body:
--- Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>...
> I like this approach---let the people giving the money decide where to
> spend it.  We could have various funds:
> * A server fund
> * An advertising fund
> * A developer-compensation fund
> * A specific-software-feature bounty system
> * An administrative expenses overhead fund (office space, travel, etc.)
> * A print-version-expenses fund

Too many funds will result in donor confusion/indecision and a headache for
people who have to track it all (me so far). Three funds (general, developer,
and legal) along with good budgeting and telling people upfront how their money
from each fund will be spent, is all we need. 10% of the general fund, for
example, could be set-aside for overhead (board member meeting and office
expenses). Another 10% of the general fund could be set-aside for special
projects.

Having a fund for everything will make managing the finances of the foundation
an inflexible nightmare. Only broad categories should be used to segregate
funds. We can, however, try to find the best mix of items to have in each broad
category.

> This would be a lot better, IMO, than going the normal route of
> non-profits and having a gigantic slush fund, which is both less
> transparent and engenders less donator confidence, especially given that
> over time a larger and larger percentage of the money in such slush
> funds tends to be siphoned off to things less and less directly related
> to the actual mission of the nonprofit.
> ...

"Slush fund" is derogatory. Why in the world would you assume our finances
would be conducted in *ANY* way other than in a transparent manor? I plan to
publish information on *EVERYTHING* the foundation spends money on and have
already been working in this direction with the limited amount of information
Jimbo has had time to spend me.

A good budget is the only component that has not been started on yet (just some
rough outlines on what it needs to consist of - no real specifics). I am a bit
insulted you would assume anything less from the board members and for the work
I've already done in this direction (and plan to continue helping with and
expanding on if the board decides to create a financial officer position and
have me fill it).

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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list: wikimedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Foundation-l] Funding for the newly elected Board Members


list: foundation-l

from_name: hcheney

body:
I would like to thank Angela and Florence for serving
on the board. Being elected trustees, a sort of hybrid
between trustee and politician, they will experience
the worst of both worlds. Having been on a governing
board of a non-profit myself, I understand that
building consensus among the users, contributors,
donors, and other trustee will be a very challenging
task.

Before I mention "weekly trips to Florida", I would
ask that readers take my comments with a grain of salt
because I am a notorious tight wad. I am reminded of
this daily because my wife does not appreciate my
energy conservation during the Florida summers.

If Angela did go to Paris for a "trustee meeting" it
would be an invalid trustee meeting unless one of the
trustees, or the computer hosting the meeting, were in
the State of Florida.

I feel administration costs should be kept to a
minimum, hopefully less than 2% of revenue. At the
present time the Wikimedia Foundation has a pressing
need for new hardware and improved software. I also
feel it is very unfair that Bomis is continuing to
give the bandwidth to Wikimedia, and I hope that
Wikimedia will be able to lift this part of this
burden soon.

Though I feel it is important for board members to
meet in person, I feel it is much more important for
other issues to be addressed and funded.

I hope that the Board of Trustees will stick to the
"meat and potatoes" of non-profit governance: auditing
financials, appointing the chief administrator
(Jimbo),  setting very broad goals, promoting the
organization, and raising money. In reality, most
non-profits boards serve as a vehicle for socializing
- which is great fun - but should not be at the
expense of the foundation (in fact, I would hope that
maybe someday there could be an International
Convention of Wikimedians with the proceeds benefiting
the foundation). Just about everything that can be
discussed in person, can be conveyed by e-mail.

Until the foundation has the financial strength to
support growth and operating expenses independently, I
feel trustee expenses should be kept to an absolute
minimum. Maybe it was a little bit too early in the
foundation's history to have elected trustees.
However, trustees should be prudently funded in their
attempts to secure further donations and grants. In so
far as reporters and the such, most reporters will
call you or come to you.

I am troubled that this controversy will further
encourage the fragmentation of the Wikimedia movement
into nationalist or linguistic factions (such as the
German society), making it all the harder for the
foundation to obtain vital general funds among a sea
of grants.

Once again, I would like to thank all of the trustee
for their work.

H. Cheney

--- Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
> hcheney wrote:
> > If the Wikimedia Foundation starts giving the
> trustees
> > "perks" I feel that fundraising could be quite a
> bit
> > harder.
>
> Firstly, phone calls made for Foundation business
> are hardly "perks".
> Secondly, I don't see this sort of expense coming
> out of the normal
> donation funds. People have given those expecting
> they will be used on
> hardware and related purchases, so that is exactly
> what should be done
> with them.
>
> However, not all of the money in our account is from
> donors. We
> already have ???10,000 from the Ars Electronica
> award, and one of the
> things Anthere and I plan to do over the coming year
> is to find funds
> from alternative sources. We can't rely purely on
> donations from
> within the website, so there is no need for actual
> donor money to be
> spent on board expenses.
>
> I expect the vast majority of our communication to
> be carried out over
> IRC. However, there are situations where this is not
> plausible. As
> well as the press contacts Anthere mentioned,
> applying for grants is
> one example where face to face contact, or at a
> minimum, phone
> contact, is far more likely to result in success.
>
> Delirium wrote:
> > As for internet connections, I assume anyone
> involved
> >  in the project already has one ???
>
> I agree. I don't see my internet costs as being
> something the
> Foundation should be paying for.
>
> Anthere wrote:
> > In about 2 weeks, there is a meeting in Paris, for
> many french speaking
> > wikipedians. I will meet Jimbo there. Jimbo made
> the great suggestion
> > that Angela meet us there as well. It will allow
> her to meet with french
> > wikipedians AND it will probably be the first and
> the last opportunity
> > for the whole year, for the board to meet face to
> face for really low cost.
>
> I have mixed views about this. It is a great
> opportunity for the three
> of us to meet, and probably the only opportunity
> over the following
> year. However, I am not entirely comfortable about
> having to take the
> Foundation's money for it, as Jimbo has suggested I
> do. On the other
> hand, I recognise that starting the year with a real
> life meeting is
> likely to be very beneficial, so if the community
> supported the idea
> that some of the award money (not donor money) could
> pay for this,
> then I would be delighted by that. However, I
> absolutely do not want
> this to happen if it is going to cause a huge
> controversy. People have
> expressed views against board expenses, and so this
> issue needs to be
> treated sensitively. I have no intention of
> upsetting the people who
> so recently voted me into this position.
>
> Anthere wrote:
> > Danny added to possible official positions,
> > the possibility of having an ombudsman.
> > I personally think it is premature right now???
>
> I don't think this is premature at all. I think it
> will ease a lot of
> the concerns surrounding the idea we're about to jet
> off to Florida
> each week. :) Having an outsider monitoring the
> spending within the
> project sounds a very beneficial idea to me.
>
> Angela.

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list: wikien-l

from_name: Viajero

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia QC (and lack thereof)

body:
In the course of categorizing articles on pianists over the weekend, I came upon a large amount of highly POV material inserted across some thirty articles which appears to have been added by a user named Pgeffen in January. Worse, this material appears to a copyright violation; according to a message posted on his Talk page by user Mandel a month ago,  it was lifted from the book "Classical Music" (ed. Alexander Morin) (alas, Mandel did not follow up on his copyvio warning). I have listed the relevant articles on the new [[Wikipedia:Help wanted]], which Danny created in response to a conversation on IRC we had about the situation. This affair IMO is a major lapse in quality control, and is symptomatic of our pursuit of quantity over quality. To use a phrase of Karl Marx from a different context, we are clearly in the phase of  "primitive accumulation", with all its attendant ills.

V.


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Funding for the newly elected Board Members

body:
--- Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> I don't see how this is the case.  They have currently, to my knowledge,
> made next to no contributions as board members, as the board has just
> been constituted within the past week.

And if they cannot attend meetings due to an inability to pay travel expenses,
then they will continue to not make

> As far as making contributions as Wikipedians, that is true of many
> people: certainly at least 100 or so.  And as far as I know, we haven't
> reimbursed any of them, and there aren't any immediate plans to do so.

Volunteering time to create articles is one thing, paying travel expenses for
board members to attend meetings is very different. They are not comparable
and also note that the board members would *not* be paid for their time to
attend the meetings, they would be reimbursed for any direct expenses they paid
to travel to and stay at the meeting site for the duration for the meeting.
They would *still* be volunteers and would *not* be making any profit - just
like the rest of us.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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from_name: Delirium

body:
Andrew Lih wrote:

>PS: And you've certainly entered "rude" territory by belittling Ant
>and Ang's extensive contributions to Wikipedia so flippantly.
>
>
I don't see how this is the case.  They have currently, to my knowledge,
made next to no contributions as board members, as the board has just
been constituted within the past week.

As far as making contributions as Wikipedians, that is true of many
people: certainly at least 100 or so.  And as far as I know, we haven't
reimbursed any of them, and there aren't any immediate plans to do so.

-Mark


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Gabriel Wicke

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Alt-B

references:
<pan.2004.06.08.12.30.14.532128@arvin.dk>
	<ca4qvk$jsu$1@sea.gmane.org> <shu0xlhq8p.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de>
	<1086800687.1588.16.camel@venus> <shsmcr7ve5.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de>
	<shk6y2pqws.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de>

body:
On Sun, 2004-06-20 at 10:36 +0200, Karl Eichwalder wrote:
> Karl Eichwalder <ke at gnu.franken.de> writes:
>
> > Gabriel Wicke <lists at wikidev.net> writes:
> >
> >> To switch them off, drop
> >>
> >> ta = false;
> >>
> >> in your monobook.js.
> >
> > thanks for advise.  Unfortunately, it does not work for me - even after
> > clearing the cache.  Is there a syntax error? :
> >
> > http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:Keichwa/monobook.js
>
> Please, help.  From where can I copy monobook.js that disables these
> shortcut assignments for Mozilla reliably?
>

Works fine for me with Firefox, did you reload after changing monobook.
js?

Gabriel Wicke


body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>Why not just provide direct links to the PayPal accounts of every active
>developer who has contributed x amount of code on the Foundation's fundraising
>page? Kinda like a tip jar. I was planning on asking the developers about this
>soon anyway.
>
>And/or we could also have a separate software development PayPal account that
>we could offer bounties from (the current PayPal account would be for general
>fund expenses - mostly server related). On top of that, we could have a legal
>defense fund account as well.
>
>
I like this approach---let the people giving the money decide where to
spend it.  We could have various funds:
* A server fund
* An advertising fund
* A developer-compensation fund
* A specific-software-feature bounty system
* An administrative expenses overhead fund (office space, travel, etc.)
* A print-version-expenses fund

This would be a lot better, IMO, than going the normal route of
non-profits and having a gigantic slush fund, which is both less
transparent and engenders less donator confidence, especially given that
over time a larger and larger percentage of the money in such slush
funds tends to be siphoned off to things less and less directly related
to the actual mission of the nonprofit.  I know I personally don't
donate to most non-profits, and advise others not to donate to them,
because I know they eat a huge percentage of their budgets (often over
30%) in paying themselves salaries, plane tickets, restaurant meals, and
so on.  Documented transparent donations are another matter altogether:
if people can donate $50 to a server fund, and be sure it will be used
to buy servers rather than someone's lunch, that's much less shady.

In the limited cases we've tried it, this seems to have worked out
pretty well.  If the Foundation had given Brion money to buy a notebook,
that would've been a little bit questionable.  It would've been
defensible, given his enormous contributions to the coding and
sysadminning and so on, but it still would've been questionable. But
since instead people decided separately if they wanted to give their
personal money to Brion to buy a notebook, then there's really no
controversy, and everything is completely transparent and above-board.

-Mark


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: ruimu uestc

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Categories considered harmful

body:
From: "Delirium" <delirium at hackish.org>

> I do think ad-hoc categorization is going to end up mostly useless.
> Either it's going to end up hierarchical, but with a rather
> idiosyncratic and arbitrary hierarchy, or it's going to be very
> inclusive and overlapping, with most articles fitting under a large
> number of categories.  Nearly all medical articles can go under
> [[Category:Alternative medicine]] as well, for example; [[The Bible]]
> can go under about a million categories relating to Christian sects, or
> even non-Christian religions, sects, groups, cults, and all manner of
> other organizations that have something to say about the Bible; etc.

I don't know but some simple rules could help to avoid too many categories,
like avoiding grand-parent and cousinage, when possible (ie if [[The Bible]]
links to Religious Texts, it shouldn't link to Texts nor to Mythical Texts)

The problem of hierarchy and thesaurus (or ontology) is that structuring the
world is always "ruling" it in a way. If you place Religion under Culture
under Human, you affirm that God is invented by human beings, in a way.
That's why categorising is easily going againt NPOV. But any list or "see
also" links can share the same problems. This "structuring is ruling" (or
"describing is deciding") problem is only more precisely uncovered with
categories (compared to other projects or lists), thus the problem is easier
to adress with them.

Imho categories are also usefull for technical and usability reasons:

a) If I click on a "see also" link, I may get lost because I'm not shure to
find a backward link on next page, and I may forget (after few jumps) where
I was starting from. Nothing is more annoying that having found somewhere an
info and not being able to find it again (that why I often open linked page
in blank explorers). jumping from branches to branches is easier than
swimming in a marsh, even if the tree (not a real one indeed, more like a
nest) cannot be proved to have the best shape.

b) As already said, categories can be helpfull to watch a subject one like.
I never used "related changes" to [[List of China-related topics]], wich is
now split in two parts, because there are too many articles there. I would
watch category Chinese Thought, because it is a lot narrower and is my
prefered topic.

c) Categories tools can be developed to go slowly to something more or less
like those beautiful project boxes, but with the standardisation that will
ensure usability.

d) ...

(gbog)


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] missing default user prefs?

body:
Tony wrote:
> OK, I give up. I can't figure out where some of  the default user preferences are hidden.
>
> Quite a few options have explicit default values (set in Language.php). These are: quickbar, underline, hover, cols, rows,
> searchlimit, contextlines, contextchars, skin, math, rcdays, rclimit, highlightbroken, stubthreshold, previewontop, editsection,
> editsectiononrightclick, showtoc, showtoolbar, and date.
>
> But where do you set the initial default values for show/hide minor edits in RC? I think there are some others missing there too.

Same place. If there's not a listed default it defaults to 0.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Categories in 1.3beta

body:
tic at tictric.net wrote:
> A page Albert_Einstein gets categorised as
> [[Category:Albert_Einstein|Einstein, Albert]] and shows up as E
> Albert_Einstein where it shoud be E Einstein, Albert.
> That's weird.

It always shows the actual title. The sort key isn't necessarily very
legible; it may be numeric, encoded, or otherwise funky to force a
certain sort mechanism.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Yann Forget

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: International Wikimedia structure

body:
Hi all,

First thanks Anthere for your input on this.

Le Monday 21 June 2004 13:02, Anthere a ?crit :
>
> akl : * There should be as clear as possible a separation between projects
> and chapters because all projects are international and should remain
> widely self-determined.
>
> ant : I agree. Chapters are here essentially for legal practicability. If
> this was not true, the current chapters would not be currently created in
> those two countries where some of the major wikipedia languages are spoken
> :-) But legal limits are national, not per language.
>
> akl : * Chapters should not primarily spend their money for projects in a
> certain language but on all projects, as far as legally possible.
>
> ant : I also agree. For two reasons. First we share a lot in common and we
> all have to participate to fund this common asset. If a local chapter
> raises money using the name of Wikimedia, then it should also participate
> the global Wikimedia operating costs. Not *only* on meeting cakes and
> promotional tee-shirts. Since money was raised in using the Wikimedia name,
> it also should help those places who do not have money income, so as to
> help distribution of knowledge in other places.

I agree that, for example, money raise in France should be used to help the
project as a whole.

> Incidently, in most poor nations, several languages are used, so it will
> make sense to publish in more than 1 language. Still, I doubt these
> countries will have chapters on their own before a long time. This is a
> global project. Do we want to help information get there ?
>
> akl * There should be no sub-chapters on national level (i.e. Wikimedia
> Austria as a sub-chapter of Wikimedia Germany). Each national chapter
> should be directly assigned to the Foundation. Exceptions could be
> meaningful for regional chapters, which could be subordinated to the
> national chapters.

First I think that it is the local people who should decide how they will be
assigned to the foundation. I can imagine that, at some later date, some
people from Arkansas, or Scotland, or Auvergne, or Baden-W?rttemberg, or ...,
would like to create an organisation to promote Wikimedia projects to their
local school / library / whatever, and it should be their decision to do so
or not.

> Ant : I very strongly agree. Which is why I would be deeply unhappy that we
> call our local chapter "francophone". This is an attempt of fairness that
> is uncalled for. I know that some people support this, because they want to
> make it clear that the french chapter will not help France only. I think
> this is perfectly obvious that we should try to be more global in our
> participation.

I see a contradiction here. It's especially *because* this chapter is not for
France only that it should be called "francophone", and not Wikimedia France.
There are already people from Belgium and Switzerland who want to work within
this chapter. And they rightfully object that this chapter is called
Wikimedia France. Which doesn't mean that, at a later date, people from
Switzerland or Belgium, could not create a local chapter in those places.
Then these local chapters will have to decide how they want to be assigned to
the foundation.

> However, calling us francophone is bad. The next chapter in a french
> speaking country will likely be called by the country name, and I sure hope
> that it will not be submitted to the french chapter. We all wish here for
> equality, and I really see not why France will be once again, declared the
> official center of Francophonie. Wikimedia France has the merit of being
> descriptive.
>
> It seems to me that any other name is bringing confusion.

I think we have the same objectives. But Wikimedia France is not an adequate
name, because, for the forseable future, this chapter will not be acting only
in France.

Best wishes,
Yann
--
http://www.non-violence.org/ | Site collaboratif sur la non-violence
http://www.forget-me.net/ | Alternatives sur le Net
http://fr.wikipedia.org/ | Encyclop?die libre
http://www.forget-me.net/pro/ | Formations et services Linux


from_name: Erik Zachte

body:
Anthere wrote
"though I tried to suggest a couple of journalists to connect to irc or only
use emails, I really do not understand why they strongly insist on phone
meeting or better, face to face meetings"

I suppose journalists then meet you at a place that is convenient for you.
They are used to travel and send the bill to their employer.

Perhaps you just ment it to be an example of how external relations have
their own dynamics.

Anthere wrote
"Jimbo made the great suggestion that Angela meet us there [Paris] as well.
It will allow her to meet with french
wikipedians AND it will probably be the first and the last opportunity for
the whole year, for the board to meet face to face for really low cost."

Does 'the board' now mean the three active members by default :) ?

In my own experience communicating only through (e)mail about sensitive
affairs is a risky business. People easily  misinterpretate the message.
Emoticons are a meagre tool for building interpersonal relations. Correcting
misunderstandings takes time, if they are recognized as such at all. It is
quite possible that the board will have to discuss sensitive matters
sometime or another. So to me paying Angelas' trip to Paris is worthwile.

I believe it is indeed customary for volunteer organisations to cover
expenses. I also believe lots of wellfare organisations have a sliding scale
over time for what is appropriate in this matter. In the Netherlands there
was a huge uproar recently when the media disclosed that the president of
the Dutch Heart Disease foundation earned more than our prime minister
(volunteers for the organisation went on strike). I'm not a bit afraid
things will turn in this direction at all, it is just an extreme example
that makes a nice story, but there are many examples of wellfare orgs with
large overhead costs and it makes peoples discomfort with a blank check
understandable.

So maybe we could agree on a budget for representational costs. I'm sure if
people can visit a page where board members log activities like external
contacts and results together with major expenses (not every phone call),
trust that this is money well spent will build. By the way other wikipedians
may engage in similar activities, Erik Moeller already has a semi official
role that comes close to this. How do we deal with that?

Maybe we should continue the discussion on meta where a vote could be held,
first on Angelas trip then on the wider issues.

Summing up, I think covering expenses to let the board do a good job is only
fair.

Erik Zachte


from_name: Rick

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia in the news -- the China ban

body:
http://www.chinatechnews.com/index.php?action=show&type=news&id=1350

RickK

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from_name: Simonides of Ceos

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Restructuring, renaming,
	creating and removing Wikiprojects

body:
Charles Matthews wrote:
Does it work that way? My experience is that WikiProjects typically have a
stated aim of 'standardising' how articles are written; which sounds good to
some people but is never enforceable and can be too prescriptive.
Categories can be added by individuals acting alone. Where there are
already lists of articles by topics, adding categories is relatively
straightforward. The creation of such lists really ought to devolve to
relevant WikiProjects; but that doesn't see to be how it pans out in
practice.

Charles, if that is not the way they have worked so far, my suggestion - of using Wikiprojects to smooth out categories and make people interested in a specific topic work together - is what I would like implemented from now on, at least in the Wikiprojects I am interested in. Adding Categories at random makes things immensely confusing, as I have discovered in the past couple of days - I can't even create an index of writers without running into scattered lists that overlap in some places and are very incomplete in others, and are not the same as identically labelled lists elsewhere (ex. List of French authors does not correspond to the list of French writers on the French personalities page.) A minimal standardisation - ex. the formatting of an article into Bio, Works, Bibliography, External Links, Categories - makes perfect sense, and I don't believe that is too prescriptive - it's not much of an imposition on actual content.

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subject:
[Wikitech-l] Planned hardware expenses for the next 6 month,
	coda testing, software bottlenecks

body:
On Mon, 2004-06-21 at 11:25 +0200, Jens Frank wrote:
> Anthere asked how much money we need to run the system
> for the rest of the year, so we took a look at the
> servers we have and at the growth we have seen over the
> last years.
>
> The results can be seen at
> http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_provisional_budget
>
> and I invite eveyone to have a look at it and provide comments.

I've added my opinion that the NFS-related problems are really a
software problem, similar with the missing MySQL load balancing. The
more money&hardware the better of course, but there are situations where
the hardware-only approach simply fails or hits a hard wall. I think
we're in such a situation.

This doesn't mean that i think we don't need money, but the decision on
what to spend it on is a hard one with such a complex system. At some
stage bounties for specific important software development tasks might
buy more performance than heaps of hardware waiting for better software.

My Coda tests went very well so far. I've moved about 70% of my home dir
to Coda for testing. I plan to do some wiki stress testing locally next,
if that goes well i'd like to run test.wikipedia.org from coda next (the
server is set up already on zwinger).

Gabriel Wicke


from_name: Jens Frank

subject: [Wikitech-l] Update of current DB replication plans

body:
Hi,

During the last few days, MySQL database replication has
been activated between suda and ariel. suda is master,
ariel is slave. To do this, a downtime of suda was needed.

If there are writes to a MySQL slave, the replication will
break. In that case the replication has to be set up again
from scratch.

To avoid downtime in that case, we're currently setting up
a second slave. This slave is not going to be used for
any queries. If the first slave fails, a copy of the
second slave can be made without taking down the master.

The latest database dump has been generated from ariel,
without any problems. During the copying of the data files
from suda to ariel, ariel served an old DB copy, without
any problems.

The second slave will be set up on zwinger and will most
likely only replicate once per day in off-peak hours.
To have enough disk space available, log files are
currently being moved to yongle and yongle will be
used to compute access statistics from the squid logs.

As soon as the second slave is working, ariel will be
used for service.

Regards,

JeLuF


from_name: tic at tictric.net

subject: [Wikitech-l] Categories in 1.3beta

body:
I see that when I categorise a page "Foo" with, say [[Category:Test]] it
will create a category page Categories:Test with an entry T Test.

If I do it like [[Category:Test|Bar]] I'll get an entry like B Test.
That's irritating.

Couldn't it be done that it shows the modified search. Like B Bar.
That example might not be a very good one but it is more clear when we use
Albert_Einstein like on meta.

A page Albert_Einstein gets categorised as
[[Category:Albert_Einstein|Einstein, Albert]] and shows up as E
Albert_Einstein where it shoud be E Einstein, Albert.
That's weird.

Cheers
Manfred


subject: [Wikitech-l] Categories in 1.3beta

body:
> I see that when I categorise a page "Foo" with, say [[Category:Test]] it
> will create a category page Categories:Test with an entry T Test.

	Of course that entry will be F Foo on page Category:Test

> If I do it like [[Category:Test|Bar]] I'll get an entry like B Test.

	And this will accordingly be B Foo

> That's irritating.
>
> Couldn't it be done that it shows the modified search. Like B Bar.
> That example might not be a very good one but it is more clear when we
> use Albert_Einstein like on meta.
>
> A page Albert_Einstein gets categorised as
> [[Category:Albert_Einstein|Einstein, Albert]] and shows up as E
> Albert_Einstein where it shoud be E Einstein, Albert.
> That's weird.

I hope there's not more errors in that post :)


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Charles Matthews wrote:

>Simonides of Ceos wrote
>
>
>>I believe Wikiprojects are a good way of dealing with or smoothing out
>>
>>
>categories, and providing context where it may not exist or may not be
>substantial. A sizeable number of people with similar interests, working
>together on a large Wikiproject, would easily be able to agree on, create
>and link necessary categories to each other; errors are also less likely.
>Criticism is welcome. Please also join in the effort to write up, modify and
>expand some of the Wikiprojects I have created.
>Thanks!
>
>Does it work that way?  My experience is that WikiProjects typically have a
>stated aim of 'standardising' how articles are written; which sounds good to
>some people but is never enforceable and can be too prescriptive.
>Categories can be added by individuals acting alone.  Where there are
>already lists of articles by topics, adding categories is relatively
>straightforward.  The creation of such lists really ought to devolve to
>relevant WikiProjects; but that doesn't seem to be how it pans out in
>practice.
>
>
I agree that there is a standardizing aim that is an essential part of
the WikiProjects,  and that's just fine.  I welcome the efforts to give
some depth to the study of what links some topic.  We get into trouble
when the standardizers begin to see their guidlines as implicit rules,
or their descriptions as implicit prescriptions.

It makes some of us cringe, but at this stage categorization is a
chaotic process, and that's good.  If someone's categorization proposal
is a good one, others will eventually begin to use it; there is no need
to enforce it.  What doesn't work will die from disuse.

Ec


body:
Anthere, can you copy your answers to <wikifr-l at wikipedia.org> ?
I think that it's interesting for the French speaking people who didn't
subscribe to the <foundation-l at wikimedia.org> list.

Le Monday 21 June 2004 14:22, Anthere a ?crit :
> Sorry, but to my opinion, the contradiction is precisely on your side.
> I know that I am a minority on this issue, but I would like to say that I
> think this name is probably one of the reason why we are *right now*
> confused on the role of the association.
>
> When I say it should be called Wikim?dia France, I use a fact. I give a
> descriptive name. The description of its legal localisation, and there is
> no objection to say that it will be legally created in France. It is a
> fact, it is a *certainty*. It is not pov :-) It is a reality. Hence, the
> name does not hold contradiction with the description of the association
> itself. It will be *an association created under the french law*.
>
> On the other hand, you object that we should call it Wikimedia Francophone,
> because *in the foreseable future, it will not be acting in France only*.
>
> I agree. Well, I hope it is so. I am not sure it will happen. This is not a
> fact, this is a wish. Perhaps it will come true, perhaps not. It is the
> future, and it is just a wish, nothing else. But I hope it will happen. I
> do not know exactly why, but I think that canadians will be disappointed
> though. Just a feeling :-)
>
> Second, if I perfectly agree it should not be acting in France only, this
> name you are trying to impose also implies it will *primarily* act to
> promote the project in french-speaking countries only. It is not a name
> based on fact, it is a name that holds a very strong connotation. It openly
> says it "the goal of this association is to help french speaking projects".
> And you actually say it yourself, it is to help promoting french language
> and set a miror or working server in France. In short, it is openly
> dissociating itself from the global project. It is openly supporting only
> part of the project. Not the project globally.

In fact, this chapter will be active in French speaking countries only.
I don't think it will be used to promote the project or raise money elsewhere.
So "francophone" just explains where the chapter will be active.

But if the chapter is used to promote regional languages as well, so why not
called it just "association WIkim?dia"?
I don't think it will be confused with the foundation.

> This is why Wikimedia francophone is not an adequate name to my opinion.
> And this is precisely why we are currently all realising we *do not* have
> the same perception of what should be the association and which roles it
> should have.
>
> And I want to insist that I really do not want to exclude non french people
> here. Some of my favorite french-speaking are not french :-) And they will
> be very precious in the french association :-) I think the french
> association is just part of the global scheme, and it is obvious nearby
> countries will be served till they have an association on their own and
> people from all nationalities are welcome to help. I am sorry Yann, but I
> just think you are trying to make it appear more political than it should
> be. And I won't support that with happiness. Just my opinion.

Yann

--
http://www.non-violence.org/ | Site collaboratif sur la non-violence
http://www.forget-me.net/ | Alternatives sur le Net
http://fr.wikipedia.org/ | Encyclop?die libre
http://www.forget-me.net/pro/ | Formations et services Linux


from_name: Ashar Voultoiz

subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikimedia servers network proposal

body:
Hello,

I invite you to have a look at my little network proposal on meta:

http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers_network_proposal

--
Ashar Voultoiz


body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>Volunteering time to create articles is one thing, paying travel expenses for
>board members to attend meetings is very different. They are not comparable
>and also note that the board members would *not* be paid for their time to
>attend the meetings, they would be reimbursed for any direct expenses they paid
>to travel to and stay at the meeting site for the duration for the meeting.
>They would *still* be volunteers and would *not* be making any profit - just
>like the rest of us.
>
>
I don't see it as very different.  Many Wikipedians have spent their
personal money in contributing to quality articles, including buying
out-of-copyright books from eBay in order to scan in images, to name
just one example.  We don't have plans to reimburse people for this expense.

Besides, if we *were* going to start reimbursing people, Jimbo would be
the obvious person to start with.  I think of the five trustees, he has
by far incurred the most personal expenses as a result of this project.
The next-most of the five board members would probably be the other two
initially-appointed board members, who I believe are co-owners of Bomis,
which has incurred significant expenses in the running of Wikipedia (and
continues to not be reimbursed by the Foundation for the cost of its
bandwidth).

There are plenty of things that would be nice, but none of which I think
the Foundation's money should go to.  For example, developers may well
be able to coordinate faster if they all flew to one location for a
weekend to draw up plans in person, and then flew to the colocation
facility to set up new machines in person rather than relying on ssh and
occasional phone calls for someone to reboot the machine locally.  But
they get by without this luxury.

-Mark


from_name: Timwi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: UTF-8 on English Wikipedia?

body:
Med?ric Boquien wrote:

> We have already converted the french wiki to utf-8. Except some strange
> characters which didn't belong to latin-1 (typically windows code page
> characters), we didn't have have problems as far as i remember.

This is why you should have listened to me when I said "*DON'T* convert
from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8. Convert from Windows-1252 to UTF-8!" because I
foresaw that problem.

Timwi


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Setting up for the Greek language

references:
<40CD966B.70105@cs.ucy.ac.cy>	<40CFECA5.4000702@cs.ucy.ac.cy>	<cb6vr0$vff$2@sea.gmane.org>	<40D70F19.3080409@hackish.org>
	<cb7jtj$gnn$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
Timwi wrote:

> Delirium wrote:
>
>> Timwi wrote:
>>
>>> You should probably give us more information on how Greek month
>>> names work. You have only told us what does *not* work. I might be
>>> able to come up with a technical solution if you explain to me what
>>> morphological properties of Greek need to be satisfied in the month
>>> names.
>>
>>
>> There may be cases I'm not covering, but for the one I can
>> immediately see in the interface, the issue is that "day month" type
>> dates use the possessive form of the month name, while month names
>> used by themselves use a simple noun form.
>
> [... etc. ...  'Maios' vs. '5h Maiou']
>
> Ah-ha. I kind of thought so. So why don't you just do this:
>
> - Set the month name to "Maio"
> - In a sentence like "{{MONTHNAME}} is nice", write "{{MONTHNAME}}s
> estis bioutiphulos"
> - Set the date format to "{{DAY}} {{MONTHNAME}}u {{YEAR}}"
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

Well, unfortunately one part I had left out were the accents, which
shift when the word becomes possessive.  To take the example from
Andreas's email, the simple noun form of June is "Io?nios", whereas the
possessive form is "Ioun?ou".  So it would really need a separate
{{MONTHNAMEPOSSESSIVE}} or something of that sort.

-Mark


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Categories in 1.3beta

references:
<opr9x2gpabv3cvyb@hause.local>
	<40D741BF.6010507@pobox.com>	<cb7kdj$hfa$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<20040621214913.GA23811@wroclaw.taw.pl.eu.org>

body:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

>There's nothing wrong with displaying grammatically correct "Albert Einstein",
>even when its ordered by family name.
>
> "Einstein, Albert" is ugly - it looks like a paper encyclopedia.

Some people may very well consider "Einstein, Albert" to be ugly, but
it's not grammatically incorrect.  There are languages (like Hungarian)
where it's considered normal.

Ec


body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> Nikola Smolenski wrote:
>
>> Quick, dirty, and it seems to work. I know that buffering is slow, but
>> this would only be a temporary solution. When hairs on your head
>> settle down, let's talk about it  :)
>
> That won't work, as you have to be able to link from one page to
> another. Title management, pulling things from the database, and case
> folding are all dependent on the character set, long before we output
> anything.

If I understood him right, his suggestion was to take the server down
briefly to convert everything but 'old' to UTF-8 atomically. In
particular, this would convert 'cur', and we can use UTF-8 for
everything including title management and case folding.

The only thing that will happen is that the history of all pages whose
title contains non-ASCII characters, will disappear. I don't think
that's too much of a problem; for as long as it's inaccessible, nobody
can temper with it, and its inaccessibility will not impede editing the
most recent versions; and we can convert the 'old' portion of those
pages first so their history comes back as soon as possible. Then
convert the rest and we're set. I think this is better than taking the
server down for several days to convert everything.

Timwi


body:
Andreas Kasenides wrote:

> Now that the months have been translated and put in place I realized
> that for Greek things are not really so simple!! I am sure other languages
> have the same problems (Spanish?). The problem is that most words
> in Greek take a different ending depending on the person that is being
> referred to or talking. [...]
> Can somebody offer a suggestion?

You should probably give us more information on how Greek month names
work. You have only told us what does *not* work. I might be able to
come up with a technical solution if you explain to me what
morphological properties of Greek need to be satisfied in the month names.

Greetings,
Timwi


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: update record

body:
Tim Starling wrote:

> Timwi wrote:
>
>> Jens Frank wrote:
>>
>>> On Tue, Jun 15, 2004 at 09:19:20AM +0200, Gerard.Meijssen wrote:
>>>
>>>> LS, I have been trying for two days to change one record in
>>>> nl:wiktionary. the article is [[Sjabloon:-noun-]]
>>>
>>> When saving a template, all pages using the template are "touched" so
>>> that they
>>> will be updated the next time they are rendered. Having zillions of
>>> pages using
>>> that template, this takes a long time. Probably too long.
>>
>> Did whoever came up with that think about the performance
>> implications? o.O
>
> Of course I did. In MediaWiki 1.2 I deliberately avoided this kind of
> cache purging, for performance reasons.

Jens Frank was talking about "touching". This sounded like a database
query to me. Now you are terming it "cache purging", which I'm not sure
what it is, but if it were referring to memcached, it would not require
a database query.

I suppose I definitely need to know more about this. Where is the
"parser cache" -- is that in memcached or elsewhere? What does
"touching" a page mean -- does it involve a database query? Can cache
purging be done without a database query? If not, can the cache
mechanism be changed (perhaps to use memcached) so database queries can
be avoided when all you want to do is invalidate a cache entry?

Timwi


from_name: Andrew Lih

body:
I propose Wikimedia Founcation fund travel for this first convening of
Jimbo and the newly elected trustees Anthere and Angela.  As Ant said,
it is rare to have folks in such local proximity, and this is a cost
effective way to take advantage of it.

It is standard for Trustees to be compensated for travel to convene
Board meetings, and this would be exactly that.  This should not be
construed to endorse the other things discussed recently, such as
phone calls, broadband, etc. That should be decided with full careful
discussion.

However, having served on boards of other US-based nonprofits, paying
expenses for convening Board of Trustees is a normal practice.  I hope
it can be agreed upon rather quickly that laying out this expense of
less than 400 euros is money well spent.

-Andrew Lih (User:Fuzheado)


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Unauthorised? You can edit this page! Re: on
	complainingto ISPs

body:
Timwi wrote:

> KNOTT, T wrote:
>
>>> I think for this to have very much credability, you
>>> would have to remove the 'You Can Edit This Page'
>>> notice.
>>> Mark
>>
>> I don't see why - people are authorized to edit, but they are not
>> authorized to vandalise.
>
>
> Yeah, exactly. Just because you are allowed to walk into a restaurant,
> and even eat food on their tables, doesn't mean you can bring an axe
> and take the table apart.
>
> So, just because you are allowed to edit our pages, doesn't mean you
> can run a bot to vandalise them en masse.

Restaurants don't need to put a sign on the door to tell people not to
bring axes in.  The axe vandal is fortunately rare.  Salt in the sugar
shaker and gum stuck under the table is more common.

Ec


from_name: Stan Shebs

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Categories considered harmful

body:
Timwi wrote:

> K Forstner wrote:
>
>> I agree wholeheartedly with what Jakob says (although it seems many
>> people
>> don't like the idea of someone rejecting their new toy). Maybe
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Writers ,
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Melbourne_trams or
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Viennese_composers can serve as
>> eye-openers: In each case, the "category" itself is rather pointless,
>> and
>> the entries are dubious. What is more, no one seems to be discussing
>> this
>> anywhere.
>
>
> How old is the category feature? About a few months?

Heh, I think it's just three weeks old as of today. As features go,
categories have been adopted remarkably rapidly - just compare
tables and images, most of which are still in the old formats.

Stan


body:
Stan Shebs wrote:

> Timwi wrote:
>
>> K Forstner wrote:
>>
>>> I agree wholeheartedly with what Jakob says (although it seems many
>>> people
>>> don't like the idea of someone rejecting their new toy). Maybe
>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Writers ,
>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Melbourne_trams or
>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Viennese_composers can serve as
>>> eye-openers: In each case, the "category" itself is rather
>>> pointless, and
>>> the entries are dubious. What is more, no one seems to be discussing
>>> this
>>> anywhere.
>>
>> How old is the category feature? About a few months?
>
>
> Heh, I think it's just three weeks old as of today. As features go,
> categories have been adopted remarkably rapidly - just compare
> tables and images, most of which are still in the old formats.

For sure!  Considering that the debate about whether or not to have
categories lasted for a year.  During that time there was very little in
that discussion about how the categories would be chosen.  So even if
many of these categories are different from the ones that I would use,
the system as a whole is on track.

Ec


from_name: epzachte at chello.nl

body:
Delirium wrote:

"I'd propose the first thing we do with a spare 400 euro is identify four important
software changes that need to be made, and put bounties on 100 euro on each of them."

Doiny any serious programming for $100 is almost equivalent to doing it for free. What incentive would that be?

If we would pay serious money for any software activity our current cash reserves would be gone in no time.
At the moment developers are rewarded with an occasional 'thank you'. Singling out tasks that are important
enough to pay a token sum, would only muddy the waters.

Erik Zachte


from_name: Jim Laurino

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Categories in 1.3beta (wican: addressed to
	exclusive sender for this address)

in_reply_to:
<cb7kdj$hfa$1@sea.gmane.org> (from
	+wican+jimlaur+c42c20c958.timwi#gmx.net@spamgourmet.com on Mon,
	Jun 21, 2004 at 17:36:39 -0400)

references:
<opr9x2gpabv3cvyb@hause.local> <40D741BF.6010507@pobox.com>
	<cb7kdj$hfa$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
On 2004.06.21 17:36, Timwi  - timwi at gmx.net wrote:
> Brion Vibber wrote:
>
>> tic at tictric.net wrote:
>>
>>> A page Albert_Einstein gets categorised as  [[Category:
>>> Albert_Einstein|Einstein, Albert]] and shows up as E
>>> Albert_Einstein where it shoud be E Einstein, Albert.
>>> That's weird.
>>
>> It always shows the actual title.
>
> I think the point in his posting was to say that it
> *should not* always show the actual title, and I agree
> with him. We shouldn't have "Albert Einstein" under E, we
> should have "Einstein, Albert".
>
> I always thought this was going to be done, and I
> actually thought that the fact that it used the string
> only as a sort key but not for display, was a bug.
> Personally, I think it should be "fixed". :-)
>
Brion went on to say:

"The sort key isn't necessarily very legible;
it may be numeric, encoded, or otherwise funky
to force a certain sort mechanism."

I just wanted to add that I, for one, was expecting
to use odd sort keys exactly for this reason, and I
am very glad that this mechanism is available.
I think it is unfortunate, in a way, that you can
not ask to see them, but I am sure that, in my case,
it is better if they are not visible by default.

Jim


subject: [Foundation-l] Jimbo on Chinese Wikipedia block/unblock

body:
Great quotes by Jimbo on the Chinese Wikipedia unavailability.
http://www.chinatechnews.com/index.php?action=show&type=news&id=1350

-Andrew Lih (User:Fuzheado)


from_name: Geoff Burling

subject: [WikiEN-l] Numeric standards considered harmful?

body:
On Sun, 20 Jun 2004, Fennec Foxen wrote:

> This was sparked by a conversation in IRC.
>
> Would you consider numeric standards harmful- particularly those
> regarding Requests for Adminship? I know there is someone (who may
> identify himself if he feels like it, and whom several people already
> know about) who places blanket opposition (no Neutral votes, a full
> Oppose) on any candidate for sysophood unless the candidate has 3,500
> edits and has been here... two months, was it? But anyway...
>
> First of all, with this specific edit count, I'd be interested in how
> many of our current sysops meet that threshold.

3,500 edits in 2 months? That works out to something in excess of 50 edits
a *DAY*! (Even if that was spread over 3 months, it still requires an
average of just under 40 edits a day.) Speaking as someone who is in the
top 100 contributors, there is no way I could manage that kind of output!
(And I'm accessing Wikipedia by means of dialup; I understand that even
now, in the 21st century, we're still the majority in the Developed
World.)

On the other hand, I do think that there needs to be some minimum "numeric
standards" for sysophood. I'd say 2-3 months, & 350-360 non-minor edits.
This works out to an average of 4 to 5 edits a day (which is what I was
maintaining when I started over 18 months ago), & requires a candidate to
spend some time poking into the dark corners of Wikipedia & getting to know
the personalities of the folks here: some very good folks have bad days,
& the even the most disliked contributors occasionally have a valid point
to make (if for no other reason than even a blind sow can find an occasional
acorn).

> I know that I don't,
> and a *large* amount of my contributions have been stuff which I
> really wouldn't be involved in if I were not a sysop- the stuff which
> comes up on a patrol of Recent Changes (which is hardly as profitable
> an activity without a Rollback link and a button to delete nonsense,
> AND the ability to back up the you-might-be-banned notice dropped on
> user pages). I certainly would not have done a fraction of that
> quantity of work if I were a regular user.
>
> Even without this specific number, such standards may also be
> inconsistent- a user with an inflated edit-count due to countless
> corrections or user page adjustments is rewarded under this system,
> where a serious and careful user may suffer. This is the exact
> opposite of what is optimal.
>
Well, hopefully the folks voting will notice such things. While I haven't
cast many votes in sysop elections, I do look at the Recent Changes page,
& any person who is self-nominated & claims 3,500 edits in 2 months that
I haven't heard of will have her/his contributions inspected -- although
not as closely as people with high-speed connections. ;-)

[snip]
>
> I speak here only of sysophood standards. Are there other strict
> numeric standards which would be subject to effects which are similar?

I'd favor a minimum of votes to make someone a sysop -- say 2% of the
total number of active contributors (however that could be calculated).
I say that knowing that I was granted sysophood with only 3 votes once
upon a time, & probably only because (IIRC) Mav spoke up for me. Being a
sysop requires some minimum number of references/votes of confidence.

Geoff


from_name: Claudio V

subject: [Wikitech-l] Concatenation of Image and old English table files

body:
When I open the test.tar with WinRar it says that
there is a certain amount of files which is equivalent
to opening 20040609_upload.tar.aa.tar by itself.  In
other words, I could open 20040609_upload.tar.aa or
test.tar and I would get the same output.

Another particular problem is that while logged in
Knoppix I cannot do "cat xaa xab xac xad xae >
somefile.bz2" because it will return an error.  I have
found that I could concatenate these files using a
little program called "ConCat" with Windows XP but if
I try to decompress it fails as if the file is
corrupted.

Claudio

--- Jens Frank <JeLuF at gmx.de> wrote: > On Mon, Jun 21,
2004 at 11:02:09AM -0400, Claudio V
>
> What does "does not contain any part of the second
> file"
> mean? How did you check this? What happens if you
> untar
> test.tar?
>
> JeLuF

______________________________________________________________________
Post your free ad now! http://personals.yahoo.ca


from_name: Karl Eichwalder

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Categories considered harmful

in_reply_to:
<tnpcd0pjum4l8ke8li12aqik2umeospgqq@4ax.com> (Philip Newton's
	message of "Mon, 21 Jun 2004 06:43:01 +0200")

references:
<1087676769.40d4a161d46f5@mail.tu-chemnitz.de>
	<1087676769.40d4a161d46f5-7187ArNAsRfQTwObEM2FzhvVK+yQ3ZXh@public.gmane.org>
	<20040619212239.GB7581@thingy.apana.org.au>
	<c89ad09kog6sdlm7v930fl867inuebpkr7@4ax.com>
	<c89ad09kog6sdlm7v930fl867inuebpkr7-e09XROE/p8c@public.gmane.org>
	<shoenepwdc.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de>
	<tnpcd0pjum4l8ke8li12aqik2umeospgqq@4ax.com>

body:
Philip Newton <Philip.Newton at gmx.net> writes:

> (Or were you referring to the edits where someone adds a category to an
> article you were watching?

Yes, that's it.

> In that case, yes, I also find it mildly annoying, though I believe
> the volume of those will die down once things settle down somewhat.)

Hopefully - but these Germans a pretty ambitious ;)

--
                                                         |      ,__o
                                                         |    _-\_<,
http://www.gnu.franken.de/ke/                            |   (*)/'(*)


from_name: Viktor Rosenfeld

subject: [Wikitech-l] texvc doesn't work

body:
Hi,

Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

> Try absolute paths. Because latex is extremely stupid and tries
> to create files in *current* directory, texvc has to switch current directory
> to tmp and then switch back. It seems to be passing full path to latex
> after that, what works with absolute paths but doesn't with relative ones
> (that's probably bug in texvc, it should pass filename without dirname to latex
> and filenames with dirname to everything else)

Okay, no I tried

	$ ./texvc `pwd`/tmp `pwd`/out 'x \not\in \Sigma' iso-8859-1

The results are somewhat odd.  I only get output in tmp, when I do this
within strace.  Then I get a tex, aux, log, and a dvi file.  So it
appears, that the LaTeX call succeeds, but then nothing happens.  There
is still nothing in out.

Still stuck,
Viktor
--
GnuPG-Fingerprint: E292 4D89 A5F1 16EC 2795  35AC 9162 34E8 2331 4340
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from_name: Brion Vibber

body:
Delirium wrote:
> You can also concatenate files from a command line in Windows (go to
> start->run and enter "cmd" to get there) by doing:
> copy xaa+xab+xac+xad+xae somefile.bz2

You probably need to use the /b flag to copy.

> (I'm not sure what utilities on Windows can decompress bzip2 files though.)

bzip2 works nicely. Google it up to find the main site, there's a win32
.exe. Or get cygwin for a full suite of Unix tools, and do:
   cat xa? | bzip2 -dc > big_darn_file.sql

This is of course assuming the files are downloaded correctly, aren't
corrupt, and were right to begin with.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

subject: [Wikitech-l] texvc doesn't work

body:
On Mon, Jun 21, 2004 at 07:47:36PM +0200, Viktor Rosenfeld wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
>
> > Try absolute paths. Because latex is extremely stupid and tries
> > to create files in *current* directory, texvc has to switch current directory
> > to tmp and then switch back. It seems to be passing full path to latex
> > after that, what works with absolute paths but doesn't with relative ones
> > (that's probably bug in texvc, it should pass filename without dirname to latex
> > and filenames with dirname to everything else)
>
> Okay, no I tried
>
> 	$ ./texvc `pwd`/tmp `pwd`/out 'x \not\in \Sigma' iso-8859-1
>
> The results are somewhat odd.  I only get output in tmp, when I do this
> within strace.  Then I get a tex, aux, log, and a dvi file.  So it
> appears, that the LaTeX call succeeds, but then nothing happens.  There
> is still nothing in out.

I checked it some more. This is a bug in either new ImageMagick or new GhostScript.
It doesn't like arguments from command line any more.

I attach render.ml that fixes both problems - it runs dvips and convert
separately (producing one more temporary file), and works correctly with
relative paths. - just drop this file into math/ and run make.

I'll commit it to CVS too.
-------------- next part --------------
let cmd_dvips tmpprefix = "dvips -R -E " ^ tmpprefix ^ ".dvi -f >" ^ tmpprefix ^ ".ps"
let cmd_latex tmpprefix = "latex " ^ tmpprefix ^ ".tex >/dev/null"
let cmd_convert tmpprefix finalpath = "convert -quality 100 -density 120 " ^ tmpprefix ^ ".ps " ^ finalpath ^ " >/dev/null 2>/dev/null"

exception ExternalCommandFailure of string

let render tmppath finalpath outtex md5 =
    let tmpprefix0 = (string_of_int (Unix.getpid ()))^"_"^md5 in
    let tmpprefix = (tmppath^"/"^tmpprefix0) in
    let unlink_all () =
      begin
	Sys.remove (tmpprefix ^ ".dvi");
	Sys.remove (tmpprefix ^ ".aux");
	Sys.remove (tmpprefix ^ ".log");
        Sys.remove (tmpprefix ^ ".tex");
	Sys.remove (tmpprefix ^ ".ps");
      end in
    let f = (Util.open_out_unless_exists (tmpprefix ^ ".tex")) in
      begin
	output_string f (Texutil.get_preface ());
	output_string f outtex;
	output_string f (Texutil.get_footer ());
	close_out f;
	if Util.run_in_other_directory tmppath (cmd_latex tmpprefix0) != 0
	then (unlink_all (); raise (ExternalCommandFailure "latex"))
	else if (Sys.command (cmd_dvips tmpprefix) != 0)
	then (unlink_all (); raise (ExternalCommandFailure "dvips"))
	else if (Sys.command (cmd_convert tmpprefix (finalpath^"/"^md5^".png")) != 0)
	then (unlink_all (); raise (ExternalCommandFailure "convert"))
	else unlink_all ()
      end


from_name: hcheney

subject: [WikiEN-l] Adminship as a reward

body:
Recently, a user was nominated for adminship because
thought " . . he needs to be rewarded for all the hard
work and dedication." [1]

Though the user in question was very well qualified
for adminship, I am disturbed by the trend that
adminship is some sort of "reward" or "vote of
confidence" in the name of the community, however, in
reality adminship is a vote of confidence and reward
for making a great deal of edits and behaving well in
the process.

I propose that the community start issuing awards of
merit to users that will be voted upon by the
community over a period of a week. Some of the ideas I
kicked around were...

the Wikipedia Peace Prize - for users who have
worked to resolve conflict in the community.

the Gutenberg Award - for users that have
extensively improved the main-namespace content of
Wikipedia

As such, we will be able to stroke the egos (and
hard-working motivation) of users, while seperating
adminship from the equation. I hope that in such a
situation, the community will finally be able to give
certain users a resounding vote of confidence when
adminship would be inappropriate.

--H. Cheney

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail is new and improved - Check it out!
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail


from_name: Delirium

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Corporate sponsorship of Wikipedia

body:
Anthere wrote:

> Delirium wrote:
>
>> Mark Pellegrini wrote:
>>
>>> Note, Angela asked me emphatically to make sure you fight it out
>>> there and not on the mailing list.
>>
>> Ugh... it's nearly impossible to carry on a lengthy conversation on
>> the wiki.  Mailing lists are a lot better: I can organize subthreads,
>> keep posts I find particularly interesting for later reference and
>> delete others, and so on.  Can't do any of that on a wiki unless you
>> make a private copy of the discussion page and edit it yourself, and
>> then keep your copy in sync with the original, which is a gigantic mess.
>
>
> well, this is very unfortunate for you, because Angela and I will
> strongly favor use of multilingual meta over mailing lists.

And I, and quite a few others, will continue to favor the opposite.
Posting stuff on the wiki is great; having actual discussion on it is
tedious and nearly impossible to keep track of past a low volume of posts.

I do think we've had a vote on this on en:, which also contained about
five pages of arguments back and forth on both sides, as it came up on
the Village Pump about 5 or 6 separate times, but I can't seem to find
where it got moved to.  Links, anyone?

I really don't see why anyone would want to use such a terrible
discussion medium though.  Discussion media in the 1980s on bulletin
boards at least supported threading and filtering; can't we at least use
something as technologically advanced as 1980?  If it must be a
web-based system (despite the fact that email is better-suited to
textual discussion), there are several software packages that support
fully-threaded discussions, included Slashcode (used on slashdot.org)
and Scoop (used on kuro5hin.org).  The latter even keeps track of unread
messages, a feature that is absolutely necessary to follow large-scale
discussions.

-Mark


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Terms of use

body:
Angela wrote:

>Timwi wrote:
>
>
>>Someone please proof-read it before making it official. :/
>>
>>
>
>It needs more than proof reading before it can be made official.
>Suggesting, as the page did before I edited it, that this was an
>agreement between users and the Foundation, is not legally meaningful
>when the board has not even approved these terms. I have emailed
>Anthere and Jimbo about this with a view to determining whether or not
>we do want these terms to be official. I also think that if we have
>terms of use, they need to be translated and put into effect
>site-wide. It doesn't make sense to have these conditions for one
>language version of Wikipedia, and nothing at all for the other wikis.
>
>
I think we should continue the consensus-based system of "officialness"
that we've been using for years now: if the Wikipedia community says
it's official, then it's official.  That's what the discussion on the
talk page is for: to hammer out a consensus wording.

Perhaps for legal niceties the board ought to rubber-stamp it, but I
certainly would expect the board wouldn't fail to agree to something
that has been drawn up by consensus.

-Mark


references:
<40CD966B.70105@cs.ucy.ac.cy>	<40CFECA5.4000702@cs.ucy.ac.cy>	<cb6vr0$vff$2@sea.gmane.org>	<40D70F19.3080409@hackish.org>	<cb7jtj$gnn$1@sea.gmane.org>	<40D7551C.5000701@hackish.org>
	<cb83dc$drf$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
Timwi wrote:

> OK. Next idea:
>
> (1) Set the month names to be the possessive forms, e.g. "Ioun?ou",
>     so they can be used normally in dates throughout the site.
> (2) Create thingies in the Template namespace that contain the
>     nominative forms, e.g. [[Template:Nominative-Ioun?ou]] would
>     contain "Io?nios".
> (3) Whenever you need the nominative, instead of {{CURRENTMONTHNAME}}
>     write {{Nominative-{{CURRENTMONTHNAME}}}}.

Sounds reasonable to me!

So this requires no code changes then I take it, only a change of the
stored months names to the possessive forms, and then creation of the
templates at the user level?

I can't type Greek on this computer (or at least haven't figured out how
to yet), so I'll wait for Andreas to send the list of possessive names.

-Mark


from_name: Tony

subject: [Wikitech-l] missing default user prefs?

body:
OK, I give up. I can't figure out where some of  the default user preferences are hidden.

Quite a few options have explicit default values (set in Language.php). These are: quickbar, underline, hover, cols, rows,
searchlimit, contextlines, contextchars, skin, math, rcdays, rclimit, highlightbroken, stubthreshold, previewontop, editsection,
editsectiononrightclick, showtoc, showtoolbar, and date.

But where do you set the initial default values for show/hide minor edits in RC? I think there are some others missing there too.

Thanks for any tips,

Tannin (Tony Wilson)


body:
Claudio V wrote:

>Another particular problem is that while logged in
>Knoppix I cannot do "cat xaa xab xac xad xae >
>somefile.bz2" because it will return an error.
>
>
By default Knoppix mounts all drives read-only, so I'm guessing the
error is that it's unable to write somefile.bz2 to a read-only drive
(though if you provided the actual error message I could be more
certain).  If the drive is something Linux can write to (i.e. not NTFS),
you can remount it read/write from the file manager (right-click and
it'll be an option in the context menu).

You can also concatenate files from a command line in Windows (go to
start->run and enter "cmd" to get there) by doing:
copy xaa+xab+xac+xad+xae somefile.bz2

(I'm not sure what utilities on Windows can decompress bzip2 files though.)

-Mark


from_name: Arne Klempert

subject: [Foundation-l] International Wikimedia structure

body:
On Monday, June 21, 2004 9:07 PM
Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> --- Arne Klempert <wikipedia at klempert.de> wrote:
>> The following points are important to me:
>>
>> * There should be as clear as possible a separation between projects
>> and chapters because all projects are international and should
>> remain widely self-determined.
>>
>> * Chapters should not primarily spend their money for projects in a
>> certain language but on all projects, as far as legally possible.
>>
>> * There should be no sub-chapters on national level (i.e. Wikimedia
>> Austria as a sub-chapter of Wikimedia Germany). Each national chapter
>> should be directly assigned to the Foundation. Exceptions could be
>> meaningful for regional chapters, which could be subordinated to the
>> national chapters.
>>
>> The bylaws of Wikimedia Germany consider these principles. I would be
>> glad, if future chapters would do this likewise.
>>
>> We should create an international organization to promote *together*
>> all international projects and not create an accumulation of single
>> organizations, which primarily promote "their" projects.
>
> Wow! I'm very impressed with the amount of thought that went into
> Wikimedia Germany's bylaws.

Thank you. We discussed the bylaws for about six months, but the
principles above seemed so important and logical to all people involved
in the preparation for Wikimedia Germany, that we didn't need to discuss
them at all.

An English translation of the German bylaws can be found here (still in
progress):
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vereinssatzung/Englisch

-akl


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Theora bitstream frozen...

body:
Timwi wrote:

> The quantification "almost nobody" applies now, but for how much
> longer? Ogg Vorbis has taken off quite remarkably. I think Wikipedia
> should help boost the popularity of these open-source formats,
> *especially* when they are the only free alternative to proprietary
> competitors.

I've personally never actually seen a Vorbis-encoded file anywhere
except Wikipedia, and non-techies I know typically don't know what to do
with them when I send them, especially since apparently they don't play
in the installations of Winamp many people have (I don't use Windows, so
have no idea if more recent versions of Winamp include a Vorbis codec in
the default download package).  Basically everyone still uses mp3, with
AAC second place, and I've even seen more MPC than Vorbis, though that
may not be representatives (codec-elitists tend to like MPC for being a
subband, rather than transform, codec, which apparently makes pre-echo
artifacts like those you find in MPC/AAC/Vorbis much less of a problem).

At the very least I think we should wait until a reasonably functional
player is available for all major operating systems, so even if people
can't play them by default, they can go somewhere and acquire software
to play them.  Even more preferable would be to have reasonably
functional encoders available for all major OSes as well, so people
could actually contribute the videos.  (Vorbis does meet both these
criteria.)

-Mark


list: wiktionary-l

subject: [Wiktionary-l] De-capitalisation-isation

body:
Hi all,

last time we discussed this, I think there was consensus to switch the
English Wiktionary to make it stop capitalising article titles, right?

Tim and I discussed this, and I think we should do it soon, because the
longer the wait, the more we will have to fix manually after the switch.

The idea is to
(1) flip the switch (so [[blah]] and [[Blah]] become separate articles)
(2) run a script that renames every page to be lower-case, except for
     those pages that contain their own title in capitalised spelling
(3) create a list of those pages that weren't moved, so we can fix them
     manually (for example, [[Kind]] will need to be split into two).

Ideas? Discussion?

Greetings,
Timwi


body:
Delirium wrote:

> Timwi wrote:
>
>> You should probably give us more information on how Greek month names
>> work. You have only told us what does *not* work. I might be able to
>> come up with a technical solution if you explain to me what
>> morphological properties of Greek need to be satisfied in the month
>> names.
>
> There may be cases I'm not covering, but for the one I can immediately
> see in the interface, the issue is that "day month" type dates use the
> possessive form of the month name, while month names used by themselves
> use a simple noun form.
[... etc. ...  'Maios' vs. '5h Maiou']

Ah-ha. I kind of thought so. So why don't you just do this:

- Set the month name to "Maio"
- In a sentence like "{{MONTHNAME}} is nice", write "{{MONTHNAME}}s
estis bioutiphulos"
- Set the date format to "{{DAY}} {{MONTHNAME}}u {{YEAR}}"

Timwi


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Categories in 1.3beta

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> tic at tictric.net wrote:
>
>> A page Albert_Einstein gets categorised as
>> [[Category:Albert_Einstein|Einstein, Albert]] and shows up as E
>> Albert_Einstein where it shoud be E Einstein, Albert.
>> That's weird.
>
> It always shows the actual title.

I think the point in his posting was to say that it *should not* always
show the actual title, and I agree with him. We shouldn't have "Albert
Einstein" under E, we should have "Einstein, Albert".

I always thought this was going to be done, and I actually thought that
the fact that it used the string only as a sort key but not for display,
was a bug. Personally, I think it should be "fixed". :-)

Timwi


from_name: Charles Matthews

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Restructuring, renaming,
	creating and removing Wikiprojects

body:
Simonides of Ceos wrote:

>Charles, if that is not the way they have worked so far, my suggestion - of
using Wikiprojects to smooth out categories and make people interested in a
specific topic work together - is what I would like implemented from now on,
at least in the Wikiprojects I am interested in.

I think using a WikiProject page to get discussion on more systematic use of
categories is a good idea.

>Adding Categories at random makes things immensely confusing, as I have
discovered in the past couple of days - I can't even create an index of
writers without running into scattered lists that overlap in some places and
are very incomplete in others, and are not the same as identically labelled
lists elsewhere (ex. List of French authors does not correspond to the list
of French writers on the French personalities page.) A minimal
standardisation - ex. the formatting of an article into Bio, Works,
Bibliography, External Links, Categories - makes perfect sense, and I don't
believe that is too prescriptive - it's not much of an imposition on actual
content.

I suppose I have the luxury of working mostly in an area - mathematics -
where the system of listing was worked out before categories arrived. (Also,
I added most of the lists myself, so I don't have many problems with that
system!).

I do see that jumping straight to categories before having a good list
system is quite tough, and potentially confusing.  It seems to me like doing
two things at once; I have compiled many lists, and the job is mainly to
_find_ everything, before thinking deeply about subclassifying.  The
technique for that that works is to explore all backlinks.  This takes time,
and those who want a quick solution underestimate quite how much material
there is in Wikipedia, often in a neglected state.

But as for inconsistent systems: I think on any wiki site one has to get
used to the idea of multiple, parallel systems.  There is no
centralisation - that's a fact of life here.  Intellectually I'm very
sympathetic to the organising/centralising tendency, actually.  It really is
better to think of it all as 'infrastructure', though - no reason to worry
about bus versus train questions.

Charles


body:
Delirium wrote:

> Anthere wrote:
>
>> well, this is very unfortunate for you, because Angela and I will
>> strongly favor use of multilingual meta over mailing lists.
>
>
> I do think we've had a vote on this on en:, which also contained about
> five pages of arguments back and forth on both sides, as it came up on
> the Village Pump about 5 or 6 separate times, but I can't seem to find
> where it got moved to.  Links, anyone?

I found it: several separate discussions are archived on [[en:Wikipedia
talk:Mailing lists]].

The votes were mostly inconclusive...

Question: Should we have meta-discussions on:
* mailing lists?  9 yes, 12 no, 3 neutral
* web forums (boards.wikimedia.org)? 2 yes, 11 no, 5 neutral
* the Wikimedia wiki (meta.wikimedia.org)? 12 yes, 9 no, 2 neutral
* on Wikipedia itself (en.wikipedia.org for en: discussions)? 4 yes, 6
no, 7 neutral

Of course, these are more like straw polls than a real vote, so can't be
said to be conclusive, even if they had shown a strong preference one
way or another, which they don't.  But clearly people are fairly
strongly divided on the issue.  Allowing simultaneous wiki and email
discussion is probably next to impossible as a compromise, but if the
pro-wiki-discussion people would be willing to compromise on some
web-based discussion interface other than a wiki, probably a gateway of
some sort could be set up to allow posting and reading by either email
or web, depending on personal preference.  gmane does some of this now,
but perhaps some better web-email gateway interface is possible.

-Mark


from_name: Jens Frank

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Planned hardware expenses for the next 6 month,
	coda testing, software bottlenecks

body:
On Mon, Jun 21, 2004 at 02:25:54PM +0200, Gabriel Wicke wrote:
> On Mon, 2004-06-21 at 11:25 +0200, Jens Frank wrote:
> > Anthere asked how much money we need to run the system
> > for the rest of the year, so we took a look at the
> > servers we have and at the growth we have seen over the
> > last years.
> >
> > The results can be seen at
> > http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_provisional_budget
> >
> > and I invite eveyone to have a look at it and provide comments.
>
> I've added my opinion that the NFS-related problems are really a
> software problem, similar with the missing MySQL load balancing. The
> more money&hardware the better of course, but there are situations where
> the hardware-only approach simply fails or hits a hard wall. I think
> we're in such a situation.
>
> This doesn't mean that i think we don't need money, but the decision on
> what to spend it on is a hard one with such a complex system. At some
> stage bounties for specific important software development tasks might
> buy more performance than heaps of hardware waiting for better software.
>
> My Coda tests went very well so far. I've moved about 70% of my home dir
> to Coda for testing. I plan to do some wiki stress testing locally next,
> if that goes well i'd like to run test.wikipedia.org from coda next (the
> server is set up already on zwinger).

I've reworded some of your additions. I totally agree that NFS will not
scale and lacks features we need.

But even with Coda, zwinger is too small to be used as both second
DB slave and media server and backup download server. It's a 1U box
and it will not be possible to add more disks to it. DB size is 100G,
only 20G are left free.

So while agreeing that we need alternatives to NFS, I do not agree that
we'll be able to run all those services on zwinger for another 6 months.

Regards,

JeLuF


body:
On Mon, Jun 21, 2004 at 11:02:09AM -0400, Claudio V wrote:
> Hello,
>
> For a couple of days now I have been trying to
> concatenate  the Wikipedia image and English dump
> files but without any success.  I am using Windows XP
> as an operating system but I also have Knoppix when I
> want to use Linux environment.
>
> For some reason that I do not understand when I do
>
> knoppix at ttyp0[hdg1]$ cat 20040609_upload.tar.aa
> 20040609_upload.tar.ab > test.tar
>
> the new file created does not contain any part of the
> second file (.ab) yet the file size is the addition of
> both files.

What does "does not contain any part of the second file"
mean? How did you check this? What happens if you untar
test.tar?

JeLuF


from_name: Timwi

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Unauthorised? You can edit this page! Re: on
 complainingto ISPs

body:
KNOTT, T wrote:

>>I think for this to have very much credability, you
>>would have to remove the 'You Can Edit This Page'
>>notice.
>>Mark
>
> I don't see why - people are authorized to edit, but they are not
> authorized to vandalise.

Yeah, exactly. Just because you are allowed to walk into a restaurant,
and even eat food on their tables, doesn't mean you can bring an axe and
take the table apart.

So, just because you are allowed to edit our pages, doesn't mean you can
run a bot to vandalise them en masse.

Timwi


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Terms of use

body:
Martin Harper wrote:

>>Some sites ask users to "sign" agreements related to their activities
>
> So will we, eventually:
> [[en:Wikipedia:terms of use]]

"# This is an agreement includes the license granted on the copyrights
page and the associated disclaimers."

Someone please proof-read it before making it official. :/

I can't fix it because I can't even figure out what was meant.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Categories in 1.3beta

body:
On Mon, Jun 21, 2004 at 10:36:39PM +0100, Timwi wrote:
> Brion Vibber wrote:
>
> >tic at tictric.net wrote:
> >
> >>A page Albert_Einstein gets categorised as
> >>[[Category:Albert_Einstein|Einstein, Albert]] and shows up as E
> >>Albert_Einstein where it shoud be E Einstein, Albert.
> >>That's weird.
> >
> >It always shows the actual title.
>
> I think the point in his posting was to say that it *should not* always
> show the actual title, and I agree with him. We shouldn't have "Albert
> Einstein" under E, we should have "Einstein, Albert".
>
> I always thought this was going to be done, and I actually thought that
> the fact that it used the string only as a sort key but not for display,
> was a bug. Personally, I think it should be "fixed". :-)

"Einstein, Albert" is ugly - it looks like a paper encyclopedia.
There's nothing wrong with displaying grammatically correct "Albert Einstein",
even when its ordered by family name.


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Concatenation of Image and old English table
	files

body:
Timwi:

The error was something like "cannot perform this
operation" (sorry I forgot the exact error message).

Claudio

--- Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote: > Claudio V wrote:
>
> > Another particular problem is that while logged in
> > Knoppix I cannot do "cat xaa xab xac xad xae >
> > somefile.bz2" because it will return an error.
>
> Why don't you tell us what this error is?
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

______________________________________________________________________
Post your free ad now! http://personals.yahoo.ca


from_name: Andrew Lih

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Funding for the newly elected Board Members

body:
> Delirium said:
> So, I'd say funding for such niceties as face-to-face board meetings
> should take place only after the developers have the money they need,
> which may include hiring additional developers for specific areas in
> which we have no sufficiently knowledgeable volunteers, or at least
> putting in place a bounty system to attract some semi-paid developers.
> I could easily see EUR1000-2000 in the immediate future being very
> desirable for this purpose.

Delirum, we've spent a *lot* more money and resources on software
development and server hardware than we have on planning and strategy
for fundraising, which would immediately benefit if we got Jimbo, Ant
and Ang together.

I had the pleasure of meeting Ang in person in London and she had
great ideas and energy about fundraising in areas we are currently
neglecting.  I also enjoyed a long lunch with Jimbo the day after the
London get together, and we exchanged ideas and thoughts about
Wikimedia in ways we never could have by email.  I can only imagine
the great synergy that will arise to get the board members in the same
room.

Virtual collaboration is wonderful. It's what makes Wikipedia so
great.  But you also need face to face contact for folks who are
putting in so much time and effort to work with Wikimedia's future.
We should not be so stingy about investing in our human capital.

-Andrew Lih (User:Fuzheado)


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Categories in 1.3beta

body:
On Mon, 21 Jun 2004 23:49:13 +0200
  Tomasz Wegrzanowski <taw at users.sf.net> wrote:
>On Mon, Jun 21, 2004 at 10:36:39PM +0100, Timwi wrote:
>> I think the point in his posting was to say that it *should not* always
>> show the actual title, and I agree with him. We shouldn't have "Albert
>> Einstein" under E, we should have "Einstein, Albert".
>>
>> I always thought this was going to be done, and I actually thought that
>> the fact that it used the string only as a sort key but not for display,
>> was a bug. Personally, I think it should be "fixed". :-)
>
>"Einstein, Albert" is ugly - it looks like a paper encyclopedia.
>There's nothing wrong with displaying grammatically correct "Albert
>Einstein",
>even when its ordered by family name.

I agree, I want "Albert Einstein" there. On the other hand, there are also
cases when I _do_ want something different to stand there:  I want [[George
III of the United Kingdom]] to be in [[Category:British monarchs]] as
"George III" and [[Deposition (Chemistry)]] in [[Category:Chemistry]] as
"Deposition". But how we get a syntax for that without making things too
complicated again, I do not know either.

Andre Engels


body:
K Forstner wrote:

> I agree wholeheartedly with what Jakob says (although it seems many people
> don't like the idea of someone rejecting their new toy). Maybe
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Writers ,
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Melbourne_trams or
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Viennese_composers can serve as
> eye-openers: In each case, the "category" itself is rather pointless, and
> the entries are dubious. What is more, no one seems to be discussing this
> anywhere.

How old is the category feature? About a few months?

I wonder what Wikipedia looked like when it was merely a few months old.
Imagine people back then had shaken their heads and gone, "This is
totally rubbish! It's pointless, nothing will ever become of this. Let's
stop this project right here."

It's amazing how people expect perfection from the start. Guys! This is
a wiki! It's a work-in-progress, and guess what, thousands of people are
actually working on it. Good wine takes time.

Also, this is the English mailing list, so we're talking about the
English Wikipedia. This is NOT de. We don't consider stubs harmful. We
don't consider redirects harmful. We don't arbitrarily reject obscure
topics. We don't go on a rampage deleting stuff we don't like at first.
We give it a chance to grow and prove itself! Why should we consider
categories harmful when they haven't even been around for long enough to
say anything about them?

Time will tell. Deletion won't.

Timwi


body:
> By default Knoppix mounts all drives read-only, so
> I'm guessing the
> error is that it's unable to write somefile.bz2 to a
> read-only drive
> (though if you provided the actual error message I
> could be more
> certain).  If the drive is something Linux can write
> to (i.e. not NTFS),
> you can remount it read/write from the file manager
> (right-click and
> it'll be an option in the context menu).
>

I know about the ?read-only? problem with Knoppix
because that was one of my first problems I encounter
with that OS.

Solution:

1- mount the hard drive and remove the ?read only?
2- write : sudo mount ?o remount,rw /dev/hdg1
/mnt/hdg1

(hdg1 is my hdd)

After doing that I could write with no problem on the
hard drive.

My drive is NTFS because if it was on a FAT32 it would
be impossible for me to have a single file larger then
4 GB.

> You can also concatenate files from a command line
> in Windows (go to
> start->run and enter "cmd" to get there) by doing:
> copy xaa+xab+xac+xad+xae somefile.bz2
>

I have tried that alrady by doing:
copy /b xaa+xab+xac+xad+xae somefile.bz2 but strangely
I get a file somefile.bz2 but with the size of 1 KB

> (I'm not sure what utilities on Windows can
> decompress bzip2 files though.)

To decompress a bzip2 file you can use WinRar or Bzip
for Windows

>bzip2 works nicely. Google it up to find the main
site, there's a win32
..exe. Or get cygwin for a full suite of Unix tools,
and do:
   cat xa? | bzip2 -dc > big_darn_file.sql

I will that tomorrow, Thanks!

Claudio

______________________________________________________________________
Post your free ad now! http://personals.yahoo.ca


subject: [Wikitech-l] UTF-8 conversion: a look at the facts

body:
I finally got my linux box's big drive cleared off and a backup dump of
en imported so I can get ready to run some conversion tests. First,
quick statistics from checking for the presence of high characters in
the 2004-06-16 dump:

10.4% of cur entries need their page content fixed
  1.9% of cur entries need their titles fixed
Smaller portions are affected by their comment fields or usernames.

[Exact proportion of old entry text can't be checked easily due to
compression.]
  1.7% of old revisions need their titles fixed.
Smaller portions are affected by their comment fields or usernames.

  1.8% of watchlist entries need their titles fixed.

  0.4% of registered usernames need to be fixed.

  0.7% of images need to be renamed
  1.4% of images need their upload comments fixed

(This is not an exhaustive list of fields needing conversion.)

This makes it pretty clear that a 'sparse' conversion that only updates
that which needs to be updated should speed things up tremendously over
the basic 'dump everything, convert, and load it back in' approach we
used on fr.

Less than 2% of titles & usernames need to be fixed; this step can be
done relatively quickly on all affected tables (cur, old, brokenlinks,
categorylinks, watchlist, user, image, oldimage) to provide consistency
for queries which must key on *_title or *_user_text and thus can't
allow for different places containing different forms of the data.

It should be possible as some have suggested to use either heuristics or
explicit marking to do run-time conversion of cur_text and old_text, and
perhaps cur_comment, old_comment, and similar bits. In this case we'd
want to do the conversion at data load time since we need the real
encoding for parsing to match up to titles. This would avoid downtime
for the conversion of the 10.4% of cur_text material that needs it
(45,862 rows), but requires changes to MediaWiki itself that need to be
coded and tested.

The remaining latin-1 wikis will have rather larger incidences of high
chars than English does, but should still benefit from this approach by
skipping the bulk text recoding.

I'd hoped to have some conversion test results by now but had some false
starts with the database setup that used up the weekend. :( I'll try to
get the code ready and running in the next few days.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
I don't understand why one groups needs to be paid *first*, precluding
expenditures for others.  Even if one agrees with your assertion that
developers should be monetarily compensated, that does not mean the
board should work in poverty.

It's quite short sighted if one cannot see that Ang/Ant/Jimbo putting
their heads together would do well for our fundraising which will in
turn raise more funds for the entire project.

-Andrew Lih (User:Fuzheado)

PS: And you've certainly entered "rude" territory by belittling Ant
and Ang's extensive contributions to Wikipedia so flippantly.

On Mon, 21 Jun 2004 11:24:49 -0500, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>
> Anthere wrote:
>
> >     In considering paying developers to stimulate them to work more,
> >     while covering our costs is seen by you as a complete loss of
> >     money with no good foreseeable justification, you are being plain
> >     rude to both Angela and I.
> >
> >     If we are to use our energy, our time and now even our personal
> >     money on this project, I think we can expect perhaps a little bit
> >     of politness, recognition and appreciation for the work we do.
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> I did not say it had no possible justification, merely that paying
> developers ought to be a higher priority.  The developers have spent a
> lot more of their energy, time, and personal money on the project, over
> the course of several *years*.  Beginning to reimburse board members who
> have hardly served for a *week* does not seem even remotely in the same
> range.


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Categories considered harmful

body:
On 06/21/04 23:57, Stan Shebs wrote:
> Timwi wrote:

>> How old is the category feature? About a few months?

> Heh, I think it's just three weeks old as of today. As features go,
> categories have been adopted remarkably rapidly - just compare
> tables and images, most of which are still in the old formats.

Anything to kill off those accursed article boxes.

- d.


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Foundation-l] Bounties and expenses

body:
--- Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> ....
> Face-to-face meetings are much more productive than IRC simply because
> real human interaction has a much higher bandwidth than letters in a
> window on a computer screen. That was obvious at the WOS in Berlin, as I
> know that some people are still reeling from the whole experience. ;-)
> Getting Angela to mingle with the French Wikimedia community will benefit
> the whole project.

I totally agree with this. Especially at this point it is very important to
create ties among various Wikimedians. Yes this is in part socializing, but
that is *vitally* important when forming (or keeping together) any
organization. It is absurd and dangerous to just discount that as a "perk."

Also, I forgot the exact percentage, but more than half of all human
communication is from body language and verbal patterns/tone so we cannot only
depend on web-based communication. A mix is needed (esp for the trustees).
Paying travel expenses for quarterly meetings seems to be most reasonable. Each
quarterly meeting could be hosted by a different Wikimedia chapter from a
different part of the world - thus forming a strong tie between the foundation
and its chapters. Meetings in-between quarterly ones can be conducted via less
expensive means.

> ....
> I do believe that funds which were not explicitly designated for the
> purpose of funding foundation organizational activity should not be
> permanently used for said purpose. So what we should do is clarify on the
> donations page how much of the money is going to be used for which
> purpose.

What we need is a budget that spells this out. A link could then be provided
for those interested in how the foundation plans to spend their donation money.

> But we will soon get a check over 10,000 euros from the Prix Ars
> Electronica award, and that money can be designated by the trustees for
> various purposes, and a certain amount of it (say 2000 euros) should
> certainly be designated for organization expenses. Temporarily withdrawing
> the necessary funds from a non-designated pool until we get the check is
> not a serious issue.

Exactly - those funds can be used for travel, special projects, and software
bounties.

> ...
> I do not yet have a final answer to this question. For the experiment
> phase, I think appointing one developer and one technically-minded non-
> developer who have to reach consensus would be a simple solution. I would
> like to nominate Tim Starling and Daniel Mayer for these two roles. If Tim
> doesn't want to do it, I would suggest Jens Frank, who has already said
> that he wants to leave bounty tasks to others, so he would have a certain
> level of objectivity.

Nod. I'll accept if asked by the board to do this. But, IMO, this should be
part of an official Wikimedia committee so a trustee will have to be a member
as well. Angela seems to be the obvious choice.

> ...
> Regarding Erik Zachte's remark that $100 is not a lot of money, that is of
> course correct. However, the purpose of this system is not so much to give
> participating developers a salary, but to provide a little extra incentive
> for completing tasks which we all agree need to be done, but which have
> been largely ignored for months. We can always raise the bounties if it
> turns out that they are ineffective. $15/hour seems like a reasonable
> starting value. I know Java programmers who work for less than that.

The amount of money is not as important as the recognition that the winner
accomplished the task - IMO. The award is more than just some cash. But the
cash is still a tangible thing and thus adds a great deal of 'realness' to the
award (however "nominal" 100 bucks may be - in India that is two weeks wages
for a tech support rep while in the U.S. it is a days wages for the same work).
A page tracking who brought in what bounties would be a good way to encourage
use of the system.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Read only the mail you want - Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard.
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail


subject: [Foundation-l] Bounties and expenses


body:
Claudio V wrote:

>I know about the ?read-only? problem with Knoppix
>because that was one of my first problems I encounter
>with that OS.
>
>Solution:
>
>1- mount the hard drive and remove the ?read only?
>2- write : sudo mount ?o remount,rw /dev/hdg1
>/mnt/hdg1
>
>(hdg1 is my hdd)
>
>After doing that I could write with no problem on the
>hard drive.
>
>My drive is NTFS because if it was on a FAT32 it would
>be impossible for me to have a single file larger then
>4 GB.
>
>
This is getting vaguely off-topic, but I'm pretty sure it's simply
impossible to mount NTFS drives read/write on Linux, as the NTFS write
code has never been reasonably functional, and has been completely
disabled in more recent kernels. You sure you can actually successfully
write files to the drive?

-Mark