a dare un voto pro o contro
questa nuova proposta di progetto. I risultati di questo voto
determineranno se questo progetto verr? avviato su un gruppo di wiki a
se stante, come progetto di Wikimedia, assieme all'approvazione del
consiglio di amministrazione della Wikimedia Foundation. La discussione
su questa proposta deve svolgersi sulla pagina di discussione di
Wikiversity <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikiversity>.

    Vota??o Wikiversidade

A vota??o <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiversity/Vote/pt> j?
come?ou para um novo projeto da Wikimedia chamado Wikiversidade
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiversity>. Este ? um pedido para
qualquer um que esteja interessado em votar tanto para apoiar quanto
para opor-se a esta nova proposta de projeto. Os resultados dessa
vota??o ir?o determinar se este projeto dever? ser iniciado em seu novo
grupo de wikis separados como projeto da Wikimedia, junto da aprova??o
do Conselho Diretivo da Wikimedia. Discuss?es sobre esta proposta devem
acontecer na p?gina de discuss?o do Wikiversidade
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikiversity>, em ingl?s.

--
Robert Scott Horning


list: textbook-l

subject: [Textbook-l] Wikiversity vote for creating a new sister project


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Afd "votes" with no real reasons given

body:
On 15/09/05, Alphax <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Count the number of articles that go up to AFD every day, and ask
> > yourself if you think its reasonable that everyone write a paragraph
> > - or even a short explanation - on everything they vote for. Simply
> > *voting* on everything would take an hour a day at least.

This is one reason why I see AfD as broken: it's very hard to actually
get a sensible reasoned debate going. One of the advantages of PWDS is
that there is no time limit to reaching consensus on talk pages -
plenty of time for a good-quality discussion. Those articles that are
really do deserve deletion will probably recieve no more attention
after they've gone, unlike where an article on AfD will sometimes get
20+ votes, all "delete" (why do people bother?).

BTW we could still easily list pages which were being debated for
deletion - just have a template with a category in it, and a central
DynamicPageList. Anything blanked without that template being added to
the talk page would be reverted as vandalism.

Dan


subject: [WikiEN-l] On notability and speedies

body:
Tony, any chance you could stop editing the subject when replying?
This debate is fragmented enough already.

Dan


subject: [WikiEN-l] Vandalism concerns with commons images

body:
uninvited at nerstrand.net wrote:
> In an effort to start some serious discussion on this, I present
> herewith some pros and cons of granting some form of commons
> adminship to wikipedia admins (including en, de, fr, and possibly
> other large wikipedis).
>
<snip>
> Cons
>
<snip>
> 3.  The "small wiki" culture at commons would change, and some people
>  who moved to commons due to frustration with the size of their home
>  Wikipedia may find that discouraging.
>

It was the "small wiki" culture at Commons (especially wrt. the number
of administrators) that prompted the following exchange on #wikipedia
(I'm ommitting as much as possible, and I have permission from the other
party to do this):

Me:
> One of the front page templates has been goatsed or something
>
> crap, it's on commons

Them:
> commons admin around?
>
> block
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Mutant_Pig
>
> goatseing the weather image on wikinews
>
> ARGHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!111
>
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Patoo.jpg NSFW
>
> I just find it annoying that we are told to upload our images to
> commons if we can, and then this sort of thing happens
>
> and there is no one available to sort it out

Given that there are a grand total of *77* admins on commons, a few more
(in different timezones, from different projects) couldn't hurt. Commons
is the one place where vandalism can occur that propgates through to
other places, and the "native" admins are powerless to stop it.

--
Alphax                      |   /"\
Encrypted Email Preferred   |   \ /     ASCII Ribbon Campaign
OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613  |    X   Against HTML email & vCards
http://tinyurl.com/cc9up    |   / \


subject: [WikiEN-l] On merging and speedies

body:
geni writes:

"there are a lot of ftse indexs with the exception of couple of them
merging them into one article would be the sensible thing to do."

Yes, I think that's about right.  So instead of speedying an article that
didn't fall into any CSD, the RC patroller here should probably have
tagged it for merge.  I don't think he did such a bad thing by speedying,
but it doesn't seem like a terribly constructive way to handle valuable
information.


from_name: Poe, Marshall

subject: [Foundation-l] New Proposal: WikiMemory

body:
Thanks for the comments, Mav.

In my conception (hardly original or final), Wikimemory would focus on
common, significant, historical *experiences* rather than the
individuals.  The top level categories in Wikimemory would, then, be
historical experiences: "The Vietnam War," "The Cultural Revolution,"
"Encounters with Jimmy Carter," "The Red Sox winning the World Series,"
"The Beatles Final Concert," "Hurricane Katrina" and so on.  Pretty much
anything with a witness, a place, a date and a bit of significance to
"your community" (very broadly defined) would fit.

Both Wikipeople and (to a lesser extent) Wikimemorial seem focused on
individuals, and that seems to me to be a separate, important kind of
information.  Does that make sense?

Linking the experiences recorded in Wikimemory with entries on the
witnesses in Wikipeople is a great idea, though.

Best, Marshall

Marshall Poe, Ph.D.
The Atlantic Monthly
600 New Hampshire Ave. NW
Washington, DC 20037
202-266-6511
mpoe at theatlantic.com


subject: [Foundation-l] New Proposal: WikiMemory


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Wrongly deleted articles from AfD: List of power
	ballads

body:
Jayjg writes:

Re:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/List_of_power_ballads

"The example you have given seems to have been perfectly in order; the
reasons given for deletion are reasonable and policy driven."

I'm afraid we'll have to agree to differ on that.  I think it's clear that
this is a case of an article requiring attention; it appears to fall into
no category on the list of problems that may require deletion.


from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] On merging and speedies

body:
On 9/15/05, Tony Sidaway <minorityreport at bluebottle.com> wrote:
> geni writes:
>
> "there are a lot of ftse indexs with the exception of couple of them
> merging them into one article would be the sensible thing to do."
>
>
>
> Yes, I think that's about right.  So instead of speedying an article that
> didn't fall into any CSD, the RC patroller here should probably have
> tagged it for merge.  I don't think he did such a bad thing by speedying,
> but it doesn't seem like a terribly constructive way to handle valuable
> information.
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

Or we can hope that the person createing substubs (these are not subs)
will get a clue and create [[FTSE listings]]. Frankly putting in a
{{merge}}
 tag would be a lot of effort since I have no idea if a sutible
article to merg too exists. On top of that there is the issue of how
big cleanup catogries tend to be. Once I had a go a storting out
Articles that need to be wikified. by the end of the week I had as far
as makeing sure everything starting with the letter A was either
wikified of on VFD.

--
geni


from_name: Sean Barrett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Images on user pages

body:
Alphax stated for the record:

> geni wrote:
>
>>On 9/16/05, Zachary Harden <zscout370 at hotmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>>Though, one question I wish to ask about images on user pages is that are
>>>they technically orphans?
>>>
>>the softwear doesn't think so
>>
> Pyjamas? :)

You don't wanna be messin' with the pyjamas image.
She is not an orphan, technical or otherwise.

--
  Sean Barrett     | I'm allowed to have a double
  sean at epoptic.com | standard. You aren't.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wrongly deleted articles from AfD: List of power ballads

body:
Dan Grey writes:

"Erm, as you can plainly see it was me who did the deed on that one! It
must've been only the third or fourth AfD I've ever closed. So if you
think I've got it wrong, you know where the undelete link is :-)"

Dan, let me first assure you that, had I also closed that debate, I would
also have felt that I had no choice but to delete, and I would have done
so without hesitation despite my personal feelings.  An administrator who
ignores consensus on such a scale needs a *very* good reason, lest his
actions bring the AfD process into disrepute.

But necessarily I had to choose an article that I think most people could
be persuaded to agree probably could have benefited from, at most, some
aggressive editing.  I've gone in and shaken up articles myself, it's not
so hard (see for instance the article on Biff Rose, which was an almighty
mess when I found it).  If someone went down that list article and
referenced every power ballad with a source for the designation, this
would at least permit readers to make their own mind up on how valid the
designation was.  That's all it would require.  Four or five hundred
songs, I reckon an enthusiastic editor with a tabbing browser could get
through about 100 in an hour, if not more.  I have no doubt that if I'd
done that on day one of the nomination the outcome would have been at
worst a no-consensus keep, and if I'd kept it up for the whole five days
(and I can) there would have been an overwhelming keep vote.


list: wikitech-l

from_name: raman singhj

subject: [Wikitech-l] Sir I want

body:
Sir I want few cds on physiotherapy if u can provide
me then reply soon From Raman
--- wikitech-l-bounces at wikimedia.org
<wikitech-l-request at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Send Wikitech-l mailing list submissions to
> 	wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
>
> To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web,
visit
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
> or, via email, send a message with subject or body
'help' to
> 	wikitech-l-request at wikimedia.org
>
> You can reach the person managing the list at
> 	wikitech-l-owner at wikimedia.org
>
> When replying, please edit your Subject line so it
is more specific
> than "Re: Contents of Wikitech-l digest..."
>
>
> Today's Topics:
>
>    1. Re: Re: Allow one-word editing (Rowan Collins)
>    2. Re: Re: Wikipedia API? (Michal Migurski)
>    3. Re: Re: Wikipedia API? (Brion Vibber)
>    4. RE: Re: Wikipedia API? (Bass, Joshua L)
>    5. Re: create new articles from the search form
(Klaus-Eduard Runnel)
>    6. Re: Wikipedia API? (Edward Z. Yang)
>    7. Re: Wikipedia page protection report (Mark
Williamson)
>    8. Re: Re: Wikipedia API? (Angela)
>    9. Re: Re: Wikipedia API? (Michal Migurski)
>   10. Re: Differential storage (Tim Starling)
>
>
>
----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2005 22:00:46 +0100
> From: Rowan Collins <rowan.collins at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Re: Allow one-word editing
> To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l at wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:
<9f02ca4c0509141400766d4103 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> On 14/09/05, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> > Edward Z. Yang wrote:
> > > The idea is this: with a combination of
> > > Javascript and server side tools, it should be
feasible to double-click
> > > any word on a page and then edit that single
word. This is especially
> > > useful for correcting spelling errors that you
would be too lazy to wade
> > > through an entire section to get to.
> >
> > I'd prefer if it was a sentence rather than a
single word. Sometimes a
> > grammar fix requires changes to multiple words
within a sentence.
>
> Well, here's a really neat idea: how about we let
people edit section
> by section - that way people can do things like
merging sentences too,
> and we don't need to worry about defining a
sentence. Oh, wait... ;)
>
> On a more serious note, I can see that this might be
useful for some
> power users, but it would definitely remain off by
default to avoid
> confusion, and only be turned on by a handful of
people, so may not be
> worth the development and maintenance time if it
required changes to
> the core code.
>
> --
> Rowan Collins BSc
> [IMSoP]
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2005 14:30:52 -0700
> From: Michal Migurski <mike at stamen.com>
> Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Re: Wikipedia API?
> To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l at wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:
<CFCF9D55-4FDB-4DE3-9E53-24453C402CE8 at stamen.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII;
delsp=yes; format=flowed
>
> >>>>> Are there any F/OSS projects that provide such
functionality
> >>>>> without
> >>>>> requiring screen-scraping?
> >>>>
> >>>> No, although the best-maintained
screen-scraping product is
=== Message Truncated ===

__________________________________
Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005
http://mail.yahoo.com


subject: [WikiEN-l] Why changing the deletion process is a bad idea

body:
On 15/09/05, Alphax <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> It's about how much can be written on the subject of the article.
> >> Seriously, how much needs to be written about a minor (or even
> >> major) character in a movie, if they are known for nothing outside
> >> of that movie, and the portrayal of the character in the movie was
> >> unremarkable?
> >
> >
> > Does it matter?
>
> Yes. People look at the articles and say "oh, they've only got 2 lines
> on such and such, and they want me to tell them about it!? What sort of
> encyclopedia is this?" That is the problem with articles which will
> never be (and in some cases, /can never be/) anything more than stubs.

I don't know if Raul was joking when he said "every article is
potentially a feature", but I wouldn't disagree with that.

Anyway, you contradict yourself: if someone looks up a topic and
thinks "they've only got 2 lines on such and such", that implies that
it must be possible for the article to be longer. The alternative is
that it must be stating everything that is known on the subject, in
which case no-one would think the above.

>
> > So far, the only argument advanced to say that it does is that such
> > entries damage Wikipedia's credibility.
>
> It does. The more stubs, the more likely people are to miss the good
> quality stuff.

That doesn't make sense: people come and read what they need/want to.

>
> > With Wikipedia now the most popular reference website in the world,
> > I'd say that Wikipedia no longer has any credibility issues.
>
> Oh, I agree. Wikipedia is still only as credible as the rest of the
> internet - that is, any idiot could have written it.

We do encourage the citing of sources - and reliable ones, at that.

>
> > There may still be some whiney critics around, but no-one is
> > listening to them, clearly!
> >
>
> You call librarians and educators "whiney critics whom no-one listens to"?

Eh? Which "librarians and educators" are critics?

Dan


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] fr, nl, ja wikipedias locked

body:
nl.wikipedia.org is back online, and seems ok. The others will follow
shortly.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [WikiEN-l] On notability and speedies

body:
On 15/09/05, Dan Grey <dangrey at gmail.com> wrote:
> Tony, any chance you could stop editing the subject when replying?
> This debate is fragmented enough already.

Gah, I should add that it's *fragmented for Gmail users*, in that
mails with the same subject line get put in lovely "conversations"
(just like threads in a forum), and if you edit the subject it gets
broken.

Dan


from_name: James D. Forrester

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Anglo-Saxon Wikipedia

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

James R. Johnson wrote:

> The Anglo-Saxon Wikipedia, with the article "Staer Floridan"
> (History of Florida) just passed the 500 article mark.

Congratulations. Keep up the good work.

Yours sincerely,
- --
James D. Forrester
Wikimedia : [[W:en:User:Jdforrester|James F.]]
E-Mail    : james at jdforrester.org
IM (MSN)  : jamesdforrester at hotmail.com
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subject: [WikiEN-l] On merging and speedies

body:
geni writes:

"Or we can hope that the person createing substubs (these are not subs)
will get a clue and create [[FTSE listings]]."

It isn't going to happen.  Moreover it seems to run against the wiki
philosophy.  Article creation is *supposed* to be cooperative.  If an
editor comes along and decides something needs merging, he should do it.
He can hardly do it if someone speedies it in the meantime!

I'd take issue with your designation of the share index article as a
substub.  The article was short, but that didn't stop it explaining
adequately what the index is and giving an external link as a reference
from which it could be extended indefinitely.  Thus it cannot possibly be
described as a substub.

By the way, I take issue with one or two of the example substubs on the
Wikipedia:Substub article.  For instance: "Anthony J. Drexel Biddle (1876
- 1948) was the man the play and film The Happiest Millionaire was based
upon" is a perfectly good stub.  It gives Biddle's full name and his
lifespan, and an inkling of where you might have heard that name before
(The Happiest Millionnaire is a fictionalized biography and features
Biddle under that name).  The stub is already useful in itself, and
absolutely nothing else would be required for any reasonably competent
editor to expand it indefinitely.

Once I had a go a storting out
Articles that need to be wikified. by the end of the week I had as far
as makeing sure everything starting with the letter A was either
wikified of on VFD.

Well yes, but that's because there's only one of you and the Library of
Babel is truly vast.  If you found any dross in there I hope you tagged it
for deletion. If you didn't then the fact that the text wasn't (horrors!)
wikified doesn't detract so much from its informational value that this
must be viewed as a serious problem.  Every article has a search box into
which the reader can type anything he wants to know about.


from_name: Ashar Voultoiz

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: XML dump not well-formed because of unicode

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> Brion Vibber wrote:
>
>>>Now filed as http://bugzilla.ximian.com/show_bug.cgi?id=76095
>>>
>>>Will see about fixing...
>>
>>Have submitted a patch. The next dump should be correct.
>
>
> Patch accepted into Mono subversion repository. These guys are fast. :)
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Added that to our bugzilla:
  http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3473

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


subject: [WikiEN-l] On merging and speedies

body:
On 9/15/05, Tony Sidaway <minorityreport at bluebottle.com> wrote:
> geni writes:
> It isn't going to happen.  Moreover it seems to run against the wiki
> philosophy.  Article creation is *supposed* to be cooperative.  If an
> editor comes along and decides something needs merging, he should do it.
> He can hardly do it if someone speedies it in the meantime!

perhaps but we have ask if the person is better off working from a
null base or this stuff.

> I'd take issue with your designation of the share index article as a
> substub.  The article was short, but that didn't stop it explaining
> adequately what the index is and giving an external link as a reference
> from which it could be extended indefinitely.  Thus it cannot possibly be
> described as a substub.
>

Did it explain what FTSE meant? did it give any information that could
not be figured out from the title?

> By the way, I take issue with one or two of the example substubs on the
> Wikipedia:Substub article.  For instance: "Anthony J. Drexel Biddle (1876
> - 1948) was the man the play and film The Happiest Millionaire was based
> upon" is a perfectly good stub.  It gives Biddle's full name and his
> lifespan, and an inkling of where you might have heard that name before
> (The Happiest Millionnaire is a fictionalized biography and features
> Biddle under that name).  The stub is already useful in itself, and
> absolutely nothing else would be required for any reasonably competent
> editor to expand it indefinitely.
>

Is that still around?

> Well yes, but that's because there's only one of you and the Library of
> Babel is truly vast.  If you found any dross in there I hope you tagged it
> for deletion. If you didn't then the fact that the text wasn't (horrors!)
> wikified doesn't detract so much from its informational value that this
> must be viewed as a serious problem.  Every article has a search box into
> which the reader can type anything he wants to know about.
>

nah for the most part if it was dross I just left the other cleanup
tags in place ( I still think they should include an element of
apology).

--
geni


from_name: Guettarda

subject: [WikiEN-l] On speedying "halfway decent stubs"

body:
On 9/15/05, Tony Sidaway <minorityreport at bluebottle.com> wrote:
>
> Phroziac wrote:
>
>
> "They're halfway decent stubs, but we really don't need a lot of one
> line articles, and we probably really didn't loose anything by
> deleting them."
>
>
> We probably should not be speedying "halfway decent stubs". Speedy
> deletion is supposedly for complete junk, stuff that cannot be salvaged by
> editing because it shouldn't be on Wikipedia in the first place. Thanks
> for undeleting the Alberta lake one.

The very thought of speedying a halfway decent stub strikes me as both a
very bad idea, and very dangerous to the encyclopaedia. How many featured
articles started out as stubs?


from_name: f crdfa

subject: [WikiEN-l] On merging and speedies

body:
I hope this thing works better. Apologies for the change of email address.

On 9/15/05, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 9/15/05, Tony Sidaway <minorityreport at bluebottle.com> wrote:
> > geni writes:
> > It isn't going to happen. Moreover it seems to run against the wiki
> > philosophy. Article creation is *supposed* to be cooperative. If an
> > editor comes along and decides something needs merging, he should do it.
> > He can hardly do it if someone speedies it in the meantime!
>
> perhaps but we have ask if the person is better off working from a
> null base or this stuff.

Oh give me a stub any day. It performs three useful functions: firstly it
provides information to readers, secondly it provides a basis for further
research and expansion (or merging) and thirdly it notifies editors of a
piece of verifiable information that (probably) belongs somewhere on
Wikipedia. If we left the job of thinking up new articles to me, we'd end up
with nothing but articles about odd programming languages.

> I'd take issue with your designation of the share index article as a
> > substub. The article was short, but that didn't stop it explaining
> > adequately what the index is and giving an external link as a reference
> > from which it could be extended indefinitely. Thus it cannot possibly be
> > described as a substub.
> >
>
> Did it explain what FTSE meant? did it give any information that could
> not be figured out from the title?

It did not explain what FTSE meant, but it did adequately describe the
index. I must confess that the title looks like gobbledygook to me so
subjectively I feel that none of the information can be figured out from the
title by the average non-specialist reader.

I've had arguments with geogre over this. He apparently thinks that "The Old
Man that the Sea is a book by Ernest Hemingway" would a substub because,
being an academic, he thinks everybody knows the book. I take what I think
is a more realistic approach: it's a clearly inadequate stub but it does
give useful information that someone unfamiliar with American literature
would surely not know. I checked this on my family. My wife knows the title
and associates it with Hemingway. My children, both in their late teens, had
never heard of it and couldn't even hazard a guess about what it might be.
To them the information in geogre's "substub" would be incomplete but
useful.

I'd hazard a guess that there are many more people in the world who fall
into that class of people who haven't a clue about Hemingway's works than is
generally realised. An avid reader of British and French novels, I don't
believe I even got as far into American literature as Melville until I was
in my twenties. This was a shame, but for British readers it is a fact of
life that American novels are not as widely appreciated as their literary
value would merit. I would say that probably more British people know about,
and have read, Salman Rushdie than John Updyke.


from_name: Sam Korn

body:
On 9/15/05, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
> And how exactly are you going to determine there's consensus to delete
> articles that deserve deletion if you don't get 20+ delete votes?

By getting four or five.  With unanimity, that's plenty.

Sam


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Foundation-l] New Proposal: WikiMemory

body:
--- daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:
> I like this idea as a repository of knowledge. Oral history is a remarkable
> tool, when used correctly, as it personalizes major events and provides
> insights  into events that would not otherwise be available to researchers.
> Furthermore,  we live in one of the most exciting periods in history, with
> outstanding events  that need recording before the people who witnessed them
> are no longer around to  tell their story.

I'm still not convinced this should be separate from the Wikipeople/Wikimorial
idea (oral histories can be sub-pages off of articles on the individuals giving
the history), but as the official Wikimedia cybersquater, I went ahead and
registered wikimemory.org and hereby give that domain to the foundation (it's
already in the foundation's GoDaddy account so physical transfer is already
complete).

I see that wikimemory.com has already been registered by Marshall Poe. Good.

-- mav

__________________________________
Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005
http://mail.yahoo.com


subject: [Foundation-l] New Proposal: WikiMemory


body:
>(why do people bother?).
>
> Dan

painless method of edit count bosting

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] On notability and speedies

body:
On 9/15/05, Keith Old <keithold at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Tony,
>
> Fair point in that I used the words wrongly
>
> However, I feel that my words have been taken out of context. I was
> responding to a admin who was claiming that the word notable should not be
> used in AfD discussions and he would speedy keep any votes in which the
> word
> was used.
>
> My point was, and remains, that notability is a central concept in AfD
> discussions as much as verifiability.

No. With the exception of biographical articles, attempts to incorporate
notability into the deletion policy have repeatedly failed. Verifiability is
rightly central to all wikipedia editing policy. Notability is and will
likely remain an ill-defined concept, only grudgingly accepted, if that.

There is a fairly large minority of Wikipedians who follow a precept
articulated once by Jimbo Wales: that when people use the word notability,
what they're really getting at is verifiability. An obscure individual about
whom nothing can be ascertained except what he himself, or his mother, wrote
into a Wikipedia article, can be described as non-notable in that sense.

That is not a widely accepted meaning of the word--far from it--but I think
it's the only one that even comes close to a useful definition. It would
only gain anything like wide acceptance if we could agree on a method of
quantifying the verifiable information available, and I fear that would be
far too ambitious a project for this little encyclopedia.

If a user wishes to assert that the
> article is worthy of an A7 speedy delete on the grounds that it isn't
> notable, it should be open for him or her to do so.

Absolutely not. The A7 speedy says nothing about whether an article is
notable, only whether it contains an assertion of notability. This is,
unless that CSD is changed, non-negotiable.


subject: [WikiEN-l] On merging and speedies

body:
On 9/15/05, f crdfa <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:

> It did not explain what FTSE meant, but it did adequately describe the
> index. I must confess that the title looks like gobbledygook to me so
> subjectively I feel that none of the information can be figured out from the
> title by the average non-specialist reader.

Not an expert and I've never studief the area but could get everyhting
from the title. wikipedia is not a dictionary

> I've had arguments with geogre over this. He apparently thinks that "The Old
> Man that the Sea is a book by Ernest Hemingway" would a substub because,
> being an academic, he thinks everybody knows the book. I take what I think
> is a more realistic approach: it's a clearly inadequate stub but it does
> give useful information that someone unfamiliar with American literature
> would surely not know. I checked this on my family. My wife knows the title
> and associates it with Hemingway. My children, both in their late teens, had
> never heard of it and couldn't even hazard a guess about what it might be.
> To them the information in geogre's "substub" would be incomplete but
> useful.

perhaps but consider if a follow a link to it hopeing for a real
amount of information I'm not going to be best pleased.

--
geni


list: commons-l

subject: [Commons-l] Re: Trademarks

body:
Claus F?rber wrote:
> Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> schrieb/wrote:
>
>>The core goal of Commons is maximal reuse.
>
>
> Maximal reuse might result in minial content.
>
> I think every restriction should be evaluated to determine whether the
> image is still "free enough".
>
> With copyright, that's quite easy: Copyright restricts nearly every act
> of redistribution, so it makes sense to require that images and other
> media need to have a "free license".[1]
>
> On the other hand, trademarks only restricts labelling products with the
> image or impersonating the owner, i.e. "trademarkish" use. IMO(!),
> that's still "free enough".
>
> Further, there's a conflict if you include "trademarkish" use within the
> maximal reuse goal of Wikimedia: If someone really starts to use an
> image on Commons as a trademark, it's likely to become protected as a
> trademark (and incompatible with the maximal reuse goal).
>
> Finally, there are some practical problems with a strict no-trademark
> policy. As everything can be trademarked, you would have to do regular
> trademark searches with every trademark registry. You can't ask the
> author/source of an image (especially if it's PD or depicts something
> found in nature) and there are very few things that can't be trademarked
> (and virtually none the upload of which to Commons makes sense).
>
>

Agreed. This makes perfect sense to me.

--
Alphax                      |   /"\
Encrypted Email Preferred   |   \ /     ASCII Ribbon Campaign
OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613  |    X   Against HTML email & vCards
http://tinyurl.com/cc9up    |   / \


subject: [WikiEN-l] On notability and speedies

body:
On 9/15/05, Keith Old <keithold at gmail.com> wrote:

> The point is that my street is probably not of any interest to anyone living
> outside the suburb of Hughes in the ACT, Australia and there shouldn't be an
> article on it in Wikipedia. Thus notability has evolved to be a key issue as
> to whether or not articles are worthy of retention.
>

probably because speedy covers so much now (although I still want to
expand it to cover obvious copyvios)

--
geni


body:
ja.wikipedia.org and fr.wikipedia.org are now back online as well. All
should be working, with all data retained from the 11 hours with the
server misconfigured.

It's possible that some pages may require manually flushing
(?action=purge) if they show incorrect cached versions.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Ryan Delaney

body:
On 9/15/05, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> I meant to respond to Ryan on this. As a AfD closer, I do expect all
> participants in the debate to spend a few minutes, or whatever it takes,
> reading the article, and then read the other comments in the debate, and
> have a bit of a poke around the subject, possibly look at the article
> history. If they're not doing at least the first two of those, they're not
> making an informed comment. If I see them write a few words in the context
> of the debate, I'm happier that there has been an informed discussion.

I don't think it's your business to decide what is and isn't an "informed
decision". The person casting the vote thought their decision was informed
enough or they wouldn't be voting. If you think someone isn't well informed,
you inform them. You don't just discard their votes without comment.

- Ryan


from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

body:
>  Those articles that are
> really do deserve deletion will probably recieve no more attention
> after they've gone, unlike where an article on AfD will sometimes get
> 20+ votes, all "delete" (why do people bother?).
And how exactly are you going to determine there's consensus to delete
articles that deserve deletion if you don't get 20+ delete votes?


from_name: SPUI

subject: [WikiEN-l] Article deletion

body:
MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
> I was talking about an argument that doesn't involve anything de facto.
> While most people consider presidents clearly notable, I explained the
> reasons you could use to point it out.
>
> My government also designates whether the field behind my house will
> be designated as a residential area or a green place. That doesn't
> neccesarily mean the place warrants an article.
>
> It's exactly the comments that claim a certain category of articles is
> worth an entry by default (or not) that I'm trying to avoid here.
> Those are the cause of endless inclusionist vs. deletionist debates.
>
> Can you actually point out any reasons that don't depend on de facto
> or by default notability?

The state has decided to spend money not only to buy the right-of-way
and maintain the road but to post markers that indicate that to the
public and help them identify the road as a more important road. That to
me says "notable".


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Wrongly deleted articles from AfD: List of power
	ballads

body:
I think the term "unmaintainable list" is quite fuzzy and unclear.
There's numerous lists which will likely never be fully complete, but
still a source of useful information.

Maybe unmaintainable needs to be clarified more and consolidated with
keeping of valid information. If all the articles have articles and
the list doesn't provide any info apart from the songs themselves and
not the artist or year, for example, it could've been made into a
category.

Not because some people find lists to be obsolete with categories, but
simply because it would work in this particular case.

--Mgm


body:
Nicholas Moreau wrote:
[snip]

This was fixed some hours ago. Please use http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/
to report problems.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
Nicholas Moreau wrote:
[snip]

This was fixed some hours ago. Please use http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/
to report problems.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
Nicholas Moreau wrote:
[snip]

This was fixed some hours ago. Please use http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/
to report problems.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
Nicholas Moreau wrote:
[snip]

This was fixed some hours ago. Please use http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/
to report problems.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [WikiEN-l] On merging and speedies

body:
> Oh give me a stub any day. It performs three useful functions: firstly it
> provides information to readers, secondly it provides a basis for further
> research and expansion (or merging) and thirdly it notifies editors of a
> piece of verifiable information that (probably) belongs somewhere on
> Wikipedia. If we left the job of thinking up new articles to me, we'd end up
> with nothing but articles about odd programming languages.
A lot of stubs fail to be verifiable and don't cite any references.
But the main problem I have with stubs is the location they're put at.
For example (totally random), someone could've written a stub about
Alice at the Mad Hatter's tea party and name the article "Tea Party",
causing immediate work for others.

1) It's miscapitalized.
2) It's already covered elsewhere. They fail to see the big picture,
search if we've already got the info at the most likely place ([[Alice
in Wonderland]])
3) Anyone looking for info on the mad hatter's tea party can end up at
the stub, when in fact we have loads more info elsewhere hidden by the
fact the reader found the stub.
4) Wikipedia shouldn't be about article creation, it should be about
structuring the incoming stuff in a logical way and place it were
readers should be looking at it.

You could write a stub about DNA structure. But if someone can't find
an article there, shouldn't it be reasonable to assume they search in
DNA next?

--Mgm


from_name: Tony Sidaway

subject: [WikiEN-l] Votes for undeletion

body:
It has come to my notice that, contrary to undeletion policy, there is a
fashion on Votes for Undeletion for citing "Valid AfD" (shorthand for
"validly closed debate on Articles for Deletion"). The citation of the
undeletion policy had apparently also been edited to remove reference to the
possibility of petitioning for undeletion on the grounds that a valid
argument had been ignored.

Since Undeletion Policy is an official policy which all editors are expected
to follow, I have replaced the inaccurate description of the purpose of the
page, quoting the undeletion policy.

If there is a consensus to change official Wikipedia policy, this should be
determined by discussion widely advertised and with broad participation;
unfortunately this little corner of Wikipedia seems to harbor editors with
other ideas. If undeletion policy doesn't suit them, they just ignore it.


subject: [Foundation-l] New Proposal: WikiMemory

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Well the idea is to also focus on events where lots of people died. Not unlike
> what the Sep11wiki was supposed to be but not focused on any one event.

Those pages were created on www.wikipedia.com as part of Wikipedia.

sep11.wikipedia.org was created long after the fact to archive the
various September 11 experience- or memorial-type pages from English
Wikipedia before they finally got deleted there, as a lot of people felt
it was inappropriate or disrespectful to just delete them permanently
without saving them (which a lot of other people wanted to do and had
started actively trying to do).

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Foundation-l] New Proposal: WikiMemory

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Well the idea is to also focus on events where lots of people died. Not unlike
> what the Sep11wiki was supposed to be but not focused on any one event.

Those pages were created on www.wikipedia.com as part of Wikipedia.

sep11.wikipedia.org was created long after the fact to archive the
various September 11 experience- or memorial-type pages from English
Wikipedia before they finally got deleted there, as a lot of people felt
it was inappropriate or disrespectful to just delete them permanently
without saving them (which a lot of other people wanted to do and had
started actively trying to do).

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Foundation-l] New Proposal: WikiMemory

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Well the idea is to also focus on events where lots of people died. Not unlike
> what the Sep11wiki was supposed to be but not focused on any one event.

Those pages were created on www.wikipedia.com as part of Wikipedia.

sep11.wikipedia.org was created long after the fact to archive the
various September 11 experience- or memorial-type pages from English
Wikipedia before they finally got deleted there, as a lot of people felt
it was inappropriate or disrespectful to just delete them permanently
without saving them (which a lot of other people wanted to do and had
started actively trying to do).

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Foundation-l] New Proposal: WikiMemory

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Well the idea is to also focus on events where lots of people died. Not unlike
> what the Sep11wiki was supposed to be but not focused on any one event.

Those pages were created on www.wikipedia.com as part of Wikipedia.

sep11.wikipedia.org was created long after the fact to archive the
various September 11 experience- or memorial-type pages from English
Wikipedia before they finally got deleted there, as a lot of people felt
it was inappropriate or disrespectful to just delete them permanently
without saving them (which a lot of other people wanted to do and had
started actively trying to do).

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Fastfission

subject: [WikiEN-l] Images on user pages

body:
On 9/15/05, Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Now I think I understand where you are coming from. Correct me if I'm wrong,
> but you think that having NC and special use images displayed on a page whose
> text is licensed under the GNU FDL to be legally incompatible or even illegal.

No, I understand that images and text can be separately licensed.
Hence all of the image tags.

My basic point is this, and I'll leave it at this: we should either
have an explicit exception laid out to user pages (can have NC images,
for example) or we should not. Having a policy of informal tolerance
is not useful and not necessary. If there are exceptions, they should
be worked out formally. I don't think we should give anybody the idea
that they actually have a proprietary right to their user page -- it
is hosted by the project, its purpose is for the project, and it can
be redistributed like the project.

I am not trying to discourage community-building in any way. But I
think we should figure out what exactly a user page "is" and what we
allow or don't allow on it in a concrete sense.

> Where has such use been intentional? I've only seen cases where a reuser also
> publishes user pages just because they were included along with articles.

I don't know about intentionality. But I think the horror which spread
across this list when it was discovered that the Nazipedia had picked
up user pages and had people with their names proudly proclaiming how
they were loyal Nazipedia users was ample illustration enough of what
I'm talking about.

I think there are a number of dangers (none of them legal!) with
thinking that user pages are separate "personal" spaces if they
technologically and substantially aren't... and I think having them be
exceptions in any regards, including image licensing policies, should
be codified one way or the other. Those are just my two cents,
though...

FF


body:
On 9/15/05, Sam Korn <smoddy at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/15/05, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
> > And how exactly are you going to determine there's consensus to delete
> > articles that deserve deletion if you don't get 20+ delete votes?
>
> By getting four or five.  With unanimity, that's plenty.
>
> Sam
>
Yeah, it is. But how are you going to get comments if people see a
blanked article and think "Good riddance"?


subject: [WikiEN-l] Article deletion

body:
geni wrote:
> On 9/16/05, SPUI <drspui at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>The state has decided to spend money not only to buy the right-of-way
>>and maintain the road but to post markers that indicate that to the
>>public and help them identify the road as a more important road. That to
>>me says "notable".
>
> sorvrin states have spent money on may things over the years. That
> doesn't make them notable.

And I claim that they are notable if they are marked highways. Want to
have this argument on every fucking vfd for a state highway?


from_name: Laura Scudder

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Images on user pages

body:
IANAL, but wouldn't icons such as
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Nuvola_apps_licq.png be
trademarked still?

Laurascudder

On 9/15/05, Alphax <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> Jimmy Wales wrote:
> > Alphax wrote:
> >
> >>Well, the Firefox and Wikipedia logos are both copyrighted and
> >>trademarked. Recreating them from scratch would at least solve the first
> >>issue.
> >
> >
> > That's just wrong.  Recreating them from scratch would not solve the
> > first issue at all.
> >
> > That's like saying that if I type in all of a Harry Potter book from
> > scratch, it's no longer copyrighted.
> >
>
> Argh, I meant in the same style, not the exact same thing... so if
> someone created an image of white globe with a chunk taken out of the
> top and letters all over it, and an orange stylised fox wrapped around
> it... would that be any better?
>
> > Please, I ask people, don't speculate on legal matters unless and until
> > you've learned more about them.
> >
>
> As an aside: I've replaced some of the images in question (at least on
> [[User:NSR/userboxes]] with icons from the Nuvola icon set for KDE
> (shameless plug: these are going on Commons, linked from
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Nuvola), which are licensed under the
> LGPL, so if anyone wants to complain about the copyright or whatever on
> them, they can ask David Vignoni (the author) about them.
>
> --
> Alphax                      |   /"\
> Encrypted Email Preferred   |   \ /     ASCII Ribbon Campaign
> OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613  |    X   Against HTML email & vCards
> http://tinyurl.com/cc9up    |   / \
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Alphax

subject: [WikiEN-l] User Pages

body:
Terry Bader wrote:
> Referring to this user page - User:Matt von Furrie; is his statement
> at the top of the page allowed on Wikipedia?  I thought all content
> was supposed to be at a minimum GDFL which includes user spaces?
>

Well, it was based on [[User:Halibutt]], which says "This content is
meaningful only on Wikipedia.org". [[User:Matt von Furrie]] says "This
content is restricted to Wikipedia.org", which is clearly not allowed.

--
Alphax                      |   /"\
Encrypted Email Preferred   |   \ /     ASCII Ribbon Campaign
OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613  |    X   Against HTML email & vCards
http://tinyurl.com/cc9up    |   / \


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Images on user pages

body:
For instance, for the Netscape icon
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Nuvola_apps_netscape.png we
apparently can only use it in limited cases and are supposed to
include the text:

"Netscape, Netscape Certificater Server, Netscape FastTrack Server,
Netscape Navigator, Netscape ONE, SuiteSpot, and the Netscape N and
Ship's Wheel logos are registered trademarks of Netscape
Communications Corporation in the United States and other countries.
[List other Netscape product names used in your document] are also
trademarks of Netscape Communications Corporation, which may be
registered in other countries." (from
http://wp.netscape.com/legal_notices/trademarks.html)

So it would seem to me that we shouldn't have the trademarked images
that we can only use in limited cases anyways.

Laurascudder

On 9/15/05, Laura Scudder <laurascudder at gmail.com> wrote:
> IANAL, but wouldn't icons such as
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Nuvola_apps_licq.png be
> trademarked still?
>
>
> Laurascudder
>
> On 9/15/05, Alphax <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Jimmy Wales wrote:
> > > Alphax wrote:
> > >
> > >>Well, the Firefox and Wikipedia logos are both copyrighted and
> > >>trademarked. Recreating them from scratch would at least solve the first
> > >>issue.
> > >
> > >
> > > That's just wrong.  Recreating them from scratch would not solve the
> > > first issue at all.
> > >
> > > That's like saying that if I type in all of a Harry Potter book from
> > > scratch, it's no longer copyrighted.
> > >
> >
> > Argh, I meant in the same style, not the exact same thing... so if
> > someone created an image of white globe with a chunk taken out of the
> > top and letters all over it, and an orange stylised fox wrapped around
> > it... would that be any better?
> >
> > > Please, I ask people, don't speculate on legal matters unless and until
> > > you've learned more about them.
> > >
> >
> > As an aside: I've replaced some of the images in question (at least on
> > [[User:NSR/userboxes]] with icons from the Nuvola icon set for KDE
> > (shameless plug: these are going on Commons, linked from
> > http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Nuvola), which are licensed under the
> > LGPL, so if anyone wants to complain about the copyright or whatever on
> > them, they can ask David Vignoni (the author) about them.
> >
> > --
> > Alphax                      |   /"\
> > Encrypted Email Preferred   |   \ /     ASCII Ribbon Campaign
> > OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613  |    X   Against HTML email & vCards
> > http://tinyurl.com/cc9up    |   / \
> > _______________________________________________
> > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> >
>


from_name: daniwo59 at aol.com

subject: [Foundation-l] New Proposal: WikiMemory

body:
I like this idea as a repository of knowledge. Oral history is a remarkable
took, when used correctly, as it personalizes major events and provides
insights  into events that would not otherwise be available to researchers.
Furthermore,  we live in one of the most exciting periods in history, with outstanding
events  that need recording before the people who witnessed them are no
longer around to  tell their story.

I would support a project like this, however, I would ask that it follow
certain strict guidelines so as to help sift through the  stories.


subject: [Foundation-l] New Proposal: WikiMemory


from_name: Andrew Gray

body:
On 15/09/05, SPUI <drspui at gmail.com> wrote:

> >  If you want to fix that, you either expand the CSD, so stuff that doesn't
> > need deliberation won't waste everyone's time, or you implement pure wiki
> > deletion, so this whole problem goes away entirely. Right now, if band and
> > business vanity, link spam, personal essays, and neologisms were all covered
> > by CSD (which they aren't), you could cut the amount of articles going up to
> > AFD by up to 1/3.
>
> Redirects are fun, easy, and boost your edit count!

Indeed. Wikiwax is your friend here...

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


from_name: BJörn Lindqvist

subject: [WikiEN-l] That's a Micropaedia

body:
> >Actually on "one-line articles", my preference
> >is for articles (or at least article intros)
> >that can fit into the first screen. This is an
> >internet encyclopedia and if you can't say
> >something useful in the first
> >paragraph then the reader will wander off
> >to another site.  If an article
> >can be written well as a single sentence,
> >I think that's a good
> >thing--indeed an ideal to aim for.
>
> "Article intros that can fit into the first screen." Oh, absolutely, by all
> means.
>
> Now I'm going to pretend that I didn't read that key qualification and tear
> off onto a rant.
>
> ARTICLES that can fit into one screen? No, no, no. That's not an
> encyclopedia, that's the Britannica MICROpaedia.
>
> An encyclopedia is not about data, it's about knowledge.
>
> An encyclopedia's job is to make knowledge _accessible_. An encyclopedia
> explains. An encyclopedia _instructs_. That's what the "-pedia" part is all
> about. An encyclopedia is supposed to synthesize and make sense of topics.

And this is where I stopped reading your mail, which I found to be way
to long. I (and almost everyone else) do the same thing for articles.

-- Mvh Bj?rn


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Is it possible to download wikipedia images using
	FTP connection?

body:
Darwin Sadeli wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I just wondered, since I failed to download the wikipedia image dump
> using HTTP connection, do you provide an FTP server and port for us to
> download using FTP
> connection. Or maybe, is there any other methods of downloading the
> file besides using HTTP connection? Thank you in advance for your
> assistance.
>
> Regards,
> Darwin Sadeli

FTP, and we can probably provide a bittorrent tracker to save up some
bandwith.

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


from_name: Ben E.

subject: [WikiEN-l] User Pages

body:
I'll do it. One has to simply tell him that his heading is not allowed per
the licensing requirements of Wikipedia. We can ask him to take it down. If
he doesn't, per [[Wikipedia:User pages]] or something like that, another
user can remove it. Heading over to talk page as we speak.

--[[en:user:Bratsche|Ben]].

On 9/15/05, Terry Bader <bader at tcbader.com> wrote:
>
> So being the noob, what guidance would you or the list give about this?
> Should I just edit it? I could post on his Talk page but I have a feeling he
> is not a "team" player as he has told another user I know to never post on
> "his" Talk page(s) (he has another user account as well). I just think he is
> going to be difficult and not being verse in all that is wiki would rather
> ask here for guidance.
>
> ~Terry
>
> ----------------------------------------
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> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] User Pages
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>
> Terry Bader wrote:
> > Referring to this user page - User:Matt von Furrie; is his statement
> > at the top of the page allowed on Wikipedia? I thought all content
> > was supposed to be at a minimum GDFL which includes user spaces?
> >
>
> Well, it was based on [[User:Halibutt]], which says "This content is
> meaningful only on Wikipedia.org <http://Wikipedia.org>". [[User:Matt von
> Furrie]] says "This
> content is restricted to Wikipedia.org <http://Wikipedia.org>", which is
> clearly not allowed.
>
> --
> Alphax | /"\
> Encrypted Email Preferred | \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign
> OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613 | X Against HTML email & vCards
> http://tinyurl.com/cc9up | / \
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
Bratsche-It means "viola!"


subject: [WikiEN-l] Seals and Commons

body:
On 9/14/05, David Benbennick <dbenbenn at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Personally, I'd shoot at first suspicion that something was not really
> > in the public domain
>
> Perhaps that's why you aren't given a gun.

...and have never asked for one!

FF


subject: [WikiEN-l] User Pages

body:
Yeah, I just figured this out. Maybe I'll wait until tomorrow. Shucks!

--[[en:User:Bratsche|Ben]]

On 9/15/05, Alphax <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Ben E. wrote:
> > I'll do it. One has to simply tell him that his heading is not allowed
> per
> > the licensing requirements of Wikipedia. We can ask him to take it down.
> If
> > he doesn't, per [[Wikipedia:User pages]] or something like that, another
> > user can remove it. Heading over to talk page as we speak.
> >
>
> Good luck; the database is locked - see http://tinyurl.com/cseoo
>
> --
> Alphax | /"\
> Encrypted Email Preferred | \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign
> OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613 | X Against HTML email & vCards
> http://tinyurl.com/cc9up | / \
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
Bratsche-It means "viola!"


from_name: steve v

subject: [WikiEN-l] Committees (Afd "votes")

body:
Tony's alluding to issue of simple gaming of the
system. Its something we dont generally think is a big
problem, but there are certain cases in VFD/AFD which
seem out of balance with our prime directives.
The Lost_Liberty_Hotel article, for example was a
total piece of dog shit from the beginning, and should
still be deleted --and thats coming from someone
rather sympathetic those concerned by the issues
raised by the Kelo case descision.

While perhaps a bit out of sync with our existing
concepts, we need oversight committees for a number of
areas --blocks, deletion, editorial policy, and
others.
In contentious cases, or cases which flounder in a
lack of consensus, the committee could make certain
descisions about articles, and follow some established
process. The distinction between a committee and
project of course would be that members are officers,
with some degree of review and trust in their
membership.

This is simply a natural extension of the existing
core government, and a natural growth of the core to
deal with the larger size. Some innovations have
rested on the work of developers (many major ones set
to be implemented), while others will require some
action for installing new social processes. (I had
thought the board would be a bit more hands on, but I
understand the distinction between foundation and
wiki). It might even be wise to start a committee that
deals with committee oversight. The last major change
in wiki-local government was when Jimbo formed the
Arbcom and Medcom. We shouldnt have to bug Jimbo to
decree a new committee if there is consensus for it--a
tabulated vote process could be used for major issues,
and anything produced would simply be an outgrowth of
consensus. How new voting sessions are instituted
would need some definition as well, but that seems
straigtforward (and sufficiently ceremonial) enough
for the founder to handle.

SV

--- Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 9/15/05, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > I meant to respond to Ryan on this. As a AfD
> closer, I do expect all
> > participants in the debate to spend a few minutes,
> or whatever it takes,
> > reading the article, and then read the other
> comments in the debate, and
> > have a bit of a poke around the subject, possibly
> look at the article
> > history. If they're not doing at least the first
> two of those, they're not
> > making an informed comment. If I see them write a
> few words in the context
> > of the debate, I'm happier that there has been an
> informed discussion.
>
>
> I don't think it's your business to decide what is
> and isn't an "informed
> decision". The person casting the vote thought their
> decision was informed
> enough or they wouldn't be voting. If you think
> someone isn't well informed,
> you inform them. You don't just discard their votes
> without comment.
>
> - Ryan
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

__________________________________
Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005
http://mail.yahoo.com


subject: [WikiEN-l] Images on user pages

body:
On 9/15/05, Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Why the hell would anybody want to use an image from a user page in an article?

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beard

Sam


from_name: Brian Brockmeyer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Violation of Blocking Policy

body:
Hello,

My user name is 'Brian Brockmeyer' and my IP address is 66.254.232.219.

I am writing because I have been the victim of an unfair block by Phroziac
over edits relating to the University of Miami article page.

User:Arigold reported me on the Wikipedia:Administrators' Noticeboard/3RR
for alleged violation of the 3-revert rule, which was not the case.
Phroziac, who handled Arigold's complaint, readily acknowledged that there
had been no 3RR violation, writing:

"Maybe I'm blind, but i don't see any four reverts from him that fall into a
24 hour period. However, that is gaming the system, and I have blocked him
for 24 hours. In the future, please sign posts on pages like this with ~~~~
--Phroziac (talk) 15:20, 15 September 2005 (UTC)"

By Phroziac's own admission, I did not violate the 3RR, yet he proceeded to
block me anyway with no basis in Wiki's Blocking Policy.

His claim that I was "gaming the system" amounts to nothing more than an
affirmation that I did NOT violate the 3RR.  Even still, it lacks all merit,
since there were merely 4 reverts in a 5 day span (19:36 September 9 to
19:54 September 14, the date of my last reversion that precipitated
Phroziac's block), which hardly evinces any kind of intent to manipulate and
exploit the 3RR.  The 3RR prohibits 3 reverts within a 24-hour window.  I
made 4 in 100+ (interestingly enough, the same # as AriGold, who was NOT
blocked).  Neither the 3RR was violated, nor its spirit, was violated.  Not
even close.  That a block was issued is an eggregious abuse of
administrative power on the part of Phroziac.

Furthermore, even after being blocked in violation of Wiki's Blocking
Policy, Phroziac failed to follow the suggested procedures for informing a
blocked user in the Policy, specifically: "It is helpful to leave a notice
of the block, with links to the differences that demonstrate the violation,
on the user's talk page."

No such notice was ever rendered on my talk page.  I did not learn that I
had been blocked until I attempted to make edit.  The reason is quite
obvious: Phroziac did not have any grounds for invoking a block that he
could point to on my talk page--he knew he could not demonstrate any
violation, so he neglected to provide notice altogether.

In sum, I request that the block be lifted and that Phroziac be made aware
of proper Wiki Blocking Policy.

Thank you for your attention,

Brian Brockmeyer

_________________________________________________________________
Don?t just search. Find. Check out the new MSN Search!
http://search.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200636ave/direct/01/


subject: [WikiEN-l] Random Plugging

body:
Its been a while, but Ive just started using the
random page link to just surf for minor edit handling.
I kind of like it --about half of the articles have
rather basic formatting, disambiguation, tag, image,
and link handling problems, and banging away at these
was a reasonably productive use of an hour.

A feel a "Random Pluggers" WikiProject coming on.

SV

__________________________________
Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005
http://mail.yahoo.com


from_name: John Anthony Hartman

subject: [Wikitech-l] My Watchlist RSS Feed

body:
Hello ye of the Wiki

I am trying to solve a problem and hope that someone might have already
considered or actually done this already. I was wondering if any one had
created any code that would collect My Watchlist data and published it as an
RSS feed. If no one has can someone please point me in the right direction
in the code to accomplish this myself?

Thank you,

 ___________________________________________________
John Anthony Hartman
website: http://www.websage.org
personal media outlet: Multi-Media Me- http://pmo.websage.org
 "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. "
--Arthur C. Clarke


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Wiki dump organization

body:
Nick Jenkins wrote:
> Brion Vibber wrote:
>>If you like you can use the mwdumper tool to convert the XML dumps to
>>local-import-friendly SQL instead of using importDump.php (which as you
>>note needs a bug fix).
>
>
> Can I please make a suggestion? Can the XML format be run through the
> mwdumper (or equivalent), and the result SQL _of that process_ be
> compressed and uploaded to the database dump site?

This would triple the disk space requirements for the data dumps
(quadruple after the next major upgrade, quintuple the time after
that...), and maybe a couple people might use some of them every once in
a while.

One of the many reasons behind moving to the new dump format is so we
don't _have_ to do that; you can transform to whatever local format you
need. (And we provide software for you to do that if you like.)

> Also, can we please have back the "is_redirect" field in the XML (and
> XML->SQL) output, that used to be in the cur SQL dump? ( Yes, I know I
> can generate it myself, but it is useful data, and may well be useful
> to many people - making each and every one of those users
> independently generate this info seems counterproductive).

Hmm, can probably do that yeah.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Images on user pages

body:
Hello all (oh, and first post to te mailing list for me, so please be
gentle),

Fastfission wrote:

>I wholly support any approach that would keep User pages either out of
>the GFDL or out of our database ports, to be honest, though I'm not
>completely aware of what that would entail in terms of licensing
>requirements or technical ones.
>
What if we forked off the user namespace into its own project shared
among all other project (like the image mainspace was /kind of/ forked
into commons)? We could put that whole project into a more restrictive
license, and give it its own dump. Of course that depends upon another
pipe dream, that of single signon across all projects, which is on top
of some people's wish list already...

--[[en:User:grm_wnr]]


from_name: Zachary Harden

subject: [WikiEN-l] Images on user pages

body:
There might be cases that we can use images from user pages. The user page I
wish to cite is of EN user Husnock. On his user page, he lists not only the
decorations and ranks he has achieved, but also their ribbon bars. While,
they are his own ribbon bars he earned for his valiant military service, we
could reuse the images of the ranks and ribbon bars (with his OK) on
relevant articles.

Though, one question I wish to ask about images on user pages is that are
they technically orphans?

Regards,

Zachary Harden


from_name: Michael Turley

body:
On 9/15/05, Alphax <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> Michael Turley wrote:
> > On 9/15/05, Alphax <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >>Ryan Delaney wrote:
> >>
> >>>Right now, if band and business vanity...
> >>
> >>...Business vanity mostly turns out to be spam...
> >
> >
> > Please excuse all the cutting, but this is a personal irritant that I
> > find very hard to ignore.  Vanity doesn't apply to businesses.
> > Businesses are either important, influential, recognizable or
> > otherwise worthy of writing an article about them, or they aren't.
> >
>
> In which case they will violate [[WP:NOR]] and [[WP:NOT]] a business
> directory.

Sure, while you're making that blanket statement without considering
each case individually, try nominating [[Wal-Mart]] to AfD and see
what happens.  (No, don't.)  Businesses are, generally speaking,
excellent subjects for articles because of the multiple sources of
verifiable NPOV information about them.  I'd find a better example of
one that started out even smaller, as a meager little stub, but the
server isn't responding right now.

--
Michael Turley
User:Unfocused


subject: [WikiEN-l] Article deletion

body:
I was talking about an argument that doesn't involve anything de facto.
While most people consider presidents clearly notable, I explained the
reasons you could use to point it out.

My government also designates whether the field behind my house will
be designated as a residential area or a green place. That doesn't
neccesarily mean the place warrants an article.

It's exactly the comments that claim a certain category of articles is
worth an entry by default (or not) that I'm trying to avoid here.
Those are the cause of endless inclusionist vs. deletionist debates.

Can you actually point out any reasons that don't depend on de facto
or by default notability?

On 9/15/05, SPUI <drspui at gmail.com> wrote:
> MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
> >
> > If all highways are notable, surely there's an argument that goes for
> > all of them?
>
> Yeah, that they're designated by the state and de facto "notable".
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
Dan Grey wrote:
> On 15/09/05, Alphax <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Mark Gallagher wrote:
> <snip>
>>
>>> Actually, Snowspinner provided an example of '1' to start the
>>> thread (well, one of the threads): /Elf-Only Inn/.  As a
>>> webcomics fan myself (although I don't like or read /Elf-Only
>>> Inn/ itself), I can certainly see his point[0].
>>
>> <snip>
>>
>>> [0] And I'm hanging out for the time when Tycho and Gabe get
>>> their own entries on en-WP.  That would obviously be cruft, but
>>> I'd like to hear those who want minor characters from movies to
>>> have pages to explain *why* major characters from /Penny Arcade/
>>>  don't belong.
>>>
>>
>> It's about how much can be written on the subject of the article.
>> Seriously, how much needs to be written about a minor (or even
>> major) character in a movie, if they are known for nothing outside
>> of that movie, and the portrayal of the character in the movie was
>> unremarkable?
>
>
> Does it matter?

Yes. People look at the articles and say "oh, they've only got 2 lines
on such and such, and they want me to tell them about it!? What sort of
encyclopedia is this?" That is the problem with articles which will
never be (and in some cases, /can never be/) anything more than stubs.

> So far, the only argument advanced to say that it does is that such
> entries damage Wikipedia's credibility.

It does. The more stubs, the more likely people are to miss the good
quality stuff.

> With Wikipedia now the most popular reference website in the world,
> I'd say that Wikipedia no longer has any credibility issues.

Oh, I agree. Wikipedia is still only as credible as the rest of the
internet - that is, any idiot could have written it.

> There may still be some whiney critics around, but no-one is
> listening to them, clearly!
>

You call librarians and educators "whiney critics whom no-one listens to"?

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body:
Kelly Martin wrote:
>Dan Grey wrote:
>>Does it matter? So far, the only argument advanced to say that it does
>>is that such entries damage Wikipedia's credibility. With Wikipedia
>>now the most popular reference website in the world, I'd say that
>>Wikipedia no longer has any credibility issues. There may still be
>>some whiney critics around, but no-one is listening to them, clearly!
>
>
> The counterargument to that is popularity doesn't imply credibility.
> Wikipedia is still perceived to be noncredible by some people, who
> cite (amongst other things) our large population of stubs and
> otherwise incomplete articles.  However, I suspect that these people
> will always find an excuse to hold Wikipedia in ill repute (do we
> really care what Encyclopedia Britannica or Larry Sanger think of us),
> and so trying to make them happy is probably pointless.
>

But the more complete our articles are, the less stubs and other
weaknesses that we show, the less places they have to criticize us. We
can say "we have more articles than (insert name of encyclopedia here)"
all we want, but it's the /quality/ of the articles that counts. AFAICT,
there is no such thing as a "featured substub".

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body:
Michael Turley wrote:
> On 9/15/05, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>It's not AFD that's failing. Any deletion system can be faulted by
>>ignorance on the part of nominators and deleters. We need to have
>>stricter rules about how people should behave when voting in deleting
>>discussions, to lessen the hostile atmosphere when controversial
>>articles come up.
>>
>>We need to address people's attitudes. Those are actually the cause of
>>problems with deletion.
>
>
> I just remembered something that I used to wonder about when I first
> arrived on Wikipedia.  I think they're still valid questions:
>
> Why isn't "Votes (now Articles) for Deletion" a subpage of "Request
> for Comments"?
> Why isn't "Articles for Deletion" instead "Request for Comments -
> Proposed Deletion"?
>
> Putting the deletion mechanism in an area where discussion and
> comments are already the focus may help a bit.

I agree completely. (I thought about renaming it "Articles for
discussion" or "Article review" until I realised that
[[Wikipedia:Article review]] is a redirect to [[Wikipedia:Peer review]])

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from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] Indefinite Bans with No Oversight

body:
On 9/15/05, steve v <vertigosteve at yahoo.com> wrote:
> A number of people seem to be missing the distinction
> between a "block" and a "ban."
>
> Any sysop may impose a block, but those blocks --even
> if they hold up indefinitely -- are never "bans."
>
> SV

I don't try and kid myself. I baned ammrow. That wans't a block

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] All information?

body:
Dan Grey wrote:
> On 15/09/05, dpbsmith at verizon.net <dpbsmith at verizon.net> wrote:
>
>
>>I thought that there was consensus that Wikipedia a) is an encyclopedia, and
>>b) is not "an indiscriminate collection of information."
>
>
> I must say, I'm sure I've read: "Imagine a world where every single
> person is given free access to the sum of human knowledge. We don't
> have to imagine it. We're doing it" attributed to Jimbo, and I have
> never squared that with "Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection
> of information."
>

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I think Jimbo said the second one as well.

> Personally, I don't mind indiscriminate information - that's what the
> whole world wide web is. Search engines like Google have made it their
> mission to make it usable, and I don't see why Wikipedia need be any
> different in our little web-within-the-web. (Tagging - which is what
> our categorisation could be seen as - seems to be the other approach,
> but as far as I can tell that's more hype than useful).
>

That violates [[WP:NOT]].

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from_name: Mark Williamson

subject: [Wikitech-l] Sir I want

body:
SPAMMER! DIE!

Mark

P.S.

I don't really want any harm to befall you. Please don't attempt to
hold me legally responsible for any physical, psychological, or
metaphysical harm you may incur from this point on unless caused
directly by me.

On 15/09/05, raman singhj <cutelittlebunny41 at yahoo.co.in> wrote:
> Sir I want few cds on physiotherapy if u can provide
> me then reply soon From Raman
> --- wikitech-l-bounces at wikimedia.org
> <wikitech-l-request at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> > Send Wikitech-l mailing list submissions to
> >       wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
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> is more specific
> > than "Re: Contents of Wikitech-l digest..."
> >
> >
> > Today's Topics:
> >
> >    1. Re: Re: Allow one-word editing (Rowan Collins)
> >    2. Re: Re: Wikipedia API? (Michal Migurski)
> >    3. Re: Re: Wikipedia API? (Brion Vibber)
> >    4. RE: Re: Wikipedia API? (Bass, Joshua L)
> >    5. Re: create new articles from the search form
> (Klaus-Eduard Runnel)
> >    6. Re: Wikipedia API? (Edward Z. Yang)
> >    7. Re: Wikipedia page protection report (Mark
> Williamson)
> >    8. Re: Re: Wikipedia API? (Angela)
> >    9. Re: Re: Wikipedia API? (Michal Migurski)
> >   10. Re: Differential storage (Tim Starling)
> >
> >
> >
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > Message: 1
> > Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2005 22:00:46 +0100
> > From: Rowan Collins <rowan.collins at gmail.com>
> > Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Re: Allow one-word editing
> > To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l at wikimedia.org>
> > Message-ID:
> <9f02ca4c0509141400766d4103 at mail.gmail.com>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
> >
> > On 14/09/05, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> > > Edward Z. Yang wrote:
> > > > The idea is this: with a combination of
> > > > Javascript and server side tools, it should be
> feasible to double-click
> > > > any word on a page and then edit that single
> word. This is especially
> > > > useful for correcting spelling errors that you
> would be too lazy to wade
> > > > through an entire section to get to.
> > >
> > > I'd prefer if it was a sentence rather than a
> single word. Sometimes a
> > > grammar fix requires changes to multiple words
> within a sentence.
> >
> > Well, here's a really neat idea: how about we let
> people edit section
> > by section - that way people can do things like
> merging sentences too,
> > and we don't need to worry about defining a
> sentence. Oh, wait... ;)
> >
> > On a more serious note, I can see that this might be
> useful for some
> > power users, but it would definitely remain off by
> default to avoid
> > confusion, and only be turned on by a handful of
> people, so may not be
> > worth the development and maintenance time if it
> required changes to
> > the core code.
> >
> > --
> > Rowan Collins BSc
> > [IMSoP]
> >
> >
> > ------------------------------
> >
> > Message: 2
> > Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2005 14:30:52 -0700
> > From: Michal Migurski <mike at stamen.com>
> > Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Re: Wikipedia API?
> > To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l at wikimedia.org>
> > Message-ID:
> <CFCF9D55-4FDB-4DE3-9E53-24453C402CE8 at stamen.com>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII;
> delsp=yes; format=flowed
> >
> > >>>>> Are there any F/OSS projects that provide such
> functionality
> > >>>>> without
> > >>>>> requiring screen-scraping?
> > >>>>
> > >>>> No, although the best-maintained
> screen-scraping product is
> === Message Truncated ===
>
>
>
>
> __________________________________
> Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005
> http://mail.yahoo.com
> _______________________________________________
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POSSIT MATERIARI
ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE


body:
Ryan Delaney wrote:
> On 9/15/05, dpbsmith at verizon.net <dpbsmith at verizon.net> wrote:
>
>> It frosts me when people on EITHER side make short, curt,
>> dismissive comments in AfD that consist simply of a vote and a
>> _generic_ remark, like "Delete, nn website," or "Delete,
>> [whatever]cruft," or "Keep, all [whatever] are inherently notable,"
>>  or "KEEP! Of course. Why would anyone want to delete this?"
>>
>> It's lazy, it's polarizing, and it tends to push AfD in the
>> direction of being a vote (bad) rather than consensus-building
>> discussion (good).
>
>
> Count the number of articles that go up to AFD every day, and ask
> yourself if you think its reasonable that everyone write a paragraph
> - or even a short explanation - on everything they vote for. Simply
> *voting* on everything would take an hour a day at least.

I think I tried that once :) Something far more productive IMO is voting
for Featured Picture Candidates (easy on the eyes, doesn't get you into
flamewars - the only downside is that it burns bandwidth like coke in a
furnace).

> Demanding a detailed explanation from every vote would only reduce
> the amount of communication because people would stop voting.

Oh, and typing a paragraph for everything you vote on will give you RSI.

> If you want to fix that, you either expand the CSD, so stuff that
> doesn't need deliberation won't waste everyone's time,

That puts the power squarely in the hands of a select few whom many
already mistrust. People in positions of authority must be beyond
reproach in the actions that they take. Acting on consensus helps to
ensure that.

> or you implement pure wiki deletion, so this whole problem goes away
>  entirely.

And you get a whole /other/ set of problems.

> Right now, if band and business vanity, link spam, personal essays,
> and neologisms were all covered by CSD (which they aren't), you could
> cut the amount of articles going up to AFD by up to 1/3.

Link spam is already covered by CSD. Band vanity is covered by
[[WP:MUSIC]]. Business vanity mostly turns out to be spam. Neologisms
are unverifiable and violate [[WP:NOR]] and [[WP:NOT]], as do personal
essays. Quite a few other things which go to AfD end up being
transwikied as appropriate or turn out to be copyvios.

There's nothing inherently wrong with the way that AfD works. It's just
that a lot of people have the wrong attitude to it - they see it as some
kind of competition. If you don't know what I'm talking about, see
[[meta:AIW]], [[meta:ADW]], and [[WP:EAD]].

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list: wiktionary-l

from_name: Gerard Meijssen

subject:
[Wiktionary-l] [Fwd: [Wikitech-l] A small Ultimate Wiktionary
	demo]

body:
James R. Johnson wrote:

>2 things - When will the OE be up? And - will UW allow full inflection
>charts for inflected languages (singular/plural, and nom/gen/dat/instr/acc
>inflections)?  You said, "We could also automatically make use of synonyms,
>plurals and inflections (though this requires further changes to the
>category code beyond internationalization)."  Would the genitive Tags, or
>dative Tagen (German) be auto-redirects to Tag, or how would you envision
>that being handled?
>
>
>
Hoi,
You have to apreciate that what Erik wrote about is how UW is used in
the Localisation of the Commons data. A little horse is "paardje" in
Dutch. When you look for paardje it could give you horse as well. This
is what Erik means.

UW will have inflections for nouns and verbs and whatever you care to
define. The potential is there (part of the data design) to define what
the inflection charts should look like. In Ultimate Wiktionary there are
no redirects. An inflection will refer to the Meaning for the
"Headword". It will also have a seperate Meaning for the type of
inflection it is. This is because it will have translations that are
different from the translation of the "Headword".

Thanks,
    GerardM