body:
Robth wrote:
> On 10/16/06, Rory Stolzenberg <rory096 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 10/16/06, Robth <robth1 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> {{Cleanup}} is a ticket to a year-long line.  If we want to get
>>> these issues addressed with any kind of speed (and it's clear
>>> from the start of this thread that we do), any system that we
>>> come up with needs to be as unlike {{cleanup}} as possible.
>>>
>>> Personally, I suspect that the only way to handle these things
>>> is to do them yourself.  I long ago gave up on the notion of
>>> article tags being an effective way to get anything but the most
>>> trivial (and thus edit-count-building) maintenance work done.
>> Not true, cleanup also has a huge amount of articles, and while there's a
>> backlog, there's also a lot of people working on it.  Currently,
>> [[Category:Articles with unsourced statements]] has a massive, totally
>> disorganized backlog, and was actually deleted a couple months ago because
>> it was so hopeless. A cleanup-like system would be a huge improvement, and
>> allow us to take care of the ones that most need sourcing first.
>
> I'm well aware of the situation; I spent several months doing a lot of
> cleanup work
> before getting burned out on it.  There are people working on cleanup,
> it is true.
> At the same time, the backlog is growing rapidly, and an (admittedly, highly
> unscientific) examination of what happens to de-tagged articles that I did in
> August suggested that much of what gets de-tagged doesn't actually get
> cleaned up much.  My point above was that, in general, maintenance tags are not
> the answer; they lead people to assume that they can get something fixed
> just by sticking a tag on it, when in fact the only way to get something fixed
> in a timely fashion (and sometimes at all) is to do it yourself.
>

   How about a function that will let you tag something and after 7 days
(or a month or whatever) a bot will leave a note on YOUR talk page that
the tag has not been removed.  This would allow people to tag things
that they are not comfortable removing, but only really encourage people
to use the tags if they have the intention of following up.

SKL


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

body:
Lars Aronsson wrote:
> Somebody has wasted their life, and all they have left now is a
> big bag of money.  Poor souls!  And now they want to attach the
> name of Wikipedia to a "big donation" in their name, as if this
> was something Wikipedia just couldn't do without.

I said nothing about a donation.


list: wikien-l

from_name: ScottL

subject: [WikiEN-l] good example of overuse of {{fact}}

body:
jayjg wrote:
> On 10/16/06, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Oct 16, 2006, at 6:12 PM, jayjg wrote:
>>
>>> People keep claiming that it's hard to source "obvious facts";
>>> however, in practice that's almost never the case. Obvious facts are
>>> generally extremely easy to source.
>> A better and more important issue is that it's a waste of time to
>> source obvious facts.
>
> Not really. Once they're sourced, they're sourced forever, and
> inserting spurious fact templates gets more difficult. And every once
> in a while, you discover that what you thought was an "obvious fact"
> was slightly different from what you imagined, or more complex than at
> first glance, or even completely untrue.
>
> Jay.

   However, having between 1 and 3 notes per sentence in an article is
probably not good for readability and decreases the usefulness of the
notes on the whole.

SKL


from_name: Gregory Maxwell

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

body:
On 10/16/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Lars Aronsson wrote:
> > Somebody has wasted their life, and all they have left now is a
> > big bag of money.  Poor souls!  And now they want to attach the
> > name of Wikipedia to a "big donation" in their name, as if this
> > was something Wikipedia just couldn't do without.
>
> I said nothing about a donation.

I say we pretend that it was a possible donation and that Lars'
impolitic response on a public list just cost us $100 million and that
we begin to tar and feather him accordingly.

Geesh... and people wonder why there are sometimes reservations about
making public notices about potential deals.

I wonder how much cooperation we lose because it's obvious to anyone
that attempts to work with Wikimedia will often result in community
histrionics.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

body:
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> On 10/16/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>> Lars Aronsson wrote:
>>> Somebody has wasted their life, and all they have left now is a
>>> big bag of money.  Poor souls!  And now they want to attach the
>>> name of Wikipedia to a "big donation" in their name, as if this
>>> was something Wikipedia just couldn't do without.
>> I said nothing about a donation.
>
> I say we pretend that it was a possible donation and that Lars'
> impolitic response on a public list just cost us $100 million and that
> we begin to tar and feather him accordingly.

:)  Well, no.  Lars was just speaking his mind, it is natural.  I don't
agree with his tone, but I suspect that he would like it even less
(though I can't be sure) that someone is brainstorming about sustainable
(i.e. business model, i.e. profitable) ways that the culture might be
transformed from proprietary to free.

--Jimbo


from_name: Oskar Sigvardsson

subject: [WikiEN-l] Semi-Protecting User Talk Pages

body:
On 10/16/06, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've just gone and removed semi-protections from about a dozen user
> talk pages. All of them were targets of vandalism in the past,
> generally due to their own anti-vandalism efforts. The pages included
> pages of administrators.
>
> For obvious reasons, anyone who is warning and blocking new users in
> turn needs to be able to be contacted by these users with questions,
> concerns, etc. Semi-protection must not be used in this fashion, and
> I've removed the line supporting it from the semi-protection policy.

While I do agree with the general principle, I think there are
certainly times where semi-protecting a talk page is warranted. If a
useris being harrassed by a persistant sock-puppeteer for instance.

Second, if a person recieves so much vandalism on his talk page that
it's beginning to be a problem, I think semi-protecting it for a while
is a good idea, atleast so that the user isn't driven away by all of
the abuse he receives. That has a tendancy to happen with
vandal-fighters.

--Oskar


from_name: Till Westermayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

body:
On the "dream" thread: putting 100.000.000 $ as stock in a foundation
will result in 1.000.000 $ or something per year to spend -- why not
use it that way?

--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
till we *) ~ Till Westermayer ~ Hirschstrasse 5 ~ 79100 Freiburg
0761 55697152 ~ till at tillwe.de ~ http://www.westermayer.de/till/
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

body:
Jimmy Wales schrieb am 16.10.2006 22:13:
> Till Westermayer wrote:
>> On the "dream" thread: putting 100.000.000 $ as stock in a foundation
>> will result in 1.000.000 $ or something per year to spend -- why not
>> use it that way?
>
> Well the point is not an unrestricted gift, though that is fun to think
> about too.  The point is not political lobbying, though that is fun to
> think about too. :-)
>
> The point is: suppose someone wanted to buy $100,000,000 of existing
> copyrighted material and set it free.  What should it be?

For the visionary minded: combine both, set up a foundation with the
goal to "free" copyrighted material (for wikipedia and others), give
it $ 100,000,000 so it can use $ 1,000,000 every year from now on for
buying copyrights. Of course that's not the same impact as spending $
100M at once, but it would be a far more sustainable approach to
change the way copyright works and do something good for a long time.

Of course, even in this model one has to decide on what to spend the
annual $1M. For a good starting point, I agree with the textbooks
(college, university) idea.

Till

--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
till we *) ~ Till Westermayer ~ Hirschstrasse 5 ~ 79100 Freiburg
0761 55697152 ~ till at tillwe.de ~ http://www.westermayer.de/till/
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Simetrical

subject: [Wikitech-l] Insight into users' behaviour

body:
On 10/16/06, Nick Jenkins <nickpj at gmail.com> wrote:
> Current state-of-play I suspect is that the person in the driver's seat for this (Simetrical) is possibly trying to weigh up whether
> the benefits are worth the transition costs.

Actually I was mostly making myself busy with other things.  I've
already dropped a line at the dewiki MediaWiki talk for Monobook.js,
which is about all I could think of to inform scripters.  Maybe post
on the enwiki technical VP too.  I should have something ready fairly
soon, anyway, which ideally would collapse to something that looks
like the dewiki edit links without CSS *or* JS.


from_name: Roger Luethi

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

body:
On Mon, 16 Oct 2006 16:13:36 -0400, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Well the point is not an unrestricted gift, though that is fun to think
> about too.  The point is not political lobbying, though that is fun to
> think about too. :-)
>
> The point is: suppose someone wanted to buy $100,000,000 of existing
> copyrighted material and set it free.  What should it be?

Dreaming a little to the tune of $100,000,000 but with restrictions is
hard, especially knowing that there is a real possibility that such a
project may do more harm than good.

But here is my restriction-compliant dream:

I wonder if content acquired within the restrictions you mentioned (pick
any of the good suggestions made by others) could be used as a lever in
some dual-licensing scheme (as used by several major open source software
companies). As long as the content is under a free license but not in the
public domain (e.g. GFDL or CC-BY-SA), we'd have a bargaining chip that we
could parlay into access to other works. -- We can't do that for Wikipedia
itself (because there is no single copyright owner), but if we owned a
significant piece of desirable content, things might be different.

Roger


from_name: Parker Peters

body:
On 10/16/06, Rory Stolzenberg <rory096 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Temporarily, it can be useful, but admins tend to forget to unprotect it;
> look at my user page for an example. While my userpage isn't a talk page
> (and it doesn't matter enough to me to get it unprotected), it's an
> example
> of something that an admin protected from vandalism then completely forgot
> about and never unprotected.
>

I was gone, but this one's piqued my interest, so here's what I have to say
on the matter:

Our backend code is stupid.

Protection should not be "forever until it is turned off." Instead, like
blocking any just about anything else, it should have a duration after which
it automatically expires.

We've got some article pages that have been "Protected" for weeks or longer,
with no edit and next to no discussions on the talk pages, because either
some admin is too damn lazy to remove the protection or enjoys keeping it
protected because they feel they own the article that way.

Parker


from_name: Robth

body:
On 10/16/06, Rory Stolzenberg <rory096 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/16/06, Robth <robth1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > {{Cleanup}} is a ticket to a year-long line.  If we want to get
> > these issues addressed with any kind of speed (and it's clear
> > from the start of this thread that we do), any system that we
> > come up with needs to be as unlike {{cleanup}} as possible.
> >
> > Personally, I suspect that the only way to handle these things
> > is to do them yourself.  I long ago gave up on the notion of
> > article tags being an effective way to get anything but the most
> > trivial (and thus edit-count-building) maintenance work done.
>
> Not true, cleanup also has a huge amount of articles, and while there's a
> backlog, there's also a lot of people working on it.  Currently,
> [[Category:Articles with unsourced statements]] has a massive, totally
> disorganized backlog, and was actually deleted a couple months ago because
> it was so hopeless. A cleanup-like system would be a huge improvement, and
> allow us to take care of the ones that most need sourcing first.

I'm well aware of the situation; I spent several months doing a lot of
cleanup work
before getting burned out on it.  There are people working on cleanup,
it is true.
At the same time, the backlog is growing rapidly, and an (admittedly, highly
unscientific) examination of what happens to de-tagged articles that I did in
August suggested that much of what gets de-tagged doesn't actually get
cleaned up much.  My point above was that, in general, maintenance tags are not
the answer; they lead people to assume that they can get something fixed
just by sticking a tag on it, when in fact the only way to get something fixed
in a timely fashion (and sometimes at all) is to do it yourself.

--
Robth
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Robth)


from_name: Platonides

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

body:
"ScottL" wrote:
> Someone may have suggested this below in the thread, I have only read
about half of it.
No, it wasn't

>But, I thought I would throw it in anyway.
Good, be bold :-)

>According  to our article on the topic Encyclop?dia Britannica started
>losing sales
>and value in the company around 1990 and then sold for 135 million in
>1996.  All print encyclopedias seem to be doing less well than in the
>last for obvious reasons.  I think this might make them open to the
>ideas of selling the copyrights (not the companies) to earlier versions.
>  The 1911 Britannica has been pretty useful to the project I suspect
that older editions of a number of print encyclopedias might also be useful.
>
>SKL

I'd add that most languages (even big ones) don't have a free encyclopedia
like it,
so having one would certainly help.


list: foundation-l

from_name: geni

subject: [Foundation-l] Dream a little...

body:
On 10/16/06, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> On 10/16/06, Birgitte SB <birgitte_sb at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > I will not pretend to really understand this stuff.
> > However Wikitex uses Lillypond and brion has marked
> > Lillypond "wontfix"  because it is inherently unsafe.
> > But if the Wikitex thing is really something different
> > please forgive my confusion.
>
> The current status, as I understand it, is that Peter Danenberg is
> coming up with a new security model for WikiTeX. He has tentatively
> stated that he wants to be done by December 1. Then the WMF tech team
> can take another stab at reviewing it (and its components) for
> integration.
>
> As you know, I strongly believe we need this and other extension-based
> functionality; we just need a general security model for it that makes
> sense.

While this might be useful on wikisource on en it would have the
problem of making the code shown on the editing pages even more
incomprehensible.

--
geni


list: wikimedia-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Dream a little...


from_name: Guy Chapman aka JzG

subject: [WikiEN-l] John Doolittle

body:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Doolittle was around 85% knocking
copy.  I removed this and put a strongly worded comment on Talk about
undue weight and WP:LIVING.  I don't give a rat's ass if there is a
close-fought election in process, if anything that is the worst
conceivable reason for bloating an article with guilt-by-association
and innuendo.

Needless to say there is an edit war.  Of course these facts are
cited; but do we really need to know that he took campaign
contributions from some guy and did not give them away like the other
people who took the guy's money?  Is that *honestly* the business of a
neutral encyclopaedia article?

We are surely not far from the day when a politician sues the project
for causing him to lose a knife-edge election.  Or is that
[[WP:BEANS]]?

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


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Username antispoof extension enabled

body:
I've gone ahead and switched in the AntiSpoof extension, based on Neil
Harris's code to check for mixed-script and similar likely-spoofed
usernames.

This has been on for a few weeks doing logging, and I'd meant to go
ahead and switch it in to actively block things but hadn't got to it
between other things.

An example of a similarity conflict as shown in the log:

2006-10-17 06:45:19 testwiki: CONFLICT new account 'Sp1arka'
[v1:5P1ARKA] spoofs 'Splarka'

If some of the similarity checks are too much of a problem we can add an
override or perhaps knock it back down into a partial mode.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>
>>Jimmy Wales wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Precisely.  It has all the flavor of an urban legend.  I found many many
>>>messageboard posts which claimed it as fact, but no one seems to have a
>>>source.  Perhaps it is true, after all, but the initial evidence seems
>>>to suggest otherwise.
>>>
>>>
>>This opens up the question of whether we need "a source" or "an original
>>source".  If we don't accept original research, we shouldn't be
>>demanding it.  Tracking these possible urban legends to their ultimate
>>beginnings should not be required.  Naturally, some source would be
>>necessary, the more reliable the better, and messageboards are
>>questionable at best.  If another reputable source questions the claim
>>that too should be mentioned in the interests of NPOV.
>>
>>"Flavor" is not evidence; it is nothing more than strong instinctual
>>suspicion.
>>
>>
>Hmm.  We might be talking past each other.
>
This may very well be.  Perhaps it's because in my philosophy of the
pursuit of knowledge the questions are more important than the answers.

>For claim X, when it seems that X may be an urban legend, we ought not
>to assert X unless and until we find a proper source for it.  And
>"proper" is an editorial judgment which will depend on the context, and
>about which reasonable people ought to be able to find some compromise
>or consensus.
>
We don't disagree here   I absolutely agree that "proper" (or "reliable"
or "reputable") depends on the context.  The same statement can also
operate on different level.  Let's start with X = "The word 'blackboard'
is not politically correct."  By itself this is not a fact, but an
opinion.  From this we can have:
    1. Many people claim X
    2. Some schools have banned the word "blackboard" because X
    3. X is an urban legend.
    4. Statement 2. is an urban legend.

The standards of evidence for these statements will differ.

>For claim X, when it seems that X may be an urban legend, we ought not
>to assert that X is an urban legend, unless and until we find a proper
>source for it.
>
I agree with this too.  I believe that the two elements necessary to an
urban legend are wide belief, and an assertion that is completely false,
and often in contradiction to contradiction to commen sense.

>Generally speaking, anytime a claim seems reasonably suspect, we ought
>to try to remove it while we sort things out.
>
Apart from the possibility that "reasonably suspect" may be an oxymoron
:-)  ...

This may be where we differ.  I thought the Boston Globe comment was
favorable.  We become publicly more credible when we recognize and admit
our own imperfections, and when we can reach out to the general public
to ask them what they know about a claim.  To be sure, potentially
libellous claims still need to be held to a much highter standard, but
for the general run of uncertain claims, keeping the tag indefinitely
will show that we want help rather than having the question remain
hidden and unanswered.  This is even more important with obscure
subjects where nobody with the needed expertise is available to
regularly check facts.

>Yes, some trolls will use such a policy to try to remove things like
>"Thomas Jefferson was the 3rd President" until we get a source.  But we
>should set our standards assuming rational people as our colleagues, and
>deal with the trolls as a separate behavioral issue.
>
And other trolls will want that statement deleted because not including
the words "of the United States" could make him the president of almost
anything. ;-)

Ec


body:
jayjg wrote:

>On 10/16/06, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>On Oct 16, 2006, at 6:12 PM, jayjg wrote:
>>
>>
>>>People keep claiming that it's hard to source "obvious facts";
>>>however, in practice that's almost never the case. Obvious facts are
>>>generally extremely easy to source.
>>>
>>>
>>A better and more important issue is that it's a waste of time to
>>source obvious facts.
>>
>>
>Not really. Once they're sourced, they're sourced forever ...
>
I'm glad to see you say that.

Jefferson had an 8-year presidency during which a lot of things
happened.  An article about any one of those things can quite easily
have a reference to "third president Thomas Jefferson"  It follows from
what you say that a source will not be needed in any of those articles,
but a link to [[Thoma Jefferson]] will be sufficient.

Ec


from_name: brion at pobox.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki automated test run failure 2006-10-17

body:
An automated run of parserTests.php showed the following failures:

Running test TODO: Table security: embedded pipes (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-April/034637.html)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Link containing double-single-quotes '' (bug 4598)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Template with thumb image (with link in description)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: message transform: <noinclude> in transcluded template (bug 4926)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: message transform: <onlyinclude> in transcluded template (bug 4926)... FAILED!
Running test BUG 1887, part 2: A <math> with a thumbnail- math enabled... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML bullet list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML ordered list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML nested bullet list, open tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML nested ordered list, open tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Parsing optional HTML elements (Bug 6171)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Inline HTML vs wiki block nesting... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Mixing markup for italics and bold... FAILED!
Running test TODO: 5 quotes, code coverage +1 line... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML Hex character encoding.... FAILED!
Running test TODO: dt/dd/dl test... FAILED!

Passed 421 of 437 tests (96.34%) FAILED!


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Foundation-l] Dream a little...

body:
On 10/16/06, Birgitte SB <birgitte_sb at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I will not pretend to really understand this stuff.
> However Wikitex uses Lillypond and brion has marked
> Lillypond "wontfix"  because it is inherently unsafe.
> But if the Wikitex thing is really something different
> please forgive my confusion.

The current status, as I understand it, is that Peter Danenberg is
coming up with a new security model for WikiTeX. He has tentatively
stated that he wants to be done by December 1. Then the WMF tech team
can take another stab at reviewing it (and its components) for
integration.

As you know, I strongly believe we need this and other extension-based
functionality; we just need a general security model for it that makes
sense.
--
Peace & Love,
Erik

Member, Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees

DISCLAIMER: Unless otherwise stated, all views or opinions expressed
in this message are solely my own and do not represent an official
position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.


subject: [Foundation-l] Dream a little...


from_name: Lars Aronsson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

> The point is: suppose someone wanted to buy $100,000,000 of existing
> copyrighted material and set it free.  What should it be?

Wikipedia could certainly use that kind of money, and it would be
a shame to turn the offer down.  But apparently the WMF isn't
going to get the money anyway, because it will be paid to some
alredy wealthy rights holder.  This is a waste, even if it is the
rights holder we're pointing at.  Should we cooperate in this?
Not me.  But then again, I'm not speaking for the foundation.

If the WMF had the money without any restrictions, would it really
buy copyrights for it?  I strongly doubt that.  I can come up with
half a dozen better ideas for how to spend money.

Somebody has wasted their life, and all they have left now is a
big bag of money.  Poor souls!  And now they want to attach the
name of Wikipedia to a "big donation" in their name, as if this
was something Wikipedia just couldn't do without. If this donation
is accepted, it is inevitable that it will make headlines, not
because of how useful it is to Wikipedia, but because of the huge
sum of money.

Or are they going to make this effort even if Wikipedia's name
isn't attached to it?  Could this donation be made towards the far
less glorious Internet Archive?  Then Wikipedia could nod and say:
Yeah, we might be able to use parts of that.

If you want to make copyrighted contents free, I think you should
avoid to involve money, because Wikipedia's moral argument is far
stronger than its financial assets will ever be. But is that the
problem addressed here?  It sounds a lot more as if the real
problem is how to spend this money that somebody happens to have,
while at the same time pushing the idea that copyrights are worth
paying for, and thus shouldn't be given up for nothing.

The whole scheme reeks of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,
where so-called "money" is spent to help schools, when in fact
that money is paid to Microsoft Corporation for software licenses,
that the school could have for free if they used free software.

Even though US$ 0.1 bn is a lot, it is just 1/16 of what Google
bought Youtube for, and Wikipedia's name will be remembered a lot
longer than Youtube's.  You might say, yes, that was $1.6 bn in
Google shares, that could be worthless any week.  But here we're
talking $0.1 bn not in cash but in "copyright vouchers", which
could lose value far sooner than Google shares.

--
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se


from_name: Andrew Gray

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

body:
On 16/10/06, Roger Luethi <collector at hellgate.ch> wrote:

> I wonder if content acquired within the restrictions you mentioned (pick
> any of the good suggestions made by others) could be used as a lever in
> some dual-licensing scheme (as used by several major open source software
> companies). As long as the content is under a free license but not in the
> public domain (e.g. GFDL or CC-BY-SA), we'd have a bargaining chip that we
> could parlay into access to other works. -- We can't do that for Wikipedia
> itself (because there is no single copyright owner), but if we owned a
> significant piece of desirable content, things might be different.

I am afraid this really isn't much of a reply to your suggestion, but
it leaped into my head when I read it...

If we went down the road of "buying copyrights", we'd probably end up
setting up a "licensing trust", a registered charitable organisation
whose sole purpose is to acquire intellectual property and license it
out For The Betterment Of Humanity.

Of course, the benefit of a registered charity is that donations to it
are tax-deductible - and, much to my delight, it seems that this even
extends to gifts of intellectual property. So, put two and two
together, and how about having them tout for donations?

"We reckon the rights to that 1953 memoir your grandfather wrote are
worth maybe $250. However, that's if it gets republished, and there
isn't much commercial demand for books on 1940s Minnesota state
politics. But if you want to get *something* for it, you could donate
the copyright to us and put it down as a tax-deductible donation of
$250..."

Unfortunately, the legal burden of confirming that the person you're
dealing with is, in fact, the copyright owner may be insurmountable -
most "unwanted IP" will be inheritances, and figuring out who got them
in the will is not always easy. But it's worth a shot.

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


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Foundation-l] Pledge of Personal Commitment

body:
As a member of the board of trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, I,
Florence Devouard, am committed to Wikimedia Foundation?s goal to
establish and maintain the highest level of public confidence in its
accountability. I have personally committed to follow the standards set
out below, which represent the Wikimedia Foundation?s conflict of
interest policies:

I will conduct my activities with the board of trustees of Wikimedia
Foundation so that I do not advance or protect my own interests, or the
private interests of others with whom I have a relationship, in a way
that is detrimental to the interests of, or to the fundamental mission
of, Wikimedia Foundation.

In every instance in which I represent the Wikimedia Foundation, I will
conduct my activities in a manner to best promote the interests of
Wikimedia Foundation.

In all matters that come before the board of trustees for a vote that
may favorably impact my own financial interests, or the private
interests of others with whom I have a financial relationship, or any
organization of which I am a part, I will reveal that relationship and
abstain from a vote in the matter.

When a conflict of interest arises, or when a potential conflict of
interest emerges, I will promptly disclose that conflict, or potential
conflict, to the Executive Director of Wikimedia Foundation and to the
Chairman of its board of trustees and seek a resolution of that issue.

Entered into on this the 17th day of October, 2006.
Florence Devouard
Member, Board of Trustees
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

-------

Conflict of Interest Questionnaire added on the board wiki.


from_name: Mark Williamson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] starting a new language

body:
It's considered a dialect of Latvian by the Ethnologue.

But they're known to have very unreliable information in many cases.
They even list Yinglish as a language when it's not even a dialect or
sociolect, merely a group of code-switching phenomena (mostly. see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yinglish ), while they neglect to even
mention Singlish, the creole language spoken natively by most young
Singaporeans.

Mark

On 17/10/06, GerardM <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hoi,
> The code bat is a "collective code" for Baltic (other). Latgalian however is
> considered a dialect of Latvian and therefore it is not "other".
>
> http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=lav
> http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/documentation.asp?id=bat
> Thanks,
>    GerardM
>
> On 10/17/06, Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On 10/17/06, GerardM <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Hoi,
> > > According to Ethnologue Latgalian is a dialect of Latvian. From my point
> > of
> > > view, there is not even a proposed code to be used for your proposed
> > > Wikipedia that would be acceptable. Acceptable would be something like
> > > "lv-latg" or "lav-latg" ..
> >
> > There's a test wiki at http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Test-wp/ltg
> > The code bat-ltv has been suggested.
> >
> > Angela
> >
> > --
> > Angela Beesley
> > http://wikia.com | http://a.nge.la
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
Refije dirije lanm? yo paske nou posede pw?p bato.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

body:
Maury Markowitz wrote:

>>I think we should also focus on works from the last 30 years and put
>>some energy behind a copyright reform effort to get even older content
>>liberated by legal means.
>>
>>
>I'm sorry, but I believe this will have no measurable effect on the wiki.
>
>In opposition to any effort this $100 million could possibly generate, the
>entire media industry is arrayed with a variety of well established lobby
>groups to ensure no such change takes place. It is resonable to suspect that
>the only changes to the law will be to increase the length of time for
>protections, while at the same time removing existing user rights.
>
This attitude of stark defeatism is the next best thing to outright
opposition.  Right as you may be about vested interest acting to protect
their investments it does not justify making our copyright policies any
more wimpish than they already are.  If we bend over to achieve absolute
legal correctness are we so na?ve as to believe that those vested
interests will be accomodating just because we are so nice about it?
When we are bent over they will know exactly where to shove our
niceness.  We can never win this war without showing some aggression.
The best that can be accomplished by a totally passive defence is stasis.

As Google digitizes large masses of material from the world's libraries
it does not talk about the fifteen year database protection laws that
are already a reality in the European Union.  When anything significant
is added to that database the 15-year clock is reset at the beginning.
The copyright status of the material in the databse does not matter for
the purpose of this protection.  By generating its huge database of
public domain  material it puts itself in the position of being able to
protect that material when it believe it to be big enough.  It can
afford to lose its fight with current publishers.  For a very long time
until now only those who wanted enhanced copyright protection were in a
position to oursue those rights.  Those who wanted to produce a handful
of copies to distribute free to their friends would have no incentive to
pursue legal avenues; the cost-effectivenes of such actions was too
poor.  We are probably in a better position than ever to seek an
intellectual property regime that would be more friendly to the users.

Ec


from_name: Jeffrey V. Merkey

subject: [Foundation-l] Cherokee Message Files Posted for mediawiki-1.8.2

body:
Cherokee Messages Files have been posted for MediaWiki-1.8.2 and
additions to Names.php for Cherokee Phonetics (non-Syllabary)
as a new language code 'chrp'.  They are released under the GFDL and may
be incorporated into future MediaWiki releases.

Changed Files:

languages/Names.php
languages/messages/MessagesChr.php
languages/messages/MessagesChr.php

The bz2 archive containing the Native Cherokee Messages files for
mediawiki-1.8.2 is located at:

ftp://www.wikigadugi.org/wiki/MediaWiki/MessagesChr-1.8.2-20061016.tar.gz.bz2

Jeff


subject: [Wikitech-l] Cherokee Message Files Posted for mediawiki-1.8.2


subject: [Foundation-l] Wikinews language coordinator needed

body:
Thanks for all the messages offering to help. I'm handing the role
over to Craig Spurrier, who is responsible for the print edition of
the English Wikinews and has been putting it out like clockwork. This
will, I hope, ensure that new language edition requests for Wikinews
will also be handled reliably. Thanks, Craig, for your help in this.

Craig, one amendment to my original request: Instead of filing the
site requests in BugZilla, could you use
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Approved_requests_for_new_languages
once a language has met the necessary approval? This will allow
developers to set up new languages as a batch.

I've been discussing with members of the language subcommittee how we
can improve the process in general and will hopefully find time to
write some thoughts on the issue soon. Ideally at some point we will
have a Grand Unified Language Policy (GULP) but we're still quite a
bit away from that. ;-)
--
Peace & Love,
Erik

Member, Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees

DISCLAIMER: Unless otherwise stated, all views or opinions expressed
in this message are solely my own and do not represent an official
position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.


from_name: ScottL

subject: [WikiEN-l] Episode summaries

body:
Oldak Quill wrote:
> On 17/10/06, Chris Picone <ccool2ax at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Sorry, I'm new to mailing lists, so bear with me. I am user Ccool2ax
>> on English WIkipedia (too lazy to link), and I've noticed in the past
>> that many "Episode summaries", plot summaries of TV shows, have
>> absolutely no sources. They are completely OR. Family Guy, the
>> Simpsons, Lost, all of them have no sources! Every time I bring up
>> discussion I get "The episode is teh reference!" as a reply. I'm here
>> to ask you guys what we should do about these thousands and thousands
>> of OR articles? So far, all there is is WP:EPISODE (again too lazy to
>> link), a small essay saying that episode summaries need sources. What
>> should we do?
>
>
> The episode is a source, the problem is whether we should be using primary
> sources like this.

   "Like this"?  He has described a behavior that is vague enough that
it could be totally appropriate use of the episode as a source or not.
Shows like books are perfectly good sources for the facts of the events
they contain.  The problem is when we wonder into the area of literary
criticism, in that case the episode or book is not a valid source for
the simple fact that it does not verify the criticism.

SKL


subject: [Foundation-l] Dream a little...

body:
On 10/17/06, Birgitte SB <birgitte_sb at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I am unsure what you mean here.  The code will look
> the same at en.WS as it does at en.WP.

Pages at en.WS likely have lower editing rates. New users looking at a
page full of code should be a less of a proble,

> It will only
> show up where there is a need to display music.  Many
> editors will never come across thes edit screens at
> all.  However much of a learning curve there is with
> this code it will be more efficient than cropping
> images from book scans.  I don't understand what you
> are advocating here.
>
> Birgitte SB

I'm suggesting we be careful before adding yet another form of
incomprihensible code to articles.
--
geni


subject: [Foundation-l] Dream a little...


subject: [Foundation-l] Closing inactive Wikinewses

body:
I suggest the following policy:

When a Wikinews edition has seen no new stories for 8 weeks, the wiki
is locked and a site notice is added: "This Wikinews edition is
currently inactive. If you are interested in working on it, please
indicate so on [[m:Wikinews/Reactivate an edition]]." (In the correct
language, of course.) Instead of just 5 votes, you would need 10
Wikimedians to sign the reactivation pledge.

Inactive editions could also be removed from the interlanguage link
list on the Main Pages, but that would be optional if it's too much
maintenance.

There are currently a few Wikinewses that meet this criterion. In
general our setup policy tends to at least determine whether there's a
general interest but that doesn't ensure that people keep posting.

Without such a policy, I think we are just turning these sites into
magnets for vandalism and spam, as well as making Wikinews look
unprofessional (a news site with news that are a year old isn't much
of one). An open recognition that an edition is dead seems preferable
to me.

Wikinews is of course very special in this regard because it doesn't
really matter that much if a Wikipedia edition is dead for a couple of
months, but for Wikinews, it is a very obvious sign that the critical
mass is not there.

Does this policy proposal sound reasonable?

--
Peace & Love,
Erik

Member, Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees

DISCLAIMER: Unless otherwise stated, all views or opinions expressed
in this message are solely my own and do not represent an official
position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.


from_name: Bryan Derksen

subject: [WikiEN-l] [[Kristian Menchaca]] - link to video

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
> I deleted the link completely.

And, frankly, in a rather sloppy manner. You gave no edit summary and
your explanation on the talk page consisted entirely of the acronyms
"WP:RS, WP:NOR." Your subsequent response when I asked for elaboration
was just a slightly more wordy version of the same thing, an assertion
that this is an unreliable source without anything to actually back the
assertion up.

This is a case where I don't care about the subject of the article and
have no basis for an opinion of my own about the external link (I
haven't even watched it), but if you'd been any other editor I would
have simply reverted your change for lack of explanation. I know it's a
hassle, but in the long run I think it's much easier on everyone if a
sound argument is presented so others don't have to keep re-adding and
re-removing this material. It looks like that's been done in the
article's history at least once already.

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body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
> I appreciate your concerns, but I think the explanation I gave on the
> talk page in response to your inquiry was adequate, and I think that
> this is the sort of explanation that ought to be always adequate
> everywhere and for everyone in cases of this type.

Your explanation of why you thought the Ogrish link was unreliable was
"It sounds very much inherently unreliable to me. It is a shock site. It
has been victimized by hoaxes in the past."

The first sentence is just a repetition of your opinion that it's
unreliable, the second is a fact that appears well supported on the
[[Ogrish.com]] page but doesn't necessarily mean it's unreliable (much
like how "being a blog" doesn't necessarily mean a source is
unreliable), and the third is unsupported by any examples either
directly from you or on [[Ogrish.com]] itself. I'm sorry, but IMO this
is still really wishy-washy.

It seems to me like you may be trying to use policies and guidelines to
support a decision already made for other unrelated reasons. Are you
actually removing this link on some sort of "human decency" grounds, as
I recall you've done in other cases in the past?

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Episode summaries

body:
Oldak Quill wrote:
> The episode is a source, the problem is whether we should be using primary
> sources like this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research#Primary_and_secondary_sources
says:

"An article or section of an article that relies on primary source
should (1) only make descriptive claims the accuracy of which is easily
verifiable by any reasonable adult without specialist knowledge, and (2)
make no analytic, synthetic, interpretive, explanatory, or evaluative
claims."

So it looks to me like a straight synopsis of the events depicted in a
TV episode easily fits that bill and is not considered original research.

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body:
On 10/17/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> ... and images can be faked. J. Random Website is not a Reliable Source.

I believe the file fits with all know descriptions. We accept a lot of
images from J. Random person that could be faked.

>
> If that's an admission of rules lawyering, you're headed for bannination.

I've admited that back when I used to inforce the 3RR I delt with rule
lawyers but being better at it. Yes I can rule lawyer if I want to.
Often it is a far more effective tactic than simply yelling "IAR IAR".
Rule lawyering is just a tool. It can be used for good or ill.

Why do you insist that rule lawyering is "wrong" or "taboo"? It is a
way of dealing with people and nothing more. For that matter
presentation is a way of dealing with people and nothing more. If you
deny yourself a useful tool simply because it reminds you
uncomfortably of some of it's users, you have uselessly and
pointlessly crippled yourself.

    * Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, "Looking Process in the Eye"

(I deny that I have spent too much time playing Alpha Centauri)

--
geni


body:
On 10/17/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> Wikipedia is not a shock site.

Wikipedia is not censored for example [[Harlequin type ichthyosis]]
could in theory be illustrated (if it ever is I wil be campaining for
an autofellatio type solution) which would risk qualifying us a a
shock site.

At the moment though the only pic we have of a of a fetal abnotmality
that I know is

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Cyclopia.jpg

In anycase the video is not used as a shock item by any known shock site

--
geni


from_name: Patrick Hall

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

body:
Hi folks,

* I'd like to see Wikipedia commission or acquire a complete set of
world maps in SVG (this almost certainly falls under more general
ideas already covered, but this is one specific detail I'd really like
to see).

* Build or formalize a reliable peer-to-peer payment system to fund
smaller Wikipedias. I recall a considerable amount of support around
the concept of funding the smaller Wikipedias in a previous thread,
but IIRC the conversation ended at "how would it be accomplished?" So,
I suggest that investing in infrastructure to make this happen would
be a good move. It would be a huge amount of work: negotiating
international tax law, figuring out reliable payment method,
preventing fraud, determining what institutions wouuld be involved,
how people apply, how positions are advertised, blah blah blah.

But you did say think big ?

Patrick Hall
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Babbage


subject: [Wikipedia-l] starting a new language

body:
Arns has a really good point. This is based on precedent.

While we do try to follow certain conventions where possible, we do
have some inconsistencies with standards. But we're not ISOpedia.
Whether we conform to standards or not is our own choice.

In the past, we have generally had codes in the form of fiu-vro,
bat-smg, and map-bms.

This is despite the fact that V?ro, Samogitian, and Banyumasan are
considered by the Ethnologue (and many others) to be dialects of
Estonian, Lithuanian, and Javanese respectively.

We are not perfect.

Mark

On 17/10/06, Zordsdavini iz Litvy <zordsdavini at gmail.com> wrote:
> Latgalian is going in the same way as Samogitian. Soon Samogitian will have
> iso. It will be ZOG. For now it use bat-smg. The latgalian will have iso,
> too, I hope because Latgalian have more tradition than Samogitian. When
> Samogitian wiki was starting we decided to use bat-smg. I think the best
> code for now is bat-ltg. To write about dictionary differences can proposer.
> I'll tell him.
>
> Arns
>
> 2006/10/17, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com>:
> >
> > Hoi,
> > There are two issues.
> > * What/ is/ the code for the moment
> > * Get recognition for Latgalian as a language.
> >
> > People have considered languages like Min-Nan and Yue as a dialect of
> > Chinese for a long time. They HAD to use codes like zh-min-nan because
> > this was necessary to comply with the standards. At this moment we have
> > 7602 languages that are recognised in ISO-639-3. This is a big
> > improvement over what was in ISO-639-2. The ISO-639-3 codes will become
> > part of how languages are seen in the near future on the Internet. I am
> > afraid that Latgalian is at this moment considered a dialect of Latvian.
> > I am also sure that there are many other "languages/dialects" that are
> > in a similar situation. Either because people are afronted because what
> > it considers a language they consider a dialect or the other way around.
> > There are also many people who consider something a dialect of for
> > instance Italian while everybody knows that Italian was constructed
> > after the unification of Italy and, that Italian is based on Florentine.
> > The point I am making here there is a lot of confusion and there is a
> > lot of posturing based on bad information. Having to base the code for
> > Latgalian on Latvian is the best for the moment.
> >
> > When you consider Latgalian a language, there are processes open to us
> > to have this considered by organisations like Ethnologue and ISO. We
> > have contacts that may help us achieve this. In order to get to that
> > stage, it is necessary to jump through certain hoops. One of these is to
> > demonstrate that there is indeed this difference that warrants Latgalian
> > to be considered a language. Aspects of this are also showing literature
> > and current use of the language. One of the first resources would be a
> > Swadesh list where both Latvian and Latgalian can be compared.
> >
> > FYI I am from an area of the Netherlands; Westfriesland where they used
> > to speak a language; Westfries. It has a literature; it has a grammar it
> > is not understood by people who speak Dutch. There are dialects of
> > Westfries there are dictionaries of Westfries and there are revival
> > societies that give cabaret performances in Westfries. At some stage I
> > am sure that someone will ask for a Wikipedia in Westfries. I would not
> > stop them. I KNOW that it takes relatively little effort to make the
> > case for Westfries. In WiktionaryZ I would welcome dictionaries in
> > Westfries or Latgalian... NB Westfries is not West Frisian .. which imho
> > is a complete misnomer.
> >
> > Thanks,
> >    GerardM
> >
> > Zordsdavini iz Litvy wrote:
> > > latgalian has long tradition of writing system. It was in 1918-1944
> > second
> > > official language. Considering of dialect status is political. And there
> > are
> > > very active people which are working on latgalian language life. It's
> > > dialect like neopolitanian or venecian. We say it's the language.
> > >
> > > Arns
> > >
> > > 2006/10/17, GerardM <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com>:
> > >
> > >> Hoi,
> > >> The code bat is a "collective code" for Baltic (other). Latgalian
> > however
> > >> is
> > >> considered a dialect of Latvian and therefore it is not "other".
> > >>
> > >> http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=lav
> > >> http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/documentation.asp?id=bat
> > >> Thanks,
> > >>    GerardM
> > >>
> > >> On 10/17/06, Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >>
> > >>> On 10/17/06, GerardM <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >>>
> > >>>> Hoi,
> > >>>> According to Ethnologue Latgalian is a dialect of Latvian. From my
> > >>>>
> > >> point
> > >>
> > >>> of
> > >>>
> > >>>> view, there is not even a proposed code to be used for your proposed
> > >>>> Wikipedia that would be acceptable. Acceptable would be something
> > like
> > >>>> "lv-latg" or "lav-latg" ..
> > >>>>
> > >>> There's a test wiki at http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Test-wp/ltg
> > >>> The code bat-ltv has been suggested.
> > >>>
> > >>> Angela
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Ok^ ek^ besla ikv Olmok Vzauep^evk
> :)
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
Refije dirije lanm? yo paske nou posede pw?p bato.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Latgalian

body:
What I don't understand is how the Baltic states can be so unyielding
to linguistic minorities. After what they went through under Soviet
occupation as regards their own national languages, you would think
they'd be a little more understanding. But apparently not.

Mark

On 17/10/06, J?v? Sull?v <juvasul at ut.ee> wrote:
> Dear Angela, Arns, Mark and others,
>
> bat-ltg like proposed in Latgalian test wiki
> http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Test-wp/ltg
> would be an ideal code for Latgalian Wikipedia.
> Like bat-smg is perfect for Samogitian
> and fiu-vro is currently perfect for V?ro.
>
> I have long personal contacts with Latgalian language activists and researchers and I
> know a bit the history of Latgalian.
>
> Of course Latgalian is not merely a dialect of Latvian. Latgalian has long history of
> its own literary language and it has been the second official language of Latvia in
> 1920-s. Later Latvian nationalist goverment of Ulmanis prohibited any official use of
> Latgalian. Latvian authorities still refuse to recognize Latgalian as a separate
> language. But it is exactly the same case as with V?ro in Estonia and with Samogitian
> in Lithuania, and with many other languages which despite it already have their own
> Wikipedia.
>
> Ethnologue (with its location and interests) is too far from us, it just does not know
> the real situation of regional languages of the Baltic countries. And maibe Latgalian
> activists have been also a bit modest to inform the World about their language.
>
> Actually Latgalian is the only regional or minority language in Latvia that is vital
> enough to have its own wikipedia, because the other small language of Latvia (Finno-
> Ugric) Livonian is too small and in fact extinct.
>
> Anyway Latgalian can be definitely considered as a language and it deserves and needs
> its own Wikipedia.
>
> See more about Latgalian:
> http://www.geocities.com/latgalian/
>
> J?v? Sull?v/Sulev Iva
> (V?rok from V?ro Wikipedia)
>
>
>
> 17.10.2006 11:24:41, "Mark Williamson" <node.ue at gmail.com> kirot':
>
> >It's considered a dialect of Latvian by the Ethnologue.
> >
> >But they're known to have very unreliable information in many cases.
> >They even list Yinglish as a language when it's not even a dialect or
> >sociolect, merely a group of code-switching phenomena (mostly. see
> >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yinglish ), while they neglect to even
> >mention Singlish, the creole language spoken natively by most young
> >Singaporeans.
> >
> >Mark
> >
> >On 17/10/06, GerardM <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> Hoi,
> >> The code bat is a "collective code" for Baltic (other). Latgalian however is
> >> considered a dialect of Latvian and therefore it is not "other".
> >>
> >> http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=lav
> >> http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/documentation.asp?id=bat
> >> Thanks,
> >>    GerardM
> >>
> >> On 10/17/06, Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> >
> >> > On 10/17/06, GerardM <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> > > Hoi,
> >> > > According to Ethnologue Latgalian is a dialect of Latvian. From my point
> >> > of
> >> > > view, there is not even a proposed code to be used for your proposed
> >> > > Wikipedia that would be acceptable. Acceptable would be something like
> >> > > "lv-latg" or "lav-latg" ..
> >> >
> >> > There's a test wiki at http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Test-wp/ltg
> >> > The code bat-ltv has been suggested.
> >> >
> >> > Angela
> >> >
> >> > --
> >> > Angela Beesley
> >> > http://wikia.com | http://a.nge.la
> >> > _______________________________________________
> >> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> >> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> >> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >> >
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> >> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> >> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >>
> >
> >
> >--
> >Refije dirije lanm? yo paske nou posede pw?p bato.
> >_______________________________________________
> >Wikipedia-l mailing list
> >Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> >http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
Refije dirije lanm? yo paske nou posede pw?p bato.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

body:
On 10/17/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> I say we pretend that it was a possible donation and that Lars'
> impolitic response on a public list just cost us $100 million and that
> we begin to tar and feather him accordingly.

Relax. The public discussion with all its highs and lows is completely
expected and fine in the context of this particular potential project.
--
Peace & Love,
Erik

Member, Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees

DISCLAIMER: Unless otherwise stated, all views or opinions expressed
in this message are solely my own and do not represent an official
position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.


body:
On 10/17/06, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Thanks for all the messages offering to help. I'm handing the role
> over to Craig Spurrier, who is responsible for the print edition of
> the English Wikinews and has been putting it out like clockwork. This
> will, I hope, ensure that new language edition requests for Wikinews
> will also be handled reliably. Thanks, Craig, for your help in this.

To clarify (once more), Craig is simply a volunteer who has committed
to looking at the Wikinews language page and the status of the
requests, and move them from one page to another. This is not an
official position or anything like that. Anyone else can help, too,
but it's good to have at least one person who pledges to do so on a
regular basis.
--
Peace & Love,
Erik

Member, Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees

DISCLAIMER: Unless otherwise stated, all views or opinions expressed
in this message are solely my own and do not represent an official
position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.


from_name: Jimmy Wales

body:
I appreciate your concerns, but I think the explanation I gave on the
talk page in response to your inquiry was adequate, and I think that
this is the sort of explanation that ought to be always adequate
everywhere and for everyone in cases of this type.

Bryan Derksen wrote:
> Jimmy Wales wrote:
>> I deleted the link completely.
>
> And, frankly, in a rather sloppy manner. You gave no edit summary and
> your explanation on the talk page consisted entirely of the acronyms
> "WP:RS, WP:NOR." Your subsequent response when I asked for elaboration
> was just a slightly more wordy version of the same thing, an assertion
> that this is an unreliable source without anything to actually back the
> assertion up.
>
> This is a case where I don't care about the subject of the article and
> have no basis for an opinion of my own about the external link (I
> haven't even watched it), but if you'd been any other editor I would
> have simply reverted your change for lack of explanation. I know it's a
> hassle, but in the long run I think it's much easier on everyone if a
> sound argument is presented so others don't have to keep re-adding and
> re-removing this material. It looks like that's been done in the
> article's history at least once already.
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


body:
Phil Sandifer wrote:
> On Oct 16, 2006, at 6:12 PM, jayjg wrote:
>
>> People keep claiming that it's hard to source "obvious facts";
>> however, in practice that's almost never the case. Obvious facts are
>> generally extremely easy to source.
>
> A better and more important issue is that it's a waste of time to
> source obvious facts.

I think that, being reasonable people, we all more or less agree about
this.  That is to say, obvious facts do not need to be sourced, and if
someone wants to challenge them (to disrupt things) one easy enough way
to deal with the is to provide the cites.

All I really meant to guard against was the notion that a firm policy of
"source it or remove it" for controversial points does not have to lead
us down some bad path where people start removing obvious facts just to
tweak us.

If someone went to 100 articles and removed a dozen sentences from each
with no explanation other than "unsourced" and they were removing
patently obvious facts, that is a behavioral issue that can be dealt
with separately.

--Jimbo


from_name: Sarah

body:
On 10/17/06, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
> Jimmy Wales wrote:
> > I appreciate your concerns, but I think the explanation I gave on the
> > talk page in response to your inquiry was adequate, and I think that
> > this is the sort of explanation that ought to be always adequate
> > everywhere and for everyone in cases of this type.
>
> Your explanation of why you thought the Ogrish link was unreliable was
> "It sounds very much inherently unreliable to me. It is a shock site. It
> has been victimized by hoaxes in the past."
>
> The first sentence is just a repetition of your opinion that it's
> unreliable, the second is a fact that appears well supported on the
> [[Ogrish.com]] page but doesn't necessarily mean it's unreliable (much
> like how "being a blog" doesn't necessarily mean a source is
> unreliable), and the third is unsupported by any examples either
> directly from you or on [[Ogrish.com]] itself.
>
Bryan, I don't know that the Ogrish link was being used for in this
case, but in general our understanding of what's "reliable" involves a
degree of editorial oversight, such as fact-checking, legal scrutiny,
and so on. I believe the Ogrish site posts video and images from
anyone who sends them in, regardless of whether they're authentic or
staged; if it looks horrible or weird, they'll use it. That makes it
pretty close to the opposite of our definition of reliable.

Sarah


from_name: Chris Picone

subject: [WikiEN-l] Episode summaries

body:
> "An article or section of an article that relies on primary source
> should (1) only make descriptive claims the accuracy of which is easily
> verifiable by any reasonable adult without specialist knowledge, and (2)
> make no analytic, synthetic, interpretive, explanatory, or evaluative
> claims."
>
> So it looks to me like a straight synopsis of the events depicted in a
> TV episode easily fits that bill and is not considered original research.

I somewhat agree, but take a look at a Family Guy episode summary..
any one. See the Cultural References section? All facts listed there
are entirely OR!

>From "Peter's Got Woods":
"When Shauna, Brian's love interest introduces herself, there's
heavenly singing of the name 'Shauna' in the background. This parodies
a scene from Ferris Beuller's Day Off when Jennifer Grey's character
tells Charlie Sheen's character 'It's Jean, but most guys call me
Shauna.'"
-No source, based entirely on editor's personal knowledge! THese
things are all over these summaries!


list: commons-l

from_name: damodar vinayak bale

subject: [Commons-l] Dream a little...

body:
 ? TRUTH only will WIN,is the meaning of the words SATYA MEVA JAYATE.
 There is no need to Dream."Arogyam Dhana Sampada" is translated as
 "Health is Wealth".So converting every moment of living in terms of
 dollars will not lead the world to good.We have harmed the Nature more
 than enough.We now should think on the basis of recycling from the
 waste that has been left,in search of good.End of the globe is very
 near,if Nature is disturbed any more.So GOOD LUCK.
   Shyam.

On Sun, 15 Oct 2006 Jimmy Wales wrote :
>
>I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you
>would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of
>generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be
>purchased and freed.
>
>Dream big.  Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase
>copyrights to be made available under a free license.  What would you
>like to see purchased and released under a free license?
>
>Photos libraries? textbooks? newspaper archives? Be bold, be specific,
>be general, brainstorm, have fun with it.
>
>I was recently asked this question by someone who is potentially in a
>position to make this happen, and he wanted to know what we need, what
>we dream of, that we can't accomplish on our own, or that we would
>expect to take a long time to accomplish on our own.
>
>--Jimbo
>_______________________________________________
>Commons-l mailing list
>Commons-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
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from_name: Gerard Meijssen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] starting a new language

body:
Hoi,
What Wiki are you talking about? What language, what project ?
Thanks,
    GerardM

Zordsdavini iz Litvy wrote:
> how much time does it takes to start new wiki (test wiki started one year
> ago)?
>
> Arns
>
> 2006/10/17, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com>:
>
>> Emma wrote:
>>
>>> Hi Guys,
>>>
>>> I am a new member of the wikipedia society. I have a plan to start
>>>
>> wikipedia
>>
>>> in a new language. Please give me any suggestion.
>>>
>>>
>> 1. What language?
>>
>> 2. How many people speak it?
>>
>> 3. Do we have it already?
>>
>> 4. See http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages


from_name: Emma

subject: [Wikipedia-l] [Wikisource-l] [Commons-l] Dream a little...

body:
Hi Guys,

I am a new member of the wikipedia society. I have a plan to start wikipedia
in a new language. Please give me any suggestion.

On 16/10/06, Yann Forget <yann at forget-me.net> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> Danny tells it right. I have little to add to his mail.
>
> daniwo59 at aol.com a ?crit :
> > My own thoughts on this, which I also expressed on the meta page:
> >
> > 1. There is plenty of material out that that is already public domain.
> > Part of the problem is that it can take forever and a day to digitize it
> > all. In the case of books and magazines, digitization often involves
> > destroying the hard copies in the process. There are, however,
> > specialized scanners that can do the work without ruining the books
> > themselves. These are expensive (about US $30,000 a machine). Ten
> > machines, strategically located around the world, along with student
> > staff to operate them around the clock could help to preserve these
> > texts and store them for prosperity. Additional people (paid and
> > volunteer) will be needed to OCR, proof, and hyperlink the material to
> > ensure that it doesn't get lost in a glut of material (I have visions of
> > the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, when the Ark was finally
> > stored in some crate in an army warehouse).
> >
> > 2. While OCR capacities exist for some languages, they do not exist for
> > other languages, where the material is much more likely to get lost.
> > Manuscripts in Tibetan monasteries, for example, can be scanend but not
> > OCRed easily. To make this information available, developers should be
> > paid to create adequate OCR tools for these languages. Rough cost: $5
> > million.
>
> Much of the limits of Wikisource now is on the capability to scan and
> ocr documents. There is no good free OCR software, apart the new
> software recently released to GPL by Google, but it works only for
> English and has still limitations. So developing a good free and
> multilingual OCR software would be my priority. AFAIK there is no good
> OCR software (free or not) for any Indian languages, including Sanskrit.
> I have never seen any for Tibetan either.
>
> But having a software is not enough. A few OCR servers managed by the
> Foundation where anyone can sent an automated OCR request would be very
> useful. There are already proprietary OCR software who can do that.
>
> > 3. Music has been recorded around the world for well over a century, yet
> > many of the early recordings are being lost, especially those on wax
> > cylinders and porcelain records. Preservation includes locating,
> > identifying, and remastering. People must be trained to do this. Rough
> > cost: $35 million over two years.
> >
> > 4. This is true of old films as well. Celluloid copies are extremely
> > rare and extremely flammable. Restoration is exceedingly costly. For
> > example, [[Theda Bara]] is a well-known vamp of early Hollywood (the
> > word "vamp" was first used to describe her), yet none of her films
> > survive, and they were made less than a hundred years ago. Films are
> > international, they include important historic documents such as
> > newsreels, and they are being lost every day. Today, most
> > preservation work is being done by major studios, since it is so costly.
> > In other words, they are taking important works now in the public
> > domain, restoring them, and contending that the restoration is an
> > original work, i.e., another hundred years at least until some Vigo or
> > Charlie Chaplin films enter the public domain ... and little attention
> > is being paid to newsreels of events like the Russian revolution, World
> > War I, etc. Like music, people should be offered scholarships to learn
> > the art of film restoration and work on these projects. Until this
> > happens it can be outsourced. Rough cost: $50 million.
>
> I would add a special request for some of Cartier-Bresson photographs of
> Gandhi's funerals. I would have said a copy of the Encyclopedia of the
> Enlightment (1750, by Diderot and d'Alembert), but we already have it. ;o)
>
> > 5. To ensure all of this remains accessible, we will need a LOT of
> > servers and bandwidth: Initial outlay: $10 million.
>
> Yes, it's important not to forget that point.
>
> > Total $100 million dollars, spent over 5 years. Costs include staffing,
> > identifying prospective targets, transportation, overhead, etc. Just
> > coordinating a project of this scope will take a lot of effort.
>
> Yes, I would generally put more money on people's work than on documents.
>
> > And there is competition too. As an example,
> > http://historical.library.cornell.edu/IWP/ is a collection of
> > Internation Women's Journals, some of which are very important
> > historically. They are already scanned, but they are inaccessible
> > because a private company has (rightfully or wrongfully) copyrighted the
> > scans.
> >
> > Lots to be done. You will see how quickly $100 million can be spent.
> >
> > Danny
> >
> > In a message dated 10/15/2006 11:27:57 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
> > jwales at wikia.com writes:
> >
> >     I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you
> >     would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job
> of
> >     generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be
> >     purchased and freed.
> >
> >     Dream big.  Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to
> purchase
> >     copyrights to be made available under a free license.  What would
> you
> >     like to see purchased and released under a free license?
> >
> >     Photos libraries? textbooks? newspaper archives? Be bold, be
> specific,
> >     be general, brainstorm, have fun with it.
> >
> >     I was recently asked this question by someone who is potentially in
> a
> >     position to make this happen, and he wanted to know what we need,
> what
> >     we dream of, that we can't accomplish on our own, or that we would
> >     expect to take a long time to accomplish on our own.
>
> Yes, fun has just started.
>
> >     --Jimbo
>
> Regards,
>
> Yann
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
Amanuel Amente
XL in life


from_name: Simetrical

body:
On 10/17/06, Jeffrey V. Merkey <jmerkey at wolfmountaingroup.com> wrote:
>
> Cherokee Messages Files have been posted for MediaWiki-1.8.2 and
> additions to Names.php for Cherokee Phonetics (non-Syllabary)
> as a new language code 'chrp'.  They are released under the GFDL and may
> be incorporated into future MediaWiki releases.

MediaWiki is GPL, not GFDL.  The messages have to be GPL or a
compatible license.


references:
<egp7lp$no6$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<NABBJGECPILFNLFEAPIKEEACJBAA.nickpj@gmail.com>
	<7c2a12e20610161943m7daefdc4pd12a4ebee5195622@mail.gmail.com>
	<4534CB7A.2050505@gmx.net>

body:
On 10/17/06, dbenzhuser <dbenzhuser at gmx.net> wrote:
> The script (which is used at frwiki, too) shouldn't make any problems.
> It searches for divs of the editsection class, if it can't find any, it
> just does nothing. As the new version uses span instead of div the
> script reacts as if there where no headings in the page.

Yes, but that's not desired behavior, is it?  Well, whatever.


from_name: Daniel R. Tobias

subject: [WikiEN-l] John Doolittle

body:
With all the talk of Mr. Doolittle's article, I looked at it myself,
and can't help noticing that it begins with a "dab note" that this
particular Doolittle is *not* the doctor who talks to animals.  Glad
*that*'s cleared up!  (Gotta love Wikipedia...)

--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/


from_name: GerardM

subject: [Wikipedia-l] starting a new language

body:
Hoi,
According to Ethnologue Latgalian is a dialect of Latvian. From my point of
view, there is not even a proposed code to be used for your proposed
Wikipedia that would be acceptable. Acceptable would be something like
"lv-latg" or "lav-latg" ..
Thanks,
   GerardM

On 10/17/06, Zordsdavini iz Litvy <zordsdavini at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> About emma - I don't know.
> But I am speaking about latgalian wikipedia :)
>
> Arns
>
> 2006/10/17, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com>:
> >
> > Hoi,
> > What Wiki are you talking about? What language, what project ?
> > Thanks,
> >     GerardM
> >
> >
> >
> > Zordsdavini iz Litvy wrote:
> > > how much time does it takes to start new wiki (test wiki started one
> > year
> > > ago)?
> > >
> > > Arns
> > >
> > > 2006/10/17, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com>:
> > >
> > >> Emma wrote:
> > >>
> > >>> Hi Guys,
> > >>>
> > >>> I am a new member of the wikipedia society. I have a plan to start
> > >>>
> > >> wikipedia
> > >>
> > >>> in a new language. Please give me any suggestion.
> > >>>
> > >>>
> > >> 1. What language?
> > >>
> > >> 2. How many people speak it?
> > >>
> > >> 3. Do we have it already?
> > >>
> > >> 4. See http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Ok^ ek^ besla ikv Olmok Vzauep^evk
> :)
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Dschwen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little... ...of free geodata

body:
> The point is: suppose someone wanted to buy $100,000,000 of existing
> copyrighted material and set it free.  What should it be?

Geographical data!

Right now there os only a very limited amount of free geodata available. The
US is a positive example, but in Europe most of the data to generate useful
maps is copyrighted and sold to companies like TeleAtlas.

Geographical data would allow the creation of a free atlas, which could be
linked to already geocoded Wikipedia content. With upcoming devices such as
cameras and mobile phones readily equipped with GPS receivers, a
Wikipedia "location based service" makes more and more sense.

The companies which make a living licensing this geodata (who's aquisition is
mostly paid for with tax money by the way) will certainly oppose a complete
buyout. But it is a real shame that not even a dataset with up to date high
resolution country borders is available and maintained (correct me if I'm
wrong). So this plus regional borders and major roads would be a good
starting point. And would make projects like (shameless plug:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dschwen/WikiMiniAtlas ) more useful.

Daniel

--
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dschwen
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dschwen
http://commons.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dschwen
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dschwen


from_name: Oldak Quill

subject: [WikiEN-l] Episode summaries

body:
On 17/10/06, Chris Picone <ccool2ax at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Sorry, I'm new to mailing lists, so bear with me. I am user Ccool2ax
> on English WIkipedia (too lazy to link), and I've noticed in the past
> that many "Episode summaries", plot summaries of TV shows, have
> absolutely no sources. They are completely OR. Family Guy, the
> Simpsons, Lost, all of them have no sources! Every time I bring up
> discussion I get "The episode is teh reference!" as a reply. I'm here
> to ask you guys what we should do about these thousands and thousands
> of OR articles? So far, all there is is WP:EPISODE (again too lazy to
> link), a small essay saying that episode summaries need sources. What
> should we do?

The episode is a source, the problem is whether we should be using primary
sources like this.
--
Oldak Quill (oldakquill at gmail.com)


from_name: Robert Scott Horning

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>I suggest the following policy:
>
>When a Wikinews edition has seen no new stories for 8 weeks, the wiki
>is locked and a site notice is added: "This Wikinews edition is
>currently inactive. If you are interested in working on it, please
>indicate so on [[m:Wikinews/Reactivate an edition]]." (In the correct
>language, of course.) Instead of just 5 votes, you would need 10
>Wikimedians to sign the reactivation pledge.
>
>
>
<*snip*>

>Does this policy proposal sound reasonable?
>
>
>
I am curious about what the rationale is for trying to increase the
threshold for reactivating an older edition rather than establishing a
brand-new language edition.  It seems to me that it ought to be the
other way around, where if a language edition already exists (presumably
with some substantial content already) that the threshold for support to
reactive ought to be lower than creating yet another new language.  This
could even be just for maintainence of the existing content alone.

I would, however, also put an additional restriction that the 5 or 10
(or whatever) votes that are needed for reactivation should happen
within a specified period of time, like 2-3 months at most.  The purpose
of this is to demonstrate that there is an active community of people
who would be willing to keep a sustained effort going once it is
reactivated, which seems like the point of the whole exercise.
 Proposals to reactivate that languish longer than this specified period
of time will simply be archived although a new proposal can certainly be
made almost immediately (with new votes) if there is still a small group
willing to participate.  I have seen some of these proposals for things
like this go on and on for years at a time... just look at the new
project proposals page on Meta as an example of some proposals that are
more than 2 years old, some as old as Meta itself seemingly.

I'm still not exactly sure what the threshold ought to be in terms of
time to declare a Wikinews language edition "inactive", but the main
goal ought to be to give the community who speaks that language the
benefit of the doubt.  In addition, I would strongly recommend that if a
Wikinews language edition is to be closed down, then the related "sister
projects" of the same langauge ought to have a notification put in the
Village Pump pages (even if in English... with an appeal for
translation) that "their" language edition of Wikinews is being shut
down due to inactivity.  Perhaps also a notification of any related
mailing list that is specific to that language, if it is listed as an
"official" Wikimedia mailing list.  I know that this seems like a lot of
work, but the point here is to try and give a final effort to simply let
speakers of that language know that Wikinews is even something that they
could participate with.

We might be surprised and get a few people to turn out without having to
shut the project down in the first place.

--
Robert Scott Horning


subject: [Wikipedia-l] starting a new language

body:
Hoi,
The code bat is a "collective code" for Baltic (other). Latgalian however is
considered a dialect of Latvian and therefore it is not "other".

http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=lav
http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/documentation.asp?id=bat
Thanks,
   GerardM

On 10/17/06, Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 10/17/06, GerardM <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hoi,
> > According to Ethnologue Latgalian is a dialect of Latvian. From my point
> of
> > view, there is not even a proposed code to be used for your proposed
> > Wikipedia that would be acceptable. Acceptable would be something like
> > "lv-latg" or "lav-latg" ..
>
> There's a test wiki at http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Test-wp/ltg
> The code bat-ltv has been suggested.
>
> Angela
>
> --
> Angela Beesley
> http://wikia.com | http://a.nge.la
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Robth

body:
On 10/17/06, ScottL <scott at mu.org> wrote:
>    How about a function that will let you tag something and after 7 days
> (or a month or whatever) a bot will leave a note on YOUR talk page that
> the tag has not been removed.  This would allow people to tag things
> that they are not comfortable removing, but only really encourage people
> to use the tags if they have the intention of following up.

Now that is a really good idea.

--
Robth
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Robth)


from_name: Zordsdavini iz Litvy

subject: [Wikipedia-l] starting a new language

body:
how much time does it takes to start new wiki (test wiki started one year
ago)?

Arns

2006/10/17, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com>:
>
> Emma wrote:
> > Hi Guys,
> >
> > I am a new member of the wikipedia society. I have a plan to start
> wikipedia
> > in a new language. Please give me any suggestion.
> >
>
> 1. What language?
>
> 2. How many people speak it?
>
> 3. Do we have it already?
>
> 4. See http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages
>
> --
> Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
> Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
> "We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
> Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
>
>
>

--
Ok^ ek^ besla ikv Olmok Vzauep^evk
:)


from_name: Sam Korn

subject: [Foundation-l] Dream a little...

body:
On 10/17/06, Birgitte SB <birgitte_sb at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Please, please tell me that you are not meaning to
> imply that en.WP's preferences should be factor in
> deciding if development resources are allocated
> towards a fucntionality for the Wikisource projects.

Well, actually, pretty much "yes".  Not "preferences", certainly, but
the deployment of development resources should always depend on the
demand.

So a project for en.wikisource that was not needed for en.wikipedia
would have lower priority than one for en.wikisource alone.  But a
project for en.wikipedia alone would have lower priority than one
needed by both en.wikipedia and en.wikisource.

--
Sam


subject: [Foundation-l] Dream a little...


from_name: Cheney Shill

subject: [WikiEN-l] Ogrish.com

body:
Recently, there have been claims regarding the reliability
of http://www.ogrish.com.  That in itself isn?t a problem.
The problem is that none of the claims have been
verifiable.

Does anyone have anything that meets Wikipedia's own
verifiability standards showing Ogrish publishes
manipulated, inaccurate, or false information?

Please make it available here too:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogrish.com

~~Pro-Lick
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/User:Halliburton_Shill
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Pro-Lick
http://www.wikiality.com/User:Pro-Lick (now a Wikia supported site)

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from_name: Nick Jenkins

subject: [Wikitech-l] Edit links have gone crazy ($wgStyleVersion)

body:
> I've now centralized this in a single global config var, $wgStyleVersion. Bump
> this whenever making changes to .css or .js files in the core distribution. When
> adding new such files, don't forget to include "?$wgStyleVersion" on the link.
>
> For those not familiar with the technique, this is an easy way to make style
> updates cache-friendly. Newly rendered pages which depend on the new styles will
> include the links with the bumped number -- the query string is ignored by the
> server (which is reading a static file) but the client will consider it a new
> URL and so pull the file fresh instead of using the previous cached version.
>
> We had been using this haphazardly; now just bumping that one var in
> DefaultSettings.php will bump all imported styles consistently, so it's harder
> to forget something.

Just thinking aloud here, but what if the $wgStyleVersion string was determined automatically by MediaWiki?

For example, for a stable release, it could use the $wgVersion string as the $wgStyleVersion (and even though there'd be some
erroneous cache-misses on a stable version upgrade, it wouldn't be a big deal, because stable version updates happen relatively
infrequently). And in an SVN-tracking environment it could perhaps do something like ' max( "committed-rev" string in .svn/entries
for skins/common/wikibits.js, "committed-rev" string in .svn/entries for skins/monobook/main.css, and so forth for the list of
CSS/JS files) '. ( In other words, something sort of semi-similar to the way that the version string in [[Special:Version]]
automatically displays the SVN revision number for a development tree, or just the $wgVersion for a stable install. )

The upside is that there'd be one less thing for us fallible humans to have to remember (and predictably forget).

The downside though is doing it in a way that doesn't kill performance.

All the best,
Nick.


body:
--- Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
> Last night I dug up a news site that had a synopsis of
> the events
> depicted in the film and so reluctantly went to compare
> it to the video
> itself. I found that the link doesn't actually work. I
> dug around in
> their archives for a while and couldn't re-find it, all
> they had was a
> very short text news article about the event. Ogrish
> apparently no
> longer has the video in question.
>
> So it's all moot anyway. I just wish people were more
> open about their
> arguments, anyone else doing basic fact-checking could
> have discovered this.

I did that basic fact checking earlier and provided a link
to the page that has thumbnails and the video:
http://www.ogrish.com/archives/us_soldiers_kidnapped_in_iraq_shown_dead_in_video_Jul_10_2006.html

Since that was missed, this previously posted material may
also be of interest:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/071206E.shtml
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13432770/
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/09/23/iraq/main2036227.shtml
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/07/10/iraq/main1789865.shtml
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/23/AR2006092300487.html
http://www.defenselink.mil/releases/2006/nr20060622-13319.html

~~Pro-Lick
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/User:Halliburton_Shill
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Pro-Lick
http://www.wikiality.com/User:Pro-Lick (now a Wikia supported site)

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] starting a new language

body:
About emma - I don't know.
But I am speaking about latgalian wikipedia :)

Arns

2006/10/17, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com>:
>
> Hoi,
> What Wiki are you talking about? What language, what project ?
> Thanks,
>     GerardM
>
>
>
> Zordsdavini iz Litvy wrote:
> > how much time does it takes to start new wiki (test wiki started one
> year
> > ago)?
> >
> > Arns
> >
> > 2006/10/17, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com>:
> >
> >> Emma wrote:
> >>
> >>> Hi Guys,
> >>>
> >>> I am a new member of the wikipedia society. I have a plan to start
> >>>
> >> wikipedia
> >>
> >>> in a new language. Please give me any suggestion.
> >>>
> >>>
> >> 1. What language?
> >>
> >> 2. How many people speak it?
> >>
> >> 3. Do we have it already?
> >>
> >> 4. See http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
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:)


from_name: charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com

body:
Phil Sandifer wrote

> On Oct 16, 2006, at 6:12 PM, jayjg wrote:

> > People keep claiming that it's hard to source "obvious facts";
> > however, in practice that's almost never the case. Obvious facts are
> > generally extremely easy to source.
>
> A better and more important issue is that it's a waste of time to
> source obvious facts.

I agree that there are clearly better things to do.

If you apply for a patent, you may be opposed either with some 'prior art', or for 'obviousness', in other words that someone 'skilled in the art' could have come up with the idea, no sweat. These are different matters: i.e. a professional searcher for prior art may not come up with all the things that are obvious inventive steps.

I think this fact of legal life ought to give some pause to claims that the obvious is always documented. The underlying reason has often been discussed, for example in relation to AI. Combining things in pairs, even, throws up so many combinations. Consider the cab driver's problem, let us say in London. Cabbies are supposed to know routes from A to B, each chosen from thousands of locations. That's millions of routes, and _clearly_ to the expert cabbie (they pass an exam on this stuff) it is not because those are individually documented. The same principle may well apply to, oh, organic chemistry syntheses; the point is that it is in the nature of combinations.

I hear plenty of non-expert opinions on 'knowledge' here, but also some pretty basic naivety on these matters.

Charles

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from_name: Jussi-Ville Heiskanen

subject: [WikiEN-l] John Doolittle

references:
<6h18j2tjtgncjp0age5m6ngqsd32vlu7qq@4ax.com>
	<45340BCE.1090206@internationalhouseofbacon.com>
	<4534139C.1050201@wikia.com>

body:
Can I just re-inforce this statement, to the effect that removing
infomation is not the core policy of wikipedia, but neither is the
spread of disinformation. Puhlease keep the distinction clear.

On 10/17/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Jeff Raymond wrote:
> > Seems like a balance issue rather than a BLP one, no?  The facts are the
> > facts, but given without proper expansion of other points doesn't create
> > a BLP issue.
>
> Without making any statement on this particular case, which I have not
> studied enough, I just wanted to point out that a balance issue can and
> often is a BLP issue.  Indeed, BLP issues are more often about balance
> than anything else.
>
> It is often that case that the worst bios of living people involve a
> skeleton bio with a huge puke of negative information (properly sourced)
> in the middle, so that the article as a whole is completely biased.
> Because of certain cultural norms against ever ever ever removing any
> precious little tidbit of information, despite it boring the reader to
> tears and being a form of attack and bias, it can be hard for people to
> combat it.
>
> Remember, NPOV is non-negotiable.  Wikipedia is not a data dump.
> Quality requires editorial judgment and good sense.
>
> --Jimbo
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
--
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]


from_name: David Monniaux

subject: [Commons-l] And in other news...

body:
And a few stats:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Commons_stats_October_2006.svg

We are probably the world's largest site for free wallpapers: the median
of the distribution looks like it's 800 kpixels, which is 1024x768.

We like NASA very much we have 7829 photos from them.
-- DM


from_name: Bryan Derksen

body:
Sarah wrote:
> Bryan, I don't know that the Ogrish link was being used for in this
> case, but in general our understanding of what's "reliable" involves a
> degree of editorial oversight, such as fact-checking, legal scrutiny,
> and so on.

Last night I dug up a news site that had a synopsis of the events
depicted in the film and so reluctantly went to compare it to the video
itself. I found that the link doesn't actually work. I dug around in
their archives for a while and couldn't re-find it, all they had was a
very short text news article about the event. Ogrish apparently no
longer has the video in question.

So it's all moot anyway. I just wish people were more open about their
arguments, anyone else doing basic fact-checking could have discovered this.

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from_name: henna

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

body:
On 10/16/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Till Westermayer wrote:
> > On the "dream" thread: putting 100.000.000 $ as stock in a foundation
> > will result in 1.000.000 $ or something per year to spend -- why not
> > use it that way?
>
> Well the point is not an unrestricted gift, though that is fun to think
> about too.  The point is not political lobbying, though that is fun to
> think about too. :-)
>
> The point is: suppose someone wanted to buy $100,000,000 of existing
> copyrighted material and set it free.  What should it be?

geographical data and/or images
(spring to mind, several copyrighted buildings, other works of art,
people not all countries have pd for their government produces works
:( (and not all ppl get to meet the US president to produce pd photos)

henna

--
"Maybe you knew early on that your track went from point A to B, but
unlike you I wasn't given a map at birth!" Alyssa, "Chasing Amy"


subject: [WikiEN-l] Episode summaries

body:
Chris Picone wrote:
> I somewhat agree, but take a look at a Family Guy episode summary..
> any one. See the Cultural References section? All facts listed there
> are entirely OR!
>
>>From "Peter's Got Woods":
> "When Shauna, Brian's love interest introduces herself, there's
> heavenly singing of the name 'Shauna' in the background. This parodies
> a scene from Ferris Beuller's Day Off when Jennifer Grey's character
> tells Charlie Sheen's character 'It's Jean, but most guys call me
> Shauna.'"
> -No source, based entirely on editor's personal knowledge! THese
> things are all over these summaries!

This is true, but also a shifting of the goalposts from your original
question. You were originally just asking about episode summaries and I
think it's still clear they're allowed. I never addressed anything else.

Stuff like this does need other sources, as you say. It's a separate issue.

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] starting a new language

body:
latgalian has long tradition of writing system. It was in 1918-1944 second
official language. Considering of dialect status is political. And there are
very active people which are working on latgalian language life. It's
dialect like neopolitanian or venecian. We say it's the language.

Arns

2006/10/17, GerardM <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com>:
>
> Hoi,
> The code bat is a "collective code" for Baltic (other). Latgalian however
> is
> considered a dialect of Latvian and therefore it is not "other".
>
> http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=lav
> http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/documentation.asp?id=bat
> Thanks,
>    GerardM
>
> On 10/17/06, Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On 10/17/06, GerardM <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Hoi,
> > > According to Ethnologue Latgalian is a dialect of Latvian. From my
> point
> > of
> > > view, there is not even a proposed code to be used for your proposed
> > > Wikipedia that would be acceptable. Acceptable would be something like
> > > "lv-latg" or "lav-latg" ..
> >
> > There's a test wiki at http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Test-wp/ltg
> > The code bat-ltv has been suggested.
> >
> > Angela
> >
> > --
> > Angela Beesley
> > http://wikia.com | http://a.nge.la
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
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:)