from_name: Klaus-Eduard Runnel

subject: [Wikitech-l] create new articles from the search form

body:
2005/9/14, Mulambo <mulambo at gmail.com>:
>
> Quick (or not so) question;
>
> I want to add a link to create a new article from the search page when
> there are no matches returned for the search, i've gone over and
> echoed what is stated in
>
> http://www.wikicities.com/wiki/Help:Searching#Create_new_articles_from_the_search_form
> but I get nothing on the search page after, anybody have any ideas?

Have a look:
http://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Nogomatch&action=edit

or change your MediaWiki:Nogomatch to something like:

Do you want to '''[[$1|create an article with that title?]]'''

Klaus


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Phroziac

subject: [WikiEN-l] Vandalism concerns with commons images

body:
On 9/14/05, Anthony DiPierro <wikispam at inbox.org> wrote:
> I think Ryan makes good points, but I think the real problem is that
> becoming an admin is too difficult in the first place. Whether it's making
> 5000 edits on EN or 500 edits on the commons, these are unnecessary
> requirements. Adminship should be granted to anyone who can be trusted not
> to screw things up, and the number of edits has no direct relevance on that
> point.
I got adminship with 3 months and 1070 edits (at the start) on
english. I finished the rfa with around 1158. That really isn't as
much as alot of people would lead you to believe. And yes, I did have
several opposers for the edit count, and one or two ones that i feel
had a good reason, not that I agreed with any of them, of course!


subject: [WikiEN-l] Why changing the deletion process is a bad idea

body:
First time I read that, I thought you said I made a bad and unhealthy
atmosphere. Bah. :D


from_name: Angela

body:
On 9/15/05, Anthony DiPierro <wikispam at inbox.org> wrote:
> That said, I think this thread is somewhat misdirected. This is really a
> Foundation issue. I suppose the Foundation isn't well enough organized to
> deal with it, though.

I don't think the ease of obtaining adminship needs to a core policy
which the Foundation would ever have any reason to impose upon the
projects. We don't even have globally agreed on written down
cross-wiki policies for many of the things which could be regarded as
core principles (policies like free licensing, NPOV, etc have been
developed on the English Wikipedia, and many others, but not all
Wikimedia projects, and it's increasingly becoming clear that not all
projects recognise these as being policies outside of the English
Wikipedia). I see this as an issue the global communities need to work
out, not something people should be waiting for the Board to impose.

Angela.


from_name: Terry Bader

subject: [WikiEN-l] User Pages

body:
Referring to this user page - User:Matt von Furrie; is his statement at the top of the page allowed on Wikipedia?  I thought all content was supposed to be at a minimum GDFL which includes user spaces?

New guy here, do not flame me too bad ;)

~Terry

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From: Dan Grey <dangrey at gmail.com>
To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Wrongly deleted articles
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On 14/09/05, Phroziac wrote:
> They're halfway decent stubs, but we really don't need a lot of one
> line articles, and we probably really didn't loose anything by
> deleting them.

Well, we lose the bits of information they do contain, and remember:
every article started out as a stub.

The flip side is: what do we gain by deleting them? Nothing, I contend.

Dan
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subject: [WikiEN-l] User Pages

body:
So being the noob, what guidance would you or the list give about this?  Should I just edit it?  I could post on his Talk page but I have a feeling he is not a "team" player as he has told another user I know to never post on "his" Talk page(s) (he has another user account as well).  I just think he is going to be difficult and not being verse in all that is wiki would rather ask here for guidance.

~Terry

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Terry Bader wrote:
> Referring to this user page - User:Matt von Furrie; is his statement
> at the top of the page allowed on Wikipedia? I thought all content
> was supposed to be at a minimum GDFL which includes user spaces?
>

Well, it was based on [[User:Halibutt]], which says "This content is
meaningful only on Wikipedia.org". [[User:Matt von Furrie]] says "This
content is restricted to Wikipedia.org", which is clearly not allowed.

--
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from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: Logo use not fair (was Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: Images on user pages)

body:
--- Michael Snow <wikipedia at earthlink.net> wrote:
> Illustrating the product is hardly a free ticket to fair use, even if
> that's what the images do here. I don't particularly buy that either;
> the images are logos that identify the user with the product, not actual
> illustrations of the product. Also, fair use arguments for user pages
> are a serious stretch. In most cases, the use has no relationship to the
> purposes enumerated in the Copyright Act (criticism, comment,
> scholarship, research, etc.).

IANAL but I have taken more than my fair share of business law classes. So
based on that, along with all the other experience I've gained while dealing
with copyright issues on Wikipedia, I have to say that I completely agree with
Michael on this point.

Our fair use argument for logos is only strong for the very limited use of
illustrating an article about the organization that owns trademark of the logo.
That is a very clear educational use and should survive a challenge to our fair
use claim. Having that same logo linked from thousands of user pages, however,
has no valid fair use claim that I can think of.

Unlike copyright, the holder of a trademark must take adequate measures to
protect that trademark (registered or not) in order to keep it. Therefore I
think these logos should be removed immediately from their templates.

-- mav

__________________________________________________
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Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
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from_name: Zephram Stark

subject: [WikiEN-l] re:Indefinite bans with no oversight

body:
On 9/14/05, Carbonite <carbonite.wp at gmail.com> wrote:

>Proof of your sockpuppets absolutely doesn't exist?
>Hmm...I must have misread this then:
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:David_Gerard#Sockpuppet_check_request
>Carbonite

Mr. Gerard's statements could not be considered proof, evidence, or even supported conjecture.  If Mr. Gerard did IP lookups for these editors, is there any reason why he can't post the results so that we can see the similarities (if any)?  Is there any reason why he can't show us the output of a proxycheck instead of alluding to open proxies?

I can think of one reason: total disclosure would not be loyal to the cause.  The faithfulness I see amongst administrators is important to the smooth operation of an association.  Yet historically, it has also been the breeding ground for corruption.  Exclusion is a sure warning sign that methods of punishment are forming and malfeasance is creeping into the system.  When it gets to the point that administrators like Jayjg and SlimVirgin don't even try to tie punishment back to any rule or standard of Wikipedia, we can know for certain that their actions are driving off good editors and contributors to this work.

At some point, the corruption becomes so blatant that it is impossible to get much of anything productive accomplished.  At that point, the system fails.  I hope you will not wait that long.  When there is ample evidence of two of your administrators using their power to bias the content of articles, it is time for them to relinquish that power.  Loyalty can include all Wikipedia editors when our editing power is equal.

Thank you for your consideration,
Zephram Stark (zephramstark at yahoo.com)
(432) 224-6991

---------------------------------
Yahoo! for Good
 Click here to donate to the Hurricane Katrina relief effort.


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Netocrat

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Re: Re: Re: Differential storage

body:
On Wed, 14 Sep 2005 13:19:49 -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:
> Netocrat wrote:
>> On Wed, 14 Sep 2005 14:22:42 +0100, Rowan Collins wrote:

>>>You can use the Special:Export page to export the complete histories
>>>of individual pages, so you could pick a few which seemed suitably
>>>representative and play with them.
>>
>> The complete history option doesn't have any affect on the articles I
>> tried on wikipedia although it works on my server - is it disabled?
>
> Yeah, that's temporarily disabled as it tends to die on very long pages
> and that was causing some problems. Needs some work...

OK, any other way to access a few revision histories short of manually
editing and copy-and-paste-ing each one?

--
http://members.dodo.com.au/~netocrat


from_name: Keith Old

body:
Geoff,

I realise that voters of Articles for Deletion need to sensitive to peoples
opinions when voting. Having said this, I would object rather strongly if an
admin closed a vote in Articles for Deletion on the grounds that a voter
referred to the subject as not being notable.

After all, one of the reasons for Speedy Deletion is that an article has not
established notability of the subject. As well, the main reason for keeping
an article is the belief that a user might find information on the subject
useful. In other words, the topic of the article is notable within a certain
field of study.

As for cruft, I never use the word myself as one man's cruft is another
man's interest. Having said this, I don't think an admin should close a vote
on such a trivial ground and I would support it being relisted as soon as
possible.

I think that we will always need an Articles of Deletion process and I think
that this system works as well as any could. It should aim to encourage as
much participation as possible so should be open to all users.

Regards

Keith
User Name: Capitalistroadster

On 9/15/05, Geoff Burling <llywrch at agora.rdrop.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 14 Sep 2005, JAY JG wrote:
>
> > >From: Snowspinner <Snowspinner at gmail.com>
> > >
> > >On Sep 14, 2005, at 12:09 PM, Phroziac wrote:
> > >
> > >>On 9/14/05, Snowspinner <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >>
> > >>>I would rather have an encyclopedia that has a truly staggering
> > >>>amount of information but that some people dismiss because it has
> > >>>some silly articles than a well-respected but heavily incomplete
> > >>>encyclopedia. If I wanted that, I'd just go to Britannica.
> > >>>
> > >>Isn't that exactly why we exist?
> > >>
> > >
> > >I always thought so.
> >
> > We exist to create a great encyclopedia. I don't see how an encyclopedia
>
> > filled with, as you put it, "silly articles", can ever be considered
> > "great".
> >
> I agree with Jay here (& I hope that doesn't surprise him too much ;).
>
> Consider Wikipedia is a form of publication: currently we have the
> lowest threshold I can imagine for acceptance of any publication. All
> you have to do is submit an article that contains information that is
> somehow useful. (Please ignore any need to define "useful" for the
> moment.)
>
> By establishing a threshold, we end up rejecting material -- for
> good or bad reasons -- which will inevitably result in hurt feelings.
> (That is why in the publishing world rejection slips are so impersonal.)
> Hurt feelings -- & the fact a certain percentage of submissions are
> simply dreadful, unusable or submitted as a joke -- result in the
> "toxic atmosphere" of the deletion process.
>
> And we can't rely on only a "Speedy Delete" process: there will always
> be cases that fall into the grey area, if for no other reason than the
> need for a second opinion. And, as Tony Sideway pointed out above, some
> items are incorrectly placed into CSD -- for whatever reason.
>
> The only solution to this is to COMPLETELY ABOLISH this threshold:
> either we have one or we don't have one. However, if we have no
> threshold, then we have to deal with unuseful articles full of gibberish,
> unfixable POV rants, hoaxes, & biographical entries that contain nothing
> more than a date of birth, details of education, & details of personality.
> Perhaps because we can somehow hide them in Wikipedia, we can argue that
> they aren't a problem -- but left unchecked, these unuseful articles
> will accumulate & grow into a problem.
>
> Although I believe we need a threshold for Wikipedia, we also should
> acknowledge that in most cases an article was submitted with the best
> of intentions: since we are knifing someone's baby, there is no need
> to express glee while doing so. It appears to me that there is a
> consensus that the words "cruft" & "notable" should not be used in AfD:
> would anyone object if I edit the opening page & explain that use of
> either of these words will result with the nomination being immediately
> closed as a Speedy Keep?
>
> Geoff
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Kelly Martin

body:
> Does it matter? So far, the only argument advanced to say that it does
> is that such entries damage Wikipedia's credibility. With Wikipedia
> now the most popular reference website in the world, I'd say that
> Wikipedia no longer has any credibility issues. There may still be
> some whiney critics around, but no-one is listening to them, clearly!

The counterargument to that is popularity doesn't imply credibility.
Wikipedia is still perceived to be noncredible by some people, who
cite (amongst other things) our large population of stubs and
otherwise incomplete articles.  However, I suspect that these people
will always find an excuse to hold Wikipedia in ill repute (do we
really care what Encyclopedia Britannica or Larry Sanger think of us),
and so trying to make them happy is probably pointless.

Kelly


from_name: dpbsmith at verizon.net

subject: [WikiEN-l] What's so bad about Comixpedia?

body:
I truly don't get it. I personally own a print set of the Encyclopedia
Britannica, 11th edition, as well as the current Britannica on CD. But I also
must own at least a dozen specialized "encyclopedias" that cover narrow
topics of interest to me in depth.

I thought that there was consensus that Wikipedia a) is an encyclopedia, and
b) is not "an indiscriminate collection of information." If so, Wikipedia has
bounds, set not by disk space, but by a shared vision of what should be in a
general-purpose encyclopedia.

What's so bad about dedicated organizations creating Wikipedia-like
encyclopedias devoted to in-depth coverage of narrower topics? How is this
different from Wikipedia breaking off "sister projects?"

As far as the end-user is concerned, if you want specialized knowledge of
webcomics it makes sense to go to Comixpedia. And if you do a Google search
on some relatively obscure webcomic that is in Comixpedia but not Wikipedia,
it will find it for you just as effectively as if it had been in Wikipedia.

This sounds like a Good Thing to me.

I mean, it's not like "I, my Wikipedia, am a jealous Wiki. Thou shalt have no
other Wikis." How do specialized Wiki-based encyclopedias hurt us in any way?


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Afd "votes" with no real reasons given

body:
It frosts me when people on EITHER side make short, curt, dismissive comments
in AfD that consist simply of a vote and a _generic_ remark, like "Delete, nn
website," or "Delete, [whatever]cruft," or "Keep, all [whatever] are
inherently notable," or "KEEP! Of course. Why would anyone want to delete
this?"

It's lazy, it's polarizing, and it tends to push AfD in the direction of
being a vote (bad) rather than consensus-building discussion (good).

(Equally bad are appeals to _fictitious_ precedents or vague assertions that
imply that concensus has been reached in areas where they have not).

People unwilling to take a few minutes to look seriously at an article and
make a real, open-minded assessment of _that particular article,_ have
nothing useful to contribute to the discussion and should refrain from
posting.

To cast votes based on one's like or dislike for _a particular topic area_ is
unhelpful.

And the accumulation of initialisms and jargon doesn't help either. For gosh
sakes... if someone can't spare the 3.5 seconds it takes to type out the word
"non-notable" in full, I have to question whether they've got enough time to
do a thoughtful assessment of the article.

Personally, I comment in about one in five of the AfD discussions that I read
through. If I were a better person than I am, it would be more like one in
twenty. If I don't have something to say that is useful in forming a group
opinion, I don't say it. (Well... actually... you know... I often do, anyway.
But I SHOULDN'T).


from_name: Ryan Delaney

body:
On 9/15/05, dpbsmith at verizon.net <dpbsmith at verizon.net> wrote:
>
> It frosts me when people on EITHER side make short, curt, dismissive
> comments
> in AfD that consist simply of a vote and a _generic_ remark, like "Delete,
> nn
> website," or "Delete, [whatever]cruft," or "Keep, all [whatever] are
> inherently notable," or "KEEP! Of course. Why would anyone want to delete
> this?"
>
> It's lazy, it's polarizing, and it tends to push AfD in the direction of
> being a vote (bad) rather than consensus-building discussion (good).

 Count the number of articles that go up to AFD every day, and ask yourself
if you think its reasonable that everyone write a paragraph - or even a
short explanation - on everything they vote for. Simply *voting* on
everything would take an hour a day at least. Demanding a detailed
explanation from every vote would only reduce the amount of communication
because people would stop voting.
 If you want to fix that, you either expand the CSD, so stuff that doesn't
need deliberation won't waste everyone's time, or you implement pure wiki
deletion, so this whole problem goes away entirely. Right now, if band and
business vanity, link spam, personal essays, and neologisms were all covered
by CSD (which they aren't), you could cut the amount of articles going up to
AFD by up to 1/3.
 - Ryan


subject: [WikiEN-l] Explaining nominations and votes on AFD

body:
On 9/15/05, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I would certainly support ignoring overly vague nominations or votes
> based on the category an article falls in rather than its individual
> merits.

 I don't think there is any way to do this without accusations that the
admin is picking and choosing what votes to count based on how he wants the
election to go. Besides, a person's opinion is just as valid, whether they
have time to explain it or not.
 - Ryan


list: commons-l

from_name: Felipe Micaroni Lalli

subject: [Commons-l] Re: Trademarks

body:
I agree.

14 Sep 2005 22:26:00 +0200, Claus F?rber
<claus at xn--frber-gra.muc.de<http://frber-gra.muc.de>
>:
>
> Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> schrieb/wrote:
> > The core goal of Commons is maximal reuse.
>
> Maximal reuse might result in minial content.
>
> I think every restriction should be evaluated to determine whether the
> image is still "free enough".
>
> With copyright, that's quite easy: Copyright restricts nearly every act
> of redistribution, so it makes sense to require that images and other
> media need to have a "free license".[1]
>
> On the other hand, trademarks only restricts labelling products with the
> image or impersonating the owner, i.e. "trademarkish" use. IMO(!),
> that's still "free enough".
>
> Further, there's a conflict if you include "trademarkish" use within the
> maximal reuse goal of Wikimedia: If someone really starts to use an
> image on Commons as a trademark, it's likely to become protected as a
> trademark (and incompatible with the maximal reuse goal).
>
> Finally, there are some practical problems with a strict no-trademark
> policy. As everything can be trademarked, you would have to do regular
> trademark searches with every trademark registry. You can't ask the
> author/source of an image (especially if it's PD or depicts something
> found in nature) and there are very few things that can't be trademarked
> (and virtually none the upload of which to Commons makes sense).
>
> > Commercial logos are frequently under _both_ trademark _and_
> > copyright.
>
> If it's also copyrighted (and not under a free license), the situation
> is clear: Wikimedia Commons can't host it.
>
> -------------------------------
> [1] You can argue what constitudes a "free" license. Some people
> consider no modification licenses free enough, some consider
> copyleft/share-alike/GNU licenses too restrictive.
>
> Claus
> --
> http://www.faerber.muc.de
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Commons-l mailing list
> Commons-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
>

--
um abra?o,
Felipe
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from_name: Michael Turley

body:
On 9/15/05, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
> It's not AFD that's failing. Any deletion system can be faulted by
> ignorance on the part of nominators and deleters. We need to have
> stricter rules about how people should behave when voting in deleting
> discussions, to lessen the hostile atmosphere when controversial
> articles come up.
>
> We need to address people's attitudes. Those are actually the cause of
> problems with deletion.

I just remembered something that I used to wonder about when I first
arrived on Wikipedia.  I think they're still valid questions:

Why isn't "Votes (now Articles) for Deletion" a subpage of "Request
for Comments"?
Why isn't "Articles for Deletion" instead "Request for Comments -
Proposed Deletion"?

Putting the deletion mechanism in an area where discussion and
comments are already the focus may help a bit.
--
Michael Turley
User:Unfocused


from_name: Dan Grey

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Vandalism concerns with commons images

body:
Really, if people have issues with how adminship is awarded on the
Commons, they should be taking it up on their Village pump. The WikiEN
list isn't really the right place.

Dan


body:
On 9/15/05, Alphax <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Link spam is already covered by CSD.

 It's only covered if the article is nothing but a link. Add some content,
and the article has to go to AFD.

Band vanity is covered by
> [[WP:MUSIC]]. Business vanity mostly turns out to be spam. Neologisms
> are unverifiable and violate [[WP:NOR]] and [[WP:NOT]], as do personal
> essays. Quite a few other things which go to AfD end up being
> transwikied as appropriate or turn out to be copyvios.

 None of that is a speedy. It all goes to AFD and it all wastes everyone's
time. There are certainly provisions for which those articles can be
deleted, but none of them can be speedy deleted. Period.
 - Ryan


body:
On 14/09/05, uninvited at nerstrand.net <uninvited at nerstrand.net> wrote:
> In an effort to start some serious discussion on this, I present
> herewith some pros and cons of granting some form of commons adminship
> to wikipedia admins (including en, de, fr, and possibly other large
> wikipedis).

No-one on this list has any influence over how adminship is awarded on
the Commons. You're best bet is taking these issues up on the Commons
Village pump.

Dan


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] Citation feature (update)

body:
I would like to remind everyone that my citation feature is still
sitting in extensions/Citation.php waiting to be turned on on the
wiki(p|m)edia projects. I just fixed a nasty display bug and hereby
declare it "production ready" (M$-grade only, of course;-)

Remark: I tried to add a <note> tag using the same sytem, which seems
straightforward enough, only to discover that the parsed replaces custom
tags ordered by tag/position, not position/tag. So, if I were to write
citation/note/citation, it gets numbered 1/3/2 instead of 1/2/3.
Therefore, I did not implement <note>, everything will have to go
through <citation>, prefferably via template, which allows for
{{note|text}}. That will have to suffice for now :-(

Magnus
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from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikitech-l] privacy policy

body:
Hi

It was decided a lonnnng time ago that we would
1) write a privacy policy
2) translate it
3) link it at the bottom of every page

I think it is best that the privacy policy page is
hosted only on the WMF to avoid alterations... which
would be problematic. So, could it be possible to add
now this link to the foundation website, where we will
link as many translated as possible ?

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Privacy_policy

Thanks

Ant

If there is a privacy policy, but no one knows about
it, it makes no sense...

__________________________________
Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005
http://mail.yahoo.com


from_name: Andrew Venier

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

>
> Speculation is not proof.  The "Guinness Book of World Records" has
> been consistent best seller in the past century, as was Joseph P.
> Haydn's "Dictionary of Dates" during the previous century.  Both
> contained an enormous amount of trivia.
>
Other consistent non-fiction best sellers of the past century include
Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People" and "The
Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook".  Being a bestseller does not make a
work instructive as to what an encyclopedia ought to contain.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Images on user pages

body:
--- Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:
> It's completely reasonable, but it's not necessarily a smart idea nor
> one our licensing scheme accomodates for. As it is, even User pages
> are included in our GFDL licensing

Now I think I understand where you are coming from. Correct me if I?m wrong,
but you think that having NC and special use images displayed on a page whose
text is licensed under the GNU FDL to be legally incompatible or even illegal.
This is not the case and is something that we hashed out many months ago and
confirmed with RMS. So while having these images for practical purposes makes
the whole document less reusable, the presence of the images is technically and
legally allowed under the aggregation clause of the GNU FDL (see 8.7 at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_License
).

Now by policy we want to make our encyclopedia as redistributable as possible
so we do not allow NC and special use images in the encyclopedia. That is
something I completely agree with and very strongly support. But the reason we
do that is *not* due to legal incompatibility with the FDL. So parts of
Wikipedia that are Wikipedia-specific need not follow the same rule and would
still be perfectly legal.

> They can be reused accordingly and often are.

Where has such use been intentional? I?ve only seen cases where a reuser also
publishes user pages just because they were included along with articles.

-- mav

__________________________________
Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005
http://mail.yahoo.com


from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

body:
<snip>
> Examples would be a perfect place to start.  There appear to be two
> main criticisms of AfD:
>
> 1. Unreliability.  This appears to be your point.
> 2. Bad and unhealthy atmosphere.
>
> I would appreciate (from anyone) evidence for either of these.
> Despite all the comments about AfD's foibles and failings, I
> personally have not seen them in action.
>
> These comments are not intended to be difficult.  I am just not
> currently certain why changes need to be made.
>
> Yours,
> Sam
It's not AFD that's failing. Any deletion system can be faulted by
ignorance on the part of nominators and deleters. We need to have
stricter rules about how people should behave when voting in deleting
discussions, to lessen the hostile atmosphere when controversial
articles come up.

We need to address people's attitudes. Those are actually the cause of
problems with deletion.

--Mgm


subject: [WikiEN-l] All information?

body:
On 9/15/05, Dan Grey <dangrey at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 15/09/05, dpbsmith at verizon.net <dpbsmith at verizon.net> wrote:
>
> > I thought that there was consensus that Wikipedia a) is an encyclopedia, and
> > b) is not "an indiscriminate collection of information."
>
> I must say, I'm sure I've read: "Imagine a world where every single
> person is given free access to the sum of human knowledge. We don't
> have to imagine it. We're doing it" attributed to Jimbo, and I have
> never squared that with "Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection
> of information."
>
> Personally, I don't mind indiscriminate information - that's what the
> whole world wide web is. Search engines like Google have made it their
> mission to make it usable, and I don't see why Wikipedia need be any
> different in our little web-within-the-web. (Tagging - which is what
> our categorisation could be seen as - seems to be the other approach,
> but as far as I can tell that's more hype than useful).

I do mind indiscriminate information.  I mind it very much.  However,
I find a large gap between "information" and "knowledge", so I don't
find the statements at all incongruent.  Just as there's a difference
between raw data and information, I see a similar gap between
information and knowledge, although strict dictionary definitions
don't show them quite as distinct.  My personal view is that data is
raw, information is data organized to become useful, and knowledge
implies an understanding of the information.

I do think that the mission of giving "free access to sum of human
knowledge" absolutely demands that we address far more topics than any
conventional encyclopedia has ever considered, even including a
proportional number of "silly" topics.

--
Michael Turley
User:Unfocused


body:
"Non-notable" in itself isn't a bad shorthand as long as its use is
explained in full by the nominator.

"Cruft" on the other hand seems to be (ab)used by people who don't
like the subject matter and is rarely explained with actual evidence
of hits, sources and other types of evidence. I wouldn't feel at all
hurt if "cruft" would be banned from AFD.

--Mgm


subject: [WikiEN-l] Article deletion

body:
On 9/14/05, SPUI <drspui at gmail.com> wrote:
> MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
> >
> > I always try to back up my vote with some point of policy or research
> > (see the photographer on AFD today). More people should base their
> > votes off facts instead of "Keep, X is good/encyclopedic/verifiable".
> > They should address the policy point that's being addressed. I.e "What
> > do you mean not-notable? They were the main guest on Oprah last week
> > and they have a top 100  Amazon sales rank." instead of "Writers are
> > notable".
>
> I believe that all state highways (at least in most states) are
> "notable", just as with state parks and such. Using any other argument
> that may apply to the current article on VFD just makes it more likely
> that someone will go and VFD a different one that doesn't match that
> argument.
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
If all highways are notable, surely there's an argument that goes for
all of them?


from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] Images on user pages

body:
On 9/15/05, Alphax <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> See Erik M?ller (Eloquence)'s recent post to Commons-l:
>
> http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/commons-l/2005-September/000077.html
>
> "Creative Commons -NC Considered Harmful"
>
> The page where he outlines why is:
>
> http://intelligentdesigns.net/Licenses/NC
>

seems to largle biol down to "you will not be compatible with current
major projects". Since CC is not compatible with GFDL that isn't
really andissue and the lack of compatibility has is own
advantages.~~~~

--
geni


body:
> Having a "bland" opinion doesn't mean that the opinion is incorrect.
>
> I think all schools are inherently notable.  I also think all US
> Presidents are inherently notable.  Both are "bland" opinions, neither
> deserves less respect than the other, but judgements about their
> correctness must be made independently.

Calling all US presidents notable can be backed up by the sheer amount
of written material on them and their profound effect on US history.

While I find education a noble thing, I don't see how that makes all
schools inherently notable and I've got no similar argument as with
presidents to back that up. The written material on schools is sparse
and often written by somone involved with the school itself, making
3rd party sources hard, if not impossible, to find. Hence, I'll look
at schools on a case by case basis.

Just a little more info to begin with would keep a lot schools out of
AFD. If the original creator added some piece of info (Famous alumni,
first school to..., or location of ...) to an otherwise common article
with basic info it would satisfy a lot of "deletionists" with regard
to notability.

I would certainly support ignoring overly vague nominations or votes
based on the category an article falls in rather than its individual
merits.

--Mgm


from_name: Mark Gallagher

body:
G'day Geoff,
<snip />
> Although I believe we need a threshold for Wikipedia, we also should
> acknowledge that in most cases an article was submitted with the best
> of intentions: since we are knifing someone's baby, there is no need
> to express glee while doing so. It appears to me that there is a
> consensus that the words "cruft" & "notable" should not be used in AfD:
> would anyone object if I edit the opening page & explain that use of
> either of these words will result with the nomination being immediately
> closed as a Speedy Keep?

*Yes*.  "Notable" is an important shorthand, and much less likely to
cause offence than the other AfD tragic favourite "vanity".

"Cruft", well, I'm ambivalent.  On the one hand, those who dislike the
word "cruft" seem to be those who dislike the *removal* of cruft.  On
the other, if one were to take an inclusionist POV then merely disliking
the removal of obvious cruft is not in itself a Bad Thing.  Blast it.  I
guess "kipple" is out of bounds, too?

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

--
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body:
> We need to address people's attitudes. Those are actually the cause of
> problems with deletion.
>
> --Mgm

it would probably simpeler to chnage the people.

--
geni


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: James R. Johnson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Anglo-Saxon Wikipedia

body:
Hi all,

            The Anglo-Saxon Wikipedia, with the article "Staer Floridan"
(History of Florida) just passed the 500 article mark.

http://ang.wikipedia.org <http://ang.wikipedia.org/>

James


body:
G'day Sam,
<snip />
> There appear to be two
> main criticisms of AfD:
>
> 1. Unreliability.  This appears to be your point.
> 2. Bad and unhealthy atmosphere.
>
> I would appreciate (from anyone) evidence for either of these.
> Despite all the comments about AfD's foibles and failings, I
> personally have not seen them in action.

Actually, Snowspinner provided an example of '1' to start the thread
(well, one of the threads): /Elf-Only Inn/.  As a webcomics fan myself
(although I don't like or read /Elf-Only Inn/ itself), I can certainly
see his point[0].

Recently, there were a couple of rather ignorant postings to AfD
(might've been VfD at the time, actually) about Australian issues.  They
were roundly defeated, though, so I don't know if that counts.

As for '2', well, Phroziac posted what he felt was evidence of a "bad
and unhealthy atmosphere" early on, as well.

[0] And I'm hanging out for the time when Tycho and Gabe get their own
     entries on en-WP.  That would obviously be cruft, but I'd like to
     hear those who want minor characters from movies to have pages to
     explain *why* major characters from /Penny Arcade/ don't belong.

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

--
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list: foundation-l

from_name: Poe, Marshall

subject: [Foundation-l] New Proposal: WikiMemory

body:
Dear Friends:

I've proposed a new wiki--Wikimemory (or Wikimemoir, or IWasThereWiki,
or something better).  It's logged in the Meta section on new proposals.
Here's the pitch:

The idea is to provide a place where anyone can record his or her
memoirs of historically significant events. Most everyone has
participated in such occurrences. Take, for example, the hundreds of
thousands who were affected the recent tragedy in New Orleans.
Unfortunately, there is no repository for the storage of the memories of
such people. Their experiences can neither be shared with others today
(I, for one, would like to read first-hand accounts of the New Orleans
floods), and they will be lost to history tomorrow. In ten, one hundred
or one thousand years, the memoirs of those "who were there" will be
very valuable. Wikimemory will, I hope, allow people all over the world
to record their experiences, share them with others, and pass them to
the future. I've created a mock-up of the site at
http://memoirbank.com/.

A nice tag line for the site: "Everyone has a story. Make yours
history."

I'd love to hear what you think.

Best,

Marshall Poe, Ph.D.
The Atlantic Monthly
600 New Hampshire Ave. NW
Washington, DC 20037
202-266-6511
mpoe at theatlantic.com


list: wikimedia-l

subject: [Foundation-l] New Proposal: WikiMemory


body:
G'day Anthony,

> I think Ryan makes good points, but I think the real problem is that
> becoming an admin is too difficult in the first place. Whether it's making
> 5000 edits on EN or 500 edits on the commons, these are unnecessary
> requirements. Adminship should be granted to anyone who can be trusted not
> to screw things up, and the number of edits has no direct relevance on that
> point.
>
> The fact that "adminship should be no big deal" should be a Wikimedia rule,
> at the foundation level. While the individual projects should have some
> leeway in enacting this rule (at least until the projects are better
> merged), I find it hard to see how someone who is an admin on the EN project
> could be denied adminship in the commons project. The reverse is probably
> also true, but I don't know enough about how hard/easy it is to get
> adminship on the commons.

I think if people could be de-adminned for obvious abuses (say,
unblocking themselves) without going through ArbComm, we'd see the bar
lowered significantly for adminship.  Nobody wants to risk creating a
rogue (or even rouge) admin.

<snip />

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

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from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Foundation-l] New Proposal: WikiMemory

body:
--- "Poe, Marshall" <MPoe at theatlantic.com> wrote:

> Dear Friends:
>
> I've proposed a new wiki--Wikimemory (or Wikimemoir, or IWasThereWiki,
> or something better).  It's logged in the Meta section on new proposals.
> Here's the pitch:
>
> The idea is to provide a place where anyone can record his or her
> memoirs of historically significant events. Most everyone has
> participated in such occurrences. Take, for example, the hundreds of
> thousands who were affected the recent tragedy in New Orleans.
> Unfortunately, there is no repository for the storage of the memories of
> such people. Their experiences can neither be shared with others today
> (I, for one, would like to read first-hand accounts of the New Orleans
> floods), and they will be lost to history tomorrow. In ten, one hundred
> or one thousand years, the memoirs of those "who were there" will be
> very valuable. Wikimemory will, I hope, allow people all over the world
> to record their experiences, share them with others, and pass them to
> the future. I've created a mock-up of the site at
> http://memoirbank.com/.
>
> A nice tag line for the site: "Everyone has a story. Make yours
> history."
>
> I'd love to hear what you think.

Interesting idea. Recording personal experiences from historically significant
events could be rolled into the genealogy and memorial project idea known as
Wikimorial/Wikipeople. Basically, the idea is to create entries on people (yep
- any person) and have those organized in family trees and event-specific
memorials where appropriate. To be really effective though, the WikiData
extension of the MediaWiki software needs to exist first.

See
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipeople
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimorial

-- mav

__________________________________
Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005
http://mail.yahoo.com


subject: [Foundation-l] New Proposal: WikiMemory


from_name: JAY JG

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Wrongly deleted articles from AfD: List of power
	ballads

body:
>From: "Tony Sidaway" <minorityreport at bluebottle.com>
>
>MacGyverMagic/Mgm writes:
>
>
>"Is there any article that was wrongly deleted within
>the past 3 days as a result of ignorance of the nominator or sheep
>voting by others without check the article and possible sources?"
>
>
>
>Sorry, that was my fault.  I wasn't following the discussion properly and
>thought it was about speedies.  My apologies for dragging us briefly (if
>entertainingly, at least for me) up the wrong trouser leg.
>
>
>Your timescale for this is a little short, but never mind.  Let's take a
>look at the deletion log, this time only AfD deletes.
>
>
>Well it was hard searching, because of the way in which the AfD link gets
>screwed when an article is deleted.  So I stopped when I reached the first
>deletion that I think is rather dodgy.
>
>
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/List_of_power_ballads

The example you have given seems to have been perfectly in order; the
reasons given for deletion are reasonable and policy driven.

Jay.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wrongly deleted articles

body:
On 14/09/05, Phroziac <phroziac at gmail.com> wrote:
> They're halfway decent stubs, but we really don't need a lot of one
> line articles, and we probably really didn't loose anything by
> deleting them.

Well, we lose the bits of information they do contain, and remember:
every article started out as a stub.

The flip side is: what do we gain by deleting them? Nothing, I contend.

Dan


subject: [WikiEN-l] That's a Micropaedia

body:
--- dpbsmith at verizon.net wrote:
> "Article intros that can fit into the first screen." Oh, absolutely, by all
> means.
>
> (Now, the Micropaedia is about a third of the Britannica's total content. And
> a Micropaedia article is typically about, well, one screen. So, OK if someone
> wants to suggest that an appropriate balance for Wikipedia is for about a
> third of its content to be one-screen articles, OK).

I know the above is a rant, but would like to bring home this point:
*Articles can and should serve those seeking either a micropedia or
macropedia-sized article. The way this is done is through the use of lead
sections (aka intros or section 0) that concisely summarizes the most important
points of the whole article. Most of the time this should be done with three
paragraphs or less but all the time these intros should be able to stand alone
as concise encyclopedia articles in their own right.

In fact it would be real neat to take the section 0 of selected articles to
nearly-automatically generate a concise encyclopedia either for print (as a
desk reference) or for mobile devices.

See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lead_section
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Summary_style

-- mav

__________________________________
Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005
http://mail.yahoo.com


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Differential storage

body:
Netocrat wrote:
> On Wed, 14 Sep 2005 13:19:49 -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:
>
>>Netocrat wrote:
>>
>>>On Wed, 14 Sep 2005 14:22:42 +0100, Rowan Collins wrote:
>
>
>>>>You can use the Special:Export page to export the complete histories
>>>>of individual pages, so you could pick a few which seemed suitably
>>>>representative and play with them.
>>>
>>>The complete history option doesn't have any affect on the articles I
>>>tried on wikipedia although it works on my server - is it disabled?
>>
>>Yeah, that's temporarily disabled as it tends to die on very long pages
>>and that was causing some problems. Needs some work...
>
>
> OK, any other way to access a few revision histories short of manually
> editing and copy-and-paste-ing each one?
>

You can have my test set if you like. I put it at

http://wikimedia.org/junk/history_expt.tar.bz2

It's 7.5 MB. I used that test set for the proof of principle detailed at

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/History_compression

Once I had a working implementation within MediaWiki, I downloaded the
full dump for ca.wikipedia.org, which was about 40 MB. I had a 56K modem
at the time too, so that's no excuse. It's no big deal that it's not in
English, you can still tell if it's working.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Mark Bergsma

subject: [Wikitech-l] Yahoo cluster entering production

body:
In the past few days, we have set up a few Squid servers on the newly
installed Yahoo! cluster in Seoul, South Korea. They have started
serving requests from several Asian countries last night, as can be seen
on http://noc.wikimedia.org/stats.php

(yellow = yahoo, blue = florida, green = amsterdam, purple = paris)

Work is underway to experiment with using the remaining boxes in the
Yahoo cluster as apache/mediawiki application servers, to offload the
Florida cluster and make things more redundant. As this will create many
complex problems and management overhead, we are not sure if and when
that situation will be used in production.

--
Mark

mark at nedworks.org


body:
On 9/15/05, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> > We need to address people's attitudes. Those are actually the cause of
> > problems with deletion.
> >
> > --Mgm
>
> it would probably simpeler to chnage the people.
>
> --
> geni
>
No one said it was going to be simple.


from_name: Fastfission

subject: [WikiEN-l] Site search

body:
I don't know enough about the algorithm Google uses to make this call.

There are various meta tags you can add to a page which will make
Google behave differently to it. Noindex makes it so that Google won't
index a page; noarchive means it won't archive it in the Google cache;
and nofollow means it won't follow any of the links on the page.

The problem is I'm not sure if they are mutually exclusive. Will a
noindex automatically noarchive? Probably. But will a noindex
automatically nofollow? I don't know. We would want them to follow --
that is, we want them to know that the redirect term links up with
that specific page -- but we wouldn't want them to index.

But if noindex also implies a nofollow, then it wouldn't be worth
doing -- not so much because it would hurt our Google pagerank, but
more because it would not help people find the articles they were
looking for, potentially. Again, it's hard to know how these things
would affect things without experimentation.

Either way, it's not a crucial, needs-to-be-decidedly-immediately
issue. It's a tiny piece of potential inelegance in a project which is
often defined by its inelegance. ;-)

FF

On 9/14/05, Pawe? Dembowski <fallout at lexx.eu.org> wrote:
> > Google indexes redirect pages? Could something be added to the code of
> > redirect pages to tell the search engine spiders to skip over them?
> > Would this make searching for pages on Wiki through google work
> > better?
>
> Not really, it would give us less google hits. It would be better if
> Google indexed redirect pages and the target page as one page.
>
> --
> Ausir
> Wikipedia, wolna encyklopedia
> http://pl.wikipedia.org
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Article deletion

body:
On 14/09/05, Sam Korn <smoddy at gmail.com> wrote:
> PWDS encourages revert warring.  Do you really, honestly, think that
> is a  good thing?

I balance this against the benefit of ending AfD. Personally, I judge
the benefits of PWDS to far outweigh the downsides.

Of course, others will disagree. And we probably will never get rid of
AfD without consensus, which we'll never get, as plenty of people
think AfD is perfect. So this conversation is probably pointless :-).

Dan

PS Someone also mentioned rc patrolling: as I've said before, I don't
see how PWDS would be a hinderance. Unless someone as made a
well-reasoned justification for the blanking on the Talk page and
signposted that in the edit summary, revert.


from_name: steve v

subject: [WikiEN-l] Notes pages idea

body:
 (This is related to the proper size of
 articles/intros discussion)

As a compromise between the deletionists and the
inclusionist factions, perhaps a stub article could
first go through a simple "notes page" stage.

This would have a simple template on the article
itself, saying

"This article is in an embryonic [[notes]] stage,
where notes are being compiled. You can add to
[[/notes|these notes]], or bring bring the article to
the [[WP:STUB|fetal]] level."

The notes thing could work like the {{todo}} works, by
dumping text from the notes into a frame on the
article.

SV

__________________________________
Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005
http://mail.yahoo.com


subject: [WikiEN-l] Images on user pages

body:
On 9/14/05, Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> It is still perfectly reasonable for a person to naturally want to show an
> image of themselves or other Wikipedias at say a WikiMeet without having to
> release those images under a license that would allow for extensive reuse. Out
> of respect to users, who contribute without pay and just for the fun of it, we
> have always been a bit lax on what users do with their user pages.

It's completely reasonable, but it's not necessarily a smart idea nor
one our licensing scheme accomodates for. As it is, even User pages
are included in our GFDL licensing. They can be reused accordingly and
often are. I think we should either formally carve out a specialized
niche for them as something distinct from the article namespace or
not. Having them be an unspecified informal zone seems like bad policy
for me, because it encourages an idea about "personal space" which is
not currently covered by any of our official or legal policies.

I wholly support any approach that would keep User pages either out of
the GFDL or out of our database ports, to be honest, though I'm not
completely aware of what that would entail in terms of licensing
requirements or technical ones.

> Forbidding such images for no practical reason smacks of fascism to me. So once
> the technical issue I mentioned is fixed, I see no valid reason for us to not
> be more permissive on image licensing in the user namespace (within the limits
> of WP:NOT a personal web page provider)

Well I assure you there is no attempt at fascism here and I'm not
quite sure I see the correlation with what I've asked and the
political systems of Mussolini, Franco, or Hitler, except for the
whole making the trains run on time bit, which I guess I'm somewhat
inclined towards in my mannerisms. ;-)

FF


subject: [WikiEN-l] Indefinite Bans with No Oversight

body:
A number of people seem to be missing the distinction
between a "block" and a "ban."

Any sysop may impose a block, but those blocks --even
if they hold up indefinitely -- are never "bans."

SV

--- Snowspinner <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:

> As a general note, regardless of the rightness or
> wrongness of a ban,
> nobody who says""This
> place is a joke. It's too bad, because it had
> possibilities before
> all you fucking Jews came along ..." will ever
> actually strike me as
> worth the effort of loading the webpage to unblock
> them. Which I
> think remains the best test for a ban against
> policy. If nobody cares
> enough to fix it, it must have been right.
>
> -Snowspinner
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

__________________________________
Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005
http://mail.yahoo.com


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Images on user pages

body:
"don't speculate on legal
> matters unless and until
> you've learned more about them."

Whats to know? Executive power effectively trumps all,
until the 30 year FOIA statute kicks in, when those
accountable are already history.

And any disputes between competing social
jurisdictions are settled by force of arms, repression
of liberties, and checkbook imperialism. Am I missing
something?

SV
Rock, paper, scissors

--- Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:

> Alphax wrote:
> > Well, the Firefox and Wikipedia logos are both
> copyrighted and
> > trademarked. Recreating them from scratch would at
> least solve the first
> > issue.
>
> That's just wrong.  Recreating them from scratch
> would not solve the
> first issue at all.
>
> That's like saying that if I type in all of a Harry
> Potter book from
> scratch, it's no longer copyrighted.
>
> Please, I ask people, don't speculate on legal
> matters unless and until
> you've learned more about them.
>
> --Jimbo
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

__________________________________________________
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http://mail.yahoo.com


body:
On 15/09/05, Alphax <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> Mark Gallagher wrote:
> <snip>
> > Actually, Snowspinner provided an example of '1' to start the thread
> > (well, one of the threads): /Elf-Only Inn/.  As a webcomics fan myself
> > (although I don't like or read /Elf-Only Inn/ itself), I can certainly
> > see his point[0].
> <snip>
> > [0] And I'm hanging out for the time when Tycho and Gabe get their own
> >     entries on en-WP.  That would obviously be cruft, but I'd like to
> >     hear those who want minor characters from movies to have pages to
> >     explain *why* major characters from /Penny Arcade/ don't belong.
> >
>
> It's about how much can be written on the subject of the article.
> Seriously, how much needs to be written about a minor (or even major)
> character in a movie, if they are known for nothing outside of that
> movie, and the portrayal of the character in the movie was unremarkable?

Does it matter? So far, the only argument advanced to say that it does
is that such entries damage Wikipedia's credibility. With Wikipedia
now the most popular reference website in the world, I'd say that
Wikipedia no longer has any credibility issues. There may still be
some whiney critics around, but no-one is listening to them, clearly!

Dan


subject: [WikiEN-l] Images on user pages

body:
--- Michael Turley <michael.turley at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/15/05, Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I don't have proof, but I suspect they're intentionally reused in
> articles.  Because people see them on Wikipedia, they think that the
> images must be OK for use in Wikipedia articles.  I strongly suspect
> this because I almost did so myself.  Had I not decided to
> double-check the license, I would have.  Many others won't
> double-check the license before referencing images in the article
> space.

Why the hell would anybody want to use an image from a user page in an article?
The images I?ve been talking about are of Wikipedians. Having images on user
pages that could validly be used in articles in not something I support at all
since Wikipedia is not a web page provider. Perhaps we have been talking past
each other on this point.

-- mav

__________________________________
Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005
http://mail.yahoo.com


from_name: dpbsmith at verizon.net

subject: [WikiEN-l] That's a Micropaedia

body:
From: "Tony Sidaway" <minorityreport at bluebottle.com>

>Actually on "one-line articles", my preference
>is for articles (or at least article intros)
>that can fit into the first screen. This is an
>internet encyclopedia and if you can't say
>something useful in the first
>paragraph then the reader will wander off
>to another site.  If an article
>can be written well as a single sentence,
>I think that's a good
>thing--indeed an ideal to aim for.

"Article intros that can fit into the first screen." Oh, absolutely, by all
means.

Now I'm going to pretend that I didn't read that key qualification and tear
off onto a rant.

ARTICLES that can fit into one screen? No, no, no. That's not an
encyclopedia, that's the Britannica MICROpaedia.

An encyclopedia is not about data, it's about knowledge.

An encyclopedia's job is to make knowledge _accessible_. An encyclopedia
explains. An encyclopedia _instructs_. That's what the "-pedia" part is all
about. An encyclopedia is supposed to synthesize and make sense of topics.

Why on earth does my public library's reference room even have an
encyclopedia in it? (Several, in fact).

Why would anyone look up something in a twenty-volume encyclopedia when the
library as a whole contains fifteen hundred times as many volumes? There
probably isn't a single topic in the encyclopedia that isn't better dealt
with in some standalone book. And it's just as easy for me to find that book
in the library's computerized catalog as it is for me to open the
encyclopedia's index.

So why do I use the library's encyclopedia?

Because the encyclopedia is selective, and because it synthesizes. Because
when I don't want to read all the way through a 1,000 page book about the
Bounty mutineers, it tells me about as much as I need and want to know.

Also, I know that the encyclopedia is going to present some broadly accepted
mainstream view of the Bounty mutiny. If I just go to the history shelves,
unless I first spend some time looking up book reviews, I won't know whether
I'm reading a "standard" account or whether it's some kind of revisionist
account with an axe to grind.

After I get _oriented_ by reading an encyclopedia article on the Bounty, or
quadratic equations, or the history of jazz, then I'm ready to move on to the
rest of the library.

(Now, the Micropaedia is about a third of the Britannica's total content. And
a Micropaedia article is typically about, well, one screen. So, OK if someone
wants to suggest that an appropriate balance for Wikipedia is for about a
third of its content to be one-screen articles, OK).


from_name: Neil Harris

body:
dpbsmith at verizon.net wrote:

>I truly don't get it. I personally own a print set of the Encyclopedia
>Britannica, 11th edition, as well as the current Britannica on CD. But I also
>must own at least a dozen specialized "encyclopedias" that cover narrow
>topics of interest to me in depth.
>
>I thought that there was consensus that Wikipedia a) is an encyclopedia, and
>b) is not "an indiscriminate collection of information." If so, Wikipedia has
>bounds, set not by disk space, but by a shared vision of what should be in a
>general-purpose encyclopedia.
>
>What's so bad about dedicated organizations creating Wikipedia-like
>encyclopedias devoted to in-depth coverage of narrower topics? How is this
>different from Wikipedia breaking off "sister projects?"
>
>As far as the end-user is concerned, if you want specialized knowledge of
>webcomics it makes sense to go to Comixpedia. And if you do a Google search
>on some relatively obscure webcomic that is in Comixpedia but not Wikipedia,
>it will find it for you just as effectively as if it had been in Wikipedia.
>
>This sounds like a Good Thing to me.
>
>I mean, it's not like "I, my Wikipedia, am a jealous Wiki. Thou shalt have no
>other Wikis." How do specialized Wiki-based encyclopedias hurt us in any way?
>
>
>
Not in the least, if they are GFDL'd, as their more notable and
encyclopedic material can be beamed up to the mothership in due course.

-- Neil


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Images on user pages

body:
Alphax wrote:
> Well, the Firefox and Wikipedia logos are both copyrighted and
> trademarked. Recreating them from scratch would at least solve the first
> issue.

That's just wrong.  Recreating them from scratch would not solve the
first issue at all.

That's like saying that if I type in all of a Harry Potter book from
scratch, it's no longer copyrighted.

Please, I ask people, don't speculate on legal matters unless and until
you've learned more about them.

--Jimbo


from_name: Phroziac

subject: [WikiEN-l] Seals and Commons

body:
On 9/15/05, Alphax <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> I thought all admins got a mop, a bucket, and an M16!

The M16 is *part of the mop*. This is why it's a sacred mop, not just a mop..


from_name: Dan Grey

subject: [WikiEN-l] All information?

body:
On 15/09/05, dpbsmith at verizon.net <dpbsmith at verizon.net> wrote:

> I thought that there was consensus that Wikipedia a) is an encyclopedia, and
> b) is not "an indiscriminate collection of information."

I must say, I'm sure I've read: "Imagine a world where every single
person is given free access to the sum of human knowledge. We don't
have to imagine it. We're doing it" attributed to Jimbo, and I have
never squared that with "Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection
of information."

Personally, I don't mind indiscriminate information - that's what the
whole world wide web is. Search engines like Google have made it their
mission to make it usable, and I don't see why Wikipedia need be any
different in our little web-within-the-web. (Tagging - which is what
our categorisation could be seen as - seems to be the other approach,
but as far as I can tell that's more hype than useful).

Dan


subject: [WikiEN-l] Seals and Commons

body:
Fastfission wrote:
> Of course, when I raise things like this on Commons, I seem to incite
> a lot of ire from people who want to pick nits about whether or not
> its usage is limited because of its *copyright* or because of federal
> laws.

Commons ought to be extremely conservative and cautious about what to
accept.  It is more important that Commons be free, than that it be
comprehensive in every last detail.

Delete it.

> Any ideas? I tend to think that any image with this sort of legal
> restriction does NOT qualify as "free" in the sense required by
> Commons and is antithetical to its purpose -- to provide a repository
> of "free" images.

Absolutely agreed.

--Jimbo


from_name: Michael Turley

subject: [WikiEN-l] Images on user pages

body:
On 9/15/05, Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:

> > They can be reused accordingly and often are.
>
> Where has such use been intentional? I've only seen cases where a reuser also
> publishes user pages just because they were included along with articles.

I don't have proof, but I suspect they're intentionally reused in
articles.  Because people see them on Wikipedia, they think that the
images must be OK for use in Wikipedia articles.  I strongly suspect
this because I almost did so myself.  Had I not decided to
double-check the license, I would have.  Many others won't
double-check the license before referencing images in the article
space.

Also, consider that many articles are developed in user subpages.
This is another reason why we should be consistent with all licenses
all throughout Wikipedia.

--
Michael Turley
User:Unfocused


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wrongly deleted articles

body:
On 9/15/05, Dan Grey <dangrey at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 14/09/05, Phroziac <phroziac at gmail.com> wrote:
> > They're halfway decent stubs, but we really don't need a lot of one
> > line articles, and we probably really didn't loose anything by
> > deleting them.
>
> Well, we lose the bits of information they do contain, and remember:
> every article started out as a stub.
>

there are a lot of ftse indexs with the exception of couple of them
merging them into one article would be the sensible thing to do.

as for you second claim

[[Joseph Ruttenberg]]

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] All information?

body:
On 9/15/05, Dan Grey <dangrey at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 15/09/05, dpbsmith at verizon.net <dpbsmith at verizon.net> wrote:
>
> > I thought that there was consensus that Wikipedia a) is an encyclopedia, and
> > b) is not "an indiscriminate collection of information."
>
> I must say, I'm sure I've read: "Imagine a world where every single
> person is given free access to the sum of human knowledge. We don't
> have to imagine it. We're doing it" attributed to Jimbo, and I have
> never squared that with "Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection
> of information."
>
> Personally, I don't mind indiscriminate information - that's what the
> whole world wide web is. Search engines like Google have made it their
> mission to make it usable, and I don't see why Wikipedia need be any
> different in our little web-within-the-web. (Tagging - which is what
> our categorisation could be seen as - seems to be the other approach,
> but as far as I can tell that's more hype than useful).
>
>
> Dan
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

You must know how much rubbish google searches tend to bring them all
up. You also appear to have forgotten that there is more than one
wikimedia project.

--
geni


body:
On 9/15/05, Alphax <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> Ryan Delaney wrote:
> > Right now, if band and business vanity...
>
> ...Business vanity mostly turns out to be spam...

Please excuse all the cutting, but this is a personal irritant that I
find very hard to ignore.  Vanity doesn't apply to businesses.
Businesses are either important, influential, recognizable or
otherwise worthy of writing an article about them, or they aren't.

--
Michael Turley
User:Unfocused


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] fr, nl, ja wikipedias locked

body:
A combination of a couple configuration errors during restoration of one
of our database servers may have corrupted data on the French, Dutch,
and Japanese wikipedias, sending updates to the wrong server during at
least some portion of the last 24 hours.

I've temporarily locked these three wikis while we work it out.

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

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Site search

body:
Pawe? Dembowski wrote:
>>Google indexes redirect pages? Could something be added to the code of
>>redirect pages to tell the search engine spiders to skip over them?
>>Would this make searching for pages on Wiki through google work
>>better?
>
> Not really, it would give us less google hits. It would be better if
> Google indexed redirect pages and the target page as one page.

And it would, if the redirects were actual proper HTTP redirects. But
people don't want to implement this because it would lose the
"Redirected from <otherpagetitle>" message.


body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> A combination of a couple configuration errors during restoration of one
> of our database servers may have corrupted data on the French, Dutch,
> and Japanese wikipedias, sending updates to the wrong server during at
> least some portion of the last 24 hours.
>
> I've temporarily locked these three wikis while we work it out.

About 11 hours of updates (from 11:20 to 22:08 UTC) were sent to the
wrong server on these three wikis. It appears to have been consistent
site-wide so there should be no data loss; we just need to move the data
back to the master server and things should be back to normal.

I'm currently backing up all the data on these wikis in preparation for
the data move; they should be back online within a few hours with no
data lost.

Details:

MySQL has a 'read-only' mode which we enable on our replicated slave
servers to protect against misconfigurations where data might be sent to
the wrong server. In the rush to get one of our two main servers back
online after a disk failure last week, this switch was left out when it
was brought online.

A subsequent typo in configuration left three wikis sending updates to
that server instead of the primary master, so there were strange
inconsistencies depending on whether the false 'master' or one of the
regular slave servers was read from. This was manifested as weird edit
conflict problems, inconsistent history, etc.

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

subject: [WikiEN-l] Article deletion

body:
MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
>
> If all highways are notable, surely there's an argument that goes for
> all of them?

Yeah, that they're designated by the state and de facto "notable".


from_name: Christof Damian

subject: [Wikitech-l] new version of my mediawiki calendar extension

body:
I have uploaded a new version of my mediawiki calendar
extension. I implemented some things people requested:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Cdamian/calendar

I fixed some bugs with the "format" option. There are new options to
set the date of the calendar and new views to show one or more
days. Some examples:

== work next week ==
<calendar>
date="next monday"
view=days
days=5
</calendar>

== christmas this year ==
<calendar>
day=23
month=12
view=days
days=4
</calendar>

Some options are redundant now. I might remove them at one point.

Some stuff that is missing:
- doesn't use the users timezone
- some strings and date formats are hardcoded at the moment

i hope you find it useful anyway,
christof
--
Christof Damian
christof at damian.net


from_name: Tony Sidaway

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wrongly deleted articles from AfD: List of power ballads

body:
MacGyverMagic/Mgm writes:

"Is there any article that was wrongly deleted within
the past 3 days as a result of ignorance of the nominator or sheep
voting by others without check the article and possible sources?"

Sorry, that was my fault.  I wasn't following the discussion properly and
thought it was about speedies.  My apologies for dragging us briefly (if
entertainingly, at least for me) up the wrong trouser leg.

Your timescale for this is a little short, but never mind.  Let's take a
look at the deletion log, this time only AfD deletes.

Well it was hard searching, because of the way in which the AfD link gets
screwed when an article is deleted.  So I stopped when I reached the first
deletion that I think is rather dodgy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/List_of_power_ballads

Now I hate those bloated, overdramatic monstrosities that are known as
power ballads, but I cannot deny the encyclopedic value of having a list
of them.    The genre is well known, and is well described in the
introduction: "a slow, quiet intro, and a gradual build to a dramatic
climax, often followed by a quiet outro.   String arrangements and even
full orchestration are not uncommon. Lyrical themes tend toward romantic
yearning, loss, pain or introspection."

The article was listed for deletion on the following premise:
"Unmaintainable list. There are obviously thousands of power ballads."

Say what?  The name of the article is "list of power ballads", not list of
every single power ballad ever written."  In fact I estimate that the
article must have contained the name and artist details of about 400-500
songs.  A valuable resource for a musicologist looking for source material
for his thesis.

Reasons for deletion given by delete voters were:

"there is no pinpointed criteria to the nomenclature".  True, but life is
full of fuzzy categories.  Normal editing and dispute resolution processes
can be used to resolve ambiguities and differences of opinion.

"useless and unmaintainable list " Well useless to ''most'' people.  But I
find it useful if only because it gives me a list of artists and albums to
steer clear of.  The claim that it's unmaintainable is contradicted by the
fact that it ''had'' been maintained, lovingly, with almost daily edits,
by several editors, ever since its creation in April.

"Kinda hopelessly POV... What is a power ballad? Is "The Time Has Come
(Pikachu's Goodbye)" a power ballad? Pika-Pika?! CHHHUUUUUU!!!! GMAFB"
Perhaps it is!  Why didn't he just discuss the question on the talk page?
A neutral choice can be made by discussion.  This is how Wikipedia works.

"the scope of the list is much, much broader than outlined by the power
ballad article (which is in line with the I Love the 80s definition, for
instance). I'd say cleanup, but if it's gotten this far it may be
unsalvageable/unmaintainable."  If true, this is a good reason for bold
editing, not radical amputation.  However the Power ballad article does
admit of the wider definition, though it claims this is less common.
Personally I'd be inclined to identify the power ballad as the mutant
offspring of soft rock and torch song, and I'd have no hesitation in
classing the works of Heart (1987, Alone) and Bonnie Tyler (1982, Total
Eclipse of the Heart), and the like as power ballads, and it's easy enough
to find credible references for these.  Items for which no such reference
can be found could be removed.

"A pointless list, with no clear definition or upper limit of entries."
Seems to be a permutation of arguments already considered.

"Cleanup if possible, otherwise delete. Some songs IMO don't come under
the category of "power ballad". 50 Cent is a rapper/hip-hop artist - since
when did they write ballads? The list was good when it was uncluttered
(see page history)."  This "problem" could obviously be solved by a simple
revert.

And in the keep arguments:

"Cleanup. This page doesn't seem to fall under any of the categories in
Wikipedia's "Problems that May Require Deletion" table. (See
Wikipedia:Deletion policy.) The list in itself is a useful one, (I
discovered it because I was searching for just such a list). The problem
is that incorrect information has been added to the list, 50 Cent's song
being the most blatant. Delete misleading entries and keep the list."

There you are, apparently the one person in the entire discussion who had
read and understood the deletion policy.  Looking at the list of "Problems
that may require deletion", I have to agree: this article seemed to be
very far from falling into any of those categories.


body:
Ryan Delaney wrote:
>
>  Count the number of articles that go up to AFD every day, and ask yourself
> if you think its reasonable that everyone write a paragraph - or even a
> short explanation - on everything they vote for. Simply *voting* on
> everything would take an hour a day at least. Demanding a detailed
> explanation from every vote would only reduce the amount of communication
> because people would stop voting.
>  If you want to fix that, you either expand the CSD, so stuff that doesn't
> need deliberation won't waste everyone's time, or you implement pure wiki
> deletion, so this whole problem goes away entirely. Right now, if band and
> business vanity, link spam, personal essays, and neologisms were all covered
> by CSD (which they aren't), you could cut the amount of articles going up to
> AFD by up to 1/3.

Redirects are fun, easy, and boost your edit count!


from_name: Alphax

body:
Mark Gallagher wrote:
>
> G'day Geoff,
> <snip />
>
>> Although I believe we need a threshold for Wikipedia, we also should
>> acknowledge that in most cases an article was submitted with the best
>> of intentions: since we are knifing someone's baby, there is no need
>> to express glee while doing so. It appears to me that there is a
>> consensus that the words "cruft" & "notable" should not be used in AfD:
>> would anyone object if I edit the opening page & explain that use of
>> either of these words will result with the nomination being immediately
>> closed as a Speedy Keep?
>
>
> *Yes*.  "Notable" is an important shorthand, and much less likely to
> cause offence than the other AfD tragic favourite "vanity".
>

I agree. Someone needs to run a bot over all the active AfD subpages to
replace all instances of "vanity" with "self-aggrandising POV on
unremarkable subject, an article on which would violate the Principle of
Least Astonishment".

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from_name: Sam Korn

subject: [WikiEN-l] Article deletion

body:
On 9/15/05, Dan Grey <dangrey at gmail.com> wrote:
> PS Someone also mentioned rc patrolling: as I've said before, I don't
> see how PWDS would be a hinderance. Unless someone as made a
> well-reasoned justification for the blanking on the Talk page and
> signposted that in the edit summary, revert.

Yes.  Precisely.  You have highlighted *exactly* what is wrong with
it.  You need to go and check it.  Time spent checking the validity of
a deletion means more "X IS A PENIS"es will get through.

Sam


body:
All presidents are clearly notable. We have billions of people in this
country, and the list of presidents could fit on a single sheet of
paper, in a font size that's legible.

I don't think schools should all get articles. Certainly they are
notable, but there are going to be a lot that would be perma stubs. If
you can't expand an article on the school past a stub, it should be
merged into the article about the place the school is from.

I really don't buy into this non notable thing. If it's encyclopedic,
and the information can either be put into an article, or be written
into a nice article on its own, it should be in Wikipedia. So, this
means anything obviously not notable wouldn't get in. For example, a
15 year old girl who likes to play DDR and goes to XXXX school, would
not be found in XXXX school article. Now, if she won the last 5 DDR
championships at Happyland Whatever School, and this was the highest
championship winning streak ever at this school, then she could be
useful information in the article.

And yes, I just said DDR championship. heh.


body:
Mark Gallagher wrote:
<snip>
> Actually, Snowspinner provided an example of '1' to start the thread
> (well, one of the threads): /Elf-Only Inn/.  As a webcomics fan myself
> (although I don't like or read /Elf-Only Inn/ itself), I can certainly
> see his point[0].
<snip>
> [0] And I'm hanging out for the time when Tycho and Gabe get their own
>     entries on en-WP.  That would obviously be cruft, but I'd like to
>     hear those who want minor characters from movies to have pages to
>     explain *why* major characters from /Penny Arcade/ don't belong.
>

It's about how much can be written on the subject of the article.
Seriously, how much needs to be written about a minor (or even major)
character in a movie, if they are known for nothing outside of that
movie, and the portrayal of the character in the movie was unremarkable?
Similarly, how much can be written about a character from a webcomic, if
they are known only for appearing in said webcomic[1]?

[1] The obvious exception here is where said character becomes notable
/outside/ of the webcomic, and enters[2] the ethereal realm of "popular
culture", whatever that is.

[2] Which is pretty much what I think "notable" means - "is notable
outside of dedicated fandom", ie. "has entered popular culture"[3].

[3] Whatever that means.[4]

[4] Too many footnotes may be hazardous to your health.

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subject: [WikiEN-l] On speedying "halfway decent stubs"

body:
Phroziac wrote:

"They're halfway decent stubs, but we really don't need a lot of one
line articles, and we probably really didn't loose anything by
deleting them."

We probably should not be speedying "halfway decent stubs".  Speedy
deletion is supposedly for complete junk, stuff that cannot be salvaged by
editing because it shouldn't be on Wikipedia in the first place.  Thanks
for undeleting the Alberta lake one.

Actually on "one-line articles", my preference is for articles (or at
least article intros) that can fit into the first screen. This is an
internet encyclopedia and if you can't say something useful in the first
paragraph then the reader will wander off to another site.  If an article
can be written well as a single sentence, I think that's a good
thing--indeed an ideal to aim for.

My tongue is only half-way inside my cheek.  I think there's the germ of a
good idea here, that has been lost in the quest for "featured articles",
which in my opinion are often unsuited to the format.  For instance
today's front page contains an article about the Krag-Petersson repeating
rifle which doesn't manage to give any dates at all until the second
paragraph (and then only the date of adoption by the Norwegian Navy),
although the most significant thing about the rifle is that it was "the
first repeating rifle adopted by the armed forces of Norway"  How did the
editors manage to miss the date out of the first sentence?  How did it
pass FA in that state?


subject: [WikiEN-l] Images on user pages

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
<snip>
> The only issue as I see it, is that we don?t give reusers the option to not
> download user pages and other Wikipedia-specific pages. But that is a current
> technical problem; not a valid reason to forever forbid NC and special use
> images in the user or Wikipedia namespaces.
>
> Forbidding such images for no practical reason smacks of fascism to me. So once
> the technical issue I mentioned is fixed, I see no valid reason for us to not
> be more permissive on image licensing in the user namespace (within the limits
> of WP:NOT a personal web page provider)
>

See Erik M?ller (Eloquence)'s recent post to Commons-l:

http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/commons-l/2005-September/000077.html

"Creative Commons -NC Considered Harmful"

The page where he outlines why is:

http://intelligentdesigns.net/Licenses/NC

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from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Foundation-l] New Proposal: WikiMemory

body:
--- "Poe, Marshall" <MPoe at theatlantic.com> wrote:
> Thanks for the comments, Mav.
>
> In my conception (hardly original or final), Wikimemory would focus on
> common, significant, historical *experiences* rather than the
> individuals.  The top level categories in Wikimemory would, then, be
> historical experiences: "The Vietnam War," "The Cultural Revolution,"
> "Encounters with Jimmy Carter," "The Red Sox winning the World Series,"
> "The Beatles Final Concert," "Hurricane Katrina" and so on.  Pretty much
> anything with a witness, a place, a date and a bit of significance to
> "your community" (very broadly defined) would fit.
>
> Both Wikipeople and (to a lesser extent) Wikimemorial seem focused on
> individuals, and that seems to me to be a separate, important kind of
> information.  Does that make sense?

Well the idea is to also focus on events where lots of people died. Not unlike
what the Sep11wiki was supposed to be but not focused on any one event.

That would cover at least part of what you?d like to do with Wikimemory. I?m
just not sure if there would be enough overlap to merge the proposals or not.

-- mav

__________________________________
Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005
http://mail.yahoo.com


subject: [Foundation-l] New Proposal: WikiMemory


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Images on user pages

body:
Michael Snow wrote:
> Alphax wrote:
>
<snip>
>
>> The only one which has serious copyright concerns is the
>> Wikipedia/Firefox "logo", which infringes two trademarks (and some
>> people are claiming is a "parody"). If someone will draw their own
>> version of this, please do so and put it on commons, it's quite cute...
>>
>>
> It may be cute, but as I understand it such images aren't eligible for
> inclusion on Commons, nor do I get how you think that someone "draw[ing]
> their own version" will avoid the legal problems.
>

Well, the Firefox and Wikipedia logos are both copyrighted and
trademarked. Recreating them from scratch would at least solve the first
issue.

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Seals and Commons

body:
David Benbennick wrote:
> On 9/14/05, Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>considered an exception? -- but it seems clear to me, anyway, that it
>>is not "free" in the sense required to be listed on Wikipedia Commons.
>>In the United States its usage is restricted fairly heavily, including
>>the "non-commercial" bugaboo. It looks to me like, in effect, this
>>would be a "copyrighted with permission but no commercial use" tag.
>>Which, as I understand it, is verboten.
>
>
> This is something to discuss on the Commons, or on commons-l.  I don't
> see that a discussion of the Commons' policies can possibly be
> relevent on wikien-l.
>

It's being discussed on commons-l and commons itself:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons_talk:Licensing#Trademarks

>
>>Personally, I'd shoot at first suspicion that something was not really
>>in the public domain
>
>
> Perhaps that's why you aren't given a gun.
>

I thought all admins got a mop, a bucket, and an M16!

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Article deletion

body:
Sam Korn wrote:
> On 9/14/05, Dan Grey <dangrey at gmail.com> wrote:
>>And that's different from vandals blanking pages as they already do, how?
>
>
> Currently, a blank page means something has gone wrong.  Under PWDS,
> it would take some investigation to find out that something had gone
> wrong.  Do you do RC patrol?  I do, and I know that this would hinder
> my work in that area.
>

Not to mention the mess it would make of [[Special:Shortpages]]...

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Article deletion

body:
Michael Turley wrote:
> On 9/14/05, Sam Korn <smoddy at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>On 9/14/05, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>>I'll definitely agree with that.  I'm totally in favor of speedy keeps
>>>for sketchy, overly vague nominations.
>>
>>There are occasions where a one-word reason for deletion is enough.
>>For instance, take a absolutely clear-cut vanity article.  You can sum
>>up the reason for deletion in one word: "Vanity. ~~~~".  You could
>>write a sentence, or two, or three, in support of that, but it would
>>never actually say more than the original statement.
>>
>>Unless, of course, this is not what you meant by "sketch, overly vague
>>nominations".  If so, please elaborate!
>
>
> I can't think of a single example where "Vanity. ~~~~" is not overly
> vague.  I haven't objected to such nominations (that I recall) but
> certainly feel annoyed that the nominator cannot be bothered to be a
> little more specific when asking for consensus to remove an article.
>
> "Vanity.  No Google hits. ~~~~" is OK with me.  "Vanity. Wikipedia
> shouldn't be used as a home page" is OK.  "Vanity.  These
> accomplishments aren't encyclopedic enough. ~~~~" is also a valid
> nomination in my mind.
>
> "Vanity. ~~~~" doesn't give enough indication of the nominator's state
> of mind, so doesn't seem intended to actually start a discussion about
> why the article was nominated.  Instead, it seems an appeal to "just
> get this thing over with" that I find disrespectful to the newbies
> that frequently make the error of posting vanity articles.  That's why
> I object to vague and uninformative nominations; we're supposed to
> discuss the article, and the nominator cannot be bothered to start the
> discussion.
>

Agreed. See http://ln-s.net/7Uc for more.

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subject:
[WikiEN-l] On reasons to keep a class of article,
 as a motivation for voting keep

body:
SPUI writes:

"What if "keep all schools" is the reason the person is voting to keep?"

Then the editor making that claim (or indeed the mirror claim "delete,
there is nothing notable about a box with students") should have
convincing arguments to support his ambitious thesis.  Since the
propositions are not widely accepted on Wikipedia it's a somewhat weak
reason for keeping any particular school.  Surely it would be more
sensible to address the reason why *this* particular school article should
be kept, or to point out that since school deletion debates almost
invariably end in the article being kept (currently 87%) the proposition
that schools are *not* notable seems to be gathering such a lot of
counter-evidence that those proposing to delete a school article had
probably better have a good reason to support their request in the case of
this school--that they might argue that perhaps the school is a pre-school
in a country where such institutions are not regulated, or information
about the school is extremely difficult to verify
.

I don't want to start an argument about schools here, and I've moved on
from the schools debate after five months intensive involvement, so I
won't post any more on the subject.  I simply want to address SPUI's point
about wanting to keep a whole class of article on principle, and how one
should as a good Wikipedian seek to convince one's fellow editors that
there is some merit to one's views.


body:
On 15/09/05, Tony Sidaway <minorityreport at bluebottle.com> wrote:
> MacGyverMagic/Mgm writes:
>
>
> "Is there any article that was wrongly deleted within
> the past 3 days as a result of ignorance of the nominator or sheep
> voting by others without check the article and possible sources?"
>
> Well it was hard searching, because of the way in which the AfD link gets
> screwed when an article is deleted.  So I stopped when I reached the first
> deletion that I think is rather dodgy.
>
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/List_of_power_ballads

Erm, as you can plainly see it was me who did the deed on that one! It
must've been only the third or fourth AfD I've ever closed. So if you
think I've got it wrong, you know where the undelete link is :-)

Just to explain why I deleted that: despite everything I've said on
the list, I still feel a certain amount of responsibility to serve the
communty's will, not just impose my own (I would have voted keep).
However there were a lot of delete votes, one good keep vote, one guy
who wanted it copied to his user page (I thought we didn't allow
that), and one vote from an anon (although he made valid point).
Overall, I took that to be "rough consensus" for "delete".

Now, this is where I get confused. I've love to close and keep
listings like that which aren't actually falling foul of the Deletion
policy. However, I've heard that if you actually enforce that policy
you'll get flamed (see dpsmith's comments here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Deletion_policy#Notability_not_a_criterion_for_deletion.3F
). So I'm trying to find the fine line between not deleting silly
listings, but also not flagrantly denying the will of the community.

I'm very open to advice for doing this better :-).

Dan