subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: no: or nb: (again)

body:
I believe we're mostly in agreement.

Perhaps I was a bit hasty in making such a characterisation of Wolfram.

However, this was based entirely on my perception of the message he
left for Andr?, talking of things like "standard norwegian" and
advocating (as far as I could tell) the labelling of no: as Norsk on
interwiki links with no parenthetical.

In my mind this is uacceptable. All remaining traces of Nynorsk in no:
should be purged and moved to nn:, and Bokm?l should be officialised
as the standard used with the understanding that use of Riksm?l is
ALLOWED, although it is not the "official" medium.

As a side note, the Northern Sami Wikipedia (the oft-neglected 3rd
official language of Norway) is still floating in a state of
near-nonexistance, the few existing articles being substubs created by
a self-proclaimed non-fluent Swedish learner of the language. If I
were in Norway, I would personally contact interested (as in, opposite
of disinterested, not opposite of uninterested) parties. However,
since I am not in Norway, I would like to encourage Norwegian
Wikipedians to either contact the interested parties, or at least to
tell any Sami friends they might have (or friends-of-friends) about
se:.

Mark

On Thu, 03 Mar 2005 01:05:00 -0500, Olve Utne <utne at nvg.org> wrote:
> Dear Mark Williamson, Lars Alvik, Andre Engels and Wolfram (who is getting
> a BCC of this message),
>
> This is getting so old... <sigh> I agree with Lars Alvik that the no:/nb:
> Wikipedia is de facto Norsk (Bokm?l).  The user interface is about 100%
> percent Norsk Bokm?l, the vast majority of the articles are Norsk Bokm?l
> (with varying tendencies towards centrist Bokm?l or towards "Moderate
> Bokm?l"/ Riksm?l). Few, if any, new articles are written in Nynorsk. I
> don't know what the proportions of existing articles are, but I suspect
> that well under 5% of the articles are in Nynorsk now.
>
> nn: is being marketed as "Nynorsk Wikpedia". I am not sure what the
> consensus about name for the no:/nb: Wikipedia is. A couple days ago, I
> looked around for it, but could not find it. It doesn't really matter very
> much for this discussion what self-designation no:/nb: uses. Nynorsk
> Wikipedia has a seeming discrepancy of names between its marketed name
> (Nynorsk Wikipedia) and the interwiki link name (Norsk (Nynorsk)). It is
> extremely unlikely that having a similar discrepancy between marketed name
> and interwiki link name is going to have any adverse effect whatsoever on
> no:/nb:.
>
> Whether Nynorsk or Bokm?l or Riksm?l (or Samnorsk or H?gnorsk, at that) is
> the good or bad "guy", the oppressor or oppressed, or the "relevant" or
> "irrelevant" one in whatever connection, seems to be a factor of very
> little relevance.
>
> Interwiki link language names should first and foremost be precise and
> descriptive -- right...?
>
> At present there is one Wikipedia with a Bokm?l interface (for the record,
> the difference between "Moderate Bokm?l" and Riksm?l is, at most, a few
> dozen words with spelling differences of one or two letters) and almost
> exclusively Bokm?l(/Riksm?l) articles. This Wikipedia, which was
> established in 2001, is doing quite well -- right now, the article count
> shows 18,679 articles.
>
> There is also one Wikipedia with a Nynorsk interface (which includes a few
> articles in H?gnorsk). It was started in July 2004 and has 3430 articles
> right now -- it is, in other words, also doing quite well.
>
> Both these are predominantly written in an official form of Norwegian.
> Neither of the two is more Norwegian, and neither is less.
> Nynorsk corresponds most closely to the spoken language of the majority of
> Norwegian speakers, Bokm?l is written by the majority of Norwegian
> speakers. Both are recognised as official languages of Norway. Both have a
> large body of literature on a high quality level. As such, they are both
> important, relevant expressions of Norwegian and should be treated with the
> tolerance, fairness and respect they both deserve.
>
> The term "Standard Norwegian" (quoted by Andre Engels from a message from
> Wolfram to him) is a bit of a stretch: There is in fact (as already
> mentioned above) no single "Standard Norwegian", but *two*: Bokm?l
> (including subsets like Riksm?l, moderat bokm?l and radikalt bokm?l; and,
> to some extent, Samnorsk) and Nynorsk (including subsets like H?gnorsk,
> Midlandsnormal, Austlandsk, etc.)
>
> To Wolfram's defense (since he doesn't subscribe to this list and hence
> can't defend himself directly on the list), it should be said that he does
> participate on nn: -- in editing, in debates, as well as in uploading
> files, and his contributions are as welcome on nn: as I hope that mine, and
> others' who also write primarily on nn: these days, are on no:/nb:... :-)
>
> Lars Alvik (whose opinions and discussion manners I have learned to respect
> very much), wrote (03:10 03/03/2005 +0000):
> >Go for no:.
> >Riksm?l can be compared to bokm?l as american english and english.  Minor
> >differences. As for Aftenposten it's in theory riksm?l, but  generally the
> >articles is written in moderate bokm?l.
> >
> >As for me i would welcome a formalization of no: to just bokm?l
> >(and  riksm?l), but with bokm?l as the dominant one, ie, all the
> >categories  in bokm?l. (example S?r-Afrika instead of Syd-Afrika).
>
> I agree almost 100% wholly with what Lars says here.
> It would by all likelihood be a major benefit for the no: Wikipedia to
> formalise its language as Bokm?l, with the very closely-related Riksm?l
> being accepted as part of this.
>
> One significant part of the reason why Nynorsk Wikipedia was established
> was that we wanted to be able to work in an environment tuned-in on Nynorsk
> as a written language. This is also very much what we have found to happen:
> Besides the basic fact-checking and debating of points of view, we have a
> strong emphasis on orthography, syntax, semantics and style.
>
> I suspect that a change of politics on no: towards really focussing on
> Bokm?l (in its variety) could have a similar effect, and it would very
> likely be a very good way of strengthening the Bokm?l (widely defined)
> writing culture.
>
> But whether the no:/nb: Wikipedia wishes to keep a few articles in Nynorsk
> or not, or what the no:/nb: Wikpedia is called is not really the main issue
> here, I think.
>
> What the issue seems to be is more about what should show up in interwiki
> links.
>
> I believe that the most precise and descriptive LANGUAGE DESCRIPTION in
> INTERWIKI links is "Norsk (bokm?l)"
> -- not "Norsk" (because it is only one of two subsets that are officially
> recognised as "Standard Norwegian"), and
> -- and not "Bokm?l", because this will be likely to cause confusion when
> users don't find the language under "N".
>
> Whether this comes up by coding "nb:" or "no:" is not really important. It
> is the result that counts, right?
>
> PLEASE NOTE that the question is NOT whether to call no:/nb: "Bokm?l" or
> "Norsk".
> The question is whether interwiki links on the bottom left of the screen
> should  display "Norsk (bokm?l)" or just "Norsk".
>
> It was suggested here earlier that no: be made a general "Norwegian"
> portal, and that nb: would be the primary code for the mainly Bokm?l
> Wikipedia. That seems to be politically impossible in the current environment.
>
> Maybe the most logical step in the current situation would be to change the
> display of the "no:" code so that it displays "Norsk (bokm?l)" in interwiki
> links? That way, the interwiki links will be descriptive/factual: Norsk
> (bokm?l) vs. Norsk (nynorsk), rather than prescriptive: Norsk vs. Norsk
> (nynorsk).
>
> I will support such a modification wholeheartedly. If this happens, I am
> pretty sure that the Nynorsk wikipedia community will be as willing as
> anyone else to use the code no: exclusively if it displays a descriptive
> name of what no: de facto is.
>
> Meanwhile, the use of a currently secondary interwiki code (nb:) is the
> only way to ensure logical interwiki links from Norsk (nynorsk) to Norsk
> (bokm?l), and no matter how Wolfram feels about that, his argument that
> no:/nb: should decide their own name has as a consequence that nn:
> should  decide how to build interwiki links on their own project.
>
> Since this question involves many other parties too, I personally find this
> question ("Norsk" vs "Norsk (bokm?l)") to be one that should be discussed
> and resolved in an open, democratic, respectful and transparent way here on
> wikipedia-l -- a forum which is there precisely to work on solving these
> kinds of issues... That means that we should stay factual and try very hard
> not to avoid loaded characterisations like "Nynorsk hater"/"Bokm?l
> hater"/"language fanatic" and the like, or imprecise expressions like
> "Standard Norwegian" when Bokm?l(/Riksm?l) (only one out of two standard
> forms of Norwegian) is implied.
>
> (When it comes to acceptance/non-acceptance of specific language varieties,
> that is a totally different issue that would be at least as logical to
> resolve locally to the extent possible.)
>
> I wish that Wolfram, who plays a rather central r?le on no:/nb:, would
> participate here and join the open debate in the "Wikipedia spirit". The
> burden isn't really that big -- after all, one doesn't have to read every
> single message. But it is useful for all parties if central people are able
> to participate in debates about their "own" project when these discussions
> occur...
>
> Respectfully,
>
> Olve Utne
>
> ("User:Olve" -- bureaucrat of nn:, admin of no:/nb:, user on en:, sv:, da:,
> etc.)
>
>
> ___________________
>
> Olve Utne
> http://utne.nvg.org
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


list: wiktionary-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Yann Forget

subject: [Wiktionary-l] Language names data

body:
Hi,

Could you please complete this, it's very useful for the Wiktionary.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Capitalization

Still to be classified:
ca (Catalan)
cy (Welsh)
eu (Basque)
et (Estonian)
hu (Hungarian)
is (Icelandic)
lt (Latvian)
ms (Malay)
mdf (Moksha)
oc (Occitan)
ro (Romanian)
sr (Serbian)
tt (Tatar)
wa (Walloon)
and some more...

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Language_names_gender

Thanks,
Yann

--
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


list: wikien-l

from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] Chrome Pussycats, Twiddlers & Whackjobs

body:
Richard Holton wrote:
> On Wed, 2 Mar 2005 17:04:14 -0500, Poor, Edmund W <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:

>>Think of Wikipedia as a massive garage where you can build any car you
>>want to. Great tools are provided, a lot of shop manuals are there, and
>>you get your own lift and away you go. Fantastic. But every one else,
>>and I mean everyone else in the garage can work on your car with you.
>>There's no "lead mechanics", no "shop floor managers", no anything. In
>>fact, the people who are allowed to work on your car can completely
>>disregard what you were doing with it. They could have flown in from
>>Boola-Boola Island 2 hours ago, not know the language, can't read the
>>manuals, and just go in and paint your car pink. And drive it. And leave
>>it somewhere. Now, since tools are free and paint is free and you can
>>easily go and retrieve your nice car and get it back to something
>>resembling sanity, a lot of the people in the garage see there's no
>>problems. But in fact, the fifth, or the hundredth time you're traipsing
>>down the lane to find your messed-up, polka-dotted,
>>covered-in-chrome-pussycats car, you're kind of inclined to drive it
>>into the lake and leave it upside down, wheels spinning.

> Except...it's not your car!

That would be the key point, yes. That's what "no article ownership" means.

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: ArbCom - too attached to 'equal treatment'?

body:
zero 0000 wrote:

> If the witnesses in a criminal trial are found to have
> committed crimes themselves, they are sceduled
> for their own trials.  They are not given sentences
> by the original court.  The same principle should
> hold here.

The analogy fails because this is not an Internet Democracy
but an encyclopedia-writing project.

Even if that is not the case, it fails because ArbCom cases
are more analogous to civil trials, not criminal ones. We
have a pile of janitors with mops, buckets and M-16s for the
equivalent of criminal ones.

- d.


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Olve Utne

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: no: or nb: (again)

body:
Dear Mark Williamson, Lars Alvik, Andre Engels and Wolfram (who is getting
a BCC of this message),

This is getting so old... <sigh> I agree with Lars Alvik that the no:/nb:
Wikipedia is de facto Norsk (Bokm?l).  The user interface is about 100%
percent Norsk Bokm?l, the vast majority of the articles are Norsk Bokm?l
(with varying tendencies towards centrist Bokm?l or towards "Moderate
Bokm?l"/ Riksm?l). Few, if any, new articles are written in Nynorsk. I
don't know what the proportions of existing articles are, but I suspect
that well under 5% of the articles are in Nynorsk now.

nn: is being marketed as "Nynorsk Wikpedia". I am not sure what the
consensus about name for the no:/nb: Wikipedia is. A couple days ago, I
looked around for it, but could not find it. It doesn't really matter very
much for this discussion what self-designation no:/nb: uses. Nynorsk
Wikipedia has a seeming discrepancy of names between its marketed name
(Nynorsk Wikipedia) and the interwiki link name (Norsk (Nynorsk)). It is
extremely unlikely that having a similar discrepancy between marketed name
and interwiki link name is going to have any adverse effect whatsoever on
no:/nb:.

Whether Nynorsk or Bokm?l or Riksm?l (or Samnorsk or H?gnorsk, at that) is
the good or bad "guy", the oppressor or oppressed, or the "relevant" or
"irrelevant" one in whatever connection, seems to be a factor of very
little relevance.

Interwiki link language names should first and foremost be precise and
descriptive -- right...?

At present there is one Wikipedia with a Bokm?l interface (for the record,
the difference between "Moderate Bokm?l" and Riksm?l is, at most, a few
dozen words with spelling differences of one or two letters) and almost
exclusively Bokm?l(/Riksm?l) articles. This Wikipedia, which was
established in 2001, is doing quite well -- right now, the article count
shows 18,679 articles.

There is also one Wikipedia with a Nynorsk interface (which includes a few
articles in H?gnorsk). It was started in July 2004 and has 3430 articles
right now -- it is, in other words, also doing quite well.

Both these are predominantly written in an official form of Norwegian.
Neither of the two is more Norwegian, and neither is less.
Nynorsk corresponds most closely to the spoken language of the majority of
Norwegian speakers, Bokm?l is written by the majority of Norwegian
speakers. Both are recognised as official languages of Norway. Both have a
large body of literature on a high quality level. As such, they are both
important, relevant expressions of Norwegian and should be treated with the
tolerance, fairness and respect they both deserve.

The term "Standard Norwegian" (quoted by Andre Engels from a message from
Wolfram to him) is a bit of a stretch: There is in fact (as already
mentioned above) no single "Standard Norwegian", but *two*: Bokm?l
(including subsets like Riksm?l, moderat bokm?l and radikalt bokm?l; and,
to some extent, Samnorsk) and Nynorsk (including subsets like H?gnorsk,
Midlandsnormal, Austlandsk, etc.)

To Wolfram's defense (since he doesn't subscribe to this list and hence
can't defend himself directly on the list), it should be said that he does
participate on nn: -- in editing, in debates, as well as in uploading
files, and his contributions are as welcome on nn: as I hope that mine, and
others' who also write primarily on nn: these days, are on no:/nb:... :-)

Lars Alvik (whose opinions and discussion manners I have learned to respect
very much), wrote (03:10 03/03/2005 +0000):
>Go for no:.
>Riksm?l can be compared to bokm?l as american english and english.  Minor
>differences. As for Aftenposten it's in theory riksm?l, but  generally the
>articles is written in moderate bokm?l.
>
>As for me i would welcome a formalization of no: to just bokm?l
>(and  riksm?l), but with bokm?l as the dominant one, ie, all the
>categories  in bokm?l. (example S?r-Afrika instead of Syd-Afrika).

I agree almost 100% wholly with what Lars says here.
It would by all likelihood be a major benefit for the no: Wikipedia to
formalise its language as Bokm?l, with the very closely-related Riksm?l
being accepted as part of this.

One significant part of the reason why Nynorsk Wikipedia was established
was that we wanted to be able to work in an environment tuned-in on Nynorsk
as a written language. This is also very much what we have found to happen:
Besides the basic fact-checking and debating of points of view, we have a
strong emphasis on orthography, syntax, semantics and style.

I suspect that a change of politics on no: towards really focussing on
Bokm?l (in its variety) could have a similar effect, and it would very
likely be a very good way of strengthening the Bokm?l (widely defined)
writing culture.

But whether the no:/nb: Wikipedia wishes to keep a few articles in Nynorsk
or not, or what the no:/nb: Wikpedia is called is not really the main issue
here, I think.

What the issue seems to be is more about what should show up in interwiki
links.

I believe that the most precise and descriptive LANGUAGE DESCRIPTION in
INTERWIKI links is "Norsk (bokm?l)"
-- not "Norsk" (because it is only one of two subsets that are officially
recognised as "Standard Norwegian"), and
-- and not "Bokm?l", because this will be likely to cause confusion when
users don't find the language under "N".

Whether this comes up by coding "nb:" or "no:" is not really important. It
is the result that counts, right?

PLEASE NOTE that the question is NOT whether to call no:/nb: "Bokm?l" or
"Norsk".
The question is whether interwiki links on the bottom left of the screen
should  display "Norsk (bokm?l)" or just "Norsk".

It was suggested here earlier that no: be made a general "Norwegian"
portal, and that nb: would be the primary code for the mainly Bokm?l
Wikipedia. That seems to be politically impossible in the current environment.

Maybe the most logical step in the current situation would be to change the
display of the "no:" code so that it displays "Norsk (bokm?l)" in interwiki
links? That way, the interwiki links will be descriptive/factual: Norsk
(bokm?l) vs. Norsk (nynorsk), rather than prescriptive: Norsk vs. Norsk
(nynorsk).

I will support such a modification wholeheartedly. If this happens, I am
pretty sure that the Nynorsk wikipedia community will be as willing as
anyone else to use the code no: exclusively if it displays a descriptive
name of what no: de facto is.

Meanwhile, the use of a currently secondary interwiki code (nb:) is the
only way to ensure logical interwiki links from Norsk (nynorsk) to Norsk
(bokm?l), and no matter how Wolfram feels about that, his argument that
no:/nb: should decide their own name has as a consequence that nn:
should  decide how to build interwiki links on their own project.

Since this question involves many other parties too, I personally find this
question ("Norsk" vs "Norsk (bokm?l)") to be one that should be discussed
and resolved in an open, democratic, respectful and transparent way here on
wikipedia-l -- a forum which is there precisely to work on solving these
kinds of issues... That means that we should stay factual and try very hard
not to avoid loaded characterisations like "Nynorsk hater"/"Bokm?l
hater"/"language fanatic" and the like, or imprecise expressions like
"Standard Norwegian" when Bokm?l(/Riksm?l) (only one out of two standard
forms of Norwegian) is implied.

(When it comes to acceptance/non-acceptance of specific language varieties,
that is a totally different issue that would be at least as logical to
resolve locally to the extent possible.)

I wish that Wolfram, who plays a rather central r?le on no:/nb:, would
participate here and join the open debate in the "Wikipedia spirit". The
burden isn't really that big -- after all, one doesn't have to read every
single message. But it is useful for all parties if central people are able
to participate in debates about their "own" project when these discussions
occur...

Respectfully,

Olve Utne

("User:Olve" -- bureaucrat of nn:, admin of no:/nb:, user on en:, sv:, da:,
etc.)

___________________

Olve Utne
http://utne.nvg.org


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: no: or nb: (again)

body:
Ooops :)

I wrote:
>That means that we should stay factual and try very hard not to avoid
>loaded characterisations...

That was of course meant to read:
>That means that we should stay factual and try very hard to avoid loaded
>characterisations...

(The curse of incomplete editing strikes again... ;-] )

-Olve

___________________

Olve Utne
http://utne.nvg.org


from_name: BJörn Lindqvist

subject: [WikiEN-l] Exeunt 172

body:
On Wed, 02 Mar 2005 12:09:50 -0500, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> Sounds like another POV-pushing PhD holder who's annoyed that everyone
> doesn't just say "oh, you are an 'expert', do with the articles as you
> wish".
>
> (And anyone who's read any history articles by 172 can attest to the
> fact that they were highly propagandistic, generally turning into
> outright apologies, if not screeds, for left-wing dictatorships.)

No they can't Delirium. I have read some of them ([[Josef Stalin]],
[[History of Russia]]) and I cannot attest to that "fact". Put your
money were your mouth is and show us these highly propagandistic,
apologetic, screeds or please STFU. I believe this is not the first
time you have slandered 172 on this mailing list and I don't approve
of it, especially not the part in which you pretend that your opinion
is the commonly accepted one.

--
mvh Bj?rn


from_name: Tony Sidaway

body:
zero 0000 said:
> I think the issue that Jay raised is a serious one.
>
> The scenario is that A brings an arbitration case
> against B, the committee looks at both sides of
> the dispute, then both A and B get penalties.
>
> This is a clear violation of A's right to due process.

Well it isn't a trial, and nobody said A or B had a right to any process!

But think of the arbitration committee as, perhaps, an examining
magistrate, not a judge.  They are investigator, prosecutor and judge all
rolled into one.
I think the mistake being made is to assume that there is supposed to be
some kind of adversarial system with a clear winner and a clear loser as
in the case of a criminal trial under the system of common law.  This
isn't the only way of getting at the truth and deciding how to remedy any
problems that exist, and for our purposes it certainly wouldn't be a very
efficient one.
It also must be borne in mind that we are all accountable, at all times,
for   all of our actions on Wikipedia.  We're not here to gossip, make a
living, entertain ourselves, argue or save the world.  Common principles
of justice and the individual have no place here.  This is a community,
one with a purpose, and the arbitration committee is here to ensure that
it functions smoothly.  Someone who is scared to take a complaint to the
arbitration committee because he may then be held accountable for his own
actions is, it seems to me, missing the point.


from_name: Lars Alvik

subject: [Wikipedia-l] no: or nb: (again)

body:
Hmpf, passing jurgement on people you don't really know? And labeling
everyone that use bokm?l as "nynorskhater". I'm really curious what i'm
being labeled as. Damn, this debate did really not have anything to do
with nynorsk vs. bokm?l, they are more or less happily coexisting with
the status quo. The current debate is about calling no: bokm?l or
norsk.

mvh.

Lars Alvik

P? 2. mar. 2005 kl. 22:39 skrev Mark Williamson:

> I like "standard norwegian" - you should ignore this guy as he is a
> typical norwegian high-school Nynorskhater.
>
> Mark
>
> On Wed, 2 Mar 2005 15:49:30 +0100, Andre Engels
> <andreengels at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I got the following message on my (Dutch) userpage:
>>
>> ===========================================================
>>
>> I don't subscribe to the mailing list, so I respond here:
>>
>> The Norwegian Wikipedia uses no: as its interwiki code. Until we have
>> decided to do otherwise, please respect our choice of domain and
>> interwiki name.
>>
>> Also, note that no: is not the "bokm?l Wikipedia", as bokm?l is only
>> one spelling standard of Standard Norwegian, which also includes
>> riksm?l (both bokm?l and riksm?l are major spelling standards, the
>> latter being used e.g. by the most significant Norwegian newspaper
>> (Aftenposten). Wolfram 2 mrt 2005 15:34 (CET)
>>
>> ============================================================
>>
>> So now I have
>> (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2005-February/
>> 037750.html)
>> someone saying it would be best to always use nb: and (above) someone
>> saying it would be best to always use no:. Then I have people at nn:
>> who really don't want it to be called no: at THEIR wiki. Could someone
>> please tell me who I am to listen to? By whom and where is the
>> decision made in a case like this?
>>
>> Andre Engels
>> _______________________________________________
>> Wikipedia-l mailing list
>> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Q1 2005 Fund Drive over

body:
On Tue, 1 Mar 2005 12:43:11 -0700, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think that, as long as you are careful to say "even available in
> minority languages" rather than "there are also versions in the other
> major languages of China" (which they really are - all of the
> languages I mentioned have over 1m speakers in China), and as long as
> you don't mention Tibetan by itself.
>

If I recall correctly the official definition of a "minority" anything
in China is ~4-6 million, calling 1 million of anything over there
might in their eyes be plain factually wrong.

> On a side note, I forgot to include Mongolian.
>
> Mark
>
> On Tue, 01 Mar 2005 13:00:14 -0500, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> > Mark Williamson wrote:
> >
> > >Some people may not think it is notable, but to give a local example
> > >drives home that Wikipedia is very diverse. If you are presenting in
> > >China, please don't forget to mention that we have places for people
> > >to build Wikipedias in Yi, Zhuang, Tibetan, Uyghur, and many other
> > >languages.
> > >
> > >
> > I don't disagree with this, but it's probably worth noting that
> > languages are intimately connected to culture, nationalism, and
> > politics, so when to mention what can sometimes be a sensitive issue.
> > In China, in particular, promoting of regional languages is often
> > connected to promoting regional political independence (i.e. secession
> > from China, or at least increased autonomy), so needs to be done
> > somewhat carefully so we don't become seen as a meddling US-based
> > political organization that's trying to break apart China or something
> > like that.
> >
> > -Mark
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: shi zhao

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Request for classical Chinese

body:
abc_root <abcd_root at ...> writes:

>
> Dear all:
>
> I would like to request a new Wikipedia for classical Chinese or kanbun(
> ??/???) which is the standard form of Chinese for about two thousand
> years and was used throughout East Asia as the formal form of writing. Its
> importance in East Asia is like that of Latin in Europe. Now that
> Wikipedias are running or being started for many of the languages in East
> Asia, it seems that the language which is the backbone of these languages
> should also have a place.
>
> One problem that might be encountered in writing articles for kanbun
> wikipedia is how the foreign loanwords (e.g. from English) should be
> phonetically transcribed when there is no corresponding word in kanbun
> itself. If they are transcribed using kanji (Chinese characters), there is
> the question of which language should be used to read the kanji. Here I
> suggest using an alphabet system of East Asia (e.g. Japanese kana or Korean
> hangul, or Taiwanese chu-yin) for the transcription and also note the
> original word in English (or any other language of origin or the roman
> transcription if the language is not written in roman alphabet). This
> allows kanbun users speaking different languages to know the original
> foreign word.
>
> __________________________________
> Let's Celebrate Together!
> Yahoo! JAPAN
> http://pr.mail.yahoo.co.jp/so2005/
>

Problem is use when of does the classical Chinese write? Ming and Qing? Is
Tang Sung period? Or does QIN2 HAN4 is period? Or to is more early? Each
period classical Chinese differ very greatly.The Manchu Dynasty and Han
dynasty rise of test twice according to the custom of the ancient works, be
for can let the then person comprehend the people of the past's  work of
classical Chinese.The ancients is still not apprehensibility more early the
classical Chinese of the ancients, so which period classical Chinese we use to
write worthwhile discussion.If use the MIng and Qing period classical  Chinese
writing, that is much more simple, plus some ????, delete ???.( this and
Chinese  version difference not big)If use first Qin's classical Chinese
write, having no several individuals perhaps can write.

[[zh:user:shizhao]]


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Q1 2005 Fund Drive was a phenomenal success

body:
--- Tomer Chachamu <the.r3m0t at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, 2 Mar 2005 17:41:45 -0800 (PST), Daniel Mayer
> <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > If I have time I'll conduct an analysis of the fund drive this weekend. I'm
> > particularly interested in what can be done to improve future fund drives.
>
> Please, could you find how much of the money came from donations of
> $100+ (or equivalent in other currencies), how much was from
> $75-$100...$10-20, $5-10, $0-5 ?

Good idea.

--mav

__________________________________
Celebrate Yahoo!'s 10th Birthday!
Yahoo! Netrospective: 100 Moments of the Web
http://birthday.yahoo.com/netrospective/


list: foundation-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Q1 2005 Fund Drive was a phenomenal success

body:
--- Neil Harris <usenet at tonal.clara.co.uk> wrote:
> That needed _improving_?

Off the top of my head; faster updates at least for PayPal data using some kind
of script (in development), launching more national chapters that have tax
exempt status (this seems to have greatly increased donations from Germany),
overall a more automated process (running this drive took me 6 to 8 hours per
day - which is not sustainable in our volunteer framework), development of
translatable interwiki templates that could be used to update
[[MediaWiki:Sitenotice]] on all wikis at once (doing this wiki by wiki is
*insane*), some improvements in the PayPal donation forms (such as a drop down
currency selection option instead of separate pages for each money type), and a
better way to keep the foundation wiki updated (having separate meta and
foundation wiki copies of the same pages is hard to deal with).

I'm sure there are other areas of improvement as well but so far I mostly see a
need for efficiency improvements and faster/better feedback to donors and the
community.

> Seriously, I can think of only one real
> improvement needed, which is the ability to give directly using credit
> cards, which I think would have further increased the rate and scope of
> donations -- but I believe you already have that task in hand.

Such a system is in development and almost certainly will be up for the next
fund drive.

> Congratulations on a job well done.

Thank you. :) Everybody who helped in this fund drive should proud.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com


list: wikimedia-l


from_name: actionforum at comcast.net

body:
-------------- Original message --------------
> This isn't the scenario here though---there are no cases against
> specific people, only disputes *between* multiple people. We require
> that earlier steps of the dispute-resolution process be followed first,
> such as mediation. If these are unsuccessful, the matter goes to
> arbitration. The arbitration is thus arbitration of the dispute between
> two people, and is charged with resolving it in some way.
>
> The proper analogy, as the name implies, is to arbitration hearings, not
> to court cases. It is standard practice in arbitration that sanctions
> may be levied against either or both of the parties to a hearing.

I think you are correct about the intent when the arbitration process
was set up.  But, de facto, because admins also err and abuse and the
arbitration committee is the only check on their power, it has had
to act on cases that are more violations than disputes.

               -- Silverback


from_name: Tomer Chachamu

body:
On Wed, 2 Mar 2005 17:41:45 -0800 (PST), Daniel Mayer
<maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> If I have time I'll conduct an analysis of the fund drive this weekend. I'm
> particularly interested in what can be done to improve future fund drives.

Please, could you find how much of the money came from donations of
$100+ (or equivalent in other currencies), how much was from
$75-$100...$10-20, $5-10, $0-5 ?


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Using <abbr>

body:
On Wed, 2 Mar 2005 23:34:56 +0100, Gerrit Holl <gerrit at nl.linux.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> a few HTML tags work in Wikipedia article, but <abbr> doesn't. Is there
> a Wikisyntax for abbr? If not, could <abbr> be enabled until there is?
>
> regards,
> Gerrit Holl.

There's no wikisyntax I can think of, but using abbr could make the
wikisource of some technical articles near-unreadable. (That is the
tag which provides a description on mouseover, right?) Perhaps we
could place in the Manual of Style only to use <abbr> for the first
instance of an abbreviation.


subject: [WikiEN-l] This is backwards (was Re: 172 de-sysopped)

body:
------------- Original message --------------
> actionforum at comcast.net wrote:
>
> > I'm not sure what your point is, if you mean admins=police,
> > apparently, they are running the judicial system too, and
> > they are loath to cost anyone their "jobs", read sysop privilege.
> > Do the admins here unite behind their own version of "The thin blue
line"?
>
>
> [[WP:AN/I]] and [[WP:AN/3RR]] give me a different picture. I see
> quite a bit of disagreement between admins (and of course anyone
> can write there).
Agreed, I overgeneralized.  I meant to refer to a general sense
among the admins that sysop privileges are not to be revoked
lightly.  Furthermore, when admins err, I have seen apologias
to the effect that they are just human and are so busy and
contributing so much that errors should be expected to occur
every so often. They are trying their best and should
be allowed an error every so often.
I can agree with this if one is referring to errors of
interpretation or of overlooking certain facts.  But it is
a different matter when in pique or anger, the admin makes
personal use of sysop powers. This shows a lack of the
proper discipline and temperament to be an admin, and not
simple error.
It is possible for such a person to learn discipline with
time, but they should not be allowed to learn it on
the job.  Such a person should be desysoped.
When they feel they are ready, they can reapply,
but if they reapply for adminship too soon they
are probably the still the wrong temperament.
Adminship is a burden and a public trust.  Admins are
to be servants not masters of the community.
Forgive me, I am a community activist who has worked
to reduce police abuse, so I am particularly sensitive
and yes, even outraged (as a matter of principle) at
those who have the hubris to think they have the perogative
to abuse the public trust.  I realize that matters
here are not quite so weighty.  But then "losing" an
adminship, is also not quite as serious as losing one's
job.
          -- Silverback


body:
--- Pedro Fayolle <pfayolle at gmail.com> wrote:
> I would particularly like to see some better directions for people no
> in the "main world". Even though I do my earnings in a rather
> devaluated currency I would have liked to make a donation this time. I
> admit I didn't put enough effort to figure it out on my own, but it is
> also a bit trickier for me here, esp. since I don't own a credit card.

Yes - making this easier is very important. MoneyBookers lets users transfer
funds in 30+ currencies but setting up a MoneyBookers account is harder than
PayPal. Jimbo is going to give me the MoneyBookers login info so I'll be better
able to figure out how to make donating using that service easy (or at least
easier).

-- mav

__________________________________
Celebrate Yahoo!'s 10th Birthday!
Yahoo! Netrospective: 100 Moments of the Web
http://birthday.yahoo.com/netrospective/


from_name: Skyring

subject: [WikiEN-l] ArbCom - too attached to 'equal treatment'?

body:
On Wed, 2 Mar 2005 17:40:55 -0000 (GMT), Tony Sidaway
<minorityreport at bluebottle.com> wrote:
> JAY JG said:
>
> > As the  person e-mailing me put it
> >
> > "It looks like the arbcom is going to put them both on POV parole,
> > which is  silly; they have this thing about equal treatment. It's like
> > if I report  someone to the police for a theft, the police first of all
> > have to  investigate whether I've committed theft too, because if they
> > charge one,  they have to charge both."
> >
> > Is this a valid concern?
> >
> I don't think so.  Arbitration is part of dispute resolution.  The
> arbitrators must examine the behavior of all parties to the dispute in
> order to arrive at factual findings and remedies that will stick.

Theft is an inappropriate metaphor in this case. If you were reporting
copyvio, it'd be OK, but in this instance, assault is closer to the
mark, where of course the cops investigate the behaviour of both.

Theft has a clear seperation between wronged and wrongdoer, but in a
brawl, it's sometimes hard to tell who is in the right, as any parent
will tell you.

--
Peter in Canberra


body:
------------- Original message --------------

> This isn't the scenario here though---there are no cases against
> specific people, only disputes *between* multiple people. We require
> that earlier steps of the dispute-resolution process be followed first,
> such as mediation. If these are unsuccessful, the matter goes to
> arbitration. The arbitration is thus arbitration of the dispute between
> two people, and is charged with resolving it in some way.
>
> The proper analogy, as the name implies, is to arbitration hearings, not
> to court cases. It is standard practice in arbitration that sanctions
> may be levied against either or both of the parties to a hearing.

I think I can speak for Neutrality.  His post on the request for arbitration page implies a case against a specific person at least as far as recusal goes:

   " I'd only recuse if you were the respondent rather than the petitioner."

                                   -- Silverback


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] How long can a title be? Database issue.

body:
Richard Holton wrote:
> I don't fully understand the use of a "broken" field. Does this
> eliminate the need for verifying page existence during rendering?
>
> Maintaining "broken" requires a potentially large update for each page
> creation, deletion, or move.

A 'broken' field is not necessary and probably not desireable due to the
cost of maintaining it. Currently we sometimes use links/brokenlinks to
prefill the link existence cache when rendering, but then we cache that
info back to another table (linkcache) anyway...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Magdalena Fikus

subject: [WikiEN-l] Junk DNA

body:
In the main text about "Junk DNA' "repressor" is quoted as a kind of junk DNA. Repressors are proteins coded by DNA. The position of the word, just after "enhancer", suggests that may be the author thought about "silencer", the sequence of DNA silencing expression of a given gene.
Magdalena Fikus
Institute of Biochemistry and Biophysics Polish Academy of Sciences.


from_name: Stan Shebs

subject: [WikiEN-l] Exeunt 172

body:
Arno M wrote:

>"He even contacted me directly, begging me to apologize, presumably so that
>he wouldn't lose face for backing off his ultimatum. (What person
>using a pseudonym worries about reputation? It was very weird.)"
>
>I will observe that 172 wasn't anonymous, unless the name that he used on
>wikien-l , Abe Sokolov, was an alias.
>
It is an alias; as his page confirms, "the name I was using in my
Wikipedia email account was not my own".

Stan


from_name: Richard Holton

body:
On Thu, 3 Mar 2005 13:47:27 +0000, Rowan Collins
<rowan.collins at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 2 Mar 2005 20:14:43 -0600, Richard Holton <richholton at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > If I understand things correctly, we
> > should look at eventually changing 'links' and 'broken links' to use:
> > from id->(to namespace, to title).
> >
> > Would there be a need for separate tables then?
>
> No, almost certainly not. In fact, it would be very helpful to create
> a unified table, because then we wouldn't need the proliferation of
> task-specific tables. See, for instance,
> http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1065
>

Thanks for the link to the bug entry. The discussion there helped me
to understand some things a bit better.

>
> > Categorylinks seems to be a bit of a special case, since it really
> > amounts to a reverse link.
>
> That's one way of thinking about it. The other, which is more in tune
> with less formalised wikis (e.g.
> http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiCategories), is that the category page is
> just a souped-up "What links here" display, and the links on
> individual pages just internal links displayed out-of-line. On this
> view, they're just another kind of link - distinguished only to solve
> the "Use-mention problem"
> (http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?UseMentionProblem)
>

Another way to think about things: a category link is like a two-way
link. It links both from the page to the category, and from the
category to the page. I definitely see the similarity between "what
links here" and categories. In that sense, each page becomes its own
category, with any link to the page a 'category entry'. Perhaps we
could use this relationship to improve the 'what links here' display.

> > At the moment, I'm thinking of adding a "fromNamespace" field to
> > categorylinks. This will decouple the display of pages from the
> > display of parent categories, and would facilitate breaking the
> > category display into namespaces.
>
> Hm, that certainly does match your "reverse link" interpretation. Of
> course, it suffers from a variant of the update problem that the
> current id->id based links table does: a page can be moved from one
> namespace to another, taking its category links with it. So, if
> [[Foo]] contains [[Category:Metasyntactic variables]], and I move it
> to [[Wikipedia:Foo]], the from_namespace field in the categorylinks
> table would become wrong, even though the actual page reference (by
> ID) would remain valid. I don't know whether that update would be more
> or less sensible/expensive/complex than having to do an extra
> lookup/join/whatever to get the namespace out of the page table when
> displaying the category.
>
Yes, that is the trade off. However, when a category page moves, it
only has to update its own categorylink entries -- one for each each
[[category:xxx]] on that page.  Note that currently, the cl_sortkey
field is updated on any page move for those links that don't have a
specified sort key.

If you add a category link ([[category:foo]] to a category page "bar",
then "bar" becomes a sub-category of Foo. The link from category:bar
to category:foo is entered into categorylinks just like any other.
Currently, to find subcategories for a category page, the links have
to be retrieved and separated by namespace in PHP. This is why the
subcategory and other pages on the category page are linked
alphabetically. A chunk of up to 200 links to the category are
retrieved, then separated. If you wanted to get the next 200
sub-categories, you would have to keep reading in category links until
you find 200 subcategories, or until you've read all the
categorylinks, whichever comes first. That is why having a namespace
field is important.

There are also requests for separating the category displays further
into namespaces (e.g. listing templates separately). This would have
the same issue as above.

> There's an additional problem with merging the categorylinks table in
> with the others anyway, in that it has extra fields cl_sortkey and
> cl_timestamp that the others don't have or need. That's a shame,
> because it would be neat, if redesigning the tables, not to have to
> leave that one out.
>
By the way, cl_timestamp is currently unused (I believe). It can be
handy for debugging, but otherwise I don't know it's intended purpose.

> Some rambling thoughts, though, on a possible links schema:
> * l_from (as page_id)
> * l_to_ns (as int)
> * l_to_title (as string)
>
> * l_is_broken (boolean)
> --- to allow everything that brokenlinks currently does; this should
> be kept seperate from the link type, because if you try to {{include}}
> a non-existent page, it's both "broken" and a "template" link, and
> both facts are potentially useful
>
I don't fully understand the use of a "broken" field. Does this
eliminate the need for verifying page existence during rendering?

Maintaining "broken" requires a potentially large update for each page
creation, deletion, or move.

> * l_type (probably an int, like namespace)
> --- values could include:
> --- LT_NORMAL: just an ordinary [[free link]] (or an escaped link to a
> [[:Image:Page]] or [[:Category:Page]])
> --- LT_IMAGE: it's an image display (l_to_ns would be redundant, but never mind)
> --- LT_TEMPLATE: it's a {{template inclusion}}
> --- LT_INTERWIKI: currently, interwiki links don't get stored
> anywhere, but it could be useful if they were; for instance, if
> someone changes the interwiki map, it might be worth looking up what
> links are affected. Obviously, l_to_ns would be meaningless, and any
> search for a specific prefix would involve matching the text, but
> might it be worth considering?
> --- LT_CATEGORY: as I say, this has rather awkward issues - where do
> the extra fields go? l_to_ns could be reused [abused] as the namespace
> of the *originating* page if keeping that up-to-date was considered
> better than looking it up in the page table
>

I want to think about your ideas on redirects, but I don't have time
at the moment. I'll try to get back to you later.

-Rich Holton
en.wikipedia:User:Rholton


from_name: James M. Ray

body:
>I would particularly like to see some better directions for people no
>in the "main world". Even though I do my earnings in a rather
>devaluated currency I would have liked to make a donation this time. I
>admit I didn't put enough effort to figure it out on my own, but it is
>also a bit trickier for me here, esp. since I don't own a credit card.
>
>Congratulations to all on the huge success!

I'm glad about the success as well, but I missed the part about why
they for some reason don't want to accept e-gold. Perhaps, if they
did, it would help you? Anyway, apparently as I just subscribed the
decision was already made a while ago...
JMR


subject: [WikiEN-l] Arbitrator recusals (was 172 de-sysopped)

body:
--- David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> Michael Snow wrote:
>
> > I think the idea of "pro tempore" arbitrators for these rare cases is
> > adequate to handle the problem. Wikipedia is big enough that nobody can
> > get their oar in on every dispute, a principle that applies to the
> > arbitrators as well and means that almost certainly at least a couple
> > sitting arbitrators will not need to recuse themselves. Also, it
> > wouldn't be necessary to reconstitute a full committee of twelve; I'd be
> > satisfied if emergency appointments brought the number of arbitrators
> > hearing the case back up to seven or so.
> > So at most Jimbo would need to come up with four or five people who have
> > good sense at how to handle these things. I don't think this would be
> > terribly difficult for him. We have several experienced former
> > arbitrators whom I at least would happily trust to deal with a case in
> > an emergency. And I could name a number of other people who might be
> > qualified, depending on the particular case that presents itself. This
> > would also be a helpful way to get in some practical observation of
> > people who may be candidates for election to the Arbitration Committee
> > in the future.
>
>
> Oooh, that's a good idea. I like that one.

Make is so!

-- mav

__________________________________
Celebrate Yahoo!'s 10th Birthday!
Yahoo! Netrospective: 100 Moments of the Web
http://birthday.yahoo.com/netrospective/


from_name: Zoney

body:
On Thu, 03 Mar 2005 00:59:27 +0000, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> Richard Holton wrote:
> > On Wed, 2 Mar 2005 17:04:14 -0500, Poor, Edmund W <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:
>
> >>Think of Wikipedia as a massive garage where you can build any car you
> >>want to. Great tools are provided, a lot of shop manuals are there, and
> >>you get your own lift and away you go. Fantastic. But every one else,
> >>and I mean everyone else in the garage can work on your car with you.
> >>There's no "lead mechanics", no "shop floor managers", no anything. In
> >>fact, the people who are allowed to work on your car can completely
> >>disregard what you were doing with it. They could have flown in from
> >>Boola-Boola Island 2 hours ago, not know the language, can't read the
> >>manuals, and just go in and paint your car pink. And drive it. And leave
> >>it somewhere. Now, since tools are free and paint is free and you can
> >>easily go and retrieve your nice car and get it back to something
> >>resembling sanity, a lot of the people in the garage see there's no
> >>problems. But in fact, the fifth, or the hundredth time you're traipsing
> >>down the lane to find your messed-up, polka-dotted,
> >>covered-in-chrome-pussycats car, you're kind of inclined to drive it
> >>into the lake and leave it upside down, wheels spinning.
>
> > Except...it's not your car!
>
> That would be the key point, yes. That's what "no article ownership" means.
>
>
> - d.

Well, if it's your original contribution, you are quite free to go put
it up somewhere else as well, with (c) MyName 2005. All the more so if
you put a modified version of your own work somewhere else (you and
only you can do this and not release it under GFDL, anyone else using
your work from Wikipedia must release the modified version as GFDL).

Of course, the version you've uploaded to Wikipedia is available there
under the GFDL, so there's little point to the above. But you retain
copyright to your own work (you've simply offered "right to copy" and
"right to modify" to everyone else also under the GFDL). Incidentally,
the (c) MyName 2005 isn't even necessary. Copyright is automatic.
Notices simply serve to remind people who has copyright.

So it's more complicated. It's like it's your custom-designed car, but
you specifically have allowed anyone to use it, make an exact or
modified replica (providing they also allow the same for their
version), paint it pink, drive it whereever, etc. But you reserve the
right to roll out a new or duplicate version of your car, anywhere
else in the world, and not make those allowances.

I've probably lost a few people. Analogies can only be taken so far!

Zoney

--
~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...


from_name: Ashar Voultoiz

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Nofollow

body:
Matthew A Trump wrote:
> What's the status of the rel="nofollow" attribute following the
> community vote?

What is the community vote result ? :o)

--
Ashar Voultoiz - WP++++
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Hashar
http://www.livejournal.com/community/wikitech/
Servers in trouble ? noc (at) wikimedia (dot) org


from_name: Marco Krohn

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: multilingualism (was Q1 drive)

body:
On Wednesday 02 March 2005 23:57, David Gerard wrote:
> Marco Krohn wrote:

> > Also I doubt that the test was a blind test, at least the two tests
> > I am aware of were to my knowledge not blind tests, but I can
> > be wrong about this. Which test do you refer to?
>
> I was originally referring to the c't test (I think it was). I thought it
> was a blind test: here are three articles, which is best?

I just looked it up again (c't 21/04) and there is nothing about a blind test.
It would not be particular hard to make it a blind test, but at least they do
not mention it explicitly.

BTW the average results (scale from 0 - 5, 5 being "excellent") were:

Wikipedia - 3.6
Brockhaus - 3.3
MS EncartaPro - 3.1

best regards,
  Marco


from_name: Neil Harris

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>All the final updates are in and all told we brought-in the equivelant of
>$94,648.70 in this fund drive (26% more than we asked for). 21% of the total
>(15,254.66 Euros | US$20,046.15) was from Wikimedia Deutschland.
>
>If I have time I'll conduct an analysis of the fund drive this weekend. I'm
>particularly interested in what can be done to improve future fund drives.
>
>
That needed _improving_? Seriously, I can think of only one real
improvement needed, which is the ability to give directly using credit
cards, which I think would have further increased the rate and scope of
donations -- but I believe you already have that task in hand.

Congratulations on a job well done.

-- Neil


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: [Foundation-l] Q1 2005 Fund Drive was a
	phenomenal success


from_name: Pedro Fayolle

body:
I would particularly like to see some better directions for people no
in the "main world". Even though I do my earnings in a rather
devaluated currency I would have liked to make a donation this time. I
admit I didn't put enough effort to figure it out on my own, but it is
also a bit trickier for me here, esp. since I don't own a credit card.

Congratulations to all on the huge success!

Pedro

On Thu, 3 Mar 2005 06:31:41 -0800 (PST), Daniel Mayer
<maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- Neil Harris <usenet at tonal.clara.co.uk> wrote:
> > That needed _improving_?
>
> Off the top of my head; faster updates at least for PayPal data using some kind
> of script (in development), launching more national chapters that have tax
> exempt status (this seems to have greatly increased donations from Germany),
> overall a more automated process (running this drive took me 6 to 8 hours per
> day - which is not sustainable in our volunteer framework), development of
> translatable interwiki templates that could be used to update
> [[MediaWiki:Sitenotice]] on all wikis at once (doing this wiki by wiki is
> *insane*), some improvements in the PayPal donation forms (such as a drop down
> currency selection option instead of separate pages for each money type), and a
> better way to keep the foundation wiki updated (having separate meta and
> foundation wiki copies of the same pages is hard to deal with).
>
> I'm sure there are other areas of improvement as well but so far I mostly see a
> need for efficiency improvements and faster/better feedback to donors and the
> community.
>
> > Seriously, I can think of only one real
> > improvement needed, which is the ability to give directly using credit
> > cards, which I think would have further increased the rate and scope of
> > donations -- but I believe you already have that task in hand.
>
> Such a system is in development and almost certainly will be up for the next
> fund drive.
>
> > Congratulations on a job well done.
>
> Thank you. :) Everybody who helped in this fund drive should proud.
>
> -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
>
> __________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
> http://mail.yahoo.com
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


from_name: Arno M

subject: [WikiEN-l] Exeunt 172

body:
"He even contacted me directly, begging me to apologize, presumably so that
he wouldn't lose face for backing off his ultimatum. (What person
using a pseudonym worries about reputation? It was very weird.)"

I will observe that 172 wasn't anonymous, unless the name that he used on
wikien-l , Abe Sokolov, was an alias.

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


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Nofollow

body:
We now have a persistent rapid-fire page-move vandal or vandals, using
the terms "Willy on Wheels" (and variants), "Pelican shit" (and
variants) and now "Sockster".

We urgently need per-user-account and per-IP rate limiting on page moves
for non-admins. The user's MO appears to be (according to a Slashdot
post, which may be from them) to use a tabbed browser to line up a load
of page moves in advance, and then to commit them all at once. They
_claim_ to be using bots, or to be a giant army of cooperating trolls,
but at the moment I doubt this.

A "leaky bucket" rate limiter with a bucket size of three moves, and a
refill rate of one page move per minute would seem like a good first
hack at the rate limit.

Needless to say, rate limiting should not apply to admins, as they need
to be able to clean up the mess faster than it is created.

And yes, a single-click page move undo would be good too, but I can't
see that being ready for some time to come.

-- Neil


subject: [Wikitech-l] Page move vandalism; take two

body:
We now have a persistent rapid-fire page-move vandal or vandals, using
the terms "Willy on Wheels" (and variants), "Pelican shit" (and
variants) and now "Sockster".

We urgently need per-user-account and per-IP rate limiting on page moves
for non-admins. The user's MO appears to be (according to a Slashdot
post, which may be from them) to use a tabbed browser to line up a load
of page moves in advance, and then to commit them all at once. They
_claim_ to be using bots, or to be a giant army of cooperating trolls,
but at the moment I doubt this.

A "leaky bucket" rate limiter with a bucket size of three moves, and a
refill rate of one page move per minute would seem like a good first
hack at the rate limit.

Needless to say, rate limiting should not apply to admins, as they need
to be able to clean up the mess faster than it is created.

A page move log would also be a very good idea: at the moment, it is
very hard to track who is doing what among the welter of edits.

And yes, a single-click page move undo would be good too, but I can't
see that being ready for some time to come.

I see that there are already other requests about this at
[[en:Wikipedia_talk:Requested_moves/Min_edit_count]], and
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1546

-- Neil

_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


from_name: Mark Williamson

body:
That's something worth pointing out.

Whenever I try to get people involved in Wikipedia, I always say
"project to build a free [language] encyclopaedia", and describe the
basic concept of Wikipedia later. The exception is the Linux
community; for example e-mailing the Maldivian Linux User Group about
the Divehi Wikipedia, I explain the concept up-front.

Mark

On Thu, 3 Mar 2005 21:02:37 +0300, V. Ivanov <amikeco at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 02 Mar 2005 13:00:14 -0500, Henry Tan-Tenn wrote:
> >  Another is the
> > assumption that should en: fail (or be judged to have failed), one can
> > safely assume smaller and less active editions will also fail.
>
> It's not exactly the fact.
>
> While the larger language Wikipedias compete with commercial
> encyclopedias (and the larger language speakers have the choice), the
> smaller language Wikipedias are _unique_, the speakers of such
> language don't have much choice -- and Wikipedia appears to be the
> only _try_ to create an encyclopedia. It also can become the main
> source for a future "official" encyclopedia, which might be too
> expensive for a not so large people, if all the authors are paid.
>
> So, Wikipedia might exist as a set of _relatively good_ sources for
> the languages, which do not have large choice. E. g. I am not sure if
> there had ever appeared any Ossetic text on the Laplandian War before
> the "translation of the week" has been done (though there are
> certainly lots of texts, including large novels, on the WWII in Soviet
> territory).
>
> Wikipedia for a nation of 500 thousand to, say, 5 million seems to be
> the best way of writing an encyclopedia in their language. And even if
> the English WP fails, that will not mean the idea is all wrong for
> every language on the Earth.
>
> Sl.
> --
> Esperu cxiam!
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Pieter Konink

subject: [Wikitech-l] Login/Cache Issue - user not logging out

body:
Hi, I've noticed that even though I will log out of my account on a
recently-installed Wikimedia 1.3.11, it will keep me logged in in at
least the main page.

Seems to be same for both IE6 and FireFox 1, so I thought it could be a
cookie problem. Then I found what I believe is the issue in Bug 63, here:

http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=63

The bug is marked fixed, but the last post merely says it was fixed in
the CVS ("... set cookie with logged in and log out timestamp, then
check them when checking If-Modified-Since.").

I was just wondering if someone who is using CVS could fill me in on the
code modified, or give me some pointers for how to do it myself. Thank you!


from_name: Daniel Mayer

body:
--- daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:
> In that case, I would like to nominate JamesF. A former arbitrator, he has
> proven himself highly capable of dealing with some of the really complex
> issues.

I second that nomination most violently. I also draft Danny. :)

--mav

__________________________________
Celebrate Yahoo!'s 10th Birthday!
Yahoo! Netrospective: 100 Moments of the Web
http://birthday.yahoo.com/netrospective/


from_name: Sean Barrett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Exeunt 172

body:
> >I will observe that 172 wasn't anonymous, unless the name that he used on
> >wikien-l , Abe Sokolov, was an alias.
> >
> It is an alias; as his page confirms, "the name I was using in my
> Wikipedia email account was not my own".
>
> Stan

I hope it truly wasn't.  Googling for "Abe Sokolov" yields interesting
results, including http://us.z.webhosting.yahoo.com/gb/view?member=songunpoliticsstudygroup


from_name: Rowan Collins

body:
On Wed, 2 Mar 2005 20:14:43 -0600, Richard Holton <richholton at gmail.com> wrote:

> Thanks for the clarity, Brion.

Firstly, let me second that thanks. And thanks also for pointing out
the relative unhelpfulness of storing the target as one text string.
It now occurs to me that if a new namespace (or a new interwiki
prefix) is created, you'd just have to search for {ns=0,
title=/Foo:.*/} instead of {target=/Foo:.*/}, so it really makes no
odds.

> If I understand things correctly, we
> should look at eventually changing 'links' and 'broken links' to use:
> from id->(to namespace, to title).
>
> Would there be a need for separate tables then?

No, almost certainly not. In fact, it would be very helpful to create
a unified table, because then we wouldn't need the proliferation of
task-specific tables. See, for instance,
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1065

> Such a configuration
> would require a lookup on the page table for each link when rendering
> a page. Although, now that I think about it, that's probably required
> now anyway.

Yes, in order to determine whether a link is "broken" or not, you have
to look for the page in the cur/page table. The only difference is
that right now it gets stored in a different table if its broken,
rather than just having a link_is_broken flag which can be checked and
toggled when necessary.

> Categorylinks seems to be a bit of a special case, since it really
> amounts to a reverse link.

That's one way of thinking about it. The other, which is more in tune
with less formalised wikis (e.g.
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiCategories), is that the category page is
just a souped-up "What links here" display, and the links on
individual pages just internal links displayed out-of-line. On this
view, they're just another kind of link - distinguished only to solve
the "Use-mention problem"
(http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?UseMentionProblem)

> At the moment, I'm thinking of adding a "fromNamespace" field to
> categorylinks. This will decouple the display of pages from the
> display of parent categories, and would facilitate breaking the
> category display into namespaces.

Hm, that certainly does match your "reverse link" interpretation. Of
course, it suffers from a variant of the update problem that the
current id->id based links table does: a page can be moved from one
namespace to another, taking its category links with it. So, if
[[Foo]] contains [[Category:Metasyntactic variables]], and I move it
to [[Wikipedia:Foo]], the from_namespace field in the categorylinks
table would become wrong, even though the actual page reference (by
ID) would remain valid. I don't know whether that update would be more
or less sensible/expensive/complex than having to do an extra
lookup/join/whatever to get the namespace out of the page table when
displaying the category.

There's an additional problem with merging the categorylinks table in
with the others anyway, in that it has extra fields cl_sortkey and
cl_timestamp that the others don't have or need. That's a shame,
because it would be neat, if redesigning the tables, not to have to
leave that one out.

Some rambling thoughts, though, on a possible links schema:
* l_from (as page_id)
* l_to_ns (as int)
* l_to_title (as string)

* l_is_broken (boolean)
--- to allow everything that brokenlinks currently does; this should
be kept seperate from the link type, because if you try to {{include}}
a non-existent page, it's both "broken" and a "template" link, and
both facts are potentially useful

* l_type (probably an int, like namespace)
--- values could include:
--- LT_NORMAL: just an ordinary [[free link]] (or an escaped link to a
[[:Image:Page]] or [[:Category:Page]])
--- LT_IMAGE: it's an image display (l_to_ns would be redundant, but never mind)
--- LT_TEMPLATE: it's a {{template inclusion}}
--- LT_INTERWIKI: currently, interwiki links don't get stored
anywhere, but it could be useful if they were; for instance, if
someone changes the interwiki map, it might be worth looking up what
links are affected. Obviously, l_to_ns would be meaningless, and any
search for a specific prefix would involve matching the text, but
might it be worth considering?
--- LT_CATEGORY: as I say, this has rather awkward issues - where do
the extra fields go? l_to_ns could be reused [abused] as the namespace
of the *originating* page if keeping that up-to-date was considered
better than looking it up in the page table

Using the links table for redirects
--- this is another idea I had which may or may not have merit. At the
moment, we can know a page is a redirect from one flag in the page
table, but have to retrieve and parse its content to find what it's a
redirect *to*. Given that this now requires a look-up in the revision
table, it would be just as easy to look up the destination in the link
table instead. The only times this wouldn't work would be redirects to
Interwiki links (unless we start storing those) and redirects to
Special pages (which are already kind of crazy, but certainly don't
show up in the links table right now; they'd have to be their own link
type if they did, I guess). You could always have a system that *fell
back to* getting and parsing the revision, but maybe that would be
kind of silly.
--- I was originally going to suggest an 'l_is_redirect' field, but
now I think about it, maybe we don't need it as long as a redirect
page can only have one valid link on it. Every use I thought of (such
as category redirects being treated as 'aliases' and effectively
merging the two categories, which would make renaming a category a
*lot* easier) has to access the page table anyway, to get the full
text of the title from the id.

Right, sorry for the ramble, if anyone actually read this far, I'd be
interested in your thoughts.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Tony Sidaway

body:
David Gerard said:
> Tony Sidaway wrote:
>
>> It also must be borne in mind that we are all accountable, at all
>> times, for   all of our actions on Wikipedia.  We're not here to
>> gossip, make a living, entertain ourselves, argue or save the world.
>> Common principles of justice and the individual have no place here.
>
>
> Not quite *no* place - volunteers must feel the processes are fair. The
> AC may say "we do this, this and this," but if people don't feel that's
> enough, they will feel less like participating in the project. Which
> would be bad.

Yes, you're right. I plead a late night and too-hasty proofing.


from_name: David Gerard

body:
Tony Sidaway wrote:

> It also must be borne in mind that we are all accountable, at all times,
> for   all of our actions on Wikipedia.  We're not here to gossip, make a
> living, entertain ourselves, argue or save the world.  Common principles
> of justice and the individual have no place here.

Not quite *no* place - volunteers must feel the processes are fair. The AC
may say "we do this, this and this," but if people don't feel that's enough,
they will feel less like participating in the project. Which would be bad.

 >  This is a community,
> one with a purpose, and the arbitration committee is here to ensure that
> it functions smoothly.  Someone who is scared to take a complaint to the
> arbitration committee because he may then be held accountable for his own
> actions is, it seems to me, missing the point.

That I'll certainly second.

- d.


from_name: Felix Wan

body:
On Wed, March 2, 2005 7:22 pm, shi zhao said:
>
> Problem is use when of does the classical Chinese write? Ming and Qing?
> Is Tang Sung period? Or does QIN2 HAN4 is period? Or to is more early?
> Each period classical Chinese differ very greatly.The Manchu Dynasty and
> Han dynasty rise of test twice according to the custom of the ancient
> works, be for can let the then person comprehend the people of the past's
> work of classical Chinese.The ancients is still not apprehensibility more
> early the classical Chinese of the ancients, so which period classical
> Chinese we use to write worthwhile discussion.If use the MIng and Qing
> period classical  Chinese writing, that is much more simple, plus some
> ????????
???, delete ?????????.( this and Chinese  version difference not
> big)If use first Qin's classical Chinese write, having no several
> individuals perhaps can write.
>
> [[zh:user:shizhao]]
>
That is a real concern.  True, even "Classical Chinese" is a blanket
term covering milleniums of evolving written Chinese style.

Since the original proposer is a Japanese, I guess the style that is
most compatible with kanbun or other traditions known to East Asians
should be that of the Tang-Song period.  That is also the period with
the richest literature for reference, and most educated Chinese should
be familiar with the style.  So if we are really going to open such an
encyclopedia, let's fix the reference time frame to the Tang-Song period.

However, my perception is that the grammar of Classical Chinese is more
or less stablized since the Tang dynasty.  New ways of saying things
were introduced, but the real substantial change happens with the
introduction of Baihuawen.

Does the Latin Wikipedia face similar problems in selecting the style?

Felix Wan


body:
Michael Snow wrote:

> I think the idea of "pro tempore" arbitrators for these rare cases is
> adequate to handle the problem. Wikipedia is big enough that nobody can
> get their oar in on every dispute, a principle that applies to the
> arbitrators as well and means that almost certainly at least a couple
> sitting arbitrators will not need to recuse themselves. Also, it
> wouldn't be necessary to reconstitute a full committee of twelve; I'd be
> satisfied if emergency appointments brought the number of arbitrators
> hearing the case back up to seven or so.
> So at most Jimbo would need to come up with four or five people who have
> good sense at how to handle these things. I don't think this would be
> terribly difficult for him. We have several experienced former
> arbitrators whom I at least would happily trust to deal with a case in
> an emergency. And I could name a number of other people who might be
> qualified, depending on the particular case that presents itself. This
> would also be a helpful way to get in some practical observation of
> people who may be candidates for election to the Arbitration Committee
> in the future.

Oooh, that's a good idea. I like that one.

- d.


body:
David Gerard said:
> Michael Snow wrote:
>> So at most Jimbo would need to come up with four or five people who
>> have  good sense at how to handle these things. I don't think this
>> would be  terribly difficult for him. We have several experienced
>> former
>> arbitrators whom I at least would happily trust to deal with a case in
>>  an emergency. And I could name a number of other people who might be
>> qualified, depending on the particular case that presents itself. This
>>  would also be a helpful way to get in some practical observation of
>> people who may be candidates for election to the Arbitration Committee
>>  in the future.
>
>
> Oooh, that's a good idea. I like that one.
>
There are the former arbitrators, and those whom the arbitrators would
co-opt because of their particular skills, as Michael suggests.  Possibly
those who have already declared their interest by standing in the Arbcom
election may also be a useful pool.
This is just a wild idea, but how about other Wikipedias?  I don't know
how well developed the de.wikipedia or fr.wikipedia dispute resolution is,
but it may be that potential arbitrators coud be co-opted from those Wikis
if they are willing and their skill with English is up to it.  At least
they'd be less likely to have reason to recuse.  It would also be a chance
to spread expertise from en.wikipedia to other Wikis.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Nofollow

body:
Neil Harris wrote:

> We now have a persistent rapid-fire page-move vandal or vandals, using
> the terms "Willy on Wheels" (and variants), "Pelican shit" (and
> variants) and now "Sockster".
> We urgently need per-user-account and per-IP rate limiting on page moves
> for non-admins. The user's MO appears to be (according to a Slashdot
> post, which may be from them) to use a tabbed browser to line up a load
> of page moves in advance, and then to commit them all at once. They
> _claim_ to be using bots, or to be a giant army of cooperating trolls,
> but at the moment I doubt this.
> A "leaky bucket" rate limiter with a bucket size of three moves, and a
> refill rate of one page move per minute would seem like a good first
> hack at the rate limit.

A minimum three-month age limit on an account before making a page move?

- d.


from_name: daniwo59 at aol.com

body:
In that case, I would like to nominate JamesF. A former arbitrator, he has proven himself highly capable of dealing with some of the really complex issues.

Danny


from_name: Chad Perrin

body:
Stephen Forrest wrote:
> On Wed, 2 Mar 2005 17:32:38 -0600, Richard Holton <richholton at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>Except...it's not your car!
>
>
> Well, not quite.  It's *was* his car, but it stopped being so the
> moment he brought it into the shop.

If you love something, set it free.

--
Chad
[ CCD CopyWrite | http://ccd.apotheon.org ]


from_name: Brion Vibber

body:
Pieter Konink wrote:
> Hi, I've noticed that even though I will log out of my account on a
> recently-installed Wikimedia 1.3.11, it will keep me logged in in at
> least the main page.

This doesn't keep you logged in; rather, some pages which were cached
while you were logged in will continue to show the cached copies (which
have your username in the corner etc).

> The bug is marked fixed, but the last post merely says it was fixed in
> the CVS ("... set cookie with logged in and log out timestamp, then
> check them when checking If-Modified-Since.").
>
> I was just wondering if someone who is using CVS could fill me in on the
> code modified, or give me some pointers for how to do it myself. Thank you!

Upgrade to 1.4rc1, which will include the fix.

The specific changes will be iirc in OutputPage.php, User.php, and I
think SpecialUserlogin.php. A timestamp cookie is set on logout to
invalidate prior cached pages. This may not 'fix' issues like expired
sessions or a closed and re-opened browser which circumvent the
cookie-setting, though the presence/absense of session cookies may do it
anyway; that hasn't been thoroughly tested.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [WikiEN-l] SD Magazine article: The Wiki Way

body:
The April 2005 edition of Software Development Magazine has an article
Rick Wayne wrote about wiki software, and MediaWiki has BY FAR the
nicest screen shots. You'll recognize the yellow flower and the
puzzle-world right away. It's in the April 2005 edition, which just
arrived in my snail mailbox today at work. (The online version lags a
few days behind, but I'll send in the URL once it's up. And, no, this is
not an April Fool's joke; I never joke around about the *really*
important stuff!)

Here's the caption for the Sample Wikipedia Page:

"The Wikipedia is the canonical example of what you can do with
MediaWiki; here's the entry on data structures, with the navigation bar
at the left and the toolbar on the top." (P. 32)

Wayne also mentions Wiki Woes:

"Vandals. Unless you're trying for the widest possible user community,
it's best to hide your wiki behind some sort of access control.
Otherwise, the maladjusted may take advantage of the Edit This Page
button until you're ready to chuck the whole thing. . . ." (P. 33)

Who knows? Maybe we'll get a flurry of contributions to our
computer-programming articles.

Uncle Ed
(still alive and kickin')


from_name: Rick

body:
--- Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:

> Karl A. Krueger wrote:
>
> >It would be unfortunate if people became afraid to
> report real abuses
> >because they did not want to be forced to defend
> themselves from unfair
> >or untrue accusations by the abuser.
> >
> >
> I agree it's a concern, but to really investigate a
> dispute between two
> users, such as an alleged flame war or edit war, you
> have to examine all
> sides in the dispute.  There's no need to look
> through the accusing
> editor's entire edit history, but it does make sense
> to look through
> both sides' posts and edits in the relevant
> discussions and articles.

The last time (and it will be the last time) I brought
a case before the arbcom, Fred Bauder thought it
appropriate to bring in situations in which I had
dealings with other people who were not even involved
in the situation at hand.  His refusal to recuse
himself showed his lack of impartiality.

RickK

__________________________________
Celebrate Yahoo!'s 10th Birthday!
Yahoo! Netrospective: 100 Moments of the Web
http://birthday.yahoo.com/netrospective/


body:
--- JAY JG <jayjg at hotmail.com> wrote:

> >From: "Tony Sidaway"
> <minorityreport at bluebottle.com>
> >
> >Someone who is scared to take a complaint to the
> >arbitration committee because he may then be held
> accountable for his own
> >actions is, it seems to me, missing the point.
>
> Missing the point indeed; the point being that few
> people come out looking
> completely spotless under the kind of forensic
> examination that sometimes
> happens in the inevitable counter-suits, combined
> with the fear that ArbCom
> will feel it needs to sanction both parties, so that
> it appears "fair".
> Again, I'm not saying this is actually happening,
> but that there is a
> perception that this is happening, which discourages
> people from getting
> involved.
>
> Jay.

Yes, it has happened.  Twice to me.  It's not worth
the hassle.

RickK

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com


from_name: Fred Bauder

body:
It is being involved which will teach you how to avoid the common mistakes
which disputive Wikipedia editors make, such as making personal attacks
rather than addressing user behavior, and discussing the issues rather than
focusing on how to express and include divergent opinions in articles on
controversial subjects.

If you are not going to make personal attacks anyway being on personal
attack parole doesn't amount to much.

Fred

> From: "JAY JG" <jayjg at hotmail.com>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Thu, 03 Mar 2005 16:43:39 -0500
> To: wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: ArbCom - too attached to 'equal treatment'?
>
>> From: "Tony Sidaway" <minorityreport at bluebottle.com>
>>
>> Someone who is scared to take a complaint to the
>> arbitration committee because he may then be held accountable for his own
>> actions is, it seems to me, missing the point.
>
> Missing the point indeed; the point being that few people come out looking
> completely spotless under the kind of forensic examination that sometimes
> happens in the inevitable counter-suits, combined with the fear that ArbCom
> will feel it needs to sanction both parties, so that it appears "fair".
> Again, I'm not saying this is actually happening, but that there is a
> perception that this is happening, which discourages people from getting
> involved.
>
> Jay.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


from_name: Neil Harris

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>
>... development of
>translatable interwiki templates that could be used to update
>[[MediaWiki:Sitenotice]] on all wikis at once ...
>
That would not only be good for fund drives, it would be good for all
sorts of data that could be shared between Wikis: scientific data,
geographical data, taxoboxes, and so on.

-- Neil


from_name: Export TheGeek

subject: [Wikitech-l] Changing md5 of wikisysop user

body:
First, let me say i hope this is the right list!

well.. I forgot my password for sysop so I created a new md5 based off
a new password and entered the md5 value into user_password in the
user table on the wiki mysql database, but attempting to login still
yeilds invalid password.. anybody have any thoughts on how to enter a
new md5 and have it work? did i miss some sort of has / calculation
done to the initial plaintext password?

Many thanks!
-Export


from_name: Alison Russell

subject: [Wikitech-l] Removing links from the sidebar and printable pages

body:
Hi,

I want to remove two links from the sidebar, and add a new link to a
sandbox. I have tried following the document
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Customization:Quickbar

I have been unable to remove links by removing them from the array I copied
into localSettings.php, and when I tried to add a new link, I couldn't enter
the link name and target. I tried defining the link in the languages.php
file but kept getting an error. I added the code specified in the document
into the relevant namespace section in the file, where the other links were
defined.

Also I want to add a Google link to my search option, beneath the text box,
does anyone have a document explaining how to do this?

And finally how can I create a link to generate a printable version of each
page?

Thanks in advance,
Alison


body:
Export TheGeek wrote:
> well.. I forgot my password for sysop so I created a new md5 based off
> a new password and entered the md5 value into user_password in the
> user table on the wiki mysql database, but attempting to login still
> yeilds invalid password.. anybody have any thoughts on how to enter a
> new md5 and have it work? did i miss some sort of has / calculation
> done to the initial plaintext password?

	/**
	 * Salt a password.
	 * Will only be salted if $wgPasswordSalt is true
	 * @param string Password.
	 * @return string Salted password or clear password.
	 */
	function addSalt( $p ) {
		global $wgPasswordSalt;
		if($wgPasswordSalt)
			return md5( "{$this->mId}-{$p}" );
		else
			return $p;
	}

	/**
	 * Encrypt a password.
	 * It can eventuall salt a password @see User::addSalt()
	 * @param string $p clear Password.
	 * @param string Encrypted password.
	 */
	function encryptPassword( $p ) {
		return $this->addSalt( md5( $p ) );
	}

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: JAY JG

body:
>From: "Tony Sidaway" <minorityreport at bluebottle.com>
>
>Someone who is scared to take a complaint to the
>arbitration committee because he may then be held accountable for his own
>actions is, it seems to me, missing the point.

Missing the point indeed; the point being that few people come out looking
completely spotless under the kind of forensic examination that sometimes
happens in the inevitable counter-suits, combined with the fear that ArbCom
will feel it needs to sanction both parties, so that it appears "fair".
Again, I'm not saying this is actually happening, but that there is a
perception that this is happening, which discourages people from getting
involved.

Jay.


from_name: Petr Kadlec

body:
On Thu, 03 Mar 2005 17:48:04 +0200, Sulev Iva <juvasul at ut.ee> wrote:
> I tried to donate by PayPal too, but failed because Estonia as very-very many (maybe most) other countries is missing in the
> PayPal list where one must choose his country before donating. :(

You might try MoneyBookers, Czechia is not supported by PayPal, too,
but Moneybookers work fine, there's a chance they might support
Estonia as well.

-- [[cs:User:Mormegil | Petr Kadlec]]


body:
On Thu, 3 Mar 2005 10:05:15 -0600, Richard Holton <richholton at gmail.com> wrote:

> Another way to think about things: a category link is like a two-way
> link. It links both from the page to the category, and from the
> category to the page.

> I definitely see the similarity between "what
> links here" and categories. In that sense, each page becomes its own
> category, with any link to the page a 'category entry'.

Yes, that's the concept behind "WikiCategories" on simple wikis like
UseMod - the backlinks are the member pages. e.g.
http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?CategoryMeatball, the contents of
which just tells you to look at its backlinks.

> Perhaps we
> could use this relationship to improve the 'what links here' display.

That would indeed be incredibly useful - that page is hideously
presented, has an arbitrary hard-coded cut-off and is unsorted. If we
could use the same display style (or even some shared super-class) as
the category listings, that would be a huge improvement.

It almost makes me wonder if all links should store a from_namespace
and sortkey, so that we can do the same paging and display seperation
tricks - but that would of course require massive updates on every
page move, so probably isn't going to happen.

> >... Of course, it suffers from a variant of the update problem that the
> > current id->id based links table does: a page can be moved from one
> > namespace to another, taking its category links with it.

> Yes, that is the trade off. However, when a category page moves, it
> only has to update its own categorylink entries -- one for each each
> [[category:xxx]] on that page.

It's not moving the *category* that's the main problem, but moving the
*content*, since that could cross namespaces. I think you did get my
point, it's just this sentence is either a typo or a non sequitur (or
both) ;-)

> Note that currently, the cl_sortkey
> field is updated on any page move for those links that don't have a
> specified sort key.

Ah, I didn't realise that; but I guess it makes sense - especially
once you get into the listing needing to be split into pages.

> Currently, to find subcategories for a category page, the links have
> to be retrieved and separated by namespace in PHP.

I'm not that hot on SQL (serves me right for not studying straight CS
at uni), but isn't it possible to do something like "SELECT <stuff>
FROM categorylinks, page WHERE cl_to=<whatever> AND
page_namespace=NS_CATEGORY LIMIT 200", thus avoiding the problem
you're describing?

I've seen things that look similar to this in the code, but it could be that
1) I have misunderstood, and this particular one's impossible
2) this would in fact be possible, but prohibitively
expensive/inefficient, and therefore it's been discarded as an option
3) it would amount to exactly the same activity as doing it as a
sequence of queries with PHP in between

> > There's an additional problem with merging the categorylinks table in
> > with the others anyway, in that it has extra fields cl_sortkey and
> > cl_timestamp that the others don't have or need. That's a shame,
> > because it would be neat, if redesigning the tables, not to have to
> > leave that one out.
> >
> By the way, cl_timestamp is currently unused (I believe). It can be
> handy for debugging, but otherwise I don't know it's intended purpose.

Hm. I thought maybe it was intended that additions and removals from a
category could be presented in a history display of some sort, or on
watchlists etc. But a timestamp would only allow listing of additions,
so I'm not sure that can be right.

Still, unless there's a sensible way of reusing the sortkey field in
other link-types, it's probably not a good idea to merge category
links in with everything else. [To store the namespace_from, you could
just reuse the otherwise redundant namespace_to field, but nothing
springs to mind that could double up with the sortkey in this way]

> > * l_is_broken (boolean)
> > --- to allow everything that brokenlinks currently does; this should
> > be kept seperate from the link type, because if you try to {{include}}
> > a non-existent page, it's both "broken" and a "template" link, and
> > both facts are potentially useful
> >
> I don't fully understand the use of a "broken" field. Does this
> eliminate the need for verifying page existence during rendering?
>
> Maintaining "broken" requires a potentially large update for each page
> creation, deletion, or move.

Well, there must be some reason we currently store "brokenlinks"
separate from "links", right? I'm not sure the distinction is used
when rendering, that seems to be done by looking at the page table,
but there's an awful lot of deferral and caching, so maybe it is. [Or,
alternatively, maybe it should be! I don't know.] It's used by
utilities like Special:Wantedpages, I know that much. It certainly
seems to make sense to store the distinction.

As for updates - yes, creation or deletion will have a big impact, but
all the linking pages need their cache invalidating anyway, because
they'll have the wrong colour links, so it's always going to be a big
deal. And note that *moving* a page doesn't break any links - there's
still a page at the old location, albeit a brand new redirect.
Somebody might delete that redirect later, but that's a seperate
action.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


body:
On Thu, 03 Mar 2005 16:30:11 +0000, Alison Russell
<alisonrussellireland at hotmail.com> wrote:

Just a quick answer to your last question:

> And finally how can I create a link to generate a printable version of each
> page?

You don't need to. Tell your users to use their browser's print
preview, and they should discover that the page reformats itself
nicely (e.g. the navigation menu will disappear) by the magic of CSS.

If that seems like a non-answer, see
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1577 for some discussion
about making this behaviour more obvious and "intuitive".

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Sulev Iva

body:
I tried to donate by PayPal too, but failed because Estonia as very-very many (maybe most) other countries is missing in the
PayPal list where one must choose his country before donating. :(

Sulev

3.03.2005 16:50:35, Pedro Fayolle <pfayolle at gmail.com> kirot':

>I would particularly like to see some better directions for people no
>in the "main world". Even though I do my earnings in a rather
>devaluated currency I would have liked to make a donation this time. I
>admit I didn't put enough effort to figure it out on my own, but it is
>also a bit trickier for me here, esp. since I don't own a credit card.
>
>Congratulations to all on the huge success!
>
>Pedro
>
>
>On Thu, 3 Mar 2005 06:31:41 -0800 (PST), Daniel Mayer
><maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> --- Neil Harris <usenet at tonal.clara.co.uk> wrote:
>> > That needed _improving_?
>>
>> Off the top of my head; faster updates at least for PayPal data using some kind
>> of script (in development), launching more national chapters that have tax
>> exempt status (this seems to have greatly increased donations from Germany),
>> overall a more automated process (running this drive took me 6 to 8 hours per
>> day - which is not sustainable in our volunteer framework), development of
>> translatable interwiki templates that could be used to update
>> [[MediaWiki:Sitenotice]] on all wikis at once (doing this wiki by wiki is
>> *insane*), some improvements in the PayPal donation forms (such as a drop down
>> currency selection option instead of separate pages for each money type), and a
>> better way to keep the foundation wiki updated (having separate meta and
>> foundation wiki copies of the same pages is hard to deal with).
>>
>> I'm sure there are other areas of improvement as well but so far I mostly see a
>> need for efficiency improvements and faster/better feedback to donors and the
>> community.
>>
>> > Seriously, I can think of only one real
>> > improvement needed, which is the ability to give directly using credit
>> > cards, which I think would have further increased the rate and scope of
>> > donations -- but I believe you already have that task in hand.
>>
>> Such a system is in development and almost certainly will be up for the next
>> fund drive.
>>
>> > Congratulations on a job well done.
>>
>> Thank you. :) Everybody who helped in this fund drive should proud.
>>
>> -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
>>
>> __________________________________________________
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>> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
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>>
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>