from_name: Matthew Trump

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Categories for images?

body:
Yes, I'd be fine with that. I think my reservations about hierarchies
of image categories can be resolved within that context through
user-defined categories. My main reservation was about mixing images
and article titles in the same alphabetized listing, which would not
occur with this.

I tend to think that there will categories that will be effectively
image-only, based on the fact that images have an inherent
categorization arising from *genre* that does not exist in articles
(i.e., distinction between photographs, digitalized artwork, maps,
graphics, charts, etc.). For example [[U.S. history photographs]] vs.
[[U.S. history maps]] vs. [[U.S. digitalized artwork]], etc. But that
can all be resolved on a case-by-case basis through user
contributions. Certainly it doesn't require an additional space.

I do have some concerns about the thumbnails. Overall I think it's a
great idea, but it could result in a large number of thumbnails being
downloaded in the case where the user isn't looking for images at
all.

As an example, Texas has over 200 counties and thus over 200
corresponding county maps (even more towns obviously, many of which
have maps now). Even if the display limit per page in catgories in
500, for example, you could have a potential right off the bat for a
large number of thumbnails to be displayed in the case where a user
isn't even looking for images at all. This could arise while paging
through a long listing (I'm assuming images will listed after
articles), but also in the case of a category with a small number of
articles but a large number of images.

There are a couple obvious ways of handling this. Deactivating image
thumbnails by default (through preferences) is one way, but knowing
myself, I would probably activate that prefence much of the time and
wind up running into this situation relatively frequently
(downloading lots of thumbnails when I don't want them). Another
solution is to require explicit loading of thumbnails for every page
display (the first time, you never get thumbnails, but have to
request it), but that seems like it could be annoying. What do you
think would be the best approach here?

Sj said:
> On Sat, 17 Jul 2004 10:39:01 -0400, Fennec Foxen <fennec at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>> ... if there are to be categories for images only, they should be
> < *enforced* as categories for images only. Otherwise, you'll
>> eventually get people who "insert articles into image categories
>> and vice-versa..."
>
> Yes, thanks Fennec.  That's exactly what I meant.  Dec, I think
> everything you want can be accomplished via changing the way
> categories are displayed; perhaps even listing images of maps
> as "Category:Image:Maps" as the section-header for images on
> the "Category:Maps" page (and redirecting the category-image-maps
> page to the cat-maps page) -- but internally separating Map-cat
> entries into Image and non-Image based on their namespace,
> not on the user-defined cat.
>
> <sj>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Timwi

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Should MP3 files be allowed on wikipedia - Current
 ongoing discussion.

body:
Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:

> The situation with MP3 is, as I understand it, much
> worse. Here the threat is to both encoders and decoders.

Audacity (free sound editor) has no complaints reading MP3s, but if you
try to save as MP3, you get a message box telling you about licensing
and patents and how you will have to install the LAME encoder.

I really don't think decoding MP3s is covered by patents.

Timwi


from_name: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Should MP3 files be allowed on wikipedia -
	Current ongoing discussion.

body:
Or other free formats for that matter, Speex or FLAC

On Sat, 17 Jul 2004 13:41:29 +0100, Neil Harris
<usenet at tonal.clara.co.uk> wrote:
> Timwi wrote:
>
> > Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
> >
> >> The situation with MP3 is, as I understand it, much
> >> worse. Here the threat is to both encoders and decoders.
> >
> >
> > Audacity (free sound editor) has no complaints reading MP3s, but if
> > you try to save as MP3, you get a message box telling you about
> > licensing and patents and how you will have to install the LAME encoder.
> >
> > I really don't think decoding MP3s is covered by patents.
> >
> > Timwi
> >
> I think you'll find that Thomson think otherwise. See
> http://www.mpeg.org/MPEG/mp3-licensing-faq.pdf
>
> Although they state: "More in general, no license fee is expected for
> desktop software decoders/players that are
> distributed free-of-charge for personal use." (Section 2.1.1, page 4),
> this does not appear to cover other possible Wikipedia uses such as
> access to Wikipedia over mobile devices running free software. Until
> there is a clear royalty-free patent licence grant for MP3 decoding by
> free software, I suggest we go with raw soundfiles or Ogg Vorbis.
>
> -- Neil
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


list: wikitech-l

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: phase3/includes DefaultSettings.php, 1.110.2.6,
 1.110.2.7 MessageCache.php,
 1.14.2.2, 1.14.2.3 Setup.php,   1.47.2.4, 1.47.2.5

body:
Tim Starling wrote:

> Modified Files:
>       Tag: REL1_3
> 	DefaultSettings.php MessageCache.php Setup.php
> Log Message:
> allow messages to be drawn from another database, off by default

This still requires the secondary database to be on the same server as
the main database, doesn't it?


from_name: Neil Harris

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Should MP3 files be allowed on wikipedia - Current
	ongoing discussion.

body:
Timwi wrote:

> Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
>
>> The situation with MP3 is, as I understand it, much
>> worse. Here the threat is to both encoders and decoders.
>
>
> Audacity (free sound editor) has no complaints reading MP3s, but if
> you try to save as MP3, you get a message box telling you about
> licensing and patents and how you will have to install the LAME encoder.
>
> I really don't think decoding MP3s is covered by patents.
>
> Timwi
>
I think you'll find that Thomson think otherwise. See
http://www.mpeg.org/MPEG/mp3-licensing-faq.pdf

Although they state: "More in general, no license fee is expected for
desktop software decoders/players that are
distributed free-of-charge for personal use." (Section 2.1.1, page 4),
this does not appear to cover other possible Wikipedia uses such as
access to Wikipedia over mobile devices running free software. Until
there is a clear royalty-free patent licence grant for MP3 decoding by
free software, I suggest we go with raw soundfiles or Ogg Vorbis.

-- Neil


list: wikipedia-l

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Waiting for 1.0

body:
Bryan Derksen wrote:

> At 12:31 PM 7/16/2004 -0700, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>> Magnus Manske wrote:
>>
>>> Now, the rapid change of wikipedia articles unveils this problem:
>>> * Does the second approval need to be for the *same version* as the
>>> first, or can it be for a later one, which then gets the "seal of
>>> approval"?
>>
>>
>> It should be essentially for the same one, except for corrections of
>> minor spelling errors or typos.
>
>
> Users who approve a version of an article would likely watchlist it,
> so it doesn't seem like a major imposition to require them to review
> newer edits and give approval to newer versions if need be. Perhaps
> even have the software create a sort of parallel specialized watchlist
> that shows articles you've approved in the past that have had edits
> performed on them since then, both to make sure one doesn't forget to
> watchlist them and to make sure one's regular watchlist doesn't become
> cluttered.
>
>>> Also, should there be
>>> * yes/no approval(s)
>>> * or rather a rating (0-9 or something)
>>
>>
>> The numerical rating has much merit. and an average rating can be
>> generated as a composite of these.
>
>
> Users should only have the yes/no option, IMO, since including or
> excluding an article is an all-or-nothing proposition. Combining
> multiple users' ratings into a more fine-grained number could be
> handy, though, showing whether the approval is controversial at a
> glance. The details of this rating system will no doubt be the subject
> of endless bickering, which I look forward to seeing the end result of. :)
>
I disagree. I believe that most users would prefer the ability to
express shades of opinion. A numerical rating allows more information to
be gathered; users who want to assert an all-or-nothing opinion can
still vote 0 or 10. I would then suggest feeding the results to a robust
estimator (using the median would be a good first hack) to prodice a
fine-grained estimate. It would also be useful to have a robust spread
measure to detect contentious articles.

By having a wide range of fine-grained estimates, and perhaps adding in
factors for linkage, we can then prune the encyclopedia to any desired
size by adjusting the threshold for inclusion.

-- Neil


from_name: account2 at secretlondon.me.uk

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Categories for images?

body:
There is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_images which is an attempt to
categorise images. It needs lots of work, of course.

Caroline


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Please let [[special:blockip]] flag AOL proxies

body:
We should do the same for freeserve proxies as well.

Caroline/Secretlondon


from_name: Yann Forget

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikiquote now has subdomains

body:
Hi,

Le Saturday 17 July 2004 12:55, Tim Starling a ?crit :
> Wikiquote now has specific-language subdomains. Instead of creating
> wikis for all 150 languages, I made a system where wikis are only
> created when they're wanted. To save time during maintenance operations,
> it should now be possible to delete unused Wiktionaries and even
> Wikipedias until they are required.

Thanks, that's useful.
Wikiquote in French is started.

> Similar conversion of Wikibooks should be a fairly simple thing, I'm now
> just waiting for community approval. We can't put subdomains under
> wikisource.org because the domain name doesn't point to the right place.
> It's owned by Mav and points to a redirect server, redirecting to
> quote.wikipedia.org.

Yes, I think Wikibooks in French is much wanted.

> -- Tim Starling

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: Sheldon Rampton

subject: [Wikitech-l] Conflict with Drupal?

body:
I've been playing around recently with CivicSpace, a Drupal-based
software package using PHP and MySQL that includes features such as a
blog, a calendar and an email list. After I did a test installation
at a domain where I also have a test installation of MediaWiki
running, I noticed a problem with MediaWiki. Whenever I tried to
access the wiki as a logged-in user, I got the following error
message:

>Fatal error: session_start(): Failed to initialize storage module.
>in /usr/www/users/rampton/wiki/User.php on line 146

After some experimenting, I discovered that the problem arises
because Drupal requires adding the the following lines to .htaccess
to modify the PHP configuration:

php_value session.save_handler 'user'
php_value session.cache_limiter none

Once I deleted those lines from .htaccess, the problem went away, and
I was able to get both CivicSpace and the wiki running on the same
server by simply putting a different .htaccess file in the
directories for each package. However, I thought I should call this
error message to the attention of developers here. If anyone ever
wants to develop MediaWiki into a Drupal module, this conflict might
give them some headaches.

--Sheldon Rampton


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikiquote now has subdomains

body:
Tim Starling wrote:

> Wikiquote now has specific-language subdomains. Instead of creating
> wikis for all 150 languages, I made a system where wikis are only
> created when they're wanted.

How can the "wiki doesn't exist" page be edited?

Thanks,
Timwi


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Waiting for 1.0

body:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

>On Sat, Jul 17, 2004 at 01:48:09PM +0100, Neil Harris wrote:
>
>
>>I disagree. I believe that most users would prefer the ability to
>>express shades of opinion. A numerical rating allows more information to
>>be gathered; users who want to assert an all-or-nothing opinion can
>>still vote 0 or 10. I would then suggest feeding the results to a robust
>>estimator (using the median would be a good first hack) to prodice a
>>fine-grained estimate. It would also be useful to have a robust spread
>>measure to detect contentious articles.
>>
>>By having a wide range of fine-grained estimates, and perhaps adding in
>>factors for linkage, we can then prune the encyclopedia to any desired
>>size by adjusting the threshold for inclusion.
>>
>>
>
>1. There are serious problems with having more than 2 options,
>   but on the other hand 2 options are not enough to express all opinions.
>   What is the meaning of each number ? Everyone knows when to give worst
>   and best available rating, but what kind of article deserves 4 or 7 ?
>   It works quite well on IMDB, where people select ratings thinking
>   "this movie was about as good as movie X, which got 7.8, so i'll rate it 8".
>   Will the ratings of the articles get coherent enough to provide such guildlines ?
>   Or are we going to attach descriptions to each rating, in which case we
>   get to another problem ...
>
>2. How to produce a single number from all the ratings.
>   There's no natural linearity in ratings, and if we were to assign descriptions
>   to each rating, what's the "average" of "bad", "bad", "great" and "needs minor
>   improvements" ?
>   Median is conceptually better than mean, as it only requires ratings
>   to be comparable ("bad" < "needs minor improvements" < "good" < "great" etc.),
>   but it's quite dissatisfying that it completely ignores the difference
>   between possible ratings below the median (ratings "horrible" and
>   "needs minor improvements" are equivalent if the average is
>   "needs minor improvements" or better), and above it
>   ("great" == "needs minor improvements", if median is "needs minor improvements"
>   or worse).
>
>3. If we were to implement rating scheme, I think it would be the best option
>   to have different each user's rating options and summary ratings.
>   The summary ratings could be based on median, variance of ratings,
>   and the number of votes.
>
>   For example:
>   Available rating options: {horrible, needs major improvements, needs minor improvements,
>   good, outstanding}
>   Possible summary ratings: {
>	not rated (no votes, or few votes and high variance),
>	controversial (many votes, too high variance)
>	extremely controversial (many votes, ratings dominated by horrible and outstanding)
>	horrible (many votes, median 'horrible', small variance),
>	probably horrible (median 'horrible', few votes or moderate variance),
>	needs major improvements,
>	probably needs major improvement,
>	...
>
>
>
I think the key thing is to keep as much raw data as possible, so we can
work out the best selection criteria once we have the data in hand.
Number of votes, and spread of vote values will be quite informative:
again, another reason for having a multi-valued selection.

Perhaps we should register amiencyclopedicornot.com ?

-- Neil


from_name: Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales

body:
Neil Harris wrote:
> Although they state: "More in general, no license fee is expected
> for desktop software decoders/players that are distributed
> free-of-charge for personal use." (Section 2.1.1, page 4), this does
> not appear to cover other possible Wikipedia uses such as access to
> Wikipedia over mobile devices running free software.

Yes, 'free-of-charge for personal use' may be gratis, but it isn't
libre.

--Jimbo


references:
<cdb0e9$mll$1@sea.gmane.org> <cdbbr5$a8h$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<cdbd2r$cfv$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
Tim Starling wrote:

> Timwi wrote:
>
>> How can the "wiki doesn't exist" page be edited?
>
> Two files:
>
> /home/wikipedia/common/php-new/missing.php and
> /home/wikipedia/htdocs/index.html

Please can you make it so that common folk who don't have direct access
to the servers can edit these pages? We've already had this discussion
with the fundraising notice.

Thanks,
Timwi


list: foundation-l

subject: [Foundation-l] How could information flow ?

body:
Tomos at Wikipedia wrote:
> I think it was not a mistake that every project got the fundraising notice.

It was a mistake, at least in the sense that I asked for the notice to
be put up, and _thought_ that I communicated the intention that it be
put up in English only.  Whether it went up elsewhere because my
intention was not sufficiently clear, or because the person who
actually put it up made a mistake, I don't know.

But it only made sense because we are in a cycle of Slashdot stories,
and Slashdot is an English website.

> I was on an IRC channel when there was a discussion of some project being
> upset, and therefore blanking the message or not translating it. One person
> asked if the messages could be turned off for some projects. A few
> developers expressed that those projects should come up with alternative
> fundraising plans that cover their portion of expected funding need.

I do not know if this was a joke or a serious proposal, but I do not
support this in any way shape or form.  And if I don't support, more
precisely, if the board doesn't support it (and I think I can
comfortably say that none of us would), it isn't going to get anywhere
at all.

> Nothing was turned off. There followed a discussion of putting different
> traffic priorities to different projects. (But I am not sure if they were
> really serious about this.)

I don't know the nature of that discussion, so I can't comment.  I
would say that *if anything*, I would support that we always tend to
"look out for the little guy" first, that is to say, to do whatever we
need to do to make sure that small and growing wikimedia communities
do not become 'ghettos' without proper support.

> So after all, we are not so disappointing, I found.

Yes.  Everyone, especially everyone who is really active, can be
safely assumed to be acting from maximum goodwill.  WikiLove and all
that.  :-)

Please always communicate to everyone in every language that I view
Wikimedia as a _global_ movement, and that I am very much opposed to
English-centric decisionmaking.

As a matter of practicality, it is not possible to conduct high-level
policy discussions in any other language than English.  And this is
not just because of the board being English, but rather because for
reasons that have nothing to do with any of us, English is the most
widely spoken intermediate language in our environment.

If a German, a Japanese, an Italian, and a French person all meet to
speak, and they wish to successfully communicate, it will be in
English in most cases.  This is not the fault of anyone at Wikipedia,
and it is not an excuse for being English-centric in any way.

--Jimbo


list: wikimedia-l


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Waiting for 1.0

body:
On Sat, Jul 17, 2004 at 01:48:09PM +0100, Neil Harris wrote:
> I disagree. I believe that most users would prefer the ability to
> express shades of opinion. A numerical rating allows more information to
> be gathered; users who want to assert an all-or-nothing opinion can
> still vote 0 or 10. I would then suggest feeding the results to a robust
> estimator (using the median would be a good first hack) to prodice a
> fine-grained estimate. It would also be useful to have a robust spread
> measure to detect contentious articles.
>
> By having a wide range of fine-grained estimates, and perhaps adding in
> factors for linkage, we can then prune the encyclopedia to any desired
> size by adjusting the threshold for inclusion.

1. There are serious problems with having more than 2 options,
   but on the other hand 2 options are not enough to express all opinions.
   What is the meaning of each number ? Everyone knows when to give worst
   and best available rating, but what kind of article deserves 4 or 7 ?
   It works quite well on IMDB, where people select ratings thinking
   "this movie was about as good as movie X, which got 7.8, so i'll rate it 8".
   Will the ratings of the articles get coherent enough to provide such guildlines ?
   Or are we going to attach descriptions to each rating, in which case we
   get to another problem ...

2. How to produce a single number from all the ratings.
   There's no natural linearity in ratings, and if we were to assign descriptions
   to each rating, what's the "average" of "bad", "bad", "great" and "needs minor
   improvements" ?
   Median is conceptually better than mean, as it only requires ratings
   to be comparable ("bad" < "needs minor improvements" < "good" < "great" etc.),
   but it's quite dissatisfying that it completely ignores the difference
   between possible ratings below the median (ratings "horrible" and
   "needs minor improvements" are equivalent if the average is
   "needs minor improvements" or better), and above it
   ("great" == "needs minor improvements", if median is "needs minor improvements"
   or worse).

3. If we were to implement rating scheme, I think it would be the best option
   to have different each user's rating options and summary ratings.
   The summary ratings could be based on median, variance of ratings,
   and the number of votes.

   For example:
   Available rating options: {horrible, needs major improvements, needs minor improvements,
   good, outstanding}
   Possible summary ratings: {
	not rated (no votes, or few votes and high variance),
	controversial (many votes, too high variance)
	extremely controversial (many votes, ratings dominated by horrible and outstanding)
	horrible (many votes, median 'horrible', small variance),
	probably horrible (median 'horrible', few votes or moderate variance),
	needs major improvements,
	probably needs major improvement,
	...
   }


from_name: Andrew Lih

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Help - blocked IP still posting to Chinese Wiki

body:
The anonymous vandal has been reverted, and has stopped activity. Not
sure why the block did not seem to "take."

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)

On Fri, 16 Jul 2004 21:37:21 -0700, Vina Wang <vwang at myrealbox.com> wrote:
>
>
> There is an user with a particular IP address that is posting the same inflamatory and derogatory page on Mao Zedong over and over again.  I have blocked the IP, but the posts kept on coming.
>
> What do I do now?
>
> The IP address is 81.48.83.54.
>
> http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Recentchanges


from_name: Wesley Sheldahl

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Waiting for 1.0

body:
On Saturday, July 17, 2004, at 08:48  AM, Neil Harris wrote:
>>
>> Users should only have the yes/no option, IMO, since including or
>> excluding an article is an all-or-nothing proposition. Combining
>> multiple users' ratings into a more fine-grained number could be
>> handy, though, showing whether the approval is controversial at a
>> glance. The details of this rating system will no doubt be the
>> subject of endless bickering, which I look forward to seeing the end
>> result of. :)
>>
> I disagree. I believe that most users would prefer the ability to
> express shades of opinion. A numerical rating allows more information
> to
> be gathered; users who want to assert an all-or-nothing opinion can
> still vote 0 or 10. I would then suggest feeding the results to a
> robust
> estimator (using the median would be a good first hack) to prodice a
> fine-grained estimate. It would also be useful to have a robust spread
> measure to detect contentious articles.
>
> By having a wide range of fine-grained estimates, and perhaps adding in
> factors for linkage, we can then prune the encyclopedia to any desired
> size by adjusting the threshold for inclusion.
>
> -- Neil
>

I support the yes/no only option. I think that some users will tend to
be more generous or scathing in their ratings than others; not everyone
will assign the same number to the same degree of approval or
disapproval. I think we'll get truer results if individuals have to
vote yes/no, and then those results are aggregated.

On the other hand, if we have to have numeric scaling, I would suggest
a scale of 0 to 5 instead of 0 to 10 as a compromise. This would let
people give more fine grained feedback while hopefully reducing the
variation in scores based on the vagaries of individuals' emotions,
namely how strongly they feel for or against an article.

-- Wesley


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: phase3/languages Language.php, 1.261,
 1.262 LanguageFr.php,
 1.67, 1.68 LanguageDe.php, 1.70,   1.71 LanguageZh.php, 1.16, 1.17

body:
Jens Frank wrote:

> Modified Files:
> 	Language.php LanguageFr.php LanguageDe.php LanguageZh.php
> Log Message:
> moved weekday, monthname etc to AllMessages arrays.

This change is going to have a noticeable and annoying effect on all
Wikipedias except for en, fr, de and zh where you adapted the language
files. Are you still planning to "fix" all the other language files too?

Greetings,
Timwi


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Attention all sysops on non-English Wikipedias

body:
Hi,

hopefully this notice will prevent complaints about this change.

Someone just checked in a software change that will allow sysops to
customise the names of months and weekdays via pages in the MediaWiki
namespace, just like most other things in the user interface. When this
change goes live on the site, you will see the month and weekdays names
change into English (I believe). Please do not panic when that happens.

Please create pages called [[MediaWiki:January]] etc. and
[[MediaWiki:Sunday]] etc. in your local Wikipedia and translate the
months/weekdays names appropriately.

In case you're not sure about the correct spellings, I have included
them below.

Greetings,
Timwi

Weekday names:
[[MediaWiki:Sunday]]
[[MediaWiki:Monday]]
[[MediaWiki:Tuesday]]
[[MediaWiki:Wednesday]]
[[MediaWiki:Thursday]]
[[MediaWiki:Friday]]
[[MediaWiki:Saturday]]

Month names:
[[MediaWiki:January]]
[[MediaWiki:February]]
[[MediaWiki:March]]
[[MediaWiki:April]]
[[MediaWiki:May]]
[[MediaWiki:June]]
[[MediaWiki:July]]
[[MediaWiki:August]]
[[MediaWiki:September]]
[[MediaWiki:October]]
[[MediaWiki:November]]
[[MediaWiki:December]]

Abbreviated month names:
[[MediaWiki:Jan]]
[[MediaWiki:Feb]]
[[MediaWiki:Mar]]
[[MediaWiki:Apr]]
[[MediaWiki:May]]
[[MediaWiki:Jun]]
[[MediaWiki:Jul]]
[[MediaWiki:Aug]]
[[MediaWiki:Sep]]
[[MediaWiki:Oct]]
[[MediaWiki:Nov]]
[[MediaWiki:Dec]]


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Forming an action plan for 1.0

body:
On 07/17/04 02:25, Tim Starling wrote:

> I just wanted to point out that when users were asked what they think is
> the most important thing programmers should be working on, only 4 out of
> 36, or 11% said formal review and distribution. The results in detail were:
> Quality: 17
> Performance: 12
> Syntax and rendering: 2
> Distribution: 4
> User rights: 1

> Note that the results were likely skewed towards quality, since the poll
> was advertised in a village pump discussion on quality features.

Yep. And people want today's problems fixed, not new features for new
problems ;-)

- d.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Attention all sysops on non-English   Wikipedias

body:
Andre Engels wrote:

>> Month names:
>> [[MediaWiki:May]]
>> Abbreviated month names:
>> [[MediaWiki:May]]
>
> I think you'd better find something else for one of those two...

Thanks! I'll go fix that.


body:
Andre Engels wrote:

>> Month names:
>> [[MediaWiki:May]]
>> Abbreviated month names:
>> [[MediaWiki:May]]
>
> I think you'd better find something else for one of those two...

The long name is now called [[MediaWiki:May_long]].

Again, thanks for pointing this out!

Timwi


from_name: Mark Richards

body:
I agree, there is no compelling reason not to use ogg
or something else that is free. Is there a
'mainstream' player (wmp, real or something) that
plays ogg these days?
Mark

--- "Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales" <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Neil Harris wrote:
> > Although they state: "More in general, no license
> fee is expected
> > for desktop software decoders/players that are
> distributed
> > free-of-charge for personal use." (Section 2.1.1,
> page 4), this does
> > not appear to cover other possible Wikipedia uses
> such as access to
> > Wikipedia over mobile devices running free
> software.
>
> Yes, 'free-of-charge for personal use' may be
> gratis, but it isn't
> libre.
>
> --Jimbo
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

__________________________________
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references:
<E1BlrOL-00045G-81@sc8-pr-cvs1.sourceforge.net>	<cdbkac$pdl$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<cdbnk6$vna$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
Tim Starling wrote:

> Timwi wrote:
>
>> Jens Frank wrote:
>>
>>> Modified Files:
>>>     Language.php LanguageFr.php LanguageDe.php LanguageZh.php Log
>>> Message:
>>> moved weekday, monthname etc to AllMessages arrays.
>>
>> This change is going to have a noticeable and annoying effect on all
>> Wikipedias except for en, fr, de and zh where you adapted the language
>> files. Are you still planning to "fix" all the other language files too?
>
> Don't be so quick to criticise. JeLuF has made a useful start towards a
> long-standing and annoying problem. We still have plenty of time left to
> fix any problems before the current CVS HEAD goes live.

Whoa. Again, I didn't mean to criticise anyone. I apologise. I was only
stating an observation and asking a question. People just read too much
between my lines. :/

Of course we can postpone the going-live of CVS HEAD as much as we want,
but in all honesty, who's going to fix those 150 language files? But
then again, it is probably enough to have all the translators create the
MediaWiki pages before it goes live, so... problem kind of solved. :)

Timwi


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikicommons take 5

body:
On 14 Jul 2004 05:37:00 +0200 erik_moeller at gmx.de (Erik Moeller) wrote:

>Apologies, I'm a bit behind on my book due to various circumstances (such
>as a friend moving in downstairs), and really need to commit myself to it
>to get it finished. I promise I'll rally the troops for the Wikicommons as
>soon as I'm ready. In the meantime, I'll state here that I will not stand
>in the way of any temporary wiki being set up.

Which finds me in a dilemma, given that I'm going on holiday in a week. Part
of me wants to start as soon as possible, but I think it's better if I wait
until I'm back, unless I find someone else who is willing to put work behind
it like Erik and me.

What needs to be done?
* set up a Wiki, preferably with the DNS entry as well
* get notification out to people who have shown interest
* get notification out to the various projects
* have discussions about policy and setting up a structure
* get some people starting with uploading
* get people working on coding issues

I need help from the technicians for #1, and would put the responsibility
for #6 with Erik. The main question is #4 and #5. If there are people not
only willing to help with that but to actually take the leading role, I
would want to ask #1 to be done ASAP, and do #2 and #3 and then get started.
If not, I will wait with those steps until I return, which will be in 3
weeks.

Andre Engels


subject: [Foundation-l] Wikicommons take 5


body:
On Sat, 17 Jul 2004 10:22:31 -0600, kelvSYC <kelvsyc at shaw.ca> wrote:
> So, in terms of wikimarkup, you could use something like [[quote:Main
> Page]] to link to Wikiquote's main page from a Wikipedia or Wiktionary?
>   What about [[books:Main Page]] or [[source:Main Page]]?

The correct interwiki links would be [[wikiquote:Main Page]],
[[wikibooks:Main Page]] and [[wikisource:Main Page]].

There is a complete list of supported interwiki links at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Interwiki_map.

Angela.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Attention all sysops on non-English Wikipedias

body:
Tim Starling wrote:

> Timwi wrote:
>
>> Someone just checked in a software change that will [...]
>
> I think you're jumping the gun a bit here. We're currently branched with
> experimental code in HEAD. Unless someone backports this to REL1_3,
> it'll be weeks before it goes live.

Hm, I see. Maybe we need to be clearer about when we are planning for
something to go live. You see, a few weeks ago I fixed something and it
went live the next day (of course, it is entirely possible that someone
back-ported it for me), so that's why I "jumped the gun" here.

Please do understand that I was acting in good faith - I anticipated
that the change might potentially annoy non-English contributors, so I
thought it'd be important to let them know.

Moving discussion thread back to tech list. Please reply only there.

Timwi


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Attention all sysops on non-English
 Wikipedias

body:
On Sat, 17 Jul 2004 17:41:10 +0100 Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:

>In case you're not sure about the correct spellings, I have included them
>below.

>Month names:
(snip)
>[[MediaWiki:May]]
(snip)

>Abbreviated month names:
(snip)
>[[MediaWiki:May]]
(snip)

I think you'd better find something else for one of those two...

Andre Engels


from_name: Daniel Mayer

body:
--- Yann Forget <yann at forget-me.net> wrote:
> Thanks, that's useful.
> Wikiquote in French is started.
>
> > Similar conversion of Wikibooks should be a fairly simple thing, I'm now
> > just waiting for community approval. We can't put subdomains under
> > wikisource.org because the domain name doesn't point to the right place.
> > It's owned by Mav and points to a redirect server, redirecting to
> > quote.wikipedia.org.
>
> Yes, I think Wikibooks in French is much wanted.

Please don't do that Tim since a French Wikibooks already exists at
http://wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page:Fran?ais .

We just need the ability to switch the interface language via preferences.

-- mav

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body:
--- Tim Starling <ts4294967296 at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Similar conversion of Wikibooks should be a fairly simple thing, I'm now
> just waiting for community approval. We can't put subdomains under
> wikisource.org because the domain name doesn't point to the right place.
> It's owned by Mav and points to a redirect server, redirecting to
> quote.wikipedia.org.

Wikibooks is internally multi-lingual so there is no need for sub-domains. The
foundation owns and controls wikisource.org and I no longer have access to it
to change settings. That project is *also* internally multi-lingual and thus
there is no need for subdomains (they would also be very repetitive since the
same source docs will need to be used in many different languages).

What we need is the ability to switch user interface language in the same wiki.

--mav

__________________________________
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from_name: MikyT

body:
Tim Starling <ts4294967296 at ...> writes:

>
> Wikiquote now has specific-language subdomains.

Hi! I'm the first user of the italian wikiquote.
I see that there are a few errors in the translation of the user interface?
Can I fix them? Who can do this?

Thanks in advance!
MikyT


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Tim Starling wrote:

> Wikiquote now has specific-language subdomains. Instead of creating
> wikis for all 150 languages, I made a system where wikis are only
> created when they're wanted. To save time during maintenance
> operations, it should now be possible to delete unused Wiktionaries
> and even Wikipedias until they are required.
>
> Similar conversion of Wikibooks should be a fairly simple thing, I'm
> now just waiting for community approval. We can't put subdomains under
> wikisource.org because the domain name doesn't point to the right
> place. It's owned by Mav and points to a redirect server, redirecting
> to quote.wikipedia.org.

It's sources.wikipedia.org.

Why would Wikisource want sub-domains anyway?  We're doing quite well
with all languages in a single project.

Ec


from_name: Tomos at Wikipedia

body:
There is perhaps a bug in blocking. It is known to some sysops of japanese
wikipedia that an admin has to sometimes block the same IP or username twice
in order to make it effective.

Tomos

_________________________________________________________________
Is your PC infected? Get a FREE online computer virus scan from McAfee?
Security. http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963


body:
Just some observations and remarks on this issue.

I think it was not a mistake that every project got the fundraising notice.

I was on an IRC channel when there was a discussion of some project being
upset, and therefore blanking the message or not translating it. One person
asked if the messages could be turned off for some projects. A few
developers expressed that those projects should come up with alternative
fundraising plans that cover their portion of expected funding need. Nothing
was turned off. There followed a discussion of putting different traffic
priorities to different projects. (But I am not sure if they were really
serious about this.)

I have to say I was quite disappointed about the lack of mutual trust. I
think the developers thought those projects do not care about our financial
needs and only be annoyed by the message. I think those projects reacted
negatively because the project members thought the placing of the notice was
top-down, English-centric practice.

I have to say that both sides might be right, which is even more
disappointing than the mutual distrust?

I saw Sj talking with the developers, suggesting some sensible solutions,
visiting many Wikipedias and talk to others, and after all, things changed
rather easily. Developers did understand how things could work out better,
and came up with a better technical solution very quick. Some projects did
respond to Sj?s call and translate the message into their languages. So,
after all, we are not so disappointing, I found.

Tomos

_________________________________________________________________
Don?t just search. Find. Check out the new MSN Search!
http://search.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200636ave/direct/01/


body:
Tim Starling wrote:

> kelvSYC wrote:
>
>> So, in terms of wikimarkup, you could use something like [[quote:Main
>> Page]] to link to Wikiquote's main page from a Wikipedia or
>> Wiktionary?  What about [[books:Main Page]] or [[source:Main Page]]?
>
>
> The current interwiki link prefixes are "w" for wikipedia, "wikt" for
> wiktionary and "wikiquote" for wikiquote. I was intending on using the
> literal names "wikibooks" and "wikisource", since those prefixes were
> already valid interwiki links. When I set up the multi-language
> wiktionaries, there were subtle differences between the "wiktionary"
> link which I left as is for backwards compatibility, and the new
> "wikt" link. People found these differences confusing when they
> encountered them, which is why I avoided it this time. However I can
> see the advantage of having short names, and perhaps the problems
> could be avoided with better documentation, or maybe a slight break in
> backwards compatibility to produce a more intuitive result.

My own preferences have always been "wp" for Wikipedia; "wd" for
Wiktionary (though I suppose "wt" would do), "wq" for Wikiquote, "ws"
for Wikisource, "wb" for Wikibooks, and "wm" for the 9/11 project.
These are all two letter "w" codes which should be easy to remember.  I
haven't heard any clamour for additional projects.  The "w" codes would
not conflict with any ISO-639-1 language codes where only "wa" and "wo"
are used.

Ec


from_name: Tim Starling

body:
Wikiquote now has specific-language subdomains. Instead of creating
wikis for all 150 languages, I made a system where wikis are only
created when they're wanted. To save time during maintenance operations,
it should now be possible to delete unused Wiktionaries and even
Wikipedias until they are required.

Similar conversion of Wikibooks should be a fairly simple thing, I'm now
just waiting for community approval. We can't put subdomains under
wikisource.org because the domain name doesn't point to the right place.
It's owned by Mav and points to a redirect server, redirecting to
quote.wikipedia.org.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Timwi

body:
MikyT wrote:

> I see that there are a few errors in the translation of the user interface?
> Can I fix them? Who can do this?

You can fix them for a particular wiki by editing the relevant messages
in the MediaWiki namespace. See [[Special:Allmessages]] for a list of
them. However, in the interest of correctness, it would be nice if you
could also get in contact with administrators on the Italian Wikipedia,
so they can fix the same mistakes there (if they exist at all).


body:
--- Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> My own preferences have always been "wp" for Wikipedia; "wd" for
> Wiktionary (though I suppose "wt" would do), "wq" for Wikiquote, "ws"
> for Wikisource, "wb" for Wikibooks, and "wm" for the 9/11 project.
> These are all two letter "w" codes which should be easy to remember.  I
> haven't heard any clamour for additional projects.  The "w" codes would
> not conflict with any ISO-639-1 language codes where only "wa" and "wo"
> are used.

"wt" should be reserved for Wikitravel. who may eventually join the Wikimedia
family. Also, current plans are to rename the Sep11 wiki to Wikipeople and
expand its focus. So that may complicate using wp.

-- mav

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from_name: Emmanuel Engelhart

subject: [Wikitech-l] [TEMPLATE INSERTION] Maybe a solution -> try this patch

body:
Hi

Another patch to try to improve the template parsing.

This patch provides the following features :
- Prevents recursive loop with templates
- Prevents too big insertions (more than n chars)
- Makes a cache for templates (include 1000 {Le} is now possible)

Cordialy

Emmanuel

--
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
UNIX n'est pas aim? des utilisateurs car avec UNIX,
un incomp?tent passe vraiment pour un incomp?tent.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Emmanuel Engelhart      ICQ UIN : 53388731   TEL (+49)(0)6.22.15.88.03.31
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from_name: Arwel Parry

body:
In message <cdbks0$qar$1 at sea.gmane.org>, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> writes
>Someone just checked in a software change that will allow sysops to
>customise the names of months and weekdays via pages in the MediaWiki
>namespace, just like most other things in the user interface. When this
>change goes live on the site, you will see the month and weekdays names
>change into English (I believe). Please do not panic when that happens.
>
>Please create pages called [[MediaWiki:January]] etc. and
>[[MediaWiki:Sunday]] etc. in your local Wikipedia and translate the
>months/weekdays names appropriately.

Will it screw things up if we create these in advance of your software
change?

While I'm on the subject of local language versions, I posted a query to
Wikitech-l last week about who, if anyone, monitors and applies
requested changes to the LanguageXX.php files, requested via
[[meta:Requests for languageXX.php update]] and [[meta:Language files to
be updated]] and got no reply at all --- there are requests on there
that go back to last March and there is no indication that any of them
have been actioned.

It's frustrating to those of us who are trying to keep our user
interfaces and magic words reasonably grammatical to go to the trouble
of updating these huge files and then we find that the developers have
gone and released another version of their own, which we then have to
keep our files in synchronisation with.

--
Arwel Parry
cy.wikipedia.org


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Waiting for 1.0

body:
--- Sj <2.718281828 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Wow, lots of talk about an important subject.  Wonderful.
> What TomK has said about this -- that it requires no technical
> support, but instead requires defining specific reachable subprojects,
> drumming up community interest in them, and providing regular updates
> and 'prereleases' with the status of the whole project -- is absolutely
> right for the short-term.

Exactly. We should first concentrate on creating progressively longer
WikiReaders before we tackle something as large as an entire general
encyclopedia (even a full concise one would be daunting).

> I would vote for World History or Physics, despite the different topics of
> the currently-underway English Readers -- and start defining the scope
> of our first validation effort.  Feel free to write me privately with other
> suggestions, if you don't want to spam the list...

But do we have adequate coverage in that subject area? Also, wouldn't a smaller
WikiReader be a better place to start?

> For a longer-term scalable solution, I think a fairly simple solution which
> would improve not only this 1.0 validation but also many other aspects of
> WP maintenance, is the creation of a page for explicitly managing
> metadata flags for an article -- "stub", "copyvio", ahd "wrong language"
> flags
> as well as review flags for higher-order quality validation.  See the metada
> section of the validation article:

Yes, I think a flag: meta tag would be good for this since that type of
information is really not appropriate for category:.

> As Ant has noted elsewhere, the intent of validation is to get editors
> to improve articles, not to encourage them to waste time voting on the
> 'best' version; as such I think a simple objection/response system, where
> each objection should be responded to by some future editor (and where the
> articles steadily improve) is a good way to think about it.

Why not readers then? Simply have a 'Rate this article' link in the toolbox of
every article. They could give a 1 to 5 rating across a few different
categories (completeness, readability, and accuracy) and be able to give an
explanation in a text box. The rating would then be associated with the version
that existed when the rating was created.

These data could be part of any validation system by feeding it articles that
readers think are pretty good (a minimum number of unique votes would be needed
to rate any article). Some other mechanism would then have to take place to
finish the validation process.

Just an idea.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Attention all sysops on non-English Wikipedias

body:
Believe it or not, I think this could be the type of messages which
would gain to be announced on wikipedia itself.

Just as a general message, send through an automated system, JUST when
the change is made.

(ant running away)

Timwi wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> hopefully this notice will prevent complaints about this change.
>
> Someone just checked in a software change that will allow sysops to
> customise the names of months and weekdays via pages in the MediaWiki
> namespace, just like most other things in the user interface. When this
> change goes live on the site, you will see the month and weekdays names
> change into English (I believe). Please do not panic when that happens.
>
> Please create pages called [[MediaWiki:January]] etc. and
> [[MediaWiki:Sunday]] etc. in your local Wikipedia and translate the
> months/weekdays names appropriately.
>
> In case you're not sure about the correct spellings, I have included
> them below.
>
> Greetings,
> Timwi
>
>
> Weekday names:
> [[MediaWiki:Sunday]]
> [[MediaWiki:Monday]]
> [[MediaWiki:Tuesday]]
> [[MediaWiki:Wednesday]]
> [[MediaWiki:Thursday]]
> [[MediaWiki:Friday]]
> [[MediaWiki:Saturday]]
>
> Month names:
> [[MediaWiki:January]]
> [[MediaWiki:February]]
> [[MediaWiki:March]]
> [[MediaWiki:April]]
> [[MediaWiki:May]]
> [[MediaWiki:June]]
> [[MediaWiki:July]]
> [[MediaWiki:August]]
> [[MediaWiki:September]]
> [[MediaWiki:October]]
> [[MediaWiki:November]]
> [[MediaWiki:December]]
>
> Abbreviated month names:
> [[MediaWiki:Jan]]
> [[MediaWiki:Feb]]
> [[MediaWiki:Mar]]
> [[MediaWiki:Apr]]
> [[MediaWiki:May]]
> [[MediaWiki:Jun]]
> [[MediaWiki:Jul]]
> [[MediaWiki:Aug]]
> [[MediaWiki:Sep]]
> [[MediaWiki:Oct]]
> [[MediaWiki:Nov]]
> [[MediaWiki:Dec]]


from_name: Fennec Foxen

body:
On Sat, 17 Jul 2004 18:08:58 -0700 (PDT), Mark Richards
<marich712000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I agree, there is no compelling reason not to use ogg
> or something else that is free. Is there a
> 'mainstream' player (wmp, real or something) that
> plays ogg these days?
> Mark

Winamp. Foobar2000. ogg123, xmms, mplayer.
--
You keep using that word...
I do not think it means what you think it means.


body:
MikyT wrote:
> Hi! I'm the first user of the italian wikiquote.
> I see that there are a few errors in the translation of the user interface?
> Can I fix them? Who can do this?

There are instructions on changing the interface at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_namespace.

However, to edit these messages, you need administrator access (see
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Amministratori for details).
There are no admins on the Italian Wikiquote yet, but users of that
wiki can apply for this at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_permissions.

Angela.


from_name: zero 0000

subject: [WikiEN-l] Quote of the day

body:
Edit summary for [[Talk:Israel Shahak]]:
  Sysops, please stop Zero's ad homenim personal attacks and
  anti-Semitic Jew bashing

You have exactly one guess who wrote this masterpiece.

I'd like to reply as follows:
   Sysops, when oh when can we finally be rid of this lunatic?

Zero.

__________________________________
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from_name: Mark Ryan

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Waiting for 1.0

body:
I believe the KISS principle is applicable here - "keep it simple,
stupid". Article versions should be endorsed by simply clicking a star
beside the revision in the article history, in the same way as Gmail
uses to "star" an email. If we make the selection process to
complicated, we'll never get around to endorsing the tens of thousands
of articles we aim to have in the finished product.

Anyway, the way I think could work is to have each permitted user able
to select only one revision of an article. From that, the total
numbers of users endorsing a particular revision could determine which
revision is selected in the end. I have created a mock screenshot of
how this could work, have a look at:

http://www.ecel.uwa.edu.au/~markryan/pagerank.png

Making the process much more complicated than this would be silly, in
my opinion.

~Mark Ryan


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

body:
On Sat, Jul 17, 2004 at 05:41:10PM +0100, Timwi wrote:
> Hi,
>
> hopefully this notice will prevent complaints about this change.
>
> Someone just checked in a software change that will allow sysops to
> customise the names of months and weekdays via pages in the MediaWiki
> namespace, just like most other things in the user interface. When this
> change goes live on the site, you will see the month and weekdays names
> change into English (I believe). Please do not panic when that happens.
>
> Please create pages called [[MediaWiki:January]] etc. and
> [[MediaWiki:Sunday]] etc. in your local Wikipedia and translate the
> months/weekdays names appropriately.

Why would anybody want to change month or week names to something different ?

This interface isn't powerful enough for creating new translations,
and it will break some of those that work now as it doesn't provide
separate nominative and genitive monthnames, like the current software does.


from_name: Sj

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Waiting for 1.0

body:
Wow, lots of talk about an important subject.  Wonderful.
What TomK has said about this -- that it requires no technical
support, but instead requires defining specific reachable subprojects,
drumming up community interest in them, and providing regular updates
and 'prereleases' with the status of the whole project -- is absolutely
right for the short-term.

Those of you who are eager to work on this, let us pick a suitable subject --
I would vote for World History or Physics, despite the different topics of
the currently-underway English Readers -- and start defining the scope
of our first validation effort.  Feel free to write me privately with other
suggestions, if you don't want to spam the list...

For a longer-term scalable solution, I think a fairly simple solution which
would improve not only this 1.0 validation but also many other aspects of
WP maintenance, is the creation of a page for explicitly managing
metadata flags for an article -- "stub", "copyvio", ahd "wrong language" flags
as well as review flags for higher-order quality validation.  See the metada
section of the validation article:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Article_validation#Validation_via_extra_metadata

Magnus writes:
> For the record, my opionion to these:
> * approvals need *not* to be on the same version, but a "disapproval"
> could invalidate any prior approvals
> * one approval (we can sort out bot articles/extremely long ones later)
> * no rating (either it is a good one or not).

I'm not sure what you mean by 'one approval', but I agree with your first and
third points -- approvals need not be on the same version (think of them as
'edits' to the article, which have to be actively removed by another editor
before they are no longer part of it), and that there should be no rating scale.

Either you think it should be validated or you have a specific
(hopefully fixable)
set of objections. I'm not eager to create a spectrum of
article-quality; certainly
not along a single linear scale of Quality; it is unnatural, and as a result
invites disappointment and disagreement from users, each of whom
will be able to find a pair of articles that s/he considers grossly misordered.

On Sat, 17 Jul 2004 23:07:43 +0800, Mark Ryan <ultrablue at gmail.com> wrote:
> Article versions should be endorsed by simply clicking a star
> beside the revision in the article history, in the same way as Gmail
> uses to "star" an email. If we make the selection process to
> complicated, we'll never get around to endorsing the tens of thousands
> of articles we aim to have in the finished product.

gmail users everywhere agree... the review process should be very simple.
(that said, I think we should prompt reviewers to evaluate an article in
certain lights, according to the different qualities we would like in validated
articles

> Anyway, the way I think could work is to have each permitted user able
> to select only one revision of an article. From that, the total

As Ant has noted elsewhere, the intent of validation is to get editors
to improve
articles, not to encourage them to waste time voting on the 'best' version; as
such I think a simple objection/response system, where each objection should
be responded to by some future editor (and where the articles steadily improve)
is a good way to think about it.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Article_validation#Validation_via_extra_metadata

>>sj<<


body:
Timwi wrote:
> Tim Starling wrote:
>
>> Wikiquote now has specific-language subdomains. Instead of creating
>> wikis for all 150 languages, I made a system where wikis are only
>> created when they're wanted.
>
>
> How can the "wiki doesn't exist" page be edited?

Two files:

/home/wikipedia/common/php-new/missing.php and
/home/wikipedia/htdocs/index.html

The first is for subdomains which are configured for a shared document
root, and includes the PHP necessary to check if the subdomain
corresponds to an approved language, and to add the language to a queue.
At the moment this means *.wikiquote.org and *.wiktionary.org. The
second is for all other non-existent domains. The text is based on the
meta main page.

-- Tim Starling


body:
Timwi wrote:
> Tim Starling wrote:
>
>> Modified Files:
>>       Tag: REL1_3
>>     DefaultSettings.php MessageCache.php Setup.php Log Message:
>> allow messages to be drawn from another database, off by default
>
>
> This still requires the secondary database to be on the same server as
> the main database, doesn't it?

Yes, but it's a trivial modification if you wish it to be otherwise.
Configure the second server with zero load allocation. Then just grab a
connection to the desired server using wfGetDB() in
MessageCache::loadFromDB(). Say if you give it an index of 10, then the
appropriate code would be:

if ( $this->mSecondaryDB ) {
     # Load from fallback
     $db =& wfGetDB( 10 );
     $sql = "SELECT cur_title,cur_text FROM {$this->mSecondaryDB}.cur
WHERE cur_is_redirect=0 AND cur_namespace=" . NS_MEDIAWIKI;
     $res = $db->query( $sql, $fname );
     $this->mCache = array();
     for ( $row = $db->fetchObject( $res ); $row; $row =
$db->fetchObject( $res ) ) {
         $this->mCache[$row->cur_title] = $row->cur_text;
     }
}


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [Wikipedia-l] The hard part of 1.0: selection.

body:
We won't be forking. We have a rating system achieving consensus. So far
so good.

I predict the all-in shitfight will be in turf wars. Selection, as every
partisan editorial group tries to get its articles into the final cut. Not at
the level of editing the articles themselves - an approval mechanism will
handle that - I'm talking about telling people that their area won't get all
the articles it might want in. If any.

(The worst thing is that we'll have to cut back the areas we're actually
really strong in.)

[[Wikipedia:List of encyclopedia topics]] gives us some idea of what should go
into a single-volume reference. We also need to work out roughly how the
Columbia or Concise Britannica break down into space per topic area. (Do we
have any work in this area already?)

A version rating system (as is mooted on the mailing list) will help a lot.
That is, the mooted peer-rating system which looks likely to happen anyway. We
can use this to 1.0's benefit - rather than set some poor bastard to rating
the articles, we *let the wiki do the work*.

    1. Wait till a lot of articles (or a fair few) have been rated.
    2. Set a cutoff level that gives you a book's worth of articles. Call that
       milestone 0.7.
    3. Examine just how imbalanced we are.

This will give us Wikipedia 0.7, let's say. 0.8 can be better, 0.9 can be
area-selection-complete, 1.0 can be a polished 0.9.

What we need is a way to let the wiki do the work for step 3 above. Is there a
way to harness dilettantism to achieve consensus on what to cut and what to boost?

Bringing areas up to scratch will still be real heavy lifting. How much real
work, we can't know until we get the 0.7 described above.

Thoughts? (Jimbo, you there?)

- d.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Please enable full HTML on foundation wiki

body:
Could somebody please respond to this email:

http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2004-July/011181.html

Getting a fully functional and multilingual foundation website will much better
enable us to generate the money needed to buy more hardware and perhaps hire a
server admin.

-- Daniel Mayer

__________________________________
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body:
Timwi wrote:
> Jens Frank wrote:
>
>> Modified Files:
>>     Language.php LanguageFr.php LanguageDe.php LanguageZh.php Log
>> Message:
>> moved weekday, monthname etc to AllMessages arrays.
>
>
> This change is going to have a noticeable and annoying effect on all
> Wikipedias except for en, fr, de and zh where you adapted the language
> files. Are you still planning to "fix" all the other language files too?
>

Don't be so quick to criticise. JeLuF has made a useful start towards a
long-standing and annoying problem. We still have plenty of time left to
fix any problems before the current CVS HEAD goes live.

-- Tim Starling


body:
Timwi wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> hopefully this notice will prevent complaints about this change.
>
> Someone just checked in a software change that will allow sysops to
> customise the names of months and weekdays via pages in the MediaWiki
> namespace, just like most other things in the user interface. When this
> change goes live on the site, you will see the month and weekdays names
> change into English (I believe). Please do not panic when that happens.

I think you're jumping the gun a bit here. We're currently branched with
experimental code in HEAD. Unless someone backports this to REL1_3,
it'll be weeks before it goes live.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Should MP3 files be allowed on wikipedia -
	Current ongoing discussion.

body:
actually there is a plugin for directshow ( which windows media player uses ).

Furthermore, shouldnt we also reccomend Ogg FLAC; Ogg Speex and Ogg
Theora on that page, perhaps move it to Wikipedia:Media, or better yet
to meta as it concerns all projects.

On Sat, 17 Jul 2004 18:08:58 -0700 (PDT), Mark Richards
<marich712000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I agree, there is no compelling reason not to use ogg
> or something else that is free. Is there a
> 'mainstream' player (wmp, real or something) that
> plays ogg these days?
> Mark
>
>
>
>
> --- "Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales" <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> > Neil Harris wrote:
> > > Although they state: "More in general, no license
> > fee is expected
> > > for desktop software decoders/players that are
> > distributed
> > > free-of-charge for personal use." (Section 2.1.1,
> > page 4), this does
> > > not appear to cover other possible Wikipedia uses
> > such as access to
> > > Wikipedia over mobile devices running free
> > software.
> >
> > Yes, 'free-of-charge for personal use' may be
> > gratis, but it isn't
> > libre.
> >
> > --Jimbo
> > _______________________________________________
> > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> >
>
>
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Mail is new and improved - Check it out!
> http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
kelvSYC wrote:
>
> So, in terms of wikimarkup, you could use something like [[quote:Main
> Page]] to link to Wikiquote's main page from a Wikipedia or Wiktionary?
>  What about [[books:Main Page]] or [[source:Main Page]]?

The current interwiki link prefixes are "w" for wikipedia, "wikt" for
wiktionary and "wikiquote" for wikiquote. I was intending on using the
literal names "wikibooks" and "wikisource", since those prefixes were
already valid interwiki links. When I set up the multi-language
wiktionaries, there were subtle differences between the "wiktionary"
link which I left as is for backwards compatibility, and the new "wikt"
link. People found these differences confusing when they encountered
them, which is why I avoided it this time. However I can see the
advantage of having short names, and perhaps the problems could be
avoided with better documentation, or maybe a slight break in backwards
compatibility to produce a more intuitive result.

-- Tim Starling


subject: [Wikitech-l] LanguageIs.php

body:
The one uploaded yesterday was based on an old version, this is a new
version i've fine-tuned a little more, please go over it hover as i
may have made some subtle mistakes i havent noticed.
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from_name: Jens Frank

body:
On Sat, Jul 17, 2004 at 09:34:42PM +0100, Arwel Parry wrote:
> In message <cdbks0$qar$1 at sea.gmane.org>, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> writes
> >Someone just checked in a software change that will allow sysops to
> >customise the names of months and weekdays via pages in the MediaWiki
> >namespace, just like most other things in the user interface. When this
> >change goes live on the site, you will see the month and weekdays names
> >change into English (I believe). Please do not panic when that happens.
> >
> >Please create pages called [[MediaWiki:January]] etc. and
> >[[MediaWiki:Sunday]] etc. in your local Wikipedia and translate the
> >months/weekdays names appropriately.
>
> Will it screw things up if we create these in advance of your software
> change?

Probably not, but there is no need in creating them in advance as they are
automatically taken from the current translation.

> While I'm on the subject of local language versions, I posted a query to
> Wikitech-l last week about who, if anyone, monitors and applies
> requested changes to the LanguageXX.php files, requested via
> [[meta:Requests for languageXX.php update]] and [[meta:Language files to
> be updated]] and got no reply at all --- there are requests on there
> that go back to last March and there is no indication that any of them
> have been actioned.

[[meta:Requests for languageXX.php update]] is rather dead, it is from the
time before users were able to customize messages using MediaWiki:...

Regards,

JeLuF


body:
On Sat, Jul 17, 2004 at 05:41:10PM +0100, Timwi wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> hopefully this notice will prevent complaints about this change.
>
> Someone just checked in a software change that will allow sysops to
> customise the names of months and weekdays via pages in the MediaWiki
> namespace, just like most other things in the user interface. When this
> change goes live on the site, you will see the month and weekdays names
> change into English (I believe). Please do not panic when that happens.
>
> Please create pages called [[MediaWiki:January]] etc. and
> [[MediaWiki:Sunday]] etc. in your local Wikipedia and translate the
> months/weekdays names appropriately.

If you would have read the entire patch, you would have noticed that I'm
moving translations from hardcoded to user-configurable, not only for
English, but for all languages. There have been complaints that certain
parts of the user interface are not maintainable (month names, user
preferences, etc) using the MediaWiki:-namespace.

I'm putting a high effort into not breaking things in this process, e.g.
moving all existing translations etc. Currently having 52 languages, this
will take some time.

If you fear that code changes will break things, please contact the author
of that patch (in this case: me) first, before frightening all our users!
Be assured that the goal of the MediaWiki developers is not to break things.

JeLuF


from_name: Charles Podles

subject: [WikiEN-l] Quote of the day

body:
--- zero 0000 <nought_0000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Edit summary for [[Talk:Israel Shahak]]:
>   Sysops, please stop Zero's ad homenim personal
> attacks and
>   anti-Semitic Jew bashing
>
> You have exactly one guess who wrote this
> masterpiece.
>
> I'd like to reply as follows:
>    Sysops, when oh when can we finally be rid of
> this lunatic?
>
> Zero.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration

The arbitrators are not hasty, but they've shown
themselves to be effective and fair in dealing with
abusive jerks like you-know-who---who has a looong
(over two years) record of abuse and personal attacks
worse than some of the users whom the AC has banned.

That route is also superior to complaints on the
mailing list; he-who-must-not-be-named makes those all
the time, and look where it gets him.

--Charles Podles ([[en:User:Mirv]])

__________________________________
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Waiting for 1.0

body:
On Sat, 17 Jul 2004 21:35:15 -0700 (PDT), Daniel Mayer
<maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- Sj <2.718281828 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Wow, lots of talk about an important subject.  Wonderful.
< > What TomK has said about this ... is just right for the short-term.
>
> Exactly. We should first concentrate on creating progressively longer
> WikiReaders before we tackle something as large as an entire general
> encyclopedia (even a full concise one would be daunting).

I have to say, I don't like the name WikiReader, and hope we stop
using it as a general term.  (-:  All of the wiki is meant to be read.  I will
just write "subpedia" and hope you know what I mean.

> > I would vote for World History or Physics, despite the different topics of
>
> But do we have adequate coverage in that subject area?

Well, we certainly have decent coverage for some subsets of these subjects.
I agree that we should start smaller; perhaps American History and
Mechanics?  I think we could manage either of those.   (One of the skills we
need to develop is the ability to cover a subject area or any size in 100 pages;
the broader the subject area, the higher-level the produced content.  WP right
now has very few good overview articles, as is evidenced by the scattershot
quality of top-level topics linked directly from the main page -- but we do
have the editor expertise to fix that, as evidenced by our deep articles.)

> > For a longer-term scalable solution, I think a fairly simple solution which
> > would improve not only this 1.0 validation but also many other aspects of
> > WP maintenance, is the creation of a page for explicitly managing
> > metadata flags for an article -- "stub", "copyvio", ahd "wrong language"
> > flags
> > as well as review flags for higher-order quality validation.  See the metada
> > section of the validation article:
>
> Yes, I think a flag: meta tag would be good for this since that type of
> information is really not appropriate for category:.

Or a longer metadata section in the db (which might be more scalable).

> > As Ant has noted elsewhere, the intent of validation is to get editors
> > to improve articles, not to encourage them to waste time voting on the
> > 'best' version; as such I think a simple objection/response system, where
>
> Why not readers then? Simply have a 'Rate this article' link in the toolbox of
> every article. They could give a 1 to 5 rating across a few different
> categories (completeness, readability, and accuracy) and be able to give an
> explanation in a text box. The rating would then be associated with the version

I could be convinced about this, if it were a loose and unbinding measure of
reader responses.  I do think that there should be a more detailed
(one explanation-box per category/facet; more options) and less rated review
function, which would be more closely bound to the validation process.

> readers think are pretty good (a minimum number of unique votes would be needed
> to rate any article). Some other mechanism would then have to take place to
> finish the validation process.

Could certainly work as a low-barrier-to-input source of information.
Expecially
if the result of such votes were not made public save for articles with hundreds
of them...

_sj_


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia denigrated in The Register

body:
On Thu, 15 Jul 2004 08:19:02 -0700, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales
<jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> > >   "For example, if you consult the world's most useless online text,
> > >   the captive Wikipedia, you'll see Fuller's entry is a plug for
> > >   Eric "AI" Drexler."

The whole piece was a bit tongue-in-cheek, and this part too just seemed
like a bit of dry humour... we are after all the world's most useful
online text,
the free! Wikipedia.  How better to convey that to a British audience?
I'm not sure if it was all an *inside* joke, though; it had the sweet sting
of truth in places.

>sj<, mail backlogged


from_name: Krzysztof Kowalczyk

subject: [Wikitech-l] Announce: Going to start phase4

body:
On Sun, 18 Jul 2004 17:45:38 +0200, Enrico Weigelt <weigelt at metux.de> wrote:
> I'm going to do some quite huge changes in mediawiki and so going
> to start a forkoff into phase4.
>
> awaiting you comments :)

I just started playing with gmail account (google's web-based e-mail
system, for those that don't know).

They have a very nice implementation of what they call "Labels". If
you have gmail account, it's best to just play with it. "Labels" are
just a categorization implementation. I can create labels and tag a
given e-mail message with multiple labels.

The idea is not new by any means - it has been done before, it's just
adding very simple metadata to pieces of information.

In context of e-mail "Labels" can be used as equivalent of "virtual
folders" e.g. I tag all e-mails from this list with "wikipedia" label.

In context of WikiPedia, Labels are equivalent of Categories.

They can also be used to implement other things that are done manually
e.g. lists of any kinds (e.g. list of articles nominated for great
writing, list of "most wanted to be written articles). We could use
label "stub" instead of {{stub}} tag etc.

So I think it would be good to have a good implementation of labels
and implement other functionality (e.g. categories) in terms of
labels.

Why bother? I'm a strong believer that good user interface is
important. Label, if implemented well like in gmail, are much better
interface than e.g. [[Category::foo]].

They are more discoverable (assumption is that labels were accessible
from main page).

Just a thought.

Krzysztof Kowalczyk / http://blog.kowalczyk.info


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Waiting for 1.0

body:
Mark Ryan wrote:

>We would need the spell checker to be reactivated and modified so that
>articles can be checked on their own (rather than giving a huge list
>of all pages with particular errors in them). I don't fancy copying
>entire articles into MS Word to check for errors (and people checking
>articles for correct spelling would be likely to miss many errors). I
>know the spell checker was a huge resource drain on Wikipedia, but if
>it is restricted to those permitted to validate articles, it shouldn't
>be so bad.
>
We would need to feel confident that the spell checker respected
national variations such as labor/labour while maintaing consistent
usage within an individual article.

Spell checkers also create false security.  They would never catch the
wrong use of there/their for example.  Human checking will still be
essential.

Ec


from_name: Yann Forget

subject: [Wikipedia-l] French Wikibooks

body:
Hi,

Le Sunday 18 July 2004 04:30, Daniel Mayer a ?crit :
>
> > > Similar conversion of Wikibooks should be a fairly simple thing, I'm
> > > now just waiting for community approval. We can't put subdomains under
> > > wikisource.org because the domain name doesn't point to the right
> > > place. It's owned by Mav and points to a redirect server, redirecting
> > > to quote.wikipedia.org.
> >
> > Yes, I think Wikibooks in French is much wanted.
>
> Please don't do that Tim since a French Wikibooks already exists at
> http://wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page:Fran?ais .

I feel that many people want to work on French Wikibooks, but don't because of
the English interface. So there are just a few pages which would be easy to
move. And there is still the problem of name conflicts.

> We just need the ability to switch the interface language via preferences.

This has been talked about for months but nothing happened.
And I didn't see any short term plan for that.

> -- mav

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


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Waiting for 1.0

body:
Le Sunday 18 July 2004 10:17, Mark Ryan a ?crit :
> We would need the spell checker to be reactivated and modified so that
> articles can be checked on their own (rather than giving a huge list
> of all pages with particular errors in them). I don't fancy copying
> entire articles into MS Word to check for errors (and people checking
> articles for correct spelling would be likely to miss many errors). I
> know the spell checker was a huge resource drain on Wikipedia, but if
> it is restricted to those permitted to validate articles, it shouldn't
> be so bad.

No, real paper publications are always ultimately checked by human eyes even
for spelling. Automatic spelling is just a tool, but it can't detect every
spelling mistakes.

> ~Mark Ryan

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


body:
On Wed, 14 Jul 2004 20:20:51 -0700 (PDT), Daniel Mayer
<maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I would really like to move the fundraising page to the new foundation wiki...
...
> Allowing full HTML will also make it possible for other language versions of
> that page (which have already been written) to go live.

It's not yet clear there will even be a separate wiki. Other than
allowing for HTML, which can be done on Meta, as is the case with the
current fundraising page, what do people see as the advantages of
separating the site to a place which will have even less visitors than
Meta currently has?

Other points that need to be decided before the new site is launched
is whether certain pages (such as the budget or the bylaws) will need
to be marked as official in some way, and whether or not translations
of those ought to be clearly marked as non-official. The permissions
of who can edit will need to be decided, particularly if the separate
wiki is used. The one in place at the moment only lets sysops create
user accounts and it is far from clear whether this is an acceptable
solution.

One problem with using HTML is that you could argue it is unwiki and
will prevent those who don't know it from editing there. Using
wikitext is an easier option, but does lead to a less pretty looking
site. Do people see this as an issue or not? If full HTML is going to
be enabled, the motivation for restricting editing access increases
for security reasons.

> Also, could somebody move the whole wiki to wikimediafoundation.org?

Whether it comes from a separate wiki or via Meta, it will be at
wikimediafoundation.org. Wikimedia.org will redirect there.

Angela


references:
<cdbks0$qar$1@sea.gmane.org> <a9hvbjDi1Y+AFwr7@cartref.demon.co.uk>
	<a9hvbjDi1Y+AFwr7-wfA80NnNzEcG2Il/BtU0GPXRex20P6io@public.gmane.org>
	<20040718050009.GB29414@jeluf.mine.nu>

body:
In message <20040718050009.GB29414 at jeluf.mine.nu>, Jens Frank
<JeLuF-Mmb7MZpHnFY at public.gmane.org> writes
>On Sat, Jul 17, 2004 at 09:34:42PM +0100, Arwel Parry wrote:
>> While I'm on the subject of local language versions, I posted a query to
>> Wikitech-l last week about who, if anyone, monitors and applies
>> requested changes to the LanguageXX.php files, requested via
>> [[meta:Requests for languageXX.php update]] and [[meta:Language files to
>> be updated]] and got no reply at all --- there are requests on there
>> that go back to last March and there is no indication that any of them
>> have been actioned.
>
>[[meta:Requests for languageXX.php update]] is rather dead, it is from the
>time before users were able to customize messages using MediaWiki:...

In that case it's a rather unfortunate that there's quite a prominent
link to it from "meta utilities" on meta's front page! But
notwithstanding MediaWiki, there are other things which individual
language users may wish to customise, such as magic words, words for
"left" "right"  "centre" "thumb" etc. for the image syntax, namespace
names, etc., which are among the things I've been trying to update on
cy. There is still a need for user communities to be able to attract the
attention of developers.

--
Arwel Parry
cy.wikipedia.org


subject: [Wikitech-l] Convert characters to entities on UTF-8 Wikipedias??

body:
Angela_ wrote:

>On Sun, 18 Jul 2004 13:56:18 +0200, Leonard Vertighel
><leonard.vertighel at web.de> wrote:
>
>
>>on the Italian Wikipedia it has recently been discussed to make a bot that is
>>used for some maintenance work additionally convert characters like letters
>>with accents to HTML-entities (è etc.).
>>It has been argued that those characters can't be entered directly e.g. with
>>an American keyboard layout...
>>
>>
>
>It does seem the wrong way round to me. The edit box should be easy to
>read, and HTML entities are not going to help that. If people have a
>problem typing certain letters, it might be helpful to put a copy of
>those into the [[it:MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning]] page. This is already
>done on the Maori and German Wikipedias. See
>http://mi.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning for example.
>This means the letters are shown at the end of every edit page and can
>be copied and pasted by those who can't type them on their keyboard.
>
>
I agree that Leonard's approach is the wrong way round.  My inclination
when I see that kind of HTML entity is to replace it with the character.
The fact is that these *can* be enterred from the keyboard for the
languages of Western Europe, including Italian.  I write regularly in
French and insteat of the &egrave I simply use Alt + 0232 for ?.

Ec


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: phase3/languages Language.php, 1.261,
	1.262 LanguageFr.php, 1.67, 1.68 LanguageDe.php, 1.70,
	1.71 LanguageZh.php, 1.16, 1.17

body:
On Sat, Jul 17, 2004 at 05:31:47PM +0100, Timwi wrote:
> Jens Frank wrote:
>
> >Modified Files:
> >	Language.php LanguageFr.php LanguageDe.php LanguageZh.php
> >Log Message:
> >moved weekday, monthname etc to AllMessages arrays.
>
> This change is going to have a noticeable and annoying effect on all
> Wikipedias except for en, fr, de and zh where you adapted the language
> files.

That's wrong. The patches only affect the specified languages.
Other languages work fine until the migration is completed.

> Are you still planning to "fix" all the other language files too?

Expect more to come, dates isn't the end of this story. But it's boring,
stupid work so it takes some time.

JeLuF


body:
On Sun, 18 Jul 2004 13:56:18 +0200, Leonard Vertighel
<leonard.vertighel at web.de> wrote:
> on the Italian Wikipedia it has recently been discussed to make a bot that is
> used for some maintenance work additionally convert characters like letters
> with accents to HTML-entities (è etc.).
> It has been argued that those characters can't be entered directly e.g. with
> an American keyboard layout...

It does seem the wrong way round to me. The edit box should be easy to
read, and HTML entities are not going to help that. If people have a
problem typing certain letters, it might be helpful to put a copy of
those into the [[it:MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning]] page. This is already
done on the Maori and German Wikipedias. See
http://mi.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning for example.
This means the letters are shown at the end of every edit page and can
be copied and pasted by those who can't type them on their keyboard.

Angela.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Waiting for 1.0

body:
Mark Ryan wrote:

>I know automatic spell checking is just a tool. But we still have
>spelling errors being found now, years after they were first inserted
>into articles. Humans are prone to errors. I know I can proofread an
>essay of my own over ten times and not notice the most obvious
>spelling errors. An automatic spell checker would just draw our
>attention to possibly overlooked errors. How many spelling errors
>would you find on Britannica?
>
Spell checkers didn't exist when the first edition of Britannica came out.

It's always more difficult to find these spelling errors on your own
work, but those same errors tend to stand out when you check another
person's work.  Maybe you should be letting someone else spell check
your work.

Ec


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Convert characters to entities on UTF-8
	Wikipedias??

references:
<200407181356.18587.leonard.vertighel@web.de>	<8b722b80040718051658a09a56@mail.gmail.com>	<cde7fc$t3l$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<200407181825.08056.leonard.vertighel@web.de>
	<cdecml$7dk$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
On Sun, 18 Jul 2004 19:44:04 +0200, Manuel Gomez Rojo <mgrojo at ya.com> wrote:
> I think the only relevant reason to switch to UTF-8 is not showing
> #xxxx; codes for international scripts, so you are totally right.

Well, in addition to that, it also lets you use the UTF-8 character in
the article title, and probably enables full-text search as well.

--
You keep using that word...
I do not think it means what you think it means.


from_name: Leonard Vertighel

body:
Hello all,

on the Italian Wikipedia it has recently been discussed to make a bot that is
used for some maintenance work additionally convert characters like letters
with accents to HTML-entities (è etc.). Does this make any sense? And
if so, why was it.wikipedia converted to UTF-8 at all? And finally, if this
really makes sense, shouldn't this be handled by the software instead of
cluttering the edit window with &foobar;s that most people don't even
understand?

It has been argued that those characters can't be entered directly e.g. with
an American keyboard layout, but in my opinion this is at best a reason for
converting the entities to the corresponding characters, not the other way
round.

Sorry for taking this here, but the thought of having soon thousands of pages
interspersed with cryptic entities was rather shocking for me ;-) and thus I
hope to find some expert answers as soon as possible. Just imagine what the
German and French Wikipedias, just to name those, would look like with lots
of ä ß ç and the like in the middle of words.

If this has already been discussed, could someone please point me to the
relevant pages/threads. Thank you,

[[en:User:Leonard Vertighel]]
[[it:Utente:Leonard Vertighel]]


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Waiting for 1.0

body:
> Spell checkers didn't exist when the first edition of Britannica came out.

If this is meant as "therefore we don't need spell-checkers" then I don't agree.

Spell-checkers are good not because they make possible something that
was impossible before (i.e. given enough time, humans can do a very
good job at spell-checking).

They are good because they improve the quality of spell-checking
process, make it cheaper (in terms of human labour) and faster.

You can't replace a human spell-checker with computer spell-checker
but a computer spell-check will help human spell-checker to do a
better job. I'm pretty sure that Britannica editors do use computer
spell-checkers those days.

Which is why it would be good to have one easily available for helping
spell-check WikiPedia articles.

Krzysztof Kowalczyk | http://blog.kowalczyk.info


from_name: Kai F. Lahmann

body:
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Am S?nndag 18 Juli 2004 13:56 schrieb Leonard Vertighel:

> on the Italian Wikipedia it has recently been discussed to make a bot that
> is used for some maintenance work additionally convert characters like
> letters with accents to HTML-entities (è etc.). Does this make any
> sense? And if so, why was it.wikipedia converted to UTF-8 at all?

an interwiki bot with a frensh AOL IP? The same was on plattd??tsch and
frensh... Allways only one edit with one IP - no chance to catch him :(

- --
Kai F. Lahmann

1zu160-Bahner
http://www.1zu160.net
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Waiting for 1.0

body:
Sj wrote:

>>>I would vote for World History or Physics, despite the different topics of
>>>
>>>
>>But do we have adequate coverage in that subject area?
>>
>>
>
>Well, we certainly have decent coverage for some subsets of these subjects.
>I agree that we should start smaller; perhaps American History and
>Mechanics?  I think we could manage either of those.   (One of the skills we
>need to develop is the ability to cover a subject area or any size in 100 pages;
>the broader the subject area, the higher-level the produced content.  WP right
>now has very few good overview articles, as is evidenced by the scattershot
>quality of top-level topics linked directly from the main page -- but we do
>have the editor expertise to fix that, as evidenced by our deep articles.)
>
Interesting that you should raise this.  I had already asked myself how
could I go about choosing articles for 1.0, and the first thing that
came to mind was the topic overview articles.  Anything else would
follow from there.  If any group of articles should be priorized for
being brought up to editorial standards  it is these.  They would be the
lead articles for each section of a paper product.  Nothing binds us to
the strict alphabetical order of many traditional encyclopedias.

>>>As Ant has noted elsewhere, the intent of validation is to get editors
>>>to improve articles, not to encourage them to waste time voting on the
>>>'best' version; as such I think a simple objection/response system, where
>>>
>>>
>>Why not readers then? Simply have a 'Rate this article' link in the toolbox of
>>every article. They could give a 1 to 5 rating across a few different
>>categories (completeness, readability, and accuracy) and be able to give an
>>explanation in a text box. The rating would then be associated with the version
>>
>>
>I could be convinced about this, if it were a loose and unbinding measure of
>reader responses.  I do think that there should be a more detailed
>(one explanation-box per category/facet; more options) and less rated review
>function, which would be more closely bound to the validation process.
>
>
Having these ratings kept loose is essential if we don't want a whole
bureaucracy built up around them.  (I do find a 10-pont rating scale
more visually menaingful.)  Security against a person casting multiple
votes needs to be kept to a minimum.  We certainly don't need to keep
track of every vote that a person has cast.  I would even go so far as
to say that a person may cast a new vote after *every* edit, but I would
attach more weight to votes cast since the last edit.  An algorithm can
certainly be devised to calculate a rating based on the available
votes.  When surveyed on many topics people do have a tendency to rate
things higher than average.  That can be normalized by looking at votes
across all topics, and taking the raw average to be equivalent to 5.0 on
a ten point scale.

The idea that validation is done to elicit improvement of articles is
important.  Many educators to-day are questioning the role of tests and
examinations in schools.  For them we should be "testing for learning"
rather than "testing of learning"; this conforms well with this idea of
article validation.


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Waiting for 1.0

body:
Krzysztof Kowalczyk wrote:
> Which is why it would be good to have one easily available for helping
> spell-check WikiPedia articles.

Since this is a general text editing need, it's the job of the browser's
text editor widget. In Safari, go to the 'Edit' menu and look under
'Spelling'; for others, see your browser's documentation.

If your browser doesn't include spell checking, see about fixing that.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Waiting for 1.0

body:
Le Sunday 18 July 2004 15:08, Mark Ryan a ?crit :
>
> I know automatic spell checking is just a tool. But we still have
> spelling errors being found now, years after they were first inserted
> into articles.

I am not convince that spell checking tools will improve that.
A spelling error squashing party would be more efficient I think.

> Humans are prone to errors. I know I can proofread an
> essay of my own over ten times and not notice the most obvious
> spelling errors.

That's why WP is a collaborative project.

> An automatic spell checker would just draw our
> attention to possibly overlooked errors.

May be it also depends on the language.
Every time I use a spell checking tool in French, I find it just useless,
partly because it reports many spelling mistakes where there are none, and
can't find others.

> How many spelling errors
> would you find on Britannica?

I don't read Britannica. ;o)
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: Dori

body:
I don't know if you already have done this, but before starting on any
major changes, I would suggest you talk to some of the core developers
(Brion, Tim, etc.) to make sure that such changes will not be so
detrimental to performance as to be useless.

I would also try to involve the community and get their feedback on a
wiki page somewhere. Of course, most ideas might just be wild, not
implementable, etc., but you can get a nice gauge of what's needed and
you might get some good ideas.

I wish you luck in the endeavor though, the code could really use a cleanup.

--
[[en:User:Dori]]


subject: [Wikitech-l] Fwd: Bot messed up databases on UTF-8 wikis

body:
Daniel Herding wrote:
> but the databases are already fucked up. The XML export special page (which
>  is used by interwiki.py) gives out crappy XML, which leads to a SAX parse
>  bug. And my newly created sqldump.py is unusable for these wikis.
>
> So I guess we should ask the MediaWiki developers to help us out. Maybe they
> can shut down the wiki for a while, then run over the 'old' database,
> replacing every non-UTF-8-byte with a question mark.

Add a quick output filter to Special:Export; there's a particular
character one's supposed to use for invalid chars (check the Unicode specs).

> It would be nice if someone could repair the databases on fr:, nds:, es:, and
> other affected Wikipedias. You should also consider implementing a filter
> that stops users from posting illegal characters. Mail me if you need
> additional information.

Patches are welcome, please send them to wikitech-l.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Waiting for 1.0

body:
We would need the spell checker to be reactivated and modified so that
articles can be checked on their own (rather than giving a huge list
of all pages with particular errors in them). I don't fancy copying
entire articles into MS Word to check for errors (and people checking
articles for correct spelling would be likely to miss many errors). I
know the spell checker was a huge resource drain on Wikipedia, but if
it is restricted to those permitted to validate articles, it shouldn't
be so bad.

~Mark Ryan


body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> Add a quick output filter to Special:Export; there's a particular
> character one's supposed to use for invalid chars (check the Unicode
> specs).

Here's the one:
U+FFFD REPLACEMENT CHARACTER
? used to replace an incoming character whose value is unknown or
unrepresentable in Unicode

In UTF-8 that should be "\xEF\xBF\xBD".

Note that LanguageUtf8.php contains a regexp for checking whether a
string is valid UTF-8, you may find this useful.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
Daniel Herding wrote:
>>Patches are welcome, please send them to wikitech-l.
>
> I'm sorry, but I don't have any experience with MySQL and PHP.

Here's your chance to get some.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Please enable full HTML on foundation wiki

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Could somebody please respond to this email:
>
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2004-July/011181.html
>
> Getting a fully functional and multilingual foundation website will much better
> enable us to generate the money needed to buy more hardware and perhaps hire a
> server admin.
>
> -- Daniel Mayer

I totally agree with Daniel on the html issue

The only point Mav, is that we are still discussing how or where and
when or whatever, the wikimedia website will be.

And as any consensual discussion trying to find the best way... it is tough.

Meanwhile, I started doing the content on meta.


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: How could information flow ?

body:
Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:

> As a matter of practicality, it is not possible to conduct high-level
> policy discussions in any other language than English.  And this is
> not just because of the board being English, ...

Uh ?

:-)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: French Wikibooks

body:
>>We just need the ability to switch the interface language via preferences.
>
>
> This has been talked about for months but nothing happened.
> And I didn't see any short term plan for that.
>
>
>>-- mav
>
>
> Yann

Incidently, such a feature would be just *perfect* for the wikimedia
website. But as Yann said, it does not exist.

ant