from_name: Jossi Fresco

subject: [WikiEN-l] Are lists subject to WP:NOR?

body:
On Jun 6, 2006, at 6:12 AM, Peter Jacobi wrote:

> So, if you put together all these atoms of sourced statements,
> is the entitity you created still in line with WP:NOR, WP:V
> and friends? IMHO its (a) just this compiling step which is
> problematic and (b), in this special case of [[List of groups
> referred to as cults]], the one-drop-rule employed: Find one
> author which says "is a cult" and the it's  on the list.

Peter,

There is indeed a problem with lists, that we have tried to address
at [[WP:LISTS]]. This proposed guideline has been questioned,
probably because it removes ambiguity, and ambiguity is the best
friend of POV pushing.

Unless [[WP:LISTS]] is accepted and implemented, I see no way to
curtail original research in lists. So, rather than fight yet-another-
AfD on [[List of groups referred to as cults]], our efforts should go
into making [[WP:LISTS]] an accepted guideline, if not a policy.

Please come and comment at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Lists_in_Wikipedia

-- Jossi


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Steve Bennett

subject:
[WikiEN-l] cancelation of the deletion review of the satanism
	userbox

body:
On 6/6/06, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> Absolutely.  Now apply this to signatures.
>
> However you seem here to be suggesting that I'm being told to any
> great degree that signatures are uniquely immune from refactoring.
> Tain't so.  We'd probably need a strong consensus to make an exception
> to policy of that magnitude.

Ok, I didn't really catch the original wave of angst, but unlike other
wikis, I haven't noticed a strong "you must refactor" vibe for talk
pages at Wikipedia. Most people seem to prefer that their
contributions be left alone, and on the rare occasions that one does
refactor, there tend to be copious apologies and explanations of what
one is doing.

Purely an observation. My first ever messages on my talk page were
complaints from someone due to my deleting old discussions off article
talk pages.

Steve


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Adrian Buehlmann

subject: [Wikitech-l] HTML normalization, transclusions, nesting

body:
"Nick Jenkins" wrote
> ....
> Maybe some kind of escaping is possible, such as backslashes, e.g.:
>
> {{#ifeq: 1 | 1 |
> {\| border="1"
> \| test
> \|}
> }}
>
> ... that would hopefully break very little, although it looks pretty
> yucky.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:ParserFunctions#Requests_and_proposals

There is another escaping proposal:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:ParserFunctions#.7B.7B.23_.3Cwikisyntax.3E_.7D.7D

--Adrian Buehlmann


from_name: John Lyden

subject: [WikiEN-l] To: Jimmy Wales - Admin-driven death of Wikipedia

body:
And the UN is going to enforce that on the US how, exactly?

On 6/6/06, Raphael Wegmann <raphael at psi.co.at> wrote:
> sean at epoptic.com wrote:
> > On Tue, Jun 06, 2006 at 12:04:35PM +0100, Selina . wrote:
> >
> >> Maybe you don't have laws against it with your happy little "patriotic"
> >> organisations like the KKK, but in civilised countries like the UK and
> >> Germany (for just two examples) racism/hate speech is illegal. Get used it
> >> it, the US is simply backwards in most social issues compared to the rest of
> >> the world (another example could be the prudishly religious aspects that's
> >> not so far off from the Puritans)
> >>
> >
> > That some countries punish thoughtcrime is not surprising.  That some
> > people are proud of the fact that their countries don't pass laws
> > forbidding people to think particular thoughts is not surprising either.
> >
>
> The discussion is not about thoughtcrimes. It is about hate *speech*
> which is a different matter. The U.S. is actually violating an UN
> resoltion by not passing hate speech laws.
>
> See: http://www.ohchr.org/english/law/ccpr.htm#art20
>
> --
> Raphael Wegmann
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
John Lyden - rasputinaxp at gmail.com
"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to
live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same
time..." -Kerouac


from_name: Lord Voldemort

body:
On 6/6/06, Raphael Wegmann <raphael at psi.co.at> wrote:
> The discussion is not about thoughtcrimes. It is about hate *speech*
> which is a different matter. The U.S. is actually violating an UN
> resoltion by not passing hate speech laws.

The UN does not make the laws for the U.S.  And besides, the U.S.
'does' have certain laws and precedents that limit the freedom of
speech (including "hate speech").  And while Americans can say and
hold racist things, enciting people to violence based on these things
is prohibited.
--LV


subject: [WikiEN-l] Category analysis with perl

body:
On 6/6/06, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
> Steve Bennett wrote:
> > Do you have any examples? What would they look like? Perhaps:
> >
> > {{thematic category|name of subject}}
>
> I don't think we should make things unnecessarily complicated by making
> the templates take parameters, just use {{PAGENAME}}. If the category's
> name isn't suitable for use in the template describing it then I suspect
> it's an indication that the category's name might need changing. :)

Mmm...you may be right. In any case, the text on the category page
should provide enough context to clarify. There may be cases where a
category is forced to obey a particular naming scheme which isn't the
most descriptive for what it is, but I can't think of any immediately.

>
> How about "Members of this category should be specific examples of
> {{PAGENAME}}"

I'll try a couple of random examples:
Members of this category should be specific examples of Districts of Berlin.
Members of this category should be specific examples of Billboard Hot
100 number-one singles
Members of this category should be specific examples of Russian and
Soviet polar explorers
[an example where the text would be better as "Russian *or* Soviet
polar explorers"?]
Members of this category should be specific examples of Cities in Kentucky
Members of this category should be specific examples of Pakistan
movement activists
Members of this category should be specific examples of Lists of state
leaders by year
[this article also had the presumably "thematic" category 730s - a
counterexample to the plurals rule]
Members of this category should be specific examples of United Kingdom
court systems
Members of this category should be specific examples of Members and
associates of the US National Academy of Sciences
[another and -> or]
Members of this category should be specific examples of Rivers of Indonesia
["Rivers in Indonesia" would be more natural]
Members of this category should be specific examples of Pejorative
names for people.

I guess in general it works, but some other ideas:
Articles in this category should describe individual
Articles in this category should be
Only ___ should be in this category.
Only articles about [specific | individual] ___ should be in this category.

Also note there is a capitalisation issue to deal with...
There is also a problem with "1923 births" type cats - these don't fit
comfortably into any of these sentences.

(incidentally, with this distinction between taxonomic and thematic,
is it time to up the ante and say that every article should have at
least one taxonomic category? by random article I come to "Chrysler
Phaeton" which only has the thematic category "Chrysler" - whereas it
really should have at least the taxonomic "Cars" or something)

>and "Members of this category or its subcategories should
> be about the topic of {{PAGENAME}}"?

Members of this category or its subcategories should be about the
topic of... Education in New York
...Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania
...Oslo T-bane
...Baseball
...Isle of Man

I don't think it works - [[The Buchan School]] is not "about the topic
of The Isle of Man". What is the relationship exactly? "should have a
strong connection with"?

> I'm deliberately leaving the "or
> its subcategories" off of the is-a template, so that we can continue
> having things like [[Category:Seattle]] be a subcategory of
> [[Category:Cities in Washington]] (or whatever the real category names
> are) like we do now.

I think we just decided in the long thread that that's a bad idea as follows:
Cities in Washington is a taxonomic category
Seattle is a thematic category
Thematic categories should never be subcategories of taxonomic
categories (although the reverse is ok)

If your proposal is to allow for a graceful changeover, then I understand.

Steve


from_name: Matt Brown

body:
On 6/6/06, Selina . <wikipediareview at gmail.com> wrote:
> Maybe you don't have laws against it with your happy little "patriotic"
> organisations like the KKK, but in civilised countries like the UK and
> Germany (for just two examples) racism/hate speech is illegal. Get used it
> it, the US is simply backwards in most social issues compared to the rest of
> the world (another example could be the prudishly religious aspects that's
> not so far off from the Puritans)

Ah, Selina.  You thought we needed another example of why you got banned?

-Matt


subject: [WikiEN-l] [[WP:OURS]] - A proposal for admin-user relations

body:
On 6/6/06, Stephen Bain <stephen.bain at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Did user A complain about the lack of history?
>
> There were 31 edits to the page, not all made by user A. I don't
> really care why B deleted it, my issue was with C copy and pasting it,
> which should never be done.

Ok, I'm really not getting this at all. Lots of people contribute to
proposal, presumably because they wanted that proposal to exist.
Someone deletes it. Someone else recreates it but fails to properly
acknowledge the original creators. You re-delete it, citing the
interests of the unacknowledged? Surely common sense dictates that the
original creators would prefer the proposal be recreated - acknowledge
or not - than that it be deleted? It's a real stretch to assume that
they would rather it be deleted than that it exist without their name
on it. Also bear in mind that the recreator didn't have access to the
history...but you did, and could have copied it to the new article's
talk page, if it bothered you.

Maybe there were good reasons for deleting it, but that's a pretty
strange justification for re-deleting something.

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] "refactoring" signatures

body:
On 6/6/06, Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson at gmail.com> wrote:
> How about this: {{subst:User:AUserName/sig}}? That little trick would
> pretty much guarantee that any limit on nicks is useless.

I'm sure the smart people who put hard limits on sigs can prevent
transclusion and substing.

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] "refactoring" signatures

body:
On 6/6/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/6/06, Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson at gmail.com> wrote:
> > How about this: {{subst:User:AUserName/sig}}? That little trick would
> > pretty much guarantee that any limit on nicks is useless.
>
> I'm sure the smart people who put hard limits on sigs can prevent
> transclusion and substing.

Unless you meant that people would stop using ~~~~ and start using
some firefox extension to subst in a custom sig. You're quite right,
but probably not many will bother.

Steve


body:
On 6/6/06, Stephen Bain <stephen.bain at gmail.com> wrote:
> See [[fighting words]]. A judicially recognised limitation to freedom
> of speech under the US Constitution.

Bingo.  Plus many other 1st Amendment SC cases.  It's an actually very
nuanced right.  --LV


subject: [WikiEN-l] A categorical question

body:
Can anyone tell me whether [[Lasers]] is a taxonomic category or a
thematic category?

What a nightmare.

Steve


from_name: Death Phoenix

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Aww, so cute,
	a banned user is trying to take us down with a DMCA notice
	(Forwarded email)

body:
On 6/5/06, Philip Welch <wikipedia at philwelch.net> wrote:
>
> On Jun 4, 2006, at 8:00 PM, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
> >>>> Wait untill you see some try to claim you can't deleted stuff
> >>>> claimed
> >>>> as fair use becuase that consitutes giving legal advice.
> >>>>
> >>> [[WP:BEANS]] ;-)
> >>>
> >> Doesn't apply becuase it has already been tried:
> >>
> >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
> >> Wikipedia_talk:Copyright_problems#A_proposal
> >>
> > Simply giving legal advice is not the practice of law.  Practice would
> > require doing it as some kind of business.
>
> It's still against the rules to give legal advice for free, because
> the rules are made by lawyers, and lawyers' business is giving legal
> advice.
>

Really? I get free legal advice from my lawyer all the time, though I guess
the "free" part could be in dispute. For instance, my mortgage agreement is
up for renewal, and I go to my lawyer to update the paperwork. He does not
charge by the hour for this service, and instead has a fixed price. While I
am there, I also let him know of some changes in my life and whether I
should update my will. He says not necessarily, but tells me what changes in
my life DO require an update on my will. Did he just give me free legal
advice, and if so, is this against the rules?

Now, let's say I don't go to the lawyer on an unrelated matter, let's say I
call him up out of the blue to tell him of changes in my life and ask him
whether I should update my will. Did he just give me free legal advice, and
if so, is this against the rules?


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Gerard Meijssen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Tajik wikipedia (again)

body:
Minh Nguyen wrote:
> Francis Tyers wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Would it be possible to get ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? on the bottom of the edit
>> box? (Like we have for the special characters on the en and ro
>> Wikipedias)?
>>
>> Also how does one go about getting the interface language changed? Are
>> there po files that can be edited?
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Fran
>>
>
> Hi Fran,
>
> If you have administrator privileges at the Tajik Wikipedia, go to
> <http://tg.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Allmessages> and click on the
> links under the "Name" column to translate each message individually.
> I'd suggest translating the most prominent messages that way at first,
> although you'll eventually want to create a LanguageTg.php file with all
> the localization strings, so that MediaWiki can come bundled with a
> Tajik localization in the future:
> <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Language.php>.
Hoi,
However well intended this advice is, it is not necessarily the best
place for doing the localisation, yes it has the advantage of instant
gratification but there is also an effort underway at the "Betawiki"
http://nike.users.idler.fi/dev/index.php?title=ISO-639-3/tgk for Tajik.
The advantage of doing translations here is that it is an environment
set up to help you do your localisation work. This includes procedures
to check to what still needs doing in translation. Translating here
ensures that the work becomes part of MediaWiki itself, it means that
the work also propagates to WikiBooks, WikiSource and any other
MediaWiki project with the application of new versions of the software.

One would for instance think that the nld localisation would be more or
less a finished product. It proves that there is still a massive amount
work to be done in order to achieve a full localisation. It is therefore
that I use this opportunity to everyone to check out the Betawiki and
coordinate changes done to the MediaWiki messages there.

Thanks,
    GerardM


list: commons-l

from_name: Jim

subject: [Commons-l] Official paintings held by the U.S. Government

body:
On 6/4/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
> Jim wrote:
> >    1. Determination that the photos lack sufficient originality, thus
> >       the photographer can not claim copyright in the photo of a public
> >       domain work (following Bridgeman)
> >    2. Assuming that there is sufficient originality, so we need to find
> >       the copyright status of the photo seperate from the one in the
> >       portrait:
> >          1. If they are photos posted by the US govt and copied to
> >             wikipedia from there - then those are clearly in the public
> >             domain as a work of the US govt.
> >          2. If the photo was taken by a contributor - then we should
> >             refer to his license in uploading the work.
> >
> > Personally, my review of the photos in question indicate that they
> > clearly fall under the Bridgeman decision and the photographer can not
> > claim a copyright in them as there is not the sufficient originality by
> > the photographer
>
> The problem is that Bridgman was only a district court case, not a
> circuit court case, and it is unclear that the reasoning in Bridgman
> will be followed by other courts.  It is not much of a precedent to rely
> upon.
>
> --Jimbo

Agreed, but we still have option 2) identify the source of the photo of the
public domain work and find out whether they will clearly grant a license
acceptable to WMF. Unfortunately, the only issue being discussed is whether
the works are public domain or not. The US govt clearly owns both the
physical objects and the copyright in the work - thus it is public domain.

So, if as Jimbo indicates we should assume that Bridgeman is not
controlling, we should focus on the source of the photos and determine
whether the photographer is claiming a seperate copyright in the photo.

Jim

--
Jim (trodel at gmail.com)
"Our love may not always be reciprocated, or
even appreciated, but love is never wasted"
- Neal A Maxwell
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Category analysis with perl

body:
On 6/6/06, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
> I don't think a "changeover" is needed, and I don't see why thematic
> categories being subcategories of taxonomic categories is a bad thing
> provided the categories are all properly labelled. The way things are
> now are pretty intuitive for human browsing, which makes sense since
> humans are the ones that organized it the way it is. But if you want to
> spider a collection of articles on a taxonomic basis (for example
> building a list of all cities in the United States with articles) then
> all you need to do is write the spider to ignore subcategories that
> aren't labelled as taxonomic. It'll ignore [[Category:Seattle]] and all
> the contents thereof.

That seems reasonable.

Steve


from_name: sean at epoptic.com

body:
On Tue, Jun 06, 2006 at 03:38:24PM +0200, Raphael Wegmann wrote:
> sean at epoptic.com wrote:
> >
> > That some countries punish thoughtcrime is not surprising.  That some
> > people are proud of the fact that their countries don't pass laws
> > forbidding people to think particular thoughts is not surprising either.
> >
>
> The discussion is not about thoughtcrimes. It is about hate *speech*
> which is a different matter. The U.S. is actually violating an UN
> resoltion by not passing hate speech laws.
>
> See: http://www.ohchr.org/english/law/ccpr.htm#art20
>
> --
> Raphael Wegmann

No, the discussion is about the legality of /racism/.  No one mentioned
hate speech until you brought it up.  Please try to stay on topic.

--
 Sean Barrett     | Honk if you've never seen a gun
 sean at epoptic.com | fired from a moving vehicle.


from_name: Berto

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Monobook

body:
Hi!

yes, that was the problem :) It's okay now :)

B?rto

----- Original Message -----
From: "Minh Nguyen" <mxn at zoomtown.com>
To: <wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org>
Sent: Tuesday, June 06, 2006 9:56 AM
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Monobook

Berto wrote:
> Here you are :)
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Infobox_Language
>
> B?rto

Hi B?rto,

I haven't taken a look at the pms: copy of Infobox Language, but I spent
a whole day importing that into the Vietnamese Wikipedia. That template
actually embeds a slew of helper templates (scroll down in the edit
page), so the problem is probably that you haven't imported all of those
templates (and translated them...) as well.

--
Minh Nguyen <mxn at zoomtown.com>
AIM: trycom2000; Jabber: mxn at myjabber.net; Blog: http://mxn.f2o.org/

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


from_name: Nick Jenkins

subject: [Wikitech-l] Origin of <fundraising> Parser tag?

body:
>> It's specific of the wikimedia foundation. However, i guess it should be at
>> the SVN somewhere.... :s
>
> http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/extensions/FixedImage/

Thank you!

It is possible maybe to add to FixedImage.php something like this:
+ $wgExtensionCredits['parserhook'][] = array( 'name' => 'FixedImage',
'author' => 'Brion Vibber' );
or this:
+ $wgExtensionCredits['parserhook'][] = array( 'name' => 'FixedImage');
... in order to ensure that Special:Version lists all installed extensions?

All the best,
Nick.


body:
[Platonides wrote] :
> I'm sure | is more used as parameter delimiter than table marker. You only
> need to count the number of [[link|named links]] a page has, and the number
> of tables.

Indeed, thank you - I clean forgot piped/named links, which I suppose
really are just another type of parameter delimiter. Phooey!

Hmmm... so essentially we have:
* HTML tables probably cannot be dropped until wiki tables can be
passed as parameters to templates / ParserFunctions.
* There are lots of wiki tables and parameter limiters already in
deployment, so changing either does not seem practical.
* It's only the intersection of these two things that seems
problematic due to the "|" being ambiguous.

Maybe some kind of escaping is possible, such as backslashes, e.g.:

{{#ifeq: 1 | 1 |
{\| border="1"
\| test
\|}
}}

... that would hopefully break very little, although it looks pretty yucky.

All the best,
Nick.


from_name: Guettarda

subject:
[WikiEN-l] "refactoring" signatures (was: cancelation of the
	deletion review of the satanism userbox)

body:
On 6/6/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 6/6/06, Guettarda <guettarda at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Now, to get onto userboxes that are really disruptive, how about the
> ones
> > that say "This user contributes in American English" or "This user
> > contributes in British English".  Isn't this, in essence, a rejection on
> > Wikipedia's policy on accepting both AE and BE?  Sure, on talk pages and
> one
>
> Surprisingly, it's actually relevant. You're supposed to respect the
> preferences of the first contributor to an article. What better way to
> find out their preferences than checking their user page?
>
> (I'm only being slightly facetious)

Well, I'd say that only holds if they expressed on.  If I were to write a
stub and use no words that differ between BE and AE, and someone else comes
along and writes an article using AE, the "first user preference" is
their's, not mine.  Anyway, expressing a preference ("prefers BE" or
"prefers AE") is fine.  Saying that they "contribute" in AE/BE says "I don't
want to compromise".  If I write an article about an American topic, I
should use AE, not matter how much it grates.


list: foundation-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Would you consider being on the Board?

body:
Delirium wrote:
> Mathieu Amo wrote:
>
>> On 6/6/06, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>> To remove the bias of large language groups or large projects and to
>>> make elections a less painful system, we might also rely on a system of
>>> "grand electeurs" (each language/project nominate a couple of people to
>>> vote in their name). The "grand electeurs " group being more likely to
>>> elect people based on their participation on Foundation issues, rather
>>> than purely on their fame.
>>>
>>>
>> I really like this idea, but it will be a tricky work to write down a
>> policy for this kind of elections. This sounds a lot like the US
>> Electoral College (that's where it's come from, I guess), but I think
>> it will give us everything we need : the possibilty for the
>> communities to really express themselves, and the assurance that the
>> electors will have a good knowledge of the Foundation and its works.
>> However, this would mean more wiki-politics. And nobody likes that.
>>
>>
>
> Is the whole issue really a problem?  It only would be if everyone votes
> mainly for "their" people, but I'm not sure that's the case, and
> instituting a system like that might actually make it happen.  When the
> first board elections were held, for example, Americans made up at least
> a plurality of those voting, possibly a majority, and yet the two
> winners were French and British (and the next-most-supported was German).
>
> -Mark
>
Hoi,
Do you believe people know and therefore vote on people "they" do not
know .. what would be the difference then between the people they know
and what is considered "their" people. So why do you think people will
not vote on their people?

When I voted for the board for the first time, I did not know any of the
members so I asked "my" people who to vote on. "They" said vote on
Angela and vote on Anthere because we certainly need someone who is not
English language based. I am still happy with this advise because they
became part of "my" board, but I disagree with what you say. It is
wishful thinking. Then again, having a two tired system is not
necessarily that great an idea either.

Thanks,
    Gerard


list: wikimedia-l


from_name: Peter Jacobi

subject: [WikiEN-l] Are lists subject to WP:NOR?

body:
And if so, in which sense?

I've just put [[List of groups referred to as cults]] on
AfD:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/List_of_groups_referred_to_as_cults

(For the 3rd time by me alone, so I expect some eye-rolling and name-calling)

My main concern is about NOR, and I suspect some other lists having the same problem. Whereas each individual entry has its source (that's just the idea of the list, that you google for some source calling Wikipedia, Randism, Shia and whatsnot a "cult"), but the list as such, even cum grano salis, has never been published, hopefully because no one has considered it to make much sense, to link such a diverse set of "groups".

As WP:NOR was invented to relieve us from difficult decisions (Is "X theory of hairy strings" a valid Theory of Everything? -- We don't bother to check the formulas, it's not published in peer-reviewed journals), shouldn't this axe also prune more creative lists?

Regards,
Peter Jacobi

[[User:Pjacobi]]

--

Der GMX SmartSurfer hilft bis zu 70% Ihrer Onlinekosten zu sparen!
      Ideal f?r Modem und ISDN: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/smartsurfer


from_name: Selina .

body:
On 06/06/06, Daniel R. Tobias <dan at tobias.name> wrote:
>
> On 5 Jun 2006 at 13:53, "Selina ." <wikipediareview at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Racism is illegal and as well as the editor puts Wikipedia in a bad
> > position. If people can't put bigotry aside and instead try to force
> > articles into their personal view of the world, it's right to ban them.
>
> How is racism illegal?  Racism is a belief system, and unless you
> have a regime that prosecutes thought-crimes, it can't be made
> illegal.  Certain forms of speech or action that are racially-
> related, and perhaps motivated by racism, are illegal in certain
> places, though the free-speech protections of some countries'
> constitutions place sharp limits on the criminalization of pure
> speech without action in those places, including the United States.
>
> --
> == Dan ==
> Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
> Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
> Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/

Maybe you don't have laws against it with your happy little "patriotic"
organisations like the KKK, but in civilised countries like the UK and
Germany (for just two examples) racism/hate speech is illegal. Get used it
it, the US is simply backwards in most social issues compared to the rest of
the world (another example could be the prudishly religious aspects that's
not so far off from the Puritans)

--
Selina -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mistress_Selina_Kyle?oldid=55639088 /
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mistress_Selina_Kyle?oldid=41845454
http://wikipediareview.com/?showuser=1
"I *do* think criticism is good for Wikipedia [...] Good quality criticism
is valuable, and Wikipedians should listen to it, and actually make changes
based on it. Are there corrupt administrators, then we should get rid of
them." --Jimmy Wales ( http://wikipediareview.com/?showtopic=1693 )


from_name: Anthere

body:
Delirium wrote:
> Mathieu Amo wrote:
>
>>On 6/6/06, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>>To remove the bias of large language groups or large projects and to
>>>make elections a less painful system, we might also rely on a system of
>>>"grand electeurs" (each language/project nominate a couple of people to
>>>vote in their name). The "grand electeurs " group being more likely to
>>>elect people based on their participation on Foundation issues, rather
>>>than purely on their fame.
>>>
>>
>>I really like this idea, but it will be a tricky work to write down a
>>policy for this kind of elections. This sounds a lot like the US
>>Electoral College (that's where it's come from, I guess), but I think
>>it will give us everything we need : the possibilty for the
>>communities to really express themselves, and the assurance that the
>>electors will have a good knowledge of the Foundation and its works.
>>However, this would mean more wiki-politics. And nobody likes that.
>>
>
>
> Is the whole issue really a problem?  It only would be if everyone votes
> mainly for "their" people, but I'm not sure that's the case, and
> instituting a system like that might actually make it happen.  When the
> first board elections were held, for example, Americans made up at least
> a plurality of those voting, possibly a majority, and yet the two
> winners were French and British (and the next-most-supported was German).
>
> -Mark

I have no evidence Americans made up a least a plurality of those
voting. English-speaking did, yes.

Still... it is significant that the candidate with the most votes is
from the language wikipedia which is the largest. Then that the two next
candidates were respectively from the second biggest and third biggest
languages (as well as in both cases participants to the english speaking
version). Would a great italian person, not participating to the english
or the french or the german languages have a chance ? Unlikely.

Then, there is also the issue of project, which was recently mentionned
as being a problem (projects other than wikipedia may tend to be forgotten).

We can not do much with regards to numbers. If we were to adopt such a
system, we might decide for something such as
* en.wiki : 10 votes
* de.wiki : 6 votes
* it.wiki : 4 votes
* ar.wiki : 1 vote
* en.wikinews : 2 votes
* commons : 10 votes
etc...

Is there a chance that in the end, the elected ones end up voting for
*their* people ?

I would say no. Simply because of an observation. In communities around,
there are some voting taking place so that people access to specific
positions of trust (arbitrator, checkuser, stewards etc...). I think we
can assume that most of these people are actually given this position
because they are highly trusted to be informed and reasonable. Chance is
that the big electors would be of the same type.

... generally, we observe that arbitrators (en, fr), checkusers,
stewards... are people who do not stick to their language project, but
rather participate to the global life as well. And as participants of
the global life, they often know the leaders of other projects, who are
likely to candidate for the board (actually, chance is that some of the
grand electors be candidate themselves). And I firmly believe they would
  give their piece of advice based not on the fact the person is from
their language, but because they happen to know him/her and value him/her.

Note as well that this is a return to the notion of wikicouncil... one
role of which would be ... to elect people on the board (depending on
the size of the wikicouncil, it might be an election or a decision based
on consensus building actually).

Ant


from_name: George Herbert

body:
On 6/6/06, Scott Stevenson <wikinetscott at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Sorry Raphael but you are wrong this isn't about a personal vendetta but
> moreso about an editor who was just bad for Wikipedia. Seeing [[User:Metta
> Bubble]] ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Metta_Bubble ) depart the
> project as a result of Resid Gulerdem's bad influence on Wikipedia really
> sealed my view that he was indeed bad. Your continued support of him
> really
> puzzles me and I really can't understand it. The only thing that makes me
> think you are so inclined to support him is that he like yourself supports
> altering the display characteristics of the Jyllands-Posten cartoons
> (censoring them) and you're not keen to see a supportive view go away
> (meaning you have personal reasons for him staying on). Such continued
> support is less than logical in view of Resid Gulerdem's repeated and
> independently natured Wikipedia violations that saw him become banned.

I am worried about the apparent precedent here, that because some idea or
proposal originated with a now-banned user, it must be permanently verboten
as a point for ongoing discussion.

I neither agree with Resid's actions that got him banned, nor with WP:OURS,
but I don't like the precedent.  See other thread and thoughtcrime...

--
-george william herbert
gherbert at retro.com / george.herbert at gmail.com


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Foundation-l] Moving the "test Wikipedias"

body:
Cormac Lawler wrote:
> On 6/2/06, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
>> I've copied all pages from Meta beginning with 'Test-wp' or 'Test-WP', with
>> complete edit history, to:
>>
>> http://incubator.wikimedia.org/
>
>
> Great! But is it too late to discuss the scope of this wiki? We've had
> discussions about having a separate wiki as an incubator for potential
> new Wikimedia projects (see:
> <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikikernel> or the older
> <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Seed_wiki>). Could/will this be that
> wiki?

Sure, why not?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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body:
Cormac Lawler wrote:
> On 6/2/06, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
>> I've copied all pages from Meta beginning with 'Test-wp' or 'Test-WP', with
>> complete edit history, to:
>>
>> http://incubator.wikimedia.org/
>
>
> Great! But is it too late to discuss the scope of this wiki? We've had
> discussions about having a separate wiki as an incubator for potential
> new Wikimedia projects (see:
> <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikikernel> or the older
> <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Seed_wiki>). Could/will this be that
> wiki?

Sure, why not?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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body:
Cormac Lawler wrote:
> On 6/2/06, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
>> I've copied all pages from Meta beginning with 'Test-wp' or 'Test-WP', with
>> complete edit history, to:
>>
>> http://incubator.wikimedia.org/
>
>
> Great! But is it too late to discuss the scope of this wiki? We've had
> discussions about having a separate wiki as an incubator for potential
> new Wikimedia projects (see:
> <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikikernel> or the older
> <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Seed_wiki>). Could/will this be that
> wiki?

Sure, why not?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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body:
Cormac Lawler wrote:
> On 6/2/06, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
>> I've copied all pages from Meta beginning with 'Test-wp' or 'Test-WP', with
>> complete edit history, to:
>>
>> http://incubator.wikimedia.org/
>
>
> Great! But is it too late to discuss the scope of this wiki? We've had
> discussions about having a separate wiki as an incubator for potential
> new Wikimedia projects (see:
> <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikikernel> or the older
> <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Seed_wiki>). Could/will this be that
> wiki?

Sure, why not?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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body:
On 6/6/06, Scott Stevenson <wikinetscott at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> George Willaim Herbert,
> While I understand your concerns about "thougthcrime" the only precedent
> that might exist here is that a page created by a banned user through
> proxy
> was deleted. Pages created by banned users can be speedy deleted under
> [[WP:CSD#General_criteria]] general criteria #5. Discussion about a
> proposal
> isn't verboten (and in fact on one of the the original threads started by
> Resid Gulerdem there is indeed a very lively ongoing discussion).
> Hope that helps you to better understand this.
>

I understand the policy, but the effect is apparently to limit that
discussion to Wikien-L and not on WP itself.

Is that the (big picture) right thing to do?

Would Raphael paraphrasing the whole WP:OURS page instead of just cutting
and pasting it get around the current GFDL issue, or is the very existence
of a WP:OURS page forbidden forever now since Resid got himself banned,
requiring a retitle as well?  If Raphael retitled and paraphrased/rewrote
from scratch the proposal, would that still be banned in your
interpretation?

Again, this commentary is NOT any kind of support for WP:OURS.  I'm just
uncomfortable with how the proposal's being treated at the moment.

--
-george william herbert
gherbert at retro.com / george.herbert at gmail.com


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
On 6/5/06, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I would support Tim resigning as early as possible. I have nothing
> against him, but we need active board members and he is simply not.
> Resigning this summer for example.

*nod*

Do you think the Executive Director (CEO) would also be on the Board
at the same time?

> Outsiders will obviously be appointed. For community members, we roughly
> have 4 solutions
> * board appoint people (benefit, we are more likely to get people with
> the best skills compared with what we need. Drawback : see current
> criticism)
> * community votes for people (Drawback : less chance to get great people
> from minority languages or projects. Might miss some great choices.)
> * community votes per group perhaps, board pick up in the outcome
> (en.wiki arbitration type). (Drawback : board might be expected to pick
> up those with highest number of votes anyway)
> * Board pre-selection, then community vote (Benefit : more likely to get
> what is truely needed).

* The Board states certain requirements or wishes, and the community
self-selects / votes in knowledge of those stated requirements and
wishes. The Board can also invite people to be candidates, or endorse
particular candidates.

Erik


from_name: Claudi Meneghin

subject: [Wikitech-l] Trying to send message

body:
Hello,
this is a trial message: seemingly there is sum bug, since I do not receive e-mails sent by me to Wikitech.
Claudi

---------------------------------
 Yahoo! Mail r?invente le mail ! D?couvrez le nouveau Yahoo! Mail et son interface r?volutionnaire.


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Cross-Site-Scripting arbitrary JavaScript execution
	and HTML insertion vulnerability in MediaWiki 1.6.6 + live
	Wikipedia.

body:
Hi All,

There is a Cross-Site-Scripting arbitrary JavaScript execution and
HTML insertion vulnerability in MediaWiki.

This is achieved by injecting malicious data into a specific value
which is not sanitized / escaped before being echoed back to the
user's browser.

The vulnerability affects current SVN, MediaWiki 1.6.6 (current
stable), as well as the live Wikipedia.

No extensions need to be installed.

Details have been provided to security at wikimedia.org as per the
instructions at: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Security , and will be
withheld for a period, before being made publicly available at:
http://nickj.org/MediaWiki

All the best,
Nick.


from_name: geni

body:
On 6/6/06, Selina . <wikipediareview at gmail.com> wrote:
> Maybe you don't have laws against it with your happy little "patriotic"
> organisations like the KKK, but in civilised countries like the UK and
> Germany (for just two examples) racism/hate speech is illegal.

Technicaly no. In the UK incitement to racial hatred is illegal but
there is no law against being racist or generalised hate speach (you
could for example say whatever you like about chess players).

--
geni


from_name: Anthony DiPierro

subject: [WikiEN-l] Category translation

body:
On 6/6/06, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 06/06/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
>
> > That brings up another, longer term, to-do for categories: they should
> > be language independent.  For instance [[Marie Curie]] is in de: and
> > en: (they happen to have the same title, but even if they don't they
> > are linked via interwiki links).  [[Kategorie:Pole]] is linked to
> > [[Category:Polish people]].  So there should be no need to categorize
> > Marie Curie twice (multiply by the actual number of languages which
> > have a Polish people category and an article on Marie Curie).
>
> Hmm... it won't work well.
>
> Basdically, there is no hard and fast en:Article <-> de:Artikel
> relationship, there's no single "meta topic" which manifests itself in
> specific articles in different languages. For some things, like
> people, it does appear so; for others, it'll break down.
>
I don't understand that.  Interwiki links are the hard and fast
en:Article <-> de:Artikel relationship.  Are you unaware of iw links,
or am I misinterpreting what you're saying?  Maybe you could give an
example?

> This is partly due to the incomplete nature of the project, but also
> because different language communities - which, especially for
> languages like German and Polish, represent individual and reasonably
> distinct cultures in a way that en: doesn't - will naturally have
> different emphasis, there'll be different levels of coverage and
> different approaches to fragmenting articles.
>
> Let's say, oh, [[History of Country]].
>
> In one language, this might be a single article. In another,
> time-divided articles (overview; ancient history; history to 1500;
> 1500 to 1900; modern history). In a third, it might be a thematic
> divide (political history; religious history; military history;
> overview).
>
> What combination of categories would work best for *all* of these pages?
>
So are you simply talking about coverage, then?

For those situations where we *don't* have an article on the same
topic in multiple languages, we don't have an interwiki link, and we
wouldn't link the categories.

The situations where we *do* have coverage in multiple languages, of
the same articles and of the same categories, it doesn't make much
sense not to share information.

I think the latter situation is much more widespread than the former.
Not just people: people, places, events, years, fictional works,
scientific concepts, etc.  Hitting random page a couple dozen times I
don't see any articles which *shouldn't* exist across all language
Wikipedias, and many of them already *do* exist across a number of
them.

Jimbo and others have also made it clear that any cultural distinction
between different language Wikipedias is accidental and in fact goes
against the intention (this in the context of which languages should
have a Wikipedia, but the idea carries here as well).  We don't have a
British Encyclopedia and an American one, because we can both
understand each other well enough to communicate.  If it were
*possible* to automatically translate all articles into every language
while keeping the content the same, we'd do so.  It just isn't, at
least not with current technology.

OTOH, interwiki links already give us the automatic translation in
terms of category information.  Yes, there will probably be some
article titles and category titles which don't translate well, but
that's the exception and for those few titles we wouldn't have any iw
links anyway.


from_name: Andrew Gray

subject: [WikiEN-l] Types of categories

body:
On 06/06/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:

> That brings up another, longer term, to-do for categories: they should
> be language independent.  For instance [[Marie Curie]] is in de: and
> en: (they happen to have the same title, but even if they don't they
> are linked via interwiki links).  [[Kategorie:Pole]] is linked to
> [[Category:Polish people]].  So there should be no need to categorize
> Marie Curie twice (multiply by the actual number of languages which
> have a Polish people category and an article on Marie Curie).

Hmm... it won't work well.

Basdically, there is no hard and fast en:Article <-> de:Artikel
relationship, there's no single "meta topic" which manifests itself in
specific articles in different languages. For some things, like
people, it does appear so; for others, it'll break down.

This is partly due to the incomplete nature of the project, but also
because different language communities - which, especially for
languages like German and Polish, represent individual and reasonably
distinct cultures in a way that en: doesn't - will naturally have
different emphasis, there'll be different levels of coverage and
different approaches to fragmenting articles.

Let's say, oh, [[History of Country]].

In one language, this might be a single article. In another,
time-divided articles (overview; ancient history; history to 1500;
1500 to 1900; modern history). In a third, it might be a thematic
divide (political history; religious history; military history;
overview).

What combination of categories would work best for *all* of these pages?

--
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk


from_name: Roger Luethi

subject: [WikiEN-l] Types of categories

body:
On Mon, 05 Jun 2006 11:43:30 +0200, Steve Bennett wrote:
> > > theme (eg, Women throughout the ages, or whatever). Disaster is
> > > inevitable from that point onward.
> >
> > We can fix that.
>
> Yep. We need to document these new rigid rules somewhere. I do like

First we need to find out which rules make sense and then make a convincing
case: Demonstrate the benefits, have answers to apparent drawbacks, a
realistic migration path. Compare the problems solved to the problems left.

If we ever got that far, there should be a sandbox that challenges people
to add problem and corner cases. New rules have little credibility unless
you can demonstrate that you don't have to rethink parts of your system
every time a new example comes up.

Unfortunately, I'm not aware of a good method for presenting and editing
the kind of graphs we're talking about in a wiki.

> > So "living women" is taxonomy, but "Living persons" is an attribute?
>
> I haven't thought this one through - ideas would be good. Ideally, we
> would have proper attributes, such that "living" could be stamped on
> someone (but that "living" could not be applied to artworks, tv shows
> or whatever...). I don't know a good way to taxonomise people, but I'm
> sure others do.

Ah, here I agree. So we have attributes for state (dead/alive). You
probably want them for location, too. Being able to slap "in France" on an
article would be helpful. Problem is, not everything is a bridge where "in
<location>" has an unambiguous meaning in relation to the subject of the
article. An American movie may be "set in France", or a movie set in the US
may be "shot in France". And people may be "born in France" or have "died
in France".

I guess the reason I am only mildly interested in hierarchies is that many
interesting attributes (dead/alive, colors, professions) don't fit well
into hierarchies. I think the real power comes from combining attributes.

The German WP is much closer to that. For instance, they don't have
categories like "Polish Chemists". They only have the attribute categories
"Polish" and "Chemist". From a practical point of view, that's less usable
than what we have (they basically need to use CatScan which is fairly
limited, and casual users don't know about it anyway). But it's
conceptually cleaner, and they are in a better position for making
interesting experiments.

> > Your definitions of taxonomies and attributes need work :-).
>
> Heh :) Input welcome! I think the distinction between "taxonomy" and
> "attribute" is probably a sliding scale. It comes down to what is
> natural. Do we really think in terms of "nobel laureates"? I doubt it

Combining rigid rules with common sense is hard. I am tempted to quote your
line about inevitable disaster.

> > Distinct namespaces for different types of categories. It would involve
> > some coding and the migration must be planned, but it might be easier to
> > explain and easier to maintain. It would also be another small step towards
> > a semantic web.
>
> How many? What would you call them? What are the arguments against?

Your first question answers the third :-). As for the second, I don't think
implementation details matter much at this stage.

Roger


from_name: Stephen Bain

body:
On 6/6/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Um, slow down a little bit.
>
> User A posts some content
> Admin B deletes the content, erasing its history
> User C reposts the content as a service to user A
> Admin D (or B?) redeletes the content, citing the lack of history preservation!
>
> Did user A complain about the lack of history?

There were 31 edits to the page, not all made by user A. I don't
really care why B deleted it, my issue was with C copy and pasting it,
which should never be done.

--
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com


from_name: Scott Stevenson

body:
Resid, [[WP:OURS]] was speedy deleted because it fell under
[[WP:CSD#General_criteria]] (general criteria 5), which states as a valid
reason for speedy deletion : "Pages created by banned
users<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_banned_users>while
they were
banned <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Banning_policy>." You are a
BANNED user. Raphael Wegmann [[User:Raphael1]] acting as a proxy for you
created the page [[Wikipedia:OURS]] in direct correspondance with this
proposal you made on this mailing list (WP:OURS). The copy of Wikiethics
stored on the user space previously accorded you was deleted because despite
your banned status you were editing it via anonymous IPs starting with
216.xx.xx (as mentioned in the RFCU confirming your usage of such IPs and
sockpuppets
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_CheckUser/Rgulerdem ).
Due to your repetitive demonstrations of highly disruptive conduct on both
the English and Turkish Wikipedias (
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&type=block&page=User:Rgulerdemand
http://tr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%C3%96zel:Log&type=block&page=Kullan%C4%B1c%C4%B1:Rgulerdem)
and your insistence on trying to create policy on Wikipedia despite
your
permanently blocked status, I suspect that you will soon be blocked from
even contributing to this mailing list (and rightly so).

-Scott Stevenson [[User:Netscott]]

On 6/6/06, Resid Gulerdem <resid_gulerdem at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
> >From: Raphael Wegmann <raphael at psi.co.at>
> >Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> >To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> >Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] To: Jimmy Wales -
> Admin-driven death of Wikipedia
> >Date: Mon, 05 Jun 2006 17:49:21 +0200
> >
> >Jimmy Wales wrote:
> > > Resid Gulerdem wrote:
> > >>    The admins are only part of the community now
> and
> > >> will stay like that in the future, as far as I
> can
> > >> see. Are some modifications needed in your
> opinion? I
> > >> believe the answer is yes. I do not know if you
> could
> > >> see the proposal [[WP:OURS]] I posted on this
> list
> > >> recently. I think it can be useful and can be
> > >> developed further. I tried to outline some
> important
> > >> points which may reduce the conflicts between the
> > >> admins and the users. If you saw it, do you think
> it
> > >> is feasible?
> > >
> > > I see no reference to WP:OURS in google, so I am
> unable to comment.  Can
> > > you send it to me?
> > >
> >
> >I've just created the proposed policy on
> [[Wikipedia:OURS]].
> >
> >--
> >Raphael
> >
>
> Mr. Wales,
>
> I was wondering if you could review the proposal
> [[WP:OURS]] and [[WP:ETH]]?
>
> I would like to know also if you are aware of the
> discussion and weird admin actions going around this
> proposals recently:
>
> Right after I posted the proposal [[WP:OURS]] to this
> mailing list (it includes a link to the updated
> version of the proposal [[Wikipedia:Wikiethics]] on my
> old user page [[User:Rgulerdem\Wikiethics]]) someone
> deleted that page immediately:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:DRV#User:Rgulerdem.2FWikiethics
>
> An editor [[User:Raphael]] decided to have a copy of
> the updated version of [[Wikipedia:Wikiethics]] from
> my old user page to improve it further. It is also
> deleted right away. Lots of wikilawyering and
> insincerity going around:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:DRV#User:Raphael1.2FWikiethics
>
> He further formulated his version of the proposal
> [[WP:OURS]] after modifications, rewording, and some
> improvements on the main space. It is deleted too
> right after created without a single word on its
> talk page. I cannot provide a link for this because
> even the 'deletion discussion page' is deleted.
>
> I hope now it is clear what may 'admin-driven death of
> Wikipedia' mean. With this structure and functioning
> it is not possible to have a health product in my
> opinion. As Wikipedia gets bigger one may expect this
> admin problem become more apparent and frustrating.
>
> Please note that on purely technical issues the
> problems are smaller than the ones on the
> controversial issues. Many (not all) of the
> admins as far as I can see are some college kids
> mostly sitting around a computer. As a result
> Wikipedia is evolving very fast towards an online
> forum or clubhouse with an heavy ideologic bigotry
> and a tone on social issues determined by the
> instincts of some computer operators and programmers
> playing encyclopedist. This does not make the
> Wikipedia a reliable source of information. Lynching
> editors according to their background that their names
> may imply does not bring any honor to Wikipedia.
>
> I would appreciate if you could give some feedback
> about these concerns. Please again consider those as
> friendly and sincere concerns from a user who likes
> the Wikipedia be successful. I am just pointing out
> the danger which will get Wikipedia down tomorrow
> if not today. I have some further ideas similar to
> [[WP:Wikiethics]] and [[WP:OURS]] towards constructing
> a better structure but an administrative will is
> necessary to be able to implement that. Your
> comments will result in either continuation or end of
> my Wiki experience.
>
> Best,
>
> Resid
>
>
> __________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
> http://mail.yahoo.com
> _______________________________________________
> 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: Mark Gallagher

body:
G'day geni,

> On 6/5/06, Selina . <wikipediareview at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>Racism is illegal
>
> No it isn't.

That's a bit of a broad assumption.  Perhaps what you meant to say was
"racism is not illegal in my jurisdiction".  There's a world outside
America: it's a world I've heard described by Americans as terrifying
and dystopian (presumably, these particular Americans were funnier in
the head than the average), but it's still there.

In some countries, Australia for example, expressing racist sentiments
*is* illegal.  In others, like Germany, certain forms of racism are
firmly stamped on.

In any case, the general thrust of Selina's comment was spot-on, so
let's try not to jump on her for one clause.

--
Mark Gallagher
"What?  I can't hear you, I've got a banana on my head!"
- Danger Mouse


from_name: Guy Chapman aka JzG

subject: [WikiEN-l] Are lists subject to WP:NOR?

body:
On Tue, 06 Jun 2006 12:00:00 +0200, you wrote:

>And if so, in which sense?

Yes, and in the usual sense: if you cannot provide a reliable source
for each individual case (and here that would mean referencing each
one explicitly as it is likely to be contentious) then the entry must
be removed.  If none of them are sourced the list is empty - delete.
If none of them *can* be sourced, the list is unverifiable - delete.

I much prefer to use categories for contentious terms, because editors
on individual articles will see and review the evidence for them.  It
is much to easy to add things undetected to a list based on POV.  But
that's just my personal view.

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


from_name: Brianna Laugher

subject: [Commons-l] Solving the "watch a category" problem

body:
Well, lately my posts here are falling on deaf ears. But since this
one is more technical maybe it will get some attention. :P

Bug 1710: Ability to watch all articles in a category
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1710

(By 'watch', I assume this means 'receive notification when members
are added to/removed from the category', rather than 'put all members
on my watchlist automatically')

Anyone who works with the category system would be well aware how much
this is needed, so that the categories can be properly maintained. It
doesn't seem like an official MediaWiki solution is going to show up
any time soon. I had an idea for a solution:
Make an article page, maybe for category X call it 'X watchlist' or 'X
changes log', that you can put on your watchlist. Have a Bot somehow
monitor the category (like, look at the category and compare the names
of members to previous check) and report any differences on the
article. Then by watching the article you will effectively get to find
out any changes within the category.

The bot would only need to check the category like once a day, I would
say. And possibly you would want to not allow this for very very large
categories like [[:Category:Public domain]] or [[:Category:Linguistic
maps]] or whatever. But for country-level cats and below it should be
OK.

So... thoughts? Please fwd to wikitech-l if appropriate & if you're on
that list.

I look forward to you techy-types nutting this one out for me. :)
thanks,

Brianna [[user:pfctdayelise]]


from_name: Aphaia

body:
On 6/6/06, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Outsiders will obviously be appointed. For community members, we roughly
> have 4 solutions
> * board appoint people (benefit, we are more likely to get people with
> the best skills compared with what we need. Drawback : see current
> criticism)
> * community votes for people (Drawback : less chance to get great people
> from minority languages or projects. Might miss some great choices.)
> * community votes per group perhaps, board pick up in the outcome
> (en.wiki arbitration type). (Drawback : board might be expected to pick
> up those with highest number of votes anyway)
> * Board pre-selection, then community vote (Benefit : more likely to get
> what is truely needed).

The forth method might reduce the work election officers have to do,
too. And for reflecting the voice of community,  it would work well
enough. This way is very similar of promotional eligibility in my
university where I was granted BA. There we had veto to the sole
candidate for university president, and if he couldn't get the
majority of voters, he would lose. So as for dean candidate. I haven't
known anyone who complain around that during my student life except
one professor who scorned us because of too low voting rate on a
going-on election at that time ...

--
Aphaia
aka
Kizu Naoko
email: Aphaia @ gmail (dot) com


from_name: Resid Gulerdem

body:
>From: Raphael Wegmann <raphael at psi.co.at>
>Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
>To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] [[WP:OURS]] - A proposal for
admin-user relations
>Date: Tue, 06 Jun 2006 21:50:46 +0200
>
>Scott Stevenson wrote:
> > George Willaim Herbert,
> >
> > While I understand your concerns about
"thougthcrime" the only precedent
> > that might exist here is that a page created by a
banned user through proxy
> > was deleted. Pages created by banned users can be
speedy deleted under
> > [[WP:CSD#General_criteria]] general criteria #5.
Discussion about a proposal
> > isn't verboten (and in fact on one of the the
original threads started by
> > Resid Gulerdem there is indeed a very lively
ongoing discussion).
> > Hope that helps you to better understand this.
>
>It is very unfortunate, that you reject my good faith
gesture and
>continue to call me a proxy.
>
>[[WP:OUR]] has not been a cut&paste copy of Resids
email.
>Instead I've tried to incorporate the whole
discussion,
>which has taken place here on this mailing list.
>
>--
>Raphael
>

Dear Raphael,

I am so sorry that The Troublemaker is using my name
to attack you personally. As a very kind and
thoughtful person and a gentleman, it should be hard
for you to deal with the people at the very opposite
end.

As I said before, I used to ignore him and do not
answer him, not because I can not, just because I
chose not: I do not want to waste my time. I would not
write even this message if he would not use my
name to attack someone else, a person who deserve
nothing but respect like you, and as a matter of fact
any other person. His baseless accusations about my
edits in both Turkish and English Wikipedia,
allegations, lies, agitations, and provocations are
worthless to mention and worthless to answer. I am
just expecting that the community will see his
behavior which will in return show them what kind of
people I have dealt with and what was the main reason
behind my blocks.

Please accept my apology for that someone is
shamelessly blaming on you using my name. I
congratulate you with your high caliber personality
and character.

Sincerely,

Resid

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


from_name: Alphax (Wikipedia email)

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Psychology of problem Wikipedians: excessive "need
 for	cognition"

body:
John Lee wrote:
> David Gerard wrote:
>
>> Karl A. Krueger wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>> When people attempt to explain other people's actions in terms of
>>> psychological disorders or oddities, it seems to me that it often
>>> reflects a lack of respect or human sympathy for the people thus
>>> diagnosed.
>>>
>>>
>> [snip long post not addressing the point at all]
>>
>>
>> Gosh, I guess that means we can't call obvious problem cases obvious
>> problem cases, and certainly can't try to address the actual problem,
>> because it might be rude to do so. Thanks for clearing that up.
>>
>>
>> - d.
>>
>>
> On a similar topic, I would like to know if anyone has added "Wikipedia
> is not a counseling or rehabilitation centre" to [[WP:NOT]] yet.

I added it[1], but I was reverted[2]. I still can't find where on the
talk page it was discussed though.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not&diff=prev&oldid=54686404
[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not&diff=next&oldid=54696242

--
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: Steve Bennett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Types of categories

body:
On 6/6/06, Roger Luethi <collector at hellgate.ch> wrote:
> First we need to find out which rules make sense and then make a convincing
> case: Demonstrate the benefits, have answers to apparent drawbacks, a
> realistic migration path. Compare the problems solved to the problems left.

Ok. I suspect rules like "Express X by doing Y and Z" are going to
work better than "Don't do X".

> If we ever got that far, there should be a sandbox that challenges people
> to add problem and corner cases. New rules have little credibility unless
> you can demonstrate that you don't have to rethink parts of your system
> every time a new example comes up.

Would it be credible to say that for 90% of the time the new system is
better, and for the other 10% we leave it the way it is?

> Unfortunately, I'm not aware of a good method for presenting and editing
> the kind of graphs we're talking about in a wiki.

No. I'd like to try doing some experiments though. We don't
necessarily need "graphs". Tables and hierarchical lists may be a
start, depending on what you're talking about.

> Ah, here I agree. So we have attributes for state (dead/alive). You
> probably want them for location, too. Being able to slap "in France" on an
> article would be helpful. Problem is, not everything is a bridge where "in
> <location>" has an unambiguous meaning in relation to the subject of the
> article. An American movie may be "set in France", or a movie set in the US
> may be "shot in France". And people may be "born in France" or have "died
> in France".

Yeah, I know. But I would actually rather see a film article labelled
"Films", "Made in France", "Made in US" rather than labelled "Films
made in France", "Films made in the US".

> I guess the reason I am only mildly interested in hierarchies is that many
> interesting attributes (dead/alive, colors, professions) don't fit well
> into hierarchies. I think the real power comes from combining attributes.

Yep. But there's no software support for that atm.

> The German WP is much closer to that. For instance, they don't have
> categories like "Polish Chemists". They only have the attribute categories
> "Polish" and "Chemist". From a practical point of view, that's less usable
> than what we have (they basically need to use CatScan which is fairly
> limited, and casual users don't know about it anyway). But it's
> conceptually cleaner, and they are in a better position for making
> interesting experiments.

What would actually be good would be being able to define categories
in terms of attributes. Stick a {{Category:Polish chemists}} template
on an article, which substitutes [[Attribute:Polish]] and
[[Attribute:Chemists]], as well as containing a link to the category
"Polish chemists". This category would be nothing more than a
description and some sort of link to the two attributes, causing all
articles with both attributes to be displayed.

IMHO it would not be a huge amount of work to implement, could be
phased in gradually, and would be a huge improvement.

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] Types of categories

body:
On 6/6/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> > > Heh :) Input welcome! I think the distinction between "taxonomy" and
> > > "attribute" is probably a sliding scale. It comes down to what is
> > > natural. Do we really think in terms of "nobel laureates"? I doubt it
> >
> > Combining rigid rules with common sense is hard. I am tempted to quote your
> > line about inevitable disaster.
> >
> Personally I don't see the difference between taxonomies and
> attributes, as described.  But I suppose one (taxonomies?) could be
> described as partitioning (an article can only be in one taxonomy
> category) whereas attributes can be mixed.  Under that definition
> though, all taxonomies are attributes (but not vice-versa).  I'm not
> sure how close that definition is to reality though.

I'm inclined to think that in practice they pretty much work the same
way. However, semantically, I would really like to distinguish
concrete, significant, basic categories like "Ships" from much less
salient, significant facts like "Born in 1793" or "Winners of Golden
Raspberries". However, I suspect that even the most basic taxonomies
will have bastard children with two parents: Something could be both a
sport and a television show. Someone could be both a musician and a
scientist. But maybe the "one taxonomy per article except in strange
cases" goal is reasonable?

Steve


body:
On 6/6/06, Scott Stevenson <wikinetscott at gmail.com> wrote:
> Resid, [[WP:OURS]] was speedy deleted because it fell under
> [[WP:CSD#General_criteria]] (general criteria 5), which states as a valid
> reason for speedy deletion : "Pages created by banned
> users<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_banned_users>while
> they were
> banned <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Banning_policy>." You are a

This is a much better reason for deleting something than concerns
about copyright.

Steve


from_name: George Herbert

body:
On 6/6/06, Resid Gulerdem <resid_gulerdem at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Dear Raphael,
> I am so sorry that The Troublemaker is using my name
> to attack you personally. As a very kind and
> thoughtful person and a gentleman, it should be hard
> for you to deal with the people at the very opposite
> end. [...]

Resid, this is unnecessarily contentious.

Please knock it off.

--
-george william herbert
gherbert at retro.com / george.herbert at gmail.com


from_name: Kelly Martin

body:
On 6/5/06, Mark Gallagher <m.g.gallagher at student.canberra.edu.au> wrote:
> In any case, the general thrust of Selina's comment was spot-on, so
> let's try not to jump on her for one clause.

No, indeed, let us give the hypocrite a fair trial.  Then we can hang her.

Kelly


from_name: Nick Jenkins

subject: [Wikitech-l] Some statistics I wish I had...

body:
> Patterns by day of the week would also be interesting.  My entirely
> subjective observation is that there are fewer people around on a
> Saturday night.

I'm pretty sure there actually are fewer people around.

I say this because there used to be a graph of number of web requests
at: http://wikimedia.org/stats/live/org.wikimedia.all.squid.requests-hits.html

The Internet Archive has a picture-less cache of it here:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://wikimedia.org/stats/live/org.wikimedia.all.squid.requests-hits.html

*However* it does not have the images, which were the useful bits....
so you'll probably just have to make do of my summary of them.

Basically what that graphs showed was:
* Oscillating within a day, presumably to reflect peak times / off
peak times for the US and Europe, with peak load presumably falling in
the overlap of business hours between the two.
* Varying within a week. Saturday and Sunday were substantially
quieter. Most of the weekdays were fairly similar, but Monday was a
little bit quieter than the rest (people coping with the Monday work
rush?), whilst Wednesday was the busiest day of all (work rush
partially coped with?), and Friday was a little bit quieter (thinking
about the weekend?).

Hope that helps.

All the best,
Nick.


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [WikiEN-l] Template HTML fixups coming this week

body:
Just a heads-up, folks:

Later this week I'm going to be installing a fix for some longstanding bugs with
HTML in wiki pages. One of the issues is a difference in rendering of templates
that improperly nest HTML tags, which caused certain badly-written templates to
render in one way on Wikipedia but wildly broken on most other wikis.

(Don't forget that an important part of what Wikipedia & its sister projects are
about is making information sharable and reusable. If the code breaks when
copied to another site, that's Bad.)

Once the fix is in, templates should render about the same on Wikipedia and
other wikis where the "HTML Tidy" plugin isn't being used. The bad news is that
some of these templates will be broken; so it would be great if we can make sure
they get cleaned up.

Problem templates are mostly those which start an HTML tag in one template, then
finish it in another. For instance if {{table-header}} contains a <table>, and
then the table rows and final </table> are in another template entirely. These
have always broken on regular MediaWiki -- the template is required to close its
own tags -- though they sometimes appeared to work on Wikipedia due to bugs with
our HTML handling when Tidy is enabled.

I've done some automated checks on templates on en.wikipedia.org to make a list
of likely problem candidates:

http://leuksman.com/misc/templates/html-table-start.txt
http://leuksman.com/misc/templates/html-table-end.txt
http://leuksman.com/misc/templates/html-table-row.txt

If you've got a template that you're not sure if it will work, try copying it to
my test wiki at http://test.leuksman.com/ . This has the fix installed with the
corrected behavior, so you can see about how it will render on Wikipedia next week.

Please make sure this information is disseminated to the various other language
and project wikis people are working on; I don't want to hear "waah! all my
templates broke and no one told me!" next week. :)

For the moment the same kind of construct with wiki tables ({| ... |}) will
still work, but note that some time in the future we're going to have to look at
'fixing' that too. (This might require some enhancements to how templates work
to make it easier to fill in long tables.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Template HTML fixups coming this week

body:
Just a heads-up, folks:

Later this week I'm going to be installing a fix for some longstanding bugs with
HTML in wiki pages. One of the issues is a difference in rendering of templates
that improperly nest HTML tags, which caused certain badly-written templates to
render in one way on Wikipedia but wildly broken on most other wikis.

(Don't forget that an important part of what Wikipedia & its sister projects are
about is making information sharable and reusable. If the code breaks when
copied to another site, that's Bad.)

Once the fix is in, templates should render about the same on Wikipedia and
other wikis where the "HTML Tidy" plugin isn't being used. The bad news is that
some of these templates will be broken; so it would be great if we can make sure
they get cleaned up.

Problem templates are mostly those which start an HTML tag in one template, then
finish it in another. For instance if {{table-header}} contains a <table>, and
then the table rows and final </table> are in another template entirely. These
have always broken on regular MediaWiki -- the template is required to close its
own tags -- though they sometimes appeared to work on Wikipedia due to bugs with
our HTML handling when Tidy is enabled.

I've done some automated checks on templates on en.wikipedia.org to make a list
of likely problem candidates:

http://leuksman.com/misc/templates/html-table-start.txt
http://leuksman.com/misc/templates/html-table-end.txt
http://leuksman.com/misc/templates/html-table-row.txt

If you've got a template that you're not sure if it will work, try copying it to
my test wiki at http://test.leuksman.com/ . This has the fix installed with the
corrected behavior, so you can see about how it will render on Wikipedia next week.

Please make sure this information is disseminated to the various other language
and project wikis people are working on; I don't want to hear "waah! all my
templates broke and no one told me!" next week. :)

For the moment the same kind of construct with wiki tables ({| ... |}) will
still work, but note that some time in the future we're going to have to look at
'fixing' that too. (This might require some enhancements to how templates work
to make it easier to fill in long tables.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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subject: [Wikitech-l] Template HTML fixups coming this week

body:
Just a heads-up, folks:

Later this week I'm going to be installing a fix for some longstanding bugs with
HTML in wiki pages. One of the issues is a difference in rendering of templates
that improperly nest HTML tags, which caused certain badly-written templates to
render in one way on Wikipedia but wildly broken on most other wikis.

(Don't forget that an important part of what Wikipedia & its sister projects are
about is making information sharable and reusable. If the code breaks when
copied to another site, that's Bad.)

Once the fix is in, templates should render about the same on Wikipedia and
other wikis where the "HTML Tidy" plugin isn't being used. The bad news is that
some of these templates will be broken; so it would be great if we can make sure
they get cleaned up.

Problem templates are mostly those which start an HTML tag in one template, then
finish it in another. For instance if {{table-header}} contains a <table>, and
then the table rows and final </table> are in another template entirely. These
have always broken on regular MediaWiki -- the template is required to close its
own tags -- though they sometimes appeared to work on Wikipedia due to bugs with
our HTML handling when Tidy is enabled.

I've done some automated checks on templates on en.wikipedia.org to make a list
of likely problem candidates:

http://leuksman.com/misc/templates/html-table-start.txt
http://leuksman.com/misc/templates/html-table-end.txt
http://leuksman.com/misc/templates/html-table-row.txt

If you've got a template that you're not sure if it will work, try copying it to
my test wiki at http://test.leuksman.com/ . This has the fix installed with the
corrected behavior, so you can see about how it will render on Wikipedia next week.

Please make sure this information is disseminated to the various other language
and project wikis people are working on; I don't want to hear "waah! all my
templates broke and no one told me!" next week. :)

For the moment the same kind of construct with wiki tables ({| ... |}) will
still work, but note that some time in the future we're going to have to look at
'fixing' that too. (This might require some enhancements to how templates work
to make it easier to fill in long tables.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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from_name: Raphael Wegmann

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 6/6/06, Scott Stevenson <wikinetscott at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Resid, [[WP:OURS]] was speedy deleted because it fell under
>> [[WP:CSD#General_criteria]] (general criteria 5), which states as a valid
>> reason for speedy deletion : "Pages created by banned
>> users<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_banned_users>while
>> they were
>> banned <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Banning_policy>." You are a
>
> This is a much better reason for deleting something than concerns
> about copyright.
>

It would be a better reason, if it wouldn't be just plain wrong.
Neither [[User:Rgulerdem/Wikiethics]] nor [[User:Raphael1/Wikiethics]]
has been created by banned users while they were banned.

Netscott claims, that there had been some edits on
[[User:Rgulerdem/Wikiethics]] from an IP-address he
alleges to be Rgulerdems. IIRC I have made a copy of
that page to [[User:Raphael1/Wikiethics]] before
Rgulerdem even had been banned.

Anyway, even if Netscotts allegations are true,
neither [[User:Rgulerdem/Wikiethics]] nor [[User:Raphael1/Wikiethics]]
has been created by banned users while they were banned.

best regards
--
Raphael


from_name: Claudi Meneghin

subject: [Wikitech-l] customizing namespace

body:
Hello,
we will soon need to customize namespaces at Lombard wikipedia; this is mainly due to three reasons (3 is most important):
1) translating English names
2) creating a 'portal' namespace
3) duplicating 'category' feature, to deal with the fragmentation of Lombard tongue into two major dialect groups.
As to 1) I guess that local Mediawiki should be enough; as to 2) it seems to me yet obscure; 3) cannot be dealt with by creating, say : 'category/west' and 'category/east', since the word 'Category' itself has two slightly different translations.
Thus an additional namespace is needed, like in case 2).
I read this:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Custom_namespaces
Best regards,

Claudi

---------------------------------
 Yahoo! Mail r?invente le mail ! D?couvrez le nouveau Yahoo! Mail et son interface r?volutionnaire.


subject: [Wikitech-l] customizing namespace

body:
Hello,
we will soon need to customize namespaces at Lombard wikipedia; this is mainly due to three reasons (3 is most important):
1) translating English names
2) creating a 'portal' namespace
3) duplicating 'category' feature, to deal with the fragmentation of Lombard tongue into two major dialect groups.
As to 1) I guess that local Mediawiki should be enough; as to 2) it seems to me yet obscure; 3) cannot be dealt with by creating, say : 'category/west' and 'category/east', since the word 'Category' itself has two slightly different translations.
Thus an additional namespace is needed, like in case 2).
I read this:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Custom_namespaces
Best regards,

Claudi

---------------------------------
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from_name: Peter Jacobi

subject: [WikiEN-l] Are lists subject to WP:NOR?

body:
Hi JzG, All,

> Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
>
> >And if so, in which sense?
>
> Yes, and in the usual sense: if you cannot provide a reliable source
> for each individual case (and here that would mean referencing each
> one explicitly as it is likely to be contentious) then the entry must
> be removed.  If none of them are sourced the list is empty - delete.
> If none of them *can* be sourced, the list is unverifiable - delete.

Mmmh. That's (IMHO) the entire problem: The single entries
are -- in a sense -- all sourced. Minus some drive-by-additions
to the list, it is usually indeed verifiable, that
* X said 19YY the group Z is a cult [of]

But the question is, does it matter?

Is X an expert on Z? Is his opinion isolated? Which of
the several meanings of "cult" is implied?

So, if you put together all these atoms of sourced statements,
is the entitity you created still in line with WP:NOR, WP:V
and friends? IMHO its (a) just this compiling step which is
problematic and (b), in this special case of [[List of groups
referred to as cults]], the one-drop-rule employed: Find one
author which says "is a cult" and the it's  on the list.

Regards,
Peter Jacobi

[[User:Pjacobi]]

--

"Feel free" ? 10 GB Mailbox, 100 FreeSMS/Monat ...
Jetzt GMX TopMail testen: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/topmail


from_name: Minh Nguyen

subject: [WikiEN-l] Category translation

body:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
> On 6/6/06, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 06/06/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
>>
>>> That brings up another, longer term, to-do for categories: they should
>>> be language independent.  For instance [[Marie Curie]] is in de: and
>>> en: (they happen to have the same title, but even if they don't they
>>> are linked via interwiki links).  [[Kategorie:Pole]] is linked to
>>> [[Category:Polish people]].  So there should be no need to categorize
>>> Marie Curie twice (multiply by the actual number of languages which
>>> have a Polish people category and an article on Marie Curie).
>> Hmm... it won't work well.
>>
>> Basdically, there is no hard and fast en:Article <-> de:Artikel
>> relationship, there's no single "meta topic" which manifests itself in
>> specific articles in different languages. For some things, like
>> people, it does appear so; for others, it'll break down.
>>
> I don't understand that.  Interwiki links are the hard and fast
> en:Article <-> de:Artikel relationship.  Are you unaware of iw links,
> or am I misinterpreting what you're saying?  Maybe you could give an
> example?
>
>> This is partly due to the incomplete nature of the project, but also
>> because different language communities - which, especially for
>> languages like German and Polish, represent individual and reasonably
>> distinct cultures in a way that en: doesn't - will naturally have
>> different emphasis, there'll be different levels of coverage and
>> different approaches to fragmenting articles.
>>
>> Let's say, oh, [[History of Country]].
>>
>> In one language, this might be a single article. In another,
>> time-divided articles (overview; ancient history; history to 1500;
>> 1500 to 1900; modern history). In a third, it might be a thematic
>> divide (political history; religious history; military history;
>> overview).
>>
>> What combination of categories would work best for *all* of these pages?
>>
> So are you simply talking about coverage, then?
>
> For those situations where we *don't* have an article on the same
> topic in multiple languages, we don't have an interwiki link, and we
> wouldn't link the categories.
>
> The situations where we *do* have coverage in multiple languages, of
> the same articles and of the same categories, it doesn't make much
> sense not to share information.
>
> I think the latter situation is much more widespread than the former.
> Not just people: people, places, events, years, fictional works,
> scientific concepts, etc.  Hitting random page a couple dozen times I
> don't see any articles which *shouldn't* exist across all language
> Wikipedias, and many of them already *do* exist across a number of
> them.
>
> Jimbo and others have also made it clear that any cultural distinction
> between different language Wikipedias is accidental and in fact goes
> against the intention (this in the context of which languages should
> have a Wikipedia, but the idea carries here as well).  We don't have a
> British Encyclopedia and an American one, because we can both
> understand each other well enough to communicate.  If it were
> *possible* to automatically translate all articles into every language
> while keeping the content the same, we'd do so.  It just isn't, at
> least not with current technology.
>
> OTOH, interwiki links already give us the automatic translation in
> terms of category information.  Yes, there will probably be some
> article titles and category titles which don't translate well, but
> that's the exception and for those few titles we wouldn't have any iw
> links anyway.

"United Kingdom" and related terms have presented a bit of a problem
with the Vietnamese Wikipedia in the past. Whereas English has articles
on "United Kingdom", "Great Britain", "England", etc., Vietnamese
doesn't have terms that correlate 1:1. We have:

*"V??ng qu?c Li?n hi?p Anh v? B?c Ireland" for "United Kingdom"

*Its shortened form, "V??ng qu?c Anh", which is literally translated
"Kingdom of England" but is used to refer to the UK as a whole or to
England, Wales, and Scotland

*"??o Anh" (Island of England) or "??o Britain" for the island of Great
Britain

*"Anh" for England proper

We've oscillated between which interwiki links we apply to "V??ng qu?c
Anh", for example; for now, it's linked to "Kingdom of Great Britain" at
the English Wikipedia, meaning that all our UK-related articles have
just one set of interwiki links for now. But that also means that our
interwiki links aren't entirely accurate, and we have to note the
differences in terminology in our articles, since the interwiki
relations we've made don't reflect actual usage in Vietnamese.

--
Minh Nguyen <mxn at zoomtown.com>
AIM: trycom2000; Jabber: mxn at myjabber.net; Blog: http://mxn.f2o.org/


from_name: Anthony DiPierro

subject: [WikiEN-l] Category translation

body:
On 6/6/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/6/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> > Jimbo and others have also made it clear that any cultural distinction
> > between different language Wikipedias is accidental and in fact goes
> > against the intention (this in the context of which languages should
> > have a Wikipedia, but the idea carries here as well).  We don't have a
> > British Encyclopedia and an American one, because we can both
> > understand each other well enough to communicate.  If it were
> > *possible* to automatically translate all articles into every language
> > while keeping the content the same, we'd do so.  It just isn't, at
> > least not with current technology.
>
> Is there an official or even unofficial policy on this? I have
> wondered. IMHO, the Wikipedias should *not* be precise translations
> though. For example, [[en:Personal pronoun]] should give descriptions
> of personal pronouns in all languages, but with emphasis and examples
> from English. [[fr:Pronom personnel]] should similarly have an
> emphasis on French, because that is the most helpful for French
> readers. Whether that extends to cultural matters (should French
> articles on cartoons draw more on examples from French cartoons such
> as Asterix than on manga for instance) is up for debate.
>
I agree with you on the "Personal pronoun" example, though I think
it's somewhat contrived (in that I was talking more about general
principles).

I think the general principle that Wikipedia articles shouldn't be
written for any particular culture falls fairly naturally from the
NPOV policy.  Perhaps this is especially so wrt the English language
though, which is so widespread and used by people of so many different
cultures.  The cartoons example is a bit less so, but it's still an
example where the culture and language is particularly intertwined.

I've skipped over the rest of your email for now because I don't have
the time to really delve into a response.  As you say, more research
is needed.

Anthony


from_name: jkelly at fas.harvard.edu

subject: [WikiEN-l] Category translation

body:
  Hi,

  On a related note, some kind of translation system for Categories is
desperately needed for Commons, as the Category system in place now is only of
benefit to English speakers.  It is a source of some frustration.

           Jkelly


from_name: Lord Voldemort

body:
On 6/6/06, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> Cormac Lawler wrote:
> >
> > Great! But is it too late to discuss the scope of this wiki? We've had
> > discussions about having a separate wiki as an incubator for potential
> > new Wikimedia projects (see:
> > <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikikernel> or the older
> > <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Seed_wiki>). Could/will this be that
> > wiki?
>
> Sure, why not?

So can/should we move all of Wikiversity there? What about Wikijunior?
 Isn't Wikibooks just holding these until they are moved onto their
own domain, therefore acting like the incubator wiki?  Wouldn't it be
more apposite for them to be there instead?
--LV


body:
sean at epoptic.com wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 06, 2006 at 12:04:35PM +0100, Selina . wrote:
>
>> Maybe you don't have laws against it with your happy little "patriotic"
>> organisations like the KKK, but in civilised countries like the UK and
>> Germany (for just two examples) racism/hate speech is illegal. Get used it
>> it, the US is simply backwards in most social issues compared to the rest of
>> the world (another example could be the prudishly religious aspects that's
>> not so far off from the Puritans)
>>
>
> That some countries punish thoughtcrime is not surprising.  That some
> people are proud of the fact that their countries don't pass laws
> forbidding people to think particular thoughts is not surprising either.
>

The discussion is not about thoughtcrimes. It is about hate *speech*
which is a different matter. The U.S. is actually violating an UN
resoltion by not passing hate speech laws.

See: http://www.ohchr.org/english/law/ccpr.htm#art20

--
Raphael Wegmann


from_name: Nicholas Moreau

body:
On 6/6/06, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> Cormac Lawler wrote:
> >
> > Great! But is it too late to discuss the scope of this wiki? We've had
> > discussions about having a separate wiki as an incubator for potential
> > new Wikimedia projects (see:
> > <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikikernel> or the older
> > <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Seed_wiki>). Could/will this be that
> > wiki?
>
> Sure, why not?
So can/should we move all of Wikiversity there? What about Wikijunior?
 Isn't Wikibooks just holding these until they are moved onto their
own domain, therefore acting like the incubator wiki?  Wouldn't it be
more apposite for them to be there instead?

I'm not sure Wikijunior was originally intended to be a seperate
project, actually.  I'd love for it to be seperate of Wikibooks, as we
do have a domain registered for it, but the WJ community opposed such
a move previously.

Nick


from_name: Scott Stevenson

body:
My allegations? Raphael Wegmann you're so quick to tell a half truth.
This MfD started by [[User:Metros232]] which you were pefectly aware of
illustrates this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion/User:Rgulerdem/Wikiethics
Move along now and cease from acting as a proxy for a banned user.

-Scott Stevenson [[User:Netscott]]

On 6/6/06, Raphael Wegmann <raphael at psi.co.at> wrote:
>
> Steve Bennett wrote:
> > On 6/6/06, Scott Stevenson <wikinetscott at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> Resid, [[WP:OURS]] was speedy deleted because it fell under
> >> [[WP:CSD#General_criteria]] (general criteria 5), which states as a
> valid
> >> reason for speedy deletion : "Pages created by banned
> >> users<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_banned_users>while
> >> they were
> >> banned <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Banning_policy>." You
> are a
> >
> > This is a much better reason for deleting something than concerns
> > about copyright.
> >
>
> It would be a better reason, if it wouldn't be just plain wrong.
> Neither [[User:Rgulerdem/Wikiethics]] nor [[User:Raphael1/Wikiethics]]
> has been created by banned users while they were banned.
>
> Netscott claims, that there had been some edits on
> [[User:Rgulerdem/Wikiethics]] from an IP-address he
> alleges to be Rgulerdems. IIRC I have made a copy of
> that page to [[User:Raphael1/Wikiethics]] before
> Rgulerdem even had been banned.
>
> Anyway, even if Netscotts allegations are true,
> neither [[User:Rgulerdem/Wikiethics]] nor [[User:Raphael1/Wikiethics]]
> has been created by banned users while they were banned.
>
> best regards
> --
> Raphael
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Are lists subject to WP:NOR?

body:
On 6/6/06, Peter Jacobi <peter_jacobi at gmx.net> wrote:
> So, if you put together all these atoms of sourced statements,
> is the entitity you created still in line with WP:NOR, WP:V
> and friends? IMHO its (a) just this compiling step which is
> problematic and (b), in this special case of [[List of groups
> referred to as cults]], the one-drop-rule employed: Find one
> author which says "is a cult" and the it's  on the list.

The problem is basically that "referred to as cult" sounds like
"everyone thinks it's a cult", but the actual criterion for inclusion
is apparently "some nut once said it was". Solution: Up the stakes for
inclusion to require labelling by some relatively authoritative
authorities.

Steve


body:
On 6/6/06, Guettarda <guettarda at gmail.com> wrote:
> Now, to get onto userboxes that are really disruptive, how about the ones
> that say "This user contributes in American English" or "This user
> contributes in British English".  Isn't this, in essence, a rejection on
> Wikipedia's policy on accepting both AE and BE?  Sure, on talk pages and one

Surprisingly, it's actually relevant. You're supposed to respect the
preferences of the first contributor to an article. What better way to
find out their preferences than checking their user page?

(I'm only being slightly facetious)

Steve


from_name: Cormac Lawler

body:
On 6/2/06, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> I've copied all pages from Meta beginning with 'Test-wp' or 'Test-WP', with
> complete edit history, to:
>
> http://incubator.wikimedia.org/

Great! But is it too late to discuss the scope of this wiki? We've had
discussions about having a separate wiki as an incubator for potential
new Wikimedia projects (see:
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikikernel> or the older
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Seed_wiki>). Could/will this be that
wiki?

I've also asked this on the incubator wiki:
<http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Incubator:Community_Portal>, but
it's probably best to reply here.

Thanks,
Cormac


from_name: jayjg

body:
>On 6/6/06, Resid Gulerdem <resid_gulerdem at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
> Dear Raphael,
>
> I am so sorry that The Troublemaker is using my name
> to attack you personally. As a very kind and
> thoughtful person and a gentleman, it should be hard
> for you to deal with the people at the very opposite
> end.

List moderators, can this individual *please* be put on moderation at
this point?

Jay.