from_name: Brion VIBBER

subject: [Wikipedia-l] offsite images

body:
Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz wrote:
> Was the original intent of the ban to disable also local images
> referenced by :
> http://www.wikipedia.org/upload/...

There shouldn't be any such remaining; that is, they should all have
been long since converted to [[Image:foo]].

> If so, are they included in the list of external images ?

Should be.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Strong request: Make the == presentation smaller

body:
tarquin wrote:
> drop the font size a bit,

I dropped the large header sizes so they're not so freakin' huge (and
increased the small header sizes, so they're no longer smaller than the
body text!) Note that it's now hard to tell the levels apart. Better
suggestions are welcome.

> and could we also remove most of the space
> after too? at the moment == headers seem to stand alone, isolated from
> both the para above and below.

We did that a long time ago; headers have a bottom margin of zero. If
you don't put in a paragraph break, they directly abut the following
text. Eg:

== Header ==
There is no break between the header above and this text.

== Other header ==

But this one, there is.

-- brion vibber (brion@  pobox.com)


from_name: Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz

subject: [Wikipedia-l] offsite images

body:
On 03-11-2002, koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com wrote thusly :
> Brion wrote:
> >Since this has been discussed and generally approved of previously, I'm
> >going to go ahead and disable them. There are probably still some
> >legitimate off-site images floating around; I'll make a list for
> >replacements.
> >(I'm only going to do this for the English wiki for now; some of the
> >others are probably still using many external images.)
Was the original intent of the ban to disable also local images
referenced by :
http://www.wikipedia.org/upload/...

If so, are they included in the list of external images ?

Regards,
Kpjas.


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [Wikitech-l] H1 (Was: mysql issues)

body:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote in part:

>There are 4 issues standing between polish wikipedia and phase 3
>software.

>Second is support for H1 (don't say that it is reserved for page
>titles, CSS already treats H1 and H1.pagetitle different).

You mean the HTML tag <H1>?
That's already supported, as a literal wiki markup.
See [[en:Talk:Jimmy Carter]] for an example of its use.
You only have to fight to *keep* it supported.
Of course, the wiki markup "=" is unsupported
(which is just as well IMO).

-- Toby


subject: [Wikitech-l] Number of articles suggestion

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
> Why? The NOA is primarily interesting as a measure of our collaborative
> progress. This is important for ourselves and for others. Personally,
> I've had several discussions about Wikipedia where I was reluctant to
> cite the NOA because of the high number of machine-generated articles,
> others probably feel the same.
>
> I therefore believe we should generally exclude autogenerated articles
> (we can change the wording on Main_Page to reflect this). As it would be
> a 5 minute task for anyone with access to the db, is there any reason
> not to do it?

The NOA is a highly unreliable figure for any purpose, and there has
been much discussion on reforming it.

If you think collaboration is the key, then a more general solution is
in order: only count article-space pages that have been edited at least
twice (and thus, have an old revision stored in the 'old' table).

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Can I be an admin please?

body:
Camembert wrote in part:

>I promise not to abuse my powers by deleting the "Votes for deletion" page,
>and if there's some sort of pledge I need to take, then send it over, and
>I'll read it out facing the [[Main Page]] with hand on heart.

After seeing some other new sysops in the past,
I personally would like all new sysops to pledge
not to get trigger happy on bannings and deletions.
I'm not really in a position to enforce such a desire, however.

(Of course, this should not be construed as a request
to hold off on blocking goatse.cx vandals
and deleting pages with nothing but goatse.cx in their histories!)

-- Toby


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Intlwiki-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] internal image links to other wikipedias

body:
> BTW: this is a subject which is definitely of
> concern for the
> international list. Or is wikipedia-l the
> international list now?
>
> greetings,
> elian

Good question...

__________________________________________________
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from_name: elian

subject: [Wikipedia-l] internal image links to other wikipedias

body:
"Erik Zachte" <e.p.zachte at chello.nl> writes:

> What about a new tag that allows inclusion of images from other
> wikipedias?
> This would save us a lot of effort to download and re-upload say 200 CIA
> factbook maps, 200 country flags and the like (which is not fun to do
> especially with current occasionally very slow response times).

No, it's no fun at all, but in the German wikipedia we decided to do
exactly this (Scipius was so nice to mail me the flags in a
zip-file). Reasons: there is no possibility to control whether pictures
are in use in other wikipedias. Pictures may be changed or deleted without
a possibility to say: hey stop, we still need this picture!

BTW: this is a subject which is definitely of concern for the
international list. Or is wikipedia-l the international list now?

greetings,
elian
--
Computers are like Airconditioners - they stop working properly when
you open windows


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikitech-l] Improving sidebar

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>
>- "What links here" needs a questionmark.
>
>Your thoughts? I'll be glad to patch this, although it should be easy
>enough for someone with CVS access to do it on their own.
>
While we're at it, could we have "What links here" appear in red when
the article is an orphan?
Eclecticology


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Feature Proposal: Certification

body:
I second Mav's suggestion and applaud his desire to help.

I really like the idea of "levels of certification". There's a big jump up from "some user" wrote this to "a reviewer with a degree in the field" reviewed it. How many more jumps are there? Department head? Published author? Nobel Prize winner?

At first, we might not be able to attract people who are as highly qualified as Britannica's reviewers -- especially if we don't pay them anything. But I would really, MUCH, rather read a biology article reviewed by Mav (or a math article reviewed by Axel) than some unreviewed, open-to-graffiti version. I mean, what if some kid changes a key value in a chemistry equation?

I knew we could do it: the Wiki Borg lives!

Ed Poor


body:
elian wrote in part:

>Erik Zachte wrote:

>>What about a new tag that allows inclusion of images from other wikipedias?
>>This would save us a lot of effort to download and re-upload say 200 CIA
>>factbook maps, 200 country flags and the like (which is not fun to do
>>especially with current occasionally very slow response times).

>No, it's no fun at all, but in the German wikipedia we decided to do
>exactly this (Scipius was so nice to mail me the flags in a
>zip-file). Reasons: there is no possibility to control whether pictures
>are in use in other wikipedias. Pictures may be changed or deleted without
>a possibility to say: hey stop, we still need this picture!

Thus we need, say, the [[fr:]] image page to look at the [[nl:]] image page
when it says whether the picture is being used.

>>Something like [[image:en:Image_US_flagmedium.png]]

It should be [[en:image:Image_US_flagmedium.png]], but otherwise you're right.

>BTW: this is a subject which is definitely of concern for the
>international list. Or is wikipedia-l the international list now?

Not yet, not yet ....

-- Toby


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Blocked, insulted, and pissed

body:
Erik Moeller wrote in first part:

>I'd like to suggest two solutions to the blocking of dynamic IP addresses or
>proxies that may affect innocent users.

I like both of these ideas.

-- Toby


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Blocked, insulted, and pissed


body:
Pierre Abbat wrote:

>Toby Bartels wrote:

>>Again, nobody mentioned anything about
>>"removing large sections of the Napoleonic Code".
>>But I realise that you're joking; it's a nice pun.
>>Especially when Pierre is ignoring the subject,
>>it's easy to pretend that he's ignoring articles too.
>>At least you had the presence of mind
>>to not be offended by your own pun this time.

>I wasn't ignoring the subject. I was at a friend's house getting his USB DSL
>modem to work with his new Linux box. It's a recent Mandrake distro, and
>there should have been instructions on how to make it work with Mandrake, but
>weren't. So I had to figure out which instructions were irrelevant (don't
>need to compile the module) and which had to be done differently.

And this led to sloppy grammar when blocking IPs on Wikipedia?

Anyway, if you look at the clauses indicating why the IP was blocked,
I'm certain that you'll find that they contain no subjects, only predicates.
Eli's interpretation of these clauses as insults
relies on their also omitting articles ("the").
(These terms "subject" and "article" are being used in their
technical grammatical senses here.)

-- Toby


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
Hi,

I'd like to suggest two solutions to the blocking of dynamic IP addresses or
proxies that may affect innocent users.

Solution #1: IP address blocks should expire after n days unless renewed by
someone. That way, instead of forgetting to unblock people, at worst we
forget to re-block them. In my opinion, it's better to fail to punish somone
effectively than to punish someone who's innocent.

Solution #2: We should give blocked users a way to re-gain access to the
site, namely by creating an account. I don't know if this is currently possible,
but it should be. We can block accounts a lot easier than IP addresses. So
we could basically say on the block page: "Because IP addresses cannot be
reliably linked to individuals, it may be that you receive this message in error.
In that case, or if you want to change your behavior, please create an
account and sign in, and you can continue to use Wikipedia."

We might still reserve complete IP&account bans for those who abuse the
account "backdoor", but this should be the exception, not the rule.

This would make our security softer, and hopefully more effective.

Regards,

Erik

--
+++ GMX - Mail, Messaging & more  http://www.gmx.net +++
NEU: Mit GMX ins Internet. Rund um die Uhr f?r 1 ct/ Min. surfen!


from_name: Gareth Owen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Feature Proposal: Certification

body:
Larry Sanger <lsanger at seeatown.com> writes:

> I remember that several Nupedia editors and reviewers came out very strongly
> against having any association with Wikipedia, and at least one (or was it
> two?) of them threatened to quit

Given the amount of progress they've made on Nupedia, how would we tell?
--
Gareth Owen
"Wikipedia does rock.  By the count on the "brilliant prose" page, there
 are 14 not-bad articles so far" -- Larry Sanger (12 Jan 2001)


body:
I'm glad you're making the == Heading == headers smaller. The only reason I was rebelling against Maveric's campaign -- and using === Heading2 === was because of font size.

Now that it doesn't SHOUT at people, I'm happy to toe the line.

== Heading ==
=== Subhead ===
==== sub-Subhead ====
etc.

Ed Poor


from_name: tarquin

body:
drop the font size a bit, and could we also remove most of the space
after too? at the moment == headers seem to stand alone, isolated from
both the para above and below.

Tom Parmenter wrote:

>The time has come to present the ==Header== in a more modest type
>face.  People are beginning to use it consistently, but it is still
>godawful big and I am tired of apologizing for it every time I write
>about how to be a good markup citizen.
>
>The size of the presentation holds back proper markup.  Even
>outstanding citizens like the guy who can't spell Brian and the guy
>who can't spell Maverick argue against the ==Header==, largely because
>it is ugly, and it is in most browsers.
>
actually, I saw Mav change a 3= to a 2= recently :)

>
>I understand some browsers may not cooperate, but we can certainly
>change the default presentation style on our end, can't we?
>
>
>
>


from_name: Jason Williams

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Spinoff "newspedia" project?

body:
Has anybody considered a spinoff project dedicated to being a
"wiki newspaper"?

I'd envisage several categories of article;

 * Time-based (day/week/month/year/decade); Brief summaries of the
    news items of the day/week/whatever.

 * Sections; broad, persistent areas of news - politics, war,
    media, etc

 * Threads; this is where most of the actual content would reside.
    A "thread" would represent a discrete story; the Washington
    Sniper, the US 2002 mid-term elections, the UK Tory leadership
    uncertainty of Autumn 2002.

This project would rely on wikipedia for background, and things like
"Current events" could be migrated out to this project if desired
(if and when the project was established and proven).

--
jason at jasonandali.org.uk    http://www.jasonandali.org.uk/jason/


from_name: Tom Parmenter

body:
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|Thread-Topic: [Wikipedia-l] Strong request: Make the == presentation smaller
|Thread-Index: AcKEKsG7j8VNpwTsSoCO9mwlLKIEYQAACHQA
|From: "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com>
|X-OriginalArrivalTime: 04 Nov 2002 17:54:02.0717 (UTC) FILETIME=[291000D0:01C2842B]
|X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by www.wikipedia.org id gA4HmjY23719
|Sender: wikipedia-l-admin at wikipedia.org
|Reply-To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
|Date: Mon, 4 Nov 2002 12:54:02 -0500
|
|I'm glad you're making the == Heading == headers smaller. The only reason I was rebelling against Maveric's campaign -- and using === Heading2 === was because of font size.

I'm delighted too, but it wasn't Maveric's campaign, it was mine.  He
was lax in this, if in nothing else ever.

Tom P.
O88

|
|Now that it doesn't SHOUT at people, I'm happy to toe the line.
|
|== Heading ==
|=== Subhead ===
|==== sub-Subhead ====
|etc.
|
|Ed Poor
|_______________________________________________
|Wikipedia-l mailing list
|Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
|http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
|


body:
Hi,

since the site stats are conveniently stored in the site_stats table, I
suggest subtracting the number of articles created by the Ram-Man bot
(US Census city information) from the total number of articles.

Why? The NOA is primarily interesting as a measure of our collaborative
progress. This is important for ourselves and for others. Personally,
I've had several discussions about Wikipedia where I was reluctant to
cite the NOA because of the high number of machine-generated articles,
others probably feel the same.

I therefore believe we should generally exclude autogenerated articles
(we can change the wording on Main_Page to reflect this). As it would be
a 5 minute task for anyone with access to the db, is there any reason
not to do it?

Regards,

Erik
--
FOKUS - Fraunhofer Insitute for Open Communication Systems
Project BerliOS - http://www.berlios.de


from_name: koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com

body:
Rob wrote;
>Incidentally, my (default) proxy (194.117.133.196 cache-
haw.cableinet.co.uk)
>is banned again - my ISP also caters to the recent goatse.cx vandal. I know
>how to manually change my proxy, but other valid users on Blueyonder in
south
>west England ([[user: Nosrail]] for example) may not.

unblocked, and added to [[wikipedia:annoying users]].  no offense to you or
Nosrail.  :-)

kq


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Re: Strong request: Make the == presentation smaller

body:
>I'm delighted too, but it wasn't Maveric's campaign,
>it was mine.  He was lax in this, if in nothing else
>ever.
>
>Tom P.
>O88

Lax on this? Have you been visiting Recent Changes
lately? I've personally fixed the headers of at least
a few hundred articles so far while adding language
links to and from es.wiki.

I quietly agreed with you a long time ago and have
been stating things like "heading 2 comes after
heading 1" in edit summaries for some time now.

--Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

__________________________________________________
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Improving sidebar

body:
I'm not 100% happy with the sidebar:

Main page
Recent changes
Watch list
Current events
--------------------
Edit this page
Watch this page
Move this page
Talk page | Subject page
History
What links here
Watch links
--------------------
Upload
Bug reports
Special pages

The links are perfectly OK, but I have problems with the words used and
sometimes with the positioning. I suggest the following sidebar:

Main Page
Recent changes
My watchlist
Random page
Current events
--------------------
Edit this page
Watch this page
Move this page
Discuss this page | View article
Older versions
What links here?
Link history
--------------------
Upload file
Special pages
Bug reports

Explanations:
- "Watch list" should be "My watchlist" to make clear that this is not a
page that is the same for all users, like the other links in this
section of the sidebar.
- "Talk page" should be "Discuss this page" to use the same imperative
style of the other links above it. Since users don't have to create
"/Talk" links anymore, it's not necessary that we use the actual word
"Talk" anywhere but in the URLs.
- "Subject page" should be "View article" or "Back to article". "Subject
page" is really ambiguous and hard to understand, I searched several
times for a way back to the article because I didn't find an obvious
link.
- "History" should be "Older versions" or "Page history" to be more
obvious. Most people are not familiar with the concept of article
histories.
- "What links here" needs a questionmark.
- "Watch links" should be "Link history", "Related changes" or something
else. "Watch links" suggests that this will add the links to my
watchlist, which it doesn't do.
- Upload should be "Upload file". True, a bit redundant, but more
familiar this way.
- Bug reports should be at the bottom as this is the least relevant.

Your thoughts? I'll be glad to patch this, although it should be easy
enough for someone with CVS access to do it on their own.

Regards,

Erik
--
FOKUS - Fraunhofer Insitute for Open Communication Systems
Project BerliOS - http://www.berlios.de


body:
there's been vague rumblings on this idea over at Meatball:

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

Jason Williams wrote:

>Has anybody considered a spinoff project dedicated to being a
>"wiki newspaper"?
>
>I'd envisage several categories of article;
>
> * Time-based (day/week/month/year/decade); Brief summaries of the
>    news items of the day/week/whatever.
>
> * Sections; broad, persistent areas of news - politics, war,
>    media, etc
>
> * Threads; this is where most of the actual content would reside.
>    A "thread" would represent a discrete story; the Washington
>    Sniper, the US 2002 mid-term elections, the UK Tory leadership
>    uncertainty of Autumn 2002.
>
>This project would rely on wikipedia for background, and things like
>"Current events" could be migrated out to this project if desired
>(if and when the project was established and proven).
>
>
>


body:
On Mon, Nov 04, 2002 at 03:29:42PM +0000, tarquin wrote:
> there's been vague rumblings on this idea over at Meatball:
>
> http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?TimeStream

I think there would be immense benefits to making it a project closely
tied to wikipeda; an excellent background resource, a well-established,
active community with a shared set of good values (NPOV, most prominently)
firmly entrenched.

Is anybody actually interested in taking part in an experiment
on these lines?

--
jason at jasonandali.org.uk    http://www.jasonandali.org.uk/jason/


from_name: Zoe

body:
I would certainly be interested in participating in this.
Zoe
 Jason Williams <jason at jasonandali.org.uk> wrote:Has anybody considered a spinoff project dedicated to being a
"wiki newspaper"?

I'd envisage several categories of article;

* Time-based (day/week/month/year/decade); Brief summaries of the
news items of the day/week/whatever.

* Sections; broad, persistent areas of news - politics, war,
media, etc

* Threads; this is where most of the actual content would reside.
A "thread" would represent a discrete story; the Washington
Sniper, the US 2002 mid-term elections, the UK Tory leadership
uncertainty of Autumn 2002.

This project would rely on wikipedia for background, and things like
"Current events" could be migrated out to this project if desired
(if and when the project was established and proven).

--
jason at jasonandali.org.uk http://www.jasonandali.org.uk/jason/
_______________________________________________
Wikipedia-l mailing list
Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

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from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia subset proposal

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>I have no opinion at the present time.  I am intending to revive
>Nupedia in the near future, in some fashion, and I am thinking very
>much along the lines of what is being discussed here.  Therefore, I
>think that Nupedia might be the right vehicle for this in the first
>place.
>
>
I would like to see Nupedia restart again, with less overhead this time.
I even wrote some software for that (http://nunupedia.sourceforge.net).
However, IMHO a separate (mispeled again?), pure "wikipedia
proofreading" project would be worth trying. It could grow quite fast,
as imports could be done within seconds. As edits would only be possible
on wikipedia, there would be positive feedback on wikipedia, while the
"stable" version would be growing fast, probably faster than wikipedia
did, to a certain point anyway.

*Then*, the "best of the best" articles could serve as a basis for
*some* Nupedia articles. Nupedia aims at yet another level of quality
and *responsibility* than even a peer-reviewed wikipedia would.

If you are not convinced, then ask yourself what we could lose with such
a project running parallel to Nupedia and Wikipedia. IMHO, nothing.
Writing new high-quality articles for Nupedia and pressing a button to
approve a wikipedia article are two entirely different things. I doubt
we'd distribute power to a point where none of the projects really
advances anymore.

Magnus


subject: [Wikitech-l] H1 (Was: mysql issues)

body:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 04, 2002 at 11:20:55PM +0100, Paul Ebermann wrote:
> >>"Tomasz Wegrzanowski" skribis:
>>>"=" worked in UseMod and must be kept supported.
>>>
>>>And no arguing is permitted (unless it comes from Polish
>>>Wikipedians).  Markup must not break.
>>
>>I think with an automatic conversion this would
>>not be an important problem.
>
>
> This would be a problem as people got used to that notation.

As far as I know it was only ever removed by oversight. I have no
objection to putting it back, and will do so if no one else either does
it first or gives a very convincing reason otherwise.

HTML headers do not impose any kind of hierarchical structure. (If they
did, you'd have to put all following text and subheadings _inside_ the
open/close tag pair, probably looking something like the list tags.) Our
==headers== are simple aliases to the HTML headers, and should not be
burdened by overcomplex hierarchy rules, magical collapsing tables of
contents (if you need a table of contents, your article is too long), or
magical detectors that chew out the user for not insufficiently
(s)lavishly constructing their markup.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


body:
Yes, of course we would like one unified project.

Since I cannot read or write Polish at all, and my French and Spanish are extremely limited, I have to rely on bilingual people who choose to write to this list.

If there is another list I should subscribe to, please let me know -- or a Wikipedia page.

I understand that some non-English Wikipedia contributors feel left out by the "main" English Wikipedia.

Ed Poor


body:
Also, a ban of even a single hour's duration can be effective.

I would include a (standard) note in Recent Changes, like:

	"Please do not use this page for graffiti. Try the [[sandbox]] instead."
or
	"Yes, you can delete an entire page. But please don't"

If they ignore the first warning, you could give them a second, final warning:

	"Please do not make any more edits until you read [[...some policy page]]. Any more (graffiti/deletions) and we'll have to ban you."

Actually, I think we should come up with some standard (boilerplate) text for warnings & explanations to newbies/vandals. I would phrase the first warning so it doesn't scare away an innocent newbie, while giving the second one an air of finality (knock it off, or you're out of here).

And I second the idea of a self-expiring ban. (I'm tempted to unilaterally un-block any IP address that was blocked more than 7 days ago. I just might do so - except dear old Helga, unless I hear a strong objection.)

Ed Poor


body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:

>I knew we could do it: the Wiki Borg lives!
>
>
"We are the wiki. Surrender your encyclopedia and prepare to be GPLed.
Your writings will be assimilated. Resistance is futile."


subject: [Wikipedia-l] user windt

body:
User Windt has posted two (so far) copyvios, PInk (singer) and Zero Mostel.
since it's a registered usernam I can't block.
i'm about to log off, so can someone else keep an eye out?

tarquin


from_name: Pierre Abbat

body:
On Monday 04 November 2002 14:14, Toby Bartels wrote:
> And this led to sloppy grammar when blocking IPs on Wikipedia?

.oiro'aro'e. I was ignoring the selnoi (because I wasn't here to read the
notci), not the sumti be fi li 1!

> Anyway, if you look at the clauses indicating why the IP was blocked,
> I'm certain that you'll find that they contain no subjects, only
> predicates. Eli's interpretation of these clauses as insults
> relies on their also omitting articles ("the").
> (These terms "subject" and "article" are being used in their
> technical grammatical senses here.)

daspo la'e lu munje nuncanja midju li'u
gi'enai
daspo la munje nuncanja midju

mu'omi'e .pier.


body:
On Monday 04 November 2002 16:31, Matthew Woodcraft wrote:
> Perhaps there's a way we can make use of the 'Client-ip' and
> 'X-forwarded-for' headers which are added by many ISPs' proxies.

If you do that, you'll run afoul of me - I'm running Squid on the laptop, so
the client ip is 127.0.0.1.

> I think it would be necessary to decide whether the actual IP address
> seemed to be a shared proxy or not when imposing the ban -- simply
> matching against these headers whenever they were persent would just
> make it easier for people with fixed IP addresses to avoid the ban.

My criterion for banning is, if there are 3 vandalisms from an IP address, I
check a sample of the IP's contributions. If there are no good-looking edits,
I ban.

I suggest that IPs that have been unbanned because they're proxies be put on
a list, and if someone tries to ban that IP, he be warned that he's banning a
proxy.

phma


body:
|From: Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com>
|Sender: wikipedia-l-admin at wikipedia.org
|Reply-To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
|Date: Mon, 4 Nov 2002 14:58:33 -0800 (PST)
|
|>I'm delighted too, but it wasn't Maveric's campaign,
|>it was mine.  He was lax in this, if in nothing else
|>ever.
|>
|>Tom P.
|>O88
|
|Lax on this? Have you been visiting Recent Changes
|lately? I've personally fixed the headers of at least
|a few hundred articles so far while adding language
|links to and from es.wiki.
|
|I quietly agreed with you a long time ago and have
|been stating things like "heading 2 comes after
|heading 1" in edit summaries for some time now.
|
|--Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
|

I apologize, I was going by your (fairly) recent mail on the subject,
which seemed to me to argue against generic markup on the grounds that
the ==H2== was just too big to be borne.  I still have the mail,
because I was going to respond to it, but decided to be more positive
and simply make the proposal without making a fuss too.

Tom Parmenter
Ortolan88


from_name: Rob Brewer

body:
>
>Solution #2: We should give blocked users a way to re-gain access to the
>site, namely by creating an account. I don't know if this is currently
>possible,
>but it should be. We can block accounts a lot easier than IP addresses. So
>we could basically say on the block page: "Because IP addresses cannot be
>reliably linked to individuals, it may be that you receive this message in
>error.
>In that case, or if you want to change your behavior, please create an
>account and sign in, and you can continue to use Wikipedia."

I definitely agree with this. I was quite surprised to find that when my
(proxy server) IP was banned, I was banned too - even though I was logged
in.

Incidentally, my (default) proxy (194.117.133.196 cache-haw.cableinet.co.uk)
is banned again - my ISP also caters to the recent goatse.cx vandal. I know
how to manually change my proxy, but other valid users on Blueyonder in south
west England ([[user: Nosrail]] for example) may not.

Rob
user:rbrwr


from_name: erik_moeller at gmx.de

body:
>> Why? The NOA is primarily interesting as a measure of our collaborative
>> progress. This is important for ourselves and for others. Personally,
>> I've had several discussions about Wikipedia where I was reluctant to
>> cite the NOA because of the high number of machine-generated articles,
>> others probably feel the same.
>>
>> I therefore believe we should generally exclude autogenerated articles
>> (we can change the wording on Main_Page to reflect this). As it would be
>> a 5 minute task for anyone with access to the db, is there any reason
>> not to do it?

> The NOA is a highly unreliable figure for any purpose, and there has
> been much discussion on reforming it.

> If you think collaboration is the key, then a more general solution is
> in order: only count article-space pages that have been edited at least
> twice (and thus, have an old revision stored in the 'old' table).

I'm in support of this idea, but I don't know how many others are. Just
cutting out the bots might be the least controversial, and since the
current modus operandi is to try to make decisions by consensus (I prefer
voting) ..

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

subject: [Wikitech-l] H1 (Was: mysql issues)

body:
On Mon, Nov 04, 2002 at 10:03:51AM -0800, Toby Bartels wrote:
> You mean the HTML tag <H1>?
> That's already supported, as a literal wiki markup.
> See [[en:Talk:Jimmy Carter]] for an example of its use.
> You only have to fight to *keep* it supported.
> Of course, the wiki markup "=" is unsupported
> (which is just as well IMO).

"=" worked in UseMod and must be kept supported.

And no arguing is permitted (unless it comes from Polish
Wikipedians).  Markup must not break.


from_name: Axel Boldt

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Photo wiki

body:
--- Giskart <giskart at wikipedia.be> wrote:

> I see more usefulness in the establishment of a special wiki for
> collecting GNU/FDL photographs.  This project can support the
> encyclopedia with photographs.

Please do me a favor and place those photos in the public domain, like
the GIMP photo archive http://gimp-savvy.com/PHOTO-ARCHIVE/ (or skip
the wiki part and contribute there directly). We are having enough
trouble with the GFDL as is. It isn't really designed for photos at
all, and most of its provisions don't even make sense in that context.

Axel

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
HotJobs - Search new jobs daily now
http://hotjobs.yahoo.com/


from_name: Giskart

body:
Jason Williams wrote:
> Has anybody considered a spinoff project dedicated to being a
> "wiki newspaper"?

You can always try it as an experimenting. Wikipedia however on the
first place must be a encyclopaedia and should not try to play CNN.   I
I see more usefulness in the establishment of a special wiki for
collecting GNU/FDL photographs.  This project can support the
encyclopedia with photographs.  http://foto.wikipedia.org ? If there is
few support it can start at the MetaWikipedia.

Giskart


from_name: Matthew Woodcraft

body:
On Mon, Nov 04, 2002 at 07:36:48PM +0000, Rob Brewer wrote:
> Incidentally, my (default) proxy (194.117.133.196 cache-haw.cableinet.co.uk)
> is banned again - my ISP also caters to the recent goatse.cx vandal. I know
> how to manually change my proxy, but other valid users on Blueyonder in south
> west England ([[user: Nosrail]] for example) may not.

Perhaps there's a way we can make use of the 'Client-ip' and
'X-forwarded-for' headers which are added by many ISPs' proxies.

I think it would be necessary to decide whether the actual IP address
seemed to be a shared proxy or not when imposing the ban -- simply
matching against these headers whenever they were persent would just
make it easier for people with fixed IP addresses to avoid the ban.

It wouldn't help people with short-term IP address leases at all, of
course.

-M-


from_name: Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz

body:
On 04-11-2002, Giskart wrote thusly :
> Jason Williams wrote:
> >Has anybody considered a spinoff project dedicated to being a
> >"wiki newspaper"?
> You can always try it as an experimenting. Wikipedia however on the
> first place must be a encyclopaedia and should not try to play CNN.   I
> I see more usefulness in the establishment of a special wiki for
> collecting GNU/FDL photographs.  This project can support the
> encyclopedia with photographs.  http://foto.wikipedia.org ? If there is
> few support it can start at the MetaWikipedia.
I am in favour of other kind of "NewsPedia" - the news about all
Wikipedias, with language versions with _all_ major languages of
Wikipedias.
Something along the lines of the deceased Wikipedia:Wikipedia NEWS.
I think that it is essential to foster cooperation and unification
between Wikipedias as well as to open, at last, a proper avenue for
information exchange between Wikipedias.
We want to have one unified project, don't we ?

Regards,
Kpjas.


from_name: Paul Ebermann

subject: [Wikitech-l] H1 (Was: mysql issues)

body:
"Tomasz Wegrzanowski" skribis:

> On Mon, Nov 04, 2002 at 10:03:51AM -0800, Toby Bartels wrote:
> > You mean the HTML tag <H1>?
> > That's already supported, as a literal wiki markup.
> > See [[en:Talk:Jimmy Carter]] for an example of its use.
> > You only have to fight to *keep* it supported.
> > Of course, the wiki markup "=" is unsupported
> > (which is just as well IMO).
>
> "=" worked in UseMod and must be kept supported.
>
> And no arguing is permitted (unless it comes from Polish
> Wikipedians).  Markup must not break.

I think with an automatic conversion this would
not be an important problem.

Paul


subject: [Wikitech-l] H1 (Was: mysql issues)

body:
On Mon, Nov 04, 2002 at 11:20:55PM +0100, Paul Ebermann wrote:
> "Tomasz Wegrzanowski" skribis:
>
>
> > On Mon, Nov 04, 2002 at 10:03:51AM -0800, Toby Bartels wrote:
> > > You mean the HTML tag <H1>?
> > > That's already supported, as a literal wiki markup.
> > > See [[en:Talk:Jimmy Carter]] for an example of its use.
> > > You only have to fight to *keep* it supported.
> > > Of course, the wiki markup "=" is unsupported
> > > (which is just as well IMO).
> >
> > "=" worked in UseMod and must be kept supported.
> >
> > And no arguing is permitted (unless it comes from Polish
> > Wikipedians).  Markup must not break.
>
> I think with an automatic conversion this would
> not be an important problem.

This would be a problem as people got used to that notation.


body:
On Tuesday 05 November 2002 04:13, Rob Brewer wrote:
> This is a good policy, except that (as far as I can tell) when you check
> contribs for an IP address you only see edits made anonymously from that
> IP, but when you ban an IP you ban both anonymous and signed-in users at
> that IP. If a proxy or a shared computer has been used by an anonymous
> vandal and a useful signed-in user, the signed-in user will be blocked, and
> Wikipedia will lose the benefit of his edits.

This needs to be changed, then. Either we have to see the signed-in
contributions from an IP address, or blocking an IP address needs to not
block signed-in users and we need a way of blocking signed-in users.

phma


from_name: Larry Sanger

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia subset proposal

body:
> From: Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com>
>
> Larry Sanger wrote:
> > > It should not go under the name nupedia, nor should it go under the
> > > name wikipedia, but something else. According to network solutions
> > > metapedia.com is owned, but metapedia.org and metapedia.net are
> > > available.  Hyperpedia.org is also a good name and available.
> >
> > We clearly need Jimbo to reply on this point.  I've got a few name
> > ideas myself.
>
> I have no opinion at the present time.  I am intending to revive
> Nupedia in the near future, in some fashion, and I am thinking very
> much along the lines of what is being discussed here.  Therefore, I
> think that Nupedia might be the right vehicle for this in the first
> place.

Then here's what I propose.  Magnus, Lee, and I (and anyone else who wants
to, I guess!) will hammer out a test version of the software.

We'll set up a mailing list for the project, in which the new project's
policy (and name), etc., will be discussed.  I'll announce the mailing
list on Wikipedia-l, Nupedia-l, and Advisory-l.

> From: Gareth Owen <wiki at gwowen.freeserve.co.uk>
>
> Larry Sanger <lsanger at seeatown.com> writes:
>
> > I remember that several Nupedia editors and reviewers came out very strongly
> > against having any association with Wikipedia, and at least one (or was it
> > two?) of them threatened to quit
>
> Given the amount of progress they've made on Nupedia, how would we tell?

FYI, the reasons for the scant progress are (1) the editorial process was
complicated.  That doesn't mean that we couldn't make progress in the
future with a simpler system and that someone who has put in hours of work
on Nupedia wouldn't be missed in the future.  And (2) the whole process
was top-down, and once it became clear that I had been more or less
reassigned to Wikipedia, all but a few just stopped working.  Again, that
doesn't mean they're not there and waiting, and that they wouldn't be
missed in the future if they quit now.

A lot of people are unjustly critical of Nupedia when they don't realize
that it was *always* a project in development, that we were generally
quite open to adjustments to make the project better--and just when we
were making a move to simplify the project, with everybody's blessing,
money ran out, and no one volunteered for the full-time unpaid job of
leading the newly-reorganized project.  So don't blame Nupedia for its
stasis.  Blame the bursting of the Internet bubble, if you want to blame
anything!

Larry
--
"We have now sunk to a depth at which the re-statement of the obvious is
the first duty of intelligent men." --George Orwell


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

body:
Rob Brewer wrote:

> This is a good policy, except that (as far as I can tell) when you check
> contribs for an IP address you only see edits made anonymously from that IP,
> but when you ban an IP you ban both anonymous and signed-in users at that IP.
> If a proxy or a shared computer has been used by an anonymous vandal and a
> useful signed-in user, the signed-in user will be blocked, and Wikipedia
> will lose the benefit of his edits.

Has anyone thought of selective banning?

Refuse anonymous edits from the banned IP, but allow signed-in edits.

We could supply a message like, "Sorry but due to abuse from IP i.j.k.l, you must sign in to contribute."

Ed Poor


body:
At 14:41 04/11/02 -0800, koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com wrote:

>unblocked, and added to [[wikipedia:annoying users]].  no offense to you or
>Nosrail.  :-)

Thanks. I hope the problems discussed in this thread lead to the
development of a more sophisticated range of tools for dealing
with vandals. Both Erik's solutions (allow logged-in users from a
banned IP, and automatically expire bans by default) sound good
to me. Perhaps IPs whose bans have expired could be automatically
moved to Wikipedia:IP_probation_watchlist or Wikipedia:Annoying users,
and maybe flagged up in Recent Changes?

Rob


from_name: Toby Bartels

body:
Ed Poor wrote:

>Ortolan88 wrote:

>>Nonetheless, it seems totally appropriate to solve this problem of
>>incoherence and occasionally upsetting behavior (inherent in the
>>nature of Wikipedia), by moving properly vetted, well-behaved,
>>near-complete, shoe-and-shirt-wearing articles from Wikipedia to
>>Nupedia.

>I agree. There's a huge difference between "requiring proper attire" and
>outright racism, to expand on Tom's metaphor.

Despite the long history of using the former to cover up the latter.

>Suppose a town decides to revoke its vagrancy law and allow homeless people to
>wander the streets and sleep in the park. It would be perfectly permissible
>for it to draw the line at access to public facilities like restaurants and
>libraries, with, e.g., a "no shirt no shoes no service" rule.

While your town would thus be laxer than most WRT vagrancy,
it would be stricter than most WRT "no shirt no shoes no service".
Hardly any municipalities have such a rule for, say, restaurants.
And why should they?  It's up to the restaurants to make those rules.
I know one very nice Moroccan restaurant in Colorado Springs
that asks its guests to remove their shoes before entering the dining room,
as is only polite in Moroccan culture.  It would be permissible
in the sense of not violating the constitution (at least in the US),
but hardly permissible on grounds of good politics, to ban that.
If the library is run directly by the town, then there's more sense
in the town setting up such a rule for that building,
but frankly IMO it would still be a pretty stupid one.
(The town's insurance might force it on them, unfortunately,
at least WRT the shoes.)

>This isn't "discriminatory", because anyone with the price of a meal can still
>eat in the restaurant:

Well, no, they need the price of a meal, a shirt, and two shoes.

>they just can't come in with their dirty, smelly feet

Speak for yourself.  Bare feet aren't smelly, nor dirtier than shoes
(which most people don't wash as often as their feet).
Only feet that have just come out of shoes are smelly,
but if you wash them and then don't put the shoes back on,
then they won't get smelly again.  Feet aren't armpits.

>or show their tits. Likewise, a dress or bathing code in a library isn't
>necessarily discriminatory. Even bums and hobos are welcome to read there
>without paying.

Except, of course, for shirts and shoes.  And now you added a shower.

I don't mean to imply that there can be no basis for requiring cleanliness.
There's the matter of public health (no flea infected clothing, say)
and the sad fact that 21st century Western society is so sissified
that most of its members truly cannot stand the sight or smell
of a human being; these sensibilities require some respect.
Nevertheless, the fact remains that dress codes have been used,
even tailored, to keep out specifically chosen people.
That the law refers only to dress doesn't mean that
it wasn't designed with ulterior motives.

So what does this have to do with what we're actually talking about,
instead of some metaphor that a couple people have been using?
Well, the fact that I would write all of the above
explains, through the magic of the metaphor,
why I'm happy with Wikipedia and don't feel the need
for any sort of expert approved subset or appendage.

But the beauty of digital copying technology (and public licences)
is that those of you that *do* feel this need
can easily set up your Expertpedia overlay without ruining my fun,
and since it's now agreed all around that Wikipedia itself won't change,
I can only give my blessing to your project.

-- Toby


body:
At 18:08 04/11/02 -0500, Pierre Abbat wrote:

>My criterion for banning is, if there are 3 vandalisms from an IP address, I
>check a sample of the IP's contributions. If there are no good-looking edits,
>I ban.

This is a good policy, except that (as far as I can tell) when you check
contribs for an IP address you only see edits made anonymously from that IP,
but when you ban an IP you ban both anonymous and signed-in users at that IP.
If a proxy or a shared computer has been used by an anonymous vandal and a
useful signed-in user, the signed-in user will be blocked, and Wikipedia
will lose the benefit of his edits.

Rob (rbrwr)


body:
I wrote in small part:

>Thus we need, say, the [[fr:]] image page to look at the [[nl:]] image page
>when it says whether the picture is being used.

I mean, of course, that the [[fr:]] image page looks at the [[nl:]] *database*.
I hope that that was obvious.

-- Toby


body:
Pierre Abbat wrote:

>Toby Bartels wrote:

>>And this led to sloppy grammar when blocking IPs on Wikipedia?

>.oiro'aro'e. I was ignoring the selnoi (because I wasn't here to read the
>notci), not the sumti be fi li 1!

I'm hoping that the "1!" is a typo and should be "!!",
or else I'll never understand this language.
(Unless it's 1337, but that doesn't fit the rest.)
Beginning words with periods is confusing enough ^_^.

>>Anyway, if you look at the clauses indicating why the IP was blocked,
>>I'm certain that you'll find that they contain no subjects, only
>>predicates. Eli's interpretation of these clauses as insults
>>relies on their also omitting articles ("the").
>>(These terms "subject" and "article" are being used in their
>>technical grammatical senses here.)

>daspo la'e lu munje nuncanja midju li'u
>gi'enai
>daspo la munje nuncanja midju

What *is* this language/script, anyway?
I've seen it here a couple of times.

>mu'omi'e .pier.

mu'omi'e .tobi.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [Wikitech-l] H1

body:
[Note:  I've crossposted to the main list so that people can see
        that there's a proposal to recognise "=".]

Brion Vibber wrote:

>Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

>>Paul Ebermann wrote:

>>>Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

>>>>"=" worked in UseMod and must be kept supported.

Ah, I understand what the issue is now.
You're using "=" *already* there!

>>>>And no arguing is permitted (unless it comes from Polish
>>>>Wikipedians).  Markup must not break.

Of course everybody has the opportunity to argue --
unless you're suggesting a fork in the wiki markup, that is.

>>>I think with an automatic conversion this would
>>>not be an important problem.

That would solve it once, if nobody's in the habit of using "=".

>>This would be a problem as people got used to that notation.

So the question is, are they used to it now?
I would assume yes, meaning that "=" should be supported.

>As far as I know it was only ever removed by oversight. I have no
>objection to putting it back, and will do so if no one else either does
>it first or gives a very convincing reason otherwise.

My concern is that a line bounded by "=" could show up naturally
in a context of writing out a mathematical equation.
It could easily be avoided by changing the line breaking, however.
So I'd appreciate it if somebody would verify (by SQL) that
no such pattern exists in the nonUseMod wikis now;
in the future, the "Preview" button will catch it.

>HTML headers do not impose any kind of hierarchical structure. (If they
>did, you'd have to put all following text and subheadings _inside_ the
>open/close tag pair, probably looking something like the list tags.) Our
>==headers== are simple aliases to the HTML headers, and should not be
>burdened by overcomplex hierarchy rules, magical collapsing tables of
>contents (if you need a table of contents, your article is too long), or
>magical detectors that chew out the user for not insufficiently
>(s)lavishly constructing their markup.

Actually, our headers *do* already impose a heirarchical structure.
Turn on numbered headers in your user preferences to see it.
This is a very desirable option IMO.  No arguing is permitted
unless it comes from people with that preference set ^_^.

-- Toby


subject: [Wikitech-l] H1


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Peer review project for Wikipedia

body:
(Posted separately to Nupedia-l and Advisory-l.)

Hello all,

Recently I proposed on Wikipedia-l to help start a "peer review" project
for Wikipedia.

If you are a Nupedia peer reviewer or editor, I hope you will consider
getting involved, because we really *need* your expertise!

The purpose of the project, at least as I've envisioned it, is limited to
picking and posting those Wikipedia articles that are of sufficiently high
quality (see below).  The picking and posting will be exceedingly simple,
to be done by subject area experts--people with qualifications similar to
those required for Nupedia peer reviewers.  Any necessary editing will be
done on Wikipedia itself, so this new website will be a *subset*, not a
*fork*, of Wikipedia articles.

I've set up a mailing list ("Sifter-l," see below).  Now we can get busy
	* discussing policy issues (e.g., article requirements)
	* picking a name
	* discussing software requirements (Magnus and Lee are at work)

If enough qualified reviewers join up and get to work posting really
excellent articles, I think we could, within several months, have several
thousand expert-certified, great articles.  This would go a long way to
winning the whole free encyclopedia movement credibility.  It would be
good for Wikipedia *and* Nupedia.  It might help win us the funding we
need.

MAILING LIST

I have just set up a mailing list, Sifter-l, for purposes of discussing
this.

http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/sifter-l

ORIGINAL PROPOSAL

For those on Nupedia-l and Advisory-l, here's the original proposal again:

In view of the facts that Wikipedia has grown tremendously; that we have
lost several of our most overeducated, overqualified participants due to
disgust with having to deal with a few difficult, uncooperative
participants; and above all, that there is a vast body of *hundreds* of
highly educated and willing free encyclopedia participants waiting idle
due to the dormancy of Nupedia; I propose the following:

(1) We--whether Bomis or someone else--should set up another website.  It
should definitely not live at the Wikipedia.com domain.

(2) The purpose of the new website will be to *select* and *post*
Wikipedia articles that are up to a certain standard.

(3) The only participants in the new website will be those that meet the
Nupedia requirements in their particular fields, or some other similarly
stringent requirements.

(4) Either I, or a small group of trusted people, will be responsible for
approving participants.

(5) The website will be *read only*.  No one will be able to edit it
directly, including its participants.  This means it *won't* be a wiki.

(6) Any participant will have to go to Wikipedia to make any edits to an
article.

(7) Participants will save *particular versions* of articles, not the
current article, whatever it happens to be.  There should be a link to
"the most current version" of a given article on Wikipedia, as well.

(8) Implementing the website should not require *any* changes to
Wikipedia.  I want to leave Wikipedia alone completely.  The only thing
that *might* make sense is to add a link (which should be optional!) to a
corresponding "subset" website article, if it exists.  In particular,
"subset" participants should **not** be regarded as Wikipedia editors with
any particular, special status on Wikipedia.  And "subset" policy,
whatever it might turn out to be, should **not** be regarded as Wikipedia
policy.

(9) Also, I don't think we should host this website on Nupedia.com.

INTERFACE WITH NUPEDIA

Jimbo has made it clear that he wanted to do something like this with
Nupedia, but it also looks like he doesn't intend to do it anytime soon.
I and others think that this would cause an unnecessary firestorm of
controversy, and several of us are anxious to get to work actually doing
something.  So the plan is to proceed using some other address--not
Wikipedia.org and not Nupedia.com--and then, later, we'll have a much
better idea of whether it's a wise move to merge the new review project
with Nupedia.

Personal note: I'm still underemployed, though not unemployed, and so I am
thinking of getting behind Lee Crocker's effort to set up a Free
Encyclopedia Foundation.  Even if no funding is forthcoming, I want to
help get this new effort off the ground, because I think it's important.
But I won't be able to work on it anywhere near full-time unless a
Foundation can support my work.

Best,
Larry
--
"We have now sunk to a depth at which the re-statement of the obvious is
the first duty of intelligent men." --George Orwell


from_name: Jason Williams

body:
On Mon, Nov 04, 2002 at 08:19:07PM +0100, Giskart wrote:
> Jason Williams wrote:
> >Has anybody considered a spinoff project dedicated to being a
> >"wiki newspaper"?
>
> You can always try it as an experimenting.

Is there any chance of getting an "official experiment" set up, or
should I set up a wiki on some random webspace of my own somewhere?

--
jason at jasonandali.org.uk    http://www.jasonandali.org.uk/jason/


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [Wikitech-l] H1

body:
On Tue, 2002-11-05 at 09:33, Toby Bartels wrote:
> Actually, our headers *do* already impose a heirarchical structure.
> Turn on numbered headers in your user preferences to see it.
> This is a very desirable option IMO.  No arguing is permitted
> unless it comes from people with that preference set ^_^.

Our headers impose no such thing. A misconceived "number headers"
feature, which users were so annoyed with that it was banished to
off-by-default and forgotten about by developers long long ago, attempts
futilely to impose such a thing.

Its continued existence is a dark blot upon the soul of the wiki.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] H1


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Article count request for comments

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>It has been suggested on wikitech-l that the article count on the main page
>should only contain articles that have been edited at least once after their
>creation. The implicit assumption is that the primary use of the count is as
>a measure of our collaborative, human success.

I think that this is a good idea, even if you don't accept
the implicit assumption.  I propose one modification:
Require a *non-minor* edit to count the article towards the total.
Then when somebody spellchecks "seperate" to "separate",
that won't count as collaborative, human work.
(I know that not everybody uses the minor edit checkbox,
but this would help.)

If people think that this makes a good change in the count,
then perhaps we can get rid of the comma requirement,
which I always thought was too arbitrary to have much meaning.

-- Toby


list: sifter-l

source: wayback-mbox

subject: [Sifter-l] Wrong address for the mailing list

body:
sifter-l-request@nupedia.com wrote:

>To post to this list, send your email to:
>  sifter-l@ross.bomis.com

And otherwise made references to <ross.bomis.com>.
These addresses don't work; they must be <nupedia.com>
(according to my tests).  Not a problem if one knows.

-- Toby Bartels


body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>> It has been suggested on wikitech-l that the article count on the main
page should only contain articles that have been edited at least once
after their creation. The implicit assumption is that the primary use of
the count is as a measure of our collaborative, human success. By
eliminating unedited articles, we would

- exclude most articles created by bots
- exclude articles that have not had any kind of quality review by others.

This would not be too hard to implement. It's not a big issue like
certification (more on that later), but it would still be nice to get some
feedback before proceeding.

The quick and even easier alternative is to manually subtract articles
from the count that have been generated by the bots we are aware of. <<

-----

I couldn't agree more, and I think this is actually rather pressing, given
that the number appears to be approaching our goal.  It *appears*, albeit
misleadingly, that we have nearly 100,000 articles on the website.  I know
that's not what it says, but the number just jumps out at the casual
reader.  When that number ticks over 100,000 then I suspect people are
going to start passing judgment on Wikipedia's level of quality: "They say
they've reached their goal of 100,000 articles, but just look at the
articles!  Another waste of bandwidth!"

Of course not everyone will say that, and *I* wouldn't say that, but
plenty of people might, e.g., on Slashdot or K5 or other influential
forums.  Let's not give them the opportunity.

Let's use Erik's modifications to cut the number of reported articles
down.  This will give the Wikipedia peer review project, and possibly
other article selection projects, some time to start working.  Then, if
someone feels inclined to say, "You might have 100,000 articles but most
of them aren't worth reading," we can reply, "There are review projects
--join them and stop complaining."

Larry
--
"We have now sunk to a depth at which the re-statement of the obvious is
the first duty of intelligent men." --George Orwell


subject: Re: [Sifter-l] Wrong address for the mailing list

body:
OK, I think I fixed that.  The welcome message should say "Nupedia.com"
now.

--Larry

On Tue, 5 Nov 2002, Toby Bartels wrote:

> sifter-l-request@nupedia.com wrote:
>
> >To post to this list, send your email to:
> >  sifter-l@ross.bomis.com
>
> And otherwise made references to <ross.bomis.com>.
> These addresses don't work; they must be <nupedia.com>
> (according to my tests).  Not a problem if one knows.
>
>
> -- Toby Bartels
> _______________________________________________
> Sifter-l mailing list
> Sifter-l@ross.bomis.com
> http://ross.bomis.com/mailman/listinfo/sifter-l
>

--
"We have now sunk to a depth at which the re-statement of the obvious is
the first duty of intelligent men." --George Orwell


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Stoping vandals (was: Blocked, insulted, and pissed)

body:
Rob Brewer, replying to Ed Poor:

> >Has anyone thought of selective banning?
> >
> >Refuse anonymous edits from the banned IP, but allow
> >signed-in edits.
> >
> >We could supply a message like, "Sorry but due to
> >abuse from IP i.j.k.l, you must sign in to
> >contribute."
>
> I think that's what Erik Moeller had in mind with
> point #2 of his message at 11:47:25 +0100 yesterday,
> and I think it's a good idea. If vandals want to be
> persistent we should at least make them go to the
> trouble of getting a fake hotmail address to sign up
> with ;-)

Yeah, but we MIGHT have to grant sysops the power to suspend or curtail editing privileges of signed-in contributors, if they engage in:
* deleting the entire text of a page for no reason
* inserting random graffiti like "I like chicken" into an article
* nonsense like "Shakespeare was born in Marion, Illinois in 1968"
* the goatse image (?)

This change in policy would require agreement from our ever-benevolent and freedom-loving sponsor, Jimbo Wales.

Assuming any of the 41 sysops can "undo" a block initiated by another sysop, I don't think there will be a problem with abuse of this power. 40 to 1 is a lot of veto power.

Ed Poor


body:
On Tuesday 05 November 2002 12:24, Toby Bartels wrote:
> I'm hoping that the "1!" is a typo and should be "!!",
> or else I'll never understand this language.
> (Unless it's 1337, but that doesn't fit the rest.)
> Beginning words with periods is confusing enough ^_^.

The "1!" is not a typo. Lojban doesn't have a word for "subject" in the
grammatical sense, so I said "sumti in place 1", which is close enough, and
then closed the sentence with an exclamation mark. The periods are needed to
distinguish among ".io.a", ".i.o'a", and ".i'o.a".

> >daspo la'e lu munje nuncanja midju li'u
> >gi'enai
> >daspo la munje nuncanja midju
>
> What *is* this language/script, anyway?
> I've seen it here a couple of times.

See the [[Lojban]] article.

> >mu'omi'e .pier.
>
> mu'omi'e .tobi.

"tobi" means "(8" and can't be a name. Having people named And (a Lojbanist)
is confusing enough; there is now an article about a place named Them.

phma


body:
Toby,

I didn't say I wanted MY town library to keep out smelly people (read that as "vagrants") or that I only go to classy "proper attire required" restaurants. Rev. Moon tells the story of how he was once confronted by a maitre d' who told him he had to wear a tie. He said "thank you" and left. He figured that if they had a rule like that they probably had a policy of not serving black people either.

I don't want the Wikipedia to exclude people with views I despise. I just don't want them to rip pages out of the books or put salt in the sugar dispenser.

Ed Poor


from_name: Anthere

body:
--- "Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz" <kpj at gower.pl> wrote:
> On 04-11-2002, Poor, Edmund W wrote thusly :
> > Yes, of course we would like one unified project.
> Ed,
> Thank you for your reply.

Thank you also.

> > Since I cannot read or write Polish at all, and my
> French and Spanish are extremely limited, I have to
> rely on bilingual people who choose to write to this
> list.
> You are not likely to get any impression what is
> going on the Polish WP,
> and the same with me in case of the nl.wikipedia.org
> and several others.

I just tried to give a few hints of the latest things
that are going on on the fr.wiki.
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Embassy
I have rather few ideas of what is really going on on
the en.wiki, as I just drop by from time to time. I
have no idea whatsoever of what is going on in other
places. Very unfortunate.

> My point is that there are people in all Wikipedias
> (the English as well)
> that
> 1) cannot get a view of what is going on in the
> _whole_ project
> 2) cannot communicate their views, grievances or
> proposals
> 3) cannot share content, data, ideas etc.
> 4) cannot build _one_ community

> it is caused, IMO, by language barriers and lack of
> the proper platform (meeting place)
> Of course Wikipedia Embassies was really a good
> idea. But its
> implementation lacks something.
> > If there is another list I should subscribe to,
> please let me know -- or a Wikipedia page.

hum...maybe you should help for the main list to
really become the main list one day, rather than the
en.list. Then you would have another list to register
to :-)). Seriously, IntList is just a partial copy of
this one...

> > I understand that some non-English Wikipedia
> contributors feel left out by the "main" English
> Wikipedia.
> This is just one of the problems and not the most
> important one.

Some feel left out. Another problem is the
globalization fear...
Fear of being "engulfed" in the bigger wiki.

For these ones, it results in instinctive rejection of
what has already been decided, whether it was a good
choice or a bad choice, just to make the point : "we
are different, we think different".

Fear of standardization.

Maybe is that not so much being involved in a central
process which is needed ('cause a central process will
orbit around en.wiki for a long time I guess), but
rather to be involved in one of the process of an
organisation with no center.

> "Wikipedia News" translated into all our major
> languagues and transmitted
> to all major Wikipedias. Ambassadors acting as
> translators and editors
> also giving resume of any discussions that result
> from any of topics.

Well, I don't think wikipedia is a news channel. But I
like the idea of a decentralized process :-)

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Y! Web Hosting - Let the expert host your web site
http://webhosting.yahoo.com/


from_name: The Cunctator

body:
On Tue, 2002-11-05 at 10:32, Rob Brewer wrote:
> At 08:41 05/11/02 -0500, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
>
> >Has anyone thought of selective banning?
> >
> >Refuse anonymous edits from the banned IP, but allow signed-in edits.
> >
> >We could supply a message like, "Sorry but due to abuse from IP i.j.k.l,
> >you must sign in to contribute."
>
> I think that's what Erik Moeller had in mind with point #2 of his message
> at 11:47:25 +0100 yesterday, and I think it's a good idea. If vandals want
> to be persistent we should at least make them go to the trouble of
> getting a fake hotmail address to sign up with ;-)
>
At the same time, we should not force people who want to contribute
anonymously to sign in.

If we really feel IP banning is so necessary that we need to impose it
even on proxy IPs, then maybe we should just end anonymous contributions
entirely.


from_name: Jonathan Walther

subject: [Wikipedia-l] proposal to speed up Wikipedia

body:
I've done some work at converting the Wikipedia to Postgres, but am not
there yet.  So, let's put that aside for now.

It seems that the wiki "source" is "interpreted" into html every single
time someone accesses a link.  That seems like a lot of overhead.

Given that for every time a change is made to the wiki source to a page,
several people "view" it, why not just regenerate the html only when
changes are made, and store it?  It would take more storage space, but
should be MUCH faster.  And if storage is an issue, I can donate some
hard drives...

The savings on the Recent Changes page alone should work wonders.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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body:
I've done some work at converting the Wikipedia to Postgres, but am not
there yet.  So, let's put that aside for now.

It seems that the wiki "source" is "interpreted" into html every single
time someone accesses a link.  That seems like a lot of overhead.

Given that for every time a change is made to the wiki source to a page,
several people "view" it, why not just regenerate the html only when
changes are made, and store it?  It would take more storage space, but
should be MUCH faster.  And if storage is an issue, I can donate some
hard drives...

The savings on the Recent Changes page alone should work wonders.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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from_name: Tom Parmenter

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [Wikitech-l] H1

in_reply_to:
<1036520114.1064.44.camel@rdaneel.vibber.org> (message from Brion
	Vibber on 05 Nov 2002 10:15:13 -0800)

body:
|From: Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com>
|Date: 05 Nov 2002 10:15:13 -0800
|
|On Tue, 2002-11-05 at 09:33, Toby Bartels wrote:
|> Actually, our headers *do* already impose a heirarchical structure.
|> Turn on numbered headers in your user preferences to see it.
|> This is a very desirable option IMO.  No arguing is permitted
|> unless it comes from people with that preference set ^_^.
|
|Our headers impose no such thing. A misconceived "number headers"
|feature, which users were so annoyed with that it was banished to
|off-by-default and forgotten about by developers long long ago, attempts
|futilely to impose such a thing.
|
|Its continued existence is a dark blot upon the soul of the wiki.
|
|-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
|

The auto-number preference is still there, but doesn't work, it
seems. As an old tech writer I can easily imagine situations where it
might be useful, or at least I can imagine readers who would prefer
it.  But I don't think it's all that important.

However, I believe that ordered use of =, ==, ===, ==== and so on
does serve important, encyclopedic purposes:

--- Encouraging writers who use headers to use them logically.

--- Regularizing optional standard features like ==External Links==

-- Making articles look alike.

-- Allowing incoming 'bots and spiders to infer the structure of an
   article and make use of that information.

-- Laying the groundwork for future hypertext applications that we
   know nothing of except that properly ordered text will be more
   useful than random disorder.

-- Keeping out the *ML markup languages

20 years at this generic markup game and still fighting,
Tom Parmenter
Ortolan88


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [Wikitech-l] H1


subject: [Wikipedia-l] did my message get through?

body:
I posted a message about an idea for speeding up the Wikipedia
(basically, make the majority of page requests NOT involve database
accesses).

That was 1/2 an hour ago. I haven't seen it show up yet.  Are my
messages getting through?

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] last message got through, but not previous one

body:
So please don't reply to my previous message asking if my messages were
getting through. :-)

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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from_name: Rob Brewer

body:
At 08:41 05/11/02 -0500, Poor, Edmund W wrote:

>Has anyone thought of selective banning?
>
>Refuse anonymous edits from the banned IP, but allow signed-in edits.
>
>We could supply a message like, "Sorry but due to abuse from IP i.j.k.l,
>you must sign in to contribute."

I think that's what Erik Moeller had in mind with point #2 of his message
at 11:47:25 +0100 yesterday, and I think it's a good idea. If vandals want
to be persistent we should at least make them go to the trouble of
getting a fake hotmail address to sign up with ;-)

Rob


from_name: Brion VIBBER

body:
(moving to the wikitech-l list; see sign-up and archive page at
http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l )

Jonathan Walther wrote:
> I've done some work at converting the Wikipedia to Postgres, but am not
> there yet.  So, let's put that aside for now.

Great! I did get postgresql installed on my machine, but got bogged down
in details of converting the table definitions and various interface
behaviors. Someone with prior experience working with postgres would be
a big help there.

> It seems that the wiki "source" is "interpreted" into html every single
> time someone accesses a link.  That seems like a lot of overhead.
> Given that for every time a change is made to the wiki source to a page,
> several people "view" it, why not just regenerate the html only when
> changes are made, and store it?  It would take more storage space, but
> should be MUCH faster.  And if storage is an issue, I can donate some
> hard drives...

We used to cache in the phase II days on the old server. This was
removed for two reasons:
1) Wiki->HTML rendering is still pretty darn fast, particularly with our
new dedicated server; database contention seems to be our main problem
during high-load periods.
2) We had problems keeping the cache consistent with the old code.

On number 2, I would certainly welcome an improved cache subsystem
that's designed right from the ground up. The old one was hacked in as a
"crap! the system's unusably slow, let's hack in some improved code"

On number 1, note that LinkCache::addLink() does a brief query on the
cur table for every link when rendering a wikipage. These could probably
be consolidated somehow or other. (Note that this does not apply to
Recentchanges, which loads everything in a big chunk.)

> The savings on the Recent Changes page alone should work wonders.

On the English wikipedia, Recentchanges is loaded at default options
about 3000 times per day; the number of edits per day is a similar
figure, and every edit means the page has to change to reflect it.
Caching the rendered display wouldn't seem to save significantly over
rerendering it on each view.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] proposal to speed up Wikipedia


subject: [Wikipedia-l] performance tweak

body:
Erik Zachte wrote:
> This is a repost in plain readable ascii.
>
> I wonder how much web bandwidth and server processing power is consumed
> by diligent wikipedians browing the list of 'recent changes', checking
> an article and returning to the list by pressing the back button, thus
> generating a new request to the database, over and over again.

They should use a browser that's not so brain-dead that it can't tell
that the forward and back buttons are for zipping through pages that are
already open and should not be loaded all over again.

> My suggestion: a very simple change would reduce this load on the server
> considerably: add target="_blank" to each link on the 'recent changes'
> page only. Now articles will be shown in a new window. The 'recent
> changes' list will only be refreshed when the user explicitly asks for
> it (via refresh button or menu click). This may alleviate slow response
> times somewhat.

Please, no. I think I know better than my browser when I want to open a
page in a new window.

> Not posted on the technical mailing list, since functionality will
> obviously change (for the better in my view, I would like a subsecond
> redisplay of the changes list).

Have you considered a browser that provides tabbed browsing?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
It has been suggested on wikitech-l that the article count on the main page
should only contain articles that have been edited at least once after their
creation. The implicit assumption is that the primary use of the count is as
a measure of our collaborative, human success. By eliminating unedited
articles, we would

- exclude most articles created by bots
- exclude articles that have not had any kind of quality review by others.

This would not be too hard to implement. It's not a big issue like
certification (more on that later), but it would still be nice to get some feedback
before proceeding.

The quick and even easier alternative is to manually subtract articles from
the count that have been generated by the bots we are aware of.

Regards,

Erik

--
+++ GMX - Mail, Messaging & more  http://www.gmx.net +++
NEU: Mit GMX ins Internet. Rund um die Uhr f?r 1 ct/ Min. surfen!


body:
On 04-11-2002, Poor, Edmund W wrote thusly :
> Yes, of course we would like one unified project.
Ed,
Thank you for your reply.
> Since I cannot read or write Polish at all, and my French and Spanish are extremely limited, I have to rely on bilingual people who choose to write to this list.
You are not likely to get any impression what is going on the Polish WP,
and the same with me in case of the nl.wikipedia.org and several others.
My point is that there are people in all Wikipedias (the English as well)
that
1) cannot get a view of what is going on in the _whole_ project
2) cannot communicate their views, grievances or proposals
3) cannot share content, data, ideas etc.
4) cannot build _one_ community
it is caused, IMO, by language barriers and lack of the proper platform (meeting place)
Of course Wikipedia Embassies was really a good idea. But its
implementation lacks something.
> If there is another list I should subscribe to, please let me know -- or a Wikipedia page.
> I understand that some non-English Wikipedia contributors feel left out by the "main" English Wikipedia.
This is just one of the problems and not the most important one.

"Wikipedia News" translated into all our major languagues and transmitted
to all major Wikipedias. Ambassadors acting as translators and editors
also giving resume of any discussions that result from any of topics.

Best regards,
Kpjas.


from_name: daniwo59 at aol.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Just blocked someone

body:
Hi

I never wanted to use my block function, but I did. 66.57.25.123 just
vandalized an article and posted a threat. Was that the correct response, or
should that user be unblocked.

Danny
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] performance tweak

body:
Karen AKA Kajikit wrote:
> Brion VIBBER wrote:
>>They should use a browser that's not so brain-dead that it can't tell
>>that the forward and back buttons are for zipping through pages that are
>>already open and should not be loaded all over again.
>
> not true.

Yes, true. Alas, not everyone lives up to my high standards. ;)

> The recent changes page used to remain the same when you went back to it
> unless you manually told it to reload, but now if you use the back
> button to go back to a list page it reloads it from the server even if
> you don't particularly want it to. If I want to save time I have to
> right-click and say 'open in new window' all the time and it wastes my
> time and energy. I would be VERY much in favour of that change being
> made.
>
> And don't tell me that my browser is braindead. It didn't used to do
> this. The wikipedia was changed, not netscape.

Netscape 4.x being braindead is not mutually exclusive with the wiki's
output changing. In fact, it's the conjunction of both that causes the
problem.

Currently the wiki sends out a number of cache-suppressing headers
which, I believe, were introduced to keep Internet Explorer from showing
you the previous version of a page after you save an edit:

   Expires: 0
   Cache-Control: no-cache
   Pragma: no-cache

Netscape 4.x and Internet Explorer (at least the 5.5 I have) are so
overzealous about these that they force a reload even when using the
forward and back buttons. Mozilla (and presumably Netscape 6 and 7) are
saner about this, and consider the page still open -- forward and back
aren't page load events, they're just showing you things you've already
opened again.

I'm not the one that added those, so I don't know exactly what they're
meant to battle against, or under what circumstances they are necessary,
or how they might be appropriately tweaked to maintain whatever alleged
benefit without breaking the angry browsers.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Pierre Abbat

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Performance tweak

body:
On Tuesday 05 November 2002 17:35, Erik Zachte wrote:
> I wonder how much web bandwidth and server processing power is consumed
> by diligent wikipedians browing the list of 'recent changes', checking
> an article and returning to the list by pressing the back button, thus
> generating a new request to the database, over and over again. An
> expensive request as well, in terms of database processing (I presume)
> and html page size, up to 500 records might be sent.

That doesn't force a reload until 10 more pages are seen before returning to
Recent Changes.

phma


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Just blocked someone

body:
On Tuesday 05 November 2002 19:36, daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:
> Hi
>
> I never wanted to use my block function, but I did. 66.57.25.123 just
> vandalized an article and posted a threat. Was that the correct response,
> or should that user be unblocked.

That is rdu57-25-123.nc.rr.com (you can type "nslookup 66.57.25.123" or "dig
66.57.25.123" to find this out), which is probably a cable modem user in the
Raleigh-Durham area. He may have the same address for several months, or may
get a new one tomorrow, depending on how often he reboots his computer.

I normally wait until the third offense to block someone, but I'm not going
to fault you for blocking someone who wrote that.

phma


from_name: Alexander Stephen Bradbury

subject: [Wikipedia-l] RE: Article count request for comments

body:
I think finding a better way to report the human contribution to Wikipedia
is a good idea, and counting only those articles that have been edited at
least once sounds like a reasonable solution. However, if possible could
the raw number of articles that is currently shown on the Main Page be
there too? Also, if we made some change to the markup, and some automated
conversion needed to be done wouldn't this sort of muck up the article
count? Anyway, as long as you keep the plain article total as well I'm
happy. I'm on the daily digest, so haven't read any other replies, but one
solution to the automated conversion thing could be to not count minor
edits, so automated conversions could be labeled minor edits.

ASB

--
<signature>
There are only 10 types of people in this world;
Those that know binary...and those that don't
</signature>


subject: [Wikipedia-l] question about Wiki database structure

body:
Hi. Question about Wiki version control.  Am I correct in believing that
every revision of an article is stored in the database, in full?

Also, looking through the php source, I'm seeing what look like a lot of
MySQLisms that are hard to clean up, but if fixed could mean tremendous
speedups with Postgres.  Thats entirely apart from the benefit of
running the VACUUM program every night so the database self-optimizes
itself for the data access patterns that it sees.

I would like to complement the coders on a really clean codebase.  The
code is a pleasure to read and tweak.  Not nice to do major changes on,
but I doubt if that was ever intended for the code anyway.  Postgres
support isn't a major change, btw.

There is one minor point; it's a very nice thing to have the sql stuff
abstracted out into it's own .sql file.  I refer to things like
buildTables.php, and the like.  Code and SQL don't mix too well; makes
it harder to hunt down bugs or make modifications in either one.  For
instance, getting rid of MySQLisms...

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
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Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] question about html templates

body:
Where are the templates stored that are used in generating the HTML
pages?  For instance, the templates for the header and footer for each
article; the format of the recent changes page; that sort of thing.  Is
it hard coded into the source?

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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from_name: tarquin

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [Wikitech-l] H1

body:
But H1 is the title of the article itself at the top of the page -- thus
we shouldn't be using  it within the article text; the next heading is H2.

Toby Bartels wrote:

>[Note:  I've crossposted to the main list so that people can see
>        that there's a proposal to recognise "=".]
>
>
>
>
>
>


from_name: Erik Zachte

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Performance tweak

body:
I wonder how much web bandwidth and server processing power is consumed
by diligent wikipedians browing the list of 'recent changes', checking
an article and returning to the list by pressing the back button, thus
generating a new request to the database, over and over again. An
expensive request as well, in terms of database processing (I presume)
and html page size, up to 500 records might be sent.

My suggestion: a very simple change would reduce this load on the server
considerably: add target="_blank" to each link on the 'recent changes'
page only. Now articles will be shown in a new window. The 'recent
changes' list will only be refreshed when the user explicitly asks for
it (via refresh button or menu click). This may alleviate slow response
times somewhat.

Not posted on the technical mailing list, since functionality will
obviously change (for the better in my view, I would like a subsecond
redisplay of the changes list).

Erik Zachte

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body:
(cc'ing to wikitech-l)

Jonathan Walther wrote:
> Where are the templates stored that are used in generating the HTML
> pages?  For instance, the templates for the header and footer for each
> article; the format of the recent changes page; that sort of thing.  Is
> it hard coded into the source?

Yes. It's kind of ugly that way. ;)

Language-specific text is stored away in arrays in the Language**.php
files, but that contains relatively little markup.

See Skin.php and its fellows for most of the layout; also OutputPage.php
for some bits.

(And feel free to use the wikitech-l list for technical discussion of
the code; wikipedia-l is fairly high traffic as it is.)

Jonathan Walther wrote:
 > Hi. Question about Wiki version control.  Am I correct in believing
 > that every revision of an article is stored in the database, in full?

Yes. Old revisions sit in the 'old' table, every blessed one. It's a big
table. (In theory this could be made more efficient in various ways;
compression, diffs, etc.)

 > Also, looking through the php source, I'm seeing what look like a lot
 > of MySQLisms that are hard to clean up, but if fixed could mean
 > tremendous speedups with Postgres.  Thats entirely apart from the
 > benefit of running the VACUUM program every night so the database
 > self-optimizes itself for the data access patterns that it sees.

Mmmm, please do!

 > I would like to complement the coders on a really clean codebase.  The
 > code is a pleasure to read and tweak.

Send all compliments on the current codebase to Lee Daniel Crocker. He
da man!

 >  Not nice to do major changes on, but I doubt if that was ever
 > intended for the code anyway.  Postgres support isn't a major change,
 > btw.

 > There is one minor point; it's a very nice thing to have the sql stuff
 > abstracted out into it's own .sql file.  I refer to things like
 > buildTables.php, and the like.  Code and SQL don't mix too well; makes
 > it harder to hunt down bugs or make modifications in either one.  For
 > instance, getting rid of MySQLisms...

Yes, it might not be a bad idea to break out the queries that way, so as
much as possible you can just drop in an alternate file or two and run
with a different database backend.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] question about html templates


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Just blocked someone

body:
On Tue, 2002-11-05 at 19:36, daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:
> Hi
>
> I never wanted to use my block function, but I did. 66.57.25.123 just
> vandalized an article and posted a threat. Was that the correct response, or
> should that user be unblocked.
>
I'm confused. If you never wanted to use your block function, then why
did you? Admit that you wanted to use it.

And why, if you have questions about whether you did the right thing,
did you do it before checking with others?

Don't be wishy-washy.

--tc


subject: [Wikipedia-l] performance tweak

body:
This is a repost in plain readable ascii.

I wonder how much web bandwidth and server processing power is consumed
by diligent wikipedians browing the list of 'recent changes', checking
an article and returning to the list by pressing the back button, thus
generating a new request to the database, over and over again. An
expensive request as well, in terms of database processing (I presume)
and html page size, up to 500 records might be sent.

My suggestion: a very simple change would reduce this load on the server
considerably: add target="_blank" to each link on the 'recent changes'
page only. Now articles will be shown in a new window. The 'recent
changes' list will only be refreshed when the user explicitly asks for
it (via refresh button or menu click). This may alleviate slow response
times somewhat.

Not posted on the technical mailing list, since functionality will
obviously change (for the better in my view, I would like a subsecond
redisplay of the changes list).

Erik Zachte


subject: [Wikipedia-l] RE: performance tweak

body:
Erik Zachte wrote:
>>Have you considered a browser that provides tabbed browsing?
>
> Follow up suggestion: make Wikipedia block all MS Explorer users. It
> will probably reduce traffic by 90%.

Hmm, that could solve our lag problems _and_ block out most vandalism.
All in favor, raise hands. ;)

> Get real. This is the world we live
> in: web designers will have to adjust to their user base not vice versa.

How silly of me to suggest to someone who is clearly looking for a
better browsing experience a way to achieve it.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Stephen Gilbert

body:
--- "Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz" <kpj at gower.pl> wrote:
> I am in favour of other kind of "NewsPedia" - the
> news about all
> Wikipedias, with language versions with _all_ major
> languages of
> Wikipedias.
> Something along the lines of the deceased
> Wikipedia:Wikipedia NEWS.
> I think that it is essential to foster cooperation
> and unification
> between Wikipedias as well as to open, at last, a
> proper avenue for
> information exchange between Wikipedias.
> We want to have one unified project, don't we ?

Yes, I'd like to get this going, too. So let's do it!
Start a proposal page on meta.wikipedia.org, and I'll
be along shortly. ;-)

Stephen G.

__________________________________________________
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Feature Proposal: Certification

body:
Ed Poor wrote:

>I didn't say I wanted MY town library to keep out smelly people (read that as
>"vagrants") or that I only go to classy "proper attire required" restaurants.

I realise that you were only running with somebody else's analogy,
but I could only respond to what was there.
Don't worry, I don't attribute any opinions to you personally.

>Rev. Moon tells the story of how he was once confronted by a maitre d' who
>told him he had to wear a tie. He said "thank you" and left. He figured that
>if they had a rule like that they probably had a policy of not serving black
>people either.

Probably jumping to conclusions, but in the right direction.

>I don't want the Wikipedia to exclude people with views I despise. I just
>don't want them to rip pages out of the books or put salt in the sugar
>dispenser.

That sounds like vandalism; I'm on record as in favour of banning vandals.
But the discussion that sparked the analogy was all of this stuff about
expert approved subsets/forks/overlays/etc.

-- Toby


subject: [Wikipedia-l] performance tweak

body:
Brion Vibber wrote in part:

>Netscape 4.x and Internet Explorer (at least the 5.5 I have) are so
>overzealous about these that they force a reload even when using the
>forward and back buttons. Mozilla (and presumably Netscape 6 and 7) are
>saner about this, and consider the page still open -- forward and back
>aren't page load events, they're just showing you things you've already
>opened again.

Netscape 6 has the same behavior as Netscape 4 and IE 5 (all for Unix).
This has annoyed me in other situations as well.

-- Toby


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Just blocked someone

body:
The Cunctator wrote:

>Danny wrote:

>>I never wanted to use my block function, but I did. 66.57.25.123 just
>>vandalized an article and posted a threat. Was that the correct response, or
>>should that user be unblocked.

>I'm confused. If you never wanted to use your block function, then why
>did you? Admit that you wanted to use it.

>And why, if you have questions about whether you did the right thing,
>did you do it before checking with others?

>Don't be wishy-washy.

And why, Cunctator, if you're such an asshole,
do you continue to infect the world with your existence?

-- Toby


subject: [Wikipedia-l] H1

body:
Ortolan88 wrote:

>Brion Vibber wrote:

>>Toby Bartels wrote:

>>>Actually, our headers *do* already impose a heirarchical structure.
>>>Turn on numbered headers in your user preferences to see it.
>>>This is a very desirable option IMO.  No arguing is permitted
>>>unless it comes from people with that preference set ^_^.

>>Our headers impose no such thing. A misconceived "number headers"
>>feature, which users were so annoyed with that it was banished to
>>off-by-default and forgotten about by developers long long ago, attempts
>>futilely to impose such a thing.

The numbered headers option (which obviously should be off by *default*)
is great, I use it all the time.  If the developers have forgotten about it,
then that's only because they don't read my posts to the mailing list
or SourceForge.

>The auto-number preference is still there, but doesn't work, it
>seems. As an old tech writer I can easily imagine situations where it
>might be useful, or at least I can imagine readers who would prefer
>it.  But I don't think it's all that important.

Why do you say that it doesn't work?
It has one bug (IMO), in that it doesn't turn itself on
unless there are headers of different sizes in the same article.
Otherwise it works for me.

-- Toby


subject: [Wikitech-l] H1


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Rebol ?

body:
> What's nice about Wikipedia is that noone *can* rip
> pages out of the books.
> They can put salt in the sugar dispenser.

Since we are at it, is that Rebol stuff about bots
generation true ??

http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikifr-l/2002-November/000084.html

Brion ???

__________________________________________________
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Y! Web Hosting - Let the expert host your web site
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from_name: Gareth Owen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Just blocked someone

body:
The Cunctator <cunctator at kband.com> writes:

> I'm confused. If you never wanted to use your block function, then why
> did you? Admit that you wanted to use it.
>
> And why, if you have questions about whether you did the right thing,
> did you do it before checking with others?

Are we still looking for things on which you're the sole voice of dissent?
--
Gareth Owen
"Wikipedia does rock.  By the count on the "brilliant prose" page, there
 are 14 not-bad articles so far" -- Larry Sanger (12 Jan 2001)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] RE: performance tweak

body:
>They should use a browser that's not so brain-dead that it can't tell
>that the forward and back buttons are for zipping through pages that
are
>already open and should not be loaded all over again.

>> My suggestion: a very simple change would reduce this load on the
>> server
>> considerably: add target="_blank" to each link on the 'recent
changes'
>> page only. Now articles will be shown in a new window. The 'recent
>> changes' list will only be refreshed when the user explicitly asks
for
>> it (via refresh button or menu click). This may alleviate slow
response
>> times somewhat.

>Have you considered a browser that provides tabbed browsing?

Follow up suggestion: make Wikipedia block all MS Explorer users. It
will probably reduce traffic by 90%. Get real. This is the world we live
in: web designers will have to adjust to their user base not vice versa.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Just blocked someone

body:
On 11/6/02 4:43 AM, "Gareth Owen" <wiki at gwowen.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:

> The Cunctator <cunctator at kband.com> writes:
>
>> I'm confused. If you never wanted to use your block function, then why
>> did you? Admit that you wanted to use it.
>>
>> And why, if you have questions about whether you did the right thing,
>> did you do it before checking with others?
>
> Are we still looking for things on which you're the sole voice of dissent?

Where's the dissent?


body:
On 11/6/02 11:04 AM, "Toby Bartels" <toby+wikipedia at math.ucr.edu> wrote:

> Ed Poor wrote:
 jumping to conclusions, but in the right direction.
>
>> I don't want the Wikipedia to exclude people with views I despise. I just
>> don't want them to rip pages out of the books or put salt in the sugar
>> dispenser.
>
> That sounds like vandalism; I'm on record as in favour of banning vandals.
> But the discussion that sparked the analogy was all of this stuff about
> expert approved subsets/forks/overlays/etc.
>
What's nice about Wikipedia is that noone *can* rip pages out of the books.
They can put salt in the sugar dispenser.