from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
On 12/18/06, Walter van Kalken <walter at vankalken.net> wrote:
> Yes ok you got a point there. But like with graphics, if you are the
> trailblazer that means most people will not be able to gaze at the tail
> you are blazing like now with .svg which as I noticed from remarks in
> the answers on my mail has some clear problems.

The key value of having SVGs is to allow long term _editability_ of
the content. A vector graphics file is simply not equivalent to a
bitmap: unlike a bitmap, it is arbitrarily scalable, easily
modifiable, and translatable. Not so much of interest to the users
(especially as Microsoft appears to have chosen to boycott the
format), this is the equivalent of providing the source code of a
computer program.

Accordingly, it might make sense to implement SVG differently than it
is done today, i.e., as an "attachment" to a bitmap format of the
"source code" (preferred modifiable version). The same could be done
for 3D formats like Collada, MID files that relate to uploaded OGGs,
etc.
--
Peace & Love,
Erik

DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of
the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.


list: wikimedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

subject: [Foundation-l] when uploading pictures to commons ....


list: wikien-l

from_name: Alphax (Wikipedia email)

subject: [WikiEN-l] The boundaries of OR

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 12/17/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
>> OR is when you go out and test the evidence yourself. Finding sources to
>> corroborate a point is called research, not original research.
>
> No. In Wikipedia, OR is when you do the interpretation of evidence
> yourself. We should simplify the OR rule to make this clearer:
> "Wikipedians are dumb. We cannot interpret, only repeat."
>

So, in theory every entry could be written by a bot, eh?

/me imagines RamBot adding articles on every court decision and piece of
legislation...

--
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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list: wikitech-l

from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Fun project: write and profile a Batik server

body:
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For rasterizing SVG images we've used librsvg for some time. Another
contender which we didn't choose originally is Batik. There are several
respects in which librsvg is unsatisfactory and Batik might be preferable.

With Sun finally in the process of releasing their Java implementation
under GPL, we don't have to worry about being so ideologically 'pure'
about Java-based solutions these days... So I went ahead and did a quick
rendering benchmark with some images plucked off of Commons:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/SVG_benchmarks

rsvg is beating the pants off Batik by a factor of 6; on my laptop the
average image in the sample took *two seconds* to render, compared to a
third of a second for rsvg.

Java is traditionally slow for command-line-type tasks, with VM startup
and JIT overhead inflating times significantly. It's possible that we
could get much better performance by starting up a single VM and sending
multiple requests to it.

If we can get performance out of Batik that approaches or exceeds
librsvg, it may be desirable to consider switching.

On the other hand if it's still slow as a dog, we can forget it and
concentrate on other things.

Would anyone like to fiddle with this, put together a test daemon? (Or
at least a test program that uses the library to render a bunch of
images from a list, so we can benchmark.) It's probably not that
difficult, and would be a fun way for some of the Java-heads in the room
to get involved. ;)

If nobody hops in, it has to wait until I get around to it, and well... ;)

- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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list: wikipedia-l

from_name: theProject

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] J.L.W.S. The Special One has invited you to open
	a Google mail account

body:
On 12/18/06, J.L.W.S. The Special One <hildanknight at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I've been using Gmail and thought you might like to try it out. Here's
> an invitation to create an account.
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> J.L.W.S. The Special One has invited you to open a free Gmail account.
>
> To accept this invitation and register for your account, visit
> http://mail.google.com/mail/a-e691274bdf-4b936b095f-9fcf0691f7
>
> Once you create your account, J.L.W.S. The Special One will be notified
> with
> your new email address so you can stay in touch with Gmail!
>
> If you haven't already heard about Gmail, it's a new search-based webmail
> service that offers:
>
> - Over 2,500 megabytes (two gigabytes) of free storage
> - Built-in Google search that instantly finds any message you want
> - Automatic arrangement of messages and related replies into
>   "conversations"
> - Powerful spam protection using innovative Google technology
> - No large, annoying ads--just small text ads and related pages that are
>   relevant to the content of your messages
>
> To learn more about Gmail before registering, visit:
> http://mail.google.com/mail/help/benefits.html
>
> And, to see how easy it can be to switch to a new email service, check
> out our new switch guide: http://mail.google.com/mail/help/switch/
>
> We're still working every day to improve Gmail, so we might ask for your
> comments and suggestions periodically.  We hope you'll like Gmail.  We
> do.  And, it's only going to get better.
>
> Thanks,
>
> The Gmail Team
>
> (If clicking the URLs in this message does not work, copy and paste them
> into the address bar of your browser).
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

Ah, the dangers of the "Invite Wikipedia to Gmail" button. :-)

--
theProject


from_name: Parker Peters

subject: [WikiEN-l] "Assume good faith" is no longer policy.

body:
On 12/18/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 18/12/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > We have seen this bite people; I've seen policies quoted by people who'd
> > happened to see a version which was then pushed back and reverted, for
> > example.
> > This is normally not that bad a problem, but people who tend to rules
> lawyer
> > instead of acting in the spirit of cooperation can cause glitches.
>
>
> Well, yeah. There is no rule that can outlaw rules-lawyering.

Which has never stopped anyone from trying, or from beating down their
opponents for 'wikilawyering' when it's pointed out that their actions go
against policy.

In general, I'm fine with AGF as a guideline, but its usage has passed from
being a well-meant guideline into something between an "opening salvo" and a
"bludgeon" when it comes to content disputes, and that's not good.

Parker


body:
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> On 12/18/06, Kat Walsh <mindspillage at gmail.com> wrote:
>> It was called a guideline for a year before someone called it policy a
>> few months ago. I haven't seen much difference in its treatment.
>>
>> I would be more concerned if I thought it made any practical
>> difference what sort of template got stuck on top of it; it's not as
>> though it were an easily enforceable bright-line rule to begin with.
>> It is simply necessary to avoid killing each other, sometimes, and so
>> people tend to regard it as a Good Idea and try to hold others to it
>> no matter what designation gets slapped atop it.
>> (As a side note, there is discussion about its status on the talk page.)
>
> I think we should totally do away with the Guideline/Policy/Essay
> notices.. Instead we should put a signature space below... so users
> can see all the people who support the page.
>
> The idea is that the only policy which really matters on a day to day
> basis is the ephemeral policy which is implemented by each and every
> one of us through our actions and decisions.
>
> So the list below a such a page becomes a list of the people whom you
> can expect to get on your case if you ignore the page.. and people
> whom it might be useful to consult if you're thinking about doing
> something which might be borderline.
>
> This would avoid all the energy thats wasted on such discussions and
> provide a more honest outlook on the complicated system which
> underlies the operation of our project.
>

I would support that as a policy.

--
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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subject: [WikiEN-l] Hello

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 12/14/06, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
>>> There is absolutely nothing at all in MediaWiki that makes a page in a
>>> subcategory behave like it's also in the parent category. Nothing.
>>> It's completely and utterly a construct in the mind of the user.
>> But it's by far the most logical construct to make, and there is very
>> little reason to keep the software free from any support of that
>> construct (even if it is to the detriment of other, more exotic constructs).
>
> I wasn't implying that MediaWiki *shouldn't* support the notion of
> "supercategory". The opposite, in fact. It would be extremely to be
> able to treat all members of all subcategories as also belonging to
> that category - for certain categories.
>

Kind of like how ls has a recursive feature, but it's off by default,
and how find is recursive by default, but you can limit it?

--
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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list: foundation-l

from_name: Bence Damokos

subject: [Foundation-l] Translations fundraising.wikimedia.org

body:
Hi.
I translated it to Hungarian, but I have to notice, that you cannot
translate the meaning of C.O.R.E. Core Online Rsomething Esomething, that is
displayed under the title, and thus you have the dilemma of wether to
localise CORE.

Regards, Bence

On 12/18/06, Brad Patrick <bradp.wmf at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Most of it
> should be possible to translate with merely a dictionary.
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_C.O.R.E.
>
>
>
> JePe wrote:
> > On http://fundraising.wikimedia.org there are now next to English some
> > translations made. How can we make a translation in another language?
> >
> > Hans (JePe)
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > 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
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Finding out what to take photos of

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 12/18/06, Rory Stolzenberg <rory096 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> As far as I know, WP:RI isn't used nearly as much as the category, and the
>> category is useful as it's connected to a template that one can add to the
>> article's talk page, so that everybody who looks at the talk page finds out
>> that it needs a picture, which is something that Commons can't do.
>
> Could a bot or something feed these language-specific requests into a
> central repository? It'd be nice if Jacques P Frenchie at
> fr:Discuter:New York can request an image, and that request actually
> be acted on by New Yorkers. New Yorkers who, presumably, are not
> likely to be reading the French version of their favourite article...
>

Who will repair me of this troublesome toolserver?

--
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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subject: [WikiEN-l] Office actions

body:
Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
> On Sun, 17 Dec 2006 21:03:02 -0500, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com>
> wrote:
>
>> We do need to have a way of distinguishing these cases.
>
> As long as we have some idea what the grounds for objection were, the
> application of Clue should be sufficient.  Hopefully protection will
> do that, since admins are supposed to posses that elusive quantity.
>

The number who have been desysopped suggests otherwise.

--
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: Tariq Ab- Jo- Tu-

subject: [WikiEN-l] Main Page Featured Article

body:
Stephen --

The policy dictating the protection of templates and images directly on
the Main Page is long-standing. Luna was referring to the templates on
Today's Featured Article itself; the protection of images / templates on
that article is a relatively new thing.

-- Tariq Ab- Jo- Tu-

Stephen Bain wrote:
> On 12/19/06, Luna <lunasantin at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> As far as templates on TFA, is there consensus as to whether they should be
>> semi or fully protected? We're obviously dealing with somebody smart enough
>> to start using sleeper accounts, is what I figure, but I'm not sure how much
>> they've done so, yet.
>>
>
> Full protection, obviously. The incident last week where such
> vandalism was on the main page for fifteen minutes until it was found
> was by an established account, semi-protection wouldn't have stopped
> it; indeed the template that was affected *was* semi-protected at the
> time the vandalism occurred.
>
>


body:
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Peter Danenberg wrote:
>> On the other hand if it's still slow as a dog, we can forget it and
>> concentrate on other things.
>
>
>      I  had  a  hell of a time with Batik when WikiTeX first
> supported it; in addition to the Java overhead, you have  to
> have a framebuffer running on your headless server.

It seems reasonably happy with setting awt to headless mode.

- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
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Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> Another engine to keep our eyes on is inkscape, which also can be used
> as a batch rasterizer. While it, like rsvg, lacks the completeness of
> Batik, it has a couple of qualities worth our attention:
>
> 1) Unlike rsvg it is actively developed and will one day be reasonably
> feature complete. (it will soon have filters for example)

Note that rsvg is actively developed, seeing several releases a year.
The web page is grossly out of date, however.

> 2) Unlike both rsvg and batik it's also a full authorship
> environment.. in a perfect world we'd expect all renders to be
> consistent, but they are not.. so if we're going to be wrong it's
> better to be wrong in the same was as a tool people can actually use.

Mm, maybe.

Generally I'm leery about a GUI tool and all its dependencies; that has
much of the same issues as librsvg.

- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: The Cunctator

body:
Ha ha.

Does anyone see the irony?

On 12/17/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> It's become a guideline. Ho hum.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Assume_good_faith
>
> Steve
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Ryan Wetherell

subject: [WikiEN-l] Main Page Featured Article

body:
On 12/18/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
> On Tue, 19 Dec 2006 06:49:11 +0100, "MacGyverMagic/Mgm"
> <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >Since when is something getting tedious for admins a reason not to do it? If
> >it's a mainpage non-article vandal target, it should be protected - no
> >exceptions.
>
> The obvious is never a problem, as my dad always says.
>
> Guy (JzG)

I have to agree.  I saw a certain penis image when I logged on the
other day and it gave me quite a start.  I haven't seen that kind of
thing in a while.  As long as the article itself get protected, we
shouldn't beat around the bush as to what to protect or not to
protect.  If a template has to get subst'd I guess that is fine too.
Better we have messy code that people can't see right away than shock
images that they can.

--Ryan


from_name: George Herbert

subject: [WikiEN-l] Main Page Featured Article

body:
On 12/18/06, Luna <lunasantin at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On 12/18/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Assuming that a {{subst:}} works recursively and automatically, which
> > I really don't know...  My MediaWiki installation is outside my
> > immediate hands-on test radius unfortunately.
> >
>
> Temporary substing is something to explore. But it would have its own
> problems, I think -- meta templates aren't substed when you subst the main
> template, from my experience. Substing all the infoboxes and other templates
> on a page can make it pretty ugly, too... unless we were thinking about
> copying all the templates to temporary subpages?
>
> An adminbot is starting to sound a bit more tempting, from my end. Any bot
> would be able to find and protect TFA, and absolutely everything transcluded
> onto it, pretty easily, I think. Though I don't imagine that'll be an easy
> sell. Might be easier to see if we can get pgkbot to report all edits to
> that set of pages in the IRC counter-vandalism channels.
>
> Still just brainstorming, here.
> -Luna

Responding to you and Steve here...

I would assume that this would be a temporary subst; that we'd
essentially freeze the page prior to TFA move, make a completely
subst'ed version, protect that, have it up for the day, and then do a
revert to the immediately prior version as soon as it's done being
TFA.

It doesn't really matter if it's terribly ugly for a while; the freeze
is intended to keep it from being malignly modified.

This does make TFA temporarily not-editable, which people have
objected to, but I don't know that doing so is necessarily a bad thing
given the ongoing highly visible vandalism problem.  How many tens of
thousands or hundreds of thousands of visitors have gotten penis
pictures so far?  8-(

--
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] Begging letters on our blogs?

body:
On 18/12/06, Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/19/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> > Feed the 'pedia, Let them know it's cup-rattling time ... I've put a
> > note on my blog, as has Kat Walsh:

> Wouldn't it make more sense to wait for the days the donations are
> going to be matched so the results of your blog post are worth double?
> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fundraising_FAQ#What_are_matching_donations_exactly.3F

I thought that was today ... buh.

- d.


from_name: Oldak Quill

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Begging letters on our blogs?

body:
On 18/12/06, Parker Conrad <parkerconrad at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm curious -- what is the objection to advertising? If there was, say, one
> unobtrusive text ad per page, I imagine that would cover all of the
> wikimedia foundation's costs and allow new features to be developed a little
> more quickly. Would people be offended and stop contributing?

If we accepted advertising, we would be faced with an impossible
conflict of interest. If Coca Cola is giving us 20 000 USD, how would
any reader consider our article on them to be NPOV?

Basically, we would lose any validity we currently have.

--
Oldak Quill (oldakquill at gmail.com)


body:
On 18/12/06, Parker Conrad <parkerconrad at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm curious -- what is the objection to advertising? If there was, say, one
> unobtrusive text ad per page, I imagine that would cover all of the
> wikimedia foundation's costs and allow new features to be developed a little
> more quickly. Would people be offended and stop contributing?

Because people hate, despise and loathe the idea of advertising, and a
substantial fraction of the volunteers who write all the content would
get up and *leave*. And that would be bad.

Basically, instead of the annoyance of advertising you get the
annoyance of slow servers on a Sunday afternoon and occasional
downtime. And people seem to be willing to accept that deal. Jimbo has
said in the past that downtime is our most lucrative product ;-)

So we get money by asking the readers, and now that we have properly
audited books we're going after big-time donors.

- d.


from_name: Brianna Laugher

body:
Geez, that is one hugely impressive map. what a labour of love!

How do you make a "low res" version of an SVG?? the only way is to
actually take things out of the image, isn't it?

SVG support is going to improve dramatically over the next few years,
I imagine. It doesn't seem sound to recommend that people upload
inferior works when this soon shouldn't be an issue.

On 18/12/06, Walter van Kalken <walter at vankalken.net> wrote:
By looking around on commons I found many many
> maps that gave me this same problem.

If you can give me a list of the images that caused you problems, I'll
put a small template on the image pages warning that they might cause
browser crashes.

cheers,
Brianna
user:pfctdayelise


from_name: Walter Vermeir

subject: [Foundation-l] Fundraising update 12/18/06 - UTC 20:27

body:
Brad Patrick schreef:
> Hello:
>
> Some minor points to report -
>
> Persons who donate through Moneybookers should expect a delay before
> their donation is posted; our engine only accepts processed
> transactions, which in the case of Moneybookers is slower than with
> Paypal.  Our data indicate donors who submitted transactions in the last
> 48 hours are still being processed, so for those of you who gave, thank
> you, and you will see your name in due course.
[cut]

And donations by money transfer, will the also be imported? And the
messages if included?

--
Contact: walter AT wikizine DOT org
Wikizine.org - news for and about the Wikimedia community


from_name: Peter Danenberg

body:
> On the other hand if it's still slow as a dog, we can forget it and
> concentrate on other things.

     I  had  a  hell of a time with Batik when WikiTeX first
supported it; in addition to the Java overhead, you have  to
have a framebuffer running on your headless server.

--
Peter Danenberg                                           .
wikisophia.org                                           ..:


from_name: brion at pobox.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki automated test run failure 2006-12-19

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

Reading tests from "/home/brion/src/wiki/phase3/maintenance/parserTests.txt"...
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: 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: dt/dd/dl test... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Images with the "|" character in the comment... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Parents of subpages, two levels up, without trailing slash or name.... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Parents of subpages, two levels up, with lots of extra trailing slashes.... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Don't fall for the self-closing div... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Always escape literal '>' in output, not just after '<'... FAILED!

Reading tests from "/home/brion/src/wiki/phase3/extensions/Cite/citeParserTests.txt"...

Reading tests from "/home/brion/src/wiki/phase3/extensions/Poem/poemParserTests.txt"...

Passed 462 of 481 tests (96.05%)... FAILED!


from_name: Walter van Kalken

body:
Lars Aronsson wrote:

>Walter van Kalken wrote:
>
>
>
>>Do we really need to be the trendsetter like with .svg??????
>>
>>
>
>Come on now, Walter, we're already the trendsetters in using
>massive collaboration on the Internet to write an encyclopedia.
>There's no way we can try to be mainstream.  We're radical.
>I think trailblazer (German: Bahnbrecher) is the word for it.
>
>
>
Yes ok you got a point there. But like with graphics, if you are the
trailblazer that means most people will not be able to gaze at the tail
you are blazing like now with .svg which as I noticed from remarks in
the answers on my mail has some clear problems.

When the majority of people will have problems opening these files we
are doing something against our own mission statement.

Waerth


body:
On 19/12/06, Walter van Kalken <walter at vankalken.net> wrote:
> That is not the point.
>
> IS there nobody here who understands that we make this project for all
> the people out there! Not to satisfy our own geekly lust to pursue the
> latest fashion in computerelectronics and programming.

I am not in favour of bleeding edge technology for its own sake, but
the reason this file is so large is because of the detail in it. I
don't see how that can be reduced without reducing quality.

There are links on that page to a PNG and a simpler SVG. These are
ways to make it accessible for all without sacrificing quality.

> Do we really need to be the trendsetter like with .svg??????

OK, my point is that as far as I can tell, we are not doing anything
trendsetting with this image that is causing it to be huge and
complex. It is just intricately detailed. I presume that has a
Featured Picture, it has had a number of people looking at it and has
been checked to have valid SVG code (actually I am not sure this is a
criterion... I will go suggest it now).

> You are talking about being better supported in a couple of years
> Briana. Ask yourself the question do you want people to be able to use
> this graphics *NOW *or in a couple of years?

I want them to be able to use it now and then, but I don't want us to
be kicking ourselves for insisting on inferior quality in the future
when it becomes a non-issue.

cheers,
Brianna


body:
On 18/12/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:

> We have seen this bite people; I've seen policies quoted by people who'd
> happened to see a version which was then pushed back and reverted, for
> example.
> This is normally not that bad a problem, but people who tend to rules lawyer
> instead of acting in the spirit of cooperation can cause glitches.

Well, yeah. There is no rule that can outlaw rules-lawyering.

But AGF is quite genuinely a policy, even if it isn't Taylorisable.

- d.


from_name: Mark Clements

subject: [Wikitech-l] [Commons-l] Recruit photographers with your blog

body:
"Rob Church" <robchur at gmail.com> wrote in
message news:e92136380612180426w77762c6ftf0ece0adc563b330 at mail.gmail.com...
> On 18/12/06, Magnus Manske
<magnusmanske at googlemail.com> wrote:
> > Or, we could use query.php (or that other api thing...) :
> >
> >
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/query.php?what=imageinfo&titles=Image:Cetacea_rang
e_map_Chinese_River_Dolphin.PNG
> >
> > to import the image history, and use SpecialImport for the description
> > page only.
>
> No, I think it makes more sense if Special:Import handles the full,
> proper import itself.
>
>
> Rob Church

I agree, Special:Import should copy the full image history as well as the
full page history.  The way it is at the moment just feels broken, and
making it a two stage process won't fix that.

We may also want an 'include files when relevant' check-box that can be
turned off for those occasions when you just want the text, although I can't
really think of a use for that - at least not for the way we use image pages
on WM projects.

- Mark Clements (HappyDog)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Multiple image namespaces in the same wiki

body:
"Brion Vibber" <brion at pobox.com> wrote in
message news:457DC455.80107 at pobox.com...
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Alex Powell wrote:
> > Any ideas on this or is it just "unsupported at this time"?
>
> No such ability is supported at this time, and we don't really expect to
> add it. At some point there'll be more aliases for 'Image', but only one
> file store area.
>
> You'd need to do a lot of hacking.
>

That's a shame - and I understand the technical issues, but it's something
we would find useful on MediaWiki.org, where we are operating under two
licenses.  Separate "PD Image:" and "GFDL Image:" namespaces would be pretty
useful.

- Mark Clements (HappyDog)


from_name: Jeffrey V. Merkey

body:
Well brion,

I have never been able to get librsvg to work at all on 1.8.2, so Batik
may be a solution.

Jeff

>-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>Hash: SHA1
>
>For rasterizing SVG images we've used librsvg for some time. Another
>contender which we didn't choose originally is Batik. There are several
>respects in which librsvg is unsatisfactory and Batik might be preferable.
>
>With Sun finally in the process of releasing their Java implementation
>under GPL, we don't have to worry about being so ideologically 'pure'
>about Java-based solutions these days... So I went ahead and did a quick
>rendering benchmark with some images plucked off of Commons:
>
>http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/SVG_benchmarks
>
>
>rsvg is beating the pants off Batik by a factor of 6; on my laptop the
>average image in the sample took *two seconds* to render, compared to a
>third of a second for rsvg.
>
>Java is traditionally slow for command-line-type tasks, with VM startup
>and JIT overhead inflating times significantly. It's possible that we
>could get much better performance by starting up a single VM and sending
>multiple requests to it.
>
>If we can get performance out of Batik that approaches or exceeds
>librsvg, it may be desirable to consider switching.
>
>On the other hand if it's still slow as a dog, we can forget it and
>concentrate on other things.
>
>Would anyone like to fiddle with this, put together a test daemon? (Or
>at least a test program that uses the library to render a bunch of
>images from a list, so we can benchmark.) It's probably not that
>difficult, and would be a fun way for some of the Java-heads in the room
>to get involved. ;)
>
>If nobody hops in, it has to wait until I get around to it, and well... ;)
>
>- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
>Version: GnuPG v1.4.2.2 (Darwin)
>Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
>
>iD8DBQFFh328wRnhpk1wk44RAlllAKDPOb3MrS/yvLF1WZJlgNu53qv5rQCguxDj
>3hMsb+2/+pv+B+VZzxLoSV8=
>=9u2X
>-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
>_______________________________________________
>Wikitech-l mailing list
>Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Main Page Featured Article

body:
On 12/19/06, NSLE (Wikipedia) <nsle.wikipedia at gmail.com> wrote:
> There have also been suggestions of communicating with the vandal's ISP.
> Should that just take place, instead of us trying to figure out how to
> preempt the vandal?

If it's one single consistent vandal, by all means call the ISP.

Someone associated with OFFICE should do so, so that it's taken
seriously, and not blown off as a random WP person making the call...

--
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com


from_name: Gregory Maxwell

body:
On 12/19/06, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
[snip]
> rsvg is beating the pants off Batik by a factor of 6; on my laptop the
> average image in the sample took *two seconds* to render, compared to a
> third of a second for rsvg.
>
> Java is traditionally slow for command-line-type tasks, with VM startup
> and JIT overhead inflating times significantly. It's possible that we
> could get much better performance by starting up a single VM and sending
> multiple requests to it.
>
> If we can get performance out of Batik that approaches or exceeds
> librsvg, it may be desirable to consider switching.
[snip]

Another engine to keep our eyes on is inkscape, which also can be used
as a batch rasterizer. While it, like rsvg, lacks the completeness of
Batik, it has a couple of qualities worth our attention:

1) Unlike rsvg it is actively developed and will one day be reasonably
feature complete. (it will soon have filters for example)
2) Unlike both rsvg and batik it's also a full authorship
environment.. in a perfect world we'd expect all renders to be
consistent, but they are not.. so if we're going to be wrong it's
better to be wrong in the same was as a tool people can actually use.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Main Page Featured Article

body:
On 12/18/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 19/12/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > This does make TFA temporarily not-editable, which people have
> > objected to, but I don't know that doing so is necessarily a bad thing
> > given the ongoing highly visible vandalism problem.  How many tens of
> > thousands or hundreds of thousands of visitors have gotten penis
> > pictures so far?  8-(
>
>
> The real problem is that the featured article often gets a great deal
> of improvement while it's featured. This does require people to be
> watching it pretty much continuously for vandalism. It would be much
> better for the wiki to arrange patrollers rather than make readers'
> first experience of Wikipedia be an article they can't in fact edit,
> and I would say it is a worse thing than seeing a picture of a penis.
>
> The only technical solution to vandals is to lock the wiki. That's a
> really bad thing. Do we really not have patrollers?

I don't like my answer, either.  It's certainly not great.

Fundamentally, the problem is that we're having some growth pains
resulting in problems which tend to put goals such as "Be a great
encyclopedia" in conflict with goals such as "Which everyone can
always edit".

I am tending towards the opinion that, as unfortunate as it is, the
Featured Article has become an Attractive Nuisance.  Legally, in the
US, it's normal to assume that the owner of an attractive nuisance
bears responsibility to put a fence around it and keep it from hurting
people.

I don't like that conclusion, but that's where I'm leaning.  I think
that it's going to come down to a balance of lesser evils.  I am
interested in seeing what everyone else thinks about it.

Something that occurred to me a bit ago...  We could both freeze and
not-freeze the featured article, with a bit of effort.  We could
create a new name heirarchy (wiki/Featured Article/article-name) and
drop a subst'ed version of the page, protected, down into that
subpage, with a link to the "live" wiki article there if people want
to see how it may have improved over the course of the day.  If
there's bandwidth available, someone could repeat the process (create
an updated frozen subst version from the live wiki page) every hour or
two during the TFA run, so it doesn't even have to be fixed as of the
beginning of the day.

This doesn't take any new technology, just a few subpages and a bit of
procedure...

--
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com


from_name: Patrick Hall

body:
On 12/19/06, theProject <wp.theproject at gmail.com> wrote:
> Ah, the dangers of the "Invite Wikipedia to Gmail" button. :-)

I thought perhaps that Wikipedia had achieved sentience, and was going
to start campaigning for benefits, beginning with its own email
account... and you thought its server demands were off the deep end,
wait till it starts in on health care!

   ?

--
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -pkd


from_name: gwern branwen

body:
On 12/19/06, theProject <wp.theproject at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/18/06, J.L.W.S. The Special One <hildanknight at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > I've been using Gmail and thought you might like to try it out. Here's
> > an invitation to create an account.
> >
> > -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > J.L.W.S. The Special One has invited you to open a free Gmail account.
> >
> > To accept this invitation and register for your account, visit
> > http://mail.google.com/mail/a-e691274bdf-4b936b095f-9fcf0691f7
> >
> > Once you create your account, J.L.W.S. The Special One will be notified
> > with
> > your new email address so you can stay in touch with Gmail!
> >
> > If you haven't already heard about Gmail, it's a new search-based webmail
> > service that offers:
> >
> > - Over 2,500 megabytes (two gigabytes) of free storage
> > - Built-in Google search that instantly finds any message you want
> > - Automatic arrangement of messages and related replies into
> >   "conversations"
> > - Powerful spam protection using innovative Google technology
> > - No large, annoying ads--just small text ads and related pages that are
> >   relevant to the content of your messages
> >
> > To learn more about Gmail before registering, visit:
> > http://mail.google.com/mail/help/benefits.html
> >
> > And, to see how easy it can be to switch to a new email service, check
> > out our new switch guide: http://mail.google.com/mail/help/switch/
> >
> > We're still working every day to improve Gmail, so we might ask for your
> > comments and suggestions periodically.  We hope you'll like Gmail.  We
> > do.  And, it's only going to get better.
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > The Gmail Team
> >
> > (If clicking the URLs in this message does not work, copy and paste them
> > into the address bar of your browser).
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
>
> Ah, the dangers of the "Invite Wikipedia to Gmail" button. :-)
>
> --
> theProject

Wikimail - the email account anyone can edit?
Number 11 on Jimbo's list of Things That Should Be Free - Free the Emails?
All licensed under the GNU Free Email License (GFEL)?

--Gwern


from_name: David Monniaux

body:
Berto 'd Sera wrote:

>Hi!
>
>
>
>>Would people be offended and stop contributing?
>>
>>
>I gather the only serious answer is: nobody knows. That's unless there had
>been previous experiments I'm not aware of. But it sure would have an impact
>on bandwidth. No matter how small the banner, given the kind of traffic we
>generate our needs are going to noticeably grow. I suppose that such a move
>would need a serious technical analysis, it's not just like adding a banner
>on an average website.
>
Banners typically are directly included from third party sites, which
enables these sites to count the number of accesses.

The issue of advertisement is entirely political, not technical. I'm
also sure that whoever provides the advertisement would be glad to deal
with the technical issues (Wikipedia is a big site, they can do that).


subject:
[Foundation-l] Sep11 Wiki/Partnership Message Removal/Mr. Wales
	Concerns

body:
I located a reference to a "partnership" on hosting the
sep11.wikipedia.org website on one of my personal websites which
referred to this project where
WMG took over the hosting and server costs for the sep11.wikipedia.org
domain for the Foundation.   This appears to be the source of the
confusion on the part of folks about this topic.

Mr. Wales has expressed concerns about our hosting of the
sep11.wikipedia.org domain as request by Erik Moeller since
it may create the impression of a "partnership" between WMF and WMG,
which should be avoided.

I am going to leave the site active for now, but I would suggest peraps
wikia.com take over this task to avoid remove any discomfort on
the part of Mr. Wales, or at a minimum, the stakeholders contact Wales
and find out what his beef is with the decision.

I would ask that Erik Moeller check with Mr. Wales on whether we should
continue to host this site or have wikia.com or one of
the chapters take it over.

Thanks

Jeff


from_name: Berto 'd Sera

body:
Hi!

>Would people be offended and stop contributing?
I gather the only serious answer is: nobody knows. That's unless there had
been previous experiments I'm not aware of. But it sure would have an impact
on bandwidth. No matter how small the banner, given the kind of traffic we
generate our needs are going to noticeably grow. I suppose that such a move
would need a serious technical analysis, it's not just like adding a banner
on an average website.

Berto


subject:
[Foundation-l] Sep11 Wiki/Partnership Message Removal/Mr. Wales
 Concerns

body:
Here's the stats on the sep11.wikipedia.org site since Dec 1 (it's very
active)

Jeff

Summary

*Reported period* 	Month Dec 2006
*First visit* 	01 Dec 2006 - 00:00
*Last visit* 	19 Dec 2006 - 04:50
	Unique visitors 	Number of visits 	Pages 	Hits 	Bandwidth
Viewed traffic * 	*6707*
	*8360*
(1.24 visits/visitor) 	*50021*
(5.98 pages/visit) 	*125657*
(15.03 hits/visit) 	*899.37 MB*
(110.16 KB/visit)
Not viewed traffic *
	*19653* 	*23500* 	*44.39 MB*

* Not viewed traffic includes traffic generated by robots, worms, or
replies with special HTTP status codes.

Jeffrey V. Merkey wrote:

>I located a reference to a "partnership" on hosting the
>sep11.wikipedia.org website on one of my personal websites which
>referred to this project where
>WMG took over the hosting and server costs for the sep11.wikipedia.org
>domain for the Foundation.   This appears to be the source of the
>confusion on the part of folks about this topic.
>
>Mr. Wales has expressed concerns about our hosting of the
>sep11.wikipedia.org domain as request by Erik Moeller since
>it may create the impression of a "partnership" between WMF and WMG,
>which should be avoided.
>
>I am going to leave the site active for now, but I would suggest peraps
>wikia.com take over this task to avoid remove any discomfort on
>the part of Mr. Wales, or at a minimum, the stakeholders contact Wales
>and find out what his beef is with the decision.
>
>I would ask that Erik Moeller check with Mr. Wales on whether we should
>continue to host this site or have wikia.com or one of
>the chapters take it over.
>
>Thanks
>
>Jeff
>_______________________________________________
>foundation-l mailing list
>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>
>


from_name: Jax

subject:
[Wikitech-l] fixing lines automatically which
	run	through	theborder

body:
Steve Sanbeg wrote:
> On Mon, 18 Dec 2006 09:47:11 +0000, Mark Clements wrote:
>
>
>> "Rob Church" <robchur at gmail.com> wrote in
>> message news:e92136380612161920k7469d462gf2b73e4316964eed at mail.gmail.com...
>>
>>> On 17/12/06, Jax <cybercorecentre at gmail.com>
>>>
>> wrote:
>>
>>>> As you see if you copy text files to the mediawiki then some line will
>>>> overruns the border and after you got thousands of pages in your wiki it
>>>> can't be fix by hand. This wiki is not public, I need to maintain it for
>>>> my company so I can't just ask someone to setup a bot to fix it even if
>>>> that's a solution.
>>>>
>>> The problem seems to be that some lines prefixed with spaces are
>>> creeping in from the source text. MediaWiki treats this as a cue to
>>> enter <pre> mode, which means that formatting and line breaks are up
>>> to the user. To correct this, delete the preceding spaces at the start
>>> of each line.
>>>
>>> To fix this in bulk, you could write a quickie maintenance script
>>> which whizzes through all pages in the database (or just those you
>>> specify) and performs this edit for you, saving the page if changes
>>> were made.
>>>
>>>
>> If the pages are text files, then presumably there is no wiki markup in it
>> anyway, therefore you should wrap the whole page in <nowiki> tags.
>>
>> You will need to remove the tags and perform any clean-up (e.g. removing
>> leading spaces, as pointed out by Rob) if you want to introduce wiki markup
>> into the page at a later date.
>>
>> - Mark Clements (HappyDog)
>>
>
> There's also a poem extension, which is used by wikisource to simplify
> copying texts.  This prevents auto filling and drawing the box around
> text, but allows wiki & HTML markup in the text.  You'd just install that
> extension and wrap the text in a <poem> tag.
>
>
>
Thank you very much. It helped, and it will be a lot easier to find
these bad articles and put a <poem> tag to them.
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>

Best Regards,

Jax


from_name: Aphaia

subject: [Foundation-l] Fundraising update

body:
Hello,
thank you for your help.
Yes, I agree it would be not helpful for visitors living in Hungary. I
guess however it would be useful for the visitors living in US now or
Germany or France ... In Japan, most of jawiki* visitors are in the
same situation, but according to statistics, 300,000 Japanese
nationality holders reside in the United States. Similar things could
happen in other language community?

Cheers,

On 12/19/06, Bence Damokos <bdamokos at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi!
> I've put back the tax  deductibility link, though I still think its
> unnecessary as only a portion of the visitors come from the US (
> http://stats.wikipedia.hu/cgi-bin/awstats.pl).
>
> I'll have a look at the translated FAQ page.
>
> Regards, Bence Damokos
>
> On 12/18/06, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On 17/12/06, Aphaia <aphaia at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Hello
> > > A comment came from a community:
> > >
> > Talk:Translation_request/WMF/Fundraising_Sitenotice%28default%29/2006&rcid=484233
> > > ----
> > > Hungarian is at hu:MediaWiki:Sitenotice, the Tax-deductibility link is
> > > taken out, as it doesn't apply in Hungary.--Dami 21:12, 17 December
> > > 2006 (UTC)
> > > ----
> > >
> > > Brad, we will apprecite your comment about such localization.
> >
> > On the matter of Hungarian... we've been sent a copy of the entire
> > Fundraising FAQ translated into Hungarian by a kind user; the draft is
> > at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Datrio/notepad waiting for
> > Datrio to copy it over.
> >
> > Could our Hungarian speakers glance over it and see if anything
> > important was missed out? Thanks!
> >
> > --
> > - Andrew Gray
> >   andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk
> > _______________________________________________
> > 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
>

--
KIZU Naoko
  Wikiquote: http://wikiquote.org
  * Nessuna poesia prima di noi *


subject: [Foundation-l] Fundraising update


from_name: Sarah

subject: [WikiEN-l] WikiEN-l Digest, Vol 41, Issue 153

body:
On 12/19/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 19/12/06, Sarah <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 12/18/06, zero 0000 <nought_0000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > > Perhaps there is another useful way to look at it: consider
> > > the legal database to be "the" source, rather than a
> > > collection of sources.  Can I say something like "Legal
> > > opinions found in the LawIsUs database uniformly favor Y"?
> > > (The wording may need tweaking.)
>
> > The problem is that material we use as sources must be available to
> > the general public, and it's not clear that we can expect the public
> > to have access to a legal database.
>
>
> Er, what on earth? No, rubbish. It's the source, it's checkable.

We use writers as sources, not databases and libraries. If Zero wants
to say that all legal opinion says X, he should find a secondary
source who confirms that, rather than relying on his own, possibly
faulty, search of a database, and then calling the database the source
(even though there are no documents in the database that say "all
legal opinion says X"). What he means, in fact, is that HE is the
source, and that he used the database to do his research, and that's
what makes it OR.
>
>
> > Also, we have to depend on you
> > having conducted the search correctly, which you may not have done if
> > you have no legal education; and we have to depend on you correctly
> > describing the opinion that you say is uniformly favored, which you
> > may also not have done.
>
> That's a separate issue.
>
It's a separable issue, but it boils down to the same thing, viz. that
we publish the published views of third parties (what they believe is
in the database, for example), and not the views of Wikipedians.

Sarah


body:
On 12/19/06, charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com
<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> Sarah wrote
>
> > The problem is that material we use as sources must be available to
> > the general public, and it's not clear that we can expect the public
> > to have access to a legal database.
>
> This is rather objectionable, as a type of argument. 'Available' to the 'general public' contains two very negotiable ideas. Few academic sources (in proportion to the total) are easily available to many (in proportion to the 6 billion total) of the world's inhabitants. Making a fuss about this is a sure route to a worse encyclopedia.

Any public library can order material that's in a regular academic
library. Similarly, they can order any material that's in a legal
database. But they can't "order" the database itself, and it's the
database as a whole that Zero wanted to call his "source," or rather
his own interpretation of its contents. That's not reasonably
checkable by Wikipedia readers, which is why we don't allow OR.

Sarah


subject: [WikiEN-l] The boundaries of OR

body:
On 12/18/06, charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com
<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> "Thomas Dalton" wrote
>
> >We don't need to go through and put "So-and-so says"
> > at the beginning of every sentence in the encyclopaedia.
>
> I basically agree. The referencing junkies will push us back a notch, to where we have the 'materials for an encylopedia', not the encyclopedia itself. Or perhaps that has always been where we are. In which case we are delaying the day when we have 'finished' articles.
>
> Is this good or bad? Well, the Internet is full of argumentative people, and many topics are contentious. The way to deal with those people and topics may well be to summarise controversies. But we really do need, even there, a degree of concision; otherwise we are going merely to recreate the scholasticism of past centuries. And then, in fact, people want to look up facts in encyclopedias. They don't always want quibbles.
>
Charles, I disagree. I think people appreciate knowing who said what,
and why that person's views are important enough to include. Why
should they trust anonymous editors who declare without sources what
"the facts" are?

I agree that articles that simply list sources and what they say are
tiresome, but that's a question of the writing. Written properly,
well-sourced articles are more readable and useful to readers than
poorly sourced ones.

Sarah


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [WikiEN-l] Main Page Featured Article

body:
On 12/19/06, NSLE (Wikipedia) <nsle.wikipedia at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've
> suggested perhaps substituting the templates before they become TFA (and
> re-transcluding after), but do the other list readers have any solution?

Recursive protection that applies to local images and templates should
do the trick. It would have to connect the protections to each other
(e.g. by using a shared protection ID) so that they can all be
unprotected together as well. You might want to raise this on
wikitech-l, or file a request on BugZilla.
--
Peace & Love,
Erik

DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of
the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.


from_name: Angela

body:
On 12/19/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> Feed the 'pedia, Let them know it's cup-rattling time ... I've put a
> note on my blog, as has Kat Walsh:

Wouldn't it make more sense to wait for the days the donations are
going to be matched so the results of your blog post are worth double?

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fundraising_FAQ#What_are_matching_donations_exactly.3F

Angela


from_name: James Hare

body:
What if the ads were off by default?

On 12/19/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 19/12/06, J.L.W.S. The Special One <hildanknight at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Contextual ads are small and unobstrusive. In addition, they may
> > benefit the reader by pointing them to additional resources.
> > Wikipedia is now a top-20 site. Server and bandwidth costs will grow
> > rapidly. Donations are not a reliable way to keep Wikipedia
> > financially afloat.
> > I remember reading a report in the Signpost which says that Wikipedia
> > could earn over $500 million if it used contextual ads.
>
>
> Certainly, but the problem is it would still make a large chunk of the
> people who actually write the sites get up and leave.
>
>
> - d.
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

subject: [WikiEN-l] Main Page Featured Article

body:
On 12/19/06, NSLE (Wikipedia) <nsle.wikipedia at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I assume most of the list's readers know what problems we've been having
> with the TFA each day on the main page (vandals inserting shock images
> into
> transcluded-on-transcluded templates). In case some don't, I'm posting
> this
> to see if anyone has ideas off how to avoid this. It's been discussed
> extensively on ANI, and there does not seem to be a workable solution to
> it.
> The images are being uploaded by sleeper socks old enough to upload them,
> and protecting every single template on TFA (including
> transcluded-on-transcluded ones) can be tedious for the admins. I've
> suggested perhaps substituting the templates before they become TFA (and
> re-transcluding after), but do the other list readers have any solution?
>
> --NSLE

Since when is something getting tedious for admins a reason not to do it? If
it's a mainpage non-article vandal target, it should be protected - no
exceptions.

Mgm


from_name: zero 0000

subject: [WikiEN-l] The boundaries of OR (contd)

body:
Thanks for everyone's replies.  I'll make a few comments.

1. The legal database (more properly, collection of legal journals)
   I was using when the question came up was HeinOnLine.  In my
   small city, it is available in one public library and two university
   libraries.  I'm sure the access is similar in other cities.  Similar
   resources like Lexis are also widely available in public libraries.
   So I don't think availability is an issue.

2. Jay is quite correct to discourage weasel words like "probably".
  For one thing, it prevents objective verification.

3. Sarah points out the following text from WP:NOR :
      "anyone--without specialist knowledge--who reads the
      primary source should be able to verify that the Wikipedia
      passage agrees with the primary source. Any interpretation
      of primary source material requires a secondary source."
  That seems to be broken.  Examples of specialist knowledge
  which might be required are the ability to read a foreign
  language and the ability to understand mathematical notation.

  Someone who can read music should be able to report from
  a musical score that it is in E-flat, even though that requires
  specialist knowledge.  What the policy *should* require
  (somehow) is that anyone who can read music will agree that
  the score is in E-flat.  The fundamental skills of the field
  should be assumed, and the policy should reflect that, imo.

4. Sarah wrote: "We use writers as sources, not databases and
  libraries."  Nobody suggested libraries.  I don't see that
  databases are excluded by any existing policy, provided that
  the process of extraction of the information from the database
  is verifiable.

  Suppose I have a book about a serial killer, which lists all the
  victims one by one.  I think it is perfectly ok to write "all the
  victims were women" after looking up each case in the book.
  It comes under "research that consists of collecting and
  organizing information from existing primary and/or secondary
  sources is, of course, strongly encouraged."(WP:NOR)  I can't
  see how that is different *in principle* from reporting that all
  the articles on a particular subject in a particular database
  give the same story about something, provided that that
  observation is one that anyone can verify.  Of course this
  criterion might not always be satisfied, but that shouldn't
  eliminate the cases where it is.

Zero.

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


from_name: Marc Riddell

subject: [WikiEN-l] Hello

body:
> From: "Steve Bennett" <stevagewp at gmail.com>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Tue, 19 Dec 2006 09:55:24 +1100
> To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Hello
>
> On 12/18/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Kind of like how ls has a recursive feature, but it's off by default,
>> and how find is recursive by default, but you can limit it?
>
> Not exactly - there you're talking about the function (searching,
> browsing, navigating...) dictating whether subcategories are included.
> I was thinking letting the category decide: "Category:Artists" should,
> when browsing, include "Category:French artists". By default, it
> should not, however.
>
> Steve

Another example that recently occurred. In the Article on [[Sophia
Yakovlevna Parnok]], the Categories, 'Poets', 'Russian poets', & 'Jewish
poets' were each included. An editor came along and deleted the 'Poets'
Category, saying it was a 'duplicate category'. If I now clicked on that
Main Category, 'Poets' would Sophia Yakovlevna Parnok, the poet be included
in that list?

Marc
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


from_name: David Gerard

body:
On 19/12/06, J.L.W.S. The Special One <hildanknight at gmail.com> wrote:

> Contextual ads are small and unobstrusive. In addition, they may
> benefit the reader by pointing them to additional resources.
> Wikipedia is now a top-20 site. Server and bandwidth costs will grow
> rapidly. Donations are not a reliable way to keep Wikipedia
> financially afloat.
> I remember reading a report in the Signpost which says that Wikipedia
> could earn over $500 million if it used contextual ads.

Certainly, but the problem is it would still make a large chunk of the
people who actually write the sites get up and leave.

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Main Page Featured Article

body:
On 19/12/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:

> This does make TFA temporarily not-editable, which people have
> objected to, but I don't know that doing so is necessarily a bad thing
> given the ongoing highly visible vandalism problem.  How many tens of
> thousands or hundreds of thousands of visitors have gotten penis
> pictures so far?  8-(

The real problem is that the featured article often gets a great deal
of improvement while it's featured. This does require people to be
watching it pretty much continuously for vandalism. It would be much
better for the wiki to arrange patrollers rather than make readers'
first experience of Wikipedia be an article they can't in fact edit,
and I would say it is a worse thing than seeing a picture of a penis.

The only technical solution to vandals is to lock the wiki. That's a
really bad thing. Do we really not have patrollers?

- d.


body:
On 19/12/06, Sarah <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/18/06, zero 0000 <nought_0000 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> > Perhaps there is another useful way to look at it: consider
> > the legal database to be "the" source, rather than a
> > collection of sources.  Can I say something like "Legal
> > opinions found in the LawIsUs database uniformly favor Y"?
> > (The wording may need tweaking.)

> The problem is that material we use as sources must be available to
> the general public, and it's not clear that we can expect the public
> to have access to a legal database.

Er, what on earth? No, rubbish. It's the source, it's checkable.

> Also, we have to depend on you
> having conducted the search correctly, which you may not have done if
> you have no legal education; and we have to depend on you correctly
> describing the opinion that you say is uniformly favored, which you
> may also not have done.

That's a separate issue.

- d.


from_name: audevivere

subject: [WikiEN-l] Main Page Featured Article

body:
The main page vandalism problem is becoming a reason why I'm becoming
reluctant to submit articles to WP:FAC or strive for that as my goal.  And,
I'm aware of other featured articles where the author(s) have understandably
expressed wishes that the article not be showcased on the main page.

{{subst}}ing the templates is worth doing, though perhaps not enough to
address concerns.  I'm not sure what the best, technically feasible option
is...


body:
On 19/12/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:

> I actually think it's the complete reverse of what AGF is really
> about. I frequently interpret AGF as "Assume incompetence". That is,
> assume that someone is just clueless, absentminded, ignorant or
> something, rather than malicious...

Yes. AGF can be thought of as a nicer way of saying "Never assume
malice when incompetence will suffice."

- d.


from_name: luke brandt

subject: [Foundation-l] Non-commercial images

body:
Sam Korn wrote:

> On 12/15/06, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>> On issues such as whether we should allow NC images I, as member of
>> the current Board, definitely don't think there should be any project
>> level autonomy at all. If we want to keep our content compatible
>> across languages and projects, we need to apply a consistent standard
>> of freedom.
>
> Is that really necessary?  Yes, a defined *minimum* level of freedom
> is necessary for cross-project compatibility, but that doesn't have to
> preclude allowing projects from being *more* strict than the
> Foundation-defined minimum.
>

Hi - I'd be interested to know the thinking behind the exclusion of
non-commercial images please. Anyone care to explain?

--
luke


subject: [Foundation-l] Non-commercial images


from_name: Guy Chapman aka JzG

subject: [WikiEN-l] Main Page Featured Article

body:
On Tue, 19 Dec 2006 06:49:11 +0100, "MacGyverMagic/Mgm"
<macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:

>Since when is something getting tedious for admins a reason not to do it? If
>it's a mainpage non-article vandal target, it should be protected - no
>exceptions.

The obvious is never a problem, as my dad always says.

Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


from_name: henna

subject: [Wikitech-l] Auto-patrol preference

body:
there was a huge fuss when the feature was introduced on nl: :)

henna

On 12/19/06, xaosflux <xaosflux at gmail.com> wrote:
> '''Support'''!
> I can't think of any reason this would ever need to NOT be set in the
> wikimedia setting.
>
> en:xaosflux
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Rob Church" <robchur at gmail.com>
> To: "Wikimedia developers" <wikitech-l at wikimedia.org>
> Sent: Monday, December 18, 2006 3:22 PM
> Subject: [Wikitech-l] Auto-patrol preference
>
>
> > On wikis where recent changes patrol ($wgUseRCPatrol) is enabled,
> > users who are permitted to mark edits as patrolled (administrators,
> > usually) have an additional user preference; when enabled, this causes
> > their edits to be automatically marked as patrolled. I added this some
> > time ago.
> >
> > I'm wondering whether or not it would have been a better idea for me
> > to simply make this the default behaviour, and do away with the toggle
> > altogether; it certainly makes more sense now, on reflection.
> >
> > What do people think? This is also bug 5411.
> >
> >
> > Rob Church
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikitech-l mailing list
> > Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

--
"Maybe you knew early on that your track went from point A to B, but
unlike you I wasn't given a map at birth!" Alyssa, "Chasing Amy"


body:
Again, "the pun is one of most difficulties for translation".
There are at least two ways to deal with:
- 1. Leave both the current title and its full title in English, then
add the full title in Hungarian.
- 2. Ignore the English abbraviation title and put the Hungalian,
based on translation of the full title in English (Core Online R...
E....), either full lengthy one or abbraviation. Just Village Pump is
only named so in English and some communities have no idea what VP is
(I saw sometimes questions "Go to VP to do something" "What's VP?").

Personally I prefer the second, but again, it depends on the character
of your community. Some prefer 1, some 2. I have no idea.

On 12/19/06, Bence Damokos <bdamokos at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi.
> I translated it to Hungarian, but I have to notice, that you cannot
> translate the meaning of C.O.R.E. Core Online Rsomething Esomething, that is
> displayed under the title, and thus you have the dilemma of wether to
> localise CORE.
>
> Regards, Bence
>
> On 12/18/06, Brad Patrick <bradp.wmf at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Most of it
> > should be possible to translate with merely a dictionary.
> >
> > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_C.O.R.E.
> >
> >
> >
> > JePe wrote:
> > > On http://fundraising.wikimedia.org there are now next to English some
> > > translations made. How can we make a translation in another language?
> > >
> > > Hans (JePe)
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > 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
> >
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

--
KIZU Naoko
  Wikiquote: http://wikiquote.org
  * Nessuna poesia prima di noi *


from_name: Rich Holton

subject: [WikiEN-l] Main Page Featured Article

body:
Michael Noda wrote:
> I'm fairly sure that you've just described exactly what is to be
> implemented when Stable Versions go online, which we have been told
> since Wikimania is Real Soon Now.
> _______________________________________________

I wonder if "stable version" could be implemented on a very limited
basis -- just the featured article -- fairly quickly. This could give
some valuable live testing to the feature for the devs, and solve a
problem for en at the same time. Just wondering...

-Rich


from_name: Abigail Brady

body:
On 12/19/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yes. AGF can be thought of as a nicer way of saying "Never assume
> malice when incompetence will suffice."

For historical interest, you may which to see the initial version of
AGF that I wrote.  It wasn't some "let's all hug and be happy" type
thing, it was some practical notes about how assuming good faith is a
good debating tactic because you can give your opponent Enough Rope
(tm).

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Assume_good_faith&oldid=3024815

--
Abi


from_name: Jeff Raymond

subject: [WikiEN-l] Main Page Featured Article

body:
Rich Holton wrote:
> Michael Noda wrote:
>> I'm fairly sure that you've just described exactly what is to be
>> implemented when Stable Versions go online, which we have been told
>> since Wikimania is Real Soon Now.
>> _______________________________________________
>
> I wonder if "stable version" could be implemented on a very limited
> basis -- just the featured article -- fairly quickly. This could give
> some valuable live testing to the feature for the devs, and solve a
> problem for en at the same time. Just wondering...

Not without some fairly significant controversy.

-Jeff


subject: [Foundation-l] Non-commercial images

body:
On 19/12/06, luke brandt <shojokid at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi - I'd be interested to know the thinking behind the exclusion of
> non-commercial images please. Anyone care to explain?

Because then the images aren't properly freely reusable free content.

- d.


subject: [Foundation-l] Non-commercial images


subject: [WikiEN-l] Top posting poll; was Re: MONGO and the ArbCom

body:
On 19/12/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> Mark Wagner wrote:
> > On 12/15/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> Jim Schuler wrote:
> >>> On 12/15/06, Mark Wagner <carnildo at gmail.com> wrote:

> >>>> !gnitsop evaewretni daer ot drah *taht* lla ton s'tI

> >>> !ton s'ti oN

> >> Qm90dG9tLXBvc3RpbmcgeW91ciBtZXNzYWdlcyBhZnRlciBCYXNlNjQ=
> >> ZW5jb2RpbmcgdGhlbSBiZWF0cyBldmVyeXRoaW5nLg==

> > begin 644 -
> > M5&AA="=S(&YO="!V86QI9"!B87-E-C0Z('EO=2=R92!O;FQY(&%L;&]W960@
> > C=&\@<'5T("<])R!A="!T:&4 at 96YD(&]F('1H92!F:6QE+ at H
> > end

> %49%74%27%73%20%61%20%70%61%64%64%69%6e%67%20%63%68%61%72%61%63%74%65%72%2e

Lbh xvqf whfg gel gbb uneq fbzrgvzrf.

- q.


body:
James Hare wrote:
> What if the ads were off by default?
>

It might make sense to have any such ads "on" by default, and off as
soon as you login. This would encourage creating accounts, and is a
fairly common practice on the web.

Having said that, I'll add that I am against having any ads. I don't
think I'd quit the project altogether if we had ads, but I do think
something significant would be lost; my motivation to contribute would
diminish, and my monthly subscription donation (tiny as it is) would end.

There is no doubt that volunteers are Wikimedia's most valuable asset,
and ads would have a significant negative impact on that asset. We may
not know for sure how significant, but it would not be trivial.

-Rich


subject: [WikiEN-l] Main Page Featured Article

body:
Jeff Raymond wrote:
> Rich Holton wrote:
>> Michael Noda wrote:
>>> I'm fairly sure that you've just described exactly what is to be
>>> implemented when Stable Versions go online, which we have been told
>>> since Wikimania is Real Soon Now.
>>> _______________________________________________
>> I wonder if "stable version" could be implemented on a very limited
>> basis -- just the featured article -- fairly quickly. This could give
>> some valuable live testing to the feature for the devs, and solve a
>> problem for en at the same time. Just wondering...
>
> Not without some fairly significant controversy.
>
Over the idea of stable version itself? Or over this particular way of
implementing it?

-Rich


from_name: Guillaume Paumier

subject: [Wikitech-l] Auto-patrol preference

body:
On 12/18/06, Rob Church <robchur at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On wikis where recent changes patrol ($wgUseRCPatrol) is enabled,
> users who are permitted to mark edits as patrolled (administrators,
> usually) have an additional user preference; when enabled, this causes
> their edits to be automatically marked as patrolled. I added this some
> time ago.
>
> I'm wondering whether or not it would have been a better idea for me
> to simply make this the default behaviour, and do away with the toggle
> altogether; it certainly makes more sense now, on reflection.
>
> What do people think? This is also bug 5411.
>

And you propose this just one week after I managed to make Anthere toggle
her edits on meta to automatically marked as patrolled... :)

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


subject: [WikiEN-l] Main Page Featured Article

body:
Rich Holton wrote:
> Jeff Raymond wrote:
>> Not without some fairly significant controversy.
>>
> Over the idea of stable version itself? Or over this particular way of
> implementing it?

Both, really.  We still can't get a protection on the main page without
people throwing a fit about it, and a couple attempts at stable trial runs
didn't exactly go well (although the person who decided to try it probably
wasn't the best choice).

I think we're merely going to have to look into the protection of problem
templates used on the main page.  That's where we're having the problem,
and protecting them doesn't remove the ability to edit what's seen in
front of people.

-Jeff

--
If you can read this, I'm not at home.


from_name: Michael Noda

subject: [WikiEN-l] Main Page Featured Article

body:
On 12/19/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:

> Something that occurred to me a bit ago...  We could both freeze and
> not-freeze the featured article, with a bit of effort.  We could
> create a new name heirarchy (wiki/Featured Article/article-name) and
> drop a subst'ed version of the page, protected, down into that
> subpage, with a link to the "live" wiki article there if people want
> to see how it may have improved over the course of the day.  If
> there's bandwidth available, someone could repeat the process (create
> an updated frozen subst version from the live wiki page) every hour or
> two during the TFA run, so it doesn't even have to be fixed as of the
> beginning of the day.
>
> This doesn't take any new technology, just a few subpages and a bit of
> procedure...

I'm fairly sure that you've just described exactly what is to be
implemented when Stable Versions go online, which we have been told
since Wikimania is Real Soon Now.


from_name: effe iets anders

subject: [Foundation-l] Non-commercial images

body:
The idea is that Wikipedia is licensed under the GFDL license. And that
license states that you may only use texts with that license in environments
witht the same, a similar or more free license. GFDL allows the commercial
use of images, so NC-images are actually incompatible with GFDL, and so with
Wikipedia. They conflict with the content. IANAL, but I am told that this is
a potential danger to the status of our content.

Lodewijk

2006/12/19, luke brandt <shojokid at gmail.com>:
>
> Sam Korn wrote:
>
> > On 12/15/06, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> >> On issues such as whether we should allow NC images I, as member of
> >> the current Board, definitely don't think there should be any project
> >> level autonomy at all. If we want to keep our content compatible
> >> across languages and projects, we need to apply a consistent standard
> >> of freedom.
> >
> > Is that really necessary?  Yes, a defined *minimum* level of freedom
> > is necessary for cross-project compatibility, but that doesn't have to
> > preclude allowing projects from being *more* strict than the
> > Foundation-defined minimum.
> >
>
> Hi - I'd be interested to know the thinking behind the exclusion of
> non-commercial images please. Anyone care to explain?
>
> --
> luke
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


subject: [Foundation-l] Non-commercial images


from_name: Steve Bennett

body:
On 12/18/06, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> > It doesn't seem to work like that these days - the change is made,
> > then thye see who complains.
>
> Which is fine. That's the point of a wiki - you can make changes and
> if other people don't like them, they can undo them.

That undermines the credibility of our policies, though. It means that
they're pretty much just ephemeral, reflecting the mood of the latest
contributor, rather than anything more substantial than that.

Steve


body:
On 12/19/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
> >I haven't participated in any of the discussion about Assume Good Faith, but
> >in my experience, I've usually encountered it when users quote it to claim
> >that criticism of them is equivalent to not assuming good faith.
> >Does it really solve more problems than it causes?
>
> It's like "don't be a dick".  The idea is to do it, not to quote it.

I personally agree with Jimbo's elevation of "assume good faith" to be
the single mantra which binds us together and makes Wikipedia work.
Everyone *does* need to know about. You don't enforce it, you don't
beat people over the head with it, but you do make sure people are
aware of its existence, and hope they follow it.

Steve (with apologies if I'm overstating Jimbo's position)


from_name: charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com

body:
Sarah wrote

> The problem is that material we use as sources must be available to
> the general public, and it's not clear that we can expect the public
> to have access to a legal database.

This is rather objectionable, as a type of argument. 'Available' to the 'general public' contains two very negotiable ideas. Few academic sources (in proportion to the total) are easily available to many (in proportion to the 6 billion total) of the world's inhabitants. Making a fuss about this is a sure route to a worse encyclopedia.

I'd much prefer people (a) to take on board the general principle that acceptable sources are tied to the topic and level of coverage, and (b) to cross some of these bridges as and when they come to them, when there is some real reason to query material.

Charles

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subject: [WikiEN-l] The boundaries of OR

body:
On 12/18/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> So, in theory every entry could be written by a bot, eh?

Presentation, organisation and filtering are pretty tricky. But yeah.

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] The boundaries of OR

body:
On 12/19/06, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think it is implicit that "The sky is blue [1]" means "Source 1 says
> the sky is blue". We don't need to go through and put "So-and-so says"
> at the beginning of every sentence in the encyclopaedia.

Which is different from "Everyone agrees the sky is blue [1][2][3][4][5][6]".

Steve


from_name: Sam Korn

subject: [WikiEN-l] Main Page Featured Article

body:
On 12/19/06, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:
> If nothing else, this indicates another reason why nested-
> transclusion is problematic, and why complexity like this ought
> perhaps to be avoided.  (But of course this observation does
> nothing to solve the current problem.)

True!

Perhaps a solution would be a sort of reverse whatlinkshere, showing
all the pages that are transcluded by a page so that they can all be
protected.  Time-limited protection would also be useful here, but I
doubt this mitigates the disadvantages in other areas.

--
Sam


from_name: Brion Vibber

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

Aphaia wrote:
> And I have no idea if it is good or not to represent English with UK
> national flag. Is it controvertial for many language communities or
> not?

Please don't use flags to represent languages, ever.

- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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Version: GnuPG v1.4.2.2 (Darwin)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFFiCb9wRnhpk1wk44RAoPGAJ99V/So6fU2uiwzVd2k+EKkVKagVwCgr43O
+c8+cWwYuNfVHab4/yz+FV8=
=w+js
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body:
"Steve Bennett" wrote

> I frequently interpret AGF as "Assume incompetence". That is,
> assume that someone is just clueless, absentminded, ignorant or
> something, rather than malicious...

I had a case: I moved [[J.C. Snead]] to [[J. C. Snead]], and an editor made an issue of how he'd spent time worrying that this was 'subtle vandalism'. Assuming good faith would have helped him.

Charles

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Hello

body:
On 12/18/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> Kind of like how ls has a recursive feature, but it's off by default,
> and how find is recursive by default, but you can limit it?

Not exactly - there you're talking about the function (searching,
browsing, navigating...) dictating whether subcategories are included.
I was thinking letting the category decide: "Category:Artists" should,
when browsing, include "Category:French artists". By default, it
should not, however.

Steve


subject: [Wikitech-l] Auto-patrol preference

body:
On 12/19/06, Rob Church <robchur at gmail.com> wrote:
> On wikis where recent changes patrol ($wgUseRCPatrol) is enabled,
> users who are permitted to mark edits as patrolled (administrators,
> usually) have an additional user preference; when enabled, this causes
> their edits to be automatically marked as patrolled. I added this some
> time ago.
>
> I'm wondering whether or not it would have been a better idea for me
> to simply make this the default behaviour, and do away with the toggle
> altogether; it certainly makes more sense now, on reflection.

I concur. It doesn't make sense for patrollers' edits to be considered
patrollable as well - it just adds to workload.

Steve


from_name: NSLE (Wikipedia)

subject: [WikiEN-l] Main Page Featured Article

body:
I assume most of the list's readers know what problems we've been having
with the TFA each day on the main page (vandals inserting shock images into
transcluded-on-transcluded templates). In case some don't, I'm posting this
to see if anyone has ideas off how to avoid this. It's been discussed
extensively on ANI, and there does not seem to be a workable solution to it.
The images are being uploaded by sleeper socks old enough to upload them,
and protecting every single template on TFA (including
transcluded-on-transcluded ones) can be tedious for the admins. I've
suggested perhaps substituting the templates before they become TFA (and
re-transcluding after), but do the other list readers have any solution?

--NSLE


subject: [WikiEN-l] Main Page Featured Article

body:
Yeah, the problem extends beyond the TFA due to the widespread use of these
vandalised templates...

On 19/12/06, James Hare <messedrocker at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> We should be locking the meta templates -- the kind that won't be changing
> anytime soon and if there's vandalism it'd be awful.
>
> On 12/18/06, NSLE (Wikipedia) <nsle.wikipedia at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > I assume most of the list's readers know what problems we've been having
> > with the TFA each day on the main page (vandals inserting shock images
> > into
> > transcluded-on-transcluded templates). In case some don't, I'm posting
> > this
> > to see if anyone has ideas off how to avoid this. It's been discussed
> > extensively on ANI, and there does not seem to be a workable solution to
> > it.
> > The images are being uploaded by sleeper socks old enough to upload
> them,
> > and protecting every single template on TFA (including
> > transcluded-on-transcluded ones) can be tedious for the admins. I've
> > suggested perhaps substituting the templates before they become TFA (and
> > re-transcluding after), but do the other list readers have any solution?
> >
> > --NSLE
> > _______________________________________________
> > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> >
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Magnus Manske

body:
On 12/19/06, Mark Clements <gmane at kennel17.co.uk> wrote:
> "Rob Church" <robchur at gmail.com> wrote in
> message news:e92136380612180426w77762c6ftf0ece0adc563b330 at mail.gmail.com...
> > On 18/12/06, Magnus Manske
> <magnusmanske at googlemail.com> wrote:
> > > Or, we could use query.php (or that other api thing...) :
> > >
> > >
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/query.php?what=imageinfo&titles=Image:Cetacea_rang
> e_map_Chinese_River_Dolphin.PNG
> > >
> > > to import the image history, and use SpecialImport for the description
> > > page only.
> >
> > No, I think it makes more sense if Special:Import handles the full,
> > proper import itself.
> >
> >
> > Rob Church
>
> I agree, Special:Import should copy the full image history as well as the
> full page history.  The way it is at the moment just feels broken, and
> making it a two stage process won't fix that.

OK. So, how do we handle the user ids from the other project? Do we
assume single login is in place? Or do we create dummy users like
"en:someguy", user_id=0? (I didn't bother to look how it's handled in
Special:Import right now, easier to ask here;-)

Also, if we plan to do mass-moving, of images, should we add this
function to the api? What about handling the deletion of the images on
the "source wiki"? If these functions were available using
"name=xxx&password=yyy" on the api, it would save a lot of clicks with
a decent front-end (which I then would volunteer to develop;-)

> We may also want an 'include files when relevant' check-box that can be
> turned off for those occasions when you just want the text, although I can't
> really think of a use for that - at least not for the way we use image pages
> on WM projects.

A checkbox/option won't hurt. Except when people set up a wikipedia
mirror and leech the images from wikimedia servers that way...

Magnus


subject: [WikiEN-l] Main Page Featured Article

body:
For reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents#Main_page_vandal_out_of_controlis
the latest discussion - there've been eight (nine?) previous ones.

On 19/12/06, NSLE (Wikipedia) <nsle.wikipedia at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I assume most of the list's readers know what problems we've been having
> with the TFA each day on the main page (vandals inserting shock images into
> transcluded-on-transcluded templates). In case some don't, I'm posting this
> to see if anyone has ideas off how to avoid this. It's been discussed
> extensively on ANI, and there does not seem to be a workable solution to it.
> The images are being uploaded by sleeper socks old enough to upload them,
> and protecting every single template on TFA (including
> transcluded-on-transcluded ones) can be tedious for the admins. I've
> suggested perhaps substituting the templates before they become TFA (and
> re-transcluding after), but do the other list readers have any solution?
>
> --NSLE
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Main Page Featured Article

body:
Full article.

On 19/12/06, Kirill Lokshin <kirill.lokshin at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 12/18/06, NSLE (Wikipedia) <nsle.wikipedia at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I assume most of the list's readers know what problems we've been having
> > with the TFA each day on the main page (vandals inserting shock images
> into
> > transcluded-on-transcluded templates). In case some don't, I'm posting
> this
> > to see if anyone has ideas off how to avoid this. It's been discussed
> > extensively on ANI, and there does not seem to be a workable solution to
> it.
> > The images are being uploaded by sleeper socks old enough to upload
> them,
> > and protecting every single template on TFA (including
> > transcluded-on-transcluded ones) can be tedious for the admins. I've
> > suggested perhaps substituting the templates before they become TFA (and
> > re-transcluding after), but do the other list readers have any solution?
>
> Wait, is this vandalism happening on templates transcluded into the
> full article, or just the TFA blurb that's displayed on the main page?
>
> --
> Kirill Lokshin
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] Main Page Featured Article

body:
On 19/12/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:

> Something that occurred to me a bit ago...  We could both freeze and
> not-freeze the featured article, with a bit of effort.  We could
> create a new name heirarchy (wiki/Featured Article/article-name) and
> drop a subst'ed version of the page, protected, down into that
> subpage, with a link to the "live" wiki article there if people want
> to see how it may have improved over the course of the day.  If
> there's bandwidth available, someone could repeat the process (create
> an updated frozen subst version from the live wiki page) every hour or
> two during the TFA run, so it doesn't even have to be fixed as of the
> beginning of the day.
> This doesn't take any new technology, just a few subpages and a bit of
> procedure...

I really like that idea - a locked-down static copy and an editable
copy linked at the top. Better if it can be semi-automated.

- d.


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

subject: [Foundation-l] Non-commercial images

body:
luke brandt schreef:
> Sam Korn wrote:
>
>> On 12/15/06, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>>
>>> On issues such as whether we should allow NC images I, as member of
>>> the current Board, definitely don't think there should be any project
>>> level autonomy at all. If we want to keep our content compatible
>>> across languages and projects, we need to apply a consistent standard
>>> of freedom.
>>>
>> Is that really necessary?  Yes, a defined *minimum* level of freedom
>> is necessary for cross-project compatibility, but that doesn't have to
>> preclude allowing projects from being *more* strict than the
>> Foundation-defined minimum.
>>
>>
>
> Hi - for information (and it has some relevance) the recent EN
> discussion on non-commercial images can be found at this web address:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Fair_use#Fair_use_VS._Non-com
>
> Hope this helps a bit
> --
> luke
Hoi,
Why would it help what the English language wikipedia community thinks
about fair use or non commercial content? The problem is that too many
subjects are raised already; the amount of mail to read is also almost
too much. The only thing that may make the English language wikipedia
communities "special" is that it is big. This makes the problem worse as
there will be more people expressing opinions without making any real
difference to what is at issue.
Thanks,
    GerardM


subject: [Foundation-l] Non-commercial images


body:
On 19/12/06, charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com
<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> Sarah wrote

> > The problem is that material we use as sources must be available to
> > the general public, and it's not clear that we can expect the public
> > to have access to a legal database.

> This is rather objectionable, as a type of argument. 'Available' to the 'general public' contains two very negotiable ideas. Few academic sources (in proportion to the total) are easily available to many (in proportion to the 6 billion total) of the world's inhabitants. Making a fuss about this is a sure route to a worse encyclopedia.
> I'd much prefer people (a) to take on board the general principle that acceptable sources are tied to the topic and level of coverage, and (b) to cross some of these bridges as and when they come to them, when there is some real reason to query material.

Indeed. Just because there is a grey area does NOT mean there is
somehow an overriding need to resolve it into black and white at all
cost to good sense.

- d.


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
On 12/19/06, Jeffrey V. Merkey <jmerkey at wolfmountaingroup.com> wrote:
> I located a reference to a "partnership" on hosting the
> sep11.wikipedia.org website on one of my personal websites which
> referred to this project where
> WMG took over the hosting and server costs for the sep11.wikipedia.org
> domain for the Foundation.   This appears to be the source of the
> confusion on the part of folks about this topic.

Perhaps it's just a matter of phrasing things correctly. Could you
send me, off-list, a copy of the text that you used? We'll then
discuss on the Board level what exactly should be done.
--
Peace & Love,
Erik

DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of
the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.


subject: [Foundation-l] Non-commercial images

body:
On 12/19/06, Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
> Erik has a good explanation of the reasons for not using content under
> a non-commercial license at http://intelligentdesigns.net/Licenses/NC

Thanks, and I would appreciate it if people read this document before
I respond in detail; that's why I wrote it. The references to
Wikimedia are a bit circular in this context, but there are plenty of
other arguments.

I would add (and perhaps should update this a bit) that especially in
the context of the developing world, local entrepreneurship is
extremely important. Enabling people to make a living by using
Wikimedia content can be a very good and desirable thing. I've had
discussions with education specialists in developing countries, who
_immediately_ recognized that the NC restriction would harm their
countries.

--
Peace & Love,
Erik

DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of
the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.


subject: [Foundation-l] Non-commercial images


from_name: Lane, Ryan

subject: [Wikitech-l] SpecialUserlogin and updateUser

body:
In SpecialUserlogin.php, it looks like after $wgAuth->updateUser( $u )
is called $u->saveSettings() is not called. This is not the same
behavior as before (in MediaWiki 1.6). Is this the correct behavior, or
should I put this into the bugzilla?

If this is the correct behavior, are plugin authors supposed to manually
call saveSettings in updateUser(), but not in initUser()?

V/r,

Ryan Lane


from_name: George Herbert

subject: [WikiEN-l] Main Page Featured Article

body:
On 12/19/06, Michael Noda <michael.noda at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 12/19/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Something that occurred to me a bit ago...  We could both freeze and
> > not-freeze the featured article, with a bit of effort.  We could
> > create a new name heirarchy (wiki/Featured Article/article-name) and
> > drop a subst'ed version of the page, protected, down into that
> > subpage, with a link to the "live" wiki article there if people want
> > to see how it may have improved over the course of the day.  If
> > there's bandwidth available, someone could repeat the process (create
> > an updated frozen subst version from the live wiki page) every hour or
> > two during the TFA run, so it doesn't even have to be fixed as of the
> > beginning of the day.
> >
> > This doesn't take any new technology, just a few subpages and a bit of
> > procedure...
>
> I'm fairly sure that you've just described exactly what is to be
> implemented when Stable Versions go online, which we have been told
> since Wikimania is Real Soon Now.

And on that day, someone's manual labors will be simplified.

If we had a known "soon" date on that maybe doing it manually wouldn't be a
good idea, but I don't know that we have any sign of where it is...

(copied wikitech-l in case there is an affirmative answer available)

--
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com


subject: [Wikitech-l] [WikiEN-l] Main Page Featured Article