from_name: Gregory Maxwell

body:
Through my participation in the schools debate, it has come to my
attention that there are wikipedians who believe that we should
include everything which is verifiable and NPOV, with no standard of
notoriety applied.  My perspective is that while that might be a good
set of criteria for a dictionary of trivia, it is not a good criteria
for an encyclopedia, even one made out of tiny bits of magnetized
composits rather than paper.

I don't wish to bring the school debate to this list right now.
However, I would like to discuss the include-everything view that I
have seen being used to justify including schools.

When I have exchanges like this:

-------------------
[[Wikipedia:Schools]]
** David, as we discussed on IRC, this rule would allow for the
creation of articles for a huge number of roadway intersections in the
US.. Plenty of official documentation at the city and state offices,
and Federal records in many cases, plus newspaper reports of
construction and accidents (just like schools). We could fill an
article up with trivia such as the frequency of accidents, time of
first construction... Photographs. Is this really acceptable in the
inclusionist agenda? Sure intersections are verifyable and NPOV, but
the vast majority of them are not notable. I encourage all who support
David's proposed rules, or similar proposed rulesets to reply. :)
--[[User:Gmaxwell|Gmaxwell]] 15:06, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

** Actually that sounds pretty cool. [[m:Wiki is not paper]]. Accident
data on road intersections could be very, very encyclopedic. Not sure
how feasible it would be, however. --[[User:Tony Sidaway|Tony
Sidaway]]|[[User talk:Tony Sidaway|Talk]] 15:31, 18 May 2005 (UTC)
-----------------------

I must question if I really understand the point of Wikipedia.

Already the next database dumb of cur will likely be too big to fix
gzipped on my Zarus (a pocket sized computer. The prior one just fit
it's 1gb SD card and I find it amazingly useful ... I'm going to need
to come up with some kind of filter to reduce the size for the next
one).....   Soon we will begin brushing the size of what we can fit on
a DVD, so what of access to our work by people in disconnected
communities and third-world nations? As our working-set grows past the
amount of ram we can reasonably expect to put in our caches and
database servers, our performance will become increasingly diskbound.
I think that many people mistake the the claim that [[m:Wiki is not
paper]] with a claim that we have boundless storage without
compromise.

Most of the facts that are in Wikipedia (though to not all) were
available elseware on the internet prior to Wikipedia, but often a
quick google search wouldn't find them because they were in a wash of
cruft, random inaccurate uncorrectable information, and
advertisements. Today much of that information is easier to find
because of Wikipedia, a beautiful accomplishment, but one which may be
lost if we lower the barrier to entry to be sufficiently low as to
include anything that anyone can cite.

I think it would be useful to have a universal repository for
verifiable and neutrally reported trivia, but just as we use
Wiktionary rather than Wikipedia for word definitions and wikisources
for freely licensed reference works, we should put material which is
not substantially notable in it's own project which can cater to the
special needs of that material and the special costs of providing that
service.

I didn't just choose the intersection example because I thought it was
a good strawman, ( :) ), I also choose it because I'm aware of the
level of information available, and could actually create a lot of
these articles myself. Since I used to work for a county government in
Florida, still have a copy of most of the GIS database, and know the
right people in a few other counties, I could patch together a bot to
create thousands of such articles, complete with aerial photographs,
construction dates, and in many cases some level of traffic
information (I have traffic counters for all the arterial/arterial
intersections with the data I have).  ... The point is that I haven't
spammed wikipedia with this data because I believe it is completely
inappropriate for an Encyclopedia, and I imagine many other people
have a similar ability to produce endless quantities of non-notable
material if that what we thought wikipedia was supposed to contain.
... Such trivia would only be useful as a raw reference, why not
wikisource if any of the preexisting wikis?

So, I'd really appreciate some commentary on this... Am I in a
minority in expecting a criteria of notability to be used in our
judgement of encyclopedic merit, or should we really be including
every fact we can cite?


list: wikitech-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: David Monniaux

subject: [Wikitech-l] date and cache

body:
> Weirder is what is currently happening on the village pump on the french
> wikipedia (though part of it might be due to Paris servers).

Last time I had such symptoms, they didn't fit with stale data in Squid
caches, but with problems further upstream (like stale data in memcached?
or desynchronized databases).

Sometimes, the slave databases are really very lagged.


list: wikien-l

from_name: Stan Shebs

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Schools on en: (was Do I misunderstand
 Wikipedia? On notability and encyclopedic merit.)

body:
Gregory Maxwell wrote:

>
>[...] does the moniker 'encyclopedia' indicate that we are generally
>using a criteria of notability to decide to include things.
>
The crux of the problem is that "notability" is a stubbornly
subjective concept. For instance, we have articles on extremely
obscure US Navy destroyers and submarines, with crews of under 100
and with only a couple of years in service, during peacetime, and
then scrapped - yet these are never challenged, while a century-old
high school with 3,000 students is likely to end up on VfD. So what
exactly is it that makes one topic "notable", and another not?

In a way, the old print encyclopedias had it easier - the
publisher could only afford to spend M months producing N
volumes, so one started at "most important" and went down
until the available space and time was used up.

Stan


list: wikipedia-l

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Schools on en: (was Do I misunderstand Wikipedia?
	On notability and encyclopedic merit.)


list: commons-l

from_name: Erwin Jurschitza

subject:
[Commons-l] AW: Directmedia: Die ersten 100 Bilder / the first 100
	pictures

body:
Thank you, Erik!

Instead of "{{Creator:Albrecht Altdorfer}}"
at the bottom I think it would be nice to have
"Painter: [[:Creator:Albrecht Altdorfer|]]"
at the top of the article or
"|Artist=[[:Creator:Albrecht Altdorfer|]]".

In the painting template I would suggest the
following output order:

|Title
|Artist
|Year
|Technique
|Dimensions
|Location
|Country
|Gallery
|Notes
|Source
|Permission
|Other versions (what is this?)

Vlado


from_name: james

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: importing wiki dump to mediawiki

body:
I think I am really stupid here - as I cannot seem to get this setup properly -
 I think I should probably try something different from easyphp1-8.... any
suggestions? I want to run this on my home intranet - so an all in one
solution would be great

I keep on getting errors like the below, I guess just installing it doesnt
help, and it needs to be configured right, of which I am not sure how.

ERROR 1045 <28000>:Access denied for user 'ODBC'@'localhost' <using password:
NO>

Anyone got any good suggestions?


from_name: Mark Williamson

body:
Yes, why is that? I think we should put all of those up for deletion
immediately. Notable? Hah.

Mark

On 18/05/05, Stan Shebs <shebs at apple.com> wrote:
> Gregory Maxwell wrote:
>
> >
> >[...] does the moniker 'encyclopedia' indicate that we are generally
> >using a criteria of notability to decide to include things.
> >
> The crux of the problem is that "notability" is a stubbornly
> subjective concept. For instance, we have articles on extremely
> obscure US Navy destroyers and submarines, with crews of under 100
> and with only a couple of years in service, during peacetime, and
> then scrapped - yet these are never challenged, while a century-old
> high school with 3,000 students is likely to end up on VfD. So what
> exactly is it that makes one topic "notable", and another not?
>
> In a way, the old print encyclopedias had it easier - the
> publisher could only afford to spend M months producing N
> volumes, so one started at "most important" and went down
> until the available space and time was used up.
>
> Stan
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
SI HOC LEGERE SCIS NIMIVM ERVDITIONIS HABES
QVANTVM MATERIAE MATERIETVR MARMOTA MONAX SI MARMOTA MONAX MATERIAM
POSSIT MATERIARI
ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Longterm software strategy

body:
Daniel Wunsch wrote:
> On Tuesday 10 May 2005 21:18, Tim Starling wrote:
>
>
>>int main() {for (unsigned i=0; i<(unsigned)1e9; i++);}
>>executes in 1.58 seconds on my desktop computer.
>
>
> hm.. we all know how badly microbenchmarks can
> go wrong. in this case i'd have expected the loop
> to be optimized away, since it does not affect the
> state of the rest of the program in any way..

If I was using such a compiler, I would have just disabled that
optimisation. For all compilers/interpreters, I tried with a few
different loop sizes to make sure it was actually taking O(N) time. As
it happens, for g++ -O3 I did dump the assembly code:

	xor	eax, eax
	.p2align 4,,15
L6:
	inc	eax
	cmp	eax, 999999999
	jbe	L6

I thought I'd be clever and make a tighter loop by hand:

	mov ecx, 1000000000
	.p2align 4,,15
L6:
	loop L6

But to my disappointment it was slower than the machine generated
version. That's pipelining for you, I guess. I could have unrolled the
loop, but, well, that's getting a bit silly.

The question I was trying to answer was: what is the fastest possible
loop in a given language? I think it was a reasonable question to ask.
For the interpreters, it was mainly a test of variable access speed. I
did try Java, but I didn't include it because it was clear that it was
using a JIT compiler to produce native code similar to the C++ version.
My purpose was to make fun of the interpreters, the compiled language
was just included as reference for what a fast language is.

Don't worry, I do have ways to make fun of Java, that just isn't one of
them :)

Another point I would make is that fundamentally, it is weak typing that
makes Perl and PHP slow. To optimise Perl or PHP properly, you'd have to
not only convert it to a low level language, you'd have to inline the
simpler variable access functions and then use an optimiser capable of
identifying the types as loop invariants, thus removing some of the
conditional branches from the loop. Object-oriented C++ has the same
problem.

-- Tim Starling


body:
On 5/18/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> So what you mean is, you don't want to create the articles?  Then don't
> create them.

I don't create them because it would disruptive to wikipedia.
If you are going to reply to lists that my message wasn't directed to,
you at least could have at least quoted my entire message.

> The last time it was advanced as policy, it got a simple majority but
> failed to make consensus. Jimbo also explained why verifiability is good
> enough for *articles people actually want to write*:

I'm quite well aware of what Jimbo has stated and the previous
decisions on the schools matter.

What I am asking about is a closely related but separate matter, which
is does the moniker 'encyclopedia' indicate that we are generally
using a criteria of notability to decide to include things.

There are wikipedians at the extreme end of the spectrum that think we
should include an article with stats for every darn roadway
intersection that we can prove exists, and I believe that either they
are misunderstanding our intentions or I am.

I'd be quite happy with an answer like, 'We prefer things to be
notable and discourage the creation of non-notable subjects... but if
someone wants to create and maintain a page on something not meeting
that we will permit it as long as it's verifiable and NPOV', which is
how I suspected things actually were... But this doesn't fit with the
small group of people determined to prevent any school (or quite a few
other things, as long as they are verifiable and NPOV) from being
deleted.


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Fwd: [Wikipedia-l] Schools on en: (was Do I
	misunderstand Wikipedia? On notability and encyclopedic merit.)

body:
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com>
Date: May 18, 2005 1:39 PM
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Schools on en: (was Do I misunderstand
Wikipedia? On notability and encyclopedic merit.)
To: wikipedia-l at wikimedia.org

On 5/18/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> So what you mean is, you don't want to create the articles?  Then don't
> create them.

I don't create them because it would disruptive to wikipedia.
If you are going to reply to lists that my message wasn't directed to,
you at least could have at least quoted my entire message.

> The last time it was advanced as policy, it got a simple majority but
> failed to make consensus. Jimbo also explained why verifiability is good
> enough for *articles people actually want to write*:

I'm quite well aware of what Jimbo has stated and the previous
decisions on the schools matter.

What I am asking about is a closely related but separate matter, which
is does the moniker 'encyclopedia' indicate that we are generally
using a criteria of notability to decide to include things.

There are wikipedians at the extreme end of the spectrum that think we
should include an article with stats for every darn roadway
intersection that we can prove exists, and I believe that either they
are misunderstanding our intentions or I am.

I'd be quite happy with an answer like, 'We prefer things to be
notable and discourage the creation of non-notable subjects... but if
someone wants to create and maintain a page on something not meeting
that we will permit it as long as it's verifiable and NPOV', which is
how I suspected things actually were... But this doesn't fit with the
small group of people determined to prevent any school (or quite a few
other things, as long as they are verifiable and NPOV) from being
deleted.


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Fwd: Do I misunderstand Wikipedia? On notability and
	encyclopedic merit.

body:
Thanks you David for forcing me to subscribe to a high volume list,
just so I can receive all the responses to my non-language specific
query about the intentions of wikipedia.

Here is the entire message which David quoted part of...

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com>
Date: May 18, 2005 12:51 PM
Subject: Do I misunderstand Wikipedia? On notability and encyclopedic merit.
To: wikipedia-l at wikimedia.org

Through my participation in the schools debate, it has come to my
attention that there are wikipedians who believe that we should
include everything which is verifiable and NPOV, with no standard of
notoriety applied.  My perspective is that while that might be a good
set of criteria for a dictionary of trivia, it is not a good criteria
for an encyclopedia, even one made out of tiny bits of magnetized
composits rather than paper.

I don't wish to bring the school debate to this list right now.
However, I would like to discuss the include-everything view that I
have seen being used to justify including schools.

When I have exchanges like this:

-------------------
[[Wikipedia:Schools]]
** David, as we discussed on IRC, this rule would allow for the
creation of articles for a huge number of roadway intersections in the
US.. Plenty of official documentation at the city and state offices,
and Federal records in many cases, plus newspaper reports of
construction and accidents (just like schools). We could fill an
article up with trivia such as the frequency of accidents, time of
first construction... Photographs. Is this really acceptable in the
inclusionist agenda? Sure intersections are verifyable and NPOV, but
the vast majority of them are not notable. I encourage all who support
David's proposed rules, or similar proposed rulesets to reply. :)
--[[User:Gmaxwell|Gmaxwell]] 15:06, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

** Actually that sounds pretty cool. [[m:Wiki is not paper]]. Accident
data on road intersections could be very, very encyclopedic. Not sure
how feasible it would be, however. --[[User:Tony Sidaway|Tony
Sidaway]]|[[User talk:Tony Sidaway|Talk]] 15:31, 18 May 2005 (UTC)
-----------------------

I must question if I really understand the point of Wikipedia.

Already the next database dumb of cur will likely be too big to fix
gzipped on my Zarus (a pocket sized computer. The prior one just fit
it's 1gb SD card and I find it amazingly useful ... I'm going to need
to come up with some kind of filter to reduce the size for the next
one).....   Soon we will begin brushing the size of what we can fit on
a DVD, so what of access to our work by people in disconnected
communities and third-world nations? As our working-set grows past the
amount of ram we can reasonably expect to put in our caches and
database servers, our performance will become increasingly diskbound.
I think that many people mistake the the claim that [[m:Wiki is not
paper]] with a claim that we have boundless storage without
compromise.

Most of the facts that are in Wikipedia (though to not all) were
available elseware on the internet prior to Wikipedia, but often a
quick google search wouldn't find them because they were in a wash of
cruft, random inaccurate uncorrectable information, and
advertisements. Today much of that information is easier to find
because of Wikipedia, a beautiful accomplishment, but one which may be
lost if we lower the barrier to entry to be sufficiently low as to
include anything that anyone can cite.

I think it would be useful to have a universal repository for
verifiable and neutrally reported trivia, but just as we use
Wiktionary rather than Wikipedia for word definitions and wikisources
for freely licensed reference works, we should put material which is
not substantially notable in it's own project which can cater to the
special needs of that material and the special costs of providing that
service.

I didn't just choose the intersection example because I thought it was
a good strawman, ( :) ), I also choose it because I'm aware of the
level of information available, and could actually create a lot of
these articles myself. Since I used to work for a county government in
Florida, still have a copy of most of the GIS database, and know the
right people in a few other counties, I could patch together a bot to
create thousands of such articles, complete with aerial photographs,
construction dates, and in many cases some level of traffic
information (I have traffic counters for all the arterial/arterial
intersections with the data I have).  ... The point is that I haven't
spammed wikipedia with this data because I believe it is completely
inappropriate for an Encyclopedia, and I imagine many other people
have a similar ability to produce endless quantities of non-notable
material if that what we thought wikipedia was supposed to contain.
... Such trivia would only be useful as a raw reference, why not
wikisource if any of the preexisting wikis?

So, I'd really appreciate some commentary on this... Am I in a
minority in expecting a criteria of notability to be used in our
judgement of encyclopedic merit, or should we really be including
every fact we can cite?


from_name: Stirling Newberry

body:
>
> "'fame' and 'importance' are not the right words to use, they are
> merely
> rough approximations to what we're really interested in, which is
> verifiability and NPOV. I understand and appreciate where people are
> coming
> from on the 'Yes' vote, but feel that they will only get the unanimity
> necessary in a wiki environment if they rephrase the issue in those
> terms.
> Consider an obscure scientific concept, 'Qubit Field Theory' -- 24
> hits on
> google. I'd say that not more than a few thousand people in the world
> have
> heard of it, and not more than a few dozen understand it. (I certainly
> don't.) It is not famous and it is arguably not important, but I think
> that
> no one would serious question that it is valid material for an
> encyclopedia. What is it that makes this encyclopedic? It is that it is
> information which is verifiable and which can be easily presented in an
> NPOV fashion. (Though perhaps only as a stub, of course, since it's
> very
> complicated and not many people would know how to express it clearly in
> layperson's terms.)"
>

Not as obscure as all of that, it's a theory by Dr. David Deutsch that
attempts to find a version of quantum chromodynamics which looks as if
all quantum operations are commutable, but which does not assume an
infinite amount of information capacity at each point. It is the basis
for several interesting ideas about the nature of the universe which
far more people have heard of. I strongly doubt it only pops 24 hits on
google, as more papers have referenced it than that.

The size problem will be solved by a distribution system, probably one
that includes rating of articles. The local geography articles will get
low ratings and thus not be in the "short" version of wikipedia.


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Fwd: Do I misunderstand Wikipedia? On notability and
	encyclopedic merit.


body:
Also there is the problem of lack of timelessness.

In 500 years, will people care about [[w:en:Daigo Fukuryu Maru]]?
Perhaps. What about [[w:en:Manchester United]]? If football doesn't
last that long, chances are the 500-years-from-now-Wikipedians would
want to merge all football teams into an article "List of famous
football teams" or something like that.

What about [[w:en:Britney Spears]], [[w:en:David Beckham]], or
[[w:en:Stefanie Sun]]?

Mark

On 18/05/05, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yes, why is that? I think we should put all of those up for deletion
> immediately. Notable? Hah.
>
> Mark
>
> On 18/05/05, Stan Shebs <shebs at apple.com> wrote:
> > Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> >
> > >
> > >[...] does the moniker 'encyclopedia' indicate that we are generally
> > >using a criteria of notability to decide to include things.
> > >
> > The crux of the problem is that "notability" is a stubbornly
> > subjective concept. For instance, we have articles on extremely
> > obscure US Navy destroyers and submarines, with crews of under 100
> > and with only a couple of years in service, during peacetime, and
> > then scrapped - yet these are never challenged, while a century-old
> > high school with 3,000 students is likely to end up on VfD. So what
> > exactly is it that makes one topic "notable", and another not?
> >
> > In a way, the old print encyclopedias had it easier - the
> > publisher could only afford to spend M months producing N
> > volumes, so one started at "most important" and went down
> > until the available space and time was used up.
> >
> > Stan
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
>
> --
> SI HOC LEGERE SCIS NIMIVM ERVDITIONIS HABES
> QVANTVM MATERIAE MATERIETVR MARMOTA MONAX SI MARMOTA MONAX MATERIAM
> POSSIT MATERIARI
> ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE
>

--
SI HOC LEGERE SCIS NIMIVM ERVDITIONIS HABES
QVANTVM MATERIAE MATERIETVR MARMOTA MONAX SI MARMOTA MONAX MATERIAM
POSSIT MATERIARI
ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE


from_name: Chad Perrin

subject: [WikiEN-l] Metric road signs in the U. S.

body:
On Tue, May 17, 2005 at 12:32:28PM -0700, Rick wrote:
> I can just see the United States trying to do a mass
> conversion of highway signs.  Each state would have to
> sign off on it, and many would not just out of "the
> federal government can't tell us what to do."
>
> We'll see if the states actually buy the new driver's
> license requirements.  Utah has already rejected the
> "No Child Left Behind" education requirements, the DL
> stuff is going to be even worse.

I can only hope.  I'm cynical enough to believe that most of the states
are just going to roll over and expose their soft underbellies to this
nonsense, though.

--
Chad Perrin
[ CCD CopyWrite | http://ccd.apotheon.org ]


from_name: Timwi

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Announcing a policy proposal

body:
JAY JG wrote:
>
>> The point isn't that the measurement is inaccurate. The point is
>> that renaming it to "CE" does not make it a different measurement.
>> It is still based on the same Christian considerations.
>
> When one uses the B.C. system one is able to make the rather bizarre
> statement that "Christ was born 4 to 6 years Before Christ".  At
> least Before the Common Era does away with that.

No, it doesn't, it only makes it subtler. "4 to 6 years before the
Common Era" would still mean "4 to 6 years before the point in time that
some wackos at some point thought was the birthdate of Jesus".


body:
Skyring wrote:
>
> I think you missed my point, you humourless bastard.

Clearly, discussion is futile with you, so I will put you on ignore for
now until you will learn to behave in a less aggressive way.


body:
On 5/18/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> It's easy enough to subscribe (so you can post) but set no-mail (so you
> don't get a flood) and read answers on the web archive:
[snip]
Thanks for pointing that out. That will be useful in the future when I
want to follow a single subject on the enlist.

> Sorry for not forwarding the full original message when I replied to
> wikien-l. I cc'd it there because the actual dispute and disputants are
> pretty much on en:, so it was the obvious relevant place. I see that it is
> about the whole project also.

I don't give a hoot about schools. I only noticed them because people
were voting keep on stubs about a playing field at a school and
substubs on elementary schools that haven't been expanded in a year of
existence and justifying these votes by saying that the subjects are
verifiable and NPOV.

I don't argue that they are verifiable (well, although I wouldn't be
shocked if there were a few hoaxes in the mass of articles being voted
on), but I really wonder if I understand what an encyclopedia is if we
are not to ever use notability as a criteria for entry.


from_name: John Fader

subject: [Wikitech-l] date and cache

body:
On 5/18/05, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> We could really use more details here, such as *what sort* of wrong
> dates are seen. Specifically what they are, and specifically where they
> are seen. Comparitive times (eg 'I saw "May 99, 2199" at the date for
> three changes on Recent Changes at about 12:40 UTC on May 16') and
> confirming screen shots may help.

Take a look at the backwards history of [[en:User:Maustrauser]], where
the timestamps actually run backward.

Also there's [[en:Mineir?o]].  Here an anon created the article and
made several subsequent edits.  Then user Jp347 added the copyedit tag
- but the database records that copyedit request as the *first* edit.
Commending on WP:HD, Jp347 says the timestamp attached to the copyedit
addition isn't correct, and that rather than create the article as the
history suggests, he added the tag afterward, as described above.

I've seen weird stuff happen before, where some edits are
/temporarily/ hidden (e.g. where users appear to be editwarring with
themselves) and I guess this is due to the database lag Brion
mentioned.  That problem always went away after a while (presumably
after the slaves caught up) but this problem seems to be a genuinely
(and permanently) wrong database condition. So I guess this is a
different issue, presumably something to do with timestamps.

--
John Fader


body:
On 5/18/05, james <jamessampford at supanet.com> wrote:
> I think I am really stupid here - as I cannot seem to get this setup properly -
>  I think I should probably try something different from easyphp1-8.... any
> suggestions? I want to run this on my home intranet - so an all in one
> solution would be great
>
> I keep on getting errors like the below, I guess just installing it doesnt
> help, and it needs to be configured right, of which I am not sure how.
>
> ERROR 1045 <28000>:Access denied for user 'ODBC'@'localhost' <using password:
> NO>
>
> Anyone got any good suggestions?

as part of that mysql invocation, add

-u root -p

when you run it, it will prompt you for the mysql root password (if
you've not set that up, just hit return)

--
John Fader


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Fwd: Do I misunderstand Wikipedia? On notability
	and encyclopedic merit.

body:
On 5/18/05, Tony Sidaway <minorityreport at bluebottle.com> wrote:
> Gregory, is there something about your Zarus we should know?

The claim has been made over and over again by you and by others that
there is no reason to consider size at all in matters dealing with
wikipedia. I've cited my little computer (which many other people
have, and have wikipedia on as well), as a simple little example of
why it can and does matter. It's not the only example, but it's a good
example of why it matters to *me* rather than some hypothetical issue
that people would argue matters to no one.

> Why is it
> important to Wikipedia that we ensure that the English Wikipedia remains
> small enough to fit on a portable computer?

Because the vast majority of the world does not spend most of their
life in front of a computer that is well connected to the Internet.
Over time this is changing somewhat, but it will remain true that the
amount of potential use for wikipedia while near a good internet link
will stay much smaller than the total potential use for wikipedia away
from such connectivity.

I travel routinely and have introduced quite a few people on airplanes
and in airport terminals to wikipedia via my portable computer.
Perhaps one of them is now subscribed and would like to chime in? I
would not be shocked.

> If size is a problem, have
> you thought of filtering out a few categories that you don't like, or
> those articles which are smaller than, say,  2kb?   I'm sure you'l find a
> way to cram all the articles you're likely to want to read onto a nice fat
> Zarus, if you only use a filter to decide which articles to take with you.

Right, but the one criteria that would be most useful is notability
and I can't achieve that without reading every article and adding
metadata. Working alone I wouldn't be as good at task as the
community.  I'm not too interested in popular culture, but it would be
very useful to have the most notable subset of articles in that area
with me...  and there have been plenty of times where an article under
2kb saved my butt!

> On the subject of road junctions, there are probably quite a few on
> Wikipedia already.  Oh yes, here we go:
[snip]
> It's about a great big pole stuck in the ground.
> It's amazing what kinds of things you can write a good encyclopedia
> article about.

I have never suggested that schools or road junctions or anything else
are categorically not notable. But rather we should not be encouraging
the creation of (or blocking the removal of) nonnotable articles.  Nor
do I argue that it wouldn't be lovely to document every little bit of
documentable thing out there.. I'd love to know why there is a funny
little concrete obelisk in the water retention pond near my home, and
I suspect something like that might end up in an ultimate collection
of trivia... But I do not believe such trivia belongs mixed in with
the rest of wikipedia any more than dictionary definitions belong.

I could write a quite through article on the slim mold in the back of
my refrigerator (well providing I could talk some grad students into
researching it, or some OPed columnist into writing about it since
we're so adverse to original research), but no amount of facts,
hyperlinks, measurements, charming prose, or photographs would make it
into a good encyclopedia article.  .... Unless, of course, it gained
sentience.. but if that was going to happen it probably would have
already.


subject: [WikiEN-l] The schools table

body:
On 5/18/05, Tony Sidaway <minorityreport at bluebottle.com> wrote:
> Not quite.  Most of the nominations seemed to be of rather recent
> articles--one was only two days old and quite a decent stub, considering.The older articles tended to show signs of organic growth. There are about
> twenty actual examples, with dates and history link, here:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Schools#The_schools_table

Right, most of them are new, but not all.
What initially caught my attention were the less excusable ones.
I'm sure there are, heaven forbid, notable schools in wikipedia too.
But it seems that no one is nominating them for VFD. I suspect this is
because no one has a vendetta against schools, but rather there are
people who believe notability counts.

Organic growth? ...   Maybe there is a story hidden in that slime-mold
of mine...?
;)


from_name: Alfio Puglisi

body:
On Wed, 18 May 2005, Timwi wrote:

>
>You don't strictly *need* them; you can re-create them using the
>rebuildlinks.php script. But, of course, you can also download them and
>import them as well. I don't know which is faster.

Downloading is a lot faster. For some reason rebuilding links takes ages.

Alfio


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Schools on en: (was Do I
	misunderstand Wikipedia? On notability and encyclopedic merit.)

body:
On 5/18/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> Yes. VFD is supposed to be an immune system, to keep out the *shit*. It's
> far too blunt a tool to try to use as a general quality-control system,
> which is why people get so very upset when articles that are NPOV and
> verifiable get nominated for VFD on grounds that are, per the deletion
> policy, spurious.

Why even NPOV?

We edit to fix POV text, why do we not rename to fix POV titles?

If I write about "A borgoula is a purple monster that eats little
children", you could fix verifiability by finding a citation and
changing it to "Gmaxwell claims a borgoula is" or "A borgoula exists
in gmaxwells imagination"...  Why not? If I published a book on it,
we'd allow my fans to make articles about it.

When it comes down to it, if we only use the criteria of "verifiable
and NPOV" we end up with the prohibition on original research as being
the only real control on what can go into wikipedia after a little
tidying up. This is amusing because the direction to avoid original
research is often taken merely as advice and only used as a rule when
there is conflict, which is good: Consider the case of articles on
works of art or pieces of music; much of the time it is the
not-directly-citable/barely-indirectly-citable opinions that make the
articles worth reading at all.


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] The schools table

body:
Gregory Maxwell wrote:

>On 5/18/05, Tony Sidaway <minorityreport at bluebottle.com> wrote:
>
>
>>Notability is not really definable.  Jimbo has even suggested that it's a
>>proxy for verifiability.
>>
>>
>We need a [[Wikipedia:Quoting Jimbo doesn't replace orignal thought]].
>
>I know what Jimbo said. I would be shocked if he intended it to be
>taken to the extremes that you are suggesting.
>
Tony said that Jimbo "suggested", so that is not really an extreme approach.

Be that as it may, your point about quoting Jimbo is well taken.  "Jimbo
says ..." is often used as some kind of drop dead argument.  That makes
it difficult for him to have an ordinary opinion on a current issue
without somebody interpreting that opinion as being ''ex cathedra''.  In
the wake of the first Vatican Council even Pius IX recognized that his
infalibility would have limited application.

Ec


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikipedia-l] [Fwd: PCMag.com Top 100 Awards]

body:
This is for Wiktionary!  This is very exciting!

This is a major award froma major US computer magazine.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	PCMag.com Top 100 Awards
Date: 	Wed, 18 May 2005 15:05:07 -0400
From: 	Cappella, Emily <Emily_Cappella at ziffdavis.com>
To: 	undisclosed-recipients: ;

<http://go.pcmag.com/2005bestwebsites>

Congratulations Webmaster!

PC Magazine's April 26th issue features "2005's Top 100 Sites You Didn't
Know You Couldn't Live Without" awards, where the magazine's editors
source the Web and award the best 100 sites in ten major categories.It's
my distinct pleasure to notify you that you have been selected within
the Education, Information & Reference category as a web site we would
be lost without!

Click here to see PC Magazine's review of the top 100 Education,
Information & Reference sites <http://go.pcmag.com/2005bestwebsites>

<http://go.pcmag.com/2005bestwebsites>

http://common.ziffdavisinternet.com/util_get_image/10/0,1311,i=102516,00.gif

Read PCMag.com's review of your site within your respective category!
*Highlight your achievement and display the logo above on your Web site
with a link back to our page or, if you prefer, link your review with*
"Named to PCMag.com Top 100 Sites for 2005, Education, Information &
Reference Category <http://go.pcmag.com/2005bestwebsites>." PCMag.com
congratulates you on your accomplishment and wishes you continued
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list: wiktionary-l

subject: [Wiktionary-l] [Fwd: PCMag.com Top 100 Awards]


subject: [WikiEN-l] The schools table

body:
On 5/18/05, Tony Sidaway <minorityreport at bluebottle.com> wrote:
> Notability is not really definable.  Jimbo has even suggested that it's a
> proxy for verifiability.

We need a [[Wikipedia:Quoting Jimbo doesn't replace orignal thought]].

I know what Jimbo said. I would be shocked if he intended it to be
taken to the extremes that you are suggesting.

In any case, if Jimbo decides he has something to add, I'm sure he can
speak for himself. Until then I'm more interested in what other
wikipedians think.  We've well established what you and I and David
think. Lets leave some room in the digests for someone else to chime
in.


from_name: Brian

subject: [Wikitech-l] dumps

body:
Yes.

On 5/18/05, Alfio Puglisi <puglisi at arcetri.astro.it> wrote:
>
>
> Is a new stats run in progress?
>
> Alfio
>
> On Mon, 16 May 2005, Domas Mituzas wrote:
>
> >Hello,
> >
> >new dumps (as of 20050516) available at http://download.wikimedia.org/
> >Please note, we no longer provide 2GB split files. I do sincerely
> believe,
> >that HTTP has enough capability to do partial downloads of files ;-)
> >And those splits simply double disk space requirements...
> >
> >Cheers,
> >Domas
> >
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Do I misunderstand Wikipedia? On
	notability and encyclopedic merit.

body:
On 5/18/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Notoriety and notability are different conmcepts.

That they are, and they are both factors we should include in our
decision on what to include in wikipedia.

> I didn't realize that one of the aims of Wikipedia was to have a
> database small enough to be dumped entirely on anybody's drive.  I
> suspect that most passive users have no need or desire for such a dump.

It's not, but the claim that adding mountains of material that few
will ever look at and fewer will ever update causes no harm is clearly
bogus.

> Omitting the articles that you would like to see left out will slow the
> growth of database a little, but that will only delay the time before it
> won't fit on your pocket computer.  When it comes to third world
> equipment, I'm sure that we have long since exceeded the capacity of
> that equipment.  As to Wikimedia's own capacity for storing information,
> I would find the request "Slow down, we have too much stuff," more
> credible if it came from our senior developers.

Perhaps slowing down isn't enough (a year ago I couldn't store today's
wikipedia on my portable computer, but I can now), but then that leave
us with the question "Is there a useful way to subset wikipedia?".   I
believe that there are many useful ways, but I believe that all of the
best ways require us to have some idea of the level of notability of
each article.

As far as third-world computer.. They often get the trash computers
from the first world. The computer I had in 1994, more than a decade
ago, could contain wikipedia just fine.

We're more limited by distribution media, DVD gives us 4.5 gigs. Of
course we could span multiple disks, but then the user will likely
have to copy it all onto the computer. The more disks we span the
greater the cost at reproducing the material.

Ultimately we need to figure out how to subset out the more useful
parts of wikipedia, but if we have no notion of notability, I'm not
sure how we achieve that.

> I'm glad to here that, but others may see it differently.  Perhaps you
> could dispel those misunderstandings by providing data on the number of
> articles about such intersections that have been contributed to Wikipedia.

There are a few intersection articles, some intersections are notable
and some of the articles might even be about notable intersections.

> >I also choose it because I'm aware of the
> >level of information available, and could actually create a lot of
> >these articles myself.
> Fantastic!
[snip]
> I don't think that dumping material that you don't like into any other
> project is a friendly act unles you have an agreement with the people
> involved in that project.

It's not about material I dislike. It's about material that I think is
inappropriate for wikipedia, perhaps it is more appropriate someplace
else that already exists? It's a question that I don't have an answer
to...

Thank you for your thoughts on this subject, I value hearing from some
other people... even if you don't agree with me :)


from_name: Chris McIntosh

subject: [WikiEN-l] Segration of MediaWiki projects

body:
My company wants to use MediaWiki for internal documentation. They
would like to separate how projects are physically stored in the
MediaWiki structure.

For example instead of all files being listed under the root
structure, can I create a new project folder for each project and have
files be placed in their respective projects?

Is this possible?

--
Chris McIntosh


body:
Tony Sidaway wrote:

>This is all to the good.  We *need* to give deletionists something to look
>forward to.  The timelessness problem will be solved because Wikipedia is
>not a timeless publication, but an organically growing one.
>Seriously, though, if any twentieth century works of literature or film
>are studied in 500 years, someone will have to compile notes for the
>students so they'll know what Bridget Jones (or Harry Potter, or Homer
>Simpson) is talking about.  There are academics who spend their entire
>working lives studying 80 million year old coproliths, so Bridget Jones'
>Big Knickers could well be on some future academic's literary excavation
>list.
>
>
Linking coproliths and Bridget Jones' knickers in the same sentence is
ominous.  Cf. the interpretation of fallout shelters by future
archaeologists in Walter Miller's "A Canticle for Leibowitz".

Ec


from_name: Geoff Burling

subject: [WikiEN-l] The schools table

body:
On Wed, 18 May 2005, Tony Sidaway wrote:

> Notability is not really definable.  Jimbo has even suggested that it's a
> proxy for verifiability.
>
Last time I saw the word used on VfD, context suggested that it was the
equivalent of "another article about a teenager whose most important
achievement so far is not dropping out of high school, which was posted
by her/his friend or relative."

Geoff


from_name: Petr Kadlec

body:
On 5/18/05, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> I thought I'd be clever and make a tighter loop by hand:
>
>         mov ecx, 1000000000
>         .p2align 4,,15
> L6:
>         loop L6
>
> But to my disappointment it was slower than the machine generated
> version.

Note that if that has not changed (I do not really study
instruction-level optimization nowadays), the "loop" instruction was
slower than an identical (almost, except for flags) dec (e)cx, jnz
label. Go figure.

-- [[cs:User:Mormegil | Petr Kadlec]]


body:
JAY JG wrote:

>> From: Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net>
>
>> Is there any support in Jewish tradition for the idea of a Chanukah
>> bush?
>
> No, and there still isn't.  I don't get the point you are trying to make.

Yeah, I too would have difficulty interpreting things that are removed
from their context.

Ec


body:
> as part of that mysql invocation, add
>
> -u root -p
>
> when you run it, it will prompt you for the mysql root password (if
> you've not set that up, just hit return)

thanks for that - its been going along now for 3 hours or so, with about 1Gb
or so to go, I hope

once it has finished, i guess i better move onto the links one, and then to
images.... i see that this is a very time consumming process

if anyone could explain what I should do, after i have imported in the above
files aswell - that would be great... like does it just magically appear in
mediawiki, or what happens?


subject: [WikiEN-l] The schools table

body:
David Gerard wrote:

>Geoff Burling (geoff at agora.rdrop.com) [050519 09:58]:
>
>>On Wed, 18 May 2005, Tony Sidaway wrote:
>>
>>>Notability is not really definable.  Jimbo has even suggested that it's a
>>>proxy for verifiability.
>>>
>>Last time I saw the word used on VfD, context suggested that it was the
>>equivalent of "another article about a teenager whose most important
>>achievement so far is not dropping out of high school, which was posted
>>by her/his friend or relative."
>>
>
>
>Far too often I see it used to mean "it must not be important because I've
>never heard of it."
>
My personal fav in this category is renowned computer scientist
Ralph Griswold. Apparently if you developed novel new languages
in the 1960s, that's undiscovered prehistory to the young PHPers.

:-)

Stan


list: foundation-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Fair use on English Wikinews

body:
Angela wrote:
> On 5/15/05, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>>This policy seems very reasonable to me. I am happy you found a solution
>>to be able to upload images necessary to illustrate wikinews articles...
>>all while limiting related risks with competitors. This is good.
>>
>>I hope other languages will soon follow as well.
>
>
> I agree with Anthere on this, and it seems safe enough to enable
> uploads now as long as the community is happy with the policy.

Thirded. :-)

--Jimbo


list: wikimedia-l


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Announcing a policy proposal: Why I devised this
	proposal

body:
steven l. rubenstein wrote:
>
> But it seems to me that you and others do not accept and respect my
> feelings.  I am offended.

Millions of people on this planet still have racist attitudes and are
offended by the sight of the face of a member of a race that isn't their
own. Should we therefore remove all photographs of people from
Wikipedia? Even more people are offended by the sight of a woman's face...

Similarly, people are offended by images of violence, by diagrams of sex
organs, by American spelling, by the colour of links...

You see, just because we don't all agree to your proposal, doesn't mean
that we don't acknowledge that something may offend you, or that we
think it is silly to get offended at it, etc.

It's just not practical to make Wikipedia so that it won't offend anybody.

Also, by proposing that AD/BC should be banned from
non-Christianity-related articles and then supporting it by saying that
you are offended, you are quite conveniently ignoring the millions of
people who are offended by CE/BCE in general.

Timwi


from_name: Skyring

subject: [WikiEN-l] Abusive editors who refuse to supply checkable sources

body:
I'm just getting back into the swing of Wikipedia things after
returning home to cheap and convenient Internet access, and I find
that in one particular article when I ask for a checkable source for a
questionable statement I'm met with a torrent of abuse from an editor
who should know better.

The discussion page may be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Government_of_Australia

The background is that there are three opinions as to who is
Australia's head of state, all supported by constitutional scholars.
1. The Queen is Australia's sole head of state.
2. The Queen and Governor-General are both heads of state, with
adjectives such as effective, formal, symbolic, defacto and de jure
used to differentiate the two roles.
3. The Governor-General is Australia's sole head of state.

The popular belief favours the first view, but the population is
generally ignorant of constitutional niceties.
Most constitutional scholars hold some variant of the second view.
The substantial monarchist following supports the third view, in an
interesting twist of irony.

I'm questioning unqualified statements supporting any one of these
three views as  fact, but instead of polite debate, I'm receiving
puerile abuse. I don't think I should have to put up with this.

--
Peter in Canberra


from_name: Carlos

subject: [Wikitech-l] date and cache

body:
Hi, Brion:

Just go to http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Especial:Recentchanges .
Then go to some other page, then go there again: the page is the same,
you must press shift-control-R (full reload) to actualize it.

At least, that are the symptoms I am seeing. The "Recentchanges" page is
always the same until you reload.

(I'm not subscripted to the list, I hope this message gets through...)


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] unsubscribed emails now reject instead of being moderated

body:
The spam load is suddenly ridiculous. (The new bout of neo-Nazi spam,
looks like.) Literally a message every 1-2 minutes. I've set the list
to reject mail from the unsubscribed, rather than moderating.
Hopefully temporary.

If you want to mail wikien-l from other than your normal address,
subscribe the secondary addresses to the list, setting the option to
receive no mail. Then you can post without wading through a second
load of *fascinating* discussion on whether BCE/AD dating should be
used in a Republican Australia during autofellatio.

- d.


from_name: JAY JG

body:
>From: Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net>

>Is there any support in Jewish tradition for the idea of a Chanukah bush?

No, and there still isn't.  I don't get the point you are trying to make.

Jay.


from_name: james

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: importing wiki dump to mediawiki

body:
> Three hours is getting to be quite long (assuming you're adding a cur
> table, not the full history).  If it gets to be very (like eight)
> hours, see this thread:
>
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2005-May/029156.html

Now at 4hrs 15mn - how am I able to speed it up, other than using Linux?

I am using the current tables, not the old ones - 2.5Gb in size - so far the
size of a file in the MySQL data directory is at 1.7Gb nearly

My system is 2.4Ghz Intel Celeron, 1Gb RAM - which i think was a little lower
than the 32minute machine in that thread you posted

> You only need links depending on what you intend to do with the final
> system.  The linktable powers "what links here".  If you don't need
> that, you don't need to load or rebuild the linktable.

I don't know what that is - but it sounds like I wont be needing it

> Yep, once the load is done the wikidb will be unlocked and your baby's
> life begins.

Sweet - just have to wait quite a bit more at this rate - to see the end
result!


subject: [WikiEN-l] The schools table

body:
>From: Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com>
>Right, most of them are new, but not all.
>What initially caught my attention were the less excusable ones.
>I'm sure there are, heaven forbid, notable schools in wikipedia too.
>But it seems that no one is nominating them for VFD. I suspect this is
>because no one has a vendetta against schools, but rather there are
>people who believe notability counts.

That pretty much sums it up.

>Organic growth? ...   Maybe there is a story hidden in that slime-mold
>of mine...?

Most of the growth is of the "trivial", rather than "organic" kind.

Jay.


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikitech-l] On strike...

body:
The board queue received about 60 mails of spam today.

This mail is of the type

De :
notexist at ya.com
?:
board at wikimedia.org
Sujet:
Usuario Inexistente / User does not exist.
El usuario pahdedgara at jazzfree.com no es un usuario valido / You sent
mail to pahdedgara at jazzfree.com
. That's not a valid user here.

Is it possible to block this address and to delete all this crap
automatically ?

Thanks

Ant


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Schools on en: (was Do
	Imisunderstand Wikipedia

body:
>From: "Tony Sidaway" <minorityreport at bluebottle.com>
>Gregory Maxwell said:
> >
> > When it comes down to it, if we only use the criteria of "verifiable
> > and NPOV" we end up with the prohibition on original research as being
> > the only real control on what can go into wikipedia after a little
> > tidying up.
>
>That's basically it.

Fortunately, Wikipedia's notability policies help keep out much of the
trivia your proposal would allow.  Unfortunately, these policies are much
clearer in the case of articles about individuals than they are in the case
of articles about schools.

Jay.


subject: [WikiEN-l] The schools table

body:
>From: Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com>
>We need a [[Wikipedia:Quoting Jimbo doesn't replace orignal thought]].
>
>I know what Jimbo said. I would be shocked if he intended it to be
>taken to the extremes that you are suggesting.

I read his opinion on schools, and it seemed to be explicitly excluding the
extremes Tony (and various school inclusionists) are suggesting.

>In any case, if Jimbo decides he has something to add, I'm sure he can
>speak for himself.

Good point; his current opinion would be most interesting.

Jay.


body:
Alphax (alphasigmax at gmail.com) [050518 15:31]:
> Timwi wrote:

> > I think we should have a Dumbest Discussion of the Week award. Or
> > Deadest Horse of the Week. Or whatever.

> And the previous winners are:
> * Banning the 3RR
> * The reader's right to perform autofellatio
> * Wikipedia kook sues Usenet
> Have I forgotten any?

The current poll on [[WP:POINT]] - Don't disrupt "Don't disrupt Wikipedia
to illustrate a point" to illustrate a point.

- d.


from_name: Alphax

subject: [WikiEN-l] More on mole molars

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

Cormac Lawler wrote:
> On 5/17/05, dpbsmith at verizon.net <dpbsmith at verizon.net> wrote:
>
>>>Speaking of explosives, should we talk of chemical measures in terms of
>>>moles (units consisting of a certain number of molecules, the number of
>>>which has slipped my mind at this moment)?
>>
>>You're thinking of Avocado's Number, named after the famous lawyer.
>>
>>Two avocados is a yotta molecules (if you interpret "yotta" in the
>>"binary prefix" sense of 2^80 rather than 10^24).
>>
>>A mole is a small burrowing animal in the family Talpidae, and their
>>dentition does include molars.
>>
>
>
> So, in other words, it's the number of avocados it takes to fill a mole?
>
> 6.022 * 10^23
>
> That's a pretty big mole..
>

Or a very small avocado :)

- --
Alphax
GnuPG key: 0xF874C613 - http://tinyurl.com/8mpg9
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,'
and those to whom God says, 'All right, then, have it your way.' - C. S.
Lewis
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body:
On 5/18/05, james <jamessampford at supanet.com> wrote:
> > as part of that mysql invocation, add
> >
> > -u root -p
> >
> > when you run it, it will prompt you for the mysql root password (if
> > you've not set that up, just hit return)
>
> thanks for that - its been going along now for 3 hours or so, with about 1Gb
> or so to go, I hope

Three hours is getting to be quite long (assuming you're adding a cur
table, not the full history).  If it gets to be very (like eight)
hours, see this thread:

http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2005-May/029156.html

> once it has finished, i guess i better move onto the links one, and then to
> images.... i see that this is a very time consumming process

You only need links depending on what you intend to do with the final
system.  The linktable powers "what links here".  If you don't need
that, you don't need to load or rebuild the linktable.

> if anyone could explain what I should do, after i have imported in the above
> files aswell - that would be great... like does it just magically appear in
> mediawiki, or what happens?

Yep, once the load is done the wikidb will be unlocked and your baby's
life begins.

--
John Fader


from_name: Tony Sidaway

body:
Gregory Maxwell said:
>
> Already the next database dumb of cur will likely be too big to fix
> gzipped on my Zarus (a pocket sized computer.

Gregory, is there something about your Zarus we should know?  Why is it
important to Wikipedia that we ensure that the English Wikipedia remains
small enough to fit on a portable computer?  If size is a problem, have
you thought of filtering out a few categories that you don't like, or
those articles which are smaller than, say,  2kb?   I'm sure you'l find a
way to cram all the articles you're likely to want to read onto a nice fat
Zarus, if you only use a filter to decide which articles to take with you.
On the subject of road junctions, there are probably quite a few on
Wikipedia already.  Oh yes, here we go:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotch_Corner

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_Junction

which is actually a disambig leading to no less than two articles about
road junctions.
They can be encyclopedic too. The English Spaghetti junction article has a
link to an aerial photo of the junction. It looks lovely.
And here's an article I wrote recently:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontop_Pike

It's about a great big pole stuck in the ground.

It's amazing what kinds of things you can write a good encyclopedia
article about.


body:
On 5/18/05, Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> "Skyring" wrote
>
> >I don't think I should have to put up with this.
>
> I can't imagine why you think anyone on this list has anything fresh to add
> to this much-trailed content dispute, that has been exhaustingly aired here.
> (I don't say 'exhaustively', since I'm not up with this arcane
> constitutional point.)
>
> We were speaking of dead horses, I believe.

Heh.

I was speaking of abusive editors.

--
Peter in Canberra


subject: [WikiEN-l] The schools table

body:
Gregory Maxwell said:
>
> I don't give a hoot about schools. I only noticed them because people
> were voting keep on stubs about a playing field at a school and
> substubs on elementary schools that haven't been expanded in a year of
> existence and justifying these votes by saying that the subjects are
> verifiable and NPOV.

Not quite.  Most of the nominations seemed to be of rather recent
articles--one was only two days old and quite a decent stub, considering.The older articles tended to show signs of organic growth. There are about
twenty actual examples, with dates and history link, here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Schools#The_schools_table


body:
Gregory Maxwell said:
> On 5/18/05, Tony Sidaway <minorityreport at bluebottle.com> wrote:
>
>> If size is a problem, have
>> you thought of filtering out a few categories that you don't like, or
>> those articles which are smaller than, say,  2kb?   I'm sure you'l
>> find a way to cram all the articles you're likely to want to read onto
>> a nice fat Zarus, if you only use a filter to decide which articles to
>> take with you..
>
> Right, but the one criteria that would be most useful is notability and
> I can't achieve that without reading every article and adding
> metadata.

I think you'd better get started now, and good luck.  But please don't try
to use something as malleable and personal as the size of your computer's
memory as a driver for the English Wikipedia's policy.


subject: [WikiEN-l] The schools table

body:
Gregory Maxwell said:
> On 5/18/05, Tony Sidaway <minorityreport at bluebottle.com> wrote:
>> Not quite.  Most of the nominations seemed to be of rather recent
>> articles--one was only two days old and quite a decent stub,
>> considering.The older articles tended to show signs of organic growth.
>> There are about twenty actual examples, with dates and history link,
>> here:
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Schools#The_schools_table
>
> Right, most of them are new, but not all.
> What initially caught my attention were the less excusable ones.

What initially caught my attention was the apparently indiscriminate
nature of the listing.

> I'm sure there are, heaven forbid, notable schools in wikipedia too.
> But it seems that no one is nominating them for VFD.

Notability is not really definable.  Jimbo has even suggested that it's a
proxy for verifiability.


body:
On 5/18/05, james <jamessampford at supanet.com> wrote:
> > Three hours is getting to be quite long (assuming you're adding a cur
> > table, not the full history).  If it gets to be very (like eight)
> > hours, see this thread:
> >
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2005-May/029156.html
>
> Now at 4hrs 15mn - how am I able to speed it up, other than using Linux?

If you read futher down that thread, you'll see my import problems
were solved by using the XAMPP packaging of MySQL.  MySQL comes with a
bunch of different configurations, and the one XAMPP uses settings
that are sensible for a large database like wikipedia's.

It's probably some of the settings in my.cnf (unforunately I zapped my
old version before installing the XAMPP version, so I don't know which
things to change).

> I am using the current tables, not the old ones - 2.5Gb in size - so far the
> size of a file in the MySQL data directory is at 1.7Gb nearly

It looks like you're doing okay.

> My system is 2.4Ghz Intel Celeron, 1Gb RAM - which i think was a little lower
> than the 32minute machine in that thread you posted

That's roughly like mine (the one quoted belonged to someone else).

--
John Fader


body:
Gregory Maxwell said:
>
> When it comes down to it, if we only use the criteria of "verifiable
> and NPOV" we end up with the prohibition on original research as being
> the only real control on what can go into wikipedia after a little
> tidying up.

That's basically it.  With the proviso that an editor must want to write
about it.  Unwanted articles should never get written.  There is a slight
flaw here if we permit people to produce articles using bots, such as
rambot, but that seems to be a result of a general decision that a certain
class of geographical feature should be in Wikipedia.  Not an unreasonable
assumption, but not without its problems in the early days.
 This is amusing because the direction to avoid original
> research is often taken merely as advice and only used as a rule when
> there is conflict

That is not my understanding.  "No original research" is official policy.


body:
On 5/18/05, Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> "Skyring" wrote
>
> >I was speaking of abusive editors.
>
> This will be about Adam Carr, won't it?  I'm no great fan of Adam's
> approach.  It seems to me you are probably doing the pettifogging thing
> yourself, rather than trying to word the relevant page: just banging on
> about sources endlessly isn't a way to a meeting on minds.
>
> There is a policy on civility.  If you think you have a case, you can take
> this to a formal procedure.  If, as you say, you have been off WP for a
> while, you could also try to take a different tack to this matter of
> 'Australia as republic' - for example, let it ride and add to some other
> part of wiki-en.
>
> Since you show no sign of changing the record, I shall not myself read any
> more of these mails.

Clearly you didn't read the discussion page I cited. Nobody was
talking about republics. I'm trying to remove incorrect and unverified
material. Adam's position is that a combination of abuse, threats, and
shilling beats verifiability.

I disagree.

--
Peter in Canberra


subject: [WikiEN-l] The schools table

body:
Gregory Maxwell said:
> On 5/18/05, Tony Sidaway <minorityreport at bluebottle.com> wrote:
>> Notability is not really definable.  Jimbo has even suggested that
>> it's a proxy for verifiability.
>
> We need a [[Wikipedia:Quoting Jimbo doesn't replace orignal thought]].

Indeed. I disagree with him on a lot of stuff, but as he's been around on
the project a bit longer than I have I think his opinion on this matter is
useful.
>
> I know what Jimbo said. I would be shocked if he intended it to be
> taken to the extremes that you are suggesting.

As you suggest he'll interject if he has something to say.


from_name: Richard Rabinowitz

body:
Hmmm. Interesting.

On Tue, 17 May 2005, Cormac Lawler wrote:

> On 5/17/05, Richard Rabinowitz <rickyrab at eden.rutgers.edu> wrote:
> >
> > >On Tue, 17 May 2005, Jim Trodel wrote:
> > >
> > > On 5/17/05, Richard Rabinowitz <rickyrab at eden.rutgers.edu> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > Speaking of explosives, should we talk of chemical measures in terms of
> > > > moles (units consisting of a certain number of molecules, the number of
> > > > which has slipped my mind at this moment)?
> > >
> > > My memory is 6.022 x 10^23
> >
> > Why such a weird number, anyway?
>
>
> See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avogadro's_number
>
> Cormac
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
(warning: criticism of Mormonism ahead) Utah has too many children, anyway
- no wonder why Utah is so reluctant to engage in "No Child Left Behind".
It's high time the President of the church over there realized the folly
of overpopulation and had another "revelation". (/criticism of Mormonism)

I could see a whole bunch of Western states whining about DL
requirements...

On Tue, 17 May 2005, Rick wrote:

> I can just see the United States trying to do a mass
> conversion of highway signs.  Each state would have to
> sign off on it, and many would not just out of "the
> federal government can't tell us what to do."
>
> We'll see if the states actually buy the new driver's
> license requirements.  Utah has already rejected the
> "No Child Left Behind" education requirements, the DL
> stuff is going to be even worse.  But highway signs
> would be a war.
>
> RickK
>
>
>
>
> Discover Yahoo!
> Have fun online with music videos, cool games, IM and more. Check it out!
> http://discover.yahoo.com/online.html
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
Do we know anything about this monk other than that he invented the BC/AD
system, his name was Dennis, and that he appears to have been a short guy?

On Wed, 18 May 2005, Skyring wrote:

> On 5/18/05, Richard Rabinowitz <rickyrab at eden.rutgers.edu> wrote:
> >
> > By the way, Islamic years and solar years have different lengths.
> > Also, by the way, it's not exactly the number of years since Jesus's
> > birth, as the writers of the New Testament were racking their brains out
> > trying to figure what happened when - and made mistakes, of course. This
> > led to a monk, the one who invented the BC/AD system to begin with, making
> > a "best guess" on the basis of inconsistent evidence in scripture. The
> > upshot: now folks think Jesus was born in 4 BCE, or 6 BCE, or some such
> > year.
>
> The monk was Dennis the Short, according to Stephen Gould. He goes
> into the whole thing in some detail.
>
> --
> Pete, wondering if WP does
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
There was a discussion over the reader's right to perform autofellatio?
LOL

On Tue, 17 May 2005, Alphax wrote:

> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Timwi wrote:
> > I think we should have a Dumbest Discussion of the Week award. Or
> > Deadest Horse of the Week. Or whatever.
> >
> > Timwi
> >
>
> And the previous winners are:
>
> * Banning the 3RR
> * The reader's right to perform autofellatio
> * Wikipedia kook sues Usenet
>
> Have I forgotten any?
>
> - --
> Alphax
> GnuPG key: 0xF874C613 - http://tinyurl.com/8mpg9
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
> There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,'
> and those to whom God says, 'All right, then, have it your way.' - C. S.
> Lewis
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
> Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (MingW32)
> Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
>
> iD8DBQFCifuw/RxM5Ph0xhMRApFFAKCf3ehpdn8nABEtj8KGsN6jmXHBmgCfVu5+
> Big+NwfDJlflqPuwX+Qv2Gw=
> =Zh6t
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [Wikitech-l] On strike...

body:
It seems that the board address has been used by some spammer as the
"From:" header, which is routinely faked when sending spam. Error messages
about invalid recipients are sent to the From address.

It happened to me also. I received some hundreds of emails per day for a
week or so, and then it stopped. There's little one can do about it.

Alfio

On Wed, 18 May 2005, Anthere wrote:

>The board queue received about 60 mails of spam today.
>
>
>
>This mail is of the type
>
>De :
>notexist at ya.com
>?:
>board at wikimedia.org
>Sujet:
>Usuario Inexistente / User does not exist.
>El usuario pahdedgara at jazzfree.com no es un usuario valido / You sent
>mail to pahdedgara at jazzfree.com
>. That's not a valid user here.
>
>
>
>Is it possible to block this address and to delete all this crap
>automatically ?
>
>Thanks
>
>Ant
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Wikitech-l mailing list
>Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


body:
Gregory Maxwell said:
> "Is there a useful way to subset wikipedia?".   I
> believe that there are many useful ways, but I believe that all of the
> best ways require us to have some idea of the level of notability of
> each article.

If you can define it algorithmically, have at it!  If not, hauling
perfectly verifiable, NPOV articles before VfD and saying "does not
establish notability" may be one way of doing it, but you may not get a
particularly accurate answer because the threat of execution tends to
force opinions.  Perhaps a notifiability project might be more popular, as
long as notifiability is divorced from deletability (if not, the
notifiability project would acquire a rather bad reputation).

>
> We're more limited by distribution media, DVD gives us 4.5 gigs. Of
> course we could span multiple disks, but then the user will likely have
> to copy it all onto the computer. The more disks we span the
> greater the cost at reproducing the material.

I believe the DVD versions that have been mooted tend to stick to the
opening section, and omit the detail.  With categories, it's possible to
select interesting categories, and there are various other projects in
progress to subset the data.  They adopt a "build up" approach rather than
"start with the entire database and delete stuff item by item".


references:
<d6cnou$dro$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<BAY107-F343B6FB6081C0AAC6B02EDB0160@phx.gbl>
	<d6ff13$4k2$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
On Wed, 18 May 2005, Timwi wrote:

> JAY JG wrote:
> >
> >> The point isn't that the measurement is inaccurate. The point is
> >> that renaming it to "CE" does not make it a different measurement.
> >> It is still based on the same Christian considerations.
> >
> > When one uses the B.C. system one is able to make the rather bizarre
> > statement that "Christ was born 4 to 6 years Before Christ".  At
> > least Before the Common Era does away with that.
>
> No, it doesn't, it only makes it subtler. "4 to 6 years before the
> Common Era" would still mean "4 to 6 years before the point in time that
> some wackos at some point thought was the birthdate of Jesus".

Or at least the wacko named Dennis the Short.

>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
David Gerard said:
> Gregory Maxwell (gmaxwell at gmail.com) [050519 04:43]:
>
>> I could write a quite through article on the slim mold in the back of
>> my refrigerator

>
> You're coming close to advocating things you don't
> actually want to happen ...

Cleaning the fridge?


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject:
[Commons-l] Re: Directmedia: Die ersten 100 Bilder / the first
	100	pictures

body:
Hi,

ich antworte jetzt mal in einem Rutsch, und da nur Antworten von
deutschsprachigen Nutzern kamen, auf Deutsch:

1) Titel in Dateinamen. Das erscheint mir nicht praktikabel. Zum einen
aufgrund der Sprache - Deutsch - zum anderen handelt es sich bei den
Titeln oft um sehr lange Beschreibungen wie

"Freskenzyklus zum Leben des Hl. Franziskus von Assisi, Szene: Traum des
Hl. Franziskus vom Rittertum (Christus erscheint ihm im Schlaf und
verweist auf einen Palazzo mit Waffen,Sinnbild des Rittertums in der
Nachfolge Christi's)" [sic]

Man bedenke, dass diese Namen ja auch verlinkt werden m?ssen.
Grunds?tzlich ist es m.E. nicht sinnvoll, den Dateinamen f?r mehr als
eine eindeutige Identifizierung zu verwenden. Auf dem Commons werden wir
da nie eine Konsistenz hinbekommen, und Mehrsprachigkeit ist aufgrund
des Eindeutigkeitskritierums kaum sinnvoll realisierbar.
Meta-Informationen sollten lieber einheitlich auf die
Beschreibungsseite, langfristig hoffentlich auch in vern?nftig
strukturierter Form (Wikidata).

2) Links auf [[K?nstler Name]] von der Beschreibungsseite. OK, sinnvoll,
da unter dem Titel evtl. noch eine Galerie existiert. Werde ich machen.
Langfristig (ja ja) w?rde ich gerne von der Verwendung dieser
Galerie-Seiten absehen und statt dessen konsistent Kategorien einsetzen
(es ist vorstellbar, dass die Kategorien-Seiten dynamisch Metadaten von
der Bildbeschreibungsseite anzeigen).

3) Auf den K?nstler verlinken *statt* die Informationen auf der
Beschreibungsseite anzuzeigen halte ich nicht f?r w?nschenswert, da man
in der Regel von einer Kategorien-Seite auf den Bildbeschreibungsseiten
landen wird und diese Informationen also am liebsten dort direkt
sichtbar h?tte.

4) Kursiv statt fett f?r Sprachcodes: OK, ich probiere mal aus, wie das
aussieht.

5) Bilder ohne Stil-Kategorien: Nicht jedes Bild im Directmedia-Bestand
hat diese Metadaten. Ich kann am Ende des Imports eine Liste von Bildern
ohne Stilangaben machen, damit wir da einen systematischen
Tagging-Prozess anschlie?en k?nnen.

6) Formatierung und Struktur der Templates k?nnen angepasst werden unter:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Painting
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Information (Meta-Template
f?r Template:Painting)
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Creator

Der Massen-Import beginnt dann in den n?chsten Stunden.

Viele Gr??e

Erik


from_name: Gregory Maxwell

body:
On 5/18/05, Tony Sidaway <minorityreport at bluebottle.com> wrote:
>>  This is amusing because the direction to avoid original
> > research is often taken merely as advice and only used as a rule when
> > there is conflict
>
> That is not my understanding.  "No original research" is official policy.

Sure enough, but it's routinely ignored. I cited example of places
where you'll not only find it ignored but we'd have lesser articles as
a result.

'No original research' is a useful idea but it's not a crowing
achievement like NPOV, we'd be fools to follow it blindly, and I'm
glad to see that we do not. Often the cost of finding a citation (if
indeed one is available) for a particular point which is obvious to
anyone who has studied the references, is just too great.  As time
goes on we will find more and more things where the material in the
various wikiprojects is some of the highest quality material
available, and we would have to ask ourselves, must we cite inferior
inferior information because of a silly policy when no one disputes
what we would like to provide?

(not that no-orignal-research is silly, but rather almost any policy
applied blindly can be silly)


body:
I have a Modest Proposal. Let's date everything from the foundation of New
York City as New Amsterdam, 380 years ago. Thus, this would  be the year
380 or 381 YONA (Year of New Amsterdam), and pre-foundation dates could be
counted as PNA (Pre=New Amsterdam). :)

On Wed, 18 May 2005, Poor, Edmund W wrote:

> Are we STILL discussing this?
>
> If mention of religion offends you, too bad. Mention of autofellatio
> offends me, but I'm not griping.
>
> If you THINK that use of AD/BC implies "endorsement of the truth of
> Christianity", then you're in a fantasy world. It's just a habit. Many
> retail stores gear up for the Christmas holidays and even derive a
> substantial fraction of their income from the Xmas season. Does this
> mean they ENDORSE Christianity? (Hint: they are just being pragmatic.)
>
> There are many calendars in use, throughout the English-speaking world.
> Even the ANTI-RELIGIOUS Soviet Union continued to use the same numbering
> system for years as the (Christian) West. Nobody EVER thought that this
> usage implied any endorsement (or even TOLERANCE) of religion on their
> part.
>
> This whole thing smacks of an "anti-religious agenda", rather than any
> sincere effort towards neutrality. When we couldn't agree on British vs.
> American spelling, we chose this solution:
>
> * Let each article use one consistent style throughout.
> * If I as an American want to write theater and center, I should NOT do
> so, if the article already uses theatre and centre.
> * Above all, nobody should systematically go through articles purging of
> the "hated style".
>
> Ever hear of live and let live? Sheesh!
>
> Uncle Ed
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
Let's make it a tradition, then. Like that orange on the seder plate.

On Wed, 18 May 2005, JAY JG wrote:

>
>
> >From: Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net>
>
> >Is there any support in Jewish tradition for the idea of a Chanukah bush?
>
> No, and there still isn't.  I don't get the point you are trying to make.
>
> Jay.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] The schools table

body:
Okay, so now Jimbo Wales has overthrown Benedict XVI. What else is new?

On Wed, 18 May 2005, Ray Saintonge wrote:

> Gregory Maxwell wrote:
>
> >On 5/18/05, Tony Sidaway <minorityreport at bluebottle.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> >>Notability is not really definable.  Jimbo has even suggested that it's a
> >>proxy for verifiability.
> >>
> >>
> >We need a [[Wikipedia:Quoting Jimbo doesn't replace orignal thought]].
> >
> >I know what Jimbo said. I would be shocked if he intended it to be
> >taken to the extremes that you are suggesting.
> >
> Tony said that Jimbo "suggested", so that is not really an extreme approach.
>
> Be that as it may, your point about quoting Jimbo is well taken.  "Jimbo
> says ..." is often used as some kind of drop dead argument.  That makes
> it difficult for him to have an ordinary opinion on a current issue
> without somebody interpreting that opinion as being ''ex cathedra''.  In
> the wake of the first Vatican Council even Pius IX recognized that his
> infalibility would have limited application.
>
> Ec
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Schools on en: (was Do I misunderstand Wikipedia?
	On notability and encyclopedic merit.)

body:
Mark Williamson said:
> Also there is the problem of lack of timelessness.
>
> In 500 years, will people care about [[w:en:Daigo Fukuryu Maru]]?
> Perhaps. What about [[w:en:Manchester United]]? If football doesn't
> last that long, chances are the 500-years-from-now-Wikipedians would
> want to merge all football teams into an article "List of famous
> football teams" or something like that.
>
> What about [[w:en:Britney Spears]], [[w:en:David Beckham]], or
> [[w:en:Stefanie Sun]]?
>

This is all to the good.  We *need* to give deletionists something to look
forward to.  The timelessness problem will be solved because Wikipedia is
not a timeless publication, but an organically growing one.
Seriously, though, if any twentieth century works of literature or film
are studied in 500 years, someone will have to compile notes for the
students so they'll know what Bridget Jones (or Harry Potter, or Homer
Simpson) is talking about.  There are academics who spend their entire
working lives studying 80 million year old coproliths, so Bridget Jones'
Big Knickers could well be on some future academic's literary excavation
list.


from_name: Angela

body:
On 5/15/05, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> This policy seems very reasonable to me. I am happy you found a solution
> to be able to upload images necessary to illustrate wikinews articles...
> all while limiting related risks with competitors. This is good.
>
> I hope other languages will soon follow as well.

I agree with Anthere on this, and it seems safe enough to enable
uploads now as long as the community is happy with the policy.

Angela.


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Schools on en: (was DoImisunderstand
	Wikipedia

body:
>From: David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au>
>JAY JG (jayjg at hotmail.com) [050519 08:30]:
>
> > Fortunately, Wikipedia's notability policies help keep out much of the
> > trivia your proposal would allow.  Unfortunately, these policies are
>much
> > clearer in the case of articles about individuals than they are in the
>case
> > of articles about schools.
>
>
>Excellent! Where's this notability policy?

[[Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not]] is a good place to start.

Jay.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: date and cache

body:
Okay, I left them a message on the pump and a link to your message.

Ant

Brion Vibber a ?crit:
> Anthere wrote:
>
>> Three times now in about a week or so, some spanish editors reported
>> me a weird bug, that makes them see the wrong date on some pages or
>> on recent changes. See the last comment
>> http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Anthere&curid=521&diff=0&oldid=132341
>
>
> We could really use more details here, such as *what sort* of wrong
> dates are seen. Specifically what they are, and specifically where they
> are seen. Comparitive times (eg 'I saw "May 99, 2199" at the date for
> three changes on Recent Changes at about 12:40 UTC on May 16') and
> confirming screen shots may help.
>
> If it's an old cached page, vs it's the specific year 2025 thing, vs
> it's a year 2003 thing, etc might have to be treated differently.
>
>
>> ... I also noticed in the past few days a huge issue with cache.
>> Three times yesterday, when I edited meta, for a new page, after I
>> saved the page, there was nothing on it, and I had to reload to see
>> the new page.
>
>
> This sort of thing is generally due to lagging in the database
> replication, and is more prone when load is heavy (and especially when
> painful page rename operations and such are going on).
>
>> Weirder is what is currently happening on the village pump on the
>> french wikipedia (though part of it might be due to Paris servers).
>>
>> I connected anonymously yesterday, and I got the 14th of may page. I
>> reload several times, forced reload... and still got the 14th of may.
>
>
> Cache updates might not be going through properly.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Schools on en: (was Do Imisunderstand
	Wikipedia? On notability and encyclopedic merit.)

body:
>From: Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com>
>'No original research' is a useful idea but it's not a crowing
>achievement like NPOV, we'd be fools to follow it blindly, and I'm
>glad to see that we do not. Often the cost of finding a citation (if
>indeed one is available) for a particular point which is obvious to
>anyone who has studied the references, is just too great.

In my experience, it is far more often ignored because an editor wants to
draw some original conclusions about something, and is unaware of the
policy, unable to comprehend it, or simply doesn't care.  Currently the risk
that Wikipedia will be damaged by "blindly following" the NOR policy is far
less than the risk that it will be damaged by *not* following it.

Jay.


from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

subject: [WikiEN-l] My IP address blocked?

body:
In plain English

On 5/18/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> Connor O' Kane (escobar600 at gmail.com) [050519 00:53]:
>
> > I only relaised today that my IP address has been blocked, it says the
> > IP is 62.254.32.19. and it was blocked by RickK, but when I looked at
> > the block list, then at this IP's contributions, I had done none of
> > them at all, but they were all to do with things in my country.
> > My username is Escobar600ie and I have only made positive
> > contributions, I am not a vandal.
> > Check the contributions by both, you will see they are diferent.
>
> 62.254.32.19 = belf-cache-3.server.ntli.net - an NTL proxy server, used by
> tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people. (NTL is a huge
> cable provider in the UK.) It's currently unblocked.
>
> The netblock is 62.254.32.0-62.254.63.255. It is currently listed on the
> Special:Blockip page as NTL range, block only for shortest time required.
>
>
> - d.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] My IP address blocked?

body:
Sorry, I somehow clicked send before I could finish the message. In
plain English that means, someone else with the same Internet Service
Provider got this IP adress during one of their wikipedia visits. It
probably wasn't you, but we still had to block the IP in order to stop
this person from committing vandalism.

We're sorry for the inconvenience it caused you but we can't do
anything about the collateral damage such a block causes. Please be
patient and continue your good contributions.

--Mgm

On 5/18/05, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
> In plain English
>
> On 5/18/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> > Connor O' Kane (escobar600 at gmail.com) [050519 00:53]:
> >
> > > I only relaised today that my IP address has been blocked, it says the
> > > IP is 62.254.32.19. and it was blocked by RickK, but when I looked at
> > > the block list, then at this IP's contributions, I had done none of
> > > them at all, but they were all to do with things in my country.
> > > My username is Escobar600ie and I have only made positive
> > > contributions, I am not a vandal.
> > > Check the contributions by both, you will see they are diferent.
> >
> > 62.254.32.19 = belf-cache-3.server.ntli.net - an NTL proxy server, used by
> > tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people. (NTL is a huge
> > cable provider in the UK.) It's currently unblocked.
> >
> > The netblock is 62.254.32.0-62.254.63.255. It is currently listed on the
> > Special:Blockip page as NTL range, block only for shortest time required.
> >
> >
> > - d.
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> >
>


from_name: Viajero

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia user Trey Stone: Email to SlimVirgin

body:
Hm.. wrote:
> I have continually tried to compromise, but these people have removed info w/o justification. BTW, I did NOT revert more than 3 times -- I have done several edits, trying to add in new info as well to counterbalance the extremely pro-Castro POV.

Trey Stone deserves little sympathy at this point; he is an unrepentant
wager of edit wars who has violated the 3RR seven times in the ten days,
for which he has been blocked four times. Because of this and other
anti-Wiki behaviour, he is currently the subject of both an RfC and a
pending arbitration case:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Trey_Stone

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Trey_Stone_and_Davenbelle

V.


from_name: Andy Rabagliati

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Do I misunderstand Wikipedia? On notability and
	encyclopedic merit.

body:
On Wed, 18 May 2005, Ray Saintonge wrote:

> I didn't realize that one of the aims of Wikipedia was to have a
> database small enough to be dumped entirely on anybody's drive.

[ ...]

> When it comes to third world equipment, I'm sure that we have long
> since exceeded the capacity of that equipment.

Well, we battle to keep up .. :-)

A single central server is a huge resource, warts and all, in an
educational environment. It is a wall of books, any page of which can
been seen by everybody at once. It is a substitute for the web.

It has quickly outstripped the CD, marched straight through the DVD, and
will be 100Mb by the end of the year, I wager.

I am including pictures in that.

Wikipedia is still entirely useful as text-only, but sometimes we need a
picture of Nelson Mandela :-)

Without a massively-parallel peer review system, I see no manageable
selection system, unless it includes page views, which in my cursory
examination have not been revealed.

An external hard drive is still big enough, and will be for a year.

Cheers,  Andy!


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Non-commercial only and By Permission Only Images to be
	deleted

body:
All images which are for non-commercial only use and by permission only
are not acceptable for Wikipedia and _will be deleted_.  We have
tolerated them for some time, but only as an interim measure during the
time when images which were previously not properly tagged could be tagged.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Non-commercial_use_only_images
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Images_used_with_permission

Are the relevant categories.

Examples of images which must be deleted include:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:100_0062.JPG

(This is a standard photo of the Mission District in San Francisco --
getting a free alternative will be simple.)

and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:167957_7674BoyVerticalBlindsSilhouette.jpg

(This is a non-commercial only image for the purpose of illustrating the
concept "vertical blinds" -- getting a free alternative will be simple.)

As of today, all *new* images which are "non commercial only" and "with
permission only" should be deleted on sight.  Older images should go
through a process of VfD to eliminate them in an orderly fashion, taking
due account of "fair use".

It is very unfortunate that such images are still being uploaded _new_
when we have not be happy about them for a long time.  It is not fair to
contributors who are working on such things, since we have no intention
to keep them in the long run.

Therefore, these templates should be modified to warn people that these
images are temporary only and will be deleted soon.

--Jimbo


from_name: Alfio Puglisi

subject: [Wikitech-l] dumps

body:
Is a new stats run in progress?

Alfio

On Mon, 16 May 2005, Domas Mituzas wrote:

>Hello,
>
>new dumps (as of 20050516) available at http://download.wikimedia.org/
>Please note, we no longer provide 2GB split files. I do sincerely believe,
>that HTTP has enough capability to do partial downloads of files ;-)
>And those splits simply double disk space requirements...
>
>Cheers,
>Domas
>


body:
Fred Bauder wrote:

:This matter has been before arbitration (or perhaps just disussed at length
:on the mailing list) although I do not remember the details or even if we
:accepted the case.

We rejected it:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration&diff=11037227&oldid=11036227

Skyring, wikien-l isn't the place to take a dispute like this. Have you
attempted other forms of dispute resolution as suggested above before
trash-talking unspecified editors on the list?

- d.


from_name: Erik Zachte

subject: [Wikitech-l] dumps

body:
>> Is a new stats run in progress?
>> Alfio

AFAIK, not yet.
I have some script updates to do, will start the job in one or two days.

Erik Zachte


from_name: Skyring

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Announcing a policy proposal

body:
On 5/18/05, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> Skyring wrote:
> >
> > I think you missed my point, you humourless bastard.
>
> Clearly, discussion is futile with you, so I will put you on ignore for
> now until you will learn to behave in a less aggressive way.

I rest my case...

--
Peter in Canberra


body:
With the agreement of the Board, I have enabled local uploads on the
English edition of Wikinews.

I ask other language editions that are interested in fair use to
formulate a similar whitelist policy for cases in which fair use should
be allowed. The emphasis is on *whitelist* - any case not covered by the
policy should be quickly deleted.

Once a policy is developed, please report it on foundation-l or
wikinews-l to move forward with enabling local uploads. A brief summary
of your policy in English would be very helpful.

For reference, the English fair use policy is at:
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Fair_use

As before, the Wikimedia Commons should be used for any free content media.

All best,

Erik


body:
On 5/18/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> Fred Bauder wrote:
>
> :This matter has been before arbitration (or perhaps just disussed at length
> :on the mailing list) although I do not remember the details or even if we
> :accepted the case.
>
> We rejected it:
>
>    http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration&diff=11037227&oldid=11036227
>
> Skyring, wikien-l isn't the place to take a dispute like this. Have you
> attempted other forms of dispute resolution as suggested above before
> trash-talking unspecified editors on the list?

Yeah.

Not as much fun.

--
Peter in Canberra


from_name: David Gerard

body:
Skyring (skyring at gmail.com) [050519 00:27]:
> On 5/18/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> > Fred Bauder wrote:

> > :This matter has been before arbitration (or perhaps just disussed at length
> > :on the mailing list) although I do not remember the details or even if we
> > :accepted the case.

> > We rejected it:
> >    http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration&diff=11037227&oldid=11036227
> > Skyring, wikien-l isn't the place to take a dispute like this. Have you
> > attempted other forms of dispute resolution as suggested above before
> > trash-talking unspecified editors on the list?

> Yeah.
> Not as much fun.

Cool. Was there any particular reason you should stay on this list?

- d.