from_name: Jean-Baptiste Soufron

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Autofellatio

body:
I don't agree at all. Freedom of speech and NPOV are not absolute. They
are simply policies that are sometimes necessary to balance with other
goals of importance.

Jean-Baptiste Soufron, Doctorant
CERSA - CNRS, Paris 2
http://soufron.free.fr

Le 29 mars 05, ? 16:33, ?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason a ?crit :

>> If your interest is to censor encyclopedic content on any wikimedia
>> wikipedia, then your goals are at odds with the goals of the
>> foundation.  Because you do not share the same goals, you should fork
>> and produce your own project with censorship among it's goals.
>>
>> If you continue to endorse censorship you are harming the project.
>> Please allow those who want to share knowledge freely the ability to
>> do so on wikipedia by taking your censorship someplace else.
>>
>> The claim that pages are somehow 'dirtied'  by a mere image speaks
>> strongly about your lack of neutral perspective.
>
> Agreed.
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Mark Williamson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Autofellatio

body:
Gregory, let me tell you, Jimbo doesn't seem to understand
metaphorical language or figures of speech, and I don't think he can
tell when people are being completely serious or when they're
exaggerating a bit. I know this from experience, and have had the same
problem with Danny. I have been told by one of them (can't remember
which), "Nobody's saying you burned their crops". He also doesn't seem
to understand very well the sliding scale that should be used in the
case of an e-mail like yours.

He seems to think that you were directly suggesting Ant fork, which is
definitely not the case. (as far as I can tell, you are saying that
she is at odds with foundation philosophy and that if she really wants
to have a Wikipedia where it doesn't follow philosophy, she can make a
fork; rather than a suggestion that she really should)

My advice is to be very literal with him, and only say exactly what you mean.

Mark

On Tue, 29 Mar 2005 19:11:55 -0500, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 29 Mar 2005 04:42:36 -0800, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales
> <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> > Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> > > If your interest is to censor encyclopedic content on any wikimedia
> > > wikipedia, then your goals are at odds with the goals of the
> > > foundation.  Because you do not share the same goals, you should fork
> > > and produce your own project with censorship among it's goals.
> >
> > This is really over-the-top, Gregory.
>
> Is that really the case?
> I'm surprised that you would disagree with the statement above, that
> if someone's intention is to censor encyclopedic content, based on
> such value judgements, that they are at odds with the project and
> should work on something else.
>
> I certainly see how you might state that I was mistaken in classifying
> the proposed measures as censorship, or that it was rude of me to
> insult someone of unquestionable value...
>
> > My problem with people using the word "censorship" in talking about
> > this very complex issue is precisely that we get responses like yours,
> > which are really not very helpful and short-circuit our ability to
> > think critically about the issue.
> >
> > We are *all* (the major participants) opposed to censorship (in the
> > sense that you mean), including (very strongly) Anthere.  It is our
> > goal to educate and inform, not to shock, offend, or titillate.
> > Of course there is a tiny majority of people who are interested in
> > censoring Wikipedia.  Fine.  Ignore them.
>
> This is quite heartening to hear reaffirmed.
>
> At the same time, what I see being proposed is the idea that it's
> acceptable for wikipedias in differing languages to have a differing
> set of standards, and this is the one, and perhaps only, point where I
> am reasonably confident that I am not misunderstanding Anthere.  I
> don't see how these ideas can coexist.
>
> If our test of a material is it's value to educate and inform, is it
> not true that the same material which would educate and inform would
> also educate and inform people of another language?
>
> A policy that says that we will exclude content differently depending
> on the language of wikipedia, says that we are applying an additional
> test, a test of moral rightness.
>
> > But don't imagine that those of us who think that, for example, it is
> > blatantly obvious that the [[Imgae:Autofellatio_2.jpg]] image is wildly
> > inappropriate for wikipedia are simply prudish censors.  Such a view
> > really fails to respect and understand the point that we are making.
>
> This thread is surrounded on all sides with bad information...
> Anthere's initial concern was primarily about vandalism... But
> vandalism is an issue that we can't even come close to solving by the
> proposed measures that I objected so strongly to (value based
> standards of content)...
>
> The autofellatio image is a bad example because most people would
> agree that it has some of the poorest inform to shock ratios of call
> the contested images on wikipedia.  (I'd still argue it's of value, as
> one person said after seeing it... "wow.. thats possible? eww",  but I
> haven't been involved in the voting for that image and don't intend to
> be)
>
> I jumped in the thread because I believe that the idea of differing
> standards inclusion standards in differing languages necessitates
> censorship and I decided that it was a worthwhile matter which was
> being ignored in the thread... because of the separately worthwhile
> discussion of applying technical means to address that specific form
> of vandalism.
>
> > A respectful discussion of this difficult issue is hard to have if
> > anyone who is in favor of deleting some images from wikipedia is to be
> > shunned as a censor who ought to leave the project and fork.
>
> My apologies, both to the list and Anthere, on this matter... My
> attempt cut away issues I saw as extranious to the issue I wanted to
> discuss (vandalism, that specific image,etc) came off as offensive. (I
> may not care if you find a useful image on the 'pedia offensive, but I
> really would hope you don't find my discussions as offensive.)
>
> Grey paint begins with black and white.
>
> I did not mean to imply that we should shun the issues or the people
> bringing them, but rather strike up some vigorous discussion on this
> important matter...   and through out some ideas that I think should
> be widely acceptable, such as "if making good/evil value judgements
> about content is someones goal then everyone would gain from them
> working on a fork, given the intentions of the project".
>
> > Especially, for goodness sake, Anthere, who is a hero to us all.
>
> Well,  If I'm going to have to base my discussions on whom is
> proposing an idea rather than the merits of the idea, then I should
> probably give up now.... :)
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


list: wikien-l

from_name: Richard Holton

subject: [WikiEN-l] What's wrong with censorship?

body:
On Tue, 29 Mar 2005 20:51:02 -0500, Karl A. Krueger <kkrueger at whoi.edu> wrote:
> [snip]
> On Tue, Mar 29, 2005 at 05:30:08PM -0500, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
>> [snip]
> > Complying with local, regional or national laws which forbid certain
> > expressions or depictions is also censorship. If we want to send a print
> > edition to "strait-laced" countries, such as Communist China (or
> > possibly even Uganda), we will have to respect their laws - or try
> > smuggling in some CDs instead. I want no part of smuggling (the legal
> > liability is too high).
>
> Wikipedia has a structural commitment to the idea that open public
> collaboration, with a focus on neutrality, can generate value and can
> approximate truth.  Wherever this idea or its practice is forbidden,
> Wikipedia is by necessity subversive and illegal.
>
> There's no getting around that.  If there is a regime under which NPOV
> is illegal because (let's say) all credit must be given to the Great
> Leader, then Wikipedia must either fail to propagate into that regime,
> or else defy the laws of that regime.  It cannot propagate into that
> regime without either breaking the law or becoming anti-Wikipedia.
>
> Where the law says we must lie, we simply must not go unless we are
> willing to break the law.  If we go there and follow the law by lying,
> then we have destroyed what we went there to build.
>
Is removing text or an image due to copyright violation "lying"? Some
uses of copyright material violates the law in the US (and elsewhere).
Removing such material could often be withholding information,
especially in the case of images. Do we defy the US law? We may try to
justify it under fair use; we may assume a generous interpretation of
the law, but if Wikipedia's stance is to outright defy US copyright
law, then there is a whole lot of people who will be surprised and
dismayed.

If there is a law in country xyz that says that photographs of child
pornography are illegal, then will we include them anyway? Oh wait,
isn't that true in some US states? Is it Wikipedia's stance to
outright defy those laws? If not, why not? Isn't this *exactly* what
you are saying we should do?

-- Rich Holton

en.wikipedia:User:Rholton


subject: [Wikipedia-l] interwikis redirects disabled

body:
I hope that this doesn't stop Brion from working on the feature in the
hope that we can re-enable these redirects.

Mark

On Wed, 30 Mar 2005 11:56:37 +0700, Walter van Kalken
<walter at vankalken.net> wrote:
> Just joined the list .....
>
> Thx Tim and Brion
>
> Waerth/Walter
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Minty

subject: [Wikitech-l] Full text search

body:
On Tue, 29 Mar 2005 22:16:23 +0200, Daniel Wunsch <the.gray at gmx.net> wrote:
> however, there are some political difficulties
> with using this - it's based on java, and java
> is not free.

Fair point. What about Plucene, the perl port of Lucene?

It is not nearly as mature, stable or feature rich as Lucene, but hey.

I plan to be playing with Plucene a bit over the next couple of months
: one initial avenue of interest is some rough and ready benchmarks on
speed/resource requirements.  I was planning to use a local copy of
the wikimedia text as a corpus for this testing.

What I don't want to do is duplicate any existing work...


from_name: Daniel Wunsch

subject: [Wikitech-l] Full text search

body:
On Tuesday 29 March 2005 21:16, Minty wrote:
> anyone playing with http://nutch.org/

there is a working prototype of a search
engine using lucene (the framework nutch
is built on).

however, there are some political difficulties
with using this - it's based on java, and java
is not free.

a number of people seem to value the fact that
wikipedia runs completely on open source
software higher than a working fulltext search.

one _could_ try to port that code to mono
and nlucene..

daniel
--
I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does
mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously.
- Douglas Adams


subject: [Wikitech-l] Full text search

body:
On Tuesday 29 March 2005 22:18, Tomer Chachamu wrote:

> However, I don't imagine either will be used by Wikimedia, as they are
> written in Java, which is  slow and takes up too much memory compared
> to natively running stuff (i.e. C or C++). It's already bad enough
> that we're using PHP! (In one extreme case, a diff took 45.5 seconds
> in PHP while the same algorithm took 0.5 seconds in C (or maybe C++)
> (this is from a developer)).

java cannot beat raw C-code (except sometimes)
but it sure is an order of magnitude faster than PHP.
a java VM does need a lot of memory to run fast, but
you need that anyway if you want reasonable search
performance.

this is from a developer, too ;)

daniel

P.S. mono is said to be quite slow up to now :/


from_name: Stefan Groschupf

subject: [Wikitech-l] Full text search

body:
> anyone playing with http://nutch.org/

Well nutch makes no sense for you guys since it uses a webcrawler you
don't need since you can simply index your database content.
Lucene it definitely what you need!!!

If you one day decide to use java, let me know I can contribute a
search engine for you.
Anyway we never really got the wiki syntax parser done (we tried regex,
neko and javacc) but all was just to bad and slow results.
To index en wikipedia content uses 4 h on a dual os x.
My prototype search engine is able to answer more then 10 queries per
second with less then 50 CPU usage on dual g5.

So, discuss  the java issue and let me know. :-)

Stefan


subject: [Wikitech-l] Full text search

body:
> Actually, I think the more generic Lucene library which Nutch is built
> upon will be more useful. We should be indexing the wikitext, not the
> HTML (which is a lower quality version ;))

This is the only open issue when you plan to use lucene, you need a
good parser for the syntax and this is very difficult.

>
> Seriously, we also don't want a crawler. What is left in Nutch's
> favour?
>
Nothing! Use Lucene - trust me. :-)
It will definitely save wikipedia very very much load!!!


from_name: Matt R

subject: [WikiEN-l] Friday's featured article

body:
--- Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- Viajero <viajero at quilombo.nl> wrote:
> > Although I realize this isn't the proper channel for doing so, I'd like
> > to nominate the following for Featured Article this coming Friday:
> >
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Bishonen/European_toilet_paper_holder
>
> That is not a featured article. In fact it is not even an article - it is a
> hoax. It will be removed as would any other sneaky vandalism masquerading as
> valid content.

Equally, if there is a consensus that the hoax should go ahead, it will be
restored.

-- Matt

Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com


from_name: geni

subject:
April Fool contest idea (was Re: [WikiEN-l] Friday's featured
	article)

body:
> In the interests of adding to instruction creep :-), we ought to have
> some ground rules for April Fool's, maybe make a contest out of it,
> for instance the winner is the hoax that goes the longest without
> being detected. For instance:
>
> * New articles only, we continue to be humorless about edits to
>   existing articles.
> * Article must be created on 1 April, between 00:00 and 23:59 UTC.
> * Detection is by the addition of a special template by an editor,
>   who must also add on the talk page the evidence that the article
>   is a hoax.
> * The winner is the one with the longest time between creation
>   and detection.
> * Undetected hoaxes must be marked by their creator by the end of
>   April 2; they are also counted as winners.
> * Winners get moved to WP: namespace, have " (April Fool 2005)"
>   added to the title (in case of inadvertant links from elsewhere),
>   all internal links removed, and are added to a list of winners
>   linked to from BJAODN or some such.
> * Losers are deleted sometime on April 2.
>
> The rules page can be on meta somewhere, linked from a couple
> relevant places. It works to have it be advertised; more of a
> challenge to include references etc that can fool a thousand
> editors already on the outlook for fiction that day.
>
> Stan

All those takeing part will then be banned indefinetly under the
dissruption rule (and for doing it on the worng day sometimes
timezones have thier good points).

--
geni


from_name: Gregory Maxwell

subject: [Wikipedia-l] censorship and guidelines

body:
On Tue, 29 Mar 2005 14:28:37 -0700, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
[snip]
> Some people are offended by very diverse things.
>
> For example, some people are offended by owls (yes, owls).
>
> Does this mean we should replace pictures of owls with drawings? I
> think it really depends. If the concept can be effectively illustrated
> by drawings, then yes, even though the people who are offended are a
> minority. Some differences in species may be difficult to illustrate
> with a drawing, and so photos may be nessecary.
[snip]

Altough I haven't conducted a scientific study, ... I would be rather
supprised if the people that were highly offended by the nude and
sexual images were not also offended by the drawings. ... certantly
there are people that are offended by the drawings (and by the text
as well).


from_name: Henry Tan-Tenn

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: incidently, talking about big principles...

body:
Anthere ti 2005/3/29 EP 10:48 sia-kong:
> incidently
>
> These days, when you navigate quietly on the smaller
> wikipedias, this is what you see
>
> http://ia.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia%3AFrontispicio&diff=0&oldid=13653

Ant,

I navigate actively on a couple smaller Wikipedias, and I do not see
such abuse, be it unreverted vandalism, tolerance for proven copyviol,
or generally editing in bad faith.  So I would not imply such
occurrences are a rule.

> I thought I was working for a project trying to gather
> free content so as to make free knowledge available ?
>
> So why are we using copyrighted pictures ?

en: has countless fair use images, which are copyrighted.

Or have I misunderstood?  Do correct me if so.

~~~~

> "This image is copyrighted. The copyright holder
> allows anyone to use it for any purpose, provided that
>  the copyright holder and image provider are credited.
>
> Image provided by hornyboy.com and copyright held by
> RudeBox Media, Inc."
>
>
> Ant


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Autofellatio

body:
On Wed, 30 Mar 2005 05:32:12 +0200, Anthere
>  > But is it appropriate for people to organize flash mobs to go vote on
>  > content in an encyclopedia that they don't even use?
>
> No. And this was *precisely* what was happening. And this was one of the
> reasons why I brought attention to the list about it. And this was
> precisely why helping to decrease the amount of vandalism on one pedia
> resulting in the decision taken by another pedia could help.
>
> There is a saying : good fences make good neighbours.

But why not start by calling out the unacceptable behavior? ... That
sort of ballot stuffing is just unacceptable. We don't need to judge
the cause to judge the result as a turn for the bad.

> perhaps not a tragedy, but yes, it occurred. It occurred because people
> were tired to fight this type vandalism.

If this turns out to actually help in the slightest against this form
of vandalism, then I think we can say with confidence that the
vandalism was an intentional effort to get the content removed and we
should be really disappointed that we have allowed the system to be
abused in that way.... even if we personally wanted the image gone.

>  > Especially since the use of that image in vandalism could very well
>  > have been the actions of strongly POVed people who wanted it removed
>  > to suit their prudish wishes (not saying that all who want it gone are
>  > prudes...)
>
> Not sure about that. I think the primary reason was to prevent vandalism...

You've said this... but I don't understand. I could go find another
image you will find offensive, and have it up in minutes. Then
another, and another.   At least if the vandal always used that
specific image it would be easy to block personally (install  firefox
adblock plugin, rightclick on image, select block this image), so that
you could remove it without having to look at it.

>  > As far as being neutral on the image. I've seen it a few times and
>  > have utterly no emotional reaction to it, when I first saw it I said
>  > "ha, I bet that causes edit wars".  ::shrugs::    Not everyone makes a
>  > big deal out of sexual things. To each his own.
>
> Neutrality is not even about being non-reactive about a topic.

You suggested that no one could be neutral about the image, ... I
disagree... It is my position that to some people the image is no
different than a picture of a desk.  I don't claim that response has a
1:1 relationship with neutrality, but rather that the image isn't
necessarily as special as you may think it is... If you find it hard
to  imagine that view, don't feel bad... While I understand that many
people are highly offended by such things, I just can't see it
myself.. It seems silly, but I respect that people differ.

Ultimately If someone can be neutral about a picture of a desk, then
someone can be neutral about that picture.  But this is offtopic for
the current discussion.


from_name: Brian

subject: [Wikitech-l] Full text search

body:
Those things aren't cheap (the Mini's run five grand, and the Google
Search Appliance is tens of $$) but they do have the ability to index
MySQL databases [1]

Interestingly they have special pricing for nonprofits[2]

Anyway, i'm surprised with this whole Google shenanigan that no one
has mentioned Google runs proprietary software, free as in "it used to
be free until we modified it and only released a insignificantly small
portion of it" [3]

[1] http://www.google.com/enterprise/gsa/features.html
[2] http://www.google.com/support/gsa/bin/answer.py?answer=16213&topic=-1
[3] http://code.google.com/

On Wed, 30 Mar 2005 08:53:31 +0100, Minty <mintywalker at gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't know where things are/got-to wrt Google donating servers, but:
>
> Would they be able to donate one of their Search-Appliance thingies?
> Even if as a short term measure?
>
> + It'd allow for daily updates
> + It'd be no coding/dev work for WP
> + No extra software to install on your servers, no extra hardware to look after
> + Look n Feel could be customised, and I imagine it could even live
> under it's own wikipedia subdomain
>
> - Would involve Google crawling the site again
> - Might not deal well with older revisions / seperation of meta pages etc.
>
> If there is a philosophical objection to the "non free" java, I can at
> least see the potential for concern about doing this, but equally if
> we are getting hardware from them for free anyway it seems logically
> to get Search customised hardware+service, rather than just pure
> hosting hardware.....
>
> And in any event, there is no "lock in" if you ever wanted to revert
> to a different implementation.
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

--
"I'd hate to die twice. It's so boring." - Richard Feynman's last words
--
http://www.br1an.net (blog)
http://www.gawr.com/br1annet/gallery2 (photos)


from_name: Anders Wegge Jakobsen

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Friday's featured article

references:
<42499F3B.1070504@comcast.net>
	<fb7fdd9c0503291040263ca65@mail.gmail.com>
	<d2cm2p$ulc$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
"csherlock-4JpCh0KsSjUQrrorzV6ljw at public" == csherlock at ljh.com.au <csherlock-4JpCh0KsSjUQrrorzV6ljw at public.gmane.org> writes:

> MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
>> Isn't there a non-hoax version in the main article space now following
>> the hoax' discovery which resulted in the Signpost article?
>> Mgm

> I don't believe so... if there is will someone speedy it?

 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_paper_holder>

 Why should that be deleted?

--
/Wegge
Min holdning til Usenet - <http://wiki.wegge.dk/Usenet>
Min weblog - <http://blog.wegge.dk/>


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Autofellatio

body:
On Tue, 29 Mar 2005 21:45:45 -0700, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
[snip]
> He seems to think that you were directly suggesting Ant fork, which is
> definitely not the case. (as far as I can tell, you are saying that
> she is at odds with foundation philosophy and that if she really wants
> to have a Wikipedia where it doesn't follow philosophy, she can make a
> fork; rather than a suggestion that she really should)

This is quite correct...
In this case it my be a matter of my debate style, which usually works
exceedingly well in person (more indirect communication channels), but
sometimes fails miserably in email.

I think it's useful to extrapolate past any unknowns, draw some
conclusions related to what I care about most, and let discussion
refine the accuracy of those conclusions.  This usually results in
everyone's position being accurately determined in a minimum number of
exchanges.

The statement about the fork was by large a trueism... if someone
actually disagrees with the fundimental goals, they should fork.... At
the least it's an *option* for someone who is upset about the
continued inclusion of offensive images.

I think it's a reasonable additional option for any group that is
upset about the content of the wikipedia that is not removed because
we are making an effort to impose our values on the articles.

I don't want anyone to fork, but I think that preserving core goals is
much more important than avoiding forking.

There are a million ways I could have been (and most likely was) wrong
with my assumptions,  but it would be dishonest of me to end my
statement with a wimpy 'this doesn't sound like the type of policy
that we want' ... I believed certain views were being proposed, and
pointed out what I thought they would or perhaps should result in... I
think it is better to completely expose my assumptions, and the
seriousness of the matter right away so that the other side has the
chance to put me in my place as quickly as possible.

Now that we've gone off on a tangent because I was too hasty with my
statements....

This still leave us, I think, with Anthere proposing that differing
languages should have differing limitations on permitted content
because of cultural norms.

Lets ignore the problem of mapping cultures to languages for a
moment...  I still think that this leaves us in a position of deciding
about content based on a (perhaps mob rule driven) value judgement of
good vs bad knowledge,  rather than the simple basis  of deciding
based of the ability of the information to inform and educate.  I know
censorship is a hot word, but I think it applies well to this
situation, no matter how noble our goals are.

I think this is worth discussion.


from_name: Padmanabhan V. Karthic

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Deletion of images under dubious criteria -- policy must
	be made clearer

body:
Hi all,

All along I had thought images are deleted because they are copyvio
(using http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyright_problems),
redundant or low quality (using
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Images_and_media_for_deletion)
or images that are obviously non-free, e.g. photos of celebrities,
single frames of videos, etc. in cases where fair use cannot be
claimed (using http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Possibly_unfree_images).
Note that those in the third category as mentioned here can usually be
restored if fair use is later verified to be OK (since these would be
from easily available photos/videos, etc.) I have myself listed many
images in these pages and all those got deleted. Fine.

But recently I happened to stumble upon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Untagged_images#Request_for_comments
where Quadell asked for comments regarding unverified orphans. The
discussion Quadell & I (& unfortunately nobody else) had has been
moved to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Images_and_media_for_deletion/Unverified_orphans#So_what_do_we_do_about_those_UOs.3F_Request_for_comments.

The talk in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Images_and_media_for_deletion/Unverified_orphans
seem to imply that many unverified orphans (UOs) have been deleted. I
would assume that most uploaders until mid-2004 (Someone relaxes this
upto November 2004 in the talk page) didn't get a Special:Upload page
that told them that their images would be deleted unless tagged. Even
images uploaded by Anthere, one of the members of the board who has
been a very respected contributor to Wikipedia got deleted due to such
misunderstanding. Now when I look at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Possibly_unfree_images I
understand it includes not only material that is uspected to be
available only under a non-free license but also those that are
untagged, which means a lot of images uploaded before 2004 were on the
verge of deletion or were already deleted. Based on Anthere's images,
I would presume that many other UOs were uploaded in good faith and
left untagged as tags didn't exist in those days and GFDL was the
default. I would like Wikipedia not to lose these images (which could
be moved to commons if it is definite that they won't be re-included
in any articles).

Since image deletion is an irreversible process (as I understood very
recently when I found Anthere's images deleted & was alarmed by her
reaction as I had thought it would be easy to undelete them) I would
like a discussion on the issue of deletion of unverified images that
aren't proved to be copyright violations.

Quadell tried to get a consensus at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Images_and_media_for_deletion/Unverified_orphans
but failed. I tried to bring this to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy) but got
only the reply of Xiong (and hence against not enough people discussed
so there is no question of a consensus).

After seeing that Sj had similarly expressed anguish over the deletion
of beautiful images in
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Images_and_media_for_deletion/Unverified_orphans
I asked him how I could get the community to discuss the issue and he
advised me to write to WikiEn-l.

I don't want to force my ideas of whether untagged images uploaded in
2002-2004 should be deleted or not. I want a discussion to take place
with enough participants to make the policy of image deletion clearer.
Any pointers on how this could be achieved (on a wiki page, not
mailing list/IRC so the process looks transparent to everyone) would
be nice.

Note that I haven't explained my ideas much in this post. I just want
a way by which a broad-based discussion on the policy could take
place. My personal views on untagged images can be found by going
through the talk pages mentioned in this mail.

Thanks,
Paddu


from_name: Egil Kvaleberg

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Status update for the extension for handling
	geographical coordinates

body:
The gis extension is now compatible with both MediaWiki version 1.4 and
version 1.5. I spent some time testing with 1.4 this weekend, and saw no
issues.

I have updated the documentation at meta:Gis

To recap, one can enable support for the geo tag, for the list of map
sources and for the neighborhood article list in steps. Only the
neighborhood list requires enabling of the database.

For the database mode, I looked at the MySQL spatial index support, but
that requires version 4.1. So I've stuck with the vanilla type so far.
Enabling the database will of course also enable support for articles
being represented in the Wikimaps, but although the database is in
place, the maps and map engine still requires a good deal of work.

Egil


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Autofellatio

body:
Anthere (anthere9 at yahoo.com) [050329 15:02]:

> However, I just limited myself to vote for its deletion on the english
> wikipedia, and will absolutely accept very willingly any decision the
> community will find toward its future.

You realise that action was probably worse than useless:

1. It doesn't slow down the vandals one bit - they routinely create a
username, upload the image then make their edit putting it in place.
The image will keep reappearing as long as the technical facility exists.

2. The deletion vote has reoccurred so often as to be vexatious IMO. It
keeps getting nominated for deletion, it keeps getting voted to be kept.
(What's the point, to keep nominating it until you get the answer you
want?)

3. It encourages threads like this has become.

- d.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: censorship

body:
First, let me apologise for the out of order reply... Gmail's
threading system is terrible to say the least, and I've missed part of
this discussion.

On Tue, 29 Mar 2005 19:46:52 +0200, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>  >>I think you are confusing censorship and neutrality
>  > I don't think I am...
>
> Well, we might agree to disagree then :-)

Quite possibly, but I'd like to be sure that we actually disagree.. So
 here is what I think...

1. For the purpose of neutrality, images and text are not greatly
different. If we shun text because we think it expresses a bad idea,
then we are not being neutral.  If we shun an image because it
expresses a bad idea it is effectively the same. If we argue that we
are not banning the topic but banning images of the topic, we have
just changed ourself from making value judgments on the topic to
judgments on "images of the topic", again, we are not neutral if we
decide that "images of the topic" are bad.  (because you could write
an article about images of that topic and then the image becomes a
direct matter)

2. Some people (at a minimum including the people whos concerns you
are bringing up now, and possibly you)  think that is would be good to
have differing 'standards' for the acceptability of content in
differing language wikis.

3. In order to be neutral, the primary standards we use to decide if
content should be banned are: Encyclopedic (i.e. it's ability to
inform and educate) and legal (do we have a right to distribute the
content).

4. If we ban material because we think that it is bad, or represents
evil, then we have imposed our values on the material and are thusly
not talking a neutral position.

5. The concepts of  encyclopedicness are generally universal: Material
which informs, educates, and increases knowledge, will continue to do
for speakers of other languages. (If translated as needed).

6. If we combine point (5) with point (2) we find that the reason for
differing standards for other languages must necessarily be of a
nature not related to encyclopedic value. This is undesirable due to
point (3). I do not think that it is a leap to state that if we are
not banning material because it does not convey knowledge, then we are
very likely banning it because we believe that it is bad or evil. Have
I made a mistake?  If not,  we run into (4).. We should not ban things
because some people decide that they are evil.

>  > Right, which is a reason why the image is useful.... It says that it
>  > is possible in a manner which is difficult for text or drawings to do
>  > alone.
>
> You have a point here.

It's not my goal to argue for the picture, but yes.. I think I do have
a point. But this point doesn't mean the image couldn't be improved or
replaced with a better one...

There are many ways we can address the issue, but removing things we
dislike because we dislike them without primarily considering their
potential value is a huge risk that I'd like for us to avoid.

> Na, you did not understand mine. I do not support its deletion due to
> the act being bad, nor to nudity being bad. I think that it is a
> delicate topic and we should be careful to limit rejection from readers.

This is indeed a very complex topic.
As it stand now, the english wikipedia in it's complete (and
unvandalized) form would not be legally usable inside public primary
schools in most of the United States.  This is a huge potential
audience for an encyclopedia (but perhaps not the most *important*
audience for us, because it's likely that a proportionately  smaller
number of good editors will come from that audience).

Once you factor in vandalism, there really is no way to use wikipedia
(or most of the internet, for that matter) in that enviroment as
things stand today.

The problem is, of course, for any sufficiently interesting subject
there will be people that any rational policy will drive away. This is
 largely because humans are generally not entire rational about at
least a few subjects.

We may only achieve the attention of some of that audience by reducing
our level of rationality... which will ultimately cost us another
audience.

If our goal is to have the widest audience *today* then we are taking
the wrong approach.  I like to think that we are trying to maximize
the value of the resource over the longterm...

It is very easy for those that care to create censored subsets of the
wikipedia. It is not easy to find censored wikipedia articles that
don't exist.

> The very vivid colors of the picture, the sweat, the bestial look, the
> angle of pictures... all suggest porn. The picture is NOT pretty.
> I think sensible topics could be much less problematic is treated in a
> sensible manner.

I never studied the image so closely. :)

But you make a point,  ... It would not be censorship to replace the
image with one that conveyed the same information but better met some
aesthetic goals.

> Here is what I would suggest.
> If you are still young enough and have a partner able to do decent
> pictures, please propose your own picture. Select soft colors, a
> pleasant angle of view, a neutral or just gently expecting look on your
> own face, and let's talk about it again ? Okay ?
>
> (I am serious).

I wouldn't be qualified to produce that particular demonstration
myself without risking a back injury.  ;)

I suppose could probably find someone who could, however..

It would be best if we could maximize the clinical appearance of such
an image.  I would not be the best person to make such suggestions,
because I'm not bothered by it at all.... your suggestion of 'soft
colors' would not be my first guess on how to achieve this goal.

>  >>Both neutrality and censorship are "strong guidelines".
>  >
>  > [snip guidelines examples]
>
> This is very unfortunate you chose not to comment on the examples.
> I think this is very relevant to the contrary. Most of you hardest core
> supporters of non-censorship, an opinion I respect, do not comment on
> where you would draw the hardline. I am sure you have a hardline just as
> anybody else, but you just put it further than we do. It might be
> informative to know where you put it. Classification of system to filter
> content do not do any different. They try to define level of "violence
> or sex" to define the different levels of filtering. If we admit that we
> have a sort of line, we might just as well try to define where it is.

I didn't reply to the examples because I thought all of them were
unreasonable. ... I really do believe that setting such a line should
be avoided, and I am really arguing that doing so would be a serious
mistake.

Here is where we really would probably end up agreeing to disagree.  I
would be surprised if I were every offended by a chunk of factual
information, I might object to what it represents as I object to the
Holocaust but I would not find images of the mutilation of humans that
happened during the holocaust objectionable.  I would not find images
of child rape offensive, although I really doubt they would be useful
in an article on the subject, and.. Of course, I would never allow
such an act to actually be committed if I had the power to stop it.

I might find information in the form of a call to action (for example,
hate speech) objectionable, because it forms instructions (directly
or indirectly) to be carried out, rather than just conveying facts.
Because of the principal of neutrality and the nature of editing on
wikipedia, I think that it's highly unlikely that I would encounter
such content.... and if I did, I would be uniquely empowered to
address the problem. :)

The difference is that true factual information is what it is... If we
erase the evidence of it, we do not make it nonexistent.  I don't
believe that information of that type can be bad. Information that
attempts to sway people to commit a bad action is the only type of
information that I think can be 'bad' (because it isn't inert), and
even in that case, outright censorship is often not the best means to
prevent harm.

Since I don't find the information we're discussing to be bad (because
it's just inert information), I do not believe that it would be
rational to exclude it on the basis of being offensive. (excluding it
because we can find better material to use on the same topic is
another matter entirely).

I am unsure how many people share my position. I live with someone
(who is actually a pretty active contributing editor, unlike me.. I've
only edited a few things) who mostly shares my position on the matter
of information being 'bad', but I don't have any reason to believe
that she is any more normal than I am.

Even if my position isn't common, I think it is a useful position to
study the subject from... if not the only potentially valid position.

> Unfortunately, we can not easily modify a picture. This is a black and
> white option.

If we decide that the image isn't the best image to convey the subject
and it should probably be replaced with a similar image, then the
intuitive course of action is to mark it as such, and leave it there.
... If we've agreed that something is informative (and encyclopedic)
but needs improvement our practice has been to not delete it...  The
bad version serves as an incentive for people to replace it with a
good version, and as an example of what we are trying to improve.

> ...Though some attempts have been made on the clitoris picture. The best
> solution is probably to provide a picture which might be more acceptable
> by a larger set of body.

Right, thats acceptable... If we keep the same educational value, it
isn't at all censorship to find content that matches other more
complex values...   For example, it would be probably reasonable to
replace  a picture of a "mustang" car on the article about that with
another equally good picture of a mustang that has a body color that
better matches the color scheme of wikipedia.... :)

>  >>I think accepting that cultures have different taboos is right.
>  >>
>  >>Calling other communities rules and opinions, when differing from
> yours, "non-neutral" is wrong. This is what you are doing. The decision
> of the english wikipedia is fine, but the rules applied on the english
> wikipedia, belongs to the english wikipedia. They should not impair the
> right of other communities to set their own rules, without those being
> called censorship.

I'm not sure if this is the case or not.. I think if you go over my
points at the top we will improve our mutual understanding on this
matter.

> > cognitive dissonance
> Sorry, I do not understand that sentence.

[[Cognitive dissonance]]  Explains the concept better than I can.
... I am basically saying that you are giving me too ideas which I
would like to believe but I find them to be conflicting.

> When
>  > we attempt to modify the article to fit our views and exclude others,
>  > this is non-neutral and this is censorship.
>
> Well, I tried to exclude an image. You tried to exclude people.

.. I'm not sure if you are talking about excluding the people who will
not use the wikipedia because they are offended by some of it's
content... or my suggestion that we exclude people who want to operate
under differing rules. Both are possible, so I will answer both.

I don't think it's our goal to include all possible readers, because
all possible readers are not rational and "you can not please all of
the people all of the time". I can't be faulted for excluding all
these people because we exclude many people just because we refuse to
include "France is a bunch of cowards". ;)

In case of excluding editors...   It is normal to ask people who do
not wish to follow the rules of the game to go start their own game
elsewhere.

>These are different approaches. Telling people to fork is also a bit
> censorship, don't you think ?

Forks are not usually good, but they can be liberating.
I'd welcome anyones contributions, but if people insist on removing
the valuable contributions of others, I don't think it is censorship
to ask them to go remove things elsewhere.

> I do not hope to start a fight in saying
> this, but just to mention that it is very easy to talk about censorship,
> but it has several faces.

That is very true.
I think we are all guilty of making things more simple than they
strictly are, but I don't know that communication is possible without
simplification.

> Well, anyway, thanks for the more moderated tone, I appreciated. Hope I
> do not offend you in this mail. Do not wish to.

You have not offended me in the least, and I'm glad we've come to a
greater understanding. Equally, I do not wish to offend you.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Autofellatio

body:
On Wed, 30 Mar 2005 09:10:01 +0200, Andre Engels <andreengels at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think it's perfectly well acceptable. There is not one possible
> 'ultimate' content of Wikipedia, and one language will make other
> choices than others. If one language uses image A and another uses
> image B, should we start having a project-wide vote on which one is
> better, and then, if B is chosen, force the first language to change
> their article?

Well do we agree that the goal of wikipedia is the same in all languages?

> The test of material is not its value to educate and inform, the test
> is whether it improves the given article and Wikipedia. And it seems
> to be generally accepted that there are places where Wikipedias
> differ. On the Danish Wikipedia there are stubs that would not be
> accepted as such on the German Wikipedia (I think). Should one of them
> change their policy because such stubs do/don't educate and inform? I
> don't think so.

I think the improves test makes the most sense in the context of
replacing some piece of information with a similar piece of
information...  and that the removal of a piece of unique knowledge
conveying fact on an encyclopedic subject, without replacing it with
something equal, can only be seen as something which reduces the
quality of the wikipedia.

> A policy that says that we will exclude the same on all languages,
> says that we don't trust the Wikipedias to make their own choices.

It could also be said by extension to say that by having any policy at
all we are expressing distrust in our editors. This is obviously
silly. If the other languages are part of the same project there
should obviously be some ground rules that are shared in all of them.

> I disagree that you say it 'necessitates censorship'. To me, forcing
> the same inclusion standards to all languages is censorship. Unless
> perhaps we take the most lenient standards possible. But do you really
> want to *force* Wikipedias to include certain images?

I would *never* force a language to include an image.
However, I would suggest that if our goal is to never allow
peoplesnon-neutral value judgements to color our articles,  that we
deny the ability of participating subprojects to deny the ability of
others to include additional encyclopedic knowledge that has failed
the kind of test that the above goal precludes using.

In short I think that the editors right to decide what goes in the
official wikipedia ends when they begin using that right to control
others with the goal of imposing a point of view on the work as a
whole.   ("Your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose")

This all stops being an issue if we decide that such value based
exclusion is acceptable in the project... But that isn't the message
I've been receiving.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Autofellatio

body:
On Wed, 30 Mar 2005 10:33:48 +0200, Andre Engels <andreengels at gmail.com> wrote:
> The goal may be the same, but that does not mean that the way to get
> to it, or even the further specification of that goal would be the
> same.

Could you expand on that some for me?

> I disagree. I am of the opinion that in several cases an article would
> improve from having certain sections of its content shortened. We're
> an encyclopedia, not a storehouse of information.

That is quite true, but motivation is a critical factor.

If you remove true facts to improve readability you have done
something valuable.

If you remove true facts because you think the information is 'bad' or
amoral, then you have caused harm.

> > It could also be said by extension to say that by having any policy at
> > all we are expressing distrust in our editors. This is obviously
> > silly. If the other languages are part of the same project there
> > should obviously be some ground rules that are shared in all of them.
>
> Certainly, some ground rules should be shared. But that does not mean
> that they should always make the same choices in the same situation.

Right.
However, neutrality is a core goal of the project. So it follows that
policy related to neutrality should be among the shared ground rules.

We can not consider ourselves neutral when we exclude content based
not on improving the readability of the article but on some personal
(or by extension, cultural) ideas on what is moral and what is not
moral.

> In other words, once someone includes such an image, it should be kept?

If someone adds information to the wikipedia, it should not not be
removed due to a nonneutral point of view.  If it is removed as part
of the editorial process of making a better article, because the
information is more clearly presented another way... then so be it.

My example wasn't as good as I would have liked..  The reason that
your right to swing your fist ends at my nose is because our soceity
has rules about such things.  Likewise, wikipedia has rules about
neutrality. You may delete things, you may even delete things I added,
you may not use this ability to impose your values on the article.
Even if you don't speak english. :)

> Which I think is a hopelessly naive way of working. In short, it would
> stop any deletion by someone else than the original submitter.

You're correct,  I did not sufficently build out my case. I hope
you'll forgive this mistake and reconsider my position using the
clarifications I've provided here.

> If someone were to include a list of letters that can be found in
> Shakespeare's work on the Shakespeare article, would someone else be
> allowed to remove that?

Sure. It's not encyclopedic. Your decision to remove it isn't based on
anyones idea of if it's moral or not.

> > This all stops being an issue if we decide that such value based
> > exclusion is acceptable in the project... But that isn't the message
> > I've been receiving.
>
> Well, I say it can be. I personally would be all for including such
> images, but I do think that when others say they don't like them, at
> some point I may have to give in.

Well that is an interesting thought, .. but if we decide that majority
rule will ultimately win: We might as well go amend the article on
evolution in the english wikipedia to say that it's a silly idea
proposed by the agents of satan. ;)  ( even though the large group of
americans that think this are underrepresented as editors, sooner or
later they will just get togeather to stuff any votes on the matter)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Autofellatio

body:
Anthere (anthere9 at yahoo.com) [050330 04:12]:

>
>
> David Gerard a ?crit:
> >Anthere (anthere9 at yahoo.com) [050329 15:02]:
> >
> >
> >>However, I just limited myself to vote for its deletion on the english
> >>wikipedia, and will absolutely accept very willingly any decision the
> >>community will find toward its future.
> >
> >
> >
> >You realise that action was probably worse than useless:
>
> Uh ?
> Giving one's opinion is worse than useless ???
>
> >1. It doesn't slow down the vandals one bit - they routinely create a
> >username, upload the image then make their edit putting it in place.
> >The image will keep reappearing as long as the technical facility exists.
>
> Yes, but if the image is voted once for deletion, it should be
> automatically redeleted afterwards.
>
> >2. The deletion vote has reoccurred so often as to be vexatious IMO. It
> >keeps getting nominated for deletion, it keeps getting voted to be kept.
> >(What's the point, to keep nominating it until you get the answer you
> >want?)
>
> This was the first time *I* voted.
>
> >3. It encourages threads like this has become.
> >
> >
> >- d.
>
> ...
>
> Well, if the current direction is to encourage editors to say nothing at
> all when they disagree with a situation, or to flow them under
> accusations and insults when they do nevertheless, I think Wikipedia is
> in big trouble. It is never a good think to threaten people who try to
> give their opinion, and today makes me really wonder what project I am
> in all fairness giving my time to.

Where in the above did I threaten you, or do anything even resembling
threatening you?

(Or were you responding to someone else in replying to my message?)

- d.


body:
Mark Pellegrini (mapellegrini at comcast.net) [050330 04:33]:

> After seeing what some people have said WRT other major media
> orgainzations doing April Fools hoaxes (the NYT and BBC) I've softened
> my position a bit. I'll go along with it if Mav does -- I'm still wary
> of putting a hoax article up, but as long as it is
> subtly marked as such, I'm OK with it (someone suggested putting it up
> as 'Today's featured [[nihilartikle]]")

That would be perfect! Don't forget to make the previous article links
clear indicators: [[Spaghetti tree]] - [[Hitler Diaries]] - [[Fur-bearing
trout]]. The archive link should go to BJAODN.

- d.


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Friday's featured article

body:
--- Matt R <matt_crypto at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> Grrr. Please stop declaring "how things will be" unilaterally, it's not very
> Wikipedia-like.

It would be very un-wikipedia-like to intentionally mislead readers given our
goal of informing them. The fact that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia is
non-negotiable (although in truth we are redefining what an encyclopedia can
be) no matter how popular notions to the contrary are.

> Moreover, I don't really think an April Fool's hoax on the main page is quite
> "subverting the goal of creating an encyclopedia". It's certainly tangential,
> but what harm are you seeing here? It's a minor diversion, not a major
> subversion.

Given the traffic we get on the Main Page, this is anything but minor. It
serves as a very bad example. The suggestion by Stan of creating hoax articles
in a contest that people would need to spot on the new page list really went
over the line. Many of these articles would not be cleaned up afterwards and
would persist in the article namespace.

> Don't be so patronising! I'm sure everyone is quite as aware of the goals of
> this project as you are.

Old hands yes, new hands have to be often reminded that we are first an
encyclopedia project and the community aspect is aimed at supporting that.

> I just think it's quite unfortunate if Wikipedia
> takes itself so seriously that it fears to do what institutions like, say,
the BBC
> are quite happy to do.

Again, I have not seen a single example of a respected encyclopedia doing this.
Give me one example and I?ll stop complaining. Wikipedia in particular needs to
be sensitive to this type of thing due to our high profile and given the many
misgivings about our reliability.

-- mav

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Small Business - Try our new resources site!
http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/resources/


from_name: Anthere

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: What's wrong with censorship?

body:
Poor, Edmund W a ?crit:

> Uncle Ed
>
> P.S. Attagirl, Anthere!

What does that mean tonton Ed ?

Ant


body:
Karl A. Krueger a ?crit:
> On Tue, Mar 29, 2005 at 05:30:08PM -0500, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
>
>>RK emerged from his lonely exile to comment that censorship is
>>suppression of IDEAS.
>
> 	[snip]
>
>>When a junior high school library decides not to shelve Lady Chatterly's
>>Lover (or The Story of O), that is most definitely censorship. Whether
>>you think pubescent students should be "shielded" from sexual texts or
>>not, the ACT of shielding them has a name, and it's called "censorship".
>
>
> While I can understand both definitions of the word "censorship", I
> think it is far more useful to draw the distinction around the type of
> behavior that seeks to suppress ideas or deny points of view a public
> hearing, as opposed to that which simply refuses to support particular
> points of view.
>
> For instance, it would be absurd (it seems to me) to state that when I
> choose to buy novels by Neal Stephenson and not to buy novels by Stephen
> King that I am "censoring" King by not supporting his work, granting it
> space on my bookshelf, or recommending it to my friends.  To define
> "censorship" this broadly makes the term meaningless.
>
> Censorship, it seems to me, needs to be defined in terms of a space of
> discourse, and an act of intrusion upon it.  There have to be speakers
> who want to speak, listeners who want to listen, and an act which
> stifles the speech for the purpose of keeping it from being heard by
> those who would choose to hear.
>
>
> (Government schools are such a bad example, and so frequently cited,
> precisely because they come already politicized.  They are supported
> with taxpayer funds which people do not have the choice to withhold;
> everyone is compelled to underwrite whatever the schools teach.
>
> That is why people get so agitated when government schools teach things
> they disapprove of -- not just because *someone* is teaching sex or
> religion or whatever, but because it's being done with *our money* and,
> in a republic, with the presumption of the "consent of the governed".
> When than consent has *not* really been given, people get indignant at
> the presumption.
>
> Wikipedia has none of those problems.)

unless....
unless we start making deals with government (by accepting their
offering of cash) or with educational system (by sharing grants to
develop certain things to them).

Then, if you add up the cases where people provide by direct individual
donations (which makes them feel ownership in a certain sense) and the
realisation the project is financed indirectly with their taxes...


list: foundation-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Autoblocking on all wikis now ?!?!?!

body:
Walter van Kalken a ?crit:
> Walter van Kalken wrote:
>
>> On 3 wikis I got today the message
>>
>> You are autoblocked because your IP is on a list named SORB ..... who
>> did that ???? Whose idea was that ???? I got blocked on ia, li and lo
>> whose brilliant idea was this. Am I deliberately being chased away on
>> all wikis now????
>>
> Brion on IRC:
>
> brion <irc://irc.freenode.net/brion,isnick>well, it might be because
> people hate *you* specifically. or it might be because ongoing anti-spam
> efforts are being experimented with, because this issue is much bigger
> than you personally.

I beg to differ. Waerth is quite confortable.

> I demand this experiment be stopped now
>
> Waerth

I think they are currently looking at that...


list: wikimedia-l


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Autofellatio

body:
Gregory Maxwell a ?crit:
 > On Tue, 29 Mar 2005 19:55:25 +0200, Anthere
 >
 >>And ?
 >>I do not think anyone can claim to be truely neutral on this picture :-)
 >>And I think we have the right to have opinions. All those who voted had
 >>an opinion.
 >
 >
 > But is it appropriate for people to organize flash mobs to go vote on
 > content in an encyclopedia that they don't even use?

No. And this was *precisely* what was happening. And this was one of the
reasons why I brought attention to the list about it. And this was
precisely why helping to decrease the amount of vandalism on one pedia
resulting in the decision taken by another pedia could help.

There is a saying : good fences make good neighbours.

 > Sounds like the image was VFDed (I don't know, I don't really care
 > about it)...  If it is the case that users which only registered to
 > keep it off of their languages swung the vote, then a tragedy
 > occurred.

perhaps not a tragedy, but yes, it occurred. It occurred because people
were tired to fight this type vandalism.

 > Especially since the use of that image in vandalism could very well
 > have been the actions of strongly POVed people who wanted it removed
 > to suit their prudish wishes (not saying that all who want it gone are
 > prudes...)

Not sure about that. I think the primary reason was to prevent vandalism...

 > As far as being neutral on the image. I've seen it a few times and
 > have utterly no emotional reaction to it, when I first saw it I said
 > "ha, I bet that causes edit wars".  ::shrugs::    Not everyone makes a
 > big deal out of sexual things. To each his own.

Neutrality is not even about being non-reactive about a topic.


body:
--- Tony Sidaway <minorityreport at bluebottle.com> wrote:
> April fools jokes are traditional.

And what evidence do you have that respected encyclopedias have done this? I
see no tradition there but please prove me wrong. Given the controversial
nature of our reliability, this stunt will likely harm us more than it is
worth.

Again I defer to Jimbo.

-- mav

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Small Business - Try our new resources site!
http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/resources/


from_name: David Benbennick

subject: [WikiEN-l] technical problem

body:
Have you tried clearing your cache?  (Try Shift+Reload, or
Ctrl+Reload.)  How about loading [[Special:Contributions]] from a
different browser or computer, that you don't normally use?

On Tue, 29 Mar 2005 13:24:47 -0500, steven l. rubenstein
<rubenste at ohiou.edu> wrote:
> For the past few days, whenever I hit "user contributions" I am taken to my
> user contribution page, BUT the most recent contribution listed is from
> 19:05, 27 Mar 2005 (I have made many edits since then).


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Autofellatio

body:
I'll consider starting yoga and relaxing techniques today...

Ant

Mark Williamson a ?crit:
> Gregory, let me tell you, Jimbo doesn't seem to understand
> metaphorical language or figures of speech, and I don't think he can
> tell when people are being completely serious or when they're
> exaggerating a bit. I know this from experience, and have had the same
> problem with Danny. I have been told by one of them (can't remember
> which), "Nobody's saying you burned their crops". He also doesn't seem
> to understand very well the sliding scale that should be used in the
> case of an e-mail like yours.
>
> He seems to think that you were directly suggesting Ant fork, which is
> definitely not the case. (as far as I can tell, you are saying that
> she is at odds with foundation philosophy and that if she really wants
> to have a Wikipedia where it doesn't follow philosophy, she can make a
> fork; rather than a suggestion that she really should)
>
> My advice is to be very literal with him, and only say exactly what you mean.
>
> Mark
>
> On Tue, 29 Mar 2005 19:11:55 -0500, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>On Tue, 29 Mar 2005 04:42:36 -0800, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales
>><jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>>
>>>Gregory Maxwell wrote:
>>>
>>>>If your interest is to censor encyclopedic content on any wikimedia
>>>>wikipedia, then your goals are at odds with the goals of the
>>>>foundation.  Because you do not share the same goals, you should fork
>>>>and produce your own project with censorship among it's goals.
>>>
>>>This is really over-the-top, Gregory.
>>
>>Is that really the case?
>>I'm surprised that you would disagree with the statement above, that
>>if someone's intention is to censor encyclopedic content, based on
>>such value judgements, that they are at odds with the project and
>>should work on something else.
>>
>>I certainly see how you might state that I was mistaken in classifying
>>the proposed measures as censorship, or that it was rude of me to
>>insult someone of unquestionable value...
>>
>>
>>>My problem with people using the word "censorship" in talking about
>>>this very complex issue is precisely that we get responses like yours,
>>>which are really not very helpful and short-circuit our ability to
>>>think critically about the issue.
>>>
>>>We are *all* (the major participants) opposed to censorship (in the
>>>sense that you mean), including (very strongly) Anthere.  It is our
>>>goal to educate and inform, not to shock, offend, or titillate.
>>>Of course there is a tiny majority of people who are interested in
>>>censoring Wikipedia.  Fine.  Ignore them.
>>
>>This is quite heartening to hear reaffirmed.
>>
>>At the same time, what I see being proposed is the idea that it's
>>acceptable for wikipedias in differing languages to have a differing
>>set of standards, and this is the one, and perhaps only, point where I
>>am reasonably confident that I am not misunderstanding Anthere.  I
>>don't see how these ideas can coexist.
>>
>>If our test of a material is it's value to educate and inform, is it
>>not true that the same material which would educate and inform would
>>also educate and inform people of another language?
>>
>>A policy that says that we will exclude content differently depending
>>on the language of wikipedia, says that we are applying an additional
>>test, a test of moral rightness.
>>
>>
>>>But don't imagine that those of us who think that, for example, it is
>>>blatantly obvious that the [[Imgae:Autofellatio_2.jpg]] image is wildly
>>>inappropriate for wikipedia are simply prudish censors.  Such a view
>>>really fails to respect and understand the point that we are making.
>>
>>This thread is surrounded on all sides with bad information...
>>Anthere's initial concern was primarily about vandalism... But
>>vandalism is an issue that we can't even come close to solving by the
>>proposed measures that I objected so strongly to (value based
>>standards of content)...
>>
>>The autofellatio image is a bad example because most people would
>>agree that it has some of the poorest inform to shock ratios of call
>>the contested images on wikipedia.  (I'd still argue it's of value, as
>>one person said after seeing it... "wow.. thats possible? eww",  but I
>>haven't been involved in the voting for that image and don't intend to
>>be)
>>
>>I jumped in the thread because I believe that the idea of differing
>>standards inclusion standards in differing languages necessitates
>>censorship and I decided that it was a worthwhile matter which was
>>being ignored in the thread... because of the separately worthwhile
>>discussion of applying technical means to address that specific form
>>of vandalism.
>>
>>
>>>A respectful discussion of this difficult issue is hard to have if
>>>anyone who is in favor of deleting some images from wikipedia is to be
>>>shunned as a censor who ought to leave the project and fork.
>>
>>My apologies, both to the list and Anthere, on this matter... My
>>attempt cut away issues I saw as extranious to the issue I wanted to
>>discuss (vandalism, that specific image,etc) came off as offensive. (I
>>may not care if you find a useful image on the 'pedia offensive, but I
>>really would hope you don't find my discussions as offensive.)
>>
>>Grey paint begins with black and white.
>>
>>I did not mean to imply that we should shun the issues or the people
>>bringing them, but rather strike up some vigorous discussion on this
>>important matter...   and through out some ideas that I think should
>>be widely acceptable, such as "if making good/evil value judgements
>>about content is someones goal then everyone would gain from them
>>working on a fork, given the intentions of the project".
>>
>>
>>>Especially, for goodness sake, Anthere, who is a hero to us all.
>>
>>Well,  If I'm going to have to base my discussions on whom is
>>proposing an idea rather than the merits of the idea, then I should
>>probably give up now.... :)
>>_______________________________________________
>>Wikipedia-l mailing list
>>Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>>
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Friday's featured article

body:
--- Seth Ilys <seth.ilys at gmail.com> wrote:
> There are several examples of this in [[nihilartikel]].

I didn?t see any examples of respected encyclopedias doing this. I did notice
this:

?It is not always simple to recognize a Nihilartikel. It is especially
difficult when the same fictitious entry is reprinted and adapted by multiple
reference works. In such cases, the multiple sources serve to bolster the
entry's authenticity, so that many come to believe that they are reading a
factual article.?

This is certainly not something we should be encouraging.

-- mav

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Small Business - Try our new resources site!
http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/resources/


from_name: Blair P. Houghton

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: WikiEN-l Digest, Vol 20, Issue 142

body:
Tony Sidaway said:

 >Absolutely. Why is this word so taboo? We all censor.

We all attempt to make the facts reflect the what we think is the truth.

Censorship isn't that.  Censorship is attempting to make the body of
facts reflect a POV we wish to present as the truth.  Censorship is
hiding the truth for other reasons.  It's a dirty word because it's also
political, and generally unconstitutional; the censorship is meant to
promote a particularly religious view of a moral issue that should be
innocuous in a free society.  It's an attack on the freedom of the
speaker by a body purporting a higher knowledge of morality.

Not all of us censor.  It should be a taboo.

--Blair


body:
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia%3ALe_Bistro#Utilisateur:Montaia_appelle_au_secours_.21

A french editor, Montaia, would also like to be unblocked.

Thanks for anyone who could help her. I told  her to register to wikitech-l.

ant

seems solved. I wonder a couple of things though .......
>
> 1) For how long, as I get a new IP address slapped on by my provider
> every 24 hours.
> 2) How many people are still blocked because of this and do not speak
> english and do now know where to complain
> 3) How many people wanted to start editting today on th.wikipedia and
> other wikipedia's and have we lost.
>
> Walter / Waerth


body:
--- Tony Sidaway <minorityreport at bluebottle.com> wrote:
> You're being unreasonable by demanding that a tradition cannot apply to
> Wikipedia unless it also applies to "respected encyclopedias."
> There are no encyclopedias like Wikipedia.  Britannica and Encarta don't
> change from one day to the next.

You are the one that said this was a tradition. I called you on that.

> Nonsense. The European toilet paper holder article proposed is a
> transparent hoax and quite harmless.  That Wikipedia cannot ever be more
> reliable than its latest edit is intuitively understood by all readers, so
> let's not foster the false impression that the situation is otherwise.

That is not an article. If I find it or any other hoax in the article
namespace, then I'll delete it on sight (might move it to BJAODN).

-- mav

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Make Yahoo! your home page
http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs


body:
On Tue, 29 Mar 2005 20:51:13 -0800 (PST), Daniel Mayer
<maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> How
> does this help us create the encyclopedia? How can you justify *encouraging*
> people to create bogus entries?

To answer your rhetorical question: Sometimes allowing a small amount
of playfulness can help motivate people to remain dedicated to the
project.  To put it another way, requiring 100% seriousness 100% of
the time might push away editors and do more harm than good.


from_name: Phil Sandifer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Friday's featured article

body:
I have to say, I agree with Mav on this one. When the BBC posts fake
news, it's funny. When Fox News does it, it's less funny. We want to be
the BBC. A lot of people still see us as Fox News. We should therefore
expect that posting actually fake articles on the main page would not
be funny.

If we wanted to put VfD on the main page, that would, to my mind, be
fine and funny. If we wanted to do other hoaxes like last year's RFA
for Jimbo, that would be fine and funny. But fake content is not the
way to go with the public perception of the project being what it is,
and I'll certainly be among the first to speedy any fake articles I
see. At least, any that Mav hasn't gotten to first.

-Snowspinner


from_name: Seth Ilys

subject: [WikiEN-l] Friday's featured article

body:
On Wed, 30 Mar 2005 05:02:33 -0800 (PST), Daniel Mayer
<maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Again, I have not seen a single example of a respected encyclopedia doing this.
> Give me one example and I'll stop complaining.

There are several examples of this in [[nihilartikel]].

--
Seth Ilys
   email: seth.ilys at gmail.com
   AIM: JehanneDaix
   blog: http://somewhereindurham.blogspot.com/


from_name: Sander Spek

subject:
[Foundation-l] Re: [WikiNL-l] Fight spilling over into the
	ia.wikipedia

body:
Hi all,

* Gerard Meijssen:
> This user is the persona of a known anonymous vandal who has a
> history of using different IP-numbers.

...which could be his provider's policy, and cannot be used as a
charge against him.

> When he was banned for a week, he started with sockpupputs.

It is not proven the aliases were his. One of the aliases
posted on Wikipedia that he is not the 'troll', and the 'troll'
has always denied he had these sockpuppets.

> In the mean time one users tried to mediate, but made the
> mistake to identify to much with one party and not listening to
> the others.

Not one user. A mediating committee has been created, on the
initiative of this user. More people are part of this committee,
including myself.

This user might have identified too much with one party, but on
the other hand the other party did not really co-operate in the
mediation.

> It resulted in the discussion being moved to another wikipedia

Yes, the discussion turned into a chaos, and the person who
initiated the mediating committee created a space on another
wikipedia, where the mediating could take place without too much
interference of other users.

> For your information I am NOT involved in this quarrel.

But you did take a standpoint in the vote about a ban for the
'troll'.

(I tried only to make corrections, and to omit my personal
opinion.)

   Sander
   [[nl:Gebruiker:SanderSpek]]


from_name: Simon Lyall

subject: [WikiEN-l] http://nupedia.8media.org/

body:
I'm not sure what this site is about but I had a link on the old nupedia
page on one of my sites and they emailed me asking e to update it.

I suspect they might be some sort of spammers trying to attract traffic?

--
Simon J. Lyall  |  Very Busy  |  Web: http://www.darkmere.gen.nz/
"To stay awake all night adds a day to your life" - Stilgar | eMT.


from_name: Minty

subject: [Wikitech-l] Full text search

body:
On Tue, 29 Mar 2005 20:09:17 -0800, Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> wrote:
> It should be pretty simple to use something like this.  Now that we
> have several servers, we can dedicate one or more to text searches

Also, you can use one or two servers to build the index then mirror
the index files out to multiple query handling servers


from_name: Kate Turner

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Full text search

body:
Minty wrote in gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical:

> I plan to be playing with Plucene a bit over the next couple of months
> : one initial avenue of interest is some rough and ready benchmarks on
> speed/resource requirements.  I was planning to use a local copy of
> the wikimedia text as a corpus for this testing.

> What I don't want to do is duplicate any existing work...

look at the "lucene-search" module in CVS
(http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/wikipedia/lucene-search/).  this is
a (mostly) complete and functional Lucene (Java version) based search
server for MediaWiki.  i'm not sure how similar the Java version is to
other versions, but you may be able to port the relevant bits without too
much effort.

an experimental test of this on the live site showed that it was able to
handle our search load on a single 3.0GHz P4 with very minimal CPU usage,
as long as the typo suggestion feature isn't enabled (because that uses
several slow searches to produce the result; it could almost certainly be
reimplemented in a much more efficient manner).

kate.


from_name: GerardM

subject: [Foundation-l] Fight spilling over into the ia.wikipedia

body:
Hoi,

On the nl:wikipedia there is a controversy about a troll. This troll has
been blocked repeatedly for a period of an increasing length. This user
is the persona of a known anonymous vandal who has a history of using
different IP-numbers. When he was banned for a week, he started with
sockpupputs. His ban was extended to a month.

In the mean time one user tried to mediate, but made the mistake to
identify to much with one party and not listening to the others. The
discussions both in IRC and on the nl:wikipedia became increasingly
acrimonious. It resulted in the discussion being moved to another
wikipedia and in the mediator being blocked and kickbanned for insulting.

For your information I am NOT involved in this quarrel.

I have however a problem with the fact that a small wikipedia, the
ia:wikipedia (Interlingua) is abused by being the host for a quarrel of
another wikipedia. I think this is unacceptable. I would appreciate some
discussion about this and as much as I hate rules, I think if there must
be a rule to prevent this, so be it.

Thanks,
   GerardM


from_name: csherlock at ljh.com.au

body:
MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
> Isn't there a non-hoax version in the main article space now following
> the hoax' discovery which resulted in the Signpost article?
>
> Mgm

I don't believe so... if there is will someone speedy it?

TBSDY


subject: [Wikitech-l] Full text search

body:
I don't know where things are/got-to wrt Google donating servers, but:

Would they be able to donate one of their Search-Appliance thingies?
Even if as a short term measure?

+ It'd allow for daily updates
+ It'd be no coding/dev work for WP
+ No extra software to install on your servers, no extra hardware to look after
+ Look n Feel could be customised, and I imagine it could even live
under it's own wikipedia subdomain

- Would involve Google crawling the site again
- Might not deal well with older revisions / seperation of meta pages etc.

If there is a philosophical objection to the "non free" java, I can at
least see the potential for concern about doing this, but equally if
we are getting hardware from them for free anyway it seems logically
to get Search customised hardware+service, rather than just pure
hosting hardware.....

And in any event, there is no "lock in" if you ever wanted to revert
to a different implementation.


from_name: Matt R

subject: [WikiEN-l] Friday's featured article

body:
--- Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- Matt R <matt_crypto at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> > Equally, if there is a consensus that the hoax should go ahead, it will be
> > restored.
>
> I will not let any mob of people subvert our goal of creating an encyclopedia
> just because it it is popular in part of the community.

Grrr. Please stop declaring "how things will be" unilaterally, it's not very
Wikipedia-like. (Jimbo is the only person for which that would be appropriate.)
Imagine if I responded with "Well, I will not let one user impose his personal
whims on the project" -- where would we be? Impasse.

Moreover, I don't really think an April Fool's hoax on the main page is quite
"subverting the goal of creating an encyclopedia". It's certainly tangential,
but what harm are you seeing here? It's a minor diversion, not a major
subversion.

> The community exists to create the encyclopedia. When the community starts to
> pull pranks on our readers for nothing more than some type of thrill, then
> the community needs to be reminded of our goals.

Don't be so patronising! I'm sure everyone is quite as aware of the goals of
this project as you are. I just think it's quite unfortunate if Wikipedia takes
itself so seriously that it fears to do what institutions like, say, the BBC
are quite happy to do.

Please excuse the ill-temperedness of this email, and I'd really rather not
engage in acrimony. I'll try to just go and forget about it, but I find such
humourlessness to be disproportionately frustrating for some reason. Is this
the kind of community we want to be? (More "Grrs" etc),

Regards,

-- Matt
[[User:Matt Crypto]]

Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
David Gerard wrote:

>Mark Williamson (node.ue at gmail.com) [050330 15:07]:
>
>
>>I hope that this doesn't stop Brion from working on the feature in the
>>hope that we can re-enable these redirects.
>>
>>
>The current functionality shows you the link you're being directed to and
>you have to click on it. It doesn't feel onerous to me, at least for the
>moment. Let's see how it goes.
>
I too prefer the current functionality.  It only means one more click if
you want to follow the redirect, and makes the page that contains the
redirect more accessible.

Ec


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Full text search

body:
Minty wrote in gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical:

> Would they be able to donate one of their Search-Appliance thingies?
> Even if as a short term measure?

i've thought about this before.  i didn't look at the appliances too
closely, but my impression was that they could only index a relatively
small number of documents (about 10,000).  is this wrong?

other than that, this would probably be the easiest way to solve the problem
for us; OTOH it's not much use to other MediaWiki users.

[...]
> If there is a philosophical objection to the "non free" java, I can at
> least see the potential for concern about doing this,

the current situation appears to be that non-free software is not allowed,
but software contained on other embedded devices is okay (e.g. switch
firmware).  given this i don't think there would be an issue with using one
of the google devices.

kate.


from_name: Richard Holton

body:
On Wed, 30 Mar 2005 07:20:20 -0700, Blair P. Houghton
<blair at houghton.net> wrote:
> Tony Sidaway said:
>
>  >Absolutely. Why is this word so taboo? We all censor.
>
> We all attempt to make the facts reflect the what we think is the truth.
>
> Censorship isn't that.  Censorship is attempting to make the body of
> facts reflect a POV we wish to present as the truth.  Censorship is
> hiding the truth for other reasons.  It's a dirty word because it's also
> political, and generally unconstitutional; the censorship is meant to
> promote a particularly religious view of a moral issue that should be
> innocuous in a free society.  It's an attack on the freedom of the
> speaker by a body purporting a higher knowledge of morality.
>
> Not all of us censor.  It should be a taboo.
>
--Not all censorship is religious or moral, as what you wrote above
implies. --Governments may censor views that oppose that of the
government.
--A particular news outlet may censor stories or information that is
contrary to its political alignment.
--Governments may censor information about troop movements, military
technology, etc.
--In the US, government documents are often censored in the name of
national security.  Certainly the identities of "intelligence
operatives" are often censored.
--The name of a minor involved in a crime is often censored, as is the
name of the victim in certain crimes.

Or is your particular definition of censorship actually limited to
just those cases of information suppression that are motivated by "a
higher knowledge of morality"?

--Rich Holton

en.wikipedia:User:Rholton


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Autofellatio

body:
On Tue, 29 Mar 2005 19:11:55 -0500, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> At the same time, what I see being proposed is the idea that it's
> acceptable for wikipedias in differing languages to have a differing
> set of standards, and this is the one, and perhaps only, point where I
> am reasonably confident that I am not misunderstanding Anthere.  I
> don't see how these ideas can coexist.

I think it's perfectly well acceptable. There is not one possible
'ultimate' content of Wikipedia, and one language will make other
choices than others. If one language uses image A and another uses
image B, should we start having a project-wide vote on which one is
better, and then, if B is chosen, force the first language to change
their article?

> If our test of a material is it's value to educate and inform, is it
> not true that the same material which would educate and inform would
> also educate and inform people of another language?

The test of material is not its value to educate and inform, the test
is whether it improves the given article and Wikipedia. And it seems
to be generally accepted that there are places where Wikipedias
differ. On the Danish Wikipedia there are stubs that would not be
accepted as such on the German Wikipedia (I think). Should one of them
change their policy because such stubs do/don't educate and inform? I
don't think so.

> A policy that says that we will exclude content differently depending
> on the language of wikipedia, says that we are applying an additional
> test, a test of moral rightness.

A policy that says that we will exclude the same on all languages,
says that we don't trust the Wikipedias to make their own choices.

> I jumped in the thread because I believe that the idea of differing
> standards inclusion standards in differing languages necessitates
> censorship and I decided that it was a worthwhile matter which was
> being ignored in the thread... because of the separately worthwhile
> discussion of applying technical means to address that specific form
> of vandalism.

I disagree that you say it 'necessitates censorship'. To me, forcing
the same inclusion standards to all languages is censorship. Unless
perhaps we take the most lenient standards possible. But do you really
want to *force* Wikipedias to include certain images?

Andre Engels


body:
On Wed, 30 Mar 2005 23:40:47 +1000, Tim Starling
<t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> I'd rather encourage the people who run these
> servers to secure them, and only unblock them as a last resort. It's in
> Wikipedia's interests, as well as the interests of the general Internet
> community.

Sure, but it's against the interests of our well-meaning contibutors
who, for whatever reason, aren't on as secure an ISP. There is great
peril in imposing restrictions on some and claiming that it's "for the
greater good," as I'd hope history has taught us all.

--
Seth Ilys
   email: seth.ilys at gmail.com
   AIM: JehanneDaix
   blog: http://somewhereindurham.blogspot.com/


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Full text search

body:
Kate Turner <keturner at livejournal.com> wrote:
> i've thought about this before.  i didn't look at the appliances too
> closely, but my impression was that they could only index a relatively
> small number of documents (about 10,000).  is this wrong?

http://www.google.com/enterprise/
"Searches up to 15 million documents"


from_name: Thomas Gries

subject: [Wikitech-l] Full text search - JODA program by Jochen Magnus

body:
Instead of Lucene (or clones of this), we could consider to use JODA
[1]. Jochen has written JODA especially for Wikipedia and Mediawiki
purposes and has published this several times in this mailing list.

His indexer can be visited live on Neue-Ruhr-Zeitung as an indexer for
Wikipedia data, see [2]

I also propose to set up a metawiki page
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/FulltextSearchEngines to discuss all
aspects and variants separated from this mailinglist to keep the list
messages "KISS" i.e. keep it short and simple.

Tom

[1] http://sourceforge.net/projects/ioda/
[2] http://wikipedia.rhein-zeitung.de/index.php/Hauptseite (this page
demonstrate only the indexer and is not intended as a mirror for wikipedia)


from_name: Daniel Mayer

body:
--- Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
> How many "respected encyclopedias" are updated on a day-by-day basis
> like Wikipedia is, with a front page that shows current events within
> minutes of their happening and then the next day replaces them with
> something else newer?

The process by which we create the encyclopedia this encyclopedia is
irrelevant. What is relevant is that it is an encyclopedia (the mass majority
of our users never edit).

I'll only 'lighten up' if and when Jimbo says this is OK.

-- mav

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


from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

subject: [WikiEN-l] Friday's featured article

body:
On Tue, 29 Mar 2005 20:45:17 -0800 (PST), Daniel Mayer
<maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- Matt R <matt_crypto at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> > Equally, if there is a consensus that the hoax should go ahead, it will be
> > restored.
>
> I will not let any mob of people subvert our goal of creating an encyclopedia
> just because it it is popular in part of the community.
>
> The community exists to create the encyclopedia. When the community starts to
> pull pranks on our readers for nothing more than some type of thrill, then the
> community needs to be reminded of our goals.
>
> Now I may be wrong about the severity of this specific case but I am *not* at
> all wrong in the general.
>
> I defer this specific case to Jimbo.
>
> -- mav
A lot of established organizations create April Fool's jokes purely
for enjoyment. National news agencies often do this, even though their
goal is to provide people with accurate news stories. I don't see how
one joke per year would detract from our goals. As long as there's
obivous hints as to the nature of the article (like linking
[[Nihilarticle]]) I don't see a big problem with it.

-- MacGyverMagic


body:
David Benbennick wrote:

>On Tue, 29 Mar 2005 20:51:13 -0800 (PST), Daniel Mayer
><maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
>>How
>>does this help us create the encyclopedia? How can you justify *encouraging*
>>people to create bogus entries?
>>
>>
>To answer your rhetorical question: Sometimes allowing a small amount
>of playfulness can help motivate people to remain dedicated to the
>project.  To put it another way, requiring 100% seriousness 100% of
>the time might push away editors and do more harm than good.
>
A sense of humour is always helps to take the air out of pomped-up balloons.

April Fool pranks have their place as long as they do no harm, and the
subject of the joke is such that believing it will not affect people's
lives or cause panic.  (News of impending Martian invasions need to be
kept secret even if they are true for this reason.)

Articles that have been used for this should perhaps retain, at the top
of the article, a notice like, "This article was the featured article
for April 1, 2005," withe "April 1" highlighted.  Such articles remind
people of the need to be critical.

Ec


body:
On Wed, 30 Mar 2005 15:48:23 +0100 (BST), Tony Sidaway
<minorityreport at bluebottle.com> wrote:
>
> I've been watching this conversation with mounting disbelief.  Somebody
> please tell me that the seeming loss of sense of humor on the part of a
> number of Wikipedians is all part of a prolonged jape, to be brought to a
> hilarous conclusion this Friday.  No?
> April fools jokes are traditional.  People reading a joke article on April
> 1 will not feel unduly put out.  Most of them.  We can just laugh at those
> who are. That's the whole point of the exercise--to puncture pretensions,
> confound expectations and--dare I say it--have a laugh!
>

Like many, I would not object to having an April fool's article on the
main page this Friday. I am against the idea of a contest that
involves inserting fake articles into the main article space. Even
with all good intentions, the potential for mistakes is just too
great.

However, I would also suggest some very obvious indicator of some
sort, such as a banner at the top of the article reading: "This is
Wikipedia's Featured Article for April 1, 2005" -- something that
inherently identifies the article as special for April Fool's day.
Remember that this may find its way into mirrors or onto printed page.

When I first saw the article, as a result of Viajero's original post,
I was not thinking about April Fool's. I *glanced* at the article, and
saw what appeared to be a very detailed, well-documented article about
a very obscure subject -- just the sort of thing we want Wikipedia to
have. Had I known someone with an interest in this arcane topic, I
might have pointed them to the page, or printed a copy and handed it
to them. Would they have immediately known this to be an April Fool's
joke? On reading it, they would conclude that it was not a serious
article, but would they know it was intentionally included in
Wikipedia as a joke for all to see? Or would they assume that some
knucklehead had added the article and no one had yet discovered it to
remove it?

Let's have some fun -- it helps to keep people motivated -- but let's
do it wisely.

-- Rich Holton

en.wikipedia:User:Rholton


subject: [Wikitech-l] Fwd:technical problem

body:
Forwarded from WikiEN-l

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: steven l. rubenstein <rubenste at ohiou.edu>
Date: Tue, 29 Mar 2005 13:24:47 -0500
Subject: [WikiEN-l] technical problem
To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org

For the past few days, whenever I hit "user contributions" I am taken to my
user contribution page, BUT the most recent contribution listed is from
19:05, 27 Mar 2005 (I have made many edits since then).  Also, it seems to
have logged me out in the process, as "create an account/log in" appears in
the upper right-hand corner of my screen (in place of the usual choices:
Slrubenstein My talk Preferences My watchlist My contributions Log
out).  When I log back in, and try to go the "user contributions," the same
thing happens.

This does not happen why I go to my watchlist or other pages, only when I
go to my user contribution page.

Does anyone know what is going on, and what I can do?

Thanks,
Steve

Steven L. Rubenstein
Associate Professor
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Bentley Annex
Ohio University
Athens, Ohio 45701

The good professor is apparently still having this problem...

-- Rich Holton

en.wikipedia:User:Rholton


subject: [WikiEN-l] technical problem

body:
On Wed, 30 Mar 2005 10:01:58 -0500, steven l. rubenstein
<rubenste at ohiou.edu> wrote:
> mgm wrote
>
> >Nope, things are working fine for me. Have you got a cookie installed
> >that keeps you logged into Wikipedia?
>
> As I said, the problem is not logging in -- I am logged in automatically,
> and when I use other links (e.g. to my watchlist or to an article) I have
> no problems.  It is only when I try to access my "user contributions" that
> I am logged out, and the user contributions is missing all of my
> contributions starting 3/27.  If I am at my "user contribution" page and
> re-log in, I get a message that the login was successful.  When I try to
> return to "special:contributions," however, I get the message "No Target:
> You have not specified a target page or user to perform this function on."
>
> The problem involves my user contribution page only, and it has been almost
> four days.
>
> I do not have any other problems.
>
> Also, I figured that no one else is having this problem since no one else
> has posted.  But that doesn't change the fact that I am having this
> problem.  Can anyone help me?
>
> Steve
>
I've just forwarded your original post to the Wikitech-l mailing list.

-- Rich Holton

en.wikipedia:User:Rholton


body:
Viajero wrote:

> Andrew Lih wrote:
>
>> HOWEVER, I would beg folks not to make it "subtly marked" but rather
>> *obviously marked* at the end.
>>
>> An April Fools joke is only fun when you can blame the reader for
>> missing an obvious doozie that gives it away. Right now, it does not
>> have such a kicker or punchline to let people in on the secret. If we
>> do not, it would amount to devious and malicious intent, which would
>> do a disservice to Wikipedia's reputation.
>
> Wow, this is an amazingly cautious attitude. You are saying we should
> take into account that on *April 1* some naive soul might read the
> text, miss all the inconguities and jokes, arrive at the bottom, not
> be explicitly told it is a joke, and blame Wikipedia for deceiving them?
>
> I'm ...ah... speechless.

Computer experts are very serious people.  They often can't tell the
difference between a picture of a hat and of an elephant hidden under a
blanket.  If you deviate from the literal Word of God to make a joke or
to add a little irony you need to forewarn them so that they will know
when it is appropriate to laugh. :-)

Ec


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Full text search

body:
Kate Turner schrieb:

>Minty wrote in gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical:
>
[ I copied text about wikipedia/lucene-search onto
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/FulltextSearchEngines ]


from_name: Walter van Kalken

subject: [Foundation-l] Autoblocking on all wikis now ?!?!?!

body:
On 3 wikis I got today the message

You are autoblocked because your IP is on a list named SORB ..... who
did that ???? Whose idea was that ???? I got blocked on ia, li and lo
whose brilliant idea was this. Am I deliberately being chased away on
all wikis now????

Waerth


body:
Walter van Kalken wrote:

> On 3 wikis I got today the message
>
> You are autoblocked because your IP is on a list named SORB ..... who
> did that ???? Whose idea was that ???? I got blocked on ia, li and lo
> whose brilliant idea was this. Am I deliberately being chased away on
> all wikis now????
>
Brion on IRC:

brion <irc://irc.freenode.net/brion,isnick>well, it might be because
people hate *you* specifically. or it might be because ongoing anti-spam
efforts are being experimented with, because this issue is much bigger
than you personally.

I demand this experiment be stopped now

Waerth