subject: [Wikipedia-l] vandalism spree

body:
Please explain Bayesian filtering?
Zoe
 The Cunctator <cunctator at kband.com> wrote:No, seriously, how about not blocking?

If you try to think of solutions to our problems that don't involve
blocking, the solutions are generally much cleaner.

For example,
1. more powerful ways of searching and sorting edits,
2. more powerful ways of rolling back edits
3. Bayesian filtering of contributions

I see #3 as an interesting solution that would deal with most of our
problems.

http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/background.html

_______________________________________________
Wikipedia-l mailing list
Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Web Hosting - Let the expert host your site
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/attachments/20021119/ca7d2569/attachment.htm


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [Wikipedia-l] anglicization

body:
Well, how about making the name of the article "Confucius", since that's the best known anglicization of his name -- but in the first paragraph of the article reveal his REAL name.

We could do the same for countries: the [[South Korea]] article should include Tae-Han Min-Gook with the Korean script and Chinese characters.

Ed Poor


from_name: Bridget

from_email: Bridget

subject: [Wikipedia-l] stupid anglicization

body:
function SetDomain(d) { document.domain = d; }First of all, thanks Oliver. I agree, the current policy amounts to intentionally choosing the wrong name, out of a fear over debate regarding the correct name.

I would also like to point out that we most certainly do not have to worry about the reader finding the correct name (despite their anglo-brainwashing), as Zoe and others have argued, because we have #REDIRECT

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Web Hosting - Let the expert host your site
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/attachments/20021119/6b67aa30/attachment.htm


from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [Wikipedia-l] vandalism spree

body:
No, seriously, how about not blocking?

If you try to think of solutions to our problems that don't involve
blocking, the solutions are generally much cleaner.

For example,
1. more powerful ways of searching and sorting edits,
2. more powerful ways of rolling back edits
3. Bayesian filtering of contributions

I see #3 as an interesting solution that would deal with most of our
problems.

http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/background.html


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] question about namespaces

body:
Jonathan Walther wrote:

> My question remains, do we need namespaces for any other reason than to
> know whether the row represents an article, binary, or discussion?

Distinguishing between
* article ("blank:")
* "talk":
* "user:"
* "user talk:"
* "wikipedia:"
* "wikipedia talk:"
* "image:"
* "image talk:"
* "special:" (not stored in the database, generated on-the-fly)

You seem to be quite eager to remodel the database structure. I am not
really qualified to tell wether your proposed changes will improve the
whole thing or not. But please, keep in mind the countless changes to
the software one (you?) would have to make for that.

IMHO we could live with a good-but-imperfect database until we have
explored other ways of optimizing the db/software. One of them would be
switching to Postgres on a test server.

Magnus


subject: [Wikitech-l] Name Change script

body:
Brion,

Is it possible, i.e., permissible to erase the "Edd Poor" username? It's too close to my own real name for comfort -- and it was only a vandal anyway. If you can do this, how about converting it to an IP address?

Ed Poor


from_name: Brion VIBBER

subject: [Wikipedia-l] stupid anglicization

body:
Bridget [name omitted for privacy reasons] wrote:
> Yes, I agree there should be some agreement about what is done on
> wikipedia. This is why I, and others, keep advocating that wikipedia
> start becoming a democracy and voting on stuff. Atm, wikipedia is pretty
> totalitarian-basically if mav, larry, vibber, and one of a couple others
> doesn't agree with something, it doesn't happen.

Oh, would that that were true! You'd still be banned, and Wikipedia
would be a much happier place.

> One of the things they
> don't agree with is the idea that wikipedia, rather than striving to
> maintain the mistakes of earlier information sources, we should strive
> to eliminate those mistakes.

So, you think Wikipedia should be a totalitarian dictator of "correct"
language usage? Interesting.

> Sadly, one of wikipedias basic premises amounts to, "And we should
> always strive for a anglo-americanized naming schema because this is
> america and if you want foreign names then maybe you should leave the
> country cuz this is america and this is the american wikipedia and we
> are gonna use american names here and thats the end of the discussion"

No, my child, it amounts to "write in the language you're writing in,
and note words in other languages when they are relevant." This is not
anglo- or americo-centric, but a bit of common sense that applies
equally well in every language.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


list: sifter-l

source: wayback-mbox

from_name: Lee Daniel Crocker

subject: Re: [Sifter-l] We need a server!

body:
> (Magnus Manske <magnus.manske@epost.de>):
> together, and I'd like feedback from the potential reviewers, so I won't
> develop against them (the Nupedia software comes haunting me in my
> dreams already ;-) [I didn't write that!]

Sorry about being invisible lately.  I've just been really
swamped at work, and I just bought a house, so my copious spare
time has dwindled.  But my project is just finishing up now,
so I'll be able to return to encyclopedia work.  I'll get the
software up on Piclab and make sure Magnus and anyone else who
needs it have accounts there.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


from_name: Steve Rawlinson

subject: [Wikitech-l] MySQL Configuration

body:
Has anyone looked into making sure the MySQL server is configured
optimally?  I'm not a MySQL expert, but I was reading over the MySQL
documentation and there are a number of parameters that can be adjusted
(like cache sizes).

There is also a MySQL command "SHOW STATUS" that might help to shed some
light on where the problems are.  It reports things like number of cache
misses and number of times it had to wait for a table lock.

So, could someone with database access send me the results of running the
following two MySQL commands "SHOW STATUS" and "SHOW VARIABLES" (or post
the output to the list for everyone if they look interesting).  I'll
examine them and report my findings.

Here is a link to what SHOW STATUS reports:
http://www.mysql.com/documentation/mysql/bychapter/manual_MySQL_Database_Administration.html#SHOW_STATUS

and some information on MySQL server optimizing:
http://www.mysql.com/documentation/mysql/bychapter/manual_MySQL_Optimisation.html#Optimising_the_Server

As I said, I'm not an expert, but maybe there are some parameters that can
be tweaked (if they haven't been already) to improve performance in the
short term while a longer-term solution is worked on.

Regards,
Steve


from_name: Christopher Mahan

subject: [Wikipedia-l] stupid anglicization

body:
> I would also like to point out that we most certainly do not have
> to worry about the reader finding the correct name (despite their
> anglo-brainwashing), as Zoe and others have argued, because we have
> #REDIRECT

Instead of a redirect, I would see a short article that explains that
word "x" is the anglicised, or Americanized version of word "y", and
to please see word "y" for more information on the subject, or look
at the "x versus y" article that goes into the finer grain.

If someone uses Peking as the capital of China, should it just
rediect to Beijing (a different approximation), or rather explain
that Peking was named such after the work of such and such scholar
but was later acknowledged... so on and so forth.

=====
Christopher Mahan
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
http://www.christophermahan.com/

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Web Hosting - Let the expert host your site
http://webhosting.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Educating newcomers (was: stupid anglicization)

body:
--- tarquin <tarquin at planetunreal.com> wrote:
>
> Poor, Edmund W wrote:
>
> >Erik,
> >
> >The reason the debate is not over, is that we old-timers have a
> responsibility to educate newcomers.
> >
> >I have "adopted" Lir as a mentee, because I believe she really
> wants to contribute. Please join me in gently (or firmly) coaching
> her about Wikipedia standards such as naming convention, NPOV, etc.
> >
> >Ed Poor
> >
> >
>
> That's an admirable aim, Ed.
> Is Lir kidding when she writes:
> "You just /think/ that Anne Rice made that interview up...but I
> guess
> you are allowed to your silly POV thoughts"
> ?

Tarquin, it's called sarcasm.

=====
Christopher Mahan
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
http://www.christophermahan.com/

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Web Hosting - Let the expert host your site
http://webhosting.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikitech-l] Database

body:
Just how much RAM does the wikipedia server have?

    http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Orchard/5802/fastdb.html


from_name: Oliver Pereira

subject: [Wikipedia-l] anglicization is stupid

body:
Oliver Pereira wrote:

> > With the redirection scheme in place, can't we have our cake and eat it?
> > The experts can put the "correct" name as the title, and make redirection
> > pages for all the different abbreviations, translations, colloquial
> > variations, and so on. (They would also put these abbreviations,
> > translations, colloquial variations in the introductory paragraph of the
> > article itself, for reference purposes.) Everyone else can then freely use
> > the common names and let the redirection direct them to the "correct"
> > name.
> >
> > Wouldn't that please everybody?

Brion Vibber replied:

> No, because the point of contention is that people disagree on what is the
> "correct" name.

No, the point of contention is that the current policy is designed to
perpetuate names which *everyone* agrees are incorrect.

I gave some examples of what I meant by "correct" in my message:
unabbreviated book titles, and original names of people. For the purposes
of this discussion, let's look at one fairly straightforward example:
Confucius. *Everyone* agrees that he was never called that in his
lifteime, and yet that is the version used in the Wikipedia, because it is
the name most commonly used by English-speaking people.

A lot of garbled anglicisations and abbreviations came about because
people didn't have the education (or linguistic skills, or patience, or
whatever else) to use the original names. An encyclopaedia is supposed to
be an educational tool. I see no reason why the Wikipedia should
perpetuate garbled versions of names if it can educate people as to what
the original versions were! It does this anyway (or should do) by giving
the original name in the introductory paragraph, so it would just be a
matter of swapping one name for another in the article title.

Of course there would be disagreement on what to adopt as the "correct"
names. But the fact that people would disagree on *how* to implement a
proposed policy is not sufficient reason not to implement a new policy at
all, especially given that everyone already disagrees on how to implement
the current one! Everyone would learn a lot from the arguments on what to
adopt as the "correct" name, and that, in my opinion, would be a good
thing.

Oliver

+-------------------------------------------+
| Oliver Pereira                            |
| Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science |
| University of Southampton                 |
| omp199 at ecs.soton.ac.uk                    |
+-------------------------------------------+


from_name: Tom Parmenter

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Minor changes (Was: vandal bots)

body:
I can't tell who wrote this, but am compelled to reply.

|
|I never hide minor edits, so it's not a big deal to *me*.
|However, I gather that this would be helpful to other people.
|

My own practice is to hide punctuation, spelling, linking changes
unless I want to engage in the minor publicity of putting an article
in Recent Changes so that others will know it exists and perhaps add
to it themselves.

Your not hiding minor edits might be a big deal to *others* if you
clutter the Recent Changes with all *your* precious apostrophes and
spelling corrections.

Some thoughtless people (readers of this list, I believe) are even
putting moves from a private chess game into Recent Changes for
reasons unfathomable to polite people.

Tom Parmenter
Ortolan88


from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [Wikipedia-l] vandalism spree

body:
Koyaanisqatsi wrote in part:

>Toby wrote:

>>no contact information for KQ

>My email is on my userpage, and there's also of course the "email this
>user" function on each userpage--neither of which, unfortunately,
>would have been any help, as I left town to shoot 2 interviews for a film.

My apologies -- you do indeed provide contact information.
Reading Hotlorp's mail to me more carefully,
it only says that you didn't reply --
which you explain the reason for above.

Can I convince you to advertise this fact on [[Wikipedia:Admininstrators]],
similar to my advertisement, to make it easier for banned users
to reach at least one of us -- it took me several hours to reply as well.

-- Toby


subject: [Wikipedia-l] vandalism spree

body:
>3. Bayesian filtering of contributions

This is an intriguing idea.
Where can we work on developing a filter that will be useful.

BTW, I trust that the purpose of this filter will be
to highlight changes that may require human intervention --
not to block changes automatically by an algorithm.

-- Toby


list: wikien-l

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] stupid anglicization

body:
Lir wrote in part:

>Yes, I agree there should be some agreement about what is done on wikipedia.
>This is why I, and others, keep advocating that wikipedia start becoming a
>democracy and voting on stuff.

Democracy is by no means the same thing as voting.
With the exception of Jimbo's rarely used dictatorial powers,
we're a pretty good democracy now -- nobody has much opportunity
to force their view on others.  There's room for improvement --
like automatic old hand status instead of sysophood on request --
but some improvement will be possible in any system, however good.

>Atm, wikipedia is pretty totalitarian-basically if mav, larry, vibber, and one
>of a couple others doesn't agree with something, it doesn't happen.

Larry?  Larry's one of the people that keeps trying to *change* things.
Personally, I think that his ideas are much more appropriate
for an auxiliary project and that he should leave Wikipedia itself alone
(I mean in the sense of not changing how Wikipedia works,
not in the sense of not participating here!), and that's what he's doing.
He only began the sifter project after several other suggestions
on the mailing list received little support; he has no particular power.

As for mav and Brion, yes, they are more conservative voices.
But they're never close to alone.  Only The Cunctator regularly
stands in the way of proposals that almost everybody else wants,
and even then, he doesn't get his way if he's truly alone.
Furthermore, Larry, mav, Brion, and even Cunc have no special powers;
anybody can block (or spur) progress just as much as they can.

>Sadly, one of wikipedias basic premises amounts to, "And we should always
>strive for a anglo-americanized naming schema because this is america and if
>you want foreign names then maybe you should leave the country cuz this is
>america and this is the american wikipedia and we are gonna use american
>names here and thats the end of the discussion"

If you think this, then you don't understand Wikipedia at all.
The English Wikipedia is the *English*language* Wikipedia,
not the *United*States* Wikipedia.  That's why, for example,
American spellings have no favoured position WRT British spellings.
America is a red herring; it's English that's at issue here.

>however, as far as I can tell far more people seem to support using native
>spellings of names, and that includes the use of non-western alphabets, an
>ability we have due to the power of #REDIRECT.

Then you should get these people to come onto the mailing list to discuss it.
I hope that they do (and one or two are starting to already),
since I'd like to make this change in policy as well.
But right now, the change is being held up because the voices on the list
are a clear majority of opposition.  No vote would help you here.

>It is also noteworthy that most of the people who speak out against using such
>"unamerican and inappropriate" naming generally make an argument stating,
>"Well, I tend to agree that we should use the native names but it's really
>not a big argument"

You're not helping our cause by presenting this sort of strawman.
That's not at all what they're saying; they think that the current system
is *right*.  You and I disagree with that, but we won't get anywhere
by implying that they secretly agree with us and are just stubborn.

-- Toby


subject: [Wikipedia-l] stupid anglicization


body:
Erik,

The reason the debate is not over, is that we old-timers have a responsibility to educate newcomers.

I have "adopted" Lir as a mentee, because I believe she really wants to contribute. Please join me in gently (or firmly) coaching her about Wikipedia standards such as naming convention, NPOV, etc.

Ed Poor


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Minor changes

body:
Zoe wrote:

>Toby Bartels wrote:

>>Indeed, you may want to do all of the editing externally,
>>only copying the text to the Wikipedia edit box
>>when you want to preview the wiki markup.

>Be sure that if you save into an external editor, that you re-type your
>apostrophes and quotation marks when you paste back into the Wiki space,
>some editors' special characters show up as weird characters on Wiki.

You may be able to do this automatically in a word processor
by saving as plain text (no formatting), closing the file,
and then opening the plain text (*.txt) file to copy and paste.

Better yet, use a true text editor, not a word processor.
That is, use Notepad, not Word.

-- Toby


from_name: koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] vandalism spree

body:
>My apologies -- you do indeed provide contact information.
>Reading Hotlorp's mail to me more carefully,
>it only says that you didn't reply --
>which you explain the reason for above.
>
>Can I convince you to advertise this fact on
[[Wikipedia:Admininstrators]],
>similar to my advertisement, to make it easier for banned users
>to reach at least one of us -- it took me several hours to reply as well.

Done.  And we should start using the wikiEN list, huh?  :-)

kq


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] anglicization is stupid

body:
Zoe wrote in part:

>Well, no, I disagree that "*everyone* agrees" the names are incorrect.  In
>your example of Confucius, should we use the old-style Chinese transliteration
>or the new version?

This isn't an argument that "Confucius" is incorrect,
but rather that it's not quite clear what *is* correct instead.
If any Chinese version is *more* correct than "Confucius"
(a point that I admit that many here would deny),
then any Chinese version would be an improvement,
even if still not perfect.

>Should we not transliterate at all but force those who
>only know the Latin alphabet to try to figure out his REAL name by only being
>able to look it up in Chinese ideographs?

Nobody will be *forcing* any user to do anything of the sort.
Every article should have all common spellings (English and original)
in boldface in the first paragraph (we do this now if we know enough to),
and they should have redirects from all of these that are in Latin-1
(we do this now too if we know enough to).
Searching will work; linking will work -- no matter who wins.

>decided that his name would ONLY be in Chinese?

Nobody is proposing this, any more than anybody is proposing
that his name should be given ONLY in English.
Rather, the question is which form is to be *preferred*,
in particular which form is to be the article title.
Every form will be (and is currently, when set up correctly) *supported*.

-- Toby


subject: [Wikipedia-l] anglicization is stupid


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Minor changes

body:
Ortolan88 wrote in part:

>Toby Bartels wrote:

>>I never hide minor edits, so it's not a big deal to *me*.
>>However, I gather that this would be helpful to other people.

And Ortolan seems to have misinterpreted "hide".

Hiding minor edits is something that the *reader* does.
It's an option in user preference to hide
from lists of edits (like Recentchanges and watchlists)
those edits that were marked minor.
I myself never do this; when I view Recentchanges,
I see every single edit, since that's what I want to see.

OTOH, what the writer does is to *mark* minor edits.
I always mark punctuation, spelling, and linking changes
in this way (regardless of whether I'm interested in publicity).
Nobody will see my apostrophes and spelling corrections
if they, as readers, hide minor edits in their user preferences.
(There are exceptions where I forget, but these are simply mistakes.)

>Some thoughtless people (readers of this list, I believe) are even
>putting moves from a private chess game into Recent Changes for
>reasons unfathomable to polite people.

Everything goes into Recentchanges, every edit whatsoever.
What you mean is that these thoughtless (I agree) people
aren't marking the moves as minor edits.
If they did so, then people who (like you) hide minor edits
wouldn't see the game show up in Recentchanges,
although people who (like me) don't hide minor edits
would continue to see it (a risk that we choose to take).

I hope that this clarifies my language.

-- Toby


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Educating newcomers

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>A mail from Ed? Surely this cannot be, as you just announced your
>departure from the project a couple of days ago (for the second time), and
>wrote that Wikipedia is doomed. Or are you perhaps a bit moody? Let me
>guess, the big advantage of Sunday school over Wikipedia was that it was
>*only* on Sundays ;-)

Ah, he's only bluffing ^_^.
(I hope *_*.)

>The problem I see is that in a consensus-finding decision making process,
>a single dedicated person can prolong discourse forever.

A *single* person can't prolong the decision-making process forever,
because we have enough people around that lack of a single person
is no obstacle to reaching a consensus.  Consensus != unanimity
(in English, although apparently it does mean that in French --
see some earlier posts between me and Anthere).

And even with a voting mechanism in place, a single dedicated person
could still prolong *discourse* forever.  Or would you censor speech?
[[Democratic centralism]] != democracy (indeed, the term is a misnomer).
Whatever decision-making process we use, those who dissent
must still always have the right to express that dissent,
or democracy is over, whatever of its trappings may remain.

>Nothing in our rules says that Lir cannot continue the debate
>about naming conventions forever -- so it would be wrong for us to punish
>her if she does.

Absolutely wrong!  Voting is one thing, but if this much *ever* changed,
then there would be no democracy left in Wikipedia, and I would have to leave.

>And I'm afraid that when people get tired of our tedious
>decision making process, they will want to resort to more drastic forms of
>enforcement and more permanent power structures, which will in turn lead
>to wrong decisions, alienation, power struggles.

Agreed, but IMO, that's exactly what *you* are trying to do ^_^.
(Don't misunderstood me; I know that your intentions are only the best.
I only think that the effect would be bad.)

-- Toby


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Educating newcomers


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Move en.wiki posts to wikien-l please (was: stupid anglicization)

body:
Old hands on en.wiki should already know my very strong position on this issue
but PLEASE move talk that only concerns (or even MOSTLY concerns) en.wiki to
the English mailing list. If policy ideas are generated at wikien-l that
might be useful for the larger community then we can move discussion to the
general policy mailing list for the whole project (HINT: Wikipedia-L).

--mav


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: vandalism spree

body:
On Tuesday 19 November 2002 03:37 pm, Erik Moeller wrote:
> > For example,
> > 1. more powerful ways of searching and sorting edits,
> > 2. more powerful ways of rolling back edits
>
> I strongly support this, but let's be careful not to lose article
> histories.

I hate to do this but: Yes me too!

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: Chuck Smith

subject: [Wikitech-l] X-System to Unicode conversion

body:
I've signed up for the technical list againand now I
find myself drowning in Wikipedia mailing lists... but
next week I should have a nice computer in Slovenia to
work with, so hopefully that will not be a problem.
:)

Anyway, we now have a problem (bug) on the Esperanto
Wikipedia and I thought perhaps other people on the
list might have some ideas.  Basically, Esperanto has
special non-ASCII characters that are often typed on
the Internet by using an x after the ASCII letter, but
they are usually displayed in Unicode.

We need to be able to allow our users to type in
x-system or Unicode and have the result be in Unicode.
 We also need to allow the users to view the Esperanto
encyclopedia in x-system in case they are using an
older browser that does not support it.  In the older
software, this worked perfectly.  We also had an extra
link on the top which allowed the user to switch their
view simply from X-System to Unicode and back by
manually editing a user preference.

Is this possible simply by editing EoLanguage.php or
do will we need to edit other files as well?  Which
one(s)?  Also, it would help if Brion could give a
technical explanation of the problem here so perhaps
even I could try to help solve it soon.   I would like
this to be fixed before I start the next wave of
promotion.

Thanks,
Chuck Smith

=====
I'm in the Czech Republic!!   Mi estas en Cxehxio!!
=========================================
Travel Plans: http://eo.wikipedia.com/wiki/Chuck_SMITH
  My Webpage: http://amuzulo.babil.komputilo.com/
Enciklopedio: http://eo.wikipedia.com/

__________________________________________________________________

Gesendet von Yahoo! Mail - http://mail.yahoo.de
M?chten Sie mit einem Gru? antworten? http://grusskarten.yahoo.de


from_name: Imran Ghory

subject: Re: [Sifter-l] We need a server!

body:
On Tue, 19 Nov 2002, Magnus Manske wrote:

> We need a server for the test software! We should be designing this
> together, and I'd like feedback from the potential reviewers, so I won't
> develop against them (the Nupedia software comes haunting me in my
> dreams already ;-) [I didn't write that!]

You could try sourceforge or savannah.

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


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Minor changes

body:
Ortolan88:
>>Some thoughtless people (readers of this list, I believe) are even
>>putting moves from a private chess game into Recent Changes for
>>reasons unfathomable to polite people.

Toby:
>Everything goes into Recentchanges, every edit whatsoever.
>What you mean is that these thoughtless (I agree) people
>aren't marking the moves as minor edits.
>If they did so, then people who (like you) hide minor edits
>wouldn't see the game show up in Recentchanges,
>although people who (like me) don't hide minor edits
>would continue to see it (a risk that we choose to take).
>
>I hope that this clarifies my language.

Yes, it does.  Another issue is of course--why are people playing
chess on wikipedia when there are so many other places to play it?
Yes, I agree that people should have some latitude in regards to what
they put on their own userpages, but that borders on the ridiculous.

kq


subject: [Wikipedia-l] vandalism spree

body:
The Cunctator wrote:

>No, seriously,
>
Oh, how boring ;-)

> how about not blocking?
>
IMHO "don't block at all" won't work, but neither does "block everything
at once", as we've seen.

>If you try to think of solutions to our problems that don't involve
>blocking, the solutions are generally much cleaner.
>
>For example,
>1. more powerful ways of searching and sorting edits,
>
We now have the "top" mark at user contributions, so we can see which
edits haven't been reverted yet. What else could we use? I already
suggested marking IP contributions on Recent Changes in red (or bold
or...) for logged-in users, but was turned down as being "unfair" to the
good contributors, which *are* the majority.

>2. more powerful ways of rolling back edits
>
How about a link on the user contributions, for sysops only probably, to
undo all "top" contributions of this user?

>3. Bayesian filtering of contributions
>
That would be similar to the automatic "quality rating" I suggested earlier.
Characteristics could include:
* removal of large parts of the text
* insertion of repetetetetitive sequences
* insertion of certain keywords ("f**k")
* insertion of off-site links (?)
Suspicious edits could be highlighted on the Recent Changes page.

Magnus


subject: [Wikipedia-l] vandalism spree

body:
Koyaanisqatsi wrote:

>Toby Bartels wrote:

>>Can I convince you to advertise this fact on [[Wikipedia:Admininstrators]],
>>similar to my advertisement, to make it easier for banned users
>>to reach at least one of us -- it took me several hours to reply as well.

>Done.  And we should start using the wikiEN list, huh?  :-)

Inasmuch as we're mostly discussing technical possibilities for banning,
rather than proposals about *policy* for banning,
I think that this belongs on the main list,
since those possibilities will be open to everybody.

But that reminds me: do the non[[en:]] Wikipedias
have pages analogous to [[Wikipedia:Administrators]]?
If not, where will the banning message point to on them?
I would suggest that any Wikipedia that uses banning at all
should have methods like those that I proposed
to allow banned users to contact administrators.

-- Toby


subject: [Wikipedia-l] vandalism spree

body:
The Cunctator wrote:

>Toby Bartels wrote:

>>BTW, I trust that the purpose of this filter will be
>>to highlight changes that may require human intervention --
>>not to block changes automatically by an algorithm.

>Well, even automatic Bayesian blocking would be much less clumsy than
>automatic IP blocking.

IP blocking is easy to keep track of and correct
(so long as the lines of communication are kept open).
But perhaps we'll develop a method of Bayesian blocking
that has the same good properties -- the important thing
is that humans have manual override.

>But my goal is to come up with strategies that make problems get solved
>invisibly without crippling necessary flexibility--or adding layers of
>complexity and hierarchy.

A Bayesian algorithm won't be hierarchical, but will it be complex?
Again, the answer will depend on just what we come up with.

>The benefits or harms of any particular technological method depend on the
>implementation.

Exactly.  I look forward to your ideas, if you have any.
(I don't have a clue about this myself ^_^.)

-- Toby


subject: [Sifter-l] We need a server!

body:
I have set up the Gnupedia demo at two different locations
(http://gnupedia.iwebland.com/main.php and
http://mitglied.lycos.de/gnupedia/main.php), but both are limited in so
far as articles cannot be imported. The reason for that is that both
providers have enabled PHP safeguards, preventing both the reading of
offsite files and the import via sockets, which are the two ways one can
read web pages in PHP (which is essential for import).
Not to mention that both sites use ads.

While the initial development of the software was fun, I find it quite
frustrating to develop on my local installation for use by myself alone ;-)

We need a server for the test software! We should be designing this
together, and I'd like feedback from the potential reviewers, so I won't
develop against them (the Nupedia software comes haunting me in my
dreams already ;-) [I didn't write that!]

So, what I'd need is
* a directory where I can put my files (ssh or ftp)
* an empty MySQL database ("gnupedia", for example)
* a PHP installation that allows me to access offsite files, or to open
sockets (a standard installation will do just fine)

Magnus


subject: [Wikipedia-l] vandalism spree

body:
Magnus Manske wrote in part:

>How about a link on the user contributions, for sysops only probably, to
.undo all "top" contributions of this user?

Only up to a certain time period that the back-roller must specify!
Please!!!

Many anonymous vandals share IPs with good anonymous users,
and the latter will often have top edits that we'll want to keep.

-- Toby


subject: [Wikipedia-l] anglicization is stupid

body:
Confucius says, "Better to be found by the wrong name than lost by the
right name."


subject: [Wikipedia-l] stupid anglicization

in_reply_to:
<20021119233836.62165.qmail@web14004.mail.yahoo.com> (message
	from Christopher Mahan on Tue, 19 Nov 2002 15:38:36 -0800 (PST))

body:
|From: Christopher Mahan <chris_mahan at yahoo.com>
|Sender: wikipedia-l-admin at wikipedia.org
|Reply-To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
|Date: Tue, 19 Nov 2002 15:38:36 -0800 (PST)
|
|
|> I would also like to point out that we most certainly do not have
|> to worry about the reader finding the correct name (despite their
|> anglo-brainwashing), as Zoe and others have argued, because we have
|> #REDIRECT
|
|Instead of a redirect, I would see a short article that explains that
|word "x" is the anglicised, or Americanized version of word "y", and
|to please see word "y" for more information on the subject, or look
|at the "x versus y" article that goes into the finer grain.
|
|If someone uses Peking as the capital of China, should it just
|rediect to Beijing (a different approximation), or rather explain
|that Peking was named such after the work of such and such scholar
|but was later acknowledged... so on and so forth.
|
|
|=====
|Christopher Mahan
|chris_mahan at yahoo.com
|http://www.christophermahan.com/
|

This is a proposal that we have two articles, one of extremely limited
value and the other missing important information, instead of just one
article on all salient points about the topic, including variations in
the name.

Tom P.
O88


subject: [Wikitech-l] MySQL Configuration

body:
Steve Rawlinson wrote:
> The current server configuration looks to be using the defaults for a
> medium size server as provided with MySQL distribution in the file
> "my-medium.cnf".  My overall recommendation is to change to the
> "my-large.cnf" defaults if there are sufficient resource.  It is "for
> large systems with 512M RAM where the system mainly runs MySQL."
> Assuming the server is only running Wikipedia and has the reported 2 Gig
> of RAM, this shouldn't be a problem.

Sounds reasonable, I'll switch the config file tonight.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Vicki Rosenzweig

subject: [Wikipedia-l] stupid anglicization

body:
At 11:56 AM 11/19/02 -0800, you wrote:

>Yes, I agree there should be some agreement about what is done on
>wikipedia. This is why I, and others, keep advocating that wikipedia start
>becoming a democracy and voting on stuff. Atm, wikipedia is pretty
>totalitarian-basically if mav, larry, vibber, and one of a couple others
>doesn't agree with something, it doesn't happen. One of the things they
>don't agree with is the idea that wikipedia, rather than striving to
>maintain the mistakes of earlier information sources, we should strive to
>eliminate those mistakes.
>
>Sadly, one of wikipedias basic premises amounts to, "And we should always
>strive for a anglo-americanized naming schema because this is america and
>if you want foreign names then maybe you should leave the country cuz this
>is america and this is the american wikipedia and we are gonna use
>american names here and thats the end of the discussion"

Bullshit.

The premise is "This is the English-language Wikipedia, and therefore we
use names that
are familiar to English-speakers." In a Spanish document, I don't insist
that my home
town not be spelled "Nueva York".

Also, you're posting on the wrong list, if your issue is with names on the
English
Wikipedia.
--
Vicki Rosenzweig
vr at redbird.org
http://www.redbird.org


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re:  anglicization is stupid

body:
On Tuesday 19 November 2002 06:35 pm,  Toby Bartels wrote:
> Zoe wrote in part:
> >Well, no, I disagree that "*everyone* agrees" the names are incorrect.  In
> >your example of Confucius, should we use the old-style Chinese
> > transliteration or the new version?
>
> This isn't an argument that "Confucius" is incorrect,
> but rather that it's not quite clear what *is* correct instead.
> If any Chinese version is *more* correct than "Confucius"
> (a point that I admit that many here would deny),
> then any Chinese version would be an improvement,
> even if still not perfect.

Very wrong. What is most correct in English is the form used and recognized by
the greatest number of English speakers. Dictionary makers realize this and
make changes that reflect widest usage. This is an organic process that
changes with time and we should prefer the terms and forms that are most
useful to the greatest number of English speakers.

> >Should we not transliterate at all but force those who
> >only know the Latin alphabet to try to figure out his REAL name by only
> > being able to look it up in Chinese ideographs?
>
> Nobody will be *forcing* any user to do anything of the sort.
> Every article should have all common spellings (English and original)
> in boldface in the first paragraph (we do this now if we know enough to),
> and they should have redirects from all of these that are in Latin-1
> (we do this now too if we know enough to).
> Searching will work; linking will work -- no matter who wins.

I have to agree with Zoe here. Back in March, April and May I moved many
hundreds of articles from incorrectly named titles to correct ones per our
naming conventions. Many of these were from overly complex non-English forms
to forms that most English speakers would understand and find useful
(Google's language tools were and still are a useful resource in this
regard). I can't remember a single instance where the author of the
non-Anglicized titled article made a redirect from the Anglicized title.

In short: If most English speakers on both sides of the pond know a term by a
certain spelling, then why have a convention that places the article on that
term at a pedanticly "correct" spelling and then has to rely on redirects for
what most people use? Remember the "surprise factor": users should not be
surprised by where a link takes them.

That is not what redirects are for. Redirects are for doing the exact opposite
- to catch non-standard alternate forms that are not as used as widely as the
main form. That is why my idea of "redirect priority" never caught on as a
way to make my proposed city naming convention work (in which Paris would be
at [[Paris]] redirect to [[Paris, France]]). I learned the error of my ways.
Please learn from my "redirect fallacy" mistake.

> >decided that his name would ONLY be in Chinese?
>
> Nobody is proposing this, any more than anybody is proposing
> that his name should be given ONLY in English.
> Rather, the question is which form is to be *preferred*,
> in particular which form is to be the article title.
> Every form will be (and is currently, when set up correctly) *supported*.
>
>
> -- Toby

What is and should be preferred is the title that is most likely to be linked
to spontaneously in articles and what is most likely to be searched for.
Please don't try to make contributing and using Wikipedia more difficult than
it needs be by going down the opposite route.

This idea of yours is also more complicated than you might think: There are
many competing transliteration of many non-English terms. Which should we
use? What about non-Latin charsets? It only seems logical to allow them so
that we can have the exact name of things (there are also competing non-Latin
charsets).

This is madness and not at all useful -- leave the pedantic language lessons
in the article itself. Technical matters that touch on ease of linking, using
and searching for articles trump using the native forms any day.

There is no reason to belittle the intelligence of users and unnecessarily
surprise them by having articles at non-English titles. This is the English
language Wikipedia, so lets stop the sillyness and title things in *shock,
horror* English.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] vandalism spree

body:
On 11/19/02 8:18 PM, "Toby Bartels" <toby+wikipedia at math.ucr.edu> wrote:

>> 3. Bayesian filtering of contributions
>
> This is an intriguing idea.
> Where can we work on developing a filter that will be useful.
>
> BTW, I trust that the purpose of this filter will be
> to highlight changes that may require human intervention --
> not to block changes automatically by an algorithm.

Well, even automatic Bayesian blocking would be much less clumsy than
automatic IP blocking.

But my goal is to come up with strategies that make problems get solved
invisibly without crippling necessary flexibility--or adding layers of
complexity and hierarchy.

The benefits or harms of any particular technological method depend on the
implementation.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] vandalism spree

body:
On Tue, 19 Nov 2002, Zoe wrote:

>
> Please explain Bayesian filtering?
> Zoe

See [[Naive_Bayesian_classification]].

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


from_name: Giskart

subject: [Wikitech-l] Static HTML Wikipedia (CD-ROM)

body:
Steve Rawlinson heeft geschreven:
[cut]
>>Idea;
>>someone reads a article on the Wikipedia cd-rom and wants to change
>>something. He clicks on ?edit this page?. He gets a form that sends a
>>email to Wikipedia by use of his email program.
>
>
> An interesting idea, but I think if they have email then they are also
> very likely to have a web access and could submit changes in the "normal"
> way online.  I know of people who currently work this way because their
> Internet connection is expensive.  They only connect long enough to get
> the most recent changes and upload any updates.

I think there are people who have email but no www. And to connect only
for downloading and submit en disconnect again. Connecting is the most
expencieve thing to do. It depens of your telecom operator of cource,
but i now from the past when I used a modem and not ADSL that making the
conncetion is very expencive.


from_name: Lars Aronsson

subject: [Wikitech-l] Response times

body:
Below is a report for the last week on how often the [[Chemstry]] page
took more than five seconds to load, according to my script.

Response times above five seconds can be considered as down time,
since the website feels so slow that users start to abandon it.
However, no actual down time was recorded this week.  (Let's recall
how phase II worked, and bless the current blitz performance.)

The [[Chemistry]] page is rather short and simple, and should be
served as fast as the network can carry it.  If the server spends
several seconds on each serving of this page, it will seem very busy.
The sooner it can get the page out of its hands, the better.

 Mon, Nov 11,   18%
 Tue, Nov 12,    8%
 Wed, Nov 13,   10%
 Thu, Nov 14,    2%
 Fri, Nov 15,    4%
 Sat, Nov 16,    2%
 Sun, Nov 17,    4%
 Mon, Nov 18,    6%
 Tue, Nov 19,    7%

Around the clock (UTC time) over all days:

 00:00 - 01:59	 8%  (7-9 pm EST, 4-6 pm PST)
 02		 6%  (9-11 pm EST, 6-8 pm PST)
 04		 3%
 06		 3%
 08		 0%
 10		 0%
 12		 8%  (7-9 am EST, 4-6 am PST)
 14              6%  (9-11 am EST, 6-8 am PST)
 16          	15%  (11 am - 1 pm EST, 8-10 am PST)
 18		11%  (1-3 pm EST, 10-12 am PST)
 20		 9%  (3-5 pm EST, 12-2 pm PST)
 22:00 - 23:59	18%  (5-7 pm EST, 2-4 pm PST)

Conclusion: Europeans should use Wikipedia in the morning.
At noon, the Americans wake up and the site gets bogged down.

--
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik
  Teknikringen 1e, SE-583 30 Linuxk?ping, Sweden
  tel +46-70-7891609
  http://aronsson.se/ http://elektrosmog.nu/ http://susning.nu/


subject: [Wikitech-l] MySQL Configuration

body:
Here are the results of my analysis of the MySQL server configuration.
Keep in mind that I am not a database or MySQL expert while you are
reading this. All the values reported are from SHOW STATUS and SHOW
VARIABLES commands run by Brion earlier today.  They reflect data
collected from the past 4.3 days.

First some, general statistics of interest:

There were 5197 "Slow_queries" meaning that they took longer than 10
seconds (real time, not CPU) to process.  There were 54,979,099 queries
during this period, so only 0.009% took longer than 10 seconds.

Table_locks_immediate 51901895
Table_locks_waited      622366

Showing that 1.2% of all table locks were blocked by another lock.

The current server configuration looks to be using the defaults for a
medium size server as provided with MySQL distribution in the file
"my-medium.cnf".  My overall recommendation is to change to the
"my-large.cnf" defaults if there are sufficient resource.  It is "for
large systems with 512M RAM where the system mainly runs MySQL."
Assuming the server is only running Wikipedia and has the reported 2 Gig
of RAM, this shouldn't be a problem.

I have found two serious problems with the current setup that might
explain the poor performance.  If switching to the my-large.cnf defaults
is not possible, then I suggest trying at least these two changes and
seeing if performance improves.

The following list is straight out of the MySQL documentation.  I will
show the relevant variables from SHOW STATUS and SHOW VARIABLES, describe
their meaning and comment:

    * If Opened_tables is big, then your table_cache variable is probably
too small.

table_cache 64
Open_tables 64
Opened_tables 544468

This is the first serious problem.  "The table_cache is the number of open
tables for all threads.  MySQL, being multi-threaded, may be running many
queries on the table at one time, and each of these will open a table."
Therefore, even though we only have a few tables, we will need many more
open_tables.

The Opened_tables (note the "ed") value is high and shows the number of
cache misses.  Everything I have read about configuring the MySQL server
suggests that getting the table_cache size correct is one of the two best
things you can do to improve performance.

I suggest the table_cache be increased to 256, the default value from
my-large.cnf.

See the following for more information on the table_cache
http://www.databasejournal.com/features/mysql/article.php/10897_1402311_3
(this is also a really good article on optimizing MySQL's configuration in
general)
http://www.mysql.com/documentation/mysql/bychapter/index.html#Table_cache

    * If Key_reads is big, then your key_buffer_size variable is probably
too small.  The cache hit rate can be calculated with
Key_reads/Key_read_requests.

key_buffer_size          16M
Key_read_requests 2973620399
Key_reads            8490571
(cache hit rate = 0.0028)

"The key_buffer_size affects the size of the index buffers and the speed
of index handling, particularly reading."  We seem to be doing pretty well
here.  The MySQL manual (and other sources) say that
"Key_reads/Key_read_request ratio should normally be < 0.01."  This is the
other most important thing to get correct.

    * If Handler_read_rnd is big, then you probably have a lot of queries
that require MySQL to scan whole tables or you have joins that don't use
keys properly.

Handler_read_rnd       27712353
Handler_read_rnd_next 283536234

These values are high, which says that we could probably stand to improve
our indexes and queries.  Improving this would require a lot of work so it
should be one of the last things considered (or part of a longer term
solution).

    * If Threads_created is big, you may want to increase the
thread_cache_size variable. The cache hit rate can be calculated with
Threads_created/Connections.

thread_cache_size 0
Threads_created 150022
Connections 150023

We aren't performing any thread caching.  This is the second problem that
I think should be fixed.  A cache size of zero is the default for
my-medium.cnf but the recommended size in my-large.cnf is 8.

A related problem I noticed was that it looks like we're reaching the
maximum number of connections.  I couldn't find any discussion about this
or if it was even a bad thing, but it may be worth noting.

max_connections 250
Max_used_connections 250

    * If Created_tmp_disk_tables is big, you may want to increase the
tmp_table_size variable to get the temporary tables memory-based instead
of disk based.

tmp_table_size             32M
Created_tmp_disk_tables   3227
Created_tmp_tables      159832
Created_tmp_files         4444

Created_tmp_disk_tables are the "number of implicit temporary tables on
disk created while executing statements" and Created_tmp_tables are
memory-based.  Obviously it is bad if you have to go to disk instead of
memory.  About 2% of temp tables go to disk, which doesn't seem too bad
but increasing the tmp_table_size probably couldn't hurt either.


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikipedia-l] vandalism spree

body:
> For example,
> 1. more powerful ways of searching and sorting edits,
> 2. more powerful ways of rolling back edits

I strongly support this, but let's be careful not to lose article
histories.

> 3. Bayesian filtering of contributions
> I see #3 as an interesting solution that would deal with most of our
> problems.

I noticed that you're in the list of Wikipedia developers. I think few
people would object to such modifications. So go for it.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: tarquin

body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:

>Erik,
>
>The reason the debate is not over, is that we old-timers have a responsibility to educate newcomers.
>
>I have "adopted" Lir as a mentee, because I believe she really wants to contribute. Please join me in gently (or firmly) coaching her about Wikipedia standards such as naming convention, NPOV, etc.
>
>Ed Poor
>
>

That's an admirable aim, Ed.
Is Lir kidding when she writes:
"You just /think/ that Anne Rice made that interview up...but I guess
you are allowed to your silly POV thoughts"
?


subject: [Wikipedia-l] stupid anglicization

body:
Hi Lir,

you do have a habit of holding positions that are inane enough to annoy
almost everyone and reasonable enough to find a small minority of
supporters ;-)

Brion nailed it. There's no point to redirect to "M?nchen" when I'm
visiting the "Munich" page on en.wikipedia.org, and I'm saying that as a
German. We have Wikipedias in almost every relevant language, including
Esperanto and Latin -- if I want to search for the native version of a
name (and am able to read it) I'll go to the Wikipedia in that language.
To just force a redirect to the native language is simply confusing and
unhelpful. There's no problem with mentioning the native name in the
article, that's educational, especially if there's information on
pronounciation etc. But if you think that simply enforcing redirects is
educational, you don't understand how learning works.

This policy is valid for other Wikipedias as well. If I go to the
"Kambodscha" page on de.wikipedia.org I don't want or expect to be
redirected to "Kambuchea". This would only confuse me, and in many cases I
wouldn't know how to pronounce or even read (for non-Latin characters) the
native versions.

Redirects are good in case of full titles etc., e.g. when I'm searching
for "Origin of Species" and get to "On the Origin of Species", or whatever
-- here the original title doesn't create confusion, but carries useful
information.

I agree with you that voting would be a good idea. Then this debate would
already be over.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Jonathan Walther

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Irritating edits to ones User page

body:
Could we have a persons contributions listed on a "Special" page, or
someone automatically included in their User page?

I mean, something showing which articles a user started, and which a
user has contributed a non-minor edit to.

I find Lirs perpetual updates to her user page annoyingly spammy on the
Recent Changes page, and I believe this solution could get rid of that
spam.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 307 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/attachments/20021119/9e7b68e8/attachment.pgp


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Educating newcomers

body:
A mail from Ed? Surely this cannot be, as you just announced your
departure from the project a couple of days ago (for the second time), and
wrote that Wikipedia is doomed. Or are you perhaps a bit moody? Let me
guess, the big advantage of Sunday school over Wikipedia was that it was
*only* on Sundays ;-)

> The reason the debate is not over, is that we old-timers have a
> responsibility to educate newcomers.

Well, Lir (Bridget) is not quite that new. Besides, the problem in this
case is not that she's not aware of our policies but that she wants to
change them. Advocating to do so is perfectly OK, and I pointed out, as
others have, why this would be a bad idea. If all goes well, the debate
will end soon, and everyone will follow conventions. We could even add the
resulting arguments to an FAQ.

The problem I see is that in a consensus-finding decision making process,
a single dedicated person can prolong discourse forever. If democracy is
the "tyranny of the majority", consensus-finding is the tyranny of the
cranks. Nothing in our rules says that Lir cannot continue the debate
about naming conventions forever -- so it would be wrong for us to punish
her if she does. And I'm afraid that when people get tired of our tedious
decision making process, they will want to resort to more drastic forms of
enforcement and more permanent power structures, which will in turn lead
to wrong decisions, alienation, power struggles.

That's why I will work more on the Wikipedia:Decision Making Process page
as soon as I have the time, and encourage others to do so.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Brion VIBBER

body:
Jonathan Walther wrote:
> Could we have a persons contributions listed on a "Special" page, or
> someone automatically included in their User page?

Click the "User contributions" link in the sidebar of any user page. For
anonymous IP addresses, you'll get this direct from clicking the IP in
the recentchanges or history pages.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


body:
On Wed, Nov 20, 2002 at 12:22:20AM -0800, Brion VIBBER wrote:
>Jonathan Walther wrote:
>>Could we have a persons contributions listed on a "Special" page, or
>>someone automatically included in their User page?
>
>Click the "User contributions" link in the sidebar of any user page. For
>anonymous IP addresses, you'll get this direct from clicking the IP in
>the recentchanges or history pages.

Well, that page is certainly useful, but not exactly what I had in mind.
I mean, something that doesn't show a list of all your edits, but just a
list of articles you have edited, since the beginning of your time on
the Wikipedia.

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 307 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/attachments/20021120/2b2fd0b2/attachment.pgp


body:
(User contributions page)
Jonathan Walther wrote:
 > Well, that page is certainly useful, but not exactly what I had in
 > mind. I mean, something that doesn't show a list of all your edits,
 > but just a list of articles you have edited, since the beginning of
 > your time on the Wikipedia.

Ah, I see what you mean. Yeah, that might be kinda nice.

This could be done, but
a) would be obscenely long in some cases :)
b) with the current setup, it is *very* slow to query the entire old
revisions table checking for this stuff. As in, it takes several
minutes and lagifies the whole server.

The current user contributions page is sped up by strictly limiting the
number of entries to search only the last couple weeks' woth of edits.
Indexing by user ID might help, though...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: zoltan simon

subject: [WikiEN-l] Proposed changes (Trojan War)

body:
Attn.: The Editors, or to whom it may concern
(Trojan War, Odysseus, Penelope, etc. absolute dates)

                                     November 20, 2002
Dear Wikipedia,

I cannot access this kind of dialogue box under the heading "Penelope," and
not sure how to send you comments regarding any page. So I try to do it
here. Namely, "Penelope waits twenty years for the return of her husband
from the Troy war." There is a grammatical mistake: it should be "Trojan
War" (both words capitalized), as widely accepted by historians.
    Other observation: although Homer mentions the twenty years of his
absense, he also mentions repeatedly that Penelope resisted the army of
suitors after the fall of Troy for almost four years. (From the summer of
1182 to April 1178 BC.) You may consider including a new absolute date for
the slaying of the suitors by Odysseus on April 16, 1178 BC, during a total
eclipse of the Sun observed at Ithaca. We came up with this proposal six
years ago in Robinson, 1996:97, and by now three web pages have accepted it.
I can give you the details if you are interested, including some academic
publications. (A total solar eclipse occurs at the same place once in an
average of 410 years.)

I congratulate for your excellent Wikipedia. Best regards,

Zoltan Andrew Simon, Senior Editor/ Land Surveyor
Vit?ria, Brazil
E-mail: zasimon at hotmail.com

_________________________________________________________________
Add photos to your messages with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*.
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikipedia-l] vandalism spree

body:
--- Toby Bartels <toby+wikipedia at math.ucr.edu> wrote:
> But that reminds me: do the non[[en:]] Wikipedias
> have pages analogous to
> [[Wikipedia:Administrators]]?
> If not, where will the banning message point to on
> them?
> I would suggest that any Wikipedia that uses banning
> at all
> should have methods like those that I proposed
> to allow banned users to contact administrators.

Hum, yeees.

Thoughts on tc, Toby, and Giskart (among others)
comments on vandalism (reference : pure nasty
vandalism : bots, porn images and so on...not "hard to
integrate" participants)

Vandalism does not only occur on the english
wikipedia, but also on the international ones, even
if, fortunately, attacks are infinitly less frequent
and less destructive in terms of volume.

Having far less participants, non-english wikipedias
do not "work" 'round the clock. There are periods of
time when nobody is watching, and nobody can react to
an attack. To speak of the case I know, there is very
often noone between 2am and 5am, and sometimes noone
between 9am to 12am on the fr:wiki. Or when somebody
is around, it's often a newcomer.
If any vandalism was to occur from an anonymous ip, we
are only 3 sysops to be able to ban it anyway.

Last monday at the end of the afternoon, a loggued-in
unknown user replaced the fr:homepage with a porn
picture (not as bad as the goatse, but still not one
that is appropriate for kids to see amha). Another
anonymous ip later replaced the picture by a single
line basically stating 'this is an encyclopedia,
please
don't do that' (hence, he was obviously not one of the
old hands, otherwise, he would have reverted the whole
page). I came around 20 mn later, and clean all. This
was fortunately a very minor vandalism (in terms of
page).

Athymik has been pointing out to us about a month ago
how damaging a bot running (loggued, behind proxy,
several ip addresses) could be.
Projection : if a bot run on the fr:wiki between 2am
to 5am and changes 2 pages per minute, the total
number of pages which could be vandalized is 360
(ain't I mastering calculus pretty well ?). I.e., more
than 10% of total pages right now.

Vandalism issues should not be treated language
separated. That is a global issue. Any knife cut in
one wiki as consequences on all wikis. Should the
international homepages be replaced by a goatse image
3 hours per week, my belief is that the english
wikipedia image would one day suffer from it -
Global public image issue, no ?

I support system that could automatically detect a
potential problem.
It is very likely that
- one user/ip saving every minute for more than 10 mn
is a potential problem
- any edit replacing more than xxxx characters by x
characters (except redirect...) is a potential problem
- any edit replacing more than xxxx characters by an
image that was downloaded less than tt minutes before
is a potential problem

But, then, what good would it do, if an automatic
system detect a potential problem but has no human to
warn ?

Some time ago, I raised the point of multi-wiki
vandalism (jumping through links). It was
interpretated as a personal whinning over consequences
interlangage links could have on minor wikis...Bah,
no. Really no. I am too happy with the links !

I had the front-idea in mind that a vandal on one
wiki, could also damage another wiki, so it could be
interesting somehow that a common system of reporting
existed, where maybe some connections could be made
between one vandal here and one vandal there. For
quicker and more effective reactivity.

With the back-idea that vandalism was a global issue,
and had to be considered including all wikis. I mean :
detection, human warning (in case of automatic
detection), human action to stop vandalism, human
action to revert vandalism.

If an international wiki is plagued by gore images
every week or so, thus damaging the image of the whole
project, if en.wikipedians has to come to help to
clean up 360 pages in a row, the issue is not local,
it's global.

I'd like not to hear "but, vandalism on international
wikis is a rare occurence". Yep, just as petrol ships
crushing on french, spanish and portuguese coasts are
a rare occurence. About every couple of years. Rare,
but damaging, no ? I see everywhere references to the
exxon waldez. Well, our last disaster was in 1999, the
Erika was an *absolutely* similar boat to the
Prestige. Same age, some construction type, same
content, same "pavillon de complaisance". Are we gonna
do nothing just because it is a rare occurence ?
In the past two months, we noticed there were people
coming through links, not because they were nominally
invited, but followed google. If they come, vandals
will come. Anticipation, prevention...

I like the idea of automatic detection. I'd like it to
be coupled with a system of automatic reaction (not
banning, rather slowing down save for example).
But, mostly, it should have an ACTIVE system of
COMMUNITY warning. Maybe, different levels of warning.
Maybe automatic emails to a list or to a board. Maybe
an automatic signal to bilingual people. Something.

Peace

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Web Hosting - Let the expert host your site
http://webhosting.yahoo.com


from_name: daniwo59 at aol.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] "transliteration" is stupider

body:
Going over last night's work, I notice that Angstrom has been redone to
include all the various diacretics. Is that common usage in English?

Oh, and Lir, I also noticed on your page that you refer to Jesus Christ as
Yehoshua of Nazareth. A very cute attempt to go back to the Hebrew/Aramaic,
but there are so many mistakes in that transliteration, it really makes it
useless.

1. There is no "ho" in the name. Yehoshua is Joshua, Yeshua is Jesus. In
fact, in Deuteronomy, Joshua's name was changed from Jesus--you are just
changing it back.
2. You're forgetting the gutteral ayin after the final a in Yeshua (though in
Hebrew/Aramaic writing it appears as if it would be before, the proper
pronunciation places it after).
3. Nazareth is just so far off the mark, it's not even worth explaining.
4. "Of" would "me" in Hebrew or "de" in Aramaic, without distinguishing
between the different vowels (tzeireh and shewa).

In other words, here your "attempt at accuracy" is just confused gibberish,
i.e., it is wrong. Stick to languages you know something about.

Danny
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/attachments/20021120/e4e26856/attachment.htm


subject: [WikiEN-l] transliteration is stupider

body:
Going over last night's work, I notice that Angstrom has been redone to
include all the various diacretics. Is that common usage in English?

Oh, and Lir, I also noticed on your page that you refer to Jesus Christ as
Yehoshua of Nazareth. A very cute attempt to go back to the Hebrew/Aramaic,
but there are so many mistakes in that transliteration, it really makes it
useless.

1. There is no "ho" in the name. Yehoshua is Joshua, Yeshua is Jesus. In
fact, in Deuteronomy, Joshua's name was changed from Jesus--you are just
changing it back.
2. You're forgetting the gutteral ayin after the final a in Yeshua (though in
Hebrew/Aramaic writing it appears as if it would be before, the proper
pronunciation places it after).
3. Nazareth is just so far off the mark, it's not even worth explaining.
4. "Of" would "me" in Hebrew or "de" in Aramaic, without distinguishing
between the different vowels (tzeireh and shewa).

In other words, here your "attempt at accuracy" is just confused gibberish,
i.e., it is wrong. Stick to languages you know something about.

Danny
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/attachments/20021120/f6821580/attachment.html


from_name: Throbbing Monster Cock

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Educating newcomers

body:
> I have "adopted" Lir as a mentee, because I believe
> she really wants to contribute. Please join me in
> gently (or firmly) coaching her about Wikipedia
> standards such as naming convention, NPOV, etc.

Lir's current standards are just as valid as the so
called "community standards".  Her persistance in
applying these standards could be seen as her attempt
to coach all other Wikipedia users to adapt to her
naming conventions and POV.

Just because a viewset is shared by the majority, no
matter how overwhelming that majority, the majority
has no authority over the dissenting individual.

--TMC

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Web Hosting - Let the expert host your site
http://webhosting.yahoo.com


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [Wikitech-l] The "ed" value (was: MySQL Configuration)

body:
Thanks to Steve Rawlinson for his analysis of tweakable factors slowing down Wikipedia access. I was especially intrigued by the "ed" value, for obvious personal reasons. ;-)

Anything performance tuning we can do *without* changing the table structure should be tried first.

Ed Poor


subject: [WikiEN-l] Chess on Wikipedia (was: Minor changes)

body:
I think Ram-Man has 2 equally valid reasons for playing chess with Lir on her user page:
* it has been excellent practice for learning how to set up tables
* it's a friendly way to engage a new community member

Ed Poor    => moving discussion to wikiEN-l


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Chess on Wikipedia (was: Minor changes)


subject: [Wikitech-l] X-System and Unicode

body:
> Currently you must manually switch this on in your
> preferences, and you
> get both X edit and X display or neither; I haven't
> had a chance yet to
> hack in the big, friendly button at the top of the
> screen.

Yes, but the problem is that I think the majority of
users would like to edit in the x-system and view in
unicode.  Currently, it is not possible to do this.
For example, in most internet cafes (where I do some
of my editing), I want to view the text in unicode,
but there's no way to type in unicode.  In this old
system it did not matter if people typed in x-system
or unicode, it always works.  Could we carry this
functionality over to the new software?  I know
Unukorno also wants this functionality.

Chuck

=====
I'm in the Czech Republic!!   Mi estas en Cxehxio!!
=========================================
Travel Plans: http://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_SMITH
  My Webpage: http://amuzulo.babil.komputilo.com/
Enciklopedio: http://eo.wikipedia.org/

__________________________________________________________________

Gesendet von Yahoo! Mail - http://mail.yahoo.de
M?chten Sie mit einem Gru? antworten? http://grusskarten.yahoo.de


from_name: Matthew Woodcraft

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re:  anglicization is stupid

body:
On Tue, Nov 19, 2002 at 08:14:41PM -0800, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> That is not what redirects are for. Redirects are for doing the exact
> opposite - to catch non-standard alternate forms that are not as used
> as widely as the main form.

This is begging the question.

-M-


from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [WikiEN-l] anglicization is stupid

body:
Mav wrote in large part:

>Toby Bartels wrote:

>>Zoe wrote in part:

>>>Should we not transliterate at all but force those who
>>>only know the Latin alphabet to try to figure out his REAL name by only
>>>being able to look it up in Chinese ideographs?

>>Nobody will be *forcing* any user to do anything of the sort.
>>Every article should have all common spellings (English and original)
>>in boldface in the first paragraph (we do this now if we know enough to),
>>and they should have redirects from all of these that are in Latin-1
>>(we do this now too if we know enough to).
>>Searching will work; linking will work -- no matter who wins.

>I have to agree with Zoe here.

Agree with what?  Zoe's not making a claim here,
only asking a rhetorical question that imputes opinions to your opponents
that *we*do*not*hold*!

>Back in March, April and May I moved many
>hundreds of articles from incorrectly named titles to correct ones per our
>naming conventions. Many of these were from overly complex non-English forms
>to forms that most English speakers would understand and find useful.
>I can't remember a single instance where the author of the
>non-Anglicized titled article made a redirect from the Anglicized title.

Then you can't remember a single instance where it was done as I would do it.
No matter which term is used as the title or is used within article text,
*every* term used in English text (including native forms,
which are also used in English text) should have redirects.
Surely we can all agree on *that*!
So don't tell me that I want to have "Kong-fu-zi" as an article title
and no redirect from "Confucius" -- I *don't* want that,
and I don't know of anybody that wants that.
(Maybe there is somebody like that, and maybe they'll speak up now,
and then you and I can gang up against them ^_^).

>In short: If most English speakers on both sides of the pond know a term by a
>certain spelling, then why have a convention that places the article on that
>term at a pedanticly "correct" spelling and then has to rely on redirects for
>what most people use? Remember the "surprise factor": users should not be
>surprised by where a link takes them.

Following a link to [[Confucius]] and seeing a page called "Kong-fu-zi"
that begins

'''???''' ([[551 BC]] - [[479 BC]]), also called '''Kong-fu-zi''',
'''Kung-fu-tze''', and (traditionally) '''Confucius''',
was a [[China|Chinese]] [[philosophy|philosopher]].

isn't going to be very shocking -- there's "Confucius" in bold up top.
(And if "Confucius" doesn't appear that way, then it wasn't written well,
and I'll be right in there with you to fix it when I see it.)

>That is not what redirects are for. Redirects are for doing the exact opposite
>- to catch non-standard alternate forms that are not as used as widely as the
>main form.

Nobody's changing what redirects are for.  Redirects are for moving us from
potential titles that aren't used to those titles that are used.
We're discussing which title to use, not the fundamental nature of redirects.

>That is why my idea of "redirect priority" never caught on as a
>way to make my proposed city naming convention work (in which Paris would be
>at [[Paris]] redirect to [[Paris, France]]). I learned the error of my ways.
>Please learn from my "redirect fallacy" mistake.

This again was not about redirects as such but about article titles.
[[Paris, France]] was rejected because we decided that it wasn't correct
(the French don't use the comma; English speakers in France
don't use the comma; the comma isn't used in England,
the closest English speaking country to France).
But whether we'd put the article at [[Paris]] or at [[Paris, France]],
there was always a redirect from one to the other.
The idea of redirect priority survives at, for example, [[Dallas]],
and rightly so.

(Actually, there was a little about redirects as such in that debate,
because readers that really need [[Paris (disambiguation)]],
so that they can move on from there to, say, [[Paris (mythology)]],
might be confused to suddenly find themselves at [[Paris, France]].
But this doesn't apply here; there is no other [[Confucius]],
which is why that page has no disambiguation block now.)

>>>decided that his name would ONLY be in Chinese?

>>Nobody is proposing this, any more than anybody is proposing
>>that his name should be given ONLY in English.
>>Rather, the question is which form is to be *preferred*,
>>in particular which form is to be the article title.
>>Every form will be (and is currently, when set up correctly) *supported*.

>What is and should be preferred is the title that is most likely to be linked
>to spontaneously in articles and what is most likely to be searched for.
>Please don't try to make contributing and using Wikipedia more difficult than
>it needs be by going down the opposite route.

I don't see how writing or reading will be more *difficult*.
What is most likely to be linked to and searched for
will be successfully linked to and searched for,
if the proper redirects are in place as I would propose.
Furthermore, if you find a case where the redirects aren't there,
then that would be *just* as wrong under my system as it is under yours,
and so would require correction under my system as it does under yours.
Under my system, the correction is to create the redirect;
under your (the current) system, the correction is to move the article.
*Both* ways then leave a situation where both names will work
in linking (thanks to redirects) and searching (same reason,
and also because both words will, if it's properly written at least,
appear in strongly emphasised text at the beginning of the article).
Either way will have the same functionality, if done properly
(and be deficient in some sense if done improperly),
so we're talking about a fairly small difference regarding
what will appear in the big header up top,
which strongly emphasised name will come first,
and which name will be preferred in the rest of the article.

>This idea of yours is also more complicated than you might think: There are
>many competing transliteration of many non-English terms. Which should we
>use? What about non-Latin charsets? It only seems logical to allow them so
>that we can have the exact name of things (there are also competing non-Latin
>charsets).

This is exactly what I responded to first in my previous letter.
This isn't an argument one way or another.
Whether we use The Original Name or What's Most Common In English Today,
we'll still have to decide *what* these things are.
If the former is more difficult to figure out than the latter
(since the latter can be found by Google -- but does that really work?),
then that's not an argument against the former,
because if we choose the "wrong" version, it'll still work out.
That is, the question for [[Confucius]] is not <Wade-Giles or Pinyin?>,
it's <Chinese or Latin?>.  *If* we decide for Chinese,
then either Wade-Giles or Pinyin will be better than Latin;
whereas if we continue with Latin (on the grounds that it's most common
in English text), then Wade-Giles vs Pinyin will of course be a nonissue.

>This is madness and not at all useful -- leave the pedantic language lessons
>in the article itself. Technical matters that touch on ease of linking, using
>and searching for articles trump using the native forms any day.

I agree with the last sentence.  However, it is irrelevant.

>There is no reason to belittle the intelligence of users and unnecessarily
>surprise them by having articles at non-English titles.

Belittle their intelligence???  How?

>This is the English
>language Wikipedia, so lets stop the sillyness and title things in *shock,
>horror* English.

"Confucius", of course, is not English.  It's a Latin form of a Chinese name,
which happens to be the form of that name most commonly (but not exclusively)
used in English text.

-- Toby


from_name: koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia is not a creche

body:
tarquin Wrote:
>Here's another thing WikipediaIsNot: a creche.
>
>Lir's been learning to follow rules, sure: she's applying NPOV to such
>entries as Star Wars (maybe the empire isn't evil) and Vampirism

<snip>

>meanwhile, she is getting up more & more people's noses: see Talk:Battle
>of Dien Bien Phu

LDC saw the writing on the wall long before I did.  I should have left
well enough alone.  apologies again for the unbanning.

kq


body:
sorry about that last message, I sent it to the wrong list.  :-/

kq


from_name: Tom Parmenter

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Chess on Wikipedia (was: Minor changes)

body:
But no reason for either one of them to clutter up the Recent Changes
page with minor edits.  If I am looking at the last 200 changes, every
chess move subtracts one possibly interesting change from my list.  I
think it is bad manners.

Tom Parmenter (general wikipedia issue)
Ortolan88

|From: "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com>
|Date: Wed, 20 Nov 2002 09:34:56 -0500
|
|I think Ram-Man has 2 equally valid reasons for playing chess with Lir on her user page:
|* it has been excellent practice for learning how to set up tables
|* it's a friendly way to engage a new community member
|
|Ed Poor    => moving discussion to wikiEN-l


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia is not a creche

body:
tarquin Wrote:
>Here's another thing WikipediaIsNot: a creche.
>
>Lir's been learning to follow rules, sure: she's applying NPOV to such
>entries as Star Wars (maybe the empire isn't evil) and Vampirism
>
><snip>
>
>meanwhile, she is getting up more & more people's noses: see Talk:Battle
>of Dien Bien Phu

LDC saw the writing on the wall long before I did.  I should have left
well enough alone.  apologies again for the unbanning; I'm having less
and less faith that Lir will cease antagonizing.

kq


subject: [WikiEN-l] RE: [Wikipedia-l] Chess on Wikipedia (was: Minor changes)

body:
I think it would be good for Ram-Man and other chess players to mark as "minor" any edits to their chess games.

Also, they could move their table-setup experiment and community-building just as well on MetaWiki, couldn't they?

Ed Poor


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re:  Request for SysOp status

body:
On Wednesday 20 November 2002 04:00 am, Khendon / Jason Williams wrote:
> I've been here a few months now; can I be a sysop, please?

As a matter of fact I was thinking about inviting you to become one.
Developers, please upgrade  Khendon's account to sysop.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

PS Khendon this is a request better suited for the en.wiki mailing list
(wikiEN-L).


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re:  Request for SysOp status


body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>In a voting process, the discourse period can be time-limited. Of
>course, people could continue to discuss the issue on a dedicated page, but an
>enforcable decision could be made before that.

And the same thing is true of a consensus process.
We discuss until a consensus is reached an implement that;
The Cunctator (or whoever ^_^) can continue to talk forever afterwards.
(For example, Cunc still talks about getting rid of banning,
despite the clear consensus in favour of banning.
If we voted on banning instead, the result would be the same.)

>>Agreed, but IMO, that's exactly what *you* are trying to do ^_^.

>Not at all, the idea is to decentralize power, and thereby reduce the
>potential for abuse. Voting seems to me very much complementary to the
>wiki idea.

Voting seems quite antithetical to wiki if you ask me.
(Not completely antithetical, of course;
the usual web page written by a single author
is even more far off from either of these.)
And I've never understood how decentralisation will result.
What *would* help with decentralising administrators' power
is mav's idea of automatic old hand status.

-- Toby


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Educating newcomers


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Request for SysOp status

body:
Khendon wrote:

>I've been here a few months now; can I be a sysop, please?

This request seems reasonable to me.

-- Toby


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Request for SysOp status


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia is not a creche

body:
You Wrote:
>How about reviving the old rule that if you save somebody's life,
you're responsible for them for ever after?
>
>Let's assign kq the job of following Lir around and checking up on
her :-)
>
>Ed Poor

Very funny.  Kq has been considering leaving wikipedia, and finding
very few reasons to stay.

kq


subject: [WikiEN-l] transliteration is stupider

body:
Danny wrote:

>Going over last night's work, I notice that Angstrom has been redone to
>include all the various diacretics. Is that common usage in English?

In this case, there is an offical standard for units of measurement:
no diacriticals, no capitalisation.  (I fixed the latter.)

>Oh, and Lir, I also noticed on your page that you refer to Jesus Christ as
>Yehoshua of Nazareth. A very cute attempt to go back to the Hebrew/Aramaic,
>but there are so many mistakes in that transliteration, it really makes it
>useless.

>1. There is no "ho" in the name. Yehoshua is Joshua, Yeshua is Jesus. In
>fact, in Deuteronomy, Joshua's name was changed from Jesus--you are just
>changing it back.

It's commonly taught in the US that "Yeshua" and "Yoshua"
are both abbreviations of "Yehoshua", and thus "Jesus" = "Joshua".
Is this wrong?

>2. You're forgetting the gutteral ayin after the final a in Yeshua (though in
>Hebrew/Aramaic writing it appears as if it would be before, the proper
>pronunciation places it after).

This is an argument about which transliteration is best.
I'd say "Yehowshua`" to reflect the presence of the Vav,
while Lir left out the "w" as well as the "`" --
but you will see both methods of transliteration employed.

>3. Nazareth is just so far off the mark, it's not even worth explaining.

Yeah, clearly she's not trying to transliterate this.
Apparently she knows only half of the name in the original
and will change this to "Natsret" (IIRC?) once she learns it.

>4. "Of" would "me" in Hebrew or "de" in Aramaic, without distinguishing
>between the different vowels (tzeireh and shewa).

And this she isn't even attempting to translate into the right language.
Clearly only a half-hearted attempt, but better than nothing.
We improve step by step.

>In other words, here your "attempt at accuracy" is just confused gibberish,
>i.e., it is wrong. Stick to languages you know something about.

-- Toby


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Re: transliteration is stupider

body:
On Wednesday 20 November 2002 04:27 am, Danny wrote:
> Going over last night's work, I notice that Angstrom has been redone to
> include all the various diacretics. Is that common usage in English?

Not to my knowledge. Taking out the diacritic flare it is still recognizable
as Angstrom so I don't think it is /that/ bad. Opps! Looks like Ed fixed it.

> Oh, and Lir, I also noticed on your page that you refer to Jesus Christ as
> Yehoshua of Nazareth. A very cute attempt to go back to the Hebrew/Aramaic,
> but there are so many mistakes in that transliteration, it really makes it
> useless.
>
> 1. There is no "ho" in the name. Yehoshua is Joshua, Yeshua is Jesus. In
> fact, in Deuteronomy, Joshua's name was changed from Jesus--you are just
> changing it back.
> 2. You're forgetting the gutteral ayin after the final a in Yeshua (though
> in Hebrew/Aramaic writing it appears as if it would be before, the proper
> pronunciation places it after).
> 3. Nazareth is just so far off the mark, it's not even worth explaining.
> 4. "Of" would "me" in Hebrew or "de" in Aramaic, without distinguishing
> between the different vowels (tzeireh and shewa).
>
> In other words, here your "attempt at accuracy" is just confused gibberish,
> i.e., it is wrong. Stick to languages you know something about.
>
> Danny

Well said. We needn't go down that road; it is far more complicated than our
current system (since it absolutely requires redirects). Newbies simply don't
know about or use redirects so using transliteration or native forms is not
an answer.

Above all else we should strive to be useful to the reader and user by using
the most widely used title in English. Redirects are supposed to catch
non-common forms and the most common form should be the article itself.

Also in many cases, several different scholars throughout history have come up
with several different transliteration for any given term. Which one should
we use? In addition Lir has expressed an interest in having article titles in
their original non-Lain text which would be completely unreadable by the mass
majority of the English world.

A Wikipedia that uses the some pedantic, more scholarly "correct" system of
naming articles gives me the creeps. This is one of the reasons why I have
moved so many organism articles from the Latin to common English forms. Under
the Latin people have tended to write to a more technical audience but now
under the common English forms people tend to write in more inclusive
language. There have also been more edits (many people were probably put-off
by the foreign titles).

I for one wouldn't want to be a part of a Pedanticpedia but anyone wanting to
do so is more than welcome to start your own encyclopedia someplace else. And
don't be surprised if it is a very lonely place.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

pedantic
     adj : marked by a narrow focus on or display of learning
           especially its trivial aspects


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Educating newcomers

body:
Hi Toby,

> A *single* person can't prolong the decision-making process forever,
> because we have enough people around that lack of a single person
> is no obstacle to reaching a consensus.  Consensus != unanimity
> (in English, although apparently it does mean that in French --
> see some earlier posts between me and Anthere).

> And even with a voting mechanism in place, a single dedicated person
> could still prolong *discourse* forever.  Or would you censor speech?

No, but in a voting process, the discourse period can be time-limited. Of
course, people could continue to discuss the issue on a dedicated page, but an
enforcable decision could be made before that.

> >And I'm afraid that when people get tired of our tedious
> >decision making process, they will want to resort to more drastic forms
> of
> >enforcement and more permanent power structures, which will in turn lead
> >to wrong decisions, alienation, power struggles.

> Agreed, but IMO, that's exactly what *you* are trying to do ^_^.

Not at all, the idea is to decentralize power, and thereby reduce the
potential for abuse. Voting seems to me very much complementary to the wiki idea.

Regards,

Erik

--
+++ GMX - Mail, Messaging & more  http://www.gmx.net +++
NEU: Mit GMX ins Internet. Rund um die Uhr f?r 1 ct/ Min. surfen!


from_name: Khendon / Jason Williams

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Request for SysOp status

body:
I've been here a few months now; can I be a sysop, please?

--
Khendon / Jason Williams
jason at jasonandali.org.uk    http://www.jasonandali.org.uk/jason/


from_name: Christopher Mahan

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Educating newcomers

body:
--- Jason Williams <jason at jasonandali.org.uk> wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 20, 2002 at 08:17:31AM -0800, Throbbing Monster Cock
> wrote:
> > Just because a viewset is shared by the majority, no
> > matter how overwhelming that majority, the majority
> > has no authority over the dissenting individual.
>
> wikipedia, though, is fundamentally a community based on
> certain shared views. Somebody who doesn't share the
> most fundamental views of a community can't be a productive
> member of that community. (Views that you don't have to
> share to be a productive member are, by definition,
> not fundamental views. Groups of people that don't
> share fundamental views aren't communities)
>
> Anybody who wants to be in a community of different
> values can start a new one.

Unfortunately that is not the case if Wikipedia still clings to the
notion that it would cover human knowledge. The only requirement for
that is to be humans. Tigers and whales can set up their "Tigers and
Whales" encyclopedia.

To deny access to wikipedia who do not conform to 20th century
western academic standards would deny, oh, roughly, 90% of the human
race from participating. In which case, it would not be an
encyclopedia of the human knowledge, but rather a wanna-be
encyclopedia with only 10% of human knowledge.

It's sort of like saying: all persons have inalieanble rights yet
only citizens have access to lawyers free of charge. Pretty silly
huh?

=====
Christopher Mahan
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
http://www.christophermahan.com/

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Web Hosting - Let the expert host your site
http://webhosting.yahoo.com


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikipedia-l] anglicization is stupid

body:
Magnus Manske wrote:

> Bridget [name omitted for privacy reasons] wrote:
>
>> we should refer to spacecraft from the USSR according to their
>> Russian name-not according to the English name.
>
> But the English wikipedia has agreed on using English names. For the
> title of the article, that is. The "native" name can be prominently
> mentioned in the opening paragraph.

I've only been on Wikipedia since February, but these "rules" were in
place before I got here.  Nevertheless I share the concerns which Oliver
and Bridget have raised, but I've not had the energy for a lonely fight
against the forces of anglocentrism.  I'll save my comments about this
particular rule for another posting; this one is about the rule making
procedures, with that rule being only one example.

People become comfortable with their rules, even wrong rules.  The fact
is that it is likely that a majority of today's Wikipedians were not
around when these rules were established.  If today's Wikipedian
perceives that he can have no influence on rules that were established
before he came on board, he will soon develop the impression that there
is a class structure based on seniority.

One highly respected Wikipedian replied to my suggestion of giving
letter codes to each article with a comment to the effect that with
nearly 100,000 articles in our encyclopedia it was too big to effect
those changes.  A similar argument can be made about "correct" names; we
have so many articles that changing a rule is impossible.  It doesn't
matter if the old rule was seriously flawed, or the new rule would
provide a useful tool for coping with an ever larger corpus of knowledge.

A broadly applicable new or revised rule must deal with transitional
compatibility problems.  That is easy to understand.  Colour television
was an obvious technical improvement over the old black-and-white
system, but its introduction had to take into account the fact that
there were a lot of black-and-white TVs out there, and that people could
not be expected to throw out their old sets just because they had
suddenly become obsolete.

My conclusion:  most of our "rules" should be subject to periodic
review.  If an old rule, including a well established rule, can be
improved or no longer seves its original purpose, or fails to cope with
newer needs it should be changed.  Of course, in making changes,
compatibility issues must be considered.

Eclecticology


subject: [WikiEN-l] anglicization is stupid

body:
On Wednesday 20 November 2002 09:44 am, Toby wrote:
>.....
> Whether we use The Original Name or What's Most Common In English Today,
> we'll still have to decide *what* these things are.
> If the former is more difficult to figure out than the latter
> (since the latter can be found by Google -- but does that really work?),
> then that's not an argument against the former,
> because if we choose the "wrong" version, it'll still work out.
> That is, the question for [[Confucius]] is not <Wade-Giles or Pinyin?>,
> it's <Chinese or Latin?>.  *If* we decide for Chinese,
> then either Wade-Giles or Pinyin will be better than Latin;
> whereas if we continue with Latin (on the grounds that it's most common
> in English text), then Wade-Giles vs Pinyin will of course be a nonissue.

Boy you make it sound even more complicated than I even thought. Thanks for
proving my point for me with specifics. Under the current system all we need
to determine is what the majority of English speakers would recognize.
Searching only webpages that are in English via Google is a very important
tool that can give a statistically significant objective measure (of at least
Internet usage - but netcitizens are our main audience anyway). Mind you this
isn't the only thing that should be used to settle naming arguments but it is
an objective measure nontheless. Under the proposed plan everything would be
subjective and requires a good deal of knowledge by the author. This would be
fine if we were all experts in the subject's field and were writing for other
experts but we ain't on both counts. "Know your audience and write for that
audience" is a basic maxim of good writing style.

> >This is madness and not at all useful -- leave the pedantic language
> > lessons in the article itself. Technical matters that touch on ease of
> > linking, using and searching for articles trump using the native forms
> > any day.
>
> I agree with the last sentence.  However, it is irrelevant.

How is it no relevant? Under the proposed system redirects are absolutely
necessary to make it work. Under the current system only a few links will be
missed if there are no redirects (which is the case for the great majority of
articles).

> >There is no reason to belittle the intelligence of users and unnecessarily
> >surprise them by having articles at non-English titles.
>
> Belittle their intelligence???  How?

By forcing a pedantic and foreign title down their throats that they probably
have never seen before and probably won't ever be able to pronounce - no
matter how many times they see it. There is no reason we should start off an
article by talking down to our readers from an ivory tower. Of course the
native form and alternate transliteration should be bold on the first line
and the article with those titles redirected to the most widely used form. A
good article would also explain just how and when the non-English forms have
been used. This is information best suited for explanation in the article -
no reason to have it in the title.

> >This is the English
> >language Wikipedia, so lets stop the sillyness and title things in *shock,
> >horror* English.
>
> "Confucius", of course, is not English.  It's a Latin form of a Chinese
> name, which happens to be the form of that name most commonly (but not
> exclusively) used in English text.

Yes it is English because that is what is most widely used by English
speakers. English picks-up and modifies non-English terms all the time in the
process of Anglicization. If and when those terms are used by a good majority
of English speakers then they have entered the English language and we should
therefore use that term to title articles. This is especially true for proper
nouns of people, places and things.

If a naming system is not useful we shouldn't use it. The proposed naming
convention is needlessly complicated, talks down to non-experts, leads to
pedantic writing and because of this would reduce contributions to affected
articles. It could also have a general chilling effect on the whole project:
People would feel that it is required to properly research what the "true"
name of an article should be before they create it instead of just relying on
the name they know (which may be wrong, but is very often correct per our
current system). Otherwise somebody will come by later and move the article
and probably chide the original author for their Anglo-centric based
ignorance. Burr

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikitech-l] Changing TMC's username

body:
Could someone (perhaps Brion Vibber since he posted the code of how to
do it) run the commands necessary to change TMC's username?

I fear doing it myself.  I fear breaking something.