subject:
[Foundation-l] Meeting with Navajo (Dine) Tribal Members on Navajo
 Machine Translation Project

body:
I hosted a meeting at my home all day Saturday with the Dine Linguists
and Tribal members on the Dine Machine Translation Project.

Similair to the Cherokee Language, Dine, while is has over 100,000
native speakers, his virtually little written materials as tribal
resources. The group was led by Ronnie Greymountain of the Dine Nation
and several linguists. The following items are in process
and being completed by myself and the Dine team:

1. Unicode templates for Dine Unicode characters:

TEXT

?? ??

?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ???? ???? ???? ???? ????

Aa Ee Ii Oo

Bb Cc Dd Gg Hh Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Ss Tt Ww Yy Zz
Unicode Hex Values for non-ASCII Navajo Letters

Precomposed Composed

glottal stop 02BC none

c unvoiced l 0141 none
s unvoiced l 0142 none

c high n 0143 004E+0301
s high n 0144 006E+0301

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

c high a 00C1 0041+0301
s high a 00E1 0061+0301

c high e 00C9 0045+0301
s high e 00E9 0065+0301

c high i 00CD 0049+0301
s high i 00ED 0069+0301

c high o 00D3 004F+0301
s high o 00F3 006F+0301

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

c nasal a 0104 0041+0328
s nasal a 0105 0061+0328

c nasal e 0118 0045+0328
s nasal e 0119 0065+0328

c nasal i 012E 0049+0328
s nasal i 012F 0069+0328

c nasal o 01EA 004F+0328
s nasal o 01EB 006F+0328

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

c high nasal a none 0104+0301 00C1+0328 0041+0301+0328
s high nasal a none 0105+0301 00E1+0328 0061+0301+0328

c high nasal e none 0118+0301 00C9+0328 0045+0301+0328
s high nasal e none 0119+0301 00E9+0328 0065+0301+0328

c high nasal i none 012E+0301 00CD+0328 0049+0301+0328
s high nasal i none 012F+0301 00ED+0328 0069+0301+0328

c high nasal o none 01EA+0301 00D3+0328 004F+0301+0328
s high nasal o none 01EB+0301 00F3+0328 006F+0301+0328

We are writing a <dine2text> and <text2dine> mediawiki extension to
allow simple text entry in order to render Navajo Unicode characters
(which are much simpler than Cherokee Syllabary). The specification
agreed to is:

[char] = high unicode
(char) = nasal unicode
{char} = high nasal
(L/l) = unvoiced L/l
' = glottal stop
The "A" with a circle on top of the chracter is not part of the formal
unicode for Dine and is not generally used with all dialects, so there
is debate and continued research on whether it will be adopted. The
Dine2Text MediaWiki extension will be completed next week and posted to
meta.

2. Wikipedia nv.wikiepdia.org

This site was reviewed and the tribal members all voiced they liked the
attempt. As with Cherokee, the Dine name for the site drew some chuckles
as it is not a real word in Dine. The machine translation site is being
setup at nv.wikigadugi.org and Ronnie will be meeting with the tribal
leaders after we get several good runs of the translator.

3. Lexicons and Grammar parser

The Dine team is working on the lexicons and grammar parser for
Wikitrans and have committed to first run on 30 days with completed
lexicons and
thesauraus. Dine has a similiar structure to Cherokee in word and
sentence structure, though it is less structured than Cherokee.

We should have first runs of a completed Dine Wikipedia Machine
translation mid to end of October. The Dine people will be publishing these
runs at Wikigadugi, then after they receive tribal acceptance, we will
start moving proofread content to the main Wikipedia site for the Dine
Language.

There are three main dialects of Dine, but the language drift is minimal
in comparison to Cherokee and several other native languages due to the
stability of large number of native speakers in NavajoLand.

Jeff


list: wikimedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Jeffrey V. Merkey


list: foundation-l

from_name: Gregory Maxwell

subject: [Foundation-l] [WikiEN-l] Wikimedia Board Elections

body:
On 9/17/06, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
[snip]
> I completely disagree with this; I would much, much rather know *more* about
> the people I'm voting for, rather than less
[snip]

So are you honestly saying that you'd spend 14 hours reading candidate
statements?

If thats true I suspect that you would be alone.

There comes a point where writing more causes you to know less.

I sat down with the two longest statements and tried to make a
position sheet that highlighted places where they clearly disagreed or
proposed alternative approaches to what was clearly the same issue.

I was able to find two points.

So sure, if you want sunshine and baby kissing, several of our
hopefuls are willing and able to dish it out by the truckload... and
perhaps thats a virtue for this position, but I understand that the
general public has a shorter attention span than I do, and I sure know
that I got bored of these folks quickly.


from_name: Kat Walsh

subject: [Foundation-l] Sanger's first post to Citizendium-l

body:
Sanger has made his first post to the Citizendium list:

https://lists.purdue.edu/pipermail/citizendium-l/2006-September/000000.html

Select quotes and a bit of commentary:

"I have a suggestion from someone very high up in the Creative Commons
organization that we should dual-license (CC and GFDL), which I simply
hadn't thought of.  I'm inclined to think it's a good idea."

I'd like to know how that would be compatible with working from
Wikipedia content.

"Speaking of naysayers, sure there have been a few on the blogosphere,
but what was especially striking to me is that Wikimedia's lawyer and
chief engineer both have said nothing but encouraging things to us.
How wonderfully refreshing of them!  And huge numbers of people on
Slashdot and elsewhere have come out saying that this is a good idea,
and that we have every right to do it."

Well, of course! That's what the "free content" bit is for, and I'm
interested in seeing how well this one works. I'd actually like to see
more projects coming from people who want to differ on some
fundamental point; Wikinfo is perhaps the best go at this so far.

"Personally, "Citizendium" rolls right off my tongue."

OK, that part I find hard to believe. :-)

-Kat

--
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mindspillage  |  G/AIM:LucidWaking
mindspillage or mind|wandering on irc.freenode.net | email for phone
The good traveller has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving
-- Lao-Tzu        Wikia: creating communities - http://www.wikia.com


list: wikien-l

subject: [WikiEN-l] Sanger's first post to Citizendium-l


from_name: Oldak Quill

subject: [Foundation-l] Minimum standards for verifiability

body:
On 16/09/06, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> ????????? ??????? wrote:
> > * Our project still very young for such strict rule (Russian Wikipedia
> > has more then 100,000 articles)
>
> This seems reasonable to me---en.wikipedia didn't enter a strong
> verifiability/citation push until around 1 million articles. Before
> that, the focus was on expanding content to a critical mass.

en.wikipedia achieved a million articles in a very short period of
time. If a project takes 10 years to reach the 1 million mark, I don't
believe it should put off strong rules of verifiability until then.
Another problem with this 1 million suggestion is that some Wikipedias
have much more restrictive policies on inclusion (de.wikipedia being a
good example).

I suppose projects will naturally form strong verifiability rules in
response to growing media criticism. This should generally result in
Wikipedias establishing these rules at the same point of
popularity/media focus.
--
Oldak Quill (oldakquill at gmail.com)


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Angela

subject: [Wikitech-l] templates broken?

body:
On 9/18/06, Simetrical <Simetrical+wikitech at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/17/06, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:
> > Platonides wrote:
> > > Er... yes, it showed as a link, but after purging has gone,
> >
> > Right.  (Can someone remind me how to do that?)
>
> Add ?action=purge to the URL

or bookmark this:
javascript:location=location + '?action=purge';
and then just click it to purge a page on any MediaWiki site.

Angela

--
Angela Beesley
http://wikia.com | http://a.nge.la


from_name: zero 0000

subject: [WikiEN-l] [[WP:V]] and [[WP:RS]] are destroying Wikipedia

body:
> From: Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com>
>
> Obviously [[WP:V]] and (to a lesser extent) [[WP:RS]] are absolutely

> vital policies that cannot be discarded. On the other hand, in their
> current form they are abominations that fundamentally undermine key
> aspects of Wikipedia's mission.

I'd like to thank Phil for his unusually thoughtful posting.
I'm not sure that I agree with all of it, but there is one point
that I want to emphasise.

> 1) They actively encourage removal of material that is accurate
>
> Admittedly, our standard for inclusion is "verifiability, not truth."
> We ought not, however, fall into the trap of deciding that we are
> therefore against truth. Our goal is to offer the sum total of human
> knowledge. If information is true and significant, we ought be trying
> to find a way to get it in.

Hear! Hear!  The problem with the current policy, starting with that
appalling slogan "verifiability, not truth" is that it presents
verifiability
and truth as alternatives.  What on Earth are we doing here if we don't
care whether our articles are true or not?  (Before you tell me that we
do care, please find a statement to that effect on [[WP:V]].)  Why
can't
we have verifiability AND truth?

What the policy should say FIRST (in my humble opinion) is that we
at Wikipedia would love to have the most accurate and complete
encyclopedia in the galaxy.  That's the AIM.  Then it should say,
SECOND, that the task of approaching that aim is constrained
by the proven need to avoid certain serious problems (personal
research, material from dubious or unknown sources, etc) and
therefore we have established policies on which sources of
information can be cited, and guidelines on ranking of sources.
Then those policies and guidelines can be explained.

I suggest that rewriting the policy in this fashion would avoid the
impression that in order to embrace verifiability we rejected truth.

Zero.

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


from_name: Birgitte SB

subject: [Foundation-l] Verifiability: Constitution? Question for Jimbo!

body:
--- David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 18/09/06, Andre Engels <andreengels at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > 2006/9/18, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>:
>
> > > If there are NO sources for an article, that
> tends to be a sign of
> > > deletability on en:wp. But that is mostly
> applied to popular culture
> > > things, where evidence of third-party
> verifiability may be needed to
> > > establish that anyone even cares.
>
> > Then you have a lot of deletable articles... I
> picked random article
> > 20 times. 15 of them did not have references, 4
> did (the one skipped
> > did not have references, but did have a
> 'bibliography' section, so I
> > was not sure where to put it).
>
>
> It's usually applied to new ones. I save the
> {{unreferenced}} tag for
> articles with no sources, bibliography, links etc
> whatsoever.
>
> Your assumption is that anything to do with
> verifiability *must* be
> applied pathologically or not at all.
>
>
> - d.

The problem is that a growing number of people *are*
applying this pathologicaly.  I don't know the answer
to this but it is a real problem.  Many people have
given up working on articles where these sort of
people (who really are well meaning and gracious but
also unreasonable) show up and make demands for
exacting citations of all asssertions equally.

I have seen the argument that a citation is not a
citation per WP:CITE unless it contains page numbers
and if no page numbers are given after some amount of
time the assertions will be removed per WP:V.  Now in
this case the assertions (from what I can gather) are
not actually believed untrue and have been in the
article for over six months (which is why page numbers
are hard to come by).  In the end I have found a local
copy of the book.  But I can only find it in the
original french so it is not a small effort for me to
sastisfy these demands (french is not my best
language, not to mention I can not check this book
out).

Two of the original people seem to have left the
article (one declared they were, the other may have
left the project entirely).  These demands have forced
people to scramble for any sort of citation they can
turn up on the internet.  I personally believe this
article is of worse quality since the citations have
begun being adding, because many of the footnotes are
misleading or are an incorrect use of primary sources
(which are easier to find on the web in this case).  I
feel I can straighten this case out, now that I have
found the book that the information oringinally came
from.  But how many more places is this happening?  I
am very alarmed this might become a widespread trend.
I have not been sucessful at countering a pathological
application of these ideas, and I really did try.

Birgitte SB

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


from_name: stvrtg

subject: [WikiEN-l] Template cruft (was: Libertarian spam)

body:
On 9/17/06, Matt Brown <morven at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> It's a bit disingenuous for Stevertigo to write
> [[Wikipedia:Sidestacking and pinching]] himself, CLAIMING IT TO BE
> POLICY, and then invoke it as policy to try and get his way.

Look, I'm just trying to correct some misguided methods which only result in
making articles unreadable. The only case in which sidestacked templates
works, on even a 20 inch monitor, is with less than 12 point type. Which,
IMHO is way too small for screen. Print, sure, if its within margins, but
not screen.

Put in plain brown wrapper English, unreadability means the experience of
reading Wikipedia has elevated vaccum retention levels. Which, IMHO goes
against our implicit mandate to make the Internet not... do that.

-sv.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Reliable sources: problems with [[WP:RS]]

body:
Currently we try to classify some types of sources as
"reliable" and other types of sources as "unreliable".  This
is problematic because in fact almost all sources are reliable
for some things and unreliable for others.  So, instead of
fixing a yes/no classification of sources, let's establish a
general principle that each article should be based on the
most reliable sources available FOR THAT TOPIC.  Then we
can give guidelines to help editors make that decision.

For example, we could discount USENET articles if there are
articles in respected newspapers.  We could discount books
by popular writers if there are books by eminent experts.
And so on; it would take some effort to get it right of course.

Doing it this way might (one can hope) avoid some of the
absurdities of the present policy.  It would also allow us to
pay attention to the consensus in the relevant community
about what sources are best.  If every comics fan knows that
certain USENET postings are the final word on a topic, it is
really silly to exclude them.  Similarly, it is really silly to
apply the same rules about basic biographical details to
movie stars (who are the subjects of many articles by
journalists that can be consulted) as to scientists
(who are not, with very few exceptions).

Zero.

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


subject: [WikiEN-l] Citizendium

body:
On 9/17/06, Oskar Sigvardsson

> That is why I think we should look at this as an opportunity, since
> Sanger is going to use an open license (I'm assuming, since he is
> going to import from wikipedia, the GFDL forces him to) this could be
> a great source for wikipedia articles. The experts are left in peace
> to develop their articles, and the wikipedians will fight the battles
> over our content.

Or instead, we could try to keep up with growth by implementing some more
advanced soft controls of our own. The idea of depending on others to
develop better content and then hoping they provide their content in an
exportable format is... not a good one.

Their process almost reads like a copy of some of own ideas over the years,
some of which Ive abandoned simply because 1) we know in fact that most of
Wikipedia is not written by the "core" (thanks Aaronsw ), and 2) If it aint
broke dont fix it. And nobody really knows how Wikipedia really works anyway
except to say that the more structure the less attracted energy, and the
more freedom the more trust and participation. Thats not to say there arent
specific little things that arent broken and other things which could be
improved.

Of course, like any upstart like Citizendium is just trying to find some
kind of "expert-editor" niche which Wikipedia doesnt cover. It doesnt matter
what project it is, its always a good idea to look for holes in the coverage
spectrum. Who knows? People might like them more just because they use a
more easy on the eyes color scheme as a default option.

-sv


body:
--- Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 9/17/06, Birgitte SB <birgitte_sb at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
> > And how should the Foundation ensure the election
> for
> > these delegates are handled in the proper manner?
> > Would the delegates be issused by langage or
> > community?  How would you define a language?  Or
> else,
> > How would this affect requests for new language
> > creations for projects?  Would all communities
> have
> > the exact same sufferage requirements or could
> they
> > come to their own consensus?  Who would verify and
> > enforce any rules the Foundation requires for
> these
> > elections?  Would people then be allowed to vote
> for
> > several delegates if they meet the sufferage
> > requirements of several communities?
>
> All of these are good questions.  All of them can,
> and should, be
> answered, but not in the space of a single email
> message.
>
> > I think this
> > proposal is quite beyond the capability of this
> > organzation.
>
> That's a very disappointing statement.  Why do you
> believe that?  More
> importantly, what do you think needs to be changed
> so as to not make
> it beyond the capability of this organization?
>
> Kelly
>

Looking at the sheer number of delegate elections that
would be necessary, and taking into account the
current lack of communication between individual
communities and the Foundation, I cannot see how WMF
is capable of ensuring fair elections.  And certainly
the possiblity of corruption exists to some degree.
These proposed elections would give that possibily a
some hundred oppourtunies to pop up.  Also the current
election appears to be quite a strain on election
offcials.  I cannot imagine how that situation would
scale.  If you propose to letting individual
communities handle these elections internally, I
wonder why you do not trust the same people who would
be in charge of elections to have Checkuser abilities?
 If the eletions are to be run by WMF officials then
they will need the budget to hire professional
translators for all the languages they are expected to
oversee.  I don't mean to imply this will always be
beyond our capability, but I certainly think it is in
the near future.  Then there is the greater question
of will having delegations actually solve anything?

There needs to be actual communication between the
various communities and WMF before we can talk about
electing delegates.  I think that there is little
understanding out there of what WMF actually is and
where the line between WMF and the communities is
drawn.  What is needed first and foremost is outreach
from WMF to the communities.  Any current
communication mostly happens in the in the opposite
direction.  When the communities reach a stalemate or
a minority opinion is held by people with strong
convictions then they come to this list.  Where
various people give their various opinions on the
subject and then promptly ignore the problem.  I mean
what are the odds that the Russian WP will atually be
given a road-map much less a solution for the
Verifiabilty problem?  They will get the same
non-answer that Wikibooks got over the ethics
question.  And the trademarks question.  And then when
some intiative is put forward by WMF everyone wonders
why there is little feedback from the communities.

We have all the shiny communications tools of the 21st
century at our fingertips.  Yet there is such support
for using the centuries old delegate soultion for our
*communication problem.*  I really do not understand
this.  I am not going to conclude that there is not
any form of delegation that could possibily benefit
WMF in the future.  However there needs to be strong
communication between the WMF and various communities
before we can talk of how to develop a system of
delegation.

This has been nothing I haven't said before so I am
sure everyone is either bored or depressed at this
point so here are new ideas.  Arrange a weekly
moderated IRC chat panel with people knowledgable
about WMF.  Focus on what WMF is and what it can and
can't do for the communities.  Each week questions
will be taken in a different language which has no
coresponding national chapter.   No questions in
English allowed.  Poll the actual communities in there
own languages about what they would like to see from
WMF (I can guarantee it isn't infighting!)   Here is a
big one.  Read the archive of the mailing list and
*follow up* with past problems.  Find out what
happened and what help is still needed if any.  Ask
the existing national chapters to find a language
community with immigration in their nation and put
together a "Big brother" program to better intergrate
that community into Foundation and chapter issues.

I think the idea that the majority of votes coming
from en.WP is a language issue is incorrect.  If we
were getting requests for translations that we could
not process I would think it was a language issue.  I
believe this is the same problem that has been going
on since I first started reading this list.  Most
communities expectations of WMF are *very* different
from the role the WMF has given itself.  When people
don't see the Foundation helping them find solutions.
And they do become aware of the continous power
struggles.  Then they lose interest and just decide to
do the best within their own familiar community so
long as the Foundation doesn't come bother them there.
 And generally the Foundation doesn't.  This is why I
believe many people are not bothering to vote.
Because they don't believe that the Foundation affects
thier community and what they know about the workings
of the Foundation turns them off.

Birgitte SB

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


from_name: Matt Brown

body:
On 9/17/06, stvrtg <stvrtg at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/17/06, Matt Brown <morven at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > It's a bit disingenuous for Stevertigo to write
> > [[Wikipedia:Sidestacking and pinching]] himself, CLAIMING IT TO BE
> > POLICY, and then invoke it as policy to try and get his way.
>
> Look, I'm just trying to correct some misguided methods which only result in
> making articles unreadable.

I agree entirely on your goals, just not your methods in this case.
Wikipedia already has too many people making up their own policies and
then using them as if they had broad agreement.

I'm not sure we need a New Policy every time someone does something stupid.

-Matt


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Stephen Streater wrote:

>Jesus complains that they are just parroting prayers without
>really thinking about what they mean, and says they should
>make up a relevant prayer each time. They ask him for an
>example of what such a prayer would be like.
>
>He gives them the Lord's prayer.
>
And that has become the most parroted prayer in Christendom, more than
any other prayer that he may have been complaining about.  :-)

Ec


from_name: Alphax (Wikipedia email)

body:
Gordon Joly wrote:
> At 18:18 +0100 17/9/06, Stephen Streater wrote:
>> On 17 Sep 2006, at 17:20, Phil Sandifer wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>  On Sep 17, 2006, at 2:14 AM, David Mestel wrote:
>>>
>>>>  On 17/09/06, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>  In essence, we have written a set of policies that fail to reflect
>>>>>  how we do work, should work, or could possibly work. And, due to the
>>>>>  frighteningly large number of contributors who, given a piece of bad
>>>>>  policy, will follow it rigidly without thinking about it, this is a
>>>>>  solidly dangerous thing. (Something to remember: IAR is our most
>>>>>  ignored rule.)
>>>>  I have to disagree with you on the IAR point - I just clicked on the
>>>>  "random article" button five times, and not one of the resulting
>>>>  articles had a single source.  I think that our problem may be that,
>>>>  because we place such a great demand on our sources, people don't
>>>>  bother to source articles at all.  Perhaps we need to demand less in
>>>>  order to achieve more...
>>>  It should be noted what IAR means, though. The heart of IAR is that
>>>  the rules are not and cannot be a substitute for actually thinking.
>>>  Carelessly leaving out sources is not following IAR. Citing J.
>>>  Michael Straczynski's web posts in a Babylon 5 article because you
>>>  know they're reliable no matter what [[WP:RS]] says is following IAR.
>>>
>>>  Put another way, following policy for policy's sake violates IAR.
>> There's an interesting parallel to IAR in the New Testament.
>> Jesus complains that they are just parroting prayers without
>> really thinking about what they mean, and says they should
>> make up a relevant prayer each time. They ask him for an
>> example of what such a prayer would be like.
>>
>> He gives them the Lord's prayer.
>>
>
>
>
> Exactly when was this story written down?
>
> And by whom?
>

If you're going to launch into a discussion about Biblical accuracy,
please take it off-list.

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

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 569 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
Url : http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/attachments/20060918/eb2c47b3/attachment.pgp


body:
--- Delphine M?nard <notafishz at gmail.com> wrote:

<snip>

> However, I believe that thinking that the Foundation
> has to do all of
> this is taking the problem by the wrong end.
>
> If "the community" of Wikimedia projects is to be
> represented in the
> board of the Foundation, it should be "the
> community" of Wikimedia
> projects that takes itself by the hand(s) and makes
> this happen, not
> the other way around.
>
> We've seen that the "Foundation" doing anything
> invariably leads to
> mild or fierce accusations of "the Foundation"
> wanting to take over,
> rule and what not. Well, maybe if *we* the
> community, proposed the
> organisation (the Foundation) with a comprehensive
> way to go about
> this, showing that *we* the community, have
> understood what's at stake
> on an organisational level, things could change for
> the better.
>
> Therefore, Birgitte, I believe you are asking the
> right questions, but
> the wrong way around, and therefore coming to the
> wrong conclusions. I
> believe for my part that this is, as of today, quite
> beyond the
> capability of the community.
>
> Delphine
> --
> ~notafish
> _______________________________________________
>

Maybe you are right Deplhine.  I just don't see this
proposal being developed in this direction currently.
I don't believe it will be effective either way.  Just
another layer of unneeded bureaucracy.   But I am
tired of being negative, so feel free to prove me
wrong.  But maybe I will change my mind by the time
the community is capable of managing your vision
anyways.

Birgitte SB

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


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Inline rendering of SVG images into PNG on
 MediaWiki 1.7.1

body:
Jeffrey V. Merkey wrote:
> I have been working on this problem for a few weeks, and I am not able
> to get the rasterization of inline conversion of SVG into PNG to work
> properly with rsvg.  ANy help on setup instructions for this would be
> appreciated.

Jeffrey, thank you for posting in a tech list instead of foundation-l, but since
this is not the first such question you have asked, please please please read
this document before continuing:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 249 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20060918/1afb3cbc/attachment.pgp>


body:
Ok Brion,

Here is a more complete question.

I have attempted to setup SVG to PNG rendering and it does  not seem to
work on 1.7.1.  I checked the Defaults file in includes and
I have verified rsvg is properly installed.  I have also enabled the
DebugLogFile option and attempted to run a trace
the results indicate this section of code is not even activating as
there are no messages being output to indicate
that the RSVG section of code is even becoming active during rendering.
The mine/type detection does appear to work
in that SVG images are in fact detected.  This would indicate an
underlying problem in either te FC5 base I am
using or the MediaWiki 1.7.1 code.

I have not found any other posts relative to 1.7.1 to indicate what
fixes or problems exist for these cases.   Is this a known problem
in MediaWiki 1.7.1 and is it simply the intention of requiring SVG
rendering in the browsers themselves by default?

Thanks

Jeff


subject:
[Wikitech-l] importDump.php spews "TEX divps" messaes out of
 its	tailpipe in 1.7.1

body:
Jeffrey V. Merkey wrote:
> The importing of the 20060911 XML dumps produces a lot of garbage in the
> output of importDump.php in MediaWiki 1.7.1

That's normal.

> (in additional to running about 50 times slower that 1.6.8 during import
> of XML dumps 1.6.8 avg is 56 pages/second, 1.7.1 is .8 pages/second):

importDump renders pages in order to update link tables. This makes it much
slower, but makes the import process work completely.

If you are doing a clean import of a large, complete wiki, importDump.php is of
course very inefficient. Use mwdumper for large, fast imports of a complete
wiki's page data and import the other SQL tables alongside it.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 249 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20060918/535d9f83/attachment.pgp>


references:
<450E2BBB.2010709@wolfmountaingroup.com>	<450E4EA2.9060709@pobox.com>
	<450EBF3D.1060307@wolfmountaingroup.com>

body:
Jeffrey V. Merkey wrote:

>Ok Brion,
>
>Here is a more complete question.
>
>I have attempted to setup SVG to PNG rendering and it does  not seem to
>work on 1.7.1.  I checked the Defaults file in includes and
>I have verified rsvg is properly installed.  I have also enabled the
>DebugLogFile option and attempted to run a trace
>the results indicate this section of code is not even activating as
>there are no messages being output to indicate
>that the RSVG section of code is even becoming active during rendering.
>The mine/type detection does appear to work
>in that SVG images are in fact detected.  This would indicate an
>underlying problem in either te FC5 base I am
>using or the MediaWiki 1.7.1 code.
>
>I have not found any other posts relative to 1.7.1 to indicate what
>fixes or problems exist for these cases.   Is this a known problem
>in MediaWiki 1.7.1 and is it simply the intention of requiring SVG
>rendering in the browsers themselves by default?
>
>Thanks
>
>Jeff
>
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Wikitech-l mailing list
>Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>

And Brion,

This is the most unprofessional and community hostile notice I have ever
seen - if I read this right is says:

"...eat our stuff, bugs and all, and you are on your own if you need
help, we don't care..."

:-)

> Many project websites link to this document in their sections on how
> to get help. That's fine, it's the use we intended ? but if you are a
> webmaster creating such a link for your project page, please display
> prominently near the link notice that /we are not a help desk for your
> project!/
>
> We have learned the hard way that without such a notice, we will
> repeatedly be pestered by idiots who think having published this
> document makes it our job to solve all the world's technical problems.
>
> If you're reading this document because you need help, and you walk
> away with the impression you can get it directly from the authors,
> /you/ are one of the idiots in question. Don't ask /us/ questions.
> We'll just ignore you. We are here to show you how to get help from
> people who actually know about the software or hardware you're dealing
> with, but 99% of the time that will not be us. Unless you know for
> /certain/ that one of the authors is an expert on what you're dealing
> with, leave us alone and everybody will be happier.
>
>
>
Jeff


from_name: Kim van der Linde

subject: [WikiEN-l] Citizendium

body:
stvrtg wrote:
> Or instead, we could try to keep up with growth by implementing some more
> advanced soft controls of our own. The idea of depending on others to
> develop better content and then hoping they provide their content in an
> exportable format is... not a good one.

To be honest, if (BIG IF) Citizendium is going to work and produces
higher quality stuff at a sufficient fast rate, it will only need a
study or two showing that Citizendium is higher quality/more reliable
than Wikipedia to flip everything around. If Wikipedia has to rely on
Citizendium for better quality GFDL texts than that they can produce
themselves, it effectively proves that Wikipedia cannot do what it wants
with its current editing paradigm.

Citizendium has one big advantage, they start from scratch with
editorial control in place, and will get a different community, while if
Wikipedia would like to implement something like that, it has a
community that will revolt against that and has to find ways to overcome
that.

Kim
--
http://www.kimvdlinde.com


from_name: Carl Peterson

body:
On 9/18/06, zero 0000 <nought_0000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > From: Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com>
> >
> > Obviously [[WP:V]] and (to a lesser extent) [[WP:RS]] are absolutely
>
> > vital policies that cannot be discarded. On the other hand, in their
> > current form they are abominations that fundamentally undermine key
> > aspects of Wikipedia's mission.
>
> I'd like to thank Phil for his unusually thoughtful posting.
> I'm not sure that I agree with all of it, but there is one point
> that I want to emphasise.
>
> > 1) They actively encourage removal of material that is accurate
> >
> > Admittedly, our standard for inclusion is "verifiability, not truth."
> > We ought not, however, fall into the trap of deciding that we are
> > therefore against truth. Our goal is to offer the sum total of human
> > knowledge. If information is true and significant, we ought be trying
> > to find a way to get it in.
>
> Hear! Hear!  The problem with the current policy, starting with that
> appalling slogan "verifiability, not truth" is that it presents
> verifiability
> and truth as alternatives.  What on Earth are we doing here if we don't
> care whether our articles are true or not?  (Before you tell me that we
> do care, please find a statement to that effect on [[WP:V]].)  Why
> can't
> we have verifiability AND truth?
>
> What the policy should say FIRST (in my humble opinion) is that we
> at Wikipedia would love to have the most accurate and complete
> encyclopedia in the galaxy.  That's the AIM.  Then it should say,
> SECOND, that the task of approaching that aim is constrained
> by the proven need to avoid certain serious problems (personal
> research, material from dubious or unknown sources, etc) and
> therefore we have established policies on which sources of
> information can be cited, and guidelines on ranking of sources.
> Then those policies and guidelines can be explained.
>
> I suggest that rewriting the policy in this fashion would avoid the
> impression that in order to embrace verifiability we rejected truth.
>
> Zero.

"Verifiability, not truth," taken literally, means that you can have several
normally reliable sources all report the same incorrect piece of
information, and without contradicting evidence, and in the absense of an
expert, the incorrect fact would be considered verified.

Perhaps the slogan should be "verified truth" or "verifiable truth." This
puts them both on an equal plane and requires both.

Carl


from_name: Phil Sandifer

body:
On Sep 18, 2006, at 10:00 AM, Carl Peterson wrote:
> Perhaps the slogan should be "verified truth" or "verifiable
> truth." This
> puts them both on an equal plane and requires both.

I was thinking of something like "truth is ensured by verifiability,"
actually.

-Phil


body:
--- Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:

> Delphine is a perfect example of this.  She doesn't
> bitch abstractly
> about the foundation, she *gets to work helping make
> things better*.
> There are a TON of people like that.  And I think we
> need to communicate
> this far and wide throughout the wider community...
> don't think of the
> Foundation as some abstract entity which is trying
> to impose its will on
> people, but rather as something you can be a part
> of.
>
> --Jimbo
>

I applaud all the people that devote so much time to
working at the Foundation level.  But there is a large
problem that I believe keeps more people from becoming
a part of this.

For some reason people at this level just cannot just
work together for the greater good without political
maneuvering.  Someone *must* be called out for past
misdeeds.  So and so simply *cannot* work together.
Foo must be mentioned to try and embarass X.  I am
nearly certain proposals are run through back chat
rooms before being made public.  I begin to wonder
sometimes if certain groups have actually developed
"talking points" on some issues.  Far too many
disscussions on this list are approached with a
noticable lack of sincerity from several parties.
Most issues are just another battle-ground in larger
power-struggle.  If I haven't been clear on this
already.  Infighting is  really harming this
organization.  Cut it out!  Everyone!

Stop gossiping

Socialize in public channels

Assume Good Faith

Work together on the issues where you can actually
agree with your normal opposition.  There really must
be sometime you agree on.  I mean you all like
Wikimedia, right?

If you know you can never agree with someone on a
certain issue; Aviod them there.  Respond to the
comments made by third parties only.

If someone is trying to avoid fighting with you; don't
provoke them.

Before you hit send read your comments.  If anything
is a sly allusion to some historical confrontation,
take that part out.

Did I mention not proking people.  Please don't
provoke people.  Everyone has a few hot buttons.
Avoid pushing them.

This whole idea about wiki's being open to everyone?
Please realize that includes the people you cannot
stand.  So bite your tongue and work with them.  You
need not have children together!  Everyday people go
work and manage to deal with co-workers, customers, or
officials they cannot stand.  It is possible for it to
be done here as well.

As long as working at the Foundation level involves
picking sides and which chat rooms you are invited
too, it will not be something everyone can be a part
of.  I am now done abstractly bitching for the day.

Birgitte SB

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


from_name: Andrew Lih

body:
On 9/18/06, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> Remember: whoever is elected will be a very public
> representative of the projects and the Foundation in many situations, and
> thus that person needs to be articulate about them.

Let's remember though - for a board of trustees, typically each member
is not supposed to be, by design, a vocal public representative of the
foundation. This has been an historical tension with WMF - the role of
the board and the role of the executives.

A board's first function is the careful consideration of the
well-being of the Foundation's principles. And that often might mean
being unified specifically in NOT playing out Foundation issues in a
public forum.


body:
Kim van der Linde wrote:

>Phil Sandifer wrote:
>
>
>>I don't allow my students to cite Wikipedia, but I don't let them
>>cite Britannica either. The reason isn't reliability, though - it's
>>that encyclopedias aren't academic sources.
>>
>>You've seen Alan Liu's guide to citing WIkipedia, right? (Liu is a
>>big name humanities figure - highly respected writer on digital
>>media) http://kairosnews.org/developing-a-wikipedia-research-policy
>>
>>It's a good example of a commonsense citation policy, and should
>>probably be taken as a model for us.
>>
>>
>Well, it is a convenient way around the issue of determining whether
>Wikipedia is reliable or not. But it is besides the point. People DO use
>Wikipedia as their reliable source. And thanks for the link. If we need
>that kind of instructions for students before they can use Wikipedia as
>a potential source, it is quite clear how unreliable Wikipedia is.
>
That last bit is a non-sequitur.  Reliability on Wikipedia is uneven,
but that is also the case for many other sites, which can be much
worse.  What students need is to be able to evaluate _all_ sources
critically without beginning with a prejudiced view about the validity
of any one of them.  They also need to be able to evaluate the relative
importance of information.  If a course requires an analytical study of
someone's theories the Wikipedia article is not valid as the only source
for that person's ideas, but the article may be sufficient to give that
person's broad biographical background.

Claims about whether Wikipedia is reliable or unreliable are most often
speculative.  Perhaps those claims too should be subject to some kind of
peer review.  But then has anybody ever developed any broadly applicable
metric for evaluating the reliability of any information source?

Ec


body:
Kim van der Linde wrote:

>You went from claiming that Wikipedia was reliable to saying that
>everything is unreliable. So, the issue we talk about is the degree of
>unreliability, and my contention is that Wikipedia for a tertiary source
>is to unreliable to be used as a source for research. Wikipedia
>unfortunately is often a primary source, with articles that are not more
>than a first year essay on a topic.
>
First year essays are not ipso facto unreliable.  Many of them indeed
are, but that's not *because* of their being first year.

Ec


from_name: David Gerard

body:
On 18/09/06, Walter van Kalken <walter at vankalken.net> wrote:

> Thank you EC that is exactly how I feel about this and these kind of
> things. Unfortunately the tendency seems to be to rigouresly edit out
> these kind of unverified statements. At least that is the impression I
> get from statements like the one Jimbo made.

On en:wp, the guideline is "don't put a {{fact}} tag on something
unless you actually think it's likely to be wrong." The only case
where we need to really be hard-arsed about citations is on living
biographies.

- d.


from_name: dmehkeri at swi.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] I've Kicked the Process Habit

body:
> > It's okish for editors and a really bad idea for admins. Editors
> > actions can be undone by pretty much anyone. Admin actions cannot. An
> > editor doing something annoying will merely result in them being
> > reverted. Admins actions can affect far larger numbers of people. Most
> > people accept WP:OWN applies to edits. A section of admins keeps
> > trying to claim that it does not apply to admin actions making it even
> > harder to revert the things. Admins are meant to serve the community.
> > The powers were only given by the community in order to do what the
> > community wanted. They were not given for you to do whatever seemed
> > like a good idea at the time.
> >
> > IAR is ok for content but admin actions apply to people rather than
> > content.
>
> Yes - this is a good point about IAR.
>
> Rules protect people from the abuse of power. I'm not so worried
> about protecting content, as it can always be restored.
>
> Once a person has gone, that's it.
>

I almost entirely agree. Some admin actions are in a fundamentally different
class. The use of IAR should be tempered, and for exactly the reasons given.

But, I would add "some" before "rules protect people". There are, unfortunately,
other times when the rules act to bite people. I wish admins would do a bit more
IAR in those circumstances. Bloody hell, a LOT more. And again, for exactly the
reasons given.

I'm going to go further and suggest that, at the current time, on the english
wikipedia, the people bitten by strict enforcment of rules outnumber the people
bitten by admins abusing power.

The flagship cases on the one side are certain bureaucrat actions to re-sysop,
certain out-of-process project-page speedy deletes, certain wheel wars, and
possibly others I'm not aware of or have forgotten. These generate an awful lot
of uproar, but, even taken all together, how often do they happen?

On the other side, my flagship case is the set of rules on WP:U. It suggests
that admins can permablock certain new accounts instantly, even when there is no
obvious malicious intent, and there are some admins who take this to heart. For
many, this means a ban until the autoblock wears off. Strict applications of
this ruleset generate little protest, and often no protest at all, but last I
checked, this by itself happens several times a day.

Regards,
Daniel Mehkeri


from_name: Jeff V. Merkey

body:
Michael Bimmler wrote:

>On 9/18/06, Kim Bruning <kim at bruning.xs4all.nl> wrote:
>
>
>>On Mon, Sep 18, 2006 at 12:47:42AM -0600, Jeffrey V. Merkey wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Jeffrey V. Merkey wrote:
>>>
>>>Brion,
>>>
>>>Hope things are going well, Please delete my last post on this thread
>>>from the archives if possible. Kat and I have taken the discussions off
>>>list. I was
>>>attempting to just respond to Kat OFFLIST and for some reason this
>>>posting ended up on the list.
>>>
>>>http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-September/010065.html
>>>
>>>
>>While the post might be removable from the archives, it's still in many people's
>>mailboxes. You might want to be more careful posting to a public list in
>>future.
>>
>>
>>
>Not only that, it might also be in mail archives (e.g. Gmane), and
>search engine caches (Google)...
>Michael
>
>
>>sincerely,
>>        Kim Bruning
>>
>>--
>>[Non-pgp mail clients may show pgp-signature as attachment]
>>gpg (www.gnupg.org) Fingerprint for key  FEF9DD72
>>5ED6 E215 73EE AD84 E03A  01C5 94AC 7B0E FEF9 DD72
>>_______________________________________________
>>foundation-l mailing list
>>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>>
>>
>>
>_______________________________________________
>foundation-l mailing list
>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>
>
I'll be more careful with the reply button in the future.

Jeff


body:
On 9/18/06, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Actually, the translation issue is a very strong argument against
> direct election of Board members.  Indirect election, via elected
> delegates at each project (or other appropriate grouping), would avoid
> much of this issue.  It would also curtail the "popularity effect" of
> enwiki -- we could use a diminishing-returns allocation of delegates
> to minimize the "hulking gorilla" effect that enwiki otherwise has on
> popular polling within Wikimedia.

One of the best, and concise, posts of the year.

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)


from_name: Gregory Maxwell

body:
On 9/18/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> I get press enquiries from non-English-speaking countries asking about
> "Wikipedia" and clearly meaning only en:wp. I often have to go to some
> effort to find a local editor to talk to them about their local
> Wikipedia. (It seems they usually use en: because it's much bigger and
> hence more useful to readers.)
[snip]

Raul654 was repeatedly introducing himself at Wikimania as
"Wikipedia's featured article director" and it drew nary a (public)
complaint.     :)    The press does such a bad job covering our
international focus that we don't even cry foul when our own
participants do a poor job of being sensitive to these issues.

I don't think we're going to get away from the fact that enwiki is the
1,000 lb gorilla and I don't think  that is a bad thing, but as Kelly
so clearly pointed out: there are things we can do to make sure the
foundation stays true to its international focus.


body:
On 18/09/06, GerardM <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:

> There is a difference between a need for being hard-arsed and being
> hard-arsed. As there are many people considering the lack of sources as a
> reason for immediate deletion, I would say we are way over the top already.

If there are NO sources for an article, that tends to be a sign of
deletability on en:wp. But that is mostly applied to popular culture
things, where evidence of third-party verifiability may be needed to
establish that anyone even cares.

In the case of the street layouts ... it's possible Wikipedia isn't
the place for this unless and until there's a third-party source to
verify it. And, you know, there are websites other than Wikipedia in
the world to write up this stuff in the *first* instance.

> I also am of the opinion that it will do little good but to drive away many
> people who have something to add.

It's a balancing act between not discouraging the newbies and dealing
with the firehose of complete crap that hits en:wp every day. (The
numbers as of Nov 2005 were around 4000 new articles/day, over 2000 of
which were killed within 24 hours; we've become really stupidly
popular since then, I don't know what the current numbers are.)

But deletion policy on en: has been problematic and deeply antisocial
in its construction for a long time.

- d.


body:
On 18/09/06, Walter van Kalken <walter at vankalken.net> wrote:

> And again a statement that makes sense. Unforunately most wikipedians
> just see a rule, or a statement by jimbo and will be hard arsed about it
> in unfortunately. We will see where this ship ends up ......

People will sometimes take a reasonable guideline entirely too far.

The trouble is that by its nature, Wikipedia attracts obsessives who
see things only in black-and-white, and if they can't get their
personal obsession on the wiki just as they want it, they scream
loudly about it.

- d.


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Michael Billington

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Create new article - module ?

body:
>
> Me too :) Just type the name and get offered the chance to "Do it
> yourself"
> :) Nevertheless, it's not that obvious for newcomers...
>
That may have its advantages... A newbie will have to delve a short distance
in to our guidelines to figure it out, and that could make them realise that
wikipedia is not the place for the article they wish to add. If it is, then
they will go ahead and write it.(in theory anyway, I don't know if it
actually works like that). --Michael Billington


from_name: Jimmy Wales

body:
Kelly Martin wrote:
> Actually, the translation issue is a very strong argument against
> direct election of Board members.  Indirect election, via elected
> delegates at each project (or other appropriate grouping), would avoid
> much of this issue.  It would also curtail the "popularity effect" of
> enwiki -- we could use a diminishing-returns allocation of delegates
> to minimize the "hulking gorilla" effect that enwiki otherwise has on
> popular polling within Wikimedia.

Without endorsing any specific proposal, I would like to second this
concept.  We want the board to always remain firmly a creature of the
community, but direct election may not be the best way to really achieve
that.  There are many methods we might better use to draw expertise from
the community in a more broadly representative fashion.

My prediction for the future is a much larger board which is much less
involved in day-to-day management, a board which supplies stability of
ultimate governance and adherence to principles, and a management drawn
largely (though perhaps not completely, esp. for particular professional
services) from the community.

--Jimbo


from_name: Carlos

subject: [Wikitech-l] What comes first: <ref> or #expr: ?

body:
Hi.

If I set MediaWiki:cite_reference_link to just $3 (so <ref>...</ref>
will output the plain number), can I do

   {{#expr: <ref/> + <ref/>}}

to get "3"?

(I don't want to change the global reference format just to check this,
that's why I don't look it myself. If somebody knows...)

Why I ask this is because in es.wiktionary we are planning to use <ref/>
for counters. We need counters, and we don't want to accumulate
references at the bottom of the page, so it's a good use for this feature.

Wiktionary definitions will be internally labeled and the numbers will
be generated automatically. So, we can rearrange them and the numbering
will be automatically updated as well as the references in the
translations box. Example (w/o the necessary templates for formatting,
etc.):

   {{lemma|avis}}

   <ref name="bird"/> Bird.
   <ref name="company"/> Car rental company.

   Translations: Spanish: <ref name="bird"/> Ave; ...

(I'm hoping one developer will jump saying "this is a kludge! here! have
real counters! :)".)

Sometimes we have more than one lemma per page (because it has a
different etymology, or because the word is used in more then one
language). In that case, we need to reset the <ref> counter. I thought
of doing that this way:

   {{lemma|avis|1}}
   {{def|bird|1}} Bird.

   {{lemma|avis|2}}
   {{def|company|2}} Car rental company.

Where {{lemma}} would output an invisible <ref name="last{{{2}}}"/> and
the number outputted by {{def}} would be {{#expr: <ref name="{{{1}}}"/>
- <ref name="last{{{2}}}"/>. That's the reason of the question in the
subject.

Whew. Does all this make any sense? Is there any better way to do it?

Thanks.
--


body:
Ok, first I will agree that Kelly's post was one of the best and most
concise of this year.  But then let me also applaud Delphine's followup,
particularly this bit here:

Delphine M?nard wrote:
> We've seen that the "Foundation" doing anything invariably leads to
> mild or fierce accusations of "the Foundation" wanting to take over,
> rule and what not. Well, maybe if *we* the community, proposed the
> organisation (the Foundation) with a comprehensive way to go about
> this, showing that *we* the community, have understood what's at stake
> on an organisational level, things could change for the better.

One of the most worrying trends I have seen is a tendency for people to
think of "the Foundation" as being completely apart from "the
Community".  That way lies madness, I think.

--Jimbo


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Foundation-l] Verifiability: Constitution?

body:
2006/9/17, Christoph Seydl <Christoph.Seydl at students.jku.at>:
> I assume that Jimbo means that only material that is verifiable with
> reference to reliable, published sources should be used. And if we
> remove all unsourced statements, Wikipedia will shrink and grow less
> fast. However, there are reliable sources even for the most simple
> objects. According to Norstedts svenska ordbok och uppslagsbok, a bucket
> is a "cylindrical vessel with a carrying handle for the transport of
> liquids sand or the like".

Can you provide such a reference too for all the other parts of the
definition of 'bucket'? And if not, should we delete that? And if you
can, should we delete it nevertheless until you have done so?

> As Jimbo said, several editors will stop contributing, if all material
> has to be sourced. At the same time, the motivation to provide sources
> will increase, whereas there is almost no motivation to source
> statements, if they will not be removed.

The motivation will certainly increase, yes. Nobody wants to add
material to Wikipedia that will be removed again. But it also means
that we are going to delete more if the rule is added than in the
whole of Wikipedia until now. Use [[Special:Randompage]]. The chance
that it's sourced is small. The change that if it is sourced, it is
specified what comes from which source is even smaller. You might as
well go and delete pages at random.

> No matter how a codification of verifiability will look like, there
> should be at least a statement on verifiability at Foundation Issues in
> my opinion. There are several options how verifiability can be defined:
> - Everything must be sourced, what Jimbo seems to prefer.
> - Only critical material (e. g. negative information about living
>   persons, disputed issues, hard facts, quotes,...) must be sourced.
>   Statements on everyday objects (cf. bucket example) may not be
>   sourced.

How do you define critical material?

> - Source what you like.
> - Abolish sourcing at all.

Why? Can't this rule be left to the separate projects?

--
Andre Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
ICQ: 6260644  --  Skype: a_engels


from_name: Death Phoenix

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikimedia Board Elections

body:
I voted for three people who I felt would be the best and most-qualified:
there is one who I think is the most qualified, and two who are about equal.
I wonder if I am doing my first choice user a disservice by voting for the
other two, and instead just vote for the one who I think is the clear
frontrunner.

DP


from_name: Delphine Ménard

body:
On 9/18/06, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:

For the record, I agree with Andrew. Kelly, your post was one of the
best and most concise of this year.

> On 9/17/06, Birgitte SB <birgitte_sb at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > And how should the Foundation ensure the election for
> > these delegates are handled in the proper manner?
> > Would the delegates be issused by langage or
> > community?  How would you define a language?  Or else,
> > How would this affect requests for new language
> > creations for projects?  Would all communities have
> > the exact same sufferage requirements or could they
> > come to their own consensus?  Who would verify and
> > enforce any rules the Foundation requires for these
> > elections?  Would people then be allowed to vote for
> > several delegates if they meet the sufferage
> > requirements of several communities?
>
> All of these are good questions.  All of them can, and should, be
> answered, but not in the space of a single email message.
>
> > I think this
> > proposal is quite beyond the capability of this
> > organzation.
>
> That's a very disappointing statement.  Why do you believe that?  More
> importantly, what do you think needs to be changed so as to not make
> it beyond the capability of this organization?

The question is not to me, but let me give a tentative answer.

First, let me point (again) to
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikicouncil . Not exactly a new idea
but the concept at least tries to address (if not answers) many of
Birgitte's concerns.

However, I believe that thinking that the Foundation has to do all of
this is taking the problem by the wrong end.

If "the community" of Wikimedia projects is to be represented in the
board of the Foundation, it should be "the community" of Wikimedia
projects that takes itself by the hand(s) and makes this happen, not
the other way around.

We've seen that the "Foundation" doing anything invariably leads to
mild or fierce accusations of "the Foundation" wanting to take over,
rule and what not. Well, maybe if *we* the community, proposed the
organisation (the Foundation) with a comprehensive way to go about
this, showing that *we* the community, have understood what's at stake
on an organisational level, things could change for the better.

Therefore, Birgitte, I believe you are asking the right questions, but
the wrong way around, and therefore coming to the wrong conclusions. I
believe for my part that this is, as of today, quite beyond the
capability of the community.

Delphine
--
~notafish


from_name: Aphaia

body:
On 9/18/06, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:

> I completely disagree with this; I would much, much rather know *more* about
> the people I'm voting for, rather than less.

I would like to point out, unless we cannot provide the good amont of
translation resources (both material and human), responce to requests
like Phoebe made, does only enlarge the hiatus between English and any
other language, that is hiatus English competent voters and the
editors whose English competence is not enough to skim up such a
volumn of texts.  And in the current situation, we rely on only unpaid
volunteering translators, it is unfeasable to provide all information
even in major lanauges on our projects  (here "major languages" means
"one of eight languages edits in that language is included into "80%
of edits on the whole Wikipedia).

I personally would like rather to provide equal amount of information
to "every" language communities. I don't welcome nor that only English
editors can access the information about the people they are voting
for nor that there is enouous different of amount which voters can
consider between editors having English competence and not. It would
mean the elected one cannot represent the community as a whole, but
not only a part of it, community of a certain language, in the worst
case, I am afraid.

And I think it is nor unwise nor kind for volunteering translators to
expect  to translate thousands of words text only in a week, or even
in days. Translation is in general a task boring, painful and took
many times. People who are not multilingual tend to think it is only
to replace one word with an equivalent. No. It is a sort of
reproduction and you need to understand the text in a whole, usually
with its background. (That is why machine translation is only helpful
to prepare a draft, not the completion in many cases).

> Effe's idea of a debate is also not terrible, though it is also late in the
game: perhaps next election?

In the same reason, in our current situation, I don't think it nice.
It helps only English editors whoe are one third of our community, I
am afraid. Even  candidate presentation hasn't been completely
translated. I prefer to see them finished to see candidate debates, so
strongly objected to be involved into the latter; due to time
limitation, I couldn't manage both at the same time and I thought
support for the former belonged to the primary mission of Election
Officials, but not the latter.

As Election Officer, I feel I am of responsibility to the whole
community, not only the communities I am active as editor, but
literally all communities. Even in this last week of voting, I found
some projects had been not noticed this Election from some reasons. It
is my regret and currently one of biggest concerns of mine as Election
Officials. I don't oppose candidate debate per se, but under our
current condition I don't feel that is exactly what our best effort
should go.

--
Kizu Naoko
  Wikiquote: http://wikiquote.org
  * vox populi, vox dei *


from_name: geni

body:
On 9/18/06, Kat Walsh <mindspillage at gmail.com> wrote:
> "I have a suggestion from someone very high up in the Creative Commons
> organization that we should dual-license (CC and GFDL), which I simply
> hadn't thought of.  I'm inclined to think it's a good idea."
>
> I'd like to know how that would be compatible with working from
> Wikipedia content.
>

You lisence everything under the GFDL and any chnages under CC as
well. This is completely useless because you have to follow the GFDL
anyway but thats life.

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] Names of places in unrecognized countries

body:
On 9/18/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> The fact that Moldovan is already written with the Roman alphabet is a
> strong argument in its favour.  A Russian form still needs to be
> transliterated from the Cyrillic.  Legally, Transnistria is a part of
> Romania, and it should not be up to us to decide whether it should be an
> independent country.
>
> Ec

Part of Moldova rather.

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] Citizendium

body:
On 17/09/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:

> If I had to guess, one response would be: the opportunity for a genuine
> expert to work hand in hand with other genuine experts, without the
> social difficulty of having to interact with the general public, some of
> whom are quite noticeably stupid and annoying.
> We try, as a community, to be welcoming and respectful of experts.  We
> have good people in the community who try to help experts deal with the
> trolls, vandals, and general nonsense that is likely to come up from
> time to time.  But we can also all easily admit that sometimes it does
> not go perfectly, and that genuine experts end up leaving rather than
> wasting time arguing with idiots.

Yeah. On Wikipedia, dealing with people you consider to be noisy
useless idiots is not optional. You can't refuse to suffer fools. If
Larry can get a live project going that doesn't do that, I think it'll
lure a lot of contributors - some from Wikipedia, but also many who
won't go near Wikipedia because there's no cure for stupid. At least
with "expert" qualifications the idiots will be expert idiots, and any
good academic has way too much experience dealing with those.

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Citizendium

body:
On 17/09/06, Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson at gmail.com> wrote:

> If he really does deliver on what he says he will, I see no reason to
> consider Citizendium the competition, we should consider them
> partners!

Hell yeah. More open content is good for everyone. And it establishes
open content as a standard paradigm, much as open source has been
established to be workable by demonstrably working.

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Citizendium

body:
On 18/09/06, stvrtg <stvrtg at gmail.com> wrote:

This jumped out at me:

> And nobody really knows how Wikipedia really works anyway

- an important point we often forget.

- d.


body:
On 18/09/06, Mathias Schindler <mathias.schindler at gmail.com> wrote:

> > You lisence everything under the GFDL and any chnages under CC as
> > well. This is completely useless because you have to follow the GFDL
> > anyway but thats life.

> If a text is completely licensed under the GFDL and the CC (every
> author has agreed to this dual-license), you have the right to copy it
> under just one license. A soft GFDL to CC transistion of Wikipedia
> could be achieved by a dual-license strategy.

Yeah. Quite a few Wikipedia editors dual-licence their stuff anyway.

- d.


from_name: Brad Patrick

body:
Here, here.  Notwithstanding Dear Leader's statement ( ;-), Jimbo) , the
words might not be perfect, but I think Delphine's sentiment here is
exactly right.  From my perspective, what happens in the office to keep
the servers running, bills paid, and all of the rest of the stuff that
never touches the online space (much less in other languages and
projects) could not be more separate than the day-to-day goings on of
the projects.  I grasp how utterly challenging it is to reach across the
divide, really.  How we do so is going to be the great challenge of the
next chapter of WMF's existence.  If I understand what I think Jimbo
meant, he meant that the reins of the organization were NOT going to be
tossed over to venture capitalists who would treat it as a private
company, that the people WMF turns to for assistance will come from both
inside and outside the community, and that the community must always be
respected as the source of everything we do.  Making the connection to
people in lands very distant from those of us here in the office (see
Anthere's marvelous discussion about her Abuja experience) mean there is
much work to be done by WMF both for those who love WMF projects (and
already self-identify as "involved") and those who have never heard of
us before.

Governance, however, is still a Real World Issue.  I think as this
dynamic, international system matures, WMF will continue to do what it
must to secure itself so the projects can continue to exist in the Real
World, and evolve to support the language-of-origin and
project-of-origin affinities users and editors develop.

I continue to remain deliriously optimistic that these are great
challenges to have.  "What seems to be the trouble?"  "We have so many
projects and so many volunteers in so many languages we are having a
hard time keeping up."

WMF just has to do more.

-Brad

Delphine M?nard wrote:
> On 9/18/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
>
>> Delphine M?nard wrote:
>>
>> One of the most worrying trends I have seen is a tendency for people to
>> think of "the Foundation" as being completely apart from "the
>> Community".  That way lies madness, I think.
>>
>
> The funny thing is that I am one of those people who think that the
> Foundation *is* apart from the community.
>
>

> I am, however, a strong advocate of both "The Foundation"
> (organisation with roots in the very real world) trying to understand
> "the community" and "the community" (a large body of volunteers who
> work towards a same goal of free knowledge for all in somewhat virtual
> environment) trying to understand "The Foundation", in order to work
> together efficiently. Trying is actually not the right word, we need
> to succeed, or we'll stall.
>
> Acknowledging differences is the best way of using them to build
> synergy. Ignoring them builds gaps and traps rather than bridges.
>
>
> Delphine
> PS. We might phrase it a tad differently, but I have a tendancy to
> believe that we agree, here, though.
>


from_name: GerardM

body:
Hoi,
There is a difference between a need for being hard-arsed and being
hard-arsed. As there are many people considering the lack of sources as a
reason for immediate deletion, I would say we are way over the top already.
I also am of the opinion that it will do little good but to drive away many
people who have something to add.
Thanks,
    GerardM

On 9/18/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 18/09/06, Walter van Kalken <walter at vankalken.net> wrote:
>
> > Thank you EC that is exactly how I feel about this and these kind of
> > things. Unfortunately the tendency seems to be to rigouresly edit out
> > these kind of unverified statements. At least that is the impression I
> > get from statements like the one Jimbo made.
>
>
> On en:wp, the guideline is "don't put a {{fact}} tag on something
> unless you actually think it's likely to be wrong." The only case
> where we need to really be hard-arsed about citations is on living
> biographies.
>
>
> - d.
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


subject:
[Foundation-l] Citizendium, a new venture,
	will "fork" off from online encyclopedia Wikipedia

body:
On 16/09/06, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> Sabine Cretella wrote:

> > Does it sound strange to you that at the beginning of this year I said
> > to a friend of mine that my feeling told me that someone will take over
> > the contents of Wikipedia and create a separate project.

> That's entirely normal in the course of events, and only one of many such
> projects; Wikipedia has an open-content license precisely to allow these sorts
> of projects.

Yes. Though we're notably lacking in forks that are actively edited;
Wikinfo is the only one I know of. Other than that it's pretty much
static mirror sites with Google ads.

> > I don't believe Citizendium will be able to take over Wikipedia, but you
> > never know - it would definitely be much better to have scientists work
> > on Wikipedia.

> It's not about "taking over", but about taking useful resources and doing
> additional things with them. We of course celebrate and applaud any serious
> undertaking to make use of Wikipedia content.

One thing which Stevevertigo pointed out on wikien-l in discussing
Citizendium was that no-one *really* knows how Wikipedia works.
There's got to be more ways to do this than the ways the various
Wikipedias do it.

And more open content is good for everyone.

- d.


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Spam blacklist extension updated for long blacklists

body:
Recently our main spam URL blacklist at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Spam_blacklist has gotten too long for PHP's
regulation expressions library (PCRE) to allow. As a result, the check would
more-or-less silently fail.

I've updated the spam blacklist extension to split a long list into multiple
regexes, so it will handle the larger list without exploding.

Third-party MediaWiki sites using our default blacklist should consider updating
it from SVN if you've noticed the blacklist has stopped working for you.

The anonymous SVN checkout URL is still:
http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/trunk/extensions/SpamBlacklist

You can also poke at the files in a human-readable fashion:
http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/extensions/SpamBlacklist/

The cleanup.php script hasn't been tested yet for the update, so if you use it,
well, say something if it's borked. :)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 249 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20060918/07ea8fcc/attachment.pgp>


subject: [Foundation-l] [WikiEN-l] Wikimedia Board Elections

body:
Brad Patrick wrote:
> From my perspective, what happens in the office to keep
> the servers running, bills paid, and all of the rest of the stuff that
> never touches the online space (much less in other languages and
> projects) could not be more separate than the day-to-day goings on of
> the projects.  I grasp how utterly challenging it is to reach across the
> divide, really.

Totally!

> If I understand what I think Jimbo
> meant, he meant that the reins of the organization were NOT going to be
> tossed over to venture capitalists who would treat it as a private
> company, that the people WMF turns to for assistance will come from both
> inside and outside the community, and that the community must always be
> respected as the source of everything we do.

Yes, that is what I mean... from the Foundation side of things.

And I also mean something else, too, from the community side of
things... it is a too common reaction of people in the community to
think of "the Foundation" as a distant entity to be blamed or yelled at
when something goes wrong, and I think that's a mistake.  The right
answer is: get involved at the "foundation" level.

Delphine is a perfect example of this.  She doesn't bitch abstractly
about the foundation, she *gets to work helping make things better*.
There are a TON of people like that.  And I think we need to communicate
this far and wide throughout the wider community... don't think of the
Foundation as some abstract entity which is trying to impose its will on
people, but rather as something you can be a part of.

--Jimbo


body:
On 9/18/06, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
> Actually, the translation issue is a very strong argument against
> direct election of Board members.  Indirect election, via elected
> delegates at each project (or other appropriate grouping), would avoid
> much of this issue.  It would also curtail the "popularity effect" of
> enwiki -- we could use a diminishing-returns allocation of delegates
> to minimize the "hulking gorilla" effect that enwiki otherwise has on
> popular polling within Wikimedia.
>
> Kelly

I haven't done an exact count but a quick scan (not removeing deleted
votes) suggests than less than 50% of votes came from en.wikipedia.

Enwikipedia tends to be on the reciving end of rather more board
actions than anyone else (the downside of not haveing a language
barrier). Thus it has a greater interest than other projects in the
outcome of foundation elections.

Secondly there is no reason the descriminate against members of the
wikipedia community for being part of a popular project.

Thirdly any board member who can't get along we en.wikipedia and
doesn't have at least a reasonable degree of support from en is
unlikely to be able to function since en.wikipedia isn't just big in
voteing power but in everything else (articles publicity effects on
other projects donations recived representation at the meta level) as
well.

--
geni


subject: [Foundation-l] Sanger's first post to Citizendium-l

body:
On 9/18/06, Mathias Schindler <mathias.schindler at gmail.com> wrote:
> > You lisence everything under the GFDL and any chnages under CC as
> > well. This is completely useless because you have to follow the GFDL
> > anyway but thats life.
>
> If a text is completely licensed under the GFDL and the CC (every
> author has agreed to this dual-license), you have the right to copy it
> under just one license. A soft GFDL to CC transistion of Wikipedia
> could be achieved by a dual-license strategy.
>
> Mathias

It's been tried. A combination of hold outs and all those one off
contributers make it unlikely to be effected.

--
geni


body:
On 9/18/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 16/09/06, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> > Sabine Cretella wrote:
>
> > > Does it sound strange to you that at the beginning of this year I said
> > > to a friend of mine that my feeling told me that someone will take over
> > > the contents of Wikipedia and create a separate project.
>
> > That's entirely normal in the course of events, and only one of many such
> > projects; Wikipedia has an open-content license precisely to allow these sorts
> > of projects.
>
>
> Yes. Though we're notably lacking in forks that are actively edited;
> Wikinfo is the only one I know of. Other than that it's pretty much
> static mirror sites with Google ads.
>
>

Trying to fight off our smarter vandels without haveing our antivandel
people tends to result in people haveing to make registration hard
which kills the project.

--
geni


body:
On 17/09/06, Matt Brown <morven at gmail.com> wrote:

> I would also suggest, personally, that the consensus behind WP:RS is a
> consensus only of those trying to forge the policy.  I suspect there a
> lot of editors like myself and yourself who disagree with its
> approach, but find the prospect of reforming it in the teeth of
> strenuous opposition simply not worth my time.

Yes. I've done my time against the edit-warriors keeping it in its
pathological state. I strongly suggest looking for people citing the
policy stupidly and dealing with them instead, since the page itself
has been rendered useless as any sort of guideline.

Perhaps [[Wikipedia:Usable sources]] can be created as a parallel
guideline with a view to replacing the one that's gone pathological.

- d.


body:
On 17/09/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/17/06, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:

> > Every other policy we have on Wikipedia explicitly gives editors a
> > wide berth to interpret it on a case-by-case basis. This is, for
> > instance, the whole reason [[WP:NPOV]] works. But increasingly,
> > [[WP:V]] and [[WP:RS]] are written to be applied by machine. We need
> > to return to trusting that editors will be able to work out what a
> > reliable source is on a topic by topic basis, given a set of general
> > guidelines on the matter. I have in the past recommended basing these
> > guidelines on _The Craft of Research_, a book published by UChicago
> > Press. This has long been one of the standard academic research
> > manuals. It's flexible, sensible, and respected - exactly what we
> > want and need.

> You want book length policy pages? No thankyou.

We have book-length policy pages. At least we could have one that's
good and usable.

- d.


body:
On 17/09/06, charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com
<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:

> Hear! Hear!
> Phil Sandifer's original post on this is well-argued, though I don't particularly wish to follow him onto the ground of webcomics.
> Common sense needs to apply, sooner rather than later. It indicates things like, oh, in religion and politics you are not going to have people 100% agreed onw what a reliable source is (do you believe the Bible or the BBC, sort of thing). Almost any source can be _fallible_ anyway. So we err generally in the direction of including sources, assuming a critical reader.
> Common sense also says that policies that are written in very black-and-white terms do not necessarily trump others, which are apparently wishy-washy and aspirational and don't help you win your edit war on content.

Could the ArbCom please apply cluebats on this subject at the next
opportunity? Thank you!

- d.


from_name: Kim van der Linde

subject: [WikiEN-l] Citizendium

body:
charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com wrote:
> It is going to be a lot easier for WP to improve
> article content, in areas where it actually has some welcome
> competition, than it is going to be for those rivals to import into
> their site the necessary redirects and so on, to give the
> navigational smooth ride.

Why should only Wikipedia be able to do that?

Kim
--
http://www.kimvdlinde.com


body:
On 17/09/06, Kim van der Linde <kim at kimvdlinde.com> wrote:

> Well, it is a convenient way around the issue of determining whether
> Wikipedia is reliable or not. But it is besides the point. People DO use
> Wikipedia as their reliable source.

I think the problem may be that your students are stupid.

> And thanks for the link. If we need
> that kind of instructions for students before they can use Wikipedia as
> a potential source, it is quite clear how unreliable Wikipedia is.

It's a good thing you're here to tell us why Wikipedia can't possibly
work and save us a lot of time.

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikimedia Board Elections

body:
On 9/18/06, Death Phoenix <originaldeathphoenix at gmail.com> wrote:
> I voted for three people who I felt would be the best and most-qualified:
> there is one who I think is the most qualified, and two who are about equal.
> I wonder if I am doing my first choice user a disservice by voting for the
> other two, and instead just vote for the one who I think is the clear
> frontrunner.

Based on the counts in the previous elections a huge number of people
only supported one... In my discussions with people I found that many
that supported only one in the election actually thought that multiple
would have done an okay job, but either didn't understand or didn't
feel comfortable with the approval voting process.

For each person like you who used the approval process correctly there
will probably be four who tried to game it by only picking their first
choice.

Based on the power lawish  distribution of approval in the last
election, it's safe to say that your first choice is likely the same
as a lot of other people's first choice.... so your preference is
still represented even if you approved multiple people.

It's unfortunate that we're using an approval vote when it appears
that most of our voters view it as something else.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikimedia Board Elections

body:
On 9/18/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 9/18/06, Death Phoenix <originaldeathphoenix at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I voted for three people who I felt would be the best and
> most-qualified:
> > there is one who I think is the most qualified, and two who are about
> equal.
> > I wonder if I am doing my first choice user a disservice by voting for
> the
> > other two, and instead just vote for the one who I think is the clear
> > frontrunner.
>
> Based on the counts in the previous elections a huge number of people
> only supported one... In my discussions with people I found that many
> that supported only one in the election actually thought that multiple
> would have done an okay job, but either didn't understand or didn't
> feel comfortable with the approval voting process.
>
> For each person like you who used the approval process correctly there
> will probably be four who tried to game it by only picking their first
> choice.
>
> Based on the power lawish  distribution of approval in the last
> election, it's safe to say that your first choice is likely the same
> as a lot of other people's first choice.... so your preference is
> still represented even if you approved multiple people.
>
> It's unfortunate that we're using an approval vote when it appears
> that most of our voters view it as something else.
>

Ah, then I'll leave my votes as is. :-) Based on your comments above, it
would seem that Cynical nailed this down perfectly: he singled out three
people who wouldn't be good, and approved of everyone else.

DP


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikimedia Board Elections

body:
On 9/18/06, Death Phoenix <originaldeathphoenix at gmail.com> wrote:
> Ah, then I'll leave my votes as is. :-) Based on your comments above, it
> would seem that Cynical nailed this down perfectly: he singled out three
> people who wouldn't be good, and approved of everyone else.

Thats really more like an approval vote should be used... it's an
admission that the world is a complex place and that we can't say that
X is better than Y, but that we can say the Z just won't work.

I suspect that the approval vote process would be better if there were
multiple open seats,... at least mathmatically a multi seat election
is more fair... but I also think the voting public would be less
likely to try to game it.

Oh well.. I don't look forward to another round of elections should we
decide to pull from the community for the expanded board seats.


subject: [WikiEN-l] 100K challenge page up

body:
On 14/09/06, Rory Stolzenberg <rory096 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Am I the only one who thinks this is absolutely impossible?  I'm thinking
> 2,500, and even that's ambitious.  Per WP:100K, each FA requires 50
> editing-hours- that's 5,000,000 editing-hours for 100,000 FAs. Dividing that
> by 8760 hours in a year, that's over 570 editors working 24/7/365.  More
> realistically, we'd have editors working on average maybe 2 hours a day at
> most, so multiply that number by 12. That's 6840 editors working 2 hours a
> day, 7 days a week for a year, solely on articles that they will make
> featured.
> 2,500 FAs would require only 125,000 hours, when dividing by the hours in a
> year it works out to be a bit over 14 editors working 24/7/365 and 168
> working 2/7/365 only on creating FAs.

I'm not presuming the FA process as it stands or anything like it; I
am presuming the FA criteria.

It's probably impossible. So?

- d.


from_name: Delirium

subject: [WikiEN-l] Citizendium

body:
David Gerard wrote:
> Yeah. On Wikipedia, dealing with people you consider to be noisy
> useless idiots is not optional. You can't refuse to suffer fools. If
> Larry can get a live project going that doesn't do that, I think it'll
> lure a lot of contributors - some from Wikipedia, but also many who
> won't go near Wikipedia because there's no cure for stupid. At least
> with "expert" qualifications the idiots will be expert idiots, and any
> good academic has way too much experience dealing with those.
>

I think this may actually be a strength of Wikipedia---expert idiots, in
my experience, are the most likely to be offended that they aren't being
given proper deference as experts, and so avoid Wikipedia.  (Of course,
not all---or even most---experts who avoid Wikipedia are idiots, but the
credential-waving type do consistently avoid it.)

What's more, expert idiots are the hardest to deal with.  Non-expert
idiots usually know they're outmatched when someone who is familiar with
the relevant literature shows up with citations, so can usually be
chased off, or forcibly chased off if necessary.  Pretty much the only
place this doesn't happen is in areas where multiple fields are laying
claim, in which case it's disagreement over the definition of "expert"
that's the problem in the first place (and Citizendium has no magic
solution to resolving that one).

If Citizendium on the other hand encourages the credentialist idiots to
show up, then that's a whole new level of problems.  As you point out,
anyone in academia has to deal with those sort on a regular basis, but
that's unfortunate, unavoidable, and my job---I'm not going to put up
with that crap in a volunteer job if I have an alternate way of
accomplishing my volunteer goals!

-Mark


subject: [WikiEN-l] Citizendium

body:
Delirium wrote:
> I think this may actually be a strength of Wikipedia---expert idiots, in
> my experience, are the most likely to be offended that they aren't being
> given proper deference as experts, and so avoid Wikipedia.  (Of course,
> not all---or even most---experts who avoid Wikipedia are idiots, but the
> credential-waving type do consistently avoid it.)
>

I should add that I don't disagree it's a problem that many of the
non-idiot sort of experts also avoid Wikipedia.  I think the strong and
still quite recent shift towards verifiability will go some way towards
addressing that problem---experts have an inherent advantage on the new
playing field, because they can pull up citations much more easily than
an uninformed bullshitter can.  It doesn't solve all problems, but it's
a step in the right direction.

Judicious organization in Wikiprojects might help also.  Many experts
are willing to get right down into the dirty work of editing the
encyclopedia and interacting on talk pages, but some who don't want to
get into that might be willing to offer indirect guidance to
participants in various Wikiprojects about what they think should be
done, and let others take care of the implementation.

-Mark


body:
When I sit at my desk all day, it is not to edit EN:WP or anything
else.  It is to respond to Real World questions, problems, financial
issues, etc.  It is also to deal with "meta"-ish things that are across
all projects.  I am perfectly fine with the notion that a content
Wikimedian can edit to their heart's content without any idea "the
Foundation" (Brad, Danny, Brion, Mark, Tim) + zillions of volunteers are
working to keep their site up and running well.  We need not be in their
face reminding them of "the Foundation."  But if they care about the
future, policy, administration, or any of the rest of that stuff, we
need to be able to talk to them and have them understand what WMF does.
Before that, though, they are likely to come in contact with admins and
the cognoscenti of their project first.

I think I was agreeing with you.

Delphine M?nard wrote:
>> Brad Patrick wrote:
>>
>>> From my perspective, what happens in the office to keep
>>> the servers running, bills paid, and all of the rest of the stuff that
>>> never touches the online space (much less in other languages and
>>> projects) could not be more separate than the day-to-day goings on of
>>> the projects.
>>>
>
> I am afraid I don't get what you mean here.
>
> Delphine
> (English as a second language. ;-) )
>
>


from_name: David Gerard

body:
On 16/09/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:

> Quite a number of our policies were created by consensus.

And almost all of our processes are quick hacks someone thought would
be a good idea at the time, and they're usually modified by putting
hacks on hacks on hacks, building into a rococo fractal mosaic of
prescriptions.

People see something quickly assembled out of gaffer tape and string
and assume it's an immaculate stainless steel construction of well
thought-out design. Then they follow it rigidly and unthinkingly.

Look at your response to Phil's posts in this thread. You're zooming
in on utterly insignificant details as if to completely ignore the
point.

- d.


body:
On 18/09/06, Andre Engels <andreengels at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2006/9/18, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>:

> > If there are NO sources for an article, that tends to be a sign of
> > deletability on en:wp. But that is mostly applied to popular culture
> > things, where evidence of third-party verifiability may be needed to
> > establish that anyone even cares.

> Then you have a lot of deletable articles... I picked random article
> 20 times. 15 of them did not have references, 4 did (the one skipped
> did not have references, but did have a 'bibliography' section, so I
> was not sure where to put it).

It's usually applied to new ones. I save the {{unreferenced}} tag for
articles with no sources, bibliography, links etc whatsoever.

Your assumption is that anything to do with verifiability *must* be
applied pathologically or not at all.

- d.


from_name: Mathias Schindler

body:
> You lisence everything under the GFDL and any chnages under CC as
> well. This is completely useless because you have to follow the GFDL
> anyway but thats life.

If a text is completely licensed under the GFDL and the CC (every
author has agreed to this dual-license), you have the right to copy it
under just one license. A soft GFDL to CC transistion of Wikipedia
could be achieved by a dual-license strategy.

Mathias


from_name: Guettarda

subject: [WikiEN-l] Citizendium

body:
On 9/18/06, David Alexander Russell <webmaster at davidarussell.co.uk> wrote:
>
>
> Unless Citizendium is suggesting that it would seek out and welcome
> people who write rubbish just because they claim to be 'experts' (surely
> a recipe for disaster) I don't really see how it will attract anyone on
> the basis of its content (especially since any decent stuff that it
> produces will be re-merged into Wikipedia, perhaps even by a bot) - all
> it will do is attract people who want to give themselves a sense of
> importance by telling 'less expert' people what to do. An expert-focused
> wiki is a good idea, but since 'experts' are given more control than
> 'non-experts' then it seems likely that no 'non-experts' will be
> interested. At which point Citizendium basically becomes Nupedia without
> the peer review process.

If the people who have written about the "expert problem" that Wikipedia has
are correct, then no, there is real value to a place where there can be
expert-driven work.  While it is easy to write on subjects that no one else
cares about, getting things done on topics where there is some amount of
controversy requires considerable political skills.  Granted, an
expert-driven process does not eliminate the problem of politics, but it
does reduce the need to deal with people peddling fringe theories.

Wikipedia has a persistent problem with fringe theories.  If you ever edit
any page related to evolution, there are persistent problems with people who
repeat creationist arguments regarding evolution - argument which they have
picked up from some web site or book, and they now push as gospel truth.  It
doesn't matter that the arguments have been {explained/refuted/are trivial} -
you are dealing with someone who doesn't understand the scientific method or
how science is done, so you have to start explaining from first principles
why the issue they want to insert into the article is idiotic.  And, you
have to do so without calling the idea idiotic, or you will get people
screaming at you for violating WP:BITE or WP:NPA.

Now, there are also problems with expert editors.  There are real disputes
about how some idea should be presented - some of them (like the Natural
selection article) end up before the arbcomm as well.  So, of course,
expert-driven does not mean "free from conflict".  But it does establish a
set of ground rules for discussion.  It still requires considerable
political skills to get a stable version, but the range of possibilities is
reduced.  This might make for a considerably saner work environment.

The idea that such an environment is meaningless because the content can be
ported back to Wikipedia isn't true.  For one, it provides a work
environment for people who don't want to deal with the stress of Wikipedia.
It also creates a "stable version" against which the Wikipedia version will
always be compared. Implemented properly, it can serve as a buffer against
articles becoming degraded.

The idea that expert-driven process will result in experts "telling people
what to do" seems like a rather pessimistic view of "experts".  We have lots
of experts on WP - some of them lack the ability to work with others, some
of them grow disenchanted and leave the project - but lots of others stay
and slog it out - and work quite well with others.

Ian


subject: [WikiEN-l] Fwd: Blocking issue

body:
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: DannyDyer.com <info at dannydyer.com>
Date: 16-Sep-2006 18:05
Subject: Blocking issue
To: wp at davidgerard.co.uk

Dear Sir,

I am the editor of Danny Dyer's official website and he has advised me about
some serious errors on his listing. I have tried creating an account so I
can amend the listing but for some reason it states that my IP address
(82.37.50.138)) has been blocked for misuse.

Please can you explain how this can be blocked as the computer with this IP
address has never been used to access Wikimedia and as Danny's editor I
should be able to remove any offending material on his Wikimedia listing.

I would appreciate it if you could please let me know how I can create an
account using my current computer and IP address.

Regards

Chris Andrews
Editor
info at dannydyer.com
www.dannydyer.com
the official web site.