body:
Well, software RAID may be faster for long, sequential writing and
reading, but we don't have very much data going in or out. Some typical
numbers may be 2-3MB/s read and ?-1 MB/s write. The parity calculation
on that is going to be negligible, no matter what solution we choose.
The problem is of course that this data is spread all over the disk, so
seek time is the major bottleneck. I do not know if the performance
hw/sw RAIDs differ significantly in this aspect. With the average RAID
card, replacing a faulty HDD is as simple and error prone as, well,
replacing a HDD when the warning e-mail drops in your inbox. I'd say
that's hard to beat as far as data security goes.

// E23

Jimmy Wales jwales-at-bomis.com |wikipedia| wrote:

>O.k., well, yesterday the other fellow yelled at me (not really) that
>I should be doing software RAID anyway.  I *can* get anything overnighted
>to me, to be sure.  Should I?
>
>Possibly that's the wisest thing to do here.
>
>Gabriel Wicke wrote:
>
>
>
>>On Tue, 03 Feb 2004 10:38:00 -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>>So, I think that's what we should do.
>>>
>>>
>>When will the replacement controller arrive? If it's adding a day or so
>>delay it's propably not worth to bother setting up the soft raid now.
>>Should be possible to get one overnight really- i can send stuff from
>>Germany to any place in the US overnight, likely to work inside the US
>>as well.
>>--
>>Gabriel Wicke
>>
>>


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Martin Harper

subject: [WikiEN-l] "Total failure of mediation process"

body:
Dear Robert "fuck you sick Nazi bastards" Kaiser,

You have alleged that I have "refused to mediate". This allegation is incorrect. I
remain entirely happy to accept mediation. TUF-KAT was the first to volunteer for
mediation, and I have already accepted his assistance, pending your agreement to
his acting as mediator. Additionally, you yourself suggested LittleDan as a mediator,
and I have indicated that he would also be acceptable to me, after he reassured me
on a few points of detail.

I believe that I am awaiting a response from you indicating your acceptance of either
LittleDan or TUF-KAT as our mediator.

I do not have a "secret agenda". I have previously publically stated my goals for
resolving the conflict between you and myself. I was cautious about restating them in
public, since I felt that doing so might inflame the situation, though I have always
been happy to do so in private, with you and a mutually agreed mediator. However,
given your concerns on this point, I am happy to publically outline my objectives for
mediation:

1) Robert to, publically and unreservedly, apologise for and retract the recent email
he sent to the wikien-l list, calling Wikipedia "Nazipedia".

2) Robert to, publically and unreservedly, apologise for and retract and cease his
completely unfounded accusations and insinuations that I agree with, or support,
Nazism, anti-Semitism, or similar bigotry, in any way.

3) Robert to, publically and unreservedly, apologise for and retract and cease his
accusations that my conduct on Wikipedia in any way constitutes "censorship" or
"harassment" of his good self.

4) Robert to accept that calling long-standing Wikipedians, editing in good faith,
"vandals", "censors", or in need of being banned, is not appropriate behaviour;
Robert to agree to henceforth cease such behaviour.

5) Resolution of certain other, more minor, points of contention.

I trust that this response is sufficient to allay any concerns you might have regarding
the mediation process. If you wish me to expand on any of these points, publically or
privately, I will be happy to do so.

Thank you for your time.
-Martin "MyRedDice" Harper


from_name: Alex R.

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Alexander Lukashenko

body:
You are right Fred, there is not a lot of "reliable news" in English out of
Belarus.
There are plenty of sources if you speak Russian, however. In English there
is
the Belpan news service with some of their articles reprinted on
Charter97.org
and on Brestonline.com, there are also a few Russian services that have
English versions of stories written. There are various Human Rights reports
that have a lot of verifiable information and OSCE committees that regularly
report on Belarus. The problem with a lot of this material is that there are
always allegations about the news sources being slanted to be "pro Western"
or pro Luka.

Regarding journalists everyone pointing the finger at everyone else
and even Russian journalists are being expelled from that country
so it is hard to know what is accurate or propaganda from either side.
If you've been to Belarus (I've been there four times) you quickly
realize that it is hard to study this country in the face of all the
mounting
opposition to Lukashenko outside Belarus and what appears to be a very
apathic populace that is just trying to survive. Reminded me a lot of Haiti
as it shares a similar status with the western hemisphere's poorest country,
but without the aging soviet infrastructure and few international aid
projects.
Lukashenko's renovated main train terminal in Mensk is _so_ tacky.

Alex

From: "Fred Bauder" <fredbaud at ctelco.net>
Part of the problem here is that we don't get a lot of news out of Belarus.
So even if someone is interested and has a general opinion we may still not
know the specifics. I know not to trust anything 172 writes but can't vouch
for the factual basis of the alternative article.

Fred


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Richard Gallagher

subject: [Wikitech-l] memory tests underway

body:
On 2 Feb 2004 at 11:08, Jimmy Wales wrote:

> There is one very important quirk that I need to report.  The
> dual opteron reports 4,096MB of ram, as expected.
>
> However, the two Pentium IV servers with 4 physical gig of RAM in them
> report only 3,584MB of RAM.  I fiddled with the chips to confirm that
> each of them really is 1 Gig, and that's not it.  I also poked around
> in the bios (in an uneducated manner), but saw nothing to fix.

There are two issues.  First the system uses some memory address
to map to IO.  Some platforms allow for memory mapped IO to be
done in a seperate space to actual memory address space however
the x86 architecture is no one of these.  If your memory is not full up
this isn't a problem as IO can be mapped to addresses that aren't
being used.  But if the RAM in your system is at the maximum then
you won't be able to use all of it.

Secondly Linux partitions the memory seen by a process as Kernel
and User.  The exact sizes of these can be set when the Kernel is
complied.  If you have 2GB or less of memory this isn't a problem
the system can juggle memory between kernel and user as needed.

However on a system with 4GB you will configure the kernel to have
512GB and give the rest to user.  However on a 32 bit system there
is not much room to move.  A user process can only access 3.5GB,
so Squid would be limited to 3.5GB even though more memory
might be free.  You can lower the amount reserved kernel, but then
you place a hard limit on the memory the kernel can use and may
run into trouble if it needs more memory than you have let it have.

I hope I have explained this well, it is complex and I have tried to
keep it simple.

Also some versions of malloc don't work well when you go over 3GB.

My suggestion, if the 1GB from each of the 4GB machines can be
put to good use elsewhere then do so.  Otherwise it won't hurt to
leave it where it is.  However if you really want to get use of 4GB
you'll really need a machine with a 64 bit architecture.

Richard Gallagher


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Elisabeth Bauer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] RfA

body:
Hello,

Could you please hold this (and all further) discussions about policies
on en.wikipedia.org in the appropriate list, i.e. wikien-l?

Optim wrote:

> Summary: Current RfA ineffective. Proposed
> automated software evaluation of Wikipedia
> contributors.

My 2 cents: too complicated. better use human judgement.

greetings,
elian


from_name: cprompt

subject: [WikiEN-l] Jack

body:
It's pretty tiring to see every comment from Adam discounted. He's not
banned, you know.

On Mon, 2004-02-02 at 20:35, Rick wrote:
> From one troll to another.
>
> RickK
>
> A [name omitted for privacy reasons] <wikilir at yahoo.com> wrote:
>         So far the only evidence presented, that Jack Lynch is
>         a "troll", is that User:Tannin swears at him. All this
>         gossip and blacklisting is not helping the wikipedia
>         become a better place.


from_name: Ira Stoll

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikivacation

body:
I am going to take a wikivacation. Things havn't been nice here for awhile,
and now that I have changed my name (and incidentally made a rather stupid
mistake involving angela) I think it is great timing for me to take a
vacation from all the name calling and hostility. I think the power
structure here is broken, and that the admins are out of control. I don't
think the admin position is helpful in its present state. Power corrupts,
and to be frank, I think most of the trolls on the wiki ARE admins. Anyways,
lets hope that when I come back, things will be loads better, and it will be
a magical place of smiles and reference checking, instead of wikipolitics,
block voting concensus, and flaming subtituting for intellectual discourse.
Clearly the article content suffers, and the time when someone could
legitamately cite the wikipedia as a reference source is not within sight.
Goodbye for now, and God bless.
Sam Spade (JackLynch)

_________________________________________________________________
Learn how to choose, serve, and enjoy wine at Wine @ MSN.
http://wine.msn.com/


from_name: Sunir Shah

subject: [WikiEN-l] RE: WikiEN-l Digest, Vol 7, Issue 4

body:
Sheldom Rampton,
> Just out of curiosity, is there some reason why the entry bar for
> Wikipedia contributors is so low?

Yes, because it's pointless to do anything else.

    http://usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?LoginsAreEvil

SS


from_name: Anthere

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: "Total failure of mediation process"

body:
Problem is...where ?

John C. Penta a ?crit:
> Jesus Christ...Both of you, go elsewhere and argue? PLEASE?


body:
I would like to insist on where private mediation could be helpful here

The last two messages of Robert and Martin were very interesting, as they
1) laid down their major grief toward each other
2) summarize what they both request
2) justify their making this request

Robert is quite upset of the existence of Martin subpage, listing the
people Robert had strong disagreement with.
Martin is quite upset of the very strong words used by Robert toward
himself and wikipedians in general.

Robert would like that the page be removed.
Martin would like that Robert to apology.

The existence of Martin page seems to be "inappropriate" as regards
wikilove or wikietiquette rules.
The use of the very strong words seems to be "inappropriate" as regards
wikilove or wikietiquette rules.

If they could agree on a mediator to act as a buffer, that would be
constructive.

And that would avoid that the discussion is disturbed by usage of "bad"
words which can only trigger irritation and spoil the process.

Anthere

Martin Harper a ?crit:
> Dear Robert "fuck you sick Nazi bastards" Kaiser,
>
> You have alleged that I have "refused to mediate". This allegation is incorrect. I
> remain entirely happy to accept mediation. TUF-KAT was the first to volunteer for
> mediation, and I have already accepted his assistance, pending your agreement to
> his acting as mediator. Additionally, you yourself suggested LittleDan as a mediator,
> and I have indicated that he would also be acceptable to me, after he reassured me
> on a few points of detail.
>
> I believe that I am awaiting a response from you indicating your acceptance of either
> LittleDan or TUF-KAT as our mediator.
>
> I do not have a "secret agenda". I have previously publically stated my goals for
> resolving the conflict between you and myself. I was cautious about restating them in
> public, since I felt that doing so might inflame the situation, though I have always
> been happy to do so in private, with you and a mutually agreed mediator. However,
> given your concerns on this point, I am happy to publically outline my objectives for
> mediation:
>
> 1) Robert to, publically and unreservedly, apologise for and retract the recent email
> he sent to the wikien-l list, calling Wikipedia "Nazipedia".
>
> 2) Robert to, publically and unreservedly, apologise for and retract and cease his
> completely unfounded accusations and insinuations that I agree with, or support,
> Nazism, anti-Semitism, or similar bigotry, in any way.
>
> 3) Robert to, publically and unreservedly, apologise for and retract and cease his
> accusations that my conduct on Wikipedia in any way constitutes "censorship" or
> "harassment" of his good self.
>
> 4) Robert to accept that calling long-standing Wikipedians, editing in good faith,
> "vandals", "censors", or in need of being banned, is not appropriate behaviour;
> Robert to agree to henceforth cease such behaviour.
>
> 5) Resolution of certain other, more minor, points of contention.
>
> I trust that this response is sufficient to allay any concerns you might have regarding
> the mediation process. If you wish me to expand on any of these points, publically or
> privately, I will be happy to do so.
>
> Thank you for your time.
> -Martin "MyRedDice" Harper


from_name: Ulrich Fuchs

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Mark questionable modifications

body:
> Some wikipedians would like to have an automatic detection of "questionable
> modifications". Questionable modifications, mean, modifications that have a
> great chance to be a rookie's test or a vandalism. This automatic detection
> may be done by check, for example:

We have discussed the same on the german language Wikipedia some time ago (we
even collected those "keyboard tests" to do a (visual) pattern analysis) and
in the end, the idea was dropped more or less: Most of the vandalism edits in
existing articles don't follow that behaviour, and new articles are checked
anyway "by hand" for formatting and so on. The percentange of "bad" edits
that one could possibly find out with such a mechanism is so small, that it
is unlikely to justify the programming effort.

Uli


from_name: Ralesk Ne'vennoyx

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: european miror

body:
Menchi wrote:
> In case anyone's wondering, the TLD .ws is (Western) Samoa in the Pacific.
>
    It's also as much used by Western Samoans as .to used by Togo people
or .vu by... errr, whatever that is.


from_name: Guillaume Blanchard

body:
Discussed on French Wikipedia:

Some wikipedians would like to have an automatic detection of "questionable
modifications". Questionable modifications, mean, modifications that have a
great chance to be a rookie's test or a vandalism. This automatic detection
may be done by check, for example:

* Article size reduction limit (or %): someone replace an article by "I rule
Wikipedia!" or cut half the article.

* Minimal size of new article: someone create an article with only "Hello
world!".

* Length of words or letters repetition in small articles:
"yyyyyyyyyyyyyfffffffffff".

There are many other criteria that can define "questionable modifications",
but this can handle a lot of case we run up against. Those questionable
modifications may be displayed in RC (for sysop or for all) with a different
mark (color, bold, italic or any visible marker). The goal is to give
information on witch articles have to be checked.

Aoineko


subject: [Wikitech-l] Mark questionable modifications


subject: [Wikitech-l] Squid was down for a short moment

body:
Just for information:

I got an access denied error when trying to reach the german lang. WP.
----------
ERROR
The requested URL could not be retrieved
 While trying to retrieve the URL: http://de.wikipedia.org/
The following error was encountered:
Access Denied.
Access control configuration prevents your request from being allowed at this
time. Please contact your service provider if you feel this is incorrect.

Your cache administrator is webmaster.

Generated Thu, 05 Feb 2004 10:49:41 GMT by localhost.localdomain
(squid/2.5.STABLE4)
------------
2 Minutes later it worked again.

Uli


from_name: brion at zwinger.wikimedia.org

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Mailing lists - switching servers

body:
We're in the process of switching the mailing lists over to the new
servers. The offsite backup mail server was supposed to pick up the
slack while the DNS changes propagate, but apparently there've been
some troubles with it. Sorry for any inconvenience; hopefully
it'll all be working within a couple days at most for those having
problems.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Mailing lists - switching servers


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Mail server workarounds

body:
Might or might not be working. Larousse is set up to forward mail to
zwinger.wikimedia.org, which when DNS changes finish will be
mail.wikipedia.org / mail.wikimedia.org.

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

subject: [WikiEN-l] unilateral bans of controversial users

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>I banned Anthony after he repeatedly vandalized the same page, even though
>I had told him to stop. I immediately unbanned him after the matter was
>resolved. I am 100% positive that this was a perfectly appropriate action
>to take, with arbitration committee or without, and is backed up by
>precedent (BuddhaInside, RK etc.). Protection was not an option, because
>the page in question, a list of sites using our MediaWiki software, is
>supposed to be openly editable at any time so that sitemasters can add
>their site to the list.
>
>
I'm not sure I'd call it "vandalism".  He was adding an obscure site to
the page that you did not think should be listed, and linking to the
Wikipedia article on the site (which was listed on VfD) instead of to
the site's URL (which may or may not have actually existed).  This is a
poor edit that shouldn't be on the page, but not quite to the level of
what I'd consider *vandalism* (especially since it later turned out that
the site did in fact exist).  It may or may not be trolling, but I don't
think it's vandalism.

I also disagree that protection wasn't an option.  Any contributor is
supposed to be able to edit, say, [[Gdansk]], but that doesn't stop us
from protecting it when necessary.  Sure, it's inconvenient when someone
happens along that has information on Gdansk that we don't have, and
they cannot edit because it's protected, but that's how it goes.  I
don't see why this one page should be special in that regard, especially
since, unlike [[Gdansk]], it doesn't even hold information that's part
of the encyclopedia.

>As others have also pointed out, Anthony has a long history of trolling
>behavior. E.g. Maximus Rex wrote: "Anthony has frequently engaged in
>troll-like behavior (examples include inserting Bill Gates' social
>security number in the opening sentence of his article (repeatedly),
>nominating articles for deletion that he admits he does not believe should
>be deleted (perhaps to prove some sort of point?), and making outrageous
>claims about copyright (for example at Al Gore he removed a sentence he
>wrote under the guise that he owned the copyright to that sentence...),
>and others)." In conversations with me on IRC, Anthony has also defended
>trolling on other websites like Kuro5hin and Slashdot.
>
>
On the copyright issue, I happen to agree with his interpretation, and
it seems one or two other people might as well.  The issue is that if I
create a GFDL work, and you make a derived work of it, you *must*
license *all* your edits under the GFDL.  If you add a fair use image to
which you do not own the copyright, your edit is not under the GFDL, so
you are violating the GFDL's terms (and thus my copyright).  You might
even add a fair use image that my company isn't allowed to redistribute,
which would put me in the position of not being able to distribute a
derived work of my own text!  Which is exactly what the GFDL was written
to prevent.

See [[meta:Do fair use images violate the GFDL?]] for additional
discussion on this point.

As for whether he's a troll, that you may have a point on.  I'm not
sure, since I've only encountered him on Wikipedia once or twice, but
I'm quite willing to believe that there are people here who are up to no
good, and he may well be one of them.

>Trolling will often be very hard to prove in practice. My proposed
>solution is to simply give admins some leeway in enforcing the rules -- we
>have over 100 admins who can clean up after each other if necessary.
>Trolls should be treated like normal users, only that I find it fair to be
>especially watchful about whether they are breaking any rules, and more
>swift in enforcing them.
>
>
I guess I don't like that solution much.  In my experience, allegations
of trolling are just as often false as they are true, and I think
implementing some undeserved bans is more damaging than neglecting to
implement some deserved bans.  They're both bad, but the former makes us
enemies (who may become long-running persistent thorns in our side) and
damages our reputation of "anyone can edit here and the admins aren't a
power-wielding cabal".  That's not to say we shouldn't ban anyone, we
should just avoid doing it a lot, and make sure that we only do it when
really necessary.

FWIW, I also think we should go a little easier on banning anonymous
users than has been done lately.  Certainly if somebody vandalizes a
bunch of pages they should be banned, but I don't think it's necessary
to ban an IP that's had two minor vandalism edits, especially if they're
the sort that might be unintentional (just adding "hi" or something,
often done by newbies to test if you really can just edit any page, as
advertised).  We can end up discouraging potential contributors with
stuff like that, and the downside of having to revert a few more edits
isn't really a big one (it's pretty easy to revert, after all).  I
personally tend only to ban users who insist on vandalizing the same
page, or have vandalized somewhere more in the range of 8-10 pages; the
rest usually either turn into good users or give up and leave before
banning them is necessary.

-Mark


body:
I just now wrote:

> FWIW, I also think we should go a little easier on banning anonymous
> users than has been done lately.  Certainly if somebody vandalizes a
> bunch of pages they should be banned, but I don't think it's necessary
> to ban an IP that's had two minor vandalism edits, especially if
> they're the sort that might be unintentional (just adding "hi" or
> something, often done by newbies to test if you really can just edit
> any page, as advertised).  We can end up discouraging potential
> contributors with stuff like that, and the downside of having to
> revert a few more edits isn't really a big one (it's pretty easy to
> revert, after all).  I personally tend only to ban users who insist on
> vandalizing the same page, or have vandalized somewhere more in the
> range of 8-10 pages; the rest usually either turn into good users or
> give up and leave before banning them is necessary.

I forgot to add--I also think that when anonymous users of that sort
*are* banned, the ban messages should make some attempt to be at least
tersely polite and directed towards the banee rather than towards the
sysops reading the ban log.  For example, "yawn, another vandal" isn't
as good as "please do not vandalize articles" or something of that sort.

Also, perhaps the ban message should tell them it's only a 24-hr ban?
Something like "Your ban will automatically expire in 24 hours, after
which you may resume editing Wikipedia in accordance with our policies.
If you persist in vandalism or other violations of our policy, however,
you will be permanently banned."

-Mark


from_name: Sascha Noyes

body:
More trolling by anthony a couple of hours ago; listing wikipedia on
[[Wikipedia:Copies of Wikipedia content (low degree of compliance)]]:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Copies_of_Wikipedia_content_(low_degree_of_compliance)&action=history
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Copies_of_Wikipedia_content_(undetermined_or_disputed_compliance)

I and a couple of others should also have received a "YHBT, HAND" notice after
engaging in a discussion on IRC with anthony where he claimed that wikipedia
is not an encyclopedia because it isn't printed on dead trees. (And some
other equally strange criteria which I've since forgotten)

Best,
Sascha Noyes
--
Please encrypt all email. Public key available from
www.pantropy.net/snoyes.asc


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikisource

body:
Tim Starling wrote:

> Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>> I have been asking for admin status at Wikisource for some time, and
>> have received no meaningful response - either positive or negative.
>> The sink there is getting full of dirty dishes, and nobody seems able
>> or willing to wash them.
>>
>> I would appreciate it if someone would act upon this.
>>
>> Ec
>
> Angela asked me yesterday to make ArnoLagrange, Samuel, Menchi and Yann
> sysops on Wikisource, which I did immediately. She also said:
>
> <Angela> Eclecticology also nominated himself, but it hasn't been
> seconded. And strangely no one seconded mav
>
> Are you telling me she was mistaken in her understanding of Wikisource
> sysopping policy? Should I make Ec and Mav sysops despite the lack of a
> seconder?

There never has been a policy on this, one way or the other, at
Wikisource.  Perhaps it's simply because the project is just too new.

Angela imported Wikipedia rules on the matter (and a number of others)
which she felt should also apply to Wikisource.  This became one of the
areas of contention which she and I have been having.  Such a rule(s)
may eventually be needed, but that has to come from the active
Wikisourcerers themselves.

Mav has been around this Wiki World a little longer than I, and has gone
to the expense of protecting the wikisource.org domain name.  His
willingness to be a Wikisource sysop should be all that is required there.

Ec


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
Jimmy-
> I know nothing about what was going on with Anthony Del Pierro and
> Eloquence.

I banned Anthony after he repeatedly vandalized the same page, even though
I had told him to stop. I immediately unbanned him after the matter was
resolved. I am 100% positive that this was a perfectly appropriate action
to take, with arbitration committee or without, and is backed up by
precedent (BuddhaInside, RK etc.). Protection was not an option, because
the page in question, a list of sites using our MediaWiki software, is
supposed to be openly editable at any time so that sitemasters can add
their site to the list.

That being said, it would have been preferable to use a per-page ban in
this case, but that feature is not yet available.

As others have also pointed out, Anthony has a long history of trolling
behavior. E.g. Maximus Rex wrote: "Anthony has frequently engaged in
troll-like behavior (examples include inserting Bill Gates' social
security number in the opening sentence of his article (repeatedly),
nominating articles for deletion that he admits he does not believe should
be deleted (perhaps to prove some sort of point?), and making outrageous
claims about copyright (for example at Al Gore he removed a sentence he
wrote under the guise that he owned the copyright to that sentence...),
and others)." In conversations with me on IRC, Anthony has also defended
trolling on other websites like Kuro5hin and Slashdot.

One thing I have always been missing in the Wikipedia community is trust.
There's nothing wrong with some healthy paranoia regarding all forms of
authority. But I'd appreciate a little more awareness of the very real
threat that persistent and annoying trolls represent to the coherence and
productivity of our community. And no, these people do not have a "right"
to test our defenses.

Trolls sometimes pretend to be working against "groupthink", but in
reality their only goal is to disrupt things, to see how much damage they
can do. Trying to deliberately sabotage the construction of a free
encyclopedia takes a special, even more disgusting type of troll.

Trolling will often be very hard to prove in practice. My proposed
solution is to simply give admins some leeway in enforcing the rules -- we
have over 100 admins who can clean up after each other if necessary.
Trolls should be treated like normal users, only that I find it fair to be
especially watchful about whether they are breaking any rules, and more
swift in enforcing them.

Of course I'd love to see the arbitration committee be quick in making
decisions in such cases, but work by committee is rarely fast or
efficient.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikisource

body:
Ec wrote:
>..
>Mav has been around this Wiki World a little longer than I,
>and has gone to the expense of protecting the wikisource.org
>domain name.

Thanks Ec. And wikisource.org is currently forwarded to Wikisource's temp url.

>His willingness to be a Wikisource sysop should
>be all that is required there.

Same for Ec. The fact that both Ec and I are admins on other wikis is all the
justification needed for immediate promotion upon asking on a new, small wiki.

But I think a major bottleneck is developing at the developer level in this
area. Phase II had an interface for Admin's to promote/demote any user - I
liked that. If this were reimplemented it would save the developers a lot of
time doing this themselves and save the wikis time waiting for approved
candidates to be sysoped.

BTW, both Ec and I have been seconded now.

--Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

__________________________________
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Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online.
http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] Certification of Arbitration Policy

body:
The arbitration committee, consisting of 11 members, was prodded by me
to take a vote on a short-term procedure to take care of some pressing
matters immmediately, an "emergency session" in Martin's terminology.

I proposed a voting procedure, and with some small modifications, it
was approved by them 7-0.  The other 4 may still vote, but of course
the existence of a majority is sufficient to get us moving right
along.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration_policy

The deal is this:

1.  The Arbitration committee will continue their careful
deliberations towards a more permanent policy, and when they get it
done, we'll have an open community vote "yes or no" on what they've
come up with.

2.  In the meantime, they will handle emergency cases that I refer to
them.  It is understood by all that they are merely acting in
my stead now, so as to begin the transfer of power in an orderly and
timely fashion.

3.  The voting procedure for the committee is as follows:

There being 11 members of the commmittee currently,

a.  An appeal to the abritration committee will be officially heard
upon referral by Jimbo and approval by any 4 committee members.  That
is, 4 votes to hear a case will result in the case being heard.

b.  Upon those 4 votes, a final decision will be made within 1 week.

c.  A quorum of the committee will consist of a majority of members,
i.e. at least 6 members must vote within that week, or no decision is
made, and no action is taken.

d.  When a quorum has been reached, then after 1 week is up, or after
enough members have voted such that the conclusion is inevitable, the
majority decision will be the arbitration committee decision.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] Status of mediation

body:
Geoff Burling wrote:
> > Just to give everybody else a heads-up, mediations
> > thus brought before the committee include:
> > *UtherSRG and Lizard King -- cancelled due to Uther
> > not responding
> > *JackLynch and Lord Kenneth -- no agreement to mediate
> > *Mr. Natural Heath and somebody  -- presumably still
> > ongoing???
> >
> TUF-KAT is slightly mistaken. I restarted arbitration between
> UtherSRG and Lizard King because Uther did send me his side of
> the dispute (& Lizard King did not say he wouldn't continue).
> I'm not at liberty to say how it's going.

I think Geoff meant to write "restarted mediation" not arbitration.

I want to refer the case of Mr. Natural Health to the temporary
session of the Arbitration committee.  Who is doing the mediation
there?  Can someone on the mediation committee certify to me that the
mediation process is over?

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] Fair use

body:
Delirium wrote:
> See [[meta:Do fair use images violate the GFDL?]] for additional
> discussion on this point.

I think that your position, and that of Anthony, is mistaken.  I have
discussed this with experts, and frankly, not only did they think this
was mistaken, they seemed bemused that I should ask such a silly
question in the first place.

Further discussion of this should take place on wikilegal-l, but I do
recommend that people read the comment I just added on the page
Delirium cited above.

The essential point is that the GNU FDL is not a restriction that
authors impose on users that goes beyond copyright, but instead is a
conditional giving up of restrictions normally imposed by copyright.

--Jimbo


body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
> If it was at least an edit war about something that reasonable
> people can disagree on -- but his edits were pure vandalism, plain
> and simple.

I think that's the key here.

We have to be cautious, of course, that we not silently expand our
understanding of "pure vandalism" too far.

But Erik has cogently and correctly made the point a few times
recently that "Wikipedia is not about 'rights'. Wikipedia is about
creating an encyclopedia. All this trolling distracts from that
goal."

I can imagine, and I would probably enjoy (for a little while) a wiki
with no purpose, no rules, no bans, anything goes, freewheeling,
random, chaotic, with that anarchic structure (or should I say
'anti-structure') being the primary value.

But that's not wikipedia.  Our open atmosphere is a means to an end,
and it's the end that is our primary focus, our loving passion, the
thing that brings us all together: the encyclopedia.

So while I'm certainly on the cautious end of the scale, very near to
Cunctator in fact, as to the merits of bans and rules and so on, I do
think it's very important to keep our priorities straight.

That's why I was supportive of Angela banning "UnbannableOne".  That's
why I banned "The Fellowship of the Troll" yesterday.

There are people in the world with active mental pathologies.  It's
difficult for good and benevolent people to really grasp that someone
could have the time and energy to come to a charitable humanitarian
project that tries to be open and friendly and inclusive and neutral
simply for the purpose of causing trouble.  We tend to try to project
our happy loving values on their actions, assuming that they are just
trying to help us remain neutral or whatever.

But sometimes, that's just not true.  As difficult as it is to
imagine, some people just are plain and simple assholes.

An important concept here is "the sanction of the victim".  Leonard
Peikoff defined that term as "the willingness of the good to suffer at
the hands of evil, to accept the role of sacrificial victim for the
'sin' of creating values."

We fall into that trap fairly often, I'm afraid.  Our own good values
are used against us.  We are open, patient, inquiring after truth,
intested in fairness, neutrality, community, harmony, justice.  And so
we put up with a fair amount of nonsense, more than we should.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] Status of mediation

body:
KNOTT, T wrote:
> Jussi-Ville Heiskanen is the mediator between myself and Mr NH. The
>process has stalled for the time being. Mr. NH has not agreed
>mediation of his behavior anyway, he wants to go directly to
>arbitration over that as (presumably) he feels he didn't do anything
>wrong.

If Mr. NH has not agreed to mediation, then I personally think
mediation is over.  Mediation has to be a consensual process.

But I will wait until I get further confirmation before referring it
to the arbitration committee.

>I feel I should say that Mr. NH is behaving himself at the moment -
>not being rude or abusive to anyone as far as I am aware, but of the
>course [[Alternative medicine]] is still protected at the moment o
>there is little to fight over.

Since mediation/arbitration takes a bit of time, and always will, I
think we should not take such things into account so much when it
really is time for arbitration.  In mediation, yes, better behavior
can be a wonderful grounds for reconciliation and positive change.

But if anyone can avoid a ban by being a jerk up until such time as it
looks like they're going to get in trouble, and then playing nice and
saying "Oh, o.k., I'll be good now", we'll just see that behavior.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] Scheduled downtime

body:
I have here 3 things that need to be installed in the colo.  I'll be
there in about 2 hours, which means around noon Florida time.

1.  SCSI RAID Card - MegaRaid SCSI 320-1LP with battery backup (neat!)
I'm a bit nervous about this, because the driver installation
instructions are very strange and un-linux-like.  There's a program
called RWFLOPPY.EXE that I might have to use.  What is this, 1981?

2.  1U rackmount keyboard/monitor 16 port KVM switch (nice!)

3.  APC powerport, donated during our pledge drive, new in box

The installation of the SCSI RAID card will mean some downtime today
for suda (the new database server, 2U opteron), while the powerport
installation will mean a few minutes of downtime for the others.

The new facility is staffed 24 hours so, in theory anyway, we don't
need the powerport, as we can have a human do it.  But adding people
to the list of authorized contacts is harder than giving people access
to the power port, so it's still worthwhile.

The power port has 8 outlets, but we have 9 machines and 10 plugs.  We
therefore need to prioritize what is on the powerport.

1.  suda (database server)
2.  suda (database server)
3 ?
4 ?
5 ?
6 ?
7 ?
8  zwenger (mail server, right?)

The prioritization has to do with (a) liklihood of the machine
actually going down and (b) how desperately important that machine is
to the running of wikipedia.

We're going to have failover protection for the webservers and the
squids, so maybe that's it.

Remember, here's the chain of events that has to happen before we
experience major regret about not having the right thing on the APC:

1.  A machine has to die in such a way that a hard boot is necessary
2.  The 24x7 staff at the colo has all vanished
3.  I am out of town and can't drive over there (but I guess if there is
no staff there, I can't get in anyway)
4.  The machine in question is not on the power port.

We could experience minor regret, though, if the machine isn't on the
power port and someone has to call a human to reboot it, which takes 5
minutes instead of 5 seconds.

--Jimbo


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] Status of mediation

body:
Do you think it might be useful to unprotect [[alternative medicine]] to see
if we still have a live issue?

Fred

> From: Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Fri, 6 Feb 2004 06:48:59 -0800
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Status of mediation
>
> KNOTT, T wrote:
>> Jussi-Ville Heiskanen is the mediator between myself and Mr NH. The
>> process has stalled for the time being. Mr. NH has not agreed
>> mediation of his behavior anyway, he wants to go directly to
>> arbitration over that as (presumably) he feels he didn't do anything
>> wrong.
>
> If Mr. NH has not agreed to mediation, then I personally think
> mediation is over.  Mediation has to be a consensual process.
>
> But I will wait until I get further confirmation before referring it
> to the arbitration committee.
>
>> I feel I should say that Mr. NH is behaving himself at the moment -
>> not being rude or abusive to anyone as far as I am aware, but of the
>> course [[Alternative medicine]] is still protected at the moment o
>> there is little to fight over.
>
> Since mediation/arbitration takes a bit of time, and always will, I
> think we should not take such things into account so much when it
> really is time for arbitration.  In mediation, yes, better behavior
> can be a wonderful grounds for reconciliation and positive change.
>
> But if anyone can avoid a ban by being a jerk up until such time as it
> looks like they're going to get in trouble, and then playing nice and
> saying "Oh, o.k., I'll be good now", we'll just see that behavior.
>
> --Jimbo
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Scheduled downtime

body:
Gabriel Wicke wrote:
> On Fri, 06 Feb 2004 07:11:19 -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> > The power port has 8 outlets, but we have 9 machines and 10 plugs.  We
> > therefore need to prioritize what is on the powerport.
>
> > We're going to have failover protection for the webservers and the squids,
> > so maybe that's it.
>
> I would vote for DB, mail server, Squids and then as many as possible
> Apaches. there are enough Apaches, if one goes down it makes relatively
> little difference for the remaining redundancy and performance.
>
> If one Squid is down we have a single point of failure.

O.k., I'll do that.  Only 2 machines will not be on the power port, so
the bulk of everything is going to be just fine.

--Jimbo


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject:
[WikiEN-l] It's not anarchy (was: unilateral bans of controversial
	users)

body:
Tim,

I respectfully disagree: we DO NOT have anarchy.

It's a benevolent dictatorship, moving gradually to a parliamentary
democracy.

Jimbo is the leader.

Developers (like you!) hold most of the reins of power.

Admins (over 100 now!!) have access to "ban buttons" but have "limited
authority" to use them.

Signed in users are the Middle Class.

Anonymous (IP) users are the Lower Class.

Jimbo is amazingly different from a GodKing (as described on Meatball
Wiki). He subscribes to the principle that "government is best which
governs least", but when push comes to shove he has occasionally put his
foot down -- I know, awful metaphor ;-)

Developers almost always keep quiet and implement software features
which seem to have consensus. No one ever complains about THEM!

Last year saw an explosion of admins; most of the active ones now have
been around less than one year (this is a, what? 3-year-old project).
They can delete or restore an entire page (with its edit history) and --
recently -- can ban a signed-in user for 24 hours. (It's only one day,
right?) This temporary ban is really only supposed to be for
emergencies, but Jimbo issue a Decree of Clemency for the bans of the
last few weeks: let's start fresh!

I'm just as frightened by the emergence of a new government as anyone
else, but I know a few things:

* Wikimedia will continue to run Wikipedia.
* The text is all GPL'ed, so there's no way the encyclopedia can be
"taken over" by commercial or ideological interests.
* Everyone on the 2 committees has a proven track record of genuine
concern for both the product and the process, i.e., the goal of creating
a superb free encyclopedia and the goal of maintaining a pleasant
"workplace" for volunteers.

Ed Poor, aka Uncle Ed

-----Original Message-----
From: Tim Starling [mailto:ts4294967296 at hotmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, February 05, 2004 12:52 AM
To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: unilateral bans of controversial users

Bjorn Lindqvist wrote:
> I think further action is necessary. Either:
>
> 1. Remove the feature. It wasn't there before and probably isn't
> really needed now either.

It was implemented specifically to deal with Michael and others like
him. It has been an invaluable tool in that respect.

>
> 2. Kick the sysops using the feature in the wrong way. If you look at
> Wikipedia:RfA it seems to be clear that admins are supposed to hold a
> higher standard than regular users. It therefore doesn't make sense
> that admins are allowed to make so many extremely critical errors and
> are escaping with at most, a slap on the wrist. Especially not while
> anon users arbitrarily can lose their editing powers and logged in
> users are only slightly more fairly judged.

Certainly this is the option I would favour. When I implemented my
feature, I thought that policy would be enough to keep sysops in line.
But I now realise that for a policy to be useful, a threat of punishment

is required. You can't expect people to follow the rules when there are
no repercussions for stepping outside them.

I can understand Hephaestos' frustration. In fact, I'd be in favour of
banning by a vote or community consensus, during this transitional
period.

What we have at the moment on Wikipedia is anarchy. There is no
coordinated way to deal with trolls, and sysops (and indeed developers)
have free reign.

IMHO we need

* Empowerment of users allowing them to do things without developer help
* Rules governing the use of powers
* Structure to enforce the rules

But that's just me.

-- Tim Starling

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


from_name: Kelly Anderson

subject: [Wikitech-l] Spam Assassin

body:
At 12:21 PM 2/2/2004, you wrote:

>Kelly Anderson wrote:
> > One solution I've used is to use Yahoo Groups email manager rather than
> > majordomo or similar. There is a web interface for approving or rejecting
> > messages from non-members. You can have as many moderators as you want
> > (can get) to approve or reject messages to the list.
>
>Majordomo has both those features, and a lot more besides.

When I used majordomo, it didn't deal with bounced messages very well.

> > I understand the desire to use open source projects, but Yahoo Groups is
> > free, and it is very effective in helping to bring this sort of thing
> > under control. I used majordomo myself for about 4 years, and was very
> > reluctant to switch to Yahoo Groups, but I've never looked back.
>
>I'd say that using Yahoo Groups is a cultural impossibility for us,
>whatever the merits might or might not be.

It's sad IF it actually is better. Mental illness can be defined as not
being able to change one's opinion even in the face of overwhelming
evidence to the contrary. I would hate to think that "open source" pride is
a mental illness ... :-)

-Kelly


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: support for <span> tags

body:
At 06:08 PM 2/2/2004, you wrote:
>>The basic premise of the new XHTML type standards is that the style sheet
>>is king. Adding Div and Span tags with specific information in them goes
>>against the intent of these new standards. They support the old stuff
>>only for backwards compatibility (in a half sort of way).
>
>This is not entirely true. It is perfectly legitimate and idiomatic HTML
>to have a SPAN tag with style="<<<CSS>>>", especially if you don't have
>access to the style sheet (which we Wikipedia contributors don't). FONT
>tags, however, are deprecated from HTML, and we should not encourage their
>use. Until there are style sheets with styles for everything, the only
>_correct_ way to sepcify styles is in DIV and SPAN tags.

I stand corrected. Thank you for this clarification. I do still believe
that the designers of CSS and XHTML would "like" for every visual aspect to
be specified through the style sheet, and only 'structural' information
like "this is a list" "this is a list member" "this should be emphasized
somehow" should be in the XHTML part. If they aren't there yet, that's one
thing, but I think their design goal is pretty clearly what I just stated.

>I'm not entirely sure why I'm getting so much resistance. It is true that
>in an ideal world, all HTML tags would be generated from the Wiki syntax.
>But the Wiki syntax isn't sufficient in its current form. Accordingly, we
>already allow <font> tags, they're all over the Wikipedia, AND they're
>deprecated from HTML. At least <span> tags aren't deprecated. What exactly
>is the problem with changing from the status quo to the status quo plus
>allowing <span> tags?
>
>- David

I think that perhaps the reason you are getting push back is the desire for
every page of Wikipedia to look like Wikipedia. There is a certain value to
"branding" that is gained from a consistent look and feel. Opening up each
page to a web designer makes it a collection of related web pages, not a
wiki encyclopedia where each page is clearly and easily identified as
belonging to Wikipedia. Does that make a little sense David?

-Kelly


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Mark questionable
  modifications

body:
At 06:22 PM 2/4/2004, you wrote:

>Guillaume Blanchard wrote:
> > There are many other criteria that can define "questionable modifications",
> > but this can handle a lot of case we run up against. Those questionable
> > modifications may be displayed in RC (for sysop or for all) with a
> different
> > mark (color, bold, italic or any visible marker). The goal is to give
>
>Could you use SpamAssassin for this?  It assignes a probability that a
>message is a spam, based on how previous messages were categorized.
>Filtering based on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes%27_theorem
>or rather http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_inference
>
>Can we dig out cases of vandalism from the "old" database table, and
>use them as training fodder for SpamAssassin?

SpamAssassin may indeed use Bayesian filtering but is primarily a heuristic
(rule based) engine. I believe you could create a heuristic engine that
would mark "likely" vandalism on the Wiki, however, just like spam, it only
starts an arms race. The spammers know about SpamAssassin, so they do
things to get around it. The next version of SpamAssassin deals with these
tricks (like word salad, for example). Then the spammers do something more
tricky. and so forth.

In the world of the Wiki, there is no economic advantage to vandalism (that
I can think of anyway) so perhaps it would not be as serious an escalation
as there is in the world of spam.

Eventually, I'm afraid that you will have to REQUIRE logging in with a user
name prior to allowing edits on the Wiki. At least that way you can undo
all changes by user XXX automatically...

-Kelly


subject: [WikiEN-l] How do we enforce our norms?

body:
It constantly amazes me how my favorite daily comic strips relate to our
deepest issues here at Wikipedia:

http://www.unitedmedia.com/creators/onebighappy/archive/images/onebighap
py2004073198206.gif

Ed Poor


subject: [WikiEN-l] Status of mediation

body:
Fred Bauder asked,

> Do you think it might be useful to unprotect [[alternative
> medicine]] to see if we still have a live issue?

I think a mediation regarding an article is successful when it's
possible to 'unprotect' the article, and it can stay unprotected for a
long time without another edit war erupting over it.

The folks at [[Silesia]] have done an admirable job. Let's give them a
hand.

<clap, clap, clap>

Ed Poor, aka Uncle Ed


subject: [Wikitech-l] Scheduled downtime

body:
Just to clarify; the machine that'll be down is a machine that we're
_not using_ on the live site yet.

So everything should be fine. :)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Scheduled downtime

body:
I'm getting really confused, here.

How can a squid wear boots, let alone get re-booted? And are we
preparing for a raid, or conducting one? What are we, jack-booted thugs
dealing out death in the night?

Now, a squid might wear a floppy if he was a SEAL...

But it sounds more like a bio-war facility with viruses and bugs, I just
hope you know what you're doing Jimbo!!

Signed,
Frightened


body:
Delirium-
> I'm not sure I'd call it "vandalism".  He was adding an obscure site to
> the page that you did not think should be listed

I don't care about his so-called "fork". I don't care about his website,
which has the trollish name "slashdotsucks.com". I have no problem with it
being listed, as it evidently uses our software. At the time of his
listing, however, the page on Wikipedia was already deleted, so all there
was in the list was a red link "McFly". He refused to provide a URL in
spite of being asked to do so several times in the edit comments. He
reverted other people's removal of the site. And he added it to the
official list of "Wikimedia projects" once.

At this point I asked him calmly to stop adding a site without providing
any evidence for its existence, as information in Wikipedia needs to be
verifiable and helpful to the reader. His reply:

        "No."

He continued to add his site to the list, so I decided to ban him.
Evidence for its existence was provided later (a URL added by Tim
Starling); at that point I immediately unbanned Anthony.

I consider my actions in this matter absolutely justifiable, and I find it
extremely silly to talk about such a triviality. Anthony plainly only used
the page for trolling purposes, and I see no reason why we should tolerate
that kind of crap.

> I also disagree that protection wasn't an option.  Any contributor is
> supposed to be able to edit, say, [[Gdansk]]

That's not quite the same. It's hard enough to get people to list their
sites on the official list at all. The last thing we need on that page is
an edit war and a protection notice. If it was at least an edit war about
something that reasonable people can disagree on -- but his edits were
pure vandalism, plain and simple.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Geoff Burling

subject: [WikiEN-l] Status of mediation

body:
On Fri, 6 Feb 2004, Jimmy Wales wrote:

> Geoff Burling wrote:
> > > Just to give everybody else a heads-up, mediations
> > > thus brought before the committee include:
> > > *UtherSRG and Lizard King -- cancelled due to Uther
> > > not responding
> > > *JackLynch and Lord Kenneth -- no agreement to mediate
> > > *Mr. Natural Heath and somebody  -- presumably still
> > > ongoing???
> > >
> > TUF-KAT is slightly mistaken. I restarted arbitration between
> > UtherSRG and Lizard King because Uther did send me his side of
> > the dispute (& Lizard King did not say he wouldn't continue).
> > I'm not at liberty to say how it's going.
>
> I think Geoff meant to write "restarted mediation" not arbitration.
>
That is correct.

Geoff


from_name: Richards,Michael

body:
I agree with Erik's idea.

And on Recent Changes in the same way we have "hide logged in users" (&hideliu=1) which only lists changes by anonymous users, we could have "hide flagged edits" (&hideflagged=1) (or some other wording) to only list edits which have not yet been flagged as being non-vandalism by someone else. Using both in combination (&hideliu=1&hideflagged=1) would work well, and would be like a collaborative "check for vandalism" to-do list. With a hundred people, say, checking for vandalism, each of them would only have to check 1% of the edits, instead of 100% as it is now. And they could get back to spending more time authoring their own edits.

And for logged in users who are vandalizing, it is important that the person who did the edit cannot also mark it as flagged. Anyone who flags vandalism as non-vandalism would be considered liable for the change themselves. e.g. to catch a person who anonymously vandalizes, them logs on and flags their edit as non-vandalism. (Although it would help if the software could detect that the IP address is still the same, even though they are logged in, and hence prevent the flagging in the first place.)

Alternative suggestion for UI is a single link or button on the diff screen labeled:
   Flag as not vandalism
or just a single word like
   endorse, concur, ratify, approve, countersign, corroborate, warrant, authenticate, verify or equivalent
   my thesaurus got a bit of a workout :)
which then changes to Verified by Foo

And Recent Changes would have "hide verified edits" (&hideverified=1) or whatever. "Flag" is much too generic a term.

Michael Richards

-----Original Message-----
From: wikitech-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org
[mailto:wikitech-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org]On Behalf Of Erik Moeller
Sent: Wednesday, February 04, 2004 4:33 PM
To: wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Mark questionable modifications

Guillaume-
> Some wikipedians would like to have an automatic detection of "questionable
> modifications". Questionable modifications, mean, modifications that have a
> great chance to be a rookie's test or a vandalism. This automatic detection
> may be done by check, for example:

I'm against that particular solution because I think it would produce too
much visual clutter and false positives. However, one thing that I would
like to see, and will implement myself sooner or later if nobody else does
it, is a way to quickly "flag" edits as being OK, that is, non-vandalism.
Implementation wise, it would be a little box on the diff screen:

 ________________________________
[ I have checked this edit,      |
| and it is not [[vandalism]].   |
|  _____   _______               |
| | OK! | | Edit! |              |
|  -----   -------               |
 --------------------------------

Possibly only for edits made by anonymous users or those with no user
page.

Once an edit is flagged, it would just get a little extra C or X in the
Recent changes table. The box would not appear for subsequent diffs.
Instead it would be nice to show something like
 ________________________________________________
| This edit has been flagged as non-vandalism by |
| User:Foo                                       |
 ------------------------------------------------

So if someone abuses the flagging privilege, they can be dealt with in
some way.

The point is, of course, to avoid having to keep diffing the same pages
for vandalism. It wouldn't work for new pages because those have no diffs,
but new pages should probably be looked at by multiple people anyway.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: limholt at excite.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] Daniel Quinlan Redirect Project

body:
Daniel has been gone for almost two months. :-(. His redirect project has helped a number of us to improve our results and the Wikipedia in general. Since I can't talk it over with Daniel, I've described a proposed change to the project's guidelines on the <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Daniel_Quinlan/redirects> page. Although happy hear from the mailing list, I'd prefer it if we discussed the proposal on the above talk page.

Thanks and respects,

Lou Imholt , LouI at Wiki.

_______________________________________________
Join Excite! - http://www.excite.com
The most personalized portal on the Web!


from_name: Jakob

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Soliciting academic research

body:
Kent wrote:

> I remember reading somewhere on Wikipedia: that it'd be really nice for
> publicity if we could have a research paper about Wikipedia published in
> a peer-reviewed academic journal. I'm currently a history undegraduate
> at the University of Texas - Austin and would like to "spam" some of our
> school's professors about this. Is there an existing pre-formed letter
> for this purpose or should I author my own? Have there been other
> attempts to solicit academic research by other Wikipedians? To what
> degree of success?

I am currently writing a students research paper on Wikipeda in Library and
Information science. There are a lot of more scientific topics relatet to
Wikipedia in other fields - for instance I would like to see a sociologic study
on Wikipedia users. But history... maybe "didactics of history" or something
like that. You could also compare Memex and other attemts up to Wikipedia (sure
there are some profs working on "internet-history" yet. Just try to make
scientists interested and sooner or later they will write something.

Personally I recommend writing something on your own - its not much more
complicated than writing *good* wikipedia articles - in all cases it is work!
(as long as you are not a prof inventing facts or stealing your students work).
As Robert wrote it should contain something new that you cannot find in any
other encyclopedia or journal article. Getting your article in a academic
journal depends on relations, knowing the style-of-writing in your field and
relations. The scientific community is open but far from beeing as open as
Wikipedia.

Greetings,
  Jakob

P.S: My paper will be in German first.


from_name: Peter Jaros

subject: [WikiEN-l] Fwd: Google News Alert - wikipedia

body:
Anyone else seen this?

> BETWEEN the grooves
> Sydney Morning Herald - Sydney,New South Wales,Australia
> ... A sub-genre of black metal, its best-known (well, it's all
> relative)
> exponents are Skyclad and Waylander, says online encyclopedia
> wikipedia.org.
> ...
> <http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/02/06/1075854056969.html>

Does anyone know if this was in print?

Peter

                                  -- ---<>--- --
                        A house without walls cannot fall.
           Help build the world's largest encyclopedia at Wikipedia.org
                                  -- ---<>--- --


from_name: KNOTT, T

subject: [WikiEN-l] Status of mediation

body:
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen  is  the mediator between myself and Mr NH. The process has stalled for the time being. Mr. NH has not agreed mediation of his behavior anyway, he wants to go directly to arbitration over that as (presumably) he feels he didn't do anything wrong.

I am still willing to continue with mediation for the time being as long as we can get it started again. But that's not really down to me. I feel I should say that Mr. NH is behaving himself at the moment - not being rude or abusive to anyone as far as I am aware, but of the course [[Alternative medicine]] is still protected at the moment o there is little to fight over.

Theresa

 From: Jimmy Wales [mailto:jwales at bomis.com]
Sent: 06 February 2004 13:59
To: Geoff Burling; English Wikipedia
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Status of mediation

I want to refer the case of Mr. Natural Health to the temporary
session of the Arbitration committee.  Who is doing the mediation
there?  Can someone on the mediation committee certify to me that the
mediation process is over?

--Jimbo


from_name: Mills, Billy

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

> > If it was at least an edit war about something that reasonable
> > people can disagree on -- but his edits were pure vandalism, plain
> > and simple.
>
> I think that's the key here.
>
> We have to be cautious, of course, that we not silently expand our
> understanding of "pure vandalism" too far.
>
> But Erik has cogently and correctly made the point a few times
> recently that "Wikipedia is not about 'rights'. Wikipedia is about
> creating an encyclopedia. All this trolling distracts from that
> goal."
>
> I can imagine, and I would probably enjoy (for a little while) a wiki
> with no purpose, no rules, no bans, anything goes, freewheeling,
> random, chaotic, with that anarchic structure (or should I say
> 'anti-structure') being the primary value.
>
> But that's not wikipedia.  Our open atmosphere is a means to an end,
> and it's the end that is our primary focus, our loving passion, the
> thing that brings us all together: the encyclopedia.
>
> So while I'm certainly on the cautious end of the scale, very near to
> Cunctator in fact, as to the merits of bans and rules and so on, I do
> think it's very important to keep our priorities straight.
>
> That's why I was supportive of Angela banning "UnbannableOne".  That's
> why I banned "The Fellowship of the Troll" yesterday.
>
> There are people in the world with active mental pathologies.  It's
> difficult for good and benevolent people to really grasp that someone
> could have the time and energy to come to a charitable humanitarian
> project that tries to be open and friendly and inclusive and neutral
> simply for the purpose of causing trouble.  We tend to try to project
> our happy loving values on their actions, assuming that they are just
> trying to help us remain neutral or whatever.
>
> But sometimes, that's just not true.  As difficult as it is to
> imagine, some people just are plain and simple assholes.
>
> An important concept here is "the sanction of the victim".  Leonard
> Peikoff defined that term as "the willingness of the good to suffer at
> the hands of evil, to accept the role of sacrificial victim for the
> 'sin' of creating values."
>
> We fall into that trap fairly often, I'm afraid.  Our own good values
> are used against us.  We are open, patient, inquiring after truth,
> intested in fairness, neutrality, community, harmony, justice.  And so
> we put up with a fair amount of nonsense, more than we should.
>
> --Jimbo

And I doubt anyone will put it better.

Billy Mills

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from_name: Jussi-Ville Heiskanen

subject: [WikiEN-l] Status of mediation

body:
On Fri, 2004-02-06 at 16:27, KNOTT, T wrote:

    Jussi-Ville Heiskanen  is  the mediator between myself and Mr NH. The process has stalled for the time being. Mr. NH has not agreed mediation of his behavior anyway, he wants to go directly to arbitration over that as (presumably) he feels he didn't do anything wrong.

    I am still willing to continue with mediation for the time being as long as we can get it started again. But that's not really down to me. I feel I should say that Mr. NH is behaving himself at the moment - not being rude or abusive to anyone as far as I am aware, but of the course [[Alternative medicine]] is still protected at the moment o there is little to fight over.

    Theresa

     From: Jimmy Wales [mailto:jwales at bomis.com]
    Sent: 06 February 2004 13:59
    To: Geoff Burling; English Wikipedia
    Subject: [WikiEN-l] Status of mediation

    I want to refer the case of Mr. Natural Health to the temporary
    session of the Arbitration committee.  Who is doing the mediation
    there?  Can someone on the mediation committee certify to me that the
    mediation process is over?

    --Jimbo

I Think I can say without prejudice to either party of the dispute,
that based on my experience during attempted mediation, the interests
of both parties are best served by arbitration. If the Arbitration
committee is ready to hear the case/cases, I would like to call this
particular mediation to a close.

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Status of mediation

body:
>Do you think it might be useful to unprotect [[alternative medicine]]
>to see if we still have a live issue?

>Fred

I don't know. I certainly wouldn't object to the page being unprotected. It can always be protected again if need be.

Theresa


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikisource

body:
Tim Starling wrote:

>Fine by me, both of you are now sysops.
>
Many thanks.  Your effort is much appreciated.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Banning for bad edits

body:
Sunir Shah wrote:
>A cheaper solution would have been to wait a while,
>say a day or two, and then delete the problematic
>text after the user had forgotten about the page.
>Time is a more powerful weapon than banlists, and
>it's free for everyone to use.

Very good advice!

-- mav

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online.
http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html


from_name: Timwi

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: I propose a formula based on reverts

body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:

> How about a simple formula, based on what percentage of a user's edits
> are reverted by other users? (We might tweak this by discounting reverts
> from a certain class of user.)

What is a revert?

Only sysops currently have an actual revert command ("rollback"). Normal
users can only load and save older versions of a page; how do you know
if it's a revert or just settling a dispute or any number of other
things? How do you keep non-vandalism reverts from influencing the
statistics?

Additionally, even if this distinction was possible, this suggestion is
leaving a rather foul taste in my mouth. People would get even more
upset about being reverted than they already do. People would start
accusing other people of being trolls solely because they reverted them
and worsened their "revert statistics".

Honestly, I don't think this is a good idea.

Timwi


subject: [Wikitech-l] Request for Help with Mediation

body:
I have an idea of a possible way to settle part of a dispute, which I
know in theory is possible, but I don't know if it also is in
practical terms.

What I would like to do is find the IP addresses for several people
who made changes to Wikipedia, then do an reverse lookup in order to
determine whether these people come from the same subnet. This mgiht
be convincing enough to the two people I'm working with to settle
the matter.

Is this doable?

Geoff


from_name: Rich Holton

subject: [WikiEN-l] Editor's forum?

body:
I have been mulling over an idea, and I'm hoping for
some feedback...

I have, several times, come across pages on Wikipedia
where there is a problem, but I don't know the
solution. This sort of thing could include:

* A conflict of fact within the article, where I don't
know which is correct.
* A link that needs disambiguating, but I can't figure
out which is the correct page.
* An important sentence that is written ambiguously,
but I don't know which sense is correct.

You get the idea...

What I don't want to do is ignore the problem. On the
other hand, I'm unconvinced that leaving a note on the
talk page will, in all cases, get the attention needed
(I'm not sure, but I'd guess that there are a lot of
pages that no one has on their watchlist).

This doesn't really seem to fit the
[[Wikipedia:Cleanup|]] profile, which seems to be
primarily used for listing pages in need of
improvement for NPOV, wikification, grammar, etc. I
suppose there could be some overlap, but Cleanup is
overloaded anyway.

My idea is to create a page called
[[Wikipedia:Editor's forum]] (or
whatever...suggestions welcome) that would be a place
to mention this sort of issue. I see the page working
in a fashion similar to Cleanup.

So, any comments?

-Rich Holton (a.k.a Anthropos)

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online.
http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html


subject: [Wikitech-l] New diff feature - bug

body:
Hi,

I'm sorry for reporting this bug here, and not on SourceForge, but since
the SourceForge site hasn't gotten any better... anyway:

There appears to be a new feature on the history page of an article
whereby we can click two checkboxes and then it will create a diff
between the two versions we selected.

Clicking on any checkbox first and then clicking on the checkbox for the
most recent edit, however, yields the same diff as the top "last" link,
and not a diff between the two selected revisions. Any other combination
appears to work correctly.

In the JavaScript, it says:
     if(v2 > v1 && v1 != 0){ tmp = v1; v1 = v2; v2 = tmp; }
My guess would be that it would work if you change this to:
     if((v2 > v1 && v1 != 0) || v2 == 0){ tmp = v1; v1 = v2; v2 = tmp; }

On a slightly related note: Who wrote this feature? Where was this
feature discussed? I didn't see an announcement along with invitation to
test.

On an even slightlier related note: What do I need to do to get the
change I mentioned in the thread titled "Suggested change" up on
test.wikipedia.org?

Thanks,
Timwi


from_name: Gabriel Wicke

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Scheduled downtime

body:
On Fri, 06 Feb 2004 07:11:19 -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> The power port has 8 outlets, but we have 9 machines and 10 plugs.  We
> therefore need to prioritize what is on the powerport.

> We're going to have failover protection for the webservers and the squids,
> so maybe that's it.

I would vote for DB, mail server, Squids and then as many as possible
Apaches. there are enough Apaches, if one goes down it makes relatively
little difference for the remaining redundancy and performance.

If one Squid is down we have a single point of failure.
--
Gabriel Wicke


subject: [Wikitech-l] RE: Mark questionable modifications

body:
Erik wrote:
>...
>Once an edit is flagged, it would just get a little extra C or X in the
>Recent changes table. The box would not appear for subsequent diffs.
>Instead it would be nice to show something like
> ________________________________________________
>| This edit has been flagged as non-vandalism by |
>| User:Foo                                       |
> ------------------------------------------------
>
>So if someone abuses the flagging privilege, they can be dealt with in
>some way.
>...

This sounds like a great feature! But unless flagging is limited to admins, I
fear that it may be abused by a group of like-minded vandals working together
(each marking the other person's edits as non-vandalism). I also think that it
should not be limited to just vandalism but to blatant POV as well (which, IMO,
is a form of vandalism).

I check for both while on RC.

-- mav

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online.
http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html


from_name: Karl Eichwalder

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Mark questionable modifications

body:
Kelly Anderson <kelly at acoin.com> writes:

> In the world of the Wiki, there is no economic advantage to vandalism
> (that I can think of anyway) so perhaps it would not be as serious an
> escalation as there is in the world of spam.

One obvious action is adding URLs pointing to your shop.  I'd like to
purge out those links without being forced to visit their site first.

Maybe, adding external links should be allowed for logged in users only;
all the others can propose URLs to be included on the talk pages.

--
                                                         |      ,__o
                                                         |    _-\_<,
http://www.gnu.franken.de/ke/                            |   (*)/'(*)


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikisource

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
>I have been asking for admin status at Wikisource for some time, and have
>received no meaningful response - either positive or negative.  The sink
>there is getting full of dirty dishes, and nobody seems able or willing to
>wash them.
>
>I would appreciate it if someone would act upon this.
>
>Ec

Angela asked me yesterday to make ArnoLagrange, Samuel, Menchi and Yann
sysops on Wikisource, which I did immediately. She also said:

<Angela> Eclecticology also nominated himself, but it hasn't been
seconded. And strangely no one seconded mav

Are you telling me she was mistaken in her understanding of Wikisource
sysopping policy? Should I make Ec and Mav sysops despite the lack of a
seconder?

-- Tim Starling

_________________________________________________________________
Hot chart ringtones and polyphonics. Go to
http://ninemsn.com.au/mobilemania/default.asp


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikitech-l] Moderately successful day

body:
1.  I did get the RAID array up and running.  RAID-5, 3x36G, for a 72G
logical volume and real usable space of a bit less than that.  Should
be fast and safe, hoorah!

The bad news is, I either inevitably or stupidly (can't decide which
just yet) managed to wipe the existing hard drive in the process.
Almost surely someone a bit more clueful than me could have avoided
that, but I will say that I did my best and chose an option for raid
creation that promised me no data loss.  I probably screwed something
up.

So, if a lot of work had been done prepping that machine, then I owe
apologies.  I had to reinstall RH9 from scratch.

2.  I ran out of time, so only some of the machines are on the power
port.  The big issue with the power port is that there are now a *lot*
of wires in the cage, and I am trying to keep the whole thing neat and
professional, for my future sanity, and so it's a bit slow to feed the
wires just so.  This is a minor issue, though, since (a) we do have
the ability to phone in for a manual reboot if necessary and (b) I'll
fix it at the earliest opportunity, i.e. early next week.

In my opinion, the db server probably needs an upgrade of ssh, but
from a hardware perspective, we're ready to roll.  All the machines
are looking good.

--Jimbo


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Moderately successful day

body:
On Feb 6, 2004, at 18:04, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> 1.  I did get the RAID array up and running.  RAID-5, 3x36G, for a 72G
> logical volume and real usable space of a bit less than that.  Should
> be fast and safe, hoorah!

Great!

> The bad news is, I either inevitably or stupidly (can't decide which
> just yet) managed to wipe the existing hard drive in the process.

See, that's why we waited to set them up completely. :)

> In my opinion, the db server probably needs an upgrade of ssh,

Ack! Done.

With luck we'll have that DB transferred over by the end of the
weekend. I'll want to run a few more tests on the RAID configuration
overnight first.

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

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Editor's forum

body:
Martin Harper wrote:

>>I'm unconvinced that leaving a note on the
>>talk page will, in all cases, get the attention needed
>>
>A note on the talk page will, in almost all cases, get the attention
>needed. The exception is articles with highly active and flame-
>infested talk pages - in these cases use HTML comments instead.
>It might take a little longer for a note on the talk page to get the
>attention needed, in some cases. Patience is a virtue.
>
There are many obscure pages that no-one ever visits, not even those who
take pride in finding new proofs for their ignorance.

>If you lack the patience of virtue, be advised that naming
>convention/disambiguation discussion may take place at [[wikipedia
>talk:naming conventions]]. More usefully, you can rectify most
>conflicts of fact and ambiguous sentences by engaging in some
>research on the topic at hand. This may require a little effort.
>
Definitely the best solution.

>If you are impatient and also lazy, move on to the next page and fix
>that one instead, and try to pick one slightly further within your area
>of expertise.
>
Also to a topic where you are mare likely to have reference material at
your fingertips.

>Pages such as your proposed [[Wikipedia:Editor's forum]] have, I
>am sad to say, a long and distinguished career of failure, as
>experience teaches us that the number of people who want to tell
>people what to do outweighs the number of people who want
>someone else to tell them what to do.
>
Wasn't the Village Pump intended to do this?
Ec


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Bureaucrat access

body:
In response to the burden placed on developers in administering sysop access
on the various wikis, and the dangerous nature of manual SQL queries, a new
feature has been implemented, as proposed by Brion and implemented by E23
(Snok). This feature creates a new level of access called "bureaucrat".
Bureacrats are able to create sysops on any wiki, even if they do not have
an account at the target wiki. Thus, the approximately 150 wikis we now host
can be effectively administered. The word "bureaucrat" was chosen because,
according to Brion, "it sounded unattractive, no one will want to fight over
it."

To attempt to get this feature off the ground, I have created a meta page on
the subject, at:

http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureaucrat

I have also moved the central location for interwiki requests for adminship
from Brion's todo list to

http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interwiki_requests_for_adminship

-- Tim Starling


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikisource

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Ec wrote:
> >..
> >Mav has been around this Wiki World a little longer than I,
> >and has gone to the expense of protecting the wikisource.org
> >domain name.
>
> Thanks Ec. And wikisource.org is currently forwarded to Wikisource's temp
url.
>
> >His willingness to be a Wikisource sysop should
> >be all that is required there.
>
> Same for Ec. The fact that both Ec and I are admins on other wikis is all
the
> justification needed for immediate promotion upon asking on a new, small
wiki.

Fine by me, both of you are now sysops.

> But I think a major bottleneck is developing at the developer level in
this
> area. Phase II had an interface for Admin's to promote/demote any user - I
> liked that. If this were reimplemented it would save the developers a lot
of
> time doing this themselves and save the wikis time waiting for approved
> candidates to be sysoped.

See my post on "bureaucrat access".

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Martin Harper

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Editor's forum

body:
> I'm unconvinced that leaving a note on the
> talk page will, in all cases, get the attention needed

A note on the talk page will, in almost all cases, get the attention
needed. The exception is articles with highly active and flame-
infested talk pages - in these cases use HTML comments instead.
It might take a little longer for a note on the talk page to get the
attention needed, in some cases. Patience is a virtue.

If you lack the patience of virtue, be advised that naming
convention/disambiguation discussion may take place at [[wikipedia
talk:naming conventions]]. More usefully, you can rectify most
conflicts of fact and ambiguous sentences by engaging in some
research on the topic at hand. This may require a little effort.

If you are impatient and also lazy, move on to the next page and fix
that one instead, and try to pick one slightly further within your area
of expertise.

Pages such as your proposed [[Wikipedia:Editor's forum]] have, I
am sad to say, a long and distinguished career of failure, as
experience teaches us that the number of people who want to tell
people what to do outweighs the number of people who want
someone else to tell them what to do.

-Martin


from_name: Nikola Smolenski

subject: [WikiEN-l] Soliciting academic research

body:
On Wednesday 04 February 2004 23:44, Robert Graham Merkel wrote:
> styles.  A research paper has to do something novel - collect new data,
> analyse old data in a novel way, or something, to be of interest.

Select random articles, verify their usability and factuality, and compare
that with other encyclopedias?


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Articles about small religious sects, concern
	about accuracy and NPOV

body:
Excellent, but don't overdo it. Any campaign to straighten things out is
hazardous and must proceed tactfully, giving reasonable credit to the
virtues of these groups as perceived by their followers.

Fred

> From: "Andries Krugers Dagneaux" <andrieskd at chello.nl>
> Reply-To: andrieskd at chello.nl, English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Sat, 7 Feb 2004 08:59:28 +0100
> To: <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Articles about small religious sects, concern about
> accuracy and NPOV
>
> Hello all,
> I am quite new here in wikipedia. I know a lot about gurus, small sects
> and cults. I noticed that the articles here in this wikipedia are often
> written by the followers of these gurus, sects and cults or the
> information on the webpages of these religious organization is
> uncritically accepted by other members and written down as a NPOV
> article in wikipedia.
>
> I think this is a wrong and dangerous thing to do. This leads to false
> information because these groups are often self deceived and do a lot of
> propaganda & rewriting history. Because so few people know about these
> groups the information is rarely checked. Examples of disinformation
> that I have seen here on wikipedia are Sathya Sai Baba, Sai Baba of
> Shirdi, Eckankar, Theosophy, ISCKCON/ Hare Krisnha. I have already
> adjusted the first three groups and I will try to adjust other articles
> but I have limited time.
>
> I would like to ask all members to help in this by staying alert and
> comparing the current articles with independent scholarly articles and
> testimonies of ex-members of these groups.
>
> Thanks in advance and kind regards, Andries Krugers Dagneaux
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


from_name: Peter Bartlett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Editor's forum?

body:
>-----Original Message-----
>From: wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org
[mailto:wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of Rich Holton
>
>
>I have been mulling over an idea, and I'm hoping for
>some feedback...
>
>I have, several times, come across pages on Wikipedia
>where there is a problem, but I don't know the
>solution. This sort of thing could include:
>
>* A conflict of fact within the article, where I don't
>know which is correct.
>* A link that needs disambiguating, but I can't figure
>out which is the correct page.
>* An important sentence that is written ambiguously,
>but I don't know which sense is correct.
>
>[...]
>
>My idea is to create a page called
>[[Wikipedia:Editor's forum]] (or
>whatever...suggestions welcome) that would be a place
>to mention this sort of issue. I see the page working
>in a fashion similar to Cleanup.
>
>So, any comments?

Like Martin and Ec I am sceptical about more centralized pages.
If the Talk: page fails to raise a response, next try the User_talk:
pages of the people who have added content (it's less worth trying those
who just copyedited) to the article. After that, and if you feel the
error is glaring, try a central page.

Pete


from_name: Andries Krugers Dagneaux

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Articles about small religious sects,
	concern about accuracy and NPOV

body:
Hello all,
I am quite new here in wikipedia. I know a lot about gurus, small sects
and cults. I noticed that the articles here in this wikipedia are often
written by the followers of these gurus, sects and cults or the
information on the webpages of these religious organization is
uncritically accepted by other members and written down as a NPOV
article in wikipedia.

I think this is a wrong and dangerous thing to do. This leads to false
information because these groups are often self deceived and do a lot of
propaganda & rewriting history. Because so few people know about these
groups the information is rarely checked. Examples of disinformation
that I have seen here on wikipedia are Sathya Sai Baba, Sai Baba of
Shirdi, Eckankar, Theosophy, ISCKCON/ Hare Krisnha. I have already
adjusted the first three groups and I will try to adjust other articles
but I have limited time.

I would like to ask all members to help in this by staying alert and
comparing the current articles with independent scholarly articles and
testimonies of ex-members of these groups.

Thanks in advance and kind regards, Andries Krugers Dagneaux


body:
Andries Krugers Dagneaux wrote:

>I know a lot about gurus, small sects
>and cults. I noticed that the articles here in this wikipedia are often
>written by the followers of these gurus, sects and cults or the
>information on the webpages of these religious organization is
>uncritically accepted by other members and written down as a NPOV
>article in wikipedia.
>
What the groups believe is what they believe, and who better to describe
that than the cult's leaders?  This does not imply that we accept these
as truth, or that we are uncritical about their claims.  Allowing a part
of an article to freely reflect what these people think is as important
to NPOV.  A simple statement at the beginning of the section that this
is taken from the group's writings or similar productions is adequate.
 Reading through something where every statement is dissected and
criticized as it's being said is very bad writing style, and in this
case completely uninformative since you end up not knowing what they
believe.

>I think this is a wrong and dangerous thing to do.
>
Absolutely not.  There is nothing dangerous about fair representation.

>This leads to false
>information because these groups are often self deceived and do a lot of
>propaganda & rewriting history. Because so few people know about these
>groups the information is rarely checked. Examples of disinformation
>that I have seen here on wikipedia are Sathya Sai Baba, Sai Baba of
>Shirdi, Eckankar, Theosophy, ISCKCON/ Hare Krisnha. I have already
>adjusted the first three groups and I will try to adjust other articles
>but I have limited time.
>
If these things have happened then they merit a whole separate section
to outline these accusations.  Many of the people who leave these sects
have an axe to grind, so that much of what they say is unreliable.
 There is no doubt that some of what some of them say is true, but just
as much can reflect personal antagonisms which they have had with the
leadership, either at the sect-wide level or at a local level.  How
would you go about deciding which accusations are true without more
evidence than the anecdotal claims of the disgruntled?  How much of what
really does go on reflects only incidents that are confined to the
misbehaviour of local groups.  Is the entire history and theology of the
Catholic Church to be dismissed because of the recent convictions of
priests for pedophilia?

>I would like to ask all members to help in this by staying alert and
>comparing the current articles with independent scholarly articles and
>testimonies of ex-members of these groups.
>
Independent scholarly articles and the often slanderous statements of
ex-members can be incompatible.

Ec

>


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Articles about small religious sects,
	concern	about	accuracy and NPOV

body:
David Gerard wrote:

> On 02/07/04 12:38, Fred Bauder wrote:
>
>> Excellent, but don't overdo it. Any campaign to straighten things out is
>> hazardous and must proceed tactfully, giving reasonable credit to the
>> virtues of these groups as perceived by their followers.
>
> It's really not hard to go looking for these articles and do some
> sensible and NPOV edits oneself. Some of them read like press releases,
> but it's very easy to sprinkle the article with "it is claimed" and
> add a section of common criticisms and critical links as well as
> official ones. This gives a basic article it's quite hard to reasonably
> object to the existence to, which serves as a template for filling out
> the article.

Sprinkling "it is claimed" throughout the article makes for terrible
writing and worse reading.  If a section is simply headed "Claims by the
leadership" (or something of the sort) that should apply to everything
in the section.  There is still plenty of space afterwords to discuss
criticisms.

Taking writings out of context, and trying to direct the reader into an
interpretation of those texts in a manner contrary to what the original
author intended would be a reprehensible imposition of your own POV.

Ec


from_name: Uros Podkriznik

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: european miror

body:
On Fri, 6 Feb 2004, Timwi wrote:

> Ralesk Ne'vennoyx wrote:
>
> > Menchi wrote:
> >
> >> In case anyone's wondering, the TLD .ws is (Western) Samoa in the
> >> Pacific.
> >>
> >    It's also as much used by Western Samoans as .to used by Togo people
> > or .vu by... errr, whatever that is.
>
> My first thought was - the Vulcans? ;-)
>
> It's Vanatu, though.
>

And .to is a country code for Tonga (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonga)
not Togo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Togo).

Uros


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: thumbing in 'de' defunct?

body:
On Feb 7, 2004, at 10:26, Gabriel Wicke wrote:
> Nfs didn't work out- Gunther is missing the modules for the running
> kernel. But we're copying 7Gb backups over to Gunther, that should be
> enough space for the next days.

There's no need for NFS; removing month-old broken database files from
ursula freed up 35 gigs.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia downtime, 05:00 UTC

body:
All wikis will be locked for a while tonight to make an up to date
clone of the database so we can get it set up on the new server.

8 February 05:00 UTC == 9pm PST, midnight EST, 5am GMT, 6am CET
Please announce this wherever it seems appropriate!

I'm sorry, I don't know exactly how long this will take, but perhaps
roughly a couple of hours. Maybe less, maybe not. We'll actually switch
over to running the site on the new servers later this weekend if
nothing goes wrong; updates on the old server until then will be
replicated so there shouldn't be any data loss.

(Tech note: we'll just copy the files on the local hard disk since
there's room, then ship the copies across the continent at our leisure
once the main db's running again. This should minimize the downtime,
but they're still really big files.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikipedia downtime, 05:00 UTC

body:
All wikis will be locked for a while tonight to make an up to date
clone of the database so we can get it set up on the new server.

8 February 05:00 UTC == 9pm PST, midnight EST, 5am GMT, 6am CET
Please announce this wherever it seems appropriate!

I'm sorry, I don't know exactly how long this will take, but perhaps
roughly a couple of hours. Maybe less, maybe not. We'll actually switch
over to running the site on the new servers later this weekend if
nothing goes wrong; updates on the old server until then will be
replicated so there shouldn't be any data loss.

(Tech note: we'll just copy the files on the local hard disk since
there's room, then ship the copies across the continent at our leisure
once the main db's running again. This should minimize the downtime,
but they're still really big files.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] thumbing in 'de' defunct?

body:
ATM, producing thumbs does not seem to work for 'de'.  In
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%FCrnberg I tried to add
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild:Nuernberg_stadt_wappen_klein.jpg as a
thumbnail with "200px".

--
                                                         |      ,__o
                                                         |    _-\_<,
http://www.gnu.franken.de/ke/                            |   (*)/'(*)


from_name: Rob Hooft

body:
Kelly Anderson wrote:

> It would be interesting if you could personalize your own style sheet
> rather than pick one of the three provided, maybe there's  a way to do
> this already... but I don't know what it is.

You know what the "C" stands for in "CSS"? The whole purpose of CSS is
that the user can override, with his own stylesheet, the style sheet
supplied by the site.... How that is done in practice is a different
matter....

Rob

--
Rob W.W. Hooft  ||  rob at hooft.net  ||  http://www.hooft.net/people/rob/


from_name: Thomas R. Koll

subject: [Wikitech-l] thumbing in 'de' defunct?

body:
On Sat, Feb 07, 2004 at 01:07:49PM +0100, Karl Eichwalder wrote:
> ATM, producing thumbs does not seem to work for 'de'.  In
> http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%FCrnberg I tried to add
> http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild:Nuernberg_stadt_wappen_klein.jpg as a
> thumbnail with "200px".

Full disc, TimStarling is already working on it.

ciao, tom
--
http://www.tomk32.de - just a geek trying to change the world
   -.-       http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:TomK32
   /|>	           http://tomk32.bookcrossing.com
   / \                 http://tinyurl.com/u6de


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Editor's forum

body:
On 6 Feb 2004 at 20:30, Ray Saintonge wrote:

> Martin Harper wrote:

> >A note on the talk page will, in almost all cases, get the attention
> >needed.
>
> There are many obscure pages that no-one ever visits, not even those
> who take pride in finding new proofs for their ignorance.

If I have found a flaw in an existing page, I have an existence proof that at least one
person has written it, and at least one person has visited it, and thus it does not fall
into that category. :)

-Martin


from_name: David Gerard

body:
On 02/06/04 18:31, Peter Jaros wrote:
> Anyone else seen this?

>> BETWEEN the grooves
>> Sydney Morning Herald - Sydney,New South Wales,Australia
>> ... A sub-genre of black metal, its best-known (well, it's all relative)
>> exponents are Skyclad and Waylander, says online encyclopedia
>> wikipedia.org.
>> ...
>> <http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/02/06/1075854056969.html>

> Does anyone know if this was in print?

It's the website of the newspaper, so yes, it will have been. (Though
someone in Sydney should confirm, but I don't *think* the Fairfax
papers are running online-only content.)

- d.