subject: [WikiEN-l] Exit Interview -- Jon Awbrey

body:
o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o

Post 12.

Regarding the assertion:

| In the present state of Wikipedia, the rules in practice and the
| prevailing attitudes of administrators are all skewed in favor
| of the Infantile Vandals and the Expert Disrupters, while the
| Accurate Reporters and Responsible Scholars don't stand a chance.

Rob,

If you read what I have written so far, it should be clear that
I am not disputing any of the fine sentiments in [[WP:POLICY]],
nor am I disputing the 3RR action.  I cited those details only
because people have been asking me for more concrete examples
of things that are leading me to say what I've been saying
from Post 1.  As far as reverts go, I try to use as few
as possible, and in the case of really hot disputes I
try as hard as I can to observe a Zero Revert Rule.
And that is what I did from 16:03 on 20 May 2006
until the incident of 12 June 2006, when I let
somebody get my goat, as the saying goes.

That is not one of the problems that I am trying to point out.
That is not the sort of thing that would lead me to postulate
the conclusion that I've repeated for ease of reference above.

I'm pointing to the fact that Infantile Vandals and Expert Disrupters
have got the Well-Intentioned Folks, WikiPeons and WikiPolitburocrats
alike, totally out-snookered in the current scheme of things, and I'm
not seeing the requisite awareness or gumption to do a thing about it.

Okay, maybe "totally" is too strong, but "seriously" at any rate.

Having spent some of the increasingly non-productive time
that I've been having lately in the WP environment musing
on why this is happening, I have accumulated some guesses
as to why, but this is already too mamy posts for one day,
so I will save it for tomorrow.

Jon Awbrey

Rob wrote:
>
> On 6/20/06, Jon Awbrey <jawbrey at att.net> wrote:.
> > I am speaking for what I know to be the generic
> > attitude of folks who take things like accuracy
> > and verifiability seriously, who do not suffer
> > fools gladly, as the saying goes, when it comes
> > to that.  It's clear to me that most folks like
> > that would have walked away, probably quietly
> > but no less disgustedly, long before putting
> > up with the kind of sophomoric toilet-papering
> > that I have had to put up with on this score.
>
> I'm sorry if you found our rules like 3RR and our dispute resolution
> process cumbersome and uninviting.  As flawed as these may be, try to
> imagine what Wikipedia would be like *without* these rules.  The 3RR
> is not that old, and prior to its implementation, edit warriors could
> revert a dozen times a day (I think the record I personally witnessed
> was 14) with impunity, a single edit warrior could essentially hold an
> article hostage for months.  While it would be nice to summarily ban
> idiots or pov pushers or conspiracy nuts, etc., what metric do you
> propose we use to separate the wheat from the chaff?  Who gets just
> three reverts and who gets more?  How do we decide? It's not often
> that clear, and some trolls can talk a good game when they need to
> appear reasonable and sane.
>
> I know from personal experience that it is frustrating to deal with
> stubborn nutjobs, and frustrating to deal with a system that treats
> you and the nutjob as equal players, but I haven't seen any serious
> proposal for a better system or one that doesn't introduce more
> problems, or reintroduce problems we've largely got a handle on.
> By and large, consensus works well.  It can sometimes be difficult
> to get enough sane eyes on a particular article, but it can be done.

o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o
inquiry e-lab: http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/
wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/user:Jon_Awbrey
o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o


list: wikitech-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Steve Bennett

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Thumbnail params,
	Was: Image uploads now undeletable

body:
On 6/20/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/20/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Yep. Look, while we're at it, some more requests:
> > In-place modifications of the following types:
> > - increase/decrease contrast
> > - increase/decrease brightness
>
> That thought of this makes me uncomfortable.  Many people have
> uncalibrated monitors and weird tastes in brightness and contrast,
> it's hard to be objective about such changes.. please see the

Sure, but give people *some* credit. Also, all these things are
available now, they just take a while to carry out. We don't want to
prevent the 90% of times when this would be useful just to stop the
10% when it would be a pain?

> miniessay on the last bullet of my commons userpage
> (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Gmaxwell). Such knobs would
> also encourage shed painting and create an unneccessary proliferation
> of additional versions.

What is "shed painting", and why would there be "additional versions"
exactly? I'm proposing either:
- parameters in [[Image: .... which would only be taken into account
when it's shown (do you mean the extra versions which would have to be
stored internally - is there a disk space problem?)
- parameters on the image page, which would be taken into account
everywhere it's used - only one version.

The current situation is the one that risks proliferating extra
versions, as you have to upload new files each time...

> > - rotate arbitrary angle
>
> I don't think this can be done without loading the entire uncompressed
> image into memory which pretty much makes it a non-starter.

Is this not the case for any of the other edits? I was kind of
presuming this would be the sort of thing where the first time the tag
was encountered, the image would be rotated then cached. But I don't
know much about how it works behind the scenes.

> It doesn't always play out so rosey...  Sometimes someone spends hours
> getting a photograph just right (because unlike wikitext, even in the
> best case 98% of the work must be done by a single photographer) and
> they are proud of their work. Then along comes a self appointed

We have a name for those: Featured Pictures. The vast majority of
user-created photos are happy snaps taken fairly quickly to illustrate
the topic. If someone chooses to post-process my photos, so much the
better!

> wiki-photo expert... who goofs up the image to fit his tastes on his
> uncalibrated display and insists that it's better. Perhaps the new
> version is more contrasty, with over pumped saturation and
> sharpness.... At first glance it's more eye catching, so other passers

Ok, again, I think your scenario where suddenly Wikipedia is overrun
with well-meaning, but tasteless editors destroying beautiful artwork
is demeaning, unkind, and just not accurate.

> by support the changed version, but it's lost it's depth, lost detail
> in the shadow, or just lost it's ability to captivate for more than a
> moment. Perhaps it's cropped to place the subject dead center,

Are we trying to captivate for much more than a moment? Sharp, bright,
high contrast images suit our encyclopaedic mission better.

> destroying the careful balence achieved in the photo which guides the
> eye...

Yep, I would probably crop photos to leave the subject dead centre,
maximising the encyclopaedic value of the photo for a given number of
pixels. Totally against the rule of two-thirds, but we're an
encyclopaedia, not an art school.

Don't forget, the original creator can always come back and undo the
changes, perhaps leaving a note to "please" not crop his image.

> We've had photographers leave in digust over this.

That sounds like a totally separate problem. It's already possble to
over-write each others' images, sounds like social solutions are
needed to that particular social problem.

> So I'm a bit hesitant to suggest we provided technical tools which may
> encourage bad aspects of our behavior.  But this has gone wayyyy
> off-topic now. :)  Once someone impliments some of this stuff we can
> debate the merits of turning it on.

IMHO, debating the merits of a proposed feature is perfectly on-topic.
I think some of your objections are a bit spurious, but that doesn't
make them off-topic...:)

Steve


list: foundation-l

from_name: Brad Patrick

subject:
[Foundation-l] Opinions/suggestions for "outside" members of
	the board?

body:
So does that mean you are in or out?

On 6/20/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 6/20/06, The Cunctator <cunctator at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I thought it was a pretty entertaining retort.
>
> Perhaps. Watching chimpanzees beat each other up can be pretty
> entertaining, too. But if we are to adopt the social standards of
> chimpanzees on this mailing list, I demand some free grooming.
>
> For the record, I have not criticized the people mentioned, and if my
> original message came across that way, I apologize. I have a lot of
> respect for all of them, and have worked closely with two of them. I
> have questioned the notion, as have others, of having opinionated
> outsiders on the _governing_ board of our organization (rather than in
> an advisory capacity), exactly because they are opinion leaders and
> very knowledgeable in the fields they work in, which are highly
> relevant to our day-to-day work, while having no involvement,
> experience and visibility in our community. I have mentioned before
> possible alternatives from other fields. None of them are me.
>
> The notion that I am campaigning here is absurd. There is no election,
> and I have about as much a chance of getting appointed as Daniel
> Brandt or Sollog. And what a great honor it would be to be allowed to
> waste away more hours for Wikimedia without pay, while receiving a
> litany of complaints from people who want their sock puppets checked,
> their admins tarred and feathered, or their crackpot theories about
> using orgasmic energy to run jet engines featured on the Main Page --
> all the while being accused of being part of some grand shadowy
> conspiracy to make every single human being on the planet read a copy
> of Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead". I've lived with a Board member for a
> year, I know how much fun it can be. Am I anxious, eager, enthusiastic
> about the idea of joining in? "No, Kiddo, at this moment, this is me
> at my most -- masochistic."
>
> Erik
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

--
Brad Patrick
General Counsel & Interim Executive Director
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
bradp.wmf at gmail.com
727-231-0101


list: wikimedia-l


list: wikien-l

from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [WikiEN-l] New York Times article

body:
On 6/20/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
> The Cunctator wrote:
> > Well, BoingBoing just published Jimmy's propagandistic stylings on
> > semi-protection (it's not a restriction, it's a freedom!) with the
> lovely
> > heading  "NYT falsely reports that Wikipedia has  added restrictions".
>
> Gee, that is hardly what I have said.  We used to fully protect in cases
> that we now semi-protect.  That's a net gain for openness.

I hope you'll get Boing Boing to correct their title.

> It's
> > difficult to tell and Wales isn't particularly interested in doing
> honest
> > critical analyses of the effects of his policies.
>
> Wow, that's a hell of a thing to say after we have known each other for
> years, and after I have spent a week gathering statistics and doing
> studies of how semi-protection is used.

Sorry. This is mainly a reference to the whole "Today, as an experiment, we
will be turning off new pages creation for anonymous users in the English
Wikipedia." I still think you were being a bit disingenuous (if
unintentially) about the experimentality of that decision.

Perhaps I shouldn't be so harsh -- I think you're essentially the best man
for the job, and as I admitted elsewhere in the thread, I'm prone to
hyperbole.

> As an admin, I've also turned
> > on/off semi-protection in various cases. I just wish people (aka Jimmy)
> > would be will to admit that there are shades of gray instead of shouting
> > that it's black and white.
>
> Excuse me?  I have spent the last several days writing dozens of
> journalists and bloggers explaining precisely this: that there are
> shades of gray and that the matter is much more complex than "Wikipedia
> is locking down" or "Wikipedia is total fucking chaos".

But when you go and write something like "The New York Times gets it exactly
backwards" that doesn't sound like someone explaining shades of gray. It
sounds like someone getting pulled into a black vs white fight (which is
easy enough to do--just look at how heated my rhetoric has been in response
to what you wrote in response to what they wrote).

> The truth is: Wikipedia is incredibly open,

Yes, yes, and yes.

and it is my intention that
> we look at the places where we have been unable to be open in the past,
> and find clever ways to slice those so that we are more open.  Like, for
> example, semi-protection instead of full protection.

I'm not sure we have identical definitions of openness. Sometimes not
letting anyone edit an article is more open than letting particular subsets
of people edit.

I think your motives are exactly right. I think sometimes your methods for
coming to decisions aren't always the best, and your understanding of the
nature of Wikipedia is imperfect. That's true of anybody, but you're a
special case, so you get criticism from the likes of me.

There's more, but rest assured that I do think about history.


subject: [WikiEN-l] New York Times article

body:
On 6/20/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:

> But, yes, it is absolutely not possible for me to claim credit for
> semi-protection.  It is a brilliant innovation that allows us to be more
> open than before, when we only had the tool of protection.  But it is
> not my innovation, and I do not know who first thought of it.

A quick note that might clear up some confusion on my part: what do you mean
by "more open" here? What's the metric?


from_name: Lord Voldemort

subject: [WikiEN-l] New York Times article

body:
On 6/20/06, The Cunctator <cunctator at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/20/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
> > But, yes, it is absolutely not possible for me to claim credit for
> > semi-protection.  It is a brilliant innovation that allows us to be more
> > open than before, when we only had the tool of protection.  But it is
> > not my innovation, and I do not know who first thought of it.
>
>
> A quick note that might clear up some confusion on my part: what do you mean
> by "more open" here? What's the metric?

He means that disputed articles that would have had to have been fully
protected, can now be semiprotected. That way more people (not just
admins) can edit the article, while potentially culling the problem.
Correct me if I'm wrong. --LV


from_name: James Hare

body:
Nah, Jimmy isn't turning into Anthere, nor is Anthere turning into Jimmy.

All the Wikimedians are very, very slowly merging and assimilating into each
other as one grand Wikimedia being.

On 6/20/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 6/20/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> > /me picks a bug from Erik hair.
>
> Scary. You are spending too much time on IRC AND adopting Anthere's
> grammatical structure. :-)
>
> Erik
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] New York Times article

body:
On 6/20/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 20 Jun 2006 17:37:21 -0400, "The Cunctator"
> <cunctator at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >Sorry. This is mainly a reference to the whole "Today, as an experiment,
> we
> >will be turning off new pages creation for anonymous users in the English
> >Wikipedia." I still think you were being a bit disingenuous (if
> >unintentially) about the experimentality of that decision.
>
> It worked, though.

What specifically were the effects?


subject: [WikiEN-l] New York Times article

body:
On 6/20/06, Lord Voldemort <lordbishopvoldemort at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> He means that disputed articles that would have had to have been fully
> protected, can now be semiprotected. That way more people (not just
> admins) can edit the article, while potentially culling the problem.
> Correct me if I'm wrong. --LV

I'm being somewhat Socratic here, but how do we decide when an article "has
to" be protected? Who decides? Does giving admins yet another power increase
the divide between admins and everyone else? To what degree is that a
problem? Does giving admins more tools give them more responsibility for
policing, making the average user less responsible? Etc. There are actually
some complicated questions here.

An imperfect analogy can be seen in 9/11 -- all the glorious powers and
authority of the military and uniformed security people and official
communications methods did nothing, but the unarmed passengers with
cellphones and friends and family found out what happened and acted
collectively to try to stop Flight 93. In some situations an elite police
force is less optimal than expecting everybody to pull their weight.


from_name: Ilmari Karonen

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Fwd: [MediaWiki-CVS] SVN:
	[14835]	trunk/phase3/languages/Messages.php

body:
Rob Church wrote:
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: rotem at svn.leuksman.com <rotem at svn.leuksman.com>
> Date: 20-Jun-2006 10:56
> Subject: [MediaWiki-CVS] SVN:  [14835] trunk/phase3/languages/Messages.php
> To: mediawiki-cvs at wikimedia.org
>
> Fixes per Gangleri's request:
> * Replacing {{ns:X}} with the real namespace names, for performance -
> except for "administrators" which is directly shown.
> * Removing the obsolete underscores from the log pages.

--
Ilmari Karonen


subject: [WikiEN-l] New York Times article

body:
On 6/20/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 20 Jun 2006 18:10:54 -0400, "The Cunctator"
> <cunctator at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> [re no anonymous creation]
> >What specifically were the effects?
>
> A massive reduction in "things made up in school one day", and
> consequently the speedy deletion queue.  Or so it seems to me - I no
> longer do newpage patrol though (appeared to be much less to do after
> that change).  But you know how it is, if there were a strong
> community consensus in favour of going back I bet it would happen.

Didn't speedy deletion get implemented around the same time or even after
the change?

I guess my point is that Wikipedia is too complicated and big to draw firm
conclusions from any one's anecdotal experience, and attempts at rigorous
analysis should be encouraged.


body:
Rob Church wrote:
>
> Fixes per Gangleri's request:
> * Replacing {{ns:X}} with the real namespace names, for performance -
> except for "administrators" which is directly shown.
>
> I went through the messages files and replaced certain instances of
> {{ns:blah}} with canonical names a while ago, per Domas' request. This
> change is a little bit needless, since those messages aren't used in
> all page views, so the performance hit is reduced. What does happen is
> a less intuitive interface readout.

Is this a significant performance issue?  When editing the MediaWiki
messages on enwiki, I've been habitually replacing [[X:Foo]] with
[[{{ns:X}}:Foo]] to make it easier to copy the messages over to other
projects with different namespace names.  Should I only do this for
{{ns:Project}}, on the assumption that the other namespaces will have
the same names on most English projects?  Or should I avoid using
{{ns:}} entirely?  Does it only matter for some messages?

--
Ilmari Karonen


from_name: Neil Harris

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Eliminating homographs in usernames: was: Re: Pruning
 "dead" accounts (was Re: New York Times article)

body:
Chris L?er wrote:
> At 09:59 AM 6/19/2006, Guettarda wrote:
>
>
>> Don't forget the accounts which exist to prevent impersonation in one's main
>> language - names with capital I's to mimic L's and Cyrillic characters.
>> Deleting these would just open things up for abuse again.
>>
>
> Is there are a reason why user names with weird Unicode characters
> are even allowed? It would seem sensible to limit user names on each
> Wikipedia to the alphabet that is used in that language.
>
>          Chl
>
>
>
A suggestion, based on practices used for IDN registration:

Restrict new usernames on the en: Wikipedia to characters from the Latin
alphabet and selected punctuation only (and possibly digits as well).

Before allowing a username to be registered, generate a canonical
comparison form by Unicode normalization, lowercasing, punctuation and
space suppression and accent-stripping, followed by homograph
canonicalizations such as mapping both digit zero and letter O to the
latter, digit 1 and letter L to the latter, eth to lowercase d, etc.

A new username should then only be allowed to be registered if the
comparison form of the proposed new username is different from the
comparison form of every existing username (which are stored in an
indexed table, alongside the full, uncanonicalized name that actually
gets registered).

Doing this will eliminate the vast majority of all simple username
spoofing hacks.

Existing usernames get grandfathered in, of course.

-- Neil


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Eliminating homographs in usernames: was: Re:
 [WikiEN-l] Pruning "dead" accounts (was Re: New York Times article)


list: commons-l

from_name: Brianna Laugher

subject: [Commons-l] Image donations?

body:
On 20/06/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/15/06, Magnus Manske <magnus.manske at web.de> wrote:
> > I was wondering if there is some kind of organized effort to ask
> > photographers and image agencies for donations (read: GFDL- or
> > CC-licensing) of images.
>
> Last year I thought a bit about the idea of having a dedicated "image
> fundraising" campaign for Commons, which could perhaps run alongside
> the next regular fundraiser. The idea is that there would be a
> simplified upload process, and a post-upload vetting system to
> determine which material is actually useful.

Er...you mean for the general public? I support seeking image
donations for historical topics or specific holes in our coverage, but
I don't know that we need more general amatuer
my-dog-in-my-backyard,sunset-over-my-fence,my-street-my-school-my-car
whatever photos. It seems to me the vetting system would have to
discard 90% of what they were offered, so I rather question if it
would be a worthwhile exercise.

Also given how much trouble even Wikipedians have understanding that
WM content can be used commercially, it might be very difficult to
succinctly put across the extent to which a free license is free.

Also, and this is a more general comment, there is still quite a
disconnect between Commons and the projects, although it is definitely
getting better as more projects switch to Commons-only and just time
goes on. Sometimes there is a wealth of good pictures on Commons and
no link on the WP article, or worse still no image at all. Sometimes
(or often?) the beautiful FP nominations are not used in any Wikimedia
project, anywhere!! Now I really wonder about that. We almost need
another "project" of Commons people pushing the best content to all
the WPs (they tend to be the most straightforward to illustrate for
outsiders, plus maybe Wiktionary). So, I don't see that there is a
good point to ask for image donations if we are not going to have
people ensuring that the images will actually be used in some
Wikimedia project. Same with the FlickrLickr content. Sitting around
Commons is nice for us, but it could be so much better...

and yes I know in some cases a Commons gallery is a natural extension
of a W* page. not every image has to be a lead photo, obviously.

Back to the topic of image donations. Not just image donations,
actually - it would be really good if we could find out if there were
some unis with, for example, recorded speech excerpts or phonemes or
whatever, that they were willing to donate. Someone would have to
convert them to OGG. This would be fantastic support for Wikibooks
language-learning books as well as linguistics articles in /all/
language Wikipedias. I don't know how good our recordings are of
clicks and trills, or uvuvular sounds, for example, are. It would be
great to have native speakers' recordings.

I just wonder how hard it is to convince unis to tighten their grip on
the IP rights...

cheers,
Brianna


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject:
[Foundation-l] Opinions/suggestions for "outside" members of
 the board?

body:
Anthere wrote:
>>> One problem I have with your list and with Jimbo's list is that they
>>> propose very few great candidates from Korea or Madagascar.
>>
>> I agree with this concern, but how to address it?  I do not know of any
>> prominent leaders either "outside" or "inside" Wikipedia from either
>> Korea or Madagascar... or similar places.
>>
>> It is not hard to find community leaders in France and Germany and
>> Holland and Italy and... all of the countries where the "international
>> crowd" has good connections.
>
> Since you have been travelling all over the world for now 2 years at
> least, I suppose you met some of those community leaders yourself.
>
> Have you some names to suggest which we could hack ?

Well, I haven't been to Korea or Madagascar. :)

My travels have been mostly in Europe and the US.

In Taiwan, I met and liked very much Theodoranian and KJ.  (I met many
more Wikimedians there too, but those are the two with whom I spent the
most time).

In India, I met no Wikipedians who are very active.

In Brazil, I met no Wikipedians at all... but I am going there next week
(so is Soufron) and hopefully there will be a meetup in Rio.

The truth is, I am as Eurocentric as anyone, both in my travels and in
my community friendships.... with possibly a bit more as mentioned above.

--
#######################################################################
#    Office: 1-727-231-0101       |  Free Culture and  Free Knowledge #
#    http://www.wikipedia.org     |     Building a free world         #
#######################################################################


from_name: Fadix

subject: [WikiEN-l] Blocked for 36 hours

body:
                          I am writting this here, because I expect that my request for unblock will be again ignored and this is for me the only way to get the point accross.

 I won't go as far as claiming that Administrators seem to support eachothers and rather decide to not comment on other administrators misbehaviors, but I kind of think that abuses of administrator privilages should be condemned severly. I am really not OK with this situation, and I think that until Inshaneee is not warned he will continue abusing and using his situation of autority.

 On my June 7 blocking I have requested an unblock, and have been unblocked only few minutes before the block expires, since I have questioned Inshaneee administrator capability this user has warned me in every given opportunities. And the reason of the 7 June blocking was his provocation when he warned me for this edit I made. [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Nakhichevan&diff=prev&oldid=57135157]

 I requested from any administrator to come and confirm that this was a warning material, and I have recieved no answer. And now this user block me for 36 hours, I don't accept the autority of this administrator, and I believe that any administrator that has a history of conflict against a user should accept this users request to leave others handle it. I have already provided the relevant materials which I believe evidence that this administrator takes this really personal (example, him signing a RfC about me about issues which he wasn't ever involved in, and had not edited once those articles after my critic, see further detail about this here [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents&diff=prev&oldid=54751548]).

 After his provocation, which was simply put an abuses of administrator privilages, it was kind of expected that I will oppose to his 'autority' which he would further use as pretext to block me. I think I highline pretty well the situation here during my first block as to why I don't consider this administrator fit to his job. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Fadix#Civility_again]

 While this administrator claims doing this in all good faith, that he hasn't warned the other side of the dispute for much worst and which I have provided examples of is again another evidences that since the day I have cricised his uses of the privilages this administrator will find any insignificant occasions to warn me for a possible block when it would take two seconds to edit the one or two words which he consider as personal attack in an answer of hundreds if not over a thousand word.

 Even an arbitration cases won't block a user from editing everything for three days and total blocks are only applied in severe case.

---------------------------------
Make free worldwide PC-to-PC calls. Try the new Yahoo! Canada Messenger with Voice


from_name: Jesse W

subject: [WikiEN-l] Exit Interview -- Jon Awbrey

body:
I appreciate your thoughts here.  Please do not let the
(understandable) less-than-serious/oh-there's-nothing-wrong responses
stop you from posting.

On Jun 20, 2006, at 2:02 PM, Jon Awbrey wrote:
> o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o
<snip>
> If you read what I have written so far, it should be clear that
> I am not disputing any of the fine sentiments in [[WP:POLICY]],
> nor am I disputing the 3RR action.  I cited those details only
> because people have been asking me for more concrete examples
> of things that are leading me to say what I've been saying
> from Post 1.
And I appreciate you doing that.  However, as you said above, the
specific thing that happened to you isn't the real problem.  As I
understand it, the real problem, in your view, is that disruptive
editors are able to use our rules and practices to gain regular,
consistent advantage over good editors.  I believe this is possible -
what would be most useful from you would be your specific, detailed
thoughts on how this occurs (what methods the disruptive editors use,
etc.), and (if you have them) suggestions on what we might to do solve
the problem.  You've hinted at such things, mentioning sockpuppet
issues, but it would be great if you could lay them out in specific
detail.  It seems like you may be planning to do this, if so, just take
this as further evidence that you should. ;-)

Thanks again for your criticism ,

	Jesse Weinstein


body:
Re: "crop" and "zoom" - seems like it would have very undesirable
"suprise" consequences if the original file was replaced (and changed
dimensions - for example if it itself was cropped).

Sharpness could be good though. See
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump#Low_sharpness
for a striking example.

cheers,
Brianna


from_name: George Herbert

subject: [WikiEN-l] More quotes from AfD

body:
On 6/20/06, Cobb <sealclubbingfun at googlemail.com> wrote:
> One criticism of AFDs is that after the second day, the only
> people who still bother to vote/comment are those with
> an interest in the article.

I can't read it every day.  I end up doing so every 2-3 days
typically, sometimes once a week.

--
-george william herbert
gherbert at retro.com / george.herbert at gmail.com


body:
On 6/20/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> The work curve today discourages casual modification.. it's both good
> and bad.  If I spend four hours preparing an image, I'd feel better if
> the next person in line spend more than four seconds considering his
> changes. :)

It's a social problem. We can come up with a "please don't edit this
unless you're willing to face the consequences" template. Easily.

> > What is "shed painting", and why would there be "additional versions"
> > exactly? I'm proposing either:
>
> It's hyperlinked! Follow the link.

Oh that. Parkinson's law.

> Extra parameters in [[Image:]] create scaling problems. If we have a
> million images, then we'll have at a minimum of around a million
> thumbs. If people tend to use two sizes, two million thumbs. If they
> tend ti have two different rotations four million thumbs.   It's not
> so much a disk space issue as it is an ability for the operating
> system and other software to scale to handling tens of millions of
> small files.

Isn't this currently the case? Or are thumbnails currently dynamically
generated?

> > The current situation is the one that risks proliferating extra
> > versions, as you have to upload new files each time...
>
> Would you actually have multiple rotations though? If not, and you
> were indeed making a correction you overwrite the original.

Uh, this is a wiki. Unless I'm mistaken, we currently store old
revisions of images, and this is not a problem. I'm not sure why it
should suddenly become a problem because we allow a new way of
modifying (that is, creating new revisions of) images.

> All the other changes could pretty simply be done without
> decompressing the entire image. (We don't fully decompress jpegs for
> resizing today, but we do PNGs.. which is why PNGs have tighter size
> constraints.. people were running the servers out of ram with huge PNG
> maps)... Rotation OTOH would be much harder to accomplish
> incrementally.

Incrementally? I'll leave that one to the image manipulation specialists.

> Fair enough... although the shed painting is sometimes the worst on
> Featured Pictures... Most people don't care to correct your happy
> snapshots.

Precisely. It's too much hard work for too little benefit. If all they
had to do was click the image, drag two scrollbars and click "save",
then maybe they would. Well, I would.

> It's cost us good photographers. Wikipedia isn't overrun by goons, but
> we're desperately short of real photographers.

Again, social problem. Hell, protect these wonderful photographers'
precious artworks if it will help keep them in the project. This is a
very minor portion of the total number of photos, and not worth
stressing over.

> > Are we trying to captivate for much more than a moment? Sharp, bright,
> > high contrast images suit our encyclopaedic mission better.
>
> No, we're trying to be tasteful, professional, and most of all
> informative.  If we were just trying to push people's attention
> buttons we could make all the images flash, and make the text red on
> yellow.

Ok, you're being silly.

> How does placing the subject dead center maximizes the encyclopedic
> value of an image?   Yes, perhaps you could see a few more hairs in

Depends what the subject is. But fairly evidently, the more stuff in
the thumbnail (and we are talking about the thumbnail that appears in
the article here - the full picture is still accessible) that is
relevant to the article, the better. Our thumbnails are already small,
like 200x150. If 100x150 of that is empty space caused by artistic
positioning, then we've lost a lot of possible informational content.
There are times and places for it - but small images that illustrate
an article are not them.

> someones eyebrow with a tighter composition, but if someone needs to
> see that they can click for the full screen version... Worse, by
> overcropping you distort perspective and create an unnatural balance
> which is potentially distracting.

So don't overcrop.

> If we wrote our text in some sort of compressed always machine
> parsable English we could probably express more ideas in a given
> number of words... but thats not what we do because the value to the
> reader is increased through brilliant prose.

Your example is good - we *do* cut waffle, and we *do* cut all the
background discussion that you need to understand the article, or we
put it down the bottom of the article, out of the way. Our lead
paragraphs are idea-rich, information-dense text exactly comparable to
cropping and increasing contrast in our thumbnails. Your example of
"compressed always machine parsable English" might be comparable with
"overcropping" - taking the idea too far and losing context.

> And they are reminded that it's a collaborative project not an
> exclusive photo publishing ground (unless we're talking about
> wikinews)... And, of course, thats quite right.  A balance is
> required, and far too often people simple change without asking.

Far too often people modify each others' images?? Thoroughly disagree
- far too often, people are not bold, hence why most of our images
look as though they came straight out of the digital camera, without
passing the photoshop square, and without collecting $200.

> I'm a big advocate of socal soutions to social problems... but I'd
> prefer that the technoligy not make things worse while we're trying to
> figure things out. :) Perhaps that would happen, perhaps it wouldn't..
> I'm not sure.

Just remember that Wikipedia couldn't possibly work.

> I don't know how to solve it... We have very few real photographers
> participating... a majority of our photo involved folks are primarly
> finding free images on the web, or just skimming their snapshot
> collections, so the culture of image alteration is very different from
> what it would be  if more people were photographers.

And better image manipulation tools would discourage real photographers?

Steve


body:
On 6/20/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> The challenge is that if their version sits orphaned it might as well
> not exist.  I don't believe that we should let prima donnas prevent us
> from having high quality content... But when someone did a awesome job
> with 98% of a picture (subject, composition, lighting, image quality,
> etc) and there is 2% which is highly subjective/viewer dependant which
> remains debatable (altered saturation, contrast, sharpening)... we
> should probably trust the person who got the 98% right to make the
> call on the rest, given our input. That it also keeps the photographer
> happy contributing is a secondary, but critical, effect.

Where is all this coming from? Wikipedia is a collaborative project.
Take a look at WP:FPC on en, and you will see that almost every
user-submitted image gets one or more edits applied to it to boost its
quality, then we vote on our favourite. Generally, this collaborative
image-manipulation process works quite well. If there are some
photographers who prefer not to take part in that, that's fine, and
I'm sure people would respect their requests if they were made clearly
on their image pages.

This really is an abnormal scenario though.

Steve


from_name: Bryan Derksen

subject: [WikiEN-l] "the experiment" - did it work?

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
>> It worked, though.
>
> It is not clear to me that it did.  I would love for us to have some
> serious analysis of that.

I don't mean to be contentious on this issue, but whenever it comes up
it kind of bugs me that no serious analysis was apparently even
_planned_. One can't really call something an "experiment" if one
doesn't intend to analyze at the results.

It seems to me that there should be some relatively straightforward
facts and figures that could be dug out of the edit history database on
this. Perhaps a graph of the average age of deleted articles would do
for a start; a drop in speedy deletion compared to other forms of
deletion should result in an increase in the average age of articles
upon deletion.

> My sense is that the number of articles created by unknown people is
> about the same, but that they now sign up for an account first.  This is
> not helpful, because whereas before we had the rough indicator of "ip
> number equals newbie" (imperfect), we now have less of an indicator.

In this case we'd see a significant increase in the number of new
accounts that make just a few edits after creation and then are abandoned.

> There is also the question of whether the net production of new articles
> by ip numbers was sufficiently worthwhile to mean that preventing those
> cost more than it was worth.

A bit harder to judge numerically since it involves "worth" judgements,
but how about looking at the rate of creation of articles that aren't
deleted within a week of their creation? That gives articles time to go
through the full AfD gauntlet, which (perhaps debatably :) acts as
worth-based filter. All ideas are just off the top of my head, of course.

Fortunately thanks to Wikipedia's retention of full edit and deletion
histories one can still do detailed analysis after the fact. But IMO
this should have already been prepared for before the switch was thrown.

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subject:
[WikiEN-l] Pruning "dead" accounts (was Re: New York Times
	article)

body:
Chris L?er wrote:
>> Don't forget the accounts which exist to prevent impersonation in one's main
>> language - names with capital I's to mimic L's and Cyrillic characters.
>> Deleting these would just open things up for abuse again.
>
> Is there are a reason why user names with weird Unicode characters
> are even allowed? It would seem sensible to limit user names on each
> Wikipedia to the alphabet that is used in that language.

Well, some people have real names with weird unicode letters, Chris
L?er. ;-)

--
#######################################################################
#    Office: 1-727-231-0101       |  Free Culture and  Free Knowledge #
#    http://www.wikipedia.org     |     Building a free world         #
#######################################################################


from_name: Redvers @ the Wikipedia

subject: [WikiEN-l] More quotes from AfD

body:
From: Mark Gallagher
> its only *current* problems can be
> cured if we're
> willing to put in the effort.

Well, always one to be clever-clever, I thought I'd
put Mark to the test and spend 24 hours policing AfD.

And you know what? He's right. A little less moaning
on about AfD here and a bit more work on AfD itself
and you can start seeing a change.

1) Cut down the size of AfD by removing the malformed
ones as they appear.

2) Cut down the size of AfD by spotting the speedy
ones mistakenly nominated for the full process in good
faith and killing them off immediately.

3) Reverse those who would tag a disputed AfD for
speedy delete anyway and administer a slap for it so
they don't do it again.

4) Make those who shout "speedy delete!" state a
[[WP:CSD]] criterion for it. Don't listen to squirming
on the subject.

After doing those four steps - easy and satifying -
you're left with an AfD process that makes more sense.

Also, you immediately see a change in user behaviour.
Screams for out-of-process speedy deletions have
quietened a little since this morning. A day or so
more of sharp slaps to those advocating them and the
problem will be in abeyance.

The nominations left are, broadly:

1) Ones that have a snowball's chance of surviving but
deserve to go through the process

2) Ones that have a snowball's chance of being deleted
but deserve to go through the process

3) Those where people have completely grasped the
wrong end of the AfD and CSD stick

4) Those that are content disputes pretending to be
AfD cases

Of those, 1 and 2 can be left to get on with it. 4 can
be watched to see if the AfD process can produce a
better article or solve the dispute by proxy, with no
need to get involved other than to remove the speedy
notices also tagged to the article by the people
discussing the article.

That leave the sticky problem of 3, where the AfD
process is most broken. For instance,
[[Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/John-Hedley Desmond
Lucy McConnell]] deserved to be deleted under existing
AfD precident. But it didn't deserve speedy deleting
and certainly not under CSD-G4, having never come to
AfD before, having attracted robotic "G4 speedy and
edit protect" votes (and they were votes) from the
clueless, and having altered in format since the first
CSD deletion.

So that helps narrow down the problem with AfD
(although it gets us nowhere nearer a solution).

So, as I said, Mark is right and less complaining here
and more work on AfD is the best course of action.

If nothing else, an hour spent on "AfD Patrol" gets
more done and gets us closer to understanding what the
future for AfD is than an hour spent emailing this
list.

IMHO.

->REDVERS

___________________________________________________________
All New Yahoo! Mail ? Tired of Vi at gr@! come-ons? Let our SpamGuard protect you. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html


from_name: Mark Williamson

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Eliminating homographs in usernames: was: Re:
	[WikiEN-l] Pruning "dead" accounts (was Re: New York Times article)

body:
One thing that could be done is to make a list of homographs -- most
of them are rather obvious -- and to consider, for example,
User:??tth?w.?r?wn as "taken" as soon as the username
User:Matthew.Brown is registered (in case you couldn't tell, the
former uses several Cyrillic letters).

The question you may ask is, why would people want characters from
multiple scripts? The answer is that, depending on the language, this
may be fashionable, a pun, or have some other effect. For example, a
username such as User:????jp is not unreasonable to allow for ja.wp,
especially for a Japanese person named Shiro Tanaka.

Also, with some scripts, there are few or no homographs with certain
other scripts -- for example, Hiragana and Basic Latin have no
homographs, you can add Hangul, most Indic scripts, Thai...

Mark

On 20/06/06, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> Neil Harris wrote:
> > A suggestion, based on practices used for IDN registration:
> >
> > Restrict new usernames on the en: Wikipedia to characters from the Latin
> > alphabet and selected punctuation only (and possibly digits as well).
> >
> > Before allowing a username to be registered, generate a canonical
> > comparison form by Unicode normalization, lowercasing, punctuation and
> > space suppression and accent-stripping, followed by homograph
> > canonicalizations such as mapping both digit zero and letter O to the
> > latter, digit 1 and letter L to the latter, eth to lowercase d, etc.
> >
> > A new username should then only be allowed to be registered if the
> > comparison form of the proposed new username is different from the
> > comparison form of every existing username (which are stored in an
> > indexed table, alongside the full, uncanonicalized name that actually
> > gets registered).
> >
> > Doing this will eliminate the vast majority of all simple username
> > spoofing hacks.
> >
> > Existing usernames get grandfathered in, of course.
>
> Yes, we could do it based on normalisation. Another option would be to
> disallow cross-script usernames.
>
> Chris L?er wrote:
> > Is there are a reason why user names with weird Unicode characters
> > are even allowed? It would seem sensible to limit user names on each
> > Wikipedia to the alphabet that is used in that language.
>
> On the English Wikipedia we could potentially limit usernames to basic
> latin, but on the other wikis it's not so simple. Wikis which use another
> alphabet for the main text often have a large number of usernames which are
> written in ASCII.
>
> Most homograph pairs occur across scripts, because within scripts,
> characters are typically intended to be distinguishable. There are a few
> unfortunate exceptions, such as l and I in some sans serif fonts, and if
> you're not watching closely you can be fooled by substitutions such as I->1
> and 0->O. But I would argue that users should most certainly be watching
> closely before they go pointing the finger at an established user. You can't
> protect against all forms of stupidity, an established user once told me
> "actually it looks like I did do that edit", when a vandal with an all
> lowercase surname impersonated a user who conventionally capitalises the
> first letter.
>
> Anyway, what I recommend is:
>
> * Disallow control character ranges. I think this one is already
> implemented.
> * Disallow usernames which take letters from multiple scripts. Exceptions
> would have to be made for certain punctuation and number characters.
> * Remove errant composing characters by normalisation. This could be done
> silently during Title creation, like first-letter capitalisation.
>
> -- Tim Starling
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

--
Refije dirije lanm? yo paske nou posede pw?p bato.


body:
...also, these names would be easy to spot if you used a
Unicode-incapable browser. Not that I encourage that, though.

Mark

On 20/06/06, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> One thing that could be done is to make a list of homographs -- most
> of them are rather obvious -- and to consider, for example,
> User:??tth?w.?r?wn as "taken" as soon as the username
> User:Matthew.Brown is registered (in case you couldn't tell, the
> former uses several Cyrillic letters).
>
> The question you may ask is, why would people want characters from
> multiple scripts? The answer is that, depending on the language, this
> may be fashionable, a pun, or have some other effect. For example, a
> username such as User:????jp is not unreasonable to allow for ja.wp,
> especially for a Japanese person named Shiro Tanaka.
>
> Also, with some scripts, there are few or no homographs with certain
> other scripts -- for example, Hiragana and Basic Latin have no
> homographs, you can add Hangul, most Indic scripts, Thai...
>
> Mark
>
> On 20/06/06, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> > Neil Harris wrote:
> > > A suggestion, based on practices used for IDN registration:
> > >
> > > Restrict new usernames on the en: Wikipedia to characters from the Latin
> > > alphabet and selected punctuation only (and possibly digits as well).
> > >
> > > Before allowing a username to be registered, generate a canonical
> > > comparison form by Unicode normalization, lowercasing, punctuation and
> > > space suppression and accent-stripping, followed by homograph
> > > canonicalizations such as mapping both digit zero and letter O to the
> > > latter, digit 1 and letter L to the latter, eth to lowercase d, etc.
> > >
> > > A new username should then only be allowed to be registered if the
> > > comparison form of the proposed new username is different from the
> > > comparison form of every existing username (which are stored in an
> > > indexed table, alongside the full, uncanonicalized name that actually
> > > gets registered).
> > >
> > > Doing this will eliminate the vast majority of all simple username
> > > spoofing hacks.
> > >
> > > Existing usernames get grandfathered in, of course.
> >
> > Yes, we could do it based on normalisation. Another option would be to
> > disallow cross-script usernames.
> >
> > Chris L?er wrote:
> > > Is there are a reason why user names with weird Unicode characters
> > > are even allowed? It would seem sensible to limit user names on each
> > > Wikipedia to the alphabet that is used in that language.
> >
> > On the English Wikipedia we could potentially limit usernames to basic
> > latin, but on the other wikis it's not so simple. Wikis which use another
> > alphabet for the main text often have a large number of usernames which are
> > written in ASCII.
> >
> > Most homograph pairs occur across scripts, because within scripts,
> > characters are typically intended to be distinguishable. There are a few
> > unfortunate exceptions, such as l and I in some sans serif fonts, and if
> > you're not watching closely you can be fooled by substitutions such as I->1
> > and 0->O. But I would argue that users should most certainly be watching
> > closely before they go pointing the finger at an established user. You can't
> > protect against all forms of stupidity, an established user once told me
> > "actually it looks like I did do that edit", when a vandal with an all
> > lowercase surname impersonated a user who conventionally capitalises the
> > first letter.
> >
> > Anyway, what I recommend is:
> >
> > * Disallow control character ranges. I think this one is already
> > implemented.
> > * Disallow usernames which take letters from multiple scripts. Exceptions
> > would have to be made for certain punctuation and number characters.
> > * Remove errant composing characters by normalisation. This could be done
> > silently during Title creation, like first-letter capitalisation.
> >
> > -- Tim Starling
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikitech-l mailing list
> > Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
> >
>
>
> --
> Refije dirije lanm? yo paske nou posede pw?p bato.
>

--
Refije dirije lanm? yo paske nou posede pw?p bato.


from_name: amgine at saewyc.net

body:
On Tue, 2006-20-06 at 14:54 +0200, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Anthere wrote:
> > One problem I have with your list and with Jimbo's list is that they
> > propose very few great candidates from Korea or Madagascar.
>
> I agree with this concern, but how to address it?  I do not know of any
> prominent leaders either "outside" or "inside" Wikipedia from either
> Korea or Madagascar... or similar places.

South Korean figures:
* Oh Yeon Ho
*: Founder and CEO of OhMyNews
* Lee Kun-hee
*: Chairman of Samsung
* Kim Chong-Won
*: Founder and CEO of SKC Corporation
* Kim Jeong-Hoon
*: Head of Bell Labs, USA, among other positions

Melagasy (Madagascar) figures:

* Raharimanana
*: Teacher, journalist, and author (in French)
* Mich?le Rakotoson
*: Writer, journalist, film maker

This is by no means a reasonably complete list; merely a selection of
figures notable enough to have entries in the English WP.

Amgine


list: textbook-l

from_name: Michael R. Irwin

subject: [Textbook-l] Wikiversity

body:
Jon wrote:

>A number of comments:
>
>1. If the aim is to provide multimedia learning materials for all age
>groups, not just university-level, then Wikiversity is a very bad name.
>Go for another one - Wikilearning, Wikicollege, Wikischool, something
>else. Just something which does not automatically imply that it is just
>for university-level learning. Otherwise, you will put off a lot of your
>target audience just with the name. Seriously. Give a dog a bad name...
>well, you know the rest.
>
>
We do not necessarily want a lot of kids to show up by themselves with
no supervision from parents, teachers or other adults.   Wikiversity
captures the essence of a University which is provide a place where
scholars and students and participants of all kinds get together to
collaborate on the exchange of knowledge.    A high school in the U.S.
focuses competition and keeping the kids from working together too much
to make evaluation of each child or student's progress easy.  I suppose
one could capture this competitive model with a wiki but it seems an
outmoded approach whe the internet is proving that collaboration between
widely separated people physcially scattered across the planet can excel
and even begin to supercede individual efforts.

>
>2. Do bear in mind that Wikibooks does use multimedia already -
>at least in terms of audio files - and will wish to continue to do so. Some
>textbooks already have exercises and Q&As. If these can be made
>more dynamic on Wikibooks in the future, then I'm sure they will. Audio
>textbooks also, to my mind, fall within Wikibooks' domain. It's not
>clear to me whether the Wikiversity proposal seeks to dilute effort
>on these elements of textbooks, or not.
>
>
The Wikiversity proposal seeks to dilute nothing already in progress in
other projects.   Rather provide a workspace where participants not
quite ready to provide top notch outstanding materials for the other
projects can work.  If the combined efforts of Wikiversity's
participants start to produce excellent materials for the other wiki
projects, the materials can be forked or transwiki'ed and linked to as
appropriate for maintenance for serving to the general public.
Wikibooks does not necessarily want aggressive students or participants
changing their best material without a reasonable time delay and
validation of the new material.   Wikiversity allow a workspace where
less capable participants just learning the material can make their
tweaks and have lengthy discussions without distracting higher level
authors or the public from the already existing excellent material
deemed worthy to be served to the general public.

>
>3. The aims Cormac lists for Wikiversity do not appear to agree with
>Michael Irwin's aims for Wikiversity. If the scope is not clear amongst
>the potential initial participants, it sure won't be clear amongst potential
>students.
>
>
The scope is as clear as it can hope to be without some participants
trying a few things and finding out what works.  There has been
substantial discussion and several approaches identified with varying
levels of support from various people kind enough or interested in the
the project to donate their time commenting on what they think will work
or is or is not a good idea.  In my view you are absolutely correct.
There will be substantial discussion and trial and error amongth the
initial participants as a common vision of Wikiversity that is
satisfactory to the rest of Wikimedia Community and attractive enough to
new participants to thrive and grow.

Cormac and I disagree primarily on initial tactics to initialize the
project efficiently.   I think we both agree substantially in our vision
of what a Wikiversity might become.  The question of how to attract
sufficient participation to achieve a critical mass where anyone who
drops in or hears about Wikiversity understands intuitively how they can
benefit from the project while productively contributing to a project
that will substantially impact the future of the internet and thus the
human species.

>
>4. Wikiversity seems very ambitious (more ambitious than Wikibooks, and
>Wikibooks, to date, has not yet delivered as much as we would wish). It's
>fair to ask - however noble the ideas- why you think they will work.
>
>Kind regards
>
>Jon
>
>
I think Wikiversity will work and augment at least Wikipedia and
Wikibooks substantially because in the front of every hundred dollar
physics, engineering, computer science, technical writing or poetry
textbook I have ever purchase there is a substantial forward or credits
page detailing the authors appreciation of the cast of hundreds if not
thousands of assistants, editors, users, etc. who have contributed in
some significant way to improving the draft version or previous edition
of the book.    As we lay out learning materials or learning trails or
learning activities at Wikiversity we will naturally be routing
interested traffic through useful materials at Wikipedia, Wiktionary,
and Wikibooks as well as other potentially useful sites around the
internet.   All of the Wiki communities are setup to capture and thrive
on diffuse input from casual users as well as higher level busy experts
who wander by with comments.  I see Wikiversity as a way to encourage
larger volumes of Wiki users at all levels from the internet accessible
people around the planet who are interested in specific learning
communities but not so dedicated as to tackle an entire high quality
encyclopedia article or textbook.

Further, a static high quality data product can become intimidating and
inaccessible to new users whereas an entire learning community or group
will include people at all levels who can help each other understand
difficult concepts poorly expressed in the current top level material or
help each other find appropriate level material expressed via an
appropriate paradigm to match the participant having difficulties.

Thanks for your interest and queries regarding Wikiversity.

regards,
lazyquasar


from_name: Vancouver University - Worldwide University

subject: [WikiEN-l]  Re: Vancouver university

body:
Why don't you folk (including that ODA weirdo Contreras)
take the time to read the http://www.VancouverUniversity.ca
                                     http://www.WorldwideUniversity.edu
website.

--
Internal Virus Database is out-of-date.
Checked by AVG Anti-Virus.
Version: 7.0.300 / Virus Database: 268.8.4 - Release Date: 6/13/2006


subject: [Foundation-l] the easy way or the less easy way

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

>>
>>
>I think it's sufficient to agree that the by-laws as a whole do not
>reflect the principles that drew us to this venture.
>
>
It might be useful sometime to have a discussion of what specific
reasons beyond the big gigantic principals or goals of changing the
world people have for being here.

Often people are motivated by extremely different personal goals to
participate effectively in a project.  If the personal goals are not met
for sufficient participation then the project will fail to meet its
larger overall goals.

regards,
lazyquasar


body:
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
>
> Extra parameters in [[Image:]] create scaling problems. If we have a
> million images, then we'll have at a minimum of around a million
> thumbs. If people tend to use two sizes, two million thumbs. If they
> tend ti have two different rotations four million thumbs.   It's not
> so much a disk space issue as it is an ability for the operating
> system and other software to scale to handling tens of millions of
> small files.

I don't think this would make things any worse than they are now.  In my
experience, whenever an image is used on more than one page (counting
use in a template as one use), more often than not each page already has
it in a different size.

--
Ilmari Karonen


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
On 6/20/06, The Cunctator <cunctator at gmail.com> wrote:
> I thought it was a pretty entertaining retort.

Perhaps. Watching chimpanzees beat each other up can be pretty
entertaining, too. But if we are to adopt the social standards of
chimpanzees on this mailing list, I demand some free grooming.

For the record, I have not criticized the people mentioned, and if my
original message came across that way, I apologize. I have a lot of
respect for all of them, and have worked closely with two of them. I
have questioned the notion, as have others, of having opinionated
outsiders on the _governing_ board of our organization (rather than in
an advisory capacity), exactly because they are opinion leaders and
very knowledgeable in the fields they work in, which are highly
relevant to our day-to-day work, while having no involvement,
experience and visibility in our community. I have mentioned before
possible alternatives from other fields. None of them are me.

The notion that I am campaigning here is absurd. There is no election,
and I have about as much a chance of getting appointed as Daniel
Brandt or Sollog. And what a great honor it would be to be allowed to
waste away more hours for Wikimedia without pay, while receiving a
litany of complaints from people who want their sock puppets checked,
their admins tarred and feathered, or their crackpot theories about
using orgasmic energy to run jet engines featured on the Main Page --
all the while being accused of being part of some grand shadowy
conspiracy to make every single human being on the planet read a copy
of Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead". I've lived with a Board member for a
year, I know how much fun it can be. Am I anxious, eager, enthusiastic
about the idea of joining in? "No, Kiddo, at this moment, this is me
at my most -- masochistic."

Erik


from_name: Guy Chapman aka JzG

subject: [WikiEN-l] New York Times article

body:
On Tue, 20 Jun 2006 17:47:15 -0400, "Lord Voldemort"
<lordbishopvoldemort at gmail.com> wrote:

>He means that disputed articles that would have had to have been fully
>protected, can now be semiprotected. That way more people (not just
>admins) can edit the article, while potentially culling the problem.
>Correct me if I'm wrong.

According to the last umpteen posts from Jimbo on the subject, that is
correct...

Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Foundation-l] Experts needed on Fundraising Committee

body:
So far, we only have one person proposed to be on the committee with any type of professional
fundraising experience (volunteering for Wikimedia does not count). I would therefore like to make
one last plea to anybody reading this that has any experience with fundraising for a non-profit.
We *really* need at least a few people with relevant knowledge about any major aspect of this
topic (seeking funds from individuals/companies/trusts, tax/reporting requirements, technical
aspects of online fundraising systems and donor/sponsor management).

Please sign up below (in the 'People interested in participating' section) and state what
experience/training you have along with your preferred level of participation in the committee
(full member, advisor, consultant or volunteer):

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_committee#People_interested_in_participating

NOTE: Signing up does not guarantee any role above volunteer.

-- mav

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com


subject: [WikiEN-l] Experts needed on Fundraising Committee


list: wikipedia-l

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Experts needed on Fundraising Committee


subject: [WikiEN-l] New York Times article

body:
On Tue, 20 Jun 2006 17:37:21 -0400, "The Cunctator"
<cunctator at gmail.com> wrote:

>Sorry. This is mainly a reference to the whole "Today, as an experiment, we
>will be turning off new pages creation for anonymous users in the English
>Wikipedia." I still think you were being a bit disingenuous (if
>unintentially) about the experimentality of that decision.

It worked, though.

Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


subject: [WikiEN-l] New York Times article

body:
The Cunctator wrote:
> Well, BoingBoing just published Jimmy's propagandistic stylings on
> semi-protection (it's not a restriction, it's a freedom!) with the lovely
> heading  "NYT falsely reports that Wikipedia has  added restrictions".

Gee, that is hardly what I have said.  We used to fully protect in cases
that we now semi-protect.  That's a net gain for openness.

> It's
> difficult to tell and Wales isn't particularly interested in doing honest
> critical analyses of the effects of his policies.

Wow, that's a hell of a thing to say after we have known each other for
years, and after I have spent a week gathering statistics and doing
studies of how semi-protection is used.

> As an admin, I've also turned
> on/off semi-protection in various cases. I just wish people (aka Jimmy)
> would be will to admit that there are shades of gray instead of shouting
> that it's black and white.

Excuse me?  I have spent the last several days writing dozens of
journalists and bloggers explaining precisely this: that there are
shades of gray and that the matter is much more complex than "Wikipedia
is locking down" or "Wikipedia is total fucking chaos".

The truth is: Wikipedia is incredibly open, and it is my intention that
we look at the places where we have been unable to be open in the past,
and find clever ways to slice those so that we are more open.  Like, for
example, semi-protection instead of full protection.

I have a general rule in discussion: assume good faith. Before you
accuse me of not being "particularly interested" in honest critical
analysis, I think you better stop for a moment and think a bit about
history.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] New York Times article

body:
Lord Voldemort wrote:
> On 6/20/06, The Cunctator <cunctator at gmail.com> wrote:
>> [snip] It's
>> difficult to tell and Wales isn't particularly interested in doing honest
>> critical analyses of the effects of his policies.
> [snip]
>> This is a complicated matter and neither the NYT, nor Jimmy, nor BoingBoing
>> is helping matters by oversimplifying the debate.
>
> Well, to be fair to Jimmy, it really isn't _his_ policy. By framing
> the debate with this in mind, I think you too are oversimplifying. ;-)
> It was a policy decided by community consensus.

And, I should add to this.  I never ever heard of semi-protection until
the community consensus was overwhelming to have it implemented.
Someone pointed me to the discussion and page about it, and I thought:
wow, this is brilliant, I fully support it.

But, yes, it is absolutely not possible for me to claim credit for
semi-protection.  It is a brilliant innovation that allows us to be more
open than before, when we only had the tool of protection.  But it is
not my innovation, and I do not know who first thought of it.

--
#######################################################################
#    Office: 1-727-231-0101       |  Free Culture and  Free Knowledge #
#    http://www.wikipedia.org     |     Building a free world         #
#######################################################################


from_name: Stephen Bain

subject: [WikiEN-l] More quotes from AfD

body:
On 6/20/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I would instead propose that AfDs be categorised. Either (as I've
> suggested a couple of times) by the reason for AfD (can't determine
> notability, unsuitable topic...), or by the field (pop culture,
> science, history...). Of course, the field may not always be obvious
> in the case of an article being proposed for deletion due to
> insufficient context...

The day system has its advantages, if only to make it easier for
closing admins to deal with a debates more than five days old by
closing a day's worth at a time.

--
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com


body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

>Michael R. Irwin wrote:
>
>
>
>>A stand out local feature is there is no state sales tax.   Which means
>>by current U.S. Federal law governing transactions over the Internet.
>>This means any corporate store owned and operated locally can be set up
>>to move goods inside the U.S.  for revenue with no need to do the
>>paperwork and collect sales taxes for 48 various U.S. states who do have
>>a state sales tax.
>>
>>
>>
>The sale of goods is a very minor concern for us.  Most businesses only
>collect sales taxes from purchasers when the goods are delivered in
>state.  For an organization with employees the lack of a state income
>tax may be more interesting.  Florida does not have a state personal
>income tax.
>
>
Personal income tax does not affect the Wikimedia Foundation except
indirectly as you note.   Sales tax would affect any revenue creating
shipments of product.

My thoughts were that the Foundation might choose to sale its stable CDs
directly if no partners choose to package the CDs and provide a small
percentage back to the originating community to encourage future
editions of its product.

I understand the final producer of the German Wikipedia was/is
contributing back $1 Euro per CD sold to customers to the German Chapter.

In large quantities, over  a thousand or more at a time, CDs can be
produced and packaged ready for shipping for under a dollar a CD.   We
probably need DVDs, maybe a couple.  Figure shipping and handling at
$5.00 a unit assuming some kind of efficiently organized order handling
database, accounting system, label printer, postage meter and mail
drop.  The Foundation might sell the stable edition for twenty dollars
plus shipping and handling to Windows users and earn up to $5.00 per
customer while of course most linux distributions will eventally
probably ship the FDL'ed product with their extended distributions over
the internet somehow.

or we can continue to rely on donations.

either way is fine by me as long as the servers can stably service
editors and users.

snip info on excise duties

>>Also various U.S. restraints regarding the export of regulated
>>militarily applicable technologies as well as import regulations.
>>
>>
>>
>What good of this sort are you planning to export?
>
>
Human knowledge.

For example, a few years ago it was illegal to ship U.S. domestic
versions of the animation package 3DStudio Max to Australia because it
had distributed processing capabilities that the Pentagon wanted kept
out of somebody's hands.  Presumably because if you can visualize what
is happening effectively you can make good decisions and more
effectively develop complex weapons systems.

Should the group that I was working with ever adopt the free software
package "Art of Illusion" and turn in a patch to allow distributed
processing then it might be a good idea to have a foreign mirror
distributing the patch to avoid entanglements with the Pentagon for U.S.
users and distributors of the free software.

Interestingly, AFAIK, nobody has bothered the BOINC supercomputer types
so perhaps enforcement is tangled up in cross border trade.  Perhaps if
no money changes hands the regulations have no teeth since they were
written to address capitalists selling U.S. funded military technologies
abroad.

I understand that there are such entanglements on various encryption
technologies as well.

regards,
lazyquasar


subject: [WikiEN-l] New York Times article

body:
On Tue, 20 Jun 2006 18:10:54 -0400, "The Cunctator"
<cunctator at gmail.com> wrote:

[re no anonymous creation]
>What specifically were the effects?

A massive reduction in "things made up in school one day", and
consequently the speedy deletion queue.  Or so it seems to me - I no
longer do newpage patrol though (appeared to be much less to do after
that change).  But you know how it is, if there were a strong
community consensus in favour of going back I bet it would happen.

Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


body:
Pawe? Dembowski wrote:
> Anthony DiPierro wrote:
>
>>> Well, I wouldn't want to live a world with only "free" content.
>>>
>> And I wouldn't want you on the board of Wikimedia.
>
> I never said I wanted to be on the board. Anyway, free content has its
> advantages, but I don't see it as either realistic or even good for it
> to replace all other sorts of content in all situations.

I absolutely agree with Pawe? here, and so would (for example) Richard
Stallman.  There are certain types of works which are better off freely
licensed, and certain types of works which are not.

Anthony DiPierro holds a different position.  Enough said.

--Jimbo

--
#######################################################################
#    Office: 1-727-231-0101       |  Free Culture and  Free Knowledge #
#    http://www.wikipedia.org     |     Building a free world         #
#######################################################################


subject: [WikiEN-l] More quotes from AfD

body:
On Tue, 20 Jun 2006 13:55:52 +0100, Cobb
<sealclubbingfun at googlemail.com> wrote:

>Making it easier for trekkies to vote on trekkie AFDs... I was
>actually thinking more along the lines of ensuring that an
>AFD is exposed to a wider selection of Wikipedians. One
>criticism of AFDs is that after the second day, the only
>people who still bother to vote/comment are those with
>an interest in the article.

Here's an idea: <noinclude> the debate, leave the nomination (and
encourage expansion of it if new facts are found), and list all open
AfDs on a single page.

Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


from_name: Platonides

subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikipedia: Importing template namespace

body:
pages-articles contains template namespace, so they should appear.

"Richard Wooding" wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have downloaded enwiki-latest-pages-articles.xml.bz2, and have a version
> of Wikimedia checked out from subversion (with relevant extension added as
> well).
>
> I issue the following commands:
>
> bzip2 -d enwiki-latest-pages-articles.xml.bz2
> cat enwiki-latest-pages-articles.xml | php5 maintenance/importDump.php
>
> My question is:
>
> Does this XML file include the Template: namespace, on completion will
> pages
> with references to templates render.
>
> Regards
> Richard Wooding


body:
On 6/20/06, Brad Patrick <bradp.wmf at gmail.com> wrote:
> So does that mean you are in or out?

That sounds kinky. In or out of what?

Erik


body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
> On 6/20/06, The Cunctator <cunctator at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I thought it was a pretty entertaining retort.
>
> Perhaps. Watching chimpanzees beat each other up can be pretty
> entertaining, too. But if we are to adopt the social standards of
> chimpanzees on this mailing list, I demand some free grooming.

/me picks a bug from Erik hair.  And eats it.

Seriously people, let's relax a notch or two, ok?  I think we have to
recognize that there is a fair amount of trolling going on in this list,
which would naturally have the goal and purpose of putting good people
like Erik, Cunctator, Anthere, me, and Gregory Maxwell at each others
throats.

As far as I am aware, "Assume Good Faith" allows for much better
conversations than all this sniping. :)

> And what a great honor it would be to be allowed to
> waste away more hours for Wikimedia without pay, while receiving a
> litany of complaints from people who want their sock puppets checked,
> their admins tarred and feathered, or their crackpot theories about
> using orgasmic energy to run jet engines featured on the Main Page --
> all the while being accused of being part of some grand shadowy
> conspiracy to make every single human being on the planet read a copy
> of Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead".

Erik gets major points here for understanding what it is like. :)

--Jimbo

--
#######################################################################
#    Office: 1-727-231-0101       |  Free Culture and  Free Knowledge #
#    http://www.wikipedia.org     |     Building a free world         #
#######################################################################


body:
On 6/20/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> /me picks a bug from Erik hair.

Scary. You are spending too much time on IRC AND adopting Anthere's
grammatical structure. :-)

Erik


subject: [Textbook-l] Wikiversity

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>
> The
>important thing is that we form a network of free content platforms
>for collaboration among educators.
>
>
Interesting perspective.   I think it is too narrow or inverted.   The
most interesting opportunity to me is to create the network of free
content platforms accessible to the general population or "students".

In my view our entire society has structured itself around gatekeepers
of all kinds enabled by information protection techniques ranging from
secrecy to legal regulation to practical regulation.

There will inevitably be large changes which I view as beneficial and
contributing to individual human rights and freedoms when there is
sufficient free information floating around to reduce the impact of
gatekeepers of all kinds on our societies and individuals.

>The tricky question for me is what to do with how-tos. I think they do
>have a place in Wikimedia, and a separate project for them might be a
>good idea.  This could include gaming walkthroughs -- instructional
>materials of any kind. But my biggest hope is for documents from the
>open source community to be migrated into the wiki context. There are
>thousands of FAQs, HOWTOs and man pages which are still maintained by
>single individuals. I made a small effort to change this with
>OpenFacts, but this was in 2002, when many of the relevant people were
>still convinced that the future was in using a strict workflow
>approach within a CMS.
>
>
I think How tos and other kinds of information have an obvious place in
Wikiversity.   In my view the range of useful information should be made
more accessible by the existence of Wikiverisity.  Theoretical
electromagnetism as well as the "How-Tos" regarding installation and
calibration of transformers that were deleted early from Wikipedia
because it was "an encyclopedia" and appropriate only for summaries, not
useful detailed information.

regards,
lazyquasar


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Fwd: [MediaWiki-CVS] SVN:
	[14835]trunk/phase3/languages/Messages.php

body:
> As I understood from discussion with Domas, the problem was the
> double-brace substitution in messages used within the skins, that is;
> messages which are used on each page view. These go through the parser
> and impact performance.
>
> Reducing these to using canonical namespace names helps, and doesn't
> harm the interface, since all those uses have corresponding "caption"
> messages.

I was surprised when Gangleri told me about it.
{{ns: }} *should be* the preferred method. If you link to
something/wiki/Project:Foo then whoever clicks on it will go under a
redirection. People looking at the target of redirection on a chinese wiki
won't expect an english word.

And if such perfomance is *so* important (they're all cached, aren't they?)
{{ns: substitution on the skin could be directly at php level, without {{
parsing, with str_replace() calls, which should be much faster.Yeah, it'd
break the 'in order parse' and force {{ns:}} substitution to be handled the
first, but i don't think it can be so bad. We already have(had) worse
things. I think it's worse to be hardcoding the {{ns: }} You can always
script from {{ns:Foo}} to LangFoo: but you can't do it the other way round.

Platonides


from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] New York Times article

body:
On 6/20/06, The Cunctator <cunctator at gmail.com> wrote:
> Didn't speedy deletion get implemented around the same time or even after
> the change?
>

speedy has been around since 2004

--
geni


from_name: Nathan

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Eliminating homographs in usernames: was: Re:
 Pruning "dead" accounts (was Re: New York Times article)

body:
I remember having an imposter with a weird unicode version of the first
"N" in my username. In fact, it's my only imposter.

I think such usernames should be blocked too.

- Nathan (nathanrdotcom)


from_name: Phil Boswell

subject: [WikiEN-l] Conservative notice board

body:
Fastfission wrote:
>
> Most of
> the "Restore" votes on the DRV were made not because they thought the
> board should exist, but because it was out-of-process and that full
> discussion had not taken place.
There is no reason why discussion should not take place BEFORE restoring the
board: if the result is an endorsement of the board then restoration would
be a snip and if not then the deletion stands.

There are very good reasons why the board should remain deleted pending such
discussion, and I fail to understand those whose apparent stance is "yes,
well, it SHOULD be deleted...but we need to argue about it for days
beforehand". People seem to have trouble understanding that we are working
on an encyclop?dia, not a discussion shop or a social website.

HTH HAND
--
Phil
--
View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Conservative-notice-board-t1808852.html#a4969045
Sent from the English Wikipedia forum at Nabble.com.


subject: [WikiEN-l] New York Times article

body:
On 6/20/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> The truth is: Wikipedia is incredibly open, and it is my intention that
> we look at the places where we have been unable to be open in the past,
> and find clever ways to slice those so that we are more open.  Like, for
> example, semi-protection instead of full protection.

Problem is most of the obvious lines for improvement involve codeing.

--
geni


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Commons-l] Image donations?

body:
Brianna Laugher wrote:
> * Please forbid any image below say 800px on one side, and ALL mobile
> phone pictures. They are the worst! (Even if they still upload a small
> image, it might be fine, the important thing is to discourage it)
>
This is now forbidden by text, and by script ;-)
> * Please enforce the user to pick a better name than the default one.
> We have more than enough D23435646 and IMG345456456 and QZ23545657
> image names already.
>
Enforcing this is difficult, unless "IMG*" and "Q*" are the only
patterns to watch out for, which I'm sure they aren't.
> * Please DON'T encourage sunsets. :( :( :( :( :( Maybe encourage
> pictures of their local area? at least they can ID that and we can
> figure out if we can use it or not.
>
Don't talk bad about sunsets. One of my sunsets made it to image oif the
day on commons, after all. They're pretty. Don't tread on them! ;-)
> * Please ONLY allow this option: "I am the creator of this image, and
> hold its copyright." The other option will be such a pain and near
> impossible to verify, and trust me, there will be enough problems with
> their own work.
>
Disagree. I have uploaded one or two pictures on commons that my mom
took. If we force people to lie on the very first item of the form, how
long do you think their discipline will be holding up?
> * "The public domain (only recommended for images which are in the
> public domain already)." Why??? I would remove this disclaimer and
> list this first, from most-free to least-free (GFDL only). [OK not
> least free but biggest hassle.] Just say "You grant anyone the right
> to use this work for any purpose including commercial use, without any
> conditions, unless such conditions are required by law." That's scary
> (and true) enough.
>
Disagree. While copyright in its current from is in place, public domain
is not a good license (yes, not a license at all, technically) for our
purposes. Only GFDL/CC-BY guarantees freedom by restricting it,
perversely. IMHO public domain should be chosen only for old images and
USGov-type ones. Pictures that a user took should get a free license
instead, or at least we should encourage that.
GFDL can't be at the end of the list anyway, because otherwise dual
licensing wouldn't make sense ;-)
> * CC-BY-SA: "...and to be released in turn under a free license" -
> change to "any derivatives of this work to be in turn released under
> this license" (to my knowledge you can't just choose something else!)
>
Done.
> * Please emphasise that licensing decisions cannot be undone in the
> future and if unsure, they should not contribute
>
Done.
> Instead of just having a big blank space, let's be smarter than
> MediaWiki ;) and have separate fields for the required info.
> "Description (Who or what is shown? Where is it located? Why is it
> interesting or important?)"
> Source should be self-made as I stated above
> "Date (when was the image taken?)"
> Author and Permission, no probs - but please don't put the {{license}}
> in the permission field, put it separately below and in the Permission
> field put a text statement like "X chose to release this image under
> the Y license as part of the Z image donation drive."
>
Mostly done. If we ever get serious about this, maybe I should
transclude the whole text from a wiki page or something.
> I think we should limit uploads to something like 2 per person per
> day. If they're uploading dozens of images they should probably get an
> account (in fact, make that the alternative: do you have heaps of
> great images to contribute? Sign up to WM commons and upload as many
> as you want!) and also to discourage WM users from "anonymous"
> uploading (WM users are probably a significant majority of donors
> anyway, come fundraising time).
>
I've added a brief notice to that end.
> * How are we going to communicate to them where if anywhere their
> image will be available? The email... eh. If we have to email them to
> find something out it's already too much hassle, dump it. (IMO)
>
I just put it in because it was on that weird drawing ;-)
Well, it is optional, and email is better than no email IMHO.
> * Also categories... suggest five (somehow) based on their description
> text & CommonSense and get them to pick the most relevant, or just
> leave it up to the reviewers?
>
AFAIK CommonSense can only "sense" categories for existing MediaWiki
pages. I could probably write some two-step mechanism, but that feels
weird somehow. I'll leave it as it is for the time being.
> BTW this doesn't mean I support this idea yet, I just like critiquing
> Magnus' UIs ;P
>
Please try it again! I've added new confusing colors especially for you :-)

Magnus


from_name: Nathan - Mailing Lists

subject: [WikiEN-l] Blocked for 36 hours

body:
Fadix: Questioning an admin's capability is generally Not A Good Idea[tm].
I wouldn't resort to this myself and I've said some things that have been
pretty disruptive.

- Nathan (User:nathanrdotcom)


from_name: Anthere

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Anthere wrote:
>
>>>>One problem I have with your list and with Jimbo's list is that they
>>>>propose very few great candidates from Korea or Madagascar.
>>>
>>>I agree with this concern, but how to address it?  I do not know of any
>>>prominent leaders either "outside" or "inside" Wikipedia from either
>>>Korea or Madagascar... or similar places.
>>>
>>>It is not hard to find community leaders in France and Germany and
>>>Holland and Italy and... all of the countries where the "international
>>>crowd" has good connections.
>>
>>Since you have been travelling all over the world for now 2 years at
>>least, I suppose you met some of those community leaders yourself.
>>
>>Have you some names to suggest which we could hack ?
>
>
> Well, I haven't been to Korea or Madagascar. :)
>
> My travels have been mostly in Europe and the US.
>
> In Taiwan, I met and liked very much Theodoranian and KJ.  (I met many
> more Wikimedians there too, but those are the two with whom I spent the
> most time).
>
> In India, I met no Wikipedians who are very active.
>
> In Brazil, I met no Wikipedians at all... but I am going there next week
> (so is Soufron) and hopefully there will be a meetup in Rio.
>
> The truth is, I am as Eurocentric as anyone, both in my travels and in
> my community friendships.... with possibly a bit more as mentioned above.

Okay. But all the people you suggested to put on the board are americans
(unless I am wrong about one).
If you are Eurocentric, you surely have met some interesting
personnalities whose experience would be valuable for us. Can you cite
some names ?

Ant


body:
On 6/21/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> It is not clear to me that it did.  I would love for us to have some
> serious analysis of that.
>
> My sense is that the number of articles created by unknown people is
> about the same, but that they now sign up for an account first.  This is
> not helpful, because whereas before we had the rough indicator of "ip
> number equals newbie" (imperfect), we now have less of an indicator.
>

Still got it you just use redlinks instead

>
> What I would prefer to see, in the long run, is a replacement of locking
> and controls by flagging and visibility.  This is core to what I think
> works: not gatekeeping, but accountability.

Uninforcable

>
> The issue we have, but so far only in English Wikipedia, and to a lesser
> degree elsewhere, I think, is that the sheer volume of crap that the new
> pages patrollers have to deal with means that every day we are making
> major mistakes that could be dealt with better through openness than
> through controls.  (Openness in this case meaning: visibility and
> accountability.)
>

Alrewadyy pretty open when it comes to deletion. The deletion logs are
there and nothing to stop you asking the person who deleted it why.
--
geni


from_name: brion at pobox.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki automated test run failure 2006-06-21

body:
An automated run of parserTests.php showed the following failures:

Running test External image... FAILED!
Running test External image from https... FAILED!
Running test External links: Clickable images... FAILED!
Running test Table security: embedded pipes (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-April/034637.html)... FAILED!
Running test Link containing double-single-quotes '' (bug 4598)... FAILED!
Running test message transform: <noinclude> in transcluded template (bug 4926)... FAILED!
Running test message transform: <onlyinclude> in transcluded template (bug 4926)... FAILED!
Running test BUG 1887, part 2: A <math> with a thumbnail- math enabled... FAILED!
Running test Language converter: output gets cut off unexpectedly (bug 5757)... FAILED!
Running test HTML bullet list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test HTML ordered list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test HTML nested bullet list, open tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test HTML nested ordered list, open tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test Parsing optional HTML elements (Bug 6171)... FAILED!
Running test Inline HTML vs wiki block nesting... FAILED!
Running test Mixing markup for italics and bold... FAILED!

Passed 388 of 404 tests (96.04%) FAILED!


subject: [WikiEN-l] More quotes from AfD

body:
On 6/20/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I would be proposing a subdivison of the day system, not a replacement.
>
> Jun_20
>   /popculture
>   /science
>   /insufficientcontext
> ...

Oh, ok. Well why not just add categories to the existing subpages?
Say, [[Category:Science articles for deletion]] onto all
science-related AfDs.

I suppose that there would need to be archive categories so that only
current AfDs remain in the category.

--
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com


body:
On 6/21/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
> Absolutely. My long-term vision of a replacement for both protection
> and semi-protection is "quality protection", where the version you see
> is the last reviewed one, but the article remains fully editable.
> Following this strategy, we can make Wikipedia ever more openly
> editable, continuing the path we have already taken.
>
> Erik

Problem is that kills one of wikipedia's main attractions.

--
geni


subject: [Commons-l] Image donations?

body:
Magnus,

thanks for hacking this.

First, I think the most important difference between your
implementation and my concept is that you want to upload images
directly to Commons. I think images uploaded through a simplified
process that is advertised e.g. as part of the next fundraiser should
go into a pre-approval queue, where their descriptions can be edited,
and bad material can be filtered. This would also allow us to enable
the usage of this system by anonymous users, as any vandalism, porn
etc. wouldn't become immediately visible.

Please have a closer look at FlickrLickr, if you haven't already. We
have reviewed over 90,000 photos and uploaded over 5,500. The process
looks like this:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Flickrlickr.png

You have 50 of these boxes per page, and for each one, you edit the
metadata and select the image if you want it to be uploaded. This
allows us to exercise quality control. I can send you the FlickrLickr
source code (Perl) and database structure if you want to play with it.
I think it might make a reasonable backend for an image donations
process. We might want to generalize it to deal with other media. The
script could also be expanded to notify the uploader whether their
files have been accepted (only a couple of lines of Perl really).

One idea that is part of the concept I posted is to enable uploading
media archives (ZIP files etc.). This would be useful for individuals
and institutions which want to share a set of images. Your script
would have to uncompress the archive, and ask the user to describe
each file that is in it.

Regarding the specific implementation at the moment, I may be alone in
this, but I think we should greatly simplify the licensing part. What
I would prefer is something like:

[ ]  You agree to donate your picture to the general public under the
terms of the
     GNU Free Documentation License 1.2 or higher and the Creative Commons
     Attribution/Share-Alike license 2.5 or higher. This means that
anyone can use
     it for any purpose, including commercial use, as long as modified
copies are
     made available under similar terms (copyleft).

Perhaps below this there could be a link "Other licensing options",
which would expand a selection of radiobuttons like the one you have
now. But I'd prefer something very simple for the casual user.

I would also suggest hacking a separate contact form for people who do
not want to use this process. This would have some questions like:
- Describe the media you want to donate
- Choose the licensing conditions (here a more advanced form would be available)
- Tell us where we can reach you.
- Other comments.

It could send a nicely formatted e-mail into an OTRS queue created
specifically for this purpose.

Erik


body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
> On 6/20/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
>>/me picks a bug from Erik hair.
>
>
> Scary. You are spending too much time on IRC AND adopting Anthere's
> grammatical structure. :-)
>
> Erik

/me hopes Jimbo will adopt her board structure as well


subject: [Commons-l] Image donations?

body:
On 6/20/06, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher at gmail.com> wrote:
> * Please enforce the user to pick a better name than the default one.
> We have more than enough D23435646 and IMG345456456 and QZ23545657
> image names already.

If we use a FlickrLickr-like process, the renaming can be done as part
of the review process. FlickrLickr already does a check on the
filenames from Flickr, and if they match a simple regular expression
like this, it forces the reviewer to rename the file.

> * Please ONLY allow this option: "I am the creator of this image, and
> hold its copyright." The other option will be such a pain and near
> impossible to verify, and trust me, there will be enough problems with
> their own work.

I tend to disagree here, but an e-mail address should be required if
this option is selected.

> I think we should limit uploads to something like 2 per person per
> day.

This depends really on whether images go directly to Commons, or
through a review process. If they go through a review process first,
someone uploading hundreds of images wouldn't be a problem. We would
just have to explain to users that becoming part of the community is
the best way to contribute.

> * Also categories... suggest five (somehow) based on their description
> text & CommonSense and get them to pick the most relevant, or just
> leave it up to the reviewers?

The point shouldn't be to clone the upload UI we have, but to provide
a simplified process for people who don't know how to use Commons,
something which we can advertise widely and broadly. Again, with a
review process, the categories can be handled by the reviewers.

Erik