from_name: Daniel P.B.Smith

body:
> From: Timwi <timwi at gmx.net>
> Daniel P.B.Smith wrote:
>
>> A weak point of Wikipedia is that people write about what they are
>> interested in, so given several topics of apparently comparable
>> importance, the length, depth, and quality of the articles may differ
>> widely.
>
> This is true. This is called "Systematic bias":
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:
> Replies_to_common_objections#Systematic_bias
>
>> This largely escapes notice in the web edition, but will become
>> much more apparent in a print edition.
>
> Is that really so bad, though?

Not on the Web, no.

> I'm sure most people will understand. :)

Yeah, right. I'm sure they'll understand why Phillips Exeter has an
article and Choate (now Choate Rosemary Hall) doesn't.

Why Bronx High School of Science has an article and La Guardia High
School of Music and Art (of _Fame_ fame) does not.

Why Cal Tech gets five paragraphs, Princeton gets seven, Harvard gets
fourteen, and MIT gets thirty-six. (This means the section on MIT's
_architecture_ is longer than the _entire article on Princeton._)

Why Radiology has nine paragraphs and Cytology gets one sentence.

Why Marianne Moore gets eight paragraphs and Vachel Lindsay gets
"Vachel Lindsay (1879 - December 5, 1931) was an American poet born in
Springfield, Illinois."

It doesn't bother me at all on the Web, but I think the slogan
"Wikipedia is not paper" may turn out to have an uncomfortable amount
of truth in it.

--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at world.std.com alternate:
dpbsmith at alum.mit.edu
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Timwi

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Mailing list postings that should be read by everyone

body:
Fantasy wrote:

> I just have to say, that I would love to follow all en-discussions, but
> I (and many others) are working in many other languages as well and can
> therefore not follow everything going on here.
>
> But: I (or we) would nevertheless like to know what "important" is going
> on here. We want to be part of Wikipedia en.
>
> So, please, help me/us by adding important postings to this page:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mailing_list_postings_that_should_be_read_by_everyone

I think it's a good idea.  :-)  I've cleaned up that page a bit, and I
hope it's going to be used.

However, there are a number of things you can do to make it easier for
you. You seem to already be aware that the mailing lists are available
through NNTP. Most newsgroup readers allow you to ignore a thread. The
problem with a page like the one you're suggesting is that there will be
clashes with what people think is "important" enough that "everyone"
should read it; with a newsreader, I can ignore the threads that don't
interest me, and I don't have to let anyone else know :-)

(Of course, it would be nice if people would stop using broken software
that completely breaks threading, but it's at least something...)

Timwi


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Print edition: unevenness of coverage

body:
Daniel P.B.Smith wrote:

> A weak point of Wikipedia is that people write about what they are
> interested in, so given several topics of apparently comparable
> importance, the length, depth, and quality of the articles may differ
> widely.

This is true. This is called "Systematic bias":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Replies_to_common_objections#Systematic_bias

> This largely escapes notice in the web edition, but will become
> much more apparent in a print edition.

Is that really so bad, though? I'm sure most people will understand. :)

Timwi


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: tool bar

body:
Okay, I've updated the code. Changes include:

* On Mozilla-based browsers it now uses the infobox mode (where it has
a box with example text rather than directly changing the main edit box
and hitting the scroll bug, which isn't a problem for Erik but is a big
problem for actual users).
* I've changed the regular expression syntax to avoid causing a "Parse
error!" message to pop up on every page view in old versions of
Netscape (eg, 3.0). It still gives a runtime error when you edit a page
in Netscape 3.0, but if you click 'ok' you can still edit.
* It now does a better job at escaping apostrophe and quote characters
in the tips and sample text. This was causing for instance the French
"Cliquez sur un bouton pour obtenir un texte d'exemple" to cut off at
the "d'".

I haven't yet solved the Safari scrolling problem, but it works ok if
you make the window big enough that there's no room to scroll. :) It
also only seems to trigger on long pages; if the edit box isn't full,
it doesn't do it.

Haven't looked at Netscape 4 yet. I had the impression that it used to
work in earlier testing, but could be wrong.

You may have to force reload the wikibits.js file to get things
properly updated... eg http://fr.wikipedia.org/style/wikibits.js

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Anthere

subject: [WikiEN-l] mediation 168-Mav

body:
As of 29 of feb 2004, I indicate that mediation between Mav and 168 is
over. No peaceful solution could be reached per discussion, and I do not
think it is resolvable amicably.
168 is requesting arbitration upon the conflict he has with Mav.

Ant


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Cool project for perl programmer

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

> To compare Wikipedia to Columbia Encyclopedia...
> http://www.encyclopedia.com/
> has the full text of Columbia.
>
> There are pages for alphabetic browsing.
> http://www.encyclopedia.com/browse/browse-Aa.asp
>
> From these pages, it should be possible to get a list of all their
> article titles.
>
> These could be matched up against Wikipedia article titles.

Well, matching them up doesn't prove very easy. For example, what they
call "Abd?l Aziz" is on Wikipedia called "Abd-ul-Aziz".

I have used the following heuristics to match up articles:
- redirects (obviously)
- names in the other order ("Thomas Jefferson" rather than
   "Jefferson, Thomas")
- middle names deleted

The latter two are already somewhat error-prone (though I haven't
spotted such an error yet).

With just these, I was able to match up 24003 article titles from
encyclopedia.com with articles on Wikipedia. 25101 other article titles
did not yield Wikipedia equivalents (although many of them have one;
e.g. Aziz as mentioned above). A number of other titles (silly me forgot
to output their number) led to the same Wikipedia article; for example,
"Aachen" and "Aix-la-Chapelle" were listed seperately on theirs, but of
course they're the same thing.

The 24003 Wikipedia articles I could match up amount to 79979774 bytes
(almost 80 MB).

However, unfortunately I also had to find that some of them are
disambiguation pages; for example, where encyclopedia.com has a one and
only "Adalbert, Saint", Wikipedia's [[Saint Adalbert]] disambiguates to
[[Adalbert of Prague]] and [[Adalbert of Magdeburg]].

So, clearly, this isn't quite as easy. But anyway. Here is the complete
report:
	(**WARNING!** 5.3 MB file! Very slow server! Better let it
	download, have dinner, and then view locally!)
	http://lionking.org/~timwi/t/wikipedia/comparison.html

Greetings,
Timwi

P.S.: More fun projects? ;-)


from_name: John Knouse

subject: [WikiEN-l] tree names

body:
I seem to be having an editing conflict with
[[user:MPF|MPF]].  He is insisting on changing "tuliptree"
to "Tulip tree" and "cucumbertree" to "Cucumber tree".  We
had a big discussion about the capitalization issue last
year, though I don't think we discussed the compounding
issue.  Does anyone remember this?  Didn't we decide for
plants NOT to capitalize?  In any case, all the authorities
either compound or hyphenate; none of them use two separate
words.  See [[talk:Tulip tree]] for more.

--
John Knouse
jaknouse at frognet.net


from_name: John C. Penta

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Trading with the Enemy

body:
----- Original Message -----
From: Delirium <delirium at rufus.d2g.com>
Date: Sunday, February 29, 2004 6:40 pm
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: Trading with the Enemy

> Which all makes it somewhat odd that the law still exists.  If
> it's not
> going to be enforced even in such egregious cases as this, why not
> just
> repeal it?

Chilling effect. The *threat* of the law actually being used makes some publications self-censor.

John


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Bug tracker

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> On Feb 29, 2004, at 11:26, Evan Prodromou wrote:
>
>> I wonder if the advantages we get out of wiki for producing other
>> content would come into play here. A report gets left, and then
>> somebody else cleans up the report into a preferred format. Someone
>> else gives more specific information, and someone else assigns the bug
>> to a person ("Assigned to: [[User:Evan]]").
>
> Like I said, we *could* but in practice *that did not happen in 2002*.
> If someone would like to commit to being Keeper of the WikiBugs and herd
> the necessary cats, then I'm all in favor of giving it a try.

I would like to commit to being Keeper Of A Bugreport Page On Which
General User Can Submit Bugreports That Will Then Be Moved To The
Almighty Bugzilla. :-)

Timwi


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: User-agent block list & Netscape 3

body:
On Sun, Feb 29, 2004 at 01:09:19PM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
> Browsers that break non-ASCII characters during editing aren't blocked
> from editing

And they should be.


from_name: Charles Matthews

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Trading with the Enemy

body:
>Look.  Somebody made a crack that the United States is "undemocratic".  I
responded with a completely truthful post.  There is absolutely nothing in
what I said that was libelous, nor even incorrect.  It's common practice on
Wikipedia to make attacks on the United States, but it's unacceptable when
Americans (yes, that's the term) respond with anything other than a cowering
"yes, we're evil."

RickK

I didn't say anything there was libelous, or incorrect.  My word was
'cheap'.  I'm in the UK, we have an Official Secrets Act.  Anthere disputes
your claim on the 'illegality' of criticising the French government (we have
had another ill-informed post on that).  I'll leave aside what you said on
Germany, for reasons well known in Usenet discussions.

These are _not_ the knock-down arguments you seem to think they are.  They
seem more like a blind need to hit back with anything at hand.

I have had the advantage of having worked in the USA for a year.  Can I just
make one point?  Wikipedia is not, actually, about American national
identity.

Charles


from_name: Pierre Abbat

subject: [WikiEN-l] tree names

body:
On Sunday 29 February 2004 22:38, John Knouse wrote:
> I seem to be having an editing conflict with
> [[user:MPF|MPF]].  He is insisting on changing "tuliptree"
> to "Tulip tree" and "cucumbertree" to "Cucumber tree".  We
> had a big discussion about the capitalization issue last
> year, though I don't think we discussed the compounding
> issue.  Does anyone remember this?  Didn't we decide for
> plants NOT to capitalize?  In any case, all the authorities
> either compound or hyphenate; none of them use two separate
> words.  See [[talk:Tulip tree]] for more.

I don't much care whether it's [[Tuliptree]] or [[Tulip tree]], as long as
the other is a redirect, which it isn't right now (both pages have
substantially identical content), and as long as they don't cut it down as
they did the sycamore. (The Bradford pear, which was a few trees up, fell
apart in the great ice storm.)

phma


subject: [Wikitech-l] tool bar

body:
Please, as it was discussed in length, could someone make the tool bar
feature disabled by default.

This feature is broken. It does not work on many browsers. It should not
be "on" per default for a newcomer. It is very disturbing.

Thanks

ant


subject: [Wikitech-l] identification

body:
On the identification page on the french wikipedia, I have a <loginend>
that is added at the end of the page, just below the "send me a new email".
it is not the case on en:
Is it a software issue, or a bug from our translation ?

Thanks

ant


from_name: Angela

subject: [Wikitech-l] identification

body:
--- Anthere <anthere8 at yahoo.com> wrote: >
> I have a <loginend>
> that is added at the end of the page, just below the
> "send me a new email".
> it is not the case on en:
> Is it a software issue, or a bug from our
> translation ?

This is so you can have half of the login message
below the login box if you want to. If you don't want
it,
just replace "<loginend>" with " " at
http://fr.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=MediaWiki:Loginend.

Angela.

Chat instantly with your online friends?  Get the
FREE Yahoo! Messenger http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com/


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: tool bar

body:
Brion Vibber a ?crit:
> On Feb 29, 2004, at 13:45, Anthere wrote:
>
>> Please, as it was discussed in length, could someone make the tool bar
>> feature disabled by default.
>
>
> The whole point is to be on by default for newcomers.

But if it is on by default, and does not work for all, it will be *more
disturbing* than beneficial to many users.

>> This feature is broken. It does not work on many browsers. It should
>> not be "on" per default for a newcomer. It is very disturbing.
>
>
> What's broken about it specifically that wasn't already addressed?

?!?!?

Look Brian...this was explained in length in numerous emails to that
mailing list when the feature was discussed.

Some french people made a report of the browsers on which it is not
working. It is here
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%E9dia%3ABarre_d%27outils_d%27%E9dition

They reported it working on
     * Mozilla Firebird
     * Internet Explorer
     * Mozilla 1.6/W2K et XP Jyp 27 f?v 2004 ? 16:06 (CET)

and not working at all, or improperly on
     * Safari
     * Konqueror 3.1.5
     * Konqueror 3.2.
     * Opera sous GNU/Linux
     * Opera 7.10 sous Windows
     * Mozilla 1.4 (KDE 3.1) elle appara?t et remplit ses fonctions mais
fait des petits sauts de puce assez ?nervants. Fred.th

To which I am gonna add immediately Netscape which was obviously forgotten.


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: tool bar

body:
Brion-
> Mozilla 1.2, Mozilla 1.6, Mozilla Firefox 0.8:
> Inline mode doesn't quite work: scrolls edit box to top.

This is a Mozilla bug:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=231389
It appears in all toolbars of this type. I prefer having this variant to
the infobox variant -- once you press a cursor key you're back where you
were before, so you can use the toolbar reasonably productively.

Netscape 4 probably uses the Moz code, needs some version checking in the
JS.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: tool bar

body:
Brion-

> Well, you're apparently at odds with the people who USE the wiki. I
> haven't heard a single consenting voice that says "yes! we should use
> the seriously broken mode, because someday Mozilla will work right with
> it and someday everyone using Mozilla will upgrade to that version!"

My rationale is not that we should use it because it might work some day,
but because it already works better than the infobox, in spite of the
scrolling bug in Moz. I actively use the toolbar under Mozilla and would
stop using it if it was in infobox mode.

However, I am thinking about implementing an alternative mode to the
infobox which would use a javascript message-box to query for the text
that is to be formatted. This would IMHO be more useful than the infobox
and work in all browsers.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Trading with the Enemy

body:
I spent a good while looking for a reference that would support the
claim the government threatened the sun of the 45000 euros fine.

In french, the number of references I found is laughable. In short, the
topic is not mentionned but by a couple of blog and forum. French just
do not know of that law, which is a good measure of how refrained in
their freedom of speech they feel.
Also, some discussions mentionning the law and the fine, indicated that
some people thought The Sun attack was a two level construction
First : insulting the president very badly
Second : spreading the word this is illegal to do so, hence that no
freedom of speech is allowed in France.

I may be wrong, but I suspect that if the Elys?es porte parole had only
even "mentionned" the law in a private dinner at her sister house, that
would have been reported everywhere immediately, with quotation, the
food that was in her plate, and the dress she was wearing that evening.
I found no such thing. I tend to believe that if any official had said
such a thing on behalf of the government, that would have made enough
noise, so that such an information would be very easily found even now.
I don't think France bashers would have missed such a delicacy :-)

Actually, what I found is many english reports saying "the Sun could be
fined 45000 under a french law".

The most frequent report is this one "The tabloid's controversial stance
breaks a French law that makes it a criminal offence to insult the
president. Breaking the law carries a fine up 45,000 euros."

Most reports seemed to be copies of this one (from Jimbo reference).

You could note that there is absolutely no indication of the name of any
  french official who would have reminded Murdoch of that law. Nor of
any date or event when that happened.

So, again, I may be wrong...and will recognise I am if anyone can find a
reference of a french government porte parole either
* threatening to sue the Sun or
* actually announcing the french governemnt is suing the Sun.

But I think the current accusations carried by RickK are not very far
from libel. As they do not stand on any reality. It is certainly true
that there is a theoretical possibility that french people could be
restrained in their liberty of speech since that law exists, but in
practice, there is no fact proving that our governemnt is actively
limiting or even thinking of limiting our freedom.

This said, I hope I use the right words.

-------

As for what angered me RickK, I can't believe you are so insensitive as
not to see that free and undeserved nation bashing is bound to anger
their inhabitants. I will consider that you were just not realising :-)

--------

Jimmy Wales a ?crit:
> Delirium wrote:
>
>> More recently the Sun was threatened with a lawsuit for insulting
>>Chirac, though this never materialized.
>
>
> In the interests of corrected a misperception which I inadvertantly
> fell into the other day, is it actually true that the Sun was
> "threatened with" such a lawsuit?  Or is it merely that observers
> (at the Guardian, for example) noted that such was a theoretical
> possibility?
>
> http://media.guardian.co.uk/presspublishing/story/0,7495,900093,00.html
>
> --Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: identification

body:
oh, good. Done. thanks :-)

ant

Angela a ?crit:
> --- Anthere <anthere8 at yahoo.com> wrote: >
>
>>I have a <loginend> that is added at the end of the page, just below the
>>"send me a new email".
>>it is not the case on en:
>>Is it a software issue, or a bug from our
>>translation ?
>
>
> This is so you can have half of the login message
> below the login box if you want to. If you don't want
> it,
> just replace "<loginend>" with " " at
> http://fr.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=MediaWiki:Loginend.
>
> Angela.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Chat instantly with your online friends?  Get the
> FREE Yahoo! Messenger http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com/


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: tool bar

body:
>> But if it is on by default, and does not work for all, it will be
>> *more disturbing* than beneficial to many users.
>
>
> We all agree 100% on this! That's why it's supposed to disable itself
> where it doesn't work. We bullied Erik into adding code to that
> SPECIFICALLY SO THAT IT WOULD NOT BREAK ON BROWSERS WHERE IT WOULD
> BREAK.

Ben... at least on mine, it is not disabled by default :-(
perhaps my browser type was forgotten in the controls ?

> Here's the results of my testing just now:
>
> Win/IE 6.0:
> Works correctly in inline mode.
>
> Mac/IE 5.2:
> Works correctly in infobox mode.
>
> Konqueror 3.1.4:
> Works correctly in infobox mode.
>
> Konqueror 3.2.0:
> Works correctly in infobox mode.
>
> Win/Opera 7.23:
> Works correctly in infobox mode. When a button is clicked the browser
> does some sort of relayout which is distracting, but not as much as
> Opera 6.03. The edit box contents are not disturbed nor scrolled, but
> focus is lost. Minor usability issue.
>
> Mac/Opera 6.03:
> Infobox mode seems to work but the screen scrolls up and down. Really
> really annoying.
>
> Mozilla 1.2, Mozilla 1.6, Mozilla Firefox 0.8:
> Inline mode doesn't quite work: scrolls edit box to top. This is a
> serious usability problem. Erik was asked to use infobox mode for
> Mozilla because of this, but apparently never applied the fix. This
> should never have gotten out the door; I seem to remember Erik agreeing
> to fix this and am very surprised that it's not fixed as promised.
>
> Safari 1.2:
> The "#" click incorrectly sends us to the bottom of the page; this is a
> serious usability problem.
> Otherwise seems to work correctly in infobox mode.
>
> Netscape 4.77:
> Just doesn't work. No infobox, no inline.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

:-(
Well, I'll copy these tests in our discussion page...
What else to say :-(

thanks for the test Brion. I notice some of your positive tests are
mentionned negative on fr ?


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia crash

body:
On Monday 01 March 2004 00:59, Arno M wrote:
> What has happened to the wikipedia?
>
> It seems to be down. I could not get in
> all day.

No problem from here. Try a traceroute.

phma


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Trading with the Enemy

body:
Delirium a ?crit:
> Anthere wrote:
>
>> I spent a good while looking for a reference that would support the
>> claim the government threatened the sun of the 45000 euros fine.
>>
>> In french, the number of references I found is laughable. In short,
>> the topic is not mentionned but by a couple of blog and forum. French
>> just do not know of that law, which is a good measure of how refrained
>> in their freedom of speech they feel.
>> Also, some discussions mentionning the law and the fine, indicated
>> that some people thought The Sun attack was a two level construction
>> First : insulting the president very badly
>> Second : spreading the word this is illegal to do so, hence that no
>> freedom of speech is allowed in France.
>
>
> That sounds likely, in light of some further reading.  It seems that the
> Sun were both trying to insult the President, and also trying to get
> themselves sued for it, which would've been very good for their public
> relations most likely.  In fact, after they didn't get sued for the
> "Chirac is a worm" one, they tried an even more outrageous story in
> which they caricatured Chirac as Saddam Hussein's prostitute, and their
> accompanying text seems similarly goading: "Last month we accused Chirac
> of behaving like a worm. Today we say to the people of France: we did
> not go far enough. Your president is not just a worm. He has behaved
> like a Paris harlot."
> (http://media.guardian.co.uk/iraqandthemedia/story/0,12823,918987,00.html).

I would dare to compare the Sun to some of our vandals.
If we are inclusionists, we tolerate their existence, however
problematic they might be (ie, we try to bear our vandal existence)
If not inclusionists, we try to have that tabloid close its business by
repeated huge fines (ie, we try to have the committee ban them)

Either way, none of this is a threat to freedom of speech.

Ihmo

> Which all makes it somewhat odd that the law still exists.  If it's not
> going to be enforced even in such egregious cases as this, why not just
> repeal it?
>
> -Mark

I guess when you are an old country, you have old laws. It is not
entirely impossible some of them are as old as begining of the XIXth
century.
And rather than to discuss them, and spent time on them, you just stop
referring to them and stop using them. They are just forgotten.

Meaningfull would be to see more exactly the context in which that law
was voted. If it was created and voted, there probably was an event that
explained it. I am no historian.


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Regarding MediaWiki:All_messages

body:
"Nick Pisarro" <nickp at aperture.com> wrote in
message news:fc.00030d6f0120cb6500030d6f0120cb65.120ce5d at aperture.com...
> Based on the unstable branch, the article "MediaWiki:All_messages", used
> for maintaining msg values is an interesting idea, but I believe this
> would be better built as a dynamically built page, i.e. as
> "special:all_messages", rather than as a static page in the database.
>
> This would get around the use of external links to edit the variables
> instead of internal links. Is this done to avoid the slow operation of
> resolving [[...]] at run time? The problem is that this makes the database
> non-portable between wiki sites.
>
> This causes a problem at our site because we update the database on a
> development server and then move it to our working server. It means I have
> to manually edit this page to change all the external links marked up on
> that page.
>
> It may also cause problems because WikiMedia distributes the wikipedia
> database. That database also will not be portable.
>
> I notice that on the wikipedia site, the similarly sized article
> "Wikipedia:MediaWiki custom messages" does use internal links and seems to
> resolve in about the same amount of time.
>
> We plan to actually change the variable '$wgServer' at run time. We want
> to present the server address differently if the user links to our site
> via our VPN intranet versus coming in through an external URL via the
> Internet. So, we rather not have the server domain defined in the
> database, but always dynamically determined.

Yes, I think a special page listing the namespace contents would be a good
idea. I'm not sure why I didn't do that to start with. But please note:
soon, all custom messages will be moved to a different namespace (probably
Template:) and only the internal messages will be in MediaWiki:.

> By making All_messages a special page, you can hide it to all but sysops,
> developers and/or bureaucrats, who are probably the ones who should see
> and maintain these variables.

No, all users should be able to view, comment on, and ideally edit the
MediaWiki namespace. Some messages cannot be edited by all users because
either they are written in unfiltered HTML, or because changing them could
make reversion difficult. Many non-sysops have made useful contributions to
the MediaWiki namespaces, usually asking a sysop to make a given change for
them.

> It also will mean that, that as a developer,
> if you add variables to "$wgAllMessagesEn" this page will be up to date
> without having to run an install procedure.
>
> I also notice this page is built from the variable '$wgAllMessagesEn'. If
> this were built as a 'special' page, it could build using the language the
> site actually represents.

Actually, the table is not simply built from $wgAllMessagesEn, it's built
from the localised language file. However, localised language files are
usually missing a few messages. The English language file is the only one
which can be relied upon to be up-to-date with the features. So the script
draws the keys from the English file, and the values from the local file if
the message exists, or the English file if it does not. This allows sysops
to maintain the interface translation, there's no need to update the
localised language files anymore except for the various items which are not
in the MediaWiki namespace.

-- Tim Starling


subject: [Wikitech-l] Cache stress-testing

body:
Word on the street is that load's going to be extra high today thanks
to some print exposure in Germany. I've taken the occasion to
stress-test Coronelli running its cache server under 2.6... Browne
(which was carrying all wikis but English) was starting to have its
periodic freezes, and at least one squid crash. I switched the .235
address over to Coronelli, so it's now handling _all_ incoming traffic.

So far it seems to be handling it smoothly; I'm not seeing the freezes
that browne had. We can switch one or both addresses back to browne if
needed.

[brion at coronelli brion]$ uptime
  09:57:36 up 2 days,  7:25,  8 users,  load average: 1.66, 1.78, 1.23

Some vmstat fragments:
procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- --system--
----cpu----
  r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in    cs us
sy id wa
  2  1   9996   8128 151056 884652   21    0   107   591 1358   294 13
42 35 10
  1  0   9996   9216 150652 884684   11    0   153    49 1552   408 12
44 39  5
  2  1   9996   8796 150748 885064    0    0    91   615 1016   214  7
42 39 12
  1  1   9996   8672 150784 885164    0    0    80   236  981   217  6
37 52  5
  1  6   9996   8416 150856 885364    0    0    69   784  835   249  5
34 12 49
  9  2   9996   8856 150916 885508    0    0    45   824  773   251  6
27 25 43
  0  0   9996   8368 150968 885796    0    0    87   303  871   235  8
31 32 29
  1  0   9996   7664 151048 886464    0    0    99   368 1121   293 13
40 40  7
  6  1   9996   9012 150896 885256    0    0    61   701 1358   303 14
43 36  7
  1  0   9996   8356 150980 886056    0    0   128     1 1590   458 15
41 38  5

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Fred Bauder

body:
Chinese are known to be wise...

Fred

> From: Sheng Jiong <sheng.jiong at hotpop.com>
> Reply-To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> Date: Mon, 01 Mar 2004 17:18:00 +0000
> To: intlwiki-l at wikimedia.org, wikipedia-l at wikimedia.org
> Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Chinese Wikipedia featured by 2 media
>
> Chinese users
> are less willing to contribute new articles.


subject: [Wikitech-l] In-place installation coming

body:
There've been lots of complaints about the MediaWiki installation
script over time, and with good reason! We don't actually use it for
Wikipedia since it doesn't fit our needs (centralized repository of
scripts for over a hundred wikis with near-identical config), nor does
it fit the needs of a lot of people trying to set up their own wikis,
who often don't have shell access to their web servers or root access
to the database.

I've checked in the beginnings of a new install script that doesn't
require shell access, root database access, or a separate place to put
the source files and the installation. You can just unzip the archive,
copy the directory tree to your web space, and run the configuration
script through the web like with any civilized PHP app with relatively
minimal fiddling.

At the moment it can create a configuration file that works with an
existing database, but doesn't yet do the database setup. I'll try to
get that merged in from the old command-line install script tonight or
tomorrow and release 1.2.0rc2 with it included.

(Tech note: we need to be sure that the maintenance scripts aren't
dangerous to have sitting around.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Cache stress-testing

body:
On Mar 1, 2004, at 01:59, Brion Vibber wrote:
> So far it seems to be handling it smoothly; I'm not seeing the freezes
> that browne had. We can switch one or both addresses back to browne if
> needed.

Coronelli's done just great. No crashing, no freezing.

We've gone ahead and installed 2.6 on Browne as well and have split the
load back up as before. Both are configured such that they (should)
boot back to 2.4 if they spontaneously reboot, but lacking any problems
we'll probably go ahead and set 2.6 as the default.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Rich Holton

subject: [Wikitech-l] post-parser for language specific modification

body:
--- Tomasz Wegrzanowski <taw at users.sf.net> wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 01, 2004 at 03:15:05PM +0900, Guillaume
> Blanchard wrote:
> > Can we have a per-language post-parser to be able
> to make language specific
> > modification on text before rendering?
> >
> > For example, in French typography, we need to put
> non-breaking space before
> > characters ':', ';', '?', '!', '?', after '?' and
> between numbers hundreds.
> >
> > Actually, we do that with HTML code   but it
> make text sometime very
> > ugly.
> >
> > For exemple :
> >
> >     Il dit : ? Bonjour ! ?
> >
> > Is actually write :
> >
> >     Il dit : ? Bonjour ! ?
> >
> > I don't know if non-breaking space is used in
> other language typography?
> >
> > An other solution may be to use a WikiSyntax for
> non-breaking space.
> >
> > For example _ or __ to be convert to
> >
> > The text above may become:
> >
> >     Il dit_: ?_Bonjour !_?
> >
> > Personally I prefer automatic conversion, and if
> you can make a hook after
> > the WikiSyntax parse, I can do the PHP function
> that add non-breaking space
> > where they must be.
>
> The idea sounds great, but it's very difficult to do
> right.
> Not everything on X Wikipedia is in language X - you
> have things in other languages,
> computer code, etc.
>
> I think it would be nice to convert -- to real dash
> and _ to  , but only
> if we can find good way for writing actual "--" and
> "_" when we want (and
> not only inside <pre> and <nowiki>). TeX-style \_
> would be absolutely the worst
> solution, and HTML-style &under; wouldn't be much
> better.

Along the same lines, I was wondering if such a
pre-parser could be used to address the issue of
browsers that break non-ascii characters when editing.
For such a browser, non-ascii characters could be
converted into numeric code equivalents (or html code,
eg. —) before presented for editing, and then
converted back after editing.

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Get better spam protection with Yahoo! Mail.
http://antispam.yahoo.com/tools


from_name: Constans, Camille (C.C.)

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wiki-images?

body:
>
>"Constans, Camille (C.C.)" <cconsta4 at ford.com> schrieb:
>> I like this idea, but it doesnt exist yet elsewhere ? It's true that
>> a wiki system would be nice.
>
>Well, I have not found anything quite like it. As said, the
>closest thing
>would be the GIMP Image Archive (http://gimp-savvy.com/PHOTO-ARCHIVE/),
>but that one has only specific sources (NASA, NOAA, USDA and
>FWS). I would
>like to give users the possibility to add images they found
>elsewhere (as
>long as they're PD or Copyleft). It also suffers the
>disadvantage of not
>having downloaded a context with the image, because of which
>it is often
>not clear to the volunteer describing the picture what is
>actually on it.
>
>A second similarity would be Google's image source, but there
>one cannot
>choose to get only images that are PD or Copyleft, but has to
>wade through
>masses of copyrighted images to see whether there is one that one is
>allowed to use.
>
>> But if a picture has nothing to do, how will you choose to keep or
>> delete it ? Will we use the same system as wikipedia for
>pages deletion ?
>
>That's a policy decision that is to be taken, but should not influence
>whether and how this is done otherwise. My own opinion would
>be that 'unused
>image' should not be a reason for deletion (on the other hand,
>unused images
>on Wikipedia might well be transwikied), but that one might
>set up a system
>to delete images that do not seem useful for Wikipedia or
>similar projects -
>Here I think in the first place of "yet another image of a..."-cases.
>

I see no pb to create a new one, but we'll have to create a new one for each language, no ?
And idea would be to upload pictures, and having the possibility to write in diffferent language about this picture.

Jimmy, what do you think about this new wiki like project ?


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Print "Wikipedia of thus-and-such"

body:
> From: Nikola Smolenski <smolensk at eunet.yu>
> If this becomes a serious issue, I think that it could be solved by
> publishing
> separate topical encyclopedias. For example, "Wikipedia of
> Informatics",
> "Wikipedia of Mathematics" and so on, for every topic that is complete.

Actually, I was thinking about this myself. I think it should be
seriously considered. Browsing Wikipedia it seems clear that
unevenness of coverage extends all the way up to the
most major subject areas.  Physical sciences, engineering,
and mathematics have a much higher quality level in general
than life science, medicine, and "the humanities" generally.

Restricting it to a topical encyclopedia has other advantages,
too. Cuts down the amount of work for the first publication,
makes it easier to put one of our many good feet forward,
makes for more interesting "sequels" than "second edition"
or "Wikipedia 2005," etc.

Maybe it's timid of me to point out that this also allows
sidestepping some of the areas most subject to POV disputes
(and minimizing the chances some egregious
troll-authored content might make it into print due to
some momentary lack of vigilance).

--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at world.std.com alternate:
dpbsmith at alum.mit.edu
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Use voting to condense (was: Concise Print
	Wikipediaisa Fork)

body:
No doubt the publishers of the print version will make some choices.
They might be interested in letting the Wikipedia community know which
article they want -- assuming they don't just take the whole thing.

Ed


from_name: Sean Barrett

subject: [WikiEN-l] [plautus@shaw.ca: signal-happy clown]

body:
> >Better get a new back channel now, the loudmouth Ed Poor blew this one.
> >
> Damn, Ed, look at the mess you made! This will delay our plans for
> weeks, if not month! ;-)

Ed, what's it going to take to get you to stick to the plan?
If I have to get the Pope to call the Reverend, I will!


from_name: Nikola Smolenski

body:
On Sunday 29 February 2004 22:41, Daniel P.B.Smith wrote:
> Yeah, right. I'm sure they'll understand why Phillips Exeter has an
> article and Choate (now Choate Rosemary Hall) doesn't.
>
> Why Bronx High School of Science has an article and La Guardia High
> School of Music and Art (of _Fame_ fame) does not.
>
> Why Cal Tech gets five paragraphs, Princeton gets seven, Harvard gets
> fourteen, and MIT gets thirty-six. (This means the section on MIT's
> _architecture_ is longer than the _entire article on Princeton._)
>
> Why Radiology has nine paragraphs and Cytology gets one sentence.
>
> Why Marianne Moore gets eight paragraphs and Vachel Lindsay gets
> "Vachel Lindsay (1879 - December 5, 1931) was an American poet born in
> Springfield, Illinois."
>
> It doesn't bother me at all on the Web, but I think the slogan
> "Wikipedia is not paper" may turn out to have an uncomfortable amount
> of truth in it.

If this becomes a serious issue, I think that it could be solved by publishing
separate topical encyclopedias. For example, "Wikipedia of Informatics",
"Wikipedia of Mathematics" and so on, for every topic that is complete.


from_name: Richard Stallman

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: New "GNU Free Media Licence"? - was: What would
	Richard Stallman say?

in_reply_to:
<200402291436.33925.news@RobertMichel.de> (message from Robert
	Michel on Sun, 29 Feb 2004 14:36:32 +0100)

references:
<E1AuAuo-0001oK-1j@fencepost.gnu.org>
	<200402232154.51816.news@RobertMichel.de>
	<E1Avgj7-0006Vm-0P@fencepost.gnu.org>
	<200402291436.33925.news@RobertMichel.de>

body:
    I would prefer license like GFDL for everythink, but for pictures where a
    right owner (e.g. institutes) has a higher commercial interrest Creative
    Commons licenses without the right for commercial use could be a working
    compromise for both interrests.

I think you have misunderstood the purpose of Wikipedia.  It is
supposed to be a free encyclopedia.  This is not a loosely formulated
"interest", it is a specific mission with a commitment to specific
ethical criteria.

    Because I have doubts about the Creative Commons licenses we
    should go on with Richards idea of "free use for educational
    purpose"

No such idea came from me!  On the contrary, I explained why this
would be a bad mistake.  If Wikipedia did this, it would not be a free
encyclopedia any more.

I am sure you mean well with these proposals, but proposing for
Wikipedia to throw away its mission and its commitments is not
the way to be helpful.


from_name: Robert Graham Merkel

subject: [WikiEN-l] Print encyclopedia and contracts...

body:
On Sun, Feb 29, 2004 at 10:59:57AM -0800, wikien-l-request at Wikipedia.org wrote:
> Date: Sun, 29 Feb 2004 10:51:34 -0800 (PST)
> From: Geoff Burling <llywrch at agora.rdrop.com>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Concise Print Wikipedia (WARNING)
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0402291044550.9514-100000 at joan.burling.com>
> Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
>
> On Sat, 28 Feb 2004, zero 0000 wrote:
> >
> > I haven't really been paying attention, but it seems like the
> > possibility of a printed snapshot of Wikipedia is under discussion.
> >
> > I hope you are all very very VERY familiar with the disastrous
> > experiences of Eric Weisstein when he gave a publisher permission to
> > print a snapshot of his online mathematics encyclopedia.
> >
> > See  http://mathworld.wolfram.com/docs/legal.html .
> >
> My understanding of this case was that Weisstein thought he was selling
> the rights to only _ONE_ version of his online mathematics encyclopedia,
> when the lawyers at Chemical Rubber actually snuck language into his
> contract that enabled them to claim _ALL_ of his encyclopedia.
>
> I assume that Jimbo, being a somewhat successful businessman, usually
> has any contract he considers signing reviewed first by a lawyer. In this
> case, I hope he picks a lawyer familiar with publishing law.
>
> Twenty years ago, when I was considering a career in writing, I had the
> impression that publishers have an ethical standard higher than the music
> industry (where an artist can sell a million copies of an album, & still
> make less money than had she/he worked at McDonald's). I am no longer so
> sure of that impression.
>

Jimbo is not in a position to mistakenly sell the exclusive rights to
the Wikipedia, due to the GNU FDL, which he chose when the project
was initiated.

Unless there's some end run around its provisions...and in the unlikely
event that there is, we're in bigger trouble than one specific print
proposal.

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

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


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Trading with the Enemy

body:
Anthere wrote:
> And rather than to discuss them, and spent time on them, you just stop
> referring to them and stop using them. They are just forgotten.

The problem is that laws restricting the freedom of speech in France
are not all forgotten, but are prosecuted with some regularity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brigitte_Bardot

--Jimbo


from_name: Nick Pisarro

subject: [Wikitech-l] Regarding MediaWiki:All_messages

body:
Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org> writes:
>Yes, I think a special page listing the namespace contents would be a good
>idea. I'm not sure why I didn't do that to start with. But please note:
>soon, all custom messages will be moved to a different namespace (probably
>Template:) and only the internal messages will be in MediaWiki:.
>
>> By making All_messages a special page, you can hide it to all but
>sysops,
>> developers and/or bureaucrats, who are probably the ones who should see
>> and maintain these variables.

I just wrote and uploaded a "SpecialAllmessages.php" page. It is slow to
generate, but I do not know if it is significantly better or worse than
loading "MediaWiki:All_messages".

Rows, where the current text is different than the default text, are shown
with a different background color.

If this flies, 'InitialiseMessages.inc' should be modified not to generate
"MediaWiki:All_messages" and perhaps should delete it out of existing
databases.

I just noticed "MediaWiki" is a constant in the PHP file. This should be
generalized.
>
>No, all users should be able to view, comment on, and ideally edit the
>MediaWiki namespace. Some messages cannot be edited by all users because
>either they are written in unfiltered HTML, or because changing them could
>make reversion difficult. Many non-sysops have made useful contributions
>to
>the MediaWiki namespaces, usually asking a sysop to make a given change
>for
>them.

I require that a user must be a Sysop because it is so slow to generate
this page. Someone may want to move it to more general access. It may be
possible to speed up generation of this page, though not without making it
more difficult to maintain.

Nick Pisarro


from_name: Timwi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Bug tracker

body:
Ivan Krstic wrote:

> Brion Vibber wrote:
>
>> If someone would like to commit to being Keeper of the WikiBugs and
>> herd the necessary cats, then I'm all in favor of giving it a try.
>
> I might be willing to take this on; I'd just like a sound understanding
> of what cats you're specifically referring to herding. Other than the
> keeptrack-assign-verify-close process, what else do you feel would need
> to be done?

Some of the almost essential features of BugZilla include:
* Severity and/or priority
* Keywords (every BugZilla installation has a pre-defined set of them)
* Status (unconfirmed, new, assigned, resolved, verified, closed)
* Resolution (if the status is "resolved", was it "fixed", "invalid",
   "duplicate" (if so, of what other bug), "wontfix", "worksforme", etc.)
* SEARCHING! Searching for combinations of all of these criteria, plus
   when a bug was last changed, when it was opened, by who, etc.etc.

Some of the not-so-essential-but-highly-useful features:
* CC lists. (Getting e-mailed with every change to a bug.)
* Even more SEARCHING! Complex queries for highly specific purposes.

I can't think of more for now, but there's probably more :-)

I can see all of these implementable in a Wiki (with e-mail CC lists
replaced by watchlists), EXCEPT FOR SEARCHING. Unfortunately, searching
is the most important of all. This is why I don't think it's feasible to
use a Wiki for this.

Of course, we could also have some sort of hybrid system. Discuss bugs
on the Wiki, but keep track of their status on BugZilla.

Just a suggestion,
Timwi


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] Parser implementation submitted to HEAD

body:
Jens Frank wrote:

>On Sun, Feb 29, 2004 at 12:17:42PM +0100, Magnus Manske wrote:
>
>
>>Jens Frank wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Hi,
>>>
>>>a new parser for internal links [[...]] and ''quotes''
>>>has been committed to cvs HEAD.
>>>
>>>
>>Cool, but it appears to have killed the category feature I revived in
>>HEAD a few days ago. I'll try to fix that today.
>>
>>
>
>How can I test this feature? What does it do?
>
>
It's supposed to work like this:
1. Set "$wgUseCategoryMagic = true" in settings
2. Write "[[category:Stuff]]" in an article (say, [[xyz]])
3. "Categories: Stuff" (with link to [[Category:Stuff]]) will appear as
first line in the article
4. On [[Category:Stuff]] (save a summy text there) all articles that
link to that category (in this case, [[xyz]]) will be listed

I didn't get around to fix it yesterday; maybe later today, if you don't
beat me to it.

Magnus


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: identification

body:
Angela wrote:

> This is so you can have half of the login message
> below the login box if you want to. If you don't want
> it,
> just replace "<loginend>" with " " at
> http://fr.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=MediaWiki:Loginend.

Does it need an   at all? ;-)


from_name: Michael Barnathan

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Wikipedia Crash

body:
The server does seem to be having some trouble. My request is reaching
the server, but the server is refusing it. Then again, it just started a
few minutes ago, so it could just be countermeasures against high CPU
load or something.


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Use voting to condense (was: Concise Print Wikipedia is
	a Fork)

body:
How about letting users vote on each article?

Here's one such scheme of the top of my head, which might be used with a
little tweaking.

1. Start with zero articles in the print version.

2. Any user can "vote" for an article to be included in the print
version.

2a. Put your votes on the talk page, or a "\print" sub-page

3. If anyone disagrees, then we need discussion and a tally.

4. Any page with 80% or higher vote /supporting/ inclusion, goes to the
print version.

Ed Poor, "trying to compromise" as www.googlism.com would say


subject: [Wikitech-l] Separating article and meta-content

body:
I believe we need to start thinking about ways to better separate content
and metadata. Making them editable separately, and perhaps making either
type of content filterable, gives us room for expansion in the meta realm
without impacting editability for users who just want the plain text.

Current meta-tags:
* interlanguage links
* __NOTOC__
* __NOEDITSECTION__
* category links (experimental)

Possible future meta-tags:
* <editnote> - shown on top of the edit box during editing, e.g. "Please
describe new events in the present tense"
* <sizelimit> - for auto-archiving or size warnings
* __NOCACHE__
* __NOTITLE__, __NOSUBTITLE__ for navigational pages, Main Page
* [[Edition=Print]] and other name=value tags
* .. anything else that would be useful, but clutter on the article page

I see two possibilities, one of which I call the hackish approach and the
other the clean approach.

== The hackish approach ==

Add a new tag, called <meta>. Content within <meta>..</meta> is shown in a
separate window, like this:

<pre>
 _________________________________________
|                                         |
| The PURINA brand of dogfood is very     |
| tasty. Critics allege that it is made   |
| of harvested souls from children        |
| in the third world.                     |
|_________________________________________|
 _________________________________________
| [[de:Fnord]] [[simple:Wormwood]]        |
| __NOTOC__ [[Category:Dogfood]]          |
| <editnote>Do not edit after dark</editn |
|_________________________________________|
[ SAVE ] [ PREVIEW ]
</pre>

There would be an option to hide meta-information during editing, and one
to use the old (single-window) behavior.

The meta-content would be part of the regular cur_text, it would be simply
concatenated with it / split away from it on demand.

Advantages:
* Relatively easy to implement
* single diffs for edits that change meta content and article content

Disadvantages:
* regular editing can still cause edit conflicts with meta-editing
* no easy filtering of meta-editing from RC, diffs

== The clean approach ==

It would of course be cleaner to separate meta-content in the database. If
we desire to do this, we should do it as part of the pending database
redesign. In this case we would have a text blob and a meta blob which
could be edited separately without conflicts. Any edit of a text or meta
blob would result in an entry in the recent changes log.

The most problematic effect of this change would probably be on the page
history. Again, the most logical approach would be to list a change to
either meta or article-content in the history, but perhaps in separate
color.

Disadavantage:
* requires table redesign, might affect quite a few pages
* more difficult but not impossible to maintain single window behavior
* complicates diffs, esp. summary diffs

Advantages:
* makes it easy to filter meta-edits from RC, history
* meta-edits cannot cause edit conflicts with regular ones
* storing and retrieving the different types of data is a lot easier and
less error-prone

== Thoughts? ==

I think before we go any further into the meta area, we need to clean up
the separation, otherwise we'll end up confusing newbies. I'd appreciate
feedback on how to do this.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikitech-l] Making it real

body:
We would need to know the articles you're going to edit to make it realistic
with some edit warring and reverting... I'm sure your audience would be
amused by the Polish-German name nonsense.

Fred

> From: Kurt Jansson <jansson at gmx.net>
> Reply-To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Mon, 01 Mar 2004 17:30:29 +0100
> To: "wikitech-l at wikipedia.org" <wikitech-l at wikipedia.org>
> Subject: [Wikitech-l] please no experiments on March 6th
>
> I'd like to edit some Wikipedia articles on March 6th from about 9 to 15
> o'clock CET (8-14 UTC), and I'd like to do it smooth. So please make
> sure that the servers are in top condition and everything's running
> really fast.
>
> You think that I'm sounding a bit selfish? You're right, but the problem
> is that I'll be in a German tv-studio (3sat) at that time. :-) Please
> don't make me sweat and put off experiments until the weekend. Thanks!
>
>
> Kurt
>
> --
> http://leihnetzwerk.de -- Vielleicht hat Dein Nachbar das Buch, das Du
> schon immer lesen wolltest - leih es Dir aus!
> http://wikipedia.de    -- Die freie Enzyklop?die
> http://jansson.de      -- Icke
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


subject: [Wikitech-l] Sysop/bureaucrat bug

body:
The web page for making a user into a sysop or bureaucrat has two
glitches.

1. If you make a user a sysop who is already a sysop, you get a
perplexing error message like "can't make him a sysop". It should either
report success, like "he's a sysop"; or report the redundant action,
like "he already was a sysop".

2. When you make a sysop into a bureaucrat, it should NOT say "User
'Optim' is now a sysop" because he already WAS one. It should say that
he's now a BUREAUCRAT.

Ed Poor
Developer, Bureaucrat, Sysop
Wikien-l Admin
...and all around nice guy :-)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Mess (was: signal-happy)

body:
What mess? If there are any articles needing care, please list them here
or on my talk page.

Uncle Ed


from_name: Charles Matthews

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Trading with the Enemy

body:
Delirium wrote

> I don't care all that much one way or the other, personally, but I think
> the main point was that if we're going to suggest that the servers need
> to be moved out of the US because of a theoretical possibility of legal
> troubles over copyediting Iranian posts, then we need to be concerned
> about all sorts of other theoretical possibilities in other countries,
> including Official Secrets Acts, laws about insulting presidents, and so
on.

The comments by RickK were aimed at supposed restrictions on freedom of
speech, or freedom of publication, or whatever.  It is a more than
theoretical possibility that web sites based anywhere might have *some*
restriction on content based on the laws of the land.  But why is this is
considered an argument?  Locating servers that were theoretically subject to
the UK's Official Secrets Act, which is a 'non-freedom of information'
measure, might well be better than locating them in a USA where a wiki might
theoretically might have to self-police to avoid any 'trading with the
enemy' under the wide definition.  After all, those posting official secrets
to a web site probably know damn well they are doing that; while someone
innocently editing a page that happened to be written by an Iranian gets
'criminalised' unwittingly.

Charles


subject: [WikiEN-l] New bureaucrats

body:
I gave Optim and Pakaran bureaucrat rights.

There are now 10 Wikipedians listed at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bureaucrats

Uncle Ed


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Guillaume Blanchard wrote:

>In my point of view, meta tag must be separate to the article text. It is
>very to disturbing to novice users.
>
>The clean approach is the better approach for me. About how editing meta tag
>part, a separate windows may be enough first, but the best may be to have a
>check box list under article edit box for tags. For language links, it's a
>little bit more difficult. :o/
>
Check boxes would not be enough for categories.

Ec


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

body:
On Mon, Mar 01, 2004 at 03:15:05PM +0900, Guillaume Blanchard wrote:
> Can we have a per-language post-parser to be able to make language specific
> modification on text before rendering?
>
> For example, in French typography, we need to put non-breaking space before
> characters ':', ';', '?', '!', '?', after '?' and between numbers hundreds.
>
> Actually, we do that with HTML code   but it make text sometime very
> ugly.
>
> For exemple :
>
>     Il dit : ? Bonjour ! ?
>
> Is actually write :
>
>     Il dit : ? Bonjour ! ?
>
> I don't know if non-breaking space is used in other language typography?
>
> An other solution may be to use a WikiSyntax for non-breaking space.
>
> For example _ or __ to be convert to
>
> The text above may become:
>
>     Il dit_: ?_Bonjour !_?
>
> Personally I prefer automatic conversion, and if you can make a hook after
> the WikiSyntax parse, I can do the PHP function that add non-breaking space
> where they must be.

The idea sounds great, but it's very difficult to do right.
Not everything on X Wikipedia is in language X - you have things in other languages,
computer code, etc.

I think it would be nice to convert -- to real dash and _ to  , but only
if we can find good way for writing actual "--" and "_" when we want (and
not only inside <pre> and <nowiki>). TeX-style \_ would be absolutely the worst
solution, and HTML-style &under; wouldn't be much better.


body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>----- Forwarded message from Plautus Satire <plautus at shaw.ca> -----
>
>Better get a new back channel now, the loudmouth Ed Poor blew this one.
>
>
>
Damn, Ed, look at the mess you made! This will delay our plans for
weeks, if not month! ;-)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Eclecticology for admin

body:
User:172 nominated Ec for admin, but the proposal attracted instant
opposition.

I'm perplexed: I never even noticed he /wasn't/ an admin, and I don't
know what all the fuss is about. Something to do with "deletionism" vs.
"inclusionism" I guess....

Ed Poor, aka Uncle Ed


from_name: Stan Shebs

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Trading with the Enemy

body:
Caroline Ford wrote:

> Poor, Edmund W wrote:
>
>> I think Reporters Without Borders is entitled to their P.O.V. about
>> press freedom, but they are very likely wrong about the U.S.
>> No one is imprisoned in the U.S. for uncovering government corruption or
>> for opposing administration policy.
>> Journalists who claim to have information on crimes but who claim they
>> have some kind of "Journalists Right" to "protect sources" are sometimes
>> jailed, but this is because the journalists are /obstructing/ justice,
>> not because they are /victims/ of injustice.
>> Anyway, the Wikipedia won't be endorsing or condemning the RWB rankings,
>> and the articl on [[freedom of the press]] should make it clear to
>> readers that the US is widely regarded as tops in press freedom, having
>> practically pioneered the concept.
>>
>> Ed Poor
>> _______________________________________________
>> WikiEN-l mailing list
>> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
>> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>>
>>
>>
> Even if it isn't? How much money do you need to publish a paper in the
> US anyway?

Inkjets are under $100 I think, and if that's too much, there's always
Kinko's.
And don't sneer, it's been done a lot by alternative outlets. Of course,
the Web
is so much cheaper now that only a handful of older technophobes still use
dead-tree media. 1/2 :-)

Stan


from_name: Arno M

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia crash

body:
What has happened to the wikipedia?

It seems to be down. I could not get in
all day.

____________________________________________________________
Find what you are looking for with the Lycos Yellow Pages
http://r.lycos.com/r/yp_emailfooter/http://yellowpages.lycos.com/default.asp?SRC=lycos10
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from_name: Nathan Russell

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Trading with the Enemy

body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
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Jimmy Wales wrote:
| Anthere wrote:
|
|>And rather than to discuss them, and spent time on them, you just stop
|>referring to them and stop using them. They are just forgotten.
|
|
| The problem is that laws restricting the freedom of speech in France
| are not all forgotten, but are prosecuted with some regularity.
|
| http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brigitte_Bardot
|
| --Jimbo

That was a civil lawsuit.  If I call you a child molestor, or call
someone a ni**** here, and it causes emotional harm or constitutes
libel, they can most definately sue me.  I doubt there's any democracy
where that isn't the case.

On the other hand, you're unlikely to get sued here for holding a KKK
parade or whatever, but that's more a matter of what the judicial
standards are.  Someone could certainly try to sue every pro-life
demonstrator, etc, in their town, but I doubt they'd get far.

Nathan
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body:
I believe we have to separate the internal from the visual
representation here.

Wiki is about ease of use. Two edit windows instead of one will do
nicely. Things with drop-down, list and check boxes scare newbies away
easily.

IMHO, we should leave the meta information in the article text for now,
but display them in two different edit boxes, and paste them together
again upon saving.

Later, we can change the internal representation in the database, while
keeping the "easy" display.

Magnus

Erik Moeller wrote:

>I believe we need to start thinking about ways to better separate content
>and metadata. Making them editable separately, and perhaps making either
>type of content filterable, gives us room for expansion in the meta realm
>without impacting editability for users who just want the plain text.
>
>Current meta-tags:
>* interlanguage links
>* __NOTOC__
>* __NOEDITSECTION__
>* category links (experimental)
>
>Possible future meta-tags:
>* <editnote> - shown on top of the edit box during editing, e.g. "Please
>describe new events in the present tense"
>* <sizelimit> - for auto-archiving or size warnings
>* __NOCACHE__
>* __NOTITLE__, __NOSUBTITLE__ for navigational pages, Main Page
>* [[Edition=Print]] and other name=value tags
>* .. anything else that would be useful, but clutter on the article page
>
>I see two possibilities, one of which I call the hackish approach and the
>other the clean approach.
>
>== The hackish approach ==
>
>Add a new tag, called <meta>. Content within <meta>..</meta> is shown in a
>separate window, like this:
>
>

> _________________________________________
>|                                         |
>| The PURINA brand of dogfood is very     |
>| tasty. Critics allege that it is made   |
>| of harvested souls from children        |
>| in the third world.                     |
>|_________________________________________|
> _________________________________________
>| [[de:Fnord]] [[simple:Wormwood]]        |
>| __NOTOC__ [[Category:Dogfood]]          |
>| <editnote>Do not edit after dark</editn |
>|_________________________________________|
>[ SAVE ] [ PREVIEW ]
>

>
>There would be an option to hide meta-information during editing, and one
>to use the old (single-window) behavior.
>
>The meta-content would be part of the regular cur_text, it would be simply
>concatenated with it / split away from it on demand.
>
>Advantages:
>* Relatively easy to implement
>* single diffs for edits that change meta content and article content
>
>Disadvantages:
>* regular editing can still cause edit conflicts with meta-editing
>* no easy filtering of meta-editing from RC, diffs
>
>== The clean approach ==
>
>It would of course be cleaner to separate meta-content in the database. If
>we desire to do this, we should do it as part of the pending database
>redesign. In this case we would have a text blob and a meta blob which
>could be edited separately without conflicts. Any edit of a text or meta
>blob would result in an entry in the recent changes log.
>
>The most problematic effect of this change would probably be on the page
>history. Again, the most logical approach would be to list a change to
>either meta or article-content in the history, but perhaps in separate
>color.
>
>Disadavantage:
>* requires table redesign, might affect quite a few pages
>* more difficult but not impossible to maintain single window behavior
>* complicates diffs, esp. summary diffs
>
>Advantages:
>* makes it easy to filter meta-edits from RC, history
>* meta-edits cannot cause edit conflicts with regular ones
>* storing and retrieving the different types of data is a lot easier and
>less error-prone
>
>== Thoughts? ==
>
>I think before we go any further into the meta area, we need to clean up
>the separation, otherwise we'll end up confusing newbies. I'd appreciate
>feedback on how to do this.
>
>Regards,
>
>Erik
>_______________________________________________
>Wikitech-l mailing list
>Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Avoid personal remarks

body:
Rick and Charles,

Trade barbs somewhere else, please. This list is for discussing ways of
improving Wikipedia.

Ed Poor
Wikien-l Admin


subject: [WikiEN-l] No forks!

body:
I like Daniel Mayer's ideas about the print edition of Wikipedia. I hope
he'll work closely with Jimbo on this, with the publishers.

"You have my proxy, Mav."

Ed Poor, aka Uncle Ed


from_name: Eric Demolli

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Trading with the Enemy

body:
It's very simple :
If I write "Jacques Chirac est un .....bip..." it's an insult, it's illegal.
If I write "Jacques Chirac est le pr?sident le plus nul que la France a
connu, sa politique est d?bile." it's a critic, it's legal.
Insulting anyone is illegal in France, for instance.  If I write "Anthere
est une ...bip..." she can sue me.
The penalty is just worse for the President (and not for the whole
governement).
This law is never applied since Valery Giscard d'Estaing promised not sdue
anyone. I don't think any President will go back as long as France remains a
democracy. Thus if you want to insult someone in France insult the President
it's less  risky than insulting anyone else.

Eric Demolli

----- Original Message -----
From: "Anthere" <anthere8 at yahoo.com>
To: <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
Sent: Sunday, February 29, 2004 4:20 AM
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Trading with the Enemy

>
>
> Delirium a ?crit:
> > Anthere wrote:
> >
> >>
> >>
> >> Rick a ?crit:
> >>
> >>> Where would you suggest?  In France, it's illegal to criticize the
> >>> government.  In Germany, it's illegal to display Nazi memorabilia.
> >>> In the UK there's the Official Secrets Act to deal with.
> >>>
> >>> RickK
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> May I *seriously* suggest that you consider avoiding libel and
> >> comments that might anger your peers RickK ?
> >
> >
> > Well, according to the World Press Freedom Committee's document "Insult
> > Laws: A Insult to Press Freedom"
> >
(http://www.wpfc.org/site/docs/pdf/Publications/Insult%20Laws-An%20Insult%20
to%20Press%20Freedom-1996%20booklet.pdf):
> >
> > "...the primary form of this crime became known as 'insult to the
> > president of the republic,' whose classic form was set in the French
> > press law of 1881.  It remains the basic press legislation in France
> > today.  The 1881 law also carries serious penalties for insulting
> > foreign chiefs of state, foreign ministers or ambassadors of friendly
> > countries, and official bodies like parliament, the judiciary, and armed
> > forces... Similar provisions are on the books in Austria, Germany, the
> > Netherlands, Norway, and Spain."
> >
> > The report goes on to note that the French law was last actually used
> > under Charles de Gaulle in the 1960s, when a spectator was arrested for
> > crying out "hoo hoo" at him.  More recently the Sun was threatened with
> > a lawsuit for insulting Chirac, though this never materialized.
> >
> > The report also notes that the French law has served as an example for
> > many laws in other countries, especially less-developed countries, and
> > especially former French colonies, that *are* enforced, and those
> > countries defend their law under "well, France has such laws, so why
> > shouldn't we?"
> >
> > So "illegal to criticize" is going too far, but it's not entirely
> > without basis either.
> >
> > -Mark
>
> So...wait a minute here...
>
> If I understand well...
>
> There is a law that says it is illegal to criticize the french governement
>
> That law was used only *once* in 125 years.
>
> It was exactly *44* years ago
>
> And *we* should be considered responsible that freedom of speech is
> *not* respected in *other* countries, because other countries took
> example on us ?
>
> And *that* would be an argument to claim France does not respect freedom
> of speech and should not host Wikipedia ?
>
> And *this* is not meant to be insulting ?
>
> Please, consider this very carefully
>
>
http://www.freedomhouse.org/research/freeworld/2003/countryratings/france.htm
> http://www.freedomhouse.org/research/freeworld/2003/countryratings/usa.htm
>
> Compare
>
http://www.freedomhouse.org/research/freeworld/2003/countryratings/israel-israeliadmin.htm
>
> And consider
> http://www.amnestyusa.org/waronterror/guantanamo/index.html
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


from_name: Dan Miller

subject: [WikiEN-l] Good news!

body:
I just called the Democratic National Committee to ask
if they would be willing to licence some of their
images under the GFDL (I was hoping to get a photo for
[[Terry McAuliffe]]).  Anyway, the person I spoke to
said that "We probably won't have any problems
licencing them to you", but wanted it in writing.  So,
I have a question regarding image copyright.

Does an email constitute permission to use these? And
should I store it? That is, what format is necessary
for the permission?

The even better news is this: when I called, I
launched into my little shpiel about how "I'm calling
on behalf of the Wikipedia, we're trying to put
together a free-content encyclopedia".  He stopped me
in the middle of my sentence and said "Of course I've
heard of the Wikipedia."  It kind of made my day.

Meelar

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Get better spam protection with Yahoo! Mail.
http://antispam.yahoo.com/tools


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Trading with the Enemy

body:
Stan Shebs wrote:

> Caroline Ford wrote:
>
>> Even if it isn't? How much money do you need to publish a paper in
>> the US anyway?
>
>
> Inkjets are under $100 I think, and if that's too much, there's always
> Kinko's.
> And don't sneer, it's been done a lot by alternative outlets. Of
> course, the Web
> is so much cheaper now that only a handful of older technophobes still
> use
> dead-tree media. 1/2 :-)

That $100 does not take into account the price of the ink. :-)

Ec


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wiki-images?

body:
"Constans, Camille (C.C.)" <cconsta4 at ford.com> schrieb:

> I see no pb to create a new one, but we'll have to create a new one for each language, no ?

No, that would at least not be my idea. I'd rather see a single one,
otherwise we will still be doing the same work over and over again in
the various languages, rather than find new things to include.

> And idea would be to upload pictures, and having the possibility to write in diffferent language about this picture.

That sounds much better. Personally I would just use English, and hope
that the majority of people looking for images knows enough English to
use that text, but if someone else wants to do antother language, that's
fine with me too.

Andre


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Trading with the Enemy

body:
I think Reporters Without Borders is entitled to their P.O.V. about
press freedom, but they are very likely wrong about the U.S.

No one is imprisoned in the U.S. for uncovering government corruption or
for opposing administration policy.

Journalists who claim to have information on crimes but who claim they
have some kind of "Journalists Right" to "protect sources" are sometimes
jailed, but this is because the journalists are /obstructing/ justice,
not because they are /victims/ of injustice.

Anyway, the Wikipedia won't be endorsing or condemning the RWB rankings,
and the articl on [[freedom of the press]] should make it clear to
readers that the US is widely regarded as tops in press freedom, having
practically pioneered the concept.

Ed Poor


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Good news

body:
Caroline Ford wrote:

>Fabulous!
>But licensing them to us, is not the same as
>licensing under the
>GFDL...

>Caroline

I know.  That's why I'm trying to get a good template
for a letter or email, explaining the GFDL and
assorted legal info.  Is such a thing available
somewhere, or should I just steer them to
[[Wikipedia:Copyrights]]?

Meelar

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Get better spam protection with Yahoo! Mail.
http://antispam.yahoo.com/tools


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Use voting to condense (was: Concise Print Wikipedia
	isa Fork)

body:
Ed Poor wrote

>How about letting users vote on each article?

I don't see how one can filter 200000 articles this way - out by two orders
of magnitude for that.

Charles


from_name: Guillaume Blanchard

body:
Can we have a per-language post-parser to be able to make language specific
modification on text before rendering?

For example, in French typography, we need to put non-breaking space before
characters ':', ';', '?', '!', '?', after '?' and between numbers hundreds.

Actually, we do that with HTML code   but it make text sometime very
ugly.

For exemple :

    Il dit : ? Bonjour ! ?

Is actually write :

    Il dit : ? Bonjour ! ?

I don't know if non-breaking space is used in other language typography?

An other solution may be to use a WikiSyntax for non-breaking space.

For example _ or __ to be convert to

The text above may become:

    Il dit_: ?_Bonjour !_?

Personally I prefer automatic conversion, and if you can make a hook after
the WikiSyntax parse, I can do the PHP function that add non-breaking space
where they must be.

Aoineko


from_name: John C. Penta

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Trading with the Enemy

body:
----- Original Message -----
From: Gareth Owen <wiki at gwowen.freeserve.co.uk>
Date: Monday, March 1, 2004 12:47 pm
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: Trading with the Enemy

> Rick <giantsrick13 at yahoo.com> writes:
> > Rick a ?crit:
> > > Where would you suggest? In France, it's illegal to criticize
> the
> > > government. In Germany, it's illegal to display Nazi
> memorabilia. In
> > > the UK there's the Official Secrets Act to deal with.
> > >
> > I am seriously asking what is wrong with what I posted here.
> Please explain
> > what I said that angered you, and what is libelous?
>
> Well, you seem pretty ignorant of the scope of the Official
> Secrets Act for a
> start.  Let me quote Section I for the gist:
>
> 1. (1) A person who is or has been?
>     (a) a member of the security and intelligence services; or
>     (b) a person notified that he is subject to the provisions
>         of this subsection,
> is guilty of an offence if without lawful authority he discloses any
> information, document or other article relating to security or
> intelligence which is or has been in his possession by virtue of his
> position as a member of any of those services
>
> So (i) It applies to employees of the government
>   (ii) Its about prevent the dissemination of classified
> information
>
> Its applicability to wikipedia is precisely nil, unless you have
> reason to
> believe British security personnel are posting classified information.
>
> Do the laws that convicted [[Robert Hanssen]] impinge on
> wikipedia's operation?

No. Similar with regards to the UK's Official Secrets Act, AFAIK, too.

You simply can *not* become subject to security restrictions, Official Secrets Act(s), etc. without knowing it.

Sorry, no. Government does NOT work that way. If you're subject to such an act, you'll *know*; You will inevitably have to complete a small mountain of paperwork to recieve access to subject information.*

Do the laws that [[Robert Hanssen]] was convicted under affect Wiki?

Do the laws that [[Katherine Gun]] was charged under affect Wiki?

In both cases, no.

In order for them to, you would have to KNOW you were recieving classified information. In the US and the UK (and in most other NATO countries, AFAIK), it's hard NOT to know: Classification markings are very, very hard to miss.

In such a situation, you really have to be impossibly stupid to recieve such information and NOT know it.

John
---
*One exception applies, that I know of: Oddly, members of the US House and Senate don't need security clearances as such. They don't go through the whole mountain of forms, the Single Scope Background Investigation, etc, etc. Instead, they're bound by an oath taken when they join the appropriate committee (or assume leadership positions like Speaker, Senate Majority Leader, Senate Minority Leader, or House Minority Leader). It's odd, but (amazingly, to those who know much about American government) it works; Leaks of classified information from the committees (particularly the intelligence oversight committees) have been rare.


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] wikipedia.com DNS issues

body:
There've been some glitches in transferring wikipedia.com to the new
DNS regime, which hopefully should be resolved (har har) soon.

Valuable lesson about life: beware register.com

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: post-parser for language specific modification

body:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 01, 2004 at 07:54:35PM +0900, Guillaume Blanchard wrote:
>
>>What about a post-parse function you may add in default language.php and
>>that each language may derive to make language specific modification. For
>>French, it may be very basic function: replace ' !' by ' !' and so on.
>
> Never written article about programming ?

Where would it ever matter to have a non-breaking space, which is
visually indistinguishable from an ordinary space?


subject: [WikiEN-l] Eclecticology for admin

body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:

>User:172 nominated Ec for admin, but the proposal attracted instant
>opposition.
>
>I'm perplexed: I never even noticed he /wasn't/ an admin, and I don't
>know what all the fuss is about. Something to do with "deletionism" vs.
>"inclusionism" I guess....
>
I've thanked 172.  When I became a Wiktionary sysop more than a year I
made a point of saying that I did NOT want to become a Wikipedia.  At
that time one of the few requirements was that a person be subscribed to
the mailing list.  I am still not seeking to be a Wikipedia sysop.  (I
did request becoming a Wikisource and Wiktionary bureaucrat on Tim
Starling's Meta talk page, but that is a different matter, which has
nothing to do with Wikipedia as such.)

The "deletionism" vs. "inclusionism" issue is certainly a significant
part of the debate, but so too has been my hostility to the VfD process
that I have refused to recognize.  We have a certain gang of people who
find delight in making up rules that they feel they should also enforce;
some others of us would be happier participating in useful contributions
instead of endless debates about rules.  This came to a head between
Angela and me when, in the early days of Wikisource, she sought to
transfer a number of these "decided" rules to Wikisource before any
discussion took place.  As a part of the ongoing dispute she had herself
desysoped on Jan. 16, and life there has been calm and co-operative ever
since.

Angela and I did have a hot exchange on the mailing list which resulted
in an agreement that we did not trust each other's activities.  I was
content with that, and certainly have not sought to further seek out
disputes with her, being happy to have the dispute behind me.  Since my
most recent activities have been focused in Wikisource this has not been
difficult in the light of her decision to no longer show a significant
presence there.  The way that she has led the charge against the
nomination by 172 suggests that she wants to maintain a grudge battle

I was amused that among the opposing voices were two user names that I
didn't recognize at all.

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Trading with the Enemy

body:
----- Original Message -----
From: Gareth Owen <wiki at gwowen.freeserve.co.uk>
Date: Monday, March 1, 2004 12:47 pm
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: Trading with the Enemy

> So (i) It applies to employees of the government
>   (ii) Its about prevent the dissemination of classified
> information

Oh, something I forgot. Gareth is, I think, not entirely correct.

If I remember correctly, such provisions also apply to contractors and such. It's not explicitly said, but that's basically how the courts (on both sides of the Atlantic) have generally interpreted such laws.

The rule of thumb is: It applies if you do "government work", whether you're employed directly by them or not. The operative factor is: Does your work possibly give you access to classified information, on purpose or not? If the answer is yes, government secrets laws apply.

Are people prosecuted under them very often? No. They have been, though, and can easily be in the future; The working reality, however, is that most cases can be dealt with administratively, and don't require going through a criminal proceeding. They save the handcuffs for actual spies, or people who flaunt their violations.

One reason why I disagree with the British decision not to prosecute [[Katherine Gun]], actually. The recipient of classified information can't know all of the factors involved in classifying the information, or all of the possible effects, and thus has no right to decide to release such information. There can't be exceptions or allowances for mercy when someone breaks the trust involved with classified information. You know what you're getting into when you work with it, and you don't *have* to do the job; If you're going to do such work, it should be crystal clear that you don't get to decide whether "the people have a right to know". They don't, not unless they're cleared for it, and the default assumption is that they aren't.

But, ah, I'm venting.

John


body:
On Mon, Mar 01, 2004 at 07:54:35PM +0900, Guillaume Blanchard wrote:
> In my point of view, meta tag must be separate to the article text.
>
> Convert '_' to   is the simpler way, but I don't see any solution to
> solve the problem if this character is used in articles (I never see it in
> French article).
>
> What about a post-parse function you may add in default language.php and
> that each language may derive to make language specific modification. For
> French, it may be very basic function: replace ' !' by ' !' and so on.

Never written article about programming ?


from_name: Lars Aronsson

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: WikiGIS perhaps? (was: Mapping complement
	toWikipedia?)

body:
Elly Waterman wrote:
> In the Netherlands, most GIS data are owned by publicly funded
> organisations, but cannot be used freely. To the contrary these data a very
> expensive.

This is the case in most of Europe.  The issue is discussed on the
EGIP mailing list (European Geographic Information Policy),
http://www.ec-gis.org/egip/

The aforementioned GRASS and other free mapping software are discussed
on the FreeGIS mailing list,
http://intevation.de/mailman/listinfo/freegis-list

Both lists have archives available online.

Most GIS systems are organized as "layers", such as rivers, roads,
city names, county borders, elevation, vegetation types, etc.  To
compile a map for a specific purpose, you select some of the layers, a
particular area, scale (zoom), and projection (transformation of
coordinates).  The more layers we can make available, the better.
But a wiki-like project could be useful even if it only produces a few
such layers, for example a list of city names and their coordinates.
This can easily be edited in text using today's wiki technology.  In
Wikipedia's case, each name (of cities, counties or rivers) can also
be tied to the disambiguated name of a Wikipedia article, so clickable
maps can be compiled.

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


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Trading with the Enemy

body:
----- Original Message -----
From: David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au>
Date: Monday, March 1, 2004 3:47 pm
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: Trading with the Enemy

> Everyone who's received a legal threat from Sc*nt*l*gy knows that
> Hollandis the only place for hosting. (Modulo EUCD.)

Huh?


subject: [Wikitech-l] Sysop/bureaucrat bug

body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:

>The web page for making a user into a sysop or bureaucrat has two
>glitches.
>
>
>
Yeah, it happens when they change something ;-)


from_name: Peter Jaros

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: wikipedia access denied

body:
On Feb 27, 2004, at 11:09 PM, Timwi wrote:

> John Knouse wrote:
>
>> Well.  I was right in the middle of a lengthy edit, and
>> tried to save it, and got a message access denied.  I've
>> tried multiple means of access.  Wikipedia seems to be
>> somehow completely screwed up right now.  Fortunately, I had
>> the (for me) atypical good sense to save the whole edit on
>> my local computer before I lost it all.
>
> If you are afraid of losing edits, you should probably think about
> using a browser that doesn't eat them. I don't know what browser you
> are using, but if it's Internet Explorer, it is known to eat submitted
> form data frequently; this really isn't Wikipedia's fault or in any
> way under Wikipedia's control.
>
> I use Firefox. When Wikipedia is down, I just press Reload a few
> minutes later and it will re-send my edit.

Sometimes this will work in IE.  Just don't hit the back button.  The
submission is saved so that you can resend it by reloading the result
page, but it's not saved in the cache of the form page, so when you go
back the text area is reset.  which means you can't copy your changes
into a text editor at that point.  Which is a pain.

Peter

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


from_name: Sheng Jiong

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Chinese Wikipedia featured by 2 media

body:
Hi, everybody, we have got really good news for Chinese Wikipedia in
February.

The Chinese Wikipedia has been reported by two media in mainland China.
The New Magazine based in the southern province of Guangdong had an
article about us on 15 Feb. Another report was from Shanghai Sunday
Morning Post, published yesterday(29 Feb). This is the first time
Wikipedia is reported in mainstream media in China. Besides, Chinese
Wikipedia has been talked about in many Chinese blogs.

These two reports have brought in much traffic for us. We are having
more newcomers, although most of their contributions are only stubs. Up
to now there are 3468 registered users, and only yesterday there were
only around 3,000. And in Alexa.com, we see that about 6% of the traffic
is contributed by ZH Wikipedia, (
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=wikipedia.org )
although we are not the top 10 Wikipedias. But I am worried that despite
the increase in traffic, there might not be a very big increase in
article counts, as from previous experiences we find that Chinese users
are less willing to contribute new articles.


from_name: Kurt Jansson

subject: [Wikitech-l] please no experiments on March 6th

body:
I'd like to edit some Wikipedia articles on March 6th from about 9 to 15
o'clock CET (8-14 UTC), and I'd like to do it smooth. So please make
sure that the servers are in top condition and everything's running
really fast.

You think that I'm sounding a bit selfish? You're right, but the problem
is that I'll be in a German tv-studio (3sat) at that time. :-) Please
don't make me sweat and put off experiments until the weekend. Thanks!

Kurt

--
http://leihnetzwerk.de -- Vielleicht hat Dein Nachbar das Buch, das Du
                           schon immer lesen wolltest - leih es Dir aus!
http://wikipedia.de    -- Die freie Enzyklop?die
http://jansson.de      -- Icke


from_name: Gareth Owen

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Trading with the Enemy

body:
Rick <giantsrick13 at yahoo.com> writes:
> Rick a ?crit:
> > Where would you suggest? In France, it's illegal to criticize the
> > government. In Germany, it's illegal to display Nazi memorabilia. In
> > the UK there's the Official Secrets Act to deal with.
> >
> I am seriously asking what is wrong with what I posted here.  Please explain
> what I said that angered you, and what is libelous?

Well, you seem pretty ignorant of the scope of the Official Secrets Act for a
start.  Let me quote Section I for the gist:

 1. (1) A person who is or has been?
     (a) a member of the security and intelligence services; or
     (b) a person notified that he is subject to the provisions
         of this subsection,
 is guilty of an offence if without lawful authority he discloses any
 information, document or other article relating to security or
 intelligence which is or has been in his possession by virtue of his
 position as a member of any of those services

So (i) It applies to employees of the government
   (ii) Its about prevent the dissemination of classified information

Its applicability to wikipedia is precisely nil, unless you have reason to
believe British security personnel are posting classified information.

Do the laws that convicted [[Robert Hanssen]] impinge on wikipedia's operation?


body:
On Mon, Mar 01, 2004 at 03:41:15PM +0000, Timwi wrote:
> Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
>
> >On Mon, Mar 01, 2004 at 07:54:35PM +0900, Guillaume Blanchard wrote:
> >
> >>What about a post-parse function you may add in default language.php and
> >>that each language may derive to make language specific modification. For
> >>French, it may be very basic function: replace ' !' by ' !' and so
> >>on.
> >
> >Never written article about programming ?
>
> Where would it ever matter to have a non-breaking space, which is
> visually indistinguishable from an ordinary space?

Uhm, it would matter to have "_" character available, so we can't
just s/_/&nbsb;/g.


subject: [Wikitech-l] The abomination that is powerpedia.org

body:
On Mar 1, 2004, at 17:44, Allan Crossman wrote:
> Is there a way to prevent abominations like www.powerpedia.org, which
> put Wikipedia in a frame with their own adverts? While that
> particular site is probably not very important, I can see this
> becoming more of an issue. Would it be possible for Wikipedia pages
> to use that lovely bit of Javascript so common nowadays, which
> automatically breaks out of frames?

Yuck! Okay, I've added a quick anti-frames check. (You may have to
reload to get wikibits.js to update.)

if( window.top != window ) window.top.location = window.location;

It works in the following browsers I tested:
Safari 1.2/Mac
Konqueror 3.2.0/Unix
Firefox 0.8/Win
Mozilla 1.2/Mac
MSIE 6.0/Win
Opera 6/Mac
Opera 7.23/Win
Netscape 4.77/Mac
Netscape 3.04/Win

For some reason it doesn't work in MSIE 5.2/Mac: it gives a "Permission
denied" error, and doesn't break out of the frameset. It doesn't give
the error on a regular page view, just when trying to escape frames.

>  It looks something like:
>
> <script language="JavaScript">
> <!--
>
> function SymError()
> {
>   return true;
> }
>
> window.onerror = SymError;
>
> var SymRealWinOpen = window.open;
>
> function SymWinOpen(url, name, attributes)
> {
>   return (new Object());
> }
>
> window.open = SymWinOpen;
>
> //-->
> </script>
>
> <body onload="var SymTmpWinOpen = window.open; window.open =
> SymWinOpen; delayedreload(); window.open = SymTmpWinOpen;">

This looks like it's meant to prevent embedded scripts from opening
popup windows.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Caroline Ford

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Trading with the Enemy

body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:

>I think Reporters Without Borders is entitled to their P.O.V. about
>press freedom, but they are very likely wrong about the U.S.
>
>No one is imprisoned in the U.S. for uncovering government corruption or
>for opposing administration policy.
>
>Journalists who claim to have information on crimes but who claim they
>have some kind of "Journalists Right" to "protect sources" are sometimes
>jailed, but this is because the journalists are /obstructing/ justice,
>not because they are /victims/ of injustice.
>
>Anyway, the Wikipedia won't be endorsing or condemning the RWB rankings,
>and the articl on [[freedom of the press]] should make it clear to
>readers that the US is widely regarded as tops in press freedom, having
>practically pioneered the concept.
>
>Ed Poor
>_______________________________________________
>WikiEN-l mailing list
>WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
>
>
Even if it isn't? How much money do you need to publish a paper in the
US anyway?

Caroline


from_name: Anthere

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Trading with the Enemy

body:
Thank you Erik for giving a very good laugh today :-)

ant

Eric Demolli a ?crit:
> It's very simple :
> If I write "Jacques Chirac est un .....bip..." it's an insult, it's illegal.
> If I write "Jacques Chirac est le pr?sident le plus nul que la France a
> connu, sa politique est d?bile." it's a critic, it's legal.
> Insulting anyone is illegal in France, for instance.  If I write "Anthere
> est une ...bip..." she can sue me.
> The penalty is just worse for the President (and not for the whole
> governement).
> This law is never applied since Valery Giscard d'Estaing promised not sdue
> anyone. I don't think any President will go back as long as France remains a
> democracy. Thus if you want to insult someone in France insult the President
> it's less  risky than insulting anyone else.
>
> Eric Demolli


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Trading with the Enemy

body:
I read that whole article very carefully Jimbo, and I failed to see
where it is mentionned that the governement was preventing Brigitte
Bardot to speak up :-)

However, I saw that some organisations (which are not the governement)
were suing Brigitte Bardot for her opinions. How does that mean that the
governement is not respecting people freedom of speech ?

Also, do you mean that *preventing* these organisations to complain
about Brigitte Bardot opinions, would be the best way to insure freedom
of speech is guaranteed ?
Whose freedom of speech and opinion are we talking about ?
* Brigitte right to speak ?
* or the organisations right to complain ?

I also note that though legal proceedings are mentionned in the article,
  no conclusions are given about them. So, that does not mean Brigitte
will be put in jail with tape on the mouth.

I also noticed that regardless of the feedback I offered with regards to
the nearly libelous accusations against my government, not only did you
choose not to recognise there hasn't been any accusation made by my
governement against the Sun, but that on top of it, you choose to
redirect accusations toward independant organisations.

I have the unconfortable feeling that whatever facts I will bring to
your attention, you will not be very motivated to consider it. Still,
let me provide you a last reference.

Currently, Wikipedia mentions this article

http://www.rsf.fr/article.php3?id_article=4116

That is the "first worldwide press freedom index"

Exactly the topic we are currently discussing I guess

Here is the top ranking

Rank  Country  Note
1 Finland  0,50  -
2 Iceland  0,50  -
3 Norway  0,50  -
4 Netherlands 0,50
5 Canada  0,75
6 Ireland  1,00
7 Germany  1,50
8 Portugal  1,50
9 Sweden  1,50
10 Denmark  3,00
11 France  3,25
12 Australia  3,50  -
13 Belgium  3,50
14 Slovenia  4,00
15 Costa Rica  4,25  -
16 Switzerland  4,25
17 United States  4,75
18 Hong Kong  4,83
19 Greece  5,00
20 Ecuador  5,50
21 Benin  6,00  -
22 United Kingdom  6,00

My best
Ant

Jimmy Wales a ?crit:
> Anthere wrote:
>
>>And rather than to discuss them, and spent time on them, you just stop
>>referring to them and stop using them. They are just forgotten.
>
>
> The problem is that laws restricting the freedom of speech in France
> are not all forgotten, but are prosecuted with some regularity.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brigitte_Bardot
>
> --Jimbo