from_name: Charles Fulton

body:
Sir, I trust that was deliberately not a fatuous response.  The Prime
Minister is the head of government, and heads of government are
generally not the people who interpret a constitution.  When John
Howard spoke in that connection, he was merely noting that the monarch
had little if any real influence on politics.

However, that no more makes Australia a republic than calling a
sheep's tail a leg make it a leg.  Skyring's POV is that Australia is
a republic and not a constitutional monarchy, which flies in the face
of logic, fact, common sense, and Australia's own constitution.

Moreover, I see no evidence from the relevant talk pages that such a
compromise has been reached, certainly if one has been reached, it
doesn't involve him.

Charles Fulton

On Thu, 10 Mar 2005 23:29:26 +0000, Christiaan Briggs
<christiaan at last-straw.net> wrote:
> On 10 Mar 2005, at 9:37 pm, Skyring wrote:
>
> > we've reached an acceptable solution, complete with good sources. The
> > Prime Minister describes Australia as a "crowned republic".
>
> Well well well. It appears Pete (Skyring) is entitled to an apology of
> sorts from some people on this list. I hope you stay on Pete and I hope
> this hasn't left a bad taste in your mouth. Good on you for sticking
> with it through all the personal attacks, etc. It's a shame you had to
> go to such lengths to create a better article.
>
> Christiaan
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

subject: [WikiEN-l] This republic nonsense has got to stop.

body:
Right, and I meant for the negation to precede the adverb ("not a
deliberately"). Although, on reflection, the phrase ("that response
was not fatuous on purpose") would have been far superior.

Sigh...

Charles

On Fri, 11 Mar 2005 02:22:41 +0000, Charles Fulton <mackensen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Sir, I trust that was deliberately not a fatuous response.  The Prime
> Minister is the head of government, and heads of government are
> generally not the people who interpret a constitution.  When John
> Howard spoke in that connection, he was merely noting that the monarch
> had little if any real influence on politics.
>
> However, that no more makes Australia a republic than calling a
> sheep's tail a leg make it a leg.  Skyring's POV is that Australia is
> a republic and not a constitutional monarchy, which flies in the face
> of logic, fact, common sense, and Australia's own constitution.
>
> Moreover, I see no evidence from the relevant talk pages that such a
> compromise has been reached, certainly if one has been reached, it
> doesn't involve him.
>
> Charles Fulton
>
>
> On Thu, 10 Mar 2005 23:29:26 +0000, Christiaan Briggs
> <christiaan at last-straw.net> wrote:
> > On 10 Mar 2005, at 9:37 pm, Skyring wrote:
> >
> > > we've reached an acceptable solution, complete with good sources. The
> > > Prime Minister describes Australia as a "crowned republic".
> >
> > Well well well. It appears Pete (Skyring) is entitled to an apology of
> > sorts from some people on this list. I hope you stay on Pete and I hope
> > this hasn't left a bad taste in your mouth. Good on you for sticking
> > with it through all the personal attacks, etc. It's a shame you had to
> > go to such lengths to create a better article.
> >
> > Christiaan
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> >
>


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Lars Alvik

subject: [Wikipedia-l] The role of a wikipedia for a language like Hopi

body:
P? 11. mar. 2005 kl. 00:28 skrev Mark Williamson:

> Currently, IIRC our greatest article-to-speaker proportion is for
> Faroese. This is a bit sad since the Faroese Wikipedia doesn't even
> have 200 articles, but if I recall correctly it is the truth (surely
> Welsh and Basque are somewhere nearby in this proportion).

Acually, after a couple of minutes of research i found the the
wikipedia with best article pr. speaker ratio. Iceland, with 7 articles
pr 1000 inhabitant. Followed closely by no, dk and fi with around 4
articles pr. 1000 inhabitant

And then follows faroese with around 3 articles pr inhabitant.

mvh.
Lars Alvik


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Extensions and unwanted extra transforms

body:
Tels wrote:
> I have written a small extension and it is very closely modelled to the
> sample extension. Basically, it uses $wgParser->setHook() and then
> returns the text that should be included in the output as HTML.
>
> However, for some reasons, the output of my extension is not put straight
> into the output page. The parser (or whoever :) looks at it, and then
> checks/transforms it. This creates, IMHO, unec. overhead.

Some steps, eg doBlockLevels(), do run after extensions are inserted
into the output. I'm not sure if there's a good reason for this.

> How do I stop whatever get's my extension's output and "mangles" it?

Hack up the parser to work differently... :)

> Another small question: How would one go and benchmark an extension
> including the overhead from the wiki? Editing pages via script and
> measure how long it takes for each submit? Has anybody done this before?

Apache comes with a simple benchmarking tool, 'ab'. You can use this to
run a bunch of repeat requests and give back some timing information.

If you disable the parser cache in 1.4, the page will be re-rendered for
each hit and your extension will be called each time.

There's also an internal profiling; turn on the debug log and
$wgProfiling and internal timings will be dumped to the log. Add
appropriate wfProfileIn()/wfProfileOut() calls in your functions to
include details on them.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Theresa Knott

subject: [WikiEN-l] Abusive editors

body:
On Thu, 10 Mar 2005 16:08:59 -0800 (PST), Rick <giantsrick13 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> --- Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > --- Rick <giantsrick13 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > > Me vs. The Recycling Troll, for starters.
> >
> > That does not appear to be a case that is currently
> > in arbitration or ever was.
> > Please explain.
> >
> > -- mav
>
> Exactly.  As I said, I did not bring the case because
> of the fear of retribution against me by the arbcom,
> as has happened in the past.
>
> RickK

RickK are you serious ? That is ridiculous.

Theresa


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] Culture glut

body:
> From: Matt Brown <morven at gmail.com>
> Reply-To: Matt Brown <morven at gmail.com>, English Wikipedia
> <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2005 18:36:51 -0800
> To: Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com>, English Wikipedia
> <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Culture glut
>
> On Thu, 10 Mar 2005 20:18:58 -0500, Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I have a strong bias to admit. I can't stand the "In popular culture"
>> heading that certain articles have, which  which become a hodgepodge
>> list for every time a major historical event or theme is mentioned in
>> a TV show, movie, Japanese cartoon, video game, rock song, or science
>> fiction novel.
>
> I strongly agree with this and the rest of what you've entered here.
>
> I don't feel that they are ALL bad or should always go, but they can,
> and are, overused.  The rule of thumb to be used is "Is this fact
> notable enough to be in this article?"  In the example of nuclear
> weapons, for example, listing every movie, book, or whatnot that ever
> mentioned one is clearly going beyond the bounds of notability.
> Listing examples of them that had SIGNIFICANT effect on the popular
> knowledge or opinion would be a different manner, and quite
> acceptable.

For example the movie ''On the Beach.''
>
> Meanwhile, in an article about something much more obscure, mentioning
> a cultural reference might be much more valuable, since it may be one
> of the few ways in which a member of the general public has heard of
> the topic.  E.g. in the article on the [[Toyota 2000GT]], a rare 1960s
> Japanese sports car, the fact that one appeared in a James Bond movie
> may be quite relevant, since it's the only place that most of us are
> likely to have seen one.
>
> In a sense, this is a special case of a meta-problem: trivia.  The
> extent that Wikipedia articles should include trivia - and how this
> should be done - isn't properly defined.

Some trivia is interesting, some not
>
> -Matt (User:Morven)
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


from_name: Skyring

subject: [WikiEN-l] Queen Elizabeth II

body:
On Thu, 10 Mar 2005 17:34:33 +0000, actionforum at comcast.net
<actionforum at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> But it is an abstraction in another sense.  The Americans have an ideological tradition starting with some of the founders and kept alive by conservatives, libertarians and classical liberals, which made a specific point that the US was not a democracy, but a republic.  By republic they meant the rule of law, constitutional law, that could not be overridden by the majority.  So, while Americans can be as sloppy in its use of democracy and as happy to call itself a democracy as the rest of the English speaking world, when democracy is drawn in opposition to republic, not only is the word republic understood in this context, but a less common definition of democracy is.  So, by abstracting to American english, not only is emotional distancing achieved, so are more precisely defined and accepted meanings.  In American, we know whether or not Austrailia is a republic, by the American definition.

It is incorrect to equate a republic with democracy in Australia.
Australia has been a democracy since Federation in 1901, but only a
few constitutional scholars considered it to be a republic. This is
still the case, the great majority of Australians thinking that
because the Queen's head is on the coins, we cannot possibly be a
republic.

But the fundamental constitutional situation remains the same as a
century ago. The Constitution is the primary law, it cannot be
over-riddden by normal legislation, and if it is to be changed,
Parliament and the people, including a majority of people in a
majority of the six States, must all agree. All power stems from the
people and there is no external source.
--
Peter in Canberra


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Abusive editors

body:
On Thu, 10 Mar 2005 06:32:38 -0600, Phil Sandifer
<sandifer at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> I think you're misrepresenting how this goes. Let's take, say, Adam
> Carr and Skyring. Or Slrubenstein and Xed. Here is generally how it
> goes.
>
> User 1: Forcefully stated idea
> User 2: Polite disagreement
> User 1: Hostility at disagreement
> User 2: Continued efforts at disagreement
> User 1: Increasing hostility. Some abuse.
> User 2: Bewildered suggestion of a compromise
> User 1: Rejection of compromise. Hostility. Claim to being willing to
> compromise. (We're about a month into the cycle now)
> User 3: Protection of article.
>
> Next month, on a new article...
> User 1: Forcefully stated idea
> User 2: Wincing, disagreement.
> User 1: Accusation that User 2 is biased and shouldn't edit this
> article. Other abuse.
> User 2: Stubbornness, some reluctance to discuss this again.
> User 1: Repeated statement to be willing to compromise, coupled with
> complete lack of compromise offered and streams of abuse.
> User 2: Requests for page to be protected.
> User 3: Protects page.
>
> Next month, on yet another article
> User 1: Forcefully stated idea
> User 2: Pointing out that to date, nobody has agreed with User 1.
> User 1: Accusation of a cabal.
> User 2: Mild personal attack.
> User 1: Arbcoms User 2.
>
> User 1 should be run out of Wikipedia. User 2 should be slapped on the
> wrist and solemnly told "Don't do that again." Then privately thanked
> for opposing the stupid.

That's silly. How are we to correct errors if we follow your reasoning?

--
Peter in Canberra


from_name: Stan Shebs

subject: [WikiEN-l] Culture glut

body:
Brian M wrote:

>I agree with you completely, and most of these sections should be
>deleted.   It is one thing for Wikipedia to be the online Encyclopedia
>of Popular Culture with articles on every Pokemon character, TV
>episode, forgotten (or never known) song or CD, every obscure corner
>of every fictional universe, etc, etc, ad absurdum, ad nauseum.  But
>when all this starts bleeding into other articles, it becomes  a major
>problem and makes Wikipedia look like it has no sense of proportion at
>all.
>
Or it makes WP more attractive to readers because it has information
that can't be gotten from other sources.

Robert Collison's history makes mention of a decision by Britannica
(for the 9th edition?) to include topics like farming, metalworking,
and so forth, not because they thought they had suddenly become
"encyclopedic", but to try to sell EB to middle-class people that
didn't have so much of a need for complete coverage of Marcus Atilius
Regulus and medieval German literature. Even so, we now know that
EB simply failed to report on great swathes of their own culture.

Nuclear weapons are one of the areas where 20th-century geopolitics
has impinged on the general consciousness, and popular culture
references are a reflection of the fears they've come to engender
in ordinary people. Not only are the references themselves
manifestations of the artists' feelings, but the very urge to add
the references tells you something about the fears of WP editors.
(There's also a good argument to be made that the desire to delete
all the cultural references is a different kind of editorial response
to the same fears.)

So yeah, if a reference is trivial, maybe it doesn't need to be
there, but it would be good to exercise a light touch, keeping in
mind the breadth of our audience, and that many (probably most)
readers will be far more interested in the culture stuff than the
mathematical equations.

Stan


list: foundation-l

from_name: Anthere

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: wikibreak

body:
Ray Saintonge a ?crit:
> Christopher Mahan wrote:
>
>> --- Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> (a whole bunch of stuff)
>>
>> Ant,
>>
>> You're no good to any of us dead. Take a break. That's an order.
>>
>> Everybody is expendable, and that means you. Wikipedia is 60,000
>> strong. You don't need to worry. As I recall we got along fine before
>> you joined.
>>
>> To all who say they miss you and wish you back already: stfu, it
>> ain't helping.
>>
>> Take good care of your children, they are much more important.
>>
>>
> So who the hell are you to be issuing orders?
>
> Anthere is very well appreciated. It's up to her to decide when she
> needs a break, nobody is complaining about it.  I'm sure she doesn't
> need a self-appointed guardian to say when.
>
> Ec

The last thing I would need is good people I love getting irritated over
this :-)
Let me just say that there are many things that can be done by some of
you, and this I try not to look at all right now, but other things it is
my responsability to do and this I will go on doing. Drowsiness and
morning sickness do not last long usually :-)

Eh !

Kisses to you both


list: wikimedia-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: wikibreak


from_name: Brian M

subject: [WikiEN-l] Culture glut

body:
I agree with you completely, and most of these sections should be
deleted.   It is one thing for Wikipedia to be the online Encyclopedia
of Popular Culture with articles on every Pokemon character, TV
episode, forgotten (or never known) song or CD, every obscure corner
of every fictional universe, etc, etc, ad absurdum, ad nauseum.  But
when all this starts bleeding into other articles, it becomes  a major
problem and makes Wikipedia look like it has no sense of proportion at
all.

Your example of [[Nuclear weapons]] is perfect.   If there were a
section on public opinion about nuclear weapons, which would be quire
reasonable to have, and there were some movie, book, or other item of
popular culture  that had a significant impact in influencing this
public opinion, then the book, etc, should be mentioned, of course.
But just a list under "in popular culture" listing movies and books
that nuclear weapons in them, is ridiculous.    Next thing you know,
there will be a section in the article "Nuclear Weapons In Star Wars",
describing the use of nuclear weapons in Star Wars, and so forth.
The article is currently missing this important aspect of nuclear
weapons.

Perhaps the "solution" is just to concede that Wikipedia is really
just the online encyclopedia of popular culture, throw in the towel,
and delete the 20% of so of it that is about reality.   You know
off-topic stuff like [[Nuclear weapons]].

Seriously, how does one go about deleting these sections?   Someone is
going to insist that it is "removal of information" and , therefore,
vandalism to remove them.

On Thu, 10 Mar 2005 20:18:58 -0500, Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have a strong bias to admit. I can't stand the "In popular culture"
> heading that certain articles have, which  which become a hodgepodge
> list for every time a major historical event or theme is mentioned in
> a TV show, movie, Japanese cartoon, video game, rock song, or science
> fiction novel.
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Scared of the arbcom?

body:
Anyone can add evidence to an arbcom case. Concise presentation of evidence
that is significant would be welcome in any arbcom case.

Fred

> From: "Tony Sidaway" <minorityreport at bluebottle.com>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Fri, 11 Mar 2005 13:44:40 -0000 (GMT)
> To: <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Scared of the arbcom?
>
> Snowspinner said:
>> I suppose I should make public what has always been an implicit fact
>> here, and note that I am willing to, assuming, in my judgment, the case
>> has merits, raise any case to the arbitration committee. Contact me
>> via  e-mail if you have a specific problem user you think needs to be
>> dealt  with and don't feel you can deal with. I can't guarantee I'll
>> deal with  it immediately (I can only manage evidence on so many arbcom
>> cases at  once), but if the case has merit, I will submit it on your
>> behalf.
>
> If you find yourself too busy (and always assuming arbcom can handle the
> caseload), I would like to volunteer to handle some of the evidence phase.
> I have experience of preparing concise, useful evidence for arbcom.
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Abusive editors

body:
On Thu, 10 Mar 2005 11:43:22 -0800 (PST), Rick <giantsrick13 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Yout left out how User 1 accuses User 2 AND User 3 of
> being members of the cabal out to get him.

There is no cabal. I've checked [[cabal]]

--
Pete, surprised to find a reference to King Arthur


list: wiktionary-l

from_name: Muke Tever

subject:
[Wiktionary-l] new vote for switching off
	First	Letter	Capitalization on en.wiktionary.org

body:
Sabine Cretella <sabine_cretella at yahoo.it> wrote:
> Who contributes simply takes the words he is "moving" (working on) off
> the list - the admins have enough work with deleting all the re-directs
> (or is there a way to do this automatically) maybe modifying the page
> and writing "to be deleted" instead of the re-direct?

Why delete the redirects?  You'll break all the old pages on the web that link
to Wiktionary articles.

You'll have to think of other wikimedia sites too.  For example en.wikipedia's
"link to Wiktionary" template currently just uses {{PAGENAME}}, which will always
be capitalized, because Wikipedia capitalizes all topics it treats.

	*Muke!
--
website:     http://frath.net/
LiveJournal: http://kohath.livejournal.com/
deviantArt:  http://kohath.deviantart.com/

FrathWiki, a conlang and conculture wiki:
http://wiki.frath.net/


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: [Fwd: Kennisnet will underwrite/pay for the
	creation of Wikidata and the Ultimate wiktionary]

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

> Angela wrote:
>
>> On Thu, 10 Mar 2005 19:10:05 +0100, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>> Wikidata is a new project... does the community supports this ?
>>>
>>
>> Wikidata itself isn't really a project. It's more of a technical
>> solution to some of the problems on existing projects.
>>
>> The implementation of Wikidata will obviously need community support
>> -- do Wiktionarians want to merge their projects into the "ultimate
>> Wiktionary", for example -- but I don't think the feature itself
>> should need consensus before its written, only before its implemented
>> on Wikimedia in a way which would affect existing projects.
>>
> Gerard is full of technical solutions.  Some of them may indeed be
> brilliant, but I don't have the technical expertise to judge.  The
> real question lies in whether contributors whose primary interest is
> language will be driven away because the editing process is too
> complicated.  One of the most important features of Wikipedia has been
> that anyone can learn how to edit with very little training.  At one
> time their were passionate arguments over the use of html or wiki
> markup.  Wiki markup was seen then as too complicated.  We've gone a
> long way since then, but we still need to be aware that many of the
> contributors that we may seek are not computer geeks, but
> knowledgeable people in the subjects that are their passion.

One of the aims of the ultimate wiktionary is to hide all the
complicated stuff that you currently find in nl:wiktionary. I am on
record saying that it is a crutch. (typically you use a crutch when the
walking is difficult). When you CAN use it, you have learned many
ISO-639 and codes by heart like I have. In the ultimate wiktionary the
crutch will not be needed anymore as all the needed information will be
hidden in the User Interface.

> I also see Gerard's proposal as directed toward the needs of
> translation.  That's a commendable goal, but a dictionary is more than
> that.  It is just as much a reference for people about their own
> language.  And people writing about their own language need to feel
> free to do so easily without needing to be concerned about the
> potential effects on translations. \

The current implementation that led to Ultimate Wiktionary was directed
toward using content in multiple wiktionaries. The ultimate wiktionary
is directed towards integration of the wiktionaries so that content
added/changed in a language will be available to all people interested
in that language. The crux ot all that I have done in wiktionary, is
that 80% of wiktionary content is language independent.

> Also much of what Gerard says is theoretical, and very little of it
> gives real practical examples of how things will work  Saying that a
> database structured on xml would be a big improvement does not mean
> much to those who are not intimately acquainted with xml.

The current content of nl:wiktionary can be easily moved to
it:wiktionary to hi:wiktionary or to .. and it will be correct with the
exception of stuff like description and etymology. That is not
theoretical, that is really practical. I have moved stuff to the
fa:wiktionary (Persian) and, it works..

XML is nice. We will want an import and export mechanism. BUT the
proposal that is to be implemented is not about XML, it is about making
the 80% of all effort count in all wiktionaries so that when I add the
3000+ words in Papiamento with translations and everything, there will
be a Papiamento resource to ALL users of wiktionary.

> As much as I've advocated for a unified Wikisource, I also advocate
> for separate Wiktionaries.  Without getting too far into that debate
> now, I can at least point out that Wikisource deals with static texts
> that will not need to be repeatedly edited.
>
> If Gerard wants to experiment with his ideas on some form of Wikidata
> project I won't stand in his way.  If he wants to go from that into
> some kind of "Ultimate Wiktionary" he may come up with something that
> works.  Maybe it will eventually be meaningful to migrate existing
> translation material there.  But let's not go there until he has
> something practical established.  The timetable for that may be
> considerably longer than the one which he so optimistically expresses.

The one thing I am asking is: read about the proposals, think about what
this tries to accomplish. Ask questions about what does not make sense.
The great thing about the wikimedia projects is the importance of the
community. I have a dream and, was able to accomplish something. I
sincerely hope that we will find it usefull and will be happy to move
forward

The current timetable is about implementing the necessary building
blocks. It is split up in several milestones that will allow us to do
reality checks on the way. The timetable says nothing about the
conversion of all the wiktionaries and, it does not make it mandatory to
move over to the ultimate wiktionary. In time, people will move over as
and when they think it is usefull to do so.

>
> Ec


subject:
[Wiktionary-l] Re: [Wikitech-l] Re: [Fwd: Kennisnet will
 underwrite/pay for the
 creation of Wikidata and the Ultimate wiktionary]


from_name: Sabine Cretella

body:
> Rather than having a developer suddenly go ahead now and toggle some
> switch, our next step should be to consider haw we can implement this
> in a project that already contains nearly 60,000 articles in its
> principle namespace with minimized disruption.
>
OK - this would mean some organisation - how many active editors are
there? Do you have the possibility to mail all people who inserted their
e-mail address?

Otherwise you need to use the message that is shown on every page until
work is over (this will maybe need some more time, but it works as well).

You need to create a wordlist with all words in it.

You need to create a page with "words to be checked" and one with "words
to be devided" (for people who ave difficulties in this).

The page with "all words" may not be a category or simply the all words
list - it must be a page where you can insert and delete the single
words (it should be possible to be able to create the list froma dump).

Who contributes simply takes the words he is "moving" (working on) off
the list - the admins have enough work with deleting all the re-directs
(or is there a way to do this automatically) maybe modifying the page
and writing "to be deleted" instead of the re-direct?

Anyone should be asked to do at least 10 words a day - if 2000 editors
help: this is an effort of  three days with 60000 words.

Ciao, Sabine

--

Sabine Cretella
Translations IT-DE, EN-DE
s.cretella at wordsandmore.it
Meetingplace for translators
http://www.wesolveitnet.com
*****
Vuoi la parola del giorno nella tua casella di posta?
Invia un'e-mail vuota a:
laparoladelgiorno-subscribe at yahoogroups.com


from_name: J.F. de Wolff

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Culture glut

body:
Fastfission has touched on an important point - the encyclopedicity of trivia.
I've had very similar arguments over some medical articles. Some articles
on diseases (e.g. [[Parkinson's disease]], [[Pneumonia]]) have grown little
lists of "famous people with pneumonia" etc.
As most know, millions of people worldwide die from pneumonia or
Parkinson's, and just because the Pope is one of them hardly makes him
worth mentioning in the article about the disease. Oddly, only some
articles have grown these lists. Nixon had thrombosis, but he's not in
[[deep venous thrombosis]]. Similarly, [[myocardial infarction]] (heart
attack) does not have a list of famous people who died from it, because it
is so very common.
I would like to seek consensus on what kind of morbidity is worthy of
inclusion in articles. I would say: only if someone's morbidity has
*significantly* altered public perception of a disorder is this person
worth mentioning (e.g. [[Lou Gehrig]] and his eponymous disease; [[Stephen
Hawking]] would qualify for this as well). Otherwise, only the article *on
that person* should mention morbidity and mortality.

Jfdwolff

--
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Version: 7.0.308 / Virus Database: 266.7.1 - Release Date: 09/03/2005


body:
On Thu, 10 Mar 2005 06:50:09 -0700, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
>
> Likewise, characterizing Australia as a republic when its title is
> Commonwealth or the Soviet Union as a dictatorship when its title is
> republic is problematic. Both characterizations seek to cut through the
> verbiage and express the essence of the matter, the truth. However they
> cannot take the place of the proper sort of NPOV information which explores
> the different ways the situation is looked at and described.

I'm not sure what's wrong with describing a commonwealth as a
republic, but we've reached an acceptable solution, complete with good
sources. The Prime Minister describes Australia as a "crowned
republic".

I take your point about blandly describing Australia as a republic,
and in hindsight it caused more heat than light.

--
Peter in Canberra


from_name: cookfire

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

> Jo wrote:
>
>> I organized a new vote on the subject of first letter capitaliztion
>> on en.wiktionary.org:
>>
>> http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Beer_parlour/First_letter_capitalization
>>
>>
>> after the previous one went awry:
>>
>> http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Beer_parlour/case-sensitivity_vote
>>
>>
>> What went wrong in the first vote is that it wasn't clear what was
>> being voted for. We got a lot of people we hardly saw making
>> contributions to Wiktionary voting against, back then. This time all
>> the major current and longtime contributors to the project are in
>> favour of switching off First letter capitalization.
>>
>> What is the next step? Should we ask a developer? Is it enough to ask
>> on this mailing list?
>>
>> Many thanks for your advice,
>>
>> Polyglot
>
>
> Thank you for your efforts in dealing with this.  It has been a month
> since the vote was started.  The 13-2 current vote in favour is seems
> to be a mandate to take this to the next step.
>
> The confusion in the earlier vote on this topic was partly because
> questions involving the use of bots and the functionality of the
> search engine were mixed in.  By contrast, this time the question was
> kept to its simplest form.
>
> Rather than having a developer suddenly go ahead now and toggle some
> switch, our next step should be to consider haw we can implement this
> in a project that already contains nearly 60,000 articles in its
> principle namespace with minimized disruption.
>
Hi Eclecticology,

What do you propose and wouldn't that discussion risk muddying the
waters again? If a developer toggles the switch, at first there would be
no difference. Then people will start converting entries and there will
be disruption for several months, maybe even more than a year. I don't
think this can be avoided. I think all the contributors will simply take
it in their stride and simply convert entries as they go. In the mean
time all the existing content gets revised, which isn't a bad thing.
There will probably be a slowdown in the addition of new entries, but I
think it's a good opportunity to broaden the scope of the existing content.

Kind regards,

Polyglot


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] Scared of the arbcom? FEARE YE NOTT!

body:
Jim Cecropia wrote:

> In my memory ArbCom was the very last resort in an open commuunity. Now it seems to be a first resort for some.
> Not good, however well-intentioned.

At which point the AC generally says "go away, put in the effort
to resolve this yourselves first."

Unfortunately, there's no way to keep people from bringing issues
to RFAr way prematurely. However, we can and do reject them for this.

- d.


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Rick wrote:

>--- Jim Cecropia <jcecropia at mail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>The issue is not Dr. Zen.
>>The issue is not WHEELER.
>>The issue is not 172.
>>
>>The issue is that Wikipedia has made great progress
>>toward shutting people up.
>>The issue is that Wikipedia has made no progress
>>toward editorial review or standards.
>>The issue is that Snowspinner is soliciting cases
>>against users people have grievances with.
>>
>>My post was incendiary? Perhaps.
>>My post was unacceptable? In your opinion.
>>My post was inappropriate? I think not.
>>
>>Luv, C.
>>
>>
>
>And what did you hope to accomplish by posting to the
>mailing list?
>
>
Hmmm!  You might consider going out to buy yourself a sense of humour.

Ec


from_name: Christopher Mahan

subject: [Foundation-l] wikibreak

body:
--- Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:

> So who the hell are you to be issuing orders?

Why, I'm French, of course. :)

I realize I'm being flippant, but I also realize that Ant may feel
conflicting priorities. I just wanted to put it in terms strong
enough to make her realize that we don't want wikipedia to harm her
health or that of her children. Surely you can echo that sentiment as
well, taking her pregnancy into consideration, no?

And so you know, my wife is now 5.5 months pregnant, so I do know
what I'm talking about.

Ant, get your sleep.

Chris Mahan
818.943.1850 cell
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
chris.mahan at gmail.com
http://www.christophermahan.com/

__________________________________
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subject: [Foundation-l] wikibreak


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia referenced by SANS

body:
Chad Perrin wrote:

> I received an email tonight from the SANS Institute, one of the most
> widely known authorities on matters pertaining to network security and
> provider of some of the best information on the subject of computer
> security threats available online.  The email is an invitation to a
> conference they'll be hosting.  Since it's in Colorado and costs great
> scads of money between the attendance fee and the expenses, I won't be
> going.
>
> I thought an excerpt from the email might interest this list, though.
>
> "According to Wikipedia, "spyware consists of computer software that
> gathers and reports information about a computer user without the
> user's knowledge or consent." This can encompass a wide range of
> different types of malware that perform a variety of actions on
> computer systems. Some spyware delivers advertising, while other
> spyware gathers user information without his/her knowledge. Spyware
> can also install modem dialing software and redirect users to
> malicious Web sites."
>
> That's the lead-in to the purpose of the conference.  It seems like
> good news to see yet another recognized authority using Wikipedia to
> provide definitions of the terms for the foci of its trade.

While I have no real complaint about the contents of the quote, someone
familiar with the subject area could go to the article to tighten up the
prose style.  The phrase about gathering user information is repetitious.

Ec


from_name: Charles Matthews

subject: [WikiEN-l] What's in a (country's) name?

body:
Ed Poor wrote

>So we really need to use this example in an article about how the
liberal media goes out of its way to discredit "the right" while NEVER
conceding any error of its own and even DELIBERATELY deceiving the
public.

We need to do no such thing.

If this article is written from a NPOV, the facts of the case can be
clarified.  Elephantine generalisations like 'liberal media' need not
appear.  Readers, if provided with facts, can draw conclusions about whether
this is about more than professional loudmouth columnist meets ill-prepared
interviewer (whatever - on a scale of 1 to 10 this is about at -6 for most
people's threshold of interest, I suppose).

Ed, your agenda is showing.

Charles


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Culture glut

body:
J.F. de Wolff wrote

> I would like to seek consensus on what kind of morbidity is worthy of
> inclusion in articles. I would say: only if someone's morbidity has
> *significantly* altered public perception of a disorder is this person
> worth mentioning (e.g. [[Lou Gehrig]] and his eponymous disease; [[Stephen
> Hawking]] would qualify for this as well). Otherwise, only the article *on
> that person* should mention morbidity and mortality.

Reasonable.  In a sense it is not so important, either way, in most cases.
Tuberculosis: there's a case where in a sense a historical list would be of
considerable general interest.  The problem with historical listings is of
course that the factuality of the diagnosis can be problematic.

Charles


from_name: dpbsmith at verizon.net

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: public

body:
The people trying to determine whether Australia is a republic just need to
get together WHEELER, who has special expertise in that area.

:-)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: public

body:
The people trying to determine whether Australis is a republic should get
together with WHEELER, who has expertise in that area.

:-)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Culture glut

body:
Matt Brown wrote

> In a sense, this is a special case of a meta-problem: trivia.  The
> extent that Wikipedia articles should include trivia - and how this
> should be done - isn't properly defined.

Yes.  But it's 'starting a hare'.  If we ever had a big debate on exactly
what counts as 'trivia', we'd never get finished and it would be a
(probably) pointless use of time.

I note that trivia used to be called 'general knowledge'; before Trivial
Pursuit fairly much broke the mould of the older type of quiz question.
There was a certain type of democratisation when facts about sportspeople,
soap stars, B-list royalty, one-hit wonders, Pikachu, actors within six
degrees of Kevin Bacon etc. all were added into the brew.

Mostly trivia neither add much to nor detract from WP; they may be
weed-like, growing in the wrong place.

Now, I hope we can agree one thing - no astrology column on the Main Page
...

Charles


from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [WikiEN-l] Culture glut? On the contrary

body:
On 3/11/05 7:20 AM, "Brian M" <brian1954 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I agree with you completely, and most of these sections should be
> deleted.   It is one thing for Wikipedia to be the online Encyclopedia
> of Popular Culture with articles on every Pokemon character, TV
> episode, forgotten (or never known) song or CD, every obscure corner
> of every fictional universe, etc, etc, ad absurdum, ad nauseum.  But
> when all this starts bleeding into other articles, it becomes  a major
> problem and makes Wikipedia look like it has no sense of proportion at
> all.

Ack! No!

> Your example of [[Nuclear weapons]] is perfect.   If there were a
> section on public opinion about nuclear weapons, which would be quire
> reasonable to have, and there were some movie, book, or other item of
> popular culture  that had a significant impact in influencing this
> public opinion, then the book, etc, should be mentioned, of course.
> But just a list under "in popular culture" listing movies and books
> that nuclear weapons in them, is ridiculous.    Next thing you know,
> there will be a section in the article "Nuclear Weapons In Star Wars",
> describing the use of nuclear weapons in Star Wars, and so forth.
> The article is currently missing this important aspect of nuclear
> weapons.

The answer is to separate distinct concepts into different pages. There's no
reason there shouldn't be [[Nuclear weapons in Star Wars]] (except that it's
not clear that there really are any--the Death Star, for example, seems to
use some kind of collimated maser? You know, the kind that makes a zapping
sound in DEEP SPACE. Ack.).

> Perhaps the "solution" is just to concede that Wikipedia is really
> just the online encyclopedia of popular culture, throw in the towel,
> and delete the 20% of so of it that is about reality.   You know
> off-topic stuff like [[Nuclear weapons]].

There's no need to delete knowledge. Interesting how you don't think popular
culture is real. Worrisome, actually.

> Seriously, how does one go about deleting these sections?   Someone is
> going to insist that it is "removal of information" and , therefore,
> vandalism to remove them.

It's good that somewhere you recognize how misguided your impulse is.

Look: Wikipedia is going to be full of knowledge that any one individual
person will find utterly uninteresting and/or irrelevant to that person's
interests or life--but that selfsame knowledge will be interesting and/or
relevant to someone else--most likely many other people.

Remember that all information in Wikipedia has been added by a reader, so we
*know* at least part of the audience feels that it's relevant. As long as
the information is objectively verifiable and is coherently presented, it
deserves place in Wikipedia. Where to put it and how to present it is a
perfectly reasonable topic for discussion.


subject: [Foundation-l] Business cards

body:
I transfered to nota and Elian the set of business
cards I made after James Forrester cards. I had to do
them again unfortunately, as I could not open them
with my available software and they were american
format, not the one we use in Europe.

These were done in Adobe Illustrator format.
Elian will put on meta. And notafish could (if you ask
nicely) make each of you a set at your name and sent
you a high quality pdf for printing. If you purchase a
set of pre-cut cards, it is quite cheap.

The benefit of it could be that we all have similar
looking cards.

You'll notice that beneath the wikimedia logo, on my
card for example, is mentionned "Wikimedia
Foundation".
We'll ask that instead is mentionned the name of the
local chapter, for example Wikimedia France.

There is also a little text, saying "A registered
non-profit corporation dedicated to encouraging the
growth and development of free-content, multilingual,
wiki-based information and learning. projects." and
adding the address of the Foundation.

You may consider (or not) an equivalent text in german
or french. And put the correct address.

I think this is all. I know german verein already has
business cards, so it is up to you whether or not to
use the model. As far as I know, french association
has no card yet.

It would be nice to get James cards as well, to put
them on meta possibly.

Last point, it was suggested that only board members
or officers get cards, not regular members of
associations. I do not think this is a problem.

Cheers

Anthere

__________________________________
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subject: [Foundation-l] Business cards


from_name: csherlock at ljh.com.au

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Abusive editors

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> --- Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>>--- Rick <giantsrick13 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>>>I think we've discussed ad nauseum how people are
>>>afraid to request sanctions against other users
>>>because of the perceived (and real) threat that the
>>>arbcom will turn it against the person bringing the
>>>case.
>>
>>Name a case where that happened.
>
>
> I should have added, name a case where that happened where the person bringing
> the case was in fact innocent and then wrongfully sanctioned. It would be
> absurd to only look at the accused and not the accuser. That would encourage
> bad actors to request frivolous arbitrations.
>
> -- mav

The ArbCom process should already be able to handle this. Let's look at
the process:

1. Conflict resolution fails
2. User requests ArbCom decision
3. ArbCom members vote on whether to accept the case
4. ArbCom procedes and looks into the matter at hand

At step 3 the user submitting the case should be examined. If its
determined that the user is requesting an Arbitration case in bad faith
the arbitrators reject the case. If the user continues to file frivilous
requests a seperate ArbCom request is submitted against that user and
they are stopped at the source.

This has already happened with CheeseDreams. It worked admirably.

TBSDY


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Abusive editors

body:
Fred Bauder wrote:
> The problem here is that we do not intervene. We accept some case which have
> gone through the dispute resolution process.
>
> If there is to be intervention it will have to be by administrators (after a
> policy allowing it is established).
>
> Fred
>
>
>>From: "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com>
>>Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
>>Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2005 14:34:45 -0500
>>To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
>>Subject: RE: [WikiEN-l] Re: Abusive editors
>>
>>User 1 should be asked to be polite after "some abuse", then requested
>>to review "no personal attacks" after "Hostility".
>>
>>User 1 should be referred to arbcom for "Other abuse", and will make the
>>committee's job easier if he offers "streams of abuse" just as they're
>>beginning to look into it all.
>>
>>No need to slap User 2 (either on wrist or back). Arbcom should
>>intervene earlier and set User 1 straight, before he tempts his victims
>>to take matters into their own hands.
>>
>>Uncle Ed

Agreed. ArbCom only deals with requests from other editors.

TBSDY


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Abusive editors

body:
Skyring wrote:
> On Thu, 10 Mar 2005 11:43:22 -0800 (PST), Rick <giantsrick13 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>>Yout left out how User 1 accuses User 2 AND User 3 of
>>being members of the cabal out to get him.
>
>
> There is no cabal. I've checked [[cabal]]
>

And none on [[Wikipedia:The_Cabal]].

TBSDY


from_name: Ulf Lunde

body:
 > Acually, after a couple of minutes of research i found the the
 > wikipedia with best article pr. speaker ratio. Iceland, with 7 articles
 > pr 1000 inhabitant. Followed closely by no, dk and fi with around 4
 > articles pr. 1000 inhabitant

Not correct.  If you compare to the number of speakers, it is the
Esperanto wikipedia that is by far the biggest wikipedia around.
Icelandic appears to be a good number two (although very far behind).

See the (stub for a) complete list at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_articles_per_population

Verdlanco


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Re Abuse of blocking powers (The Recycling Troll)

body:
debussy at cyber-rights.net wrote:
> Hi, Recycling Troll.
>
> Please note that the wikipedia scum are doing the same routine to
> you as they've done to many before. (Check back over this mailing
> list.) The wikipedia is not of course an online encyclopedia,
> there's plenty of real online encyclopedias, (you know, the places
> where wikipedia steals most of it's stuff from), it's a place where
> Jimmy Wales and other scum lure people in with a pack of lies and
> then proceed to do to them what they're starting in on doing to
> you.
>
> Many have tried to opppose their insanity. But you are flogging a
> dead horse. If you keep trying they'll just have loads of fun at
> your expense, as they control the system, and in the end carry out
> a bizarre an un-American great "court case" against you and then
> ban you. They are pathetic (but nasty) morons.
>
> Also did you know that Jimmy Wales is a sick
> pornograper?:http://www.247news.net/2004/20041211-wikipedia.shtml
>
>
>
>
>
> Get your free encrypted email at http://www.cyber-rights.net

Oh. My. Gosh. Can someone kick Sollog off the mailing list please?

Thanks.

TBSDY


subject: [WikiEN-l] Culture glut

body:
Charles Matthews wrote:

> Now, I hope we can agree one thing - no astrology column on the Main
> Page ...

No, that would go next to the crossword on Wikinews.

AQUARIUS: Your habit of looking in newspapers for guides to how to
live your life today may indicate a shallow grasp of personal
responsibility and an excess of gullibility. Read more Richard
Dawkins and Carl Sagan. Lucky number: 0.

- d.


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: wikibreak

body:
--- Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> These days, I work too much, I do not take enough rest. But it is
> important for me to not turn entirely inside and to stick to
> outside
> world. Not sure everyone can understand that. A balance Wikipedia
> helps
> keeping :-)

Ant,

That's fine. Just want you to know that as far as I am concerned, I
would rather you rest when your body needs it than stress about
wikipedia. That's all.

Chris Mahan
818.943.1850 cell
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
chris.mahan at gmail.com
http://www.christophermahan.com/

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Small Business - Try our new resources site!
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subject: [Foundation-l] Re: wikibreak


from_name: Fastfission

subject: [WikiEN-l] Culture glut

body:
> In any case, nuclear weapons in popular culture is a huge and fascinating
> sociological topic, for those of us old enough to remember the Cold War
> and to try to get across what it felt like to those who aren't. It still
> amazes me when I meet mature adults with kids who don't remember the Cold
> War and just don't understand WTF I'm talking about.

That's of course the hopeful point of the "In popular culture" section
for that article. But does it currently accomplish that? I think not
-- it is mostly a list of Hollywood movies. That's sort of my point:
cultural impacts are important, but a list of movies or times
something is used in video games is not a real metric of cultural
impact and doesn't tell you anything new.

See [[philosopher's stone]] for another excellent example of something
which COULD have an interesting section on how and why it is used in
popular culture (notions of immortality, alchemy, mystery, secrecy!),
but instead has a list of Japanese cartoons and video games which in
some minor way feature something called a philosopher's stone.

FF


body:
Whoops, I owe an apology to the Swedes: the Swedish Wikipedia
is bigger than the Icelandic, even if you take the number of
speakers into account.

I also wanted to say that I agree that gerard Meijssen's point is very
important: The wikipedias are indeed culture-bearers for their
respective populations, and not just for humanity as a whole!

The Esperanto wikipedia is a good example of just this.  You'll find
plenty of articles there with information which might be considered
vanity, or at least not encyclopedic enough, in other languages'
wikipedias.

Verdlanco


body:
I think I should clarify one thing about what I was trying to say:

I'm not against the ==In popular culture== sections if they are
coherent sentences, narratives, etc. about the impacts and
representatiosn in popular culture. Popular culture is important
(though of course I worry that "popular culture" simply means "US and
UK popular culture" but anyway that's for the CSB people to worry
about).

I'm against *lists* where people just hemorrage "trivia" in a
non-interesting, non-useful function.

Sure, a reader thought the fact that a song called "Manhattan Project"
by the prog-rock band "Rush" was relevant and interesting. But I think
most people would find that to be "trivia", and not very interesting
trivia at that.

Of course it is an individual judgment call. But if someone really
thought it was important, they could add it back in with an expanded
line about WHY this is notable (i.e. "... and this song became the
anthem of a generation, featured prominently as the official UN song
about nuclear weapons" etc.), and suddenly, it's not trivia any more!
I feel that everything in an article should be there for a reason, and
if that reason isn't apparent, it should be spelled out. Within
reason, of course.

FF


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Culture glut

body:
J.F. de Wolff wrote:

> Nixon had thrombosis, but he's not in deep venous thrombosis.

A very poetic comment!

Ec


from_name: Tels

body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

Moin,

I have written a small extension and it is very closely modelled to the
sample extension. Basically, it uses $wgParser->setHook() and then
returns the text that should be included in the output as HTML.

However, for some reasons, the output of my extension is not put straight
into the output page. The parser (or whoever :) looks at it, and then
checks/transforms it. This creates, IMHO, unec. overhead.

For instance I have to remove leading spaces inside style-tages, or
otherwise the output becomes garbled. Likewiese, things like
 are
transformed into
 (this is harmless, but unec.).

How do I stop whatever get's my extension's output and "mangles" it? I
want the text from my extension be included verbatim into the page
(basically because I trust my extension to return valid HTML - if it
doesn't, the extra check/transform from Wikimedia will not help, anyway)

Another small question: How would one go and benchmark an extension
including the overhead from the wiki? Editing pages via script and
measure how long it takes for each submit? Has anybody done this before?

Thanx,

Tels

PS: Sorry if this is the wrong place to ask - I am not very familiar with
the /.*wiki.*/ background :)

- --
 Signed on Fri Mar 11 11:26:03 2005 with key 0x93B84C15.
 Visit my photo gallery at http://bloodgate.com/photos/
 PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email.

 "You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy,
 the best golfer is a black guy, the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese,
 the Swiss hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the U.S. of
 arrogance, Germany doesn't want to go to war, and the three most
 powerful men in America are named 'Bush', 'Dick', and 'Colon'. Need I
 say more?" -Chris Rock

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body:
Charles Matthews wrote:

> Ed Poor wrote
>
>> So we really need to use this example in an article about how the
>> liberal media goes out of its way to discredit "the right" while
>> NEVER conceding any error of its own and even DELIBERATELY deceiving
>> the public.
>
> We need to do no such thing.
>
> If this article is written from a NPOV, the facts of the case can be
> clarified.  Elephantine generalisations like 'liberal media' need not
> appear.  Readers, if provided with facts, can draw conclusions about
> whether this is about more than professional loudmouth columnist meets
> ill-prepared interviewer (whatever - on a scale of 1 to 10 this is
> about at -6 for most people's threshold of interest, I suppose).
>
> Ed, your agenda is showing.

Well put.  Ed's statement would read as well if "liberal" were changed
to "conservative" and "right" were changed to "left".  If the opposite
is as meaningful for a different cohort of people, the likelihood is
that the truth is somewhere between.

Ec


from_name: Cool Hand Luke

body:
On Thu, 10 Mar 2005 21:11:11 -0400, Jim Cecropia <jcecropia at mail.com> wrote:
> Already Hath Brave SNOW-SPINNER ...

I find this thread very funny, but I should say that Snowspinner's
pledge to help any case is admirable.


from_name: Stan Shebs

body:
Delirium wrote:

>
> My personal pet peeve is that nearly every short-lived country or
> obscure semi-sovereign-at-one-time region has a section on their
> stamps that is larger than the section on the area itself.  And of
> course, this information is interesting if you're a philatelist, and
> shouldn't be deleted---but should be somewhere like [[Stamps of
> Blah]], rather than making up 80% of the [[Blah]] article.

Hey! You're dissing my material! :-)

Actually, I did this because the short-lived entities tend not
to have their own lengthy articles - their story is usually
subsumed in the history article for the modern-day country,
which is sometimes sensible, sometimes less so. So instead of
creating two cross-connected stubs, I just made a single longer
article. Note that all such have a [[Postage stamps and postal
history of Blah]] redirect, to facilitate future splitting.
I think I'm the only one that has done such a split however.

Stan


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: wikibreak

body:
Anthere wrote:

> Ray Saintonge a ?crit:
>
>> Christopher Mahan wrote:
>>
>>> --- Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>> (a whole bunch of stuff)
>>>
>>> Ant,
>>>
>>> You're no good to any of us dead. Take a break. That's an order.
>>>
>>> Everybody is expendable, and that means you. Wikipedia is 60,000
>>> strong. You don't need to worry. As I recall we got along fine before
>>> you joined.
>>>
>>> To all who say they miss you and wish you back already: stfu, it
>>> ain't helping.
>>>
>>> Take good care of your children, they are much more important.
>>
>> So who the hell are you to be issuing orders?
>>
>> Anthere is very well appreciated. It's up to her to decide when she
>> needs a break, nobody is complaining about it.  I'm sure she doesn't
>> need a self-appointed guardian to say when.
>>
>> Ec
>
> The last thing I would need is good people I love getting irritated
> over this :-)
> Let me just say that there are many things that can be done by some of
> you, and this I try not to look at all right now, but other things it
> is my responsability to do and this I will go on doing. Drowsiness and
> morning sickness do not last long usually :-)
>
> Eh !
>
> Kisses to you both

I at least recognize that BOTH of us had your concerns in mind.  There
is so much in your many posts to which I would like to reply.  They are
usually very thoughtful (even if slightly prolix).  The problem is that
they make me think so much that I never find time to reply.  It's much
easier to respond to an idiot by making a sarcastic comment than to give
due reflection to thoughtful essays.  So I put your messages aside while
I deal with the mountain of other things in the hope that I will be able
to appreciate the diamond that is left when the heap of dung (including
spam from non-WP sources) has been removed.  The result has been that I
now have postings from you in my things-to-reply-to box going as far
back as June 2003.

I can only hope that the timing of your life-affirming event will not
conflict with the proposed events of August.  Although I would not
consider my attendance to be a certainty until I have secured the plane
ticket, I do look forward to meeting you.

En "Citadelle" CCXII on trouve, "...le gendarme, ?tant n? pour cogner,
s'?tiole s'il manque d'aliments".  J'imagine bien ton dessin de
l'endroit que tu a visit? en Alg?rie, et des enfants qui sauront qu'un
dessin d'un chapeau n'est pas toujours un dessin d'un chapeau.

Ec


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: wikibreak


from_name: Fred Bauder

body:
Sure, that's a way to go. But not to the detriment of the big English or
French Wikipedias. Especially there could be an Indian (South Asia)
Wikipedia in English. But only when the time comes that a lot of people want
it.

Fred

> From: Delirium <delirium at hackish.org>
> Reply-To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> Date: Fri, 11 Mar 2005 13:48:28 -0500
> To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] The role of a wikipedia for a language like Hopi
>
> Or do people actually seriously think we *should* have separate
> Wikipedias catering to different cultures?


body:
Delirium wrote:

> Delirium wrote:
>
>> You seem to be arguing a cultural relativist position, which I think
>> frankly is nonsense, even if it sometimes is popular in "critical
>> theory" academic circles.
>
>
> To expand on this, I think that every language's viewpoint should
> bridge *all* cultures, to the extent possible, not just all cultures
> that speak that language.
>
I agree, but that doesn't mean cultural influence doesn't infiltrate
the articles in interesting ways. I've been reading Wolfram's History
of the Goths lately, and he uses Ulfila's Gothic version of the Bible
to acquire cultural insights, for instance by comparing words that
can be translated directly, suggesting concepts integral to the
culture, vs loan-words for "foreign" things, like palm trees.

The production of an encyclopedia is more of an un-self-conscious
effort of using the language in a normal way. I've heard that the
Hopi language doesn't have the usual concept of past and present;
if so, Hopi-language articles on physics could be much more
revealing than the traditional interviewing by academic linguists.

We can only get this kind of benefit from the participation of
multiple native speakers, so I think it's reasonable to set that
as a criterion for creation.

Stan


subject: [WikiEN-l] Culture glut

body:
Brian M wrote

>But
> when all this starts bleeding into other articles, it becomes  a major
> problem and makes Wikipedia look like it has no sense of proportion at
> all.

As far as I can see, WP doesn't have a sense of proportion.  It has a sense
of mission.  The mission is not proportionate to anything conventional.

It would certainly be quite wrong to read anything into relative coverage.
I think the positiion is like this: after a certain point pop culture can
become spam.  Just like a bot creating a page for each prime number would be
spamming WP, after a certain point.  We have no idea where that point would
be - it's a judgement call, it makes little odds to the merit of WP one way
or another.  Information about the uninteresting is not the threat that
disinformation about the interesting is - by a factor of at least 100.  We
don't need to have a page about every Magic the Gathering card, but if they
proliferate it would be much better to purge them en masse some day, than to
clog up VfD-type processes.

Charles


from_name: Matt R

subject: [WikiEN-l] Culture glut

body:
--- Brian M <brian1954 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I agree with you completely, and most of these sections should be
> deleted.   It is one thing for Wikipedia to be the online Encyclopedia
> of Popular Culture with articles on every Pokemon character, TV
> episode, forgotten (or never known) song or CD, every obscure corner
> of every fictional universe, etc, etc, ad absurdum, ad nauseum.  But
> when all this starts bleeding into other articles, it becomes  a major
> problem and makes Wikipedia look like it has no sense of proportion at
> all.

I enthusiastically agree, and I'm glad I'm not the only one that has noticed
and been (mildy) irked by this phenomenon -- phew! Perhaps we could propose a
[[Wikipedia:*]] advice page cautioning against this trend?

> Seriously, how does one go about deleting these sections?   Someone is
> going to insist that it is "removal of information" and, therefore,
> vandalism to remove them.

Yes, I can see that happening :( But just like questioning accuracy or
neutrality of material, I think it's quite legitimate to question something's
importance (relative to the topic) in an article. There's a trade-off at work
here, something like:

* The benefit of the information provided;

versus

* The risk of bloating the article and making it less useful as a concise
survey of a topic.

This is quite a different dynamic to VfD, because trivia parceled up in its own
separate article is much less harmful to other content (some might even say
harmless).

On a large scale, we can be guided by the balance that other people have
thought workable, for example, themes that are covered in other encyclopedia
articles, books, textbooks, surveys, etc. Ultimately, though, the best any of
us can do is to make a heuristic judgement about how "trivial" such information
is -- it might be controversial, but we can try and discuss things and arrive
at consensus (yes, I'm an optimist...)

-- Matt

[[User:Matt Crypto]]

Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com


from_name: Tom Haws

body:
You mean Ed wasn't joking?

Tom Haws
"And [the angel] said unto me: Knowest thou the condescension of God?
And I said unto him: I know that he loveth his children; nevertheless, I
do not know the meaning of all things."

Ray Saintonge wrote:

> Charles Matthews wrote:
>
>> Ed Poor wrote
>>
>>> So we really need to use this example in an article about how the
>>> liberal media goes out of its way to discredit "the right" while
>>> NEVER conceding any error of its own and even DELIBERATELY deceiving
>>> the public.
>>
>>
>> We need to do no such thing.
>>
>> If this article is written from a NPOV, the facts of the case can be
>> clarified.  Elephantine generalisations like 'liberal media' need not
>> appear.  Readers, if provided with facts, can draw conclusions about
>> whether this is about more than professional loudmouth columnist
>> meets ill-prepared interviewer (whatever - on a scale of 1 to 10 this
>> is about at -6 for most people's threshold of interest, I suppose).
>>
>> Ed, your agenda is showing.
>
>
> Well put.  Ed's statement would read as well if "liberal" were changed
> to "conservative" and "right" were changed to "left".  If the opposite
> is as meaningful for a different cohort of people, the likelihood is
> that the truth is somewhere between.
>
> Ec
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
>


from_name: Matthew Trump

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Culture glut

body:
Over time, the probability that any given article in Wikipedia will
contain a reference to a video game goes to one.


subject: [Foundation-l] wikibreak

body:
Christopher Mahan wrote:

>Why, I'm French, of course. :)
>
>And so you know, my wife is now 5.5 months pregnant, so I do know
>what I'm talking about.
>
Premier??

Ec


subject: [Foundation-l] wikibreak


from_name: Richard Holton

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: [Bug 710] Redirect to category page doesn't work

body:
On Fri, 11 Mar 2005 18:54:05 +0000 (UTC),
bugzilla-daemon at mail.wikimedia.org
<bugzilla-daemon at mail.wikimedia.org> wrote:
> http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=710
>
> ------- Additional Comments From Aphaia at gmail.com  2005-03-11 18:54 UTC -------
> well, if a category:YY contains "#redirect[[:Category:XX]] "can work and we
> reach the target category, but there the page tagged with category:YY cannot be
> listed in Category:XX, so redirection itself don't solve the problem perfectly
> imo. I wonder we could get the tagged with the former category in the latter
> category too, or it is not feasible.
>
As far as I can tell, this would be technologically possible within
the current and pending database schema, though it might prove
"expensive" to server loading.

Another option might be a "merge category" function (special page,
perhaps admin status required. Again, possible, but potentially
expensive.

Of course, either of these would require actual PHP coding to accomplish.

Is the purpose of this to allow renaming/merging of categories, or is
there something more that I'm missing?

--Rich Holton
en.wikipedia:User:Rholton


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: wikibreak

body:
Anthere wrote:

> Yeah, these are strange times. For my two first kids, I was not
> working and spent all days just ... euh... doing what actually ? Hmmm,
> getting informed by others, swimming, trying to prepare myself...
> But after the birth of the second, I felt like my brain was dying from
> lack of activity. Just being with other non working young moms, and
> with babies who do not even talk, your brain begins to crumble, and
> you wonder why on Earth you ever received an education. It is so easy
> to let oneself slip. Turn one self only toward family duties,
> cleaning, ironing, cooking, sleeping, chatting. Just duties. Passive
> activities.
>
> These days, I work too much, I do not take enough rest. But it is
> important for me to not turn entirely inside and to stick to outside
> world. Not sure everyone can understand that. A balance Wikipedia
> helps keeping :-)

Some Americans are only beginning to learn about it through a TV
programme called, "Desparate Housewives."  It was only natural that it
should follow "Sex and the City."

It all speaks to the changing role of women in society, and the
reallignment of gender roles.  I suspect that it will be several
generations before the situation finds equilibrium.

Ec


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: wikibreak


from_name: Mark Williamson

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: [Wiktionary-l] new vote for switching off First
	Letter Capitalization on en.wiktionary.org

body:
...speaking of which, capitalisation is a problem on Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/list_of_languages will give you a page
different from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Languages or
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_Of_languages or
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LIST_OF_LANGUAGES

The arguement against removing capitalisation sensitivity is in my
opinion a very weak one: the number of cases for which it serves as a
natural disambiguation is very very small, and even in those cases
somebody might use capitals or not use capitals and inadvertently end
up at the wrong article.

I think we need to get rid of case sensitivity once and for all.

Mark

On Fri, 11 Mar 2005 17:27:41 +0100, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Muke Tever wrote:
>
> > Sabine Cretella <sabine_cretella at yahoo.it> wrote:
> >
> >> Who contributes simply takes the words he is "moving" (working on) off
> >> the list - the admins have enough work with deleting all the re-directs
> >> (or is there a way to do this automatically) maybe modifying the page
> >> and writing "to be deleted" instead of the re-direct?
> >
> >
> > Why delete the redirects?  You'll break all the old pages on the web
> > that link
> > to Wiktionary articles.
> >
> > You'll have to think of other wikimedia sites too.  For example
> > en.wikipedia's
> > "link to Wiktionary" template currently just uses {{PAGENAME}}, which
> > will always
> > be capitalized, because Wikipedia capitalizes all topics it treats.
> >
> >
> >     *Muke!
>
> Hoi,
> You delete the redirects because they are plain wrong. A word that has
> has both a capitalised version and a non capitalised version will be
> split into two versions. The usage of wikipedia's link to Wiktionary
> currently does indeed use PAGENAME, how do you know that it still refers
> to the correct version of the word ?? You do not ! So it needs to be
> changed as PAGENAME is not good enough.
>
> It is feasible to change the PAGENAME to something else for instance a
> genuine parameter that is either capitalised or not. I think it would be
> feasible to have a bot check the occrurence of the old template and
> change it for a capitalised or an  uncapitalised REAL parameter. So
> practically all the instances of the current template need to be changed
> anyway.
>
> The decision of the capitalisation on en:wiktionary has been made, now
> it is necessary to plan a good conversion plan. It will hurt and it will
> be a lot of work. Extra painfull is the fact that the en:wiktionary did
> not agree to change the first time round because MANY new words have
> been added in the mean time. I think it is better to suffer a bit and do
> a good job than to do an incomplete job and not remove the pain.
>
> One other reason why you want to change the current wiktionary content
> is because you will not add redirects for all the new words that will be
> added in the future.
>
> Thanks,
>     GerardM
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


body:
"the usual"?

Most languages don't use grammatical devices to separate time, but
rather use separate words if it's relevant and exclude it if it's not.

Hopi does have a distinction between past and present, as do all
languages, it's just not nessecarily inherently grammatical.

Mark

On Fri, 11 Mar 2005 12:33:47 -0800, Stan Shebs <shebs at apple.com> wrote:
> Delirium wrote:
>
> > Delirium wrote:
> >
> >> You seem to be arguing a cultural relativist position, which I think
> >> frankly is nonsense, even if it sometimes is popular in "critical
> >> theory" academic circles.
> >
> >
> > To expand on this, I think that every language's viewpoint should
> > bridge *all* cultures, to the extent possible, not just all cultures
> > that speak that language.
> >
> I agree, but that doesn't mean cultural influence doesn't infiltrate
> the articles in interesting ways. I've been reading Wolfram's History
> of the Goths lately, and he uses Ulfila's Gothic version of the Bible
> to acquire cultural insights, for instance by comparing words that
> can be translated directly, suggesting concepts integral to the
> culture, vs loan-words for "foreign" things, like palm trees.
>
> The production of an encyclopedia is more of an un-self-conscious
> effort of using the language in a normal way. I've heard that the
> Hopi language doesn't have the usual concept of past and present;
> if so, Hopi-language articles on physics could be much more
> revealing than the traditional interviewing by academic linguists.
>
> We can only get this kind of benefit from the participation of
> multiple native speakers, so I think it's reasonable to set that
> as a criterion for creation.
>
> Stan
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Tony Sidaway

subject: [WikiEN-l] Scared of the arbcom?

body:
Snowspinner said:
> I suppose I should make public what has always been an implicit fact
> here, and note that I am willing to, assuming, in my judgment, the case
>  has merits, raise any case to the arbitration committee. Contact me
> via  e-mail if you have a specific problem user you think needs to be
> dealt  with and don't feel you can deal with. I can't guarantee I'll
> deal with  it immediately (I can only manage evidence on so many arbcom
> cases at  once), but if the case has merit, I will submit it on your
> behalf.

If you find yourself too busy (and always assuming arbcom can handle the
caseload), I would like to volunteer to handle some of the evidence phase.
 I have experience of preparing concise, useful evidence for arbcom.


from_name: Ryan Wetherell

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Scared of the arbcom? FEARE YE NOTT!

body:
> The '''Wikipedia Arbitration committee''' is [[Wikipedia]]'s final
> mechanism of [[m:dispute resolution]] process.
>
> ==History==
> In an effort to [[m:devolve power]], in early 2004 [[Jimbo Wales]]
> appointed 12 trust members
> of the Wikipedia community and tasked them with sorting out user disputes.
>
> Unfortunately, for the first year of its existance, the arbitration
> commitee was lambasted for being too slow and
> too feeble in its decisions. Following the vicious
> [[Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2004|2004
> elections]], the commitee's processes began to speed up and
> decisions became more decisive. Unfortunately, the commitee was
> then lambasted as being a [[witch hunt]] and for 'shutting people
> up'. ==See also==
> * [[Catch 22]]
> * [[No-win situation]]
>
> {{stub}}

This sounds an awful lot like a George W. Bush effect.  Bush was nothing but a stupid cowboy unfit to lead the USA, *but* he was SO wickedly smart that he tricked everybody into following him into a war only for Big Oil!

I love how the Arbitration Committee has gotten a better attitude and is now churning out real results at a faster pace.

--Merovingian
--
___________________________________________________________
Sign-up for Ads Free at Mail.com
http://promo.mail.com/adsfreejump.htm


from_name: Delirium

body:
Ulf Lunde wrote:

>I also wanted to say that I agree that gerard Meijssen's point is very
>important: The wikipedias are indeed culture-bearers for their
>respective populations, and not just for humanity as a whole!
>
>
I disagree that this should be the case, and to the extent that it is,
feel it should be corrected.  Languages are not culture, although they
have connections with it.

If we wanted languages to be identified with culture, then we should
split some up, and have a "United States" wikipedia as a culture-bearer
for the U.S., a "French Canadian" Wikipedia as a culture-bearer for
French-Canadians, and so on.  But we don't, and to the extent possible
keep these together.  In essence, the only reason we have separate
Wikipedias at all is because of language barriers---when languages are
similar enough to keep together (as with the French spoken in Canada vs.
France vs. Algeria), we do so.

Or do people actually seriously think we *should* have separate
Wikipedias catering to different cultures?

-Mark


from_name: Sabine Cretella

subject: [Wiktionary-l] Czech speakers

body:
Do we have a Czech speaker here?

What does "Je???ek" really mean - Father Christmas?

I had an edit on it. wiktionary and I am not sure if this is a vandal or
serious edit - He added that the Czech word means "Jesus, the child"

Thanks for your help!

Ciao, Sabine


body:
The Cunctator wrote:

>The answer is to separate distinct concepts into different pages. There's no
>reason there shouldn't be [[Nuclear weapons in Star Wars]] (except that it's
>not clear that there really are any--the Death Star, for example, seems to
>use some kind of collimated maser? You know, the kind that makes a zapping
>sound in DEEP SPACE. Ack.).
>
>
This seems like the right answer to me.

My personal pet peeve is that nearly every short-lived country or
obscure semi-sovereign-at-one-time region has a section on their stamps
that is larger than the section on the area itself.  And of course, this
information is interesting if you're a philatelist, and shouldn't be
deleted---but should be somewhere like [[Stamps of Blah]], rather than
making up 80% of the [[Blah]] article.

But I think this is really a somewhat minor organization issue, not a
huge problem with our focus and content.

-Mark


from_name: Brian M

subject: [WikiEN-l] Half a million

body:
As a deletionist, I reckon we ought to have a party if we can get it
back down to, oh, 400,000, for a start.    Just joking -- well ....,
yeah, just joking.

On Fri, 11 Mar 2005 19:46:19 +0100, Magnus Manske <magnus.manske at web.de> wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> I noticed the en.wikipedia close to 500 000 articles. Press release?
> Celebration? Party?
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
> Version: GnuPG v1.2.1 (MingW32)
> Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
>
> iD8DBQFCMed7CZKBJbEFcz0RAiUsAJ0fPHwl08NV/jDcRx7eJ47e7Xh4hwCeO4uG
> BCeQ1G3qegURGQC8hYZrgao=
> =tm8x
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: csherlock at ljh.com.au

subject: [WikiEN-l] [[Wikipedia:Baseline revision]]

body:
I have started off our first attempt to find a baseline revision for
[[Common Unix Printing System]]. The proposal is here and is locked in
to stop vandals from editing the URL to the revision: [[Common Unix
Printing System/Proposed baseline]]. See the [[Talk:Common Unix Printing
System/Proposed baseline|talk page]] to see the objections and review
for the proposed baseline revision.

I figure the mailing list is as good a place as any to make this
announcement! :)

TBSDY


from_name: Skyring

body:
On Fri, 11 Mar 2005 02:22:41 +0000, Charles Fulton <mackensen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Sir, I trust that was deliberately not a fatuous response.  The Prime
> Minister is the head of government, and heads of government are
> generally not the people who interpret a constitution.  When John
> Howard spoke in that connection, he was merely noting that the monarch
> had little if any real influence on politics.

He said: "The essence of a republican form of government is that
ultimate sovereignty resides in the people, and that all public office
holders derive their authority from the people, either through
election by the people, or by appointment by officers themselves
elected by the people - precisely the form of government we enjoy in
Australia. What this means is that we have always been a crowned
republic. " http://www.pm.gov.au/news/speeches/1997/waerydun.htm

This seems to go a long way beyond your claim.

As for constitutional commentators, the first were Quick and Garran
with their monumental Annotation published in 1901, in which they
said: "'The Constitution is the master of the legislature, and the
community itself is the author of the Constitution ... Sovereignty
resides in [those] in whom is ultimately vested the power to amend a
Constitution of Government'."

>
> However, that no more makes Australia a republic than calling a
> sheep's tail a leg make it a leg.  Skyring's POV is that Australia is
> a republic and not a constitutional monarchy, which flies in the face
> of logic, fact, common sense, and Australia's own constitution.

That is not my view. I have never said that Australia is not a
constitutional monarchy. In fact I take the opportunity to state it
quite firmly. Australia *is* a constitutional monarchy.

The fact is that we are also a republic because we have a republican
form of government, sovereignty resides in the people, and power is
exercised through elected or appointed officials. The Queen certainly
has a role, but as a figurehead.

However, I am persuaded that to state it as a bland generalisation in
the lead sentence without some considerable explanation immediately
following is stylistically inelegant, to be polite. 8^)

> Moreover, I see no evidence from the relevant talk pages that such a
> compromise has been reached, certainly if one has been reached, it
> doesn't involve him.

This turns out not to be the case, as can be plainly seen.

--
Peter in Canberra


from_name: Jean-Christian Imbeault

subject: [Wikipedia-l] wikipedia's bugzilla monobook templates

body:
How can I get a hold of the templates used by the wikipedia bugzilla?

I've been able to find something at
http://download.wikipedia.org/bugzilla/mediazillatemplate.tar.gz

But I think it's abit old and might not be fully functional (i.e. I've
installed it but it doesn't work out of the box and needs tweaking).

Jc


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] Culture glut

body:
Matt R wrote:
> --- Brian M <brian1954 at gmail.com> wrote:

>>I agree with you completely, and most of these sections should be
>>deleted.   It is one thing for Wikipedia to be the online Encyclopedia
>>of Popular Culture with articles on every Pokemon character, TV
>>episode, forgotten (or never known) song or CD, every obscure corner
>>of every fictional universe, etc, etc, ad absurdum, ad nauseum.  But
>>when all this starts bleeding into other articles, it becomes  a major
>>problem and makes Wikipedia look like it has no sense of proportion at
>>all.

> I enthusiastically agree, and I'm glad I'm not the only one that has noticed
> and been (mildy) irked by this phenomenon -- phew! Perhaps we could propose a
> [[Wikipedia:*]] advice page cautioning against this trend?

I would strongly caution against a blanket purge. Take [[ununpentium]],
for instance - the popular culture stuff is most of the reason anyone would
look at it. At which point they learn *why* it got into popular culture, and
can learn about the [[island of stability]] and UFO nut [[Bob Lazar]]. It
adds a lot of interest to an otherwise almost cookie-cutter sciencecruft
article.

A lot of articles are not in fact very balanced. This happens. Better to
split off the trivia to another suitable article than just delete it
because you don't care. "The existence of this pisses me off" is not
in fact a reason to delete.

One example of how to handle this is [[Lilith]]. The ==Lilith in popular
culture== section was about to overwhelm the article, so it all got put
into [[Lilith (disambiguation)]]. The section says to see that article
because people kept putting trivia into it. Now [[Lilith]] is reasonably
balanced and the thousand uses of Lilith in popular culture are usefully
placed at a disambig.

In any case, nuclear weapons in popular culture is a huge and fascinating
sociological topic, for those of us old enough to remember the Cold War
and to try to get across what it felt like to those who aren't. It still
amazes me when I meet mature adults with kids who don't remember the Cold
War and just don't understand WTF I'm talking about.

- d.


body:
Mark Williamson wrote:

>[...] the ideas of Stan and Delirium to create different
>Wikipedias for different cultures rather than different languages,
>which I think is a bad idea.
>
Whoa whoa whoa, you've completely misinterpreted what I said. All
I said was that language and culture are intertwined, even if you
don't want them to be. That used to be a truism in linguistics
back when I studied it, but that was twenty years ago and maybe
new theories are in vogue, I don't know.

Stan


body:
Gerard Meijssen wrote:

> I would almost accept your point if you agree to only read French or
> Chinese in future. You will find how much it will divorce you from the
> culture that you live in.

I don't find this at all.  I speak both English and Greek fluently, and
find that the people speaking it makes much more difference than the
language.  When my Greek relatives speak to me in English, they still
speak from a Greek cultural perspective.

You seem to be arguing a cultural relativist position, which I think
frankly is nonsense, even if it sometimes is popular in "critical
theory" academic circles.

-Mark


subject: [WikiEN-l] Admin assistance requested

body:
On Thu, 10 Mar 2005 17:05:04 -0700, slimvirgin at gmail.com
<slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:
> I just realized that a lot of you might not read my last post because
> I listed the subject as related to the Queen again, and I don't blame
> you. It is, in fact, a request for assistance from an admin. See
> below.
>
> Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2005 16:55:54 -0700
> Subject: User:Skyring and the Queen (again)
>
> Could an admin help out on [[Talk:Government of Australia]], please?
> User:Skyring is, for the third time, trying to escalate things with
> Adam, this time by saying he's about to delete the entire
> head-of-state section because it's simply Adam's opinion. If an admin
> could have a word with Skyring now, it might stop it before anyone
> gets blocked again. I've asked for help on WP:AN/I, but no response so
> far.

Your summary is inaccurate. Here's what I said: "If you look back to
[2] (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Government_of_Australia&diff=next&oldid=10232643)
of nearly a month ago, you may see that in fact I proposed deleting
any references to head of state because it was not a term that could
be definitively sourced. Any additions are the property of others - my
contribution was a single letter, which has since disappeared, I note.
Let us be fair. Skyring 08:49, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Accordingly, I will remove the Head of State section because it is
contentious. Adam has not provided any verification for his statements
that there is a convention that the Queen is head of state, that the
authors of the Constitution thought this axiomatic, and that "most
authorities" say that the Queen is the head of State. As
User:SlimVirgin has argued repeatedly, the criterion for inclusion in
Wikipedia is verifiability."

Here is what Sarah said in discussion: "Skyring, the criterion for
entry into Wikipedia is verifibility, not truth; and the propositions
we call factual are simply an overview of the most prevalent beliefs
held by sources we regard as reputable and authoritative.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Government_of_Australia/archive_1]

I do hope that she does not oppose me asking Adam to provide reputable
sources for his opinions in the article. At one point he has claimed
intimate knowledge of what was in the minds of the framers of the
constitution, and I seriously doubt that he can back this up to the
extent he claims.

--
Peter in Canberra


body:
Delirium wrote:

> You seem to be arguing a cultural relativist position, which I think
> frankly is nonsense, even if it sometimes is popular in "critical
> theory" academic circles.

To expand on this, I think that every language's viewpoint should bridge
*all* cultures, to the extent possible, not just all cultures that speak
that language.

That is, the Greek Wikipedia should not only be a consensus of
Greek-speaking people (i.e. Greeks and Cypriots).  It should attempt, as
much as possible, to present things neutrally, so that even a Turk who
reads Greek (and there are quite a few) could read an article on the
Greek-Turkish conflict on the Greek Wikipedia and agree that it's a
neutral article, not an article from the Greek perspective.

This is of course easier to do in languages which have more diverse
cultures speaking them---the en: Wikipedia is constantly moving away
from being a U.S. perspective through the efforts of English speakers
from other countries.  With languages like Greek, this is harder, but I
don't think impossible.

Going the other way, I also disagree that languages should have more
content on their local cultures.  This will happen initially just
because of what people are interested in, but there's no reason it has
to stay that way.  I personally am planning to go through and translate
hundreds of articles on local German universities to en:, so that
eventually en:'s coverage of small Germany universities will be on par
with de:'s, and on par with en:'s coverage of U.S. and U.K. universities.

-Mark


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia referenced by SANS

body:
Chad Perrin wrote:

> That's the lead-in to the purpose of the conference.  It seems like
> good news to see yet another recognized authority using Wikipedia to
> provide definitions of the terms for the foci of its trade.

This is a great thing, because it also showcases one of our strengths:
We're becoming an authoritative source for summaries of consensus
opinion.  A common way of doing that is to find a few authors who have
made statements, like "according to Foo, spyware is 'blah'; according to
Foo2, it's 'blah2'".  Wikipedia sort of collects and summarizes those
sorts of things for them.

(For our good articles anyway. :-)

-Mark


body:
Do you know the meaning of the phrase "speaking of which"?

Mark

On Fri, 11 Mar 2005 22:17:54 +0100, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Mark,
> It is simple, this posting is about things that will happen on the
> en:wiktionary. It is not an encyclopedia but a dictionary. It is not an
> English dictionary only and it includes words of potentially any
> language. In a dictionary you expect to find words as they should be
> spelled. Having them capitalised is plain wrong. Consequently the
> current methodology of linking from the en:wikipedia to the
> en:wiktionary will break. So work needs to be done to correct this. We
> hope we will be able to do a lot of the work by using bots.
>
> I hope you will be giving us a helping hand in this big undertaking.
> Again this has nothing to do with the capitalisation of articles on the
> en:wikipedia.
>
> Thanks in advance,
>     GerardM
>
> Mark Williamson wrote:
>
> >...speaking of which, capitalisation is a problem on Wikipedia.
> >
> >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/list_of_languages will give you a page
> >different from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Languages or
> >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_Of_languages or
> >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LIST_OF_LANGUAGES
> >
> >The arguement against removing capitalisation sensitivity is in my
> >opinion a very weak one: the number of cases for which it serves as a
> >natural disambiguation is very very small, and even in those cases
> >somebody might use capitals or not use capitals and inadvertently end
> >up at the wrong article.
> >
> >I think we need to get rid of case sensitivity once and for all.
> >
> >Mark
> >
> >On Fri, 11 Mar 2005 17:27:41 +0100, Gerard Meijssen
> ><gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> >>Muke Tever wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>>Sabine Cretella <sabine_cretella at yahoo.it> wrote:
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>>Who contributes simply takes the words he is "moving" (working on) off
> >>>>the list - the admins have enough work with deleting all the re-directs
> >>>>(or is there a way to do this automatically) maybe modifying the page
> >>>>and writing "to be deleted" instead of the re-direct?
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>Why delete the redirects?  You'll break all the old pages on the web
> >>>that link
> >>>to Wiktionary articles.
> >>>
> >>>You'll have to think of other wikimedia sites too.  For example
> >>>en.wikipedia's
> >>>"link to Wiktionary" template currently just uses {{PAGENAME}}, which
> >>>will always
> >>>be capitalized, because Wikipedia capitalizes all topics it treats.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>    *Muke!
> >>>
> >>>
> >>Hoi,
> >>You delete the redirects because they are plain wrong. A word that has
> >>has both a capitalised version and a non capitalised version will be
> >>split into two versions. The usage of wikipedia's link to Wiktionary
> >>currently does indeed use PAGENAME, how do you know that it still refers
> >>to the correct version of the word ?? You do not ! So it needs to be
> >>changed as PAGENAME is not good enough.
> >>
> >>It is feasible to change the PAGENAME to something else for instance a
> >>genuine parameter that is either capitalised or not. I think it would be
> >>feasible to have a bot check the occrurence of the old template and
> >>change it for a capitalised or an  uncapitalised REAL parameter. So
> >>practically all the instances of the current template need to be changed
> >>anyway.
> >>
> >>The decision of the capitalisation on en:wiktionary has been made, now
> >>it is necessary to plan a good conversion plan. It will hurt and it will
> >>be a lot of work. Extra painfull is the fact that the en:wiktionary did
> >>not agree to change the first time round because MANY new words have
> >>been added in the mean time. I think it is better to suffer a bit and do
> >>a good job than to do an incomplete job and not remove the pain.
> >>
> >>One other reason why you want to change the current wiktionary content
> >>is because you will not add redirects for all the new words that will be
> >>added in the future.
> >>
> >>Thanks,
> >>    GerardM
> >>
>


body:
Gerard, perhaps you should look at the text Boris quoted.

He isn't referring to the creation of a Hopi Wikipedia, he is
referring to the ideas of Stan and Delirium to create different
Wikipedias for different cultures rather than different languages,
which I think is a bad idea.

Mark

On Fri, 11 Mar 2005 22:49:53 +0100, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Boris Lohnzweiger wrote:
>
> >Frankly spoken, I am totally against that idea because I think it would lead to a fragmentation of the knowledge that we are trying to collect. I couldn't think of any Indian topics that wouldn't have a place in the general English encyclopedia. The main advantage of a large encyclopedia is that is gathers knowledge from various fields (in our case, in many different languages). We shouldn't fragmentize knowledge but rather unify it in one single place. Once we'd start splitting Wikipedias into separate editions for ethnic or cultural groups, it would eventually lead to "Wikipedias for Christians", "Wikipedias for Muslims", "Wikipedias for Women", "Wikipedias for Students", "Wikipedias for Seniors" and the like, and all of them would have to be translated into 200 languages. Would that still constitute a "Free Encyclopedia" then or wouldn't it rather mean of plethora of "closed shops".
> >
> >
> We are talking languages here and not "Wikipedia for Christians" or some
> such. This will never happen as Wikipedia is a trademark. A wikipedia in
> Hopi does not mean that the same subjects cannot be covered in any other
> wikipedia therefore how does it fragment the knowledge we are trying to
> collect ? Your argument against Hopi is as valid when wielded against
> the English wikipedia because the French wikipedia could serve equally
> well as a lingua franca.
>
> >IMHO, our main advantage is that we bring together people with all different sorts of backgrounds and enable them to *cooperate*. Thus we are able to attract as much knowledge as we presently do. The exchange between people of very different origins is a unique feature of Wikipedia. Any sort of separation or segregation among Wikipedia's contributors would invariably effect the level of quality we have been able to achieve, simply because it would mean a brain-drain for the general Wikipedia.
> >
> >
> The level of quality that we achieve is something that can happen in any
> wikipedia and some argue that the de:wikipedia is better than the
> en:wikipedia. Our stated aim is to provide our wikipedia in all
> languages currently 187. We can achieve great things in all languages.
> It will take time, hard work but there is nothing lost and much gained
> with a wikipedia for each language that is spoken.
>
> >Nevertheless certains steps in order to better serve specific communities of users can very well make sense. More than that, they would raise Wikipedia's value even more. AFAIK WikiReaders provide a very useful tool for that and so do categories and lists. Please let us not make knowledge exclusive while we are striving to unify it in one single place were it is easily accessible to everyone. We're here to remove obstacles to knowledge and not to errect new ones.
> >
> >
> How will you serve the people that speak Arabic, Parsi or Bangla with an
> English reader? Please let us not make knowledge exclusive to those that
> speak one of the major languages. We are striving to provide a resource
> to all people, we should cherish all spoken languages and not
> discriminate against any of them. If there are five people willing and
> committed to write an encyclopedia, with NPOV content, cherish them
> because to me they are the unsung heroes of our community.
>
> Thanks,
>     GerardM
>
> >
> >wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org schrieb am 11.03.05 20:25:23:
> >
> >Sure, that's a way to go. But not to the detriment of the big English or
> >French Wikipedias. Especially there could be an Indian (South Asia)
> >Wikipedia in English. But only when the time comes that a lot of people want
> >it.
> >
> >Fred
> >
> >
> >
> >>From: Delirium <delirium at hackish.org>
> >>Reply-To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> >>Date: Fri, 11 Mar 2005 13:48:28 -0500
> >>To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> >>Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] The role of a wikipedia for a language like Hopi
> >>
> >>Or do people actually seriously think we *should* have separate
> >>Wikipedias catering to different cultures?
> >>
> >>
>
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