from_name: Geoff Burling

body:
On Sat, 9 Oct 2004, Robert wrote:

> We have lost so many of our early and best contributors to
> Wikipedia, because our system of arbitration and mediation
> is flawed and useless.

I don't agree with this conclusion. I believe there's another
reason: we've pickaed all of the low-hanging fruit, & it's
getting harder to write new articles both quickly & to an
acceptible level.

In the old days (which is another way of saying 12 to 18 months
ago), I found I could fill the need of countless numbers of
articles by spending about an hour consulting an encyclopedia
or two, doing a few queries on Google, or cut-n-pasting material
from the Public Domain. Now that the English Wikipedia has
over 350,000 articles, to add new articles either requires
specialized knowledge or education, or a lot more research time.

As an example, I've been working on creating a new list of
Egyptian Pharaohs. While the current lists we have are not
misleading, & are probably as accurate as any list someone could
find on the Internet, there are some problems with them as they
stand. However, to come up with a new list that is clearly an
improvement on the old ones has taken me the full time equivalent
of several week's of research & analysis: the primary sources
are incomplete, the best authorities do not always agree at
every step or one omits names that another one has -- all of which
needs to explained in a satisfactory manner. In other words,
these are changes that require more work than the usual Wiki
method of incremental changes.

The demands of such heavy work can only slow the contributions of
concientious contributors. Add to this the inevitable problem
that even the experts outside the Wikipedia world frequently
disagree -- often far more heatedly than we do -- over certain
points, & it's inevitable that people either gradually reduce
their number of contributions, or focus more on less substantive
contributions like fixing links, wikifying old & new articles,
or adding category tags. At least that's one of two reasons why
my contributions have fallen off. (The other is the demands of
a full-time job; for half of the 2 years now that I have been
contributing to Wikipedia, I have been unemployed.)

The fact that Wikipedia's structure leads to a flat heirarchy of
expertise is only one factor in this gradual fading away of us
"old timers". Although sometimes it is hard to remember that the
new contributor who appears for the 1st time & adds material that
at first glance seems questionable or inappropriate may have a
valid point.

Geoff


list: wikitech-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikitech-l] email this user -- question

body:
Jens Ropers wrote:

> Regarding the "E-mail this user" feature: Currently it says:
>
> "If this user has entered a valid e-mail address in his or her user
> preferences, the form below will send a single message. (...)"
>
> Is there any way for the sender to see if his email will actually be
> delivered?
> Would it make sense to log this as a feature request/bug?

In such a situation there also needs to be some protection from those
who want to exploit this feature for creating lists of spam victims.

Ec


from_name: Matthias Pospiech

subject: [Wikitech-l] Complete Latex Files in WikiTeX ?

body:
As far as I can see, the TeX System is used to display things that HTML can
not do.

My interest goes beyond all this - I would like to have a Latex-Wiki that
can show and prove the functionality and beauty of Latex.
That means that it is necessary to create pictures of arbitrary tex/latex
content, and as well to be able to deliver all Pages (in PDF) and the whole
Latex Code.

Seems to be more complex than what is done in WikiTeX so far,
so my question is, whether is is possible to implement complete Latex files
or arbitrary content of complete Latex files in WikiTeX now - or in the
future ?

Matthias
--
---------------------------------
www.matthiaspospiech.de


list: wikien-l

from_name: JAY JG

body:
>From: "Charles Matthews" <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com>
>Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
>To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Loosing more of our best contributors
>Date: Sun, 10 Oct 2004 16:00:51 +0100
>Jay jg wrote
>
> > In the end, we're either
> > left with wikijunk, or a mass of overlapping articles, or (in the best
>case)
> > the POV warriors eventually abandon their quest, having wasted many
> > person-days of individual editors times which could have been far more
> > profitably spent creating new content.
>
>Well, these outcomes are different in nature.
>
>I think it is common ground that edit wars create poor articles; so, yes,
>edit warriors do leave wikijunk. Experienced editors are capable of dealing
>with this.

I think a number of experienced editors here are telling you the exact
opposite; that they "deal with it" by giving up.

>'A mass of overlapping articles' is indeed a probable consequence of two or
>more sides to an argument backing up their cases: this is intrisically a
>Good Thing, in that one can get behind strongly-held beliefs to some of the
>grounds. A case I was looking at today is [[loop quantum gravity]]; where
>WP
>is getting the benefit of some expert contributions, though not in the most
>finished or useable form.  The merge options are a little tricky here (and
>are surely more so in other cases); but typicallly are mostly about skill
>as
>an editor.

It is intrinsically a Bad Thing if it persists; we get to the state where
Wikipedia cannot be trusted because it simultaneously (and often
vociferously) asserts all sorts of contradictory things, and no-one actually
knows where to look for information, because the articles (as stated) all
overlap.  It also makes the maintenance effort grow exponentially.

>Finally, time consumption.  Undeniable that responsible Wikipedians
>watching
>contentious areas do have to put in the hours.  Perhaps creating new
>content
>would get more recognition.  It is, though, rapid to revert; the bias is in
>favour of sustaining the status quo if that's the object.

Hmm.  I've personally been criticized quite strongly and regularly for
reverting to the status quo; maybe the bias in your mind is not that of
others.

>By the way, it seems a fairly good rule of thumb that when Robert complains
>to this list, he has some other quarrel on his agenda; and no change with
>this one.

True enough, but regardless of the source, it does touch on a broader
problem.

Jay.

_________________________________________________________________
Powerful Parental Controls Let your child discover the best the Internet has
to offer.
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  Start enjoying all the benefits of MSN? Premium right now and get the
first two months FREE*.


from_name: phil hunt

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Loosing more of our best contributors

body:
On Sun, 10 Oct 2004 04:37:10 -0400, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>
>I'd have to say I agree with that criticism.  I've wasted some time
>myself on some of these contentious subjects, only to come back a few
>months later and find an abysmally horrid article in its place.  Now I
>could start over again and try to hammer that article back into a
>reasonable state, or I could just revert to my 3-month-old version, or I
>could give up and say, "fine, the crappy article can stay".  And,
>increasingly, a lot of people are taking the third option.

So, what is the fix for this problem?

Probably a number of systems will have to be part of the fix,
including a formal peer review system. But one simple measure might
be to label some articles (those where edit wars and NPOV problems
are common) as "contentious articles", and make it that only
wikipedians of some standing (accounts that have existed for >1
month, with > a number of edits) can edit them.

--
"It's easier to find people online who openly support the KKK than
people who openly support the RIAA" -- comment on Wikipedia
(Email: zen19725 at zen dot co dot uk)


from_name: Evan Prodromou

body:
On Sun, 2004-10-10 at 19:10 +0200, Jens Ropers wrote:
> Regarding the "E-mail this user" feature: Currently it says:
>
> "If this user has entered a valid e-mail address in his or her user
> preferences, the form below will send a single message. (...)"
>
> Is there any way for the sender to see if his email will actually be
> delivered?
> Would it make sense to log this as a feature request/bug?

That's a documentation problem. If the user hasn't entered a valid
e-mail address, the form won't come up.

~ESP

--
Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
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body:
On Sun, 2004-10-10 at 11:12 -0700, Ray Saintonge wrote:

> > Is there any way for the sender to see if his email will actually be
> > delivered?
> > Would it make sense to log this as a feature request/bug?
>
> In such a situation there also needs to be some protection from those
> who want to exploit this feature for creating lists of spam victims.

Probably a mail-throttling feature would be a better way to deal with
this.

Either that, or a captcha for sending mail.

~ESP

--
Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
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list: foundation-l

from_name: Kiss All

subject: [Foundation-l] Formal request: Wikinews project

body:
You guys are going so far.
wikipedia is not designed for anything. It is for encyclopedia. We
should focus on what we should do and not to be distracted.
There are many things to do to improve wikipedia, don't waste our
limited resources to do something meaningless.
I can only expect troubles if we set up a news site.

On 10 Oct 2004 17:22:00 +0200, Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> Fred-
> > Is it proposed that Wikinews would allow original reporting? If so, how
> > would we deal with libel risks?
>
> See the proposal. All articles have to pass through a review stage before
> they are formally published. Factual statements are attributed to external
> sources or to named Wikinews reporters. Hence, the situation with regard
> to libel is the same as for any news publication: We do our best to make
> sure to prevent it, and we protect our reporters from legal harrassment if
> they have exercised due diligence.
>
> Regards,
>
> Erik
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

--
Be good....


list: wikimedia-l


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Re: Loosing more of our best contributors

body:
>> So, what is the fix for this problem?
>>
>> Probably a number of systems will have to be part of the fix,
>> including a formal peer review system. But one simple measure
>> might
>> be to label some articles (those where edit wars and NPOV
>> problems
>> are common) as "contentious articles", and make it that only
>> wikipedians of some standing (accounts that have existed for >1
>> month, with > a number of edits) can edit them.

On Sun, 10 Oct 2004 07:29:05 -0600, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
>Turning articles in the area of communist history over to the tender mercies
>of 172 is not a solution. It's not a matter of experience, although newbie
>POV warriors are pretty bad too. It is a fact, that in practice, a
>determined (and experienced) POV pusher can get their way just by wearing
>down any opposition.

True, perhaps there could be a mechanism where POV pushers are
labelled "problematic users" and aren't allowed to edit
"contentious articles" (or reverts of their edits don't count for
the 3-reverts rule).

--
"It's easier to find people online who openly support the KKK than
people who openly support the RIAA" -- comment on Wikipedia
(Email: zen19725 at zen dot co dot uk)


references:
<BD8E9790.7D05%fredbaud@ctelco.net> <9I$D3IvCpVB@erik_moeller>
	<384f6ad404101013087153fde5@mail.gmail.com>

body:
There were many examples that some projects/or even companies lost
control and finally died because some leaders were too confident after
seeing some little success.  I am really worrying about there may be
such leaders in wikipedia.

Even Bill Gates says it is only 18 months for MS to go bankrupt at
anytime. And I don't think wikipedia is doing better than MS. We
should see more problems in wikipedia rather than getting happy and
expand it without boundary by previous success.

Focus, please. For wikipedia's sake. In chinese saying, Faithful words offend
the ears, good medicine tastes bitter. Please forgive me if I offend you.

On Sun, 10 Oct 2004 15:08:04 -0500, Kiss All <kissall at gmail.com> wrote:
> You guys are going so far.
> wikipedia is not designed for anything. It is for encyclopedia. We
> should focus on what we should do and not to be distracted.
> There are many things to do to improve wikipedia, don't waste our
> limited resources to do something meaningless.
> I can only expect troubles if we set up a news site.
>
>
>
> On 10 Oct 2004 17:22:00 +0200, Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> > Fred-
> > > Is it proposed that Wikinews would allow original reporting? If so, how
> > > would we deal with libel risks?
> >
> > See the proposal. All articles have to pass through a review stage before
> > they are formally published. Factual statements are attributed to external
> > sources or to named Wikinews reporters. Hence, the situation with regard
> > to libel is the same as for any news publication: We do our best to make
> > sure to prevent it, and we protect our reporters from legal harrassment if
> > they have exercised due diligence.
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > Erik
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > foundation-l mailing list
> > foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >
>
>
> --
> Be good....
>

--
Be good....


body:
On Sun, 2004-10-10 at 21:02 +0200, Kurt Jansson wrote:

> > That's a documentation problem. If the user hasn't entered a valid
> > e-mail address, the form won't come up.
>
> But the address isn't really checked for validity, maybe in a technical way, but
>   I fear many people are entering an address like spam123 at spam.com.

Since the "From:" address on the email is the sending user's email
address, I believe what will happen is that the sending user will
receive a MTA error email.

~ESP

--
Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
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from_name: Charles Matthews

subject: [WikiEN-l] Loosing more of our best contributors

body:
Jay jg wrote

> In the end, we're either
> left with wikijunk, or a mass of overlapping articles, or (in the best
case)
> the POV warriors eventually abandon their quest, having wasted many
> person-days of individual editors times which could have been far more
> profitably spent creating new content.

Well, these outcomes are different in nature.

I think it is common ground that edit wars create poor articles; so, yes,
edit warriors do leave wikijunk. Experienced editors are capable of dealing
with this.

'A mass of overlapping articles' is indeed a probable consequence of two or
more sides to an argument backing up their cases: this is intrisically a
Good Thing, in that one can get behind strongly-held beliefs to some of the
grounds. A case I was looking at today is [[loop quantum gravity]]; where WP
is getting the benefit of some expert contributions, though not in the most
finished or useable form.  The merge options are a little tricky here (and
are surely more so in other cases); but typicallly are mostly about skill as
an editor.

Finally, time consumption.  Undeniable that responsible Wikipedians watching
contentious areas do have to put in the hours.  Perhaps creating new content
would get more recognition.  It is, though, rapid to revert; the bias is in
favour of sustaining the status quo if that's the object.

By the way, it seems a fairly good rule of thumb that when Robert complains
to this list, he has some other quarrel on his agenda; and no change with
this one.

Charles


from_name: Bryan Derksen

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: The "months later" effect

body:
At 09:55 PM 10/10/2004 +0100, Charles Matthews wrote:
>Matthew Lar> > I also think the idea of having a stable locked version is good (I
> > think I posted the idea in another thread), as it stops disruption.
>
>Well, then you don't have a wiki.  You have one of those other things, where
>you need some permission to edit.  In fact this is exactly the suggestion
>that bright people who don't know the wiki way always will come up with, in
>their first five minutes of thinking about how to make it work.

Well, I've been an editor here on Wikipedia practically since it started
and this is an idea I've come up with a lot too, so don't dismiss it so
lightly. I think it bears some deeper consideration. How about the
following variant on the idea, for example:

The default page that everyone first sees when they go to an article is the
most up-to-date "working" version, just like what we see when we go to an
article currently. Editing it, viewing its history, all of that would
remain exactly the same. The difference would be that tucked away in the
sidebar or at the top of the page would be a link that says "view most
recent stable version". This would take the reader to the most recent
version that's been tagged by whatever form of "editorial staff" or
"approval rating" system we eventually come up with (to be worked out
separately). Following any links from that "stable" version (including the
edit link) would take one right back to the "working" version of whatever
page is linked to, so it would be impossible to ignore the work in progress.

Does that address your concerns about stasis? The only remaining issue I
can think of is ensuring that the "stable" version isn't considered so
great that people keep mindlessly reverting to it when they shouldn't, and
that's similar enough to the existing issue of article reversion that I
suspect it wouldn't take a lot of policy work to handle it.


body:
On Sun, 2004-10-10 at 21:52 +0200, Jens Ropers wrote:

> Granted, we may still
> want to consider changing our signup process so that any email
> addresses submitted will be verified in a way similar to Mailman's
> opt-in process. That might make sense. It's only a minor inconvenience
> to users signing up and it's probably best practice to do it. Any
> motivation to code this, anybody (because I sadly can't)?

I think it's an excellent idea. Why don't you register it in Bugzilla?

~ESP

--
Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
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from_name: Andries Krugers Dagneaux

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Base Line consensus versions on contentious subjects
	(was Loosing more of our best contributors)

body:
Mark/Delirium wrote:
>Much of his frustration
>seems to stem from the fact that, even after such difficult consensus
is
>forged, the wiki method means that any random POV pusher can come in
and
>mangle the article, which has happened on [[Anti-Zionism]] on numerous
>occasions.  Unless a group of knowledgeable people are willing to waste

>their time baby-sitting an article, which usually amounts to
revert-wars
>(since rarely are the additions even remotely helpful), the articles go

>rapidly downhill, wasting the effort of the people who painstakingly
put
>together a quality article on a contentious subject.

>I'd have to say I agree with that criticism.  I've wasted some time
>myself on some of these contentious subjects, only to come back a few
>months later and find an abysmally horrid article in its place.  Now I
>could start over again and try to hammer that article back into a
>reasonable state, or I could just revert to my 3-month-old version, or
I
>could give up and say, "fine, the crappy article can stay".  And,
>increasingly, a lot of people are taking the third option.

>-Mark

I think we could introduce a marked base line consensus version of
articles, as introduced by [[user:Gary_D]] for the articles [[Prem
Rawat]] and [[Criticism of Prem Rawat]]. We now have agreed versions,
both by pro-Rawat and anti-Rawat editors (incl. me) and in future
disputes we could simply revert to those versions without giving
extensive explanations. May be we could make this a formal policy and we
give a base line consensus version a formal approval. It comes close to
a peer review. The disadvantage is that changes have to be argued
extensively. I had to write paragraph after paragraph on [[talk:Prem
Rawat]] just to get one sentence removed.

Andries K.D.

------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Sun, 10 Oct 2004 20:27:04 +1000
From: Robin Shannon <robin.shannon at gmail.com>
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: WikiEN-l Digest, Vol 15, Issue 14
To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
Message-ID: <623d733804101003271d6d55e1 at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII

G'day y'all,

The current ACOTW (Aussie colaboration of the week) is victor chang.
Now victor chang was murdered and because he was famous (in Australia)
had a public funeral, at which his daugter made a funeral speech which
was reprinted in the Sydney Morning Herald. Now this all happened in
1991, which makes it impossible to link to the SMH article containing
the speech (because only paying subscribers can view the archives), so
i would like to put a link in the wikipedia article on victor to a
copy of the speech on wikisource. But i dont know if public speeches
are pd, or if US or AU copyright law applies. Does anyone know the
answer, or know someone who might know?

--
robin.shannon.id.au

This email is licensed under the Creative Commons
Recombo Plus License. To view a copy of this license, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/sampling+/1.0/

------------------------------

Message: 3
Date: Sun, 10 Oct 2004 20:52:08 +1000
From: Rebecca <misfitgirl at gmail.com>
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Loosing more of our best contributors
To: wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
Message-ID: <530912670410100352460937e7 at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII

Thankfully, Adam isn't leaving altogether - and his continued presence
in Australian-related articles will be much appreciated.

But it's a damned tragedy for Wikipedia that he's giving up dealing
with more controversial topics. He's been one of the most prolific and
skilled contributors we've had - we need as many of the people that
can write an FA in one hit as we can.

This highlights what is, in my view, going to become a real problem.
Dealing with an extremely biased POV-pusher here takes months. It
often destroys an article in the process. And Adam's not the only one
in this position. I've noticed PMA making similar comments, as well as
most of those involved in the long-running LaRouche controversy, which
shows no sign of ending.

It's all well and good to say that all viewpoints are welcome, and
indeed this is true. But by taking it to the extreme, and making it
far too painful to deal with determined POVpushers, I think we'll see
more and more good users walking away from controversial articles, and
even the project as a whole. If they do that, then our articles on
such subjects are going to turn into complete and utter garbage, as
our Lyndon LaRouche article becomes another vessel for original
research (as the ArbCom has already condemned, but not acted upon),
and our Khmer Rouge article becomes an all-out apology. Idealism is
good, but if we push it too far, then we can say goodbye to our
controversial articles being any good at all.

Rebecca (ambi)

------------------------------

Message: 4
Date: Sun, 10 Oct 2004 04:09:55 -0700
From: Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net>
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Loosing more of our best contributors
To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
Message-ID: <41691883.9070806 at telus.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

Stan Shebs wrote:

> Robert wrote:
>
>> Adam writes:
>> [...] When and if Wikipedia adopts a structure that
>> protects serious editors and prevents fools and fanatics
>> from sabotaging their work I will return to editing in
>> other areas. I will be posting a longer piece giving my
>> views on Wikipedia soon. Adam 14:22, 8 Oct 2004 (UTC
>
> Just to put things in perspective, this is the same Adam Carr
> who's been known to call other editors idiots and morons just for
> preferring a different picture in an article. Not everybody is cut
> out to be a wiki editor; it's good to be knowledgeable, but a lot
> of people just can't handle it when their additions are touched
> by others, and they get into fight after fight over it.

Some of us take on too much, and participation in controversial can be a

considerable drain on time and emotion.  Adam appears to have realized
that.  Limiting himself to the stated topics may make him more
productive.

Ec

------------------------------

Message: 5
Date: Sun, 10 Oct 2004 04:31:58 -0700
From: Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net>
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: WikiEN-l Digest, Vol 15, Issue 14
To: Robin Shannon <robin.shannon at gmail.com>,	English Wikipedia
	<wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
Message-ID: <41691DAE.9070301 at telus.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

Robin Shannon wrote:

>G'day y'all,
>
>The current ACOTW (Aussie colaboration of the week) is victor chang.
>Now victor chang was murdered and because he was famous (in Australia)
>had a public funeral, at which his daugter made a funeral speech which
>was reprinted in the Sydney Morning Herald. Now this all happened in
>1991, which makes it impossible to link to the SMH article containing
>the speech (because only paying subscribers can view the archives), so
>i would like to put a link in the wikipedia article on victor to a
>copy of the speech on wikisource. But i dont know if public speeches
>are pd, or if US or AU copyright law applies. Does anyone know the
>answer, or know someone who might know?
>
Most public speeches are copyright.  I believe that US courts have
decided that there is a subsisting copyright in Martin Luther King's "I
have a dream" speech.  In the absence of an agreement to the contrary
the daughter rather than the newspaper would own the copyright.

For determining whether something IS copyright the law where the author
had the closest connection would apply, but the courts where the
infringement took place would have jurisdiction.

Ec

------------------------------

Message: 6
Date: Sun, 10 Oct 2004 06:35:21 -0600
From: Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net>
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] The real story, Was (Loosing more of our best
	contributors)
To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
Message-ID: <BD8E88A8.7CF5%fredbaud at ctelco.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"

I was present, and to a certain extent responsible for Adam Carr's
retreat
from Wikipedia. Here is the precipitating incident. It occured during
editing of [[Great Purge]]. I have been actively editing this article,
mostly puting reams of information into the article about how bad it was
and
how unjustified. I was being regularly reverted and was happy to see
Adam
Carr come along and from a similar perspective to mine added to the
article.

[[User:Ruy Lopez]] inserted the following paragraph with the comment,
"(The
Moscow Trials - other theories)":

"Some who think the trials were inherently fair, such as Molotov,
concede
that some of the confessions contain unlikely statements. Molotov said
there
may have been several reasons or motives that this can be attributed to
-
one being if the handful who made doubtful confessions were trying to
undermine the Soviet Union and its government, then making dubious
statements within the confession would cast doubts on their trial.
Molotov
postulated a defendant could invent a story that he collaborated with
foreign agents and party members to undermine the government, and then
those
members would come under suspicion despite doing nothing, while the
false
foreign collaboration charge would be believed as well. Thus, the Soviet
government was also the victim of false confessions. Nonetheless, he
said
the evidence of mostly out-of-power Communist officials conspiring to
make a
power grab during a moment of weakness in the upcoming war was there."

This paragraph, in the context of the article, follows a long
explanation
that there was little or no ground for the purges.

Adam removed it, with the comment, "(this is now progessing towards
being a
respectable article and this ridiculous stalinoid rubbish will not be
allowed)" [[User:Everyking]] put it back in with the comment, "(rv, i
think
it's quite useful to include this pov in the article, don't see why it
wouldn't be). Adam then reverted with the comment, "(because it is a
pathetic attempt to drag absurd red herrings into a factual account of
what
happened, and should not be tolerated by serious editors)".

I then reverted, modifying it somewhat with the comment, "(modify and
restore Stalinist perspective)":

"Some contemporary supporters of Stalin who think the trials were
inherently
fair cite the statements of Molotov who while conceding that some of the
confessions contain unlikely statements, said there may have been
several
reasons or motives that this can be attributed to - one being if the
handful
who made doubtful confessions were trying to undermine the Soviet Union
and
its government, then making dubious statements within the confession
would
cast doubts on their trial.  Molotov postulated a defendant could invent
a
story that he collaborated with foreign agents and party members to
undermine the government, and then those members would come under
suspicion
despite doing nothing, while the false foreign collaboration charge
would be
believed as well.  Thus, the Soviet government was in his view the
victim of
false confessions.  Nonetheless, he said the evidence of mostly
out-of-power
Communist officials conspiring to make a power grab during a moment of
weakness in the upcoming war was there."

(This is not his original version, I added the attributing, "Some
contemporary supporters of Stalin....)

At this point Adam Carr went into a huff, making the comments: "(well if
apparently sensible editors think it is acceptable to include complete
rubbish like this in a serious historical article I am withdrawing from
it.)" and "(as a parting expression of my disgust, i am returning the
article to the crap state it was in before i began attempting to rescue
it.)"

He then left notes on my and Everyking's talk pages and replaced his own
pages with the note Robert references.

Fred

> From: Robert <rkscience100 at yahoo.com>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Sat, 9 Oct 2004 21:59:18 -0700 (PDT)
> To: wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Loosing more of our best contributors
>
> Adam Carr is now gone.
> Evry loss like this is a huge blow to the project.
>
> Adam writes:
> I have decided to scale back substantially my involvement
> in the Wikipedia project, since I no longer believe it is
> capable in its present form of achieving its objectives. I
> have removed from my watchlist about 300 articles relating
> to historical and political subjects outside Australia. I
> will no longer edit any such articles or respond to
> requests to edit them or comment on them. My edits will be
> confined to Australian topics, ancient history and gay
> topics. When and if Wikipedia adopts a structure that
> protects serious editors and prevents fools and fanatics
> from sabotaging their work I will return to editing in
> other areas. I will be posting a longer piece giving my
> views on Wikipedia soon.
> Adam 14:22, 8 Oct 2004 (UTC

------------------------------

Message: 7
Date: Sun, 10 Oct 2004 06:51:57 -0600
From: Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net>
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Loosing more of our best contributors
To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
Message-ID: <BD8E8C8D.7CF7%fredbaud at ctelco.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"

In the case [[Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Lyndon LaRouche]] which
principly involved the editing activities of [[User:Herschelkrustofsky]]
who
had initiated the case, the Arbitration Committee severely restricted
Herschelkrustofsky's and others editing of Wikipedia articles in
relation to
references to Lyndon LaRouche. What we did not agree on was restrictions
of
the [[Lyndon LaRouche]] article itself where after arbitration the
trouble
continued.

Whether we failed in some way is hard to say, we simply did not come to
complete agreement. We did agree to ban Adam Carr for one day for making
personal attacks which did not go down well with some.

Fred

> From: "Charles Matthews" <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Sun, 10 Oct 2004 09:04:36 +0100
> To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Loosing more of our best contributors
>
> Phil Sandifer wrote
>
>
>> One of the major factors in Adam's decision to leave, so far as I can
>> tell, was the edit warring that took place over articles related to
>> Lyndon LaRouche.
>
> I can't comment on that.  I found in my contact with Adam that he was
> abrupt, brusque etc.. I was surprised to find a page dealing with the
> Australian Left and its history protected, when I had reason to want
to edit
> it.
>
> Clearly a fine WP editor, though.  So I'm glad that he has _not_ left,
as
> Robert misleadingly implies.
>
> Charles
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

------------------------------

Message: 8
Date: Sun, 10 Oct 2004 13:09:57 +0100
From: zen19725 at zen.co.uk (phil hunt)
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Loosing more of our best contributors
To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
Message-ID: <slrncmi9kl.2pr.zen19725 at cabalamat.somewhere>

On Sun, 10 Oct 2004 04:37:10 -0400, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org>
wrote:
>
>I'd have to say I agree with that criticism.  I've wasted some time
>myself on some of these contentious subjects, only to come back a few
>months later and find an abysmally horrid article in its place.  Now I
>could start over again and try to hammer that article back into a
>reasonable state, or I could just revert to my 3-month-old version, or
I
>could give up and say, "fine, the crappy article can stay".  And,
>increasingly, a lot of people are taking the third option.

So, what is the fix for this problem?

Probably a number of systems will have to be part of the fix,
including a formal peer review system. But one simple measure might
be to label some articles (those where edit wars and NPOV problems
are common) as "contentious articles", and make it that only
wikipedians of some standing (accounts that have existed for >1
month, with > a number of edits) can edit them.

--
"It's easier to find people online who openly support the KKK than
people who openly support the RIAA" -- comment on Wikipedia
(Email: zen19725 at zen dot co dot uk)

------------------------------

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

End of WikiEN-l Digest, Vol 15, Issue 15
****************************************


from_name: David Gerard

body:
Matthew Larsen wrote:

> There are lots of good points in this thread, both for and against
> edit wars (generally speaking), but unfortunatly this is a spin off of
> something as open as wikipedia. It seems to be mainly humanities
> subjects that have this problem, in the analogy of 'one persons
> terrorist is another persons freedomfighter'.

Have a look at the history of [[Linux]] some time.

- d.


body:
"JAY JG" .

> I think a number of experienced editors here are telling you the exact
> opposite; that they "deal with it" by giving up.

Yes, but it only takes one who does take an interest.  There is always
plenty to do and edit on WP - let's not assume that that's a _failure_ of
the project.
>
> >'A mass of overlapping articles' is indeed a probable consequence of two
or
> >more sides to an argument backing up their cases: this is intrisically a
> >Good Thing, in that one can get behind strongly-held beliefs to some of
the
> >grounds. A case I was looking at today is [[loop quantum gravity]]; where
> >WP
> >is getting the benefit of some expert contributions, though not in the
most
> >finished or useable form.  The merge options are a little tricky here
(and
> >are surely more so in other cases); but typicallly are mostly about skill
> >as
> >an editor.
>
> It is intrinsically a Bad Thing if it persists; we get to the state where
> Wikipedia cannot be trusted because it simultaneously (and often
> vociferously) asserts all sorts of contradictory things, and no-one
actually
> knows where to look for information, because the articles (as stated) all
> overlap.  It also makes the maintenance effort grow exponentially.

OK, it can get to be a muddle.  I don't spend much time on this kind of
contention myself.  I _have_ spent a great deal of time on listing and
categorising areas, and that tends towards reducing duplication and
improving navigation.

> >Finally, time consumption.  Undeniable that responsible Wikipedians
> >watching
> >contentious areas do have to put in the hours.  Perhaps creating new
> >content
> >would get more recognition.  It is, though, rapid to revert; the bias is
in
> >favour of sustaining the status quo if that's the object.

> Hmm.  I've personally been criticized quite strongly and regularly for
> reverting to the status quo; maybe the bias in your mind is not that of
> others.

Well, sometimes it's the right thing to do.  Not always.

Charles


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
Delirium-
> Given that on en: at least, Current Events is fairly mediocre in
> quality, is there a need for an entirely separate site?  Why not work to
> make [[en:Current Events]] a truly good summary of current news, and
> once that happens, expand to original reporting?

The purpose of [[current events]] is to collect one paragraph summaries
and aggregate them in unsorted, unreadable bullet point lists. The purpose
of Wikinews is to publish in-depth reports about current issues including
original reporting, which will be frozen and archived after a certain
amount of time. As the proposal describes, [[current events]] may be able
to eventually transclude summaries from Wikinews. But the two are very
different in focus and always will be.

Wikinews will already be useful even with spotty participation. For
example, even if only Linux fans participate in writing Wikinews articles
initially, we can still create the best Linux news source on the web using
wiki collaboration. However, I believe that Wikinews will soon acquire
editors and reporters from all relevant fields, although our coverage of
events outside Internet-connected countries will always be mixed (as is
that of the mainstream media).

After we've created a nice Main Page and some basic policies, I'd like to
write a press release specifically about the launch of Wikinews.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Matthew Larsen

body:
There are lots of good points in this thread, both for and against
edit wars (generally speaking), but unfortunatly this is a spin off of
something as open as wikipedia. It seems to be mainly humanities
subjects that have this problem, in the analogy of 'one persons
terrorist is another persons freedomfighter'.

Wikipedia is a great resourse for science and technical materials
because most of this information is 'fact'. There is no doubting the
Cosine rule for example (there probrably is in advanced mathematics,
but generally), but an article on a religion will always incure
differences of opinion or sabotage. This has been true throughout
history and I feel the only way to prevent it on wikipedia would to
either ban the topic or to freeze a version of it (which defeats the
whole point of wikipedia).

As a step forward it may be interesting to create an 'edit relevance'
limit which can be set by a moderator. It would cut out a lot of
random things like 'I like pizza' from articles and may help. Another
idea may be incurring some sort of time limit - If an article has been
stable for a long time and then edited, the edit is reviewed by a
moderator as to see if it was worth it. These are just ideas, feel
free for C&C.

Just my thoughts.

Regards,

On Sun, 10 Oct 2004 17:00:15 +0100, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> "JAY JG" .
>
> > I think a number of experienced editors here are telling you the exact
> > opposite; that they "deal with it" by giving up.
>
> Yes, but it only takes one who does take an interest.  There is always
> plenty to do and edit on WP - let's not assume that that's a _failure_ of
> the project.
> >
> > >'A mass of overlapping articles' is indeed a probable consequence of two
> or
> > >more sides to an argument backing up their cases: this is intrisically a
> > >Good Thing, in that one can get behind strongly-held beliefs to some of
> the
> > >grounds. A case I was looking at today is [[loop quantum gravity]]; where
> > >WP
> > >is getting the benefit of some expert contributions, though not in the
> most
> > >finished or useable form.  The merge options are a little tricky here
> (and
> > >are surely more so in other cases); but typicallly are mostly about skill
> > >as
> > >an editor.
> >
> > It is intrinsically a Bad Thing if it persists; we get to the state where
> > Wikipedia cannot be trusted because it simultaneously (and often
> > vociferously) asserts all sorts of contradictory things, and no-one
> actually
> > knows where to look for information, because the articles (as stated) all
> > overlap.  It also makes the maintenance effort grow exponentially.
>
> OK, it can get to be a muddle.  I don't spend much time on this kind of
> contention myself.  I _have_ spent a great deal of time on listing and
> categorising areas, and that tends towards reducing duplication and
> improving navigation.
>
> > >Finally, time consumption.  Undeniable that responsible Wikipedians
> > >watching
> > >contentious areas do have to put in the hours.  Perhaps creating new
> > >content
> > >would get more recognition.  It is, though, rapid to revert; the bias is
> in
> > >favour of sustaining the status quo if that's the object.
>
> > Hmm.  I've personally been criticized quite strongly and regularly for
> > reverting to the status quo; maybe the bias in your mind is not that of
> > others.
>
> Well, sometimes it's the right thing to do.  Not always.
>
> Charles
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
Matthew Larsen
   > mat.larsen at gmail.com
   > 07739 785 249


body:
Fred-
> Is it proposed that Wikinews would allow original reporting? If so, how
> would we deal with libel risks?

See the proposal. All articles have to pass through a review stage before
they are formally published. Factual statements are attributed to external
sources or to named Wikinews reporters. Hence, the situation with regard
to libel is the same as for any news publication: We do our best to make
sure to prevent it, and we protect our reporters from legal harrassment if
they have exercised due diligence.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Elisabeth Bauer

subject: [Foundation-l] wikimedia meetup 2005 - final candidates

body:
Hiho,

As announced on meta-wiki, the selection round for the city where the
wikimedia meetup will take place ended today.

We compiled a list with the final candidates on
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_meetup_2005/City_Candidate_List
* Amsterdam/Rotterdam, Netherlands
* Berlin, Germany
* Cluj-Napoca, Romania
* Dublin, Ireland
* Frankfurt am Main, Germany
* Ljubljana, Slovenia

To make the final decision we asked some well known wikipedians from
countries around the world. The people you'll have to bribe ;-) are:

Angela, Anthere, Jimbo, Danny, Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz, Tomos, Brion
Vibber, Oscar and Gerard Meijssen, Arno Lagrange and elian.

I want to invite these people and all the wikipedians who proposed one
of the finalists and are willing to act as local coordinators for a
first meeting on IRC.

I propose Sunday 17th October, 18:00 UTC, if you have troubles with this
date, state this on http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_meetup_2005
please.

greetings,
elian


list: wikipedia-l

subject: [Wikipedia-l] wikimedia meetup 2005 - final candidates


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: wikimedia meetup 2005 - final candidates

body:
Elisabeth Bauer a ?crit:
> Hiho,
>
> As announced on meta-wiki, the selection round for the city where the
> wikimedia meetup will take place ended today.
>
> We compiled a list with the final candidates on
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_meetup_2005/City_Candidate_List
> * Amsterdam/Rotterdam, Netherlands
> * Berlin, Germany
> * Cluj-Napoca, Romania
> * Dublin, Ireland
> * Frankfurt am Main, Germany
> * Ljubljana, Slovenia
>
> To make the final decision we asked some well known wikipedians from
> countries around the world. The people you'll have to bribe ;-) are:
>
> Angela, Anthere, Jimbo, Danny, Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz, Tomos, Brion
> Vibber, Oscar and Gerard Meijssen, Arno Lagrange and elian
> I want to invite these people and all the wikipedians who proposed one
> of the finalists and are willing to act as local coordinators for a
> first meeting on IRC.
>
> I propose Sunday 17th October, 18:00 UTC, if you have troubles with this
> date, state this on http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_meetup_2005
> please.
>
> greetings,
> elian

The current proposal has been moved to sunday 17th of october 20:00 UTC.
Please, could all of you confirm, or mention other day/date options.
Note : there is a board meeting on saturday 16th. No more than one
meeting per day please.

:-)

ant


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Switching Wiki-based and LanguageCs.php-based
	translations

body:
On Oct 10, 2004, at 6:27 PM, Tim Starling wrote:
> We're looking into that problem. It's probably an occasional transient
> problem with tugelacache, the memcached replacement which was recently
> put into production. Approximately 12 hours ago, Domas implemented a
> workaround in MediaWiki which should minimise the effect of such
> errors. So hopefully you won't notice it anymore.

This intermittent problem has been around much longer than tugela has
existed, hasn't it? Probably the same issue under memcached.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
On Sun, 10 Oct 2004 10:30:48 -0400, Daniel P.B.Smith <dpbsmith at verizon.net> wrote:
>
>There's also a regression-to-the-mean-like effect. When an article is
>relatively undeveloped, and a random newcomer wanders in and decides to
>"edit this page," the chances of improvement are high. Not only because
>the average quality of the editors is higher than the quality of the
>page, but also because theor motivation is likely to be relatively
>pure. The main reason for wanting to edit a _low-quality_ page is that
>one actually knows something about the subject.
>
>But when an article is of high quality, the people who have knowledge
>in the topic area are likely to leave it alone. The people who are most
>likely to edit it are people who want to push a point of view, or
>people who know much less than they think they know. The result is that
>the better an article is, the greater the chances that random edits
>will lower its quality.

I don't know if this effect actually exists -- I suspect it does --
but if there are any systemic mechanisms that impede the development
of WP, we must be on the lookout for them.

>I think there needs to be some mechanism in place so that when an
>article becomes generally regarded as good, Version 1.0 or whatever, it
>can be sort of locked in place. Perhaps it could be stamped with a
>version number, and any attempts to edit [[GoodArticle]] are
>automatically redirected to [[GoodArticle/Version1.1]]. Within a
>discussion forum, when and only when there is general consensus that
>[[GoodArticle/Version1.1]] is better than [[GoodArticle]], a sysop or
>suitably-authorized-panjandrum can move it to [[GoodArticle]].

That soulds a good idea.

--
"It's easier to find people online who openly support the KKK than
people who openly support the RIAA" -- comment on Wikipedia
(Email: zen19725 at zen dot co dot uk)


from_name: Jens Ropers

body:
Regarding the "E-mail this user" feature: Currently it says:

"If this user has entered a valid e-mail address in his or her user
preferences, the form below will send a single message. (...)"

Is there any way for the sender to see if his email will actually be
delivered?
Would it make sense to log this as a feature request/bug?

-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]]
     www.ropersonline.com


from_name: Walter Vermeir

subject: [Foundation-l] The names of the Wikimedia projects

body:
There is a increase of projects under the Wikimedia Foundation flag.

The name given to a project is important. This beacuse most, if not all,
projects aim at a international public and versions in many languages.

A good name must be possible to pronounce in many languages and
perferably mean something relevant. This is very difficult, i know.

The only name of a project that is so is the name Wikipedia. Even that
name is to strange to use for some languages so the have to use a local
version like "Vikipedi" or "Vikipedio". But the name is at least 	useful
in many languages.

The names of other projects are less international useful.

Wiktionary

For me, who have seen it a lot, I must concentrate me to pronounce it
accurately. It also has no meaning form my point of view (dutch). It is
a very strange and difficult name.
For this the dutch version is wikiwoordenboek(.org)
The french is Wiktionnaire

Wikiquote

This is a beter name, at least for the dutch version, but still not very
universal.

Wikibooks, Wikisource and Wikinews has zero points for international
use. It is Wiki + English word.

I do not have beter names or am I saying to change the names of existing
projects. But when creating new projects please also think about this.

One name for all wikis of the same project, or at least for so many as
posibel, is good for publicity use. Whit many, many local names of the
same project you also have more	expenses because you have get the domain
in the local name for local use.

--
[[w:nl:gebruiker:walter]]


body:
Walter-
> A good name must be possible to pronounce in many languages and
> perferably mean something relevant. This is very difficult, i know.

When it comes to meaning, it is not just difficult, it is impossible. With
regard to the name Wikinews, I would say that the word "news" is probably
more international than the word "encyclopedia" (or the suffix "-pedia"),
not least because people are familiar with it from English language news
sources like CNN (Cable News Network) or EuroNews. Indeed, a Google search
for the word "news" in the jp domain yields 4.4 million hits, while
"encyclopedia" only returns 93,000.

I'd say our worst naming choice so far was "Wiktionary", because the word
"dictionary" isn't really that well known, especially in its mutilated
form. Something like "Wikiwords" would probably have been more
appropriate.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Robin Shannon

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: WikiEN-l Digest, Vol 15, Issue 14

body:
G'day y'all,

The current ACOTW (Aussie colaboration of the week) is victor chang.
Now victor chang was murdered and because he was famous (in Australia)
had a public funeral, at which his daugter made a funeral speech which
was reprinted in the Sydney Morning Herald. Now this all happened in
1991, which makes it impossible to link to the SMH article containing
the speech (because only paying subscribers can view the archives), so
i would like to put a link in the wikipedia article on victor to a
copy of the speech on wikisource. But i dont know if public speeches
are pd, or if US or AU copyright law applies. Does anyone know the
answer, or know someone who might know?

--
robin.shannon.id.au

This email is licensed under the Creative Commons
Recombo Plus License. To view a copy of this license, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/sampling+/1.0/


from_name: Delirium

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Indymedia and FBI

body:
In case anyone is still following up to this, it turns out that the
server seizure was ordered by the Swiss and Italian governments, who
requested that the FBI carry it out as it was hosted by a
US-headquartered company (Rackspace). The FBI apparently is bound by a
legal assistance treaty it has with the two European governments, so
honored the request.

Unwieldy URL:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1509&ncid=738&e=6&u=/afp/20041008/tc_afp/us_internet_justice

-Mark


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Indymedia and FBI


from_name: Rebecca

body:
Thankfully, Adam isn't leaving altogether - and his continued presence
in Australian-related articles will be much appreciated.

But it's a damned tragedy for Wikipedia that he's giving up dealing
with more controversial topics. He's been one of the most prolific and
skilled contributors we've had - we need as many of the people that
can write an FA in one hit as we can.

This highlights what is, in my view, going to become a real problem.
Dealing with an extremely biased POV-pusher here takes months. It
often destroys an article in the process. And Adam's not the only one
in this position. I've noticed PMA making similar comments, as well as
most of those involved in the long-running LaRouche controversy, which
shows no sign of ending.

It's all well and good to say that all viewpoints are welcome, and
indeed this is true. But by taking it to the extreme, and making it
far too painful to deal with determined POVpushers, I think we'll see
more and more good users walking away from controversial articles, and
even the project as a whole. If they do that, then our articles on
such subjects are going to turn into complete and utter garbage, as
our Lyndon LaRouche article becomes another vessel for original
research (as the ArbCom has already condemned, but not acted upon),
and our Khmer Rouge article becomes an all-out apology. Idealism is
good, but if we push it too far, then we can say goodbye to our
controversial articles being any good at all.

Rebecca (ambi)


body:
On 10 Oct 2004, at 20:40, Evan Prodromou wrote:

> On Sun, 2004-10-10 at 19:10 +0200, Jens Ropers wrote:
>> Regarding the "E-mail this user" feature: Currently it says:
>>
>> "If this user has entered a valid e-mail address in his or her user
>> preferences, the form below will send a single message. (...)"
>>
>> Is there any way for the sender to see if his email will actually be
>> delivered?
>> Would it make sense to log this as a feature request/bug?
>
> That's a documentation problem. If the user hasn't entered a valid
> e-mail address, the form won't come up.
>
> ~ESP

Okay, now I can't find/edit the relevant template/special page to
change the text (and I'm also not an admin, in case that's required) --
Can somebody change the wording accordingly?

-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]]
     www.ropersonline.com


body:
Geoffrey Burling wrote

> Now that the English Wikipedia has
> over 350,000 articles, to add new articles either requires
> specialized knowledge or education, or a lot more research time.

I recommend minor poets - the chances of ever running out seem slim.  Unlike
Pharoahs there's one born every few days.

More seriously, I suppose we're always going to hear more from those who
think WP is going to the goddem bowwows.  If I click RandomPages repeatedly,
that is hardly the impression I get.  There are surely a large number of bad
pages around, but it seems to be a trap to argue from those, rather than
from process (as, indeed, Geoff was doing).

Charles


from_name: Reinhardt Wiewe

body:
== lot of fluctuation regarding e-mail addresses ==

I questioned Brion VIBBER on this issue these days. My opinion is, that for the community it is important to have "nonambiguos communication facilities". If somone wants to spam, he / she can do it anyway. The function "email this user" is available only for visitors logged in. Where is the risc?

As a webmaster of an alumni site http://www.lenauschule.de/ having implemented a similar feature (e-mailing registered colueges) I experienced a lot of fluctuation regarding e-mail addresses. We use "Return-path:" too. Returned e-mails are exchanged manualy if valid alternative e-mail addesses (three in total) are available.

Analysing the reasons for rejected e-mails there are lots of: account full, spam flter rejects, other rejects because company e-mail addresses where provided, user unknown etc.

The feature is implemented at http://lenauschule.de/jahrgang/1975/ . Search Wiewe at the end and click on the e-mail address. You have to reenter the number next to the "chricht senden" button.

Regards Reinhardt [[w:en:User:Gangleri]]
http://easy.go.is/gangleri/


from_name: Kurt Jansson

body:
Evan Prodromou schrieb:
> On Sun, 2004-10-10 at 19:10 +0200, Jens Ropers wrote:
>
>>Regarding the "E-mail this user" feature: Currently it says:
>>
>>"If this user has entered a valid e-mail address in his or her user
>>preferences, the form below will send a single message. (...)"
>>
>>Is there any way for the sender to see if his email will actually be
>>delivered?
>>Would it make sense to log this as a feature request/bug?
>
> That's a documentation problem. If the user hasn't entered a valid
> e-mail address, the form won't come up.

But the address isn't really checked for validity, maybe in a technical way, but
  I fear many people are entering an address like spam123 at spam.com.

Kurt


body:
The only usefull way to verify an e-mail address is the one used at  http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/. Many bancropted service providers will not return e-mails, who would never reach customers.

Regards Reinhardt


body:
Daniel P.B.Smith wrote:

[many true things]

> But when an article is of high quality, the people who have knowledge in
> the topic area are likely to leave it alone. The people who are most
> likely to edit it are people who want to push a point of view, or people
> who know much less than they think they know. The result is that the
> better an article is, the greater the chances that random edits will
> lower its quality.

I completely agree with this view. We are loosing too many good authors
due to these problems. Bored with reverting the same propaganda and POV
again and again, having to repeat discussions every two months when the
next guy arrives who insists on bringing up an already solved point.
It's not only Adam Carr, there are many others who silently leave wikipedia.

> I think there needs to be some mechanism in place so that when an
> article becomes generally regarded as good, Version 1.0 or whatever, it
> can be sort of locked in place. Perhaps it could be stamped with a
> version number, and any attempts to edit [[GoodArticle]] are
> automatically redirected to [[GoodArticle/Version1.1]]. Within a
> discussion forum, when and only when there is general consensus that
> [[GoodArticle/Version1.1]] is better than [[GoodArticle]], a sysop or
> suitably-authorized-panjandrum can move it to [[GoodArticle]].

We'll need mechanisms - what kind I don't know yet.
For the moment I placed two feature requests on bugzilla:
http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=675
http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=674

I want to encourage everyone to vote for and leave comments on these
requests.

That's the technical part. The other thing I want to propose is a
change to our NPOV policy.

At the moment it says: "articles should have a neutral point of view."
This dates back to the time where people had confidence that in the wiki
process, in the struggle between adherents of different views after some
time a good NPOV version finally emerges. I don't believe in this (I
never did, actually). Yes, sometimes it happens, but only if
non-involved people put a lot of effort in establishing compromises,
moderating the conflicts and so on.

NPOV policy should be: "authors should write from a neutral point of view."

Of course, that's an ideal. You can never completely leave your personal
views aside. But the important is: you can try. People who openly work
for pushing POV in an article, shouldn't be allowed to edit that article
at all. NPOV policy is not about "I insert my propaganda into an article
and let others do the tedious taks of neutralizing it", it's "do your
best to write from a neutral point of view. And if you are unable to do
so, leave the article alone". And this policy should be enforced by the
community.

greetings and sorry for the terrible english,
elian


body:
An inacurate indication about expiration of an e-mail address could be seen verifying User contributions as http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=Gangleri .

If there are no contributions for months the e-mail address may have changed too.

Regards Reinhardt


body:
I also think the idea of having a stable locked version is good (I
think I posted the idea in another thread), as it stops disruption.

I assume most users of wikipedia just go on to find information, and
to see that an article has been 'generally agreed' on will be a
positive sign for people to trust that article.

It might be interesting to put a kind of 'was this article helpful' or
'rate this article' thing on, like on MSDN. It might aid the editing
of articles and / or be used as part of the 'generally agreed'
procedure. Users could add a comment why they dont think it was
useful, and if its a valid point the article could be edited.

On Sun, 10 Oct 2004 21:09:12 +0200, Elisabeth Bauer <elian at djini.de> wrote:
> Daniel P.B.Smith wrote:
>
> [many true things]
>
> > But when an article is of high quality, the people who have knowledge in
> > the topic area are likely to leave it alone. The people who are most
> > likely to edit it are people who want to push a point of view, or people
> > who know much less than they think they know. The result is that the
> > better an article is, the greater the chances that random edits will
> > lower its quality.
>
> I completely agree with this view. We are loosing too many good authors
> due to these problems. Bored with reverting the same propaganda and POV
> again and again, having to repeat discussions every two months when the
> next guy arrives who insists on bringing up an already solved point.
> It's not only Adam Carr, there are many others who silently leave wikipedia.
>
> > I think there needs to be some mechanism in place so that when an
> > article becomes generally regarded as good, Version 1.0 or whatever, it
> > can be sort of locked in place. Perhaps it could be stamped with a
> > version number, and any attempts to edit [[GoodArticle]] are
> > automatically redirected to [[GoodArticle/Version1.1]]. Within a
> > discussion forum, when and only when there is general consensus that
> > [[GoodArticle/Version1.1]] is better than [[GoodArticle]], a sysop or
> > suitably-authorized-panjandrum can move it to [[GoodArticle]].
>
> We'll need mechanisms - what kind I don't know yet.
> For the moment I placed two feature requests on bugzilla:
> http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=675
> http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=674
>
> I want to encourage everyone to vote for and leave comments on these
> requests.
>
> That's the technical part. The other thing I want to propose is a
> change to our NPOV policy.
>
> At the moment it says: "articles should have a neutral point of view."
> This dates back to the time where people had confidence that in the wiki
> process, in the struggle between adherents of different views after some
> time a good NPOV version finally emerges. I don't believe in this (I
> never did, actually). Yes, sometimes it happens, but only if
> non-involved people put a lot of effort in establishing compromises,
> moderating the conflicts and so on.
>
> NPOV policy should be: "authors should write from a neutral point of view."
>
> Of course, that's an ideal. You can never completely leave your personal
> views aside. But the important is: you can try. People who openly work
> for pushing POV in an article, shouldn't be allowed to edit that article
> at all. NPOV policy is not about "I insert my propaganda into an article
> and let others do the tedious taks of neutralizing it", it's "do your
> best to write from a neutral point of view. And if you are unable to do
> so, leave the article alone". And this policy should be enforced by the
> community.
>
> greetings and sorry for the terrible english,
> elian
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
Matthew Larsen
   > mat.larsen at gmail.com
   > 07739 785 249


body:
A rejected e-mail returns to "Return path" as used in

- Return-path: <wikitech-l-bounces at wikimedia.org> for wikitech-l issues
- Return-path: <wiki at wikimedia.org> for "email this user"

I do not know what a MTA is.

Regards Reinhardt

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Evan Prodromou
  To: Wikimedia developers
  Sent: Sunday, October 10, 2004 9:40 PM
  Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] email this user -- question
  Since the "From:" address on the email is the sending user's email
  address, I believe what will happen is that the sending user will
  receive a MTA error email.

  ~ESP

  --
  Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>

  _______________________________________________
  Wikitech-l mailing list
  Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
  http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


body:
Elisabeth Bauer wrote:

> That's the technical part. The other thing I want to propose is a change
> to our NPOV policy.
> At the moment it says: "articles should have a neutral point of view."
> NPOV policy should be: "authors should write from a neutral point of view."

Perfect. Yes.

(I thought that was what it already meant, actually.)

Jimmy?

- d.


body:
On 10 Oct 2004, at 21:02, Kurt Jansson wrote:

> Evan Prodromou schrieb:
>> On Sun, 2004-10-10 at 19:10 +0200, Jens Ropers wrote:
>>> Regarding the "E-mail this user" feature: Currently it says:
>>>
>>> "If this user has entered a valid e-mail address in his or her user
>>> preferences, the form below will send a single message. (...)"
>>>
>>> Is there any way for the sender to see if his email will actually be
>>> delivered?
>>> Would it make sense to log this as a feature request/bug?
>> That's a documentation problem. If the user hasn't entered a valid
>> e-mail address, the form won't come up.
>
> But the address isn't really checked for validity, maybe in a
> technical way, but  I fear many people are entering an address like
> spam123 at spam.com.
>
> Kurt

IMHO the concern about individual users possibly having entered a
nonworking email address is mostly a separate issue to what I asked
about. I'm concerned about the fact that users (including me prior to
this email conversation) will think that their email might not be
''sent'' because the other user might not have provided an email
address (when in reality it ''will'' be ''sent'' because as per the
above info that page only comes up if the other user did in fact
provide an email address).

Now as regards the separate email-related issue:

I.
It is true that an email which was ''sent'' may not get ''delivered'',
for various reasons (account maxed out, prolonged server outage, etc.).
As regards that possibility: Do the emails that get sent currently have
a ''both'' the '''Return-Path''' and '''Reply-To''' headers set to the
user/sender's address? If not, can this be changed?

II.
Finally, yes, it's true, our system of accepting email addresses is not
fully opt-in. In theory, someone could create and account giving
another person's email address, then do a lot of trolling and have any
angry email messages delivered to the (probably very surprised) other
person's mailbox. That's a bit of a roundabout way of spamming people,
though. If a spammer already has another person's email address, then
it would be so much easier to spam them directly. Granted, we may still
want to consider changing our signup process so that any email
addresses submitted will be verified in a way similar to Mailman's
opt-in process. That might make sense. It's only a minor inconvenience
to users signing up and it's probably best practice to do it. Any
motivation to code this, anybody (because I sadly can't)?

-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]]
     www.ropersonline.com


body:
Matthew Larsen wrote

> I also think the idea of having a stable locked version is good (I
> think I posted the idea in another thread), as it stops disruption.

Well, then you don't have a wiki.  You have one of those other things, where
you need some permission to edit.  In fact this is exactly the suggestion
that bright people who don't know the wiki way always will come up with, in
their first five minutes of thinking about how to make it work.

My own other wiki experience suggests to me that stasis is probably death
for a wiki.

Charles


body:
On 10 Oct 2004, at 21:44, Reinhardt Wiewe wrote:

> <snip>
> I do not know what a MTA is.
>
> Regards Reinhardt

An MTA is a Mail Transfer Agent,
aka Message Transfer Agent,
aka SMPTD (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol Daemon),
aka--in plain English--an email server (referring mostly to the piece
of software that does the email shuffling work and mostly not to the
physical box that piece of software runs on).

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_transfer_agent


from_name: Petr Kadlec

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Switching Wiki-based and LanguageCs.php-based
	translations

body:
In the recent week, we have experienced random switches between
wiki-based (MediaWiki:*) and PHP-based message translations on the
czech Wikipedia. And because the translations in LanguageCs.php are
quite obsolete, those switches are very visible and unpleasant.

So I have two questions:
1. Why do those switches happen? Is it only some transitional problem,
or is this going to happen regularly in the future?
2. What could I do to get the LanguageCs.php updated? Should I just
send the updated version here? (AFAIK we do not have any developer on
the cs: wikipedia.) Maybe someone could just get the Special:Allpages
in PHP format and dump them to the PHP file, as those are the most
differing entries.

Best regards,
Mormegil (a sysop on cs: Wikipedia)


from_name: zero 0000

body:
If viewed as a whole, Wikipedia is one of the truly
great web projects and its success cannot be questioned.
However, the model by which Wikipedia operates has its
limits and for some things it doesn't work.  One of the
things it cannot do is to make high quality articles on
controversial topics.

I'm writing as someone who recently decided to stop
editting Wikipedia after making about 3000 edits over
a year or so.  The area I most worked in was the Middle
East, about which I have substantial expertise.  The hope
I had when I started was that despite some ups and downs
articles would gradually get better; that is, the average
quality would slowly improve over time so that the
long-term benefit of one's labors would be clear.  Alas,
it is not so.  Sometimes a serious effort from a few
contributors with NPOV at heart can create a major
improvement in an article, but it only lasts as long
as they man the trenches to fend off the barbarians.
A moment of lapsed attention and the article is back to
where it was before.

The dynamic process is like a cup of water with some sand
in it.  You can get the sand closer on average to the top
by energetic stirring, but any success in getting it closer
to the top than that average is fleeting.  Stop stirring
and all your prior work is gone in an instant.

I frankly don't think this problem can be solved by making
small changes.  Tweaking the rules won't help very much.
Yes, people should have to write NPOV rather than merely
accept it in principle, but who is going to enforce that
rule and who is going to stop the enforcers from becoming
a sort of star chamber which in practice is a source of POV?
Having a "latest stable edition" won't work either, because
any sort of mechanism for changing the stable edition based
on consensus will never gain that consensus.  (If you doubt
this, review the history of attempts to delete truly awful
MidEast articles via VfD; it is nearly impossible.)

Of course I wish the best of luck to those willing to devote
more of their time to trying to fix the unfixable, but I have
personally had enough.  I hope to return later on to edit in
an area (mathematics) where Wikipedia works pretty well.

Zero.

_______________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Declare Yourself - Register online to vote today!
http://vote.yahoo.com


from_name: Emmanuel Engelhart

subject: [Wikitech-l] browser black list

body:
Hi

With this email, a patch to show a warning if the browser is not unicode compliant.

- languages/Language.php : new warning message
- LocalSettings.sample : new conf. variable, an array of bar browser regexp
- includes/EditPage.php : a function checkBrowser() which return true or false, and code to show the message.

Best regards

Emmanuel Engelhart

--
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sit?t que les hommes sont en soci?t?, ils perdent le sentiment de
leur faiblesse ; l'?galit? qui ?tait en eux cesse, et l'?tat de
guerre commence.      Montesquieu, "de l'esprit des lois" livre I/III
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Emmanuel Engelhart      ICQ UIN : 53388731   TEL (+49)(0)6.22.15.88.03.31


from_name: Sheldon Rampton

subject: [WikiEN-l] Cool wiki tool

body:
Here's a very cool wiki tool that adds structure to unstructured Wiki
pages. It would be interesting to see if this approach could be
integrated with the category system now implemented on MediaWiki.

http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/gems/jot.swf

http://www.jotspot.com
--
--------------------------------
|  Sheldon Rampton
|  Research director, Center for Media & Democracy (www.prwatch.org)
|  Author of books including:
|     Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities
|     Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
|     Mad Cow USA
|     Trust Us, We're Experts
|     Weapons of Mass Deception
|     Banana Republicans
--------------------------------


subject: [Wikitech-l] Cool wiki tool


body:
On 10 Oct 2004, at 22:19, Evan Prodromou wrote:

> On Sun, 2004-10-10 at 21:52 +0200, Jens Ropers wrote:
>
>> Granted, we may still
>> want to consider changing our signup process so that any email
>> addresses submitted will be verified in a way similar to Mailman's
>> opt-in process. That might make sense. It's only a minor inconvenience
>> to users signing up and it's probably best practice to do it. Any
>> motivation to code this, anybody (because I sadly can't)?
>
> I think it's an excellent idea. Why don't you register it in Bugzilla?
>
> ~ESP

Done.
http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=677

-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]]
     www.ropersonline.com


from_name: Matthias Pospiech

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Complete Latex Files in WikiTeX ?

body:
Peter Danenberg wrote:

>> That means that it is necessary to create pictures of arbitrary tex/latex
>> content, and as well to be able to deliver all Pages (in PDF) and the
>> whole Latex Code.
>
>
>      It appears as though you have a pure TeX environment in
> mind, sans HTML; would hyper-linking  then  be  accomplished
> externally?

somehow I do not understand your question at all...

What I mean is to create a Wiki System with Latex-Howtos as the content.
That means for example to say how to create Chapters and sections. So this
code would appear in the html as description and code. The document result
should be shown as a picture otherwise it would be a very unsatisfactory
wiki.
One could say that this is somehow a selfLatex (as in selfhtml)

So the Latex content would be simple text with one chapter and a few
sections - thats what I mean with arbitrary latex content.

There are other problems where the result can only be shown as the whole pdf
file - so then there would be no picture, but a link to the pdf file.

what I need therefore is a complete TeX system - but that is depending on
what shall be done in the TeX system, and therefore not really a problem of
the wiki code.

Hope to have cleared up what I meant...
Matthias

---------------------------------
www.matthiaspospiech.de


from_name: phil hunt

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Re: The "months later" effect

body:
On Sun, 10 Oct 2004 21:09:12 +0200, Elisabeth Bauer <elian at djini.de> wrote:
>
>That's the technical part. The other thing I want to propose is a
>change to our NPOV policy.
>
>At the moment it says: "articles should have a neutral point of view."
>This dates back to the time where people had confidence that in the wiki
>process, in the struggle between adherents of different views after some
>time a good NPOV version finally emerges. I don't believe in this (I
>never did, actually). Yes, sometimes it happens, but only if
>non-involved people put a lot of effort in establishing compromises,
>moderating the conflicts and so on.
>
>NPOV policy should be: "authors should write from a neutral point of view."
>
>Of course, that's an ideal. You can never completely leave your personal
>views aside. But the important is: you can try. People who openly work
>for pushing POV in an article, shouldn't be allowed to edit that article
>at all. NPOV policy is not about "I insert my propaganda into an article
>and let others do the tedious taks of neutralizing it", it's "do your
>best to write from a neutral point of view. And if you are unable to do
>so, leave the article alone". And this policy should be enforced by the
>community.

I agree with this change.

--
"It's easier to find people online who openly support the KKK than
people who openly support the RIAA" -- comment on Wikipedia
(Email: zen19725 at zen dot co dot uk)


body:
On Sun, 10 Oct 2004 21:24:25 +0100, Matthew Larsen <mat.larsen at gmail.com> wrote:
>I also think the idea of having a stable locked version is good (I
>think I posted the idea in another thread), as it stops disruption.
>
>I assume most users of wikipedia just go on to find information, and
>to see that an article has been 'generally agreed' on will be a
>positive sign for people to trust that article.
>
>It might be interesting to put a kind of 'was this article helpful' or
>'rate this article' thing on, like on MSDN. It might aid the editing
>of articles and / or be used as part of the 'generally agreed'
>procedure. Users could add a comment why they dont think it was
>useful, and if its a valid point the article could be edited.

Good idea.

--
"It's easier to find people online who openly support the KKK than
people who openly support the RIAA" -- comment on Wikipedia
(Email: zen19725 at zen dot co dot uk)


body:
On Sun, 10 Oct 2004 21:55:49 +0100, Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
>Matthew Larsen wrote
>
>
>> I also think the idea of having a stable locked version is good (I
>> think I posted the idea in another thread), as it stops disruption.
>
>Well, then you don't have a wiki.  You have one of those other things, where
>you need some permission to edit.  In fact this is exactly the suggestion
>that bright people who don't know the wiki way always will come up with, in
>their first five minutes of thinking about how to make it work.

I'm been editing Wikipedia for over a year, and I think it's a
(potentially) good idea.

--
"It's easier to find people online who openly support the KKK than
people who openly support the RIAA" -- comment on Wikipedia
(Email: zen19725 at zen dot co dot uk)


from_name: Daniel Mayer

body:
--- Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> 3) Facilitate forking. It should be easy to create and maintain forks of
> controversial articles written from a specific group's point of views -
> not necessarily within the Wikimedia framework, but outside of it. Others
> can then take Wikipedia, Wikinews or Wikibooks entries and develop them
> according to their respective belief systems.

Absolutely not within Wikimedia! That flies directly in the face of NPOV, leads
to needless duplication in what we are doing, and transfers edit wars to all
articles that link to the forked versions (with each edit warrior would want to
orphan his opponent's version).

-- mav

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


from_name: oboenfan

subject: Fw: [Wikipedia-l] New Wikipedia langage solresol

body:
----- Original Message -----
From: "oboenfan" <oboenfan at hotmail.com>
To: "Rowan Collins" <rowan.collins at gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, October 11, 2004 1:27 AM
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] New Wikipedia langage solresol

 Hi Rowan

 Thank you very much to you personally. Your message did really comfort me
last week.

But I did find this matter really absurd: The administration of Wikipedia
looks as a really terrible giant animal and to occupy too much a lot of
people.

This forum is alone a surprising kind to loose the time...

I don't give up and realize without discussion with a lot of people and
loosing of time a dictionary and all my other projects concerning old,
menaced and artificial languages at the new anarchopedia. I did create
French, German main pages, Spanish will follow in the next hours, and
Interlingue, Solresol, Frater and more will follow in the next days.All that
is new. I have to rectify a lot of text errors in a second time but it
exists now. I is a good work for a short week where I have to go to my
professional occupations.

I did observe different problems in the approach of the things at Wikipedia
and I work at anarchopedia that this don't appears in the new project. I
think my technical approach of dictionary better and start for this reason a
lot of languages myself. My first word, the first entry in the new multi
language dictionary was of course a word in "a", naturally the word
"anarchy". And if you compare the content of 2 dictionaries you can see a
completely other view of our world. Anarchy is not conform to the bad
definition in Wikipedia... At the letter "I" I will introduce in the next
days as first word the word "idealism" ;-)

Less bureaucracy (be quite: I didn't redefine in the first time at the
letter "b" the word "bureaucracy" - "birth" is really more important!)

Je veux remercier tr?s sp?cialement Anthere, mon fier concitoyen, pour son
intervention contre mes petits efforts anarchistes (je ne pensais pas le
moins du monde ? une telle d?finition de mes efforts il y a seulement 8
jours) car sans cette petite querelle vraiment juste au bon moment, je
n'aurais jamais fait connaissance ? cette date du projet des autres
anarchistes! Mes visions de mon pays dans le continent qui l'h?berge et
surtout mes visions du r?le de mon continent en tant que r?alit? politique
et sociale ne semble pas ?tre totalement ?quivalentes aux v?tres!

Perhaps is this the decisive reason why a Wikipedia can't be enough.

 Yours truly

 Fran?ois

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Rowan Collins" <rowan.collins at gmail.com>
> To: <wikipedia-l at wikimedia.org>; <oboenfan at hotmail.com>
> Sent: Sunday, October 03, 2004 6:20 PM
> Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] New Wikipedia langage solresol
>
>
> > Francois,
> >  please don't give up so easily. If you truly believe that this is
> > something worth doing and encouraging, it should take more than a few
> > people saying "maybe" rather than "yes" to make you give up. Nobody
> > here has said "no" to your proposals; if you think you can make this
> > work, then have courage and try to make it work, even when it seems
> > difficult. I will try to address and discuss some of your current
> > concerns below.
> >


from_name: The Cunctator

body:
On 10/11/04 2:07 AM, "Erik Moeller" <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> 1) Be very inclusive. NPOV can only work if everyone gets a fair chance to
> have their point of view included in an article (even if not the main
> article).
>
> 2) Center discussions around issues rather than people. Conduct systematic
> peer review in different categories for every article. Highlight
> unsourced/unattributed claims in the article.
>
> 3) Facilitate forking. It should be easy to create and maintain forks of
> controversial articles written from a specific group's point of views -
> not necessarily within the Wikimedia framework, but outside of it. Others
> can then take Wikipedia, Wikinews or Wikibooks entries and develop them
> according to their respective belief systems.
>
> 4) Eliminate edit wars. The most obvious solution seems to be a "Ban to
> talk page" feature that does not protect the whole page, but only forces
> the users involved in an edit war to discuss the issue.
>
> 5) Faster response when people violate the rules, by randomly selected
> trusted user committees or something similar. Milder, but quicker
> punishments. Less talk, more action.
>
> 2)-5) require changes to the software. Have patience, they will come. Some
> related proposals and documents are on Meta, particularly LiquidThreads
> and Wikiflow.

The number one thing that would help this is to support atomization. The
more clearly defined the scope of the entry, the easier it is to find
consensus and to discard chaff. As entries get larger, their scope broadens,
and conflict, dispute, and confusion ensue.


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Indicationg consensus (was: Losing more of our best
	contributors)

body:
I was deliriously happy to read what Mark wrote below, because it gave
me an idea:

> the wiki method means that any random POV pusher can come in and
> mangle the article, which has happened on [[Anti-Zionism]] on
> numerous occasions.  Unless a group of knowledgeable people are
> willing to waste their time baby-sitting an article, which usually
> amounts to revert-wars (since rarely are the additions even
> remotely helpful), the articles go rapidly downhill, wasting the
> effort of the people who painstakingly put together a quality
> article on a contentious subject.
>
> I'd have to say I agree with that criticism.  I've wasted some
> time myself on some of these contentious subjects, only to come
> back a few months later and find an abysmally horrid article in
> its place.

I propose that we agree upon a scheme for marking a particular version
of an article as "the consensus version". And then show this by default
to new users and to search engines like Google.

We should clearly indicate that the consensus version is just a
MILESTONE along the path of article development. We should remind our
readers that any article can be edited any time, and that newer versions
of this article are likely to appear.

Indeed, we could have a colorful flag or icon letting them know
something like, "A more recent version of this article is available" or
"This article has been edited X times since the milestone was set.

Also, we should give every user the option to keep "consensus versions"
as their default, or "latest versions".

I believe that this is in keeping with the Wiki Way -- and that it
supports Jimbo's NPOV policy -- and that it will preserve the value of
hard-won compromise, give and take, and consensus formation. Yet it
poses no handicap to those who want to improve the article.

Magnus and Timwi have created software that can do this, and I'm sure
they would be able to adapt it to work whatever way we need.

Ed Poor
Bureaucrat and Developer Emeritus


body:
Andrew Lih wrote:

>I've been waiting for this voice of reason. As much as I appreciate
>Adam Carr's work, scores of useful contributors have come and become
>valuable members of the community.
>
>There are about 500-700 very active Wikipedians in EN recently, up
>from 300 at the beginning of the year. Let's try to get beyond the
>anecdotal.
>
>
I don't think we're doubting that there are Wikipedians.  What's doubted
is that these Wikipedians are, in the current system, producing quality
articles on controversial topics.  A quick look reveals that a huge
percentage of the controversial topics are either: engaged in endless
edit wars, are locked, or have had the reasonable people abandon them.
[[Gdansk]] and related articles have been in edit wars for over a year
now, for example, and most reasonable people have given up on that
mess.  The Israeli-Palestinian conflict articles seem to have mainly
degenerated into territoriality, with some "pro-Palestinian" and some
"pro-Israeli" articles each guarded by a group of advocates.  There are
some exceptions ([[Israel]] is still pretty good, mostly through the
tireless efforts of a a handful of people who watch it), but the amount
of work it takes to keep a controversial article in a reasonable state
drives people off eventually, so the article quality suffers.

The egregious offenders can be banned (as with MrNaturalHealth), but POV
pushers who don't actually violate any of our rules, or even good
contributors who are very biased and very motivated on one particular
issue, are a major problem.  The neutral arbiters tend to be people
without a personal stake in the subject, and it's hard for any of them
to match the time committment and passion that the POV pushers bring to
the editing process.

-Mark


from_name: Charles Matthews

body:
David Gerard wrote

> > NPOV policy should be: "authors should write from a neutral point of
view."
>
>
> Perfect. Yes.
>
> (I thought that was what it already meant, actually.)

Me too. Sadly, it seems that some people go with 'I'm sure we need an
article on this, I've supplied my POV, someone please do the rest'.  And
explicitly - there is of course a great deal more where that is done
implicitly/unintentionally.

Charles


from_name: Mike Halterman

subject: [WikiEN-l] Advice please

body:
This sounds like a case of "wah wah waaaaaaah crying over spilt milk" to me. I've found that petulant users threaten legal action as that is sufficiently "scarier" than just a good ol' "fuck you!"

In the case of Mr. Treason (is this Mr. Treason?)...he keeps threatening court but then he acts like a 15-year-old and goes around calling people queer fucks and faggots and, I believe, "stunods", whatever the hell that last one is. In any case, it just cements how juvenile and grade nine it all is.

I wouldn't give it too much in the whole scheme of things.

-Mike

"KNOTT, T" <tknott at qcl.org.uk> wrote:
Today I blocked a user for making legal threats. See User:Gordy and
Vandalism in progress. Since doing that I have received two emails
threatening to take me to court

"You claim to have banned me for threatening wiki with legal action. at
no time did I do this. I may well have suggested that to personal users,
including yourself, and believe me, I am serious in my threat, so
serious in fact that I already have draft writ produced in the time that
I have waited on you getting back to me."

He goes on to write

"The whole impression that you have created of me is derogatory,
defammatory and extremely distressing. Such actions can be remedied
legally, and believe me, I you continue to push me on this one, you
better have a good lab technicians salary, because I'll take you
personally to the cleaners. Your actions can be addressed by way of writ
for interdiction/ and or damages, because on at least two counts you
have interfered in a matter which I did not believe was any concern of
yours."

And in a separate email he writes:

"Having secured wiki's legal owners, I shall then be compelling them by
order of court to provide me with the full names and addresses of the
individuals who have attacked me on this unbelievable place, whereby I
can raise personal actions against those individuals without harming
wikipedia."

So it's not just me, he intents to sue others as well. There is actually
a lot more but it's mostly just rant.

1) Was I right to block him or did I act too hastily?

2) Should I respond to his email or ignore it?

(3. I've just typed ~~~~ instead of my name does this mean I'm a
wikiaddict?)

Theresa

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from_name: Domas Mituzas

body:
Hey,

Well, there was a case when in case of some rogue apache not getting (or not willing to get) messages object. I didn't track it yet wether it was limited to one server or was it cluster-wide trouble. I could not track any troubles with tugelas, using mctest. There could be file descriptor troubles or similiar stuff.

I did a trivial change, now in case of troubles does not override existing messagecache object with "loading", but silently loads that object itself.
There are two things I'm going to do - track the troubles in tugela and/or memcached-client/apaches, and using Turck MMCache for frequently used large object storage.

Cheers,
Domas

-----Original Message-----
From: wikitech-l-bounces at wikimedia.org [mailto:wikitech-l-bounces at wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Tim Starling
Sent: Monday, October 11, 2004 6:27 AM
To: wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
Subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Switching Wiki-based and LanguageCs.php-basedtranslations

It seems to be more frequent now. The key expires after 24 hours (I
thought it was a week, did someone change it?), and you'd expect to see
the message cache stop working for a few seconds each time it expires. I
always assumed it was just this problem. But we've had a sudden increase
in the number of reports, and the problem persists for longer than a few
seconds. Not exactly conclusive, it would be nice to have a theory about
why this happens.

-- Tim Starling

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Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


from_name: Sean Barrett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Advice please

body:
KNOTT, T stated for the record:

> 1) Was I right to block him or did I act too hastily?

You enforced the published rules of this community, which he agreed to
abide by when he created his account.  You are in the right, and his
threats are a laughably feeble bluff.