subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Patent idea

body:
Walter Vermeir wrote:
> Imran Ghory <imran at ...> writes:
>
>
>>Actually given that Ward Cunningham now works for Microsoft and Microsoft
>>is developing their own wiki software, it might be a good idea to get a
>>patent on some of MediaWiki's unique features.
>>
>>Imran
>
>
> ... and maybe recieve a donation form Microsoft to WikiMedia for use of those
> unique features.
>
> Walter

You seem to be forgetting that the Wikimedia Foundation does not own IP
rights to MediaWiki, except for perhaps the Yahoo XML feed. Some of it
was placed in the public domain by Lee Daniel Crocker, the rest is owned
by the developers who contributed it. Whether or not our code is
patented is our decision. Personally I'm not fond of the idea of calling
code "open source" but requiring that people get permission if they want
to use it.

Even if Magnus Manske (or whoever it was) wanted to patent the language
code thing, it couldn't be patented anyway, because it is not new. From
http://www.bitlaw.com/patent/requirements.html :

Novelty (Newness) Requirement: In order for an invention to be
patentable, it must be new as defined in the patent law. This novelty
requirement states that an invention cannot be patented if certain
public disclosures of the invention have been made. The statute which
explains when a public disclosure has been made (35 U.S.C. Section 102)
is complicated and often requires a detailed analysis of the facts and
the law. The most important rule, however, is that an invention will not
normally be patentable if:

     * the invention was known to the public before it was "invented" by
the individual seeking patent protection;
     * the invention was described in a publication more than one year
prior to the filing date; or
     * the invention was used publicly, or offered for sale to the
public more than one year prior to the filing date.

Although the United States grants the one year grace period described in
the last two rules above, most other countries do not grant such a
period. Therefore, it is almost always preferable to file a patent
application before any public disclosure of the invention. Most patent
attorneys will try diligently to file a patent application prior to any
public release or announcement in order to allow international patent
filings.

[end quote]

-- Tim Starling


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Walter Vermeir

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Languages: crossing a border?

body:
Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at ...> writes:

> But they don't harm anyone, right? Well, they do clutter the list of
> interlanguage links, and they do have the potential to harm our reputation
> as a serious project. When a professional historian reads our article
> about the Holocaust, and there's a "Klingon" link right next to Japanese,
> that might be seriously off-putting. Especially if there's also Tolkien's
> Elvish, and maybe some language from the Buck Rogers universe. I'm sure
> the furries also have their own languages.

Because whe are using the language links in the language of that language
visitors will not see "Klingon" but "tlhIngan" (I do not think there is unicode
support for the real Klingon glyphs http://www.kli.org/pics/piqdemo.gif )

And so for most if not all special languages I do not think anybody will be
abel to identify them if the do not know the language already.

Walter


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikipedia-l] pyWikipediabot news

body:
PyWikipediabot is a bot used for several functions in Wikipedia.
Most famous is probably the bot for working on Interwiki links.
See http://sourceforge.net/projects/pywikipediabot/. This is a
report of changes and additions to the bot in the past week.

* imagetransfer.py is a new bot. Given a Wikipedia page, it
  searches through interwiki links for images, and on request
  of the user, uploads them to the user's home Wikipedia. It's
  still in development, but it seems the serious bugs have gone.
  It was created by Andre Engels, with help from Head, and based
  on an existing bot by Rob Hooft.
* copy_table.py takes a table from one Wikipedia and puts it in
  another, translating 'on the fly'. Programmed by head. It
  currently can translate taxoboxes between English, French,
  German and Dutch, and German city data from German to English
  and Dutch
* If the interwiki-bot is given a hint without a page title, the
  title of the original page is taken to be the hint.
* The hints 'main' and 'more' of the interwiki-bot have been
  renamed to '10' and '20', and '30' has been added; each gives
  approximately that number of the largest languages. Also the
  hint cyril: (for all languages in Cyrillic writing) has been
  added.

Current discussion:
We are looking for ways to improve the handling of problems in
interwiki.py where more than one link is found to one language.

Andre Engels


from_name: Peter Gervai

body:
On Mon, Apr 05, 2004 at 12:05:00PM +0200, Erik Moeller wrote:

> Analogously, you might say we could have articles about persons on
> Wikipedia who have a high potential for doing something meaningful in
> their lives, in order to let people learn about it so they can get in
> touch. Of course we don't do that, because judging who has a potential for
> doing something is a highly subjective endeavor, and a promotional one to
> boot (and therefore POV).

Well I just shared my views with a person that he should probably publish
his material elsewhere. He started to generate articles on his lifelong work
about connections between mathematical vectors, sub-quark material, changed
relativity theory of einstein and redical philosophy. Naturally nobody ever
heard of that, and he haven't published it yet, but... look at the
unimaginable possibility.

Not that I agree or disagree with people coming up with wild ideas, but I am
strongly against using wikipedia as a free publishing and discussion body
for original works. (This probably would include languages nobody speak [or
heard of] but their author and her 18 friends.)

grin


from_name: Denny Vrandecic

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Languages: Crossing a border

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

> Some of us are flexible enough to live in communities where lines are
> never drawn.  The passion that some people have for making rules
> probably drives more people away than our support for obscure languages.

Write this down and glue it to your screen.
Full support!

Denny


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Languages: crossing a border?

body:
I'm pretty sure Klingon and most other languages made for fictional universes
are copyrighted (or at least many of their creators claim copyright).  Let's
call these 'fictional languages' in order not to confuse them with languages
like Esperanto which were made specifically for people to use them (and not
just made to make fictional races seem more real).

These links seem to confirm the copyright situation for Klingon at least:

http://www.corante.com/importance/archives/002300.html

http://higbee.cots.net/~holtej/klingon/faq.htm#2.12

I could not find anything about this on StarTrek.com though and it does seem a
bit dubious to copyright fictional words. But then, I'm not sure if we would
want to be in a postion to pay legal fees to test Paramount's purported claim
(not to mention all the lost effort in a Klingon encyclopedia if we decided to
just pull the plug).

Also, the word 'Klingon' is a Paramount trademark.

I'm also uncomfortable with people using Wikimedia resources and the very
significant promotional aspects of the Wikipedia name to construct their own
languages. Erik's comparison with micronations seems to be an apt one to me
(although I don't agree with his specific recommendations since they would
exclude dead and many moribund languages).

So, IMO, a language must exist independent of Wikipedia and not be hindered by
a claim of copyright before an encyclopedia is started in it.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Small Business $15K Web Design Giveaway
http://promotions.yahoo.com/design_giveaway/


list: wikien-l

from_name: Robert Graham Merkel

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Googlebombing by activists raising Wikipedia article
	ranking

body:
In the features section of the Jerusalem Post (http://www.jpost.com),
there is a report about the efforts of a New York based activist who
is using Googlebombing (essentially, convincing others to set up links
in a particular manner) to change the search engine's top ranked answer
to the query term "Jew".  Apparently, at the time the article was
written, it brings up a rather nasty anti-Semitic site, which this
individual is trying to replace with...a Wikipedia article (in terms
of the top ranking on Google).

Given the nature of the attention this could bring, I suspect
we should keep a particularly close eye on Judaism-related topics for
vandalism and partisan editing (of any kind) over the next few days.

If you want to read the article without registering at the Post,
do a search on http://news.google.com for Wikipedia.

--
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                           Robert Merkel
                                     robert.merkel at benambra.org
                                        http://benambra.org

Simpson!  Homer Simpson!
He's the greatest guy in history,
>From the...town of Springfield
He's about to hit a chestnut tree.
 --The Simpsons
--------------------------------------------------------------------------


from_name: Evan Prodromou

in_reply_to:
<96IU3x4hpVB@erik_moeller> (Erik Moeller's message of "05 Apr
	2004 23:09:00 +0200")

body:
>>>>> "EM" == Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> writes:

    EM> Having many articles does not make a language important.

Actually, I'd take that a step further: being important does not
justify having a Wikipedia for the language.

The most crucial thing for a wikipedia (or any wiki) is having an
active community that's willing to feed, water, prune and tend the
wiki.

Some things that are probably really crucial to getting a wikipedia
off the ground:

    * A _core_group_ of individuals willing to get the wiki started.

    * A non-zero pool of _potential_contributors_; people who will or
      could be either committed or occasional editors.

    * A _liaison_ (or multiple liaisons) willing to keep the community
      informed about goings on in the greater pediasphere, and vice
      versa.

    * A _translation_ of the key documents necessary to allow new
      users to become contributors: the UI interface file, the
      MediaWiki Users' Guide, NPOV.

~ESP

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


from_name: Peter Jaros

subject: [WikiEN-l] submitting pictures

body:
On Apr 5, 2004, at 9:13 AM, RolyPhotography at aol.com wrote:

> I was approached some time ago about donating pictures to the site and
> was interested in doing so. I received an email back then on the
> specific steps and image size that was needed, but i no longer have
> that information. If someone can get back to me regarding this, i'd
> appreciate it.
> thanks
> roly

Does anyone here know what this is in specific reference to?  Consider
me
trying to do a little coordination.

Peter

                                  -- ---<>--- --
                        A house without walls cannot fall.
           Help build the world's largest encyclopedia at Wikipedia.org
                                  -- ---<>--- --


from_name: gisellelazze

subject: [WikiEN-l] remove gisellelazze@onvol.net

body:
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from_name: Lars Aronsson

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
> I'd say a minimum of 10,000 active speakers is a requirement for
> creating an encyclopedia.  Neither Klingon nor Toki Pona meet that
> requirement.

Does Latin meet that requirement?  The aboriginal Sami minority in
northern Sweden, Norway and Finland numbers 85,000 people and it is
not clear to me whether they speak one language with six dialects or
six different languages.  Many wrongs have been done to these folks in
history, and I think it is fair to assume that the same goes for many
other language minorities throughout the world.  It seems unnecessary
to raise more artificial barriers.

If a Sami or Kashubian encyclopedia or one in Toki Pona is a really
bad idea, it will die or fade away from its own failure, and the
contributors cannot blame anyone else for their own failure.

> But they don't harm anyone, right? Well, they do clutter the list of
> interlanguage links, and they do have the potential to harm our reputation
> as a serious project.

If this is the problem, why not solve this problem.  Split the lists
in two or three different lists: Languages with more than 20K articles
can be considered "useful" encyclopedias, languages with 1K-20K
articles can be listed as "developing" encyclopedias, and languages
with less than 1K articles are "experimental".  Every big corporation
or organization has "experimental" projects which can fail without
risking the credibility of the whole.

Currently, eight languages have more than 20K articles (English,
German, Japanese, French, Polish, Swedish, Dutch, and Spanish).
Another 26 languages have 1K-20K articles, including Esperanto,
Chinese, Hebrew, Interlingua, Basque, Latin, and Walloon.

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


from_name: Pierre Abbat

subject: [Wikipedia-l] pyWikipediabot news

body:
On Monday 05 April 2004 10:18, Andre Engels wrote:
> PyWikipediabot is a bot used for several functions in Wikipedia.
> Most famous is probably the bot for working on Interwiki links.
> See http://sourceforge.net/projects/pywikipediabot/. This is a
> report of changes and additions to the bot in the past week.

I would like to modify it to work with Wikitravel. The main differences are:
*URLs begin http://www.wikitravel.org/<language>, not
http://<language>.wikitravel.org/.
*All Wikitravels are UTF-8 enabled.

There is no test Wikitravel. I asked Evan to set one up, but he hasn't
answered.

phma
--
li fi'u vu'u fi'u fi'u du li pa


from_name: steven l. rubenstein

subject: [WikiEN-l] Hard-ban User:TDC right away

body:
I am not sure that TDC's behavior warrants a hard ban, but 172 is right
that there is a serious problem and I am sorry to see people responding to
his concerns by criticizing 172 rather than by examining the issue.  172
can certainly be hard to work with at times (he and I have had spats in the
past), but he always seems to respond to other people's
concerns.  Moreover, he has made substantive scholarly contributions to
various articles.  One can not say the same about TDC.  I have yet to see
an instance where TDC has made an informed contribution to any article.

One person remarked that TDC adds critiques of communism.  The point is not
whether communism is good or bad -- informed and thoughtful people can take
either position or even argue that there are good and bad things about
different communist regimes or communist thinkers.  The point is that TDC's
critiques are ill-informed, sloppy, and ultimately useless.  He inserts
opinions, not accounts of scholarly (or other) debates.  That some of us
may agree with his opinions is neither here nor there; articles should be
informative and are not personal essays.

Moreover, TDC cannot engage in constructive discussion.  Believe me, on
both the Talk Fascism and Talk Karl Marx pages I and many others
(Andylehrer is the best example) tried many times to engage him civilly --
to explain how he was misunderstanding or misconstruing historical issues
or scholarly debates, or how he was misconstruing wikipedia.  The result
was only an escalation of hostility on his part.  172 and I lost patience a
few days ago, but others continue to be very civil with to absolutely no
avail.  This is not a problem between TDC and either me or 172, it is a
problem between TDC and many others that obstructs progress on an article.

The Karl Marx page was recently protected because TDC kept reverting
content I had added.  The problem is, all past behavior indicates that TDC
will not accept anything close to a compromise on the talk page.

I did not know that Steve and Fred had blocked TDC for 24 hours.  Believe
me, I would have been delighted if after that block he apologized to me and
also started responding constructively to others on talk pages.  It just
doesn't seem that that will happen.  I really don't know what to do, and I
don't think protecting pages is a good long-term solution,

Steve

Steven L. Rubenstein
Associate Professor
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Bentley Annex
Ohio University
Athens, Ohio 45701
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body:
On Mon, Apr 05, 2004 at 05:47:46PM +0200, Lars Aronsson wrote:

> Does Latin meet that requirement?  The aboriginal Sami minority in

I'm sure there are more than 10000 people who knows latin. At least every
doctor in Hungary ought to. :)

> If this is the problem, why not solve this problem.  Split the lists
> in two or three different lists: Languages with more than 20K articles
> can be considered "useful" encyclopedias, languages with 1K-20K
> articles can be listed as "developing" encyclopedias, and languages
> with less than 1K articles are "experimental".

Allright. So I am going on with my bot to create year articles (let's start
with 3000), and create cities (~4500) and maybe country templates and ...
and...

Yep. We have ~600 articles, but they are _real_. Not templates. Not
automatically created. I believe I can create around 10000 of those without
much thinking. So we can be "useful" in, say, I week. Progress is fast
nowadays, isn't it?

(All I wanted to say: article count isn't god's way to rate us. Apart from
the problem that there ain't no god.)

--grin

ps: ...on the other hand the number of speakers of a language.... (much
harder to boost artifically)


from_name: Michael Wolf

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Starting a new language: Upper Sorbian

body:
Timwi napisa:
> Michael Wolf wrote:
>
>> What I have to do? AFAIK there must be translated the file Language.php
>> and copied to LanguageHsb.php. This I've alread done and I wrapped the
>> LangageHsb.php into a zip archive languagehsb.zip that you can find on:
>>
>> http://www.michalupo.de/wikipedia/languagehsb.zip
>
>
> Whoa. Why did you do that?

Hi Timwi,

I thought it's better to wrap the binary php into a zip file. Seems I
thought too complicatedly. Please excuse I'm new at Wikipedia.

> Please post the file to http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/LanguageHsb.php
> instead. Don't forget to wrap it into <pre>...</pre> tags so it displays
> correctly. Also, please copy the paragraph about the GPL (see
> http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/LanguageFr.php for example).

Done.

> Then encourage a few friends of yours to proofread it and make edits
> accordingly. When it's stable, notify us again :)

I posted into a Sorbian forum to find anybody who wants to to that.

Thank you for your help.

Best regards,
Michael Wolf


subject: [WikiEN-l] stop sending mail to wrong e-mails!!!!!!

body:
gisellelazze at onvol.net
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from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Prominence of language links

body:
For those participating in the ongoing debate, you may or may not wish
to be aware of the relative prominence of the interlanguage links in
the new page layout.

You can see the new layout in development at Gwicke's demo wiki at
http://wiki.aulinx.de/. (Log in and select the "MonoBook' skin in your
preferences if it's not being shown initially.) After continued
tweaking of the layout and the rest of the software, this or a close
cousin is going to be the standard page layout on Wikipedia; it's been
developed in response to longstanding usability problems with the
existing skins, and has consistently met with the approval of
Wikipedians asked to take a look.

Instead of along the top and bottom (which is ok for a few links but
overwhelming as the list grows), they go in the sidebar, following the
other functional links. This keeps them accessible but out of the way,
and handles a long list less disruptively.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Thomas Luft

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Deletion of single revisions: please include these
	diffs

body:
Hi there,

although Timwi and some other people already requested to code the
deletion for single revisions and I posted a modification some weeks ago
  nothing happend yet. Unfortunately the last weeks brought some major
code changes, as far as I noticed.

However I attached my proposal for the deletion of single revisions as
diffs against the current cvs. I have no idea if it still works, but I
think it should.

The deletion of the complete article when a copyright violation occured
is not feasable and I hope that my few lines of code help a little bit.

Regards

Thomas aka Urbanus
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from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
Ivo-
> choises: eighter the languge is not importand and has not much articles (in
> this case their can not be much interwiki-links to that language) or it is
> important and has much articles.

Having many articles does not make a language important. With some basic
Klingon skills I could get the article count up to 30,000 by translating
the US census data. Furthermore, most conlang Wikipedias will effectively
be abused as dictionaries for their respective languages, and if a very
dedicated conlang inventor like Sonja works on the wiki, they can easily
get to a few thousand definition "articles" in little time. Hell, my own
infoAnarchy wiki has 3100 pages created by a handful of volunteers. That
does not mean it is an encyclopedia, nor does it mean it ever has the
potential to become one.

I'll create a page on Meta for voting on new language Wikipedias (and I
would like for a vote to be also applied to Toki Pona). That seems like
the most reasonable solution to this problem.

Regards,

Erik


subject:
[WikiEN-l] stop fooling around...you son of a bitch!! go to
	timbactu !

body:
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from_name: Ivo Köthnig

body:
> To me, it matters not whether a language is artificial or whether it has
> naturally developed over hundreds of years. It does matter, however, how
> many speakers there are, and if we can realistically create a complete and
> accurate encyclopedia with that number of speakers. I'd say a minimum of
> 10,000 active speakers is a requirement for creating an encyclopedia.
> Neither Klingon nor Toki Pona meet that requirement.

Although I share the POV of Erik that we do not really need Toki Pona, I must
say, that this argument can't be true, sine there are just 2 fuzzy choises:
eighter the languge is not importand and has not much articles (in this case
their can not be much interwiki-links to that language) or it is important
and has much articles.

--Ivo K?thnig


body:
On Apr 6, 2004, at 1:39 AM, Andre Engels wrote:

> "Erik Moeller" <erik_moeller at gmx.de> schrieb:
>
>> Yes, I agree that conlangs are the more serious problem than natural
>> languages. However, I don't think that there should be no criteria at
>> all
>> for natural languages. The three criteria that Andre proposed - ISO
>> 639-2,
>> more than 50 archived documents, or more than 10,000 speakers - seem
>> reasonable, and would probably kick out most obscure conlangs, while
>> leaving in legitimate spoken tongues, and dead languages too, if
>> there's a
>> written record of them (not that I care at all about those, but in the
>> interest of wikipeace ..).
>
> Actually, I think these might be too inclusive when looking at dead
> languages. While I am all for the Latin Wikipedia, and would not mind
> a Sanskrit one, Hittite or Sumerian are another matter. Many dead
> languages are only in passive use, and to exclude those, I would
> like to restrict ourselves to those languages in which (new) documents
> have been written within the last 50 years or so.

I agree instinctively with your point, but I must ask: why exactly?  If
a group
of speakers can maintain a Wikipedia in that language, isn't that
requirement
enough?  Contrast this issue to that of Klingon, where some have made
the
argument that seeing "Klingon" (or tlh... whatever) at the top of
certain pages
might be offensive.  I can't think of a good reason why not to let
people have a
go at Sumerian if they feel up to it.  If it never gets big it takes up
that
much less room.  :)  If it's a substantial burden on Brion and others
though,
then that's a good answer to my question.

Peter

                                  -- ---<>--- --
                        A house without walls cannot fall.
           Help build the world's largest encyclopedia at Wikipedia.org
                                  -- ---<>--- --


from_name: Caroline Ford

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>Ivo-
>
>
>>choises: eighter the languge is not importand and has not much articles (in
>>this case their can not be much interwiki-links to that language) or it is
>>important and has much articles.
>>
>>
>
>Having many articles does not make a language important. With some basic
>Klingon skills I could get the article count up to 30,000 by translating
>the US census data. Furthermore, most conlang Wikipedias will effectively
>be abused as dictionaries for their respective languages, and if a very
>dedicated conlang inventor like Sonja works on the wiki, they can easily
>get to a few thousand definition "articles" in little time. Hell, my own
>infoAnarchy wiki has 3100 pages created by a handful of volunteers. That
>does not mean it is an encyclopedia, nor does it mean it ever has the
>potential to become one.
>
>I'll create a page on Meta for voting on new language Wikipedias (and I
>would like for a vote to be also applied to Toki Pona). That seems like
>the most reasonable solution to this problem.
>
>Regards,
>
>Erik
>_______________________________________________
>Wikipedia-l mailing list
>Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
>
>
I disagree - it is not up to current users to decide whether a language
community wants its own wikipedia. This just gives the english wikipedia
an effective veto.

I have no problem at all with _any_ natural language having a wikipedia
if there is the desire for one. The complaints about costs must be
negligible compared to the cost of en, for example. What is the actual
costs for a small wikipedia - bandwidth and a tiny bit of disk space?

The issue that has been raised refers to conlangs - I think we need to
separate out the two. I agree that we would look silly having Klingon,
and that we will need to moderate conlangs - in the same way that some
articles about conlangs have been deleted if they exist only in the mind
of their creators.

Fundamentally I don't see this as a massive problem - if we get over-run
by conlangs then we need to reconsider, but at the moment all natural
languages that request a wikipedia should get one.

Caroline / Secretlondon


from_name: Timwi

body:
Walter Vermeir wrote:

> Because whe are using the language links in the language of that language
> visitors will not see "Klingon" but "tlhIngan" (I do not think there is unicode
> support for the real Klingon glyphs http://www.kli.org/pics/piqdemo.gif )

This is off-topic, but -- Klingon enthusiasts prefer to use the Latin
letters, and the pIqaD (I hope I spelt that right) are widely recognised
as being unofficial and non-canon and therefore have little following.

Timwi


from_name: Guillaume Blanchard

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Extension_Syntax

body:
Can we start vote at
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extension_Syntax ?
If noone else want to do it, I can attend to this vote process.

Aoineko


subject: [Wikitech-l] Extension_Syntax


body:
Daniel-
> So, IMO, a language must exist independent of Wikipedia and not be hindered
> by a claim of copyright before an encyclopedia is started in it.

Well, this is another issue:

http://www.tokipona.org/
(C) Toki Pona is the intellectual property of Sonja Elen Kisa, 2001-2004.
You may use these materials freely, as long as you do not compete with
this site.

Given that Sonja is also the most active contributor to the Toki Pona
Wikipedia that's probably not much of a big deal, though. Still, the "as
long as you do not compete" clause is annoying.

Yes, I agree that conlangs are the more serious problem than natural
languages. However, I don't think that there should be no criteria at all
for natural languages. The three criteria that Andre proposed - ISO 639-2,
more than 50 archived documents, or more than 10,000 speakers - seem
reasonable, and would probably kick out most obscure conlangs, while
leaving in legitimate spoken tongues, and dead languages too, if there's a
written record of them (not that I care at all about those, but in the
interest of wikipeace ..).

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikitech-l] Removing Smarty skins

body:
Any objection to removing SkinSmarty.php and the templates therefore?
That's my half-finished experimental implementations of Tarquin's
Montparnasse and Paddington layouts.

I've never had the chance to get them cleanly working, meanwhile
Gwicke's PHPTal-based skins are at a much more advanced state... it
seems kind of silly to maintain two parallel template systems. If
someone would like to rebuild Paddington and Montparnasse for PHPTal,
that would be great, but at present they don't really work and I don't
think it's worth the effort to clean up the Smarty code.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Imran Ghory

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Reference desk

body:
I'd like to propose that we break Wikipedia's Reference Desk (and
wikibook's Study help desk) to they're own wiki, at the moment both are
fairly unstructured.

Having their own wiki will mean we can properly classify/sort the
questions/answer and make navigation easier.

So what do people think ?

Possible name suggestions for the project:

wikiref / wikiquestion / wikiquest / refdesk.wikipedia

Imran
--
http://bits.bris.ac.uk/imran


list: foundation-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Extension syntax vote begins

body:
Please vote on
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extension_Syntax

To explain again what this is about:

Currently there is one extension, LaTeX for mathematical formulas. This
extension is called using the syntax

<math>a + b</math>.

This vote is about a general syntax for encapsulating different
extensions. For example, a music extension could be encapsulated like so:

<music>do re mi fa so</music>

Or like so:

[!music do re mi fa so]

This vote is *not* about the syntax for the different extensions
themselves (stuff like "\sin x + \ln y +\operatorname{sgn} z" for math),
it is merely about the syntax for encapsulating these extensions. Some
people think XML-like tags (like <math>)  are good enough, while others
are asking for a more "wiki-like" syntax.

Voting deadline is April 12, 2004, 20:00 UTC. Please distribute this
announcement to your local projects. This is not only relevant to
Wikipedia but to all Wikimedia projects.

Let the edit conflicts begin.

Regards,

Erik


list: wikimedia-l


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Extension syntax vote begins


body:
On Mon, 5 Apr 2004, Daniel Mayer wrote:

> I could not find anything about this on StarTrek.com though and it does seem a
> bit dubious to copyright fictional words. But then, I'm not sure if we would
> want to be in a postion to pay legal fees to test Paramount's purported claim
> (not to mention all the lost effort in a Klingon encyclopedia if we decided to
> just pull the plug).

I don't think Paramount would have a case (at least in the UK), the fact
that they're publishing and endorsing educational material would seem to
give people implicit permission to use it.

We could just write to Paramount's lawyers and ask them to state one way
or another.

But the fact that we've got to the stage where we see reviews of the
Klingon translation of Hamlet appearing in Shakespeare Quarterly indicate
Klingon as a language no-longer belongs to Paramount.

According to [[Lojban]] Dr Brown lost a courtcase on language copyright,
but I can't trace the court case.

Imran
--
http://bits.bris.ac.uk/imran


from_name: Jay Bowks

body:
From: "Brion Vibber" <brion at pobox.com>
> Certainly there are people who have derided the existence of the
> Esperanto-language Wikipedia, but having it has brought a number of
> people to Wikipedia in general, such as myself, who might not have been
> called to it otherwise. I started patching the old UseMod wiki to
> better support Esperanto and Unicode, and ended up pretty much
> maintaining the software and server config.
> Will an Esperanto-language Wikipedia really educate lay readers in the
> future better? Maybe, maybe not. But as a recruiting tool it's
> certainly been a success, and I'd rather not begrudge that chance to
> others.

Well said, Brion!
I first found Wikipedia through
a mention of the eo.wiki by
Don Harlow I believe. And
I've enjoyed so much being
able to look up quite informative
texts in Esperanto and other
languages! The Interlingua
wiki has grown too, by getting
people interested and adding
articles who perhaps may never
have had the urge to translate or
compose in this beautiful auxiliary
and international language.

Not to get overly sappy or anything
but I really appreciate everything
you've done for the Wikipedia.
There isn't a day that goes by
that I don't think appreciatively of
all the help you've been, Brion,
and so many others also, who
are dedicated to keeping this
project running, in the late nights,
and during times when things
go hay-wire. Thanks for keeping
everything working so well for
the benefit of so many.

With sincere thanks,
Jay B.
[[User:ILVI]]


from_name: Andre Engels

body:
"Erik Moeller" <erik_moeller at gmx.de> schrieb:

> Yes, I agree that conlangs are the more serious problem than natural
> languages. However, I don't think that there should be no criteria at all
> for natural languages. The three criteria that Andre proposed - ISO 639-2,
> more than 50 archived documents, or more than 10,000 speakers - seem
> reasonable, and would probably kick out most obscure conlangs, while
> leaving in legitimate spoken tongues, and dead languages too, if there's a
> written record of them (not that I care at all about those, but in the
> interest of wikipeace ..).

Actually, I think these might be too inclusive when looking at dead
languages. While I am all for the Latin Wikipedia, and would not mind
a Sanskrit one, Hittite or Sumerian are another matter. Many dead
languages are only in passive use, and to exclude those, I would
like to restrict ourselves to those languages in which (new) documents
have been written within the last 50 years or so.

Andre Engels


body:
Tomasz-
> It's like voting on whether to use British or American spelling in
> Wikipedia, with majority of voters being native Chinese.

No. The issue here is fairly easy to understand. It's just that some
people - well, Eclecticology - got confused because they thought the vote
would be about the syntax for the extensions themselves.

Furthermore, my main goal here is to finally arrive at a decision. I don't
care if the [%$)=PAWER}?3]?3] syntax wins, then people have nobody to
blame but themselves. But the integration of things like Wikitex has been
held up because of this trivial matter. We can always change things later
if they turn out to be seriously screwed up. Or you can all just vote for
my proposal and get a nice, working, standard syntax ;-)

Regards,

Erik


body:
Peter Gervai wrote:
> Yep. We have ~600 articles, but they are _real_. Not templates. Not
> [...]
> (All I wanted to say: article count isn't god's way to rate us. Apart from

This is of course not about "rating" a people or language per se, only
indicating the size (at a point in time) of a collection of articles.
It took me (alone) only one month to write the first 1000 articles
(real articles) in my own wiki website, so 600 articles is a very
small collection.

I'm not suggesting to remove the smaller language Wikipedias, only to
separate big from small in lists such as
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Multilingual_coordination

The Hungarian Wikipedia has gotten a late start, but I'm sure it will
soon reach 6000 and then 60,000 articles, just like German, Polish and
Swedish, so you need not worry.  But I'm worried that Sami or
Kashubian will never reach 600, and I don't think we should stop them
from trying just because these languages might not have 10,000 active
speakers.  When someone asks why there is no active Kashubian
Wikipedia, do you think we should answer "they tried but have not yet
succeeded" or "we have forbidden them from trying"?

And what if the Poles (46 million speakers) and Germans (140 million
speakers) would decide to set the limit at 30 million speakers instead
of 10 thousand, then both you (Hungarian, 15 million speakers) and me
(Swedish, 9 million speakers) will be in trouble.

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


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

body:
On Tue, Apr 06, 2004 at 02:10:00AM +0200, Erik Moeller wrote:
> Please vote on
> http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extension_Syntax
>
> To explain again what this is about:
>
> Currently there is one extension, LaTeX for mathematical formulas. This
> extension is called using the syntax
>
> <math>a + b</math>.
>
> This vote is about a general syntax for encapsulating different
> extensions. For example, a music extension could be encapsulated like so:
>
> <music>do re mi fa so</music>
>
> Or like so:
>
> [!music do re mi fa so]
>
> This vote is *not* about the syntax for the different extensions
> themselves (stuff like "\sin x + \ln y +\operatorname{sgn} z" for math),
> it is merely about the syntax for encapsulating these extensions. Some
> people think XML-like tags (like <math>)  are good enough, while others
> are asking for a more "wiki-like" syntax.
>
> Voting deadline is April 12, 2004, 20:00 UTC. Please distribute this
> announcement to your local projects. This is not only relevant to
> Wikipedia but to all Wikimedia projects.
>
> Let the edit conflicts begin.

This vote is the dumbest of the votes held so far (unfortunately I expect
even worse in the future). Average contributor has absolutely zero clue about
technical issues that make one of the syntaxes preferable.

It's like voting on whether to use British or American spelling in Wikipedia,
with majority of voters being native Chinese.


from_name: Erik Zachte

body:
Several people complained about this vote being too technical.
Actually the vote is mainly about usability.

What syntax would you find easiest to use or even only to recognize when
editing an article.
Nothing technical about that.

Erik Zachte


body:
To be more complete, the vote is also about which syntax is most consistent
with existing syntax, is easy to expand and does not lead to confusion.

Arguments pro and contra are presented for each suggested solution. So
anyone interested can make an informed judgement. No technical skills
required.

Erik Zachte


from_name: Mantas Dirgela

body:
What would be the purpose of suspending them? I would suggest we manualy
remove links to inactive wikipedia's and when somebody is ready to revive
them then he/she will find everything ready. Lithuanian wikipedia has been
inactive for about 6 months and now is starting to get more wikipedians and
finally reached 100 pages. If editing it would have been "suspended" or
otherwise complicated the chances of revival are pretty low. As inactive
wikipedia dont take space I don't see any reason to suspend or close
inactive one as wikipedia is atracting more and more users and some of them
will probably try to revive inactive wikipedias.
"Ray Saintonge" <saintonge at telus.net> wrote in
message news:407175E4.7050500 at telus.net...
> Andre Engels wrote:
>
> >It varies, but then, it also varies for some much larger languages
(Marathi
> >with 65 million speakers has only 4 pages, for example). There's four
> >Wikipedia languages with less than 100.000 speakers, none of them getting
> >anywhere serious, however the fifth smallest language (Icelandic, 250.000
> >speakers) managed to get to a number of 9 Wikipedians (with 10 or more
> >logged-in edits), and is seriously trying to make something.
> >
> >Wikipedia languages with less than 1 million speakers:
> >
> >             speakers   Wikipedians  pages
> >Manx             250      0             1
> >Nauruan        7.000      2            16
> >Maori         50.000      0             8
> >Scottish      60.000      1            14
> >Icelandic    250.000      9           209
> >Irish        260.000      3            62
> >Corsican     340.000      0            14
> >Occitan      350.000      7           493
> >Welsh        600.000      9           954
> >Basque       600.000      5          2319
> >Frisian      700.000      9           881
> >
> Regretably, in a few instances the proponents start the wiki in their
> language just to see if it can be done.  When they have immediate
> success, they lose interest.  I suppose that a seriously inactive
> Wikipedia could be put into suspense, and the work that has already been
> done could be revived if there is a renewed interest.  From the above
> list Manx, Maori, and Corsican would be candidates for suspension
> depending on how long since their last activity.
> There would need to be a prominent mention somewhere (perhaps after the
> list of active pedias) inviting people to breathe life back into them.
>
> Ec


from_name: Antoine

subject: [pyWikipediaBot-users] Re: [Wikipedia-l] pyWikipediabot news

body:
Tuesday, April 6, 2004, 12:53:31 AM, you wrote:
> On Monday 05 April 2004 10:18, Andre Engels wrote:
>> PyWikipediabot is a bot used for several functions in Wikipedia.
>> Most famous is probably the bot for working on Interwiki links.
>> See http://sourceforge.net/projects/pywikipediabot/. This is a
>> report of changes and additions to the bot in the past week.
>
> I would like to modify it to work with Wikitravel. The main differences are:
> *URLs begin http://www.wikitravel.org/<language>, not
> http://<language>.wikitravel.org/.
> *All Wikitravels are UTF-8 enabled.

> There is no test Wikitravel. I asked Evan to set one up, but he hasn't
> answered.

> phma

Hello Pierre,

You will need to edit the array "langs" in file wikipedia.py. I think
instead of:

'en':'en.wikipedia.org'

you can use:
'en':'www.wikitravel.org/en

To set them all as utf-8 empty the "latin1" and "latin1old" array as I
think the bot default to utf-8 for encoding :)

We can eventually move those arrays to the default configuration
script. That will allow a user to override the settings in his
user configuration script.

cheers,

--
Antoine
mailto:thoane at altern.org


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Proxy blocker security

body:
Tim Starling wrote:

> In response to reports of people posting misleading links to
> Special:Blockme, or otherwise tricking users' browsers into requesting
> the relevant URL, I've implemented a basic keyed hash authentication
> algorithm.

You might also want to make it a POST request.


body:
"Peter Jaros" <rjaros at shaysnet.com> schrieb:

> > Actually, I think these might be too inclusive when looking at dead
> > languages. While I am all for the Latin Wikipedia, and would not mind
> > a Sanskrit one, Hittite or Sumerian are another matter. Many dead
> > languages are only in passive use, and to exclude those, I would
> > like to restrict ourselves to those languages in which (new) documents
> > have been written within the last 50 years or so.
>
> I agree instinctively with your point, but I must ask: why exactly?  If
> a group
> of speakers can maintain a Wikipedia in that language, isn't that
> requirement
> enough?

Yes, that should be enough, but I think it would be good to get prima
facie evidence that they can. And such evidence would I think best be
"Well, we (or others) have already written articles in this language."

Andre Engels


body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

> I'm pretty sure Klingon and most other languages made for fictional universes
> are copyrighted (or at least many of their creators claim copyright).

I often read that this is a common misconception. Many Klingon
enthusiasts seem to be convinced that you cannot "copyright a language".
Supposedly you can only copyright, for example, a text that /describes/
a language, but when I write a new text in that language, I only use the
pure knowledge represented in that description of the language, not the
description itself, and as we all know you can't copyright knowledge.

Now some might say, "Ah, but you can copyright ideas!" No, you can't.
You can *patent* ideas. I am less sure about whether a language (which
can be regarded as an encoding for information) can be patented. Sonja,
how about you go patent Toki Pona, and let us know how it went ;-)

> These links seem to confirm the copyright situation for Klingon at least:
> http://www.corante.com/importance/archives/002300.html
> http://higbee.cots.net/~holtej/klingon/faq.htm#2.12

The first one does challenge the copyright claim. The second one is only
a copy of the first paragraph of the first.

> Also, the word 'Klingon' is a Paramount trademark.

Yes, but that is irrelevant. That only means that you can't create a new
product in such a way that it can be confused with the trademark. By
saying that our Wikipedia is in the Klingon language, we are clearly not
referring to a new product, but the good old Klingon language. It's the
same as having articles about trademarked names (like companies and
products).

Did you know there's a shoe-shop in London called McDonald's? Supposedly
they can get away with that because a shoe-shop is difficult to confuse
with a fast-food restaurant.

> So, IMO, a language must exist independent of Wikipedia and not be hindered by
> a claim of copyright before an encyclopedia is started in it.

As far as I can tell, Toki Pona fulfills these conditions.

Timwi


body:
Peter Jaros wrote:

> Contrast this issue to that of Klingon, where some have made the
> argument that seeing "Klingon" (or tlh... whatever) at the top of
> certain pages might be offensive.

Whoa! First it only hurt our reputation, and now it's even offensive.

How much worse can it get? :-)

Timwi


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Starting a new language: Upper Sorbian

body:
"Peter Gervai" <grin at tolna.net> schrieb:

> I can talk from experience.
>
> HU was existing since 1991, and contained 5 pages (when I last counted). One
> main page with dead links, 1 page with real, short content, and the others
> varying from "hehehehe" to "*** your *** *** mother".

1991? Sounds improbable, given that the Wikipedia project as a
whole only exists since 2001.

> I convinced brion to flush it down the toilet and start again, and invested
> considerable amount of time to get it started. Now, with 5 or so permanent
> editors it is alive and probable won't die anymore.
>
> What a new language needs is more than zero permanent editor with dedication
> to create as much articles that makes it look like a worthwile waste of time
> for the people walking nearby. I'd say without 3 dedicated editors (friends
> preferably) a new language should not be started. It is probably going to
> get extinct soon, because there are at least 50 articles required to be
> created before people consider it serious.

And a single person writing will likely give up before that point is
reached, while a small group will tend to give the positive feedback
that makes people continue. On the other hand, often the first group
will come from single persons who just arrived at approximately the
same time, so I would still like not to discourage single people from
editing a new language Wikipedia.

Perhaps we could have people from a 'related' language keep an eye on
such small languages. A number of Dutch speakers (among which yours
not so humbly) have helped the Frisian Wikipedia to start up in that
way, and I think some French did with Occitan (?). The idea is to
welcome people on the 'small' Wikipedia in the same way one would do
on the 'big' one - say hello, wikify their contributions etcetera.

This way new contributors might find themselves in a 'spread bed', and
be more likely to stay long enough that a second and third one has
come in between.

Andre Engels


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Extension_Syntax

body:
Guillaume Blanchard wrote:

> I created a page to allow people to see syntax proposal with concrete
> examples:
>
> http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extension_Syntax/Example

Thanks.

However, your example is pretty particular. You are taking a particular
(long) maths formula and pretending that this example was representative.

I have added another line to all your examples where I have written a
sentence with three formulae in it. I hope this illustrates how

	The function [[! f(x) !]] may also be written as [[! x^2 +
	y^2 !]] or [[! re^\theta !]].

is clearly easier, faster, more readable and better :) than

	The function <rend type="math">f(x)</rend> may also be written
	as <rend type="math">x^2 + y^2</rend> or <rend
	type="math">re^\theta</rend>.

Timwi


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Reference desk

body:
Imran Ghory wrote:

> I'd like to propose that we break Wikipedia's Reference Desk (and
> wikibook's Study help desk) to they're own wiki, at the moment both are
> fairly unstructured.

They seem to me to be very specific things; I think a whole new Wiki
would be overkill. Instead, you can implement your proposed structed as
subpages. Whatever you can do on a separate Wiki, you can do in subpages
under [[Wikipedia:Reference desk]].

> Having their own wiki will mean we can properly classify/sort the
> questions/answer and make navigation easier.

But it will also mean that you will have *yet* another site with *yet*
another DB, *yet* another sign-in, *yet* another set of preferences,
*yet* another watchlist etc.etc.

Timwi


from_name: Peter Gervai

body:
On Mon, Apr 05, 2004 at 08:06:12AM -0700, Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Andre Engels wrote:
>
> >It varies, but then, it also varies for some much larger languages (Marathi
> >with 65 million speakers has only 4 pages, for example). There's four
> >Wikipedia languages with less than 100.000 speakers, none of them getting
> >anywhere serious, however the fifth smallest language (Icelandic, 250.000
> >speakers) managed to get to a number of 9 Wikipedians (with 10 or more
> >logged-in edits), and is seriously trying to make something.

> Regretably, in a few instances the proponents start the wiki in their
> language just to see if it can be done.  When they have immediate
> success, they lose interest.

I can talk from experience.

HU was existing since 1991, and contained 5 pages (when I last counted). One
main page with dead links, 1 page with real, short content, and the others
varying from "hehehehe" to "*** your *** *** mother".

I convinced brion to flush it down the toilet and start again, and invested
considerable amount of time to get it started. Now, with 5 or so permanent
editors it is alive and probable won't die anymore.

What a new language needs is more than zero permanent editor with dedication
to create as much articles that makes it look like a worthwile waste of time
for the people walking nearby. I'd say without 3 dedicated editors (friends
preferably) a new language should not be started. It is probably going to
get extinct soon, because there are at least 50 articles required to be
created before people consider it serious.

Maybe I should write that into [[Wikipedia:What to expect when you start a
new langauge Wikipedia]]?

>  I suppose that a seriously inactive
> Wikipedia could be put into suspense, and the work that has already been
> done could be revived if there is a renewed interest.  From the above
> list Manx, Maori, and Corsican would be candidates for suspension
> depending on how long since their last activity.

I do not yet see the purpose and method of this suspension. Deactivating the
domain would change the neutral effect to negative. These wikipediaes
suspend themselves.

Maybe there could be a boilerplate text on the main page of the zombie
wikipedias that "this wikipedia lacks supporters of this natural language
speakers and doesn't evolve right now. if you want to adopt this orphan, and
want to dedicate time, see [[XXXX]] what to expect"... or like. In their
natural language, preferably.

grin


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Extension syntax vote begins

body:
Erik Zachte wrote:

> Several people complained about this vote being too technical.
> Actually the vote is mainly about usability.
>
> What syntax would you find easiest to use or even only to recognize when
> editing an article. Nothing technical about that.

That is true. Nevertheless, it seems that so far mostly
technically-minded people have voted. I suppose the less
technically-minded people
(a) don't really quite get what this is about
(b) don't care enough to read the huge bulk of arguments for and against
everything.

It is not uncommon for less technically-minded people to stay out of
this kind of thing and blindly trust the "higher-ups". It is also not
uncommon for them to have no real idea which option they will like
better once it goes into actual production use. In fact, most people
probably just take things like <math> for granted the way they are and
aren't really consciously aware of the fact that they can influence it.

The vote therefore has a systemic bias towards the programmers, but they
are not the intended audience. Also, most of the programmers
(apparently) vote on what they prefer (as opposed to what they think
unsavvy people might prefer).

There is no other way I can imagine that people seriously prefer
<math>x^2</math> over simple-and-quick [!x^2!] or [$x^2$] or whatever.
Except for <rend type="math">, *all* proposed syntaxes are better than
<math>.

Timwi


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Prominence of language links

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> For those participating in the ongoing debate, you may or may not wish
> to be aware of the relative prominence of the interlanguage links in the
> new page layout.

Where is that on-going debate? This is the first time I hear of it. It's
not even mentioned on [[Wikipedia:Goings-on]].

The inter-language links are fine. I have a number of other gripes with
that skin, where do I post them?

Thanks,
Timwi


from_name: Camille Constans

subject: [Wikitech-l] Geoffrin woes -> Jimmy

body:
On Sun, 4 Apr 2004 13:58:56 -0700
Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:

> Shaihulud's been running the Mersenne Twister calculation as a CPU
> stress test on geoffrin. Related or not, things seem to have gone
> south; it comes up with "I/O error" in response to most commands, I
> can't even tell it to shutdown or reboot.
>
> Log fragment:
> Apr  4 19:05:02 geoffrin kernel: EXT3-fs error (device sd(8,7)) in
> ext3_reserve_inode_write: IO failure
> Apr  4 19:05:02 geoffrin kernel: SCSI disk error : host 0 channel 0 id
> 0 lun 0 return code = 25040001
> Apr  4 19:05:02 geoffrin kernel:  I/O error: dev 08:07, sector 0
> Apr  4 19:05:02 geoffrin kernel: SCSI disk error : host 0 channel 0 id
> 0 lun 0 return code = 25040001
> Apr  4 19:05:02 geoffrin kernel:  I/O error: dev 08:07, sector 60715128
> Apr  4 19:05:02 geoffrin kernel: SCSI disk error : host 0 channel 0 id
> 0 lun 0 return code = 25040001
> Apr  4 19:05:02 geoffrin kernel:  I/O error: dev 08:07, sector 60715008

Jimmy could you reboot geoffrin to get a chance to work with it ?

Shaihulud


from_name: Evan Prodromou

subject: [Wikipedia-l] pyWikipediabot news

in_reply_to:
<1BAmg1-07RyAC0@fwd02.sul.t-online.com> (Andre Engels's message
	of "06 Apr 2004 09:15 GMT")

body:
>>>>> "AE" == Andre Engels <engelsAG at t-online.de> writes:

    AE> (so please, if you want the bot to work _don't_ customize the
    AE> name of the /wiki/ directory as well).

Explain to me again why I want a bot that has this kind of stuff
hard-coded and difficult to change running against our server.

~ESP

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


from_name: Obey GFDL

subject:
[Foundation-l] "stewards" should not be liars, "witch hunters",
	privacy violators, libellers or those conflicted

body:
The following should be added to
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewards
in time for debate before validating which of the named people should acquire these responsibilities.  This is being mailed on behalf of those whose contributions have been censored, by exactly the people who would be excluded if such criteria were applied:

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

=== Liars ===

People who can be shown to have lied in any Wikimedia forum ought not to be granted this power and approval, even if the lie is small.  For instance, to invent serious accusations like "death threats", as RK, RickK and Daniel Mayer have done, when neutral examination of the evidence shows quite the opposite, and then repeat this lie again and again in an [[echo chamber]] like the [[Wikipedia mailing list]], does serious damage to Wikimedia's credibility.

Libel is a serious legal matter.  Sanctioning it will create problems for the Foundation.  And several times, the lying has in fact crossed this line.

Casual lying, such as the convenient claim that "egregious vandalism" originated from IP ranges in Halifax (when in fact it was a troll/political issue), also is a sign that someone can't be trusted to speak for any org.  Certainly not one trusted to maintain the [[GFDL corpus]] and remove lies from it.

Also such fatuous statements as "no legitimate use" applied to anonymous proxies, when there
are whole IP ranges blocked, are lies.  Maximus Rex makes statements like this, and they're
simply false.  History of Wikipedia has shown many cases where revealing IPs or names has been
highly detrimental to those editing.  There are many legitimate anonymizing uses.  Like for instance adding categories like this.

=== Witchhunters ===

People who make claims about alleged or collective identity based on spurious criteria (like who has "troll" in their name, or uses an easily copied style of discourse regarding [[en:Groupthink]] and bad [[Wikipedia Governance]], which are obvious for anyone to see, all being somehow "the same person").  This would disqualify Daniel Mayer and The_Anome and Morwen, and most likely Angela and Martin Harper as well.

=== Privacy violators and/or libellers ===

A particularly serious matter is privacy violations;  Some people voluntarily expose their own names, and thereby suffer some ego bruises (Daniel Mayer and Martin Harper and Robert Kaiser among them), others don't (The_Anome, Angela, Morwen, RickK).  The right to conceal your name, as long as you don't use some abusive tactic like using proxy servers to mask actual death threats (not made up ones), ought to be absolute.  In any case the assignment of any collective or alleged identity to some group of posts is very problematic with no [[interwiki identity standard]] (such as the one proposed based on jabber.org).

Those who assume they have the right to do "outing", assigning names (correct or not) to those who offend them, are doing violence to them.  If they have a legal issue with the people they are naming, they should take it to the police and courts, who have the power to track down IP numbers.  To do so from behind the shield of a pseudonym is worse, but, revealing one's own name is no excuse for revealing others'.  You can do as you like to your own body - that doesn't give you the right to do so to others.

Daniel Mayer and possibly Martin Harper ought to be ruled out on this grounds.  Larry Sanger and Sunir Shah set some very very bad precedents in this regard, and it's time to lose their legacy.  Jimbo Wales may have listened to them too much, and not enough to his lawyers.

=== Conflicted ===

Those who habitually edit or protect pages or block IPs in which they themselves are
in a dispute:  This shows a profound lack of respect for objectivity.  IF there's a
valid reason to do these things, someone who is not in the edit war ought to see it.

Those who may gain commercially from certain choices about the administration of the
[[GFDL corpus]] - i.e. [[Bomis]] employees.  The [[board]] is already conflicted, no reason to conflict everything else.

---------------------------------
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body:
The following should be added to
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewards
in time for debate before validating which of the named people should acquire these responsibilities.  This is being mailed on behalf of those whose contributions have been censored, by exactly the people who would be excluded if such criteria were applied:

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

=== Liars ===

People who can be shown to have lied in any Wikimedia forum ought not to be granted this power and approval, even if the lie is small.  For instance, to invent serious accusations like "death threats", as RK, RickK and Daniel Mayer have done, when neutral examination of the evidence shows quite the opposite, and then repeat this lie again and again in an [[echo chamber]] like the [[Wikipedia mailing list]], does serious damage to Wikimedia's credibility.

Libel is a serious legal matter.  Sanctioning it will create problems for the Foundation.  And several times, the lying has in fact crossed this line.

Casual lying, such as the convenient claim that "egregious vandalism" originated from IP ranges in Halifax (when in fact it was a troll/political issue), also is a sign that someone can't be trusted to speak for any org.  Certainly not one trusted to maintain the [[GFDL corpus]] and remove lies from it.

Also such fatuous statements as "no legitimate use" applied to anonymous proxies, when there
are whole IP ranges blocked, are lies.  Maximus Rex makes statements like this, and they're
simply false.  History of Wikipedia has shown many cases where revealing IPs or names has been
highly detrimental to those editing.  There are many legitimate anonymizing uses.  Like for instance adding categories like this.

=== Witchhunters ===

People who make claims about alleged or collective identity based on spurious criteria (like who has "troll" in their name, or uses an easily copied style of discourse regarding [[en:Groupthink]] and bad [[Wikipedia Governance]], which are obvious for anyone to see, all being somehow "the same person").  This would disqualify Daniel Mayer and The_Anome and Morwen, and most likely Angela and Martin Harper as well.

=== Privacy violators and/or libellers ===

A particularly serious matter is privacy violations;  Some people voluntarily expose their own names, and thereby suffer some ego bruises (Daniel Mayer and Martin Harper and Robert Kaiser among them), others don't (The_Anome, Angela, Morwen, RickK).  The right to conceal your name, as long as you don't use some abusive tactic like using proxy servers to mask actual death threats (not made up ones), ought to be absolute.  In any case the assignment of any collective or alleged identity to some group of posts is very problematic with no [[interwiki identity standard]] (such as the one proposed based on jabber.org).

Those who assume they have the right to do "outing", assigning names (correct or not) to those who offend them, are doing violence to them.  If they have a legal issue with the people they are naming, they should take it to the police and courts, who have the power to track down IP numbers.  To do so from behind the shield of a pseudonym is worse, but, revealing one's own name is no excuse for revealing others'.  You can do as you like to your own body - that doesn't give you the right to do so to others.

Daniel Mayer and possibly Martin Harper ought to be ruled out on this grounds.  Larry Sanger and Sunir Shah set some very very bad precedents in this regard, and it's time to lose their legacy.  Jimbo Wales may have listened to them too much, and not enough to his lawyers.

=== Conflicted ===

Those who habitually edit or protect pages or block IPs in which they themselves are
in a dispute:  This shows a profound lack of respect for objectivity.  IF there's a
valid reason to do these things, someone who is not in the edit war ought to see it.

Those who may gain commercially from certain choices about the administration of the
[[GFDL corpus]] - i.e. [[Bomis]] employees.  The [[board]] is already conflicted, no reason to conflict everything else.

---------------------------------
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body:
The following should be added to
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewards
in time for debate before validating which of the named people should acquire these responsibilities.  This is being mailed on behalf of those whose contributions have been censored, by exactly the people who would be excluded if such criteria were applied:

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

=== Liars ===

People who can be shown to have lied in any Wikimedia forum ought not to be granted this power and approval, even if the lie is small.  For instance, to invent serious accusations like "death threats", as RK, RickK and Daniel Mayer have done, when neutral examination of the evidence shows quite the opposite, and then repeat this lie again and again in an [[echo chamber]] like the [[Wikipedia mailing list]], does serious damage to Wikimedia's credibility.

Libel is a serious legal matter.  Sanctioning it will create problems for the Foundation.  And several times, the lying has in fact crossed this line.

Casual lying, such as the convenient claim that "egregious vandalism" originated from IP ranges in Halifax (when in fact it was a troll/political issue), also is a sign that someone can't be trusted to speak for any org.  Certainly not one trusted to maintain the [[GFDL corpus]] and remove lies from it.

Also such fatuous statements as "no legitimate use" applied to anonymous proxies, when there
are whole IP ranges blocked, are lies.  Maximus Rex makes statements like this, and they're
simply false.  History of Wikipedia has shown many cases where revealing IPs or names has been
highly detrimental to those editing.  There are many legitimate anonymizing uses.  Like for instance adding categories like this.

=== Witchhunters ===

People who make claims about alleged or collective identity based on spurious criteria (like who has "troll" in their name, or uses an easily copied style of discourse regarding [[en:Groupthink]] and bad [[Wikipedia Governance]], which are obvious for anyone to see, all being somehow "the same person").  This would disqualify Daniel Mayer and The_Anome and Morwen, and most likely Angela and Martin Harper as well.

=== Privacy violators and/or libellers ===

A particularly serious matter is privacy violations;  Some people voluntarily expose their own names, and thereby suffer some ego bruises (Daniel Mayer and Martin Harper and Robert Kaiser among them), others don't (The_Anome, Angela, Morwen, RickK).  The right to conceal your name, as long as you don't use some abusive tactic like using proxy servers to mask actual death threats (not made up ones), ought to be absolute.  In any case the assignment of any collective or alleged identity to some group of posts is very problematic with no [[interwiki identity standard]] (such as the one proposed based on jabber.org).

Those who assume they have the right to do "outing", assigning names (correct or not) to those who offend them, are doing violence to them.  If they have a legal issue with the people they are naming, they should take it to the police and courts, who have the power to track down IP numbers.  To do so from behind the shield of a pseudonym is worse, but, revealing one's own name is no excuse for revealing others'.  You can do as you like to your own body - that doesn't give you the right to do so to others.

Daniel Mayer and possibly Martin Harper ought to be ruled out on this grounds.  Larry Sanger and Sunir Shah set some very very bad precedents in this regard, and it's time to lose their legacy.  Jimbo Wales may have listened to them too much, and not enough to his lawyers.

=== Conflicted ===

Those who habitually edit or protect pages or block IPs in which they themselves are
in a dispute:  This shows a profound lack of respect for objectivity.  IF there's a
valid reason to do these things, someone who is not in the edit war ought to see it.

Those who may gain commercially from certain choices about the administration of the
[[GFDL corpus]] - i.e. [[Bomis]] employees.  The [[board]] is already conflicted, no reason to conflict everything else.

---------------------------------
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-------------- next part --------------
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body:
The following should be added to
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewards
in time for debate before validating which of the named people should acquire these responsibilities.  This is being mailed on behalf of those whose contributions have been censored, by exactly the people who would be excluded if such criteria were applied:

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

=== Liars ===

People who can be shown to have lied in any Wikimedia forum ought not to be granted this power and approval, even if the lie is small.  For instance, to invent serious accusations like "death threats", as RK, RickK and Daniel Mayer have done, when neutral examination of the evidence shows quite the opposite, and then repeat this lie again and again in an [[echo chamber]] like the [[Wikipedia mailing list]], does serious damage to Wikimedia's credibility.

Libel is a serious legal matter.  Sanctioning it will create problems for the Foundation.  And several times, the lying has in fact crossed this line.

Casual lying, such as the convenient claim that "egregious vandalism" originated from IP ranges in Halifax (when in fact it was a troll/political issue), also is a sign that someone can't be trusted to speak for any org.  Certainly not one trusted to maintain the [[GFDL corpus]] and remove lies from it.

Also such fatuous statements as "no legitimate use" applied to anonymous proxies, when there
are whole IP ranges blocked, are lies.  Maximus Rex makes statements like this, and they're
simply false.  History of Wikipedia has shown many cases where revealing IPs or names has been
highly detrimental to those editing.  There are many legitimate anonymizing uses.  Like for instance adding categories like this.

=== Witchhunters ===

People who make claims about alleged or collective identity based on spurious criteria (like who has "troll" in their name, or uses an easily copied style of discourse regarding [[en:Groupthink]] and bad [[Wikipedia Governance]], which are obvious for anyone to see, all being somehow "the same person").  This would disqualify Daniel Mayer and The_Anome and Morwen, and most likely Angela and Martin Harper as well.

=== Privacy violators and/or libellers ===

A particularly serious matter is privacy violations;  Some people voluntarily expose their own names, and thereby suffer some ego bruises (Daniel Mayer and Martin Harper and Robert Kaiser among them), others don't (The_Anome, Angela, Morwen, RickK).  The right to conceal your name, as long as you don't use some abusive tactic like using proxy servers to mask actual death threats (not made up ones), ought to be absolute.  In any case the assignment of any collective or alleged identity to some group of posts is very problematic with no [[interwiki identity standard]] (such as the one proposed based on jabber.org).

Those who assume they have the right to do "outing", assigning names (correct or not) to those who offend them, are doing violence to them.  If they have a legal issue with the people they are naming, they should take it to the police and courts, who have the power to track down IP numbers.  To do so from behind the shield of a pseudonym is worse, but, revealing one's own name is no excuse for revealing others'.  You can do as you like to your own body - that doesn't give you the right to do so to others.

Daniel Mayer and possibly Martin Harper ought to be ruled out on this grounds.  Larry Sanger and Sunir Shah set some very very bad precedents in this regard, and it's time to lose their legacy.  Jimbo Wales may have listened to them too much, and not enough to his lawyers.

=== Conflicted ===

Those who habitually edit or protect pages or block IPs in which they themselves are
in a dispute:  This shows a profound lack of respect for objectivity.  IF there's a
valid reason to do these things, someone who is not in the edit war ought to see it.

Those who may gain commercially from certain choices about the administration of the
[[GFDL corpus]] - i.e. [[Bomis]] employees.  The [[board]] is already conflicted, no reason to conflict everything else.

---------------------------------
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Yahoo! Finance Tax Center - File online. File on time.
-------------- next part --------------
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body:
The following should be added to
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewards
in time for debate before validating which of the named people should acquire these responsibilities.  This is being mailed on behalf of those whose contributions have been censored, by exactly the people who would be excluded if such criteria were applied:

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

=== Liars ===

People who can be shown to have lied in any Wikimedia forum ought not to be granted this power and approval, even if the lie is small.  For instance, to invent serious accusations like "death threats", as RK, RickK and Daniel Mayer have done, when neutral examination of the evidence shows quite the opposite, and then repeat this lie again and again in an [[echo chamber]] like the [[Wikipedia mailing list]], does serious damage to Wikimedia's credibility.

Libel is a serious legal matter.  Sanctioning it will create problems for the Foundation.  And several times, the lying has in fact crossed this line.

Casual lying, such as the convenient claim that "egregious vandalism" originated from IP ranges in Halifax (when in fact it was a troll/political issue), also is a sign that someone can't be trusted to speak for any org.  Certainly not one trusted to maintain the [[GFDL corpus]] and remove lies from it.

Also such fatuous statements as "no legitimate use" applied to anonymous proxies, when there
are whole IP ranges blocked, are lies.  Maximus Rex makes statements like this, and they're
simply false.  History of Wikipedia has shown many cases where revealing IPs or names has been
highly detrimental to those editing.  There are many legitimate anonymizing uses.  Like for instance adding categories like this.

=== Witchhunters ===

People who make claims about alleged or collective identity based on spurious criteria (like who has "troll" in their name, or uses an easily copied style of discourse regarding [[en:Groupthink]] and bad [[Wikipedia Governance]], which are obvious for anyone to see, all being somehow "the same person").  This would disqualify Daniel Mayer and The_Anome and Morwen, and most likely Angela and Martin Harper as well.

=== Privacy violators and/or libellers ===

A particularly serious matter is privacy violations;  Some people voluntarily expose their own names, and thereby suffer some ego bruises (Daniel Mayer and Martin Harper and Robert Kaiser among them), others don't (The_Anome, Angela, Morwen, RickK).  The right to conceal your name, as long as you don't use some abusive tactic like using proxy servers to mask actual death threats (not made up ones), ought to be absolute.  In any case the assignment of any collective or alleged identity to some group of posts is very problematic with no [[interwiki identity standard]] (such as the one proposed based on jabber.org).

Those who assume they have the right to do "outing", assigning names (correct or not) to those who offend them, are doing violence to them.  If they have a legal issue with the people they are naming, they should take it to the police and courts, who have the power to track down IP numbers.  To do so from behind the shield of a pseudonym is worse, but, revealing one's own name is no excuse for revealing others'.  You can do as you like to your own body - that doesn't give you the right to do so to others.

Daniel Mayer and possibly Martin Harper ought to be ruled out on this grounds.  Larry Sanger and Sunir Shah set some very very bad precedents in this regard, and it's time to lose their legacy.  Jimbo Wales may have listened to them too much, and not enough to his lawyers.

=== Conflicted ===

Those who habitually edit or protect pages or block IPs in which they themselves are
in a dispute:  This shows a profound lack of respect for objectivity.  IF there's a
valid reason to do these things, someone who is not in the edit war ought to see it.

Those who may gain commercially from certain choices about the administration of the
[[GFDL corpus]] - i.e. [[Bomis]] employees.  The [[board]] is already conflicted, no reason to conflict everything else.

---------------------------------
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Extension_Syntax

body:
> The problem with voting on something like this is that most of us
> understand absolutely nothing about it.  This effectively leaves the
> decision in the hands of the techno-nerds.
>
> For those of us who stand outside of that elite crowd, we are most
> likely to ask
>     1) What does the result look like? and
>     2) How easy is it to use?
>
> It seems from the meta article that some of these proposals may be
> easily learned, (but I can't be sure.)  On the other hand, except for a
> couple of very short mathematical expressions, there are no examples of
> what these might look like, particularly for the hieroglyphics and
> musical material.
>
> I fully recognize that several specialized subjects require specialized
> tools, and they should be available to those who want to write about
> such subjects.  I hope that whatever is adopted will be adequately
> documented for the rest of us.  Also a person who wants to enter music
> (for example) should not need to learn how to enter mathematical formulas.

I create a page to allow people to see syntax proposal with concrete
examples:

http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extension_Syntax/Example

Please remember the vote is about finding syntax to encapsulate extensions,
not to decide the syntax of the extensions themselves.

Aoineko


subject: [Wikipedia-l] pyWikipediabot news

body:
"Pierre Abbat" <phma at webjockey.net> schrieb:

> I would like to modify it to work with Wikitravel. The main differences are:
> *URLs begin http://www.wikitravel.org/<language>, not
> http://<language>.wikitravel.org/.
> *All Wikitravels are UTF-8 enabled.

The second is no big problem, the first is a bigger problem. Another issue
is that /wiki/ in Wikipedia is called /article/ on Wikitravel, but /articol/
on Romanian Wikitravel. I solved this by using the /wiki/wiki.phtml?title=
form in all cases on Wikitravel, whereas /w/wiki.phtml/?title= is being
used on Wikipedia only when necessary (so please, if you want the bot to
work _don't_ customize the name of the /wiki/ directory as well).

However, this left me with the first problem. I _thought_ that I could
simply change langs for that, but it appears that that is not the case.
Problem is, that it will now be looking for the sitename
http://www.wikitravel.org/en/ instead of http://www.wikitravel.org/, and
that one does not exist.

Andre Engels


from_name: Brion Vibber

body:
On Apr 6, 2004, at 02:56, Timwi wrote:
> Brion Vibber wrote:
>> For those participating in the ongoing debate, you may or may not
>> wish to be aware of the relative prominence of the interlanguage
>> links in the new page layout.
>
> Where is that on-going debate? This is the first time I hear of it.
> It's not even mentioned on [[Wikipedia:Goings-on]].

You've posted several times in it; the thread is titled "Languages:
crossing a border?" The prominence of language links has been mentioned
several times by certain participants in that thread.

> The inter-language links are fine. I have a number of other gripes
> with that skin, where do I post them?

On wiki.aulinx.de, please.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


body:
From: "Tomasz Wegrzanowski"
> This vote is the dumbest of the votes held so far (unfortunately I expect
> even worse in the future). Average contributor has absolutely zero clue
about
> technical issues that make one of the syntaxes preferable.
>
> It's like voting on whether to use British or American spelling in
Wikipedia,
> with majority of voters being native Chinese.

What do you suggest? Let's developers choose themselves the best syntax?

Feel free to give us any idea to make this vote less "dumb".

Aoineko


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] Proxy blocker security

body:
In response to reports of people posting misleading links to
Special:Blockme, or otherwise tricking users' browsers into requesting
the relevant URL, I've implemented a basic keyed hash authentication
algorithm.

Still to do: initialising the key from a higher quality random number
source in the installer program. Currently it just draws 124 bits from a
Mersenne Twister, which is probably seeded from the system time. In the
short term, users may wish to replace $wgProxyKey with their own random
string. Wikipedia is using a 160 bit key drawn from /dev/random.

-- Tim Starling


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Problems installing mediawiki 1.2.3 tarball: endless
	redirection

body:
On Apr 6, 2004, at 08:15, G?tz Hoffart wrote:
> I've got problems installing mediawiki 1.2.3 (tarball stable, taken
> from Sourceforge) on my Debian GNU/Linux testing machine (Apache
> 1.3.29, PHP 4.3.3).

Is PHP configured as an Apache module, as a CGI plug-in, or otherwise?
Could you run this script and let me know the output?

<?php
header( "Content-type: text/plain" );
print "SAPI: " . php_sapi_name();
print "PATH_INFO: " . $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'];
?>

Try also appending "/Title" after the '.php' in the filename, and see
what the output is.

> After installing it into /var/www/wiki-verkauf (accessible as
> http://<ourlocalnetworknotaccessiblefromtheinternet>/wiki/  -- I tried
> this with a phpinfo.php file containing <?php phpinfo(); ?> ) I get an
> endless redirection loop when accessing index.php with my web browser.
> Firefox gives up telling me that there were too many redirections.

Did you install with the old command-line install.php or the new
browser-based install?

If the new install, can you list the output of the installer? If the
old install, can you provide the LocalSettiings.php you constructed
(minus passwords)?

> I sniffed this with tcpflow and saw that first there was
> .../index.php?Hauptseite called, then .../index.php/Index.php then
> .../index.php/Index.php/Index.php then
> .../index.php/Index.php/Index.php/Index.ph then
> .../index.php/Index.php/Index.php/Index.php/Index.php -- and so on
> until the browser stops.

As a workaround, you can try setting it to use classic "ugly" URLs. In
LocalSettings.php set:
	$wgUsePathInfo = false;
	$wgArticlePath = "$wgScript?title=$1";

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


body:
On Tue, Apr 06, 2004 at 03:33:49AM +0200, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 06, 2004 at 02:10:00AM +0200, Erik Moeller wrote:
> > Please vote on
> > http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extension_Syntax
[..]

> This vote is the dumbest of the votes held so far (unfortunately I expect
> even worse in the future). Average contributor has absolutely zero clue about
> technical issues that make one of the syntaxes preferable.

The page should start with "this vote requires substantial amount of
technical approach and can be considered as the part of the mediawiki
development process, if you do not feel like being informed enough to vote,
don't worry and don't vote.".

Basically: if you feel you cannot vote, don't.

> It's like voting on whether to use British or American spelling in Wikipedia,
> with majority of voters being native Chinese.

Good example, bad conclusion. I am a native speaker of Hungarian and I'd
vote for British spelling, since that's what I've learned in the school.
English speaking Chinese probably do have preferences too.

And additionally I wouldn't expect non-english speaking Chinese to vote in
that voting.

my 4 HUF (~2 cents)
[[user:grin]]


body:
On Tue, Apr 06, 2004 at 09:55:00AM +0000, Andre Engels wrote:
> "Peter Gervai" <grin at tolna.net> schrieb:
>
> > I can talk from experience.
> >
> > HU was existing since 1991, and contained 5 pages (when I last counted). One
> > main page with dead links, 1 page with real, short content, and the others
> > varying from "hehehehe" to "*** your *** *** mother".
>
> 1991? Sounds improbable, given that the Wikipedia project as a
> whole only exists since 2001.

typo, naturally 2001. (I concentrated on the last '1' :))

> > I convinced brion to flush it down the toilet and start again, and invested
> > considerable amount of time to get it started. Now, with 5 or so permanent
> > editors it is alive and probable won't die anymore.
> >
> > What a new language needs is more than zero permanent editor with dedication
> > to create as much articles that makes it look like a worthwile waste of time
> > for the people walking nearby. I'd say without 3 dedicated editors (friends
> > preferably) a new language should not be started. It is probably going to
> > get extinct soon, because there are at least 50 articles required to be
> > created before people consider it serious.
>
> And a single person writing will likely give up before that point is
> reached,

You're free to argue with reality, I guess. Who am I to force you otherwise?

> while a small group will tend to give the positive feedback
> that makes people continue. On the other hand, often the first group
> will come from single persons who just arrived at approximately the
> same time, so I would still like not to discourage single people from
> editing a new language Wikipedia.

Starting them, not editing them.

You seem to have missed my point. I wanted to share that people may not be
aware that starting(!) a new language requires plenty of time and efforts.
Having a half-created new language actually may _discourage_ people ("oh,
another wiki with stupid texts, the 13th this week, ok lets see that porn
site again").

Probably some of us was at the start of a new wikipedia. Some of people
who's not here around anymore have started one and got bored. The first
group may share how it has happened. I just tried to tell about the latter
and what could have happened, and how to prevent it from happening again,
and again.

> Perhaps we could have people from a 'related' language keep an eye on
> such small languages. A number of Dutch speakers (among which yours
> not so humbly) have helped the Frisian Wikipedia to start up in that
> way, and I think some French did with Occitan (?). The idea is to
> welcome people on the 'small' Wikipedia in the same way one would do
> on the 'big' one - say hello, wikify their contributions etcetera.

Sounds easy if you start a language which is largely the same as an other
one (defeats the purpose of having a separate wikipedia for me, but since
hungarian doesn't really have such language siblings, I cannot really
judge).

On the other hand how many of you could help in the hungarian, basque or
tamil wikipedia? And I could pull up other obscure examples (like lojban and
other visibly dead 'pedias) where the average Joe U.S. Editor cannot help.

> This way new contributors might find themselves in a 'spread bed', and
> be more likely to stay long enough that a second and third one has
> come in between.

Good luck in contributing to toki pona wikipedia. :)

peter


from_name: David Friedland

body:
Timwi wrote:

>
> There is no other way I can imagine that people seriously prefer
> <math>x^2</math> over simple-and-quick [!x^2!] or [$x^2$] or whatever.
> Except for <rend type="math">, *all* proposed syntaxes are better than
> <math>.

Did you really want to bring this debate onto the list (again)?!

The simple answer is that <math> </math> is self-documenting. I look at
[! !] and say "what does that mean?" and I look at <math> </math> and
say "oh that must have something to do with math."

The reason that non-savvy users might prefer <math>x^2</math> is that it
requires understanding the concept of markup, a concept which most
people learn in the context of HTML, and the very first thing you learn
when you attempt to learn HTML is that things are enclosed in things
that look like <something> </something>. That's why <math></math> is
preferable to something like [! !], because it looks to most people what
their idea of "markup" is. So even if a user knows only one thing about
how HTML works, chances are it'll be enough for them to intuitively
understand <math></math>. On the other hand, although [! !] is simple
and/or quick, it is intuitive to no one.

- David


from_name: Adam

from_email: Adam

subject: [WikiEN-l] Fuck the wikipedia

body:
I've grown up a lot in the last year or two. I used to
want to volunteer and help people learn stuff - I no
longer care, you people are scum.

Some of you are ok -- Users like CPrompt seem like
really good people. But what a bunch of self-righteous
lying fools there are here! Its a real shame that
Jimbo failed to provide better leadership.

I wash my hands of the lot of you. I once thought that
it would be possible to have a website where anyone
could edit, it just doesn't work. Trolls and vandals
are the problem -- its the control freaks who are the
real problem.

Im better than you. Im better than this. This site is
better than Everything2, but its not that good. The
wiki is a great idea, but the wikipedia has failed to
evolve. I wash my hands of this nonsense.

Please delete all references to me or my name. Doing
so is the best way of ensuring I don't come back.

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Small Business $15K Web Design Giveaway
http://promotions.yahoo.com/design_giveaway/


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Languages: crossing a border?

body:
Timwi wrote:
>Now some might say, "Ah, but you can copyright ideas!"
>No, you can't. You can *patent* ideas. I am less sure
>about whether a language (which  can be regarded as an
>encoding for information) can be patented. Sonja,  how
>about you go patent Toki Pona, and let us know how it went ;-)

Hasn't Microsoft put some type of protection on C#? Haven't you heard of
proprietary languages? Not that I agree with such a thing, but we should be
careful.

-- mav

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Small Business $15K Web Design Giveaway
http://promotions.yahoo.com/design_giveaway/


body:
On Apr 6, 2004, at 14:33, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Hasn't Microsoft put some type of protection on C#? Haven't you heard
> of
> proprietary languages? Not that I agree with such a thing, but we
> should be
> careful.

This is getting way off-topic, but C# is an ECMA and ISO standard and
several alternate implementations exist, such as:

Mono - http://www.go-mono.com/
DotGNU Portable.NET - http://www.southern-storm.com.au/portable_net.html

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Time to get some new servers

body:
On Apr 6, 2004, at 14:36, Luc Van Oostenryck wrote:
> Now, at 21:34:35 UTC, it's also very slow (1-2 minutes for viewing a
> page).

We have an intermittent problem where one of the servers will have an
unusually large number of running processes for a minute or two, which
will slow down response time.

By unusual I mean like 50-100 processes fighting for CPU time; normally
there are just a handful. The cause of this isn't entirely clear yet.
My pure speculation is that the squids might be distributing traffic
poorly; for instance the NFS server occasionally freezes up for a
couple seconds, which might cause the squids to give up on all of the
servers, then start sending all traffic to the first one that responds.
Maybe? Maybe not. Just speculation which I haven't gotten a chance to
investigate.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Götz Hoffart

body:
Hi,

I've got problems installing mediawiki 1.2.3 (tarball stable, taken
from Sourceforge) on my Debian GNU/Linux testing machine (Apache
1.3.29, PHP 4.3.3).

After installing it into /var/www/wiki-verkauf (accessible as
http://<ourlocalnetworknotaccessiblefromtheinternet>/wiki/  -- I tried
this with a phpinfo.php file containing <?php phpinfo(); ?> ) I get an
endless redirection loop when accessing index.php with my web browser.
Firefox gives up telling me that there were too many redirections.

I sniffed this with tcpflow and saw that first there was
.../index.php?Hauptseite called, then .../index.php/Index.php then
.../index.php/Index.php/Index.php then
.../index.php/Index.php/Index.php/Index.ph then
.../index.php/Index.php/Index.php/Index.php/Index.php -- and so on
until the browser stops.

Other self-written php scripts I placed in the wiki directory don't
show this so I guess it's something with the wiki php files or my
configuration of mediawiki.

Any hints?

Regards
G?tz


body:
Hello,

As wikipedia is slow at the busy time, I propose to get some new servers for our cluster.

- Some new web servers(3 or 4), P4 2,8Ghz with 2Go of RAM
- A server which could be a backup for nfs server, zwinger, with bigger disk, 80Go is very low, maybe 200 or 250Go
- Upgrading disk of zwinger to 200 or 250Go (or add a new one)
- A db server in 64 bits mode with 4Go of RAM (if we cant make working geoffrin), like this one :
 http://www.macomp.com/products/servers/patriot2200.asp
 With raid 10 disk system, 4 or 6 drives in raid and 1 stand-by. I prefer 15000rpm disk, but I can understand that they are more expensive
- Maybe another squid server

What do you think of that ?

Shaihulud


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikitech-l] Geoffrin woes -> Jimmy

body:
I'm headed to the colo tomorrow to adjust a setting that Penguin
recommended to Jason.  Essentially, they wonder if the memory setting
that was giving us trouble got set back somehow.

If that isn't it, that's the end.  I'm already shopping for a
replacement, and I'll deal with Penguin after that.

--Jimbo

Camille Constans wrote:

> On Sun, 4 Apr 2004 13:58:56 -0700
> Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
>
> > Shaihulud's been running the Mersenne Twister calculation as a CPU
> > stress test on geoffrin. Related or not, things seem to have gone
> > south; it comes up with "I/O error" in response to most commands, I
> > can't even tell it to shutdown or reboot.
> >
> > Log fragment:
> > Apr  4 19:05:02 geoffrin kernel: EXT3-fs error (device sd(8,7)) in
> > ext3_reserve_inode_write: IO failure
> > Apr  4 19:05:02 geoffrin kernel: SCSI disk error : host 0 channel 0 id
> > 0 lun 0 return code = 25040001
> > Apr  4 19:05:02 geoffrin kernel:  I/O error: dev 08:07, sector 0
> > Apr  4 19:05:02 geoffrin kernel: SCSI disk error : host 0 channel 0 id
> > 0 lun 0 return code = 25040001
> > Apr  4 19:05:02 geoffrin kernel:  I/O error: dev 08:07, sector 60715128
> > Apr  4 19:05:02 geoffrin kernel: SCSI disk error : host 0 channel 0 id
> > 0 lun 0 return code = 25040001
> > Apr  4 19:05:02 geoffrin kernel:  I/O error: dev 08:07, sector 60715008
>
> Jimmy could you reboot geoffrin to get a chance to work with it ?
>
> Shaihulud
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