from_name: Neil Harris

subject: [WikiEN-l] "Can you trust Wikipedia?"

body:
The Guardian has a story entitled "Can you trust Wikipedia?" in which
various specialists rate Wikipedia articles in their field of knowledge:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1599116,00.html

At the very least, it will draw attention to the articles reviewed,
particularly the article on [[haute couture]], which Vogue's editor
rated at 0/10.

Noted Wikipedia critic Robert McHenry rates the [[Encylopedia]] article
at 5/10: not nearly good enough, but it's a start... it might well be
worthwhile to try to improve Wikipedia's McHenry Index by improving the
quality of this article, and backing up its statement with solid cites.
Downplaying the self-reference to Wikipedia own fabulousness might be a
useful first step.

The other article ratings were:

[[Steve Reich]] 7/10
[[Basque people]] 7/10
[[TS Eliot]] 6/10
[[Samuel Pepys]] 6/10
[[Bob Dylan]] 8/10

A friend forwarded me a link to this; they have an interest in one of
the fields reviewed, and commented that they were somewhat dubious about
the factual accuracy of one of the criticisms made in the article ;-)

-- Neil


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: David Gerard

subject:
[WikiEN-l] So,
	you think you're a good writer? The "Fix Crappy Prose" Challenge

body:
I've just put the following text on my userpage. If you think you're
hard enough, you take the challenge and then put this on your own
userpage.

===The "Fix Crappy Prose" Challenge===

I'd like everyone reading this who thinks they're a pretty good writer
to middle-click'''*''' "Random page" twenty times and
rewrite any crappy prose you find without sacrificing any factual
content. Do this at least once a week.

Detail and accuracy beat elegant prose, if you're forced to make the
choice. But that doesn't make crappy prose a good idea.

'''*''' You do use [[Mozilla Firefox|Firefox]], right?

- d.


from_name: Matt R

subject: [WikiEN-l] Unnecessary nudity on [[Hogtie bondage]]

body:
--- MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
> I totally agree with your view Matt. BTW, are there any copyright
> issues with the images? I'm on a public machine, so I'm not going to
> dare checking...

The uploader declared them to be {{GFDL}}. I emailed the webmaster of the adult
site in question, and got no reply -- I would imagine we would have got a
prompt response if they were a copyright violation, given that they are in the
business of selling these photos.

-- Matt

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Matt_Crypto
Blog: http://cipher-text.blogspot.com

___________________________________________________________
How much free photo storage do you get? Store your holiday
snaps for FREE with Yahoo! Photos http://uk.photos.yahoo.com


list: foundation-l

from_name: Poe, Marshall

subject: [Foundation-l] Answers.com stuff

body:
Danny wrote:

"We don't want ad sense or Google ads."

Gosh, I don't know why we wouldn't *try* such a program.  The benefits
seem huge, the pitfalls few, and if we don't like it we could just cut
it off after the trial period (we'd vote!).  A test would scale up
nicely: first you allow the ads on the front page,  then if that worked
alright some other pages, and if that looked good, you'd open up more.
Moreover, since we're big and have leverage, we could limit the *kinds*
of ads AdSense placed to those consistent with our goals (e.g., no porn,
no x, no y, no z--damned if I know). Another idea: we could use AdSense
in focused, time-limited "campaigns," like a pledge drive on NPR.  We
assess our needs, state a fund raising goal, tell AdSense to serve the
ads until the goal is reached.  After that, the ads come down until we
need more money. I imagine that just the prospect of long AdSense
"campaigns" would drive contributions from users.  "You tired of those
ads? We are too. So donate to Wikipedia and shorten the campaign."

Best, MP

Marshall Poe, Ph.D.
The Atlantic Monthly
600 New Hampshire Ave. NW
Washington, DC 20037
202-266-6511
mpoe at theatlantic.com
-----Original Message-----
From: foundation-l-bounces at wikimedia.org
[mailto:foundation-l-bounces at wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of
daniwo59 at aol.com
Sent: Monday, October 24, 2005 5:53 PM
To: foundation-l at wikimedia.org
Subject: [Foundation-l] Answers.com stuff

Well, since the list is being overrun by people's comments on the
Answers.com agreement, I may as well dive in with some thoughts of my
own. I think I am pretty qualified to speak-after all, I actually saw
the agreement, which is more than I can say for many of the people
commenting on it.

But first, I want to tell you a little story about my former place of
employment, a museum in Manhattan. Said Museum is now $17 million
dollars in debt. It has used up its emergency fund. It has been forced
to let people go (I was not let go, and was immediately replaced, but a
few of my colleagues, including many more qualified than me, were).

It's part of a problem faced by most not-for-profits today. Lots of
great ideas, and not enough money to go around. In fact, the little
donations ($10-$500), or in the case of museums, admissions are never
enough to cover basic operating costs.

We are now among the top 30 websites in the world. I believe that we are
the only one that is a not-for-profit (haven't checked it recently, but
it is a fairly safe assumption). How can we cover our operating costs?

Grants are one possibility, but there are plenty of people competing for
those same grants. Besides, grants have to be sexy. And they have to be
something we can really carry through with. And NO ONE will give us a
substantial sum to just do whatever we want with it. The CFO of my old
place of employment used to tell me that it was easy to find people to
pay for some crap sculpture that no one else liked, or for marble in the
elevators, but when it came to basic operating costs like a monthly
cleaning bill of $40,000-forget it.

Nor are we in the position to put up a plaque, have a cocktail
reception, and dedicate the "Stanley and Edith Rosenthal Server in honor
of their grandson Milton's bar mitzvah." Nor do we want to.

We don't want pop up ads on our site. We don't want ad sense or Google
ads, though I find it rather odd that one of the vocal opponents to the
Answers.com deal admits to running a mirror of Wikipedia with Google
ads. Along comes someone who wants to use our information, which we are
giving away for free, and to pay us for it in the name of fair play.
Rather than asking for ads on every page, they simply suggested a modest
link on a single page, a tools page which most people don't go to. They
did this out of respect for our mission and our ideals.

How are people responding? Well, someone suggested that it would be
better to shut down Wikipedia for editing except for one hour a day.
People are talking about drastically cutting the budget, though I can
only wonder if they can point to anything significant in the budget that
can be cut, or if they have even seen the budget at all. Of course,
everyone wants the site to run faster. I would just like someone to tell
us how we can do just that without getting significant funding. I would
like someone to explain to me how we can realize our goal of providing
every person in the world with an encyclopedia in a language that they
can understand without paying for it in some way.

Danny

_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l at wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l


list: wikimedia-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Answers.com stuff


from_name: Dan Grey

subject:
[Foundation-l] Benefits of advertising (was Re: Our exponentially
	increasing costs)

body:
On 24/10/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Tim Starling wrote:
> > The Answers.com deal, on the other hand, is just a recipe for offence.
> > The benefit is unknown and will probably be small. The Board has agreed
> > to it in secret, apparently to repay favours such as the Wikimania
> > sponsorship. They've given a single organisation preferential treatment,
> > which brings their motives into question: are they doing this to help
> > Wikipedia or Answers.com?
>
> "apparently to repay favours such as the Wikimania sponsorship" -
> absolutely false.
>
> "a single organization preferential treatment" - absolutely false.
>

But, Jimbo, that's how people *are* viewing it, like it or not.

Dan


subject:
[Foundation-l] Answers.com and Wikimedia Foundation to Form
	NewPartnership

body:
On 24/10/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> There are other reasons to be worried about ads

With people saying they could lead to an income of $26m a year, or pay
for all of our normal hosting costs in a fortnight, I'd like to know
what these other reasons are!

Dan


from_name: Anthony DiPierro

subject: [Foundation-l] Answers.com stuff

body:
On 10/24/05, daniwo59 at aol.com <daniwo59 at aol.com> wrote:

> We don't want pop up ads on our site. We don't want ad sense or Google
> ads, though I find it rather odd that one of the vocal opponents to the
> Answers.com <http://Answers.com> deal admits to running a mirror of
> Wikipedia with Google
> ads.

Since I'm the only one on this list I know that runs a mirror of Wikipedia
with Google ads, I assume you're talking about me.

I'm not against the answers.com <http://answers.com> deal. Not at all. I
think it'd be better if we built our own open source version of the 1-click
software, and took 100% of the revenues, but until that software has been
written I think it's perfectly fine to get 50%. I think that putting a
prominently placed link to the software on [[Wikipedia:Tools]] would be
advertising, but I don't think that advertising is necessarily a bad thing,
and after hearing from Jimbo who has implied that [[Wikipedia:Tools]] will
be open for editing just like any other wiki page I don't even think I'd
call it advertising. Finally, I think a CPA should be consulted to ensure
that any revenues generated won't be taxed, if this hasn't already been
done.

I'm not at all against the answers.com <http://answers.com> deal. In fact, I
think Wikipedia should start putting opt-out Google Adsense ads on the site,
and barring agreement for that (which probably wouldn't be easy to obtain),
that we should put opt-in Google Adsense ads on the site. If that feature
was enabled, I'd personally opt-in to the ads, both to give Wikipedia some
extra revenue, and because I actually find Google Adsense ads to be a
feature. I don't want pop-up ads, though I don't think they'd be effective
anyway. Most people nowadays probably block pop-up ads. I know I do.

So, maybe you were talking about a different person who runs a mirror of
Wikipedia and runs Google Adsense ads on it. If so, sorry for jumping to
conclusions :).

Let me finish by saying that while I make a few bucks off my Wikipedia
mirror, it's much less than minimum wage considering all the time I spend
working on it (and the fact that I roll the majority of the revenues back
into hardware to run the site). If I ever made a significant profit off of
that site I'd gladly share the majority of it with Wikipedia. In fact, it is
my goal to use the money from this site to create The Free Content
Foundation, and as soon as I get a couple people to join me in that goal I
plan to make mcfly.org <http://mcfly.org> a non-profit.

Anthony


subject: [Foundation-l] Answers.com stuff


from_name: Dori

body:
On 10/24/05, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> "If the stacks of money is better than editors and readers, then the
> foundations should go for it."
>
> Without stacks of money, there will be no editors or readers. Without the
> generous donations of Jimbo and Bomis (who made their money off of - get
> this - advertising), there would be no Wikipedia.

There wouldn't be a Wikipedia without editors either.

> I can't for the life of me understand why people "a bunch of editors and
> readers" would leave over something like this. I also don't think it'd be a
> bad thing to get rid of the people who think this way.

Yes, and for the life of me I can't understand why you don't have a
successful fork and community. Advertising - check, Not afraid to get
rid of whiny editors - check

--
Dori


list: wikipedia-l

subject: [Wikipedia-l] multilingual redirect

body:
Mark Williamson wrote:

>What exactly do you mean by "permanently reserved"?
>
>Is there some sort of binding legal document which says this? Or is it
>just a matter of "We could very well change it but we just don wanna"?
>
>Mark
>
>
"Cool URIs don't change" by Tim Berners-Lee http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI should be required reading on this topic.

Which reminds me: it might be interesting to consider the use of some outside-the-web URI namespace in addition to Wikipedia URLs for truly persistent documents; for example, the doi: namespace, which identifies a specific thing, rather than where to find it, and may be more useful that URLs for serious long-term (> 100 years) references to objects. We already go some way towards doing this with article revision numbering, but the renderings of even fixed revisions of an article are still mutable, as images, templates, and software changes change under them.

To work properly, unlike the current scheme for revisions, a permanent version identifier for a truly persistent immutable document would need to capture the state of not only the wikitext of that article version, but the side-effects of context of the rendered page at the time of snapshot (template expansions, images, current software version and settings, user prefs etc.) at the moment of creation.

Clearly it is impractical, to say the least, to represent an article by a complete snapshot of an installation; however, all that is really needed is a snapshot of the complete rendered/renderable article including all content referenced. Perhaps a .tgz of an HTML+files tree of a rendered Wiki page, or an XML file containing all the necessary data including images etc., or a .pdf, might be a suitable format for capturing truly immutable snapshots of Wikipedia articles, with the DOI being based on a high-quality hash of the generated file content?

(See http://www.doi.org/handbook_2000/enumeration.html for more context.)

-- Neil


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Tels

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Upload URL/filesystem restructuring

body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

Moin,

On Monday 24 October 2005 08:57, Brion Vibber wrote:
> Nick Jenkins wrote:
> > Brion Vibber wrote:
> >>One possibility is to embed the timestamp into the URL. So the goatse
> >>version might be:
> >>http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2005/10/23/074223/Puppy.jpg
> >>
> >>and the reverted image would get a different URL, a few minutes
> >> later:
> >> http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2005/10/23/074506/Puppy.jpg
> >
> > Alternative but very similar idea would be to embed the revision
> > number in the URL, instead of the upload timestamp:
> >
> > Example original:
> > http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/P/1/Puppy.jpg
> >
> > Example revised:
> > http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/P/2/Puppy.jpg
>
> We had a lively discussion on in #wikimedia-tech on this subject; as
> well as the revision ID numbers another possibility discussed was using
> a content hash.
>
> A content hash has the additional advantage that duplicate file
> versions only need to be stored once; for instance currently when
> reverting a file it makes a new copy of the file on the filesystem,
> which wastes space. (However you then need to be careful about
> deleting.)
>
> So you might have something like:
> http://upload.wikimedia.org/584/590/5845907fdfc6eb1125129c4ce0da0704c49
>6a7e4.jpg
>
> Obviously a disadvantage is that the filenames are ugly. One might tack
> a 'pretty' but ignored filename on the end, using rewrites or whatever
> tool to drop it on the backend:
>
> http://upload.wikimedia.org/584/590/5845907fdfc6eb1125129c4ce0da0704c49
>6a7e4/Puppy.jpg

Which is still very human-unfriendly. I couldn't remember this URl even if
my life depended on it!

I rather like

	http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/P/2/Puppy.jpg

although I am not sure why the "/P/" needs to be visible to the user (it
is deterministic, after all), and it would be handy to have a "latest"
revision URL. Which could be just:

	http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/Puppy.jpg

and the software behind the back figures out what the exact latest
revision is and under what /CapitcalLetter/ directory it falls. These are
things a human user shouldn't need to do or know about.

(Yes, I know, it is technically difficult. But I'd rather have you spent
some time figuring it out and implementing it, than every wikipedia user
to remember these little technicalities :)

If the plan is to hide all that, well, please forget my 0.02?.

Best wishes,

Tels

- --
 Signed on Mon Oct 24 18:58:02 2005 with key 0x93B84C15.
 Visit my photo gallery at http://bloodgate.com/photos/
 PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email.

 "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged
 demo."  -- Andy Finkel, computer guy

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from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] cancelling unicode for buginese

body:
muhammad zaid zainuddin wrote:
> Dear wikitech developers,
>
> First of all, we (me and my friends whoe're agree to work on buginese
> wikipedia) are terribly sorry for this change. It should be before the
> creation of the domain but turn out that most of our pc (even me) cannot
> display the fonts in the edit box. Therefore, we'd like to cancel the
> unicode input/writings for our edit box as well as our display and
> change to standard wikipedia like enlish/ malay/ indonesian wikis (means
> that all will be in roman, no unicode like english wiki). This problem
> actually occurred before the creation of the domain but I kind of busy
> that time and forget to tell wikitech's. However we'd like wikitech to
> keep the font family of lontara. We will be needing it for the future.
> Again, we're terribly-terribly sorry for this messed up.

I don't understand what this means? All Wikipedias are Unicode,
including English.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Rowan Collins

body:
Various people wrote:
[I've picked this response just because it's the most recent, various
people have been making similar points.]

> > So you might have something like:
> > http://upload.wikimedia.org/584/590/5845907fdfc6eb1125129c4ce0da0704c49
> >6a7e4.jpg
> >
> > Obviously a disadvantage is that the filenames are ugly. One might tack
> > a 'pretty' but ignored filename on the end, using rewrites or whatever
> > tool to drop it on the backend:
> >
> > http://upload.wikimedia.org/584/590/5845907fdfc6eb1125129c4ce0da0704c49
> >6a7e4/Puppy.jpg
>
> Which is still very human-unfriendly. I couldn't remember this URl even if
> my life depended on it!

The question that occurs to me is, quite simply, why do humans ever
*need* to know or manipulate such URIs?

* anyone wanting to "bookmark" a particular image will want to link to
its description page (to show copyright info, possible replacements,
etc); if that's not the case, we need to redesign our image
description pages (this may be the case w.r.t. Commons).

* anyone *saving* the image ("downloading" it, as they would describe
it) would only see the *filename* part (as the default name); as long
as we tack on the "friendly name" at the end (even just to ignore) the
rest of the URI can be anything at all

* anyone wanting to include an image *inline* in an external site is
abusing our bandwidth (either maliciously or just through naivety)

* somebody mentionned bot authors; but what purpose do bot authors
have with the absolute URI of an image? Creating a static dump by
screen-scraping rather than parsing the wikitext dump?

* a user-side renderer (e.g. WikiWyg, Pilaf's Live Preview) might need
to know them to render fully, I suppose; like distinguishing "red" and
"blue" internal links, this could ideally be done through some minimal
"API", question and answer style

In short, I don't see any need for making these URIs "pretty", or even
providing a Special page that redirects, except as a [bad] substitute
for a "bot API" that allows you to request the current full URI. I
*do*, however, see some very good reasons for tacking a pretty
*filename* on as the last part, even if it's actually ignored (e.g.
for "save as", as mentionned above).

Actually, we might want to do more than just ignore the pretty name,
because (esp. knowing IE) it rmight be dangerous if
http://..../abc123/Puppy.jpeg and http://..../abc123/Puppy.txt are
valid URIs for the same file. To keep things static, we don't really
want to check this explicitly, but perhaps the "pretty bits" could
actually exist on the filesystem, as symlinks or such:
http://.../abc123/abc123 [actual content]
http://..../abc123/Puppy.jpeg [symlink to above]
http://..../abc123/JSC0123.jpg [symlink to above; old or alternative name]
http://..../abc123/Haxx0r.txt [no symlink here, so returns HTTP 404]

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


body:
"If the stacks of money is better than editors and readers, then the
foundations should go for it."

Without stacks of money, there will be no editors or readers. Without the
generous donations of Jimbo and Bomis (who made their money off of - get
this - advertising), there would be no Wikipedia.

I can't for the life of me understand why people "a bunch of editors and
readers" would leave over something like this. I also don't think it'd be a
bad thing to get rid of the people who think this way.


from_name: Fl Celloguy

subject: [WikiEN-l] RE: In The News - new name needed

body:
How about if we just add a redirect (as proposed) called [[WP:NEWS]] and ask
people not to call it ITN? I'm sure that would suffice if nobody used that
abbreviation any more.

Flcelloguy
>From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia.

_________________________________________________________________
Express yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! Download today - it's FREE!
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from_name: Mark Williamson

body:
It seems that Mr Zainuddin has given up on using the traditional
Lontara script due to a simple technical problem, which could probably
be solved very easily.

Anybody with the latest version of Code2000 and Firefox should be able
to see the special characters on http://bug.wikipedia.org/wiki/

The only problem with it is that one of the vowels is placed
incorrectly -- after a character when it is supposed to be before.
However, this should be easily solved using Uniscribe. If not, I would
hope it's possible to make some sort of hack so that it can use proper
Unicode and _also_ display properly.

Mark

On 24/10/05, Dori <slowpoke at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/24/05, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> > muhammad zaid zainuddin wrote:
> > > Dear wikitech developers,
> > >
> > > First of all, we (me and my friends whoe're agree to work on buginese
> > > wikipedia) are terribly sorry for this change. It should be before the
> > > creation of the domain but turn out that most of our pc (even me) cannot
> > > display the fonts in the edit box. Therefore, we'd like to cancel the
> > > unicode input/writings for our edit box as well as our display and
> > > change to standard wikipedia like enlish/ malay/ indonesian wikis (means
> > > that all will be in roman, no unicode like english wiki). This problem
> > > actually occurred before the creation of the domain but I kind of busy
> > > that time and forget to tell wikitech's. However we'd like wikitech to
> > > keep the font family of lontara. We will be needing it for the future.
> > > Again, we're terribly-terribly sorry for this messed up.
> >
> > I don't understand what this means? All Wikipedias are Unicode,
> > including English.
> >
> > -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
> I think he means the script that people have chosen to use not
> understanding that they could choose to use something else.
>
> --
> Dori
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

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from_name: Snowspinner

subject: [WikiEN-l] Deletion again

body:
Some time ago, I bemoaned the fact that our poor treatment of
webcomics topics had led to a fork, and that we were going to lose
webcomics contributors.

For those who did not believe me, I point to http://www.websnark.com/
archives/2005/10/on_the_other_ha_13.html

Websnark is one of the three big sites in webcomics commentary. The
writer of that entry, Eric Burns, has an article, his blog has an
article, he maintains two comics, and writes for both of the other
two big sites - Comixpedia and the Webcomics Examiner. He is not an
idiot. He knows what he is talking about on webcomics.

And he's right here. Deletions are being carried out by people who
know nothing about the subject. The opinions of people who do (I will
admit, I am referring to myself - but go ahead and see
[[User:Snowspinner/Webcomics]] if you like - my credentials are
existent here) are being counted the same as the clueless.
Explanations of notability are disregarded - people are making the
assertion that webcomics that are a part of professional syndicates -
the webcomic equivalent of KIng Features - aren't notable. When
linked to the site of a syndicate that clearly lists a comic among
its members, they claim this is not a reliable source.

I don't know how many times I can continue to put this in new and
innovative ways. Deletion is broken. We are making mistakes. Our
mistakes are costing us contributors. They are costing us good
contributors.

We need a solution here. Not hand-wringing and a conviction that we
should come up with a solution. We need a damn solution, and we need
it back before Comixpedia split off in the first place.

Here's a first stab - people with documentable credentials in an area
that would, in the eyes of a reasonable layman, qualify them to make
a decision on the importance of a topic will be allowed to speedy
keep articles in the area of their credentials.

-Snowspinner


from_name: Ivan Krstic

body:
Tels wrote:
> although I am not sure why the "/P/" needs to be visible to the user (it
> is deterministic, after all), and it would be handy to have a "latest"
> revision URL. Which could be just:
> 	http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/Puppy.jpg
> and the software behind the back figures out what the exact latest
> revision is and under what /CapitcalLetter/ directory it falls.

Please read Brion's original message again.

> These are
> things a human user shouldn't need to do or know about.

Serving static content usually amounts to just pushing bits, and that's
all it should be. If you want it to be more than that, you need to call
into a language that will supply an additional layer of logic before you
can start pushing bits, which is usually enormously slower than being
able to say "here's a link to a static file". You can serve the latter
with all sorts of optimizations -- one example being in-kernel httpd, or
one of the very fast userland ones.

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


subject: [Wikitech-l] Upload URL/filesystem restructuring

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> Just thought I'd float this idea for comments before I try working on
> it...
>
> Between multi-megapixel digital photographs and other wacky multimedia
> fun, uploads are taking up an ever-huger amount of disk space,
> bandwidth, etc. Our existing primary image fileserver is a bit sluggish;
> a new one with a nice big drive array is on order but we still would
> like to provide for better local and downstream caching.
>
> It would make caching much easier if the file at a given URL was
> immutable; that is, if a replacement image has a different URL from the
> old one.
>
[snip]

>
> One possibility is to embed the timestamp into the URL. So the goatse
> version might be:
> http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2005/10/23/074223/Puppy.jpg
>
> and the reverted image would get a different URL, a few minutes later:
> http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2005/10/23/074506/Puppy.jpg
>
> (The article pages need to be rerendered with the new link, but this is
> already necessary to accomodate changes in size, etc. Articles are
> forced to be rechecked from end-clients and are only cached by proxies
> we control and send explicit purges to, so that 'should' stay under
> control.)
>
> This scheme would allow for outside proxy caches to cache a given image
> file indefinitely without it becoming dangerously stale, as well as more
> permanent on-demand replicated image servers to distribute bandwidth
> across our clusters without stealing squid cache space from articles.
>
> A downside is that image URLs aren't predictable ahead of time; unless
> you're in the database to check what the latest version of the image is
> you can't build the URL from just a file name. One could though concoct
> a litte special page or something to redirect to whatever the current
> version is.
>
> Another benefit is that not having the "/a/ad/" cache directory will
> allow people with badly written ad blockers to see the missing 1/256th
> of our images again. ;)
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

This is a good idea. Cache-friendliness is really important, and, done
right, can greatly reduce load and increase performance, without
affecting the freshness of content for end-users. (See my remarks from
last week).

-- Neil


from_name: Angela

body:
On 10/24/05, Poe, Marshall <MPoe at theatlantic.com> wrote:

> Isn't it the case that Google Adsense (and similar programs) basically
> cut the tie between specific advertisers and specific publications?

This isn't relevant to the current Answers.com proposal since no
AdSense ads will be on Wikipedia. However, the assumption that AdSense
cuts the ties in this way is not entirely correct, since the website
with ads can choose to block ads from any particular URL, and the
advertiser can choose not to appear on any particular site. Therefore,
it is still possible for a company to decide not to advertise on a
site anymore, but Google would endeavor to fill the gap with an
alternative ad, albeit one with a potentially lower cost-per-click.

> If this is so, it's pretty hard for me to understand how putting Adsense
> ads on Wikipedia pages could ever lead to any of the editorial-influence
> scenarios being described here.

In a scenario which is hard to imagine ever occurring on Wikipedia,
the influence could come from the fact that AdSense relies on context,
and particular keywords on a page will lead to
higher-revenue-generating ads. So, attempts to drop phrases like
"credit repair" into articles could lead to greater revenues and might
encourage some to insert an odd sort of influence on the content for
this purpose. It would, of course, be violating Google's terms of
service and not something I would recommend doing. :)

Angela
--
Angela Beesley
Moderator of SEM 2.0


subject: [WikiEN-l] Deletion again

body:
We can backport, sure. And they'll be deleted. Really - have a look
at the deletion debates Eric is talking about there. They're
appalling. In particular, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Able_and_Baker_%282nd_nomination%29
is galling.

-Snowspinner

On Oct 24, 2005, at 7:33 PM, Han Dao wrote:

> Losing contributors? Excuse me? I am a
> comixpedia.org<http://comixpedia.org>adiminstrator and a wikipedian at
> the same time. I saw some wikipedians and
> they are certainally not abandoing Wikipedia. I may not edit
> Wikipedia as
> often as I used to, but in the first place; all I know is webcomics
> and a
> little bit about open source software. The things is...you can
> backport some
> of the article suitable to become a wikipedia article. Some of our
> article
> are even more comperhensive than the one at Wikipedia but not
> certainally
> all. We save some webcomic on wikipedia article that may not be even
> "notable" so we are the dumping ground for webcomic that got
> deleted from
> wikipedia.
>
> Yes, we are also licensed under the GNUFDL. If you guys decided
> that you
> want a certain webcomic article back, you might find them at
> Comixpedia.
> On 10/24/05, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> On 10/25/05, Snowspinner <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> I don't know how many times I can continue to put this in new and
>>> innovative ways. Deletion is broken. We are making mistakes. Our
>>> mistakes are costing us contributors. They are costing us good
>>> contributors.
>>>
>>
>> Oh let's just shut down AfD for a month and see if the wiki explodes.
>> Honestly I don't think it would even come near. There just aren't
>> enough articles involved for it to impact the wiki much (many times
>> more rubbish is speedied daily) and we shouldn't be driving away good
>> editors.
>> _______________________________________________
>> WikiEN-l mailing list
>> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
>> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
>> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>>
>>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
> With people saying they could lead to an income of $26m a year, or pay
> for all of our normal hosting costs in a fortnight, I'd like to know
> what these other reasons are!

It's purely speculation to imagine the income would be that high. From
my experience with Wikicities, $26m seems an exaggeration. Also, would
the number of people visiting stay as high if we had ads? Would there
still be the same level of motivation to use Wikipedia.org as opposed
to a much faster loading mirror?

The threats of forking and boycotts over the last day highlight one of
the biggest reasons for not doing this, or certainly for not rushing
into it - Wikipedia.org would be nothing without the community behind
it. Would they still be behind it if AdSense was used on the site?
Even if for just two weeks a year? Would we be jeopardising our
non-profit status? What effect would turning Wikimedia into something
commercial have on the project? Would it make people less likely to
donate / less likely to use Wikipedia / less likely to edit?

We also need to bear in mind that covering the basic costs is only the
beginning. Our goal, of providing free knowledge to every person on
the planet, is a much larger aim than buying servers for Wikipedia,
and 2 weeks AdSense isn't going to cover it. Would those 2 weeks
prevent us getting the grants, donations, corporate sponsorship, and
volunteer effort, needed to attain those wider goals?

These are more questions than reasons at this stage, but the fact that
so many questions exist is a reason in itself not to even consider
this until they can be answered.

Angela.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Quality

body:
> > I really don't know where you get these ideas from. How are low-quality
> > articles "tolerated"? Who would rather have more articles than better
> > articles? Who even thinks there is a choice between more articles and
> better
> > articles?
> >
> Editor makes a good-faith edit to article. It is reverted by another
> editor who is uncompromisingly pushing a POV. A conflict results,
> sometimes
> more acrimonious than at other times.
>
> Rinse, lather, repeat. Eventually the first editor will decide that it is
> more rewarding to start creating articles & turn those red links blue
> than to argue over content -- unless that editor is also uncompromising
> about a certain POV, & decides to squat on certain articles to preserve
> that POV.
>
> Either path means that articles improve to a certain point, then unless
> something happens they remain at that level of quality. We need more
> tools to ensure that "something happens".
>
> Geoff

I'm not sure you're referring to the same issue as Daniel, but you do raise
a major one. What tools do you think we need more of to ensure that
something happens?

I think the Requests for Comments page is a good idea for how to resolve
these types of problems, but last time I followed it (many months ago) it
was more about trying to get someone banned than about resolving problems
with articles. Looking at the page again it seems it's been reorganized and
more focused around "Article content disputes". But it's just a bunch of
links to talk pages, so in that sense it's probably not focussed enough to
do much good.

Do you think the RfC page could be adapted to resolve these issues more
easily? I don't know if it could or not. It takes a lot of effort to argue
your point effectively, and it's pretty easy for a troll to game the system
until you give up. This is a really tough problem, somewhat inherent in the
concept of a wiki, and I don't have much of a clue how to resolve it.

Initially I saw Wikipedia as more of a rough draft than a finished product.
Over the years it's been made abundantly clear that the majority of
Wikipedians don't see it that way. I've come to accept that, but I guess I
never really figured out how it would work. Along those same lines, I've
never heard anyone explain how you could solve the quality problems inherent
in a wiki without throwing out all the advantages.

Nowadays my greatest optimism is that we'll be able to point to the highest
quality version of any particular article, even if it isn't the most recent
version. So in your example, the POV pusher might be able to make his/her
version the latest version, but the software would still recognize that most
people consider that version to be POV. I suppose if you're going to that
you might as well just make that version the latest version, though. So now
I've come full circle.

I don't know. :)

Anthony


body:
Gah, I'm finding all this really weird.

1. We need money for servers and bandwidth
2. Currently, it comes from donations but people seem to be saying
that's not sustainable
3. We've had a few big donations, but they could be time-limited (will
Yahoo want their servers back?) and they don't happen often
4. One proposal is a small link to a small tool which probably won't
generate much money, so is no solution by itself
5. There's a few other ideas which show promise, but not a lot in
terms of delivering hard cash
6. Adsense could give us stacks of cash

Surely there's only a handful of logical conclusions here:

1. We stay with just donations (small private and few large coporate
ones) and the site slowly bogs down as traffic demand outstrips server
supply
2. We try more small stuff like the Amazon and the forthcoming 1-Click
experiments, but let's be honest unless WP is plastered in them
they'll never make much of a difference
3. We eventually accept a small amount of Adsense (or Adsense-syle)
advertising on the site, which will most likely pay for what we need.

Dan


subject: [WikiEN-l] Deletion again

body:
On 10/24/05, Snowspinner <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> We can backport, sure. And they'll be deleted. Really - have a look
> at the deletion debates Eric is talking about there. They're
> appalling. In particular, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
> Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Able_and_Baker_%282nd_nomination%29
> is galling.
>
> -Snowspinner

Don't you think opinions on this matter are eventually going to change? I'd
be more concerned in the near term with making sure that we keep a good
relationship with those running the webcomics forks. Make sure that any
articles on webcomics that are deleted from here are transwikied to the
forks. And in appropriate places where those comics are at least mentioned,
to link to the forks.

You're an admin, so it's not like you can't access the articles to copy them
over. I'm fairly confident that opinions on this matter are going to change.
Then we can just copy the articles back.

Anthony


from_name: Nick Jenkins

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Importing XML database dumps - what actually works?

body:
> Please check with the 20051020 dump and mwdumper.

Problem reproduced on 20051020_pages_articles.xml.bz2

Command line was:
/usr/java/jre1.5.0_05/bin/java -server -jar mwdumper.jar
--format=sql:1.4 20051020_pages_articles.xml.bz2 | mysql enwiki

Nature of the problem:
At first the number of articles goes up from 0, but then it stalls at
29155. Any articles beyond 29155 do not seem to get imported :
======================================================
mysql> select count(*) from cur;
+----------+
| count(*) |
+----------+
|    29155 |
+----------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> select count(*) from cur;
+----------+
| count(*) |
+----------+
|    29155 |
+----------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> select count(*) from cur;
+----------+
| count(*) |
+----------+
|    29155 |
+----------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
======================================================

> If it stops, please
> check what the error was (eg, key conflicts) and report that.

Console output is as follows:
======================================================
19,000 pages (110.119/sec), 19,000 revs (110.119/sec)
20,000 pages (110.596/sec), 20,000 revs (110.596/sec)
21,000 pages (110.747/sec), 21,000 revs (110.747/sec)
22,000 pages (110.813/sec), 22,000 revs (110.813/sec)
23,000 pages (110.643/sec), 23,000 revs (110.643/sec)
24,000 pages (111.562/sec), 24,000 revs (111.562/sec)
25,000 pages (111.3/sec), 25,000 revs (111.3/sec)
26,000 pages (111.093/sec), 26,000 revs (111.093/sec)
27,000 pages (111.733/sec), 27,000 revs (111.733/sec)
28,000 pages (111.115/sec), 28,000 revs (111.115/sec)
29,000 pages (113.361/sec), 29,000 revs (113.361/sec)
ERROR 1062 at line 459: Duplicate entry '0-1_E0_m?' for key 1
30,000 pages (115.039/sec), 30,000 revs (115.039/sec)
31,000 pages (116.308/sec), 31,000 revs (116.308/sec)
32,000 pages (117.91/sec), 32,000 revs (117.91/sec)
33,000 pages (119.448/sec), 33,000 revs (119.448/sec)
34,000 pages (121.732/sec), 34,000 revs (121.732/sec)
35,000 pages (122.996/sec), 35,000 revs (122.996/sec)
36,000 pages (124.101/sec), 36,000 revs (124.101/sec)
37,000 pages (125.216/sec), 37,000 revs (125.216/sec)
38,000 pages (126.43/sec), 38,000 revs (126.43/sec)
39,000 pages (127.583/sec), 39,000 revs (127.583/sec)
Mon Oct 24 19:41:15 EST 2005
ludo:/home/nickj/wikipedia# screendump 1 > screen1
======================================================

I did not spot any other errors, and there does not seem to be a log
file or equivalent.

All the best,
Nick.


body:
> Console output is as follows:
> ======================================================
> 19,000 pages (110.119/sec), 19,000 revs (110.119/sec)
> 20,000 pages (110.596/sec), 20,000 revs (110.596/sec)
> 21,000 pages (110.747/sec), 21,000 revs (110.747/sec)
> 22,000 pages (110.813/sec), 22,000 revs (110.813/sec)
> 23,000 pages (110.643/sec), 23,000 revs (110.643/sec)
> 24,000 pages (111.562/sec), 24,000 revs (111.562/sec)
> 25,000 pages (111.3/sec), 25,000 revs (111.3/sec)
> 26,000 pages (111.093/sec), 26,000 revs (111.093/sec)
> 27,000 pages (111.733/sec), 27,000 revs (111.733/sec)
> 28,000 pages (111.115/sec), 28,000 revs (111.115/sec)
> 29,000 pages (113.361/sec), 29,000 revs (113.361/sec)
> ERROR 1062 at line 459: Duplicate entry '0-1_E0_m?' for key 1
> 30,000 pages (115.039/sec), 30,000 revs (115.039/sec)
> 31,000 pages (116.308/sec), 31,000 revs (116.308/sec)
> 32,000 pages (117.91/sec), 32,000 revs (117.91/sec)
> 33,000 pages (119.448/sec), 33,000 revs (119.448/sec)
> 34,000 pages (121.732/sec), 34,000 revs (121.732/sec)
> 35,000 pages (122.996/sec), 35,000 revs (122.996/sec)
> 36,000 pages (124.101/sec), 36,000 revs (124.101/sec)
> 37,000 pages (125.216/sec), 37,000 revs (125.216/sec)
> 38,000 pages (126.43/sec), 38,000 revs (126.43/sec)
> 39,000 pages (127.583/sec), 39,000 revs (127.583/sec)
> Mon Oct 24 19:41:15 EST 2005
> ludo:/home/nickj/wikipedia# screendump 1 > screen1
> ======================================================
>
> I did not spot any other errors, and there does not seem to be a log
> file or equivalent.

Just to clarify - I pressed CTRL-C at around 39000 articles as there
did not seem to be any point continuing (i.e. it didn't die or
anything, rather I stopped it at that point because the count of
articles had stopped increasing).

All the best,
Nick.


body:
On 10/24/05, Dori <slowpoke at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 10/24/05, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> > "If the stacks of money is better than editors and readers, then the
> > foundations should go for it."
> >
> > Without stacks of money, there will be no editors or readers. Without
> the
> > generous donations of Jimbo and Bomis (who made their money off of - get
> > this - advertising), there would be no Wikipedia.
>
> There wouldn't be a Wikipedia without editors either.

You're not claiming that having advertising is going to cause *all* editors
to leave, are you?

> I can't for the life of me understand why people "a bunch of editors and
> > readers" would leave over something like this. I also don't think it'd
> be a
> > bad thing to get rid of the people who think this way.
>
> Yes, and for the life of me I can't understand why you don't have a
> successful fork and community. Advertising - check, Not afraid to get
> rid of whiny editors - check

I'm really not sure what you're getting at there. Are you saying if I got
rid of the ads on McFly I'd have a successful fork? If so, remind me to
laugh my ass off. (BTW, since adding the ads my readership has gone up, not
down).

--
> Dori

Anthony


subject: [WikiEN-l] Deletion again

body:
On 10/24/05, Justin Cormack <justin at specialbusservice.com> wrote:
>
>
> On 25 Oct 2005, at 00:36, Snowspinner wrote:
>
> > We can backport, sure. And they'll be deleted. Really - have a look
> > at the deletion debates Eric is talking about there. They're
> > appalling. In particular, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
> > Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Able_and_Baker_%282nd_nomination%29
> > is galling.
>
> I dont know anything at all about webcomics, but I recognise the
> notability standards problem from elsewhere; people argue that
> breweries should produce so much beer a year to be notable and other
> such arbitrary decisions. But I dont see anything in the article that
> establishes notability (this may be because it has been fighting
> deletion of course), but something that shows how it forms part of
> the history or culture or influenced or was influenced by other
> things would help; lists of characters and so on are just not
> interesting. Its not linked from any other articles. No notable
> cultural item stands in isolation; the links from it are just words -
> potato, vending machine etc.

It looks perfectly notable to me, and Snowspinner would have had my vote had
he not fought so hard to get me banned from voting.

Anthony


from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Quality

body:
On 10/24/05, Anthony DiPierro <wikispam at inbox.org> wrote:
>  I really don't know where you get these ideas from. How are low-quality
> articles "tolerated"?

by not being deleted
>Who would rather have more articles than better
> articles?

It is the logical endpoint of the inclusionist position

> Who even thinks there is a choice between more articles and better
> articles?

Those of us that can do the maths. The relivant caculation is:

Ew=A*meanAE

AQ=AE

So

MeanAQ=Ew/A

Where

A= no of articles
E=effort
w=wikipedia
Q=quality.

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] Deletion again

body:
On Oct 24, 2005, at 8:07 PM, Anthony DiPierro wrote:
>
> It looks perfectly notable to me, and Snowspinner would have had my
> vote had
> he not fought so hard to get me banned from voting.
>

Well sniped.

-Snowspinner


from_name: AlisonW

subject:
[Foundation-l] Answers.com and Wikimedia Foundation to Form New
	Partnership

body:
Chris Jenkinson wrote:
> The way you can demonstrate it is a good move is to make a page which
> clearly sets out why it is needed, why Answers is the correct
> corporation to have a partnership with, and what will happen if anything
> goes wrong. I think it would be a bad idea to jump in, cross our fingers
> and hope for the best.

I wonder whether we could stop referring to this Answers.com deal as a
"partnership" please? imho "partnership" is a two-way arrangement and
this product placement is purely one-way (their advert, our site, their
payment; nothing sending people towards us from them), and given that
the link would not exist without the payment then there can be no valid
argument against it being an advertisement (of sorts).

Personally, I doubt that the anwsers.com deal will produce much of an
income - the people who look at the tools page will likely be editors
with their own ethos of how they want to see wikimedia projects work,
however it has been very beneficial to us all on this list to discuss
financing and income generation and I believe that we must indeed seek
new lines of income. Saying that though I do not believe advertising is
the right way to go as it demeans our 'product' and - like adverts on
other sites - leads readers to believe that we will be favourable to
advertisers in our articles (whether that is the case or not).

Alison

btw. I presume that our accounts are done to *US* GAAP (which is quite
different from UK GAAP)


body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Part of the problem here may be that there are many people who are new
> to the community who might not know me very well.  I think anyone who
> knows me would know the answer to the question "What do we do if some
> donor demands that an article be changed to suit them?"

I've met you, and I believe you.

However this is the subject of a contract ... and contract law doesn't
permit of personalities that well, indeed the only way it does is
compensation for breaking the contract (which wouldn't be very
beneficial to WMF I suspect!)

Alison


from_name: SPUI

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Find-A-Grave's founder provides us with list of famous
	people

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Brian wrote:
>
>> FindAGrave.com provides genealogists, historians, and others with
>> information on people who have died (famous or not). It averages
>> millions of hits daily, 500k-700k page views daily, and 30k-50k unique
>> visitors daily. They have a separate category for "famous people",
>> each of whom were individually approved by the Find-A-Grave staff to
>> be "well-known outside his or her local community".
>>
>> So, after a lot of wrangling with a 4.33MB spreadsheet file,
>> containing 46,698 individuals, I've posted it at
>> [[Wikipedia:Find-A-Grave famous people]]. Of course, there is some
>> overlap with our content, but this should give us something to work on
>> for a while :)
>
> Sounds like it sets a standard for "notability". :-)

I'm not so sure about that. I looked up the first name that came to mind
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Jay_Gould_I - who is certainly
"notable" and all, having been the owner of an almost-transcontinental
system of railroads, and he's not on the list. (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh_and_West_Virginia_Railway
actually has a lot more about the railroads than his article at the
moment.) His father Jay Gould is on the list, but that wouldn't
automatically make George "notable".


subject: [WikiEN-l] Deletion again

body:
On 10/24/05, Justin Cormack <justin at specialbusservice.com> wrote:
>
>
> On 25 Oct 2005, at 01:07, Anthony DiPierro wrote:
> > It looks perfectly notable to me, and Snowspinner would have had my
> > vote had
> > he not fought so hard to get me banned from voting.
>
> Well explain to me why you think it is notable then. I am open
> minded, it
> just isnt clear as an outsider that it is.

Well, I think all web comics are notable, so I doubt my reasoning is going
to change your mind.

You have until I rewrite [[Lentil]], which is notable, but you cant
> really
> tell that from reading it either (although less likely to be deleted).
>
> Justinc


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Quality

body:
On 10/24/05, Anthony DiPierro <wikispam at inbox.org> wrote:
>  So deletion is the only solution to something that is low quality? I would
> think making it higher quality would also suffice.
>

yeah but I think we have fairly firmly established that that isn't happening.

>  Not at all. I'm an inclusionist, and I'd much rather have better articles
> than more articles. However 1) I think deletion is a waste of time that
> could be better spent improving articles, and 2) I don't think the two are
> mutually exclusive, I think you can have more articles *and* better
> articles.
>  So please, if you're not an inclusionist, don't speak for us. That's called
> a strawman argument.
>

1)I can delete stuff at a rate of more than once a second

2)Errr that isn't happening.

3)It's called Reductio ad absurdum. The logical endpoint of the
inclusionist position is to include everything.

--
geni


from_name: muhammad zaid zainuddin

body:
Dear wikitech developers,

First of all, we (me and my friends whoe're agree to work on buginese
wikipedia) are terribly sorry for this change. It should be before the
creation of the domain but turn out that most of our pc (even me) cannot
display the fonts in the edit box. Therefore, we'd like to cancel the
unicode input/writings for our edit box as well as our display and change
to standard wikipedia like enlish/ malay/ indonesian wikis (means that all
will be in roman, no unicode like english wiki). This problem actually
occurred before the creation of the domain but I kind of busy that time and
forget to tell wikitech's. However we'd like wikitech to keep the font
family of lontara. We will be needing it for the future. Again, we're
terribly-terribly sorry for this messed up.

Secondly, I wish to talk to the person in charge for buginese wikipedia,
for setting up stuff, how to change titles like special page, sandbox,
categories from english to buginese. I can't connect to freenode server due
to the software abort. (I don't even know what's that mean) and because I'm
the only free at most time, therefore, my pals're depending on me to do the
talks to the wiki.

Again we're terribly-terribly sorry for this change. we wish to tell wiki
sooner.

Zaid Zainuddin


from_name: Justin Cormack

subject: [WikiEN-l] no speedy criterion for blatent non fair use media

body:
I just had to list over 500 audio tracks on http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Wikipedia:Images_and_media_for_deletion/2005_October_24
As I cant find any speedy delete criterion they fall under. I could
tag them all with
fairusedisputed or something, but it is a blatent attempt at mass
copyright violation
from a user who left some time back. Many are whole tracks, some are
shorter although
they may be complete too. The speedy delete criteria are too
bureaucratic now, things
have to be tagged for a week, which is pointless in this case.

Justinc


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Quality

body:
On 10/24/05, Anthony DiPierro <wikispam at inbox.org> wrote:
>  Let me expand on why that equation is bullshit. Effort is not a constant,
> and the more articles you have, the more contributors you'll have, and the
> more effort you'll have.

I think the term you are looking for is over simplifed modle. I know
this is the case (Ew is a compersite of at least three terms). I could
go go through with more complex models but the result is the same.
Beyond a certian number of articles the law of diminishing returns
kicks in and the average article quality starts to fall.

> Also, not all effort is equal, nor does it have an
> equal effect on quality. In fact, some of the worst quality articles happen
> to be the articles which have the most editors, and the most effort, spent
> on them.

Prove it.

> Keeping around a short factual article about an obscure topic is
> not going to bring the average quality of the encyclopedia down. In fact, a
> short article on an obscure topic is easy to make into a high quality short
> article on an obscure topic, and will therefore bring the average quality of
> the encyclopedia up.
>

However such articles don't seem to turn up at AFD much and even these
articles require mentanence.

--
geni


from_name: Neil Harris

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Ratings again (was: Oour quality could rival
	Encyclopedia Britannica)

body:
charles matthews wrote:

> Ed Poor wrote
>
>> What conclusion can we draw from this? I'd like to hear some discussion
>
> on this, please.
>
> Interesting that Ed and I, not a usual combination, have both been
> talking recently about the [[Arnold J. Toynbee]] article on its Talk
> page.
>
> Interesting, that is,  in the sense that Toynbee was hot on
> civilizations' responses to challenges, as catalytic of development.
>
> WP actually needs rivals, right now.  My view is that WP can easily
> take on _any_ online opposition, as far as factual volume is
> concerned.  We have the bodies.  We can simply put up enough
> 6/10-rated articles (today's Guardian) about _everything_, and
> dominate Google.  Simply extrapolate from where we are.
>
> I like that approach.  I like, for example, posting good
> bibliographies of prolific authors, where the WWW generally has
> scrappy lists.  In the long run, and with good search and
> hyperlinking, we create a most awesome research tool.
>
> There are these other challenges:
>
> - quality writing (doesn't come easy)
> - higher accuracy
> - fuller reach into deep academia, outside the Anglophone world (for
> wiki-en), across cultures
> - get the other breaking-new media to say 'uncle'
> - put hard-copy encyclopedias out of business
> - make people want to release under GFDL so that WP can easily
> assimilate their content
> - Textbooks'R'Us, have our articles segmented so that getting a
> reasonable first textbook draft is just a filtering exercise.
>
> But I think we know all this.  To return to Toynbee, it is more a
> question of how to get Wikipedians to 'feel challenged', on the
> specifics.  Right now, with the site running slow, the main practical
> challenge seems to be hardward/developers/cash.  _I_ mostly feel
> challenged by the sheer breadth of approach needed.
>
> Charles
>
At the risk of being tedious,

article rating
article rating
article rating
article rating
article rating

might be a reasonable first step towards goals 1, 2, 3, and 5 on that
list. Even a _bad_ article rating system would be better than no article
rating system at all, since the obvious deficiencies of a bad system
would quickly provide the spur for developing a better one. If the first
system is truly sucky, we lose nothing in the long run; we can simply
archive its data, and start again from scratch, and the second try will
be better because of it.

As has been said many times before, what really counts is starting to
gather the data. Analysing the results and fine-tuning the system can be
done later; the scope for getting useful information from detailed
analysis of the whole database of ratings is _immense_.

Remember categories? They were really controversial when they were first
introduced, but now they are invaluable, and it's hard to remember what
MediaWiki was like without them.

-- Neil


body:
On 10/24/05, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> muhammad zaid zainuddin wrote:
> > Dear wikitech developers,
> >
> > First of all, we (me and my friends whoe're agree to work on buginese
> > wikipedia) are terribly sorry for this change. It should be before the
> > creation of the domain but turn out that most of our pc (even me) cannot
> > display the fonts in the edit box. Therefore, we'd like to cancel the
> > unicode input/writings for our edit box as well as our display and
> > change to standard wikipedia like enlish/ malay/ indonesian wikis (means
> > that all will be in roman, no unicode like english wiki). This problem
> > actually occurred before the creation of the domain but I kind of busy
> > that time and forget to tell wikitech's. However we'd like wikitech to
> > keep the font family of lontara. We will be needing it for the future.
> > Again, we're terribly-terribly sorry for this messed up.
>
> I don't understand what this means? All Wikipedias are Unicode,
> including English.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

I think he means the script that people have chosen to use not
understanding that they could choose to use something else.

--
Dori


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Quality

body:
On 10/24/05, Anthony DiPierro <wikispam at inbox.org> wrote:
>  Speedy delete, maybe, but the current deletion process is too permanent to
> allow any admin to speedy delete any article for any reason. If you allowed
> editors to view deleted articles that might be a solution, but until then it
> isn't.
>

I dunno it seems to be working at Uncyclopedia. Servival of the
fittest and all that.

> 2)Errr that isn't happening.
>
>  I disagree.
>

See all the recent messages on the mailing list

> > 3)It's called Reductio ad absurdum. The logical endpoint of the
> > inclusionist position is to include everything.
>
>  Huh? Is the logical endpoint of the deletionist position to delete
> everything?

Yep. In practice deletionists tend to be in a much better position to
draw a line in the sand.

--
geni


from_name: Daniel P. B. Smith

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Crappy prose isn't the main "quality" problem.

body:
The quality problem in our articles isn't "crappy prose." Sure, a
sentence like

"Implicit order means a system has hidden information which is not
apparent based solely on direct observation."

makes me wince.

But improving the quality of an article is more than just rewriting
crappy prose. Or checking facts. Or adding references. Or fixing
typos. Or removing inaccuracies.

As the -paedia root implies, a good encyclopedia article should
teach. That means it should go beyond Gradgrind, facts, facts, facts.
It should convey not data, not information, but knowledge. It should
integrate and synthesize; it should be comprehensible to a wide range
of readers, for example by having a progressive structure that gives
the basics quickly without sacrificing detail later. It should be
well balanced, giving suitably proportioned weight to all aspects of
its subject. It should be analytical.

It takes a _lot_ of work to do that.

If you look at the Guardian criticisms, Mike Barnes complains that
some of the writing in an article is "unhelpful." He thinks
encyclopedia articles should be helpful.

Alexandra Shulman complains that an article "inaccurate and unclear"
and that "every value judgment it makes is wrong." She thinks
encyclopedia articles should be not only accurate but clear, and that
they _should present value judgements--sound ones._

Mark Kurlansky complains of some factual details. No comment on the
prose.

Anthony Julius complains that an article is "purely factual and not
in any way analytical." He thinks encyclopedia articles should be
analytical.

Claire Tomalin complains of minor accuracies, complains more about
major _omissions_, and by the failure of the article to comment on
the literary merit of Pepy's diary. She thinks an encyclopedia should
provide balanced coverage of a topic. Like Shulman, she thinks  it
should present sound value judgements.

Derek Barker indeed complains of prose style.

Robert McHenry complains that an article shows "no understanding of
the cultural and historical contexts involved. In other words, it is
a school essay, sketchy and poorly balanced."

Most complain of inaccuracies, but characterize them as minor.

Only one complains of bad prose.

The others complain of articles that fail to be helpful; clear;
present sound value judgements; be analytical; and provide balanced
coverage of their subject.

--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at verizon.net
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/


from_name: Ryan Delaney

subject: [WikiEN-l] Deletion again

body:
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Han Dao wrote:

>The problem is that most webcomics that are added into the encyclopedia are
>usually non-notable. So editors tend to vote delete because most will be non
>notable.
>
You talk about notability like it's some objective thing. Where are
you getting this standard from?

Ryan
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from_name: Anthony DiPierro

subject: [WikiEN-l] Deletion again

body:
On 10/24/05, Justin Cormack <justin at specialbusservice.com> wrote:
>
>
> On 25 Oct 2005, at 01:35, Anthony DiPierro wrote:
> >
> > Well, I think all web comics are notable, so I doubt my reasoning
> > is going
> > to change your mind.
>
> I dont have an opinion either way. All I said was that it wasnt
> immediately
> apparent from the article to an outsider.

It's immediately apparent that it's a web comic (at least, it is after
clicking the links to confirm that it is one). For me, that's enough.

Ok if you cant do that why are all webcomics notable?

Because Wikipedia has no space requirements. We have plenty of room to
include all webcomics. To choose to include some, but not others, would
allow us to make a statement about what is worthwhile and what isn't. It
would violate NPOV. Further, the only people who are going to come across
the article are those who are specifically looking for it. Keeping the
article in the encyclopedia provides useful information to those people, and
doesn't hurt anyone else. If any webcomics are notable, then all webcomics
are notable.

If you cant convince me (a broadish inclusionist really, and very
> open minded)
> then no wonder you cant convince the people on afd.

I can't convince the people on afd at least in part because I'm not allowed
to make comments on afd.


from_name: Michael Turley

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Rambot city articles vs. other topics

body:
On 10/23/05, Keith Old <keithold at gmail.com> wrote:
> Anthony,
>
> I'd at least look seriously at doing so as she has some claims to
> notability. She apparently is working on her second album and has sung live
> with a notable artist namely Neil Finn of Crowded House and Split Enz fame.
> The New York Times article refers to this
>
> In my view, she would be a borderline casein AfD. I would also argue that
> she is not a typical case of a garage band that appears on AfD who have not
> typically recorded an album or have much verifiable information.
>
> I also note that no-one has yet written an article about her to my
> knowledge. There is certainly no article currently on Wikipedia.

If you keep in mind that WP:MUSIC is not a policy but a guideline and
therefore feel free to ignore it, you just might find that
WP:Verifiability does about equally well at keeping the trash out, but
results in fewer incorrect deletions, in my opinion.

--
Michael Turley
User:Unfocused


from_name: Alphax

subject: [WikiEN-l] AfD should be Arguments for Deletion

body:
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Hash: SHA256

Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Brian Haws wrote:
>
>> Martin Richards <Martin at velocitymanager.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>> Just kidding, I never get involved with AFD at the moment as a
>>>> >>kind of silent protest at the silly way it functions. I do think
>>>> the idea, or >>some variant of it is great, and will go a long way
>>>> to fixing this. However, >>I think the "Uncontested deletions"
>>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_reform/Proposals/Uncontested_deletions
>>>> is good too, some hybrid of the two ideas may be a really good
>>>> >>solution.
>>
>> I think the uncontested deletions proposal has a lot of potential as a
>> stand alone way to funnel off easy and obvious deletion canidates from
>> AFD. I'd like to hear more opinions about it on it's talk page..
>>
>>
> It will clearly be more efficient.  AFD fails because it broadcasts the
> fact that an article is proposed for deletion.  By confining the
> deletion discussion to the page itself (and its talk page, of course) it
> will limit interference by inclusionists who do not recognize the value
> of removing cruft from Wikipedia.
>

Ray, I severely hope you're joking...

- --
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Giving reasons in AfD

body:
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Daniel P. B. Smith wrote:
<snip>
> At one time, someone decided it would be a good idea to review VfD
> nominations and make judgements as to whether the nominator's  rationale
> for deletion accorded with policy, and to mark those  nominations which
> he judged to be invalid with cheerful little pastel- colored nastygrams.
> It turned out not to be a good idea.
>

Ooh yes, more pastel boxes! :)

- --
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from_name: Tom Cadden

subject: [WikiEN-l] In The News - new name needed

body:
I've raised this issue on the [[In the News]] page,
but got little response.

Rather than unilaterally propose a change on the page,
I decided to bring in here first to see can we get a
consensus here initially.

A lot of users refer to the above page as ''ITN''.
That is deeply unwise. The page uses the acronyms that
media uses - BBC, RT?, NBC, ABC, CBS, etc. ''ITN'' is
also an acronym used by a news agency, Independent
Television News, which supplies news coverage for ITV
News and Channel 4 News in the UK and wire services
for any international organisations.

A google search linking to our In the News page will
show up references to ITN and think that the ITN being
mentioned is the news agency, not an insider acronym
for our page.

I know someone in ITN who has had negative feedback
because of an error we carried. The person who spotted
him and mentioned the error to him saw ITN on the talk
page and thought that the error was the result of
mistake by Independent Television News. So far some
people in the real ITN are peeved. If we are not
careful and make some clanger (and as many of those
contributing to the page aren't journalists they are
often clumsy in their use of language in a news report
and get things wrong) the real ITN might go from
peeved to seriously pissed off.

ITN is their registered name, not ours. For our own
sake we should stop people using ITN when they mean
our page. If necessary a new name is needed for the
page to avoid a serious problem happening and
seriously pissing off the real ITN.

Thom
jtdirl

___________________________________________________________
How much free photo storage do you get? Store your holiday
snaps for FREE with Yahoo! Photos http://uk.photos.yahoo.com


from_name: Andrew Gray

body:
On 24/10/05, Tom Cadden <thomcadden at yahoo.ie> wrote:
> I've raised this issue on the [[In the News]] page,
> but got little response.
>
> Rather than unilaterally propose a change on the page,
> I decided to bring in here first to see can we get a
> consensus here initially.
>
> A lot of users refer to the above page as ''ITN''.

...

> ITN is their registered name, not ours. For our own
> sake we should stop people using ITN when they mean
> our page. If necessary a new name is needed for the
> page to avoid a serious problem happening and
> seriously pissing off the real ITN.

I agree it's confusing.

ITN probably came about via the [[WP:ITN]] shorthand (compare
references to RFC, RFA, VFD, CV, and so forth); would it be worth
deprecating this and trying to spread the use of [[WP:NEWS]] as the
reference?

--
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk


from_name: Robert Scott Horning

subject:
[Foundation-l] Answers.com and Wikimedia Foundation to
	Form	NewPartnership

body:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:

>On 10/24/05, Dori <slowpoke at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>On 10/24/05, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>"If the stacks of money is better than editors and readers, then the
>>>foundations should go for it."
>>>
>>>Without stacks of money, there will be no editors or readers. Without
>>>
>>>
>>the
>>
>>
>>>generous donations of Jimbo and Bomis (who made their money off of - get
>>>this - advertising), there would be no Wikipedia.
>>>
>>>
>>There wouldn't be a Wikipedia without editors either.
>>
>>
>
>
>You're not claiming that having advertising is going to cause *all* editors
>to leave, are you?
>
>
No, we are not claiming that having advertising is going to cause all
editors to leave, but it will be the creative ones who stick their necks
out, are bold, and make things happen.  In any project, company, or
community for that matter, the creative ones are only about 1%, and it
is often very difficult to tell just who those very creative ones are.
 They are the ones that make a group grow and propser instead of die and
fall apart.  An effort to do advertising like this is going to drive
away that precious 1%, and you won't even notice that they are gone
because for a short time edits will actually go up and it will appear as
though everything is just fine.  But the creative ones will be gone and
Wikipedia will be a dying project afterward.

You don't even have to believe me on this point, but it is a warning to
not take the general opinions of the community for granted.  It is a
hard task to try and balance the wants and needs of a community of
volunteers in particular, and aristiocratic governace of such
communities just lead to their eventual demise.

Having been driven away from other communities for other silly reasons,
I don't see any reason why Wikipedia or the Wikimedia group of projects
is going to be any different in this respect.

Wikipedia is currently on a "bubble" of growth, but eventually that is
going to burst because there are only so many people in the world who
are capable of adding encyclopedic article entries and have the drive to
do some basic research to put the information in.  When this limit is
reached, Wikipedia will mature and either collapse or turn into a stable
project.  Leadership principles right now are going to determine just
how that is going to happen.  As far as the cost of the servers is
concerned, that will also be an interesting thing to see.  At what point
does this exponential growth on the part of adding servers to the
database level out?

As far as fundraising is concerned, usage growth is your friend in that
as well.  Wikipedia in particular has become a very valuable resource
for a great many things, and if there is demand that means there are
also people willing to pay for it.  The trick is to find out how to get
those people to chip in a couple of bucks to keep these projects going.
 By going the route of advertising, the few bucks will instead come from
corporate sponsors rather than from readers/editors directly, but the
participants will eventually be paying anyway in one way or another.

I honestly don't know the solution to this, but I think we can be
creative.  I also fail to see why seeking advertising is an issue right
now as each time we go on a fund raising drive we tend to exceed the
fundraising goal very quickly, indeed with a strong tendancy to cut the
fundraising drive once the monetary goal has been reached.  This last
fundraising drive sputtered in the end with seeming fits of starting and
stopping going all over the place, and frankly confusion as to even if
the Foundation needed the money at all.  Consistancy on the part of the
fundraising activities, and good P.R. campaigns for an "annual"
fundraiser that could be announced through more conventional media
outlets may also be useful.  I'm just suggesting that we can be creative
on how the money can be obtained for a project like this, and resorting
to advertising is not necessary.  It won't necessarily be easy to come
up with the ideas, however.

--
Robert Scott Horning


subject: [WikiEN-l] NuNotNuPedia (again)

body:
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David Gerard wrote:
> Charles Matthews wrote:
>
>>David Gerard wrote
>
>
>>>There's probably a happy medium between Wikipedia and Nupedia,
>>>actually. I can easily picture something using MediaWiki or a variant
>>>with a workflow something like Wikinews. Get academics to write and
>>>sign articles. Release the results under GFDL and maybe CC-by-sa.
>>>Source Wikipedia articles (under GFDL only, of course) that pass
>>>muster. It could be quite complementary to Wikipedia.
>
>
>>From where I sit, surveying the mathematics coverage, there are a few
>
>>reasons for doubting the scenario:
>>1. A moderated site, PlanetMath, has done good work, without attracting
>>people as good as WP-en has
>>2. Their articles are worthy but easy to improve with freer editing
>>3. We are beginning to get more articles about current research, the real
>>USP for a hot site
>
>
>
> ooh, I didn't consider that one. That would be straddling the edge of
> No Original Research, of course ...
>
>

We can use them as references and use editorial judgement (failing that,
reader discretion) to determine the quality of these references.

>
>>Academics who even consider doing pro bono expository work have of course a
>>free choice.  They all have departmental web space; if they just want to
>>write surveys and essays, they can post there easily.
>
>
>
> Yes, but so few do ... Wikipedia somehow motivates them to start, but
> then to get annoyed when people ruin their beautiful prose. I'd
> actually like them to do so more, because then the pages would be more
> useful as references!
>
>

I agree. Need more quality online reference material. Academics writing
stuff on their personal webpages would be perfect. We can easily
reference and link it.

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from_name: Matt R

subject: [WikiEN-l] Unnecessary nudity on [[Hogtie bondage]]

body:
--- BJ?rn Lindqvist <bjourne at gmail.com> wrote:
> It is a very natural thing to assume that ones own values
> are omnipresent. We like to be around people who are similar to
> ourselves and therefore we by default assume that those that have
> different points of view are wrong. But it doesn't work on an
> international project like Wikipedia. I.e what you think is
> "potentially offensive" may be totally non-offensive to someone else.
> And what someone else think is "potentially offensive" may be totally
> non-offensive to you.

If I'd simply used the word "offensive", you might have a point, but I
deliberately qualified it by saying "potentially-offensive" for exactly the
reason you point out. I grew up outside of Europe, and I am quite aware that
there are many different cultures and values that are involved in a project
like Wikipedia. However, it is indisputable that nudity is a touchy issue for
lots of cultures, and even more so in deliberately erotic images.

I'm not sure you understand where I'm coming from, here. I am arguing that when
A) an image is used which likely to be offensive to very many readers, across
many cultures and countries; and B) an alternative can be produced which is of
equal illustrative value, but which mitigates the offensiveness to some degree,
then we should go for the alternative. It's a clear win for the project.

As a case study, consier the following two images which could be used to
illustrate the "Hogtie bondage" article (likely not work/public safe!):

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Model_in_classic_Hogtie.jpg
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Model_in_stringent_hogtie.jpg

The images seem virtually identical to me in terms of what they illustrate
regarding the topic. However, for some reason, people have been insisting on
using the unclothed version in preference to the clothed version. I would argue
that that's a clear loss for the project.

-- Matt

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Matt_Crypto
Blog: http://cipher-text.blogspot.com

___________________________________________________________
How much free photo storage do you get? Store your holiday
snaps for FREE with Yahoo! Photos http://uk.photos.yahoo.com


from_name: BJörn Lindqvist

body:
> > You have never had a problem with from an American viewpoint
> > potentially-offensive images? OK. I have never had a problem with
> > potentially-offensive photos (and text!) on pages like [[female]],
> > [[hair]], [[feet]], [[homosexual]], etc... By saying that only
> > [[penis]] and [[clitoris]] are potentially offensive but not the other
> > examples I mentioned, you are implying that your viewpoint is the
> > supreme one and more important than all others.
>
> I don't really understand what you're getting at here, but I'd like to point
> out that I'm British, not American.

Sorry, that was a bone-headed slip. I think I menat to say western
viewpoint. It is a very natural thing to assume that ones own values
are omnipresent. We like to be around people who are similar to
ourselves and therefore we by default assume that those that have
different points of view are wrong. But it doesn't work on an
international project like Wikipedia. I.e what you think is
"potentially offensive" may be totally non-offensive to someone else.
And what someone else think is "potentially offensive" may be totally
non-offensive to you.

--
mvh Bj?rn


from_name: Tim Starling

subject:
[Foundation-l] Benefits of advertising (was Re: Our exponentially
	increasing costs)

body:
Neil Harris wrote:
> Hmm. 2500 hits/sec * 86400 secs/day * $1 CPM = $216,000 / _day_, or
> $78,000,000+/year. Have you considered that the Wikimedia foundation
> board might be aware of this, and that its decision not to put up
> advertising might be a principled decision, rather than motivated by
> "fear of money"?

We don't have 2500 hits/sec, we have 2500 requests/sec, i.e. including
images, stylesheets, etc. The difference is roughly a factor of 3. The
income would thus be closer to $26M.

By these figures, we could cover our current operating costs by putting
ads on the site for two weeks per year. I'm not sure if it's a good idea
though.

Like Jimbo, I think distribution of Wikipedia around the world,
especially offline distribution to poorer countries, should be our top
priority. But Wikimedia lacks the infrastructure for such hands-on work.
It also lacks the moral high ground in the eyes of funding agencies,
because its focus to date has been to provide a service for relatively
wealthy Internet users. Our donors give money out of reciprocity, not
out of compassion for those less well-off.

There are other organisations who have been distributing information and
technology to developing countries for many years, and these
organisations are often well-funded and have a well-established HR
infrastructure. For my part, I've been working with WiderNet, which is
entirely capable of delivering Wikipedia to African universities in the
next 6 months, without funding from us. Andy Rabagliati periodically
updates installations of Wikipedia in secondary schools in South Africa.
All we have to do is provide a free encyclopedia for these people to
distribute, and they will distribute it.

It's true that they could probably distribute it to more places in less
time if we gave them millions of dollars, and we could probably raise
that sort of money by advertising. But we would have to make it *very*
clear to readers and editors that the ads are to support such activities.

It's possible to display advertising and keep the moral high ground,
thehungersite.com is a good example of that. But the connection between
the advertising and the charitable goal has to be eminently clear.
Editors who are thinking of leaving in a huff have to know that it is
the poor children in Africa who will suffer if they do. The Board would
have to have a well-documented plan for the immediate distribution of
the funds that are collected, and that plan would need to be advertised
relentlessly.

The Answers.com deal, on the other hand, is just a recipe for offence.
The benefit is unknown and will probably be small. The Board has agreed
to it in secret, apparently to repay favours such as the Wikimania
sponsorship. They've given a single organisation preferential treatment,
which brings their motives into question: are they doing this to help
Wikipedia or Answers.com?

That's why I join the chorus of editors in asking the Board to withdraw
from this deal. If we are going to have advertising, it needs to be done
with extreme sensitivity to the sensibilities of the community. Claiming
that it's not advertising most certainly doesn't help -- even if the
Board believes that line, the community certainly doesn't.

I don't believe that we need to have advertising to keep the site
running. We can still go a long way by pressing our readers to donate
more money, and by making better use of strings-free hardware donation
offers such as the Google deal. Some people have expressed reservations
against "begging", but it's generally seen as a more acceptable activity
than advertising.

If the Board wants to perform "special projects" such as offline
distribution, these projects first have to be rigorously justified to
the community. Supporting them by advertising can only be considered
after the community has been convinced of their benefit.

-- Tim Starling


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Policy on breaches of bans

body:
Tim Starling wrote:

>
>The Internode proxies 203.26.206.129 and 203.26.206.130 have been on our
>trusted XFF list for a few weeks, although they have a nasty habit of
>randomly giving 10/8 addresses, so you might still see some edits coming
>from them occasionally.
>
>
Would edit-blocking sessions with RFC1918-space XFF addresses given out
by most trusted XFF proxies be a good idea, since it's generally a sign
of something going seriously wrong?

-- Neil


from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Quality

body:
On 10/24/05, Anthony DiPierro <wikispam at inbox.org> wrote:

>  I guess I'm supposed to take your word for this.
>

No you are free to try and come up with a modle that is consitant with
reality but at the same time doesn't have the diminishing returns
kicking in. Of course trivualy since the amount of effort availible on
the internet is finite a large enough number of articles will always
bring their mean quality down.

>  Well, it's an opinion, not a fact, but if I recall correctly those two
> articles that Jimbo brought up before were quite popular and heavily edited.
>

And nowhere near as bad as some of the ignored dross that no one
edits. The cleanup catogries are growing at an impressive rate.

>  I don't understand what you're getting at. In my experience most articles
> listed on AFD could be turned into quality short factual articles in about 5
> minutes.

But they aren't.

> Did you read my suggestion about replacing AFD with "Articles for
> Improvement"? Would that satisfy your problem with articles which require
> "mentanence"?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Cleanup_by_month

And thats just straight cleanup. The system is already overloaded.

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Quality

body:
On 10/24/05, Anthony DiPierro <wikispam at inbox.org> wrote:
>  Is that sarcasm or something? You're not seriously suggesting that
> Wikipedia become more like Uncyclopedia, are you?

We both have a simular problem (substandard articles). It would appear
they are being proactive.

--
geni


from_name: Tony Sidaway

body:
On 10/24/05, Matt R <matt_crypto at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>
> As a case study, consier the following two images which could be used to
> illustrate the "Hogtie bondage" article (likely not work/public safe!):
>
>    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Model_in_classic_Hogtie.jpg
>    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Model_in_stringent_hogtie.jpg
>
> The images seem virtually identical to me in terms of what they illustrate
> regarding the topic. However, for some reason, people have been insisting on
> using the unclothed version in preference to the clothed version. I would argue
> that that's a clear loss for the project.

Actually I think the unclothed one is nicer to look at; the clothes
don't do anything for the picture.

However the two pictures aren't at all equivalent.  In the "stringent
hogtie" picture, the model is further restrained, for instance by
extra bindings below the breasts, on the calves and on the thighs
closest to the knee joint.

And although to you the clothed figure may appear more "decent", it
worries me a little because of the safety aspect.  The hogtie position
can cause difficulty with breathing and this is not improved by the
use of the further restraint below the breasts and the wearing of
tight clothing.  There is also in the clothed picture a suggestion
that the binding may involve a ligature around the model's neck (which
may be practised in extreme forms of the hogtie).

Of course Wikipedia isn't a HOW-TO guide, but it's as well to minimise
the possible damage that might arise from amateurs copying the
photographs.


from_name: Snowspinner

subject: [WikiEN-l] Blocked - In violation of the Wikipedia blocking policy

body:
On Oct 24, 2005, at 8:18 PM, Paul Rynne wrote:
>
> The "blocking" policy as used by user Jtdirl might more accurately
> be labelled a censorship policy as it is clearly intended to
> prevent editing of inaccurate entries. I would strongly suggest you
> come up with a better policy to police who can block people and
> review when and why they do so.
>

For future reference, you had me plausibly believing you weren't
Skyring right up until that paragraph.

Just a tip for, you know, future times you try to lie to us.

-Snowspinner


subject: [WikiEN-l] Deletion again

body:
On 10/25/05, Snowspinner <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I don't know how many times I can continue to put this in new and
> innovative ways. Deletion is broken. We are making mistakes. Our
> mistakes are costing us contributors. They are costing us good
> contributors.

Oh let's just shut down AfD for a month and see if the wiki explodes.
Honestly I don't think it would even come near.  There just aren't
enough articles involved for it to impact the wiki much (many times
more rubbish is speedied daily) and we shouldn't be driving away good
editors.


subject:
[Foundation-l] Re: Benefits of advertising (was Re: Our
 exponentially increasing costs)

body:
Anthere wrote:
>> The Answers.com deal, on the other hand, is just a recipe for offence.
>> The benefit is unknown and will probably be small. The Board has agreed
>> to it in secret, apparently to repay favours such as the Wikimania
>> sponsorship. They've given a single organisation preferential treatment,
>> which brings their motives into question: are they doing this to help
>> Wikipedia or Answers.com?
>
>
>
> Since you are mentionning the Board here, I am clearly included. I will
> not speak for the other board members here, but only for me though.
>
> I consider your comment being an accusation of corruption.
>
> I do not think you have any basis, as far as I am concerned, for making
> such a public accusation. Unless you can provide a good argument to
> support it and explain how I could in any sens benefit of the current
> deal, I will kindly ask you to provide public apologies for this comment
> I consider defaming.

Sorry, by "apparently" I only meant that that is the way it appears that
way to the most extreme members of the community, I don't hold such
views myself. I was only trying to explain why I think this deal has met
such strong opposition, especially on the wiki. It was wild speculation
in any case, my apologies.

Jimmy Wales wrote
> "apparently to repay favours such as the Wikimania sponsorship" -
> absolutely false.
>
> "a single organization preferential treatment" - absolutely false.
>
> I'm so shocked by these remarks, that I'm going to do something fairly
> rare for me and ask for a public apology.

Fair enough, it was ill-considered.

>>> That's why I join the chorus of editors in asking the Board to withdraw
>>> from this deal. If we are going to have advertising, it needs to be done
>>> with extreme sensitivity to the sensibilities of the community. Claiming
>>> that it's not advertising most certainly doesn't help -- even if the
>>> Board believes that line, the community certainly doesn't.
>
>
> Then as a longstanding member of the community with a good reputation, I
> ask for your help in explaining to them how it is *not* advertising.  In
> order to do that, you'll have to stop spinning wild accusations first
> and ask some basic questions about the deal until you understand it.

I'll come back to this in a later post.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

body:
I like that idea. But how would we deal with old links? We can't just
deprecate a link and not replace it. If they call it ITN, it will
still be called ITN if it points to [[WP:NEWS]].

--Mgm

On 10/24/05, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 24/10/05, Tom Cadden <thomcadden at yahoo.ie> wrote:
> > I've raised this issue on the [[In the News]] page,
> > but got little response.
> >
> > Rather than unilaterally propose a change on the page,
> > I decided to bring in here first to see can we get a
> > consensus here initially.
> >
> > A lot of users refer to the above page as ''ITN''.
>
> ...
>
> > ITN is their registered name, not ours. For our own
> > sake we should stop people using ITN when they mean
> > our page. If necessary a new name is needed for the
> > page to avoid a serious problem happening and
> > seriously pissing off the real ITN.
>
> I agree it's confusing.
>
> ITN probably came about via the [[WP:ITN]] shorthand (compare
> references to RFC, RFA, VFD, CV, and so forth); would it be worth
> deprecating this and trying to spread the use of [[WP:NEWS]] as the
> reference?
>
> --
> - Andrew Gray
>  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Upload URL/filesystem restructuring

body:
I'm putting further notes at:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/1.6_image_storage

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Our exponentially increasing costs

body:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:

>It boggles my mind that this isn't being done. Seems to me like a totally
>irrational fear that Wikimedia would somehow start catering to the
>advertisers. It's almost as though Wikipedians are afraid of money or
>something.
>
There's a word for it: chrematophobia. :-)

Ec


from_name: Robin Shannon

subject:
[Foundation-l] Re: Answers.com and Wikimedia Foundation to Form New
	Partnership

body:
On 10/23/05, Robin Shannon <robin.shannon at gmail.com> wrote:
> This IS advertising. We are providing a link to a service that we will
> get money from. We are not doing this for educational or whatever
> reasons like in the external links section of articles, we are doing
> it because it will (we hope) generate $$$s.
<snip />

I would just like to publicly apoligise for this comment. Having
followed this debate it would seem that i reached an overhasty
conclusion. I thank Jimbo, the board and mav for reacting to the
barrage of critisism from me and others in such a calm and intelligent
manner. Provided that this is just placed on the tools page (along
with the other tools) and that it has an appropriate explanation, then
I believe that it is really not advertising, and generally a good
thing.

paz y amor,
-rjs.

--
DO NOT SEND ME WORD ATTACHMENTS - I *WILL* BITE!
<http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/sylvester-response.html>

Hit me: <http://robin.shannon.id.au>
Jab me: <robin.shannon at jabber.org.au>
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