from_name: Pedro Sanchez

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: WikiEN-l Digest, Vol 31, Issue 28

body:
> Message: 3
> Date: Sat, 4 Feb 2006 19:54:33 -0500
> From: The Cunctator <cunctator at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Should we be declaring war on vandals?
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
> Message-ID:
>         <dfd0b40602041654w4f10c8aaoe616b5f6ad511990 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> On 2/4/06, Chris Jenkinson <chris at starglade.org> wrote:
> > The Cunctator wrote:
> > > [[User:Cool Cat]].
> >
> > One person? It seems a more productive path would be to discuss it on
> > his talk page rather than discussing it behind his back on the mailing
> > list - as far as I know, he's not subscribed.
>
> He's the person who founded the "Counter Vandalism Unit", so his
> attitudes are influential.

I resent that, most of us have our own mind and our own attitudes,
philosophies and approaches to our wikiwork. And again, this is no
about coolcat, you seem to be shifting the target of yoru criticisicm:
cvu is bad, not it's not cvu, it's the name, not it's not the name,
it's the fantasy, no it's not the fantasy, it's one person statemetn,
no it's not a pern statement, it's his influence, and so on.

as someone pointed: you're just looking for things to criticize on.


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

body:
>
> Message: 9
> Date: Sun, 5 Feb 2006 04:53:36 +0200
> From: "gediza at gmail.com" <gediza at gmail.com>
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: WikiEN-l Digest, Vol 31, Issue 27
> To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
> Message-ID:
>         <1228d5bb0602041853n1a56b8d6uac3b9f1b92e35535 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
> 3. I am at a state of war against some vandals, spesificaly ones that use
> wikimedia vunrabilities to get good users blocked. There are vandals whom
> could spoof IPs of good users and get them blocked. The more extreme vandals
> get, the more exreme I will get. I'd like to note I am "warring" bare
> handed. I cannot block a vandals. If we don't declare "war" on persistant
> vandals who only seek to vandalise wikipedia we created for their amusement.
> We need to "war" against vandalism. The ultimate battle strategy is to
> destroy the will of the opponent to fight. Most vandals stop after test
> warnings or a 5-15 minute "warning" block. Provoking vandals is just asking
> for more.

And for the record and to avoid possible further trolling, those are
HIS views, doens't mean every RC patroller thinks he's at war, to
clarify


list: foundation-l

from_name: oscar

subject: [Foundation-l] communications committee

body:
On 2/5/06, Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Although the communications committee will primarily use meta and the
> foundation wiki for its activities, there are three areas that need to
> remain confidential:
> 1) copies of old press reports since these would be copyright
> violations if you just put them on a public wiki (linking isn't an
> option for sites that don't keep open and/or permanent archives of
> their news nor for press that only appeared in hard copy)
> 2) personal contact details on the press distribution lists
> 3) press releases that we really can't release ahead of time (like
> partnerships and other deals)
>
> Unless we want to open up the internal wiki to every committee member

as to the internal wiki,

(potentially hundreds of people when you consider every sub-committee
> that will be formed)

do sub-committee members really need to have access to this, do i really
need to?

oscar

, having separate wikis for the few committees
> that need it seems the only sensible solution. I had not assumed that
> anyone who became a committee member would automatically get access to
> the internal wiki. Remember that only the initial committee members
> are approved by the Board. Any future additions (and the press
> committee for one intends to expand a lot over the coming weeks) will
> presumably not be going through board votes.
>
> Angela.
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


list: wikimedia-l

subject: [Foundation-l] communications committee


from_name: gediza at gmail.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: WikiEN-l Digest, Vol 31, Issue 27

body:
> > The Cunctator wrote:
> > > Should any of us declare war on vandals?
> > >
> > > Aren't most vandals people who are just being juvenile, and likely if
> > > shown how much fun being a productive contributor to Wikipedia is,
> > > would rather have their edits last, influencing others?
> > >
> > > Shouldn't we distinguish between fighting vandalism and fighting
> > > vandals? It's not personal -- it's business. Right?
> > >
> > > Isn't declaring war a gross violation of assuming good faith?
> > >
>> > Please tell me why "declaring war" on vandals is a good idea.
> >
> > Who's been declaring war on vandals?
> >
> [[User:Cool Cat]].

It is highly dishonorable to talk behind someones back although you did
mention the mailing list on my talk page. If you have a problem with me,
please use my talk page. Your personal problems with me does not concern
rest of wikipedia. And if it does concern rest of wikipedia there is arbcom
or rfc.

1. Should we declare war on vandals: Firstly define "war".
  a. If you suggest reverting vandalism is war. Then yes there shall be war.
  b. If you are suggesting using bots to monitor every edit on wikipedia,
then let there be war
  c. Fighting vandalism does not mean you get to bite newbies. Thats the
major thing I tried to emphecise with the Counter Vandalism Unit.
2. You practicaly are campaigning against everything RC patrolers are doing
ranging from opposing semi-protection, Counter Vandalism Unit to
Anti-vandalism barnstar. I do not think you have any idea the level of
vandalism wikipedia has. I'll give you two easy examples. See the history of
my talk page. Check past 5000 edits. you will see about 5+ vandal bot
attacks. Also see articles such as [[Geroge W. Bush]]. Articles such as
[[George W. Bush]] is finaly reliable. Aka when you load the page you do not
see random images of genetials. Granted Bush is a dick as far as I care but
I'd rather have an encyclopedic article about him rather than a picture of
someone elses dick.
3. I am at a state of war against some vandals, spesificaly ones that use
wikimedia vunrabilities to get good users blocked. There are vandals whom
could spoof IPs of good users and get them blocked. The more extreme vandals
get, the more exreme I will get. I'd like to note I am "warring" bare
handed. I cannot block a vandals. If we don't declare "war" on persistant
vandals who only seek to vandalise wikipedia we created for their amusement.
We need to "war" against vandalism. The ultimate battle strategy is to
destroy the will of the opponent to fight. Most vandals stop after test
warnings or a 5-15 minute "warning" block. Provoking vandals is just asking
for more.
4. I invite you to RC patrol for several days. Feel free to join us at
#wikipedia-en-vandalism on freenode. In an enviorment you are assuming good
faith there should be no reason why you should not give it a try.
5. RC patroling is not an easy task. It requires dedication of numerous
people watching practicaly thousands of edits per hour. For that we RC
patrolers only ask to be left alone, we don't even require patting in the
back. Just let us do our work and allow people to recognise our hard work by
giving us the Anti-vandalism barnstar. Vandalism can only be fought with
comunity concensus, a joint effort. Tens of vandalism happens per hour.
Mostly highschool kids testing or some congressman blanking contraversies
about him or some disturbed individual who likes to replace pages with
images of penises. It is absolutely painfull for RC patrolers to be sconred
upon for fighting against vandalism.

                   Cool Cat


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject:
[Foundation-l] Internal wiki(s) and confidential committee
	communications

body:
I apologize for taking this out of the communications committee thread;
however, I think this is an issue which affects all committees and
should be discussed separately: How to deal with confidential information?

Daniel Mayer has rightly pointed out the risk of balkanization of our
communications infrastructure. The current approach -- one wiki and
mailing list for a lot of trusted people -- has the clear advantage that
we can get input on a variety of issues from a reasonably large group of
individuals.

Right now, being a member of the internal wiki and internal-l is tied to
organizational status: board members and officers of the mother
organization and its chapters have access. This is not entirely fair, as
being a chapter officer doesn't automatically mean you're doing as much
work, or have as much legitimate interest, as someone who does not
currently have the required organizational status, and there is no
process -- as far as I am aware -- for those who don't have it to gain
access.

My favored approach would therefore be one which makes a clear
distinction between the "core committees" (created through  Board
resolutions) and the subcommittees (created by the committees
themselves). To my knowledge, we have never really defined what a
subcommittee is, so here is a hypothetical model:

1) A core committee which chooses its own members, using 75% approval
(the steward threshold). If it is considered necessary, these members
might also have to be approved by the Board majority or the Executive
Committee; I would prefer this not to be the case. All these members
have access to the internal wiki and list as they currently exist.

Membership status might be re-evaluated regularly. The committee members
would be advised to choose only individuals who are already trusted to
be granted access to confidential information, rather than those who
have yet to earn that trust.

In addition, there are the observers/consultants, who can participate in
open meetings, but do not have access to confidential information.
Ideally, as much as possible should be discussed in open meetings, but
how much that can be will vary, of course. Having these non-voting,
non-member participants on board ensures that we have a constant
pressure for openness, which is good, as it is always easy to become
complacent and do things confidentially when you don't have to.

2) A subcommittee focusing on a particular area of interest, e.g. one
project ("Wiktionary"), task ("OTRS") or language ("Swedish"). These
could have their own membership procedures, i.e. be totally open or more
restrictive, with the maximal restrictiveness being the same as the core
committee. Being a member of a subcommittee alone would not
automatically give you full access to the internal wiki and list.
However, one could be a member of both a core committee and a subcommittee.

I would imagine that in practice, much of the work will be going on in
focused subcommittees. I would also imagine that, due to them being
generally more open, they will have less authority to act in the name of
the Foundation than the core committees, but that they will be able to
propose resolutions to the core committees.

So, in this model, members of the core committees would ideally be
chosen based on them doing good work in the subcommittees, hence moving
more to a meritocratic model of information access than the current one,
which is tied to the (rather stagnant) organizational status.

Now, each of these subcommittees may have the need for confidential
communications, and this is where it gets tricky. Here, I would suggest
exploring the use of namespaces on the internal wiki to segregate
confidential information relevant only to one subcommittee. For example,
an OTRS: namespace could be created on internal.wikimedia.org
particularly for the OTRS subcommittee of Communications.

This would necessitate changing the software to allow for namespaces to
be associated with user groups, and then giving the correct group
membership to everyone who is supposed to have access to the information
relevant to a subcommittee. Hiding page content is not too hard; it gets
a bit more complicated if we want to make sure that people cannot even
see page _titles_ outside their given namespace access, as these are
currently shown all over the place. Perhaps a gradual implementation
would be sufficient.

I prefer this approach to creating lots of separate wikis because, for
those people who are trusted to see _all_ confidential information, it
reduces the need to manually aggregate information from lots of places
(balkanization), and enables them to quickly get involved in relevant
discussions (synergies). At the same time, it guarantees that people who
have not yet gained the trust of a core committee cannot see anything
which is not clearly relevant to them.

I know solutions involving software changes are always the least popular
;-), but perhaps it is still preferable to ending up with 30 new wikis
and mailing lists.

What do others think about this model? I hope we can discuss this in
some more detail at the open meeting later today.

Best,

Erik


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: [Wikinews-l] Relaunch Chinese Wikinews poll?

body:
OK, I've created a brainstorming page on

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikinews/China_2

to design a poll or set of polls to deal with the issue. I think all
votes should take place on Meta rather than Wikipedia, since there
already is Chinese Wikiquote, Chinese Wikisource, Chinese Wiktionary,
Chinese Wikicommons, Chinese Wikispecies, and Chinese Wikibooks, and it
wouldn't be fair to potentially exclude people who are members of any of
these communities, but not of the Chinese Wikipedia.

Erik


subject:
[Foundation-l] Internal wiki(s) and
	confidential	committee	communications

body:
Brion-

you raise excellent technical points. Of course, there are also security
issues with the existing implementation, such as file uploads, which are
openly accessible (don't know if they have been specially secured on
internal).

The fact that people keep asking for better access control functionality
may be a good reason to start thinking seriously about it, and it seems
to me that namespaces provide the best existing structural element for
this. They are relatively easily checked against, and already basically
considered by lots of special pages, including search.

Yes, it's going to be a PITA to make sure the system is secure in all
places. Since we will also start out with a smaller number of people
initially, the gradual implementation approach could be one with a
fairly steady risk. Also don't forget that it's always possible to
resort to hacks, such as simply starting out with two-level
functionality, where most special pages are entirely unavailable to
people who have only limited namespace access.

There are always different levels of confidentiality. If we're about to
sign a major deal with a major company, the terms of that deal being
leaked prematurely could kill it, and cost the foundation hundreds of
thousands of dollars. If we're working on a confidential response to an
accusation of libel in Wikipedia, said response being leaked would be
embarrassing and potentially cause minor legal issues, but not nearly as
bad.

If there are different levels of confidentiality, then it follows
logically that it makes sense to have different levels of trust, and
therefore different levels of access to information, because otherwise
your only option will be to go with the lowest common denominator. We do
not, for example, say that you either have full access to the servers,
or you don't have access at all. We have the toolserver, we have shell
access, we have root database access, and we have full root access.

It's not just about trust - it's also about competence and willingness
to do work in certain areas. Ultimately, why should someone who only
ever handles libel cases as part of some subcommittee need to know about
confidential deals which are being negotiated? It creates only risk and
no benefit.

The only remaining question then is whether it is easier and more
practical to have multiple confidential places (from which information
will have to be aggregated), or to modify our software to allow multiple
levels of access in a single installation. I would argue that a gradual
implementation of the latter strategy is more promising and scalable in
the long run. However, if you say that it cannot be done, it is pretty
much a no-go.

Erik


from_name: Alexis Bugnolo

subject: [WikiEN-l] Discussion of Block against 69.39.68.109 by Hall Monitor

body:
Hall Monitor seems to have blocked 69.39.68.109 for 48 hours for a 3RR violation

  However this IP is used by a good number of Christian Net subscribers, who were not involved.

  Also it seems that Hall Monitor has not checked back at 69.39.68.109's discussion page to hear his side.

  As one who accesses the Net through Christian Net and who has been contacted by original the blocked individual, I am requesting this block be removed; as the individual has assured me that he has now read the Wikipedia guidless for edits, and misunderstood the expected and established policy by the board of editors which is overseeing edits, AND WILL not engage in what Wikipedia terms vandalism again.

  Sincerely in Christ,

  Br. Alexis Bugnolo

---------------------------------
Brings words and photos together (easily) with
 PhotoMail  - it's free and works with Yahoo! Mail.


from_name: Ilya N.

subject: [WikiEN-l] Discussions for Adminship

body:
The problem, as I've explained before, is there may be one of the following
situations:

   - Vote tally is (20/0/0) and someone raises a very valid concern that
   may make the person unsuitable for adminship.
   - Someone raises a concern, vote tally becomes (0/20/0), and then it
   turns out it was a sockpuppet doing it.

We want people to only vote once they've gotten the whole picture after
discussion.

As an admin, I'd perfer having this instead of relying on a handful of
encounters with said user, or having to research 20 users in-depth. As a
bureaucrat, it makes it easier to tell whether or not to promote in
borderline cases.

Finally, I don't think we should use voting as the main medium for
discussion.

On 2/5/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> What was wrong with the existing method at RFA?
> We don't need hard and fast suffrages. Anyone with too low an edit count
> or
> too little experience, won't survive the request anyway. All it adds is a
> lot of bureaucratic (please forgive the word) crap.
>
> Mgm
>
>
> On 2/5/06, Ilya N. <ilyanep at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Please look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:DFA and comment on it. I
> > guess people didn't like us suspending RFA before discussing, so we made
> a
> > different page, where you can tie up the whole thing in discussion until
> > the
> > cows come home. Please inform me of any obvious contradictions in the
> > pages.
> >
> > --
> > ~Ilya N.
> > http://w3stuff.com/ilya/ (My website; DarkLordFoxx Media)
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ilyanep (on Wikipedia)
> > http://www.wheresgeorge.com - Track your money's travels.
> > _______________________________________________
> > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> >
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
~Ilya N.
http://w3stuff.com/ilya/ (My website; DarkLordFoxx Media)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ilyanep (on Wikipedia)
http://www.wheresgeorge.com - Track your money's travels.


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] A novel policy interpretation

body:
Probably better to watch it here than in federal court. Now of,
course, should the Mafia decide to announce themselves and edit here,
we would have to let them. They are so powerful.

Fred

On Feb 5, 2006, at 8:02 AM, Andrew Gray wrote:

> [[WP:AN]] currently contains this announcement:
>
> "The userbox Template:User pedophile [...] is a great way of
> identifying those users who consider themselves to be pedophiles. I
> plan on indefinitely blocking any user who includes this template.
> I've already blocked the only user to include this template [...]
> Wikipedia has no obligation to permit deviants to edit. If a someone
> has sexual thoughts about children, keep it to yourself and stay off
> Wikipedia. I can't even imagine the PR nightmare that the Wikimedia
> Foundation would face if articles were being written by
> self-identified pedophiles."
>
> I can just tell this one's going to be a fun argument to watch.
>
> --
> - Andrew Gray
>   andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: communications committee

body:
Angela wrote:
>>To be a UK press contact, I should probably be listed on the
>>Foundation wiki press contacts ... I've decided my mobile number is
>>public (though I usually let it go to message): 07990 822 568. I asked
>>to be added to the page a while ago ... is there some problem I'm not
>>aware of?
>
>
> I suspect that the problem is that Anthere is basically the only
> person who regularly updates the foundation wiki, and she probably
> wasn't aware that you were supposed to be added. It's a good job we'll
> be getting a communications committee (pending board approval) to
> resolve this sort of thing. :)
>
> Angela.

Yes. There are a whole lot of pending issues at the moment regarding the
Foundation website.

Such as possibly you asking to be added as press contact (I also
suddenly wonder if there was not also something left to update about
Nicholas Moreau that I might have forgotten on the way).
Also, Delphine asked to be made sysop on it.
And finally, there are *many* pending requests to simply have an account
on it (Li Sung and others I think).

I usually try to fix these issues every 2-3 weeks, but it may be that
with holidays and the stewards elections... errr... I might have left
time go without realising :-)

Sorry.

Anthere

PS : just a note. As for contact people, it is getting a bit messy,
because I think we have a complete page of them on the internal wiki
(so, none visible to the press), a shorter list on the foundation wiki
(so, visible), other lists on local projects and maybe even some lists
on meta.

And the *one* day I needed the contact with the swiss... I had to go
hunt on irc channels to find it...

There is work to do :-)


body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> --- Elisabeth Bauer <elian at djini.de> wrote:
>
>>Working tools:
>>* an internal press wiki (enotif enabled) and a mailing list will be
>>used to coordinate the work of the communications committee. The mailing
>>list and the wiki will be open to all people doing PR on an
>>international or project level.
>>* the press queues in otrs
>>* the press release distribution and archive software on wikimedia.de
>
>
> A separate list I can understand (I plan to have one for finance). But why is there a need for a
> separate Wiki? We already have InternalWiki whose editors must be approved of by the board not
> only to edit but to even view pages. Do we now not trust all board members, officers and the board
> members of chapters? If so, then we are in serious trouble.

Problem is Mav... Some members of the committees are neither board
members, nor officers, no members of chapters. They are just simply
themselves, good people we like and trust....

Only problem, there is some confidential stuff on the internal wiki, and
some people might be unhappy that all committees members are given
access to it.

For myself, I would be glad to work mostly on meta or on a more discreet
place (with for example, login mandatory and rather open membership), an
archive-open mailing list, and hack the confidential stuff by private
email and if necessary put the confidential stuff on internal.

ant

> A separate wiki for press and PR is a very bad idea since other parts of the organization will
> also need to periodically be involved in press/PR issues. At the very least they need to be
> informed of what is going on so they don't get blindsided. Other times their input will be needed.
> All that can and should be done in one centralized place, InternalWiki.
>
> Anything uber secret should only be handled by the board and they already have their own wiki.
>
> -- mav
>
> __________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
> http://mail.yahoo.com


from_name: Daniel Mayer

body:
--- Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> Now, each of these subcommittees may have the need for confidential
> communications, and this is where it gets tricky. Here, I would suggest
> exploring the use of namespaces on the internal wiki to segregate
> confidential information relevant only to one subcommittee. For example,
> an OTRS: namespace could be created on internal.wikimedia.org
> particularly for the OTRS subcommittee of Communications.
>
> This would necessitate changing the software to allow for namespaces to
> be associated with user groups, and then giving the correct group
> membership to everyone who is supposed to have access to the information
> relevant to a subcommittee. Hiding page content is not too hard; it gets
> a bit more complicated if we want to make sure that people cannot even
> see page _titles_ outside their given namespace access, as these are
> currently shown all over the place. Perhaps a gradual implementation
> would be sufficient.
>
> I prefer this approach to creating lots of separate wikis because, for
> those people who are trusted to see _all_ confidential information, it
> reduces the need to manually aggregate information from lots of places
> (balkanization), and enables them to quickly get involved in relevant
> discussions (synergies). At the same time, it guarantees that people who
> have not yet gained the trust of a core committee cannot see anything
> which is not clearly relevant to them.

I agree with this approach and suggested something similar. But Brion said that it really isn't
possible without a hell of a lot of redesigning of the software.

Something like finance, for example, is going to be of interest to lots of people on the
organizational level and things like budgeting will also need input from the entire organization.

Having all that on a finance wiki that can only be viewed by maybe the board and the members of
the finance committee will not facilitate its functioning at all. Also, people like me, like to
give input on other aspects of the organization. Blocking out that input a priori will reduce if
not kill, as you said, synergistic effects.

If, however, strictly confidential things were only viewable by certain groups, then the other 90%
of things can be viewable by anybody on InternalWiki. And only trusted people are allowed on
InternalWiki. So, let's trust them and get on with the work we need to do.

-- mav

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


body:
--- Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> If we're going to try hiding things,
> * What are we hiding, from whom?
> * How much do we trust them?
> * Do we trust them enough not to peek?
> * If we don't trust them, why are they there?
> * If we do trust them, why are we hiding information?
>
> If the only requirement is to protect against casual reading of pages by
> highly-trusted individuals in another workgroup, maybe it's good enough. But do
> we need it then?

All the right questions. All we need to do is properly vette those people who are given access to
InternalWiki. We could given make each promise to keep what they see there secret. But if we can't
trust committee members in one committee with information generated from another, then they should
not be a member of *any* committee.

-- mav

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


from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [WikiEN-l] The Counter Vandalism Unit? Whaa?

body:
On 2/4/06, Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2/4/06, The Cunctator <cunctator at gmail.com> wrote:
> > It's not a taste issue -- it's a culture issue. I strongly believe
> > that inclinations to building an outsider-insider dichotomy, a culture
> > that worries about destruction and damage, that is paranoid about
> > attack and ruination, is one that is pernicious to the Wikipedia
> > project.
>
> So in the end, that's the objection. The name bugs you. Nothing to do
> with how they actually work, what they have or have not done, but the
> name. And an assumption about the culture of the people who
> participate in it, and generally in insider-outsider metaphors.
>
> Don't get me wrong -- I know metaphors are important. I've read my
> "Metaphor and War", my _Metaphors We Live By_, my _Women, Fire, and
> Dangerous Things_, and I think they're all great, smart works. But
> unless you can present some real EVIDENCE of a pernicious problem
> stemming from the name of this group of editors, I find it very hard
> to be persuaded that this is a serious issue.

How about being persuaded that the name should be changed and that
editors shouldn't be declaring war on vandals?


from_name: Ryan Delaney

body:
On 2/5/06, The Cunctator <cunctator at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> How about being persuaded that the name should be changed and that
> editors shouldn't be declaring war on vandals?

That's an interesting thought, but I have a better idea: How about dropping
it and getting back to work on the encyclopedia?

Ryan


body:
--- Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Problem is Mav... Some members of the committees are neither board
> members, nor officers, no members of chapters. They are just simply
> themselves, good people we like and trust....

And when they become official members of a committee, then they will have an official role in the
organization. They will be trusted with at least one part of the organization. Thus they should
have to place where internal matters are worked on; internal wiki. Sounds like it will be possible
to make incidental viewing of things they don't need to view possible (yet hackable for some time
; but if they are trusted already, then we should be able to trust that they won't try to hack
into things they shouldn't be seeing).

Finance, for example, will be working on draft financial reports. We need a place to put those
that are not public until after the board (or the committee itself if so designated by the board)
approves them for publication. If we had those on a FinanceWiki, then nobody else in the
organization will be aware of them and none of them will be able to comment on them or add their
input. We NEED that kind of back and forth, especially for things like budgeting.

If, however, only a small part of finance committee has access to InternalWiki and we have the
draft documents there, then the other members of the committee might as well not be on the
committee at all since they don't have access to the place where the work is being done.

But my biggest point is this; If we can't trust members of the finance committee with keeping
sensitive non-financial matters confidential, then how the hell can we trust them to keep
sensitive financial matters confidential? Trust is trust. We either trust them or we don't.

> Only problem, there is some confidential stuff on the internal wiki, and
> some people might be unhappy that all committees members are given
> access to it.

'Some people might be unhappy' is not a valid reason. If that were valid, then the fact that I'm
unhappy about balkanization should carry just as much weight.

-- mav

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
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body:
Hi All

Thanks for the update Elian :-)

Just one comment and one question.

The comment : this committee will consist of these members only after
approval by the board. It has not yet been approved.

A question : why are all members only people living in english-speaking
countries ?

Ant

Elisabeth Bauer wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Angela, Michael and I met today for discussing the details of the
> communication committee. I'm giving here a summary of this meeting, a
> second meeting will be held next weekend, open to all interested people
> who want to help with the communications committee.
>
> The committee will consist of four initial members
> * Angela Beesley
> * Michael Snow
> * Nicholas Moreau
> * David Gerard
> Further members are welcome.
>
> The Schwartz PR team who is working pro bono for us and I will act as
> advisors. With this email, I am resigning from my job as press officer.
> I will still help with the work, but I need a bit of distance from
> Wikimedia/Wikipedia at the moment.
>
> The committee will elect a chair as soon as it has a stable membership.
>
> Working tools:
> * an internal press wiki (enotif enabled) and a mailing list will be
> used to coordinate the work of the communications committee. The mailing
> list and the wiki will be open to all people doing PR on an
> international or project level.
> * the press queues in otrs
> * the press release distribution and archive software on wikimedia.de
>
> Main tasks (for the moment):
> * The committee is responsible for authorizing and coordinating the
> press teams on local projects (list on [[Wikimedia:Press room]])
> * The committee will tend to the list of interview contacts
> ([[Internal:Interview partners]])
> * It will draft and distribute the press releases of the Wikimedia
> foundation and provide help for local press releases
>
> Areas of work:
>>From the structure of the committees, there are quite a lot of work
> areas for the communication committee:
> * Press
> * Promotion
> * OTRS
> * Translation
> * Fundraising
> * Internal communication
>
> To address all these areas, probably subcommittees have to be founded,
> that's a topic for the open meeting next weekend.
>
> Relevant meta pages:
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications_committee
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications_subcommittees
>
> greetings,
> elian


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Discussions for Adminship

body:
But that's exactly what we're doing. An x-day discussion period.

The reason there's a different page is that we were originally going
to suspend RfA and put this procedure where RfA is located right now,
but some people complained, and then Demi suggested we make a new
page.

On 2/5/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2/5/06, John Lee <johnleemk at gawab.com> wrote:
> >
> > I strongly agree. Based on my assessment of our current
> > consensus-determining mechanisms, dividing things into a
> > discussion/fact-finding and voting period will rectify a number of
> > problems. (I'm a regular on [[WP:AFD]] where I close debates, [[WP:FAC]]
> > where I've gotten more than 20 articles featured and [[WP:RFA]].) FAC is
> > effectively one huge fact-finding period, as the culture encourages
> > people to rectify problems as soon as possible and notify the objectors.
> > AfD right now faces the same problem as RFA -- people vote before all
> > the facts are in. If [[WP:PROD]] works, I hope we'll be able to change
> > AfD into something like this -- disputed discussions should have all the
> > facts in before people vote. Right now closing admins have to grimace as
> > they "overrule consensus" because they realise that "Ohnoes, the last
> > voter is right and this article should be kept/deleted, but nobody else
> > has noticed!"
> >
> > I'm all for this. Let's bring FAC-style discussion to the rest of our
> > consensus-determining mechanisms.
> >
> > John Lee
> > ([[User:Johnleemk]])
> > _______________________________________________
>
> FAC has a lot of the same problems. People oppose before things are fixed
> without coming back to change their vote. I'd be happy to see a x-day
> discussion implemented before voting starts, but at most that would require
> a change to the rules of RFA (which is requests for adminship - not votes
> for adminship). I don't see the need to make an entirely new page.
>
> If this idea was discussed before changing anything, I'm sure there'd be
> less opposition.
>
> Mgm
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
~Ilya N.
http://w3stuff.com/ilya/ (My website; DarkLordFoxx Media)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ilyanep (on Wikipedia)
http://www.wheresgeorge.com - Track your money's travels.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Changing fair use tags

body:
--- Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:

> This is beginning to become somewhat of a significant problem...
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Promophoto&diff=25617866&oldid=25553321
>
> On October 15, someone changed [[Template:Promophoto]] quite
> significantly.  The old text read that "This work is a copyrighted
> promotional photo with a known source [...]"  The new text reads that
> "This work is a copyrighted promotional photograph of a person that is
> '''known''' to have come from a media kit or similar source."
>
> I can see the reasoning, that works which are not from a media kit or
> similar source are not acceptable.  But I think that changing the text
> of such a template is very dangerous.
>
> Looking at "what links here", there seem to be several instances of
> tagged images which probably did not come from a media kit or similar
> source.  That is to say, I can't really say for certain that they
> definitely didn't come from a media kit or similar source, but they
> give no indication that they were, and they were tagged before this
> came into play.
>
> This is bad for oh so many reasons.  I won't get into the legal ones,
> in part because I'm not sure who exactly is to blame, but it should be
> enough reason that someone might come along, see this image, and
> assume that it's part of a press kit, because, well, *it says it is*.

This is indeed very bad for the reasons you give. I think the old wording is better. Also, 'being
part of a press kit' is too high a bar to prove and I'm not sure if 'being part of a press kit' is
well defined enough anyway.

Just my IANAL 2 cents.

-- mav

__________________________________________________
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Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
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from_name: Angela

body:
> To be a UK press contact, I should probably be listed on the
> Foundation wiki press contacts ... I've decided my mobile number is
> public (though I usually let it go to message): 07990 822 568. I asked
> to be added to the page a while ago ... is there some problem I'm not
> aware of?

I suspect that the problem is that Anthere is basically the only
person who regularly updates the foundation wiki, and she probably
wasn't aware that you were supposed to be added. It's a good job we'll
be getting a communications committee (pending board approval) to
resolve this sort of thing. :)

Angela.


body:
On 2/5/06, Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2/5/06, The Cunctator <cunctator at gmail.com> wrote:

> > How about being persuaded that the name should be changed and that
> > editors shouldn't be declaring war on vandals?
> That's an interesting thought, but I have a better idea: How about dropping
> it and getting back to work on the encyclopedia?

Let's do both.


from_name: Alphax (Wikipedia email)

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Should we be declaring war on vandals?

body:
Michael Snow wrote:
> Chris Jenkinson wrote:
>
>> MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
>>
>>> I could, but if I did that I would mess up the listings in GMail
>>> which I use
>>> myself.
>>> I can't make everyone happy at the same time.
>>> I'll try quoting part of the messages I reply to instead, which
>>> hopefully
>>> makes as much people happy as possible.
>>
>>
>> Why does it mess up the listing in Gmail? If that's the case, Gmail is
>> broken.
>
>
> Of course it's broken, it's only in beta. Doesn't mean we should ban it,
> though. Otherwise, by a similar logic, perhaps the Wikimedia Foundation
> should optimize all of its sites for Internet Explorer.
>

I consider Internet Explorer to be in more of a "beta" status than
Firefox is - at least it actually has people looking at what's wrong
with it, if anything.

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

from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Problem with extensions on MW1.5.5

body:
admin Yellowikis wrote:
> I've finally upgraded to 1.5.5 but now I can't get any of the great
> new extensions to work.
>
> For example here is what I get with Erik M?ller's Inputbox extension:
>
> http://www.eco-gites.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
>
> Any idea what's gone wrong?

Nothing looks wrong, but there's no indication that you've attempted to use the
extension for anything on that page.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

subject: [WikiEN-l] Discussions for Adminship

body:
What was wrong with the existing method at RFA?
We don't need hard and fast suffrages. Anyone with too low an edit count or
too little experience, won't survive the request anyway. All it adds is a
lot of bureaucratic (please forgive the word) crap.

Mgm

On 2/5/06, Ilya N. <ilyanep at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Please look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:DFA and comment on it. I
> guess people didn't like us suspending RFA before discussing, so we made a
> different page, where you can tie up the whole thing in discussion until
> the
> cows come home. Please inform me of any obvious contradictions in the
> pages.
>
> --
> ~Ilya N.
> http://w3stuff.com/ilya/ (My website; DarkLordFoxx Media)
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ilyanep (on Wikipedia)
> http://www.wheresgeorge.com - Track your money's travels.
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Matt Brown

subject: [WikiEN-l] Changing fair use tags

body:
The point is that when someone uploads an image with a tag, they
assert that what the tag says AT THAT TIME is correct.  If the wording
is then changed, it in effect puts words in the mouth of the uploader.

-Matt


body:
admin Yellowikis wrote:
> I get this:
>
> http://static.flickr.com/35/95945683_4f7697d726.jpg
>
> Maybe I have a User-Keyboard interface error.

Sounds like a combination of:
1) Corrupt file upload
2) You fixed the file or removed it, then didn't do anything to clear the
browser's cache of that page.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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from_name: Anthony DiPierro

subject: [WikiEN-l] Changing fair use tags

body:
This is beginning to become somewhat of a significant problem...

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Promophoto&diff=25617866&oldid=25553321

On October 15, someone changed [[Template:Promophoto]] quite
significantly.  The old text read that "This work is a copyrighted
promotional photo with a known source [...]"  The new text reads that
"This work is a copyrighted promotional photograph of a person that is
'''known''' to have come from a media kit or similar source."

I can see the reasoning, that works which are not from a media kit or
similar source are not acceptable.  But I think that changing the text
of such a template is very dangerous.

Looking at "what links here", there seem to be several instances of
tagged images which probably did not come from a media kit or similar
source.  That is to say, I can't really say for certain that they
definitely didn't come from a media kit or similar source, but they
give no indication that they were, and they were tagged before this
came into play.

This is bad for oh so many reasons.  I won't get into the legal ones,
in part because I'm not sure who exactly is to blame, but it should be
enough reason that someone might come along, see this image, and
assume that it's part of a press kit, because, well, *it says it is*.

Anthony


from_name: Sean Barrett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Worst. Userbox. Ever.

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

David Gerard stated for the record:

> Someone created {{User pedophile}}. While almost anyone would think
> this was created as a vehicle for trolling and personal attacks, the
> creator actually did create it for the purpose of finding and blocking
> paedophiles from editing, since *of course* they would put it on their
> own page.

Would it violate WP:POINT if I included the box in my page, then
permablocked the fool who tried to block me for including it?

- --
 Sean Barrett     | I'm sure there's a way to say "fuck off,
 sean at epoptic.org | you drooling idiot" in Diplomatian. -d
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
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subject: [Foundation-l] communications committee

body:
Although the communications committee will primarily use meta and the
foundation wiki for its activities, there are three areas that need to
remain confidential:
1) copies of old press reports since these would be copyright
violations if you just put them on a public wiki (linking isn't an
option for sites that don't keep open and/or permanent archives of
their news nor for press that only appeared in hard copy)
2) personal contact details on the press distribution lists
3) press releases that we really can't release ahead of time (like
partnerships and other deals)

Unless we want to open up the internal wiki to every committee member
(potentially hundreds of people when you consider every sub-committee
that will be formed), having separate wikis for the few committees
that need it seems the only sensible solution. I had not assumed that
anyone who became a committee member would automatically get access to
the internal wiki. Remember that only the initial committee members
are approved by the Board. Any future additions (and the press
committee for one intends to expand a lot over the coming weeks) will
presumably not be going through board votes.

Angela.


subject: [Foundation-l] communications committee


from_name: Fastfission

subject: [WikiEN-l] Changing fair use tags

body:
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. You seem to be saying that
1. there are instances of images with this template on them which are
mistagged and that 2. people might think the tags are correct when
they might not be. I'm not sure how this is different than any other
image tag, whether they have been changed or not.

A lot of fair use tags were changed around then to make their
definitions tighter, easier to understand, etc. I don't think that was
a bad thing, and it makes it easier to spot when they have been
misapplied.

Perhaps it would please you if "is known" is changed to something more
ambiguous? Is asserted by the person placing this tag?

Perhaps we should put a little disclaimer on all tagging templates
that they may in fact be incorrectly applied?

FF

On 2/5/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> This is beginning to become somewhat of a significant problem...
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Promophoto&diff=25617866&oldid=25553321
>
> On October 15, someone changed [[Template:Promophoto]] quite
> significantly.  The old text read that "This work is a copyrighted
> promotional photo with a known source [...]"  The new text reads that
> "This work is a copyrighted promotional photograph of a person that is
> '''known''' to have come from a media kit or similar source."
>
> I can see the reasoning, that works which are not from a media kit or
> similar source are not acceptable.  But I think that changing the text
> of such a template is very dangerous.
>
> Looking at "what links here", there seem to be several instances of
> tagged images which probably did not come from a media kit or similar
> source.  That is to say, I can't really say for certain that they
> definitely didn't come from a media kit or similar source, but they
> give no indication that they were, and they were tagged before this
> came into play.
>
> This is bad for oh so many reasons.  I won't get into the legal ones,
> in part because I'm not sure who exactly is to blame, but it should be
> enough reason that someone might come along, see this image, and
> assume that it's part of a press kit, because, well, *it says it is*.
>
> Anthony
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Andrew Gray

body:
[[WP:AN]] currently contains this announcement:

"The userbox Template:User pedophile [...] is a great way of
identifying those users who consider themselves to be pedophiles. I
plan on indefinitely blocking any user who includes this template.
I've already blocked the only user to include this template [...]
Wikipedia has no obligation to permit deviants to edit. If a someone
has sexual thoughts about children, keep it to yourself and stay off
Wikipedia. I can't even imagine the PR nightmare that the Wikimedia
Foundation would face if articles were being written by
self-identified pedophiles."

I can just tell this one's going to be a fun argument to watch.

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


body:
On 2/5/06, The Cunctator <cunctator at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Let's do both.

Well, in absence of any coherent reason to change the name, it won't be
changed, so I'll have to take my own initative to get back to work and leave
you to decide whethe you want to do the same, or continue arguing
pointlessly with whoever still has the energy on the mailing list.

Ryan


from_name: Rob Smith

subject: [WikiEN-l] Worst. Userbox. Ever.

body:
Geez I thought the brilliant idea of not being "rule bound" took care of
this.

nobs

On 2/5/06, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
>
>
> A lot of it is newbies coming along and going through bad ideas that the
> wiki's been through several times already; pointing out why things are a
> bad idea seems to be what's missing. They REALLY DON'T KNOW THE IDEAS ARE
> STUPID if someone doesn't tell them.


from_name: Guettarda

subject: [WikiEN-l] Changing fair use tags

body:
On 2/5/06, Matt Brown <morven at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The point is that when someone uploads an image with a tag, they
> assert that what the tag says AT THAT TIME is correct.  If the wording
> is then changed, it in effect puts words in the mouth of the uploader.
>
> -Matt

I agree.  All of the templates should have warning text saying something
like <!--- Do not make changes which alter the meaning of this text.  If you
want to replace this tag with a more specific one, please create a new tag
--->

Ian


body:
--- Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> Let's say that the finance committee has a subcommittee on fundraising
> strategies (this might well be located elsewhere, but humor me). Such a
> subcommittee would have to come up with innovative strategies -- social,
> technical -- to maximize the return from our next fundraising drive.
> Having a dedicated subcommittee for this purpose can help to make sure
> that people stay on the ball, have regular meetings, publish their
> progress, and so forth. It's also exactly an area where we want to be
> fairly open about participation.

Not sure that fundraising is the best example since almost everything it does, even the draft
stuff, will be on meta. Thus hardly anybody involved in that subcommittee would not need access to
either the internal list or wiki.

> Hence my distinction between core committees and subcommittees. Core
> committee members should have complete access to all confidential
> information on the internal wiki and internal-l. Subcommittee members
> could have their own private communications channels or, as we agreed,
> ideally have separate spaces on the internal wiki without having access
> to everything else there.

I'm not sure a distinction between a core committee and other committee members makes much sense
in practice. Accounting and budgeting, for example, will be subcommittees to the finance
committee. All members of those two subcommittees will need access to InternalWiki since that is
where draft reports and budgets will be created. Yet almost everybody in the fundraising
subcommittee need only have access to meta.

Access to the internal wiki and list would be controlled by the board. Being a member of any
committee or subcommittee would not automatically give them access to those things. That can be
needs based. But a prerequisite to be considered for having that access should be committee
membership, an affirmative super-majority vote by the committee for each candidate, and then
ratification by the board.

-- mav

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


subject: [WikiEN-l] Changing fair use tags

body:
On 2/5/06, Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm not sure what you're getting at here. You seem to be saying that
> 1. there are instances of images with this template on them which are
> mistagged and that 2. people might think the tags are correct when
> they might not be.

Yes, but also 3) this problem is becoming more and more widespread
among these types of image tags.

> I'm not sure how this is different than any other
> image tag, whether they have been changed or not.
>
It's different because when the template changes it makes makes tens
or hundreds of tags incorrect all at once, as opposed to when an image
is simply mistagged, that affects only one image.

You're right that both are a problem.  The one of changing image tags
seems to be easier to resolve, though.  Don't change image tags except
for minor grammatical changes.  If you break that rule, at least go
through all the tags and remove the tag from the images where it no
longer applies.  If that's too much work, start a new tag instead of
changing the existing one.

> A lot of fair use tags were changed around then to make their
> definitions tighter, easier to understand, etc. I don't think that was
> a bad thing, and it makes it easier to spot when they have been
> misapplied.
>
It is, of course, possible to define when a tag is supposed to be used
without rewriting the actual text of the tag.  Personally I'd suggest
that policy changes should not be enacted by changing the text of
templates, but that's just me.  Another possible solution would be to
remove the tag from the images where it no longer applies - a job
which most naturally would fall upon the person changing the tag.

It seems to me that the result is quite obviously a bad thing - lots
of images are mistagged.  I don't really understand how you can
suggest that there's nothing wrong with that.

> Perhaps it would please you if "is known" is changed to something more
> ambiguous? Is asserted by the person placing this tag?
>
Changing "is known" would be one possible solution, though changing it
to "is asserted by the person placing this tag" would be false and/or
misleading in most of the same circumstances.  I'd say such a change
would actually make matters worse, because now anyone changing the tag
is putting words into someone else's mouth - on top of being negligent
now we're being libelous (and not just in the legal sense, giving
people bad advice and attributing false statements to others is just
plain *wrong*).

> Perhaps we should put a little disclaimer on all tagging templates
> that they may in fact be incorrectly applied?
>
> FF

Probably.  But if a tag isn't correctly applied, what's the point of
having it in the first place?  Seriously, I'd rather have no tag at
all than have an incorrect one.  Image tags were originally
descriptive, not prescriptive, and frankly I see no reason that should
be changed.

Saying "this might be wrong" is arguably a good first step - but the
real problem is that so many tags are wrong in the first place.

Anthony


subject: [WikiEN-l] Changing fair use tags

body:
On 2/5/06, Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> > This is beginning to become somewhat of a significant problem...
> >
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Promophoto&diff=25617866&oldid=25553321
> >
> > This is bad for oh so many reasons.  I won't get into the legal ones,
> > in part because I'm not sure who exactly is to blame, but it should be
> > enough reason that someone might come along, see this image, and
> > assume that it's part of a press kit, because, well, *it says it is*.
>
> This is indeed very bad for the reasons you give. I think the old wording is better. Also, 'being
> part of a press kit' is too high a bar to prove and I'm not sure if 'being part of a press kit' is
> well defined enough anyway.
>
> Just my IANAL 2 cents.
>
> -- mav

Personally I'd go with something like: "This work has been tagged as a
copyrighted promotional photo.  Promotional photos should only be used
in Wikipedia under the terms of [[Wikipedia:Publicity photos]]."  And
then let that referenced page decide the *policy* of when to use the
photos.

I'm not sure if others would agree with this or not, so I'm just
throwing it out there.

Anthony


from_name: stevertigo

subject: [WikiEN-l] Parallel stupidity

body:
--- David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> What happens is that really really stupid ideas get
> floated and discussed, but people who aren't stupid
>avoid the discussions because their brain will fall
out if they try ...

There is also the devil-may-care crowd --inbetween
stupid and smart -- who see the need to make
themselves useful despite the cost to themselves
--brain falling out, etc. But its the same thing with
any controversial issue. Such is the foolish quest to
make people better informed.

With that said, it might be best to avoid using
pejoratives to refer to people, David. Youre English;
surely you can craft your concepts with a bit more
wit. I of course am no stranger to the need for
clarity, but if were going to take it to that level,
then you're talking about a kind of overhaul of
current WP structure and WP culture. Same canine
complaining --different context.

SV

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


from_name: Sam Korn

body:
On 2/5/06, Michael Snow <wikipedia at earthlink.net> wrote:
> Of course it's broken, it's only in beta. Doesn't mean we should ban it,
> though.

A little birdy told me *we* were still in beta.  Surely that can't be right...

;-)

--
Sam


from_name: Henry Olders

subject: [Wikitech-l] Suggestion: collapsible/expandable lists for outlining

body:
I would like to see wiki markup support for outlining, ie for
hierarchical lists which can be expanded or contracted by clicking on
icons.

I did not find any reference to this in the newsgroup version of
wikitech-l at gmane.org; my apologies if this has been brought up before.

Henry


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> Erik Moeller wrote:
>
>> Hiding page content is not too hard; it gets
>> a bit more complicated if we want to make sure that people cannot even
>> see page _titles_ outside their given namespace access, as these are
>> currently shown all over the place. Perhaps a gradual implementation
>> would be sufficient.
>>
>
> I have strong reservations on this due to the large number of ways open to
> access page content in MediaWiki. I have consistently recommended against third
> parties attempting to hack MediaWiki for this; anyone who actually requires this
> sort of multiple-group confidentiality levels in a single wiki could lose their
> job when it fails (and it probably would fail).
>
This is a great argument why it should not be third parties to attempt
to hack MediaWiki for this. It is not an argument why it should not be
done. Given that you have expressed your reservations on multiple
occasions, there is a clear demand for this functionality, there is also
the present expressed requirement.. The fact that this is NOT the first
time that it is discussed for use within the Wikimedia Foundation gives
weight to the argument that it should be developed. It is not only but
also useful for the Wikimedia Foundation, it does provide functionality
that cannot be done well by third parties. It is known that this
functionality has been hacked multiple times. You make a great case for
the development of this functionality.
> In addition to page titles there are summaries, extracts, fragments, search
> results, templates, old versions, watchlist entries, raw loads, diffs, logs, RSS
> feeds, export, and god knows what else.
>
> I can pretty much assume that lots of time would be spent cleaning up after
> mistakes, where confidential material was placed into the wrong page / edit
> summary / log entry / whatever that's hard to remove.
>
> So while we could try, I recommend strongly against it if legal confidentiality
> is actually a requirement (as I cannot guarantee we can provide it with software
> diametrically opposed to it) and I recommend against it if it's not a
> requirement (why bother?)
>
>
When there is no legal confidentiality required, it makes for an ideal
environment for creating this functionality. It is ideal because as the
people involved are trusted, it means that a failure of the security
implemented does not create a genuine security situation.

When there is legal confidentiality required, it means that a
confidential wiki with low security requirements is selected and will be
used to test the security features. As confidence in these security
features grows, content can be merged into this wiki in order from low,
medium to high confidentiality requirements. The trust of the people who
are /not /given permission to view content is still implicit, the
difference in approach is because of the legal requirements.

Creating an environment with increased needs for confidentiality is
however a dangerous thing. There is cost associated both with being open
and with being closed. I have the impression that we only hear arguments
for having closed / confidential information. The discussion of these
arguments also seem to be rather closed / confidential. People who are
not "in the know" are likely to see increased secrecy as being not
benign. The consequence/ is/ that the group that is in the know becomes
more isolated. This leads to less migration into and out of the group
that is privy to information and therefore to a more centralised
organisation that in time becomes increasingly likely to look for new
people outside of the Wikimedia communities.

At this moment the activity in the Wikimedia Foundation is
overwhelmingly Western; American or European. It is extremely important
that the organisation of the Wikimedia Foundation remains open; this
will allow for the hoped for infusion of people and ideas that are not
Western.
> If we're going to try hiding things,
> * What are we hiding, from whom?
> * How much do we trust them?
> * Do we trust them enough not to peek?
> * If we don't trust them, why are they there?
> * If we do trust them, why are we hiding information?
>
> If the only requirement is to protect against casual reading of pages by
> highly-trusted individuals in another workgroup, maybe it's good enough. But do
> we need it then?
There are two ways of looking at MediaWiki, either it is seen in a
Wikimedia centred way or, it is seen as software that is used by many
organisations with Wikimedia as the principal user. The second approach
acknowledges that organisations like Wikicities, or like schools, etc
use MediaWiki.

There are arguments outside of Wikimedia that plead for the
implementation of this functionality. Please take these into account.

Thanks,
   GerardM


body:
On 2/5/06, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> [[WP:AN]] currently contains this announcement:
>
> "The userbox Template:User pedophile [...] is a great way of
> identifying those users who consider themselves to be pedophiles. I
> plan on indefinitely blocking any user who includes this template.
> I've already blocked the only user to include this template [...]
> Wikipedia has no obligation to permit deviants to edit. If a someone
> has sexual thoughts about children, keep it to yourself and stay off
> Wikipedia. I can't even imagine the PR nightmare that the Wikimedia
> Foundation would face if articles were being written by
> self-identified pedophiles."
>
> I can just tell this one's going to be a fun argument to watch.
>
> --
> - Andrew Gray
> andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk

I don't understand how anyone could be stupid enough to attract that kind of
attention to themselves, but really that is one big load of crap. Unlike
yourself, I won't have fun watching that argument. I don't like pedophiles,
but I don't see why they shouldn't be allowed to edit Wikipedia. As long as
they follow the rules, they are useful editors. The same goes for murderers
and fascists and terribly close-minded people. As long as someone can leave
their own feelings at the doorstep, it should work out.

No one should be disallowed to edit Wikipedia because of who they are.

Mgm


subject: [WikiEN-l] Discussions for Adminship

body:
On 2/5/06, John Lee <johnleemk at gawab.com> wrote:
>
> I strongly agree. Based on my assessment of our current
> consensus-determining mechanisms, dividing things into a
> discussion/fact-finding and voting period will rectify a number of
> problems. (I'm a regular on [[WP:AFD]] where I close debates, [[WP:FAC]]
> where I've gotten more than 20 articles featured and [[WP:RFA]].) FAC is
> effectively one huge fact-finding period, as the culture encourages
> people to rectify problems as soon as possible and notify the objectors.
> AfD right now faces the same problem as RFA -- people vote before all
> the facts are in. If [[WP:PROD]] works, I hope we'll be able to change
> AfD into something like this -- disputed discussions should have all the
> facts in before people vote. Right now closing admins have to grimace as
> they "overrule consensus" because they realise that "Ohnoes, the last
> voter is right and this article should be kept/deleted, but nobody else
> has noticed!"
>
> I'm all for this. Let's bring FAC-style discussion to the rest of our
> consensus-determining mechanisms.
>
> John Lee
> ([[User:Johnleemk]])
> _______________________________________________

FAC has a lot of the same problems. People oppose before things are fixed
without coming back to change their vote. I'd be happy to see a x-day
discussion implemented before voting starts, but at most that would require
a change to the rules of RFA (which is requests for adminship - not votes
for adminship). I don't see the need to make an entirely new page.

If this idea was discussed before changing anything, I'm sure there'd be
less opposition.

Mgm


from_name: Philip Welch

subject: [WikiEN-l] Worst. Userbox. Ever.

body:
> David Gerard wrote:
>
>> ... stupidity is created by a massively parallel process.
>>
> Is that statement protected by copyright?

Ray, I've asked you privately, and I know I'm not the only one. FIX
YOUR COMPUTER'S DATESTAMP. You're screwing up everybody's message
sorting because all your messages show up as being from 1997.

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


subject: [WikiEN-l] Worst. Userbox. Ever.

body:
>>>> ... stupidity is created by a massively parallel process.
>>>>
>>> Is that statement protected by copyright?
>>
>>
>> Ray, I've asked you privately, and I know I'm not the only one. FIX
>> YOUR COMPUTER'S DATESTAMP. You're screwing up everybody's message
>> sorting because all your messages show up as being from 1997.
>>
>
> Sort by "order received" or view as threads?
>
> But yeah, this is really bizzare...

I have my mail client set the way I like it. I'm not gonna change it
just to accommodate one guy who doesn't bother to correctly set his
computer clock, even after people let him know politely.

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


from_name: Rob Church

subject: [Wikitech-l] process for contributing mediawiki extensions?

body:
You need to be subscribed.

Rob Church

On 05/02/06, Tels <nospam-abuse at bloodgate.com> wrote:
> Moin,
>
> On Friday 03 February 2006 13:04, Tels wrote:
> > Moin,
> >
> > On Friday 03 February 2006 12:22, Rob Church wrote:
> > > No one list is necessarily better than the other, but I'd be inclined
> > > to recommend announcing on mediawiki-l regardless, since a MediaWiki
> > > extension might be of use to several others using the software.
> >
> > I think I'll do that.
>
> I send over two days ago an email:
>
>   Announce: Graph extension updated
>   From: Tels <nospam-abuse at bloodgate.com>
>   To: mediawiki-l at wikimedia.org
>   Date: 03.02.2006 13:41
>
> So far it hasn't made it to
>
>  http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-l/2006-February/thread.html
>
> , nor did I get a bounce. Are these delays normal? Or do I need to be
> subscribed to post there?
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Tels
>
> --
>  Signed on Sun Feb  5 19:26:20 2006 with key 0x93B84C15.
>  Visit my photo gallery at http://bloodgate.com/photos/
>  PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email.
>
>  "What you have to have faith in is human beings being able to work
>  together." -- Larry Sanger
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Changing fair use tags

body:
On 2/5/06, Nick Boalch <n.g.boalch at durham.ac.uk> wrote:
> Matt Brown wrote:
> > The point is that when someone uploads an image with a tag, they
> > assert that what the tag says AT THAT TIME is correct.  If the wording
> > is then changed, it in effect puts words in the mouth of the uploader.
>
> An argument for using subst?
>

Personally I have mixed feelings about that solution.  In order to be
useful for sorting the template would have to include a category link,
and to some extent you're just redirecting the problem to one of
defining the category.  At the same time, at least categories are
somewhat more obviously ambiguous.

Using subst makes it harder for automated tools to parse things.  But,
again, if you have a category this problem is somewhat mitigated.

I guess I could see using subst for the more in-depth arguments.  If
you are using the template, to use a quote from the talk page, "to
make a fair use claim in the template itself", then subst is probably
better.  But that's not why image tagging was started, image tagging
was started for the purpose of facilitating the sorting of images.
For that use, categories and {{templates}} are about equal (I believe
image tagging predated categories or we might not have used templates
in the first place), but using subst isn't so much so.

I guess the best way to go, if one had the luxury of starting from
scratch, would be to use categories for the simple stuff (this is an
album cover, this is a promotional photograph, this is GFDL), and
subst templates for the more complicated stuff (this is a promotional
photo of a person for which there is no free alternative being used
only in an article about the person depicted in the photo).  Of
course, one doesn't have the luxury of starting from scratch...

Anthony


subject: [WikiEN-l] Changing fair use tags

body:
On 2/5/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> On 2/5/06, Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I'm not sure what you're getting at here. You seem to be saying that
> > 1. there are instances of images with this template on them which are
> > mistagged and that 2. people might think the tags are correct when
> > they might not be.
>
> Yes, but also 3) this problem is becoming more and more widespread
> among these types of image tags.

Have any evidence? Most of these tags were revised three months ago as
part of a general overhaul. The hope was that by improving the wording
on the tags and making it more specific, it would be easier to spot
inappropriately applied tags. Checking over all existing media is of
course a much slower affair, but I think the goal was good. And I
haven't seen any big changes of this sort for quite awhile, certainly
not anything which deserves to be called "more and more widespread".

> It's different because when the template changes it makes makes tens
> or hundreds of tags incorrect all at once, as opposed to when an image
> is simply mistagged, that affects only one image.

So, are you arguing that we should never change image templates? Or
that we should go through each one after each change to check if it is
up to date? Give me a break. You want to organize people do to that,
go for it, but it seems like a foolish way to approach this.

Which is not to say that templates of this sort should be changed
often or changed regularly. But these fair use templates have changed,
what, once? At that was for a specific reason, which was discussed
amongst editors both on the 'pedia and on the mailing list. And yeah,
there will be some images for which the template no longer applies.
And when we stumble across them, as good editors, we should change
them. Same as anything else.

> You're right that both are a problem.  The one of changing image tags
> seems to be easier to resolve, though.  Don't change image tags except
> for minor grammatical changes.  If you break that rule, at least go
> through all the tags and remove the tag from the images where it no
> longer applies.  If that's too much work, start a new tag instead of
> changing the existing one.

Well, in an ideal world we'd have hoards of people willing to do this.
In reality we have only a handful. And there have been a number of
re-cat projects. Anyway, if you really think this category should be
gone over with a fine-toothed comb, there are ways to get this
effected.

> It is, of course, possible to define when a tag is supposed to be used
> without rewriting the actual text of the tag.  Personally I'd suggest
> that policy changes should not be enacted by changing the text of
> templates, but that's just me.  Another possible solution would be to
> remove the tag from the images where it no longer applies - a job
> which most naturally would fall upon the person changing the tag.

This was raised on this list and on multiple places on the 'pedia
months ago when it was undertaken. Nobody voiced any real objections,
and lots of people were supportive. I don't know where you were then
but this wasn't something which was just done out of the blue and
without any notification and deliberation. The goal was a re-haul of
the fair use templates from their original forms ("This image is fair
use") to something which would encourage better tagging and better
understanding of fair use ("This image, when used in X and Y fashion,
should be fair use"). Personally I think it has done a lot of work in
getting people to better use fair use tags and helping people decide
whether or not a given image is properly tagged.

> It seems to me that the result is quite obviously a bad thing - lots
> of images are mistagged.  I don't really understand how you can
> suggest that there's nothing wrong with that.

All I'm suggesting is that a unilateral dismissal of all change is
foolish, and that not everything gets fixed overnight. And that there
are actually places to discuss this thing if you are really trying to
get things fixed, rather than just to complain.

> Probably.  But if a tag isn't correctly applied, what's the point of
> having it in the first place?  Seriously, I'd rather have no tag at
> all than have an incorrect one.  Image tags were originally
> descriptive, not prescriptive, and frankly I see no reason that should
> be changed.

Because it wasn't working AT ALL originally. There is some backward
implementation which needs to be done, but the newer tags are, I
think, better on every level in moving forward.

FF


from_name: Tels

body:
Moin,

On Friday 03 February 2006 13:04, Tels wrote:
> Moin,
>
> On Friday 03 February 2006 12:22, Rob Church wrote:
> > No one list is necessarily better than the other, but I'd be inclined
> > to recommend announcing on mediawiki-l regardless, since a MediaWiki
> > extension might be of use to several others using the software.
>
> I think I'll do that.

I send over two days ago an email:

  Announce: Graph extension updated
  From: Tels <nospam-abuse at bloodgate.com>
  To: mediawiki-l at wikimedia.org
  Date: 03.02.2006 13:41

So far it hasn't made it to

 http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-l/2006-February/thread.html

, nor did I get a bounce. Are these delays normal? Or do I need to be
subscribed to post there?

Best wishes,

Tels

--
 Signed on Sun Feb  5 19:26:20 2006 with key 0x93B84C15.
 Visit my photo gallery at http://bloodgate.com/photos/
 PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email.

 "What you have to have faith in is human beings being able to work
 together." -- Larry Sanger

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Changing fair use tags

body:
On 2/5/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> Image tags were originally
> descriptive, not prescriptive, and frankly I see no reason that should
> be changed.

One last note on this:

The old templates said things like, "Posters are thought to be fair
use on Wikipedia." and "Television show screenshots are thought to be
fair use on Wikipedia."

The new ones are mostly written along the lines of "This is a form of
X media. It is copyrighted. It is thought that low-resolution and
limited numbers of X media are used on Wikipedia in Y way, it is fair
use. Any other use of this media could be a copyright violation."

There are two benefits to this. First, it gives users a quick way to
see if their invocation of fair use is likely to actually be fair use
-- without having to know the first thing about copyright law.

Second, it is not necessarily descriptive at all. Descriptive and
misplaced tags are the sort of inaccurate things you are talking
about. They make claims about the copyright status that may or may not
be true. The sorts of tags I am talking about, when written well, are
much more ambiguous. They discuss it in terms of conditions -- if
condition Y is met, then X is probably fair use.

When mistagged, they do not necessarily give incorrect information.
They point out whether or not the current image is likely to be fair
use or not. Sometimes it is not. Now the way to fix this, in my
opinion, is to change the tag to say, "This image SHOULD be X type of
media." Now, if it is wrong, it is wrong, but it is clear when it is
wrong and nobody gets in a snit.

The benefits of this sort of approach are, I think, legion, over the
other. It is a way of both encouraging correct use, allowing users
without detailed copyright understanding to quickly spot inappropriate
use, and encourage a mindset about fair use which is hinged on the
conditions of use rather than the form of the media. Personally, I
think it has worked for the mostpart. I hadn't thought about changing
the labeling wording itself ("this image SHOULD BE" versus "this image
IS"), but if people think that is a good idea then that is easy enough
to put into place.

The only recurrent arguments I have ever seen against this approahc
is, "Copyright tags shouldn't try to instruct users as to their use."
I've never really heard a good reason of WHY that should be true,
except for a rather vague and hazy notion about separating out
functions, and about how copyright law was hard and fair use was
really about the four factors. I know it is, that's why I tried to
come up with a model which would result in the factors being fairly
satisfied in most situations, if the tags were properly followed.
Perhaps it isn't perfect, and I'm completely open to suggestions for
improvements.

In any case, simplistic and poorly thought out tags lead to simplistic
and poorly thought out tagging; the evidence of this is quite clear,
or at least it was months ago.

FF


body:
On 2/5/06, Ilya N. <ilyanep at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> But that's exactly what we're doing. An x-day discussion period.
>
> The reason there's a different page is that we were originally going
> to suspend RfA and put this procedure where RfA is located right now,
> but some people complained, and then Demi suggested we make a new
> page.

How wide was this discussed before someone tried to suspend RFA and put this
in its place?
I never heard about the idea before today, and I think the opposition was
mainly due to a lack of community-wide discussion before implementation was
tried.

Mgm


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Worst. Userbox. Ever.

body:
Philip Welch wrote:

> Ray, I've asked you privately, and I know I'm not the only one. FIX
> YOUR COMPUTER'S DATESTAMP. You're screwing up everybody's message
> sorting because all your messages show up as being from 1997.

I've seen these messages on the list, but this is the first time anyone
has said it was me.  Oh well, it's no big deal, so there's no need to
shout. :-(


subject: [WikiEN-l] Worst. Userbox. Ever.

body:
>> Ray, I've asked you privately, and I know I'm not the only one.
>> FIX  YOUR COMPUTER'S DATESTAMP. You're screwing up everybody's
>> message  sorting because all your messages show up as being from
>> 1997.
>
> I've seen these messages on the list, but this is the first time
> anyone has said it was me.  Oh well, it's no big deal, so there's
> no need to shout. :-(

Thanks. I recall (and my records confirm) that I emailed you
privately about this yesterday afternoon, but if you didn't get the
message for some reason, no hard feelings.

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


subject: [WikiEN-l] Discussions for Adminship

body:
Ilya N. wrote:

>The problem, as I've explained before, is there may be one of the following
>situations:
>
>   - Vote tally is (20/0/0) and someone raises a very valid concern that
>   may make the person unsuitable for adminship.
>   - Someone raises a concern, vote tally becomes (0/20/0), and then it
>   turns out it was a sockpuppet doing it.
>
>We want people to only vote once they've gotten the whole picture after
>discussion.
>
>As an admin, I'd perfer having this instead of relying on a handful of
>encounters with said user, or having to research 20 users in-depth. As a
>bureaucrat, it makes it easier to tell whether or not to promote in
>borderline cases.
>
>Finally, I don't think we should use voting as the main medium for
>discussion.
>
Sometimes a bureaucrat has to be willing to override a majority vote.
Most of the time this won't happen.  Bureaucrats do not yet have the
power to de-sysop, though it would be handy in borderline cases to have
a sort of probation system where if the new admin soon becomes a problem
the status could be withdrawn without a fuss.  On Wiktionary I do become
extra careful before I promote someone, and if I go against the majority
I better have good reasons for doing that.

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] Worst. Userbox. Ever.

body:
Philip Welch wrote:

>>> Ray, I've asked you privately, and I know I'm not the only one.
>>> FIX  YOUR COMPUTER'S DATESTAMP. You're screwing up everybody's
>>> message  sorting because all your messages show up as being from  1997.
>>
>> I've seen these messages on the list, but this is the first time
>> anyone has said it was me.  Oh well, it's no big deal, so there's  no
>> need to shout. :-(
>
> Thanks. I recall (and my records confirm) that I emailed you
> privately about this yesterday afternoon, but if you didn't get the
> message for some reason, no hard feelings.

Sorry, but it looks like I didn't even notice that it was a private
message since it continued a thread that was already on the list.  We
did have a brief power outage Friday night; that must have done it.

Ray


from_name: admin Yellowikis

body:
I've finally upgraded to 1.5.5 but now I can't get any of the great
new extensions to work.

For example here is what I get with Erik M?ller's Inputbox extension:

http://www.eco-gites.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Any idea what's gone wrong?

I'm baffled - the same thing happens with all extensions. So it must
be something wrong with the set-up.

Paul


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
Daniel Mayer:
> If, however, only a small part of finance committee has access to InternalWiki and we have the
> draft documents there, then the other members of the committee might as well not be on the
> committee at all since they don't have access to the place where the work is being done.

Let's say that the finance committee has a subcommittee on fundraising
strategies (this might well be located elsewhere, but humor me). Such a
subcommittee would have to come up with innovative strategies -- social,
technical -- to maximize the return from our next fundraising drive.
Having a dedicated subcommittee for this purpose can help to make sure
that people stay on the ball, have regular meetings, publish their
progress, and so forth. It's also exactly an area where we want to be
fairly open about participation.

Now, not all of these members of the subcommittee are necessarily
trusted to see the entire financial planning of the organization, as
well as all the other information on internal. Nevertheless, they might
discuss strategies that we do not necessarily want to be completely
open, e.g. "Let's do X on day Y of the fundraising drive".

Hence my distinction between core committees and subcommittees. Core
committee members should have complete access to all confidential
information on the internal wiki and internal-l. Subcommittee members
could have their own private communications channels or, as we agreed,
ideally have separate spaces on the internal wiki without having access
to everything else there.

If someone becomes trusted enough through their work in a subcommittee,
they will ideally be invited or apply for membership in the core
committee: meritocracy in action.

Subcommittee would not automatically mean "open to everyone" - you might
have subcommittees where only core committee members are allowed,
depending on the nature of their work.

As a reminder, all these issues will hopefully be discussed about an
hour from now, on #wikimedia-meeting on irc.freenode.net. :-)

Erik


body:
I get this:

http://static.flickr.com/35/95945683_4f7697d726.jpg

Maybe I have a User-Keyboard interface error.

Paul

On 2/5/06, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> admin Yellowikis wrote:
> > I've finally upgraded to 1.5.5 but now I can't get any of the great
> > new extensions to work.
> >
> > For example here is what I get with Erik M?ller's Inputbox extension:
> >
> > http://www.eco-gites.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
> >
> > Any idea what's gone wrong?
>
> Nothing looks wrong, but there's no indication that you've attempted to use the
> extension for anything on that page.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>
>

--
Yellowikis is to Yellow Pages, as Wikipedia is to The Encyclopedia Britannica


from_name: Robert Scott Horning

subject: [Foundation-l] Bigger Board, open Foundation membership

body:
Dariusz Siedlecki wrote:

>I'm really, REALLY sorry to propose it, but we need to divide the
>current Foundation in two halfs - a community one, and an
>organizational one - one that will be part of the community and will
>do everything possible to help the projects, and another one which'll
>work on the promotion and distribution of our projects
>
>I think this was the idea behind the communities. I support them, but
>like I said - without Foundation members, it's hard to have community
>members and manage them.
>
>Basicly, that's all I wanted to say during the meeting. A bigger Board
>of 7 or maybe even 9 people would be the best. An open membership for
>anyone interested (under a small membership fee, I presume) would also
>be a good start.
>
>What's YOUR opinion on this?
>
>--
>Regards,
>Dariusz Siedlecki
>
>
I think this is a terrible idea.  A bigger board for the sake of having
a bigger board is to increase bureaucracy and slow down things even more
than they are.  Often that is in fact a goal, and if it is, it may be a
good idea.  Most legislative groups are specifically set up along these
lines to slow down the legislative process and get more opinions on the
topic, with the goal to shoot down most bad ideas even if a few good
ideas need to get lost in the process.  This was done historicly to
restrict the role that any one individual could have on being opressive
and corrupt, by whatever standard you want to use.

With a smaller board they can be more responsive to new pressures and be
able to react to rapidly changing circumstances.  A benevolant god and
dictator is even more responsive, but I think that has been decided as
too much.  Of course the opposite problem does occur that some bad ideas
get implemented before they can be completely thought through.

BTW, the current organization of the Wikimedia Foundation board is
already percieved as being bureaucratic and unresponsive to new ideas by
contributors to various Wikimedia projects.  Most of this is merely
communications and language issues, but it is obviously going to get
worse before it gets better.

As far as special privileges for "membership" in the foundation, I am
personally against this.  From my viewpoint, the thing that really
matters to these projects is those volunteers who contribute their time
to developing content for all of these projects we are involved with.
 Without that, you have nothing else to work with.  The ordinary
editor/contributor should be the most important position within the
Wikimedia Foundation, and everything else needs to be done as merely
support structures to make sure that the primary mission of these
contributors is continued.  I'm afraid that some of this is getting lost
right now.

I'm not against special "premiums" for donations, aka like the PBS
television fundraisers in the USA, where a donation at a certain level
would get you Wikipedia on DVD or something like that, or perhaps a
"magazine" of some sort like the National Geographic.  Besides good
karma for donating, membership shouldn't really mean anything nor any
special privileges in terms of Foundation governance.  It is all a
matter of semantics anyway about what it really means to be a member or
contributor as well.  Keep the power with the people who are doing the work.

--
Robert Scott Horning


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] Worst. Userbox. Ever.

body:
Someone created {{User pedophile}}. While almost anyone would think
this was created as a vehicle for trolling and personal attacks, the
creator actually did create it for the purpose of finding and blocking
paedophiles from editing, since *of course* they would put it on their
own page.

Someone went "wtf" and killed it. Then someone else RECREATED it. Then
it was put on TFD. Then someone else killed it. Then someone else
recreated it *because it was in the process*.

A sample of the depths of Wiki discussion can be found at:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:AN#Blocking_self-identified_pedophiles

What happens is that really really stupid ideas get floated and
discussed, but people who aren't stupid avoid the discussions because
their brain will fall out if they try ... so then the people who like
the stupid idea consider they've formed a 'consensus' amongst all
those interested, and think it's the will of the community to push the
really stupid idea.

I think we really, really need a Wiki Stupidity Patrol to go to really
dumb discussions and attempt to inject sense into them.

- d.


from_name: Nick Boalch

subject: [WikiEN-l] Changing fair use tags

body:
Matt Brown wrote:
> The point is that when someone uploads an image with a tag, they
> assert that what the tag says AT THAT TIME is correct.  If the wording
> is then changed, it in effect puts words in the mouth of the uploader.

An argument for using subst?

Cheers,

N.

--
Nicholas Boalch
School of Modern Languages & Cultures       Tel: +44 (0) 191 334 3456
University of Durham                        Fax: +44 (0) 191 334 3421
New Elvet, Durham DH1 3JT, UK               WWW: http://nick.frejol.org/


body:
It seems that I had a problem with my copy of Firefox.

After a re-install everything went back to normal.

FYI - because of this problem I've done the the upgrade from 1.4.x to
1.5.5 four times on 3 different wikis, using 3 different methods. Not
one problem (apart from my bad browser).

Kudos to all those involved.

Paul

On 2/5/06, admin Yellowikis <yellowikis at gmail.com> wrote:
> I get this:
>
> http://static.flickr.com/35/95945683_4f7697d726.jpg
>
> Maybe I have a User-Keyboard interface error.
>
> Paul
>
> On 2/5/06, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> > admin Yellowikis wrote:
> > > I've finally upgraded to 1.5.5 but now I can't get any of the great
> > > new extensions to work.
> > >
> > > For example here is what I get with Erik M?ller's Inputbox extension:
> > >
> > > http://www.eco-gites.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
> > >
> > > Any idea what's gone wrong?
> >
> > Nothing looks wrong, but there's no indication that you've attempted to use the
> > extension for anything on that page.
> >
> > -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikitech-l mailing list
> > Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
> >
> >
> >
>
>
> --
> Yellowikis is to Yellow Pages, as Wikipedia is to The Encyclopedia Britannica
>

--
Yellowikis is to Yellow Pages, as Wikipedia is to The Encyclopedia Britannica


from_name: Tony Sidaway

subject: [WikiEN-l] Worst. Userbox. Ever.

body:
On 2/5/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> Someone created {{User pedophile}}. While almost anyone would think
> this was created as a vehicle for trolling and personal attacks, the
> creator actually did create it for the purpose of finding and blocking
> paedophiles from editing, since *of course* they would put it on their
> own page.

That *is* trolling, by definition.  I'm speedying it.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Worst. Userbox. Ever.

body:
On 2/5/06, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2/5/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Someone created {{User pedophile}}. While almost anyone would think
> > this was created as a vehicle for trolling and personal attacks, the
> > creator actually did create it for the purpose of finding and blocking
> > paedophiles from editing, since *of course* they would put it on their
> > own page.
>
> That *is* trolling, by definition.  I'm speedying it.
>
Not fair!  You beat me!


from_name: The Cunctator

body:
On 2/5/06, Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2/5/06, The Cunctator <cunctator at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Let's do both.
>
>
> Well, in absence of any coherent reason to change the name, it won't be
> changed, so I'll have to take my own initative to get back to work and leave
> you to decide whethe you want to do the same, or continue arguing
> pointlessly with whoever still has the energy on the mailing list.

So my reasons were incoherent? Or are you just being rude?


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Worst. Userbox. Ever.

body:
On 2/5/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:AN#Blocking_self-identified_pedophiles
>
> What happens is that really really stupid ideas get floated and
> discussed, but people who aren't stupid avoid the discussions because
> their brain will fall out if they try ... so then the people who like
> the stupid idea consider they've formed a 'consensus' amongst all
> those interested, and think it's the will of the community to push the
> really stupid idea.

You think this is a stupid idea? You must like pedophiles...etc...

How about a board called "The guardians of good taste" or something,
who stomp on bad ideas like this?

There are so many comments that could be made about this template,
but...I'll refrain.

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] Changing fair use tags

body:
Totally agree. The wording of a tag should never be used once any
image uses it. By all means, create {Promophoto2}, or even retag all
old images using the old version {promophotov1} and then update
{promophoto}. But yeah, changing the text after the tag has been used
completely undermines the whole system.

Steve

On 2/5/06, Guettarda <guettarda at gmail.com> wrote:
> I agree.  All of the templates should have warning text saying something
> like <!--- Do not make changes which alter the meaning of this text.  If you
> want to replace this tag with a more specific one, please create a new tag
> --->