body:
Hi Martin,

I did some research this afternoon and located your swahili dictionary
and a large number of on-line references and lexicons written by others. I
also noticed only 1000+ swahili articles on the sw.wikipedia.org
website. I will spend some time further this week with my spiders
pulling down and constructing swahili lexicons and grammar references
and hopefully in a week or so, I can make some runs against
sw.wikipedia.org as a test. I'll even import the whole of wikipedia for
you to review at my site after I make several machine translation runs
into this language. Won't be perfect, but its better than 1000+ articles
and could be a good basis for a test of this system. I note a lot of
similarities between the projects.

I think after looking over it you may have a different view and will be
able to grasp the possibilities. A lot easier to correct calculus
textbooks for
grammar here and there than to try to convince people 5000 miles away to
try to find a computer somewhere to log in. At any rate, would be a much
faster way to entice editors to a site somewhere.

I have some strange ability to assimilate and understand languages very
rapidly, being raised trilingual my have had something to do
with it. I find swahili fluid, musical, and beautiful and very much like
our language (but not quite as synthetic or structured).

Jeff


list: wikimedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Jeff V. Merkey

subject: [Foundation-l] African Languages Wikipedia Bashing on Slashdot


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] #time

references:
<ecrho0$vvl$1@sea.gmane.org>	<ect2h9$t8g$1@sea.gmane.org>	<7c2a12e20608271435l11ae2ae2l6e9f0cace2405466@mail.gmail.com>	<ect46r$20t$1@sea.gmane.org>	<8EE8DB45-04D1-4644-AB12-56F7C20168A7@gmail.com>	<44F2BFFB.2010900@pobox.com>
	<44F2CD2A.2090703@jdforrester.org>

body:
James D. Forrester wrote:
> Brion Vibber wrote:
>> Presumably the same way the computer does it; provide a location such as
>> 'Europe/Berlin' or 'America/Los_Angeles' and let the C library look in its big
>> list of locales.
>
> Oh, goody, more things for you devs to keep in sync when a country
> arbitrarilty decides to massively redefine the period over which Summer
> Time is set. Not that any country would ever do that. :-)

Ah see, but we can ignore it and leave that to the distro vendors. ;)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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from_name: Buttay cyril

subject: [Wikitech-l] flexbisonparse

body:
Magnus Manske wrote:
> Official clarification: flexbisonparse was written by Timwi, and Timwi
> alone :-)
>
> I had a look at it once, and didn't find my way through the flex jungle,
> so I gave up quickly. I did, however, base the XML of wiki2xml on the
> flexbisonparse output; they're not identical, however.
>
>
I've just given wiki2xml a go on a big page (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Tintin ) that is full of
references, and I noticed that there is a problem with some of them:
the following wikicode:
<ref name="Farr">{{cite journal | last =Farr | first =Michael |
authorlink =Michael Farr | coauthors = | year =2004 | month =March |
title =Thundering Typhoons | journal =History Today | volume =54 | issue
=3 | pages =62 | id = | url = | format = | accessdate = }}</ref>

is translated as:
<extension extension_name="ref" name="Farr">
<xhtml:cite style="font-style:normal">.</xhtml:cite>
</extension>

As you can see, there is quite a bit of missing information.

At the moment, I think I'll carry on with flexbisonparse, adding some
python patches to correct the output. Maybe later I'll switch to
wiki2xml instead (although it is a bit slower than flexbisonparse to say
the less). This shouldn't be to difficult as they both use some dialect
of XML.

Concerning docbook, I'll also have to give it a try, but one of my
concerns is that (as far as I know) there is no way to give specific
formatting instructions, which, IMO is mandatory for a nice print
output. I have nothing against semantic description, but sometimes you
have to fine-tune some specific part (figure position, alignment
tolerance...). I'm sure those who use LaTeX intensively will understand...

Cyril


from_name: Neil Harris

subject: [Wikitech-l] flexbisonparse

body:
Eric Astor wrote:
>
> I've actually been working on a Python-based wikitext parser, using some
> techniques that should make the system a bit faster and cleaner... With a
> lot of luck, I should start making progress on that again in the next month
> or so.
>
> For anyone who cares, I'll probably be trying to implement a PEG-based
> parser using mxTextTools, since I think that should be able to parse all of
> MediaWiki's wikitext, and should be about twice as fast as the current
> Parser.php (which is about as fast as wiki2xml)... Or I might just end up
> using ANTLR, if I can bully my current semi-grammar into working in that
> framework... If anyone knows of a decent PEG parser with a Python API (a
> packrat parser might be ideal), that'd be great too. *shrugs*
>
> - Eric Astor
>
>
Yes! I also believe that PEGs and [[packrat parser]]s are the way to go
with parsing wikitext, because of the very ad-hoc definition of wikitext.

A basic packrat parser is pretty easy to implement; it's simply a
brute-force recursive-descent parser with memoization of (offset, term)
-> production mappings.  Scheme is a pretty good language to write a
packrat parser in, since the grammar itself can be written as an
S-expression, and is easy to use for program transformation (see below).

A simple implementation just interprets the grammar tree, matching as it
goes.

You can achieve considerable speedups by:

1 using the grammar to generate code, and compiling and executing that
instead of interpreting the grammar by hand

2 allowing the grammar to contain both PEG expressions and regexps for
low-level lexical matching: regexps will be at least an order of
magnitude faster than even compiled PEGs for matching low-level lexical
tokens like numbers and names, without removing the ability of PEGs to
blur the distinction between lexical and syntactic analysis, which is
important for parsing strange things like wikitext.

I've implemented packrat parsing in both Python and Scheme: Scheme was
faster, and ultimately more natural.

The one awkward bit is left-recursion removal, which breaks packrat
parsers unless you alter the grammar to an equivalent form without left
recursion. I did it by hand on my input grammars, but it could easily be
done programatically at grammar-generation time.

I'm not sure about the best way to implement an API: have you considered
just using the parser to convert from wikitext to somthing like PYX,
which is a very simple-to-parse and Python-friendly representation of an
XML data structure, and can then be used either to build an in-core
parse tree, or drive something like a SAX API, or whatever other form of
post-processing you like (for example, direct procedural text-to-text
generation, which could be very simple indeed, since the output of a
successful parse is guaranteed by definition to _exactly_ conform to the
grammar specification).

-- Neil

[PYX: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2000/03/15/feature/index.html]


list: foundation-l

from_name: Alphax (Wikipedia email)

subject:
[Foundation-l] Fwd: NYTimes.com: African Languages Grow as a
 Wikipedia Pr...

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:
>
>> daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:
>>
>>
>>> In a message dated 8/27/2006 6:17:12 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
>>> gerard.meijssen at gmail.com writes:
>>>
>>> It is  imho wrong to call it languages in developing regions, it is not
>>> that  simple and the article cited is about Wikipedia in its African
>>> settings.
>>>
>>> Actually, the article cited doesnt mention WiktionaryZ, which was the bulk
>>> of your email. I am talking in principle, when we refer to projects that need a
>>> nudge, let's not just focus on African languages because it happens to be in
>>> vogue. There are plenty of other important languages out there that also
>>> need a  gentle push so that they can reach their full potential.
>>>
>>>
>> Unfortunately the people who are likely to know these languages are
>> unlikely to want to contribute to Wikipedia, because they'd probably see
>> it as a waste of time/doomed to fail/whatever. Still, I can ask people...
>>
> It would be wrong to impute motives to any of the speakers whose
> language is not represented by a strong Wikipedia community.
>

Ok, perhaps I should clarify something here. I'm not talking about
native speakers, I'm talking about people who have some knowledge and
have access to native speakers when they go back to wherever they're
taking a break from...

> In many respects I agree with both Danny and Gerard on this.
> "Developing regions" may have been an unfortunate choice of words, but
> the differences that they have expressed seem like the sort of thing
> that can easily be resolved through dialogue.  We should indeed be
> encouraging development in all languages, and development goes well
> beyond word lists and languages.  Having complete dictionary listings
> for Tocharian or Beothuk is not going to bring those languages back to
> life.  Extensive dictionary listings for all the aboriginal languages of
> Australia will do very little to bring those people onto the internet
> and contributing to Wikipedia in their own languages.
>
> Many of these languages were pre-literate until waves of Christian
> missionaries went in and translated the Bible for them.  Talk about
> paternalistic!

... and they're Christian missionaries from various aid organisations.

NOW do you see why people have no desire to contribute? Attitudes like
yours, buddy.

--
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

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body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:
>
>> daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:
>>
>>
>>> In a message dated 8/27/2006 6:17:12 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
>>> gerard.meijssen at gmail.com writes:
>>>
>>> It is  imho wrong to call it languages in developing regions, it is not
>>> that  simple and the article cited is about Wikipedia in its African
>>> settings.
>>>
>>> Actually, the article cited doesnt mention WiktionaryZ, which was the bulk
>>> of your email. I am talking in principle, when we refer to projects that need a
>>> nudge, let's not just focus on African languages because it happens to be in
>>> vogue. There are plenty of other important languages out there that also
>>> need a  gentle push so that they can reach their full potential.
>>>
>>>
>> Unfortunately the people who are likely to know these languages are
>> unlikely to want to contribute to Wikipedia, because they'd probably see
>> it as a waste of time/doomed to fail/whatever. Still, I can ask people...
>>
> It would be wrong to impute motives to any of the speakers whose
> language is not represented by a strong Wikipedia community.
>

Ok, perhaps I should clarify something here. I'm not talking about
native speakers, I'm talking about people who have some knowledge and
have access to native speakers when they go back to wherever they're
taking a break from...

> In many respects I agree with both Danny and Gerard on this.
> "Developing regions" may have been an unfortunate choice of words, but
> the differences that they have expressed seem like the sort of thing
> that can easily be resolved through dialogue.  We should indeed be
> encouraging development in all languages, and development goes well
> beyond word lists and languages.  Having complete dictionary listings
> for Tocharian or Beothuk is not going to bring those languages back to
> life.  Extensive dictionary listings for all the aboriginal languages of
> Australia will do very little to bring those people onto the internet
> and contributing to Wikipedia in their own languages.
>
> Many of these languages were pre-literate until waves of Christian
> missionaries went in and translated the Bible for them.  Talk about
> paternalistic!

... and they're Christian missionaries from various aid organisations.

NOW do you see why people have no desire to contribute? Attitudes like
yours, buddy.

--
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

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body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:
>
>> daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:
>>
>>
>>> In a message dated 8/27/2006 6:17:12 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
>>> gerard.meijssen at gmail.com writes:
>>>
>>> It is  imho wrong to call it languages in developing regions, it is not
>>> that  simple and the article cited is about Wikipedia in its African
>>> settings.
>>>
>>> Actually, the article cited doesnt mention WiktionaryZ, which was the bulk
>>> of your email. I am talking in principle, when we refer to projects that need a
>>> nudge, let's not just focus on African languages because it happens to be in
>>> vogue. There are plenty of other important languages out there that also
>>> need a  gentle push so that they can reach their full potential.
>>>
>>>
>> Unfortunately the people who are likely to know these languages are
>> unlikely to want to contribute to Wikipedia, because they'd probably see
>> it as a waste of time/doomed to fail/whatever. Still, I can ask people...
>>
> It would be wrong to impute motives to any of the speakers whose
> language is not represented by a strong Wikipedia community.
>

Ok, perhaps I should clarify something here. I'm not talking about
native speakers, I'm talking about people who have some knowledge and
have access to native speakers when they go back to wherever they're
taking a break from...

> In many respects I agree with both Danny and Gerard on this.
> "Developing regions" may have been an unfortunate choice of words, but
> the differences that they have expressed seem like the sort of thing
> that can easily be resolved through dialogue.  We should indeed be
> encouraging development in all languages, and development goes well
> beyond word lists and languages.  Having complete dictionary listings
> for Tocharian or Beothuk is not going to bring those languages back to
> life.  Extensive dictionary listings for all the aboriginal languages of
> Australia will do very little to bring those people onto the internet
> and contributing to Wikipedia in their own languages.
>
> Many of these languages were pre-literate until waves of Christian
> missionaries went in and translated the Bible for them.  Talk about
> paternalistic!

... and they're Christian missionaries from various aid organisations.

NOW do you see why people have no desire to contribute? Attitudes like
yours, buddy.

--
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

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body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:
>
>> daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:
>>
>>
>>> In a message dated 8/27/2006 6:17:12 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
>>> gerard.meijssen at gmail.com writes:
>>>
>>> It is  imho wrong to call it languages in developing regions, it is not
>>> that  simple and the article cited is about Wikipedia in its African
>>> settings.
>>>
>>> Actually, the article cited doesnt mention WiktionaryZ, which was the bulk
>>> of your email. I am talking in principle, when we refer to projects that need a
>>> nudge, let's not just focus on African languages because it happens to be in
>>> vogue. There are plenty of other important languages out there that also
>>> need a  gentle push so that they can reach their full potential.
>>>
>>>
>> Unfortunately the people who are likely to know these languages are
>> unlikely to want to contribute to Wikipedia, because they'd probably see
>> it as a waste of time/doomed to fail/whatever. Still, I can ask people...
>>
> It would be wrong to impute motives to any of the speakers whose
> language is not represented by a strong Wikipedia community.
>

Ok, perhaps I should clarify something here. I'm not talking about
native speakers, I'm talking about people who have some knowledge and
have access to native speakers when they go back to wherever they're
taking a break from...

> In many respects I agree with both Danny and Gerard on this.
> "Developing regions" may have been an unfortunate choice of words, but
> the differences that they have expressed seem like the sort of thing
> that can easily be resolved through dialogue.  We should indeed be
> encouraging development in all languages, and development goes well
> beyond word lists and languages.  Having complete dictionary listings
> for Tocharian or Beothuk is not going to bring those languages back to
> life.  Extensive dictionary listings for all the aboriginal languages of
> Australia will do very little to bring those people onto the internet
> and contributing to Wikipedia in their own languages.
>
> Many of these languages were pre-literate until waves of Christian
> missionaries went in and translated the Bible for them.  Talk about
> paternalistic!

... and they're Christian missionaries from various aid organisations.

NOW do you see why people have no desire to contribute? Attitudes like
yours, buddy.

--
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

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from_name: Jussi-Ville Heiskanen

subject: [Foundation-l] Withdrawl

body:
On 8/28/06, Nathan Carter <cartmanau at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
> I just wish to formally advise that I am pulling out of the board elections.
> I do not consider myself to be a serious contender and believe my running
> could take votes from others. At the same time, I believe that there are
> others more deserving than I for a board position.
>
> As most of my platform was centred on the role of chapters within the
> foundation, I feel I can best serve it through my membership on the ChapCom.

For my part, let me say that all of the above indicates that you are a
genuine class act. Based on that I predict that you do good work on
the chapters committee. What you have done can't have been an easy
decision, so I salute you.

>
> Cheers,
> Nathan Carter (Cartman02au)

Cheers.

--
--
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, AKA. Cimon Avaro

Candidate for Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation in the
September 2006 elections.


subject: [Foundation-l] Withdrawl


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Foundation-l] Celebrity pictures

body:
Anthony wrote:

>On 8/28/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>
>
>>Has anybody so much as investigated industry standards about the use of
>>album covers or the publicity shots of celebrities?  The entertainment
>>industry if infamous for protecting what it believes to be its
>>copyrights.  Have there been any cases regarding this kind of material?
>>What can we do to free this borderline material?
>>
>>
>I don't know of any such study.  But if one is done it should look at
>both sides.  Has anyone lost a case over it is one question.  But
>another is whether there are companies in jurisdictions which don't
>have fair use that are using publicity shots without permission in the
>first place.
>
I was afraid you would come back with something like that. :-)
Perhaps more significant than whether anyone has lost is whether any
such case has ever been filed.  Given that they are distributed for the
specific purpose of publicity there could be an implicit permission.

>As a tangentially related case, the John Dillinger Museum in Hammond,
>Indiana lost a lawsuit over the "right of publicity", "which restrict
>the use of someone's image or name for commercial purposes".  It seems
>John Dillinger's family doesn't want the museum portraying him as a
>murderer.  http://www.artsjournal.com/artfulmanager/main/008254.php
>
The article that you mention also suggested that this museum is somewhat
trashy.  People who might find such a museum acceptable often don't act
unless things get trashy.  Similarly, people who never saw their writing
as money-making might be okay with a tasteful infringement of copyright
may change their tune if they find the usage disrepectful.

The right of publicity may be a dubious theory.  Wasn't this the issue
in the case that WMF-de won in Germany?  Major League Baseball has not
been doing very well with this argument in its attempt at preventing the
use of its statistics by fantasy leagues.  They had already given up on
the argument over copyright infringement because it's expression and not
information that is copyright.

Ec


subject: [Foundation-l] Celebrity pictures


list: wikien-l

from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [WikiEN-l] on new article creation

body:
On 8/28/06, maru dubshinki <marudubshinki at gmail.com> wrote:
> Judge by what people do, and not what they say. Perhaps that was not
> his intention in the beginning, but thus far that has been the
> practical effect.

Ironically today he has just posted that he's strongly considering
undoing it, due to lack of perceived benefits.

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] WTF Have I Missed?

body:
On 8/28/06, dmehkeri at swi.com <dmehkeri at swi.com> wrote:
> Before I saw this post, I was about to counter-propose just that: a simple
> delay-to-live timer. Something similar could apply to page creation.

Perhaps the time-to-publish could be a dynamic figure based on the age
of the editor making the change (anons have age 0, old editors go live
faster), the frequency of changes of the page (more frequently edited
pages go live faster) and the frequency of page views (less frequently
viewed pages go live faster).

The idea being that an anon editing a rarely-edited page should go
live slower, to give other editors a chance to see the edit. Maybe 24
hours or more...

Steve


subject:
[Foundation-l] Swahili Machine Translation in Process - Estimated
 Compeltion of Total Swahili Translation - 4 hours from now ....

body:
I have obtained Martin's lexicons and several others from the web and
have already build the lexicon hiearchy.  I very kind contributor
is also sending me a grammar reference for this language.

Estimated time for complettion of full machine translation of Wikipedia
into Swahili is four hours.  First pass is phrase and word by
word machine translation with no conjungation, verb stem decompositon,
or inference engine restructuring.  The full site will be active
four hours from now.    If Martin will take 20 or so articles and
correct any teensing and conjugation issues and return these changes,
I will feed them through the inference engine and run a second pass to
reorder the translations.

Jeff


subject:
[Foundation-l] Swahili Machine Translation in Process -
 Estimated Compeltion of Total Swahili Translation - 4 hours from now ....

body:
Jeff V. Merkey wrote:

>I have obtained Martin's lexicons and several others from the web and
>have already build the lexicon hiearchy.  I very kind contributor
>is also sending me a grammar reference for this language.
>
>Estimated time for complettion of full machine translation of Wikipedia
>into Swahili is four hours.  First pass is phrase and word by
>word machine translation with no conjungation, verb stem decompositon,
>or inference engine restructuring.  The full site will be active
>four hours from now.    If Martin will take 20 or so articles and
>correct any teensing and conjugation issues and return these changes,
>I will feed them through the inference engine and run a second pass to
>reorder the translations.
>
>Jeff
>_______________________________________________
>foundation-l mailing list
>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>
>
URL is not setup yet, but will be at four hours from now:

http://sw.wikigadugi.org

Jeff


subject: [WikiEN-l] WTF Have I Missed?

body:
On 8/28/06, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> so we can not waste time discussing
> in a vacuum.

That's ruining our fun. :)

I am curious to see how it works on the german wikipedia. How long will this
expiriment last btw?

Garion96


subject: [Wikitech-l] References - ugh

body:
On 8/28/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> The fact that lifting a graf with references and copying it to another
> article becomes a major hassle.
>
> The problem as *I* see it is that the whitespace necessary to make the
> wikitext readable screws with the article vspace.

That's part of the problem, but not all of it.

You know, what would really be ideal (in dreamland) would be a column
of references next to the edit box. You would type <ref name="foo" />
and the instant you'd closed the >, you'd have a new entry in the list
to the right, just begging you to give it some details. The list would
probably be stored at the bottom of the article, but you wouldn't even
care. You'd always edit it directly in that list. And you could do
neat things like collapsing two references together, highlighting any
references which were no longer referred to in the text etc...

Steve


from_name: Александр Сигачёв

subject: [Foundation-l] Approved requests for new languages: Siberian

body:
It's interesting.

Siberian language is in list of approved requests for new languages.
It has more then 1000 articles in Incubator.
http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Test-WP/chal

Siberian language does not have an ISO code.
Where are no article or any references to the language in English Wikipedia.

>From official site of the language:
"It is project of language based on old north dialects of Russian language".

>From http://wikiznanie.ru
"Siberian language was created in 2005."

I can not find discussion about this language in archive of "Requests
for new languages".

Where were 30 (or more) votes "oppose" in August 8, but where are only
15 votes "oppose" in summary about the language in the approved list.

See list of "support" votes in history of the discussion.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Requests_for_new_languages&oldid=404242#Chaldon-Siberian_.2846_support.2C_29_oppose.29

They are mostly anonymous.

So, was this language really approved?

--
Alexander Sigachov
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/user/ajvol


from_name: Александр Сигачёв


from_name: Jay R. Ashworth

subject: [Wikitech-l] References - ugh

body:
On Mon, Aug 28, 2006 at 07:44:12PM +0200, Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 8/28/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> > It occurs to me that diffing XML wouldn't be pretty.
>
> Why ever not?

Because in wikitext, everything is in-band; in XML, the structure is
out-of-band, on purpose.  This requires an entirely different, and I
suspect, much more complicated diff algorithm.

Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

	The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.


subject: [Wikitech-l] flexbisonparse

body:
On Mon, Aug 28, 2006 at 11:51:14PM +0200, Lars Aronsson wrote:
> Magnus Manske wrote:
> > Official clarification: flexbisonparse was written by Timwi, and
> > Timwi alone :-)
>
> The important thing is that it is "a piece of German engineering".

Works for me.

Cheers,
-- jr "'87 e24" a
--
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

	The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.


from_name: Mathias Schindler

subject: [WikiEN-l] AP introduces a Recentchanges-feed

body:
It seems that AP, the news agency that almost anyone can edit, has
introduced a Special:Recentchanges feature for Wikipedia edits.

http://www.duluthsuperior.com/mld/duluthsuperior/news/politics/15381771.htm

Associated Press

MILWAUKEE - A Wikipedia article about the Lake Express ferry has been
altered repeatedly to emphasize the vessel's cancellations, delays,
mechanical problems and passengers' seasickness, a newspaper reported
Monday.

oh wait, CNN is having breaking news. Someone has created a new
article on Wikipedia...


from_name: Virgil Ierubino

subject: [Foundation-l] New Project Proposal: Wikinotes - Discussion

body:
See original mailing list proposal:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-August/009520.html

In reply to Eric:
I agree that interaction with real-world institutions would be a very good
addition to the existing, new Wikiversity. Hence I think this project
proposal works best as a direct adjunct to it, either at a seperate domain
or as a subsection. However what I'm suggesting is a) not Wikiversity and b)
a very good way to achieve that aim, it's the bridge between the
institutions, the students, and Wikiversity.

In reply to AI:
The "moral" problem raised doesn't and shouldn't really exist, if it is
understood that the purpose of the site is for writing, and 1% for reading.
The way students benefit is by typing up their notes (which helps ingrain
the knowledge, etc), typsetting them, structuring and organising them
(builds a mental map). Very little is gained from reading someone else's
notes; if a student "gets lazy" then s/he won't get very far anyway. The
site can obviously also remind them of this.

As Ray wrote, "the act of note-taking is a part of the learning process.
 Reading notes does not have the same effect on the mind as actually writing
them down where students will benefit from the notes even if they never
review them again in the future."

So the sharing is beneficial, yes, but the largest gain is from actually
working on, and writing the notes oneself. Just like editing a Wikipedia
article a lot makes you really take in its content more than reading it. The
shared notes is a main facet, but could not usefully be the only facet for a
visiting student.

In reply to Andrew:
As for problems of plagiarism, sharing notes is not, and never has been
plagiarism. Obviously, plagiarism, like non-free images on Wikipedia, is
against Wikinotes policy; plagiarism could occur if a student uploaded a
portion of his/her essay to the site, was giving direct answers to exam
questions, etc. All of these would be strictly against policy. However I
think you'll find that in practise no one is likely to upload a whole essay.
More to the point, the collaborative writing of notes is in no way
plagiarism; learning institutions encourage their students to work together
in such a way.

Yes, there would be hundreds and hundreds of categories, and yes the
students will have to identify three things (in current implementation) -
their University (or institution), their Course (or class) and the Course
Part (or other identifier). These three things form a category:
[[Category:University Course Part]], e.g. [[Category:Cambridge Philosophy
1A]]. This will always be enough to single out any class.

The categories are heirarchical. [[Category:Cambridge Philosophy 1A]] is a
subcategory of [[Category:Cambridge Philosophy]] (which also holds
[[Category:Cambridge Philosophy 1B]], etc), which is a subcategoy of
[[Category:Cambridge]] (which also holds a category for every other subject
at the institution, e.g. [[Category:Cambridge Engineering]]). The
subcategorisation process *could* be automated by bots. In my current
version, it relies on a student at some point clicking on a red link within
the categories box at the bottom of their page, which brings up a edit box
preceded by instructions to subcategorise. Also note that this heirarchy is
not essential to the functioning of the wiki, but does streamline it. If
bots are impossible, subcategorisation would be an on-going task of the wiki
(like CSD, orphaned pages, etc, at Wikipedia) - although after a short time
a complete category heirarchy will emerge with little need for any further
changes.

Lots of boilerplate text may be needed, much of which makes it easier to
perform the above categorisations. This poses an initial "setting up"
problem, but not a damning problem. It would just require work. I've already
done most of this work at my implementation anyway.

*Forcing* the students to typeset their notes would yes, be more useful to
them, but you need to remember what kind of site this is. Instead of forcing
this on them (which would reduce the userbase to about 1%), they can just
know that what they put in is what they take out. The site highly encourages
them to structure, organise and typset their notes as this is very
beneficial, and is a work ethic the wiki embraces. But they don't *have* to.


from_name: Matt Brown

subject: [WikiEN-l] OT gmail spam increase?

body:
On 8/28/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> A lot of that is masses of text to clog spam filters that work on word
> frequency, with the actual content in an image at the end.

The good thing, though, is that the more spammers try to mask what
they're pushing,

a) The spam becomes easier to distinguish by human eye, and
b) The spam becomes less effective, since it's a much poorer advertisement.

-Matt


from_name: Mark Gallagher

subject: [WikiEN-l] WTF Have I Missed?

body:
G'day Bryan,

> Seriously, though, I'm still looking for a response on my request for
>  details when you said "analysis has been done, results will be
> published" regarding the initial disabling of anon page creation. Who
>  did the analysis? Or did you answer in a different thread that I
> haven't been reading? I know I'm being a hardass about this, but so
> far this has been the only lead I'm aware of indicating that any such
> analysis might actually be taking place.

While there are aspects of dear old Gregory I would undoubtedly like to
reflect (being able to take a decent fscking photograph for a start), we
are, in fact, different people, and would both prefer not to be confused!

Cheers,

--
Mark Gallagher
"But the visibility was very poor, and you yourself admit that you were
being struck by thunderbolts all the time, which must have distracted
your attention, so it is more than probable you were mistaken."
- Esmond Haddock, /The Mating Season/


subject: [WikiEN-l] WTF Have I Missed?

body:
G'day Kelly,

> On 8/27/06, Joe Anderson <computerjoe.mailinglist at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
>>This article (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5286458.stm) got my
>>concern. Editorial control on the Wikipedia? What exactly have I missed?
>
> You basically missed the fact that Bill Thompson is fond of talking
> out of his ass.
>
> Mark's description of what German is going to be testing is not
> accurate.

<snip />

Be fair, Kel, my *source* was a fellow apparently known for being "fond
of talking out of his ass"!

Thanks for the correction :-)

--
"That's right, Mr Howard, but he's not called a wicket keeper, because
he's the goalie."
(John Clarke attempts to explain football)


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Christopher Hagar

subject: [Wikipedia-l] [Wikitech-l] WikiCharts

body: This is really great. Thank you.


subject: [Wikitech-l] References - ugh

body:
On 8/28/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> It occurs to me that diffing XML wouldn't be pretty.

Why ever not?

Steve


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia - entering the collective consciousness

body:
On 28/08/06, Mak <makwik at gmail.com> wrote:

> "Mathematics is supposed to be a Wikipedia-like undertaking," from
> http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/27/weekinreview/27johnson.html
> It is funny to me that Wikipedia is showing up more and more in these
> contexts.

The whole sentence is an interesting view of what we do as well:
"Mathematics is supposed to be a Wikipedia-like undertaking, with
thousands of self-effacing scriveners quietly laboring over a great
self-correcting text."

And the next: "But in any endeavor ? literature, art, science,
theology ? a celebrity system develops and egos get in the way."

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] [[User:Jon_Awbrey]] and [[Wikipedia:Wikilawyering]]

body:
On 28/08/06, Daniel R. Tobias <dan at tobias.name> wrote:

> [User:Jon_Awbrey]] has moved [[Wikipedia:Wikilawyering]] to
> [[Wikipedia:WikiCaviling]], on the grounds that he claims the
> original title is defamatory to lawyers.  However, politically-
> incorrect or not, "Wikilawyering" is the actual terminology that has
> been in use on Wikipedia's discussion areas; "WikiCaviling" is an
> ugly neologism with no support that I know of.  Page titles should
> reflect actual usage instead of attempting to impose political
> correctness.

I'[ve moved it back. Either Jon is trolling, in which case he doesn't
deserve any more than the page being moved back and locked in place
(which I've done), or he really doesn't appreciate how stupid this is
- and he's reverted it being moved at least once so far - in which
case no mere discussion will sway him and there's no plausible reason
to wait on such.

- d.


body:
On 28/08/06, Sarah <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8/28/06, Daniel R. Tobias <dan at tobias.name> wrote:

> > [User:Jon_Awbrey]] has moved [[Wikipedia:Wikilawyering]] to
> > [[Wikipedia:WikiCaviling]], on the grounds that he claims the
> > original title is defamatory to lawyers.

> Jon Awbrey has been making a nuisance of himself on several policy and
> guideline pages recently, engaging heavily in wikilawyering (hence his
> undoubted interest in it) and generally driving people nuts. I've been
> contemplating an RfC, but a speedier remedy might be in order.

Revert as needed, note on WP:ANI and block 24 hours if he's being
really quite disruptive so other admins can work out what to do. He's
busy playing basic-level WikiNomic.

- d.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Teaser trailer

body:
On 8/28/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> >                                                               When the
> > current text is saved, the button grays out and changes to read
> > "Saved".
>
> I don't like this.  Browsers aren't smart enough for that. Hell, *apps*
> aren't smart enough for that.  When I say save, *save* damnit.

Fwiw, it works well. If you really desperately want to save again for
some paranoid reason, you can always add and remove a few spaces and
press 'save' then.

>
> > * If you have a reply entered and try leaving the page, it shows a
> > popup dialog asking if you want to discard changes (if not, it cancels
> > the page-leave, but doesn't save the draft, I think).
>
> Yeah; I've seen that on-leave idea a couple of places.  I like it quite
> a bit,  though permitting a browser to do it can have.. consequences.

It works well here.

Steve


from_name: Anthony

subject: [WikiEN-l] on new article creation

body:
On 8/28/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8/28/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Wikipedia won't be finished in a day...and some times we need to just
> > try things out if we are to find good solutions.
>
> Yep. My heart is not bleeding that anons couldn't make their usual
> truckload of crappy articles.
>
So are a truckload of crappy articles no longer being made, or do you
think you can identify the people who are making them?

Anthony


body:
On 28/08/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> Revert as needed, note on WP:ANI and block 24 hours if he's being
> really quite disruptive so other admins can work out what to do. He's
> busy playing basic-level WikiNomic.

I've put a note on WP:ANI:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents#User:Jon_Awbrey_and_Wikipedia:Wikilawyering

- d.


from_name: Delirium

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
> daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:
>
>> I have a lot of sympathy and fondness for African languages. However, I
>> think the attitude we are taking is paternalistic.
>>
>
> Who is?  I have not seen this.
>
>
>> The same problems exist for
>> languages in many other corners of the world. Identifying this issue as uniquely
>>  "African" is paternalistic and, quite frankly, a tad racist. Why do we not
>> make the same efforts for Khmer (the official language of Cambodia, 66
>> articles), Burmese (the official language of Myanmar, with 32 million speakers,  and
>> just 66 articles), or Assamese (an official language of India with 20
>> million speakers and only 6 articles)?
>>
>
> I think we absolutely ARE taking efforts in ALL parts of the world,
> simultaneously.  I had a meeting in Delhi with someone who is interested
> in pursuing a joint project to develop African languages.
>
> I have no idea who you have in mind who thinks anything racist or
> paternalistic about African languages, but if they do, then they do not
> represent the attitudes of the broad community or me.
>

I think the fear being expressed, or in any case the one I'll express,
is that there are a bunch of Americans and Europeans saying that we
ought to do such-and-such about African languages, or such-and-such to
change African societies for the better---basically, paternalistic
attitudes that the enlightened Westerners have arrived on their glorious
steeds of Information to fix the problems of Africa.  See also,
[[en:white man's burden]].

A non-paternalistic attitude would be to treat African languages like we
treat all other languages.  Even though quite a few Westerners are
interested in the subject of spreading information in China, for
example, the Chinese-language projects have been run by Chinese speakers.

-Mark


from_name: Nathan Carter

subject: [Foundation-l] [Election] Withdrawl

body:
Hi all,
I just wish to formally advise that I am pulling out of the board elections.
I do not consider myself to be a serious contender and believe my running
could take votes from others. At the same time, I believe that there are
others more deserving than I for a board position.

As most of my platform was centred on the role of chapters within the
foundation, I feel I can best serve it through my membership on the ChapCom.

Cheers,
Nathan Carter (Cartman02au)


subject: [Foundation-l] [Election] Withdrawl


from_name: Brianna Laugher

subject: [Wikipedia-l] New language proposal: Wikipedia...

body:
I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but there is a Chinese
'converter' between mainland (simplified), Taiwan (traditional), Hong
Kong (traditional) & Singapore (simplified) scripts/dialects (??), as
well as a default plain 'Chinese' which may be a mixture I guess.

Maybe a goal could be to develop a similar item for these scripts. No
idea how realistic that is, just throwing it out there. :)

cheers
Brianna

On 28/08/06, Frederick FN Noronha <fredericknoronha at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks Fran, this is going to be helpful. Maybe a technical fix could
> help reduce some of the misunderstanding that creeps in due to script
> and dialectical differences. The problem is that most literary people
> aren't too tech-oriented, and vice-versa. I belong to neither camps,
> being a journalists writing on technology :-) FN
> PS: Your link is useful, I'll post it to our local GNU/Linux users'
> group and see how people respond. We have people use or knowing
> different scripts there.
>
> On 28/08/06, Francis Tyers <spectre at ivixor.net> wrote:
> > If there are only small dialect differences, it might be worth looking
> > at Apertium (http://apertium.sourceforge.net). Free software machine
> > translation for closely related languages. I think having just different
> > scripts is about as closely related as you get :)
> >
> > Fran
> >
> > On Sun, 2006-08-27 at 15:06 +0530, Frederick "FN" Noronha wrote:
> > > That doesn't seem possible at this point of time. Each script tends to
> > > have some small but significant dialectal variations. So, simply using
> > > some form of mechanical transalation/transiteration might render the
> > > output quite unreadable.
> > >
> > > It would be preferable to have human-created pages.
> > >
> > > Even if done in different scripts, I don't think this would cause any
> > > problems as such. Teams would work at differing paces, as per their
> > > own abilities and convenience. And work by one team might spur on
> > > others to catch up too.
> > >
> > > The issue we're shifting to is a much wider question, which has been
> > > causing worry for those keen about the Konkani language. As far as
> > > Wikipedia goes, what do you see as the suitable solution?
> > >
> > > We have two options -- a common Konkani Wikipedia, or separate ones
> > > (set up according to interest shown and activity levels initiated). FN
> > >
> > > PS: Have just been working on a portal for Goa at
> > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Goa  You can see some Konkani
> > > descriptions (in English there). Since I'm not a techie, have been
> > > struggling a bit to control the templates and code!
> > >
> > > On 27/08/06, Berto <albertoserra at ukr.net> wrote:
> > > > Hi!
> > > >
> > > > >a script-neutral Wikipedia, or multi Wikipedias to deal
> > > > > with the diverse scripts of Konkani (even if with differening levels
> > > > > of activity).
> > > >
> > > > Is there any way to make an automatic coverter among the 5 scripts? It would
> > > > save you a lot of trouble.
> > > >
> > > > B?rto
> > > >
> > > > _______________________________________________
> > > > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > > > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > > > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> > > >
> > >
> > >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
>
>
> --
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Frederick Noronha http://fn.goa-india.org  9822122436 +91-832-240-9490
> http://fredericknoronha.wordpress.com fredericknoronha at gmail.com
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Gregory Maxwell

subject: [WikiEN-l] on new article creation

body:
On 8/28/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8/28/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> > And no one has proposed how we could have measured the effects without
> > going ahead and doing it... there are just too many variables.   We
>
> I don't know what you mean by "without going ahead and doing it" -
> obviously you have to perform the experiment in order to collect data
> from it. I also proposed a list of data that could have been
> collected. I don't have any problem with the fact that no data were
> collected, however - there are scientific experiments, and there are
> lots of other experiments.

"No data was collected"  ... What single piece of data did we *fail*
to collect? Okay.. there are a few things, but I've yet to see any
suggested here.

Collection isn't the problem. It's the effort it take to sit down and
make sense of the fire hose...


subject: [Foundation-l] Celebrity pictures

body:
On 8/28/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Anthony wrote:
> >On 8/28/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> >>Has anybody so much as investigated industry standards about the use of
> >>album covers or the publicity shots of celebrities?  The entertainment
> >>industry if infamous for protecting what it believes to be its
> >>copyrights.  Have there been any cases regarding this kind of material?
> >>What can we do to free this borderline material?
> >>
> >>
> >I don't know of any such study.  But if one is done it should look at
> >both sides.  Has anyone lost a case over it is one question.  But
> >another is whether there are companies in jurisdictions which don't
> >have fair use that are using publicity shots without permission in the
> >first place.
> >
> I was afraid you would come back with something like that. :-)
> Perhaps more significant than whether anyone has lost is whether any
> such case has ever been filed.  Given that they are distributed for the
> specific purpose of publicity there could be an implicit permission.
>
If you're using the image for the purposes of promoting the person.
If, on the other hand, you're using the image to sell an encyclopedia
article which portrays the person in a way which they don't want to be
portrayed, then there probably isn't implicit permission.

Maybe I'm overly paranoid, but even here in the US where we have some
very strong fair use and first amendment rights, I still wouldn't feel
comfortable selling an encyclopedia with the current [[Lindsay Lohan]]
article in it, without first receiving permission from the copyright
holders of the images.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lindsay_Lohan&oldid=72480012
in case it changes before this is read)

> >As a tangentially related case, the John Dillinger Museum in Hammond,
> >Indiana lost a lawsuit over the "right of publicity", "which restrict
> >the use of someone's image or name for commercial purposes".  It seems
> >John Dillinger's family doesn't want the museum portraying him as a
> >murderer.  http://www.artsjournal.com/artfulmanager/main/008254.php
> >
> The article that you mention also suggested that this museum is somewhat
> trashy.  People who might find such a museum acceptable often don't act
> unless things get trashy.  Similarly, people who never saw their writing
> as money-making might be okay with a tasteful infringement of copyright
> may change their tune if they find the usage disrepectful.
>
> The right of publicity may be a dubious theory.  Wasn't this the issue
> in the case that WMF-de won in Germany?  Major League Baseball has not
> been doing very well with this argument in its attempt at preventing the
> use of its statistics by fantasy leagues.  They had already given up on
> the argument over copyright infringement because it's expression and not
> information that is copyright.
>
Frankly I think that case could be probably be won by the museum on
appeal, if they spent enough money fighting it.  Besides, there are
always going to be crazy jurisdictions (like Indiana, apparently) with
laws so out of touch with reasonableness that we just can't follow
them.  But when it comes to finding a free image of Lindsay Lohan, for
example, I just don't think it's difficult enough to not insist on it.

As for relying on the copyright holder of the image finding the
Wikipedia article "respectful", well, I just think that's a horrible
thing for us to even have to consider.  Would Linsay Lohan (*) object
to our portrayal of her in "Media spotlight"?  I don't know, and I
don't care.

Anthony

(*) Who apparently has become the example of the day: I typed in
[[Jody Foster]], and was pleasantly surprised that there were no
"publicity photos", just two film screenshots.  Then I clicked on the
[[category:Former child actors]] and found Lindsay Lohan.


subject: [Foundation-l] Celebrity pictures


subject:
[Foundation-l] Idea for New Wikimedia Project,
	possible adjunct to Wikiversity

body:
On 8/28/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> No Spam wrote:
>
> ><Virgil Ierubino Wrote:>
> >
> >
> >>I already have a live version of this in use, at Cambridge University, so
> >>I've already very thoroughly thought about the problems it could face, and
> >>worked out (I believe) viable ways around them. For now I'd like to just
> >>discuss the basic idea. The idea is clearer with a university example:
> >>
> >>
> >Virgil,
> >In your current implementation, at Cambridge, are you witnessing any change
> >in behavior from note takers?
> >I envision a moral hazard, or a kind-of prisoner's dilemma, manifested in
> >lazy students waiting for others to post notes.
> >Then, eventually, note-takers catch on and stop posting...
> >How's that playing out in your prototype setting?
> >
> It also needs to be remembered that in many instances the act of
> note-taking is a part of the learning process.  Reading notes does not
> have the same effect on the mind as actually writing them down where
> students will benefit from the notes even if they never review them
> again in the future.
>
> Ec
>
You're not one of those people who thinks that everyone learns the
same way, are you?

C'mon, once you've made it to Cambridge I think you deserve the right
to choose for yourself whether you learn better by writing things down
during class or by paying closer attention to your professor.  I know
from first hand experience, and as someone who graduated summa cum
laude, that there are some people in this world who can't effectively
do both at the same time.

Anthony


subject: [WikiEN-l] OT gmail spam increase?

body:
On 8/28/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> Sorry to post such an incredibly lame off topic. Over the last week,
> the amount of spam getting through gmail's filters has gone up hugely
> for me. It's coming in through the 5 or so email addresses I have that
> forward to the same account in equal measure, so I can't blame one
> email address suddenly getting extra exposure. Has anyone else
> experienced like this? I was previously getting around 1 spam a day
> making it through the filter, but now it's like 10 or even more per
> day.

Mine went up drastically a month or two ago.  So far today I got about
350 in my spam folder, about 50 which were caught by my own filters
but not gmail's (ones going to old retired addresses, which I filter
and keep around for the analysis which I'll probably never get around
to), and 11 in my inbox.  Anecdotally it seems to me that some
spammers discovered that putting one or two random words in the
subject works wonders on getting through gmail's spam filter.  That's
one problem with using such a popular email service - the spammers get
to test their spam on the filters.

> Lots of it is a weird, right-justified format, all nonsense text
> (jumbled quotations from something or other) whose purpose I can't
> divine...
>
Just checked, and yeah, I'm getting the right-justified crap.

Anthony


from_name: Scott Stevenson

body:
Not that Jon Awbrey's been blocked this page can probably safely be
unprotected.

-Scott

On 8/28/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 28/08/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Revert as needed, note on WP:ANI and block 24 hours if he's being
> > really quite disruptive so other admins can work out what to do. He's
> > busy playing basic-level WikiNomic.
>
>
> I've put a note on WP:ANI:
>
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents#User:Jon_Awbrey_and_Wikipedia:Wikilawyering
>
>
> - d.
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
Now... rather....

On 8/28/06, Scott Stevenson <wikinetscott at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Not that Jon Awbrey's been blocked this page can probably safely be
> unprotected.
>
> -Scott
>
>


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

subject: [Foundation-l] Professional bookkeeping in the office

body:
Hear hear !!
GerardM

Brad Patrick wrote:
> I write to advise the community that we have successfully brought a
> bookkeeper in to work with Michael Davis on a part-time basis, Tricia
> Hoffman. Trish was referred to us by our audit firm and has more than
> ten years of complicated full-cycle accounting experience.  During an
> initial transition phase, Michael will be working with Trish to learn
> the accounts and work with our internal processes.  Following the
> certification and publication of our audited financial statements, we
> will resume publication of our financials, on what I anticipate will be
> a monthly basis.  Trish has agreed to provide professional support for
> our accounting functions on a contract basis.  After we have worked
> together for a while, we will reassess based on the amount of time that
> is appropriate for the tasks required.
>
> mav has had an extraordinary influence on WMF and is to be heartily
> congratulated for his willingness to jump in and work hard, especially
> in the earliest days of the projects.  As I have come to appreciate the
> work that must be done to keep things going in the office, mav's energy
> and initiative become all the more apparent.  I'm sure he will continue
> to contribute in multiple ways going forward.
>
> Thanks, mav!
>
> -Brad
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>


from_name: Simetrical

subject: [Wikitech-l] References - ugh

body:
On 8/28/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> Because in wikitext, everything is in-band; in XML, the structure is
> out-of-band, on purpose.  This requires an entirely different, and I
> suspect, much more complicated diff algorithm.

I don't know what "in-band" and "out-of-band" mean ([[Out of band]]
doesn't help either), but if the diff engine parses the XML, it can
look for a) changes in structure/markup and b) changes in content.
Either one should be very easy and fast to diff, given XML-parsing
library functions (for the C++ module used on WMF sites, that is).
Faster than present, I don't know, but the present differ is hardly a
bottleneck.


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Foundation-l] How I should consider GFDL in shared content?

body:
Robert Scott Horning wrote:
> I've been using the page import feature with Wikiversity, and it makes
> the transwiki process work out so successfully that I really wonder why
> this isn't allowed with other projects?  Is this mainly a CPU bandwidth
> issue, or is this still just an experimental feature?
>
> There are a few bugs with the page import, but those few bugs can be
> usually compensated for by compitent administrators.

Please report these bugs... :)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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body:
Robert Scott Horning wrote:
> I've been using the page import feature with Wikiversity, and it makes
> the transwiki process work out so successfully that I really wonder why
> this isn't allowed with other projects?  Is this mainly a CPU bandwidth
> issue, or is this still just an experimental feature?
>
> There are a few bugs with the page import, but those few bugs can be
> usually compensated for by compitent administrators.

Please report these bugs... :)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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body:
Robert Scott Horning wrote:
> I've been using the page import feature with Wikiversity, and it makes
> the transwiki process work out so successfully that I really wonder why
> this isn't allowed with other projects?  Is this mainly a CPU bandwidth
> issue, or is this still just an experimental feature?
>
> There are a few bugs with the page import, but those few bugs can be
> usually compensated for by compitent administrators.

Please report these bugs... :)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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body:
Robert Scott Horning wrote:
> I've been using the page import feature with Wikiversity, and it makes
> the transwiki process work out so successfully that I really wonder why
> this isn't allowed with other projects?  Is this mainly a CPU bandwidth
> issue, or is this still just an experimental feature?
>
> There are a few bugs with the page import, but those few bugs can be
> usually compensated for by compitent administrators.

Please report these bugs... :)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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from_name: maru dubshinki

body:
On 8/28/06, Daniel R. Tobias <dan at tobias.name> wrote:
> [User:Jon_Awbrey]] has moved [[Wikipedia:Wikilawyering]] to
> [[Wikipedia:WikiCaviling]], on the grounds that he claims the
> original title is defamatory to lawyers. However, politically-
> incorrect or not, "Wikilawyering" is the actual terminology that has
> been in use on Wikipedia's discussion areas; "WikiCaviling" is an
> ugly neologism with no support that I know of. Page titles should
> reflect actual usage instead of attempting to impose political
> correctness.
>
> --
> Dan

Bah. Stop caviling about minor things like what "lawyering" and
"caviling" mean; the real problem here is his blatant disregard of
process!

~maru
process nuts: attack!


from_name: Rob Church

subject: [Wikitech-l] flexbisonparse

body:
On 28/08/06, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:
> Magnus Manske wrote:
>
> > Official clarification: flexbisonparse was written by Timwi, and
> > Timwi alone :-)
>
> The important thing is that it is "a piece of German engineering".
> You might not realize how strong this brand is in the
> English-speaking world. Perhaps we should add that line just under
> "the free encyclopedia" in the logotype?

Flexbisonparse isn't used on Wikipedia, though. However, MediaWiki
started life as a script written by a German biology student...so...
;)

Rob Church


from_name: cohesion

subject: [WikiEN-l] USGS maps are liberated!

body:
Jared Benedict bought all of the USGS maps for $1600 and then had a
fund raiser to recoup the money. That has been done and now they are
being uploaded to the Internet Archive. Project info is here
http://ransom.redjar.org/

Just letting people know, I'm sure there are a lot of cartographers
eager to get these into wikipedia :D

Judson


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Foundation-l] Resignation as CFO

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> In July 2004 I was appointed to the official position of Chief Financial Officer of the Wikimedia
> Foundation. The expectation, backed up by repeated calls from myself, was that I would be replaced
> by a relevantly trained paid professional when the needs of the foundation became greater than
> what I, as a part time volunteer, could provide.
>
> During my tenure, I have helped with bookkeeping, budgeting, financial reporting, and with
> fundraising. I am most proud of my work coordinating several fundraisers that together brought in
> nearly a million dollars for the foundation. I am least proud of the last nine months, a time when
> the board repeatedly failed to meet to discuss proposed budgets I submitted to them or to give me
> direction on what we could or could not publish to the community in regards to spending.
>
> Last week, the board informed me that a selection process has been initiated to hire a paid
> professional to help run the foundation's finances from the Wikimedia office in Saint Petersburg,
> Florida, USA. At the same time, the board informed me that they approved the membership of a
> fundraising committee. I will be serving on that committee.
>
> I therefore resign as Chief Financial Officer of the Wikimedia Foundation but will continue to
> help where needed during the transition process.
>
> It truly amazes me how long we, as an organization that runs one of the top sites on the Internet,
> can go on volunteer time alone. So it is both a sad and happy day for me as I prepare to hand the
> baton to a paid professional.
>
> Yours in the wikiway,
>
> Daniel Mayer,
> Wikipedian

Thank you as well Mav.
Indeed, the Foundation is getting more and more professional. It is
somehow a bit sad, but the good side of it (at least until now) is that
it frees volunteers time to do what is giving them the most pleasure and
satisfaction.

Ant


subject: [Foundation-l] Resignation as CFO


from_name: Platonides

subject: [Wikitech-l] Categories problem

body:
"Steve Bennett"
> I think the behaviour where the saved text is not what you actually
> typed ought to be kept to a minimum. At current I know of that
> happening in two instances: ~~~~ (and variants) and [[Foo (blah)|]],
> which is replaced by [[Foo (blah)|Foo]]. It's kind of surprising to
> the user...
>
> Steve

I agree it's annoying, tried to improve a mesage saying: You can't add this
category: it's a redirect. uh..


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Questions about Gileki;
 a new language that has been proposed

body:
Hoi,
* With five active supporters, a project has a reasonable chance of
succeeding.
* You do not need to request a Wiktionary.. You could decide to be part
of WiktionaryZ instead. The language portal has been created for you.
* When you create a Wikipedia, the question of dialects in the speaking
language is not really relevant. It is the written language that is of
importance.. Are there differences in the written language as well ?

Thanks,
    GerardM

http://wiktionaryz.org/Portal:glk

Mohammad Rastgaar wrote:
> Hi,
>
>   We have proposed Gileki language. And so far We have received good amount of supportive comments. I have some questions regarding this matter though
>
>   1-How many supporters are enough to proceed to the next steps?
>   2-Do we need to request a wikitionary too? or this project will be available when the domain of Gileki wikipedia is ready?
>   3- There are two dialects that are slightly different. But the native speakers can recognize which one is what they are listening to and the other is strange( sometimes funny!!) for them,but of course they understand it. What is the best solution to this issue? I am sure there have been many similar cases before. I would be gratefull to learn from other folks experiences.
>
>   Thanks a lot in advance
>   _Rastgaar


from_name: Lars Aronsson

subject: [Wikitech-l] flexbisonparse

body:
Magnus Manske wrote:

> Official clarification: flexbisonparse was written by Timwi, and
> Timwi alone :-)

The important thing is that it is "a piece of German engineering".
You might not realize how strong this brand is in the
English-speaking world. Perhaps we should add that line just under
"the free encyclopedia" in the logotype?

Number of Google hits reported for:

   976,000  "German engineering"
                Just look at the distance to No. 2.
   273,000  "American engineering"
   259,000  "Texas engineering"
   147,000  "Michigan engineering"
   119,000  "Swiss engineering"
   110,000  "Canadian engineering"
   104,000  "British engineering"
    76,000  "European engineering"
    74,700  "French engineering"
    71,000  "Florida engineering"
    58,600  "California engineering"
    56,700  "Indian engineering"
    40,200  "Swedish engineering"
    37,500  "Chinese engineering"
    35,900  "Utah engineering"
    33,600  "Italian engineering"
    33,400  "English engineering"
    33,200  "Japanese engineering"
    31,300  "Minnesota engineering"
    31,100  "New York engineering"
    29,800  "Washington engineering"
    27,200  "Thai engineering"
    26,200  "Russian engineering"
    25,200  "Scottish engineering"
    24,000  "Pennsylvania engineering"
    21,700  "Oklahoma engineering"
    19,600  "Arizona engineering"
    19,500  "Ohio engineering"
    18,500  "Alabama engineering"
    17,600  "Norwegian engineering"
    16,400  "Oregon engineering"
    16,200  "New Jersey engineering"
    13,700  "Dutch engineering"
    13,200  "Connecticut engineering"
    12,300  "Nevada engineering"
    11,000  "Danish engineering"
    10,600  "Egyptian engineering"
     9,780  "Spanish engineering"
     9,670  "Finnish engineering"
       891  "Slovak engineering"
       806  "Massachusetts engineering"
       723  "Austrian engineering"
       681  "Czech engineering"
       650  "Israeli engineering"
       544  "Ukrainian engineering"
       529  "Iranian engineering"
       485  "Greek engineering"
       478  "Mexican engineering"
       451  "Hungarian engineering"
       432  "Polish engineering"
       388  "Portuguese engineering"
       325  "Scandinavian engineering"
       269  "Welsh engineering"
       223  "Belgian engineering"

--
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se


subject: [Wikitech-l] #time

body:
Well, i was thinking in something even simpler. On the #time you give it a
parameter saying use daylight saving time. That would solve the countries
don't supporting it. It'd move an hour forward (though i don't like the
'usually' word on the article). The hour of when it changes seems quite
regular. The exact timezone change day is a bit more tricy. Underlaying
arquitecture should be able to handle the whole process.


subject: [WikiEN-l] OT gmail spam increase?

body:
On 28/08/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:

> Sorry to post such an incredibly lame off topic. Over the last week,
> the amount of spam getting through gmail's filters has gone up hugely
> for me. It's coming in through the 5 or so email addresses I have that
> forward to the same account in equal measure, so I can't blame one
> email address suddenly getting extra exposure. Has anyone else
> experienced like this? I was previously getting around 1 spam a day
> making it through the filter, but now it's like 10 or even more per
> day.

The spammers are indeed getting smarter. But I'm still getting < 0.5%
that makes it into my inbox, rather than getting caught in the spam
filter. I press the "report spam" button with great glee.

>Lots of it is a weird, right-justified format, all nonsense text
> (jumbled quotations from something or other) whose purpose I can't
> divine...

A lot of that is masses of text to clog spam filters that work on word
frequency, with the actual content in an image at the end.

(I wonder if there's some sort of online encyclopedia that might have
information on this sort of thing.)

- d.


from_name: brion at pobox.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki automated test run failure 2006-08-29

body:
An automated run of parserTests.php showed the following failures:

Running test TODO: Table security: embedded pipes (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-April/034637.html)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Link containing double-single-quotes '' (bug 4598)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Template with thumb image (with link in description)... FAILED!
Running test Template infinite loop... FAILED!
Running test TODO: message transform: <noinclude> in transcluded template (bug 4926)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: message transform: <onlyinclude> in transcluded template (bug 4926)... FAILED!
Running test BUG 1887, part 2: A <math> with a thumbnail- math enabled... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML bullet list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML ordered list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML nested bullet list, open tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML nested ordered list, open tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Parsing optional HTML elements (Bug 6171)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Inline HTML vs wiki block nesting... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Mixing markup for italics and bold... FAILED!
Running test TODO: 5 quotes, code coverage +1 line... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML Hex character encoding.... FAILED!
Running test TODO: dt/dd/dl test... FAILED!

Passed 412 of 429 tests (96.04%) FAILED!


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Foundation-l] Celebrity pictures

body:
Anthony wrote:

>On 8/28/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>
>
>>Perhaps more significant than whether anyone has lost is whether any
>>such case has ever been filed.  Given that they are distributed for the
>>specific purpose of publicity there could be an implicit permission.
>>
>>
>If you're using the image for the purposes of promoting the person.
>If, on the other hand, you're using the image to sell an encyclopedia
>article which portrays the person in a way which they don't want to be
>portrayed, then there probably isn't implicit permission.
>
I don't know if it's to "sell" an encyclopedia.  Lindsay Lohan would
need to think she's pretty special if she believes a picture of her will
make all the difference in encyclopedia sales.  Is she as self-absorbed
as Paris Hilton?  Our use is transformative, and it in no way adversely
affects the company's sales..  It would even be interesting to hear the
companies comment on the function of publicity shots.

>Maybe I'm overly paranoid, but even here in the US where we have some
>very strong fair use and first amendment rights, I still wouldn't feel
>comfortable selling an encyclopedia with the current [[Lindsay Lohan]]
>article in it, without first receiving permission from the copyright
>holders of the images.
>(http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lindsay_Lohan&oldid=72480012
>in case it changes before this is read)
>
This may be a problem for the print version, and specific permissions
should probably be sought when we get that far.  For the on-line
verrsion however I have no problem with an active campaign to replace
the fair use images with "free" ones.  It's clear that I'm more risk
tolerant than you, but that doesn't mean there's such a wide gap between
our views.

>Frankly I think that case could be probably be won by the museum on
>appeal, if they spent enough money fighting it.
>
Yeah, Dillinger has been dead since 1934.

>Besides, there are
>always going to be crazy jurisdictions (like Indiana, apparently) with
>laws so out of touch with reasonableness that we just can't follow
>them.
>
Developing policies to account for such extremes is playing to the
lleast common denominator.

>As for relying on the copyright holder of the image finding the
>Wikipedia article "respectful", well, I just think that's a horrible
>thing for us to even have to consider.  Would Linsay Lohan (*) object
>to our portrayal of her in "Media spotlight"?  I don't know, and I
>don't care.
>
There's also the question of who owns the copyright.  I suspect it's the
studio who sends out fan pics to admirers.

Ec


subject: [Foundation-l] Celebrity pictures


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [Wikitech-l] Categories problem

references:
<44F180B0.6030605@happycoders.org> <ect1um$rle$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<f1c3529e0608271500s2f044920va94852ee1a8817cd@mail.gmail.com>
	<ecvo6g$ub4$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
On 8/28/06, Platonides <Platonides at gmail.com> wrote:
> I agree it's annoying, tried to improve a mesage saying: You can't add this
> category: it's a redirect. uh..

Why shouldn't category redirects work exactly as you'd expect: exactly
the same as if you'd put the target of the redirect?

Steve


body:
On 8/28/06, Mathias Schindler <mathias.schindler at gmail.com> wrote:
> It seems that AP, the news agency that almost anyone can edit, has
> introduced a Special:Recentchanges feature for Wikipedia edits.
>
> http://www.duluthsuperior.com/mld/duluthsuperior/news/politics/15381771.htm

Jeepers, we've come a long way. A couple of odd edits to a Wikipedia
article is now AP news?

Steve


body:
On 8/29/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8/28/06, Mathias Schindler <mathias.schindler at gmail.com> wrote:
> > It seems that AP, the news agency that almost anyone can edit, has
> > introduced a Special:Recentchanges feature for Wikipedia edits.
> >
> > http://www.duluthsuperior.com/mld/duluthsuperior/news/politics/15381771.htm
>
> Jeepers, we've come a long way. A couple of odd edits to a Wikipedia
> article is now AP news?

Err, to clarify: a couple of non-libellous, apparently factual (the
problems were simply "emphasised" - we haven't heard that they were
actually false) edits are news? This is a new step. Inaccuracies have
been reported before, but mild breaches of NPOV, I don't think so...

Steve


body:
On 8/28/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> The whole sentence is an interesting view of what we do as well:
> "Mathematics is supposed to be a Wikipedia-like undertaking, with
> thousands of self-effacing scriveners quietly laboring over a great
> self-correcting text."
>
> And the next: "But in any endeavor ? literature, art, science,
> theology ? a celebrity system develops and egos get in the way."

Taking that naively, it sounds like they're holding Wikipedia up as
the ideal - free from these problems -  and mathematics as its flawed
application?

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] on new article creation

body:
On 8/28/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> And no one has proposed how we could have measured the effects without
> going ahead and doing it... there are just too many variables.   We

I don't know what you mean by "without going ahead and doing it" -
obviously you have to perform the experiment in order to collect data
from it. I also proposed a list of data that could have been
collected. I don't have any problem with the fact that no data were
collected, however - there are scientific experiments, and there are
lots of other experiments.

> could have carefully quantified how much crap is created by anons vs
> non-anons, but we couldn't have quantified how many of the crapmakers
> would have simply made accounts.

Well, we *could* have.

> Wikipedia won't be finished in a day...and some times we need to just
> try things out if we are to find good solutions.

Yep. My heart is not bleeding that anons couldn't make their usual
truckload of crappy articles.

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] OT gmail spam increase?

body:
Sorry to post such an incredibly lame off topic. Over the last week,
the amount of spam getting through gmail's filters has gone up hugely
for me. It's coming in through the 5 or so email addresses I have that
forward to the same account in equal measure, so I can't blame one
email address suddenly getting extra exposure. Has anyone else
experienced like this? I was previously getting around 1 spam a day
making it through the filter, but now it's like 10 or even more per
day. Lots of it is a weird, right-justified format, all nonsense text
(jumbled quotations from something or other) whose purpose I can't
divine...

Thanks anyone for any observations, comments etc.

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] OT gmail spam increase?

body:
On 8/29/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Sorry to post such an incredibly lame off topic. Over the last week,
> the amount of spam getting through gmail's filters has gone up hugely
> for me. It's coming in through the 5 or so email addresses I have that
> forward to the same account in equal measure, so I can't blame one
> email address suddenly getting extra exposure. Has anyone else
> experienced like this? I was previously getting around 1 spam a day
> making it through the filter, but now it's like 10 or even more per
> day. Lots of it is a weird, right-justified format, all nonsense text
> (jumbled quotations from something or other) whose purpose I can't
> divine...
>
> Thanks anyone for any observations, comments etc.
>
> Steve

Lame response to a lame off topic post :) but yes, I am getting more spam
recently. Most from viagra and such. I only use this e-mail for the wiki
mailing lists so I assume someone is collecting e-mails from that.

Garion96


from_name: Jeffrey V. Merkey

subject:
[Foundation-l] Swahili Machine Translation First Run Completed for
 enwiki-20060817

body:
The first pass machine translation run of the English Wikipedia into the
Swahili Language has completed and is posted.
The translated XML dumps are posting to :

http://sw.wikigadugi.org

they will post throughout the night.

Lexicons can be downloaded from:

ftp://www.wikigadugi.org/africa/lexicon/swlexicon.public.bz2  - public
swahili lexicon
ftp://www.wikigadugi.org/africa/lexicon/swlexicon.kamusi.bz2 - kamusi
project lexicon
ftp://www.wikigadugi.org/africa/lexicon/sw.thesaurus.bz2 - rogets
thesaurus in swahili

MediaWiki Messages Files:

ftp://www.wikigadugi.org/africa/MediWiki/MessagesSW.php.bz2

Machine Translated XML Dumps against the ewiki-20060817 XMl Dumps from
the English Wikipedia:

ftp://www.wikigadugi.org/africa/xml/swphwiki-20060816-pages-articles.xml.bz2

This first run does NOT employe the verb stem decomposer and conjugator,
does NOT employ the grammar parser or sentence composer, does NOT
employ the AI Inference engine, and does not perform verb or noun
disambiguation as do the other machine translations as I have not
constructed
a decomposition rule set or grammar rules set for the translator.  This
first run uses simple word by word translation and phrase matching with
hierarchical
thesaurus lookups and substitution.

This first pass is provided as an illustration of just how rapidly
Wikipedia can be translated into a target language.  A swahili grammar
manual has been
overnighted to me and later this week I will perform another run with
grammar and sentence parsing rules.  Since I am not a native speaker of
swahili, I request a native speaker to select 20 or more very long
articles and correc them.  When I completed the disambiguator and
grammar rules
set for sentence construction, I will use the corrected articles to
teach the AI engine how to reorder and retense the translations.  This
should get
the translations over 90% accurracy.  Unlike Cherokee, swahili appears
to be a much simpler language for this task.

The Machine translation of swahili is a VERY early first run and is a
work in progress.

Jeffrey V. Merkey


from_name: James Hare

subject: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Hadraj Said

body:
As a FR-1 I say that looks authentic.

On 8/29/06, Guillaume Paumier <guillom.pom at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> As Hadraj can't speak English, I am sending this email for him.
> Hadraj has decided to withdraw his candidacy to the Board for health
> reasons.
>
> g.
>
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: said hadraj <hadraj_said at yahoo.fr>
> Date: Aug 28, 2006 11:04 PM
> Subject: Hadraj Said
> To: guillom.pom at gmail.com
>
> Bonsoir
> Je vous remercie fort bien pour vore collaboration,je vous informe que je
> retire ma candidature pour des raisons de sant? .
> Mrci
> cordialement
>
>
> Hadraj Said
>
> ------------------------------
> D?couvrez un nouveau moyen de poser toutes vos questions quelque soit le
> sujet ! Yahoo! Questions/R?ponses pour partager vos connaissances, vos
> opinions et vos exp?riences. Cliquez
> ici<http://fr.rd.yahoo.com/evt=42054/*http://fr.answers.yahoo.com>.
>
>
>
>
> --
> Guillaume Paumier
> Disciplus Simplex
> http://fr.wikipedia.org : Resistance is futile ? You will be assimilated.
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


subject: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Hadraj Said


from_name: Ivan Krstić

subject: [Wikitech-l] References - ugh

body:
Simetrical wrote:
> doesn't help either), but if the diff engine parses the XML, it can
> look for a) changes in structure/markup and b) changes in content.
> Either one should be very easy and fast to diff

XML diffs are generally rather non-trivial (see e.g.
http://www.unibw.de/rz/dokumente/getFILE?fid=1076019), though it would
be somewhat easier for MediaWiki to get away with them, as we're talking
about a strongly constrained XML schema.

In any case, I don't see much point in discussing this; it's been made
abundantly clear that even comparatively minor and much saner changes in
the syntax will not happen.

--
Ivan Krsti? <krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> | GPG: 0x147C722D


subject:
[Foundation-l] Fwd: NYTimes.com: African Languages Grow as a
	Wikipedia Pr...

body:
Delirium wrote:
> Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
>>daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:
>>
>>
>>>I have a lot of sympathy and fondness for African languages. However, I
>>>think the attitude we are taking is paternalistic.
>>>
>>
>>Who is?  I have not seen this.
>>
>>
>>
>>>The same problems exist for
>>>languages in many other corners of the world. Identifying this issue as uniquely
>>> "African" is paternalistic and, quite frankly, a tad racist. Why do we not
>>>make the same efforts for Khmer (the official language of Cambodia, 66
>>>articles), Burmese (the official language of Myanmar, with 32 million speakers,  and
>>>just 66 articles), or Assamese (an official language of India with 20
>>>million speakers and only 6 articles)?
>>>
>>
>>I think we absolutely ARE taking efforts in ALL parts of the world,
>>simultaneously.  I had a meeting in Delhi with someone who is interested
>>in pursuing a joint project to develop African languages.
>>
>>I have no idea who you have in mind who thinks anything racist or
>>paternalistic about African languages, but if they do, then they do not
>>represent the attitudes of the broad community or me.
>>
>
>
> I think the fear being expressed, or in any case the one I'll express,
> is that there are a bunch of Americans and Europeans saying that we
> ought to do such-and-such about African languages, or such-and-such to
> change African societies for the better---basically, paternalistic
> attitudes that the enlightened Westerners have arrived on their glorious
> steeds of Information to fix the problems of Africa.  See also,
> [[en:white man's burden]].
>
> A non-paternalistic attitude would be to treat African languages like we
> treat all other languages.  Even though quite a few Westerners are
> interested in the subject of spreading information in China, for
> example, the Chinese-language projects have been run by Chinese speakers.
>
> -Mark

Nod.
There are a couple of things we can do, I think, without being
paternalistic. It is simply to "tell them". To tell them about our
projects. To tell them about "free content". To tell them how they can
participate and develop their own language project.

And to make suggestions about how they could push more (maybe by paying
an editor in chief, maybe by organising a conference, maybe by having
advertisment on Wikipedia in a local journal, maybe by visiting a
school). But then, I think that's their business to do what is needed
once they have the cards in hand (the platform).

ant


from_name: Daniel Mayer

body:
--- Brad Patrick <bradp.wmf at gmail.com> wrote:
> I write to advise the community that we have successfully brought a
> bookkeeper in to work with Michael Davis on a part-time basis, Tricia
> Hoffman. Trish was referred to us by our audit firm and has more than
> ten years of complicated full-cycle accounting experience.  During an
> initial transition phase, Michael will be working with Trish to learn
> the accounts and work with our internal processes.  Following the
> certification and publication of our audited financial statements, we
> will resume publication of our financials, on what I anticipate will be
> a monthly basis.  Trish has agreed to provide professional support for
> our accounting functions on a contract basis.  After we have worked
> together for a while, we will reassess based on the amount of time that
> is appropriate for the tasks required.

Wow - great news! Mid-term, I would like us to hire a relevantly-trained professional full time to
keep the books, coordinate budgets and conduct donor management (the person, IMO, would need to be
based in the St Pete office). Eventually, I imagine several people would need to specialize in
certain areas and be supervised by a Finance Director.

> mav has had an extraordinary influence on WMF and is to be heartily
> congratulated for his willingness to jump in and work hard, especially
> in the earliest days of the projects.  As I have come to appreciate the
> work that must be done to keep things going in the office, mav's energy
> and initiative become all the more apparent.  I'm sure he will continue
> to contribute in multiple ways going forward.
>
> Thanks, mav!

I am just one of many people who helped - and continue to help. I certainly will not stop helping
where I can and where I see a need to fill (hopefully in areas that are more fun than accounting
and budgeting).

But thank you and everybody else for saying such nice things. :)

-- mav

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


from_name: Cheney Shill

subject: [WikiEN-l] Colbert on the loose

body:
Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
>Just removed another tripling elephant population reference at
>[[Queenie (elephant)]], which had apparently been there for 2 weeks. I
>wonder how many more of these there are.

>Even more alarmingly,
>http://www.google.com/search?hl=fr&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=elephant%20population%20triple%20site%3Aen.wikipedia.org
>shows quite a few of these joke references have made their way into
>Google's cache.

>Ok, the current example is trivial, but maybe we need some sort of
>organised response to these kind of attacks, which will presumably
>become more common. What if an organised group starting planting
>"George Bush is dead" all over the place or something...

Yes, or a ferry sank in lake Michigan and 50 died.  I'm glad you're looking into this.  The same basic issue has come up in a variety of ways recently.  Part of it is simply numbers.  Unless you have enough people to watch over all the possible changes and undo them, there is no, hmmmm, process to respond to such attacks.  Consider yourself lucky that this wasn't a PR firm that quietly hired 50 temps to sit down and make blind edits to thousands of article sections over a few days.

While looking over this myself, I found a sourced article referring to a specific wildlife area where the elephant population had tripled, so having an automated search & replace isn't the answer.  OTOH, if the software can be told to watch for identical changes in many different articles over a short period, it's possible to at least set-up an alarm so, preferably, all editors can be notified and check that the change at least meet policy and are verifiable.  All editors because I doubt 10 admins want or even can deal with a truly dedicated attack.

~~Pro-Lick
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/User:Halliburton_Shill
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Pro-Lick
http://www.wikiality.net/index.php?title=User:Pro-Lick

--spam may follow--

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
 Get on board. You're invited to try the new Yahoo! Mail.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Smoother treatment of actions like "unwatch"

body:
On 8/29/06, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> More than one, we could just put a username and password box on the edit form.

I think I suggested exactly that in the bug report :)

Steve


from_name: Guillaume Paumier

subject: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Hadraj Said

body:
Hello,

As Hadraj can't speak English, I am sending this email for him.
Hadraj has decided to withdraw his candidacy to the Board for health
reasons.

g.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: said hadraj <hadraj_said at yahoo.fr>
Date: Aug 28, 2006 11:04 PM
Subject: Hadraj Said
To: guillom.pom at gmail.com

Bonsoir
Je vous remercie fort bien pour vore collaboration,je vous informe que je
retire ma candidature pour des raisons de sant? .
Mrci
cordialement

Hadraj Said

------------------------------
D?couvrez un nouveau moyen de poser toutes vos questions quelque soit le
sujet ! Yahoo! Questions/R?ponses pour partager vos connaissances, vos
opinions et vos exp?riences. Cliquez
ici<http://fr.rd.yahoo.com/evt=42054/*http://fr.answers.yahoo.com>.

--
Guillaume Paumier
Disciplus Simplex
http://fr.wikipedia.org : Resistance is futile ? You will be assimilated.


subject: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Hadraj Said


subject: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Hadraj Said

body:
hehe

Anyway, I can ask him to send an email directly to foundation-l if needed.

g.

On 8/29/06, James Hare <messedrocker at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> As a FR-1 I say that looks authentic.
>
> On 8/29/06, Guillaume Paumier <guillom.pom at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hello,
> >
> > As Hadraj can't speak English, I am sending this email for him.
> > Hadraj has decided to withdraw his candidacy to the Board for health
> > reasons.
> >
> > g.
> >
> >
> >
> > ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> > From: said hadraj <hadraj_said at yahoo.fr>
> > Date: Aug 28, 2006 11:04 PM
> > Subject: Hadraj Said
> > To: guillom.pom at gmail.com
> >
> > Bonsoir
> > Je vous remercie fort bien pour vore collaboration,je vous informe que
> je
> > retire ma candidature pour des raisons de sant? .
> > Mrci
> > cordialement
> >
> >
> > Hadraj Said
> >
> > ------------------------------
> > D?couvrez un nouveau moyen de poser toutes vos questions quelque soit le
> > sujet ! Yahoo! Questions/R?ponses pour partager vos connaissances, vos
> > opinions et vos exp?riences. Cliquez
> > ici<http://fr.rd.yahoo.com/evt=42054/*http://fr.answers.yahoo.com>.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Guillaume Paumier
> > Disciplus Simplex
> > http://fr.wikipedia.org : Resistance is futile ? You will be
> assimilated.
> > _______________________________________________
> > 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
>

--
Guillaume Paumier
Disciplus Simplex
http://fr.wikipedia.org : Resistance is futile ? You will be assimilated.


subject: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Hadraj Said


from_name: Nick Jenkins

subject: [Wikitech-l] #time

body:
> >> Depending on the month of the year, you may be +1 or +2 from the
> >> UTC...
> >> (it's the difference between CET & CEST)
> >
> > Just professional curiosity, how would you define when daylight
> > saving time is enabled/disabled? There're different rules for
> > different countries. And some countries don't have it at all :-(
>
> Presumably the same way the computer does it; provide a location such as
> 'Europe/Berlin' or 'America/Los_Angeles' and let the C library look in its big
> list of locales.

I did some brute-force testing of PHP's strtotime() implementation [for every known timezone, on every day from 1 Jan 1970 to 31 Dec
2037, performed jumps to every day of the week, i.e. approx 250*(2037-1970)*365*7 = 43 million tests], and filed some corner-case
bugs (e.g. you ask for strtotime for a "Tuesday", and it gives you a day that's a Friday), so I can maybe fill-in some of the rough
details here.

As I understand it, up until PHP 5.1, PHP used to use the O/S libraries for timezone details and determining daylight savings.
However the time/date handling was completely rewritten in PHP 5.1 by Derick Rethans, so that PHP now supplies its own timezone data
(in this large header file: http://chora.php.net/viewvc.cgi/php-src/ext/date/lib/timezonedb.h?view=markup ). One of the benefits of
this is that for OSes with dodgy daylight savings/timezone handling (Windows in particular), which brute-force testing showed to be
completely broken, you can largely avoid the O/S, and do-it-yourself, and get the same behaviour on different platforms (which is
obviously a good thing when you're a cross-platform language). The new date/time implementation seems much more robust, and it also
includes a mechanism whereby updated files can be dropped into place in the event of future timezone changes (without recompiling
PHP).

And here's a weird factoid for the day: Did you know that there have been 3 occasions in history where a day was *not* followed by
the next day in the week (e.g. a Saturday was followed not by a Sunday, but by a Monday)? All three were caused by Pacific Island
areas (Pacific/Kwajalein, Pacific/Enderbury, and Pacific/Kiritimati) deciding that they wanted to move from one side of the
international date line to the other, and when they moved, they simply lost a whole day. :-)

All the best,
Nick.


subject: [Wikitech-l] References - ugh

body:
On 8/29/06, Simetrical <Simetrical+wikitech at gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't know what "in-band" and "out-of-band" mean ([[Out of band]]
> doesn't help either), but if the diff engine parses the XML, it can
> look for a) changes in structure/markup and b) changes in content.

I think what's meant is that with XML, it's basically trivial to
separate text from markup - depending on how you receive the XML, that
may already have been done for you. The structure and formatting thus
occupies a completely separate "band" to the text being formatted.

Whereas Wikitext is a nightmare to parse :)

Steve