body:
---- geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/5/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
> > On Fri, 5 May 2006 13:21:10 -0700 (PDT), you wrote:
> >
> > >    "Voting" has changed to "finding consensus", but the process remains
> > >    the same. User conduct regulation is called "dispute resolution", but
> > >    focuses mainly on finding a pseudo-judicial basis to ban troublesome
> > >    editors.
> >
> > You think?
> >
> > Look at the RfC on Whaleto.  Does that fit this description?  Very
> > often problems are quietly resolved.  Of course sometimes they aren't,
> > but I'd suggest that far more disputes are resolved than end up with
> > indef-blocks.
> >
> > Guy (JzG)
>
> Bad choice. I'd give that one a fair chance of ending up at arbcom
> sooner or latter.
>
> --
> geni
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
Geni,
How can we convince Guy that it is necessary to visually recognize the troublemakers and then block them from Wikipedia?  Dispute resolution?  I'm spending two thirds of my time trying to get troublemakers to leave me alone.  Then, very rarely, a serious posting reaches me and I can respond.  This is rediculous!  Last night I got accused of being on crack, I was accused of being insane, and today I was referred to as a "Boob."  Yet obviously my opinion must count for something because my e-box is full.
-Julie
_______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] We need to recognize that advocating is a basic right

body:
On 5/5/06, Phil Boswell <phil.boswell at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> geni wrote:
> >
> > On 5/5/06, Rob Church <robchur at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> "PR photo" implies non-free licencing, which means that it's not
> >> acceptable on Commons, our free media repo. So in this case, and in
> >> others, no image *is* better.
> > I assumed that people were releasing them under a free licence (it
> > might be a logical course of action for politicians although not so
> > much for celebrities).
> >
> Actually, you would have thought that any given celebrity of any rank or
> stripe would rather that there was a freely-available high-quality
> controlled-source picture being used for them than an opportunistic snap
> taken during some sweaty ruck at a premiere with inadequate lighting and
> extraneous limbs intruding from strange angles...or maybe a paparazzi-style
> "candid" image of them in some embarrassing pose.
>
> Obviously we wouldn't necessarily use the latter if it proved too salacious
> but if it were the best available free-licence picture you'd likely be able
> to build some sort of reasonable argument...
>
> HTH HAND
> --
> Phil
> --

The problem is that under the GFDL people would be free to modify the image.

--
geni


from_name: Rob Church

body:
On 05/05/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> I assumed that people were releasing them under a free lisence (it
> might be a logical course of action for politicians although not so
> much for celebrities).

Politicians, logic. Chalk, cheese.

Rob Church


from_name: Cheney Shill

subject: [WikiEN-l] We need a pedia split

body:
Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:

    On 5/5/06, Philip Welch wrote:
    >
    > Undue weight. It's absurd for Pokemon to have 10,000 times more
    > coverage within Wikipedia as, for instance, 19th century philosophy.

    It's an interesting idea, but applying this criterion you would end up
    with a Diana Moon Glampers encyclopedia, where nobody would dare to
    write an article on a popular subject lest he incur the wrath for the
    Handicapper General for unbalancing it.

    The *embarasse de richesse* with regard to Pokemon characters doesn't
    directly hamper the use of the encyclopedia by those wishing to read
    about the likes of Hegel and Schopenhauer and the Mills.

I definitely agree with this, but Phil is right about the coverage (although not about the application of undue weight which is for NPOV determination).  It seems like all this pop-culture stuff (which also includes the likes of the Britneys of the world and wrestling entertainment) could be dumped, umm, I mean reorganized, into another wiki project, such as Mediapedia, Wikipop, or WikiStuffNobodyWillCareAbout100YearsFromNow.  I think it would be better, for both groups to have admins dealing with the type of content they are dedicated to and interested in.  I see a lot of inactive admins and it would be interesting to see how many have decided to take an indefinite leave of absence because they spend 90% of their time dealing with content and user disputes involving articles they have no interest in.~~~~Pro-Lick

---------------------------------
Talk is cheap. Use Yahoo! Messenger to make PC-to-Phone calls.  Great rates starting at 1¢/min.


list: wikitech-l

from_name: thomasasta at gmx.net

subject: [Wikitech-l] wiki search engine over the weblinks in wikipeda

body:
Hi

google gets more and more negative headlines, europeans make an own search
engine to have not only books scanned, which are from USA.
called quaero:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/search.shtml?T=quaero&button=los%21

Would it be possible to have in Wikipedia a search engine, which searches
not only the articles, but only all weburls within wikipedia? The mettags
for the urls could then be the articales with all words.

So if a url is on a wikipage, all words within the search found on the
wikipage give a queryhit, as well all urls from the keywordsearch are shown
from teh webpage, which has the same keyworf for the article..

So... Search for Germany and you get

- all weburls from the wikipage-article "germany"
- all weburls from wikiarticles, which include the word germany.

The we could make a new Domain www.go-wiki.org / .de   as a search engine,
which is in a simple graphic modus showing ONLY URLS !!! liek google and
then we can brwose from that to the internet.

See the descriptopn of social reviewd urls in lycos and yahoo.
But wiki has this already!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

At download.com you find as well url-blaze, which was never sucessful in a
p2p style.

I have not yet subscribed to the technical list, please can you forward it
to the list?

for a social reviewed link search engine it may be interesting to perform a
joint venture betwen wikipedia, metager.de and querro. aka exalead ??

can someone coordinate this project with wikipedia ?

- all internet-weblinks in the wikipedia are the database.
- a keyword search announces all weblinks in the wikiarticle for this
keyword
- plus all wiki links with the keyword on any page in wikipedia

ok some will drop in in wikipedia some links, but categorized to the
articels the users will discuss and perform only the 15 relevant weburls for
a keyword on the page and on other pages

This would be a great extension to wiki and quero !!

Wolfgang can you coordinate a meeting in hannover?

thanks

>>>>>
Yahoo-Suche wird sozial

Yahoo hat heute eine neuartige Web-Suche gestartet. Der Dienst mit dem Namen
Mein Web 2.0 soll Ergebnisse liefern, die von anderen Nutzern bereits als
interessant und relevant eingestuft wurden. Dazu spinnt Yahoo soziale Netze.
Benutzer k?nnen bei dem Dienst ihre Bookmarks speichern – ?hnlich
anderen sozialen Bookmarking-Diensten wie del.icio.us mit so genannten Tags
versehen.

Die Lesezeichen lassen sich f?r Freunde oder f?r die Allgemeinheit
freigeben. Mein Web 2.0 kann die eigene Link-Sammlung sowie die der
Community im Volltext durchsuchen. Das Konzept ?hnelt ein wenig dem von
Lycos iQ, bei dem neben den Link-Sammlungen auch Forenbeitr?ge in die
Ergebnislisten zu Rate gezogen werden. (jo/c't)

http://yahoo.de/meinweb

http://del.icio.us/

http://iq.lycos.de/

Lycos: Besser suchen mit Web 2.0

Lycos Europe hat heute einen neuen Dienst freigeschaltet, der die Recherche
im Internet mit einem sozialen Netzwerk-System und einem Bookmark Manager
verkn?pft. Bei Lycos iQ k?nnen Surfer beliebige Fragen stellen, die andere
Nutzer beantworten. Der Fragesteller bewertet die Qualit?t der Antworten,
ein Punktesystem belohnt die Ratgeber f?r ihre Hilfe. Greifbare Belohnungen
gibt es derzeit daf?r nicht; daf?r kann man sich in der Expertenhierarchie
vom "Student" zum "Einstein" hocharbeiten. Lycos baut Ergebnisse aus dem
Fundus von Lycos iQ auch in die klassische Lycos-Volltextsuche mit ein.

Zudem k?nnen Benutzer bei Lycos iQ auch ihre Links verwalten. So genanntes
Tagging, die Verschlagwortung mit beliebigen Begriffen durch die Benutzer,
verbindet alle Teile von iQ. Andere so genannte Social-Bookmarking-Dienste
wie del.icio.us, die das Tagging bereits mit gro?em Erfolg einsetzen,
standen offensichtlich Pate. Lycos hofft, dass das System durch die
Interaktion der Nutzer zu einem gro?en Wissensfundus anw?chst. (jo/c't)

--
Analog-/ISDN-Nutzer sparen mit GMX SmartSurfer bis zu 70%!
Kostenlos downloaden: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/smartsurfer


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [WikiEN-l] We need a policy against vote-stacking

body:
On 5/5/06, Phil Boswell <phil.boswell at gmail.com> wrote:
> But if all of those articles were of good quality and well referenced, who
> could possibly object? Those articles are still subject to fearless editing
> from anybody who wants to fix the often egregious grammar and spelling (as
> is common elsewhere I should add :-). Also WP:NOT paper, remember? It's not
> as if those articles on Pokemon are taking up space which would otherwise be
> available for your own pet subject.

I'm assuming, perhaps unfairly, that Pokemon voters will keep to vote
anything related to Pokemon, good quality and well referenced or not.
If they would actually behave like ideal model AfD voters, then this
discussion is moot.

Similarly, if you want to argue for the removal of notability as
criteria for in Wikipedia, then that's a different discussion
entirely.

> Also, that knife cuts both ways: you could set up your own WikiProject(s) to
> cover your areas of interest. Would you want armies of Pokemon fans
> hammering your articles because they don't think they're notable?

WP:OWN, there's no such thing as "my articles" :p

> Actually, come to think of it, doesn't it seem interesting that you don't
> often see a Pokemon fan trying to have huge swathes of articles on other
> subjects removed because they don't recognise the subjects? Maybe some
> people could learn a bit of tolerance from their example...

Maybe they do, we don't have a foolproof method for detecting Pok?mon fans.

(what's more surprising is no one has yet objected to my merciless
Pokemon-bashing)

Steve


from_name: charles matthews

subject: [WikiEN-l] Getting smarter about surnames

body:
 "Guettarda" wrote

> Do you think that a WikiProject Surnames might be in order?

There is certainly enough to do - an essentially unlimited field, you could
say.

There are projects and projects.  What is most urgently needed is to get
under control the most common names on the wiki.  There are inevitably
'Anglo': Smith, Jones, Brown, Robinson, lots of Irish and Scots names as
found all over Canada and Australia, that kind of thing.  Almost the first
discussion would have to be what to do about these.  For example Smiths are
listed under [[List of people by name: Smi]].  We don't really want to start
off with a schism between people who think that the [[List of people by
name]] pages should be maintained, and those (like me) who think that that
is the wrong approach, that writing it "Smith, Adam" is to be deprecated
because it confuses search engines, and anyway with biographies into six
figures we have to do something other than 1000 pages averaging more than
100 names on.

That's one issue.  Another is that WikiProjects can appear much better at
prescribing rules to do the work, than at actually doing it.

On the other hand, if there's a chance of getting together people who know
their onomastics, with those with theories on how to integrate and present
some genealogical information here (for example the boxes turning up on
[[Arnold J. Toynbee]] to show the relation to [[Polly Toynbee]]), and others
who want to 'add value' to raw lists of names, it could be interesting.  I'm
pretty much a 'raw list' man myself; but a template for a surname page ought
indeed to take into account a bit more.

Charles


from_name: Tony Sidaway

subject: [WikiEN-l] Reply to Tony on advocacy - resend with new title

body:
On 5/5/06, John Tex <johntexster at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I thought it was a bit rude of you to essentially invite me to leave the
> project with your "You're on the wrong project, mate."

I think you're being somewhat disingenuous by implying that I invited
you to leave.  Stay by all means, but don't describe advocacy as a
right.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Image Downloads

body:
On 5/5/06, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> What happens when you try? I believe some clients have trouble downloading
> files bigger than 2GB.

Maybe he was on dialup...?

Steve


from_name: Stan Shebs

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Wikiparazzi (was Re: We need to recognize that
 advocating is a basic right)

body:
Philip Welch wrote:

>
>Incidentally, why don't we have free-content paparazzi tracking down
>celebrities to take pictures for Wikipedia articles?
>
What makes you think we don't? There are indeed a handful of
contributors who've taken pictures of celebrities; unlike
paparazzi, we have the advantage that we typically want to
get them looking at their best, such as at public appearances,
and at those times celebrities are happy, nay eager, to smile
for our cameras.

We apparently have many slacker editors - not only do they not
bestir themselves to photograph celebrities at local shopping mall
appearances, but they would rather upload a copyvio image of their
*own* *school* while *sitting* *inside* it, rather than get out
of their chairs, go outside, and take a picture with their *own*
*cellphone* *cameras*. Now that's lazy!

Stan


from_name: Greg Sabino Mullane

subject: [Wikitech-l] Towards MW 2.0

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

> Is there enough involved these days in running MW against Pg to entail
> writing a howto?  (Or, I think, updating the one that's already on
> meta...)

Once my current patches get applied, it should be pretty seamless as far
as using Pg vs mysql: just pick which one you want on the config screen.
(Updating an existing installation is another matter I'm deferring for now).

Once the patches are in place and things a little further along (e.g.
everything just works from start to finish), I'll update the existing
docs.

- --
Greg Sabino Mullane greg at turnstep.com
PGP Key: 0x14964AC8 200605051256
http://biglumber.com/x/web?pk=2529DF6AB8F79407E94445B4BC9B906714964AC8
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----

iD8DBQFEW4PPvJuQZxSWSsgRAm2oAKCh0jB4t2tNG1msOtJmIGD5H+ttHgCeOjgb
Oyo7kpvC8dQ0J8DGGlUAXMc=
=cctJ
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


subject: [WikiEN-l] meshing (was: Re:  AfD on unencyclopedic content)

body:
On 5/5/06, Phil Boswell <phil.boswell at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am still having difficulty figuring out where exactly Wikibooks is
> supposed to mesh with Wikipedia in the grand Wikimedia scheme...to read some
> of the discussions there, it would seem that they don't think any kind of
> "meshing" suitable at all, which seems ridiculous to me...

And similarly, Wikitravel. There is such a lot of duplication of
effort on city articles. IMHO, a wikitravel article on a city should
basically be a great big {{wikipedia:en:Paris}} followed by "the best
bars are..." and "don't forget to buy a metro ticket". There's plenty
of information in Wikitravel that ought to be present in Wikipedia as
well, and a vast amount of the opposite situation.

Steve


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] 100 day block

body:
This was corrected.

Fred

On May 5, 2006, at 4:16 PM, brian wrote:

> Could an administrator please take a look at this.  I shouldn't be
> blocked for 100 days due to a mistake.  Thanks
>
> brian <bs_politic at yahoo.ca> wrote: Hi, I was just blocked for 100
> days --it is an obvious mistake, hopefully someone can check it
> out.  (apperently I have been making poor, pov edits.  --However, I
> have only made one article edit in the past week, and it was
> removal of a pov, albiet popular one).  I have had a bit of an
> issue with sockpuppets in the past, although nothing serious.  I
> have also had a username change, as my last one had a personal
> attachment. See my userpage at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
> User:Myciconia
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Brian
>
>
> ---------------------------------
> Now you can have a huge leap forward in email: get the new Yahoo!
> Mail.
>
>
> ---------------------------------
> All new Yahoo! Mail
> ---------------------------------
> Get news delivered. Enjoy RSS feeds right on your Mail page.
> _______________________________________________
> 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:
geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:

    On 5/6/06, Steve Bennett wrote:
    > For exactly the same reason I think it is very poor for us to have
    > 900,000 (or more?) inactive user accounts. They don't harm us directly
    > - but they do vastly misrepresent the actual state of the project.

    Every free internet forum has the same issue.

Few free interent "forum"s are encyclopedias.

    > Speaking for myself, the existence of Pokemon is not directly a
    > problem. But Wikipedia would certainly be better off if somehow all
    > the effort that was expended on Pokemon articles was somehow invested
    > in other ways.

    Pokemon are massive. How many pokemon can you name? How many uk canals
    (my area) can you name?

I agree with Steve.  My solution would be as I stated in "pedia split".  Both groups would be happy.  Both would have admins interested and dedicated in them.  It's really not a question of what's huge at the moment.  It's more a question of WP:NOT and how they fit into the sum of the world's knowledge.  I'm sure there are elements of Pokemon that still deserve coverage by an encyclopedia, such as story and animation techniques and its impact on children, the economy, etc.  Leave that here.  Move the rest to Wikipop or whatever brand name you'd like to give it.  If nothing else, 99% of the disputes over whether [insert 15-minute celebrity is encyclopedic or not would go away.  That seems like a significant enough benefit to pursue.~~~~Pro-Lick

---------------------------------
New Yahoo! Messenger with Voice. Call regular phones from your PC and save big.


from_name: Uwe Brauer

subject: [Wikitech-l] add a border (in CSS) in order to emphasise indentation

body:
Hello

As I was pointed out by Plyd, the french wiki has an extension in css,
such that indentation in talk pages is emphasised via a border.

Could that be also implemented for the english and german wiki?

I also would recommend to use

    -  : for indentation in article

    -  : For indentation with border in the talk pages and

    -  > For the usual indentation in the talk pages

It would be more logical to do it the other way around > for
indentation with border : for without, but maybe most people would
find that to confusing.

Uwe Brauer


subject: [WikiEN-l] We need a policy to deal with new policies

body:
On 5/5/06, Mark Gallagher <m.g.gallagher at student.canberra.edu.au> wrote:
> Somehow, however, this is not sufficient.  People start to look at our
> principles as a game of Nomic:

Your examples don't back up Wikipedia-as-nomic. How about these:
"This AfD was closed improperly. It doesn't matter if it was going to
fail, according to the policy, it can only be closed by an admin"
"This RfA should be restarted, it ran for an hour too long due to
daylight savings. The bureaucrat was deficient in his duties"
"Of course I can include my blog as a source, it says quite clearly in
this guideline that websites that support a common point of view are
good sources"
"If you want to delete for this reason, you first have to create a
policy that says so. To do that, you need to gain consensus as defined
in this article"
"No, it says you must discuss changes *before* you make them. No exceptions!"

etc etc

I admit I'm guilty sometimes - nomic is great ;)

Steve


from_name: maru dubshinki

subject: [WikiEN-l] Intelligent body parts

body:
On 5/5/06, Sean Barrett <sean at epoptic.org> wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> julieharding1 at charter.net stated for the record:
>
> > Sean, you arrogant pig!  I probably have more intelligence in my pinky finger than you have in your entire brain.  Feminine intelligence is intimidating you guys.  Well, I think I'll stick around for a while longer now because of what Sean said and see if I can put some more pressure on your testes.  Maybe if I prove you up long enough I can get one of you guys to puke.
> - -Julie
>
> It's far more likely that we'll rupture something from laughing too hard.
>
> - --
>  Sean Barrett     | You know, boys, a nuclear reactor is a lot

Now, now, Sean... Let's not get testy.

~maru


subject:
[Wikitech-l] add a border (in CSS) in order to emphasise
	indentation

body:
On 5/5/06, Uwe Brauer <oub at mat.ucm.es> wrote:
> It would be more logical to do it the other way around > for
> indentation with border : for without, but maybe most people would
> find that to confusing.

Sure, why not. It'd also be great if there was a convenient way of
quoting stuff from the article. I still haven't come up with a
convention that I'm happy with. You really want something that puts a
nice big box around it to make clear what's a quote and what isn't.
Something sort of like what happens when you start a line with a
space, but without the monospace, and with line wrapping.

Steve


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikitech-l] Threads: any plans

body:
I just saw that Tax Almanac, a MediaWiki customized by Intuit
software, has a very interesting integrated discussion system:

http://www.taxalmanac.org/index.php/Discussion_Forum_Index

It uses normal wiki pages in the "Discussion:" namespace to store the
threads, and stores the comments themselves as parametrized templates
within these pages. But the user interface looks like any ordinary
bulletin board.

I don't see any links to source code and don't expect that it is
available. Has someone talked to them about whether they'd be willling
to open source it already?

Erik


from_name: Mark Wagner

body:
On 5/5/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/5/06, Mark Wagner <carnildo at gmail.com> wrote:
> > You probably need to find a better example.  According
> > [[User:Carnildo/The 100]] and [[User:Carnildo/The 100 Biography]], we
> > don't have any articles on either.  On the other hand, we've got 4,535
> > articles on Digimon characters, 40,814 Rambot-created stubs, 4,535
> > biographies of saints, 15,872 articles on schools, 2,267 articles on
> > episodes of television series, and 2,267 copyvios on [[The Elf Queen
> > of Shannara]].
> >
> > This abuse of statistics has been brought to you by the letters ? and
> > ?, and by the number e.
>
> Seriously, where did those figures come from?  4,535 articles on
> digimon characters? huh?

The two article surveys cited include 493 still-existent articles.  At
the time I started mangling statistics, Wikipedia had 1,117,850
articles.  So, it was simply a matter of multiplying the article
counts in the surveys by 2,267.44 and rounding to the nearest integer.

--
Mark
[[User:Carnildo]]


from_name: Plyd

subject: [Wikitech-l] add a start reply

body:
On 5/4/06, Uwe Brauer <oub at mat.ucm.es> wrote:
>
> Consider the following example:
>
> In the main article the following is problematic:
> : ''Fermat proved his theorem himself''
> as we know this is incorrect, etc etc
>
> You see I cite a text in the article and according to the CSS it would
> get that border.
>

This is why this CSS stuff has only been activated on talk pages on fr.

Plyd


list: foundation-l

from_name: Cormac Lawler

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikistats

body:
On 5/5/06, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:
> Bryce Roney wrote:
>
> > I have just proposed a new project, you can find more info here:
> > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikistats_proposal . Please comment :)
>
> No, you have not.  You've written ten lines that say absolutely
> nothing about your chances to bring this to successful completion.
> It's like you're begging for a fast deletion.  It's like you think
> people will thank you for spawning unrealistic ideas. Think again.
>
> I'm not speaking for the foundation.

That's pretty harsh, Lars. It's by no means a complete or even
coherent proposal, but it's a decent idea, and it *might* come to
completion at some stage in the future. In creating that page and
notifying this list, Bryce has only followed standard practice at:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/New_project_policy

Still, Bryce, it might be good to have some more info :-)

Cormac


list: wikimedia-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikistats


from_name: Carl Witty

body:
On Sat, 2006-05-06 at 01:44 +0200, Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 5/6/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Pokemon are massive. How many pokemon can you name? How many uk canals
> > (my area) can you name?
>
> Zero. Now, if all the people who had put 20 hours into Pokemon
> articles had instead put 5 hours into Pokemon articles, and 15 hours
> into cleanup of random articles, don't you think Wikipedia would be
> better off?

Yes.  Any suggestions how to achieve this?  I don't think that "Delete
most of the Pokemon articles" would help with this goal.

Carl


body:
On 5/5/06, charles matthews <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> That's one issue.  Another is that WikiProjects can appear much better at
> prescribing rules to do the work, than at actually doing it.

That's ok - we're not in a hurry. Personally I'm happier if  I'm
working in an area that has a WikiProject. I don't sign up, but it's
handy to double check the conventions before I start rampantly
renaming articles, for instance.

Steve


body:
Mark Wagner <carnildo at gmail.com> wrote:

    On 5/5/06, Steve Bennett wrote:
    > Seriously, where did those figures come from? 4,535 articles on
    > digimon characters? huh?

    The two article surveys cited include 493 still-existent articles. At
    the time I started mangling statistics, Wikipedia had 1,117,850
    articles. So, it was simply a matter of multiplying the article
    counts in the surveys by 2,267.44 and rounding to the nearest integer.

Using google, excluding pages that have the word "talk", "user", or "archive", Digimon still gets about 18,500 en.wikipedia results.  Pokemon gets about 30,100.  About 643 for the category "american porn stars".  If we can get porn stars more coverage, they are MASSIVE after all, I might compromise on splitting pop culture into a separate pedia.~~~~Pro-Lick

---------------------------------
How low will we go? Check out Yahoo! Messenger?s low  PC-to-Phone call rates.


from_name: Conrad Dunkerson

subject: [Wikitech-l] taxobox problem

body:
* wiwo wowi wrote:
> I'm trying use a taxobox, but it doesn't work. I need something special
> template or anything else?? I can see the text code, for example:
> Template:Taxobox_begin, .... but i cann't see the table

Assuming you are working on the English Wikipedia see Template:Taxobox.
The old format using 'Taxobox_begin' and various other sub-templates has
been phased out. Complete details on using the single taxobox template can
be found at;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Tree_of_Life/taxobox_usage

I believe most of the other language Wikipedias have adopted a similar method.


from_name: David Gerard

body:
Amen.

Process is important. However, the fallacy is to assume any of the following:

1. Process is not less important than product.
2. Process is good, so more process is better.  <-- this is a bad one
3. Process is good, so we should not proceed without making process
along the way.
4. If a process exists, it must be followed because it's a process.

The fallacious elements of these are:

1. Process is important, but the product is more important. "We're
here to write an encyclopedia."
2. Process is good, but more process is *BAD*. Process grows like
bindweed and must be culled regularly. Anyone who says "process is
important" must read and understand [[m:Instruction creep]].
3. Grey areas exist; the human brain exists to deal with them. You
can't Taylorise clue.
4. Processes are frequently written up to try to win at wikinomic.
This is part of how process grows like bindweed.

Process is important. It is also dangerous, and must be kept strictly
under control and rebuilt regularly. AND NO I'M NOT GOING TO WRITE UP
A PROCESS FOR THAT.

- d.


from_name: Timwi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Threads: any plans

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
> I just saw that Tax Almanac, a MediaWiki customized by Intuit
> software, has a very interesting integrated discussion system:
>
> http://www.taxalmanac.org/index.php/Discussion_Forum_Index
>
> It uses normal wiki pages in the "Discussion:" namespace to store the
> threads, and stores the comments themselves as parametrized templates
> within these pages. But the user interface looks like any ordinary
> bulletin board.

That is indeed interesting; however from a software engineering point of
view it is extremely hacky and probably hard to maintain. I strongly
recommend against using this in official MediaWiki.

Timwi


from_name: brian

subject: [WikiEN-l] 100 day block

body:
Could an administrator please take a look at this.  I shouldn't be blocked for 100 days due to a mistake.  Thanks

brian <bs_politic at yahoo.ca> wrote: Hi, I was just blocked for 100 days --it is an obvious mistake, hopefully someone can check it out.  (apperently I have been making poor, pov edits.  --However, I have only made one article edit in the past week, and it was removal of a pov, albiet popular one).  I have had a bit of an issue with sockpuppets in the past, although nothing serious.  I have also had a username change, as my last one had a personal attachment. See my userpage at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Myciconia

Thanks in advance,

Brian

---------------------------------
Now you can have a huge leap forward in email: get the new Yahoo! Mail.

---------------------------------
All new Yahoo! Mail
---------------------------------
Get news delivered. Enjoy RSS feeds right on your Mail page.


from_name: Aphaia

subject:
[Foundation-l] The status of smaller languages on the Wikimedia
	Commons

body:
Hoi,

On 5/5/06, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:

> >> It is abundantly true that we need better support for the localisation
> >> of our project and of our software. There is a subcommittee that deals
> >> with communication and translation. I am sure that they were consulted
> >> before these punitive measures were enacted.

Thank you for your mention on us, Gerald. Would you also be so kind to
let me know where I can find the beginning of this thread? Brianna
quoted your mail but since her mail header contents no In-Reply-To:
then I feel I can't figure precisely the entire discussion of yours.
Related URLs would be helpful as additional information.

And yes, since we are not mere Translation subcommittee, but Promotion
& Translation subcommittee, caring for promotion projects smaller than
our flagship Wikipedia, it is right for you to be recalled the
potential helper working on Foundation activity layer - not as
"meta-subcommittee". Though our contact page is on meta, it is crystal
clear we aren't such - not people caring for and involved into only
meta issues, but attempting both to keep and enhance
multilingalization of our project and help smaller project to work out
smoothly.
--
Aphaia
aka
Kizu Naoko
email: Aphaia @ gmail (dot) com


from_name: Jay R. Ashworth

subject: [Wikitech-l] Image Downloads

body:
On Fri, May 05, 2006 at 04:07:33PM -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:
> Tom Dichiaro wrote:
> > No, I've got a supposedly 8M road runner connection - Not that I get that on
> > download.
> >
> > Anyway, that's not really the problem - it never gets that far.  It claims
> > that it's downloading a file that is 3.5G but then downloads what appears to
> > be a valid, empty tar that is only 700 bytes.  My tar program opens it,
> > doesn't complain about the format, and says its empty.
>
> This is most likely a problem with your download tool failing to handle large
> file sizes.

A valid tarball, though?

Tom: what are you pulling it with?

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: Steve Bennett

subject: [WikiEN-l] meshing (was: Re: AfD on unencyclopedic content)

body:
On 5/5/06, Pete Bartlett <pcb21 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Yep if you could just spend a couple of minutes unifying the licences
> for us Guy that would be great ;-).

Wikitravel and Wikipedia have incompatible licenses?

Steve


from_name: geni

body:
On 5/5/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> 3. Process is good, so we should not proceed without making process
> along the way.

As long as people give any weight to presedent this one is pretty much
imposble to avoid.

> 4. If a process exists, it must be followed because it's a process.
>

However much of wikipedia process exists for a reason. Please respect
that reason and understand the people who came up with probably put a
fair bit of thought into its desighn

> 2. Process is good, but more process is *BAD*. Process grows like
> bindweed and must be culled regularly. Anyone who says "process is
> important" must read and understand [[m:Instruction creep]].

Since m:Instruction creep relates to process they probably have. The
broad principle is correct (although I quite like our overgrown and
contradictory guidelines it means it is almost imposible to produce a
solid case based on them to stop me doing what I want to do) the
anicdote doesn't tend to apply wikipedia (It is generaly less complex
to remove someone from wikipedia rather than get a new policy
aproved).

> 3. Grey areas exist; the human brain exists to deal with them. You
> can't Taylorise clue.

However you can produce rigidly defined areas of doubt and
uncertainty. It is possible to define where the grey areas are.

> 4. Processes are frequently written up to try to win at wikinomic.
> This is part of how process grows like bindweed.
>

I find they are generaly writen by well meaning people. The trick is
squashing the idea without squashing the person.

> Process is important. It is also dangerous, and must be kept strictly
> under control and rebuilt regularly. AND NO I'M NOT GOING TO WRITE UP
> A PROCESS FOR THAT.
>
>
> - d.

So would you support protecting all policy pages (have you seen the
edit rate on CSD?)?
--
geni


from_name: Bryan Derksen

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> Zero. Now, if all the people who had put 20 hours into Pokemon
> articles had instead put 5 hours into Pokemon articles, and 15 hours
> into cleanup of random articles, don't you think Wikipedia would be
> better off?
>
I doubt it, because I suspect most of them would put the 5 hours of
Pokemon-writing in and then spend the next 15 hours somewhere other than
Wikipedia. The fact that they spent 20 hours writing about Pokemon and
no hours doing random cleanup is a strong indication that they really do
like writing about Pokemon, and really _don't_ like doing random cleanup.

Myself, I love random cleanup. I spend some days on Wikipedia doing
nothing but random-paging around, tidying categories for subjects I care
nothing about, formatting references, etc. If I was told on one of those
days that I had to write ten kilobytes of text about the movie "Barbie:
Mermaidia" instead, I'd probably just go build new shelving for my room
or something. So it's a good thing there are people on Wikipedia with a
wide variety of interests, and provided the articles conform to our
basic policies (NOR, NPOV, etc) I will never denigrate those interests
even if they don't match my own.


from_name: Ben McIlwain

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

Philip Welch wrote:
> On May 5, 2006, at 2:21 PM, Phil Boswell wrote:
>
>>>> It's not
>>>> as if those articles on Pokemon are taking up space which would
>>>> otherwise be
>>>> available for your own pet subject.
>>> Undue weight. It's absurd for Pokemon to have 10,000 times more
>>> coverage within Wikipedia as, for instance, 19th century philosophy.
>>>
>> {{sofixit}}: rather than bitching that there are too many articles
>> about
>> something you don't like, try writing more articles about something
>> you do.
>
> It's not about someone (me) liking one thing or another. It's about
> objective importance and notability. Pokemon's influence even within
> contemporary popular culture is minimal outside a devoted community
> of fans.
>
>> We need to move towards an environment which will nurture the current
>> generation of Pokemon writers and help them mature into
>> 19th-century-literature writers at their own pace, rather than
>> drive them
>> away to their own little Pokepedia and lose them forever.
>
> I have high doubts that such editors are likely to mature. It's more
> likely that they'll turn us into Pokepedia, with only slight coverage
> of the real world (appended, always, by every single reference to
> such real world occurrences in TV shows and Flash cartoons).

I really don't understand why people have so many problems with Pok?mon
articles.  If you're not interested, you don't have to read it.  I'm not
interested in the thousands of articles about random small towns, but
I'm not saying they should be deleted.  There's a bar for notability
that Pok?mon presumably meets.  Each individual Pok?mon is certainly
verifiable from any number of sources.  I agree with the other Phil ...
don't let the Pok?mon piss you off, just ignore it and focus on writing
articles on other stuff you think is more important.

- --
Ben McIlwain ("Cyde Weys")

~ Sub veste quisque nudus est ~
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pCDtXb0PiS31YjEztTG9A74=
=m3Ed
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


from_name: Thommandel at aol.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] Ha Ha Ha you are so funny Jimbo!!

body:
In a message dated 5/3/2006 4:30:22 P.M. Central Daylight Time,
jwales at wikia.com writes:

>>> And then you get people who'll insist that an  article  MUST remain the
>>> way it is simply because its  subject doesn't want it  to.
>>
>> Such people should  be beaten hard with the nearest available  cluebat.
>>
>>> Moderation in all things.
>>
>> Ok you are  right.   Such people should be beaten _moderately_ with  the
>> nearest available  cluebat. ;-)
>
> What  kind of statement is this? Are you joking or are you serious?

Oh the  irony of being ask whether a pair of silly sentences containing
the word  'cluebat' is a joke or not.

/me looks for his  cluebat.

Oh, now I get it, HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA I'm so sorry, it's just that I
have been out of school for so long I guess...
  s-e-t-t-i-n-g  e-x-a-m-p-l-e     m-a-t-u-r-i-t-y

Opps, you are a private company and "can do as you damn well please..."

Tommy Mandel


from_name: Sam Pointon

body:
On 05/05/06, charles matthews <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> There are projects and projects.  What is most urgently needed is to get
> under control the most common names on the wiki.  There are inevitably
> 'Anglo': Smith, Jones, Brown, Robinson, lots of Irish and Scots names as
> found all over Canada and Australia, that kind of thing.  Almost the first
> discussion would have to be what to do about these.  For example Smiths are
> listed under [[List of people by name: Smi]].  We don't really want to start
> off with a schism between people who think that the [[List of people by
> name]] pages should be maintained, and those (like me) who think that that
> is the wrong approach, that writing it "Smith, Adam" is to be deprecated
> because it confuses search engines, and anyway with biographies into six
> figures we have to do something other than 1000 pages averaging more than
> 100 names on.

Crazy idea, but could we possibly autogenerate these lists? If, say,
we have a template "person", used like {{person|Smith|John Smith|An
ordinary man who works in an office}} (that is,
{{person|<<surname>>|<<name>>|<<short desc>>}}) on page [[John Smith
(person)]], it automatically adds the line:

*[[John Smith (person)|John Smith]] - An ordinary man who works in an office]]

to [[Smith (disambiguation)]] in the appropriate place.

Slightly more formally, it'll add
*[[<<page name>>|<<name>>]] - <<short desc>>

to [[<<surname>> (disambiguation)]] at the alphabetic, proper place.

Like I said, crazy idea out of left field, but it would help solve the
syncing problem. Possibly even a, say, {{brother}} or {{mother}}
template to specify relations between people on these disambig lists.

--Sam


from_name: Guy Chapman aka JzG

references:
<eeec757b0605050704g76c4bb8bj47ca3a7fdf33a62d@mail.gmail.com>
	<c5nm52p93492odspf55u3s86ml1b09f98t@4ax.com>
	<48F10423-CDE3-44CC-8FF0-BA7C9CB63D34@ctelco.net>
	<anom52lq5dlir1mcgpd4u9im7ikm1hiq6v@4ax.com>
	<8C944DD3-0002-490A-9E5F-C995C4454ADA@ctelco.net>

body:
On Fri, 5 May 2006 10:58:15 -0600, you wrote:

>There is a bit of talking by one another here. Reasoned polite
>advocacy of policy positions is welcomed. Tendentious biased editing
>(especially when you are working in a group) is not. However, there
>are numerous situations where which is occurring is not immediately
>clear. Often the touchstone is that the nasty behavior goes on and on
>and on and on and on and at some point you realize you are engaging
>in deliberate behavior calculated to subvert neutral point of view
>(or in some other way create some tendency which simply doesn't
>belong in a reference work.

Yes, I suspect we are in violent agreement.  It probably comes down to
how one understands advocacy: I understand it as a point of view
forcefully put, whereas on Wikipedia I rather prefer a case simply
stated and consensus sought.  But there is more than one shade of the
colour advocado.

Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


subject: [WikiEN-l] WikiEN-l Digest, Vol 34, Issue 49

body:
On Fri, 5 May 2006 19:54:37 +0200, you wrote:

>we'd love to have your corrections and
>improvements, and you don't need a funny user name to do that. Hell, I
>don't. And David Gerard certainly doesn't

Oh damn.

Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


from_name: Matt Brown

body:
On 5/5/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> This approach I don't agree with. Everytime we cite the fact that
> Wikipedia has 1,000,000 articles, we ascribe value to each of those
> articles. Every time we allow crud that we would be ashamed to speak
> of to remain in the article, we diminish the value of those articles.

Hmm.  I'd doubt many people in the world believe we've reached a
million articles without handling a lot of trivia.  Do you really
think that anyone would be surprised by the fact that a good portion
of that million are on such subjects?

> For exactly the same reason I think it is very poor for us to have
> 900,000 (or more?) inactive user accounts. They don't harm us directly
> - but they do vastly misrepresent the actual state of the project.

I don't think we tend to boast about our numbers of user accounts, do
we?  User accounts unused for <x> months and with no undeleted
contributions should be pruned though, I think, simply from a
manageability point of view.

I've noticed people mentioning our active user count and our admin
count more often than the total.

-Matt


body:
On 5/5/06, Cheney Shill <halliburton_shill at yahoo.com> wrote:
Are you saying this is "good"?  Instruction creep could easily be
retitled tax code creep or bureaucrat creep.  Tossing people into the
torture chamber doesn't seem like a reasonable solution to dealing
with a process problem, especially if the intent (AGF) is to cleanup
(de-weed) the process.

There is a limit to how far we should go to acomerdate people.
Currently you have to do something pretty negative to get banned long
term. However it is genraly better that we remove those people rather
than comeing up with special process just for them. Admins don't have
the power to toss people into torture chambers. I am aware that being
blocked can hurt but it is still preferable to most forms of tourture.

--
geni


from_name: Bryce Roney

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikistats

body:
I have just proposed a new project, you can find more info here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikistats_proposal . Please comment :)


subject: [Foundation-l] Wikistats


references:
<87psisms1a.fsf@mat.ucm.es>
	<f1c3529e0605050810g198b013al8b4e4e218f06b78@mail.gmail.com>
	<4250963.post@talk.nabble.com>

body:
On 5/5/06, Phil Boswell <phil.boswell at gmail.com> wrote:
> I commend for your perusal the <blockquote> tag, which can be customised
> with CSS styles to your heart's content, and the {{quotation}} template:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Quotation
>
> There's a nice example here:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy
>
> It needs a bit of tweaking (named parameters are better for various reasons,
> and in some places you don't actually need the attribution because it
> precedes the quotation) but it seems to fit your bill.

Ok, yeah I know about that template, which I find for most practical
purposes pretty impractical. Everytime I've tried to use it, either
the source of the quotation was already obvious, or I wanted to
surround it with ""s or something. In any case, it's a bit cumbersome
for a talk page. If a template was the only solution, a very basic
style would be my preference - none of this hard-coded quotation
author bizzo...

Steve


body:
On 5/5/06, Bacchante Maenad <bacchante at gmail.com> wrote:
> Both times I've tried to register with a name I was reading wikipedia and
> wanted to make a small addition/correction.  Inspired by some of the other
> funny user names I've seen on wikipedia, I wanted to make one.  But this

Ok, but seriously - we'd love to have your corrections and
improvements, and you don't need a funny user name to do that. Hell, I
don't. And David Gerard certainly doesn't (no offence, David) :)

> whole process has left me with a bad taste about what wikipedia is.  Rather
> than 'assume good faith' and not resorting to ad hominem attacks like I've
> seen recommended in so many wikipedia pages, I've seen a lot of nastiness,
> on this list (which I don't read often, but just glancing at some of the
> side conversations and other conversations, it's hard to find one devoid of
> insults) and on wikipedia.  I guess this list isn't held to the same
> standards as wikipedia, so I suppose maybe why the concentration of nasty
> people here is because this is where angry wikipedians go? I don't know.
> I'm sure someone will just insult me for being earnest.  Have at it.

This list is where some of Wikipedia's most passionate editors hang
out. It's not surprising that emotions can run high. Seriously,
though, if you just want to make good contributions to Wikipedia, you
don't need the list, and there are thousands of pages that need your
help where you won't hit any nastiness at all. We tend to discuss some
of the worst corners of Wikipedia here, but they're pretty rare.

Steve


from_name: Chad Perrin

subject: [Wikitech-l] Image Downloads

body:
On Fri, May 05, 2006 at 04:07:33PM -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:
> Tom Dichiaro wrote:
> > No, I've got a supposedly 8M road runner connection - Not that I get that on
> > download.
> >
> > Anyway, that's not really the problem - it never gets that far.  It claims
> > that it's downloading a file that is 3.5G but then downloads what appears to
> > be a valid, empty tar that is only 700 bytes.  My tar program opens it,
> > doesn't complain about the format, and says its empty.
>
> This is most likely a problem with your download tool failing to handle large
> file sizes.

I'm having a hard time imagining what else it could be, other than the
download tool.  The first thing that occurred to me was "Doesn't SMB
choke on anything bigger than 2GB?", but that shouldn't apply here.

--
Chad Perrin [ CCD CopyWrite | http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
"It's just incredible that a trillion-synapse computer could actually
spend Saturday afternoon watching a football game." - Marvin Minsky


from_name: julieharding1 at charter.net

subject: [WikiEN-l] Apology

body:
---- Philip Sandifer <snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> I would like to apologize for suggesting that Julie Harding is on
> crack. The term was an unfortunate choice of metaphors to express my
> concern that Ms. Harding's posts were incoherent and nonsensical. I
> have no reason to believe that Ms. Harding is currently or has ever
> been using crack, any other form of cocaine, or any other drug that
> was not prescribed by a licensed medical professional. My sincere
> apologies if my previous e-mail led anyone to think otherwise.
>
> Best,
> Phil Sandifer
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

Thank you for your formal apology.  I am to assume that someone spoke to you about your behavior.  Right now I am enraged.  I just spent over six hours editing the front page issues for you guys and for some reason, your program wouldn't take it from me.  Wikipedia is supposed to be the encyclopedia that anyone can edit?  Well, I just edited a whole section for you!  Goodnight
----redhawk1972


body:
Aah, I believe I succeeded in tracking the right direction now,

On 5/4/06, Delphine M?nard <notafishz at gmail.com> wrote:
> This said, I believe that a mid-way can be found.
>
> How about launching a massive translation rally (A translsation of the
> week maybe?) of Commons main page that would translate in smaller
> languages a "default" type of main page that does not need to be
> updated?

Good idea. Not completely, but it has been already applied to the
Foundation website. Some languages (eh, or only English now?) are
updated more frequently than other languages, and some languages
updated rarely, like Korean, were removed sections which needs
frequent updating.

For languages whose editors are hard to avail quickly, it is helpful
to set a page which contains minimum required information - even stats
would be a potential cause of aches for those languages. But after
all, a mite is infinitely valuable than void.

> While I believe I see the reasoning about getting rid of the "smaller"
> languages on the main page, while I understand the problem of having
> outdated main pages, I totally agree that smaller languages should not be penalized in accessing commons.

*nod*

As a P&T member, I daresay it would be a strategic loss to remove big
languages like Spanish / Japanese, whose projects are steadly growing
and many speakers of them are involved into the project, or just are
frequent visitors.

I admit it is a problem to have a start page poorly maintained, but a
shabby main page in their own languages are far better than splendid
main page written in a language they can hardly read. And again, I'd
like you to be aware there are some languages which fairly activated
projects with a huge number of pageview but poorly involved into the
so-called grobal activities of Wikimedia project - plainly activities
of English speaker both native and as foreign/second.

Besides those practical reasons, we could pay attention to emotional
aspects. Small languages' editors and visitors once removed would feel
dissapointment, sadness, disrespect or just anger. Addition is
normally no problem at that time: but removal has often caused a
raged, or at least negative reaction as far as I have experienced on
this problem.

Some of us can be recalled Hebrew Wikipedia past preferences to
restrict interlangs. They had their reasons, but its effect was, in my
opinion, disasterous rather than inpragmatic; some good editors were
raged and declaired their entire quitting from the project, even their
mother langue's. Later He people changed their mind and hostile
between them and other some editors dissapeared. I think this episode
has its moral stil now.

> I am not going to argue that Mediawiki is not fit for a multilingual
> website today, although that is probably the primary problem of
> commons.

So as meta, but it needs much more time and powerful hands of
developers to resolve.

--
Aphaea@*.wikipedia.org
email: Aphaia @ gmail (dot) com


from_name: Mark Gallagher

body:
G'day Phil B,

> Please provide links to AfD discussions which contain reasonable arguments
> like those suggested which are not then countered by piled-on "nn, delete"
> entries; even better would be a "nn, delete" replaced with a "keep" as a
> result of listening to reason. I would like to sooth my tortured soul with a
> bit of good-natured discussion...

I've already provided a link:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Jonathan_Smith_%28games_programmer%29>

Joffa Smith's article is nominated for deletion because his full name
doesn't get many Google hits.  We see a bunch of regrettable pile-on "nn
d"-type comments, plus a weird (and bloody stupid) "delete, self-nom"
(!).  Then we get some experts appearing, one of which is an anon but
who obviously knows what he's talking about, and they say "but he won
the Nobel Prize, Anthony!"

To this day I don't know the numerical tally.  There's no reason why I
shouldn't, it's a short discussion and it would be easy enough to count
the bold words.  If feeling adventurous, I could even write a script to
do it.  But *it doesn't matter*, so I've never got 'round to it.  I
suspect, however, that if we had a silly vote-counting sod attempt to
close it, they may well be tempted to close it as a "delete" because of
some irrelevant magic number (50%, 60%, 66%, 67%, 70%, 90%, whatever).
Fortunately, our admins are *not*, in the main, silly vote-counting
sods, and the Use Common Sense movement hasn't yet been wiped out.

--
Mark Gallagher
"What?  I can't hear you, I've got a banana on my head!"
- Danger Mouse

--
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.1.392 / Virus Database: 268.5.4/332 - Release Date: 4/05/2006


body:
---- Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
> On Fri, 5 May 2006 19:54:37 +0200, you wrote:
>
> >we'd love to have your corrections and
> >improvements, and you don't need a funny user name to do that. Hell, I
> >don't. And David Gerard certainly doesn't
>
> Oh damn.
>
> Guy (JzG)
> --
> http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

 I just spent all day editing a whole section for you Guy.  Your system would not save it for me.  It had to have been at least six hours.  God, I'm tired.  Why did I do it?  My love for English and writing and boy were there a lot of mistakes!  Yet, se la vi.  Snowspinner apologized, so I don't have to report him for cyber-abuse.  Your cite is filled with it though.  Today, I was referred to as: "Boobs."  You are going to lose a lot of very talented people at the rate you're going.
 P.S. The attachment is just a Goodbye picture of me.  Maybe if you try, you can find and save the whole section I edited today.

----redhawk1972


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

subject:
[Foundation-l] The status of smaller languages on the Wikimedia
 Commons

body:
Daniel Arnold wrote:
> Am Freitag, 05. Mai 2006 11:30 schrieb Gerard Meijssen:
>
>> Wrong. InstantCommons has everything to do with the WM Foundation.
>> InstantCommons would have been coded by now if this was not the case.
>>
>
> InstantCommons is a nice idea but without a notification framework that
> *automatically* notifies other projects about things that need their
> attention like duplicate files, files missing required info and all kinds of
> deletion requests it simply would increase our current problems by a order of
> magnitude and thus would make Commons unmaintainable.
>
It does not. At this moment there is nothing stopping people from taking
content from Commons. People do. We are not responsible for this, as it
is. The best we can do is what we do. Mind you InstantCommons is NOT to
be used for Wikimedia projects. From a performance point of view,
currently many installations use the pictures of Commons on a real time
basis. This has an impact on our responsiveness.

The consequence of what you are saying is that our pictures are not Free
to use. The fact is that no matter how diligent and intelligent we
maintain Commons we will never get to the situation where all material
is certified as being completely and correctly. This means that either
Commons is Free for people to use or it is not. With InstantCommons Meta
data will be available about these pictures on the remote Wikis.
Consequently the situation will be much better to find the material that
needs deletion and that is also elsewhere. Remember, Google is our
friend :) We can even build in some functionality that helps the remote
administrator to check Commons for issues. This however is something
that they have to do. It is not our responsibility.
> Duesentrieb (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Duesentrieb) is currently
> writing an automated notification framework called CommonsTicker that would
> run on the tool server and would work as follows:
>
> A database cronjob at the toolserver looks for new files that need the above
> described attention. The new files will be send through CheckUsage on the
> same server and this will return a usage list of these images of every local
> project. In the end a pybot will write in every local project a at a
> dedicated page a daily compiled list of files that get used by them and that
> need their attention (like unlinking images and thus reducing image "holes"
> in articles, alerting people on deletion debates in Commons and so forth).
>
> Of course this solution can only be temporarily and needs to be integrated
> into MediaWiki via a RSS feed that can be imported by other MediaWiki
> installations (which will do the automated checkusage filtering locally on
> their own on the imported RSS feed) and thus tracked by them.
>
> So at first we need to solve our current Wikimedia wide communication problem
> and see how CommonsTicker performs, after that it needs to be coded into
> MediaWiki and later if things have stabilized after a time in Commons we can
> think of how to realize InstantCommons.
>
This is a solution to a WMF problem. It does not answer the question; is
our data Free to use or not but also, CommonsTicker and InstantCommons
are not related.
>
>> A summary of what happened is nice. It is not what I am really
>> interested in. What I am interested in is having things announced before
>> they happen. This will have, as an effect, that people do not have the
>> excuse that they did not know. They will have less reason to moan (they
>> will anyway). When you say nobody told us, you mean nobody told you.
>> Fine. This has been discussed at previous occasions when we had a flash
>> in the commons pan.
>>
>
> See above. We have so many things to do daily it is impossible notifying
> people in local wikis on a regular basis manually. And of course there are
> also other people suddenly jumping into Commons (you never heared of them
> before) and that just put thousands of images onto deletion request without
> any debate or worse simply make mass image changes (and are as well unwilling
> to share their points) and that make really *big* trouble if I stop them. In
> order to get an impression how much energy it took for me making a proper
> debate on a certain single issue see:
>
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons_talk:Licensing#Review_of_license_templates
>
> Well and for sure there are many more such people I can't be aware of and
> ocassionally someone makes a general Commons-admins-flame on Village Pump and
> afterwards we try to find out what he was flaming about at all and who was
> the person that did something wrong...
>
> So there are two sides:
> * One side that makes trouble because we talk to much and do not delete fast
> enough.
> * The other side that says we talk to less and delete too fast.
>
> Seems to me that at least one side must be wrong...
>
> The facts are:
> * Far more images need to be deleted in Commons daily.
> * Local unlinking of files and manual local notifications are such a huge task
> no Wikipedian can imagine (really Wikipedians simply don't realize *how huge*
> Wikimedia universe is).
> * Many people upload images in Commons without even interested in a minimum of
> communication.
> * A tiny fraction of active Commons admins tries to catch up...
>
You do not get my point. When policies are to be changed, when the way
things work are to be changed, this is when you should inform the
communities in advance. Some careful marketing communication is what is
needed. Marketeers call it customer relations. And you /need /to inform
your customers; when you do, you talk to all your customers when you
don't you have to deal with them one at a time and you may find that
customers do no longer give you their custom. Given how busy you are,
you would not even notice.
>
>> As to my definition of "profound"; changes in policy that affect usage
>> need to be communicated widely before they are finalised and implemented.
>>
>
> Well I could have talked a lot previous to my many *very bold* changes in
> Commons and wouldn't have come so far. I prefer in that case a model of
> communication with some people I know, switching in my brain previous to an
> edit of mine and and then simply do the thing and if something is not that
> ideal hey we can sort it out afterwards. That's the only way how things can
> efficiently get done in Commons.
>
> Regards,
> Daniel/Arnomane
Efficiently in Commons. Sadly there are these other projects and while
many, myself included, applaud the hard work and understand its
importance many others balk and refuse to use Commons for their
material. Given your preference to limit your deliberations to your
intimi, I am afraid this will not instil trust in the very people who
refuse to use Commons.

Thanks,
    GerardM


body:
On 5/5/06, Philip Welch <wikipedia at philwelch.net> wrote:
> On May 5, 2006, at 12:38 AM, Steve Bennett wrote:
>
> > That's a major problem. Perhaps if we change the emphasis from
> > "deleting it", with its connotations of purging it from the surface of
> > the earth, to "moving it out of Wikipedia"?
>
> Gah! Enough with these stupid euphemisms!
>

You mean differently intelligent

> "Voting" has changed to "finding consensus", but the process remains
> the same. User conduct regulation is called "dispute resolution", but
> focuses mainly on finding a pseudo-judicial basis to ban troublesome
> editors.

Not true. Article RFCs can resolve dissputes. I don't know about medation.

> We *delete* things that don't belong here. Deal with it.

I reserve the right to continue to use the description Vaporise in
edit and deletion summeries.

--
geni


from_name: Steve Block

subject: [WikiEN-l] How do you decide the top 10 categories?

body:
There's a category rename discussion which might stand more eyeballs
that just the regular's on cfd.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categories_for_deletion/Log/2006_May_4#Category:Top_10_to_Category:Top_8

Cheers

Steve block

--
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.1.392 / Virus Database: 268.5.5/333 - Release Date: 05/05/06


body:
On 5/5/06, Philip Welch <wikipedia at philwelch.net> wrote:
> Incidentally, why don't we have free-content paparazzi tracking down
> celebrities to take pictures for Wikipedia articles?

Becuase very few wikipedians are prepared to travel for the sole
perpose of takeing photos. Those who are tend not to be too interested
in celeb culture.

--
geni


from_name: Philip Sandifer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Apology

body:
I would like to apologize for suggesting that Julie Harding is on
crack. The term was an unfortunate choice of metaphors to express my
concern that Ms. Harding's posts were incoherent and nonsensical. I
have no reason to believe that Ms. Harding is currently or has ever
been using crack, any other form of cocaine, or any other drug that
was not prescribed by a licensed medical professional. My sincere
apologies if my previous e-mail led anyone to think otherwise.

Best,
Phil Sandifer


from_name: amgine at saewyc.net

subject:
[Foundation-l] A Wikisource Definition (was: RfC: A Free
 Content and Expression Definition)

body:
On Sat, 2006-06-05 at 03:43 +0200, Erik Moeller wrote:
On 5/4/06, amgine at saewyc.net <amgine at saewyc.net> wrote:
>
> > The Foundation should (and did) describe the projects goals and missions,
> > and approve any modifications of these.
>
> Wikisource ("Project Sourceberg") was created before the Foundation
> even had a Board. This was during the time when new projects were
> essentially set up when something had to be dumped from Wikipedia.
> People were adding texts like national constitutions to Wikipedia
> verbatim. Hence, the only mission statement I've seen for Wikisource
> is on [[m:Wikisource]]:
>
> "Mission: Allow people to handle primary sources better than
> currently, so that no one gets upset. Maybe that means provide a
> repository for primary sources; maybe that means figure out how to
> improve the Wikipedia interface for linking to outside repositories."
>
> People get flamed nowadays for even submitting project proposals like
> this. You say I want to "dictate terms". But in actual fact, I want to
> be clear about what the project should _allow_, not so much about what
> it should _prohibit_. I do _not_ want a small group of a handful of
> people to retroactively create a definition that has never been
> written when it should have been. But that is exactly what will happen
> if you leave, for example, the question of whether to allow
> translations to the small, existing community of de.wikisource.org.
>
> There are different scales of community involvement that are
> appropriate for different purposes. Even for an individual page, you
> may see cases where a group of editors is annoyed because someone else
> suddenly opens up a discussion without ever having worked on the page
> or having read past discussions.
>
> However, nobody would argue that the people who have worked on a
> single Wikipedia article have some special "right" to make up their
> own policies -- because Wikipedia follows a particular philosophy,
> which, to a certain extent, is even shared across languages. Nobody, I
> hope, would seriously make the case that each language edition of
> Wikipedia should have a different logo symbol (as opposed to the
> subtitle). So these decisions are made on a project-wide level.
>
> And in addition to the project level, there is the Wikimedia level.
> This includes involvement from the entire Wikimedia community, whether
> they have worked on a specific project or not. This is where we decide
> whether to launch a new projects. And in the case of old projects that
> did not go through this process, I think this is where the scope will
> have to be, gently and through a largely consultative process that of
> course involves the existing community, gradually defined or refined.
>
> This has nothing to do with "dictating terms". Some see Wikimedia as a
> group of largely disparate tribes, others see it as a single
> community. It is, however, both. Some decisions are best made locally,
> some globally.
>
> The ability to make global decisions, to arrive at a single definition
> for a project scope, to consistently enforce free content principles
> and NPOV, and so forth, is one of the reasons to have an organization
> like Wikimedia in the first place. The other key reason I can see is
> to build an ever larger community that is given ever more
> opportunities to do good. Both are negatively affected by excessive
> tribalism.
>
> What else do we need Wikimedia for? Fundraising? The projects would
> probably be more effective in this regard if they could work
> independently, and besides, none is even remotely on the same scale as
> Wikipedia. Wikimedia without a Wikimedia community identity is a
> pointless entity.
>
> I hope "Wikisourcerors" see themselves also as members of the larger
> Wikimedia community. I hope everyone who works on a Wikimedia project
> does.
>
> Erik

That's an awfully long way to say we should ignore the last half of my
sentence - "and approve modifications of these" - and instead have a
top-down approach where changes come from outside and not from the inside.

Amgine


from_name: A

subject: [WikiEN-l] Criticism sections on bios of living people

body:
First post to the mailing list... I have been happily editing for a
couple of years without incident, but I had a situation this week that
prompted me to get some additional feedback.

I have been working a lot on controversial biographies of living
people this year, because it seems like an emerging area of policy:
people like [[Daniel Brandt]] who don't want articles, people like
[[Paul Barresi]] whose biography was culled down in a [[WP:OFFICE]]
action, and critics of the project like [[Warren Boroson]]. I
personally feel that our response in these situations needs to be
clear and empathetic, and show what Wikipedia can be when at its best.
Mr. Barresi, for instance, went from calling me a bitch to telling me
today he owed me flowers. I consider that a victory for Wikipedia, and
evidence that the office policy is not "censorship," but a stop-gap
measure while an article gets back on track.

Having said that, I started editing a biography this week that led to
a troubling series of events. The article in question, [[Xeni
Jardin]], is about a blogger for [[Boing Boing]]. I did not know who
she was when I started editing, but I saw that there was a lot of
controversy about inclusion of a "Criticism" section, including a
"xenisucks.com" site. I commented on the talk page that the hate site
(as it had been aptly described by others) seemed neither notable nor
reliable. I did not remove it, but I suggested we should discuss if it
should be removed.

The owner of xenisucks.com immediately wrote two entries about me:

http://xenisucks.com/index.php?entry=entry060501-065920
http://xenisucks.com/index.php?entry=entry060501-095418

The people who added and and then voted to keep the "Criticism"
section are mainly new editors with fewer than 100 edits, with most if
not all edits on the Xeni Jardin article. They began linking the blog
entries above on the Talk page to make sure I saw them, and eventually
someone claiming to be the author of xenisucks.com opened a Wikipedia
account (Mnsharp) and started commenting on the talk page.

Now, there's nothing in those entries I haven't heard, oh, about a
million times, but it seems to violate the spirit of Wikipedia for
this person to be having a running commentary of that tone and then
coming on Wikipedia and making further comments here, referring to
those links but within the letter of the law in terms of [[WP:CIVIL]].
This editor also has recruited several more new editors this week to
take up the cause on the Xeni Jardin page, to the point it got
protected after another longtime editor had the same issue with the
Criticism section, and actually removed it, which sparked an edit war.

Had I known what I was walking into, I wouldn't have been as
heavy-handed in making sure every statement had a citation, but the
criticism section as it stood had a lot of weasel words about "critics
comment on her appearance," or "critics say she's an irresponsible
journalist." When I asked for citations, most were from xenisucks.com.

So, this brings up several interesting issues:

1. Is a "____sucks.com" blog a notable or reliable source?
2. If an editor is engaging in vicious personal attacks offsite, then
coming here and demanding civility, is that a violation of the letter
and/or spirit of the project?
3. Are "criticism" sections valid in general, or do they just become a
repository for quibbles and an amplifier of relatively insignificant
hatecruft about a person?
4. If they are valid, do blogs count as notable or reliable sources?
What if they are anonymous? Are there criteria in place for
determining this?
5. Should we formulate a guideline regarding living persons and this
kind of criticism in their biographies?

I have worked on biographies of Nazis, conspiracy nuts, politicians,
racists, porn stars, etc., and I have never run into this kind of
hostility, where someone as tangentially related to the article's
subject as I am gets attacked like this by a Wikipedia editor (albeit
offsite). It seems to be part of the petty "gotcha" mentality of the
blog subculture, which is probably why I don't read blogs. The
question is, how do we keep the negative parts of that from creeping
into the Wikipedia culture, especially as it pertains to biographies
of living people?

Jokestress (at gmail)

"You're no one till somebody hates you."
-- Snake River Conspiracy


body:
On Fri, 5 May 2006 13:21:10 -0700 (PDT), you wrote:

>    "Voting" has changed to "finding consensus", but the process remains
>    the same. User conduct regulation is called "dispute resolution", but
>    focuses mainly on finding a pseudo-judicial basis to ban troublesome
>    editors.

You think?

Look at the RfC on Whaleto.  Does that fit this description?  Very
often problems are quietly resolved.  Of course sometimes they aren't,
but I'd suggest that far more disputes are resolved than end up with
indef-blocks.

Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] Image Downloads

body:
Rob Church wrote:
> On 05/05/06, Tom Dichiaro <tom at trasa.com> wrote:
>
>>Are the image downloads offline?  I can't pull down the files in the normal
>>way from:
>
>
> I don't believe we offer image dumps at this time.

Well you believe wrong, they're at http://download.wikimedia.org/images/ .
However there haven't been any dumps since last November.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: geni

body:
On 5/5/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
> On Fri, 5 May 2006 13:21:10 -0700 (PDT), you wrote:
>
> >    "Voting" has changed to "finding consensus", but the process remains
> >    the same. User conduct regulation is called "dispute resolution", but
> >    focuses mainly on finding a pseudo-judicial basis to ban troublesome
> >    editors.
>
> You think?
>
> Look at the RfC on Whaleto.  Does that fit this description?  Very
> often problems are quietly resolved.  Of course sometimes they aren't,
> but I'd suggest that far more disputes are resolved than end up with
> indef-blocks.
>
> Guy (JzG)

Bad choice. I'd give that one a fair chance of ending up at arbcom
sooner or latter.

--
geni


subject: [Wikitech-l] Image Downloads

body:
Tom Dichiaro wrote:
>
>
> Sorry if this posts in duplicate - I messed up my first effort to post here
> somehow.
>
>
>
> Are the image downloads offline?  I can't pull down the files in the normal
> way from:
>
>
>
> http://download.wikimedia.org/images/wikipedia/en/

What happens when you try? I believe some clients have trouble downloading
files bigger than 2GB.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Cheney Shill

subject: [WikiEN-l] NPOV majorities/minorities

body:
Stephen Bain <stephen.bain at gmail.com> wrote:

    NPOV is an editorial skill, one of the more difficult editorial skills
    to learn. Trying to reduce it to a formula will not work, because
    there is no perfect scenario like you outline. Sources will always
    need evaluating, that is the role of editors.

"In accordance with Wikipedia's No original research policy, we do not add our own opinion or in any other way attempt to investigate or evaluate whether they are right or wrong." [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:RS#Check_multiple_independent_sources]

1st, not all editors are capable of evaluating.  Ideally, they would be.  The point of verifiability and WP:RS is to take that part out of the editors' hands and put it into the hands of those that meet the requirements set forth.  In reality, those interested in an article have a wide degree of evaluation skills and an even wider degree of interest in actually using them, and articles should not be expected to sit around with inaccurate, unsourced information for a year while these other editors get up to speed, assuming they actually are willing and able to get up to speed.  For practical purposes, while all this evaluation is going on, there needs to be strict application of the rules.  The discussion areas and sandboxes are there for a reason.  "The burden of evidence lies with the editor who has made the edit in question...." [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:RS#Unattributed_material]

2nd, there is in fact such a "perfect" scenario at this very moment.  I'll grant you that some of the sources deserve more weight than others, but for purposes of keeping the debate from getting lost for a year, it was simply agreed that secondary and tertiary sources that met WP:RS would all be treated the same.~~~~Pro-Lick

---------------------------------
New Yahoo! Messenger with Voice. Call regular phones from your PC and save big.


from_name: maru dubshinki

subject: [WikiEN-l] We need a pedia split

body:
On 5/5/06, Cheney Shill <halliburton_shill at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I definitely agree with this, but Phil is right about the coverage (although not about the application of undue weight which is for NPOV determination).  It seems like all this pop-culture stuff (which also includes the likes of the Britneys of the world and wrestling entertainment) could be dumped, umm, I mean reorganized, into another wiki project, such as Mediapedia, Wikipop, or WikiStuffNobodyWillCareAbout100YearsFromNow.  I think it would be better, for both groups to have admins dealing with the type of content they are dedicated to and interested in.  I see a lot of inactive admins and it would be interesting to see how many have decided to take an indefinite leave of absence because they spend 90% of their time dealing with content and user disputes involving articles they have no interest in.~~~~Pro-Lick

Why don't we wait 100 years before we make that determination? I mean,
we already do that for things from the 1800s or whatever, and it seems
unfair to impose a higher standard on current things. I am no
historian, but I imagine there are many, many things that have been
derided as crap or pop culture or irrelevant by the generation which
produced them, but later generations gleaned greater value from them
than did their creators. (Off-hand, I'm thinking of Japanese romantic
tales and novels in the Heian era, and fiction in European
monasteries, and penny dreadfuls. No doubt others can adduce many
other examples).
To wax less prolix, we aren't in a very good position to determine
what the future will find notable or not; all we can hope to do is
filter out a decent portion of the crap.

~maru


subject: [WikiEN-l] We need a pedia split

body:
maru dubshinki <marudubshinki at gmail.com> wrote:

    To wax less prolix, we aren't in a very good position to determine
    what the future will find notable or not; all we can hope to do is
    filter out a decent portion of the crap.

Nor are we in a position according to you to determine what crap is.  After all, what we believe is crap today may very well to turn out to be bio-fuel or natural gas tomorrow.  I'm simply setting forth one principle for determining what crap is.  Besides, the real point of my recommendation in this context regarding pop-culture items (Pokemon, pop-stars, etc.) is to give them a holding place outside the encyclopedia itself that is still part of Wiki until we have better knowledge about where on the crap continuum they belong.  I'm not recommending a flush, simply a split, and anything can be moved back to the encyclopedia and is of course still accessible and editable like any other Wiki content.~~~~Pro-Lick

---------------------------------
Love cheap thrills? Enjoy PC-to-Phone  calls to 30+ countries for just 2?/min with Yahoo! Messenger with Voice.


from_name: River Tarnell

subject: [Wikitech-l] Image Downloads

body:
Jay R. Ashworth:
> > Tom Dichiaro wrote:
> > > be a valid, empty tar that is only 700 bytes.  My tar program opens it,

> A valid tarball, though?

a valid tar file would be a multiple of 512 bytes in size.

	- river.
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body:
On 5/5/06, Cheney Shill <halliburton_shill at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Verifiability.  Provide some recent cases where RFCs have.~~~~Pro-Lick

I didn't say it did very often. I've just know it work from time to time.
--
geni


from_name: GerardM

body:
Hoi,
There is one crucial difference between the en.wikisource.org and the
commons.wikimedia.org. The first is independent and all projects
should be able to depend on the second. Commons is not a project that
runs in a vacuum. The other projects are using Commons as as service.
They are involved in their own project. They do not really care about
anything else.

You laugh at the idea of the communities being your customers. I
wonder for whom you are doing all the good work that you are doing.
You want to consider the opinion of people who get their hands dirty.
I would say that the people, these customers make their hands dirty,
just not on commons.

In the past we have had issues the .svg being a notorious one. The
consequence has been that many people I know off do not post to
Commons anymore. A proposal on one project I know of to post only on
Commons was defeated because of the resulting sentiments. Indeed it is
your project, you do good work but your challenge is to do great work.

In my honest opinion, and that is for now the last of it, you need to
improve the communication to improve the image of Commons.

Thanks,
   GerardM

On 5/5/06, Birgitte SB <birgitte_sb at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
> --- Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> > You do not get my point. When policies are to be
> > changed, when the way
> > things work are to be changed, this is when you
> > should inform the
> > communities in advance. Some careful marketing
> > communication is what is
> > needed. Marketeers call it customer relations. And
> > you /need /to inform
> > your customers; when you do, you talk to all your
> > customers when you
> > don't you have to deal with them one at a time and
> > you may find that
> > customers do no longer give you their custom. Given
> > how busy you are,
> > you would not even notice.
>
>
> I disagree with this sentiment in general terms.  If
> the "customers" are not making an effort to watch the
> pages where policy decisions are disscused, they
> should not expect to courted by those wishing to
> change policy.  The community that is actually doing
> the work of maintaining a project should have the
> ability to set policy without going out of their way
> to court the fly-by-night users of the project.  I do
> not think it is wise to try and alienate the less
> active userbase, but it is unrealistic to wait for
> their reaction before making any decisions.
>
> The English Wikisource recently made a major change to
> it's incluson guidelines (which involves the eventual
> deletion of around 200 pages).  We held open
> disscusion for over three weeks, and the material is
> now being slowly phased out without a mass deletion.
> Although there was a small amount of advertising
> amoung people with a specific interest, the
> participants in the disscusion did not vary from the
> regular editors.  I cannot agree that it should have
> been advertised at large across projects.  I am very
> happy with the way we have handled this situation
> which quite at odds with your sentiments.
>
> It would not be productive during a major policy
> disscussion to issue an invitation to people who have
> no idea how a project operates on a day-to-day basis.
> The community which actually *works* on a project
> needs to be the ones to set policy.  If the people you
> consider "customers" find that the community no longer
> serves their needs, they should work to carve out such
> a niche themselves.  These projects are all operating
> with a limited amount of volunteers and I cannot
> imagine any of them would ignore the corcerns of
> people willing to get their hands dirty.  But when
> someone has the mindset that they are a "customer" and
> want to reallocate these existing voluteers to take
> care of their pet issues, well I won't be so impolite
> as to express what I think of that.  Now they are
> welcome to share these concerns.  Many people can
> vouch that I am willing to drop my current project to
> help them deal with issue I agree is important when
> they bring to my attention.  But to say projects
> should not attempt to set policy unless they
> personally invite over all the people who are standing
> on the sidelines is ridiculous.  Even if such people
> are the most informed, intelligent, reasonable people
> on earth, they will not be a useful addition to policy
> disscusions until they have worked within the project
> and achieved such understanding that can only be
> gained by experience.  The fact that infrequent users
> may not *like* the communities policy descision is not
> reason enough to hold off on any decision till they
> have been consulted.
>
> Birgitte SB
>
>
> __________________________________________________
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> _______________________________________________
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> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


from_name: Guy Chapman aka JzG

body:
On Fri, 5 May 2006 22:12:45 +0100, you wrote:

>> Look at the RfC on Whaleto.  Does that fit this description?  Very
>> often problems are quietly resolved.  Of course sometimes they aren't,
>> but I'd suggest that far more disputes are resolved than end up with
>> indef-blocks.

>Bad choice. I'd give that one a fair chance of ending up at arbcom
>sooner or latter.

Maybe - I am an incurable optimist.  John seems to have ceased his
problematic behaviour and has deleted several problematic pages from
his site.  Maybe he will revert to type, maybe not.  Give him the
benefit of the doubt for now.

Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


body:
On Fri, 5 May 2006 15:18:34 -0700, you wrote:

>My point isn't that we don't have dispute resolution. Article RfCs
>and mediation are, in fact, forms of dispute resolution. But "dispute
>resolution" also lumps in our user conduct processes, including user
>RfC's (which are the most pointless thing ever) and ArbCom.

User RfCs are pointless when people use them as a whining shop.  When
a consensus is rapidly reached, there is no reason not to close them
and enforce any decision as community consensus.  We can do that, I
think.  Why not?  If a significant number of people agree, then take
that as consensus and move on.

Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


from_name: Tony Sidaway

body:
On 5/5/06, Philip Welch <wikipedia at philwelch.net> wrote:
>
> Undue weight. It's absurd for Pokemon to have 10,000 times more
> coverage within Wikipedia as, for instance, 19th century philosophy.

It's an interesting idea, but applying this criterion you would end up
with a Diana Moon Glampers encyclopedia, where nobody would dare to
write an article on a popular subject lest he incur the wrath for the
Handicapper General for unbalancing it.

The *embarasse de richesse* with regard to Pokemon characters doesn't
directly hamper the use of the encyclopedia by those wishing to read
about the likes of Hegel and Schopenhauer and the Mills.

It might be said, perhaps, that at most the quantity of Pokemon
articles might drive away people who might otherwise contribute
serious content on another subject.

Then again, there's nothing stopping the compilers of a specialist
encyclopedia on, say, philosophy, taking the Wikipedia content and
placing it on a wiki (or other content editing system) of their own
where it may be extended by those who would be repelled from
Wikipedia, or those who would simply not find the philosophy articles
amid the clutter.   They could apply their own rules, provided the
resulting content was made available under a GFDL-compatible license.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Any Roman Catholics on the list?

body:
G'day Guy,

> I could do with some input at
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Traditionalist_Catholic

I'm not going to make any edits tonight, but FWIW Lima's statements in
the thread above your RfC notice (about the Pope's view on tradition not
being "a box of dead things", about traditionalists not being allowed to
decide who can and cannot be considered a "traditional Catholic", and so
on) pretty much accords with my own view.  However, my personal views on
my faith could not be regarded as either traditional or traditionalist,
and I suspect anyone so set in his ways that he is willing to disregard
the views of several Popes would doubtless care very little for an
opinion from little ol' modernist me.

--
Mark Gallagher
"What?  I can't hear you, I've got a banana on my head!"
- Danger Mouse

--
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.1.392 / Virus Database: 268.5.4/332 - Release Date: 4/05/2006


from_name: brion at pobox.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki automated test run failure 2006-05-06

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!
Running test Language converter: output gets cut off unexpectedly (bug 5757)... FAILED!
Running test HTML bullet list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test HTML ordered list, closed tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test HTML ordered list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test HTML nested bullet list, open tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test HTML nested ordered list, closed tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test HTML nested ordered list, open tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!

Passed 303 of 313 tests (96.81%) FAILED!


subject: [WikiEN-l] We need a pedia split

body:
On 5/6/06, Cheney Shill <halliburton_shill at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I definitely agree with this, but Phil is right about the coverage (although not about the application of undue weight which is for NPOV determination).  It seems like all this pop-culture stuff (which also includes the likes of the Britneys of the world and wrestling entertainment) could be dumped, umm, I mean reorganized, into another wiki project, such as Mediapedia, Wikipop, or WikiStuffNobodyWillCareAbout100YearsFromNow.  I think it would be better, for both groups to have admins dealing with the type of content they are dedicated to and interested in.  I see a lot of inactive admins and it would be interesting to see how many have decided to take an indefinite leave of absence because they spend 90% of their time dealing with content and user disputes involving articles they have no interest in.~~~~Pro-Lick

I have no interest in either 18th century philosophers or pop culture.
Admins can steer clear of stuff that doesn't interest them if they
want to.
The pop culture section appears to be one of our most popular so it
stays. Other than the copyvios there I can ignore it for the most
part.

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] We need a policy against vote-stacking

body:
On 5/6/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> This approach I don't agree with. Everytime we cite the fact that
> Wikipedia has 1,000,000 articles, we ascribe value to each of those
> articles. Every time we allow crud that we would be ashamed to speak
> of to remain in the article, we diminish the value of those articles.
>
> For exactly the same reason I think it is very poor for us to have
> 900,000 (or more?) inactive user accounts. They don't harm us directly
> - but they do vastly misrepresent the actual state of the project.
>

Every free internet forum has the same issue.

> Speaking for myself, the existence of Pokemon is not directly a
> problem. But Wikipedia would certainly be better off if somehow all
> the effort that was expended on Pokemon articles was somehow invested
> in other ways.
>
> Steve

Pokemon are massive. How many pokemon can you name? How many uk canals
(my area) can you name?

--
geni


body:
On 5/6/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/6/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Every free internet forum has the same issue.
>
> Yes...but not very relevant. The number of contributors to Wikipedia
> is quite interesting and relevant to many people, but no reliable
> figure is readily available.
>

[[WP:1000]] would be the closest. The are various problems with trying
to figure out the number of people who have contributed at least once.

> Zero. Now, if all the people who had put 20 hours into Pokemon
> articles had instead put 5 hours into Pokemon articles, and 15 hours
> into cleanup of random articles, don't you think Wikipedia would be
> better off?
>
> Steve

Perhaps but that isn't going to happen. The best we can hope for is
that we don't have to worry about the quality of the pokemon articles
too much.

--
geni


from_name: Anthere

body:
Brianna Laugher wrote:

>>making Commons more relevant is called InstantCommons and we are waiting
>>for the special projects committee to finally inform us that we can
>>start coding.
>
>
> [[m:InstantCommons]] has nothing much to do with the WM foundation or
> its projects, which is what I thought we were discussing?

InstantCommons has to do with WMF and its projects.
The special project committee recently approved the project with the
following resolution :

The SPC recommends the implementation of the InstantCommons project, as
broadly described
[http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=InstantCommons&oldid=293364
on meta] and in email to the SPC mailing list; and that the Foundation
seek a grant from Kennisnet to implement InstantCommons, paying the
developers involved itself.  The SPC approves a detailed recommendation
regarding the proposal and related contracts, as described
[[InstantCommons/Recommendation|on the SPC wiki]].

It has actually to do with the Foundation because we provided some legal
recommandations with regards to this project, because the Foundation
will seek a grant for it, because the Foundation will handle the
contract with the developer and because it will involve some work from
Brion or Tim (as paid staff).

I just mention this for information, though I do not see very much the
relationship with the Commons main page controversy.

Ant