from_name: Decumanus (Matthew Trump)

body:
I should clarify that I don't mean that the radio button would result
in an extra database field. It would simply invoke an appending of
text in the image commentary in the way that many users currently do
by manually typing "{{msg:GFDL}}" in the commentary text box. This
would simply provide additional encouragement in that direction (as
well as a short cut). Certainly not a foolproof or comprehensive
system, but it might make new users more conscientious of the need to
specificy licenses, as well as making them aware of the preference of
the GFDL over other licenses. For example, clicking the
{{msg:fairuse}} radio could bring up a javascript dialog cautioning
about the use of that license, etc.

Decumanus (Matthew Trump) said:
> What about a radio button set in the form that forces uses to choose
> a particular license when uploaded?
>
> Michael Snow said:
>> Jimmy Wales wrote:
>>
>>>Michael Snow wrote:
>>>> We still need to get a system in place that requires people to
>>>> provide
>>>> source information when uploading images. For the types of uses
>>>> for
>>>> which US copyright law allows "fair use", the Berne Convention
>>>> requires
>>>> that the source of the work be mentioned. We cannot justify fair
>>>> use if
>>>> we aren't able to determine where the stuff comes from.
>>>
>>>While it would be nice to have a "system" that's all
>>> database-happy,
>>>wouldn't it be nearly as effective, and immediately possible, to
>>>simply update the text of the upload page to ask people to give as
>>>much detail as they possibly can as to the source of the upload?
>>> They
>>>can be warned that if they don't do so, there is a strong risk of
>>>deletion.
>>>
>> It is immediately possible, but I question its effectiveness. For
>> about
>> the past two months, the upload text has included, "If you are
>> uploading
>> an image under the doctrine of fair use, please place the text
>> '{{msg:fairuse}}' in the image description and give the source of
>> the
>> image." Adding a warning about the risk of deletion for not citing
>> the
>> source would be nice too, but somebody else needs to do it because
>> I
>> can't.
>>
>> Nevertheless, my impression from scanning recent uploads is that
>> many
>> images, including those claiming fair use, do not provide source
>> information. This is almost certainly because the upload page has
>> two
>> fields (plus the checkbox for affirming the license). Those fields
>> are
>> called "Filename:" and "Summary:". And the content provided with
>> most
>> uploads is, not surprisingly, a simple summary of what the upload
>> is.
>> Sometimes the source is mentioned, but often not.
>>
>> Many people who upload stuff probably do so regularly, and are
>> unlikely
>> to read the upload instructions carefully every time, or notice if
>> they
>> change. They *will* notice if we add fields where they are expected
>> to
>> input information.
>>
>> We need to add a field specifically called "Source:". I realize
>> that
>> may
>> not happen immediately, but it needs to be done. It would be nice
>> if
>> this field also did not allow null content, although I realize
>> that's
>> not very effective against the joker who says his source is
>> "df39rhjufuasl2".
>>
>>>And we should, again with an appropriate lead-time to allow people
>>> to
>>>try to fix existing problems without edit wars over deletion, just
>>>start deleting stuff that doesn't have proper attribution.  (I'm
>>> not
>>>asking people to start deleting stuff today, because a good-faith
>>>effort to do the right thing all around will take a bit of time.)
>>>
>> I would expect that even stuff without proper attribution should go
>> through a deletion procedure with community involvement, in case
>> somebody can provide the information needed. And any large-scale
>> effort
>> to clean out non-compliant images should wait until people are more
>> aware of the need to provide attribution.
>>
>> But I reiterate that the way to let everyone know what's expected,
>> so
>> that we have people trying to do the right thing, is to have a
>> separate
>> field that requires source information.
>>
>> --Michael Snow
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> WikiEN-l mailing list
>> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
>> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


list: wikitech-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikitech-l] OS choice?

body:
I've postponed the purchase until Monday, so we can discuss this more
over the weekend.

Ivan Krstic wrote:
> I apologize if this has been discussed, but is there a compelling reason
> to use a rpm-based distribution in the first place? I swear by Debian,
> and for the high-performance needs that wikipedia has, even looking into
> Gentoo would not be a bad idea. I'd be more than willing to lend a hand
> with any aspect of either of these distributions that needs clarification.

It has been discussed in the past, but in the fast moving world of free
software, it's worth revisiting.

1.  The last time I checked, Debian for AMD64 was not in existence.
http://alioth.debian.org/projects/debian-amd64/

seems to indicate that things have not changed much.

2. For practical purposes, it's also a lot simpler to go with an OS
that's offered by SiliconMechanics -- they are offering for some
reason only SuSe Enterprise (mucho $$$) and Fedora Core 1 for AMD 64
(free).  Could they install the less expensive SuSE?  Yes, I think so,
after all they did it for us before.  (It used to be an option in the
dropdown box.  I haven't talked to anyone to see why not anymore.)

3.  The existing systems are all RPM based, and all the developers are
familitar with that.  I would imagine that all are also familiar enough
with .deb packages and apt-get, or that it's easy enough to learn.  But
that's not really for me to say.

--Jimbo


from_name: David Friedland

subject: [Wikitech-l] "Likelihood of reversion"

body:
I have written up a short, math-y description of an algorithmic method
for determining whether or not a given revision constitutes reversion.
There have been some previous suggestions regarding automatically
determining whether something is a revision and using that information
in various ways. In addition, it has recently been suggested to the
arbitrators that one possible remedy in the matter of Wik would be to
restrict his ability to perform reversions.

Please take a look at

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

for my proposal for defining and algorithmically determining what
constitutes reversion and how to calculate what I call "likelihood of
reversion". I would suggest that for most purposes any edit with a
likelihood of reversion over 90% could be counted as reversion. Please
leave your comments if you have any suggestions, critiques, etc.

- David


list: textbook-l

from_name: Karl Wick

subject: [Textbook-l] software updates

body:
All on the same software install eh ..

I'd love to have multi-language functionality on Wikibooks,
so that the english pages are on en.wikibooks.org, and
other language books are hosted on specific domains. This
would include the automatic redirect for English-configured
browsers to the English Wikibooks Main Page or whichever
other respective language main page.

The other thing is probably small to everyone else besides
myself, and that is the Wikipedia shows up in a nice,
friendly Georgia default font whereas Wikibooks seems
determined to use Times New Roman as its un-overridable
default font, that is not as friendly to read on the
screen.

Anything we can do to face these issues?

Thanks Brion!!
Karl

> There is a single master copy of the software that all
> the wikis we run
> use. However, some may be configured a little
> differently, and the user
> interface messages have separate copies for
> customization.
>
> Can you point out what's out of order specifically?
>
> -- brion vibber

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Photos: High-quality 4x6 digital prints for 25?
http://photos.yahoo.com/ph/print_splash


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Textbook-l] software updates

body:
On Apr 17, 2004, at 15:42, Karl Wick wrote:
> The other thing is probably small to everyone else besides
> myself, and that is the Wikipedia shows up in a nice,
> friendly Georgia default font whereas Wikibooks seems
> determined to use Times New Roman as its un-overridable
> default font, that is not as friendly to read on the
> screen.
>
> Anything we can do to face these issues?

Your browser sucks, upgrade it. ;)

There is probably a "Unicode" setting in the font selection which is
separate from "Western", etc. Select a reasonable font there instead of
the crappy default (Times New Roman).

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] PHP debugging and profiling tools

body:
I've been looking at a few things trying to improve the debugging
experience...

Zend Studio: http://www.zend.com/store/products/zend-studio.php

Commercial IDE from the people who write PHP. No-cost 21-day trial,
available as personal-use crippleware after the trial expires. I don't
like the editor, but it does "real" debugging (breakpoints,
single-step, examine variables and the callstack etc). It can run
scripts via the CGI interface, or in theory hook up to a web server,
though I haven't figured out how to get that running.

I've found debugging in Zend Studio to be a lot easier to work with
than sticking in a hojillion extra debug assertions, even in the local
CGI mode. It has a "Profile URL..." command for the remote debugging,
but I haven't found a local profiling option. The online help is vague.

Advanced PHP debugger: http://pecl.php.net/package/apd

Open source (PHP license). More of a profiler than a debugger, it
seems. May be more thorough than our current stack of
wfProfileIn()/wfProfileOut() calls...

I had some trouble installing it on my mac (had to change the
permissions to writable and run 'glibtoolize' manually between phpize
and configure). Quick demo output at
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profiling

DBG: http://dd.cron.ru/dbg/

The website for this confuses me utterly. It appears to be a debugging
module for PHP, which is either open source or some versions of it are
open source but not others, and there's a commercial IDE that it hooks
into and maybe you can use it without it too. Perhaps worth checking
out.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Slave server coming up

body:
Now that coronelli's back online, curly (the server Bomis loaned to
cover coronelli's squid job briefly) will serve as a MySQL slave until
the New Server to be ordered gets here.

We'll have to take the database offline for about 2 hours to make a
clean transfer, but once up this will protect us against potentially
much worse outages in the case of hardware or software failure on suda.

The transfer is currently scheduled for midnight UTC Sunday
night/Monday morning (5pm PDT, 8pm EDT, 2 AM CEST). Make sure this is
known...

The database will be _offline completely_. Squid should still push out
cached pages to random visitors during this time.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Textbook-l] software updates

body:
Is it very labor-intensive to bring language-specific
subdomains to Wikibooks and Wiktionary? To have them seems
like a clear step forward for the projects. What can I do
to help bring this about?

Thanks,
Karl

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Photos: High-quality 4x6 digital prints for 25?
http://photos.yahoo.com/ph/print_splash


from_name: Timwi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Problems with headers

body:
Ivan Krstic wrote:

> Timwi wrote:
>
>> The server is running PHP 4.1.2 and MySQL 3.23.49. I don't know how to
>> find out the version of Apache; if you need it, please let me know.
>
> Your PHP is probably too old. To find out Apache versions, [...]

Thanks for your help. I can't upgrade PHP because the server isn't mine,
but I have also e-mailed the sysadmins and they managed to get it to work.

In OutputPage.php, line 96, I only needed to change:
     header( "HTTP/1.0 304 Not Modified" );
to:
     header( "Status: 304 Not Modified" );

and similarly line 271:
     header("Status: {$this->mRedirectCode} Moved Permanently");

However, since your way works with never PHPs, it's probably not worth
changing in CVS.

Timwi


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: "Likelihood of reversion"

body:
David Friedland wrote:

> I have written up a short, math-y description of an algorithmic method
> for determining whether or not a given revision constitutes reversion.

It won't work. No matter how clever and complicated your algorithm gets,
people can just study it and then make edits that *just* fall outside
the definition of a reversion.

Timwi


list: wikien-l

subject: [WikiEN-l] Text on Special:Upload

body:
Hi,

inspired by the recent discussion on non-commercial-use-only images, I
have proposed to change the text of the Upload page:

     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_talk:Uploadtext

In particular, I think information on how the form works (or how to add
images to articles) does not really need to be there (people skip it
anyway if they think they know how it works, and if they don't, then
they will happily follow a link to find out). I think it is more
important to place information on this page that people usually regarded
as "not important" or "not necessary", as is the case with a detailed
description of the source of an image and the licence of the image.

Thank you,
Timwi


subject: [Wikitech-l] Wayback Machine

body:
To direct people to something helpful while the database is offline for
duplication, I've added a link to try to load the requested page from
the Wayback Machine at www.archive.org.

To my surprise, it seems that we haven't gotten indexed by then since
mid-2003! So... it's a little dated. :(

It's possible that something in our robots.txt or user-agent checking
is keeping them away, but I'm not sure what. I'll look into it...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Use of noncommercial-only images

body:
Michael Snow wrote:
> It is immediately possible, but I question its effectiveness. For about
> the past two months, the upload text has included, "If you are uploading
> an image under the doctrine of fair use, please place the text
> '{{msg:fairuse}}' in the image description and give the source of the
> image." Adding a warning about the risk of deletion for not citing the
> source would be nice too, but somebody else needs to do it because I can't.

It sounds like a good idea.  I think that it should be made bold face,
and should say 'you must' instead of 'please'.  After that it should
explain the potential penality for not doing it -- deletion.

We're not going to do anything radical and sudden and frightening, but
at some point in the possibly distant future, we hope to have our
image-tagging sophistication to the point that we'll just delete stuff
that doesn't suit our needs for freedom and transparency.

> Nevertheless, my impression from scanning recent uploads is that many
> images, including those claiming fair use, do not provide source
> information. This is almost certainly because the upload page has two
> fields (plus the checkbox for affirming the license). Those fields are
> called "Filename:" and "Summary:". And the content provided with most
> uploads is, not surprisingly, a simple summary of what the upload is.
> Sometimes the source is mentioned, but often not.

Perhaps we could ask the wikitech-l list to add a field for "Source:",
and the text there could say "Source (required!):".

> Many people who upload stuff probably do so regularly, and are unlikely
> to read the upload instructions carefully every time, or notice if they
> change. They *will* notice if we add fields where they are expected to
> input information.

I think that's an astute observation, yes.

> We need to add a field specifically called "Source:". I realize that may
> not happen immediately, but it needs to be done. It would be nice if
> this field also did not allow null content, although I realize that's
> not very effective against the joker who says his source is
> "df39rhjufuasl2".

That's true, but our main purpose is to keep good people happy, not to
concern ourselves too much with jokers.  Once we firm up our policy
here, if a joker writes 'df39rhjufuasl2' for the source, we'll just
delete the image on sight.

My primary concern is not to offend and annoy the many good people who
have made perfectly valid contributions to date, and whose failure to
give proper source attribution is not *their* fault, but rather mine,
for not seeing to it that they were properly guided all along.

> I would expect that even stuff without proper attribution should go
> through a deletion procedure with community involvement, in case
> somebody can provide the information needed. And any large-scale effort
> to clean out non-compliant images should wait until people are more
> aware of the need to provide attribution.
>
> But I reiterate that the way to let everyone know what's expected, so
> that we have people trying to do the right thing, is to have a separate
> field that requires source information.

I agree absolutely.  Let's start irritating the developers.  :-)

--Jimbo


references:
<c5s046$l9o$1@sea.gmane.org> <c5u07s$o5e$2@sea.gmane.org>
	<c5u487$2c7$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
Tim Starling wrote:

> Timwi wrote:
>
>>David Friedland wrote:
>>
>>>I have written up a short, math-y description of an algorithmic method
>>>for determining whether or not a given revision constitutes reversion.
>>
>>It won't work. No matter how clever and complicated your algorithm gets,
>>people can just study it and then make edits that *just* fall outside
>>the definition of a reversion.
>
> I analysed David's algorithm, and wrote a summary of it that hopefully
> non-mathematicians will be able to understand. I also described the method
> required to make a reversion barely exceed the definition. You just have to
> add padding 1/9 of the size of the change you're making. An HTML comment
> would be quite sufficient. It's all on the meta page.

Thanks for that, now I don't need to study it :-) But my point is more
general: I don't think it is possible to come up with *any* algorithm
that does not have this problem.

Timwi


subject: [Wikitech-l] Slave server coming up

body:
When the New Server gets here, will it be necessary to have this kind
of outage again?  It seems like a big flaw in the replication system
if we have to go completely down to put a new machine online.

It's not even possible to have read-only access to the database while
the new server is getting synced?

Brion Vibber wrote:

> Now that coronelli's back online, curly (the server Bomis loaned to
> cover coronelli's squid job briefly) will serve as a MySQL slave until
> the New Server to be ordered gets here.
>
> We'll have to take the database offline for about 2 hours to make a
> clean transfer, but once up this will protect us against potentially
> much worse outages in the case of hardware or software failure on suda.
>
> The transfer is currently scheduled for midnight UTC Sunday
> night/Monday morning (5pm PDT, 8pm EDT, 2 AM CEST). Make sure this is
> known...
>
> The database will be _offline completely_. Squid should still push out
> cached pages to random visitors during this time.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] [frankbservices@yahoo.com: Atlantic Charter signed When?]

body:
I have no idea if this is true or false, but it might be interesting
for someone to investigate.

----- Forwarded message from Frank Branzuela <frankbservices at yahoo.com> -----

From: Frank Branzuela <frankbservices at yahoo.com>
Date: Sat, 17 Apr 2004 19:37:31 -0700 (PDT)
To: jwales at bomis.com
Subject: Atlantic Charter signed When?

A Wikipedia article states that the Atlantic Charter was signed by President Franklin Roosevelt and English Prime Minister Winston Churchill in August 1945 off the coast of Newfoundland....  It would be fascinating to compile a list of all the authoritative history publications that quote this historical event as happening on Aug. 14, 1945. I'm sure it would number into the tens of thousands. The fact of the matter is that the "Atlantic Charter" was handed out as a news release by the PR staff. Neither Roosevelt or Churchill ever signed it. There has never existed a signed copy of the "Atlantic Charter" but "history" tells us otherwise. A quick check of the U.S. Archives will reveal that the source document is not signed. Funny how a myth becomes fact if it is printed often enough and quoted by respected authorities.

Have a Nice Day,
Frank

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Photos: High-quality 4x6 digital prints for 25?
----- End forwarded message -----


subject: [Wikitech-l] Slave server coming up

body:
On Apr 18, 2004, at 18:09, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> When the New Server gets here, will it be necessary to have this kind
> of outage again?  It seems like a big flaw in the replication system
> if we have to go completely down to put a new machine online.

This won't be necessary since at that point we'll be able to take the
_existing_ slave offline to make a full copy of it, and let both slaves
re-sync from the master's logs without interruption of service.

The problem is that our old slave backup fell out of sync while we were
having all kinds of troubles, so it was necessary to make a clean,
complete copy to start the new slave from. If the database is active
while we're copying the files, the copy will be corrupt and completely
useless.

(MySQL sells a commercial tool for doing complete hot backups of InnoDB
databases, but we don't have it.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Slave server coming up

body:
Suda and all wikis back online. I'll set up syncing on the slave after
dinner.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Michael Snow

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Perhaps we could ask the wikitech-l list to add a field for "Source:",
>and the text there could say "Source (required!):".
>
>Let's start irritating the developers.  :-)
>
As a non-wikitech subscriber myself, someone else might want to let the
developers know. Although I believe at least one or two developers have
taken notice of the discussion here.

>My primary concern is not to offend and annoy the many good people who
>have made perfectly valid contributions to date, and whose failure to
>give proper source attribution is not *their* fault, but rather mine,
>for not seeing to it that they were properly guided all along.
>
Agreed, not that I care to blame anyone at all for this problem. I'm
more interested in getting a fix implemented, because it makes little
sense to start a clean-up project if the same kind of mess is still
being created.

--Michael Snow


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Image upload

body:
Daniel P.B.Smith wrote:

> Seems to me that if we want to encourage better voluntary description,
> the upload page should be redesigned so that:
>
> a) It provides not just a checkbox, but a _choice_ of common license
> situations, including GFDL, public domain, fair use, used with
> permission, and of course "other."
>
> b) You are presented with concise information that will help the
> layperson determine _which_ of these situations applies.

I'm still not a fan of the idea that we ask uploaders to identify a
choice of license. We don't ask text contributors to identify what
portions are GFDL, public domain, or fair use. We simply expect that
they comply with our copyright policy and the GFDL. As I've said before,
we don't need to encourage people to engage in the amateur practice of
law - many are already more than willing to do so.

> c) You are presented with some apparatus that encourages you to enter
> _all_ the relevant information, _all at once_, _before_ uploading.

Most definitely.

> I'm still unclear, when I upload a photograph that I've taken myself
> and am willing to release under GFDL, whether I should include
> language that asserts "copyright ?2004 by Daniel P. B. Smith and
> licensed under the term of the Wikipedia copyright."

You can if you want, though I'll make the general point that actual
copyright notices are not necessary. Creative expression is copyrighted
by default, as you probably already know, and a notice is merely a handy
reminder of that fact.

--Michael Snow


from_name: Daniel P.B.Smith

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Image upload

body:
> From: Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com>
>
> Michael Snow wrote:
>> We still need to get a system in place that requires people to provide
>> source information when uploading images. For the types of uses for
>> which US copyright law allows "fair use", the Berne Convention
>> requires
>> that the source of the work be mentioned. We cannot justify fair use
>> if
>> we aren't able to determine where the stuff comes from.
>
> While it would be nice to have a "system" that's all database-happy,
> wouldn't it be nearly as effective, and immediately possible, to
> simply update the text of the upload page to ask people to give as
> much detail as they possibly can as to the source of the upload?

Actually, the present upload system is both awkward and confusing and
could be greatly improved. Wikipedia is down right now so I can't give
exact quotations, but the upload page only has one option--a checkbox
asserting that the content is GFDL--and a text field providing only a
single line of description. You have to be at least half-awake and
click on several things in order to get to the description field that
lets you typing in a long description.

Seems to me that if we want to encourage better voluntary description,
the upload page should be redesigned so that:

a) It provides not just a checkbox, but a _choice_ of common license
situations, including GFDL, public domain, fair use, used with
permission, and of course "other."

b) You are presented with concise information that will help the
layperson determine _which_ of these situations applies.

c) You are presented with some apparatus that encourages you to enter
_all_ the relevant information, _all at once_, _before_ uploading.

Or something like that. Not that I'm a great fan of technical fixes,
but the present upload mechanism is fairly confusing. I'm still
unclear, when I upload a photograph that I've taken myself and am
willing to release under GFDL, whether I should include language that
asserts "copyright ?2004 by Daniel P. B. Smith and licensed under the
term of the Wikipedia copyright."

--

Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at verizon.net alternate:
dpbsmith at alum.mit.edu
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/

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subject: [Wikitech-l] Slave server coming up

body:
Curly is synced up. Hopefully we won't need it until it's time to
transfer everything peacably to Mme. Geoffrin II...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Matthew Brown

body:
Michael Snow writes:

> For the types of uses for which US copyright law allows "fair use",
the Berne Convention
> requires that the source of the work be mentioned.

A clarification I'd like: does *US copyright law* require the source be
mentioned?  Or is it the Berne Convention that requires it?

-Matt


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Matthew Brown wrote:

>Michael Snow writes:
>
>>For the types of uses for which US copyright law allows "fair use",
>>
>the Berne Convention
>
>>requires that the source of the work be mentioned.
>>
>
>A clarification I'd like: does *US copyright law* require the source be
>mentioned?  Or is it the Berne Convention that requires it?
>
Does it matter?   If the United States has ratified the Berne
Convention, then international law would have it that its provisions
override contrary provisions in US domestic law.  Nevertheless, the
United States has often made the claim in many areas that the opposite
is true, much to the annoyance of other nations.

Whatever the law, citing sources remains a desirable practice.  The
ability to trace a submission is the strongest evidence that we can have
for establishing our rights to do what we do.

Ec


from_name: Laurent GUERBY

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: OS Choice

body:
<<
The differences seem compelling in favor of Fedora Core:

1.  Fedora Core is free-beer, price of $0, whereas SUSE is $767.
2.  Fedora Core is GNU-free, whereas I'm not so sure about SUSE.
>>

SuSE is GNU-free starting with 9.1 (the installation tool YaST is GPL in this release),
the professional edition is $90 and should work on AMD64 (kernel 2.6), the
release has gone gold and should start shipping end of April.

Fedora Core 2 is release is planned for May 17th, kernel 2.6 with SELinux
on which needs lots of fixing to get right (progressing nicely though), test3 beta
will be released on April 26th.

Fecora Core 1 is 2.4 based and I believe users of AMD64 are happy with it.

I don't know about debian and mandrake.

I've no AMD64 system yet, but since I just did a review of
the Linux state sharing some information would make sense :).

FC1 looks like the distribution to try first with
an update at end of may to a newer distribution if needed
(2.6 is reported as sometimes much faster on servers than 2.4).

Hope this helps,

Laurent


from_name: Tim Starling

body:
Timwi wrote:
> David Friedland wrote:
>
> > I have written up a short, math-y description of an algorithmic method
> > for determining whether or not a given revision constitutes reversion.
>
> It won't work. No matter how clever and complicated your algorithm gets,
> people can just study it and then make edits that *just* fall outside
> the definition of a reversion.

I analysed David's algorithm, and wrote a summary of it that hopefully
non-mathematicians will be able to understand. I also described the method
required to make a reversion barely exceed the definition. You just have to
add padding 1/9 of the size of the change you're making. An HTML comment
would be quite sufficient. It's all on the meta page.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Bill

subject: [WikiEN-l] Atlantic Charter

body:
Arno M wrote:

> There was another problem with the date. FDR died in
> April 12, 1945, so his ghost would have had to sign
> it in August 1945.
>
> Actually, the charter was signed in August 1941
> (at least according to the wikipedia article).
>
> Can anyone readily verify the charter's existance?

Here's a gif from the U.S. National Archives:

http://www.archives.gov/digital_classroom/lessons/fdr_churchill_documents/images/atlantic_charter.gif

It reflects an August 14, 1941 issuance date.  Roosevelt's and
Churchill's names are printed, but there is no signature.

HTH,

Bill


body:
Matthew Brown wrote:

> Michael Snow writes:
>
> > For the types of uses for which US copyright law allows "fair use",
> the Berne Convention
> > requires that the source of the work be mentioned.
>
> A clarification I'd like: does *US copyright law* require the source be
> mentioned?  Or is it the Berne Convention that requires it?

To my knowledge, and I am not a lawyer, it is only the Berne
Convention that requires it.  However, that's really a moot point --
we need not do it just to comply with the law -- it's good scholarly
practice in any event, and that's reason enough.

--Jimbo


subject:
[WikiEN-l] [frankbservices@yahoo.com: Atlantic Charter signed
	When?]

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>I have no idea if this is true or false, but it might be interesting
>for someone to investigate.
>
>----- Forwarded message from Frank Branzuela
>
>A Wikipedia article states that the Atlantic Charter was signed by President Franklin Roosevelt and English Prime Minister Winston Churchill in August 1945 off the coast of Newfoundland....  It would be fascinating to compile a list of all the authoritative history publications that quote this historical event as happening on Aug. 14, 1945. I'm sure it would number into the tens of thousands. The fact of the matter is that the "Atlantic Charter" was handed out as a news release by the PR staff. Neither Roosevelt or Churchill ever signed it. There has never existed a signed copy of the "Atlantic Charter" but "history" tells us otherwise. A quick check of the U.S. Archives will reveal that the source document is not signed. Funny how a myth becomes fact if it is printed often enough and quoted by respected authorities.
>
The error in question is not particularly controversial nor is it
difficult to fix, but it seems that Mr. Branzuela is missing the point
of what Wikipedia is all about.  He has the right to make the necessary
corrections.  If Mr. Branzuela wants to pursue his fascinating list he
is welcome to do so.

It seems to me that an appropriate answer to questions of this sort
would be to advise the person of his right to make whatever corrections
he feels may be needed.  He can even be re-assured that the change from
1945 to 1941 is the correction of an obvious factual error that is not
likely to be opposed.  He could even be sent some boilerplate text about
how to edit a Wikipedia article.  We would give him an opportunity to be
a part of the solution.

Ec


body:
I agree with you completely, Ray.  That's what I normally do, except
not the "boilerplate" concept, which is a very good one.  I usually
just write to people.

Ray Saintonge wrote:

> Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
> >I have no idea if this is true or false, but it might be interesting
> >for someone to investigate.
> >
> >----- Forwarded message from Frank Branzuela
> >
> >A Wikipedia article states that the Atlantic Charter was signed by
> >President Franklin Roosevelt and English Prime Minister Winston Churchill
> >in August 1945 off the coast of Newfoundland....  It would be fascinating
> >to compile a list of all the authoritative history publications that
> >quote this historical event as happening on Aug. 14, 1945. I'm sure it
> >would number into the tens of thousands. The fact of the matter is that
> >the "Atlantic Charter" was handed out as a news release by the PR staff.
> >Neither Roosevelt or Churchill ever signed it. There has never existed a
> >signed copy of the "Atlantic Charter" but "history" tells us otherwise. A
> >quick check of the U.S. Archives will reveal that the source document is
> >not signed. Funny how a myth becomes fact if it is printed often enough
> >and quoted by respected authorities.
> >
> The error in question is not particularly controversial nor is it
> difficult to fix, but it seems that Mr. Branzuela is missing the point
> of what Wikipedia is all about.  He has the right to make the necessary
> corrections.  If Mr. Branzuela wants to pursue his fascinating list he
> is welcome to do so.
>
> It seems to me that an appropriate answer to questions of this sort
> would be to advise the person of his right to make whatever corrections
> he feels may be needed.  He can even be re-assured that the change from
> 1945 to 1941 is the correction of an obvious factual error that is not
> likely to be opposed.  He could even be sent some boilerplate text about
> how to edit a Wikipedia article.  We would give him an opportunity to be
> a part of the solution.
>
> Ec
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [Wikitech-l] Upload log causes problems while importing cur dump

body:
On Apr 19, 2004, at 07:37, Timwi wrote:
> while importing the cur dump today I received this error message:
>
> 	Error: MySQL server has gone away

Try bumping up the max packet size.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: [MediaWiki-CVS] phase3/includes Parser.php, 1.92,
	1.93

body:
On Apr 19, 2004, at 10:04, Gabriel Wicke wrote:
> Modified Files:
> 	Parser.php
> Log Message:
> allow del and ins, other xhtml tags might be worth to allow as well
> (acronym and similar)

I was under the impression we were trying to reduce, not increase, the
amount of arbitrary HTML.

-- brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Evan Prodromou

subject: [Wikitech-l] cvs2cl

body:
So, one tool I've found very useful with MediaWiki is cvs2cl:

    http://www.red-bean.com/cvs2cl/

There's a Debian package, too ("cvs2cl"). This tool parses CVS log
output to a nicely-formatted ChangeLog file.

It might actually be useful to ship the generated changelogs with
MediaWiki releases.

~ESP

--
Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
Wikitravel - http://www.wikitravel.org/
The free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide


from_name: Arno M

subject: [WikiEN-l] Atlantic Charter

body:
There was another problem with the date. FDR died in
April 12, 1945, so his ghost would have had to sign
it in August 1945.

Actually, the charter was signed in August 1941
(at least according to the wikipedia article).

Can anyone readily verify the charter's existance?

____________________________________________________________
Find what you are looking for with the Lycos Yellow Pages
http://r.lycos.com/r/yp_emailfooter/http://yellowpages.lycos.com/default.asp?SRC=lycos10


from_name: Ashar Voultoiz

subject: [Wikitech-l] mediawikis extensions as a different cvs module

body:
Hello,

On cvs, could it be possible to get wikihero out of the phase3 module and
release it under an "extension" module ?

The ~1000 images takes time to analyze and slow down a bit the process of
updating the cvs local copy.

That extensions also take close to 16MB of space on my hard disk (due to
cluster size) for an option I am not interested in ! Maybe we could release
it under it's on file category like "extensions" ?

cheers,

--
Ashar Voultoiz
http://fr.wikipedia.org/Utilisateur:Hashar


body:
Hi,

while importing the cur dump today I received this error message:

	Error: MySQL server has gone away

This error occurs regardless of whether I pipe the dump through mysql
(the "usual" way), or use a Perl script to import it through DBI (what I
usually use because it gives me a progress meter).

My investigation pin-pointed this to one particular line in the cur dump
which contains an INSERT statement which is for the page
[[Wikipedia:Upload log]]. The one row of data for this page is 1051409
bytes.

So I'm wondering:

1) Why does that cause the above error message? Am I doing something
    wrong?
2) Do we have to have such a huge page? Can we circumvent this by
    splitting the page up?

Thanks,
Timwi


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Upload log causes problems while importing cur dump

body:
Timwi wrote:

> My investigation pin-pointed this to one particular line in the cur dump
> which contains an INSERT statement which is for the page
> [[Wikipedia:Upload log]].

I'm sorry - actually it is
[[Wikipedia:Upload log archive/March 2004 (2)]].


from_name: Kasper

subject: [Wikitech-l] Wayback Machine

body:
> To my surprise, it seems that we haven't gotten indexed by then since
> mid-2003! So... it's a little dated. :(
>
> It's possible that something in our robots.txt or user-agent checking is
> keeping them away, but I'm not sure what. I'll look into it...

It's policy... They first wait for half a year before
publishing pages.

bye


from_name: Carl Witty

body:
On Sun, 2004-04-18 at 06:35, Timwi wrote:
> David Friedland wrote:
>
> > I have written up a short, math-y description of an algorithmic method
> > for determining whether or not a given revision constitutes reversion.
>
> It won't work. No matter how clever and complicated your algorithm gets,
> people can just study it and then make edits that *just* fall outside
> the definition of a reversion.

Just because a defense mechanism fails against a sufficiently
knowledgeable and determined attacker does not mean it's useless.

Carl Witty


from_name: Patrice Neff

subject: [Wikitech-l] Wayback Machine

body:
Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> writes:

> To my surprise, it seems that we haven't gotten indexed by then since
> mid-2003! So... it's a little dated. :(

I haven't seen any site lately which has been indexed after that
date. But I only tried a handful of sites in the past few weeks and
months.

Regards,
Patrice

--
Jesus answered, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes
to the Father except through me."               (The Bible, John 14:6)


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Peter Gervai

subject: [Wikipedia-l] new wiktionary

body:
hello,

excuse me but I missed the way how to start up a new wiktionary in my own
language. anyone could enlighten me please?

can we use hu.wikipedia.org for the base? could we start it now? :)

thanks,
[[user:grin]]


subject: [WikiEN-l] "The free, accessible and gratuitous encyclopedia."

body:
In an attempt to see whether I could ask the folks at the
Spanish-language Wikipedia for help with the English-Wikipedia article
on "La Borinque?a," I went to http://babelfish.altavista.com and asked
it to translate the Web page http://es.wikipedia.org from Spanish to
English.

Lo, and behold...

"Welcome to Wikipedia, the free, accessible and gratuitous
encyclopedia."

Trying the same thing on fr.wikipedia.org yields "Welcome on Wikip?dia,
a project of free encyclopaedia," which is OK... but I like the part
that says "Read the instructions, the FAQ or made tests in the sand
vat."

--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at verizon.net alternate:
dpbsmith at alum.mit.edu


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Upload log causes problems while importing cur
	dump

body:
Timwi-
> Timwi wrote:

>> My investigation pin-pointed this to one particular line in the cur dump
>> which contains an INSERT statement which is for the page
>> [[Wikipedia:Upload log]].

> I'm sorry - actually it is
> [[Wikipedia:Upload log archive/March 2004 (2)]].

For what it's worth, I imported the latest en:-dump a couple of days ago,
and I had the same problem with the same page. I didn't have time to
investigate, so I just removed the offending line from the .sql-file.

Out of curiosity, is this a standard Perl script you are using for
importing with a progress meter? Can I download it somewhere?

Regards,

Erik


body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

>Matthew Brown wrote:
>
>>Michael Snow writes:
>>
>>>For the types of uses for which US copyright law allows "fair use",
>>>
>>the Berne Convention
>>
>>>requires that the source of the work be mentioned.
>>>
>>
>>A clarification I'd like: does *US copyright law* require the source be
>>mentioned?  Or is it the Berne Convention that requires it?
>>
>Does it matter?   If the United States has ratified the Berne
>Convention, then international law would have it that its provisions
>override contrary provisions in US domestic law.
>
The requirement is found in Article 10 of the Berne Convention. The
United States ratified the Berne Convention effective March 1, 1989. As
Ray says, that should make the requirement US law as well. And in any
case, I would prefer to see us complying with international law and not
relying on the crutch of "Our servers are located in the US, so that's
the only law that applies."

There is no independently codified requirement in US copyright law. This
is partly because in US copyright law, fair use is handled as a defense
claimed by the party accused of copyright infringement. As such, the
"fairness" of a use is decided on a case-by-case basis, and the
Copyright Act creates no specific requirements for fair use - it only
mentions some factors to be considered. The factors mentioned in the Act
say nothing either way about mentioning the source, so the problem is
not really a contrary provision, just the failure to explicitly
incorporate the requirement. I expect that even without considering the
Berne Convention, a court might look more favorably on a fair use
defendant who acknowledged the source openly.

>Nevertheless, the
>United States has often made the claim in many areas that the opposite
>is true, much to the annoyance of other nations.
>
Indeed, although from the perspective of copyright law, the bigger
sticking point has been the moral rights of authors.

>Whatever the law, citing sources remains a desirable practice.  The
>ability to trace a submission is the strongest evidence that we can have
>for establishing our rights to do what we do.
>
I agree with Ray and Jimbo. There are many good reasons to cite sources
- as a matter of ethics or just plain courtesy, and as good scholarly
practice to improve verifiability. It's good to cover our legal bases as
well, but that's hardly the only reason.

--Michael Snow
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from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikipedia-l] editing restrictions

body:
Hello all,

This is at the same time, news from another wikipedia,
and somehow a feature request (or start of discussion,
whatever), hence sent to wikipedia-l and wikitech.

---------

NEWS SECTION

Today, the french wikipedia adopted new rules with
regards to sanctions and exclusion (majority of 93%)

To make it simple.

Before : the only action toward a problematic user was
banning. It was decided by consensus, with 100%
agreement. Two people were banned by this way, Mulot
(in august 2002) and Papotages (in november 2003).

This naturally has become unworkable.

Now : a new policy was adopted. This is not a final
policy, as several points have to be further
discussed, but it outlines the principles.

This policy is rather different from the english one.
I guess the difference is due to 1) we are less
numerous and 2) we never had a benevolent dictator :-)

The major differences rely here

* There is no arbitration committee. Decisions are
taken by the full community (with requirements of
number of contributions or length of presence
depending on the decision).

* The policy relies on two steps, clearly identified.

The first step is meant to slow down edition by a
problematic user, or to restrict his right of edition
to some parts of the project for example. It is
relying on the *agreement* of the user to respect
these rules. The community issues a sort of warning to
the problematic user and ask him to voluntarily
respect this collective warning.

For example, if a user is unable to collaborate on an
article, and starts edit wars on this article all the
time, he may be asked by the community not to edit
this specific article for one month.

The restriction in edition is automatically lifted
after a month.

If the user does not respect the request issued by the
community, the second step is reached. Similarly, a
user being issued repeated warnings and edition
restrictions in first step will meet second step.

The second step is restriction of edition, by
technical means. In short blocking/banning temporarily
or permanently.

#  This means that the entire community will be able
to express disagreement to a user, depending on his
behavior as an editor.

#  Decisions of restriction of edition or banning will
not be unilateral but collective

#  Restriction in edition should not be necessarily
seen as a punishment for the user, but more a warning
from the collective, and request for him to behave
differently

#  Restriction in edition should be respected by the
user himself, voluntarily. That means the user
actively chooses to behave within community norms or
not. If he accepts, his full rights will be
reinstated. If he refuses, a vote for banning will be
started

#  Community answer to problematic behavior is
gradual. It allows room for voluntary behavior
improvement and general forgiveness.

-------

FEATURE REQUEST SECTION

You may note that the second step, restriction of
edition by technical means, is limited. The only point
on which we may act is time. Banning for one week, one
month, forever etc?.

I think it would be nice that technical means allow to
block people more selectively, such as blocking on all
meta space, or blocking on one article specifically.

In the first case (meta space blocking), that means we
recognise the right of the user to contribute to
articles themselves, but we do not welcome them in the
community.
In the second case (article blocking), that means we
could selectively prevent a user to edit on article or
some set of articles which are really ?hot buttons?
for him.

This has been mentioned a couple of time already, as
well as edit throttling, which I think, holds interest
as well.

I would give a 100 wiki-kisses to any developer
interested in working on that :-)

I would also suggest raising funds for this, 'cause I
am not sure I own 100 wiki-kisses. But I promise I am
dedicated in making/removing people sysop and
bureaucrat status to give developers more free time
:-)

Anthere

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Photos: High-quality 4x6 digital prints for 25?
http://photos.yahoo.com/ph/print_splash


subject: [Wikitech-l] editing restrictions


from_name: Gabriel Wicke

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: [MediaWiki-CVS] phase3/includes Parser.php,
	1.92, 1.93

body:
On Mon, 2004-04-19 at 12:38 -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:
> On Apr 19, 2004, at 10:04, Gabriel Wicke wrote:
> > Modified Files:
> > 	Parser.php
> > Log Message:
> > allow del and ins, other xhtml tags might be worth to allow as well
> > (acronym and similar)
>
> I was under the impression we were trying to reduce, not increase, the
> amount of arbitrary HTML.

<s> is currently allowed, but it's not adding any semantic information.
Del on the other hand has a clear meaning in the xhtml 1.0 specs.
Similar with ins, although i'm not sure that's really needed. Generally,
i think starting to replace deprecated non-sematic elements with modern,
more meaningful equivalents makes sense if there's no good wiki syntax
equivalent for it available.
I agree that acronym isn't needed, that's much better done in wiki
links.

Another thing is font vs. span- font is deprecated, span with arbitrary
allowed style information wouldn't be much better on the other hand. A
few pre-defined classes that are meant to be used in the content might
help here.
--
Gabriel Wicke


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Tokenizer reading past ends of strings

body:
The Tokenizer class seems to do a lot of lookahead, which can
potentially fall off the edge of the string. In strict error reporting
mode (E_ALL) this produces a notice-level warning about an out of range
string access. I see that JeLuF has been putting in isset() checks to
suppress the warnings.

Since a read past end of string produces a reasonably well-defined
result (ie, empty string), I wonder whether it's better just to
suppress the notice with a @ on the expression. Since the bounds check
happens anyway, the extra isset() doesn't _do_ anything.

As a side note: isset() on a past-end-of-string read actually itself
produces a notice-level error message in PHP 4.3.2, although they seem
to have turned it off by 4.3.4.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Moving extensions (WikiHiero) to separate module in CVS

body:
WikiHiero is really neat, but only a small number of installations are
likely to enable it, and the large number of small images is rather
burdensome. Aside from the space factor, it *really* slows down CVS
operations to examine them all.

If there's no objection, I'd like to move the 'extensions' directory to
a top-level module, next to 'phase3' instead of inside it, so it can be
checked out separately.

We'd package it for separate download anyway, so this is mainly a
developers' convenience. The extensions folder could then just be
dropped into place and the appropriate switch enabled to turn it on in
an installation.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: "The free, accessible and gratuitous encyclopedia."

body:
Anthere wrote:

> I did not get your point Daniel ?
>
> ant
>
> Daniel P.B.Smith a rit:
>
>> In an attempt to see whether I could ask the folks at the
>> Spanish-language Wikipedia for help with the English-Wikipedia
>> article on "La Borinque," I went to http://babelfish.altavista.com
>> and asked it to translate the Web page http://es.wikipedia.org from
>> Spanish to English.
>>
>> Lo, and behold...
>>
>> "Welcome to Wikipedia, the free, accessible and gratuitous
>> encyclopedia."
>
C'est une question de faux amis.  Le mot fran?ais "gratuit" peut-?tre
traduit come "gratuitous" en quelques circonstances, mais pas toujours.
 L'expression anglaise la plus commune pour ce mot est "gratuitous
violence" ou la violence gratuite.  "Gratuitous help" serait une
assistance rendu sans que la personne qui le re?oit le d?sire.  Alors
l'id?e d'inutilit? est beaucoup plus fort dans ce mot en anglaiz.

Ec


from_name: Timwi

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> On Apr 19, 2004, at 07:37, Timwi wrote:
>
>> while importing the cur dump today I received this error message:
>>
>>     Error: MySQL server has gone away
>
> Try bumping up the max packet size.

Thanks a lot, that fixed it.


body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

> For what it's worth, I imported the latest en:-dump a couple of days ago,
> and I had the same problem with the same page. I didn't have time to
> investigate, so I just removed the offending line from the .sql-file.

Brion's suggestion helped and it worked.

You need to add something like this to /etc/my.cnf:
	[mysqld]
	set-variable = max_allowed_packet=16M

(or, if you are using MySQL 4 or above)
	[mysqld]
	max_allowed_packet=16M

and then restart.

> Out of curiosity, is this a standard Perl script you are using for
> importing with a progress meter? Can I download it somewhere?

No, it's something I wrote. I added it to

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

so you can download it there.

Greetings,
Timwi


subject: [Wikitech-l] Embedded MathML?

body:
texvc is able to produce MathML for some input (currently just some
very simple text, not complex equations). When using XHTML output, it's
possible to embed MathML directly in the text such that Mozilla and
maybe Amaya can render it inline:

<math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML">bla bla</math>

Is this a useful thing we should support, is it worth the trouble?

Good:
* Text can be cut-n-pasted
* Can scale with zoomed font sizes and for printouts
* Inherits user overrides of forward and background colors
* Transparency with no alpha channel tricks

These would be good for users requiring large font sizes or
high-contrast displays;transparent PNGs that hard-code a black
foreground will be illegible for a user who forces white-on-black text.
All the above points are true of hacky HTML output as well, but hacky
HTML doesn't tend to look that good, particularly for fractions,
radicals, etc where positioning is hard to do right.

Bad:
* Needs more work on texvc to be useful for non-trivial equations.
* Supported by few browsers. Either a browser detect or an explicit
user option must be used. We'd prefer to only have one canonical
rendering to simplify caching.[1]
* Mozilla complains at the user that they don't have special math fonts
installed, which is rather annoying.

[1] A sick and evil option may be to introduce the MathML at load time
via JavaScript+DOM upon determining that browser should support it. As
with all such solutions this won't function with JavaScript disabled
and is thus suboptimal.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Sean Barrett

body:
Daniel P.B.Smith wrote:
> "Welcome to Wikipedia, the free, accessible and gratuitous encyclopedia."

Is that gratuitous as in sex, or gratuitous as in violence?

--
  Sean Barrett     | I'll be with you in a moment,
  sean at epoptic.com | I'm just sealing some fates.


body:
I did not get your point Daniel ?

ant

Daniel P.B.Smith a ?crit:
> In an attempt to see whether I could ask the folks at the
> Spanish-language Wikipedia for help with the English-Wikipedia article
> on "La Borinque?a," I went to http://babelfish.altavista.com and asked
> it to translate the Web page http://es.wikipedia.org from Spanish to
> English.
>
> Lo, and behold...
>
> "Welcome to Wikipedia, the free, accessible and gratuitous encyclopedia."
>
> Trying the same thing on fr.wikipedia.org yields "Welcome on Wikip?dia,
> a project of free encyclopaedia," which is OK... but I like the part
> that says "Read the instructions, the FAQ or made tests in the sand vat."
>
> --
> Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at verizon.net
> alternate: dpbsmith-FrUbXkNCsVf2fBVCVOL8/A at public.gmane.or
> g


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikitech-l] Categories, once again

body:
Magnus Manske wrote:

> Well, I tried the category function on my local machine again, and it
> _seems_ to work OK. Before this goes "live", there's one point I'd
> like to mention:
>
> In the current CVS, "category" is _not_ a real namespace. While that
> simplifies the search queries, it has a few downsides:
> * Category descriptions will be counted as articles (or is that a good
> thing?)
> * Queries (invoked every time you view a "Category:" page) do a string
> comparison ("Category:%")
> * [[:Category:abc]] will generate a category link, rather than an
> inline link (despite the leading ":")
>
> I thought I'd better ask before creating a "real" new namespace, though.

It's a cause for joy to see that some progress is being made in this
area.  Although I seak as a non-technical person I can appreciate the
concerns that Timwi has raised.  Still I would dearly love to see
something on line soon.

The features that I consider important remain the same as they have been
at other times when this subject has been raised.  An article must be
capable of accepting multiple categorizations in multiple systems.
 Plain text categories are essential, but so too should various coding
systems.  My simple suggestion remains that a category which begins with
two capital letters would indicate a code; exactly which code would be
indicated by the specific choice of those two letters.

I know that my suggestion will lead to many schemes that go nowhere, but
I believe that that process is a natural part of organic wiki growth.
 If a particular categorization scheme turns out to be nothing more than
clutter, the community will make that decision by failing to use it.

Ec


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia nominated for Webby Awards!

body:
Wikipedia has been nominated for Webby Awards in two categories:
Best Practices and Community.  The definitions of these two categories
can be found here:

http://www.webbyawards.com/main/webby_awards/cat_defs.html

The nomination itself is an honor, since in each category we are 1 of
5 sites selected from thousands of submissions.

>Best Practices
>
>Sites demonstrating unparalleled excellence across The Academy's six
>criteria: content, structure & navigation, visual design,
>interactivity,functionality, and overall experience. Best Practices
>sites serve as an industry benchmark for the most current, innovative,
>and advanced practices in Web development.

>Community
>
>Sites creating and facilitating online community, connectedness and/or
>communication around shared interests. These sites can target either a
>broad-based or niche audience.

In each category, we are eligible for both a Webby Award and a The
People's Voice award.

In their email to me, they said:

>While the Academy selects The Webby Awards' winners, the online public
>selects The People's Voice Award winners. With frequently different results
>some people are as honored to receive the People's Voice vote of confidence
>as it indicates a strong following by your site's visitors. We encourage you
>to launch a People's Voice campaign to get your loyal audience to the polls.
>More information is available in the Nominee Kit that you will receive once
>you've confirmed your contact information as outlined below.

The kit is here:
http://www.webbyawards.com/nomineekit/downloads.html

I think we should launch a strong People's Voice campaign, today!

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia nominated for Webby Awards!


subject: [Wikitech-l] Webby awards

body:
http://www.webbyawards.com/nomineekit/downloads.html

I am going to my sister's wedding tomorrow, and I will be back next
Tuesday.  Unfortunately, this means that I won't be around for a few
days, and I might not even have web access, I'm not sure yet.

Therefore, I'd like to ask the wikitech-l list to see to it for me
that we have a thorough campaign to win a People's Choice Webby Award,
by putting a logo all over the site that links to the proper place.

They say to link to logo to http://www.webbyawards.com/, which is
fine, but to increase our "conversion rate" I recommend a touch of
text that that links directly to:

http://www.webbyawards.com/peoplesvoice/index.html

...which is where you go to signup to vote.

To reach people who are most likely to be motivated to vote for us,
which means people who actually write on wikipedia, I recommend some
bold text on the edit screen, just below the "Save page" button,
saying something like "If you have a couple of minutes, we'd really
appreciate your going to vote for Wikipedia at the People's Choice
Webby Awards."  And a link there of course to the peoplesvoice page.

Additionally, since everyone who is anyone views Recent Changes, some
similar text there would likely be helpful.

----

Additionally, we should take some of the suggestions from
"How_to_Make_The_Most.doc" page (from the download page, see link
above) and place them on a meta page, to be linked from all the above
places.  The gist of the message we should get out to people is "Go
here to vote for us, and go here for other ways to
help."

--Jimbo


from_name: Nikola Smolenski

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Image upload

body:
On Monday 19 April 2004 04:08, Daniel P.B.Smith wrote:
> Actually, the present upload system is both awkward and confusing and
> could be greatly improved. Wikipedia is down right now so I can't give
> exact quotations, but the upload page only has one option--a checkbox
> asserting that the content is GFDL--and a text field providing only a
> single line of description. You have to be at least half-awake and
> click on several things in order to get to the description field that
> lets you typing in a long description.

I think that long descriptions would clutter the upload log. What I do is,
give short description, then edit Image page to add longer description and
copyright information.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] bot

body:
can I set a user to be a bot? seems being sysop isn't enough, or I'm
undereducated :)

thanks,
[[w:hu:user:grin]]


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] Categories, once again

body:
Well, I tried the category function on my local machine again, and it
_seems_ to work OK. Before this goes "live", there's one point I'd like
to mention:

In the current CVS, "category" is _not_ a real namespace. While that
simplifies the search queries, it has a few downsides:
* Category descriptions will be counted as articles (or is that a good
thing?)
* Queries (invoked every time you view a "Category:" page) do a string
comparison ("Category:%")
* [[:Category:abc]] will generate a category link, rather than an inline
link (despite the leading ":")

I thought I'd better ask before creating a "real" new namespace, though.

Magnus


from_name: Arvind Narayanan

in_reply_to:
<1082422254.1217.6.camel@flare>;
	from cwitty@newtonlabs.com on Mon, Apr 19, 2004 at 05:50:54PM
	-0700

body:
On Mon, Apr 19, 2004 at 05:50:54PM -0700, Carl Witty wrote:
> On Sun, 2004-04-18 at 06:35, Timwi wrote:
> > David Friedland wrote:
> >
> > > I have written up a short, math-y description of an algorithmic method
> > > for determining whether or not a given revision constitutes reversion.
> >
> > It won't work. No matter how clever and complicated your algorithm gets,
> > people can just study it and then make edits that *just* fall outside
> > the definition of a reversion.
>
> Just because a defense mechanism fails against a sufficiently
> knowledgeable and determined attacker does not mean it's useless.
>
Besides, the cost of figuring it out and the time needed to make the edit
circumvent the detection algorithm each time will act as a strong deterrent.

Theoretically, our main page should get vandalized all the time because the
templates are unprotected. But see how well it has served us.

Arvind
--
Its all GNU to me


from_name: Thomas R. Koll

subject: [Wikipedia-l] new wiktionary

body:
On Mon, Apr 19, 2004 at 06:54:55PM +0200, Peter Gervai wrote:
> hello,
>
> excuse me but I missed the way how to start up a new wiktionary in my own
> language. anyone could enlighten me please?
>
> can we use hu.wikipedia.org for the base? could we start it now? :)

and also one for de: please.

ciao, tom
--
== Weblinks ==
* http://www.tomk32.de - just a geek trying to change the world
* http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:TomK32 - Free Knowledge
* http://tomk32.bookcrossing.com - Free Books


subject: [Wikitech-l] Embedded MathML?

body:
On Apr 20, 2004, at 08:30, Gabriel Wicke wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-04-20 at 17:06 +0200, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
>> If we ever start producing xhtml, I'll add real mathml support.
>
> The current skins (see test.wikipedia.org) are xhtml-based now, and
> most
> content pages validate as such.

One caveat: the page also has to be served with an XML content-type or
Mozilla ignores the MathML tags. This leads to a much stricter
requirement for output to be well-formed, since any error will prevent
the page from being viewable.

We're improving in this regard, but user-supplied HTML isn't always
well-formed, and problems aren't always corrected automatically. If we
serve pages as XML, we *must* ensure that all possible output is
well-formed so that non-experts can see the page, follow the link back
to the edit page, etc. I'm not sure to what degree the output has to
validate...
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Categories, once again

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> On Apr 20, 2004, at 08:49, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>> The features that I consider important remain the same as they have
>> been at other times when this subject has been raised.  An article
>> must be capable of accepting multiple categorizations in multiple
>> systems.
>
> A page may be assigned to arbitrarily many categories. Category pages
> themselves may be  assigned to categories, giving rise to a
> hierarchical categorization system (though right now it's a little
> awkward to navigate.) Parallel hierarchies shouldn't be a problem.

Perfect.

>>  Plain text categories are essential, but so too should various
>> coding systems.  My simple suggestion remains that a category which
>> begins with two capital letters would indicate a code; exactly which
>> code would be indicated by the specific choice of those two letters.
>
> The category names are opaque to the software; it doesn't have any
> interest in what naming conventions are used. Codes are fine, but they
> should be sufficiently legible that having a bunch of them appear at
> the top of an article won't be confusing.

I think that we agree.  I suppose that the issue that I raised may be
more editorial than software related.  It is conceivable that at some
distant future time some very popular coding systems should be
recognizable by the software, but that should not become an impediment
to getting a functioning category system activated.

If codes are to be allowed there must be a way of distinguishing them
from plain text, and there must be a way of distinguishing them from
each other.  Some people may find the Dewey Decimal System appropriate,
but I would suggest that something in category 537 be coded as "DD:537"
rather than simply "537" .  Any coding system would need to be defined
and described

Ec


subject: [Wikitech-l] Categories, once again

body:
On Apr 20, 2004, at 08:49, Ray Saintonge wrote:
> The features that I consider important remain the same as they have
> been at other times when this subject has been raised.  An article
> must be capable of accepting multiple categorizations in multiple
> systems.

A page may be assigned to arbitrarily many categories. Category pages
themselves may be  assigned to categories, giving rise to a
hierarchical categorization system (though right now it's a little
awkward to navigate.) Parallel hierarchies shouldn't be a problem.

>  Plain text categories are essential, but so too should various coding
> systems.  My simple suggestion remains that a category which begins
> with two capital letters would indicate a code; exactly which code
> would be indicated by the specific choice of those two letters.

The category names are opaque to the software; it doesn't have any
interest in what naming conventions are used. Codes are fine, but they
should be sufficiently legible that having a bunch of them appear at
the top of an article won't be confusing.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Webby awards

body:
Ashar Voultoiz wrote:
> > Additionally, since everyone who is anyone views Recent Changes, some
> > similar text there would likely be helpful.
>
> I will not give my email address to spammers :p

That's a very bold claim about them, do you have any evidence?  Or do
you automatically assume that anyone requiring registration is a
spammer?

Their privacy policy says:
"The Webby Awards does not sell, rent, or share your personal
information to others. We do allow our partners to provide you with
news and special offers only if you have chosen to receive such
information by opting-in to our distribution list. However, we do not
share your personal information with our partners."

--Jimbo


from_name: fabiform

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Webby awards

body:
--- Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:

> The question does remain why they ask for information such as income
> level, age and education - this kind of data is of interest only for
> marketing purposes. It would be interesting to set up a fresh email
> account exclusively for signing up to the Webby awards and see if any spam
> subsequently arrives there.

Thankfully they don't require that you share all that information, the only
parts you have to fill in are your email and name.  By the way, Wikipedia is
leading in those two categories at the moment (it tells you after you vote).

Fabi.

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Photos: High-quality 4x6 digital prints for 25?
http://photos.yahoo.com/ph/print_splash


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Webby awards

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
> The question does remain why they ask for information such as income
> level, age and education - this kind of data is of interest only for
> marketing purposes.

If you do opt-in to receive stuff from sponsors, this presumably
enables them to target more effectively.  Only email and first and
last name are required, and presumably email is the only "real" thing
required.

> It would be interesting to set up a fresh email account exclusively
> for signing up to the Webby awards and see if any spam subsequently
> arrives there.

Sure, that'd be interesting for just about every site on the Internet
that asks for an email address.  I don't see why it's particularly
interesting in this case, other than that they are a widely recognized
awards-giving body that purports to give awards for "Best Practices".
If they violated their own privacy policy, I guess that'd be a huge
scandal.  But, I see no particular reason to expect it.

--Jimbo


from_name: Erik Zachte

subject: [Wikitech-l] webalizer stats

body:
Visitor count for en: is way off, see
http://www.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/PlotsPngUsageVisits.htm

Someone said a while ago that one of the squids does not feed the webalizer
stats.
I forgot who or which machine.

Would it be possible to recover those stats or at least include it from now
on?

Erik Zachte


subject: [Wikitech-l] webalizer stats

body:
On Tue, 2004-04-20 at 12:43 +0200, Erik Zachte wrote:
> Visitor count for en: is way off, see
> http://www.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/PlotsPngUsageVisits.htm
>
> Someone said a while ago that one of the squids does not feed the webalizer
> stats.
> I forgot who or which machine.

That was curly.

> Would it be possible to recover those stats or at least include it from now
> on?

Webalizer can't cope with logs that are out of order, so it's not
possible to include them in the running stats. The logs are archived, it
would be possible to re-run the stats (or just the missing days) if
somebody volunteers to do it.
On the other hand adding the average hits per day is easier and yields
pretty much the same result.
--
Gabriel Wicke


from_name: Arno M

subject: [WikiEN-l] Atlantic Charter on wikipedia

body:
I agree that this matter is better off discussed on
the Atlantic Charter page. However, the wikipedia
page has never said that it was signed in 1945.

It did say July 1941 at one point before it was
corrected, but the year always was 1941.

So frankly, I don't think that this guy did his
homework before he raised the matter with Jimbo.

____________________________________________________________
Find what you are looking for with the Lycos Yellow Pages
http://r.lycos.com/r/yp_emailfooter/http://yellowpages.lycos.com/default.asp?SRC=lycos10


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Categories, once again

body:
Magnus Manske wrote:

> Well, I tried the category function on my local machine again, and it
> _seems_ to work OK. Before this goes "live", there's one point I'd like
> to mention:

Warning: My personal opinions follow...

> In the current CVS, "category" is _not_ a real namespace.

It should be!

> * Category descriptions will be counted as articles (or is that a good
> thing?)

Very bad thing!

> * Queries (invoked every time you view a "Category:" page) do a string
> comparison ("Category:%")

Very bad indeed!

> * [[:Category:abc]] will generate a category link, rather than an inline
> link (despite the leading ":")

Needs to be fixed!

> I thought I'd better ask before creating a "real" new namespace, though.

:-)

Greetings,
Timwi


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

subject: [Wikitech-l] Embedded MathML?

body:
On Tue, Apr 20, 2004 at 02:20:52AM -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:
> texvc is able to produce MathML for some input (currently just some
> very simple text, not complex equations). When using XHTML output, it's
> possible to embed MathML directly in the text such that Mozilla and
> maybe Amaya can render it inline:
>
> <math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML">bla bla</math>
>
> Is this a useful thing we should support, is it worth the trouble?
>
> Good:
> * Text can be cut-n-pasted
> * Can scale with zoomed font sizes and for printouts
> * Inherits user overrides of forward and background colors
> * Transparency with no alpha channel tricks
>
> These would be good for users requiring large font sizes or
> high-contrast displays;transparent PNGs that hard-code a black
> foreground will be illegible for a user who forces white-on-black text.
> All the above points are true of hacky HTML output as well, but hacky
> HTML doesn't tend to look that good, particularly for fractions,
> radicals, etc where positioning is hard to do right.
>
> Bad:
> * Needs more work on texvc to be useful for non-trivial equations.
> * Supported by few browsers. Either a browser detect or an explicit
> user option must be used. We'd prefer to only have one canonical
> rendering to simplify caching.[1]
> * Mozilla complains at the user that they don't have special math fonts
> installed, which is rather annoying.
>
> [1] A sick and evil option may be to introduce the MathML at load time
> via JavaScript+DOM upon determining that browser should support it. As
> with all such solutions this won't function with JavaScript disabled
> and is thus suboptimal.

Extending texvc to support real mathml is quite simple. I didn't do it yet because:
* it can't be used without xhtml
* I don't have any browser that supports mathml (mozilla on Debian has serious
  fonts problems with math), so I can't test it

If we ever start producing xhtml, I'll add real mathml support.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Embedded MathML?

body:
On Tue, 2004-04-20 at 17:06 +0200, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

> If we ever start producing xhtml, I'll add real mathml support.

The current skins (see test.wikipedia.org) are xhtml-based now, and most
content pages validate as such.
--
Gabriel Wicke
http://www.aulinx.de
Plone, Zope and MediaWiki Hosting


subject: [Wikitech-l] Categories, once again

body:
Magnus-
> Well, I tried the category function on my local machine again, and it
> _seems_ to work OK.

There's still a bug in that text which is typed directly next to a
category tag is appended to the category header, e.g. if I type

[[Category:Dogfood]] is tasty

then the categories header says

"Categories: [[Dogfood]] is tasty"

The text "is tasty" is thus duplicated (in the header, and where it was
typed).

You can see this here:
http://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categories2

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Webby awards

body:
Jimmy-
> Their privacy policy says:
> "The Webby Awards does not sell, rent, or share your personal
> information to others. We do allow our partners to provide you with
> news and special offers only if you have chosen to receive such
> information by opting-in to our distribution list. However, we do not
> share your personal information with our partners."

The question does remain why they ask for information such as income
level, age and education - this kind of data is of interest only for
marketing purposes. It would be interesting to set up a fresh email
account exclusively for signing up to the Webby awards and see if any spam
subsequently arrives there.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikipedia-l] bot

body:
"Peter Gervai" <grin at tolna.net> schrieb:
> can I set a user to be a bot? seems being sysop isn't enough, or I'm
> undereducated :)

I see that Angela already did so, however I also notice that the
Hungarian recentchanges page does not yet contain the possibility
to show bot edits.

Please edit [[hu:MediaWiki:Showhideminor]] to read the Hungarian
translation of:

    $1 minor edits | $2 bots | $3 logged in users

Andre Engels


from_name: Guillaume Blanchard

body:
No problem for me.

WikiHiero is a specialized feature and don't need to be an integral part of
MediaWiki.

Aoineko

PS: By the way, we have "only" a thousand pictures (that cover 90% of case)
while there are about 5000 hieroglyphs for all periods.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Brion Vibber" <brion at pobox.com>
To: "Wikimedia developers" <wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org>
Sent: Tuesday, April 20, 2004 4:17 PM
Subject: [Wikitech-l] Moving extensions (WikiHiero) to separate module in
CVS

> WikiHiero is really neat, but only a small number of installations are
> likely to enable it, and the large number of small images is rather
> burdensome. Aside from the space factor, it *really* slows down CVS
> operations to examine them all.
>
> If there's no objection, I'd like to move the 'extensions' directory to
> a top-level module, next to 'phase3' instead of inside it, so it can be
> checked out separately.
>
> We'd package it for separate download anyway, so this is mainly a
> developers' convenience. The extensions folder could then just be
> dropped into place and the appropriate switch enabled to turn it on in
> an installation.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


from_name: Ashar Voultoiz

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Webby awards

body:
On Tue, 20 Apr 2004 09:20:17 -0700, Jimmy Wales wrote:

> o reach people who are most likely to be motivated to vote for us,
> which means people who actually write on wikipedia, I recommend some
> bold text on the edit screen, just below the "Save page" button,
> saying something like "If you have a couple of minutes, we'd really
> appreciate your going to vote for Wikipedia at the People's Choice
> Webby Awards."  And a link there of course to the peoplesvoice page.
>
> Additionally, since everyone who is anyone views Recent Changes, some
> similar text there would likely be helpful.

I will not give my email address to spammers :p

--
Ashar Voultoiz
http://fr.wikipedia.org/Utilisateur:Hashar


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Categories, once again

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

> Magnus-
>
>>Well, I tried the category function on my local machine again, and it
>>_seems_ to work OK.
>
> There's still a bug in that text which is typed directly next to a
> category tag is appended to the category header.

Another bug: Subcategories are displayed with underscores instead of
spaces (e.g. "Rock_music" instead of "Rock music").


from_name: Peter Gervai

subject: [Wikipedia-l] bot

body:
On Tue, Apr 20, 2004 at 07:00:00PM +0000, Andre Engels wrote:
> "Peter Gervai" <grin at tolna.net> schrieb:
> > can I set a user to be a bot? seems being sysop isn't enough, or I'm
> > undereducated :)
>
> I see that Angela already did so, however I also notice that the
> Hungarian recentchanges page does not yet contain the possibility
> to show bot edits.

Thanks. It's pretty hard to notice such changes due to:
* mediawiki:all messages doesn't get refreshed again (last update was feb)
* all messages diff to the previous timeouts.

I have to probably retrieve the versions to local machine and diff it
manually... :-o

grin


from_name: Michael Snow

subject: [WikiEN-l] Review of quickpolls policy

body:
For those who haven't heard yet, since quickpolls have completed their
30-day trial, we're reviewing whether this system should continue.
Contribute your input at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Quickpolls

--Michael Snow


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Categories, once again

body:
Magnus-
> Please try the current CVS, should have mucho bugs fixed now. (And
> plenty of new exiting ones!;-)

Please turn E_NOTICE on in your PHP config. We use E_NOTICE now for
debugging purposes.

The category code triggers a notice in Parser.php, line 291, when viewing
a category page, which is this line:

        if ( count ( $y ) == 2 && $y[0] == $cat )

It complains that $cat is an uninitialized variable. $cat seems to be used
nowhere in Parser.php, which proves the usefulness of E_NOTICE. I suggest
you replace it with the correct variable name, if any.

I've seen quite a bit of strange behavior (including such things as
templates being listed as subcategories), but let's start with this stuff.

Incidentally, it would be very useful if you would add some comments to
your code. Presently the only comments in the function categoryMagic()
are:

# Children
# Articles

Neither of which is particularly informative ..

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Categories, once again

references:
<4084D6B7.7030209@web.de> <97EZT5hSpVB@erik_moeller>
	<c640h9$78g$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
OK, I made "Category" and "Category talk" real namespaces. Hey, we're up
to 15 now (not including "special")! Does anyone remember the time when
we used to write an encyclopedia?...

Please try the current CVS, should have mucho bugs fixed now. (And
plenty of new exiting ones!;-)

Magnus

Timwi wrote:

> Erik Moeller wrote:
>
>> Magnus-
>>
>>> Well, I tried the category function on my local machine again, and it
>>> _seems_ to work OK.
>>
>>
>> There's still a bug in that text which is typed directly next to a
>> category tag is appended to the category header.
>
>
> Another bug: Subcategories are displayed with underscores instead of
> spaces (e.g. "Rock_music" instead of "Rock music").
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] Copyediting of material from embargoed nations

body:
The prior decision which prohibited editing of written material from
embargoed nations such as Iran and North Korea has been reversed.

See

http://www.biomedcentral.com/news/20040407/03/

Fred


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikitech-l] Webby awards

body:
Arvind Narayanan wrote:

>On Tue, Apr 20, 2004 at 09:20:17AM -0700, Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
>
>>To reach people who are most likely to be motivated to vote for us,
>>which means people who actually write on wikipedia, I recommend some
>>bold text on the edit screen, just below the "Save page" button,
>>saying something like "If you have a couple of minutes, we'd really
>>appreciate your going to vote for Wikipedia at the People's Choice
>>Webby Awards."  And a link there of course to the peoplesvoice page.
>>
>Sorry for being sarcastic, but do you think an 'award' won in this
>manner has any merit? I mean, it just reduces to a most-visited-site
>contest. Google is one of the nominees under 'best practices', and do
>you think they could win less than 95% of the votes if they put a
>similar link on their main page?
>
I've visited several other candidate sites, and many of them have
already created such links.  That means they are all trying to get out
their core support.  Our competion for this award is BBC, Google, Lego
and Ted Turner.  If Google put something like this up on its page we
could even pick up anti-Google votes.  That's politics!

Ec


subject: [Wikitech-l] Webby awards

body:
On Tue, Apr 20, 2004 at 09:20:17AM -0700, Jimmy Wales wrote:

> To reach people who are most likely to be motivated to vote for us,
> which means people who actually write on wikipedia, I recommend some
> bold text on the edit screen, just below the "Save page" button,
> saying something like "If you have a couple of minutes, we'd really
> appreciate your going to vote for Wikipedia at the People's Choice
> Webby Awards."  And a link there of course to the peoplesvoice page.
>
> Additionally, since everyone who is anyone views Recent Changes, some
> similar text there would likely be helpful.

Hey, while we're at it, why don't we send out emails to all registered
users?!

Sorry for being sarcastic, but do you think an 'award' won in this
manner has any merit? I mean, it just reduces to a most-visited-site
contest. Google is one of the nominees under 'best practices', and do
you think they could win less than 95% of the votes if they put a
similar link on their main page?

Arvind
--
Its all GNU to me


from_name: Jan-Åke Larsson

subject: [Wikitech-l] dvipng

body:
I see that currently math content is rendered from DVI to PNG by using
dvips and gs. A possible way to do this simpler (and save some server
CPU) would be to use the dvipng utility:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/preview-latex/

/Jan-?ke


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] dvipng

body:
On Apr 21, 2004, at 03:42, Jan-?ke Larsson wrote:
> I see that currently math content is rendered from DVI to PNG by using
> dvips and gs. A possible way to do this simpler (and save some server
> CPU) would be to use the dvipng utility:
>
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/preview-latex/

Note for others; see earlier thread mentioning possible use of dvipng
including initial patch to texvc (needs to be changed to a command-line
selectable switch between dvips and dvipng):
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2004-April/009564.html

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Transparent math rendering

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> There's a lovely little program 'dvipng' which was designed to do
> real-time previews of LaTeX in an editor
> (http://sf.net/projects/preview-latex/) but is available as a
> stand-alone utility as well. This can replace the dvips & convert steps
> of our math rendering.

Thanks for the praise. The program was written for preview-latex but
has gotten a growing independent audience. It is even mentioned in the
TeX FAQ nowadays.

> In theory it should be faster (I haven't
> benchmarked it), but the neat thing is that it can produce output with
> a transparent background, which has been asked for for a while.

In practice it is _much_ faster. You'll find that the main bottlenecks
are 1) writing the image to disk, e.g., on NFS and 2) output of
diagnostic messages. The -q option you use below is very helpful with
the latter, writing images to a local disk with the former. On my
laptop, small images take on the average 2 ms to generate, if you do a
many-page DVI (=one image for each page).

> I've been able to get pretty nice output with this command line:
> dvipng -q -D 120 -bg Transparent -T tight -o outputfile.png
> inputfile.dvi
>
> which produces files about the same dimensions as our current stuff.
> They are 8-bit indexed PNG images with solid transparency, which is
> compatible with Internet Explorer for Windows without any hacks, and
> will still look nice on most light-colored backgrounds. However, they
> won't look too great on a dark background, and some browsers may not be
> able to print them correctly.

I find dark background and math terrible anyway. Not much I can do
about this one, but I will listen to any ideas.

> There's also a truecolor option that I
> haven't tried (which has potential problems of its own).

Such as much bigger files (and slower writing of them).

Hint: dvipng is currently in debian unstable.
/J?


subject: [Wikitech-l] wiki-indexed.png

body:
I really don't think it's a good idea to have separate hard-coded logo
image files for IE and everything else. It's already bad enough that
you have to overwrite files installed as part of MediaWiki to set the
logo displayed by Monobook (*separately* from the other skins), now you
have to do two, and remember to do the one that your browser never
shows?

It just seems like a lot of trouble to maintain.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] wiki-indexed.png

body:
On Apr 21, 2004, at 13:34, Gabriel Wicke wrote:
> They could both be indexed, but i wouldn't like the indexed look in a
> modern browser, especially with the book behind it. The png hack for ie
> doesn't seem to work with some versions of 6.0. Giving ie an opaque
> background might be ok for the mediawiki logo, but imo not for a real
> site.

I think that would be perfectly acceptable for a small minority of
users with such an incompatible configuration to get the opaque
fallback. Certainly it's far more acceptable than having two logo files
which will likely be frequently out of sync.

> If the default logo was placed in the main style dir relative paths to
> that one would be possible as well. Any objections against this?

Yes, that would be rather inconvenient. On Wikipedia we have slightly
different logo images for every wiki while the rest of the styles
remain the same; this would then require maintaining dozens/hundreds of
near-duplicate style directory trees, where now we've got a shared
style tree and just adjust $wgLogo.

The trees would have to be carefully synced up to propagate updates
without overwriting the logo all the time (this is a problem for
third-party users as well; we should seek to minimize the amount of
mucking about with internal files that has to be done).

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: [MediaWiki-CVS] phase3/includes
	SpecialDeadendpages.php, 1.4, 1.5

body:
On Apr 21, 2004, at 14:02, Luc Van Oostenryck wrote:
> Modified Files:
> 	SpecialDeadendpages.php
> Log Message:
> Don't include redirects in dead-end pages

By definition there should *be* no dead-end redirects, unless they are
faulty. So... we'd _want_ to see them if there are any, right?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Static Test - Empty???

body:
On Apr 21, 2004, at 15:36, Richard Ames wrote:
> I succeeded in changing the static text for [[MediaWiki:Fromwikipedia]]
> and [[MediaWiki:Gnunote]] but if you leave them empty the default text
> appears.
>
> Is this expected behavior?

Yes.

> What do I enter for nothing to appear on the served page in the
> respective place?

In a pinch " " will usually do. This leaves a single space, which
doesn't get filtered out.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Re: Webby awards

body:
On Tue, 20 Apr 2004 11:28:02 -0700, Jimmy Wales wrote:

> Ashar Voultoiz wrote:
>>> Additionally, since everyone who is anyone views Recent Changes, some
>>> similar text there would likely be helpful.
>>
>> I will not give my email address to spammers :p
>
> That's a very bold claim about them, do you have any evidence?  Or do
> you automatically assume that anyone requiring registration is a
> spammer?
>
> Their privacy policy says:
> "The Webby Awards does not sell, rent, or share your personal
> information to others. We do allow our partners to provide you with
> news and special offers only if you have chosen to receive such
> information by opting-in to our distribution list. However, we do not
> share your personal information with our partners."
>
> --Jimbo

Hello,

Sorry if you took my reply as an offense, it was more like a warning to
the community.
As advise Erik, voting with a dedicated to spam email will help :)

cheers,

--
Ashar Voultoiz
http://fr.wikipedia.org/Utilisateur:Hashar


subject: [Wikitech-l] Transparent math rendering

body:
Jan-?ke Larsson wrote:
> In practice it is _much_ faster. You'll find that the main bottlenecks
> are 1) writing the image to disk, e.g., on NFS and 2) output of
> diagnostic messages.

...if you are using a slow terminal (like gnome-terminal or so)...

> The -q option you use below is very helpful with
> the latter, writing images to a local disk with the former. On my
> laptop, small images take on the average 2 ms to generate, if you do a
> many-page DVI (=one image for each page).

/J?

--
TeX, n.: A part of a typesetting system that preserves the medieval
         traditions of sorcery and black art.


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikitech-l] Webby awards

body:
Arvind Narayanan wrote:
> Sorry for being sarcastic, but do you think an 'award' won in this
> manner has any merit?

I don't know -- Newsweek interviewed me today, does that seem
worthwhile?

> Google is one of the nominees under 'best practices', and do
> you think they could win less than 95% of the votes if they put a
> similar link on their main page?

I'm sure they could win if they tried.  So far, they haven't.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Webby awards

body:
Tim Starling wrote:
> Notices were added to [[MediaWiki:Watchdetails]],
> [[MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning]] and [[Wikipedia:Recentchanges]], but were
> removed by Martin and Wik. Martin explained:
>
> "I recommend we ignore Jimbo's recommendation, get on with creating an
> encyclopedia, and forget about random award ceremonies. People only need
> to be told about this once, at most, not every time they edit every
> page. Martin 22:59, 20 Apr 2004 (UTC)"
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_talk%3AWatchdetails#Webbys

Well, since this is a wiki, I thought I'd be bold and just put those
edits back.  Since I'm on vacation, it'll be hard for me to get into an
edit war about it.

Actually, I couldn't figure out how to change Wikipedia:Recentchanges
back, that's how lame I am.  But perhaps someone else will enjoy doing
that.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] Webby awards

body:
> Together with time magazine, newsweek is quite popular here. Does "they
> interviewed me today" mean that there will be an article on wikipedia in
> the near future or is this just some sort of preparational stuff for the
> awards?

They asked me for a high resolution logo (which I sent) because
the article goes to the printers tonight... so I don't know their
schedule, but I guess it'll be out very soon.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] Contributors list

body:
On Apr 21, 2004, at 19:29, Evan Prodromou wrote:
> So, I'd like to add a little block of attribution data to each page
> (optional, per-installation; I'm guessing Wikipedia wouldn't use
> this). Something along the lines of:
>
>        This article last edited on April 21, 2004 by Evan Prodromou.
>        Based on work by Alice Notaperson, Bob Alsonotaperson, users
>        Crankshaft, Deckchair and Eggplant, and anonymous editors.
>
> For each (distinct) person who's listed in the old table, it'd show
> their real name if it's set, or their user name if not.

The clear problem with this is that it doesn't scale well. The list
will increase and increase and increase on popular pages, and on some
pages could literally contain hundreds, maybe thousands of distinct
names. Not only will this add a huge amount of text to the output, but
it will require trawling through thousands of history entries to get
the info, making it a fairly expensive operation. This is already a
potentially serious problem with the metadata return, but there it only
has to be done on request.

It would probably be a good idea to limit it to the last N editors,
where N is some sensible number.

> getContributors would return an array of arrays, each of which would
> contain:
>
>         0. User ID
>         1. User account name
>         2. User real name, if set

That's probably reasonable.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)