from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
Anthere-
> Requirement on real names are naturally bugging me.

With your objections to any such rule in mind, I have tried to make this
an option, rather than a requirement. There's a flip side to this and this
is that without such an option, Wikinews will actually become *more*
restrictive on what types of stories it allows.

I call it the Abu Ghraib test.

Let's say that our policy is that "any reported information can be allowed
in an article as long as there is consensus among editors to include it."
If we had a story like the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal before anyone
else, and some reporter tried to include it under this rule -- all backed
up both by good sources and by his credibility -- I am quite certain that
some people would try to block it through endless discussions from ever
being reported.

In many cases, where we would have some anonymous whistleblower (a person
telling secrets about a company, government etc.) willing to give us
information, I am also quite certain that under such a policy, this
information would be unlikely to be accepted on grounds of verifiability.
Again, it is quite likely - as unfortunate as this is - that people from
the opposite political point of view would try to block information that
does not suit them.

Therefore, my proposal suggests that we DO allow this type of consensus-
based reporting from anonymous or unaccredited sources (called "witness
reports" in the proposal), but IN ADDITION TO IT, we also allow Wikinews
reporters to use their reputation as currency for publishing original
reports, and to act as relays for people who want to stay anonymous.

So there is no requirement for real names, but the additional credibility
offered by verified or verifiable identities guarantees that we can pick
up stories that we would otherwise probably ignore.

I hope that the proposal is clear enough on the point that original
reporting by non-accredited persons is allowed as long as there is
consensus to include their stories.

I would like to emphasize that Wikipedia allows no original reporting
whatsoever. Wikinews is therefore *much* more inclusive than Wikipedia,
not less.

> The notion that all wikinews reporters will be necessarily sysops, and
> all sysops necessarily wikinews reporter is problematic as well.

I agree. However, initially, the functionality of "publishing" an article
will be linked to the tools that we currently have, such as page
protection. The potential for abuse of this privilege, and the associated
consequences, are larger than in Wikipedia: Imagine a Wikinews article
about a massacre in Israel being published without proper review and then
being distributed in other media. Such news articles can lead to fatal
consequences.

Therefore, I believe that initially, we need to limit the circle of sysops
who can publish stories to those we can identify and hold accountable. In
order to make the process more wiki-like, I am working on a workflow
system called "Wikiflow" that ensures an article can only flow from one
state (unpublished) to the other (published) if there is consensus, if a
certain amount of time has passed, and if it has come to the attention of
certain people who should see it (reviewers).

This Wikiflow system can also be the basis of peer review on Wikipedia, it
can replace the current sysop-centric VfD process, and so forth. So take
this early version of Wikinews like you take something like VfD: It kind
of works, but it's not open enough in the long term.

> Respective editorials ? You mean editorials can have a view point ? In
> short, Wikinews will be a big change, since we will not any more have to
> respect NPOV rule. But replace it with a collection of viewpoint. If one
> view point comittee is missing, then the viewpoint is missing ?

This was just an experimental aspect of the proposal: to, in addition to
news articles, have a daily editorial (commentary) about current events
written by different "factions". This was *never* supposed to apply to
regular news articles. While I still think it is a good idea to explore
this, given that this part of the proposal is the most controversial, I
have taken it out. We can still think about this in the Wikinews community
once it exists.

> Last, I am not sure that all languages have really heard of this
> project. So, I wish we advertise it a little bit more.

What do you suggest?

> I have not exactly forgotten yet the huge thread in september, saying
> "the board has overstepped authority and blablabla" while we were only
> acting in good faith. With such a reaction, any step from me for
> agreeing for a new project will be *very* careful :-)

I understand. Of course I would like to start working on this project and
publicize its existence as soon as possible. So I would appreciate some
more concrete suggestions on how to move it from the proposal and
discussion phase into the implementation phase. Waiting another month now
when I actually have time to do some real work on this project would be
painful.

Regards,

Erik


list: wikimedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Formal request: Wikinews project


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Thomas R. Koll

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Need urgent help! (Wikipedia)

body:
On Mon, Oct 11, 2004 at 01:54:09PM +0200, info at konservativ.se wrote:
> I would like to get in contact with any of the international organizers/leaders
> of the Wikipedia project!

let's say community.

> Over here in Sweden, I have problems with the correct information of political
> parties. Different political groups apparently rearrange each others pages.
> >From my point of view, I would like to secure the proper information in the
> interest of the public and the democratic community! Thus each party or
> political group should have control of their own pages, rather than to let
> their political opponents have the control.

Why should there be problems? The swedish Wikipedia has over 43.000 articles
and 50 very active users/admins, that's more than enough to resist any vandals.
I didn't hear about any problems from there so why do you, a outsider as it
seems, request a proposel which is strongly against the idea of openess which
we have from many years now?

> Who could I discuss this topic with?

right here is ok.

ciao, tom

--
== Weblinks ==
* http://shop.wikipedia.org - WikiReader Internet zu kaufen
* http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:TomK32
* http://www.hammererlehen.de - Urlaub in Berchtesgaden


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] State of SVG support

body:
I've been poking at SVG support a bit; 1.4 in CVS now has the ability
to run SVG images through an external rasterizer to display PNGs inline
(ImageMagick, Batik, or sodipodi/inkscape though I've had trouble
getting those last two working).

Of course it would be preferable to be able to use the actual SVG
images inline when possible; they should download faster and should
print at full resolution.

The <object> tag theoretically should let us use the SVG image when the
browser supports it and automagically fall back to the rasterized PNG.
Unfortunately in my testing I've had a few problems:

* No transparency support for plug-ins. All tests I did showed the SVG
image on a solid white background.
* If the image is embedded in a link, clicking it does not work if the
SVG is showing; the click is passed through to the SVG plugin.
* In Firefox, clicking or even right-clicking on the PNG if SVG is not
available will bring up a plugin search dialog!
* Firefox bugs the user to install a plugin if they don't have one
already installed. If you click the button to search, it's unable to
find any suitable plugins. :P
* Printing with the Adobe SVG plugin doesn't work in Safari or Mozilla
on Mac OS X, possibly other browsers/platforms are affected.
* Some Mozilla users on Debian reported not seeing any image at all on
my test page.

The test page is here: http://leuksman.com/misc/svgtest/

Anyone have ideas for working around these problems in a sensible way,
or is real inline SVG that "just works" like our other images just out
for now?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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list: foundation-l

from_name: Anthere

subject: [Foundation-l] tandem

body:
Look at how Angela and I spend our evenings...

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta%3ABureaucrat_log

* 17:53, 11 Oct 2004 Anthere Rights for user "Maskbot at tlwiki" set "=bot"
* 17:51, 11 Oct 2004 Angela Rights for user "Maskbot at tlwiki" set "=bot"
* 17:50, 11 Oct 2004 Anthere Rights for user "ALoan at enwiki" set "=sysop"
* 17:49, 11 Oct 2004 Angela Rights for user "ALoan at enwiki" set "=sysop"
* 17:49, 11 Oct 2004 Angela Rights for user "ALoan at enwiki" set "="
* 17:49, 11 Oct 2004 Anthere Rights for user "ALoan at enwiki" set "="
* 17:49, 11 Oct 2004 Angela Rights for user "Pippu d'Angelo at scnwiki" set
"=sysop"
* 17:47, 11 Oct 2004 Anthere Rights for user "Pippu d'Angelo at scnwiki"
set "=sysop"
* 17:44, 11 Oct 2004 Angela Rights for user "CE at nlwikibooks" set "=sysop"
* 17:40, 11 Oct 2004 Anthere Rights for user "CE at nlwikibooks" set "=sysop"

Sigh, double sigh. Double power for those !


subject: [Foundation-l] tandem


list: wikien-l

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Article forks (was Re: Loosing more of our best
	contributors)

body:
Daniel-
> Absolutely not within Wikimedia! That flies directly in the face of NPOV,
> leads to needless duplication in what we are doing, and transfers edit wars
> to all articles that link to the forked versions

In the long term it will be desirable to have multiple views on an article
besides NPOV, whether it's a Wikinews story or a Wikipedia article.
Duplication can be avoided using powerful diff/merging tools as they are
already used in the open source development world (darcs, BitKeeper etc.).
Each view will be managed by a group of people who make their own rules as
to who else is allowed to add information, with NPOV being the "mother
view" from which other views can be extracted (as NPOV is the most
inclusive).

So you will get a version of the circumcision article approved and edited
by the APA, or a version of the creationism article approved and edited by
the Institute for Creationism.

This mangifies the potential influence of Wikimedia content even further
and it is something that other news and information sources cannot easily
compete with because they are not open content (ironically, it's also the
reason for the success of agencies like AP, Reuters and AFP - they allow
their stories to be modified for the purposes of individual users). The
edit war problem is negligible in this context, as each group can define
its own rules of exclusion.

However, whether it is desirable to have such functionality within
Wiki[mp]edia is open to debate. I have contemplated a separate "Wikiviews"
project, or simply making it as easy as possible for third parties to
manage forks of Wikimedia content in their MediaWiki installs. Temporary
and fixable problems like "edit wars" are certainly not a strong argument
in favor of a very conservative approach, though.

NPOV is great, but it does not allow me to make use of my existing
"reputation information": I cannot easily get from the current article on
creationism to an article that includes the points of view only of the
people I trust on this particular topic. On controversial topics, I will
have to wade through many pages of text to get to the meat of the matter.
Therefore, many people will prefer specialized information sources like
EvoWiki and talkorigins.org on such subjects, because they know that their
information space is not "polluted".

This in itself carries a much greater risk of duplication of effort than
us providing the tools to do it properly (easy merging between changing
revisions).  We should not close our eyes to this problem and explore ways
in which we can make Wikimedia content more useful to specific interest
groups while maintaining NPOV as the central ideology of the Wikimedia
projects. Open content is not just about vertical growth: from 100
articles to 10,000. It is also about horizontal growth: from 1 article
about a topic to 10 or 100. Only if we embrace both types of growth we
will become the catalyst of the media revolution .

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Jean-Christophe Chazalette

subject: [Foundation-l] tandem

body:
You started first, what the heck did you do between 17:40 and 17:47, hmm ?
You finished last, that's a shame !
villy

----- Original Message -----
From: "Anthere" <anthere9 at yahoo.com>
To: <foundation-l at wikimedia.org>
Sent: Monday, October 11, 2004 8:04 PM
Subject: [Foundation-l] tandem

> Look at how Angela and I spend our evenings...
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta%3ABureaucrat_log
>
> * 17:53, 11 Oct 2004 Anthere Rights for user "Maskbot at tlwiki" set "=bot"
> * 17:51, 11 Oct 2004 Angela Rights for user "Maskbot at tlwiki" set "=bot"
> * 17:50, 11 Oct 2004 Anthere Rights for user "ALoan at enwiki" set "=sysop"
> * 17:49, 11 Oct 2004 Angela Rights for user "ALoan at enwiki" set "=sysop"
> * 17:49, 11 Oct 2004 Angela Rights for user "ALoan at enwiki" set "="
> * 17:49, 11 Oct 2004 Anthere Rights for user "ALoan at enwiki" set "="
> * 17:49, 11 Oct 2004 Angela Rights for user "Pippu d'Angelo at scnwiki" set
> "=sysop"
> * 17:47, 11 Oct 2004 Anthere Rights for user "Pippu d'Angelo at scnwiki"
> set "=sysop"
> * 17:44, 11 Oct 2004 Angela Rights for user "CE at nlwikibooks" set "=sysop"
> * 17:40, 11 Oct 2004 Anthere Rights for user "CE at nlwikibooks" set "=sysop"
>
>
>
> Sigh, double sigh. Double power for those !
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


subject: [Foundation-l] tandem


from_name: Johanna & François Comparot

body:
----- Original Message -----
From: "Anthere" <anthere9 at yahoo.com>
To: <wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org>
Sent: Monday, October 11, 2004 1:12 PM
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Fw: New Wikipedia langage solresol

>
> Je veux remercier tr?s sp?cialement Anthere, mon fier concitoyen, pour
> son intervention contre mes petits efforts anarchistes blablabla
>
> Anthere, ma fi?re concitoyenne s'il te plait :-)
> J'y tiens...
>
> Pour le reste, je n'ai pas tr?s bien compris. Es tu certain que nous
> sommes concitoyens ?

bonsoir anthere!
non, au contraire. vous me semblez ?trang?re ;-))))
(notre maison familiale, ? moins de 200 km de paris, fut occup?e au XIV
si?cle par une personne portant notre nom de famille, et il n'est pas
courant...)
cordialement
fran?ois
PS: ce genre d'entretien o? vous me guidez va passionner vos amis de
wikip?dia ;-)))


from_name: Fred Bauder

body:
You do seem to have moderated your attitude. Can I take yes for an answer?
Of course, its just that [[chiropractic medicine]] is a bit down my priority
list right now. I had not checked back for several days, and I do see you
are having at least some dialog with the young chiropractic student who is
looking at it.

Fred

> From: Robert <rkscience100 at yahoo.com>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Mon, 11 Oct 2004 18:40:52 -0700 (PDT)
> To: wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] If you want to add info, then just do it. Ok?
>
> Huh?  How did I getinserted into this?  In any case, how
> can you make this statement, after I have been working so
> hard to comes to turn with you of late?  I especially have
> been trying to find areas of argreement with you on the
> Chiropractic medicine article.  Why won't you take "yes"
> for an answer?


from_name: Arvalux

subject: [Wikitech-l] dynamic contents in WikiMedia pages?

body:
Hello.

Is it possible to add dynamic contents to the pages of WikiMedia? For
example to include some statistics from an underlying .xml file?

Arvalux.


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: tandem

body:
I edited each time "request for permission" and each time "local admin
page" or "bot page" to indicate the new status.
Plus, I was missing a few accounts Angela already had (I'd be curious to
know how many accounts we have).

So, actually, I won :-)
I was just awarded Steward of the day on IRC

To celebrate, I go play Alpha Centauri, tonight, I will won :-)

PS : to be fair, Angela is handicapped, so she probably does not click
as quickly as I.

Jean-Christophe Chazalette a ?crit:
> You started first, what the heck did you do between 17:40 and 17:47, hmm ?
> You finished last, that's a shame !
> villy
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Anthere" <anthere9 at yahoo.com>
> To: <foundation-l at wikimedia.org>
> Sent: Monday, October 11, 2004 8:04 PM
> Subject: [Foundation-l] tandem
>
>
>
>>Look at how Angela and I spend our evenings...
>>
>>http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta%3ABureaucrat_log
>>
>>* 17:53, 11 Oct 2004 Anthere Rights for user "Maskbot at tlwiki" set "=bot"
>>* 17:51, 11 Oct 2004 Angela Rights for user "Maskbot at tlwiki" set "=bot"
>>* 17:50, 11 Oct 2004 Anthere Rights for user "ALoan at enwiki" set "=sysop"
>>* 17:49, 11 Oct 2004 Angela Rights for user "ALoan at enwiki" set "=sysop"
>>* 17:49, 11 Oct 2004 Angela Rights for user "ALoan at enwiki" set "="
>>* 17:49, 11 Oct 2004 Anthere Rights for user "ALoan at enwiki" set "="
>>* 17:49, 11 Oct 2004 Angela Rights for user "Pippu d'Angelo at scnwiki" set
>>"=sysop"
>>* 17:47, 11 Oct 2004 Anthere Rights for user "Pippu d'Angelo at scnwiki"
>>set "=sysop"
>>* 17:44, 11 Oct 2004 Angela Rights for user "CE at nlwikibooks" set "=sysop"
>>* 17:40, 11 Oct 2004 Anthere Rights for user "CE at nlwikibooks" set "=sysop"
>>
>>
>>
>>Sigh, double sigh. Double power for those !
>>
>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>foundation-l mailing list
>>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>>
>


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: tandem


body:
Yeh, you folks are just not listening. You need to check into what even a
simple nuisance action against you would cost. God forbid, what the
consequences would be if there was a substantial award against you.

At a bare minimum, in order that all the work we have done doesn't end up in
the ownership of a plaintiff, the Wikinews project needs to be a separate
corporation.

We are not a little hole in the corner outfit no one heard of anymore. We
are getting up there with the New York Times and CBS News who budget millons
for legal defense. Where is that kind of money going to come from?

Fred

> From: Andrew Lih <andrew.lih at gmail.com>
> Reply-To: Andrew Lih <andrew.lih at gmail.com>, Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
> <foundation-l at wikimedia.org>
> Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2004 10:23:44 +0800
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l at wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Re: Formal request: Wikinews project
>
> This endeavour, while sharing Wikimedia's goals of openness, inclusion
> and free content is the most ambitious project yet, because it becomes
> primary source journalism. And with this, comes the baggage of having
> to deal with libel and slander in ways Wikipedia does not, because WP
> is one level of indirection away from accountable sources. Legal
> counsel for any primary source reporting would be a necessity.


body:
In some cases that is true, in others they are simply overwhelmed by
righteous indignation at their nonsense. It isn't just that they want their
POV, they want all other POV's out of there.

Fred

> From: "csherlock at ljh.com.au" <csherlock at ljh.com.au>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2004 12:32:36 +1000
> To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Loosing more of our best contributors
>
> If the authors are having to create new articles to add their POV, then
> may I suggest that they are not getting a fair hearing on Wikipedia?


from_name: Peter Danenberg

subject: [Wikitech-l] State of SVG support

body:
> (ImageMagick, Batik, or sodipodi/inkscape though I've had trouble
> getting those last two working).

     Not  sure  the  exact  nature  of  your problem; but at
Wikisophia, I resorted to an Xserver Virtual Frame Buffer.

> * No transparency support for plug-ins. All tests I did showed the
> SVG image on a solid white background.

     Aye, that's the rub; what need we transparency?  Opaque
PNG's render more efficiently.

--
Peter Danenberg                                           .
wikisophia.org                                           ..:


from_name: Rowan Collins

body:
On Mon, 11 Oct 2004 20:30:49 +0200, Arvalux <arvalux at yahoo.de> wrote:
> Hello.
>
> Is it possible to add dynamic contents to the pages of WikiMedia? For
> example to include some statistics from an underlying .xml file?
>
> Arvalux.

AFAIK, there is no flexible tool for doing this developed as yet.
There are a few magic variables, such as {{SITENAME}} and
{{NUMBEROFARTICLES}} which when inserted in wiki-text will be replaced
on demand by the software, but for a more complex case, it might be
worth developing an 'extension' with similar syntax to the <math>
markup.

For instance, you could define <xml>data.xml: title</xml> to get the
<title> element out of a file called "data.xml". (This is a rather
dumb example, but the point is the software has "hooks" for
interfacing with 'external' code in this way).

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Article forks (was Re: Loosing more of our
	best	contributors)

body:
David-
> I believe you have just described Wikinfo, Fred Bauder's fork of Wikipedia.
> That is, it's already been done.

Wikinfo is an example, yes, although they do the keeping-in-sync part
manually. I actually wrote a little script that makes the merging of
Wikinfo and Wikipedia articles easier a while ago, not sure if anyone uses
it. In the long term, I want multiple such forks with specific purposes
(views) and I want to facilitate the cooperation between these different
variants of our content. Mav's concerns about doing this within Wikimedia
are understandable, but false. I will prove this when the time comes.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikitech-l] State of SVG support

body:
On Oct 11, 2004, at 8:54 PM, Peter Danenberg wrote:
>> (ImageMagick, Batik, or sodipodi/inkscape though I've had trouble
>> getting those last two working).
>
>      Not  sure  the  exact  nature  of  your problem; but at
> Wikisophia, I resorted to an Xserver Virtual Frame Buffer.

 From a terminal they work fine with the -z (--without-gui) option, but
on a shell out from PHP running under Apache they segfault. I've only
tested this on my Mac so far, so it may be an idiosyncratic problem.

Actually, on second look sodipodi works from a shell and crashes from
Apache/PHP but inkscape crashes both ways. I'll work through the
backtrace and see if I can find something sensible. (I'm using packages
from fink's unstable branch, compiled from source.)

Batik works fine with the headless AWT option, and produces very pretty
output. ImageMagick produces lower quality output and doesn't scale up
nicely -- it seems to render at some native screen resolution and then
scale the rasterized version, at least with the command line I used.

>> * No transparency support for plug-ins. All tests I did showed the
>> SVG image on a solid white background.
>
>      Aye, that's the rub; what need we transparency?  Opaque
> PNG's render more efficiently.

People put images on top of colored backgrounds and then complain that
the background doesn't show through.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: John Lee

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: The "months later" effect

body:
This thread basically encapsulates my frustration over the occasional
POV disputes that flare up on [[Malaysia]]-related articles. When I
first came here more than a year ago, I felt many of our articles
covering Malaysia were fine, i.e. [[Bumiputra]], [[Malaysia]],
[[Mahathir bin Mohamad]]. A year later, I'm horrified at the state of
these articles. Two of them have NPOV notices; all of them have been
subject to pointless edit wars and constant NPOVing and POVing, wasting
a tremendous amount of time. Recently, one anon has been reverting
[[Malaysia]] to his biased version (which practically everyone involved
on the article was and is reverting - recently, Malbear rephrased some
of the factual statements the anon made, which hopefully will pacify
this POV warrior). But I'm truly fed up with being a tiny drop in an
ocean of editors who would almost certainly be unchecked in their POVing
if not for me and two or three others. I wonder what these articles will
look like around this time next year, as I've given up doing any NPOVing
work on articles related to Malaysian politics that doesn't involve a
quick revert.

John Lee
([[User:Johnleemk]])

Delirium wrote:

> I don't think we're doubting that there are Wikipedians.  What's
> doubted is that these Wikipedians are, in the current system,
> producing quality articles on controversial topics.  A quick look
> reveals that a huge percentage of the controversial topics are either:
> engaged in endless edit wars, are locked, or have had the reasonable
> people abandon them.  [[Gdansk]] and related articles have been in
> edit wars for over a year now, for example, and most reasonable people
> have given up on that mess.  The Israeli-Palestinian conflict articles
> seem to have mainly degenerated into territoriality, with some
> "pro-Palestinian" and some "pro-Israeli" articles each guarded by a
> group of advocates.  There are some exceptions ([[Israel]] is still
> pretty good, mostly through the tireless efforts of a a handful of
> people who watch it), but the amount of work it takes to keep a
> controversial article in a reasonable state drives people off
> eventually, so the article quality suffers.
>
> The egregious offenders can be banned (as with MrNaturalHealth), but
> POV pushers who don't actually violate any of our rules, or even good
> contributors who are very biased and very motivated on one particular
> issue, are a major problem.  The neutral arbiters tend to be people
> without a personal stake in the subject, and it's hard for any of them
> to match the time committment and passion that the POV pushers bring
> to the editing process.
>
> -Mark


from_name: Mark Williamson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] One Wikipedia - two scripts

body:
uhh... Tahoma, Code2000, Arial Unicode MS, and plenty of other fonts
seem to support those glyphs. Or is that just me?

Also, I think in the long run, the best solution would be an automated
conversion system so that there is exactly the same content, in two
different scripts. (either one that converts text upon retrieval from
or submission to the database, or one that converts into separate
articles)

--node

On Tue, 12 Oct 2004 02:08:38 +0200, Erdal Ronahi <erdal.ronahi at gmx.net> wrote:
> Hi there!
>
> We on ku: have a problem. Kurdish uses two different scripts, latin and
> arabic. You can see both on the main page at http://ku.wikipedia.org. To
> keep the Kurdish Wikipedia together we would like to have both scripts
> in one Wikipedia. But there are some problems:
>
> * Though unicode supports the Arabic-letter Kurdish alphabet, very few
> fonts do. In the internet a special font named "Unikurd Web" is the
> de-facto standard for used on almost all websites. We use a template on
> every page that enforces the use of this font, but that does not work
> for the headings. Therefore there are wrong letters in the headings. See
> http://ku.wikipedia.org/wiki/mallewe for an example. The letter that
> looks like a "L" that has turned around is from a different font.
>
> Can this be solved with a global style sheet or something similar? The
> font is compatible with Unicode, so Arabic of Farsi words would not be
> harmed.
>
> To solve this problem would be the most important thing, because then
> all texts will be readable. Other minor problems:
>
> * The font ennforcing template {{rtl}} must be repeated after each
> heading. That will probably solve with the first problem.
> * Dotted lists cross the right border when used on right-to-left pages.
> (Also an example on http://ku.wikipedia.org/wiki/mallewe)
>
> Thanks,
> Erdal
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


subject: [Wikitech-l] State of SVG support

body:
On Oct 11, 2004, at 8:31 PM, Evan Prodromou wrote:
> On Mon, 2004-11-10 at 20:02 -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:
>> * Some Mozilla users on Debian reported not seeing any image at all on
>> my test page.
>
> Mozilla (Firefox)? doesn't have the built-in SVG support on Debian;
> this
> is due to conflicts with desktop environments like Gnome. There's a bug
> for it somewhere that I can dig up if someone needs it.

Mozilla & Firefox don't have the built-in SVG support anywhere, so far
as I know, since they refuse to enable it in the default build. The
expected result if there's no built-in support and there's no plugin
(such as the Adobe SVG viewer plugin) is that the PNG would show
instead -- and that's exactly what happens on Mozilla 1.4.1 packaged by
Fedora Core 1 and Mozilla 1.7.3 packaged by Fedora Core 2 and Firefox
0.10.1 packaged by the Mozilla Foundation for Win32.

However, two users of Mozilla 1.7 on Debian have claimed to see just a
big gray box. If anyone knows why this is so, I'd love to know!

>> Anyone have ideas for working around these problems in a sensible way,
>> or is real inline SVG that "just works" like our other images just out
>> for now?
>
> Is there a good reason not to do content negotiation (see
> wfNegotiateContent() in GlobalFunctions.php) to determine if the
> browser
> can handle SVG?

Mainly because you'd never find out about it that way...

Mozilla with Adobe SVG plugin:
Accept:
text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/
plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5

Safari 1.2.3 with Adobe SVG plugin:
Accept: */*

Internet Explorer 5.2/Mac OS X with Adobe SVG plugin:
Accept: */*

Opera 7.54 with Adobe SVG plugin:
Accept: text/html, application/xml;q=0.9, application/xhtml+xml,
image/png, image/jpeg, image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, */*;q=0.1

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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list: textbook-l

from_name: Matthew Wilson

subject: [Textbook-l] Re: How to upload C programs?

body:
On 2004-10-11, Magnus Manske wrote:
> Why not make "foo/code1.c", "foo/code2.c" pages and link them from
> "foo"?

Thanks -- that's a good tip.  I'll use that.  In the long run, though,
it would be nice to be able to attach files to pages.


from_name: Magnus Manske

body:
Arvalux wrote:

>Is it possible to add dynamic contents to the pages of WikiMedia? For
>example to include some statistics from an underlying .xml file?
>
>
You can register an extension (currently an euphemism;-) as it was done
for <math>. For your extenstion foo, the wiki text <foo>bar</foo> will
then pass "bar" to a PHP function of your choice. You can also access
the global $wgTitle or the like to include a file associated with the
article title, or something.

Magnus


from_name: Rebecca

body:
With all respect to Andrew and Charles, I think they're both missing the point.

No one is disputing that there are many areas of Wikipedia that work
brilliantly, such as mathematics. Both these answers seem to be along
the lines of "well, lots of it works, so don't criticise it at all!"

The problem lies in the controversial articles. Saying "let them burn
out, and hope someone comes along to replace them" is a really, really
bad idea - both for the growth of Wikipedia (losing good contributors
who were making other contributions), and for the articles (they then
become unusably bad, without someone willing to fend off the
POVpushers).

I've suggested solutions, and so have numerous others. Attacking the
messenger doesn't make our handling of controversial articles any less
problematic.


from_name: daniwo59 at aol.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] If you want to add info, then just do it. Ok?

body:
In a message dated 10/11/2004 8:41:03 PM Eastern Standard Time,
rkscience100 at yahoo.com writes:
Huh?  How did I getinserted into this?
Then he continues in his next paragraph with:

I find the same odd attitude from Danny and others.
I can only reiterate his comment: Huh? How did I get inserted into this?

Danny


subject: [Wikitech-l] State of SVG support

body:
On Oct 11, 2004, at 9:24 PM, Brion Vibber wrote:
>>> (sodipodi/inkscape
>
> From a terminal they work fine with the -z (--without-gui) option, but
> on a shell out from PHP running under Apache they segfault. I've only
> tested this on my Mac so far, so it may be an idiosyncratic problem.

The problem was that the Apache user (www) on Mac OS X has a home
directory that it doesn't have permission to write to. When sodipodi
and inkscape try to initialize their profile data they try to create a
~/.sodipodi or ~/.inkscape directory if it doesn't exist; then when
it's unable to create the directory it tries to display a GTK+ dialog
with a warning message.

Whoops! Can't display a GTK+ dialog box when there's no X11 server, can
we? Eventually a massive failure to check for error conditions leads to
a segmentation fault, where a graceful printf() would have sufficed.

Creating www-writable .inkscape and .sodipodi directories in
/Library/WebServer has sidestepped this, and they now both work fine.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Foundation-l] Formal request: Wikiversity project

body:
I just don't see why it makes any sense to have Wikiversity as part of
Wikibooks. The two projects would be likely to feed off each other -
as the development of courses would thus need textbooks, which would
help Wikibooks.

But they're not one and the same. Wikibooks is about making textbooks.
Wikiversity would be about learning stuff through organised courses.

It'd be ideal if the faculty system that's already templated out on
Wikibooks was taken live, because if they then organised themselves,
they'd have a much better chance of putting together a textbook that
made any sense. That would then be used as part of a course - and also
put on Wikibooks, benefiting both communities.

- ambi


from_name: stephan

subject: [Wikitech-l] PHP Safe Mode = on => no Pictureupload ?

body:
Hello,

i have install mediawiki-1.3.5 on my webspace. PHP is sadly in Safe Mode =
on.

During upload of a picture ( Source: /home/stephan/Desktop/images.jpeg)
cames

Warning: SAFE MODE Restriction in effect. The script whose uid is 653 is not allowed
to access /home/www/web17/html/wiki/images/f owned by uid 30 in
/home/www/web17/html/wiki/includes/GlobalFunctions.php on line 489

Warning: Unable to create '/home/www/web17/html/wiki/images/f': Is a directory in
/home/www/web17/html/wiki/includes/SpecialUpload.php on line 198

Warning: Unable to move '/home/www/web17/phptmp/phpaT7j3V' to
'/home/www/web17/html/wiki/images/f' in
/home/www/web17/html/wiki/includes/SpecialUpload.php on line

In the middle of the pages

Interner Fehler
aus THWiki, der freien Wissensdatenbank
Konnte Datei "/home/www/web17/phptmp/php9Hvmkd" nicht nach
"/home/www/web17/html/wiki/images/fInterner Fehler aus THWiki, der freien
Wissensdatenbank Konnte Datei "/home/www/web17/phptmp/php9Hvmkd" nicht
nach "/home/www/web17/html/wiki/images/f[unknow symbol]fe/Images.jpeg"
kopieren.

Hier you can see an Screenshot
http://141.30.213.177/public_html/pics/screen-2004-10-11_22:31:45.jpg

Why mediawiki will convert images.jpeg to Images.jpeg ?
Why create mediawiki a unknow symbol (see screenshot)

What can i do to solve this error ?

INFO:PHP Version 4.2.2


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Indicationg consensus (was: Losing more of our best
	contributors)

body:
This would be one solution - and thank you very much for proposing
one, instead of saying "I don't care if people leave, so nyah!"

It would still, however, mean a departure from our core way of doing
things up until now. I don't necessarily oppose it, because I feel
that the problem is so serious, but I'd much rather see quick action
taken against POVpushers. I'm not convinced that we should change the
whole system of what we've been doing up until now as a consequence of
letting a few people who are unwilling or unable to edit neutrally to
run rampant.

-- ambi

On Mon, 11 Oct 2004 05:48:08 -0700, Poor, Edmund W
<edmund.w.poor at abc.com> wrote:
> I was deliriously happy to read what Mark wrote below, because it gave
> me an idea:
>
> > the wiki method means that any random POV pusher can come in and
> > mangle the article, which has happened on [[Anti-Zionism]] on
> > numerous occasions.  Unless a group of knowledgeable people are
> > willing to waste their time baby-sitting an article, which usually
> > amounts to revert-wars (since rarely are the additions even
> > remotely helpful), the articles go rapidly downhill, wasting the
> > effort of the people who painstakingly put together a quality
> > article on a contentious subject.
> >
> > I'd have to say I agree with that criticism.  I've wasted some
> > time myself on some of these contentious subjects, only to come
> > back a few months later and find an abysmally horrid article in
> > its place.
>
> I propose that we agree upon a scheme for marking a particular version
> of an article as "the consensus version". And then show this by default
> to new users and to search engines like Google.
>
> We should clearly indicate that the consensus version is just a
> MILESTONE along the path of article development. We should remind our
> readers that any article can be edited any time, and that newer versions
> of this article are likely to appear.
>
> Indeed, we could have a colorful flag or icon letting them know
> something like, "A more recent version of this article is available" or
> "This article has been edited X times since the milestone was set.
>
> Also, we should give every user the option to keep "consensus versions"
> as their default, or "latest versions".
>
> I believe that this is in keeping with the Wiki Way -- and that it
> supports Jimbo's NPOV policy -- and that it will preserve the value of
> hard-won compromise, give and take, and consensus formation. Yet it
> poses no handicap to those who want to improve the article.
>
> Magnus and Timwi have created software that can do this, and I'm sure
> they would be able to adapt it to work whatever way we need.
>
> Ed Poor
> Bureaucrat and Developer Emeritus
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Angela

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: tandem

body:
> On 11 Oct 2004, at 20:32, Anthere wrote:
>
> > PS : to be fair, Angela is handicapped, so she probably does not click
> > as quickly as I.

Just to clarify, since I received an email assuming something else,
that this is not really the case, other than the fact I sprained my
shoulder last week. :)

Angela


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: tandem


subject: [Textbook-l] How to upload C programs?

body:
Why not make "foo/code1.c", "foo/code2.c" pages and link them from
"foo"? Just put a space in front of every line, or just cover the whole
thing in <pre>:
<pre>
your code here
</pre>

Should work just fine...

Magnus

Matthew Wilson wrote:

>I'm working on a distributed operating systems textbook here:
>
>    http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/ComputerScience:Distributed_Systems
>
>There's lots of example code samples in the text.  The code samples are
>getting longer and longer, and I'd like to make them available for
>download, but I can't tell how.  I tried the Special:Upload page, but I
>kept getting the message ".c is not a valid image type" or something
>similar.
>
>Any ideas?  I posted this to the staff lounge last week but got no
>responses.
>
>Matt
>
>_______________________________________________
>Textbook-l mailing list
>Textbook-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/textbook-l
>
>


from_name: Marco Krohn

body:
On Monday 11 October 2004 13:54, info at konservativ.se wrote:

cc'ing info AT konservativ.se

> Different political groups apparently rearrange each
> others pages.

this is not a bug, this is a feature :-)

>From my point of view, I would like to secure the proper information in
> the interest of the public and the democratic community! Thus each party or
> political group should have control of their own pages, rather than to let
> their political opponents have the control.

sorry, but this is not how Wikipedia works. Please have a look at

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:NPOV

which describes / defines the meaning of "neutral point of view". This is one
of the most important concepts within Wikipedia and it is very important to
understand it.

best regards,
  Marco


from_name: Andrew Lih

subject: [WikiEN-l] User talk:Cheung1303

body:
It's Chinese - Cantonese to be specific. He's editing mostly Hong Kong
related articles.

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)

On Mon, 11 Oct 2004 07:51:26 -0700 (PDT), Mike Halterman
<haltermannews at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I had a friend named Cheung in high school. I'm almost 100% sure it's Chinese and not Korean.
>
> "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:Cheung sounds like Korean. Should I try? Or maybe we could ask that
>
>
> contributor who writes about [[Korean language]] topics (I forget the
> name right now).
>
> Ed
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: KNOTT, T [mailto:tknott at qcl.org.uk]
> > Sent: Monday, October 11, 2004 6:38 AM
> > To: English Wikipedia
> > Subject: [WikiEN-l] User talk:Cheung1303
> >
> >
> > It has just occurred to me that the reason this user keeps
> > ignoring please for copyright info on the various pictures
> > he's uploaded is because he doesn't understand them. He has
> > contributed articles in English but his grasp of the language
> > might not be good enough to understand what we require. I
> > don't know what country he is posting from (perhaps someone
> > with a knowledge of buses can tell?) but even if I did I
> > don't know any Asian languages anyway) Can someone else give
> > it a go please? He doesn't look like a vandal, I don't think
> > blocking him is a good option, but unless he is willing to
> > communicate with someone I don't see any other option.
> >
> > Theresa
> >
> >
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
>
> ---------------------------------
> Do you Yahoo!?
> vote.yahoo.com - Register online to vote today!
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
Andrew Lih
andrew.lih at gmail.com


body:
To reinforce what Charles said, see this subpage from one year ago,
when  the same issue was on Village Pump.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fuzheado/NPOV_disputes

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)

On Mon, 11 Oct 2004 13:40:58 +0100, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> Rebecca wrote
>
> > With all respect to Andrew and Charles, I think they're both missing the
> point.
> >
> > No one is disputing that there are many areas of Wikipedia that work
> > brilliantly, such as mathematics. Both these answers seem to be along
> > the lines of "well, lots of it works, so don't criticise it at all!"
> >
> > The problem lies in the controversial articles. Saying "let them burn
> > out, and hope someone comes along to replace them" is a really, really
> > bad idea - both for the growth of Wikipedia (losing good contributors
> > who were making other contributions), and for the articles (they then
> > become unusably bad, without someone willing to fend off the
> > POVpushers).
>
> Figures: around 360 articles marked as NPOV disputed, out of 360,000 on
> Wikien.  That's 0.1%.
>
> With all due respect to Adam Carr, Zero and other good editors who engage in
> the toughest areas: when I come across you guys, I say to myself '"that
> inflexibility isn't the best way".  You may be right much more often than
> not - still, patience is a virtue, and burn out is waiting for those who
> want it fixed this minute, not in the longer term.
>
> > I've suggested solutions, and so have numerous others. Attacking the
> > messenger doesn't make our handling of controversial articles any less
> > problematic.
>
> Have to take the community with you: that's the problem here.
>
> Charles
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
Andrew Lih
andrew.lih at gmail.com


from_name: Evan Prodromou

subject: [Wikitech-l] State of SVG support

body:
On Mon, 2004-11-10 at 20:02 -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:

> * Some Mozilla users on Debian reported not seeing any image at all on
> my test page.

Mozilla (Firefox)? doesn't have the built-in SVG support on Debian; this
is due to conflicts with desktop environments like Gnome. There's a bug
for it somewhere that I can dig up if someone needs it.

> Anyone have ideas for working around these problems in a sensible way,
> or is real inline SVG that "just works" like our other images just out
> for now?

Is there a good reason not to do content negotiation (see
wfNegotiateContent() in GlobalFunctions.php) to determine if the browser
can handle SVG?

~ESP

--
Evan Prodromou                  .O.
http://bad.dynu.ca/~evan/       ..O
evan at bad.dynu.ca                OOO


from_name: JAY JG

body:
>From: "csherlock at ljh.com.au" <csherlock at ljh.com.au>
>Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
>To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
>Subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Loosing more of our best contributors
>Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2004 12:32:36 +1000

>JAY JG wrote:
>
>>Exactly.  As my watchilist grows I find myself spending no time actually
>>creating content, and all my time monitoring existing articles with
>>painfully reached NPOV, as each new POV warrior discovers Wikipedia and
>>decides to add a few "relevant" comments promoting his/her POV, which in
>>turn prompts other to insert their own POV, etc.  Or, as I've more
>>recently been experiencing, the replace the article entirely with their
>>own POV version.  In the latter case, if they don't ultimately get their
>>way, they often create new articles with their own POV under similar
>>titles, or highly POV titles, as a back-door to getting their way.  If
>>these articles are eventually discovered, they are often listed for VfD or
>>re-direct, a process which usually takes further weeks of negotiation.  In
>>the end, we're either left with wikijunk, or a mass of overlapping
>>articles, or (in the best case) the POV warriors eventually abandon their
>>quest, having wasted many person-days of individual editors times which
>>could have been far more profitably spent creating new content.
>>
>>Jay.
>
>If the authors are having to create new articles to add their POV, then may
>I suggest that they are not getting a fair hearing on Wikipedia?

They generally aren't interested in the Talk: pages, and when forced to them
they tend to use them for soapboxes or ad hominems, rather than for
discussing article content.

Jay.

_________________________________________________________________
Take advantage of powerful junk e-mail filters built on patented Microsoft?
SmartScreen Technology.
http://join.msn.com/?pgmarket=en-ca&page=byoa/prem&xAPID=1994&DI=1034&SU=http://hotmail.com/enca&HL=Market_MSNIS_Taglines
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from_name: tic at tictric.net

body:
I believe /home/www/web17/html/wiki/images/ needs to be world writeable in
your case.
You can change that with your ftp client.

Then it will probably work.

--tic

> Hello,
>
> i have install mediawiki-1.3.5 on my webspace. PHP is sadly in Safe Mode
> =
> on.
>
> During upload of a picture ( Source: /home/stephan/Desktop/images.jpeg)
> cames
>
> Warning: SAFE MODE Restriction in effect. The script whose uid is 653 is
> not allowed
> to access /home/www/web17/html/wiki/images/f owned by uid 30 in
> /home/www/web17/html/wiki/includes/GlobalFunctions.php on line 489
>
> Warning: Unable to create '/home/www/web17/html/wiki/images/f': Is a
> directory in
> /home/www/web17/html/wiki/includes/SpecialUpload.php on line 198
>
> Warning: Unable to move '/home/www/web17/phptmp/phpaT7j3V' to
> '/home/www/web17/html/wiki/images/f' in
> /home/www/web17/html/wiki/includes/SpecialUpload.php on line
>
> In the middle of the pages
>
> Interner Fehler
> aus THWiki, der freien Wissensdatenbank
> Konnte Datei "/home/www/web17/phptmp/php9Hvmkd" nicht nach
> "/home/www/web17/html/wiki/images/fInterner Fehler aus THWiki, der freien
> Wissensdatenbank Konnte Datei "/home/www/web17/phptmp/php9Hvmkd" nicht
> nach "/home/www/web17/html/wiki/images/f[unknow symbol]fe/Images.jpeg"
> kopieren.
>
>
>
> Hier you can see an Screenshot
> http://141.30.213.177/public_html/pics/screen-2004-10-11_22:31:45.jpg
>
> Why mediawiki will convert images.jpeg to Images.jpeg ?
> Why create mediawiki a unknow symbol (see screenshot)
>
> What can i do to solve this error ?
>
> INFO:PHP Version 4.2.2
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


from_name: Anthere

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Article forks (was Re: Loosing more of our best
	contributors)

body:
Erik Moeller a ?crit:
> Daniel-
>
>>Absolutely not within Wikimedia! That flies directly in the face of NPOV,
>>leads to needless duplication in what we are doing, and transfers edit wars
>>to all articles that link to the forked versions
>
>
> In the long term it will be desirable to have multiple views on an article
> besides NPOV, whether it's a Wikinews story or a Wikipedia article.
> Duplication can be avoided using powerful diff/merging tools as they are
> already used in the open source development world (darcs, BitKeeper etc.).
> Each view will be managed by a group of people who make their own rules as
> to who else is allowed to add information, with NPOV being the "mother
> view" from which other views can be extracted (as NPOV is the most
> inclusive).
>
> So you will get a version of the circumcision article approved and edited
> by the APA, or a version of the creationism article approved and edited by
> the Institute for Creationism.

We will have to disagree with you on this.


from_name: Arvalux

subject: AW: [Wikitech-l] dynamic contents in WikiMedia pages! - Yippee!

body:
-----Urspr?ngliche Nachricht-----
Von: wikitech-l-bounces at wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikitech-l-bounces at wikimedia.org] Im Auftrag von Magnus Manske
Gesendet: Montag, 11. Oktober 2004 22:02
An: Wikimedia developers
Betreff: Re: [Wikitech-l] dynamic contents in WikiMedia pages?

Arvalux wrote:

>Is it possible to add dynamic contents to the pages of WikiMedia? For
>example to include some statistics from an underlying .xml file?
>
>
You can register an extension (currently an euphemism;-) as it was done
for <math>. For your extenstion foo, the wiki text <foo>bar</foo> will
then pass "bar" to a PHP function of your choice. You can also access
the global $wgTitle or the like to include a file associated with the
article title, or something.

Magnus

--------------------------------------------

Yeeeeeeeehhaaaaaaa!  :-)

I've added following lines at the end of Setup.php:

function ParsePHPTag($Content)
{
  ob_start();
  eval($Content);
  $Result = ob_get_contents();
  ob_end_clean();
  return($Result);
}

$wgParser->setHook('php','ParsePHPTag');

and I've added the following to a regular site, edited by click 'edit':

<php>
echo date('Y-m-d H:i:s');
</php>

Whats the result?

2004-10-12 01:11:23

It does its work! Yeeepiee! :-)
Now WikiMedia is my favorite UECMS - User Editable CMS ;-)

Of course, I'll remove my changes from the native WikiMedia files and put
them in separate files.

Thanks for help!

Arvalux.


from_name: Bryan Derksen

body:
At 08:34 AM 10/12/2004 +0100, Charles Matthews wrote:

>Bryan Derksen wrote
>
> > The version that gets picked as the "milestone" won't always _remain_ the
> > milestone.
>
>Well OK.  We have 'featured articles' and may wish to revisit those too, I
>suppose.  But the main point is that WP pages should constantly and
>obviously be 'open for business', not subject to hurdles for editors.

Which would be the default view of things under the system I proposed. The
current "working" version is the first thing people see, and unless they
specifically go out of their way to click on the "view last milestone" link
in the sidebar it'll be the only version they see.

IMO this is the key for rolling out and testing any new feature on
Wikipedia without causing a major uproar; it should be possible for people
who don't care about the feature to just ignore it and continue to use
Wikipedia as they always have, with it behaving in the same way it always
did. Templates violated this somewhat since it's not obvious how to edit
them when you stumble upon one in an article, but categories fit it well
since one can simply ignore them and they make no difference. TeX and table
wikimarkup was sort of midway between those, since they required a bit of
learning to use properly but one could still do those things the "old way"
instead. Can't think of any other recent major additions to Wikipedia
offhand, I'm probably missing a few.


from_name: Erdal Ronahi

body:
Hi there!

We on ku: have a problem. Kurdish uses two different scripts, latin and
arabic. You can see both on the main page at http://ku.wikipedia.org. To
keep the Kurdish Wikipedia together we would like to have both scripts
in one Wikipedia. But there are some problems:

* Though unicode supports the Arabic-letter Kurdish alphabet, very few
fonts do. In the internet a special font named "Unikurd Web" is the
de-facto standard for used on almost all websites. We use a template on
every page that enforces the use of this font, but that does not work
for the headings. Therefore there are wrong letters in the headings. See
http://ku.wikipedia.org/wiki/mallewe for an example. The letter that
looks like a "L" that has turned around is from a different font.

Can this be solved with a global style sheet or something similar? The
font is compatible with Unicode, so Arabic of Farsi words would not be
harmed.

To solve this problem would be the most important thing, because then
all texts will be readable. Other minor problems:

* The font ennforcing template {{rtl}} must be repeated after each
heading. That will probably solve with the first problem.
* Dotted lists cross the right border when used on right-to-left pages.
(Also an example on http://ku.wikipedia.org/wiki/mallewe)

Thanks,
Erdal


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Advice please

body:
Anthere wrote:

> KNOTT, T a ?crit:
>
>> "You claim to have banned me for threatening wiki with legal action. at
>> no time did I do this. I may well have suggested that to personal users,
>> including yourself, and believe me, I am serious in my threat, so
>> serious in fact that I already have draft writ produced in the time that
>> I have waited on you getting back to me."
>>
>> "The whole impression that you have created of me is derogatory,
>> defammatory and extremely distressing. Such actions can be remedied
>> legally, and believe me, I you continue to push me on this one, you
>> better have a good lab technicians salary, because I'll take you
>> personally to the cleaners. Your actions can be addressed by way of writ
>> for interdiction/ and or damages, because on at least two counts you
>> have interfered in a matter which I did not believe was any concern of
>> yours."
>>
>> "Having secured wiki's legal owners, I shall then be compelling them by
>> order of court to provide me with the full names and addresses of the
>> individuals who have attacked me on this unbelievable place, whereby I
>> can raise personal actions against those individuals without harming
>> wikipedia."
>
>
>> So it's not just me, he intents to sue others as well. There is actually
>> a lot more but it's mostly just rant.
>
>> 2) Should I respond to his email or ignore it?
>
>
> I would probably answer and try to cool him off :-)

He clearly doesn't know what he's talking about.  Maybe he has misread
one or two lawbooks, or watched too many court shows on TV.  I would be
inclined to simply tell him to "put up or shut up".

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: If you want to add info, then just do it. Ok?

body:
Robert a ?crit:
> Fred Bauder writes:
>
>>Turning articles in the area of communist history over
>>to the tender mercies of 172 is not a solution. It's not
>>a matter of experience, although newbie POV warriors are
>>pretty bad too. It is a fact, that in practice, a
>>determined (and experienced) POV pusher can get their
>>way just by wearing down any opposition.
>>Robert, who started this thread, is another major
>>offender.
>
>
> Huh?  How did I getinserted into this?  In any case, how
> can you make this statement, after I have been working so
> hard to comes to turn with you of late?  I especially have
> been trying to find areas of argreement with you on the
> Chiropractic medicine article.  Why won't you take "yes"
> for an answer?
>
> I find the same odd attitude from Danny and others. They
> claim that they disagree with me, and that I push my views
> too much. However, if you check the Talk pages of the
> articles in question (as well as the recent archives of
> this very list) you will see that I constantly invite
> others to add their own points of view.  In fact, one can
> reasonbly say that I have been begging Danny and others to
> contribute to several articles, on several topics, on
> precisely the points that they disagree with me on!  That -
> by definition - is the best sign of good faith one can have
> from a Wikipedia contributor.
>
> My problem with Fred Bauder, Danny and others is that they
> demand that I add material they agree with, and they want
> me to write their own POVs for them.  As I have been
> repeating here many times in the last month, if you have
> some information that is useful for an article, by all
> means please add it, in NPOV fashion.
>
> Just stop attacking me for not writing the articles in the
> way that you want to.  Is this so much to ask?
>
>
> Robert (RK)

Hi Robert.

While it is true that Fred attacked you, and that it is understandable
that you feel upset, please try to avoid escalating in doing the same in
reverse to others.
I think that here, Danny would be in right to feel you are launching a
personal attack against him for no reason.

Please, do not fuel a flame war :-)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: recipes

body:
David Friedland wrote:

> Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>> Phil Sandifer wrote:
>>
>>> But recipes, well, there's an awful lot of them. And I can just
>>> imagine the NPOV fights on them. (Chile with or without beans?
>>> Chocolate chip cookies with nuts? White or dark meat chicken? Does a
>>> dash of cumin improve the dish?) And they're not something that most
>>> people would think to go to an encyclopedia about.
>>
>> This argument is pure speculation.  Can you give examples of where it
>> in fact has happened?  Any recipe can easily accomodate notes about
>> hoe it can be varied.
>
> See [[Talk:Paella]] for an example. The recipe itself was moved to
> Wikibooks because there was too much argument about what could and
> couldn't go into paella. The current [[Paella]] article discusses the
> kinds of ingredients that can go in paella and who thinks what about
> those different ingredients. It also discusses the traditional cooking
> method and other related info, but there is no recipe. The recipe on
> Wikibooks is linked to.

Having the link is important.  Anthere complained correctly about people
who were removing the links or redirects.

> Hopefully, after reading the [[Paella]] article, the reader would
> understand the issues around the ingredients and upon encountering a
> recipe for paella, would be able to identify what kind of paella it
> was. To include recipes for all the different types of paella and the
> minute variations in choices and quantities of ingredients, not to
> mention cooking times would frankly be a waste a space. The exact
> quantity of rice that goes into a paella for 4 is not really
> encyclopedic.

Nobody really expects that.  One can still have a traditional recipe
from the place of origin, or outline the fundamental ingredients.
Beyond that, this kind of recipe evolves according to what is available
to the cook.

> Let the encyclopedia discuss the dish; let the WikiBooks Cookbook
> provide the recipes.

Better still let's allow for there being some amount of overlap rather
than a sharp division of jurisdictions.

Ec


body:
Elisabeth Bauer wrote:

>   The other thing I want to propose is a change to our NPOV policy.
>
> At the moment it says: "articles should have a neutral point of view."
> This dates back to the time where people had confidence that in the
> wiki process, in the struggle between adherents of different views
> after some time a good NPOV version finally emerges. I don't believe
> in this (I never did, actually). Yes, sometimes it happens, but only
> if non-involved people put a lot of effort in establishing
> compromises, moderating the conflicts and so on.
>
> NPOV policy should be: "authors should write from a neutral point of
> view."
>
> Of course, that's an ideal. You can never completely leave your
> personal views aside. But the important is: you can try. People who
> openly work for pushing POV in an article, shouldn't be allowed to
> edit that article at all. NPOV policy is not about "I insert my
> propaganda into an article and let others do the tedious taks of
> neutralizing it", it's "do your best to write from a neutral point of
> view. And if you are unable to do so, leave the article alone".

I basically disagree.  Wikipedia is about its contents, not about the
people who write them.  The NPOV article is the objective, and will
remain there when the participants are long gone.  I still believe in
the wiki process of finding common ground.

This is not to say that it is bad to say that authors should write from
a neutral point of view.  They should continue to be encouraged to do
so.  Nevertheless, none of us can completely escape his biases, and that
sometimes makes us the worst judges of our own neutrality.  Try as we
might, others may not consider that our writing has achieved
neutrality.  Writing from other than a POV in any subject is next to
impossible.  The POV pusher just takes it further than reasonable, and
fails to consider alternative POVs in the process of synthesizing a good
article.  Please don't confuse the natural tendency to have a POV with
POV pushing.

Ec


from_name: Daniel P.B.Smith

subject: [WikiEN-l] Just gently _mark_ milestones

body:
How about providing this minimal amount of mechanism:

a) A way of marking a particular edit as a "milestone."

b) The ability to mark an edit as a milestone would be suitably
restricted to people, probably sysops, who would agree to be governed
by discussion, consensus, policy, etc. TBD.

c) When a page with milestone(s) on it was displayed, _you would still
see and edit the latest version,_ but a not-too-conspicuous indicator
would appear to show that there was a milestone and clicking on it
would display the milestone.

d) NPOV and such notices could contain a suggestion that you might want
to read the latest milestone.

This would change the current situation minimally--newcomers would
still see and edit the latest page regardless of whether there were
"milestones." In situations where there was a serious "months-after"
effect, it would be easy to revert to the last milestone and then hash
things out via the usual edit wars... I can imagine a "Votes for
Reversion to Milestone" conference.

In other words, once a milestone is marked, don't lock it or obviously
prefer it--just make it available.

The assumption is that in the vast majority of cases, once a milestone
is reached, further edits would still be progressive improvements.

In other words, just provide a way of putting bookmarks into the
existing "history" file and a tab which, instead of bringing up the
whole history, brings up the latest milestone.

--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at verizon.net
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/


from_name: Sean Barrett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Advice please

body:
KNOTT, T stated for the record:

>>He clearly doesn't know what he's talking about.  Maybe he has misread
>>one or two lawbooks, or watched too many court shows on TV.  I would be
>>inclined to simply tell him to "put up or shut up".
>>
>>Ec
>
>
> Part of me is itching to do just that. Another part is saying that
> contacting someone like this is stupid.

It has been my experience that when part of me is saying that something
is stupid, it's right far more often than not.

Which doesn't mean the rest of me actually listens to it....


body: Great idea


from_name: Fred Bauder

body:
Anyone with a damages decree is going to levy on the servers and the domain
names.

Fred

> From: erik_moeller at gmx.de (Erik Moeller)
> Reply-To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l at wikimedia.org>
> Date: 12 Oct 2004 14:40:00 +0200
> To: foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Re: Formal request: Wikinews project
>
> Pure FUD. The ownership of the content is with its authors, not with the
> Wikimedia Foundation.


from_name: Charles Matthews

subject: [WikiEN-l] Tolerance of multiple views (was: Article forks)

body:
Ed Poor wrote

>So it really depends on how much we can tolerate divergent points of
view.

There Ed goes again.  No, I don't think that.  I think it depends on having
editors who can actually write NPOV articles, in a NPOV style, within the WP
NPOV policy.  And always has done.  _Not_ posting one-sided material,
expecting others to 'balance' it, and appealing to tolerance as a value.

Charles


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Article forks (was Re: Loosing more of our
	bestcontributors)

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote

> If people want to have a biased instead of an NPOV encyclopedia, then they
can
> start one any time they wish, but it will not be part of Wikimedia.

I'm with mav on this.

Charles


body:
Bryan Derksen wrote

> The version that gets picked as the "milestone" won't always _remain_ the
> milestone.

Well OK.  We have 'featured articles' and may wish to revisit those too, I
suppose.  But the main point is that WP pages should constantly and
obviously be 'open for business', not subject to hurdles for editors.

Charles


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

body:
I like DPB's idea of gentle milestones. It would give contributors
something to aim for, like:

* Let's work together co-operatively and try to create the next
milestone version.

It would also make it easier to do a "diff" between the current version,
and the one which (months *ago*) was agreed upon as a consensus version:

* On the article's History Page, just click the "cur" link on the
milestone version.

If the milestone idea gains traction, what's the next step? Submit the
idea directly to the developers, or create some sort of vote page at the
website and wait 2 weeks?

Ed Poor
Bureaucrat


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Open Mapping

body:
--- Stirling Newberry <stirling.newberry at xigenics.net> wrote:
> Collecting and creating spatial data is indeed creative work,

Making a digital outline of a river or road from an aerial photo is slavish,
not creative work. The only creativity possible is in making mistakes but the
Supremes have ruled that that cannot be used to justify a copyright defense.
The problem is that this concept has not be tested yet for GIS data.

-- mav

_______________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Declare Yourself - Register online to vote today!
http://vote.yahoo.com


from_name: The Cunctator

body:
On 10/12/04 6:01 AM, "Daniel P.B.Smith" <dpbsmith at verizon.net> wrote:

> How about providing this minimal amount of mechanism:
>
> a) A way of marking a particular edit as a "milestone."
>
> b) The ability to mark an edit as a milestone would be suitably
> restricted to people, probably sysops, who would agree to be governed
> by discussion, consensus, policy, etc. TBD.
>
Instead of restricting the power to sysops, everyone (registered) should be
able to vote, with clear criteria. You'd get something like the recommended
diaries at Daily Kos.

*Or* the process of becoming a sysop should become automated so that most
regular users are sysops.


body:
At 11:32 AM 10/12/2004 +0100, Charles Matthews wrote:

>Daniel P.B.Smith wrote
>
> > How about providing this minimal amount of mechanism:
> >
> > a) A way of marking a particular edit as a "milestone."
> >
> > b) The ability to mark an edit as a milestone would be suitably
> > restricted to people, probably sysops, who would agree to be governed
> > by discussion, consensus, policy, etc. TBD.
>
>Well, the wiki way is more like: make Milestone a category; allow anyone to
>add, therefore, but have a convention that no one awards their own edit a
>milestone, and that anyone adding a Milestone category should comment it in
>the edit, so it's clear in the history.  And one can have Milestone2, etc.
>This is one form of editable page ratings.

How does one put a category tag on a specific _version_ of an article? I
think what's being discussed is sufficiently different from the existing
category system that we should call it something different to avoid confusion.

Other than that, since this proposal exactly matches the one I made a day
or two back I support it entirely. :)


from_name: Peter Gervai

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Open Mapping

body:
On Mon, Oct 11, 2004 at 10:47:50AM -0700, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> --- Magnus Manske <magnus.manske at web.de> wrote:
> > While I basically agree with both notions, I can see that someone
> > investing money in getting to Zaire and taking precise measurements, or
> > in sequencing some DNA and determining what it does (broadly speaking),
> > should get something in return. If the question is no information vs.
> > information to pay for, the latter is preferable, IMHO. But, patents are
> > likely the wrong way, and Wikipedians traveling to Zaire and taking down
> > coordinates would certainly be best :-)
>
> It also takes effort and money to obtain a photograph of a painting whose
> copyright is in the public domain. Yet the resulting photograph is not
> protected by copyright.

Creating a map is a creative work while making an almost exact copy of a
picure is not. That is what matters regarding copyright.

(I don't know how much work is needed to create a map - probably it's not
that scary nowadays, being able to trace aerial photos - but I guess it's
many magnitude more work than going to British Museum and taking a photo. I
wouldn't debate that it contains creative work, and lots of it.)

my 2 'cents,
grin


from_name: Sheldon Rampton

body:
Elisabeth Bauer wrote:

>I completely agree with this view. We are loosing too many good authors
>due to these problems. Bored with reverting the same propaganda and POV
>again and again, having to repeat discussions every two months when the
>next guy arrives who insists on bringing up an already solved point.
>It's not only Adam Carr, there are many others who silently leave wikipedia.

Actually, the problems that Elisabeth and others are pointing to are
actually quite different and in fact opposite in nature.

Problem #1: "The same propaganda and POV again and again." For it to
be "the same" propaganda, presumably it must be coming from the same
individual or small group of individuals.

Problem #2: New people who "insist on bringing up an already solved
point." But if new people keep coming and concluding that the point
is problematic, maybe it isn't really "solved." And if new people
keep raising objections, obviously this problem ISN'T coming from an
individual or a small group.

On the one hand, it's a problem when the same OLD people keep
inserting their POV over and over again. On the other hand, it's a
problem when NEW people keep challenging the "correct" version as
defined by self-declared guardians of the article. See the
contradiction?

The problems stated here are, of course, seen quite differently by
the supposed malefactors. From their perspective, problem #1 would be
(and often is) stated as, "Other people are enforcing their POV and
censoring mine."

For those accused of #2, the problem is perceived as "A clique has
formed that refuses to brook any challenge to its imagined
'ownership' of the article."

I think the real problem, though, is something more deeply structural
that is imbedded in the very design of the WIkipedia. In this regard,
I recommend reading Clay Shirky's essay, "A Group Is Its Own Worst
Enemy":

http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

Shirky mentions Wikipedia several times, calling it "the most
interesting conversational artifact I know of, where product is a
result of process." More interestingly, though, he examines the
nature of human group dynamics and makes a number of observations.
For example:

>"The likelihood that any unmoderated group will eventually get into
>a flame-war about whether or not to have a moderator approaches one
>as time increases." As a group commits to its existence as a group,
>and begins to think that the group is good or important, the chance
>that they will begin to call for additional structure, in order to
>defend themselves from themselves, gets very, very high.

My personal corollary to this observation is that the TYPE of group
plays an important role in determining how large the group gets
before this dynamic kicks in. Here are a couple of examples:

*Listservs become overwhelming to subscribers if they contain a large
number of postings. Once they reach that point, therefore, an
equilibrium sets in. As the number of postings (and flames)
increases, the number of people who drop out in frustration begins to
equal the number of new people joining the list. At this point its
growth stagnates, and in the absence of moderation, trolls or cliques
tend to take over and drive out everyone else.

*The same dynamic occurs with usenet groups and bulletin boards, but
typically the number of postings needed to reach the equilibrium
point is higher than with listservs. (With bulletin boards, people
have more ability to pick and choose what they read than with
listservs, so the number of postings can be higher before the
experience gets overwhelming.)

By comparison with these other types of groups, one of the great
strengths of wikis is that they accommodate much larger groups than
other internet communities. What experience is showing, however, is
that wikis too have an equilibrium point (even though it is markedly
higher than the equilibrium point for listservs or bulletin boards).
On Wikipedia, the equilibrium point has already been reached with
respect to a number of topics that are popular or controversial.

As for what should be done about this, I don't know. It seems that
some system is needed that enables more moderation while sticking to
the NPOV principle.

--Sheldon Rampton


from_name: Andrew Lih

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Formal request: Wikinews project

body:
Erik, I'm intrigued by the idea, of course, as it's my area of study.
However, with the Wikinews project having to source original content,
identify individuals, institute a reputation system and the establish
a workflow, I questioin how apt the title "wiki" is to this project.
It has more similarity to [[OhMyNews]], [[Indymedia]] and other
citizen reporter efforts. The project should at least have a rundown
of these other citizen reporter projects and rundown their
experiences.

This endeavour, while sharing Wikimedia's goals of openness, inclusion
and free content is the most ambitious project yet, because it becomes
primary source journalism. And with this, comes the baggage of having
to deal with libel and slander in ways Wikipedia does not, because WP
is one level of indirection away from accountable sources. Legal
counsel for any primary source reporting would be a necessity.

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)

On 11 Oct 2004 19:51:00 +0200, Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> Anthere-
> > Requirement on real names are naturally bugging me.
>
> With your objections to any such rule in mind, I have tried to make this
> an option, rather than a requirement. There's a flip side to this and this
> is that without such an option, Wikinews will actually become *more*
> restrictive on what types of stories it allows.
>
> I call it the Abu Ghraib test.
>
> Let's say that our policy is that "any reported information can be allowed
> in an article as long as there is consensus among editors to include it."
> If we had a story like the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal before anyone
> else, and some reporter tried to include it under this rule -- all backed
> up both by good sources and by his credibility -- I am quite certain that
> some people would try to block it through endless discussions from ever
> being reported.
>
> In many cases, where we would have some anonymous whistleblower (a person
> telling secrets about a company, government etc.) willing to give us
> information, I am also quite certain that under such a policy, this
> information would be unlikely to be accepted on grounds of verifiability.
> Again, it is quite likely - as unfortunate as this is - that people from
> the opposite political point of view would try to block information that
> does not suit them.
>
> Therefore, my proposal suggests that we DO allow this type of consensus-
> based reporting from anonymous or unaccredited sources (called "witness
> reports" in the proposal), but IN ADDITION TO IT, we also allow Wikinews
> reporters to use their reputation as currency for publishing original
> reports, and to act as relays for people who want to stay anonymous.
>
> So there is no requirement for real names, but the additional credibility
> offered by verified or verifiable identities guarantees that we can pick
> up stories that we would otherwise probably ignore.
>
> I hope that the proposal is clear enough on the point that original
> reporting by non-accredited persons is allowed as long as there is
> consensus to include their stories.
>
> I would like to emphasize that Wikipedia allows no original reporting
> whatsoever. Wikinews is therefore *much* more inclusive than Wikipedia,
> not less.
>
> > The notion that all wikinews reporters will be necessarily sysops, and
> > all sysops necessarily wikinews reporter is problematic as well.
>
> I agree. However, initially, the functionality of "publishing" an article
> will be linked to the tools that we currently have, such as page
> protection. The potential for abuse of this privilege, and the associated
> consequences, are larger than in Wikipedia: Imagine a Wikinews article
> about a massacre in Israel being published without proper review and then
> being distributed in other media. Such news articles can lead to fatal
> consequences.
>
> Therefore, I believe that initially, we need to limit the circle of sysops
> who can publish stories to those we can identify and hold accountable. In
> order to make the process more wiki-like, I am working on a workflow
> system called "Wikiflow" that ensures an article can only flow from one
> state (unpublished) to the other (published) if there is consensus, if a
> certain amount of time has passed, and if it has come to the attention of
> certain people who should see it (reviewers).
>
> This Wikiflow system can also be the basis of peer review on Wikipedia, it
> can replace the current sysop-centric VfD process, and so forth. So take
> this early version of Wikinews like you take something like VfD: It kind
> of works, but it's not open enough in the long term.
>
> > Respective editorials ? You mean editorials can have a view point ? In
> > short, Wikinews will be a big change, since we will not any more have to
> > respect NPOV rule. But replace it with a collection of viewpoint. If one
> > view point comittee is missing, then the viewpoint is missing ?
>
> This was just an experimental aspect of the proposal: to, in addition to
> news articles, have a daily editorial (commentary) about current events
> written by different "factions". This was *never* supposed to apply to
> regular news articles. While I still think it is a good idea to explore
> this, given that this part of the proposal is the most controversial, I
> have taken it out. We can still think about this in the Wikinews community
> once it exists.
>
> > Last, I am not sure that all languages have really heard of this
> > project. So, I wish we advertise it a little bit more.
>
> What do you suggest?
>
> > I have not exactly forgotten yet the huge thread in september, saying
> > "the board has overstepped authority and blablabla" while we were only
> > acting in good faith. With such a reaction, any step from me for
> > agreeing for a new project will be *very* careful :-)
>
> I understand. Of course I would like to start working on this project and
> publicize its existence as soon as possible. So I would appreciate some
> more concrete suggestions on how to move it from the proposal and
> discussion phase into the implementation phase. Waiting another month now
> when I actually have time to do some real work on this project would be
> painful.
>
>
>
> Regards,
>
> Erik
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

--
Andrew Lih
andrew.lih at gmail.com


from_name: Christopher Mahan

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: POV Pushers (was: The "months later" effect)

body:
--- Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> If we want to reduce edit wars, the solution may not be to ban
> people,
> but to improve their tolerance to each other. If we want to limit
> pov,
> the solution is not to limit the number of editors, but on contrary
> to
> increase it.

As a test, on Occupation of Palestine (about a month ago) I called
for a timeout.  I came in through a prompt on this list by Ed Poor,
who was involved in the escalating war of words. I put a notice that
the page should not be changed for 48 hours, by any participant.

Ambi was not too supportive and asked me not to do it again (see my
talk page).

I wonder, though, whether that is a viable solution for edit wars
between logged in users.
I agree that banning one party but not the other can often be
interpreted as: there is a winner and there is a loser. This only
reinforces animosity between wikipedians.

What I asked for in the timeout is that people think about what the
page should become, and make changes offline, or on their own user
pages.

I'd like some feedback from some of the participants as to the pros
and cons of this approach.

It is my hope that we can develop a way to defuse edit wars early
while allowing everyone to "save face" and have time to think things
through.

=====
Chris Mahan
818.943.1850 cell
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
chris.mahan at gmail.com
http://www.christophermahan.com/

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: One Wikipedia - two scripts

body:
Hi Mark and everybody,

Yes, Tahoma works (but is ugly and therefore not used on ar: for
example) and is even more widespread than Unikurd Web. I just tried it
on http://ku.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fontexample. The words there
should look similar with the only difference being the diacriticals.

I have not expressed myself correctly. The problem was not only the
font, but the fact one cannot tell Wikipedia to use one font throughout
an article if there are headings and lists. For the page name it doesn't
work anyway. Something I forgot to mention was the edit window, words
appear differently in the edit window and on the page or in the preview.

An automatic script converter would be a fine thing, but there are also
dialect differences. So an article in the two main dialects Kurmanci and
Sorani would exist four times after automatic conversion into both
scripts. At the moment we have three dialects represented which are only
partly mutually intellegible. Until now all Sorani is written in arabic
letter, all Kurmanci and Zazaki in latin letter with links to each other
if the same article exists in different dialects. We like it that way,
there were no objections yet.

But because arabic and latin script are used for either of them,
automatic script conversion would be fine on the long run. Technically
it should be possible, as far as I know 1:1 conversion is possible.

Erdal


from_name: Mark Richards

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Advice please

body:
Please don't feed the trolls... ;)
Mark R.

--- "KNOTT, T" <tknott at qcl.org.uk> wrote:

>
> >>> 2) Should I respond to his email or ignore it?
> >>
> >>
> >> I would probably answer and try to cool him off
> :-)
> >
> >He clearly doesn't know what he's talking about.
> Maybe he has misread
> >one or two lawbooks, or watched too many court
> shows on TV.  I would be
>
> >inclined to simply tell him to "put up or shut up".
>
> >
> >Ec
>
> Part of me is itching to do just that. Another part
> is saying that
> contacting someone like this is stupid.
>
> Theresa
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

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body:
It doesn't look like anything technical would be
required. If there is a concensus on the talk page,
then mark in the comments that it is a version that
everyone seems happy with.
Mark R.

--- Andrew Lih <andrew.lih at gmail.com> wrote:

> Why not have milestones done the usual wiki way?
>
> Try consensus first, then do voting.
>
> No fancy mechanisms or sysop only policies.
>
> -Andrew (User:Fuzheado)
>
> On Tue, 12 Oct 2004 22:15:10 +0800, ruimu uestc
> <ruimu at uestc.edu.cn> wrote:
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "The Cunctator" <cunctator at kband.com>
> > To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> > Sent: Tuesday, October 12, 2004 9:40 PM
> > Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Just gently _mark_
> milestones
> >
> > > On 10/12/04 6:01 AM, "Daniel P.B.Smith"
> <dpbsmith at verizon.net> wrote:
> > >
> > > > How about providing this minimal amount of
> mechanism:
> > > >
> > > > a) A way of marking a particular edit as a
> "milestone."
> > > >
> > > > b) The ability to mark an edit as a milestone
> would be suitably
> > > > restricted to people, probably sysops, who
> would agree to be governed
> > > > by discussion, consensus, policy, etc. TBD.
> > > >
> > > Instead of restricting the power to sysops,
> everyone (registered) should
> > be
> > > able to vote, with clear criteria. You'd get
> something like the
> > recommended
> > > diaries at Daily Kos.
> > >
> > > *Or* the process of becoming a sysop should
> become automated so that most
> > > regular users are sysops.
> >
> > And stating that only "high level" sysops can
> unmark milestones...
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> >
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> >
>
>
> --
> Andrew Lih
> andrew.lih at gmail.com
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

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subject: [WikiEN-l] POV Pushers (was: The "months later" effect)

body:
I think this is a terrible idea.
Mark

--- Rebecca <misfitgirl at gmail.com> wrote:

> With the idea technical measures of banning certain
> users from certain
> articles, I think Ed's right on the money. Ed's
> sensible enough to
> know that he might not be able to stay neutral on
> global warming, so
> he doesn't edit articles related to this. There's
> some topics on which
> I'm the same. But for those users who don't know any
> better, I think
> this would be an apt solution. I know it's already
> been done in
> certain cases by the ArbCom, but I'd like to see it
> in greater use and
> perhaps (if it was to become a technical measure)
> able to be acted
> upon by any sysop (though of course, with stringent
> guidelines to
> avoid abuse). The idea of banning IPs from editing
> certain articles, I
> believe, would be very wise as well.
>
> - ambi
>
>
> On Mon, 11 Oct 2004 09:16:50 -0600, Fred Bauder
> <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
> > This is one remedy the arbitration committee has
> been applying to dedicated
> > POV warriors. Not always, it is not policy itself,
> just a way to deal with
> > determined violaters of NPOV and other policies.
> But it could be policy.
> > However it may prove difficult to separate editors
> who insist on the
> > integrity of the article, like Adam Carr, from
> editors who insist on a
> > biased article.
> >
> > Fred
> >
> > > From: "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com>
> > > Reply-To: English Wikipedia
> <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> > > Date: Mon, 11 Oct 2004 07:47:14 -0700
> > > To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> > > Subject: [WikiEN-l] POV Pushers (was: The
> "months later" effect)
> >
> >
> > >
> > > Issue #2: Can we exclude certain users from
> editing certain articles?
> > > (How about starting on a small scale as an
> experiment: let admins "ban"
> > > NON-SIGNED-IN contributors, i.e., IP's, on a
> per-article basis -- and
> > > see how this works out. The [[Prem Rawat]]
> series would benefit.)
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> >
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> >
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

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from_name: Jens Ropers

body:
Strong-worded, but I have to say that I gotta agree.
Fred's literally right on the money.
There's a lot on things that I found totally un-wikipedian about Erik's
proposal, and many others have already pointed those things out, so I
don't need to <AOL> them. (Suffice to say that I strongly oppose it in
its present form.)
Considering the below legal issue however is a sine qua non:
Don't heed Fred's warning and your proposal has the potential
to--excuse my language--royally shaft the entire Wikimedia Foundation
and ALL its projects.

-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]]
     www.ropersonline.com

On 12 Oct 2004, at 04:34, Fred Bauder wrote:

> Yeh, you folks are just not listening. You need to check into what
> even a
> simple nuisance action against you would cost. God forbid, what the
> consequences would be if there was a substantial award against you.
>
> At a bare minimum, in order that all the work we have done doesn't end
> up in
> the ownership of a plaintiff, the Wikinews project needs to be a
> separate
> corporation.
>
> We are not a little hole in the corner outfit no one heard of anymore.
> We
> are getting up there with the New York Times and CBS News who budget
> millons
> for legal defense. Where is that kind of money going to come from?
>
> Fred
>
>> From: Andrew Lih <andrew.lih at gmail.com>
>> Reply-To: Andrew Lih <andrew.lih at gmail.com>, Wikimedia Foundation
>> Mailing List
>> <foundation-l at wikimedia.org>
>> Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2004 10:23:44 +0800
>> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l at wikimedia.org>
>> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Re: Formal request: Wikinews project
>>
>> This endeavour, while sharing Wikimedia's goals of openness, inclusion
>> and free content is the most ambitious project yet, because it becomes
>> primary source journalism. And with this, comes the baggage of having
>> to deal with libel and slander in ways Wikipedia does not, because WP
>> is one level of indirection away from accountable sources. Legal
>> counsel for any primary source reporting would be a necessity.
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


body:
When a user engaged in an edit war logs out so that they can get in a few
anonymous reverts it can be annoying. However their choice of articles to
revert readily identifies them.

Fred

> From: Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2004 19:15:46 +0200
> To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: POV Pushers (was: The "months later" effect)
>
> There is NO evidence in my view that IPS are more prone to edit waring
> than identified users.
>
> There is NO evidence in my view that IPS are more biaised than
> identified users.


body:
Daniel P.B.Smith wrote

> How about providing this minimal amount of mechanism:
>
> a) A way of marking a particular edit as a "milestone."
>
> b) The ability to mark an edit as a milestone would be suitably
> restricted to people, probably sysops, who would agree to be governed
> by discussion, consensus, policy, etc. TBD.

Well, the wiki way is more like: make Milestone a category; allow anyone to
add, therefore, but have a convention that no one awards their own edit a
milestone, and that anyone adding a Milestone category should comment it in
the edit, so it's clear in the history.  And one can have Milestone2, etc.
This is one form of editable page ratings.

And yes, I suppose it would be good to have the chance to see a filtered
page history, with just those edits that affected milestones.

Charles


subject: [WikiEN-l] Do drop menu (was: Fun with anagrams)

body:
Do proud men
Dump on Ed, or
Dupe Dr. Moon?

No dud, Mr. Poe:
Duped Moron
Rode on dump!

--Edmund Poor (Proud Demon, Roped on mud)

> >And that explains why I'm an "ode pro".
>
> >Rod Poe
>
> Or dope?
>
> Theresa


subject: [Wikitech-l] State of SVG support

body:
On 12 Oct 2004, at 06:32, Brion Vibber wrote:
> Safari 1.2.3 with Adobe SVG plugin:
> Accept: */*

Let me add:

If you DON'T have that plugin installed, you're getting an unwieldy
error message (sheet) of:
>> Safari cannot find the Internet plug-in
>>
>> The page ?SVG test? has content of MIME type ?image/svg+xml?. Because
>> you don?t have a plug-in installed for this MIME type, this content
>> can?t be displayed.

despite the page
> http://leuksman.com/misc/svgtest/
saying that one should not receive any dialog boxes.

-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]]
     www.ropersonline.com


subject: [WikiEN-l] Linux (was: The "months later" effect)

body:
But David, the GNU/Linux system DOES just use "Linux" as the kernel.
(Richard Stallman said so, and a Saint wouldn't lie! ;-)

-- D. Proud Nome


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Open Mapping

body:
--- Stirling Newberry <stirling.newberry at xigenics.net> wrote:
> Translating from one medium to another is defined as creativity. Just
> as making a translation is copyrightable (though derrivative of the
> original work). However, taking a PD aerial photograph and taking a
> program to reduce it down to a line and releasing it under GFDL puts
> the material in the intellectual commons. The change is that in 1980
> you had to hire a person to do the work, and companies successfully
> argued that if they could not make enough to pay that person, it would
> not be done.

Translating is one thing, literally tracing is very different. Tracing does not
require any creativity at all. But as I said, the particulars in regard to GIS
data have not been tested yet (AFAIK). The Court may find there is a compelling
interest in giving that type of GIS data copyright protection. Thus we must
play it safe and create our own whenever PD data is not available.

-- mav

=====

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from_name: Stirling Newberry

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Open Mapping

body:
On Oct 12, 2004, at 11:37 AM, Andre Engels wrote:

> However, the creative work in creating a map is in the search of map
> symbols - the colour and thickness of the lines, the precision in
> which they are drawn, etcetera. The spatial data on which the map is
> based are not part of the 'creative' work on the map.
>
> Andre Engels
>
> Grin wrote:
>

Collecting and creating spatial data is indeed creative work, however,
most of the spatial data needed are not copyright - but are generated
by governments (USGS quads for example) and can be turned into maps.
This is a fundamental wiki process - and indeed a fundamental open
source process: isolate the creative component which "protects"
information, that is, withholds it from the public. Duplicate that
component, and include the public domain information which has been
"fenced in" by the small amount of copyrightable material.

In the case of mapping, that's conerting PD spatial data where it
exists into visual maps. Where there is no PD spatial data, then we
have to do more. But much of what people want can be accomplished by
the above mechanism. We should not attempt to appropriate copyright
material on the argument that it isn't very copyright, on the other
hand, we should be very aggressive in making sure that every particle
of what is in the intellectual commons is accessible.

Thanks for the pointers people, I will draft a proposal to the people
working on the problem.