from_name: elian

subject: [Wikipedia-l] user interface design

body:
Hello,

When I did a lot of image uploads recently (the country flags of the
english wikipedia for the german pages) I came across a very annoying
thing:
Step 1: choose "Upload file" from the special menu
Step 2: Upload of the file
and then I get a page, announcing that the file was succesfully uploaded -
but that's not where I wanted to go, I want to upload the next image!

These announce pages are in my opinion completely useless (an error
message, if it was not okay would be sufficient). It's always one or more
mouse clicks to much. Same for the "You succesfully logged in" or "The
page was added to your watchlist".

In my opinion an immediate redirect to the page where I came from (maybe
with a line "successfully logged in" on top of the page, if this is
technically possible) would make more sense. You would save mouse clicks
and page loads - especially for people with a slow connection this is an
important feature. It's a principle of user interface design: a programm
which confirms every action of the user ("You have done this") and then
demands a click on the OK-button, before one can go back to work, is
not well designed.

greetings,
elian
--
========= Open Content statt Copyright ==========
http://de.wikipedia.org - Die freie Enzyklopaedie


list: wikitech-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] "Technical" categories

body:
A while ago, one of the lists was discussing "technical" categories for
articles. As far as I remember, many liked the idea to mark, for
example, a biography as such, so all biographies could be listed
automatically, searches could be limited to biographies, etc.

Nothing was ever heard of since.

It seems especially the Germans have a tendency for these categories.
They have lists which they keep up-to-date manually, but IMHO they'll
fail in the near future.

I put my proposal on meta
(http://meta.wikipedia.com/wiki.phtml?title=Technical_categories_in_Wikipedia).
Please comment and develop.

Magnus


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Michael R. Irwin

subject: [Wikipedia-l] order of lists of works & prizes

body:
Karen AKA Kajikit wrote:
>
> Ray Saintonge wrote:
> >
> > tarquin wrote:
> >
> > > Of the 5 nobel prize pages, 3 start from the present day, 2 go forward
> > > from 1901.
> > >
> > > I found a page on filmographies etc which suggest that lists start
> > > from the most recent item:
> > > http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia_talk:Filmographies_and_Discographies
> > >
> > >
> > > A comment on the talk page Wikipedia talk:Filmographies and
> > > Discographies raises the fact that this order may have been influenced
> > > by the IMDB's filmographies.
> > >
> > > IMO lists of prize awards or works are in a sense timelines, and as
> > > such should go forwards.
> > > what are your opinions?
>
> It's the same as listings of an author or artist's works (eg.paintings,
> books). A few weeks ago somebody went to the trouble of making a listing
> of books by Dianna Wynne Jones - in alphabetical order, which meant that
> somebody else had to go through and painstakingly re-order it to be
> chronological.

I think it might have been appropriate to copy the list
and reorder the copy in accordance with the new preference.
If the lists are then appropriately titled the reader can
select the best for their purposes.

>
> I would like to be bold here and to suggest that ALL lists involving
> dates in any way should be chronological.

There may be places where multiple indexing schemes
are appropriate.

For example:  If a researcher is looking for background
on a specific satellite or space mission, and they have
a mission or spacecraft name, they may not
wish to scan a chronological list of all human space
missions from the early 50s on to find it.

In this case, an alphabetical index works best for the
reader.

If they are looking for space based earth surveys then a
subject index may work best.

If they are looking for research done in the late
60s or early 70s then a chronological index may be
most useful.

If a Wikipedian exists who is willing to create a
specific type of index, then I see no benefit to the
reader from other Wikipedians displacing this contribution
rather than adding another method to it.

regards,
Mike Irwin


from_name: Stephen Gilbert

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Common typos (was: Tucci528)

body:
--- Hynek Hanke <hanke at volny.cz> wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 14, 2002 at 03:32:06PM -0400, Vicki
> Rosenzweig wrote:
> > >Why doesn't someone just add a function, that
> before
> > >submitting every article/change, it runs a spell
> checker, writes
> > >all the ``mistakes'' and possible ``corrections''
> along with
> > >an editable field of the article bellow. This way
> the editor
> > >can see his/her mistakes and correct them very
> easily.
> >
> > Because some of us find these things very
> irritating, and rarely
> > run them on software that comes with them.
> Conversely, those
> > who want such a function can copy the text into a
> word
> > processor that has it, run the spell-check, and
> make the changes
> > they want. We don't need to burden our programming
> team, or
> > our software.
>
> But you can't deny that the problem is there. I
> think most
> people wouldn't cut&past it into their spellchecker
> but they would correct it if they saw their mistakes
> directly on the screen.

Perhaps such a feature could be controlled via User
Preferences...

Stephen Gilbert

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! News - Today's headlines
http://news.yahoo.com


body:
--- "Michael R. Irwin" <mri_icboise at surfbest.net>
wrote:
> There may be places where multiple indexing schemes
> are appropriate.
>
> For example:  If a researcher is looking for
> background
> on a specific satellite or space mission, and they
> have
> a mission or spacecraft name, they may not
> wish to scan a chronological list of all human space
> missions from the early 50s on to find it.
>
> In this case, an alphabetical index works best for
> the
> reader.

A search would work even better.

> If they are looking for space based earth surveys
> then a
> subject index may work best.

A search would work here too.

> If they are looking for research done in the late
> 60s or early 70s then a chronological index may be
> most useful.

> If a Wikipedian exists who is willing to create a
> specific type of index, then I see no benefit to the
> reader from other Wikipedians displacing this
> contribution
> rather than adding another method to it.

Maintaining multiple manual indexes of the same
material is next to impossible. I've tried. An
advanced search function (which Lee mentioned as one
of his priorities) would allieviate the need for such
lists.

Stephen Gilbert

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! News - Today's headlines
http://news.yahoo.com


from_name: koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com

body:
Mike wrote:
>> If a Wikipedian exists who is willing to create a
>> specific type of index, then I see no benefit to the
>> reader from other Wikipedians displacing this
>> contribution
>> rather than adding another method to it.

Stephen responded:
>Maintaining multiple manual indexes of the same
>material is next to impossible. I've tried. An
>advanced search function (which Lee mentioned as one
>of his priorities) would allieviate the need for such
>lists.

That's right.  It's cumbersome and one of them is usually out of date.

Regardless of whether Lee updates the search function, if I'm on e.g. [[Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress]] I can just CTRL+F and type in "Lilia Skala" to find it on the page.  I don't see how a second page listing the entries according to a different scheme is really such a big help.

kq


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] New software TEST wikis for Esperanto, Polish

body:
As I was recently sent a translations file for Polish for the new
phase III Wikipedia software, I've set up preliminary test wikis for
Esperanto and Polish:

  http://eo.wikipedia.org/
  http://pl.wikipedia.org/

(This will be the same location the final upgraded wikis will be at, but
the current .com URLs will also be redirected there once things are set up
for real.)

A number of things are probably broken, including:

* There may be searching problems with non-ASCII chars

* Article titles which start with non-ASCII chars may not have proper case
conversion. This is either a bug in the locale setup or in PHP's ucfirst()
function; if I can't iron it out, I'll copy in the workaround I'd used in
an earlier version of the program.

* There are some article titles in the Polish database which started with
lowercase non-ASCII chars. These may have been skipped in conversion; this
should be fixable with automatic renaming, remind me to do that.

* The automatic conversion of uploaded files is very buggy so I
temporarily disabled it; I'll rework that in a bit. In the meantime, test
to be sure that uploads work.

* User accounts are not carried over; make sure you can create and use new
accounts.

* X-system conversion for the Esperanto wiki isn't currently implemented;
until I get that cleanly worked in, use Ek! (Windows) or an appropriate
multilingual keyboard layout (Mac, Unix) to type supersigns.

* I've converted both of these wikis to standard UTF-8 (from modified
UTF-8-with-X-surrogates for eo and ISO-8859-2 for pl). Difficulties
internal to the system (for instance, capitalization issues) should be
sorted out shortly. Polish folks; if this is a real problem with browser
support (can you read & write as before?), let me know; in the worst case
I can shift you back to ISO-8859-2 and have more charsets to deal with.

* URLs with titles in the old syntax/charset aren't compatible yet, this
will be added in before final conversion, so URLs will be preserved.  On
the same note, interlanguage links to English, French, German etc
(ISO-8859-1) with accented characters won't work if typed in straight.
That'll get fixed in a bit.

* Namespaces may be generally broken, and some translations may suck. :)
Suggestions for improvements and corrections are welcome.

* Talk (diskusja, priparolu) links are (or at least should be)
automatically converted to namespaces, but the links aren't taken out of
the body text yet. That'll be done later.

* The timezone on the new server is UTC instead of California time; for
Polish eventually the _default_ offset will be local Polish time, but this
isn't ready yet.

I'll be making improvements over the next few days; if things are looking
reasonably good, expect final conversion by the end of the week. Please
play with editing, special pages, etc and complain at me if things other
than the above-mentioned don't work.

Oh, and here's the page on the English wiki which describes the various
changes from the old software to the new:
  http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:PHP_script_new_features

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [Wikipedia-l] A Korean Wikipedia

body:
Found this yesterday:

http://www.godisgreen.com/wiki/wiki.phtml?title=Encyclopedia

If you do not have Korean fonts it will not display properly.

Fred


subject: [Wikipedia-l] A Korean Wikipedia

body:
Fred Wrote:
>Found this yesterday:
>
>http://www.godisgreen.com/wiki/wiki.phtml?title=Encyclopedia
>
>If you do not have Korean fonts it will not display properly.

and if you go to edit, you get the following warning: "Please notice that all contributions to Wikipedia are considered to be released under the GNU Free Documentation License. If you don't want your writing to be edited mercilessly and redistributed at will, then don't hit submit. You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain resource. DO NOT USE COPYRIGHTED WORK WITHOUT PERMISSION!"

Interesting site.  I hope they get more contributors, though--I'm seeing only three in the last three days.  Also they're using Phase II software.

kq


subject: [Wikipedia-l] A Korean Wikipedia

body:
It looks like this project actually is doing something
with the software and the content, as opposed to
taking a database dump and slapping ads on it.

I'd like to ask godisgreen.com to remove all the
"Wikipedia" references in the code, which makes it
look as if it is an official Korean Wikipedia. Also,
they should mention somewhere that the material is
covered by the GFDL and is originally from our
project. Comments?

Since I'm in South Korea, I have lots of friends who
can help me with this. ;-)

Stephen Gilbert

--- koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com wrote:
> Fred Wrote:
> >Found this yesterday:
> >
>
>http://www.godisgreen.com/wiki/wiki.phtml?title=Encyclopedia
> >
> >If you do not have Korean fonts it will not display
> properly.
>
> and if you go to edit, you get the following
> warning: "Please notice that all contributions to
> Wikipedia are considered to be released under the
> GNU Free Documentation License. If you don't want
> your writing to be edited mercilessly and
> redistributed at will, then don't hit submit. You
> are also promising us that you wrote this yourself,
> or copied it from a public domain resource. DO NOT
> USE COPYRIGHTED WORK WITHOUT PERMISSION!"
>
> Interesting site.  I hope they get more
> contributors, though--I'm seeing only three in the
> last three days.  Also they're using Phase II
> software.
>
> kq

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! News - Today's headlines
http://news.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikipedia-l] A Korean Wikipedia

body:
At 04:31 AM 9/16/02 -0700, you wrote:
>It looks like this project actually is doing something
>with the software and the content, as opposed to
>taking a database dump and slapping ads on it.
>
>I'd like to ask godisgreen.com to remove all the
>"Wikipedia" references in the code, which makes it
>look as if it is an official Korean Wikipedia. Also,
>they should mention somewhere that the material is
>covered by the GFDL and is originally from our
>project. Comments?
>
>Since I'm in South Korea, I have lots of friends who
>can help me with this. ;-)
>
>Stephen Gilbert

Maybe they'd like to be an "official Korean Wikipedia." I didn't see any
easy way to get in touch with them, but this computer doesn't read Korean.

Fred


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikitech-l] OFFTOPIC : question about a firewall

in_reply_to: <r5i7khoyagz.fsf@gill.maths.keele.ac.uk>; from wiki@gwowen.freeserve.co.uk on Sat, Sep 14, 2002 at 02:19:56PM +0100

body:
I don't know a precise answer, but I think you can do something like this with
ssh port forwarding capabilities.

See, for example:
http://www.ssh.com/products/ssh/administrator30/Port_Forwarding.html

And this is apparently a detailed explanation:
http://csociety.ecn.purdue.edu/~sigos/projects/ssh/forwarding/

Don't ask *me* any details.  I had something similar to this done *for me* by
someone in the past, but I didn't research it then to understand all the
details.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] A Korean Wikipedia

body:
There is a UseModWiki at http://ko.wikipedia.com/, but
it only has the homepage, and the characters aren't
displaying properly for me.

The domain name is "godisgreen". Envangelical
Christianity is quite widespread over here; "oak" at
godisgreen (he seems to be the only, but very
enthusiastic contributor to the project) may not be
interested in a NPOV encyclopedia.

It's quite late here in Korean Standard Time, but I'll
have one of my friends look over the site and tell me
what it's about. Then we can talk about issuing
invitations.

Stephen Gilbert

--- tarquin <tarquin at planetunreal.com> wrote:
> Is there an existing Korean wikipedia?
> If not, should we perhaps invite them to move their
> project to Wikipedia?
>

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! News - Today's headlines
http://news.yahoo.com


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Logging out

body:
The system seems to have developed a new bug!

I can be properly logged in and occupied for a time when I try to go to
another page, and it appears as though I had logged out.  If this has
happened while I was working on a longer edit, it means that the edit is
then credited to my URL rather than my pseudonym.

This is a really annoying bug.

Ec


from_name: Karen AKA Kajikit

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
> tarquin wrote:
>
> > Of the 5 nobel prize pages, 3 start from the present day, 2 go forward
> > from 1901.
> >
> > I found a page on filmographies etc which suggest that lists start
> > from the most recent item:
> > http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia_talk:Filmographies_and_Discographies
> >
> >
> > A comment on the talk page Wikipedia talk:Filmographies and
> > Discographies raises the fact that this order may have been influenced
> > by the IMDB's filmographies.
> >
> > IMO lists of prize awards or works are in a sense timelines, and as
> > such should go forwards.
> > what are your opinions?

It's the same as listings of an author or artist's works (eg.paintings,
books). A few weeks ago somebody went to the trouble of making a listing
of books by Dianna Wynne Jones - in alphabetical order, which meant that
somebody else had to go through and painstakingly re-order it to be
chronological.

I would like to be bold here and to suggest that ALL lists involving
dates in any way should be chronological.

--

Karen AKA Kajikit

And on the seventh day, God said 'What my world needs is a creature
that will truly appreciate it in all its facets' -
and so He made the kitten.

Come and visit my part of the web:
Kajikit's Corner: http://Kajikit.netfirms.com/
Aussie Support Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AussieSupport
Allergyfree Eating Recipe Swap:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Allergyfree_Eating
Ample Aussies Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ampleaussies/

Love and huggles to all!


from_name: tarquin

subject: [Wikipedia-l] A Korean Wikipedia

body:
Is there an existing Korean wikipedia?
If not, should we perhaps invite them to move their project to Wikipedia?

Stephen Gilbert wrote:

>It looks like this project actually is doing something
>with the software and the content, as opposed to
>taking a database dump and slapping ads on it.
>
>I'd like to ask godisgreen.com to remove all the
>"Wikipedia" references in the code, which makes it
>look as if it is an official Korean Wikipedia. Also,
>they should mention somewhere that the material is
>covered by the GFDL and is originally from our
>project. Comments?
>
>Since I'm in South Korea, I have lots of friends who
>can help me with this. ;-)
>
>Stephen Gilbert
>
>--- koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com wrote:
>
>
>>Fred Wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Found this yesterday:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>http://www.godisgreen.com/wiki/wiki.phtml?title=Encyclopedia
>>
>>
>>>If you do not have Korean fonts it will not display
>>>
>>>
>>properly.
>>
>>and if you go to edit, you get the following
>>warning: "Please notice that all contributions to
>>Wikipedia are considered to be released under the
>>GNU Free Documentation License. If you don't want
>>your writing to be edited mercilessly and
>>redistributed at will, then don't hit submit. You
>>are also promising us that you wrote this yourself,
>>or copied it from a public domain resource. DO NOT
>>USE COPYRIGHTED WORK WITHOUT PERMISSION!"
>>
>>Interesting site.  I hope they get more
>>contributors, though--I'm seeing only three in the
>>last three days.  Also they're using Phase II
>>software.
>>
>>kq
>>
>>
>
>
>


from_name: lcrocker at nupedia.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Logging out

body:
> Yes, we seem to be timing out, and as I use 3 different
> browsers on 2 different computers to access wikipedia I
> notice odd differences in how each of them handles it.

I'm setting the standard cookie timeout to 30 days.  Could
it be that each of your browsers is timing out every 30 days
or so, but giving you the overall illusion that it happens
every few days on average?


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Logging out

body:
>The system seems to have developed a new bug!
>
>I can be properly logged in and occupied for a time when I try to go to
>another page, and it appears as though I had logged out.  If this has
>happened while I was working on a longer edit, it means that the edit is
>then credited to my URL rather than my pseudonym.
>
>This is a really annoying bug.
>
>Ec

Yes, we seem to be timing out, and as I use 3 different browsers on 2
different computers to access wikipedia I notice odd differences in how
each of them handles it. Practically it means having to log in over and
over despite having checked the little box, keep me logged in on this
computer. As I have noted before eBay sometimes exhibits exactly the same
bug so Lee is in some good company. I am disorganized enough that off the
top of may head I couldn't say exactly what happens with each browser on
each computer, but the timing out affects them all.

Fred


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Logging out

body:
lcrocker at nupedia.com wrote:

>>Yes, we seem to be timing out, and as I use 3 different
>>browsers on 2 different computers to access wikipedia I
>>notice odd differences in how each of them handles it.
>>
>
>I'm setting the standard cookie timeout to 30 days.  Could
>it be that each of your browsers is timing out every 30 days
>or so, but giving you the overall illusion that it happens
>every few days on average?
>
The problem only first appeared yesterday when I went to save edits to
[[Diptera]].  It seemed to have suddenly developed a 30 minute timeout
which it kept doing even after I completely rebooted, and logged on anew.

That two of us would have the same new problem at the same time suggests
that it may not have been at our end.  I've checked the cookies and they
now do show expiry at October 16.

I'll have more to say if things go wrong again.  Thanks

Ec


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

body:
On Mon, Sep 16, 2002 at 03:24:42AM -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:
> * There are some article titles in the Polish database which started with
> lowercase non-ASCII chars. These may have been skipped in conversion; this
> should be fixable with automatic renaming, remind me to do that.

This shouldn't be done.
These articles are redirects to overcome bug in UseMod.

Links like:
l/acina and L/acina pointed at different articles,
so the first was created as a redirect to the second.


body:
> Of the 5 Nobel prize pages, 3 start from the present day,
> 2 go forward from 1901.
> IMO lists of prize awards or works are in a sense timelines,
> and as such should go forwards.  What are your opinions?

When I created "World Series of Poker", I did it from
present-day backwards, because that seemed to me easiest
from the reader's point of view--the latest, most relevant
stuff up front, followed by historical stuff that can be
easily skipped.  As a user, I'd like to see things like
Nobel prizes and Academy awards in that same order, most
recent to as far back as we care to document.  But maybe
that's just a personal preference of mine.

Timelines of /a single event/ should go forward--even if
that event is something that lasts over many years like a
war or a human life (i.e., a biography); that seems natural,
because it follows the way the event unfolds.  And there's
no clear separation of units of time to reverse.

But /recurring multiple events/ seem to be a different beast
to me: people generally want to know mainly about the recent
ones, and a reverse order doesn't seem at all "unnatural"
because the events are seen as separate and individual, and
only vaguely related as a sequence.  And there's certainly
no sense of later events having dependencies on earlier ones
as there would be in a biography or war timeline.


from_name: Bryan Derksen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Logging out

body:
At 09:38 AM 16/09/02 -0700, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>The system seems to have developed a new bug!
>
>I can be properly logged in and occupied for a time when I try to go to
>another page, and it appears as though I had logged out.  If this has
>happened while I was working on a longer edit, it means that the edit is
>then credited to my URL rather than my pseudonym.

I've had this happen to me every once and a while too. I'm not sure if it's
exactly the same bug, though. Here's the basics;

*I never, ever get this problem on my home computer. I'm running Mozilla
1.1 and I've set my login to be remembered across sessions.
*I occasionally get this problem when editing articles on a computer in the
university computer lab. I use Netscape 6 there, and I _don't_ set my login
to be remembered across sessions just in case I forget to log out. Also,
since Netscape 6 doesn't have tabbed browsing, I usually have many browser
windows open. I'm not sure whether length of article is related, it doesn't
happen often enough for me to have developed a strong pattern.

I'm thinking that the problem may likely be something to do with
single-session logins getting lost prematurely. Which way do you log in,
multiple or single session?


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Esperanto Wikipedia on Kuro5hin

body:
The Esperanto Wikipedia was linked to from a front
page Kuro5hin article on Esperanto:
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/9/16/15141/4257

There may be a surge of Esperanto traffic...

Stephen Gilbert

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! News - Today's headlines
http://news.yahoo.com


from_name: Gareth Owen

body:
Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> writes:

> I don't know a precise answer, but I think you can do something like this
> with ssh port forwarding capabilities.
>
> See, for example:
> http://www.ssh.com/products/ssh/administrator30/Port_Forwarding.html
>
> And this is apparently a detailed explanation:
> http://csociety.ecn.purdue.edu/~sigos/projects/ssh/forwarding/

Thanks Jimmy, those links were exactly what I needed to get myself mainling
Usenet again.
--
Gareth Owen


from_name: Brion VIBBER

subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikipedia.org e-mail

body:
Should it be possible to send e-mail to addresses like
root at wikipedia.org, postmaster at wikipedia.org, etc? At the moment,
sendmail doesn't accept connections except from the local machine on
loopback so, eg a theoretical person trying to complain about a spammer
sending stuff through clever manipulation of the "e-mail this user"
function couldn't reach the customary addresses.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikipedia.org e-mail

body:
> Should it be possible to send e-mail to addresses like
> root at wikipedia.org, postmaster at wikipedia.org, etc? At the
> moment, sendmail doesn't accept connections except from
> the local machine on loopback so, eg a theoretical person
> trying to complain about a spammer sending stuff through
> clever manipulation of the "e-mail this user" function
> couldn't reach the customary addresses.

I'm sure it's just a matter of sendmail configuration; I'm
just not very up on that because I use qmail on my server.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Logging out

body:
Bryan Derksen wrote:

>> I can be properly logged in and occupied for a time when I try to go
>> to another page, and it appears as though I had logged out.  If this
>> has happened while I was working on a longer edit, it means that the
>> edit is then credited to my URL rather than my pseudonym.
>
> I've had this happen to me every once and a while too. I'm not sure if
> it's exactly the same bug, though. Here's the basics;
>
> I'm thinking that the problem may likely be something to do with
> single-session logins getting lost prematurely. Which way do you log
> in, multiple or single session?

I generaly have used an automatic login.  I haven't had the problem
since Lee has made his adjustment yesterday.  I also double-checked to
make sure that I was remembering the log-in across sessions.  Hopefully
the problem is gone forever.

Ec


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Logging out

body:
Bryan Derksen wrote:

>> I can be properly logged in and occupied for a time when I try to go
>> to another page, and it appears as though I had logged out.  If this
>> has happened while I was working on a longer edit, it means that the
>> edit is then credited to my URL rather than my pseudonym.
>
> I've had this happen to me every once and a while too. I'm not sure if
> it's exactly the same bug, though. Here's the basics;
>
> I'm thinking that the problem may likely be something to do with
> single-session logins getting lost prematurely. Which way do you log
> in, multiple or single session?

I generaly have used an automatic login.  I haven't had the problem
since Lee has made his adjustment yesterday.  I also double-checked to
make sure that I was remembering the log-in across sessions.  Hopefully
the problem is gone forever.

Thanks

Ec


from_name: The Cunctator

references:
<r5i7khoyagz.fsf@gill.maths.keele.ac.uk>
	<20020916060356.S21626@joey.bomis.com>
	<r5i3cs9yorp.fsf@gill.maths.keele.ac.uk>

body:
On Tue, 2002-09-17 at 05:00, Gareth Owen wrote:
> Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> writes:
>
> > I don't know a precise answer, but I think you can do something like this
> > with ssh port forwarding capabilities.
> >
> > See, for example:
> > http://www.ssh.com/products/ssh/administrator30/Port_Forwarding.html
> >
> > And this is apparently a detailed explanation:
> > http://csociety.ecn.purdue.edu/~sigos/projects/ssh/forwarding/
>
> Thanks Jimmy, those links were exactly what I needed to get myself mainling
> Usenet again.

I hope you're going to add this knowledge to Wikipedia....


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Logging out

body:
On Tuesday 17 September 2002 12:01 pm, you wrote:
> >The system seems to have developed a new bug!
> >
> >I can be properly logged in and occupied for a time when I try to go to
> >another page, and it appears as though I had logged out. ?If this has
> >happened while I was working on a longer edit, it means that the edit is
> >then credited to my URL rather than my pseudonym.

Yup - I have the same problem with my browser of choice Konqueror 2.2.2 on
Linux Mandrake 8.2. I do not have the same problem with IE 6.x on Win 2000 or
XP.

Up until a day or two ago I would be logged out /very/ often but now it
occurs only after I have been away from my computer for more than a few
minutes.

This is still annoying but probably nothing to loose sleep over.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Time zone discrepancy

body:
I've set the German wiki to consider the default timezone as Central
European (Summer) Time. That is, if you _don't_ set a timezone offset
(leave it blank) you see times in CEST. If you do set an offset, it's
still measured against UTC, so there should be no nasty surprises.

The four-tilde signature-with-time also shows according to this
site-wide default local time. (This can be set via $wgLocaltimezone in
LocalSettings.php)

Note that this does not affect the places in recentchanges list where
the date change is shown; this is a known bug that affects anyone with
offset not set to server time.

Giskart wrote:
 > And there are also locations where  the difference between UTC and local
 > time is not  clean houres but also 30 minutes.
 > For  French Polynesia <http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Polynesia>
 > it is UTC - 9:30  Does the software support - 30 minutes ? I have no
 > succes.
 > Not that i am from "French Polynesia"  but i like to know. -- giskart

Not yet, but I'll be sure and bang that in.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Most active contributors

body:
--- Andre Engels <engels at uni-koblenz.de> wrote:
> Of course this is only a very rough measure of how
> much someone is working
> on the project - correcting a typo is an edit just
> as much as, say, extending
> a stub to a three-page article. Still, it seems that
> Wikipedia should hope and
> pray that maveric is not getting a life any time
> soon...

I guess I'll have to stop paying so much attention to
mine in order to crack the top 20...

Stephen Gilbert

__________________________________________________
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Yahoo! News - Today's headlines
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] A Three Way Split

body:
I was watching ABC news and saw a believable statistic, that 40% of the
adult population can't read at the 5th grade level.  Not much we can do for
them.

But it got me thinking and then I read a short article in a book of exerpts
from ETC about tailoring your writing to the semantic capacity of your
audience and came up with this proposed convention.

A wikipedia article should begin with a section written for the huge number
of people who read at a basic level (5th grade level to high school level).
I suspect that middle school level kids are one of our better customers in
any event. It should be both written in simple English and contain a basic
explanation of the topic, accurate and clear, but without technical
language and niceties, and unless easily stated without whatever
complicating factors exist with respect to that topic. It should have a
section title, "[[Simply put]]" or "In [[Simple Terms]], or "In [[Simple
Terminology]]" (the link would explain what we are doing with this section).

This should be followed by the section "In [[General Terminology]]" which
would contain material tailored to the high school or college graduate,
basically the top 20% of the population which is literate. A attempt would
be made to edit this so that a coherent NPOV article results which reads
easily, including basic technical language and definitions.

The third section of advanced or specialized material (for you, who
regularly tested in the 99th percentile +) would give a full technical
treatment, would not try to create an integrated viewpoint (that is the
ambiguities of the topic would be exposed), go into detail about
controversies in the area etc.

There would be an external links and further reading after each section
with appropriate material.

I have noted in my own writing style that I tend to mix up material of all
three types in the opening paragraph. A conscious choice to write for our
likely audiences would, IMO, result in a more useful (and authoritative)
enclyclopedia.

Fred Bauder


subject: [Wikipedia-l] A Three Way Split

body:
While I understand the motivation, I think a better
plan would be to put some effort into the Basic
English Wikipedia. One person started it, but it
hasn't caught on yet.

Stephen Gilbert

--- Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
> I was watching ABC news and saw a believable
> statistic, that 40% of the
> adult population can't read at the 5th grade level.
> Not much we can do for
> them.
>
> But it got me thinking and then I read a short
> article in a book of exerpts
> from ETC about tailoring your writing to the
> semantic capacity of your
> audience and came up with this proposed convention.
>
> A wikipedia article should begin with a section
> written for the huge number
> of people who read at a basic level (5th grade level
> to high school level).
> I suspect that middle school level kids are one of
> our better customers in
> any event. It should be both written in simple
> English and contain a basic
> explanation of the topic, accurate and clear, but
> without technical
> language and niceties, and unless easily stated
> without whatever
> complicating factors exist with respect to that
> topic. It should have a
> section title, "[[Simply put]]" or "In [[Simple
> Terms]], or "In [[Simple
> Terminology]]" (the link would explain what we are
> doing with this section).
>
> This should be followed by the section "In [[General
> Terminology]]" which
> would contain material tailored to the high school
> or college graduate,
> basically the top 20% of the population which is
> literate. A attempt would
> be made to edit this so that a coherent NPOV article
> results which reads
> easily, including basic technical language and
> definitions.
>
> The third section of advanced or specialized
> material (for you, who
> regularly tested in the 99th percentile +) would
> give a full technical
> treatment, would not try to create an integrated
> viewpoint (that is the
> ambiguities of the topic would be exposed), go into
> detail about
> controversies in the area etc.
>
> There would be an external links and further reading
> after each section
> with appropriate material.
>
> I have noted in my own writing style that I tend to
> mix up material of all
> three types in the opening paragraph. A conscious
> choice to write for our
> likely audiences would, IMO, result in a more useful
> (and authoritative)
> enclyclopedia.
>
> Fred Bauder
>
> [Wikipedia-l]
> To manage your subscription to this list, please go
> here:
> http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] A Three Way Split

in_reply_to: <200209181609.g8IG9rF29633@ross.bomis.com>; from lcrocker@nupedia.com on Wed, Sep 18, 2002 at 09:09:53AM -0700

body:
lcrocker at nupedia.com wrote:
> Far better we should work to make all articles on the
> main site more lucid.

I tend to agree.  But I did like the original proposal -- to a limited
extent, at least.  I don't think we need to hyperlink all the
introductions to an explanation that might well seem offensive to some
poor readers, no matter how delicately we put it.

But it does make sense to me that we should make an extra effort to
ensure that the introductory paragraphs in each article are easily
accessible to people of a variety of background contexts.


from_name: Jens Frank

subject: [Wikipedia-l] some strange pages

body:
Hello,

I just found three pages in the list of "New Pages" that are somewhat strange:

- They are empty
- According to the history they are from December 31, 1969
  In Unix Time, this would be the time "-1"
- Added to "Wikipedia:Votes for deletion" they appear as
  a link to an unwritten page.

Can someone please have a look at this?

Regards,

	JeLuF


subject: [Wikipedia-l] some strange pages

body:
On Wed, Sep 18, 2002 at 08:50:29AM +0200, Jens Frank wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I just found three pages in the list of "New Pages" that are somewhat strange:
>
> - They are empty
> - According to the history they are from December 31, 1969
>   In Unix Time, this would be the time "-1"
> - Added to "Wikipedia:Votes for deletion" they appear as
>   a link to an unwritten page.
>
> Can someone please have a look at this?
>
Forget it.

I just found out what it was: Non-existent pages (deleted
during the time I scanned "New Pages") have a history!

	Regards,

		jeluf


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Most active contributors

body:
>> I wanted to see who is the most active contributor at the moment.
>> To do so, I counted (or rather, had the database count) the
>> numbers of edits per registered user.

I should point out that this only counts edits made since
the installation of Magnus's Phase II software, so it
somewhat undercounts those who contributed to the project
in its early days, such as Larry Sanger, me, Tim Shell,
Magnus, and probably a few others.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] A Three Way Split

body:
>While I understand the motivation, I think a better
>plan would be to put some effort into the Basic
>English Wikipedia. One person started it, but it
>hasn't caught on yet.

I couldn't disagree more--I think that separate wiki is
a complete waste of time and effort.  After all, it's
based on a premise that has itself been thoroughly
discredited ("Basic English" is based on the idea that
limited vocabulary is what makes a language simple--
linguists know better), and it can only serve to
distract and divide the labor of good contributors.
Far better we should work to make all articles on the
main site more lucid.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] A Three Way Split

body:
Fred Bauder wrote:

>I was watching ABC news and saw a believable statistic, that 40% of the
>adult population can't read at the 5th grade level.  Not much we can do for
>them.
>
>But it got me thinking and then I read a short article in a book of exerpts
>from ETC about tailoring your writing to the semantic capacity of your
>audience
>
>I have noted in my own writing style that I tend to mix up material of all
>three types in the opening paragraph. A conscious choice to write for our
>likely audiences would, IMO, result in a more useful (and authoritative)
>enclyclopedia.
>
The motivation for this is commendable, but I don't see it as a
reasonable course of action.  It reflects the process that leads to a
"dumbing down" of education.  More can probably be done to improve
skills by having articles where the reader has to stretch just a little
to be able to understand what's going on.

The 40% of "adults" who can't read above the 5th grade level are not
likely to be using computers or spending a lot of time on the internet
anyway.  The adults who did not graduate from high school probably have
limited computer interest as well.  The most promissing audience is
likely the student who is not yet old enough to have graduated.

There's a real challenge in knowing just who comes to Wikipedia to
simply read select articles and why they read what they read.  Currently
5 of the top 10 most viewed articles (after the Main Page) relate to
9/11 and another two are of current affairs nature

In any event, writing in this three level fashion is a particularly
difficult thing to do.  Those who are very knowledgeable in their own
specialty sometimes have no appreciation of what it is that the general
public wants to know about their subject.  Some subjects can't even be
simplified at all.  How we interpret the concept of writing for the
benefit of lower reading abilities is another problem again.  There was
a situation a few years ago in the United States where the Internal
Revenue Service decided that all of its tax guides should be written to
be readable by people with a 10th grade reading level.  What that meant
was that a long difficult word would be replaced by a phrase or even a
whole sentence full of simpler words.  That made the the guides at least
50% thicker.  The person who didn't care to read a 100 page manual,
wasn't going to be any more enthusiastic about a 150 page manual even if
it did contain simpler language.  To make matters worse, those people
who were able to make enough sense of the guide to pick out what was
relevant for them became turned out by the excess verbiage.

Asking that the lead paragraph of an article reasonably and succinctly
defines the subject matter may be as much as we can hope for.

Ec


subject: [Wikipedia-l] A Three Way Split

body:
Actually, only Canada beats the U.S. according to some statistics that
I looked up.  And that appears to be due to diversity in the U.S.,
i.e.  although blacks read less well than whites, it turns out that
Hispanics have the most reading difficulties, which makes sense of
course, since they are not from native-English-speaking families.

I think, based on the same research that I did, that 40% at < 5th grade level
is overblown.  That's not consistent with the numbers that I've seen.  But,
I'm not an expert in this area by a long shot.

Fred Bauder wrote:

> At 05:49 PM 9/18/02 +0200, you wrote:
> >Fred Bauder wrote:
> >
> >>I was watching ABC news and saw a believable statistic, that 40% of the
> >>adult population can't read at the 5th grade level.
> >>
> >40% of the adult population of what ?  The USA ?
> >
> >Perhaps the statistics of other English speaking countrys like Canada,
> >New Zealand, Australia, England are better so the overal numbers are not
> >so bad. -- giskart
>
> The USA. Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and Scotland are probably better,
> England is probably worse.
>
> Fred
>
> [Wikipedia-l]
> To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
> http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Source Forge

body:
For our Source Forge people, I was just trying to check for broken links
in my bookmarks and came across the following at gameai.com.

I've been lax in mentioning this, but there's a group that spun out of
one of the sessions at 2002 GDC <http://www.gdconf.com> now over on
SourceForge <http://www.sourceforge.com> . This group is trying to
create some common AI Interface Standards
<http://sourceforge.net/projects/ai-standards/> to help guide the
evolution of future game AIs. Neat stuff, really. Hop on over and talk
about what you'd like to see...
Posted: 08/27/02

I thought you might like to hear that people have been paying attention
to you.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] A Three Way Split

body:
At 05:49 PM 9/18/02 +0200, you wrote:
>Fred Bauder wrote:
>
>>I was watching ABC news and saw a believable statistic, that 40% of the
>>adult population can't read at the 5th grade level.
>>
>40% of the adult population of what ?  The USA ?
>
>Perhaps the statistics of other English speaking countrys like Canada,
>New Zealand, Australia, England are better so the overal numbers are not
>so bad. -- giskart

The USA. Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and Scotland are probably better,
England is probably worse.

Fred


subject: [Wikipedia-l] A Three Way Split

body:
At 06:05 PM 9/18/02 +0100, you wrote:
>On Wed, Sep 18, 2002 at 06:45:02PM +0200, Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz wrote:
>> Should Wikipedia articles be made understandable, without
>> any preparation, to secondary education students and
>> links to more specialist resources be provided ?
>> Or should we strive for the best, most up-to-date and
>> accurate content ?
>
>I don't really understand why we might want to or have to choose between
>the two. Why not both?

>Khendon  (Jason Williams)
>khendon at khendon.org.uk    http://www.jasonandali.org.uk/jason/

That is the point of the original proposal. To have all 3.

I sat next to a middle school student (we share our library computers with
the charter school next door). He was working on a paper (he happened to be
not that good in English, in fact, a child of an Mexican worker). He was
struggling a bit, for example he thought kangaroos lived in the Sahara
desert, where he got that from...  Anyway he tried out Wikipedia, the
Sahara desert article at that time could have used some work. But I kind of
take him for a model of one class of typical customers. They need
relatively comprehensive basic information. I remember using encyclopedia
articles a whole lot more in elementary school than I ever have later in
life. Another class is retired professionals. I like us to have an article
on international relations that Henry Kissenger would find interesting.

Fred


from_name: Jim McKeeth

subject: [Wikipedia-l] A Three Way Split

body:
At 09:30 AM 9/18/2002 -0700, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>Asking that the lead paragraph of an article reasonably and succinctly
>defines the subject matter may be as much as we can hope for.

I think this is the key.  If we can give them the basics in the first
paragraph then if it is something they are interested in they will stretch
their reading skills (use dictionaries, etc.) to finish the rest of the
article.  For some people that first paragraph may be all they are
interested in.

I know a lot people who probably fall in that 40% who have computers, and
are on the Internet, but none of them would have any interest in visiting
an encyclopedia.  In fact, I would wager the very act of looking up a word
in an encyclopedia would start to elevate their reading level to 5th grade
or beyond.  If we aim the encyclopedia to the 5th grade level then we will
never help to elevate our readers.

-Jim


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Most active contributors

body:
Andre Engels wrote:

>I wanted to see who is the most active contributor at the moment. To do so,
>I counted (or rather, had the database count) the numbers of edits per
>registered user.
>
>The outcome can be found at [[Wikipedia:Most active Wikipedians]].
>
>
>Note that in total we are slightly above 130000 edits, so Maveric did almost
>10% of all edits.
>
This is interesting data, but your total of 130,000 is not correct.  I
put the data from the article on a spreadsheet and totalled the number
of edits.  I came up with 185,630.  And this doesn't include people who
have contributed fewer than 104 edits.

Ec

>


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Most active contributors

body:
I wanted to see who is the most active contributor at the moment. To do so,
I counted (or rather, had the database count) the numbers of edits per
registered user.

The outcome can be found at [[Wikipedia:Most active Wikipedians]].

 1 Maveric149        12995
 2 Andre Engels       6287
 3 Bryan Derksen      5978
 4 AxelBoldt          5802
 5 Koyaanis Qatsi     5002
 6 Ed Poor            4849
 7 Tucci528           4620
 8 Jheijmans          4477
 9 Brion VIBBER       4069
10 Zoe                3853
11 Eclecticology      3667
12 The Anome          3581
13 Tarquin            3577
14 Vicki Rosenzweig   3273
15 -- April           3155
16 Ellmist            2798
17 PierreAbbat        2654
18 Lee Daniel Crocker 2652
19 Isis               2651
20 The Epopt          2586

Note that in total we are slightly above 130000 edits, so Maveric did almost
10% of all edits.

Of course this is only a very rough measure of how much someone is working
on the project - correcting a typo is an edit just as much as, say, extending
a stub to a three-page article. Still, it seems that Wikipedia should hope and
pray that maveric is not getting a life any time soon...

Andre Engels


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Most active users

body:
LDC wrote
>Andre wrote;
>> I wanted to see who is the most active contributor
>> at the moment. To do so, I counted (or rather, had
>> the database count) the numbers of edits per
>> registered user.

>I should point out that this only counts edits made
> since the installation of Magnus's Phase II
> software, so it somewhat undercounts those who
> contributed to the project in its early days, such
> as Larry Sanger, me, Tim Shell, Magnus, and probably
> a few others.

Yeah it would be nice to have /somebody/ who is even
close to me :) (although adding the extra month would
also add a couple hundred more edits to my total too).
It should be noted that the majority of my edits are
rather minor (minor NPOVing, minor adds, wikification
and formatting mostly). I don't know how useful having
a list of most active contributors would be though -
our focus shouldn't be on number of edits but on the
quality of individual articles (which really can't be
measured by any SQL query).

There will always be people like me who feel they need
to do grunt work to make the whole encyclopedia look
and feel like a coherent whole. I would spend more
time on fewer articles (I have a /huge/ backlog of
notes and material to contribute) but since others are
doing that so well I spend much of my time doing what
many people don't like to do because it is boring or
otherwise not fun. If this work gets largely done
without me then I will switch to concentrating my
contributions to fewer articles (something I've been
wanting to do for some time now anyway -- there are
/many/ areas in biology, chemistry and geology that
need better coverage). In short, there are many
different ways to contribute to Wikipedia and a list
of most active users really only highlights Recent
Changes junkies like me.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

PS to Andre; I'm not going anywhere but as my user
page states I have had to significantly cut-back my
contributions due to simultaneous full-time work and
full-time school. In fact, I have been concentrating
my contributions of late toward the element and orders
of magnitude articles. Of course I still wikify,
WikiFormat and check for copyright violations in many
articles every other day or so. I'll be back into the
full swing of things as soon as winter break arrives.

__________________________________________________
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from_name: Khendon

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Most active contributors

body:
On Wed, Sep 18, 2002 at 01:09:10PM +0200, Andre Engels wrote:
> I wanted to see who is the most active contributor at the moment. To do so,
> I counted (or rather, had the database count) the numbers of edits per
> registered user.

Bah; if you'd only done it a day later, I would have easily cracked the
top 200 list :-)  Presumably somebody will update the list occasionally?

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


from_name: wojtek pobratyn

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Most active contributors

body:
At 13:09 18.09.2002, Andre Engels wrote:
>I wanted to see who is the most active contributor at the moment. To do so,
>I counted (or rather, had the database count) the numbers of edits per
>registered user.

If possible, could you give us a hint about what query you used?
I'm almost SQL-illiterate as you see;-)

Cheers,
WojPob


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Most active contributors

body:
> At 13:09 18.09.2002, Andre Engels wrote:
> >I wanted to see who is the most active contributor at the moment. To do so,
> >I counted (or rather, had the database count) the numbers of edits per
> >registered user.
>
> If possible, could you give us a hint about what query you used?
> I'm almost SQL-illiterate as you see;-)

So am I, I had not used SQL at all outside Wikipedia; however I used
Enchanter's formula for creating Wikipedia:Disambiguation_pages_with_links
as my model, and used that I came up with:

SELECT user_name, COUNT(*) as co FROM cur, user WHERE cur_user=user_id GROUP BY user_id ORDER BY co DESC LIMIT 500

plus:

SELECT user_name, COUNT(*) as co FROM old, user WHERE old_user=user_id GROUP BY user_id ORDER BY co DESC LIMIT 500

And then sorted them using Unix commands, and added the numbers by hand. I
suppose that someone who knows more about SQL will be able to tell me how I
could have done the addition within the sorting.

Andre Engels


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Most active contributors

body:
> Yes, and I know what went wrong - the numbers I have are for
> the period since the switch phase I-phase II, that is February,
> while the 130,000 I got from the Statistics page is from the
> period since the phase II-phase III transition, that is, July.

There are 226,000 old article revisions in the database, which
includes all changes made since Phase II, and about 9,600 articles
that have never been edited (and are not redirects), so that's
about 235,000 total edits.  About 190,000 of those are in the
main article namespace.


from_name: Vicki Rosenzweig

subject: [Wikipedia-l] A Three Way Split

body:
At 07:00 AM 9/18/02 -0600, Fred Bauder wrote:
>I was watching ABC news and saw a believable statistic, that 40% of the
>adult population can't read at the 5th grade level.  Not much we can do for
>them.

Believable doesn't mean valid. I'd want a lot more documentation before I
accepted this.

>But it got me thinking and then I read a short article in a book of exerpts
>from ETC about tailoring your writing to the semantic capacity of your
>audience and came up with this proposed convention.
>
>A wikipedia article should begin with a section written for the huge number
>of people who read at a basic level (5th grade level to high school level).
>I suspect that middle school level kids are one of our better customers in
>any event. It should be both written in simple English and contain a basic
>explanation of the topic, accurate and clear, but without technical
>language and niceties, and unless easily stated without whatever
>complicating factors exist with respect to that topic. It should have a
>section title, "[[Simply put]]" or "In [[Simple Terms]], or "In [[Simple
>Terminology]]" (the link would explain what we are doing with this section).

Not at the beginning, please: this sort of approach will drive away much of our
best audience (and potential contributors). In particular, bright high-school
students do *not* want to be talked down to.

If you want to write "simple language" explanations, and cross-reference
them from the main articles, go ahead. But it's not as easy as you seem to
be assuming. (Purely as an exercise for the reader, I'd suggest trying to
rewrite your proposal so it's appropriate for a fifth-grade reading level.)

The beauty of Wikipedia is that *we have all these cross-references*. If
someone is reading an article about the American Revolution and doesn't
know who George III is, all they have to do is click.
--
Vicki Rosenzweig
vr at redbird.org
http://www.redbird.org


from_name: Tom Parmenter

subject: [Wikipedia-l] A Three Way Split

in_reply_to:
<20020918170557.GA2485@mrtall.compsoc.man.ac.uk> (message from
	Khendon on Wed, 18 Sep 2002 18:05:57 +0100)

body:
|From: Khendon <jason at jasonandali.org.uk>
|Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2002 18:05:57 +0100
|
|On Wed, Sep 18, 2002 at 06:45:02PM +0200, Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz wrote:
|> Should Wikipedia articles be made understandable, without
|> any preparation, to secondary education students and
|> links to more specialist resources be provided ?
|> Or should we strive for the best, most up-to-date and
|> accurate content ?
|
|I don't really understand why we might want to or have to choose between
|the two. Why not both?
|
|--
|Khendon  (Jason Williams)
|khendon at khendon.org.uk    http://www.jasonandali.org.uk/jason/
|

Indeed, with a non-paper encyclopedia, we can write it up for the
general inquirer and put "click here for a more detailed and accurate
treatment".

You know, my granddaughter is in the sixth grade.  You can read plenty
at that level.  I can read at the "got part of a master's degree"
level, but I don't do it every day or all the time.  You can also
write plenty at that level if you make the effort.  It's all in the
attitude.  Are you writing to teach?  Or not?

Tom Parmenter
Ortolan88


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Kangaroos in the desert, weas three-way split

body:
"... a child of an Mexican worker).  He was struggling a bit, for example
he thought kangaroos lived in the Sahara desert, where he got that
from..."

He probably thought that because kangaroo rats live in the desert in
Mexico and the western US.

No Wikipedia article on them apparently.

Tom Parmenter
Ortolan88


from_name: Giskart

subject: [Wikipedia-l] A Three Way Split

body:
Fred Bauder wrote:

>I was watching ABC news and saw a believable statistic, that 40% of the
>adult population can't read at the 5th grade level.
>
40% of the adult population of what ?  The USA ?

Perhaps the statistics of other English speaking countrys like Canada,
New Zealand, Australia, England are better so the overal numbers are not
so bad. -- giskart


subject: [Wikipedia-l] A Three Way Split

body:
On Wed, Sep 18, 2002 at 06:45:02PM +0200, Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz wrote:
> Should Wikipedia articles be made understandable, without
> any preparation, to secondary education students and
> links to more specialist resources be provided ?
> Or should we strive for the best, most up-to-date and
> accurate content ?

I don't really understand why we might want to or have to choose between
the two. Why not both?

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


from_name: Kurt Jansson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Logging out

body:
> I haven't had the problem
> since Lee has made his adjustment yesterday.  I also double-checked to
> make sure that I was remembering the log-in across sessions.
Hopefully
> the problem is gone forever.

Someone reported the same problem one hour ago on the German Wikipedia:
http://de.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Beobachtete_Fehler

Kurt


from_name: Stephen Gilbert

subject: [Wikipedia-l] A Three Way Split

body:
--- "Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz" <kpj at kki.net.pl> wrote:
> Should Wikipedia articles be made understandable,
> without
> any preparation, to secondary education students and
> links to more specialist resources be provided ?
> Or should we strive for the best, most up-to-date
> and
> accurate content ?

Both. I think that articles (and collections of
articles on related topics) will evolve in this
direction naturally. General articles will serve as
broad introductions to a given topic and also provide
a jumping-off point to more detailed and specific
treatments.

Stephen Gilbert

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New DSL Internet Access from SBC & Yahoo!
http://sbc.yahoo.com


from_name: Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz

subject: [Wikipedia-l] A Three Way Split

body:
On 18-09-2002, lcrocker at nupedia.com wrote thusly :
>
> >While I understand the motivation, I think a better
> >plan would be to put some effort into the Basic
> >English Wikipedia. One person started it, but it
> >hasn't caught on yet.
>
> I couldn't disagree more--I think that separate wiki is
> a complete waste of time and effort.  After all, it's
> based on a premise that has itself been thoroughly
> discredited ("Basic English" is based on the idea that
> limited vocabulary is what makes a language simple--
> linguists know better), and it can only serve to
> distract and divide the labor of good contributors.
> Far better we should work to make all articles on the
> main site more lucid.

Hi all,

I think this is an important subject that needs some
more debate.

Looking from my field most encyclopedic articles
(not only Wikipedia's) look oversimplified.
In some cases they are aimed at general public and
designed to be so.
Sometimes there are size constraints in paper encyclopedias.

Should Wikipedia articles be made understandable, without
any preparation, to secondary education students and
links to more specialist resources be provided ?
Or should we strive for the best, most up-to-date and
accurate content ?

Regards,
kpjas.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Dutch Wikipedia ready for Phase III Software

body:
The Dutch Wikipedians (or at least a few of them) have been working on
translating the configuration file the last few weeks, and now regard
themselves ready to start up Phase III for real (or at least in test version).
The result of our work can be found at:

http://home.deds.nl/~sol3/wikinl/LanguageNL.php.txt

We don't know what should happen now, but would like to get on the new
Software as quickly as possible.

Andre Engels


from_name: Adam Williamson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Source Forge

body:
On Wed, 2002-09-18 at 17:38, Ray Saintonge wrote:
> For our Source Forge people, I was just trying to check for broken links
> in my bookmarks and came across the following at gameai.com.
>
> I've been lax in mentioning this, but there's a group that spun out of
> one of the sessions at 2002 GDC <http://www.gdconf.com> now over on
> SourceForge <http://www.sourceforge.com> . This group is trying to
> create some common AI Interface Standards
> <http://sourceforge.net/projects/ai-standards/> to help guide the
> evolution of future game AIs. Neat stuff, really. Hop on over and talk
> about what you'd like to see...
> Posted: 08/27/02
>
> I thought you might like to hear that people have been paying attention
> to you.

Huh? Sourceforge is one of the biggest sites of the free software
community, where development for a whole bunch of rather important
applications is carried on. Doesn't need references to ghost projects
from small AI sites to confirm its importance, really...have you looked
at the amount of stuff that's on sourceforge, or its usage statistics,
lately? Read the about sourceforge page...
--
adamw


from_name: Bryan Derksen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Most active contributors

body:
At 01:09 PM 18/09/02 +0200, Andre Engels wrote:
>I wanted to see who is the most active contributor at the moment. To do so,
>I counted (or rather, had the database count) the numbers of edits per
>registered user.
>
>The outcome can be found at [[Wikipedia:Most active Wikipedians]].
>
>  1 Maveric149        12995
>  2 Andre Engels       6287
>  3 Bryan Derksen      5978

Holy cow! I had no idea I was that far up there. I might have to start
taking myself more seriously in the future.

Heh heh heh... I'm gunning for your silver medal now, Andre! I just have to
add/edit 300 more articles! Maveric's probably quite secure with the gold,
though. :)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] A Three Way Split

body:
On 18-09-2002, Khendon wrote thusly :
> On Wed, Sep 18, 2002 at 06:45:02PM +0200, Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz wrote:
> > Should Wikipedia articles be made understandable, without
> > any preparation, to secondary education students and
> > links to more specialist resources be provided ?
> > Or should we strive for the best, most up-to-date and
> > accurate content ?
>
> I don't really understand why we might want to or have to choose between
> the two. Why not both?

I mean we either take 'general reference attitude' or 'reflection of the current
human knowledge attitude'. Has this been decided ? Discussed ?

Regards,
kpjas.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] A Three Way Split

body:
On 18-09-2002, Fred Bauder wrote thusly :
> I was watching ABC news and saw a believable statistic, that 40% of the
> adult population can't read at the 5th grade level.  Not much we can do for
> them.
>
> But it got me thinking and then I read a short article in a book of exerpts
> from ETC about tailoring your writing to the semantic capacity of your
> audience and came up with this proposed convention.
>
> A wikipedia article should begin with a section written for the huge number
> of people who read at a basic level (5th grade level to high school level).
> I suspect that middle school level kids are one of our better customers in
> any event. It should be both written in simple English and contain a basic
> explanation of the topic, accurate and clear, but without technical
> language and niceties, and unless easily stated without whatever
> complicating factors exist with respect to that topic. It should have a
> section title, "[[Simply put]]" or "In [[Simple Terms]], or "In [[Simple
> Terminology]]" (the link would explain what we are doing with this section).
>
> This should be followed by the section "In [[General Terminology]]" which
> would contain material tailored to the high school or college graduate,
> basically the top 20% of the population which is literate. A attempt would
> be made to edit this so that a coherent NPOV article results which reads
> easily, including basic technical language and definitions.
>
> The third section of advanced or specialized material (for you, who
> regularly tested in the 99th percentile +) would give a full technical
> treatment, would not try to create an integrated viewpoint (that is the
> ambiguities of the topic would be exposed), go into detail about
> controversies in the area etc.
>
> There would be an external links and further reading after each section
> with appropriate material.
>
> I have noted in my own writing style that I tend to mix up material of all
> three types in the opening paragraph. A conscious choice to write for our
> likely audiences would, IMO, result in a more useful (and authoritative)
> enclyclopedia.

This 3-tier approach would require a special kind of discipline from
Wikipedia authors that I think would be hard to achieve with the current
'no rules' rule.

Besides it would mean major rewrite of almost (all ?) articles.

Regards,
kpjas.


from_name: Axel Boldt

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Most active contributors

body:
> I just have to  add/edit 300 more articles!

For anybody who feels the urge to add a cool 1500
article edits to their account, I suggest removing the
remaining now obsolete Year-in-Review links from the
year pages. I think I'm down to the 13th century.

Axel

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New DSL Internet Access from SBC & Yahoo!
http://sbc.yahoo.com


from_name: elian

subject: [Wikipedia-l] A Three Way Split

body:
Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> writes:

> There's a real challenge in knowing just who comes to Wikipedia to
> simply read select articles and why they read what they read.
> Currently 5 of the top 10 most viewed articles (after the Main Page)
> relate to 9/11 and another two are of current affairs nature

Maybe a short questionnaire for wikipedia readers, which they can fill out
volontarily, would help to get answers to these questions and would give
interesting insights about the wikipedia audience to the regular writers.

greetings,
elian


from_name: Karen AKA Kajikit

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Most active contributors

body:
Andre Engels wrote:
>
> I wanted to see who is the most active contributor at the moment. To do so,
> I counted (or rather, had the database count) the numbers of edits per
> registered user.
>
> The outcome can be found at [[Wikipedia:Most active Wikipedians]].

[snip]

> Note that in total we are slightly above 130000 edits, so Maveric did almost
> 10% of all edits.
>
> Of course this is only a very rough measure of how much someone is working
> on the project - correcting a typo is an edit just as much as, say, extending
> a stub to a three-page article. Still, it seems that Wikipedia should hope and
> pray that maveric is not getting a life any time soon...

Hmmm... I would have thought I'd be up there, and looking at the longer
list I see I slot in at number 21 - not bad since I only registered in
April! :)

I haven't got a job... so what's everyone else's excuse? :P

--

Karen AKA Kajikit

And on the seventh day, God said 'What my world needs is a creature
that will truly appreciate it in all its facets' -
and so He made the kitten.

Come and visit my part of the web:
Kajikit's Corner: http://Kajikit.netfirms.com/
Aussie Support Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AussieSupport
Allergyfree Eating Recipe Swap:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Allergyfree_Eating
Ample Aussies Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ampleaussies/

Love and huggles to all!


from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Book links

body:
Eclecticology wrote:

>The LC Classification does have many benefits, but it remains a subject
>based listing, and as such involves a great deal of subjectivity.  Would
>a book of the correspondence between an American and a French novellist,
>for example, be included in the PQ or the PS class?  An author with
>multiple interests would have his works all over the place.  What's more
>some libraries are free to deviate from LC to meet the needs of their
>own particular conventions.

Of course, this is no argument for ISBN in preference to LC;
it's only an argument for author/title.
I think that LC is better if we can make it work.

>The author/title approach probably remains the best basis.

My worry here is that this isn't very conducive to look up by computer,
since the spelling can vary (not only foreign names,
but prepositions and articles in the titles).
If we have people look these up in the LC catalogue,
then they might as well look up the LC number as well.

-- Toby


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Book links

body:
Axel Boldt wrote:

Toby Bartels wrote:

>>But we need a code that you can easily look up
>>just from having the book in your hand,

>Well, the book's code has to be looked up only once, when the
>Wikipedia article containing the book reference is written. For those
>books which don't already contain the LC code, determining it involves
>a 2 minute visit to the Library of Congress catalog's website.

Wow! the LC web site is much better than it was when I last tried this.
I now agree that LC# is the way to go, if we have sites to look it up in.

-- Toby


from_name: tarquin

subject: [Wikipedia-l] A Three Way Split

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

> Fred Bauder wrote:
>
>> I was watching ABC news and saw a believable statistic, that 40% of the
>> adult population can't read at the 5th grade level.  Not much we can
>> do for
>> them.
>
Some of us have known this sad statistic for a long time. Although in
the UK I think it' s 20%. That is still alarmingly high.

 > There was a situation a few years ago in the United States where the
Internal Revenue Service decided that all of its tax guides should be
written to be readable by people with a 10th grade reading level.

Yes, they have done that in the UK too, for most government forms such
as tax and Social Security.
The problem is that they are largely incomprehensible to people with an
adult reading age. The sentence end up winding too much and tripping
over themselves. To break them up they shove in full stops and "ands".
They eliminate all complex clauses, and end up being very ambiguous.
Lately, utility companies have started simplifying too: my electricity
bill now just says "PLEASE PAY ?46.40", with no explanation of how many
units I've used, or how much is tax, until I turn over and read small print.

>
> Asking that the lead paragraph of an article reasonably and succinctly
> defines the subject matter may be as much as we can hope for.

I agree. The opening paragraphs should establish context (already a
wikipedia guideline), establish which discipline the article falls
under, and give links to less specialized pages: "In [[mathematics]], a
'''group''' .... " etc.

Clear writing should always be a goal, but that should not result in
over-simplified writing.


from_name: lcrocker at nupedia.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Book links

body:
>> Well, the book's code has to be looked up only once, when the
>> Wikipedia article containing the book reference is written. For
>> those books which don't already contain the LC code, determining
>> it involves a 2 minute visit to the Library of Congress catalog's
>> website.

> Wow! the LC web site is much better than it was when I last tried
> this.  I now agree that LC# is the way to go, if we have sites to
> look it up in.

Thanks, I'll check it out.


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] A Three Way Split

body:
On Wednesday 18 September 2002 09:59 pm, you wrote:
> Both. I think that articles (and collections of
> articles on related topics) will evolve in this
> direction naturally. General articles will serve as
> broad introductions to a given topic and also provide
> a jumping-off point to more detailed and specific
> treatments.
>
> Stephen Gilbert

I agree - this is exactly what is being done for the country and state
articles. I also try to encapsulate the essence of a subject by always
writing a good definition and have that serve as the introductory paragraph.

That way if the reader /only/ reads the first paragraph then they will still
get a good idea of what the subject /is/. Intro paragraphs are also great
places to entice the reader into reading more. This does lead to some minor
redundancy between the body and the intro though. But since only the most
important facts are supposed to be stated in the intro this is hardly a
liability. See  http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Whither bondage?

body:
tarquin wrote:

>Sudden influx of pages on bondage today:
>bondage magazine
>bondage photographer
>bondage artist

>Yes, yes, I know, wikipedia is *wide*, wikipedia is *all-inclusive*,
>wikipedia has room for everyone and everything.
>Even so, I am feel mysteriously tempted to start writing a slew of
>articles on the fine art of picking one's nose.

Well, nose picking is much less of a social activity than bondage,
and there probably aren't magazines, photographers, or artists dedicated to it.
(Yes, there's surely a nose picking fetish out there, but it must be rare.)
Still, if I'm wrong, and you know something about nose picking,
then by all means, write away!

-- Toby Bartels
   Wikipedia contributor
   Bondage enthusiast


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Most active contributors

in_reply_to:
<3D88D8E7.2070308@telus.net> from Ray Saintonge at "Sep 18, 2002
 12:49:59 pm"

body:
> This is interesting data, but your total of 130,000 is not correct.  I
> put the data from the article on a spreadsheet and totalled the number
> of edits.  I came up with 185,630.  And this doesn't include people who
> have contributed fewer than 104 edits.

Yes, and I know what went wrong - the numbers I have are for the period since
the switch phase I-phase II, that is February, while the 130,000 I got from
the Statistics page is from the period since the phase II-phase III
transition, that is, July.

Andre Engels


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Most active users

body:
mav wrote:

> Yeah it would be nice to have /somebody/ who is even
> close to me :) (although adding the extra month would
> also add a couple hundred more edits to my total too).
> It should be noted that the majority of my edits are
> rather minor (minor NPOVing, minor adds, wikification
> and formatting mostly). I don't know how useful having
> a list of most active contributors would be though -
> our focus shouldn't be on number of edits but on the
> quality of individual articles (which really can't be
> measured by any SQL query).

That's true, as #2 I must say that many of my edits are even more minor
than that - no textual change at all, just redirecting one or two links
so that they bypass a disambiguation page. For a better view of my REAL
contribution to Wikipedia, one could perhaps look at my /Pages page (108
pages started, 10 pages started but my text lost, 68 other major edits,
with a number forgotten).

Andre Engels


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Article def for {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}}

body:
This has been discussed in a few places and the consensus that I have
gathered is that most people would like to have a more conservative
definition for purposes of software detection.

Could this be enacted before we hit our "50%" milestone of 50,000 "articles"?

Hitting that number could very well get us undeserved media attention and
subsequent media articles that are critical of our article count and average
article quality (based on byte size). That is not the type of media attention
we need.

For starters, a 500-1000 byte minimum page size should be part of the current
spec (keep this in mind though: there are many minor topics that can be
considered to be minimal articles with only 500 bytes). Other more
complicated criteria can be added later.

Having the default behavior of "Random pages" to be "Random article" would be
nice to (that is, only pages that are automatically detected as articles
would be displayed).

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: Brion VIBBER

subject: [Wikitech-l] New software TEST wiki for Dutch; eo, pl updates

body:
As requested, I've set up a Dutch test wiki running the new software.
I've been sent also a Danish translations file, but I don't yet have
access to the usemod database for the current Danish wiki to convert
from; when I have that I'll set it up too.

A couple days ago I wrote:
 >   http://eo.wikipedia.org/
 >   http://pl.wikipedia.org/

and http://nl.wikipedia.org/

 > (This will be the same location the final upgraded wikis will be at,
 > but the current .com URLs will also be redirected there once things
 > are set up for real.)
 >
 > A number of things are probably broken, including:
 >
 > * There may be searching problems with non-ASCII chars

Please check!

 > * Article titles which start with non-ASCII chars may not have proper
 > case conversion. This is either a bug in the locale setup or in PHP's
 > ucfirst() function; if I can't iron it out, I'll copy in the
 > workaround I'd used in an earlier version of the program.

Now fixed on pl, eo. Nl is latin-1, shouldn't have a problem.

 > * There are some article titles in the Polish database which started
 > with lowercase non-ASCII chars. These may have been skipped in
 > conversion; this should be fixable with automatic renaming, remind me
 > to do that.

I'm told this is not a problem for the Polish wiki. Please check on
others.

 > * The automatic conversion of uploaded files is very buggy so I
 > temporarily disabled it; I'll rework that in a bit. In the meantime,
 > test to be sure that uploads work.

More or less fixed now. Please check them!

Files previously linked from the English wiki are automatically copied
over in the conversion and relinked with the new syntax; files linked
from the meta wiki are not, mainly because that's on a different server
and I don't have clean access to the upload space there.

 > * User accounts are not carried over; make sure you can create and use
 > new accounts.

Still true.

 > * X-system conversion for the Esperanto wiki isn't currently
 > implemented; until I get that cleanly worked in, use Ek! (Windows) or
 > an appropriate multilingual keyboard layout (Mac, Unix) to type
 > supersigns.

Still on the agenda...

 > * I've converted both of these wikis to standard UTF-8 (from modified
 > UTF-8-with-X-surrogates for eo and ISO-8859-2 for pl). Difficulties
 > internal to the system (for instance, capitalization issues) should be
 > sorted out shortly. Polish folks; if this is a real problem with
 > browser support (can you read & write as before?), let me know; in the
 > worst case I can shift you back to ISO-8859-2 and have more charsets
 > to deal with.

No one's complained to me yet (though there are some URL-prettification
issues in general which I will be attacking when I get a chance;
especially as regards the note at the bottom of the Printable version),
so I guess that's fine. Dutch and Danish will continue to be ISO-8859-1
for the time being.

 > * URLs with titles in the old syntax/charset aren't compatible yet,
 > this will be added in before final conversion, so URLs will be
 > preserved.  On the same note, interlanguage links to English, French,
 > German etc (ISO-8859-1) with accented characters won't work if typed
 > in straight. That'll get fixed in a bit.

Still on the agenda. Dutch, Danish are the same as English, German;
don't have to worry about this.

 > * Namespaces may be generally broken, and some translations may suck.
 > :) Suggestions for improvements and corrections are welcome.

Please check these!

 > * Talk (diskusja, priparolu) links are (or at least should be)
 > automatically converted to namespaces, but the links aren't taken out
 > of the body text yet. That'll be done later.

These should now be automatically plucked out in most cases (where the
link appears alone on a line and it looks safe to remove). Please check
that real links haven't been disappeared too.

Note that pre-conversion text should be preserved in the edit histories,
so individual problem conversions should be easy to restore. Serious
problems, of course, should be fixed in the script before the final
conversions are made.

 > * The timezone on the new server is UTC instead of California time;
 > for Polish eventually the _default_ offset will be local Polish time,
 > but this isn't ready yet.

Done. Polish, Dutch should be on Central European time by default, as is
the live German wiki. Manual timezone offset is still against UTC.

 > I'll be making improvements over the next few days; if things are
 > looking reasonably good, expect final conversion by the end of the
 > week. Please play with editing, special pages, etc and complain at me
 > if things other than the above-mentioned don't work.
 >
 > Oh, and here's the page on the English wiki which describes the
 > various changes from the old software to the new:
 >   http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:PHP_script_new_features

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com

body:
mav wrote:
>Having the default behavior of "Random pages" to be "Random article" would be
>nice to (that is, only pages that are automatically detected as articles
>would be displayed).

Not if an article must be 500 bytes--then how do we find stubs?  Frequently I'll find a stub and add a sentence or so to it--that e.g. Tony Hawk has a popular series of skateboarding video games on various platforms, etc.

I would always like stubs to turn up through "random page."

kq


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Book links

body:
Books are most easily found by ISBN if you wish to buy them. To find them
in a library or if they don't have an ISBN author and title (supplemented
by publisher or binding information) works best. Many libraries us Dewey
Decimal rather than Library of congress classification. To find all the
editions of a book you have one ISBN for a further search for author and
title will produce them on a good search engine like ABE or if they all
have an ISBN on AddAll.

Not all books that have ISBNs have Library of Congress numbers or are in
the Library of Congress. (Two copys of any book copyrighted in the US go to
the Library but not all are put in the collection and cataloged). That
includes many books published in the past that don't have ISBNs too of course.

If a book published outside the US is in the Library of Congress Collection
it has a LC number, but it almost always has an ISBN (the ones starting
with something else than 0 or 1 which cover the US and UK.). This leaves
out several hundred thousand books published each year (about 100,000 in
Spanish).

Practically a link to a good author title search like the AddAll used
search is probably the best thing we can give our users.  I think the How
to Find a Book has progressed enough that it could be included in at the
bottom of that page clicking on an ISBN takes you to, but don't freeze it
just yet, it doesn't have how to use OCLC (World Cat) on it yet.

Fred

At 09:53 PM 9/18/02 -0700, you wrote:
>Eclecticology wrote:
>
>>The LC Classification does have many benefits, but it remains a subject
>>based listing, and as such involves a great deal of subjectivity.  Would
>>a book of the correspondence between an American and a French novellist,
>>for example, be included in the PQ or the PS class?  An author with
>>multiple interests would have his works all over the place.  What's more
>>some libraries are free to deviate from LC to meet the needs of their
>>own particular conventions.
>
>Of course, this is no argument for ISBN in preference to LC;
>it's only an argument for author/title.
>I think that LC is better if we can make it work.
>
>>The author/title approach probably remains the best basis.
>
>My worry here is that this isn't very conducive to look up by computer,
>since the spelling can vary (not only foreign names,
>but prepositions and articles in the titles).
>If we have people look these up in the LC catalogue,
>then they might as well look up the LC number as well.
>
>
>-- Toby
>[Wikipedia-l]
>To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
>http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Edit wars

body:
At 02:32 PM 9/19/02 +0100, you wrote:
>I'm new here, so this is probably a silly idea; but...
>
>I wonder if a page called something like [[wikipedia:Current edit wars]]
>might be a good idea. When somebody spots that they or others are
>becoming involved in an edit war, they could put a link on that
>page.
>
>That way, "outsiders" with less of a stake in that particular
>war might be able to contribute some neutrality.
>
>Just, y'know, a random passing thought.
>
>khendon at khendon.org.uk

Sounds good, but, you know, dragging in a sysop or someone else with
"authority" is just another tactic. And often they just get caught up in
the same dynamic without knowing the background of the dispute.

Fred


from_name: Neil Harris

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>This has been discussed in a few places and the consensus that I have
>gathered is that most people would like to have a more conservative
>definition for purposes of software detection.
>
>Could this be enacted before we hit our "50%" milestone of 50,000 "articles"?
>
>Hitting that number could very well get us undeserved media attention and
>subsequent media articles that are critical of our article count and average
>article quality (based on byte size). That is not the type of media attention
>we need.
>
>For starters, a 500-1000 byte minimum page size should be part of the current
>spec (keep this in mind though: there are many minor topics that can be
>considered to be minimal articles with only 500 bytes). Other more
>complicated criteria can be added later.
>
>Having the default behavior of "Random pages" to be "Random article" would be
>nice to (that is, only pages that are automatically detected as articles
>would be displayed).
>
>-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
>[Wikipedia-l]
>To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
>http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
>
>
>
>
I vote for a 500 byte cutoff to be added to the existing rules.  More
conservative estimates can do us nothing but good.
1000 bytes is too brutal, though: as mav says, many simple topics can be
dealt with in 500 bytes.  This will have the effect of reducing the
article count by about 30%, to around 31,000.

The [[Wikipedia:Size of Wikipedia]] page graphs can be adjusted to deal
with the change in index.

Oh, by the way, can I be please be granted administrator privileges?

Neil


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Year in Review (was: Most active contributors)

body:
--- Andre Engels <engels at uni-koblenz.de> wrote:

> Actually, to get 1500, they would have to find
> another project as well -
> there are 'only' 800 such year pages left.

Ok then, here's another project: find a list of the
most common spelling mistakes in the English language,
and correct them all in Wikipedia. Fun!

Axel

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New DSL Internet Access from SBC & Yahoo!
http://sbc.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Book links

body:
On Thu, 2002-09-19 at 05:55, Toby Bartels wrote:
> Axel Boldt wrote:
>
> Toby Bartels wrote:
>
> >>But we need a code that you can easily look up
> >>just from having the book in your hand,
>
> >Well, the book's code has to be looked up only once, when the
> >Wikipedia article containing the book reference is written. For those
> >books which don't already contain the LC code, determining it involves
> >a 2 minute visit to the Library of Congress catalog's website.
>
> Wow! the LC web site is much better than it was when I last tried this.
> I now agree that LC# is the way to go, if we have sites to look it up in.

Is it possible to get an LC number for a book that's never been
published in the US?
--
adamw


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Re: Article def for {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}}

body:
>mav wrote:
>>Having the default behavior of "Random pages" to be
>>"Random article" would be nice to (that is, only
>>pages that are automatically detected as articles
>>would be displayed).
>
>Not if an article must be 500 bytes--then how do we
>find stubs? Frequently I'll find a stub and add a
>sentence or so to it--that e.g. Tony Hawk has a
>popular series of skateboarding video games on
>various platforms, etc.1
>
>I would always like stubs to turn up through "random
>page."
>
>kq

That's why I said "default behavior". It of course
would be nice for a logged-in user to have the ability
to turn that filter off.

--Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New DSL Internet Access from SBC & Yahoo!
http://sbc.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikipedia-l] A Three Way Split

body:
As a former primary teacher and recovered dyslexic, I'm not at all
surprised that 40% of the population are only up to a 5th grade level
(if that).

I'm a fluent adult, and there are some articles in the wikipedia that
leave me going 'huh?!' because they're too complex and convoluted... I
think a really good writer who knows what they're talking about can make
complicated information seem simple, but a poor writer or someone overly
involved in the subject can make the simple seem incredibly complex
because they assume that everyone else has a certain level of
understanding that they don't actually have.

--

Karen AKA Kajikit

And on the seventh day, God said 'What my world needs is a creature
that will truly appreciate it in all its facets' -
and so He made the kitten.

Come and visit my part of the web:
Kajikit's Corner: http://Kajikit.netfirms.com/
Aussie Support Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AussieSupport
Allergyfree Eating Recipe Swap:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Allergyfree_Eating
Ample Aussies Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ampleaussies/

Love and huggles to all!


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikipedia-l] A Three Way Split

body:
Robert Graham Merkel wrote:

> I strongly disagree with the idea of splitting
> Wikipedia up at this stage.  Make sure we provide comprehensible
> introductions
> to articles, readable overviews, and concentrate on clear writing, and
> most of Wikipedia will be comprehensible to most people who try to read
> it (perhaps with some help for younger children, but they're going to
> need
> help with any other reference).

In many cases that should read "perhaps with some help *from* younger
children".

Ec


body:
Neil Harris wrote:

> koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com wrote:
> >
> >Not if an article must be 500 bytes--then how do we find stubs?
> Frequently I'll find a stub and add a sentence or so to it--that
> >
> >I would always like stubs to turn up through "random page."
> >
> >kq
>
> How about this: we call what the existing count measures "article
> entries" or "entries"  and articles that fit the new, more tightly
> defined count's rules are then called "substantial articles" or just
> "articles".
>
> We could then have both "Random article" and "Random entry".
>
I can support that solution.  Access to all "entries" can often be very
useful.


from_name: Imran Ghory

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Most active contributors

body:
On 18 Sep 2002, at 20:52, Axel Boldt wrote:

> > I just have to  add/edit 300 more articles!
>
> For anybody who feels the urge to add a cool 1500
> article edits to their account, I suggest removing the
> remaining now obsolete Year-in-Review links from the
> year pages. I think I'm down to the 13th century.

Not wanting to spoil anyones fun, wouldn't it be slightly more
productive for someone with access to the server to just export the
year articles from the database, do a search and replace, and
import them back in ?

Imran

Imran


body:
mav wrote:
>KQ wrote:
>>I would always like stubs to turn up through "random
>>page."
>>
>>kq
>
>That's why I said "default behavior". It of course
>would be nice for a logged-in user to have the ability
>to turn that filter off.

interesting idea, but I wonder if that wouldn't give a false
impression of the state of wikipedia.  Or would that matter?

kq


body:
koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com wrote:

>mav wrote:
>
>>KQ wrote:
>>
>>>I would always like stubs to turn up through "random
>>>page."
>>>
>>>kq
>>>
>>That's why I said "default behavior". It of course
>>would be nice for a logged-in user to have the ability
>>to turn that filter off.
>>
>interesting idea, but I wonder if that wouldn't give a false
>impression of the state of wikipedia.  Or would that matter?
>
Sometimes it seems that people get a little too concerned about public
image.  If good things are happening on Wikipedia, the public will catch
on in its own good time.

Let's just accept that some stubs are opportunities waiting for newbies

Ec


body:
koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com wrote:

 >mav wrote:
 >
 >
 >>Having the default behavior of "Random pages" to be "Random article"
would be
 >>nice to (that is, only pages that are automatically detected as articles
 >>would be displayed).
 >>
 >>
 >
 >Not if an article must be 500 bytes--then how do we find stubs?
Frequently I'll find a stub and add a sentence or so to it--that e.g.
Tony Hawk has a popular series of skateboarding video games on various
platforms, etc.
 >
 >I would always like stubs to turn up through "random page."
 >
 >kq
 >
 >
 >
 >
 >[Wikipedia-l]
 >To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
 >http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
 >
 >
 >
 >
 >
How about this: we call what the existing count measures "article
entries" or "entries"  and articles that fit the new, more tightly
defined count's rules are then called "substantial articles" or just
"articles".

So, the Main Page would say,

"we already have 31522 substantial articles (out of a total of 43726
article entries)"

We could then have both "Random article" and "Random entry".

Neil


from_name: Jim McKeeth

body:
What if each article had a flag for stub (or entry) vs. article.   Then we
populate all of these flags based on 1000 byte limit.  Later the flag can
be toggled for smaller articles that are complete in less then 1000
bytes.  There could be logic behind the flag that would prevent it from
being set if the article is under a certain size if that is a concern.

I agree that users should be given a default preference of random (or
searching) stubs or articles.  But they should always have the option of
going against their default preference without having to change their
preference.

At 12:21 AM 9/19/2002 -0700, Daniel Mayer wrote:
>For starters, a 500-1000 byte minimum page size should be part of the current
>spec (keep this in mind though: there are many minor topics that can be
>considered to be minimal articles with only 500 bytes). Other more
>complicated criteria can be added later.


body:
Axel Boldt wrote:

> For anybody who feels the urge to add a cool 1500
> article edits to their account, I suggest removing the
> remaining now obsolete Year-in-Review links from the
> year pages. I think I'm down to the 13th century.

Actually, to get 1500, they would have to find another project as well -
there are 'only' 800 such year pages left. The 4th century for example is
completely 'clean', with the exception of 395. (A random check shows that
it is you yourself and Chris mahan who cleaned this one up).

> Not wanting to spoil anyones fun, wouldn't it be slightly more
> productive for someone with access to the server to just export the
> year articles from the database, do a search and replace, and
> import them back in ?

One would have to be VERY careful doing that, because there are 4 or 5
different formats that a not-corrected year page can have. But if someone
wants to do so, maybe (s)he could check the other languages as well, and
automatically add the interlanguage links for them?

Andre Engels


from_name: khendon

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Edit wars

body:
I'm new here, so this is probably a silly idea; but...

I wonder if a page called something like [[wikipedia:Current edit wars]]
might be a good idea. When somebody spots that they or others are
becoming involved in an edit war, they could put a link on that
page.

That way, "outsiders" with less of a stake in that particular
war might be able to contribute some neutrality.

Just, y'know, a random passing thought.

--
khendon at khendon.org.uk


from_name: Kurt Jansson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Whither bondage?

body:
> Still, if I'm wrong, and you know something about nose picking,
> then by all means, write away!

Some hints:
* The journal of Clinical Psychiatry, Vol. 62, p. 426-432
* The journal of Clinical Psychiatry, Vol. 56, p. 56-59
(Sorry, I only have the German titles of the articles.)

You might also want do make a google search for "Rhinotillexomania" (333
hits!).

Have fun!

Kurt