from_name: Rowan Collins

subject:
[Wikitech-l] are soft newlines evil? (was: rationale behind the
	use of hard newlines)

references:
<87d5k32vz2.fsf@mat.ucm.es> <439C9AB1.1050703@pobox.com>
	<dnim9n$5nj$1@sea.gmane.org> <87k6e9j9xv.fsf_-_@mat.ucm.es>

body:
On 13/12/05, Uwe Brauer <oub at mat.ucm.es> wrote:
> In order to describe what I have in mind, let me use the following
> notation
>
> [] denotes an empty line
> :H: denotes a hard newline
> :S: denotes a soft newline

Can you just clarify what you mean by "soft newline" and "hard
newline" here? I can think of three types of wrapping that are
relevant to our discussion:
1) ASCII (or Unicode, ISO-8859-x or whatever) newline characters
(either CR, LF, or both, depending on the editting environment)
2) [X]HTML newline tags -
, and in a sense also

3) on-screen wrapping which isn't stored in the file in any way, as
available in most modern text editors and browser textarea widgets
[which is what I'd call "soft wrapping", which is why I got a little
confused]

Of these, MediaWiki doesn't need to (indeed, *can't*) know about type
(3), because it is purely an aspect of the display in the editor -
unless the editor actually adds characters [type (1)], the file will
not be changed by turning such wrapping on and off. HTML renderers
also ignore type (1), so that you can format your sourcecode nicely
without altering the result. The question is whether (or rather, when)
MediaWiki should convert type (1) newlines into type (2) tags so that
they actually show up in the browser.

>     - could I add soft newlines in  the other paragraphs such that
>       they are displayed nicely in my editor, or is this risky
>       since I might destroy the formating of the
>       paragraphs. Since my possibility 3. Is buggy I would be
>       interested in an answer to the problem

If by "soft newlines" you mean what I've called type (1) - i.e. the
ASCII newline characters produced by pressing "return" - then yes,
current behaviour is for MediaWiki to treat these as though they
didn't exist, unless there are two of them in a row. Of course, what
looks nice in your editor may look horrible in someone else's, so
playing with the display wrapping in your editor (type (3)) might be
marginally more sociable, but the actual page output should be the
same either way.

Manually using type (2) - that is, putting "
" in the middle of
paragraphs, or even "
foo
" to separate paragraphs - is generally
frowned upon unless absolutely necessary because it makes the source
ugly and potentially rather hard to follow [for non-HTML geeks]. "
" is occasionally useful, though, because there's no other way of
doing it, and in some places you really only want a new line, not a
new paragraph.

Does this make any kind of sense and answer your question?
--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Chris Jenkinson

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: SPOV threatens NPOV

body:
sockmonk at gmail.com wrote:
> I agree of course that science and religion are not "at each other's
> throats". However, there is one place where I think the SPOV is seen most
> clearly as a POV. This is when any account of a miracle, or other
> supernatural event, is presumed to be false, impossible, or to necessarily
> have a purely scientific explanation. The 'laws of science' are undoubtedly
> useful, and have produced lots of great things. Of course, people made some
> progress even when the leading 'scientists' of the day thought everything
> was made of just four elements. But to presume that everything supernatural
> is bunk, is imposing a scientific point of view in a way that many people
> think goes too far.

An example of a 'supernatural phenomenon' which is not 'bunk' would be
welcome. :)

Chris


from_name: Sam Korn

subject: [WikiEN-l] NPOV trainwreck

body:
On 12/13/05, Sam Spade <samspade.thomasjefferson at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Needless to say I am offended and saddened that criticism of the
> committe is being dismissed as the ravings of extremists. That is not
> a good sign. It is no compliment when those on both sides of an issue
> sternly criticise the "neutral" referee. When that happens in sports,
> it is the clearest of signals that the umpire is in the wrong.

But sometimes it is a clear signal that the umpire is in the right.

--
Sam


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: SPOV threatens NPOV

body:
On 12/13/05, Chris Jenkinson <chris at starglade.org> wrote:
> An example of a 'supernatural phenomenon' which is not 'bunk' would be
> welcome. :)

The Resurrection of Christ.  Certainly it is inexplicable (a term I
prefer to "supernatural"), but that doesn't make it nonsense.

--
Sam


from_name: Jon

subject: [WikiEN-l] Verifiability

body:
  Is there any reason why we don?t introduce immediately a rule that says all new information added to an article must be sourced or referenced or the edit will automatically be reverted? And any new articles must be sourced or referenced within two hours, say, of their creation, or will be speedily deleted?

  Unsourced information has no place on the encyclopaedia, and the person introducing the information is best placed to know where he got it from. OK, this idea is not a panacea - it doesn?t help reference up information already in the encyclopaedia, but it?d stop making the problem worse. Nor would it address the issue of editors making up false sources - but any regular editor doing that will soon be rumbled, and this issue is already around anyway.

  Editors would soon get used to the new requirement - and it?d have the benefit of making all those RC and New Pages patrollers who currently do not improve the encyclopaedia one jot (they merely prevent it from degrading) actually help improve the project by enforcing proper standards.

  Ideally [[Wikipedia:Verifiability]] and [[Wikipedia:Cite sources]] would undergo a quick re-write to explain better how sources can be given, but that can easily be done.
  This idea would start to improve our quality immediately, and make a Siegenthaler repeat far less likely. Why not go for it?

  Jon (jguk)

---------------------------------
To help you stay safe and secure online, we've developed the all new Yahoo! Security Centre.


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Stephen Bain

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Stupid Mediawiki Tricks: logical templates

references:
<439A1430.5050100@thingy.apana.org.au> <dnk5ht$8e6$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<dnkdt4$8af$1@sea.gmane.org> <200512122140.11728@bloodgate.com>
	<dnl1fq$f60$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
On 12/13/05, Adrian Buehlmann <adrian at cadifra.com> wrote:
>
> qif is not a curly mess.
>
> No. All that hot stuff is packaged securely inside if/qif. And there are
> enough gurus that understand this and can maintain it. It's already very
> stable. And using if/qif (especially qif) does not require a MSc in brainfuck.
> And it will be implemented in the template syntax anyway, sooner or later.

It might be a good idea to protect all of those templates to prevent
horrible consequences in the event of vandalism. If the syntax is
really stable, then there shouldn't be any problems with that.

--
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com


from_name: Adrian Buehlmann

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Bug with transcluded template list
	when<includeonly>used?

body:
"Adrian Buehlmann" <adrian at cadifra.com>
wrote in message news:dnn0k6$dvb$1 at sea.gmane.org
>[snip]
> Editing [[en:template:book reference]] at the moment
>(2005-12-13 17:30 UTC) still shows usage of qif, though I could swear
                                             ^^^
                              typo: I meant "if"

--
Adrian
[[en:User:Adrian Buehlmann]]


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Christmas presents, or: MediaWiki,
	reloaded

body:
On 13/12/05, Magnus Manske <magnus.manske at web.de> wrote:
> You know what? Done! :-)

Wow, wow, and more wow. I feel duly humbled for doing nothing but
pointing out flaws, only to see them fixed by someone else (you).

Now, I can still think of more ways the presentation could be fiddled
with, but I think I really will leave those until I have time to do it
myself! So, yeah, good work and thank you on behalf of all the
hundreds of people who'll be using this in the future. :)

[It occurred to me that it's not inconceivable that this could one day
provide enough features to act as a bug/request tracker; add the
long-awaited, long-debated single login, and we could do away with
bugzilla too! I'll stop dreaming now ;)]
--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: SPOV threatens NPOV

body:
Sam Korn wrote:
> On 12/13/05, Chris Jenkinson <chris at starglade.org> wrote:
>
>>An example of a 'supernatural phenomenon' which is not 'bunk' would be
>>welcome. :)
>
>
> The Resurrection of Christ.  Certainly it is inexplicable (a term I
> prefer to "supernatural"), but that doesn't make it nonsense.

Do you have any verification that the 'Resurrection' of Christ actually
occurred, other than Christian literature?

Chris


from_name: Sam Spade

subject: [WikiEN-l] NPOV trainwreck

body:
I think the fact that our most extreme POV pushers on both the right
and the left are united on how worthless the arbitration committee is
says something good about us.

Fred

Needless to say I am offended and saddened that criticism of the
committe is being dismissed as the ravings of extremists. That is not
a good sign. It is no compliment when those on both sides of an issue
sternly criticise the "neutral" referee. When that happens in sports,
it is the clearest of signals that the umpire is in the wrong.

Sam Spade


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: SPOV threatens NPOV

body:
On 12/13/05, Chris Jenkinson <chris at starglade.org> wrote:
> Do you have any verification that the 'Resurrection' of Christ actually
> occurred, other than Christian literature?

Christian literature.  That makes it not bunk.

We should present all views, not only the ones that seem most rational
to us.  To call the Resurrection "bunk" is completely POV and
unacceptable.  It doesn't conform to our knowledge of science, but
that should not say that Wikipedia should present an opinion on
whether or not it happened.

SPOV should be in NPOV, but it isn't NPOV in itself.

--
Sam


from_name: Hyunsung

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Obstetrician needed for 7 new Wikipedias

body:
Mark Williamson <node.ue at ...> writes:

>
> I would like to second this request.
>
> Of these, Banyumasan and Samogitian have been waiting a particularly long time.
>
> Mark
>

I also fully support this request. Most of these approved wikipedias have
steadily growing test-wikis, and some are starting to look like successful
wikipedias already. I hope they all can be created in the near future.

Hyunsung


subject: [WikiEN-l] SPOV threatens NPOV

body:
There isn't much to discuss here. Articles should cite verifiable
POV's in a neutral manner. Ergo we cite scientific journal X, and
religious periodical Y. Everybody reads and makes up their own minds.

Only the most irredeemable fanatic feels that science possesses a
monopoly on the truth, or that all things labeled as "pseudoscience"
by random eggheads (or worse yet POV pushing wikipedia editors) are in
fact unscientific or lacking in merit.

In short, cite sources in a neutral manner. Do NOT attempt to make the
wikipedia a primary source, or bully pulpit from which to spout
materialist pseudoscience.

Sam Spade


list: foundation-l

from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Foundation-l] Q4 Fund Drive to start on Friday

body:
Hello everyone -

The fourth quarter fund drive for the Wikimedia Foundation will start on 00:00 UTC Friday 16
December and last until 00:00 UTC Friday 6 January. There is no specific goal for this drive but
we would like to at least cover all next quarter's spending along with the rest of this quarter.
That will require well over $500,000. A draft budget is on meta and will be open for public
comment soon (announcement will be on foundation-l and meta?s Goings On page).

Wikimedia needs your help to make sure this drive is a success. Some other charities spend up to
80% of donations on fundraising costs. With your continued help our only fundraising costs are
PayPal and bank fees. This means that over 95% of donations made to us go toward running the
foundation and its projects.

Here is what needs to be done:
1) make sure your language's translation of the fund drive documents are completed. See
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fund_drives/2005/Q4_planning/Translations
2) get somebody who can edit the foundation wiki to place a copy of your translation there
3) Put your translated fund drive notice on your wiki's [[MediaWiki:Sitenotice]] page soon after
the drive starts.

Everything else will be taken care of by myself and the Wikimedia team.

Sincerely,

Daniel Mayer,
Wikimedia CFO

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


subject: [WikiEN-l] Q4 Fund Drive to start on Friday


list: wikimedia-l


list: wikipedia-l

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Q4 Fund Drive to start on Friday


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: SPOV threatens NPOV

body:
Sam Korn wrote:
> On 12/13/05, Chris Jenkinson <chris at starglade.org> wrote:
>
>>Do you have any verification that the 'Resurrection' of Christ actually
>>occurred, other than Christian literature?
>
>
> Christian literature.  That makes it not bunk.
>
> We should present all views, not only the ones that seem most rational
> to us.  To call the Resurrection "bunk" is completely POV and
> unacceptable.  It doesn't conform to our knowledge of science, but
> that should not say that Wikipedia should present an opinion on
> whether or not it happened.
>
> SPOV should be in NPOV, but it isn't NPOV in itself.

Well, obviously Christian literature would say that Christ was
resurrected. I accepted that, and I asked for other verification.

Consider this scenario:

The world was considered flat in ancient times. That conformed to
contemporary rational thinking (basically, the world is flat since we
can't see it curve). It was also wrong. Is Wikipedia presenting a point
of view by stating this theory is wrong?

Chris


subject: [WikiEN-l] Simple interface tweak?

body:
On 13/12/05, Sherool <jamydlan at online.no> wrote:
> Main reason I believe is that page view logging is disabled for
> performance reasons.

I think you're confusing "viewing" with "watching" - you are
absolutely right that monitoring page *views* would be very hard, very
expensive, and of little value. But by "watching" what is meant is the
number of people on whose "watchlist" the page is; this would be
fairly easy to determine from the database (we already store
everyone's watchlists, obviously) and changes fairly rarely, so that
maybe caches could be invalidated when pages were watched/unwatched,
or maybe the count becoming "stale" wouldn't be such a problem
[especially if it was only ever a ball-park figure].

Meanwhile, I think a version of this may actually *already be
implemented* in the software, but switched off on Wikimedia sites,
probably for performance reasons. See
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=727 and
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3128

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: SPOV threatens NPOV

body:
On 12/13/05, Chris Jenkinson <chris at starglade.org> wrote:
> Well, obviously Christian literature would say that Christ was
> resurrected. I accepted that, and I asked for other verification.

But Christian literature and Christian beliefs are quite enough!  Why
should anything else be needed?  It is clearly POV to say that
Christians' beliefs are "bunk", however little they conform to
scientific rules.

> Consider this scenario:
>
> The world was considered flat in ancient times. That conformed to
> contemporary rational thinking (basically, the world is flat since we
> can't see it curve). It was also wrong. Is Wikipedia presenting a point
> of view by stating this theory is wrong?

Yes.  Wikipedia should never make statements of fact unless they are
undisputed.  All others should be cited.

--
Sam


from_name: Sherool

subject: [WikiEN-l] Simple interface tweak?

body:
On Tue, 13 Dec 2005 16:02:29 +0100, John Lee <johnleemk at gawab.com> wrote:

> Andrea Forte wrote:
>
>> Has it ever been suggested before that a simple indicator of "how many
>> people are watching this article" could be a useful tool for:
>>
>> users who want to figure out what to trust
>> wikipedians who want to know where to spend their efforts
>> discouraging vandalism
>>
>> Has this been tried? Suggested? Debated?
>>
>> Just curious,
>>
>> Andrea
>>
> It's not exactly new, but I've never figured out why it hasn't been
> explored further.

Main reason I believe is that page view logging is disabled for
performance reasons. The only way to get such a feature to work would be
to generate every page on the fly from the database on every view
(otherwise the count would be out of date). As it is pages are cached by
any number of Squid servers so the main database server have absolutely no
idea how many people are watching any given page at any given time. If the
caching was turned off the server(s) would probably outright die from
overwork pretty much right away, it can barely cope as it is at peak times.

Aside from that I don't think the feature would be overly usefull. The
best you can do is give a count of how many people have loaded the page
within the last X minutes, there is no way to actualy tell if anyone is
*actualy* viewing the page. I think a more meaningfull number would be the
number of active (insert a convenient definition of active here) users
have the page on theyr watchlist or something like that, but again you
can't stick that on the page itself with the caching eneabled, otherwise
it would only update every time someone edited the page (or did an
action=purge on it). Maybe it could be put in an asosiated special page,
kinda like Special:Whatlinkshere or some such though, they are not cached.

--
[[User:Sherool]]


from_name: Oskar Sigvardsson

subject: [WikiEN-l] More Seigenthaler fallout

body:
On 12/13/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
<snip>
> The only sensible counter-argument I know of in this area is a concern
> for future historians or contemporary researchers who would like to
> study the phenomenon of vandalism.  For this, it seems more than enough
> to make such revisions available in some limited-access way.  There's
> just no reason to keep this junk cluttering up the publicly-viewable
> article history.
>
> --Jimbo

The by far greatest argument I see against deleting such things from
page history is that by doing that you are infact deleting evidence of
bad user conduct. We need to see all that a user have done to be able
to judge them fairly, not only in RfCs and RfArs but also in such
things as Requests For Adminship and the like.

What if a user has been notorious in vandalising an article for a
short time, but only very, very few users have been aware of it (say,
a low profile page), and one month later an RfA comes up and some one
says "No way, this guy vandalised article X severl times a month ago".
The other users need to see proof of that from the history, and be
able to judge the users themselves!! Are we supposed to take these
other guys words for it that he is a vandal? No, we need to see the
evidence.

We also need to be able to judge the rollbacking admins actions, how
will we know if a rollback was warrented if the history is incomplete.

Then there are ofcourse arbcom hearings and RfCs, that's obvious too.

Delete only when absolutly necessary, keep EVERYTHING else in the
history. A complete history of everything that's happend is
fundamental to make wikipedia work.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: SPOV threatens NPOV

body:
On 12/13/05, Snowspinner <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> There's got to be a corollary to Godwin's Law that covers this.

What, against all comparisons with controversial figures?  We could
have Big Foot, or UFOs, or many, many other things.

;=)

--
Sam


subject: [Foundation-l] Q4 Fund Drive to start Friday


subject: [WikiEN-l] Q4 Fund Drive to start Friday


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Q4 Fund Drive to start Friday


subject: [WikiEN-l] Mirrors and accountability

body:
I was thinking about something during the whole Seigenthaler thing,
about the mirrors of wikipedia (I apologise if this has already been
discussed, if it has, I haven't seen it). One of his big complaints
was that even though wikipedia removed his information instantly it
stayed on several of our mirrors such as answers.com and others.
Legally speaking, can wikipedia be held accountable for that? My gut
feeling is that we can't (mostly because we shouldn't be) because
thats the other servers' problem. That is, if they hold old, now
nonexisting on wikipedia libellous claims, can we be sued for that? It
seems like a case of "Hey, we removed it long ago, if you have a
problem with other servers, take it up with them".

Can anyone clarify the legal aspects of this for a poor, legally
illitarate wikipedian?


from_name: charles matthews

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: SPOV threatens NPOV

body:
> There's got to be a corollary to Godwin's Law that covers this.
>
> -Phil

Strange, is it not, to have SPOV high on one's list of worries.  Of course
you could take it as read that NPOV copes swimmingly with troubles coming
from politics, religion, economic self-interest, ethnicity, cultural
blinkers and bad history.  But somehow grinds to a halt when asked to cope
with the verifiable/falsifiable nexus and those insidious claims on
scientific method.  When all we have to do is report proportionately on
consensus and minority views, not root out the bad science (which of course
is always with us).

Charles


subject: [WikiEN-l] Allow searching of wikitext as well as articles

body:
> If a scan of the page doesn't do the trick, then I have to
copy the wikitext into a text editor and search the exposed markup there.
It'd be great to be able to do this using the search tool. How feasible is
this?

My browser has text search, so I can use it with the edit box open.

Charles


subject: [WikiEN-l] Quoting back list footers

body:
On Mon, 12 Dec 2005 00:16:01 +0100, Steve Bennett <wiki at stevage.com> wrote:

>
>
>> Could *somebody* program the mailing list software used by this list
>> to reject messages that quote back the list footers, as done *four*
>> times in a row above?  That might put a stop to the
>
> <snip inflammatory top-posting vs bottom posting comments>
>
> Wouldn't a better suggestion be, if someone is actually going to
> reprogram the list server, to simply trim off all quoted footers?
> Computers were designed to do our monotonous work for us, after all.

Why not just "escape" it with a sig marker
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature_block#E-mail_and_Usenet>? I mean
add "hyphen hyphen space newline". Any standards compliant mail sofrware
will automaticaly strip anything following such a sig marker when
replying. Some clueless mail software (like Outlook) would still cause
problems, but still...

--
[[User:Sherool]]


subject: [WikiEN-l] More Seigenthaler fallout

body:
On 12/13/05, Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> A bot with sysop rights could be able to detect admin reverts fairly easily and delete both the
> vandalized versions that were reverted along with the admin's revert version (which would be
> pointless clutter at that point). The bot would use the text 'Reverted to last version by..' along
> with checking the reverting person to make sure they are an admin. The bot would only delete
> versions that are older than a week and would need to. This would clean-up page histories a great
> deal and get rid of most of the libel and slander in them. Then, as needed, a human admin can
> delete more versions since a great many reverts are not done by admins. A more sophisticated admin
> bot could compare diffs to detect reverts (using the comments 'Reverted to last version by..' and
> 'rv' only to identify diffs to check).

An issue arises when admins use the rollback feature for reversions
that aren't vandalism.  I know they're not supposed to, and I make a
point never to, but it nonetheless does happen.  Any ideas how to
prevent this?

--
Sam


from_name: FxParlant

subject: [Wikitech-l] call for calendars

body:
Hi,

I lately built a calendar extension for mediawiki 1.5+. The sql request
was easy to create, thanks to the re-architecting of the database.
Nevertheless, as nobody could yet help me transpose the captcha system
for 1.5, I still have to stay with my oldish version of mediawiki 1.3 :
I hear Rob Church gasping again:-) So, in contradiction to evolution, I
now need to adapt the easy version of the calendar for mediawiki 1.3

Here is the question:

I ask for all the pages title having a link to a page whose title has an
[[Dec/%/2005]] pattern.

The first difficulties is that if the page [[Dec/%/2005]] exists, it is
in the LINKS table, and if it is not created it is in the BROKENLINKS

The BROKENLINKS situation seems easy to deal with:
SELECT *
FROM cur, brokenlinks, categorylinks
WHERE (
bl_to LIKE 'Dec/%/2005' AND cur_id = bl_from AND cl_to='Blog' AND
cl_from=cur_id
)

The LINKS situation presents a difficulty surely overcomed by the use of
aliases: I need to ask the title of a page in cur_title and at the same
time the title of another page (the [[Dec/%/2005]]) in cur_title

Has anyone here any cognition of an sql / mysql syntax for this?
Or better, any adaptation of the captcha system for mediawiki 1.5 :-)

Thanks for any help

Fran?ois
http://www.fxparlant.net/Mediawiki_Calendar


from_name: Corum O' Fallamhain

subject: [Foundation-l] Status of Chinese Wikinews proposal

body:
What is the current status of the Chinese Wikinews proposal? I feel quite
strongly about this, and want to see one set up as soon as possible. More
than enough people have expressed interest, why has one not been set up yet?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ce_garcon


from_name: Ryan Delaney

subject: [WikiEN-l] 3RR Unenforceable

body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Jtkiefer wrote:

> It's gotten to the point where 3RR has become unenforceable. Any
> administrator who tries to enforce 3RR regulations posted on AN/3RR
> are subsequently villified, accused of bias, amd/or threatened with
> an RFC if they continue doing their job. Due to this many editors
> stay away from enforcing 3RR and I think something needs to be
> changed so that admnistrators can actually enforce this rule without
> fear.

In my experience, this is the case with just about any enforcement
policy. When you judge that someone has violated policy, they conclude
that you are "involved" and therefore should not be the one to enforce
the policy.  The implicit logic is that any administrator who
familiarized him or her self with the case and chose to act in an
administrative function because the situation called for it is now
"involved". That may be true by definition, but it doesn't imply
conflict of interest. Yet a lot of people -- including other
administrators, in my direct experience -- have been subliminally
persuaded by this faulty reasoning.

Ryan
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Simple interface tweak?

references:
<7d75d40512130631q5bd1bffaj205e84004c3524b4@mail.gmail.com>
	<439EE285.9050904@gawab.com>
	<op.s1qkr4aar18sbe@mainframe.mshome.net>
	<7d75d40512131141t71abfc2fpe80caa777af4a460@mail.gmail.com>

body:
On Tue, 13 Dec 2005 20:41:52 +0100, Andrea Forte <andrea.forte at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Sorry, I think we have a communication break down. Of course when I
> say "watching" this article, I mean how many people have it on their
> watch list, not how many people are reading it.>

Yeah I see that now, my bad. That's what you get for reading the mailing
list while half-asleep (while I rely ought to be programming the "test
case" I'm due to hand over to a potential employer by tomorow) :P

--
[[User:Sherool]]


from_name: Geoff Burling

subject: [WikiEN-l] Next experiment: switch off AFD for a month

body:
On Wed, 14 Dec 2005, David Gerard wrote:

> Justin Cormack wrote:
> > On Tue, 2005-12-13 at 13:24 +0000, Tony Sidaway wrote:
>
> >>No need to userfy.  Just add an "unreferenced" tag.  This has the
> >>advantage of permitting casual visitors to find and improve the
> >>article.
>
> > Thats much better.
> > When do we start?
>
>
> Whenever you hit "Random page" and get an article with no references and
> no external links that isn't a stub. That's how I do it! Get in the
> habit until people get the idea about these things.
>
> Heck, it strikes me as eminently bot-assistable - no external links, no
> word "References" or "Sources", no stub message, flag it for the
> operator to press the button on.
>
There's a couple of glitches with that approach.

One is that you'll end up mislabelling a lot of my articles: my choice
of terms has been "Bibliography" (which I used at first) & "Notes".

Another is that you'll miss one sneaky misuse of the concept of "citing
sources": for some articles, an editor will mention several authors
& describe their POVs in the article -- only to omit any information
that would help to identify their writings in the section marked
"References" "Notes" or "Some Books I found on Amazon that Might Have
Some Relevence to This Article". The way the letter of this requirement
is followed (but the spirit is kicked in the groin to keep out of the
way) makes this section less useful had no sources been provided.

Geoff


from_name: John Lee

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Next experiment: switch off AFD for a month. (was
	Guardian in defense of Wikipedia)

body:
Justin Cormack wrote:

>On Tue, 2005-12-13 at 13:24 +0000, Tony Sidaway wrote:
>
>
>
>>No need to userfy.  Just add an "unreferenced" tag.  This has the
>>advantage of permitting casual visitors to find and improve the
>>article.
>>
>>
>
>Thats much better.
>
>When do we start?
>
>Justinc
>
>
I believe the {{unreferenced}} template already exists. I've seen it
quite a few times, but not often enough, IMO. I'm a fanatic on citing
sources, but some of the old ones I started that I don't really have
much interest in (like [[chicken nugget]] and [[double-decker bus]])
don't have references yet (AFAIK).

John Lee
([[User:Johnleemk]])


from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: SPOV threatens NPOV

body:
On 12/13/05, Chris Jenkinson <chris at starglade.org> wrote:
> The world was considered flat in ancient times.

Evidence?

--
geni


from_name: Jtkiefer

subject: [WikiEN-l] 3RR Unenforceable

body:
Ryan Delaney wrote:

>Jtkiefer wrote:
>
>
>
>>It's gotten to the point where 3RR has become unenforceable. Any
>>administrator who tries to enforce 3RR regulations posted on AN/3RR
>>are subsequently villified, accused of bias, amd/or threatened with
>>an RFC if they continue doing their job. Due to this many editors
>>stay away from enforcing 3RR and I think something needs to be
>>changed so that admnistrators can actually enforce this rule without
>>fear.
>>
>>
>
>In my experience, this is the case with just about any enforcement
>policy. When you judge that someone has violated policy, they conclude
>that you are "involved" and therefore should not be the one to enforce
>the policy.  The implicit logic is that any administrator who
>familiarized him or her self with the case and chose to act in an
>administrative function because the situation called for it is now
>"involved". That may be true by definition, but it doesn't imply
>conflict of interest. Yet a lot of people -- including other
>administrators, in my direct experience -- have been subliminally
>persuaded by this faulty reasoning.
>
>Ryan
>
>
Yes it happens with quite a few policies most recently NPOV but 3RR is
something that's not just like other policies where occasionally issues
pop up but 3RR at the fundamental level seems to be flawed by the fact
that it is misused by those who wish to gain an upper edge in content
disputes and administrators who try to enforce it have to end up digging
through edit warring and conflicts many times and much of the time end
up being villified for it even more than administrators normally are for
doing their jobs... and coming from someone who gets threats and
personal attacks against him quite a bit that's saying a lot.  Enforcing
3RR has become an everyday battle. ~~~~


subject: [WikiEN-l] Simple interface tweak?

body:
On 12/13/05, Guettarda <guettarda at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > Well, a quick rule-of-thumb is that if we were to spread the 850,000
> > articles on en: out over the 600-or-so admins, that would make for
> > 1400-or-so items to be added to each watchlist.
> >
> > If the # of regular RC watchers is, say, 5x the number of admins, that
> > would become a more reasonable 280.
>
>
> I recently purged my watchlist down to 2200 items.  It's back up to 2300 a
> few days later.  Of course, it's the same hundred or so articles that keep
> popping up, a smaller subset that keep getting vandalised.  I understand why
> Evolution gets vandalised constantly.  I am clueless as to why Deforestation
> gets vandalised all the time.

School projects. Like dolly the sheep and egypt.

--
geni


from_name: Ilya Haykinson

body:
The last time the Chinese Wikinews proposals were being circulated,
they were shot down because it was feared that Wikipedia would become
blocked in PRC due to politically-sensitive news stories on Wikinews.

Now that Wikipedia has been banned in PRC for months, I feel that this
justification is

On 12/13/05, Corum O' Fallamhain <corumsmail at gmail.com> wrote:
> What is the current status of the Chinese Wikinews proposal? I feel quite
> strongly about this, and want to see one set up as soon as possible. More
> than enough people have expressed interest, why has one not been set up yet?
>
> en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ce_garcon
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


from_name: Chip Berlet

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Where do I report editor deleting "skinhead" from many
	pages?

body:
Hi,

OK, I tried to find what to do about this by reading Wikipedia pages, but navigation is--shall we say--incomprehensible to a novice in such matters.

What is the proper procedure for alerting an admin that there is an editor systematically removing a reference from multiple pages?

An editor is deleting "skinhead" from many pages. I do not think this is a content dispute. The user has been here for only a day and seems to have an agenda.

Technically, it is not vandalism, but it is hardly a content dispute, either.

User:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&target=70.50.15.50

diffs:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Beast_Reawakens&diff=31269734&oldid=28286504

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Beast_Reawakens&diff=31269734&oldid=28286504

Help, please.

-Cberlet


from_name: Chris Jenkinson

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: SPOV threatens NPOV

body:
geni wrote:
> On 12/13/05, Chris Jenkinson <chris at starglade.org> wrote:
>
>>The world was considered flat in ancient times.
>
>
> Evidence?

Well, according to [[Flat Earth]] "in early Mesopotamian thought the
world was portrayed as a flat disk floating in the ocean, and this forms
the premise for early Greek maps like those of Anaximander and
Hecataeus." The Flat Earth article references a web page called
"Analysis of 7000 Years of Thinking Regarding Earth's Shape", at
http://www.ethicalatheist.com/docs/flat_earth_myth_ch5.html, which
summarises and in turn cites a number of sources.

Chris


body:
On 12/13/05, Blackcap <snoutwood at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/13/05, charles matthews <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
>
> > My browser has text search, so I can use it with the edit box open.
> >
> > Charles
> >
>
> Mine does as well (I'm using FireFox), but it doesn't seem to like to search
> the text box, instead getting everything that isn't in the box.

I think there is something at [[WP:TOOLS]] to address this.

--
geni


from_name: Magnus Manske

body:
Rowan Collins wrote:
> On 13/12/05, Magnus Manske <magnus.manske at web.de> wrote:
>
>> You know what? Done! :-)
>>
>
> Wow, wow, and more wow. I feel duly humbled for doing nothing but
> pointing out flaws, only to see them fixed by someone else (you).
>
Glad to be of service :-)
> Now, I can still think of more ways the presentation could be fiddled
> with, but I think I really will leave those until I have time to do it
> myself! So, yeah, good work and thank you on behalf of all the
> hundreds of people who'll be using this in the future. :)
>
I hope this is the /near/ future. *Near* future. Like, before 22C3 would
really be nice, for example. Do you hear my pleas, Lords of the Servers? :-)
> [It occurred to me that it's not inconceivable that this could one day
> provide enough features to act as a bug/request tracker; add the
> long-awaited, long-debated single login, and we could do away with
> bugzilla too! I'll stop dreaming now ;)]
>
Maybe you should submit this as a feature request at Bugzilla?

Oh, wait...

Magnus


subject: [Wikitech-l] call for calendars

body:
FxParlant wrote:
> So, in contradiction to evolution, I
> now need to adapt the easy version of the calendar for mediawiki 1.3
>
<Anakin>Noooooooooooooo!!!</Anakin>


from_name: Steve Block

subject: [WikiEN-l] UK libel law and reusers

body:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
> On 12/13/05, Steve Block <steve.block at myrealbox.com> wrote:

>> You've already ceded that yes,
>> there are reasons for the foundation to worry.
>
> No I haven't.

I'm sorry, but when you stated that yes, there was concern for reusers
regarding potential suits, and could I suggest anything to be done, that
that meant the foundation was likewise concerned. Is it the case that
the foundation has no worries regarding funding or reputation in the
light of a potential suit?

> The fact that two British newspapers called Robbie Williams gay is
> true information.  Does British law define this as libel or not?

According to the BBC, http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/actionnetwork/A1183394#4

"It is inadvisable to repeat a defamatory rumour unless you are in a
position to prove it?s true. Even if you are contradicting the rumour
you should not repeat it. And adding ?allegedly? is not enough to get
you out of libel difficulties."

As far as I can ascertain, only once the trial has ended can the nature
of the allegation may be reported, when it becomes a matter for the
public record.  I am unclear on the position whilst the case is ongoing,
but England and Wales have very strict laws to prevent the prejudicing
of trials.

> I don't understand.  Is it libel, in the UK, to say "Two newspapers
> alleged that Robbie Williams was gay"?  I agree Wikipedia shouldn't
> say "Robbie Williams is gay", if that's all you're saying.  Can you be
> more specific as to what type of statement you *are* talking about?

See above.  It can be deemed libelous to repeat a rumour, so it can be
deemed libelous to state "Two newspapers alleged that Robbie Williams
was gay"? up until the point that it is settled in court.  By repeating
the allegation you are, if the allegation is false, disseminating false
information and party to defamation.

> I'll ask again.  What do you propose that we do?

I made that proposal at [[Wikipedia:Libel]].  It doesn't seem to have
met with community consensus.  The trouble seems to be hinging on whose
definition of libel is used.  I would add, however, that the foundation
review either European law or the basing of assets in the European
Union.  I am not a lawyer, but I glanced at the Council Regulation (EC)
No 44/2001 of 22 December 2000 on jurisdiction and the recognition and
enforcement of judgments in civil and commercial matters
http://europa.eu.int/eur-lex/lex/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:32001R0044:EN:HTML
and these clauses give cause for concern:

(9) A defendant not domiciled in a Member State is in general subject to
national rules of jurisdiction applicable in the territory of the Member
State of the court seised, and a defendant domiciled in a Member State
not bound by this Regulation must remain subject to the Brussels Convention.

(10) For the purposes of the free movement of judgments, judgments given
in a Member State bound by this Regulation should be recognised and
enforced in another Member State bound by this Regulation, even if the
judgment debtor is domiciled in a third State.

(11) The rules of jurisdiction must be highly predictable and founded on
the principle that jurisdiction is generally based on the defendant's
domicile and jurisdiction must always be available on this ground save
in a few well-defined situations in which the subject-matter of the
litigation or the autonomy of the parties warrants a different linking
factor. The domicile of a legal person must be defined autonomously so
as to make the common rules more transparent and avoid conflicts of
jurisdiction.

Number (11) would probably allow libel cases to take place in England
for the English language wikipedia since that is where English is the
primary language.

However, the McLibel case showed that the European Human Rights
directive, which guarantees freedom of expression, is in conflict with
the libel laws of England and Wales.

What I am ultimately asking is that the foundation consider seeking
advice on the libel laws of England and Wales and those of Europe from a
resident expert.

> We clearly should
> remove false information from Wikipedia.  I agree with that, and I
> think everyone else does.  We should remove private information which
> has not been published anywhere else.  Our verifiability rule ensures
> that.  So what else should we do?

Clarify the position with regards to libel laws around the world as best
as possible.  At the moment we have different editors who are either
based in the US and therefore do not care or have concerns but are
feeling frustrated because no-one is prepared to stick their head above
the parapet with even the loosest of risk assesments.

> Even with images we have only gone so far to protect reusers.  Images
> which can only be used by Wikipedia are off limits.  Images which can
> be used by a broad range of reusers, on the other hand, are generally
> kept.  There is somewhat of a balancing act here.

But that's the point at issue here.  Is wikipedia pursuing a policy that
it is happy to use text which potentially only the online Wikipedia can
use, or is it going to pursue a policy whereby text which can be used by
a majority of reusers is the preferred option.  If the latter is the
case, then I would ask that the foundation sits down and explores how
various libel laws affect reusers, and then formulate a policy
appropriately, informing and appraising the community along the way so
as not to be seen to be handing down dictats.  If the former is the
case, then I am unsure how wikipedia expects the text to be reused, and
upon whose shoulders it places the burden of risk to fact check.  If a
reuser has to check every page for potential libel, why would it do so?
  When it comes to printing encyclopedias, information will likewise
have to be vetted dependent upon the territory at which the publications
are aimed.  It would make sense to have some idea of how these problems
are to be tackled, wouldn't it?

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from_name: Ben Yates

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia Class Action

body:
I called the number on the class action website and talked to someone on the
phone.  During the course of our conversation (partial transcript at
http://wikip.blogspot.com/2005/12/i-just-talked-on-phone-to.html ) he told
what seemed like several obvious untruths (about things like his location,
his connection to QuakeAID, etc.).  With enemies like this ...

On 12/13/05, Matt Brown <morven at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 12/13/05, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> > Well, yeah, in my opinion it's a pretty obvious case of fair use as
> > far as the copyright goes.  Doesn't Wikipedia have a tag for "logo of
> > a company on a page about the company".
>
> The individual behind this is in Greece, not the US.  How does this
> change things?  I'm not sure what Greek law has to say about Fair Use.
>
> >The case for dilution is
> > trickier, but still probably fair use (if it's even dilution in the
> > first place).  I think it'd be a horrible mistake to sue them over it,
> > but hey, it'd be an interesting thing to watch.
>
> Not worth suing; besides, all the better to make him look foolish.
>
> -Matt
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
Ben Yates
Wikipedia blog - http://wikip.blogspot.com


from_name: Sam Spade

subject: [WikiEN-l] NPOV trainwreck

body:
My team is the readers, and the score is decidedly mixed, given recent
headlines.

Sam Spade

> Sam Spade stated for the record:
>
> > Needless to say I am offended and saddened that criticism of the
> > committe is being dismissed as the ravings of extremists. That is not
> > a good sign. It is no compliment when those on both sides of an issue
> > sternly criticise the "neutral" referee. When that happens in sports,
> > it is the clearest of signals that the umpire is in the wrong.
>
> Do you see this a sport, with umpires?  How does one score in this
> sport?  Is your team currently winning or losing?
>
> - --
>  Sean Barrett     | How much does it cost to have
>  sean at epoptic.org | the Internet installed?


from_name: Adrian Buehlmann

body:
Announcing a nice new page (no pun intended):

[[m:Help:Parameter default]]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Parameter_default

Describes the basics for the new template tricks. Kudos to Patrick and AzaToth.

--
Adrian
[[en:User:Adrian Buehlmann]]


body:
On 12/13/05, Blackcap <snoutwood at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/13/05, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I think there is something at [[WP:TOOLS]] to address this.
> >
> > --
> > geni
> >
>
> Hmmm... I'm not finding anything. Could you be more specific?
>
> --
> [[User:Blackcap]]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tools/Browser_integration#Search_within_Textarea_Extension
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=252371#c123

No idea if it works or not.

--
geni


from_name: Mark Gallagher

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Turn off AfD

body:
G'day geni,

> On 12/13/05, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>On 12/13/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>>
>>>In all fairness Googling, then adding the information is a lot of work.
>>
>>It's a couple of minutes.  And at the end of it you have a useful
>>article instead of a hole in the ground.
>
> Nocking out people on RC patrol for couple of minutes soon results in
> the loss of RC patrol as they are all of researching stuff.

We don't have to verify stuff while on RC patrol.  If something looks
... odd, do you know what I do?  Tag it {{cleanup-verify}} and let
someone who isn't RC patrolling sort it out.

We should not be AfDing something if we don't have time to do research.
  Let someone else sort it out if you must.

--
Mark Gallagher
"What?  I can't hear you, I've got a banana on my head!"
- Danger Mouse

--
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subject: [WikiEN-l] NPOV trainwreck

body:
On 12/13/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> That's not true at all.  There seems to be considerable support for a
> hybrid model.  Perhaps you haven't kept up with the poll and discussion.

Have you outlined how exacty the comunity would go about nominateing people yet?

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] Simple interface tweak?

body:
Andrea Forte wrote:

>Has it ever been suggested before that a simple indicator of "how many
>people are watching this article" could be a useful tool for:
>
>users who want to figure out what to trust
>wikipedians who want to know where to spend their efforts
>discouraging vandalism
>
>Has this been tried? Suggested? Debated?
>
>Just curious,
>
>Andrea
>
>
It's not exactly new, but I've never figured out why it hasn't been
explored further.

John Lee
([[User:Johnleemk]])


from_name: Till Westermayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] fwd - Re: Wikipedia Logo

body:
To whom it may concern ... Till (read from bottom to top)

## Nachricht vom 13.12.05 weitergeleitet
## Ursprung : till at tillwe.de
## Ersteller: lawsuit at wikipediaclassaction.org

Criticism

Till Westermayer wrote:
> . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . till we *) . . .
>
> Hi WikipediaClassAction.org,
>
> could you elaborate a bit more? In which way is your use of the logo
> (and the design and the name Wikipedia in the webside address) fair use?
>
> Regards,
>
> Till
>
>
>
>>Hello,
>
>
>>Two words:  Fair use.
>
>
>>Regards,
>
>
>
>
>>Till Westermayer wrote:
>>
>>>. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . till we *)
>>>. . .
>>>
>>>Hi,
>>>
>>>I noticed you are using a clone of the Wikipedia logo on your
>>>class action website. Are you sure you are legally using this?
>>>(I don't speak on behalf of Wikipedia, I'm only curious because
>>>if you want to take legal action against Wikipedia, a copyright
>>>problem with your use of the Wikipedia logo would be something
>>>funny).
>>>
>>>Regards,
>>>
>>>Till Westermayer
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> __ .
>>> / / / /                            ... Till Westermayer - till
>>> we *)
>>>. .
>>>  . mailto:till at tillwe.de . www.westermayer.de/till/ . icq
>>>  320393072 . Hirschstra?e 5. 79100 Freiburg . 0761 55697152 .
>>>  0160 96619179 . . . . .
>>>
>>>
>>>
>
>
>  __ .
>  / / / /                            ... Till Westermayer - till we *)
> . .
>   . mailto:till at tillwe.de . www.westermayer.de/till/ . icq 320393072
>   . Hirschstra?e 5. 79100 Freiburg . 0761 55697152 . 0160 96619179
>   . . . . .
>
>
>


from_name: Domas Mituzas

subject: [Wikitech-l] call for calendars

body:
> bl_to LIKE 'Dec/%/2005' AND cur_id = bl_from AND cl_to='Blog' AND

I guess I will not be telling anything useful, but personally me, I'd
nuke the one who'd be keeping dates this way in database. Either use
DATETIME or at least... put most-significant-first (ergh, yyyy-mm-
dd), so that prefix searches are efficient.

Domas


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Turn off AfD

body:
G'day Toni,

> On 12/13/05, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
>>On 12/13/05, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>On 12/13/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>>>>In all fairness Googling, then adding the information is a lot of work.
>>>
>>>It's a couple of minutes.  And at the end of it you have a useful
>>>article instead of a hole in the ground.
>>
>>Nocking out people on RC patrol for couple of minutes soon results in
>>the loss of RC patrol as they are all of researching stuff.
>
> Goodness, editors of an encyclopedia performing research!  We can't
> have that!  Anybody would think we wanted to be as good as Britannica
> or something!

You know exactly what geni meant.  This sort of cheap shot helps nobody.

--
Mark Gallagher
"What?  I can't hear you, I've got a banana on my head!"
- Danger Mouse

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body:
Uhm, [offtopic]

> I also fully support this request. Most of these approved
> wikipedias have
> steadily growing test-wikis, and some are starting to look like
> successful
> wikipedias already. I hope they all can be created in the near future.

Such requests may demotivate ;-) e.g. Samogitian 'language', in
request is written to have '0.5 million speakers'. Have you ever
heard of a language in Europe spoken by 0.5 million people, that has
no media, literature, not used at all in schools (even in it's core
region), etc? :) Currently it's a dialect, that reflects in sometimes
weird pronouncations of words ;-)

If there're 3 guys, who can write it, they won't be creating a
successful wikipedia. But I guess Wikipedia fits the purpose of
extinct language museum?

Cheers,
Domas


from_name: Andrew Gray

subject: [WikiEN-l] Simple interface tweak?

body:
On 13/12/05, Stephen Bain <stephen.bain at gmail.com> wrote:

> Consider running a query on a local installation:
> (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_queries)
> or running a query at http://www.wikisign.org/ (although this uses
> slightly out of date dumps), and then posting the results to somewhere
> like [[Wikipedia:Most watched pages]] or [[Wikipedia:Least watched
> pages]].

I don't think the database dumps include identifiable watchlist
records, do they? If they do, that does seem a little... potentially
embarassing. You'd need to run it on "the real copy", I'd have
thought.

--
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Turn off AfD

body:
G'day geni,
> On 12/13/05, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
>>I'm sorry that you see it as a cheap shot; it's rather the reverse.  I
>>regard the argument that research prior to deletion would detract from
>>recent changes patrolling as utterly indefensible.  I find it
>>difficult to believe that anyone would seriously attempt to defend it.
>
> Why? We've seen the cost of a failed RC patrol. If you want to put an
> article on wikipedia doing a minium of research yourself is not too
> much to ask.

Remember that we are talking about coming across articles that don't
cite their sources.  If you came across such an article on RC patrol,
you would *not* immediately reach for AfD, and you should not be listing
stuff on AfD without doing research (if nothing else, because then you
couldn't write a good nom, and I've been hot on the issue of AfD
nominations for a while now).

{{cleanup-verify}}, save, move on to the next article that crops up.

--
Mark Gallagher
"What?  I can't hear you, I've got a banana on my head!"
- Danger Mouse

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from_name: David Gerard

body:
Justin Cormack wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-12-13 at 13:24 +0000, Tony Sidaway wrote:

>>No need to userfy.  Just add an "unreferenced" tag.  This has the
>>advantage of permitting casual visitors to find and improve the
>>article.

> Thats much better.
> When do we start?

Whenever you hit "Random page" and get an article with no references and
no external links that isn't a stub. That's how I do it! Get in the
habit until people get the idea about these things.

Heck, it strikes me as eminently bot-assistable - no external links, no
word "References" or "Sources", no stub message, flag it for the
operator to press the button on.

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Simple interface tweak?

body:
On 12/14/05, Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:
> As a side note, my favorite "always vandalized though no idea why"
> article is [[Gold foil experiment]]. But perhaps the school-project
> approach is why.
>
> FF

It's second on google and the kind of thing school kids are going to
be asked to look up so probably.

--
geni


body:
Matt Brown wrote:

> I also believe we should cite primary, secondary or tertiary sources,
> whichever is available.  In the case of primary sources, of course,
> these should only be readily available ones.

Please don't say so out loud, some dickhead will start nominating for
deletion anything with a source he can't google.

- d.


body:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:

> I find the unreferenced tag to be useless.  Either it says that the
> article contains some unreferenced facts, in which case we'd be better
> off tagging those few articles which don't contain unreferenced facts
> with the opposite tag,

Then it shouldn't be used to tag the article. That's not what it's for.

> or it says that the article contains zero
> references, which is already evident to anyone scanning the article
> anyway.

The tag puts the article in the category. It also looks like a big ugly
box telling the editor "PLEASE DO BETTER KTHX."

> If you want to put the tag on the talk page or use a category, in the
> case of articles with absolutely no references, I wouldn't object.
> But I don't think that is a solution for what I'm saying, which is
> that we shouldn't be creating such articles in the first place.

I suggest that we can only lead by example and peer pressure, and the
template does IMO help there.

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Turn off AfD

body:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:

> Anyway, I see now the article has been redirected to [[Open source
> religion]].  There was no need for an AFD to do that.

I've been hitting AFD of late and occasionally reminding people that if
they can possibly just merge-and-redirect they should do so, because AFD
is the size of a planet already ;-)

- d.


from_name: Tony Sidaway

subject: [WikiEN-l] 3RR Unenforceable

body:
On 12/13/05, Jtkiefer <jtkiefer at wordzen.net> wrote:
> It's gotten to the point where 3RR has become unenforceable.  Any
> administrator who tries to enforce 3RR regulations posted on AN/3RR are
> subsequently villified, accused of bias, amd/or threatened with an RFC
> if they continue doing their job. Due to this many editors stay away
> from enforcing 3RR and I think something needs to be changed so that
> admnistrators can actually enforce this rule without fear.
>
>
The 3RR was one of those ideas that may have seemed good at the time
(I supported the proposal).  In practice it seems to be used for two
bad purposes:

* to justify the notion that making up to three reverts per day is a
normal mode of editing
* to bait hotheads and get them into trouble

I've blocked a few people, only one under 3RR (and that was an
administrator). I just tell them they're being disruptive, which they
are.

But the waggy finger will always be the principle sanction on
Wikipedia.  It's my weapon of choice, and seldom fails.

It's conceivable that I may have been vilified for my blocks, but if
so I didn't notice.  It's probably a bad idea to take on administrator
powers if you're very sensitive to criticism.


from_name: Justin Cormack

subject: [WikiEN-l] Simple interface tweak?

body:
On 14 Dec 2005, at 00:04, Fastfission wrote:

> As a side note, my favorite "always vandalized though no idea why"
> article is [[Gold foil experiment]]. But perhaps the school-project
> approach is why.

Check the vandalism history on [[Lentil]]. Is that a school project?

The choices vandals make are odd.

Justinc


subject: [WikiEN-l] Turn off AfD

body:
On 12/14/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> Anthony DiPierro wrote:
>
> > Anyway, I see now the article has been redirected to [[Open source
> > religion]].  There was no need for an AFD to do that.
>
>
> I've been hitting AFD of late and occasionally reminding people that if
> they can possibly just merge-and-redirect they should do so, because AFD
> is the size of a planet already ;-)
>

Let's just start closing AfDs that have obvious merges.  AfD is big
and doesn't need to be bloated unnecessarily.


body:
On 12/14/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> Justin Cormack wrote:
> > On Tue, 2005-12-13 at 13:24 +0000, Tony Sidaway wrote:
>
> >>No need to userfy.  Just add an "unreferenced" tag.  This has the
> >>advantage of permitting casual visitors to find and improve the
> >>article.
>
> > Thats much better.
> > When do we start?
>
>
> Whenever you hit "Random page" and get an article with no references and
> no external links that isn't a stub. That's how I do it! Get in the
> habit until people get the idea about these things.
>
> Heck, it strikes me as eminently bot-assistable - no external links, no
> word "References" or "Sources", no stub message, flag it for the
> operator to press the button on.
>

And the first editor, and the last three editors, get a message on
their talk pages?  I'd go with that.


from_name: Ashar Voultoiz

subject: [Wikitech-l] my bugzilla email

body:
Hello,

Just to be consistent, I changed my bugzilla email address from
thoane at altern.org to hashar at altern.org :o)

cheers,

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


from_name: sockmonk at gmail.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: SPOV threatens NPOV

body:
Agreed, reporting proportionately on consensus and minority views would be
wonderful, without folks trying to root out bad science, or bad philosophy,
or bad theology, all of which are always with us. ;-)

The real issue I think is one of philosophy. The SPOV or materialist view
wants to say that all knowledge we can have is acquired through our senses,
and all occurrences can ultimately be explained in terms of natural
processes and laws of physics, even if our current understanding of those
processes and laws isn't up to explaining everything just yet. That
obviously works very well in terms of the scientific progress that has been
and is being made. One other view is that there are other ways of acquiring
knowledge; perhaps divine or angelic revelation, perhaps via ESP or
clairvoyance or from spirits of the dead. The 'supernaturalist' view allows
for occurrences either contrary to or transcendant of what are usually
thought to be the laws of physics, whether it's some miracle or healing or
resurrection, or teleknesis, or some kind of qi manipulation. Obviously
there are many variations on a theme, and many many different ideas of which
or even what sort of revelations might be reliable, or which phenomena might
be genuine or why. To ask whether these other phenomena are scientifically
verifiable is to examine them from within the SPOV, and almost presupposes
the answer. One might just as well ask whether some random miraculous
healing can be explained in terms of qi or the five elements of traditional
Japanese acupressure.

As far as reporting on consensus and minority views, it's fine to report
that scientists are skeptical of this or that miraculous occurrence, and
that some religious folks are skeptical of the morality or ethics of this or
that application of scientific knowledge. These fields are not diametrically
opposed at all, they often learn from each other or borrow from each other,
but they do generally represent different ways of looking at the world.
Neither should have a completely free pass to pass itself off as NPOV by
itself.

On 12/13/05, charles matthews <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
>
> > There's got to be a corollary to Godwin's Law that covers this.
> >
> > -Phil
>
> Strange, is it not, to have SPOV high on one's list of worries.  Of course
> you could take it as read that NPOV copes swimmingly with troubles coming
> from politics, religion, economic self-interest, ethnicity, cultural
> blinkers and bad history.  But somehow grinds to a halt when asked to cope
> with the verifiable/falsifiable nexus and those insidious claims on
> scientific method.  When all we have to do is report proportionately on
> consensus and minority views, not root out the bad science (which of
> course
> is always with us).
>
> Charles
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
User:Wesley


from_name: geni

body:
On 12/14/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> Matt Brown wrote:
>
> > I also believe we should cite primary, secondary or tertiary sources,
> > whichever is available.  In the case of primary sources, of course,
> > these should only be readily available ones.
>
>
> Please don't say so out loud, some dickhead will start nominating for
> deletion anything with a source he can't google.

I'm waiting for someone to try and use WP:NOR to argue for the
deletion of most of our pages on fictional characters.

--
geni


from_name: John Lee

body:
Stan Shebs wrote:

> Justin Cormack wrote:
>
>> On Tue, 2005-12-13 at 21:41 +0800, John Lee wrote:
>>
>>
>>> I believe the {{unreferenced}} template already exists. I've seen it
>>> quite a few times, but not often enough, IMO. I'm a fanatic on
>>> citing sources, but some of the old ones I started that I don't
>>> really have much interest in (like [[chicken nugget]] and
>>> [[double-decker bus]]) don't have references yet (AFAIK).
>>>
>>
>> Well lets start putting it in more.
>>
>> Yes, things with little interest are an issue.
>>
>> I think I will have to make full list of articles I am interested
>> in being good that I have contributed to, and prune my watchlist of
>> the stuff that I just made small fixes to and dont really care
>> about in order to make this improvement thing work.
>>
>> I might however have a few erudite references for chicken nugget
>> in my large pile of history of food books.
>>
> I wonder how many people hold off adding references because they're
> hoping for a better source. For instance, I used to not mention
> using Oxford Classical Dictionary, because it's technically a
> tertiary source, but many of its articles mention only primary
> sources, leaving no secondaries to cite. Nowadays I just cite it
> anyway - if somebody has something better later, they can replace
> the OCD cite.
>
> Stan

I always cite any possible source - even tertiary ones. They're better
than nothing at all, and when someone with a better source comes along,
they can be replaced.

John Lee
([[User:Johnleemk]])


subject: [WikiEN-l] NPOV trainwreck

body:
I see no evidence of the arbcom being stacked based on political bias.
That simply makes no sense. It is instead stacked w people who you
(Jimbo) happen to know. Appointee's don't result in a perfect
committee. Some mandate from the common man is essential.

What makes me so unhappy about my case is not only the recusals which
might have occured, and the people who might have voted but did not.

I am very much saddened to be formally chastised for these 2 mistakes
(and I do concede the 2 minor errors). The timing is particularly
unfortunate, as I have recently gotten my first article featured
([[Human]]), and passed 30,000 edits.

To be lined up w 5 other "right wing conspirators" fingered by
Cberlet... that was pretty dreadful. It has certainly called into
question the rewards vrs. punishments ratio of my experience here.

I have been advised by Fred Bauder

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Sam_Spade#Your_care._Arbs_strange_ways

that by emailing other arbiters, I can discuss my case (and that of
what appears to be my AMA client) on the Arbcom-l list, and that is an
IRC channel with the potential for conferences. I would like to pursue
those remedies as could result in better outcomes in these cases.

Sam Spade

Sam Spade wrote:
> Needless to say I am offended and saddened that criticism of the
> committe is being dismissed as the ravings of extremists. That is not
> a good sign. It is no compliment when those on both sides of an issue
> sternly criticise the "neutral" referee. When that happens in sports,
> it is the clearest of signals that the umpire is in the wrong.

I think we can distinguish serious and thoughtful criticism of the
ArbCom from partisan rantings fairly easily.  Suggesting that I am
stacking the ArbCom with people whose politics I agree with is quite
frankly absurd.

On the other hand, legitimate feedback to the ArbCom like: "you're too
soft on trolls" or "you are too hard on users who have just made a minor
mistake" might be right or wrong in the final analysis, but at least it
is legitimate criticism.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] More DRV shenanigans

body:
G'day David,

>>I have made a template that administrators can add to their user
>>pages, containing David's notice and adding the administrator to an
>>appropriate category.
>>{{user recovery}}
>
> Nice one!
>
> See how long before that text gets reworded ;-) I have linked the cat
> from WP:DRV.

Well, if you don't want your text to be mercilessly edited ... that was
on the edit page once.  I wonder what happened to it ...

--
Mark Gallagher
"What?  I can't hear you, I've got a banana on my head!"
- Danger Mouse

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Simple interface tweak?

body:
G'day Mark,

> On 12/13/05, Carbonite <carbonite.wp at gmail.com> wrote:
["X users watchlisted this article" feature]
>>One of the drawbacks is that vandals would be able to target articles that
>>have zero users watching them.
>
> That's not true.  An article with zero watchers still shows up on
> Recent Changes, where anyone doing RC patrol can see what's happening.

How often do you check your watchlist and find that something survived
through RC patrol?  How often do you RC patrol and find yourself
despairing as too many edits scroll past for you to check out everything?

If a vandal knows an article isn't being watched, he'd be quite correct
to assume his vandalism would stay on Wikipedia longer than if he'd
taken an article watchlisted by 600 people.  RC patrol is a worn-out net
with many holes in it: sometimes it catches enough, sometimes it doesn't.

--
Mark Gallagher
"What?  I can't hear you, I've got a banana on my head!"
- Danger Mouse

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from_name: Kelly Martin

subject: [WikiEN-l] More Seigenthaler fallout

body:
On 12/14/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> Bad idea. There are way too many admins who use rollback on stuff they
> don't like - see the list of diffs I posted from WP:DRV recently. No way
> was that rollback of "vandalism".

There are way too many admins who shouldn't be, then.

Kelly


from_name: Anthony DiPierro

body:
On 12/13/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> Anthony DiPierro wrote:
>
> > I find the unreferenced tag to be useless.  Either it says that the
> > article contains some unreferenced facts, in which case we'd be better
> > off tagging those few articles which don't contain unreferenced facts
> > with the opposite tag,
>
>
> Then it shouldn't be used to tag the article. That's not what it's for.
>
This could certainly be made more clear.  Right now it's on the top of
[[Homosexuality and Christianity]], which was the first one I checked.

(Maybe I should add a tag which says "This article has a tag on it
which isn't appropriate.  You can help Wikipedia by removing the
tag.")

> > or it says that the article contains zero
> > references, which is already evident to anyone scanning the article
> > anyway.
>
>
> The tag puts the article in the category. It also looks like a big ugly
> box telling the editor "PLEASE DO BETTER KTHX."
>
I can think of ways to make the template even uglier, if that really
is the point of it.

> > If you want to put the tag on the talk page or use a category, in the
> > case of articles with absolutely no references, I wouldn't object.
> > But I don't think that is a solution for what I'm saying, which is
> > that we shouldn't be creating such articles in the first place.
>
>
> I suggest that we can only lead by example and peer pressure, and the
> template does IMO help there.
>
>
> - d.

I guess you're saying the template has been a success.  I sure haven't
seen this.

Anthony


subject: [WikiEN-l] More Seigenthaler fallout

body:
On 12/14/05, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/14/05, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
> > There are way too many admins who shouldn't be, then.

> It isn't as if we have the luxery to say that.

Just what do you mean by that?  There's no reason why we need to
continue to grant admin privileges to people who abuse them.

Kelly


from_name: Andrea Forte

subject: [WikiEN-l] More Seigenthaler fallout

body:
One of the features I'm thinking of coding in for my wiki (running on
mediawiki 1.5) is the ability to tag contributions as "suspect" and
have them viewable only by specific kinds of users. This is because
the wiki will be used for education and we don't want kids to see
not-nice content, but we do want teachersto see it and be able to take
action if their students are being disruptive.

That's still on the wish list, though. :-) I'm planning on trying to
implement it this spring. If anyone wants to help... ;-)

Andrea

On 12/13/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Ryan Delaney wrote:
> > Too difficult in the sense of "not worth it". I'm not just talking
> > about coding here though, since I'm not a coder and have no idea how
> > much effort it would cost the devs. I mean it may be too difficult and
> > too costly to implement administratively; see my other email in reply
> > to Jimbo.  What I _don't_ want to see is an atmosphere where admins
> > are seen as obligated to scour the page histories to delete all vandal
> > edits. That would slow down RC patrol enormously, which is a job that
> > is tedious and rewardless enough as it is.
>
> I think a lot of the issues being raised are solvable and amount to
> interface design issues.  Certainly we don't want an atmosphere where
> admins are seen as obligated to scour page histories.  But it might be
> nice if admins could simply 'nuke' individual revisions (and 'unnuke'
> them, of course).
>
> There are lots of things that we allow admins to do, which other admins
> can undo (like block vandals).  This can just be another tool in our
> arsenal: the ability for admins to "hide" (we should call it that rather
> than "delete") certain edits from casual users.
>
> The issue of whether this would allow vandals to make it through an
> admin election is an interesting one of course.  It seems unlikely to
> me, and if it ever did happen that a vandal was elected admin, we could
> adjust process.  (Calvinball, remember.)
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Phil Boswell

body:
"Adrian Buehlmann" <adrian at cadifra.com> wrote in
message news:dnn0k6$dvb$1 at sea.gmane.org...
> "Phil Boswell" <phil.boswell at gmail.com>
> wrote in message news:dnmga3$edh$1 at sea.gmane.org
[snip]
>> If you create a template which uses <includeonly> and inside that tag
>> you transclude another template, that second template does not appear
>> on the list of templates. It does however seem to appear OK on the
>> list for client pages, i.e. those which transclude the "outer"
>> template.
> Yes. There seems to be something strange. At the moment, to me it looks
> like templates existing in older versions of the page that's edited
> are also counting.

You have to do null edits all the way down the line to update the linkage
table in each of the client templates as well...

> Editing [[en:template:book reference]] at the moment
> (2005-12-13 17:30 UTC) still shows usage of qif, though I could swear
> I have replaced that with qif now (on all sub-templates too).

Fixed with a null edit: don't know what might have been going on. However I
think that {{booland}} has recently been updated to use {{qif}} instead of
{{if}}, maybe the update hadn't trickled down yet?
--
Phil
[[en:User:Phil Boswell]]


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: are soft newlines evil? (was: rationale behind the
	useof hard newlines)

references:
<87d5k32vz2.fsf@mat.ucm.es>
	<439C9AB1.1050703@pobox.com><dnim9n$5nj$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<87k6e9j9xv.fsf_-_@mat.ucm.es>

body:
"Uwe Brauer" <oub at mat.ucm.es> wrote in message
news:87k6e9j9xv.fsf_-_ at mat.ucm.es...
[snip]
> So again by questions:
>    -  shall I delete soft newlines? If not
>    - could I add soft newlines in  the other paragraphs such that
>      they are displayed nicely in my editor, or is this risky
>      since I might destroy the formating of the
>      paragraphs. Since my possibility 3. Is buggy I would be
>      interested in an answer to the problem
> I checked all the possibilities in the sandbox, and they seem
> fine, but I want to be sure.

My preference is to divide long paragraphs up into sentences, with each one
starting on a new line.

That way, when you change something in the middle of a long paragraph, the
"diff" can display the exact sentence which changed, rather than show a huge
paragraph for you to hunt through.

Mind you, I'm still trying to work out how to tweak my monobook.css to give
changed characters a different coloured **background**, so that changes in
punctuation and, more importantly, white-space, show up better.

HTH HAND
--
Phil
[[en:User:Phil Boswell]]


from_name: Axel Boldt

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Nature compares science coverage of Wikipedia and
	Encyclopaedia Britannica

body:
>From the Village Pump, found by BanyanTree: the Australian newspaper
The Age is the first to report on Nature's formal comparison of the
science coverage in the English Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica:

http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/online-encyclopedias-put-to-the-test/2005/12/14/1134500913345.html

"The exercise revealed numerous errors in both encyclopedias, but among
42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not great: the
average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies;
Britannica, around three"

This can provide us with a good talking point in discussions about
Wikipedia's quality: "Wikipedia is not nearly as good as we would like
it to be, and you certainly cannot trust all statements in it. But then
again, Encyclopedia Britannica is not much better."

I also expect that, once the complete list of evaluated articles is
published by Nature, we will find that our articles are longer, so that
the error rate *per sentence* might very well be lower in Wikipedia.

Axel

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


from_name: Afraz ulquraish

subject: [Wikitech-l] Urdu Wiktionary

body:
I am working on Urdu Wiktionary and Wikipedia............... should I need to register myself here or somewhere ?

  Regards

  Afraz ulquraish
  MD PhD

  Tokyo Japan

---------------------------------
Yahoo! Messenger  NEW - crystal clear PC to PC calling worldwide with voicemail


from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

subject: [WikiEN-l] Mirrors and accountability

body:
I'm not a lawyer, but we really can't be accountable for other
people's website especially when they fail to update in a timely
manner or update at all. I think answers.com is reasonably quick. It
picked up all my changes to the mummy article when I made them, but if
something is heavily edited (like Seigenthaler or Bush) it may simply
lack behind, because whatever it does, it cannot be as up-to-date as
Wikipedia itself.

Mgm

On 12/13/05, Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson at gmail.com> wrote:
> I was thinking about something during the whole Seigenthaler thing,
> about the mirrors of wikipedia (I apologise if this has already been
> discussed, if it has, I haven't seen it). One of his big complaints
> was that even though wikipedia removed his information instantly it
> stayed on several of our mirrors such as answers.com and others.
> Legally speaking, can wikipedia be held accountable for that? My gut
> feeling is that we can't (mostly because we shouldn't be) because
> thats the other servers' problem. That is, if they hold old, now
> nonexisting on wikipedia libellous claims, can we be sued for that? It
> seems like a case of "Hey, we removed it long ago, if you have a
> problem with other servers, take it up with them".
>
> Can anyone clarify the legal aspects of this for a poor, legally
> illitarate wikipedian?
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Christof Damian

subject: [Wikitech-l] call for calendars

body:
On Tue, 13 Dec 2005, FxParlant wrote:
>
> I lately built a calendar extension for mediawiki 1.5+. The sql request
> was easy to create, thanks to the re-architecting of the database.
> Nevertheless, as nobody could yet help me transpose the captcha system
> for 1.5, I still have to stay with my oldish version of mediawiki 1.3 :
> I hear Rob Church gasping again:-) So, in contradiction to evolution, I
> now need to adapt the easy version of the calendar for mediawiki 1.3
>
> Here is the question:
>
> I ask for all the pages title having a link to a page whose title has an
> [[Dec/%/2005]] pattern.

You could try http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Cdamian/calendar
which is the simple wiki calendar extension I wrote. It doesn't use
SQL queries (except to try flushing the cache). To get page titles
like you want you would use something like this:

<calendar>
format="%M/%j/%Y"
view="month"
</calendar>

I haven't tried the extension on 1.3 for a while, but it might still
work.

Christof

--
Christof Damian
christof at damian.net


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] NPOV trainwreck

body:
Sam Spade wrote:
> I see no evidence of the arbcom being stacked based on political bias.
> That simply makes no sense. It is instead stacked w people who you
> (Jimbo) happen to know. Appointee's don't result in a perfect
> committee. Some mandate from the common man is essential.

That's why we're changing the procedure, in an attempt to get a much
more universal mandate.

--Jimbo


from_name: Ben Hallert

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: WikiEN-l Digest, Vol 29, Issue 143

body:
Regardint the searching of text boxes in Firefox, install the
Retrofind extension to re-gain the ability to search.  I had to do it
to be able to use FireFox for disambiguation link repair which
involves lots of searching.

http://s93731204.onlinehome.us/firefox/retrofind.html

Regards,

[[User:Chairboy]]


subject: [WikiEN-l] Undeletion service

body:
On 12/13/05, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/13/05, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 12/12/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> > >
> > > ==Undeletion==
> > >
> > > If you need access to a Wikipedia article that has been deleted, ask me.
> > [etc]
>
This service seems to follow all the rules. Be sure, though, that if
the article gets recreated in a new and improved form, that the
history of this thing should be undeleted to attributed any info to
their original contributors.

BTW, I don't think there's much instruction creep in DRV. It says to
provide evidence it was deleted in error, or evidence that was
overlooked in the original debate. I think that's no more than
logical.

What I do hate though, is people supporting the original decision on
bare numbers, or ignoring new evidence with a quick "non-notable"-tag.

Mgm


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] Improve AFD - require rationales (2-step process)

body:
Ryan Delaney wrote:

> It bothers me that you and David are ignoring my main point, so I'll
> try repeating it: I'm not using this email to make a judgment about
> what percentage you arbitrarily picked as a standard for what
> "consensus" means.  The mere fact that administrators can decide for
> themselves is what bothers me, and if I am criticizing you, I am
> criticizing everyone (including myself, since I've closed a lot of
> AFDs).  What troubles me is that the result of AFD votes -- the
> controversial ones that actually matter, anyway -- can be
> substantially influenced by the administrator who closes them.

Mmmm. Administrators are expected to be able to exercise the judgement
that has presumably been a factor in their selection as an admin. Trust
me when I say there's a lot of feedback (loud screeching noise) when
someone thinks they're wrong ...

> Say some contentious issue comes up on an AFD, say a series of
> "roadcruft" nominations.  Now, the votes will be very close, but say
> we have 64% of people voting to delete.  Some administrators, without
> doing the math, would close this as a delete.  You certainly
> wouldn't.  What does that say about the discussion process?  Doesn't
> that mean the opinion of the closing admin on deletion standards
> weighs in more than anyone elses?  This is what I'm getting at-- I
> think your case isn't an example of an admin abusing his power, but it
> is an example of what can go wrong with AFD *as a system*, and it
> actually goes wrong every day without anyone noticing.

It's explicitly Not A Vote, so it's hard to see how to get around this one.

I am tempted to summarily remove all tally boxes as blatant invitations
to abuse of AFD as a straight vote.

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] More Seigenthaler fallout

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

> I think that getting that set-up should be a top development priority. One idea:
> A bot with sysop rights could be able to detect admin reverts fairly easily and delete both the
> vandalized versions that were reverted along with the admin's revert version (which would be
> pointless clutter at that point). The bot would use the text 'Reverted to last version by..' along
> with checking the reverting person to make sure they are an admin. The bot would only delete

Bad idea. There are way too many admins who use rollback on stuff they
don't like - see the list of diffs I posted from WP:DRV recently. No way
was that rollback of "vandalism".

- d.


from_name: Mark Wagner

subject: [WikiEN-l] More Seigenthaler fallout

body:
On 12/13/05, Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
> > Matt Brown wrote:
> > > My belief is that in general we should not remove things from page
> > > history so easily.
> >
> > My belief is that in general we should be aggressive about removing
> > vandalism from the page history.  If there was an automated way to go
> > through on a regular basis and remove reverted versions from the
> > history, I would strongly support that we do so.
>
> I think that getting that set-up should be a top development priority. One idea:
>
> A bot with sysop rights could be able to detect admin reverts fairly easily and delete both the
> vandalized versions that were reverted along with the admin's revert version (which would be
> pointless clutter at that point). The bot would use the text 'Reverted to last version by..' along
> with checking the reverting person to make sure they are an admin. The bot would only delete
> versions that are older than a week and would need to. This would clean-up page histories a great
> deal and get rid of most of the libel and slander in them. Then, as needed, a human admin can
> delete more versions since a great many reverts are not done by admins. A more sophisticated admin
> bot could compare diffs to detect reverts (using the comments 'Reverted to last version by..' and
> 'rv' only to identify diffs to check).

Bad idea.  I don't know about other admins, but I use rollback for
things other than vandalism and linkspam, such as widespread
implementations of bad ideas.  Most recent case: someone had modified
the wording of about three dozen stub templates in a way that implied
that a particular wikiproject had ownership over the articles in
question.

--
[[User:Carnildo]]


subject: [WikiEN-l] More DRV shenanigans

body:
Mark Gallagher wrote:

> Well, if you don't want your text to be mercilessly edited ... that was
> on the edit page once.  I wonder what happened to it ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning&action=history

- d.


body:
I think [[WP:ANI]] would be a good place to put this.

Mgm

On 12/14/05, Chip Berlet <c.berlet at publiceye.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> OK, I tried to find what to do about this by reading Wikipedia pages, but navigation is--shall we say--incomprehensible to a novice in such matters.
>
> What is the proper procedure for alerting an admin that there is an editor systematically removing a reference from multiple pages?
>
> An editor is deleting "skinhead" from many pages. I do not think this is a content dispute. The user has been here for only a day and seems to have an agenda.
>
> Technically, it is not vandalism, but it is hardly a content dispute, either.
>
> User:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&target=70.50.15.50
>
> diffs:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Beast_Reawakens&diff=31269734&oldid=28286504
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Beast_Reawakens&diff=31269734&oldid=28286504
>
> Help, please.
>
> -Cberlet
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
>
>


body:
On 12/14/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> It's explicitly Not A Vote, so it's hard to see how to get around this one.
>
> I am tempted to summarily remove all tally boxes as blatant invitations
> to abuse of AFD as a straight vote.
>
>
> - d.

Unbold the votes while you're at it.  And remove any repetition, where
multiple people say the exact same thing.

Anthony


body:
On 12/14/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> It's explicitly Not A Vote, so it's hard to see how to get around this one.
>
> I am tempted to summarily remove all tally boxes as blatant invitations
> to abuse of AFD as a straight vote.
>
>
> - d.

Oh yeah, and be forewarned.  I was once blocked for doing exactly
that.  In fact, I was only removing the tally boxes that were
incorrect!

Anthony


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [WikiEN-l] More Seigenthaler fallout

body:
--- Mark Wagner <carnildo at gmail.com> wrote:
> Bad idea.  I don't know about other admins, but I use rollback for
> things other than vandalism and linkspam, such as widespread
> implementations of bad ideas.  Most recent case: someone had modified
> the wording of about three dozen stub templates in a way that implied
> that a particular wikiproject had ownership over the articles in
> question.

How is that a bad idea? The page history is for showing how an article developed. If a bit of text
is no longer in the article due to a revert for any purpose, then the edit that added it and the
edit that removed it need not be there forever. A week is long enough. In addition to removing
vandalism, the above idea would also help to de-clutter page histories.

-- mav

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


from_name: JAY JG

subject: [WikiEN-l] 3RR Unenforceable

body:
>From: Jtkiefer <jtkiefer at wordzen.net>
>Ryan Delaney wrote:
>
>>Jtkiefer wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>>It's gotten to the point where 3RR has become unenforceable. Any
>>>administrator who tries to enforce 3RR regulations posted on AN/3RR
>>>are subsequently villified, accused of bias, amd/or threatened with
>>>an RFC if they continue doing their job. Due to this many editors
>>>stay away from enforcing 3RR and I think something needs to be
>>>changed so that admnistrators can actually enforce this rule without
>>>fear.
>>>
>>>
>>
>>In my experience, this is the case with just about any enforcement
>>policy. When you judge that someone has violated policy, they conclude
>>that you are "involved" and therefore should not be the one to enforce
>>the policy.  The implicit logic is that any administrator who
>>familiarized him or her self with the case and chose to act in an
>>administrative function because the situation called for it is now
>>"involved". That may be true by definition, but it doesn't imply
>>conflict of interest. Yet a lot of people -- including other
>>administrators, in my direct experience -- have been subliminally
>>persuaded by this faulty reasoning.
>>
>>Ryan
>>
>>
>Yes it happens with quite a few policies most recently NPOV but 3RR is
>something that's not just like other policies where occasionally issues pop
>up but 3RR at the fundamental level seems to be flawed by the fact that it
>is misused by those who wish to gain an upper edge in content disputes and
>administrators who try to enforce it have to end up digging through edit
>warring and conflicts many times and much of the time end up being
>villified for it even more than administrators normally are for doing their
>jobs... and coming from someone who gets threats and personal attacks
>against him quite a bit that's saying a lot.  Enforcing 3RR has become an
>everyday battle. ~~~~

The alternative is (and was) worse.

Jay.


body:
Tony Sidaway wrote:
> On 12/14/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:

>>Whenever you hit "Random page" and get an article with no references and
>>no external links that isn't a stub. That's how I do it! Get in the
>>habit until people get the idea about these things.
>>Heck, it strikes me as eminently bot-assistable - no external links, no
>>word "References" or "Sources", no stub message, flag it for the
>>operator to press the button on.

> And the first editor, and the last three editors, get a message on
> their talk pages?  I'd go with that.

Bot-posted talk page messages are ill favoured. I think the last one was
Ram-man's about asking people to CC their contributions to Rambot US
place articles.

- d.


from_name: Taco Deposit

subject: [WikiEN-l] Arbitration Committee Elections December 2005

body:
On 12/14/05, Fl Celloguy <flcelloguy at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Just a friendly announcement: Jimbo has announced that the ArbCom
> elections
> procedure will be his second proposal, a hybrid procedure, after closing
> the
> straw poll. Check [[Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December
> 2005]] for more information.

Does "patterned as closely as is reasonable after the RfA process" mean that
everyone's support/oppose vote will be visible to all? And that
special:boardvote will therefore not be used?

TD


subject: [WikiEN-l] 3RR Unenforceable

body:
On 12/13/05, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/13/05, Jtkiefer <jtkiefer at wordzen.net> wrote:
> > It's gotten to the point where 3RR has become unenforceable.  Any
> > administrator who tries to enforce 3RR regulations posted on AN/3RR are
> > subsequently villified, accused of bias, amd/or threatened with an RFC
> > if they continue doing their job. Due to this many editors stay away
> > from enforcing 3RR and I think something needs to be changed so that
> > admnistrators can actually enforce this rule without fear.
> >
> >
> The 3RR was one of those ideas that may have seemed good at the time
> (I supported the proposal).  In practice it seems to be used for two
> bad purposes:
>
> * to justify the notion that making up to three reverts per day is a
> normal mode of editing
> * to bait hotheads and get them into trouble
>

That is more a symptom of other problems, though (and I say this as
someone who doesn't support the 3RR as a rule but only a guideline).

There needs to be better mechanisms for dispute resolution: somewhere
people can turn to when they disagree over an article and using the
talk page is not resolving the problem; somewhere where there are
established precedents for dealing with certain types of situations
that come up over and over again; somewhere that the wise citizens of
Wikipedia occassionally hang out in and can diffuse the situations by
pointing to policies and precedents.  This would make both revert wars
and the 3RR unnecessary.

I see the proper place for this as the RfC page.  But the RfC page is
not utilized very well.  But then again, maybe I'm overoptimistic as
to how easy these things are to resolve.


body:
On 12/14/05, Taco Deposit <tacodeposit at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 12/14/05, Fl Celloguy <flcelloguy at hotmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Just a friendly announcement: Jimbo has announced that the ArbCom
> > elections
> > procedure will be his second proposal, a hybrid procedure, after closing
> > the
> > straw poll. Check [[Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December
> > 2005]] for more information.
>
>
> Does "patterned as closely as is reasonable after the RfA process" mean
> that everyone's support/oppose vote will be visible to all? And that
> special:boardvote will therefore not be used?
>
> TD
>

To elaborate: I'm not sure how much different this is from the
"disendorsements" that seem to be so widely reviled.

TD


from_name: Stephen Bain

subject: [WikiEN-l] Simple interface tweak?

references:
<7d75d40512130631q5bd1bffaj205e84004c3524b4@mail.gmail.com>
	<439EE285.9050904@gawab.com> <op.s1qkr4aar18sbe@mainframe.mshome.net>
	<9f02ca4c0512131200o19a62eban@mail.gmail.com>

body:
On 12/14/05, Rowan Collins <rowan.collins at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Meanwhile, I think a version of this may actually *already be
> implemented* in the software, but switched off on Wikimedia sites,
> probably for performance reasons. See
> http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=727 and
> http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3128

Consider running a query on a local installation:
(http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_queries)
or running a query at http://www.wikisign.org/ (although this uses
slightly out of date dumps), and then posting the results to somewhere
like [[Wikipedia:Most watched pages]] or [[Wikipedia:Least watched
pages]].

Doing it live would be very resource intensive, this way would not use
the wikimedia servers at all, and would be reasonably accurate
(depending on the frequency of updates).

--
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com


from_name: Bob Mellish

body:
On 12/14/05, Axel Boldt <axelboldt at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> >From the Village Pump, found by BanyanTree: the Australian newspaper
> The Age is the first to report on Nature's formal comparison of the
> science coverage in the English Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica:
>
>
> http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/online-encyclopedias-put-to-the-test/2005/12/14/1134500913345.html
>

That's a rather good showing for Wikipedia. As soon as the issue is
available at Nature's webpage, I'll look for more details.

Bob Mellish


body:
On 12/14/05, John Lee <johnleemk at gawab.com> wrote:
>
> Taco Deposit wrote:
>
> >Does "patterned as closely as is reasonable after the RfA process" mean
> that
> >everyone's support/oppose vote will be visible to all? And that
> >special:boardvote will therefore not be used?
> >
> >TD
> >
> >
> Presumably so, yes. I don't see what's so wrong about this. This is the
> nomination process, not the election itself.

What's the difference between publicly opposing a candidacy, and a
"disendorsement"?

TD