from_name: David Gerard

body:
Chad Perrin (perrin at apotheon.com) [050208 08:25]:
> David Gerard wrote:

> >>particular perspective with identified adherents.  Thus, if Stormfront
> >>troopers swarm in and add some biased information as though it were
> >>gospel, rather than actively oppose it, editors should simply . . . edit
> >>it.  Tidy up the language, make it non-repetitive, collect it in one
> >>section, and label it as a particular perspective.

> >I'm sure S*ll*g was very pleased with the results ;-)

> I think I missed a reference, there.

<whisper>Look at the history of [[Sollog]] some time ...</whisper>

> Search for it independently, then.  If you don't find a reference, edit
> it out if need be WITH A NOTE to the effect that it is unsubstantiated
> at this time, and will be re-entered at such time as it can be
> substantiated (note probably delivered both on the talk page and in a
> note for the history page).  Editing other people's contributions out
> should include justifications, anyway, and should not be done as a first
> resort, in my considered opinion.  Don't edit what someone else has said
> without being positive you know the reasons for what came before your
> edit, even if your own edit requires attempts at independent verification.

I find that with a new, hotheaded but potentially sincere editor,
commenting out a dubious addition (HTML comments - start "<!--" and end
"-->" ), starting the comment with a request for a reference, produces
better results than just deleting material. It gives them a better idea of
the standard to work to.

> Besides, if their heads explode you'll have reduced the population of
> people introducing problematic edits into controversial articles.

I'd rather convert them into NPOV pushers ;-) The Arbitration Committee has
recently reaffirmed that even the worst editors are to be regarded as
theoretically redeemable!

> >Really, I've found they're really bad at checkable references on even the
> >simple stuff - e.g. "This organization believes ..." It's actually really
> >annoying.

> I certainly don't disagree with that.  Activists do tend to have that
> problem, and it definitely does tend to be annoying.

"WE DONOT THINK THAT YOU ZOG ACTIVIST"
"So do you have a checkable reference for what your organization does
  believe?"
"LOOK IT UP URSELF ASSWIP"
"You put it in, you supply the reference. Statements with solid refs do
  stay in."
*silence*

NPOV implies writing for the POV you don't agree with - I edit a lot on
Scientology and neo-Nazi articles and try to keep my strong opinions on
both topics in check and stick to the facts with references, ma'am - but
there's a limit to how much of someone else's homework I can be bothered
doing.

- d.


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

subject: [WikiEN-l] Neo-nazis to attack wikipedia

body:
Karl A. Krueger (kkrueger at whoi.edu) [050208 05:51]:

> One place where a few more technical tools might be useful is in
> ascertaining where the problematic pages are, and bringing it to more
> people's attention when a page goes into edit-war.
> As the volume of editing on Wikipedia increases, it's harder and harder
> to discern anything about current problems by looking at Recent Changes
> -- there are hundreds of changes every hour.  I'll notice an edit war if
> it shows up on my watchlist or WP:RFC, but if nobody is watching and the
> editors involved don't post to WP:RFC (or don't know about it), the
> problem can persist indefinitely.

Not technical tools, but [[WP:AN/3RR]] and [[WP:AN/I]] (and parent page
[[WP:AN]]) are being used as alert pages at present, with some success.
Think of them as a PA message to the janitors to get out there with mop,
bucket and M16.

- d.


body:
Fred Bauder (fredbaud at ctelco.net) [050208 06:02]:

> We could have two recent changes, one that has everything, another that has
> pages of interest, a sort of watchlist for everyone that had all pages that
> were embroiled in controversy listed.

Multiple watchlists would be a *really nice* feature. I could create
multiple usernames for the same function, but that'd be a PITA to manage
editing from only one of the usernames.

I've filed an enhancement bug as
http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1492 .

- d.


from_name: Death Phoenix

body:
On Tue, 8 Feb 2005 10:47:09 -0000 (GMT), Tony Sidaway
<minorityreport at bluebottle.com> wrote:
> Deathphoenix said:
> >
> > Having teams of trusted moderators (not necessarily the same team for
> > each article) to overlook certain "risky" articles might be a good
> > compromise. Part of being in a team of trusted moderators is the
> > knowledge that the best safeguard of content is verifiability. The team
> >  can have disagreements, but I think it would be better to argue on the
> >  talk page than to get into edit/revert war.
> >
> You can't have "a team of trusted moderators" *and* verifiability--well,
> you can, but only up to the point where the moderators are challenged on
> unverifiable material.  At which point you have stopped trusting them and
> you might as well have just left things the way they were.
>

I don't think challenging moderators on unverified material imples
that you have stopped trusting them. I think the moderators are a
layer of "protection" on deciding what to include in the article based
on other people's input. The moderators wouldn't be the *only*
contributors to the article, they would merely the only ones allowed
to edit the article itself. The other option for a protected/moderated
article is to have admins edit the article (which, AFAIK, is the
current system for protected pages). I just think having moderators
takes some work of editing protected pages away from the potentially
overworked admins.

Cheers,

DP


from_name: Tony Sidaway

subject: [WikiEN-l] Neo-nazis to attack wikipedia- a diversion?

body:
AndyL said:
> on 2/7/05 9:46 PM, rose.parks at att.net at rose.parks at att.net wrote:
>
>> Second, do you all really believe that if they intended to do exactly
>> as they say, they would post their tactics openly on their site?
>
> Yes. We're not exactly dealing with prime tacticians here.

I think AndyL is right.  Look at their rhetoric.  They have convinced
themselves that in engaging Wikipedia they are exposing a deliberate and
systematic campaign of censorship carried out by a small and dedicated
group of editors (with tentacles everywhere, it goes without saying) as
agents of the Zionist occupation government of America, or something.
They do not believe that secrecy will help them, they're conspiracy
theorists on a mission.


list: wikitech-l

from_name: admin Yellowikis

subject: [Wikitech-l] jumping logo

body:
or we could add:

 "This site is NOT optimized for Microsoft(tm) Internet Explorer(tm) -
if you don't like the way the Wikipedia logo jumps when you first load
the page please go quietly to encarta.com"

That should solve the problem ;-)

On Tue, 8 Feb 2005 12:41:05 +0200, NSK <nsk2 at wikinerds.org> wrote:
> On Tuesday 08 February 2005 12:12, Paul Youlten wrote:
> > The trouble is that it's not just me - the vast majority of visitors to my
> > site (and the different wikipedias) use IE.
>
> Just place a Mozilla or Firefox icon on the site.
>
> Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox are different things: Firefox is just the
> lightweight version of Mozilla and doesn't contain all the features of
> Mozilla.
>
> --
> NSK
> http://portal.wikinerds.org/slashdotting2005feb4
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


from_name: NSK

subject: [Wikitech-l] jumping logo

body:
On Tuesday 08 February 2005 11:43, Paul Youlten wrote:
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:DE_wikipedia_logo_jump_01.gif

Why you don't use Mozilla?

--
NSK
http://portal.wikinerds.org/slashdotting2005feb4


from_name: Paul Youlten

subject: [Wikitech-l] jumping logo

body:
So 15% of your users aren't real wikinerds? What else does that prove? ;-)

Paul Youlten
mobile: +44(0)7814 517 807
----- Original Message -----
From: "NSK" <nsk2 at wikinerds.org>
To: "Wikimedia developers" <wikitech-l at wikimedia.org>
Sent: Tuesday, February 08, 2005 12:15 PM
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] jumping logo

> On Tuesday 08 February 2005 12:54, David Gerard wrote:
>> used by 80% of Wikipedia users and 90% of web accesses in general is a
>
> Where did you got these statistics? I don't think they are correct:
>
> According to the statistics of my site for February, 60% of users use
> Firefox,
> 15% IE, 10% Mozilla, 5% Safari, 3% Opera, 3% Konqueror, 1% Netscape.
>
> In addition, only 60% of my readers and users run Windows. 30% run
> GNU/Linux,
> 8% MacOS, 1% FreeBSD.
>
> The most common combination is Windows and Firefox.
>
> I say it again: Only 15% of my users run MSIE.
>
> --
> NSK
> http://portal.wikinerds.org/slashdotting2005feb4
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


from_name: Fred Bauder

body:
Yes, a parallel article can be created, see for example, [[Social structure
of the United States]].

Fred

> From: Chad Perrin <perrin at apotheon.com>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Tue, 08 Feb 2005 13:58:55 -0500
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Neo-nazis to attack wikipedia
>
> The real problem that arises, I think, is in new articles.  If someone
> from, say, the Stormfront crew creates a new article loaded with bias
> from day one, it's entirely possible it my fly in under radar (as
> 'twere) for quite some time without being noticed.
>
> --
> Chad


from_name: Amgine

subject: [Wikitech-l] mediazill bug 1411

body:
IlyaHaykinson has built an extension which allows for quick bulleted
lists of articles based on categories and last edits.
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1411

What it does is allow layouts which automatically update the latest
articles in a topic area. For example, a section on the main page could
include a list of articles which are categorized with [[Category:United
States]] and [[Category:Elections]] to get a list of the most recently
edited articles both the United States and Elections categories.

The Wikinews projects are all waiting for this enhancement to get
through whatever vetting process is required before implementation. What
can be done to facilitate this?

Amgine


subject: [Wikitech-l] jumping logo

body:
I think you'll find that IE comes free with every installation of Windoze XP
($200).

Mac users can down load it free from Mactopia.

I expect that BG will admit defeat soon and launch a version for Debian
Linux.

Paul Youlten
----- Original Message -----
From: "NSK" <nsk2 at wikinerds.org>
To: "Wikimedia developers" <wikitech-l at wikimedia.org>
Sent: Tuesday, February 08, 2005 12:24 PM
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] jumping logo

> On Tuesday 08 February 2005 13:10, David Gerard wrote:
>> I understood non-IE was 20% on Wikipedia - I don't have a reference to
>
> Well, if it's only 20% you need to do something to promote free browsers,
> shouldn't you? Think about it: You are a free encyclopedia which should be
> browsed with a free browser.
>
>> (I currently use IE at work to keep from browsing too much specifically
>> because it's such a bad experience ;-)
>
> ;-)
>
> --
> NSK
> http://portal.wikinerds.org/slashdotting2005feb4
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


from_name: Skriptor

subject: [Wikitech-l] jumping logo

body:
> I think you'll find that IE comes free with every installation of
> Windoze XP ($200).

Wow! You mean that Porsche gives away its engines for free? (After all,
one comes with every car you buy from them at no extra charge ;-)

SCNR
Skriptor

[[de:Benutzer:Skriptor]]


subject: [Wikitech-l] jumping logo

body:
On Tuesday 08 February 2005 12:12, Paul Youlten wrote:
> The trouble is that it's not just me - the vast majority of visitors to my
> site (and the different wikipedias) use IE.

Just place a Mozilla or Firefox icon on the site.

Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox are different things: Firefox is just the
lightweight version of Mozilla and doesn't contain all the features of
Mozilla.

--
NSK
http://portal.wikinerds.org/slashdotting2005feb4


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Spam on en:PHP

body:
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> By adding per-edit human regognition stuff in, you make bots impossible.

That's only if it's strictly required on *every* edit *ever* by
*everyone*, which is not likely to happen as it would be a pain in the butt.

What we probably will be doing at some point is engaging CAPTCHA-like
recognition for account creation, and probably for at least some portion
of anonymous edits, as a situational response (eg to halt an attack in
progress), or more generally or intermittently.

> With the latest security fix, it is not
> possible to do anonymous edits using bots anymore.

This is not actually true; there's a minor bug with a particular
interaction of the pywikipediabot, which I've mentioned to Andre.
However anonymous bot edits are really not recommended, and will likely
get much harder to do as we look more at closing out spambots.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] UTF-8 for en.wikipedia: convert as you go?

body:
We'll be converting to UTF-8 when we restructure the database for the
1.5 upgrade. This will be sometime in the next couple of months.

1.5 supports on the fly conversion of the old text blobs on load, so
what needs to be converted is the usernames, titles, comments, etc in
the other support tables. This should be a relatively minor expense of
the overall conversion (which is necessary as it will be removing some
of the nasty bottlenecks of our current database layout).

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] jumping logo

body:
On Tuesday 08 February 2005 12:54, David Gerard wrote:
> used by 80% of Wikipedia users and 90% of web accesses in general is a

Where did you got these statistics? I don't think they are correct:

According to the statistics of my site for February, 60% of users use Firefox,
15% IE, 10% Mozilla, 5% Safari, 3% Opera, 3% Konqueror, 1% Netscape.

In addition, only 60% of my readers and users run Windows. 30% run GNU/Linux,
8% MacOS, 1% FreeBSD.

The most common combination is Windows and Firefox.

I say it again: Only 15% of my users run MSIE.

--
NSK
http://portal.wikinerds.org/slashdotting2005feb4


body:
Fred Bauder said:
> We have these on our watchlists now.

Yep.
 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Recentchangeslinked&target=User:Silsor/Neo-nazi_watchlist


subject: [Wikitech-l] jumping logo

body:
On Tuesday 08 February 2005 13:10, David Gerard wrote:
> I understood non-IE was 20% on Wikipedia - I don't have a reference to

Well, if it's only 20% you need to do something to promote free browsers,
shouldn't you? Think about it: You are a free encyclopedia which should be
browsed with a free browser.

> (I currently use IE at work to keep from browsing too much specifically
> because it's such a bad experience ;-)

;-)

--
NSK
http://portal.wikinerds.org/slashdotting2005feb4


subject: [Wikitech-l] Spam on en:PHP

body:
Rhobite wrote:
> If you implement some sort of bot detection, you could issue keys to
> approved bots which would allow them to edit.

Right.

> But I don't think
> CAPTCHA tests are the right approach, due to accessibility issues.

What would you suggest?

In response to your earlier note; if you haven't found it yet, the
blacklist is editable by sysops on Meta:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Spam_blacklist

Leave a comment on the talk page to request additions.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] jumping logo

body:
On Tuesday 08 February 2005 13:12, Paul Youlten wrote:
> So 15% of your users aren't real wikinerds? What else does that prove? ;-)

Hey, I suspect they are just free browser users who are lying ;-)

There are some uber-geeks with customised id-strings, too:
http://nsk.wikinerds.org/blog/index.php?p=136

--
NSK
http://portal.wikinerds.org


from_name: Chad Perrin

subject: [Wikitech-l] jumping logo

body:
NSK wrote:

> Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox are different things: Firefox is just the
> lightweight version of Mozilla and doesn't contain all the features of
> Mozilla.
>

This is somewhat off-topic, but . . .

Err, that's not really accurate.  Firefox includes features Mozilla
lacks, and its interface works differently.  I haven't looked into the
technical details, but I'm sure there are some "under the hood"
differences as well.

The way the interface works is, in my experience, actually closer to the
way the IE interface works than to that of Mozilla.  For instance,
Firefox allows one to use Ctrl+Enter to automatically navigate to .com
domains, and will refresh the page when the F5 key is pressed.  These
are both features borrowed from IE, and not from Mozilla.

I suspect the interface functionality is much of the reason Firefox is
stealing away IE users far more effectively than Mozilla ever did: it
attracts people who stuck with IE because they didn't like the Mozilla
interface, but would prefer something other than IE, and it attracts
people who are just now waking up to browsers other than IE and don't
want to have to learn a new way of doing things.

I've rambled on enough about that.  Back to the subject at hand:

Maybe the logo image is just loading at an inopportune moment.  I
haven't checked the code for it, but it might be worth investigating.
If the logo is loading before some formatting that affects its
placement, that would account for the jump.  On the other hand, if it's
actually just a bug in IE (which I'm inclined to believe), and it
doesn't actually affect the usability, functionality, or final
appearance of the page, it might also be worth ignoring if no simple
solution appears.

--
Chad


body:
On Tue, 8 Feb 2005 17:04:58 -0000 (GMT), Tony Sidaway
<minorityreport at bluebottle.com> wrote:
>
> Thanks.  I don't really have a reasoned objection, or at least not a
> categorical one, to this.  On admins editing protected articles, I think
> the consensus is that they're not really supposed to but I'm not familiar
> with the details of consensus on this--just that it proved controversial
> when an admin altered the content of [[clitoris]] while it was protected.
> I do feel uneasy about the idea of having "trusted" content editors.  When
> editors have a limited number of collaborators they will inevitably learn
> one another's blind spots and edit for consensus within the group.
> Without new editors coming along and entering new material out of the
> blue, the dynamics of editing would be very different.  I'm not against
> this at all in principle, but I'd hate to see Wikipedia abandon a winning
> formula just because of a few racist nuts.  Readers are cleverer than we
> think.
>

You make good points about Wikipedia's winning formula. The current
dispute process has, for the most part, worked very well. I'm just (as
we all probably realise) speaking hypothetically about a system that
might work. You also make good points about the dangers of only taking
consensus among a small group. However, the discussion and call for
consensus would be among the community as a whole, not just among the
moderators. The moderators have the only write access to the article,
but normal users can still discuss the matter. Maybe I'm assuming too
much good faith among the moderators to edit for consensus among the
community as a whole and not just for themselves. Maybe it's just my
inexperience. :-)

Cheers,
DP.


subject: [Wikitech-l] jumping logo

body:
Paul Youlten wrote:
> I think you'll find that IE comes free with every installation of
> Windoze XP ($200).
>
> Mac users can down load it free from Mactopia.
>
> I expect that BG will admit defeat soon and launch a version for Debian
> Linux.
>

As a Debian user, I have mixed feelings about that . . .

--
Chad


body:
Tony Sidaway wrote:
> Karl A. Krueger said:
> [...]
>
>>The problem here is that it depends on someone listing the article as a
>>controversial article on some other page.  Presently, I suspect there
>>are a lot more edit wars than ever get listed on WP:RFC or any other
>>repository for problems.  Moreover, I think we might not even know
>>where many of those problems are, because waiting for people to report
>>them publicly is no guarantee they ever get reported.
>>
>
> Yes.  Well, a way around this is to identify templates that are highly
> likely to be associated with an edit war, and put those templates into a
> category, which would result in controversial articles appearing in the
> category.  Using the same mechanism on the category would give you another
> view of possibly explosive articles.
> Wikis are designed to be open and flexible so it's unlikely that any
> single mechanism will ever be able to identify all controversial articles
> without fail. Adopting the UNIX standard of "works in most cases" is good
> enough, because other users will adopt other methods to identify the
> controversial articles. --~~~~

The real problem that arises, I think, is in new articles.  If someone
from, say, the Stormfront crew creates a new article loaded with bias
from day one, it's entirely possible it my fly in under radar (as
'twere) for quite some time without being noticed.

--
Chad


from_name: Alfio Puglisi

subject: [Wikitech-l] it.wikipedia localization not working

body:
>From this morning something is not working on it.wikipedia.org.

All interface texts are in English and the special page "All system
messages" shows the default English texts instead of the translated one.

The worst issue is that the Main Page has reverted to the "Wikipedia"
article instead of the right one, "Pagina principale".  I fixed this with
a redirect, that of course must be only temporary.

I briefly looked at de:, fr: and es:, and they don't seem to suffer from
the problem.

Alfio


subject: [Wikitech-l] Spam on en:PHP

body:
Marco Krohn wrote:

>>The English article on PHP has been subject to some strange spam over
>>the past week.
>
>
> this looks like if they test how their script works before they really start
> using it on large scale.

That's a scary thought.

>
>
>>but it's coming from many different IP
>>addresses, probably trojaned hosts from all over the world.
>
>
> if they start using [[botnet]]s to spam Wikipedia then this is worrying.
>

I think it's probably a good idea to assume that someone, at some point,
will -- even if the culprits here do not.  It really seems to me that
it's only a matter of time.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Wiki maps

body:
How's going with the wiki maps? To anyone who is working on them, check
this out:

http://maps.google.com

Zoom somewhere and *drag* the map around (!). Search for anything and find
it on the map (spelling corrections is working as usual...)

Only the USA for now, and only IE and Mozilla/Firefox.

Alfio


body:
Works OK now, thanks.

Alfio

On Tue, 8 Feb 2005, Brion Vibber wrote:

>Alfio Puglisi wrote:
>>>From this morning something is not working on it.wikipedia.org.
>>
>> All interface texts are in English and the special page "All system
>> messages" shows the default English texts instead of the translated one.
>>
>> The worst issue is that the Main Page has reverted to the "Wikipedia"
>> article instead of the right one, "Pagina principale".  I fixed this with
>> a redirect, that of course must be only temporary.
>
>There's an intermittent problem with the message cache getting corrupted
>or something.
>
>I've cleared the message cache and it should be running ok now, however
>I'm still not quite sure about the source of the problem.
>
>-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] Wiki maps

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

Alfio Puglisi schrieb:
| How's going with the wiki maps? To anyone who is working on them, check
| this out:
|
| http://maps.google.com

Yup, I saw that on /.

| Zoom somewhere and *drag* the map around (!). Search for anything and find
| it on the map (spelling corrections is working as usual...)

That will take a while to reproduce :-)

| Only the USA for now, and only IE and Mozilla/Firefox.

I'm the winner, I already have Germany and South America [1]! :-)
But only for SVG-enabeled browsers, which is still the minority somehow...

Magnus

[1] http://magnusmanske.de/wikimaps/index.php/Main_Page
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from_name: Nathan Hamblen

body:
Wikihackers,

You may remember me from last year, pushing for UTF-8 on the English
wikipedia. There was more to it than I thought at the time, so I
retreated, checking the site's encoding every few weeks to see if anyone
had made a breakthrough. Alas, here we are, still chugging along in
trusty old ISO-8859-1.

Knowing that shutting down the site for a few days is unacceptable, I'm
working on a technique to keep the site up, already in UTF-8 mode,
while 'cur' and 'old' are converted. The site itself would be doing the
bulk of the conversion. The idea is to intercept calls to these tables
and convert the encoding before they are sent to the user. If a
conversion is made, save it to the database so we don't have to convert
it again. Here's an outline:

1.	Take site offline. :(

2.	Convert smaller, essential tables. (user? what else?)

3.	Apply code changes to intercept retrievals from cur and old:
	Change A: For _title queries that don't return anything, try converting
querystring to Latin1.
	Change B: Check the _text (and _user_text ?) strings to see if they are
valid UTF-8. If not, convert and update the database.
	Change C: $wgUseLatin1 = false !

4.	Take site back online. :D

5.	When the dust settles, start an external script to run through the
database and update any unpopular entries that haven't been converted.

I've written some code for the cur_text intercept to make sure that it
will work. It's running well for me on a test DB  I made, a simple
English DB converted to Latin1. It's only for the cur_text field right
now, but it should work the others if expanded. I haven't looked at the
problem with titles (Change A), but I think it could be similarly tackled.

Before I continue, I wonder if anyone sees catastrophic problems with
this approach? My familiarity with the codebase is still pretty spotty.

Here's the patch:

Index: Database.php
===================================================================
RCS file: /cvsroot/wikipedia/phase3/includes/Database.php,v
retrieving revision 1.71.2.7
diff --unified=3 -w -B -r1.71.2.7 Database.php
--- Database.php	14 Jan 2005 13:04:04 -0000	1.71.2.7
+++ Database.php	8 Feb 2005 20:10:37 -0000
@@ -681,11 +681,37 @@
  		}
  		$obj = $this->fetchObject( $res );
  		$this->freeResult( $res );
+
+		if ($conds['cur_id'])
+			$this->checkEncoding($conds['cur_id'], $obj);
+
  		return $obj;

  	}

  	/**
+	 * Checks if the object's encoding is UTF-8. If it is not, convert to
UTF-8 and update
+	 * the database record as well.
+	 *
+	 * @param $id the cur_id or old_id
+	 * @param $obj object whose fields will be verified and possibly updated
+	 */
+	function checkEncoding($id, $obj) {
+
+		// If a conversion from UTF-8 to UTF-8 does not result in the same
string, it is
+		// not a valid UTF-8 string.
+		if ($obj->cur_text != iconv("UTF-8", "UTF-8", $obj->cur_text)) {
+
+			// Assume it is Windows-1252 (Latin1 + em dashes etc., then convert.
+			$obj->cur_text = iconv("Windows-1252", "UTF-8", $obj->cur_text);
+
+			//save converted string to db
+			$cur_text = mysql_real_escape_string($obj->cur_text);
+			$this->query("UPDATE cur SET cur_text = '$cur_text' WHERE cur_id =
$id");
+		}
+	}
+
+	/**
  	 * Removes most variables from an SQL query and replaces them with X
or N for numbers.
  	 * It's only slightly flawed. Don't use for anything important.
  	 *


from_name: Rhobite

subject: [Wikitech-l] Spam on en:PHP

body:
If you implement some sort of bot detection, you could issue keys to
approved bots which would allow them to edit. But I don't think
CAPTCHA tests are the right approach, due to accessibility issues.

Rhobite


from_name: Pedro Fayolle

subject: [Wikitech-l] Spam on en:PHP

body:
> I think it's probably a good idea to assume that someone, at some point,
> will -- even if the culprits here do not.  It really seems to me that
> it's only a matter of time.

I agree.

I believe more focus should be put on the security side of the
software, there should be ways of preventing bot attacks (such as with
per-edit human recognition, a la Hotmail or Yahoo user registration),
even if this isn't needed right now. Wikipedia is becoming too
noticeable not to be a victim of some sort of large scale attack at
some point, and we should all know by now that not every vandalism is
easily reversible, so we should at least prevent them.

-Pedro


subject: [Wikitech-l] Spam on en:PHP

body:
On Tue, 08 Feb 2005 13:34:48 -0800, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> > But I don't think
> > CAPTCHA tests are the right approach, due to accessibility issues.
>
> What would you suggest?

Unfortunately I don't have any great suggestions. I've dealt with bot
spam on a much smaller scale on my weblog, and it's not a simple
problem.

> In response to your earlier note; if you haven't found it yet, the
> blacklist is editable by sysops on Meta:
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Spam_blacklist
>
> Leave a comment on the talk page to request additions.

Thanks, I'll do that.

Rhobite


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikitech-l] tonos and oxia

body:
The representation of the tonos and oxia on Greek vowels has become an
issue at Wikisource.  For the letter alpha modern monotonic Greek uses
U+03AC (decimal 940) for alpha with an acute accent or "tonos".
Traditional, or polytonic Greek uses U+1F71 (decimal 8049) for alpha
with an acute accent or "oxia".  I understand that the simplification of
Greek writing has been a matter of considerable controversy in the 20th
century.

Our software now converts the 1F71 to the 03AC form.  It would
nevertheless be preferable not to conflate these forms.  Wikisource will
include both classical and modern Greek texts, and it would seem
preferable to have the entire range of accents available for the
classical texts when required.

Ec


body:
Death Phoenix said:
> The other option for a protected/moderated
> article is to have admins edit the article (which, AFAIK, is the
> current system for protected pages). I just think having moderators
> takes some work of editing protected pages away from the potentially
> overworked admins.
>
Thanks.  I don't really have a reasoned objection, or at least not a
categorical one, to this.  On admins editing protected articles, I think
the consensus is that they're not really supposed to but I'm not familiar
with the details of consensus on this--just that it proved controversial
when an admin altered the content of [[clitoris]] while it was protected.
I do feel uneasy about the idea of having "trusted" content editors.  When
editors have a limited number of collaborators they will inevitably learn
one another's blind spots and edit for consensus within the group.
Without new editors coming along and entering new material out of the
blue, the dynamics of editing would be very different.  I'm not against
this at all in principle, but I'd hate to see Wikipedia abandon a winning
formula just because of a few racist nuts.  Readers are cleverer than we
think.


from_name: Marco Krohn

subject: [Wikitech-l] Spam on en:PHP

body:
On Tuesday 08 February 2005 15:32, Rhobite wrote:

Hi,

> The English article on PHP has been subject to some strange spam over
> the past week.

this looks like if they test how their script works before they really start
using it on large scale.

> but it's coming from many different IP
> addresses, probably trojaned hosts from all over the world.

if they start using [[botnet]]s to spam Wikipedia then this is worrying.

best regards,
  Marco


from_name: Yann Forget

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Language Version for Wikipedia

body:
Hi Ginu,

You are welcome to edit the Malayalam Wikipedia.
I?am monitoring it via the channel #inrc.wikipedia on Freenode, and it was
spammed a few times.

You can come to the #in.wikimedia channel if you want to talk.

Le Tuesday 8 February 2005 15:35, Anthere a ?crit :
> Hello,

[...]
> Thanks and hope you do a great job on ma (I think the language code is
> ma...).

No, it's ml. ;o)

> Anthere
>
> Ginu George <ginu.george at gmail.com> wrote:
> I saw the language version for Malayalam in Wikipedia is not in full
> mode for long. But i go through the entire stuff. There is no option
> to edit the logo text. Thats wrong. And i would like to do the project
> for malayalam. So if you can provide further information, then thats
> better i think.
>
> Hope you respond soon

Reagrds,
Yann
--
http://www.non-violence.org/ | Site collaboratif sur la non-violence
http://www.forget-me.net/ | Alternatives sur le Net
http://fr.wikipedia.org/ | Encyclop?die libre
http://www.forget-me.net/pro/ | Formations et services Linux


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Namespace problem after LanguageEt.php update, quite
	urgent.

body:
Klaus-Eduard Runnel wrote:
> The problem: {{ns:4}} gives "Wikipedia" on et.wikipedia, should be
> "Vikipeedia". On wiktionary it gives "Wiktionary", should be
> "Vikis?naraamat". No such problems occured on my test wikis (I think
> LocalSettings.php saved me somehow).

Because the old files had incorrectly hardcoded the namespace, the
$wgMetaNamespace configuration variables had not been set.

Since this was never set for the wiktionary, the 'Vikis?naraamat:x'
pages were stored in article namespace and I've had to adjust things to
clean them up. There were some project-namepace pages, which would have
been accessible as Vikipeedia:x which are now at Vikis?naraamat:x.

Should be working now, but check that pages are where they're expected.

> Also there are problems with showing dates (monthnames or
> abbreviations)... but first things first. Please help!

Will take a look.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
David Gerard wrote:
> Chad Perrin (perrin at apotheon.com) [050209 06:02]:
>
>
>>The real problem that arises, I think, is in new articles.  If someone
>>from, say, the Stormfront crew creates a new article loaded with bias
>>from day one, it's entirely possible it my fly in under radar (as
>>'twere) for quite some time without being noticed.
>
>
>
> The Vicious Deletionist Forces watch Special:newpages reasonably closely.
> It's not *that* likely *no-one* will notice it.

Good!

Hm.  The VDF.  That sounds Wrong, somehow.

--
Chad


list: foundation-l

from_name: Wikimedia Foundation

subject: [Foundation-l] Promo-stuff shop of openstuff.

body:
---- Forwarded message from "Walter Vermeir ." <walter at wikipedia.be> ----

> Hi,
>
> This shop is selling stuff from opensource projects;
> http://openstuff.net
>
> There are in Belgium, good central point for Europa.
>
> Question; can we ask or someone of the board of the are willing to sell
> Wikimdia/Wikipedia-stuff on there shop?
>
> When we need t-shirts, posters or so then we can just order them. At
> least
> for use in Europa. And users of Wikipedia whot like to have one can
> order
> also. Or Wikipedia must create there own internal production and
> distribution channel for this stuff and earn more money. But that can
> give
> problems to do.
>
> Greetings,
> [[w:nl:gebruiker:Walter]]


list: wikimedia-l


from_name: Alison Russell

subject: [Wikitech-l] Problems with Wiki on a Stick/USB Flash Drive

body:
Hi, this is my first posting so bear with me if I am asking something dumb.
I am studing a BSc Hons degree in Computer Science at University of Ulster,
so I am using the networked PCs in University. The is my first attempt at
installing my own Wiki.

I am following the document http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_on_a_stick
as I cannot install it on any particular PC in university, so need it to be
portable.

I want to install my own Wiki on a 256MB memory drive. But I'm stuck. An
help would be appreciated!! I am stuck at the section Configure The Wiki -
Initial Wiki Configuration.

I am at the stage of starting the web and database servers by running the
start.bat file in the folder UniServer3_2. Is that all i have to do? I don't
understand the bit about start.bat w mysql in the document. Running the
batch file does open the web browser re-direct page, but then when I try to
open localhost/wi/config/index.php I just get "Page cannot be found" error
message.

Any ideas? I've checked for log files for any clues, as suggested by
troubleshooting section, but they haven't been created yet.

Also I am not sure about the HTTP TCP Port section and how to check if
another Apache.exe is running(both referred to in the document).

Thanks in advance,
Alison


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Mark Williamson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia.org portal is not...

body:
I think some of the main disagreements regarding the portal page stem
from disagreements and misunderstandings of its purpose.

Some (myself, sj) believe it should be short and simple, with the sole
purpose of directing users quickly to their intended destination.

Others (GeorgeStepanek, David Gerard) believe it should be our "front
page", Mr Stepanek even advocating a Featured Article template for
each of the top 4 Wikipedias, Mr Gerard suggesting a logo including
the logo text in hexilingual fashion.

In the end nearly all the stylistic disagreements come down to one
question: What is the portal page? What is its purpose?

Before we can find a solution that is satisfactory to most parties
involved (ie, not just users from the en.villagepump and a couple of
others), we need to reach a consensus as to what exactly this portal
is.

My opinion is: The problem (and reason people think it is our
frontpage or that it should be) is that people continue to circulate
wikipedia.org as the URL for "Wikipedia", rather than using the proper
language-specific URLs based on the language medium in which you are
advertising. The only people who end up at wikipedia.org /should/ be
those who guess the URL, or those who pressed "I'm feeling lucky" at
Google (even that may lead to en:). The lack of popular distinction
among English speakers between Wikipedia and the English Wikipedia is
an issue, but it should not concern us when deciding whether we need a
frontpage, or a portal. We have used language-specific domains (and
until recently have redirected visibly to the en subdomain from the
wikipedia.org domain) for long enough now that if they still don't
know, they should be patient enough to look through the top six
languages to find English, which is featured very prominently (yet
some people still complain on en: - boo hoo!)

Mark


subject: [Wikitech-l] jumping logo + Solution

body:
Paul Youlten wrote:
> Chad,
>
> I think you have the right idea - if you look at
> http://www.guitarwiki.com - you see something even more strange - first
> it loads the navigation menu then the logo graphic with a blue
> background - then the google ads come in under the navigation box and
> the blue background is swapped for a transparent one. It also does an
> impressive jump up - as well as the traditional right.
>
> Bizarre...
>
> I tried 2 things: First I enlarged the size of the logo to see if maybe
> there was some problem related to a change in width of the table column
> on the arrival of the navigation column  - that made no difference.
>
> then I made a new headbg.jpg (the background image) into which I pasted
> my wiki logo. After some pixel pushing I got the position right and I
> solved the problem.  Not pretty but at least I'm not twitching anymore.
>
> I'll add a note explaining what I did to the 1084 bug as a kind of
> work-around.
>
> ... and I'll email Nohat and tell him about it too.
>

Yay, I fixed it!  I hereby claim credit for all good things.

Ahem.  Whoops.  I mean:  Good.  I'm glad that helped in your search for
a solution.

--
Chad


from_name: Ginu George

subject: [Wikitech-l] WikiPedia Malayalam

body:
I saw the language version for Malayalam in Wikipedia is not in full
mode for long. But i go through the entire stuff. There is no option
to edit the logo text. Thats wrong. And i would like to do the project
for malayalam. So if you can provide further information, then thats
better i think.

Hope you respond soon

--
Regards
Ginu George
www.ginugeorge.com


from_name: Anthere

body:
Yann Forget a ?crit:

>>Thanks and hope you do a great job on ma (I think the language code is
>>ma...).
>
>
> No, it's ml. ;o)

Sigh...
when we begin to talk in trigram or two-letters code, asylum is not far.


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Simple English and English look too confusingly
	similar

body:
There _is_ no such thing as "the Wikipedia article on".
Wikipedia/???????/????/????/??????????/????????/Wikip?dia/Wikiib??diiya/Vichipedie/?????????/?????????/????????????/Viquip?dia/Oiquip?dia/Wikipidiya/?????????/?????????/?????????/Vicip?id/?????/?????/???????????/???????????/Wikipedija/Wicip?dia/+++
is an INTERNATIONAL project to build a MULTILINGUAL encyclopedia.
There should be multiple articles for each topic, and there are for a
significant portion, in many different languages.

Mark

On Wed, 09 Feb 2005 03:47:19 +0100, Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> I just read this blog entry from January:
> http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2005/01/04/academia_and_wikipedia.php
>
> The author, Danah Boyd, a notable blogger and expert in social networks,
> criticized "the Wikipedia entry" for "social network", but she actually
> referenced the entry on the Simple English Wikipedia. What's worse,
> nobody in the comments corrected her, even though they clearly went to
> the English Wikipedia to look up different topics and compare.
>
> I suspect Danah googled for the title rather than visiting Wikipedia.
> Picking the wrong site is an easy mistake to make, since, except for the
> word "Simple" in the URL and page title, articles from the two sites
> look exactly the same. The concept of a "Simple English" Wikipedia is
> also not a trivial one to grasp even if someone actually does see it in
> the title, so they may just ignore it and think it's some strange
> Internet thing. After all, many addresses have things like "www10" or
> even arbitrary server names in the front.
>
> If an expert can make that mistake, I'm sure many other people have,
> wondering why all the Wikipedia articles they looked at were written in
> very juvenile prose and incomplete.
>
> I strongly recommend that we change the look and feel of the Simple
> English Wikipedia to avoid that confusion, perhaps going so far to add a
> [[MediaWiki:Sitenotice]] to that effect. A somewhat different logo would
> also help. The changes I can make without being a sysop are limited,
> though, and Simple is not particularly active, so I thought I'd bring
> this to the attention of the list first.
>
> Regards,
>
> Erik
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: David Gerard

body:
Stacey Greenstein (stacey.nj at gmail.com) [050208 12:08]:
> On Tue, 8 Feb 2005 05:10:17 +1100, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:

> > You'll explode their heads and risk your own trying to get a decent
> > checkable reference out of them, thoguh.

> Heh! For a very recent examplof this, see
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wiedergutmachung

Now, now! Assuming good faith tells me that's just someone coming to terms
with "references are haaard" ;-)

- d.


from_name: Nikola Smolenski

subject: [Wikitech-l] Guessing interface language from Accept-Language

body:
On Tuesday 8. February 2005. 09:32, Petr Kadlec wrote:
> > [snip] you can use
> > Accept-Language as a starting point but you can't really trust it. You
> > can set UI language based on it, but in that case users should always
> > have an option to easily change it.
>
> Just to be clear -- my idea is to add, not to remove. Currently, there
> is AFAIK _NO_ possibility at all, how an anonymous user could choose
> the language of the interface. If you visit Commons, then until
> logging in, the whole interface is in English, and you have to log in
> using that English interface.

I agree, and just to make it clear, I think that even anonymous users should
be able to choose interface language.


from_name: Tels

body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

Moin,

On Tuesday 08 February 2005 19:58, Anthere wrote:
> Yann Forget a ?crit:
> >>Thanks and hope you do a great job on ma (I think the language code
> >> is ma...).
> >
> > No, it's ml. ;o)
>
> Sigh...
> when we begin to talk in trigram or two-letters code, asylum is not
> far.

Hu? Hm. No!

CU,

T.

SCNR:)

- --
 Signed on Tue Feb  8 21:12:18 2005 with key 0x93B84C15.
 Visit my photo gallery at http://bloodgate.com/photos/
 PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email.

  http://bloodgate.com/perl/graph - graph extension for wikipedia
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from_name: Gerard Meijssen

subject: [Wikitech-l] Spam on en:PHP

body:
Pedro Fayolle wrote:

>>I think it's probably a good idea to assume that someone, at some point,
>>will -- even if the culprits here do not.  It really seems to me that
>>it's only a matter of time.
>>
>>
>
>I agree.
>
>I believe more focus should be put on the security side of the
>software, there should be ways of preventing bot attacks (such as with
>per-edit human recognition, a la Hotmail or Yahoo user registration),
>even if this isn't needed right now. Wikipedia is becoming too
>noticeable not to be a victim of some sort of large scale attack at
>some point, and we should all know by now that not every vandalism is
>easily reversible, so we should at least prevent them.
>
>-Pedro
>
By adding per-edit human regognition stuff in, you make bots impossible.
This would have a dramatic impact on the projects. Both Wiktionary and
Wikipedia have many people operate bots that benefit the quality and
quantity of the projects. With the latest security fix, it is not
possible to do anonymous edits using bots anymore. A big improvement
from a security point of view however, we are still smarting from the
resulting downtime for the bots.

Thanks,
    GerardM


subject: [Wikitech-l] jumping logo

body:
NSK (nsk2 at wikinerds.org) [050208 21:32]:
> On Tuesday 08 February 2005 12:12, Paul Youlten wrote:

> > The trouble is that it's not just me - the vast majority of visitors to my
> > site (and the different wikipedias) use IE.

> Just place a Mozilla or Firefox icon on the site.
> Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox are different things: Firefox is just the
> lightweight version of Mozilla and doesn't contain all the features of
> Mozilla.

"This site optimised for arguing with customers" is not actually a good
thing. While IE is undoubtedly an inferior browser in many ways, a browser
used by 80% of Wikipedia users and 90% of web accesses in general is a
reasonable target for at least graceful degradation rather than breakage,
even if the actual problem is IE's horrible CSS implementation.

- d.


subject: [Wikitech-l] jumping logo

body:
NSK (nsk2 at wikinerds.org) [050208 22:06]:
> On Tuesday 08 February 2005 12:54, David Gerard wrote:

> > used by 80% of Wikipedia users and 90% of web accesses in general is a

> Where did you got these statistics? I don't think they are correct:

I understood non-IE was 20% on Wikipedia - I don't have a reference to
hand.

90% general is from the most recent widely-publicised WebTrends report
which showed IE dipping just below 90% for the first time in a few years.

Given the content of yours, I can well believe it's only 15% IE!

(I currently use IE at work to keep from browsing too much specifically
because it's such a bad experience ;-)

- d.


from_name: Rowan Collins

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Google preventing comment spam

body:
On Sun, 6 Feb 2005 21:29:13 +0000, ?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason
<avarab at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 4 Feb 2005 14:56:31 +0000, Rowan Collins
> <rowan.collins at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Although this *seems* simple, the database request needed to determine
> > "how old is this page" [snip]
>
> This should not be an issue since this query is already made, look at
> the bottom of any page on any wikimedia project, you'll see something
> like " This page was last modified 00:05, 5 Feb 2005."

Oops! My bad - now I think about it, there's timestamp right there in
the 'cur' table, isn't there? And even in the new schema, you won't be
able to get the text of a page without also encountering its revision
date, won't you? So, yeah, ignore that bit of stupidity!

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikitech-l] Spam on en:PHP

body:
Brion:
> This is not actually true; there's a minor bug with a particular
> interaction of the pywikipediabot, which I've mentioned to Andre.
> However anonymous bot edits are really not recommended, and will likely
> get much harder to do as we look more at closing out spambots.

My attempts to fix this bug failed, and reactions to restricting the
bot to only logged-in edits have been positive, so for the time I will
consider it a feature.

Andre Engels


subject: [Wikitech-l] Wiki maps

body:
On Tue, 8 Feb 2005 14:37:55 +0100 (MET), Alfio Puglisi
<puglisi at arcetri.astro.it> wrote:
> http://maps.google.com
>
> Zoom somewhere and *drag* the map around (!). Search for anything and find
> it on the map (spelling corrections is working as usual...)

Clicks. Drags.
I'm sure this joke was made a million times on /., but:

"Woohoo! A map where North America really *is* the whole world!"

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Johannes Schindelin

subject: [Wikitech-l] Spam on en:PHP

body:
Hi,

On Tue, 8 Feb 2005, Rhobite wrote:

> On Tue, 08 Feb 2005 13:34:48 -0800, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> > > But I don't think
> > > CAPTCHA tests are the right approach, due to accessibility issues.
> >
> > What would you suggest?
>
> Unfortunately I don't have any great suggestions. I've dealt with bot
> spam on a much smaller scale on my weblog, and it's not a simple
> problem.

How about a lazy Bayesian similarity checker: spam bots tend to write the
same blabla into several articles. So, after each edit, with a certain
(low) probability, check for identical (or similar) words in the last 100
articles, and flag those articles with matches (or matched words) for
potential spam which can then be blocked more efficiently. Of course,
there are words like "is", "are", "the", etc. are probably there, but
there are relatively few words which are common (I think something like
1500 words in English). The list of common words could be built on the
fly.

Just my 1.5 cents,
Dscho


from_name: Maik Musall

subject: [Wikitech-l] Make PDFs from articles

body:
Hello folks,

I want to make PDF files from a number of wikipedia articles, but
encountered several technical problems and wondered if there's a better
way how to do that than I came about. (If you want to know what this is
for, look at the end of this posting.)

The number of articles should be about 1000. That has some consequences:
1. I have to avoid wasting bandwidth and wikipedia server load as
   much as possible.
2. I have to automate the task because I cannot click 1000 pages
   interactively.

To save server load and bandwidth, I considered using the database dump,
but that lacks the images and the layout, right? I even downloaded the
wikipedia CDROM image, but discovered that's a Windows software with
data stuffed into some database where it's probably difficult to
retrieve and make PDFs from.

My current idea is to use the normal web access since I have no other
working solution. I would spread the accesses over a week and only use
times where normal server load is low.

But: html2ps is regarded as a harvester by wikipedia.org and doesn't get
the real pages, even with User-Agent tweaked by a squid. When I use wget
-p and html2ps afterwards on the local files, it fetches the images
twice for some weird reason. And worse, html2ps is obviously not capable
of dealing with utf-8 encoded pages.

So, I have two questions to the community here:
1. What's the best way to get those 1000 articles from the servers
   without putting too much load on them?
2. What's a good way to automate the conversion to PDF of those pages?

Any suggestions appreciated.

(What is all this for? I work for a software company that will show a
demonstration of a document management system on the CeBIT fair in March
2005 in Hannover, Germany. I will hold some lectures there where I will
demonstrate a power plant documentation system. Of couse I cannot do
that with the actual real documents from our customers because those are
classified, so I intend to substitute them with wikipedia articles about
power plants, electricity and related topics. Thus, I only show free
content, and I can also use the opportunity to demonstrate wikipedia
quality to some business people who might not know it yet. I hope you
agree this is a perfectly valid intention of using wikipedia content.)

Regards
--
Maik Musall <maik at musall.de>
GPG public key 0x856861EB (keyserver: wwwkeys.de.pgp.net)
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from_name: Alexandre Dulaunoy

subject: [Wikitech-l] Make PDFs from articles

body:
On Tue, 8 Feb 2005, Maik Musall wrote:

> Hello folks,
>
> I want to make PDF files from a number of wikipedia articles, but
> encountered several technical problems and wondered if there's a better
> way how to do that than I came about. (If you want to know what this is
> for, look at the end of this posting.)
>

http://wiki.auf-trag.de/

http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/wikipdf/

Maybe a good start...

--
-- 	  	     Alexandre Dulaunoy (adulau) -- http://www.foo.be/
-- 	   http://pgp.ael.be:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x44E6CBCD
-- 	   "Knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance
-- 				  that we can solve them" Isaac Asimov


from_name: Brion Vibber

body:
Klaus-Eduard Runnel wrote:
> The dates look quite ugly at the moment (see et.wiktionary.org main
> page for example), it would be great if someone submitted the patch. I
> opened a bug (http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1498)  for
> this one as well, not for long I hope.

Committed and installed the patch there.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Jonah Bossewitch

subject: [Wikitech-l] The mediawiki-agora

body:
I apologize for the delay - we are in the midst of launching a bunch of
other projects around here.

I have created the mediawiki-agora sf project:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/mediawiki-agora/

Please email me your sf id if you have any interest in developing here.

The idea behind this collective is to let anyone developer who is interested
become a contributor so we can begin collecting extensions, scripts, and
useful tools in one place.  I hope to convince some of the existing
extensions authors to host stuff here (at least until it gets integrated
into the core).

If anyone is interested, here is an announcemnt indicating Columbia
University's CNMTL commitment to the mediawiki

http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/web/p03_announcements.html#20050131

Thanks to Peter Danenberg for the nifty name.

best regards,
Jonah


from_name: Paul Youlten

subject: [Wikitech-l] Spam on en:PHP

body:
I don't know much about bots - but they must be much faster then humans at
making changes? Would it be possible to reject edits that happen less than
5 seconds after the page is served? and/or ask users to take a CAPTCHA test
if they were making an edit to a page less than 15 seconds after it was
served?

Just a thought.

Paul Youlten
----- Original Message -----
From: "Johannes Schindelin" <Johannes.Schindelin at gmx.de>
To: "Wikimedia developers" <wikitech-l at wikimedia.org>
Sent: Tuesday, February 08, 2005 10:54 PM
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Spam on en:PHP

> Hi,
>
> On Tue, 8 Feb 2005, Rhobite wrote:
>
>> On Tue, 08 Feb 2005 13:34:48 -0800, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
>> > > But I don't think
>> > > CAPTCHA tests are the right approach, due to accessibility issues.
>> >
>> > What would you suggest?
>>
>> Unfortunately I don't have any great suggestions. I've dealt with bot
>> spam on a much smaller scale on my weblog, and it's not a simple
>> problem.
>
> How about a lazy Bayesian similarity checker: spam bots tend to write the
> same blabla into several articles. So, after each edit, with a certain
> (low) probability, check for identical (or similar) words in the last 100
> articles, and flag those articles with matches (or matched words) for
> potential spam which can then be blocked more efficiently. Of course,
> there are words like "is", "are", "the", etc. are probably there, but
> there are relatively few words which are common (I think something like
> 1500 words in English). The list of common words could be built on the
> fly.
>
> Just my 1.5 cents,
> Dscho
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


from_name: Peter Danenberg

subject: [Wikitech-l] The mediawiki-agora

body:
> Thanks to Peter Danenberg for the nifty name.

     A  thought  occurred to me, Jonah, as I was registering
wikiagora.org: I've just  set  up  Subversion,  Mailman  and
Bugzilla for wikitex.org, and have some spare capacity.

     Would  it  make  sense to supplement SF with home-grown
facilities? We'll eventually need a testbed box, anyway; not
to mention sysadmin's liberty.

--
Peter Danenberg                                           .
wikisophia.org                                           ..:


from_name: Daniel Wunsch

subject: [Wikitech-l] Spam on en:PHP

body:
On Wednesday 09 February 2005 00:11, Paul Youlten wrote:

> I don't know much about bots - but they must be much faster then humans at
> making changes? Would it be possible to reject edits that happen less than
> 5 seconds after the page is served? and/or ask users to take a CAPTCHA test
> if they were making an edit to a page less than 15 seconds after it was
> served?

i sure can fix a typo in less than 5 seconds using the jEdit plugin,
provided that the server is fast enough. but i cannot fix many typos
one after another in a short time.

daniel


subject: [Wikitech-l] Spam on en:PHP

body:
Then you have to answer a CAPTCHA test question - or (better) be given
permission to make fast edits when logged in.

Paul Youlten

----- Original Message -----
From: "Daniel Wunsch" <the.gray at gmx.net>
To: "Wikimedia developers" <wikitech-l at wikimedia.org>
Sent: Wednesday, February 09, 2005 12:20 AM
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Spam on en:PHP

> On Wednesday 09 February 2005 00:11, Paul Youlten wrote:
>
>> I don't know much about bots - but they must be much faster then humans
>> at
>> making changes? Would it be possible to reject edits that happen less
>> than
>> 5 seconds after the page is served? and/or ask users to take a CAPTCHA
>> test
>> if they were making an edit to a page less than 15 seconds after it was
>> served?
>
> i sure can fix a typo in less than 5 seconds using the jEdit plugin,
> provided that the server is fast enough. but i cannot fix many typos
> one after another in a short time.
>
> daniel
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


subject: [Wikitech-l] jumping logo + Solution

body:
Chad,

I think you have the right idea - if you look at http://www.guitarwiki.com -
you see something even more strange - first it loads the navigation menu
then the logo graphic with a blue background - then the google ads come in
under the navigation box and the blue background is swapped for a
transparent one. It also does an impressive jump up - as well as the
traditional right.

Bizarre...

I tried 2 things: First I enlarged the size of the logo to see if maybe
there was some problem related to a change in width of the table column on
the arrival of the navigation column  - that made no difference.

then I made a new headbg.jpg (the background image) into which I pasted my
wiki logo. After some pixel pushing I got the position right and I solved
the problem.  Not pretty but at least I'm not twitching anymore.

I'll add a note explaining what I did to the 1084 bug as a kind of
work-around.

... and I'll email Nohat and tell him about it too.

Hasta manana todos.

Paul Youlten
----- Original Message -----
From: "Chad Perrin" <perrin at apotheon.com>
To: "Wikimedia developers" <wikitech-l at wikimedia.org>
Sent: Tuesday, February 08, 2005 7:55 PM
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] jumping logo

> NSK wrote:
>
>> Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox are different things: Firefox is just the
>> lightweight version of Mozilla and doesn't contain all the features of
>> Mozilla.
>>
>
> This is somewhat off-topic, but . . .
>
> Err, that's not really accurate.  Firefox includes features Mozilla lacks,
> and its interface works differently.  I haven't looked into the technical
> details, but I'm sure there are some "under the hood" differences as well.
>
> The way the interface works is, in my experience, actually closer to the
> way the IE interface works than to that of Mozilla.  For instance, Firefox
> allows one to use Ctrl+Enter to automatically navigate to .com domains,
> and will refresh the page when the F5 key is pressed.  These are both
> features borrowed from IE, and not from Mozilla.
>
> I suspect the interface functionality is much of the reason Firefox is
> stealing away IE users far more effectively than Mozilla ever did: it
> attracts people who stuck with IE because they didn't like the Mozilla
> interface, but would prefer something other than IE, and it attracts
> people who are just now waking up to browsers other than IE and don't want
> to have to learn a new way of doing things.
>
> I've rambled on enough about that.  Back to the subject at hand:
>
> Maybe the logo image is just loading at an inopportune moment.  I haven't
> checked the code for it, but it might be worth investigating. If the logo
> is loading before some formatting that affects its placement, that would
> account for the jump.  On the other hand, if it's actually just a bug in
> IE (which I'm inclined to believe), and it doesn't actually affect the
> usability, functionality, or final appearance of the page, it might also
> be worth ignoring if no simple solution appears.
>
> --
> Chad
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


subject: [Wikitech-l] The mediawiki-agora

body:
Hi Peter,

There are free facilities that offer subversion repositories-
http://www.subversionary.org/subversionary.cgi/HostingServices, many with
packaged pm tools  It is certainly true that sf is a dog, and its tools
could use some improvements (it does use mailman for lists, but its bug
tracking leaves something to be desired).  I am not certain what we would
gain by hosting these services ourselves.

I thought that keeping the agora in the same place as the core code makes
sense.  If/When mediawiki moves to an svn repo, then the agora can move with
it.  Subversion is catching on, but it still offer a barrier of entry to
many developers.  I would be happy to use it, but we really want to be as
inclusive as possibly. But perhaps I underestimated peoples frustration w/
sf + cvs.

As far as a common hosting environment, thats a nice idea, but I don't know
if it is necessary.  The way that the collective works in the plone
community, is that every mini-project claims its own directory within the
cvs module.  People respect this division, and don't modify each others
directories without a courtesy email. The only thing this messes up is cvs
notifications, since people rarely want to be notified activity across the
entire module.

At that point, everyone is responsible for testing and developing their own
extensions. Admitedly, it gets hard when it comes to releasing extensions.
Reviews and rations are desirable, and one needs to consider the
interactions between various extensions (they might not all be compatible
with each other, or they're might be dependencies).  Furthermore, some
extensions may only work with certain versions of the core software.  This
can be handled at first with readmes and documentation within the individual
directories, as well as on the Extensions wiki.

The directories will really serve as independent projects - its just that no
one needs to go through the hassle of setting up a new repository to get
their code under version control.  And, if you are lucky, you may reap the
traditional benefits of OSS development.  The agora could become a means for
gaining mindshare on interesting extensions, encouraging folks to use,
debug, and contribute.  Hopefully, situations like disappearing scripts and
tools can be more easily avoided (provided the code is under an open license
and resides in the repository).

I am also hopeful that Evan's hook infrastructure catches on and will lead
to a more standard way of developing, configuring, and installing extensions
that do more than define a new tag.

That said, if any individual agora developers want to share some resources,
or even decide to use external tools for their particular project, they
should feel free.  Just note the links w/in a standard place in the
directory (the README?).  Some projects may be large enough to warrant their
own mailing lists, others might just piggy back on this one (or the
mediawiki-agora general one it gets any traction).

Does that jibe with what you had in mind?

nite
/Jonah

----- Original Message -----
From: "Peter Danenberg" <pcd at wikitex.org>
To: "Wikimedia developers" <wikitech-l at wikimedia.org>
Sent: Wednesday, February 09, 2005 1:12 AM
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] The mediawiki-agora

>> Thanks to Peter Danenberg for the nifty name.
>
>
>     A  thought  occurred to me, Jonah, as I was registering
> wikiagora.org: I've just  set  up  Subversion,  Mailman  and
> Bugzilla for wikitex.org, and have some spare capacity.
>
>     Would  it  make  sense to supplement SF with home-grown
> facilities? We'll eventually need a testbed box, anyway; not
> to mention sysadmin's liberty.
>
> --
> Peter Danenberg                                           .
> wikisophia.org                                           ..:
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


from_name: Klaus-Eduard Runnel

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Namespace problem after LanguageEt.php update,
	quite urgent.

body:
Thanks, Brion, for updating LanguageEt file, but it seems that my
patch was not OK after all. There are problems with namespaces on
et.wikipedia and et.wiktionary now... quick fix would be welcome.
People panic... (actually, right now they are having some bad dreams).

The problem: {{ns:4}} gives "Wikipedia" on et.wikipedia, should be
"Vikipeedia". On wiktionary it gives "Wiktionary", should be
"Vikis?naraamat". No such problems occured on my test wikis (I think
LocalSettings.php saved me somehow).

I'm not sure I'm getting it right this time, so someone please have a
look, is this the problem? --

The file contained lines
        NS_WIKIPEDIA        => $wgMetaNamespace,
        NS_WIKIPEDIA_TALK   => $wgMetaNamespace . '_arutelu',

I guess it should be:

        NS_PROJECT          => $wgMetaNamespace,
        NS_PROJECT_TALK     => $wgMetaNamespace . '_arutelu',

instead? I can't do any testing at the moment -- can't reach my office computer.

If the fix above is not enough -- I see some Languge files contain

if($wgMetaNamespace === FALSE)
        $wgMetaNamespace = str_replace( ' ', '_', $wgSitename );

LanguageEt doesn't. Should it?

Also there are problems with showing dates (monthnames or
abbreviations)... but first things first. Please help!

Klaus


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
I just read this blog entry from January:
http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2005/01/04/academia_and_wikipedia.php

The author, Danah Boyd, a notable blogger and expert in social networks,
criticized "the Wikipedia entry" for "social network", but she actually
referenced the entry on the Simple English Wikipedia. What's worse,
nobody in the comments corrected her, even though they clearly went to
the English Wikipedia to look up different topics and compare.

I suspect Danah googled for the title rather than visiting Wikipedia.
Picking the wrong site is an easy mistake to make, since, except for the
word "Simple" in the URL and page title, articles from the two sites
look exactly the same. The concept of a "Simple English" Wikipedia is
also not a trivial one to grasp even if someone actually does see it in
the title, so they may just ignore it and think it's some strange
Internet thing. After all, many addresses have things like "www10" or
even arbitrary server names in the front.

If an expert can make that mistake, I'm sure many other people have,
wondering why all the Wikipedia articles they looked at were written in
very juvenile prose and incomplete.

I strongly recommend that we change the look and feel of the Simple
English Wikipedia to avoid that confusion, perhaps going so far to add a
[[MediaWiki:Sitenotice]] to that effect. A somewhat different logo would
also help. The changes I can make without being a sysop are limited,
though, and Simple is not particularly active, so I thought I'd bring
this to the attention of the list first.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Foundation-l] Progress on wikimedia.com?

body:
I seem to recall that there were negotiations underway at some point
with the owner of wikimedia.com on transferring that domain name to the
Foundation. To this day, there is no content under the domain, not even
ads, just a German "Under construction" notice. I would like to inquire
what the outcome of the past negotiations was. If they failed, is there
any chance that we can get the domain by virtue of owning the trademark
rights to "Wikimedia", and the domain name not being used in any other
way by its owner?

My interest is primarily that I would like the Foundation site to move
from wikimediafoundation.org to wikimedia.org - a domain which is
currently just an ugly portal site, but also a subdomain of Meta, the
Wikimedia Commons, and the mailing lists. I think having the foundation
site there could help to strengthen the Wikimedia brand identity, but
when that was discussed in the past, the problem that we do not hold the
.com was the main (only?) reason not to do it.

So, to get the ball rolling, what's the situation? If I can help by
getting in touch with the owner, I'll see what I can do. Are we willing
to pay for the domain, or does it have to come for free? Legal
proceedings cost money, too, so if the owner is happy with a small fee,
that might be the least troublesome approach.

On a different note, yes, Wikimedia and Wikipedia are very confusingly
similar. Individually, our naming choices have been good, but taken
together, they're a mess. I think it's too late to rename Wikimedia,
with international organizations in place and 2 million Google hits on
that name. The best way to deal with that problem, in my opinion, is to
give a short explanation on the wikimedia.org page  (which would then be
the foundation page), with a small icon and a link to Wikipedia.

All best,

Erik


body:
On Tue, 08 Feb 2005 17:58:43 -0800, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:

> Because the old files had incorrectly hardcoded the namespace, the
> $wgMetaNamespace configuration variables had not been set.
>
> Since this was never set for the wiktionary, the 'Vikis?naraamat:x'
> pages were stored in article namespace and I've had to adjust things to
> clean them up. There were some project-namepace pages, which would have
> been accessible as Vikipeedia:x which are now at Vikis?naraamat:x.
>
> Should be working now, but check that pages are where they're expected.

I can't thank you enough, it does seem to work :)

>
> > Also there are problems with showing dates (monthnames or
> > abbreviations)... but first things first. Please help!
>
> Will take a look.

Took a look myself meanwhile --  getMonthAbbreviation, getMonthName,
etc. should not be there or should not return things like:
$wgMonthAbbreviationsEt[$key-1]; which are now in $wgAllMessages.
Also, getMessage() should be changed, I think.

Klaus

Klaus


body:
Tried the patch below (for LanguageEt 1.23), found a wiki to test it
on... No problems so far, except that {{CURRENTDAYNAME}} does not seem
to work. I could not understand why.

Klaus

1345,1373d1344
<       function getMathNames() {
<               global $wgMathNamesEt;
<               return $wgMathNamesEt;
<       }
<
<       function getMonthName( $key )
<       {
<               global $wgMonthNamesEt;
<               return $wgMonthNamesEt[$key-1];
<       }
<
<       /* by default we just return base form */
<       function getMonthNameGen( $key )
<       {
<               global $wgMonthNamesEt;
<               return $wgMonthNamesEt[$key-1];
<       }
<
<       function getMonthAbbreviation( $key )
<       {
<               global $wgMonthAbbreviationsEt;
<               return $wgMonthAbbreviationsEt[$key-1];
<       }
<
<       function getWeekdayName( $key )
<       {
<               global $wgWeekdayNamesEt;
<               return $wgWeekdayNamesEt[$key-1];
<       }
1393,1397c1364,1374
<       function getMessage( $key )
<       {
<               global $wgAllMessagesEt;
<               return $wgAllMessagesEt[$key];
<       }
---
>
>         function getMessage( $key )
>         {
>                 global $wgAllMessagesEt;
>                 if( isset( $wgAllMessagesEt[$key] ) ) {
>                         return $wgAllMessagesEt[$key];
>                 } else {
>                         return Language::getMessage( $key );
>                 }
>


from_name: Bobby Maisnam

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Possible copyright violation of Wikipedia content by
	Infoslurp.com

body:
Hi All,

I am posting to this list because I could not find a way to email
Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Contact_us

The following site seems to be a direct copy of Wikipedia
content.
http://www.infoslurp.com/information/

And it also has Google Ads. I wonder how Google is allowing this
site to earn revenue from Wikipedia content.

Example page:
Original Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogger
Infoslurp page: http://www.infoslurp.com/information/Blogger

Thanks,
- Bobby Maisnam


from_name: Catherine Munro

subject: [WikiEN-l] A counterpoint to the mobilization of Stormfront

body:
OK, so it's not nearly as compelling as Neo-Nazis breathing hard outside
the door, but I ran across this today on the "Excessive Sweating and Facial
Blushing" site (it was linked from the talk page of another WP user):

A group with an agenda (opposition to a drastic type of surgery to treat
sweating disorders) discovered Wikipedia, said, "hey, we can support our
agenda there"...."but wait, they have an NPOV policy"...."that's ok, we can
do that"..."in fact, let's invite the doctors who support the treatment to
come work on it"....
http://www.esfbchannel.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl?board=ETS_General&action=display&num=1100250508

And now, two months later, we have a fairly balanced little article on
[[Endoscopic thoracic sympathectomy]], which the group is now telling other
ETS/anti-ETS sites they can use and copy (WITH proper GFDL linking and
credit, no less!):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endoscopic_thoracic_sympathectomy

Obviously these are rational people, and not ideologues of any stripe --
still, I thought it would be a nice bit of evidence that the system /does/
usually work.  :)

Catherine


from_name: Sj

subject: [Wikitech-l] The mediawiki-agora

body:
Cool!  Thanks for setting this up.  (and for the CNMTL link... we
should ask *them* to submit some entries to the upcoming multimedia
contest :)

+sj+

On Wed, 9 Feb 2005 00:09:39 -0500, Jonah Bossewitch
<mrenoch at phantomcynthetics.com> wrote:
> I apologize for the delay - we are in the midst of launching a bunch of
> other projects around here.
>
> I have created the mediawiki-agora sf project:
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/mediawiki-agora/
>
> Please email me your sf id if you have any interest in developing here.
>
> The idea behind this collective is to let anyone developer who is interested
> become a contributor so we can begin collecting extensions, scripts, and
> useful tools in one place.  I hope to convince some of the existing
> extensions authors to host stuff here (at least until it gets integrated
> into the core).
>
> If anyone is interested, here is an announcemnt indicating Columbia
> University's CNMTL commitment to the mediawiki
>
> http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/web/p03_announcements.html#20050131
>
> Thanks to Peter Danenberg for the nifty name.
>
> best regards,
> Jonah


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Wikicite project pages (english versions only so
	far)

body:
I was wary of this idea at first, but after talking to Stirling about
it last week, I am very enthusiastic.  Two librarians I have talked to
in Boston seem to think it's a good idea, also.  In addition to
helping us reference our existing articles, this would be a fine way
to provide a universal, POV-free service (with potentially POV
commentary built on top of it).

+sj+

On Sun, 30 Jan 2005 14:07:43 -0500, Stirling Newberry
<stirling.newberry at xigenics.net> wrote:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Wikicite
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikicite
>
> A fact is only as reliable as the ability to source that fact, and the
> ability to weigh carefully that source. Wikipedia's community, in an
> effort to expand its useful sphere of users, increase its reliability,
> usability and credibility has held several related discussions on
> improving the scholarly apparatus of wikipedia. The need to cite
> sources is now in the community standard's list, the desire to upgrade
> the citation of articles is the subject of the Fact and Reference
> Project, and the Encyclopediac Standards project has discussed
> automatic, or at least software assisted citations. There has also been
> a coding effort to support footnoting.
> [edit]
>
> Need for Live Data
>
> These projects, need, not only to be joined together, but to be joined
> together in a live manner, which allows for the creation of
> bibliographic apparatus. The Library of Congress is working on such a
> project for its purposes, it is the purpose of this project to create
> an open wiki system which will allow:
>
> 1.  Software assisted citation. To make it easier for editors to cite,
> and to make citations comprehensive to include a link to an author
> article, the book's card and the date as a wikilink.
>
> 2.  Card catalogs which will allow users to annotate the work, and to
> link to other works, which could include later editions, bibliography
> and textual apparatus. To make the card catalog live data, rather than
> dead data.
>
> 3.  Support a footnote system in wikimedia. To improve the ability to
> assess credibility and standards compliance of articles and their
> information.
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
+sj+
 _ _ :-------.-.--------.--.--------.-.--------.--.--------[...]


body:
Anyone in the Boston area who is interested in this subject, please
come to our next meetup this Sunday evening at 6pm!  We will be
discussing librarianship, citations, and database imports...
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Boston

--SJ--

On Wed, 9 Feb 2005 05:21:45 -0500, Sj <2.718281828 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I was wary of this idea at first, but after talking to Stirling about
> it last week, I am very enthusiastic.  Two librarians I have talked to
> in Boston seem to think it's a good idea, also.  In addition to
> helping us reference our existing articles, this would be a fine way
> to provide a universal, POV-free service (with potentially POV
> commentary built on top of it).
>
> +sj+
>
>
> On Sun, 30 Jan 2005 14:07:43 -0500, Stirling Newberry
> <stirling.newberry at xigenics.net> wrote:
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Wikicite
> > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikicite
> >
> > A fact is only as reliable as the ability to source that fact, and the
> > ability to weigh carefully that source. Wikipedia's community, in an
> > effort to expand its useful sphere of users, increase its reliability,
> > usability and credibility has held several related discussions on
> > improving the scholarly apparatus of wikipedia. The need to cite
> > sources is now in the community standard's list, the desire to upgrade
> > the citation of articles is the subject of the Fact and Reference
> > Project, and the Encyclopediac Standards project has discussed
> > automatic, or at least software assisted citations. There has also been
> > a coding effort to support footnoting.
> > [edit]
> >
> > Need for Live Data
> >
> > These projects, need, not only to be joined together, but to be joined
> > together in a live manner, which allows for the creation of
> > bibliographic apparatus. The Library of Congress is working on such a
> > project for its purposes, it is the purpose of this project to create
> > an open wiki system which will allow:
> >
> > 1.  Software assisted citation. To make it easier for editors to cite,
> > and to make citations comprehensive to include a link to an author
> > article, the book's card and the date as a wikilink.
> >
> > 2.  Card catalogs which will allow users to annotate the work, and to
> > link to other works, which could include later editions, bibliography
> > and textual apparatus. To make the card catalog live data, rather than
> > dead data.
> >
> > 3.  Support a footnote system in wikimedia. To improve the ability to
> > assess credibility and standards compliance of articles and their
> > information.
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
>
> --
> +sj+
>  _ _ :-------.-.--------.--.--------.-.--------.--.--------[...]
>

--
+sj+
 _ _ :-------.-.--------.--.--------.-.--------.--.--------[...]


from_name: Angela

body:
On Wed, 09 Feb 2005 06:28:04 +0100, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > SCNR:)
>
> Did not know this one
> What does that mean ?

It means "Sorry, could not resist".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCNR

Angela.


from_name: Anthere

body:
Tels a ?crit:

> SCNR:)

Did not know this one
What does that mean ?


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Progress on wikimedia.com?

body:
Erik Moeller a ?crit:
> I seem to recall that there were negotiations underway at some point
> with the owner of wikimedia.com on transferring that domain name to the
> Foundation. To this day, there is no content under the domain, not even
> ads, just a German "Under construction" notice. I would like to inquire
> what the outcome of the past negotiations was. If they failed, is there
> any chance that we can get the domain by virtue of owning the trademark
> rights to "Wikimedia", and the domain name not being used in any other
> way by its owner?

Negociations were under way with a member of the german association. I
do not remember with certainty who. Possibly akl.

> My interest is primarily that I would like the Foundation site to move
> from wikimediafoundation.org to wikimedia.org - a domain which is
> currently just an ugly portal site, but also a subdomain of Meta, the
> Wikimedia Commons, and the mailing lists.

? I really do not see what you mean here.
Actually, the more time goes by, the happier I am with the full name
Many people get confused between wikipedia, wikimedia and mediawiki
We certainly  need wikimedia.com, but I am not so convinced we should
move the site to wikimedia.org.

I think having the foundation
> site there could help to strengthen the Wikimedia brand identity, but
> when that was discussed in the past, the problem that we do not hold the
> .com was the main (only?) reason not to do it.
>
> So, to get the ball rolling, what's the situation? If I can help by
> getting in touch with the owner, I'll see what I can do. Are we willing
> to pay for the domain, or does it have to come for free? Legal
> proceedings cost money, too, so if the owner is happy with a small fee,
> that might be the least troublesome approach.

A small fee would be reasonable.

> On a different note, yes, Wikimedia and Wikipedia are very confusingly
> similar. Individually, our naming choices have been good, but taken
> together, they're a mess. I think it's too late to rename Wikimedia,
> with international organizations in place and 2 million Google hits on
> that name. The best way to deal with that problem, in my opinion, is to
> give a short explanation on the wikimedia.org page  (which would then be
> the foundation page), with a small icon and a link to Wikipedia.

This is the reason I would now rather support using full adress (with a
redirection of course from wikimedia.org)

I would be glad if you could take time to fix that up.

> All best,
>
> Erik


body:
The dates look quite ugly at the moment (see et.wiktionary.org main
page for example), it would be great if someone submitted the patch. I
opened a bug (http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1498)  for
this one as well, not for long I hope.

Klaus


from_name: Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia on answers.com/google

body:
A few weeks.  These are the people who invited me over to Israel and
arranged for me to speak at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and Tel
Aviv University.  Their CEO is a huge fan of wikipedia, and is
increasingly a supporter of the Wikimedia Foundation.  Good people, very
supportive of NPOV and of our charitable ideals.

Christiaan Briggs wrote:

> I was looking up the word orchard via google today and noticed that
> they have a Wikipedia section:
> http://www.answers.com/orchard&r=67
>
> http://snipurl.com/cna7
>
> Cool, how long have they been doing this?
>
> Christiaan
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

--
"La n?fle est un fruit." - first words of 50,000th article on fr.wikipedia.org


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Valentine's day!

body:
It would be fun to do sound recordings of "I love you" in dozens of
languages, as we did for the "Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year"
project.

--Jimbo

Sabine Cretella wrote:

> Hi!
>
> Last year I started this collection on my private wiki - now I
> transferred it to the Italian wiktionary.
> http://it.wiktionary.org/wiki/Buon_San_Valentino%21
> So please have a look at it to correct and/or complete it - this would
> be really great :-)
>
> Btw.: the editor Langenscheidt in Germany uses the wishes in 20
> languages to send out the greetings - can't we do much better? I'll now
> search for a photo to combine with the wishes.
>
> Ciao, Sabine
>
> *******************
>
> Buon San Valentino!
> Da Wikipedia, l'enciclopedia libera.
>
> Italiano
>
> Espressione
>
> Buon San Valentino!
>
> Traduzione
>
> * bulgaro: Chestit Sveti Valentin!
> * danese: De k?rligste hilsner p? Vantentinsdag!
> * tedesco:
>
> Alles Gute zum Valentinstag!
> Alles Liebe zum Valentinstag!
>
> * inglese:
>
> Happy St. Valentine's Day!
> Happy Valentine's Day!
>
> * esperanto: Bonan Tagon de Sankta Valentino!
> * spagnolo:
>
> ?Feliz d?a del amor y de la amistad! (Colombia)
> ?Feliz d?a de San Valent?n!
> ?Feliz San Valent?n!
> ?Feliz d?a de los enamorados! (Venezuela)
>
> * finlandese: Hyv?? yst?v?np?iv??!
> * francese:
>
> Joyeuse St. Valentin!
> Bonne f?te de la Saint-Valentin!
>
> * croato:
>
> Sretno Valentinovo!
> S ljubavlju za Valentinovo!
>
> * ungherese:
>
> Boldog Valentin Napot!
> Sok szeretettel Valentin-napon!
>
> * giapponese: ?????????????.
> * olandese:
>
> Wil jij mijn Valentijn zijn? (attenzione: significa "Vorresti essere il
> mio Valentino" - quindi da utilizzare veramente soltanto per che si ama
> e non per una amico/a)
> Fijne Valentijnsdag!
>
> * norvegese: Kj?rlig hilsen i anledning valentinsdagen!
> * polacco: Wszystkiego nahlepszego z okazji walentynek!
> * portoghese brasiliano: Feliz Dia dos Namorados!
> * svedese:
>
> Alla hj?rtans dag!
> K?ra h?lsingar p? Alla hj?rtans dag!
>
> * serbo: Sve najlep?e za dan svetog Valentina!
> * sloveno: Veliko ljubezni na Valentinovo!
> * turco: Sevgililer g?n? kutlu olsun!
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
"La n?fle est un fruit." - first words of 50,000th article on fr.wikipedia.org


list: wiktionary-l

subject: [Wiktionary-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Valentine's day!


subject: [Foundation-l] Grant meeting

body:
Hi,

As you all have probably seen, our budget is seriously
increasing every trimester.

It is my personal view that we cannot anymore entirely
rely on donations by visitors, but must seriously seek
other sources of income.

Last year, we were offered two grants and one prize,
and a third grant of 40 000 dollars was just offered.

These grants make the difference between succeeding to
run the site,

or not.

We need to pay more attention to grants. Most require
quite a bit of work, but the result is really worth
it.

For this reason, a meeting will be held on this
sunday, 4 PM UTC. If you wish to participate, please
come over to #wikimedia, we'll find a quiet room to
host us.

While the meeting is open, I or Angela or Danny
reserve the right to kindly ask a visitor to leave the
room if necessary. We wish to involve people as much
as possible, but only seriously interested and trusted
people :-)

Topics will be
* feedback on current grant requests (Danny)
* discussion over new possible grants
* Decision to seek for a couple ones.
* Teams setting up.

In particular, last year, we thought of asking a NEH
grant, but the deadlines were too short. We might try
again this year. The work to do is not only setting up
figures, but there is also a lot of work simply
describing our project, gathering statistics or press
clipings, helping on the layout, fixing typos,
improving style etc...

I invite you to read
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants

and join us sunday

Anthere

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - Find what you need with new enhanced search.
http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250


subject: [Foundation-l] Grant meeting


from_name: Tomer Chachamu

subject: [Wikitech-l] Make PDFs from articles

body:
On Tue, 8 Feb 2005 23:13:12 +0100, Maik Musall <lists at musall.de> wrote:
> 1. I have to avoid wasting bandwidth and wikipedia server load as
>    much as possible.
>
> To save server load and bandwidth, I considered using the database dump,
> but that lacks the images and the layout, right? I even downloaded the
> wikipedia CDROM image, but discovered that's a Windows software with
> data stuffed into some database where it's probably difficult to
> retrieve and make PDFs from.
>
> My current idea is to use the normal web access since I have no other
> working solution. I would spread the accesses over a week and only use
> times where normal server load is low.
>
> 1. What's the best way to get those 1000 articles from the servers
>    without putting too much load on them?

Do you know about Special:Export?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Export/Electricity

All you need to do then is to download the images.

Find out how the wikireaders were made.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiReader


subject: [Wikitech-l] Spam on en:PHP

body:
Rhobite wrote:
> If you implement some sort of bot detection, you could issue keys to
> approved bots which would allow them to edit. But I don't think
> CAPTCHA tests are the right approach, due to accessibility issues.

Although I have been a supporter of limited CAPTCHA use (following the
usual wikimedia way of looking for the softest possible security to
deal with an actual rather than imagined problem), I am very
sympathetic to this point.

What are some possible alternatives, or ways of minimizing this problem?

--Jimbo


body:
Anthere-

> Actually, the more time goes by, the happier I am with the full name
> Many people get confused between wikipedia, wikimedia and mediawiki
> We certainly  need wikimedia.com, but I am not so convinced we should
> move the site to wikimedia.org.

Is it actually true that wikimediafoundation.org reduces the confusion,
though? One could argue that it increases it. Compare:

wikipedia.org
wikimediafoundation.org

wikipedia.org
wikimedia.org

In the first case, there are two differences - the "foundation" suffix
and the "m" instead of the "p". In the second case, the only difference
is the "m"/"p" difference.

If I give someone the wikimediafoundation.org URL, and they visit it,
chances are, they only notice the big difference - the "foundation" -
and do not notice the smaller one. They might remember it as the
"Wikipedia Foundation". A Google search for "Wikipedia Foundation" turns
up 887 hits, so we can take this to be a common mistake. The reality may
be somewhat counterintuitive: reducing the name to wikimedia.org makes
the small difference more apparent -- leading to the intuition that it
is "more confusing", when actually it highlights the difference and
thereby reduces the confusion.

Now, there are cases of confusion that will happen between wikipedia.org
/ wikimedia.org -- but if we redirect wikimedia.org to
wikimediafoundation.org anyway, what positive difference does the
"-foundation" make? Tell people that they are in the right or wrong
place? That's what the content of the website should accomplish. This
could be done very tastefully with a nice, prominent icon box both on
the wikipedia.org and wikimedia.org homepages.

I also think that using wikimedia.org would be more consistent with its
use in our projects such as commons.wikimedia.org, meta.wikimedia.org,
foundation-l at wikimedia.org, etc.. wikimediafoundation.org vs.
wikimedia.org suggests that there's a difference when they're one and
the same. Again, this may add to the confusion rather than reducing it,
because we have two domain names in active use.

I don't think the confusion can be reduced by simply using a longer name
-- I believe the only way to accomplish that would be to change the main
component, the "Wikimedia", but that doesn't seem practical. What are
the cases where the confusion would increase if we move the site to
wikimedia.org?

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikitech-l] Backup problem source -- network saturation?

body:
On Friday, Chad and I will be in the colo moving a lot of stuff to
the new switch.  This will free up ports-o-plenty and so everything
from Wikimedia can go on the gigabit switches for sure.

I'm going to give that 100Mbs switch back to Bomis (it's theirs
anyway) and we're going to hang them off a single port of the new
switch.  This will facilitate measuring their traffic and charging
them accordingly.

(We're changing the contract with the colo so that Wikimedia pays for
hosting directly, and charges Bomis for whatever they use.  This will
mean that for the first time, Wikimedia will be paying fully for our
bandwidth and hosting, instead of Bomis picking up more than it's fair
share of the tab.)

--Jimbo

Brion Vibber wrote:

> Albert seems to be connected to the internal network on a 100Mbps link;
> the backup files are stored on yongle, and accessed over NFS through
> that link.
>
> Fast, disk-intensive things like making the image tarballs or md5sum'ing
> the database dumps saturate the line; the apaches have to fight for
> traffic on that same line trying to load images from albert's NFS server
> when rendering pages... which leads to waits, hangs, and general suckiness.
>
> If we run the backup process on yongle (or move the actual dump files
> used?) maybe it'll work better... and/or if that 100Mbps link is
> supposed to be gigabit, we need to figure out why it's at the wrong speed.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

--
"La n?fle est un fruit." - first words of 50,000th article on fr.wikipedia.org