subject: [WikiEN-l] Vacation for Uncle Ed

body:
On Tue, Jan 14, 2003 at 04:10:12PM -0500, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
>I enjoyed my vacation very much, and I see that in my absence everything went much better! So maybe I should stay away a bit longer ^_^

It went quieter, not better.  The entrenched POV partisans had their
way.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [WikiEN-l] Vacation for Uncle Ed

body:
I enjoyed my vacation very much, and I see that in my absence everything went much better! So maybe I should stay away a bit longer ^_^

Ed Poor


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Image Upload Security

body:
On mar, 2003-01-14 at 17:31, Jason "Rodzilla" Rodzik wrote:
> I just uploaded a test script, not even thinking it would let me.  Although
> the script didn't run for some reason(why is that?  I'd like to implement it
> on my own server)

Only the /w/ and /tools/ subdirectories have the PHP filter enabled in
the Apache configuration, and you can't upload to them. So, you just get
to download the source.

>  isn't this still a possible security breech?  The ability
> to upload .php files should be stopped during script execution.

Arbitrary HTML file uploads are potentially much more dangerous than a
PHP file that your browser is going to load as plaintext.

>   I couldn't
> figure out how to delete the file either...
> http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image%3ATest.php

Seems to be already deleted.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Jason "Rodzilla" Rodzik

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Image Upload Security

body:
I just uploaded a test script, not even thinking it would let me.  Although
the script didn't run for some reason(why is that?  I'd like to implement it
on my own server) isn't this still a possible security breech?  The ability
to upload .php files should be stopped during script execution.  I couldn't
figure out how to delete the file either...
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image%3ATest.php

---------------------------------------------------
Jason "Rodzilla" Rodzik
Seriously! Owner & Director of Operations
http://www.seriouszone.com


list: wikitech-l

subject: [Wikitech-l] Freak TeX hash error

body:
On http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feigenbaum_constant I see:

   Warning:  pack type H: not enough input, need 16, have 15 in
   /usr/local/apache/htdocs/w/OutputPage.php on line 72

The line is:
         $outputhash = unpack ("H32md5", $rpage->math_outputhash);

It's triggered by this tex fragment:

   <math>\delta = 4.6692\cdots</math>

Inserting it into Wikipedia:Sandbox gives the same error there. On
submit it becomes all-encompassing; on page view it just hides behind
the regular text.

Adding a space to alter the input hash, or clearing it from the math
table causes the next load (with render) to work fine; on reload, the
error comes up.

Changing \delta to \alpha makes it play nice.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [Wikitech-l] Ugly <math>

body:
Tim Starling wrote:

>\sin -> sin, etc.
...
>\! ->

>There you go. If you're too busy, I might even consider coding it. Does PHP
>have regular expressions the same as Perl?

This too is a wheel that's already been invented.
Ask on comp.text.tex about TeX to ASCII converters.

-- Toby


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] 172 :-(

in_reply_to: <20030114202932.GA2693@reactor-core.org>; from krooger@debian.org on Tue, Jan 14, 2003 at 12:29:32PM -0800

body:
Although I agree with Jonathan on this one, let's not debate, on this
list, the particular merits of particular ideas in articles.  Or at
least, let's tie them back to policy.

Jonathan Walther wrote:

> On Tue, Jan 14, 2003 at 01:08:47PM -0500, Tom Parmenter wrote:
> >I wonder if he is salvageable, given my first observation.  Stalin did
> >modernize Russia, and it's worth knowing, but only at the cost of
> >millions of lives, also worth knowing, and more important.  Ideally,
>
> Stalin only modernized Russia with massive outside funding from the very
> "capitalists" he was supposedly fighting against.
>
> Jonathan
>
> --
>                      Geek House Productions, Ltd.
>
>   Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
>   QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
>   General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998
>
> Phone:   604-435-1205
> Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
> Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
> Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Getting rid of protected pages

body:
O.k., I'm convinced.  :-)

Brion Vibber wrote:

> On Tue, 14 Jan 2003, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> > > The Main Page of all language wikis would benefit greatly from this, as it
> > > could now be updated by everyone without the risk of the goat-man suddenly
> > > appearing on our frontpage.
> >
> > Well, this would be nice, I admit.  But sysop status is handed out
> > freely for the asking, for the most part, so I'm not sure if the
> > benefit is really all that great.
>
> Then apparently you haven't been following the Swedish mess. ;)
>
> The fundamental problem with our current sysop model is that promotion and
> demotion of sysops rests with Jimbo, the owner, and myself, one of the
> software maintainers.
>
> Jimbo has very little contact with the non-English wikis, and I am
> directly active in only a couple; as such we can't easily monitor abuse of
> sysop privs or find trustworthy people who should be sysops. An edit war
> goes on and we just don't _know_ who's at fault, who can be trusted to
> calm down, or who's just going to keep trolling.
>
> Related to this is the absent maintainer bottleneck; if the sysops *aren't
> around*, changes don't get made to protected pages. If Jimbo and I *aren't
> around*, new sysop requests don't get filled, and changes don't get made
> to protected pages.
>
> Automatic replacement of an edit copy means that users can still get stuff
> done without constantly petitioning a small number of god-kings; instead,
> the god-kings' responsibility becomes the much smaller task of watching
> for _problematic_ edits and canceling them before they take effect... and
> that can be done by the rest of the users, too, so things keep running if
> every sysop and developer is hit by a bus simultaneously with no plans
> for succession.
>
> We have the same problem with updates to the interface translation files,
> which currently wait on me to fix them up and put them online (and if
> necessary set up and convert the wiki). It's slow, it's prone to delays,
> and it's damned aggravating for everyone involved. Frankly, it's a
> kludge and it's un-wiki... the wiki way would be much better served by
> user-editable stuff at all levels.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


from_name: Tom Parmenter

subject: [WikiEN-l] 172 :-(

body:
I agree too.  But this was meant to be an example of how contributors
we don't agree with, whose very premises we suspect, can still make
contributions to the Wikipedia.

Tom P.
O88

|From: Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com>
|Date: Wed, 15 Jan 2003 05:25:41 -0800
|
|Although I agree with Jonathan on this one, let's not debate, on this
|list, the particular merits of particular ideas in articles.  Or at
|least, let's tie them back to policy.
|
|Jonathan Walther wrote:
|
|> On Tue, Jan 14, 2003 at 01:08:47PM -0500, Tom Parmenter wrote:
|> >I wonder if he is salvageable, given my first observation.  Stalin did
|> >modernize Russia, and it's worth knowing, but only at the cost of
|> >millions of lives, also worth knowing, and more important.  Ideally,
|>
|> Stalin only modernized Russia with massive outside funding from the very
|> "capitalists" he was supposedly fighting against.
|>
|> Jonathan
|>
|> --
|>                      Geek House Productions, Ltd.
|>
|>   Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
|>   QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
|>   General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998
|>
|> Phone:   604-435-1205
|> Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
|> Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
|> Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
|
|
|_______________________________________________
|WikiEN-l mailing list
|WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
|http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
|


subject: [Wikitech-l] Freak TeX hash error

body:
On mer, 2003-01-15 at 06:07, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> It seems it's MySQL who's not playing nice. Last byte of hash of such
> expression is 20 and MySQL probably thinks that as it's a space it doesn't
> have to be transferer to us, and so it transfer only first 15 bytes.
>
> `char(16) NOT NULL' seems to behave that way.
> Is there some data type that doesn't behave that way or should we
> keep adding spaces to $rpage->math_outputhash until it is 16 bytes long ?

Yeah, that would do it. CHAR columns aren't binary-safe; they're
internally padded with spaces at the end and trailing spaces are
stripped on read. Perhaps VARCHAR(16) BINARY?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Mispeelings going wrong

body:
On mer, 2003-01-15 at 07:30, Andre Engels wrote:
> The Dutch misspellings page seems to have gone crazy, showing for many words
> not only the pages with mis-spelled words, but also the pages where the
> word or part of it is spelled correctly. For example, the second misspelling on
> http://nl.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Speciaal:Maintenance&subfunction=mispeelings
> is 'adfundum', being a mis-spelling of 'ad fundum'. There are 18 pages there,
> but those are actually pages with 'ad' rather than 'ad fundum'. What is going
> on? Is there a technical error or is there something wrong with our
> [[Wikipedia:Veel voorkomende spelfouten]]?

Some of the entries used tabs instead of spaces to separate the
misspelled word from the comment/correction. This code was hard-coded to
check for spaces:

   $x = explode ( " " , $x ) ;
   $x = array_shift ( $x ) ;

so it considered "adfundum\t(ad" to be its search word.

I've replaced it with this:

   $x = preg_replace( '/^(\S+).*$/', '$1', $x );

It should now accept any whitespace as a delimiter instead of just
spaces.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

subject: [Wikitech-l] Ugly <math>

body:
On Wed, Jan 15, 2003 at 07:00:53PM +1100, Tim Starling wrote:
> \le -> <=
> \Rightarrow -> <=

Do you see now how does it in fact encode more information ?
Arrows and weak inequality must not use the same symbol.

> There you go. If you're too busy, I might even consider coding it. Does PHP
> have regular expressions the same as Perl?

I think you'll get much further using syntax trees of texvc.
TeX markup is not a regular language, so you can't parse it
well with regular expressions.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Freak TeX hash error

body:
On Wed, Jan 15, 2003 at 12:40:57AM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
> On http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feigenbaum_constant I see:
>
>   Warning:  pack type H: not enough input, need 16, have 15 in
>   /usr/local/apache/htdocs/w/OutputPage.php on line 72
>
> The line is:
>         $outputhash = unpack ("H32md5", $rpage->math_outputhash);
>
> It's triggered by this tex fragment:
>
>   <math>\delta = 4.6692\cdots</math>
>
> Inserting it into Wikipedia:Sandbox gives the same error there. On
> submit it becomes all-encompassing; on page view it just hides behind
> the regular text.
>
> Adding a space to alter the input hash, or clearing it from the math
> table causes the next load (with render) to work fine; on reload, the
> error comes up.
>
> Changing \delta to \alpha makes it play nice.

It seems it's MySQL who's not playing nice. Last byte of hash of such
expression is 20 and MySQL probably thinks that as it's a space it doesn't
have to be transferer to us, and so it transfer only first 15 bytes.

`char(16) NOT NULL' seems to behave that way.
Is there some data type that doesn't behave that way or should we
keep adding spaces to $rpage->math_outputhash until it is 16 bytes long ?


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Mispeelings going wrong

body:
Giskart wrote:
> Is it possibel to exclude the language links?

Only by excluding them from searches altogether (bad!) or perhaps
loading and checking the text of every match manually (ugh).

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikipedia-l] GNU/FDL and other copyleft restrictions.

body:
Something that I've tried to avoid since coming on board Wikipedia in
February 2001.  Could I be made a sysop for Wiktionary; I can still do
without it for Wikipedia.  Since I joined Wiktionary on day-1 I'm
finding that there is a need to be able to cull some of the experimental
pages which have built up.

Ray (Eclecticology)


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikitech-l] Mispeelings going wrong

body:
The Dutch misspellings page seems to have gone crazy, showing for many words
not only the pages with mis-spelled words, but also the pages where the
word or part of it is spelled correctly. For example, the second misspelling on
http://nl.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Speciaal:Maintenance&subfunction=mispeelings
is 'adfundum', being a mis-spelling of 'ad fundum'. There are 18 pages there,
but those are actually pages with 'ad' rather than 'ad fundum'. What is going
on? Is there a technical error or is there something wrong with our
[[Wikipedia:Veel voorkomende spelfouten]]?

Andre Engels


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [WikiEN-l] 172

body:
After leaving a message on 172's user talk page about Jimbo wanting him to
join the mailing list, he and I had a conversation (argument really) about
his contributions and disruptiveness.

During the early part of the discussion he re-inserted  'virulent and deviant"
back in the Pol Pot article in the section that talks about his political
views (an edit war was started over this before). I then stated on talk:Pol
Pot:

  Either choose more neutral sounding
  adjectives or use as few adjectives as
  possible. Words like "virulent" and "deviant",
  while possibly true in an objective sense, still
  do evoke an emotional response in the reader
  which is far from NPOV. --mav

He responded by changing the text to read: "radically revised"

In addition, he surprised me by actually apologizing for adding the suggestive
words and in other places he promised he would try to be less disruptive in
the future (not his exact words, but that was my impression).

See my talk page:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Maveric149

172's talk page:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:172

And the talk page for Pol Pot:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Pol_Pot

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

WikiKarma Payment. Have you had your Wiki today?
I helped with the creation of a new Main Page
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] Ugly <math>

body:
>From: Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com>

<snip>

>I got a better idea, and it takes a lot less coding: move your mouse. :)
>Seriously, "the alt text looks ugly when I let my mouse sit
>on top of an image for several seconds" is what I would consider a
>non-problem.

I think I've been pretty much shouted down on this. But what about the font
size issue?

>The point is not to look good (though if we can, great), but to get
>information across. How much can we strip out of the TeX without losing
>information?

How does "\mathbf{F} = q\mathbf{E}" convey more information than "F = qE"?
Perhaps it conveys more information in the sense defined by Shannon, but
certainly not to the poor human attempting to read the thing. Commands such
as \left and \mathbf serve only to obscure the useful information. Of course
when it comes down to the coding it's a question of judgement. How about I
give you a start?

\sin -> sin, etc.
\nabla -> \/
\approx -> ~=
\le -> <=
\ge -> >=
\ne -> =/=
^\prime -> `
\frac{%1}{%2} -> (%1)/(%2)
\alpha -> alpha, etc.
\rightarrow -> ->
\leftarrow -> <-
\Leftarrow -> =>
\Rightarrow -> <=
\left ->
\right ->
\mathbf{%1} -> %1
\mathbb{%1} -> %1
\mathfrak{%1} -> %1
\mathcal{%1} -> %1
\sqrt{%1} -> sqrt(%1)
\in -> in
\cap -> intersection
\cup -> union
a\,b -> a b
a\;b -> a  b
a\ b -> a  b
a \quad b -> a   b
a \qquad b -> a     b
\! ->

There you go. If you're too busy, I might even consider coding it. Does PHP
have regular expressions the same as Perl?

-- Tim Starling.

_________________________________________________________________
MSN 8: advanced junk mail protection and 2 months FREE*.
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail


from_name: Geoff Burling

subject: [WikiEN-l] Vandalism Watch

body:
For some reason, the topic ``Samnite wars 327 - 290 BC" is attracting a
number of vandals. Well, so far two.

Following various links related to Roman History, I took a look at this
article last night & found it was nothing more than several lines of
gibberish. Instead of blanking this out, I overwrote it with a stub
entry based on 10 minutes of research.

As part of my daily habit, I took a look at all of the articles I had editted,
to see if anyone had changed them & saw this one had been altered. Looking
at the article tonight, I saw some more gibberish added to the end from
different IP address than the first edits.

If a bunch of vandals can't help but turn this article into gibberish,
maybe it should just be deleted.

Geoff


subject: [Wikitech-l] Freak TeX hash error

body:
On Wed, Jan 15, 2003 at 12:46:40PM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
> On mer, 2003-01-15 at 06:07, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> > It seems it's MySQL who's not playing nice. Last byte of hash of such
> > expression is 20 and MySQL probably thinks that as it's a space it doesn't
> > have to be transferer to us, and so it transfer only first 15 bytes.
> >
> > `char(16) NOT NULL' seems to behave that way.
> > Is there some data type that doesn't behave that way or should we
> > keep adding spaces to $rpage->math_outputhash until it is 16 bytes long ?
>
> Yeah, that would do it. CHAR columns aren't binary-safe; they're
> internally padded with spaces at the end and trailing spaces are
> stripped on read. Perhaps VARCHAR(16) BINARY?

It's not variable size - it's always 128 bit.
What is usually used to store MD5s in MySQL ?

Would CHAR(16) BINARY NOT NULL work ?


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikitech-l] History needs multi-page view

body:
See subject, especially important on pages like [[Main Page]] and
[[Wikipedia:Sandbox]]. Could someone familiar with our paging stuff code
that in?

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Giskart

body:
Is it possibel to exclude the language links?

example;

http://nl.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Speciaal:Maintenance&subfunction
=mispeelings

The error "electron (elektron)"

The article http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elektron

The only "electron" is  [[en:Electron]]

Giskart


from_name: youandme at poczta.fm

subject: [Wikitech-l] Put your text... here and JavaScript will wipe it out

body:
Hi list,

Two issues are rised: improving text edit box
and JavaScript to help wiping it out.

While I was working on langauge php file for Polish,
I decided to enhance the text

  Put your text for the new page here.

The rationale was: the imperative tone could provoke
trolls to give a try to they creativity
and vandals to express they agression.

I've changed the text to sth that could be translated
to English as:

  There is no article on that subject yet.
  In this field you can enter it's first fragment.
  If this wasn't your intention just press the Back button.

A bit of comment - the only valid interpretation... ;)
It's a small guide for the "tresspasser"
- first line explains the situation,
- second explains and encourages editing
- the last one clears the confusion that perhaps occured
in the "tresspassers" mind (that's _the_ "guard")

And the ratio of "light" acts of vandalism (since on Polish
Wikipedia there are no such "heavy" acts as on English)
dropped down from about 2-3 unwanted new articles per day
to 1 such article per week!  (I'm still curious if that was
the reason for unwanted edits... :-)

The change provoked some users to add a kind of method
helping in wiping out the default text
- some of them are working on X-Windows - after copying an earlier
prepared article to the clipboard they mark the default text
of the textarea and unfortunately the article in the clipboard
is replaced by rubish (many forget about wiping out the box
at first)
- other would be pleased to substitute 3 step combination
as well (like eg. <leftclik>, <ctrl-a>, <del>)
with one click.

"One click is enough for all of us" as some time ago Sting sang... :-)

We propose to add the following scripts to TEXTAREA attributes

  onfocus="if(this.value=='.....') {this.value='';}"
  onblur="if(this.value=='') {this.value='.....';}"

where five dots should be replace by the text
returned by wfMsg("newarticletext")
this text should be posted between
<TEXTAREA> and </TEXTAREA> tags as well.

I don't know if that works on most browsers so another option
in user preferences would be a necessity.

No matter how long the text, such script makes the work
more comfortable.

Regards
Youandme

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Nowa MOTORYZACJA w portalu INTERIA.PL: aktualnosci, nowe auta, testy,
tuning, ceny, galerie, motosport... >>> http://link.interia.pl/f16bb


subject: [WikiEN-l] Draft of our 2003 press release

body:
I have created a draft for our 2003 press release and have placed it at
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:2003_Press_Release

Unfortunately, I will be out of town for the next several days so I will not
be able to submit a news summary to Slashdot or anywhere else if we hit the
100,000 article mark while I am gone. So it would be great if somebody else
could do this. See the talk page for some suggested text to send to Slashdot.

Also, if anybody knows where we could submit our press release for free then
please do so when the time comes.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

WikiKarma Payment:
Writing the draft press release and
http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=January_16&diff=590304&oldid=589827


from_name: elian

body:
youandme at poczta.fm writes:

> "One click is enough for all of us" as some time ago Sting sang... :-)
>
> We propose to add the following scripts to TEXTAREA attributes
>
>   onfocus="if(this.value=='.....') {this.value='';}"
>   onblur="if(this.value=='') {this.value='.....';}"
>
> where five dots should be replace by the text
> returned by wfMsg("newarticletext")
> this text should be posted between
> <TEXTAREA> and </TEXTAREA> tags as well.

Wouldn't it be better just to set the focus to the text area field on
pageload (I just realized that WP doesn't do yet) and select the content
of the textarea if it equals the NewArticle text?

It gives absolutely the same result (one click and you can type directly
without having to delete something) and it should be more familiar to
newbies.

Can something like this be done in JavaScript? Maybe like this...change
PHP and Javascript as you like ;-)

function doOnLoad() {
        // var ta = document.getElementById["wpTextbox1"];
        var ta = document.forms["form"].elements["wpTextbox1"];
        ta.focus();
        if (ta.value == "<? wfMsg("newarticletext") ?>") {
                ta.select();
        }

}

greetings,
elian
--
to listen to the words of the learned, and to instill into others the
lessons of science, is better than religious exercises.
- prophet muhammad


from_name: james duffy

subject: [WikiEN-l] Deliberate vandalism of earlier versions of articles to stop reverting

body:
Hi Zoe,

I've a serious allegation to make about a fellow Wiki. I wrote a page on the
Irish Potato famine which became rather controversial with two people. One
of them threatened to revert any changes I made, and make sure I could not
revert his changes back.

He rewrote one section of the page in a decidedly POV, dodgy historical way.
When I tried to revert, I found that many of the earlier versions had been
vandalised, by him, so as to ensure that either I could not revert to them
or that if I did, the page would be so littered with POVs (his
interpretations of what he thinks my POVs are!) as to be pulled off.

Here's an example of one of the paragraphs vandalised. The changes he made
are in capitals.

One issue which divides the perspective of Ireland on the history of the
Famine from some BOGUS attitudes among the FAKE Irish - living abroad, is
the claim, made by some of the latter, that the Famine amounted to genocide
by the British against the Irish. Few Irish historians accept such a
PATENTLY FALSE definition, which would imply a deliberate policy of
extermination. While all are agreed that the British policies during the
Famine, particularly those applied by the ministry of [[Lord John Russell]],
were somewhat misguided, perhaps ill-informed and frequently
counter-productive, with Professor Joe Lee calling what happened a
'holocaust', [9] Irish, British and American historians of the cailbre of
Professors [[F.S.L. Lyons]], John A. Murphy, Joe Lee, Roy Foster, and James
S. Donnelly, Jr, as well as historians Cecil Woodham-Smith, Peter Gray, Ruth
Dudley Edwards and many others have long dismissed claims of A DELIBERATE
POLICY OF genocide. PERHAPS MORE THAN A STRONG BELIEF.

I spotted this paragraph by chance. I saw other dodgy add ons as well. I had
to go back to the version before he began his first of a series of
(seemingly innocent) changes (announcing how he was correcting a spelling or
a grammatical mistake,  etc) to find a version that had not been vandalised.

The person responsible is Stevertigo.

What should we do about this? It is one thing to row over interpretation,
but to deliberately vandalise earlier versions so that they cannot be used
or would get pulled as being POV, is astonishing. I know how annoyed many of
us are with 172, but at least (as far as I know) all he does is revert
versions, not vandalise earlier versions as well so that no one can revert
his revertions. I don't fancy having to stand guard over an article most
people are happy with, all because some twat is determined to find some way
of screwing it up

If this is the standard of behaviour that Stevertigo is bringing to Wiki,
then he should be banned.

JT

_________________________________________________________________
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http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus


subject: [WikiEN-l] deliberate vandalism to ensure article can't be reverted.

body:
Hi Tom,

I've a serious allegation to make about a fellow Wiki. I wrote a page on the
Irish Potato famine which became rather controversial with two people. One
of them threatened to revert any changes I made, and make sure I could not
revert his changes back.

He rewrote one section of the page in a decidedly POV, dodgy historical way.
When I tried to revert, I found that many of the earlier versions had been
vandalised, by him, so as to ensure that either I could not revert to them
or that if I did, the page would be so littered with POVs (his
interpretations of what he thinks my POVs are!) as to be pulled off.

Here's an example of one of the paragraphs vandalised. The changes he made
are in capitals.

One issue which divides the perspective of Ireland on the history of the
Famine from some BOGUS attitudes among the FAKE Irish - living abroad, is
the claim, made by some of the latter, that the Famine amounted to genocide
by the British against the Irish. Few Irish historians accept such a
PATENTLY FALSE definition, which would imply a deliberate policy of
extermination. While all are agreed that the British policies during the
Famine, particularly those applied by the ministry of [[Lord John Russell]],
were somewhat misguided, perhaps ill-informed and frequently
counter-productive, with Professor Joe Lee calling what happened a
'holocaust', [9] Irish, British and American historians of the cailbre of
Professors [[F.S.L. Lyons]], John A. rphy, Joe Lee, Roy Foster, and James S.
Donnelly, Jr, as well as historians Cecil Woodham-Smith, Peter Gray, Ruth
Dudley Edwards and many others have long dismissed claims of A DELIBERATE
POLICY OF genocide. PERHAPS MORE THAN A STRONG BELIEF.

I spotted this paragraph by chance. I saw other dodgy add ons as well. I had
to go back to the version before he began his first of a series of
(seemingly innocent) changes (announcing how he was correcting a spelling or
a grammatical mistake,  etc) to find a version that had not been vandalised.

The person responsible, according to the records, is the same person who
threatened to do something; Stevertigo.

What should we do about this? It is one thing to row over interpretation,
but to deliberately vandalise earlier versions so that they cannot be used
or would get pulled as being POV, is astonishing. I know how annoyed many of
us are with 172, but at least (as far as I know) all he does is revert
versions, not vandalise earlier versions as well so that no one can revert
his revertions. I don't fancy having to stand guard over an article most
people are happy with, all because some twat is determined to find some way
of screwing it up

If this is the standard of behaviour that Stevertigo is bringing to Wiki,
then he should be banned.

JT

_________________________________________________________________
Add photos to your e-mail with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*.
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail


body:
> If this is the standard of behaviour that Stevertigo is bringing to Wiki,
> then he should be banned.

I have noticed other strange edits from Stevertigo. But his later version
seems to strive more for NPOV. Let's keep an eye on his contributions. I'll
post a separate mail explaining what I think could be done in cases like this
one.

Regards,

Erik

--
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subject: [WikiEN-l] A mentor system

body:
As we grow larger, we get more and more users who seemingly act against at
least some of our rules or do not understand what our mission is. 172, Frank
Wappler, Stevertigo and others are users I would classify as "problematic".
However, doing so on the wiki will not help us much, it will only alienate them
from Wikipedia. There is, of course, a certain point at which we need to ban
users, but I do not see this line being crossed in these cases yet.

Another idea would be to create a list of "Watched users", with a "watcher"
assigned to each one of them, keeping an eye on their contributions. However,
this does have negative connotations, which might lead to edit wars on the
respective page.

A more positive, affirmative approach might be to create a mentor policy. It
could work like this:

  [[Wikipedia:Available mentors]] -> everyone willing to be a mentor can put
themselves in that list. Only requirement: needs to have been a Wikipedian
for n months. (I suggest n=6).

  [[Wikipedia:Votes for mentoring]] -> users who may need a mentor can be
added to this list.

The "Available mentors" link could be put on the main page and linked
prominently elsewhere so that new users who want some hand holding can message one
of them directly. If we "vote for mentoring" of a user, the assigned mentor
could put some text on the user's talk page:

"Hello, .... It has been suggested that one of the Wikipedia oldtimers could
help you better understand our policies and convention. In that spirit, I
will try to work with you on your future edits to make sure they meet our
standards of neutrality and research. If that bothers you, please comment on my
Talk page or on the [[Wikipedia:Votes for mentoring]]  page."

What do you think? I do believe that we need to watch the edits of
problematic users in a more coordinated fashion, at least.

Regards,

Erik

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subject:
[Wikitech-l] Put your text... here and JavaScript will wipe it
	out

body:
On Don, 2003-01-16 at 00:09, youandme at poczta.fm wrote:

> The rationale was: the imperative tone could provoke
> trolls to give a try to they creativity
> and vandals to express they agression.

I don't think this is a big deal because even non-sysops can fix this by
replacing the nonsense with a stub article. But changing the text might
be a good idea. If we implement the FileCopy proposal, we can perhaps
also make these kind of internal texts world editable - it's all in
Language*.php after all.

Regards,

Erik
--
FOKUS - Fraunhofer Insitute for Open Communication Systems
Project BerliOS - http://www.berlios.de


subject: [Wikitech-l] External editor support

body:
The folks at ZOPE have come up with a pretty damn good idea to support
external editors in all browsers. (Right now we have to use the
<textarea> or copy&paste, the latter of which is horribly broken in
Linux-Mozilla.) It's at

http://www.zope.org/Members/jimbag/ZopeEDIT

What they basically do is generate a x-zope-edit MIME type file, which
contains the data and some metadata. This MIME type has to be associated
with the provided "helper application" by the user. The helper app
(written in Python) launches the editor and, if the file has changed
after the editor is closed, uploads it to the server.

We might implement the same. I suggest the following strategy:

* Should be a user preference with prominent link to help page
explaining setup.

* Use existing "Edit this page" link to call external editor
immediately, so that there's no added overhead

* have some header in the generated file like

<header>
wpMinorEdit=0
wpWatchthis=0
wpSummary=""
</header>

so that we don't miss any other information in the form. Alternatively,
let the helper app provide some user interface to do this.

* Once the file is closed, submit it directly and transparently to the
server. The user just has to reload the page and should see his changes
immediately.

* Biggest problem: In case of edit conflicts, we need to send the helper
app a smart file, preferably with CVS-style syntax. Alternatively,
instead of submitting the file directly to the server, we could launch a
browser window with the contents in preview mode. This is somewhat less
user friendly though, especially if we cannot control how the window is
opened.

In any case, this is an absolute killer feature, especially for power
users. Any volunteers for implementation? Otherwise I'll put it in my
(already long) to do list. (Right now I'm working on talk pages for
anons.)

Regards,

Erik
--
FOKUS - Fraunhofer Insitute for Open Communication Systems
Project BerliOS - http://www.berlios.de


subject: [WikiEN-l] Mostly in defence of 172

body:
172 is a handful and a piece of work.  Vera Cruz is a troll.  We are
indebted to Tannin for making this distinction.

I would work with 172.  I refuse to engage with Vera Cruz.  I
understand that this amounts to surrender to Vera Cruz wherever he,
she, it chooses, but I am not going to lose sleep over it, whereas if
I try to engage with trolls I do, quite literally, lose sleep.

Tom Parmenter
Ortolan88

|From: "Tony Wilson" <list at redhill.net.au>
|Priority: Normal
|X-Qmail-Scanner-Message-ID: <104271797850110872 at ren.netconnect.com.au>
|Sender: wikien-l-admin at wikipedia.org
|Reply-To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
|Date: Thu, 16 Jan 2003 22:53:42 +1100
|
|I'm going to confine these remarks to the areas where I have a
|reasonable amount of experience of interacting with 172, and some
|expertise of my own - in other words, I'll discuss 172's contribution
|to articles dealing with colonial history in the late 19th and early
|20th Centuries. (I have not followed developments in the articles on
|modern China and the USSR at all closely, nor am I especially
|well-versed in those subjects, so on those I'll say nothing.)
|
|User 172 seems to have the ability to arouse great passion. I think
|it's fair to summarise the charges against him as:
|
|1: Left-wing bias
|2: Aggressive defence of his contributions, in particular instant
|reversion without comment to the "authorised version"
|3: Failure to work co-operatively with others
|4: Insisting on cross-posting more-or-less the same text to a number
|of related articles.
|
|And I think it's also fair to add that a great deal of the venom 172
|attracts is not simply because of the points above, but because:
|
|1: He is all too often abrupt and dismissive of those who take a contrary view.
|2: His prose is very difficult to edit. It is dense, convoluted, and
|far from easy reading. Short of wholesale slashing, editing 172's work
|is not for the faint-hearted.
|3: His writing is littered with the jargon of Marxian political
|economy. Readers unfamiliar with sociology or political economy can
|all too easily confuse many of the common technical terms, which  have
|specific, value-neutral  meanings, with the more familiar terms of
|nakedly value-laden Leninist tracts (which were quite well-used until
|recently). The untrained reader thus is prone to jump to  the
|conclusion that 172 is a raving communist.
|
|These factors are multiplied because they work in combination. One
|tends to find a statement that has a questionable POV but feel
|reluctant to edit it because it is embedded in dense, complex, and
|technical prose, and further reluctant because one fears an edit war.
|
|On the other hand. 172 has a great deal of expertise in certain
|fields. On the development of European colonialism, for example, I
|think I'm safe in saying that I am not alone in having developed
|considerable respect for his knowledge. (See Talk:New Imperialism for
|evidence of my assertion here.) He writes in great detail, and on
|dauntingly difficult subjects. Although I firmly believe that 172's
|longer contributions need careful copy editing and peer review before
|they are set in concrete, they make an excellent foundation for
|readable, fact-filled articles of real scholarship. For an example of
|this, wade through the most recent two talk pages in New
|Imperialism. There you will see that Ortolan88, Slrubenstein and I
|made a good start on the task of making the article neutral in tone
|and accessible to the general reader without losing accuracy or too
|much detail. 172 was, on the whole, co-operative with us, and the
|article began to improve a great deal. It was only when the far more
|disruptive and unreasonable Vera Cruz stepped in with (as another
|contributor complained) the "death of a thousand cuts" that Ortolan88
|gave up in disgust. I perservered for a little longer before doing
|likewise, and I think even SLR has become discouraged now.
|
|We can work with 172. We can't work with the mindless chaos of a Vera
|Cruz edit war.  Get rid of that particular disruptive influence and
|SLR or I (or more likely both of us working together) will lick "New
|Imperialisim" into shape inside a week, and unless I miss my guess, we
|will do it with the help and co-operation of 172.
|
|(I should add, just in case the point isn't clear from my comments
|above, that without 172's solid foundation of detailed content, the
|eventual article would be weaker.)
|
|172 *can* be reasoned with. He and I engaged in a moderately
|protracted edit war in History of the Democratic Republic of the
|Congo. (It's worth reviewing the history of that page, and reading its
|talk page also.) Consider the following exchange from Talk:History of
|the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
|
|TANNIN: (as a PS to an extended and detailed defence of my point of
|view about the edit war) The introduction of technical terms,
|especially terms from political economy which have become loaded with
|emotive associations in the minds of most non-specialists, is
|something to avoid except where absolutely essential. Just as writers
|on mathematics have learned the hard way that littering texts for the
|general reader with mathematical formulae is a sure-fire shortcut to
|eternal obscurity, so too must the historian be aware that many of his
|most useful terms are counter- productive in non-specialist
|contexts. In fact, it is worse for the historian than it is for the
|mathematician: readers see a formula and just skip over it because
|they don't understand it or don't want to stop and puzzle it out
|before continuing, but readers see text laced with terms like
|"multinational", "capitalism", "accumulation of surpluses",
|"inalienable", "commodities", and "bourgeois" and, unless the terms
|are used sparingly, and in a way that makes their technical meaning
|clear (as opposed to their emotion-laden common meanings) they recoil
|in horror. Readers don't understand mathemetician's technical
|expressions (their formulae). Readers *misunderstand* political
|economists' technical expressions (words like those listed above) -
|which is a good deal worse.
|
|172: I truly appreciate your suggestions. I will strive to improve my
|communication on the grounds you listed.
|
|Now 172 *did* then take the opportunity to quote my comment in his own
|defence on various user talk pages, and (in my view) made more of it
|than was actually there - I went so far as to complain to him that he
|had quoted me out of context at one point - but I genuinely believe
|that he has learned a little from that exchange (and from some other,
|broadly similar, ones, both with me and with other contributors). He
|remains a prickly character but his prose is improving, and while he
|is certainly not as easy to work with as some, he can be amenable to
|evidence and reason. (As the history and talk of History of the
|Democratic Republic of the Congo shows.)
|
|In summary, yes, 172 creates difficulties. But he also makes a very
|useful contribution to Wikipedia, and is not impossible to work
|with. He has moderated his initial anti-cooperative behaviour, and (I
|suspect) will learn to moderate it further as time goes by (not least
|in consequence of this present controversy).
|
|
|Tony Wilson
|(Tannin)
|list at redhill.net.au
|
|
|_______________________________________________
|WikiEN-l mailing list
|WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
|http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
|


subject: [WikiEN-l] unbanned name

body: So, is "CG" going to continue its unsalubrious existence?


body:
On 16 Jan 2003 at 2:51, elian wrote:
> Wouldn't it be better just to set the focus to the text area field on
> pageload (I just realized that WP doesn't do yet) and select the
> content of the textarea if it equals the NewArticle text?
>
> It gives absolutely the same result (one click and you can type
> directly without having to delete something) and it should be more
> familiar to newbies.
>
> Can something like this be done in JavaScript? Maybe like
> this...change PHP and Javascript as you like ;-)
>
> function doOnLoad() {
>         // var ta = document.getElementById["wpTextbox1"];
>         var ta = document.forms["form"].elements["wpTextbox1"];
>         ta.focus();
>         if (ta.value == "<? wfMsg("newarticletext") ?>") {
>                 ta.select();
>         }
>
> }

For me there's no problem. If you think that this is the most popular
way of doing thing then OK.

To be honest I have to mention that on Wikipl-l there was a second proposal
of HTML attributes version:

  onfocus="if(this.value=='......') { this.value=ArtTitle; }"
  onblur="if(this.value=='' || this.value == ArtTitle) { this.value='......'; }"

Youandme

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Bezplatne przelewy do ZUS i US. Tylko mBIZNES Konto.
>>> http://link.interia.pl/f16bd


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Mechanics of name change

body:
If it is your own name just create a new account and redirect from the old
name and talk pages. (You do lose your old watchlist unless you log in to
the old name to check it).

Fred

>Fellow Wikipedians,
>
>What are the mechanics of changing somebody's username?  Is that something
>administrators can do, or is developer access required?
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Wikipedia-l mailing list
>Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
>http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


from_name: koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] unbanned name

body:
You Wrote:
>So, is "CG" going to continue its unsalubrious existence?

Hm, and I wonder about the new user Cockgoblin.  Completely unrelated,
I'd imagine.

kq


subject: [WikiEN-l] Mostly in defence of 172

body:
If you have problems with Vera Cruz, just remind her[1] that she is on
borrowed time. Vera Cruz is also known as Lir. Lir was banned in November and
immediately signed up under the new handle. By doing so, Lir subverted the ban
and thereby Wikipedia policy -- instead of talking to Jimbo about lifting the
ban, she pretended to be someone else. This alone would be reason enough to
re-establish the ban.

That being said, Vera Cruz / Lir is one of the more active Wikipedia
contributors and has done lots of copyediting (sometimes harmful, but usually OK).
Given that she is clearly a Wikipediholic it could be argued that we are
violating her rights by depriving her of the drug ;->. Under the new nick she has
behaved somewhat more appropriate. She knows that she can be banned
immediately if she breaks the rules again. Give her a gentle warning and she'll
probably stop dicking around.

Regards,
Erik

[1] Lir is apparently one Adam [name omitted for privacy reasons], but she has put herself on the list
of "queer, ... and transgendered Wikipedians", so I'll respect her own
designation of her gender.

--
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NEU: Mit GMX ins Internet. Rund um die Uhr f?r 1 ct/ Min. surfen!


subject: [WikiEN-l] Mostly in defence of 172

in_reply_to:
<3E26EAFB.6070802@planetunreal.com> (message from tarquin on Thu,
	16 Jan 2003 17:25:15 +0000)

body:
This is an old union trick called "work to rule".  Instead of
striking, which, say, public employees have a hard time doing, they
simply follow every rule and regulation to a hyper-T, thus bringing
things to a halt in ways that it is hard for management to complain
about.

Tom P.
088

|From: tarquin <tarquin at planetunreal.com>
|X-Accept-Language: en-us, en
|Sender: wikien-l-admin at wikipedia.org
|Reply-To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
|Date: Thu, 16 Jan 2003 17:25:15 +0000
|
|
|
|Erik Moeller wrote:
|
|>If you have problems with Vera Cruz, just remind her[1] that she is on
|>borrowed time. Vera Cruz is also known as Lir. Lir was banned in November and
|>immediately signed up under the new handle. By doing so, Lir subverted the ban
|>and thereby Wikipedia policy -- instead of talking to Jimbo about lifting the
|>ban, she pretended to be someone else. This alone would be reason enough to
|>re-establish the ban.
|>
|>
|>
|Vera Cruz has a habit of following NPOV policy down to the very last
|dotted t and crossed i.
|
|Today Vera Cruz insisted on removing this from the article on Isaac Asimov:
|"a highly successful and extraordinarily prolific"
|
|Does VC have a metal health problem which makes her/him incapable of
|seeing what is reasonable?
|Or is s/he a troll, bent on applying NPOV so hard it breaks us?
|
|would s/he have us write:
|"Isaac Asimov (dates), described by some as a writer"?
|
|or "born in Russia according to some"?
|or "Asimov was a human being accoding to some advocates"?
|
|
|
|
|>
|>
|
|
|_______________________________________________
|WikiEN-l mailing list
|WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
|http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
|


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [WikiEN-l] unbanned name

body:
Oliver Pereira wrote:
 > If I
> recall the earlier case of Throbbing Monster Cock correctly, a developer
> just changed his name to "TMC", and there were no further problems.
> Couldn't the same thing be done again?

If by "no further problems" you mean to say "the person made several
attempts to use similar usernames, such as the same thing with different
capitalization, ended up with their ip banned for a while, and never
came back under the officially sanctioned or any other recognizable
sanitized nick", then your recollection is correct.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] FileReplacement implementation strategy

body:
Here's how I think the FileReplacement proposal

http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2003-January/008537.html
http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?FileReplacement

should be implemented (Jimbo and Brion agreed that it would be a good
idea):

1) Add a copy_of int(8) column to the CUR table. If blank or 0, the
article is not a copy. This saves us the trouble of creating a dozen
Copy/Copy talk namespaces.

2) Change the "Protect this page" link to a more general "Protection
settings"  special page, looking roughly like this:

	Protection settings
	-------------------
    	[*] Page is not protected

	[ ] Only copy is editable. Page is replaced with copy

    	     [*] [     ] minutes after the last edit
 	     [ ] manually

	[Save]

(The timed auto-replacement might cause problems especially for less
active wikis. How we set the policy is a matter for wikipedia-l.)

The time (null or 0 for unprotected, -1 for manual replacement,
otherwise number of minutes after which article is replaced) could be
stored in the cur_restrictions field of the cur table.

2) Once the page is protected this way, copy page contents to a separate
page with the title appended by "(COPY)" and is_copy set to the
referenced article ID. If there is already a COPY, copy it to the OLD
table first.

3) Now we need a way to automatically do the following:
	1) start OR reset a timer when someone edits the page
	2) replace the article with the COPY once the timer has elapsed.

I'm a bit clueless as to whether there is a good Apache/PHP-based
solution for such a persistent timer, cron seems like a bad choice
(makes the whole thing harder to maintain). The way I would do it is as
follows:

Create a new action table:

		action_type	page_id		action_time

When someone edits a COPY and the protection is not set to manual, set
action_type=1 (copy) and action_time=<current server time> + <copy time
period>.

In wiki.phtml, we have two lines

#
$wgOut->output();
foreach ( $wgDeferredUpdateList as $up ) { $up->doUpdate(); }
#

Between these lines we could insert a function call that checks if there
is anything in the ACTION table and if so, picks a random row (or all
rows, not sure about the load this would cause), creates a new Update
object for that row and adds it to the deferred update list. That way we
would regularly replace the original pages with their copies. Once the
page has been copied, the row is removed from the ACTION table.

User interface
--------------
>From an UI perspective, we would add an "Edit copy" link under the
"Protected page" text. There should also be some dynamically generated
explanatory text on the COPY page:

"This is a copy of $1."

+

"This copy is different from the current revision of [[$2]]. It will
automatically replace it at $3 unless someone else edits it, in which
case the timer is reset to $4 minutes."

OR

"This copy is identical to the current revision of [[$2]]. If it is
edited, it will automatically replace it $4 hours later."

Sysops should also be shown a "Use this revision" link to execute the
copy action immediately.

Discussion
----------
I would be especially interested in feedback on
- "Copy:/Copy talk:/User copy:/User copy talk:..." namespaces vs.
copy_of column vs. ???
- Timed action execution: other strategies; always check all rows of the
table?

As always, I am happy if someone else adds this to their todo list,
otherwise I'll add it to mine.

Regards,

Erik
--
FOKUS - Fraunhofer Insitute for Open Communication Systems
Project BerliOS - http://www.berlios.de


subject: [WikiEN-l] weird Redirects -- Probably being stupid

body:
On ?a?, 2003-01-16 at 16:02, Lee Pilich wrote:
> Actually, it's:
>
> L%E9gion_d%92honneur - article
> L%E9gion_d%27honneur - redirect

Ugh. I've renamed it to use the regular apostrophe instead of a high
control character which happens to be in the same place as a curly
single quote in Microsoft's almost, but not quite, standard character
set.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: tarquin

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Put your text... here and JavaScript will wipe it
 out

body:
youandme at poczta.fm wrote:

>
>While I was working on langauge php file for Polish,
>I decided to enhance the text
>
>  Put your text for the new page here.
>
>The rationale was: the imperative tone could provoke
>trolls to give a try to they creativity
>and vandals to express they agression.
>
>
>

See also http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empty_page_page

>
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Mostly in defence of 172

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>If you have problems with Vera Cruz, just remind her[1] that she is on
>borrowed time. Vera Cruz is also known as Lir. Lir was banned in November and
>immediately signed up under the new handle. By doing so, Lir subverted the ban
>and thereby Wikipedia policy -- instead of talking to Jimbo about lifting the
>ban, she pretended to be someone else. This alone would be reason enough to
>re-establish the ban.
>
>
>
Vera Cruz has a habit of following NPOV policy down to the very last
dotted t and crossed i.

Today Vera Cruz insisted on removing this from the article on Isaac Asimov:
"a highly successful and extraordinarily prolific"

Does VC have a metal health problem which makes her/him incapable of
seeing what is reasonable?
Or is s/he a troll, bent on applying NPOV so hard it breaks us?

would s/he have us write:
"Isaac Asimov (dates), described by some as a writer"?

or "born in Russia according to some"?
or "Asimov was a human being accoding to some advocates"?

>
>


body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

>We have the same problem with updates to the interface translation files,
>which currently wait on me to fix them up and put them online (and if
>necessary set up and convert the wiki).
>
I'd love to help with the French ones but I can't work out how to commit
my changes to the CVS  repository :(

>
>


from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [Wikitech-l] Ugly <math>

body:
Brion Vibber wrote in part:

>The point is not to look good (though if we can, great), but to get
>information across. How much can we strip out of the TeX without losing
>information?

When I see mathematicians' emails, the tendency seems to be
to use straight ASCII when things are just letters
but to leave in the TeX markup when things are symbols.
Thus, TeX's "\int_0^1 \sin x \, dx"
would become ASCII's "\int_0^1 sin x dx".

-- Toby


from_name: Robert Graham Merkel

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Mechanics of name change

body:
Fellow Wikipedians,

What are the mechanics of changing somebody's username?  Is that something
administrators can do, or is developer access required?


from_name: Zoe

body:
James,
All you can do is to ask for help from the people on the mailing list, and try to revert back to a reasonably NPOV article and make the needed changes.  Or give up.  That's pretty much what I've done.  I'm tired of being the bad person whenever there are problems, and I never get any support.  See the articles in support of 172 below.  Why should we care?
Zoe

 james duffy <jtdirl at hotmail.com> wrote:Hi Zoe,

I've a serious allegation to make about a fellow Wiki. I wrote a page on the
Irish Potato famine which became rather controversial with two people. One
of them threatened to revert any changes I made, and make sure I could not
revert his changes back.

He rewrote one section of the page in a decidedly POV, dodgy historical way.
When I tried to revert, I found that many of the earlier versions had been
vandalised, by him, so as to ensure that either I could not revert to them
or that if I did, the page would be so littered with POVs (his
interpretations of what he thinks my POVs are!) as to be pulled off.

Here's an example of one of the paragraphs vandalised. The changes he made
are in capitals.

One issue which divides the perspective of Ireland on the history of the
Famine from some BOGUS attitudes among the FAKE Irish - living abroad, is
the claim, made by some of the latter, that the Famine amounted to genocide
by the British against the Irish. Few Irish historians accept such a
PATENTLY FALSE definition, which would imply a deliberate policy of
extermination. While all are agreed that the British policies during the
Famine, particularly those applied by the ministry of [[Lord John Russell]],
were somewhat misguided, perhaps ill-informed and frequently
counter-productive, with Professor Joe Lee calling what happened a
'holocaust', [9] Irish, British and American historians of the cailbre of
Professors [[F.S.L. Lyons]], John A. Murphy, Joe Lee, Roy Foster, and James
S. Donnelly, Jr, as well as historians Cecil Woodham-Smith, Peter Gray, Ruth
Dudley Edwards and many others have long dismissed claims of A DELIBERATE
POLICY OF genocide. PERHAPS MORE THAN A STRONG BELIEF.

I spotted this paragraph by chance. I saw other dodgy add ons as well. I had
to go back to the version before he began his first of a series of
(seemingly innocent) changes (announcing how he was correcting a spelling or
a grammatical mistake, etc) to find a version that had not been vandalised.

The person responsible is Stevertigo.

What should we do about this? It is one thing to row over interpretation,
but to deliberately vandalise earlier versions so that they cannot be used
or would get pulled as being POV, is astonishing. I know how annoyed many of
us are with 172, but at least (as far as I know) all he does is revert
versions, not vandalise earlier versions as well so that no one can revert
his revertions. I don't fancy having to stand guard over an article most
people are happy with, all because some twat is determined to find some way
of screwing it up

If this is the standard of behaviour that Stevertigo is bringing to Wiki,
then he should be banned.

JT

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Mostly in defence of 172

body:
> Vera Cruz has a habit of following NPOV policy down to the very last
> dotted t and crossed i.

> Today Vera Cruz insisted on removing this from the article on Isaac Asimov:
> "a highly successful and extraordinarily prolific"

> Does VC have a metal health problem which makes her/him incapable of
> seeing what is reasonable?
> Or is s/he a troll, bent on applying NPOV so hard it breaks us?

Actually, if she does that, she doesn't follow NPOV policy. NPOV dictates
that we present different views only where they verifiably exist. If she
claims that "highly successful and extraordinarily prolific" is not NPOV
(the "extraordinarily" may need some backing), she will have to cite
sources that dispute this or ask for references that prove it.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Red Hill Technology

subject: [WikiEN-l] Mostly in defence of 172

body:
I'm going to confine these remarks to the areas where I have a reasonable amount of
experience of interacting with 172, and some expertise of my own - in other words, I'll
discuss 172s contribution to articles dealing with colonial history in the late 19th and early
20th Centuries. (I have not followed developments in the articles on modern China and the
USSR at all closely, nor am I especially well-versed in those subjects, so on those I'll say
nothing.)

User 172 seems to have the ability to arouse great passion. I think it's fair to summarise
the charges against him as:

1: Left-wing bias
2: Aggressive defence of his contributions, in particular instant reversion without comment
to the "authorised version"
3: Failure to work co-operatively with others
4: Insisting on cross-posting more-or-less the same text to a number of related articles.

And I think it's also fair to add that a great deal of the venom 172 attracts is not simply
because of the points above, but because:

1: He is all to often abrupt and dismissive of those who take a contrary view.
2: His prose is very difficult to edit. It is dense, convoluted, and far from easy reading.
Short of wholesale slashing, editing 172's work is not for the faint-hearted.
3: His writing is littered with the jargon of Marxian political economy. Readers unfamiliar
with sociology or political economy can all too easily confuse many of the common
technical terms, which have specific, value-neutral  meanings, with the more familiar
terms of nakedly value-laden Leninist tracts (which were quite well-used until recently).
The untrained reader thus is prone to jump to the conclusion that 172 is a raving
communist.

These factors are multiplied because they work in combination. One tends to find a
statement that has a questionable POV but feel reluctant to edit it because it is embedded
in dense, complex, and technical prose, and further reluctant because one fears an edit
war.

On the other hand. 172 has a great deal of expertise in certain fields. On the development
of European colonialism, for example, I think I'm safe in saying that I am not alone in
having developed considerable respect for his knowledge. (See Talk:New Imperialism for
evidence of my assertion here.) He writes in great detail, and on dauntingly difficult
subjects. Although I firmly believe that 172's longer contributions need careful copy
editing and peer review before they are set in concrete, they make an excellent foundation
for readable, fact-filled articles of real scholarship. For an example of this, wade through
the most recent two talk pages in New Imperialism. There you will see that Ortolan88,
Slrubenstein and I made a good start on the task of making the article neutral in tone and
accessible to the general reader without losing accuracy or too much detail. 172 was, on
the whole, co-operative with us, and the article began to improve a great deal. It was only
when the far more disruptive and unreasonable Vera Cruz stepped in with (as another
contributor complained) the "death of a thousand cuts" that Ortolan88 gave up in disgust. I
perservered for a little longer before doing likewise, and I think even SLR has become
discouraged now.

We can work with 172. We can't work with the mindless chaos of a Vera Cruz edit war.
Get rid of that particular disruptive influence and SLR and I (or more likely both of us
working together) will lick "New Imperialisim" into shape inside a week, and unless I miss
my guess, we will do it with the help and co-operation of 172.

(I should add, just in case the point isn't clear from my comments above, that without
172's solid foundation of detailed content, the eventual article would be weaker.)

172 *can* be reasoned with. He and I engaged in a moderately protracted edit war in
History of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. (It's worth reviewing the history of that
page, and reading its talk page also.) Consider the following exchange from Talk:History
of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

TANNIN: (as a PS to an extended and detailed defence of my point of view about the edit
war) The introduction of technical terms, especially terms from political economy which
have become loaded with emotive associations in the minds of most non-specialists, is
something to avoid except where absolutely essential. Just as writers on mathematics
have learned the hard way that littering texts for the general reader with mathematical
formulae is a sure-fire shortcut to eternal obscurity, so too must the historian be aware
that many of his most useful terms are counter-productive in non-specialist contexts. In
fact, it is worse for the historian than it is for the mathematician: readers see a formula
and just skip over it because they don't understand it or don't want to stop and puzzle it
out before continuing, but readers see text laced with terms like "multinational",
"capitalism", "accumulation of surpluses", "inalienable", "commodities", and "bourgeois"
and, unless the terms are used sparingly, and in a way that makes their technical meaning
clear (as opposed to their emotion-laden common meanings) they recoil in horror.
Readers don't understand mathemetician's technical expressions (their formulae).
Readers misunderstand political economist's technical expressions (words like those
listed above) - which is a good deal worse.

172: I truly appreciate your suggestions. I will strive to improve my communication on the
grounds you listed.

Now 172 *did* then take the opportunity to quote my comment in his own defence on
various user talk pages, and (in my view) made more of it than was actually there - I went
so far as to complain to him that he had quoted me out of context at one point - but I
genuinely believe that he has learned a little from that exchange (and from some other,
broadly similar, ones, both with me and with other contributors). He remains a prickly
character but his prose is improving, and while he is certainly not as easy to work with as
some, he can be amenable to evidence and reason. (As the history and talk of History of
the Democratic Republic of the Congo shows.)

In summary, yes, 172 creates difficulties. But he also makes a very useful contribution to
Wikipedia, and is not impossible to work with. He has moderated his initial
anti-cooperative behaviour, and (I suspect) will learn to moderate it further as time goes
by (not least in consequence of this present controversy).

Tony Wilson
(Tannin)
list at redhill.net.au

twilson at netconnect.com.au


subject: [WikiEN-l] Mostly in defence of 172

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>(the "extraordinarily" may need some backing)
>
The next sentence of that article reads: "He published about 500 volumes"

... I think that's backing :-)

>
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] unbanned name

body:
koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com wrote:

>You Wrote:
>
>
>>So, is "CG" going to continue its unsalubrious existence?
>>
>>
>
>Hm, and I wonder about the new user Cockgoblin.  Completely unrelated,
>I'd imagine.
>
>
>
Are the developers going to do somehting about this?

This matter is a http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?CommunityExpectation

We have a very simple means on our hands to enforce it: revert every
single edit Cumguzzler makes.

we've tried asking on CG's talk page for the last few days, with no
result. Time for some http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?PeerPressure

>
>


from_name: Oliver Pereira

subject: [WikiEN-l] unbanned name

body:
> We have a very simple means on our hands to enforce it: revert every
> single edit Cumguzzler makes.

To remove information from the Wikipedia because of who contributed it,
rather than because of the nature of the information itself, would be to
cut off one's nose to spite one's face. I haven't been paying much
attention to this person's edits, but other people have stated on the
person's User talk page that they have made useful contributions. If I
recall the earlier case of Throbbing Monster Cock correctly, a developer
just changed his name to "TMC", and there were no further problems.
Couldn't the same thing be done again?

Oliver

+-------------------------------------------+
| Oliver Pereira                            |
| Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science |
| University of Southampton                 |
| omp199 at ecs.soton.ac.uk                    |
+-------------------------------------------+


from_name: Eric Demolli

subject: [WikiEN-l] DW images upload

body:
I'm nearly certain that DW is posting copyrighted photos he doesn't seem to
answer to question.

Ericd


subject: [WikiEN-l] unbanned name

body:
On Thu, 16 Jan 2003, Brion Vibber wrote:

> If by "no further problems" you mean to say "the person made several
> attempts to use similar usernames, such as the same thing with different
> capitalization, ended up with their ip banned for a while, and never
> came back under the officially sanctioned or any other recognizable
> sanitized nick", then your recollection is correct.

Oh yes, that's what I meant to say! ;)

Sorry, I can't have been paying enough attention to what was going on.
Since the name that was offending people disappeared (and I didn't see any
of the variants you mention), I just assumed everything was sorted out.

However, I still think that reverting someone's edits for any reason other
than the quality of the edits themselves is counter-productive. Couldn't
there be a list of offensive user names in the system somewhere, and a
mechanism to prevent people from signing in under these names? That way,
any user who makes valuable contributions can still do so anonymously, or
they can get a new name that isn't on the disallowed list, and everyone's
happy(ish)!

I know nothing of the mechanics of these things, but could the
aforementioned list be the page [[Wikipedia:List of offensive usernames]]
itself? That way, whenever someone is offended by a name, they can just
add it to that page, and no banning or further intervention by the
developers would be needed. The page would probably need to be protected,
to prevent people from removing their own usernames, and the rule would be
that people's usernames would only be added when there was a consensus to
do so. Could that be done?

Oliver

+-------------------------------------------+
| Oliver Pereira                            |
| Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science |
| University of Southampton                 |
| omp199 at ecs.soton.ac.uk                    |
+-------------------------------------------+


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [WikiEN-l] DW images upload

body:
Eric Demolli wrote:

>I'm nearly certain that DW is posting copyrighted photos he doesn't seem to
>answer to question.
>
>
Try mailing him through the wikipedia mail system; it worked for me to
get an answer from him...

Magnus


from_name: Tony Wilson

subject: [WikiEN-l] Mostly in defence of 172

body:
I'm going to confine these remarks to the areas where I have a reasonable amount of experience of interacting with 172, and some expertise of my own - in other words, I'll discuss 172's
contribution to articles dealing with colonial history in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. (I have not followed developments in the articles on modern China and the USSR at all closely, nor am I
especially well-versed in those subjects, so on those I'll say nothing.)

User 172 seems to have the ability to arouse great passion. I think it's fair to summarise the charges against him as:

1: Left-wing bias
2: Aggressive defence of his contributions, in particular instant reversion without comment to the "authorised version"
3: Failure to work co-operatively with others
4: Insisting on cross-posting more-or-less the same text to a number of related articles.

And I think it's also fair to add that a great deal of the venom 172 attracts is not simply because of the points above, but because:

1: He is all too often abrupt and dismissive of those who take a contrary view.
2: His prose is very difficult to edit. It is dense, convoluted, and far from easy reading. Short of wholesale slashing, editing 172's work is not for the faint-hearted.
3: His writing is littered with the jargon of Marxian political economy. Readers unfamiliar with sociology or political economy can all too easily confuse many of the common technical terms, which
have specific, value-neutral  meanings, with the more familiar terms of nakedly value-laden Leninist tracts (which were quite well-used until recently). The untrained reader thus is prone to jump to
the conclusion that 172 is a raving communist.

These factors are multiplied because they work in combination. One tends to find a statement that has a questionable POV but feel reluctant to edit it because it is embedded in dense, complex,
and technical prose, and further reluctant because one fears an edit war.

On the other hand. 172 has a great deal of expertise in certain fields. On the development of European colonialism, for example, I think I'm safe in saying that I am not alone in having developed
considerable respect for his knowledge. (See Talk:New Imperialism for evidence of my assertion here.) He writes in great detail, and on dauntingly difficult subjects. Although I firmly believe that
172's longer contributions need careful copy editing and peer review before they are set in concrete, they make an excellent foundation for readable, fact-filled articles of real scholarship. For an
example of this, wade through the most recent two talk pages in New Imperialism. There you will see that Ortolan88, Slrubenstein and I made a good start on the task of making the article neutral
in tone and accessible to the general reader without losing accuracy or too much detail. 172 was, on the whole, co-operative with us, and the article began to improve a great deal. It was only
when the far more disruptive and unreasonable Vera Cruz stepped in with (as another contributor complained) the "death of a thousand cuts" that Ortolan88 gave up in disgust. I perservered for a
little longer before doing likewise, and I think even SLR has become discouraged now.

We can work with 172. We can't work with the mindless chaos of a Vera Cruz edit war.  Get rid of that particular disruptive influence and SLR or I (or more likely both of us working together) will
lick "New Imperialisim" into shape inside a week, and unless I miss my guess, we will do it with the help and co-operation of 172.

(I should add, just in case the point isn't clear from my comments above, that without 172's solid foundation of detailed content, the eventual article would be weaker.)

172 *can* be reasoned with. He and I engaged in a moderately protracted edit war in History of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. (It's worth reviewing the history of that page, and reading its
talk page also.) Consider the following exchange from Talk:History of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

TANNIN: (as a PS to an extended and detailed defence of my point of view about the edit war) The introduction of technical terms, especially terms from political economy which have become
loaded with emotive associations in the minds of most non-specialists, is something to avoid except where absolutely essential. Just as writers on mathematics have learned the hard way that
littering texts for the general reader with mathematical formulae is a sure-fire shortcut to eternal obscurity, so too must the historian be aware that many of his most useful terms are counter-
productive in non-specialist contexts. In fact, it is worse for the historian than it is for the mathematician: readers see a formula and just skip over it because they don't understand it or don't want to
stop and puzzle it out before continuing, but readers see text laced with terms like "multinational", "capitalism", "accumulation of surpluses", "inalienable", "commodities", and "bourgeois" and,
unless the terms are used sparingly, and in a way that makes their technical meaning clear (as opposed to their emotion-laden common meanings) they recoil in horror. Readers don't understand
mathemetician's technical expressions (their formulae). Readers *misunderstand* political economists' technical expressions (words like those listed above) - which is a good deal worse.

172: I truly appreciate your suggestions. I will strive to improve my communication on the grounds you listed.

Now 172 *did* then take the opportunity to quote my comment in his own defence on various user talk pages, and (in my view) made more of it than was actually there - I went so far as to complain
to him that he had quoted me out of context at one point - but I genuinely believe that he has learned a little from that exchange (and from some other, broadly similar, ones, both with me and with
other contributors). He remains a prickly character but his prose is improving, and while he is certainly not as easy to work with as some, he can be amenable to evidence and reason. (As the
history and talk of History of the Democratic Republic of the Congo shows.)

In summary, yes, 172 creates difficulties. But he also makes a very useful contribution to Wikipedia, and is not impossible to work with. He has moderated his initial anti-cooperative behaviour, and
(I suspect) will learn to moderate it further as time goes by (not least in consequence of this present controversy).

Tony Wilson
(Tannin)
list at redhill.net.au


body:
take a look at this page:

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%E9gion_d%27honneur

In what way is the article name different from the redirect?
All I can see is that one has a "smart quote"-style apostrophe.

but the URL of the redirect page seems the same:

http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=L%E9gion_d%27honneur&redirect=no

have I missed something obvious?

L%E9gion_d%27honneur -- article
L%E9gion_d%27honneur -- redirect


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [WikiEN-l] unbanned name

body:
> I know nothing of the mechanics of these things, but could the
> aforementioned list be the page [[Wikipedia:List of offensive usernames]]
> itself? That way, whenever someone is offended by a name, they can just
> add it to that page, and no banning or further intervention by the
> developers would be needed. The page would probably need to be protected,
> to prevent people from removing their own usernames, and the rule would be
> that people's usernames would only be added when there was a consensus to
> do so. Could that be done?

Bad idea. Don't challenge people with technology that is inherently
flawed, they will only try to overcome it (and succeed). We just need a
quick nickname change policy where we fix these problems without having to
get Jimbo's approval first. (My understanding is that we already have
established that we can do this, but Brion thinks we need to wait.)

Don't exaggerate this problem. I do not want it to become a breeding
ground for general hysteria about "foul" language.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Lee Pilich

body:
At 23:21 16/01/2003 +0000, tarquin wrote:
>take a look at this page:
>
>http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%E9gion_d%27honneur
>
>In what way is the article name different from the redirect?
>All I can see is that one has a "smart quote"-style apostrophe.
>
>but the URL of the redirect page seems the same:
>
>http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=L%E9gion_d%27honneur&redirect=no
>
>
>have I missed something obvious?
>
>L%E9gion_d%27honneur -- article
>L%E9gion_d%27honneur -- redirect

Actually, it's:

L%E9gion_d%92honneur - article
L%E9gion_d%27honneur - redirect

Don't forget that when you are redirected to a page, the URL of the
redirect page remains in the location bar, even though that's not actually
the page you're viewing (see http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beethoven for a
more obvious example).

Now, pretend I just said that using impressive technical words.

LP (camembert)


from_name: youandme at poczta.fm

body:
On 16 Jan 2003 at 17:21, tarquin wrote:
> See also http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empty_page_page

On 16 Jan 2003 at 10:45, Erik Moeller wrote:
> I don't think this is a big deal because even non-sysops can fix this
> by replacing the nonsense with a stub article. But changing the text
> might be a good idea. If we implement the FileCopy proposal, we can
> perhaps also make these kind of internal texts world editable - it's
> all in Language*.php after all.

These are still theoretical (in other words potential) solutions.
If anybody suffers from texts like
       "kjasf piqwekl apijasf poijasdf"
or   "That's wonderful! It works!"
or   "What the f*#$ is that? I want to get to know, not to write"
or   stronger insults
on newly created pages, the improvement we've done
would be probably a good and _very easy_ start.
This applies to 'pedias which has still a lot of broken links
(unwriten articles). But if majority prefers to read that
and revert manually... no objections :-)

Thanks for your attention
Youandme

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Poczta nowych mozliwosci >>> http://link.interia.pl/f16bc


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] Mostly in defence of 172

in_reply_to: <200301160910.h0G9A0520019@www.wikipedia.org>; from redhill@redhill.net.au on Thu, Jan 16, 2003 at 08:11:56PM +1100

body:
Red Hill Technology wrote:
> Readers misunderstand political economist's technical expressions
> (words like those listed above) - which is a good deal worse.

I think that everywhere you have written "political economist" you
should have written "Marxist".  The field of political economy is not
primarily Marxist, and does not use Marxist jargon for the most part.

> In summary, yes, 172 creates difficulties. But he also makes a very
> useful contribution to Wikipedia, and is not impossible to work
> with. He has moderated his initial anti-cooperative behaviour, and
> (I suspect) will learn to moderate it further as time goes by (not
> least in consequence of this present controversy).

Well, I suppose we can wait and see.


subject: [WikiEN-l] unbanned name

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> Oliver Pereira wrote:
>  > If I
> > recall the earlier case of Throbbing Monster Cock correctly, a developer
> > just changed his name to "TMC", and there were no further problems.
> > Couldn't the same thing be done again?
>
> If by "no further problems" you mean to say "the person made several
> attempts to use similar usernames, such as the same thing with different
> capitalization, ended up with their ip banned for a while, and never
> came back under the officially sanctioned or any other recognizable
> sanitized nick", then your recollection is correct.

As much of a pain in the neck as this was, I think that the outcome is
perfectly acceptable.  We don't need contributions from every jackass
in the world.

The idea that there might be a perfectly reasonable person with great
values to contribute to Wikipedia, but who will refuse to participate
unless allowed to use a juvenile and offensive username is farfetched.

The idea, on the other hand, that there might be a perfectly
reasonable person with great values to contribute to Wikipedia, but
who shows up and *initially chooses a juvenile and offensive
username*, for a joke, for the hell of it, whatever, is not so
farfetched.

So it's no big deal to reach out (as we already do, to an absurd
extent) and say "Hey, be our friend, stop being a jerk with this
annoying name."  But it's also no big deal to lose someone if they
refuse to co-operate.

There's a billion nice people on the Internet; we can afford to lose
the jerks.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] unbanned name

body:
Oliver Pereira wrote:
> However, I still think that reverting someone's edits for any reason other
> than the quality of the edits themselves is counter-productive.

Usually, yes, I think you're right.

> Couldn't there be a list of offensive user names in the system
> somewhere, and a mechanism to prevent people from signing in under
> these names? That way, any user who makes valuable contributions can
> still do so anonymously, or they can get a new name that isn't on
> the disallowed list, and everyone's happy(ish)!

Well, such a list will always be incomplete.  And pattern matching
will lead to funny results.  So automating the determination of what's
offensive is not likely to be very effective.

"ThrobbingMonsterCock" -- hmm, we might ban 'Cock'.  But what about
someone named "Cockburn"?

I've basically declared open season on these things, so there's not
going to need to be a lot of mailing list discussion about them,
except when something odd happens, as is bound to be the case sooner
or later.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] unbanned name

in_reply_to: <8dxIupbCpVB@erik_moeller>; from erik_moeller@gmx.de on Thu, Jan 16, 2003 at 11:57:00PM +0100

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
> We just need a
> quick nickname change policy where we fix these problems without having to
> get Jimbo's approval first. (My understanding is that we already have
> established that we can do this, but Brion thinks we need to wait.)

Brion did think that, and he was right.  But yesterday I said that
there's no need to ask me first.  Let me know when something like this
is done, so I don't miss it, and let me know *before* if there's some
question about it being borderline.

> Don't exaggerate this problem. I do not want it to become a breeding
> ground for general hysteria about "foul" language.

Yes.  I curse like a sailor myself in appropriate contexts.  Foul
language doesn't bother me.  But wikipedia is not an appropriate
context.

There's a danger of a person or group of people deciding to get their
jollies by fighting us about this.  Yes, that would be stupid.  But
some people have too much time on their hands.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] A mentor system

body:
Whether a formal system is established, the principles of mentoring can be
put into play by those who can do so simply by adopting that tone in your
interactions with others who seem inexperienced and are deviating from
established policy.

Fred

At 10:06 AM 1/16/03 +0100, you wrote:
>As we grow larger, we get more and more users who seemingly act against at
>least some of our rules or do not understand what our mission is. 172, Frank
>Wappler, Stevertigo and others are users I would classify as "problematic".
>However, doing so on the wiki will not help us much, it will only alienate
them
>from Wikipedia. There is, of course, a certain point at which we need to ban
>users, but I do not see this line being crossed in these cases yet.
>
>Another idea would be to create a list of "Watched users", with a "watcher"
>assigned to each one of them, keeping an eye on their contributions. However,
>this does have negative connotations, which might lead to edit wars on the
>respective page.
>
>A more positive, affirmative approach might be to create a mentor policy. It
>could work like this:
>
>  [[Wikipedia:Available mentors]] -> everyone willing to be a mentor can put
>themselves in that list. Only requirement: needs to have been a Wikipedian
>for n months. (I suggest n=6).
>
>  [[Wikipedia:Votes for mentoring]] -> users who may need a mentor can be
>added to this list.
>
>The "Available mentors" link could be put on the main page and linked
>prominently elsewhere so that new users who want some hand holding can
message one
>of them directly. If we "vote for mentoring" of a user, the assigned mentor
>could put some text on the user's talk page:
>
>"Hello, .... It has been suggested that one of the Wikipedia oldtimers could
>help you better understand our policies and convention. In that spirit, I
>will try to work with you on your future edits to make sure they meet our
>standards of neutrality and research. If that bothers you, please comment
on my
>Talk page or on the [[Wikipedia:Votes for mentoring]]  page."
>
>What do you think? I do believe that we need to watch the edits of
>problematic users in a more coordinated fashion, at least.
>
>Regards,
>
>Erik
>
>--
>+++ GMX - Mail, Messaging & more  http://www.gmx.net +++
>NEU: Mit GMX ins Internet. Rund um die Uhr f?r 1 ct/ Min. surfen!
>
>_______________________________________________
>WikiEN-l mailing list
>WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
>http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] unbanned name

in_reply_to: <200301161633.LAA00672@TheWorld.com>; from tompar@world.std.com on Thu, Jan 16, 2003 at 11:33:14AM -0500

body:
Tom Parmenter wrote:
> So, is "CG" going to continue its unsalubrious existence?

I would change the name myself, but I don't know how to do it safely.

Someone smarter than me will surely do it soon.


subject: [WikiEN-l] 172

body:
At least AxelBoldt thinks that 142.177.99.163 is '24'.

I almost think that's more interesting than the controversy about 172.

--Jimbo


in_reply_to: <BAY1-F117lUohIi6YEF0000e916@hotmail.com>; from jtdirl@hotmail.com on Thu, Jan 16, 2003 at 04:51:47AM +0000

body:
james duffy wrote:
> I've a serious allegation to make about a fellow Wiki. I wrote a page on the
> Irish Potato famine which became rather controversial with two people. One
> of them threatened to revert any changes I made, and make sure I could not
> revert his changes back.

James, if the history has been edited somehow, that's a serious bug in
the software.  The whole point of the history mechanism is that older
versions are available so that we can either revert, wholesale, or at
least copy and paste good stuff that somehow got lost.

I haven't yet reviewed the article to form an opinion about who is
right or wrong in the content battle, but really, all of us (even
sysops) are "equal" in the content wars.  So if you can explain
further just how you think the history was messed up, that would
be helpful.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] Mostly in defence of 172

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
> If you have problems with Vera Cruz, just remind her[1] that she is
> on borrowed time. Vera Cruz is also known as Lir. Lir was banned in
> November and immediately signed up under the new handle. By doing
> so, Lir subverted the ban and thereby Wikipedia policy -- instead of
> talking to Jimbo about lifting the ban, she pretended to be someone
> else. This alone would be reason enough to re-establish the ban.

Yes.

But to be clear, Lir and I do talk about lifting the ban, basically on
and off every week or two.  I have not heard from Lir, though, since I
heard about the Vera Cruz persona.  So we haven't discussed that.

My position with Lir has been simple and consistent.  Show me by
explaining in your own words what happened and what you will do to
avoid it, and I will reinstate you on a trial basis.  Lir has thus far
not done anything even closely resembling this.  I don't really know
why.

--Jimbo


from_name: Jens Frank

body:
On Thu, Jan 16, 2003 at 02:51:23AM +0100, elian wrote:
> youandme at poczta.fm writes:
>
> > "One click is enough for all of us" as some time ago Sting sang... :-)
> >
> > We propose to add the following scripts to TEXTAREA attributes
> >
> >   onfocus="if(this.value=='.....') {this.value='';}"
> >   onblur="if(this.value=='') {this.value='.....';}"
> >
> Wouldn't it be better just to set the focus to the text area field on
> pageload (I just realized that WP doesn't do yet) and select the content
> of the textarea if it equals the NewArticle text?

No, please don't!

Using Unix or Linux, your text is automatically copied to the clipboard
when you select it, replacing the prior content of the clipboard. I often
find myself
a) select some kind of text
b) click on an edit-link
c) paste the text I had previously selected
d) delete "Put your new text here"

If the text in the edit box would be selected automatically, everything
would be messed up.

	Best regards,

		JeLuF


subject: [WikiEN-l] Offensive usernames...

body:
elian wrote:
> ["Worcestershire County Council Email Virus Scanner" <xxx at xxx.net>]
> You sent an email that contained possible profanity

Hopefully the county of Worcestershire is not having a public
comments period on the regulation of poultry farms.

--Jimbo


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Offensive usernames...

body:
elian wrote:

>Maybe we can use this scanner as testing tool in the question if a certain
>username is offensive or not ;-)
>elian
>****
>
>An automatic scan of the attached email, which you appear to have tried to
>send to <xxx>, , indicated possible objectionable content.
>
>The Worcestershire County Council email system scans all messages and attachments before delivering them.
>The scanner reports:
>
>This message not was delivered to <xxx>, ,
>but instead was diverted for moderation by the administrator.
>Please contact admin at networcs.net if you feel that this email was incorrectly blocked.
>
>Worcestershire County Council
>
I find the action of the bureaucrats far more offensive than the name
chosen by TMC.

Eclecticology


from_name: koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com

subject: Lir/Vera (was: [WikiEN-l] Mostly in defence of 172)

body:
tarquin wrote:
>I have just tried to politely expect to Vera that NPOV is not required
>for the statement that Nightfall is Asimov's most famous short story.
>
>Her reply on my talk page:
>
>It is obviously contested or we wouldn't be having an edit war over it.
>Vera Cruz <http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Vera_Cruz>

Vera has also made the dubious additions of information on the
transportation history of the Philippines in the 1940s (e.g. how many
cars there were, etc.) and several other Philippines pages (though the
one on its military history was interesting & probably useful too).
She's made the concisely-titled [[List of areas, barracks, bases,
camps, fields, forts, lines, points, and posts]] and we've gone back
and forth over whether to include the complete nutritional breakdown
for Kemps Chocolate Milk. (
http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Chocolate_milk&action=history
)

Nothing compared to the troubles others have had with her, though.
Lir/Vera is obviously trying to push buttons, though, while appearing
innocent and wide-eyed: "what?  You mean that that ''shouldn't'' go in
an encyclopedia?"

>What is her problem?

Burning need for attention.  Off the record, I'd say--well, this isn't
off the record.  On the record, I'll say that I think LDC was right to
ban her when she called herself Lir, and I was wrong to unban her, and
I wish she'd go back to wherever trolls go so we can work.

best

kq

wikipayments:  [[Economy of Poland]] at 17:27 UTC and related Poland
pages (except the History one, which has had I think Helga-inspired
controversy surrounding it), [[Philippines]] pages, [[Peru]] (light at
the end of the tunnel on this Dept. of State stuff.


body:
Lee Pilich wrote:

>>
>
> Actually, it's:
>
> L%E9gion_d%92honneur - article
> L%E9gion_d%27honneur - redirect
>
> Don't forget that when you are redirected to a page, the URL of the
> redirect page remains in the location bar, even though that's not
> actually the page you're viewing (see
> http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beethoven for a more obvious example).
>
> Now, pretend I just said that using impressive technical words.
>
/me points to the "Probably being stupid" bit :-D


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [WikiEN-l] A mentor system

body:
I like the new idea of a "mentor" better than the old idea of "this guy needs to be banned".

I suggest that mentors apply a 7-to-1 ratio of praise to criticism. That is, "I liked this" "That was good" "Thanks for mentioning X", etc. seven times, followed by "Oops! That's not how we do it" once.

"Uncle" Ed Poor


subject: [WikiEN-l] Mostly in defence of 172

body:
"Asimov wrote hundreds of books." Say that.

Ed Poor

-----Original Message-----
From: Erik Moeller [mailto:erik_moeller at gmx.de]
Sent: Thursday, January 16, 2003 1:56 PM
To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Mostly in defence of 172

> Vera Cruz has a habit of following NPOV policy down to the very last
> dotted t and crossed i.

> Today Vera Cruz insisted on removing this from the article on Isaac Asimov:
> "a highly successful and extraordinarily prolific"

> Does VC have a metal health problem which makes her/him incapable of
> seeing what is reasonable?
> Or is s/he a troll, bent on applying NPOV so hard it breaks us?

Actually, if she does that, she doesn't follow NPOV policy. NPOV dictates
that we present different views only where they verifiably exist. If she
claims that "highly successful and extraordinarily prolific" is not NPOV
(the "extraordinarily" may need some backing), she will have to cite
sources that dispute this or ask for references that prove it.

Regards,

Erik
_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


from_name: Tom Parmenter

subject: [WikiEN-l] Mostly in defence of 172

body:
|From: Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com>
|Content-Disposition: inline
|Sender: wikien-l-admin at wikipedia.org
|Reply-To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
|Date: Fri, 17 Jan 2003 04:31:04 -0800
|
|Red Hill Technology wrote:
|> Readers misunderstand political economist's technical expressions
|> (words like those listed above) - which is a good deal worse.
|
|I think that everywhere you have written "political economist" you
|should have written "Marxist".  The field of political economy is not
|primarily Marxist, and does not use Marxist jargon for the most part.
|
|> In summary, yes, 172 creates difficulties. But he also makes a very
|> useful contribution to Wikipedia, and is not impossible to work
|> with. He has moderated his initial anti-cooperative behaviour, and
|> (I suspect) will learn to moderate it further as time goes by (not
|> least in consequence of this present controversy).
|
|Well, I suppose we can wait and see.

172 has been very rude to Zoe and avidly pursues a point of view.  Has
asserted "ownership" of many pages and replaced so many edits that no
one could keep up with him.  Zoe tried until she was driven off in
frustration.  Valuable, yes, I agree, but handle with care.  Still
could be more trouble than it's worth.

Tom Parmenter
Ortolan88

|_______________________________________________
|WikiEN-l mailing list
|WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
|http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
|