subject:
[WikiEN-l] Dead wikipedians and how to really make a project
	boring to death

body:
On 7/29/06, Sherool <jamydlan at online.no> wrote:
> On Wed, 26 Jul 2006 18:20:53 +0200, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > The crime : it was uploaded as a non-derivative license. So, it is
> > proposed for deletion.
> >
> >
> > And frankly, I can not ask Treanna any more if he would be nice enough
> > to change that license to make it free by wikipedia definition.
>
> Sorry if I'm beeing an insensitive prick here, but why not simply ask his
> family to change the license? With the author dead the family is the new
> legal copyright holder (unless he left a will stating otherwise), and we
> obviosly know how to get in contact with them. I mean by all means give
> them some time to grieve before confronting them with the GFDL release
> forms or whatever, but if we are planning to keep the image around
> permanently it seems like the only real solution. It is what we would have
> demanded of anyone else (people have literaly been banned for insisting on
> using NC or ND images of themselves on theyr own userpage), and I for one
> do not apreciate having double standards. Either we allow every unfree
> image with a sufficiently compelling "sob storry" to stay, or we stay true
> to our stated goals of free content even if it means that an image of
> someone dear to us can not be used. Personaly I favour the later.
>
I agree with the sentiment, but I think it ignores an important sanity
check.  Why does the image have to be free in the first place?

It's obviously not a legal reason, as the ND license means things are
perfectly legal.  So why is just being legal not enough?  The reason
is so that third parties can use the content.

Well, the image is ND, so third parties *can* use the content, "in all
media and formats whether now known or hereafter devised".  Further,
they can "make such modifications as are technically necessary to
exercise the rights in other media and formats".  And they can also
make any modifications which are permitted under the doctrine of fair
use.  A third party could copy [[Wikipedia:Deceased Wikipedians]].
They could add other people to it.  They could remove some.  They
could change the text.  They could probably enhance the image itself
under the doctrine of fair use.  They could print out this new copy.
They could create an article on Bernard and include the image in it.
They could make a newspaper article out of that article.  They could
broadcast a television show which included the picture in it.

I for one can't think of anything that a third party is going to want
to do with this image that they can't legally do, unless it's some
troll picking on this image just to make a point.

For me, it has nothing to do with a double standard.  The only way I
think it could even be argued that it makes sense to ban this image
would be if the parents were contacted and they flat out refused to
license the image under a free license.  Then I suppose you could
argue that we should refuse to include the image, basically as an
ultimatum.  Even then though I tend to be of the opinion that CC-BY-ND
is "free enough", especially for an image in the Wikipedia namespace
of a person who is almost surely never going to have an article about
him.

Anthony


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Common sense exceptions to our copyright policy.

body:
On 7/29/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> I hate to spoil your fun, but what is going to stop people from just
> claiming "Yes, I made this" on every random image they get from
> Flickr/Photobucket/Google images?

I would be surprised if changing from a "stick a template on a page
and hope no one notices" to a "tell us honestly - did you make this?
we're going to check!" model, made no difference. People who aren't
there for malicious reasons are going to dislike blatantly lying when
asked "did you take this photo with your own camera?"

So: physically what stops them? Nothing. Morally what stops them?
Having to blatantly lie.

Steve


body:
On 7/28/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> I wasn't aware that consensus had anything to do with copyright

I'm proposing a change to the status quo, whereby a *broad* consensus
(hopefully with some clueful people) can "overrule copyright".

Probably these situations are still best dealt with by one person
taking responsibility for the "copyright violation" and uploading the
image under their name.

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] giving medical advice

body:
On 7/28/06, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
> > The last sentence of the lead,

It actually can be spelt "lede".

Steve


list: foundation-l

from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions

body:
mboverload wrote:
> On 7/27/06, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
>
>
>>Our next purchase is additional caching proxy servers; these are essential
>>to
>>keeping pages flowing since they handle most of the visitor and image
>>traffic,
>>and the current ones are expected to start dragging as the back-to-school
>>traffic peak comes at the end of the summer.
>>
>>-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>>
>
>
> Not sure if this is related, but I have seen more squid errors than I've
> gotten before.

It's not related. Squid error messages are what you get when squid is
working and something else isn't. When squid isn't working, you just get
timeouts or refused connections, it's left up to the browser to report
an error to the user.

The something else that isn't working is typically a segfault in PHP or
APC, which squid reports as ERR_ZERO_SIZE_OBJECT.

If squid is pushed over its capacity, the result is poor page view
performance, although there's half a dozen things other things that can
cause that. Identifying a system bottleneck can be a complex task.

-- Tim Starling


list: wikimedia-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions


from_name: Michael Snow

subject: [WikiEN-l] Categories for deletion/discussion issues

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:

> On 7/29/06, Daniel R. Tobias <dan at tobias.name> wrote:
>
>> > Pop? Isn't that what you do to bubble wrap?
>> >
>> > Coke? Isn't that a fuel made from heating coal in the absence of
>> air, or
>> > a slang term for cocaine?
>>
>> Soda?  Do you mean baking soda or the nonalcoholic part of scotch &
>> soda?
>
> I can't think of any other interpretations of "soft drink".

All it fundamentally means is something non-alcoholic, as in the
opposite of "hard drink". Lemonade can be a soft drink (unless of course
it's hard lemonade), but it doesn't qualify as pop or soda. As with
freeway/motorway/etc., there is no single satisfactory term that both
includes all that should be included, and excludes all that should be
excluded. If you want to say carbonated non-alcoholic flavo(u)red
beverage with absolute precision, that's what you have to say.

--Michael Snow


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Edward Z. Yang

subject: [Wikitech-l] Interpolation is faster than concatenation

body:
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Tim Starling wrote:
> The main reason I'm doing this is because I think $foo.' '.$bar looks
> ugly compared to "$foo $bar", and it also takes up more screen space. I
> doubt the performance gain would be significant either way,
> concatenation takes only 19us. I just don't like seeing the MediaWiki
> codebase uglied up for specious reasons.

While I agree that if interpolation looks nicer then concatenation, you
should definitely use it, I don't think the test results mean very much.
String interpolation used to be quite slow, but the PHP team managed to
speed it up quite a bit from 4.2 to 4.3 to 5 (Schlossnagle 2004).

I think it's highly dependent on server configuration: you should run
the test on a production Wikimedia server and see how it fares there.
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from_name: Chad Perrin

body:
On Sat, Jul 29, 2006 at 08:29:31PM +1000, Tim Starling wrote:
> Hashar noticed that for simple string literals, single quotes are faster
> than double quotes, if you count both parse time and execution time.
> This is reasonably easy to understand: single quotes have only two
> special characters, \ and ', so the loop body to process them would be
> simpler. Some people went on to assert that by extension $foo.' '.$bar
> is faster than "$foo $bar", without doing any benchmarks. I was never
> convinced of this.

I'd never bothered to consider whether concatenation or string
interpolation was slower -- I just knew that both would slow things
down.  Nice to know someone checked on it, at least for academic
purposes.

>
> I did a benchmark where I had one file which looked like this:

[ snip a bunch of data and explanation ]

>
> The slightly longer filesize in the string_interpolation.php case was
> because I used line breaks embedded in the string to break up powers of
> 10, whereas in concatenation.php the line breaks were not in the strings.
>
> The main reason I'm doing this is because I think $foo.' '.$bar looks
> ugly compared to "$foo $bar", and it also takes up more screen space. I
> doubt the performance gain would be significant either way,
> concatenation takes only 19us. I just don't like seeing the MediaWiki
> codebase uglied up for specious reasons.

Excellent point.

However . . .

This is almost certainly the fastest option, when using echo (which is
faster than print, if I'm not mistaken, though it doesn't work as part
of a more complex enclosing expression):

  echo $foo, ' ', $bar;

One can feed multiple strings to echo for printing via the comma without
having to wait through the concatenation operation, similarly to the way
the print function works in Perl.  Of course, I'm guessing: for all I
know, PHP might be so obtuse as to treat multiple arguments to echo like
a loop, and restart an expensive operation for every argument.

Considering I don't really use PHP when speed is a concern, though, it's
unsurprising I haven't bothered to benchmark it.

--
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
"There comes a time in the history of any project when it becomes necessary
to shoot the engineers and begin production." - MacUser, November 1990


from_name: Nick Jenkins

subject: [Wikitech-l] New SVN user

body:
> It's probably worth mentioning that there's a new project to create a
> MediaWiki-workalike engine that runs in a Java Servlets container. It's
> called JAMWiki, and it's here:
>
>         http://jamwiki.org/
>
> I've played around with it a little and, while it's definitely Not There
> Yet, it's way ahead of 80% of existing Wiki engines. I'm going to be
> keeping an eye on it.
>
> ~Evan

And amusingly, it also has at least one of the exact same XSS
vulnerabilities that used to be in MediaWiki ;-)

And yes, I have reported this to them, together with PoC, at
http://jamwiki.org/wiki/en/Bug_Reports#XSS

Their implementation does look interesting though.

All the best,
Nick.


body:
On Sat, Jul 29, 2006 at 12:19:03PM -0600, Chad Perrin wrote:
>
> This is almost certainly the fastest option, when using echo (which is
> faster than print, if I'm not mistaken, though it doesn't work as part
> of a more complex enclosing expression):
>
>   echo $foo, ' ', $bar;
>
> One can feed multiple strings to echo for printing via the comma without
> having to wait through the concatenation operation, similarly to the way
> the print function works in Perl.  Of course, I'm guessing: for all I
> know, PHP might be so obtuse as to treat multiple arguments to echo like
> a loop, and restart an expensive operation for every argument.
>
> Considering I don't really use PHP when speed is a concern, though, it's
> unsurprising I haven't bothered to benchmark it.

Curiosity got the better of me, so I did a quick, unscientific benchmark
using the unix time utility.  Results, with script output cut out, on a
script that prints "foo bar" 1499 times, once with comma separation,
once with string concatenation, and once with a single interpolated
string:

  $ time php -f comma.php
  real    0m0.546s
  user    0m0.151s
  sys     0m0.070s

  $ time php -f concat.php
  real    0m0.351s
  user    0m0.173s
  sys     0m0.025s

  $ time php -f interp.php
  real    0m0.286s
  user    0m0.108s
  sys     0m0.025s

So, apparently, I got the opposite of what I would have expected.  I
think the PHP interpreter is actually running a separate echo routine
for every comma-separated string.  Interpolation is fastest.

I didn't add any linebreaks or spaces for code readability, so this is
about as direct a performance comparison as I'm likely to get from the
time utility, and this data set, I suppose.

--
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
Ben Franklin: "As we enjoy great Advantages from the Inventions of
others we should be glad of an Opportunity to serve others by any
Invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously."


from_name: ScottL

body:
Michael Snow wrote:
> Steve Bennett wrote:
>
>> On 7/29/06, Daniel R. Tobias <dan at tobias.name> wrote:
>>
>>>> Pop? Isn't that what you do to bubble wrap?
>>>>
>>>> Coke? Isn't that a fuel made from heating coal in the absence of
>>> air, or
>>>> a slang term for cocaine?
>>> Soda?  Do you mean baking soda or the nonalcoholic part of scotch &
>>> soda?
>> I can't think of any other interpretations of "soft drink".
>
> All it fundamentally means is something non-alcoholic, as in the
> opposite of "hard drink". Lemonade can be a soft drink (unless of course
> it's hard lemonade), but it doesn't qualify as pop or soda. As with
> freeway/motorway/etc., there is no single satisfactory term that both
> includes all that should be included, and excludes all that should be
> excluded. If you want to say carbonated non-alcoholic flavo(u)red
> beverage with absolute precision, that's what you have to say.
>
> --Michael Snow

   I can see them making space for that on menus world wide :).


body:
On Sat, Jul 29, 2006 at 01:04:53PM -0600, Chad Perrin wrote:
>
> Curiosity got the better of me, so I did a quick, unscientific benchmark
> using the unix time utility.  Results, with script output cut out, on a
> script that prints "foo bar" 1499 times, once with comma separation,
> once with string concatenation, and once with a single interpolated
> string:
>
>   $ time php -f comma.php
>   real    0m0.546s
>   user    0m0.151s
>   sys     0m0.070s
>
>   $ time php -f concat.php
>   real    0m0.351s
>   user    0m0.173s
>   sys     0m0.025s
>
>   $ time php -f interp.php
>   real    0m0.286s
>   user    0m0.108s
>   sys     0m0.025s

. . . and just for the sake of completeness, I decided to run the
interpolation test with print instead of echo to double-check my belief
that echo is faster.  It seems to actually be roughly equivalent
(execution times returned by the time utility vary by greater than the
differences between interp.php and print.php).  Print, of course,
doesn't allow the comma syntax, but since it's the slowest I don't think
that's really a problem -- though it can be formatted in a slightly less
obnoxious-looking manner than concatenation.  Very slightly.

  $ time php -f print.php
  real    0m0.285s
  user    0m0.101s
  sys     0m0.032s

--
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
"The first rule of magic is simple. Don't waste your time waving your
hands and hopping when a rock or a club will do." - McCloctnick the Lucid


from_name: Jay R. Ashworth

body:
On Sat, Jul 29, 2006 at 11:08:51AM -0400, Edward Z. Yang wrote:
> Tim Starling wrote:
> > The main reason I'm doing this is because I think $foo.' '.$bar looks
> > ugly compared to "$foo $bar", and it also takes up more screen space. I
> > doubt the performance gain would be significant either way,
> > concatenation takes only 19us. I just don't like seeing the MediaWiki
> > codebase uglied up for specious reasons.
>
> While I agree that if interpolation looks nicer then concatenation, you
> should definitely use it, I don't think the test results mean very much.
> String interpolation used to be quite slow, but the PHP team managed to
> speed it up quite a bit from 4.2 to 4.3 to 5 (Schlossnagle 2004).

"If a programmer can simulate a construct more efficiently than the
compiler can implement it, then the compiler writer has blown it
*badly*".  --Guy L Steele, in Harbisone & Steele.

"Premature optimization is the root of all evil." --Hoare, via Knuth

Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

	Fanfic: read enough, and you'll loose your mind.  --me


body:
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Edward Z. Yang wrote:
> While I agree that if interpolation looks nicer then concatenation, you
> should definitely use it, I don't think the test results mean very much.
> String interpolation used to be quite slow, but the PHP team managed to
> speed it up quite a bit from 4.2 to 4.3 to 5 (Schlossnagle 2004).

Argh, that was phrased poorly. What I meant to say is:

I agree that interpolation looks nicer than concatenation, and you
should use it whenever it improves readability.

However, I don't think the test results mean very much. (insert rest of
message).

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from_name: Marc Schütz

body:
Am Samstag, 29. Juli 2006 12:29 schrieb Tim Starling:
>
> There were 10000 "foo bar" strings output by each one. On my laptop,
> with no bytecode caching, string interpolation was 12 times faster than
> concatenation.

I believe this is because you are concatenating a large number of variables
together into one string, which is quite unrealistic for a real-world
application. The more frequent case is where you have only a few variables:

foo = 'foo';
$bar = 'bar';
$start = microtime(TRUE);

for($j = 0; $j < 100; $j++)
        for($i = 0; $i < 100000; $i++)
                $s = $foo.' '.$bar;
                //$s = "$foo $bar";

$stop = microtime(TRUE);
echo $stop-$start;

On my laptop this example needs about 14 secs with interpolation, but only
9-10 secs with concatenation.
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body:
On Sat, Jul 29, 2006 at 10:24:26PM +0300, Domas Mituzas wrote:
> Chad,
> >>   $ time php -f comma.php
>
> I'm sure you understand, that most of our string operations are
> happening not in print/echo ;-)

Yes . . .

. . . and?

Concatenation occurs before print or echo operates on the string.  I
wasn't sure whether echo operated on each argument in a comma-separated
list individually or as an aggregate whole, though judging by the
slowness of it I'm inclined to believe the former now.  Interpolation
occurs outside of print or echo, and the resulting interpolated string
output is operated upon by print or echo.

I'm not sure what your point was.

--
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
Brian K. Reid: "In computer science, we stand on each other's feet."


from_name: Alphax (Wikipedia email)

body:
Daniel R. Tobias wrote:
> On 27 Jul 2006 at 20:41, Alphax wrote:
>
>> ScottL wrote:
>>> It has a map showing the geographic distribution of pop vs soda vs coke
>>> vs. other (usually soft drink).
>> Pop? Isn't that what you do to bubble wrap?
>>
>> Coke? Isn't that a fuel made from heating coal in the absence of air, or
>> a slang term for cocaine?
>
> Soda?  Do you mean baking soda or the nonalcoholic part of scotch &
> soda?
>

Soda


body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 7/28/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I am strongly in support of taking action to reduce the amount of
>> copyright outrageous violations that we get...   But I think it would
>> be self defeating to implement any policy which discourages real
>> contribution.   There must be some solution which simultaneously
>> curtails copyright violation (or at least its impact) and encourages
>> contribution.
>
> How about a middle ground:
> 1) By default, any logged in user can upload any image they themselves
> have produced. (some way of discouraging them from uploading any other
> images needs to be found)
> 2) "Confirmed" users, preferably those who have uploaded 3 or 4 of
> their own images, can upload copyrighted images for fair use.
>

I hate to spoil your fun, but what is going to stop people from just
claiming "Yes, I made this" on every random image they get from
Flickr/Photobucket/Google images?

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

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from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Foundation-l] Project Proposal: Wikicat

body:
Jonathan Leybovich wrote:

>However, in a more general vein,
>I'm not sure the lexical construct WiktionaryZ wishes
>to impose on every sort of Wikidata entity makes
>sense.  For example, multi-lingualism is certainly
>important in a lexicographic context, but it does not
>apply to a catalog.  A catalog has language-specific
>data, for sure, but this is not multi-lingual data-
>the language(s) in which a book's title is
>historically expressed by the author or publisher is
>important, and you cannot just do your own translation
>into an arbitrary language and say that is also the
>book's title.  Similarly, films are given multiple
>titles by their distributors for different markets yet
>often these are very different from what a direct
>translation would look like.  Here is more detail on
>these issues:
>
>http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multilingual_Wikidata
>
The common name of a taxonomic entity IS a translation of the formal
Latin name.  Why should it be treated as a separate data type?  The
endangered species Microhexura montivaga from North Carolina and
Tennessee is known in English as the spruce-fir moss spider.  It may
have a name in the first nations languages of the area, but can it
really have a name in any other language.  You can invent a name in
every other language, but these would be purely hypothetical, and not
supported by actual usage.  This would amount to unverifiable original
research.

Similarly, arbitrary translations of book titles would be unacceptable.
For a translated title to be meaningful it must have in fact been
translated that way.  The title of Camus' famous book "L'?tranger" has
been translated both with the literal "The Stranger" and the literary
"The Outsider"; these would both be valid entries for the repective
translations of the book which would then require a "Translation of ..."
entry.

>Regarding different referencing styles, I'm open to
>anything though I think you'll find that in practice
>standard numbers like ISBN are less cumbersome to use
>than titles.  For example, <<ref:The Davinci Code>>-
>does this mean the book, the movie, the audio book, or
>"The Davinci Code: Fact or Fiction?" ?
>
ISBNs have their limitations too.  My copy of the 1977, 22nd edition of
"Dorland's Pocket Medical Dictionary" has two different ISBNs depending
on whether there are index tabs on the fore-edge.  My earlier 1922, 11th
edition, "The American Illustrated Medical Dictionary", (edited by
Dorland) does not have an ISBN.  I bought that specific edition to
enable me to check out potential copyright problems.  My more recent
2003, 30th edition, "Dorland's illustrated medical dictionary", has four
different ISBNs depending on whether it's a standard, deluxe, trade or
international edition.  There are 27 other editions, and a distinction
still needs to be made between pocket and full-size editions.  Sometimes
the difference is important; other times it isn't.  The issue is not so
simple that it can be solved by simply using an ISBN number.

>Also, citation is not just fetching bibliographic data
>for the purposes of displaying it in an info box like
>other information.  It is fundamentally about
>associating an assertion with evidence or support, and
>so must capture the cited "text" as well as the
>paraphrase text. Here is a mock-up of these idea in
>the context of an enhanced article validation feature:
>
>http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Wikicite_spider_review_mockup.jpg
>
That simple example does best to illustrate some of the difficulties
that are faced in scientific description.  My first inclination would be
to ask whether the description is consistent (but not necesarily
identical) with the description that is officially accepted by the
relevant international society.  Would a spider be better described as a
kind of arachnid arthropod rather than just an invertebrate.  The first
citation is very poor because it uses a simile.  Saying that it is
"like" most invertebrates does not imply that it "is" a vertebrate.
Citation sometimes need to be rigorously applicable.

Ec


from_name: Ilmari Karonen

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Regulation of user pages (was: Dead wikipedians and how
 to really make a project boring to death)

body:
Anthony wrote:
>
> Anyway, looking at the User:SPUI page I guess I see what you're
> saying.  And I guess the ban on non-free content would tend to lessen
> this type of thing.  Actually my response would probably be a minority
> one - I don't really see a problem with providing every Wikipedian
> with his or her own little private webspace, wholly unregulated by the
> community except for the limits of the law and space considerations.

In my opinion, the only significant problem with your suggestion is that
we currently have no formal way to distinguish a "Wikipedian" from
"anyone who just registered an account".  We may know one when we see
one, but there's a broad grey area and no agreed-upon threshold for
considering someone a genuine contributor to the encyclopedia.

In other words, we'd be providing a free-as-in-beer, anonymous, mostly
unregulated webspace for anyone with an internet connection.

To some extent, of course, we're already doing that, but we've set up
all sorts of minor speed bumps to make this feature less attractive to
those who want to use it for purposes unrelated to the project.  In
fact, the whole userbox controversy effectively hinged on this: how easy
or hard should we make it to put a 240-by-45-pixel box on one's user
page, given that there clearly were and are people who are interested in
doing that but not interested in contributing to the project?

At the time I considered proposing that we do away with user pages
entirely, but this turns out to be infeasible since we do want to allow
user subpages, for article drafts and whatnot, and we are just as
lacking in a formal way to tell a useful user subpage from a vanity one.

Instead, perhaps what we should do is establish a rule that all pages in
the User: namespace must be somehow related to the project and not
contrary to its goals, and must, if necessary, explain how they are so;
if not, they may and should be speedily deleted.

This doesn't mean you couldn't describe yourself on your user page.  But
if the page didn't include _any_ information actually relevant to the
project, such as your contributions to Wikipedia, areas of interest,
useful skills, etc., it would be unsuitable and speediable.

--
Ilmari Karonen


references:
<eafdac$3hf$1@sea.gmane.org> <20060729195226.GJ22671@apotheon.com>
	<eaggs5$ogc$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
On Sat, Jul 29, 2006 at 10:36:07PM +0200, Platonides wrote:
>
> "Chad Perrin" wrote:
> > I'm not sure what your point was.
>
> The point was that even if echo comma were 200%, MediaWiki couldn't use it,
> as internal functions doesn't use echo/print, but return data to an upper
> level which goes to another function, which calls $wgOut....

Ahhh, that makes sense.  Okay, duly noted.

Meanwhile, I got carried away and did more pseudo-benchmarking.  Such
fun.

--
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
Brian K. Reid: "In computer science, we stand on each other's feet."


from_name: geni

body:
On 7/29/06, Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> This strategy would probably work best if there were a way to lock an
> image so that it can't appear in any article.

there is but useing it to list several thousand problem images would
kill the servers.

--
geni


from_name: Matt Brown

references:
<ea84nf$4c1$1@sea.gmane.org> <op.tdgclrfhr18sbe@mainframe.lan>
	<71cd4dd90607290714x222db593r8bf1f2faa0e1f9a7@mail.gmail.com>
	<op.tdgvcppwr18sbe@mainframe.lan>
	<71cd4dd90607291344n29bc2777g410545acd4f40b86@mail.gmail.com>

body:
On 7/29/06, Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> Well, yeah, that is what I'm saying.  But I should point out that this
> *was* the policy up until about a year ago.  The new policy in my
> opinion doesn't make any sense.  This particular example is evidence
> of that.

I don't think I agree with you - at least in terms of the project's
official policy.  /De facto/, restricted images were sometimes
tolerated or ignored, but I don't think ever officially approved of.

-Matt


subject: [WikiEN-l] Regulation of user pages

body:
Fred Bauder wrote:
> On Jul 29, 2006, at 5:16 AM, Ilmari Karonen wrote:
>
>>Instead, perhaps what we should do is establish a rule that all
>>pages in the User: namespace must be somehow related to the project
>>and not contrary to its goals, and must, if necessary, explain how
>>they are so; if not, they may and should be speedily deleted.
>
> To me this is just one more bunch of rules to enforce. We have so far
> to go in presenting usable verifiable information from reputable
> source that getting after inappropriate user pages seems out of
> priority.

You do have a point.  On the other hand, people (including Jimbo)
obviously _do_ care about inappropriate user pages, as evidenced by the
Great Userbox Wars of '06.  Since this seems unlikely to change, a rule
that made dealing with such pages simpler and more effective could in
fact free up more time for actually building the encyclopedia.

--
Ilmari Karonen


from_name: Michael R. Irwin

subject:
[Foundation-l] Wikipedia and Wikimedia Software Prompt Solution to
 Problem Posed in 2000 by David Brin?

body:
Hi All,

Some of you might find this article by David Brin (P,hd in Space Physics
& SciFi Author) interesting:
http://www.davidbrin.com/disputationarticle1.html

He outlines a top down design to try to use the Internet as a
collaborative discussion and thinking tool.

It seems to me that the Wikimedia software and various projects
utilizing some simple rules (NPOV, only one 32K article per subject or
title, comprehensive history of revision, and the ever evolving
community guidelines) allowed solutions meeting his basic criteria and
goals to self organize.

As a publicity drive or stunt we might consider inviting him to evaluate
how well Wikipedia or some other Wikimedia project meets his proposed
requirements for useful Internet sites on his website for his fans.

Perhaps a good time (considering that Wikipedia hardly needs publicity
drives considering its current success and maturity) would be after a
few months of Wikiversity's authorized operation makes it clear that
good ideas or material tends to float or stay on the current page of
learning/study activities there; just like the best material and
presentations drift to the current article or definition on Wikipedia
and Wiktionary.

I would be very interested in reactions or opinions why or why not
Wikipedia currently meets or does not meet his stated goals or criteria
for a "Disputation Arena".

regards,
lazyquasar


subject: [WikiEN-l] Accented characters (was Re: fancruft)

body:
On 7/28/06, John Lyden <rasputinaxp at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm still roughly confused as to why some people are pilloried for
> applying [[Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English)]] to hockey
> players.

Because that guideline doesn't have 100% consensus, especially for
peoples' names, and secondarily for placenames.  You might not like
that fact, but we wouldn't have constant arguments about the topic
were the consensus solid.

This is made more complex by the fact that 'use English' is in itself
a complex issue.  Some - many - English-language publications use
diacritics.  It's also somewhat debatable whether 'use English' means
'always transliterate into diacriticless spellings'.

-Matt


from_name: Sherool

body:
On Wed, 26 Jul 2006 18:20:53 +0200, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Anthere#Image:Norbert3.jpg_listed_for_deletion
>
> Norbert was a much appreciated wikipedian on the french wikipedia. He
> contributed a lot.
> Wikipedia is not produced by machines. But by living beings. We should
> value people and we should value good contributors.
>
> Norbert died some time ago. It was the first wikipedian we lost on the
> french project. At that point, he was the editor with the largest number
> of edits. And it was not only typos. He left us a last word just before
> he had an operation and did not survive it.
>
> We sent flowers to his burial. We told his family how important he was
> for us and they were proud of what he did for Wikipedia.
> A text was written about him. And for some reasons, it was translated on
> the english signpost
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2005-10-10/News_and_notes.
>
> I uploaded the picture of Treanna on the english wikipedia. It was the
> picture he had on his user page. A bad image, but the only one we had
> for him. Certainly an image which will never be reused by anyone. But an
> image of Treanna.
>
>
> The crime : it was uploaded as a non-derivative license. So, it is
> proposed for deletion.
>
>
> And frankly, I can not ask Treanna any more if he would be nice enough
> to change that license to make it free by wikipedia definition.

Sorry if I'm beeing an insensitive prick here, but why not simply ask his
family to change the license? With the author dead the family is the new
legal copyright holder (unless he left a will stating otherwise), and we
obviosly know how to get in contact with them. I mean by all means give
them some time to grieve before confronting them with the GFDL release
forms or whatever, but if we are planning to keep the image around
permanently it seems like the only real solution. It is what we would have
demanded of anyone else (people have literaly been banned for insisting on
using NC or ND images of themselves on theyr own userpage), and I for one
do not apreciate having double standards. Either we allow every unfree
image with a sufficiently compelling "sob storry" to stay, or we stay true
to our stated goals of free content even if it means that an image of
someone dear to us can not be used. Personaly I favour the later.

--
[[:en:User:Sherool]]


subject: [Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

>mboverload wrote:
>
>
>
>>I'm just not comfortable with leasing period.
>>
>>I find Wikipedia to be too important to leave in anyone's hands other than
>>the immediate foundation.  A company that leases servers may easily give in
>>to legal challenges or other backhanded threats. We'd have to have legal
>>advice about how this would effect the lawsuit situation and consider what
>>we would be giving up.
>>
>>
>>
>Leasing does not necesarily mean going through an existing for-profit
>leasing company.  Many of them would certainly give cause to your
>discomfort.  A totally new company established for the purpose of
>leasing back the hardware would do just fine.  Whatever contractual
>arrangements are made could reflect the values of the community and a
>break even business plan.
>
>Ec
>
>_______________________________________________
>
>
Considering the efforts that WMF is putting into operating correctly in
full compliance with Florida and Federal U.S. law; I find it hard to
believe that our potential legal liabilities are large enough to justify
complicating our community/corporate structure.

To casual reviewers considering donation this type of thing could look
like an attempt to siphon money out of the WMF or raise questions why we
feel it is necessary.

Consider the absolute worst case, litigation goes against us and WMF is
forced to liquidate all  assets and cease operations.

The major asset of the project/program/community/foundation is the
FDL'ed databases, GPL'ed software, and community of contributors,
developers, and other volunteers.

A new Foundation could be back up and operating at current levels within
a quarter or two with an aggressive public funding drive for hardware.

If the legal risks are really so high, perhaps we should seek a
partnership or understanding with a major university such as Oxford, or
Yale, or _______ that in the event of legal catastrophe the site could
be brought back up on their servers until the community had organized a
new nonprofit to host its projects and acquired and setup new servers
and bandwidth.

Perhaps the Electronic Frontiers Foundation or SourceForge would be
interested in some kind of reciprocal agreement?

regards,
lazyquasar


subject: [Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions


from_name: Andrew Gray

subject: [WikiEN-l] giving medical advice

body:
On 28/07/06, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:

> > is also completely wrong and incredibly Americentric.
>
> But in the movie Groundhog Day the weatherman saves a life by using
> the Heimlick Manoeuvre, and in the TV ad for the National Bank of
> Scotland, same thing.

Um... the National Bank of Scotland closed its doors ninety yeard
back. I don't think it's doing TV spots...

(I agree on the Amerocentrism. It's not nearly as common a medical
practice in Europe)

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


list: wiktionary-l

from_name: Oldak Quill

subject: [Wiktionary-l] thanks

body:
On 28/07/06, Amii Asthana <dramiiasthana at googlemail.com> wrote:
> thanks

For what are you thankful?
--
Oldak Quill (oldakquill at gmail.com)


body:
On Wed, 26 Jul 2006 19:18:54 +0200, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On 7/26/06, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> I uploaded the picture of Treanna on the english wikipedia. It was the
>> picture he had on his user page. A bad image, but the only one we had
>> for him. Certainly an image which will never be reused by anyone. But an
>> image of Treanna.
>
> I've tagged the photo as fair use and delisted it from IfD.

You could at least *try* to explain why the image should be allowed to
stay as such even though it's blatantly against policy. Such as trying to
invode the "comunity consensus" exception clause in item #9 of the fair
use policy.

With the current explanation probided that image will most likely get shot
on sight the next time a "copyright patroller" who are not aware of this
debate notice the image.

I still say it would be better to just ask his family to re-release the
image with a more free license.

--
[[:en:User:Sherool]]


list: wikipedia-l

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia is featured by on the front page of
	Asahi Shimbun, the leading newspaper in Japan

body:
On 29/07/06, Aphaia <aphaia at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello all,
> originally this mail was sent to other mailinglist, but someonw urged
> me strongly to share it with a broader audience ;)
>
> Asahi Shimbun http://www.asahi.com, one of leading newspaper in Japan
> focused on Wikipedia (mainly Japanese edition) on its front page and
> the second. The whole space this article taken was equivalent to a
> half of page.
>
> Most of space was used to describe how it worked, with three Japanese
> Wikipedians' comments (two
> anonymous, supposedly sysops, one by Suisui under his real
> identification). The general atmosphere seemed very positive to me.
> Fact checking seemed to be done properly, and no apparent criticism
> was shown.  I daresay it is one of the best articles on Wikipedia as
> for fact correctness view, and would like to make my applause to the
> editors.
>
> Japanese newspapers carry a column ("series" they call) on the front
> page (1/4 of pages except advertisements) and Wikipedia was chosen as
> the first theme of their new series on net activities. Usually it is
> placed on the first
> page, but this special version continued to the second page, and there
> took 1/4 page too, so 1/2 of first two pages were dedicated to
> Wikipedia.
>
> The first part mentioned almost only to the Wikipedia and was signed
> by Mr. Yasuda Tomooki, one of their journalist based on Tokyo. The
> second part was credited by two journalists including Mr. Yasuda, and
> referred to other net communities in the Japanese speaking world, with
> comments of authorities, one of them are interesting a researcher and
> Wikipedia editor with her real name and her involvement to the
> project. "Not job, but as specialist
> [I contribute to the Wikipedia] said she ... she found some
> remarkable mistakes on articles of her field, and many thought
> Wikipedia credible. "As professional, I would like to prevent to
> spread misunderstanding" (relying on remembrance, very lough
> translation)
>
> Regretfully the column itself can't be available online for free, but
> if you are in South Korea, Australia, New Zealand or India, you can
> utilize "trial subscription" of Web Asahi Shimbun
> (http://wasa.asahi.com/)  for 3days (and get the 2 days before
> article).

Thanks for the information. I don't suppose you, or someone else who
can understand Japanese, could translate the article for us?
--
Oldak Quill (oldakquill at gmail.com)


from_name: Kelly Martin

subject: [Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions

body:
On 7/29/06, Alison Wheeler <wikimedia at alisonwheeler.com> wrote:
> >>>>A company that leases
> >>>>servers may easily give in to legal challenges or other backhanded
> >>>>threats.
>
> Can I just clarify for people who may not be aware of such things, but
> there are *two* basic forms of leasing.
>
> One is where the company 'selling' the equipment provides the leasing
> facility, such that the equipment remains the property of that company
> during the lease (basically what has been discussed)
>
> The other is a Finance lease, where you 'buy' the finance separately, use
> that finance to pay the equipment supplier and own the equipment yourself,
> subject to payments to the bank or other provider of the finance.

In most cases, they're the same thing, because when the seller
provides financing it's usually through a separate financing company
operating behind the scenes -- and if not, they usually discount the
transaction to a financing company shortly after the lease funds.

Kelly


subject: [Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions


from_name: Anthony

references:
<ea84nf$4c1$1@sea.gmane.org> <op.tdgclrfhr18sbe@mainframe.lan>
	<71cd4dd90607290714x222db593r8bf1f2faa0e1f9a7@mail.gmail.com>
	<op.tdgvcppwr18sbe@mainframe.lan>

body:
On 7/29/06, Sherool <jamydlan at online.no> wrote:
> Our current policy is that we want our content to be (completely) free
> (wich include the ability to make derivative works) *especialy* in
> comunity space (since all user contributions are supposed to be free
> licensed). Granted this is more for "philosophical" reasons (we are a free
> content project and all that) than practical legal ones, but it *is* the
> current policy, in fact is is one of the 5 pillars of the project wich
> states "(...)Do not submit copyright infringements **or works licensed in
> a way incompatible with the GFDL**." (emphasis mine), and just for the
> record ND licenses are not compatable with the GFDL.
>
> If you are saying we should change the policy and allow use of unfree (or
> at least "semi free") contnet in "community space" because it is seperate
>  from our content, then that is one thing, I disagree, but it is a somewhat
> valid argument.

Well, yeah, that is what I'm saying.  But I should point out that this
*was* the policy up until about a year ago.  The new policy in my
opinion doesn't make any sense.  This particular example is evidence
of that.

Yes, we'd like everything to be free (how "completely" varies from
person to person, but putting a restriction on most derivative works
is certainly not acceptable).  You say especially in project space.  I
say especially in article space.  But either way, a wish for
everything to be complete free does not equal a mandate that
everything must be completely free.

As for whether or not ND licenses are "compatible" with the GFDL, it
seems to me that they're just as compatible as CC-BY-SA licenses.
You're not suggesting that these must be removed from Wikipedia, are
you?

I'd also like to point out something you said.  Maybe you meant it in
this way, and maybe you didn't.  You said "all user contributions are
supposed to be free licensed".  I take that to mean that contributions
for which the Wikipedian owns the copyright must be free licensed.  If
that were the situation, if we were talking about a case where a
Wikipedian owned the license to the image, then I think we'd be
talking about something different.

> You might be interested in trying to breathe som life back
> info
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Licensing_for_community_images>.

No, not at all.  Wikipedia politics is not a game I'm good at playing.

> However what I'm trying to say is that I'm uncomfortable with the idea of
> a handfull of users just desciding that in this one case we will simply
> ignore a core policy of the project because it doesn't allow them to do
> what they want to.
>
And I completely agree with this part of your argument.  There
shouldn't be a special exception made just for this case.  If the vast
majority of people agree that Wikipedia should include this image in
the Wikipedia namespace, then we should be asking ourselves why, and
adapting the policy to fit this situation.

And while we're at it, we should either remove [[Image:Wikimedia.png]]
from the User namespace or examine why policy allows that one too.
Allowing that one in the User namespace is just plain old hypocrisy.

Anthony


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] LIVE MIRROR, please block

body:
?? ??? wrote:
> On Friday 28 July 2006 22:05, Brion Vibber wrote:
>> ?? ??? wrote:
>>> I found this page:
>>>
> http://ja.andmoretop.info/pacman-online/Special:Recentchanges.html
>>> which is mirroring Wikipedia live, also English
> version
>
>> Killed.
>
> Thankyou! But it looks like it is still working :-(. eg
> also
> http://en.andmoretop.info/Special:Recentchanges.html

Killed their new IP.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
On Sat, 29 Jul 2006 14:25:22 +0200, Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:

> On 7/29/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
>> That said, I think "saying no" would cause a real reduction in bad
>> images... but if we aren't careful how we say no we will encourage
>> people to twiddle the knobs until they've left misleading metadata.
>> I'd rather we have more violations which are tagged somewhat correctly
>> than fewer violations but with them tagged as free content.
>
> Maybe if there weren't any knobs at all it'd be better.
>
> 1) Any logged in user can upload an image, if they include text which
> explains why they think the image fits within the policy.  A tutorial
> can help guide them as to what the policy is, but ultimately anything
> can be uploaded with explanatory text.
>
> 2) Only after you've convinced us that you know what you're talking
> about and aren't lying about everything, then you get a pulldown menu
> of choices.
>
> This strategy would probably work best if there were a way to lock an
> image so that it can't appear in any article.  Who would be able to
> add or remove the lock, and whether or not the lock would be on or off
> by default (personally I'd say probably off) could be tweaked to find
> the best solution.  Blatant violations would of course be deleted -
> the lock would be for situations where there's just not enough
> explanation, or the explanation hasn't been checked.

Hmm, this gave be an idea, maybe not a good idea, but I'll throw it out
there anyway:

Remove the dropdown list entierly. Rather than a copyright tag include a
boilplate text that give detailed step by step instruction on what you
need to add to the image to have it kept. This boilplace also categorise
the image as [[Category:Incomplete uploads as of XXX]] (replace XXX with
the date). The "sucessfull upload" message should also be changed to make
it clear that unless the uploader goes to the image page and follow the
instructions and include all the required information the upload is
considered "incomplete" and the image can not be used and will be deleted
after a week (yes the downside would be that even peple who know what they
are doing would have to do this for each upload) unless the process is
completed by having the proper source and license data added.

Then have a bot summarily remove all "incomplete uploads" from articles
and remind the uploader after a couple of days (kinda like what Orphan bot
does now), and make images with the default boilplate intact after a week
a speedy deletion criterea.

This would force the uploader to read a bit and work a little to find the
correct tag rater than just picking something at random from a dropdown
list. The problem is though that a lot of people are remarkably resistant
to taking any notice of instructions and warnings. They just want to
upload cool images, and get very upset when we remove and delete them.

--
[[:en:User:Sherool]]


from_name: Jonathan Leybovich

body:
Lars Aronsson wrote:
>
>
> Even though I think Wikicat is one of most promising
> project
> proposals in the last few years, I fear it will have
> a hard time
> to explain, over and over again, the basics of
> bibliography to all
> newcomers who think they are experts.  How can this
> project sort
> out the beginners and give them easy but meaningful
> tasks where
> they can be productive, without their ignorance
> causing damage?

One of the soft deliverables of the project proposal
is documentation and hopefully a training regime to
orient new users.  The hope is that appropriate groups
like  Wikiproject Librarians could take up the
responsibility once Wikicat became world-editable.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikicat#Stage_1.0

>
> Could we perhaps have a separate mailing list
> (wikicat-l) for
> discussions about Wikicat, even before the project
> is formally
> established? That would be an opportunity to
> establish some level
> of common knowledge and "get to know" each other.
>

It would be very useful, I think, to invite the
members of Wikiproject Librarians to this discussion
from the outset.  If anyone knows of similar groups on
the non-English Wikipedias please invite them as well.

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


from_name: Samuel Klein

body:
On Sun, 30 Jul 2006, Lars Aronsson wrote:

>> ISBNs have their limitations too.  My copy of the 1977, 22nd
>> edition of "Dorland's Pocket Medical Dictionary" has two
>> different ISBNs depending on whether there are index tabs on the
>> fore-edge.  My earlier 1922, 11th edition, "The American
>> Illustrated Medical Dictionary", (edited by Dorland) does not
>> have an ISBN.
>
> These comments, while accurate, are on the absolute layman level.
>
> Even though I think Wikicat is one of most promising project
> proposals in the last few years, I fear it will have a hard time
> to explain, over and over again, the basics of bibliography to all
> newcomers who think they are experts.  How can this project sort
> out the beginners and give them easy but meaningful tasks where
> they can be productive, without their ignorance causing damage?
>
> Could we perhaps have a separate mailing list (wikicat-l) for
> discussions about Wikicat, even before the project is formally
> established? That would be an opportunity to establish some level
> of common knowledge and "get to know" each other.

YES.  Please.


from_name: Aphaia

subject: [Foundation-l] Reporting & communicatio

references:
<44C71BE9.7090600@wolfmountaingroup.com>
	<44C7E0AD.4040006@wolfmountaingroup.com>
	<D4A4DF3E-ACB5-4B47-A895-E7EA7F991953@gmail.com>
	<44C7F91F.3090909@wolfmountaingroup.com>
	<896BCBF2-DB1D-481B-A6A1-DED6C4F3E9B6@gmail.com>
	<35be2a710607272257t325a3ch6946f95fb1e6a833@mail.gmail.com>
	<913D4FF1-BEBD-41BF-B4AD-A593B5FF3FEF@gmail.com>
	<35be2a710607280237k6eff6259h4db93486de1eec49@mail.gmail.com>
	<F520DE7A-80DD-40C9-A01F-80514B433CC0@gmail.com>
	<eaebna$ba$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
On 7/29/06, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Domas Mituzas wrote:
> >>So we expect you remember other present and important issues clearly,
> >>including the informally proposed Houserule for Wikimania?
> >
> >
> > I'm rebellious, surely not following that one. :)
>
> I missed a step. What is this Houserule ?

ah it's a joke. Danny proposed "R35 for alchol" and  certain people
like our Lithuanian friend don't like it.

> As for hardware purchase reports, they have never been as clear as
> today, since precise purchases are detailed and voted in a resolution.
> They may all be found on the wikimediafoundation site. Now, just a
> thought : if you are a visitor not familiar with this website, I wish
> you good luck to find the resolutions :-) They are very much hidden. It
> would be nice that someone helps to make them more visible. Perhaps even
> putting a [[resolutions]] link in the toolbar.

Toolbar is one of improvement needed things definitely. It can be
optimized through MediaWiki:Sidebar only for sysop.

Other potential addition is "policies" -> Privacy policy & Visual
guideline. The latter is hardly found too, I'm afraid.

It is fine to know the Board gets reports steadly. As the nect step,
would the Board be interested in re-releasing some of those reports to
the Foundation wiki or passing to Comcom as potential materials to the
foundation wiki? Since 1) it is suggested some of those reports might
contain things not suitable to be in public, 2) those reports haven't
been passed to Comcom [even by itself, IIRC]. I think we are rather
better to bother the Board in this area.

Delphine permitted me to reuse her reports on early summer European
tour as report from Chapter Com (see my meta talk), but it would be
nicer much newer stuffs could be published.

> We got one or two reports of the trademark committee. For obvious
> reasons, our strategy with regards to brand is not openly published.

--
Aphaia
aka
Kizu Naoko
email: Aphaia @ gmail (dot) com


subject: [Foundation-l] Reporting & communicatio


from_name: Tim Starling

body:
Marc Sch?tz wrote:
> Am Samstag, 29. Juli 2006 12:29 schrieb Tim Starling:
>
>>There were 10000 "foo bar" strings output by each one. On my laptop,
>>with no bytecode caching, string interpolation was 12 times faster than
>>concatenation.
>
>
> I believe this is because you are concatenating a large number of variables
> together into one string, which is quite unrealistic for a real-world
> application. The more frequent case is where you have only a few variables:
>
> foo = 'foo';
> $bar = 'bar';
> $start = microtime(TRUE);
>
> for($j = 0; $j < 100; $j++)
>         for($i = 0; $i < 100000; $i++)
>                 $s = $foo.' '.$bar;
>                 //$s = "$foo $bar";
>
> $stop = microtime(TRUE);
> echo $stop-$start;
>
> On my laptop this example needs about 14 secs with interpolation, but only
> 9-10 secs with concatenation.

That test measures execution time, not parse time. You're measuring 1us
per iteration for concatenation and 1.4us per iteration for
interpolation, for execution only. I'm measuring 74us per iteration for
concatenation and 6us for interpolation, for parse and execution
combined. Hashar's justification for replacing double quotes with single
quotes throughout the MediaWiki codebase was to speed up execution for
environments with no oparray caching, since the measured difference for
oparray cache hits was said to be negligible.

Which brings me to this:

Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
> "If a programmer can simulate a construct more efficiently than the
> compiler can implement it, then the compiler writer has blown it
> *badly*".  --Guy L Steele, in Harbisone & Steele.

It's not so easy to simultaneously optimise compile speed and execution
speed. Improving one often means trading off the other. An intermediate
representation, even one hand-written in the source language, can escape
that tradeoff.

-- Tim Starling


body:
Hashar noticed that for simple string literals, single quotes are faster
than double quotes, if you count both parse time and execution time.
This is reasonably easy to understand: single quotes have only two
special characters, \ and ', so the loop body to process them would be
simpler. Some people went on to assert that by extension $foo.' '.$bar
is faster than "$foo $bar", without doing any benchmarks. I was never
convinced of this.

I did a benchmark where I had one file which looked like this:

<?php
$foo = 'foo';
$bar = 'bar';
echo "
$foo $bar $foo $bar $foo $bar $foo $bar $foo $bar $foo $bar $foo $bar
...
?>

And one file that looked like this:

<?php
$foo = 'foo';
$bar = 'bar';
echo
$foo.' '.$bar.' '.$foo.' '.$bar.' '.$foo.' '.$bar.' '.$foo.' '.$bar.
...
?>

There were 10000 "foo bar" strings output by each one. On my laptop,
with no bytecode caching, string interpolation was 12 times faster than
concatenation.

Document Path:          /test/concatenation.php
Document Length:        80001 bytes

Concurrency Level:      1
Time taken for tests:   7.420670 seconds
Complete requests:      10
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      801670 bytes
HTML transferred:       800010 bytes
Requests per second:    1.35 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       742.067 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       742.067 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          105.38 [Kbytes/sec] received

Document Path:          /test/string_interpolation.php
Document Length:        82242 bytes

Concurrency Level:      1
Time taken for tests:   0.610879 seconds
Complete requests:      10
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      824080 bytes
HTML transferred:       822420 bytes
Requests per second:    16.37 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       61.088 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       61.088 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          1316.14 [Kbytes/sec] received

The slightly longer filesize in the string_interpolation.php case was
because I used line breaks embedded in the string to break up powers of
10, whereas in concatenation.php the line breaks were not in the strings.

The main reason I'm doing this is because I think $foo.' '.$bar looks
ugly compared to "$foo $bar", and it also takes up more screen space. I
doubt the performance gain would be significant either way,
concatenation takes only 19us. I just don't like seeing the MediaWiki
codebase uglied up for specious reasons.

-- Tim Starling


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia is featured by on the front page of Asahi
	Shimbun, the leading newspaper in Japan

body:
Hello all,
originally this mail was sent to other mailinglist, but someonw urged
me strongly to share it with a broader audience ;)

Asahi Shimbun http://www.asahi.com, one of leading newspaper in Japan
focused on Wikipedia (mainly Japanese edition) on its front page and
the second. The whole space this article taken was equivalent to a
half of page.

Most of space was used to describe how it worked, with three Japanese
Wikipedians' comments (two
anonymous, supposedly sysops, one by Suisui under his real
identification). The general atmosphere seemed very positive to me.
Fact checking seemed to be done properly, and no apparent criticism
was shown.  I daresay it is one of the best articles on Wikipedia as
for fact correctness view, and would like to make my applause to the
editors.

Japanese newspapers carry a column ("series" they call) on the front
page (1/4 of pages except advertisements) and Wikipedia was chosen as
the first theme of their new series on net activities. Usually it is
placed on the first
page, but this special version continued to the second page, and there
took 1/4 page too, so 1/2 of first two pages were dedicated to
Wikipedia.

The first part mentioned almost only to the Wikipedia and was signed
by Mr. Yasuda Tomooki, one of their journalist based on Tokyo. The
second part was credited by two journalists including Mr. Yasuda, and
referred to other net communities in the Japanese speaking world, with
comments of authorities, one of them are interesting a researcher and
Wikipedia editor with her real name and her involvement to the
project. "Not job, but as specialist
[I contribute to the Wikipedia] said she ... she found some
remarkable mistakes on articles of her field, and many thought
Wikipedia credible. "As professional, I would like to prevent to
spread misunderstanding" (relying on remembrance, very lough
translation)

Regretfully the column itself can't be available online for free, but
if you are in South Korea, Australia, New Zealand or India, you can
utilize "trial subscription" of Web Asahi Shimbun
(http://wasa.asahi.com/)  for 3days (and get the 2 days before
article).

Cheers,

--
Aphaia
aka
Kizu Naoko
email: Aphaia @ gmail (dot) com


from_name: John Lyden

body:
On 7/29/06, Oldak Quill <oldakquill at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 29/07/06, John Lyden <rasputinaxp at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I'm still roughly confused as to why some people are pilloried for
> > applying [[Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English)]] to hockey
> > players.
>
> Although many letters with diacritics *look* like English letters,
> they are not the same. "Anton?n Dvo??k" can't simply be changed into
> "Antonin Dvorak" because this would be changing the letters of the
> word, so changing the spelling of the word. In this name, changing "?"
> would be particularly problematic as the letter is quite distinct from
> "r" in several ways (most importantly, pronounciation).

I fully understand that. The most common way you see Dvo??k's name
printed in English is "Dvo??k," fully and diacritically correct.

That said, if the full policy is that the most commonly recognized
English name for the person or thing addressed in the article is where
the article should reside, then [[Jaromir Jagr]] is right where it
belongs.

There are people who are quite unhappy about it right now, and I
really don't understand why, not because I don't understand the
concept of diacritics, pronunciation differences et al, but because as
a common courtesy, we as English speakers don't go barging over to
cs-wiki demanding that they change
http://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Woolfov%C3%A1 to [[Virginia
Woolfe]] because they have the capability to display E's.

We're not saying "change Dvo??k," we're saying "respect policy."

-Ras

--
John Lyden - rasputinaxp at gmail.com
"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to
live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same
time..." -Kerouac


subject: [WikiEN-l] Regulation of user pages

body:
Pedro Sanchez wrote:
>
> I'm annoyed to the userbox controversy being consistently called
> "Great Userbox War". IT was not a war. Wikipedia is not a battlefield.

It's called sarcasm.  I know it's hard to convey over the Internet, but
I did honestly expect the Gratuitous Capitalization, not to mention the
juxtaposition of the words "userbox" and "war", would in this case have
made it clear enough.  If you have any suggestions for making it even
more over-the-top, please do tell.

In the fact of it, you are, of course, right.  It's not a war, and
calling it such is particularly ironic given that we do have actual
real-world armed conflicts (the Israel/Lebanon one comes to mind, as
well as the situation in Kosovo) spilling over to Wikipedia.  It's a
rather chilling thought that some of the people involved in those edit
wars might actually be fighting the same battles off-wiki with real guns
and bombs.

--
Ilmari Karonen


body:
On 7/29/06, Oldak Quill <oldakquill at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 30/07/06, John Lyden <rasputinaxp at gmail.com> wrote:
> > We're not saying "change Dvo??k," we're saying "respect policy."
>
> Because English Wikipedia is so international, and has so many
> English-as-a-second-language users, I think we should remain as
> international as possible. We should retain non-English spellings as
> extensively as possible.

So forget policy then, right?

--
John Lyden - rasputinaxp at gmail.com
"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to
live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same
time..." -Kerouac


body:
geni wrote:
> On 7/29/06, Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
>
>>This strategy would probably work best if there were a way to lock an
>>image so that it can't appear in any article.
>
> there is but useing it to list several thousand problem images would
> kill the servers.

I assume you mean the bad image list?  Thanks to robchurch, there is now
an extension hook for it, so more efficient methods could be added quite
easily.

In fact, both this proposal and the current bad image list could be
replaced by a single boolean field in the image table, toggleable by admins.

The only real issue, as Anthony notes, is when and how to grant users
the right to bypass the quarantine when uploading.

--
Ilmari Karonen


body:
Jonathan Leybovich wrote:

>All-
>
>I hereby propose for your consideration Wikicat, a
>project to create an open, bibliographic catalog.  The
>purpose of Wikicat is to both lay the groundwork for a
>scholarly apparatus to be used within Wikipedia as
>well as create a unique and valuable information
>resource in its own right.  In particular, Wikicat
>will:
>
>* facilitate the process of citation by automatically
>fetching bibliographic data based upon unique keys
>such as ISBN, ISSN, and LCCN
>* allow users to more easily navigate between
>information resources by grouping them in a
>functionally significant manner (in particular,
>according to the principles of [[w:FRBR]]) so that,
>for example, different editions, translations, etc.
>are all joined together
>* apply Wikipedia's collaborative content creation
>model to bibliographic data, resulting in a catalog of
>unprecedented detail
>
>In terms of implementation, Wikicat will be defined
>like any other [[m:Wikidata]] dataset and will
>integrate with other datasets such as WiktionaryZ to
>share common entities and perhaps someday support
>something along the lines of a Semantic Mediawiki.  As
>Wikidata is currently not code complete, though,
>Wikicat will be deployed in stages, during the first
>of which it will exist as a read-only database that
>populates itself on an as-needed/"as-cited" basis by
>importing data from the open catalog servers of such
>institutions as the Library of Congress, the
>University of California library system, the U.S.
>National Library of Medicine, etc.
>
>Details about the project, in increasing technical
>detail, are available on the following pages:
>
>http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_new_projects#Wikicat
>http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikicat
>http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikicat_Technical_Design
>
>Coding of the first stage of the project is nearly
>complete and a list of its operational requirements
>will soon be forthcoming.  Here is a demo of Wikicat
>integration with the Cite/<ref> extension:
>
>http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Wikicat_Cite_screenshoot.png
>
>Thank you for your time and I look forward to your
>comments.
>
While I have deep sympathy for the intentions of this proposals, I also
find that the kind of theoretical discussions that are linked to the
proposal offer very little encouragement to the average contributor.

Citations and verifiability are absolutely essential to the credibility
of Wikipedia and its sister projects.  Nevertheless, a person
undertaking to substantiate his contributions should not need a
professional librarianship background to do so.  Any manner of clearly
identifying the source should be acceptable.  If someone else considers
it important to bring the format of citations up to modern library
standards he should feel to do that without blame being attributable to
the original contributor.

There is also a need to begin referencing the material that is
relatively easy to access on line or in other relatively inexpensive
sources of public domain material, like CDs sold for $5.00 each that can
each easily contain 100 books or more.  In the last few years this
material has been produced at a phenomenal rate.  These are available in
image, ASCII plain Jane or more scholarly annotatable formats.  We could
begin by including our own Wikisource material in the catalogue.

Ec


body:
Ilmari Karonen wrote:
> geni wrote:
>>On 7/29/06, Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
>>
>>>This strategy would probably work best if there were a way to lock an
>>>image so that it can't appear in any article.
>>
>>there is but useing it to list several thousand problem images would
>>kill the servers.
>
> In fact, both this proposal and the current bad image list could be
> replaced by a single boolean field in the image table, toggleable by admins.

Actually, thinking about it a bit more, anyone who can bypass the
quarantine when uploading should presumably also be able to release an
existing image from the quarantine, assuming it hasn't been explicitly
protected.

Also, we'd need to decide how to handle images on Commons.

--
Ilmari Karonen


from_name: Joe Anderson

subject: [WikiEN-l] Fair use status of animated screencaps

body:
Do animated images still qualify for fair use?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:AllYourBaseAnimated.gif is interesting,
though this may qualify as it's a video game. What about TV shows?

--
Joe Anderson

[[User:Computerjoe]] on en, fr, de, simple, Meta and Commons.


body:
On 29/07/06, Joe Anderson <computerjoe.mailinglist at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Do animated images still qualify for fair use?
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:AllYourBaseAnimated.gif is interesting,
> though this may qualify as it's a video game. What about TV shows?
>
> --
> Joe Anderson

I think this depends upon whether moving images (videos clips) are
available under fair use. Does anyone know the specifics?

--
Oldak Quill (oldakquill at gmail.com)


from_name: Nathaniel Sheetz

subject: [WikiEN-l] "Submit review"

body:
On 7/29/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> a) A brief excerpt (~1000 characters) of the article from which the
> user clicked "Submit review", and a link to open the whole article in
> a separate window

Why the excerpt?  And how would the length be determined?  Including the
lead might be good, but there's huge variability in size there.  I'd say
just include the article title.

c) A form with the following elements
>
>     Reviewer's name
>     Reviewer's e-mail address
>     Reviewer's professional background / affiliation (if any)
>     Review text
>     [ ] You agree that text of your review may be quoted, copied and
> otherwise used
>         under the terms of the GNU FDL

Would we require that they check the last box?  Obviously if they don't we
can't copy it to the talk page, but it might be useful anyway (forward the
email to the article's primary editor, etc.)

The reviews would be sent to a to-be-created mailing list, e.g.
> reviews-l at wikipedia.org. Besides the form information, the messages
> would include an exact revision ID of the article that was being
> reviewed.
>
> Might such a strategy be a way to bridge the gap between experts and
> the larger wiki world? One reason why experts may not want to
> participate directly is that they simply do not want to waste their
> time arguing with Wikipedians about what is right and wrong --
> instead, they feel that their expertise should carry some weight. We
> could even put out a press release: "Wikipedia solicits experts
> reviews."

I like the email list idea.  Easy to use, somewhat private, less "scary".
We need to accomodate these people as much as possible, and soliciting
reviews via email seems like a good way to go.  We would have to make sure
that we take action quickly, however--asking for feedback and then failing
to act on it wouldn't do much for our image.  We'd need enough volunteers to
keep this running smoothly.

To prevent spam and abuse, e-mail confirmation could be required
> before a review is processed. But perhaps it should be tried first
> without that.

With or without email confirmation, I wonder what the noise to signal ratio
will be.  Worse than just the normal spam, which is easy to identify, will
be the cases where malicious folks write something that to the untrained eye
might pass as expert opinion but in reality is complete bunk.

Nathaniel


body:
On 29/07/06, Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> And while we're at it, we should either remove [[Image:Wikimedia.png]]
> from the User namespace or examine why policy allows that one too.
> Allowing that one in the User namespace is just plain old hypocrisy.

I entirely agree. I'm guessing a logo is fully copyrighted so that
others can't use it to masquerade as us? I can't really think of a
compromise though between copyrighting logos and allowing users to
display them.
--
Oldak Quill (oldakquill at gmail.com)


from_name: Alison Wheeler

subject: [Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions

body:
>>>>A company that leases
>>>>servers may easily give in to legal challenges or other backhanded
>>>>threats.

Can I just clarify for people who may not be aware of such things, but
there are *two* basic forms of leasing.

One is where the company 'selling' the equipment provides the leasing
facility, such that the equipment remains the property of that company
during the lease (basically what has been discussed)

The other is a Finance lease, where you 'buy' the finance separately, use
that finance to pay the equipment supplier and own the equipment yourself,
subject to payments to the bank or other provider of the finance.

(That is trying to simplify it, anyway!)

Alison Wheeler


subject: [Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions


body:
On Sat, 29 Jul 2006 16:14:15 +0200, Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:

> On 7/29/06, Sherool <jamydlan at online.no> wrote:
>> On Wed, 26 Jul 2006 18:20:53 +0200, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> > The crime : it was uploaded as a non-derivative license. So, it is
>> > proposed for deletion.
>> >
>> >
>> > And frankly, I can not ask Treanna any more if he would be nice enough
>> > to change that license to make it free by wikipedia definition.
>>
>> Sorry if I'm beeing an insensitive prick here, but why not simply ask
>> his
>> family to change the license? With the author dead the family is the new
>> legal copyright holder (unless he left a will stating otherwise), and we
>> obviosly know how to get in contact with them. I mean by all means give
>> them some time to grieve before confronting them with the GFDL release
>> forms or whatever, but if we are planning to keep the image around
>> permanently it seems like the only real solution. It is what we would
>> have
>> demanded of anyone else (people have literaly been banned for insisting
>> on
>> using NC or ND images of themselves on theyr own userpage), and I for
>> one
>> do not apreciate having double standards. Either we allow every unfree
>> image with a sufficiently compelling "sob storry" to stay, or we stay
>> true
>> to our stated goals of free content even if it means that an image of
>> someone dear to us can not be used. Personaly I favour the later.
>>
> I agree with the sentiment, but I think it ignores an important sanity
> check.  Why does the image have to be free in the first place?
>
> It's obviously not a legal reason, as the ND license means things are
> perfectly legal.  So why is just being legal not enough?  The reason
> is so that third parties can use the content.
>
> Well, the image is ND, so third parties *can* use the content, "in all
> media and formats whether now known or hereafter devised".  Further,
> they can "make such modifications as are technically necessary to
> exercise the rights in other media and formats".  And they can also
> make any modifications which are permitted under the doctrine of fair
> use.  A third party could copy [[Wikipedia:Deceased Wikipedians]].
> They could add other people to it.  They could remove some.  They
> could change the text.  They could probably enhance the image itself
> under the doctrine of fair use.  They could print out this new copy.
> They could create an article on Bernard and include the image in it.
> They could make a newspaper article out of that article.  They could
> broadcast a television show which included the picture in it.
>
> I for one can't think of anything that a third party is going to want
> to do with this image that they can't legally do, unless it's some
> troll picking on this image just to make a point.
>
> For me, it has nothing to do with a double standard.  The only way I
> think it could even be argued that it makes sense to ban this image
> would be if the parents were contacted and they flat out refused to
> license the image under a free license.  Then I suppose you could
> argue that we should refuse to include the image, basically as an
> ultimatum.  Even then though I tend to be of the opinion that CC-BY-ND
> is "free enough", especially for an image in the Wikipedia namespace
> of a person who is almost surely never going to have an article about
> him.

Our current policy is that we want our content to be (completely) free
(wich include the ability to make derivative works) *especialy* in
comunity space (since all user contributions are supposed to be free
licensed). Granted this is more for "philosophical" reasons (we are a free
content project and all that) than practical legal ones, but it *is* the
current policy, in fact is is one of the 5 pillars of the project wich
states "(...)Do not submit copyright infringements **or works licensed in
a way incompatible with the GFDL**." (emphasis mine), and just for the
record ND licenses are not compatable with the GFDL.

If you are saying we should change the policy and allow use of unfree (or
at least "semi free") contnet in "community space" because it is seperate
 from our content, then that is one thing, I disagree, but it is a somewhat
valid argument. You might be interested in trying to breathe som life back
info
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Licensing_for_community_images>.
However what I'm trying to say is that I'm uncomfortable with the idea of
a handfull of users just desciding that in this one case we will simply
ignore a core policy of the project because it doesn't allow them to do
what they want to.

--
[[:en:User:Sherool]]


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
John Lyden wrote:

>Some people just don't LIKE volumes of mail being dumped in their inbox.
>
>That being said, the current rehash of the diacritic vs. non-diacritic
>article titles is piping back up on [[WP:HOCKEY]].
>
>I'm still roughly confused as to why some people are pilloried for
>applying [[Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English)]] to hockey
>players.
>
I wasn't aware that the problem had arisen in that context.  Maybe it's
because these players normally write their names with an accent.

Ec


from_name: Domas Mituzas

body:
Chad,
>>   $ time php -f comma.php

I'm sure you understand, that most of our string operations are
happening not in print/echo ;-)

BR,
--
Domas Mituzas -- http://dammit.lt/ -- [[user:midom]]


from_name: Platonides

body:
"Chad Perrin" wrote:
> I'm not sure what your point was.

The point was that even if echo comma were 200%, MediaWiki couldn't use it,
as internal functions doesn't use echo/print, but return data to an upper
level which goes to another function, which calls $wgOut....


from_name: Pill

subject: [Wiktionary-l] thanks

body:
2006/7/29, Oldak Quill <oldakquill at gmail.com>:

For what are you thankful?

Maybe for the mailing list ;)

--
-- Pill (wiki.pill at gmail.com)


from_name: geni

body:
On 7/29/06, Joe Anderson <computerjoe.mailinglist at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Do animated images still qualify for fair use?

Sometimes
--
geni


from_name: Jack

subject: [Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions

body:
>>>I'm just not comfortable with leasing period.
>>>I find Wikipedia to be too important to leave in anyone's hands
>>>other than the immediate foundation.  A company that leases
>>>servers may easily give in to legal challenges or other backhanded
>>>threats.
>>>-- mboverload
>
> It seems rather far fetched to me that a company with a big leasing
> contract like this is going to just decide to break its contract and
> confiscate its servers.
> -- Anthony

See "FBI seizes Indymedia servers"
<http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/10/08/1097089554894.html>
--
user:Jeandr?


subject: [Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions


from_name: Matt Brown

body:
On 7/29/06, John Lyden <rasputinaxp at gmail.com> wrote:
> We're not saying "change Dvo??k," we're saying "respect policy."

While [[Wikipedia:Naming conventions]] is marked as policy, the page
[[Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English)]] is marked as guideline
only.

In the end, whether the name on the article is recognisable is what's
important, not whether or not it has diacritics - redirects can take
care of that.

-Matt


from_name: maru dubshinki

subject: [WikiEN-l] "Submit review"

body:
On 7/29/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
> How would people feel about a "Submit review" tab that is only shown
> to unregistered users, and that would result in a page showing
>
> a) A brief excerpt (~1000 characters) of the article from which the
> user clicked "Submit review", and a link to open the whole article in
> a separate window
>
> b) A note that we encourage people to directly correct errors, with
> further links on how to get started
>
> c) A form with the following elements
>
>  Reviewer's name
>  Reviewer's e-mail address
>  Reviewer's professional background / affiliation (if any)
>  Review text
>  [ ] You agree that text of your review may be quoted, copied and
> otherwise used
>  under the terms of the GNU FDL
>
> The reviews would be sent to a to-be-created mailing list, e.g.
> reviews-l at wikipedia.org. Besides the form information, the messages
> would include an exact revision ID of the article that was being
> reviewed.
>
> Might such a strategy be a way to bridge the gap between experts and
> the larger wiki world? One reason why experts may not want to
> participate directly is that they simply do not want to waste their
> time arguing with Wikipedians about what is right and wrong --
> instead, they feel that their expertise should carry some weight. We
> could even put out a press release: "Wikipedia solicits experts
> reviews."
>
> With a mailing list, volunteers could look at each submission, and act
> upon the ones which are legitimate (perhaps posting excerpts to the
> talk page etc.). At the same time, such a system would not undermine
> the regular community processes. It would also be easier to use than
> talk pages, and encourage providing credentials.
>
> Another advantage of such a solution is that it's almost trivial to
> code -- in fact Angela wrote a "Contact us" extension that could be
> used as a basis for such a form.
>
> To prevent spam and abuse, e-mail confirmation could be required
> before a review is processed. But perhaps it should be tried first
> without that.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Erik

An email list for this is a *horrible* idea. You're proposing that
something that could receive hundreds and hundreds of emails a day
(assuming even a extremely tiny fraction of the 1.25 million articles
or whatever get reviewed), each one possibly lengthy, and each one
possibly needing a subject area layman or expert to meaningfully deal
with, be sent to an extremely obscure mailing list no one in their
right mind would want to subscribe to or deal with.  We tried
something like this once; you remember that ML that was so
dysfunctional that it had to be chucked and moved over to OTRS (which
I hear *still* can't cope with the flood)? And there are other
problems; people tend to mean reviews to last for a while, at least
until all the issues are dealt with. Wanna bet how fast each review
will be forgotten in the onrush? I'll give you a hint: look at how
many people review old AFC pages which need reviewing.

What this should be is a nice and easy form for adding a section to a
talk page. It is transparent, scalable, and might even get the review
to the editors in a particular subject area who know what the deuce
the anon is talking about and might  do something about it. Any more
is hopeless, and possible instruction creep.

~maru


subject: [WikiEN-l] So you think you can be a Wikipedia article

body:
On 7/29/06, Peter Ansell <ansell.peter at gmail.com> wrote:
> That was a joke right? You can't just wait forever because someone
> "might" come. Policies in the real world have to be made in some
> finite timespace. Half of wikipedia's problems may indeed come from
> the fact that policies are argued over endlessly, through opinions
> like yours that the more argument/time and effort spent, the better
> the situation will "possibly be". Ever heard of the concept of
> diminishing returns, and/or the concept of negative return on
> investment.

With the exception of certain core policies laid down by Jimbo / the
Foundation, all other Wikipedia policies and guidelines are subject to
review and possible change.  Where's the gain in being crippled by
policy made by a contributing pool of maybe ten people three years ago
that you can't change?

IMO, policies should always be changeable - but should default to not
changing unless real support for a change materialises, not just
because one or two argumentative people don't agree.

-Matt


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Dead wikipedians and how to really make a project
 boring to death

body:
Gregory Maxwell wrote:

>On 7/27/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>
>
>>Silas Snider wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Except when process protects us from (potentially lenghty and costly)
>>>legal proceedings. Without a tag, it is not clear whether we have the
>>>right to even host the image.
>>>
>>>
>>It would be nice if people who put up these claims about protecting us
>>had half a clue about what they are saying.  Such legal proceedings are
>>always possible no matter what we do.  So too is winning the big prize
>>in a national lottery.  If you sign a binding agreement to donate 50% of
>>that prize to WMF when you win it, I would suggest that the Board not
>>make that eventuality a prominent part of its future plans.
>>
>>
>Of course, it's always possible to be sued no matter what we do...
>thus we should not do anything to decrease the probability of lawsuit!
>  It's all so simple!
>
Decreasing the probability of a lawsuit is certainly appropriate.  The
question is more one of at what probability level does the law of
diminishing returns set in.

>On a more serious note...
>It does make sense to permit some things which will never be a risk or
>a problem.  The problem is that with thousands of users, for any
>instance there is someone who doesn't see a problem with it. My
>favorite, although old, example is Raul654 arguing that a cover
>recording of [[Alanis Morissette]]s Ironic [[Ironic (song)]] was
>public domain.
>
Permissive as my views may be, that would not extend to making a PD
claim unless it was based on facts.

>As a result, we can't simple accept all members of the community
>carrying the ability to make exceptions.   To me this seems like a
>hard problem.
>
It depends on what kind of exception.  It would probably be yes when
it's a question of a picture of one's own self.  Beyond that, a
rationale based on some knowledge of law and facts should be a mandatory
precondition in most cases.

>I oppose this image being claimed as fair use on English Wikipedia in
>the Wikipedia: namespace. I'd rather a {{Because Erik Said So}}
>template be created, if we're going to grant Erik the ability to
>unilateral ignore our requirements for image in the Wikipedia
>namespace.
>
I don't see "Because X said so" as an acceptable fair use rationale.

>It is important that in the process of allowing exceptions
>for obviously harmless things that we do not undo the work of others
>who have worked so hard to keep unacceptable material out.
>
Policies can change.  The nature of what we call "free" can change.  You
win some; you lose some.  There is no need for them to take this personally.

>The unfree
>image of Tim Starling we hosted on his user page easily caused months
>of additional work in reducing unfree images in userspace because it
>was frequently cited as a counter example, prolonging uncomfortable
>disagreements.
>
I didn't participate in that discussion, but I'm sure that his opinion
on that should have been highly influential.

>Of course this is not a matter of legal peril... it is, rather, a
>matter of commitment to our goal of free content.  I hope that when I
>die no one insults my contribution to Wikipedia by increasing the
>number of non-free images we have by uploading non-free images of me
>to all our projects, especially ones where my only interactions were
>interlanguage links.
>
You won't be in a position to complain.


from_name: Sherool

body:
On Sat, 29 Jul 2006 22:44:49 +0200, Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:

<snip>
> As for whether or not ND licenses are "compatible" with the GFDL, it
> seems to me that they're just as compatible as CC-BY-SA licenses.
> You're not suggesting that these must be removed from Wikipedia, are
> you?

There is in fact a big difference between the two. The GFDL
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_License>
states  :

"You may copy and distribute a Modified Version of the Document under the
conditions of sections 2 and 3 above, provided that you release the
Modified Version under precisely this License, with the Modified Version
filling the role of the Document, thus licensing distribution and
modification of the Modified Version to whoever possesses a copy of
it(...)".

So if you use a "no modifications" license you have less freedoms than
what you are granted by the GFDL, so the license is not GFDL compatable.

The CC-BY-SA and simmilar licenses are however compatable because the
requirements are equal to, or less restrictive than those imposed by the
GFDL. The GFDL is a share alike license, so it is not a problem that
CC-*-SA requre derivative works to use the same license, GFDL does the
same. GFDL also require at least 5 (or all if less than 5) previous
editors to be credited, CC-BY-* type licenses "only" require than credit
is given to the author as spesified by him/her.

So no reason to get rid of all the CC-BY-SA stuff.

<snip>
> And while we're at it, we should either remove [[Image:Wikimedia.png]]
> from the User namespace or examine why policy allows that one too.
> Allowing that one in the User namespace is just plain old hypocrisy.

That is a very good point. I have never realy seen a straight explanation
for why those logos are permited (or when they are not permited). I
believe the foundation have allowed them to be used in various "meta"
templates and such, but I'm not sure if the implications to our overall
copyright policy have ever been examined, or if we just keep them around
by force of old habbit...

--
[[:en:User:Sherool]]


from_name: Lars Aronsson

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

> ISBNs have their limitations too.  My copy of the 1977, 22nd
> edition of "Dorland's Pocket Medical Dictionary" has two
> different ISBNs depending on whether there are index tabs on the
> fore-edge.  My earlier 1922, 11th edition, "The American
> Illustrated Medical Dictionary", (edited by Dorland) does not
> have an ISBN.

These comments, while accurate, are on the absolute layman level.

Even though I think Wikicat is one of most promising project
proposals in the last few years, I fear it will have a hard time
to explain, over and over again, the basics of bibliography to all
newcomers who think they are experts.  How can this project sort
out the beginners and give them easy but meaningful tasks where
they can be productive, without their ignorance causing damage?

Could we perhaps have a separate mailing list (wikicat-l) for
discussions about Wikicat, even before the project is formally
established? That would be an opportunity to establish some level
of common knowledge and "get to know" each other.

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


from_name: brion at pobox.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki automated test run failure 2006-07-30

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

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

Passed 412 of 429 tests (96.04%) FAILED!