from_name: Mark Gallagher

subject: [WikiEN-l] Deleting the Lolicon picture

body:
G'day Ben,

> Katefan0 wrote:
>
>>Beyond this image, there are lots of problems with pedophilia-related
>>articles.
>>
>>I don't think that most of the censorship stalwarts in the Lolicon debate
>>were pedophiles, but it's certain that there are pedophiles fighting for
>>certain things to be included in articles like [[NAMBLA]], [[Childlove
>>movement]], [[Curley v. NAMBLA]], etc.  An infusion of experienced, neutral
>>editors into fights over articles like these would be appreciated.
>
> I feel like we're repeating the McCarthy era, only instead of
> Communists, this time it's pedophiles.  Where exactly are these alleged

I assume you're American.  Only an American (or a very radical non-)
could consider a comparison of Communists and paedophiles to be appropriate.

Why is it, anyway, that you're upset at what Katefan0 had to say?  It is
a fact that paedophiles have POV-pushed on certain articles (such as the
three she pointed out above).  This doesn't mean you're a dupe for
standing up for them in relation to a different article, so you have no
need to be offended by Katefan0.

Er, that is to say, *I* think you're a silly sausage, but Katefan0 never
even implied it, so get off her back, sort of thing.

> pedophiles?  I've heard a lot of accusations of pedophilia being thrown
> about (even by Jimbo, which is most unfortunate), but I haven't really
> seen any actual evidence of pedophilia, just people pointing at the
> anti-censorship types and yelling "PEDOPHILES!!"  Do you have any

Now, now.  Some of us have been pointing to the anti-censorship types
and saying "why the hell are you in league with the paedophiles?" which
is, I'm sure you'll agree, not nearly so bad ...

As for who the paedophiles on Wikipedia is ... have you *read* the
articles Katefan0 points out?  There's a number of self-declared
paedophiles on Wikipedia, who (surprise, surprise) spend a lot of their
time editing articles about sickos to say "we're not sickos really, it's
the government that's sick!".  Granted, there's not as many paedos as,
say, Communists (tee hee), but then Commies who go out of their way to
POV-push ("we're not sickos really, it's the Capitalists who're sick!")
tend to wind up before ArbCom, in my experience.

The only example of an open paedophile editing Wikipedia who springs to
mind is User:Silent War, but he's far from being the only one.  There
*are* paedophiles on Wikipedia, they *do* POV-push, and you've got no
need to deny it simply because you're involved in a debate unrelated to
Childlove movement or any of the other  articles mentioned.

> specific evidence of pedophiles trying to co-opt Wikipedia for "mass
> grooming" or whatever?

I don't have any evidence, and neither does anyone else ... fortunately,
nobody here has actually tried to assert that this is happening (see
also: silly sausages).  It's a bloody scary thought, though, innit?

--
Mark Gallagher
"What?  I can't hear you, I've got a banana on my head!"
- Danger Mouse

--
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.1.385 / Virus Database: 268.3.5/301 - Release Date: 4/04/2006


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Criminal copyright infringement (was request to
 Jimbo for out-of-process deletion of image)

body:
Michael Snow wrote:

>Steve Bennett wrote
>
>
>>On 4/3/06, Justin Cormack <justin at specialbusservice.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Do we? I dont actually know of anything else that is a criminal offence
>>>in a major country which has general laws protecting free speech,
>>>where Jimbo is likely to visit and wouldnt like to be arrested on
>>>entry. And where we have an article about the law in question.
>>>Maybe we should use the picture to illustrate this?
>>>
>>>
>>Sorry, you're correct, I meant we have plenty of examples of copyright
>>violation. Which is not, as you point out, a criminal offence.
>>
>>
>Actually, as the occasional outraged victim is more than happy to remind
>us, copyright infringement can be considered criminal under certain
>circumstances, at least in the US. For example, willful infringement for
>commercial advantage, private financial gain, or of works with a total
>retail value of more than $1,000 over any 180-day period. See 17 U.S.C.
>?506. The safe harbors for online service providers and the requirement
>of willfulness make it difficult to apply to the Wikimedia Foundation,
>but I can imagine situations in which it could theoretically apply to
>the person uploading the material.
>
>The section also provides, among other things, for fines for fraudulent
>removal of copyright notices. This might be worth pointing out to those
>users we find modifying images they've clearly copied from other
>websites to remove such notices.
>
A key thing for the copyright paranoiacs to remember is that criminal
infringement requires that the infringement must also pass the test for
being a civil infringement, and it must be "willful".  The standard of
proof is also much higher.  The only thing that goes the other way to
making it easier is a longer statute of limitation: 5 instead of 3 years.

In other words, things need to get pretty bad before there is a US
criminal prosecution.  There would be plenty of warning before things
got that far.

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] Deleting the Lolicon picture

body:
Drini drini wrote:

>On 4/4/06, Philip Welch <wikipedia at philwelch.net> wrote:
>
>
>>On Apr 4, 2006, at 4:48 PM, Mark Gallagher wrote:
>>
>>
>>>I assume you're American.  Only an American (or a very radical non-)
>>>could consider a comparison of Communists and paedophiles to be
>>>appropriate.
>>>
>>>
>>I wasn't aware that Americans were unique in thinking pedophiles were
>>morally comparable to communists, although to be perfectly fair,
>>pedophiles have never committed acts of genocide.
>>
>>Philip L. Welch
>>
>>
>Well, capitalists have as well, and I'm betting money on some
>paedophiles being capitalists    /*duck*
>
Why should you have to duck when someone else has made such an
extraordinarily stupid straw man statement.

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] Deleting the Lolicon picture

body:
Mikkerpikker wrote:

>>I'm sorry, who's a pedophile?  Would you like to make any specific
>>allegations or are you referring to everyone who wanted the image kept
>>as a pedophile?  That is a very strong allegation.
>>
>>
>I don't want to make any allegations, but look at who included the
>pedophile userbox on their userpages, then look at who participated in
>the [[Talk:Lolicon]] discussion. Not all those in favour of keeping
>the pic were pedophiles, but some, it seems, were.
>
Arguments over whether to keep a picture should be based on the picture
itself rather than on who is making the arguments.

Ec


from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

subject:
[WikiEN-l] What surprised me about Britannica's response to
	Nature...

body:
If Nature's method left Britannica's entries cut to Wikipedia size or
collated from several Britannica sources, then they might have a case
against some of the omissions, but whether text comes from the online
BE, the paper one or some other Britannica sources shouldn't matter
when they were being called on errors. An error is an error, no matter
where they've published it.


from_name: Steve Bennett

body:
Unless the errors in the online version are a selling point for the
print version. "Buy the print version! Now with 20% less errors than
online!"

Steve

On 4/5/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
> If Nature's method left Britannica's entries cut to Wikipedia size or
> collated from several Britannica sources, then they might have a case
> against some of the omissions, but whether text comes from the online
> BE, the paper one or some other Britannica sources shouldn't matter
> when they were being called on errors. An error is an error, no matter
> where they've published it.
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

Yes, it should be "fewer errors".


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Jay R. Ashworth

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Mathematical expressions and conditional
	constructs, now implemented

body:
On Wed, Apr 05, 2006 at 04:14:31PM +0100, Rob Church wrote:
> On 05/04/06, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> > In response to a campaign by users of the English Wikipedia to
> > harrass developers by introducing increasingly ugly and inefficient
> > meta-templates to popular pages, I've caved in and written a few
> > reasonably efficient parser functions.
>
> Where are we going, and what's with the handbasket?

Hee.

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

     A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
     Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?

     A: Top-posting.
     Q: What is the most annoying thing on Usenet and in e-mail?


from_name: Stan Shebs

subject: [WikiEN-l] Image deletion

body:
David Alexander Russell wrote:

>-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>Hash: SHA1
>
>How about an obligation on *any* admin who speedies *any* image to first
>of all save that image on their hard drive, and store a local copy of it
>for at least a week/two weeks in case the speedy deletion turns out to
>have been incorrect?
>
Oh yeah, just what I need, a whole archive of mustachioed Mona Lisas
and popes embracing space aliens, produced by artistes with all the
Photoshop skills of the average hamster.

:-)

Stan


from_name: Mark Wagner

subject: [WikiEN-l] Image deletion

body:
On 4/5/06, David Alexander Russell <webmaster at davidarussell.co.uk> wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> How about an obligation on *any* admin who speedies *any* image to first
> of all save that image on their hard drive, and store a local copy of it
> for at least a week/two weeks in case the speedy deletion turns out to
> have been incorrect?

I did something like that when I was speedy-deleting no-source and
no-license images, and OrphanBot's been keeping a copy of every
no-source and no-license image it's encountered.  Means that over the
past four months, I've acquired a 2GB archive of 25,000 images.

--
Mark
[[User:Carnildo]]


subject: [WikiEN-l] Is en: too large?

body:
On 4/5/06, Jtkiefer <jtkiefer at wordzen.net> wrote:
> David Gerard wrote:
> > http://www.uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Image:ThatsNoMoonThatsWikipedia.jpg
> >
> > We also need to help get this outfit properly decorated:
> > http://www.uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Image:ThatsNoMoonThatsWikipedia.jpg
> >
> That's no moon, that's a copyvio image misusing the wikipedia logo.

It's called "parody".  Since Uncyclopedia isn't a serious
encyclopedia, they don't have the same fair-use limits we do, and
parody is a perfectly defensible fair-use claim for them.

--
Mark
[[User:Carnildo]]


from_name: Govardhanen Gopal

subject: [Wikitech-l] Answere to questions on Non Ugly URL's setup

body:
Hello Wilinckx,

Here are my responses to your questions:

Q.the kind of URL you'd like to have
-  I would like to have url look like how it is in en.wikipedia.org ie
en.wikipedia.org/Unix etc etc..

Q. the URL's MediaWiki links to when he links to an Article
Also please note, I am unable to login or do anything at all once I
try to make non ugly urls.
-  Currently the links look like this
http://wiki/wiki/index.php?title=FEC if the changes do work I would
anticipate they look like http://wiki/wiki/FEC

Q. the URL MediaWiki says in it's HTML output the MonoBook CSS files
should be found
-  Here's the entry in the html output that you are asking for.
    <style type="text/css" media="screen,projection">/*<![CDATA[*/
@import "/wiki/skins/monobook/main.css"; /*]]>*/</style>

Q. the name of the directory MediaWiki is installed in
- Mediawiki is installed in /opt/local/htdocs/wiki

Q. the part of LocalSettings.php containing $wgScriptPath, $wgStylePath , etc
- Settings from Localsettings.php are as follows.
	$wgScriptPath       = "/wiki";
	$wgStylePath        = "$wgScriptPath/skins";
	$wgScript           = "$wgScriptPath/index.php";
	$wgRedirectScript   = "$wgScriptPath/redirect.php";

Q.  and the mod-rewrite rules you've setup in httpd.conf ?
- The .htaccess in /opt/local/htdocs/wiki/ contains the following entries.
-----------------------------
# close the php security hole...
#  not actually needed but probably a good idea anyway
php_flag register_globals off

# first, enable the processing - Unless your ISP has it enabled
# already.  That might cause weird errors.
RewriteEngine on

# uncomment this rule if you want Apache to redirect from www.mysite.com/ to
#  www.mysite.com/wiki/Main_Page
RewriteRule ^/$ /wiki/Main_Page [R]

# do the rewrite
RewriteRule ^wiki/?(.*)$ /w/index.php?title=$1 [L,QSA]
-----------------------------
The httpd.conf has the following entries in the very end.

## Wiki Settings
Alias /wiki /opt/local/htdocs/wiki/index.php
Alias /index.php /opt/local/htdocs/wiki/index.php
RewriteEngine on
RewriteLog "logs/rewrite.log"
RewriteLogLevel 5


from_name: David Alexander Russell

subject: [WikiEN-l] Deleting the Lolicon picture

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

I agree that 'pedophile' might have been a bit strong. Perhaps 'people
who believe that Wikipedia has a duty to provide pedophiles with child
porn regardless of the law' would be a more accurate, objective description.

Cynical

Ben McIlwain wrote:
> Jimmy Wales wrote:
>>> I posted a statement of strong support for Sam there.  The key to my
>>> approach to this is to distinguish between (a) where we should draw the
>>> line and (b) what to do while we are thinking about it.  In this case,
>>> we have been trolled by pedophiles creating facts on the ground, abusing
>>> our open processes.
>
> I'm sorry, who's a pedophile?  Would you like to make any specific
> allegations or are you referring to everyone who wanted the image kept
> as a pedophile?  That is a very strong allegation.
>
>
> --
> Ben McIlwain ("Cyde Weys")
>
> ~ Sub veste quisque nudus est ~
_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

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Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (MingW32)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFEM6rXg8fvtQYQevcRAm7KAJ0dBv3hwCbJsXk2Ci104vESskO0WwCeMqR5
JIcRsMl9Bvh+SBnKEz4JuKk=
=q7SP
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


from_name: Matt Brown

subject: [WikiEN-l] en: CD! Well, sort of

body:
On 4/5/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> http://fixedreference.org/2006-Wikipedia-CD-Selection/
>
> 2011 articles, hand-picked and cleaned up. Only 1,000,000 to go ;-)

A very interesting beginning, at least!

-Matt


from_name: Ryan Delaney

subject: [WikiEN-l] Deleting the Lolicon picture

body:
On 4/5/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>
> Why should you have to duck when someone else has made such an
> extraordinarily stupid straw man statement.
>

Again, I really think we have better things to do than sit on the mailing
list
exchanging these jabs.

Ryan


list: foundation-l

from_name: Gerard Meijssen

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

body:
Hoi,
I have read the thread as it was published so far and I am amazed that
nobody mentioned one simple reason why people do not edit or add content
to the Arab, the Farsi, the Hebrew and Assamese projects .. It is too
bloody hard. When you say "everybody can edit", it is as if it is the
same effort is involved. I read somewhere where an African president
said; "we do not have scripts yet for all of our indigenous languages.
When the yi.wikipedia celebrated its 1000th article Gangleri was thanked
for his hard work to make this technically possible. When I created some
Farsi training material on Wikibooks, I needed two browsers to complete
certain tasks; both Internet Explorer and Firefox were not up to the task.

Gangleri does a great job, he is imho one of the most valuable
Wikimedians because he tries to make it possible to have information in
all languages. To take things to the next level, we need more
developers; people of all the language families and make sure with them
that MediaWiki is up to the task. So far we have been self
congratulatory about how well we do. We profess that we want to do
better in Africa Asia and South America. We can if we make it a priority.

For me improving these issues /is/ a priority. http://WiktionaryZ.org
requires good support for all languages. I am happy that we initiated
the "Multilingual Mediawiki" project as it will further improve the
multilingual capabilities of MediaWiki. It will still not do all the
things that are necessary to make MediaWiki as easy to edit as it is for
us. For that I need people that speak Hindi Assamese Twi Farsi Arab
Hebrew and help us define what /their /problem with our software is and
when we are lucky help us fix these issues.

Thanks,
    GerardM

Mark Williamson wrote:
> Hi everybody,
>
> While it's sort of obvious, given the digital divide, that the number
> of articles in Wikipedias is not proportional to the number of
> speakers, for example Hindi has a much smaller number of articles
> compared to speakers than most active Wikipedias; German has more.
>
> However, something that people may not notice as much is the
> incongruency between popularity of a particular language version and
> the number of articles in that version.
>
> The most visited Wikipedias, in order, are:
>
> 1 English (65%)
> 2 German (10%)
> 3 Japanese (6%)
> 4 Spanish (3%)
> 5 French (2%)
> 6 Polish (2%)
> 7 Chinese (2%)
> 8 Arabic (2%)
> 9 Italian (1%)
> 10 Hebrew (1%)
> 11 Turkish (1%)
> 12 Dutch (1%)
> 13 Portuguese (1%)
> (all others combined total 1% of visits)
>
> On the other hand, the list of Wikipedias ranked by number of articles is:
> 1 English (1048.7K)
> 2 German (376.9K)
> 3 French (261.1K)
> 4 Polish (223.8K)
> 5 Japanese (196.3K)
> 6 Dutch (156.9K)
> ...
> 8 Italian (146.8K)
> 9 Portuguese (123.8K)
> 10 Spanish (105.0K)
> ...
> 12 Chinese (61.48K)
> ...
> 17 Hebrew (34.35K)
> ...
> 29 Turkish (19.94K)
> ...
> 37 Arabic (12.03K)
>
> What this says to me is that these Wikipedias are not attracting new
> pages proportional to views when compared with other Wikipedias. This
> may be because people don't want to write new pages, but it seems to
> me more likely that people simply don't know they can.
>
> How can this be fixed? Perhaps a site notice inviting people to write
> quality pages or register, or a drive to recruit new Wikipedians from
> the academic community.
>
> Mark


list: wikimedia-l


list: wikipedia-l

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


from_name: Matt R

subject: [WikiEN-l] Deleting the Lolicon picture

body:
Cynical wrote:
> Ben McIlwain wrote:
> > I'm sorry, who's a pedophile?  Would you like to make any specific
> > allegations or are you referring to everyone who wanted the image kept
> > as a pedophile?  That is a very strong allegation.

> I agree that 'pedophile' might have been a bit strong. Perhaps 'people
> who believe that Wikipedia has a duty to provide pedophiles with child
> porn regardless of the law' would be a more accurate, objective description.

\I don't think your description is particularly fair or objective. I support the removal
of the image in question, but I recognise that at least some of those who argued
for it to be it kept did so out of good faith and a desire to create the best encyclopedia
possible. I don't think they were trolling or motivated by a desire to supply pedophiles
with child porn.

-- Matt


subject:
[WikiEN-l] External links to image boards with images of
 a	child engaged in sexually explicit acts.

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>I agree about not needing new policies, although I do think that some of
>the default assumptions may need to be moved, with respect to images
>which have been uploaded.  I think a move of default assumptions would
>go a long way toward nuking a ton of fair use images that we would
>prefer not to have in en.wikipedia.
>
Yes, writing new policies only confuses people, when what is needed is
the courage to enforce the ones that already exist.

>But the one thing that I hope can healthily come out of this discussion
>is a general feeling of empowerment by admins to actually *enforce*
>policy in the face of trolling by pedohiles and the like, or the sorts
>of people who think that merely by camping out and pushing POV on an
>article, they should have more of a say of what goes into it than admins.
>
We had the same lolicon cartoon appear to illustrate that word in
Wiktionary, and probably the same proportion of people who objected to
it, and always who want to keep it as a part of some free speech
crusade.  I feel on safe ground enforcing the elimination of that
picture from the project, but oftentimes in other circumstances
enforcement is a tough call because the amount of flak can become
overwhelming.  A senior administrator or bureaucrat has an extra stock
of goodwill to draw upon, but that does not make it easier when there's
a need to come down heavy on long-standing contributors.

BTW, congrats for having your "Everybody tells jokes, but we still need
comedians" make it to Quote of the Day on Google.

Ec


from_name: Guettarda

subject: [WikiEN-l] Is en: too large?

body:
On 4/5/06, Jtkiefer <jtkiefer at wordzen.net> wrote:
>
> David Gerard wrote:
> > http://www.uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Image:ThatsNoMoonThatsWikipedia.jpg
> >
> > We also need to help get this outfit properly decorated:
> > http://www.uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Image:ThatsNoMoonThatsWikipedia.jpg
> >
> >
> > - d
> That's no moon, that's a copyvio image misusing the wikipedia logo.
>
> -Jtkiefer

Satire = fair use


from_name: Sydney Poore

subject: [WikiEN-l] LS Studio and pro-pedophilia pov

body:
LS Studio is an article with content introduced by editors with a pro
pedophiles pov. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LS_Studio

Jimbo is aware of the problems with this article. I'm speculating that
his comments about trolling come from observing the pro-pedophilia pov
pushing at this article and a dozen more articles.

I'm trying to gather consensus to delete LS Studio. There is no
verifiable reliable sources for the content of the article. Evidently
the current content is original research. Look through past versions and
you will see that more detailed original research describing the web
site has been removed. None of the newspaper articles identify LS Studio
by name. I searched through FBI press announcement looking for some
evidence that LS Studio was  raided. I've looked through the United
States official statements on human rights violations for Ukraine.
Again, I find general reference to the FBI's involvement in shutting
down child porn web sites in Ukraine but nothing specifically naming
this studio.

This article was nominated for deletion on February 4 2006. The result
of the discussion was Keep. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/LS_Studio
I'm not satisfied with the outcome of this Afd. There was heavy input
from pro-pedophilia pov editors. There was a vote from a brand new user.
This Afd vote was their first and last edit. Unless someone can find
verifiable reliable sources in the next 48 hours I'm going to start
another Afd. WP child pornography article already includes this content
so there is no need to merge.

Sydney aka FloNight


subject: [WikiEN-l] Nature replies to Britannica

body:
Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:

>Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>
>>zero 0000 wrote:
>>
>>
>>>The current issue of Nature has a reply to Britannica.
>>>
>>>Zero.
>>>
>>>=============================
>>>
>>>Editorial
>>>
>>>Last week, Encyclopaedia Britannica issued a statement, ... and
>>>this week published a half-page advertisement in the London Times
>>>criticizing our study and demanding that we retract our story.
>>>
>>>
>>It seems that management at EB has been taken over by PR experts and
>>gravediggers rather than encyclopedia editors.
>>
>>
>So, the rumours of Britannica being taken over by Wikimedia are false
>then :)
>
The way their management is carrying on that may be the only way to save EB.

Ec


from_name: Jtkiefer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Is en: too large?

body:
David Gerard wrote:
> http://www.uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Image:ThatsNoMoonThatsWikipedia.jpg
>
> We also need to help get this outfit properly decorated:
> http://www.uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Image:ThatsNoMoonThatsWikipedia.jpg
>
>
> - d
That's no moon, that's a copyvio image misusing the wikipedia logo.

-Jtkiefer


from_name: Mikkerpikker

subject: [WikiEN-l] Deleting the Lolicon picture

body:
> I'm sorry, who's a pedophile?  Would you like to make any specific
> allegations or are you referring to everyone who wanted the image kept
> as a pedophile?  That is a very strong allegation.

I don't want to make any allegations, but look at who included the
pedophile userbox on their userpages, then look at who participated in
the [[Talk:Lolicon]] discussion. Not all those in favour of keeping
the pic were pedophiles, but some, it seems, were.

M


from_name: Tony Sidaway

subject: [WikiEN-l] Footers (WAS: Re: Deleting the Lolicon picture)

body:
On 4/4/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Arguments about top-quoting vs bottom-quoting on a list is almost as
> bad as mentioning Hitler.

Indeed.  I suggest that instead of arguing we each individually
resolve to make our replies concise, quoting only what is absolutely
necessary to convey our meaning and its context.


subject: [WikiEN-l] request to Jimbo for out-of-process deletion of image

body:
On 4/4/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> I think the best way to understand 'what justification' is to understand
> a certain sort of POV pushing... one of the goals of pedophiles is to
> make the case that such materials are perfectly normal and healthy and
> should be viewed as being completely routine.  One way to achieve that
> goal is to be sure that such materials are published widely.

Hi Jimbo,
  A couple of people have taken exception to your references to
paedophiles in this debate, and I'd like to join them. Is there any
evidence that actual paedophiles were arguing for the inclusion of
that image? Or is it just, as you acknowledge, anti-censorship people
getting caught up in the argument and crossing the bounds of good
taste?

Conflating anti-censorship, anti-prude, anti-common sense, or simply
trollish people with paedophiles is unfair at best, and inflammatory
and offensive at worst, isn't it?

Steve


from_name: Locke Cole

body:
On 4/5/06, Conrad Dunkerson <conrad.dunkerson at worldnet.att.net> wrote:

> While people complain about the complexity which templates have taken on
> it is worth noting that there is a direct correlation between increasing
> template complexity/functionality and decreasing article complexity.
> Tables no longer have to be convoluted HTML or wiki-markup blocks in the
> article themselves... they've been replaced by a short template call. And
> conditional logic has made it so that the average user can insert one of
> those templates into an article and fill out the parameters to produce a
> perfect table without needing to understand the underlying table code at
> all. That wasn't possible previously... they ''had'' to know table markup
> (or HTML) in order to edit tables.

I think this is the most important thing people need to understand
about template complexity: by making the *template* complex, we're
making the articles *simpler* and easier to maintain.

-L


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] emphasis vs italics, strong vs bold

body:
Omegatron wrote:
> I seem to remember ''two quotes'' rendering as emphasis, but
> now it is rendered as italics.  It also says "emphasis" in both
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Wikitext_quick_reference#Basic_text_formatting
>
> and
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:How_to_edit_a_page#Character_formatting
>
> so I don't think it's just my bad memory.  Was this changed accidentally?

No, on purpose. That was like a year and a half ago, I think.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki 1.6.1 released

body:
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Hash: SHA1

Some minor issues in the 1.6.0 release have been corrected:
* (bug 5458) Fix double-URL encoding in block log link in contribs and contribs
  link in block log
* (bug 5462) Bogus missing patch warning in updater
* (bug 5461) Use of deprecated "showhideminor" in Special:Recentchangeslinked
* (bug 5471) PHP warning when allow_call_time_pass_reference is off
* Update to Finnish localization

The instructions in UPGRADE have also been updated with more detail.

Full release notes:
http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/tags/REL1_6_1/phase3/RELEASE-NOTES
http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/tags/REL1_6_1/phase3/HISTORY

Download:
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/wikipedia/mediawiki-1.6.1.tar.gz

MD5 checksum:
mediawiki-1.6.1.tar.gz  53db32294c1faed22ac3cc19189e84a0

Before asking for help, try the FAQ:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_FAQ

Low-traffic release announcements mailing list:
(Please subscribe to receive announcements of security updates.)
http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-announce

Wiki admin help mailing list:
http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l

Bug report system:
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/

Play "stump the developers" live on IRC:
#mediawiki on irc.freenode.net

- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Ben McIlwain

subject: [WikiEN-l] en: CD! Well, sort of

body:
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David Gerard wrote:
> http://fixedreference.org/2006-Wikipedia-CD-Selection/
>
> 2011 articles, hand-picked and cleaned up. Only 1,000,000 to go ;-)

That's a very nice collection, one thing I noticed is that they didn't
include the full-size images and just went with the thumbnail-sized.
This leads to some inconsistency (and some too small images), because as
we all know, the size of thumbnails for pictures across Wikipedia is
wildly inconsistent.

- --
Ben McIlwain ("Cyde Weys")

~ Sub veste quisque nudus est ~
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from_name: Rob Church

body:
On 05/04/06, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> In response to a campaign by users of the English Wikipedia to harrass developers by introducing
> increasingly ugly and inefficient meta-templates to popular pages, I've caved in and written a few
> reasonably efficient parser functions.

Where are we going, and what's with the handbasket?

Rob Church


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Deleting the Lolicon picture

body:
On 4/5/06, Matt R <matt_crypto at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> \I don't think your description is particularly fair or objective. I support the removal
> of the image in question, but I recognise that at least some of those who argued
> for it to be it kept did so out of good faith and a desire to create the best encyclopedia
> possible. I don't think they were trolling or motivated by a desire to supply pedophiles
> with child porn.

Agreed. Poor judgment sure, wrong priorities definitely, but not
paedophiles (or paedophile-friendly).

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] Footers (WAS: Re:  Deleting the Lolicon picture)

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

David Alexander Russell wrote:
> Because any modification of the message post-sending would royally screw
> any digital signing of the message (which me, Alphax, and a couple of
> other people use on this list) which relies on a hash computed at the
> time of sending by the user's encryption program

For what it's worth my mail client (Thunderbird with the EnigMail
plugin) figures it out just fine.  It highlights the part of the message
that has been signed.  On this list, that doesn't include the footer.

- --
Ben McIlwain ("Cyde Weys")

~ Sub veste quisque nudus est ~
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from_name: Steve Block

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 4/4/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>> I think the best way to understand 'what justification' is to understand
>> a certain sort of POV pushing... one of the goals of pedophiles is to
>> make the case that such materials are perfectly normal and healthy and
>> should be viewed as being completely routine.  One way to achieve that
>> goal is to be sure that such materials are published widely.
>
> Hi Jimbo,
>   A couple of people have taken exception to your references to
> paedophiles in this debate, and I'd like to join them. Is there any
> evidence that actual paedophiles were arguing for the inclusion of
> that image? Or is it just, as you acknowledge, anti-censorship people
> getting caught up in the argument and crossing the bounds of good
> taste?
>
> Conflating anti-censorship, anti-prude, anti-common sense, or simply
> trollish people with paedophiles is unfair at best, and inflammatory
> and offensive at worst, isn't it?

Look, I for one initially argued keep at IFD, and I don't feel insulted
so much as embarrassed that I allowed myself to be blind-sided in such a
way, and I think Jimbo's spot on in what he says, and I'm a bit
disturbed that a lot of people who weren't involved in this are knocking
Jimbo on this point, superficially on my behalf.  I don't want people to
knock Jimbo on my behalf, I think Sam made the right call, so did Jimbo
and I think anyone who can't see that is either as blind sided as I was
or just looking for another big stick to hit Jimbo with.

I'd like to apologise once again for getting the wrong end of the stick
on this issue, and I would like to see people extend the good faith that
everyone involved has extended me by not calling me a complete plonker,
which would be well deserved, and extend that good faith to Jimbo, who
has already qualified his statement once.  Jimbo's thrust, as I read it,
was that we shouldn't allow the gaming of the system by those who wish
to promote pedophilia, and that those of us for whom censorship and fair
use is a hot button topic should be aware that we can be manipulated,
and remember the goal is building an encyclopedia, not fighting
censorship or justifying the inclusion of any particular image.

People who's hot button is mistrusting authority should also remember
the goal is building an encyclopedia, not fighting censorship or
justifying the inclusion of any particular image.

I'm sorry if people feel my words are too strong, but there it is.  I
was made to look a fool, and no-one likes that.  But I'm not too proud
to admit it and I don't see why I should be walking away scott free when
Jimbo is getting a hard time.

Now, can I take this hair shirt off, it damn well itches.

Steve Block

Steve Block

--
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.1.385 / Virus Database: 268.3.5/301 - Release Date: 04/04/06


from_name: Reinhardt WIEWE @ torg.is

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Mathematical expressions and conditional
 constructs, now implemented

body:
On Wed, 05 Apr 2006 18:27:24 +0300
 Rotem Liss <mail at rotemliss.com> wrote:
> A replacement for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Switch would be
> great.
>

*strong* support

zay gezunt / kve?ja / gru? / salutas / best regards

reinhardt [[user:gangleri]]


from_name: SJ

subject: [Foundation-l] statistics

body:
For a demographic breakdown of visitors to the site in the US, the
Hitwise data are pretty good.  Here are data from early March:

http://hcs.harvard.edu/%7Esjklein/WP-Charts-030206.doc

Cheers,
   SJ

On 4/5/06, kent emerson <kentpiano at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I am preparing a Masters thesis on wikipedia and am
> questioning whether
> > wikipedia users are representative of the regular
> population. I would
> > like to know what demographic uses wikipedia? Have
> you collected any
> > statistics on the representative makeup of those who
> work on your site
> > including gender, age, geographic location, income,
> education, ownership
> > of home, marital status? If so, would you feel
> comfortable sharing it
> > with me for the purposes of my research.
> >
> > I would appreciate if you can help.
> >
> > Kent Emerson.
>
>
> __________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
> http://mail.yahoo.com
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

--
++SJ


subject: [Foundation-l] statistics


body:
On 05/04/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 4/5/06, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> > Don't blame me. I've always been against turning wikitext into a programming language.
>
> Why?

Because the idea of wikitext is to make editing as simple as possible
for Joe User who clicks Edit. Joe User who, perhaps, doesn't know what
HTML is.

Rob Church


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Mathematical expressions and
	conditional	constructs, now implemented

references:
<e10mie$buv$1@sea.gmane.org> <4433E1DC.4080907@rotemliss.com>
	<e10pls$olh$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
On Thu, 06 Apr 2006 02:02:04 +1000
 Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:

> I'm willing to hear a case for the use of switch, but I'm not convinced of
> its utility based what
> I've seen.
>
> -- Tim Starling

http://epov.org/wd-gemet/index.php/Template_talk:user_native_speaker_level#step_by_step
Is about *(re-)designing* the Babel templates.

It is *not* intended to use the templates
http://epov.org/wd-gemet/index.php/Template_talk:user_lang#step_by_step
on *every* user page.

As soon as the texts are available and
Bug 2777: request for a {{substall:foo}} beside {{subst:bar}}
is a vailable a bot can regenerate all Babel templates.

Unfortunatelly I can not show you the 120 hour work done on Rob's previous test
wiki "Dev-HEAD". In order to identify the font-family, font-size parameters for
about 80 languages using scripts other then 10pt I used {{switch}} at all
levels:
direction
font-family
font-size
sample-text-short
sample-text-long

One could see acceptable fonts for the 80 language codes.

Onece the requirements for displaying multiscript / multilanguage text on *one*
page one can start the discussion what markup is required for simple users.

reinhardt [[user:gangleri]]


from_name: Jan Vanoverpelt

subject: [Wikitech-l] Automatically put text on a non existing page?

body:
I tried to modify the "exists"-template so that after this template has
checked whether a page exists or not, another template (a template with
preload-parameter for a new page or a template without preload-parameter for
an existing page) is returned:

=> The original qif-code of the {{exists}}-template is:
     {{qif
          |test={{booleq
          |1=[[{{ucfirst:{{{1|defaultFalse}}}}}]]
          |2={{:{{{1|defaultFalse}}}}}
                   }}
          |then={{{else|false}}}
          |else={{{then|true}}}
     }}

=> I tried to adapt this into:
     {{qif
         |test={{booleq
         |1=[[{{ucfirst:{{{1|defaultFalse}}}}}]]
         |2={{:{{{1|defaultFalse}}}}}
                  }}
         |then={{{else|{{hotspot || Image = image-name.gif | Link =
name-of-the-page
                |Preload=Template:templatename | Heigth = 81px}}}}}
         |else={{{then|{{hotspot-no-preload || Image = image-name.gif | Link
= name-of-the-page
                | Heigth = 81px}}}}}
     }}

Unfortunately, I want to apply this to several different images, each of
which links to a different page so i should have to put this qif-code into
different {{exists}}-templates so that each of these different
{{exists}}-templates then contains its own "image-name.gif"-reference and
"name-of-the-page"-link. This is not efficient because lots of
{{exists}}-templates have to be made.

A little bit more efficiently: I could put this qif-code on the wiki each
time such an image should be displayed, but i do not understand how the
name-of-the-page-parameter can be passed to this qif-code without referring
to a global template like {{exists|name-of-the-page}}. What i mean is that
when the {{exists}}-template is used, the parameter is passed by {{exists
|name-of-the-page}} and then the qif-code knows which page to check. What i
would like to accomplish now, is to adapt the qif-code so that i can
manually define in the qif-code which page should be checked for existence.

In short: how do i adapt the above qif-code, so that it knows what page to
check for existence, without passing the name-of-the-page-parameter via
{{exists|name-of-the-page}}??

Thanks a lot in advance!

JAN

2006/4/5, Minh Nguyen <mxn at zoomtown.com>:
>
> Yes, I think there is: the English Wikipedia has an "exists" template
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Exists> to check if a particular
> page has been created yet.
>
> Jan Vanoverpelt wrote:
> > 2006/4/4, Jan Vanoverpelt
> <jan.vanoverpelt at gmail.com>:
> >> Thank you all for the help: it works now!
> >
> > ...BUT 1 practical problem is still there:
> > Scenario:
> > 1) The user clicks on an image, which refers to a non-existing page.
> > 2) The user is linked to the non-existing page's edit-box in which the
> > preloaded text is written.
> > 3) The user adds some additional text and saves the page.
> > 4) The user leaves the pages, surfs around on the wiki and goes back
> to the
> > image through which he previously created the new page.  This is the
> point
> > where the practical problem jumps in: the user clicks on the image,
> BUT he
> > is AGAIN taken directly to the edit-box INSTEAD OF being taken to the
> actual
> > page (which exists now, so he does not have to be linked directly to the
> > edit-box of the page).
> >
> > I think this problem is due to the fact that i have created some kind of
> > "hard link" behind the image, so that the user is always forced to go
> > directly to the edit-box with the preloaded text in it. Is there a way
> to
> > fix this, so that the user (after he/she visited the non-existing
> page for
> > the first time, added something and saved it) is directly taken to the
> > actual page the second time (like is done in case of "normal" links) ??
> >
> > Thanks!
> >
> > JAN
>
> --
> Minh Nguyen <mxn at zoomtown.com>
> AIM: trycom2000; Jabber: mxn at myjabber.net; Blog: http://mxn.f2o.org/
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


from_name: Max Völkel

subject: [Wikitech-l] A design for a debate tool

body:
Hello Robert,

> By stepping out of the wiki model we can embody each of the assertions as
> its own data object.  Assertion, creator, votes, links, the whole nine
> yards, stored as a living object in the database.  This solves the metadata
> problem and allows you to automate the entire process. My design correlates
> to Wikibates the same way that dynamic pages correlate to static ones.

> I'll have to look deeper into OpenCyc.  A quick glance suggests that it
> could be a very powerful back end resource, and may even provide a good data
> model to work with.

For  a  flexible  data  model,  consider  looking  at  RDF  [1].  When
programming  in  Java,  a  tool such as RDFReactor [2] can give you an
object-oriented access. A similar tool exists for Ruby [3].

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-primer/
[2] http://rdfreactor.ontoware.org
[3] http://activerdf.m3pe.org/


body:
On 4/5/06, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> Don't blame me. I've always been against turning wikitext into a programming language.

Why?

Steve


body:
On 4/5/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 4/6/06, Jakob Voss <jakob.voss at nichtich.de> wrote:
> > * Make it usable in the template namespace only
>
> I think that could be a reasonable restriction. Template code already
> tends to be messy, and these new functions might actually make it
> cleaner in a few cases. But I'd rather not see calculation functions
> and such used in the article namespace.

This would be a bad idea, specifically, because it wouldn't allow
people to make tests in their userspace sandbox(es). Better to allow
it to be used anywhere, and let individual projects develop policies
to limit or restrict it's use.

-L


references:
<e10mie$buv$1@sea.gmane.org> <4433E1DC.4080907@rotemliss.com>
	<web-151787993@heimsnet.is> <e10rok$r8$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
 Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> Reinhardt WIEWE @ torg.is wrote:
> > On Wed, 05 Apr 2006 18:27:24 +0300
> >  Rotem Liss <mail at rotemliss.com> wrote:
> >
> >>A replacement for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Switch would be
> >>great.

> >
> > *strong* support
>
> What would you use it for?
>
> -- Tim Starling

For application development and template design. Please note that there are
different "layers" of working with a wiki. Neither all registered users are
developers nor are they providing patches.

On the other side you will find a lot of functionality not available today when
you reach 20,000, 50,000, 70,000 edits in a wiki work on categorization or
"travel" trough hundereds of wikies.

You will see what is efficient and what not, how fast you can implement changes
in a growing wiki, find information, restructure it etc. Contributors are
working in different areas, have different preferences, working methods and
complementary goals.

reinhardt [[user:gangleri]]


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

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

body:
Mark,
I do not care for Internet Explorer until I can get the ear of a
developer at Microsoft, this should however be doable. I am convinced
that we can get attention at the Mozilla Foundation. But most of all I
want MediaWiki to just work and work well for all languages. You know
how difficult the first editing efforts are. When it becomes really
screwy only a few will preservere. As to economic motivation, when we
can create a cool project we can find money for things like fonts and
scripts. It then becomes a question if someone does it for free or for a
fee. The other cost is that some languages are just not economic and
therefore without merit; this is an argument Microsoft loved to not have
gotten into in many instances...

What we can do as a Wikimedia Foundation is limited. We cannot bring a
computer to every house of this world but we can make our software ready
for the moment when the people from these houses find their way to a
computer.

Thanks,
    GerardM

Mark Williamson wrote:
> Assuming you're speaking about complex script rendering, part of this
> is dependent on software -- There is nothing that will make Internet
> Explorer properly render traditional Mohawk hieroglyphic narrative
> script, for instance, unless it is represented as an image. Even if a
> font existed, the rendering is simply so complex that it would really
> need some programmers to concentrate on it, and there is really no
> economic motivation for this.
>
> Hebrew is generally well-supported nowadays in software. Arabic,
> Farsi, Hindi, etc. are a little bit farther behind.
>
> But I think in many of these cases, it's not our issue so much as it
> is the issue of developers of browers and operating systems. Granted,
> we do have problems with BiDi, which Gangleri is always working on.
> But even with that, only a tiny fraction of the problems with BiDi
> have ever been on our end, many of them simply aren't fixable by us.
>
> That aside, none of the languages of South America that I know of, a
> minority of the languages of Africa, and really mostly only the
> languages of South and Southeast Asia (ie, excluding languages of
> Central Asia, North Asia) are written in complex scripts. This means
> that population-wise, if we concentrate on complex scripts, we are
> more specifically concentrating on Indic languages, Southeast Asian
> languages (Thai, Lao, Khmer, Burmese), minority languages in China
> (Tibetan, Mongolian), and Arabic-script languages (Arabic, Farsi,
> Urdu, Uyghur, Balochi, S. Azeri). Certainly these are very
> population-heavy languages. But I think the root of the issue is
> internet access. With many of these languages, it seems that people
> are trying to resolve script problems before access is really
> widespread, which is certainly lamentable, but at the same time makes
> it clear that problems with rendering are certainly not one of the
> major reasons for current numbers for most of these languages.
>
> Mark
>
>
> On 05/04/06, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hoi,
>> I have read the thread as it was published so far and I am amazed that
>> nobody mentioned one simple reason why people do not edit or add content
>> to the Arab, the Farsi, the Hebrew and Assamese projects .. It is too
>> bloody hard. When you say "everybody can edit", it is as if it is the
>> same effort is involved. I read somewhere where an African president
>> said; "we do not have scripts yet for all of our indigenous languages.
>> When the yi.wikipedia celebrated its 1000th article Gangleri was thanked
>> for his hard work to make this technically possible. When I created some
>> Farsi training material on Wikibooks, I needed two browsers to complete
>> certain tasks; both Internet Explorer and Firefox were not up to the task.
>>
>> Gangleri does a great job, he is imho one of the most valuable
>> Wikimedians because he tries to make it possible to have information in
>> all languages. To take things to the next level, we need more
>> developers; people of all the language families and make sure with them
>> that MediaWiki is up to the task. So far we have been self
>> congratulatory about how well we do. We profess that we want to do
>> better in Africa Asia and South America. We can if we make it a priority.
>>
>> For me improving these issues /is/ a priority. http://WiktionaryZ.org
>> requires good support for all languages. I am happy that we initiated
>> the "Multilingual Mediawiki" project as it will further improve the
>> multilingual capabilities of MediaWiki. It will still not do all the
>> things that are necessary to make MediaWiki as easy to edit as it is for
>> us. For that I need people that speak Hindi Assamese Twi Farsi Arab
>> Hebrew and help us define what /their /problem with our software is and
>> when we are lucky help us fix these issues.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>     GerardM
>>
>>
>> Mark Williamson wrote:
>>
>>> Hi everybody,
>>>
>>> While it's sort of obvious, given the digital divide, that the number
>>> of articles in Wikipedias is not proportional to the number of
>>> speakers, for example Hindi has a much smaller number of articles
>>> compared to speakers than most active Wikipedias; German has more.
>>>
>>> However, something that people may not notice as much is the
>>> incongruency between popularity of a particular language version and
>>> the number of articles in that version.
>>>
>>> The most visited Wikipedias, in order, are:
>>>
>>> 1 English (65%)
>>> 2 German (10%)
>>> 3 Japanese (6%)
>>> 4 Spanish (3%)
>>> 5 French (2%)
>>> 6 Polish (2%)
>>> 7 Chinese (2%)
>>> 8 Arabic (2%)
>>> 9 Italian (1%)
>>> 10 Hebrew (1%)
>>> 11 Turkish (1%)
>>> 12 Dutch (1%)
>>> 13 Portuguese (1%)
>>> (all others combined total 1% of visits)
>>>
>>> On the other hand, the list of Wikipedias ranked by number of articles is:
>>> 1 English (1048.7K)
>>> 2 German (376.9K)
>>> 3 French (261.1K)
>>> 4 Polish (223.8K)
>>> 5 Japanese (196.3K)
>>> 6 Dutch (156.9K)
>>> ...
>>> 8 Italian (146.8K)
>>> 9 Portuguese (123.8K)
>>> 10 Spanish (105.0K)
>>> ...
>>> 12 Chinese (61.48K)
>>> ...
>>> 17 Hebrew (34.35K)
>>> ...
>>> 29 Turkish (19.94K)
>>> ...
>>> 37 Arabic (12.03K)
>>>
>>> What this says to me is that these Wikipedias are not attracting new
>>> pages proportional to views when compared with other Wikipedias. This
>>> may be because people don't want to write new pages, but it seems to
>>> me more likely that people simply don't know they can.
>>>
>>> How can this be fixed? Perhaps a site notice inviting people to write
>>> quality pages or register, or a drive to recruit new Wikipedians from
>>> the academic community.
>>>
>>> Mark


body:
On 4/5/06, Neil Harris <neil at tonal.clara.co.uk> wrote:

> Okay then: support its use in template, MediaWiki and user namespaces:
> just not in any other namespaces. Problem solved.
>
> It _has_ to be a programmatic restriction, or people will inevitably
> ignore it, and present a fait accompli through usage.

Again, I think we should defer to individual projects and not impose
it as developer mandate. If individual projects want it turned off in
specific namespaces, let them decide. The decision shouldn't be made
arbitrarily here on a mailing list.

-L


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Email confirmations being sent with a
	returnaddress of wiki-AeOJrEpdGNeGglJvpFV4uA@public.gmane.org

body:
On 05/04/06, Platonides <Platonides at gmail.com> wrote:
> I agree. Verifciations shouldn't go from wiki at wikimedia.org but from a
> MediaWiki:  configurable email.

Disagree. Put it in the site configuration (which it is, so
something's been buggered up there), not in the hands of a bunch of
users who could do something stupid with it.

Rob Church


from_name: Mark Jeays

subject:
[Wikitech-l] [Ticket#2006040510003988] Using the
	Wikipedia"Featured Article"

body:
I think he may be referring to my unofficial (screen-scraped) RSS feed of
"Today's Featured Article" hosted on my web site at
http://jeays.net/wikipedia/featured.xml ?

I don't even know if I can officially give or deny permission?! In any case,
everyone is free to use the feed.

HTH,

Mark Jeays

> -----Original Message-----
> From: wikitech-l-bounces at wikimedia.org
> [mailto:wikitech-l-bounces at wikimedia.org]On Behalf Of Wikimedia
> Foundation
> Sent: April 5, 2006 5:39 PM
> To: wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] [Ticket#2006040510003988] Using the
> Wikipedia"Featured Article"
>
>
> Hi
>
> Does anyone have the knowledge and understanding to answer this email ?
>
>
> Ant
>
> --
> Wikimedia Foundation
> http://wikimediafoundation.org/
> ---- Forwarded message from james.johnstone at ayion.com ---
>
> From: james.johnstone at ayion.com
> To: board at wikimedia.org
> Subject: Using the Wikipedia "Featured Article"
> Date: 2006-04-05 08:23:40
>
> > Hello,
> >
> > I'm writing to follow up on something I asked about a little while ago
> > that has come up for us again.
> > I wrote to you around two months ago asking about whether or
> not we could
> > use an RSS feed of the Wikipedia "Todays Featured Article" block to
> > include it in a piece of educational software we are currently in the
> > process of developing, but we never got as far as to request whether or
> > not we could do this.
> >
> > So the question we are trying to get answered is, can we include the RSS
> > feed of the "Today's Featured Article" section in this educational
> > software package that we are developing?
> > The include would be displayed on the students "Start page",
> the page they
> > see when they first open up the service to gain access to other
> > information.
> >
> > This permission would be greatly appreciated,
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > James Johnstone
> > head of development
> > ayion educational
> >
> >
> >
> >
> ---- End forwarded message ---
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


from_name: Rotem Liss

body:
A replacement for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Switch would be
great.

Tim Starling wrote:

>In response to a campaign by users of the English Wikipedia to harrass developers by introducing
>increasingly ugly and inefficient meta-templates to popular pages, I've caved in and written a few
>reasonably efficient parser functions. There are two conditional functions and a mathematical
>expression function. The expression function should support uses such as time and date deltas, as
>well as floating point applications such as unit conversion. The conditional functions should
>replace most uses of {{qif}}, and improve the efficiency of similar templates.
>
>Documentation is at:
>
>http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ParserFunctions
>
>I would like to hear comments about the syntax, before we put them live. Syntax is guided by
>consistency with existing functions such as {{localurl:}}, but if it looks too unwieldy then we can
>probably change it.
>
>Don't blame me. I've always been against turning wikitext into a programming language. I'm just
>weaker than the other developers. How can I stand by and watch this sort of thing be inflicted on
>our articles:
>
>http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Ed_Poor/subtract&action=edit
>
>I had a choice between going on a deletion rampage or answering the persistent calls on the wiki for
>this kind of thing to be implemented.
>
>Templates, that's where it all went wrong. Or custom messages, as we called them back then. If only
>I understood what a Pandora's box I was opening when I implemented {{MSG:}}.
>
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2003-September/018536.html
>
>-- Tim Starling
>
>_______________________________________________
>Wikitech-l mailing list
>Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>
>


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Mathematical expressions and
 conditional	constructs, now implemented

body:
Rotem Liss wrote:

> And he shouldn't know - but the wikitext as programming language is
> used only in the templates, not in the pages. (Should be used only
> there, at least.)
>
> Rob Church wrote:
>
>> On 05/04/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On 4/5/06, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Don't blame me. I've always been against turning wikitext into a
>>>> programming language.
>>>
>>> Why?
>>
>> Because the idea of wikitext is to make editing as simple as possible
>> for Joe User who clicks Edit. Joe User who, perhaps, doesn't know what
>> HTML is.
>
But Joe User still needs to plug information into the template.  Or in
the course of ordinary editing he runs into a template which is not
suitable to his subject, but it's beyond his technical capacity to trace
the problem.  It's easy to say that he should ask someone more
experienced in thee things, but that detracts from his editing
experience and the genuine value that he has as a content provider.

I can understand how techies can sit back and narcissistically admire
their own creations or clever tricks to develop a uniform or
standardized image of everything that fits or can fit.  To be sure,
there is something aesthetically pleasing about that uniformity and
order, but that does shut out a broad range of people who would prefer
not to deal with such minutiae.  Joe Editor is comfortable with what he
knows.  He accepts that he must learn a minimum range of wiki markup to
do his work effectively.  Beyond that any announcement of improvements
is a serious cause for concern.

This is difficult enough for Jou Users who work primarily in developed
languages where a high degree of educational skill is the norm.  Many of
those editors have already adapted to some of those changes over time.
It is difficult to see how we can progress in less developed societies
and languages where technical experience is not the norm unless we make
big allowances for non-technical approaches.

Ec


body:
And he shouldn't know - but the wikitext as programming language is used
only in the templates, not in the pages. (Should be used only there, at
least.)

Rob Church wrote:

>On 05/04/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>On 4/5/06, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Don't blame me. I've always been against turning wikitext into a programming language.
>>>
>>>
>>Why?
>>
>>
>
>Because the idea of wikitext is to make editing as simple as possible
>for Joe User who clicks Edit. Joe User who, perhaps, doesn't know what
>HTML is.
>
>
>Rob Church
>_______________________________________________
>Wikitech-l mailing list
>Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>
>


from_name: Conrad Dunkerson

body:
Neil Harris wrote:

> It might therefore be a good idea to only evaluate formulae and
> conditional expressions to work within templates, and to simply treat
> them as plain text anywhere else. Templates using these programming
> features can then be treated by most users as "magic spells" that work
> automagically, without needing to learn these advanced features.

Most of the 'template coders' I know go to pains to use the existing
conditional kludges that way and I can't imagine built-in functionality
will be treated any differently. The goal is always to make the 'end
product' in the article itself as simple as possible.

While people complain about the complexity which templates have taken on
it is worth noting that there is a direct correlation between increasing
template complexity/functionality and decreasing article complexity.
Tables no longer have to be convoluted HTML or wiki-markup blocks in the
article themselves... they've been replaced by a short template call. And
conditional logic has made it so that the average user can insert one of
those templates into an article and fill out the parameters to produce a
perfect table without needing to understand the underlying table code at
all. That wasn't possible previously... they ''had'' to know table markup
(or HTML) in order to edit tables.

Yes, templates, parameters, and the 'parameter default' have been expanded
out into a 'programming language' of sorts... greatly simplifying and
enriching things for the average Wikipedian in the process. Yes, the
various 'date math' features are painfully convoluted... but they have
made it possible to automatically display tomorrow's or next month's 'of
the day' material... thereby aiding in efforts to verify that it will
display properly when the official day comes. They have added the ability
to go to dated content for the 'next day' or 'prior day'... creating
improved browsing capabilities. Et cetera.

Complexity and increased functionality are GOOD. Yes, they require
'programmers' to understand / implement them... but they can be used by
those programmers to make complicated / previously impossible things
simple for everyone to use.


from_name: Omegatron

body:
I seem to remember ''two quotes'' rendering as emphasis, but
now it is rendered as italics.  It also says "emphasis" in both

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Wikitext_quick_reference#Basic_text_formatting

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:How_to_edit_a_page#Character_formatting

so I don't think it's just my bad memory.  Was this changed accidentally?

Likewise for strong/bold.


from_name: Philip Welch

subject: [WikiEN-l] Deleting the Lolicon picture

body:
On Apr 5, 2006, at 6:57 AM, Matt R wrote:

>> I agree that 'pedophile' might have been a bit strong. Perhaps
>> 'people
>> who believe that Wikipedia has a duty to provide pedophiles with
>> child
>> porn regardless of the law' would be a more accurate, objective
>> description.
>
> \I don't think your description is particularly fair or objective.
> I support the removal
> of the image in question, but I recognise that at least some of
> those who argued
> for it to be it kept did so out of good faith and a desire to
> create the best encyclopedia
> possible. I don't think they were trolling or motivated by a desire
> to supply pedophiles
> with child porn.

I agree with Matt. This is not a profitable direction for discussion.

--
Philip L. Welch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Philwelch


subject: [WikiEN-l] Deleting the Lolicon picture

body:
On Apr 5, 2006, at 10:42 AM, Ray Saintonge wrote:

>>> I wasn't aware that Americans were unique in thinking pedophiles
>>> were
>>> morally comparable to communists, although to be perfectly fair,
>>> pedophiles have never committed acts of genocide.
>>>
>>>
>> Well, capitalists have as well, and I'm betting money on some
>> paedophiles being capitalists    /*duck*
>>
> Why should you have to duck when someone else has made such an
> extraordinarily stupid straw man statement.

Not to belabor this meta-debate, but it's a simple matter of
historical fact that communists have committed large-scale mass
murder. Tacit implications that communism is "okay" is as offensive
to many people as implying that fascism is "okay". Since neither
question is of direct relevance here, let's just agree, for the sake
of avoiding conflict, not to say nice things about controversial
political ideologies.

--
Philip L. Welch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Philwelch


from_name: Jesse W

subject: [WikiEN-l] en: CD! Well, sort of

body:
On Apr 5, 2006, at 12:42 PM, David Gerard wrote:

> http://fixedreference.org/2006-Wikipedia-CD-Selection/
>
> 2011 articles, hand-picked and cleaned up. Only 1,000,000 to go ;-)

I just want to say I think this is a great idea, a good and useful
step, and something to be commended.  I've been thinking that this sort
of thing is a direction that re-users of Wikipedia content really ought
to go in, and I'm pleased to see that they have.

Jesse Weinstein


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] Is en: too large?

body:
http://www.uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Image:ThatsNoMoonThatsWikipedia.jpg

We also need to help get this outfit properly decorated:
http://www.uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Image:ThatsNoMoonThatsWikipedia.jpg

- d.


from_name: David Alexander Russell

subject: [WikiEN-l] Image deletion

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

How about an obligation on *any* admin who speedies *any* image to first
of all save that image on their hard drive, and store a local copy of it
for at least a week/two weeks in case the speedy deletion turns out to
have been incorrect?

Cynical

Ilmari Karonen wrote:
> Jimmy Wales wrote:
>> With images, though, there has grown this bizarre culture that we must
>> not delete anything until we have a consensus to do so.  This is partly
>> because images can't be easily restored, and there is some legitimacy to
>> that as a factor in how we do things, but I think it has gotten much
>> worse.  Wildly inappropriate images which do not even have a majority
>> support for keeping are kept in articles in a way that similarly
>> inappropriate text would be shot on sight.
>
> I think this is in fact a (if not the) major cause of this controversy.
>   I'm not at all surprised that many users are very nervous about image
> deletion: we still remember when CSD I4 was added in September and as a
> consequence people had to go to Answers.com and other mirrors to look
> for copies of hastily deleted images.  I don't know if any free images
> were actually permanently lost because of that, but it wouldn't surprise
> me at all either.
>
> I've occasionally thought of setting up a bot to download and archive
> every file that is uploaded to Wikipedia.  I think just the knowledge
> that permanent copies existed _somewhere_ would probably calm people
> down a lot, even if the copies wouldn't be easily accessible.  I don't
> think the bandwidth and storage costs would be prohibitive.  I'd have to
> get someone's help to set up offsite backups, though.
>

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (MingW32)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD4DBQFENBWSg8fvtQYQevcRAkFCAJjltfHW3u4z2i+BGWw8fR0NFDbOAJ9vWLtO
TT2Sx4O52VhzA0XiCAWZXQ==
=H1xQ
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


from_name: Ilmari Karonen

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Image deletion (was: External links to image boards with
 images of a child engaged in sexually explicit acts.)

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
> With images, though, there has grown this bizarre culture that we must
> not delete anything until we have a consensus to do so.  This is partly
> because images can't be easily restored, and there is some legitimacy to
> that as a factor in how we do things, but I think it has gotten much
> worse.  Wildly inappropriate images which do not even have a majority
> support for keeping are kept in articles in a way that similarly
> inappropriate text would be shot on sight.

I think this is in fact a (if not the) major cause of this controversy.
  I'm not at all surprised that many users are very nervous about image
deletion: we still remember when CSD I4 was added in September and as a
consequence people had to go to Answers.com and other mirrors to look
for copies of hastily deleted images.  I don't know if any free images
were actually permanently lost because of that, but it wouldn't surprise
me at all either.

I've occasionally thought of setting up a bot to download and archive
every file that is uploaded to Wikipedia.  I think just the knowledge
that permanent copies existed _somewhere_ would probably calm people
down a lot, even if the copies wouldn't be easily accessible.  I don't
think the bandwidth and storage costs would be prohibitive.  I'd have to
get someone's help to set up offsite backups, though.

--
Ilmari Karonen


body:
Jakob Voss wrote:

> Oh my god! Is there no common sense in the English Wikipedia? Don't you
> have no community procedures to stop people from doing this?

> * Only activate the if-construct. You can use it for optional parameters
> in templates. This is the only useful application that I can think of.

I don't understand. You are (understandably) horrified by the massive
'subtract' template, but also then suggest to NOT implement Tim's 'expr'
feature which would replace (and improve upon) it with a single line? Why?

I agree that the current add/subtract templates are overboard, but there
are viable uses for mathematical functions. See;

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Yesterday&action=edit

Now, that is about as efficient as currently possible for what it does
(generate yesterday's date - including month/year changeovers and
leap-days), but with mathematic evaluation it could be reduced to just a
few lines. More complex capabilities = less complex pages.

That kind of 'yesterday' and 'tomorrow' logic was first introduced on
English Wikipedia only a couple of weeks ago, but is already used on
hundreds of pages for a variety of effects (previewing 'daily' content in
advance to verify that it is formatted correctly, going back to
'yesterday's main page' to find something you saw before, browsing forward
and backward through pages arranged in date order, et cetera). Heavy use
is fairly good indicator of 'usefullness'.


subject: [WikiEN-l] en: CD! Well, sort of

body:
http://fixedreference.org/2006-Wikipedia-CD-Selection/

2011 articles, hand-picked and cleaned up. Only 1,000,000 to go ;-)

- d.


body:
Neil Harris wrote:
> Okay then: support its use in template, MediaWiki and user namespaces:
> just not in any other namespaces. Problem solved.

> It _has_ to be a programmatic restriction, or people will inevitably
> ignore it, and present a fait accompli through usage.

Why?

Seriously. I can't think of a single case of 'qif' being used directly in
an article. Why would people use Tim's 'if' replacement differently?

Mind you - I agree that we wouldn't want people to be using these
capabilities directly on most pages. I just don't think they would...
because they don't currently.


from_name: Robert Scott Horning

subject: [Foundation-l] Adult and Illegal content on Wikimedia projects

body:
I'm trying to get the sense of the Wikimedia community here on a
potentially explosive topic.

I started a thread on the Staff Lounge at Wikibooks over what to do with
content that openly advocates breaking laws.  The goal I had was to help
come up with some wording that we could add to existing policies that
would prohibit this sort of content from being added to Wikibooks.

It has since devolved into general adult-level content including
pornography and if it should or should not be permitted and what sorts
of policies should be set for handling this sort of content.  Generally
pornography is not a problem at all on Wikibooks, because it almost
always involves a copyright violation or has other policy issues that
come into play well before it becomes an issue over pornography.  The
one exception was ordered to be deleted by Jimbo himself, and comes back
to the above issue because it involved a display of what could arguably
be child pornography.  That doesn't mean it won't be a problem in the
future, but at the moment nobody seems to be trying to push the envelope
here.

Where Wikibooks is having some real problems is with things like the
Manual of Crime, How to Rape, AIM Password Cracking, or a currently
contentious book on the use of illegal drugs called Drugs: Fact and
Fiction.  There was one book that even advocated genocide, but that was
defeated by a VfD.  The point I was trying to bring up is that these
books should not have to go before the Wikibooks community if there is a
clear policy that is strongly against this sort of practice.  As Jimbo
pointed out in an earlier discussion, many of these books should simply
be removed through a speedy deletion process with perhaps a concurring
opinion by another user (i.e. administrator) before it goes.

My question to the Wikimedia community at large is to see how you have
dealt with content of this nature, or if this is something that is
restricted mainly to Wikibooks?  I've tried to use NPOV arguments to
help temper some of the content, but many times it is simply better to
remove the content entirely as the entire book is advocacy of this sort
of activity, or to leave it in place with an obvious bias.  Sometimes
the book is added by an anonymous contributor over a few days and then
is a dead project, but in a few cases there are some very active
contributors who are very passionate that the content and fight tooth
and nail to keep the content in its current form and on Wikibooks, with
even a community of contributors that are involved as well.  With enough
other problems on Wikibooks, administrators have a tendancy to simply
leave content like this alone under this situation and perhaps add it to
their watch list as something to take care of in the future.

One proposal was to simply "wall off" the mature content in such a way
that no links would go into or out of the mature content area, and
become in effect a project within a project.  I don't know how to
effectively do this, but in theory it might be possible.  Policing that
content for vandalism is going to be a nightmare, and I can see other
problems as well including administrators openly encouraging vandalism
on this sub-set of pages.  The more I think about it, the more I dislike
the idea, but it at least is a partial solution to the issue.

--
Robert Scott Horning


from_name: Angela

subject: [WikiEN-l] Santa Barbara meetup, April 8th

body:
I don't usually advertise Wikipedia meetups on the mailing list, but
the Santa Barbara one is looking like it's going to be the smallest
ever at this rate, with just me and Antandrus, so if anyone is close
to Santa Barbara this Saturday, please sign up at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Santa_Barbara

Angela.

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


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [Wikitech-l] finer control of Hover Box?

body:
As a way of cheating, you could always make the link point to some
long, descriptive name which redirects to the real thing.

Steve

On 4/5/06, Rich Morin <rdm at cfcl.com> wrote:
> I would like to be able to put arbitrary text into a
> hover box (aka, HTML title tag), to give the user a
> short precis of where a link will go.  Looking at
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Link, I don't see
> any way to do this.
>
> If I'm missing something, please let me know.  If not,
> perhaps we should discuss the possible syntax for this.'
>
> -r
> --
> http://www.cfcl.com/rdm            Rich Morin
> http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/resume     rdm at cfcl.com
> http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/weblog     +1 650-873-7841
>
> Technical editing and writing, programming, and web development
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


body:
Tim Starling wrote:
>
> I'm willing to hear a case for the use of switch, but I'm not convinced of its utility based what
> I've seen.

It's syntactic sugar for a series of conditionals.  I used to recommend
{{switch}} over {{qif}} for performance reasons, since multiple calls to
qif can often be replaced with one switch, but I doubt it makes as much
difference in the new implementation.  Still, switch is often more
readable, and having it would make converting existing templates easier.

--
Ilmari Karonen


body:
> No, on purpose. That was like a year and a half ago, I think.

...because?


from_name: Platonides

subject: [Wikitech-l] Answere to questions on Non Ugly URL's setup

body:
"Govardhanen Gopal" <govardha at gmail.com>
escribi? en el mensaje
news:19b4af2f0604050931p6521688aldf50b4ef728263fa at mail.gmail.com...
> Hello Wilinckx,
>
> Here are my responses to your questions:
>
> Q.the kind of URL you'd like to have
> -  I would like to have url look like how it is in en.wikipedia.org ie
> en.wikipedia.org/Unix etc etc..
en.wikipedia uses  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix

> Q. the URL's MediaWiki links to when he links to an Article
> Also please note, I am unable to login or do anything at all once I
> try to make non ugly urls.
> -  Currently the links look like this
> http://wiki/wiki/index.php?title=FEC if the changes do work I would
> anticipate they look like http://wiki/wiki/FEC

Maybe the error is here. if you see wikimedia's project they use
http://theprojectname.org/w/index.php?title=Foo and the short system is
http://theprojectname.org/wiki/Foo
If you are trying to redirect /wiki/* to  /wiki/index.php?title=* well, you
may be trying to redirect to another redirect...  Even the existence of that
folder may be confusing your rules (anyway, that folder would be shadowed).

I suggest you to trying to make your urls as
http://theprojectname.org/wiki2/Foo  to see if some of that problem
resolves.


from_name: Wikimedia Foundation

subject:
[Wikitech-l] [Ticket#2006040510003988] Using the Wikipedia
	"Featured Article"

body:
Hi

Does anyone have the knowledge and understanding to answer this email ?

Ant

--
Wikimedia Foundation
http://wikimediafoundation.org/
---- Forwarded message from james.johnstone at ayion.com ---

From: james.johnstone at ayion.com
To: board at wikimedia.org
Subject: Using the Wikipedia "Featured Article"
Date: 2006-04-05 08:23:40

> Hello,
>
> I'm writing to follow up on something I asked about a little while ago
> that has come up for us again.
> I wrote to you around two months ago asking about whether or not we could
> use an RSS feed of the Wikipedia "Todays Featured Article" block to
> include it in a piece of educational software we are currently in the
> process of developing, but we never got as far as to request whether or
> not we could do this.
>
> So the question we are trying to get answered is, can we include the RSS
> feed of the "Today's Featured Article" section in this educational
> software package that we are developing?
> The include would be displayed on the students "Start page", the page they
> see when they first open up the service to gain access to other
> information.
>
> This permission would be greatly appreciated,
>
> Regards,
>
> James Johnstone
> head of development
> ayion educational
>
>
>
>
---- End forwarded message ---


from_name: Berto

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

body:
Hi!

> What we can do as a Wikimedia Foundation is limited. We cannot bring a
> computer to every house of this world but we can make our software ready
> for the moment when the people from these houses find their way to a
> computer.

A perfect phrase to describe what wikimedia is doing. May we quote it the
pms
edition? We are getting a page ready, to explain to the people what's this
all about.

Consider it a request for you to declare your phrase a PD statement :))

B?rto


body:
Minh Nguyen wrote:
> Jan Vanoverpelt wrote:
>  >
>  > I think this problem is due to the fact that i have created some kind of
>  > "hard link" behind the image, so that the user is always forced to go
>  > directly to the edit-box with the preloaded text in it. Is there a way to
>  > fix this, so that the user (after he/she visited the non-existing page for
>  > the first time, added something and saved it) is directly taken to the
>  > actual page the second time (like is done in case of "normal" links) ??
>
> Yes, I think there is: the English Wikipedia has an "exists" template
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Exists> to check if a particular
> page has been created yet.

Eww!  That's clever, but also incredibly ugly.  I can see why a template
(or a parser function) for this might be useful, but Jan's problem would
be much cleanly solved by a small patch to MediaWiki.

A minimal patch would be to add a new action ("action=editnew"?) that
would act like "action=edit", but only if the page does not already exist.

A slightly more invasive solution would be to show the edit box even in
the absence of "action=edit" if the page does not exist and the preload
parameter has been given.  This would avoid the need for a new action,
and the presence of the preload parameter seems a fairly good indication
that page creation is desired.

A radical, but simple, solution would be to show the edit box for _all_
nonexistent pages, with or without "action=edit".  After all, all
MediaWiki-generated links to nonexistent pages already do have
"action=edit" included.

The last suggestion would probably require some special handling for
blocked users, since we don't really want to trigger an autoblock just
because a blocked user clicked what he thought was a bluelink.  This is
related to Bug 4990, which apparently has been marked WONTFIX "for
caching reasons".  I realize this is going off on a tangent, but could
someone who understands that comment (Brion? Rob?) explain it to me?

--
Ilmari Karonen


from_name: Reinhardt WIEWE @ torg.is

body:
On Wed, 5 Apr 2006 23:28:16 +0200
 Tels <nospam-abuse at bloodgate.com> wrote:
> Moin,
> ...
> * recursion (template includes itself, is that already possible?)
> ...
> Tels

MediaWiki has a build in recursion detection. This should not be touched
because of vulnerability due to infinite loops. The last occurence I noticed
was reported to Brion in spring / summer 2005.

reinhardt [[user:gangleri]]


from_name: Michael Snow

subject: [WikiEN-l] Criminal copyright infringement

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

> Michael Snow wrote:
>
>> Actually, as the occasional outraged victim is more than happy to
>> remind us, copyright infringement can be considered criminal under
>> certain circumstances, at least in the US. For example, willful
>> infringement for commercial advantage, private financial gain, or of
>> works with a total retail value of more than $1,000 over any 180-day
>> period. See 17 U.S.C. ?506. The safe harbors for online service
>> providers and the requirement of willfulness make it difficult to
>> apply to the Wikimedia Foundation, but I can imagine situations in
>> which it could theoretically apply to the person uploading the material.
>>
>> The section also provides, among other things, for fines for
>> fraudulent removal of copyright notices. This might be worth pointing
>> out to those users we find modifying images they've clearly copied
>> from other websites to remove such notices.
>
> A key thing for the copyright paranoiacs to remember is that criminal
> infringement requires that the infringement must also pass the test
> for being a civil infringement, and it must be "willful".  The
> standard of proof is also much higher.  The only thing that goes the
> other way to making it easier is a longer statute of limitation: 5
> instead of 3 years.
>
> In other words, things need to get pretty bad before there is a US
> criminal prosecution.  There would be plenty of warning before things
> got that far.

Oh, criminal copyright prosecutions are rare enough, all right. In
addition, it's not the copyright holder who gets to decide whether
criminal charges are pressed. That decision is for the prosecutor in
conjunction with a grand jury. Most federal prosecutors have more
important matters to attend to.

--Michael Snow


from_name: Jay R. Ashworth

body:
On Wed, Apr 05, 2006 at 06:32:01PM -0700, Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Date: Wed, 05 Apr 2006 18:32:01 -0700
> But Joe User still needs to plug information into the template.  Or in
> the course of ordinary editing he runs into a template which is not
> suitable to his subject, but it's beyond his technical capacity to trace
> the problem.  It's easy to say that he should ask someone more
> experienced in thee things, but that detracts from his editing
> experience and the genuine value that he has as a content provider.

That sounds like an argument in favor of penalizing smart users at the
expense of stupid users -- worse, making it harder for the smart users
to *help* the stupid users.

That way lies madness, and sweaty palms.

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

     A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
     Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?

     A: Top-posting.
     Q: What is the most annoying thing on Usenet and in e-mail?


from_name: maru dubshinki

subject: [WikiEN-l] Image deletion

body:
On 4/5/06, Ilmari Karonen <nospam at vyznev.net> wrote:
> David Alexander Russell wrote:
> >
> > How about an obligation on *any* admin who speedies *any* image to first
> > of all save that image on their hard drive, and store a local copy of it
> > for at least a week/two weeks in case the speedy deletion turns out to
> > have been incorrect?

Instead of adding a major burden to admins deleting images (which is
something that needs to be done; I'm fairly sure there are large
backlogs), and slowing them down, and aggravating them, why not simply
fix image deletion's permament deletion?

Speaking only for myself, if I had to archive images on my own
hardware, and manually, everytime I went to CSD and deleted some
images (or used Gmaxwell's list, or went on New Pages patrol, or...),
I'd probably simply stop deleting images, since there are many other
equally worthwhile but easier things to do.

~maru


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Mathematical expressions and conditional
	constructs, now implemented

body:
On Thu, Apr 06, 2006 at 02:14:30AM +0200, Erik Moeller wrote:
> As for the syntax, might it make sense to use a double colon instead
> of a single colon, e.g. {{if:: <condition> | <then text> | <else text>
> }}? I'm not a big fan of the semantic overload we have with single
> colon prefixes.

I like that a lot; is there any reason why that would make the parser's
head explode?

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

     A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
     Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?

     A: Top-posting.
     Q: What is the most annoying thing on Usenet and in e-mail?


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] emphasis vs italics, strong vs bold

body:
Omegatron wrote:
>> No, on purpose. That was like a year and a half ago, I think.
>
> ...because?

To stop abusing semantic markup (such abuse renders the semantics meaningless).

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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subject: [Foundation-l] statistics

body:
SJ wrote:

>For a demographic breakdown of visitors to the site in the US, the
>Hitwise data are pretty good.  Here are data from early March:
>
>http://hcs.harvard.edu/%7Esjklein/WP-Charts-030206.doc
>
>
With the caveat that their breakdown by age starts at 18, which
obviously omits a sizable chunk of the online population, and we can be
fairly confident that this affects Wikipedia more than some other sites.
How much this matters may depend on what lines of research you're
interested in pursuing.

--Michael Snow


subject: [Foundation-l] statistics


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Mathematical expressions and conditional
 constructs, now implemented

body:
Tim Starling wrote:
> In response to a campaign by users of the English Wikipedia to harrass developers by introducing
> increasingly ugly and inefficient meta-templates to popular pages, I've caved in and written a few
> reasonably efficient parser functions. There are two conditional functions and a mathematical
> expression function. The expression function should support uses such as time and date deltas, as
> well as floating point applications such as unit conversion. The conditional functions should
> replace most uses of {{qif}}, and improve the efficiency of similar templates.
>
Of course, the moment I get my XML converter working reasonably well,
you have to go ahead and extend the syntax! ;-)

OTOH, why not think this through till the bitter end? Let's implement a
whole programming language! What about WikiScript? Or a Perl
implementation: Wiki + Perl = Wirl! It would be slow, but you could use
wiki markup & HTML for the comments.

Sorry.

Magnus


from_name: Neil Harris

body:
Rotem Liss wrote:
> And he shouldn't know - but the wikitext as programming language is
> used only in the templates, not in the pages. (Should be used only
> there, at least.)
>
It might therefore be a good idea to only evaluate formulae and
conditional expressions to work within templates, and to simply treat
them as plain text anywhere else. Templates using these programming
features can then be treated by most users as "magic spells" that work
automagically, without needing to learn these advanced features.

-- Neil


from_name: Tels

body:
Moin,

On Wednesday 05 April 2006 22:57, Magnus Manske wrote:
> Tim Starling wrote:
> > In response to a campaign by users of the English Wikipedia to
> > harrass developers by introducing increasingly ugly and inefficient
> > meta-templates to popular pages, I've caved in and written a few
> > reasonably efficient parser functions. There are two conditional
> > functions and a mathematical expression function. The expression
> > function should support uses such as time and date deltas, as well as
> > floating point applications such as unit conversion. The conditional
> > functions should replace most uses of {{qif}}, and improve the
> > efficiency of similar templates.
>
> Of course, the moment I get my XML converter working reasonably well,
> you have to go ahead and extend the syntax! ;-)
>
> OTOH, why not think this through till the bitter end? Let's implement a
> whole programming language! What about WikiScript? Or a Perl
> implementation: Wiki + Perl = Wirl! It would be slow, but you could use
> wiki markup & HTML for the comments.
>
> Sorry.

A wiki can already viewed as a collection of large programs:

* artikle = program with input (the wiki text) and output (the HTML)
* executed by running it in the browser, output is cached as to not
  "run" the program if the output wouldn't change (clever!)
* template = subroutine, takes input, outputs something different
* params to subroutines (templates)
* default params to subroutines (templates)
* recursion (template includes itself, is that already possible?)

You can then view a wiki as a collection of programs (artikles) and
subroutines (templates, some of them are used in multiple programs).

Now add conditional templates, and you got suddenly conditional subroutine
execution.

I guess adding loops is not far away, and at that point it would be turing
complete.

	10 print "Hello World!"
	20 goto 10

isn't that much different from:

	Hello World!
	{{ {{{ARTICLENAME}}} }}

(No idea if that actually works, but one might imagine it)

:-)

Best wishes,

Tels
--
 Signed on Wed Apr  5 23:22:10 2006 with key 0x93B84C15.
 Visit my photo gallery at http://bloodgate.com/photos/
 PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email.

 "Zudem k?nnten nun nicht mehr nur T?ter, sondern auch Opfer abgeh?rt
 werden, um diese besser zu sch?tzen." J?rg Bode, FDP -
 http://heise.de/newsticker/data/anw-11.12.03-003/

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