body:
Hi again,

Yep, you're both right, but what I meant was, it's not a language like
english for ex, that's spoken all over the world by quite a lot of people.
moreso, as for the region around arlon, my grandmother told me that they used
to speak lux but that today, it's not very common to find a person who can.

and i just remembered, there's a lux village in the US, they speak lux there
too, apparently :)

Ehm, since this is the first time that I propose a language, how will I know
when the site is up ?

Caroline.

On Thu, 15 Jul 2004 11:29:43 +0200, Pablo Saratxaga wrote
> Kaixo!
>
> On Thu, Jul 15, 2004 at 09:06:47AM +0200, Ewen Caroline wrote:
>
> > luxembourgish is only spoken in my country
>
> Not true; it is also spoken in its neighbours (Arelerland, parts of
> Germany; I've also been told by a Romanian that the "german language"
> spoke by "German speakers" there is actually much more close to
> Luxemburguish than to Hochdeutsch).
> Only in Luxembourg however it has official status and is commonly
> used in written.
>
> http://lb.wikipedia.org/ would be a very good news.
>
> --
> Ki ?a vos v?ye b?n,
> Pablo Saratxaga
>
> http://chanae.walon.org/pablo/		PGP Key available, key ID:
0xD9B85466
> [you can write me in Walloon, Spanish, French, English, Catalan or
Esperanto]
> [min povas skribi en valona, esperanta, angla aux latinidaj lingvoj]

--
Open WebMail Project (http://openwebmail.org)


list: wikitech-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales

subject: [Wikitech-l] Relative loading times across languages

body:
Anthere reports that there is a general impression among the French
that en.wikipedia.org loads faster than fr.wikipedia.org.  Is this
possible?

Can we run some tests?

----- Forwarded message from Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> -----

From: Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com>
Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2004 20:44:24 +0200
To: wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Fork risk (was Re: Google ads)

I can just say one thing I saw myself, and which was mentionned by
several french people.

When I have several windows open at the same moment, say three

*one open on en
*one open on fr
*one open on www.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main Page

The first page to load in en.
Several seconds later, it is fr.
And much later wikimedia.

I cant avoid seeing that en pages are often served much quicker than fr
pages.
I know not why. I am sure it is not on purpose. But it is a fact.

Thomas R. Koll wrote:
>On Thu, Jul 15, 2004 at 08:41:55PM +1000, Tim Starling wrote:
>
>>If a Wikimedia chapter wants to buy servers for their language wiki to
>>avoid slow, poor-quality service or site-wide advertising, then we
>>should give them our blessing.
>
>
>I'd prefer read-only mirrors which redirect the edits to the main
>server. I don't know the situation at fr: but at de: we use wikipedia.de
>not de.wikipedia.org in press news, so it would be easy to take some
>good portion of the traffic off the Florida-servers.
>
>ciao, tom

_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

----- End forwarded message -----


from_name: Alfio Puglisi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Escaping backticks?

body:
On Thu, 15 Jul 2004, Ray Saintonge wrote:

>We would not normally encourage HTML for italics but I just tried
>''Fahrenheit 9/11's and that works too.
>Hmm! Amazing that a technical dunce could come up with a solution. =-O
>Ec

It works for now, but I would strongly advise against using mixed syntax
like that. If one wants to use html, it's better to write it correctly:

Fahrenheit 9/11's

This way, a parser that translates '' to something else than  will not
screw everything up.

Maybe one could also write:

''Fahrenheit 9/11'' 's

(with a space before 's)

Alfio


list: wikien-l

from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] NPOV policy

body:
steven l. rubenstein wrote:

> I appreciate RK's work on developing our NPOV policy concerning
> historical context for articles such as ones on religion.  For what it
> is worth, I think we can explain it in a simpler and more direct way.
> 1) NPOV often means multiple points of view.  This means providing not
> only the points of view of different groups today, but different
> groups in the past.
> 2) Wikipedia is an encyclopedia.  One important task for articles is
> to explain things.  In the case of human beliefs and practices,
> explanation encompasses not only what motivates individuals who hold
> these beliefs and practices, but an account of how such beliefs and
> practices came to be and took shape.

Well put.  It's not just for history and religion that this is
important, but for science too.  The story of the development of
scientific ideas can be very interesting too.  From a modern perspective
some of the abandoned paths are too easily dismissed as speculative
pseudoscience.  When you consider how few scientific tools they had to
work with, I am amazed that they ever got anything right.

Ec


from_name: Fennec Foxen

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia denigrated in The Register

body:
I sent a (long rambling and somewhat annoyed) comment to the guy via
the Register's web interface, and got a reply saying that he'd chat
with me if we didn't use my Gmail account. More on this as it occurs.


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Pablo Saratxaga

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Language request: Luxembourgish

body:
Kaixo!

On Thu, Jul 15, 2004 at 11:51:01AM +0200, Ewen Caroline wrote:

> moreso, as for the region around arlon, my grandmother told me that they used
> to speak lux but that today, it's not very common to find a person who can.

In Arlon itself that's true; however in the smaller towns and villages
around it it is still quite common (up to 90% of speakers in some
places in 1978, according to
http://wa.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lussimbordjw?s

(there is also an image with text "Eis sprooch iwert all grenzen" that
shows where Luxemburguish is spoken: in Luxembourg (where it has
official status, along with French and German), Arelerland (at the west,
region around Arlon town, in Belgium, where only French has official status),
around the region of Sankt-Vith (at the north, in Belgium, where only
German has official status, and French special minority status),
in Germany (at the east, where only German has official status),
and in France (at the south, where only French has official status).

--
Ki ?a vos v?ye b?n,
Pablo Saratxaga

http://chanae.walon.org/pablo/		PGP Key available, key ID: 0xD9B85466
[you can write me in Walloon, Spanish, French, English, Catalan or Esperanto]
[min povas skribi en valona, esperanta, angla aux latinidaj lingvoj]
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from_name: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason

subject: [WikiEN-l] I am out of here

body:
Yeah, the politics are a bit of a trauble, you might want to switch to
a smaller language though to cool yourself off, relaxing;).

----- Original Message -----
From: Muriel Gottrop <gottrop at yahoo.co.uk>
Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2004 13:33:05 +0100 (BST)
Subject: [WikiEN-l] I am out of here
To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org

Fellow wikipedians,

it makes me sad, but i believe the wikipedia.en is turning mad. I
found myself drifting further and further away and now i shall stop
contributing.

Wikipedia.en looks like an high-school, with all its cliche
characters: the populars, the nerds, the bully-boys, the conflicts
between groups, the pretty girls, the independent mind, which are,
therefore, outsiders. I went through all of this 10 years ago in David
Game College in London. I am sick of pseudo-problems and problemettes
invented by people who frankly seem to have nothing else to do.

Finlay described the problem well on his talk page:Wikipedia -
Unemployed PhD death match.

The problem i think resides not on the wikipedia concept, but on the
size of the wiki.en, so enormous that became an aquarium of human
society. Thats neat, but i dislike big societies, politics, lobbying
and influence games. I shall continue, but in wiki.pt, a tiny livable
thing - like Portugal.

I hope that one day Recent Changes will not be a TV program. That
would be a sign that the world had gone beserk (even more). I wish you
all the best not in wiki, but in real life.

Muriel

		________________________________

ALL-NEW
Yahoo! Messenger
 - sooooo many
all-new ways to express yourself


list: foundation-l

from_name: Stevertigo

subject: [Foundation-l] Presentability

body:
After reading this (via /. )
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996151

It occurred to me that if Hawking might have feel
better if that selection included a presentable
version of WP. I would if I could, but I cant, so I
wont.

S

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Address AutoComplete - You start. We finish.
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail


list: wikimedia-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Presentability


from_name: Geoffrey Burling

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: The Church of Scientology is discovered to have
	discovered Wikipedia!

body:
Please be careful when quoting other people. I did not write any of
the text attributed to me below.

Geoff

On Thu, 15 Jul 2004, Sheldon Rampton wrote:

> Geoff Burling wrote:
>
> >I find this quite alarming.  At the existing policy page
> >[[Wikipedia:Auto-biography]] we find "editing an article about
> >yourself or your organization is also generally considered
> >improper and best avoided."  Should we announce a change of
> >policy now?
>
> As currently worded, this policy page contradicts itself. On the one
> hand, it states:
>
> >If you are reasonably significant, someone will create an article
> >about you sooner or later. You are free to contribute to that
> >article, but please only add verifiable information and be
> >especially careful to respect the neutral point of view.
>
> This says unambiguously that it is okay for people to contribute to
> articles about themselves. Later, however, the article states,
>
> >Editing an article about yourself or your organization is also
> >generally considered improper and best avoided.
>
> Since there is no clear difference between "contributing" to the
> Wikipedia and "editing an article," these two statements contradict
> each other.
>


from_name: Timwi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Escaping backticks?

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
> We would not normally encourage HTML for italics but I just tried
> ''Fahrenheit 9/11</i>'s and that works too.

No, that only works if this is the only italics you have in that line.
As soon as you have another one, it will break.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Escaping backticks?

body:
Bill Clark wrote:

> ''Fahrenheit 9/11'''s does horrible things to the text.

The easiest solution is ''Fahrenheit 9/11'''s. I've been using that
for some time and I've gotten quite used to it.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Memcached rearrangement

body:
Tim Starling wrote:

> Because the client algorithm distributes keys to each available server equally,

Is this a shortcoming of the PHP version of the memcached client? This
is certainly not true for the Perl version; you can specify weights there.


from_name: Bill Clark

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: How could information flow ?

body:
On Thu, 15 Jul 2004 18:51:32 +0200, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Yes Bill, but... the whole issue is that it has to be quickly available
> for all projects ... ie, about 300 right now (okay, we could reduce this
> to perhaps 80 active ones perhaps).

We could still go for the low-hanging fruit and stick an "About this
message" link on the  most popular projects.  That would eliminate a
lot of the questions and complaints people have, I'd think.

> If we have to create 80 pages for each language on each project, better
> just give up now. One person can't do it alone. He cant create 80 pages
> and cant create 80 translations alone in a couple of hours.

I know they're still not great, but has anyone looked at some of the
automated translation tools for some of this?  If the message is
simple enough, the translations might not get TOO garbled.  (Oh, who
am I kidding? They stink.  Right?)

> The other point of my proposal is precisely to make it possible that
> information is available to all, without being necessarily displayed
> very visibly.

Maybe something in the top part of the page, where the username and
such are displayed?  An "announcements" link that changes color when
there are new notices?

Or if it's something we want to make sure people don't miss, we could
go the route of making a (shudder) "splash" page for the site, so that
the very first thing visitors see is the donation message.

(As an aside, perhaps for a certain level of donation we could offer
mugs or tote-bags with the Wikipedia logo on them? <smirk>)

> Unfortunately yes, it requires development, so if no one is interested
> by doing it, it wont be done at all.

I'm going to be very happy to do development... once I familiarize
myself with the code base.  Now, if I just spent more time actually
moving forward on that familiarization, rather than just talking about
it... (...then I think my paying clients would probably be upset with
me.)

> Still, this is what machines, bots can do for us, replace humans for
> works which take too much time.

We were talking earlier about a custom bot interface on the website,
but here's another thought:  A separate, special "internal" bot
mechanism whereby scripts can run directly on the server, available
only for tasks that are *part* of the Wikipedia, rather than those
having to do with articles themselves.  The python bot code could
probably be adapted for this purpose, and would provide a standard way
of making server-side maintenance scripts.

-Bill Clark


from_name: Muriel Gottrop

subject: [WikiEN-l] I am out of here

body:
Fellow wikipedians,

it makes me sad, but i believe the wikipedia.en is turning mad. I found myself drifting further and further away and now i shall stop contributing.
Wikipedia.en looks like an high-school, with all its cliche characters: the populars, the nerds, the bully-boys, the conflicts between groups, the pretty girls, the independent mind, which are, therefore, outsiders. I went through all of this 10 years ago in David Game College in London. I am sick of pseudo-problems and problemettes invented by people who frankly seem to have nothing else to do.

Finlay described the problem well on his talk page:Wikipedia - Unemployed PhD death match.

The problem i think resides not on the wikipedia concept, but on the size of the wiki.en, so enormous that became an aquarium of human society. Thats neat, but i dislike big societies, politics, lobbying and influence games. I shall continue, but in wiki.pt, a tiny livable thing - like Portugal.

I hope that one day Recent Changes will not be a TV program. That would be a sign that the world had gone beserk (even more). I wish you all the best not in wiki, but in real life.

Muriel

---------------------------------
 ALL-NEW Yahoo! Messenger - sooooo many all-new ways to express yourself
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from_name: Brion Vibber

body:
Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
> Anthere reports that there is a general impression among the French
> that en.wikipedia.org loads faster than fr.wikipedia.org.  Is this
> possible?

fr might in fact be very slightly slower than en since it loads a second
language file and the UTF-8 support functions & data. (This will be
mostly eliminated once en converts to UTF-8 someday.)

However all speed is extremely variable on these wikis, and depends on
the load of the servers, how much you've got cached, whether you're
logged in, whether the page is cached in the parser cache, the
complexity of the pages involved, whether there are templates, whether
the templates are cached, whether you have new messages, whether there's
a site message, whether your user data's cached, and the phase of the
moon. The absolute speed difference will be *dwarfed* by the hit-to-hit
variations.

-- brion vibber (brino @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Joe Block

subject: [Wikitech-l] New install question

body:
I'm setting up a new mediawiki install for internal use at our company.
I'm  running the following versions of the software: MediaWiki: 1.2.6,
PHP: 4.3.2, MySQL: 4.0.18, all on Mac OS X 10.3.4. The database is
running on the same host as the site.

Everything seems to be working ok, but I'm trying to change it to not
say "From Octavo, the free encyclopedia." I've edited
languages/Language.php and changed the fromwikipedia entry, but it
hasn't changed the actual pages output when I look at pages with the
browser.

I've looked for a way to refresh the templates, but haven't find one.

jpb
--
Joe Block <jpb at octavodesign.com>

Octavo Design & Production
791 Piedmont-Wekiwa Road, Apopka, FL 32703
v: 407.598.1050 f: 407.598.1061


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Escaping backticks?

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> Bill Clark wrote:
>
>> I just encountered an interesting problem.  The article on Michael
>> Moore mentions Front Row Entertainment, Fahrenheit 9/11's UAE
>> distributor.
>>
>> How do I italicize "Fahrenheit 9/11" without italicizing the "s" in
>> the possessive (since that's not properly part of the title)?
>
>
> ''Fahrenheit 9/11''<nowiki>'</nowiki>s
>
> Yeah, it's ugly, but there's no way to cleanly work around it with the
> '' and ''' syntaxes short of special-casing /\S'''s/ and similar.

A similar problem is often encountered on fr, where they want to write
l'foo where foo is the title of the article and hence should be bold,
without bolding the apostrophe. One solution is to use HTML-style tags,
i.e. l'<b>foo</b>

-- Tim Starling


body:
On Thu, 15 Jul 2004 11:54:16 -0700, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales
<jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Anthere reports that there is a general impression among the French
> that en.wikipedia.org loads faster than fr.wikipedia.org.  Is this
> possible?
>
> Can we run some tests?

The French Wikipedia loads several seconds faster for me.

I suspect this is at least partly just an instance of selective
observation.  For some people, one site probably loads slightly faster
than the other for whatever random routing reason.  Those who see the
French site load first aren't going to complain, but those who see the
English site load first _will_ complain.  Hence, you only hear one
side of what's really a two-sided issue.

Or at least that's my guess.

It could also be something about the round-robin DNS:

root at xoom:~>host en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.247
en.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.248
en.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.235
en.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.236
en.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.245
en.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.246
root at xoom:~>host fr.wikipedia.org
fr.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.246
fr.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.247
fr.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.248
fr.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.235
fr.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.236
fr.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.245

Some browsers will choose an IP at random, but others take the first
in the list.  Maybe it's just that .246 is faster than .247 and some
people's DNS servers have the order cached that way so the same IP is
always returned first.

-Bill Clark


from_name: Yann Forget

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: [WikiFR-l] How could information flow ?

body:
Hi Anth?re,

As I already said, I think that people requesting to remove this kind of
banner are nor very responsible. It is necessary that this information
reaches everybody.

Le Thursday 15 July 2004 14:47, Anthere a ?crit :
> I think another tool would be very much welcome. What I would like to see
> is something similar to the current ?you have a message?.  A little warning
(...)
> Is this technically possible ? Is this suitable ? What do you think ? Do
> you have other ideas ?

I think that this is a great idea. It would meet most of the concerns people
have about this.

Regards,
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] Re: [WikiFR-l] How could information flow ?


from_name: Andy Rabagliati

subject: [Wikipedia-l] RPMs

body:
Folks,

  For my own purposes, I have created an RPM of the mediawiki-1.2.6
  stable download.

  If anyone would like to poke at it and make suggestions, it can be
  found at :-

  ftp://ftp.wizzy.com/pub/wizzy/rpms/mediawiki-1.2.6-2wiz.noarch.rpm
  ftp://ftp.wizzy.com/pub/wizzy/SRPMS/mediawiki-1.2.6-2wiz.src.rpm

  I want to do this for schools install, and the web interface, though
  very nice, does not fit in with the 'fire and forget' nature of RPMs.

  I run sed over the (unmodified) sql scripts in /maintenance to do
  the initial database setup.

  It will still need a snapshot loaded.

  To load a snapshot of wikipedia, try this :-

  bzip2 -d -c 20040327_cur_table.sql.bz2 | mysql -u wikiuser --password=wiki:user wikidb

Cheers,     Andy!

http://wizzy.org.za/
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia growth since February 2004 greatly slowed

body:
Christopher Mahan wrote:
> --- "Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales" <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
>
>>First, our growth has to level off at some point.  Has to, dammit!
>>:-)
>>Maybe we're already maxed out; there's not really any way to know.
>
>
> I doubt we're anywhere close to maxing out.
>

I've been meaning to find a peg to hang the following post on ever since
I lost the post with mav's original 90% growth projections on:

All the evidence (see below) suggests that Wikipedia has *not* grown by
a significant amount since the huge explosion in February/March 2004.

Now we have had a myriad of technical issues, and perhaps had reached
capacity to prevent growth (until the most recent db master/slave
setup). These are clearly key factors and I am expecting big growth in
July.

''However'' I do not think it is a coincidence that this four months of
little growth corresponds almost exactly with the period that Wikipedia
has "disappered" from Google.

This time last year WP was very often top of typical searches. Now our
mirrors always come out ahead except for very recently breaking news
(where they don't have the new content yet). What I term the "second
generation" mirrors (such as thefreedictionary.com) are "gaming" the
Google algorithm much better than Wikipedia is, and in a way the older
mirrors (4reference.net etc) didn't.

Assuming few technical restrictions, Wikipedia will grow, but I really
think it will be at the low-end of Mav's predictions.

Pete/Pcb21 (knowing that people have been wrong on this before, but
sticking the neck out anyway)

== Data ==
(en only in places)

As far as I know there are three places to get information about the
growth of Wikipedia.

1) The Webalizer pages: (http://wikimedia.org/stats/en.wikipedia.org/)

The daily average visits for the past months are:

Jul 2004 	270339
Jun 2004 	295800
May 2004 	274077
Apr 2004 	189930
Mar 2004 	280845
Feb 2004 	265556

There has not been much change in these -

(there has been change in some of the other statistics - I would need a
tech to tell me what effect the new software had on this)

2) The Wikipedia Statistics pages
(http://www.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm)

Feb 2004 741 new wikipedians 536 new articles (per day)
Mar 2004 824 new wikipedians 688 new articles
Apr 2004 689 new wikipedians 627 new articles
May 2004 615 new wikipedians 581 new articles
Jun 2004 326 new wikipedians 475 new articles

3) Alexa

- see the following graph
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&range=6m&size=large&compare_sites=&url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page#graph
which shows Wikipedia has not grown in the last four/five months.


body:
On Thu, 15 Jul 2004 15:12:46 -0400, Bill Clark <wclarkxoom at gmail.com> wrote:

> The French Wikipedia loads several seconds faster for me.

Method: Keep open a browser window in Firefox with two tabs, one
pointing to the En WP the other the Fr WP.  Refresh both tabs at the
same time, wait to see which finishes loading first.

Results:

French Wikipedia wins: 11 times
English Wikipedia wins: 5 times
Tie: 5 times

I'd run a script to test this but I don't want to hit the server that
much.  Before I started keeping track I'd run another dozen or two
tests and the French Wikipedia won most of them.

I still think it might be a round-robin DNS issue, but not just cached
ordering of the list.  I'm not sure how the browser decides to do
lookups that are made basically at the same time, but if it's
alphabetical then the French Wikipedia might always get the IP after
the English Wikipedia IP during the rotation.

So if the speed of the servers happens to decrease roughly in order of
IP (so that .235 is slightly faster than .236, which is slightly
faster than .245, etc.) then the French Wikipedia would only get
assigned the faster IP one things loop back around from .248 back to
.235 again.  Things don't seem quite that bad, but if anything like
that pattern holds then this might explain the differences in speed.

Also, it might simply be better squid caching for the English site due
to the fact that it gets far more traffic.

-Bill Clark


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: [Solution ?] [ 967833 ] Only first five template
 inclusions work

body:
Bill Clark wrote:
> On Wed, 14 Jul 2004 23:46:35 +0200, Jens Frank <jeluf at gmx.de> wrote:
>
>
>>If article [[X]] includes [[Template:A]] which includes [[Template:B]],
>>which again includes [[Template:A]], this would result in a memory
>>bomb using only two different templates.
>
>
> I think Emmanuel's suggestion is more akin to PHP's include_once() and
> thus wouldn't be vulnerable to the type of problem you're describing.

That's what we already do. MAX_INCLUDE_REPEAT is a maximum for
inclusions of a given template, there's no limit on the number of
different templates included. So if A included B and B included A, you'd
get 5 copies of each: A->B->A->B->A->B->A->B->A->B->link to A.

This is unacceptable because people want to use templates for things
which are included many times in a single page, like superscript "Le" on
fr, or fancy bullet points.

-- Tim Starling


body:
On Thu, 15 Jul 2004 15:50:49 -0400, Bill Clark <wclarkxoom at gmail.com> wrote:

> Also, it might simply be better squid caching for the English site due
> to the fact that it gets far more traffic.

(In which case the fact that the French Wikipedia is faster for me
would just be an anomaly, obviously.)

-Bill


from_name: Sj

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Google ads

body:
I thought initially it would be a fun experiment to try opt-in
ads; but I have been convinced it would have a real negative
impact on the community.  I would still like to be able to
browse a Google Ad-enabled mirror... as long as I knew I
was supporting the project.

This is an elegant solution. Can we do the same with the
Amazon account that used to be associated with ISBNs?

+Sj+

> Thomas R. Koll wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > Why not create a account for Wikipedia and publish the id of the accout.
> > So everyone who is interested to support Wikipedia can add google-adsense
> > to their website. Specially for mirrors that would be a nice idea without
> > much work for the webmasters.
> >
> > ciao, tom


body:
Ewen Caroline wrote:
> Ehm, since this is the first time that I propose a language, how will I know
> when the site is up ?

The progress of newly requested wikis is noted on
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages. When it is
created, a message will be added to that page for a few weeks before
it is removed to make way for new requests. There is often an email to
this mailing list, or the wikitech-l list announcing the new language
as well.

Angela.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Google ads

body:
On Thu, 15 Jul 2004 15:56:40 -0400, Sj <2.718281828 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I thought initially it would be a fun experiment to try opt-in
> ads; but I have been convinced it would have a real negative
> impact on the community.

Random thought anyway. If we have any ads, and we want to make turning
them off as easy as possible- we could just have a button above the
ads that says "turn off ads". That should a) set a prefrence if the
user is logged in, *and* b) set a cookie that tells us to turn off
ads, even should they log out.


from_name: Charles Matthews

subject: [WikiEN-l] NPOV policy

body:
steven l. rubenstein wrote

> For what it is worth, I
> think we can explain it in a simpler and more direct way.
> 1) NPOV often means multiple points of view.  This means providing not
only
> the points of view of different groups today, but different groups in the
past.
> 2) Wikipedia is an encyclopedia.  One important task for articles is to
> explain things.  In the case of human beliefs and practices, explanation
> encompasses not only what motivates individuals who hold these beliefs and
> practices, but an account of how such beliefs and practices came to be and
> took shape.

I note that Steven is in an academic department where these points will be
part of the environment.  There are some standard approaches in the
humanities to which it is well to pay attention.  Still, it won't do, from
WP's point of view, to be either confused or naive about the issues.  There
are several  that occur to me.

1. NPOV without history is perfectly OK, in some cases.  Take an example
that is fairly uncontentious.  The legal system in Scotland differs from
that in England, for historical reasons.  One can write about the legal
differences in buying a house, north or south of the Border, without
addressing the issue of why those are there.  NPOV is quite possible without
going into the historical side of English common law.

2. History as can of worms.  I'm sure people know what I mean.  An example
that occurs to me is discussion of the Korean minority in Japan.

3. If it is really meant that writing from an ahistorical point of view is
going to be labelled POV, then this is going to be used in polemics, without
a doubt.  It is not a simple matter to say what the historical context is of
any one issue -  certainly not clear-cut, and worrying excessively about
this also goes against good habits of crisp writing.

4. The historical point of view can itself be used as a stick to beat the
very idea of NPOV. Any competent Hegelian or Marxist can write the script
for doing this.

Charles


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Google ads

body:
On Wed, 14 Jul 2004 09:36:20 -0700 (PDT), Christopher Mahan
<chris_mahan at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- "Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales" <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
> > First, our growth has to level off at some point.  Has to, dammit!
> > :-)
> > Maybe we're already maxed out; there's not really any way to know.
>
> I doubt we're anywhere close to maxing out.
>
> I can see 500 million hits per day (15 billion hits per month) by
> year's end (especially just leading to and around the elections).
> That would put us squarely in the top 10 on the internet.
>
> Of course, now may be the time to talk to IBM about those mainframe
> donations.
Is there any further info on that? Has any "official" discussion taken
place between wikimedia and IBM/Apple/Sun/Whoever about something like
that? I bet some of them would love to pay for something like that for
a bit of karma boost
>
> The W has achieved enormous press coverage in the last year and now
> the completeness level is good enough that for all practical purposes
> for the average person, we have articles on everything.
>
> Can you name another computer-based project (beside IE's
> vulnerabilities) that gets as much "good" press coverage as we do?
>
> I suggest the ride is going to get even more fun.
>
> People: Send in your donation, we have to ramp up.
>
>
> =====
> Chris Mahan
> 818.943.1850 cell
> chris_mahan at yahoo.com
> chris.mahan at gmail.com
> http://www.christophermahan.com/
>
>
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers!
> http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Rowan Collins

body:
Bill wrote:
> [...]
>   "For example, if you consult the world's most useless online text,
>   the captive Wikipedia, you'll see Fuller's entry is a plug for
>   Eric "AI" Drexler."
>
> From:
>
>    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07/14/buckminster_fuller_stamp/
>
> Guess Andy doesn't love us.

Why does it not surprise me that the self-same paragraph mentions that
other pet hate of theirs, Kevin Warwick - I mean, alright, the guy's a
bit of a poser, but they don't half go *on*! I guess they find
slagging people off an easier form of journalism than actual
intelligent writing.

Out of interest, what do you suppose he means by "captive"? Captive to
one PoV, perhaps
- unlike, say, a "news" website having patronising nicknames for those
they disapprove of. Erm...

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


subject: [Wikitech-l] Memcached rearrangement

body:
In an attempt to raise the hit ratio for the parser cache, I've
increased the amount of memory available to memcached. Because the
client algorithm distributes keys to each available server equally,
without regard for the amount of memory in each one, it's necessary to
have multiple instances running on each machine, each instance having a
fixed amount of memory. We're using 15 instances with 512 MB of memory
each, for a total of 7.5 GB. The arrangement is:

bart: 2
bayle: 2
yongle: 4
rabanus: 4
will: 3

I wanted to put some on suda but I had trouble with installation. Keys
are distributed using the hash mod the number of instances, so whenever
we change the number of instances, most keys get lost. In other words,
adding more servers incurs a performance hit since the cache needs to be
rebuilt.

-- Tim Starling


subject: [WikiEN-l] Context

body:
Simonides of Ceos wrote

>I don't mind if you start "screening" posts, because I rarely post here,
and because I am not interested by these silly and transparent games, like
your effort at "neutrality" on the Anti-Semitism Talk page where you
blithely accepted some of RK's delusions and prodded him to take the "higher
moral ground".

Note that Ed Poor does not speak for anyone except himself, in that
capacity; but that he is the list admin.  If you want to find out what other
opinions there are here, you would do well to conform as a poster.  There is
plenty of traffic, most days, and it is quite easy to ignore posts freighted
with personalia.

Charles


subject: [Wikitech-l] Categorization

body:
__NOCAT__ would certainly be useful, and I like sugg's 2-4
below. Fennec, can you explain #1?  ~sj~

On Tue, 13 Jul 2004 08:34:00 -0400, Fennec Foxen <fennec at gmail.com> wrote:
> How about several features all at once? (fun fun :)
> 1) Ability to change the displayed-title of an article in a category
> (not just the sort key). For cases where you want to kill parentheses.
> 2) Ability to surpress display of a certain category (the pages can
> thus be in Category:Stub without displaying the category message, and
> yet be in other useful categories).
> 3) Ability to cancel automatic display of all categories (the box at the bottom)
> 4) Ability to force display of all categories at a specific spot in the page.
>
> I'm sure you can come up with an [[Image:]]-like syntax of some sort :)


body:
Bill Clark wrote:
> On Thu, 15 Jul 2004 15:50:53 +1000, Tim Starling
> <ts4294967296 at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>This is unacceptable because people want to use templates for things
>>which are included many times in a single page, like superscript "Le" on
>>fr, or fancy bullet points.
>
>
> How about a MAX_INCLUDE_DEPTH then, instead?

The vulnerability with inclusion was pointed out when we had a
hard-coded maximum depth of 1. As I explained in a comment in the source
file:

#----------------------------------------
#    Variable substitution O(N^2) attack
#-----------------------------------------
# Without countermeasures, it would be possible to attack the parser by
saving a page
# filled with a large number of inclusions of large pages. The size of
the generated
# page would be proportional to the square of the input size. Hence, we
limit the number
# of inclusions of any given page, thus bringing any attack back to O(N).
#

-- Tim Starling


subject: [Wikitech-l] Categorization

body:
On Thu, 15 Jul 2004 16:09:34 -0400, Sj <2.718281828 at gmail.com> wrote:
> __NOCAT__ would certainly be useful, and I like sugg's 2-4
> below. Fennec, can you explain #1?  ~sj~
>
> On Tue, 13 Jul 2004 08:34:00 -0400, Fennec Foxen <fennec at gmail.com> wrote:
> > How about several features all at once? (fun fun :)
> > 1) Ability to change the displayed-title of an article in a category
> > (not just the sort key). For cases where you want to kill parentheses.

Sure. I was just at [[Category:File sharing]] recently, populating it.
I thought would be nice to list "Morpheus (computer program)" as just
"Morpheus", since it didn't seem to match most of the other articles.
The ability to be able to do that would be useful.

We can already change the order in which articles are sorted with the
sort-key [[Category:Foo|sort-key]], perhaps we could extend the syntax
in a manner similar to the extension of the [[Image:]] syntax.


body:
On Thu, 15 Jul 2004 22:35:36 +0200, Luc Van Oostenryck
<luc.vanoostenryck at easynet.be> wrote:
> It can be that this speed difference is due to the simultaneous loading of 3 "heavy" pages
> on fr while the only from en is not so demanding.

Also, most browsers will only open a certain number of connections per
server. If you are loading many pages from fr, especially if those
pages contain images (likely) then you may simply have to wait for the
first set of fr: material to load before a connection is free and a
second set can load.


body:
On Thu, 15 Jul 2004 15:50:49 -0400, Bill Clark <wclarkxoom at gmail.com> wrote:

> I still think it might be a round-robin DNS issue,

I'd bet dollars to donuts that it's at least in part due to DNS.
Hard-coding different values into my hosts file allows me to more
consistently control which site loads first.  (Note: If you do this,
make sure to pick pages to compare that have the same number of
images, since using just one IP address significantly slows down the
loading of the page as your browser will no longer request files in
parallel.)

I don't have the time to try all 6x6 combinations right now (running
out the door) but it really does seem that picking and choosing which
IP address to use for each domain makes a very significant difference.

I'm not sure why some servers would be consistently slower than
others, but perhaps some DNS resolvers choose the highest/lowest
address in a list rather than the first/last/random one, and that
could bias things quite a bit.

> Also, it might simply be better squid caching for the English site due
> to the fact that it gets far more traffic.

It's probably both.  I was testing the homepage on each site earlier,
which was probably the stupidest page for me to test since it's
obviously going to be cached.  When comparing some random page on the
French and English sites, it's far more likely that the English one
will be cached.

-Bill Clark


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Wikipedia in the news

body:
On Wed, 14 Jul 2004 10:41:18 -0500, Sheldon Rampton
<sheldon.rampton at verizon.net> wrote:
> Tim wrote:
>
> >Concluding factual inaccuracy or unreliability from mere grammatical
> >imperfection is fallacious and prejudicial.
>
> Well, it tells you *something* about the quality of the article. I'm
> pretty sure that the Encyclopedia Britannica would be concerned if
> one in five of its articles was riddled with grammatical errors.
>
> Mark Richards wrote:
>
> >I don't think so, although, of course, the two
> >sometimes do go together. We have some contributors
> >for whom English is not their first language. Grammar
> >and spelling are an issue for them where facts are
> >not.
>
> Someone who can't communicate well in English is more likely to
> produce inadvertent errors of fact. As one rather humorous example of
> this, years ago I knew a guy from Mexico with a thick accent who
> declared that he wanted "world piss." It took a few minutes before
> everyone figured out that he was actually saying he wanted "world
> peace."
I do not agree with that reasoning at all, some people do not learn
english fluently as most western europeans do and it isnt a part of
their daily culture, just because some chinese scholar has some
trauble with grammar doesnt mean he doesnt have his facts straight. Do
not assume that lack of fluency in a language indicates some sort of
general "thinking problems". In fact, there are lots of people on the
english, and probably other wikipedias who are far from fluent but
have a much better knowlage of some issues than some people who are
fluent in the language, for example some people from arabs countries
which would be more known to middle-eastern issues than the general
population of western europe and the states.
>
> In the stub articles I mentioned, the grammatical flaws in one were
> numerous but insufficient to prevent me from discerning the author's
> intent. In the other article, one of the sentences was so poorly
> written that I couldn't figure out the writer's meaning at all. When
> that's the case, I think poor grammar and spelling do indeed call
> "the facts" of the article into question.
>
> The bottom line, though, is that an encyclopedia article shouldn't
> have errors of grammar *or* fact. I know some respected university
> scholars who have problems with spelling and grammar, but before
> their writings get published, someone fixes those problems. An
> article in the Wikipedia that has problems with spelling and grammar
> clearly hasn't been through the level of review that goes into a
> student's term paper, let alone an article for the Encyclopedia
> Britannica.
>
> I'm not saying that contributors should be banned from Wikipedia if
> they have trouble with spelling and grammar. All I'm saying is that
> Wikipedia hasn't yet figured out how to match Encyclopedia Britannica
> with respect to the quality of its articles. Some individual articles
> in the Wikipedia are undoubtedly superior in quality to corresponding
> articles in the Britannica, but with the Britannica, *every article*
> comes virtually guaranteed to be accurate and well-researched -- and
> also correct in terms of spelling and grammar. That degree of
> confidence doesn't exist across the board for the Wikipedia.

Thing is, it's a totally unrealistic goal to reach some Britannica
"standard", the two encyclopedias have a _totally_ different operating
model, they have their flaws and we have ours, but we also have great
strengths that they do not have. Rather than always try to be like
Britannica an exploration of how we can levage our atvantages would be
in order.
>
> --Sheldon Rampton
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Fork risk (was Re: Google ads)

body:
Anthere wrote:
> Jimbo, I just read what you wrote about cultural bias, deny, confirm or
> infirm. Yes, that might be cultural biais. Who knows ?

Actually I said "confirmation bias".  I wasn't even thinking of
"cultural bias".

Confirmation bias is, according to wikipedia, "a type of cognitive
bias towards confirmation of the hypothesis under study."

Anyhow, it is my goal that we make sure that there is absolutely no
difference in load times -- to the extent it is technically feasible
-- between the different languages.  I was shocked to hear that people
have a feeling that fr loads slower than en, and I really want us to
do a lot of tests to make sure that is not true.

And if it is, we need to address it.

--Jimbo


body:
Bill Clark wrote:
> Hmm.. the problem would seem insurmountable then (barring some sort of
> checking on the size of includes, which seems like more trouble than
> its worth).
>
> Oh well.

We've discussed all this before, a couple of times. It's not insurmountable.

http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2004-June/010701.html

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Google ads and other ramblings by Chris

body:
Jimmy-
> It brings in very very close to nothing.  I believe Erik told me when
> I was in Berlin that we are getting close to the threshold for them to
> cut us our first check of $100.  Something like that anyway, I'm sure
> he'll clarify if this is materially wrong.

>From the Cafepress interface:

- - - -

Since your most recent check (which was mailed on July 15, 2004 for
$140.26 and covered all sales through May 2004), you've earned $225.44
through your account.

Of that amount, $100.20 has already cleared the mandatory 30 day return
period, and will appear in your next check (unless you spend it as
CafeCash!).

The other $125.24 comes from sales in the past 30 days, and remains in a
"pending state" until the items can no longer be returned. Once the 30-day
return period has elapsed, the commission is no longer pending, and
therefore becomes available to you, either through a check or as CafeCash.

- - -

So sales appear to be increasing, thanks in large part to the shop being
prominently featured on the fundraising page. Of course the fact that
quite a few people now have Wikipedia wall clocks, Wikipedia bags,
Wikipedia mugs, Wikipedia caps and Wikipedia shirts is cool on its own.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Thomas R. Koll

subject: [WikiEN-l] Fork risk (was Re: Google ads)

body:
On Thu, Jul 15, 2004 at 08:41:55PM +1000, Tim Starling wrote:
> If a Wikimedia chapter wants to buy servers for their language wiki to
> avoid slow, poor-quality service or site-wide advertising, then we
> should give them our blessing.

I'd prefer read-only mirrors which redirect the edits to the main
server. I don't know the situation at fr: but at de: we use wikipedia.de
not de.wikipedia.org in press news, so it would be easy to take some
good portion of the traffic off the Florida-servers.

ciao, tom
--
== Weblinks ==
* http://shop.wikipedia.org - WikiReader Internet zu kaufen
* http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:TomK32


from_name: Pablo Saratxaga

body:
Kaixo!

On Thu, Jul 15, 2004 at 03:58:41PM +0100, Angela_ wrote:

> The progress of newly requested wikis is noted on
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages. When it is
> created, a message will be added to that page for a few weeks before
> it is removed to make way for new requests. There is often an email to

Thanks.

It should be nice to have a similar page with archives on the past
demands, and their status (accepted, with the link to the wikipedia;
or refused)

--
Ki ?a vos v?ye b?n,
Pablo Saratxaga

http://chanae.walon.org/pablo/		PGP Key available, key ID: 0xD9B85466
[you can write me in Walloon, Spanish, French, English, Catalan or Esperanto]
[min povas skribi en valona, esperanta, angla aux latinidaj lingvoj]
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Categories for images?

body:
On Tue, 13 Jul 2004 16:54:33 +0100, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> Matthew Trump wrote:
>  It seemed highly desirableto me to create separate
> categories, for images only, so that we don't have "mixed"
> categories of both articles and images, which would be
> quite ugly and not very useful at all.

Could you explain what would be ugly and useless?  The
conceptual reduction of using the same term to describe
both images and articles, or the results of a mixed-source
presentation of category contents, or?

There are distinct interface and metadata issues here.
I'm not sure that it is necessary to have two different
conceptual cats for maps (articles) and maps (images),
if you mean the same kind of maps.

Cat display /should/ distinguish source types; articles,
images, and {other media} can be shown separately for
each group without further metadata, leveraging existing
namespaces.

+sj+


from_name: Wiki WIKI

subject: [Wikitech-l] Problems with the search function at Rev. 1.2.6

body:
Hello together,

I am using MediaWiki Rev. 1.2.6 and I am facing troubles with the search function.
Strings with less than 4 characters are not searchable, however I set the parameter
in the DefaultSettings.php.

I have set the $wgDBminWordLen = 2 and ran rebuildtextindex.php but no change.

I would really appreciate an advise, how to fix the matter.

Thanks in advance and best regards

Michael

_____________________________________________________
Powered by Diabetes-Kids Mail - www.diabetes-kids.de

Bei Missbrauch unseres Webmail Services schreibt bitte an abuse at diabetes-kids.de


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Language request: Luxembourgish

body:
Ewen Caroline wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I would like to request a luxembourgish version of Wikipedia. First of all,
> it's the language of my country, Luxembourg, and second, luxembourgish is
> only spoken in my country and still not by the whole population as we have
> 42% foreigners who mostly speak french. To keep the language alive, I think
> it would be a good idea to have a wikipedia in lux.

This language has an ISO 639-1 code of "lb" and 250,000 native speakers.
According to SIL it is related to German but not mutually intelligible
with it. I doubt there will be any objections to me setting this up at
lb.wikipedia.org

-- Tim Starling


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [Foundation-l] How could information flow ?

body:
On 07/15/04 12:47, Anthere wrote:

> 6. The message is not pretty (location in the page, red border, police size...)

We fiddled with it last night (see the edit history) to make it less
obnoxious. Centering it and putting it in italics seems to make it
less obnoxious. I would have made it <small> as well, but that doesn't
look so good in Monobook or Cologne Blue skins. (Perhaps someone who
knows css well enough can change the 'classic' skin to render the
template in small ...)

> 7. The message appears on every page (not enough discretion)

That's a ridiculous objection. The Wikipedia logo also appears on every
page. Current Events appears on every page. Presumably the servers are
bought using air ...

- d.


from_name: Anthere

body:
Yes Bill, but... the whole issue is that it has to be quickly available
for all projects ... ie, about 300 right now (okay, we could reduce this
to perhaps 80 active ones perhaps).
If we have to create 80 pages for each language on each project, better
just give up now. One person can't do it alone. He cant create 80 pages
and cant create 80 translations alone in a couple of hours.

The other point of my proposal is precisely to make it possible that
information is available to all, without being necessarily displayed
very visibly.

Unfortunately yes, it requires development, so if no one is interested
by doing it, it wont be done at all.

Still, this is what machines, bots can do for us, replace humans for
works which take too much time.

Bill Clark wrote:
> From: Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com>
> Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2004 05:47:40 -0700 (PDT)
>
>
>>Is this technically possible ? Is this suitable ? What do you think ? Do you have other ideas ?
>
>
> How about a link on this (and any future) such announcements that says
> something like "What's this announcement all about?"  It could point
> to a page explaining everything you just did about the banner (that
> it's temporary, because of a Slashdot interview with Jim, ads on pages
> -- even self-promotion ads -- isn't something Wikipedia normally does,
>  etc.)
>
> -Bill Clark


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Categories for images?

body:
On Fri, 16 Jul 2004 00:05:11 +0100, Rowan Collins
<rowan.collins at gmail.com> wrote:
> I was also going to suggest that one benefit of having separate image
> categories is that they could be displayed as auto-thumbnailed
> galleries, rather than lists of links. I guess even this could be done
> within the existing structure - although it would become even *more*
> important to have a decent multi-page results system...

A neat idea.  I would rather see work to go into multiply-useful interface
improvements like thisi than into debating, creating, and perhaps later
merging namespaces.   >sj<


from_name: Matthew Trump

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Categories for images?

body:
I think it would be "ugly" in that many image file names are quite
nondescriptive, using cryptic abbreviations or containing extra info
in the image file names, based on many different nomenclatures. So if
you mixed them, you would have "clean" descriptive article names
interspersed with many nondescriptive and arbitarily-formatted image
article names. I think that's less than ideal from the standpoint of
easy navigation through the metadata hierarchies.  It would detract
from the nice look-and-feel of categorization of articles.

Overall, in my opinion it is more natural to have articles and images
in separate categories spaces.

Sj said:
> On Tue, 13 Jul 2004 16:54:33 +0100, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
>> Matthew Trump wrote:
>>  It seemed highly desirableto me to create separate
>> categories, for images only, so that we don't have "mixed"
>> categories of both articles and images, which would be
>> quite ugly and not very useful at all.
>
> Could you explain what would be ugly and useless?  The
> conceptual reduction of using the same term to describe
> both images and articles, or the results of a mixed-source
> presentation of category contents, or?
>
> There are distinct interface and metadata issues here.
> I'm not sure that it is necessary to have two different
> conceptual cats for maps (articles) and maps (images),
> if you mean the same kind of maps.
>
> Cat display /should/ distinguish source types; articles,
> images, and {other media} can be shown separately for
> each group without further metadata, leveraging existing
> namespaces.
>
> +sj+
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Categories for images?

body:
I think this would work up to a point. Invoking categorization of
images *only* through article categories would not perhaps not bring
into a account the ontological hierachies that exists for images. For
examples, historical U.S. maps could be within [[Category:U.S.
history]], but they could also be collected under an image-related
category of all historical maps, which is a subcategory of all maps.
This particular hierachy may not be one that is natural for articles,
so it may be the case where we need image-only categories. I've come
to this conclucsion through some experimentation with this. I think
doing within the existing framework would be very useful.

I like Timwi's idea of [[Category:Image:xxxxx]]. Some coding to
produce thumbnails in these categories might not be too strenuous.

Rowan Collins said:
> Sj wrote:
>> Cat display /should/ distinguish source types; articles,
>> images, and {other media} can be shown separately for
>> each group without further metadata, leveraging existing
>> namespaces.
>
> That's a very good point - each category could have a partitioned off
> section for "Images in this category" as seperate from "Articles in
> this category", with no extra work on the user's part.
>
> I was also going to suggest that one benefit of having separate image
> categories is that they could be displayed as auto-thumbnailed
> galleries, rather than lists of links. I guess even this could be
> done
> within the existing structure - although it would become even *more*
> important to have a decent multi-page results system...
>
> --
> Rowan Collins BSc
> [IMSoP]
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Wikipedia growth since February 2004 greatly slowed

body:
Pete/Pcb21 wrote:

> This time last year WP was very often top of typical searches. Now our
> mirrors always come out ahead except for very recently breaking news
> (where they don't have the new content yet). What I term the "second
> generation" mirrors (such as thefreedictionary.com) are "gaming" the
> Google algorithm much better than Wikipedia is, and in a way the older
> mirrors (4reference.net etc) didn't.

But... think about it... what we want is information to be made
available... after all, this is what mirrors are offering... they
distribute information, and relieve our servers.

Hum ?


body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

> I personally don't have a distaste for ads - they just annoy me a bit. But I do
> have a distaste for the thought of forks such as with Enciclopedia Libre. This
> is especially dangerous now that chapters are being set-up that could fund a
> successful fork.

If a Wikimedia chapter wants to buy servers for their language wiki to
avoid slow, poor-quality service or site-wide advertising, then we
should give them our blessing. We should also give them a conditional
license to use the Wikipedia name, access to private SQL dumps and full
technical support. And once they have their hardware set up, we can set
the relevant DNS entries to point to them. We can help them with backups
and redundancy with a slave database server in Florida replicating all
writes. In order to allow software upgrades, maintenance tasks and
future features such as shared logins, it would be nice if all the
developers with shell access to the Florida servers also had shell
access to the foreign servers.

Forking is a bad thing because it implies duplicate effort from editors.
But I see no reason to fear distribution. The French chapter is
prohibited by law from sending most of their money to Florida, so in the
future it might be best for them to contribute hardware.

-- Tim Starling


body:
I can just say one thing I saw myself, and which was mentionned by
several french people.

When I have several windows open at the same moment, say three

*one open on en
*one open on fr
*one open on www.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main Page

The first page to load in en.
Several seconds later, it is fr.
And much later wikimedia.

I cant avoid seeing that en pages are often served much quicker than fr
pages.
I know not why. I am sure it is not on purpose. But it is a fact.

Thomas R. Koll wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 15, 2004 at 08:41:55PM +1000, Tim Starling wrote:
>
>>If a Wikimedia chapter wants to buy servers for their language wiki to
>>avoid slow, poor-quality service or site-wide advertising, then we
>>should give them our blessing.
>
>
> I'd prefer read-only mirrors which redirect the edits to the main
> server. I don't know the situation at fr: but at de: we use wikipedia.de
> not de.wikipedia.org in press news, so it would be easy to take some
> good portion of the traffic off the Florida-servers.
>
> ciao, tom


body:
Jimbo, I just read what you wrote about cultural bias, deny, confirm or
infirm. Yes, that might be cultural biais. Who knows ? Possibly. But I
was not only talking of the main page, just of regular pages. Yes, I was
always logged in. I really had this feeling a couple of weeks ago, when
it was so slow. I remember several times, around 7pm (in France), giving
up the fr wikipedia, to go to meta or en, because access was quicker.
I also had many "no db access" and when I asked people on irc, it seems
they had less than I.
This is not the case now.
Now, I see rather that the new little wikimedia.org takes huge time to load.

> Thomas R. Koll wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Jul 15, 2004 at 08:41:55PM +1000, Tim Starling wrote:
>>
>>> If a Wikimedia chapter wants to buy servers for their language wiki
>>> to avoid slow, poor-quality service or site-wide advertising, then we
>>> should give them our blessing.
>>
>>
>>
>> I'd prefer read-only mirrors which redirect the edits to the main
>> server. I don't know the situation at fr: but at de: we use wikipedia.de
>> not de.wikipedia.org in press news, so it would be easy to take some
>> good portion of the traffic off the Florida-servers.
>>
>> ciao, tom
>


body:
Anthere wrote:
> 5. The message appeared everywhere in english, and people did not know how to have it translated

The message did have an [edit] link attached to it. Is there a way of
making this clearer? Perhaps just having the word "edit" in the target
language would help?

> 6. The message is not pretty (location in the page, red border, police size...)

This can be changed in [[MediaWiki:Monobook.css]] but I expect many
people don't know that. Bill's suggestion of including a link to
"What's this announcement all about?" could address that issue and
explain how to reformat the message.

>>> 7. The message appears on every page (not enough discretion)
>> That's a ridiculous objection. The Wikipedia logo also appears on
every page. Current Events appears on every page.
> I agree. But still that is an objection which was made. And this is one of the reason why the message was removed from non en pedias.

I don't think that the notice appearing on every page had anything to
do with being removed from the non-English Wikipedias. It was removed
from them only for the reason that it was never supposed to be there
in the first place. Jimbo requested that it be put on the English
Wikipedia because of the expected increased in traffic from Slashdot.
As the Slashdot article was in English and linked only to the English
Wikipedia, the message was only required on the English Wikipedia. As
a result of trying to set up a system where the message would be
editable, it was accidentally placed on all Wikipedias, a situation
which was rectified as soon as Tim Starling was made aware of it.

Bill Clark wrote:
> I know they're still not great, but has anyone looked at some of the automated translation tools for some of this?

There aren't free machine translators available for every language in
which we have a Wikipedia, and I fear it would look rather
unprofessional to have garbled semi-translated messages at the top of
every page.

Anthere wrote:
> What I would like to see is something similar to the current "you have a message"...

I think this is a great idea, as long it is not abused by people
wanting to draw attention to some dispute or edit war they are in.

> Once the page is read, the warning message would disappear...

It wouldn't disappear for non-logged in users unless we want to start
sending them cookies.

Angela.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Please help us convert nl:Wiktionary to UTF-8

body:
At this moment nl:wiktionary is the fourth largest wiktionary. Many pages are waiting to be created. They cannot be as it requires UTF-8 to do so.

Regularly I have been moving information from nl:wiktionary to en:wiktionary from Timwi's website all translations of languages. It would be helpfull if the nl:wiktionary were UTF-8 as the texts would remain in the original characterset and edititing them will be less difficult.

Could someone _please_ help us out and convert the nl:wiktionary to UTF-8. Downtime is no problem. It can be done with 5 minutes notice. I think we have some 100 pages to be created.. Currently we have 1144 pages..

Thanks, GerardM---------------------7d40259d0--


from_name: Camille Constans

body:
On Thu, 15 Jul 2004 21:58:34 +0200
"Gerard.Meijssen" <gerardm at myrealbox.com> wrote:

> At this moment nl:wiktionary is the fourth largest wiktionary. Many pages are waiting to be created. They cannot be as it requires UTF-8 to do so.
>
> Regularly I have been moving information from nl:wiktionary to en:wiktionary from Timwi's website all translations of languages. It would be helpfull if the nl:wiktionary were UTF-8 as the texts would remain in the original characterset and edititing them will be less difficult.
>
> Could someone _please_ help us out and convert the nl:wiktionary to UTF-8. Downtime is no problem. It can be done with 5 minutes notice. I think we have some 100 pages to be created.. Currently we have 1144 pages..

I plan to switch es this week-end, a small wiki. If all works well, we could do the same with nl

Shaihulud


from_name: Luc Van Oostenryck

subject: [Wikitech-l] Relative loading times across languages

body:
Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
> Anthere reports that there is a general impression among the French
> that en.wikipedia.org loads faster than fr.wikipedia.org.  Is this
> possible?
>
> Can we run some tests?
>

Each time I start my computer and I open my browser I load 10 pages at the same time:
my user page on fr, my watch list on fr, two related pages from fr,
3 normal pages from fr and a page from en: [[List of astronomical topics]].
Since several weeks, systematically, the pag efrom en load substantially
faster than the fr ones (the second page is my user page on fr, then all
the remaining one more or less at the same time).

It can be that this speed difference is due to the simultaneous loading of 3 "heavy" pages
on fr while the only from en is not so demanding.
Otherwise, I don't feel a great subjective difference of loading time between fr and en
(but I have the impression that pages from en: loads a little bit faster, while the ones from meta
  load a little bit slower).

-- Looxix


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Relative loading times across languages

body:
> The French Wikipedia loads several seconds faster for me.
>
> I suspect this is at least partly just an instance of selective
> observation.  For some people, one site probably loads slightly faster
> than the other for whatever random routing reason.  Those who see the
> French site load first aren't going to complain, but those who see the
> English site load first _will_ complain.  Hence, you only hear one
> side of what's really a two-sided issue.
>
> Or at least that's my guess.
>
> It could also be something about the round-robin DNS:
>
> root at xoom:~>host en.wikipedia.org
> en.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.247
> en.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.248
> en.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.235
> en.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.236
> en.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.245
> en.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.246
> root at xoom:~>host fr.wikipedia.org
> fr.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.246
> fr.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.247
> fr.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.248
> fr.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.235
> fr.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.236
> fr.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.245
>
> Some browsers will choose an IP at random, but others take the first
> in the list.  Maybe it's just that .246 is faster than .247 and some
> people's DNS servers have the order cached that way so the same IP is
> always returned first.
>
> -Bill Clark

I was not precise enough. This feeling was quite strong about 3 or 4
weeks ago (or more ? time goes so quickly :-)). This was a time where
fr.wikipedia was nearly stuck every day around 7pm-9pm. When I say
"stuck", I really mean """stuck""". At that time, I could go on editing
en or meta, it was very slow, but was definitly faster than fr.

Shai told me that the configuration a few weeks ago was different from
what it is right now.
In any cases, this slowliness is not the case any more. But I personally
have no idea of config changes, so had no idea it was different a while ago.
I think that the one-side or two-sided issue is not really relevant.

If you ask me, each time I go to the www.wikimedia.org (now about a week
old), it is horribly slow to load pages. To the point that in spite of
my wish to work on this website, I have hardly done anything on it yet
because I do not have the patience to wait 10 to 20 seconds for a page
to load or save.

I know not what is the problem.
I just loaded the main page. The source writes
<!-- Served by isidore.wikimedia.org in 0.20 secs. -->

Still the page took exactly 21 seconds to load.

Why ????

This is not "cultural" effect, this is just what I see.


from_name: phil hunt

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Re: Google ads

body:
On Thu, 15 Jul 2004 07:17:30 -0700, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>Just a couple of important notes...
>
>phil hunt wrote:
>> Has anyone contacted Google to see what they think of opt-in
>> adverts?
>
>I would like to discourage people from contacting Google directly on
>our behalf.

Sure -- I wasn't implying random people should. If anyone sohuld
approach Google it'd have to be someone "official", such as you.

> I have an existing and substantial (to me!) business
>relationship with Google and good contacts within their ad syndication
>group.  It will baffle them if random people call them up asking
>questions about us.

I expect so.

>> However, Wikipedia is quite a high-traffic website, which would
>> probably give it a reasonable level of clout in any negotiations
>> with Google.
>
>Sure.  Even with Bomis, we don't just sign up for their general public
>program, we have a (long and detailed) contract.  There's no reason to
>assume that their general AdSense terms of service would have much to
>do with us.
>
>At the same time, I think it is important to recognize that "opt-in"
>is likely to be frowned upon for exactly the reason that you mentioned
>-- the audience of people opting in would be too likely to click just
>to generate revenue, as opposed to clicking out of genuine interest.
>That's useless for the advertisers.

Indeed so. However, I could imagine some adverts being useful and
relevant to me. After all, I'm likely to be visiting Wikipedia pages
I'm interested in, and Google adverts are likely to be well-targeted
(the ones on my personal website seem to be), so it's very likely I
would see some adverts that were of interest to me.

>I also am not really comfortable with opt-in.  Compared to opt-out, I
>think it would generate very close to zero revenue.  Probably less
>than 5% of the revenue potential of opt-out.  The reason is that the
>vast majority of our pageviews are from people who just happen in.
>These people are not opposed to advertising, but at the same time,
>they will not care enough to bother to read a link about how to enable
>ads.
>
>So with opt-in, we get almost all of the "negative press" issues as we
>get with opt-out, but we also don't get the kind of money that would
>enable us to do really astounding things consistent with our
>charitable mission.

If there is opt-out, then people who don't like to see adverts
can't really complain about them. Especially if opting out is easy:
if it was cookie based rather than forcing people to log in to stop
seeing adverts, then people would be able to set preferences for the
site once, and never see another ad. (On a tangent, it'd be nice if
style sheets were cookie-based, since I prefer the traditional style
of WP to the more modern one.)

>Let me state again that I am currently opposed to any advertising on
>Wikipedia.  I have only been talking about this because I think it is
>important for us to continue to make the "no advertising" decision
>while being fully cognizant of what it is that we are turning down.

What about the argument the other way round, where people think
Wikipedia is a worthwhile project, and they would donate money to
it, but they see WP turning down substancial amonuts of revenue from
advertising, and they ask themselves "if WP won't help themselves,
why should I help them?"

I've no idea if this represents a significant number of people, but
it might do.

>It's much easier for us to say no when we imagine that the revenue
>would be $1,000 a month.  It would obviously be much easier for the
>community to say no, if the revenue was to go to a for-profit company.
>(Hooray!  The make-Jimbo-rich fund!  Not.)

I think most people here trust your honest intentions.

>But I think that the issue really only gets interesting when we start
>talking about really vast sums of money that would be spent with
>extreme efficiency to further our charitable aims.

Yes, it does.

--
"It's easier to find people online who openly support the KKK than
people who openly support the RIAA" -- comment on Wikipedia
(Email: zen19725 at zen dot co dot uk)


from_name: kelvSYC

subject: [Wikipedia-l] And now a bit of fun...

body:
Here's a very unscientific and informal gauge of how great Wikipedia
has become compared to other encyclopedias: the Google fight
(www.googlefight.com).  It simply compares Google hits and displays it
in a rather humorous format.

Wikipedia - 11,200,000

Encyclopedia Britannica - 1,670,000
Encyclopaedia Britannica - 1,420,000
Encyclop?dia Britannica - 803

Encyclopedia Americana - 94,700
Encyclopaedia Americana - 11,500
Encyclop?dia Americana - 88

Encarta - 5,060,000
Microsoft Encarta - 1,070,000

Funk and Wagnalls - 36,400

Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia - 11,300

Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia - 29,000
Grolier's Encyclopedia - 5,920

The Star Trek Encyclopedia - 108,000

Interesting to note that Wikipedia loses against "World Book"
(14,800,000) but not "World Book Encyclopedia" (3,130,000).

For comparison, Wikipedia wins against
Internet Explorer - 10,900,000
The Simpsons - 9,900,000 (the Simpson family member with the highest
score is Lisa Simpson)
iPod - 8,390,000
World Cup - 7,870,000
ESPN - 5,520,000
Warcraft - 3,860,000
Super Bowl - 3,590,000
Slashdot - 3,490,000
National Football League - 2,600,000 (although Wikipedia loses to "NFL"
- 13,300,000)
Pokemon - 2,470,000 (like "Encyclop?dia Britannica", you get less
results with the correct spelling of "Pok?mon")
Street Fighter - 1,900,000 (speaking of which, Marvel beats Capcom,
which beats SNK)
Starcraft - 1,680,000

Wikipedia tied against SourceForge, and lost embarassingly to football
(42,700,000), Google (59,600,000) and eBay (65,300,000).

As for Wikipedia's dictionary counterpart, Wiktionary loses a lot of
its Google fights...

Wiktionary - 331,000

Oxford English Dictionary - 2,090,000
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language - 1,160,000
New Oxford American Dictionary - 796,000
Concise Oxford Dictionary - 182,000

All data based on results on July 15, 2004.


from_name: Alex Regh

subject:
[WikiEN-l] The Church of Scientology is discovered to have
	discovered Wikipedia!

body:
Hi!

On Thu, 15 Jul 2004 07:48:05 -0600, Fred Bauder wrote:

>Attempts by the Chinese government to edit
>Wikipedia articles on China would be highly counter-productive and
>embarrassing for many of the same reasons that apply to an individual user.

Not too sure about that - I am sure that many articles about China could be
edited in a quite NPOV way even by the Chinese government. However, articles
about current Chinese politics would not be among these articles.

Same way, CoS should maybe not edit articles about the CoS, because their way
of dealing with anything that does not agree with their point of view is quite
notorious, and, let me put this carefully, does not exactly seem to agree well
with the principle of NPOV.

The comparison with say, Roman Catholics, does not hold too much water,
because let's face it, there are quite a few Catholics who do not necessarily
agree with everything that comes from Rome; something that is said not to be
particularly good if you are a member of CoS. (Or not even a member, for that
matter.) Also, Rome has stopped burning their critics for quite a while now,
too.

Alex
--
If you don't go over the top,
you can't see what's on the other side.
        --- Jim Steinman ---

Alex' Assorted Homepages: www.alexsite.de


from_name: Timwi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Memcached rearrangement

references:
<cd56vn$4u4$1@sea.gmane.org> <cd5skq$kkh$3@sea.gmane.org>
	<cd69e9$qfm$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
Tim Starling wrote:

> I can rant all day
> about problems with memcached, both in the clients and in the server.

Have you considered reporting the problems with the server "upstream"?


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Categories for images?

body:
Sj wrote:
> Cat display /should/ distinguish source types; articles,
> images, and {other media} can be shown separately for
> each group without further metadata, leveraging existing
> namespaces.

That's a very good point - each category could have a partitioned off
section for "Images in this category" as seperate from "Articles in
this category", with no extra work on the user's part.

I was also going to suggest that one benefit of having separate image
categories is that they could be displayed as auto-thumbnailed
galleries, rather than lists of links. I guess even this could be done
within the existing structure - although it would become even *more*
important to have a decent multi-page results system...

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject:
[Foundation-l] Wikipedia growth since February 2004 greatly slowed
	- uh, no

body:
--- Pete/Pcb21 <pete_pcb21_wpmail at pcbartlett.com> wrote on wikien-l:
> Christopher Mahan wrote:
> I've been meaning to find a peg to hang the following post on ever since
> I lost the post with mav's original 90% growth projections on:
>
> All the evidence (see below) suggests that Wikipedia has *not* grown by
> a significant amount since the huge explosion in February/March 2004.

Huh? Check out the graph on page one here (again, this model assumes business
as usual):

http://meta.wikimedia.org/upload/0/07/Hardware_costs_-_year.pdf

The first big bump was in Q1 2004 (Jan-March) and the second, much larger spike
was in June during Q2 2004 (1.21 M hits/day on average). We are still about at
the same level (1.23 M hits/day average) as June, which is about the same as
the figure in the model I developed (1.29 M hits/day average for July  2004).
However that model averages each three month period so we won't know just how
close the estimate is until the end of this quarter.*

But replacing the model figure with the current partial one and extrapolating
for the rest of the quarter still gives 75% more hits/day for Q3 vs Q2 (the
model predicts 85%). That assumes we keep the *same* average we have now for
each month this quarter (1.123 M hits/day). Our average may do down but more
likely it will increase to at least the modeled figure (I fear it may surpass
it).

> ''However'' I do not think it is a coincidence that this four months of
> little growth corresponds almost exactly with the period that Wikipedia
> has "disappered" from Google.

I think we did take a two month hit from that and that may explain why our
traffic only grew by 73% from Q1 2004 to Q2 2003 but we also have to take into
account that our traffic grew 176% from the last quarter of 2003 to the first
quarter of 2004. So that *mere* 73% growth *alone* is in fact more traffic than
we served in all 2003 *combined* (that's right, add up the totals of each of
those 12 months and you are just shy of the *increase* in traffic from the
first three months this year to the second three months).

Given our continued rapid growth in spite of our Google rank situation, I think
an exponentially growing number of people are starting to go to Wikipedia
*first* and then using Google in the increasingly rare cases that Wikipedia did
not have all the info they needed.

So the Google effect, like the previous Slashdot effect, is starting to show
some signs of having somewhat less influence on us, IMO. I won't be surprised
if Google comes to us in a years time trying to push us into having Google ads.

NOTE: I just revised my January filler figure from 5000 K hits/day to 1600 K
hits/day since that is the carry over number from the last time we had data
(October 2003). Also, IIRC the server farm wasn't installed until late January
so a lower figure is probably closer to reality.

> This time last year WP was very often top of typical searches. Now our
> mirrors always come out ahead except for very recently breaking news
> (where they don't have the new content yet). What I term the "second
> generation" mirrors (such as thefreedictionary.com) are "gaming" the
> Google algorithm much better than Wikipedia is, and in a way the older
> mirrors (4reference.net etc) didn't.

This is indeed a problem, but a good one until we can firmly get a handle on
our finances. The server situation would be much worse if the articles we host
were still in the top ten like they were before Google changed their PageRank
criteria. Since we do not get ad revenue from hits and our traffic/popularity
is already growing exponentially, I don't see a problem with our mirrored
content getting higher PageRanks than the originals. At least for now.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - Send 10MB messages!
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail


from_name: Tim Starling

body:
Timwi wrote:
> Tim Starling wrote:
>
>> Because the client algorithm distributes keys to each available server
>> equally,
>
>
> Is this a shortcoming of the PHP version of the memcached client? This
> is certainly not true for the Perl version; you can specify weights there.

Before we fixed it, the PHP client sent every key with a key length
longer than about 8 bytes to the first server on the list. Since pretty
much all our keys are longer than 8 bytes, this caused some problems. I
still haven't sent a patch upstream for that one. I can rant all day
about problems with memcached, both in the clients and in the server. As
soon as I find (or write) a suitable alternative, I'm switching to it.
Perhaps some sort of LRU cache wrapper around TreadMarks or SAM would do
the trick.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Sj

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: [WikiFR-l] How could information flow ?

body:
Bonjour Anthere,

Some further thoughts after a good sleep:
> This was not planned so we could not really discuss it in length beforehand.

[-A-]nnouncements

There needs to be a way to notify active community members about a sudden
change, before random visitors (the bulk of our Audience, and
/potential/ community
members) are exposed to the fallout.

Some sort of read-only mailing list for announcements (like
announcement-l) could be
an important part of this communication setup; for instance, if I were
on a wikibreak, I
would only hear about things via mailing lists or personal email.
Likewise, I could filter
mail from an important low-traffic announcements list to my PDA or phone.

[-B-]roadcasting sudden change

There should be a checklist for discussing/preparing for/announcing
sudden changes:
 * message-box on all affected wm projects (Ant's proposal)
 * one-line comment in #wp, #wm, #mw as appropriate
 * quick email to wikipedia-l, an announcement-l, other lists (as appropriate)
 * quick note on [[meta:Goings-on]] (perhaps just the contents of the
above email)

These could be implemented after the change, if urgency demands, but
soon after, and with relevant details (who, when, why, for how long).  In
addition to helping clarify to the community what is going on, this
would provide
a feedback loop for the various people involved in deciding what to do, to help
reduce the ''telephone'' effect.

< I was also nicely explained I should have made a page [about] why
the banner was
< on, how long it would stay... Of course that page should have been
in 50 languages.

[-C-]oordinated Translation

This is very much on my mind right now. (see [-F-] Crude CMS below)

I created a "translate this into every language" section of
[[meta:Translation]], & seeded
it with the text for the image-upload forms (currently only in de:)
... please tell me
(everyone!) what you think of that template.

> This is only possible if more people are automatically made aware of the issue,
> and can come and help.

[-A*-]
Being able to make an announcement to those interested in helping, before
affecting first-time visitors (and those not interested in helping),
would be useful here.

> 7. The message appears on every page (not enough discretion)

[-D-]iscretion

As for this -- I think many other compromises might have been reached.  Without
greatly reducing the number of visitors who see the message, we could decide to
limit its appearance in various ways
* Not on User pages.
* Only on article/Talk pages, and not on the Main Page.
* Only on every tenth page-load, for logged-in users.
&c, &c.

> 5. The message appeared everywhere in english, and people did not know how to
> have it translated
< ...
> Once edited, it would appear on all projects, in english by default,
> but will be editable easily for translation (just as a mediawiki page,

[-E-]diting and translating.

Note that, while [edit] links were there for most wp's, only Admins
were able to edit
the protected message yesterday.  Some middle-ground of protection,
allowing anyone
to edit/translate but requiring an admin to approve it, might improve
this process.

> Each time the meta message page is updated, a warning of the type ''you have a
> message'' would appear to all users on all projects.  Once the page is read, the
> warning message would disappear, but the information still be available from the
> menu in the "global news" page.

[-F-]low  ( crude workflow : Discussion --> Translation --> Notice -->
Publication )

We need to take ourselves seriously as publishers.  I would like to
see a tiny bit
of coordinated workflow introduced into major all-projects all-pages
publication
decisions.  For instance:

1) An initial announcement is posted to [[Meta:Announcements]] (perhaps also to
#wp or #wm) in a single language, along with a brief notice/explanation.
2) A standard message is sent to all translators, ambassadors, &
admins notifying
them that an announcement is being prepared.  Anyone who catches this post or
message can suggest rewording, timing for the two delays below, or translations
(in a specified place/format)
     --- delay 1 ---
3) The notices are sent out in translated langs, with links to the
announcement... via
a "New Announcement" banner for logged-in users, or just a combination
of mailing lists, IRC, and goings-on.  This would give the broader
community notice,
and a chance to comment on the translations, even a chance to comment on the
placement (and discretion) of the proposed message on their project pages.
     --- delay 2 ---
4) Announcements are published -- banners for all users saying "New
Announcement",
or a direct banner message.

We're a big enough project that even with two delays of only an hour
each, this could
have respectable results.

+sj+


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: [WikiFR-l] How could information flow ?


from_name: Robert

subject:
[WikiEN-l] This is NOT a religious encyclopedia;
	we do not push religious beliefs.

body:
Frd bauder responds to SLR's discussion on NPOV:
> Big problem here though. For example, if you apply this
> to Judaism, you are taking the Reform Judaism position.

Fred, are you joking? We are NOT a fundamentalist religious
encycloepdia. We are NOT here to push the Orthodox Jewish
view of history, ethics and the Bible in our articles.
Similarly, we are NOT here to push the Fundamentalist
Christian or Muslim views of history, ethics and the Bible
in our articles.

>From day one fundamentalist Christians, Jews and Muslims
have swammped our talk pages claiming about imaginary bias
in Wikipedia, because we use history instead of blindly
accepting their POV as factual. And fortunately, the great
majority of us have reverted their partisan POV edits, and
restored Wikipedia articles to be in line with our NPOV
policy.

You really need to re-read what our NPOV policy says. For
instance, We do not say that: "God created the world 6,000
years ago."

Rather we say something like: "According to many Orthodox
Jews God created the world 6,000 years ago. However, this
belief has evolved over time, and even in the medieval era
a number of Jewish rationalists disagreed with this view.
Using the science and philosophy of their, they concluded
that the world was much, much older, and that such
reinterpretations were not a violation of Jewish principles
of faith. Today, all non-fundamentalist Jews reject such
views, and instead re-interpret their religious texts to be
in consonance with modern say scientific findings, to show
that the the world was created several billion years ago."

As SLR writes, NPOV often means multiple points of view.
This means providing not only the points of view of
different groups today, but different groups in the past."
If anyone is unwilling to follow NPOV policy, they cannot
contribute to our articles. End of story.

As SLR writes "Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. One important
task for articles is to explain things. In the case of
human beliefs and practices, explanation encompasses not
only what motivates individuals who hold these beliefs and
practices, but an account of how such beliefs and practices
came to be and took shape."

He is right. To do anything less means the death of
Wikipedia. We are not a religious encyclopedia with a
religious agenda, no matter what some of our contributors
may wish.

Robert (RK)

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - 100MB free storage!
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: How could information flow ?

body:
Angela_ wrote:
> Anthere wrote:
>
>>5. The message appeared everywhere in english, and people did not know how to have it translated
>
>
> The message did have an [edit] link attached to it. Is there a way of
> making this clearer? Perhaps just having the word "edit" in the target
> language would help?

Sorry, but I do not understand your comment at all.
When I look at any page on en right now, say my watch list, I currently
see a message at the top of it, with a red border all around it. The
message says "To help support Wikipedia, please visit our fundraising
page, or read about how we use the money.".

There is no [edit] link within it, attached to it. Where do you see one ???

>>6. The message is not pretty (location in the page, red border, police size...)
>
>
> This can be changed in [[MediaWiki:Monobook.css]] but I expect many
> people don't know that. Bill's suggestion of including a link to
> "What's this announcement all about?" could address that issue and
> explain how to reformat the message.

Yes.

>>>>7. The message appears on every page (not enough discretion)
>>>
>>>That's a ridiculous objection. The Wikipedia logo also appears on
>>
> every page. Current Events appears on every page.
>
>>I agree. But still that is an objection which was made. And this is one of the reason why the message was removed from non en pedias.
>
>
> I don't think that the notice appearing on every page had anything to
> do with being removed from the non-English Wikipedias. It was removed
> from them only for the reason that it was never supposed to be there
> in the first place. Jimbo requested that it be put on the English
> Wikipedia because of the expected increased in traffic from Slashdot.
> As the Slashdot article was in English and linked only to the English
> Wikipedia, the message was only required on the English Wikipedia. As
> a result of trying to set up a system where the message would be
> editable, it was accidentally placed on all Wikipedias, a situation
> which was rectified as soon as Tim Starling was made aware of it.

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia%3ALe_Bistro#Gratuite_.3F

And yes, I was the one who suggested that the message be put on the
pedia after Jimbo told me of the interview. That created such an uproar
I regret it.

> Anthere wrote:
>
>>What I would like to see is something similar to the current "you have a message"...
>
>
> I think this is a great idea, as long it is not abused by people
> wanting to draw attention to some dispute or edit war they are in.

Since these would be global community messages, I do not see why local
dispute or edit war would be there. Some users try to spread edit wars
on the wrong mailing list, but usually, they are told they are in the
wrong place. Here, more simply, their message would be deleted.

>>Once the page is read, the warning message would disappear...
>
>
> It wouldn't disappear for non-logged in users unless we want to start
> sending them cookies.
>
> Angela.

True. But, the current message with red border does appear constantly as
well.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: How could information flow ?

body:
Bill Clark wrote:
> On Thu, 15 Jul 2004 18:51:32 +0200, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
>>Yes Bill, but... the whole issue is that it has to be quickly available
>>for all projects ... ie, about 300 right now (okay, we could reduce this
>>to perhaps 80 active ones perhaps).
>
>
> We could still go for the low-hanging fruit and stick an "About this
> message" link on the  most popular projects.  That would eliminate a
> lot of the questions and complaints people have, I'd think.

Yes, but this message would have to be hosted on meta, and have a "edit"
this page, so that users could add translations to it.

>>If we have to create 80 pages for each language on each project, better
>>just give up now. One person can't do it alone. He cant create 80 pages
>>and cant create 80 translations alone in a couple of hours.
>
>
> I know they're still not great, but has anyone looked at some of the
> automated translation tools for some of this?  If the message is
> simple enough, the translations might not get TOO garbled.  (Oh, who
> am I kidding? They stink.  Right?)

They stink :-)
The problem is that even if you use a translation tool, you still have
to go to each wiki in turn and post the translation. The translation,
then the edition takes a minimum of 5 minutes each.

>>The other point of my proposal is precisely to make it possible that
>>information is available to all, without being necessarily displayed
>>very visibly.
>
>
> Maybe something in the top part of the page, where the username and
> such are displayed?  An "announcements" link that changes color when
> there are new notices?

Good idea. Of course, that means that only loggued in people would get
warned, but we could still have an annoucements page in the tool bar.

> Or if it's something we want to make sure people don't miss, we could
> go the route of making a (shudder) "splash" page for the site, so that
> the very first thing visitors see is the donation message.

No way :-)

> I'm going to be very happy to do development... once I familiarize
> myself with the code base.  Now, if I just spent more time actually
> moving forward on that familiarization, rather than just talking about
> it... (...then I think my paying clients would probably be upset with
> me.)

This is very good news :-)

>>Still, this is what machines, bots can do for us, replace humans for
>>works which take too much time.
>
>
> We were talking earlier about a custom bot interface on the website,
> but here's another thought:  A separate, special "internal" bot
> mechanism whereby scripts can run directly on the server, available
> only for tasks that are *part* of the Wikipedia, rather than those
> having to do with articles themselves.  The python bot code could
> probably be adapted for this purpose, and would provide a standard way
> of making server-side maintenance scripts.
>
> -Bill Clark

Hum, I am not sure I understand this well.
Let me try to explain what I imagine. Dunno if that is technically possible.

On meta (for example), there is a page called [[annoucements]].

------
This page is built this way

*10 juillet 2004 : [[mediawiki:We got an award !]] ([[edit this comment]])

*8 juillet 2004 : [[mediawiki:German Wikipedia on TV]] ([[edit this
comment]])

*5 juillet 2004 : [[mediawiki:Servers will be down on the 14th of july]]
([[edit this comment]])

------

on each wiki, for each user, an announcement link is available
somewhere. When the user click on it, he will read

-------

*10 juillet 2004 : Wikipedia received an award today, blablabla ([[edit
this comment]])

*8 juillet 2004 :  The German Wikipedia was featured on TV yesterday
evening... Arne said... the hits during the show were amazing... ([[edit
this comment]])

*5 juillet 2004 : Holiday time : servers will be down on the 14th of
july ... ([[edit this comment]])

------

The text displayed per default will be the one wrote on meta, but as
soon as someone click on [[edit this comment]], the translation will
replace the original text on the local site.

Each time the [[announcements]] page is modified on meta, users will be
notified on their wiki.

What it mostly needs is that the information on meta is automatically
loaded on each local project.

Possible ?


from_name: Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales

subject: [Wikipedia-l] And now a bit of fun...

body:
This was cute.

In 1966, John Lennon caused a bit of a stir by saying that the Beatles
were "more popular than Jesus".  I'm not an international rock star,
so hopefully no one will notice if I post this link:

http://www.googlefight.com/cgi-bin/compare.pl?q1=Wikipedia&q2=Jesus&B1=Make+a+fight%21&compare=1&langue=us
and this one:
http://www.googlefight.com/cgi-bin/compare.pl?q1=Wikipedia&q2=Beatles&B1=Make+a+fight%21&compare=1&langue=us

Beatles 5,560,000
Jesus   5,190,000

Beatles plus Jesus total: 10,750,000

Wikipedia by itself: 11,200,000

Roll over, John Lennon, Wikipedia is more popular than Jesus and the
Beatles combined.

--Jimbo


subject:
[Foundation-l] Wikipedia growth since February 2004 greatly
	slowed - uh, no

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> I won't be surprised if Google comes to us in a years time trying to
> push us into having Google ads.

You seem to be hinting with the word "push" that they would compromise
their editorial integrity in exchange for the opportunity to show ads.
I think that is extraordinarily unlikely.  They are good people.

I think it's much more likely that once they get the Google Foundation
underway, they'll be supporting us financially as a matter of good
will.

(Search the web for "Google Foundation" and you'll see what I mean.)

--Jimbo