from_name: John Dehlin

subject: [Wikitech-l] Videos in Wikipedia?

body:
One more question....

Have you considered providing your entries as web services, such that
other web sites can "consume" the web services, and utilize the content
via XML within their own sites?

Imagine, for example, a Mormon History site, that wants to keep people
in their site, but would rather use the information from your site
(giving proper credit of course).

Thanks for he info!

John

-----Original Message-----
From: Brion Vibber [mailto:brion at pobox.com]
Sent: Friday, May 21, 2004 3:21 PM
To: Wikimedia developers; John Dehlin
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Videos in Wikipedia?

John Dehlin wrote:
> Please forgive if this is the incorrect list to post my question.
Also,
> I am not currently a member of this list, so will require a direct
reply.
>
> Basically, I'm curious to know if Wikipedia currently supports, or has

> plans to support video files in the future.

It's possible to upload short video files to the wiki and link to them,
but we don't have support for inline (embedded) video, and we've got a
strict upload size limit.

For some discussion on possibilities, see:
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_policy

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: David Gerard

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: w to properly use articles from an outside GFDL
	source?

body:
On 05/24/04 15:56, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> --- Nathaniel Krause <nathanielkrause at hotmail.com> wrote:
>>>Sheldon Rampton wrote:

>>>When  I use material from the Wikipedia in the Disinfopedia, I put in
>>>a line of attribution at the bottom of the article. For example,
>>>Disinfopedia's [[Richard A. Clarke]] article includes the following
>>>line at the bottom, with links back to Wikipedia article:
>>>>Note: A version of this article also appears in the Wikipedia.

>>>If you want to do something similar when moving Disinfopedia material
>>>into the Wikipedia, it would be appreciated but isn't obligatory.
>>>It's not like we're in a position to sue over it.

>>Hmmmm, I hadn't thought of that.  I've imported several Disinfopedia
>>articles and had plans for a couple more.  I think it's good for us to pool
>>our efforts where applicable.  I'll go back and add an attribution for
>>Disinfopedia.  I figure I can just put that under ==References== at the end,
>>right?

> Attribution is good. And the ==References== section is the natural place to put
> info like that.

Yes. I wasn't asking out of fear of lawsuit, but out of politeness and
a wish to properly attribute the work of the Disinfopedia contributors :-)

I've added a suggestion to
[[Wikipedia:GNU Free Documentation License resources]]:

   When using material from Disinfopedia, you may wish to use the following
   as an attribution line:

     ''This article includes [http://address-of-Disinfopedia-article material]
     from [[Disinfopedia]].''

Example is on [[Alexis de Tocqueville Institute]] (or [[AdTI]] for the lazy).
Quite a bit of the material is from Disinfopedia. (With suitable NPOV
massaging - Disinfopedia feeling freer to label scoundrels as scoundrels ;-)

Is there a way to make a {{msg:disinfopedia}} that would automatically link to
the article of the same name on Disinfopedia? That would be a lot easier hence
more widely used.

- d.


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Videos in Wikipedia?

body:
John Dehlin wrote:
> One more question....
>
> Have you considered providing your entries as web services, such that
> other web sites can "consume" the web services, and utilize the content
> via XML within their own sites?

All our data is available for download (warning: large files):
http://download.wikimedia.org/

Individual pages' source text can be exported via the Special:Export
function. See http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML_export

We don't currently have a 'clean' way of exporting XHTML or other
formatted output without the surrounding user interface.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


list: foundation-l

from_name: Michael Snow

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Project Proposal: GlobalFamilyTree

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>--- Joel Konkle-Parker <jjk3 at msstate.edu> wrote:
>
>
>>Quoting Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com>:
>>
>>
>>>I've already proposed that at http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimorial .
>>>
>>>The idea is to simply expand the focus of the the Sep11wiki (which is a rather lonely place).
>>>
>>>The only major stumbling block was the name - some people didn't like 'Wikimorial'. Other ideas were:
>>>*Wikimedia Memorial (generic and boring, IMO),
>>>*Wikipeople (I liked this one so I bought the domain names),
>>>*Wikifamily (another one I liked - although in the U.S. right-wing
>>>
>>>
>>Christian
>>
>>
>>>fundamentalists have co-opted the word "family").
>>>
>>>
>>Well, I guess I missed that one. It sounds like our end goal is the same, but for different reasons. Your description and name (Wikimorial) implies a memorial/obituary/mourning project, more than a living global genealogy. But perhaps this is not the case?
>>
>>
>It would be both. There would be individual pages on individual people and there also would be memorial pages that list people who died in some
>disaster/military assault/terrorist act/industrial accident/whatever. The
>"memorial"-type names were just an emphasis on that aspect.
>
>I would also like to see actual family trees constructed on family name pages. There is a wiki syntax to do this that is being developed.
>
>
>>What I had in mind was a living genealogy reference, not so much
>>memorializing the past, but serving as a reference guide to those curious about their ancestors. This goal wouldn't require a ban on content for the living, either (I'd be interested in looking up my uncle and seeing "So-and-so is a consultant for Whatchamathingy Inc.).
>>
>>
>I fear that having pages on the living would cause the creation of vanity pages and the use of Wikimedia resources for personal webpages. At least at first, I would like to ban any articles about any person still living.
>
I can see why misuse of this project to host personal vanity webpages
would be a concern, but I think there may be better ways to discourage
that. I don't see a good reason to ban articles about the living,
especially since it's probably easier to get information about a person
while they're still alive.

Instead, if the project is oriented toward genealogy rather than
encyclopedic biography, it could be designed to focus on certain
categories of information. "Family trees" all have something in common
in terms of format, and most genealogical data is directed towards
things like dates and places for major life events. A genealogy project
might have more in common with Wiktionary than Wikipedia, in the sense
that entries are more restricted in the types of information that are
presented. An article might allow for dates and places of birth, death,
marriage, etc., cause of death, names of parents and siblings, and other
appropriate information, the same way that a Wiktionary article would
consist primarily of spelling, pronunciation, part of speech,
definition, etymology, usage, etc. If the purpose of the project is
clear, we can set boundaries that prevent people from using it as a
vehicle for a blog, or whatever else it is we don't want them doing with it.

--Michael Snow
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body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>--- Joel Konkle-Parker <jjk3 at msstate.edu> wrote:
>
>
>>Quoting Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com>:
>>
>>
>>>I've already proposed that at http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimorial .
>>>
>>>The idea is to simply expand the focus of the the Sep11wiki (which is a rather lonely place).
>>>
>>>The only major stumbling block was the name - some people didn't like 'Wikimorial'. Other ideas were:
>>>*Wikimedia Memorial (generic and boring, IMO),
>>>*Wikipeople (I liked this one so I bought the domain names),
>>>*Wikifamily (another one I liked - although in the U.S. right-wing
>>>
>>>
>>Christian
>>
>>
>>>fundamentalists have co-opted the word "family").
>>>
>>>
>>Well, I guess I missed that one. It sounds like our end goal is the same, but for different reasons. Your description and name (Wikimorial) implies a memorial/obituary/mourning project, more than a living global genealogy. But perhaps this is not the case?
>>
>>
>It would be both. There would be individual pages on individual people and there also would be memorial pages that list people who died in some
>disaster/military assault/terrorist act/industrial accident/whatever. The
>"memorial"-type names were just an emphasis on that aspect.
>
>I would also like to see actual family trees constructed on family name pages. There is a wiki syntax to do this that is being developed.
>
>
>>What I had in mind was a living genealogy reference, not so much
>>memorializing the past, but serving as a reference guide to those curious about their ancestors. This goal wouldn't require a ban on content for the living, either (I'd be interested in looking up my uncle and seeing "So-and-so is a consultant for Whatchamathingy Inc.).
>>
>>
>I fear that having pages on the living would cause the creation of vanity pages and the use of Wikimedia resources for personal webpages. At least at first, I would like to ban any articles about any person still living.
>
I can see why misuse of this project to host personal vanity webpages
would be a concern, but I think there may be better ways to discourage
that. I don't see a good reason to ban articles about the living,
especially since it's probably easier to get information about a person
while they're still alive.

Instead, if the project is oriented toward genealogy rather than
encyclopedic biography, it could be designed to focus on certain
categories of information. "Family trees" all have something in common
in terms of format, and most genealogical data is directed towards
things like dates and places for major life events. A genealogy project
might have more in common with Wiktionary than Wikipedia, in the sense
that entries are more restricted in the types of information that are
presented. An article might allow for dates and places of birth, death,
marriage, etc., cause of death, names of parents and siblings, and other
appropriate information, the same way that a Wiktionary article would
consist primarily of spelling, pronunciation, part of speech,
definition, etymology, usage, etc. If the purpose of the project is
clear, we can set boundaries that prevent people from using it as a
vehicle for a blog, or whatever else it is we don't want them doing with it.

--Michael Snow
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body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>--- Joel Konkle-Parker <jjk3 at msstate.edu> wrote:
>
>
>>Quoting Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com>:
>>
>>
>>>I've already proposed that at http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimorial .
>>>
>>>The idea is to simply expand the focus of the the Sep11wiki (which is a rather lonely place).
>>>
>>>The only major stumbling block was the name - some people didn't like 'Wikimorial'. Other ideas were:
>>>*Wikimedia Memorial (generic and boring, IMO),
>>>*Wikipeople (I liked this one so I bought the domain names),
>>>*Wikifamily (another one I liked - although in the U.S. right-wing
>>>
>>>
>>Christian
>>
>>
>>>fundamentalists have co-opted the word "family").
>>>
>>>
>>Well, I guess I missed that one. It sounds like our end goal is the same, but for different reasons. Your description and name (Wikimorial) implies a memorial/obituary/mourning project, more than a living global genealogy. But perhaps this is not the case?
>>
>>
>It would be both. There would be individual pages on individual people and there also would be memorial pages that list people who died in some
>disaster/military assault/terrorist act/industrial accident/whatever. The
>"memorial"-type names were just an emphasis on that aspect.
>
>I would also like to see actual family trees constructed on family name pages. There is a wiki syntax to do this that is being developed.
>
>
>>What I had in mind was a living genealogy reference, not so much
>>memorializing the past, but serving as a reference guide to those curious about their ancestors. This goal wouldn't require a ban on content for the living, either (I'd be interested in looking up my uncle and seeing "So-and-so is a consultant for Whatchamathingy Inc.).
>>
>>
>I fear that having pages on the living would cause the creation of vanity pages and the use of Wikimedia resources for personal webpages. At least at first, I would like to ban any articles about any person still living.
>
I can see why misuse of this project to host personal vanity webpages
would be a concern, but I think there may be better ways to discourage
that. I don't see a good reason to ban articles about the living,
especially since it's probably easier to get information about a person
while they're still alive.

Instead, if the project is oriented toward genealogy rather than
encyclopedic biography, it could be designed to focus on certain
categories of information. "Family trees" all have something in common
in terms of format, and most genealogical data is directed towards
things like dates and places for major life events. A genealogy project
might have more in common with Wiktionary than Wikipedia, in the sense
that entries are more restricted in the types of information that are
presented. An article might allow for dates and places of birth, death,
marriage, etc., cause of death, names of parents and siblings, and other
appropriate information, the same way that a Wiktionary article would
consist primarily of spelling, pronunciation, part of speech,
definition, etymology, usage, etc. If the purpose of the project is
clear, we can set boundaries that prevent people from using it as a
vehicle for a blog, or whatever else it is we don't want them doing with it.

--Michael Snow
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list: wikimedia-l

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>--- Joel Konkle-Parker <jjk3 at msstate.edu> wrote:
>
>
>>Quoting Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com>:
>>
>>
>>>I've already proposed that at http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimorial .
>>>
>>>The idea is to simply expand the focus of the the Sep11wiki (which is a rather lonely place).
>>>
>>>The only major stumbling block was the name - some people didn't like 'Wikimorial'. Other ideas were:
>>>*Wikimedia Memorial (generic and boring, IMO),
>>>*Wikipeople (I liked this one so I bought the domain names),
>>>*Wikifamily (another one I liked - although in the U.S. right-wing
>>>
>>>
>>Christian
>>
>>
>>>fundamentalists have co-opted the word "family").
>>>
>>>
>>Well, I guess I missed that one. It sounds like our end goal is the same, but for different reasons. Your description and name (Wikimorial) implies a memorial/obituary/mourning project, more than a living global genealogy. But perhaps this is not the case?
>>
>>
>It would be both. There would be individual pages on individual people and there also would be memorial pages that list people who died in some
>disaster/military assault/terrorist act/industrial accident/whatever. The
>"memorial"-type names were just an emphasis on that aspect.
>
>I would also like to see actual family trees constructed on family name pages. There is a wiki syntax to do this that is being developed.
>
>
>>What I had in mind was a living genealogy reference, not so much
>>memorializing the past, but serving as a reference guide to those curious about their ancestors. This goal wouldn't require a ban on content for the living, either (I'd be interested in looking up my uncle and seeing "So-and-so is a consultant for Whatchamathingy Inc.).
>>
>>
>I fear that having pages on the living would cause the creation of vanity pages and the use of Wikimedia resources for personal webpages. At least at first, I would like to ban any articles about any person still living.
>
I can see why misuse of this project to host personal vanity webpages
would be a concern, but I think there may be better ways to discourage
that. I don't see a good reason to ban articles about the living,
especially since it's probably easier to get information about a person
while they're still alive.

Instead, if the project is oriented toward genealogy rather than
encyclopedic biography, it could be designed to focus on certain
categories of information. "Family trees" all have something in common
in terms of format, and most genealogical data is directed towards
things like dates and places for major life events. A genealogy project
might have more in common with Wiktionary than Wikipedia, in the sense
that entries are more restricted in the types of information that are
presented. An article might allow for dates and places of birth, death,
marriage, etc., cause of death, names of parents and siblings, and other
appropriate information, the same way that a Wiktionary article would
consist primarily of spelling, pronunciation, part of speech,
definition, etymology, usage, etc. If the purpose of the project is
clear, we can set boundaries that prevent people from using it as a
vehicle for a blog, or whatever else it is we don't want them doing with it.

--Michael Snow
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body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>--- Joel Konkle-Parker <jjk3 at msstate.edu> wrote:
>
>
>>Quoting Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com>:
>>
>>
>>>I've already proposed that at http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimorial .
>>>
>>>The idea is to simply expand the focus of the the Sep11wiki (which is a rather lonely place).
>>>
>>>The only major stumbling block was the name - some people didn't like 'Wikimorial'. Other ideas were:
>>>*Wikimedia Memorial (generic and boring, IMO),
>>>*Wikipeople (I liked this one so I bought the domain names),
>>>*Wikifamily (another one I liked - although in the U.S. right-wing
>>>
>>>
>>Christian
>>
>>
>>>fundamentalists have co-opted the word "family").
>>>
>>>
>>Well, I guess I missed that one. It sounds like our end goal is the same, but for different reasons. Your description and name (Wikimorial) implies a memorial/obituary/mourning project, more than a living global genealogy. But perhaps this is not the case?
>>
>>
>It would be both. There would be individual pages on individual people and there also would be memorial pages that list people who died in some
>disaster/military assault/terrorist act/industrial accident/whatever. The
>"memorial"-type names were just an emphasis on that aspect.
>
>I would also like to see actual family trees constructed on family name pages. There is a wiki syntax to do this that is being developed.
>
>
>>What I had in mind was a living genealogy reference, not so much
>>memorializing the past, but serving as a reference guide to those curious about their ancestors. This goal wouldn't require a ban on content for the living, either (I'd be interested in looking up my uncle and seeing "So-and-so is a consultant for Whatchamathingy Inc.).
>>
>>
>I fear that having pages on the living would cause the creation of vanity pages and the use of Wikimedia resources for personal webpages. At least at first, I would like to ban any articles about any person still living.
>
I can see why misuse of this project to host personal vanity webpages
would be a concern, but I think there may be better ways to discourage
that. I don't see a good reason to ban articles about the living,
especially since it's probably easier to get information about a person
while they're still alive.

Instead, if the project is oriented toward genealogy rather than
encyclopedic biography, it could be designed to focus on certain
categories of information. "Family trees" all have something in common
in terms of format, and most genealogical data is directed towards
things like dates and places for major life events. A genealogy project
might have more in common with Wiktionary than Wikipedia, in the sense
that entries are more restricted in the types of information that are
presented. An article might allow for dates and places of birth, death,
marriage, etc., cause of death, names of parents and siblings, and other
appropriate information, the same way that a Wiktionary article would
consist primarily of spelling, pronunciation, part of speech,
definition, etymology, usage, etc. If the purpose of the project is
clear, we can set boundaries that prevent people from using it as a
vehicle for a blog, or whatever else it is we don't want them doing with it.

--Michael Snow
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from_name: Hunter Peress

subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikipedia-related project: WikiRover

body:
You are just wrong. And this wrong judgment is really annoying.

Use knoppix bootable linux. http://knoppix.net

it comes with all the tools you'll need for all the conversions you can dream of
except svg. and for all the potential systems that are bound to be
encountered in non-net enabled areas.

And thats pretty much it. And for mentioning a low level language like C++
please meditate for a few weeks until the wrong is no longer in you.

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Friends.  Fun.  Try the all-new Yahoo! Messenger.
http://messenger.yahoo.com/


from_name: Viajero

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: [[Anti-French sentiment in the United States]]

body:
On 05/24/04  at 05:09 PM, Viajero <viajero at quilombo.nl> said:

> Well, I bit the bullet and moved Accusations section to the Talk page. We'll see what happens...

It was reverted by user Sam Spade half-hour later. Anyone care to lend a hand?

V.


body:
On 05/24/04 18:21, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> --- David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:

>>Is there a way to make a {{msg:disinfopedia}} that would automatically link
>>to the article of the same name on Disinfopedia? That would be a lot easier
>>hence more widely used.

> I hear that the new template namespace for MediaWiki 1.3 can take variables. It
> would be neat if a {{PAGENAME}} variable (with spaces replaced by underscores)
> were created and used as such a variable. But that will only work if the
> Wikipedia article and the Disinfopedia article both have the same name.

How about an optional {{msg:disinfopedia:Article_name}}. While we're wishing ;-)

The articles are *mostly* - though not always - under the same name.

- d.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Wikipedia-related project: WikiRover

body:
Tim Starling wrote:
> Hunter Peress wrote:
>> Use knoppix bootable linux. http://knoppix.net
>> it comes with all the tools you'll need for all the conversions you
>> can dream of
>> except svg. and for all the potential systems that are bound to be
>> encountered in non-net enabled areas.
>
> So whenever you want to look up something in an article, you just stick
> in the CD, reboot the computer, write down the information you want on a
> bit of paper, and reboot the computer again to get back to your
> preferred OS?

FWIW I think a bootable linux+Wikipedia would be *awesome*. But, the
data needs to be accessible from an existing OS as well (and not all of
us are running an x86 machine!) or we get the above scenario of
extremely limited usefulness.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Viajero wrote:

>On 05/24/04  at 05:09 PM, Viajero <viajero at quilombo.nl> said:
>
>
>>Well, I bit the bullet and moved Accusations section to the Talk page. We'll see what happens...
>>
>>
>
>It was reverted by user Sam Spade half-hour later. Anyone care to lend a hand?
>
>
I was tempted to jump in.  The article is a better criticism of the
Americans than of the French. :-)

Ec


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikimedia Communs

body:
>
>
>> Thank you for your support. I would like to again
>invite all interested
>> parties (especially developers, but also writers,
>photographers etc.) to
>> add themselves on the above page, so that we can
>together move this
>> project forward after MediaWiki 1.3 has reached a
>stable state. As the
>> above proposal states, I hope that we can also
>implement single sign-on in
>> one fell swoop with the Commons itself, which would
>be one important step
>> to bring the individual Wikimedia projects closer
>together.
>
>
>>I am still willing to help and aid in this project.
>>However, as things
>>look now, the only help I can offer you is to
>>discontinue any plans I
>>myself have in this direction until you are ready.
>
>>One time there was just the English Wikipedia, then
>>other languages
>>were made. I have the feeling that I'm like someone
>>wanting to set
>>up another language and getting the answer that it's
>a >good idea, but
>>that in half a year there will be a new software with
>>language links
>>and the possibility to have an interface adaptable to
>>languages, and
>>I just wait for that.
>
>>It's not that I don't like your plans. I do. And when
>>the time
>>comes, I'll join in. For now I'll just count my
>>losses. And wonder
>>why you might succeed and I do not. Is it because you
>>are a
>>developer and I'm not? Because your plans are grand
>>and mine
>>down-to-earth? Because I'm not brazen enough? Anyway,
>>I lost.
>>Again.
>
>>Andre Engels
>
>Andr?. Pause r?flexion. Un vrai leader ?vite de
>perp?tuellement marcher sur les pieds des autres. Il
>leur laisse de la place pour s'exprimer, parfois m?me
>il s'efface pour laisser les autres s'occuper d'un
>projet qui leur tient ? coeur. Il ?vite de cr?er des
>rancoeurs :-) Enfin, juste ma triste opinion. ant
>
C'est bien de voir que tout au moins quelqu'un se souvient de la liste
correcte pour discuter ces sujets. Est-ce que tous les autres oublient
parce que en ce moment Jimbo ne re?oit pas les messages de cette liste-ci ?

--Michel Neige
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subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikimedia Communs

body:
>
>
>> Thank you for your support. I would like to again
>invite all interested
>> parties (especially developers, but also writers,
>photographers etc.) to
>> add themselves on the above page, so that we can
>together move this
>> project forward after MediaWiki 1.3 has reached a
>stable state. As the
>> above proposal states, I hope that we can also
>implement single sign-on in
>> one fell swoop with the Commons itself, which would
>be one important step
>> to bring the individual Wikimedia projects closer
>together.
>
>
>>I am still willing to help and aid in this project.
>>However, as things
>>look now, the only help I can offer you is to
>>discontinue any plans I
>>myself have in this direction until you are ready.
>
>>One time there was just the English Wikipedia, then
>>other languages
>>were made. I have the feeling that I'm like someone
>>wanting to set
>>up another language and getting the answer that it's
>a >good idea, but
>>that in half a year there will be a new software with
>>language links
>>and the possibility to have an interface adaptable to
>>languages, and
>>I just wait for that.
>
>>It's not that I don't like your plans. I do. And when
>>the time
>>comes, I'll join in. For now I'll just count my
>>losses. And wonder
>>why you might succeed and I do not. Is it because you
>>are a
>>developer and I'm not? Because your plans are grand
>>and mine
>>down-to-earth? Because I'm not brazen enough? Anyway,
>>I lost.
>>Again.
>
>>Andre Engels
>
>Andr?. Pause r?flexion. Un vrai leader ?vite de
>perp?tuellement marcher sur les pieds des autres. Il
>leur laisse de la place pour s'exprimer, parfois m?me
>il s'efface pour laisser les autres s'occuper d'un
>projet qui leur tient ? coeur. Il ?vite de cr?er des
>rancoeurs :-) Enfin, juste ma triste opinion. ant
>
C'est bien de voir que tout au moins quelqu'un se souvient de la liste
correcte pour discuter ces sujets. Est-ce que tous les autres oublient
parce que en ce moment Jimbo ne re?oit pas les messages de cette liste-ci ?

--Michel Neige
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subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikimedia Communs

body:
>
>
>> Thank you for your support. I would like to again
>invite all interested
>> parties (especially developers, but also writers,
>photographers etc.) to
>> add themselves on the above page, so that we can
>together move this
>> project forward after MediaWiki 1.3 has reached a
>stable state. As the
>> above proposal states, I hope that we can also
>implement single sign-on in
>> one fell swoop with the Commons itself, which would
>be one important step
>> to bring the individual Wikimedia projects closer
>together.
>
>
>>I am still willing to help and aid in this project.
>>However, as things
>>look now, the only help I can offer you is to
>>discontinue any plans I
>>myself have in this direction until you are ready.
>
>>One time there was just the English Wikipedia, then
>>other languages
>>were made. I have the feeling that I'm like someone
>>wanting to set
>>up another language and getting the answer that it's
>a >good idea, but
>>that in half a year there will be a new software with
>>language links
>>and the possibility to have an interface adaptable to
>>languages, and
>>I just wait for that.
>
>>It's not that I don't like your plans. I do. And when
>>the time
>>comes, I'll join in. For now I'll just count my
>>losses. And wonder
>>why you might succeed and I do not. Is it because you
>>are a
>>developer and I'm not? Because your plans are grand
>>and mine
>>down-to-earth? Because I'm not brazen enough? Anyway,
>>I lost.
>>Again.
>
>>Andre Engels
>
>Andr?. Pause r?flexion. Un vrai leader ?vite de
>perp?tuellement marcher sur les pieds des autres. Il
>leur laisse de la place pour s'exprimer, parfois m?me
>il s'efface pour laisser les autres s'occuper d'un
>projet qui leur tient ? coeur. Il ?vite de cr?er des
>rancoeurs :-) Enfin, juste ma triste opinion. ant
>
C'est bien de voir que tout au moins quelqu'un se souvient de la liste
correcte pour discuter ces sujets. Est-ce que tous les autres oublient
parce que en ce moment Jimbo ne re?oit pas les messages de cette liste-ci ?

--Michel Neige
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subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikimedia Communs

body:
>
>
>> Thank you for your support. I would like to again
>invite all interested
>> parties (especially developers, but also writers,
>photographers etc.) to
>> add themselves on the above page, so that we can
>together move this
>> project forward after MediaWiki 1.3 has reached a
>stable state. As the
>> above proposal states, I hope that we can also
>implement single sign-on in
>> one fell swoop with the Commons itself, which would
>be one important step
>> to bring the individual Wikimedia projects closer
>together.
>
>
>>I am still willing to help and aid in this project.
>>However, as things
>>look now, the only help I can offer you is to
>>discontinue any plans I
>>myself have in this direction until you are ready.
>
>>One time there was just the English Wikipedia, then
>>other languages
>>were made. I have the feeling that I'm like someone
>>wanting to set
>>up another language and getting the answer that it's
>a >good idea, but
>>that in half a year there will be a new software with
>>language links
>>and the possibility to have an interface adaptable to
>>languages, and
>>I just wait for that.
>
>>It's not that I don't like your plans. I do. And when
>>the time
>>comes, I'll join in. For now I'll just count my
>>losses. And wonder
>>why you might succeed and I do not. Is it because you
>>are a
>>developer and I'm not? Because your plans are grand
>>and mine
>>down-to-earth? Because I'm not brazen enough? Anyway,
>>I lost.
>>Again.
>
>>Andre Engels
>
>Andr?. Pause r?flexion. Un vrai leader ?vite de
>perp?tuellement marcher sur les pieds des autres. Il
>leur laisse de la place pour s'exprimer, parfois m?me
>il s'efface pour laisser les autres s'occuper d'un
>projet qui leur tient ? coeur. Il ?vite de cr?er des
>rancoeurs :-) Enfin, juste ma triste opinion. ant
>
C'est bien de voir que tout au moins quelqu'un se souvient de la liste
correcte pour discuter ces sujets. Est-ce que tous les autres oublient
parce que en ce moment Jimbo ne re?oit pas les messages de cette liste-ci ?

--Michel Neige
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subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikimedia Communs

body:
>
>
>> Thank you for your support. I would like to again
>invite all interested
>> parties (especially developers, but also writers,
>photographers etc.) to
>> add themselves on the above page, so that we can
>together move this
>> project forward after MediaWiki 1.3 has reached a
>stable state. As the
>> above proposal states, I hope that we can also
>implement single sign-on in
>> one fell swoop with the Commons itself, which would
>be one important step
>> to bring the individual Wikimedia projects closer
>together.
>
>
>>I am still willing to help and aid in this project.
>>However, as things
>>look now, the only help I can offer you is to
>>discontinue any plans I
>>myself have in this direction until you are ready.
>
>>One time there was just the English Wikipedia, then
>>other languages
>>were made. I have the feeling that I'm like someone
>>wanting to set
>>up another language and getting the answer that it's
>a >good idea, but
>>that in half a year there will be a new software with
>>language links
>>and the possibility to have an interface adaptable to
>>languages, and
>>I just wait for that.
>
>>It's not that I don't like your plans. I do. And when
>>the time
>>comes, I'll join in. For now I'll just count my
>>losses. And wonder
>>why you might succeed and I do not. Is it because you
>>are a
>>developer and I'm not? Because your plans are grand
>>and mine
>>down-to-earth? Because I'm not brazen enough? Anyway,
>>I lost.
>>Again.
>
>>Andre Engels
>
>Andr?. Pause r?flexion. Un vrai leader ?vite de
>perp?tuellement marcher sur les pieds des autres. Il
>leur laisse de la place pour s'exprimer, parfois m?me
>il s'efface pour laisser les autres s'occuper d'un
>projet qui leur tient ? coeur. Il ?vite de cr?er des
>rancoeurs :-) Enfin, juste ma triste opinion. ant
>
C'est bien de voir que tout au moins quelqu'un se souvient de la liste
correcte pour discuter ces sujets. Est-ce que tous les autres oublient
parce que en ce moment Jimbo ne re?oit pas les messages de cette liste-ci ?

--Michel Neige
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subject: [WikiEN-l] [[Anti-French sentiment in the United States]]

body:
On 05/24/04 18:17, Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Delirium wrote:

>> Ah, but by that logic we would have to ban non-Americans from editing
>> [[Anti-French sentiment in the United States]].  It is after all
>> primarily about how Americans view the French, so clearly only an
>> American could understand the extent of that sentiment, eh?

> Certainly!
> One of the clearest descriptions of the United States system was written
> by a Frenchman, de Tocqueville.

Trust me when I say that [[AdTI]] is NO RELATION WHATSOEVER.

- d.


from_name: Nicolas Weeger

body:
Hello.

As Med mentioned in a mail in reply to Magnus, he & I are working on a
project called 'wikirover' (exists on sourceforge, empty for now).
Not very advanced yet, but you never know :p

I think some people may be interested, so i'll try to explain what we
have in mind.

The aim will be, ultimately, to make an offline Wikipedia, that could
be distributed on CD/DVD/...
But not necessarily the whole encyclopedia, a subpart would do it
(sports? movies? you name it).

The core will be a C++ library. It'll have tools to store raw articles
(and history) in an sqlite database, parse'em to different formats
(html first, then maybe others). Also search capabilities.
Maybe classes to access articles from live Wikipedia, mysql server,
and/or database dump.

Then an application that'll actually display articles, from local
database. It'll use different raw articles sources, and merge that
(like: first download 'movie' database, then 'actors/actresses', it'll
merge & make correct links between topics). With also update
capability (from live Wikipedia? dump? why not :p), things like that
(basically, things you'd expect from a regular encyclopedia).

And, potentially, a tool to manage those theme-related bases.

We'll try to make it crossplatform (we can test on Linux & Windows).
Library will use platform independant code, applications probably
wxWidgets (depends, nothing is sure yet :p)

Nicolas


from_name: Christopher Larberg

subject: [WikiEN-l] Who is this editorial group?

body:
It's the Cabal, silly. [/#wikipedia reference] Perhaps they're trying to
talk about the sysops, but failing miserably? And I agree; it seems to be
hard for people to accept the fact that Wikipedia is completely open. I get
the same kind of reaction whenever I tell people about it.

Perhaps a correction letter should be sent to the magazine? We don't want
people to get the wrong impression about Wikipedia.
>=)

----- Original Message -----
From: "Peter Jaros" <rjaros at shaysnet.com>
To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
Sent: Monday, May 24, 2004 8:25 PM
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Who is this editorial group?

> http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_22/b3885044.htm:
>
> > WIKIPEDIA IS ONE of the more remarkable projects on the Web. The
> > online encyclopedia (www.wikipedia.com) is the work of 6,000-odd
> > volunteers covering a huge range of subjects, even though it does
> > better on science and technology than on arts and culture. Not
> > surprisingly, the articles are of uneven depth and quality. If you
> > find an error, you are welcome to suggest a correction. And if you
> > find a topic that isn't covered, you are welcome to create a new
> > article. (An editorial group decides which corrections and
> > contributions merit posting.)
>
> Uh, who is this "editorial group"?  This wouldn't disturb me so much
> if I hadn't sent a letter to another columnist recently about almost
> the same language.  I supposed the WikiWay is just too hard for some
> people to believe, but who is this "editorial group"?
>
> Peter
>
> Wow.  Three consecutive lines, 76 chars each.  By accident.  ::Bow::
>
>                             -- ---<>--- --
>                   A house without walls cannot fall.
>      Help build the world's largest encyclopedia at Wikipedia.org
>                             -- ---<>--- --
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Delirium

subject: [Wikitech-l] parsing wikitext

body:
I like the WikiRover, but something IMO it needs is a formal parser for
wikitext.  I haven't looked at MediaWiki 1.3, but last time I looked at
the parser (1.1 maybe?) it wasn't actually a parser, but a bunch of
regular expressions applied to the flat Wiki file, with some hacks like
replacing math sections with a unique text string to avoid them getting
clobbered.  All that makes repurposing it for other things a bit
difficult.  As a side note, it also seems to make extending it
difficult---it seems to be the reason (unless I'm missing something
else) for limitations like "you can't have links inside of image
captions", because regular expressions have a more limited
expressiveness than context-free grammars do, so can't distinguish a ]]
closing an internal link from the ]] closing the image.

I've been thinking of doing it for a while, but my main hang-up, apart
from lack of time, is the lack of a good parser-generator for the full
class of context-free grammars.  Most require you to have LALR(1)
grammars, and maintaining the wikimarkup specification in such a form,
not to mention getting it there in the first place, would be a
nightmare, since wikitext isn't particularly designed with it in mind
like many programming languages are (it's hard to even scan to
unambiguously find terminals with a lexer in wikitext).  One tool that
does both take the full set of grammars and has no separate lexer is
"ratpack parsing", which was some guy's master's thesis recently, and
has been implemented so far in Haskell and Java.  It's very
fast---O(n)---but also takes O(n) space, where 'n' is the size of the
document being parsed, which isn't so good (LALR(1) parsers are O(k)
where k is the maximum nesting depth).  A ratpack parser on one of the
larger Wikipedia articles (say, 100kb) would take around 0.5-1 second
and 4MB of RAM to parse.  That's fine for offline generation, but would
be impossible to use on wikipedia.org, and it'd be ideal if eventually
we could have one grammar that is used for everything, instead of
keeping differently-specified things in approximate sync.

The other possibilities I've found are:
 1. Bite the bullet and try to shove wikitext into LALR(1).  Not very
fun, and might not even be possible.
 2. Write a hand-coded pseudo-recursive-descent parser (but the nature
of wikitext means this requires unbounded lookahead to resolve ambiguities)
 3. Use a GLR parser-generator like Berkeley's Elkhound.  This might be
doable, but Elkhound is a bit hard to use.  Or I may just not have
looked enough.
 4. Use ratpack parsing, but change things up so articles get parsed on
edit instead of on view, which is only on the order of a few tens of
thousands per day, and have views generated from pre-parsed abstract
representations (or perhaps even already-generated HTML-with-blanks that
just needs link-coloring and date-format preferences filled in).

Anyone have any thoughts in this direction, or suggestions?  Is this
even worth doing at all?  It seems like having wikitext formally
specified would be nice, because it would allow for easy extensions,
like the mentioned "links inside of image captions" example, and easy
retargetting to any other sort of output format.  But doing it for
wikitext seems difficult---most programming languages are specifically
designed with clean lexing followed by LALR(1) parsing in mind.  That's
not meant to be a criticism of wikitext btw---it's clearly supposed to
be person-readable, with machine readability being a distant
second---but it does make it rather difficult to deal with given the
current state of parsing technology.

-Mark


from_name: N.T. Riche

subject: [WikiEN-l] the Enforcer

body:
Here is an E-mail I just got from the Enforcer (i Will NOT show you my responce):

Hey, Plato,

Can you list me as a member of the Red Faction?

I hope you don't mind the legal information I contributed to your

talk page. I thought it proper to drop a casual Wiki hint before I

started posting letters to attorneys general that could get members

of the cabal fined or worse...

Happy May Day. Thanks for your work for freedom.

~`~

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Friends.  Fun. Try the all-new Yahoo! Messenger
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from_name: Ivan Krstic

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> FWIW I think a bootable linux+Wikipedia would be *awesome*. But, the
> data needs to be accessible from an existing OS as well (and not all of
> us are running an x86 machine!) or we get the above scenario of
> extremely limited usefulness.

Brion is dead-on here, as usual. While a bootable knoppix disc is a
great idea, the WP data residing on the disc needs to be kept in a
format that can be read by multiplatform reader applications that are
also on the disc.

For instance, something like RealBasic [http://www.realsoftware.com/]
will compile an application for both Mac and Windows, so if it can also
live on the CD, I think the combination (Mac, Windows, Linux) is very
satisfactory coverage. An alternative, of course, is Java - but I think
sticking red-hot needles into our respective eyes might be more pleasurable.

Cheers,
Ivan.


body:
Actually, d'oh, I just checked the RealBasic page (I haven't read up on
RB in a while). It turns out the new version, 5.5, supports compilation
to OS X, Windows and Linux, and has reasonably good database functionality.

Ivan.

Brion Vibber wrote:

> Tim Starling wrote:
>
>> Hunter Peress wrote:
>>
>>> Use knoppix bootable linux. http://knoppix.net   it comes with all
>>> the tools you'll need for all the conversions you can dream of
>>> except svg. and for all the potential systems that are bound to be
>>> encountered in non-net enabled areas.
>>
>>
>> So whenever you want to look up something in an article, you just
>> stick in the CD, reboot the computer, write down the information you
>> want on a bit of paper, and reboot the computer again to get back to
>> your preferred OS?
>
>
> FWIW I think a bootable linux+Wikipedia would be *awesome*. But, the
> data needs to be accessible from an existing OS as well (and not all of
> us are running an x86 machine!) or we get the above scenario of
> extremely limited usefulness.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>


from_name: Peter Jaros

subject: [WikiEN-l] Who is this editorial group?

body:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_22/b3885044.htm:

> WIKIPEDIA IS ONE of the more remarkable projects on the Web. The
> online encyclopedia (www.wikipedia.com) is the work of 6,000-odd
> volunteers covering a huge range of subjects, even though it does
> better on science and technology than on arts and culture. Not
> surprisingly, the articles are of uneven depth and quality. If you
> find an error, you are welcome to suggest a correction. And if you
> find a topic that isn't covered, you are welcome to create a new
> article. (An editorial group decides which corrections and
> contributions merit posting.)

Uh, who is this "editorial group"?  This wouldn't disturb me so much
if I hadn't sent a letter to another columnist recently about almost
the same language.  I supposed the WikiWay is just too hard for some
people to believe, but who is this "editorial group"?

Peter

Wow.  Three consecutive lines, 76 chars each.  By accident.  ::Bow::

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


from_name: brion at pobox.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki 1.2.6 released

body:
This will likely be the last release in the 1.2.x series, as we work on
finishing up 1.3.0...

  Changes since 1.2.5:
  * Spam blocker ($wgSpamRegex - refuses to save edits that match)
  * Updated documentation about $wgWhitelistRead
  * Ensure that searchindex table is created as MyISAM
  * Interwiki cache timeout (memcached)
  * Fix uploads on Windows with magic_quotes_gpc
  * Some config fixes for Windows (slashes etc)
  * Local interwiki URL redirects
  * Fixed obscure deletion problem in squid mode on corrupt entries
  * Language files updated to remove more hard-coded "Wikipedia" strings

There are no database format changes.

Release notes:
https://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?release_id=240784

Download:
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/wikipedia/mediawiki-1.2.6.tar.gz?
download

If you encounter a problem in the installation process, please include
*all* of the output under the 'Checking environment' heading with your
report!

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: [Mediawiki-l] MediaWiki 1.2.6 released

body:
brion at pobox.com wrote:
>  * Updated documentation about $wgWhitelistRead

Just a reminder: MediaWiki is *not* really intended for wikis that
aren't accessible to the general public. $wgWhitelistRead is very weak,
and there are a number of ways to get around it to read blocked pages
(at least some of which are fixed in 1.3).

If you're running a private wiki, use your web server's built-in support
for IP range limits and HTTP authentication and other such controls to
keep unwanted visitors from reading your pages.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
Arvind Narayanan wrote:
> Hold on there - what's the necessity of having to use this kind of thing
> just for writing a cross platform app? Perhaps you like the "integrated
> database" feature, but couldn't we just bundle MySql with the app? But I
> wonder whether we need to do all that. Couldn't a simple mozilla plugin
> which implements untarring and unzipping do the job, assuming that the
> files are stored on disk in the form of a few tens of articles per
> compressed tarball?

There is no necessity, I was merely throwing out ideas. I personally
like the idea of one application that does all the work, but that may
just be personal bias. Bundling MySQL is an option, but I don't think
it's wise - we'd have to have binaries for each of the platforms on the
CD, and make sure all the glue is also cross-platform, AND make sure we
can do this without having to install anything on the user's computer.

As far as cross-platform development goes, however, XUL is something to
consider - it'd let us have the Mozilla guys deal with the
cross-platform backend magic. Not to mention, if there existed an
inconspicuous "Install Mozilla to Hard Drive" link on the CD somewhere,
the CD might become a reasonably effective, completely inobtrusive
method for open-source evangelism (i.e. after people use Mozilla to
browse the wikipedia CD and realize the blessings of tabbed browsing and
the like, they just might be willing to make it their browser of choice).

Lots to think about here.

Cheers,
Ivan.


from_name: Anthere

body:
Viajero a ?crit:
> On 05/24/04  at 05:09 PM, Viajero <viajero at quilombo.nl> said:
>
>
>>Well, I bit the bullet and moved Accusations section to the Talk page. We'll see what happens...
>
>
> It was reverted by user Sam Spade half-hour later. Anyone care to lend a hand?
>
>
> V.

Sam...

What about starting the contest of the article with the longest
"neutrality dispute" heading ?


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject:
[WikiEN-l] How to teach journalists (was: who is this editorial
	group?)

body:
I suggest we do this:

1. Ensure that there is an article about their publication, e.g.,
[[Business Week]].

2. Include something obviously wrong and easy to fix, like the spelling
of the journalist's name!

3. Send them the URL of the Wikipedia article and invite them to fix
it!!!

Ed Poor, aka Uncle Ed
Bureaucrat
Mediator
WikiEvangelist


from_name: Jimmy Wales

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> FWIW I think a bootable linux+Wikipedia would be *awesome*. But, the
> data needs to be accessible from an existing OS as well (and not all of
> us are running an x86 machine!) or we get the above scenario of
> extremely limited usefulness.

I agree totally with Brion on both points.

A bootable linux+Wikipedia that just comes up as a 'kiosk', i.e. it's
an instant "appliance" that could be placed in a library or school
with extremely limited financial/hardware/skill resources would be
excellent.

But also, having the data easily accessible from existing OS as well
is extremely important.

It'd be neat to do both on 1 CD, but if they are too far different
from each other, it'd be fine to have these be different "products".

--Jimbo


from_name: Fred Bauder

body:
I tried. I am no fan of the French, but that article has crap in it that is
not only false but almost no Americans believes. I think we will have to ask
them to demonstrate some references. Perhaps some language, "A small
misinformed minority of Americans believe...."

Fred

> From: Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Mon, 24 May 2004 20:20:45 -0700
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: [[Anti-French sentiment in the United States]]
>
> I was tempted to jump in.  The article is a better criticism of the
> Americans than of the French. :-)
>
> Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] Who is this editorial group?

body:
> Uh, who is this "editorial group"?  This wouldn't disturb me so much
> if I hadn't sent a letter to another columnist recently about almost
> the same language.  I supposed the WikiWay is just too hard for some
> people to believe, but who is this "editorial group"?

I had a long interview with a different reporter at BusinessWeek last
week, and apparently these guys didn't compare notes.

I recommend if people want to write, to do so with an enthusiastic
positive spin.  We appreciate the favorable attention, and if the
details aren't quite right, it's an opportunity to spread our message.

I absolutely think that the WikiWay *is* hard for people to grasp.  I
personally have a hard time believing it myself, it's ridiculous, isn't
it, a website that anyone can edit?

--Jimbo


from_name: Jens Frank

subject: [Wikitech-l] parsing wikitext

body:
On Mon, May 24, 2004 at 10:30:50PM -0500, Delirium wrote:
> I like the WikiRover, but something IMO it needs is a formal parser for
> wikitext.  I haven't looked at MediaWiki 1.3, but last time I looked at
> the parser (1.1 maybe?) it wasn't actually a parser, but a bunch of
> regular expressions applied to the flat Wiki file, with some hacks like
> replacing math sections with a unique text string to avoid them getting
> clobbered.

You should perhaps have a look at 1.3 first. Parts of the Parser are
already a real parser, reading the wikitext in one pass, character by
character. See Tokenizer.php and its use in Parser.php. This work is
not yet completed, so the regexes still exist for some parts of the markup.

Regards,

JeLuF


from_name: dpbsmith at verizon.net

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: BusinessWeek article DEFINITELY needs correction

body:
> From: "Peter Jaros" <rjaros at shaysnet.com>
>
> > http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_22/b3885044.htm:
> >
> > > WIKIPEDIA IS ONE of the more remarkable projects on the Web. The
> > > online encyclopedia (www.wikipedia.com) is the work of 6,000-odd
> > > volunteers covering a huge range of subjects, even though it does
> > > better on science and technology than on arts and culture. Not
> > > surprisingly, the articles are of uneven depth and quality. If you
> > > find an error, you are welcome to suggest a correction. And if you
> > > find a topic that isn't covered, you are welcome to create a new
> > > article. (An editorial group decides which corrections and
> > > contributions merit posting.)
> >
> > Uh, who is this "editorial group"?  This wouldn't disturb me so much
> > if I hadn't sent a letter to another columnist recently about almost
> > the same language.  I supposed the WikiWay is just too hard for some
> > people to believe, but who is this "editorial group"?

Christopher Larberg added
> Perhaps a correction letter should be sent to the magazine? We don't want
> people to get the wrong impression about Wikipedia.

This should definitely be corrected. It's just... totally... wrong. (I'd
better to log into BusinessWeek right now and fix it. Oh, wait...)

Nobody needs to "suggest" corrections, they can just _make_ them. The
"editorial group" is everyone, including anons. (Any user can blank an entire
page or replace it with a redirect. The distinction between doing that and
deleting a page is very subtle). And the even if the "editorial group" means
the admins/sysops it's wrong. Sysops don't "decide what merits posting"
before the fact--no "prior restraint." It acts, if at all, after the fact.
And it doesn't act as a group--whoever feels like discussing an article
discusses it. And all decisions are reversible...


subject: [WikiEN-l] How Wikipedia works

body:
(To Stephen H. Wildstrom, BusinessWeek "Technology and You" columnist)

Your description of how Wikipedia is edited gives a seriously incorrect
impression. Users do not "suggest" corrections, they simply _make_
them. There is no "editorial group," or rather the editorial group is
everybody, and new articles and corrections do not undergo any _prior_
approval process.

You say, "If you find an error, you are welcome to suggest a correction."
Wrong; if you find an error, we encourage you to "be bold" and simply
correct it yourself. You do not even need to create an account to do this.
The link on every page that says "edit this page" means exactly what it says.
It's _possible_ to suggest a correction, which is what the "discuss this
page" link is for, and _advisable_ if you're not sure or the topic is highly
controversial, but it is not necessary. If you see something wrong in
Wikipedia, just fix it.

You say that "An editorial group decides which corrections and contributions
merit posting." This is doubly wrong. First, this suggests that things need
to be approved _prior_ to posting. They don't. Anyone can create a new page
or correct any existing page at any time. Anything that happens, happens
after the fact.

Second, there's no "editorial group." Or, the editorial group is everyone,
including anons (those who haven't created usernames, a two-minute
process). There _is_ a special category of users called sysops that have the
ability to delete a page, making it actually disappear from the encyclopedia.
But this is a fairly subtle distinction, since _any_ user can replace a page
with totally new content, or blank it (remove all its content), or convert it
into a "redirect."

There are, indeed, checks and balances, but they don't work the way you seem
to think they do. For example, I have a special interest in Jack London, so I
have the Jack London page on my "watchlist." I don't own the page, I'm not
consider the author, I have no special responsibility--but I watch it. Any
time someone edits that page, it appears on my watchlist. If you were to add
a sentence to the page saying "Jack London was also the author of 'Lassie
Come-Home,'" I would probably spot it and remove it within a day or two.  You
could, of course, put it back. Then I would probably remove it again and
message you saying "No, it's a great book but it was written by Eric Knight,
not Jack London. We could use an article on Eric Knight, by the way." And
that would probably be the end of it.

Many people watch the lists of recent changes and new pages. People create
silly pages all the time. If someone were to create a page on "Stevie
Wildstrom" saying "Stevie rocks! He is just totally cooooooool," it would be
spotted by a sysop and deleted, probably within hours.

On the other hand, suppose you created a page saying "Steven H. Wildstrom is
unquestionably the world's foremost authority on technology, whose
Technology and You column, has, since 1994, delighted billions of readers
every week. Widely considered a likely Nobel Prize nominee, Wildstrom
is the most prominent alumnus ever to graduate from the University of
Michigan. He lives in Victorian garden suburb of Kensington, Maryland, known
as the 'antique shop capital of the world.' He is a member of the local
arrangements committee for the International Math Olympiad."

A page like this, probably within hours, would be listed in Votes for
Deletion as a "vanity page," and _anyone interested_ would take part in a
discussion about whether the article had a suitably neutral point of view,
and whether you were really notable enough to warrant inclusion in an
encyclopedia. After five days of discussion, a sysop--any sysop--would
eyeball and judge whether or not there was a consensus to delete the page.

It is quite interesting how it works (and it does work). All is not sweetness
and light, and there are mechanisms for banning problem users, protecting
pages to stop edit wars and so forth, but probably 99.9% of all Wikipedia
articles are created and written by users simply... writing them.

It's been observed that errors on a page that nobody reads aren't serious,
because nobody reads the page; while errors on a page that many people read
aren't serious, because if many people read the page someone will spot the
error and fix it quickly.

I hope you and your readers will contribute to Wikipedia.


from_name: KNOTT, T

subject: [WikiEN-l] Theresa Knott Vs. Mr. Natural Health

body:
>From: N.T. Riche [mailto:vonriche at yahoo.com]

>OK Theresa I'll use the Talk pages I do find some MNH's behavior "troubling"
>(I'm avoiding personal attacks) as well as yours. Maybe you two should go the Arbitration.

Been there done that, MNH was banned for a month. I may well ask the AC to look into things again but I'd rather let them deal with irismeister first.
?
>Now for thing Lir's real name is Adam he's guy.

I know that. As I understand it, he prefers to be addressed as she. If that is not the case, then perhaps you could let us all know, because I am not the only one who thinks this.

>Also I do have a will of my own Michael chats with me a lot on aim and I don't listen to him. It's just Adam is a fellow socialist, and friend.

I'm sorry if I seemed a bit curt. Of course you have free will, but you have got into a dispute that has been ongoing for months, and you don't know anything about it. MNH has told blatant lies about mediation with me, he has also told blatant lies about me harassing him, yet you choose to believe him. Adam came to iridology looking for a fight. Adam has driven several people away from wikipedia, and she tried her usual tactics on me. But it didn't work we me, and she didn't like. <shrugs shoulders> that's just tough I'm afraid. Irismeister is one of the rudest people I've ever met. He attacks loads of people with really low down nasty remarks. When people like fabiform can't take it anymore and decide to get out of iridology, her follows them to their talk page with his insults. When they delete him from their own talk page he posts their names on review of admin actions or on conflicts between users claiming they have no right to delete stuff. He also threatens people with lawsuits. Yet you choose to allow him into pressuring you to agree with MNH

You appear to me to have taken sides in this dispute. You posted that you have seen me attacking MNH on this mailing list without backing things up with links. You posted  "I have seen Ms. knott engage in Poving articles such as Iridology" in MNHs request for comments on me, and have still not posted links proving this despite being asked to by David Gerard two days ago.

So what's it to be? You have to choose.  Are you going to side with them or are you going to be neutral? If you want to act as a neutral go between between MNH and the "science people" I personally have no problem with that.But you have to stop taking sides, you have to not be pressured into doing things by anyone, and you have to back up signed posts on RFCs with links as evidence or else strike out your comment. Sometimes doing the right thing means upsetting people. That's just the way it is.

Theresa


from_name: Christopher Mahan

subject: [WikiEN-l] How Wikipedia works

body:
--- "KNOTT, T" <tknott at qcl.org.uk> wrote:
> Have you sent it yet? It's too long IMO keep it simple and to the
> point, plus be more polite. Something like

Which is a very good example of the way wiki works, in my opinion. If
several people send this guy at newsweek their own version, he'll see
for himself the process at work.

Besides, there's no "official" wikipedia media-person...

=====
Christopher Mahan
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
818.943.1850 cell
http://www.christophermahan.com/

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Friends.  Fun.  Try the all-new Yahoo! Messenger.
http://messenger.yahoo.com/


from_name: Medéric Boquien

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Re: Wikipedia-related project: WikiRover

body:
Hi list!

I think there is one thing we should make clear. WikiRover is intented to be
a _library_, nothing less, nothing more. We want it to be independant from
the platform (C++ is fast and quite portable i think) and independant from
the GUI. We expect people to use the lib to make an interface with what
they prefer (Qt, gtk+, win32, cocoa, XUL, etc.). The database functionality
is provided by sqlite. Ryo has made a small proof of concept app that works
under windows and linux.
Oh, by the way, the library will be LGPLed and we don't want it to depend on
non-free software.

Cheers,

Med


from_name: Arvind Narayanan

in_reply_to:
<40B2BBE2.2000206@cranbrook.edu>;
	from ccikrs1@cranbrook.edu on Mon, May 24, 2004 at 11:22:10PM
	-0400

body:
On Mon, May 24, 2004 at 11:22:10PM -0400, Ivan Krstic wrote:
> Brion Vibber wrote:
> > FWIW I think a bootable linux+Wikipedia would be *awesome*. But, the
> > data needs to be accessible from an existing OS as well (and not all of
> > us are running an x86 machine!) or we get the above scenario of
> > extremely limited usefulness.
>
> Brion is dead-on here, as usual. While a bootable knoppix disc is a
> great idea, the WP data residing on the disc needs to be kept in a
> format that can be read by multiplatform reader applications that are
> also on the disc.

Agreed.
> For instance, something like RealBasic [http://www.realsoftware.com/]
> will compile an application for both Mac and Windows, so if it can also
> live on the CD, I think the combination (Mac, Windows, Linux) is very
> satisfactory coverage. An alternative, of course, is Java - but I think
> sticking red-hot needles into our respective eyes might be more pleasurable.

Hold on there - what's the necessity of having to use this kind of thing
just for writing a cross platform app? Perhaps you like the "integrated
database" feature, but couldn't we just bundle MySql with the app? But I
wonder whether we need to do all that. Couldn't a simple mozilla plugin
which implements untarring and unzipping do the job, assuming that the
files are stored on disk in the form of a few tens of articles per
compressed tarball?

Arvind
--
Its all GNU to me


from_name: Joel Konkle-Parker

body:
Quoting Michael Snow <wikipedia at earthlink.net>:

[snip]

> I can see why misuse of this project to host personal vanity webpages
> would be a concern, but I think there may be better ways to discourage
> that. I don't see a good reason to ban articles about the living,
> especially since it's probably easier to get information about a person
> while they're still alive.
>
> Instead, if the project is oriented toward genealogy rather than
> encyclopedic biography, it could be designed to focus on certain
> categories of information. "Family trees" all have something in common
> in terms of format, and most genealogical data is directed towards
> things like dates and places for major life events. A genealogy project
> might have more in common with Wiktionary than Wikipedia, in the sense
> that entries are more restricted in the types of information that are
> presented. An article might allow for dates and places of birth, death,
> marriage, etc., cause of death, names of parents and siblings, and other
> appropriate information, the same way that a Wiktionary article would
> consist primarily of spelling, pronunciation, part of speech,
> definition, etymology, usage, etc. If the purpose of the project is
> clear, we can set boundaries that prevent people from using it as a
> vehicle for a blog, or whatever else it is we don't want them doing with it.

Yes, this is exactly what I had in mind. My original rough template proposal is
at http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/GlobalFamilyTree. I had intended it to have a
set of well-structured information, including names of relatives, dates,
places, etc., with space for a few paragraphs about who the person was. That
last part would be the part that could be abused, but it is also what gives the
genealogy its character. If it is restricted to the format of a few paragraphs,
I think the potential for abuse would be minimized.

I started a Wikipeople page <http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipeople> to
discuss this further.

--
Joel Konkle-Parker
Webmaster  [Ballsome.com]

E-mail     [jjk3 at msstate.edu]
Phone      [662-518-1636]


from_name: Sheldon Rampton

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: ho w to properly use articles from an outside GFDL
	source?

body:
David Gerard wrote:

>How about an optional {{msg:disinfopedia:Article_name}}. While we're
>wishing ;-)
>
>The articles are *mostly* - though not always - under the same name.

If the names aren't the same, the obvious solution is to use
redirects and/or move articles.

--Sheldon Rampton


from_name: Burak Emir

subject: [Wikitech-l] can't contact tr.wikipedia.org

body:
Hello,

what is going on ?

cheers,
Burak


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
Nicolas-
> The aim will be, ultimately, to make an offline Wikipedia, that could
> be distributed on CD/DVD/...

This is a great idea, and several people have been working on similar
ideas.

What I don't get is why you want to parse the raw wikitext. This will be
quite a PITA unless you also bundle PHP, texvc etc. It would be much
easier to use the existing parser code to create a static HTML dump from
the wikisource, and use something like swish-E ( www.swish-e.org ) to
index that HTML dump. This would give you more time to focus on what
actually matters, i.e. the user interface.

As I recall Tim is working on something like that. Maybe while none of
these projects is very far along yet, these efforts could be merged into
one?

Besides Tim, there's Magnus, who has hacked together his stand alone
webserver/wiki engine for Windows, and there's an existing alpha quality
static HTML dumper called terodump by Tero Karvinen:
http://www.hut.fi/~tkarvine/tero-dump/

So how about it - Magnus, Tim, Tero, Nicolas, do you think you could work
together on one solution?

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikitech-l] works again Re: can't contact tr.wikipedia.org

body:
Burak Emir wrote:
> what is going on ?

hm, of course it worked again 1 min after I had sent my mail. Maybe
network...

cheers,
B.


from_name: Stephan Walter

body:
Hi,

There's also Alfio Puglisi who wrote a script to generate static HTML.

He has archives of multiple languages for download:

http://www.tommasoconforti.com/wiki/

en is 800MB (bz2 compressed), should be no problem to put it on a DVD
uncompressed.

Cheers,
Stephan

--
http://cowww.epfl.ch/~swalter/


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikimedia Communs

body:
Michael-
> C'est bien de voir que tout au moins quelqu'un se souvient de la liste
> correcte pour discuter ces sujets. Est-ce que tous les autres oublient
> parce que en ce moment Jimbo ne re?oit pas les messages de cette liste-ci ?

Jimbo is subscribed to the list, but he started the thread on wikipedia-l,
so I replied there. Is there any particular reason for this thread to be
in French? Andre, Anthere and yourself all speak English, which is surely
the best language to reach the largest number of people? foundation-l and
wikipedia-l are multilingual to allow people to communicate who otherwise
could not, not to have semi-private exchanges on a public list.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikimedia Communs


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Foundation-l] Re:Wikimedia Communs

body:
"Anthere" <anthere9 at yahoo.com> schrieb:

> Andr?. Pause r?flexion. Un vrai leader ?vite de
> perp?tuellement marcher sur les pieds des autres. Il
> leur laisse de la place pour s'exprimer, parfois m?me
> il s'efface pour laisser les autres s'occuper d'un
> projet qui leur tient ? coeur. Il ?vite de cr?er des
> rancoeurs :-) Enfin, juste ma triste opinion. ant

You may be right, but I guess that all it shows is that
I'm no 'vrai leader'.

Apart from that, I would happily not only let Eloquence
have his pet project, but even help him with it. But in
exchange I would like to get mine.

I want this, I have wanted it for many months. I have
made proposals to implement it, and all I need is to
get a wiki set up. Nothing. And then Eloquence comes
with his proposal and I think "Yes! Now it's going to
happen!" And then we get into discussion and I hear
that we might be able to get this in 3 months when
everyone helps. That's where I break.

I don't know what I should do now. Part of me says that
I should just keep quiet and come back when my help is
needed. Part of me wants to keep bickering, hoping
people agree. And part of me says to let people go to
hell, and just hijack one of those unused Wikis on
wikimedia and do my thing.

Andre Engels


subject: [Foundation-l] Re:Wikimedia Communs


from_name: cprompt

subject: [WikiEN-l] Who is this editorial group?

body:
I sent an email, thanking him for mentioning Wikipedia and pointing out
that changes are made in real time. The reply I got was that he was
simplifying the explanation of the site in the interest of space. The
reason he mentioned the editorial group is because any change can be
reverted. (Though I think he thinks only sysops can revert.)

--
http://www.fastmail.fm - A no graphics, no pop-ups email service


from_name: Tim Starling

body:
Hunter Peress wrote:
> You are just wrong. And this wrong judgment is really annoying.
>
> Use knoppix bootable linux. http://knoppix.net
>
> it comes with all the tools you'll need for all the conversions you can dream of
> except svg. and for all the potential systems that are bound to be
> encountered in non-net enabled areas.

So whenever you want to look up something in an article, you just stick
in the CD, reboot the computer, write down the information you want on a
bit of paper, and reboot the computer again to get back to your
preferred OS?

-- Tim Starling


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: jneden at bellsouth.net

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Need a new Cherokee Wiki, ASAP!

body:
Hi guys

Do me a favor, somebody, and please create our first Cherokee wiki at
http://chr.wikipedia.org ASAP, so I can get started!

Sgi! (Thanks!)

 -- Jeremy, Cherokee Wikipedian


from_name: Fennec Foxen

subject: [WikiEN-l] Who is this editorial group?

body:
On Tue, 25 May 2004 12:38:51 -0400, cprompt <cprompt at tmbg.org> wrote:
>
> I sent an email, thanking him for mentioning Wikipedia and pointing out
> that changes are made in real time. The reply I got was that he was
> simplifying the explanation of the site in the interest of space. The
> reason he mentioned the editorial group is because any change can be
> reverted. (Though I think he thinks only sysops can revert.)
I sent an email too, noting that anyone can revert (though sysops have
the rollback button) and pointing him at Votes for Deletion.


from_name: Stan Shebs

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: My email to BusinessWeek and Wildstrom's reply

body:
dpbsmith at verizon.net wrote:

>"What I was referring to loosely as the "editorial group" are the
>administrators, of whom you are one."
>
>If he actually knows that I am an administrator, rather than guessing, that
>suggests a reasonable degree of knowledgeability. Perhaps he is a Wikipedian
>himself?
>
He probably wandered around a bit, saw that some people throw their
weight around a lot :-), noticed that it sort of matches up to the
sysop list, and came to the logical conclusion. It would be easy to
look you up once he'd gotten your email. Another possibility is that
he was just equating administrators with logged-in users.

This is all very reminiscent of when the press started becoming aware
of Linux and GNU ca. 1994 or so; seemed like every possible hypothesis
and prognostification ended up in print somewhere before people started
understanding it.

Stan


from_name: nweeger at noos.fr

body:
>What I don't get is why you want to parse the raw wikitext.
<snip>

Because who said the interface would use HTML to display things? :)
The base library will have an abstract parser, and an HTML parser, but you could add a PDF parser, latex, you name it.
So I/we don't want to work with HTML, but with wikitext.
You could also envision the ability to export an article of the offline encyclopedia to PDF - and again, html probably isn't the right tool for that...

>As I recall Tim is working on something like that. Maybe while none of
>these projects is very far along yet, these efforts could be merged into
>one?

Yes, I think it'd be best. But others may have diverging opinions ^_
Med & I posted a message on Meta:Babel (village pump of meta) a while ago, but no one replied, so we assumed there wasn't really any project like that. Didn't even think of asking on wikitech, shame :)

Nicolas


body:
What is the size of the W in html uncompressed?

Can that be multi-CD load into a PC, or even via FTP ala apt...

I can imagine an offsite versioning that checks for the latest
version of all articles and self-updates accordingly. Also, drop the
histories. They're on the website.

If I had a 4 gig offline self-update-able (when on network) or via
new articles cds (using python of course for updating) this might be
a good way to keep the W for offline browsing.

Thoughts?

=====
Christopher Mahan
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
818.943.1850 cell
http://www.christophermahan.com/

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Friends.  Fun.  Try the all-new Yahoo! Messenger.
http://messenger.yahoo.com/


subject: [WikiEN-l] How Wikipedia works

body:
Have you sent it yet? It's too long IMO keep it simple and to the point, plus be more polite. Something like

Hi thanks for you article on Wikipedia, there are a couple of misconceptions that I would like to point out.

Users do not "suggest" corrections, they simply _make_
them. There is no "editorial group," or rather the editorial group is
everybody, and new articles and corrections do not undergo any _prior_
approval process.

You say, "If you find an error, you are welcome to suggest a correction."
Not true; if you find an error, we encourage you to "be bold" and simply
correct it yourself. You do not even need to create an account to do this.
The link on every page that says "edit this page" means exactly what it says.
It's _possible_ to suggest a correction, which is what the "discuss this
page" link is for, and _advisable_ if you're not sure or the topic is highly
controversial, but it is not necessary. If you see something wrong in
Wikipedia, just fix it.

You say that "An editorial group decides which corrections and contributions
merit posting." This is doubly wrong. First, this suggests that things need
to be approved _prior_ to posting. They don't. Anyone can create a new page
or correct any existing page at any time.

Second, there's no "editorial group." Or, the editorial group is everyone! It's a weird way of working, yet it does work.


from_name: Peter Jaros

body:
On May 24, 2004, at 12:19 PM, Daniel Mayer wrote:

> If we had a hand in drafting the GNU FCL, then we could ensure that it
> could be
> friendly to all content and more lax in what needs to be done in order
> to
> comply (requiring pretty much what we require for compliance - which
> happens to
> be a *very* liberal interpretation of the GNU FDL in order to make is
> practical
> for people to copy us).

How stuck are we to the license?  If you're saying it could be
possible to change it, could it be possible to make our own license?
Or is there another license out there that's just what we want?

Peter

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


subject: [WikiEN-l] How Wikipedia works

body:
On May 25, 2004, at 9:44 AM, KNOTT, T wrote:

> Have you sent it yet? It's too long IMO keep it simple and to the
> point, plus be more polite. Something like

Yes, that was the message itself.  It was addressed to him and CC'd
to the list.

Peter

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


from_name: dpbsmith at verizon.net

body:
Yes, Theresa Knott was right that it was much much too long, but I had
already sent it...

I got a very interesting reply:

"It's true that the explanation I gave was grossly oversimplified, both
for space and, frankly, to put it in terms that editors could understand."

(!!!!!!)

"What I was referring to loosely as the "editorial group" are the
administrators, of whom you are one."

If he actually knows that I am an administrator, rather than guessing, that
suggests a reasonable degree of knowledgeability. Perhaps he is a Wikipedian
himself?

He concluded "The wonder of Wikipedia is that it works remarkably well. I
have a background in sociology and somewhere in this process there's a
dissertation for someone."


from_name: Vikram Dendi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Offline Reader/editor for wiki

body:
Hi Magnus,
I am interested in testing your offline reader/editor.
thanks!
V


from_name: Alfio Puglisi

body:
On Tue, 25 May 2004, Stephan Walter wrote:

>Hi,
>
>There's also Alfio Puglisi who wrote a script to generate static HTML.
>
>He has archives of multiple languages for download:
>
>http://www.tommasoconforti.com/wiki/
>
>en is 800MB (bz2 compressed), should be no problem to put it on a DVD
>uncompressed.

Yes, but that's quite an old dump, and it's growing fast. The last html
version I did were well past 1 GB, still bzip2 compressed, and
uncompressed over a significant fraction of a DVD :-) If the en wiki
continues to grow so fast, it will overflow even a DVD in a not too
distant future.

Alfio


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] How Wikipedia works

body:
dpbsmith at verizon.net wrote:

>It is quite interesting how it works (and it does work). All is not sweetness
>and light, and there are mechanisms for banning problem users, protecting
>pages to stop edit wars and so forth, but probably 99.9% of all Wikipedia
>articles are created and written by users simply... writing them.
>
>
The reference to "edit wars" is well understood by Wikipedians, but to
an outsider it is undefined jargon.

Ec


from_name: sannse

subject: [Wikitech-l] SQL queries - a suggestion for limited access

body:
I'd very much like to update [[Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links]]
on a regular basis.

I'm sure this has been suggested before (maybe by Angela somewhere?) but is
there a possibility of allowing specified users to run specified SQL
queries?   This wouldn't have to be coded for perhaps, just a trust system
where a number of people are given access, but only on the condition that
they *only* run queries that have been checked and agreed.

The restrictions could be as specific as necessary:

eg: sannse is permitted to use the query (Disambiguation pages with links)
between  (specified hours), on a Sunday only, no more than once every three
weeks.

If someone went outside their conditions they would obviously lose the
access.

What do you think?  Possible?  Practical?

--sannse


from_name: Dan Drake

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Re: [[Anti-French sentiment in the United States]]

body:
On Tue, 25 May 2004 03:20:45 UTC, Ray Saintonge
<saintonge at telus.net> wrote:

>...
> I was tempted to jump in.  The article is a better criticism of the
> Americans than of the French. :-)

So it is.  (Though the definite articles give a false sense of
concreteness. *The* [Americans|French] are not something that really
exists in this context.)

I almost wonder why it causes so much offense.  Almost.  Of course, no one
wants to read a lot of insults to his country.  But the coverage (more or
less factual) of the large number of stupid horses' asses in _my_ country
seems more damaging; and the article, or the snapshot of it that I looked
at, doesn't ignore that aspect of the matter.  I'd rather not have such
infomration about Americans exposed to the world's view, but one doesn't
want to suppress the facts.  (Not that one can; not that the French don't
know about this stuff without Wikipedia; but here we have all the gory
details.)

--
Dan Drake
dd at dandrake.com
http://www.dandrake.com

Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.
 --George Orwell


from_name: delirium at hackish.org

subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikipedia-related project: WikiRover

body:
Quoting Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de>:

> What I don't get is why you want to parse the raw wikitext. This will be
> quite a PITA unless you also bundle PHP, texvc etc. It would be much
> easier to use the existing parser code to create a static HTML dump from
> the wikisource, and use something like swish-E ( www.swish-e.org ) to
> index that HTML dump. This would give you more time to focus on what
> actually matters, i.e. the user interface.

This seems like a pretty hackish solution long-term.  The HTML dump has some
semantic information, but it also has a lot of HTML-ish cruft in it.  The
wikitext doesn't have all the semantic information anyone might want, but it's
much better than the HTML version.  If you're going to do anything reasonably
intelligent with the output (other than just display the rendered HTML), or
output it to some different format (TeX is the one I've been working on), and
want it automated, a lot of that information will be useful.

So, basically:
  Wikitext --> abstract syntax --> a presentation format (HTML, TeX, etc.)

instead of:
  Wikitext --> one presentation format (HTML) --> another presentation format

...seems better to me.

The latter version is sort of like compiling a C++ program into x86 assembly and
then transforming it into PowerPC assembly from that, rather than doing wha gcc
does--compiling C++ into an abstract intermediate representation, which can
then be output to x86 assembly or PowerPC assembly or whatever you might like.

It does bring up another point though: even in the wikitext there isn't as much
semantic information as might be nice.  Some is hard to come up with good
markup for, but some is fairly easy--for example, encouraging people to use
<math> tags for everying that's logically math, even short things like "the
variable <math>g</math> is..." instead of using manual non-logical formatting
commands like "italicize".  Or even worse, using HTML-specific stuff like fancy
divs.

-Mark

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from_name: Michael Snow

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikimedia Communs

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>Jimbo is subscribed to the list
>
Yes, but until today, every time I've looked at the list of subscribers,
Jimbo's email was marked as having list delivery disabled. So as far as
I know, he hasn't been reading the messages on this list for most or all
of its existence. That's not necessarily a criticism of Jimbo, who has
many things to attend to, and can't be everywhere at once. But when we
collectively, consciously or unconsciously, only discuss policy issues
"in his presence", our behavior gives the impression of Jimbo as a
MeatBall:GodKing. A number of people have criticized the way these
mailing lists operate, and some object to participating as a result.
When you can observe differences between one mailing list and another
for reasons like this, it unfortunately gives credence to the criticism
that the mailing list is "like a king's court" (quoting someone else's
phrase). I think the mailing lists are useful, but we need to be aware
of appearances and not reinforce the image of a cabal.

>but he started the thread on wikipedia-l, so I replied there.
>
Nothing wrong with that, and possibly Jimbo also started the thread
there because you posted the original idea there (before this list ever
existed). Another possible approach is to shift the discussion to the
appropriate mailing list. Given that some people have equated this list
with the defunct and rarely used wikilegal-l, I think it worthwhile to
put a little extra effort into seeing that this list actually gets used
for its intended purpose.

>Is there any particular reason for this thread to be
>in French?
>
Anthere wrote in French, so I replied in French. Since she preferred to
use her native language, for whatever reasons, I considered it a small
show of courtesy and good will to reply in the same language, since I'm
able to. I would be happy to translate into English for anyone who asks.

>foundation-l and wikipedia-l are multilingual to allow people to communicate who otherwise could not
>
Now that I look closely I see you added something similar to
[[Wikipedia:Mailing lists]] a couple months ago, and apparently nobody
objected. That seems like a pretty restrictive formulation to me, as if
we're only allowing multilingual discussion as a sort of concession, and
you _must_ use English unless you cannot.

For an organization as diverse and multilingual as Wikimedia, I think we
should take a more friendly attitude toward the use of other languages.
After all, for many languages there are also various people using the
list who can take a stab at translation. I would just as soon see a
person post in their native language, and rely on someone else with good
English skills to translate, than try and sort out from their broken
English what they really meant. Basically, I think it would be more in
keeping with the spirit of the project, if we allow people to post to
project-wide mailing lists in whatever language they choose. Many will
probably prefer to use English, but they don't need to be told to do so,
and by not telling them we do less to intimidate those who feel less
secure in their English.

Well, I've raised my concerns, and we can discuss it further on the talk
page.

>not to have semi-private exchanges on a public list.
>
>
I see discussions all the time on the mailing lists that are basically
conversations involving a very small handful of people. I don't see
anything wrong with that, any more than there's anything wrong with two
people engaging in a conversation on a talk page, which is equally
public. Whoever is interested can always join in, and I'm happy to shift
between my limited selection of languages to accommodate other participants.

--Michael Snow
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subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikimedia Communs

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>Jimbo is subscribed to the list
>
Yes, but until today, every time I've looked at the list of subscribers,
Jimbo's email was marked as having list delivery disabled. So as far as
I know, he hasn't been reading the messages on this list for most or all
of its existence. That's not necessarily a criticism of Jimbo, who has
many things to attend to, and can't be everywhere at once. But when we
collectively, consciously or unconsciously, only discuss policy issues
"in his presence", our behavior gives the impression of Jimbo as a
MeatBall:GodKing. A number of people have criticized the way these
mailing lists operate, and some object to participating as a result.
When you can observe differences between one mailing list and another
for reasons like this, it unfortunately gives credence to the criticism
that the mailing list is "like a king's court" (quoting someone else's
phrase). I think the mailing lists are useful, but we need to be aware
of appearances and not reinforce the image of a cabal.

>but he started the thread on wikipedia-l, so I replied there.
>
Nothing wrong with that, and possibly Jimbo also started the thread
there because you posted the original idea there (before this list ever
existed). Another possible approach is to shift the discussion to the
appropriate mailing list. Given that some people have equated this list
with the defunct and rarely used wikilegal-l, I think it worthwhile to
put a little extra effort into seeing that this list actually gets used
for its intended purpose.

>Is there any particular reason for this thread to be
>in French?
>
Anthere wrote in French, so I replied in French. Since she preferred to
use her native language, for whatever reasons, I considered it a small
show of courtesy and good will to reply in the same language, since I'm
able to. I would be happy to translate into English for anyone who asks.

>foundation-l and wikipedia-l are multilingual to allow people to communicate who otherwise could not
>
Now that I look closely I see you added something similar to
[[Wikipedia:Mailing lists]] a couple months ago, and apparently nobody
objected. That seems like a pretty restrictive formulation to me, as if
we're only allowing multilingual discussion as a sort of concession, and
you _must_ use English unless you cannot.

For an organization as diverse and multilingual as Wikimedia, I think we
should take a more friendly attitude toward the use of other languages.
After all, for many languages there are also various people using the
list who can take a stab at translation. I would just as soon see a
person post in their native language, and rely on someone else with good
English skills to translate, than try and sort out from their broken
English what they really meant. Basically, I think it would be more in
keeping with the spirit of the project, if we allow people to post to
project-wide mailing lists in whatever language they choose. Many will
probably prefer to use English, but they don't need to be told to do so,
and by not telling them we do less to intimidate those who feel less
secure in their English.

Well, I've raised my concerns, and we can discuss it further on the talk
page.

>not to have semi-private exchanges on a public list.
>
>
I see discussions all the time on the mailing lists that are basically
conversations involving a very small handful of people. I don't see
anything wrong with that, any more than there's anything wrong with two
people engaging in a conversation on a talk page, which is equally
public. Whoever is interested can always join in, and I'm happy to shift
between my limited selection of languages to accommodate other participants.

--Michael Snow
-------------- next part --------------
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subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikimedia Communs

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>Jimbo is subscribed to the list
>
Yes, but until today, every time I've looked at the list of subscribers,
Jimbo's email was marked as having list delivery disabled. So as far as
I know, he hasn't been reading the messages on this list for most or all
of its existence. That's not necessarily a criticism of Jimbo, who has
many things to attend to, and can't be everywhere at once. But when we
collectively, consciously or unconsciously, only discuss policy issues
"in his presence", our behavior gives the impression of Jimbo as a
MeatBall:GodKing. A number of people have criticized the way these
mailing lists operate, and some object to participating as a result.
When you can observe differences between one mailing list and another
for reasons like this, it unfortunately gives credence to the criticism
that the mailing list is "like a king's court" (quoting someone else's
phrase). I think the mailing lists are useful, but we need to be aware
of appearances and not reinforce the image of a cabal.

>but he started the thread on wikipedia-l, so I replied there.
>
Nothing wrong with that, and possibly Jimbo also started the thread
there because you posted the original idea there (before this list ever
existed). Another possible approach is to shift the discussion to the
appropriate mailing list. Given that some people have equated this list
with the defunct and rarely used wikilegal-l, I think it worthwhile to
put a little extra effort into seeing that this list actually gets used
for its intended purpose.

>Is there any particular reason for this thread to be
>in French?
>
Anthere wrote in French, so I replied in French. Since she preferred to
use her native language, for whatever reasons, I considered it a small
show of courtesy and good will to reply in the same language, since I'm
able to. I would be happy to translate into English for anyone who asks.

>foundation-l and wikipedia-l are multilingual to allow people to communicate who otherwise could not
>
Now that I look closely I see you added something similar to
[[Wikipedia:Mailing lists]] a couple months ago, and apparently nobody
objected. That seems like a pretty restrictive formulation to me, as if
we're only allowing multilingual discussion as a sort of concession, and
you _must_ use English unless you cannot.

For an organization as diverse and multilingual as Wikimedia, I think we
should take a more friendly attitude toward the use of other languages.
After all, for many languages there are also various people using the
list who can take a stab at translation. I would just as soon see a
person post in their native language, and rely on someone else with good
English skills to translate, than try and sort out from their broken
English what they really meant. Basically, I think it would be more in
keeping with the spirit of the project, if we allow people to post to
project-wide mailing lists in whatever language they choose. Many will
probably prefer to use English, but they don't need to be told to do so,
and by not telling them we do less to intimidate those who feel less
secure in their English.

Well, I've raised my concerns, and we can discuss it further on the talk
page.

>not to have semi-private exchanges on a public list.
>
>
I see discussions all the time on the mailing lists that are basically
conversations involving a very small handful of people. I don't see
anything wrong with that, any more than there's anything wrong with two
people engaging in a conversation on a talk page, which is equally
public. Whoever is interested can always join in, and I'm happy to shift
between my limited selection of languages to accommodate other participants.

--Michael Snow
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