from_name: Mirko Thiessen

body:
Hello all,

I am very pleased to tell you, that a compromise was achieved in the
Oder/Odra river dispute. Even Space Cadet agreed to this compromise
and promised to convince Taw of complying with it as well.

Could a sysop please move the article "Odra-Nysa line" back to
"Oder-Neisse line"? I don't think, that the edit wars will go on.
Thank you.

Mirko.

--
Mirko Thiessen
http://www.mirko-thiessen.de


list: wikitech-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Thinking about Phase IV

body:
On Fri, 21 Feb 2003, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
>   Can we estimate how long we'll be able to limp along with
>   the current code, adding performance hacks and hardware to
>   keep us going?  If it's a year, that will give us certain
>   opportunities and guide some choices; if it's only a month
>   or two, that will constrain a lot of those choices.

The immediate crisis is over. Now that we're on the track of proper
indexing, performance should no longer significantly degrade with
increased size.

The special pages that are currently disabled just need to be rewritten to
have and use appropriate indexes or summary tables. Performance hacks?
Sure.

We're planning to move the database and web server to two separate
machines, which should help quite a bit as well, and there's still a lot
of optimization to be done in the common path. (Caching HTML would save
trips to the database as well as rendering time, though it's not the
biggest priority yet.)

I'd feel quite confident giving us another year with the current codebase.

> * Suggestion 1: The test suite.

AMEN BROTHER!

>   I'd even like to revisit the decision of using a database
>   at all.  After all, a good file system like ReiserFS (or to
>   a lesser extent, ext3) is itself a pretty well-optimized
>   database for storing pieces of free-form text, and there are
>   good tools available for text indexing, etc. Plus it's
>   easier to maintain and port.

Really though, our text _isn't_ free-form. It's tagged with metadata that
either needs to be tucked into a filesystem (non-portably) or a structured
file format (XML?). And now we have to worry about locking multiple files
for consistency, which likely means separate lockfiles... and we quickly
find we've reinvented the database, just using more file descriptors. ;)

The great advantage of the database though is the ability to perform
ad-hoc queries. Obviously our regular operations have to be optimized, and
special queries have to be set up such that they don't bog down the
general functioning of the wiki, but in general the coolest thing about
the phase II/III PediaWiki is the SQL query ability: savvy (and
responsible) users can cook up their own queries to do useful little
things such as:

* looking up new user accounts who haven't yet been greeted
* checking for "orphan" talk pages
* most frequent contributors

etc, without downloading a 4-gigabyte database to their home machines or
begging the developers to write a special-purpose script.

Now, it may well be that it would make sense to store the rendered HTML in
files which could be rapidly spit out on request, but that's supplementary
to what the database does for us.

>  For
>   example, we could probably make it easier to cache page
>   requests if we made most of the article content HTML not
>   dependent on skin by tagging elements well and using CSS
>   appropriately.

You mean, like we had in phase II before you rewrote it? ;)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia mascot

body:
On Fri, 2003-02-21 at 15:16, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
> > (The Cunctator <cunctator at kband.com>):
> > The [[slime mold]] is obviously the best choice.
>
> ...but it's really hard to turn into a recognizable logo.
>
Hardly! One could easily anthropomorphize a plasmodium such as from
these photos, as Magnus pointed out:
http://dictybase.org/dd1.gifhttp://www.hiddenforest.co.nz/slime/photos/image/what01.jpg
http://www.hiddenforest.co.nz/slime/photos/what02.htm
http://www.mykoweb.com/photos/Slime_mold(ms-04).jpg

We could even use the species Dictyostelium.

http://dictygenome.bcm.tmc.edu/Background/

Dicty, the Wikipedia slime-mold mascot!


subject: [Wikitech-l] Thinking about Phase IV

body:
On Fri, 21 Feb 2003, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
> > You mean, like we had in phase II before you rewrote it? ;)
>
> Now, waitaminnit, that's not true at all.  Magnus had all kinds
> of dynamic nonsense that I removed--his code changed the actual
> HTML of links depending on the user's preference for link color,
> for example.

You must have been working from an older version of the codebase, because
I know for a fact that I replaced those with stylesheets, which is how we
had caching of rendered HTML in phase II.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Jay Bowks

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia mascot

body:
From: "Anthere" <anthere6 at yahoo.com>
> > > ants would be perfect
> > Other people noticed that they are perfect too.
> > See http://ant.apache.org/
> > and their logo
> > Youandme
> Crumbs, too late...
> What about a threatened flower then ? :-)

"Let all the pretty flowers bloom" - Mao

Hmmm, why not a centi- or millipede!
Lots of feet, like "pedia" for feet!
Lots of collaboration...

Since,
Jay B.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia mascot

body:
From: "Richard Grevers" <dramatic at xtra.co.nz>
> A meerkat? They rank with penguins for cuteness factor and have that look
> of curiosity.

Are those the ones that stand up
in a group and look all around
like they're wondering what's
going on? They're the funniest
looking things! Cool idea though!

Since,
Jay B.


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Mascot

body:
The meerkat is real cute. Check out:
http://www.oaklandzoo.org/atoz/azmeerkat.html

Note the text also says that they are gregarious to
each other and very protective with no noted
hierarchy. This sounds similar to what we aspire to
be, no?

But the tongue in cheek aspect of "wikipede" and the
many graphic possibilities that using a worm present
is also appealing.

We should move this to meta so that /many/
possibilities are presented (and none are forgotten -
which is very easy on a mailing list). At that point
we could have several rounds of voting to eliminate
all but several finalists. Then a final vote would
determine the winner.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

WikiKarma:
The usual updates related to [[February 16]] and pages
linked from there.

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Tax Center - forms, calculators, tips, more
http://taxes.yahoo.com/


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikitech-l] Thinking about Phase IV

body:
> I think our priorities should be this:
> 3) Implement suggested improvements.
>         - Improve search + redirect handling
>         - Finish Magnus' interlanguage links
> redesign
>         - Fix Recent changes layout
>         - Redesign image pages
>         - Redesign talk pages
>         - Improved edit conflict handling (CVS style
> merge)
>         - Backends (SVG, Lilypond), syntax
> improvements etc.

Improvements in management of the deleted files. Right
now, it's *very* difficult to find a file which has
been erased, then to check it to estimate whether it
should be restored or not.
It would be great if this page could at least be
sorted out by date of deletion, author of deletion,
name space and alphabetical order. Does anybody else
have trouble with this log ?

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Tax Center - forms, calculators, tips, more
http://taxes.yahoo.com/


subject: [Wikipedia-l] The Wikipede

body:
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia mascot
> Hmmm, why not a centi- or millipede!
> Lots of feet, like "pedia" for feet!
> Lots of collaboration...

Hey, what about calling it a "Wikipede"!
Lots of legs all pulling forward to good
progress. Whatcha think?

I can just imagine a java applet that
makes a "Wikipede" walk across
your screen when you visit the link
to it's wiki-entry page :-)))

Well, maybe not, but what do you
think of this centi- / millipede called
the "Wikipede"???

Cheers,
Jay B.


from_name: Lee Daniel Crocker

subject: [Wikitech-l] Thinking about Phase IV

body:
After getting back into wikiland catching up with wikipedia-l
was pretty easy, but catching up with the wikitech list took a
little longer.  It seems you guys have had interesting times
lately (in the Chinese curse sense).  Sorry I abandoned you,
but you guys do seem to have risen to the challenge.

Magnus did a great service by giving us code with features
that made Wikipedia usable and popular.  When that code bogged
down to the point where the wiki became nearly unusable, there
wasn't much time to sit down and properly architect and develop
a solution, so I just reorganized the existing architecture for
better performance and hacked all the code.  This got us over
the immediate crisis, but now my code is bogging down, and we
are having to remove useful features to keep performance up.

I think it's time for Phase IV.  We need to sit down and design
an architecture that will allow us to grow without constantly
putting out fires, and that can become a stable base for a fast,
reliable Wikipedia in years to come.  I'm now available and
equipped to help in this, but I thought I'd start out by asking
a few questions here and making a few suggestions.

* Question 1: How much time do we have?

  Can we estimate how long we'll be able to limp along with
  the current code, adding performance hacks and hardware to
  keep us going?  If it's a year, that will give us certain
  opportunities and guide some choices; if it's only a month
  or two, that will constrain a lot of those choices.

* Suggestion 1: The test suite.

  I think the most critical piece of code to develop right now
  is a comprehensive test suite.  This will enable lots of
  things.  For example, if we have a performance question, I
  can set up one set of wiki code on my test server, run the
  suite to get timing data, tweak the code, then run the suite
  again to get new timing.  The success of the suite will tell
  us if anything broke, and timing will tell us if we're on
  the right track.  This will be useful even during the
  limp-along with current code phase.  I have a three-machine
  network at home, with one machine I plan to dedicate 100% to
  wiki code testing, and my test server in San Antonio that we
  can use.  This will also allow us to safely refactor code.
  I'd like to use something like Latka for the suite (see
  http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/latka/index.html ).

* Question 2: How wedded are we to the current tools?

  Apache/MySQL/PHP seems a good combo, and it probably would
  be possible to scale them up further, but there certainly
  are other options.  Also, are we willing to take chances on
  semi-production quality versions like Apache 2.X and MySQL 4.X?
  I'd even like to revisit the decision of using a database
  at all.  After all, a good file system like ReiserFS (or to
  a lesser extent, ext3) is itself a pretty well-optimized
  database for storing pieces of free-form text, and there are
  good tools available for text indexing, etc. Plus it's
  easier to maintain and port.

* Suggestion 2: Use the current code for testing features.

  In re-architecting the codebase, we will almost certainly
  come to points where we think a minor feature change will
  make a big performance difference that won't hurt usability,
  or just features that we want to implement anyway.  For
  example, we could probably make it easier to cache page
  requests if we made most of the article content HTML not
  dependent on skin by tagging elements well and using CSS
  appropriately. Also, we probably want to eventually render
  valid XHTML.  I propose that while we are building the
  phase IV code, we add little features like this to the
  existing code to guage things like user reactions and
  visual impact.

Other suggestions/questions/answers humbly requested
(including "Are you nuts? Let's stick with Phase III!" if
you have that opinion).

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


subject: [Wikipedia-l] HomePage

body:
--- Tom Parmenter <tompar at world.std.com> wrote:
>
> The Danish Wikipedia differs from the French in
> having three language
> lists instead of one.
>
> Tom P.

So ?!?

Do you think we should necessarily look all the same ?

I dig (or dug ?) up for you the last home page before
the first pusch (4th of february)

Please have a look

http://fr.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Accueil&oldid=27380

You will notice we had 30 languages listed at the top
and the bottom. Hopefully, that list should grow even
more.
2 lines of langages is quite different from 4 lines of
langages in terms of communication on a main page,
especially on a small screen.
The top of a page should display the biggest point for
it is the place people see first.

Question is : what is the *most* important message to
convey, that we are multilingual, or that we are an
encyclopedia ?

> |> I just wanted to introduce you to our new
> HomePage at
> |> http://fr.wikipedia.org/
> |
> |It look good.
> |In fact it looks so good, that we decided to use
> the same layout on the
> |danish wiki at
> |http://da.wikipedia.org/
> |
> |Regards
> |Christian List

That's a great honor Christian :-)

Cordialement ? tous deux

Anthere

__________________________________________________
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Yahoo! Tax Center - forms, calculators, tips, more
http://taxes.yahoo.com/


subject: [Wikipedia-l] That Perky Pesky Wikipede

body:
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] The Wikipede

A [[centipede]] is described as:
an arthropod having a cylindrical
'''body''' composed of many
segments each having a '''pair'''
of '''legs'''.

A Wikipede logo could have
a centipede or millipede walking
and making the shape of a W

\  /\  ?
 \/  \/

Jay B.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Labelling links

body:
> [Long discussion about typed links]

Yes, typed links were a useful feature of many early hypertext
systems; alas, Tim didn't put them into HTML until late in the
game (and then only for document-to-document links), so lots of
people don't know about the idea.

There are several issues: (1) how to specify a typed link in wiki
syntax in some clean way; (2) how to choose the set of link types
that's most useful; (3) how to interpet and/or update the existing
untyped links; (4) whether or not the extra functionality is worth
the cost and complexity in the first place.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


from_name: Karl Eichwalder

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Bandwidth and anon ips

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

> I'm afraid there's not much we can do about your bandwidth limitations;
> that's between you and your ISP.

I cannot confirm this statement for my case.  I'm pretty sure between
me and my ISP is not the bottleneck.  Maybe, between my ISP and
wikipedia, but there are many a lot hops.

> (No, actually there is -- we could compress sent pages.

For most of the German pages it wouldn't help that much.  Those pages
are rather short.

--
ke at suse.de (work) / keichwa at gmx.net (home):              |
http://www.gnu.franken.de/ke/                            |      ,__o
Free Translation Project:                                |    _-\_<,
http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/contrib/po/HTML/             |   (*)/'(*)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Thinking about Phase IV

body:
> (Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de>):
> Lee,
>
> I don't think we should completely redesign things from scratch. See
> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
> about rewriting in general.

I'm well aware of refactoring; that's the main reason I want the
test suite first.  But this is a case a little different from what
Joel is describing: we're starting with a complete feature set and
(at least initially) not making any changes at all to that.  That
in a sense makes it a refactor job even if we do replace the actual
code.  If we decide that Apache/PHP/MySQL is the tool of choice,
we will of course not throw away code at all but just refactor all
the way.

> 1) PHP is not and has never been a problem. Virtually all our
> performance problems have been related to specific SQL queries
> (either a very high number of them, or complex ones). I do not
> see any reason at all to stop using PHP.

I can believe that.

> 2) Getting MySQL to perform properly largly depends on using
> indexes the right way. This means providing composite indexes
> where needed. In the case of timestamps, we had to add a reverse
> timestamp column for it to be index-sorted fast, but while this
> is a hack, it is a needed hack until MySQL4...

I'm still concerned, though, that even if we optimize all the
indexing, we'll never achievea speedup of more than 2-3x.  I don't
know if that will be enough in the long run.  After the test suite
is done, I can do some head-to-head testing of things like indexes
and MySQL 4.X.

> I think our priorities should be this:
> 1) Get some of the other language Wikipedias up that people are
> waiting for. If there are motivated users who want to start a
> Wikipedia in their language, we should not let them wait.

I agree that this should be a priority for the project.  I'm not
as convinced that it's the best use of /my/ time, and since my
absence I'm more committed to ensuring that I don't burn out again
by spending my own time on things I'm not best suited to.  I think
it should be up to motivated foreign users to migrate their own
wiki.  The presence of someone skilled enough to do that should
be evidence of the level of desire.

> 2) Fix known bugs and try to improve the speed in case of
> remaining bottlenecks.

Agreed.  This can also be done in parallel with new development
if needed, and if the speedups are dramatic enough, perhaps it
will show that new development isn't needed after all.

> 3) Implement suggested improvements.
>     - Improve search + redirect handling
>     - Finish Magnus' interlanguage links redesign
>     - Fix Recent changes layout

That's one of my concerns too: I spent about three weeks trying
to do this, but it just wasn't possible to get the features I
wanted with the current architecture and acceptable performance.

>     - Redesign image pages
>     - Redesign talk pages
>     - Improved edit conflict handling (CVS style merge)

Hmm. I'm not sure about that one.

>     - Backends (SVG, Lilypond), syntax improvements etc.
>
> Aside from this, an entirely new project is the dedicated
> Wikipedia client, for offline reading and, hopefully,
> ultimately for editing as well. Magnus has started working
> on this.

That's great.  That's probably better suited to his talents.

> What I understand to be "Phase IV" is, then, a point where
> we have finished all the important fixes and improvements and
> then decide to move on to "nice to have" stuff. Among this is
> the much requested multilanguage portal for Wikipedia, with a
> multilanguage search, RC etc., and possibly merging the
> databases of the different Wikipedias (at least the user data).
> I do think the current software can and should be used as a basis
> for the next phase(s).

Cross-language stuff is a big issue too.  I confess that I
ignored that issue 100% in the present design.  If we can add
those features without looking like a hack, I'm all for it, but
I suspect a new architecture will help there more than anywhere.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


subject: [Wikitech-l] Thinking about Phase IV

body:
> The great advantage of the database though is the ability
> to perform ad-hoc queries.

Yep, that's a big one, no doubt about it.  That's why I'm mostly
just brainstorming at this point.  I _suspect_ that the database
costs us a lot in things like unnecessary locking and indexing,
but that may well be offset by the gains.

>> For example, we could probably make it easier to cache page
>> requests if we made most of the article content HTML not
>> dependent on skin by tagging elements well and using CSS
>> appropriately.
>
> You mean, like we had in phase II before you rewrote it? ;)

Now, waitaminnit, that's not true at all.  Magnus had all kinds
of dynamic nonsense that I removed--his code changed the actual
HTML of links depending on the user's preference for link color,
for example.  I removed a lot of those, but I don't know if I
caught all of them.  I know for sure that the sidebars are fully
dynamic and likely uncacheable, but the article content should
be mostly cacheable now or close to it.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


subject: [Wikitech-l] Thinking about Phase IV

body:
> (Brion Vibber <vibber at aludra.usc.edu>):
> On Fri, 21 Feb 2003, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
> > > You mean, like we had in phase II before you rewrote it? ;)
> >
> > Now, waitaminnit, that's not true at all.  Magnus had all kinds
> > of dynamic nonsense that I removed--his code changed the actual
> > HTML of links depending on the user's preference for link color,
> > for example.
>
> You must have been working from an older version of the codebase, because
> I know for a fact that I replaced those with stylesheets, which is how we
> had caching of rendered HTML in phase II.

That's possible, I suppose, but I'm sure I didn't _add_ any
dynamic HTML except outside the article content.  If I did, then
mea maxima culpa.

Yes, it is necessary to eliminate dynamically rendered article
content to make caching effective.  I don't think that's where
the biggest bang-for-the-buck will be, though.  The things I
personally think would be the biggest wins are (1) Fine-tuning
the hell out the queries needed to do "RecentChanges, and
(2) making the link cache persistent across queries so we don't
have to look up every page that's linked to when rendering.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


from_name: Christian List

subject: [Wikipedia-l] HomePage

body:
From: "Anthere"
> Hello !
>
> I just wanted to introduce you to our new HomePage at
> http://fr.wikipedia.org/

It look good.
In fact it looks so good, that we decided to use the same layout on the
danish wiki at
http://da.wikipedia.org/

Regards
Christian List


from_name: Gareth Owen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia mascot

references:
<8gGQvPACpVB@erik_moeller> <3E56088C.21388.24DEA3C@localhost>
	<20030221170812.GA8171@piclab.com>

body:
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> writes:

> Lemmings aren't social at all.  I personally nominate the leaf-cutter ant.
> They're both cooperative and inventive--they invented agriculture long
> before humans did, and are a model of cooperative productivity.

On top of that, their social structure is like ours -- a group of socially
equal workers ruled by a benevolent matriarchal figure (Hi Jimbo!)
--
Gareth Owen


from_name: Tom Parmenter

subject: [Wikipedia-l] HomePage

body:
The Danish Wikipedia differs from the French in having three language
lists instead of one.

Tom P.

|From: "Christian List" <clist at visi.net>
|X-Priority: 3
|X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
|X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2800.1106
|Sender: wikipedia-l-admin at wikipedia.org
|Reply-To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
|Date: Fri, 21 Feb 2003 19:08:12 -0500
|
|From: "Anthere"
|> Hello !
|>
|> I just wanted to introduce you to our new HomePage at
|> http://fr.wikipedia.org/
|
|It look good.
|In fact it looks so good, that we decided to use the same layout on the
|danish wiki at
|http://da.wikipedia.org/
|
|Regards
|Christian List
|
|_______________________________________________
|Wikipedia-l mailing list
|Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
|http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
|


from_name: Vicki Rosenzweig

subject: [Wikipedia-l] The Wikipede

references:
<016101c2d9f7$de9ebe10$c8bdfdd0@impressario>
 <20030221125211.55157.qmail@web20710.mail.yahoo.com>
 <00f401c2d9f5$b4f47610$c8bdfdd0@impressario>
 <016101c2d9f7$de9ebe10$c8bdfdd0@impressario>

body:
At 12:45 AM 2/22/03 +0100, you wrote:
>"Jay Bowks" <jjbowks at adam.cheshire.net> writes:
>
> > Hey, what about calling it a "Wikipede"!
> > Lots of legs all pulling forward to good
> > progress. Whatcha think?
>
>mhm, the name is nice. maybe something like this?

I like it. Maybe he could have a pen or keyboard or something?

--
Vicki Rosenzweig
vr at redbird.org
http://www.redbird.org


subject: [Wikipedia-l] HomePage

body:
Vendredon, 2003-02-21 20:00, Tom Parmenter skribis:
> But is a list of *other* languages the first thing people look for?
> Or is it information on how to look something up, what information is
> available, and so forth, in their *own* language?

For that, it would help if they can *find* their own language. For that,
we need links. :)

I await with bated breath your suggestions on how to make a long list of
language links not suck while remaining easily findable and accessible.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia mascot

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Tom Parmenter wrote:
>
>
>>seriously, isn't the monkey behind the typewriter exactly right?
>>
>>
>
>:-) I like it, anyway.  I'm not voting for it, necessarily, but I'm
>fond of it.
>
>
Most suggestions I saw represent the writers rather than the 'pedia
itself. It started with one article (BTW, does anyone remember which was
the first "real" article?), and now there are more than 100 000. Must be
*tribbles*! :-)

Magnus


list: wikien-l

from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] edit war at [[Jewish ethnocentrism]]

in_reply_to: <200302220531.h1M5VYL32009@ross.bomis.com>; from koyaanisqatsi@nupedia.com on Fri, Feb 21, 2003 at 09:31:34PM -0800

body:
I just banned Clutch.  He's been warned before, and I've just had
enough.

--Jimbo


from_name: koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com

body:
Hello all,

There was an edit war at [[Jewish ethnocentrism]].  I reverted to what
looked like pre-edit war status, but may not have been.  It looked
like yesterday's edits to me, but I forgot the server is in UTC and I
am not.  Anyway, it may need to be worked with from an earlier state,
I don't know.  I don't think I've ever edited the page, and I don't
have any intentions of editing it.

Two points:  1) the diff is unweildy on that page because of a long
google link.  Apologies, but I'm not going back in to do anything with
it, because it might look like I'm abusing the super duper sysop death
ray, and I try to treat the super duper sysop death ray with care.

2) The link to "unprotect this page" is inconspicuous, and other than
that, sysops have no notice they're on a protected page.  I don't know
if a sysop has ever unwittingly edited a protected page, but it's not
hard for me to imagine it happening.  Maybe there could be a note at
the top for sysops: "This page is protected.  If it's been protected
because of a controversy, editing it will look unfair to people who
are not sysops, and for good reason.  Perhaps you should unprotect the
page first."

best,

kq

wikikarma -- I guess I'll cash in [[Time Indefinite]] from yesterday?


body:
Jonathan Walther wrote:
> You should be clear what you warned me about.  No more working behind
> closed doors.  Tell people EXACTLY why you banned me.

For a failure to work co-operatively in editing articles.  For
insisting on a link to your website, rather than another site with the
same source material.  For causing repeated complaints about these
and related behaviors.

> You spoke of mysterious people "complaining" to you in private, people
> you wouldn't reveal.

There's nothing mysterious or secret about it.  Look on the pages that
you edit.  Look on the mailing list.

> Star Chambers were abolished 300 years ago.  You have every right to ban
> me from your project Jimbo, but a passing nod to democratic openness and
> transparency would be appreciated.

Well, anyone who wants to weigh in to explain it to you is welcome to
do so.

--Jimbo


from_name: Chuck Smith

subject: [Wikipedia-l] #DEPRECATED too technical...

body:
> This is an excellent suggestion; I invite the list
> to tell
> me if they see any problems with implementing it.
> If not, I'll
> do it.

I agree that #DEPRECATED is a good idea, but could we
come up with a command that's a bit less *technical*
and a bit more understandable by non-native English
speakers...?  I thought of #OBSOLETE or #OLD or
something similar, but I'm not sure what would be
best... any ideas?  Also, it would be nice if there
were an interface so you can see all the redirects and
choose those easily which should be switched over...
at least this would still work on the non-English
Wikipedias!  :-)

Chuck

=====
Learn Esperanto! - http://www.lernu.net/
Enciklopedio: http://eo.wikipedia.org/

___________________________________________________
Yahoo! M?viles
Personaliza tu m?vil con tu logo y melod?a favorito
en http://moviles.yahoo.es


from_name: Pierre Abbat

subject: [WikiEN-l] MyPasswordIsXYXY

body:
Someone uploaded something as this user. I tried the obvious password and it
didn't work (intending to change it to something random and promptly forget
it). Can someone with database access make sure that the account is unusable?

phma
--
.i toljundi do .ibabo mi'afra tu'a do
.ibabo damba do .ibabo do jinga
.icu'u la ma'atman.


from_name: Jonathan Walther

body:
On Fri, Feb 21, 2003 at 09:27:54PM -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:
>I just banned Clutch.  He's been warned before, and I've just had
>enough.

You should be clear what you warned me about.  No more working behind
closed doors.  Tell people EXACTLY why you banned me.

You spoke of mysterious people "complaining" to you in private, people
you wouldn't reveal.  You said there were more and more of these people.
If these persons complaints were legitimate, there is no reason they
could not have discussed them in an open forum.

Star Chambers were abolished 300 years ago.  You have every right to ban
me from your project Jimbo, but a passing nod to democratic openness and
transparency would be appreciated.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia mascot

body:
Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:

>>(The Cunctator <cunctator at kband.com>):
>>The [[slime mold]] is obviously the best choice.
>>
>>
>
>...but it's really hard to turn into a recognizable logo.
>
>
>
Try http://www.mykoweb.com/photos/Slime_mold(ms-04).jpg


body:
I don't know how long the page should remain protected; I'm going to
leave myself a note on my user page, but I'm about to go to bed so
it'll probably be 8 hrs or more.  Maybe it should be unprotected
earlier, and if so, you (whoever "you" are in this case) have my
blessing.  If not, I'll do it when I get up.

best,

kq


body:
On Fri, Feb 21, 2003 at 09:39:27PM -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:
>Jonathan Walther wrote:
>> You should be clear what you warned me about.  No more working behind
>> closed doors.  Tell people EXACTLY why you banned me.
>
>For a failure to work co-operatively in editing articles.

I have been bending over backwards to work cooperatively.  I have had to
deal with people reverting chains of edits for no other reason than that
I contributed to them.  I have continuously incorporated material other
people have introduced while making my edits.

Compare that to the activities of the few individuals reverting my work;
they made no attempt to incorporate my edits, and put quite blatant POV
in their edits.  For instance, the reversions to the Judeocentrism
article were phrased to cast doubt on whether such a thing even exists!

>For insisting on a link to your website, rather than another site with the
>same source material.

Noone gave a good reason why my link should have been removed. Why put the
onus on me only, and pretend the other participants smelled like roses?

>For causing repeated complaints about these
>and related behaviors.

I'm sure they complained bitterly when Copernicus came up with his model
of the solar system too...  It is a mistake to equate volume of
complaints with facts.

>> You spoke of mysterious people "complaining" to you in private, people
>> you wouldn't reveal.
>
>There's nothing mysterious or secret about it.  Look on the pages that
>you edit.  Look on the mailing list.

Actually, that's not true. On the telephone you specifically spoke of
"private" complaints which I was not privy to.  You speak of their
"rising volume", at a time when I was relatively inactive and there were
few complaints about me on the Wikipedia.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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body:
>I just want to note that "protecting" a page to deal with edit conflicts
>is a mediocre solution at best.
>
>This could have been handled so much better.

Please explain the ways it could have been handled better.  I will
paint your fence, I will wax your car; just put me on the path to
slack, zen, nirvana.

kq


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Alphabetical article index

body:
re #deprecated as alternative to #redirect:

> This is an excellent suggestion; I invite the list to tell
> me if they see any problems with implementing it.  If not, I'll
> do it.

I don't think we should add another #.. type command. Instead, the syntax
of #REDIRECT should be expanded.

Please see
http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2003-January/002345.html
(search for "thought")

and

http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2003-February/002523.html

for an alternative way to improve the #REDIRECT syntax, namely by

1) allowing language-specific redirect reasons,
2) making it possible to turn a redirect into a disambiguation page by
simply adding another #REDIRECT line.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikipedia-l] HomePage

body:
|From: Anthere <anthere6 at yahoo.com>
|Sender: wikipedia-l-admin at wikipedia.org
|Reply-To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
|Date: Fri, 21 Feb 2003 17:43:42 -0800 (PST)
|
|
|--- Tom Parmenter <tompar at world.std.com> wrote:
|>
|> The Danish Wikipedia differs from the French in
|> having three language
|> lists instead of one.
|>
|> Tom P.
|
|So ?!?
|
|Do you think we should necessarily look all the same ?

No, but I believe that one list of languages is all anyone needs.

The message said the Danish page had the same layout the French, but
the French main page has only one language list and the Danish has
three.

I believe that one is the right number of language lists.  I believe
that more than one is both confusing and uses space that could be
better used for encyclopedic information.

The English main page also has three language lists, which is two too
many.

I don't say this to offend or annoy.  I admire the efforts that all
wikipedias are making to provide information in their own languages.
I believe that each wikipedia should publicize the availability of
wikipedias in other languages.  I believe that even the small,
beginning wikipedias should get just as much publicity as the larger,
more established ones.

|
|I dig (or dug ?) up for you the last home page before
|the first pusch (4th of february)
|
|Please have a look
|
|http://fr.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Accueil&oldid=27380
|
|You will notice we had 30 languages listed at the top
|and the bottom. Hopefully, that list should grow even
|more.
|2 lines of langages is quite different from 4 lines of
|langages in terms of communication on a main page,
|especially on a small screen.

I think two lists of languages is one too many.  That space could be
used for more information.

|The top of a page should display the biggest point for
|it is the place people see first.
|

But is a list of *other* languages the first thing people look for?
Or is it information on how to look something up, what information is
available, and so forth, in their *own* language?

|Question is : what is the *most* important message to
|convey, that we are multilingual, or that we are an
|encyclopedia ?

I believe the *most* important message is that we are an encyclopedia.
Most people read only one language.  Nobody can read 30 languages.
(very few anyway).  Even people who can read more than one language
have a preference.  I'm not the world's greatest linguist, but I can
get to the train station or order a meal in four languages and read
with decreasing comprehension in three of them, but I still do the
most in my native language.

I think the French wikipedia is correct in not placing language lists
on three sides of the main page the way we do in English.  I can find
my four languages on one list.  I don't need three lists.

The other wikipedias are welcome to design their main pages as they
like.  I propose that they all follow the French model and have only
one list of languages.  I particularly propose that the English
wikipedia, to which I am a contributor, should not have three lists of
languages, but only one.  (Someday, maybe, if I live long enough, I
will have contributions in Norsk, Deutsch, and castellano too.)

Doors don't have three handles.  I don't think having three language
lists helps anyone.  If I am missing some advantage of having three
lists, I am sure someone will tell me.

For your attention, tusen takk, muchas gracias, danke schoen, and
thank you very much.

Tom

|
|
|> |> I just wanted to introduce you to our new
|> HomePage at
|> |> http://fr.wikipedia.org/
|> |
|> |It look good.
|> |In fact it looks so good, that we decided to use
|> the same layout on the
|> |danish wiki at
|> |http://da.wikipedia.org/
|> |
|> |Regards
|> |Christian List
|
|That's a great honor Christian :-)
|
|Cordialement ? tous deux
|
|Anthere
|
|__________________________________________________
|Do you Yahoo!?
|Yahoo! Tax Center - forms, calculators, tips, more
|http://taxes.yahoo.com/
|_______________________________________________
|Wikipedia-l mailing list
|Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
|http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
|


from_name: Oliver Pereira

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Labelling links

body:
Hello,

I'm afraid that I've got a bit behind with following everything that's
been happening on the list, but I have some ideas that I'd like to put
forward, so please forgive me if they've already been discussed and
rejected and I just haven't noticed...

About the categorisation of articles: I gather that someone suggested
putting them into a hierarchy, and that other people didn't like the idea
because it imposed one particular structure on the article space, whereas
many different structures might be appropriate in different circumstances.
Mav suggested a spider which would give different categories to a page
based on what categories of other pages linked to it.

I like the idea, but the version proposed by mav would seem to require
quite a bit of "intelligence" on the part of the spider to work out the
categories of pages just from following the links and trying to read the
pages. So what I think would be a good idea would be to put information
into the links themselves, thus eliminating the need to put calssificatory
information in the articles, or expecting the spider to be able to
understand the pages themselves.

The information could be put into the links in a similar way to the
namespace modifiers, e.g. [[city:London]]. These modifiers would be
completely optional, so that newbies wouldn't need to worry about them,
and initially the parsing software could just ignore any modifiers that it
doesn't recognise. That way, people could put in information about
connections, or not, without anything breaking.

For example, on [[List of astronomers]], all the astronomers could have
"astronomer:" before their name; in articles on bands, album titles could
have "album:"; biographical articles could have "father:", "mother:",
"teacher:", "successor:", "book:", and so on. People could make them up as
they went along, because the parsing thing would just ignore them, but as
soon as a consensus was reached about how they should be done, extra
features could be added to the software to take advantage of them.

One benefit could be that "What links here" could be made more useful by
classifying the links according to the labels in them. For example, if a
bunch of biographical pages all have [[alumnus:Selwyn College, Cambridge]]
links in them, going to "What links here" from [[Selwyn College,
Cambridge]] would give a nice list of alumni, regardless of whether or not
they are mentioned in the Selwyn article itself.

And then with the [[successor:]] links and so on, we could get automatic
chronologically ordered lists of people with titles, and with the
[[father:]] and [[mother:]] links we could get automatic Ahnenreihe and
family tree generation... Ahem. I may be dreaming a bit there, but it
could happen!

I like the suggestion by Toby Bartels of differentiating between different
types of redirects, but I think that replacing the word "REDIRECT" would
be odd, since they're still all redirects. So we could use this system,
and put extra information about the redirects in the actual links, like
this:-

[[TonyBlair]] would be "#REDIRECT[[CamelCase:Tony Blair]]"
[[Tony Blare]] would be "#REDIRECT[[misspelling:Tony Blair]]"
[[Anthony Blair]] would be "#REDIRECT[[alternative:Tony Blair]]"
[[Bush's lapdog]] would be "#REDIRECT[[deprecated:Tony Blair]]"

The deprecated names, and misspellings and so on could then be filtered
out in lists and things.

Of course, I know nothing of the internal structure of the database, and I
suppose this might all be impossible. Okay, time to start the ridicule...

Oliver

+-------------------------------------------+
| Oliver Pereira                            |
| Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science |
| University of Southampton                 |
| omp199 at ecs.soton.ac.uk                    |
+-------------------------------------------+


from_name: Richard Grevers

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia mascot

body:
On 21 Feb 2003 06:08:00 +0100, Erik Moeller
<erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:

> If there's consensus that we want a mascot, I suggest putting a call for
> suggestions on all the mainpages, with a link to an English page on Meta.
>
> That might seem like overkill, but I really think we should use the wiki
> process here. There are many species -- prehistoric animals, insects,
> animals living only in a single, small world region -- which are largely
> unknown, yet unbelievably photogenic. I also think that any mascot we
> choose should reflect the fact that we are a cooperative, social project,
>
> in other words, it should be a social animal or insect. Dolphins, whales,
>
> ants, bees etc. all work nicely.

A meerkat? They rank with penguins for cuteness factor and have that look
of curiosity.

--
Richard Grevers


subject: [Wikipedia-l] HomePage

in_reply_to:
<1045887318.1028.28.camel@rdaneel.vibber.org> (message from Brion
	Vibber on 21 Feb 2003 20:15:20 -0800)

body:
|From: Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com>
|Organization:
|Sender: wikipedia-l-admin at wikipedia.org
|Reply-To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
|Date: 21 Feb 2003 20:15:20 -0800
|
|
|--=-y9jyPU66MsI+bYU9OWLV
|Content-Type: text/plain
|Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
|
|Vendredon, 2003-02-21 20:00, Tom Parmenter skribis:
|> But is a list of *other* languages the first thing people look for?
|> Or is it information on how to look something up, what information is
|> available, and so forth, in their *own* language?
|
|For that, it would help if they can *find* their own language. For that,
|we need links. :)
|
|I await with bated breath your suggestions on how to make a long list of
|language links not suck while remaining easily findable and accessible.
|
|-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
|

That doesn't tell me why three lists are better than one.  Put it
anywhere you like, but why duplicate it?  More to the point, why have
lists of languages that are *not* duplicates?

If I read Arabic, my eye would absolutely leap to a bit of Arabic text
no matter where it appeared on the page, I am sure.

I believe we should have one list and it should be complete and not
discriminate against any language that has a wikipedia project.  In
other words, all 30 languages, and when the Tagalog and Shoshone and
Pig Latin editions are available, add 'em.  If the list has 300
languages, well, cool.  People will still be able to find their own
language just as well with one list as with three.

How to present?  Alphabetical order, according to the alphabet (or
other equivalent sorting technique) of the language of the main page.
Maybe there could be a link to other presentations, sorting by number
of articles, chronological order of appearance, little flags, maps,
pulldowns by linguistic groups . . .

Tom Parmenter
Ortolan88

PS -- While we're discussing encyclopedian languages, is it strictly
accurate to state, for instance, that the article [[Louis Armstrong]]
is also available in German, if the German article is completely
different from the English one?  If the link said, "Other Wikipedias"
instead of "Other languages", it would be more accurate.

Tom

|


from_name: Neil Harris

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Semantic links (was: Labelling links)

body:
Oliver Pereira wrote:

>Hello,
>
>I'm afraid that I've got a bit behind with following everything that's
>been happening on the list, but I have some ideas that I'd like to put
>forward, so please forgive me if they've already been discussed and
>rejected and I just haven't noticed...
>
>About the categorisation of articles: I gather that someone suggested
>putting them into a hierarchy, and that other people didn't like the idea
>because it imposed one particular structure on the article space, whereas
>many different structures might be appropriate in different circumstances.
>Mav suggested a spider which would give different categories to a page
>based on what categories of other pages linked to it.
>
>I like the idea, but the version proposed by mav would seem to require
>quite a bit of "intelligence" on the part of the spider to work out the
>categories of pages just from following the links and trying to read the
>pages. So what I think would be a good idea would be to put information
>into the links themselves, thus eliminating the need to put calssificatory
>information in the articles, or expecting the spider to be able to
>understand the pages themselves.
>
>The information could be put into the links in a similar way to the
>namespace modifiers, e.g. [[city:London]]. These modifiers would be
>completely optional, so that newbies wouldn't need to worry about them,
>and initially the parsing software could just ignore any modifiers that it
>doesn't recognise. That way, people could put in information about
>connections, or not, without anything breaking.
>
>For example, on [[List of astronomers]], all the astronomers could have
>"astronomer:" before their name; in articles on bands, album titles could
>have "album:"; biographical articles could have "father:", "mother:",
>"teacher:", "successor:", "book:", and so on. People could make them up as
>they went along, because the parsing thing would just ignore them, but as
>soon as a consensus was reached about how they should be done, extra
>features could be added to the software to take advantage of them.
>
>One benefit could be that "What links here" could be made more useful by
>classifying the links according to the labels in them. For example, if a
>bunch of biographical pages all have [[alumnus:Selwyn College, Cambridge]]
>links in them, going to "What links here" from [[Selwyn College,
>Cambridge]] would give a nice list of alumni, regardless of whether or not
>they are mentioned in the Selwyn article itself.
>
>And then with the [[successor:]] links and so on, we could get automatic
>chronologically ordered lists of people with titles, and with the
>[[father:]] and [[mother:]] links we could get automatic Ahnenreihe and
>family tree generation... Ahem. I may be dreaming a bit there, but it
>could happen!
>
>I like the suggestion by Toby Bartels of differentiating between different
>types of redirects, but I think that replacing the word "REDIRECT" would
>be odd, since they're still all redirects. So we could use this system,
>and put extra information about the redirects in the actual links, like
>this:-
>
>[[TonyBlair]] would be "#REDIRECT[[CamelCase:Tony Blair]]"
>[[Tony Blare]] would be "#REDIRECT[[misspelling:Tony Blair]]"
>[[Anthony Blair]] would be "#REDIRECT[[alternative:Tony Blair]]"
>[[Bush's lapdog]] would be "#REDIRECT[[deprecated:Tony Blair]]"
>
>The deprecated names, and misspellings and so on could then be filtered
>out in lists and things.
>
>Of course, I know nothing of the internal structure of the database, and I
>suppose this might all be impossible. Okay, time to start the ridicule...
>
>Oliver
>
>
>
This is really good. I like the way that this is going.
I note that this is similar to what I was suggesting about relations.
Nobody liked the notation I was suggesting,

#RELATION [[TonyBlair]] is-camelcase-of [[Tony Blair]]

and then everyone went quiet for a bit. Oliver's suggestion is really
good: I think all these things we have been talking about are what I
would call "semantic links". At the moment, we have a few basic kinds of
link, roughly

ordinary links: [[Page 1]] links-to [[Page 2]]
redirects:  [[Page 1]] redirects-to [[Page 2]]
inter-language: [[Page1]] is-different-language-link [[Page 2]]

All of these can be expressed as a relation. If we are willing to have a
very limited number of possible relations, we can use the namespace
convention, as above.

If we want an unlimited number of possible relations, perhaps we need a
special syntax for relational links that is different from namespaces
and can be used in-line, describing the relationship between the current
page and the linked page in a natural way:

[[parent of->Queen Victoria]] rendered same as "parent of [[Queen
Victoria]]"
[[region of->England]] rendered same as "region of [[England]]"

As suggested above, these links could then be used to map genealogies
and other hierarchies, as well as providing a better web of more
specific connections to make categories.  We can then use the
[[relation:]] namespace to keep tabs on the relations themselves: "what
links here" for a relation page would show the pages that used links
_with_ that relation, we could also have "most used relations".
"relation talk:" for relation pages and so on.

Without pre-judging the syntax argument, can we have suggestions for
desirable relation specifiers?

Off the top of my head, I can think of: parent-of, child-of,
sibling-of, contemporary-of, subset-of, member-of,  same-as,
specialization-of, generalization-of ...

-- Neil


from_name: elian

subject: [Wikipedia-l] The Wikipede

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from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [WikiEN-l] Recent Changes

body:
Checking in from the real world for a moment...

I don't think the Recent Changes page should have a link to "Vandalism"
as one of the utilities on the top.

I'm sorry I wasn't around to handle the Judeocentrism entry. A little
merciless editing would have dealt with it quite well.

But then, we can always ban people, I guess.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] HomePage

body:
|From: elian <elian at gmx.li>
|Sender: wikipedia-l-admin at wikipedia.org
|Reply-To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
|Date: 22 Feb 2003 05:42:38 +0100
|
|Tom Parmenter <tompar at world.std.com> writes:
|
|> Doors don't have three handles.  I don't think having three language
|> lists helps anyone.  If I am missing some advantage of having three
|> lists, I am sure someone will tell me.
|
|Doors don't have three handles, that's right. But a house where more than
|one family is living, has normally at the front door a number of signs for
|all parties living there.
|
|Wikipedia, at the moment, is maybe best compared to a multifamily
|residence, where Mr Smith has ten signs on his door reading: "Mr Miller is
|living on the right" "Mr Gates is living over there" and "there is the
|apartment of Mrs Williams"... The others have also ten signs, saying the
|same.
|
|I propose to wait with a settlement of the language list problem until a
|solution for the wikipedia front page is found. Then the problem will
|solve itself.
|
|greetings,
|elian
|
|_______________________________________________
|Wikipedia-l mailing list
|Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
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|

I'm not objecting to listing the languages.  I'm objecting to listing
them three times in ways that aren't identical and therefore convey,
to my way of thinking, less information than one list would convey.

I'm asking: What is the advantage, if any, of listing 12 wikipedias at
the top of the page, the same 12 wikipedias at the bottom, and 28
wikipedias in the middle of the page?  That's what I mean by three
handles on one door.

Are the 16 "extra" wikipedias in the middle supposed to be any less
"real" than the 12 at the top and bottom?

I don't understand why I seem to be coming across like some kind of
rude crank on this.  I don't mean to.  I apologize again to everyone.
I have nothing against anyone's language or anyone's wikipedia.  I
just don't see the point of the redundant, inconsistent information on
available languages.

Sincerely and humbly yours,

Tom


body:
On Sat, 2003-02-22 at 00:31, koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com wrote:
> 2) The link to "unprotect this page" is inconspicuous, and other than
> that, sysops have no notice they're on a protected page.  I don't know
> if a sysop has ever unwittingly edited a protected page, but it's not
> hard for me to imagine it happening.  Maybe there could be a note at
> the top for sysops: "This page is protected.  If it's been protected
> because of a controversy, editing it will look unfair to people who
> are not sysops, and for good reason.  Perhaps you should unprotect the
> page first."

I just want to note that "protecting" a page to deal with edit conflicts
is a mediocre solution at best.

This could have been handled so much better.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Thinking about Phase IV

body:
Lee,

I don't think we should completely redesign things from scratch. See
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
about rewriting in general.

We are getting to the point where we know what the performance bottlenecks
are, and we are fixing them. Brion has built some basic profiling into the
code, and we've checked the slow query log. We still haven't fully
understood everything, but I think we are pretty certain about the
following:

1) PHP is not and has never been a problem. Virtually all our performance
problems have been related to specific SQL queries (either a very high
number of them, or complex ones). I do not see any reason at all to stop
using PHP.

2) Getting MySQL to perform properly largly depends on using indexes the
right way. This means providing composite indexes where needed. In the
case of timestamps, we had to add a reverse timestamp column for it to be
index-sorted fast, but while this is a hack, it is a needed hack until
MySQL4.

It is specifically complex SQL queries which require ordering the whole
result set that create headaches. These have been disabled for the moment,
but I believe we can fix them. None of them are mission critical.

As for MySQL4, I support trying it out on our test server,
test.wikipedia.org, and possibly on meta.wikipedia.org as well. We
shouldn't switch the main site(s) until these two have run on it for a
while.

We also need to keep in mind that we are growing very fast. We now have
several highly active Wikipedias, all of them residing on the same server.
While I think our server still has some room, at some point we will have
to upgrade and no amount of hacking will prevent that. Separating web and
database server, as is planned, should help, but I don't know how much.

I think our priorities should be this:

1) Get some of the other language Wikipedias up that people are waiting
for. If there are motivated users who want to start a Wikipedia in their
language, we should not let them wait.

2) Fix known bugs and try to improve the speed in case of remaining
bottlenecks.

3) Implement suggested improvements.
        - Improve search + redirect handling
        - Finish Magnus' interlanguage links redesign
        - Fix Recent changes layout
        - Redesign image pages
        - Redesign talk pages
        - Improved edit conflict handling (CVS style merge)
        - Backends (SVG, Lilypond), syntax improvements etc.

Aside from this, an entirely new project is the dedicated Wikipedia
client, for offline reading and, hopefully, ultimately for editing as
well. Magnus has started working on this.

What I understand to be "Phase IV" is, then, a point where we have
finished all the important fixes and improvements and then decide to move
on to "nice to have" stuff. Among this is the much requested multilanguage
portal for Wikipedia, with a multilanguage search, RC etc., and possibly
merging the databases of the different Wikipedias (at least the user
data). I do think the current software can and should be used as a basis
for the next phase(s).

Regards,

Erik


body:
On Sat, 2003-02-22 at 01:09, koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com wrote:
>
> >I just want to note that "protecting" a page to deal with edit conflicts
> >is a mediocre solution at best.
> >
> >This could have been handled so much better.
>
> Please explain the ways it could have been handled better.  I will
> paint your fence, I will wax your car; just put me on the path to
> slack, zen, nirvana.
>
I just edited the entry. I also am trying to get rid of the depressing
edifices of antagonism that others have constructed while I haven't been
watching, like "Wikipedia:Edit wars in progress" etc.

We have Ed saying that "edit wars" is a less provocative term than
"vandalism", and noone comments? What do you think "war" is?

The whole Vandalism in progress thing was an ugly and bad idea from the
start, and it's just getting worse. I mean, "Wikipedia:Votes for
sanction"? C'mon.

[[User:The Cunctator/How to build Wikipedia]]: "Avoid Cabals", "Be
Respectful but Firm"
[[m:WikipediAhimsa]]: "When in doubt, don't ascribe bad motives to
people"

Sorry for the aggrieved tone, but it bothers me to see the current
situation on Wikipedia, where Jimbo is banning people on a frequent
basis, juvenile hissy-fights occur on innumerable pages, and the
supposedly responsible people are either avoiding the fray or fanning
the flames.

Okay. Enough procrastination for me. Back to better things.

--tc


subject: [Wikipedia-l] The Wikipede

body:
Vicki Rosenzweig <vr at redbird.org> writes:

> At 12:45 AM 2/22/03 +0100, you wrote:
> >"Jay Bowks" <jjbowks at adam.cheshire.net> writes:
> >
> > > Hey, what about calling it a "Wikipede"!
> > > Lots of legs all pulling forward to good
> > > progress. Whatcha think?
> >
> >mhm, the name is nice. maybe something like this?
>
> I like it. Maybe he could have a pen or keyboard or something?

fine idea. I imagine a classic feather. But can a centipede writing with
his feet? ;-) anyway, I'll try, if I find the time...

greetings,
elian


subject: [Wikipedia-l] HomePage

body:
Tom Parmenter <tompar at world.std.com> writes:

> Doors don't have three handles.  I don't think having three language
> lists helps anyone.  If I am missing some advantage of having three
> lists, I am sure someone will tell me.

Doors don't have three handles, that's right. But a house where more than
one family is living, has normally at the front door a number of signs for
all parties living there.

Wikipedia, at the moment, is maybe best compared to a multifamily
residence, where Mr Smith has ten signs on his door reading: "Mr Miller is
living on the right" "Mr Gates is living over there" and "there is the
apartment of Mrs Williams"... The others have also ten signs, saying the
same.

I propose to wait with a settlement of the language list problem until a
solution for the wikipedia front page is found. Then the problem will
solve itself.

greetings,
elian


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Mascot

body:
--- julien tayon <julien at tayon.net> wrote:
> Le Fri, 21 Feb 2003 17:14:21 -0800 (PST),
> inspir? Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> ?crivait
> la plume alerte :
> > The meerkat is real cute. Check out:
> > http://www.oaklandzoo.org/atoz/azmeerkat.html
> >
> We could take a mascot that  exists everywhere where
> there are
> wikipedian contributors...
> mouse
> a plant like weed (real sense)
> mosquito
>
> Jul

Not "mouse" Jul, "field mouse" is the proper
translation for "mulot" (so my dictionary says...)

__________________________________________________
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Yahoo! Tax Center - forms, calculators, tips, more
http://taxes.yahoo.com/


from_name: Jay Bowks

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia - the multilingual encyclopedia

body:
From: "Chuck Smith" <msochuck at yahoo.com>
> This can be quite an emotional issue for some,
> especially those who are fighting against language
> discrimination full-time.  That's why I'm here in
> Rotterdam volunteering for TEJO (www.tejo.org).
> Language discrimination is a tough issue and it's not
> going to go away anytime soon...  I just want to add,
> that I don't think that you personally are
> discriminating, but that you're simply not aware of
> the problem.  I hope I wasn't too harsh, it's just
> that I feel quite strongly about these issues...

Indeed, Chuck,
As a non-native speaker of English
I've run into some bias, partly why
I'm known as Jay Bowks at work
and Jacinto Javier Bowks de la Rosa
to friends and family :-))) But I think
that it is a matter of economics too,
English makes money worldwide,
when a person from Finland and
a Spaniard want to talk business
they turn to English. We who may
speak an international auxiliary
lang though may want to combat
this, but it may be like fighting
against the wind, hot wind ;-)

If we worry too much about
English rather than keep marching
on the causes we treasure we
harm our goal of having a world
auxiliary or keeping alive the
local langs with few speakers.
After all, language is the best
carrier of culture I belive. If
a smaller tongue disappears
we risk loosing a culture and
a differing way of seeing the
world.

Notice that your Tejo page,
(very appealing and interesting),
has Eo and En as the welcoming
langs then an option to change into
something else. The true world
auxiliary is English, it's just the
way of things. During the 18th
and 19th centuries it may have
been French, before that maybe
Latin, no? But as things change
I feel more good can be accomplished
by devoting our energies to promoting
alternatives to English, rather than
try to put it down or fight against it.
Ride the English wave, surf it,
the flow may someday begin to
slow and its ebb may pull you back.
After all English may not be the
language of the future world of
business as things in the world
change.

But I know what you're saying
and I encourage you to keep
up your efforts for Tejo! Kudos
and the Esperanto Wikipedia is
awsome in looks and effort that
has gone into it, it shows, again,
Kudos!

w/ regards,
Jay B.


body:
> I just banned Clutch.  He's been warned before, and I've just had
> enough.

Thank you, Jimbo. It is about time. For the reasons, see e.g. my message
http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-January/000894.html

Clutch has
- vandalized user pages
- misrepresented himself ("I agree with Clutch" as Jonathan Walther, who
is Clutch)
- engaged in countless edit wars
- removed perfectly valid content from articles
- added unfounded POV assertions to articles
(e.g. the social work article: "They generally force their 'help' on
people who don't want it and ignore human rights ..trained to place
feelings and gut instincts supreme above reason .." etc.)
- lied about and slandered other users who pointed out his behavior.

The only reason he hasn't been banned before is his "I have done nothing
wrong, look at what all the other evil people have been doing" strategy.

I am looking forward to working constructively with people who share many
valid views, pro-Palestinian, pro-Israel, even views I consider anti-
Semitic or otherwise unacceptable, but who are able to express these views
without engaging in childish behavior and violating established policies.
Clutch is not one of these people.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Takuya Murata

subject: [Wikipedia-l] takubot

body:
Could you please unblock my IP address? That is,
140.190.66.4.

I understand some people dislike bots, some including me
don't care. But the problem is this is not fair at all. I
posted in Village Pump that I am going to use bots, and I
waited and see for about one hour then because no one shows
any complain, I started to use bots. Then my ip address is
blocked. Since that I can't edit any page in wikipedia, I
posted this mail to here.

I don't debate about the bot is good or not, but I am
talking about the fairness. Some people probably wonder why
I stopped putting more stubs. If you don't want me not use
bots, you should say that in the first place and explain
more and give me chance to respond to it.

Am I frustrated? Yes, I am little because I think I am being
treaded a kind of unfair.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] takubot

body:
>When a bot is running, the only recourse is to block the
IP. I just
>unblocked the IP. Please don't run Takubot again, at least
not before
>discussing it and getting explicit approval first.

I understand you wanted to stop me. Then why don't you just
simply state please not use bots or something? Did you think
I am not telling the truth?


from_name: Tom Parmenter

body:
Dear Friends,

I'm not going to talk about this any more, but there is no way that
three lists of 12, 30, and 12 languages is better than one list of
30.  It isn't fair to accuse me of pro-American bias for pointing it
out either.  My bias on this one is to the French, with one list.

For this issue, farvel, adios, auf wiedersehen and good bye.

Tom Parmenter
Ortolan88


body:
On 2/22/03 8:45 AM, "Lee Pilich" <pilich at btopenworld.com> wrote:

> At 00:55 22/02/2003 -0500, Cunctator wrote: (about the Clutch thing)
>> This could have been handled so much better.
>
> Cunc, you often stick your head up after a conflict such as this and chirp
> "I could've done better". It isn't useful, and I for one find it quite
> annoying. If you could've done better, *why* *didn't* *you* *do* *better*?
>
Because I wasn't asked.

Chirp chirp.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] takubot

body:
On 2/22/03 10:50 AM, "Takuya Murata" <takusi at manjiro.net> wrote:

> Could you please unblock my IP address? That is,
> 140.190.66.4.
>
> I understand some people dislike bots, some including me
> don't care. But the problem is this is not fair at all. I
> posted in Village Pump that I am going to use bots, and I
> waited and see for about one hour then because no one shows
> any complain, I started to use bots. Then my ip address is
> blocked. Since that I can't edit any page in wikipedia, I
> posted this mail to here.
>
> I don't debate about the bot is good or not, but I am
> talking about the fairness. Some people probably wonder why
> I stopped putting more stubs. If you don't want me not use
> bots, you should say that in the first place and explain
> more and give me chance to respond to it.
>
> Am I frustrated? Yes, I am little because I think I am being
> treaded a kind of unfair.

Sorry, but you should know you're being treated fairly. Waiting one hour is
simply not enough time. See [[Wikipedia:Bots]].

When a bot is running, the only recourse is to block the IP. I just
unblocked the IP. Please don't run Takubot again, at least not before
discussing it and getting explicit approval first.


from_name: Brion Vibber

body:
On Sat, 22 Feb 2003, Tom Parmenter wrote:
> I'm not going to talk about this any more, but there is no way that
> three lists of 12, 30, and 12 languages is better than one list of
> 30.

Tom, there are not three lists. There are two: the list of language links,
such as appear on every page (shown both at top and bottom of the page,
just like "edit" and "other versions" etc); and the redundant list that IS
NOT NECESSARY that has been stuck into the body text of the main page.

The only reason this second list still exists is that some people think
the regular language link list is too long if we include all languages,
and therefore have butchered the list to just a few "approved" "major"
languages. The redundant list is thus the only recourse for other
languages to get a link on the main page.

The problem; the ONLY problem here, is that the list of language links
gets very long when more than about a half-dozen languages are listed. If
anyone can suggest a better way of handling this, that would be much more
useless than droning "there are 3 lists! its too many! there are 3 lists!
its too many! there are 3 lists! its too many!" over and over like a
broken record.

I look forward to your constructive suggestions with bated breath.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


body:
> Question is : what is the *most* important message
> to
> convey, that we are multilingual, or that we are an
> encyclopedia ?

Of course, it is that we are an encyclopedia, but it
is fine to have one list on the non-English
Wikipedias, because we've already been suppressed to
using subdomain names instead of the prestigious www.

> Most people read only one language.  Nobody can read
> 30 languages.
> (very few anyway).  Even people who can read more
> than one language
> have a preference.

You're an American, right?  I live in Rotterdam
(although I'm an American too) and I don't know anyone
here who would only read Wikipedia in one language.  I
know people who go first to Wikipedia, simple
*because* it's the only multilingual encyclopedia in
existence (from what I know, correct me if I'm wrong)
and it's incredibly enlightening to see the different
POV that articles get in different languages and my
European friends thinks it's funny to see how often
the English language articles in Wikipedia are biased
toward an American POV.

*Everyone* on the Esperanto Wikipedia can (and does)
read two languages and most can read three or four.
Most of the people who would have Internet access and
would read Wikipedia can and will read more than one
language!  The majority of people who would only read
Wikipedia in one language would be in the United
States, England and Australia which is 0.6% of the
world population...

> I think the French wikipedia is correct in not
> placing language lists
> on three sides of the main page the way we do in
> English.  I can find
> my four languages on one list.  I don't need three
> lists.

The three lists on the English Wikipedia is a
temporary measure until we can make www a multilingual
portal and then we can eliminate the extra language
lists on en.wikipedia.org and move it down to one
language list.  The other question is, how many first
time visitors will see their languages on just one
list?  How many would even notice the language list at
all if it wasn't shown three times?

Having the language list three times is there to
appease the people who find it offensive that www
isn't a multilingual portal.  Don't forget that it was
one of the reasons why the Spanish Wikipedia broke off
from us AND why it won't rejoin.

> I don't understand why I seem to be coming across
> like some kind of
> rude crank on this.  I don't mean to.  I apologize
> again to everyone.
> I have nothing against anyone's language or anyone's
> wikipedia.  I
> just don't see the point of the redundant,
> inconsistent information on
> available languages.

Well, it's because you don't see language
discrimination around you everyday.  People in French
Canada are getting their native language shoved aside
by English and they needed laws to protect them.  Most
countries of Europe don't have laws to protect their
languages and are getting run over by English.  Some
job offers are only for English native speakers which
means that even if your English is perfect, but you
aren't a native speaker, you're not getting the job.

This can be quite an emotional issue for some,
especially those who are fighting against language
discrimination full-time.  That's why I'm here in
Rotterdam volunteering for TEJO (www.tejo.org).
Language discrimination is a tough issue and it's not
going to go away anytime soon...  I just want to add,
that I don't think that you personally are
discriminating, but that you're simply not aware of
the problem.  I hope I wasn't too harsh, it's just
that I feel quite strongly about these issues...

Chuck

=====
Learn Esperanto! - http://www.lernu.net/
Enciklopedio: http://eo.wikipedia.org/

___________________________________________________
Yahoo! M?viles
Personaliza tu m?vil con tu logo y melod?a favorito
en http://moviles.yahoo.es


body:
On Sat, 22 Feb 2003, Brion Vibber wrote:
> If anyone can suggest a better way of handling this, that would be
> much more useless than...

Much more use*ful* than... :)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] takubot

body:
>The Cunctator has pointed out that one hour is not
sufficient time to
>assume that it's okay because nobody has objected, and
that, for
>technical reasons, the only way he could stop your bot was
to block
>your IP address temporarily.

Technically speaking, he can say at least something if he
checks the villag pump. It seems to me like I say I am going
to rub and people are wating until I actually did!

And actually I waited not about a hour but one and half hour.

I am saying it is unfair that even sysops have time to
dicuss but they didn't. They can simply say don't do it or
wait. And then how long should I have waited? A day, a week,
a month?

>Have you looked at the [[Wikipedia: Bots]] page?

Yeah.


from_name: Vicki Rosenzweig

subject: [Wikipedia-l] takubot

body:
At 10:14 AM 2/22/03 -0600, Takuya Murata wrote (quoting the Cunctator(:
> >When a bot is running, the only recourse is to block the
>IP. I just
> >unblocked the IP. Please don't run Takubot again, at least
>not before
> >discussing it and getting explicit approval first.
>
>I understand you wanted to stop me. Then why don't you just
>simply state please not use bots or something? Did you think
>I am not telling the truth?

Nobody has accused you of not telling the truth.

The Cunctator has pointed out that one hour is not sufficient time to
assume that it's okay because nobody has objected, and that, for
technical reasons, the only way he could stop your bot was to block
your IP address temporarily.

Have you looked at the [[Wikipedia: Bots]] page?
--
Vicki Rosenzweig
vr at redbird.org
http://www.redbird.org


body:
On Sat, 22 Feb 2003, Jay Bowks wrote:
> How about a drop down list box, such as the one on the TEJO site? That
> would be very economical as to space and give plenty of options to
> choose from.

I'm generally leery of drop-down boxes as they don't show the available
options until you've gone to the trouble of asking what's available. And
if the available options are different for each page, that's going to
spell trouble. People will check a few times, then stop looking once
they've found that their language never comes up.

Wiki is about serendipidous discovery; part of that is seeing that a link
to Chinese or Polish or Esperanto or Volapuk or Latin or French is
available without having thought to seek it out.

However, it's a direction worth looking into.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


body:
On Sat, 22 Feb 2003, Erik Moeller wrote:
> > The problem; the ONLY problem here, is that the list of language links
> > gets very long when more than about a half-dozen languages are listed.
>
> Why not simply reduce the font size?

That's not scalable. ;)

Smaller fonts just moves the problem from ~6-8 languages to ~12-16
languages. This is still going to be an acute problem for the near term on
the main page and major head-topics, and with luck in the long term we'll
have that many _or more_ languages available on many thousands of
articles.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] takubot

body:
On 2/22/03 12:31 PM, "Takuya Murata" <takusi at manjiro.net> wrote:

>> The Cunctator has pointed out that one hour is not
> sufficient time to
>> assume that it's okay because nobody has objected, and
> that, for
>> technical reasons, the only way he could stop your bot was
> to block
>> your IP address temporarily.
>
> Technically speaking, he can say at least something if he
> checks the villag pump. It seems to me like I say I am going
> to rub and people are wating until I actually did!
>
> And actually I waited not about a hour but one and half hour.
>
> I am saying it is unfair that even sysops have time to
> dicuss but they didn't. They can simply say don't do it or
> wait. And then how long should I have waited? A day, a week,
> a month?
>
You need to get explicit approval to run any bot.

That's it. Anything less than that, and you shouldn't be running a bot.

Simple. This is the rule for everyone.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] feature idea: drop down menus for languages

body:
On Sat, 22 Feb 2003, Thomas Corell wrote:
> And just another one:
>
> [x] Display other languages as ISO-3166-1 country-codes
>
> Meens instead of printing: Other languages: Dansk, English, German, ...
> Just print: Other languages: DA, EN, DE, ...

Country codes aren't appropriate, as they in many cases don't match up
with language codes.

We could have an option to show the ISO 639 language codes, though.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] takubot

body:
>You need to get explicit approval to run any bot.
>
>That's it. Anything less than that, and you shouldn't be
running a bot.
>
>Simple. This is the rule for everyone.

Then why didn't anyone, including you, tell me about it when
I posted about using bots? If no one knows that rule, it is
not the rule.

Again, I am not talking about how to use bots but fairness.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikiped Ideas (Re: Mascot cartoonism

body:
From: "s" <esvtg at yahoo.com>
> Whatever is decided upon for a mascot... I can help out with the graphical
> end of it... a favorite of mine being the platypus, www.hexley.com
> although I nitpick hex for looking too much like a Donald Duck ripoff...
> anyway, if anyone has any ideas, just let me know and Ill sketch them
> up. -Stevertigo

That's a really nice offer.

I like too the idea of a
Wikipede with a feather
or typing on keyboard
with numerous little legs.

Centipede or Millipede
are very much alike a
critter with multiple ones
would do, so I'd propose
a Wikipede is like one of
them little critters :-)))

With regards,
Jay B.


from_name: Lee Pilich

body:
At 00:55 22/02/2003 -0500, Cunctator wrote: (about the Clutch thing)
>This could have been handled so much better.

Cunc, you often stick your head up after a conflict such as this and chirp
"I could've done better". It isn't useful, and I for one find it quite
annoying. If you could've done better, *why* *didn't* *you* *do* *better*?

lp (camembert)
WikiKarma: [[Gilbert and George]]


from_name: julien tayon

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Mascot

body:
Le Fri, 21 Feb 2003 17:14:21 -0800 (PST),
inspir? Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> ?crivait la plume alerte :
> The meerkat is real cute. Check out:
> http://www.oaklandzoo.org/atoz/azmeerkat.html
>
We could take a mascot that  exists everywhere where there are
wikipedian contributors...
mouse
a plant like weed (real sense)
mosquito

Jul
Goda's Truism:
	By the time you get to the point where you can make ends meet,
	somebody moves the ends.


body:
--- elian <elian at gmx.li> wrote:
> Brion Vibber <vibber at aludra.usc.edu> writes:
>
> > I'm generally leery of drop-down boxes as they
> don't show the available
> > options until you've gone to the trouble of asking
> what's available. And
> > if the available options are different for each
> page, that's going to
> > spell trouble. People will check a few times, then
> stop looking once
> > they've found that their language never comes up.
>
> That is why I proposed the drop down boxes as a user
> pref. It should be
> switched off by default to allow people to discover
> the multilinguality of
> wikipedia. But if someone speaks only one language
> and isn't interested in
> others his GUI shouldn't be cluttered up with for
> him useless language
> links.

I remember it was proposed several months ago that the
display of international links on top of article pages
could be selected in the user prefs. By default all
links would be proposed; but it a loggued in user
could see links only to the languages he reads (and to
highlight his favorite language).

This doesnot solve the issue of anonymous users though.

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Tax Center - forms, calculators, tips, more
http://taxes.yahoo.com/


from_name: Sascha Noyes

subject: [Wikipedia-l] image resizing

body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Hi

I'm relatively new to significantly contributing to wikipedia, and need your
help:

I stumbled over the [[Peafowl]] page and saw that the image in the table was
of a horrible quality. I took the larger image and resized it, resulting in a
picture of vastly superior quality (considering the size), but the original
author (Arpingstone) disputes this. Please see my talk page [[User
talk:snoyes]], and weigh in on the dispute, as I want to upload my resizings
of most of his other pics (whose resizings are of equally miserable quality),
but would like to do it with the recognition that my resizings are superior
(otherwise what is the point). Also, what would you recommend, that they I
just upload them with the appropriate credits (as I failed to do on my first
try) - or put them on my webpage so that Arpingstone can upload them as his.

Thanks,

Sascha Noyes
(aka snoyes)
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Version: GnuPG v1.2.1 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQE+V8zagzJdfX+cTW8RAmWsAJ9owSJLavbR+uT14gwUKwarzIKGrgCeMp+Y
Dm/mI8bQP4ScbtSWWIvN6XQ=
=oocF
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


subject: [Wikipedia-l] japanese wikipedia: article count and embassy

body:
--- elian <elian at gmx.li> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> sorry, I just can't stop posting today ;-) I paid
> the Japanese Wikipedia a
> visit today and besides lots of strange characters I
> couldn't read and
> much activity on recentchanges I saw on their
> statistics page that they
> had over 2000 pages but only 200 described as
> articles. That seems rather
> dubious to me...
>
> Our article count is based on commas, isn't it? Is
> Japanese a language
> without commas?
>
> And my other question: I wanted to put an
> interlanguage link to them on
> the German Mainpage, but copy and paste didn't work.
> So I wanted to ask
> someone but all pages are in Japanese... Could
> someone of the Japanese
> Wikipedia (is there anyone here?) set up one page in
> English, f.e. a
> Japanese embassy?
>
> Later I found out that [[ja:HomePage]] worked,
> without any strange
> characters...
>
> greetings,
> elian

Aoineko could probably help you, but he is currently
busy changing a dozen nappies per day :-) I'll copy
this message on his french page

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Tax Center - forms, calculators, tips, more
http://taxes.yahoo.com/


subject:
Protected pages (was [WikiEN-l] edit war at [[Jewish
  ethnocentrism]])

body:
At 21:31 21/02/2003 -0800, KQ wrote:
>2) The link to "unprotect this page" is inconspicuous, and other than
>that, sysops have no notice they're on a protected page.  I don't know
>if a sysop has ever unwittingly edited a protected page, but it's not
>hard for me to imagine it happening.  Maybe there could be a note at
>the top for sysops: "This page is protected.  If it's been protected
>because of a controversy, editing it will look unfair to people who
>are not sysops, and for good reason.  Perhaps you should unprotect the
>page first."

I've wondered about something like this as well. Also, is there a list of
protected pages somewhere, or else some DB query we can run to generate
such a list? I sometimes wonder if pages have been protected about and then
forgotten, left protected forever more.

lp (camembert)
WikiKarma: [[Malcolm Morley]]

PS Apologies for my last post - it was just as useless as the post it was a
reply to. I shouldn't have sent it.


body:
From: "Brion Vibber" <vibber at aludra.usc.edu>
> The problem; the ONLY problem here, is that the list of language links
> gets very long when more than about a half-dozen languages are listed. If
> anyone can suggest a better way of handling this, that would be much more
> useless than droning "there are 3 lists! its too many! there are 3 lists!
> its too many! there are 3 lists! its too many!" over and over like a
> broken record.

Hi Brion,
How about a drop down list box,
such as the one on the TEJO site?
That would be very economical
as to space and give plenty of
options to choose from.

Since,
Jay B.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Protected pages

body:
I wrote:

>Also, is there a list of protected pages somewhere, or else some DB query
>we can run to generate such a list? I sometimes wonder if pages have been
>protected about and then forgotten, left protected forever more.

I read [[Wikipedia talk:Database queries]] and found my answer: SELECT
cur_namespace,cur_title FROM cur WHERE cur_restrictions != ''

Not having a good day with mailing lists...

lp (camembert)


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re:  edit war at [[Jewish ethnocentrism]]

body:
On Saturday 22 February 2003 04:00 am, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> I just banned Clutch.  He's been warned before, and I've just had
> enough.
>
> --Jimbo

I can't say that I am happy but I am relieved. It would have been much better
if Clutch simply got along with people.

Jonathan Walther wrote:
>....
> I have been bending over backwards to work
> cooperatively. .....

I'm sorry but I almost fell out of my chair laughing. On Sunday a few months
ago I remember you being in 4 different edit wars during the same day. In
each case it was one person against a group of old timers and interested
newbies. That one person was you. I noted this fact on the mailing list and
you should have been banned at that time (temporarily at least) - esp since
you have been involved in similar edits wars since and your crusade
"correcting" Lir was over the top.

So /IF/ you have been bending over backwards then your views are even more
bizarre and absolute than I thought.

Perhaps this unchallenged email will spark your memory:
http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-February/000908.html

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

WikiKarma:
Go Wikipedes!
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/centipede (new)


from_name: koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] Koyaanis Quatsi

body:
You Wrote:
>Could anyone tell me what happened to Koyaanis Quatsi? Why is his
user page
>empty?
>
>KF

I'm done with wikipedia for now.  I'll check up on it in a couple
months and decide what to do then.

best,

kq


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re:  takubot

body:
On Saturday 22 February 2003 10:40 am, Takuya Murata wrote:
> I understand some people dislike bots, some including me
> don't care. But the problem is this is not fair at all. I
> posted in Village Pump that I am going to use bots, and I
> waited and see for about one hour then because no one shows
> any complain, I started to use bots. Then my ip address is
> blocked. Since that I can't edit any page in wikipedia, I
> posted this mail to here.

One hour was not long enough. A few days to a week for something like this is
warrented so that most people can respond. I responded right away and in fact
only had one minor complaint about the format. But other people may have had
other issues to express - if only they had the time.

> Am I frustrated? Yes, I am little because I think I am being
> treaded a kind of unfair.

How about considering what is fair for everybody else that is using Recent
Changes? What about what is fair for people who really don't like
microarticles polluting the article database? Perhaps somebody who was asleep
could have helped you find a database you could use to add more data to the
generated articles? Considering what is fair to other Wikipedians is also
important. One hour just doesn't cut it.

Have you read our policy on bots yet? Please do - it explains the pros, cons
and procedures.

--Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

WikiKarma
Added a bunch of events to [[February 18]]; updated all the year pages and
many of the other articles linked from that page.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Mascot

body:
Le Sat, 22 Feb 2003 06:56:49 -0800 (PST),
inspir? Anthere <anthere6 at yahoo.com> ?crivait la plume alerte :
[...]
> > We could take a mascot that  exists everywhere where
> > there are
> > wikipedian contributors...
> > mouse
[...]
> Not "mouse" Jul, "field mouse" is the proper
> translation for "mulot" (so my dictionary says...)

;)
Maybe a spider, since words forms the web of the sens we try to share.
Since we are an encyclopedia, it may be a special one.
Or ants, since we work together
or bees, since we are like a big hive, and can be as nice as bees :)
....

jul
I'm not a lovable man.
		-- Richard Nixon.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] takubot

body:
On 2/22/03 2:19 PM, "Takuya Murata" <takusi at manjiro.net> wrote:

>> You need to get explicit approval to run any bot.
>>
>> That's it. Anything less than that, and you shouldn't be
> running a bot.
>>
>> Simple. This is the rule for everyone.
>
> Then why didn't anyone, including you, tell me about it when
> I posted about using bots? If no one knows that rule, it is
> not the rule.
>
> Again, I am not talking about how to use bots but fairness.

Because it's your responsibility to find out, not mine to tell you. And now
you've been told.

Wikipedia is a collaboration--and that collaboration is founded upon the
presumption that each participant is responsible for his/her actions. If
errors are made, others will help correct them.

You did not know the rule. That does not mean that no one knows the rule.

I'm not blaming you for your action, but you're blaming me for mine.

I am not talking about fairness but about how to use bots.


body:
From: "Erik Moeller" <erik_moeller at gmx.de>
> Why not simply reduce the font size?

 In  "ia.WIKIPEDIA" I put <small> around
the list of langs and this seemed to help the
overall look of the page.
http://ia.wikipedia.com/

w/ regards,
Jay B.


body:
On Sat, 22 Feb 2003, elian wrote:
> Brion Vibber <vibber at aludra.usc.edu> writes:
> > spell trouble. People will check a few times, then stop looking once
> > they've found that their language never comes up.
>
> That is why I proposed the drop down boxes as a user pref. It should be
> switched off by default to allow people to discover the multilinguality of
> wikipedia. But if someone speaks only one language and isn't interested in
> others his GUI shouldn't be cluttered up with for him useless language
> links.

Sure, as a user pref it might theoretically be okay, but it doesn't help
the primary point of contention, which is that 1st-time visitors, who are
not logged in, and who may have smaller browser windows than those of us
with million x million pixel screens, need to be presented with language
links without it stealing the enirety of their screen.

> Thomas' idea of taking the language code is another idea I would favour.

Again, great for those of familiar with the codes -- but most people are
not. People _are_ familiar with their own country's country code (it's in
all the URLs after all), but that doesn't help in but a handful of cases
where country and language match up both in range and in the letters
eelected for the code.

> BTW, in some Wikipedias (Czech, Esperanto, Svedish, Polish) the language
> links are translated into this language, making it difficult for someone
> who doesn't know czech f.e. to find the link to "his" wikipedia. Maybe we
> should add a comment in Language.php that the list of languages should not
> be touched and localized.

Those instructions are already there, just ignored or not yet followed.

I'd prefer that we can get a complete list of native names for all those
languages so we can just yank the list out of the localized messages file
entirely.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Koyaanis Quatsi

body:
On 2/22/03 5:56 PM, "K Forstner" <kurt.forstner at chello.at> wrote:

> Could anyone tell me what happened to Koyaanis Quatsi? Why is his user page
> empty?
>
He deleted his pages. He's taking a break from WP.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Mis-spellings

body:
On Sun, 23 Feb 2003, Andre Engels wrote:
> Is it possible to skip these interwiki-links in checking for
> misspellings?

Not real easily... the mispeelings page uses the search index, which
deliberately includes language links as an aid to searching.

The only thing to do would be to load the text of all matching pages and
parse them for interlanguage links, then check for the word again. Which,
of course, would make it even slower. :)

Note however that the system is already a little limited in that it'll
treat accented characters the same as the search does -- which is often
not how you'd want to treat them in a spell checker. If someone wants to
rewrite the function, be my guest.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] HomePage

body:
Tom Parmenter <tompar at world.std.com> writes:

> I'm not objecting to listing the languages.  I'm objecting to listing
> them three times in ways that aren't identical and therefore convey,
> to my way of thinking, less information than one list would convey.
>
> I'm asking: What is the advantage, if any, of listing 12 wikipedias at
> the top of the page, the same 12 wikipedias at the bottom, and 28
> wikipedias in the middle of the page?  That's what I mean by three
> handles on one door.

Yes, I understood you perfectly well and to some extent I even agree with
you ;-)

> Are the 16 "extra" wikipedias in the middle supposed to be any less
> "real" than the 12 at the top and bottom?

Seems to. My policy in the German wikipedia was to list on top and bottom
only these wikipedias which consist of at least some articles - otherwise
I fear to dissappoint the reader if he sees "other languages" and clicks
first on turkish, then greek and the russian - and everywhere is nothing.

So the more complete list in the middle was intended to show that there is
the _possibility_ to work at a turkish wikipedia, but actually it doesn't
exist yet.

I hope this explanation is halfway comprehensible...

BTW, while renewing the Main page recently, I replaced the list in the
middle in the German wikipedia by a simple
link to a complete list. Bit of a sacrifice, but I thought it would be
better to promote the existing Wikipedias on a prominent place than risking
that some people don't find the information in the middle.

> I don't understand why I seem to be coming across like some kind of
> rude crank on this.  I don't mean to.  I apologize again to everyone.

If my reply invoked this impression in you, I apologize. I didn't mean to
- sometimes I am a bit of cynic, I can't help.

> I have nothing against anyone's language or anyone's wikipedia.  I just
> don't see the point of the redundant, inconsistent information on
> available languages.

It is not inconsistent - it just transmits a different message.

greetings,
elian
--
Computers are like Airconditioners - they stop working properly when
you open windows


subject: [Wikipedia-l] takubot

body:
>Because it's your responsibility to find out, not mine to
tell you. And now
>you've been told.

This claim should be against the principle of wiki
community. We *all* are responsible for what we *all* are
doing. If someone did something against the policy, I am
going to stop it because I am responsible for what he is
doing too.

>Wikipedia is a collaboration--and that collaboration is
founded upon the
>presumption that each participant is responsible for
his/her actions. If
>errors are made, others will help correct them.

No. We are making things together not each one is making
things with help of others.

>I'm not blaming you for your action, but you're blaming me
for mine.

Yes, because you can tell me about the rule before I started
using bots? Once again, why didn't you tell me? The job of
sysops should include not only catch the mis-behavior but
also prevent it if possible. You can stop before I actually
did me but you didn't. Why is that?

>I am not talking about fairness but about how to use bots.

Then talk about fairness. I don't have any objection about
how to use bots. See I am not using bots now.