from_name: maru dubshinki

body:
On 4/12/06, Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've wondered what the best way is to deal with this sort of thing.
> One might be to make FA status awarded to specific versions of the
> article in a more direct way -- i.e. the FA template on the talk page
> could link directly to the version which was voted to be featured, to
> make comparisons with the current article easier.
>
> Another is a better way of detecting bad edits. I've seen a lot of
> really bad content sneak into high-visibility and highly-watched
> articles because of the following pattern:
>
> 1. Editor X vandalizes an article once
> 2. Editor Y vandalizes the article three times
> 3. Admin Z reverts Editor Y, does not look at the edit of Editor X
>
> This is especially prevalent when there is a small spate of vandalism.
> I try to make sure I always check the current version against
> something further down the page,  but it's hard to remember to do in
> all cases. Perhaps if it was easier (i.e., with a single click and
> without any looking at the history) to see the diff for the edits done
> by the most recent five users (sorting it by user rather than edit
> would make it easier to avoid skipping single bad edits)? Maybe if
> there was a regularized system of evaluating many edits at a time and
> screening them for problematic content? Maybe we need to find ways to
> get around seeing histories as collections of single edits and rather
> as clusters of edits? I don't exactly know. I'm just speculating
> wildly here and not proposing anything concrete.
>
> I don't think anyone thinks the wiki system is flawless in any
> respect, or that infinite edits means an infinitely good article.
> There are benefits and detriments, and a good working-philosophy is to
> try and focus on ways in which can -- utilizing social, technological,
> and other approaches -- try and boost the strengths of the positive
> aspects and get around the negative ones. It's no more destined to
> succeed than it is doomed to fail.
>
> FF

That would work well with patrolled edits- one could then check back
to the last patrolled edit, and then if all the subsequent changes
were good, mark them all as patrolled.
Of course, we'd need patrolled edits in the first place.

~maru


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Google using DMOZ

body:
Hi all,
  Anyone else notice that Google uses DMOZ descriptions for certain
web pages? Search for [[George W Bush]] or [[Jack Thompson]] and
you'll see what I mean.

The implications are weird. Sometimes we'll be "an encyclopaedia",
other times an "open-source encyclopaedia", who knows...

Apparently they've been doing this for a while but I've never noticed
it until now (http://www.webproworld.com/archive.php/o_t__t_61217__view_previous__index.html).

Steve


from_name: Philip Welch

subject: [WikiEN-l] Why voting *is* evil

body:
On Apr 12, 2006, at 3:09 AM, Steve Bennett wrote:

>> Systematic bias is not at issue here. Systematic bias is the tendency
>> to fail at NPOV or comprehensiveness due to the knowledge set of our
>> contributors. This is not a content issue--this is an organizational
>> issue. Content should be organized for the greatest convenience
>> for the
>> greatest number of consumers.
>
> Would you brook any exception to that? Would you go as far as putting
> an entry under a misspelling if most consumers thought that was the
> correct spelling?

If one spelling is preferred over another by a vast number of people,
then that spelling is by definition correct according to a
descriptivist theory of language.

If there's significant dispute over how a word is spelled, then the
most common use should be under that spelling while the other
spellings would be redirects. Actually, misspellings themselves are
valid redirects.

I would say that even the name that an entry is under is an issue of
organization, not content. The article on The Rock is located at
[[The Rock (entertainer)]] but starts "Dwayne Douglas Johnson (born
May 2, 1972 in Hayward, California), better known by his stage name
The Rock..." Clearly "The Rock" is the better known name, while
Dwayne Douglas Johnson is his actual name and the name that's bolded
at the beginning of the article.

--
Philip L. Welch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Philwelch


from_name: Sean Barrett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Answers.com tool released

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

maru dubshinki stated for the record:

> On 4/12/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
> ...
>
>>What, we use Sun servers?  Or is it Microsoft software?
>>
>>I know a lot of firms which refuse to *buy* from unethical suppliers,
>>but not many which refuse to *sell* to anyone who can't prove they are
>>whiter than white.
>>Guy (JzG)
>
>
> Are you saying we should sink to as low a moral level as is most profitable?
>
> ~maru

People have morals.  Organizations don't.  WikiMedia should "sink" (to
use your prejudiced and highly loaded term) to whatever it needs to do
to carry out its mission.  If you disagree with WikiMedia's actions, you
should do whatever your morals suggest.

- --
 Sean Barrett     | There's very little advice in men's magazines,
 sean at epoptic.org | because men think, "I know what I'm doing.
                  | Just show me somebody naked!" --Jerry Seinfeld
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list: wikitech-l

from_name: Rob Church

subject: [Wikitech-l] &action=edit??

body:
On 12/04/06, Jan Vanoverpelt <jan.vanoverpelt at gmail.com> wrote:
> 1) When I do not put "&action=edit"  in the code,  the preload-parameter
> does not seem to work. Can someone explain why in this code the "
> &action=edit" MUST be there in order for the preload-parameter to be passed?

Without the "action=edit" part, MediaWiki will attempt to view the
article; this is the default action. When in this mode, the "preload"
parameter is ignored; it means nothing to the code, and the value
won't even be checked.

When in edit mode, however, the preload parameter *can* mean
something, so the software will check for it and act as needed.

> 2) Where in the MediaWiki source code is it possible to adapt "action=edit"?

The code that handles editing, from the start, is in
includes/Wiki.php; look at MediaWiki::performAction() and the switch
statement therein. This differentiates between internal and external
editing, and passes off to the appropriate code. In most cases, this
means a trip to the EditForm class, in includes/EditForm.php. A lot of
other code is called in between; dig around.

Rob Church


from_name: Matt Brown

subject: [WikiEN-l] Archives as sources proposal

body:
A poorly thought out proposal, I feel.

-Matt


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] ParserFunctions trial

body:
The extension for mathematical expressions and conditional constructs has been enabled on all
Wikimedia wikis, on a trial basis. Documentation is at:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ParserFunctions

See the talk page for discussion.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Why voting *is* evil

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:

>On 4/12/06, Philip Welch <wikipedia at philwelch.net> wrote:
>
>
>>Interestingly, this is the same way I feel about your comments about
>>sovereignty. Sovereignty is a political fiction--population is a
>>reality.
>>
>>
>A very encyclopaedic kind of political fiction.
>
There's not a big distance between political fiction and political friction.

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] Why voting *is* evil

body:
Philip Welch wrote:

>On Apr 11, 2006, at 5:59 PM, Mark Gallagher wrote:
>
>
>>>Georgia wasn't named after the country of Georgia, it was named after
>>>King George II.
>>>
>>>
>>George II ... that's the one who *isn't* The British Tyrant, right?
>>
>>
>Right. George III was the tyrant :)
>
Hmmm.
    George I ... Washington
    George II ... Bush Sr.
    George III ... Bush Jr. ;-)

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] Archives as sources proposal

body:
On 4/12/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
> Two, actually, if you include the edit war at
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:NOR

Although that one appears much less in good faith than the other proposal.

-Matt


from_name: Ilmari Karonen

subject: [WikiEN-l] Two proposals against wheel warring

body:
I thought I'd let folks here on the mailing list know something I just
found out about -- there's not one but _two_ active policy proposals to
curtail wheel warring:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Proposed_wheel_warring_policy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Admin_zero-revert_rule

I'm not sure how we ended up with two redundant proposal pages, but
somehow we did.  The first page, which I hadn't heard of until today,
includes polls for five alternatives, the last two of which seem to have
some support.  The other page features one, more detailed and somewhat
stricter, proposal, which hasn't been put to a poll but has been
extensively discussed and seems to also enjoy some degree of consensus.

Anyway, I agree that it's probably time to turn these proposals into
actual policy.  There are folks here on this list who have much more
experience with doing this than I have, so I won't try to teach grandma
to suck eggs.  What I've done so far is point people to the talk page of
the former proposal page, suggestion that the issue be hashed out there,
using the consensus versions of both proposals as basis for the policy.

Anyway, your input and policymaking skills are appreciated.  Let's get
this thing done.

--
Ilmari Karonen


from_name: charles matthews

body:
"Ilmari Karonen" wrote

> Anyway, your input and policymaking skills are appreciated.  Let's get
> this thing done.

What 'thing'?

The thing that people seem to think about is rationing the use of admin
powers.  I'm against that.

If the basic issue is admins in conflict, who can't be bothered to discuss a
difficult issue with each other as colleagues, then such proposals don't
really solve that.  I say that a lack of consultation, admin-to-admin, is a
root cause of troubles.  Simply imposing rationing doesn't address that.

What is more, I'm fundamentally against equating 'edit wars' and 'wheel
wars'.  From an ArbCom point of view, we handle edit wars very largely by
ignoring content issues.  We should not treat so-called 'wheel wars' in the
same way.  Admin actions are in protection of the project, and we need to
look, very much, at what motivations and interpretations are behind them.

Recent ArbCom judgements show (I hope) some consistency in my approach.  I
don't want admins to have, in effect, fewer powers.  I do want to treat lack
of consultation with admin colleagues as very serious.  And I would much
prefer to have 1% of the current admins lose all their powers, for abuses,
than have 100% of admins have restrictions placed on their discretion.

Charles


list: foundation-l

from_name: Gregory Maxwell

subject: [Foundation-l] Answers.com tool released

body:
On 4/12/06, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> If Wikimedia really needs money, it should just put some discreet, well chosen advertising on the
> site. Better to advertise some random debt consolidation firm than a company so openly hostile to
> the goals of the free software movement.

It's funny... back when this came up before, it was suggested that
someone make a free software simmlar tool, and I believe some work was
begun in that direction.

Will answers.com next sue the authors of this software?

When we lay down with dogs we risk getting fleas.

I too would rather see 'at arms length' advertising issued out to the
highest bidder, rather than oddball favors for donations deals with
potentially unethical orginizations which seems now to be the case
with answers.com.

But... As far as I'm concerned, the advertising/funding issue is
orthorgnal... It is my understanding that If we put up advertising our
'secondary income' will be so great that it will break out tax
status... I'm not particularly pleased with the way things went with
the mozilla foundation.

I'd been convinced that the answers.com deal was okay, until this
patent issue came around... and honestly I'd though that it had put a
break on our plans since I hadn't heard anything for so long, I'm
disappointed to see it go in right now.


list: wikimedia-l


body:
On 4/12/06, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> If Wikimedia really needs money, it should just put some discreet, well chosen advertising on the
> site. Better to advertise some random debt consolidation firm than a company so openly hostile to
> the goals of the free software movement.

A little bit of follow on...
It appears that the current answers.com tool still has the same
license terms as their initial tool.
http://wikipedia.answers.com/main/legal_notices.jsp#terms

The terms require users of the answers.com tool to agree to various
restrictions which are overtly incompatible with the GFDL.  Because I
raised this concern in the initial discussion with Jimbo and was
assured that he would take the issue to the Answers.com CEO, I can
only conclude that these unacceptable terms are are intentional and
not merely an oversight.

As a result I have removed the answers.com tool from the tools page.

Before I send out the notice to answers.com to discontinue
distributing my copyrighted works in violation of the GFDL, I'd though
I'd ping the list and find out if anyone else has already done so...
No need to flood them with initial takedown requests.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Application of the {{pd-art}} tag

body:
Matt Brown wrote:

>On 4/12/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>
>
>>Matt Brown wrote:
>>
>>
>>>If Bridgeman v. Corel is overturned, then I can still copy MY copy of
>>>the book, but I cannot take someone else's scans from their website
>>>and use those.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>If the original image was in the public domain there is nothing wrong
>>about your using someone else's scan of the image.  That other person's
>>scan of a public domain work is not copyrightable.
>>
>>
>
>Ah, you're missing the point, or rather the IF statement that the rest
>of the sentence depends on.  I personally believe the decision in
>Bridgeman v. Corel is correct and that a scan, photograph, or other
>"slavish copy" of 2-dimensional artwork does not create new copyright.
>
>/However/, I was discussing the case IF Bridgeman v. Corel was
>overturned and, say, Supreme Court precedent is set that even such a
>slavish copy creates copyright, THEN you can't use other peoples'
>scans without permission.
>
My apologies for the misreading.  Of course, until that happens a lot of
people will be making good faith copies, and it's hard to imagine a
situation where there will be attempts to retroactively punish people
for their scans.  It has already been 6(?) years since the Bridgeman
decision to which the doctrine of laches may apply.

Ec


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Mark Williamson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Europanto

body:
See mr SMH,

It is indeed a linguistic chaos rather than a true language.

We don't have a Wikipedia for code-switching phenomena such as
Spanglish, Franglais, Taglish, and the like; someone did create a
test-wp for Portu?ol but whether Portunhol is code-switching or a
mixed language is debatable.

On the other hand, Europanto is not even code-switching because it
often breaks the rules which tend to govern most code-switching.

See http://recycledknowledge.blogspot.com/2005/06/code-switching.html

Sentences which violate the metagrammatical rules of codeswitching
make up for less than 1% of corpus text for code-switching in general,
but I'm pretty sure the rate in Europanto is much higher.

The main rules are basically these:

1. switches happen only between free morphemes -- the free morpheme rule
2. switches happen only when the word order of both languages is in
alignment -- the equivalence rule

This means that you cannot say "J'ai une friend am?ricain" because
French puts adjectives after the nouns they modify while English puts
them before. In such a case the only natural choices would be to say
"J'ai une ami am?ricain" or "J'ai an american friend" (with regards to
the "american friend" part; you could obviously have different
combinations regarding whether you say "J'ai" or "I have", etc)

In Europanto however, it seems like people ignore these rules entirely.

If Europanto is not a fully-fledged contact language variety such as a
pidgin, creole, or mixed language (which it clearly is not because it
does not fit the criteria for any of those), and it is not a
code-switching phenomena (which it is also clearly not), then what is
it?

It seems that the most reasonable way to describe it is a number of
related sociolects of various languages which use foreign borrowings
very very heavily. You can see the obvious grammatical influence of
English in my own Europanto, I'm guessing you can see the grammatical
structure of French in yours, or German in that of a native speaker of
German.

And the only way to get around the rules of codeswitching is to
explain the words from different languages as borrowed words into the
native language, since borrowings are generally governed by the
grammatical rules of the language which is absorbing them.

So on this basis I would oppose a Europanto Wikipedia -- we already
have several Wikipedias in "Europanto". en.wiki is in English, which
is basically English Europanto with less foreign words; fr.wiki is in
French, which is basically French Europanto with less foreign words;
it.wiki is in Italian, which is basically Italian Europanto with less
foreign words; etc.

Mark

On 12/04/06, Marek Najmajer <marqoz at wp.pl> wrote:
> me too!
>
> /marqoz
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Pawel Dembowski" <fallout at lexx.eu.org>
> To: <wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, April 12, 2006 10:30 AM
> Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Europanto
>
>
> >> If you say "Ich anderen than cioccolato mas bonbons prefer" no one will
> >> understand either.
> >
> > Actually, I did understand it.
> >
> > --
> > Ausir
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
"Take away their language, destroy their souls." -- Joseph Stalin


subject: [WikiEN-l] Featured article deterioration

body:
On 4/12/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
...
> This is possible with my greasemonkey script. I will really try to
> release it properly. There's a screenshot here:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image%3AEnhanceHistory-ShowerJuggling.png
>
> Would that help?
>
> Steve

Steve, that is quite neat. When you do release, I'd love to try it
out. (Assuming it works. I never got the Greasemonkey extension to
animate histories to work, for instance. Wikipedia seems rather
hostile to Greasemonkey extensions...)

~maru


from_name: Birger

subject: [Wikitech-l] &action=edit??

body:
2006/4/12, Rob Church <robchur at gmail.com>:
>
> On 12/04/06, Jan Vanoverpelt <jan.vanoverpelt at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 1) When I do not put "&action=edit"  in the code,  the preload-parameter
> > does not seem to work. Can someone explain why in this code the "
> > &action=edit" MUST be there in order for the preload-parameter to be
> passed?
>
> Without the "action=edit" part, MediaWiki will attempt to view the
> article; this is the default action. When in this mode, the "preload"
> parameter is ignored; it means nothing to the code, and the value
> won't even be checked.

Is there a possibility to change this, so that the "preload" parameter is
not ignored without the "action=edit" part being present? So the code would
become {{SERVER}}{{localurl:{{{Link}}}|preload={{{Preload}}}}}, the user
views the article directly and when he wants to switch to the edit box he
sees the preloaded text in this edit box and is able to add some additional
text to it. Is that possible?

Thanks a lot!


subject: [WikiEN-l] Answers.com tool released

body:
On 4/12/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
...
> What, we use Sun servers?  Or is it Microsoft software?
>
> I know a lot of firms which refuse to *buy* from unethical suppliers,
> but not many which refuse to *sell* to anyone who can't prove they are
> whiter than white.
> Guy (JzG)

Are you saying we should sink to as low a moral level as is most profitable?

~maru


subject: [WikiEN-l] Article about Wikipedia and the Bogdanov affair

body:
On 4/12/06, Laurence Soixante-sept <laurence_soixante_sept at yahoo.fr> wrote:
> Hi,
>
>   I have just written and published an article about Wikipedia on my web site (www.bogdanov.ch), more precisely about the circumstances in which I have been banned by trying to take part to the article "Bogdanov Affair".
>
>   My article is entitled "Wikipedia et l'affaire Bogdanov : "encyclop?die libre" ou dictature virtuelle ?", which means : "Wikipedia and the Bogdanov affair : "free encyclopedia" or virtual dictatorship ?". It is in french... sorry, I cannot translate it by myself !
>
>   I just hope I will not be censored by the moderators as I habe been by the Arbitrators on Wikipedia ! ;-)
>
>   Laurence67 (talk page)

This isn't much good to us without a translation- I know my French is
only good enough to catch a little of what you are saying, and you
really should have provided a direct link...
http://www.bogdanov.ch/affaire-bogdanov/wikipedia.htm

~maru


subject: [WikiEN-l] Answers.com tool released

body:
On Apr 12, 2006, at 4:15 PM, Ben McIlwain wrote:

> Seconded.  Companies choose who they want to do business with all
> of the
> time.  It's not illegal by embargo laws to sell small arms to many
> countries in the Middle East, but most American companies absolutely
> refuse to do it.

There's a difference between selling *arms* (i.e. things that can be
used to kill people and blow shit up) and selling, say, *encyclopedias*.

--
Philip L. Welch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Philwelch


list: commons-l

from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Commons-l] [Fwd: [Wikipedia-l] Commons moving helper]

body:
Brianna Laugher schrieb:
> Wow, that's super awesome. Nice work!!
>
> Some initial thoughts:
> * It would be nice if you could enter "Image:Foo.jpg" as well as
> "Foo.jpg", or at least have a warning that the latter is expected,
> since the former generates scary looking errors. :)
> * It would be really nice if it failed (with explanation) if an image
> with a fairuse license was entered. eg, fairuse, logo, screenshot,
> promophoto, et al. I don't know if Duesentrieb's meta tags have been
> implemented on en yet but if/when they are, they could be useful here.
> * It would be super nice if it prompted/warned the user to only upload
> images where the license is verifiable and/or a source is given. This
> would be more for the benefit of people transferring images after the
> fact rather than the original uploaders, since they obviously ignore
> such warnings anyway.
> * It would be awesomely nice if it also put a message at the end
> asking the user to give the image a category. This is v important for
> the Commons but not so much for the Wikipedias. In this spirit, it
> could also remind the user to tag the original image as
> {{NowCommons|new name}} or {{NowCommonsThis}}.
>
All done. Someone please check if this version works correctly with UTF8.
> But anyway... very awesome! We can add this to [[commons:Commons:Tools]].
>
Thanks!
> Now we just need the universal login to make life complete :)
>
Brion's working on it...

Magnus

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subject: [Wikitech-l] enwiki split

body:
The English Wikipedia database has now been moved to its own dedicated server cluster. The master is
db3, the slaves are db4 and ariel. This was done to reduce write load and improve cache efficiency.
Commons is not replicated to the new cluster, instead we've set up a system based on "query groups"
to send commons reads to the main cluster.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Conrad Dunkerson

subject: [Wikitech-l] TOClimit

body:
* Steve Bennett wrote:
> {{TOCright}} exists? I am pleasantly stunned.

Just a template which right aligns __TOC__.


subject: [Wikitech-l] TOClimit

body:
* Tels wrote:

> Which is one of the serious problems of having usefull stuff in templates:
> You need to replicate them to all wikis that might use them.

> That's where build-ins for some very-often used or usefull things have an
> advantage, like other wiki sites getting them, too.

Backwards logic. The 'problem' you assign to the templates is actually the
absence of the feature in MediaWiki. The template is not the problem, but
rather a solution to it. If the 'TOCright' template is at some point
deemed vital (which seems unlikely - I worked on it and I know it is not
extensively used) then it'll be built into MediaWiki.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Why voting *is* evil

body:
* Steve Bennett wrote:

> Would you brook any exception to that? Would you go as far as putting
> an entry under a misspelling if most consumers thought that was the
> correct spelling?

Heh. If most consumers thought it was the correct spelling... then it
would be. That's how languages evolve.


subject: [Commons-l] Commons moving helper

body:
Daniel Kinzler schrieb:
> Thanks Magnus!
>
> I have been wanting to write something like that myself for quite some
> time now. Too much else to do, I guess.
>
> About categorizing the image: this is very important, and one of the
> things often ignored by commons newbies. Its also a task that may take
> some time to do it right.
>
> I have written CommonSense
> <http://tools.wikimedia.de/~daniel/WikiSense/CommonSense.php> for
> automatically suggesting categories, based on where an image is used
> and/or keywords from the description text. It has a mode with easy to
> parse output for bots... maybe you can make your thing use it?
>
Thanks, already implemented! I didn't check the option by default, as
CommonSense sometimes takes quite a while to return (no pun intended ;-)

Magnus

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subject: [Wikitech-l] ParserFunctions trial

body:
* Tim Starling wrote:
> The extension for mathematical expressions and conditional constructs has been enabled on all
> Wikimedia wikis, on a trial basis. Documentation is at:
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ParserFunctions
>
> See the talk page for discussion.

Great!
Wonderful job Tim! This is wonderful and will vastly simplify tons of things.

I need to get busy converting all the 'date math' templates to use 'expr:'.

And phasing out the 'calcadd' and 'calcsubtract' templates.

And building out conditional row functionality for all the infoboxes with
'#if:'.

And converting Wikipedia:Featured content to use 'rand:'.

And... oi!

Damn you Tim! :]


from_name: Matt R

subject: [WikiEN-l] Answers.com tool released

body:
Elisabeth Bauer <elian at djini.de> wrote:
> Erik Moeller schrieb:
> > Jimmy has added a link to the answers.com Wikipedia edition to the
> > [[Wikipedia:Tools]] page:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Don%27t_disrupt_Wikipedia_to_illustrate_a_point
<snip>
> *geez* get a cup of tea, listen to good music and do something useful.

Wikipedia has a business relationship with a company that is indulging in some intellectual property-related evilness. Moreover, the actions of this company are inhibiting the creation of tools that facilitate access to Wikipedia. Both ethically and pragmatically, therefore, it is entirely reasonable to ask ourselves what our response should be (if anything). Maybe not listing their tool is an appropriate response -- who knows? It's worth at least thinking about for a minute. It's not WP:POINT.

-- Matt
[[User:Matt Crypto]]


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
Jimmy has added a link to the answers.com Wikipedia edition to the
[[Wikipedia:Tools]] page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Tools&diff=48023818&oldid=47591620

Since Jimmy has also said that the decision to list this tool, and
where to list it, should be an editorial decision, I have begun an
editorial discussion on

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Tools#Answers.com_tool

about whether it is wise to effectively advertise this tool, which is
at the heart of Answers.com's software patents lawsuit against Babylon
Software. You can find more information about Answers.com's lawsuit in
their press release on the matter:

http://www.answers.com/main/ir/press03082006.jsp

I have also pointed out the issue on foundation-l and asked the
Wikimedia Board to re-evaluate the Answers.com deal in light of the
software patents lawsuit:

http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-March/006356.html

The Board has not responded to this request. Again, failing any
comment to the contrary, I will assume that the decision whether to
list this tool on [[Wikipedia:Tools]] and/or highlight it in other
forms is up to the community. I personally object to it unless the
software patent lawsuit is mentioned on the page in an NPOV manner.

Erik


subject: [WikiEN-l] Answers.com tool released


from_name: Mark Gallagher

subject: [WikiEN-l] Why voting *is* evil

body:
G'day Gordon,

> At 12:00 +0200 11/4/06, Steve Bennett wrote:
>>[[WP:CSB]] really is worth a read.
>
> And also
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_%28disambiguation%29
>
> :-)

"Boring Brown Chocolate, an acronym used in a recent Strong Bad Email."

?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?

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

--
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.1.385 / Virus Database: 268.4.1/308 - Release Date: 11/04/2006


from_name: Mathias Schindler

subject: [WikiEN-l] Answers.com tool released

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
> Jimmy has added a link to the answers.com Wikipedia edition to the
> [[Wikipedia:Tools]] page:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Tools&diff=48023818&oldid=47591620

Thanks for the note. I am going to test this tool. So far, it seems like
a nice thing and it is also in the right category on
[[Wikipedia:Tools]]. Sigh, I wish that answers.com wasn't
self-restricting on English content.

> I have also pointed out the issue on foundation-l and asked the
> Wikimedia Board to re-evaluate the Answers.com deal in light of the
> software patents lawsuit:

I haven't heard anything from this legal dispute. Most people monitoring
this said it's just the usual behavior in this kind of business.

Mathias


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Answers.com tool released

body:
On 4/12/06, Mathias Schindler <neubau at presroi.de> wrote:
> Thanks for the note. I am going to test this tool. So far, it seems like
> a nice thing and it is also in the right category on
> [[Wikipedia:Tools]]. Sigh, I wish that answers.com wasn't
> self-restricting on English content.

I'm more concerned that it's promising "accurate" information.

Steve


from_name: Jastrow

subject: [Foundation-l] WMFrance: new Board

body:
Hi all,

Wikim?dia France just got its new Board.

* Nicolas Weeger (Ryo), chairman,
* Marie-Lan Nguyen (Jastrow, that's me), secretary,
* Delphine M?nard (notafish), treasurer,
* Florence Devouard (Anthere),
* Mathieu Amo (Solensean),
* Fr?d?ric Thuillier (Fred-th),
* David Monniaux,
* Jean-Baptiste Soufron (Soufron),
* Emmanuel Engelhart (Kelson).

Cheers,

--
Marie-Lan (Jastrow)


subject: [Foundation-l] WMFrance: new Board


subject: [Wikitech-l] [Toolserver-l] account activity review [IMPORTANT]

body:
Tim Starling wrote:
> There's a reason we are splitting our databases into lots of different indepdently replicating
> clusters, that's because our servers were having increasing difficulty keeping up with the write
> load while still performing a useful amount of read load. Zedler is experiencing that problem too,
> there are apparently times of the day or week when it can't keep up with the write rate, given its
> existing read rate.
>
I don't thnik Gregory disputed the need to keep the site running, and if
makeing an en cluster is what it takes to do this, so be it. His point
is the frustration from hearing "Hey, we made a new cluster. And by the
way, the toolserver won't work with that, so everyone wo invested month
of work into the tools there is s*****d. So what." Taking the wheels and
engine from a car and then giving someone the keys isn't really helpful
in such a situation.

Magnus
(who keeps trying no matter the treatment ;-)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Answers.com tool released

body:
On 4/12/06, Mathias Schindler <neubau at presroi.de> wrote:

> I haven't heard anything from this legal dispute. Most people monitoring
> this said it's just the usual behavior in this kind of business.

Accumulating patents is the usual behavior. Filing aggressive patents
against competitors based on them is certainly not, especially not
against a competitor who has been on the market with an (arguably
superior) software tool for many years.

Erik


subject: [WikiEN-l] Answers.com tool released

body:
On 4/12/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 4/12/06, Mathias Schindler <neubau at presroi.de> wrote:
>
> > I haven't heard anything from this legal dispute. Most people monitoring
> > this said it's just the usual behavior in this kind of business.
>
> Accumulating patents is the usual behavior. Filing aggressive patents

.. aggressive patent lawsuits ..

Erik


body:
Interwiki links. Uhg!

Seems I'll have to pipe the sucker through my XML parser after all to
make sense of it ;-)

I'll see what I can do...

Magnus

David Benbennick wrote:
> On 4/10/06, Magnus Manske <magnus.manske at web.de> wrote:
>
>> I recently noticed what a pain it can be to move image to commons,
>> especially with the image description. To help this issue, I now offer
>> this service:
>>
>> http://magnusmanske.de/wikipedia/commonshelper.php
>>
>
> Neat!  Here's a couple bugs.
>
> If the image upload summary has interwiki links, the links break.  For
> example, (taking an image from EN):
>
> here's a summary with [[link]] and [[de:interwiki link]]. How about
> [[commons:link]]?
>
> turns into
>
> here's a summary with [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link Link] (link)
> and [http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/interwiki_link" class='extiw'
> title="de:interwiki_link] (de:interwiki link) . How about
> [http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/link" class='extiw'
> title="commons:link] (commons:link) ?
>
> Also, it would be nice of the helper deduced wiki-syntax for links in
> the upload summaries, instead of making everything be external links.
> For example, [[link]] should turn into [[:en:link]], not
> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link Link].
>
>
> Another minor bug, interwiki links in image descriptions aren't quite
> right.  In terms of link syntax, the Commons thinks of itself as an
> English Wikipedia (in otherwords, [[q:Foo]] links to English
> Wikiquote, while [[:de:Foo]] links to German Wikipedia).  The script
> needs to know this quirky fact.  Again from EN, the image description
>
> [[Foo]] and [[:de:Bar]].  [[:Image:Bob]].
>
> turns into
>
> [[:en:Foo]] and [[:en::de:Bar]]. [[:en::Image:Bob]].
>
> when it should be
>
> [[:en:Foo]] and [[:de:Bar]]. [[:en:Image:Bob]].
>
> (Notice the double :: in two places, too.)
> _______________________________________________
> Commons-l mailing list
> Commons-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
>


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Foundation-l] WMFrance: new Board

body:
Hi

David Monniaux being known as Submarine.

Ant

Jastrow wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Wikim?dia France just got its new Board.
>
> * Nicolas Weeger (Ryo), chairman,
> * Marie-Lan Nguyen (Jastrow, that's me), secretary,
> * Delphine M?nard (notafish), treasurer,
> * Florence Devouard (Anthere),
> * Mathieu Amo (Solensean),
> * Fr?d?ric Thuillier (Fred-th),
> * David Monniaux,
> * Jean-Baptiste Soufron (Soufron),
> * Emmanuel Engelhart (Kelson).
>
> Cheers,
>


subject: [Foundation-l] WMFrance: new Board


from_name: Elisabeth Bauer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Answers.com tool released

body:
Erik Moeller schrieb:
> Jimmy has added a link to the answers.com Wikipedia edition to the
> [[Wikipedia:Tools]] page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Don%27t_disrupt_Wikipedia_to_illustrate_a_point

It's a tool, it goes on the tools page. You didn't scrutinize the
business practices of the other companies listed on the page, so why do
it here?

*geez* get a cup of tea, listen to good music and do something useful.

--elian


subject: [WikiEN-l] Answers.com tool released

body:
On 4/12/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm more concerned that it's promising "accurate" information.

Okay, I have downloadeed and installed this software on Win2K as a
non-Administrator. The installation routine also tried to install a
toolbar in the MSIE by default, but failed due to the lack of rights.

The tool itself has a permanent link to the foundation donation page.
100% (minus paypal fee) of this money gets to Wikimedia. The tool
appears to be based on some ActiveX-Object thingy that uses MSIE to
render the pages. I could be mistaken. If an article is too long, it
is shortened. There are hyperlinks to wikipedia.answers.com and to the
license text of the GFDL on wikipedia.org. Direct hyperlinks to the
wikipedia article itself is missing. Defining on how you interpret
this large piece of impractical text called GFDL, Anwwers.com might be
violating the GFDL (ie for not proving a list of authors). Whatever,
IANAL. Background colors are sometimes irritating, I am not sure how
to configure it.

Has anyone yet taken a tcpdump of this software?

So far, it could be a helpful tool for some people. I am not sure if I
want to keep it, due to the lack of applicability to my needs.

I think Wikipedia should mention this software at a suitable place and
should be happy if there are more people discovering the "donation"
button.

Mathias


subject: [WikiEN-l] Answers.com tool released

body:
On 4/12/06, Elisabeth Bauer <elian at djini.de> wrote:

> It's a tool, it goes on the tools page. You didn't scrutinize the
> business practices of the other companies listed on the page, so why do
> it here?

I'm in favor of an NPOV description of any relevant business practices
of companies listed on [[Wikipedia:Tools]], particularly those related
directly to the tools listed there. For example, if WikiWax filed a
patent lawsuit against Google on their "search autocompletion"
feature, I would very much be in favor of informing our readers about
this. However, I am not aware of any such incidents. The other
question is, if Answers.com's tool is listed, *where* it should be
listed.

As for whether or not the issue is important, it becomes obviously
more important if [[Wikipedia:Tools]] is listed more prominently in
the user interface, e.g. the sidebar, as has been proposed in the past
in conjunction with the Answers.com partnership. As long as
Wikipedia:Tools stays where it is, a fairly obscure page in the middle
of nowhere, I do not care *that* much.

Erik


from_name: Ben McIlwain

subject: [WikiEN-l] Answers.com tool released

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

Justin Cormack wrote:
> On 12 Apr 2006, at 20:25, Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 12 Apr 2006 18:27:49 +0000 (GMT), you wrote:
>>
>>> Wikipedia has a business relationship with a company that is
>>> indulging in some intellectual property-related evilness.
>> What, we use Sun servers?  Or is it Microsoft software?
>>
>> I know a lot of firms which refuse to *buy* from unethical suppliers,
>> but not many which refuse to *sell* to anyone who can't prove they are
>> whiter than white.
>
> I remember talking to a company that wouldnt sell to a security company
> in apartheid South Africa who were developing an automated security
> system. With guns. SO it does happen.

Seconded.  Companies choose who they want to do business with all of the
time.  It's not illegal by embargo laws to sell small arms to many
countries in the Middle East, but most American companies absolutely
refuse to do it.

- --
Ben McIlwain ("Cyde Weys")

~ Sub veste quisque nudus est ~
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from_name: William Allen Simpson

subject: [Wikitech-l] ParserFunctions trial

body:
Conrad Dunkerson wrote:
> * Tim Starling wrote:
>> The extension for mathematical expressions and conditional constructs has been enabled on all
>> Wikimedia wikis, on a trial basis. Documentation is at:
>>
>> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ParserFunctions
>>
>> See the talk page for discussion.
>
> Great!
> Wonderful job Tim! This is wonderful and will vastly simplify tons of things.
>
When Tim says "trial", how is the testing coordinated?  Shouldn't it be
tried on a few not too prominent places, rather than fix every qif now?

Where should I be looking for posts coordinating this?


subject: [WikiEN-l] Why voting *is* evil

body:
On 4/12/06, Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm just saying in terms of the likelihood of somebody speaking
> English who said they were born in "Georgia". The odds are just
> statistically higher that somebody saying that, knowing nothing else
> about the context in which it was said, were born in the US state than
> in the Eastern European country. I of course don't mean that to be
> much of a convincing argument, but it was something which occurred to
> me in response to an earlier comment.

You actually just accidentally distorted the argument (originally, the
person born in Georgia wasn't necessarily an English speaker), but
it's not too important. This discussion convinces me that slight
differences in how we define the goals of this project, its biases,
how we measure masses of people, etc, can lead to significant
differences in outcome.

Imagine, for example that instead of a 60-60 on the poll, the result
had been 40-80. Or, it had been advertised on other Wikipedias (as if
it mattered that much). Or something.

Steve


from_name: Michael Snow

subject: [WikiEN-l] Georgia/Victoria

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:

>On 4/11/06, Pete Bartlett <pcb21 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
>>To back up Mark's point with a concrete example,
>>[[Victoria]] has had no controversy, despite the
>>Australian state getting far less prominence on that
>>page than it deserves.
>>
>>
>That is truly the mother of all disambiguation pages!
>
It would be more appropriate to call it the queen of disambiguation pages.

--Michael Snow


from_name: Alphax (Wikipedia email)

subject: [WikiEN-l] Why voting *is* evil

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:
>
>> John Lee wrote:
>>
>>
>>> Oskar Sigvardsson wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> I've never set foot in the US and I've still seen and heard more
>>> references to Georgia the state than Georgia the country in my entire
>>> life. I think making [[Georgia]] a disambig is a good compromise.
>>>
>>>
>> Stalin was from Georgia...
>>
>>
> Yes, but he did not become famous by retaining the name Dzhugashvili.
>

Bless you. You meant Gdankzig, right?

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

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Why voting *is* evil

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 4/12/06, Gordon Joly <gordon.joly at pobox.com> wrote:
>> Many peoples names are richer examples.
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Wilson_%28disambiguation%29
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists_of_ambiguous_human_names
>
> Yep. I'd never heard of the American [[Jack Thomspon]] until the
> recent controversy on Wikipedia. Then again, I doubt most Americans
> have heard of the Australian [[Jack Thomspon (actor)]].
>

WHY does some two-bit Yank lawyer get priority???

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

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from_name: Tels

subject: [Wikitech-l] TOClimit

body:
Moin,

On Wednesday 12 April 2006 12:35, Guillaume Paumier wrote:
> on fr: too
>
> g.

Which is one of the serious problems of having usefull stuff in templates:
You need to replicate them to all wikis that might use them.

That's where build-ins for some very-often used or usefull things have an
advantage, like other wiki sites getting them, too.

Best wishes,

Tels

--
 Signed on Wed Apr 12 19:45:58 2006 with key 0x93B84C15.
 Visit my photo gallery at http://bloodgate.com/photos/
 PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email.

 This email violates U.S. patent #5,546,528 and EU patent EP0689133:

   ________________________________________
   | Header | Body | Attachements |	  |
   |--------+	   +----------------------|
   |					  |
   ~					  ~

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subject: [Wikitech-l] DISPLAYTITLE

body:
Moin,

On Wednesday 12 April 2006 13:04, Magnus Manske wrote:
> Brion Vibber schrieb:
> > 1) It breaks template inclusions.
> > 3) It may have effect in places it shouldn't.
> >
> > Previews, background rendering, display of message chunks inside a
> > special page, etc might run the parser at many times other than a
> > page view. This could lead to inappropriate overwriting of the
> > special page's title information.
> >
> > An immediate example is that the "Editing XYZ" message gets
> > overwritten entirely when previewing.
>
> I've limited it to "$action == 'view'". That leaves some special pages.
> I'll write a workaround.

How do you determine whether the parser currently runs for action=view or
action=preview etc?

I would like to generate different output depending on whether my
extension code is triggered for a preview, or for a save.

Best wishes,

Tels

--
 Signed on Wed Apr 12 19:49:02 2006 with key 0x93B84C15.
 Visit my photo gallery at http://bloodgate.com/photos/
 PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email.

 This email violates EU patent EP0394160:

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Why voting *is* evil

body:
Mark Gallagher wrote:
> G'day Fastfission,
>
>> And not to get on Georgia (the country's) bad side, but the state of Georgia
>> actually has almost twice as many people living in it as the country does.
>>
>> Which means that if someone says "My grandmother was born in Georgia", in
>> English, and without any other context, you probably are correct in assuming
>> they mean the U.S. state and not the country, just based on the numbers
>> alone.
>
> Err ... maybe in America (I have noticed Americans don't seem to see the
> need to specify nationality, presumably because anyone important is from
> the USA).
>
> If an Australian said "my grandmother was born in Georgia", they would
> usually mean the country.  Otherwise, they'd say "my grandmother was
> born in Georgia ... you know, in America".
>

Yeah, wot he said.

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

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subject: [Wikitech-l] TOClimit

body:
Conrad Dunkerson wrote:
> * Tels wrote:
>
>> Which is one of the serious problems of having usefull stuff in templates:
>> You need to replicate them to all wikis that might use them.
>
>> That's where build-ins for some very-often used or usefull things have an
>> advantage, like other wiki sites getting them, too.
>
> Backwards logic. The 'problem' you assign to the templates is actually the
> absence of the feature in MediaWiki. The template is not the problem, but
> rather a solution to it. If the 'TOCright' template is at some point
> deemed vital (which seems unlikely - I worked on it and I know it is not
> extensively used) then it'll be built into MediaWiki.
>
You did touch it once, a few days ago.

By "not extensively used" you mean the fact that it is mandated for
disambiguation pages and the like, but currently only in a couple of
thousand pages, then I'd agree it's not "vital".  But it is handy....


body:
On 4/12/06, Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:
> This is especially prevalent when there is a small spate of vandalism.
> I try to make sure I always check the current version against
> something further down the page,  but it's hard to remember to do in
> all cases. Perhaps if it was easier (i.e., with a single click and
> without any looking at the history) to see the diff for the edits done
> by the most recent five users (sorting it by user rather than edit
> would make it easier to avoid skipping single bad edits)? Maybe if
> there was a regularized system of evaluating many edits at a time and
> screening them for problematic content? Maybe we need to find ways to
> get around seeing histories as collections of single edits and rather
> as clusters of edits? I don't exactly know. I'm just speculating
> wildly here and not proposing anything concrete.

This is possible with my greasemonkey script. I will really try to
release it properly. There's a screenshot here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image%3AEnhanceHistory-ShowerJuggling.png

Would that help?

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] Why voting *is* evil

body:
G'day Alphax,

> Steve Bennett wrote:
>
>>On 4/12/06, Gordon Joly <gordon.joly at pobox.com> wrote:
>>
>>>Many peoples names are richer examples.
>>>
>>>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Wilson_%28disambiguation%29
>>>
>>>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists_of_ambiguous_human_names
>>
>>Yep. I'd never heard of the American [[Jack Thomspon]] until the
>>recent controversy on Wikipedia. Then again, I doubt most Americans
>>have heard of the Australian [[Jack Thomspon (actor)]].
>
> WHY does some two-bit Yank lawyer get priority???

Because he pissed off a small minority of the gamer community, and they
decided to set up a hate shrine to him using Wikipedia.  Ask any gamer
(and they're the only people who come near that area) which Thompson is
more notable ...

The Jack Thompson thing is a great case of how you can be a total
fuckwit and still be the legitimately injured party ...

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

--
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.1.385 / Virus Database: 268.4.1/308 - Release Date: 11/04/2006


from_name: Guy Chapman aka JzG

subject: [WikiEN-l] Answers.com tool released

body:
On Wed, 12 Apr 2006 18:27:49 +0000 (GMT), you wrote:

>Wikipedia has a business relationship with a company that is indulging in some intellectual property-related evilness.

What, we use Sun servers?  Or is it Microsoft software?

I know a lot of firms which refuse to *buy* from unethical suppliers,
but not many which refuse to *sell* to anyone who can't prove they are
whiter than white.
Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


subject: [WikiEN-l] Why voting *is* evil

body:
Philip Welch wrote:
> On Apr 11, 2006, at 6:05 PM, Mark Gallagher wrote:
>
>>>>> [[Macedonia]]
>>>>>
>>>>> Should it point to the Greek administrative region, the modern
>>>>> country, the ancient kingdom, or the geographic region?
>>>> You were probably asking me. I answer: The country.
>>> And not the kingdom that at one time controlled the entire
>>> civilized world?
>> [[Rome]].
>>
>> C'mon.
>
> [[Alexander the Great]].
>
> C'mon.
>

[[Lleyton Hewitt]].

C'mon!

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

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subject: [Wikitech-l] DISPLAYTITLE

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> Magnus Manske wrote:
>
>>> 3) It may have effect in places it shouldn't.
>>>
>>> Previews, background rendering, display of message chunks inside a special page,
>>> etc might run the parser at many times other than a page view. This could lead
>>> to inappropriate overwriting of the special page's title information.
>>>
>>> An immediate example is that the "Editing XYZ" message gets overwritten entirely
>>> when previewing.
>>>
>>>
>> I've limited it to "$action == 'view'". That leaves some special pages.
>> I'll write a workaround.
>>
>
> That's still extremely wrong. You should not attempt to divine anything about or
> affect the outside environment from the parser.
>
> In many cases rendering for future views happens at save time. It might also
> happen from a command-line maintenance script or other background job.
>
I will remove this hack once I make it return data through the
parseroutput object.

Magnus


subject: [WikiEN-l] Answers.com tool released

body:
On 4/12/06, Matt R <matt_crypto at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> Wikipedia has a business relationship with a company that is indulging in some intellectual property-related evilness. Moreover, the actions of this company are inhibiting the creation of tools that facilitate access to Wikipedia. Both ethically and pragmatically, therefore, it is entirely reasonable to ask ourselves what our response should be (if anything). Maybe not listing their tool is an appropriate response -- who knows? It's worth at least thinking about for a minute. It's not WP:POINT.

Given that Wikipedia recently named Answers.com an official partner
(or whatever it was), taking the attitude "answers.com is evil, let's
having nothing to do with them" probably isn't going to wash.

Steve


from_name: Stephen Bain

subject: [WikiEN-l] LS Studio and pro-pedophilia pov

body:
On 4/12/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
> I think we absolutely should delete it, if it is as unverifiable as
> people are saying.
>
> This could be done in multiple steps, if that would help.
>
> First, remove all unverifiable statements from the article.  Insist
> firmly on the talk page that nothing goes back into the article without
> a solid site to a mainstream publication.
>
> Second, after a couple of weeks of demonstrating that there is therefore
> nothing to be said, AfD would be appropriate and likely to succeed.

That's basically what I did already: I cut all the unverifiable stuff
and moved it to [[2004 Ukrainian child pornography raids]]. There have
been no substantive changes in the five days since, after raging
activity beforehand, clearly there is nothing of encyclopaedic value
left.

Nominating it for deletion is a good idea.

--
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com


from_name: Ilmari Karonen

subject: [Wikitech-l] &action=edit??

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> Birger wrote:
>>2006/4/12, Rob Church <robchur at gmail.com>:
>>
>>>Without the "action=edit" part, MediaWiki will attempt to view the
>>>article; this is the default action. When in this mode, the "preload"
>>>parameter is ignored; it means nothing to the code, and the value
>>>won't even be checked.
>>
>>Is there a possibility to change this, so that the "preload" parameter is
>>not ignored without the "action=edit" part being present?
>
> The "preload" parameter is *meaningless* when anything other than editing is
> going on.

It would make a certain amount of sense to trigger edit mode if the
"preload" parameter is present _and_ the page does not yet exist, even
if "action=edit" is not present.

I'll see if I can produce a patch.

--
Ilmari Karonen


from_name: charles matthews

body:
"maru dubshinki" wrote

>This isn't much good to us without a translation- I know my French is
only good enough to catch a little of what you are saying, and you
really should have provided a direct link...
http://www.bogdanov.ch/affaire-bogdanov/wikipedia.htm

The essential in what is indeed quite a long article seems to me in the
section Bannissement (presque) collectif, which gives a clipping from the
ArbCom ruling (in English as well as French).  And makes some complaints
about the handling (which have some merit).

The basic issues are like this:

- where an existing controversy teleports into WP, how to stop the edit
warring, when it is being fueled elsewhere?

- particularly in such a situation, how to play spot the sockpuppet, without
biting newbies?

Charles


subject: [WikiEN-l] Archives as sources proposal

body:
Wikipedia:Archives as sources <WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org>

There is a proposal going on to alter the No Original Research policy.

Just in case people missed it.

Garion96


from_name: Conrad Dunkerson

subject: [Wikitech-l] ParserFunctions trial

body:
* William Allen Simpson wrote:
> When Tim says "trial", how is the testing coordinated?  Shouldn't it be
> tried on a few not too prominent places, rather than fix every qif now?

> Where should I be looking for posts coordinating this?

I suggested on 'Village Pump (technical)' that we apply changes to high
traffic pages first and see how it plays out. Provides a reasonable stress
test, but fewer pages to revert if there are problems. That's about the
extent of 'coordination' this far. The m:ParserFunctions talk page would
probably be a good spot for further discussion.


from_name: Justin Cormack

subject: [WikiEN-l] Answers.com tool released

body:
On 12 Apr 2006, at 20:25, Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:

> On Wed, 12 Apr 2006 18:27:49 +0000 (GMT), you wrote:
>
>> Wikipedia has a business relationship with a company that is
>> indulging in some intellectual property-related evilness.
>
> What, we use Sun servers?  Or is it Microsoft software?
>
> I know a lot of firms which refuse to *buy* from unethical suppliers,
> but not many which refuse to *sell* to anyone who can't prove they are
> whiter than white.

I remember talking to a company that wouldnt sell to a security company
in apartheid South Africa who were developing an automated security
system. With guns. SO it does happen.

Justinc


subject: [WikiEN-l] Archives as sources proposal

body:
On 12 Apr 2006, at 21:08, Garion1000 wrote:

> Wikipedia:Archives as sources <WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org>
>
> There is a proposal going on to alter the No Original Research policy.
>
> Just in case people missed it.

Yes, can you provide a link if you mail to the list.

Justinc


from_name: Laurence Soixante-sept

body:
maru dubshinki <marudubshinki at gmail.com> a ?crit :  On 4/12/06, Laurence Soixante-sept wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have just written and published an article about Wikipedia on my web site (www.bogdanov.ch), more precisely about the circumstances in which I have been banned by trying to take part to the article "Bogdanov Affair".
>
> My article is entitled "Wikipedia et l'affaire Bogdanov : "encyclop?die libre" ou dictature virtuelle ?", which means : "Wikipedia and the Bogdanov affair : "free encyclopedia" or virtual dictatorship ?". It is in french... sorry, I cannot translate it by myself !
>
> I just hope I will not be censored by the moderators as I habe been by the Arbitrators on Wikipedia ! ;-)
>
> Laurence67 (talk page)

This isn't much good to us without a translation- I know my French is
only good enough to catch a little of what you are saying, and you
really should have provided a direct link...
http://www.bogdanov.ch/affaire-bogdanov/wikipedia.htm

~maru
_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

  Thank you, anyways, for having done it ! I linked the title of the article, I tought it would work...
  Laurence

---------------------------------
 Faites de Yahoo! votre page d'accueil sur le web pour retrouver directement vos services pr?f?r?s : v?rifiez vos nouveaux mails, lancez vos recherches et suivez l'actualit? en temps r?el. Cliquez ici.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Georgia/Victoria

body:
On 4/11/06, Pete Bartlett <pcb21 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> To back up Mark's point with a concrete example,
> [[Victoria]] has had no controversy, despite the
> Australian state getting far less prominence on that
> page than it deserves.

That is truly the mother of all disambiguation pages! It would
probably do well to highlight the most important cases (notably, the
ex Queen, the Australian state, and the Canadian city) up the top, as
recommended in whatever manual of style page. Then the more obscure
articles, like defunct voting zones in Canadian provinces can be
hidden down the bottom.

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] Archives as sources proposal

body:
On Wed, 12 Apr 2006 22:08:32 +0200, you wrote:

>There is a proposal going on to alter the No Original Research policy.

Two, actually, if you include the edit war at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:NOR - see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:No_original_research
Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


subject: [Wikitech-l] &action=edit??

body:
Ilmari Karonen wrote:
>
> It would make a certain amount of sense to trigger edit mode if the
> "preload" parameter is present _and_ the page does not yet exist, even
> if "action=edit" is not present.
>
> I'll see if I can produce a patch.

Here's a quick hack that seems to work:
http://vyznev.net/misc/preloadWithoutEdit.diff

To digress a bit, it seems to me like the division of labor between the
MediaWiki and Article classes is somewhat suboptimal, as evidenced by
the fact that such as simple change requires patching two different
classes.  In particular, the return value of Article::getContent() has
too many different meanings -- I've encountered some cases before where
MediaWiki "no such article" notices appear in the edit box when
something unexpected happens and the code gets confused.  (I think
trying to edit an old revision of a deleted article can cause this, for
example.  That happens quite often when doing new pages patrol.)

--
Ilmari Karonen


from_name: John Lee

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia broken

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:

>On 4/11/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
>
>
>>This pisses me off, actually.  We deleted the uncited list of obscure
>>sexual terms (read: juvenile protologisms) and now we have a whole
>>series of equally uncited articles on each one, which can't be deleted
>>because that would be "censorship" and because they are on Teh
>>Intarwebs, so it must be true.
>>
>>
>
>Can't the article be phrased just as you put it. "These are found on
>[[teh interweb]], but are likely to be [[urban legend]]s." Urban
>legends can be notable too...
>
>Steve
>
>
No can do. We can't cite anything off the old internet without /at
least/ knowing the publisher. [[WP:RS]] rejects blogs, forums, etc.
because they are either anonymously written, unreliable as secondary
sources, or both. The only source with a name that we've dug up is a
one-sentence reference to a "Cleveland Steamer" in a San Francisco
gossip column that doesn't even explain what the phrase means. The pop
culture stuff is probably verifiable, but that means the article's focus
should be on a sexual term used predominantly in pop culture, which
makes it a Wiktionary article, not a Wikipedia article. We write
encyclopaedia articles about topics that have encyclopedic, not
etymological, material.

John


subject: [WikiEN-l] Archives as sources proposal

body:
On 4/12/06, Justin Cormack <justin at specialbusservice.com> wrote:
>
>
> On 12 Apr 2006, at 21:08, Garion1000 wrote:
>
> > Wikipedia:Archives as sources <WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org>
> >
> > There is a proposal going on to alter the No Original Research policy.
> >
> > Just in case people missed it.
>
> Yes, can you provide a link if you mail to the list.
>
> Justinc

Weird, it does show in my sent mail that I did. Anyway, here it is
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Archives_as_sources

Garion96


from_name: Matt R

subject: [WikiEN-l] Answers.com tool released

body:
Philip Welch <wikipedia at philwelch.net> wrote:
On Apr 12, 2006, at 4:15 PM, Ben McIlwain wrote:
> > Seconded.  Companies choose who they want to do business with all
> > of the
> > time.  It's not illegal by embargo laws to sell small arms to many
> > countries in the Middle East, but most American companies absolutely
> > refuse to do it.

> There's a difference between selling *arms* (i.e. things that can be
> used to kill people and blow shit up) and selling, say, *encyclopedias*.

Yep, we're well into strained analogy territory here. And nobody, as far as I'm aware, has suggested we stop "doing business" with Answers.com, rather that we don't advertise their product: one for which they're engaging in some unpleasant software patent litigation.

-- Matt


from_name: brion at pobox.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki automated test run failure 2006-04-13

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

Going to run database updates for fiveralpha
Depending on the size of your database this may take a while!
..hitcounter table already exists.
..querycache table already exists.
..objectcache table already exists.
..categorylinks table already exists.
..logging table already exists.
..validate table already exists.
..user_newtalk table already exists.
..transcache table already exists.
..trackbacks table already exists.
..externallinks table already exists.
..job table already exists.
..langlinks table already exists.
..have ipb_id field in ipblocks table.
..have ipb_expiry field in ipblocks table.
..have rc_type field in recentchanges table.
..have rc_ip field in recentchanges table.
..have rc_id field in recentchanges table.
..have rc_patrolled field in recentchanges table.
..have user_real_name field in user table.
..have user_token field in user table.
..have user_email_token field in user table.
..have user_registration field in user table.
..have log_params field in logging table.
..have ar_rev_id field in archive table.
..have ar_text_id field in archive table.
..have page_len field in page table.
..have rev_deleted field in revision table.
..have img_width field in image table.
..have img_metadata field in image table.
..have img_media_type field in image table.
..have val_ip field in validate table.
..have ss_total_pages field in site_stats table.
..have iw_trans field in interwiki table.
..have ipb_range_start field in ipblocks table.
..have ss_images field in site_stats table.
..already have interwiki table
..indexes seem up to 20031107 standards
Already have pagelinks; skipping old links table updates.
..image primary key already set.
The watchlist table is already set up for email notification.
Adding missing watchlist talk page rows... ok
..user table does not contain old email authentication field.
Logging table has correct title encoding.
..page table already exists.
revision timestamp indexes already up to 2005-03-13
..rev_text_id already in place.
..page_namespace is already a full int (int(11)).
..ar_namespace is already a full int (int(11)).
..rc_namespace is already a full int (int(11)).
..wl_namespace is already a full int (int(11)).
..qc_namespace is already a full int (int(11)).
..log_namespace is already a full int (int(11)).
..already have pagelinks table.
..templatelinks table already exists
No img_type field in image table; Good.
Already have unique user_name index.
..user_groups table already exists.
..user_groups is in current format.
..wl_notificationtimestamp is already nullable.
..timestamp key on logging already exists.
Setting page_random to a random value on rows where it equals 0...changed 0 rows
Initialising "MediaWiki" namespace...
Clearing message cache...Done.
Done.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Archives as sources proposal

body:
On 4/13/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 12 Apr 2006 22:08:32 +0200, you wrote:
>
> >There is a proposal going on to alter the No Original Research policy.
>
> Two, actually, if you include the edit war at
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:NOR - see
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:No_original_research
> Guy (JzG)

Oh brother, didn't even realised that was going on as well.

Garion96


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] ParserFunctions trial

body:
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> I do understand from Gangleri that this new functionality is horribly
> broken when it comes to right to left languages.


body:
brion at pobox.com wrote:
> An automated run of parserTests.php showed the following failures:
>
> Going to run database updates for fiveralpha

Woops, think I got this sorted out now.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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subject: [Wikitech-l] What is required to "fix search"?

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> Hi,
>   Just wondering what the story with the search functionality is
> exactly.

Currently the index does not update on a regular basis as it caused the search
servers to explode violently, bringing everything down. Until that is corrected,
search is only updated sporadically.

> I understand that searching is a difficult problem best left to
> Google, but is there a way where it could at least be hacked to check
> for articles whose name matches the search string verbatim?

Click the "go" button or hit "enter" when searching.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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from_name: Brianna Laugher

body:
Very cool. I didn't try testing UTF8 but everything else worked,
although ticking the box for "suggest categories" didn't do
anything... so I don't think that works.

Brianna

--
"Mathematicians do it with Nobel's wife."


body:
Also I don't know if you want to cover the case where someone tries to
move an image that is already at the Commons. It kinda half-succeeds
and half-fails. Maybe you give people more credit than that ;)

Brianna

--
"Mathematicians do it with Nobel's wife."


body:
Oops, I should've finished my testing before I fired off these emails!
For a different image, it worked and suggested categories. Maybe the
first image just didn't have any - in that case, a note to that effect
could be handy, otherwise you don't know if anything has happened or
not.

Also that checkbox would be handy on the front page, rather than
having to do it twice.

I'll stop testing now in case I find something else :)

On 13/04/06, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher at gmail.com> wrote:
> Very cool. I didn't try testing UTF8 but everything else worked,
> although ticking the box for "suggest categories" didn't do
> anything... so I don't think that works.

--
"Mathematicians do it with Nobel's wife."


body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 4/13/06, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
>> Currently the index does not update on a regular basis as it caused the search
>> servers to explode violently, bringing everything down. Until that is corrected,
>> search is only updated sporadically.
>
> Ok, when could that next be done? Is there any kind of plan to fix
> searching at some stage? It's not like it's some minor obscure little
> feature...

Currently it works off the page data dumps.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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from_name: Tim Starling

body:
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> Because I can't even expect the nonexistent toolserver administration
> to perform the trivial action of turning off my account, I have
> deleted my ssh authorized key... thus my account is effectively
> disabled.  So don't worry, you can go on doing nothing.

I'm in favour of giving you root access on the toolserver and a pppuser account for the main
cluster, then you can do what you can with it. If you accepted the role and the others in control of
the toolserver consented, I'd wish you luck, but I'm not sure how much you'd be able to do. The site
is growing rapidly, and so is the data size and write load. We currently have somewhere around
500-600GB of InnoDB data across all our clusters. Zedler has 625GB total space in its main
partition. If the data fits now, it won't leave much room, and it won't fit for long.

There's a reason we are splitting our databases into lots of different indepdently replicating
clusters, that's because our servers were having increasing difficulty keeping up with the write
load while still performing a useful amount of read load. Zedler is experiencing that problem too,
there are apparently times of the day or week when it can't keep up with the write rate, given its
existing read rate.

Now, with careful optimisation of the read load, including halting all non-critical reads when lag
is over a certain value, it may be possible to keep the lag low, even when replicating the entire
multi-master data set. But that will mean limiting the number of expensive queries. And how long
will it last, anyway?

The point I'm getting at is that maybe it's not reasonable to expect a server of zedler's type to
replicate every transaction that occurs anywhere in our site. If we want a complete, up-to-date copy
of all data at knams, we probably need to dedicate more hardware to it.

In any case, I think giving Gregory root access would be a positive step forward. He is obviously
very motivated towards the toolserver project (or at least was), and it's my understanding that he's
capable as well. Could Kate and/or the e.V. give some comment on this?

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Tony Sidaway

subject: [WikiEN-l] Answers.com tool released

body:
On 4/12/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have begun an
> editorial discussion ...about whether it is wise to effectively advertise this tool,
>which is
> at the heart of Answers.com's software patents lawsuit against Babylon
> Software.

The patent suit is the human equivalent of a male Koala urinating on a
tree branch to mark its territory.  The total amount of the claim,
according to the lawsuit, is just $210,000.  Peanuts.

I don't see how this software, which is a product of Answers.com, can
possibly be "at the heart of" a lawsuit concerning a product sold by
another company which is alleged to be infringing a patent held by
Answers.com.  Answers.com either holds a valid patent which is being
infringed by another company, or it does not.  Answers.com's own
products are not relevant to the case.

In any case,


subject: [WikiEN-l] Answers.com tool released

body:
On 4/13/06, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> In any case,
>
...as I was saying!

In any case, this seems to be a very useful third party product that
would be of interest to Wikipedia users.  Moreover it generates
advertising revenue that improves Wikimedia Foundation and thus helps
to pay for the servers.  Why should we not mention this on the
relevant project page?


body:
If Wikimedia really needs money, it should just put some discreet, well chosen advertising on the
site. Better to advertise some random debt consolidation firm than a company so openly hostile to
the goals of the free software movement.

-- Tim Starling


body:
Magnus Manske wrote:
> I don't thnik Gregory disputed the need to keep the site running, and if
> makeing an en cluster is what it takes to do this, so be it. His point
> is the frustration from hearing "Hey, we made a new cluster. And by the
> way, the toolserver won't work with that, so everyone wo invested month
> of work into the tools there is s*****d. So what." Taking the wheels and
> engine from a car and then giving someone the keys isn't really helpful
> in such a situation.

The toolserver will work with it, just like it will work with external storage. I know that Gregory
knows this because we were discussing it on toolserver-l on March 29:

Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> On 3/29/06, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:
[...]
>>It should be possible to set up 5 MySQL instances and have each of them
>>replicating from a different master. Is anyone volunteering to set up
>>those instances? Maybe we need to give root access to someone who
>>actually cares about this stuff.
>
> I, in effect, volunteered to do it when I pointed out that would solve
> that issue on this list previously.  I've setup replication with other
> RDMSes, never mysql... but there is already a configured instance to
> work from.  I don't even see how this could be even considered a
> challenge,... it's the ongoing maintenance that carries the real
> burden.


from_name: Phil Boswell

subject: [Wikitech-l] DISPLAYTITLE

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
>
> Tels wrote:
>> I would like to generate different output depending on whether my
>> extension code is triggered for a preview, or for a save.
> Please don't. Among other things, this defeats the purpose of a preview.
>
I can certainly see where this might actually be a good thing to do.

For example in the case of Aevar's <ref> extension it has been suggested
that in cases where a section is being edited which contains <ref> tags but
no <references/> tag, the extension might be able to produce a preview of
what would appear without the user having to introduce a temporary
<references/> (which would run the risk of their forgetting to remove it
:-).
--
Phil
--
View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/DISPLAYTITLE-t1429950.html#a3899914
Sent from the Wikipedia Developers forum at Nabble.com.


subject: [Foundation-l] Placeopedia

body:
Benjamin Webb wrote:
>
> I've just discovered http://www.placeopedia.com/ ...[which]
allows you to put
> Wikipedia articles onto google maps...
I wondered if anyone else had spotted these and whether placeopedia has
> permission to use the Wikipedia logo on its page.
>
There is a {{placeopedia}} template on enwiki which allows you to add a
reference to the appropriate article for a place listed on Placeopedia.

HTH HAND
--
Phil
--
View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Placeopedia-t1442977.html#a3900746
Sent from the WikiMedia Foundation forum at Nabble.com.


subject: [Foundation-l] Placeopedia


from_name: Steve Bennett

body:
On 4/12/06, maru dubshinki <marudubshinki at gmail.com> wrote:
> Steve, that is quite neat. When you do release, I'd love to try it
> out. (Assuming it works. I never got the Greasemonkey extension to
> animate histories to work, for instance. Wikipedia seems rather
> hostile to Greasemonkey extensions...)

It's not at all. It's just that old Greasemonkey extensions are rather
hostile to new versions of FireFox.

The major issue I've battled with in this particular extension is
finding a good diff routine. I've now been through three:

1) One that worked relatively quickly, was pretty, but had bugs and
frequently missed changes
2) One that worked very quickly, but diffed at the character level (I
think that's shown in the screenshot). Often two completely different
words would be considered "almost the same" with just individual
characters changed.
3) One that worked as slow as all hell, was pretty, and sometimes
crashed for unknown reasons (about 1 in 10 diffs failed to return
anything).

So the options are:
Fix the bugs in 1) (possible, others have already attempted this, I think)
Make 2) work at word level (hard, IMHO)
Fix the bug in 3) and just put up with its incredible slowness, and
adapat the extension as a whole to show less diffs.

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] Georgia/Victoria

body:
On 4/13/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:

> Without even looking, I'd suggest something like:
>
> * [[Queen Victoria]]
> * [[Victoria, Australia]]
> ** Stuff relating to Victoria, Australia
> * [[Victoria, British Columbia]]
> * Stuff relating to Victoria, British Columbia

Have a look now.

Steve


from_name: europanto

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Europanto

body:
Don't you see that it is precisely one of the point that pleases
europantists : no "rules" and good sounding sentences.
I would say : "Tengo een amerikanische friend" or "An amigo am?ricain hebe
Ich".
Worse than unpure code-switching : sometimes, you even transform or invent
words ( you qualified that "heavy". )
I particularly like to use verb+"ando". For example : spielando ( playing ).
And ... guess what "avioplano" stands for in one of Diego Marani's text ?

Anyway, as I said before, I won't kill myself if there's no Europanto
Wikipedia.
I didn't ask for one and that will probably save me a lot of time.

Well, that will be my last words here, I think.

Bye

Ms smh

--
View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Europanto-t1056989.html#a3902686
Sent from the Wikipedia General forum at Nabble.com.


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

subject: [Wikitech-l] ParserFunctions trial

body:
Conrad Dunkerson wrote:
> * Tim Starling wrote:
>
>> The extension for mathematical expressions and conditional constructs has been enabled on all
>> Wikimedia wikis, on a trial basis. Documentation is at:
>>
>> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ParserFunctions
>>
>> See the talk page for discussion.
>>
>
> Great!
> Wonderful job Tim! This is wonderful and will vastly simplify tons of things.
>
> I need to get busy converting all the 'date math' templates to use 'expr:'.
>
> And phasing out the 'calcadd' and 'calcsubtract' templates.
>
> And building out conditional row functionality for all the infoboxes with
> '#if:'.
>
> And converting Wikipedia:Featured content to use 'rand:'.
>
> And... oi!
>
> Damn you Tim! :]
Hoi,
I do understand from Gangleri that this new functionality is horribly
broken when it comes to right to left languages. I take it this code is
still very much experimental until it works properly for *all *the
languages Wikimedia uses MediaWiki for. It would therefore be better to
wait replacing templates until this functionality works properly.

Thanks,
   GerardM


subject: [Wikitech-l] TOClimit

body:
It's great. The TOC on the left side often looks very ugly when it's
long. You have a nice intro section, then a long pause while you
scroll down, then the text starts again.

I have used it at [[Victoria]] now ;)

Steve

On 4/12/06, Conrad Dunkerson <conrad.dunkerson at worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> * Steve Bennett wrote:
> > {{TOCright}} exists? I am pleasantly stunned.
>
> Just a template which right aligns __TOC__.


from_name: Arie van Buuren

subject: [WikiEN-l] Ethics

body:
On April 10, 2006 5:46 AM Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney at gmail.com> wrote:

> Optimally, each edit should be analyzed on its own merits, not the merits
> (or lack thereof) of the person contributing. That means that a pedophile
> shouldn't be forbidden from making neutral, referenced edits to [[NAMBLA]]
> and an evolutionary biologist shouldn't be forbidden from making neutral,
> refereced edits to [[Creationism]]. There's no need for this litmus test
> of moral responsibility-- the quality of an edit stands out on its own.

This is certainly how I understand things should happen on Wikipedia.  The
ethics involved should not generally be seen as a reason to revert. Things
should be kept in balance and undue weight and other policy violations
prevented by the consensus process which in turn is safeguarded
(by admins and dispute resolution processes) against disruption.

You wrote that it is difficult for people who are invested in a topic to
make neutral edits on the subject. Guettarda called 'writing for the enemy'
a great but somewhat humbling experience. Sean Barrett wrote that editing
the opposing viewpoint is necessary and expected. The thread started
with a question by Thommandel at aol.com about the ethicality of edits
by editors working on a part of an article that describes a POV they
personally oppose.

It appears that the situation has two complementary components
(somewhat modified version incorporating your qualifiers):
(A) "correcting" a description of an opposing view to align it with
one's own view, e.g. by removing text, is unethical, unless done in
good faith. Regardless of the editor's intentions, Wikipedia processes
are in place to handle the situation. "Writing against the enemy" is
out of the question. "Wikipedia is not a battleground. If there's a battle,
we don't (re-)enact it - we describe it."
(B) Improving a description of an opposing view based on one's insight,
knowledge of sources, etc. - Yes, it's great, expected and necessary, and
difficult. I would like to see it more often. Even in contentious
areas where edits for the enemy are likely to be hit by friendly fire if the
battle is being (re-)enacted on talk pages and sometimes even in articles.

Does that change things in regards of the enforcement of policy? No, it
doesn't, as argued by you and others. But I do think Tom had a good question
and I hope the various responses are helpful for those who are trying to
gain a better understanding of the issues involved.

The general answer, I  guess, is that problems where someone thinks
consensus is skewed can be solved by using the various dispute resolution
processes. Tom's problem as posted here on the list looks like a good
candidate for a survey or RfC. Calling in more editors to weigh in with
their opinion is expected to offset editor bias skewing consensus.

Thanks,

Arie
[[User:Avb]]


from_name: Benjamin Webb

subject: [Foundation-l] Placeopedia

body:
I've just discovered http://www.placeopedia.com/ and also
http://www.yourhistoryhere.com/. They are both from
mySociety<http://www.mysociety.org/>,
the same people who gave us pledge bank. The first allows you to put
Wikipedia articles onto google maps, and the second allows you to add local
information onto maps.

I wondered if anyone else had spotted these and whether placeopedia has
permission to use the Wikipedia logo on its page.

Thanks
Ben Webb


subject: [Foundation-l] Placeopedia


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] Now I wonder if this counts as a reliable source?

body:
The MIT study looks like good science. At the proper frequencies the
helmet will act as an antenna rather than a shield. This has to do
with the relationship of the wave length of the radio signal with the
dimensions of the helmet. What is skipped over is the relevance of
radio signals to the brain in the first place. This is an excellent
source, and could be cited in [[April Fool's Day]] if there were not
so many other excellent examples.

Fred

On Apr 13, 2006, at 9:02 AM, Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:

> Surely as a public service this important new research should be
> incorporated into our growing series of articles on alien abduction
> theories and other conspiracies, but is it a reliable source?
>
> http://people.csail.mit.edu/rahimi/helmet/
>
> It put me rather in mind of this ground-breaking study:
> http://www.plokta.com/plokta/issue23/teapot.htm which gives us a
> verifiable source to back the frequently-repeated assertion that
> ''foo'' is about as much use as a chocolate teapot.
>
> Sorry, a slow afternoon in the office :-)
> Guy (JzG)
> --
> http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
Hi,
  Just wondering what the story with the search functionality is
exactly. My biggest concern is that searches for the exact title of an
existing (but "recently" created articles) fail.

For example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=Cities+%28album%29&fulltext=Search

I understand that searching is a difficult problem best left to
Google, but is there a way where it could at least be hacked to check
for articles whose name matches the search string verbatim?

Thanks,
Steve


from_name: Matt Brown

subject: [WikiEN-l] Archives as sources proposal

body:
On 4/13/06, Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:
> That doesn't even begin to capture its ridiculousness.

As an Englishman, I carry a current understatement license.

-Matt


from_name: Chuck Smith

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Attention: interwiki bots (Esperanto title policy
	change)

body:
I want to bring to the attention of interwiki bot programmers that the
Esperanto Wikipedia has recently changed its title policy for names.
Previously family names were completely capitalized, so, for example,
my name would appear as Chuck SMITH.  This was done to help people not
to be confused with Asian names where the family name comes first.

We have now changed our policy so that titles will appear "normally"
and the name with proper family name capitalization will only appear
in the first line of the article.  We are currently in the process of
writing a bot to convert all of our titles in biographies to the new
system.

For those of you who speak Esperanto and are interested in the
details, the vote can be found at
http://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vikipedio:Baloto_pri_majuskligo_de_familiaj_nomoj
showing the results about the change 21-19-3, for-against-neutral.

Best wishes,
Chuck SMITH  ;-)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Socialist POV

body:
In other words, Sam, you keep getting caught trying to insert your POV
into articles.

Move along, folks, nothing to see here.

-Matt


from_name: Birger

subject: [Wikitech-l] &action=edit??

body:
Thanks a lot for the hack, but it seems i do not have a Wiki.php-file in my
"/includes-folder"...i am using MediaWiki 1.5.2....should the code that
normally fits into the Wiki.php-file be put in the EditPage.php-file or
somewhere else? (there is no "function performAction( &$output, &$article,
&$title, &$user, &$request ) {" in this EditPage.php-file).

Thanks again!

2006/4/12, Ilmari Karonen <nospam at vyznev.net>:
>
> Ilmari Karonen wrote:
> >
> > It would make a certain amount of sense to trigger edit mode if the
> > "preload" parameter is present _and_ the page does not yet exist, even
> > if "action=edit" is not present.
> >
> > I'll see if I can produce a patch.
>
> Here's a quick hack that seems to work:
> http://vyznev.net/misc/preloadWithoutEdit.diff
>
> To digress a bit, it seems to me like the division of labor between the
> MediaWiki and Article classes is somewhat suboptimal, as evidenced by
> the fact that such as simple change requires patching two different
> classes.  In particular, the return value of Article::getContent() has
> too many different meanings -- I've encountered some cases before where
> MediaWiki "no such article" notices appear in the edit box when
> something unexpected happens and the code gets confused.  (I think
> trying to edit an old revision of a deleted article can cause this, for
> example.  That happens quite often when doing new pages patrol.)
>
> --
> Ilmari Karonen
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


body:
On 4/13/06, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> Currently the index does not update on a regular basis as it caused the search
> servers to explode violently, bringing everything down. Until that is corrected,
> search is only updated sporadically.

Ok, when could that next be done? Is there any kind of plan to fix
searching at some stage? It's not like it's some minor obscure little
feature...

> Click the "go" button or hit "enter" when searching.

Yes, *I* know that...

Steve


from_name: Fastfission

subject: [WikiEN-l] Archives as sources proposal

body:
That doesn't even begin to capture its ridiculousness. Most of the
arguments in favor seem to be "Yeah, we should be on the cutting edge
of research!" and "Well I work in an archive which no one has heard
about and I want to be able to post thing I found in it."

Fortunately I'm fairly sure that no matter how many misguided people
vote to support this ridiculous thing, being that what they are asking
for is essentially a complete repeal of NOR, it would never be able to
be implemented anyway.

FF

On 4/12/06, Matt Brown <morven at gmail.com> wrote:
> A poorly thought out proposal, I feel.
>
> -Matt
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [Wikitech-l] ParserFunctions trial

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> Gerard Meijssen wrote:
>
>> I do understand from Gangleri that this new functionality is horribly
>> broken when it comes to right to left languages.
>>
>
> From my experience with Gangleri's bug reports, I can safely say that what this
> means is "it's hard to read the markup in a web browser's text editor,
> particularly in Firefox, so sometimes people get confused and type things in the
> wrong order when editing".
>
> Unfortunately mixing markup characters, a right-to-left environment, and
> left-to-right numbers and keywords often does lead to an illegible mess in the
> basic text editor widgets that you'll find in a web browser.
>
> Please note that:
>
> 1) Localized (thus right-to-left) keywords can be provided if necessary.
>
> 2) Numbers are left-to-right even in the right-to-left scripts. *You thus cannot
> avoid mixed-directionality text when doing "math" stuff.*
>
>
>> I take it this code is
>> still very much experimental until it works properly for *all *the
>> languages Wikimedia uses MediaWiki for. It would therefore be better to
>> wait replacing templates until this functionality works properly.
>>
>
> and most importantly:
>
> 3) This is no different from the case of templates, whose syntax and markup
> usage is nearly *identical* to this extension.
>
> The argument given here thus fails on its face, as it would apply equally
> against the use of existing templates.
>
Hoi,
The argument does not fall on its face; it only proves again that
MediaWiki is hard, arguably impossible for many, to use for languages
that are not left to right. Templates are constructs and they tend to be
local to a particular project. When the keywords are such that they are
based on choices based on the expectation of left to right languages
they are inherently broken for right to left languages.

Often it has been discussed why a Wikipedia project like Arab is not
doing as well as expected; one reason often denied is because it is hard
to understand the editing process. The net result of this 'confusion' is
that people find it too difficult to edit. From a user experience it is
MediaWiki that is broken. If we also need to cooperate with Mozilla,
Opera, Apple and Microsoft to fix this it where the browser is to blame,
we should.

Thanks,
   GerardM


subject: [WikiEN-l] Socialist POV

body:
Dismissing him out of hand is inappropriate without looking at the
edits. There is plenty of POV editing on the other side too. I'm
going to answer him too, but after I look at some sample edits.

Fred

On Apr 13, 2006, at 11:03 AM, Matt Brown wrote:

> In other words, Sam, you keep getting caught trying to insert your POV
> into articles.
>
> Move along, folks, nothing to see here.
>
> -Matt
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Gregory Maxwell

body:
On 4/13/06, Jakob Voss <jakob.voss at nichtich.de> wrote:
[snip]
> How about about a title search?
>
> SELECT page_id FROM page WHERE page_title RLIKE $regxp AND $conditions
> LIMIT $limit
>
> It would be useful to find articles named "FOO (BAR)", "List of FOO" etc.

narf.

Seqscanning through a million rows on each users query?
I think not.

It MySQL's full text indexing worked on anything but myisam tables it
would be easy to provide your title search, but they don't.


from_name: Taco Deposit

subject: [WikiEN-l] Archives as sources proposal

body:
On 4/13/06, Justin Cormack <justin at specialbusservice.com> wrote:
>
> Thats not an understatement license.
> Its an irony license with the word 'irony' crossed out and
> the word 'understatement' added.
>
in crayon?


from_name: Ben Greenberg

body:
It doesn't seem to me like Greasemonkey could solve the systemic problem--
it'd just help deal with it better for a couple individual users who choose
to use it.  How could we systemically work to prevent deterioration?  I've
identified the following causes:

1.Multiple vandalisms, where only some are reverted
2.Additions of poorly written stuff, but stuff not bad enough to warrant
straight up reverting.
3.Citations getting removed
4.Unecessary factoids and observations getting added.