subject: [Foundation-l] Wikivacations

body:
R?sum? en fran?ais : je prend des vacances pour d?m?nager.

After months spent to find a new house, then very stressful weeks fighting with banks, insurrance and other administrative tasks, my family and I are now in the middle of the most physical part of it, moving.

For those interested, we are moving from a small flat in a rather noisy street in the middle of Clermont Ferrand, to a rather big house in a tiny city (Malintrat... no use looking in the encyclopedia... yet) about 20mn away. The house is at the end of Malintrat, with nearby corn, wheat, sunflower and beet fields. Slightly further is a beet factory (expect pictures of this oddity... it is the most southernish beet factory in France...). The nearest bigger city is Aulnat, where our international airport stands (international... with at least 5 non french destinations... Amsterdam included).

The house has 5 rooms, a big living room, one kitchen, 2 bathrooms, one cellar (which will be used as a cellar...), 2 rooms for washing machines and other heating devices, 2 garages, huge terrasse and balcony (to host smokers).
Add a pond with a waterlily and some fishes, several neat trees, a bunch of nearly dead rose bushes, and a big previously-vegetable-garden-now-a-place-full-of-weeds (expect an article on lumbago). There is certainly gardening work to provide...
In any cases, there is enough place to host anyone visiting.

Currently, there is no city gaz, no city sewage, no heating yet (and snow is expected today...)... But normally, the DSL internet connection is possible ! (this is the first thing I checked after visiting the house... wikiholic indeed).
Still, I expect that my current phone line will be cut between today and saturday, and the internet connection must be built before entering into service. Since France is a rather underdevelopped country, it takes between 5 to 8 days *after* the phone line enters into service.

Immediate consequence : I will be on forced wikivacations (which is a very good idea actually) from today or tomorrow till possibly the 20th. I will be able to check my personal email as soon as the 16th when back to work, but since I limit myself to email activity from my work place, I won't check wiki, nor mailing lists (I do not receive mails from mailing lists except for wikimediafr-l), nor blogs, and I won't be on irc. If you need to join me, please do so at my personal email adress.

More long lasting consequence : I was home for lunch everyday, since my working place was near my appartment. That allowed me to be on irc. This won't be the case anymore. I will use lunch time for email answering, grant writing, and any other external activities which do not require access to wiki. I am not worried for lack of activity, but I regret I won't read you guys as much.

Besides, since I will live in a "castle", the computer wont be in the main room anymore, so I wont be able to type on irc, stir dinner in the pan, drop washing power on the floor, and supervise kids schoolwork at the same time and place. On the bright side, the family should welcome a new computer by 2005, hence reducing human competition for access. (expect new bugs as I will explore new OS system and new browser though).

Next deadline is Rotterdam where I will spent the week end of the 27th. I look forward meeting many of you.

Cheers. Anthere

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
 Check out the new Yahoo! Front Page. www.yahoo.com


list: wikimedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Anthere

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikivacations


list: wikien-l

from_name: Mark Richards

subject: [WikiEN-l] The Onion!

body:
Check out the Onion this week for an article on Wikipedia!
Mark

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
 Check out the new Yahoo! Front Page. www.yahoo.com


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] Troll?

body:
For our purposes, except when used inappropriately as an insult or as a way
of harrassing folks who disagree with you, these are the operative
definitions:

> 3. Troll is anybody who intends to destroy a community.
> 4. Troll is anybody who intends to be entertained at the expense of other
> users.

Fred


list: wikipedia-l

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] This is the beginning of a "today in
	wikipedia"-section in major newspapers

body:
This article is very low quality and obviously written by someone who has no
experience at editing or administrating on Wikipedia and is just trying to
cherrypick humourous examples of our interactions.

However, I think we should begin producing a short column of this nature
which in an entertaining way supplies an account of Wikipedia interactions
and release it to internet and paper publications on a daily basis, (perhaps
a syndicate could pick it up.

Fred

> From: Mathias Schindler <neubau at presroi.de>
> Reply-To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> Date: Wed, 10 Nov 2004 06:42:11 +0100
> To: Mailingliste der deutschsprachigen Wikipedia <wikide-l at Wikipedia.org>,
> wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> Subject: [Wikipedia-l] This is the beginning of a "today in wikipedia"-section
> in major newspapers
>
> We should start a wikipedia weather forecast.
>
>
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/10/arts/10wiki.html
>
> CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
> Mudslinging Weasels Into Online History
> By SARAH BOXER
>
> Published: November 10, 2004
>
>
> about NPOV: "But each one has a different view of that job. And that is
> where the fun begins."
>
> about protecting pages: "Thus Senator Kerry and President Bush took
> their places next to the other untouchables in the Wikipedia: Ariel
> Sharon, Osama bin Laden, Rush Limbaugh and Salvador Allende."
>
> about foreign admins: "One administrator, a German computer programmer,
> wrote, "Hopefully once the elections are over this article won't be the
> prime vandalism target anymore.""
>
> about the election: "one Wikipedia administrator humbly proposed an
> addition to the Bush page "We should probably go ahead and add something
> about him winning the election, with or without mentioning the help of
> Diebold Electronics and ESS,""
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


subject: [WikiEN-l] The Onion!

body:
Check out the article in the Onion this week on Wikipedia!
Mark

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
 Check out the new Yahoo! Front Page. www.yahoo.com


from_name: Mathias Schindler

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] This is the beginning of a "today in
 wikipedia"-section in major newspapers

body:
We should start a wikipedia weather forecast.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/10/arts/10wiki.html

CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
Mudslinging Weasels Into Online History
By SARAH BOXER

Published: November 10, 2004

about NPOV: "But each one has a different view of that job. And that is
where the fun begins."

about protecting pages: "Thus Senator Kerry and President Bush took
their places next to the other untouchables in the Wikipedia: Ariel
Sharon, Osama bin Laden, Rush Limbaugh and Salvador Allende."

about foreign admins: "One administrator, a German computer programmer,
wrote, "Hopefully once the elections are over this article won't be the
prime vandalism target anymore.""

about the election: "one Wikipedia administrator humbly proposed an
addition to the Bush page "We should probably go ahead and add something
about him winning the election, with or without mentioning the help of
Diebold Electronics and ESS,""


list: foundation-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Crazy desires

body:
Rich Holton a ?crit:
> --- Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote: (in part)
>
>
>>I'd like that more people make the effort to use a
>>simple english.
>>
>
>
> This is a very reasonable request. Like many from the
> US, I know only one language. It seems that the least
> people like me can do is write in a simple style.
>
> However, I'm not really sure what sort of sentences
> give the most trouble to speakers of other languages.
> How careful do I need to be? Can I offend by being too
> simple?
>
> I would really appreciate your comments.
>
> -Rich Holton (Rholton)

I wish I really knew...

when the audience is small and not very good in english, write sentences
of the type ''subject + verb + complement''.

Avoid familiar language and slang

Sometimes, to be kind, some editors run a comment in google translation,
and post only the google translation.
Please do not do this; if you post a google translation, always add the
original as well (it helps understanding the translation...)

I recommand any of those understanding 2 languages to experiment with
automatic translations. Recently, I had to do some nl -> en and I
realised I could very well understand some editors while others just
cant be understood.

When some one does not understand what you say, rephrase in a different
way, with other words. That might sound simple, but some people just
keep using similar sentence with similar words and construction. This is
not really a language issue, but a communication one.

 > Can I offend by being too simple?
Tricky...
We are all different...


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Crazy desires


from_name: Michael Snow

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Shrinking and expanding at the same time (was AC with a
 small quorum and IRC meetings)

body:
Tim Starling wrote:

> Rebecca wrote:
>
>> I think is an excellent idea: kudos to you both.
>>
>> The two things that I'd been keen to know first, however, are - would
>> this involve a reduction in the number of arbitrators, as in Michael's
>> proposal,
>
> No. The number of arbitrators could well be increased. Michael wanted
> to reduce the number of arbitrators to reduce the number of people
> required for a decision, our proposal is to reduce that number more
> directly, while retaining a low workload on each arbitrator and
> keeping a wide variety of views on the committee.

There remains a problem, which is that if you take more arbitrators and
divide them into smaller panels, but have panel decisions subject to
review by the full committee, then the full committee will be too large
to work effectively as a body. If twelve is too many now, what if we
have thirty?

I think there are good ideas in all of the proposals that have been
advanced, and we can put something workable together. I would suggest
that the current Arbitration Committee continue in existence, but shrink
to nine members, and primarily handle reviews of decisions by
three-person panels. The panels would be drawn from a larger pool with
no fixed number of positions. This pool we might call magistrates.

A panel would consist of three people as proposed - any combination of
magistrates and arbitrators could form the panel. The panel would have
the same authority as the Arbitration Committee has now. It could place
users on revert parole or personal attack parole, issue standing orders,
and also impose bans.

Panels can be formed on an ad hoc basis and deliberate wherever
appropriate and convenient for the magistrates. We can have a page for
submitting cases and another where the magistrates document rulings, so
the admins know which users are under some type of ban or probation.

This would allow smaller panels to reach relatively quick decisions. It
would allow magistrates to self-select their workload to some extent,
and those that can't or don't want to constantly be involved don't have
to be. Meanwhile, the Arbitration Committee would remain a more
deliberate process, although I also agree with elian's suggestion that
arbitration could use more explicit deadlines. Something like one or two
weeks for participants to present their evidence, then an additional
week or two for deliberations, with some flexibility according to the
nature of the case.

There remains the question of how to choose a substantial pool of
magistrates. Should we work this in as part of the arbitration election,
and if so, will we get enough people? Should we have Jimbo or the Board
make appointments, or take volunteers subject to an approval process in
a way similar to adminship? When this kind of idea has been discussed in
the past, it has often been in the context of having _all admins_ be
what I'm calling "magistrates". But I think that approach will get
nowhere because too many people are uncomfortable with giving certain
existing admins that kind of power.

--Michael Snow


from_name: Anthony DiPierro

subject: [WikiEN-l] blocked due to bug

body:
Hi all,

My IP address (4.63.105.149) is currently blocked due to a bug in the
mediawiki code.  Can someone please fix this?

Anthony


from_name: Lars Aronsson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] An honorable compromise and no: or nb: forBokmål?

body:
Bjarte Sorensen wrote:
> Lars Alvik (user:Profoss) on the debate on no:, and I think it is a
> very honorable compromise:
>
> 1. Bokm?l stays at no: for these reasons:
> * Interwiki-links will otherwise need to be corrected
> * Other active links (e.g. Google) will be rendered dead
> * www.wikipedia.org points to en.wikipedia.org, which is the major language
> 2. The interwiki-name is changed. "Norsk" is changed to "Norsk (bokm?l)" and
> "Nynorsk" is changed to "Norsk (nynorsk)".

This sounds very reasonable.  Everybody should be happy.  I think this
is a lasting solution and not a temporary compromise.  I don't see a
switch to nb: anytime in the future.

> The concept of "Norwegian" language (written and spoken) is easy to
> understand and unambiguous for non-Norwegians you say. I think this
> debate has proven the opposite. It is hard even for us!

I disagree.  This issue is hard *only* for Norwegians.  When you see
it from a greater cultural distance, you see the forest ("Norwegian")
rather than the individual trees.  I'm Swedish and I understand
"Norwegian", including all major dialects, written or spoken, which
means I can go almost anywhere in Norway without a dictionary.

> I wouldn't exactly call a language with a user base of
> 400,000-800,000 a small language either, on a Scandinavian scale,
> although it is the minor of the four.

And I'm frustrated with Swedish being such a small language, having
only 9 million speakers, the population of Michigan.  Consider the
business of publishing an Encyclopedia Michigania with no market at
all in Ohio or Ontario.  Still, four or five major encyclopedias have
been published in Swedish in the 20th century alone, the biggest one
in 38 volumes.  Swedish and Nynorsk would just be dialects of a common
Danish tongue with 19 million speakers (the population of North
Rhine-Westphalia or the state of New York), hadn't the Kalmar union
split up in the 1520s.  But it's too late to save it now.

--
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se


list: wikitech-l

subject: [Wikitech-l] web traffic stats

body:
Webalizer statistics on http://en.wikipedia.org/stats/
haven't been updated since October 18th.  This is a tragedy.
It's been shaky since September 23rd, but July and August were fine.
What's wrong?  Can anybody fix it?

--
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se


from_name: Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] The Onion!

body:
Charles Matthews wrote:
> Mark Richards wrote
>
> > Check out the Onion this week for an article on Wikipedia!
>
> http://www.theonion.com/opinion/index.php?issue=4045&o=2
>
> Errs (the parody rant) on the side of being far too reasonable.
>
> Charles

Agreed.  I get complaint emails that are funnier than this one on a
regular basis.  :-)

--Jimbo


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Shrinking and expanding at the same time (was AC
	with a small quorum and IRC meetings)

body:
I think we should simply empanel a 3 person jury from active users
(including folks who are not administrators) and let them make a decision.
If someone is dissatisfied they can appeal to the arbitrators and get a new
trial.

Fred

> From: Michael Snow <wikipedia at earthlink.net>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Wed, 10 Nov 2004 07:22:38 -0800
> To: wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Shrinking and expanding at the same time (was AC with a
> small quorum and IRC meetings)
>
> There remains the question of how to choose a substantial pool of
> magistrates. Should we work this in as part of the arbitration election,
> and if so, will we get enough people? Should we have Jimbo or the Board
> make appointments, or take volunteers subject to an approval process in
> a way similar to adminship? When this kind of idea has been discussed in
> the past, it has often been in the context of having _all admins_ be
> what I'm calling "magistrates". But I think that approach will get
> nowhere because too many people are uncomfortable with giving certain
> existing admins that kind of power.


from_name: vic

subject: [Wikitech-l] Future of mediawiki is tied to wikipedia ?

body:
Hi ...
I would like to know if the development lines of mediawiki will be
extensively
tied (or slown down) because of wikipedia ...
The reason of my question, is that i am recently reading the mailing
list , and show
that developers and contributions are allways extensily closed to
wikipedia requirements,
not open to new ideas beyond enciclopedias.
A general use wiki with mediawiki engine would be great, ( i am using it
to developments
documentation) ... but it lacks features like authentication and email
notifications
 (i know the 1.4 plans on this features), that i think are being slown
down by the
WIKIPEDIA ...

What is your oppinion ???

Another branch of mediawiki with general features would be great.

regards

--
Problems with Windows - Reboot.
Problems with Linux   - Be root.

Vic (aKa CoffMan)
vic at wickle.com
wickle at gmail.com


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikivacations

body:
--- Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>  ...
> Immediate consequence : I will be on forced wikivacations (which is a very
> good idea actually) from today or tomorrow till possibly the 20th. I will be
> able to check my personal email as soon as the 16th when back to work, but
> since I limit myself to email activity from my work place, I won't check
> wiki, nor mailing lists (I do not receive mails from mailing lists except for
> wikimediafr-l), nor blogs, and I won't be on irc. If you need to join me,
> please do so at my personal email adress.

Have a nice Wikivacation Ant! I hope moving isn't too stressful for you (it
always is for me).

-- mva

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Check out the new Yahoo! Front Page.
www.yahoo.com


subject: [Foundation-l] Wikivacations


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Crazy desires

body:
--- Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I recommand any of those understanding 2 languages to experiment with
> automatic translations. Recently, I had to do some nl -> en and I
> realised I could very well understand some editors while others just
> cant be understood.

If the original is not grammatically correct, then the automatic translation is
very often unintelligible. Humans are much more forgiving than computers.

-- mav

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Check out the new Yahoo! Front Page.
www.yahoo.com


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Crazy desires


from_name: Jim Redmond

subject: [WikiEN-l] The Onion!

body:
Mark Richards wrote:
> Check out the Onion this week for an article on Wikipedia!

d'oh!  I just sent that link to the list!

Anyway, here it is:
I Must Take Issue with the Wikipedia Entry for 'Weird Al' Yankovic
http://www.theonion.com/opinion/index.php?issue=4045&o=2

What really cracks me up about this piece is how accurately they parody
our POV warriors.

--
Jim Redmond  [[User:Jredmond]]
jim at scrubnugget.com


from_name: Ulf Lunde

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: An honorable compromise and no: or nb: for Bokmå l?

body:
Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:
 >
 > Bjarte Sorensen wrote:
 >
 >> Bokm?l stays at no: [...]
 >
 > This sounds very reasonable.  Everybody should be happy.  I think this
 > is a lasting solution and not a temporary compromise.  I don't see a
 > switch to nb: anytime in the future.

I truly wish it was that simple!

The main problem with the (otherwise very nice) proposed solution is
the proposed use
of "no:" exclusively for the bokm?l form, something most nynorsk users
will never accept.
Therefore, it is the existing solution which is the compromise, and the proposed
"compromise" is no compromise at all, but will probably be regarded by
many as the
bokm?l users "stealing" the common "no:" code for their own use, thus
igniting a real
conflict.

It is misleading to say "Bokm?l stays at no:", because "no:" was never
a pure bokm?l
Wikipedia.  "no:" has so far been the *common Norwegian* Wikipedia.
However, since
"nb:" exists only as a link to "no:", and since nynorsk now has its
own Wikipedia at "nn:",
almost all new articles in "no:" are in bokm?l.  But that still does
not change the
meaning of the ISO code "no:".

 >> [...] for these reasons:
 >> * Interwiki-links will otherwise need to be corrected
 >> * Other active links (e.g. Google) will be rendered dead
 >> * www.wikipedia.org points to en.wikipedia.org, which is the major language

The first two reasons are simply false, as long as we do not remove
all existing articles
from "no:" when creating "nb:".  If we do move an article away from
"no:", we should
leave a link to its new home in "nb:" or "nn:", or to both if it
exists in both.  No problem,
and no dead links!

The third reason is a pretty far-fetched analogue to a different kind
of umbrella address.
If there were only two Wikipedia languages in the world, and they both
had the same
official status, I think that www.wikipedia.org would point to both,
not just to the bigger one.

> I'm frustrated with Swedish being such a small language, having only 9 million speakers,

(For your information, only 63 of the world's approximately 6,700
living languages
have more native speakers than that, so Swedish is in the top 1% if
we're talking size.
There is hardly any standard by which you can call Swedish a "small" language.)

As languages go, nynorsk actually has a rather big and active user
base, and most
nynorsk users are also very conscious (some would say "sensitive")
about language
issues, having always been overshadowed by its "bigger brother",
bokm?l.  In many
contexts, nynorsk users resent very strongly the use of the word
"Norwegian" (or "norsk")
when what is meant is "bokm?l".  I predict that by promoting such
inaccurate use of
the code for "Norwegian", the proposed solution would make a lot of
people very upset.

This was yet another (unspoken) reason why my original proposal did not opt for
any kind of renaming or moving of existing Wikipedias, just the
creation of a new one
("nb:") in addition to the existing ones.  I still think that is the
best way to go.

Ulf Lunde

Some references:
 Languages of the world ordered by number of users:
http://bertilow.com/lanlin/lingvoj.html
 Languages of the world ordered by language family:
http://geography.about.com/msub83.htm


from_name: Shane King

subject: [WikiEN-l] Troll?

body:
On Tue, Nov 09, 2004 at 05:55:59PM -0700, Josiah wrote:
> Forgive my ignorance, but what exactly does it mean to be a Troll?
>
> Josiah (user:yoshiah_ap)

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


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Troll?

body:
NSK wrote:

>On Wednesday 10 November 2004 02:55, Josiah wrote:
>
>
>>what exactly does it mean to be a Troll?
>>
>>
>It's an insult and when used on Internet communities it has several meanings:
>1. Troll is anybody who is disliked by the person who uses that word.
>2. Troll is anybody who disagrees with the older users or the administrators.
>3. Troll is anybody who intends to destroy a community.
>4. Troll is anybody who intends to be entertained at the expense of other
>users.
>
>When used outside the context of Internet communities, a troll is a Nordic
>dwarf and http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=trolling
>
The internet definitions that you provide suggests a particular POV,
especially the imputation of intent.

Although a troll can indeed be a nordic dwarf, that may not be the
appropriate meaning.

More relevant is that the verb "to troll" is a fishing term to describe
fishing method where by a fishing line with one or more often baited
hooks is dragged behind a moving boat.  The line itself can be referred
tp by the noun "the troll".

By transference to internet parlance it becomes the practice of putting
out bait to see who will grab it.  The advice to not feed the trolls
thus becomes a warning to the fish that they should not attempt to eat
the fishhooks.

Trolling need not be inherently bad, though unfortunately many who troll
do tend to take advantage of others.  Sometimes putting out a little
bait may be the only way to encourage a discussion that people tend to
avoid.  That practice, of course, needs to be used with great caution to
avoid having the discussion deflected from the issue to the person who
raised it.

Ec


from_name: NSK

subject: [WikiEN-l] Troll?

body:
On Wednesday 10 November 2004 02:55, Josiah wrote:
> what exactly does it mean to be a Troll?

It's an insult and when used on Internet communities it has several meanings:
1. Troll is anybody who is disliked by the person who uses that word.
2. Troll is anybody who disagrees with the older users or the administrators.
3. Troll is anybody who intends to destroy a community.
4. Troll is anybody who intends to be entertained at the expense of other
users.

When used outside the context of Internet communities, a troll is a Nordic
dwarf and http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=trolling

--
NSK
Admin of http://portal.wikinerds.org
Project Manager of http://www.nerdypc.org
Project Manager of http://www.adapedia.org


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Delay of emails

body:
On Nov 10, 2004, at 5:55 AM, Walter Vermeir wrote:
> I noticed that emails send to the mailing lists the last days
> sometimes takes
> several hours to arrive. This is not a complaint, only a notice.

The mail server sometimes gets clogged up and stops delivering mail
until it's restarted. We haven't quite figured out why yet.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
On Nov 10, 2004, at 2:24 AM, vic wrote:
> A general use wiki with mediawiki engine would be great, ( i am using
> it to developments
> documentation) ... but it lacks features like authentication

What does 'authentication' mean to you? Normally this means a password
check to ensure that someone logging in as a particular user in fact is
that user. Obviously this is something we already have... ;)

External authentication system plugins would also be nice, and some
people have been starting on that; for instance there's an LDAP
authentication patch which should be a good starting point if someone
wants to take that up.

>  and email notifications
> (i know the 1.4 plans on this features), that i think are being slown
> down by the WIKIPEDIA ...
>
> What is your oppinion ???

I'd say your opinions are not supported by fact. Wikipedia has nothing
to do with the work on the e-mail notification feature; there are
general issues still to be resolved with it (code style,
generalizability, maintainability, correctness, extensibility,
internationalization, etc), and Tom is *still working on it* -- it's
not finished.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
On Nov 10, 2004, at 12:33 PM, Delirium wrote:
> One that came up for me is a feature to not allow new accounts to
> become active without an administrator approving them first.

There is currently a feature to require that accounts be created by an
administrator. ($wgWhitelistAccount)

>   When combined with disallowing IP-user edits, this would allow
> MediaWiki to be used as an internal collaboration platform for
> not-open-to-the-public groups.  Allowing only logged-in users to even
> read pages would be a nice feature in some such cases as well.

$wgWhitelistEdit and $wgWhitelistRead already provide this.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] no or nb for Bokmal, or time to move to ISO 639-3?

body:
On Nov 10, 2004, at 5:05 AM, Pochung(Pektiong) Chen(Tan) wrote:
> The Norwegian language code problem might get a better solution using
> ISO 639-3. ISO 639-3 is not out yet, but it seems to be getting there.
> Here is the url to the draft
> http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/render_download.php?
> site_id=nrsi&format=file&media_id=ISO_DIS_639
> -3.5&filename=ISO_DIS_639-3.5.pdf
>
> In ISO 639-3 we will have
> nor= {nob, nno}, Norweigian (so called macrolanguage code)
> nob= Norweigian Bokmal
> nno= Norweigian Nynorsk

This doesn't really provide anything that ISO 639-1 doesn't already in
no, nb, nn.

> Another macrolanguage example is the Serbo-Croation
> hbs= {bos, hrv,srp}, Serbo-Croatian
> bos= Bosnian
> hrv= Croatian
> srp= Serbian

ISO 639-1 sh, bs, hr, sr. (Technically the sh code has been retired.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Bjarte Sorensen

body:
A recent suggestion to resolve this conflict has been put forward by Lars Alvik
(user:Profoss) on the debate on no:, and I think it is a very honorable
compromise:

1. Bokm?l stays at no: for these reasons:
* Interwiki-links will otherwise need to be corrected
* Other active links (e.g. Google) will be rendered dead
* www.wikipedia.org points to en.wikipedia.org, which is the major language
2. The interwiki-name is changed. "Norsk" is changed to "Norsk (bokm?l)" and
"Nynorsk" is changed to "Norsk (nynorsk)".
3. Both Bokm?l and Nynorsk wikis make sure to prominently "advertise" each other
on the respective main pages.
4. Bokm?l and riksm?l will be recognised languages on the Bokm?l Wiki, using
similar guidelines in regards to editing as American vs British English on en:

Other arguments for keeping no: has been
* It is the better-known name as it equates with the top-level domain .no
* Less work

I am happy to see that we may come close to an agreement and I agree with
everything, but unless a few conditions are fulfilled I don't agree with
point 1. My argument is outlined in my response to Lars Aronsson's post to the
list:

Lars Aronsson wrote:
> Are there really any no.wikipedia contributors who want this? I mean,
> outside of those who prefer the nn.wikipedia? Is this a "we should
> change our name" or "they should change their name" kind of issue?
> Or, if someone supports this change, how do we know they are among the
> "we" people and not covert nn.wikipedia supporters?

I think you're right. All contributors to the debate so far who are active on
both nn: and no: have been biased towards the "nb:" solution, while those who
are only active on no: are for keeping this code (at least 3 of the more than
100 active users who have spoken out as yet, I am worried others may be
deterred by comments like "we've had this discussion before" and "I'm tired of
this debate" from several administrators).

This is not in any way covert - I am quite open about my preference towards nn:,
but I also look at myself as eligible for an opinion about what should happen
at no: through being a user there, and through being more likely to help future
work on BOTH if I think the situation is fair.

I personally don't think it is right that the language with the greatest amount
of users gets to use our common (umbrella if you like) ISO code "no:" and
mistakable with the top-level domain ".no" when there already is a perfectly
good code, nb. It is interesting to note also that Swedish uses its ISO-code
(sv:), as does the Danish Wiki (da:) despite their respective top-level domains
of .se and .dk.

> I'm Swedish and not contributing to any of no or nn, even though I
> have no problem in reading and understanding them.  As much as I
> appreciate the efforts made to support dialects and small languages
> such as Icelandic and written Nynorsk, I think it would be a pity to
> abandon no.wikipedia and "Norwegian" as the name for it.  To most
> non-Norwegians, and I think also for many Norwegians, the concept of
> the "Norwegian" language (written and spoken) is easy to understand
> and unambigious, with Nynorsk being little more than a written
> dialect, such as we all have spoken dialects in various parts of our
> countries.  We also have no problem with American English being called
> "English" or Hochdeutsch being called "German", despite their
> separation from England and Plattdeutsch (Low Saxon).  Some 10--15
> percent of Norwegians write in Nynorsk, about twice the population of
> Iceland.  The no.wikipedia currently has 10 times more articles than
> nn.wikipedia.  Even if the gap is closing, it seems likely that
> no.wikipedia will continue to be the larger one by a factor of 2 or
> more.

The concept of "Norwegian" language (written and spoken) is easy to understand
and unambiguous for non-Norwegians you say. I think this debate has proven the
opposite. It is hard even for us! The concept of "Norwegian" language has been
an inflamed issue for hundreds of years, and despite many bokm?l users attempts
at trying to call they're own language for "norsk" and my preferred language for
"nynorsk" this is far from the definition recognised by any authority, whether
reference works or the Norwegian government. I wouldn't exactly call a language
with a user base of 400,000-800,000 a small language either, on a Scandinavian
scale, although it is the minor of the four.

I agree, it could be argued that Nynorsk, is like a "written dialect" if you
want, but is no more so than the three other written languages of Scandinavian
language, Swedish, Danish and Bokm?l. From a linguistic point of view, these
languages are not true languages as they are all mutually intelligible but
rather strong dialects (each with theire won contiunuae of dialects). Only
history and political borders have defined them as languages (cf the situation
with Chinese languages, which is kind of the reverse). In fact, Nynorsk and
Swedish lies roughly equally far away from Bokm?l.

About your final point about nynorsk always being smaller, that is possibly
true, and may be predicted since we are the smaller group. It must be pointed
out, however, that we have grown to a size of 10% of a 3 year old wiki within 2
months. I have no doubts that we will have a much higher production of articles
in proportion to our user base than any of the other Scandinavian languages -
very many people are excited about this first Nynorsk reference work in 40
years, and new contributors arrive regularly.

The conditions that will make me agree with Profoss' suggestion about retaining
no: for bokm?l are proposed below:

1. This is a temporary solution until its contributors feel ready to switch to
nb:, something which should happen within, say, a year.

OR

2. We state explicitly on the front pages of both nn: and no: why Bokm?l is
erronously situated on no: and that we are actively working towards a common
Scandinavian wikipedia where UI-language can be customized, there is a common
search function, common login, parallel texts and a common URI. (Maybe the
Scandinavian wikis can be a testing ground for developers with the aim of
implementing a similar system Wikipedia-wide?).

Finally I would like to say that I think that if having bokm?l on no: is
recognised as not entirely correct, there should be no poll. If it is a
mistake, it doesn't really matter whether the majority would like to keep this
mistake.

Sincerely yours,

Bjarte S?rensen, Sydney, Australia


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Shrinking and expanding at the same time (was AC with
	a small quorum and IRC meetings)

body:
--- Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
> I think we should simply empanel a 3 person jury from active users
> (including folks who are not administrators) and let them make a decision.
> If someone is dissatisfied they can appeal to the arbitrators and get a new
> trial.

I'm not dead fast opposed to such an idea, but I want to make very clear that
there is nothing simple about it:

*Who decides who is empaneled?
*A great many people will not want to participate and we can not compel anyone
to do so.
*The time it takes to empanel a jury will increase the total trial time.
*Any baned user will automatically appeal and thus the regular ArbCom will
still have to decide things (it could become a rubber stamping body though).

-- mav

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from_name: Delirium

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Crazy desires

body:
Anthere wrote:

> It is significant that I have been registered to this mailing list for
> months, and never participate, for it takes me to much time and energy
> to read the messages and even worse to answer to them.
> I use my mother language on purpose and hope that all english people
> here would make an effort to understand a message in a language which
> is not their mother language. Perhaps then would you perceive how
> difficult it is to assist to debates in a foreign language without
> mentionning how difficult it is for you.
>
> The Wikimedia Foundation should be more open to non english people
> since it is recovering a multilingual project.

I agree with the sentiment in general, but I don't see how else we could
do things.

I speak two languages fluently: English and (modern) Greek.  I can post
to this list in either.  If I posted in Greek, almost nobody would be
able to read it, so I don't.  If you get people from Greece, Germany,
France, Japan, and Spain all into one room, what language can they
speak?  English is the only language that has a chance of being even
partly understood by all those people.  It'd be nice if everyone could
post in Greek, Japanese, French, Chinese, or German as they wish, but
very few people can read all those languages.

-Mark


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Crazy desires


from_name: Ryan Lane

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Future of mediawiki is tied to wikipedia ? (Should
	LDAP Authentication be added to 1.4?)

body:
vic <vic <at> wickle.com> writes:

>
> Hi ...
> I would like to know if the development lines of mediawiki will be
> extensively
> tied (or slown down) because of wikipedia ...
> The reason of my question, is that i am recently reading the mailing
> list , and show
> that developers and contributions are allways extensily closed to
> wikipedia requirements,
> not open to new ideas beyond enciclopedias.
> A general use wiki with mediawiki engine would be great, ( i am using it
> to developments
> documentation) ... but it lacks features like authentication and email
> notifications
>  (i know the 1.4 plans on this features), that i think are being slown
> down by the
> WIKIPEDIA ...
>
> What is your oppinion ???
>
> Another branch of mediawiki with general features would be great.
>
> regards
>

I wouldn't so much say that authentication or email notification is being slowed
down by wikipedia (although i do imagine stuff like group/user based permissions
is). The current version of my LDAP authentication patch has been submitted, and
could probably be included in the 1.4 release (although it still needs bug
testing by someone other than myself).

The current version is actually not meant for larger sites like wikipedia, but
for smaller sites and internal use because it requires you to manage the LDAP
objects manually (which most organizations that use it internally would prefer).

The next version i'm aiming to let the wiki create users, change passwords, etc.
in the LDAP directory. This version will be aimed at large sites that are only
using their directory for authentication to the wiki.

I would like the current version to be added to 1.4 if it is feasible.


from_name: Walter Vermeir

subject: [Wikitech-l] Delay of emails

body:
I noticed that emails send to the mailing lists the last days sometimes takes
several hours to arrive. This is not a complaint, only a notice.

Greetings,
Walter Vermeir


from_name: Fred Bauder

body:
> From: Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Wed, 10 Nov 2004 13:15:25 -0800 (PST)
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Shrinking and expanding at the same time (was AC with
> a small quorum and IRC meetings)
>
> --- Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
>> I think we should simply empanel a 3 person jury from active users
>> (including folks who are not administrators) and let them make a decision.
>> If someone is dissatisfied they can appeal to the arbitrators and get a new
>> trial.
>
> I'm not dead fast opposed to such an idea, but I want to make very clear that
> there is nothing simple about it:
>
> *Who decides who is empaneled?

Selected randomly but assigned a ranking number (so if thirty are called,
and 6 accept within 12 hourse, only the 3 highest ranked would be
empaneled).

> *A great many people will not want to participate and we can not compel anyone
> to do so.

Must reply within 12 hours after selection or a new set of random users is
selected and notified.

> *The time it takes to empanel a jury will increase the total trial time.

Select more than actually needed. Experience will tell about how many need
to be selected to come up with 3 who accept.

> *Any baned user will automatically appeal and thus the regular ArbCom will
> still have to decide things (it could become a rubber stamping body though).

True, but if the work done by the jury is ok, it should go pretty fast. If
the work is not good, true, it might take quite a bit of time.

The downside would be that the work we do on trying to devise alternatives
to banning would suffer and the justice dispensed by the jury might be more
rigid, i.e. they might ban rather than trying to come up with alternatives.

Fred

>
> -- mav
>
> __________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
> http://mail.yahoo.com
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> On Nov 10, 2004, at 2:24 AM, vic wrote:
>
>> A general use wiki with mediawiki engine would be great, ( i am using
>> it to developments
>> documentation) ... but it lacks features like authentication
>
>
> What does 'authentication' mean to you? Normally this means a password
> check to ensure that someone logging in as a particular user in fact
> is that user. Obviously this is something we already have... ;)

One that came up for me is a feature to not allow new accounts to become
active without an administrator approving them first.  When combined
with disallowing IP-user edits, this would allow MediaWiki to be used as
an internal collaboration platform for not-open-to-the-public groups.
Allowing only logged-in users to even read pages would be a nice feature
in some such cases as well.

At the moment I implement this with .htaccess and a password, but that's
non-ideal, because there's one global password for access to the wiki,
which makes it easier for that one password to get leaked and less easy
to control.  It also means that if I want different users to have
different accesses, I have to set up completely separate wikis in
separate directories, and a user with access to two of them has to
remember two different wiki-access passwords.  If it were integrated
with the user system it'd be cleaner, at least for my purposes.

Of course, I haven't complained (until now, I suppose) because I'm not
(currently) offering to code it. =]

-Mark


from_name: Ashar Voultoiz

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Future of mediawiki is tied to wikipedia ?

body:
Hello vic,

vic wrote:
> Hi ...
> I would like to know if the development lines of mediawiki will be
> extensively tied (or slown down) because of wikipedia ...
> The reason of my question, is that i am recently reading the mailing
> list , and show
> that developers and contributions are allways extensily closed to
> wikipedia requirements,
> not open to new ideas beyond enciclopedias.

MediaWiki is originaly a hack of usedmodwiki to fits the need of
wikipedia, it eventually got used by other people for different matters.
Developpers are also somehow system administrators for wikimedia server
farms.

> A general use wiki with mediawiki engine would be great, ( i am using it
> to developments
> documentation) ... but it lacks features like authentication and email
> notifications
> (i know the 1.4 plans on this features), that i think are being slown
> down by the WIKIPEDIA ...

That's a call for new features, 1.4 have been under development for like
6 months and the .plan is to try to get it before the end of the year. I
personally think we have to freeze new features right now and start beta
testing. If we do so, new features will be included in january with a
possible release (ex: 1.5 around april 2005).

The good point is there is already some patches floating around:

_ Enotif for email notification but it isn't in cvs yet. It looks
complete and probably can be included in 1.4.
_ LDAP authentication, the patch is small and available in bugzilla. I
did not have the time to test it yet but it will certainly be included
in 1.4 (relativly minor patch).

Another patch I personally made is a new system to manage users, it's
not intend to wikipedia but a common request coming from the MediaWiki
user base.

Also, I am not sure we want email notification in wikipedia, cause it
also means the system team will have to manage two email servers and
that will raise our bandwith usage. Anyway it is a great feature and
deserves to be included in MediaWiki.

> What is your oppinion ???
>
> Another branch of mediawiki with general features would be great.

Na no more branch, it's complicate the developper work. Actually our
branches are:

* 1_3 : used to release current stable releases (1.3.x)
* 1_3A : tweaked 1_3 for wikipedia
* HEAD : the future 1.4.x
* SCHEMA_WORKS : a massive patch to change the database layout, will
probably be 1_5 once HEAD is moved to 1_4.

That also mean each time something is patched in HEAD for 1.3 it needs
to be backported to the 3 others branches.

In conclusion, MediaWiki development is a bit slow but it's moving. If
you know about PHP and are interested in open source development you are
welcome to join the team of developpers :o)

cheers,

--
Ashar Voultoiz - WP++++
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Hashar
Servers in trouble ? noc (at) wikimedia (dot) org


body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> On Nov 10, 2004, at 12:33 PM, Delirium wrote:
>
>> One that came up for me is a feature to not allow new accounts to
>> become active without an administrator approving them first.
>
>
> There is currently a feature to require that accounts be created by an
> administrator. ($wgWhitelistAccount)

Excellent; I had missed that.  Thanks!

-Mark


from_name: Thomas Gries

subject:
[Wikitech-l] How to: CVS/diff (including the diff of a new local
 file, not existing in CVS)

body:
A new module I have written was not  expressly included in the diff file
I have uploaded to bugzilla. That file is called
/maintenance/archives/patch-email-notification.sql and was my first
bugzilla upload.

Brion suggested to use the option -N. However, this does not work. Here
is the full command I use now, but this does not include the code of my
local new file in the diff file:

phase3> cvs -d :pserver:anonymous at cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/wikipedia
-z3 diff -N -u -b > myfiles_against_cvs14.diff

Can you please help me, how to modify the above command, so that the
(full) code of my new file is inlcuded in that
myfiles_against_cvs14.diff file ?
Tom


from_name: Charles Matthews

subject: [WikiEN-l] Troll?

body:
NSK wrote

> It's an insult and when used on Internet communities it has several
meanings:
> 1. Troll is anybody who is disliked by the person who uses that word.
> 2. Troll is anybody who disagrees with the older users or the
administrators.
> 3. Troll is anybody who intends to destroy a community.
> 4. Troll is anybody who intends to be entertained at the expense of other
> users.

Oh, do be quiet.  'Troll' has a definite meaning; 1 and 2 have nothing to do
with it.

Charles


subject: [WikiEN-l] The Onion!

body:
Mark Richards wrote

> Check out the Onion this week for an article on Wikipedia!

http://www.theonion.com/opinion/index.php?issue=4045&o=2

Errs (the parody rant) on the side of being far too reasonable.

Charles


from_name: Christopher Mahan

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Crazy desires

body:
--- Jens Ropers <ropers at ropersonline.com> wrote:

> On 9 Nov 2004, at 23:20, Rich Holton wrote:
>
> > --- Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote: (in part)
> >
> >>
> >> I'd like that more people make the effort to use a
> >> simple english.
> >>
> >
> > This is a very reasonable request. Like many from the
> > US, I know only one language. It seems that the least
> > people like me can do is write in a simple style.
> >
> > However, I'm not really sure what sort of sentences
> > give the most trouble to speakers of other languages.
> > How careful do I need to be? Can I offend by being too
> > simple?
> >
> > I would really appreciate your comments.
> >
> > -Rich Holton (Rholton)
>
> As a non-native speaker whose English language proficiency has
> developed to a level that now exceeds the skillset of quite a few
> native speakers, I have this to add:
>
> IMHO this is NOT a matter that would be helped by using simple and
> basic English throughout. A lot of non-native speakers are quite
> motivated to learn, and especially the more esoteric linguistic
> quirks
> can make discovering and using a language just so much more fun.

Likewise english is a second language for me. French is first,
although neglected of late.

What I would like to add is that for non-natives, since english is
tiring to read, the quality of the writing is important.

It is also very important that the writing be succinct.

When people ramble on, doing stream-of-consciousness writing because
they're pissed, not only does it not add anything constructive to the
general discussion, it also makes it harder to find the good text.

I suggest this: write short paragraphs, in correct and collegial
english, and focus on only one subject per paragraph.

If you are unable to do that: learn how.

=====
Chris Mahan
818.943.1850 cell
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
chris.mahan at gmail.com
http://www.christophermahan.com/

__________________________________
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www.yahoo.com


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Crazy desires


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Galleries on Wikipedia vs. galleries
	onWikimediaCommons

body:
On Nov 10, 2004, at 2:54 PM, James R. Johnson wrote:
> A single login would be quite nice.  My question is, with the same name
> being occupied on many different wikipedias, how would that be handled?
> Your "Eloquence at enwikipedia" suggestion, with the screen showing only
> "Eloquence" would be nice.  I agree to wait on a true solution rather
> than a
> hack.

This is an issue that's been giving us indigestion for a couple of
years. For some of the existing thought on the subject, please see:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Single_signon_transition

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [WikiEN-l] election fraud article

body:
--- Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> That said, I find the fact that people keep adding
> [[en:2004_U.S._Election_controversies_and_irregularities]] to the main
> page odd.  It's a poorly-written article that mostly cites amateurish
> statistical correlations (with lots of graphs) and draws unwarranted
> causations from them, and generally reads like it was written by the
> tinfoil-hat crowd.  Furthermore, this issue isn't really "in the news"
> by any stretch of the imagination, and even on left-leaning sites such
> as dailykos.com, it's controversial and not agreed upon.  In short, this
> article presents a viewpoint that:
> 1) Shouldn't be on the front page, based on newsworthiness and
> neutrality; and
> 2) Is controversial *even* by the standards of a left-wing community
> that agrees John Kerry would make a much better president than George W.
> Bush.
>
> As such, it would be nice if someone would remove it from the front
> page.  I've already reverted three times today, so will not do so again,
> but I feel it makes us look like we're both amateurish and biased.
>
> -Mark

I agree completely - and also voted for Kerry. As of right now, it isn't on the
Main Page.

-- mav

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from_name: Jens Ropers

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Crazy desires

body:
On 9 Nov 2004, at 23:20, Rich Holton wrote:

> --- Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote: (in part)
>
>>
>> I'd like that more people make the effort to use a
>> simple english.
>>
>
> This is a very reasonable request. Like many from the
> US, I know only one language. It seems that the least
> people like me can do is write in a simple style.
>
> However, I'm not really sure what sort of sentences
> give the most trouble to speakers of other languages.
> How careful do I need to be? Can I offend by being too
> simple?
>
> I would really appreciate your comments.
>
> -Rich Holton (Rholton)

As a non-native speaker whose English language proficiency has
developed to a level that now exceeds the skillset of quite a few
native speakers, I have this to add:

IMHO this is NOT a matter that would be helped by using simple and
basic English throughout. A lot of non-native speakers are quite
motivated to learn, and especially the more esoteric linguistic quirks
can make discovering and using a language just so much more fun. It may
be "hard fun" during that stage where you still have to look up words
and google for colloquialisms to finally cop on to a double-entendre,
but it's well worth it if you're asking me. I would have been quite
annoyed if at that learning stage people had tried to talk
"foreigner-speak" to me. That said, there's a place for everything and
as far as more formal processes (e.g. official announcement emails) are
concerned, a certain degree of unambiguity may be called for.

A newspeak-style reductionalism would be counterproductive. What is
mandatory however, is that any and all discourse remain sufficiently
''polite'', as well as ''open and accessible'' in terms of a
''readiness to further explain'' more intricate phraseology to the
uninitiated.

In short:
Using elaborate language is in itself not an issue we should worry
about too much. Personal preferences vary; let's not take exception at
them -- and if in any doubt at all: ask.
HOWEVER: Bad faith, superior airs and an unwillingness to explain
things in a non-snobbish way are The Real Problem -- and taunting
people on grounds of their limited knowledge of English is clearly
beyond the pale.

-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]]
     www.ropersonline.com


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Crazy desires


from_name: James R. Johnson

body:
I would like to see each wikipedia be able to view what's in the
Wiki-Commons from within their own wiki, but in their own language, and when
they upload a picture, they upload to the commons, not the wiki, thereby
saving server space.  So, if I log into the German wiki, I can edit a
description of the picture, and from English, Dutch, etc., I can do the same
thing, and it all describes the same picture, not multiple copies of the
same picture.

James

-----Original Message-----
From: wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Stan Shebs
Sent: Wednesday, November 10, 2004 5:32 AM
To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Galleries on Wikipedia vs. galleries on
WikimediaCommons

Erik Moeller wrote:

>Now that the Wikimedia Commons is being widely used as a central image
>archive - if you haven't already, check out http://commons.wikimedia.org/
>- we are facing the question again whether we want to store image
>galleries in Wikipedia.
>
I think it's worth suggesting that people take a look, but the
commons is not really ready for primetime; while there's been a
lot of energetic image dumping, not so much effort has gone into
organization or cross-reference support. My experience so far has
been to be confronted with piles of random uploads of monster
pictures, sort of like some horrible museum where if you express
interest in something, the docent grabs you and shoves you up
against the painting, and you have to walk back and forth with
your nose to the wall in order to view it. :-)

It also seems that there is not a consensus as to whether the
commons is a bare repository for editors to draw upon, versus
something that you want to send readers to. It would be unfortunate
to move a gallery there and then have somebody delete it because
"that's not what the commons is for."

Stan

_______________________________________________
Wikipedia-l mailing list
Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


from_name: Christopher Larberg

subject: [WikiEN-l] a smart wikipedian is needed.

body:
It looks like the pictures were moving the "edit" links into funny
places. I've rearranged them.

--Slowking Man

On Thu, 11 Nov 2004 12:45:28 +1100, Robin Shannon
<robin.shannon at gmail.com> wrote:
> Howdy, anybody got any idea why in [[amazon]] all the edit buttons for
> the sub-sections get squashed into just above ===enviromentalism=== ?
> i dont get it, and cant see how it could be fixed.
>
> paz y amor,
> rjs [[User:The bellman]]
>
> --
> hit me: robin.shannon.id.au
> jab me: saudade at jabber.zim.net.au
>
> This work is licensed under the Creative Commons
> Recombo Plus License. To view a copy of this license, visit
> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/sampling+/1.0/


from_name: Michael Snow

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Shrinking and expanding at the same time (was AC
 with a small quorum and IRC meetings)

body:
Fred Bauder wrote:

>I think we should simply empanel a 3 person jury from active users
>(including folks who are not administrators) and let them make a decision.
>If someone is dissatisfied they can appeal to the arbitrators and get a new
>trial.
>
>
As part of the Arbitration Committee + magistrates concept, one possible
benefit I can see is that anyone from the pool of magistrates could step
up and serve as a pro tem arbitrator when there are recusals. This
benefit would not be available if the panels are simply juries.

That doesn't necessarily prevent us from making use of the "jury of
peers" approach to justice, but I definitely think that any jury in that
sense needs to be larger than three people.

--Michael Snow


from_name: Jeff Warnica

body:
On Wed, 2004-10-11 at 15:33 -0500, Delirium wrote:
> Brion Vibber wrote:
>
> > On Nov 10, 2004, at 2:24 AM, vic wrote:
> >
> >> A general use wiki with mediawiki engine would be great, ( i am using
> >> it to developments
> >> documentation) ... but it lacks features like authentication
> >
> >
> > What does 'authentication' mean to you? Normally this means a password
> > check to ensure that someone logging in as a particular user in fact
> > is that user. Obviously this is something we already have... ;)
>
> One that came up for me is a feature to not allow new accounts to become
> active without an administrator approving them first.  When combined
> with disallowing IP-user edits, this would allow MediaWiki to be used as
> an internal collaboration platform for not-open-to-the-public groups.
> Allowing only logged-in users to even read pages would be a nice feature
> in some such cases as well.

....

There is a distinction between authentication and authorization.
Authentication is being who you say you are, and authorization is
permission to do whatever is in question. I don't know how much of a
distinction mediawiki makes between these two, but if we are talking
about it we may as well be using the right terms.


subject: [Wikitech-l] going for 1.4

body:
On Nov 9, 2004, at 4:33 PM, Ashar Voultoiz wrote:
> It looks like our .plan is to get 1.4 by the end of the year. I believe
> we should call for a "feature freeze" soon and launch the beta at the
> beginning of december.

I would like to be ready to launch a beta and rollout on Wiki[mp]edia
sites by two weeks from now (November 24), with a hard limit of three
weeks (December 1).

> Given that most dev will probably be out during the last weeks of
> december that will let us until ~ december 20th to fix the most
> important bugs. Then in January we can work toward the release
> candidate
> / 1.4.0.
>
> There is two huge patch as far as I know:
>
>  - Enotif : bring email notification in MediaWiki
>  _ Database schema change.

I like the way it's going to look, but there's just a lot of little
things to fix up and it's going to take a while. We should merge the
SCHEMA_WORK new schema in once we've got 1.4 rolled out.

I'd also like to move the release schedule up in the future; we've been
doing roughly three major releases a year, about 4 months apart. As
Tim's noted, we'd generally benefit more from faster integration. Being
a distributed, volunteer development team without any solid time
commitments from people makes smaller, focused releases harder to do,
unfortunately, but I'd like to see us try harder.

In particular we need to look at exposing extension hooks to make it
easy for people to plug in their custom modules.

> Enotif can probably be commited by the end of november and be shipped
> in
> the first 1.4 beta.

I'd like to merge the back-end support for it (the change to the
watchlist database) so it can be added as an extension more easily. If
a clean, stable notification front-end fits too in time, we'll see.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Proposal for the first annual staggered Arbitration
 Committee elections

body:
James D. Forrester wrote:

>I've jotted down a draft of the note about the upcoming December elections
>for the AC, along the same lines as Angela's first draft for the July ones.
>It's at:
>
>  [[Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2004]]
>
>Looking forward to some input and moving forwards,
>
>
I have tried to combine and condense the different proposals onto this
page and provided links to the relevant posts from the mailing list.
I'll try advertising the discussion a little more on the wiki at this point.

--Michael Snow


from_name: Pochung(Pektiong) Chen(Tan)

body:
The Norwegian language code problem might get a better solution using
ISO 639-3. ISO 639-3 is not out yet, but it seems to be getting there.
Here is the url to the draft
http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/render_download.php?site_id=nrsi&format=file&media_id=ISO_DIS_639-3.5&filename=ISO_DIS_639-3.5.pdf

In ISO 639-3 we will have
nor= {nob, nno}, Norweigian (so called macrolanguage code)
nob= Norweigian Bokmal
nno= Norweigian Nynorsk

For example, one can try to use nob exculsively for Bokmal, nno
exclusively for Nynorsk, and nor for common Noreigian (mixed script,
including other minority script, etc)

Another macrolanguage example is the Serbo-Croation
hbs= {bos, hrv,srp}, Serbo-Croatian
bos= Bosnian
hrv= Croatian
srp= Serbian

best
pektiong


subject: [WikiEN-l] election fraud article

body:
Personal political views disclaimer: I voted for John Kerry, and am of
the mind that the possibility of voter fraud in the just-completed
election cannot be altogether discounted.

---

That said, I find the fact that people keep adding
[[en:2004_U.S._Election_controversies_and_irregularities]] to the main
page odd.  It's a poorly-written article that mostly cites amateurish
statistical correlations (with lots of graphs) and draws unwarranted
causations from them, and generally reads like it was written by the
tinfoil-hat crowd.  Furthermore, this issue isn't really "in the news"
by any stretch of the imagination, and even on left-leaning sites such
as dailykos.com, it's controversial and not agreed upon.  In short, this
article presents a viewpoint that:
1) Shouldn't be on the front page, based on newsworthiness and
neutrality; and
2) Is controversial *even* by the standards of a left-wing community
that agrees John Kerry would make a much better president than George W.
Bush.

As such, it would be nice if someone would remove it from the front
page.  I've already reverted three times today, so will not do so again,
but I feel it makes us look like we're both amateurish and biased.

-Mark


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Galleries on Wikipedia vs. galleries on Wikimedia
	Commons

body:
Stan-
> I think it's worth suggesting that people take a look, but the
> commons is not really ready for primetime; while there's been a
> lot of energetic image dumping, not so much effort has gone into
> organization or cross-reference support. My experience so far has
> been to be confronted with piles of random uploads of monster
> pictures, sort of like some horrible museum where if you express
> interest in something, the docent grabs you and shoves you up
> against the painting, and you have to walk back and forth with
> your nose to the wall in order to view it. :-)

First, let me emphatically encourage everyone to upload the highest
resolution version of any image you have which still includes useful
information. It is of paramount importance for future print editions to
have high resolution versions of our most important images. Scaling
existing images down for display reasons is bad, bad, bad.

The CVS HEAD version of MediaWiki automatically scales down any super-
sized image on the Image: description page and provides a link to the
full-size version. Until this goes live, the huge image display on Image:
pages has to be considered a temporary inconvenience.

As for organization, the development version also contains a feature that
shows the thumbnails of images on Category: pages. That makes it quite
easy to create image galleries. In the future, I would also like it to be
possible to dynamically include captions from the image description pages,
so that when no caption is provided, and the image description page
contains one, it is used.

> It also seems that there is not a consensus as to whether the
> commons is a bare repository for editors to draw upon, versus
> something that you want to send readers to. It would be unfortunate
> to move a gallery there and then have somebody delete it because
> "that's not what the commons is for."

Well, that's why we should make a decision on this matter now. I'll go
with my proposed policy for now. In any case, useful information is
unlikely to be deleted outright - that's what Transwiki is for.

Regards,

Erik


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Galleries on Wikipedia vs. galleries on
	WikimediaCommons

body:
James-
> I would like to see each wikipedia be able to view what's in the
> Wiki-Commons from within their own wiki, but in their own language, and when
> they upload a picture, they upload to the commons, not the wiki, thereby
> saving server space.  So, if I log into the German wiki, I can edit a
> description of the picture, and from English, Dutch, etc., I can do the same
> thing, and it all describes the same picture, not multiple copies of the
> same picture.

If you have a Commons image like

        [[Image:Magnolia blossom.jpg]]

and you use it on a Wikipedia, e.g.:

        http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild:Magnolia_blossom.jpg

then you can edit the image description page and add a German text. The
image still comes from the commons - no disk space wasted.

However, it is not currently possible to upload files from any other
Wikimedia project directly to the Commons. That's because to do so, the
Commons would have to know who you are - and every wiki has its own
account database. We could use something like "Eloquence at enwikipedia" as
the identity, or offer an option to store the Commons password in the
preferences, but I'd rather wait until we have true single login instead
of using a temporary hack.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Gerrit

subject: [Wikitech-l] ANN: editarticle.py 0.1

body:
Hello,

I hate to use the browser editor when editing the article.
I hate it to cut 'n' paste into vim, because of line numbers, line
breaks, buffer size, etc.

So I created editarticle.py.

It currently runs from the commandline and is able to do only anonymous
edits. It requires pywikipediabot (latest CVS) and is included with it.
It should become available at
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/pywikipediabot/pywikipedia/ as
soon as Sourceforge got it. It's also temporarily mirrored at
http://topjaklont.student.utwente.nl/creaties/editarticle.py

The current version is 0.1.

regards,
Gerrit Holl.

--
Weather in Twenthe, Netherlands 10/11 22:25:
	4.0?C   wind 1.3 m/s None (57 m above NAP)
--
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of
unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the
military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of
misplaced power exists and will persist.
    -Dwight David Eisenhower, January 17, 1961


from_name: peter

subject: [Wikitech-l] Special:UserLogin

body:
I will start by admitting that I am new to Wikimedia but very much
impressed by this piece of software.

I am working a small community that consists of three parts that very
much do not work together, even so I have taken on the task to bring
PHPBB, Coppermine and Wikimedia together under one shared login.

I've managed to merge the user-databases together into one for all three
and Coppermine and PHPBB can share login session, which leaves me to
Wikimedia.

So my question is, how can I hack the login?

I can consider doing something strange like created a separate loginform
and post to a page which in turn posts to two different pages, the PHPBB
login and Wikimedia login. I've realised that Wikimedia has a class for
the login handling but I have not yet figured out how I can use it.

My thougt is that I can use this login-class on the login-page of PHPBB
and validate login there, which actually would be two different logins,
but be both should be done in the click of one button. Since username
and password are shared I can use only the validation from PHPBB and
only create the login-sessino and wikimedia, and of course, do a
similiar action when logging out.

How do I use the userlogin-class for this purpose? Is it even possible?

Regards,

Peter Andersson
peter at wa.se
http://wa.se


subject: [Wikitech-l] Special:UserLogin

body:
I'm sorry, of course I meant MediaWiki when I was writing Wikimedia.

My bad.
    /peter

peter wrote:
>
>
> I will start by admitting that I am new to Wikimedia but very much
> impressed by this piece of software.
>
> I am working a small community that consists of three parts that very
> much do not work together, even so I have taken on the task to bring
> PHPBB, Coppermine and Wikimedia together under one shared login.
>
> I've managed to merge the user-databases together into one for all three
> and Coppermine and PHPBB can share login session, which leaves me to
> Wikimedia.
>
> So my question is, how can I hack the login?
>
> I can consider doing something strange like created a separate loginform
> and post to a page which in turn posts to two different pages, the PHPBB
> login and Wikimedia login. I've realised that Wikimedia has a class for
> the login handling but I have not yet figured out how I can use it.
>
> My thougt is that I can use this login-class on the login-page of PHPBB
> and validate login there, which actually would be two different logins,
> but be both should be done in the click of one button. Since username
> and password are shared I can use only the validation from PHPBB and
> only create the login-sessino and wikimedia, and of course, do a
> similiar action when logging out.
>
> How do I use the userlogin-class for this purpose? Is it even possible?
>
>
> Regards,
>
> Peter Andersson
> peter at wa.se
> http://wa.se
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


from_name: jneden at bellsouth.net

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: An honorable compromise and no: or nb: for Bokm?
	l?

body:
Hi, everybody

First things first, I have by no means been active in the list lately, but I have been checking in with things. This is one topic I felt the need to discuss.

As a fairly competent (though not fluent) Norwegian speaker, I am well familiar with the bokm?l/nynorsk contrast and the political connotations they entail. Norway's unique lingual situation has been going on for over a century. While Swedes may not get it (and I understand that leaving bokm?l at no: might make a lot of sense), the use of no: (or a "macro-language" Norwegian code) for bokm?l implies that bokm?l is the "normal" form of Norwegian, whereas nynorsk is "specialty" Norwegian. They are neither. Nynorsk and bokm?l (I'm most fluent in the latter, which is admittedly the "big brother" in this situation) truly are equal forms of the greater spectrum of Norwegian dialects, and they deserve their place. To Norwegians, dialect matters much more than in many other countries. There are a lot of viable options here, but using no: or a general Norwegian code for bokm?l is simply not one of them.

Moving onto Swedish, the language of greater communication issue largely comes down to a matter of a linguistic nation's history of colonialism. Let's get real here, people: all languages are equally valuable. No language is inherently better than another language. Swedish is a large language by world standards. Let's look at some of the world's largest language populations, focusing on languages from Europe: French (colonialism), Portuguese (colonialism), Russian ("domestic" colonialism as the empire expanded; USSR connection), Spanish (colonialism), and English (colonialism: "native-language" areas, like Ireland, created in themselves by colonialism). Remaining top-ten languages tended to be spread by empires or areas where historical population booms happened. No comment. These languages are the exceptions, not the rule.

In regards to Norwegian, whatever happens, let Wikipedia be sensitive to the lingual needs of speakers of the "macro" Norwegian language. Thank you for your time.

 -- Jeremy


from_name: sannse

subject: [WikiEN-l] The Onion!

body:
Robin Shannon wrote:
> Well, all the facts from the onion have now been added to our article. Ironic?
>
> paz y amor,
> rjs [[User:The bellman]]
>

I whoever added them checked that they /were/ facts first

--sannse


body:
A single login would be quite nice.  My question is, with the same name
being occupied on many different wikipedias, how would that be handled?
Your "Eloquence at enwikipedia" suggestion, with the screen showing only
"Eloquence" would be nice.  I agree to wait on a true solution rather than a
hack.

James

-----Original Message-----
From: wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Erik Moeller
Sent: Wednesday, November 10, 2004 10:40 PM
To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Galleries on Wikipedia vs. galleries
onWikimediaCommons

James-
> I would like to see each wikipedia be able to view what's in the
> Wiki-Commons from within their own wiki, but in their own language, and
when
> they upload a picture, they upload to the commons, not the wiki, thereby
> saving server space.  So, if I log into the German wiki, I can edit a
> description of the picture, and from English, Dutch, etc., I can do the
same
> thing, and it all describes the same picture, not multiple copies of the
> same picture.

If you have a Commons image like

        [[Image:Magnolia blossom.jpg]]

and you use it on a Wikipedia, e.g.:

        http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild:Magnolia_blossom.jpg

then you can edit the image description page and add a German text. The
image still comes from the commons - no disk space wasted.

However, it is not currently possible to upload files from any other
Wikimedia project directly to the Commons. That's because to do so, the
Commons would have to know who you are - and every wiki has its own
account database. We could use something like "Eloquence at enwikipedia" as
the identity, or offer an option to store the Commons password in the
preferences, but I'd rather wait until we have true single login instead
of using a temporary hack.

Regards,

Erik
_______________________________________________
Wikipedia-l mailing list
Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Unicode normalization spot-checks

body:
One of the fun new things in MediaWiki 1.4 is validation and
normalization of UTF-8 text input. The wiki will strip out malformed
and illegal UTF-8 sequences, and normalize combining character
sequences to help avoid almost-but-not-quite-equal oddities. (See
http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr15/ for background.)

I figured it would be wise to do some spot-checks of the existing
databases to see just how much trouble we're in already... I checked
the October 30 'cur' table dumps for the Russian, Portuguese, and
Korean Wikipedias.

The normalization routine UtfNormal::cleanUp() does a first quick pass
to strip malformed UTF-8 byte sequences (this is extra optimized for
predominantly Latin or pure-ASCII text), and if any characters are
found during this pass that might indicate a non-normalized string a
slower, full normalization pass is conducted.

Portuguese (40422 pages):
  text requiring slow check:    193 (0.5%)
  non-normal or invalid text:    13 (0.0%)
  non-normal or invalid title:    7 (0.0%)
  non-normal or invalid comment:  1 (0.0%)
(All of the broken titles and the comment are illegal 8-bit latin-1
names on image pages, from an upload bot.)

Russian (14733 pages):
  text requiring slow check:    571 (3.9%)
  non-normal or invalid text:    18 (0.1%)
  non-normal or invalid comment:  3 (0.0%)
(A lot of these are Greek text fragments with non-normalized accent
characters.)

Korean (7998 pages):
  text requiring slow check:    780 (9.6%)
  non-normal or invalid text:   745 (9.3%)
(Most of these are Han characters which appear in a special
'compatibility' duplicate encoding area, and are normalized to the
standard unified Han encoding of the same character. Many more are the
Greek (!?) middle-dot character being replaced by the Latin one, which
is the preferred encoding. This seems to get used in the formatting of
lists.)

The full normalization check of Korean text is the worst case for my
code -- every syllable gets decomposed into constituent parts and
reassembled, and it can add about a second to the save/preview time for
a 30k article on my (otherwise unloaded) 2GHz Athlon. Not too awful all
things considered (most articles are much shorter than 30kb, and less
than 10% of Korean-language edits should not be a huge burden overall),
but it should be able to do much better by running the slow pass on
substrings around the 'maybe' points.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: John Lee

subject: [Wikitech-l] Delay of emails

body:
Walter Vermeir wrote:

>I noticed that emails send to the mailing lists the last days sometimes takes
>several hours to arrive. This is not a complaint, only a notice.
>
>
Funny, I thought I was the only one. I nearly complained to my mail
provider, but fortunately things began picking up in the past few days.

>Greetings,
>Walter Vermeir
>
>
John Lee
([[En:User:Johnleemk]])


list: commons-l

subject: [Commons-l] Wikimedia Commons mailing list

body:
The purpose of this mailing list is to have a single place of discussion
for the needs and organization of the Wikimedia Commons project, as well
as a good way to alert its members of important developments.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Foundation-l] New mailing list for Wikimedia Commons

body:
I've created a list for the Wikimedia Commons project:

http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l

There are already 1.5 gigabytes of media in the archive after just two
months in existence. It is quite clear that this thing will become huge,
if we let it, and the task to organize this growing heap of media is
massive. I also think that the Commons could become a focal point of
creative activity by photographers, artists and other creators, but this
will require some rethinking to make it as easy as possible to participate
for people with no wiki foreknowledge. That's why I foresee the need for a
discussion list alongside the wiki as we have it with other projects.

The mailing list is multilingual. We'll try to use markers like [en] and
[de] in the subject lines and encourage people to translate messages into
other languages.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Mark Richards

subject: [WikiEN-l] Troll?

body:
For our purposes, except when used as someone intending to destroy the community or who intends to be entertained at the expense of others, these are the operative definitions:

1. Troll is a word used inappropriately as an insult;
2. Calling someone a troll is a way of harrassing folks who disagree with you.

;)

Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
For our purposes, except when used inappropriately as an insult or as a way
of harrassing folks who disagree with you, these are the operative
definitions:

> 3. Troll is anybody who intends to destroy a community.
> 4. Troll is anybody who intends to be entertained at the expense of other
> users.

Fred

_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

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


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] election fraud article

body:
It is the duty of anyone who sees this on the main page to remove it. And
just who is putting it back? This is a clear violation of [[Wikipedia:What
Wikipedia is not]], not propaganda. But there is something to it. Here in
the county where I live the county clerk, a Republican, was removed from
supervising the election due to failure to mail out absentee ballots which
would mostly have gone to Democrats. She was also keeping early ballots in a
closet accessable to the public rather than in the safe. But what happened
was more an example of the system working than not working.

Fred

> From: Delirium <delirium at hackish.org>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Wed, 10 Nov 2004 21:16:13 -0500
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] election fraud article
>
> Personal political views disclaimer: I voted for John Kerry, and am of
> the mind that the possibility of voter fraud in the just-completed
> election cannot be altogether discounted.
>
> ---
>
> That said, I find the fact that people keep adding
> [[en:2004_U.S._Election_controversies_and_irregularities]] to the main
> page odd.  It's a poorly-written article that mostly cites amateurish
> statistical correlations (with lots of graphs) and draws unwarranted
> causations from them, and generally reads like it was written by the
> tinfoil-hat crowd.  Furthermore, this issue isn't really "in the news"
> by any stretch of the imagination, and even on left-leaning sites such
> as dailykos.com, it's controversial and not agreed upon.  In short, this
> article presents a viewpoint that:
> 1) Shouldn't be on the front page, based on newsworthiness and
> neutrality; and
> 2) Is controversial *even* by the standards of a left-wing community
> that agrees John Kerry would make a much better president than George W.
> Bush.
>
> As such, it would be nice if someone would remove it from the front
> page.  I've already reverted three times today, so will not do so again,
> but I feel it makes us look like we're both amateurish and biased.
>
> -Mark
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


from_name: Milos Rancic

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Bot on Serbian Wikipedia

body:
On sr: we were talking a lot about using Latin and Cyrillic scripts.
After recommendation on this list that we should have Lagin alphabet
because it demands significant minority, our general decision is to
make it automatic (using bot).

So, I started to play with pywikipediabot. User:Millbot at sr: is user
for bot. (I just made not as it is described in
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Interwiki_bot/Getting_started

I'll inform you about important things about this bot.


from_name: Joel Wiesmann

body:
Hi vid

I won't say that. I think the bigger problem is, that there are not a lot
of plugins and extensions. If there would be more plugin-hackers, you could
use inofficial software-extensions independant from wikipedia-standards and
roadmaps.

As I said in other mails before, I'm currently analysing the software and
will start to write howto's for plugin-developers as soon as the redesign
of my homepage is finished. Maybe this will help people to start modifying
mediawiki and allow normal users to have extended features.

I'm pretty new here, just my thoughts, I hope I'm not completely wrong ;)
Joel

vic wrote:
> Hi ...
> I would like to know if the development lines of mediawiki will be
> extensively
> tied (or slown down) because of wikipedia ...
> The reason of my question, is that i am recently reading the mailing
> list , and show
> that developers and contributions are allways extensily closed to
> wikipedia requirements,
> not open to new ideas beyond enciclopedias.
> A general use wiki with mediawiki engine would be great, ( i am using it
> to developments
> documentation) ... but it lacks features like authentication and email
> notifications
> (i know the 1.4 plans on this features), that i think are being slown
> down by the
> WIKIPEDIA ...
>
> What is your oppinion ???
>
> Another branch of mediawiki with general features would be great.
>
> regards
>


from_name: Raul Mircea Gigea

subject: [Wikitech-l] Ubersetzungsproblem in Deutsch

body:
Hallo,

Ich habe die 1.3.7 version von MediaWiki von Sourceforge installiert,
und es auf Deutsch configuriert.

Beim ersten Lauf vom Browser treten folgende Probleme auf:
1. Alle tabs(Navigationselemente) sind kleingeschrieben (d.h.
"einstellungen" statt "Einstellungen" usw).
2. Die Tooltips dafuer (z.b. Der Tooltip bei "einstellungen" lautet "My
preferences")
3. Das WikiPedia-Portal Link wurde nicht in <site name>-Portal Link ersetzt,
wobei 3 eigentlich nicht so wichtig ist.

Ich kann, und habe sogar das schon veraendert (in LanguagesDe.php), will
aber verstehen ob das so gewollt ist, oder ob es bloS nicht behandelt
wurde.
Ich frage, weil die deutsche Version von Wikipedia die obig genannten
Fehler _nicht_ hat.
Gibt es vielleicht einen "Patch" fur die Deutsche Version, weil ich mein
Wiki immer up-to-date erhalten will, also wenn es eine neue Version
gibt, und vielleicht neue tabs hinzugefuegt werden, oder die Struktur
der Languages.php files veraendert wird, so kann ich nicht immer es
"manuell" patch-en.

Vielen Dank,
Raul.


body:
Entschuldigung. Ich habe es eigentlich _nicht_ korigiert, weil in
LanguagesDe.php das schon groSgeschrieben waren, und trotzdem werden sie
kleingeschrieben.
Ist das vielleicht ein StyleSheet problem ?

Raul Mircea Gigea wrote:

> Hallo,
>
> Ich habe die 1.3.7 version von MediaWiki von Sourceforge installiert,
> und es auf Deutsch configuriert.
>
> Beim ersten Lauf vom Browser treten folgende Probleme auf:
> 1. Alle tabs(Navigationselemente) sind kleingeschrieben (d.h.
> "einstellungen" statt "Einstellungen" usw).
> 2. Die Tooltips dafuer (z.b. Der Tooltip bei "einstellungen" lautet
> "My preferences")
> 3. Das WikiPedia-Portal Link wurde nicht in <site name>-Portal Link
> ersetzt,
> wobei 3 eigentlich nicht so wichtig ist.
>
> Ich kann, und habe sogar das schon veraendert (in LanguagesDe.php),
> will aber verstehen ob das so gewollt ist, oder ob es bloS nicht
> behandelt wurde.
> Ich frage, weil die deutsche Version von Wikipedia die obig genannten
> Fehler _nicht_ hat.
> Gibt es vielleicht einen "Patch" fur die Deutsche Version, weil ich
> mein Wiki immer up-to-date erhalten will, also wenn es eine neue
> Version gibt, und vielleicht neue tabs hinzugefuegt werden, oder die
> Struktur der Languages.php files veraendert wird, so kann ich nicht
> immer es "manuell" patch-en.
>
> Vielen Dank,
> Raul.
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Uebersetzungsproblem in Deutsch bzw. kleingeschriebene
	Woerter

body:
Hallo,

Ich habe die 1.3.7 version von MediaWiki von Sourceforge installiert,
und es auf Deutsch configuriert.

Beim ersten Lauf vom Browser treten folgende Probleme auf:
1. Alle tabs(Navigationselemente) sind kleingeschrieben (d.h.
"einstellungen" statt "Einstellungen" usw).
2. Die Tooltips dafuer (z.b. Der Tooltip bei "einstellungen" lautet "My
preferences")
3. Das WikiPedia-Portal Link wurde nicht in <site name>-Portal Link
ersetzt,
wobei 3 eigentlich nicht so wichtig ist.

Ist das so gewollt , oder wurde es bloS nicht behandelt.
Ich frage, weil die deutsche Version von Wikipedia die obig genannten
Fehler _nicht_ hat.
Gibt es vielleicht einen "Patch" fur die Deutsche Version, weil ich mein
Wiki immer up-to-date erhalten will, also wenn es eine neue Version
gibt, und vielleicht neue tabs hinzugefuegt werden, oder die Struktur
der Languages.php files veraendert wird, so kann ich nicht immer es
"manuell" patch-en.

Vielen Dank,
Raul.


from_name: Stirling Newberry

subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Re: An honorable compromise and no: or nb: for Bokmål?

body:
On Nov 11, 2004, at 9:11 AM, Lars Aronsson wrote:

> Ulf Lunde wrote:
>> But since some people on this list (notably Lars Aronsson and Lars
>> Alvik) apparently still do not get it, I will attempt some analogies
>
> Sorry, your Microsoft analogy doesn't help.  You're full of
> feminist-style rhetoric, where all opposition is disqualified as a
> matter of "not getting it".  There's nothing I can do here.  I'm glad
> I'm not part of this conflict.
>
>

Cool down. There is no particular group that has a monopoly on the
attitude "if you don't agree with me, I obviously haven't made myself
clear." More over, while the dicussion has been pointed, the
participants should be praised for patiently explaining these issues. I
don't know about other people, but I've found the exchange enlightening
and interesting, and would like to thank Mssrs Lunde and Alvik for
taking their valuable time to present differing viewpoints.


from_name: Lars Alvik

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: An honorable compromise and no: or nb: for
	Bokm? l?

body:
P? 11. nov. 2004 kl. 05.10 skrev <jneden at bellsouth.net>:

> Hi, everybody
>
> First things first, I have by no means been active in the list lately,
> but I have been checking in with things. This is one topic I felt the
> need to discuss.
>
> As a fairly competent (though not fluent) Norwegian speaker, I am well
> familiar with the bokm?l/nynorsk contrast and the political
> connotations they entail. Norway's unique lingual situation has been
> going on for over a century. While Swedes may not get it (and I
> understand that leaving bokm?l at no: might make a lot of sense), the
> use of no: (or a "macro-language" Norwegian code) for bokm?l implies
> that bokm?l is the "normal" form of Norwegian, whereas nynorsk is
> "specialty" Norwegian. They are neither. Nynorsk and bokm?l (I'm most
> fluent in the latter, which is admittedly the "big brother" in this
> situation) truly are equal forms of the greater spectrum of Norwegian
> dialects, and they deserve their place. To Norwegians, dialect matters
> much more than in many other countries. There are a lot of viable
> options here, but using no: or a general Norwegian code for bokm?l is
> simply not one of them.

The idea nowadays is to change the interwikicoding and provide a list
of reasons why bokm?l is no: (like Utne suggested). This would create a
bokm?l/riksm?l wiki on no: and formalize the language situation. And
yes, i see this as an permanent solution.
I recon there are probably no more than 300 nynorsk arcticles on no:.
These and new nynorsk articles on no: will not get deleted but will not
get "protected" against translation either.
We don't want no trouble with the nynorskpeople (eventhough we are
indeed very tired of the debate in general).
Just moving no: to nb: creates a lot of problem and establish an own
nb: wiki idependantly of no: would kill the community and confuze new
users (i for one don't think it's fun to move around 11 500 articles).

The reason why i've not been debating earlier is that my written
english is quite crappy and i perfer my own language, norwegian
(bokm?l).

mvh. Lars Alvik


from_name: sockmonk at gmail.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] Troll?

body:
Yes, in internet usage, a "troll" is usually someone who posts
"flamebait" to a discussion. That is, they will state something that
is highly controversial in order to elicit a strong reaction to it,
typically a reaction against it. They are (usually) disliked because
they are seen as just stirring up arguments for the sake of stirring
up arguments. Occasionally, the troll might just be trying to get
someone else's hidden opinion out into the open.

"Don't feed the trolls" basically means don't take the bait, don't
encourage a troll by participating in the argument they were trying to
start. Not feeding the trolls is generally good advice and just good
netiquette.

--
sockmonk


from_name: Robin Shannon

subject: [WikiEN-l] The Onion!

body:
Well, all the facts from the onion have now been added to our article. Ironic?

paz y amor,
rjs [[User:The bellman]]

On Wed, 10 Nov 2004 09:31:47 -0800, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales
<jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Charles Matthews wrote:
> > Mark Richards wrote
> >
> > > Check out the Onion this week for an article on Wikipedia!
> >
> > http://www.theonion.com/opinion/index.php?issue=4045&o=2
> >
> > Errs (the parody rant) on the side of being far too reasonable.
> >
> > Charles
>
> Agreed.  I get complaint emails that are funnier than this one on a
> regular basis.  :-)
>
> --Jimbo
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
hit me: robin.shannon.id.au
jab me: saudade at jabber.zim.net.au

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons
Recombo Plus License. To view a copy of this license, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/sampling+/1.0/


from_name: Walter Vermeir

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: New mailing list for Wikimedia Commons

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
> I've created a list for the Wikimedia Commons project:
>
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
>
> There are already 1.5 gigabytes of media in the archive after just two
> months in existence. It is quite clear that this thing will become huge,
> if we let it, and the task to organize this growing heap of media is
> massive. I also think that the Commons could become a focal point of
> creative activity by photographers, artists and other creators, but this
> will require some rethinking to make it as easy as possible to participate
> for people with no wiki foreknowledge. That's why I foresee the need for a
> discussion list alongside the wiki as we have it with other projects.
>
> The mailing list is multilingual. We'll try to use markers like [en] and
> [de] in the subject lines and encourage people to translate messages into
> other languages.
>
> Regards,
>
> Erik

Can you send the request to add it to gmane?

The logical newsgroup name is;
gmane.org.wikimedia.commons

http://gmane.org/subscribe.php

Done not to forget to pick "Encrypt addresses"

--
[[w:nl:gebruiker:walter]]