from_name: Berto

body:
I suppose there is no such thing as a single explanation. Some editions may
have an approach problem, that is, they may not be good enough in marketing
themselves. Other may stumble against a local tradition in which a written
word is a law, so people read and believes, rather than editing and
adding/discussing content. Cultures are very different. Besides, most people
who can properly use a wiki will also look for an english version in the
first place, and only eventually access a local variant. Too bad these are
also the guys who can mostly use an editor.

IMHO, edition lacking partecipation should better focus on their work with
children, who are quicker into adopting technologies. The wiki generation
had time enough to grow up in many language spaces, but is only being born
in many others. Instead of looking for a quick rise in rating, I'd rather
advice people to build solid grounds for the future.

B?rto

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Williamson" <node.ue at gmail.com>
To: <wikipedia-l at wikimedia.org>
Sent: Wednesday, March 29, 2006 5:18 AM
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Language versions' popularity vs. number of
articles(vs. number of speakers)

> Hi everybody,
>
> While it's sort of obvious, given the digital divide, that the number
> of articles in Wikipedias is not proportional to the number of
> speakers, for example Hindi has a much smaller number of articles
> compared to speakers than most active Wikipedias; German has more.
>
> However, something that people may not notice as much is the
> incongruency between popularity of a particular language version and
> the number of articles in that version.
>
> The most visited Wikipedias, in order, are:
>
> 1 English (65%)
> 2 German (10%)
> 3 Japanese (6%)
> 4 Spanish (3%)
> 5 French (2%)
> 6 Polish (2%)
> 7 Chinese (2%)
> 8 Arabic (2%)
> 9 Italian (1%)
> 10 Hebrew (1%)
> 11 Turkish (1%)
> 12 Dutch (1%)
> 13 Portuguese (1%)
> (all others combined total 1% of visits)
>
> On the other hand, the list of Wikipedias ranked by number of articles is:
> 1 English (1048.7K)
> 2 German (376.9K)
> 3 French (261.1K)
> 4 Polish (223.8K)
> 5 Japanese (196.3K)
> 6 Dutch (156.9K)
> ...
> 8 Italian (146.8K)
> 9 Portuguese (123.8K)
> 10 Spanish (105.0K)
> ...
> 12 Chinese (61.48K)
> ...
> 17 Hebrew (34.35K)
> ...
> 29 Turkish (19.94K)
> ...
> 37 Arabic (12.03K)
>
> What this says to me is that these Wikipedias are not attracting new
> pages proportional to views when compared with other Wikipedias. This
> may be because people don't want to write new pages, but it seems to
> me more likely that people simply don't know they can.
>
> How can this be fixed? Perhaps a site notice inviting people to write
> quality pages or register, or a drive to recruit new Wikipedians from
> the academic community.
>
> Mark
>
> --
> "Take away their language, destroy their souls." -- Joseph Stalin
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
>


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Language versions' popularity vs. number
	ofarticles (vs. number of speakers)

body:
Hi!

> I think here you're confusing the issues of quantity and quality.
> Writing 'quality pages', or inviting academics to do so, isn't the
> way to boost page count quickly. And I'm sure many academics
> would be less interested in the number of articles a wikipedia
> has than the quality of those articles anyway. Perhaps it would
> be better to forget about page count and focus on improving the
> overall quality of wikipedia.

Yes, and high quality often acts as a barrier against massive partecipation.
I myself would think twice before changing a word on the Britannica... Some
balance must be reached, though, because quality is what makes reading a
wiki interesting for the public. It's also very difficult to judge how the
quality vs quantity balance is achieved in a single wiki, since the first
term of the equation is mainly a subjective parameter.

I guess the main thing a wiki needs is a solid group of managers, that are
capable of attracting quality from academical level environments (we are
contacting university teachers who have retired, for example) and at the
same time can put up a good "village pump", where people may socialize and
become community members. Not an easy thing, though. Many people who love
culture and may be wonderful researchers might lack the socializing
capability that is needed to build a constructive  environment.

A wiki is a world in itself, a book that writes itself. But directors are
needed, unless you want the story to go nowhere. Bulding a good PR team
means more than achieving a quick rise in published page numbers by running
bots to make millions of empty stubs. Nonetheless, empty stubs are necessary
to shape content growth...  It's a HUGE job, as I am realizing.

B?rto


from_name: Miguel Chaves

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Mediametry survey (was )Re: Language versions'
	popularity vs. number of articles...)

body:
Hi, I wonder if wikipedia only relies on this sort of external statistics
(like Alexa) to gather information about visits to the sites.
Aren't there statistcs collected on wikipedia servers itself? This would be
more useful and reliable.
BTW, if we want to know the popularity of an specific article (not a
specific wikipedia), is there a tool for that?

Regards,
     Miguel.

On 3/29/06, Pawe? Dembowski <fallout at lexx.eu.org> wrote:
>
> Anthere wrote:
>
> > Answer : these values are collected strictly thanks to the use of the
> > Alexa bar...; which is apparently very little used at least in France.
> > Hence possibly messing up the statistics. It might well be the same for
> > other languages, in particular those for which the Alexa bar... is
> > simply not working/translated. So... be careful with the use of the
> > Alexa data. They are a very interesting feedback... but also to take
> > with a pinch of salt.
>
> It's the same in Poland - I think very few Poles use Alexa bar.
>
> --
> Ausir
> Wikipedia, wolna encyklopedia
> http://pl.wikipedia.org
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Jay R. Ashworth

subject:
[Wikitech-l] [MediaWiki-CVS] phase3/includes Parser.php, 1.602,
	1.603

body:
On Wed, Mar 29, 2006 at 07:14:52PM +0200, Gabriel Wicke wrote:
> While i would welcome all effort being directed towards a proper
> solution of the core issue this is simply not happening right now, for
> various reasons. Shifting the focus of MediaWiki development from the
> current parser to a better solution is difficult at best, i doubt
> anything short of doing the full implementation or funding it will do. I
> would love to be wrong on this though, and i would really like to work
> on such a parser.

Since you appear to be the person sleeping with the parser this month
(:-), I'll direct this question to you:

Just how complex is it?

I'd like to get maybe 75-80% of the pertinent parts of the parser glued
into WebGUI as a replacement for it's current article markup
facilities, but that will entail rewriting it in perl.

Is that even remotely practical-sounding?

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

     A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
     Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?

     A: Top-posting.
     Q: What is the most annoying thing on Usenet and in e-mail?


list: wikien-l

from_name: charles matthews

subject: [WikiEN-l] Britannica quote of the day (Johntex)

body:
"Steve Bennett"  wrote

>And notice that my example was objective: "naked breasts".
> Yours is subjective: "offensive". Kind of logical that a subjective
> term is hard to apply objectively.

Naked breasts - the last thing young kids should be exposed to.  No, wait.
The first thing young kids should be exposed to.  No, wait, the breasts
should be exposed to the kid, but one at a time.  Good thing newborns have
good enough grasp of subjectivity and objectivity not to be confused.  Or
offended.  No wait, they grasp fingers, but I think they don't really grasp
... never mind, the confusion seems to lie elsewhere ...

Charles


list: foundation-l

from_name: David Gerard

subject: [Foundation-l] Meta:MetaProject to Overhaul Meta

body:
On 28/03/06, Alex Schenck <linuxbeak at gmail.com> wrote:

> Despite praise from various sources, several other Meta people have
> complained that this project is doing more harm than good. While I of course
> completely disagree with that notion, I feel that I ought to let out some
> steam.
> Meta right now is horrible. Really, it is. People need to stop kidding
> themselves and understand that the way that it is in right now is akin to a
> trash heap. Sure, there are some good things on Meta, but the vast majority
> is unorganized rubbish that could probably be put away in an archive and
> forgotten about until cyber-archaeologists come along and sift through it
> and thing that they're artifacts. I mean, come on. Sure, this place has a
> lot of history of Wikimedia, but if things need to be kept, why can't they
> be kept in a more orderly fashion?

I've just put some notes on

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta_talk:MetaProject_to_Overhaul_Meta#How_not_to_piss_people_off

I asked on m:RFA "What is the local community? There isn't one."
Anthere answered with a *long* paragraph which didn't answer that
question, answered several I didn't ask and accused me of all sorts of
things ... I've asked again and await an answer.

But the long paragraph answering questions I didn't ask and accusing
me of things indicates deep, if inchoate, suspicion over motives and a
fear of change.

The essential conflict appears to be between:

   1. Those who want Meta to be a good repository of historical documents
   2. Those who want Meta to be usable as an active work wiki.

The impetus for this project is that the first function is actively
hampering the second. The piles of historical stuff masquerade as
currently useful documents and get in the way of doing work. You don't
archive paper documents in your in-tray!

The main thing that is pissing off the advocates of the first function
(what exists of a "meta community" appear to be in the first group,
the museum staff) is the sweeping deletions. So we need to avoid that.

I suggest that rather than delete anything as part of this project for
now, we cordon it off by putting it in an appropriate category.
Category:Apparently irrelevant, Category:Possible deletia,
Category:Historical (or Category:Archive - we appear to be using
both), Category:Move to Mediawiki.org (most of the help pages should
be on that wiki), etc.

> For the meantime, I will continue this project, but I would like to propose
> a solution: an archive wiki of Meta. Move *everything* on Meta over to this
> archive. Start fresh. The archive will contain all things that Meta used to
> have, so nothing will just disappear, and someone else can go through the
> archive if they really feel like it and find whatever they're looking for. I
> promise I won't touch that archive.

This idea has strong merit.

For now, I suggest appropriate categorisation and tagging (e.g.
{{historical}} ) will do for the moment. Deletion really isn't urgent
- it can wait as long as we like for the museum staff to go over the
artifacts carefully dusting and categorising them further.

Does this sound workable to all?

- d.


list: wikimedia-l


from_name: Steve Bennett

body:
On 3/29/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> Earlier you wrote "Yes, I am leaping to the conclusion that making
> Wikipedia an attractive resource for teachers for use with kids is an
> improvement."

Yeah, I still don't get where plaudits come into anything.

> Ok, so someone else could fork us and produce a meta-stable "clean"
> version. Wait, doesn't answers.com do that already?

No comment.

> However, "offensive" is most definately a subjective term - the term
> "bugger" can be offensive in certain contexts, as can the infamous
> phrase "so where the bloody hell are you"...

It's probably not so much the context as the hearer/reader that
matters. And notice that my example was objective: "naked breasts".
Yours is subjective: "offensive". Kind of logical that a subjective
term is hard to apply objectively.

> So, you're willing to tag *all* articles based on their content?
>
> Are you then willing to tag the list of tags?

I don't really understand your objection here. It's like me saying "we
should fix spelling errors" and you saying "are you personally willing
to fix every spelling error in every article?"

>
> "Warning: this set of articles have been identified of being of a
> biologically accurate/theologically dubious/unscientific nature"? (sex,
> evolution, and creation respectively)

I feel mocked. Ah well.

> >>Really? So, if they're "invisible to most users", what's the point of
> >>having them? Why not just leave them out altogether?
> >
> >
> > Presumably you would make the same argument for removing braille
> > markings from food products in supermarkets.
> >
>
> Braille on food products is expected by people with impaired vision. Who
> is going to which readers do and don't see the warnings? Please stop
> trying to build strawmen...

Braille is "invisible" to most sighted people, because it's not useful
to them, and they simply aren't aware of its existence. Of course, a
blind person is very much aware. The same would go for content tags. I
imagine that certain software can find content tags in <META> html
tags, or even <!-- HTML comments-->.  The average user would be
blissfully unaware. Anyone with appropriate software would still be
able to make use of them.

Work with me here, eh?

Steve


from_name: Mark Williamson

body:
That's certainly a good point.

Unfortunately, the most recent statistics we have for site visits are
from October 2004 but they are as follows:

1 English: 42.75%
2 Japanese: 14.72%
3 German: 13.74%
4 Spanish: 5.34%
5 French: 4.14%
6 Polish: 3.93%
7 Dutch: 2.94%
8 Swedish: 1.74%
9 Chinese: 1.42%
10 Italian: 1.20%
11 Portuguese: 1.20%
12 Hebrew: 0.94%
13 Danish: 0.53%
14 Finnish: 0.52%
15 Esperanto: 0.32%
16 Norwegian: 0.28%
17 Russian: 0.25%
18 Arabic: 0.25%
19 Slovene: 0.23%
20 Catalan: 0.21%
21 Korean: 0.16%
22 Malaysian: 0.16%
23 Bulgarian: 0.15%
24 Romanian: 0.15%
25 Simple: 0.14%
26 Czech: 0.13%
27 Hungarian: 0.13%
28 Indonesian: 0.13%
29 Estonian: 0.12%
30 Interlingua: 0.12%
31 Croatian: 0.11%
32 Turkish: 0.10%
33 Farsi: 0.10%

This still raises some questions; for example the Catalan WP has over
20k articles while the Arabic WP has just over 10k; numbers for
Chinese, Spanish, and even Japanese (!) are similarly incongruent.

Mark

On 29/03/06, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Mark Williamson wrote:
> > Hi everybody,
> >
> > While it's sort of obvious, given the digital divide, that the number
> > of articles in Wikipedias is not proportional to the number of
> > speakers, for example Hindi has a much smaller number of articles
> > compared to speakers than most active Wikipedias; German has more.
> >
> > However, something that people may not notice as much is the
> > incongruency between popularity of a particular language version and
> > the number of articles in that version.
> >
> > The most visited Wikipedias, in order, are:
> >
> > 1 English (65%)
> > 2 German (10%)
> > 3 Japanese (6%)
> > 4 Spanish (3%)
> > 5 French (2%)
> > 6 Polish (2%)
> > 7 Chinese (2%)
> > 8 Arabic (2%)
> > 9 Italian (1%)
> > 10 Hebrew (1%)
> > 11 Turkish (1%)
> > 12 Dutch (1%)
> > 13 Portuguese (1%)
> > (all others combined total 1% of visits)
> >
> > On the other hand, the list of Wikipedias ranked by number of articles is:
> > 1 English (1048.7K)
> > 2 German (376.9K)
> > 3 French (261.1K)
> > 4 Polish (223.8K)
> > 5 Japanese (196.3K)
> > 6 Dutch (156.9K)
> > ...
> > 8 Italian (146.8K)
> > 9 Portuguese (123.8K)
> > 10 Spanish (105.0K)
> > ...
> > 12 Chinese (61.48K)
> > ...
> > 17 Hebrew (34.35K)
> > ...
> > 29 Turkish (19.94K)
> > ...
> > 37 Arabic (12.03K)
>
> Hi
>
> By the way, I have wondered for a long time how it could be that the
> french wikipedia be the third largest (which is a fact)... and only
> supposingly 2% of the visits. I also remember that meta had very
> significantly more visits than the french wikipedia. Which.. to me... is
> not something I *believe*.
>
> Answer : these values are collected strictly thanks to the use of the
> Alexa bar...; which is apparently very little used at least in France.
> Hence possibly messing up the statistics. It might well be the same for
> other languages, in particular those for which the Alexa bar... is
> simply not working/translated. So... be careful with the use of the
> Alexa data. They are a very interesting feedback... but also to take
> with a pinch of salt.
>
> By the way, there was recently a study by Mediametry (a statistical
> agency, making polls. In France, probably the largest and most famous one).
>
> The study showed this
>
>         d?c. 2004       avr. 2005       ao?t 2005       d?c. 2005
> USA     4 544 000       6 753 000       11 874 000      17 498 000
> Germany 1 707 000       2 956 000       4 502 000       5 529 000
> France  681 000         1 169 000       1 429 000       2 421 000
> UK      540 000         766 000         1 525 000       2 298 000
>
>
> Please see that :
> http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=mediametrie+wikipedia&btnG=Google+Search
>
> anthere
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
"Take away their language, destroy their souls." -- Joseph Stalin


from_name: wilinckx

subject: [Wikitech-l] Hierarchical navigation bar? - part of the answer

body:
On Wed, 29 Mar 2006 11:20:17 +0200
Birger <bweynants at gmail.com> wrote:

> Thanks a lot for the help! The hierarchical navigation bar is working now
> ;-)
>
> While playing around with the menu, I encountered some strange behavior
> though:
>
>    1. Whatever I put before the sublevel, is placed automatically above
>    the navigationbox. For example:
>
> 'sidebar' => '
> * [[Mainpage|Main Page]]
> * [[Special:Recentchanges|Recent Changes]]
> * [[Current_events| News]]
> * [[Help|Help]]
> * Cases
> ** [[Technicalcase|Tcase]]
> ** [[Businesscase|Bcase]]
> ',
>
> MediaWiki puts then the word "Cases" above the navigationbox. I have tried
> to put "*navigation" right above "* [[Mainpage|Main Page]] " but
> unfortunately this does not help. MediaWiki keeps putting the word that is
> placed right above the sublevel above the box. Why is this done
> automatically? How could i possibly change this?

You probably are still having this code:

<?php $out = wfMsg( $bar ); if (wfNoMsg($bar, $out)) echo $bar; else echo $out; ?>

The $bar variable comes from
  <?php foreach ($this->data['sidebar'] as $bar => $cont) { ?>
and $this->data['sidebar'] comes from the old navigation parse system,
which you don't want to use anymore.

What you can do is modify the
 line directly, like this:

The Title I Want To Have Above The Box

This is not clean at all, but it's easy.  If you want to do it more
cleanly you can instead modify the sidebar-parser, which is the function
buildSidebar() in includes/Skin.php

>        2.  I wanted to make a second box beneith the navigation box and
> therefore i had put
>             <?php $this->msgWiki( 'sidebar' ) ?>
>             <?php $this->msgWiki( 'casebar' ) ?>
> in monobook.php with 'casebar' => '
> * Cases
> ** [[Technicalcase|Tcase]]
> ** [[Businesscase|Bcase]]
> ',
> Unfortunately, MediaWiki joins the two bars together into one box. Is it
> possible to create two separate boxes? I could separate boxes before (when i
> did not apply the
> hack<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Layout_customization#How_do_I_add_an_editable_Left_Menu.3F>),
> by just putting "*" before the word that had to appear above the box. I
> don't see how it is possible to figure that out while applying the hack...

In HTML code, a box looks like this:

The title above the box:

 here the content of the box

In the non-hacked MonoBook, this HTML code is inside a loop, so generated
multiple times if needed.

What you did is this:

The title above the box:

 here the content of the first box
 here the content of the second box

What you need is this:

The title above the first box:

 here the content of the first box

The title above the second box:

 here the content of the second box

ps: this is not 100% the exact code of MonoBook, more to give you the
idea.  If you can't find out how to change your MonoBook code it's maybe
more usefull to paste the part of the code.

Succes,

Wilinckx.


from_name: Angela

subject: [Foundation-l] Violations of Wikimedia copyright

body:
On 3/29/06, Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:
> I would like to know what the current policy is (if any) for people who
> are strongly suspected of violating copyright of content that was
> produced on Wikimedia projects.

There isn't one policy covering all the projects, but the English
Wikipedia does have a process for dealing with this, which could be
applied more broadly. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks#Non-compliance_process

Angela.


from_name: 오현성

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Language versions' popularity vs. number of
	articles (vs. number of speakers)

body:
Mark,
I don't agree with all of your conclusions here....

>What this says to me is that these Wikipedias are not attracting new
>pages proportional to views when compared with other Wikipedias. This
>may be because people don't want to write new pages, but it seems to
>me more likely that people simply don't know they can.

There are all kinds of possible reasons for this. It isn't necessarily because non-Europeans (and the wikipedias you seem to be referring to are mostly non-European wikipedias) are less likely to know that they can write new articles. Perhaps people are less interested in writing new articles, perhaps they're content with the articles that are there, or perhaps they have other ways to spend their time. Perhaps they _are_ increasingly writing new articles - some of the wikipedias you listed might still be small, but they are growing rapidly.

>How can this be fixed? Perhaps a site notice inviting people to write
>quality pages or register, or a drive to recruit new Wikipedians from
>the academic community.

I think here you're confusing the issues of quantity and quality. Writing 'quality pages', or inviting academics to do so, isn't the way to boost page count quickly. And I'm sure many academics would be less interested in the number of articles a wikipedia has than the quality of those articles anyway. Perhaps it would be better to forget about page count and focus on improving the overall quality of wikipedia.

Hyunsung

>
>Mark
>
>--
>"Take away their language, destroy their souls." -- Joseph Stalin
>_______________________________________________
>Wikipedia-l mailing list
>Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

-------------------------------------------------
Your Life on the Net
DreamWiz Free Mail @ http://www.dreamwiz.com/


from_name: Pawe³ Dembowski

body:
Anthere wrote:

> Answer : these values are collected strictly thanks to the use of the
> Alexa bar...; which is apparently very little used at least in France.
> Hence possibly messing up the statistics. It might well be the same for
> other languages, in particular those for which the Alexa bar... is
> simply not working/translated. So... be careful with the use of the
> Alexa data. They are a very interesting feedback... but also to take
> with a pinch of salt.

It's the same in Poland - I think very few Poles use Alexa bar.

--
Ausir
Wikipedia, wolna encyklopedia
http://pl.wikipedia.org


subject: [WikiEN-l] Neal Horsley explains: "Why I Am Suing Wikipedia "

body:
On 3/29/06, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
> I think though, in terms of choice of plaintiff, he would make a good
> one. I would hate us to be so chickenshit that we could not
> truthfully say that this is a very bad man.

Shall we just call him a freedom fighter and be done with it?

Steve


from_name: Birger

body:
Thanks! Everthing is displayed and working perfectly now ;-)

One thing I do not clearly see is the fact that I had to change sidebar into
casebar in includes/skin.php:
    function buildSidebar() {
        $fname = 'SkinTemplate::buildSidebar';
        wfProfileIn( $fname );

        $bar = array();
        $lines = explode( "\n", wfMsgForContent( 'casebar' ) );
        foreach ($lines as $line) {
            if (strpos($line, '*') !== 0)
                continue;
            if (strpos($line, '**') !== 0) {
                $line = trim($line, '* ');
                $heading = $line;
            } else {
                if (strpos($line, '|') !== false) { // sanity check
                    $line = explode( '|' , trim($line, '* '), 2 );
                    $link = wfMsgForContent( $line[0] );
                    if ($link == '-')
                        continue;
                    if (wfNoMsg($line[1], $text = wfMsg($line[1])))
                        $text = $line[1];
                    if (wfNoMsg($line[0], $link))
                        $link = $line[0];
                    $bar[$heading][] = array(
                        'text' => $text,
                        'href' => $this->makeInternalOrExternalUrl( $link ),
                        'id' => 'n-' . strtr($line[1], ' ', '-'),
                    );
                } else { continue; }
            }
        }

I had to do this, apparently since no boxes could be displayed because
sidebar does not contain sublevels (it only contains *items and no **items,
while casebar does have **items), but I do not understand quite well why
exactly I had to change this. I guess it has something to do with
                f (strpos($line, '**') !== 0) {
                $line = trim($line, '* ');
                $heading = $line;
but i'm not sure.

In any case, thanks a lot for the help you gave me! I'm really happy it
works now :-)

Birger.

2006/3/29, wilinckx <wilinckx at willempen.org>:
>
> On Wed, 29 Mar 2006 11:20:17 +0200
> Birger <bweynants at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Thanks a lot for the help! The hierarchical navigation bar is working
> now
> > ;-)
> >
> > While playing around with the menu, I encountered some strange behavior
> > though:
> >
> >    1. Whatever I put before the sublevel, is placed automatically above
> >    the navigationbox. For example:
> >
> > 'sidebar' => '
> > * [[Mainpage|Main Page]]
> > * [[Special:Recentchanges|Recent Changes]]
> > * [[Current_events| News]]
> > * [[Help|Help]]
> > * Cases
> > ** [[Technicalcase|Tcase]]
> > ** [[Businesscase|Bcase]]
> > ',
> >
> > MediaWiki puts then the word "Cases" above the navigationbox. I have
> tried
> > to put "*navigation" right above "* [[Mainpage|Main Page]] " but
> > unfortunately this does not help. MediaWiki keeps putting the word that
> is
> > placed right above the sublevel above the box. Why is this done
> > automatically? How could i possibly change this?
>
> You probably are still having this code:
>
<?php $out = wfMsg( $bar ); if (wfNoMsg($bar, $out)) echo $bar; else
> echo $out; ?>

> The $bar variable comes from
>   <?php foreach ($this->data['sidebar'] as $bar => $cont) { ?>
> and $this->data['sidebar'] comes from the old navigation parse system,
> which you don't want to use anymore.
>
> What you can do is modify the
 line directly, like this:
>
The Title I Want To Have Above The Box

>
> This is not clean at all, but it's easy.  If you want to do it more
> cleanly you can instead modify the sidebar-parser, which is the function
> buildSidebar() in includes/Skin.php
>
> >        2.  I wanted to make a second box beneith the navigation box and
> > therefore i had put
> >             <?php $this->msgWiki( 'sidebar' ) ?>
> >             <?php $this->msgWiki( 'casebar' ) ?>
> > in monobook.php with 'casebar' => '
> > * Cases
> > ** [[Technicalcase|Tcase]]
> > ** [[Businesscase|Bcase]]
> > ',
> > Unfortunately, MediaWiki joins the two bars together into one box. Is it
> > possible to create two separate boxes? I could separate boxes before
> (when i
> > did not apply the
> > hack<
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Layout_customization#How_do_I_add_an_editable_Left_Menu.3F
> >),
> > by just putting "*" before the word that had to appear above the box. I
> > don't see how it is possible to figure that out while applying the
> hack...
>
> In HTML code, a box looks like this:
>
>

>
The title above the box:

>

> here the content of the box
>

>

>
> In the non-hacked MonoBook, this HTML code is inside a loop, so generated
> multiple times if needed.
>
> What you did is this:
>
>

>
The title above the box:

>

> here the content of the first box
> here the content of the second box
>

>

>
> What you need is this:
>

>
The title above the first box:

>

> here the content of the first box
>

>

>

>
The title above the second box:

>

> here the content of the second box
>

>

>
> ps: this is not 100% the exact code of MonoBook, more to give you the
> idea.  If you can't find out how to change your MonoBook code it's maybe
> more usefull to paste the part of the code.
>
> Succes,
>
> Wilinckx.
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


subject:
[Foundation-l] Fwd: Wikimedia Foundation: invitation to the
	iCommons Summit - 23-25 June, Rio

body:
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Heather Ford <hfordsa at gmail.com>
Date: Mar 29, 2006 4:05 PM
Subject: Wikimedia Foundation: invitation to the iCommons Summit -
23-25 June, Rio
To: foundation-l-owner at wikimedia.org
Cc: Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com>

Please forward to the list - thank you!

__________________________________

Dear members of the Wikimedia Foundation,

I'm very pleased to extend a very warm invitation to you all to attend
the annual iCommons Summit taking place this year in the heart of free
culture - Rio de Janeiro, Brazil - from the 23rd to the 25th of June.
We're hoping to have very strong participation by the Wikimedia
Foundation in the event - along with communities from Creative
Commons, Science Commons, Ubuntu, open access and others.

This year's Summit is set to be one of the most exciting events for
creative and knowledge commons pioneers from around the world and is
structured around three major themes:

1. Tools. Developing effective, relevant tools to assist other
creators, authors, scientists and researchers to develop and showcase
their creativity and innovation.

2. Policy. Strategies to ensure international, regional and local
policy fora that are conducive to the development and nurturing of the
commons.

3. Practice. Learning from the experience of others to develop
effective models for the development of open content in societies
around the world.

The goals of iCommons are to build the Summit into a launch-pad for
global cooperation around commons projects and to provide an open,
creative space for practitioners to learn from best case practices and
to showcase new ideas. With iCommons' strong institutional
partnerships, we will continue to nurture these alliances throughout
the year, providing the tools and spaces for commoners to build on the
friendships and shared experience of the event, and building a united
global commons community.

The three-day program will have a mix of formal presentations,
roundtable working groups, practical workshops and community-driven
program slots that enable participants to gain strategic insights and
practical techniques as well as play a critical role in shaping the
emerging global commons movement.

With keynote speakers including Larry Lessig, Jimmy Wales, Joi Ito and
James Boyle who will inspire participants with a vision of a living,
thriving commons, to members of the expanding iCommons community
showcasing their ideas and inviting participation in key projects,
this year's Summit is proving to be a must-attend for anyone engaged
in the growth and development of the digital commons of the future.

We sincerely hope that as many Wikimedia Foundation members can attend
as possible - and I look forward to receiving your suggestions for
presenting the work of the Foundation at the event.

I will send more details when we launch the website later this week,
but please diarise in the meantime :)

Best wishes,

Heather.

--
Heather Ford
Acting Executive Director: iCommons

Phone: +27 11 717 3914
Cell: +27 82 872 7374

IM:
queenbea878: AOL
243161375: ICQ
heatherford: skype


from_name: Mark Wagner

subject: [WikiEN-l] (No subject)

body:
On 3/29/06, Geoff Burling <llywrch at rdrop.com> wrote:
> On Sun Mar 26 19:08:45 UTC 2006 Steve Bennett stevage at gmail.com wrote:
>
> > On 3/26/06, Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > I find it very curious that of all the things they can attack
> > > wikipedia for, the fact that wikipedia is not censored is the one they
> > > focus on. Very strange indeed.
> >
> > All the more reason to tag Wikipedia articles as kidsafe/worksafe.
>
> It occurs to me that this entire debate about tagging articles is
> entirely moot. If a school or workplace wishes to filter Wikipedia
> content by articles, we have already provided the means for them to
> identify unwanted material: use the article category.
>
> It should be a straightforward task for any computer technician to create
> a filter to keep out all of the articles marked [[Category:Sex]],
> [[Category:Porn star]], & even [[Category:Pokemon]], if a school or
> workplace desires. Explicit metatags duplicate information that is
> already part of the article & thus is unneeded -- unless some person
> starts making contributions that confuse this categorization, for example
> adding pictures of naked bodies to articles like [[Triangle]] & [[George
> W. Bush]]. In that case these edits would be vandalism & dealt with
> accordingly.

What about articles like [[Latin profanity]]?  Last I checked, that
article had an image near the top that's certain to trigger comments
and questions from co-workers, but at the same time, no red-flag
categories, and a title that sounds linguistics-related.

--
Mark
[[User:Carnildo]]


from_name: Gregory Maxwell

body:
On 3/29/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
[snip]
> That's nice. Are you speaking for the Foundation here? I ask because
> of opinions expressed by Aurevilly and Delphine on the Communications
> Committee list regarding en: Wikipedia. Fairly problematic ones
> considering Wikimedia France is the one local chapter that is actually
> legally affiliated with the Foundation. I note that Aurevilly just
> blanked his en: Wikipedia user page, coinciding with expressing his
> contempt for en:wp openly. Just the thing for a Foundation person to
> show their high regard for cross project issues.
>
> What on earth is going in in WMF France? Has en: wikipedia been
> declared the enemy?

Bringing this back on the topic of the meta cleanup,  this post/thread
is obvious evidence that http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Dick is still
needed and important and shouldn't be removed.

;)

Just an observation.


from_name: Samuel Klein

subject: [Foundation-l] Meta:MetaProject to Overhaul Meta (fwd)

body:
Whoops, sent from the wrong address.

---------- Forwarded message ----------

On Wed, 29 Mar 2006, David Gerard wrote:

> legally affiliated with the Foundation. I note that Aurevilly just
> blanked his en: Wikipedia user page, coinciding with expressing his
> contempt for en:wp openly. Just the thing for a Foundation person to
> show their high regard for cross project issues.

David, this comment is totally out of line.

Villy has nothing to do with the metaproject thread.  Blanking one's user
page, while a pity, happens all the time.  And he is one of the last
people I would expect to be disrespectful to another wiki project.

If you're talking about a conversation I was part of (and I'm guessing
you are), Villy did *not* express contempt for en:wp (though you
misunderstood him at first), and he clarified what he meant respectfully.

If you want to discuss that further, this really isn't the way to do it.

SJ


body:
On 3/29/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 3/29/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> [snip]
> > That's nice. Are you speaking for the Foundation here? I ask because
> > of opinions expressed by Aurevilly and Delphine on the Communications
> > Committee list regarding en: Wikipedia. Fairly problematic ones
> > considering Wikimedia France is the one local chapter that is actually
> > legally affiliated with the Foundation. I note that Aurevilly just
> > blanked his en: Wikipedia user page, coinciding with expressing his
> > contempt for en:wp openly. Just the thing for a Foundation person to
> > show their high regard for cross project issues.
> >
> > What on earth is going in in WMF France? Has en: wikipedia been
> > declared the enemy?
>
> Bringing this back on the topic of the meta cleanup,  this post/thread
> is obvious evidence that http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Dick is still
> needed and important and shouldn't be removed.
>
> ;)
>
> Just an observation.

Sort of a follow on to this, since it's something I said to other
folks and was told it was thoughtful enough to bear a public
repetition:

I think we need to do more to make everyone understand that we're
working for common goals even if we don't always agree on methods.  I
used to get far more upset with Angela, Florence, and Jimbo when I
disagreed with them.  ... After spending more time talking with them,
and more time talking to people who've spent time talking with them I
am far more willing and able to accept disagreements as just that,
disagreements. For a counter example, I was still a dick to Tim (on
the toolserver-list) today, largely because I've not reached a point
where I believe in my heart that he and I share common goals.

This is an issue common to all organizations, and I've seen this play
out many times within Wikimedia both for myself and for others. Even
when you are aware of it, it can be hard to escape.  I think this is
just one of those things which will always challenge us, and which we
will always have find ways to improve.


from_name: Roger

subject: [Wikitech-l] New to Wiki - want to know how use for my web site

body:
I am new to Wiki. I want to know if this Wiki method could be used on a Web
Site to edit text on a specfic page or pages ONLY by one person (via
password) I want only specific indaviduals to edit text and not use a web
editing software.  Thank you Roger


from_name: Andrew Gray

subject: [WikiEN-l] Most "fair use" images in one article

body:
On 29/03/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> KISS (band) 13
>
> Can anyone top that (and diging out the [[Amber Smith]] article before
> I killed the "fair use" gallery doesn't count)?

We used to have lists of "Playboy cover models 1970-1979" (or
somesuch), I recall, which topped the most-fair-use lists... don't
know if they're still there or not.

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


from_name: Anthere

body:
David Gerard wrote:
> On 28/03/06, Alex Schenck <linuxbeak at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>Despite praise from various sources, several other Meta people have
>>complained that this project is doing more harm than good. While I of course
>>completely disagree with that notion, I feel that I ought to let out some
>>steam.
>>Meta right now is horrible. Really, it is. People need to stop kidding
>>themselves and understand that the way that it is in right now is akin to a
>>trash heap. Sure, there are some good things on Meta, but the vast majority
>>is unorganized rubbish that could probably be put away in an archive and
>>forgotten about until cyber-archaeologists come along and sift through it
>>and thing that they're artifacts. I mean, come on. Sure, this place has a
>>lot of history of Wikimedia, but if things need to be kept, why can't they
>>be kept in a more orderly fashion?
>
>
>
> I've just put some notes on
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta_talk:MetaProject_to_Overhaul_Meta#How_not_to_piss_people_off
>
> I asked on m:RFA "What is the local community? There isn't one."
> Anthere answered with a *long* paragraph which didn't answer that
> question, answered several I didn't ask and accused me of all sorts of
> things ... I've asked again and await an answer.

Uh ?

Let me see... if I was asking you "what is the community on the english
wikipedia", what would you answer ???

Probably... those working on en.wikipedia, not only to do the articles
but also to discuss its rules, procedures etc... and to act in such a
way that the rules, procedures... are followed.

Note that this essentially requires identification of people. So, we
might add that the members of the community are recognised people (as
opposed to anonymous ips).

Along those lines... "what is the community on meta"...

Well, the community is a loose collection of editors who may be
recognised (so, under a pseudonyme or a real name), who contribute to
meta content, who participate to setting up its rules and procedures,
and who participate to acting to ensure that rules and procedures are
followed.

An easy way to track these people is for example to look at the
following pages
* requests for permission
* requests for translation
* pages for deletion
* many chapters pages
* committee pages
* most of those updating the pages related to wikimedia foundation
* requests for adminiship
etc....

Now... I agree there is not ONE community (just as to be fair, there is
not ONE community on the english wikipedia, but rather groups of editors
involved in some issues but not all issues). There are groups, who meet
on common grounds.

Now, yes, I have a problem with those who claim that there is NO
community on meta. I think the ones claiming this have not properly
opened the eyes. It is not because the babel page (the equivalent of the
pump) is not very active that people are not communicating. They are
communicating in many places.
Through mailing lists (for example here)
Through other wikis (for example, the spcom is communicating on
spcom.wiki, but writing things on meta as well)
Through blogs
Through private emails
And a *lot* through irc.

What defines a community is NOT the fact the wiki pump is live or dead.
What defines a community is the fact people communicate and agree on
basic facts and goals.

If there is a community, there are community members. If there are
community members, there is a community.

Now, I'd like to copy here what is a community member role :

Qualities of a member:
*he has the trust of the other members and the host
*he is a long-term contributor (high chance that they will still be part
of the community in a year)
*he will contribute most weeks of the year; notices what is going on in
the community and reacts to it
*in important issues they place the community interests above their own
*cares for the social quality of the community (life, climate, stability)
*cares for the content quality

Primary interests:
* to increase the value of the community for contributors, readers and
for himself
*to care for the long-term life of the community (to make the common
investment save)

Means:
*to contribute regularly
*to be available socially
*to add top values to the community

Now... think about it. If there was no community on meta, I think that
you could go to the place and make any changes you wish to make and no
one but for a loney would complain. The *very fact* you get some
complaints or some positive comments actually ! implies that THERE IS A
COMMUNITY.

> But the long paragraph answering questions I didn't ask and accusing
> me of things indicates deep, if inchoate, suspicion over motives and a
> fear of change.

I tend to love saying things nobody asked me for :-)
But yes, when a group of new users arrive one place and starts deleting
things, it is not so surprising a fear of changes is expressed by those
living in the place.

> The essential conflict appears to be between:
>
>    1. Those who want Meta to be a good repository of historical documents
>    2. Those who want Meta to be usable as an active work wiki.
>
> The impetus for this project is that the first function is actively
> hampering the second. The piles of historical stuff masquerade as
> currently useful documents and get in the way of doing work. You don't
> archive paper documents in your in-tray!

I would be happy for you to give us examples of jobs which were actually
empaired by the current state of meta. It seems to be taken for granted.
But which useful documents have you been looking for and did not find ?

> The main thing that is pissing off the advocates of the first function
> (what exists of a "meta community" appear to be in the first group,
> the museum staff) is the sweeping deletions. So we need to avoid that.

Yup.

> I suggest that rather than delete anything as part of this project for
> now, we cordon it off by putting it in an appropriate category.
> Category:Apparently irrelevant, Category:Possible deletia,
> Category:Historical (or Category:Archive - we appear to be using
> both), Category:Move to Mediawiki.org (most of the help pages should
> be on that wiki), etc.

May I respectfully suggest that tagging something as [[apparently
irrelevant]] is likely to cause edit wars ?

It is easy to tag something as "historical", because this is a "fact".
Irrelevant is a personal opinion.

>>For the meantime, I will continue this project, but I would like to propose
>>a solution: an archive wiki of Meta. Move *everything* on Meta over to this
>>archive. Start fresh. The archive will contain all things that Meta used to
>>have, so nothing will just disappear, and someone else can go through the
>>archive if they really feel like it and find whatever they're looking for. I
>>promise I won't touch that archive.

No.
Part of the historical interest is the "edit history".
If you move the content, you delete this history.

This is bad.

> This idea has strong merit.
>
> For now, I suggest appropriate categorisation and tagging (e.g.
> {{historical}} ) will do for the moment. Deletion really isn't urgent
> - it can wait as long as we like for the museum staff to go over the
> artifacts carefully dusting and categorising them further.
>
> Does this sound workable to all?
>
>
> - d.

I do not know. I think that if you keep using irreverant terms to
qualify some of us, you will run into problems.
I also suggest that if you do the tagging with the idea in mind to
delete all that stuff the next time the "museum staff" is on holidays,
you will also run into problems.

Actually, you know what I *really* think deep inside ?

I think that for some reasons, en.wiki is not keeping you busy enough.
So, you are looking for other things to do. If you want to play moving
the dust around, fine. This might be useful. But I hope that you do not
remove very precious artifacts, as you call them.

ant


from_name: Alphax (Wikipedia email)

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 3/28/06, charles matthews <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
>
>>I would call it a complete change from five years of getting the
>>encyclopedia written.  It bears repetition: the mission is to get the
>>encyclopedia written, the free NPOV encyclopedia.  Not to try to gather
>>plaudits from classroom teachers.  It's an old discussion here: GFDL means
>>_someone else_ can perfectly well make the fork that is more child-safe.
>
>
> Wait, where did anyone mention plaudits? You want to get the
> encyclopaedia written. I want the encyclopaedia to be useful to
> people. These goals are not incompatible.
>

You want Wikipedia to be "safe for work", where "work" includes in
classrooms. The logical conclusion is that being "classroom-safe" will
earn us plaudits from teachers. "Wow, a free encyclopedia, which doesn't
include all the naughty things which are illegal to teach in
Texas/Kansas/North Korea!"

>
>>With any luck, they revise their views on the Internet as a whole.  The
>>place is not 'safe for minors'.  I don't know where they might have got the
>>idea that it is.
>
>
> You could hope for that.
>

That an openly editable, largely unmoderated, uncensored website will be
"safe for minors"? OTRS gets enough complaints from *adults* about
"pornographic vandalism". Why should we offend minors any less?

>
>>It's good to know that the fine old tradition of monolingual Anglo-Saxons is
>>in such good shape.
>
>
> It's in excellent shape. And it's pretty much monolingual anglosaxons
> who have driven Wikipedia thus far.
>

Odd, I could have sworn that it was the German language Wikipedia which
had produced three hardcopies of its content...

>
>>But the whole concept of a 'safe' Wikipedia is just crocked.  What we have
>>is 'knowledge wants to be free', and a few semi-permeable membrances put up
>>on the wiki will not suffice to counter the osmotic pressure.
>
>
> How about a "safer" Wikipedia? We have spoiler tags on articles about
> movies and TV shows, and that didn't seem to cause anyone a
> philosophical crisis. How would content tags be vastly different?
>

A spoiler warning indicates the *fact* that an article contains "plot or
solution details" on the subject of the article. Content warnings would
be incredibly objective and POV - once you start putting up "offensive
content" tags, it's a slippery slope to...

"Warning: This article contains graphic descriptions of electron flow"

in [[electricity]].

> Answer: They would be invisible to most users.
>

Really? So, if they're "invisible to most users", what's the point of
having them? Why not just leave them out altogether?

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

body:
On 3/29/06, Gabriel Wicke <lists at wikidev.net> wrote:
> My task at hand was to fix bugs in the current parser, not working on a
> replacement for it. The change above makes MediaWiki-generated (x)html
> slightly less invalid, so i consider it an improvement overall.

It is, I agree with you on that.

What I have an issue with is that the test case I'm talking about (and
there might be others) is supposed to test whether the parser can
balance (X)HTML tags, which it can't (with or without your fix), even
though you've fixed some cases where the parser will generate output
containing unbalanced tags with a hack the core issue has still not
been solved, which is okey, we have a lot of unsolved core issues. But
what's worse is that the test case that tested whether the parser
could balance tags now passes although the parser still can't balance
tags (because your fix only fixes a very small subset of unbalanced
tags that the parser might generate).

Thus what I'm asking you to do is go over the test cases that were
solved with your fix(es) and add new ones that do fail if you didn't
solve the real problem they were supposed to test for (e.g. if it
tested whether the parser can balance tags and you only fixed
 or some other things like that), because having a test
suite that passes when we still have some core parsing problems
doesn't mean that we have a decent parser, it means that the test
suite has become worthless.


from_name: Benjamin Webb

subject:
[Foundation-l] Rodovid.org, family tree wiki,
	wishes to become a wiki project

body:
Well, I was actually talking about the copyright issue when I said
that. I agree we need to have some way of checking the data and the
need to do something about the privacy issues.

Still, what do people think of the meta page?

On 29/03/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> This strikes me as somewhat irresponsible.  Some GEDCOM files are huge.
> Are you suggesting that we just accept them as valid without any
> standards for verifiability?  We also need to address the privacy
> issues.  The copyright question may turn out to be a less critical problem.
>
> Ec
>
> Benjamin Webb wrote:
>
> >To be honest, I don't really know either. I only really know from certain
> >discussions on Wikipedia. The best thing to do, in my opinion, is to let
> >people import GEDCOMs from anywhere until we get some sort of complaint, and
> >then think about what we are going to do from there.
> >
> >On 27/03/06, Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:
> >
> >
> >>Benjamin Webb wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>>When you import a GEDCOM to the Rodovid database, the information is
> >>>extracted and stored as wikipages, not as the GEDCOM, so the
> >>>copyrightability of the GEDCOM doesn't matter.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>Any patents or copyright claims on the GEDCOM file format itself is not
> >>really the point.  This is an open international data format standard
> >>that has widespread support and usage from many geneological computer
> >>users, including many for profit and non-profit groups.  Royalties have
> >>never been assessed for using the data format itself and likely won't be
> >>either.  Trust me when I say that the internal politics of the LDS
> >>church would simply not allow formal royalties to be charged for it
> >>either, and there are geneological groups involved with the development
> >>of that data standard that have nothing to do with the LDS church
> >>either, although that is who has organized conferences and groups to
> >>discuss development of this standard.
> >>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


body:
On 29/03/06, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> Miguel Chaves wrote:
> > Hi, I wonder if wikipedia only relies on this sort of external statistics
> > (like Alexa) to gather information about visits to the sites.
> > Aren't there statistcs collected on wikipedia servers itself? This would be
> > more useful and reliable.
>
> Not at this time. At our traffic level, web server logs are too large to handle
> comfortably without a dedicated infrastructure, and we've been forced to simply
> disable them until something easier to handle gets set up.

Is that "keep recording but ignore them", or disable in the sense of
turn off logging totally? Just curious...

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


from_name: Gabriel Wicke

body:
On Sun, 2006-03-26 at 03:08 +0000, ?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason wrote:

> This fixes the "Bug 2702: Mismatched <i>, <b> and <a> tags are
> invalid" test case but it's not really an improvement. The test case
> was supposed to demonstrate that we don't balance tags, which this
> doesn't fix, it merely hacks around very specific cases with regular
> expressions which fail if you insert more tags which would be fixed in
> a parser that balanced tags properly.
>
> I'm all for fixing the parser, but it's not an improvement to make
> that parser test cases we have pass by basically writing a hack in the
> parser to make just that test pass rather than fixing the core issue.

?var,

i'm the last one to disagree with you about the core issue.
I did start an (unfinished) attempt to write a Bison-based parser, and i
added tidy support to MediaWiki to get at least close to xhtml.
Timwi and others got further with the flexbisonparse module in CVS.

But still as it stands the parser in use is a sophisticated regexp
collection.

While i would welcome all effort being directed towards a proper
solution of the core issue this is simply not happening right now, for
various reasons. Shifting the focus of MediaWiki development from the
current parser to a better solution is difficult at best, i doubt
anything short of doing the full implementation or funding it will do. I
would love to be wrong on this though, and i would really like to work
on such a parser.

My task at hand was to fix bugs in the current parser, not working on a
replacement for it. The change above makes MediaWiki-generated (x)html
slightly less invalid, so i consider it an improvement overall.
--
Gabriel Wicke
MediaWiki hosting, support and development
http://wikidev.net wicke at wikidev.net
Phone +49 (0)431-5569001, Mob +49 (0)177 2065127
Eckernf?rder Str.58, 24116 Kiel


body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 3/29/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>>Wait, where did anyone mention plaudits? You want to get the
>>>encyclopaedia written. I want the encyclopaedia to be useful to
>>>people. These goals are not incompatible.
>>>
>>
>>You want Wikipedia to be "safe for work", where "work" includes in
>>classrooms. The logical conclusion is that being "classroom-safe" will
>>earn us plaudits from teachers. "Wow, a free encyclopedia, which doesn't
>>include all the naughty things which are illegal to teach in
>>Texas/Kansas/North Korea!"
>
>
> Yeah, sorry, I'm just not seeing where you're getting "plaudits"
> (praise, accolades) out of all this. There are other motivations for
> doing useful things than wanting a pat on the back.
>

Earlier you wrote "Yes, I am leaping to the conclusion that making
Wikipedia an attractive resource for teachers for use with kids is an
improvement."

>>>You could hope for that.
>>
>>That an openly editable, largely unmoderated, uncensored website will be
>>"safe for minors"? OTRS gets enough complaints from *adults* about
>>"pornographic vandalism". Why should we offend minors any less?
>
>
> I suspect adults complain because the content is there. Teachers etc
> know that the web is filthy, they just (afaik) want a reference site
> where their kids aren't going to be looking at porn.
>

Ok, so someone else could fork us and produce a meta-stable "clean"
version. Wait, doesn't answers.com do that already?

>
>>A spoiler warning indicates the *fact* that an article contains "plot or
>>solution details" on the subject of the article. Content warnings would
>>be incredibly objective and POV - once you start putting up "offensive
>>content" tags, it's a slippery slope to...
>
>
> So, plot details are facts, but naked breasts are subjective. I
> disagree completely. If anything, I think what is a spoiler is very
> subjective - no distinction is made between details of unaired
> episodes, minor plot points and character deaths, soapies and suspense
> thrillers, for example. Whereas, as we've seen, the examples where
> content ratings are contentious are fairly contrived, and mostly come
> down to whether nude art is pornographic or not.
>

Whoops, we should probably swap all instances of "subjective" and
"objective" in those two paragraphs.

However, "offensive" is most definately a subjective term - the term
"bugger" can be offensive in certain contexts, as can the infamous
phrase "so where the bloody hell are you"...

>
>>"Warning: This article contains graphic descriptions of electron flow"
>>in [[electricity]].
>
>
> Sure, that's a great example. No, really.
>

So, you're willing to tag *all* articles based on their content?

Are you then willing to tag the list of tags?

"Warning: this set of articles have been identified of being of a
biologically accurate/theologically dubious/unscientific nature"? (sex,
evolution, and creation respectively)

>
>>>Answer: They would be invisible to most users.
>>>
>>
>>Really? So, if they're "invisible to most users", what's the point of
>>having them? Why not just leave them out altogether?
>
>
> Presumably you would make the same argument for removing braille
> markings from food products in supermarkets.
>

Braille on food products is expected by people with impaired vision. Who
is going to which readers do and don't see the warnings? Please stop
trying to build strawmen...

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

subject: [WikiEN-l] (No subject)

body:
On Thu, 30 Mar 2006, Andrew Gray wrote:

> On 29/03/06, Geoff Burling <llywrch at rdrop.com> wrote:
>
>> It should be a straightforward task for any computer technician to create
>> a filter to keep out all of the articles marked [[Category:Sex]],
>> [[Category:Porn star]], & even [[Category:Pokemon]], if a school or
>> workplace desires. Explicit metatags duplicate information that is
>> already part of the article & thus is unneeded -- unless some person
>> starts making contributions that confuse this categorization, for example
>> adding pictures of naked bodies to articles like [[Triangle]] & [[George
>> W. Bush]]. In that case these edits would be vandalism & dealt with
>> accordingly.
>
> Smart one. We also have the nice (though oddly motivated) people
> who've put together little galleries of all the nekkid pictures on
> Wikipedia. It'd be a little tricker, but certainly not impossible, to
> come up with on-the-fly page filtering based on the inclusion of those
> images, or by sporadically generating Special:Whatlinkshere
> references, or something...
>
> This is stuff we're already doing. Regardless of the merits of
> actually including filtering aids, tagging images and so on, it might
> be worth creatively thinking about how someone can use features
> already present in the live version to come up with filtering *at
> their end*.
>
Thanks. It's clearly something for our ambassadors to say when a
jourmalist repeats the claim that Wikipedia has this collection of
pr0n beneath the surface. Say, along the lines of "I'm not aware of
that allegation, & while I doubt its accuracy anyone concerned can
easily filter out objectionable material by looking at the article's
category."

But what puzzles me is how did my email end up becoming nothing
more than an attachment of a perl script? Those in the know can
contact me off-list.

Geoff


body:
This thread is getting surreal... as might be expected with a
triply-Meta subject line.

>> On 28/03/06, Alex Schenck <linuxbeak at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Despite praise from various sources, several other Meta people have
>>> complained that this project is doing more harm than good.

Linuxbeak : Labeling as useless or removing things without discussion,
because you don't use them or see their purpose, isn't terribly helpful.
Categorizing and organizing information can be, hence the praise :-)

Here is part of why people have complained:

* You were made an admin in December despite your low edit count because
people expected you would become a more active Meta user and wouldn't use
admin tools to blow things up...

* In the three months since then, you made a handful of article edits.
Then last week, over the span of a few days, you made 1500 categorizations
and 800 deletions, many of them irreversible image deletions, with almost
no discussion.  (The images had been listed on RfD for a long time without
action, but this was in part because the image deletion policy on meta
needed refining.)

* A number of the pages you speedily deleted were not speediable, and in
fact would be 'speedy keeps' if listed on RfD -- because you weren't
familiar with some of the standards and long-standing uses of Meta.  The
bolder your pet projects, the more careful you should be to know the
community norms before starting.

> David Gerard wrote:
>
>> I asked on m:RFA "What is the local community? There isn't one."

That's a strong and unfriendly statement to make. It is only natural for
the community to take offense at this.

On Wed, 29 Mar 2006, Anthere wrote:
>
> Now... I agree there is not ONE community (just as to be fair, there is
> not ONE community on the english wikipedia, but rather groups of editors
> involved in some issues but not all issues). There are groups, who meet
> on common grounds.

People from highly active wikis seem to expect that all wikis will be
active in the same way...

> Qualities of a member:
> *he has the trust of the other members and the host
> *he is a long-term contributor (high chance that they will still be part
> of the community in a year)
> *he will contribute most weeks of the year; notices what is going on in
> the community and reacts to it
> *in important issues they place the community interests above their own
> *cares for the social quality of the community (life, climate, stability)
> *cares for the content quality

A good list.  I notice that in the last few days a number of people have
nominated themselves for meta adminship who don't meet half or more of
these points...

David Gerard :
>> The essential conflict appears to be between:
>>
>>    1. Those who want Meta to be a good repository of historical documents
>>    2. Those who want Meta to be usable as an active work wiki.

If one must simplify, I would describe the current conflict as one between

  1. People who have been inactive Meta community members, have used
     it sporadically for specific ends, and now want to make the whole
     project something different

  2. People who have been active community members, are used to the normal
     gradual speed of change on Meta, don't quite know what to do with
     administrators diving in to rip up the site, and have a sense of the
     many different overlapping things that take place there.

If one has broad changes to site policy and norms that you would like to
propose, have at it!  Make suggestions, discuss them widely, implement
them one by one.  But editors who haven't used Meta much to date should be
wary of upending things under the vague claim of 'making Meta usable'.

David Gerard :
>> {{historical}} ) will do for the moment. Deletion really isn't urgent
>> - it can wait as long as we like for the museum staff to go over the
>> artifacts carefully dusting and categorising them further.

You would probably lump me in as 'museum staff' -- but I don't personally
care about curating museum pieces.  I do recognize their potential use to
others. Wiki is not paper; meta doubly so.  My personal preferences about
what should stay and what should go are irrelevant compared to supporting
others' uses of the site.

SJ


body:
geni wrote:
> On 3/29/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>So, you're willing to tag *all* articles based on their content?
>>
>>Are you then willing to tag the list of tags?
>>
>>"Warning: this set of articles have been identified of being of a
>>biologically accurate/theologically dubious/unscientific nature"? (sex,
>>evolution, and creation respectively)
>
>
> Why stop at articles? "Warning:This talk page contians geni's spelling"
>

Maybe our tagline should be

"From Wikipieda (Hi mum!), the communist's free encyclopeedia that
anywun can eddit ON WHEEELS!!1!!eleven (buy V1aGr4)"

(No, this is *not* a suggestion for April Fools Day...)

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

from_name: michael_irwin at verizon.net

subject: [Textbook-l] Status update regarding Wikiversity

body:
Extracted from:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special_projects_committee
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special_projects_committee/Resolutions

      "2006-21

The SPC authorize the creation of a subcommittee dedicated to
Wikiversity. Its purpose will be to clarify the scope of this project
and to set up Wikiversity as a sister Wikimedia project. The
subcommittee will consist initially of Cormac Lawler, and will report
back to the SPC on its formation, no later than the 31st of March.

    * Date of last vote: march 20, 2006"

I do not recall any discussion, nomination or election of Cormac to
represent the Wikiversity project proponents within the Wikiversity
proposal, at the Wikiversity discussions at meta, or on Wikiversity
pages at Wikibooks.   Perhaps this will be a useful reference the next
time some gullible researcher cites Wikipedia as Democracy in action.

OTOH Perhaps the special projects committee only intends to delegate the
tedious task of writing the draft memo (potentially asking Brion to
activate a new set of wiki databases at the existing URL:
http://wikiversity.org/) for review and revision of Jimmy's personal
staff and advisors prior to seeking approval to proceed from the God
King himself via official signature, timestamp, and seal in simulated blood.

Proposed draft  milestone schedule for authorizing memorandum revision:

1 April 2006

Cormac reports back to SPC in appreciation of the trust they have
bestowed upon him.

1 May 2006

Draft memo circulates the stealthy Wikiversity prototype site at
Wikibooks and/or meta for comment

1 Jun 2006  - 1 Sept 2006

All work suspended as busy volunteer leadership figures prepare for
Wikimani presentation on how virtual free knowledge shall revolutionize
the 3rd rock from the sun no later than the 42nd century.

1 Oct 2006

Suspense routing slip completed for final review cycle of the revised by
consensus memo to be submitted by the designated leader of the
Wikiversity project participant wanna bes (Cormac, the first) to the
Special Project's Committee for approval per prespecified quorum
criteria to request blessing and permission from the God-King (and or
delegated staff ... Jimmy's legislative review calendar currently
available no sooner than one week prior to review time allocated by
order of the super secretive service pending update of the risk
management matrices established by the Board's partner's security
consultants on loan from U.N.)  to deliver to Brion for evaluation of
technical feasibility.

2 Oct 2006

Technical go or nogo from Office of the Technical Administrators (Brion)

15 Nov 2006

New review time slot allocated from God King's 07 calendar for final
review and decision.

Break for holidays.

15 Jan 2007

Draft memo's electronic data font discovered to be in obsolete 06 format
previously utilized by U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Authority to authenticate
Presidential Launch Orders to USN Ballistic Missile Submarines.  Memo
returned to Cormac for appropriate font revision and formatting along
with request to eliminate phrase "distance elearning" from the proposal.

15 Feb 2007

Apparently all versions of the revised wikiversity proposal were erased
during the great meta cleanup of 06 and nobody noticed the links were
dead until now ...

15 Mar 2007

As a joke somebody proposed that the Special Projects Committee be
reorganized.  Unforunately an involuntary knee jerk (conditioned
reflexive) second in the IRC log activated automated quorum call
procedures and the effort to set aside the motion failed by one vote.

15 Apr 2007

We think we can get on Jimmy's calender in 2009.  We will know more by
NLT July 2008.

Sept 2008

Cormac takes leave to defend 3rd P'hd Thesis.

Nov 2010

Mav149 enters the obelisk bearing the official Wikimeda DVD archive
documenting the singularity minus wikiversity.

(Note to makeup and/or lighting,  need a duller black sheen on the
spacesuit.  Cool backpack thruster exhaust!)

Feb 2012

authorization to proceed with wikiversity.org pending approval by
technical staff


body:
Hmm. Well Rodovid is designed to have a My Tree button, so would it be
alright to have information about yourself? The current policy on
Rodovid is ask permision if you are going to include living people. By
default living people are not imported during a GEDCOM inport. What do
you think of this? What must we do by law, because that is most
important, although it would be best to have better privacy.

On 29/03/06, Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:
> Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
> >This strikes me as somewhat irresponsible.  Some GEDCOM files are huge.
> >Are you suggesting that we just accept them as valid without any
> >standards for verifiability?  We also need to address the privacy
> >issues.  The copyright question may turn out to be a less critical problem.
> >
> >Ec
> >
> >
> The best privacy policy I've seen regarding geneological information is
> to not list anybody who is currently alive, or in other words does not
> have a listed death date and is less than 110 years old, under the
> assumption that people over 110 years of age are so unusual that they
> deserve special mention anyway, or can be generally assumed to be dead.
>  I think it might be safer for 120 years instead, but that is a fine
> point to quibble here.
>
> Some exceptions might happen for very famous people, but that is
> certainly something to express concern over.  It is also something that
> can be automated directly in the software if a policy is set up, where
> the information can be added but not displayed if it fails the living
> person criteria.
>
> A good point to raise, however.
>
> --
> Robert Scott Horning
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


body:
On Wed, 2006-03-29 at 12:55 -0500, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:

> Just how complex is it?

Take a look at Parser.php, function parse().

> I'd like to get maybe 75-80% of the pertinent parts of the parser glued
> into WebGUI as a replacement for it's current article markup
> facilities, but that will entail rewriting it in perl.
>
> Is that even remotely practical-sounding?

Hmm- depends on how you weigh things to get those 75-80% ;-)
--
Gabriel Wicke
MediaWiki hosting, support and development
http://wikidev.net wicke at wikidev.net
Phone +49 (0)431-5569001, Mob +49 (0)177 2065127
Eckernf?rder Str.58, 24116 Kiel


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki Beyond Wikipedia

body:
Gregory Szorc wrote:
> My questions to the MediaWiki developers are as follows:
>
> Will features perhaps never desirable for Wikipedia ever be considered for
> MediaWiki?

Where nice and clean. Modular extensions are always a huge plus!

> Will MediaWiki development ever take a significant step away from Wikipedia
> so drastic overhauls to the core can be made?  Right now, MediaWiki development
> is mainly implementing features on a production site and spewing them back out
> in the form of a new version release. Will this model ever change?

There's been a significant amount of refactoring, rearrangement, and core
changes going on over the years -- mostly done precisely to better support
Wikipedia. I think it's a mistake to think there's nothing big happening.

The big changes are mostly harder to see, to be sure; the 1.4 to 1.5 database
structure change brought *huge* code changes streamlining a lot of old code,
paving the way for improved storage systems, etc, but isn't really visible to an
end-user poking at the site.

Naturally we have some constraints because MediaWiki has to actually work for
some purpose. :) But I think these are good, as they allow us to, well, actually
work. Some big changes happen very quickly, others go on in parallel for some
time before the old code gets dropped (for instance we've dumped the PHPTAL
code, favoring a system that works better for small third-party sites, but
haven't yet replaced all of the old pre-TAL skins).

[snip-a]
>  In other words, there is a considerable market share in which
> MediaWiki can't even compete.

Of course, MediaWiki does not *have* to compete in other markets. We're not in
*competition* with anybody; I wholeheartedly welcome the existence of other wiki
packages.

But since we do get used for other purposes, it is worth spending some time and
effort to keep them in mind. We've done some things in the past for the 'small'
market: the web installer wizard, replacing the fragile PHPTAL skin, merging Tom
Gries' email notification patches, providing authentication hooks usable for
LDAP and HTTP auth plugins, etc.

Paying some more attention can be good; among other things it'll encourage
cleanup and modularization of existing code. :)

Domas and I are going to be at the MySQL User Conference next month in Santa
Clara; if anyone interested in non-Wikipedia-like use of MediaWiki is going to
be there, that'd be a great time to meet and exchange thoughts and make evil plans.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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from_name: Sherool

body:
On Wed, 29 Mar 2006 08:10:16 +0200, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:

> KISS (band) 13
>
> Can anyone top that (and diging out the [[Amber Smith]] article before
> I killed the "fair use" gallery doesn't count)?

Does lists count? like
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_South_Park_episodes> and it's ilk (a
lot of "list of XXX episodes" type articles have at least one image per
episode.

There is also <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_television_idents>, wich
is basicaly just a collection of indents.

There are a lot of these at
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Gmaxwell/query_fairusecount>, the list
is somewhat out of date (from November 2005), but it looks like a lof of
them are still stuffed with fair use images and I'm sure Gmaxwell could
update it if asked.

--
[[User:Sherool]]


from_name: Thomas Gries

subject: [Wikitech-l] [Bug 5389]  New: Email notification not working

body:
> Please can you help with that ?
> I have read most of the online docs on this subject and still have no luck ..
> Also, can you tell me if the enhanced of enotif will be merge in a future
> version of mediawiki ?

E-mail notification  _is_ built-in in MediaWiki. Please read
http://www.enotif.org about the common pitfalls.
For example, you'll never get an notification for your own changes. And:
try first to get a temporary password mailed.
If this doesn't work, something more basic in your installation need to
be fixed first.

Be aware: I only stopped the publication of the special version
"EnotifWiki", but not the support for e-mail notification as such.
Tom


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [Foundation-l]  Meta:MetaProject to Overhaul Meta

body:
Anthere wrote:

>Actually, you know what I *really* think deep inside ?
>I think that for some reasons, en.wiki is not keeping you busy enough.
>So, you are looking for other things to do. If you want to play moving
>the dust around, fine. This might be useful. But I hope that you do not
>remove very precious artifacts, as you call them.

That's nice. Are you speaking for the Foundation here? I ask because
of opinions expressed by Aurevilly and Delphine on the Communications
Committee list regarding en: Wikipedia. Fairly problematic ones
considering Wikimedia France is the one local chapter that is actually
legally affiliated with the Foundation. I note that Aurevilly just
blanked his en: Wikipedia user page, coinciding with expressing his
contempt for en:wp openly. Just the thing for a Foundation person to
show their high regard for cross project issues.

What on earth is going in in WMF France? Has en: wikipedia been
declared the enemy?

- d.


body:
On 29/03/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> That's nice. Are you speaking for the Foundation here? I ask because
> of opinions expressed by Aurevilly and Delphine on the Communications
> Committee list regarding en: Wikipedia. Fairly problematic ones
> considering Wikimedia France is the one local chapter that is actually
> legally affiliated with the Foundation. I note that Aurevilly just
> blanked his en: Wikipedia user page, coinciding with expressing his
> contempt for en:wp openly. Just the thing for a Foundation person to
> show their high regard for cross project issues.

In particular, the Board needs to state in as many words: "Those in
the Foundation who view their role as Foundation versus volunteer
writers and editors are working severely against the role ofthe
Foundation." And enforce it as needed.

- d.


from_name: Rob Lanphier

subject:
[Wikitech-l] MediaWiki face-to face? (Re: MediaWiki
	Beyond	Wikipedia)

body:
On Wed, 2006-03-29 at 20:46 -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
> Domas and I are going to be at the MySQL User Conference next month in Santa
> Clara; if anyone interested in non-Wikipedia-like use of MediaWiki is going to
> be there, that'd be a great time to meet and exchange thoughts and make evil plans.

I wasn't planning to go to the MySQL User Conference, but if there's
critical mass for a scheduled MediaWiki meeting/gathering coincident
with this conference, I'd be willing to fly down from Seattle for a day
trip.

Rob


from_name: mingli yuan

subject: [Foundation-l] Problems on block ip user in Chinese Wikipedia

body:
> Agreed. We must do our best so that inland users really succeed to
> access the projects. I am not sure I understood the method you plan to
> use to ensure CNBlog proxy users will have access. Can you clarify ? I
> will read the wikitech as well...

Thanks Ant.

We have post the same message to wikitech-l (
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-March/034563.html
), and get feedback there that XFF project (
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/XFF_project ) could be a solution for
our problems.

With help from Tim Starling, Wikimedia had already added CNBlog.org to
the trusted XFF list. Now any vandalism from CNBlog.org can be blocked
without interrupting normal contributions. Also the real IP will be
revealed for any edit from CNBlog.org.

The XFF really works, thanks for our developers.


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject:
[Wikitech-l] [MediaWiki-CVS] phase3/includes Parser.php, 1.602,
	1.603

body:
On 3/29/06, ?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason <avarab at gmail.com> wrote:
>  or some other things like that), because having a test
> suite that passes when we still have some core parsing problems
> doesn't mean that we have a decent parser, it means that the test
> suite has become worthless.

Maybe "insufficient" would be a nicer way of putting it than "worthless"? :)

Steve


from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

body:
On 3/29/06, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
>
> On Mar 29, 2006, at 12:41 AM, Steve Bennett wrote:
>
> > Are there reliable sources that he advocates terrorism?
>
>
> I haven't found any yet, but haven't looked that hard. I had never
> heard of the guy before, which I find quite agreeable. I think his
> advocacy is based on inference, not direct evidence of advocacy
> statements. He does things which an advocate of terrorism would do,
> but does not say he advocates terrorism in so many words.
Any such sources should be in the article to begin with so if you
can't find them, that's a good reason to remove it until we find a
proper source. I no doubt do things an advocate of X does. But it
doesn't mean I advocate X too. The same goes for this guy. I'd be
happy to keep stuff (although the term terrorist should be replaced if
possible), but we should source it all rigorously.

Has anyone checked the mailing lists for his supposed email yet?

Mgm


subject: [WikiEN-l] Britannica quote of the day (Johntex)

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 3/29/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>Earlier you wrote "Yes, I am leaping to the conclusion that making
>>Wikipedia an attractive resource for teachers for use with kids is an
>>improvement."
>
>
> Yeah, I still don't get where plaudits come into anything.
>

Neither do I.

<snip>
>>>>Really? So, if they're "invisible to most users", what's the point of
>>>>having them? Why not just leave them out altogether?
>>>
>>>
>>>Presumably you would make the same argument for removing braille
>>>markings from food products in supermarkets.
>>>
>>
>>Braille on food products is expected by people with impaired vision. Who
>>is going to which readers do and don't see the warnings? Please stop
>>trying to build strawmen...
>
>
> Braille is "invisible" to most sighted people, because it's not useful
> to them, and they simply aren't aware of its existence. Of course, a
> blind person is very much aware. The same would go for content tags. I
> imagine that certain software can find content tags in <META> html
> tags, or even <!-- HTML comments-->.  The average user would be
> blissfully unaware. Anyone with appropriate software would still be
> able to make use of them.
>
> Work with me here, eh?
>

Okay, I just wasn't sure how you'd make them "invisible to most users"
and yet still useful...

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

subject: [WikiEN-l] (No subject)

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from_name: Matt Brown

subject: [Foundation-l] Meta:MetaProject to Overhaul Meta

body:
On 3/29/06, Samuel Klein <meta.sj at gmail.com> wrote:
> * In the three months since then, you made a handful of article edits.
> Then last week, over the span of a few days, you made 1500 categorizations
> and 800 deletions, many of them irreversible image deletions, with almost
> no discussion.  (The images had been listed on RfD for a long time without
> action, but this was in part because the image deletion policy on meta
> needed refining.)

Were all the image deletions of images listed for deletion with no/few
objections for a long time? That seems to be what you're saying, in
which case I'd say deleting them is understandable; it just looks like
a task not done through inertia / nobody interested, rather than
anything else.

-Matt


from_name: Oliver Coddington

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Mediametry survey (was )Re: Language versions'
	popularity vs. number of articles...)

body:
Surely the quality of the articles matters more than the quantity
(although I appreciate that it does not look how there is such a
disparity in numbers).

Oliver

On 3/29/06, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> That's certainly a good point.
>
> Unfortunately, the most recent statistics we have for site visits are
> from October 2004 but they are as follows:
>
> 1 English: 42.75%
> 2 Japanese: 14.72%
> 3 German: 13.74%
> 4 Spanish: 5.34%
> 5 French: 4.14%
> 6 Polish: 3.93%
> 7 Dutch: 2.94%
> 8 Swedish: 1.74%
> 9 Chinese: 1.42%
> 10 Italian: 1.20%
> 11 Portuguese: 1.20%
> 12 Hebrew: 0.94%
> 13 Danish: 0.53%
> 14 Finnish: 0.52%
> 15 Esperanto: 0.32%
> 16 Norwegian: 0.28%
> 17 Russian: 0.25%
> 18 Arabic: 0.25%
> 19 Slovene: 0.23%
> 20 Catalan: 0.21%
> 21 Korean: 0.16%
> 22 Malaysian: 0.16%
> 23 Bulgarian: 0.15%
> 24 Romanian: 0.15%
> 25 Simple: 0.14%
> 26 Czech: 0.13%
> 27 Hungarian: 0.13%
> 28 Indonesian: 0.13%
> 29 Estonian: 0.12%
> 30 Interlingua: 0.12%
> 31 Croatian: 0.11%
> 32 Turkish: 0.10%
> 33 Farsi: 0.10%
>
> This still raises some questions; for example the Catalan WP has over
> 20k articles while the Arabic WP has just over 10k; numbers for
> Chinese, Spanish, and even Japanese (!) are similarly incongruent.
>
> Mark
>
> On 29/03/06, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > Mark Williamson wrote:
> > > Hi everybody,
> > >
> > > While it's sort of obvious, given the digital divide, that the number
> > > of articles in Wikipedias is not proportional to the number of
> > > speakers, for example Hindi has a much smaller number of articles
> > > compared to speakers than most active Wikipedias; German has more.
> > >
> > > However, something that people may not notice as much is the
> > > incongruency between popularity of a particular language version and
> > > the number of articles in that version.
> > >
> > > The most visited Wikipedias, in order, are:
> > >
> > > 1 English (65%)
> > > 2 German (10%)
> > > 3 Japanese (6%)
> > > 4 Spanish (3%)
> > > 5 French (2%)
> > > 6 Polish (2%)
> > > 7 Chinese (2%)
> > > 8 Arabic (2%)
> > > 9 Italian (1%)
> > > 10 Hebrew (1%)
> > > 11 Turkish (1%)
> > > 12 Dutch (1%)
> > > 13 Portuguese (1%)
> > > (all others combined total 1% of visits)
> > >
> > > On the other hand, the list of Wikipedias ranked by number of articles is:
> > > 1 English (1048.7K)
> > > 2 German (376.9K)
> > > 3 French (261.1K)
> > > 4 Polish (223.8K)
> > > 5 Japanese (196.3K)
> > > 6 Dutch (156.9K)
> > > ...
> > > 8 Italian (146.8K)
> > > 9 Portuguese (123.8K)
> > > 10 Spanish (105.0K)
> > > ...
> > > 12 Chinese (61.48K)
> > > ...
> > > 17 Hebrew (34.35K)
> > > ...
> > > 29 Turkish (19.94K)
> > > ...
> > > 37 Arabic (12.03K)
> >
> > Hi
> >
> > By the way, I have wondered for a long time how it could be that the
> > french wikipedia be the third largest (which is a fact)... and only
> > supposingly 2% of the visits. I also remember that meta had very
> > significantly more visits than the french wikipedia. Which.. to me... is
> > not something I *believe*.
> >
> > Answer : these values are collected strictly thanks to the use of the
> > Alexa bar...; which is apparently very little used at least in France.
> > Hence possibly messing up the statistics. It might well be the same for
> > other languages, in particular those for which the Alexa bar... is
> > simply not working/translated. So... be careful with the use of the
> > Alexa data. They are a very interesting feedback... but also to take
> > with a pinch of salt.
> >
> > By the way, there was recently a study by Mediametry (a statistical
> > agency, making polls. In France, probably the largest and most famous one).
> >
> > The study showed this
> >
> >         d?c. 2004       avr. 2005       ao?t 2005       d?c. 2005
> > USA     4 544 000       6 753 000       11 874 000      17 498 000
> > Germany 1 707 000       2 956 000       4 502 000       5 529 000
> > France  681 000         1 169 000       1 429 000       2 421 000
> > UK      540 000         766 000         1 525 000       2 298 000
> >
> >
> > Please see that :
> > http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=mediametrie+wikipedia&btnG=Google+Search
> >
> > anthere
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
>
>
> --
> "Take away their language, destroy their souls." -- Joseph Stalin
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Anthere

body:
David Gerard wrote:
> Anthere wrote:
>
>
>>Actually, you know what I *really* think deep inside ?
>>I think that for some reasons, en.wiki is not keeping you busy enough.
>>So, you are looking for other things to do. If you want to play moving
>>the dust around, fine. This might be useful. But I hope that you do not
>>remove very precious artifacts, as you call them.
>
>
>
> That's nice. Are you speaking for the Foundation here?

By default, I speak as an individual human being. I would not dare say
anything in the name of the Foundation, without the agreement of the
other board members :-)

Besides, activity on meta is unrelated to Foundation issues. It is not
the Foundation wiki. Nor the chapter wiki. It is every editor in a
Wikimedia Project wiki.

So, there is no reason to introduce the Foundation here.

I ask because
> of opinions expressed by Aurevilly and Delphine on the Communications
> Committee list regarding en: Wikipedia.

I am not on the communication committee. I do not have access to the
communication committee mailing list. So, I have no idea what was
discussed there since it was created. I am actually not even allowed to
post to that list. So, sorry, I do not know which opinions were
expressed by Villy and Delphine on the topic of the english wikipedia.
I can not  help you here...

Fairly problematic ones
> considering Wikimedia France is the one local chapter that is actually
> legally affiliated with the Foundation.

Hmmmm. Recent discussions showed that this affiliation was actually
quite limited. We foresee that the bylaws will be modified in that
respect in the future. Note that I absolutely have no idea what is the
relationship between
1) categorizing meta and deleting historical articles and essays
2) Affiliation of Wikimedia France with the Foundation
3) Villy and Delphine opinion on en.wikipedia

You got me entirely lost here David :-(((

I note that Aurevilly just
> blanked his en: Wikipedia user page, coinciding with expressing his
> contempt for en:wp openly.

Hum ?
Well, Aurevilly has had some personal issues recently (which are none of
this list business). He took a short wikibreak a few days ago. Imho,
blanking his page on en.wikipedia is totally unrelated to anything he
could have said about the english wikipedia. I fear you are in a wrong
path here...

  Just the thing for a Foundation person to
> show their high regard for cross project issues.

Hmmmmm. I *think* that all the people working on Foundation issues are
suffering considering stress these days. This has extremely little to do
with any opinion we could have with one project or another.

I myself was on a semi-wiki break most of last week. You may have
noticed other people posting less frequently than before.

It is difficult to work on Foundation issues, because the Foundation is
suffering growing pains. It is difficult for us to find the *right*
path, or at least the least *bad* path. It is difficult for us to agree
when we know some decisions may have HUGE consequences on the whole
project.

And aside from this weight about responsability, Foundation people share
a difficulty to take care of all issues in timely fashion. There is a
lot to do, and many of us also have a life aside from the Foundation. It
is not always easy to have everything fit together. Most of us need
breaks from time to time. We just are more or less noisy when we do so
:-) I do not think it is fair to consider these "breaks" as contempt for
the projects. Usually, it really is not...

> What on earth is going in in WMF France? Has en: wikipedia been
> declared the enemy?

Hum ?

Villy is not on the french association board...

But, yes, the french people have a certain proeminence which might
appear shocking to english editors :-)

> - d.

Ant

PS : from time to time, I still go editing on en.wikipedia. Often
anonymously actually ;-) Yesterday night, I needed a cool time. I went
to take care of the ecoregions. I did some tagging and categorizing
during a full hour. I think I started working on the ecoregions more
than 3 years ago. Now, I do not do much. There is an editor,
Radulovitch. He has been working on ecoregions for more than 2 years. He
is, little by little, doing an absolutely fabulous work. I admired it
yesterday night. Then, I helped a little categorizing it better. It is
possible to contribute on en.wikipedia while keeping very little
interaction with the other editors (in particular avoiding most of the
mindless arguments and useless edit wars). It is very relaxing. There is
no reason to see the english wikipedia the enemy...


body:
David Gerard wrote:
> On 29/03/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>That's nice. Are you speaking for the Foundation here? I ask because
>>of opinions expressed by Aurevilly and Delphine on the Communications
>>Committee list regarding en: Wikipedia. Fairly problematic ones
>>considering Wikimedia France is the one local chapter that is actually
>>legally affiliated with the Foundation. I note that Aurevilly just
>>blanked his en: Wikipedia user page, coinciding with expressing his
>>contempt for en:wp openly. Just the thing for a Foundation person to
>>show their high regard for cross project issues.
>
>
>
> In particular, the Board needs to state in as many words: "Those in
> the Foundation who view their role as Foundation versus volunteer
> writers and editors are working severely against the role ofthe
> Foundation." And enforce it as needed.
>
>
> - d.

Sorry, I do not get it.

You'll have to clarify what you mean here.

Ant


from_name: Ivan Krstic

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki Beyond Wikipedia

body:
Gregory Szorc wrote:
> I see MediaWiki as much more than the software that powers Wikipedia.

The core MediaWiki developers traditionally don't. MediaWiki was built
to run Wikipedia, and only incidentally runs other people's wikis.
Changing that significantly would require the expenditure of
(inexistent) developer resources while bringing no benefit to Wikipedia,
and so hasn't been pursued, nor is likely to be pursued by the core team.

--
Ivan Krstic <krstic at fas.harvard.edu> | GPG: 0x147C722D


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
On 3/29/06, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> I am not on the communication committee. I do not have access to the
> communication committee mailing list.

What exactly do you mean by "You do not have access"? Is it a matter
of Foundation policy that Board members are explicitly excluded from
reviewing the interactions of  committees they aren't part of? That
would seem very strange and unnecessary to me. Or are you saying you
simply did not ask a developer or list moderator for access, because
you don't have time to deal with this additional volume of
information? Just trying to understand what exactly the current
situation is.

Erik