subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Development tasks

in_reply_to: <20030710160948.GE3154@math-cl-n02.ucr.edu>; from toby+wikipedia@math.ucr.edu on Thu, Jul 10, 2003 at 09:09:48AM -0700

body:
Toby Bartels wrote:
> >>* You need an extra login on each of them.
> >>* You have to change your preferences on all of them individually.
> >>* You have to follow several watchlists/recent changes lists.
>
> >I've traditionally referred to this group of features as "single
> >sign-on".  I don't think that there's any opposition to these features
> >at all, and they are much desired.
>
> You mean that /changing/ this group is "single sign-on", yes?
> ^_^

Yes, yes!  Sorry for the lack of clarity.  All of those things
are bad.  Getting rid of them is good, and I call the good thing
'single sign-on'.


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Use of Wikipedia articles at Malaspina.com

body:
Stevertigo wrote in part:

>Ironically, the notion that "your not supposed to make
>$$ off of  X" (as a claim) is kinda antithetical to
>the whole notion of lawsuits, which tend to be about
>"only Ims supposed to make money off X".

That's not the motivation of the FSF people, of course --
yet even so, they don't endorse that notion in the first place!
Commercial application is irrelevant to the GNU licences.
And Wikimedia seems to be in line with that too.

>And in the
>end, regardless of GNUFDL, a civil win would be
>represented (symbolically) in dough.

I'd expect any lawsuit initiated by the FSF, at least,
to have a cease-and-desist effect as its main goal.
Although Wikimedia is not a GNU project (as we know),
there are probably enough people here against profiting
that we'd also confine ourselves to that goal in our suits.
(Not that such a suit would be very practical in the first place
with such a large number of plaintiffs to manage.
Or could we initiate a class action?)

>Otherwise why would anyone bother forking out for a lair?

???

-- Toby


body:
Delirium wrote in part:

>Well, the GFDL doesn't actually require that the original work be
>provided at all; only that the derived work itself be provided in
>"transparent" form.  With normal text this just means that you have to
>provide the derived work; with wiki-text, since "transparent" is derived
>as the wiki-markup version, someone who makes an HTML/ASCII/whatever
>derived work would have to provide the wiki-text, which is sometimes
>onerous to make them do.

Since HTML and ASCII are themselves transparent
(at least HTML is unless you deliberately obscure it),
how do you know that part of the derivation process
wasn't to translate the soure from PediaWiki to HTML?
Then they just have to provide the HTML of the derived work --
which is exactly what their HTTP server does.

OTC, the link back to Wikipedia is required, as I understand it,
to give /credit/ for the work, which the GFDL also insists upon.
It could be avoided by copying all of the credit info to the new site
(which might include copying contact info from user pages, I'm not sure).
Simpler just to link back to Wikipedia.

-- Toby


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Revenue and ISBN Links

in_reply_to: <20030710162158.GF3154@math-cl-n02.ucr.edu>; from toby+wikipedia@math.ucr.edu on Thu, Jul 10, 2003 at 09:21:59AM -0700

body:
Toby Bartels wrote:
> I'm not sure why we list individual booksellers in the first place.

Some users, like me, have a preferred bookseller and would rather just
click straight through.  I'd rather pay a little more sometimes than
go through the hassle of entering my credit card number and address
again, so meta-searches aren't that interesting to me.

Different people have different preferences, and we can easily
accomodate them all, so, you know, why not?

The only reason why not, that I've seen so far, is that some people
not only want to boycott Amazon, they want to force others to do it as
well.  I'm not persuaded that *that* is what we want to be doing.

--Jimbo


from_name: John Knouse

subject: [WikiEN-l] World domination and the IRS

body:
My two cents worth:

In the application for tax-exempt status, it's critical to
be clear, concise, and understandable, and to clearly
delineate past, present, and projected future activities,
cast in the light of public service (particularly
educational) purposes.  If it's a really clean application,
determination may be awarded within three months.  If not,
then it can take a couple of years of the IRS requesting
additional information.

--
John Knouse
jaknouse at frognet.net


from_name: webmaster

subject: [WikiEN-l] World domination and the IRS

body:
Well then I guess it's really lucky that we found a lawyer to do the work for us pro bono :).  I'm sure Jimbo was pulling his hair out trying to fill those forms out.

---------- Original Message ----------------------------------
From: John Knouse <jaknouse at frognet.net>
Reply-To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
Date:  Thu, 10 Jul 2003 10:36:51 -0700

>My two cents worth:
>
>In the application for tax-exempt status, it's critical to
>be clear, concise, and understandable, and to clearly
>delineate past, present, and projected future activities,
>cast in the light of public service (particularly
>educational) purposes.  If it's a really clean application,
>determination may be awarded within three months.  If not,
>then it can take a couple of years of the IRS requesting
>additional information.
>
>--
>John Knouse
>jaknouse at frognet.net
>
>_______________________________________________
>WikiEN-l mailing list
>WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


list: wikitech-l

subject: [Wikitech-l] Srpskohrvatski wiki

body:
[[sh:]] is nothing but a portal to [[bs:]], [[hr:]], and [[sr:]].
I've been maintaining it (with the help of occasional anonymous users),
and I'd like to be given admin access on it
so that I can delete [[User talk:63.159.189.191]],
whose only content is "smell by butt hole".

Thanks!

-- Toby


list: textbook-l

from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Textbook-l] textbook.wikipedia.org wiki set up

body:
Brion wrote:
> Should now be editable:
> http://textbook.wikipedia.org/
>
> No special features so far; like meta, it's running
> in UTF-8 mode. Has
> not yet been thoroughly tested, so be warned. :)
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Thank you Brion! :)

-- mav

__________________________________
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SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month!
http://sbc.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikitech-l] WikmediaOne login (was Re: Development tasks)

body:
Thomas Corell wrote:
> There is the problem that some users want and have different usernames in
> different wiki's. The only way to handle this is keeping all those 'lokal'
> users and first of all allow additional sigle-signon on the 'Master user
> DB' which should handle not only single-sign-on, but even all those lokal
> user accounts.

Couldn't we use the wikimedia.org domain name for handling user logins? That
way a user only has to sign into their WikimediaOne login and will then be
logged-in to every Wikimedia project and subproject.

But before that happens (and periodically after) we may want to flush out
several thousand en.wikipedia user accounts that have been 1) idle for more
than say 3 months and 2) have fewer than 10 total edits since the account was
created.

That would free up many user names so that actual contributors can use them.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: Karl Wick

subject: [Textbook-l] RE: textbook.wikipedia.org wiki set up

body:
Thanks Brion !!

Karl

__________________________________
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SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month!
http://sbc.yahoo.com


body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Couldn't we use the wikimedia.org domain name for handling user logins? That
> way a user only has to sign into their WikimediaOne login and will then be
> logged-in to every Wikimedia project and subproject.

No, that wouldn't work very well.  Cookies are domain-specific, and so
people need to be on the wikipedia domain so we can set a
.wikipedia.org cookie.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Revenue and ISBN Links

in_reply_to: <3F0DA44C.17241.156C791@localhost>; from sgilbert@nbnet.nb.ca on Thu, Jul 10, 2003 at 05:37:16PM -0300

body:
An interesting point, but the way most program works is that there's a
minimum needed before the send a check, but it accumalates as long as
is necessary.  So, eventually, some years from now, perhaps, we'd get
a check.

I do think you raise a very important point, though -- the amount of
money that the Wikimedia Foundation would make from such programs is
not likely to be huge, anyway.

By way of comparison, I conservatively estimate that if we put paid
listings from Overture or Google into the search results page, we
would make $1000-$2000 a month.  I'd be very opposed to doing that.

--Jimbo


from_name: Delirium

body:
Toby Bartels wrote:

>Since HTML and ASCII are themselves transparent
>(at least HTML is unless you deliberately obscure it),
>how do you know that part of the derivation process
>wasn't to translate the soure from PediaWiki to HTML?
>Then they just have to provide the HTML of the derived work --
>which is exactly what their HTTP server does.
>
>OTC, the link back to Wikipedia is required, as I understand it,
>to give /credit/ for the work, which the GFDL also insists upon.
>It could be avoided by copying all of the credit info to the new site
>(which might include copying contact info from user pages, I'm not sure).
>Simpler just to link back to Wikipedia.
>
>
After reading through the GFDL again I'm more clear on this now: HTML is
explicitly mentioned as an acceptable "transparent" format, so to
fulfill that requirement all they have to provide is the webpage itself;
they do not anywhere have to provide access to the original unmodified work.

The only further requirement is that they list all authors of their
modifications (e.g. list themselves), and list the names of five authors
of the original version (or all the authors if fewer than five).
Contact information is not required, just the names (presumably if the
authors originally published under a pseudonym/username, that name would
suffice as well).  This is a bit vague though -- it seems to indicate
that essentially all they have to do is preserve the credit in the
author list of the original document: but Wikipedia documents do not
have an author list.  One can be inferred by looking at the page
history, but there is no explicit list anywhere of "these are the
authors of this document."  The GFDL isn't clear on whether it's the
modifier's responsibility to construct such a list of the original
document does not contain one; I would lean towards not.  If not, then
all the deriver has to do is provide their webpage and say "this is
licensed under the GFDL."  They don't even have to say "from Wikipedia,"
as Wikipedia does not own any of the relevant copyrights.

Of course I may be wrong in that interpretation -- perhaps they have to
list the copyright holders even if the original document does not, but
that seems like it'd be an odd requirement.

-Mark


in_reply_to: <3F0DD691.6030502@rufus.d2g.com>; from delirium@rufus.d2g.com on Thu, Jul 10, 2003 at 02:11:45PM -0700

body:
Delirium wrote:
> This is a bit vague though -- it seems to indicate that essentially
> all they have to do is preserve the credit in the author list of the
> original document: but Wikipedia documents do not have an author
> list.  One can be inferred by looking at the page
> history, but there is no explicit list anywhere of "these are the
> authors of this document."

Well, we've always treated this as "It's in the 'Page history'".  But
it probably would be simple enough to have a link to 'Authors' on each
article, and when you click on it, you get a list of all unique id's
that worked on the article.

Presumably, at some point as we draw closer to 1.0 and the possibility
of print reuse, we'll want to have a setting in preferences for people
to (optionally) put their real name for attribution purposes.  And
then on this 'author' page would show that as well.

--Jimbo


from_name: Chuck Smith

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Multilingual promotional materials?

body:
This message from Brion Vibber on Intlwiki-L would
probably also be of interest to this list.

Chuck

> Date: Wed, 09 Jul 2003 23:16:39 -0700
> From: Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com>
> To: intlwiki-l at wikipedia.org
> Subject: [Intlwiki-l] Multilingual promotional
> materials?
>
> Assuming my tickets aren't lost in the mail and
> airport security doesn't
> arrest me for being a bearded young man flying
> alone, I'll be off to
> Sweden later this month for a couple Esperanto
> conventions, which should
> be a great place to promote Wikipedia to an
> international audience.
>
> It might be nice to have some promotional materials
> available in various
> languages that people can take to show the folks
> back home.
>
> If you've got anything nice to show off, or make
> anything new, please
> drop a link at
>
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_promotion_material
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

=====
Learn Esperanto - http://www.lernu.net/
My homepage - http://www.amuzulo.net/
TEJO-Vikio - http://www.tejo.org/vikio/
Enciklopedio - http://eo.wikipedia.org/

__________________________________________________________________

Gesendet von Yahoo! Mail - http://mail.yahoo.de
Logos und Klingelt?ne f?rs Handy bei http://sms.yahoo.de


body:
[use of wikimedia.org for logins]

>No, that wouldn't work very well.
>Cookies are domain-specific, and
>so people need to be on the
>wikipedia domain so we can set
>a .wikipedia.org cookie.
>
>--Jimbo

Fair enough. A Wikipedia-wide login would still be neat though (along with
database integration; I guess it makes sense to have each Wikimedia project
to have its own database/login).

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


in_reply_to: <1057875642.13357.31.camel@venus.mit.edu>; from cunctator@kband.com on Thu, Jul 10, 2003 at 06:20:41PM -0400

body:
The Cunctator wrote:
> I strongly think we're better off formalizing a policy in which
> particular author attribution is not required. That is, by contributing
> to Wikipedia, you agree to be attributed as one of the "Wikipedia
> Contributors" or somesuch.

Well that certainly much more closely matches our social custom, in
which articles aren't "owned" by anyone, and we value all sorts of
contributions to the project without specifically privileging
'authorship'.

But, how can we reconcile your suggestion with the FDL?

--Jimbo


from_name: koyaanis qatsi

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: group work, unattributed work (was: Use of Wikipedia articles at Malaspina.com)

body:
The Cunctator wrote:
>> I strongly think we're better off formalizing a
>> policy in which particular author attribution is
>> not required. That is, by contributing to
>> Wikipedia, you agree to be attributed as one of
>> the "Wikipedia Contributors" or somesuch.

Jimmy responds:
> Well that certainly much more closely matches our
> social custom, in which articles aren't "owned"
> by anyone, and we value all sorts of contributions
> to the project without specifically privileging
> 'authorship'.
>
> But, how can we reconcile your suggestion with the
> FDL?

Not to be a wag, but how can we reconcile anonymous
contributions of any stripe--including ones that
aren't logged in--with the FDL?  Pick an AOL IP
address and try to assign it to one author, without
AOL's help.  Impossible.  It doesn't even trace to one
*computer* without AOL jumping through hoops, much
less to one author at that one computer.  (If this
weren't the case, we wouldn't have the problem of
recurring vandals).

Now, if the {irony} brilliant, uninvasive {/irony}
idea of prepending IPs with phone numbers ever comes
to fruition, maybe we would be closer to compliance
with what the FDL seems to require.  As it is, I think
we're probably not, but also unable to do much about
it without severely changing what wikipedia is.

kq

__________________________________
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SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month!
http://sbc.yahoo.com


in_reply_to: <20030710224743.40949.qmail@web14711.mail.yahoo.com>; from obchodnakorze@yahoo.com on Thu, Jul 10, 2003 at 03:47:43PM -0700

body:
koyaanis qatsi wrote:
> Not to be a wag, but how can we reconcile anonymous
> contributions of any stripe--including ones that
> aren't logged in--with the FDL?

Those are pseudonyms.  Nothing about the FDL requires authors to give
their 'real names'.  However an author chooses to identify themselves
is good enough.

>  Pick an AOL IP address and try to assign it to one author, without
> AOL's help.  Impossible.

Sure, and lots of people have the same names, too.

The GNU FDL only requires redistributors to pass along at least 5
names of prior contributors, not that the prior contributors be hunted
down and investigated for their 'real' names.

----

I think this is worth stressing.  Suppose someone came up to you
and handed you a bit of paper with an essay on it.  "Hi, my name is
Bob, and you can create derivative works from this paper if you like,
but you have to attribute the original to me.  Bye bye!"

Are you ethically required to research whether or not Bob is his real
name?  Or, since he said he was 'Bob', isn't that sufficient, morally,
ethically, and legally?

I think this is a non-issue, really.

--Jimbo


body:
Jimmy writes:
>(snip a bit about a hypothetical situation)<

> Are you ethically required to research whether or
not
> Bob is his real name?  Or, since he said he
> was 'Bob', isn't that sufficient, morally,
> ethically, and legally?
>
>I think this is a non-issue, really.

I hadn't thought of it that way.  Ok, you've convinced
me.

best,

kq

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month!
http://sbc.yahoo.com


from_name: Thomas Corell

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Development tasks

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

> Under a system like you're proposing, I could create a new 'master'
> account, 'Jimbo Wales', and then consolidate all of my 'local'
> accounts under it, so for example, 'Jimbo Wales' could "own" 'en:Jimbo
> Wales' and 'de:Jimbo Wales' and even 'jp:Yojimbo' (just a joke, I
> don't really have such an account as that.
>
> I love the concept, but does it introduce a layer of unfriendly
> complexity for the end user?

Well, it should work exacly this way, but only for existing accounts.
I try to explain some steps of the concept, I hope it helps:

Creating a user will only works on the 'master'. All the names used on any
other language could be blocked, if we want 'Jimbo Wales' give a change to
keep 'Jimbo Wales', if not, the master has no limits in choosing names.

If we want that you can make 'en:Jimbo Wales' a master account, we ask on
the login form if and where (here: en) you have an old account. And we
query the passwort. If everything matches fine, we create the master
account Jimbo Wales and now you can add additional accounts from other
languages. We can present each language a 'Jimbo Wales' is known, and ask
for Passwort to activate the name on the master. If no 'Jimbo Wales' in any
other languages is left to add, we can ask to remove all old accounts on
the languages and remove the data about the other language links in the
master and mark it as 'full converted' user. Than you have single sign on.

There may be some more questions on the login form, but and that why I
created this proposal, someone with different names on different languages
can keep those names. Without broken links in the Article-Histories etc.
(Additionaly I still think a user_right 'deleted' should be added, to
handle this mater of broken Username links properly.) And new users get
automatically single-sign-on. Of course we can adding different profiles on
  different languages, but first of all my idea was to get rid of those
language specific account, without the need to give everybody a new
username and get long protest mails.

The proposal try to follow the idea: single-singn-on for new users, and
giving old users a chance to keep their old name. More technical stuff
(more inteligence in the database) is better than unlucky users.

Additionaly we can search for old, unused users and remove them (no
reference to them in article histories, texts etc.) to keep the
User-Databases clear. But thats a mainainance issue.

> The way I was thinking of it is that people could have a single signon
> across all the wikipedias, and if they want a different id on one,
> then they could just create it, and it would work everywhere of
> course, but they'd just have two accounts and could use one on 'jp'
> and one on 'en' if they wanted.

Well the concept tries to get rid of those 'language-usernames' but it
support's them, for old users. Of course we can add the complexer way to
create language users as 'subusers' even for newusers, but that's not what
I indended in the beginning.

> Your solution is more elegant, in that it does away with the problem
> of namespace collisions, I guess.
>
> But it could be very confusing for users in some cases?

I think we have enough helpful users, if there are some confused ones.

Please write me if I wrote things you don't understood, my english is not
so good, that I'm sure all the time I wrote all the right way. And
describing proposels without seeing questionmarks on the other face is
difficult.

--
Smurf

smurf at AdamAnt.mud.de
-------------------------  Anthill inside! ---------------------------


subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikiquote domain name reminder for Jimbo

body:
Jimbo wrote:
O.k., I bought these. Email wikitech-l, and me, to remind me to have Jason
point them in the right spot or whatever.

-------
Thanks Jimbo!

--mav


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Continuing CVS server problems

body:
On Fri, 11 Jul 2003, Timwi wrote:
> Thomas Corell wrote:
> >
> > You are useing cvs.sourcforge.net as server (which is the developer
> > cvs-server, instead of the public cvs.wikipedia.sourceforge.net Server)?
>
> I didn't know that. Nor did I know I was supposed to use ssh instead of
> pserver. So I tried that, and this is what I get now:

Hrm, you _did_ read http://sourceforge.net/cvs/?group_id=34373 right?

> ssh: cvs.sourcforge.net: Name or service not known
>
> What am I doing wrong here?

Try cvs.sourcEforge.net :)

(Also I don't know if it would consider usernames to be case-sensitive.
Try 'timwi' if 'Timwi' doesn't get you anywhere.)

> ... although the true cause of this could be that I don't have a Windows
> port of ssh. Anyone know where I can get one?

http://www.cygwin.com/

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: group work, unattributed work (was: Use of Wikipedia
 articles at Malaspina.com)

body:
koyaanis qatsi wrote:

>Not to be a wag, but how can we reconcile anonymous
>contributions of any stripe--including ones that
>aren't logged in--with the FDL?  Pick an AOL IP
>address and try to assign it to one author, without
>AOL's help.  Impossible.  It doesn't even trace to one
>*computer* without AOL jumping through hoops, much
>less to one author at that one computer.  (If this
>weren't the case, we wouldn't have the problem of
>recurring vandals).
>
>
Well, I think the FDL only requires that you attribute the authors the
same way they attributed themselves.  My concern here then wasn't that
it'd require too much attribution, but too little: if right now
Wikipedia's authors aren't attributed in a list of authors, the authors
of derived works could reasonably argue that they don't have to make
such an attribution either.  I think most of us would be happy with
simply an attribution to "Wikipedia," but legally Wikipedia is not one
of the authors, since the license explicitly says that you don't
transfer copyright to Wikipedia when you post.  I think legally
Wikipedia is just another user of your GFDL text -- exactly the same as
anyone else who copies stuff from Wikipedia -- and so the other users
are no more required to attribute anyone than Wikipedia itself is.

The only way I can think of to cleanly reconcile this with the FDL is to
allow authors of derived works to credit "Wikipedia" in lieu of the
actual authors and copyright holders -- that is, make an explicit
exception to the GFDL's requirement of acknowledging 5 authors, and
allow this one pseudo-author instead.  But that would require an actual
license change, which at this point is probably infeasible.  We could do
it informally (say "crediting Wikipedia is good enough for us"), but
technically any individual Wikipedia contributor could still decline to
give up their right to be individually credited, since it's not actually
in the license, and Wikipedia has no legal claim to the content it hosts
on its website (beyond being just another licensed user).  With online
sources all this isn't so much an issue, since just a link back to the
page resolves everything, but if anyone wants to print things in a book,
the issue of whether they can credit 'from Wikipedia' or instead have to
say "authored by Blah Blah, Person two, Person Three, etc." for each
individual article might be a major one.

-Mark


body:
I forgot to mention that http://quote.wikipedia.org already exists as a wiki.
For now 301 redirecting both http://wikiquote.org and http://wikiquote.com to
http://quote.wikipedia.org would be fine but actually moving
http://quote.wikipedia.org to http://wikiquote.org would be best.

-- mav


subject: [Textbook-l] License issues

body:
Now that the wiki is set-up I think it is imperative for us to decide about
the dual licensing issue. I'm all for it but I do have one major concern:

Specifically I want to know if it would be possible to import Wikipedia text
to the textbook project without having to get the permission of every
Wikipedian who contributed to the Wikipedia article to agree to dual-license
their work.

For more detail please read my previous post on this topic:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/textbook-l/2003-July/000089.html

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>The Cunctator wrote:

>>I strongly think we're better off formalizing a policy in which
>>particular author attribution is not required. That is, by contributing
>>to Wikipedia, you agree to be attributed as one of the "Wikipedia
>>Contributors" or somesuch.

>Well that certainly much more closely matches our social custom, in
>which articles aren't "owned" by anyone, and we value all sorts of
>contributions to the project without specifically privileging
>'authorship'.

>But, how can we reconcile your suggestion with the FDL?

For past contributions, we probably can't.
But for future contributions, we'd ask them to assign authorship rights
to the Wikimedia Foundation.  Is this what you want, Cunc?

-- Toby


from_name: sgilbert at nbnet.nb.ca

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Revenue and ISBN Links

body:
> limholt at excite.com wrote:
> >
> >Explain to the reader (or user or editor) that Wiki may get a
> >commission at no added cost to them if they buy the book.

I think Wikipedia should keep the commission, instead of donating
it to Wiki.

Ok, it's official. "Wiki" is to me as "Linux" is to Richard Stallman...
:)

- Stephen G.

-------
Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia
http://www.wikipedia.org


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Revenue and ISBN Links

body:
> Oliver Pereira wrote:
> > I think it is very likely that more people will buy from Amazon if they
> > think they will be helping Wikipedia by doing so. And so Amazon will
> > quite likely make more profits.
>
> Well, I think all the booksellers offer some kind of commissions
> program.  Nearly all do, anyway, I guess we'd have to check each one
> of them to be sure about the exact details.
>
> --Jimbo

True. However, since all of these programs require a minimum
amount earned in your account before they send you a cheque, it
doesn't make much sense to have a page full of commissions
links. People generally make very little money on these programs;
in our case we would have to spread our tiny commission over a
half a dozen or more booksellers, thus ensuring that we never meet
the minimum payment amount for any one of them.

It looks to me that we really only have two choices:

1. Join a single program, or
2. Don't join any at all (which would have the same finacial effect as
joining all of them, while avoiding the problems).

Option one is unacceptable to me (and many others, I think)
because it takes away our neutrality, at least in appearance.

- Stephen G.
-------
Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia
http://www.wikipedia.org


body:
Delirium wrote in part:

>The only further requirement is that they list all authors of their
>modifications (e.g. list themselves), and list the names of five authors
>of the original version (or all the authors if fewer than five).

Only 5?  Very well.  Probably still easier to link to us, however.

>Contact information is not required, just the names (presumably if the
>authors originally published under a pseudonym/username, that name would
>suffice as well).

What I'm worried about is that if, say, mav submits an edit,
then we not only log this under the name "Maveric149"
but also link to mav's user page, which lists his real name.
Can mav reasonably expect, then, to receive credit
as "Daniel Meyer", a name that perhaps he uses professionally?
("contact info" was too broad a term to use.)

>This is a bit vague though -- it seems to indicate
>that essentially all they have to do is preserve the credit in the
>author list of the original document: but Wikipedia documents do not
>have an author list.  One can be inferred by looking at the page
>history, but there is no explicit list anywhere of "these are the
>authors of this document."

I'd argue that standard practice on a wiki
is that if you want to know who edited a particular page,
then you look at the page history.
Understanding that, derivers must look there.

>They don't even have to say "from Wikipedia,"
>as Wikipedia does not own any of the relevant copyrights.

I'll agree with this.

-- Toby


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: WikmediaOne login (was Re: Development tasks)

body:
On Fri, 11 Jul 2003, Timwi wrote:
> Jimmy Wales wrote:
> > No, that wouldn't work very well.  Cookies are domain-specific, and so
> > people need to be on the wikipedia domain so we can set a
> > .wikipedia.org cookie.
>
> Are you sure wikimedia.org can't also set a cookie for the wikipedia.org
> domain?

It could redirect to a page on wikipedia.org that sets a wikipedia.org
cookie, but I'm not sure what the point of the exercise would be.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Jason Richey

in_reply_to: <bel0ck$jjl$2@main.gmane.org>; from timwi@gmx.net on Fri, Jul 11, 2003 at 02:29:18AM +0200

body:
We *COULD*, but it would be rejected by some browsers.  Some browsers
don't allow cookies to be set by one domain to be used by another.
This also leads to the next question:

If wikimedia.org sets the domain for a cookie to wikipedia.org and the
browser DOES acceept the cookie, will the cookie ever be given to
wikimedia.org by the browser?

And the answer here is "no".  The wikipedia.org cookie would only be
included in the HTTP request for pages in the wikipedia.org domain,
even if wikimedia.org set it in the first place.

Jason

Timwi wrote:

> > No, that wouldn't work very well.  Cookies are domain-specific, and so
> > people need to be on the wikipedia domain so we can set a
> > .wikipedia.org cookie.
>
> Are you sure wikimedia.org can't also set a cookie for the wikipedia.org
> domain?
>
> Timwi
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

--
"Jason C. Richey" <jasonr at bomis.com>


body:
Toby writes:
> I'd argue that standard practice on a wiki
> is that if you want to know who edited a
> particular page, then you look at the page
> history.  Understanding that, derivers must
> look there.

Speaking of which, I'd just like to remind people that
the final, unlinked (last) on a history page is not
always trustworthy.  A few weeks ago I was praised for
having started the article on Alfred Hitchcok, but I
had not--I was merely the 50th most recent edit at
that point. There was another page of edits.  Not such
a big issue now, maybe, but it gives an incorrect
impression.

Off to file a bug report,

kq

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month!
http://sbc.yahoo.com


subject: [Textbook-l] open textbook project

body:
Here is another link to a group seeking to develop open
content textbooks:

http://otp.inlimine.org/

A bit of text from their site:

>The mission of the open textbook project is to develop
openly copyrighted (copylefted) textbooks using the free
software development model. The books, developed
collaboratively, would be freely available to download,
modify, print and distribute. Not only are textbooks
unavailable to a great number of students in the US and
abroad simply due to cost, few textbooks are universally
suitable for courses in any given subject and many are
simply sub-standard. The Open Textbook Project aims to
address these issues by using a collaborative development
model which has proven its effectiveness in the world of
free software.

>Development has begun!

>We are currently working on the website and the
interactive tools with which individual textbook projects
will be developed. We'll make  a more formal announcement
when there is more ware and less vapor.

And from the main page:

>in Limine strives to find innovative and thoughtful ways
to improve education and the arts. Our efforts take the
form of well-focused, low cost projects. Our organizational
model is an incubator in which we nurture small, sometimes
risky projects with administrative and financial support
until they are able to stand on their own. We are
constantly seeking new ideas. We don't aim to change the
world (just small pieces of it).

Jimmy: Have you been in any more contact with those Cali
folks, the Creative Commmons fellow or anyone else?

__________________________________
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SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month!
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Development tasks

in_reply_to: <bel074$jjl$1@main.gmane.org>; from timwi@gmx.net on Fri, Jul 11, 2003 at 02:26:22AM +0200

references: <3F0BDD1F.8010004@pobox.com> <behnuh$54o$1@main.gmane.org> <3F0C6ECF.7020903@pobox.com> <behtnq$458$1@main.gmane.org> <3F0C8876.30505@corell.dyndns.org> <bei6lu$il0$1@main.gmane.org> <20030709191311.C7763@joey.bomis.com> <bel074$jjl$1@main.gmane.org>

body:
Timwi wrote:
> I mean, we're not hosting anything for the users except for their
> preferences. A user can re-create an account (and re-set all
> preferences) within a few minutes. Wouldn't it be worth starting with a
> whole new userbase? It has the added bonus of getting rid of inactive
> users in the old system.

Well, all of the article histories attribute edits to particular
people.  So, you know, just starting over willy-nilly seems like a bad
idea to me.

> Or perhaps we could make it so that a Phase-IV user can "claim
> ownership" of a Phase-III user (by entering their e-mail address and
> password) and then all their article history and contributions will be
> transferred to them.

Sure, something like that makes sense.

> If I started this as another whole new Phase-IV software, would there be
> a chance it would be used on Wikipedia? As I'm sure you understand, I'm
> reluctant to starting it if it's not going to be used anyway. And I
> can't really judge this because I haven't been here for very long yet.
>
> If yes, would anyone object if I bring us back to Perl this way? :-)

Yikes, I wouldn't recommend doing that.  I personally wish it was perl
all along, but since I have only rarely coded anything since the old
UseMod days, and since I'm embarassed at how crufty my coding is (you
should see the bailing wire and chewing gum that holds Bomis
together!)...

But, really, it seems like we have a *lot* of really good code that
should be reused, even in a radical refactoring of the code?

--Jimbo


body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> > Are you sure wikimedia.org can't also set a cookie for the wikipedia.org
> > domain?
>
> It could redirect to a page on wikipedia.org that sets a wikipedia.org
> cookie, but I'm not sure what the point of the exercise would be.

Right.  It's absolutely true that wikimedia.org can't directly set a
cookie for wikipedia.org.  It's also true that we could wing it with
some complicated redirects.  But I see no good reason to do that!

I'm not sure where this suggestion was coming from, exactly, or what
the point was supposed to be.

My thinking is that for the foreseeable future, wikimedia.org will
just be a page describing the foundation, with nice pretty pictures of
all the Ivy-covered buildings on our expansive campus, and information
about how our billion dollar endowment is invested.  Oh, wait, I'm
dreaming, sorry.

But, anyhow, the wikimedia.org site isn't going to take the place of
wikipedia.org as the main portal for people to sign in.

The only reason, really, for the wikimedia name is (a) it sounds cool
and (b) it points towards the idea that we have a grand vision for the
future that is multi-media, that is beyond just the encyclopedia, etc.

But, for now, we're the encyclopedia.

--Jimbo


body:
On Fri, 11 Jul 2003, Timwi wrote:
> Now I'm getting this in Linux:
>
> /c/Wikipedia> cvs -z3
> -d:ext:timwi at cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/wikipedia co phase3
> ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host
> cvs [checkout aborted]: end of file from server (consult above messages
> if any)
>
> The first time I tried, it took about 10 minutes or so until it produced
> this error. Now it does it immediately.

I did a fresh checkout about an hour ago just to make sure it works (from
my OS X machine at work), and had no problem.

Let's diagnose this thing...

  ssh -v timwi at cvs.sourceforge.net

What do you get?

> Could not create directory '/home/Timwi/.ssh'.
> (Anyone know how to tell the Cygwin ssh not to try to create Unix
> filepaths? o.O)

Why don't you just create /home/Timwi? (Probably under c:\cygwin; if you
installed as administrator, double-check the permissions.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Textbook-l] open textbook project

body:
Karl Wick wrote:
> http://otp.inlimine.org/

Perhaps we need a 'similar projects' page on the wikitext site?

> >We are currently working on the website and the
> interactive tools with which individual textbook projects
> will be developed. We'll make  a more formal announcement
> when there is more ware and less vapor.

We could probably help them with that, and *fast*.  We have
software, after all, and an enthusiastic community.

I recommend visiting the inlimine.org main website.  It's sort of
interesting.  It looks like it's basically a couple who are trying to
do various things and who have gotten funding for something else, but
no funding for their textbook project.

We have the huge benefit of not waiting for funding before just
randomly working on stuff that interests enough people.  :-)

> Jimmy: Have you been in any more contact with those Cali
> folks, the Creative Commmons fellow or anyone else?

The Cali guy emailed me and said he was busy and would email later.  I
chat with Larry Lessig from time to time, but haven't talked to him
*lately*.  He's excited about the textbook project using a creative
commons license.

--Jimbo


from_name: The Cunctator

body:
On Thu, 2003-07-10 at 17:26, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Delirium wrote:
> > This is a bit vague though -- it seems to indicate that essentially
> > all they have to do is preserve the credit in the author list of the
> > original document: but Wikipedia documents do not have an author
> > list.  One can be inferred by looking at the page
> > history, but there is no explicit list anywhere of "these are the
> > authors of this document."
>
> Well, we've always treated this as "It's in the 'Page history'".  But
> it probably would be simple enough to have a link to 'Authors' on each
> article, and when you click on it, you get a list of all unique id's
> that worked on the article.
>
> Presumably, at some point as we draw closer to 1.0 and the possibility
> of print reuse, we'll want to have a setting in preferences for people
> to (optionally) put their real name for attribution purposes.  And
> then on this 'author' page would show that as well.
>
I strongly think we're better off formalizing a policy in which
particular author attribution is not required. That is, by contributing
to Wikipedia, you agree to be attributed as one of the "Wikipedia
Contributors" or somesuch.


in_reply_to: <bel2qf$641$2@main.gmane.org>; from timwi@gmx.net on Fri, Jul 11, 2003 at 03:10:50AM +0200

body:
Timwi wrote:
> Nevertheless, I suppose we could still create a central user database.
> Although users would have to log in for each domain, they would still
> log in to the same account, retaining the same Wikimedia-wide
> preferences, etc.

Right!  Doesn't sound too bad to me.

--Jimbo


subject: [Textbook-l] License issues

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Specifically I want to know if it would be possible to import Wikipedia text
> to the textbook project without having to get the permission of every
> Wikipedian who contributed to the Wikipedia article to agree to dual-license
> their work.
>
> For more detail please read my previous post on this topic:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/textbook-l/2003-July/000089.html

Well, that's a very very good question.

When I recommended dual licensing, I wasn't thinking of the question
of importing stuff from wikipedia.

Ai yi yi, this all seems like such a headache.

I see the options as being:

1. Forget Creative Commons, just use GNU FDL with all it's complexity,
for the purpose of easy compatibility with wikipedia.

2. Forget wikipedia imports, use Creative Commons, and everything has
to be from scratch.  (Yucky, because free and liberal reuse of our
wikipedia work is the whole POINT of wikipedia in the FIRST place.)

3.  Dual license, and deal with the issue that Mav is talking about,
but notice that this is just as difficult as #2, because if we can get
permission from wikipedians (likely, but only if we can find them!),
it's all good anyway.

This whole discussion makes #1 seem like our only recourse.

Let's discuss this for a few days, and then I'll chat with RMS and
Lessig about it.  I know RMS is going to say "why don't you just use
GNU FDL?"  because part of the point of GNU licenses is just this sort
of 'viral' spread that forces people to stick with GNU licenses.

But maybe I can convince him to release (someday?) an FDL 2.0 that is
a lot more general and easy to understand.

--Jimbo


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Please help test new features

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>Ray-
>
>>When can we hope that the new feature will be implemented on Wiktionary?
>> Structure is a lot more important there than on Wikipedia.
>>
>
>There are still a couple of bugs to fix and some adjustments to be made
>before the remaining wikis are upgraded. For Wiktionary, it would be
>interesting to have a minimum article length before the TOC is triggered,
>since Wiktionary entries often have a lot of headings while being
>relatively short (making the TOC mostly pointless).
>
Yes, that's a point to consider.  I just looked, and out of 4343
articles the 434th has only 1449 bytes.  Many of the bigger ones are
indexes and other kinds of lists that really serve a meta-dictionary
function.  The minimum number of headings parameter will also be
available as in Wikipedia.  Is the TOC function flexible enough to make
these kinds of parameters so that they can be set in user preferences.
 Whatever a user chooses, since the TOC function operates only on the
currently called article it will not significantly affect operation time.

Ec


subject: [Wikitech-l] [hardy@math.mit.edu: an oddity]

body:
Interesting!

----- Forwarded message from Michael Hardy <hardy at math.mit.edu> -----

From: Michael Hardy <hardy at math.mit.edu>
Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2003 21:51:00 -0400 (EDT)
To: jwales at bomis.com
Subject: an oddity

   OK, type "[[real]]ism" in a Wikipedia article and you
see the whole word "realism" made clickable, underlined,
and colored blue, and when you click on it you go to the
article titled "real".  But type "real[[ism]]" and then,
although the whole word "realism" is colored blue and you
go to "ism" if you click on it, only "ism" is underlined!
(See if you can find "o[[ecumenical]]".  I thought this
was a cute way to be efficient when an old-fashioned
spelling was used in the text.)      -- Mike

--
Michael Hardy
hardy at math.mit.edu

----- End forwarded message -----


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Development tasks

in_reply_to: <bel59q$i52$1@main.gmane.org>; from timwi@gmx.net on Fri, Jul 11, 2003 at 03:53:08AM +0200

references: <3F0BDD1F.8010004@pobox.com> <behnuh$54o$1@main.gmane.org> <3F0C6ECF.7020903@pobox.com> <behtnq$458$1@main.gmane.org> <3F0C8876.30505@corell.dyndns.org> <bei6lu$il0$1@main.gmane.org> <20030709191311.C7763@joey.bomis.com> <bel074$jjl$1@main.gmane.org> <20030710180905.K30892@joey.bomis.com> <bel59q$i52$1@main.gmane.org>

body:
Timwi wrote:
> The problem there is that you need someone to reuse the code; this
> someone would have to be able to tell what is "really good code".

The part that works. ;-)

> I know no PHP apart from the obvious, so this someone won't be me
> ;-) Judging from the proportion of what I know about PHP to what I
> know about Perl, I think as long as Wikipedia will be on PHP, I
> won't be able to submit anything beyond bugfixes and minor cosmetic
> changes.

Well, if you know perl, you pretty much know PHP.  That's what I tell
myself everytime I look at the code, at least.

I sympathize with you.  And if you want to write the whole site over
from scratch in perl, that's a bold undertaking.  I suspect it'd be
hard to get the people who have invested a lot of time in the current
code to see the wisdom in doing that, esp. if the only real reason is
yours and my knowledge deficit with respect to PHP.

--Jimbo


subject: [Textbook-l] License issues

body:
Jimbo wrote:
>This whole discussion makes #1 [GFDL only]
>seem like our only recourse.

That's what I thought... Which is a real shame because at first glance dual
licensing seemed like such a neat idea. But if we cannot easily use Wikipedia
as a text resource then that would hamper the project.

>Let's discuss this for a few days, and then
>I'll chat with RMS and Lessig about it.

That sounds like a good idea.

>I know RMS is going to say "why don't you
>just use GNU FDL?"  because part of the point
>of GNU licenses is just this sort of 'viral' spread
>that forces people to stick with GNU licenses.

I'm not so sure RMS is so religious when it comes to the GNU FDL though.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html states:

:Licenses for Other Types of Works
:
:We believe that published software and documentation should be free software
:and free documentation. We recommend making all sorts of educational and
:reference works free also, using free documentation licenses such as the GNU
:Free Documentation License (GNU FDL).

Note especially:

:For other kinds of works, we recommend you consider the licenses proposed by
:Creative Commons.

>But maybe I can convince him to release (someday?)
>an FDL 2.0 that is a lot more general and easy to
>understand.

Or simply a FDL that requires derivative works to be licensed under one of a
select list of similar viral copyleft licenses like the Creative Commons
Share Alike license. That would make it possible for us to import GFDL only
text into the textbook projects and then downstream users of the textbook
text could choose between GFDL or Creative Commons Share Alike.

But I'm not sure if that would be legal.

--- Daniel Mayer (aka mav


body:
On Fri, 11 Jul 2003, Timwi wrote:
> Brion Vibber wrote:
>
>  > Why don't you just create /home/Timwi? (Probably under c:\cygwin; if
>  > you installed as administrator, double-check the permissions.)
>
> That did it! I didn't know it interpreted those paths to be under C:\cygwin.
>
> Thanks, I've got CVS working now! Yay!
>
> *gives you a very special hug*

Congratulations! Just don't go rewriting the whole thing in perl before
you've figured out how the current code works, now... ;)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Development tasks

in_reply_to: <bel79q$qs3$3@main.gmane.org>; from timwi@gmx.net on Fri, Jul 11, 2003 at 04:27:16AM +0200

body:
Timwi wrote:
> Superficially, yes, but ... for example, I was trying to program the
> "redirect /w/wiki.phtml?title=(.*?) URLs to /wiki/$1 when they don't
> contain an ampersand" feature yesterday, and I realised I had absolutely
> not the faintest idea how to do that.

Hmm, yeah.  Well, of course my mind immediately wanders to some deep
voodoo of mod_rewrite, which could conceivably do that for us,
although I'm sure I'll have nightmares tonight from even thinking the
thought.

> That's not really the only reason. My major reason is that the currect
> code-base will be extremely difficult to enhance to support things like
> "single-signon" and inter-wiki co-ordination.

Right, but what I'm saying is, there's a lot of perfectly good code
that doesn't have anything to do with signing on, and it seems a shame
(not to mention being error-prone for sure) to rewrite all that code
in perl.

There's a lot of tricky code for handling individual language quirks,
and a lot of code in the wiki parsing engine area, and so on.  That
stuff works pretty well, and rewriting it in perl, well, it'd be
tedious.

Probably, I'm guessing, it'd be easier to go pick up a PHP book and
spend an afternoon learning how to do the most basic stuff.  That's
my thinking, anyway.

Now, as for me, I *have* this PHP book over here, which I've been
admiring the cover of for some *months*.  :-)

--Jimbo


from_name: steve vertigo

body:
The issue of unifying user names on a new phase, and
the problems of maintaining article histories, is
related, i think, to the notion i recently stated
about the need for cross-langa transfers of articles,
and a history related to these transfers. The idea of
making something built willy nilly jive with something
designed to the tits with structure seems -- as anyone
will admit -- far fetched. But structure is whats
required when integrating stuff -- and if structure is
the key, then its got to be made to fit the hole that
WP is in -- namely that of not living up to the
teenage imagination.

When looked at from a macro-pedia point of view --
boiling it all down and considering trends in WP's IA
-- the "next step" is looking like the long dreamt-of
WP XML schema - as the foundation for a highly
integrated, cross-langa manifestation of complex yet
sublime brilliance.   Of course it wasnt built that
way... the much lauded simplicity-of-editing is the
prime factor in a Wiki. Though compared to what the WP
will someday be... the first Meatballish incarnation
was but a cheezy homepage. (I wasnt around then, but I
see other Meatballs around....)

The question then becomes, how might more advanced
technologies actually integrate with Willy Nilly in a
reasonable way to create the foundation for something
that has titties.  If its just a question of porting
all of what exists to a new, unified Wikipedia system,
then there are bound to be a few conflicts.  I'm *not
convinced that these anomalies exist in such a
quantity that they couldnt be dealt wih by hand, or
that these amount to anything thats worth discounting
a potentially advantageous paradigm shift.

You cant make an omelet...

Wikilovin be greetin you,
-S-

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month!
http://sbc.yahoo.com


subject:
*** GMX Spamverdacht *** [Wikitech-l] WikmediaOne login (was
 Re: Development tasks)

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

> Couldn't we use the wikimedia.org domain name for handling user logins? That
> way a user only has to sign into their WikimediaOne login and will then be
> logged-in to every Wikimedia project and subproject.

The database with the needed tables don't worry about the DNS-name, I'm
sure of that. I'm sure we can handle the nessessary rights to access all
needed tables, even the user.tables in the different languages, without
needing a DNS entry for it.

And the loginpage will be the nearly the same, only with a few more
possibilities, most of this change happens in the background, thats the
idea behind it. Of course we have to get all the parts in the CVS where
there are calls to the user table and change them. But I think if we realy
plan to do it this way it's a huge change, usually for more than one
developer. I can e.g. try to created a proper proposel and write a lot of
the things down, but I don't think i'm able to fix all php-pages etc.
because I'm still not read and understand them all.

> But before that happens (and periodically after) we may want to flush out
> several thousand en.wikipedia user accounts that have been 1) idle for more
> than say 3 months and 2) have fewer than 10 total edits since the account was
> created.
>
> That would free up many user names so that actual contributors can use them.

1) is ok. but that's needed for all wikipedias, and although it should be a
regular thing we need to do.
2) very bad. We will get [[User:foobar]] links marked red, and someone
starts filling them (we had one case in the wiki.de). And we get those
links in the history of pages.

I would prefere the solution I mentioned in earlier mails, to mark those
users, instead of 'sysop' or 'bot' with the keyword 'delete'. If we modify
that function that making links, in a way that a deleted user don't get a
proper link, but only the text, we are keeping all pages sane (we don't
need to fix them) without to much effort. (E.g: [[User:Smurf]] (undeleted)
--> <b>Smurf</b> (deleted user)).

--
Smurf

smurf at AdamAnt.mud.de
-------------------------  Anthill inside! ---------------------------


body:
Sorry for the stupid subject of the privious mail, I forgot to change it.

GMX don't like yahoo ;)

--
Smurf

smurf at AdamAnt.mud.de
-------------------------  Anthill inside! ---------------------------


from_name: Eugene Gill

body:
It might be of interest, that both the Britannica and Encarta websites still
state that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone despite the US
congress passing a resolution in 2001 acknowleding that it was infact
invented by Antonio Meucci
http://www.popular-science.net/history/meucci_congress_resolution.html -
whereas of course Wikipedia was corrected some time ago.

Mintguy

----- Original Message -----
From: "Erik Moeller" <erik_moeller at gmx.de>
To: <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
Sent: Wednesday, July 09, 2003 7:49 AM
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia more popular than Britannica!

> Toby-
> > Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
> >> So, this is pretty interesting.  According to Alexa.com, Wikipedia is
> >> now more popular than Britannica.
>
> > We should probably keep in mind that Britannica is also available in
print.
> > In fact, that's the brand's traditional medium.
>
> Encarta has very much harmed Britannica's print sales.....


subject: [Wikitech-l] LEMME OUTTA HERE!!!

body:
james duffy wrote:

> 1. What am suddenly doing on the wikitech list?

Heck if I know.

> 2. What is the wikitech list?

"Wikitech-l -- A mailing list for discussing about the technical
organization of the Wikipedias" according to
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

> 3. How do I get off the said wikitech list?

Send e-mail to wikitech-l-request at wikipedia.org with subject "unsubscribe".

> Oh and a fourth question thrown in in honour of my 144 wiki emails -
> what the wikitech are Timwi and Brion talking about in the above
> email???    :-)

Timwi was having trouble getting at the place where we keep all the
source code. :)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Matthias Jordan

subject: [Wikitech-l] Kerberos?

body:
Hi, folks!

Seems like a Kerberos integration could do the job for you. I guess it's
plain overkill, though.

Bye!

Matthias


from_name: Timwi

body:
Thomas Corell wrote:
>
> You are useing cvs.sourcforge.net as server (which is the developer
> cvs-server, instead of the public cvs.wikipedia.sourceforge.net Server)?

I didn't know that. Nor did I know I was supposed to use ssh instead of
pserver. So I tried that, and this is what I get now:

In Linux:

/c/Wikipedia> export CVS_RSH=ssh
/c/Wikipedia> cvs -z3 -d:ext:Timwi at cvs.sourcforge.net:/cvsroot/wikipedia
co phase3
ssh: cvs.sourcforge.net: Name or service not known
cvs [checkout aborted]: end of file from server (consult above messages
if any)

What am I doing wrong here?

In Windows:

cvs checkout -P phase3 (in directory C:\Wikipedia)
cvs [checkout aborted]: Connection to server failed

... although the true cause of this could be that I don't have a Windows
port of ssh. Anyone know where I can get one?

Thanks,
Timwi


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Development tasks

references: <3F0BDD1F.8010004@pobox.com> <behnuh$54o$1@main.gmane.org> <3F0C6ECF.7020903@pobox.com> <behtnq$458$1@main.gmane.org> <3F0C8876.30505@corell.dyndns.org> <bei6lu$il0$1@main.gmane.org> <20030709191311.C7763@joey.bomis.com>

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

> Well, there is one potential complication.  Right now, someone could
> be signed up as 'John' on the en.wikipedia.org, and someone else could
> be signed up as 'John' on the de.wikipedia.org, and they might not
> even know each other or realize that there's a collision.

Well, I've thought about the issue of merging user accounts, and I have
come to a conclusion. Do we need to do that at all?

I mean, we're not hosting anything for the users except for their
preferences. A user can re-create an account (and re-set all
preferences) within a few minutes. Wouldn't it be worth starting with a
whole new userbase? It has the added bonus of getting rid of inactive
users in the old system.

Or perhaps we could make it so that a Phase-IV user can "claim
ownership" of a Phase-III user (by entering their e-mail address and
password) and then all their article history and contributions will be
transferred to them.

That takes the issue off our shoulders, and it will take every user no
more than a few minutes to do.

> But, you know, if you're interested in working on a grand plan for the
> future, by all means... :-)  I'd be eager to see single sign-on, that's
> for sure.

If I started this as another whole new Phase-IV software, would there be
a chance it would be used on Wikipedia? As I'm sure you understand, I'm
reluctant to starting it if it's not going to be used anyway. And I
can't really judge this because I haven't been here for very long yet.

If yes, would anyone object if I bring us back to Perl this way? :-)

Greetings,
Timwi


body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

> Daniel Mayer wrote:
>
>>Couldn't we use the wikimedia.org domain name for handling user logins? That
>>way a user only has to sign into their WikimediaOne login and will then be
>>logged-in to every Wikimedia project and subproject.
>
> No, that wouldn't work very well.  Cookies are domain-specific, and so
> people need to be on the wikipedia domain so we can set a
> .wikipedia.org cookie.

Are you sure wikimedia.org can't also set a cookie for the wikipedia.org
domain?

Timwi


body:
Hi Brion,

first of all, thanks a lot for all your patience in trying to track down
this problem for me. However, I've as yet still been unsuccessful:

Brion Vibber wrote:

> Hrm, you _did_ read http://sourceforge.net/cvs/?group_id=34373 right?

No. I don't remember anyone linking to that before. Thanks.

> Try cvs.sourcEforge.net :)

Oops, how embarrassing :-)

Now I'm getting this in Linux:

/c/Wikipedia> cvs -z3
-d:ext:timwi at cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/wikipedia co phase3
ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host
cvs [checkout aborted]: end of file from server (consult above messages
if any)

The first time I tried, it took about 10 minutes or so until it produced
this error. Now it does it immediately.

> http://www.cygwin.com/

cvs checkout -P phase3 (in directory C:\wikipedia)
Could not create directory '/home/Timwi/.ssh'.
ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host

:-(

(Anyone know how to tell the Cygwin ssh not to try to create Unix
filepaths? o.O)

Again, thanks for any help you can offer,
Timwi


body:
Jason Richey wrote:

> If wikimedia.org sets the domain for a cookie to wikipedia.org and the
> browser DOES acceept the cookie, will the cookie ever be given to
> wikimedia.org by the browser? And the answer here is "no".

It is possible to set several cookies in a single request response.
Thus: Set the same cookie for several domains.

 > We *COULD*, but it would be rejected by some browsers.  Some browsers
 > don't allow cookies to be set by one domain to be used by another.
 > This also leads to the next question:

I see where /that/ would be a problem... :(

Nevertheless, I suppose we could still create a central user database.
Although users would have to log in for each domain, they would still
log in to the same account, retaining the same Wikimedia-wide
preferences, etc.

Timwi


from_name: Karl Eichwalder

body:
Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> writes:

>> Unfortunately, that's not the "we" I seem to belong to.
>
> I'm not sure what you mean.

It is simple: you (= "we") don't mind to link ISBNs with the Am*zon
store; I do not like this.

> The status quo is that we list 10 different booksellers in English, 2
> in Japanese, and 3 libraries.

This is better than it used to be.

> Well, sure!  Any bookseller that accepts a search based on ISBN could
> easily be added.  Just 'Edit this list of links' on the URL above.

Many a lot German booksellers accept ordering books via the internet;
unfortunately, the order interface isn't unified -- some even accept
simple e-mail messages.

--
                                                         |      ,__o
http://www.gnu.franken.de/ke/                            |    _-\_<,
ke at suse.de (work) / keichwa at gmx.net (home)               |   (*)/'(*)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Development tasks

references: <3F0BDD1F.8010004@pobox.com> <behnuh$54o$1@main.gmane.org> <3F0C6ECF.7020903@pobox.com> <behtnq$458$1@main.gmane.org> <3F0C8876.30505@corell.dyndns.org> <bei6lu$il0$1@main.gmane.org> <20030709191311.C7763@joey.bomis.com> <bel074$jjl$1@main.gmane.org> <20030710180905.K30892@joey.bomis.com>

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

> But, really, it seems like we have a *lot* of really good code that
> should be reused, even in a radical refactoring of the code?

The problem there is that you need someone to reuse the code; this
someone would have to be able to tell what is "really good code". I know
no PHP apart from the obvious, so this someone won't be me ;-) Judging
from the proportion of what I know about PHP to what I know about Perl,
I think as long as Wikipedia will be on PHP, I won't be able to submit
anything beyond bugfixes and minor cosmetic changes.

Greetings,
Timwi


body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

 > Why don't you just create /home/Timwi? (Probably under c:\cygwin; if
 > you installed as administrator, double-check the permissions.)

That did it! I didn't know it interpreted those paths to be under C:\cygwin.

Thanks, I've got CVS working now! Yay!

*gives you a very special hug*

Greetings,
Timwi


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: [hardy@math.mit.edu: an oddity]

body:
>    OK, type "[[real]]ism" in a Wikipedia article and you
> see the whole word "realism" made clickable, underlined,
> and colored blue, and when you click on it you go to the
> article titled "real".  But type "real[[ism]]" and then,
> although the whole word "realism" is colored blue and you
> go to "ism" if you click on it, only "ism" is underlined!
> (See if you can find "o[[ecumenical]]".  I thought this
> was a cute way to be efficient when an old-fashioned
> spelling was used in the text.)      -- Mike

I don't know why he's saying that in the case of "real[[ism]]" the
entire word is blue, because it's not. At least not for me, neither on
Wikipedia nor on my test server:

realism

realism


subject: [Wikitech-l] Problem with PHP

body:
Hi,

my test server is currently working, but for some reason, I no longer
have the command-line command php. How come? I used to have (I have run
the install script, after all).

When I try to make php, I get:

gcc: sapi/cli/php_cli.o: No such file or directory
gcc: sapi/cli/getopt.o: No such file or directory
make: *** [sapi/cli/php] Error 1

Thanks for any help,
Timwi


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Development tasks

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>>I know no PHP apart from the obvious, so this someone won't be me
>>;-) Judging from the proportion of what I know about PHP to what I
>>know about Perl, I think as long as Wikipedia will be on PHP, I
>>won't be able to submit anything beyond bugfixes and minor cosmetic
>>changes.
>
> Well, if you know perl, you pretty much know PHP.  That's what I tell
> myself everytime I look at the code, at least.

Superficially, yes, but ... for example, I was trying to program the
"redirect /w/wiki.phtml?title=(.*?) URLs to /wiki/$1 when they don't
contain an ampersand" feature yesterday, and I realised I had absolutely
not the faintest idea how to do that. It's nice that PHP puts query
string variables into PHP variables automatically, but it's not useful
in this case ...

> And if you want to write the whole site over
> from scratch in perl, that's a bold undertaking.

Well, yeah. I know.

> esp. if the only real reason is
> yours and my knowledge deficit with respect to PHP.

That's not really the only reason. My major reason is that the currect
code-base will be extremely difficult to enhance to support things like
"single-signon" and inter-wiki co-ordination.

Greetings,
Timwi


from_name: james duffy

subject: [Wikitech-l] LEMME OUTTA HERE!!!

body:
>
>Timwi wrote:
>
>>Just now I caught another minute the CVS server was working, so I tried,
>>and I received the same error as before (WinCVS 1.3.8.1):
>>
>>cvs login
>>Logging in to
>>:pserver:Timwi at cvs.wikipedia.sourceforge.net:2401/cvsroot/wikipedia
>
>Hrm... that doesn't look right. You should be using external authentication
>via ssh, not pserver.
>
>If you were on Unix or using Cygwin's Win32 port of the regular Unix CVS,
>I'd tell you to just follow the instructions on SF and pull a fresh source
>tree like so:
>
>export CVS_RSH=ssh
>cvs -z3 -d:ext:timwi at cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/wikipedia co phase3
>
>I don't know how to set up WinCVS for this, as I've never used it. I think
>Tarquin has used it....?
>
>-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

I went into my email and found that I had received 144 wiki emails. After
collapsing from a suspected heart failure,  I discovered that many were from
the wikitech list. Which raises three interesting questions:

1. What am suddenly doing on the wikitech list?

2. What is the wikitech list?

3. How do I get off the said wikitech list?

Oh and a fourth question thrown in in honour of my 144 wiki emails - what
the wikitech are Timwi and Brion talking about in the above email???    :-)

OK, maybe I don't want to know, given that I am the sort of person who if I
change a lightbulb blows every fuse in North county Dublin on a good day (on
a bad day the lights flicker all the way to Boston!)

In other words, LEMME OUTTA HERE!!!!          :-O

JT

_________________________________________________________________
Protect your PC - get McAfee.com VirusScan Online
http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963


subject: [Wikipedia-l] 300,000 is a much better milestone (was: Preparing for 150,000 articles)

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>Andre Engels wrote:
>
>>I disagree. I think it is strange to count the various
>>languages together into one number. Some of these
>>articles are translations of each other, others are
>>different articles about the same subject.
>>
>
>We are talking about the progress of the project as a whole -our community
>effort-, we /are not/ boasting about the relative merit of our encyclopedia
>as a usable resource (using article count as a proxy). We need to make that
>clear in the announcement. It takes a lot of work to create 300,000 articles
>(including the ones that are translations). /That/ is what the milestone
>statement is for.
>
250,000 is a somewhat better milestone since it can be expressed as a
"quarter million"

Ec.


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] Category feature commited

body:
As there were no real problems with my implementation of the Erik-style category feature at the test site (only a few improvement suggestions, IIRC), I commited the changes in Language.php, Skin.php, OutputPage.php, and the new SpecialCategories.php to the CVS.

It will not engage unless
   $wgUseCategoryMagic = true ;
is set in LocalSettings.php

Magnus


from_name: Karl Wick

subject: [Textbook-l] legal counsel on copyright issues

body:
Is there any way we could get some good legal counsel on
the copyright/left stuff before we get too far into the new
textbook project ? Now is our chance to start fresh and
have the licence we want, not stumble into something
unideal that we will have to live with later.

Maybe we could license the textbook stuff under no license
for the moment until we get things worked out .. it isnt
that important to me if anyone "steals" my work, it is
better than working and having all of the material stuck
under a license scheme designed for software and not for
content.

(My textbook plans dont include using much from the WP anyway).

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month!
http://sbc.yahoo.com


from_name: tarquin

subject: [Wikitech-l] New development policy

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>* NO MORE MANUAL OVERWRITING OF FILES ON TEST.WIKI. Sorry for shouting,
>but this really has to stop. If our Test-Wiki is supposed to be useful, it
>has to be in a consistent state. That means it should only be updated from
>CVS unstable.
>
>
sorry to ask dumb questions, but what is the correct procedure for
putting files on the test-server?


from_name: Sanford Forte

subject: [Textbook-l] Introduction - California Open Source Textbook Project

body:
Hello,

Jimmy Wales (Jimbo) was kind enough to invite me to the wikipedia list as a way to contribute, and gain feedback for one of my current projects. The project is called The California Open Source Textbook Project (COSTP) www.opensourcetext.org

The idea is to utilize open source and innovative content licensing (via Creative Commons www.creativecommons.org ) to help California realize a initial significant savings, and eventual complete elimination of its $400M+ (and rising) annual debt for K-12 textbooks.

This project has been lobbied to the Governor's office, the State Senate and Assembly, the California Teacher's Assn., several foundations, and many others.

Most of those who have had benefit of hearing about COSTP in detail are impressed with the possibilities. It will take a combination of political will, and a pilot that proves the concept (not necessarily in that order) to make this work.

We would like to get a pilot going, and what I'm currently thinking about doing - in the absence of funds - is starting something up via the Connexions Project at Rice University http://cnx.rice.edu/

I will be adding more information, in the way of updates, and a more complete project business model to the site soon.

All feedback is welcome. I understand this is a forum set up to share ideas, and am delighted to share what little I know about this area.

Thanks again,
Sanford

Sanford Forte, Founder and  Director
California Open Source Textbook Project
Palo Alto, CA
www.opensourcetext.org

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from_name: Daniel Mayer

body:
Oliver Pereira wrote:
>....
>Perhaps the edit page should have a notice
>saying, "This edit will be attributed to you under
>the pseudonym [some unique identifier here]. If
>you do not wish to use that pseudonym, you may wish
>to register a user name or, if you already have one,
>log in."
>....

I think that is a very good idea. Otherwise, as you
have noted, allowing Anon edits isn't really in the
spirit of the GNU FDL. The only other real alternative
is to stop allowing Anon edits and, IMO, that is last
thing we should do at this point (maybe when Wikipedia
is a household word we can think about that but until
then allowing anybody to edit without even having to
log in has been a major source of snagging new
contributors - cut that off and I fear that our
attrition numbers will begin to exceed our recruiting
numbers).

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month!
http://sbc.yahoo.com


from_name: Jimmy Wales

in_reply_to: <002501c347e3$4c4d79c0$0400a8c0@oemcomputer>; from siforte@ix.netcom.com on Fri, Jul 11, 2003 at 12:33:25PM -0700

body:
Sanford Forte wrote:
> We would like to get a pilot going, and what I'm currently thinking
>about doing - in the absence of funds - is starting something up via
>the Connexions Project at Rice University http://cnx.rice.edu/

Those who are interested in getting right down to the 'meat of the
matter' should look here for the content:
http://cnx.rice.edu/courses/

They are using the Creative Commons 'Attribution' license -- this is
not 'Attribution-Share Alike', if you're a license connoisseur such as
myself.  :-)

> All feedback is welcome. I understand this is a forum set up to
>share ideas, and am delighted to share what little I know about this
>area.

Our greatest strength is the strength of our community, and the
"institutional knowledge" that we've gained as a group.  We talk a
lot, but more importantly, we just *do* things as they seem possible,
without waiting for a 'project business model'. ;-)

For your purposes, what kinds of textbooks would be most useful to you
as as 'pilot that proves the concept'?  Choose wisely, because you may
find yourself in two years holding a copy of whatever book you request
of us!

My own thinking here is that the textbook project of the Wikimedia
Foundation should focus on a single book or series of books that fit
into the K-8 curriculum.

Interested parties should then write in accordance with the California
state standards, supplemented by standards of other states where
appropriate, and should also endeavor to obtain examples of competitor
books as a "development target", i.e.  to meet or exceed the standard
set by existing texts.

If we focus our efforts in this way, we should be able to produce
something that could be printed in small quantities as an example, and
then you could use that as a proof of concept for your lobbying
efforts.

--Jimbo


body:
Oliver Pereira wrote:
> An author does not choose their IP address. In the vast majority of cases,
> they won't even know their IP address, or even what an IP address is! You
> cannot claim that an author is "choosing" to use a name if they don't even
> know what that name is.

If that's true, then we're free to identify them as 'anonymous',
right?  Or to identify them by the number that we have for them.

There's *nothing* that can give us a moral duty to try to found out
the real name of a contributor, if they don't give it to us.  If they
don't give us a name, we are perfectly free to identify them by
whatever we *do* have.

> If, as you seem to be asserting, the attribution requirements of the GFDL
> allow firstly for an author's "name" to be assigned by an external party,
> without the author's knowledge or consent, and secondly for no effort to
> be gone to to ensure that the "name" thus assigned corresponds to a single
> individual, then it follows that citing "the author" as the author of any
> piece of work is perfectly acceptable.

No, that's not what I'm claiming at all, and the absurd conclusion
that you cite does not follow from what I'm claiming.

What I'm asserting is that the GFDL requires us to identify up to 5
authors.  This requirement can only mean that we are required to
identify them using whatever information they gave us.  If they didn't
give us information, then we should identify them as best we can.

> (1) The name of the author, even if it is a pseudonym, should be agreed by
> that author.

And that's exactly what I'm arguing for.  If someone contributes
anonymously, by not logging in, then we identify them as best we can.

> (2) Reasonable lengths should be gone to to make the name as near to
> unique as is feasible. (In a database, there is no reason for this not be
> become just plain "unique".)

For example, we can use what little identifying traces they did leave
us, i.e. their ip number.

> Even if it is agreed that pseudonyms are acceptable, it is still true that
> the current system doesn't even require *them*.

No, it does require them.  Every contribution is identified in a
particular way.

This is a pretty silly argument, I think.  What are we concerned
about, exactly?  Do you think someone could plausibly contribute an
anonymous edit and then get mad at us later because we didn't do the
impossible, i.e. we didn't hunt them down and find out their real name
or get permission to identify them as best we could?

That's absurd, I think.  We don't need to worry about it, and the FDL
in no way requires such nonsense.

--Jimbo


body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> I think that is a very good idea. Otherwise, as you
> have noted, allowing Anon edits isn't really in the
> spirit of the GNU FDL.

I couldn't possibly disagree more, I think.  *Disallowing* anon edits
would not be in the spirit of the GNU FDL.  I just don't know where
this idea is coming from that the attribution requirement extends
beyond the identification that someone actually gives us.  It
certainly doesn't come from the law, or from the license itself.

I say: the spirit and letter of GNU FDL are best served by doing
*exactly* what we are doing.  There's no tension at all, and indeed
there *is* tension between any *other* alternative.

We are already doing, in this respect, *exactly* what the spirit and
letter fo the GNU FDL require, and I really am quite confused by
suggestions to the contrary!

--Jimbo


from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [Textbook-l] License issues

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>Or simply a FDL that requires derivative works to be licensed under one of a
>select list of similar viral copyleft licenses like the Creative Commons
>Share Alike license. That would make it possible for us to import GFDL only
>text into the textbook projects and then downstream users of the textbook
>text could choose between GFDL or Creative Commons Share Alike.

>But I'm not sure if that would be legal.

If the GNU licence changes to allow this, then it's all good.
That's because (and why) thing are licensed under
"Version xxx or any later version of the GNU FDL".
             ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

-- Toby


from_name: Chong Yidong

subject: [WikiEN-l] Crackpot articles

body:
Hi there. I haven't posted to the list before, but I've been
editing under the callsign "CYD" for for quite a while now.

I'd like to point out a number of crackpot articles recently
contributed by the user Reddi:

[[Plasma cosmology]]
[[Dynamic theory of gravity]]
[[Rotating magnetic field]]

These articles are written in a very obtuse and confusing way,
which makes the specific claims impossible to pin down, let alone
correct. Furthermore, the references are chosen in a misleading
way to make the topics look like they are well-received. For
example, the article on "plasma cosmology" contains links to
various studies of plasmas, including the IEEE Transactions on
Plasma Science. These studies have however no relevance to the
purported topic, which is an "alternative cosmology to the Big
Bang theory."

In addition, there have been several equally incoherent edits to
articles such as [[Luminiferous aether]].

Any suggestions about what to do?

-- CYD


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Revenue and ISBN Links

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Toby Bartels wrote:

>>I'm not sure why we list individual booksellers in the first place.

>Some users, like me, have a preferred bookseller and would rather just
>click straight through.  I'd rather pay a little more sometimes than
>go through the hassle of entering my credit card number and address
>again, so meta-searches aren't that interesting to me.

>Different people have different preferences, and we can easily
>accomodate them all, so, you know, why not?

>The only reason why not, that I've seen so far, is that some people
>not only want to boycott Amazon, they want to force others to do it as
>well.  I'm not persuaded that *that* is what we want to be doing.

First of all, that's not /my/ motivation for questioning the link.
While I personally will not do business with Amazon,
I oppose Wikipedia's steering people away from them.
My motivation is to avoid swamping the list of links
with individual booksellers when the meta-searches are more useful.

Remember that those (like you) with preferred booksellers
can continue to use these with the meta-search sites.
OTOH, newcomers can be harmed by not knowing
that the meta-search sites aren't just another bookseller.

As for those that /are/ motivated by opposition to Amazon,
I don't know what they would really hope to get
out of removing individual booksellers from the list.
After all, Amazon is listed on both AddALL and PriceSCAN.

Also, Fred and I are the only people in this discussion
to question the list of individual booksellers
(and neither of us has come out in /opposition/ yet!);
I don't know what Fred's motivation is,
but even if it's to force a boycott on others,
that makes only 50% of us. ^_^

Anyway, I have a new idea:
Just explain on the page what the difference is --
then people can make the decisions that they want.
So see my new version of [[en:Special:Booksources]].

-- Toby


body:
Tim Starling wrote:

> Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
>> Timwi wrote:
>>
>>> Nevertheless, I suppose we could still create a central user
>>> database. Although users would have to log in for each domain, they
>>> would still log in to the same account, retaining the same
>>> Wikimedia-wide preferences, etc.
>>
>> Right!  Doesn't sound too bad to me.
>
> It still leaves the problem, as someone already mentioned, of people who
> want a localised user name. For example "Boris the Inquisitive Goat"
> might want to be known as "Boris la Ch?vre Investigatrice" on the French
> Wikipedia.

Just let one account have different nicknames in different languages.
This gives us the extra bonus that someone wanting to be named a lengthy
"Boris the Inquisitive Goat" could still use something as short as
"Boris" for a login identifier.

Timwi


subject: [Wikitech-l] Committed stuff

body:
Speaking of committed stuff, now that I have finally managed to gain CVS
access, I have committed the following changes (if someone could put
them on the test server, that would be great):

- OutputPage.php: The apostrophe-stuff. See
   http://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostrophe_Test_page

- SearchEngine.php: "Go" button redirects to the article if one found
   (rather than displaying it under the "search" URL).

Please everyone test :-)

Timwi


from_name: Delirium

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: group work, unattributed work

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>I couldn't possibly disagree more, I think.  *Disallowing* anon edits
>would not be in the spirit of the GNU FDL.  I just don't know where
>this idea is coming from that the attribution requirement extends
>beyond the identification that someone actually gives us.  It
>certainly doesn't come from the law, or from the license itself.
>
>
I'd tend to agree with this interpretation --- my reading of the GFDL is
that it's informally saying "you have to keep the original attribution
information, with the exception that you don't have to keep more than
five authors".  If somebody published a book anonymously under the GFDL,
then presumably you could make derived versions of that book with no
author attribution.  At the very most, you could say "originally
published anonymously."  Which I think is the same situation here --
"this article contributed to by User2, JonDoe, and several anonymous
authors."

-Mark


from_name: Tim Starling

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Timwi wrote:
>
>>Nevertheless, I suppose we could still create a central user database.
>>Although users would have to log in for each domain, they would still
>>log in to the same account, retaining the same Wikimedia-wide
>>preferences, etc.
>
>
> Right!  Doesn't sound too bad to me.

It still leaves the problem, as someone already mentioned, of people who
want a localised user name. For example "Boris the Inquisitive Goat"
might want to be known as "Boris la Ch?vre Investigatrice" on the French
Wikipedia.

We could tell them "tough luck". Or instead of a central database, a
user could have a collection of "linked" user accounts, with
synchronised preferences (incl. password) and automatically generated
interlanguage links on user pages. Implementing this in the current
scheme would be relatively simple compared to some of the other
suggestions made here. It would require the various wikis to be able to
connect to each others' databases. There could be performance issues if
users create *lots* of linked accounts, but if that becomes a problem we
can always update in batches to save on the connection overhead.

-- Tim Starling
<tst.ar.li.ngphy.sicsun.i.melbed.uau> (fix punctuation to email)


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikitech-l] Committed stuff

body:
Timwi-

> - SearchEngine.php: "Go" button redirects to the article if one found
>    (rather than displaying it under the "search" URL).

This doesn't work if mod_rewrite is not set up -- not good, as many of our
installations don't use it.

You also did not implement it for the last stage (title match). And it
breaks the Go button for titles which are not in the article namespace
(namespace is not prefixed).

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Brion Vibber

body:
Before we go tearing our hair out, we should probably actually *check* to
see how many duplicate names we've got to deal with.

If the number is quite small, which I expect it is, conflicts could simply
be resolved by (consensually) renaming a few accounts.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Committed stuff

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>>- SearchEngine.php: "Go" button redirects to the article if one found
>>   (rather than displaying it under the "search" URL).
>
> This doesn't work if mod_rewrite is not set up -- not good, as many of our
> installations don't use it.
> You also did not implement it for the last stage (title match).

Thanks. Fixed.

> And it
> breaks the Go button for titles which are not in the article namespace
> (namespace is not prefixed).

The Go button never returns pages that are not in the article namespace.

Regardless, I've fixed that too.

Anything else?

Greetings,
Timwi


subject: [Wikitech-l] Database design

body:
On Sat, 12 Jul 2003, Timwi wrote:
> * BLOBs that store article text are combined in the same table as
> meta-data (e.g. date, username of a change, change summary, minor flag,
> etc.). This is bad because variable-length fields like BLOBs negatively
> affect the performance of reading the table.

How much of a difference does this make when we're usually taking single
rows found via an index?

> One table, 'userproplist', stores the possible user properties
> (userprops), and another table, 'userprop', stores what user has what
> userprop with what value. This way all that is needed for adding a new
> userprop is adding a single row to the 'userproplist' table.

Potentially interesting...

> * BLOBs that fulfill the same function (article text) are scattered
> across two tables (cur and old).

Yeah, this is bad mojo. They should be combined in one 'revisions' table.

> * You are using a 'recentchanges' table which, I presume, gets also
> updated with every edit. This, I assume is the idea behind it, allows
> the 'Recent Changes' page to quickly grab the most recent changes
> without having to find them elsewhere in the DB.

There were two reasons for this: first, cur and old being separate and no
good way in MySQL to read them together. Second, old mysql couldn't do an
inverse sort on an index, so sorting by reverse timestamp was, well,
suckage. :) This is remedied already using a hackish 'inverse_timestamp'
column, which itself is no longer really needed on mysql 4 which can
sort descending on indexes.

Recentchanges would be irrelevent with cur and old combined as they ought
to be, plus a key in the revisions table for "first edit" so we know which
to mark as "new".

> * Store translated website text, so translators don't have to dig
> through PHP code and submit a file to the mailing list.

We certainly could do this, though there are performance concerns whenever
the idea is brought up. Caching the strings in shared memory may alleviate
this.

There's been some talk of adapting the translation system we use at some
of Esperanto cxe Interreto's sites, such as http://lernu.net/, so the
interface and source-file-scanner doesn't have to be written from scratch.
I haven't looked at the table structure used, but I imagine it's a fairly
straightforward language-key-string triplet set.

> * A global table for bidirectional inter-wiki links. People should not
> have to add the same link to so many articles.

There's an experimental table for interwiki links, but it's not entirely
the best setup. It's questionable whether bidirectional is really right,
though, as there's not always a 1:1 matchup between articles.

> Are you all still convinced that adapting the current code to all these
> radical changes is easier than rewriting it all from scratch? :-)

Yes, certainly.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Lightning

subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikimedia login, and global login solution

body:
Ok, I would love to see global log-ins, but yeah there is user conflicts and
the problem of making the switch smoothly. Here is what I propose.

* Keep all existing Usernames;
* Make a new type of global login from Wikimedia
*All new users are made with the wikimedia domain
*Wikimedia logins require that no one else have that name, anywhere
*If one user has Jane at en.wikipedia and Jane at wiktionary and that is THE ONLY
conflict present, allow her to merge the accounts (with a password
validation) Inwhich case the account is coverted to a wikimedia login.
* How does it work?  easy..
---If there is no name conflicts, the user is automatically moved to a
wikimedia login, in which case he automatically has a global login
name/password
---If there is a conflict, the users stay in their own logins.
*We develop new "login" namespaces
--For example I would be: Lightning at en.wikipedia
--But if there is no conflict I would be Lightning at wikimedia
*From then on logins have 2 parts, username and "domain"
*That way we could have Jose at en.wikipedia and Jose at sp.wikipedia
*If you go to sp.wikipedia.org it automatically assumes your login is @ the
sp.wikimedia domain, but if it is not found there, it searches for it in the
wikimedia domain. In the future, once more people have wikimedia logins than
local ones, we can switch the default to wikimedia.
*User pages and user talks:
--Keep as it is, make each user have a different user page and user talk per
domain. We could untie them all based on a PRIMARY KEY userId, but it would
be confusing to have these crazy usertalk pages where people from different
projects are leaving messages about different projects in different
languages(provided you speak more than 1). It would just get really
cluttered.
*Eventually, as domains start having 0 users, we elminate them.
*Oh, and constant purging of Old abandoned accounts (1 year with no logins?
or say 4 months with no logins and less than 5 total edits?)
**Easy, thats all, completely transparent!!!!

Techinical Issues:
*Purge abandoned accounts to make the switching process easier
*Make a new 'user' table, a global one that includes an additional "domain"
field.
*All user accounts are switched to this table with their respective domain.
*Run a script that finds all the usernames with no conflicts, and makes all
those global. all the non-uniques would stay in their respective domains
until they were merged, deleted or changed (We could give the ability of a
user to switch his username, lose his contribution counts, etc, but keep
their watch list and preferences)
*From now on, internally we refer to users with a PRIMARY KEY 'userId', but
the users should never see this

--NOTE: we could additionally (if we wanted to be true to the relational
database structure) have a new table called "domains" that kept a domainId
and "DomainName" to avoid a varchar field in the new user table (plus it
would make that index smaller and matching faster)

PROBLEMS I FORSEE:
*character encoding of usernames and people making logins that look exactly
the same, but are not (think the #1 and letter l trick.....)
*does MYSQL support full UNICODE? does wikipedia?
*Since cookies are domain-based you couldnt just log in and access all the
sites.. or can wikimedia.org set cookies with other domains on them??
*Never eliminating domains because of people getting into fights about
keeping their usernames.. but well.. thats people, no technology can fix
that

I spent some time thinking about this solution and I find it elegant, easy
and ultimately the easiest to implement for a migration. I know I have never
checked in code or am a significant figure here, theres no reason for you to
listen to me, or my ideas as I have never really proved my technical
abilities, but I do find that this solution could prove beneficial without
requiring a major rewrite of existing code. This not a final revision and
not complete and exhaustive as I do not know the codebase very well, but the
ground work is there and the gist of it too. Opinions  and suggestions are,
as allways, greatly appriciated.

One more thing, I also see this solution centralizing data, which is allways
good. With all the users centralized into one table, we could, inthe future,
implement some sort of caching system which would invariably aid in
performance. If you remember one of my previous posts, you might remember my
reference to "memcached" (www.danga.com) as it already has phpbindings...

Lightning


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Development tasks

body:
> The problem there is that you need someone to reuse the code; this
> someone would have to be able to tell what is "really good code". I know
> no PHP apart from the obvious, so this someone won't be me ;-) Judging
> from the proportion of what I know about PHP to what I know about Perl,
> I think as long as Wikipedia will be on PHP, I won't be able to submit
> anything beyond bugfixes and minor cosmetic changes.
>

You know more than you think you know. Good code is not dependent on
language, but on logic. Thts the one  thing I learned in comp sci. I would
routinely write pseudo code programs or php programs, for my c++ projects
and then just port them over, it made it sooooo much easier that way. plus
php is so easy.. and the manual so good. There is a whole lot of built-in
functionality, and php is designed from the ground up to work with web
interfaces. Another thing is that Perl code is a little harder to understand
than php since "TIMTOWTDI" . Perl tends to look a lot different depending on
who programs it, while php doesnt so much because, frankly there is not
allways that many ways to do it... Plus i might be biased cause i dislike
perl cause I tried to learn it as my first programming langueage and i was
rather confused and never got anything done... so I learned C, which I did
ok with, but had a lot of trouble with stupid crap, then i discovered php..
which I loved because it reminded me of C while removing most of the tedious
and confusing parts of it (dynamic memory allocation)....

Lightning


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Crackpot articles

body:
Timwi wrote:
>What exactly does 'contributed' mean here?
>If the articles are entirely new, then there's
>no reason to act at all, other than improving
>the articles.

You are completely missing the point; The point was that the terms and
concepts are pseudoscience junk and may not even warrent inclusion in our
encyclopedia at all. But a simple Google search of "plasma cosmology" brings
up this interesting website:

http://www.matter-antimatter.com/plasma_cosmology.htm

Which is a website which states (as fact) that "Plasma Cosmology has replaced
the Steady State (1950's - 1960's) & Big Bang Theories (1960's - 1990's) of
the Universe." (which is /complete/ hoghash in the most extreme) and also has
this to say about a future NASA mission:

:On July 4, 2005, NASA plans to collide a 350
:kilogram spacecraft into the antimatter Comet
:Tempel 1.  The spacecraft's impact with the
:comet will result in a 7,500 Megatons explosion
:that will fracture the 125 billion metric ton comet
:into millions of fragments.  The antimatter fragments
:will disperse into solar orbit and periodically collide
:with earth for years to come, produce tremendous
:explosions (equivalent to millions of Megatons of
:TNT), and will destroy life as we know it.
:Armageddon  will have come.

Ee gads! I just paid off my mortgage. Bummer I won't be alive long to enjoy
it.

Give me a break.

I'm a bit sick and tired of having this type of pseudo-science crap on our
website. Real scientists don't have time to constantly neutralize every one
of these stupid claims and Wikipedia will look as idiotic as the
matter-antimatter website if we allow too much of this stuff.

Sorry, I'm in a bit of a bad mood over the Reciprocal System of Theory nut
Doug Bundy and his renewed efforts at trying to legitimize his pet "theory"
by linking to it from valid scientific articles on Wikipedia.

--mav


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Committed stuff

body:
Timwi-
> The Go button never returns pages that are not in the article namespace.

That's simply not true.

Regards,

Erik


body:
> It still leaves the problem, as someone already mentioned, of people who
> want a localised user name. For example "Boris the Inquisitive Goat"
> might want to be known as "Boris la Ch?vre Investigatrice" on the French
> Wikipedia.

WARNING:  you might not understand this unless you have seen my previous
post about the single logins.

We might have a wikimedia domain login, with it's single userID, have mapped
nicknames based on each domain, but the actual login name would be the same.
We culd have a nickname table that mapped nicknames to a userid based on a
domain. Basically an alias system....

Lightning