from_name: Anthere

body:
Erik Zachte wrote:
> Anthere:

> My point, please give it few more days or even weeks, perhaps give yourself
> a break as well, before you decide no one is interested.
> We don't need to reach a conclusion within a week. Better slow and steady
> than hastily and without results.
>
> Erik Zachte

My own point is that we may have days, but we may not have weeks.
I know who is on the board now, I do not know for sure who will be on
the board in a few months. By the way, about a good dozen people
indicated their interest to be on the board, and some of them gave their
opinion on the current topic. Others did not.

I think that it would be interesting that all current candidates
actually *give* their opinion publicly on what they consider is
membership, on how membership should be taken into account and which
type of organisation they envision would be best for the Foundation.

Ultimately, either we together will have to decide which persons should
be elected (in case of elections) or I (and other board members) will
have to decide which persons to appoint (in case of appointments).

During last elections, some people complained that there has not been
much "deep" discussions. To my opinion, membership and organisation are
really important topics. There is a pending resolution which aims at
appointing a temporary board member. This board member will have a
voice, just as current board members have. This person will be able to
impact greatly the future of the organisation depending on his/her
position. I gather I was elected with the expectation I will make
informed decisions with regards to the future of the organisation.
I do not consider myself informed enough. No decisions is required. But
opinions are necessary.

ant


list: wikimedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

subject: [Foundation-l] the easy way or the less easy way


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Image uploads now undeletable

body:
Timwi wrote:
> Brion Vibber wrote:
>> Uploaded files which are deleted can now be undeleted; admins can also view the
>> deleted files without actually undeleting them. This is integrated into the
>> existing Special:Undelete in what I hope is a fairly clear and intuitive manner.
>
> Brilliant! Thank you very much for this!
>
> Now, when will we have file renames? ;-)

When the primary file storage is migrated to the hash-based filestore, that will
decouple physical filenames from logical filenames and make that feasible.

I do want to make sure it's done before the end of the year, but it's not a top
priority (and we want to be damn sure migration will work correctly when it
happens; we'll have near half a terabyte of data to migrate when the time
comes!) so it won't be tomorrow.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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list: foundation-l

from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Foundation-l] A proposal for organisation

body:
Anthere wrote:

>Jan Kulveit wrote:
>
>
>>One dissimilarity - what are the "projects"? In the sense of ASF it
>>may be Wikipedia, Wikinews, Commons, etc.  Here the projects are
>>language versions of "meta-projects".
>>Commiters have common languages - code and English. Wikimedia
>>projects do not. You can hardly effectively oversight a Wikimedia
>>project if you dont understand the language. => question - if you take
>>board members and their freinds, and maybe even theirs friends, does it
>>cover the spectrum of Wikimedia languages? I would guess it doesn't.
>>
>>
>If course it does not...
>I would be tempted to say that Wikimedia projects are the projects (so,
>Wikipedia, Wikinews etc...), rather than by breaking down to language.
>Why so ? Because even if they have a different language, the various
>language versions share the same goals (or precisely *should* share the
>same goal), the same needs and the same threats.
>
>A direction of thought would be to examine to areas of authority of the
>PMC. Here are my suggestions
>* ensuring all projects are following the same goal
>
This is really a question of how detailed the goal will be.  The goal of
building an encyclopedia is general enough, as is ensuring NPOV, but
once you get away from general pronciples and start to micromanage the
whole thing will fall apart.  As the goals become more detailed ensuring
should not depend imply enforcing.

>* overseeing tm issues (the project logo, the project tm, domain names...)
>* overseeing the general threats facing this particular project (legal
>threats faced by wikiquote are definitly different from those faced by
>Wikipedia)
>* overseeing the licencing issue of the project (note that this
>naturally occured when wikinews chose another set of licensing... for
>all language version wide)
>* oversee technical needs (wikiversity or wiktionary needs are specific
>to a project, not to a language version)
>
>etc...
>
>Naturally, the PMC can not cover all languages version. But if that
>committee has 20 members (for example), I guess they will always cover
>more languages than the current board ;-)
>
PMCs are not needed for all projects in all languages.  A small language
project may do quite well with a one man governance model, and may very
much benefit from that even if that person has dictatorial tendencies.
However, as these projects grow applied governance models should grow
with them until they are big enough to need a full-scale PMC

>>Another dissimilarity is in the existence of local chapters. How do
>>they fit in the above scheme?
>>
>>
>I do not see why local chaters would get a specific involvement in the
>PMC scheme.
>They could get involved in the membership scheme by also having up to a
>certain number of representative on the Foundation.
>
Some level of chapter involvement in both the Foundation and PMCs is
lkely desireable, but for different reasons.  At the Foundation level
they would participate in co-ordinating responses to the legal
situations in each country.  At the project level they could would
likely help to co-ordinate issues relating to national dialects.  In
French it would make sense if Canadian, Belgian and Swiss chapters were
represented on the PMC for each French language project.

Ec


list: wikien-l

from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Exit Interview -- Jon Awbrey

body:
On 6/18/06, Jon Awbrey <jawbrey at att.net> wrote:
> 1.  accurate reporters (AR's).
> 2.  responsible scholars (RS's).
> 3.  infantile vandals (IV's).
> 4.  expert disrupters (ED's)

What is an accurate reporter? Where do the stamp collectors (the
people who write vast, presumably accurate, catalogues of all the
train stations, types of trains, etc etc) fit in? What about the
wikignomes, those (like me) that will happily attack any random
article in the hope of improving it?

Steve


body:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:

>In terms of Wikimedia, I'd like to see membership as an
>extremely open thing.  But at the same time, I don't want to see it so
>open as to being "members of all Wikimedia projects", as Delphine
>describes it.
>
Extremely open membership is a great ideal, but it can make it difficult
to know just who your members are at any given time.  It is also
difficult to establish any kind of continuity in policy when attendance
at meeting is highly random.

>One potential problem is that Wikimedia is way too big to have voting
>for every single member.  For this reason and also so that it remains
>"no big deal" like adminship was supposed to be, I'd be strongly
>opposed to voting.  Rather, there should be a clear standard for
>identification and activity and anyone who meets this can apply.  Once
>a member you remain a member as long as you remain active and aren't
>kicked out.
>
I don't think that I would go so far as to characterize these positions
as "no big deal".  The kind of disputes that arise over the naming of
admministrators suggest that that slogan is not consistent with what
happens.  Inactive members should be subject to automatic suspension in
the absence of maintaining a minimal level of activity, but their
reinstatement would be just as automatic when they once again meet that
standard.

>The activity rules would be project specific, and should be met on a
>regular basis in order to continue membership.  I'd like to see the
>activity rules be somewhat tough, just editing a few times a year
>shouldn't cut it.  But participation in offline activities would also
>be taken into consideration.  For example if you show up to stuff
>envelopes you're definitely considered active for that quarter.
>Eventually there should probably be a committee which decides on the
>activity rules.
>
That's acceptable.

Ec


body:
Birgitte SB wrote:

>Personally,  I  really like this model a great deal.
>I like it much better as it is here than with any of
>the modifications which have already been proposed.
>This really could work easily without major elections
>in most cases.  I think we should keep it as simple as
>possible.  Start off with all current buearucrats
>being Project Members ask them to immediately nominate
>one(?) other person from where they are a bueruecrat
>and two(?) people from a language too small to have a
>buerucrat.  That is the seed membership which should
>allow initial elections of officers and voting on
>basic bylaws etc.  From then on any Project Member can
>nominate anyone to join as in Apache, also future
>buearucrats do not automatically become members.  Once
>that is setup we begin to worry about how to seed the
>Foundation Memebership.  I think that Foundation
>Membership should be drawn from Project Members and
>Chapter Members pretty much exclusively without
>"making a choice" of which membership card one person
>can carry.  Although I do not think *officers* at the
>Project Level should hold any position on Foundation
>Level commitees at the same time, I do not see a
>problem with an officer being simple voting Foundation
>Member.  Nor do I see a problem with Foundation
>Committee members being simple voting Project or
>Chapter Members.  I imagine the Foundation Membership
>would be pretty self-balancing.  If for example the
>Foundation Membership begins to be over weighted with
>Wikipedia Project Members the Chapter Members and
>other Non-pedia Project Members could easily put a
>stop to more Wikipedia Projects Members being
>confirmed and confirm people from other areas to
>restore balance.
>
>As to concerns that smaller languages will be left
>out, and that they have different issues.  I think the
>first can be easily avoided as so many people strongly
>believe in promoting smaller languages.  Honestly can
>they be more left out in this new system than they are
>now?  That they face different challenges according to
>size is even more reason to keep them together so they
>can learn from each other.  A place were RC can be
>checked by hand will one day grow, and to learn in
>advance how to deal with libel on a larger project can
>only be a benifit.  The problems faced at a smaller
>languages can find many suggestions from those who
>have already "been there and done that".  But I think
>the Project Membership (especially non-pedia ones)
>will be as concerned with common technical issues as
>legal or procedural ones.  Besides that there are many
>issues that *do* scale.  How to encourage people to
>work on core topics, instead of pet projects for
>example.  There could always be a backdoor built in to
>allow the Board to appoint people from
>un-representented languages to Project Membership if a
>complaint comes up through the Chapters.  But I do not
>think it would come to that. /listinfo/foundation-l
>
This would be a helpful approach to getting the ball rolling.

We begin with what works, and deal with problems pragmatically rather
than trying to imagine every conceivable hurdle ahead of time.  By-laws
should reflect practice; not the other way around.

Ec


from_name: Michael Snow

body:
Kelly Martin wrote:

> Does Florida law require that member of nonprofits be actual persons?
> A nonprofit I used to work for (a national organization) had as its
> members the 50 state organizations of which it was comprised.  Perhaps
> the members of Wikimedia should be the various national organizations
> which already exist, as corporate entities.

It doesn't appear to be a requirement, just the assumption we've been
working with. Using the chapters as members could perhaps be workable,
it warrants consideration at least.

I can imagine three possible problems, not necessarily insurmountable.
First is that the extent of chapter coverage remains inadequate, so I
don't know that it would make sense to launch a membership structure
right now. We might need to deal with the current membership vacuum for
a little while longer.

Second is that we currently emphasize not putting chapters in a position
of potential liability, particularly since local libel laws or lack of
safe harbors for hosted online content may place them in greater
jeopardy than the Florida foundation. Florida law does provide that
members are not liable for corporate acts as such, but I don't know what
credence that will be given in another nation's courts. As a general
principle, the closer the chapters get to actually managing the
Wikimedia Foundation, the more likely it is that their court systems
will choose to "pierce the veil" and hold them directly accountable.

Third is the possibility that local laws for some chapters might
prohibit them from participating in the membership structure as it is
ultimately organized. I can't say if or where this would be an actual
problem, it's a little beyond my current mastery of the situation. As
with the international liability issues, people with a better
understanding of those local laws would need to address what a given
chapter can or cannot do.

--Michael Snow


from_name: Jon Awbrey

subject: [WikiEN-l] Exit Interview -- Jon Awbrey

body:
o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o

post 3.

incorporating responsess to:

CM = Charles Matthews
SB = Steve Bennett

CM:  Yes, editing WP doesn't suit everybody.
And it is possible to leave, without feeling
a need to blacken its reputation.

SB: What is an accurate reporter?  Where do the stamp collectors (the
people who write vast, presumably accurate, catalogues of all the
train stations, types of trains, etc etc) fit in?  What about the
wikignomes, those (like me) that will happily attack any random
article in the hope of improving it?

to continue,

i will try to stay focused on the task at hand,
which is simply to provide clear feedback that
might become useful at some time in the future
toward the actualization of a worthy objective
with which i continue to feel a certain degree
of sympathy, even though my personal resources
on its behalf are approaching final exhaustion.

accesses of strong feelings as i lay out this narrative
are probably inevitable, and defensive reactions on the
part of some of its readers are quite natural and to be
expected, especially with those who share a strong bond
of common identity with each other and the ideals of WP.
indeed, until just a few days ago, i was commonly found
to be voicing many of the same apologies and excuses to
my acquaintances with regard to the rough-jeweled state
and the promise of WP, so i know most of these by heart.

i do not know if the reputation of WP could be diminished any further
among the acquaintances that i have discussed it with, but i do know
that whether its reputation improves or worsens, it will be through
the acts of the WP community as a whole, and not through my words.

after reading SB's remarks 3 or 4 times,
i'm not sure i can guess what he means,
so i'll just leave this as a question.

jon awbrey

o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o
inquiry e-lab: http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/
wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/user:Jon_Awbrey
o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o


from_name: henna

subject:
[Foundation-l] Dutch moderators destroy evidence of checkuser
	abuse

body:
I have tried to translate Walter van Kalken's email without
changingthe meaning of his words. I'm not a profesional translator, my
apologies for the less then nice flowing of the sentences from time to
time.

Finne/henna

On 6/15/06, Walter van Kalken <walter at vankalken.net> wrote:
> Have it translated by your favourite Dutch person:

> ==De moderatoren vernietigen het bewijs van hun machtsmisbruik==
==Admins destroy proof of their abuse of power==

> Dit haalde [[Gebruiker:Dolledre]] zojuist uit de kroeg,
[[User:Dolledre]] removed this a short while ago from the village pump

> het bewijs dat men oneigenlijke middelen gebruikt en de privacy van
> gebruikers ten grabbel gooit:
the proof that tools are used inapropriatly and the privacy of users
is disrespected

> === Misbruikmaken chekuser en inbreuk op de privacy ===
===Abuse checkuser and invasion of privacy===
> Zojuist heeft [[gebruiker:Walter]] gebruik gemaakt van de tool checkuser.
[[User:Walter]] has just used the tool checkuser

> Dit is een tool die ter beschikking staat aan de stewards en slechts in een
> uiterst noodgeval gebruikt mag worden.
This is a tool available to stewards and should only used in emergencies

> Namelijk als iemand erg vandalisme pleegt om zijn IP op te kunnen sporen.
Namely, when one vandalises to be able to retrieve someones IP

> Dit deed ik niet en toch heeft Walter checkuser gebruikt.
I did not do this and still Walter used checkuser.

> Tegen alle richtlijnen daaromtrent in.
Against all directives concerning this

> Hoe weet ik dat Walter dit deed?
How do I know that Walter did this?

> Heel eenvoudig hij blokkeerde zojuist het IPadres waaronder ik werkte.
Very simple, he blocked my IPadress

> Dat kan hij alleen geweten hebben als hij checkuser gebruikte.
He can only have known this when he used checkuser

> Niet alleen is dit een schending van onze privacyregels.
Not only is this an invasion of our privacy

> Maar ook nog eens een schending van het feit dat dit alleen in een noodgeval gebruikt mag worden.
But it is also an infraction on the fact that this can only be used in
emergencies

> En dan alleen nog als er meerdere mensen mee instemmen
And even then only when other people approve

> Daarnaast stuurde Walter mij ook nog eens een dreigemail vandaag dat ik
> voor altijd geblokkeerd ga worden en dat hij mij alleen
> ''kan redden''als ik braaf > ben en allen als waerth edit.
Apart from that, Walter send me a threatening email that I will be
blocked indefinitly and that he "can save" me only if i'm good and
only edit as Waerth

> Tja als dat editten me onmogelijk wordt gemaakt .......
Tja, if this editting is made impossible for me

> Dit is:
This is:

> A) Schending van iemands privacy ... er is een reden dat men onder een
> naam edit.
A) Invasion of privacy, there's a reason people use names to edit

> B) Bedreiging
B) Threath

> C) Oneigenlijk gebruik van machtsmiddelen.
C) Inapropriate use of tools

> Ik vraag [[Gebruiker:Walter]] zelf de conclusie te verbinden aan deze 3 zeer > ernstige feiten!
I ask [[User:Walter]] to draw his own conclusions

> WAERTH (die zijn computer opnieuw op heeft moeten starten)
Waerth (who had to reboot his computer)


list: commons-l

from_name: Brianna Laugher

subject:
[Commons-l] An interactive copyright tutorial as a requirement
	for uploading?

body:
Hm, I'm not sure what would stop users just guessing and hitting
'back' a lot to get through it. And what questions would we ask? That
would be the hardest bit. (Well, maybe collecting all the translations
would be the hardest...)

I had an idea which would hopefully achieve a similar outcome, that we
could introduce "throttled" or "reviewed" uploads. Once a user uploads
say, 5 files, an admin has to review the files before they can upload
any more. If they made any mistakes, they stay on reviewed upload. If
they didn't make any mistakes with licensing, they can go onto
unreviewed upload (what we have at the moment).

No idea if it would be even remotely technically feasible, though.

Brianna

On 16/06/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
> Wikimedia Commons is a very important resource, but it also has
> policies which many people will find difficult to understand. They
> cannot just upload whatever they want, they have to provide full
> source information, and they should have at least a basic
> understanding of licensing.
>
> Many ideas have been mentioned here to somehow limit uploads by first
> timers. One that I haven't heard mentioned is to require every new
> user to go through some interactive tutorial process that explains the
> basics. How could this be done?
>
> 1) Create a new permission for uploading.
> 2) Any user who doesn't have the permission, and tries to upload, is
> presented with the tutorial.
> 3) Once they have completed the tutorial, they receive the permission.
>
> On the implementation level, it seems that this can be done as an
> extension which a) hooks into the upload process and checks whether a
> user has the permission, b) displays a set of pages from the
> MediaWiki: namespace (important so the tutorial can be localized using
> the "/de", "/en" .. subpage syntax), each of them with a
> "Previous"/"Next" button. Only when a user has viewed the final page
> in the sequence, they would be given the upload permission.
>
> All existing users (except sysops) would have to go through the process as well.
>
> Future refinements could include interactive questions/answers about
> copyright issues. As for bots, bot status has to be set by bureaucrats
> anyway, so these could also give bots the upload permission.
>
> Does this idea make sense? If it works for Commons, a simplified
> version might even be useful for each individual Wikimedia project.
>
> Erik
> _______________________________________________
> Commons-l mailing list
> Commons-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
>


from_name: CPA London

subject: [Commons-l] Project completed

body:
[[Category:Images requiring rotation]] has had all approximately 150 images rotated back to proper viewing this week. I left the category and there should be more coming in to fill the article and be worked on. I also created a category for Vietnam War Memorial photographs and catelogued the existing ones that were in neither article nor category other than Vietnam War, which seemed innapropriate.

Wayne Ray
http://wayneray.ca/


body:
Thanks for the translation Henna

I do not think it is written anywhere that the tool should be used only
in case of emergencies. Usually, the only reason for emergency reaction
is that the logs are kept only for a limited amount of time.

It is worth noting that the sockpuppets might have been created on
purpose by a third party, in the intention of doing prejudice on Waerth.
If that had been so, Waerth would have been more than happy if a
checkuser had revealed he was not the sockpuppet holder.

I do not see any abuse in what Walter did.

Ant

henna wrote:
> I have tried to translate Walter van Kalken's email without
> changingthe meaning of his words. I'm not a profesional translator, my
> apologies for the less then nice flowing of the sentences from time to
> time.
>
> Finne/henna
>
> On 6/15/06, Walter van Kalken <walter at vankalken.net> wrote:
>
>>Have it translated by your favourite Dutch person:
>
>
>>==De moderatoren vernietigen het bewijs van hun machtsmisbruik==
>
> ==Admins destroy proof of their abuse of power==
>
>
>>Dit haalde [[Gebruiker:Dolledre]] zojuist uit de kroeg,
>
> [[User:Dolledre]] removed this a short while ago from the village pump
>
>
>>het bewijs dat men oneigenlijke middelen gebruikt en de privacy van
>>gebruikers ten grabbel gooit:
>
> the proof that tools are used inapropriatly and the privacy of users
> is disrespected
>
>
>>=== Misbruikmaken chekuser en inbreuk op de privacy ===
>
> ===Abuse checkuser and invasion of privacy===
>
>>Zojuist heeft [[gebruiker:Walter]] gebruik gemaakt van de tool checkuser.
>
> [[User:Walter]] has just used the tool checkuser
>
>
>>Dit is een tool die ter beschikking staat aan de stewards en slechts in een
>>uiterst noodgeval gebruikt mag worden.
>
> This is a tool available to stewards and should only used in emergencies
>
>
>>Namelijk als iemand erg vandalisme pleegt om zijn IP op te kunnen sporen.
>
> Namely, when one vandalises to be able to retrieve someones IP
>
>
>>Dit deed ik niet en toch heeft Walter checkuser gebruikt.
>
> I did not do this and still Walter used checkuser.
>
>
>>Tegen alle richtlijnen daaromtrent in.
>
> Against all directives concerning this
>
>
>>Hoe weet ik dat Walter dit deed?
>
> How do I know that Walter did this?
>
>
>>Heel eenvoudig hij blokkeerde zojuist het IPadres waaronder ik werkte.
>
> Very simple, he blocked my IPadress
>
>
>>Dat kan hij alleen geweten hebben als hij checkuser gebruikte.
>
> He can only have known this when he used checkuser
>
>
>>Niet alleen is dit een schending van onze privacyregels.
>
> Not only is this an invasion of our privacy
>
>
>>Maar ook nog eens een schending van het feit dat dit alleen in een noodgeval gebruikt mag worden.
>
> But it is also an infraction on the fact that this can only be used in
> emergencies
>
>
>>En dan alleen nog als er meerdere mensen mee instemmen
>
> And even then only when other people approve
>
>
>>Daarnaast stuurde Walter mij ook nog eens een dreigemail vandaag dat ik
>>voor altijd geblokkeerd ga worden en dat hij mij alleen
>>''kan redden''als ik braaf > ben en allen als waerth edit.
>
> Apart from that, Walter send me a threatening email that I will be
> blocked indefinitly and that he "can save" me only if i'm good and
> only edit as Waerth
>
>
>>Tja als dat editten me onmogelijk wordt gemaakt .......
>
> Tja, if this editting is made impossible for me
>
>
>>Dit is:
>
> This is:
>
>
>>A) Schending van iemands privacy ... er is een reden dat men onder een
>>naam edit.
>
> A) Invasion of privacy, there's a reason people use names to edit
>
>
>>B) Bedreiging
>
> B) Threath
>
>
>>C) Oneigenlijk gebruik van machtsmiddelen.
>
> C) Inapropriate use of tools
>
>
>>Ik vraag [[Gebruiker:Walter]] zelf de conclusie te verbinden aan deze 3 zeer > ernstige feiten!
>
> I ask [[User:Walter]] to draw his own conclusions
>
>
>>WAERTH (die zijn computer opnieuw op heeft moeten starten)
>
> Waerth (who had to reboot his computer)


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Commons-l] some updated statistics

body:
Brianna Laugher wrote:
> Another write-me-some-code request:
> for any image in [[category:duplicate]], where the replacement image
> has a different file extension, remove {{duplicate|Image:...}} and
> replace with {{superseded|Image:...}} (if it's not already there) with
> edit summary '{{duplicate}} is only for exactly identical images,
> please don't use it for different file types, they cannot be
> identical'.
>
Done (in commons_dupes.php).

Magnus


subject: [Foundation-l] Mail Stats

body:
Erik Zachte wrote:
> In the category 'nice to know':
>
> I made a script to measure who is most involved in public mailing lists
> discussions, and on which lists.
>
> You'll find a complete list of mailing lists and how their activy changed
> over time
> http://www.infodisiac.com/Wikipedia/ScanMail/
>
> For each list you'll find a breakdown of posts by author, with board
> activity added separately, e.g. for the foundation list
> http://www.infodisiac.com/Wikipedia/ScanMail/foundation-l.html
>

...
I find these stats more scary than anything :-)

Okay, I shut up for a while...

Thanks Eric ...

> Powerposters get their own page (*). They are all combined at
> http://www.infodisiac.com/Wikipedia/ScanMail/_PowerPosters.html
>
> Overall board activy on public mailing lists has not significantly decreased
> over time
> http://www.infodisiac.com/Wikipedia/ScanMail/Board.html
> Most change of activity can be alluded to less board posts on technical
> lists.
>
> Caveat: be careful with interpretations.
>
> 1 Please don't confuse number of posts of a person with relevance of that
> person's contributions. Less may be more in some cases.
> 2 People who seem less active may be very active on private mailing lists.
> 3 Lists that are hardly active may have a private couterpart.
> 4 People may have posted with different names, some are already interpreted
> as aliasses, but probably some not yet.
> 5 Over time the character of some lists may have evolved as new more
> specialized lists were introduced.
> 6 There is no strict separation between lists. Non technical lists will
> contain technical discussions from time to time.
>
> These stats are autoupdated daily.
>
> By the way, I hope to refresh wikistats as soon as a reasonably complete set
> of new downloads is available, with most major wikipedias included.
> http://download.wikimedia.org/
>
> Erik Zachte
>
> * Known bug: for some powerposters with special chars in their name their
> own page is not linked properly.
> -------------------------------------------------------------
> Unrelated: Delphine pointed out my posts break mail threads.
> That was not on purpose e.g. to draw attention.
> I follow lists through pipermail and copy/paste texts I quote.
> I'll subscribe to mail, and reply in orderly fashion.


subject: [Foundation-l] Mail Stats


subject: [WikiEN-l] New York Times article

body:
Keith Old wrote:
> Folks,
>
> The New York Times has an article on Wikipedia called "
>  Growing Wikipedia Revises Its 'Anyone Can Edit' Policy
> http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/17/technology/17wiki.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&th&adxnnl=0&emc=th&adxnnlx=1150543441-Nof7ctx7%20AH77qh5FKXKNw
>
> Regards
>
>
> Keith Old
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

I also like the following comment

"Mr. Wales shares the work of running Wikipedia with the administrators
and four paid employees of the foundation. "

ant


subject: [WikiEN-l] New York Times article

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
> On 6/17/06, Keith Old <keithold at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>Folks,
>>
>>The New York Times has an article on Wikipedia called "
>> Growing Wikipedia Revises Its 'Anyone Can Edit' Policy
>
>
> This is remarkably poor journalism. It shows that the media are
> clutching at straws to write about us. I hope the recently created
> Communications Committee is building personal connections to some of
> the journalists involved, and will occasionally feed them interesting
> "exclusive" stories in addition to regular press releases. We can't
> prevent the press from screwing up, but perhaps at least we can give
> them a better idea about things which are actually happening, e.g:
> - ongoing reorganization of Wikimedia, heated debates about the
> non-profit's future
> - 1,000 featured articles, ongoing experiments towards Wikipedia 0.5/1.0
> - Wikimedia Commons becoming a gigantic archive of functional free
> content (643,000 files, ~250 GB)
> etc.
>
> Erik

What is embarassing even more is that these stories spread all over the
world. Journalists call locals (such as me) to say

"did you read the last NYT article ? Can you tell me more about the last
decisions ?"

Me : "there are no new decisions"

Journalist : "but it is written on the NYT !"

Me : "so what ?"

Journalist : "Ah...well... still, it is no more open to everyone - I
would like to explain french readers that new articles can not be
created by anonymous any more"

Me : "well, I recommand you do not, because on the french speaking
wikipedia, anonymous can still create articles"

Journalist : "but Jimmy Wales said that..."

Me : "Okay. But things are not so simple. Maybe I could explain to you
how decision making is done in the different language versions and maybe
introduce you to our governance system. This is a fascinating topic you
know ?"

Which reminds me... did we get press coverage for the hiring of the CEO ?

Aside from Wikipedia being open or not being open to editing, I think
hiring a CEO should be food for thought and speculation from at least
some of the magazines. Did any magazine questionned whether it would
change the governance of the organisation ? Did anyone wonder if it
would somehow impact the international dimension (such as would it
impact latin america or india engagement ? would it impact china block
?). Could it change our relationship with service providers or potential
partners ? Did someone wonder if that would change something in terms of
staff ? What would be the related main benefits and threats ?

No ?


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

references:
<e7157g$kf4$1@sea.gmane.org>	<NMENLBGDKAFGBDHEPOBNAEIODBAA.erikzachte@infodisiac.com>
	<e73fd3$vpj$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
Anthere wrote:
> Erik Zachte wrote:
>
>> Anthere:
>>
>
>
>> My point, please give it few more days or even weeks, perhaps give yourself
>> a break as well, before you decide no one is interested.
>> We don't need to reach a conclusion within a week. Better slow and steady
>> than hastily and without results.
>>
>> Erik Zachte
>>
>
> My own point is that we may have days, but we may not have weeks.
> I know who is on the board now, I do not know for sure who will be on
> the board in a few months. By the way, about a good dozen people
> indicated their interest to be on the board, and some of them gave their
> opinion on the current topic. Others did not.
>
> I think that it would be interesting that all current candidates
> actually *give* their opinion publicly on what they consider is
> membership, on how membership should be taken into account and which
> type of organisation they envision would be best for the Foundation.
>
> Ultimately, either we together will have to decide which persons should
> be elected (in case of elections) or I (and other board members) will
> have to decide which persons to appoint (in case of appointments).
>
> During last elections, some people complained that there has not been
> much "deep" discussions. To my opinion, membership and organisation are
> really important topics. There is a pending resolution which aims at
> appointing a temporary board member. This board member will have a
> voice, just as current board members have. This person will be able to
> impact greatly the future of the organisation depending on his/her
> position. I gather I was elected with the expectation I will make
> informed decisions with regards to the future of the organisation.
> I do not consider myself informed enough. No decisions is required. But
> opinions are necessary.
>
> ant
Hoi,
Weighing in on the subject.

The first question to ask is what IS our organisation and what is its
values, how does it work so far.
Our organisation is the Wikimedia Foundation. Its value is in providing
an organisational background to several projects that exist in many
languages. There are a few ground rules that are enforced by the
organisation. They are NPOV, wiki and Freedom and, they are aspects of
the mission statement of the WMF. The projects have a specific domain
and they are organised per language. By and large they are self
organised. The English Wikipedia serves as a role model for many of the
projects and the many language versions.

The WMF provides infra-structure; it owns the hardware it provides some
office functions including legal expertise. When necessary it steps in
and takes action in order to prevent legal problems. The WMF provides
the financial underpinnings for the operation of the projects by
soliciting funds via the projects. There are some meta-functions for the
projects; OTRS stewards and two developers are paid to oversee the
smooth development of the MediaWiki software.

The projects largely run themselves. There are opposing faction on
almost everything. This does not mean that things do not develop. They
do. People can become relevant in a project and they can become
irrelevant again depending on the quality of their social skills and the
recognition of their value to the project, the community. When a choice
is made for a more formal structure in the projects, it means that the
current processes are pushed to the side. My expectation is that the
result will not lead to what some expect ie more stability.

The WMF is very much an enabling organisation. To accomplish this,
chapters have been started. They too are imho intended to support the
organisation in countries. When charitable money is solicited, this can
only be considered charitable (and tax deductible) when it is done
according to the laws of the land. The chapters are also great to use as
a vehicle when organising events. In my opinion, it would be good to
emphasize the organisational nature of the chapters and have strong
links between the chapters and the organisation.

The consequence of all this is that the WMF is very much about
organisation. It helps prevent editors falling victim when they behave
irresponsible by intervening when it is necessary for legal reasons. It
provides the monetary and organisational background needed for
activities undertaken by the projects.

When people want to become member, they can. They can become member of
their chapter. This allows them to find the organisational background
when something is to be organised from within the projects in their
country. When there is no chapter yet in a country, this points to the
immaturity of the community in a country. This immaturity may exist for
many reasons. One reason may be that there are not many projects
relevant in a country. When the WMF is of the opinion that it would be
GOOD to stimulate projects in a country and for a particular language,
this is something where particularly infrastructural things come to mind.

When people are of the opinion that they want direct influence in the
WMF, the current representation by board members is one way. It could be
that chapters are given some visible influence in the WMF.When people
want influence, they can do what they have done so far; make a lot of
noise or they can get themselves a reputation of being helpful in
finding solutions by actively involving themselves (e.g. in the Betawiki)

* I am of the opinion that there should be an US-American chapter. The
WMF is NOT its chapter and should not play that role.
* I do not like to hear that you are not sure who will be on the board
in the not so distant future.. I hope to see you there

Thanks,
   GerardM


from_name: Roger Luethi

subject: [WikiEN-l] Exit Interview -- Jon Awbrey

body:
I haven't run into this editor before and cannot make authoritative
statements, but a quick search shows that he made over 6000 main space
edits in half a year, notabene in areas that we _want_ to cover and where
we need experts to help out.

He does seem to be involved in disputes on quite a few pages, it's hard to
see through the mess. One (apparently retracted) 3RR block on June 12.

Based on my quick research I can't rule out that Jon Awbrey's problems
are worth investigating.

Roger


from_name: Erik Moeller

references:
<e7157g$kf4$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<NMENLBGDKAFGBDHEPOBNAEIODBAA.erikzachte@infodisiac.com>
	<e73fd3$vpj$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
On 6/18/06, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I think that it would be interesting that all current candidates
> actually *give* their opinion publicly on what they consider is
> membership, on how membership should be taken into account and which
> type of organisation they envision would be best for the Foundation.

This is the kind of thing that I would want to put into an election
platform after much serious thought and, if elected to the Board,
would want to debate in further detail with everyone concerned, rather
than making some kind of firm statement about it on a Sunday
afternoon.

Michael Snow raised the important question whether we want any
membership to be tied to our legal structure. I tend to agree with him
that this is not strictly necessary if an informal commitment to open
and broad member participation -- legal or otherwise -- is firmly
rooted in our organization's principles. I believe that, given some
recent episodes, the desire of some users to remain anonymous is
understandable, and needs to be taken very seriously. I would like to
hear some more of Tim Starling's thoughts on the matter; I believe he
is an advocate of legal membership.

I also think Kelly's suggestion to tie membership to the chapter
structure deserves some serious thought, though of course we don't
have chapters in most regions. It would drive the creation of new
chapters, but I would also want some other method for people who do
not have a chapter to represent them to nevertheless participate in
membership-oriented decisions. This is a complex proposal with many
implications, given our desire to keep chapters to some extent
separate from the Foundation. (I'm also not sure all chapters
currently have members.) Here I would very much appreciate Delphine's
input, and that of the chapter committee and the chapters themselves.

I am inclined to believe that the entire Board should be chosen by the
community (legally as members or otherwise), and that there should be
an additional Advisory Council with non-voting experts and, as you
like to call them, "Big Shots" ;-).  So far I haven't seen many strong
arguments to give outsiders or non-elected community members the full
_legal_ authority of the Board.  While I might be convinced on that
point, I would probably want at least the majority of the Board to be
elected.

As we are striving to reduce the role of the Board in day-to-day
governance, I think the more critical questions are about the
interaction of the committees, the role of the Executive Director and
(possibly) an Executive Committee, the ease of participation in these
groups, their scope, their internationality, and so on. Board
membership should be about strategy, while the implementation of that
strategy should be left up to a well-balanced combination of a large
and dynamic group of volunteers and some hired staff.

I do explicitly not support the notion of a small membership base of
handpicked individuals, and think that membership dues must be set up
in such a way that they do not discriminate against those who cannot
afford them. I am not a big fan of the Wikicouncil idea or similar
proposals of elected representative bodies. Any Board election should
be open to all active community members who are interested in
Foundation affairs, and votes on new projects or other Foundation
matters should be similarly direct and open. Simply put, when you have
an open vote, I see no reason not to allow anyone who meets some basic
criteria to vote. And when it's about getting involved in Foundation
matters, the criteria for involvement should not be imposed
universally through some community filter, but according to the needs
of each project and workgroup.

As regards your statement that a temporary Board appointment may be
imminent, is there a particular reason why it needs to be an
appointment, rather than an election? For what period of time would
such an appointment be?

Erik


list: textbook-l

from_name: listspam at cretin.net

subject: [Textbook-l] Rewrite of Wikibooks:What is Wikibooks

body:
On Sat, Jun 17, 2006 at 01:02:06PM -0400, Lord Voldemort wrote:
> No.  The community has every right to delete a specific module if that
> one module does not fall within the scope of general WB policy.

Sure, but the more important issue is deletions desired by the
contributors of larger books. For the cookbook this is especially
important; we get lots of piecemeal, unfinished or downright bad
contributions by more people than any other book. We shouldn't need a
full scale VFD for each module we want to do away with and yet marking
these modules as speedies raises objections from admins who see
potentially usable content. There needs to be a greater degree of trust
in the major contributors to decide what is not appropriate for their
book.

Kellen


from_name: Wildrick Steele

subject: [WikiEN-l] "refactoring" signatures

body:
On 18/06/06, Ilmari Karonen <nospam at vyznev.net> wrote:
>
> Wildrick Steele wrote:
> > On 15/06/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >>Possible solution (if it's absolutely critical that color and colour
> >>both have top level non-redirected articles): Put all the content in
> >>{{colr}} and transclude it. If you include a heading near the top and
> >>people use section editing, they won't even know!
> >
> > Reasons include that [[color]] contains, or at least should contain,
> > different etymologies, pronunciations, derived terms, related terms,
> etc.
> > than [[colour]]. Another argument is that [[color]] also lists the
> Latin,
> > Spanish, etc. words, which [[colour]] doesn't of course.
>
> Hmm, that does rather ruin the redirect idea.  Silly of me not to figure
> that out myself.  (Of course, I don't really find the Wiktionary
> approach of putting homographs -- in different languages, even -- on the
> same page very useful, but I'm not going to try changing _that_.)
>
> The template approach proposed by Steve could still work, though.  One
> could have both [[color]] and [[colour]] transclude {{en-color-colour}}.
>
> --
> Ilmari Karonen
>

The only sections that are shared by both words are the translations,
though. Because of that, we're now experimenting with having a shared
translation section transcluded via template.

--
Cheers,
Wildrick
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/User:Vildricianus


references:
<e7157g$kf4$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<NMENLBGDKAFGBDHEPOBNAEIODBAA.erikzachte@infodisiac.com>
	<e73fd3$vpj$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<b80736c80606180810p91f3d07u637daa766dc68524@mail.gmail.com>
	<8b722b800606180822m6ee567d9te664a09e25d5cc9e@mail.gmail.com>

body:
On 6/18/06, Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/19/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
> > As regards your statement that a temporary Board appointment may be
> > imminent, is there a particular reason why it needs to be an
> > appointment, rather than an election?

> It would be an interim measure between the time of the appointment and
> the next election (hopefully September if the Board can make the
> effort to vote on the pending resolution between now and then).

Has the possibility been considered to make this, then, an interim
appointment in the same way Brad is our interim Executive Director --
i.e. the person appointed would explicitly not be running in the Board
election? Besides being more fair to all prospective candidates, it
would allow us to postpone some of the matters being discussed here
until the final Board setup is clear. The interim Board member would
focus on operational issues only.

Erik


from_name: mboverload

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia's administrative system

body:
Wow...that was a pointless read.  You can claim anything you want, but you
have to back it up with real cases.

mboverload


subject: [Commons-l] Commons browser

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> Magnus Manske wrote:
>
>> Brion Vibber wrote:
>>
>>> Mono 1.1.15 doesn't seem too happy with it; it seems to be missing the
>>> SplitContainer control. Got source I could look at?
>>>
>>>
>> Sure:
>> http://magnusmanske.de/wikipedia/CommonsBrowserProject.zip
>>
>
> Yep, SplitContainer isn't implemented in Mono's System.Windows.Forms yet; it's a
> .NET 2.0-only control, and not all of the class library is updated for 2.0. If
> you can redo it with the older Splitter control it would likely work; or better
> yet abstract out the UI so a Gtk# user interface can be written on it for Linux.
>
Done (though I think I broke "paint" temporarily).
> (Any reason you're not putting this in SVN?)
>
It's in now.

Magnus


subject: [Commons-l] some updated statistics

body:
Brianna Laugher wrote:
> On 18/06/06, Magnus Manske <magnus.manske at web.de> wrote:
>
>> Brianna Laugher wrote:
>>
>>> Another write-me-some-code request:
>>> for any image in [[category:duplicate]], where the replacement image
>>> has a different file extension, remove {{duplicate|Image:...}} and
>>> replace with {{superseded|Image:...}} (if it's not already there) with
>>> edit summary '{{duplicate}} is only for exactly identical images,
>>> please don't use it for different file types, they cannot be
>>> identical'.
>>>
>>>
>> Done (in commons_dupes.php).
>>
>
> That's perfect, except it puts a "Template:" prefix even before the
> image one...???
>
It replaces the "duplicate" template, whereever that is...

Magnus


subject: [WikiEN-l] Exit Interview -- Jon Awbrey

body:
Jon,

thank you for putting your time and energy into Wikipedia. I hope you
will return to making contributions when you feel the system has
improved, or you find the patience to give it another try.

Best wishes,

Erik


from_name: Dabljuh

body:
> Maybe, but when someone I never saw before on the mailing list (or I forgot)
> does a long e-mail like this on the mailing list. And when that user very
> recently had a RFAR filed against him and is now banned indefinitely. It's
> very hard to take that user or the e-mail seriously. Especially when you
> read the case and see the diffs. That btw has got nothng to do with
> editcount.

Who, do you think, would be most suitable at pointing out flaws in Wikipedia?
Someone who was confronted with a number of them in rapid succession, or
someone who is part of the problem? Of course my vision could well be distorted
by my experience. But during all of this I have gotten the support of various
other editors, who were equally disappointed with "how stuff works" here.
I can assure you, the entire procedure that I have been victim of has been
highly controversial, and that is not simply my personal, disgruntled
opinion.

Read my other post on edit count vs "MMORPG" aspects.


subject: [WikiEN-l] New York Times article

body:
On 6/18/06, Daniel R. Tobias <dan at tobias.name> wrote:
> > That said, I found it quite interesting how Larry Sanger is now lost
> > from the official narrative of the creation of Wikipedia. History
> > belongs to the victors, I suppose. Although I became one of his most
> > active critics during his tenure, he does not deserve to become a
> > footnote, or worse, forgotten.

> This is ironic, given that Wikipedia is often a place where true
> histories of things are given a fair presentation, even where they
> differ from the "official corporate history".  See [[Monopoly
> (game)]] (not really invented by Charles Darrow), [[McDonald's]] (not
> really started by Ray Kroc), and the decades-long battle between
> [[Skippy peanut butter]] and [[Skippy (comic strip)]] (ignored in the
> corporate history).

I think Wikipedia itself does a reasonable job at telling both sides
of the Sanger/Wales story at the moment. The Wikimedia Foundation, on
the other hand, is not neutral on the matter, i.e. it has often
referred to Jimmy as Wikipedia's (implicitly sole) founder (in press
releases or fund drives).

Erik


subject: [WikiEN-l] Exit Interview -- Jon Awbrey

body:
Obviously, this is just a disruptive user disappointed he could
not get Wikipedia to work the way he wanted.

Oh, 6000 mainspace edits. That of course changes everything.
Obviously, this is a responsible editor and we must investigate
why he is disappointed with working in Wikipedia.

And that's right after I point out (and get ad hominem'd for it)
that social networking is more important than having a high
edit count, and that having a high edit count is more important
than being a responsible journalist / scholar observing policy,
when it comes to being successful inside Wikipedia. I.e. being
able to contribute to the "Encyclopedia" without being harassed
or even forcefully removed by powerful factions that happen to
share a different POV.

To the "upper management" of Wikipedia:
Please, take these problems serious and act. Not doing so will
simply make Wikipedia lose more and more good editors.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Username blocks on companies

body:
Also, we have no way to know if that person is indeed from that company - it
could be someone trying to give them a bad reputation.  I think the blocks
were completely in order.

mboverload

On 6/18/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Erik Moeller wrote:
> > I don't know how common this is:
> >
> > # 01:30, June 19, 2006 RadioKirk blocked "Shout magazine (contribs)"
> > with an expiry time of indefinite (username, existing company)
> > # 01:02, June 19, 2006 RadioKirk blocked "Shi star entertainment
> > (contribs)" with an expiry time of indefinite (username, existing
> > company)
> > # 21:04, June 18, 2006 RadioKirk blocked "ParsInternet (contribs)"
> > with an expiry time of indefinite (Username (name of existing
> > company))
> > # 00:59, June 19, 2006 RadioKirk blocked "Hammond Publishing
> > (contribs)" with an expiry time of indefinite (username, existing
> > company)
> >
> > Given that we probably want people to identify who they work for,
> > especially when editing articles where this is relevant, is it a good
> > idea to block company accounts without any edits on sight?
>
> Yes. Firstly, it's an unacceptable username; secondly, it could be seen
> as a "group account"; thirdly, it could be being used for impersonation.
>
> > If so, perhaps we should at least modify the talk plage template to
> > indicate to the user how they can put the company information on
> > their user page? See
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Hammond_Publishing for an
> > example of the current template.
>
> People identifying the company they work for shouldn't be editing the
> article on that company, per [[WP:AUTO]] and [[WP:CORP]].
>
> --
> Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
> Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
> "We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
> Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
>
>
>


from_name: Robert Scott Horning

body:
Jon wrote:

>I don't think we want a Cookbook-specific guideline, especially
>as this relates to all maturing textbooks.
>

However, I don't mind the participants of the cookbook adding additional
restrictions or standards to the cookbook as a whole for
cookbook-specific guidelines.  And other books can do the same thing
among their participants.  Why exactly should this be something bad?

>
>Personally, I have already assented to deleting these on the
>request of main contributors to the textbook under the part of
>our deletion policy that says we can speedily delete:
>
>"A page that has been nominated for deletion due to a general
>reorganization of the Wikibook by the contributors."
>
>although I confess I was unaware of the next sentence which
>says: "In this situation, please note the location of the relevant
>discussion that occured regarding the page cleanup." (which
>is particularly difficult to achieve if a book has only one main
>contributor!)
>

This is not difficult to do, and if there is truly only one contributor,
it isn't a problem.  But make sure there is only one contributor.  The
deletion policy also allows you to nominate for deletion content to
which you are the only editor/contributor, which should be a no-brainer
about being reasonable about contributions.  A user that tried to do a
massive overhaul of a Wikibook should still be watched carefully if they
are working with an older Wikibook that might have inactive
contributors.  In that case they should at least try to start a dialog
on the main discussion page of the Wikibook, which should be fairly
obvious to participants.  Generally this is the talk page of the table
of contents, but it can be elsewhere.

>Although for maturing textbooks, we can in the vast majority
>of cases prettymuch go with what the main contributors say
>on this issue, I do think we also need to keep provisions allowing
>for community review. This must be by allowing individual
>modules to be nominated on VFD (with due weight being
>given to experts in the subject area) and by being able to
>review speedy deletions on VFU (whilst acknowledging that
>if material is reinstated, it probably ought to be moved out
>of that textbook into another).
>
>I would still appreciate more comments on:
>
>http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Inclusion_criteria/Proposal
>
>Some bits have changed since originally proposed, and these
>amendments can be seen here:
>
>http://en.wikibooks.org/w/index.php?title=Wikibooks%3AInclusion_criteria%2FProposal&diff=492850&oldid=488465
>
>I am looking to see it replace the current wording at WB:WIW
>in around a month, provided the text can be agreed. (It isn't
>really meant to be a fundamental change to what we do in
>practice, even though it is a fundamentally different way of
>expressing it.)
>
That, especially for Wikibooks, is an incredibly short period of time,
particularly since you havn't mentioned this on the Staff Lounge either.
 You are talking about a major overhaul of a fundimental policy for the
entire project, and expecting that there will be little opposition to
even the idea of doing the overhaul?  The "What is Wikibooks?" and its
predecessor "What Wikibooks is not." came from painful discussions (in
terms of arguments and verbal language) that have developed over the
courses of years, not months or even days.  This is not something that
should be done quickly, and is something that should be very widely
advertised in terms of seeking input.  Something like a global
announcement that is site-wide and displayed on every Wikibook page in
terms of user input, lasting at least six weeks for the comment period
alone.  I am saying this due to my own experience with Wikibooks users,
and I would strongly object to a major overhaul of a policy page like
this (even if it is warrented) if it was changed and I never knew about it.

It is a good first step, but substantially more user comments should be
sought before it replaces a policy page like [[WB:WIW]].

>I would add that I would expect the inclusion criteria to be
>read permissively rather than restrictively. Like every policy,
>this is intended to be an aid to us developing Wikibooks
>productively going forward, not a tight straitjacket - so the
>phrase "worthy of study" is meant to mean that some people
>consider a subject to be "worthy of study", not that the
>whole world considers it to be so.
>
>Kind regards
>
>Jon
>
>
>
I want to add here that I think this is a good approach to go.  Just
that we may have to be going a little slower than you are used to with
Wikipedia.

--
Robert Scott Horning


from_name: Jon

body:
I don't think we want a Cookbook-specific guideline, especially
as this relates to all maturing textbooks.

Personally, I have already assented to deleting these on the
request of main contributors to the textbook under the part of
our deletion policy that says we can speedily delete:

"A page that has been nominated for deletion due to a general
reorganization of the Wikibook by the contributors."

although I confess I was unaware of the next sentence which
says: "In this situation, please note the location of the relevant
discussion that occured regarding the page cleanup." (which
is particularly difficult to achieve if a book has only one main
contributor!)

Although for maturing textbooks, we can in the vast majority
of cases prettymuch go with what the main contributors say
on this issue, I do think we also need to keep provisions allowing
for community review. This must be by allowing individual
modules to be nominated on VFD (with due weight being
given to experts in the subject area) and by being able to
review speedy deletions on VFU (whilst acknowledging that
if material is reinstated, it probably ought to be moved out
of that textbook into another).

I would still appreciate more comments on:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Inclusion_criteria/Proposal

Some bits have changed since originally proposed, and these
amendments can be seen here:

http://en.wikibooks.org/w/index.php?title=Wikibooks%3AInclusion_criteria%2FProposal&diff=492850&oldid=488465

I am looking to see it replace the current wording at WB:WIW
in around a month, provided the text can be agreed. (It isn't
really meant to be a fundamental change to what we do in
practice, even though it is a fundamentally different way of
expressing it.)

I would add that I would expect the inclusion criteria to be
read permissively rather than restrictively. Like every policy,
this is intended to be an aid to us developing Wikibooks
productively going forward, not a tight straitjacket - so the
phrase "worthy of study" is meant to mean that some people
consider a subject to be "worthy of study", not that the
whole world considers it to be so.

Kind regards

Jon

----- Original Message ----
From: Lord Voldemort <lordbishopvoldemort at gmail.com>
To: Wikimedia textbook discussion <textbook-l at wikimedia.org>
Sent: Sunday, 18 June, 2006 6:54:56 PM
Subject: Re: [Textbook-l] Rewrite of Wikibooks:What is Wikibooks

On 6/18/06, listspam at cretin.net <listspam at cretin.net> wrote:
> Sure, but the more important issue is deletions desired by the
> contributors of larger books. For the cookbook this is especially
> important; we get lots of piecemeal, unfinished or downright bad
> contributions by more people than any other book. We shouldn't need a
> full scale VFD for each module we want to do away with and yet marking
> these modules as speedies raises objections from admins who see
> potentially usable content. There needs to be a greater degree of trust
> in the major contributors to decide what is not appropriate for their
> book.

Okay, then let's make another template for speedies within the
cookbook namespace.  Make it a be subcategory of the regular speedies.
Then, if it is a regular author of the cookbook, we will be more
liberal in deletion.  (Is there some page where regular cookbook
authors are listed? Sorry, it's been awhile since I checked out the
cookbook.)  I dunno, just throwing out an idea.
--LV
_______________________________________________
Textbook-l mailing list
Textbook-l at wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/textbook-l


subject: [Commons-l] some updated statistics

body:
[[Category:against policy]] has less than 600 items! (from 1000)

[[Category:Unknown - March 2006]] is gone! (from 1000)

[[Category:Unknown - April 2006]] is gone! (from 1400)

[[Category:Unknown - May 2006]] is gone! (from 2800)

[[Category:Unknown - June 2006]] has less than 2000 items!

[[Category:Images with unknown source as of unknown date 2006]] has
around 4000 items (last time I wrote statistics, these images were in
[[Category:Unknown - June 2006]])

[[Category:Incomplete license]] has less than 400 items. (from >400)

[[Category:Images with no copyright tag]] has less than 400 items (from 500).

[[Category:Duplicate]] has less than 800 items (the same).

[[Template:Delete]] links to ~ 2050 pages. About the same.

Just at a rough guess, there are probably still about 200 items listed on
[[Commons:Deletion requests]].

Thanks to everyone who responded to my deletion push - (obviously we
still have some way to go) - especially Magnus, Essjay, Brion, also
Gr?n, Samulili and Jon Harald S?by who have nominated themselves for
adminship (haha - the first time I wrote "deletion" ;)), and also any
admins who have quietly but steadily been deleting (I don't check the
deletion log that often).

So, the two next biggish problems I see are (A) why are there 2000
links to [[template:delete]]?? and (B) what can we do to make
[[COM:DEL]] more managable?

For (A), it is probably not too hard. Here is a list of RDRs to
[[template:delete]]: (all in the template namespace)
vfd
deletionrequest
del
d
destruir
apagar
ifd
dr
Image-Bigfoto (pretty sure this is a mistake, so don't include it)
ek
deletion request

* Check all the images that have one of these tags. Check to see if
the image is linked to on any of the pages in
{{Special:Prefixindex/Commons:Deletion requests}}. If it is, put it on
a list to be checked manually (did they forget to remove the tag, or
forget to delete the image?). If it isn't, remove the tag with an edit
summary 'removing delete tag, no entry at [[Commons:Deletion
requests]] - see [[Commons:Deletion guidelines]] for speedy tags &
guidelines'

For (B), probably (sadly) it cannot be solved by a bot, but by clearer
guidelines on how to request deletion (still sees a lot of misplaced
requests) and, I dunno, maybe splitting the page up into different
days or reasons or something...still not sure on that one.

Another write-me-some-code request:
for any image in [[category:duplicate]], where the replacement image
has a different file extension, remove {{duplicate|Image:...}} and
replace with {{superseded|Image:...}} (if it's not already there) with
edit summary '{{duplicate}} is only for exactly identical images,
please don't use it for different file types, they cannot be
identical'.
I am happy to run a script that does this, since it might well cop some flak. :)

Thank you code monkeys and everyone else with wonderful ideas and a
willingness to improve the Commons :)

Brianna


from_name: Delphine Ménard

body:
On 6/18/06, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hm, I'm not sure what would stop users just guessing and hitting
> 'back' a lot to get through it. And what questions would we ask? That
> would be the hardest bit. (Well, maybe collecting all the translations
> would be the hardest...)
>
> I had an idea which would hopefully achieve a similar outcome, that we
> could introduce "throttled" or "reviewed" uploads. Once a user uploads
> say, 5 files, an admin has to review the files before they can upload
> any more. If they made any mistakes, they stay on reviewed upload. If
> they didn't make any mistakes with licensing, they can go onto
> unreviewed upload (what we have at the moment).
>
> No idea if it would be even remotely technically feasible, though.

No idea either, but it'd be nice if it could. I really like the idea.
I like the tutorial idea too, it could be implemented if someone fails
the 5 uploads without licence problems. then you'd have to take your
"commons upload license" type thing.

Let's see.

New user uploads up to 5 files
Admin (or any trusted user..ie. with X files uploaded and no
deletion/warnings etc.) reviews the 5 pics and waives the reviewed
status.
New user doesn't pass the test of 5 good licenses.
New user must go through tutorial.
New user gets 5 new uploads.
etc.

Potential problems:
-Some people just download one bad file and go. Lots of people
actually. So this only tackles one part of the problem.
- How do we make sure that files are reviewed within a certain period
of time (ie. do people on Commons have the time to do this?) so that
people don't wait around for ever to get their reviewed satus waived?
- If it can be implemented at all, can it be accessed from local
wikipedias (ie. there are people who can review the stuff better in
their own language and who are not commons users).

Delphine

--
~notafish


subject: [Commons-l] Image donations?

body:
> > We could even offer a service: I'm sure some of us have
> > (semi-)professional film scanners (I do). Deal goes like this: mail us
> > your films (encyclopedia/commons-style only; not your family picknick;-)
> > and a note that releases them under GFDL/CC/PD/whatever, and we'll
> > upload them in high-res on commons, where you can download them. Free
> > film digitization!

On the subject of digitizing, you might be interested by the project
Wikimedia Deutschland just completed, that of digitizing a 16th
century book for Wikisource.

http://www.wikimedia.de/index.php?p=127

It might be an interesting thing to have the chapters and/or the
Foundation vouch for the people proposing this kind of service. I
believe not everyone is ready to give their pics/files whatever to
people they've never seen and who just say "I have a scanner, I can do
this for you". There are practical issues to take into consideration
which go from conservations of the documents to returning them to
their owner.

Compiling a list of people interested by such a project though would
be indeed a great idea, and commons probably is the place to start.

Delphine
--
~notafish


from_name: Timwi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Brion is *the man*

body:
Rob Church wrote:
> On 17/06/06, Tomer Chachamu <the.r3m0t at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>/me thought image deletions were permanent for disk-space reasons.
>
> Why the hell does everybody seem to have thought that?

I think this preconception has emerged when, a year or two ago, everyone
here suddenly went crazy about saving article revisions as diffs, or
gzip-compressed, or both, and several people came up with clever schemes
and algorithms, and in the corresponding discussion disk space was
constantly mentioned, and discussion of its efficiency (speed of
retrieval) was silenced.

Timwi


from_name: Ryan Delaney

subject: [WikiEN-l] Username blocks on companies

body:
Uhh. If someonoe wants volunteer to identify their POV in their username,
that doesn't bother me one whit.

Ryan

On 6/18/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I don't know how common this is:
>
> # 01:30, June 19, 2006 RadioKirk blocked "Shout magazine (contribs)"
> with an expiry time of indefinite (username, existing company)
> # 01:02, June 19, 2006 RadioKirk blocked "Shi star entertainment
> (contribs)" with an expiry time of indefinite (username, existing
> company)
> # 21:04, June 18, 2006 RadioKirk blocked "ParsInternet (contribs)"
> with an expiry time of indefinite (Username (name of existing
> company))
> # 00:59, June 19, 2006 RadioKirk blocked "Hammond Publishing
> (contribs)" with an expiry time of indefinite (username, existing
> company)
>
> Given that we probably want people to identify who they work for,
> especially when editing articles where this is relevant, is it a good
> idea to block company accounts without any edits on sight? If so,
> perhaps we should at least modify the talk plage template to indicate
> to the user how they can put the company information on their user
> page? See
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Hammond_Publishing
> for an example of the current template.
>
> Erik
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Redvers @ the Wikipedia

subject: [WikiEN-l] Exit Interview -- Jon Awbrey

body:
From: Jon Awbrey <jawbrey at att.net>
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Exit Interview -- Jon Awbrey
Message-ID: <4494D0B6.ED03BE97 at att.net>

An attempt at translation:

> it is no longer worth the headache trying to
> write quality articles or to improve articles
> in this ennvironment.

"Wikipedia doesn't suit me."

> but i would like to post some of my observations
> in hopes that it might help out somehow, someday.

"Because..."

> WP is a meeting ground for several types of people.
> the main types i've observed fall under these heads:
>
> 1.  accurate reporters (AR's).
> 2.  responsible scholars (RS's).
> 3.  infantile vandals (IV's).
> 4.  expert disrupters (ED's)

"There are a number of types of people on it I don't
like."

> in the present state of WP, the rules in practice
> and the prevailing
> attitudes of admins
> are all skewed in favor of IV's and ED's,
> while the AR's and RS's don't
> stand a chance.

"And the admins are to blame."

> by "rules in practice" i mean the way that
> policies and guidelines
> actually get enforced.
> the sad thing is that the "rules in principle"
> state all the right
> ideas, but people who
> are born and bred to check facts don't have a
> chance against puppet
> mobs of pseudo-newbies,
> who seem bent on nothing short of making the
> world safe for their
> current state of ignorance.
> "assuming good faith" and "not biting newcomers"
> are so much easier for
> admins to parrot
> that it has rendered them the most naive dupes
> of expert disrupters who
> have learned how
> it easy it is to exploit their naivete.  in short,
> WP is like email
> before virus protection.

"Because I don't like how admins operate and the rules
don't work."

> this is one of the biggest reasons that WP's
> reputation in responsible
> communities has gone from "not especially
> reliable source" (NERS) to "dump of
> popular errors" (DOPE).
> it is my impression from my acquaintances that
> more and more
> responsible scholars who buy
> into the ideals of WP in the beginning quickly
> find themselves disamyed
> by the realities,
> and just go way quietly after a short while of
> seeing their efforts go
> to waste here.

"And I don't like how Wikipedia works generally."

> i really do hope that something that lives up
> to the stated ideals and
> policies of WP
> does come into existence someday, so i will try
> to put aside my present
> discouragement
> and focus on the kinds of experiences that can
> be converted into
> constructive critique.

"Although it would be nice if it worked how I thought
it was going to work, and I'm in a bad modd because it
doesn't."

---

> the resistance to facing unpleasant realities
> is perfectly human and thorougly understandable,
> but real situations do not improve
> unless people squarely face the gap between ideals
> and realities. i am not such a newbie on planet
> earth that i have not faced constant disappointment
> and near-utter discouragement on a recurring basis,
> and i have survived long enough on
> planet earth to know that there is nothing for it,
> when the transient pain has passed, but to salvage
> what lessons can be learned from the experience.

"You may not like what I have to say, but I'm entitled
to say it."

> so, yes, it will be necessary in this
> parting feedback
> to recount a number of negative turns of events that
> i have experienced during my sojourn in wikipedia.
> but the purpose of examining these incidentals
> is to find some means of learning from them.

"I haven't enjoyed my time with Wikipedia and here is
why."

---

> i will try to stay focused on the task at hand,
> which is simply to provide clear feedback that
> might become useful at some time in the future
> toward the actualization of a worthy objective
> with which i continue to feel a certain degree
> of sympathy, even though my personal resources
> on its behalf are approaching final exhaustion.

"I'm fed up, but want to give my reasons".

> accesses of strong feelings as i lay out this
> narrative
> are probably inevitable, and defensive reactions
> on the
> part of some of its readers are quite natural
> and to be
> expected, especially with those who share a
> strong bond
> of common identity with each other and the
> ideals of WP.
> indeed, until just a few days ago, i was
> commonly found
> to be voicing many of the same apologies and
> excuses to
> my acquaintances with regard to the rough-
> jeweled state
> and the promise of WP, so i know most of these
> by heart.

"Wikipedia editors tend to band together."

> i do not know if the reputation of WP could
> be diminished
> any further among the acquaintances that i
> have discussed
> it with, but i do know that whether its
> reputation improves
> or worsens, it will be through the acts of
> the WP community
> as a whole, and not through my words.

"My friends agree Wikipedia isn't much good, and only
Wikipedia's editors can change that opinion."

I'll have a crack at the next email in the sequence
when I get it. I've often had to work on
machine-translated words, like Mr Awbrey is posting
here, so I'm pretty good at getting the gist, although
it's more useful to have the originsl to work from as
well.

Mr Awbrey: please will you email this to me in your
original language and I will try to find a translator
who can help with the details. Thank you.

->REDVERS

___________________________________________________________
Try the all-new Yahoo! Mail. "The New Version is radically easier to use" ? The Wall Street Journal
http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: maru dubshinki

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Image uploads now undeletable

body:
On 6/16/06, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
....
> We haven't reached consensus on exactly what software design we're going to
> use, but I believe we're largely in agreement that more amane-type machines
> would be useful. I've asked for another one or two depending on budget; I'm
> not sure what the status of that proposed order is.
>
> -- Tim Starling

Pardon my cluelessness, but what is an "amane-type machine"? Checking
[[Amane]] shows anime characters, but no sort of clustering scheme...

~maru


from_name: Platonides

subject: [Wikitech-l] home cache server

body:
Are you really thinking in downloading the 638,763 file Wikimedia Commons
store??
Moreover, only a little part of the images will be used... I suggest you to
do some random caching-browsing from a good connection before, so you get
the Pagina principale, Portale comunit?, Bar... with all its images, teh
logo and the stub templates images... Those which will probably queried. If
an image is on one article, only try getting it if someone gets to such
article.
If you really have bandwidth problems, you may even want to block image
downloading... (but people will be expecting an imaged encyclopedia :(  ).

Godd luck with the Festambiente.
Platonides

"Iron Bishop" wrote:
> Hi all,
> next week there will be a Wikipedia presentation in Italy [1] where we
> will offer the opportunity to browse Wikipedia from a group of public
> pc. The problem is: probably we will only have one/two GPRS card for the
> internet connection, so we think there will be a problem because of the
> low bandwidth.
>
> I can install a squid trasparent proxy, but i don't know how to populate
> the cache; i wish i could "download in the cache" at least all the
> images stored on commons, in order to save a lot of bandwidth.
> How can i do?
>
>
> [1] http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Raduni/Vicenza_2006
>
> --
> Flavio "Iron Bishop" Pastore
> http://www.fsfe.org/fellows/ironbishop/index


body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> Uploaded files which are deleted can now be undeleted; admins can also view the
> deleted files without actually undeleting them. This is integrated into the
> existing Special:Undelete in what I hope is a fairly clear and intuitive manner.

Brilliant! Thank you very much for this!

Now, when will we have file renames? ;-)

Timwi


subject: [WikiEN-l] Why AFD just does not work

body:
On 6/16/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:

> It is a legit subject. The article can be cleaned up with the liberal
> use of machete editing. It would be nice to have something explaining
> why the fighting styles are mostly rather stupid but I can live
> without that.
>
> --
> geni

Well, there used to be an interview with [[Nick Gillard]] (the
choreographer for the prequels) which was quoted in the article, in
which he pointed out that the martial arts was quite deliberately
flashy and totally impractical. That the sort of thing you were
thinking of?

~maru


subject: [WikiEN-l] Exit Interview -- Jon Awbrey

body:
On Mon, 19 Jun 2006 01:42:18 +0800
John Lee <johnleemk at gawab.com> wrote:
> Huh? How is accepting that those with high edit counts (and thus more
> experience editing) are more likely to know what they're talking about
> than someone who just arrived yesterday making "social networking" more
> important than writing the encyclopaedia? Believe me, if someone had
> 6000 edits in userspace and nothing else, nobody would respect him or
> her, but if the 6000 edits are well-distributed, it's a likely indicator
> that the fellow either knows what he/she is talking about. (It's never
> an infallible one, however; some of our worst POV warriors, and of
> course edit warriors, will have high edit counts.)

The problem here is when the actual dispute is being reduced to
"edit count" and social networks. Imagine a new user makes an good
addition to a controversial article, that you and I would find, while
favoring one particular POV, is factual and well sourced, and do not
make the article violate NPOV as a whole.

Imagine the situation when an experienced user simply reverts,
criticises the new editor for POV pushing. The new editor is
confused - he can either himself revert again, only to be himself
reverted and now being accused of revert and edit warring. Then, on
the talk page tries to explain that this is in his opinion in no way
an invalid addition to Wikipedia, details why, and that removing
it would equal censorship.

Next thing the newbie knows is that he's blocked from editing on
Wikipedia for "being a disruptive POV pusher, edit warrior, and
personal attacks such as calling 'experienced user' a censor."

And everyone goes "hey, the guy with the 6000 edits sure must know
what he's talking about, that other guy is a disruptive newbie"

<sarcasm> But of course that does never happen on Wikipedia </sarcasm>

> And do define "responsible journalist / scholar". If you arrive at
> Wikipedia with preconceptions of how things should be done from past
> experience, and don't adjust these preconceptions, then you will of
> course have a difficult time fitting in, especially when our editorial
> norms are established for good reasons.

I would say a responsible journalist / scholar is capable of reducing or
negating his own bias, researches the topic he writes about, understands
that Wikipedia is not a soapbox and makes responsible decisions when it
comes to writing. You know, essentially respecting WP:NPOV / WP:V / WP:NOT.
In addition to that, he should try to debate, understand and arrange with
people of a different point of view, instead of trying to bully them away
from the article or trying to get opposing opinions blocked, which is
what WP:CIV and WP:NPA partially try to achieve (but fail).


body:
On 6/17/06, Dabljuh <samw at student.ethz.ch> wrote:
....
> Currently Wikipedia is too much of an MMORPG: If one editor has 500 edits, and another has 20'000, and they have a dispute, the editor with 20'000 edits always wins - especially so when he is a sysop himself, the chances for which increase almost exponentially with the number of posts. This is not a way to find consensus: Consensus must be found in debate. And debate is the hardest of all ways to fight an opposite POV - It is almost always the more successful strategy to get the opposite side blocked than to actually get down and find this sacred consensus (or compromise).
....

Actually, this isn't true. One of the more interesting results of
various RFA statistical analyses is that chances of being nominated
for / passing RFA increase polynomically (ie, greater than merely
linear, but almost certainly not an exponential) with edit count up
until about 3/4000, at which point it increase linearly and at some
point around twice the first threshold begins to fall.

~maru


from_name: Richard Fan

subject: [WikiEN-l] Request for the unblocking of PatCheng

body:
Who should I apologise to, if they've "formed a reasonable opinion that
you're not worth your time"? If you want me to apologise to those I
attacked, I already did.

On 6/17/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 6/17/06, Richard Fan <richardfanx at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Did you actually bother to read WP:Sock puppetry? Nowhere is blocked
> users
> > > mentioned, nor is using it to get the attention of an admin. It does
> however
>
> Well, apart from this sentence: "Users who are banned from editing or
> temporarily subject to a legitimate block may not use sock puppets to
> circumvent this. Evading a ban in this manner causes the timer on the
> ban to restart, and may further lengthen the ban."
>
> That difficult-to-find paragraph was under "Circumventing policy"
> which was under "Prohibited uses of sock puppets". Section 1.3 if you
> still can't find it.
>
> > > mention use sockpuppets to engage in edits wars is clearly a violation
> of
> > > the rule, which does include TJive.
>
> Let's not worry about TJive ok? Trying to get someone else banned is
> unlikely to help your case.
>
> > > No, it showed a severe double standard in Blnguyen's policies towards
> > > users with the same political opinion versus the ones who doesn't.
> Does this
> > > admin even follow WP policies regarding blocking?
>
> Double standards are actually ok. Admins get in trouble when they
> block for the wrong reason, but failing to block at all is not a
> problem - another admin could always do that.
>
> > I've been blocked 24 hours for this already, thus I cannot be punished
> > twice for the same offence.
>
> For exactly the same instance of the same offence? I'd agree that you
> *shouldn't* be punished twice for the same offence, but there's
> nothing that says you *can't*. It's all up to admin discretion.
>
> > > Why? Admins such as Blnguyen and Tony Sidaway refuse even to talk to
> me,
> > > and openly sided with TJive, that somehow this vandal's "evidence" is
> all
> > > that needed to block me. Kunguadam already unblocked me, and Blnguyen
> simply
> > > reblocked me to engage a wheel war.
>
> If they refuse to talk to you, it's probably because they've formed a
> reasonable opinion that you're not worth your time. Wonder how that
> happened. Well, there are still some more avenues, but most of them
> involve admitting you were wrong, accepting that the admins were
> right, and promising to do better in the future. Or, there's always
> myspace.com.
>
> Steve
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
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from_name: Iron Bishop

subject: [Wikitech-l] home cache server

body:
Platonides ha scritto:
> logo and the stub templates images... Those which will probably queried.

that's true. i'll start downloading all the templates, for now.

--
Flavio "Iron Bishop" Pastore
http://www.fsfe.org/fellows/ironbishop/index


from_name: Rob Church

body:
On 18/06/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> Would any kind of hack usable by non-admins be conceivable? I mean,
> considering that a rename can be modelled simple as a copy followed by
> a delete...being able to rename would do wonders for file naming
> consistency.

Hacks are what get us into this kind of mess in the first place.
Implement a clean solution, or don't implement one at all. There's a
difference between hacking around a shortcoming in PHP, or writing a
dodgy bit of code in a nonessential place, and making a bloody mess in
a major function that'll take weeks (and a lot of Domestos) to clean
up after.

Rob Church


from_name: Roger Luethi

subject: [WikiEN-l] Exit Interview -- Jon Awbrey

body:
On Sun, 18 Jun 2006 21:51:08 +0100, Redvers @ the Wikipedia wrote:
> From: Jon Awbrey <jawbrey at att.net>
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Exit Interview -- Jon Awbrey
> Message-ID: <4494D0B6.ED03BE97 at att.net>
>
> An attempt at translation:

Cut it out. This is not helpful. Do you have any contributions based on the
actual case or are you limited to knee-jerk responses to people who come
here with a complaint?

Roger


subject: [WikiEN-l] (fwd) Re:PatCheng and the mailing list

body:
TJive, don't act like that you're innocent in this whole matter. You're just
lucky that you found an "administrator" who shared your political opinions.
Your IP addresses from Virginia such as 72.65.68.229 has been violating 3RR
at "2008 Summer Olympics"

On 6/17/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
>
> Forwarded from TJive
>
> On Sat, 17 Jun 2006 00:52:30 GMT, TJive <YINever66 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> >
> >Considering the fact that PatCheng continues to rant and rave in the
> mailing list, might you inform them as to the fact that he is returning via
> anon IPs to continue his harassment and disruptive revert warring?  Please
> post this, along with any comment of your own you may have.
> >
> >You can see on his first ranting <
> http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2006-June/048757.html>, among
> other things, that he was observing the Talk:Abu Musab al-Zarqawi page when
> I briefly visited it around the time of the reports of his death.  He
> mentions my removal <
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Abu_Musab_al-Zarqawi&diff=prev&oldid=57546346>
> of a clear and unambiguous personal attack on other editors, which was
> curiously put back in its place by an anon <
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Abu_Musab_al-Zarqawi&diff=prev&oldid=57559746>
> who was traversing through several articles I had edited, whether with my
> name or anonymously. <
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&limit=500&target=139.168.71.93
> >
> >
> >This obvious sockpuppet was blocked by Blnguyen, and since that time two
> more anon IPs have showed up <
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&limit=500&target=138.130.126.104>
> <
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&limit=500&target=144.131.110.42>,
> with all three IPs tracing to the same provider in Australia (where PatCheng
> admits he is from), <
> http://www.apnic.net/apnic-bin/whois.pl?searchtext=139.168.71.93> <
> http://www.apnic.net/apnic-bin/whois.pl?searchtext=138.130.126.104> <
> http://www.apnic.net/apnic-bin/whois.pl?searchtext=144.131.110.42> doing
> much the same thing, including straight reverts of content <
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bill_Gertz&diff=prev&oldid=59029048>
> and summary reverts which practically constitute vandalism because of the
> various fixes <
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Students_for_a_Free_Tibet&diff=prev&oldid=59026219>.  Not
> only is he not interested in discussion and compromise
> ,
> >  much less a quality article, but he should not be editing in the first
> place given that no one has sanctioned his return.
> >
> >In other words, he has not merely created blatant sockpuppets to extend
> his campaign for parole, he is busy continuing the same disruptive practices
> that helped to get him blocked in the first place.  He obviously feels he
> has the license to behave this way unimpeded in any case, but is on the
> mailing list simply to seek official sanction for administrators to do so
> with their blessing.  I hope everyone can now see his crocodile tears for
> what they are.
> >
> >Sincerely,
> >
> >TJive
> >
>
> Guy (JzG)
> --
> http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
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> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
On 6/17/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On 6/17/06, Richard Fan <richardfanx at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > Did you actually bother to read WP:Sock puppetry? Nowhere is blocked
> > users
> > > > mentioned, nor is using it to get the attention of an admin. It does
> > however
> >
> > Well, apart from this sentence: "Users who are banned from editing or
> > temporarily subject to a legitimate block may not use sock puppets to
> > circumvent this. Evading a ban in this manner causes the timer on the
> > ban to restart, and may further lengthen the ban."
> >
> > That difficult-to-find paragraph was under "Circumventing policy"
> > which was under "Prohibited uses of sock puppets". Section 1.3 if you
> > still can't find it.
>
> My ban was not even legitimate in the first place.

> > > mention use sockpuppets to engage in edits wars is clearly a violation
> of
> > > the rule, which does include TJive.
>
> Let's not worry about TJive ok? Trying to get someone else banned is
> unlikely to help your case.

He's the one who caused my ban, and is gloating over it.

> > > No, it showed a severe double standard in Blnguyen's policies towards
> > > users with the same political opinion versus the ones who doesn't.
> Does this
> > > admin even follow WP policies regarding blocking?
>
> Double standards are actually ok. Admins get in trouble when they
> block for the wrong reason, but failing to block at all is not a
> problem - another admin could always do that.
>
Banning users based on political opinions should not exist in the first
place.

> > I've been blocked 24 hours for this already, thus I cannot be punished
> > twice for the same offence.
>
> For exactly the same instance of the same offence? I'd agree that you
> *shouldn't* be punished twice for the same offence, but there's
> nothing that says you *can't*. It's all up to admin discretion.
>
Where exactly in WP guidelines state this?

> > > Why? Admins such as Blnguyen and Tony Sidaway refuse even to talk to
> me,
> > > and openly sided with TJive, that somehow this vandal's "evidence" is
> all
> > > that needed to block me. Kunguadam already unblocked me, and Blnguyen
> simply
> > > reblocked me to engage a wheel war.
>
> If they refuse to talk to you, it's probably because they've formed a
> reasonable opinion that you're not worth your time. Wonder how that
> happened. Well, there are still some more avenues, but most of them
> involve admitting you were wrong, accepting that the admins were
> right, and promising to do better in the future. Or, there's always
> myspace.com.

Or trying to hide their faces.


from_name: Michael R. Irwin

body:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:

>  IIRC, oregon is usually recognized for very liberal
>non-profit corporate laws.
>
>
I doubt they are all that much different to justify a relocation.

A stand out local feature is there is no state sales tax.   Which means
by current U.S. Federal law governing transactions over the Internet.
This means any corporate store owned and operated locally can be set up
to move goods inside the U.S.  for revenue with no need to do the
paperwork and collect sales taxes for 48 various U.S. states who do have
a state sales tax.

Obviously foreign excise duties must be still be investigated and
serviced if the intent is to ship worldwide.

Also various U.S. restraints regarding the export of regulated
militarily applicable technologies as well as import regulations.

Some research here might informative for any interested:
http://www.constructionweblinks.com/Industry_Topics/Laws_and_Regulations_--_Full_T/State__Laws_and_Regulations/Oregon__State_Laws_and_Regulat/oregon__state_laws_and_regulat.html

I could not find an official Oregon state site via google which is
rather irritating and disappointing.   How the hell can we be a nation
of laws if the laws are secret, unknown, or published in an expensive
proprietary format nobody wishes to invest in?  No wonder the local law
and order Republican busy bodies keep losing our state to the
irresponsible fiscally conservative Democrats.

The local law library is open by prearranged appointment a few hours a
week.  If there are any serious specific questions regarding Corporate
advantage somebody could fly into Coos Bay International and do the
detailed research.  8)

regards,
lazyquasar


from_name: Steve Bennett

body:
On 6/18/06, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> When the primary file storage is migrated to the hash-based filestore, that will
> decouple physical filenames from logical filenames and make that feasible.
>
> I do want to make sure it's done before the end of the year, but it's not a top
> priority (and we want to be damn sure migration will work correctly when it
> happens; we'll have near half a terabyte of data to migrate when the time
> comes!) so it won't be tomorrow.

Would any kind of hack usable by non-admins be conceivable? I mean,
considering that a rename can be modelled simple as a copy followed by
a delete...being able to rename would do wonders for file naming
consistency.

Steve


from_name: Brianna Laugher

subject: [Commons-l] some updated statistics

body:
On 18/06/06, Magnus Manske <magnus.manske at web.de> wrote:
> Brianna Laugher wrote:
> > Another write-me-some-code request:
> > for any image in [[category:duplicate]], where the replacement image
> > has a different file extension, remove {{duplicate|Image:...}} and
> > replace with {{superseded|Image:...}} (if it's not already there) with
> > edit summary '{{duplicate}} is only for exactly identical images,
> > please don't use it for different file types, they cannot be
> > identical'.
> >
> Done (in commons_dupes.php).

That's perfect, except it puts a "Template:" prefix even before the
image one...???

Brianna


from_name: brion at pobox.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki automated test run failure 2006-06-19

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

Running test External image... FAILED!
Running test External image from https... FAILED!
Running test External links: Clickable images... FAILED!
Running test Table security: embedded pipes (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-April/034637.html)... FAILED!
Running test Link containing double-single-quotes '' (bug 4598)... FAILED!
Running test message transform: <noinclude> in transcluded template (bug 4926)... FAILED!
Running test message transform: <onlyinclude> in transcluded template (bug 4926)... FAILED!
Running test BUG 1887, part 2: A <math> with a thumbnail- math enabled... FAILED!
Running test Language converter: output gets cut off unexpectedly (bug 5757)... FAILED!
Running test HTML bullet list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test HTML ordered list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test HTML nested bullet list, open tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test HTML nested ordered list, open tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test Parsing optional HTML elements (Bug 6171)... FAILED!
Running test Inline HTML vs wiki block nesting... FAILED!
Running test Mixing markup for italics and bold... FAILED!

Passed 388 of 404 tests (96.04%) FAILED!