from_name: Walter van Kalken

subject: [Foundation-l] Waerth's stewardship

body:
I agree with Andre that this are 2 seperate issues. Danny said in his
public comunication that it would be temporarily. Not permanently. I
have never abused my steward abilities. I have always handled as per the
guidelines and rules. Why this is being made permanent all of a sudden I
do nt know. I would like to be told openly I am not trusted with it
..... by the board and not someones who claims to know what the board
thinks. Or I would really appreciate it if my stewardship was restored.

It has been a month now. And that is long enough I feel for people
making up there mind.

I am also surprised/shocked that oscar wants to implement a policy
retro-actively to keep me out of stewardship. Anything to do with my
opposition to the Dutch Foundation perhaps? Which was put through by
Oscar and RonaldB against the explicit wishes of the community about
which there was a vote! I am in favour of the association btw

Waerth/Walter

>2006/4/23, GerardM <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com>:
>
>
>>Hoi,
>>The proposal may be sensible BUT is it to be implemented retro
>>actively? Given the current situation in the Dutch chapter and the
>>Dutch wikipedia where a substantial group of people are dissatisfied
>>because of a perceived lack of communication, this is absolutely the
>>wrong thing to do.
>>
>>
>
>I agree with Gerard that the situation around the Dutch chapter is
>very worrying. It causes maybe the deepest rift ever having been
>placed into the Dutch community, even though there seems to be a
>history of crises there.
>
>However, I do not so what a possible removal of Steward rights from
>Waerth would have to do with this. Surely the Dutch community will
>understand that Stewardship is based on deliberations in the Wikimedia
>community at large, and not necessarily in the Dutch one. On the other
>hand, retroactiveness should also not be automatical; I think it
>should be a separate proposal that Oscar has not made.
>
>Having said that, I think the wording is too strong:
>------------------------------------------------------------------
>Any abuse, or even the threatening of abuse, of the steward-rights, will
>lead to an immediate and permanent removal of these.
>------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>People can do actions that others see as abuse while acting in
>perfectly good intentions. They get a request from a community, follow
>it, and later hear the request was not bona fide (for example, there
>was a procedure in place at the specific wiki that should have been
>followed and was not). The sysop has both people in favor and people
>opposed. Those opposed claim he was abusing steward-rights. Seeing the
>fighting that has been started, another Steward removes the
>sysop-rights from this person. Those in favor claim he was abusing
>steward-rights. Hell, for that sake, some might be of the opinion that
>Danny's un-stewarding of Waerth was an abuse of Steward rights.
>
>Secondly, the issue with the abuse of Steward rights is that Stewards
>should be trusted. Abusing one's rights breaks that trust. However, I
>see no reason why someone cannot regain that trust by showing true
>regret over their action and acting trustworthy from then on.
>
>Because of this, I would propose to change the proposed rule by
>changing "will" in "may" and removing the "and permanent" part.
>
>
>
>>I have heard noices that it is not for people of the Dutch community
>>to question the procedures around this. This is one factor that makes
>>the situation of the Dutch chapter even worse because it suggest that
>>things are done in secret and it strenghtens the existing feeling of
>>un-ease because it demonstrates that while the letter of the statues
>>of the Dutch chapter suggest a hands-off approach the facts on the
>>ground are different. These "noices" did not originate from people of
>>the chapter by the way.
>>
>>
>
>Again, I don't see the connection. It would not be the Dutch Wikimedia
>Association, nor the much-maligned Dutch Wikimedia Foundation that
>would be doing this, and surely the Dutch Wikipedia community cannot
>expect to be the one deciding over a Wikimedia-wide function such as
>Steward.
>
>As for the Dutch charter problem, I am not sure what should be done
>with that. The amount of distrust shown towards RonaldB and the Dutch
>Wikimedia Foundation is huge. And his attempts to take away the
>distrust are few and ineffective. Things seem to be on a collision
>course, but I have no idea how they can be led back to the right
>track.
>
>--
>Andre Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
>ICQ: 6260644  --  Skype: a_engels
>_______________________________________________
>foundation-l mailing list
>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>
>


list: wikimedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

subject: [Foundation-l] Waerth's stewardship


list: wikien-l

from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wheel warring

body:
On 4/23/06, Katefan0 <katefan0wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> I wasn't talking about anything you did -- perhaps it was you not paying
> attention?   I'm talking about the *very first* point at which someone could
> have reached out and did not.  This whole thing got botched up when Erik
> reversed Danny's action without a word to him.  If he'd tried to contact
> Danny *before* he decided to reverse his action, all this could've been
> avoided.
>

No if danny hadn't taken his action in the first place all this could
be avoided.

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikitruth

body:
On 4/23/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> On 4/22/06, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> > A similar argument applies to defamation.  The onus is on me, as
> > custodian of my own post, to demonstrate that I do not recklessly
> > dispose of it.  Whilst I shouldn't be expected to take responsibility
> > for any and every illegal act that is perpetrated by my servants, once
> > I become aware that such an act may take place, I should take
> > reasonable steps to prevent it.  The problem is the word "reasonable".
> >  If a defamatory statement is published, a plaintiff may well have an
> > apprehension that this is because I have been reckless, even if I
> > haven't,  and much time and money may be spent by both sides in
> > deciding the issue.
>
> So someone goes to a community corkboard in an apartment building and
> writes "John Heybobarebob is gay" on the bathroom door.  Then the
> owner of the apartment building sees the defamatory statement, takes
> down the message, and stores it in a closet with a bunch of other
> removed messages.  Then a janitor goes into to the closet, takes the
> message, and creates photocopies which she proceeds to hand out to
> people.
>
> You think the building owner can be sued?
>
> I don't get it.
>
> Anthony

Under UK law they probably could be. Sending a postcard containing
deflamotory information under UK law is enough to allow a claim to be
made.

--
geni


from_name: Tony Sidaway

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikitruth

body:
On 4/23/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
>
> So someone goes to a community corkboard in an apartment building and
> writes "John Heybobarebob is gay" on a corkboard message.  Then the
> owner of the apartment building sees the defamatory statement, takes
> down the message, and stores it in a closet with a bunch of other
> removed messages.  Then a janitor goes into to the closet, takes the
> message, and creates photocopies which she proceeds to hand out to
> people.
>
> You think the building owner can be sued?
>

Yes, I think that the owner of the apartment building might well be
liable for the defamation conducted by the janitor.  It would be, as
I've said, something that a court would decide.  Arguably by not
disposing of the defamatory material in an appropriate manner he
facilitated the subsequent actions of the janitor.

Now if it was found that one of his janitors had done this *once*, it
might not be a big deal and there wouldn't be much of a case.  But
once this happens, the owner of the apartment building becomes aware
that his janitors are not all reliable, it would be reasonable to
expect him to take steps to keep sensitive material out of their
reach.  So the second time it happens there would be a stronger case,
and each time the owner of the apartment building permits potentially
defamatory material to be published by not taking such steps, the case
becomes stronger.


list: foundation-l

from_name: Dariusz Siedlecki

subject:
[Foundation-l] Wikipedia trademark not registered by Wikimedia
	Foundation

body:
Eh, just a quick note - there are four days left. Better be bold and
at least try to get some delay on it, instead of waiting for someone
to take care of it.

--
Pozdrawiam,
Dariusz Siedlecki


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Foundation-l] Optional advertisement on wikipedia

body:
On 4/23/06, Tony Bruguier <tony.bruguier at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm new to this list, so please forgive me if I mess up. There's been
> some talk about advertisement on wikipedia or not. Why not make it
> optional, so that each user decides if he/she wants to see the
> advertisement? That way, users can "support" wikipedia or not. I don't
> think that'd be a sell out.

If someone wants to implement an "opt in" ad feature, I have no real
opposition to it, but it strikes me as looking for love in the wrong
place. The tiny fraction of pageviews that would be ad-enabled does
not, in my belief, make this a significant revenue stream.

I remain opposed to anything but an "opt in" model for ads unless our
existing fundraising methods fail us. We've learned a lot during the
last fundraising drive (e.g., donation targets are necessary, appeals
and other emotional or interesting messages increase the incentive to
donate), and I'll be interested to see how the next one goes.

Erik


from_name: Ilmari Karonen

subject: [WikiEN-l] I am not infallible.

body:
I've just added the following notice to my user and talk pages:

"I am not infallible. Regardless of any policies to the contrary, feel
free to revert any admin actions I have performed if you believe them to
be mistaken or unwise."

This isn't meant as a criticism of the proposed wheel warring policy,
which I have helped draft and generally support, nor do I assume that
anyone would necessarily wish to extend the same permission to me.  I
recognize that there are admins who, for one reason or another, cannot
or do not wish to give such permission; indeed, one might consider the
entire WP:OFFICE policy the exact antithesis of this.  I merely wish to
hereby announce my personal assumption of good faith on behalf of other
administrators, and to create, in the case of reversion of my actions, a
presumption of "amity" as described in the current draft of the wheel
warring policy.

Just thought I'd mention this here, since it's related to some of the
ongoing discussions.

--
Ilmari Karonen


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikitruth

body:
On 4/23/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> The building owner didn't send anything to anyone, though.
>
> Anthony

It isn't the act of sending that is an issue since putting the
postcard in an envelope would prevent any such case.

--
geni


from_name: Stephane Charette

subject: [WikiEN-l] WikiEN-l Digest, Vol 33, Issue 164

body:
>On Apr 23, 2006, at 3:14 PM, Stephane Charette wrote:
><snip details of dispute>
>> My comments were reverted.  Today, that user posted my username on
>> WP:AIV.  I've been blocked ever since by Royboycrash.
>
>Happily, this error was quickly resolved:
>
>     * 18:05, 23 April 2006 Royboycrashfan unblocked S charette
>(contribs) (Decided to simply unblock.)
>     * 18:05, 23 April 2006 Royboycrashfan blocked "S charette
>(contribs)" with an expiry time of 12 hours (shorter block time)
>     * 18:04, 23 April 2006 Royboycrashfan unblocked S charette
>(contribs) (shortening block)
>     * 17:30, 23 April 2006 Royboycrashfan blocked "S charette
>(contribs)" with an expiry time of 31 hours (stalking/vandalism)
>
>35 minutes blocked.  It still shouldn't have happened, from what I
>understand, but I hope that the quick resolution restored at least some
>of S_charette's faith in Wikipedia.
>
>Jesse Weinstein

I disagree -- not happily resolved.  Here we are 9 hours later, and I'm still blocked.  Please see my talk page for details.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:S_charette

I'm quite dissapointed for the following reasons:

1) The {{unblock}} template has not helped me in any way; 9 hours after I was told I'd be unblocked, I'm still blocked and still cannot finish off the school article I'd started.

2) Why was I blocked in the first place?  Are there rules to follow before a user is blocked?  Besides the fact that I'm not a vandal or a spammer (any check of my contributions will confirm this), the WP:AIV page seems to indicate there are some rules, such as:

-> 1) The vandal has been warned with the appropriate warning templates. If you can't justify leaving these messages on a user's talk page, it likely isn't vandalism.

-> 2) The vandal vandalized within the last few hours and after the final warning.

Even though neither of these conditions apply to me, a disruptive user who is unhappy with my edit and posting my name on WP:AIV has now managed to have me blocked for the past 9 hours...and counting...

Isn't there anything that can be done about this?  Do all users go through this upsetting experience?

Stephane Charette


from_name: Jean-Baptiste Soufron

body:
Actually we are already taking care of the german stuff with a German
Law Firm. We have been working on this for 3 months already.

Do not try to do anything on your own that would complicate everything.

Same thing for the .eu stuff. We are facing a company that is
agressively acting against us, and we are trying to handle this the
best we can.

Now, I hope you will believe me if I say that things are not as bad
as they look :-)

I also hope to give you more details once we'll begin to get some
results. But you know, when it comes to judicial stuff, communication
is not easy.

Best,

Jean-Baptiste Soufron
wikimedia foundation
chief legal officer

Le 23 avr. 06 ? 23:39, Dariusz Siedlecki a ?crit :

> Eh, just a quick note - there are four days left. Better be bold and
> at least try to get some delay on it, instead of waiting for someone
> to take care of it.
>
> --
> Pozdrawiam,
> Dariusz Siedlecki
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l


subject: [WikiEN-l] Why the uproar over wikitruth

body:
On 4/23/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> >
> Frankly, I just don't see it, but maybe I don't know what you mean by
> "sensitive information".  You also don't mention what Wikipedia would
> be sued for.  Negligence?  If so, I don't see where the duty of care
> is.

By "sensitive information" I mean, in this context, information the
publication of which would render the publisher liable for a tort.

What would Wikipedia be sued for?  Well, in the case of publication of
defamatory material, it would be sued for defamation.  Once a service
provider becomes aware of a specific case of defamatory material on
his system, he has a common law duty to take reasonable steps to limit
the damage.  This is not negated by Section 230 of the Communications
Decency Act, which only applies to unwitting publication resulting
from the nature of the Internet Service.


list: wikitech-l

from_name: brion at pobox.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki automated test run failure 2006-04-24

body:
An automated run of parserTests.php showed the following failures:

Running test Table security: embedded pipes (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-April/034637.html)... FAILED!
Running test Magic Word: {{NUMBEROFFILES}}... FAILED!
Running test BUG 1887, part 2: A <math> with a thumbnail- math enabled... FAILED!

Passed 300 of 303 tests (99.01%) FAILED!


from_name: Steve Block

subject: [WikiEN-l] Verifiability equating to notability

body:
I had a bash at creating a proposal which would define notability on
wikipedia as meaning that an article or topic is mentioned in a third
party reliable source.  I figure it should be impossible to write an
article without a third party reference, as per [[WP:V]], [[WP:NOR}] and
[[WP:NPOV]], and so I hope that people will consider using that as the
level for notability in areas where no other guidance exists.

Thoughts welcomed at [[Wikipedia:Notability/Proposals]].

--
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.1.385 / Virus Database: 268.4.5/322 - Release Date: 22/04/06


subject:
[Foundation-l] Wiki trademark issue for ZH Wikipedia in
	mainland China

body:
I'll get in touch with a chinese law firm through our japanese law firm.

Best,

Jean-Baptiste Soufron
wikimedia foundation
chief legal officer

Le 23 avr. 06 ? 19:47, Andre Engels a ?crit :

> 2006/4/23, THD <theodoranian at gmail.com>:
>> Hi,
>> There are some things different between Chinese characters and
>> English word.
>> Every Chinese character has its own meaning. When we translate a
>> foriegn
>> language into Chinese, sometimes we do it by meaning, but more
>> often we use
>> characters with similar pronunciation for translation. Wiki is a
>> generic
>> name, so it can't be a trade mark. In Chinese sphere, wiki can be
>> translate
>> in many ways. Such as ?? (now all the Wikimedia projects in
>> Chinese
>> language, the first one pronunces as "wei", and the second
>> pronunces as
>> "gee"), ??(first "wei", second "gee"), and ??(first "wei" ,
>> second "ke")etc.
>> ?? is one of translations of the word "wiki", and it was chosen
>> by Chinese
>> Wikipedians to be the only name of Chinese Wikipedia. Before Chinese
>> Wikipedian's choosing ?? as the name, there was no famous name
>> of wiki
>> technology. The problem is "if we don't register ??, the
>> Chinese Wikipedia
>> will face the challenge of changing its name (in Chinese)".
>> Wikipedia is one
>> word, but ???? have 4 characters.  In Chinese text trade
>> mark, the
>> government protect the usage of charater singly.When someone
>> registers ??,
>> other people can't use ?? in their own trade mark. So the
>> situation is not
>> the same.
>> THD
>
> I am not into Chinese trademark law, but in general is it not a
> defense against a claim of trademark violation that one used the
> trademark continuously since BEFORE the person claiming violation used
> it? I know that this is the case here in the Netherlands, there is
> even the rule that if that other person knew about your previous use
> of the trademark, their registration is considered mala fide, and can
> be cancelled on those grounds.
>
>
> --
> Andre Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
> ICQ: 6260644  --  Skype: a_engels
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l


body:
On 4/23/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> With 800 administrators how can you possibly determine the level of
> trust that we can put in each.

To a degree I do this for every user.

>And there have been arguments made that
> we need more admins.  The mantra is that being an admin is no big deal.
> Once a person is an admin he has the technical ability to put the
> goatse.cx image on the main page, but we trust him not to do that.

More correctly I trust them to be able to figure out they will be
reverted instantly and blocked for the rest of eternity.

> An
> agent acts with the authority of Wikimedia in an external environment;
> is there any evidence that any ordinary admin is acting  on behalf of
> Wikimedia when he is dealing with the real world?  Agency is often
> linked with employment, but none of our admins are being paid to do that
> job.  Nobody is required to sign an agreement saying that they won't
> give away secrets or even defining what would be a secret.
>

Yet. In practice I suspect most admins have a pretty good idea what
they are not meant to talk about.
--
geni


list: textbook-l

subject: [Textbook-l] Wikibooks - removal of games walkthrough books

body:
On 4/22/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> We have to draw a line somewhere, and we can argue internally endlessly
> without getting much resolution.  So a useful technique is to try really
> hard to reference some external standards.

Perhaps the project should be officially renamed to "WikiTextbooks" to
avoid misunderstandings - or would that be overkill? People probably
base their ideas of what is acceptable on a) the content that is
already there, b) the name "Wikibooks" suggesting an open-ended
project to create books using wiki technology.

I agree that clear standards of what a "textbook" is are needed. But
besides these, I think it is important to work out a way to get
Wikibooks from "here" to "there".

For projects which are deemed outside the scope, as an alternative to
deletion, it might be a good idea to have "Votes for adoption" - books
tagged in this form could continue to be developed for the time being,
but people would be encouraged to find a different, free content wiki
to host them. Once there is consensus about a new home, the Wikibooks
version would be redirected there.

This would recognize the fact that in its first couple of years,
Wikibooks hasn't been very strict about the "textbook" requirement.
People may be understandably concerned to have their work deleted
without trace, having links break, etc. A gentle process might help to
strengthen the textbook focus of the project without making people too
mad about it.

Just some ramblings from a non-Wikibooks editor,

Erik


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: SJ

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Survey of New Media in this week's Economist (fwd)

body:
Speaking of research into collaborative media : here's the lead article
about a recent Economist survey.  Wikipedia gets a kind tip.  Has anyone
read the full report?

The entire survey is available as a PDF for $5...
<http://www.economist.com/members/survey_paybarrier.cfm?story_id=6794156>

(thanks to aslam for the tip)

---------- Forwarded message ----------

AMONG THE AUDIENCE
Apr 20th 2006

The era of mass media is giving way to one of personal and
participatory media, says Andreas Kluth. That will profoundly change
both the media industry and society as a whole

THE next big thing in 1448 was a technology called "movable type",
invented for commercial use by Johannes Gutenberg, a goldsmith from
Mainz (although the Chinese had thought of it first). The clever idea
was to cast individual letters (type) and then compose (move) these to
make up printable pages. This promised to disrupt the mainstream media
of the day--the work of monks who were manually transcribing texts or
carving entire pages into wood blocks for printing. By 1455 Mr
Gutenberg, having lined up venture capital from a rich compatriot,
Johannes Fust, was churning out bibles and soon also papal indulgences
(slips of paper that rich people bought to reduce their time in
purgatory). The start-up had momentum, but its costs ran out of control
and Mr Gutenberg defaulted. Mr Fust foreclosed, and a little bubble
popped.

Even so, within decades movable type spread across Europe,
turbo-charging an information age called the Renaissance. Martin
Luther, irked by those indulgences, used printing presses to produce
bibles and other texts in German. Others followed suit, and vernaculars
rose as Latin declined, preparing Europe for nation-states. Religious
and aristocratic elites first tried to stop, then control, then co-opt
the new medium. In the centuries that followed, social and legal
systems adjusted (with copyright laws, for instance) and books,
newspapers and magazines began to circulate widely. The age of mass
media had arrived. Two more technological breakthroughs--radio and
television--brought it to its zenith, which it probably reached around
1958, when most adult Americans simultaneously turned on their
television sets to watch "I Love Lucy".

SECOND INCARNATION
In 2001, five-and-a-half centuries after Mr Gutenberg's first bible,
"Movable Type" was invented again. Ben and Mena Trott, high-school
sweethearts who became husband and wife, had been laid off during the
dotcom bust and found themselves in San Francisco with ample spare
time. Ms Trott started blogging--ie, posting to her online journal,
Dollarshort--about "stupid little anecdotes from my childhood". For
reasons that elude her, Dollarshort became very popular, and the Trotts
decided to build a better "blogging tool", which they called Movable
Type. "Likening it to the printing press seemed like a natural thing
because it was clearly revolutionary; it was not meant to be arrogant
or grandiose," says Ms Trott to the approving nod of Mr Trott, who is
extremely shy and rarely talks. Movable Type is now the software of
choice for celebrity bloggers.

These two incarnations of movable type make convenient (and very
approximate) historical book-ends. They bracket the era of mass media
that is familiar to everybody today. The second Movable Type, however,
also marks the beginning of a very gradual transition to a new era,
which might be called the age of personal or participatory media. This
culture is already familiar to teenagers and twenty-somethings,
especially in rich countries. Most older people, if they are aware of
the transition at all, find it puzzling.

Calling it the "internet era" is not helpful. By way of infrastructure,
full-scale participatory media presume not so much the availability of
the (decades-old) internet as of widespread, "always-on", broadband
access to it. So far, this exists only in South Korea, Hong Kong and
Japan, whereas America and other large media markets are several years
behind. Indeed, even today's broadband infrastructure was built for the
previous era, not the coming one. Almost everywhere, download speeds
(from the internet to the user) are many times faster than upload
speeds (from user to network). This is because the corporate giants
that built these pipes assumed that the internet would simply be
another distribution pipe for themselves or their partners in the media
industry. Even today, they can barely conceive of a scenario in which
users might put as much into the network as they take out.

THE AGE OF PARTICIPATION
Exactly this, however, is starting to happen. Last November, the Pew
Internet & American Life Project found that 57% of American teenagers
create content for the internet--from text to pictures, music and
video. In this new-media culture, says Paul Saffo, a director at the
Institute for the Future in California, people no longer passively
"consume" media (and thus advertising, its main revenue source) but
actively participate in them, which usually means creating content, in
whatever form and on whatever scale. This does not have to mean that
"people write their own newspaper", says Jeremy Zawodny, a prominent
blogger and software engineer at Yahoo![1], an internet portal. "It
could be as simple as rating the restaurants they went to or the movie
they saw," or as sophisticated as shooting a home video.

This has profound implications for traditional business models in the
media industry, which are based on aggregating large passive audiences
and holding them captive during advertising interruptions. In the
new-media era, audiences will occasionally be large, but often small,
and usually tiny. Instead of a few large capital-rich media giants
competing with one another for these audiences, it will be small firms
and individuals competing or, more often, collaborating. Some will be
making money from the content they create; others will not and will not
mind, because they have other motives. "People creating stuff to build
their own reputations" are at one end of this spectrum, says Philip
Evans at Boston Consulting Group, and one-man superbrands such as
Steven Spielberg at the other.

As with the media revolution of 1448, the wider implications for
society will become visible gradually over a period of decades. With
participatory media, the boundaries between audiences and creators
become blurred and often invisible. In the words of David Sifry, the
founder of Technorati, a search engine for blogs, one-to-many
"lectures" (ie, from media companies to their audiences) are
transformed into "conversations" among "the people formerly known as
the audience". This changes the tone of public discussions. The
mainstream media, says David Weinberger, a blogger, author and fellow
at Harvard University's Berkman Centre, "don't get how subversive it is
to take institutions and turn them into conversations". That is because
institutions are closed, assume a hierarchy and have trouble admitting
fallibility, he says, whereas conversations are open-ended, assume
equality and eagerly concede fallibility.

Today's media revolution, like others before it, is announcing itself
with a new and strange vocabulary. In the early 20th century, Charles
Prestwich Scott, the editor, publisher and owner of the MANCHESTER
GUARDIAN (and thus part of his era's mainstream media), was aghast at
the word "television", which to him was "half Greek, half Latin: no
good can come of it." Mr Scott's equivalents today confront even
stranger neologisms. Merriam-Webster, a publisher of dictionaries, had
"blog" as its word of the year in 2004, and the New Oxford American
Dictionary picked "podcast" in 2005. "Wikis", "vlogs", "metaverses" and
"folksonomies" (all to be explained later in this survey) may be next.

WORD COUNT
"These words! The inability of the English language to express these
new things is distressing," says Barry Diller, 64, who fits the
description "media mogul". Over the decades, Mr Diller has run two big
Hollywood film studios and launched America's fourth
broadcast-television network, FOX Broadcasting. More recently, he has
made a valiant effort to get his mind around the internet, with mixed
results, and is now the boss of IAC/InterActiveCorp, a conglomerate
with about 60 online brands. Mr Diller concedes that "all of the
distribution methods get thrown up in the air, and how they land is,
well, still up in the air." Yet Mr Diller is confident that
participation can never be a proper basis for the media industry.
"Self-publishing by someone of average talent is not very interesting,"
he says. "Talent is the new limited resource."

"What an ignoramus!" says Jerry Michalski, with some exasperation. He
advises companies on the uses of new media tools. "Look around and
there's tons of great stuff from rank amateurs," he says. "Diller is
assuming that there's a finite amount of talent and that he can corner
it. He's completely wrong." Not everything in the "blogosphere" is
poetry, not every audio "podcast" is a symphony, not every video "vlog"
would do well at Sundance, and not every entry on Wikipedia[2], the
free and collaborative online encyclopedia, is 100% correct, concedes
Mr Michalski. But exactly the same could be said about newspapers,
radio, television and the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

What is new is that young people today, and most people in future, will
be happy to decide for themselves what is credible or worthwhile and
what is not. They will have plenty of help. Sometimes they will rely on
human editors of their choosing; at other times they will rely on
collective intelligence in the form of new filtering and collaboration
technologies that are now being developed. "The old media model was:
there is one source of truth. The new media model is: there are
multiple sources of truth, and we will sort it out," says Joe Kraus,
the founder of JotSpot, which makes software for wikis.

The obvious benefit of this media revolution will be what Mr Saffo of
the Institute for the Future calls a "Cambrian explosion" of
creativity: a flowering of expressive diversity on the scale of the
eponymous proliferation of biological species 530m years ago. "We are
entering an age of cultural richness and abundant choice that we've
never seen before in history. Peer production is the most powerful
industrial force of our time," says Chris Anderson, editor of WIRED
magazine and author of a forthcoming book called "The Long Tail", about
which more later. (Mr Anderson used to work for THE ECONOMIST.)

At the same time, adds Mr Saffo, "revolutions tend to suck for ordinary
people." Indeed, many people in the traditional media are pessimistic
about the rise of a participatory culture, either because they believe
it threatens the business model that they have grown used to, or
because they feel it threatens public discourse, civility and even
democracy.

This survey will examine the main kinds of new media and their likely
long-term effects both on media companies and on society at large. In
so doing, it will be careful to heed a warning from Harvard's Mr
Weinberger: "The mainstream media are in a good position to get things
wrong." The observer, after all, is part of the observation--a product
of institutional media values even if he tries to apply the new rules
of conversation. This points to the very heart of the coming era of
participatory media. It must be understood, says Mr Weinberger, "not as
a publishing phenomenon but a social phenomenon". This is illustrated
perfectly by blogging, the subject of the next article[3].

-----
[1] http://www.yahoo.com/
[2] http://wikipedia.org/
[3] http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_ID=6794172


from_name: Minh Nguyen

subject: [Wikitech-l] Browser problems with previewing long pages

body:
Jens Frank wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 23, 2006 at 10:26:11PM -0700, Minh Nguyen wrote:
>> Lars Aronsson wrote:
>>> [...]  Perhaps this is related to
>>> Firefox 1.5 or 1.5.0.2?  I run Linux.  I never had this problem
>>> with Mozilla 1.7.8. Any clues?
>> Interesting... for the past couple weeks, I've been getting a truncation
>> problem too on occasion, but it also happens on shorter pages, and it's
>> only the "toolbox" list that gets truncated [...]
>
> Are you also using Firefox 1.5?
>
> Regards,
>
> 	jens

Yes. Firefox 1.5.0.2, to be exact. :)

Lars Aronsson wrote:
 > I think Wikipedia's use of stylesheets means the article body is
 > transferred *before* the navigation.  See "view source" for some
 > pages.  This would mean it's the end that gets truncated, not the
 > middle.

No, I wasn't talking about the article body; I was talking about the
interwiki links, which actually do come after the toolbox. Also, the
page footer (with the "Powered by MediaWiki" image button) is also
displayed just fine when this happens.

--
Minh Nguyen <mxn at zoomtown.com>
AIM: trycom2000; Jabber: mxn at myjabber.net; Blog: http://mxn.f2o.org/


from_name: THD

body:
Hi,
There are some things different between Chinese characters and English word.
Every Chinese character has its own meaning. When we translate a foriegn
language into Chinese, sometimes we do it by meaning, but more often we use
characters with similar pronunciation for translation. Wiki is a generic
name, so it can't be a trade mark. In Chinese sphere, wiki can be translate
in many ways. Such as ?? (now all the Wikimedia projects in Chinese
language, the first one pronunces as "wei", and the second pronunces as
"gee"), ??(first "wei", second "gee"), and ??(first "wei" , second "ke")etc.
?? is one of translations of the word "wiki", and it was chosen by Chinese
Wikipedians to be the only name of Chinese Wikipedia. Before Chinese
Wikipedian's choosing ?? as the name, there was no famous name of wiki
technology. The problem is "if we don't register ??, the Chinese Wikipedia
will face the challenge of changing its name (in Chinese)". Wikipedia is one
word, but ???? have 4 characters.  In Chinese text trade mark, the
government protect the usage of charater singly.When someone registers ??,
other people can't use ?? in their own trade mark. So the situation is not
the same.
THD

? 2006/4/22?Jakob Voss <jakob.voss at nichtich.de> ???
>
> Hi,
>
> > We have found an Chinese had registered "Wiki" and "??" (in literly it
> > also means "Wiki" in Chinese) as his trademarks at 2005/11/23 in
> mainland
> > China. Since we now have WP and WN, there might be some trademark issues
> in
> > mainland China. Do you have any advice or suggestions that we can do?
>
> There is Trademark in China? ;-) Alawyer should point the Trademark
> office to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Wikipedia#Naming and/or
> other sources (publications) to show that the name ?? is used since
> long before 2005. According to the Chinese trademark law (Article 11,
> paragraph 1 and Chapter V)
> http://www.chinaiprlaw.com/english/laws/laws11.htm generic names are not
> allowed so you have to prove that Wiki and ?? are generic names for
> special kind of websites that were invented by Ward Cunningham.
> Wikimedia Foundation does not have Trademark on Wiki or ?? neither
> because nobody can have a trademark on this.
>
> But I don't know any chinese lawyer. At least you can find out how to
> submit a application for adjudication to the Chinese Trademark Review
> and Adjudication Board. The best way is to find a chinese lawyer who has
> handled such an application before and who is willing to help for free.
>
> Greetings,
> Jakob
>
> P.S: In Germany a baker has trademark for "Wiki" for cakes since 1956
> but this is ok because Wikis and cakes are different things. Sadly he
> does not produce the cakes anymore,I would like to taste it :-)
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


from_name: Hagen Böttcher

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia's Success Factors

body:
Dear everybody,

I am new to this list, but I need your help, as I am currently busy with my
B.A.Thesis on Wikipedia's Success Factors.
I would very much appreciate your comments and critique on the following:

Wikipedia's success mainly depend on its users - the Wikipedians. In
theory, everybody can be a Wikipedian. This thread is supposed to find
out if the theory holds true in practice.

The idea is that the Wiki-community of Wikipedians is a special group
of people, who have special characteristcs. To account for these
special characteristics, I have provided the following Factor
Model:

User factors: - Openness - Neutrality -
Flat hierarchy- Computer Skills - Motivation -

Knowledge factors: - Tacit & Explicit knowledge - Fast changing rate - Peer
review

Technology factors: - Easy usability - Fast access - Infinite reach,
multilingual - Flexible structure - Safe

All these factors play together to accomplish the goal of succesful
knowledge creation and knowledge sharing.

See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Success_factors

Comments, feedback and own ideas are very welcome!

Thank you very much in advance for your time,
Hagen


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikitech-l] short URLs for non-latin pages

body:
Artem wrote:

>Are there any more contemporary solutions to this issue? Ideally I'd
>like to have a separate field for URL when creating/editing a page -
>is it possible to create a plugin that would allow this? Another
>solution would be having this field noneditable and automatically
>filled with transliterated name of the page..
>
While I can't comment on the more technical aspects, the idea of
transliterated entries has consistently intrigued me in a Wiktionary
context.  There would need to be some kind of standardized and
reversible transliteration   Serbian Wikipedia already allows for a
two-scripted language, and it's possible that that is not compatible
with Russian or many other languages using the Cyrillic script.

Ec


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] 2006-04-21T02:30 drastic slowdown postmortem

body:
William Allen Simpson wrote:
> Tim Starling wrote:
>
>> William Allen Simpson wrote:
>>
>>> Wouldn't want to bother anybody during an outage, as I'm sure that folks
>>> are busy.  The point of a postmortem is to figure out how to prevent the
>>> same from happening in the future.
>>
>>
>> Since I still don't have a clue what you're talking about, preventing it
>> from happening in the future might be difficult. I'll ask again: what is
>> "local time"? Which local time are you talking about?
>>
> Since the thread hasn't had the words "local time" for some time, it was
> hard to figure out your query.  Going back to my first message, there is
> a "local time" in parentheses.  In context, it is clear that "last night
> (local time)" relates to your data center.  That is, local night.

Meet the sysadmin team (with corresponding timezones)

Brion: PDT -7
Kyle: EDT -4
Kate: BST +1
JeLuF: CEDT +2
Mark: CEDT +2
Domas: usually EET +2, currently travelling somewhere
Me: AEST +10

The only person who lives near the servers is Kyle, and he was hired as a
hardware tech for that exact reason. The servers all have their clocks set
to UTC, and we use UTC in logs and communications.

> Had you looked at the graphs (or other logs) at the time, or anytime in
> the following day (all I would hope), the data was obvious.  Since you
> didn't, I've attached some of the dozen or so that I saved.
>
> The time was 02:30+ UTC.

Ah, well in that case, I can tell you exactly what happened. The hero of the
day was Zsinj, a canny newbie who had his eye on the relevant monitoring
graphs, and alerted us to the problem immediately, using very specific
terms, allowing us to track down and fix it rapidly.

Log extract from #wikimedia-tech follows, times are UTC+10.

[12:32] <Zsinj> Just had a SQL spike and squids almost flatlined. What happened?
[12:34] <TimStarling> Zsinj: had?
[12:34] <Interiot> network is slow maybe?
[12:34] <TimStarling> oh, continuing
[12:34] <Zsinj> SQL loads adb2, db4, and ariel all skyrocket load averages
[12:35] <Zsinj> db2, db4, and ariel*
[12:39] <Zsinj> hm, something caused sq1 to really cut its load, that's what
increased the demand on the SQL servers.
[12:39] <DragonFire2410> Wikinews not responding
[12:39] * mboverload stabs himself because someone thought it was a good
idea to put the datacenter in Flordia
[12:39] <Zsinj> what's wrong with florida?
[12:40] <Zsinj> TimStarling: Perhaps something with sq1?

At about this time I identified the problem as being a flood of
Special:Listusers type queries. Fearing a deliberate DoS attack, I invited
Zsinj into the private channel, so that he could watch while we fixed the
problem that he described so well and so promptly. My immediate response was
to disable the special page and kill the queries. While I was doing that, I
had time to type a few lines into IRC. Kate (consanguinity) was also there.

[12:44] * Zsinj (n=chatzill at node230-67.unnamed.db.erau.edu) has joined
#secretchannel
[12:44] <TimStarling> invited Zsinj
[12:44] <Zsinj> Hello everyone.
[12:45] <TimStarling> I'm a bit busy at the moment
[12:46] <TimStarling> basically we had a flood of requests for
Special:Listusers with a limit of 500
[12:46] <Zsinj> Interesting.
[12:46] <TimStarling> it could have been a deliberate DoS attack
[12:46] <Zsinj> it certainly has the symptoms of one.
[12:46] <consanguinity> was it the same page?  more likely someone trying to
list all the users, if not
[12:47] <Zsinj> or a rogue bot request?
[12:47] <consanguinity> assume stupidity before malice ;-)
[12:47] <TimStarling> well yeah, these things have almost always turned out
to be accidents
[12:47] <TimStarling> but I thought I'd better switch channel just in case
[12:48] <Zsinj> Good precaution. :)
[12:48] <TimStarling> I disabled that special page altogether
[12:48] <TimStarling> then I killed the queries, still in progress
[12:48] <Zsinj> squids and apaches are on the upswing and SQL load is
decreasing.
[12:49] <consanguinity> is listusers still using limit,offset or was it slow
for another reason?

Some pasting of queries and thinking out loud followed. I worked out the
problem and applied a temporary fix at 13:03 UTC+10. I summarised it in a
later conversation with Domas on #wikimedia-tech, who among other things is
our local DB expert:

[00:04] <Wegge> So it's around 5 or 6 AM for you?
[00:04] <dammit> 7AM
[00:11] * dammit is now known as domas
[00:17] <TimStarling> hi domas
[00:17] <domas> hey Tim
[00:17] <TimStarling> we had some stuff going on earlier today with GROUP BY
that you might be interested in
[00:17] <TimStarling> well, not today in your timezone obviously
[00:18] <TimStarling> mysql> SELECT 'Listusers' as type, 2 AS namespace,
user_name AS title, user_name as value, user_id, COUNT(ug_group) as
numgroups FROM `user` LEFT JOIN `user_groups` ON user_id=ug_user  GROUP BY
user_name, user_id ORDER BY value  LIMIT 50,50;
[00:18] <TimStarling> 50 rows in set (32.94 sec)
[00:18] <TimStarling> mysql> SELECT 'Listusers' as type, 2 AS namespace,
user_name AS title, user_name as value, user_id, COUNT(ug_group) as
numgroups FROM `user` LEFT JOIN `user_groups` ON user_id=ug_user  GROUP BY
user_name ORDER BY value  LIMIT 50,50;
[00:18] <TimStarling> 50 rows in set (0.01 sec)
[00:18] <TimStarling> the first one groups by two columns
[00:19] <TimStarling> it was done in the name of PostgreSQL compatibility:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-cvs/2006-April/014586.html
[00:19] <domas> riiiiight
[00:19] <domas> probably it's better to use min/max for constants
[00:19] <domas> rather than putting them to GROUP BY
[00:19] <domas> this was mistake I was doing few years ago too
[00:22] <TimStarling> well, I reverted the extra fields in GROUP BY, there
were a few of them in that patch
[00:25] <TimStarling>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-cvs/2006-April/014764.html

-- Tim Starling


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wheel warring

body:
On 4/24/06, jayjg <jayjg99 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 4/23/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 4/23/06, jayjg <jayjg99 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > A brief block is not the end of the world. If it drags on for a
> > > lengthy period then it's something else.  And yes, the first admin
> > > executed their best judgement when making the block; that's what
> > > admins are supposed to do.  If a second admin disagrees with that
> > > judgement, then they need to take it up with the first admin, rather
> > > than initiate a wheel war with them.
> > >
> > > Jay.
> >
> > Pulling a block is not initiateing a wheel war.
>
> Actually, it is, by definition.
>

No. I have done something to try and fix something. They have decided
to take responcibilty for the problem and try an different fix

> > If I initiated a wheel
> > war every time someone pulled one of my blocks we wouldn't be haveing
> > this conversation now.
>
> If someone pulled one of your blocks, then the wheel war has already
> started.  How you respond, of course, is up to you.

No. The first "wheel war" to recive wide attention would be the one
involeing trying to inforce a 3RR block on an admin. There is a world
of difference between that and someone pulling a 3RR block because
someone contacted them by email. In any case you have just accused
some fairly widely respect members of the old school admins of "wheel
waring".

>
> >
> > Allowing the revsal of admin actions is just a logical extension of
> > [[WP:OWN]].
>
> WP:OWN is about articles, not actions.  This is not a "logical
> extension".  A more logical extension would have to do with not
> reverting.
>

No. You do not own articles. You do not own blocks . You do not own
page protections. You do not own deletions. You do not own your
f****** Mediawiki namespace edits. You're a wikipedia admin. Your ego
can go hang and it is about time you started wearing toecaps.

> >Most revsals of admin actions don't result in any problems
> > thus it requires less rescources to do whatever and then deal with any
> > screaming afterwards.
>
> Yes, and reverting someone using the admin revert button also requires
> less resources, and you can deal with any screaming afterwards.
>
> Jay.

Rollback does not give you a comment box. Unprotection and unblock does.
--
geni


from_name: Molu

subject: [WikiEN-l] WikiEN-l Digest, Vol 33, Issue 152

body:
"The recent fuss over Office actions demonstrates amply that even quite
well established administrators feel that they can challenge and
disregard the interests of the Foundation." Unfortunately it demonstrates nothing even remotely resembling the dark senario you choose to paint. No party involved *has* challenged, let alone felt entitled to challenge, the interests of the foundation. I believe it is a unanimous consensus among wikipedia community (disregarding vandals of course) that the interests of the foundation are foremost because without it the project can not exist.

  One of the parties has challenged what he could be reasonably certain were the interests of another party as an individual editor having nothing to do with any real-life Foundation affairs. By challenging an out-of-policy action he did the irght thing and the interests of the Foundation had nothing to do with it. It seems some people do not find it unreasonable to expect an editor to act on information he did not have.

  Reverting once the actions of another editor, especially when that action was in direct violation of wikipedia policies established through community consensus, is part of the normal wiki editing process and such actions are encouraged by [[WP:BOLD]] because they serve to advance the interests of the encyclopaedia better than spending endless hours (and because of the nature of talk page communication, holding even a short dialougue can take days) discussing an edit even when that edit is not very likely to cause controversies and edit wars.

  It is surprising how some people go on claiming that Erik should have emplyed some hidden precognitive abilities to deduce that an action explicitly labeled by Danny as a normal editorial action was actually performed in the interests of the Foundation and thereby refrained from exercising the editorial powers gifted to him by the *wiki*pedia.

  Molu

Message: 1
Date: Sat, 22 Apr 2006 20:54:42 +0100
From: "Tony Sidaway"
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Why the uproar over wikitruth
To: "English Wikipedia"
Message-ID:
<605709b90604221254l3f7c6da1uf7bed1d214415ee0 at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

On 4/22/06, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>> Under the Communications Decency Act
> >which provides a general exemption from third party liability to
> >online information providers, this exemption does not extend to
> >liability for publication by agents of the provider. A Wikipedia
> >administrator who uses his special powers to publish defamatory
> >content or copy copyright-infringing content would tend to advance the
> >case against Wikipedia for third-party liability.
> >
> The fallacy there is in suggesting that all admins are agents of
> Wikipedia. There is nothing in any description of admins that allows
> them to do anything on any site outside of a particular project. A
> Wikipedia admin does not thereby receive the right to be an admin on any
> sister project or even on a Wikipedia in any other language. Perhaps
> you should review the meaning of "agent".

I use the term loosely. If someone entrusted with the ability to see
unpublished content then uses that ability to cause it to be
published, then the organisation's task of showing that it took
reasonable steps to prevent publication is made more difficult, for it
most demonstrate that it reasonably believed that this person would
not do so. If our admins are chosen through a popularity contest in
which their loyalty to the aims and interests of the Foundation,
rather than the community, is not examined, I think it would be very
difficult to argue that such a belief was reasonable. Basically we
let any mutt off the street act as an administrator, irrespective of
his views on, or knowledge of liability, copyright, or anything else
relevant, or his commitment to act in the interests of the Foundation.

The recent fuss over Office actions demonstrates amply that even quite
well established administrators feel that they can challenge and
disregard the interests of the Foundation.

---------------------------------
Yahoo! Messenger with Voice. Make PC-to-Phone Calls to the US (and 30+ countries) for 2?/min or less.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wheel warring

body:
On 4/24/06, jayjg <jayjg99 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 4/23/06, Conrad Dunkerson <conrad.dunkerson at worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> > * jayjg wrote:
> >
> > > One can posit all sorts of "maybes", but the fact remains that
> > > reverting the first admin assumes the first admin is incorrect.
> > > Instead of assuming, contact them first, and find out for sure.  It's
> > > quite simple, and it astonishes me that anyone would defend summarily
> > > reverting an admin action over communicating with them first and
> > > building a consensus.  This is not an emergency, and almost never is.
> >
> > I find your position equally illogical. Tracking down the admin who
> > originally protected a page to get their 'buy in' on unprotecting it after
> > the issue has been resolved would be a pointless waste of time. MAYBE one
> > time in a hundred they are going to have some non-apparent reason for
> > wanting the page to remain protected, but usually not.
>
> You keep forgetting the element of time here.  The key is that it need
> not be done immediately; unprotecting a page after 20 minutes is wheel
> warring.  Unprotecting a page after 20 days is probably fine.
>

Probably?

> Sometimes for good, often for bad.
>

Evidences?

> Sort of like reverting.  Oh wait, but we should always discuss
> reversions, shouldn't we?
>

Not always beyond the edit summery.

> You can bet that if an admin has blocked someone, he'll object to the
> block being lifted a few minutes later, unless he has it explained
> first.  I've never seen a case where that wasn't true.

Me. Three revert rule way back when I was dealing with most of the
blocks resulting from it. Why should I care if anonther admin wishes
to take responsibilty for a users behaviour?

--
geni


body:
> [00:18] <TimStarling> mysql> SELECT 'Listusers' as type, 2 AS namespace,
> user_name AS title, user_name as value, user_id, COUNT(ug_group) as
> numgroups FROM `user` LEFT JOIN `user_groups` ON user_id=ug_user  GROUP BY
> user_name, user_id ORDER BY value  LIMIT 50,50;
> [00:18] <TimStarling> 50 rows in set (32.94 sec)
> [00:18] <TimStarling> mysql> SELECT 'Listusers' as type, 2 AS namespace,
> user_name AS title, user_name as value, user_id, COUNT(ug_group) as
> numgroups FROM `user` LEFT JOIN `user_groups` ON user_id=ug_user  GROUP BY
> user_name ORDER BY value  LIMIT 50,50;
> [00:18] <TimStarling> 50 rows in set (0.01 sec)

Some general thoughts about this while it's on my mind: the key here to
minimising the impact of this kind of problem is isolation, rather than
distribution. We already have good isolation for search, and improving
isolation for images -- if one of those two services goes offline then the
rest should stay up, unaffected. Maybe it's time we introduced a "basic"
query group, containing those queries required for pages views. Then we
could send all "basic" queries to a dedicated cluster, and all other queries
to a second isolated cluster. Then as long as we can keep the apache thread
count low enough, any problem with those diverse special page queries would
not affect page view performance.

We could go even further and split the apache cluster into an "ordinary page
view" cluster and an "everything else" cluster. This would mitigate DoS
attacks on apache resources.

Any comments?

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Jürgen Herz

body:
On Mon, 24 Apr 2006 00:02:35 +0200 Jean-Baptiste Soufron wrote:

> Actually we are already taking care of the german stuff with a German
> Law Firm. We have been working on this for 3 months already.

So that's reassuring to read - from the lack of information I can't
say promissing.

> I also hope to give you more details once we'll begin to get some results.

If you don't try to buy the trademark (see
http://ecommerce.infochannel.org/product_info.php?products_id=170) but
to object on the official way, I guess we'll se the result soon in the
DPMA database.

> Do not try to do anything on your own that would complicate everything.

Of course not. I'm not talking about full disclosure. But in my
opinion a little more information from the beginning on would have
been nicer.

Thanks,
J?rgen


from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wheel warring

body:
On 4/24/06, slimvirgin at gmail.com <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 4/23/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> > No if danny hadn't taken his action in the first place all this could
> > be avoided.
> >
> That's true of all admin actions. You're implying that the best way to
> stop wheel wars is to have no admins.
>
> Sarah

Well it would be one logical aproach.

There is no more reason to as a default attribute blame to person who
undid the action than there is to attribute it to the person who did
it.

In reality it is quite posible to have no fault "wheel "wars"".
--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wheel warring

body:
On 4/24/06, slimvirgin at gmail.com <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't know who this was directed at, but it's exactly the attitude
> that's causing a problem.

Really? Most historical problems with "wheel wars" have been due to
the problem that it is tricky to block an admin who doesn't want to be
blocked.

>Respecting someone else's judgment is not the same as them "owning"
the block or >protection or edit.
>
> Sarah

Functionaly the difference is?

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wheel warring

body:
On 4/24/06, slimvirgin at gmail.com <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 4/23/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 4/24/06, slimvirgin at gmail.com <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > I don't know who this was directed at, but it's exactly the attitude
> > > that's causing a problem.
> >
> > Really? Most historical problems with "wheel wars" have been due to
> > the problem that it is tricky to block an admin who doesn't want to be
> > blocked.
>
> I don't know what that means.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&type=block&user=&page=User%3A172&limit=14&offset=5

That is a real wheel war.

>The wheel war problem is caused by people taking it upon themselves
to undo other >people's admin actions, simply because they disagree
with them.

I can't offhand think of any other reason to undo them. However that
doesn't cause wheel wars. The wheel war only gets going when the
person who has had their admin action undone tries to get it redone by
brute force.

> As Kate said, it often boils down to an ego problem, the presumption of knowing better.

Of course. And yet you object to my point where I show what rejecting
all that ego stuff means.

> You can strongly disagree with an admin action, but at the same time
> realize that perhaps the original admin knows more about the situation
> than you do; or perhaps knows just as much but has better judgment in
> this case; or perhaps neither of these, and you'll just have to agree
> to differ.

Either the action is pulled or it is not. Agreeing to differ makes no
sense in this context.

> Just as we can't always have our own way when editing, we
> also can't always have our own way when adminning.

And yet you blame the person who is preventing someone from haveing
their own way.

--
geni


from_name: Phil Boswell

body:
William Allen Simpson-2 wrote:
>
> Tim Starling wrote:
>> Log extract from #wikimedia-tech follows, times are UTC+10.
> Ah, another place that doesn't use UTC logs....
>

That's an IRC channel, so the log would be client-side, so the TZ would
perforce be client-based.

HTH HAND
--
Phil
--
View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/2006-Apr-20-drastic-slowdown-postmortem-t1486956.html#a4062009
Sent from the Wikipedia Developers forum at Nabble.com.


from_name: Michael R. Irwin

body:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:

>On 4/23/06, Michael R. Irwin <michael_irwin at verizon.net> wrote:
>
>
>>Delirium wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>>Gregory Maxwell wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>>I'd guess the open questions would be:
>>>>
>>>>1) How would this impact the charitable non-profit status of WMF?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>The general rule is that a non-profit organization should have at least
>>>one-third of its annual income come from a combination of: governmental
>>>donations, donations from other public charities, and small (less than
>>>2% of total income each) donations from the general public and private
>>>charities (large donations can still have the first 2% counted).  If
>>>that all adds up to less than 1/3, things get considerably more complicated.
>>>
>>>Whether advertising income would cause a problem depends on how much we
>>>expect to get, and how much in large donations from private individuals
>>>and charities we typically get.
>>>
>>>-Mark
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>Interesting information.   Do you have any further detail.   Is the
>>above a good general guideline because it is mandated by law;  accepted
>>as good practice by accountants, IRS, rating organization, possible
>>donors or other?
>>
>>
>>
>Presumably he is referring to the "public support test", section 509
>of the Internal Revenue Code.  Failure to meet the test would have the
>organization deemed a private foundation which would have significant
>negative tax effects.  In extremely excessive cases the organization
>could completely lose its non-profit status.
>
>Anthony
>_______________________________________________
>foundation-l mailing list
>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>
>
>
Hmm ... from www.irs.gov search on "public support test section 509"

http://www.irs.gov/charities/article/0,,id=137609,00.html

>
>     Section 509(a)(3) Supporting Organizations
>
> Supporting organizations are public charities that carry out their
> exempt purposes by supporting one or more other exempt organizations,
> usually other public charities. The category can cover many types of
> entities including university endowment funds and organizations that
> provide essential services for hospital systems. The classification is
> important because it is one means by which a charity can avoid
> classification as a private foundation, a status that is subject to a
> much more restrictive regulatory regime. The key feature of a
> supporting organization is a strong relationship with an organization
> it supports. The strong relationship enables the supported
> organization to oversee the operations of the supporting organization.
> Therefore, the supporting organization is classified as a public
> charity, even though it may be funded by a small number of persons in
> a manner that is similar to a private foundation.
>
> Like all charitable organizations, a supporting organization must be
> organized and operated exclusively for purposes described in section
> 501(c)(3). A supporting organization must also be organized and
> operated exclusively to support specified supported organizations.
> Moreover, a supporting organization must have one of three
> relationships with the supported organizations, all of which are
> intended to ensure that the supporting organization is responsive to
> the needs or demands of the supported organization and intimately
> involved in its operations and that the public charity is motivated to
> be attentive to the operations of the supporting organization. Type I
> supporting organizations are "operated, supervised, or controlled by"
> the supported organization. Type II supporting organizations are
> "supervised or controlled in connection with" the supported
> organization. Type III supporting organizations are "operated in
> connection with" the supported organization. Since Type III
> relationships are less formal than a Type I or Type II relationship,
> Type III organizations must meet a responsiveness test and an integral
> part test. Section 1.509(a)-4(i)(2) and (3) of the Income Tax
> Regulations. These tests are designed to ensure that the supporting
> organization is responsive to needs of a public charity and that the
> public charity oversees the operations of the supporting organization.
> Finally, the supporting organization must not be controlled directly
> or indirectly by disqualified persons (defined in section 4946), who
> generally are substantial contributors and their family members.
> Section 509(a)(3)(C).
>
> Some promoters have encouraged individuals to establish and operate
> supporting organizations described in section 509(a)(3) for their own
> benefit. There are a variety of methods of abuse, but a common theme
> is a "charitable" donation of an amount to the supporting
> organization, and a return of the donated amounts to the donor, often
> in the form of a loan. To disguise the abuse, the transaction may be
> routed through one or more intermediary organizations controlled by
> the promoter.
>
> Organizations that operate for the personal benefit of their founders
> are not operated exclusively for purposes described in section
> 501(c)(3). Where part of an organization?s net earnings inures to the
> benefit of private persons or where more than an insubstantial part of
> its activities benefit private interests, the organization will fail
> to qualify, or lose its tax-exempt status under section 501(c)(3). In
> addition, section 4958 excise taxes may be imposed on its disqualified
> persons and organization managers as defined under section 4958(f).
> Even in cases where the organization does not operate for the personal
> benefit of its founder, it may fail to qualify for section 509(a)(3)
> classification for several reasons. It might be controlled by
> disqualified persons. It might not be sufficiently responsive to the
> needs or demands of a supported public charity. It might not maintain
> a significant involvement in the affairs of a specified publicly
> supported charity. A specified public charity might not be motivated
> to be attentive to its operations Loss of section 509(a)(3)
> classification means that the organization would be classified as a
> private foundation, subject to excise taxes under chapter 42 for a
> variety of reasons including self-dealing transactions and improper
> investments.
>
> _Additional information_:
>
> /Public Charity or Private Foundation Status, Issues Under IRC
> 509(a)(1)-(4), 4942(j)(3), and 507,/ 2003 EO CPE Text Topic B
> <http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-tege/eotopicb03.pdf>
>
> /Control and Power: Issues Involving Supporting Organizations, Donor
> Advised Funds, and Disqualified Person Financial Institutions/, 2001
> EO CPE Text Topic G <http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-tege/eotopicg01.pdf>
>
> /Public Charity Classification and Private Foundation Issues: Recent
> Emerging Significant Developments/, 2000 EO CPE Text Topic P
> <http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-tege/eotopicp00.pdf>
>
> /Supporting and Publicly Supported Organizations/, 1993 EO CPE Text
> Topic J <http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-tege/eotopicj93.pdf>
>
> /Exclusion from Private Foundation Status Under IRC 509(a)(3)/, 1982
> EO CPE Text Topic B <http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-tege/eotopicb82.pdf>
>
Fun stuff! I sure am glad the stacked Board is finding an excellent,
licensed, bonded, high powered, high paid, unaffiliated, CPA to certify
we have met all those pesky general requirements at the strategic level
as well as all the properly nuanced shifty definitions referenced by
link and of course the entire history of IRS case law and whatever new
stuff they making up to extend the envelope as we think.

Clearly we are not a dynamic duo structure yet as most of the document
discusses but perhaps some of the subprojects or new projects with large
scope such as Wikiversity could become independent organizations with
mutual support and accountability. Or we could seek to partner with some
appropriate existing 503(s) with experience in this mutual cross
checking requirement.

I wonder if Wikiversity has to be accredited before we start an
endowment fund to guarantee perpetual, stable, adequate performance as a
grid initilization, calibration and fuzzy logic center?

Further, I wonder if specific endowments could be established at
existing accredited land, sea, space and/or air grant universities
involved with distributed supercomputing to fund local redundancy assets
sufficient to establish a Wikiversity Grid specific oceanstore substrate
with appropriate diffusion rates, data pumping stations, backups,
alerting (say parental controls or warrant specified data products) and
toxic waste or bit rot repair handling provisions. Might attract some
attention from Globus Developers if we used their tools to implement a
full up permanent grid.

Actually I think an appropriate google search would probably turn up
appropriate email contacts for all of the above should it be decided how
we could usefully setup independent entities and design appropriate
power control checks, balances, and audits between the various entities
to meet operational and regulatory cross checking and auditing requirements.

Anybody know when some formal reports or conclusions routinely
confirming the Wikimedia Foundation's tax status and compliance will be
available for further assessment and planning purposes to the general
public vs. the private working theaters or comm channels?

Regards,
lazyquasar


body:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:

>
>Anyway, I'm not a lawyer, and not even a CPA, just a lowly
>non-government-regulated tax accountant.  This is not tax advice, blah
>blah blah (whatever crap that lawyer keeps saying about Circular 230,
>that goes for me too).
>
>Anthony
>_______________________________________________
>
>

Thanks for the info.  You are way above me in knowledge on these
issues.   I thought we were discussing the basic accounting question and
the difference between the concept of gross revenue and net profit
returned to personal pockets.

This concept of interlocking mutually regulating/cross checking mazes of
incestous relationships in non profits is new to me.

 I knew this kind of crap is used in interlocking Boards of Directors,
divisions, stock holdings, etc. in conglomerates and holding companies
of for profit corporations but I have only read laymans interpretations
of this or introductory business texts, never actually experienced it
directly in any meaningful way.

Thanks for the reference on Circular 230.  I will check it out.

Regards,
lazyquasar


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia's Success Factors

body:
The "infinite reach" is the big thing. Only a tiny fraction the
population gets into it, but on a world wide scale that is a few
thousand. We are generally not an elite, just people who especially
enjoy this pass time. Reasons vary.

Fred

On Apr 23, 2006, at 5:17 PM, Hagen B?ttcher wrote:

> Dear everybody,
>
> I am new to this list, but I need your help, as I am currently busy
> with my
> B.A.Thesis on Wikipedia's Success Factors.
> I would very much appreciate your comments and critique on the
> following:
>
> Wikipedia's success mainly depend on its users - the Wikipedians. In
> theory, everybody can be a Wikipedian. This thread is supposed to find
> out if the theory holds true in practice.
>
> The idea is that the Wiki-community of Wikipedians is a special group
> of people, who have special characteristcs. To account for these
> special characteristics, I have provided the following Factor
> Model:
>
> User factors: - Openness - Neutrality -
> Flat hierarchy- Computer Skills - Motivation -
>
> Knowledge factors: - Tacit & Explicit knowledge - Fast changing
> rate - Peer
> review
>
> Technology factors: - Easy usability - Fast access - Infinite reach,
> multilingual - Flexible structure - Safe
>
> All these factors play together to accomplish the goal of succesful
> knowledge creation and knowledge sharing.
>
> See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Success_factors
>
> Comments, feedback and own ideas are very welcome!
>
> Thank you very much in advance for your time,
> Hagen
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
Delirium wrote:

>Michael R. Irwin wrote:
>
>
>>Delirium wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>>The general rule is that a non-profit organization should have at least
>>>one-third of its annual income come from a combination of: governmental
>>>donations, donations from other public charities, and small (less than
>>>2% of total income each) donations from the general public and private
>>>charities (large donations can still have the first 2% counted).  If
>>>that all adds up to less than 1/3, things get considerably more complicated.
>>>
>>>Whether advertising income would cause a problem depends on how much we
>>>expect to get, and how much in large donations from private individuals
>>>and charities we typically get.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>Interesting information.   Do you have any further detail.   Is the
>>above a good general guideline because it is mandated by law;  accepted
>>as good practice by accountants, IRS, rating organization, possible
>>donors or other?
>>
>>Any background you care to provide regarding where you gained this
>>knowledge would also be appreciated but I can follow up elsewhere if you
>>do not care to provide that private information on a public mailing list.
>>
>>
>>
>
>The official guidelines on the subject are in IRS publication 557,
>"Tax-Exempt Status for Your Organization".  The relevant chapter for the
>Wikimedia Foundation is chapter 3 on 501(c)(3) organizations (online:
>http://www.irs.gov/publications/p557/ch03.html).
>
>I was a bit imprecise; these aren't requirements for all non-profit
>organizations, but specifically for 501(c)(3) organizations, the type
>that are required to be public charities.  That gives added benefits
>over private charities (like the Gates foundation), such as allowing
>people who donate money to deduct those donations from their taxes.  It
>also includes added requirements; for example, they must serve a public
>purpose (rather than a community or niche purpose), must spend their
>money on activities that advance that public purpose (not social
>activities), and must receive a substantial amount of their monetary
>support from the general public, either directly or through government
>entities or other public charities.  One-third support seems to be the
>official line above which the organization is safe; if the public
>support is less than that but above 10%, it's still possible to maintain
>the status, but things get trickier.
>
>
>
Excellent expansion and clarification Mark!  Thank you very much.   I
think that gives me as much knowledge as I wish to have on this subject
for the moment.   I do appreciate the links to further specific
information and will file this note for future reference if I ever get
involved in assisting with the launch or maintenance of a non profit.
Thanks again!

Sincerely,
Michael R. Irwin


body:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:

>On 4/23/06, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>
>
>>Michael R. Irwin wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Delirium wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>>The general rule is that a non-profit organization should have at least
>>>>one-third of its annual income come from a combination of: governmental
>>>>donations, donations from other public charities, and small (less than
>>>>2% of total income each) donations from the general public and private
>>>>charities (large donations can still have the first 2% counted).  If
>>>>that all adds up to less than 1/3, things get considerably more complicated.
>>>>
>>>>Whether advertising income would cause a problem depends on how much we
>>>>expect to get, and how much in large donations from private individuals
>>>>and charities we typically get.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>Interesting information.   Do you have any further detail.   Is the
>>>above a good general guideline because it is mandated by law;  accepted
>>>as good practice by accountants, IRS, rating organization, possible
>>>donors or other?
>>>
>>>Any background you care to provide regarding where you gained this
>>>knowledge would also be appreciated but I can follow up elsewhere if you
>>>do not care to provide that private information on a public mailing list.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>The official guidelines on the subject are in IRS publication 557,
>>"Tax-Exempt Status for Your Organization".  The relevant chapter for the
>>Wikimedia Foundation is chapter 3 on 501(c)(3) organizations (online:
>>http://www.irs.gov/publications/p557/ch03.html).
>>
>>I was a bit imprecise; these aren't requirements for all non-profit
>>organizations, but specifically for 501(c)(3) organizations, the type
>>that are required to be public charities.  That gives added benefits
>>over private charities (like the Gates foundation), such as allowing
>>people who donate money to deduct those donations from their taxes.
>>
>>
>
>I thought the Gates Foundation *was* a 501(c)(3) organization.  I
>could be wrong about that, though.  Either way, a 501(c)(3) can be a
>private foundation *or* a public charity.  In fact, all 501(c)(3)
>organizations which make more than $5000 other than churches are by
>default considered private foundations unless they apply for and
>qualify as public charities under 509(a).  (see IRC 508(b) and 509(a)
>at http://www.access.gpo.gov/uscode/title26/subtitlea_chapter1_subchapterf_partii_.html).
>
>Also, donations to private foundations generally *are* tax deductible,
>just to a lesser extent (30% of AGI vs. 50% for most individual
>taxpayers).
>
>
>
>>One-third support seems to be the
>>official line above which the organization is safe; if the public
>>support is less than that but above 10%, it's still possible to maintain
>>the status, but things get trickier.
>>
>>
>>
>The 1/3 test is 509(a)(2).  The other (trickier) tests are 509(a)(1),
>509(a)(3), and 509(a)(4).
>
>
>
Thank you Anthony for the excellent clarification!   I will file this
information for future reference and sleep comfortably tonight knowing
that you and Mark are well informed on the general requirements of non
profit foundations.   No longer an immediate issue of interest to me
unless we decide it would be beneficial to have an independent
Wikiversity organization to work with the Wikimedia Foundation in
meeting long term requirements.

Sincerely,
Michael R. Irwin


from_name: Lars Aronsson

body:
In the last two weeks it has happened several times that I lost
the tail of a long wiki page.  I think the page gets truncated
when I'm doing a preview.  Can it be that some chunked transfer
doesn't get completed? It has happened both on sites running
MediaWiki and on other wiki websites, so it seems to be browser
related rather than server related.  Perhaps this is related to
Firefox 1.5 or 1.5.0.2?  I run Linux.  I never had this problem
with Mozilla 1.7.8. Any clues?

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


from_name: Jens Frank

body:
On Sun, Apr 23, 2006 at 10:26:11PM -0700, Minh Nguyen wrote:
> Lars Aronsson wrote:
> > [...]  Perhaps this is related to
> > Firefox 1.5 or 1.5.0.2?  I run Linux.  I never had this problem
> > with Mozilla 1.7.8. Any clues?
>
> Interesting... for the past couple weeks, I've been getting a truncation
> problem too on occasion, but it also happens on shorter pages, and it's
> only the "toolbox" list that gets truncated [...]

Are you also using Firefox 1.5?

Regards,

	jens


from_name: Sean Barrett

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

Tony Sidaway stated for the record:

> On 4/24/06, Molu <loom91 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>>"The recent fuss over Office actions demonstrates amply that even quite
>>well established administrators feel that they can challenge and
>>disregard the interests of the Foundation." Unfortunately it demonstrates nothing even remotely resembling the dark senario you choose to paint. No party involved *has* challenged, let alone felt entitled to challenge, the interests of the foundation.
>
>
> To be specific, Geni removed office protection from an article about a
> month ago without consulting Danny, and The Epopt, an arbitrator, has
> recently removed a block on an another editor imposed by Danny.  I
> don't need to paint any dark scenarios, they're already here.
> Moreover the attacks on Office protection continue.

To be clear as well as specific, I objected to the block, not article
protection under the OFFICE policy.  I fully support OFFICE as a
mechanism to protect the Foundation's interests.

- --
 Sean Barrett     | Where there's a will, I want to be in it.
 sean at epoptic.org |
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from_name: oscar

subject: [Foundation-l] Fwd: [Wikipedia-l] Dutch chapter

body:
i agree with walter too.

fruggo is rightly referring to the fact that unfortunately, in the beginning
of the formation of the dutch chapter, there have been attempts by two dutch
wikipedians (both currently no member of the boards) to create a foundation
only, without any involvment of the dutch communities. both ronald and i
recently found out that both of us had been asked to participate in this. at
the time, in fact both of us independently (since we weren't informed about
attempts to persuade the other), refused to do so, i might as well say:
literally prevented this.

in 5 meetings, see
http://nl.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia:Ontmoeten/Plaatsgevonden the ideas
concerning the founding of the dutch chapter took their final form. these
meetings have been open to everyone and have been announced well before they
actually took place, and were each attended by various wikians, both from
holland and from belgium. it was finally agreed upon by those present, that
2 organizations would suit the dutch situation best, and would give maximum
possibilities of being active and to apply for funding in holland; both an
association (see: http://nl.wikimedia.org/wiki/Statuten_VWN_%28en%29 and a
foundation, see: http://nl.wikimedia.org/wiki/Statuten_SWN_%28en%29 were
founded - see also http://nl.wikimedia.org/wiki/Statuten/Reglement_FAQ,
translation not complete yet).

since the creation of these, negative comments have bursted from a limited
number of wikipedians, rather loudly advocating their mistrust in the
chapter and the people involved. given the rapidity of their new comments,
in combination with the spreading of false rumours and strange notions (for
example, someone falsely stated that the statutes have never been published
- i provided the links here, histories of, if necessary also: earlier, dutch
versions are available thanks to the mediawiki software; another comment was
that any sysop holding a position in the chapter would have a position with
too much power, and conflicting interests), it actually gives the impression
of a concerted action, since end of march...

maybe fruggo is right in suggesting that the current board and chapter is
suffering from the mistrust that those two people that have tried to
organize a chapter before, without any involvement or even knowledge thereof
by the dutch communities, has left behind.

only solid information can replace rumours however, so we are currently
working at updating nl.wikimedia.org, trusting that everyone, at least the
imho current majority of dutch people that support and trust the chapter,
and the people having organized it, will stay informed.

oscar

On 4/19/06, Fruggo <fruggo at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I believe Walter is right when he contradicts that there is a group of
> admins that act against the wishes of the community. When the first plans
> of
> a Dutch Wikimedia organisation were made I contributed to the discussions
> on
> the Dutch Wikimedia website and I went to a (the first?) meeting of people
> who were interested. It soon occurred to me that some people had very
> strong
> opinions on forming an organisation, and there was not many room for
> dissident opinions. I got the impression that many people thought that the
> organisation could/should have a say about the Dutch Wikipedia. I didn't
> like the way some people (who were intent on becoming a board member)
> seemed
> to force their opinion on others, so I backed out of the development of
> the
> organisation. I believe that the way dissident opinions were handled is
> now
> an important source of the fear of many Dutch Wikipedians that the Dutch
> foundation and association (but mostly the foundation, since that is the
> least democratic) will not listen to the Dutch community.
>
> -Fruggo
>
> Walter Vermeir schreef:
>
> >
> > > I think the biggest problem is that a certain group of Dutch
> moderators
> > take
> > > decisions for example to block someone for a long time, without being
> > > interested in the opinion of the community. Something there is some
> > admin
> > > power abuse done by that specific group of moderators. Now the case is
>
> > that
> > [cut]
> >
> > The Dutch Wikipedia is not paradise. But you give the impression that
> > there is a group of admins on the Dutch Wikipedia who are behaving
> > strongly against the wishes of the community. And that those are now
> > also controlling those new chapters.
> >
> > This is highly incorrect.
> >
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


from_name: Pedro de Medeiros

subject: [Wikitech-l] Define and Formalize wiki markup

body:
Hello, list members.

I have noticed that there is a summer of code project for definition
and formalization of wiki markup language. But it is stated in the
current meta-wiki page that this would be "mostly a documentation step
and developer discipline issue."

Well, the summer of code rules clearly specify that a valid project
can't be one of documentation, but of coding (and I assume "discipline
issues", whatever that means, is also non-coding).

With that said, I am interest in such project if it involves coding.
To make this change into a valid summer of code project, I propose to
do a wiki parser, for which I have already designed some draft rules
in a yacc/bison manner.

Who should I talk to? Maybe I can email some of my draft yacc/bison
parser to the mentor?

Cheers.
--
Pedro de Medeiros - Computer Science - University of Bras?lia
Email: pedro.medeiros at gmail.com - Home Page: http://www.nonseq.net
Linux User No.: 234250 - ICQ: 2878740 - Jabber: medeiros at jabber.org


from_name: Ivan Krstic

body:
Pedro de Medeiros wrote:
> To make this change into a valid summer of code project, I propose to
> do a wiki parser, for which I have already designed some draft rules
> in a yacc/bison manner.

Have you looked at the existing parser attempts in SVN (I don't remember
if they're all still there)? Getting the first 90% of a real parser for
MediaWiki syntax will take a small fraction of the time required to get
a full parser. This makes it easy to create another
almost-but-not-quite-finished parser by the end of the summer, and we'd
be no better off for it.

I strongly recommend investigating the existing parser attempts, and
finishing one of them.

> Who should I talk to? Maybe I can email some of my draft yacc/bison
> parser to the mentor?

If Arne "Timwi" Heizmann was interested in mentoring someone for SoC,
he'd likely be a good person to mentor this project.

--
Ivan Krstic <krstic at fas.harvard.edu> | GPG: 0x147C722D


from_name: Anthony DiPierro

body:
On 4/24/06, Michael R. Irwin <michael_irwin at verizon.net> wrote:
> Anybody know when some formal reports or conclusions routinely
> confirming the Wikimedia Foundation's tax status and compliance will be
> available for further assessment and planning purposes to the general
> public vs. the private working theaters or comm channels?
>
> Regards,
> lazyquasar

The 990-EZ for Wikimedia's first year is already available on
Guidestar.  Any later ones which were filed (there should be at least
one) are required to be provided by the Wikimedia office upon request.
 I suppose someone should send Danny an email requesting them.

Anthony


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject:
[WikiEN-l] 2 Questions for Jimbo about WP:OFFICE and things
 that aren't labeled WP:OFFICE.

body:
John Tex wrote:
> That makes perfect sense but again there was originally no indication this
> was a WP:OFFICE action.  So, the question I think many of us want answered
> is, "What should people do when they see something appears to NOT be an
> office action"?

Assume good faith.  It could be a mistake, it could be a poor decision,
it could be a very strange emergency having to do with a suicide attempt
(this case wasn't but my point is, we do sometimes get those on the wiki
and have to do our best to try to be helpful), it could be...

In general, there is plenty of time to stop and ask questions.

--
#######################################################################
#    Office: 1-727-231-0101       |  Free Culture and  Free Knowledge #
#    http://www.wikipedia.org     |     Building a free world         #
#######################################################################


from_name: Mark Wagner

subject: [WikiEN-l] Run that by me, one more time?

body:
On 4/23/06, Gordon Joly <gordon.joly at pobox.com> wrote:
> At 16:45 +0300 23/4/06, Ilmari Karonen wrote:
> >Gordon Joly wrote:
> >>  Today's featured article (Main Page, 23rd April 2006)
> >>
> >>  "Turkish literature is the literature written in the Turkish language....."
> >
> >Without even looking at the article, I'm guessing that "literature" and
> >"Turkish language" are wikilinks.
>
> Does that stop it being a tautology?

It distinguishes "literature written in the Turkish language" from
"literature written in the country of Turkey" from "literature written
by Turks", all of which are valid interpretations of the phrase
"Turkish literature".

--
Mark
[[User:Carnildo]]


from_name: Guettarda

subject: [WikiEN-l] Congrats for Jimbo

body:
On 4/24/06, Mathias Schindler <mathias.schindler at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> http://www.register-mail.com/stories/042406/LOC_B9J6O93V.GID.shtml
>
> Monday, April 24, 2006
>
> GALESBURG - Knox College has announced the names of the 2006 honorary
> degree recipients.
>
> Stephen Colbert, star of "The Colbert Report"; Shirley E. Barnes,
> former U.S. Ambassador to Madagascar; and Jimmy Wales, the founder of
> Wikipedia, will all received the award at Knox's 2006 commencement
> ceremony at 10 a.m. June 3.
>
> - Wales will receive the honorary doctor of laws degree.
>
> http://www.knox.edu/x12198.xml

Stephen Colbert?  Jimbo's in ecxellent company.


body:
On 4/24/06, Ivan Krstic <krstic at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
> Pedro de Medeiros wrote:
> > To make this change into a valid summer of code project, I propose to
> > do a wiki parser, for which I have already designed some draft rules
> > in a yacc/bison manner.
>
> Have you looked at the existing parser attempts in SVN (I don't remember
> if they're all still there)?

As a matter of fact, I did. Sometime ago. But code was difficult to
understand, it wouldn't compile and running bison on the .y file
returned lots (maybe 2000?) grammar conflicts.

> Getting the first 90% of a real parser for
> MediaWiki syntax will take a small fraction of the time required to get
> a full parser. This makes it easy to create another
> almost-but-not-quite-finished parser by the end of the summer, and we'd
> be no better off for it.

That depends also in what platform this parser need be, and also for
what use. For instance, a C/C++ parser would be a necessary step to
create a php module for wiki parsing.

If a parser takes only a small fraction of the time, maybe I could
also write the php module that uses the parser. :)

> I strongly recommend investigating the existing parser attempts, and
> finishing one of them.

I have seen some attemps. But none of them is in C/C++ or even complete.

> > Who should I talk to? Maybe I can email some of my draft yacc/bison
> > parser to the mentor?
>
> If Arne "Timwi" Heizmann was interested in mentoring someone for SoC,
> he'd likely be a good person to mentor this project.

Thanks.

Cheers,
--
Pedro de Medeiros - Computer Science - University of Bras?lia
Email: pedro.medeiros at gmail.com - Home Page: http://www.nonseq.net
Linux User No.: 234250 - ICQ: 2878740 - Jabber: medeiros at jabber.org


body:
Pedro de Medeiros wrote:
> As a matter of fact, I did. Sometime ago. But code was difficult to
> understand, it wouldn't compile and running bison on the .y file
> returned lots (maybe 2000?) grammar conflicts.

The latter part of this is surprising. Timwi, can you clarify? I seem to
remember that the parser was incomplete, but what of it was there worked
fine.

> That depends also in what platform this parser need be, and also for
> what use.

Not really. My point was that it's easy to build a parser for *a lot* of
the MediaWiki syntax, and hard to build one for all of it. We need the
latter.

> If a parser takes only a small fraction of the time, maybe I could
> also write the php module that uses the parser. :)

You misunderstood me; see above.

> I have seen some attemps. But none of them is in C/C++ or even complete.

Timwi's work used standard tools that would eventually produce a C
parser, IIRC. Of course none of the parsers in SVN are complete -- if
they were, we wouldn't be having this discussion.

--
Ivan Krstic <krstic at fas.harvard.edu> | GPG: 0x147C722D


from_name: Jay R. Ashworth

body:
On Mon, Apr 24, 2006 at 11:34:10AM -0400, Pedro de Medeiros wrote:
> With that said, I am interest in such project if it involves coding.
> To make this change into a valid summer of code project, I propose to
> do a wiki parser, for which I have already designed some draft rules
> in a yacc/bison manner.

Check the list archive; Tim or brion just pointed out in the last 48
hours that the prep work for this is sufficiently wide ranging that
it's unlikely to be the best choice of project (ie: if it requires
modifying things, it's a Major Project).

Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

     A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
     Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?

     A: Top-posting.
     Q: What is the most annoying thing on Usenet and in e-mail?


from_name: Gregory Maxwell

body:
On 4/24/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 24, 2006 at 11:34:10AM -0400, Pedro de Medeiros wrote:
> > With that said, I am interest in such project if it involves coding.
> > To make this change into a valid summer of code project, I propose to
> > do a wiki parser, for which I have already designed some draft rules
> > in a yacc/bison manner.
>
> Check the list archive; Tim or brion just pointed out in the last 48
> hours that the prep work for this is sufficiently wide ranging that
> it's unlikely to be the best choice of project (ie: if it requires
> modifying things, it's a Major Project).

A solid, high speed, external parser is valuable even if not yet
integrated into Mediawiki.


from_name: John Tex

subject:
[WikiEN-l] 2 Questions for Jimbo about WP:OFFICE and things
	that aren't labeled WP:OFFICE

body:
>John Tex wrote:
>> That makes perfect sense but again there was originally no indication
this
>> was a WP:OFFICE action.  So, the question I think many of us want
answered
>> is, "What should people do when they see something appears to NOT be an
>> office action"?

>Assume good faith.  It could be a mistake, it could be a poor decision,
>it could be a very strange emergency having to do with a suicide attempt
>(this case wasn't but my point is, we do sometimes get those on the wiki
>and have to do our best to try to be helpful), it could be...

>In general, there is plenty of time to stop and ask questions.

It seems like Eloquence did assume good faith.  He didn't go off onto any
rant about Danny removing most of the content.  He did post to the article
talk page about what he was doing, etc.

Johntex


body:
On 4/24/06, Ivan Krstic <krstic at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
> Pedro de Medeiros wrote:
> > As a matter of fact, I did. Sometime ago. But code was difficult to
> > understand, it wouldn't compile and running bison on the .y file
> > returned lots (maybe 2000?) grammar conflicts.
>
> The latter part of this is surprising. Timwi, can you clarify? I seem to
> remember that the parser was incomplete, but what of it was there worked
> fine.

If I am not mistaken, the name of the directory is flexbisonparse. CVS
tells me it is several months stopped. Code was probably confusing
because wiki syntax is not really context free, so there is a lot of
considerations to make beforehand.

I would also like to know from Timwi (or anyone who is involved with
it) what is planned for this parser in the future and how it will be
used.

> > That depends also in what platform this parser need be, and also for
> > what use.
>
> Not really. My point was that it's easy to build a parser for *a lot* of
> the MediaWiki syntax, and hard to build one for all of it. We need the
> latter.

Ok. But what I said about writing the wiki parser is not besides the
point: I suppose a complete wiki parser is pretty much needed. If one
is to finish an incomplete parser or to rewrite a new one based on
that is a matter of approach. And I think the existing one needs some
heavy lifting and, from what I saw of it, it won't be an easy task to
complete it.

> Timwi's work used standard tools that would eventually produce a C
> parser, IIRC. Of course none of the parsers in SVN are complete -- if
> they were, we wouldn't be having this discussion.

Yes, I guess it is pretty much unmantained nowadays. Most of it is
more than 2 years old. I guess this serves as an indication that it
needs a heavy lifting. :)

Cheers,
--
Pedro de Medeiros - Computer Science - University of Bras?lia
Email: pedro.medeiros at gmail.com - Home Page: http://www.nonseq.net
Linux User No.: 234250 - ICQ: 2878740 - Jabber: medeiros at jabber.org


subject:
[WikiEN-l] 2 Questions for Jimbo about WP:OFFICE and things
	that aren't labeled WP:OFFICE.

body:
On 4/24/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> John Tex wrote:
> > That makes perfect sense but again there was originally no indication this
> > was a WP:OFFICE action.  So, the question I think many of us want answered
> > is, "What should people do when they see something appears to NOT be an
> > office action"?
>
> Assume good faith.  It could be a mistake, it could be a poor decision,
> it could be a very strange emergency having to do with a suicide attempt
> (this case wasn't but my point is, we do sometimes get those on the wiki
> and have to do our best to try to be helpful), it could be...
>
> In general, there is plenty of time to stop and ask questions.
>
Speaking of asking questions...  What was it?

Anthony