from_name: John Knouse

subject: [WikiEN-l] Movie v. Film

body:
Whoa, here's a radical solution: use the form "Jackass
(movie/film)".  There.  Doesn't that cover it?

--
John Knouse
jaknouse at frognet.net
www.jaknouse.athens.oh.us
+1.740.589.4575
PO Box 1196, Athens, OH 45701-1196

Author - F. P. Jones

English - Experience is that marvelous thing that enables
you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.

Quote supplied courtesy of Verba Volant at:
http://www.logos.it/owa-l/press.rol_ml.verbavolant1?lang=en


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: cprompt

subject: [WikiEN-l] Movie v. Film

body:
Now what if I prefer "motion picture"?  ;-)

Good compromise.

John Knouse wrote:

>Whoa, here's a radical solution: use the form "Jackass
>(movie/film)".  There.  Doesn't that cover it?
>
>--
>John Knouse
>jaknouse at frognet.net
>www.jaknouse.athens.oh.us
>+1.740.589.4575
>PO Box 1196, Athens, OH 45701-1196
>
>
>Author - F. P. Jones
>
>English - Experience is that marvelous thing that enables
>you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.
>
>Quote supplied courtesy of Verba Volant at:
>http://www.logos.it/owa-l/press.rol_ml.verbavolant1?lang=en
>
>


from_name: Alex R.

subject: [WikiEN-l] European preference for film over movie

body:
In a message dated 5/5/2003 6:53:14 PM Eastern Standard Time,
jtdirl at hotmail.com writes:

<snip>

It used to be said in Europe
that 'Americans don't ''do'' irony'. Seeing the failure to grasp the fact
that what I was saying was sarsasm, I guess that statement seems true after
all. No offence was intended. Obviously we should put different concept of
'sense of humour' and 'irony' on a list of American and European differences
on a wiki list! Wikilove.
JT.

What kind of Americans are you talking about, the kind that come from
Canada,
or the Americans that come from those ''other'' places in the Americas?


from_name: james duffy

body:
It seems most Americans missed the point I was making and don't grasp the
Irish and European use of sarcasm. So let me spell it out.

1. Most non-Americans do not use the word 'movie' and see it as a word
largely unique to America and its exclusive use on wikipedia classic
americocentrism.

2. Most English speakers on the use 'film'. Most Americans don't.

3. Most Americans use 'movie', not film.

The obvious solution is to apply the same approach as we do with British
English and American English. Accept the form used by whoever writes the
article. In some areas on wiki, there are definite rights and wrongs, over
names, titles, references. But here there is no right and wrong, merely
different terms for the same thing. Wiki may well have decided to use
'movie' previously, but that was when wiki was overwhelmingly American in
terms of contributors. The longer it goes on, the more non-Americans will
join, and it hardly helps convince people that wiki isn't americocentric if
they are told they must use the American-English word in preference to their
own. It is already irritating to non-Americans when they  create entries to
films in foreign languages that may not have had an American release, only
to find a French language or German language films christened 'movie'. Using
'movie' to describe a European film is as annoying to Europeans as calling
someone from Belgium French is to a Belgian, or calling someone from Ireland
'British' is to the Irish. Or indeed presuming a Canadian is from the United
States is to a Canadian. It is an causing an offence that is unnecessary and
can easily avoided.

As to the reference to 'movie' bring used to describe Hollywood
blockbusters, that is done tongue in cheek by many Europeans to contrast big
budget Hollywood blockbusters to arthouse films or film noir. And I was
mentioning that in a tongue in cheek manner. It used to be said in Europe
that 'Americans don't ''do'' irony'. Seeing the failure to grasp the fact
that what I was saying was sarsasm, I guess that statement seems true after
all. No offence was intended. Obviously we should put different concept of
'sense of humour' and 'irony' on a list of American and European differences
on a wiki list! Wikilove.
JT.

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Movie v. Film

body:
How about using film when it was made by a filmmaker
and use movie when it was made by a moviemaker?
This is the only moviemaker entry I could find on google search
was http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI
All the rest of the Super 16mm, 35mm, 65mm cinemagraphed
or digital video videographed audiovisual works made for
distribution in commercial movie or film theaters or theatres
or for broadcast or cablecast on NTSC, PAL, SECAM or other
HDTV video formats were made by filmmakers, but this does
not include those works originally commissioned or otherwised
produced for television known as television programs that were
made by television directors, video artists or documentarians
and may have been recorded on kinoscope or quad video
which may have subsequently secured a theatrical release in
major markets or in the art house market domestically or
internationally having been originally shot on any of the above
mentioned formats and subsquently reformated or transfer
to simulate a different technology (such as Frank Zappa's 200
Motels) nor does it include those works by artists in any of
the above formats that was produced for original release on
CD-ROM, DVD, VHS, Betamax, flipbook format or for
exhibition in a sculptural installation, interactive video kiosk
or via slowscan ham video transmission licensed by the
FCC or similar foreign licencing authority in any sovereign state.
Not to mention the internet...


subject: [WikiEN-l] it looks like DW is back again

body:
Given the abuse given by DW and Adam to Zoe and others, we really do need to
have some form of control mechanism to stop the constant 'Invasion of the
Trolls'. Adam's latest two person? seem to have disappeared after being
stood up to. Do we have to keep niavely accepting the good will of people
who constantly come back and do the same as they did in their last
'apparition'. A suggestion:

1. if someone is banned TWICE for their behaviour, they should not be
allowed back at all, unless they contact Jimbo (perhaps publicly on his
page, perhaps privately) to guarantee that they will change their behaviour,
with Jimbo then stating on his page that DW, Adam, Michael or whomever has
indicated they will not resort to their previous behaviour.

2. Where such a guarantee is given, THEN AND ONLY THEN will they be given
the benefit of the doubt and allowed back a third time.

3.  If such a guarantee has not been given, once it has clearly been
demonstrated that 'x' user is indeed DW, Adam, Michael etc and they have
been banned twice, then an AUTOMATIC PAGE REVERSION POLICY is followed,
pending their permanent banning. And a person permanently banned will also
be subject to an AUTOMATIC PAGE REVERSION POLICY. That might seem harsh and
might seem costly in so far as it could lose wiki some good contributions,
but only an absolute and clear policy that tells such a troll A PERMANENT
BAN MEANS NOT ONE WORD OF YOURS WILL BE ACCEPTED ON WIKI will work.
Otherwise a permanent ban is useless and simply means 'take a break, then
come back and start hassling users all over again'.

The latest Adam troll invasion was only stopped when people challenged him.
The softly softy approach in his case simply encourages him, especially when
newbies join and, not knowing his 'game', try to be nice and constructive
and end up challenging older wiki people over 'why are you being nasty to
'x'?' (One said that to me recently, only to email an apology later saying
that in his words ''that son of a bitch had had me fooled. You, Zoe, Tannin
and 172 were right. Why did wikipedia let this abhorrent person on again,
given their record?'' If he is banned, why did wikipedia not kick him off
the moment he came on again?)

JT

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list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Hunter Peress

subject: [Wikipedia-l] use of a bot (long)

body:
It should be ok ;-) im not an op, but there have been other...far more useless bots (50,000 pages
of extremely homogenous and trivial US census data).

Anyway, before you do bot, maybe there is now enough reason to finally get a good discussion code
into wikipedia.

I feel that phpbb (which is GNU ) is the best open source bb out there, and I know for a fact that
its very international friendly.

How about you confirm that it handles japanese to your liking.

If not, then you can still work with the phpbb people to make it better or use the other board
that you are already using.

If so, then we're set, and this start snowballing people into action.
--- Tomos at Wikipedia <wiki_tomos at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Hello. I have a question about the use of a bot.
>
> After some trials-and-errors, we wikipedians in Japanese 'pedia are now
> starting to use an outside BBS (prepared by one of the active wikipedians)
> for our discussion of basic policies and other site-wide issues. And in
> conjunction with it, we are wondering if it is okay to use a bot to
> automatically update a page within wikipedia (something like
> [Wikipedia:Discussions_at_WikipediaBBS]) which displays info. on recent
> postings occuring at the BBS.
>
> Now I think I should explain two things - why we (some of us) think outside
> BBS is good, and why the bot is helpful for that.
>
> 1. Why we think outside BBS is good
>
> For discussion purposes, we have three options.
> Meta, talkpage, and some dedicated pages in the Wikipedia namespace.
>
> Meta is not user-friendly because its interface is in English.
>
> We tried talk pages, but there happened too many discussions of overlapping
> topics, and it was hard for latecomers to join, because the discussions are
> taking place in many places (some unknown to the newcomers), hard to
> reconstruct the dialogue spanning multiple talkpages. It is also difficult
> for anybody to revisit the past discussions and decisions, because the
> records are scattered.
>
> Then we tried Wikipedia:Village_pump as a place for discussion and
> decision-making regarding site-wide issues - naming conventions, spelling
> conventions, disambiguation policies, admin selections, basic style and
> layout issues, and so on. Some are re-doing of what people did in English
> wikipeida, some are more or less unique to Japanese wikipedia. We faced some
> problems again. The major ones are (a)32kb limit for some browsers, and (b)
> too many issues to be discussed within the limited space (though we used
> subpages, etc.). I can also point out that (c) there are several yet-to-be
> understood bugs/troubles related to display and character encoding (some
> characters turn jibrish, some characters automatically get deleted, some
> characters are visible only in editing box, and at least a few more), and
> outside BBS is a good place to discuss about the problem without being
> annoyed by the very problem we talk about. Some others pointed out (d)
> Wikipedia is slow or down too often these days, and it is better to have
> outside place we can work on.
>
> While at least some of us think that we can improve the way we use
> Wkipedia:Village_pump and make it workable, (and of course I cannot deny
> that there is a possibility that the BBS turn out to be problematic in other
> ways,) many of active users think we would try the BBS for now.
>
> 2. Why the bot is helpful
>
>
> 2. Why a bot is helpful
>
> Bot is good for two reasons. It saves users time by automatically creating
> the content that the user would want to post. It helps others (those of us
> who do not always check on the BBS) to stay informed of what's going on in
> the BBS.
>
> As it is preliminary designed and implemented, the bot does two things: (a)
> automatically create a page content for a specific page something like
> [[Wikipedia:Discussions in the Wikipedia BBS]] and (b) with a click of a
> mouse, the user will be taken automatically to the edit mode of the page
> (now in wikipedia) with the auto-generated content. -The content is not
> saved/posted at this stage. The user still has to confirm the content by
> pressing the "save" button.
>
> In other words, the bot does not automatically update any content. It
> generate the content that users can save.
>
> I am aware that some of you are quite against the use of bot. So I offer
> some defense here.
>
> First, the Special:Recent_changes will not be flooded. The bot works only
> with a human confirming the content. The pace of the activities cannot be
> faster than that of humans.
>
> Second, the way it works, it cannot be abused by some mal-intended users to
> overload the server.
>
> If no objection, some of us would complete the bot and show to admins for
> the final check.
>
> Many thanks,
>
> Tomos
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> Add photos to your e-mail with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*.
> http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail
>
> _______________________________________________
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from_name: K Forstner

subject: [WikiEN-l] "Movie" versus "film"

body:
I would never have thought that renaming "Young and Innocent (film)" so that
it becomes "Young and Innocent (movie)" -- purely for consistency's sake --
would create such a lengthy debate. What you don't take into consideration
is that there isn't just a world outside the United States: There are also
parts of this planet where ENGLISH is NOT the first language. If you were
living in a small landlocked country such as Austria, where I'm writing from
just now, you'd be appalled at the sheer number of both English and German
words with which you are inundated every single day of your life. We've
arrived at a point where three year-olds say "Tsch?s" (German, but certainly
not Austrian for "Bye") when they leave and "cool" if they see something
they like -- all because they have heard it on TV. And now imagine an
Austrian saying, "I'm not putting up with this. They are supposed to say
"Servus" and "nett" or whatever.

And of course you can call an Austrian made-for-TV Film (which is the German
word) a "movie". Where's the problem?

KF


from_name: Tomos at Wikipedia

subject: [Wikipedia-l] use of a bot (long)

body:
Hello. I have a question about the use of a bot.

After some trials-and-errors, we wikipedians in Japanese 'pedia are now
starting to use an outside BBS (prepared by one of the active wikipedians)
for our discussion of basic policies and other site-wide issues. And in
conjunction with it, we are wondering if it is okay to use a bot to
automatically update a page within wikipedia (something like
[Wikipedia:Discussions_at_WikipediaBBS]) which displays info. on recent
postings occuring at the BBS.

Now I think I should explain two things - why we (some of us) think outside
BBS is good, and why the bot is helpful for that.

1. Why we think outside BBS is good

For discussion purposes, we have three options.
Meta, talkpage, and some dedicated pages in the Wikipedia namespace.

Meta is not user-friendly because its interface is in English.

We tried talk pages, but there happened too many discussions of overlapping
topics, and it was hard for latecomers to join, because the discussions are
taking place in many places (some unknown to the newcomers), hard to
reconstruct the dialogue spanning multiple talkpages. It is also difficult
for anybody to revisit the past discussions and decisions, because the
records are scattered.

Then we tried Wikipedia:Village_pump as a place for discussion and
decision-making regarding site-wide issues - naming conventions, spelling
conventions, disambiguation policies, admin selections, basic style and
layout issues, and so on. Some are re-doing of what people did in English
wikipeida, some are more or less unique to Japanese wikipedia. We faced some
problems again. The major ones are (a)32kb limit for some browsers, and (b)
too many issues to be discussed within the limited space (though we used
subpages, etc.). I can also point out that (c) there are several yet-to-be
understood bugs/troubles related to display and character encoding (some
characters turn jibrish, some characters automatically get deleted, some
characters are visible only in editing box, and at least a few more), and
outside BBS is a good place to discuss about the problem without being
annoyed by the very problem we talk about. Some others pointed out (d)
Wikipedia is slow or down too often these days, and it is better to have
outside place we can work on.

While at least some of us think that we can improve the way we use
Wkipedia:Village_pump and make it workable, (and of course I cannot deny
that there is a possibility that the BBS turn out to be problematic in other
ways,) many of active users think we would try the BBS for now.

2. Why the bot is helpful

2. Why a bot is helpful

Bot is good for two reasons. It saves users time by automatically creating
the content that the user would want to post. It helps others (those of us
who do not always check on the BBS) to stay informed of what's going on in
the BBS.

As it is preliminary designed and implemented, the bot does two things: (a)
automatically create a page content for a specific page something like
[[Wikipedia:Discussions in the Wikipedia BBS]] and (b) with a click of a
mouse, the user will be taken automatically to the edit mode of the page
(now in wikipedia) with the auto-generated content. -The content is not
saved/posted at this stage. The user still has to confirm the content by
pressing the "save" button.

In other words, the bot does not automatically update any content. It
generate the content that users can save.

I am aware that some of you are quite against the use of bot. So I offer
some defense here.

First, the Special:Recent_changes will not be flooded. The bot works only
with a human confirming the content. The pace of the activities cannot be
faster than that of humans.

Second, the way it works, it cannot be abused by some mal-intended users to
overload the server.

If no objection, some of us would complete the bot and show to admins for
the final check.

Many thanks,

Tomos

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


from_name: Jimmy Wales

in_reply_to: <BAY1-F143ymQ1WE9ql200000389@hotmail.com>; from jtdirl@hotmail.com on Tue, May 06, 2003 at 12:51:34AM +0100

body:
james duffy wrote:
> The obvious solution is to apply the same approach as we do with British
> English and American English. Accept the form used by whoever writes the
> article.

The problem is that disambiguation in article titles pushes us
strongly in the direction of a convention.

In the text of articles, to be sure, there's no reason to prefer one
over the other, and in fact, a respect for the nuances of language
suggests that no a priori rule is likely to capture the richness of
what someone is trying to express.

But for article titles, consistency is more important.

> As to the reference to 'movie' bring used to describe Hollywood
> blockbusters, that is done tongue in cheek by many Europeans to
> contrast big budget Hollywood blockbusters to arthouse films or film
> noir.

This usage is common in the U.S. as well.  The word 'film' is often
used tongue in cheek to contrast solid entertainment with pretentious
European dreck masquerading as art.  So... you know... I guess
international word choice doesn't diverge as much as you might think.
:-)

I tend to agree with the choice of 'film', but not for the reasons
that you outline.  I think it's really silly to think that
non-Americans are offended by the use of the word, or, if they are,
they need to relax.  A lot.  And not pretend that Americans are
humorless!  :-)

But 'film' is more formal, and formality is good in an encyclopedia,
so I lean in that direction anyway.

--Jimbo


list: wikitech-l

subject: [Wikitech-l] Transition to new server

body:
How's that?  I'm sorry, I don't understand.  It's all in my register.com
account, right?

Jason Richey wrote:

> I am only in control of wikipedia.com, I don't know who can change the
> TTL on wikipedi.org subdomains.
>
> Jason
>
> Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
>
> >
> > Jason, regardless of which way we go, you can start by reducing
> > the lifetime of "test" and "www" in DNS, and make entries for
> > "pliny" and "larousse". We also need to change the canonical
> > name of ww to pliny--I can do that, but I'm not sure what else
> > that might effect, so I haven't done it yet.
> >
> > --
> > Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
> > "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
> > are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
> > for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikitech-l mailing list
> > Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> > http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
> --
> "Jason C. Richey" <jasonr at bomis.com>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


subject: [WikiEN-l] "Movie" versus "film"

in_reply_to: <000d01c3136d$b5cba110$4c136c50@OHGOD>; from kurt.forstner@chello.at on Tue, May 06, 2003 at 03:20:41AM +0200

body:
K Forstner wrote:
> I would never have thought that renaming "Young and Innocent (film)" so that
> it becomes "Young and Innocent (movie)" -- purely for consistency's sake --
> would create such a lengthy debate.

:-) Welcome to wikipedia.  We love to get things right, and we love to
discuss every possible angle on things.  A lot.

> you'd be appalled at the sheer number of both English and German
> words with which you are inundated every single day of your life.

Perhaps part of the culture clash here is that Americans are completely
accustomed to new non-English words, and we just soak them up and keep on
going.

Once when I was taking Japanese language classes, the teacher made a
point that I thought was interesting.  In the United States we are
very accustomed to people speaking English badly, with strange
accents, etc.  I lived in Chicago at the time, a real melting pot of a
city, and it was certainly true.  Many strange forms of English thrive
there among taxi drivers and similar.

But most Japanese people have never heard anyone speak Japanese
*badly*.  So, allegedly, it is a lot harder for them to understand
someone speaking bad Japanese than it is for us to understand someone
speaking bad English.

This relates to the current discussion as follows.  Some people seem
to see the use of 'movie' over 'film' as some kind of enforced
Americentrism, i.e. the view that the rest of the world better use the
"right" term, which is the AMERICAN term, dammit.  But I don't think
that's an accurate assessment of anyone's actual attitude.

It's more like, we're completely bewildered that people seem so upset
about such a thing.  Call it movie, call it film, whatever.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] use of a bot (long)

in_reply_to: <BADD2C66.8DDB%cunctator@kband.com>; from cunctator@kband.com on Tue, May 06, 2003 at 09:09:58AM -0400

body:
The Cunctator wrote:
> Hmm...when did I recommend that Wikipedia use a BBS?
>
> How's that going, Jimbo?

It's being ignored for absolutely no good reason.

What BBS software are the Japanese using?  Where is it hosted?  Is it
something that we could/should host for them, and also set up for
English-speakers?

I love using email, and so that's one of the main reasons I haven't
gotten off my butt to look into this.  But that's not a very good
reason.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] use of a bot (long)

body:
As i recommended to tomos, phpbb is the best open source (GNU) out there (phpbb.com). I will use
their bb to illustrate counterpoints:

--- Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> 1) Mailing lists are, by their very nature, decentralized. Any post is
> replicated on hundreds of machines. This automatic replication makes
> censorship very hard and a total loss of data unlikely.
Whatever. paranoia. backups?

>
> 2) Archives like the ones generated by Mailman can be imported into email
> clients and searched locally at high speed. I have frequently made use of
> that feature to build high quality archives. The search function of most
> BBS systems, on the other hand, is far from optimal (I've seen many BBS
> which claimed to have a search, but where this search never worked).

phpbb is solid and well tested for years now: http://phpbb.com/phpBB/search.php

>
> 3) Mailing lists keep a track record. It is easy and fast to see all posts
> by a particular member, or everything written by yourself. With a BBS, you
> first have to figure out if such a feature exists, then wait for the
> server to perform some search. Server is down? Too bad, you'll never get
> that post you wrote 3 months ago now.
http://phpbb.com/phpBB/search.php?search_author=theFinn

>4) Mailing lists allow everyone to participate without a free online
>connection. In many developing nations, Internet access is paid by the
>minute, and reading and replying to posts online costs money. Mailing
>lists can be conveniently read, responded to and archived offline.

you can 'watch' topics via email with phpbb. And i could easily hack in a reply-via-email option.
There are many bbs/mailing lists out there...

> 5) Mailing lists allow the use of a variety of email clients which all
> have advantages and disadvantages. Everyone can use the software of their
> choice, with a user interface that suits them, without being forced to
> make use of an arbitrary web interface. This is of importance to
> handicapped users, for whom special email clients exist.
and special web-browsers....you wouldnt believe how much complaint of "aural" goes on in the
mozilla.

> 6) Good email clients make quoting and threading transparent and easy to
> use. They interpret the reference ID in a message and thereby allow you to
> quickly navigate to the parent post that a message has responded to.
> Quoting and writing within a real text editor is also a lot more
> convenient than writing within a browser window.
http://phpbb-hpmods.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/posting.php?mode=reply&t=34

Thats my bb on sourceforge for a patch i made a while ago... try the [quote] feature, its quite
clean.

>
> 7) Bulletin board systems are slow. This is related to 4) -- in a BBS I
> have to wait for each individual thread to load, for the "post reply"
> screen to load, for sorting options to affect my display etc. -- as with
> all web interfaces, you have a high additional latency as every aspect of
> the interface is generated "on demand".

I agree flat out.

>
> 8) Bulletin board systems have a higher noise level. They allow no easy
> client-side filtering, as many email clients do. Many BBS encourage the
> use of fonts, pictures, animated smileys, overlong signatures etc., often
> leading to very hard to read threads.

A good administrator of phpbb can produce very clean sites. Its very configurable and skinable

>
> 9) Every BBS is different. Everyone is familiar with email, but learning
> to use a BBS always requires making yourself familiar with its particular
> user interface and functionality.

You must not have heard of phpbb...it has quite an active development community both on the web,
and on irc.freenode.net #phpbb

>
> 10) Mailing lists can be easily moderated, even in groups. BBS usually
> have after-the-fact moderation, where individual posts are censored or
> threads are locked. On a mailing list, posts can be pre-approved and
> individual members banned. With a BBS that does not use some ID
> confirmation method, we'll have the same banning problem we have on
> Wikipedia proper -- totally open access is not always a good thing. And if
> email confirmation is required, this only advantage of a web-based BBS
> goes away.

??? wikipedia has groups, individual user permissions, and IP based blacklisting...

Now its my turn.

phpbb allows for structure of topics. This would easily allow it to become the talk section for
each article on top of its other duties.

as you can see from http://phpbb.com/phpBB/ there are 500,000 articles, well more than wikipedia
;-) and 160 users online at the time im writing this. you tell me of the performance?

However, if we can find a file-based bb that allows structure and is well developed, then that
would be ideal.

Im also not aggressively inclined toward having a bbs, i just wanted to shed some light.

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from_name: Vicki Rosenzweig

subject: [Wikipedia-l] use of a bot (long)

body:
At 03:52 AM 5/6/03 +0000, Tomos wrote:
>Hello. I have a question about the use of a bot.
>
>After some trials-and-errors, we wikipedians in Japanese 'pedia are now
>starting to use an outside BBS (prepared by one of the active wikipedians)
>for our discussion of basic policies and other site-wide issues. And in
>conjunction with it, we are wondering if it is okay to use a bot to
>automatically update a page within wikipedia (something like
>[Wikipedia:Discussions_at_WikipediaBBS]) which displays info. on recent
>postings occuring at the BBS.<snip>
>While at least some of us think that we can improve the way we use
>Wkipedia:Village_pump and make it workable, (and of course I cannot deny
>that there is a possibility that the BBS turn out to be problematic in
>other ways,) many of active users think we would try the BBS for now.
>
>2. Why a bot is helpful
>
>Bot is good for two reasons. It saves users time by automatically creating
>the content that the user would want to post. It helps others (those of us
>who do not always check on the BBS) to stay informed of what's going on in
>the BBS.
>
>As it is preliminary designed and implemented, the bot does two things:
>(a) automatically create a page content for a specific page something like
>[[Wikipedia:Discussions in the Wikipedia BBS]] and (b) with a click of a
>mouse, the user will be taken automatically to the edit mode of the page
>(now in wikipedia) with the auto-generated content. -The content is not
>saved/posted at this stage. The user still has to confirm the content by
>pressing the "save" button.
>
>In other words, the bot does not automatically update any content. It
>generate the content that users can save.
>
>I am aware that some of you are quite against the use of bot. So I offer
>some defense here.
>
>First, the Special:Recent_changes will not be flooded. The bot works only
>with a human confirming the content. The pace of the activities cannot be
>faster than that of humans.

 From what you describe, the bot should not cause any problems. The
objections to
bots are that they overload either Recent_changes or the processors,
neither of which
will happen here.

--
Vicki Rosenzweig
vr at redbird.org
http://www.redbird.org


from_name: daniwo59 at aol.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] History of Croatia

body:
Hello

I am getting really tired of a signed in editor named Or, who works only on the article [[History of Croatia]]. He is erasing material and making it POV. In a previous incarnation, before he got a user name, he also erased the [[Jasenovac]] article. Basically, every day he does this, and every day someone reverts him. Today, I reverted him, he reverted me, someone anonmous blanked the article, and someone reverted to Or's version. It is getting tiresome. I have asked him about his changes in the Talk page, but to no avail. This is also the only article he ever does anything with.

Suggestions anyone?

Danny


from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [Wikipedia-l] use of a bot (long)

body:
Hmm...when did I recommend that Wikipedia use a BBS?

How's that going, Jimbo?


subject: [WikiEN-l] History of Croatia

body:
On 5/6/03 9:06 AM, "daniwo59 at aol.com" <daniwo59 at aol.com> wrote:

> Hello
>
> I am getting really tired of a signed in editor named Or, who works only on
> the article [[History of Croatia]]. He is erasing material and making it POV.
> In a previous incarnation, before he got a user name, he also erased the
> [[Jasenovac]] article. Basically, every day he does this, and every day
> someone reverts him. Today, I reverted him, he reverted me, someone anonmous
> blanked the article, and someone reverted to Or's version. It is getting
> tiresome. I have asked him about his changes in the Talk page, but to no
> avail. This is also the only article he ever does anything with.
>
If he's only working on one article, then I wouldn't worry about it too
much. We'll outlast him.


from_name: Jason Richey

subject: [Wikitech-l] Transition to new server

body:
Yeah, I noticed that right after I sent this mail...  For some reason,
I thought that wikipedia.org was a different situation (in terms of
DNS) than wikipedia.com.  I don't know what made me think that.

Jason

Jimmy Wales wrote:

> How's that?  I'm sorry, I don't understand.  It's all in my register.com
> account, right?
>
> Jason Richey wrote:
>
> > I am only in control of wikipedia.com, I don't know who can change the
> > TTL on wikipedi.org subdomains.
> >
> > Jason
> >
> > Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
> >
> > >
> > > Jason, regardless of which way we go, you can start by reducing
> > > the lifetime of "test" and "www" in DNS, and make entries for
> > > "pliny" and "larousse". We also need to change the canonical
> > > name of ww to pliny--I can do that, but I'm not sure what else
> > > that might effect, so I haven't done it yet.
> > >
> > > --
> > > Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
> > > "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
> > > are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
> > > for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Wikitech-l mailing list
> > > Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> > > http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
> >
> > --
> > "Jason C. Richey" <jasonr at bomis.com>
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikitech-l mailing list
> > Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> > http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

--
"Jason C. Richey" <jasonr at bomis.com>


subject: [Wikipedia-l] use of a bot (long)

body:
The Cunctator wrote:
> The short response to Erik's reference for email over a BBS is
> essentially that for a power-user, with the talent, knowledge, and time
> to configure and use "good email clients" which make "quoting and
> threading transparent and easy to use", email is preferable.
>
> The reality is that is not the case for most people.

I don't accept that mailing lists present an additional barrier for
most people.  Almost everyone uses mailing lists -- from Yahoo groups
on up -- and most people understand the concept implicitly.  The user
interface is one that they are already familiar with, i.e. their
comfortable normal mail software, as opposed to a brand-new and
generally idiosyncratic user interface for a bbs.

> Because the the discussion forum is currently in email form, there are
> several additional barriers to entry.

But I don't think these barriers are very large, and not as large as
the barriers to using a BBS.

> But instead of having the argument about why a BBS would be better than
> an Email list, I recommend setting up a BBS, and letting practice
> decide.

I'm open to this idea, and I'm keenly interested in what the Japanese
speakers are doing, and why they are doing it.  I wonder if their
reasons are similar to yours, or if they have other, unique reasons,
having to do with Japanese language support in email or something like
that.

Unless there's a way to gateway email conversations into a bbs, then
the bbs is almost certainly doomed to failure, just due to inertia.

--Jimbo


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] MySQL 4.0.12

body:
On Tue, 6 May 2003, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
> MySQL AB just released a notice that there's a security bug in
> version 3.23.54, which we are using. So now would be a good time
> to upgrade to 4.0.12. It's been running at Piclab (where it was
> installed in-place over an existing installation) and larousse
> (where it was installed initially), and seems to be running well.

Sounds good, but please run a backup dump first!

(Lee, the current backup script is /home/brion/bin/backup-wikis. It takes
a few hours to finish, largely for dumping and compressing the English
old table.)

> This will require a reboot, which I'll plan on doing late tonight
> if there are no objections.

I can't imagine any reason for rebooting, unless you're also planning to
upgrade the kernel.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] MySQL 4.0.12

body:
The DNS change is done.  DNS propagation is a different matter...

Jason

Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:

> MySQL AB just released a notice that there's a security bug in
> version 3.23.54, which we are using. So now would be a good time
> to upgrade to 4.0.12. It's been running at Piclab (where it was
> installed in-place over an existing installation) and larousse
> (where it was installed initially), and seems to be running well.
> This will require a reboot, which I'll plan on doing late tonight
> if there are no objections.
>
> It would be great if I could get the DNS changes done by then
> too, at least for "pliny", "larousse", and "test".
>
> --
> Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
> are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
> for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

--
"Jason C. Richey" <jasonr at bomis.com>


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikipedia-l] use of a bot (long)

body:
> > ??? wikipedia has groups, individual user
> permissions, and IP based
> > blacklisting...
>
> IP-blacklisting is unreliable because most IPs are
> dynamically assigned.
> It is also only available for non signed in users in
> the current
> configuration. Groups? Wikipedia has no groups. It
> also has no "individual
> user permissions" besides a simple is_sysop flag.

Wikipedia has language groups.

__________________________________
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The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikipedia-l] use of a bot (long)

body:
On Tue, 2003-05-06 at 12:59, Erik Moeller wrote:
> Don't get me wrong: developers of PHPBB & Co. are doing a good job -- but
> for our purposes, email is a much better solution.
>
The short response to Erik's reference for email over a BBS is
essentially that for a power-user, with the talent, knowledge, and time
to configure and use "good email clients" which make "quoting and
threading transparent and easy to use", email is preferable.

The reality is that is not the case for most people.

The more important reality is that there should not be an additional
barrier to entry in finding and using the discussion forum (currently in
email form) above the barriers to entry to becoming a Wikipedia editor
(which are web access, going to Wikipedia, clicking on "Edit this page"
and possibly creating a user account).

Because the the discussion forum is currently in email form, there are
several additional barriers to entry.

This is bad, and will never be a Good Thing.

Another basic, basic thing: since we're discussing Wikipedia matters, we
really should be able to make links to Wikipedia entries in the
discussion forum. We can't usefully do that with email.

But instead of having the argument about why a BBS would be better than
an Email list, I recommend setting up a BBS, and letting practice
decide.


from_name: Lee Daniel Crocker

subject: [Wikitech-l] MySQL 4.0.12

body:
MySQL AB just released a notice that there's a security bug in
version 3.23.54, which we are using. So now would be a good time
to upgrade to 4.0.12. It's been running at Piclab (where it was
installed in-place over an existing installation) and larousse
(where it was installed initially), and seems to be running well.
This will require a reboot, which I'll plan on doing late tonight
if there are no objections.

It would be great if I could get the DNS changes done by then
too, at least for "pliny", "larousse", and "test".

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


subject: [Wikitech-l] NTP time goodness

body:
Okay, I think I've got NTP set up for time synchronization.

I think.

I installed it from source on pliny (the workhorse), pointed it at a local
tier 2 server, and it _seems_ to be happy:

# ntptrace
localhost.localdomain: stratum 3, offset 0.000024, synch distance 0.03992
zorac.sf-bay.org: stratum 2, offset 0.053651, synch distance 0.02638
timekeeper.isi.edu: stratum 1, offset 0.054295, synch distance 0.00000, refid 'GPS'

(Note that I did a manual approximate-synch to current time on this
machine before installing NTP.)

I'm more confused on the new machine, larousse. NTP was already installed
as an RPM; I wiped out the config file to point it at the same server, but
I'm not sure it's working:

# /usr/sbin/ntptrace
localhost.localdomain: stratum 16, offset 0.000120, synch distance 0.00272
0.0.0.0:        *Not Synchronized*

It may just need to sit for a while and work its magic.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] MySQL 4.0.12

body:
> (Brion Vibber <vibber at aludra.usc.edu>):
>
> I can't imagine any reason for rebooting, unless you're also planning
> to upgrade the kernel.

Mainly to get the canonical machine name "pliny.wikipedia.org" from
/etc/sysconfig/network to take effect--makes ssh happy. Also, I'm just
a bit over-paranoid about things like old version of shared libs being
in the cache and such (though I know MySQL is built statically).

At any rate, a reboot isn't a major thing--takes about two minutes.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Movie v. Film

body:
JT wrote:
>....
>On the movie vs film issue, I like the suggestion of
>(movie/film) or (film/movie). Perhaps the solution as
>to which one comes first can be solved
>simply by the rule - put them alphabetically.

Please no. Just keep it simple. Either (movie) or
(film) works. My personal preference is for (movie)
because it is less ambiguous than (film) ("film" has
more than one meaning while "movie" only has one). But
this isn't a strong preference. The /main/ reason why
I think (movie) is better is because this is the term
used for the majority ambiguous movie names already.

If somebody goes to the great deal of effort on moving
these articles to the (film) format then I'll support
that as the standard.

But (film/movie) is madness - newbies will create all
sorts of variants based on this disambiguator.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

=====

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com


from_name: Richard Grevers

subject: [WikiEN-l] Movie v. Film

body:
On Mon, 05 May 2003 22:11:16 -0700, John Knouse <jaknouse at frognet.net> gave
utterance to the following:

> Whoa, here's a radical solution: use the form "Jackass
> (movie/film)".  There.  Doesn't that cover it?

Or we could be encyclopaedic and write (motion picture) - which is what the
movie/film industry tends to formally call itself.
--
Richard Grevers
When all else fails put the blame on someone else


subject: [Wikipedia-l] [mriddle@MONARCH.PAPILLION.NE.US: Re: reason magazine]

body:
Distributed journalism via blogs... I'm just forwarding this to this
list because we've chatted in the past about wikimedia and the possibility
of a wiki-style news site.

----- Forwarded message from Mike Riddle <mriddle at MONARCH.PAPILLION.NE.US> -----

From: Mike Riddle <mriddle at MONARCH.PAPILLION.NE.US>
Date:         Tue, 6 May 2003 16:58:04 -0500
To: FIREARMSREGPROF at listserv.ucla.edu
Subject:      Re: reason magazine

On Tue, 6 May 2003 16:47:37 -0500, Robert Woolley wrote:

>There is an article in the 5/03 Reason magazine by Julian Sanchez (I think
>that's the name) about John Lott, Mary Rosh, and distributed investigative
>journalism by bloggers. It mentions this very list, as well as members of
>it, naturally.

The Mystery of Mary Rosh
How a new form of journalism investigated a gun research riddle.
By Julian Sanchez

Stories that might never be broken if a single reporter had to spend days
researching them are now being covered by dilettante swarms rather than
diligent professionals. It s a new form of journalism, reminiscent less of old-
fashioned investigative reporting than of the decentralized "peer production"
that generates open source software. If it had a slogan, it might be "We
report, we decide."

New York University law professor Yochai Benkler has argued that open source
works because programming is a "granular" task -- the job of coding a massive
piece of software can be broken into many small pieces -- and because the
Internet allows the rapid collating and peer filtering of work done by
thousands of dispersed individuals. Traditional programming requires a few
coders to commit a lot of time and effort, for which they will reasonably
expect to be paid. When the software s source code is freely available,
however, the big job can be done in small increments by a large pool of
volunteers. The results are filtered for quality the same way, with superior
pieces of coding copied and spread through the population.

Distributed journalism works similarly. Different lines of inquiry will occur
to different people, who bring different kinds of knowledge to bear on the same
topic. The ability to concatenate that information online -- particularly via
those motley commentary sites and open diaries called blogs -- makes the
information discovered by each available to all.

To see the process in action, consider the case of John R. Lott, author of More
Guns, Less Crime, which argues that concealed-carry gun laws reduce crime.

[continues at http://www.reason.com/0305/co.js.the.shtml]

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


from_name: Neil Harris

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Chat about Wikipedia performance?

body:
David A. Wheeler wrote:

>
>Unfortunately, we can't really separate processor architecture from
>software architecture - the goal is to maximize performance while
>minimizing hardware & development-time cost.  Hopefully, this
>kind of free-flowing discussion of alternatives will yield
>that perfect combination - or at least a good one.
>
>
>
I think the three critical resources at the moment are:
* disk head contention on the DB
* lock contention / concurrency control on the DB
* memory on the DB (memory is > 1000 times faster than disk)

The solutions for these are:
* Disk head contention: add more, faster disks, in a RAID
* Careful database design / shifting to a DB which handles concurrency
better (PostgreSQL?)
* Slamming in as much RAM as possible on the DB machine

Query processing, on the other hand, is easily parallelizable by adding
multiple cheap front-end boxes, and load-balancing via round-robin DNS
or some other scheme.

However, all this is based on thinking rather than measurement, and
test-and-measure is the only way forward.
This is where splitting the DB from the page rendering is vital: it will
allow these two to be individually measured, to see where resources are
really being used.

Neil


subject: [Wikitech-l] NTP time goodness

body:
> (Brion Vibber <vibber at aludra.usc.edu>):
>
> I'm more confused on the new machine, larousse. NTP was already installed
> as an RPM; I wiped out the config file to point it at the same server, but
> I'm not sure it's working:
>
> # /usr/sbin/ntptrace
> localhost.localdomain: stratum 16, offset 0.000120, synch distance 0.00272
> 0.0.0.0:        *Not Synchronized*

FWIW, I haven't been able to get my machines at home (also running
redhat 9) to sync with my server. But then, I had never tried before,
so you've got more experience in that regard.

I will note that when my machine boots, it prints a message that it
is opening a hole in the firewall for port 123, then after the sync
attempt fails, it closes it again. So you may want to reboot
larousse to see if it does that.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


subject: [WikiEN-l] Movie v. Film

body:
On Mon, 05 May 2003 20:18:01 -0700, Stan Shebs <shebs at apple.com> gave
utterance to the following:

>
> Perhaps the next generation of software can have more variables to
> adjust for reader nationality set via preference, so you could have
> "Jackass (%MOTIONPICTURE)", "labo%Ur", "theat%ERRE",
> and so forth.  Makes a little more work for editors, but avoids giving
> offense.
>
> Stan
> .
> .
> .
> .
> .
> (See, without the :-) you weren't sure whether my last paragraph
> was a serious suggestion or not, eh?  But no, I wasn't serious.)
>
Just when I was about to point out that a great number of American theatre
practitioners of my e-acquaintance insist that "theatre" is indeed the
correct spelling for their profession and venues and that "theater" implies
a burlesque house or a place where movies are shown :-).
--
Richard Grevers
Bureaucrats cut red tape - lengthwise


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [WikiEN-l] "Moses ben Nachman" and NPOV

body:
Please take a look at:

http://www.wikipedia.org/w/
wiki.phtml?title=Joseph_McCarthy&diff=895253&oldid=894480

(the URL may need to be pasted together). This edit, marked as *minor*, is
the work of one "Moses ben Nachman", a Wikipedia user with a very brief
edit history who just announced on his talk page that, "after several
months, I have decided to give this internet project another chance."

I strongly suspect that "Moses" is really the banned user Clutch. The
above edit is exactly his style (like changing "heavy drinking" to "social
drinking"), and even includes a link to a text on Clutch's homepage ("How
the Marxists destroyed Joe McCarthy"), reactor-core.org. Moreover, if you
check his user page, you will find that he was immediately welcomed by
Clutch -- and then complained about RK, as Clutch also did. In the
McCarthy edit, he removed large slabs of text without explanation.

I'm not involved in the McCarthy article, but I suggest people keep an eye
on it, and on "Moses'" other edits. Yes, the McCarthy article was slightly
POV before the edits, but I doubt that it will be possible to make it NPOV
with the "help" of someone like "Moses".

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikipedia-l] use of a bot (long)

body:
> The Cunctator wrote:
>> Hmm...when did I recommend that Wikipedia use a BBS?
>>
>> How's that going, Jimbo?

> It's being ignored for absolutely no good reason.

> What BBS software are the Japanese using?  Where is it hosted?  Is it
> something that we could/should host for them, and also set up for
> English-speakers?

> I love using email, and so that's one of the main reasons I haven't
> gotten off my butt to look into this.  But that's not a very good
> reason.

It is a very good reason. The Japanese may do whatever the want, but I
strongly advise against using a BBS for Wikipedia discussions.

1) Mailing lists are, by their very nature, decentralized. Any post is
replicated on hundreds of machines. This automatic replication makes
censorship very hard and a total loss of data unlikely.

2) Archives like the ones generated by Mailman can be imported into email
clients and searched locally at high speed. I have frequently made use of
that feature to build high quality archives. The search function of most
BBS systems, on the other hand, is far from optimal (I've seen many BBS
which claimed to have a search, but where this search never worked).

3) Mailing lists keep a track record. It is easy and fast to see all posts
by a particular member, or everything written by yourself. With a BBS, you
first have to figure out if such a feature exists, then wait for the
server to perform some search. Server is down? Too bad, you'll never get
that post you wrote 3 months ago now.

4) Mailing lists allow everyone to participate without a free online
connection. In many developing nations, Internet access is paid by the
minute, and reading and replying to posts online costs money. Mailing
lists can be conveniently read, responded to and archived offline.

5) Mailing lists allow the use of a variety of email clients which all
have advantages and disadvantages. Everyone can use the software of their
choice, with a user interface that suits them, without being forced to
make use of an arbitrary web interface. This is of importance to
handicapped users, for whom special email clients exist.

6) Good email clients make quoting and threading transparent and easy to
use. They interpret the reference ID in a message and thereby allow you to
quickly navigate to the parent post that a message has responded to.
Quoting and writing within a real text editor is also a lot more
convenient than writing within a browser window.

7) Bulletin board systems are slow. This is related to 4) -- in a BBS I
have to wait for each individual thread to load, for the "post reply"
screen to load, for sorting options to affect my display etc. -- as with
all web interfaces, you have a high additional latency as every aspect of
the interface is generated "on demand".

8) Bulletin board systems have a higher noise level. They allow no easy
client-side filtering, as many email clients do. Many BBS encourage the
use of fonts, pictures, animated smileys, overlong signatures etc., often
leading to very hard to read threads.

9) Every BBS is different. Everyone is familiar with email, but learning
to use a BBS always requires making yourself familiar with its particular
user interface and functionality.

10) Mailing lists can be easily moderated, even in groups. BBS usually
have after-the-fact moderation, where individual posts are censored or
threads are locked. On a mailing list, posts can be pre-approved and
individual members banned. With a BBS that does not use some ID
confirmation method, we'll have the same banning problem we have on
Wikipedia proper -- totally open access is not always a good thing. And if
email confirmation is required, this only advantage of a web-based BBS
goes away.

A motivated and informed writer could certainly expand the above list to
10 times this length. Any of the advantages that people cite for bulletin
boards -- such as easier participation -- can be easily replicated with
mailing lists. For example, the Wikipedia mailing lists are available
through the portal

        http://www.gmane.org

and can be accessed with a newsreader or webbrowser. In other words: Not
only can mailing lists be read with an email or webmail client, they can
also be read with a newsreader or BBS-style interface! Now try reading a
BBS with an email client or newsreader.

I will not participate in any BBS. Of all the forums that the Internet
offers, bulletin boards are among the worst.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Abe Sokolov

subject: [WikiEN-l] administrator's status

body:
I do have support for becoming an admin. I?d like to refer to the below comments posted on my talk page at http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:172

: BTW, to become an admin, you need to send an email to the mailing list. (Sing out if you don't know how to do this.) You were ''persona non-grata'' there in the early days. Indeed, the reason I originally signed up for the list was to (a) speak in your defence, and (b) make a plea to ban Vera bloody Cruz. (And I firmly believe that time has proved me 100% right on both counts!) But that was quite some time ago, and I'm sure your stocks have risen considerably since then. I'll certainly speak up for you: your contribution to the history sections here has been outstanding. [[User:Tannin|Tannin]]

Thanks. I have been having major technical problems here. And it has been difficult getting on to wiki. I wrote something on a talk page at 3.30pm today but could only get onto wiki to put it on at 10pm tonight! I got a new digital camera so I spent a couple of days walking around Dublin talking pictures for wiki articles. (See [[Irish Houses of Parliament]]) God what so of wikiholic am I!!! I see the latest of Adam's trolls have disappeared. I think our 'no holes barred' attitude is working. Once he is rumbled, he knows the game is up and we will tolerate no messing! Anyway, thanks for the message. BTW you have my full support in joining admin. [[User:Jtdirl|??REman]] 21:57 May 3, 2003 (UTC)

-----

We've had our differences and I still think you are not able to see your own POV sometimes (especially by selective presentation) but I will not oppose your application for Adminship (however I won't support it either). If Fred can be an Admin I guess you can too. --[[User:Maveric149|mav]]

You have my support too. [[User:Danny|Danny]]

----------

Fred Bauder?s charges pertaining to bias are also baseless. To get an idea see the debate on the talk pages of Communist state and China.

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subject: [WikiEN-l] administrator's status

body:
I do have support for becoming an admin. I?d like to refer to the below comments posted on my talk page at http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:172

: BTW, to become an admin, you need to send an email to the mailing list. (Sing out if you don't know how to do this.) You were ''persona non-grata'' there in the early days. Indeed, the reason I originally signed up for the list was to (a) speak in your defence, and (b) make a plea to ban Vera bloody Cruz. (And I firmly believe that time has proved me 100% right on both counts!) But that was quite some time ago, and I'm sure your stocks have risen considerably since then. I'll certainly speak up for you: your contribution to the history sections here has been outstanding. [[User:Tannin|Tannin]]

Thanks. I have been having major technical problems here. And it has been difficult getting on to wiki. I wrote something on a talk page at 3.30pm today but could only get onto wiki to put it on at 10pm tonight! I got a new digital camera so I spent a couple of days walking around Dublin talking pictures for wiki articles. (See [[Irish Houses of Parliament]]) God what so of wikiholic am I!!! I see the latest of Adam's trolls have disappeared. I think our 'no holes barred' attitude is working. Once he is rumbled, he knows the game is up and we will tolerate no messing! Anyway, thanks for the message. BTW you have my full support in joining admin. [[User:Jtdirl|??REman]] 21:57 May 3, 2003 (UTC)

-----

We've had our differences and I still think you are not able to see your own POV sometimes (especially by selective presentation) but I will not oppose your application for Adminship (however I won't support it either). If Fred can be an Admin I guess you can too. --[[User:Maveric149|mav]]

You have my support too. [[User:Danny|Danny]]

Fred Bauder?s charges pertaining to bias are also baseless. To get an idea see the debate on the talk pages of Communist state and China.

---------------------------------
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: use of a bot (long).

body:
> The mailing lists are for policy nerds, techies and masochists. Article-
> related discussions already take place on the respective talk pages, and
> for user help there's the Village Pump. I've already stated that I agree
> the discussion system on talk pages needs improvements - give me money and
> I will fix it.

Heh...give me an admin account and *I( will fix it.

check this out:http://zesty.ca/criticons/

Then I summarized most of the issues here: http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_media  (also on top
level meta homepage).

discussion should continue on both media.

__________________________________
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subject: [WikiEN-l] administrator's status

body:
I do have support for becoming an admin. I?d like to refer to the below comments posted on my talk page at http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:172

: BTW, to become an admin, you need to send an email to the mailing list. (Sing out if you don't know how to do this.) You were ''persona non-grata'' there in the early days. Indeed, the reason I originally signed up for the list was to (a) speak in your defence, and (b) make a plea to ban Vera bloody Cruz. (And I firmly believe that time has proved me 100% right on both counts!) But that was quite some time ago, and I'm sure your stocks have risen considerably since then. I'll certainly speak up for you: your contribution to the history sections here has been outstanding. [[User:Tannin|Tannin]]

Thanks. I have been having major technical problems here. And it has been difficult getting on to wiki. I wrote something on a talk page at 3.30pm today but could only get onto wiki to put it on at 10pm tonight! I got a new digital camera so I spent a couple of days walking around Dublin talking pictures for wiki articles. (See [[Irish Houses of Parliament]]) God what so of wikiholic am I!!! I see the latest of Adam's trolls have disappeared. I think our 'no holes barred' attitude is working. Once he is rumbled, he knows the game is up and we will tolerate no messing! Anyway, thanks for the message. BTW you have my full support in joining admin. [[User:Jtdirl|??REman]] 21:57 May 3, 2003 (UTC)

-----

We've had our differences and I still think you are not able to see your own POV sometimes (especially by selective presentation) but I will not oppose your application for Adminship (however I won't support it either). If Fred can be an Admin I guess you can too. --[[User:Maveric149|mav]]

You have my support too. [[User:Danny|Danny]]

Fred Bauder?s charges pertaining to bias are also baseless. To get an idea see the debate on the talk pages of Communist state and China.

---------------------------------
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] use of a bot (long)

body:
Don't get me wrong: developers of PHPBB & Co. are doing a good job -- but
for our purposes, email is a much better solution.

> -+- Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
>> 1) Mailing lists are, by their very nature, decentralized. Any post is
>> replicated on hundreds of machines. This automatic replication makes
>> censorship very hard and a total loss of data unlikely.
> Whatever. paranoia.

You wouldn't say that if you had seen archives of hundreds of your posts
disappear without prior notice -- not necessarily out of malice, maybe the
bandwidth bill simply got too high. Mailing lists provide protection
against such incidents. Even if you no longer have copies, one of the
hundreds of subscribers will.

>> 2) Archives like the ones generated by Mailman can be imported into
email
>> clients and searched locally at high speed. I have frequently made use of
>> that feature to build high quality archives. The search function of most
>> BBS systems, on the other hand, is far from optimal (I've seen many BBS
>> which claimed to have a search, but where this search never worked).

> phpbb is solid and well tested for years now:
> http://phpbb.com/phpBB/search.php

Doesn't counter my main argument -- you have to rely on a central server
for search, which is much slower and usually has less features, and when
it isn't available, you can't search.

>> 3) Mailing lists keep a track record. It is easy and fast to see all posts
>> by a particular member, or everything written by yourself. With a BBS, you
>> first have to figure out if such a feature exists, then wait for the
>> server to perform some search. Server is down? Too bad, you'll never get
>> that post you wrote 3 months ago now.
> http://phpbb.com/phpBB/search.php?search_author=theFinn

Doesn't counter the argument above.

>> 4) Mailing lists allow everyone to participate without a free online
>> connection. In many developing nations, Internet access is paid by the
>> minute, and reading and replying to posts online costs money. Mailing
>> lists can be conveniently read, responded to and archived offline.

> you can 'watch' topics via email with phpbb. And i could easily hack in a
> reply-via-email option. There are many bbs/mailing lists out there...

Doesn't counter the argument above -- working offline is inevitably less
convenient with a web-based solution.

>> 5) Mailing lists allow the use of a variety of email clients which all
>> have advantages and disadvantages. Everyone can use the software of their
>> choice, with a user interface that suits them, without being forced to
>> make use of an arbitrary web interface. This is of importance to
>> handicapped users, for whom special email clients exist.
> and special web-browsers....you wouldnt believe how much complaint of
> "aural" goes on in the mozilla.

Sure, but this is a big difference: An aural or braille web browser will
read to the user everything that is on the screen in the order in which it
appears on the page. Depending on the UI, this can make it very, very hard
to navigate within a page. An aural email client is tailored for that
specific purpose, all navigational elements are *part* of the aural
interface. And let's not forget that a single button without an ALT tag
can make a web UI unusable ..

>> 6) Good email clients make quoting and threading transparent and easy
>> to use. They interpret the reference ID in a message and thereby allow you to
>> quickly navigate to the parent post that a message has responded to.
>> Quoting and writing within a real text editor is also a lot more
>> convenient than writing within a browser window.
> http://phpbb-hpmods.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/posting.php?mode=reply&t=34

> Thats my bb on sourceforge for a patch i made a while ago... try the [quote]
> feature, its quite clean.

Not as clean and fast as email, sorry. And yet another interface the user
has to learn.

>> 8) Bulletin board systems have a higher noise level. They allow no easy
>> client-side filtering, as many email clients do. Many BBS encourage the
>> use of fonts, pictures, animated smileys, overlong signatures etc., often
>> leading to very hard to read threads.

> A good administrator of phpbb can produce very clean sites. Its very
> configurable and skinable

And it's yet another problem you don't have to worry about when using a
list.

>> 9) Every BBS is different. Everyone is familiar with email, but
>> learning to use a BBS always requires making yourself familiar with its
>> particular user interface and functionality.

> You must not have heard of phpbb...it has quite an active development
> community both on the web, and on irc.freenode.net #phpbb

What does this have to do with the above? Whether an individual BB has an
active community is irrelevant, it is still just one of many systems out
there.

>> 10) Mailing lists can be easily moderated, even in groups. BBS usually
>> have after-the-fact moderation, where individual posts are censored or
>> threads are locked. On a mailing list, posts can be pre-approved and
>> individual members banned. With a BBS that does not use some ID
>> confirmation method, we'll have the same banning problem we have on
>> Wikipedia proper -- totally open access is not always a good thing. And if
>> email confirmation is required, this only advantage of a web-based BBS
>> goes away.

> ??? wikipedia has groups, individual user permissions, and IP based
> blacklisting...

IP-blacklisting is unreliable because most IPs are dynamically assigned.
It is also only available for non signed in users in the current
configuration. Groups? Wikipedia has no groups. It also has no "individual
user permissions" besides a simple is_sysop flag.

> phpbb allows for structure of topics. This would easily allow it to become
> the talk section for each article on top of its other duties.

What a nightmare! The talk section for articles within a completely
different system -- no more wiki style refactoring, no more proper
archiving, no more single user experience. Thanks, but no thanks. Not that
the talk pages cannot use improvement -- they would certainly benefit from
some BBS-style functionality. But the wiki nature needs to be preserved.

> as you can see from http://phpbb.com/phpBB/ there are 500,000 articles, well
> more than wikipedia ;-)

"Me too" is not an article. Have you counted the individual comments on
all of Wikipedia's Talk pages? I thought not.

> and 160 users online at the time im writing this.
> you tell me of the performance?

I haven't said anything about the performance other than about web-
inherent latency, but now I will: The performance of a BBS is tied
directly and fundamentally to the speed and availability of a central
server. As you may have noticed, our central servers aren't exactly in the
best form right now. A mailing list requires very little overhead -- no
database, no webserver, just a script that tells the mailer daemon what to
do. It could be run on a 233 Mhz PC. A PHP bulletin board on our main
server will slow other Wikipedia processes down.

> Im also not aggressively inclined toward having a bbs, i just wanted to shed
> some light.

Where there's light there is darkness ..

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Zoe

subject: [WikiEN-l] Sysop Rights

body:
Does this user have a history?  I'm afraid I don't
know who this is.

Zoe

--- bedingt at dellepro.com wrote:
> To Whom It May Concern:
>
> My login is NBtarheel33 and I am requesting Sysop
> rights.
>
> Thanks,
>
> NBtarheel33

__________________________________
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from_name: cprompt

subject: [WikiEN-l] Sysop Rights

body:
Tim Starling wrote:

>
>
>
>> From: <bedingt at dellepro.com>
>>
>> To Whom It May Concern:
>>
>> My login is NBtarheel33 and I am requesting Sysop rights.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> NBtarheel33
>
>
> After you've made one edit? And that one edit was changing the bold in
> an intro paragraph to bold-italic, and deleting the boilerplate stub
> warning? Yeah, right.
>
> -- Tim Starling
>
I agree. Sorry, NBtarheel, maybe after you've made some more edits and
been around a while longer, you might become a sysop.


subject: [WikiEN-l] [[User:Mcilwain]]

body:
[[User:Mcilwain]] is a former anonymous contributor
who was creating nonsense articles and writing about
someone who apparently doesn't exist named David
Mcilwain.  Now he or she has created a user account,
which means he can't be blocked without being banned.
Will someone deal with him?

Zoe

__________________________________
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The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com


from_name: james duffy

subject: [WikiEN-l] Movie v. Film

body:
) FILETIME=[8591F960:01C3137A]
>
>John Knouse wrote:
>
>>Whoa, here's a radical solution: use the form "Jackass
>>(movie/film)".  There.  Doesn't that cover it?
>>
>>
>Or "(film/movie)", so as to forestall charges of American
>cultural imperialism because "movie" comes first. :-)
>
>Or, use "(movie/film)" and "(film/movie)" as a subtle
>method of differentiating the European-preferred from
>the American-preferred works, heh-heh.

Nice one, Stan. BTW sorry if offence was caused. It was not intended. To be
honest, I never thought it important to use smileys. I am only back on the
net since August and just never got 'into' using smileys. But please do
realise I have a habit of being ironic and sarcastic and take my comments in
that light.

And in case some people think it, I do NOT dislike America. Far from it. I
admire so many things about America - heck, my favourite TV shows are
Fraser, The West Wing and Six Feed Under, which all 'do' irony. But many
people outside the US do have a problem with the attitude (perhaps an
unintended attitude) of 'we know best' with any criticism of anything to do
with the US as being 'anti-american'. The Bush administration has REALLY
rubbed non-Americans the wrong way in a whole range of areas, and that has
impacted on attitudes worldwide towards the US. Wiki does have a tendency
(understandably, given that most of its initial members were American) to
have an american-orientation in many areas. Lists of TV shows that were hits
are exclusively American. An article on First Ladies was really about US
first ladies until I renamed it to clarify that fact. (Those who doing the
page - and did great work - never considered the fact that such a term might
be used outside the US) American linguistic styles like saying 'city name,
country' are prevalent even though that format is not widely used outside
the US. American terms 'movie, automobile' etc are used, even if english
language speakers outside the US don't use the terms and see them as
exclusively American terms.

On the movie vs film issue, I like the suggestion of (movie/film) or
(film/movie). Perhaps the solution as to which one comes first can be solved
simply by the rule - put them alphabetically.

In any case, wikilove (totally non sarcastically and non ironically, BTW
Danny!) :-)

JT

_________________________________________________________________
Help STOP SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE*
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from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] administrator's status

body:
Basically (except for Mav) this is the same tag team (Tannin and
User:Jtdirl|??REman) who supported 172 in his efforts to protray Communist
history from a sympathetic point of view. 172 is the one who deleted the
reference to Tiananmen Square from the China article. All three then engaged
in a protracted edit war to prevent a link to [[authoritarianism and
totalitarianism]] from the China article by creating a sanitized article on
the [[communist state]] which they strongly defended.

Their activity is no different from those who think they can deny the
holocaust.

If you will look at the history of [[China]] and [[communist state]] you
will see that their efforts at editing consist of endless reverts to their
own point of view and minimal discussion of the issues at hand.

Fred

From: Abe Sokolov <sokolov47 at yahoo.com>
Reply-To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 16:44:46 -0700 (PDT)
To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: [WikiEN-l] administrator's status

I do have support for becoming an admin. I?d like to refer to the below
comments posted on my talk page at
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:172

: BTW, to become an admin, you need to send an email to the mailing list.
(Sing out if you don't know how to do this.) You were ''persona non-grata''
there in the early days. Indeed, the reason I originally signed up for the
list was to (a) speak in your defence, and (b) make a plea to ban Vera
bloody Cruz. (And I firmly believe that time has proved me 100% right on
both counts!) But that was quite some time ago, and I'm sure your stocks
have risen considerably since then. I'll certainly speak up for you: your
contribution to the history sections here has been outstanding.
[[User:Tannin|Tannin]]

Thanks. I have been having major technical problems here. And it has been
difficult getting on to wiki. I wrote something on a talk page at 3.30pm
today but could only get onto wiki to put it on at 10pm tonight! I got a new
digital camera so I spent a couple of days walking around Dublin talking
pictures for wiki articles. (See [[Irish Houses of Parliament]]) God what so
of wikiholic am I!!! I see the latest of Adam's trolls have disappeared. I
think our 'no holes barred' attitude is working. Once he is rumbled, he
knows the game is up and we will tolerate no messing! Anyway, thanks for the
message. BTW you have my full support in joining admin.
[[User:Jtdirl|??REman]] 21:57 May 3, 2003 (UTC)

-----

We've had our differences and I still think you are not able to see your own
POV sometimes (especially by selective presentation) but I will not oppose
your application for Adminship (however I won't support it either). If Fred
can be an Admin I guess you can too. --[[User:Maveric149|mav]]

You have my support too. [[User:Danny|Danny]]

----------

Fred Bauder?s charges pertaining to bias are also baseless. To get an idea
see the debate on the talk pages of Communist state and China.

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The New Yahoo! Search
<http://us.rd.yahoo.com/search/mailsig/*http://search.yahoo.com>  - Faster.
Easier. Bingo.

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] use of a bot (long)

body:
On Tue, 2003-05-06 at 18:51, Erik Moeller wrote:
> Not necessary, the arguments against a BBS are sufficiently strong. The
> last thing we need is another forum, even if it's just experimental.
>
Heh. Judge, jury, and executioner.


subject: [WikiEN-l] "Moses ben Nachman" and NPOV

body:
>
> Here's an interesting point, now. If you look at
> http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=66.20
> 0.207.29
> (I hope that wraps OK, you may have to tack it together), it looks like
> this is the same person (at least, the same IP, with only the two
> contributions to date) that told Ril aka Lir/Adam/et al. to check its
> email about a week ago. Geeze, are these people in cahoots, cooperating to
> make our lives difficult? Or is it just more of Adam talking to itself to
> try to convince us it's not all just one big hydra?
>

No, the focus is on different issues.

Fred


subject: [WikiEN-l] administrator's status

body:
>> Their activity is no different from those who think they can deny the
>> holocaust.
>
> How dare you make such an accusation? Your behaviour on those pages was a
> disgrace and an insult to everyone on wiki who tries however unsuccessfully
> on occasion, to produce NPOV stuff, not propaganda.  To compound it all you
> have the balls to make the above statement. You owe me and everyone else you
> libeled a public apology.
>
> JT

Historical revision is not limited to Nazis. But don't put on the steel boot
unless it fits. I was doing my best to write a truthful neutral point of
view article which could have have been made more balanced by adding more
material about the achievements of the communist state not by removing
material about its problems. Its the repeated removal of factual negative
material which is the issue regarding 172.

Fred


from_name: John R. Owens

subject: [WikiEN-l] "Moses ben Nachman" and NPOV

body:
On 6 May 2003, Erik Moeller wrote:

> Date: 06 May 2003 15:58:00 +0100
> From: Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de>
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] "Moses ben Nachman" and NPOV
>
> Please take a look at:
>
> http://www.wikipedia.org/w/
> wiki.phtml?title=Joseph_McCarthy&diff=895253&oldid=894480
>
> (the URL may need to be pasted together). This edit, marked as *minor*, is
> the work of one "Moses ben Nachman", a Wikipedia user with a very brief
> edit history who just announced on his talk page that, "after several
> months, I have decided to give this internet project another chance."
>
> I strongly suspect that "Moses" is really the banned user Clutch. The
> above edit is exactly his style (like changing "heavy drinking" to "social
> drinking"), and even includes a link to a text on Clutch's homepage ("How
> the Marxists destroyed Joe McCarthy"), reactor-core.org. Moreover, if you
> check his user page, you will find that he was immediately welcomed by
> Clutch -- and then complained about RK, as Clutch also did. In the
> McCarthy edit, he removed large slabs of text without explanation.
>
> I'm not involved in the McCarthy article, but I suggest people keep an eye
> on it, and on "Moses'" other edits. Yes, the McCarthy article was slightly
> POV before the edits, but I doubt that it will be possible to make it NPOV
> with the "help" of someone like "Moses".

Here's an interesting point, now. If you look at
http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=66.200.207.29
(I hope that wraps OK, you may have to tack it together), it looks like
this is the same person (at least, the same IP, with only the two
contributions to date) that told Ril aka Lir/Adam/et al. to check its
email about a week ago. Geeze, are these people in cahoots, cooperating to
make our lives difficult? Or is it just more of Adam talking to itself to
try to convince us it's not all just one big hydra?

--
John R. Owens http://www.ghiapet.homeip.net/
It's easy to find something worth dying for.  Do you have anything worth
living for?
				--Lorien


subject: [Wikipedia-l] use of a bot (long)

body:
Cunc-
> The short response to Erik's reference for email over a BBS is
> essentially that for a power-user, with the talent, knowledge, and time
> to configure and use "good email clients" which make "quoting and
> threading transparent and easy to use", email is preferable.

> The reality is that is not the case for most people.

While I agree that most people aren't "power users", most people are
familiar with at least the basic functionality that their email client
offers. So I do not see the "barrier to entry" you see. If someone cannot
follow the instructions "reply to this email to confirm your
subscription", it is questionable whether they can participate at all.

> The more important reality is that there should not be an additional
> barrier to entry in finding and using the discussion forum (currently in
> email form) above the barriers to entry to becoming a Wikipedia editor
> (which are web access, going to Wikipedia, clicking on "Edit this page"
> and possibly creating a user account).

The mailing lists are for policy nerds, techies and masochists. Article-
related discussions already take place on the respective talk pages, and
for user help there's the Village Pump. I've already stated that I agree
the discussion system on talk pages needs improvements - give me money and
I will fix it.

> Another basic, basic thing: since we're discussing Wikipedia matters, we
> really should be able to make links to Wikipedia entries in the
> discussion forum. We can't usefully do that with email.

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhikers_Guide_to_the_Galaxy

Do you see an URL above, or has the string been magically converted into
noise by your email client? What seems to be the problem?

> But instead of having the argument about why a BBS would be better than
> an Email list, I recommend setting up a BBS, and letting practice
> decide.

Not necessary, the arguments against a BBS are sufficiently strong. The
last thing we need is another forum, even if it's just experimental.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [WikiEN-l] administrator's status

body:
Abe,

now that you've got an idea how things work around here, how about signing
up with a new name? "172" isn't really a username anyway, and people will
probably be more accomodating when they do not get the feeling that they
are dealing with a number. Besides, a fresh start is often a good idea.

In any case, please elaborate on why you want to be an administrator, and
how you intend to use these privileges.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Björn Lindqvist

subject: [Wikipedia-l] I like BBS:es

body:
Why I prefer BBS:es:

1. Discussion is closer to content because both are webbased.

2. Threads can be followed more easily. There is no way that a
mailprogam can figure out in which thread this reply belongs to for
example because I use digest mode.

3. I can edit my post after it has been written, if that feature is
desireable. This also means that post publishing moderation will be
easier which is preferable to prepublishing that a mailinglist requires.

4. How does this look?:

 >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Hello
 >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>I
really
 >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>wonder
 >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>if this
 >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>is
 >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>readable
 >>>>>>>>>>>because different mailprograms use different styles for
quotation
bla<hej>weird eh?>

5. From time to time there comes someone who replies to the whole digest
without deleting anything.

6. I dont have to read "Do you have Yahoo?" 2,000,000 times.

7. Many users use the Internet at work or school where they dont have
access to mail only to the web.

8. Using webmail like Hotmail is not fun to read mailinglists on. Your
mailbox fills up with spam instantly and the interfaces are usually very
cumbersome.

9. Because I can write down all the e-mailadresses i get from the list
and spam you with penis-enlargements. Bush could easily track all Afgan
terrorists on this list down if he wanted to - would be much harder on a
BBS.

10. I have to wait a day for new letters to arrive because I use digest
mode and if I dont my mailbox will get clogged. BBS:es enables immidiate
response.

11. When many topics is discussed simultaneously it becomes very hard to
follow the threads on a list. Not so on a BBS.

12. Mentioning offsite mailarchives is out of question imho. No sane
person should need to or want to use that.

13. No bold or italic style.

I for one would love to have some kind of messageboard instead of an
antique mailingsystem. Both the mailinglist and the talk-pages are so
cumbersome, there should be an EASY way to discuss!

BBS:es are not perfect either, if anyone remembers Fidonet it had an
ultimate messageing system but it not an option. They have their flaws
but it is the best alternative. And usually; Mailinglist = intelligent,
low traffic BBS = dumb, high traffic and thats also something to consider.
I think its the way of the future.

Bj?rn Lindqvist


subject: [Wikipedia-l] I like BBS:es

body:
Bj?rn-

> Why I prefer BBS:es:

> 1. Discussion is closer to content because both are webbased.

Define "closer"- an "Alt+Tab" gets me to my email client, a "Ctrl+Tab"
gets me to another browser window. If you use a suite like Mozilla mail
and web are integrated. You yourself mentioned webmail -- if you want to
use that, you're free to do so. Ironically, the interface arguments
against webmail are also applicable to BBS.

> 2. Threads can be followed more easily. There is no way that a
> mailprogam can figure out in which thread this reply belongs to for
> example because I use digest mode.

Sure, but you'd never have something equivalent to digest mode in the
first place when using a BBS :-). Besides, even if you reply to a digest,
you should always use the proper subject line -- MIME digests make this
easy, and may also preserve message references (not sure).

> 3. I can edit my post after it has been written, if that feature is
> desireable. This also means that post publishing moderation will be
> easier which is preferable to prepublishing that a mailinglist requires.

If you want editable comments, use a wiki. Whether post-moderation is
preferable to pre-moderation is debatable, I for one think the exact
opposite is the case: Pre-moderation reduces the amount of unnecessary
content members are exposed to, and also the amount of public discussion
about the moderation.

> 4. How does this look?:

[crapquote snipped]

Highly nested quotes always get ugly, no matter which quoting system you
use. Yes, many mail clients unfortunately do not follow standards, esp. MS
Outlook. But you get the same phenomenon with BBS: Users will quote in
different styles, some using the built in quoting mechanism, others
quoting manually, others not at all. Mix those and it gets ugly -- I've
seen it.

> 5. From time to time there comes someone who replies to the whole digest
> without deleting anything.

Users acting stupidly is a problem you will have with any system. If you
want to avoid digest-associated nuisances, disable digest delivery.

> 6. I dont have to read "Do you have Yahoo?" 2,000,000 times.

Ignore it, or write a filter. It's just plaintext -- I could care less.
Those annoying Flash banners on some bulletin boards, on the other hand ..

> 7. Many users use the Internet at work or school where they dont have
> access to mail only to the web.

If you have access to the web, you have access to mail. If you have access
to the machine, you have access to an email client.

> 8. Using webmail like Hotmail is not fun to read mailinglists on. Your
> mailbox fills up with spam instantly

Depends on the freemail provider used. I have used GMX for ages without
getting spam. My regular home mail account on the other hand is full of
spam. But there are filters for these things, whereas a BBS hardly
provides any filtering options.

>  and the interfaces are usually very
> cumbersome.

See above -- don't want a web interface? Don't use it.

> 9. Because I can write down all the e-mailadresses i get from the list
> and spam you with penis-enlargements. Bush could easily track all Afgan
> terrorists on this list down if he wanted to - would be much harder on a
> BBS.

Spam is a real problem, I will give you that. Fortunately, filters like
spamassassin are getting better, and most mailing list archives now hide
email addresses to prevent harvesting. Harvesting by spam-subscribers
might happen in the future, though.

> 10. I have to wait a day for new letters to arrive because I use digest
> mode and if I dont my mailbox will get clogged.

"Get clogged"? POP3 mailboxes are limited by space, not by
# of messages. Use filters, file to folders. Two clicks in a decent mail
client.

> 11. When many topics is discussed simultaneously it becomes very hard to
> follow the threads on a list. Not so on a BBS.

Again, use your mail client properly. If you like to have all messages in
a digest with no sorting or threading, then that's your choice.

> 12. Mentioning offsite mailarchives is out of question imho. No sane
> person should need to or want to use that.

Huh?!

> 13. No bold or italic style.

*Are* you _sure_? Lack of "advanced" formatting tends to be an advantage
for high signal discussions. Check out the few messages that actually use
HTML and you see what I mean. I refer you to my comment regarding animated
smileys with beer kegs on bulletin boards.

> I for one would love to have some kind of messageboard instead of an
> antique mailingsystem. Both the mailinglist and the talk-pages are so
> cumbersome, there should be an EASY way to discuss!

Learn to use the technology you own, and you may find that it is much more
advanced than you think. Email has evolved over the last decades.

> And usually; Mailinglist = intelligent,
> low traffic BBS = dumb, high traffic and thats also something to consider.
> I think its the way of the future.

You think that "dumb, high traffic" is the way of the future? I think I'll
pass.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: use of a bot (long).

body:
>> The mailing lists are for policy nerds, techies and masochists. Article-
>> related discussions already take place on the respective talk pages, and
>> for user help there's the Village Pump. I've already stated that I agree
>> the discussion system on talk pages needs improvements - give me money and
>> I will fix it.

> Heh...give me an admin account and *I( will fix it.

Define "admin account" and explain what you want to do with it. Set up a
PHPBB? Yeah, right. If you want to improve the Talk page code, go for it:

http://wikipedia.sourceforge.net/

We await your patch at wikitech-l at wikipedia.org.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] Sysop Rights

body:
> >> My login is NBtarheel33 and I am requesting Sysop rights.

Please, folks, let's try not to react to such requests in a sharp or
hostile manner.  NBtarheel33, as far as we know, could very well be a
future highly valuable contributor.  No need to bonk him or her on the
head for a premature sysop request.

Slack.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] I like BBS:es

in_reply_to: <3EB88C71.8000008@corell.dyndns.org>; from T.Corell@t-online.de on Wed, May 07, 2003 at 06:32:49AM +0200

body:
Well, not to be too me-centric, but I know that if there's a BBS I
will look at it sometimes, out of a sense of responsibility for the
project, but I'm not likely to "live" there in the same way that I
"live" on the mailing list, if you see what I mean.

So if important policy discussions were to take place there, I'd miss
them all completely.

Perhaps what we need is just a better interface for the mailing list
archives, and some means for people to post to the mailing list from
the web?  What are the main features that the pro-BBS'ers want?

Just as I don't care if other people read email using Microsoft
Outlook instead of a civilized mail program ;-), I don't care if some
people want to read and participate on the mailing list in some
BBS-centric fashion.

As long as I can live my life in emacs, I'm happy.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] administrator's status

in_reply_to: <8lOFY+QxpVB@erik_moeller>; from erik_moeller@gmx.de on Wed, May 07, 2003 at 01:50:00AM +0100

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
> now that you've got an idea how things work around here, how about
> signing up with a new name? "172" isn't really a username anyway,
> and people will probably be more accomodating when they do not get
> the feeling that they are dealing with a number. Besides, a fresh
> start is often a good idea.

Actually, I think that's a really good idea, but it's up to him, of
course.  On problem is that in the past, we have had notoriously
destructive participants, "24" and "142", who were dubbed with numbers
because they refused to login but we needed something to refer to
them.

That's not 172/Abe's fault, of course, and it's unfortunate, but
nonetheless, I cringe when I see a number-name.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] I like BBS:es

body:
--- Thomas Corell <T.Corell at t-online.de> wrote:
> Bj?rn Lindqvist wrote:
> > Why I prefer BBS:es:
> >
> > 1. Discussion is closer to content because both
> are webbased.
>
> Oh, ****. I still hate it to search some hours to
> get a overview of all
> disscussed subjects inside Wikipeda with this stupid
> Discussion/Talk pages.
>
> Mails are coming full automaticly on my system at
> home, are sorted into
> IMAP Folders and the next new message is at
> keystroke distance (mostly
> ''delete'' or 'Next Message''. An I don't have to
> wait for a webserver to
> serve a page. I bet pressing a key to get the next
> message from your local
> mailfolder is 1000 times faster than any BBS System.

If this is *so* *quick* and *easy* to press the "next"
or "delete" key, perhaps would it be nice to show a
little more tolerance toward those who feel more
confortable dealing with some difficult topics in
their native language, rather than english language.

Everyone has a right to be part of the big picture in
Wikipedia. That might means sometimes switching to
another language for more convenience.

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