from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] WP:OFFICE actions

body:
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Guy Chapman aka JzG [mailto:guy.chapman at spamcop.net]
>Sent: Saturday, January 20, 2007 02:25 AM
>To: 'English Wikipedia'
>Subject: [WikiEN-l] WP:OFFICE actions
>
>I raised this a while back.
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Western_University was office
>protected.  Editors had gathered some well-cited material, Jimbo said
>go ahead and rewrite, so we did.  It got hacked back again.  I don't
>have a problem with this, as Brad has now old us what the concern was,
>and we can work with that.  I do have a problem with a couple of
>elements of process:
>
>* The problem was not communicated until after the event, resulting in
>another pissed-off phone call to Brad which could have been avoided.
>
>* I was told the new version was not "cleared with foundation" but no
>mechanism exists for doing that, else I would have done so.
>
>* Brad (or Danny or Jimbo) does not scale.  People get impatient when
>months go by with no explanation of why we cannot say something which
>is, or appears to be, verifiably true.  This was a particular problem
>with the article on Gregory Lauder-Frost.
>
>So what should be the process for getting foundation approval for a
>rewrite where an article subject has made a complaint causing
>protection, and how can we ensure that the substance of the complaint
>is communicated (to the extent possible without compromising the
>various parties)?
>
>Is it possible to facilitate communication direct with the parties
>where errors of fact are the problem, to let them know in advance when
>changes are to be made?
>
>And where an external source (in this case Bear's Guide) says that two
>institutions are run by the same people out of the same address, and
>no known sources say otherwise, but the subject insists they are
>different, how do we go about validating that?  It's all very well for
>them to say they are different, but surely that gets {{fact}}?
>
>Guy (JzG)
>--
>http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG

What is lacking is well administered policy. When there is such a vacuum the problem ends up in the Office. With respect to persons there is Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons and its corresponding noticeboard, Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons/Noticeboard. With respect to enterprises, such as Pacific_Western_University, there is Wikipedia:Articles about ongoing enterprises. Wikipedia:Articles about ongoing enterprises is only an attempt at policy making, "currently inactive and kept for historical purposes". Appeals to the Office to support this policy have not been responded to.

While we discourage individuals or enterprises  from editing their own articles, it is sometimes very helpful if we are in communication with them on the talk page of their article. When the only communication is through the Office, perhaps through legal counsel, feedback is delayed and perhaps mediated more than is useful for editors crafting the article.

Fred


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Mathematics university lecture notes - useful to
	anybody?

body:
Timwi wrote:

>Hi,
>
>Upon cleaning up, my parents discovered some of my (hand-written)
>lecture notes that I took down when I studied undergraduate mathematics
>at Cambridge University from 1998-2001.
>
>I don't need them anymore. But I didn't want to throw them away in case
>they might be useful to someone. Thus, I'm asking here. I'd be willing
>to ship them to anyone who in turn would be willing to use them to
>improve Wikipedia and/or Wikibooks. Consider it a donation of sorts.
>
You could also consider Wikiversity.  The hard job is not in finding or
having the information, but in organizing it and writing it up.

Ec


from_name: Oskar Sigvardsson

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Nofollow back on URL links on en.wikipedia.org
	articles for now

body:
On 1/20/07, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Having been requested by Jimmy to do so, and having seen a fun rumor of
> a "search engine optimization world championship" contest targeting
> WP[1], I've gone ahead and switched rel="nofollow" back onto URLs in
> en.wikipedia.org's article namespace.
>
> (Better heuristic and manual flagging tools for URLs would of course be
> super; anyone interested in working on integrating such support into
> MediaWiki should swing on by the tech channels and give a shout.)

This is a real shame since good external links help to vastly improve
search :( Oh well, cost of doing business I guess.

--Oskar


from_name: Delirium

subject: [WikiEN-l] WP:OFFICE actions

body:
Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
> And where an external source (in this case Bear's Guide) says that two
> institutions are run by the same people out of the same address, and
> no known sources say otherwise, but the subject insists they are
> different, how do we go about validating that?  It's all very well for
> them to say they are different, but surely that gets {{fact}}?
>

One way of at least limiting damage to our accuracy and credibility is
to explicitly mark such pages as being incomplete due to legal threats.
If Pacific Western University's lawyers prohibit us from writing the
sort of complete, neutral, verifiable article that we otherwise would
have done, then we have a duty to warn our readers of that fact before
they read our article.

-Mark


list: foundation-l

from_name: geni

subject: [Foundation-l] Board meeting in Rotterdam later this week

body:
On 1/20/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> If you think that youtube and flickr are so much the way to go, by all
> means go ahead;

[[Irony]]

> I certainly said nothing about them.and whatever their
> copyright policy may be.

You basicaly suggested following their copyright policy.

>"Caring" (whatever you mean by that) about
> copyright need not imply paranoia that borders on ass-kissing.
>

That would be aa strawman. If we took that aproach commons would be
rather less full.

> It means that as long as your talking theoretically about images that
> you only hypothesizing your answers have no basis in fact.

En.Wikipedia has 692,119 media files. There is nothing theoretical.

> Courts like
> to reject cases that are based on hypothetical facts.

I think people sueing us our our uploaders will not be talking about
hypothetical cases.
--
geni


list: wikimedia-l


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Mathematics university lecture notes - useful
	to	anybody?

body:
Thomas Dalton wrote:

>>It is far easier to source a text than to gather sources and write a
>>new article from scratch. Sourcing is grunt work where writing a new
>>article requires creativity and whatnot.
>>
>>
>That kind of thinking is one of the biggest problem with Wikipedia at
>the moment. Sourcing should always come *before* writing. The source
>is where the information came from, that's what "source" means, so you
>have to have the source before you can write the article. Adding
>sources afterwards is a way of fixing a problem - unsourced articles -
>it should not be a part of the standard process of writing articles.
>The problem should never be created in the first place.
>
There are benefits and drawbacks to either approach.  Some simply can
maintain a better narrative flow if they wait until they are finished to
add the sourcing.  They may have a stack of sources sitting beside their
computer, but not be sure which will be relevant until they are well
advanced intheir writing.  Presumably they are making private notes as
they go along so that they will be able to add the references when they
get to the bottom of the article.  If an article appears to be a work
that is actively in progress it is good etiquette to let the editor
finish what he is doing before complaining about missing sources.

Ec


from_name: Brian Salter-Duke

subject: [WikiEN-l] A copy of WP articles

body:
http://www.justrec.com/wilderness.html

This is just one of several articles on this site that appears to be a
direct copy of the WP article. Scouting is another. They claim copyright
on the page and do not mention WP. Is this legit?

Brian
--
          Brian Salter-Duke            b_duke at bigpond.net.au
               [[User:Bduke]]  mainly on en:Wikipedia.
           Also on fr: Wikipedia, Meta-Wiki and Wikiversity


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

subject: [Foundation-l] In defence of Google

body:
Anthony schreef:
> On 1/20/07, Peter van Londen <londenp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> GerardM is not alone.
>>
>> I do agree, with Gerards view.
>> Why this hostility to commerce, I don't understand?
>> Let's use them for our purposes in stead of renounce them!
>>
>>
> If you know anything about me you'd know I'm not at all hostile to
> commerce.  There's nothing at all wrong with commerce.  I just don't
> think commerce is something to be praised.
>
> I also think it's a joke to say that Google is a proponent of open
> content.  Google Video: DRM.  Google Book Search: DRM.  The list of
> Google's adoption of policies which go completely against open content
> goes on and on.  Maybe they donate to some open source projects.  In
> fact, if you want to say that "Google did a world of good to the Open"
> SOURCE movement, I won't object.  But the original statement that
> touched off my objection was talking about Open Content, not Open
> Source.
>
> Anthony
Hoi,
Commerce is an abstraction. Google a reality. The traffic that we have
and the resulting relevance that we acquired as a result is largely due
to Google. This is a reality. As I said earlier, it is relevant to
appreciate our friends. Microsoft's search engine does not do us any
favours. This is a reality. Our aims are in bringing information to
people; that is what Google helps us do. If we had twice the amount of
content and we did not have the traffic that comes from Google we would
not be half as good in achieving our goal. Our goal is to get the
information out, it is not sitting on it and think ourselves great for
having created such a large body of work.

Google does not need to be actively creating Open Content to be
considered beneficial to the Open Content. As they gave us a fair
ranking in their search engine we thrived. With your dismissal of Google
Books you conveniently ignore the controversy that exists because of the
audacity that Google had in making this tool available. You conveniently
ignore that many publishers went to court in order to prevent this
service in the first place. If anything, Google should be applauded for
services like Google book search, Google scholar. Writers and publishers
have praised Google because their offerings can now be found and have a
second lease of commercial life. It is exactly a service like Google
book search that prevents the monopolistic content of most of the book
shops to dominate even more. It may be an inconvenient truth, but Google
does good where it matters. What matters is that information becomes
available to people and it is not just the Open Content project and
communities that have a patent on this.

I will confess, I am not really interested in video, but I would not be
surprised if it turns out that you are wrong on that as well.

So please repeat after me, Google did and does well for us. Google is
our friend.

Thanks,
    GerardM

PS .. well do not bother.. just trying to be funny.


subject: [Foundation-l] In defence of Google


body:
On 1/20/07, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:
> Brion wrote:
> > ...having seen a fun rumor of a "search engine optimization
> > world championship" contest...
>
> It wouldn't surprise me a bit if that rumor was true.  I have
> a high-pagerank website with an unremarkable submission form
> (c-faq.com/feedback.html) that usually receives one or two
> linkspams per week, but suddenly yesterday and today I've gotten
> about a dozen.
>

They've happened before they will happen again we have delt with them
in the past.

--
geni


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Andrew Dunbar

subject:
[Wikitech-l] [Foundation-l] Wikitext isn't aprogramminglanguage,
	but...

body:
On 1/20/07, Rob Church <robchur at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 19/01/07, Anthony <wikitech at inbox.org> wrote:
> > If it were implemented in PHP, could then a lookup be done so one
> > would only need to give the ISBN and page number, and the rest would
> > be added automagically?
>
> Where would we get the data from? Who's going to allow us to query
> this stuff at the rate we need it? Sure, we can cache it, but it still
> takes time to build up a good cache of titles.

Try librarything.com - they have an API and were keen recently for people
to do mashups. Tell Tim I recommended it (-;

Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail)

> Coincidentally, I just finished the beta version of an extension,
> BookInformation, which enhances the output of Special:Booksources with
> a cute little box containing the title, author and publisher
> corresponding to the ISBN entered, where it exists. Works with Amazon
> Web Services right now, but has been coded to allow a number of
> possible providers to be supported. (Let me take the opportunity to
> thank the guys who shot in and provided translations for Finnish,
> Dutch, German and Indonesian within 10 minutes of committing it; if
> that's not bloody service, I don't know what is!)
>
> There's no reason we couldn't enhance the citation extension with an
> auto-formatter for book/journal/similar references, *but* consider
> that to do this, we'd be pulling the format from a message as it is;
> so there isn't much benefit over using a template as is done at
> present.
>
>
> Rob Church
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

--
http://linguaphile.sf.net


body:
Thomas Dalton wrote:

>>There are benefits and drawbacks to either approach.  Some simply can
>>maintain a better narrative flow if they wait until they are finished to
>>add the sourcing.  They may have a stack of sources sitting beside their
>>computer, but not be sure which will be relevant until they are well
>>advanced intheir writing.  Presumably they are making private notes as
>>they go along so that they will be able to add the references when they
>>get to the bottom of the article.  If an article appears to be a work
>>that is actively in progress it is good etiquette to let the editor
>>finish what he is doing before complaining about missing sources.
>>
>>
>Oh certainly, you don't need to add the sources to the code as you go
>along, but you need to know what the sources are. The sources should
>be added in the same editing session as the article is written, the
>exact order within that session is up to the writer. Someone else
>coming along after you've written the article and trying to find
>sources for your statements is completely wrong - it's not what
>"source" means. They are effectively rewriting the article.
>
>If you want different people to do the sourcing and the writing, then
>the sourcer should find the information and add it as bullet points to
>the article, with correct references, and then the writer comes along
>and makes it read eloquently. The other way round is completely wrong.
>
I'm not at all saying that an editor should depend on others to find
sources.  I am saying that there is no urgency to add them in each
editing session.  When you look at the article's history, and see a
regular and continuing series of diffs that keep adding material to the
article you need to be ready to cut that person some slack.

Ec


from_name: Steve Summit

body:
Oskar wrote:
> On 1/20/07, Bogdan Giusca <liste at dapyx.com> wrote:
>> Saturday, January 20, 2007, 5:08:52 PM, Steve wrote:
>>> Right.  But some of the sites we link to are good sites, and
>>> do deserve our "vote" in terms of increasing their pagerank.
>>
>> Wikipedia's primary objective is to build an encyclopedia,
>> not to help the search engines to have better results.
>
> I agree, which is why this move was necessary. I just think that if
> good, relevant links didn't have nofollow on them it would improve the
> overall "health" of the internet...

Indeed.

I should not have used the word "vote", even in quotes.  If we
were all straightforwardly creating websites, linking to other
sites based on their value to our readers, then Google's pagerank
algorithm would tick along there in the background, working just
fine.  It's when people start self-consciously thinking of links
as "votes", and trying to artificially skew Google's results
thereby, that all the troubles begin.  Some people start
introducing bad-faith links, and others therefore have to declare
*all* their links invalid, thus cutting off our own nose to spite
our face -- er, to spite those damn linkspammers.

If our objective is to build an encyclopedia, not to help the
search engines to have better results, then our objective is not
to help the search engines not to have worse results, either,
so perhaps we shouldn't be so concerned about nofollow at all.

>> Without the "nofollow" tag, we'd have much more spam, which is
>> detrimental to that objective.

No question at all.  (But this is an essentially selfish motive,
and neither the Internet nor Wikipedia works on selfishness.)


from_name: Thomas Dalton

body:
> Upon cleaning up, my parents discovered some of my (hand-written)
> lecture notes that I took down when I studied undergraduate mathematics
> at Cambridge University from 1998-2001.
>
> I don't need them anymore. But I didn't want to throw them away in case
> they might be useful to someone. Thus, I'm asking here. I'd be willing
> to ship them to anyone who in turn would be willing to use them to
> improve Wikipedia and/or Wikibooks. Consider it a donation of sorts.
>
> Is anyone interested? Please only reply if you're serious about using
> them to improve Wikipedia or Wikibooks.

I don't think your lecture notes are a reliable source, so anyone
using them would have to verify them with a textbook, so they might as
well just use the textbook to start with...

If I were you, I'd put them them in a box in the attic - they'll
probably have more sentimental value to you/your children in years to
come than they have value to Wikipedia now.


from_name: David Gerard

body:
On 20/01/07, Nina Stratton <ninaeliza at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi. What did you do? Pretend I'm, like, eight and/or stupid (because on this
> I are pretty stoopid).

Fortunately, I have this handy Internet encyclopedia in front of me.
If I go to en.wikipedia.org and type "nofollow" into the search box,
it takes me to an article that explains it and even has a paragraph
about Wikipedia :-)

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] WP:OFFICE actions

body:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Western_University was office
> protected.  Editors had gathered some well-cited material, Jimbo said
> go ahead and rewrite, so we did.  It got hacked back again.  I don't
> have a problem with this, as Brad has now old us what the concern was,
> and we can work with that.  I do have a problem with a couple of
> elements of process:

The most important thing is for us to be told what the complaint was
so we can fix it. All that would take is a quick message from Danny on
the talk page - surely he can make time for that?

> And where an external source (in this case Bear's Guide) says that two
> institutions are run by the same people out of the same address, and
> no known sources say otherwise, but the subject insists they are
> different, how do we go about validating that?  It's all very well for
> them to say they are different, but surely that gets {{fact}}?

If there is a reliable source stating the information, and it's
properly referenced, any complaint should be responded to with a
simple "Sorry you feel this way, but we have reliable sources for the
information in the article. If you believe our sources are mistaken,
please provide alternative sources. Thank you." - there is no need for
any office protection in such a case.


from_name: Oldak Quill

body:
On 20/01/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't think your lecture notes are a reliable source, so anyone
> using them would have to verify them with a textbook, so they might as
> well just use the textbook to start with...

It is far easier to source a text than to gather sources and write a
new article from scratch. Sourcing is grunt work where writing a new
article requires creativity and whatnot.

I think lecture notes could be valuable to Wikipedia if someone is
willing to work with them.

--
Oldak Quill (oldakquill at gmail.com)


body:
> It is far easier to source a text than to gather sources and write a
> new article from scratch. Sourcing is grunt work where writing a new
> article requires creativity and whatnot.

That kind of thinking is one of the biggest problem with Wikipedia at
the moment. Sourcing should always come *before* writing. The source
is where the information came from, that's what "source" means, so you
have to have the source before you can write the article. Adding
sources afterwards is a way of fixing a problem - unsourced articles -
it should not be a part of the standard process of writing articles.
The problem should never be created in the first place.


body:
On 20/01/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> > It is far easier to source a text than to gather sources and write a
> > new article from scratch. Sourcing is grunt work where writing a new
> > article requires creativity and whatnot.
>
> That kind of thinking is one of the biggest problem with Wikipedia at
> the moment. Sourcing should always come *before* writing. The source
> is where the information came from, that's what "source" means, so you
> have to have the source before you can write the article. Adding
> sources afterwards is a way of fixing a problem - unsourced articles -
> it should not be a part of the standard process of writing articles.
> The problem should never be created in the first place.

We want the same end: good, readable, sourced mathematical articles.
I'm suggesting that sourcing these notes would be the quickest way to
achieve this. I agree that sourcing written texts is not the
preferable way to achieve our end, but I don't think the end-article
is worse than an alternative article written from sources first.

--
Oldak Quill (oldakquill at gmail.com)


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Independent article

body:
On 1/18/07, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 17/01/07, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 1/17/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Fans of the Wet Wet Wet frontman Marti Pellow were left stunned yesterday
> > > after the online encyclopedia Wikipedia reported that he had died last
> >
> > The word "reported" is very telling of how we are still misperceived.
> > We're not a news site. Why do people think we are?
>
> Hmm. The alternative word would be "stated". Reported makes it sound a
> bit less bad, at least to my ears...

Maybe I would even prefer "was reporting". If you picture Wikipedia as
a whiteboard with people wandering past writing stuff or rubbing out
stuff, would you say it "said" or "did" something? Or would you say
"was saying"?

In this case maybe "was claiming" would have been the best.

Steve


body:
> We want the same end: good, readable, sourced mathematical articles.
> I'm suggesting that sourcing these notes would be the quickest way to
> achieve this. I agree that sourcing written texts is not the
> preferable way to achieve our end, but I don't think the end-article
> is worse than an alternative article written from sources first.

I'm not sure what you mean by "sourcing these notes" - can you rephrase that?


body:
> Question is who holds the copyright over the lecture notes? The
> notetaker, or the lecturer? Or both?

In most cases, probably the university. They generally claim copyright
on everything anyone does within 100 miles of the uni.

I don't think it matters though - the mathematics isn't copyrightable,
just the way it's written in the notes, and I don't think anyone is
planning on just typing up the notes, they're talking about using them
as sources for an article.


body:
> Hang on, what do you think the downside of the nofollow tag is? All
> this change does is make Google not use the fact that we link to a
> site as evidence that it's a good site.

Are they also used to calculate relevance - if our article links to
lots of good pages about the search terms, will our article appear
higher up in the search results? I have no idea how the Google search
algorithm works, but that's how I interpreted Oskar's email.


subject: [WikiEN-l] My own Livejournal

body:
On 1/20/07, Parker Peters <parkerpeters1002 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've been nothing but civil, but I'm the one being put on moderation.
>
> That shows what the groupthink is like around here. Do you all drink the
> same kool-aid too?

Chill. We're working together for a common goal. We adopt certain
conventions to help achieve that. We reject suggestions made simply
for the purpose of argument, or ones that are clearly not workable or
worth spending time on. If that meets your definition of groupthink,
then fine - we have far too much to do without being bothered by such
a trollish label.

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] A copy of WP articles

body:
On 1/20/07, Brian Salter-Duke <b_duke at bigpond.net.au> wrote:
> http://www.justrec.com/wilderness.html
>
> This is just one of several articles on this site that appears to be a
> direct copy of the WP article. Scouting is another. They claim copyright
> on the page and do not mention WP. Is this legit?

When this came up a few months ago, we concluded that it was not
illegal to falsely claim copyright. It doesn't make their claim valid,
but it's certainly easier for many sites to simply claim copyright
over everything appearing on their site than to work out which part of
that claim would actually be valid.

Steve


from_name: Cormac Lawler

body:
On 1/20/07, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> Upon cleaning up, my parents discovered some of my (hand-written)
> lecture notes that I took down when I studied undergraduate mathematics
> at Cambridge University from 1998-2001.
>
> I don't need them anymore. But I didn't want to throw them away in case
> they might be useful to someone. Thus, I'm asking here. I'd be willing
> to ship them to anyone who in turn would be willing to use them to
> improve Wikipedia and/or Wikibooks. Consider it a donation of sorts.
>
> Is anyone interested? Please only reply if you're serious about using
> them to improve Wikipedia or Wikibooks.
>
> Timwi

Hi Timwi, we could *definitely* use these notes in Wikiversity
<http://en.wikiversity.org> (provided copyright can be negotiated) -
and from there, they could be used in any project to improve
mathematical resources in Wikipedia, Wikibooks, or indeed any other
space..

I can volunteer to undertake this myself, though it might be best if
this was done by someone with an interest in/knowledge of mathematics.
I could add a note for people in the mathematics school
<http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/School:Mathematics> if you think this
is a desirable option.

Cheers,
Cormac (Cormaggio)


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Nofollow back on URL links on
 en.wikipedia.org	articles for now

body:
Bogdan Giusca wrote:
> Saturday, January 20, 2007, 9:14:54 PM, geni wrote:
>
>
>> Eh there is worse:
>> http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=217145&highlight=wikipedia
>> Don't worry to much the opening posters links have been removed.
>>
>
> Or even worse!
> http://www.bluehatseo.com/wikipedia-links-part-1/
>
> "If PR is your concern please quit paying money for PR6's,
> Wikipedia is full of them and waiting for you to post your link."
>
> "it only takes a couple hours to gain a good 50 or so one way
> PR6 links. I've had one site of mine gain over 150 PR6 links and
> 72 PR5 links this way."
>

Somehow I can't imagine that Google's ranking algorithms are that
simplistic these days, considering they have entire teams devoted to
combating fellows like that.  I would be extremely surprised if they
don't already treat "link from Wikipedia" as its own category of link.

The use of "nofollow" is so Google doesn't have to manually figure out
how to treat every page on the internet, by allowing site owners to give
them some information.  In Wikipedia's case, Google already knows who we
are, and probably already treats us specially, and so adding or not
adding "nofollow" gives them no new information---and I'd be surprised
if changing it has any effect on rankings at all.

-Mark


subject: [Wikitech-l] Loss of session data

body:
I keep getting the warning message about "Lost session data" when I go
to save changes at EN. This was a problem a few months ago, then was
fixed, but seems to be back. However there's a twist:

1) I click save (with an edit summary)
2) Preview comes up with message "Sorry! We could not process your
edit due to a loss of session data. Please try again. If it still
doesn't work, try logging out and logging back in." - edt summary box
still has my summary in it
3) I click save
4) Reminder: You have not provided an edit summary. If you click Save
again, your edit will be saved without one.
5) Save again - works.

On one or two instances, the lost session data error message has
appeared twice in a row.

Steve


from_name: Nina Stratton

subject: [WikiEN-l] What is your definition of an "expert"?

body:
On 1/20/07, Jeff Raymond <jeff.raymond at internationalhouseofbacon.com> wrote:
>
> Daniel P. B. Smith wrote:
>
> > 1) I regard someone as an expert if they can show me that they can
> > accurately convey detailed information on a topic directly from
> > memory, and when needed can remember or quickly rediscover the source
> > from which they that got that information. Think of a lawyer who
> > cites a legal decision, or a minister who can literally "cite chapter
> > and verse."
> >
> > 2) Someone who has done so much valuable work on a topic that he is
> > cited as a source by many others, either formally (in a print
> > citation) or informally (someone telling you "go see so-and-so about
> > that.")
>
> This is a really great answer.
>
> Completely pointless post, but there you go.
>
> -Jeff
>
> --
>
I thought it was a highly relevant post. If we're going to continue to
examine Citizendium for "best practices" or whatever the rationale is, then
it's a good idea to consider what an "expert" is. It's important, if
anything, in defining yet again what Wikipedia is not.

--
Sincerely,

Nina
"Look at the sky. We are not alone. The whole universe is friendly to us and
conspires only to give the best to those who dream and work." - Abdul Kalam


from_name: effe iets anders

subject: [Foundation-l] License policy (was: Rotterdam...)

body:
geni wrote:
<snip>
>
>
>
> > Courts like
> > to reject cases that are based on hypothetical facts.
>
> I think people sueing us our our uploaders will not be talking about
> hypothetical cases.
> </snip>
>

Whether it is hypothetical or not is not an issue right now. We are talking
about policies here. Policies are always about both hypothetical *and*
practical situations. Imho Wikimedia *should* think about what to when a
picture would be uploaded. I think we should draw a border somewhere.

I however repeat my request to not discuss what we want on this list. If we
want to discuss what we want, please do that on meta. I give you the
arguments for that in an earlier email.

I also repeat my request to the Board of the WMF to give a position on this
very issue, and at least tell us on short term (a week would be great)
whether they will give out policy on this *at all*. (that does not mean that
they would have to make policy at that very moment, I understand that that
will take time). I would like to know from at least the elected boardmembers
whether it is their intention to bring this into discussion, especially now
it is so clear that this issue lives within the communities, and whether
they will come up with a motion in the board. I hope that erik, florence,
kat or oscar could give us an insight in the pathway we will be going, and
what we can expect from the board on this.
I would really like to know whether we can expect from the board:
*no reaction, none of their business
*An advice to the communities, to tell them what they think is free
*A policy for every wikimedia project except en.wikipedia / en.wikinews
*A policy for all wikimedia projects stating which licenses are allowed for
media used within the projects.
*or just something in between :)

I look forward to your reply.

Lodewijk


from_name: Rob Church

body:
On 20/01/07, Jens Frank <jf at mormo.org> wrote:
> After some googling, I found
>
>         http://isbndb.com/docs/api/
>
> Would this be helpful? They claim to have about 2.5 Million titles. The
> search found some O'Reilly books that I tried, but failed on some German
> titles I tried.

Good find. It might be advisable for us to compile a list of such
providers - if we can establish common data to be obtained for each
title, then perhaps we can do some sort of basic round-robin querying,
rather than pulling all our information from one provider.

Thanks,

Rob Church


from_name: Jens Frank

body:
On Fri, Jan 19, 2007 at 08:00:17PM +0000, Rob Church wrote:
> On 19/01/07, Anthony <wikitech at inbox.org> wrote:
> > If it were implemented in PHP, could then a lookup be done so one
> > would only need to give the ISBN and page number, and the rest would
> > be added automagically?
>
> Where would we get the data from? Who's going to allow us to query
> this stuff at the rate we need it? Sure, we can cache it, but it still
> takes time to build up a good cache of titles.

After some googling, I found

	http://isbndb.com/docs/api/

Would this be helpful? They claim to have about 2.5 Million titles. The
search found some O'Reilly books that I tried, but failed on some German
titles I tried.

Regards,

	jens


from_name: Newyorkbrad (Wikipedia)

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia Club of New York - 31 January 2007 event

body:
>
> On 1/11/07, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:> Washington, DC.
> > They moved my 26 January trip... instead of NYC, I am going to
> > On the evening of 31 January, the free culture group at NYU will be
> > hosting a party, probably this would be good for a joint meeting?
>
> Dear Mr. Wales:
> I think we should probably team up with the Free Culture Group at NYU for
> the Wednesday, 31 January 2007 event.  Is there a contact person at NYU I
> can get in touch with in order to facilitate some cooperation between us
> and
> them...possibly assist them in getting the event going?  If so, please
> pass
> along my e-mail address to them.
> Regards,
> Christopher D. Thieme
> User:ExplorerCDT

Following up on the status of this event, if anyone could kindly advise.

Regards,
Newyorkbrad


subject: [Wikitech-l] Suggestion: "Maintenance mode"

body:
On 20/01/07, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> - Links that go to disambiguation pages

Depends upon finding a decent solution for
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6754#c8.

> - Spelling errors, possibly?

British, Australian or American English? We get enough editing
disputes as it is. What about all the other languages we support? We'd
have to maintain dictionaries, and we don't even have full maintenance
of our *translations* at the moment.

> - Stuff that goes against MoS (for example, level 1 headings, links in
> headings...)

"MoS" is extremely variant from wiki to wiki and could change on a
whim, which would mean software changes.

Rob Church


from_name: Anthony

body:
On 1/20/07, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> Having been requested by Jimmy to do so, and having seen a fun rumor of
> a "search engine optimization world championship" contest targeting
> WP[1], I've gone ahead and switched rel="nofollow" back onto URLs in
> en.wikipedia.org's article namespace.
>
What about links to sister projects, like Wikinews?  It seems some of
those projects could benefit greatly from the links not being
nofollowed.

Anthony


subject: [WikiEN-l] A copy of WP articles

body:
On Sat, Jan 20, 2007 at 03:25:09AM +0000, geni wrote:
> On 1/20/07, Brian Salter-Duke <b_duke at bigpond.net.au> wrote:
> >http://www.justrec.com/wilderness.html
> >
> >This is just one of several articles on this site that appears to be a
> >direct copy of the WP article. Scouting is another. They claim copyright
> >on the page and do not mention WP. Is this legit?
> >
> >Brian
>
>This is generaly delt with at :
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks

Thanks. I have done that. However I can not follow it through as I
currently do not have access to "whois" and I can not find a contact for
this web page. Could someone do a whois on www.justrec.com for me?
Thanks.

Brian.

> --
> geni

--
          Brian Salter-Duke            b_duke at bigpond.net.au
               [[User:Bduke]]  mainly on en:Wikipedia.
           Also on fr: Wikipedia, Meta-Wiki and Wikiversity


from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

subject: [WikiEN-l] A copy of WP articles

body:
Yeah sure. It's easier but that doesn't make it "not illegal". Claiming
copyright on something that isn't yours is about as illegal as it can get.
They should comply to the GFDL whether it's easy or not.

Mgm

On 1/20/07, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 1/20/07, Brian Salter-Duke <b_duke at bigpond.net.au> wrote:
> > http://www.justrec.com/wilderness.html
> >
> > This is just one of several articles on this site that appears to be a
> > direct copy of the WP article. Scouting is another. They claim copyright
> > on the page and do not mention WP. Is this legit?
>
> When this came up a few months ago, we concluded that it was not
> illegal to falsely claim copyright. It doesn't make their claim valid,
> but it's certainly easier for many sites to simply claim copyright
> over everything appearing on their site than to work out which part of
> that claim would actually be valid.
>
> Steve
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Marc Riddell

subject: [WikiEN-l] What is an "expert"?

body:
> From: Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Date: Fri, 19 Jan 2007 08:48:21 -0500
> To: "Wiki-EN-L (new topics)" <wikien-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] What is an "expert"?
>
> Hello all,
>
> I believe there is something we should ask at this point. This question is
> for everyone participating in this Mailing List:
>
> What is your definition of an "expert"?
>
> Please, for now, try to resist responding to the others' answers, simply
> state your own.
>
> Marc Riddell

In my case, I don?t work with a single definition of the word ?expert?; in
too many contexts it is divisive and elitist. That is why, when I must use
it for any reason, I enclose it in quotes (no, I don?t use air quotes when I
speak it, George Carlin broke me of that).

Rather, my focus is on the material that may be in question. If that
material is in my field, and it is counter to what I have learned in the
past, I know where, and to whom, to go for verification.

If that material is in a field I know a little bit about, and the
statement(s) don?t jive with what I?ve learned in the past, I go to other
source(s) and check them out.

If it is in a field I know absolutely nothing about ? and I am wanting to
apply what it is telling me to someone or something in my own life ? I read
many sources.

My beliefs regarding the word ?expert? were further strengthened recently
when a person on CNN was introduced as a ?personal safety expert?. I didn?t
know whether they were a bodyguard, a crossing guard, or someone who
designed condoms.  After the interview was over ? I still didn?t know. :-)

Perspective.

Marc Riddell

>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] What is an "expert"?

body:
Marc Riddell wrote:

>I believe there is something we should ask at this point. This question is
>for everyone participating in this Mailing List:
>
>What is your definition of an "expert"?
>
>Please, for now, try to resist responding to the others' answers, simply
>state your own.
>
The first place that I looked at for help on this was my 1816 11th
edition of Samuel Johnson's dictionary.  What surprised me was to see
that it appears there only as an adjective.  Its use as a noun came
later in the 19th century.  That being said the shortening of "expert
person" to simply "expert" is a common linguistic phenomenon.

"Expert" comes from the Latin 'expertus', the past participle of
'experior', meaning 'to try."  "Experience" and "experiment" have the
same origon.  The general tone of the word suggests an acquisition of
skills through practice and experience.  An interesting usage from
Francis Bacon: "Expert men can execute and judge of particulars, one by
one; but the general counsels, and the plots and marshalling of affairs
come best from those that are learn?d."  Or Oliver Goldsmith: "The
sceptic is ever expert ast puzzling a debate which he finds himself
unable to continue."

 From this it would be inappropriate to suggest that a person is an
expert by the simple expedient of having sat an exam or completed a
course of certification.  At bare minimum a physician needs to have
interned, and a lawyer to have articled.  Even then it would be too easy
to fall into presumptuous folly.  Book learning alone does not produce
an expert.

Ec


from_name: geni

body:
On 1/20/07, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Having been requested by Jimmy to do so, and having seen a fun rumor of
> a "search engine optimization world championship" contest targeting
> WP[1], I've gone ahead and switched rel="nofollow" back onto URLs in
> en.wikipedia.org's article namespace.
>
> (Better heuristic and manual flagging tools for URLs would of course be
> super; anyone interested in working on integrating such support into
> MediaWiki should swing on by the tech channels and give a shout.)
>
> [1]
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard#Globalwarming_awareness2007.2FSEO_world_championship_--_expect_a_spam_onslaught.
>

and the reviews start to come in:

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=224044&highlight=wikipedia

--
geni


from_name: Alphax (Wikipedia email)

subject: [WikiEN-l] Troubling news on Citizendium

body:
Nina Stratton wrote:
> On 1/18/07, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Nina Stratton wrote:
>>> I'm a 40 (almost) year old black woman who dropped out of high school
>> and
>>> never finished college. I'm also fundamentally opposed to "experts"
>> running
>>> anything I have to do with. I can read, I can write, and I can learn.
>> That's
>>> all I need and all I will ever need.
>>>
>> You're either incredibly na?ve, or the best troll I've seen in a long
>> time.
>>
>
> I'm from the Midwest, so I think I fall into the "incredibly naive"
> category. Having said that...on reflection I better not say much else.:)
>

Don't worry, I've said plenty of stupid things too. It's probably easier
to count the number of not-stupid things that I've said...

> On a side note, I've been invited by my would-have-been alma mater to tour
> the high school and discuss my life with the principal as "an inspiration to
> the students". I must be doing something right.
>

Indeed.

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

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body:
On 1/20/07, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:
>
> Nina wrote:
> > Hi. What did you do? Pretend I'm, like, eight and/or stupid (because on
> > this I are pretty stoopid).
>
> Once upon a time, websites were written and maintained by
> individuals, or by relatively small, closely-knit groups of people.
>
> Once upon a time, and indeed even to this day, there has always
> been a need to try to figure out how "good" a website is.  Now,
> of course, "goodness" is a terribly subjective and multifaceted
> concept, so trying to reduce it to a unidimensional metric or
> "rank" is a task fraught with peril and ultimately utterly
> impossible, but the need is strong enough that people are bound
> to try anyway.  One area in which the need is real is: ranking
> search results.  It's (comparatively) very easy to write a web
> search engine that returns links to every single page where a
> user's search terms are mentioned.  It's much, much more
> difficult, however, to rig it up so that the user can easily zero
> in on the *interesting* or *useful* links first, without having
> to wade through all of the hundreds or thousands or millions of
> hits which a simpleminded brute-force search engine might yield.....
>
> That's like, deep. Thanks.

Well I think it's a good idea. In this weird way, the nofollow tag even
supports Wikipedia's NPOV policy - if you look at it the right way. I tried
to remove spam once and removed too much. It's hard to tell what's spam and
what isn't in some articles.

--
Sincerely,

Nina
"Look at the sky. We are not alone. The whole universe is friendly to us and
conspires only to give the best to those who dream and work." - Abdul Kalam


body:
On 20/01/07, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:

> and the reviews start to come in:
> http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=224044&highlight=wikipedia

I was going to reply, but I would probably have said something like
"Yes, we've gone nofollow. And it is entirely because of festering
parasitical weasels like your own good selves. I find it hard to
express the utter, utter contempt we have for your 'need' for
backlinks. In the words of Saint Bill Hicks: just kill yourselves.
Seriously." However, that would have been entirely too understated a
response, and they still wouldn't have understood it anyway.

- d.


body:
On 1/20/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 20/01/07, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > and the reviews start to come in:
> > http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=224044&highlight=wikipedia
>
>
> I was going to reply,

well rather a lot of them don't appear to have figured out that we
read their forum.

> but I would probably have said something like
> "Yes, we've gone nofollow. And it is entirely because of festering
> parasitical weasels like your own good selves. I find it hard to
> express the utter, utter contempt we have for your 'need' for
> backlinks. In the words of Saint Bill Hicks: just kill yourselves.
> Seriously." However, that would have been entirely too understated a
> response, and they still wouldn't have understood it anyway.
>
>
> - d.
>

Eh there is worse:

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=217145&highlight=wikipedia

Don't worry to much the opening posters links have been removed.

--
geni


from_name: Oskar Sigvardsson

body:
On 1/20/07, Bogdan Giusca <liste at dapyx.com> wrote:
> Saturday, January 20, 2007, 5:08:52 PM, Steve wrote:
>
> > Right.  But some of the sites we link to are good sites, and
> > do deserve our "vote" in terms of increasing their pagerank.
> > (But the problem, of course, is that there's no way to
> > differentiate those external links of ours that have this
> > quality, versus those that are as-yet-undetected linkspam.)
>
> Wikipedia's primary objective is to build an encyclopedia,
> not to help the search engines to have better results.

I agree, which is why this move was necessary. I just think that if
good, relevant links didn't have nofollow on them it would improve the
overall "health" of the internet (that is, promotion of good, quality
sites, versus drowning in bad ones). I think that that is a goal we
should ALL care about.

> Without the "nofollow" tag, we'd have much more spam, which is
> detrimental to that objective.

Again, I agree that the move is necessary, I'm just saying it's a damn shame.

> Wikipedia also should always be neutral and it should try not to
> directly influence the events outside of it.

Excuse me? Are you saying that when google uses wikipedia links to
determine relevance in a search, it's detrimental to the neutrality of
wikipedia? How exactly would that go?

--Oskar


from_name: Jay R. Ashworth

body:
On Fri, Jan 19, 2007 at 04:52:56PM -0500, Anthony wrote:
> Are these databases copyrightable?  Can the Library of Congress
> database be obtained with a Freedom of Information Request?

Databases are inherently not copyrightable (Feist v. Rural).

The LoC is operated for our benefit anyway; I would be very surprised
if they didn't already have some fashion by which you could look stuff
up over the net.

This may be a good start: http://www.loc.gov/library/

(for anyone who hasn't already seen it...)

Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274


body:
On 1/20/07, Matthew Brown <morven at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/20/07, Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Excuse me? Are you saying that when google uses wikipedia links to
> > determine relevance in a search, it's detrimental to the neutrality of
> > wikipedia? How exactly would that go?
>
> In a sense, it is exactly that - because it increases the temptation
> to add links to Wikipedia, regardless of real relevance to the reader.

To me that is like saying that having a wiki increases the temptation
for people to vandalise articles.

--Oskar


from_name: Bogdan Giusca

body:
Saturday, January 20, 2007, 5:08:52 PM, Steve wrote:

> Right.  But some of the sites we link to are good sites, and
> do deserve our "vote" in terms of increasing their pagerank.
> (But the problem, of course, is that there's no way to
> differentiate those external links of ours that have this
> quality, versus those that are as-yet-undetected linkspam.)

Wikipedia's primary objective is to build an encyclopedia,
not to help the search engines to have better results.

Without the "nofollow" tag, we'd have much more spam, which is
detrimental to that objective.

Wikipedia also should always be neutral and it should try not to
directly influence the events outside of it.


from_name: David Gerard

body:
On 20/01/07, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:

> them some information.  In Wikipedia's case, Google already knows who we
> are, and probably already treats us specially, and so adding or not
> adding "nofollow" gives them no new information---and I'd be surprised
> if changing it has any effect on rankings at all.

Oh well. At least we know it's telling the spammers^Wsearch
optimisers^Wspammers to Just Bugger Off.

- d.


from_name: Ashar Voultoiz

subject: [Wikitech-l] SVN:  [19523] trunk/phase3

body:
hashar at svn.wikimedia.org wrote:
> Revision: 19523
> Author:   hashar
> Date:     2007-01-20 11:36:16 -0800 (Sat, 20 Jan 2007)
>
> Log Message:
> -----------
> Fix #8703 : correct Limburgish namespace translations

I have update the site but havent found how to clear memcached :)

--
Ashar Voultoiz - WP++++
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Hashar
http://www.livejournal.com/community/wikitech/
IM: hashar at jabber.org  ICQ: 15325080


body:
Saturday, January 20, 2007, 9:14:54 PM, geni wrote:

> Eh there is worse:
> http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=217145&highlight=wikipedia
> Don't worry to much the opening posters links have been removed.

Or even worse!
http://www.bluehatseo.com/wikipedia-links-part-1/

"If PR is your concern please quit paying money for PR6's,
Wikipedia is full of them and waiting for you to post your link."

"it only takes a couple hours to gain a good 50 or so one way
PR6 links. I've had one site of mine gain over 150 PR6 links and
72 PR5 links this way."


from_name: Thomas Dalton

body:
> There are benefits and drawbacks to either approach.  Some simply can
> maintain a better narrative flow if they wait until they are finished to
> add the sourcing.  They may have a stack of sources sitting beside their
> computer, but not be sure which will be relevant until they are well
> advanced intheir writing.  Presumably they are making private notes as
> they go along so that they will be able to add the references when they
> get to the bottom of the article.  If an article appears to be a work
> that is actively in progress it is good etiquette to let the editor
> finish what he is doing before complaining about missing sources.

Oh certainly, you don't need to add the sources to the code as you go
along, but you need to know what the sources are. The sources should
be added in the same editing session as the article is written, the
exact order within that session is up to the writer. Someone else
coming along after you've written the article and trying to find
sources for your statements is completely wrong - it's not what
"source" means. They are effectively rewriting the article.

If you want different people to do the sourcing and the writing, then
the sourcer should find the information and add it as bullet points to
the article, with correct references, and then the writer comes along
and makes it read eloquently. The other way round is completely wrong.


from_name: charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com

body:
"Thomas Dalton"

> I don't think your lecture notes are a reliable source, so anyone
> using them would have to verify them with a textbook, so they might as
> well just use the textbook to start with...

Aha. There is no adequate textbook for the typical [[Mathematical Tripos]] course. So a wikibook rendering is actually quite a sound idea; the main issue not being reliability, but the need to expand exposition.

Charles

-----------------------------------------
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body:
> Aha. There is no adequate textbook for the typical [[Mathematical Tripos]] course. So a wikibook rendering is actually quite a sound idea; the main issue not being reliability, but the need to expand exposition.

There won't be one textbook for the entire Tripos, no... you have to
get textbooks on each lecture course. Sometimes the textbook won't
coincide exactly with the lecture course, but you can usually find one
that covers a superset of the course, or two that cover the entire
course between them. Lecture courses only coincide exactly with books
if the lecturer designs it to do so, which they usually don't (unless
they wrote the book, of course).

Also, I expect the courses change slightly each year, as the lecturers
doing them change. So writing a wikibook for a specific lecture course
at a specific uni really isn't worth it...


body:
> What about links to sister projects, like Wikinews?  It seems some of
> those projects could benefit greatly from the links not being
> nofollowed.

That double negative took me two attempts to get right... words
shouldn't have negatives included within them, it just confuses me...


subject: [WikiEN-l] Expertaphobia

body:
> Wikipedia has this "write then cite" thing going on it's
> tutorials

The tutorials actually say that? Where? It really needs to be corrected...


from_name: Brian Salter-Duke

subject: [WikiEN-l] A copy of WP articles

body:
On Sat, Jan 20, 2007 at 02:57:04PM +1100, Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 1/20/07, Brian Salter-Duke <b_duke at bigpond.net.au> wrote:
> >http://www.justrec.com/wilderness.html
> >
> >This is just one of several articles on this site that appears to be a
> >direct copy of the WP article. Scouting is another. They claim copyright
> >on the page and do not mention WP. Is this legit?
>
> When this came up a few months ago, we concluded that it was not
> illegal to falsely claim copyright. It doesn't make their claim valid,
> but it's certainly easier for many sites to simply claim copyright
> over everything appearing on their site than to work out which part of
> that claim would actually be valid.
>
> Steve

This is pretty new to me. This site has all its substantial content
taken from Wikipedia, yet it claims to have copyright on it. I do not
think that is right. I have flagged it on the appropriate pages on WP and
I have finally tracked down the details of the site. I will e-mail them
tomorrow. Right now I'm off to bed having been on the turps.

Cheers, Brian.

> ------------------------------

--
          Brian Salter-Duke            b_duke at bigpond.net.au
               [[User:Bduke]]  mainly on en:Wikipedia.
           Also on fr: Wikipedia, Meta-Wiki and Wikiversity


from_name: Rob Church

body:
On 20/01/07, Platonides <Platonides at gmail.com> wrote:
> They should have their own CSS class, so
> you could show them different.

For redirect pages, at least, this has been proposed before and closed
WONTFIX; see http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4709.

Rob Church


from_name: Matthew Brown

subject: [WikiEN-l] What is an "expert"?

body:
On 1/20/07, Daniel R. Tobias <dan at tobias.name> wrote:
> Unfortunately, you seem to have some sort of character set issue; the
> quotes you use come out as question marks in the digest version, and
> as superscripted numbers in the web archive.  I haven't seen the
> headers of the individual-message version of this list, so I don't
> know what character encoding your messages are originally sent under.

No character set info in his headers, but he does have this:

User-Agent: Microsoft-Outlook-Express-Macintosh-Edition/5.0.6

Which sounds like trouble.

-Matt


from_name: Platonides

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> Here's an idea. Have a "maintenance mode" preference for editors that
> highlights errors in Wikipedia articles so they're easy to spot and
> fix. For example:
> - Links that go to disambiguation pages
> - Links that go to redirects (not necessarily errors, but worth checking)

They should have their own CSS class, so
you could show them different.


from_name: David Spencer

subject: [Wikitech-l] template for number of page views?

body:
January 20, 2007

Hello wikitech friends:

I have discovered that the following templates will provide the
following information.

1. Current Day (Sunday to Saturday)
{{CURRENTDAYNAME}}

2. Current Month (January to December)
{{CURRENTMONTHNAME}}

3. Current Day (1 to 31)
{{CURRENTDAY}}

4.  Current Year (2007)
{{CURRENTYEAR}}

5. Number of articles on your wiki
{{NUMBEROFARTICLES}}

QUESTION
--------------
On Wikipedia.org, the number of page views can be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics

What is the template one would use to indicate the number of page views
for a wiki?

Thanks.

David Spencer
in Canada


from_name: Daniel R. Tobias

subject: [WikiEN-l] What is an "expert"?

body:
On 19 Jan 2007 at 08:48, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net>
wrote:

> In my case, I don?t work with a single definition of the word ?expert?; in
> too many contexts it is divisive and elitist. That is why, when I must use
> it for any reason, I enclose it in quotes (no, I don?t use air quotes when I
> speak it, George Carlin broke me of that).

Unfortunately, you seem to have some sort of character set issue; the
quotes you use come out as question marks in the digest version, and
as superscripted numbers in the web archive.  I haven't seen the
headers of the individual-message version of this list, so I don't
know what character encoding your messages are originally sent under.

Online archive version of your latest message:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2007-
January/061199.html

You could also do with a little quote-trimming; while you do reply
inline rather than top-posting, you still insist on leaving in all of
the original message including headers, trailers, and other
irrelevant material, so there's sometimes a lot of excess stuff both
above and below your reply.

--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/


from_name: brion at pobox.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki automated test run failure 2007-01-21

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

This is MediaWiki version 1.10alpha (r19546).

Reading tests from "maintenance/parserTests.txt"...

Reading tests from "extensions/Cite/citeParserTests.txt"...

Reading tests from "extensions/Poem/poemParserTests.txt"...

   2 new FAILING test(s) :(
      * URL-encoding in URL functions (single parameter)
      * URL-encoding in URL functions (multiple parameters)
  16 still FAILING test(s) :(
      * TODO: Table security: embedded pipes (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-April/034637.html)
      * TODO: Link containing double-single-quotes '' (bug 4598)
      * TODO: message transform: <noinclude> in transcluded template (bug 4926)
      * TODO: message transform: <onlyinclude> in transcluded template (bug 4926)
      * BUG 1887, part 2: A <math> with a thumbnail- math enabled
      * TODO: HTML bullet list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)
      * TODO: HTML ordered list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)
      * TODO: HTML nested bullet list, open tags (bug 5497)
      * TODO: HTML nested ordered list, open tags (bug 5497)
      * TODO: Inline HTML vs wiki block nesting
      * TODO: Mixing markup for italics and bold
      * TODO: 5 quotes, code coverage +1 line
      * TODO: dt/dd/dl test
      * TODO: Images with the "|" character in the comment
      * TODO: Parents of subpages, two levels up, without trailing slash or name.
      * TODO: Parents of subpages, two levels up, with lots of extra trailing slashes.

Passed 489 of 507 tests (96.45%)... 18 tests failed!


from_name: Dominic McDevitt-Parks

subject: [Foundation-l] WikiGadugi Wikipedia Rating???

body:
There are a few problems with the site currently. In order to be in
compliance, you must also credit Wikipedia as your source. I'm clicking
"random page" and not seeing any articles that do this. They are just
direct copies with no reference to Wikipedia. You should have a note,
perhaps at the bottom of the page, like:

This article is licensed under the
 GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the
 Wikipedia article
"Foo".

Also, your content does not appear to be licensed under the GFDL; it
says on each page: "Content is available under Wikigadugi Public License
<http://www.wikigadugi.org/index.php/License>." And the link to that
license is broken. Your disclaimer and about pages linked at the bottom
are also blank, so I'm not sure where the GFDL is posted to your site.

In order to comply: You must link to a local copy of the GFDL, you must
make it clear that the content from Wikipedia is available under the
GFDL license, your materials in turn have to be licensed under GFDL, you
must credit Wikipedia and link back to the source article. We also
recommend that you include the date of the version copied, so that one
is able to clearly figure out the authors by checking the history tab
(it will likely have changed since you copied the content, and the
authorship will have changed, too).

Dominic

Jeffrey V. Merkey wrote:
> Wikigadugi is listed here at:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GFDL_Compliance
>
> as
>
> " ...Either more research is needed, or it is disputed Fail in a very
> significant way such as claiming their own copyright without including a
> GFDL <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GFDL> notice ..."
>
>
> Pardon me folks, but if someone feels we are not in compliance with the
> GFDL, can please someone point out where this is the case?   All of our
> content
> is GFDL compliant and we do not offer any license other than the GFDL
> and post the GFDL to our site.
>
> I am happy to address and correct any issues with use of the Foundations
> content if anyone feels it is not adequately spelled out as GFDL.
>
> Jeff
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] defused timebomb

body:
Pedro Sanchez wrote:

>I just blanked, and deleted
>
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famous_people_responsible_for_a_death
>
>We had names of many famous people, stating they were responsible for
>someone else dying.
>** Not a single reference **
>
>I was told that I should have AFD it instead
>
>The potential for libel was huge, afd was likely to come as no
>consensus or delete.
>Wikimedia can't take the risk of being sued for the sake of process.
>
>So I deleted the entry to hide history, and drop a note stating should
>anybody readd content it must be with references.
>
>Probably many people will complain and ask for my head, just telling
>you people why I did it.
>
That sounds terribly unilateral.  AFD would have been more prudent.
Altering the title would have been more sensible, given that some were
apparently only accused, and never convicted.

I don't know how long the list was but being a "list" it should be
enough if there are sources on the listed pages themselves.  Nobody puts
sources on the index or Table of Contents of a book, because the sources
would already be at more appropriate places.

The "huge" potential for libel is a product of your imagination.  I'm
not saying that there is none at all, but it is certainly much less than
what you imagine.  In any event, other ways of fixing the article would
also have eliminated that problem.  I don't know when the page was
started but its talk page has been there four months; there was no urgency.

The chronic bad blood in the deletion process is precisely because of
people who take drastic and sudden unilateral action when they could
have taken the time to think of softer ways of dealing with a problem.

It would be a peaceful gesture if you restored the page, and initiated
alternative solutions.

Ec


body:
Rob Church escribi?:
> On 20/01/07, Platonides <Platonides at gmail.com> wrote:
>> They should have their own CSS class, so
>> you could show them different.
>
> For redirect pages, at least, this has been proposed before and closed
> WONTFIX; see http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4709.
>
>
> Rob Church
Interesting. What was the reason?
On the  last proposal (#5) there are no performance issues, adds no
difference for the normal user and seems easy to do.


from_name: Ken Arromdee

subject: [WikiEN-l] defused timebomb

body:
On Sun, 21 Jan 2007, Ray Saintonge wrote:
> >I just blanked, and deleted
> >
> >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famous_people_responsible_for_a_death
> >
> >We had names of many famous people, stating they were responsible for
> >someone else dying.
> >** Not a single reference **
> >
> >I was told that I should have AFD it instead
> That sounds terribly unilateral.  AFD would have been more prudent.
> Altering the title would have been more sensible, given that some were
> apparently only accused, and never convicted.

Remember [[WP:BLP]].  Anything making accusations about living people without
a source should be deleted immediately.


body:
Sunday, January 21, 2007, 12:06:04 AM, Anthony wrote:

> What about links to sister projects, like Wikinews?  It seems some of
> those projects could benefit greatly from the links not being
> nofollowed.

I checked it and links to Wikinews do not have Nofollow, if
you use the {{wikinews}} template.


subject: [WikiEN-l] WP:OFFICE actions

body:
Delirium wrote:

>Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
>
>
>>And where an external source (in this case Bear's Guide) says that two
>>institutions are run by the same people out of the same address, and
>>no known sources say otherwise, but the subject insists they are
>>different, how do we go about validating that?  It's all very well for
>>them to say they are different, but surely that gets {{fact}}?
>>
>>
>One way of at least limiting damage to our accuracy and credibility is
>to explicitly mark such pages as being incomplete due to legal threats.
>If Pacific Western University's lawyers prohibit us from writing the
>sort of complete, neutral, verifiable article that we otherwise would
>have done, then we have a duty to warn our readers of that fact before
>they read our article.
>
Legal threats alone should not be the basis for any permanent resolution
of problems in an article.  Temporarily removing material while the
facts are being checked is one thing, but once the facts are established
it is dangerous to be intimidated by some lawyer purporting to prohibit
the inclusion of valid information.  There is a point where letting them
sue is the proper strategy.

As to whether the California and Hawaii operations are related, a check
of official records should provide the names of the directors for both
schools.  That, more than anything else will serve to establish whether
they are operating at arm's length.  That would be stronger evidence
than anything the institutions of "Bears' Guide" could give.

Ec


from_name: Pedro Sanchez

subject: [WikiEN-l] defused timebomb

body:
I just blanked, and deleted

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famous_people_responsible_for_a_death

We had names of many famous people, stating they were responsible for
someone else dying.
** Not a single reference **

I was told that I should have AFD it instead

The potential for libel was huge, afd was likely to come as no
consensus or delete.
Wikimedia can't take the risk of being sued for the sake of process.

So I deleted the entry to hide history, and drop a note stating should
anybody readd content it must be with references.

Probably many people will complain and ask for my head, just telling
you people why I did it.

-- drini


from_name: Steve Bennett

body:
Here's an idea. Have a "maintenance mode" preference for editors that
highlights errors in Wikipedia articles so they're easy to spot and
fix. For example:
- Links that go to disambiguation pages
- Links that go to redirects (not necessarily errors, but worth checking)
- Broken syntax - make it big and red and ugly rather than gracefully degrading.
- Spelling errors, possibly?
- Stuff that goes against MoS (for example, level 1 headings, links in
headings...)

There are already tools to do this, but they rely on a user making the
(pretty significant effort) to get AWB and decide that they're going
to do maintenance. Integrating highlighting like this into normal
Wikipedians' daily routine would be a lot more effective. And certain
problems like links going to disambig pages are really hard to pick up
unless you're specifically looking for them.

Any takers?

Steve


body:
On 1/21/07, Oldak Quill <oldakquill at gmail.com> wrote:
> It is far easier to source a text than to gather sources and write a
> new article from scratch. Sourcing is grunt work where writing a new
> article requires creativity and whatnot.

Question is who holds the copyright over the lecture notes? The
notetaker, or the lecturer? Or both?

Steve


subject: [Foundation-l] Fwd: [WikiEN-l] WP:OFFICE actions

body:
David Gerard wrote:

>---------- Forwarded message ----------
>From: Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net>
>
>I raised this a while back.
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Western_University was office
>protected.  Editors had gathered some well-cited material, Jimbo said
>go ahead and rewrite, so we did.  It got hacked back again.  I don't
>have a problem with this, as Brad has now old us what the concern was,
>and we can work with that.  I do have a problem with a couple of
>elements of process:
>
>* The problem was not communicated until after the event, resulting in
>another pissed-off phone call to Brad which could have been avoided.
>
>* I was told the new version was not "cleared with foundation" but no
>mechanism exists for doing that, else I would have done so.
>
>* Brad (or Danny or Jimbo) does not scale.  People get impatient when
>months go by with no explanation of why we cannot say something which
>is, or appears to be, verifiably true.  This was a particular problem
>with the article on Gregory Lauder-Frost.
>
>So what should be the process for getting foundation approval for a
>rewrite where an article subject has made a complaint causing
>protection, and how can we ensure that the substance of the complaint
>is communicated (to the extent possible without compromising the
>various parties)?
>
>Is it possible to facilitate communication direct with the parties
>where errors of fact are the problem, to let them know in advance when
>changes are to be made?
>
>And where an external source (in this case Bear's Guide) says that two
>institutions are run by the same people out of the same address, and
>no known sources say otherwise, but the subject insists they are
>different, how do we go about validating that?  It's all very well for
>them to say they are different, but surely that gets {{fact}}?
>
In a manner similar to what I have said before in relation to copyright
problems protocols need to be established for dealing with these
situations with legal implications.  If the person responding to the
call feels that there is some merit to the complaint, that would require
strict adherence to that protocol.  Criteria for sourcing and
verifiability are a separate issue since they would apply whether or not
there is a telephone complaint.  The protocol is important for ensuring
that we are not working at cross purposes.  That requires proper and
timely information about the complaint that caused the Office to Act.
With that information available it is much easier to follow the
rationale for it.  What does not work is an authoritarian edict from the
Office.  The Office should know by now that such edicts are normally
followed by a storm of protest.

Ec


body:
On 1/20/07, Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson at gmail.com> wrote:
> This is a real shame since good external links help to vastly improve
> search :( Oh well, cost of doing business I guess.

Hang on, what do you think the downside of the nofollow tag is? All
this change does is make Google not use the fact that we link to a
site as evidence that it's a good site.

Steve


from_name: Simetrical

body:
On 1/20/07, David Spencer <wikimedia.org-updates at davidspencer.ca> wrote:
> January 20, 2007
>
> Hello wikitech friends:
>
>
> I have discovered that the following templates will provide the
> following information.
>
> 1. Current Day (Sunday to Saturday)
> {{CURRENTDAYNAME}}
>
>
> 2. Current Month (January to December)
> {{CURRENTMONTHNAME}}
>
>
> 3. Current Day (1 to 31)
> {{CURRENTDAY}}
>
>
> 4.  Current Year (2007)
> {{CURRENTYEAR}}
>
>
> 5. Number of articles on your wiki
> {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}}
>
>
>
> QUESTION
> --------------
> On Wikipedia.org, the number of page views can be found here:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics
>
>
> What is the template one would use to indicate the number of page views
> for a wiki?

1) They aren't templates, they're variables/magic words.
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Magic_words>

2) On Wikimedia projects, page views are not tracked due to load.
Probably because of this, nobody's created a {{PAGEVIEWCOUNT}} magic
word or whatnot.


from_name: Jeffrey V. Merkey

body:
Wikigadugi is listed here at:

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

as

" ...Either more research is needed, or it is disputed Fail in a very
significant way such as claiming their own copyright without including a
GFDL <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GFDL> notice ..."

Pardon me folks, but if someone feels we are not in compliance with the
GFDL, can please someone point out where this is the case?   All of our
content
is GFDL compliant and we do not offer any license other than the GFDL
and post the GFDL to our site.

I am happy to address and correct any issues with use of the Foundations
content if anyone feels it is not adequately spelled out as GFDL.

Jeff


from_name: George Herbert

subject: [Foundation-l] in defence of Google

body:
On 1/21/07, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> With the feeling for a need of an alternate search engine, you will have
> obviously considered a business model for this project, even "not for
> profits" need business plans. This business plan will make plain why it
> is a good thing to do but most of all how it will be possible to make it
> a sustainable project. Sustainable as in being both able to scale and to
> be there next year as well.

As the recent Wikipedia fundraising drive demonstrates, it's one thing
to start a collaboration project, but it's entirely another to keep up
with your own wild success if you do take off.

If you introduce the world's best, brand new search engine open source
tech project tomorrow, that's more useful and open than Google, you're
going to have a hard time managing the growth, by any standards,
commercial or open source...

To amplfy Gerard's comment, the "vision" has to include a business
plan and some operational clue.

--
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com


subject: [Foundation-l] in defence of Google


from_name: Delirium

subject: [WikiEN-l] defused timebomb

body:
Pedro Sanchez wrote:
> I just blanked, and deleted
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famous_people_responsible_for_a_death
>
> We had names of many famous people, stating they were responsible for
> someone else dying.
> ** Not a single reference **
>
> I was told that I should have AFD it instead
>
> The potential for libel was huge, afd was likely to come as no
> consensus or delete.
> Wikimedia can't take the risk of being sued for the sake of process.
>
> So I deleted the entry to hide history, and drop a note stating should
> anybody readd content it must be with references.
>
> Probably many people will complain and ask for my head, just telling
> you people why I did it.
>
I don't particularly object, but I also don't see what would be wrong
with listing it on AFD.  It's been there for quite a while, so it seems
very unlikely that the world would end if it got deleted a week from now
instead of immediately.

-Mark


from_name: Anthony

subject: [Foundation-l] In defence of Google

body:
On 1/21/07, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have read enough to learn why Google is getting the opposition to its
> program. I agree with that opposition. However, you will also have read
> that Bruster Kahle acknowledges that his project is very much a reaction
> to the Google project. The opposition that exists is not unlikely to
> have Google to reconsider its position. When we consider Google a
> friend, we can as a friend discuss these issues. When we consider Google
> an enemy, we will not even try to engage in a conversation.
>
When we consider them a corporation trying to make a buck, and not a
friend or an enemy, we are best positioned to engage in that
conversation.  By all means this world we live in rewards those who
form symbiotic relationships.  If I ever referred to Google as the
enemy, then I admit I was wrong for that.

> I object to see enemies everywhere, I prefer to see friends that have a
> different outlook, friends that may be convinced to consider an other
> approach. I think this approach is more productive.
>
I prefer to see corporations as corporations, entities that are bound
by law not to have friends or enemies but only to consider what is in
the best interest of their shareholders in terms of making the most
money (in terms of for-profit US corporations, anyway).  By all means
I think we should recognize that corporations do change their
approaches.  But that has nothing to do with them being a friend and
everything to do with it being in the best interests of both of us to
do, whatever.

I'd love to see Google do a complete 180 on its relationship with the
open content movement.  Do you see any way they could do that without
destroying their entire business?  For now I think it's enough that
they don't actively try to harm Wikipedia and other open content sites
by biasing their search results against them.  So thank you Google.
Thanks for not destroying us.  We love you.

Anthony


subject: [Foundation-l] In defence of Google


from_name: Marc Riddell

subject: [WikiEN-l] What is an "expert"?

body:
> From: "Daniel R. Tobias" <dan at tobias.name>
> Organization: Barely
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Date: Sat, 20 Jan 2007 23:36:32 -0500
> To: wikien-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] What is an "expert"?
>
> On 19 Jan 2007 at 08:48, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net>
> wrote:
>
>> In my case, I don?t work with a single definition of the word ?expert?; in
>> too many contexts it is divisive and elitist. That is why, when I must use
>> it for any reason, I enclose it in quotes (no, I don?t use air quotes when I
>> speak it, George Carlin broke me of that).
>
> Unfortunately, you seem to have some sort of character set issue; the
> quotes you use come out as question marks in the digest version, and
> as superscripted numbers in the web archive.  I haven't seen the
> headers of the individual-message version of this list, so I don't
> know what character encoding your messages are originally sent under.
>
> Online archive version of your latest message:
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2007-
> January/061199.html
>
> You could also do with a little quote-trimming; while you do reply
> inline rather than top-posting, you still insist on leaving in all of
> the original message including headers, trailers, and other
> irrelevant material, so there's sometimes a lot of excess stuff both
> above and below your reply.

Daniel,

This is my very first experience with a Mailing List of any kind. Please
bear with me. Are you saying that, when replying, I should delete all other
material on the original message except the exact statement(s) I am replying
to?

Help!

Marc Riddell
>
>
> --
> == Dan ==
> Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
> Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
> Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


from_name: Steve Summit

body:
geni wrote:
> Hmm an I evil for enjoying this:
> http://www.seorefugee.com/forums/showthread.php?t=4655

No more so than I!

The outraged, "how *dare* they!" tone is just priceless.

skitzoo:
| Son Of A *****! That freakin blows. So, I guess I'll be
| deleting the articles I wrote for them.

He don't know us vewy well, do he?

eKstreme:
| Question: did nofollows reduce blog spam? Answer: no.
| Question: will nofollows reduce Wikipedia spam? Guess: no.

But his guess is contradicted by the lead post in the thread:

Sorvoja:
| :-( :-( Wikipedia has added the fracking NOFOLLOW attribute to
| all external links. There goes hours upon hours of editing and
| link building down the drain. :-( :-(

(Those are little animated, pyrotechnic thumbs-down frownies,
not simple three-char ASCII emoticons.  The blog crowd, they do
love their icons.)


from_name: Jeff Raymond

subject: [WikiEN-l] defused timebomb

body:
Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:
> Oldak Quill wrote:
> <snip>
>> I don't think you did the *wrong* thing, but I think we should always
>> aim to stick to process.
>>
>
> No, no, and just plain... no. "Process" is what killed Nupedia. The OP
> has our sincere thanks for removing another of our drive-by-stupidity
> magnets. Seriously. Next thing you know [[snopes.com]] or [[The Straight
> Dope]] will have entire sections labelled "according to Wikipedia..."
> where they debunk all of the unreferenced tripe that's lying around.

Process merely makes things run smoother and keeps people from doing
dumb things more often than not.

Meanwhile, I've already restored about 5 of those in the article, and
I'll try to get to more later.  a quick post somewhere saing "we know
these things are true, can we find sources" and it'd be done in 5
minutes.  Instead, knee-jerk reaction time, whee!!!

Maybe some people would like to pitch in?  The Google cache is right here:

http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:FBnIbSOEGeoJ:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famous_people_responsible_for_a_death+http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famous_people_responsible_for_a_death&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1

-Jeff

--
Name: Jeff Raymond
E-mail: jeff.raymond at internationalhouseofbacon.com
WWW: http://www.internationalhouseofbacon.com
IM: badlydrawnjeff
Quote: "As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the
	Eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else."
	- Sen. Rick Santorum on the war in Iraq.


from_name: Brion Vibber

body:
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Timwi wrote:
> Rob Church wrote:
>> On 20/01/07, Platonides <Platonides at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Interesting. What was the reason?
>> I assume you'll be insulted if I assume you can't read.
>
> Either there is no reason given in the bug, or he and I both can't read.

You can't read. ;)

- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Till Weber

subject: [Foundation-l] in defence of Google

body:
Anthony, I don?t think it is posible to merge both projects, wikiasari and peerpedia. Though the central person is Jim Wales, but he already decided to built a project without the foundation and one for profit. As well the proposal concept for wikiasari is still missing, if it is central or decentral. So I recommend to have the wikifoundation to run as well a search propject the p2p way.

Just my to cents. If there are persons, which decide to act, it then really a question of freedom in organizations. Open source is one thing, but freedom from the hierachy is one other.

/Till

-------- Original-Nachricht --------
An: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Betreff: Re: [Foundation-l] in defence of Google

> -------- Original-Nachricht --------
>
> > I'd love to see Google torn down and replaced with an open source
> > collaborative search engine run democratically by the world.  I'd love
> > to have access to a search engine as good as Google, with a truly open
> > API (i.e. sans http://code.google.com/apis/soapsearch/api_terms.html),
> > and with all the results being released under an open content license.
> >  Is Wikimedia the one to do that?  It's arguable whether it'd be
> > within the scope of the Foundation's mission.  And in any case, I
> > haven't seen a reasonable proposal of how to do it.  So I guess when
> > it comes to that point, we're both in agreement.  And yeah.  Google
> > did good.  Google does good.  But Google did bad, too.  Google does
> > bad, too.  And Microsoft also did/does good/bad.
> >
> > Anthony
> >
>
> Who is in defence of Google? Wikifoundation?
> "wikifoundation in defence of Google"
>
> The problem is, Jimmy is one of the founders of wikipedia, has nothing to
> do with wikiseek; and wikiasari is a concept supported by a lot of people.
> But: If wikifoundation makes a peerpedia-search, this means that there are
> several conflicts. Is wikiasari more in solidarity to wikiseek, because
> they both are for-profit ads-projects? or more in solidarity to peerpedia, to
> support the core competencies of the foundation?
> Wikifoundation need the courage, to steal Jimmies Idea to make it (a
> search project) really open with p2p and without ads.
> Ok, this is not about one person and I do not want to annoy anyone, so
> let?s talk about the peerpedia project of the foundation here on this list.
> Wikiasari is a different project on a different list.
>
> This simple sentence, said by Jim originally, means foe the rest of the
> foundation members, to have the courage, to first develop a similar project
> and split the development. This must be the rest of the foundation board
> members aware of. Acting like wikiseek and play a card against the
> wikisariproject. And this card here was suggested as a peerpedia-search, which means
> (as the url was announced with a concept) to set up several yacy.net servers
> to index the web p2p.
>
> (Or: Jim has to be asked, if he is agreeing to make wikiasari a kind of a
> peerpedia project and if we are pulling the same goals. He still has not
> announced, if nutch or yacy is on the three servers and/or if there is a
> cooperation with the foundation, last I guess not, but if this is clear, this
> means we need couraged people to do the same from the foundation side but
> only p2p with the community).
>
> I wonder, why the members here on the list doubt the core cometencies or
> Mission of the foundation, if the peerpedia-search project is in accordance.
>
> Here is the mission again:
> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Mission_statement
>
> you see, several stars fit the project and social software is nutch not at
> all, it is yacy, this is why I recomment to ask Jim to join the peerpedia
> idea with his large knowledge and history experience.
>
> We could wook out a proposal (which jim announced the day before his
> disney journey on anotehr list,  but still has not published) together, here is
> the peerpedia "blanket" for this:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_P2-search_peerpedia
>
> >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Mission_statement
>
> The general purpose and objectives of the Foundation shall be the
> following:
>
> Wikimedia Foundation is dedicated to the development and maintenance of
> online *free*, *open content* encyclopedias, collections of quotations,
> textbooks *and other collections of documents*, *information*, and other
> informational *databases* in *all* the languages of the world that will be
> distributed free of charge to the public under a free documentation license such
> as the Free Documentation License written by the Free Software Foundation
> Inc. at http://www.fsf.org or similar licensing scheme, see
> http://www.wikimedia.org.
>
> The goals of the foundation are to *encourage* the further growth and
> development of *open content*, *****social software**** WikiWiki-based projects
> (see http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki) and to provide the full contents
> of those projects to the public free of charge. In addition to managing the
> already developed multilingual general encyclopedia and almanac named
> Wikipedia, (http://www.wikipedia.org) there is a multi-language dictionary and
> thesaurus named Wiktionary, an encyclopedia of quotations named Wikiquote,
> a collection of e-book resources aimed specifically toward students (such
> as textbooks and annotated public domain books) named Wikibooks and a
> collection of source works called Wikisource; other projects are envisioned like
> **peerpedia** - the open source search-engine yacy.net community in a p2p
> style. The Foundation also manages the operations of the largely dormant
> Nupedia project (which is not a wiki but is open content).
>
> >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2007-January/date.html
>
> BTW: we discuss here only in a free brainstorming, and indeed the leader
> of foundation and the leader of wikia should meet at a round tabel and
> discuss, if a collaboration is possible, and if the foundation is behind the p2p
> idea, which several times was stated as the only way to have 1 Mio google
> servers in defence. If both leaders or the board does not agree, the
> question is open, if the foundation is willing to start and found a
> yacy-wikipedia-indexing serverfarm project with several servers.
>
> Ok, let?s say each year we add 2 servers. Is this too much?
> Yacysearch.com has done this in one weel with 7 servers.
>
> Kind regards.
>

--
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Ideal f?r Modem und ISDN: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/smartsurfer


subject: [Foundation-l] in defence of Google


subject: [WikiEN-l] What is an

body:
> From: "Fred Bauder" <fredbaud at waterwiki.info>
> Reply-To: fredbaud at waterwiki.info, English Wikipedia
> <wikien-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Date: Sun, 21 Jan 2007 15:32:01 +0000
> To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] What is an
>
>
>> This is my very first experience with a Mailing List of any kind. Please
>> bear with me. Are you saying that, when replying, I should delete all other
>> material on the original message except the exact statement(s) I am replying
>> to?
>>
>> Help!
>>
>> Marc Riddell
>
> Yes, provided those following the thread can still understand the context.
>
> Fred

Thanks. I'm going to take a closer look at how some other persons' responses
in the past are set up, and take my cue from these.

Still learning,

Marc
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


from_name: Marco Schuster

body:
Steve Bennett schrieb:
> On 1/21/07, Simetrical <Simetrical+wikitech at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 2) On Wikimedia projects, page views are not tracked due to load.
>> Probably because of this, nobody's created a {{PAGEVIEWCOUNT}} magic
>> word or whatnot.
>>
>
> I thought they kind of were now. Like every 1000th view is recorded
> somewhere, possibly offsite. Wikicharts, it was called. What's the
> status of that?
>
that is on toolserver. but i think it would produce too much server load
both on ts and on "normal" servers to call the stat info for every page
call...

marco


from_name: Rob Church

references:
<b8ceeef70701200642l3da1e01dnd77e5afdeec48121@mail.gmail.com>
	<eou46o$vca$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<e92136380701201500k64184009y607bf33b9306f1ad@mail.gmail.com>
	<eou8u1$drj$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
On 20/01/07, Platonides <Platonides at gmail.com> wrote:
> Interesting. What was the reason?

I assume you'll be insulted if I assume you can't read.

Rob Church


from_name: Daniel R. Tobias

subject: [WikiEN-l] What is an "expert"?

body:
On 21 Jan 2007 at 07:42, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net>
wrote:

> This is my very first experience with a Mailing List of any kind. Please
> bear with me. Are you saying that, when replying, I should delete all other
> material on the original message except the exact statement(s) I am replying
> to?

Normal netiquette (though subject to some degree of debate, as with
just about anything on the Internet) is to trim down the quoted
material to the relevant portions and reply beneath them.  Exactly
what is "relevant" may be up for discussion; certainly, the exact
statements you're replying to are relevant, and perhaps a little bit
more that's related to them (lest you be accused of taking quotes out
of context), but certainly such things as message headers and
footers, and entire paragraphs that have nothing to do with anything
you're replying to, are irrelevancies that should be snipped.

Here, mailing list reply style differs from the style often enforced
in corporate communications, where they insist on preserving the
entire thread history (somewhat wastefully) in order that the
participants can follow the CYA (cover your ass) principle by showing
that they received all parts of the previous messages (even while
often showing, in their replies, that they failed to have any decent
degree of reading comprehension as to actually understanding any of
it).

More info:
http://mailformat.dan.info/quoting/

As for your other problem, with character sets, your mail program is
apparently putting in such things as "curly" quotes and apostrophes
in the proprietary Macintosh character encoding, which has these
characters in different positions from the proprietary Windows
character encoding that many of the readers support; however, your
messages are also going out without any header indicating what
character encoding they are in, which means that standards-compliant
readers should render them as US-ASCII, a 7-bit character encoding
containing only 128 different characters (including control
characters) which does not include any of the "extended" characters
of either the Mac or Windows proprietary encodings, or of more
standardized encodings such as ISO-8859-1 or UTF-8.  What it means is
that you're better off sticking to plain-ASCII straight quotes and
apostrophes unless you can get your program to send the more exotic
characters in a standards-compliant, platform-independent way.

http://mailformat.dan.info/body/charsets.html

--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
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Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/