subject: [WikiEN-l] How much?

body:
There is a legitimate question about how much human nudity should
be shown in Wikipedia.

On the one hand, anyone who types /wiki/penis at the end of
http://www.wikipedia.org has no one to blame but himself if he
finds an article there about a human penis. And if he or she is
offended that the article goes beyond its excretory role to
describe its role in reproduction or *shudder* "getting it on",
tough luck. It's like visiting Las Vegas and being shocked to
discover that gambling goes on there.

On the other hand, many of us hope that the Wikipedia could
produce a version suitable for distribution to schools. And we
all know how prissy (or protective) some schools are about giving
access to 'obscene' information or images. The general rule is,
the lower the age group, the more "protection" they should get.
Note that this is from the POV of the "protectors"; others say
that if the kids aren't old enough to be interested, they'll just
turn the page.

For acceptance, however, those of us with a "no holds barred"
attitude might do well to consider the feelings of the "guardians
of youth". This means, either leave stuff out of Wikipedia
(unthinkable!) or somehow creating an expurgated (or bowdlerized)
edition.

This might not be so traumatic as you'd think. Many school
subjects are graded, with math probably having the finest
gradations. "Age-appropriate" materials are common in U.S. public
schools, and, presumably elsewhere as well.

But the first "print" or "plastic" (DVD) edition of Wikipedia
probably ought to be un-censored. Its target would be adults.

Perhaps if enough people get their hands on a physical copy of
Wikipedia, one of them will decide to make a "school edition". I
don't think we (the content providers) have to worry about that
right now.

Ed Poor, aka Uncle Ed


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Gutza

subject: [WikiEN-l] Reading Software

body:
Nikos-Optim wrote:

>>There even is no need for any special hidden
>>punctuation: it should not be a
>>problem for the software to automatically add a ; at
>>the end of every heading
>>and list item.
>>
>>
>
>you mean Wikipedia's software (for the "Speakable
>Version" link), right?
>
>--Optim
>
>
Yes, that's the idea, tweaking the Wiki's "rendering" engine as to
produce proper "markup" for reading, as opposed to the two existing
variants or markup (regular and print).

I also proposed a "simple" rendering version some time ago IIRC, don't
remember what came out of that. My idea was to be able to access the
articles as plain text -- no links, no images, no markup, no nothing,
just plain (maybe flowed, as in the MIME type?) text with proper spacing
(one empty line between paragraphs, bullets represented as asterisks and
indented lists, etc). That could be used for various purposes, for
instance it would make it really easy to integrate in third-party online
applications, such as multiplayer games (just one example that came to
mind).

--Gutza


from_name: Delirium

subject: [WikiEN-l] Shades of Rashomon

body:
Viajero wrote:

>Several of us were discussing the topic on the IRC channel in December
>(Anthere may remember this because she was one of them) and this question
>came up. One person said they thought WP (EN) had a pro-Israeli bias.
>Another said a pro-Palestinian bias. A third said neither POV was
>accurately represented.
>
>Conclusion???
>
>
>
>>There just aren't a lot of
>>Arabs or Palestinians showing up here. Most pro-Palestinian edits are
>>coming from a liberal Israeli point of view such as Danny's
>>
>>
>
>One Palestinian-Canadian showed up awhile ago but alas he has not
>contributed since September:
>
>http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&limit=500&offset=0&target=Joseph_E._Saad
>
>
I think part of the problem, as always, is deciding what is a "neutral"
point of view.  IMO, it does *not* mean that it's one that all people
would accept as neutral.  It's one that all *reasonable* people would
accept as neutral, even if somewhat grudgingly.  Of course, how to
define reasonable is controversial.

To take one example, it is mainstream public opinion in many Arab
countries that the [[Protocols of the Elders of Zion]] are an authentic
document, a viewpoint that is not in keeping with the evidence (which is
fairly strong on this point).  To have any sort of reasonable argument,
we can't help but simply saying "well, just about everyone who has
examined the evidence thinks mainstream Arab public opinion is flat-out
wrong on this point" (albeit phrased more politely).

This is not only to pick on Arabs.  Some polls last year showed that a
fairly high percentage of Americans believed Iraqis were among the Sept.
11 hijackers, but as evidence shows that the hijackers were Saudis, we
can't really present "they were Iraqis" as a legitimate viewpoint.

-Mark


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Neil Harris

subject: [Wikitech-l] Access patterns, disks, etc.

body:
== Access patterns ==

I did some stats ages ago, showing an approximately Zipfian distribution
for page accesses. A bit of calculation shows that for small numbers of
articles, this means a small amount of cache will give a large
performace boost.  However, as the number of articles increases, the
vast majority of seldom-accessed articles will start to dominate the
behavior of the system for article fetches. Thus, RAM caching will
decrease in usefulness over time as the project progresses, unless the
RAM cache is close to the size of the entire working set.

Nick's suggestion of tuning the filing system page size to the article
size is a good idea; it will tend to make the RAM cache which is
currently available more effective. I'm rather dubious about some of his
other suggestions.

Where RAM caching is really important is in the "hot" data such as
article timestamps and link tables. These have already been partially
addressed by the use of memcached, I believe.  These commonly accessed
pieces of data should be small enough to keep in RAM all the time,
giving a large speedup to the system.

== Seek bound performance ==

Since disk I/O requests are effectively random, the load will be
dominated by seek and rotational latency. It will cost very nearly the
same to pick 64kbytes off the disk for an article as to get 4 bytes for
a timestamp.

Using high-performance disks and spreading the database across many RAID
spindles should greatly increase performance.

I agree with the posters who are arguing for software RAID: it has
higher performance than hardware RAID in many cases, and again, we can
fine-tune stripe sizes etc. to our application. (Big stripe sizes are a
bad idea for random-seek loads, but give better performance for
streaming loads). We should also consider kernel 2.6: there are major
gains in disk I/O performance in this kernel, and most of the teething
troubles are not related to server issues.

== Not all disks are equal ==

Consider buying the disks specifically by access time statistics. In
particular, high-performance SCSI disks should greatly out-perform IDE
for random seek access patterns, even though their performance may be
roughly the same for data streaming. SCSI command tagging will further
increase performance, where there is concurrency on a single spindle.

See http://www.storagereview.com/php/benchmark/bench_sort.php for some
interesting stats:

*  a Fujitsu MAS3735 has an average read access time of 5.6ms, for a
price of $700 for 73 GB.
* a Hitachi Deskstar 7K250 has an average read access time of 12.1ms,
for a price of $250 for 250 GB
* a seagate U6 has an average read access time of 20.0ms, for a price of
??? for 80 GB

According to this, if performance is dominated by read access time, the
most expensive drive should have almost four times the random-read
performance of the cheapest, all else being equal.

Using price and performance figures such as those above, we should be
able to calculate the best price/performance/storage compromise for this
application.

== The Google strategy for article caching ==

Google seem to use a large number of RAM-based cache servers, based on
the observation that network access latency on a small network is tiny,
but disk latency is large. This does not make any sense for us now: we
don't have the resources, unless Google open-source their Google
filesystem.

For future expansion, it might be cheaper to buy 10 4Gbyte RAM commodity
machines than one 40 Gbyte enterprise-class machine, and spread the load
across them. Although this would still be costly, the performance of
serving data directly from RAM would be very high.

-- Neil
*/

/*


list: wikipedia-l

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Logging no-Go queries?

body:
How about logging the failed "Go" queries on the server and ranking
them? Searching the Wikipedia can be pretty frustrating at times,
especially when you don't know exactly what you're looking for. You know
what I mean, you *know* what you're looking for, you just don't know
what exactly it is called, especially when that's an article which can
have a lot of names.

Once the queries are logged and ranked, a relatively simple mechanism
could be built to pick one of the top 100 every couple of hours and show
it somewhere in every page, obviously as long as the article hasn't been
already created. That way we increase the chances towards meaningful
pathfinding (#REDIRECTs) and *really* "wanted articles".

I'm aware this would incur a tad more load on the server, but since
people typically tend to follow links rather than search for stuff, I
don't think this would be a serious performance hit. What do you think?

--Gutza


subject: [WikiEN-l] How much?

body:
Sascha Noyes wrote:

>In your opinion this is a legitimate question. I don't consider it legitimate
>because I don't consider nudity offensive. (I have previously given the
>example that if puritans consider exposure to nudity a bad thing for
>children, they have to in the same vein consider a child looking at their own
>unclothed body as harmful. That position is patently ridiculous. (And a sad
>reflection on the influence of religious fundamentalists on societies the
>world over.)
>
>
Ah, but should we add some graphic photographs to [[anus]], [[feces]],
and a variety of other subjects people perhaps wouldn't want to see
images of?  After all, unless you're offended by your own bowel
movements, you can't possibly find images of feces offensive, right?

And even if you think that's alright, I'm sure I can find *some* image
you'd prefer not to look at.  We have to draw the line somewhere unless
Wikipedia is just going to become rotten.com and offend absolutely
everyone.  Where we draw it is a subjective judgment.

In any case, I'm less worried about offending people per se than in
simply forcing people to see these images.  What's wrong with making
them a link?  Many people, myself included, do not want to see a picture
of [[penis]] inline in the article, and are quite capable of clicking on
the link if we did at some point wish to see the picture.  This is not
because I am offended by penises or pictures thereof, but simply because
I consider it a private matter and don't generally wish to be accosted
by them for no good reason.  And I think adding them inline adds very
little vs. "click here", so don't consider it a good reason.

Same goes for other photographs, such as [[feces]], [[car accident]],
and etc.  We should have all these photographs (up to some very high
level--perhaps we shouldn't have goatse.cx photographs), but we
shouldn't have them all inline.  So those who choose to see them can see
them.  I don't see how this is censorship, since we are not removing the
information, or even making it hard to get.

It seems, on the contrary, that there is a small segment of people here
trying to push a POV that nudity (or at least pictures of nudity) ought
to be acceptable in public, and are resisting any efforts to compromise
in a manner that would prevent their own personal moral agenda from
being advanced.

-Mark


from_name: Sascha Noyes

subject: [WikiEN-l] How much?

body:
On Tuesday 13 January 2004 03:09 pm, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
> There is a legitimate question about how much human nudity should
> be shown in Wikipedia.

In your opinion this is a legitimate question. I don't consider it legitimate
because I don't consider nudity offensive. (I have previously given the
example that if puritans consider exposure to nudity a bad thing for
children, they have to in the same vein consider a child looking at their own
unclothed body as harmful. That position is patently ridiculous. (And a sad
reflection on the influence of religious fundamentalists on societies the
world over.)

> For acceptance, however, those of us with a "no holds barred"
> attitude might do well to consider the feelings of the "guardians
> of youth". This means, either leave stuff out of Wikipedia
> (unthinkable!) or somehow creating an expurgated (or bowdlerized)
> edition.

The first suggestion is untenable. The second suggestion will have a lot of
followers. Sadly. If someone wants to provide a censored (and let's not mix
words here, it truly is a censorship) version of wikipedia, they are free to
do so under the GFDL.

As far as I'm concerned, they can leave out whatever they want: No nudity, No
criticism of religion, No blasphemy, No pictures of women (special feature
for the fundamentalist islamicists), No mentioning of the word "God", No
criticism of Israel/Saudi Arabia. No criticism of al-Qaida/Bush. No
information on anti-terrorism measures (could help the terrorists, right?) No
information on birth control. Human closed-mindedness literally has no
bounds.

What I do vigorously object to is doing something like this under the auspices
of wikimedia. This means there should be no integration of a "censor"
function in either wikipedia or in the wikipedia 1.0 effort. If such a
project exists under the wikimedia umbrella, I will ask that none of my
donation will in any way go towards this. I know that I (and everyone else)
has donated with the full knowledge that wikimedia will do with the money
what they/we see fit, and that the donators don't have any real say in the
process. But I would consider it ethical to establish a seperate "censorpedia
fund" (you're more than welcome to use that term ;-).

As an aside, I've been doing some research into the development of
L'Encyclop?die (for wikipedia, of course). They too had tensions between
those that wanted to censor information in order to have wider adoption, and
those that believed that they should be able to publish information seen as
offensive (or in the particular case of the Encyclop?die blasphemous) by
portions of the population. Funny enough, they didn't seem to be as prude in
regards to nudity as some of us are. I hope nobody is offended by the fact
that they will see a penis in a picture from the Encyclop?die that I have
added to [[anatomy]]. ;-)

Best,
Sascha Noyes

--
Please encrypt all email. Public key available from
www.pantropy.net/snoyes.asc


from_name: tarquin

subject: [WikiEN-l] Audience : was Re: pictures of genetalia

body:
Anthere wrote:

>
> I do not like the concept of "first" and "second" audience because
> that would be officially stating that we should primarily write for
> the first, to the detriment of the second.
>
> * First because as you stated it, english (along with spanish
> possibly) is international language. It is the most international of
> all languages. Potentially, it can reach many many more people than
> just native english speakers. Whether you want it or not, english is
> not entirely your language anymore. It is our common language. The one
> we can share. The one that can be a babel tower so we can understand
> all together.
>
I agree with Anthere.
In terms of material and content, we should consider the audience of all
wikipedia languages to be international.
(Naturally, in terms of the vocabulary and grammar, we write for
competent speakers of the language.)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Reading Software

body:
Nikos-Optim wrote:

>Considering that we usually don't put some punctuation
>(; . , :) after headings (section titles), List items,
>See also listings where a list is utilised, etc etc...
>I am afraid to say that the current Wikipedia style
>seems to be unfair to Reading Software (software which
>converts text into voice, Example: Adobe 6). Reading
>Software uses the punctuation to make pauses, and
>cannot get into account the document's markup and
>format (headings etc). Lately I started putting :
>after headings and ; or . after list items, but I
>found the visual result disgusting and hard-to-read.
>
>
I am aware of this problem.
I must say that in this instance, it is the reading software that is
broken and must be fixed.
It SHOULD know to pause after a H* HTML element!!!!!


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
tarquin-
> In terms of material and content, we should consider the audience of all
> wikipedia languages to be international.

I agree, too, and I don't think that this precludes the inclusion of a
circumcised penis or clitoris picture in the respective articles [[penis]]
and [[clitoris]], as long as these images are put into proper context and
counter balanced with images of intact organs.

The English Wikipedia should be orientated toward the English *language*.
I don't think it should be orientated toward the English-speaking
*culture*, if there even is such a thing. That would be inherently POV.
Realistically of course there will always be some cultural bias, but we
should work to eliminate it.

Ideally, in my opinion, Wikipedia articles in all languages should contain
exactly the same information. And yes, that also means facts like "In
Germany, circumcision is rarely practiced .." - we do have such "by
country" sections in many articles. And yes, this also means that
"cultural sensibilities" are more or less irrelevant -- the only relevant
sensibilities are those that are shared among most humans.

The NPOV principle is a serious thing. We can't sacrifice it at the altar
of popular culture at every opportunity.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Logging no-Go queries?

body:
Gutza wrote:
> How about logging the failed "Go" queries on the server and ranking
> them? Searching the Wikipedia can be pretty frustrating at times,
> especially when you don't know exactly what you're looking for. You know
> what I mean, you *know* what you're looking for, you just don't know
> what exactly it is called, especially when that's an article which can
> have a lot of names.
>
> Once the queries are logged and ranked, a relatively simple mechanism
> could be built to pick one of the top 100 every couple of hours and show
> it somewhere in every page, obviously as long as the article hasn't been
> already created. That way we increase the chances towards meaningful
> pathfinding (#REDIRECTs) and *really* "wanted articles".
>
> I'm aware this would incur a tad more load on the server, but since
> people typically tend to follow links rather than search for stuff, I
> don't think this would be a serious performance hit. What do you think?

A little extra table with a string and a counter (to count multiple
ones), and maybe a timestamp, so we can automatically get rid of queries
that were searched only once for in, say, a month. Or a week.

You probably don't mean to display /all top 100 queries/ somewhere on
every page? ;-)
IMHO a link to "Special:Most searched topics" would suffice...

As much as I like adding new toys (Phase II was practically drowning in
'em ;-) I'd suggest to put that aside until we have a monster server
running the database again. Otherwise, I like it (had something similar,
but more simple implemented once).

Magnus


from_name: Pedro Fortuny

subject: [WikiEN-l] Reading Software

body:
* tarquin <tarquin at planetunreal.com> [2004-01-13]:
> I am aware of this problem.
> I must say that in this instance, it is the reading software that is
> broken and must be fixed.
> It SHOULD know to pause after a H* HTML element!!!!!
>

It sounded quite obvious to me that the software should know that:
the reader (adobe) is to blame, not the writer (in this case WP), if it
cannot make a heading from ordinary text.

Pedro.

--
Pedro Fortuny Ayuso: http://pfortuny.sdf-eu.org
Colegio Mayor Pe?afiel, Universidad de Valladolid
C/ Estudios 6, 47005 Valladolid, Spain -->        www.cmpenafiel.org
pfortuny at sdf-eu.org                         Tfn. Nr. 34  983  298277


from_name: Daniel Mayer

body:
Optim wrote:
>There is no discrimination between Native and
>Non-Native speakers. Let's get rid of discriminations.

There is no discrimination. It is a matter of information organization and
focus, which means that an encyclopedia in one language is not really the
same thing as an encyclopedia in another language. So people who are not
native speakers should respect the traditions of the second language they may
be writing in. If they don't then the resulting articles will only be
maximally useful to people who happen to have the same primary language as
themselves. Cross pollination is nice and a good thing, but can only be taken
so far.

For example, if I spoke French as a second language, I would not insist that a
textbook written in French follow standards of focus and organization that
are common in English textbooks. To do so would make the French textbook less
useful to most French speakers (except those whose primary language is
English). Also, if every combination of primary/secondary language audience
were written to, then the textbook would be huge and not be very useful to
any audience. See what I mean?

But since we are a wiki whose content is created by volunteers (most of whom
who are native speakers), these rough edges will get ironed out very
naturally in time - if left alone. So the point is really moot (and is more
of a background effect to larger differences in personal likes and dislikes
of information organization - those get ironed out in time as well). But it
is still an important point because we *could* form policies that work
against this natural inclination. That, IMO, would be a very bad thing.

But having Wikipedias in different languages helps to ensure that each is
maximally useful to their readers.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: Anthere

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Shades of Rashomon (was: Re: This is getting ugly)

body:
Viajero a ?crit:
> On 01/12/04  at 08:35 AM, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> said:
>
>
>>Generally, although I would not expect you to admit it, Wikipedia
>>articles have a somewhat pro-Israeli bias.
>
>
> Several of us were discussing the topic on the IRC channel in December
> (Anthere may remember this because she was one of them) and this question
> came up. One person said they thought WP (EN) had a pro-Israeli bias.
> Another said a pro-Palestinian bias. A third said neither POV was
> accurately represented.
>
> Conclusion???

Yes, I remember that conversation. We were three people talking, and the
three of us had a different perception. That was curious ;-)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Audience : was Re: pictures of genetalia

body:
I agree with what Tarquin, Charles, Erik said.

And we should not think "culture", just language.
Those who share a language do not necessarily share a same culture.
Organising information to reflect the most proeminent culture among
those using a specific language is not a very good idea.

Though admitedly, by default that happen, because the editors of that
proeminent culture are more numerous. It is not because it happens that
it should be a goal.

Daniel Mayer a ?crit:
> Anthere wrote:
>>I guess we will have both to see that we are not
>>writing for the same audience. As long as you
>>accept that some do not recognise these notions
>>of *primary* and *secondary* as valid, while others
>>do, that is fine.
>
>
> This whole discussion was more academic than practical since things naturally
> develop toward what I described unless unnatural force is applied to direct
> things down another path (which does happen for individual articles but on
> the whole it is not a very significant force).
>
> Those of us who speak more than one language, however, should remember that
> there are different notions of how to organize information in different
> languages. They should therefore not just assume that the way they do things
> in their primary language is necessarily transferable in other languages they
> may know.
>
> This is one thing that I have learned while working on Wikipedia.
>
> -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


body:
Daniel Mayer a ?crit:
> Erik wrote:
>
>>The English Wikipedia should be orientated toward the English
>>*language*.
>
>
> Exactly my point. The English language has its own traditions on how to
> organize information - that does not mean, however, that we exclude
> information or not follow NPOV.
>
>
>>I don't think it should be orientated toward the English-speaking
>>*culture*, if there even is such a thing. That would be inherently
>>POV.
>
>
> I agree.

I agree. That is why we do need to present the penis with which a baby
born and grew up, if not modified, as a "penis".
Not as an "uncircumsed penis".

First label (penis) is oriented toward "english language".
Second label (uncircumsed penis) is oriented toward "english culture"
(ie, meant to fit with the number of circumsised people in english culture).

English language, not english culture. That was precisely my point as
well :-)


from_name: Rick

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia in the news

body:
In the past month, Wikipedia has shown up in several online news reports, according to news.google:

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2004/1/11/124803.shtml

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/78/conscious.html

http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=1405

http://www.pdalive.com/showarticle.php?threadid=5000

http://www.nbr.co.nz/home/column_article.asp?id=7930&cid=8&cname=News

http://www.macobserver.com/article/2003/12/23.11.shtml

RickK

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Hotjobs: Enter the "Signing Bonus" Sweepstakes
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from_name: Menchi

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: User:Annek

body:
> he has, after all,
> edited my comments to make it appear as though I
> agreed with him when I clearly did not ....-- isn't that an
> officially bannable action?
>
> Tuf-Kat
>

Malevolently changing another person's comment definitely sounds like a
bannable action. Not sure if it is.

Menc


from_name: Thomas R. Koll

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Logging no-Go queries?

body:
On Tue, Jan 13, 2004 at 03:33:54PM +0200, Gutza wrote:
> How about logging the failed "Go" queries on the server and ranking
> them? Searching the Wikipedia can be pretty frustrating at times,
> especially when you don't know exactly what you're looking for. You know
> what I mean, you *know* what you're looking for, you just don't know
> what exactly it is called, especially when that's an article which can
> have a lot of names.
>
> Once the queries are logged and ranked, a relatively simple mechanism
> could be built to pick one of the top 100 every couple of hours and show
> it somewhere in every page, obviously as long as the article hasn't been
> already created. That way we increase the chances towards meaningful
> pathfinding (#REDIRECTs) and *really* "wanted articles".

You could ask the operators for the apache-logs and run a simple script
over them to compare them with the database dump.
Just an idea.

ciao, tom
--
http://www.tomk32.de - just a geek trying to change the world
   -.-       http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:TomK32
   /|>	           http://tomk32.bookcrossing.com
   / \                 http://tinyurl.com/u6de


from_name: Nick Hill

subject: [Wikitech-l] The order

body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:
> At that price, they should send a technician to install it, test it, and
> hang around for a few days to make sure it "burns in" all right.

It would be nice if they would. Their prices seem very competitive so
they may make a substantial loss if they offered that.

http://www.siliconmechanics.com/

For example, the extra cost of adding a 1Gb DDR400 DIMM is $380- less
than what you would pay Crucial or most other 3rd party vendors. System
integrators

Comapring Dell and Silicon Mechanics P4 servers, the closest is the Dell
Poweredge 650. Dell has slower memory and does not come with SATA.

The equivalent config with dell costs US$2475 -$100 mail in rebate and
free palm Zire. Say worth $50. Nett Price US$2325
The closest silicon mechanics machine to the Dell is a 1150A, equally
configured will cost US$1593. 32% cheaper.

Silicon mechanics machine as ordered still costs 25% less than the
inferior DELL at US$1773.


from_name: Gabriel Wicke

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: The order

body:
On Tue, 13 Jan 2004 09:41:42 -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:

> The total cost is $19,308, plus tax and shipping.

Not the cheapest option but very decent hardware i'd say...

I wished they had Debian preloaded but hey, you can't have everything...

--
Gabriel Wicke


subject: [Wikipedia-l] .eu domains perhaps? (was: Palpal in Europe)

body:
Yann wrote:
>I think that might be interesting for European people who
>want to make donations.

This is potentially great news! Do you know if they will *finally* have
translated interfaces for the major European languages soon?

Which reminds me - we really need to get the Wikipedia and Wikimedia
trademarks registered in the U.S. and in Europe so that when .eu domains
become available we can be more certain of obtaining wikipedia.eu,
wikimedia.eu and wikimediafoundation.eu. Whatever we do with those domains, I
think that it is important for us to control them (at the very least they
would make for great portals).

The proliferation of "pre-registration" sites disturbs me. Example:
http://www.domainregistry.de/eu.html

OIC, that may be a scam:
http://www.vnunet.com/News/1144248

Either way we may have to fight for .eu domains - better to have the paperwork
ready before the great .eu grab starts.

It would be nice, but from what I've read we don't *need* an official business
presence in the EU to buy .eu domains once they become available. We just
need an EU resident to act as our proxy and official .eu domain holder until
a Wikimedia Europe affiliate organization is set-up.

-- mav


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Audience

body:
Daniel Mayer a ?crit:
> Anthere wrote:
>
>>I agree. That is why we do need to present the penis with
>>which a baby born and grew up, if not modified, as a "penis".
>>Not as an "uncircumsed penis".
>
>
> Uh, no. If and when the article [[penis]] gets large enough, then it will make
> sense to have more photos. One of those photos will be one of an circumcised
> penis. Given that circumcision is relatively common among English readers
> (our audience) we can expect to have - naturally - a relatively large section
> at [[penis]] about circumcision.

Right now, the internet is dominated by native english people. Mostly
americans. But that will change. Soon, most europeans will be connected.
And later asian people. And later african people.
I think a good deal of them will speak english. And if Wikipedia is
successful, many of them will read the english wikipedia.
The audience that is occurring right now, is likely not the audience we
will have in 10 years.
I suspect that right now, if developpers checked, they would find that
95% of the hits the english wikipedia gets are from north america. I
also suspect that it won't be so true in 10 years.

> I'm sure that in languages other than English in which circumcision is much
> rarer, that there may never be a whole section in their [[penis]] article
> about that - just a sentence or two and a link in their section dealing with
> all penis modifications.

> Having more than that may bore an audience where circumcision is not as common
> - that sub-topic isn't really as relevant to the the subject for them as it
> would be to readers for whom circumcision is more common. So just because it
> makes sense to you as a non-native speaker that a photo of a circumcised
> penis is not really very relevant to the penis article, please do not think
> that that would make sense to a native speaker.

No, you did not understand me. I never said that a picture of a
circumsised penis was *wrong* there.

*I said it should not be seen as the FIRST picture, as if it was nearly
the natural condition of it. There should be FIRST a paragraph
describing what a penis is, what it is in its natural state. The state
of a penis as it is created by normal development of a human. It could
be the anatomic paragraph, and truely, a schematic drawing would be best
here. For neutrality, as well as accuracy and detail.

*Then BELOW, in another paragraph, there could be a detailed description
of the fact all sort of penis can be found around us. Black, white,
long, big, circumsised etc...whatever. There, you may put more on the
circumsision stuff than there are in other languages perhaps.

It is not correct that for cultural proeminence, the anatomy of a penis
is described differently in one encyclopedia and another. The anatomy of
a penis is just the same everywhere, on every human. That is what is
common to all men. It is nature we are describing. We should first
describing what we all have in common (well, not me naturally :-))

Then, in a second time, we give details, of what is different among
them. How we differ.

The second point I raised, is that it is POV to label a regular penis,
as using a comparison with a *specific* state, created by *cultural*
background.

Imagine an article on [[woman]], where at the top of the page there are
two women, one naked, and the other one entirely covered by a burka.

Would you describe the picture of the naked woman by saying it is a "a
woman not wearing a burka"; or would you say it is "a woman".

I guess you would say a woman. There is nothing cultural here. It is
just description. There is no use of being opposing a natural state with
a culturally biased state. That is confusing two types of description.

> Relevance is a relative thing. So know your audience and select information
> that is most useful to them and organize it accordingly. That is going to be
> different in different languages (even when NPOV is followed faithfully). But
> again this happens naturally on Wikipedia due to the fact that the different
> language versions give each language the opportunity to develop articles that
> are most useful to their readers.
>
> -- mav

Definitly we will have to conclude that we disagree Mav :-)

I know my audience, you know your audience.
So we both will select information that will be most useful for our
audience, as we define it.
And we will both organise it the way we think it best for our audience,
as we define it.
And as long as we disagree on the content and the organisation, we will
have to talk about it :-)
That is all there is to say :-)


from_name: Stan Shebs

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia in the news

body:
Rick wrote:

>In the past month, Wikipedia has shown up in several online news reports, according to news.google:
>
>
>http://www.macobserver.com/article/2003/12/23.11.shtml
>
At first this one puzzled me, it was an announcement of a search tool
called DEVONagent. The Wikipedia connection is that it comes with
"plug-ins searching the Wikipedia encyclopedia, the Wiktionary online
dictionary", and others. Kind of interesting to see people selling
commercial software that automagically goes to WP for info.

Stan


from_name: Bjorn Lindqvist

subject: [WikiEN-l] anti-semites...

body:
> (That being said, most anti-Zionists today also have
> anti-Semitic views. The problem is that people are using
> the same word ("anti-Zionism") to refer to many different
> things.  Last year, no one saw this problem. After I made
> this point in new ways, a number of times, others here
> finally figured that out. Hence the new improved article.

The article says there is a connection between anti-Semitism and
anti-Zionism? Gotta edit that.

> No, and I think the problem is that you have no idea what I
> was talking about. I was talking about the many explicitly
> anti-Semitic posts made by a number of Wikipedia users,
> which were well-documented.

In my narrow world there are some things that are legal and some that
are illegal, some things that I should give a fuck about and some
thing I should not give a fuck about.

In this case it is very legal to be the thing you describe. You will
not get booted from the project if you admit to being or if someone
"proves" you are an anti-Semite. Atleast thats how I think it
works. Because where I live, there are quite a few anti-Semites. And
while I do despise them I think it would be wrong for me to shot them
or stab them with a knife (those being the only real punishments I can
deal out). Maybe they deserve to be punched in the face a few times,
but I don't dare that. I'm to small and they would punch me back much
harder. And strangely enough it seems like the officials aren't
punishing them either! I guess all cops and politicians to are
anti-Semites or something. Maybe it isn't illegal in my country to be
a nazi.. dunno..

And that is why I stopped caring about anti-Semites anymore. I
realized it isn't my problem or duty to keep track on who is an
anti-Semite and who is not. I mean I don't want to associate with them
or anything but keeping track on each and every anti-Semite is just to
much work for absolutely no reward.

So that's what I'm curious why you are trying to find Nazis on the
Wikipedia, RK. You had done a great study and proved someone was a
Nazi or something, right? Well, I didn't read it because I figured
that it is none of my fucking business to find out what ideology
Wikipedia persons belong to.

What if I am a Nazi? Would that change anything at all really?

Yours truly,
the sick Nazi bastard BL


from_name: Yann Forget

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Palpal in Europe

body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Hi,

FYI.
I think that might be interesting for European people who want to make
donations.

Regards,
Yann

Subject: Information Regarding Anticipated Future European Operations
Date: Tuesday 13 January 2004 03:22
From: "PayPal Inc." <announcements-account at paypal.com>
To: "Yann Forget" <yann at forget-me.net>

Dear Yann Forget,

We would like to update you on our preparations for the anticipated future
 launch of PayPal (Europe) Ltd., a UK company, as the service provider for
 PayPal customers in the European Union.

This is a positive development that would help us provide our European
 customers with improved services to satisfy local needs, both online and
 through our new European Customer Service Centre in Dublin.

We anticipate that PayPal (Europe) Ltd. will begin operating in February
 2004, subject to receiving authorisation from the Financial Services
 Authority (FSA) in the UK. Please note, no action will be necessary on your
 part. You will be able to continue using your PayPal account as you do
 today.

Your existing relationship

Until PayPal (Europe) Ltd. starts operating, your customer relationship
 continues to be with PayPal, Inc., a US company regulated as a money
 transmitter by various states in the US, under the PayPal User Agreement
 governed by California law.

In June 2003, we applied to the UK's Financial Services Authority (FSA) for
 authorisation for PayPal (Europe) Ltd. to operate as an Electronic Money
 Institution (ELMI) in the European Union. This process is still in progress.

A new customer relationship

With the introduction of our new UK company, your customer relationship would
 automatically reside with PayPal (Europe) Ltd. instead of PayPal, Inc. We
 would also introduce a new User Agreement and Privacy Policy, similar to the
 current agreements but without US-specific references and modified to comply
 with UK financial services and consumer protection requirements.

While this transition is at least 30 days away, we encourage you to:

understand your rights and obligations. Please preview the PayPal (Europe)
 Ltd. User Agreement and Privacy Policy

learn about the key changes and how they may affect you. Please visit the
 PayPal (Europe) Ltd. FAQs page as well as the Policy Updates section for
 more details.

If you do not wish to hold a PayPal (Europe) Ltd. account and would prefer to
 continue your relationship with PayPal, Inc., you may only do so if your
 primary address in your PayPal account, as of 1 February 2004, is a
 legitimate postal address within the United States.

If your primary address is not in the United States and you do not wish to
 receive services from PayPal (Europe) Ltd., you may close your account at
 any time, either before or after the transition. To do so, log in to your
 PayPal account and click 'Profile' to access the relevant link.

As we await authorisation from the FSA, we wish to inform you in advance of
 our plans and how these may affect you. We will notify you of further
 developments in the coming weeks. Until then, thank you for using PayPal.

Yours sincerely,

PayPal, Inc.

- --
http://www.non-violence.org/ | Site collaboratif sur la non-violence
http://www.forget-me.net/ | Alternatives sur le Net
http://fr.wikipedia.org/ | Encyclop?die libre
http://www.forget-me.net/pro/ | Formations et services Linux
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from_name: ReyGir at aol.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] hello!

body:
Hi! I was wondering if you can tell me how the policies of the Han Dynasty
helped the people live better lives. Can you give me a good answer please?
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from_name: Lars Aronsson

subject: [Wikitech-l] Secondary servers

body:
Alfio Puglisi wrote:
> former will be cheaper. But it seems that our disk subsystem is hampered
> by latency - lots of small reads looking for DB indexes, articles, things
> that got pushed out from the cache, all of them from multiple concurrent

If things get pushed out of the cache, you need RAM, not SCSI disks.
And you don't need 40 GB of RAM, you only need so much that things
don't get pushed out of the cache so often.  Today's ATA disks are far
better than any SCSI disk of a few years ago.  And only a few years
further back, people used to say that SCSI was only toys and you
really needed 8, 12 or 14 inch Eagle disks, and stuff like that.
A recommended read is the first chapter of "The Innovator's Dilemma".

This design-by-committee approach to hardware problems is so boring.

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


subject: [WikiEN-l] Simple deletion reorganization

body:
Erik wrote:
>Opponents of voting should note that this proposal does
>advocate a very conservative stance on voting, including
>an 80% threshold and use of voting only after consensus
>has failed, and only on the basis of complete summaries of
>past arguments. I hope that most opponents can agree to
>such a compromise.

>The proposal and associated poll is at:
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Deletion_policy

<mav raises hand>
Opponent of voting here.
</mav raises hand>

Since when have we started voting on a specific proposal without discussing
that specific proposal first? More is already on the linked talk page.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: Sascha Noyes

subject: [WikiEN-l] How much?

body:
On Tuesday 13 January 2004 06:16 pm, Delirium wrote:
> Sascha Noyes wrote:
>>In your opinion this is a legitimate question. I don't consider it
legitimate
>>because I don't consider nudity offensive. (I have previously given the
>>example that if puritans consider exposure to nudity a bad thing for
>>children, they have to in the same vein consider a child looking at their
own
>>unclothed body as harmful. That position is patently ridiculous. (And a sad
>>reflection on the influence of religious fundamentalists on societies the
>>world over.)
>>
>>
>Ah, but should we add some graphic photographs to [[anus]], [[feces]],
>and a variety of other subjects people perhaps wouldn't want to see
>images of?  After all, unless you're offended by your own bowel
>movements, you can't possibly find images of feces offensive, right?

That is correct. I see my feces nearly every day, and recognise that
defecation is a normal and natural act. I am not in the least bit offended by
the sight of feces. People study feces of animals to infer what they ate,
etc. I don't find these people to be morally reprehensible characters because
they are interested in feces. Similarly for anuses.

>And even if you think that's alright, I'm sure I can find *some* image
>you'd prefer not to look at.  We have to draw the line somewhere unless
>Wikipedia is just going to become rotten.com and offend absolutely
>everyone.  Where we draw it is a subjective judgment.

Ah, but you fail to see that even if there exist images that I would prefer
not to look at, I would not seek them out. You make it sound as though I am
advocating putting pictures of anuses on the cover of the encyclopedia.
Another false assumption is that if (in the hypothetical) I prefer not to
look at pictures of self-mutilation, I would want you to take the decision to
remove an exemplary picture from the article [[self-mutilation]]. This is not
the case. I would firstly not actively seek such a picture, and if I had
stumbled upon it accidentally I would simply look away.

>In any case, I'm less worried about offending people per se than in
>simply forcing people to see these images.  What's wrong with making
>them a link?  Many people, myself included, do not want to see a picture
>of [[penis]] inline in the article, and are quite capable of clicking on
>the link if we did at some point wish to see the picture.  This is not
>because I am offended by penises or pictures thereof, but simply because
>I consider it a private matter and don't generally wish to be accosted
>by them for no good reason.  And I think adding them inline adds very
>little vs. "click here", so don't consider it a good reason.

"Forcing" is a very strong word. Do you consider yourself "forced" to see a
penis when you, of your own volition visit [[penis]]? And when you visit
[[anatomy]]? Who decides what is considered "force"? Regarding linking to
images. I did not in any way state that I oppose the idea of having images
that are almost universally offensive located on a page that people need to
click to view the image, with a notice that there will be eg. an image of
self-mutilation, or of eg. a car-crash. You are misrepresenting my view in
order to be able to attack it. Now, I don't think that it is plausible that a
version of wikipedia that is censored in accordance with the moral doctrine
of the puritans would include images of a penis, anus, feces, etc. with the
limitation that they would have to be clicked and not displayed inline. Don't
tell me that you honestly think that they would settle for that.

>Same goes for other photographs, such as [[feces]], [[car accident]],
>and etc.  We should have all these photographs (up to some very high
>level--perhaps we shouldn't have goatse.cx photographs), but we
>shouldn't have them all inline.  So those who choose to see them can see
>them.  I don't see how this is censorship, since we are not removing the
>information, or even making it hard to get.

But in which encyclopedic article would you include the goatse.cx picture?
Again, you are misrepresenting my position. I did not state that not having
an image inline is censorship. Perhaps I should have been clearer on this
point.

I have made what I believe to be a well-founded argument that we should not
have an officially censored version of wikipedia. If people want to have a
censored version, they should (and can) go ahead and do so. But I argue
against integrating any censorship into either wikipedia or wikipedia 1.0.
You have not presented any argument that censorship of wikipedia or wikipedia
1.0 to remove potential and/or actual offensive material beside the one that
I myself have mentioned: popularity. And this is where I find that we step
onto a slippery slope. I know that some people consider the slippery slope
argument a fallacy, but I shall employ it here nonetheless. If we submit to
the censorship of the american puritans, why not to that of fundamental
islamists? Why not to that of those who do not whish to have "God" spelled
out? Why not to that of those who do not wish to see pictoral representations
of deities? Then you have to start arguing that "my offense at seeing a penis
is justified", whereas "your offense at seeing a depicition of a deity is not
justified".

>It seems, on the contrary, that there is a small segment of people here
>trying to push a POV that nudity (or at least pictures of nudity) ought
>to be acceptable in public, and are resisting any efforts to compromise
>in a manner that would prevent their own personal moral agenda from
>being advanced.

As Erik said in his response to this point, our goal as an encyclopedia is to
provide encyclopedic knowledge. There are probably very few people that would
disagree that a picture of a penis adds encyclopedic knowledge to the article
[[penis]] (otherwise why do we include pictures at all?). Note that our goal
is not to provide a sanitised version of reality but, I repeat, to provide
encyclopedic knowledge. The onus is therefore on the censors to justify the
removal of encyclopedic knowledge from an encyclopedia. I have just latched
onto the nudity issue because that seemed like a particularly relevant
example of people trying to remove encyclopedic knowldge from an
encyclopedia. Whether or not I find nudity offensive is not the issue -
Although I will freely admit that I did not hesitate to point out the
stupidity of finding nudity offensive ;-)

Best,
Sascha Noyes
--
Please encrypt all email. Public key available from
www.pantropy.net/snoyes.asc


subject: [WikiEN-l] How much?

body:
Delirium-
> In any case, I'm less worried about offending people per se than in
> simply forcing people to see these images.  What's wrong with making
> them a link?  Many people, myself included, do not want to see a picture
> of [[penis]] inline in the article, and are quite capable of clicking on
> the link if we did at some point wish to see the picture.

Many people do not want to see a picture of a woman in public without a
veil, and are quite capable of clicking on the link if they did at some
point wish to see the picture.

> It seems, on the contrary, that there is a small segment of people here
> trying to push a POV that nudity (or at least pictures of nudity) ought
> to be acceptable in public, and are resisting any efforts to compromise
> in a manner that would prevent their own personal moral agenda from
> being advanced.

"It seems that there is a small segment of people here trying to push the
POV that women walking in public (or at least pictures of women walking in
public) ought to be acceptable, and are resisting any efforts to
compromise in a manner that would prevent their own personal moral agenda
from being advanced."

Exclusion of such content is fundamentally irreconcilable with our
neutrality policy, and should only happen in cases where we can assume
near universal offensiveness. This clearly advances an agenda - just as
doing the opposite would. Neutrality is the lack of involvement --
philosophically speaking, as soon as we have decided to create an
encyclopedia, we have at the very least taken the position that bringing
knowledge to human beings is a good thing to do. By making our NPOV policy
non-negotiable, we have also taken the position that Wikipedia does not
subscribe to absolute truths, but presents all points of view instead.

Combine these two "agendas" and you arrive at the inevitable outcome that
we *have* to include such images. Removing them would mean that we fail in
terms of providing knowledge, and hiding them as links means that we fail
in terms of being free of bias.

We make an exception to the latter rule in order to further the former: We
link pictures that we consider almost universally offensive (sometimes
with warnings) in order to avoid turning away readers, and in order to get
them to actually read the article that contains the pictures. But as soon
as we start pandering to local cultural biases, we inevitably fail in both
regards.

The inclusion itself must be allowed not because of a particular
*personal* agenda. It must be allowed because it is our *collective*
agenda to provide knowledge without bias, and keeping Wikipedia as free of
censorship as reasonably possible is necessary to do so.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Gutza

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Logging no-Go queries?

body:
Magnus Manske wrote:

> Gutza wrote:
>
>> Once the queries are logged and ranked, a relatively simple mechanism
>> could be built to pick one of the top 100 every couple of hours and
>> show it somewhere in every page
>
> A little extra table with a string and a counter (to count multiple
> ones), and maybe a timestamp, so we can automatically get rid of
> queries that were searched only once for in, say, a month. Or a week.
>
> You probably don't mean to display /all top 100 queries/ somewhere on
> every page? ;-)
> IMHO a link to "Special:Most searched topics" would suffice...
>
> [snipped]
>
> Magnus

When I say "pick one" I obviously don't mean "display all". Is there any
possibility that my original message could have been interpreted
otherwise? I think it's easy to interpret correctly what I said: pick
one, and show one; show *one* on *every* page. You're somehow twisting
it into pick *all*, show *all* -- which would obviously result in
showing them all on some isolated page... I was going towards a proposal
which would have made *one* failed query available for *all* users in
order for them to have a chance at fixing it somehow (either by creating
a redirect or by creating an article).

--Gutza


from_name: Pablo De Nápoli

subject: [Wikipedia-l] wikipedia is too much open

body:
Hi!

I'm new to wikipedia, and I think that it is a great project that can help to
extend the ideas of free software to other areas, and to non technical
people.

I don't want to start a flame war but I want to express my point of view on
the way that articles are edited in wikipedia.

I've contributed with some articles. I'm rather disapointed, though. For
example, I've rewriten the article on Lebesgue integration in the English
wikipedia, since I find that the article explained the tenichal difficulties
of Riemman integral, but it does not define the notion of Lebesgue integral
(perhaps I had to tell you that I'm a mathematician, I work at the mathematics
department of Buenos Aires University, Argentina).

After that, looking at the history of the page, I find that some rather old
previous versions where much better, but they had been deleted since a
user consider them "too advanced". Needless to say, Lebesgue integration is
indeed an advanced topic in mathematics, so that any article on this subject
is necesarilly advanced (or does not covered the topic).

It seems to me that the model of  wikipedia is too much open, so that open
that anyone can annonymously edit any page. That I think is to much.that at
least one should have to register and log in in order to modify a page, one
has to take a responsability for what is saying (specially for deleting some
one else work). In the current model, we don't know who write what
(even though, most civilizated wiikipedians do log in, but I think this should
be mandatory)

Another idea that comes to my mind is that there could be some teams for
especific topics, that  manage the pages in some section (say mathematics,
geogrpahy,
economics or whatever). This does not mean that any user from outside the team
could not submit modifications. But without a team of core developers or
a project leader for each section how can you assure a minimum of
quality of wikipedia?
(this is more or less the model in all free software projects, no project
grants write access to cvs to everyone anonymously, say)

Best regards,
Pablo De N?poli


from_name: Toby Bartels

body:
Pablo De N?poli wrote in part:

>It seems to me that the model of  wikipedia is too much open, so that open
>that anyone can annonymously edit any page. That I think is to much.that at
>least one should have to register and log in in order to modify a page, one
>has to take a responsability for what is saying (specially for deleting some
>one else work). In the current model, we don't know who write what
>(even though, most civilizated wiikipedians do log in, but I think this should
>be mandatory)

Well, the short response is:
Get to know Wikipedia, and then say if you still believe this.
I suspect that some experienced Wikipedians /do/ think this way,
albeit probably not as strongly as you do (although I would disagree).

However, if you're worrying that you might not want to work on Wikipedia,
then you will need a longer response.  There is a whole lot of this at
[[en:Wikipedia:Replies to common objections]] (that is shorthand for the URL
<http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/en:Wikipedia:Replies to common objections>),
so I'll shut up since I can't say anything here that isn't said better there.
(And that's not very surprising, since that text was edited in the wiki way,
and has had far more input and refinement than this extemporaneous email! ^_^)

-- Toby


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Logging no-Go queries?

body:
Gutza wrote:

> Magnus Manske wrote:
>
>> Gutza wrote:
>>
>>> Once the queries are logged and ranked, a relatively simple
>>> mechanism could be built to pick one of the top 100 every couple of
>>> hours and show it somewhere in every page
>>
>>
>> A little extra table with a string and a counter (to count multiple
>> ones), and maybe a timestamp, so we can automatically get rid of
>> queries that were searched only once for in, say, a month. Or a week.
>>
>> You probably don't mean to display /all top 100 queries/ somewhere on
>> every page? ;-)
>> IMHO a link to "Special:Most searched topics" would suffice...
>>
>> [snipped]
>>
>> Magnus
>
>
> When I say "pick one" I obviously don't mean "display all". Is there
> any possibility that my original message could have been interpreted
> otherwise? I think it's easy to interpret correctly what I said: pick
> one, and show one; show *one* on *every* page. You're somehow twisting
> it into pick *all*, show *all* -- which would obviously result in
> showing them all on some isolated page... I was going towards a
> proposal which would have made *one* failed query available for *all*
> users in order for them to have a chance at fixing it somehow (either
> by creating a redirect or by creating an article).
>
> --Gutza

Just for the record, re-read your original post and realized I
completely misinterpreted it when I sent the reply above. Typical online
conversation misinterpretation (you know the drill, missing facial cues,
etc). In any case, I apologize if I came out as a paranoid schizoid
(which I probably did :-)).

You're right, I don't mean 100 queries/anywhere, I meant /one/ failed
query /everywhere/, and that one query would only be picked once every
two hours. I honestly don't think that would be any perceptible
performance hit.

--Gutza


from_name: Delirium

subject: [WikiEN-l] How much?

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>Delirium-
>
>
>>In any case, I'm less worried about offending people per se than in
>>simply forcing people to see these images.  What's wrong with making
>>them a link?  Many people, myself included, do not want to see a picture
>>of [[penis]] inline in the article, and are quite capable of clicking on
>>the link if we did at some point wish to see the picture.
>>
>>
>
>Many people do not want to see a picture of a woman in public without a
>veil, and are quite capable of clicking on the link if they did at some
>point wish to see the picture.
>
>
>
>>It seems, on the contrary, that there is a small segment of people here
>>trying to push a POV that nudity (or at least pictures of nudity) ought
>>to be acceptable in public, and are resisting any efforts to compromise
>>in a manner that would prevent their own personal moral agenda from
>>being advanced.
>>
>>
>
>"It seems that there is a small segment of people here trying to push the
>POV that women walking in public (or at least pictures of women walking in
>public) ought to be acceptable, and are resisting any efforts to
>compromise in a manner that would prevent their own personal moral agenda
>from being advanced."
>
>Exclusion of such content is fundamentally irreconcilable with our
>neutrality policy, and should only happen in cases where we can assume
>near universal offensiveness. This clearly advances an agenda - just as
>doing the opposite would. Neutrality is the lack of involvement --
>philosophically speaking, as soon as we have decided to create an
>encyclopedia, we have at the very least taken the position that bringing
>knowledge to human beings is a good thing to do. By making our NPOV policy
>non-negotiable, we have also taken the position that Wikipedia does not
>subscribe to absolute truths, but presents all points of view instead.
>
>
It seems that you are assuming what you find personally offensive has
"near universal offensiveness", and what you do not find personally
offensive does not.  For example, I'd argue that close-up pictures of
genitalia are considered offensive by a similar proportion of the
world's population as pictures of someone slitting their wrist (the
latter appear quite often in mainstream movies, for example, while the
former generally only appear in pornographic movies).  So then we'd have
to include those too.  And if our article on [[feces]] has pictures of
feces, our article on [[clitoris]] has a detailed photo of a clitoris,
our article on [[suicide methods]] (hypothetical; I'm not sure if such
an article exists and Wikipedia is too slow to check at the moment)
includes photos of slit wrists, and so on, a large proportion of
Wikipedia will simply be unreadable by a large number of people.  I
certainly wouldn't read it, anyway, and I'm more liberal in these
matters than most people I know.

You sound like you may be arguing that close-up pictures of a clitoris
are of a similar level of offensiveness to photos of women without a
veil, which is simply not true: the former are far more offensive to far
more people.  It is true that they do not offend everyone, but I think
they offend enough people to make it a poor idea to include them inline,
much as slit wrists and feces and other things that a very large
proportion of people don't particularly want to see casually unless
they're looking for that photo on purpose.

-Mark


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
In the midst of the numerous proposals, I hope this one does not go
completely under. I have proposed a reorganization of our deletion pages,
including some changes to the process which should better integrate
Wikipedia:Cleanup and clarify what both "consensus" and "voting" are in
this context and when to use them.

Opponents of voting should note that this proposal does advocate a very
conservative stance on voting, including an 80% threshold and use of
voting only after consensus has failed, and only on the basis of complete
summaries of past arguments. I hope that most opponents can agree to such
a compromise.

The proposal and associated poll is at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Deletion_policy

Please discuss.

All best,

Erik


from_name: zero 0000

subject: [WikiEN-l] Shades of Rashomon

body:
> Viajero wrote:
>
> > Several of us were discussing the topic on the IRC channel in
> > December (Anthere may remember this because she was one of
> > them) and this question came up. One person said they thought
> > WP (EN) had a pro-Israeli bias. Another said a pro-Palestinian
> > bias. A third said neither POV was accurately represented.

In my experience bias is not the most serious problem in the
ME pages, it is ignorance.  People think they know something
about the subject because they have some infantile propaganda
tract (or a collection of infantile web sites) and insist on
copying it into WP.  Of course this is related to bias, but on
the other hand there have been people in WP with strong
political opinions who are nevertheless valuable contributors
on account of the depth of their knowledge.

Two knowledgable people with opposing biases can generally
write a good article even if the road is rocky.  No number of
ignoramuses can write a good article regardless of their biases.

One of the surest marks of a problem editor is that they insist
on filling up articles with "quotations".  I plan to write more
on this in the near future.

Zero.

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from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikipedia-l] French net censorship law

body:
How might this bill affect Wikipedia, if I go through with plans to
set up a French nonprofit?

http://www.computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/UNID/C1F6A082562EB682CC256E160006A48E?OpenDocument

The portion that concerns me is that "Internet access providers" (but
what is the definition of that in the bill?) will be obligated to
filter "illegal content", which has a much wider scope in France than
in the US, including "material excusing crimes against humanity".

Currently, if the French government were to find material on Wikipedia
not to their liking, they would have little recourse against either
me, the Wikimedia Foundation, or the French end users who wrote the
material.  I am in the U.S., the Wikimedia Foundation is in the U.S.,
and therefore I can freely ignore the judgments of French courts.

French end users are protected by this arrangement as well -- in order
for the French government to pursue an end user, they will need to
pierce the veil of anonymity given by Wikipedia usernames.  Of course,
I would completely ignore any court order from France to hand over
such information.

On the other hand, if we had a French mirror operating under the
auspices of a French nonprofit subsidiary, that subsidiary could be
legally liable in such matters, thus putting us all at risk.

Perhaps this is all merely of academic concern -- Wikipedia is
self-consciously uncontroversial to a large extent.  We don't advocate
anything, by design.  Likely the law would not be abused to the extent
that Wikipedia would become a target.  But I do know that French users
have often expressed concern that this article or that might be a
violation of French law.  I don't have an opinion about the realism of
such concerns.

And so that's why I ask.  As we move towards a European organization
and European subsidiary, what concerns should we have as to the proper
location of the organization?

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] Problem with en?

body:
This guy is having trouble connecting.  Although I can use the
website fine with a number of browsers, I am able to replicate
this exact sequence using telnet.  What's the issue here?

This fellow apparently can't see the website.

=============================================================================
phil at altair:/home/phil 96> telnet en.wikipedia.org 80
Trying 130.94.122.199...
Connected to en.wikipedia.org.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: en.wikipedia.org

HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2004 21:03:19 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.28 (Unix) mod_throttle/3.1.2 PHP/4.3.2
Connection: close
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

10f
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">

<TITLE>403 Forbidden</TITLE>

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /
on this server.

<ADDRESS>Apache/1.3.28 Server at en.wikipedia.org Port 80</ADDRESS>

0

Connection closed by foreign host.
phil at altair:/home/phil 97>
=============================================================================

On Tue, Jan 13, 2004 at 09:13:50AM -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:

| wow that must have been a very temporary thing, let me know if you see
| it again.
|
| Phil Howard wrote:
|
| > On Tue, Jan 13, 2004 at 04:26:55AM -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:
| >
| > | Phil Howard wrote:
| > | > Who do I contact when webmaster at wikipedia.org does not work?
| > |
| > | Me.  Hi, what's up?
| >
| > webmaster at wikipedia.org did not work, which is what I first tried when I
| > could not access the web site.
| >
| > I get a 403 permission denied.  Here is a screenshot:
| >     http://phil.ipal.org/wikipedia.png
| >
| > Here's the bounce from the original message I sent:
| >
| > =============================================================================
| > [-- Attachment #1: Notification --]
| > [-- Type: text/plain, Encoding: 7bit, Size: 0.5K --]
| >
| > This is the Postfix program at host vega.ipal.net.
| >
| > I'm sorry to have to inform you that the message returned
| > below could not be delivered to one or more destinations.
| >
| > For further assistance, please send mail to <postmaster>
| >
| > If you do so, please include this problem report. You can
| > delete your own text from the message returned below.
| >
| >                         The Postfix program
| >
| > <webmaster at wikipedia.org>: host mail.wikipedia.org[130.94.122.197] said: 550
| >     <webmaster at wikipedia.org>: User unknown in local recipient table (in reply
| >     to RCPT TO command)
| >
| > [-- Attachment #2: Delivery error report --]
| > [-- Type: message/delivery-status, Encoding: 7bit, Size: 0.3K --]
| >
| > Reporting-MTA: dns; vega.ipal.net
| > Arrival-Date: Mon, 12 Jan 2004 23:31:44 -0600 (CST)
| >
| > Final-Recipient: rfc822; webmaster at wikipedia.org
| > Action: failed
| > Status: 5.0.0
| > Diagnostic-Code: X-Postfix; host mail.wikipedia.org[130.94.122.197] said: 550
| >     <webmaster at wikipedia.org>: User unknown in local recipient table (in reply
| >     to RCPT TO command)
| >
| > [-- Attachment #3: Undelivered Message --]
| > [-- Type: message/rfc822, Encoding: 7bit, Size: 0.8K --]
| >
| > Date: Mon, 12 Jan 2004 23:31:44 -0600
| > From: Phil Howard <phil at ipal.net>
| > To: webmaster at wikipedia.org
| > Subject: still not working
| > User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.1i
| >
| > Here's the screenshot:  http://phil.ipal.org/wikipedia.png
| >
| > --
| > -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
| > | Phil Howard KA9WGN       | http://linuxhomepage.com/      http://ham.org/ |
| > | (first name) at ipal.net | http://phil.ipal.org/   http://ka9wgn.ham.org/ |
| > -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
| > =============================================================================
| >
| > --
| > -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
| > | Phil Howard KA9WGN       | http://linuxhomepage.com/      http://ham.org/ |
| > | (first name) at ipal.net | http://phil.ipal.org/   http://ka9wgn.ham.org/ |
| > -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
| >

--
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Phil Howard KA9WGN       | http://linuxhomepage.com/      http://ham.org/ |
| (first name) at ipal.net | http://phil.ipal.org/   http://ka9wgn.ham.org/ |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

----- End forwarded message -----


from_name: Nikos-Optim

subject: [Wikipedia-l] French net censorship law

body:
You can consider a Scandinavian country such as
Sweden.

--Optim

--- Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> wrote:
> How might this bill affect Wikipedia, if I go
> through with plans to
> set up a French nonprofit?
>
>
http://www.computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/UNID/C1F6A082562EB682CC256E160006A48E?OpenDocument
>
> The portion that concerns me is that "Internet
> access providers" (but
> what is the definition of that in the bill?) will be
> obligated to
> filter "illegal content", which has a much wider
> scope in France than
> in the US, including "material excusing crimes
> against humanity".
>
> Currently, if the French government were to find
> material on Wikipedia
> not to their liking, they would have little recourse
> against either
> me, the Wikimedia Foundation, or the French end
> users who wrote the
> material.  I am in the U.S., the Wikimedia
> Foundation is in the U.S.,
> and therefore I can freely ignore the judgments of
> French courts.
>
> French end users are protected by this arrangement
> as well -- in order
> for the French government to pursue an end user,
> they will need to
> pierce the veil of anonymity given by Wikipedia
> usernames.  Of course,
> I would completely ignore any court order from
> France to hand over
> such information.
>
> On the other hand, if we had a French mirror
> operating under the
> auspices of a French nonprofit subsidiary, that
> subsidiary could be
> legally liable in such matters, thus putting us all
> at risk.
>
> Perhaps this is all merely of academic concern --
> Wikipedia is
> self-consciously uncontroversial to a large extent.
> We don't advocate
> anything, by design.  Likely the law would not be
> abused to the extent
> that Wikipedia would become a target.  But I do know
> that French users
> have often expressed concern that this article or
> that might be a
> violation of French law.  I don't have an opinion
> about the realism of
> such concerns.
>
> And so that's why I ask.  As we move towards a
> European organization
> and European subsidiary, what concerns should we
> have as to the proper
> location of the organization?
>
> --Jimbo
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Donor management

body:
I'm looking for donor management systems software, preferably
GNU-free, although more important to me right now is doing a good job.
I am writing a tiny little internal website on my home machine using
PhP and MySQL to keep track of this information, but that's a pretty
feature-poor solution.

I want to be able to send receipts and thank you notes to donors, and
I want to be able to generate summary reports for the accountant, etc.

At some point I can envision (though I have no concrete plans at the
moment for this) a quarterly magazine or report containing news about
Wikipedia, a few well-chosen articles, etc.  This would be made
available free on the web in pdf format or similar, and then donors
above some threshold could opt to receive a paper copy if they want.

All of this requires that I be conscientious about properly managing
information about donors.

Does anyone have direct experience in this area, with specific advice
for me as to what packages exist and what features I should be looking
for?

An example of proprietary software:
http://www.donorquest.com/
http://www.donorquest.com/pricing.html

This one is completely unacceptable because (a) it is outlandishly
expensive, and (b) it only runs under Windows, and I don't even have a
windows computer running anymore.

My thinking is that in the long run, an open source solution will make
more sense, and not just from an ideological perspective, because we
can easily customize it to interface properly with our website
memberships.

-----

Imagine this scenario -- I get a $10,000 donation from someone, out of
the blue.  I want to telephone them to give a personal thanks.  I
would of course research them first, tracing their email to a user
account and looking at their edit history, to know their interests and
work on the website, if any.  That's only basic courtesy.

With proper software that integrated everything, I could do all of
that with a couple of clicks from an internal donor management system,
so that I could afford the time to give personal thanks to much
smaller donors.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] re: new system ideas

body:
Graham Cox wrote:
> Just to throw my 2 cents-worth into the debate - any particular reason
> for running on Intel? An Xserve dual G5 gives better price/performance
> and is (possibly) much easier to administer. It's probably also likely
> to be more reliable. I'm not an Apple apologist, but I think these
> machines should be at least given fair consideration. If not, why not?

First, we are committed for internal ideological/political reasons to
run Wikipedia on all free software.  Perhaps if it could be shown that
every element of Xserve that's actually in use by Wikipedia is open
source (of course the OS X kernel is, and apache/php/etc would be, but
I really don't know what else), this objection could be met.

Second, it seems very unlikely to me (though I could of course be
proven wrong) that the Xserve dual G5 really gives better
price/performance.  Someone else suggested this to me the other day,
so I went to Apple's website to price out what I take to be equivalent
hardware -- the price is *significantly* higher (10-30%) than
commodity Intel/AMD boxes running Linux.  It is of course difficult to
assess total performance, of course, without a specific head-to-head
configuration.  However, there was no obvious advantage to Apple to be
sure.

----

There's a great irony in the world these days.  If we placed
organizations/operating systems on a spectrum from closed/proprietary
to open/free, we'd have the free Unix-like systems all the way over to
the right, and Microsoft over to the left, and (traditionally) Apple
all the way over to the very very extreme left.

I would argue, and without much originality, that Apple's propensity
to try to establish monopolostic situations has been their constant
downfall.  Apple would rather squeeze money out of people by locking
them into specific choices than to grow their market with open
standards.  This has nearly killed them several times.

And they are operating true to form with the iPod/iTunes pairing.
They seem to think that by refusing to interoperate cleanly with other
alternatives, they will push for dominance.  I.E., people will choose
iTunes as their music store because iPod is go great, and they will
choose iPod as their music device because the iTunes music store is go
great, and the two interoperate together most cleanly.

But mark my words -- this will kill them, and in 10 years, Apple will
have a tiny share of the legal downloads market.

--------

None of that is relevant to your question, of course.  I'm just saying
that there are good reasons for free software advocates to avoid Apple
products.

(Let me be the first to accuse myself of hypocrisy, as I'm sitting
here typing this on my very beloved G5 running OS X 10.3 Panther.  It
is a stunning work of art, and the best desktop Unix system in
history.)

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] Problem with en?

body:
Ah, very good.  I will let him know.

Jens Frank wrote:

> On Wed, Jan 14, 2004 at 05:31:51AM -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> > This guy is having trouble connecting.  Although I can use the
> > website fine with a number of browsers, I am able to replicate
> > this exact sequence using telnet.  What's the issue here?
> >
> > This fellow apparently can't see the website.
> >
> > =============================================================================
> > phil at altair:/home/phil 96> telnet en.wikipedia.org 80
> > Trying 130.94.122.199...
> > Connected to en.wikipedia.org.
> > Escape character is '^]'.
> > GET / HTTP/1.1
> > Host: en.wikipedia.org
> >
> > HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden
>
> The request doesn't specify a user-agent. Those are blocked
> since they originate from badly written spiders most of the
> time.
>
> Best regards,
>
> 	JeLuF
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


from_name: Karl Eichwalder

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: .eu domains perhaps?

body:
Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> writes:

> Whatever we do with those domains, I think that it is important for us
> to control them (at the very least they would make for great portals).

No, don't play this game.  wikipedia.org is perfectly okay, no need to
waste money for additional domains.  Just do nothing and people will
learn to take care on their own.

--
                                                         |      ,__o
                                                         |    _-\_<,
http://www.gnu.franken.de/ke/                            |   (*)/'(*)


body:
Daniel-
> Since when have we started voting on a specific proposal without discussing
> that specific proposal first?

Countless times. In fact most policy pages were created that way -- the
policy page is written, then the talk page contains a listing of
supporters, opponents and arguments. People switch from supporter to
opponent as they read the arguments. There have been plenty of "this or
that article" votes (e.g. Adam Carr's Mother Teresa rewrite), and the
selection of options for a poll in itself constitutes a proposal; many
polls were set up with no discussion of the options whatsoever.

There's no reason to be too paranoid about votes or, more accurately,
polls, as you can change your opinion at any given time. There's good
reason to delay the voting process for deletion in particular as it is
such a drastic action that is not easily reverted. But in this case I find
your reaction disturbingly dramatic and not rooted in precedent.

However, this discussion reminds me that we need a more clearly defined
general decision making process. Sadly, Jimbo seems to think that no such
thing is necessary.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Alex R.

subject: [WikiEN-l] Shades of Rashomon

body:
> Two knowledgable people with opposing biases can generally
> write a good article even if the road is rocky.  No number of
> ignoramuses can write a good article regardless of their biases.

What about the typing monkey paradox?

Alex756


from_name: A

from_email: A

subject: [WikiEN-l] Stop slandering me.

body:
Stop slandering me.

__________________________________
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from_name: Rick

subject: [WikiEN-l] Adam [name omitted for privacy reasons] (a.k.a. Lir)

body:
Ed, you might want to check [[Conflicts between users]].

RickK

"Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:
Viajero,

Your complaint about Lir is the /first/ I've heard in months. I was just
about to mention him as an example of someone who "once was lost but now
is found" (quoting 'Amazing Grace').

Please be more specific about the edits you object to, and let me see if
I can mediate -- before jumping 2 or 3 steps directly to making a ban
request.

Ed Poor, aka Uncle Ed
_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

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subject: [WikiEN-l] How much?

body:
As is well known, I'm somewhat conservative about what I think we
ought to show in Wikipedia.  The bounds of good taste are very
important.

Having said that, I think that the current article and diagram/photo
are not problematic.  This is very different from the 'clitoris'
picture (don't know the current status on that one), which looked
"like porn" to me -- in poor taste.

The diagrams and photo in this case are very "textbook" looking.

As to whether this sort of thing should go into a version of Wikipedia
intended for distribution to schools is perhaps a different matter,
and one that we will have to address specifically at some point in the
future.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] How much?

body:
Peter Jaros wrote:
> It seems like a diagram, rather than a picture, would be much more
> informative, which is obviously the point.  And if we offend fewer
> people, so much the better.

I think Peter points the way towards a principle that can resolve
most, though perhaps not all, of the dilemmas we will face in this
area.

The goal of our articles is to be informative, not offensive.  It
turns out that in most cases (penis, for example) the ways of
presenting the content that are offensive are also lacking in terms of
informativeness.  A photo "in the style of" pornography takes away
from our mission of informativeness, while a photo "in the style of" a
medical text comports with that mission.

Consider how NPOV can help us to resolve this.  Person A says "I think
that including this photo is offensive".  Person B says "I think that
omitting it is censorship, and offensive".

This is not an irreconcilable conflict *in the majority of cases*.  A
little creative thought may often turn up a way for both parties to be
satisfied.  Of course, if either side is just hell-bent on refusing to
co-operate, not much can be done.  But usually, a little WikiLove can
go a long way...


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [Wikipedia-l] French net censorship law

body:
This is the correct approach. We pretty much stomp all over folks who even
try to put stuff like this in Wikipedia articles. We are probably in
conformity with French law now and if not (perhaps missed something) could
and should be.

Fred

> From: "Ruimu" <ruimu at uestc.edu.cn>
> Reply-To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2004 23:05:49 +0800
> To: <wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] French net censorship law
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Jimmy Wales" <jwales at bomis.com>
> To: <wikipedia-l at wikimedia.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2004 9:27 PM
> Subject: [Wikipedia-l] French net censorship law
>
>
>> How might this bill affect Wikipedia, if I go through with plans to
>> set up a French nonprofit?
>
> Not much, I guess, except if Wikipedia becomes a den of negationists
> (revisionist seems to be the only translation but I don't like it as any
> historian is "revising" History), suicide apologists, or paedophiles.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikimedia PayPal donations for 2003 page updated/fixed

body:
While adding running balances to the summaries I discovered that the numbers
didn't add up. After some trial and error I fixed the errors. The biggest
problem was that many of the e-check PayPal transactions were erroneously
marked as "cleared" when they should have been marked as "uncleared" - this
mislabeling is frustrating but I know how to spot this in the future.

I am now very confident in the accuracy of these data.

http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_PayPal_donations_for_2003

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [WikiEN-l] linked to page

body:
I'm very glad that at least SOME of our articles are stable and
comprehensive enough to be cited as footnotes to an academic paper.
Someday, when we've all learned NPOV a lot better, even our Middle East
political articles will be similarly cited.

Ed Poor <-- ever hopeful


from_name: Nikola Smolenski

subject: [WikiEN-l] Reading Software

body:
On Tuesday 13 January 2004 13:27, Nikos-Optim wrote:
> > There even is no need for any special hidden
> > punctuation: it should not be a
> > problem for the software to automatically add a ; at
> > the end of every heading
> > and list item.
>
> you mean Wikipedia's software (for the "Speakable
> Version" link), right?

Yes.


from_name: Thomas R. Koll

body:
On Wed, Jan 14, 2004 at 12:43:36AM -0300, Pablo De N?poli wrote:
> After that, looking at the history of the page, I find that some
> rather old previous versions where much better, but they had been
> deleted since a user consider them "too advanced". Needless to say,
> Lebesgue integration is indeed an advanced topic in mathematics, so
> that any article on this subject is necesarilly advanced (or does
> not covered the topic).

Such a topic is an extreme example, but you always should try to write
an article clear and easy enough that one who has just started to work
into this topic will find great help in you article.

> It seems to me that the model of wikipedia is too much open, so that
> open that anyone can annonymously edit any page.

In my eyes wikipedia is NOT open enough, but the problem is mankind
has too much bad behaviours and we can't trust our own kind.

> Another idea that comes to my mind is that there could be some teams
> for especific topics, that manage the pages in some section (say
> mathematics, geogrpahy, economics or whatever). This does not mean
> that any user from outside the team could not submit
> modifications. But without a team of core developers or a project
> leader for each section how can you assure a minimum of quality of
> wikipedia?

There are WikiProjects, although they mostly have no leader, they
bring some order into the chaos.

>  (this is more or less the model in all free software
> projects, no project grants write access to cvs to everyone
> anonymously, say)

That's a different thing. It requires special abilites to write
software, abilities which only few people have.

ciao, tom
--
http://www.tomk32.de - just a geek trying to change the world
   -.- http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:TomK32 /|>
   http://tomk32.bookcrossing.com / \ http://tinyurl.com/u6de


from_name: Magnus Manske

body:
Pablo De N?poli wrote:

>I've contributed with some articles. I'm rather disapointed, though. For
>example, I've rewriten the article on Lebesgue integration in the English
>wikipedia, since I find that the article explained the tenichal difficulties
>of Riemman integral, but it does not define the notion of Lebesgue integral
>(perhaps I had to tell you that I'm a mathematician, I work at the mathematics
>department of Buenos Aires University, Argentina).
>
>After that, looking at the history of the page, I find that some rather old
>previous versions where much better, but they had been deleted since a
>user consider them "too advanced". Needless to say, Lebesgue integration is
>indeed an advanced topic in mathematics, so that any article on this subject
>is necesarilly advanced (or does not covered the topic).
>
>
I see your point there, but consider this: An encyclopedia should
explain what "Lebesgue integration" is and what it does, in a way that
an average reader can understand it. It would be no problem to add
mathematical details *after* such an introduction, but a degree in
mathematics should *not* be required to understand the introduction itself.

If you like to elaborate on mathematical topics in detail, wikibooks.org
might be a good place. I've written some biochemistry pages there myself.

>It seems to me that the model of  wikipedia is too much open, so that open
>that anyone can annonymously edit any page. That I think is to much.that at
>least one should have to register and log in in order to modify a page, one
>has to take a responsability for what is saying (specially for deleting some
>one else work). In the current model, we don't know who write what
>(even though, most civilizated wiikipedians do log in, but I think this should
>be mandatory)
>
>
Try http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Replies_to_common_objections

>Another idea that comes to my mind is that there could be some teams for
>especific topics, that  manage the pages in some section (say mathematics,
>geogrpahy,
>economics or whatever). This does not mean that any user from outside the team
>could not submit modifications. But without a team of core developers or
>a project leader for each section how can you assure a minimum of
>quality of wikipedia?
>(this is more or less the model in all free software projects, no project
>grants write access to cvs to everyone anonymously, say)
>
>
There are WikiProjects for starters, but if you want to recruit a "math
team", go ahead :-)
Also, we have (rather vague) plans for a "wikipedia 1.0", which will
contain only selected, proof-read article versions from wikipedia. This
will have to wait until the current server crisis is solved, though.

Magnus


subject: [WikiEN-l] Bannable actions (was: User:Annek)

body:
There is no such thing as a "bannable action" at Wikipedia. Rather,
there are actions which we as a community strongly wish to discourage.

It's not a matter of "he stole an apple from a street vendor, cut off
his hand". There is no hard and fast rule like that.

Each person is different. Some people will respond to reason, or
flattery, or humor. Others require what the Cunctator might term "hard"
measures like warnings, suspensions, or expulsion.

I don't want us to get into a mode where we say, "He did this, so he
should be banned." Rather, let us say, "He did this, let's find a way to
make him stop it."

I've already warned Annek, so if he keeps breaking the rules I guess
this will make him a good candidate for the Arbitration Committee's
first case. Or if that's not quick enough, someone can ask Jimbo to
examine his edit history.

Ed Poor, aka Uncle Ed


body:
Viajero,

Your complaint about Lir is the /first/ I've heard in months. I was just
about to mention him as an example of someone who "once was lost but now
is found" (quoting 'Amazing Grace').

Please be more specific about the edits you object to, and let me see if
I can mediate -- before jumping 2 or 3 steps directly to making a ban
request.

Ed Poor, aka Uncle Ed


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikipedia-l] German Wikipedia Inavailability/Hardware Status

body:
On Jan 14, 2004, at 09:25, Ulrich Fuchs wrote:
> We get more and more complaints from german Wikipedians about the
> inavailability of the german language Wikipedia. So, what's the status
> here
> right now? The hardware that went down at christmas time should be
> replaced
> by now?!?

It should have been, yeah.

The replacement motherboard apparently didn't solve everything though,
and it's been sent back again.

>  Or are we still running on that low-performing fail-over-system,
> and if so, why?

Yes.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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