from_name: Sj

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Newsletter

body:
Hello all,

I am happy to announce that a Wikimedia newsletter is underway.  The
plan is to publish it online next week, then lay it out for print
publication.  You can see an outline of the first issue here:
  http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Newsletter_(outline)

We are looking for a managing editor in each language, a lead
copyeditor, a print editor, and a community reporter.  If you would
like to work on the newsletter in any capacity, please leave a note on
the talk page, or email me directly.
  http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Newsletter

Everyone is encouraged to suggest content; particularly compelling
wiki-statistics, notes about local wikiprojects, symbolic articles
(preferably from the [[meta:List of articles all languages should
have]], and 'feature-quality' in more than one language) and images
for the gallery.  Please leave suggestions for newsletter content on
the discussion page above.

We also need translators, and proofreaders in each language.  You can
follow the translation effort or contribute to it here:
  http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_requests/NL-1

Rundschreiben der Wikimedia
Wikimedia newsletter
Bolet?n de noticias de Wikimedia
Lettre de diffusion de Wikimedia
??????????
   http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_requests/NL-1

Wer Lust hat, sich an der deutschen (oder anderen) Fassung zu
beteiligen, schreibt bitte an meta.sj at gmail.com

If you would like to help translate or edit the newsletter, please
send mail to meta.sj at gmail.com

Si Usted quiere traducir entre espa?ol y otro idioma, o corregir en
espa?ol, favor de mandar un email a meta.sj at gmail.com.

Si vous voulez faire une traduction ou r?dacter en fran?ais,
?crivez-nous a meta.sj at gmail.com.

??????????????????
?????????????????????meta.sj at gmail.com??????????????

=====
On the subject of translations, I want to repeat Michael Snow's notice
of the press release being prepared in honor of the one millionth
Wikipedia article.  Please spread the word, and help us translate this
into every one of our hundred+ languages (currently we only have
translations in 15). Note that the original is still being edited, and
is not yet ready for release.

Globale Presseerkl?rung (millionstel Seite)
Global press release (millionth article)
Lanzamiento de prensa global (millon?simo art?culo)
Communiqu?  de presse global (millioni?me article)
?????????????????????
   http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_requests/PR-1mil

This is also a good time to think of local newspapers and radio
stations that you could contact about the announcement (it's not too
early to start contacting them now).  For a list of organizations
contacted earlier this year, see
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Press_releases/Logbook

September cheer,
     Sj


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikimedia Newsletter


list: wikimedia-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Newsletter


list: wikipedia-l

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikimedia Newsletter


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Daniel Kinzler

subject: [Wikitech-l] Database shema : let's start the fun

body:
Talking about changes in the database-schema: I wonder if there would be
an efficient way of storing *implicite* membership in categories (i.e.
that members of categories could be queries including all
subcategories). Formally, I ask to implement a transitive closure
sematics for categories - and, furthermore, to feature that allows to
query for cross-sections of categories (which should be easy, then).

I wrote a blurp about that on 8/26, but hav not received any response.
Did it even get through, or was it lost in the orcus?

I would be relly interrested in your thoughts about this. I am willing
to accept it if this just cant be done sanely - but I would like to dig
deep and look at all the possibilities.

Thanks,
Daniel


from_name: Matthew Larsen

subject:
Netoholic blocking (was Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: Re: Re: Re: VfD
	isbroken)

body:
it seems to me all these policies are making things a bit hard to do,
It might be a good idea to have another policy (yes i know!) that says
you can ban any user for a certain amount of days (say 10) whilst
other policies are being reviewed etc.

This way u can stop the problems and then decide on the appropriate
course of action instead of choosing one course and then getting
contradicted by others etc.

This probably already is in place, but thought it might be helpful :)

Regards,

On Tue, 7 Sep 2004 16:22:20 -0500, Phil Sandifer <sandifer at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> Netholic is not an IP address, however - he's a logged in user, and he
> certainly doesn't qualify as a "new" account, which is a criterion for
> blocking logged in users under this policy.
>
> Not saying I don't think he's a problem - just pointing out once again
> that we do need more options in the blocking policy, because as it
> stands the rules don't leave any room for dealing with this.
>
> -Snowspinner
>
>
>
> On Sep 7, 2004, at 4:15 PM, Brian Corr wrote:
>
> > The relevant policy is at
> > <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Blocking_policy#Disruption>,
> > which says in part:
> >
> > "Sysops may, at their judgement, block IP addresses that disrupt the
> > normal functioning of Wikipedia. Such disruption is to be objectively
> > defined by specific policies, and may include changing other user's
> > signed comments or making deliberately misleading edits. Users should
> > be warned that they are violating policy before they are blocked."
> >
> > And, BTW, the warning has now become a discussion. See:
> > <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Netoholic#Warning_re:
> > _refactoring>
> > and
> > <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Netoholic#refactoring> for the
> > previous discussion that led up to this.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Brian (BCorr)
> >
> > Phil Sandifer wrote
> > >What portion of the blocking policy are you invoking in this warning?
> > >
> > >-Snowspinner
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> >
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
Matthew Larsen
   > mat.larsen at gmail.com
   > 07739 785 249


from_name: Rowan Collins

body:
OK, I have very little knowledge of database structures, but I feel
like weighing in in a kind of "creative discussion" kind of way...

Constans, Camille (C.C.) wrote:
> >Ashar Voultoiz wrote:
> >> Hello !
> >The biggest changes that we'd like to do are:
> >
> >* Put current and old revisions together, to avoid having to
> >juggle data
> >between cur and old all the time and to allow a consistent revision
> >numbering scheme (permalinks for current revision as well as the olds)
>
> Personnaly I dont like the idea to put old and cur together, it will be more difficult to setup a dump job :)

Well, while that is a disadvantage, I think it may be outweighed by
the things such a merger would make possible/easier - there's a
bugzilla entry for assigning a lasting ID to latest revision (bug 181)
that mentions some of them. It also makes a lot of sense with some of
the other changes here.

Perhaps the combined table could have a is_latest field, so that you
don't have to do any timestamp comparisons, or touch more than one
table.

> >* Separate page information like the title from the individual
> >revision
> >data, so page renames of longstanding pages don't bog down the server
> >touching thousands of rows
>
> Dont really needed if 1 row = 1 page (old+cur) ?

Surely, we'll only get 1 row = 1 page if we *do* have a specific table
of (page_title, page_id). Otherwise, every revision has a page_title
attached to it, hence it's impossible to move [[en:Wikipedia:Village
pump]] without more-or-less crashing the server.

One thing that occurs to me to wonder, not having seen a full
break-down of the new schema, is where is_redirect would end up. I've
begun working on a bit of tidying up around the redirect code, and
have figured on this as a field that could be used to better effect
than it currently (IIRC) is. I guess it would live in the table of
revision information (since it changes), and would be another good
reason to be able to filter on an is_latest. Like I say, I'm not
really hot on DB stuff, but I figure that if we're going to have magic
sysop reverts that don't actually touch any text we can't rely on
recreating is_redirect by parsing the text.

As for how to migrate, I want to refloat an idea I had before, that if
the wiki could be put into an 'audit-log' mode (where changes can be
made, but aren't entered into the 'real' database), the main db could
be set to read only, restructured, and then have the log of
changes-that-happened-in-the-meantime applied to it. After that, you
just need a short amount of down-time while you switch the databases
round. The simplest way of doing that would be to just have two copies
of the DB, one running the live site, the other being processed
offline. The log could then record all write actions performed on the
live site - either in the form of SQL queries used, or in a more
abstract format that would be easier to apply to a changed schema.
Something along the lines of (if you felt like playing in XML):

<edit timestamp"01231231231"><page title="User:IMSoP"><newtext>I 4m
teh l33t h4x0r!</newtext></page><user name="V4nd4l" id="666" /></edit>

Essentially, a bit like the export/import facility but with the
ability to store all kinds of write-action in a way that allows them
to be "replayed" by the software into the new database schema. I think
it would be very nice not to have to turn the wiki read-only for
things that take as long as 1.2 -> 1.3 ended up causing, let alone
longer...

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Krzysztof Kowalczyk

subject: [Wikitech-l] off-line GPL program

body:
> Wouldn't it be by far the easiest if this program would be a small "web
> server" which would retrieve and serve Wikipedia pages to user's web browser
> of choice? That way it could be made quickly, small, and portable.

It would be. Also, it would suck. (not to mention that implies
installing MySQL on user's machine - a requirement that I wouldn't
like to put in an end-user application).

The whole point of writing an offline, native client is to provide
much better browsing and/or editing experience for users. If it's not
much better, people won't bother to install it.

Users don't care about how easy (or hard) it is to develop software.
Only programmers care about that. Users care about value added. If
there is no value added in native client, there is no reason for them
to use it.

The only value added of such solution would be ability to run
Wikipedia offline. While a noble thing, it's not really that much of a
change. There's much more that could be done and much more will have
to be done if anyone expects people to actually use said application.

Krzysztof Kowalczyk | http://blog.kowalczyk.info


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Patch for bug 56 - section edits sometimes wrongly
	merged

body:
First, thanks for having a go at tackling this - these edit
conflict-related bugs can be a real pain as a user.
Second, how come I see no attachment: is it my fault, yours, or the
mailing list software's?
Third, are you going to copy this to the said bugzilla report,
attachment and all? Apologies if you're on your way there now, but
there's little point in a dedicated bug database if we just go and
discuss the bugs somewhere else...

On Tue, 7 Sep 2004 14:55:29 -0700 (PDT), Wil Mahan <wmahan_04 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> MediaWiki bug 56 describes a problem that occurs when
> there is an edit conflit between two users...
<snip>
> The attached patch (against CVS head) is my attempt to
> fix the bug. When editing a section, the updated
> section is inserted into the revision at the time
> editing began, rather than always using the current
> revision.

So hang on, I'm not quite clear on this: what happens to the edits
since 'the time editing began'? Or am I completely miunderstanding? Or
is this just a proof-of-analysis type patch, not an actual
ready-for-inclusion fix?

Again, thanks.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Rick

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia blocking policy

body:
No.  If my blocking BY NAME is causing problems with logged in users, then it's a problem that needs to be addressed by programmers, not by me.  But then, since I won't be blocking anybody again, it doesn't matter, anyway.

RickK

Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
Rickk,

Do you recognize that this is a problem?

Fred

> From: daniwo59 at aol.com
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia
> Date: Tue, 7 Sep 2004 20:24:46 EDT
> To: wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia blocking policy
>
> Actually, Rick, everytime you block these chunks of vandals, I end up being
> blocked as well. Face it, the blocks are doing more harm than good. Frankly, I
> am fed up being blocked literally every day. I also want to participate in
> Wikipedia, and your attitude is not helping.
>
> Danny
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

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

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers!


list: foundation-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Mediawiki installation trouble

body:
On Tue, 7 Sep 2004 16:14:53 -0600, Rich Points <rich at richpoints.com> wrote:
> Howdy,
> I hope this is the right list to post this inquiry, if not can someone direct me to the appropriate list.

You want the "mediawiki-l" list - mediawiki-l at wikimedia.org |
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l

Good luck.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Eckhart Wörner

body:
Hi,

Brion Vibber schrieb:
> The biggest changes that we'd like to do are:
[...]

Why not create a row for meta data, like the links to other languages,
categories, __NOTOC__.
It would cause some overhead in the database, but perhaps it makes the
parsing faster, as the meta data part could be parsed very efficiently.
The metadata part could also be ignored for searches. Perhaps you could
also see in the RC what actually has changed - the meta data or the text.

Just an idea.

Eckhart


list: wiktionary-l

from_name: Gerard Meijssen

subject: [Wiktionary-l] Opening up the Wiktionary content

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

> Gerard Meijssen wrote:
>
>> Anthere, Jimbo,
>> At this moment, we are in the position of getting the cooperation of
>> all kinds of outside people with regard to Wiktionary. This is
>> documented to a large extend on META and on the wiktionary-l
>> mailinglist. Because of the quality of the data that we are allowed
>> to enter and because of the quality of the persons that are involved,
>> it would really help if we are able to import but also export
>> wiktionary data using XML structures.
>>
>> The benefits are:
>> *We will open up to other open dictionary content for inclusion in
>> wiktionary.
>> *We will open up our content to other intrested parties.
>> *The wiktionary content will not be only in our own "proprietary"
>> format.
>> *We will be able to import data from one wiktionary in the next. This
>> will not only enhance the quality of the wiktionaries; it will also
>> enhance the reputation of the wiktionaries.
>> *We will prevent the duplication of effort. Much effort now goes in
>> doing the same job over and over again. An example; the word
>> "Nederlands" in nl:wiktionary has 68 exact translations; these words
>> exist as well. Technically these words can be copied to ALL other
>> wiktionaries. This is not possible at the moment. The human effort is
>> huge and wasted as it can be automated.
>>
>> When a consensus arrives on how to do this, it will also mean that
>> some programming will be required. Without your backing, I expect
>> that nothing is going to happen. When we have arrived at a road map,
>> it will mean that a lot of work will be needed to make the wiktionary
>> data conformant for inclusion in the new scheme and have the
>> technique to get this done. We cannot reasonably ask this of the
>> wiktionary community and the wikitech community when this road map is
>> not co-owned by the wikimedia board.
>>
>> Questions:
>> *Acknowledge that you will consider this as being strategic to the
>> development of Wiktionary.
>> *Give a timeframe in which we will know that we can plan with a
>> reasonable chance of getting things implemented. (basically when will
>> we have an answer to the first question)
>
>
> The implications of Gerald's proposal are very unclear, and he has yet
> to outline them in detail.  His focus appears to be on the translation
> aspects of Wiktionary, but he needs to be reminded that translations
> are only the secondary objective of the Wiktionaries.  The primary
> objective is to develop a detailed understanding of a language for
> speakers of that language.  Etymology, pronunciation and notes to
> distinguish different usages all serve that purpose.
> Gerard does not make the programming that he wants very clear.  Where
> is at least an example of what he would want a page to look like?
> We are already free to exchange material with other sites with
> compatible licensing.  The software that we use is not proprietary is
> it is available for all to use without the payment of any licensing
> fees.  The comments about enhancing the quality and reputation of the
> wiktionaries are subjective and speculative.  There is no evidence to
> support this.   Before this can be seen as a strategic plan a lot more
> detail should be given.
>
> Ec
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wiktionary-l mailing list
> Wiktionary-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiktionary-l
>
>
Ec does indeed not see what I am talking about. I am talking about the
ability of wiktionary to import and export data. In META there are now
several pages on that subject. It is important to understand that
Wiktionary has its data in a proprietary format and that it is not
possible to import and export the wiktionary data in a collaborative
way. The methodology of exporting would be best served by using XML.
There are at least two relevant existing XML definitions and we will
propably settle on a third definition; one more suited to dictionaries.

As to not being clear, in META there are two first stabs at database
design, one by Polyglot and one by me. Both are not complete and they
are there to help start the needed discussion. Etymology,
pronounciation, pictures and sound are part of what is proposed.

Proprietary also means that a format is used that does not lend itself
to sharing. As such the wiktionary content is closed. The fact that data
can not be re-used in sister-wiktionaries is all the proof needed that a
lot of redundant work is done. To make the wiktionaries relevant we need
content in our wiktionaries. Nl.wiktionary has 3600 articles and the
45000 pages in en:wiktionary cannot be added to it. The en: content is
relevant content to the nl:wiktionary and any other wiktionary. There
are 5200 words in the GEMET glossary with translations and we do not
have a standard method to include these in our wiktionaries. We do not
have a method to let the GEMET people know what changes are made to
their data.  Those are the strategic requirements I am talking about.
The need to share the wiktionary content is strategic; it makes our data
open and it allows for the sharing of work that is done in the
wiktionaries. By sharing, all the work done becomes more relevant.

How a finished page will eventually look, is to early to tell, it may
look like the way [[wikt:nl:Engels]] and [[wikt:nl:English]] looks. The
edit screens will however be completely different.

As to a purpose of a dictionary; it should help people understand a
language; it is not only for the speakers of a language. The
en:wiktionary helps people who can use the English language to
understand the English language and other languages as well.

Thanks,
    GerardM


from_name: Sabine Cretella

body:
Sorry, this week is full of work and I won't have too much time to
dedicate before the week end.

Referring to the posts of Ray and Gerard: my problem was and still is
(but much less now) how to make e.g. multilingual ressources of my
project on sourceforge.net available to wiktionary. At the moment we are
talking about how to be able to pass translations of words easily from
one wiktionary to the other as this part is the easiest of all. But if
you had a look at the tables Polyglot uploaded to the meta site you
would have seen that these tables include punctuation, synonyms,
opposites, definitions, part of speech and much, much more (to me it was
quite overwhelming as we translators think in glossaries and not all
those particular definitions for a term).

So now we have quite a good method to copy and paste quite easily
translations into the different wiktionaries, but does it make sense
that a work needs to be repetead for every language again and again? Do
we really have that much time to spend? Up to some weeks it was not even
possible to think about a copy and paste method and thanks Gerard it is
there - so its one huge step ahead, but it is still far away from being
"time friendly".  Users (contributing users) should talk about
concentrating efforts in order to have better results in less time. Now
we are using the wiktionary just like the huge dictionary editors used
to do years ago when every single word with all the relevant information
was written on single sheets. The techinques are there to avoid double
or in case of language translatios multiple work (how many wiktionaries
are there? 20? 30? I did not check this out) so instead of one person
needing one hour for a certain work this menas 30 hours of work to do
the same job for 30 witkonaries. I agree, wiktionary is open content,
but contributing people are working - and 30 hours are almost a week of
work ... how much does this cost? where's the break even point for hours
invested for programming and hours invested to let's say only 5000
terms? We are talking about computers and software of the second
millennium not about the good old Zuse.

Please don't become upset now: but we should try to make things with a
certain criteria from the beginning on - it is much harder to do it
afterwards when there's a lot of data inserted and the need is
definitely there. To my experience wiktionary is going to be used by at
least 90% of the people like a dictionary - to search a word in a
certain language.

E.g. what disturbes a bit is that foreign language words are "seen" in
the wiktionary. This is confusing. German should only give German
terminology in its lists, English the English one, Dutch the Dutch one
etc. When I am on the English wiktionary and find "Deutsch" as a single
page this is not logic to me - the term "Deutsch" should be linked to
the German wiktionary instead and should not appear in the listing under
the letter "D".

All of what you ask for is needed, but there are already plenty of
glossaries that could be uploaded and I am sure, if we have the
techniques many companies would agree to pass their glossaries with
definitions to OpenContent.

The next thing is: I now can pass e.g. the colours list to Wiktonary,
but I cannot retrieve an animals list with all its translations - so
it's a one-way direction - to work with many other projects both
directions are needed. So many of us who now concentrate on their own
projects probably would say: I pass all my data to wiktionary as I get
something back. Many of these listings, definitions etc. are from people
in the language industry - and people of the language industry most of
all search for the right term.

So: in any case I support the XML and database way - it will take some
time to develop it, but once it is there wiktionary has all the
characteristics needed to become the main reference tool for people
working with languages and people being interested in languages. The
more people can use it the more will contribute. Gerard, Polyglot and
whoever is convinced about this way: please don't stop going. You are on
the right way.

Now who's going to kill me ;-) ??

Ciao, Sabine

-----

Sabine Cretella
s.cretella at wordsandmore.it
www.wordsandmore.it
Meetingplace for translators
www.wesolveitnet.com

>


from_name: Jens Ropers

body:
> Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Database shema : let's start the fun

<snip />

Yes, let's start the fun:

>> From WordNet (r) 2.0::
>>
>> Shema
>>      n : a liturgical prayer (considered to be the essence of Jewish
>>          religion) that is recited at least twice daily by adult
>>          Jewish males to declare their faith; "as soon as Leonard
>>          learned to talk he was taught to recite the first words
>>          of the Shema, the creed of Judaism which originated on
>>          Sinai with Moses and is recited daily"
>>
>>
>> -----------------
>>
>> From Hitchcock's Bible Names Dict::
>>
>> Shema, hearing; obeying
>>
>>
>>
>> -----------------
>>
>> From Easton's Bible Dict::
>>
>> Shema
>>    rumour. (1.) A Reubenite (1 Chr. 5:8).
>>
>>      (2.) A Benjamite (1 Chr. 8:13).
>>
>>      (3.) One who stood by Ezra when he read the law (Neh. 8:4).
>>
>>      (4.) A town in the south of Judah (Josh. 15:26); the same as
>>    Sheba (ver. 5).
>>
>>
>>


from_name: Kiss All

subject: [Wikitech-l] off-line GPL program

body:
Very interesting discussing topic.

We are trying to use MetaWiki as an internal communication,
documentation, and knowlege base platform. I really find it is
annoying to edit and update pages online because it is slow,
especially from Internet. It is also painful to navigate back and
forth in the wiki site to get the right pages to write on stuffs.

As a result, I continue to use a local small program named e-Stack
Room to take notes and write my own knowlege base. Actually I have
used it for years. It is much faster and well organized in tree view.

The offline and online topic is a long-life topic in computer science.
I learnt from graduate Operating System course that there are a lot of
researchers trying to handle it. It is about achieving  remote and
local storage coherence with less communication cost. I can review the
course to see details if necessary. :-)

Maybe MetaWiki is not suitable for our goal. But if there is a local,
faster, well organized version for it, I'd like to be the first one to
try it.

On Tue, 7 Sep 2004 23:10:15 -0700, Krzysztof Kowalczyk
<kkowalczyk at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Wouldn't it be by far the easiest if this program would be a small "web
> > server" which would retrieve and serve Wikipedia pages to user's web browser
> > of choice? That way it could be made quickly, small, and portable.
>
> It would be. Also, it would suck. (not to mention that implies
> installing MySQL on user's machine - a requirement that I wouldn't
> like to put in an end-user application).
>
> The whole point of writing an offline, native client is to provide
> much better browsing and/or editing experience for users. If it's not
> much better, people won't bother to install it.
>
> Users don't care about how easy (or hard) it is to develop software.
> Only programmers care about that. Users care about value added. If
> there is no value added in native client, there is no reason for them
> to use it.
>
> The only value added of such solution would be ability to run
> Wikipedia offline. While a noble thing, it's not really that much of a
> change. There's much more that could be done and much more will have
> to be done if anyone expects people to actually use said application.
>
> Krzysztof Kowalczyk | http://blog.kowalczyk.info
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

--
Be good....


from_name: Ashar Voultoiz

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Database shema : let's start the fun

body:
Jens Ropers wrote:
>> Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Database shema : let's start the fun
>
>
> <snip />
>
> Yes, let's start the fun:
>
>>> From WordNet (r) 2.0::
>>>
>>> Shema
>>>      n : a liturgical prayer (considered to be the essence of Jewish
>>>          religion) that is recited at least twice daily by adult
>>>          Jewish males to declare their faith; "as soon as Leonard
>>>          learned to talk he was taught to recite the first words
>>>          of the Shema, the creed of Judaism which originated on
>>>          Sinai with Moses and is recited daily"
<snip>

Damn I really need english lessons :o)

--
Ashar Voultoiz


body:
Stan Shebs wrote:

> Sabine Cretella wrote:
>
>>
>> E.g. what disturbes a bit is that foreign language words are "seen"
>> in the wiktionary. This is confusing. German should only give German
>> terminology in its lists, English the English one, Dutch the Dutch
>> one etc. When I am on the English wiktionary and find "Deutsch" as a
>> single page this is not logic to me - the term "Deutsch" should be
>> linked to the German wiktionary instead and should not appear in the
>> listing under the letter "D".
>
>
> If a high-school student was using Wiktionary for German class,
> it would be kind of useless to send her over to read a definition
> of "Deutsch" written *in* German, eh? Not all words translate
> mechanically either, consider "Ordnung" for instance; you need an
> explanation in English of its subtleties, not in a language with
> whose subtleties you are unfamiliar.
>
> Stan
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wiktionary-l mailing list
> Wiktionary-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiktionary-l
>
>
Stan,
You are completely correct. All wiktioanaries can and should have all
words in all languages, the definition of the meanings of the words
should be in the language native to the wiktionary. This may be
confusing at first, but once you understand the concept it makes perfect
sense.
Thanks,
    GerardM


from_name: Andrew Dunbar

body:
 --- Sabine Cretella <sabine_cretella at yahoo.it> wrote:

> Sorry, this week is full of work and I won't have
> too much time to dedicate before the week end.
>
> Referring to the posts of Ray and Gerard: my problem
> was and still is (but much less now) how to make
> e.g. multilingual ressources of my project on
> sourceforge.net available to wiktionary. At the
> moment we are talking about how to be able to pass
> translations of words easily from one wiktionary to
> the other as this part is the easiest of all.

I still think even this much is a bad idea. Copy &
paste in every arena always makes it quicker and
easier
to make mistakes. The only time you can copy all the
translations from word A in language X to word A' in
language Y is when the sense and subtleties are
*identical*. It will not work for "mouse" or "rat"
into
many languages. Just thinking about it for "moose" or
"elk" is painful. Just because "mouse" in English can
be translated into a/b/c/d in languages W/X/Y/Z, does
not mean that "mus" in "language W" can also be
translated into b/c/d in languages X/Y/Z. Every single
one must be checked. Copying and pasting is the
opposite of checking!

> But if you had a look at the tables Polyglot
> uploaded to the meta site you would have seen that
> these tables include punctuation, synonyms,
> opposites, definitions, part of speech and much,
> much more (to me it was quite overwhelming as we
> translators think in glossaries and not all those
> particular definitions for a term).

Can you point to these tables please?

> So now we have quite a good method to copy and paste
> quite easily translations into the different
> wiktionaries, but does it make sense that a work
> needs to be repetead for every language again and
> again?

Yes. Because every language is different. If it wasn't
we'd just use Babelfish and the results would always
be perfect.

> Do we really have that much time to spend?

Whether or not we have the time to spend, a good
quality dictionary requires time spent. If we choose
not to spend that time we will not have a good quality
dictionary. Ask any professional lexicographer. The
OED, Websters, Le Grand Robert, you name it - all the
big, quality dictionares took a long time. That is the
nature of the game.

> Up to some weeks it was not even possible to think
> about a copy and paste method and thanks Gerard it
> is there - so its one huge step ahead, but it is
> still far away from being "time friendly".  Users
> (contributing users) should talk about
> concentrating efforts in order to have better
> results in less time. Now we are using the
> wiktionary just like the huge dictionary editors
> used to do years ago when every single word with all
> the relevant information was written on single
> sheets.

You will find they still do it this way. They use
computers now but the work is still painstaking and
precise and slow. Dictionary building is not a race.

> The techinques are there to avoid double or in case
> of language translatios multiple work (how many
> wiktionaries are there? 20? 30? I did not check this
> out) so instead of one person needing one hour for a
> certain work this menas 30 hours of work to do
> the same job for 30 witkonaries.

I can guarantee if you avoid half the work you will
double the errors.

> I agree, wiktionary is open content, but
> contributing people are working - and 30 hours
> are almost a week of work ... how much does this
> cost? where's the break even point for hours
> invested for programming and hours invested to let's
> say only 5000 terms? We are talking about computers
> and software of the second millennium not about the
> good old Zuse.

All you are doing is labouring a non-sequitor. Every-
body agrees that time is both scarce and valuable.
I do not agree that taking shortcuts and rushing
result
in better dictionaries. Anybody who has used a poor /
cheap translating dictionary must know this already.

> Please don't become upset now: but we should try to
> make things with a certain criteria from the
> beginning on - it is much harder to do it
> afterwards when there's a lot of data inserted and
> the need is definitely there. To my experience
> wiktionary is going to be used by at least 90% of
> the people like a dictionary - to search a word in a
> certain language.
>
> E.g. what disturbes a bit is that foreign language
> words are "seen" in the wiktionary. This is
> confusing. German should only give German
> terminology in its lists, English the English one,
> Dutch the Dutch one etc.

Woah there! Are you not aware that Wiktionary is a
dictionary of all languages? It is both a definition
dictionary and a translating dictionary. People whose
first language is not English will be aided in their
understanding of English definitions for English words
when they can also see the glosses of that word in
their own language.

Now I do believe that in the future we should have a
way to "show only relevant information". Users should
be able to choose whether they want to see the
translations or not. At the moment the Wiktionary is
small, the developers time is scarce, the structure is
not robust. So this will happen later.

> When I am on the English wiktionary and find
> "Deutsch" as a single page this is not logic to me -
> the term "Deutsch" should be linked to the German
> wiktionary instead and should not appear in the
> listing under the letter "D".

Then the user must be able to read German to find out
what the word means! This is like suggesting an
English-only dictionary and a German-only dictionary
would be sufficient for a monolingual to translate
between the two languages!

> All of what you ask for is needed, but there are
> already plenty of glossaries that could be uploaded
> and I am sure, if we have the techniques many
> companies would agree to pass their glossaries with
> definitions to OpenContent.
>
> The next thing is: I now can pass e.g. the colours
> list to Wiktonary, but I cannot retrieve an animals
> list with all its translations - so it's a one-way
> direction - to work with many other projects both
> directions are needed. So many of us who now
> concentrate on their own projects probably would
> say: I pass all my data to wiktionary as I get
> something back. Many of these listings, definitions
> etc. are from people in the language industry - and
> people of the language industry most of all search
> for the right term.
>
> So: in any case I support the XML and database way -
> it will take some time to develop it, but once it is
> there wiktionary has all the characteristics needed
> to become the main reference tool for people
> working with languages and people being interested
> in languages. The more people can use it the more
> will contribute.
> Gerard, Polyglot and  whoever is convinced about
> this way: please don't stop going. You are on
> the right way.

One "problem" I'm beginning to see for the future is
that currently Wiktionary is both the lexicographer's
index cards and the finished dictionary in one place.
Especially as it grows, the "finished" articles are
mixed right in with the under-research articles.
I don't think it's a problem yet but it will be in a
couple of years and I'm not sure what kind of solution
might exist.

Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail)

> Now who's going to kill me ;-) ??
>
> Ciao, Sabine
>
> -----
>
> Sabine Cretella
> s.cretella at wordsandmore.it
> www.wordsandmore.it
> Meetingplace for translators
> www.wesolveitnet.com
>
>
> >
> _______________________________________________
> Wiktionary-l mailing list
> Wiktionary-l at Wikipedia.org
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiktionary-l
>

=====
http://linguaphile.sf.net/cgi-bin/translator.pl    http://www.abisource.com

___________________________________________________________ALL-NEW Yahoo! Messenger - all new features - even more fun!  http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com


from_name: Karl Eichwalder

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: A domain for is.wikipedia.org, wikipedia.is

in_reply_to: <51dd1af804090607587b1eeb5@mail.gmail.com> (Ævar ArnfjörðBjarmason's message of "Mon, 6 Sep 2004 16:58:43 +0200")

body:
?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason <avarab at gmail.com> writes:

> Having wikipedia.is would go down better with the Icelandic press than
> some .org domain due to reasons specified in the original message.

Please, think about this issue again.

Is Icelandic the only language spoken in Iceland?  Are people in Iceland
only interested in Icelandic?

Please, design htpp://www.wikipedia.is as an Icelandic portal to the
international WP project; cf. http://www.wikipedia.nl as an example for
such a portal.

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


from_name: jairo

subject: [WikiEN-l] ABOUT LATITUDE.

body:
Gentlemen, wishing you a fine day.

Wikipedia overwhelms me. Thanks.?

Please, on your page for The United States of America, at the very end of it, "Countries in  North America" you do mention all of them: but, how about Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Surinam and French Guayana.? This Countries are all located above the Ecuatorial line and
we are more subject to the North Hemisphere Winter than to the Southern one. So, are we
South Americans or North Americans.?

                                Thanks.
                                             JAIRO BETANCOURT ?LVAREZ.

                                            CARRERA 73 # 41-16 APT. 202
                                            MEDELL?N, COLOMBIA
                                            ?SOUTH AMERICA?


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [WikiEN-l] A future for Nupedia?

body:
We already have the technical means to indicate that an article has
passed peer review by people with serious academic credentials. This was
discussed at the First Annual English Wikipedia Meeting this summer in
Boston.

Magnus Manke even made a working copy of the software to support this
plan, and Larry Sanger described in detail how it could work (Sanger
called it "sifter").

Basically, reviewers with academic credentials can add a mark (or
"flag") to a specific version of an article, indicating that they
approve of it.

Readers can see these marks. For example, they can see that Prof. Chaim
Tahm approved version #382 of [[History of Israel]].

Importantly, any change at all to a reviewed article DOES NOT carry the
flag of approval forward! Let's explore what this means:

* the current version will often not be "peer reviewed"
* user has the option of going back to the "peer reviewed" version
** Some users might want to set their Wikipedia browsing options to show
"only the peer reviewed version" of articles
* when viewing a version which is "peer reviewed" (but is not the latest
version) a notice is displayed pointing out that there are subsequent
versions.
* Clicking "Edit This Article" when viewing an old "peer reviewed"
version brings up the standard "You are editing an old version" warning.

We might decide that a hard-copy or DVD of Wikipedia would contain:
(a) only the peer-reviewed version of articles (when available); or,
(b) only the latest version; or,
(c) both the peer-reviewed and latest versions

I realize there are unresolved questions of identifying reviewers:

1. Who is a "qualified" academic?
2. How can we be sure that someone logging in to Wikipedia is "really"
the person they say they are? (We don't want a troll pretending to be
Stephen Hawking and reviewing a physics article.)

But I think these questions are resolvable. We might establish a
Credentials Committee, who could e-mail and/or talk to prospective
reviewers on the phone. If I look up "Professor Warren Pease" at
Columbia University, by calling the school's main switchboard and asking
for the History Department, isn't that good enough? If the guy who
answers the phone says he's Professor Pease, that's good enough for me.

Ed Poor

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Robert [mailto:rkscience100 at yahoo.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, September 07, 2004 7:45 PM
> To: wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] A future for Nupedia?
>
>
> >>> Having an article only gives the impression to readers
> >>> that we tolerate junk.
>
> >> Which is good.  If we give the impression to readers
> >> that we tolerate only full-grown complete articles,
> >> we will detract contributors who are perhaps not quite
> >> as good a writer as they would like to be.
>
> > Exactly. This is why Nupedia failed.
>
>
> That may be one of the reasons why the early attempt at
> Nupedia failed, but the idea behind Nupedia still lives.
> Haven't many of us discussed some form of stable Wikipedia
> 1.0, which has some form of peer-review above the usual?
> And perhaps Nupedia was a bit premature, as we were asking
> volunteers to start from zero.
>
> Wikipedia has grown immensely in the last few years. The
> number of people with serious academic credentials who have
> some favorable opinion of it has probably grown by an order
> of magnitude as well. Now that a huge amount of open-source
> material is already available here, it should be easier to
> re-kindle the Nupedia project today.  The idea would be much
> more attractive this time around, as (on many
> subjects) people wouldn't have to start from scratch.
> Contributors could take a series of Wikipedia articles (if
> they wished) and use this text as a launching pad for their own work.
>
> Like Larry Sanger, I am still concerned about the long-term
> prestige of Wikipedia. As long as many contributors don't
> reference their claims, and don't rely on published
> authorities (at least to some extent), then many people in
> academic won't take our articles seriously. But using
> Wikipedia as an open-source feeder for growing Nupedia
> articles leverages everyone's efforts; the whole could be
> much greater than the sum of its parts.
>
> Nupedia might not have worked then. But one or two years
> from now it might be the perfect idea.
>
> Robert (RK)
>
>
> =====
> I'm astounded by people who want to "know" the universe when
> it's hard enough to find your way around Chinatown. - Woody Allen
>
>
>
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Mail is new and improved - Check it out!
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] ABOUT LATITUDE.

body:
South America is a continent. Everything south of Panama is in South
America.

Fred

> From: jairo <jairobetancourta at epm.net.co>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Wed, 08 Sep 2004 06:18:29 -0500
> To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] ABOUT LATITUDE.
>
> Gentlemen, wishing you a fine day.
>
> Wikipedia overwhelms me. Thanks.?
>
> Please, on your page for The United States of America, at the very end of it,
> "Countries in  North America" you do mention all of them: but, how about
> Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Surinam and French Guayana.? This Countries are
> all located above the Ecuatorial line and
> we are more subject to the North Hemisphere Winter than to the Southern one.
> So, are we
> South Americans or North Americans.?
>
> Thanks.
> JAIRO BETANCOURT ?LVAREZ.
>
> CARRERA 73 # 41-16 APT. 202
> MEDELL?N, COLOMBIA
> ?SOUTH AMERICA? _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


from_name: James Moore

subject:
[Foundation-l] Help Request: Changing an Existing Non-Wiki Project
	into a Wiki Project

body:
Greetings,

I have for the past four years been the webmaster and chief author of the Outcyclopedia, an online reference guide for the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community.  I would like to revamp the project into a wiki, using articles already existing on the site, any future articles written by myself or contributors, plus articles forked from Wikipedia, per Wikipedia's copyright guidelines, using and granting permissions under either the GNU or Creative Commons License.

The change from a site using html to one utilizing PHP, MySQL, and MediaWiki would take me into new territory, technical and otherwise. I would therefore appreciate any and all help and advice which may be offered, especially from persons running their own non-Wikipedia wiki projects, such as Memory Alpha or Jewpedia, and of course any other GLBt Wikipedians that may be out there. Thanks.

Cheers,

James

http://outcyclopedia.0catch.com


from_name: Nikola Smolenski

subject: [Wikitech-l] off-line GPL program

body:
On Monday 06 September 2004 18:54, Lu?s Fernando wrote:
> Basically, the database + program could be purchased on CD or downloaded on
> internet. We could have a "static database" (since we can't rewrite
> CDs) and make just "diffs databases" to update. When the diffs
> database gets big, the program should suggest purchasing a new CD or an
> "updated static database" (for the case the user has downloaded the
> program).
>
> I'm interested on starting this program (that will be licensed as GPL)
> and I can do it in C++ (compiling with Microsoft Visual C++). Since
> it's a GPL program, I know most people would prefer using a GPL
> compiler like gcc and maybe for an opensource OS, but I'm not used to
> program on it.
>
> Well... Of course I want to participate the project, but I want to do a
> Windows version now (I've learned a lot of Windows APIs from other programs
> I did before and I'm really not interested on learning all again for other
> OS at this time). We may change the compiler since I have no problems to
> make a few "adjustments" in the way I program and I'm a computer science
> student, so one day or other I'll need to learn that.
> After this program is done, we could port it to other OS, or if many
> people don't agree to do it for Windows, we can split and each group
> start doing it for different OS.

Wouldn't it be by far the easiest if this program would be a small "web
server" which would retrieve and serve Wikipedia pages to user's web browser
of choice? That way it could be made quickly, small, and portable.


from_name: Michael Snow

subject: [Foundation-l] Press release finalized

body:
The press release is now in its final version. The text has been frozen
should not be edited any further. If you have started translating the
press release already, please update your translation to reflect the
final version.

If the press release has not been translated into your language yet,
please post an announcement on your Wikipedia asking for someone who can
do that. Translation is being coordinated at:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_requests/PR-1mil

Different languages may add content that would be of local interest to
media in that language. I would recommend that any such additions be
kept brief, so that the overall press release is not too long.

We are still planning for the press release to start going out on
September 15 when we reach one million articles. Thank you to everyone
who has helped so far, and to everyone who will help when it comes time
to distribute the press release as well.

--Michael Snow


subject: [Foundation-l] Press release finalized


subject: [Wiktionary-l] Re: Wiktionary-l Digest, Vol 4, Issue 5

body:
>When you answer e-mail from the mailing list, please do not repeat
>everything in the digest.  It makes some people very upset..  Please
>feel free to contribute on the wiktionary of your choice.  There is much
>work that needs to be done, both in English and your own language.

>Ray (Eclecticology)

Thanks Ray,
I saw my mistake too late. I hope I'll do better next time.
Your contributes seem very interesting but too difficult to me (I'm a simple
linguistic/lexicography PHD). I'll follow you at the moment and as soon as
I'll somethings quite cleaver to say I'll do it.
If you needs somthing in French or Italian make me know.
Thank you
Mar?ka


body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

> Sabine Cretella wrote:
>
>> Referring to the posts of Ray and Gerard: my problem was and still is
>> (but much less now) how to make e.g. multilingual ressources of my
>> project on sourceforge.net available to wiktionary. At the moment we
>> are talking about how to be able to pass translations of words easily
>> from one wiktionary to the other as this part is the easiest of all.
>> But if you had a look at the tables Polyglot uploaded to the meta
>> site you would have seen that these tables include punctuation,
>> synonyms, opposites, definitions, part of speech and much, much more
>> (to me it was quite overwhelming as we translators think in
>> glossaries and not all those particular definitions for a term).
>
>
> I looked at his pdf file and found it pretty.  My browser would not
> open the other one; I don't know what software is needed for that.

The second file is in Open Office format. :)

>
> The first thing that we need to address is the purpose and philosophy
> of a dictionary.  To me, a dictionary is primarily descriptive, and
> not prescriptive.  The multi-volume Oxford English Dictionary is a
> model to be followed.  An ideal Wiktionary article will include a
> series of definitions that trace the history of the word over the
> centuries.  The etymology is important for understanding these uses.
> I tend to view translations as a form of synonym which happens to be
> in another language.  They are guide lines which the wise translator
> will consider but will not consider binding.  I would not depend on
> BabelFish to give me a good Italian translation of Shakespeare or a
> good English translation of Dante.
>
Describing it to be like "the multi-volume Oxford English Dictionary" is
as helpfull as the "Dikke van Dale"; both are emminent dead wood
dictionaries, and therefore there should be differences with wiktionary
as well. If you propose we follow OED explain what makes it so relevant
to you describe the features that are important to you. I do not have an
OED, I have a van Dale, it is as authoritive and I am sure it has the
same features but I do not know. Van Dale does a NE and EN dictionary as
well, so models for translation dictionaries exist

>> So now we have quite a good method to copy and paste quite easily
>> translations into the different wiktionaries, but does it make sense
>> that a work needs to be repetead for every language again and again?
>> Do we really have that much time to spend? Up to some weeks it was
>> not even possible to think about a copy and paste method and thanks
>> Gerard it is there - so its one huge step ahead, but it is still far
>> away from being "time friendly".  Users (contributing users) should
>> talk about concentrating efforts in order to have better results in
>> less time. Now we are using the wiktionary just like the huge
>> dictionary editors used to do years ago when every single word with
>> all the relevant information was written on single sheets. The
>> techinques are there to avoid double or in case of language
>> translatios multiple work (how many wiktionaries are there? 20? 30? I
>> did not check this out) so instead of one person needing one hour for
>> a certain work this menas 30 hours of work to do the same job for 30
>> witkonaries. I agree, wiktionary is open content, but contributing
>> people are working - and 30 hours are almost a week of work ... how
>> much does this cost? where's the break even point for hours invested
>> for programming and hours invested to let's say only 5000 terms? We
>> are talking about computers and software of the second millennium not
>> about the good old Zuse.
>
>
> A volunteer project does not usually need to think in terms of
> financial break even points.  Nobody is getting paid. :-)   Better
> results depend on what you mean by that term.
>
A volunteer project that does not value the time spent by the volunteers
is not worth the time. Time of quality people is a scarce resource. Is
this your argument against re-using content in nl:wiktionary for data
from en:wiktionary ??

>> Please don't become upset now: but we should try to make things with
>> a certain criteria from the beginning on - it is much harder to do it
>> afterwards when there's a lot of data inserted and the need is
>> definitely there. To my experience wiktionary is going to be used by
>> at least 90% of the people like a dictionary - to search a word in a
>> certain language.
>
>
> We "have" been working on criteria from the beginning!  You're right
> that most people will use Wiktionary to look up a word.  That's what
> it's for.
>
>> E.g. what disturbes a bit is that foreign language words are "seen"
>> in the wiktionary. This is confusing. German should only give German
>> terminology in its lists, English the English one, Dutch the Dutch
>> one etc. When I am on the English wiktionary and find "Deutsch" as a
>> single page this is not logic to me - the term "Deutsch" should be
>> linked to the German wiktionary instead and should not appear in the
>> listing under the letter "D".
>
>
> This was intentional.  English speakers will gain an insight into the
> words of other languages.
>
>> All of what you ask for is needed, but there are already plenty of
>> glossaries that could be uploaded and I am sure, if we have the
>> techniques many companies would agree to pass their glossaries with
>> definitions to OpenContent.
>
>
> So what?  We're not looking for mere glossaries.
>
When you do not know what these glossaries contain, so how can you judge
their value to wiktionary. Glossaries add content and with a wiktionary
it is like a telephone network; the more people who have a telephone the
more valuable the network is. With so many words not yet described,
glossaries may fill a need.

>> The next thing is: I now can pass e.g. the colours list to Wiktonary,
>> but I cannot retrieve an animals list with all its translations - so
>> it's a one-way direction - to work with many other projects both
>> directions are needed. So many of us who now concentrate on their own
>> projects probably would say: I pass all my data to wiktionary as I
>> get something back. Many of these listings, definitions etc. are from
>> people in the language industry - and people of the language industry
>> most of all search for the right term.
>
>
> I have not followed the issue of colours or animals, so I can't
> comment fully, though it would seem that for the latter the best thing
> would be to relate the vernacular names to the Latin binomials.  The
> fact that a term comes from the "language industry" should not make
> the proposals of others less valid.  Contributions from either source
> are open to discussion and modification.
>
Contributions from any source are open to discussion; at present we
discuss opening up the wiktionary content so that it can be shared in
all wiktionaries. At this moment, nl: does contribute easily to
en:wiktionary while it is hard to use the en:wiktionary content. Is that
not a waste of your time; the work you have done could be so much more
valuable !

>> So: in any case I support the XML and database way - it will take
>> some time to develop it, but once it is there wiktionary has all the
>> characteristics needed to become the main reference tool for people
>> working with languages and people being interested in languages. The
>> more people can use it the more will contribute. Gerard, Polyglot and
>> whoever is convinced about this way: please don't stop going. You are
>> on the right way.
>
>
> We will be more able to discuss the proposal when we see what it looks
> like.
>
At this point we discuss the merites of opening up the wiktionary
content and use standard XML formats that are/will be shared among
electronic dictionaries. When we agree that there is a need, from that a
lot of changes to the wiktionary content will follow. The first thing is
to agree on the merits of opening up the content. We must first agree on
this, this is part of our mission as I see it. Certainly we will not
have less data, we will have data in a proper place that will enable
open content.

>> Now who's going to kill me ;-) ??
>
>
> Huh! :-*  No problem.  Va bene.
>
> Ec
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wiktionary-l mailing list
> Wiktionary-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiktionary-l
>
>
Thanks,
    Gerard


from_name: Stan Shebs

subject: [Wikipedia-l] The Register, Round 2

body:
Andrew Lih wrote:

>The second round in the Wikipedia-Register battle of 2004 has been
>published, and Andrew Orlowski promises a third.  You have to chuckle
>at his description of the Wikipedia community as "the Khmer Rouge in
>diapers."
>
That's why they say not to get in fights with people who buy ink
by the gallon, err, servers by the truckload. :-) You can bet he
won't mention it the first time he actually gets the info he's
looking for from WP, but maybe a year or two from now he might
casually drop that "WP is starting to become useful", as if we
were all breathlessly waiting for his stamp of approval.

Stan


subject: [Wiktionary-l] terms of several languages

body:
>> E.g. what disturbes a bit is that foreign language words are "seen"
>> in the wiktionary. This is confusing. German should only give German
>> terminology in its lists, English the English one, Dutch the Dutch
>> one etc. When I am on the English wiktionary and find "Deutsch" as a
>> single page this is not logic to me - the term "Deutsch" should be
>> linked to the German wiktionary instead and should not appear in the
>> listing under the letter "D".
>
>
> If a high-school student was using Wiktionary for German class,
> it would be kind of useless to send her over to read a definition
> of "Deutsch" written *in* German, eh? Not all words translate
> mechanically either, consider "Ordnung" for instance; you need an
> explanation in English of its subtleties, not in a language with
> whose subtleties you are unfamiliar.
>
>
So the definition should be together with the English translation of the
term "Ordnung" and not a single term where you can't look up the
alternatives at once or see below. Again something that can be achieved
easily with databases and then of course uploaded accordingly to the
wiktionary.

e.g. German-English

Ordnung f (-; no pl)

allg. order;
Ordentlichkeit: order(liness), tidiness;
Vorschriften: rules pl, regulations pl;
Anordnung: arrangement;
System: system, set-up;
Rang: class: in Ordnung all right;
tech. etc in (good) order;

in Ordnung bringen put right (a. fig.);
Zimmer etc: tidy up;
reparieren: repair, fam. fix (a. fig.);
(in) Ordnung halten keep (in) order;
et. ist nicht in Ordnung (mit) there is s.th. wrong (with).

so every singles meaning or definition or whatever needs to stay with
its translation

Now let's assume that Ordnung has just 5 possible translations into
other languages (this is easier to calculate) and there fore if we have
the translation into 30 languages we would have approximately 150
different terms in different languages right? So when you look at the
alphabetical word list you will have a completely mixed up list. the
only possibilty would then be: create separate lists for separate
languages - this would not mix up things. E.g. in the German wiktionary
there wouldn't be "regulations" in the German index, but in a separate
one. Mixing all languages together in one huge pool is not user friendly
at all - what about terms in languages with other alphabets? Do you feel
people would not become a bit annoyed if, when having a look at the
present terms, they find words in arabic, hebrew, russian, chinese,
japanese, korean etc.?

That's what I dislike on the actual way of organising terms - you find
every kind of writing in there - OK, on the English page there are the
words beginning with other scripts. But how about the student studying
German and going to the German wiktionary he finds "Anguille" - at a
first glance if he/she knows french he/she could think that the french
term is used in German as well - and this will happen - people are lazy
- don't think about how we use the tools since we know them, but think
about people who don't take much time - what then happens is that the
student is being corrected the term and the end is: wiktionary is not a
good ressource even if the fault is not wiktionary's fault, but the
student's fault. He'll then talk with his friends etc. etc ... what
comes out of this.

So there are two possibilities: or foreign terms are identified as such
by colour/symbol/language code in the listing or there are subsections
for the single listings in different languages.

Hmmm ... I hope this is understandable - I was just thinking about my
pupils at school (when I was still teaching) - using the dictionary even
if you explain over and over again 80% of them just take the first
translation they found as they don't like reading all the context. I'd
like to avoid misunderstandings - that's all. For myself I have no
problems with mixed up lists - working with languages every day it is
normal, but we should think about those who potentially would have
difficulties.

Ciao, Sabine

(p.s. and now I'll read the rest of the mails)


body:
>>
>>
> Stan,
> You are completely correct. All wiktioanaries can and should have all
> words in all languages, the definition of the meanings of the words
> should be in the language native to the wiktionary. This may be
> confusing at first, but once you understand the concept it makes
> perfect sense.
> Thanks,
>    GerardM
>
Gerard, please don't become upset now: we can understand the concept and
many others as well, but the majority will not - I sent some of my
colleagues to wiktionary and a first reaction was that they felt not "at
home" because languages are "mixed up".  And there's a lot of these
people around and it is very unlikely that people go to a place where
they don't feel at home, but we need those people to have them
understand that even their help is needed and that wiktionary indeed is
more than just another useful site where to find terms.

Ciao, Sabine


body:
Andrew Dunbar wrote:

> --- Sabine Cretella <sabine_cretella at yahoo.it> wrote:
>
>
>
>>Sorry, this week is full of work and I won't have
>>too much time to dedicate before the week end.
>>
>>Referring to the posts of Ray and Gerard: my problem
>>was and still is (but much less now) how to make
>>e.g. multilingual ressources of my project on
>>sourceforge.net available to wiktionary. At the
>>moment we are talking about how to be able to pass
>>translations of words easily from one wiktionary to
>>the other as this part is the easiest of all.
>>
>>
>
>I still think even this much is a bad idea. Copy &
>paste in every arena always makes it quicker and
>easier
>to make mistakes. The only time you can copy all the
>translations from word A in language X to word A' in
>language Y is when the sense and subtleties are
>*identical*. It will not work for "mouse" or "rat"
>into
>many languages. Just thinking about it for "moose" or
>"elk" is painful. Just because "mouse" in English can
>be translated into a/b/c/d in languages W/X/Y/Z, does
>not mean that "mus" in "language W" can also be
>translated into b/c/d in languages X/Y/Z. Every single
>one must be checked. Copying and pasting is the
>opposite of checking!
>
>
We are not talking about copy and paste; that would not be helpfull.
When a meaning does not have a word or phrase that is the literal
translation, there is no translation in that other language. This does
not mean that this meaning cannot be defined. When translations are not
the same, they are not. But this is not what is at issue, at issue is
opening up data to both other wiktionaries and other electronic
dictionaries.

>>But if you had a look at the tables Polyglot
>>uploaded to the meta site you would have seen that
>>these tables include punctuation, synonyms,
>>opposites, definitions, part of speech and much,
>>much more (to me it was quite overwhelming as we
>>translators think in glossaries and not all those
>>particular definitions for a term).
>>
>>
>
>Can you point to these tables please?
>
>
The discussion and papers are on Meta.

>
>
>>So now we have quite a good method to copy and paste
>>quite easily translations into the different
>>wiktionaries, but does it make sense that a work
>>needs to be repetead for every language again and
>>again?
>>
>>
> <>
> Yes. Because every language is different. If it wasn't
> we'd just use Babelfish and the results would always
> be perfect.

When the word "applepie" gets its entry in nl:wiktionary, would it not
be fair to say that the en:wiktionary content for that word is relevant
? Would it not make sense to use all the content with some translations
where needed?

> <>Do we really have that much time to spend?

>
>Whether or not we have the time to spend, a good
>quality dictionary requires time spent. If we choose
>not to spend that time we will not have a good quality
>dictionary. Ask any professional lexicographer. The
>OED, Websters, Le Grand Robert, you name it - all the
>big, quality dictionares took a long time. That is the
>nature of the game.
>
>
Yes, but contrary to Websters, OED, van Dale, we are not in the business
of making money out of it. We are in the business of making open content
and we can and should accept open content contributions from others. It
is the aim of the wiktionary to have open content; and that is where we
fail at this moment.

>
>
>>Up to some weeks it was not even possible to think
>>about a copy and paste method and thanks Gerard it
>>is there - so its one huge step ahead, but it is
>>still far away from being "time friendly".  Users
>>(contributing users) should talk about
>>concentrating efforts in order to have better
>>results in less time. Now we are using the
>>wiktionary just like the huge dictionary editors
>>used to do years ago when every single word with all
>>the relevant information was written on single
>>sheets.
>>
>>
>
>You will find they still do it this way. They use
>computers now but the work is still painstaking and
>precise and slow. Dictionary building is not a race.
>
>
When the en:wiktionary content were open, I would be able to re-use that
content in nl:wiktionary at this stage we cannot. Am I to believe all
this work is not relevant to nl:

>>The techinques are there to avoid double or in case
>>of language translatios multiple work (how many
>>wiktionaries are there? 20? 30? I did not check this
>>out) so instead of one person needing one hour for a
>>certain work this menas 30 hours of work to do
>>the same job for 30 witkonaries.
>>
>>
> <>
> I can guarantee if you avoid half the work you will
> double the errors.

What work are you talking about: does {{en}} not translate well between
the wiktionaries ?

> <>I agree, wiktionary is open content, but
> contributing people are working - and 30 hours
> are almost a week of work ... how much does this
> cost? where's the break even point for hours
> invested for programming and hours invested to let's
> say only 5000 terms? We are talking about computers
> and software of the second millennium not about the
> good old Zuse.

> <>
> All you are doing is labouring a non-sequitor. Every-
> body agrees that time is both scarce and valuable.
> I do not agree that taking shortcuts and rushing
> result
> in better dictionaries. Anybody who has used a poor /
> cheap translating dictionary must know this already

> <>Please don't become upset now: but we should try to
> make things with a certain criteria from the
> beginning on - it is much harder to do it
> afterwards when there's a lot of data inserted and
> the need is definitely there. To my experience
> wiktionary is going to be used by at least 90% of
> the people like a dictionary - to search a word in a
> certain language.
>
> E.g. what disturbes a bit is that foreign language
> words are "seen" in the wiktionary. This is
> confusing. German should only give German
> terminology in its lists, English the English one,
> Dutch the Dutch one etc.

>
>Woah there! Are you not aware that Wiktionary is a
>dictionary of all languages? It is both a definition
>dictionary and a translating dictionary. People whose
>first language is not English will be aided in their
>understanding of English definitions for English words
>when they can also see the glosses of that word in
>their own language.
>
>Now I do believe that in the future we should have a
>way to "show only relevant information". Users should
>be able to choose whether they want to see the
>translations or not. At the moment the Wiktionary is
>small, the developers time is scarce, the structure is
>not robust. So this will happen later.
>
>
>
>>When I am on the English wiktionary and find
>>"Deutsch" as a single page this is not logic to me -
>>the term "Deutsch" should be linked to the German
>>wiktionary instead and should not appear in the
>>listing under the letter "D".
>>
>>
>
>Then the user must be able to read German to find out
>what the word means! This is like suggesting an
>English-only dictionary and a German-only dictionary
>would be sufficient for a monolingual to translate
>between the two languages!
>
>
>
>>All of what you ask for is needed, but there are
>>already plenty of glossaries that could be uploaded
>>and I am sure, if we have the techniques many
>>companies would agree to pass their glossaries with
>>definitions to OpenContent.
>>
>>The next thing is: I now can pass e.g. the colours
>>list to Wiktonary, but I cannot retrieve an animals
>>list with all its translations - so it's a one-way
>>direction - to work with many other projects both
>>directions are needed. So many of us who now
>>concentrate on their own projects probably would
>>say: I pass all my data to wiktionary as I get
>>something back. Many of these listings, definitions
>>etc. are from people in the language industry - and
>>people of the language industry most of all search
>>for the right term.
>>
>>So: in any case I support the XML and database way -
>>it will take some time to develop it, but once it is
>>there wiktionary has all the characteristics needed
>>to become the main reference tool for people
>>working with languages and people being interested
>>in languages. The more people can use it the more
>>will contribute.
>>Gerard, Polyglot and  whoever is convinced about
>>this way: please don't stop going. You are on
>>the right way.
>>
>>
>
>One "problem" I'm beginning to see for the future is
>that currently Wiktionary is both the lexicographer's
>index cards and the finished dictionary in one place.
>Especially as it grows, the "finished" articles are
>mixed right in with the under-research articles.
>I don't think it's a problem yet but it will be in a
>couple of years and I'm not sure what kind of solution
>might exist.
>
>Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail)
>
>
>
When the data is in a databaseformat, it would become more obvious you
would just be able te query for words without etymplogy or
pronounciation and tacle them. This functionality will come with better
structured content, this structure will result from the necessary work
to enable import and export to the wiktionaries.

>>Now who's going to kill me ;-) ??
>>
>>Ciao, Sabine
>>
>>-----
>>
>>Sabine Cretella
>>s.cretella at wordsandmore.it
>>www.wordsandmore.it
>>Meetingplace for translators
>>www.wesolveitnet.com
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>Wiktionary-l mailing list
>>Wiktionary-l at Wikipedia.org
>>
>>
>>
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiktionary-l
>
>
>>
>>
>>
Thanks,
    Gerard


body:
Sabine Cretella wrote:

>
>>>
>>>
>> Stan,
>> You are completely correct. All wiktioanaries can and should have all
>> words in all languages, the definition of the meanings of the words
>> should be in the language native to the wiktionary. This may be
>> confusing at first, but once you understand the concept it makes
>> perfect sense.
>> Thanks,
>>    GerardM
>>
> Gerard, please don't become upset now: we can understand the concept
> and many others as well, but the majority will not - I sent some of my
> colleagues to wiktionary and a first reaction was that they felt not
> "at home" because languages are "mixed up".  And there's a lot of
> these people around and it is very unlikely that people go to a place
> where they don't feel at home, but we need those people to have them
> understand that even their help is needed and that wiktionary indeed
> is more than just another useful site where to find terms.
>
> Ciao, Sabine
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wiktionary-l mailing list
> Wiktionary-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiktionary-l
>
>
I am not upset. I can sympathise. I expect that at some stage it will be
possible to specify in the user preferences for wiktionary: English
words only; translations in French, German and Farsi.

The most important thing is that we will get data exchange enabled; have
a standard XML format that everybody speaks so that it will not matter
what application you use, you will have quality data with all the trimmings.

I do agree that we need all the quality data in the wiktionaries. By
increasing the amount of words and the quality of the entries more
people will use wiktionary and they will start to feel at home.

Thanks,
    Gerard


body:
Thank you Gerard, you answered most of the questions - I'll just add
some more info to single points here.

> Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>> Sabine Cretella wrote:
>>
>>
>> The first thing that we need to address is the purpose and philosophy
>> of a dictionary.  To me, a dictionary is primarily descriptive, and
>> not prescriptive.  The multi-volume Oxford English Dictionary is a
>> model to be followed.  An ideal Wiktionary article will include a
>> series of definitions that trace the history of the word over the
>> centuries.  The etymology is important for understanding these uses.
>> I tend to view translations as a form of synonym which happens to be
>> in another language.  They are guide lines which the wise translator
>> will consider but will not consider binding.  I would not depend on
>> BabelFish to give me a good Italian translation of Shakespeare or a
>> good English translation of Dante.
>>
> Describing it to be like "the multi-volume Oxford English Dictionary"
> is as helpfull as the "Dikke van Dale"; both are emminent dead wood
> dictionaries, and therefore there should be differences with
> wiktionary as well. If you propose we follow OED explain what makes it
> so relevant to you describe the features that are important to you. I
> do not have an OED, I have a van Dale, it is as authoritive and I am
> sure it has the same features but I do not know. Van Dale does a NE
> and EN dictionary as well, so models for translation dictionaries exist

Of course this is OK, but there are definitions + translations in there
- now: if someone doesn't have the time to add the whole definition, but
only a list of valuable translations this should be possible. The
definitions can then be integrated in a second stage. In any case, to ba
able to create a huge Oxford Dictionary project you need first of all a
list of terms and then someone who takes the time to look up everything
or a linguist who already knows everything - both of them need their
time to do it and it is much easier to work step by step on existing
terms than having to create term lists from scratch.

>
>>> So now we have quite a good method to copy and paste quite easily
>>> translations into the different wiktionaries, but does it make sense
>>> that a work needs to be repetead for every language again and again?
>>> Do we really have that much time to spend? Up to some weeks it was
>>> not even possible to think about a copy and paste method and thanks
>>> Gerard it is there - so its one huge step ahead, but it is still far
>>> away from being "time friendly".  Users (contributing users) should
>>> talk about concentrating efforts in order to have better results in
>>> less time. Now we are using the wiktionary just like the huge
>>> dictionary editors used to do years ago when every single word with
>>> all the relevant information was written on single sheets. The
>>> techinques are there to avoid double or in case of language
>>> translatios multiple work (how many wiktionaries are there? 20? 30?
>>> I did not check this out) so instead of one person needing one hour
>>> for a certain work this menas 30 hours of work to do the same job
>>> for 30 witkonaries. I agree, wiktionary is open content, but
>>> contributing people are working - and 30 hours are almost a week of
>>> work ... how much does this cost? where's the break even point for
>>> hours invested for programming and hours invested to let's say only
>>> 5000 terms? We are talking about computers and software of the
>>> second millennium not about the good old Zuse.
>>
>>
>>
>> A volunteer project does not usually need to think in terms of
>> financial break even points.  Nobody is getting paid. :-)   Better
>> results depend on what you mean by that term.
>>
> A volunteer project that does not value the time spent by the
> volunteers is not worth the time. Time of quality people is a scarce
> resource. Is this your argument against re-using content in
> nl:wiktionary for data from en:wiktionary ??

I agree very much to this one - we don't have much time since we need to
work to earn a living and so it is crucial to us that work done once can
be used twice or more times.

>
>>> Please don't become upset now: but we should try to make things with
>>> a certain criteria from the beginning on - it is much harder to do
>>> it afterwards when there's a lot of data inserted and the need is
>>> definitely there. To my experience wiktionary is going to be used by
>>> at least 90% of the people like a dictionary - to search a word in a
>>> certain language.
>>
>>
>>
>> We "have" been working on criteria from the beginning!  You're right
>> that most people will use Wiktionary to look up a word.  That's what
>> it's for.
>>
>>> E.g. what disturbes a bit is that foreign language words are "seen"
>>> in the wiktionary. This is confusing. German should only give German
>>> terminology in its lists, English the English one, Dutch the Dutch
>>> one etc. When I am on the English wiktionary and find "Deutsch" as a
>>> single page this is not logic to me - the term "Deutsch" should be
>>> linked to the German wiktionary instead and should not appear in the
>>> listing under the letter "D".
>>
>>
>>
>> This was intentional.  English speakers will gain an insight into the
>> words of other languages.
>>
>>> All of what you ask for is needed, but there are already plenty of
>>> glossaries that could be uploaded and I am sure, if we have the
>>> techniques many companies would agree to pass their glossaries with
>>> definitions to OpenContent.
>>
>>
>>
>> So what?  We're not looking for mere glossaries.
>>
> When you do not know what these glossaries contain, so how can you
> judge their value to wiktionary. Glossaries add content and with a
> wiktionary it is like a telephone network; the more people who have a
> telephone the more valuable the network is. With so many words not yet
> described, glossaries may fill a need.

We started with a very "simple" glossary - colours - it seemed simple at
the beginning - now it is becoming a huge project. We started with 20
colour names and now there are 271 - they are going to grow as now, at
this stage I'll add the English colour names present on wiktionary.org
then those of the other languages I understand (German, French, Spanish,
Portuguese etc.).

When having completed as much as possible with as many languages as
possible my aim is to ask colleagues to integrate as much as possible in
any present language.

The next step is then to include all this work (and it is quite a lot of
work be sure) into all existing wiktionaries. But how to do this? The
original approach is "one page for every colour adding manually
translations". Now we have the templates and so we can create the
entrances immediately without problems and then insert (still paste)
them in the single wiktionaries. But this is not the way to go - it
should be possibile (e.g. via xml and MySql) to recall these terms in
order to avoid typos and errors. For now this is not possible - you
cannot tell someone: could you please have a look at all Chinese
entrances in this list and then just update with the corrections and all
pages are automatically updated. This is the way to go - it is the only
way to assure a certain quality.

Other possible glossaries that are going to be built up step by step -
legislation, machinery, edp, etc.
Just take "screws" - can you imagine how many of those tiny things exist
and make us translators get mad as often engineers mix up terms
themselves? Imagine what I am translating right now: an English to
German translation of a machinery manual, but the English version was
written by an Italian - so it happens to me that I first need to
retranslate from EN to IT and then from there to DE to understand and to
find the right term - he obviously sometimes used just the first term he
found in a dictionary. These highly specialistic glossaries are needed
and having a place where to store not only the different translations of
a term, but also definitions etc. this is indeed the best thing we can
imagine. That's why I feel that our glossary project can give support to
wiktionary passing the tables where others can then think about the
definitions since terms are already there.

BMW: - they have a glossary English-German with definitions on their
website - wouldn't it be great to convince them to donate it to Open
Content? There's so much work that has already been done - we should try
to re-use it as a basis.

Many companies have their own glossaries and partly with definitions.

>
>>> The next thing is: I now can pass e.g. the colours list to
>>> Wiktonary, but I cannot retrieve an animals list with all its
>>> translations - so it's a one-way direction - to work with many other
>>> projects both directions are needed. So many of us who now
>>> concentrate on their own projects probably would say: I pass all my
>>> data to wiktionary as I get something back. Many of these listings,
>>> definitions etc. are from people in the language industry - and
>>> people of the language industry most of all search for the right term.
>>
>>
>>
>> I have not followed the issue of colours or animals, so I can't
>> comment fully, though it would seem that for the latter the best
>> thing would be to relate the vernacular names to the Latin
>> binomials.  The fact that a term comes from the "language industry"
>> should not make the proposals of others less valid.  Contributions
>> from either source are open to discussion and modification.
>>
> Contributions from any source are open to discussion; at present we
> discuss opening up the wiktionary content so that it can be shared in
> all wiktionaries. At this moment, nl: does contribute easily to
> en:wiktionary while it is hard to use the en:wiktionary content. Is
> that not a waste of your time; the work you have done could be so much
> more valuable !

see above :-)

>
>>> So: in any case I support the XML and database way - it will take
>>> some time to develop it, but once it is there wiktionary has all the
>>> characteristics needed to become the main reference tool for people
>>> working with languages and people being interested in languages. The
>>> more people can use it the more will contribute. Gerard, Polyglot
>>> and whoever is convinced about this way: please don't stop going.
>>> You are on the right way.
>>
>>
>>
>> We will be more able to discuss the proposal when we see what it
>> looks like.
>>
> At this point we discuss the merites of opening up the wiktionary
> content and use standard XML formats that are/will be shared among
> electronic dictionaries. When we agree that there is a need, from that
> a lot of changes to the wiktionary content will follow. The first
> thing is to agree on the merits of opening up the content. We must
> first agree on this, this is part of our mission as I see it.
> Certainly we will not have less data, we will have data in a proper
> place that will enable open content.

You will have much more data if this happens - why? I can, for example,
take a list of terms with all its translations (maybe also include the
definition), add some parts myself and ask colleagues for help to
integrate and add other specific material. So opening the content will
attract further content.

Ciao, Sabine


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Foundation-l] Press release finalized

body:
Great work Michael and everbody else who has been working on this!

--- Michael Snow <wikipedia at earthlink.net> wrote:

> The press release is now in its final version. The text has been frozen
> should not be edited any further. If you have started translating the
> press release already, please update your translation to reflect the
> final version.
>
> If the press release has not been translated into your language yet,
> please post an announcement on your Wikipedia asking for someone who can
> do that. Translation is being coordinated at:
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_requests/PR-1mil
>
> Different languages may add content that would be of local interest to
> media in that language. I would recommend that any such additions be
> kept brief, so that the overall press release is not too long.
>
> We are still planning for the press release to start going out on
> September 15 when we reach one million articles. Thank you to everyone
> who has helped so far, and to everyone who will help when it comes time
> to distribute the press release as well.
>
> --Michael Snow
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

__________________________________________________
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subject: [Foundation-l] Press release finalized


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] ABOUT LATITUDE.

body:
jairo wrote:

>Gentlemen, wishing you a fine day.
>
>Wikipedia overwhelms me. Thanks.?
>
>Please, on your page for The United States of America, at the very end of it, "Countries in  North America" you do mention all of them: but, how about Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Surinam and French Guayana.? This Countries are all located above the Ecuatorial line and
>we are more subject to the North Hemisphere Winter than to the Southern one. So, are we
>South Americans or North Americans.?
>
The term South America ordinarily relates to the large continental land
mass that happens to be relatively more southerly than North America.
(Even some Mexicans would not call themselves Norteamericanos.)  It has
nothing to do with the placement of the equator.  At one time Panam? was
considered a part of South America.  That gradually changed after the
United States swindled it away from Colombia.

Ec (from the one country where the people of the United States could be
considered sudamericanos.)


subject: [WikiEN-l] A future for Nupedia?

body:
--- "KNOTT, T" <tknott at qcl.org.uk> wrote:

>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Delirium [mailto:delirium at hackish.org]
>
> >I don't think academic credentials are very good ones.
> > Perhaps some measure of involvement in Wikipedia would
> >be a reasonable start, as most of our longtime
> >contributors are reasonably reliable.
> >
> >-Mark
>
>
> Perhaps articles should be reviewed by at least a couple of people. One
> 'expert' plus one long term wikipedian, in whom we trust.

Sounds good to me.

--mav

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from_name: Delirium

subject: [WikiEN-l] A future for Nupedia?

body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:

>Basically, reviewers with academic credentials can add a mark (or
>"flag") to a specific version of an article, indicating that they
>approve of it.
>
>
Despite being in academia myself (or perhaps because of it), I must
point out that having academic credentials is no guarantee of not being
a nutcase, of not being egregiously biased, or of otherwise not being
wholly unreliable.

I'm not sure what a good replacement is, but I don't think academic
credentials are very good ones.  Perhaps some measure of involvement in
Wikipedia would be a reasonable start, as most of our longtime
contributors are reasonably reliable.

-Mark


from_name: KNOTT, T

subject: [WikiEN-l] A future for Nupedia?

body:
>Like Larry Sanger, I am still concerned about the long-term
>prestige of Wikipedia. As long as many contributors don't
>reference their claims, and don't rely on published
>authorities (at least to some extent), then many people in
>academic won't take our articles seriously. But using
>Wikipedia as an open-source feeder for growing Nupedia
>articles leverages everyone's efforts; the whole could be
>much greater than the sum of its parts.
>
>Robert (RK)

That's not a bad idea. I'd like a name change though to make sure it's
connection to wikipedia is known about. "Wikipedia stable" "Wikipedia
1.0" Wikipedia reviewed/approved or some such thing. But apart from that
I think it might work.

Theresa


from_name: Thomas Whaples

subject: [Wikipedia-l] The Register, Round 2

body:
Andrew Lih wrote:

>The second round in the Wikipedia-Register battle of 2004 has been
>published, and Andrew Orlowski promises a third.  You have to chuckle
>at his description of the Wikipedia community as "the Khmer Rouge in
>diapers."
>
>http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/07/khmer_rouge_in_daipers/
>
>He has the advantage of being able to cherry pick the most acerbic,
>typo ridden email rants in order to make his case. Then again, the
>Register folks have no high ground here - they didn't spell their own
>URL correctly ("daipers" [sic]).
>
As long as they can tell us to go read a "*real* encyclopedia", how
about we go off and read a *real* newspaper? :)


from_name: cookfire

body:
Ray Saintonge schreef:

> Sabine Cretella wrote:
>
>> Referring to the posts of Ray and Gerard: my problem was and still is
>> (but much less now) how to make e.g. multilingual ressources of my
>> project on sourceforge.net available to wiktionary. At the moment we
>> are talking about how to be able to pass translations of words easily
>> from one wiktionary to the other as this part is the easiest of all.
>> But if you had a look at the tables Polyglot uploaded to the meta
>> site you would have seen that these tables include punctuation,
>> synonyms, opposites, definitions, part of speech and much, much more
>> (to me it was quite overwhelming as we translators think in
>> glossaries and not all those particular definitions for a term).
>
>
> I looked at his pdf file and found it pretty.  My browser would not
> open the other one; I don't know what software is needed for that.
>
> The first thing that we need to address is the purpose and philosophy
> of a dictionary.  To me, a dictionary is primarily descriptive, and
> not prescriptive.  The multi-volume Oxford English Dictionary is a
> model to be followed.  An ideal Wiktionary article will include a
> series of definitions that trace the history of the word over the
> centuries.  The etymology is important for understanding these uses.
> I tend to view translations as a form of synonym which happens to be
> in another language.  They are guide lines which the wise translator
> will consider but will not consider binding.  I would not depend on
> BabelFish to give me a good Italian translation of Shakespeare or a
> good English translation of Dante.

Hi Eclecticology,

Maybe you will feel better about my proposal  for a database schema, if
you know that I also consider a translation as a synonym that happens to
be in a different language. They are connected through the Meanings
table. If you query for words in the same language, you will get
synonyms. If you query for words in a different language you will get
translations. It is true that I have concentrated on the translations
and other kinds of relations between words. This has always been my
primary purpose for a dictionary. But there certainly is room for
descriptions and the etymologies, they can easily be added as field to
the WordDescriptions tables.
The entire setup is also meant as a way to help translators (translation
memory) or even as a base for machine translation.

The biggest advantage is that entries of how words relate to each other
between languages only need to be given once. The descriptions will
still need to be given and translated many times though, but it will
become a lot easier to do so, because the database will know to which
words they belong.

In a user interface it will be possible to select the interface
language, but also and maybe more importantly, it will be possible to
indicate ad-hoc or in a user profile which languages are of interest. So
you could have the dictionary present itself as a descriptive
dictionary. Somebody else can have it work as a translation dictionary
between as many languages as they are interested in. This will result in
pages that don't have to be cluttered with information that people
don't  use anyway and that stands in the way of what they were really
trying to look up.

And of course it will become possible for people to write their own
interfaces, so it becomes a translation memory. It could also become a
distributed project, but we aren't there yet. So let's first discuss
whether it is feasible for the WikiMedia foundation to set up a database
with the necessary tables and then to create a php interface for it,
with help of the community, of course.

Jo

PS: .sxd is a format that can be openede with OpenOffice.org. The
content is the same as the PDF though. It is there for people who would
want to edit it.


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Hidden/protected page in MediaWiki

body:
Tony wrote:
[snip]
 > For real world organisations,
> single login is a must-have feature.

That's already in 1.4 CVS, isn't it?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Stan Wiechers

subject: [Wikipedia-l] using categories

body:
hey all!

I set up a wiki for myself and would like to use the wiki category feature.
They don't seem to work out of the box. I put things like the following in
my documents:

[[Category:People]]

Now I wish to have a category page that shows all the documents of the
Category people, how can I make that work?

thanks a lot,

stan wiechers


from_name: Sj

subject: [Foundation-l] Press release finalized

body:
September 15 no longer feels so far away...  (crossposting to wikipedia-l).

As to other versions of the release : Do you think it is worth
creating a simple, one-paragraph version for the tiny languages, in
which we may not be able to find someone conversant in both that
language and english?  Will there be separate HTML and text-only
versions again?

I copied the en: page to  [[m:How to distribute a press release]], and
added a few FAQ at the end. For the meta page, it would be nice to get
information on distributing press releases from people outside the
US... I imagine it is rather different in Japan, for example.

 --Sj

On Wed, 08 Sep 2004 07:22:41 -0700, Michael Snow
<wikipedia at earthlink.net> wrote:
> The press release is now in its final version. The text has been frozen
> should not be edited any further. If you have started translating the
> press release already, please update your translation to reflect the
> final version.
>
> If the press release has not been translated into your language yet,
> please post an announcement on your Wikipedia asking for someone who can
> do that. Translation is being coordinated at:
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_requests/PR-1mil
>
> Different languages may add content that would be of local interest to
> media in that language. I would recommend that any such additions be
> kept brief, so that the overall press release is not too long.
>
> We are still planning for the press release to start going out on
> September 15 when we reach one million articles. Thank you to everyone
> who has helped so far, and to everyone who will help when it comes time
> to distribute the press release as well.

--
+sj+
http://tinyurl.com/4df8s


subject: [Foundation-l] Press release finalized


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [Foundation-l] Press release finalized


subject: [Wikipedia-l] The Register, Round 2

body:
On Wed, 8 Sep 2004 14:47:04 +0800, Andrew Lih <andrew.lih at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/07/khmer_rouge_in_daipers/
>
> Register folks have no high ground here - they didn't spell their own
> URL correctly ("daipers" [sic]).

They're the villians who stole my dipthong!

--
+sj+