from_name: Delirium

subject: [Foundation-l] Bounties and expenses

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>--- Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>
>
>>Oh, having a board is fine, so long as it only handles unimportant
>>things.  We decided to have a board initially not because anyone thought
>>it was a good idea, but because the State of Florida requires
>>non-profits to have boards of trustees consisting of five or more
>>people.  For one reason or another, Jimbo decided it would be a good
>>show of community participation and democratic fuzziness and whatnot if
>>we elected two of these five members, and so we did.
>>
>>
>
>Yeah - unimportant things such as making sure we have servers and they keep
>running. Unimportant things such as setting up chapters and other outreach
>efforts. Unimportant things like creating a CD/printed version. Unimportant
>things such as hiring an on-site server admin. Utterly unimportant things such
>as having representative members with the ability to help make this all happen.
>Sure - all very unimportant. "Democratic fuzziness" ?? What are you smoking?
>
>
No, the board emphatically should not handle any of those things you
listed.  These are decisions to be made by the Wikimedia community, not
a committee.  Top-down committee decisions are not the wiki way of doing
things.

>>...
>>I don't see how they will be open and inclusive unless the Foundation is
>>prepared to pay for hundreds of Wikipedians to attend them.  If they
>>involve only a minutely small percentage of the users, then they are
>>worse than no meeting at all, and bias decision-making towards those
>>with the resources to attend.
>>
>>
>
>Have you been listening? My idea is to have quarterly meetings in different
>parts of the world that will hosted by a different Wikimedia chapter each time.
>The trustees thus come to the users. Our elected representatives and Jimbo
>should be there. The meetings will also be conducted in *real time* online via
>audio/video streaming (which can be had fairly cheaply nowadays).
>
>
How are they going to come to the users?  Are they going to have
thousands of meetings?  It would take about 5-10 meetings in the US
alone to come within range of a decent majority of users, another 10-15
in Europe, 5-10 in Asia, and so on.

>>Wikipedia is indeed a social and collaborative system, but it takes
>>place online, on a large scale.
>>
>>
>
>So I guess you are against the idea of Wikimedia chapters as well.
>
>
No, having local chapters to make tax deductions work more smoothly is
perfectly fine.

>>If the Foundation can come up with
>>funding so that any significant subset of its users can meet somewhere,
>>or even any significant subset of one of its language encyclopedias can
>>meet, I would not object to that.  However, so far there have been no
>>proposals for that, only proposals for small cliques of users to meet,
>>which I feel is detrimental to the project on a whole.  All important
>>work should take place online, in public, with as full participation as
>>possible, not take place behind closed doors and then reported after the
>>fact.
>>
>>
>
>'Cliques' - can you be more offensive? The meetings *will* be very public (see
>above). Why would you assume anything else? You are making the improper
>conclusion that real world = closed door.
>
>
Real world by definition means only a small group of users will
participate in the decision-making.

>>As for other comments on travel reimbursements as a good thing, one of
>>them even cited EU-funded projects, which are pretty notorious for being
>>full of wasteful perks (http://www.iht.com/articles/521419.html among
>>thousands of related articles).
>>
>>
>
>Perks my ass - having the elected trustees visit the people they represent
>while at the same time conducting quarterly meetings are all very important.
>Only so much can be done online and with computers - the human element is not
>present and thus a great deal of communication is lost.
>
>
How are they going to visit the people they represent?  They represent
people spread out over the entire world.  Unless we are going to give
them a travel budget up in the millions, and have them spend weeks per
year travelling, that's simply impossible.

Plus, I don't really see it as "people they represent" anyway.  The
people represent themselves, and ought to make the decisions themselves,
preferably through some sort of consensus-based system, with a
voting-based system as a fallback.

-Mark


list: wikimedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

subject: [Foundation-l] Bounties and expenses


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Tim Starling

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Link table corruption due to templates (was Re:
 Setting up for the Greek language)

references:
<40CD966B.70105@cs.ucy.ac.cy>	<40CFECA5.4000702@cs.ucy.ac.cy>	<cb6vr0$vff$2@sea.gmane.org>	<40D70F19.3080409@hackish.org>	<cb7jtj$gnn$1@sea.gmane.org>	<40D7551C.5000701@hackish.org>	<cb83dc$drf$1@sea.gmane.org>	<40D7AE94.5080909@hotmail.com>
	<cba0ai$tm2$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
Timwi wrote:
> Can't you put in a little "if" at the right spot that will prevent these
> tags from adding anything to the links table? Yes, we'll have a missing
> line in "What links here", but at least the links table will stop
> getting corrupted.

Last time I checked, you had CVS access.

-- Tim Starling


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Ralesk Ne'vennoyx

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Theora and video policy...

body:
Robert Graham Merkel wrote:

> With regards to the discussion I prompted on Video formats, might I
> suggest those people interested have a look at
>
> http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_policy
>
> To my knowledge, however, nobody has yet tried to actually add video to the
> Wikipedia.
>
> As far as all the charges of excessive idealism at work here in the
> existing choice of Ogg Vorbis for sound and (prospectively) Theora
> for video, might I just repeat the key point I made on that page:
> there are no other open, unencumbered video formats available.
> The choice is Theora or nothing.
>

Theora is built on On2?s VP3 codec, about which we know the following:

| VP3 was originally a proprietary video codec developed by On2
| Technologies (http://www.on2.com/). It is closely comparable in
| quality and bitrate to MPEG-4 video codecs.
|
| In September, 2001 it was donated to the public as open source, and
| On2 disclaimed all rights to it, including their patents on the
| technology. In 2002, they entered into an agreement with the Xiph.org
| Foundation to make VP3 the base of a new, free video codec, Ogg
| Theora. It will operate alongside Ogg Vorbis to provide a set of
| patent and royalty free open source multimedia codecs. Theora is
| currently still in alpha stage, as of May 2004.

VP3 is just as unknown to the general public as is Theora at the moment,
Theora is probably a less known project.  However, it?s ?ready for use?,
something I don?t know if I can really say Theora yet (frozen or not).

The attitude some have taken against Theora reminded me of Mozilla
developments attitude towards MNG, which led to its removal from the 1.4
trunk in favour of Flash (?!), Animated GIF (!!) and SVG.


from_name: Ting Chen

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: zh.wikipedia.org - having a single unified
	portal

body:
Hello,

I don't think the technical problem is so big.

For the first: we don't need a translation German->English->German, we even
don't need a translation traditional->simplified->traditional.

Second as was already pointed out, the conversion traditional->simplified is
very easy.

So, one technical solution could be we save the articles always in
traditional form in the database. If a user has in his user-setting
simplified, then the server would convert that article into simplified.
After his edition, the server can compare the changes and only converse the
changed part into traditional and save it into database.

This last part is the only place, where the conversion could make failure
because it is possible, that one simplified character is conversed into a
false traditional character. But that is no problem, for one, we can place
some commonly used context related conversions into the program. Second, the
other users can manually correct the failure.

Greetings.
Ting

--
+++ Jetzt WLAN-Router f?r alle DSL-Einsteiger und Wechsler +++
GMX DSL-Powertarife zudem 3 Monate gratis* http://www.gmx.net/dsl


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Full text Search

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> Camille Constans wrote:
>
>> As Ariel is now in production, I enabled full text search on all
>> wikis. I tryed to load balance search to Ariel, Tim could you check
>> it when you have some spare time.
>>
>> Another pb, the script to rebuild the index doesnt seem to work, so
>> search is often empty. Of course each time you're making an edit, the
>> search is updated :) So you only have to edit all articles (joke)
>
>
> Search without the index is pretty useless, so I've disabled it again
> until the script is fixed up and run. I might get to it tonight if no
> one else does, but i might not.

I fixed the script and left it running in screen. It's going to take a
while. You can watch its progress at:

http://wikimedia.org/rebuildtextindex.log

To test it, I first rebuilt the text index on meta and enabled search
there. Meta is a mess of orphans and obscure navigation pages, so it
seemed like a good place to start.

-- Tim Starling


list: wikien-l

from_name: Rick

subject: [WikiEN-l] Long pages

body:
Woah, wait.  Are you saying that as items are added to categories (or vice versa), they should be deleted from the list page?  No, that's entirely inappropriate.  Lists serve an entirely different purpose from categories.  To begin with, they have red links that let users know that an article is needed.  I really don't think we should be destroying list pages just because categories are around!

RickK

Stan Shebs <shebs at apple.com> wrote:
Magnus Manske wrote:

> Other lists ([[List of astronomical topics
> ]], as an
> example) can be restructured into the category system, while leaving
> unwritten topics.

Since those kinds of lists are essentially pre-category attempts to
make categories, I think it's worth using them like we do "list of
encyclopedia topics" - remove topics as they are categorized, provide
a link to the category at the top of the list as a hint about where
the rest of the list went. Seems like these lists could become a
better per-area substitute for the requested articles page, since the
lists of topics will tend to become a list of unwritten articles
that somebody thinks are needed.

Stan

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

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references:
<40CD966B.70105@cs.ucy.ac.cy>	<40CFECA5.4000702@cs.ucy.ac.cy>	<cb6vr0$vff$2@sea.gmane.org>	<40D70F19.3080409@hackish.org>	<cb7jtj$gnn$1@sea.gmane.org>	<40D7551C.5000701@hackish.org>	<cb83dc$drf$1@sea.gmane.org>	<40D7AE94.5080909@hotmail.com>	<cba0ai$tm2$1@sea.gmane.org>	<40D8E525.90609@hotmail.com>
	<cbapql$d7a$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
Timwi wrote:

>> Last time I checked, you had CVS access.
>
>
> CVS access doesn't make me an expert on the source code. :-p

Asking an "expert" to do everything for you is not the way to either
become an expert or to even get thing in question done.

-- Tim Starling


list: foundation-l

from_name: Dietrich von Hase

subject: [Foundation-l] A Challenge: Sending Angela to gay Paree!

body:
sannse wrote:

>>Excellent idea!
>>
>>I find all these discussion really ridicoulous and I also think that
>>it is important that Angela can meet Anthere and Jimbo at Paris.
>>
>>I offer 50EUR to the fondation to cover her travel if she attend the meet
>>and without other condition :-)
>>

I think the discussion mixes two aspects which should be separted for
transparancy:

1) the problem that successful developing organisations their elected
management usually gets apart from the broad mass of the community. This
might either be an informal process or a process due to formal
organisational structures like forming a board of a foundation. I
suppose this will not yet happen with the current members elected which
come from the roots of Wikipedia. But what will be with future
generations of board members? Usally special people get attracted by
such formal structures and are keen to get elected - as you can see in
many parties, foundations etc. worldwide. So its a kind of law that over
time the danger grows that bureaucratic structures develop and the gap
between management and the community widens more and more. It therefore
seems important to establish the most open communication rules and
transparancy to prevent such typical developments. I assume, that the
discussion about funding  travel costs of board members here is just
taken as an example as a future take off by elected board members from
the basic community is feared.

2) The funding of travel costs itself.  May be it could be helpful if
all people intending to give donations are given options for which
purpose they can donate - just place such options on the donation web
pages and explain them. The total amount of donations received is
usually much greater if donators can choose personally for what purpose
their donation shall be used for. One of the options could then be the
funding of travel costs.  I think this would be the most open approach
towards donators. At the same time budgets and aims for donations must
be openly argued for and published. Furthermore internal discussions
about justifications why what money for what purpose shall be used can
be avoided. If nobody donates for a purpose proposed - just let it be.
Presenting the donation community the needs for funding by options is
the fairest approach, its their money Wikipedia uses. And letting the
donators decide about how their money shall be spent, you can be sure
that they are willing to spend much more in total cash. By this
Wikipedia will have the greatest benefit possible.

Dietrich
hase at akademie.de


from_name: ruimu uestc

body:
----- Original Message -----
From: "Roozbeh Pournader" <roozbeh at gmail.com>
To: <wikipedia-l at wikimedia.org>
Sent: Tuesday, June 22, 2004 10:50 PM
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] zh.wikipedia.org - having a single unified portal

> I don't want to get into the debate, but just FYI, such a convertor is
> considered impossible by many experts. By impossible, I mean
> impossible in the level of a perfect German to English to German
> machine translation software. Refer to Unicode mailing list and its
> archives for more details.
>
> roozbeh

There are some unsolvable problems if one wish to automatically convert an
unknown text from simplified to full forms, because there are some
exceptions (simplified form of F1 and F2 could be the same S, for instance),
but it is surely not as far as English to German "conversion". I guess that
in the case of Wikipedia, such exceptions could be handled by special
markups inside the text. If a simplified sentence is S1 S2 S3 S4 S5 and S3
conversion is not obvious, one could write something like S1 S2 S3
<!--#Full=F3--> S4 S5, what would help the conversion tool. As most of the
simplification is "bijective" (one and only one S <-> one and only one F),
this markup would not be that annoying to add, and robots could look for the
relatively few problematic characters and display a list of articles to be
checked.

(gbog)


from_name: Peter Gervai

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Theora bitstream frozen...

body:
On Tue, Jun 22, 2004 at 08:22:01AM -0700, Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Peter Gervai wrote:
>
> >If they're lazy or uneducated to install a player they probably won't miss
> >much since Wikipedia content is not multimedia oriented, and this may be a
> >drive to them to educate themselves and install the players.
> >
> >
> That's a damned arrogant attitude.  In some parts of the world people
> would count themselves lucky just to have text available on a slow
> connection.  I support the vision of making information available in
> these places, so a lot of this fancy stuff needs to be severable.

I think you missed my other sentence below that. :-)

It mentioned that apart from those (people who use hardware fit to show
video ought to be driven to use free codecs [too]) multimedia *is not*, and
*should not* be considered important (or even significant) part of
Wikipedia, which is an encyclopedia and targeting textual information
representation. I guess this shows that I support fully the "viewable by any
browser" approach and saves me from being a damned arrogant person. :-)

My opinion could be summarised that "we should concentrate on text, but when
we use graphical, sound, movie or other media files we should use and
support free formats if they're available".

grin


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] Can't delete page

body:
I found [[Gaasterlân-Sleat]] on orphaned pages, obviously a broken
copy of [[Gaasterl?n-Sleat]]. When I tried to delete the former, instead
the latter (correct) one was deleted, while the broken one remained.

As if we didn't have enough problems on the site right now ;-)

Magnus


from_name: bcorr at neaction.org

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Bounties and expenses

body:
I've been watching this conversation with great dismay. As someone else has
said, IMO Mark clearly has a very different vision of the Wikimedia board, and
an incredibly negative opinion of boards in general. For the record, I
completely disagree with him and believe that the board is important, and that
reasonable expenses like the ones being discussed ought to be paid for gladly
and without reservation

I have also just given -- $15.00 US -- for Angela's travel. I have done this
as a show of good faith in the board, the individual members, and the process
that led to the board's creation and the recent elections.

*However* I hope that this does not set a precedent, and will not make such a
contribution again, and I believe that this should be paid for by the
Wikimedia Foundation -- *not* by individual wikipedians.

And finally, I hope that this discussion ends soon. It's very demoralizing for
me to see this long debate full of accusations continue after so much good
will was recently created among the various projects and languages through the
board elections -- and I can only imagine what it must be like for Angela and
Anthere.

Let's move on, and if necessary develop a *process* to decide how board travel
expenses will be handled in the future, rather than a debate about the pros
and cons of a board and what it should or should not do. And if also
necessary, we can develop another process to discuss and debate, and decide
the pros and cons of a board and what it should or should not do

Thanks,
Brian (BCorr)


from_name: Stan Shebs

subject: [WikiEN-l] Long pages

body:
Read a little more carefully please - I specifically limited my
suggestion to the "list of X topics" lists, which rarely if ever
have any useful content or organization and are not used by readers
(in fact editors generally ignore them too, most have become woefully
incomplete) *and* was only talking about removing the blue links,
in the same way that one would remove entries from a wanted articles
page. As the creator of some of the largest reader-oriented lists
in WP, I'm hardly eager to damage those!

Stan

Rick wrote:

>Woah, wait.  Are you saying that as items are added to categories (or vice versa), they should be deleted from the list page?  No, that's entirely inappropriate.  Lists serve an entirely different purpose from categories.  To begin with, they have red links that let users know that an article is needed.  I really don't think we should be destroying list pages just because categories are around!
>
>RickK
>
>Stan Shebs <shebs at apple.com> wrote:
>Magnus Manske wrote:
>
>
>>Other lists ([[List of astronomical topics
>>]], as an
>>example) can be restructured into the category system, while leaving
>>unwritten topics.
>>
>
>Since those kinds of lists are essentially pre-category attempts to
>make categories, I think it's worth using them like we do "list of
>encyclopedia topics" - remove topics as they are categorized, provide
>a link to the category at the top of the list as a hint about where
>the rest of the list went. Seems like these lists could become a
>better per-area substitute for the requested articles page, since the
>lists of topics will tend to become a list of unwritten articles
>that somebody thinks are needed.
>
>Stan
>
>_______________________________________________
>WikiEN-l mailing list
>WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
>
>---------------------------------
>Do you Yahoo!?
>New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - Send 10MB messages!
>
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>_______________________________________________
>WikiEN-l mailing list
>WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Anthere

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Fuzzy Bunny Awards

body:
Denni wrote:
> Timwi wrote:
>
> (1) The reasons Rick already mentioned.
> (2) WikiMoney didn't work either.
> (3) People will start doing certain things (e.g. make loads of trivial
>      edits to the article namespace) *just* to get (one of) these awards,
>      and then genuinely think they are entitled to (one of) these awards.
> (4) Community recognition works best when it is not measurable. I can
>      say with certainty that Anthere is more popular on Wikipedia than a
>      vandal, but I can't rank her with other people. If she were awarded
>      a "Wikipedia peace prize" and, say, Angela wasn't, then this would
>      create an artificial (and deceptive) ranking between them.
>
> My thoughts:
> (1) The competitive will always be with us. They will always vie for all
> the prizes. That does not mean we should stop giving them. It will be
> very difficult to compete for the "Least Competitive Wikipedian" award.
> And the more prizes the merrier. It is very nearly as easy to fool
> adults as it is to fool children, and even when knowingly fooled, both
> adults and children still value the recognition, except for the
> occasional curmudgeon who is offended by any recognition of any sort.

I agree with this. I also think wikipedia is badly missing opportunities
to show others we appreciate their work, and making our pleasure visible
publicly.

> (4) Always. This month's number is "3". We deem three people worthy for
> nicest Wikipedia:Faces faces. The fuzzy bunny award goes back to its
> perpetual holder, Anthere.

:-)

> --
> ?"The difference between extra-marital sex and extra marital sex is not
> to be sneezed at." --George Will, on hyphen use

I am not sure I understood this one....


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Peter Gervai wrote:

>On Tue, Jun 22, 2004 at 08:22:01AM -0700, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>
>>Peter Gervai wrote:
>>
>>
>>>If they're lazy or uneducated to install a player they probably won't miss
>>>much since Wikipedia content is not multimedia oriented, and this may be a
>>>drive to them to educate themselves and install the players.
>>>
>>>
>>That's a damned arrogant attitude.  In some parts of the world people
>>would count themselves lucky just to have text available on a slow
>>connection.  I support the vision of making information available in
>>these places, so a lot of this fancy stuff needs to be severable.
>>
>>
>
>I think you missed my other sentence below that. :-)
>
>It mentioned that apart from those (people who use hardware fit to show
>video ought to be driven to use free codecs [too]) multimedia *is not*, and
>*should not* be considered important (or even significant) part of
>Wikipedia, which is an encyclopedia and targeting textual information
>representation. I guess this shows that I support fully the "viewable by any
>browser" approach and saves me from being a damned arrogant person. :-)
>
>My opinion could be summarised that "we should concentrate on text, but when
>we use graphical, sound, movie or other media files we should use and
>support free formats if they're available".
>
>
Sorry if my response was too strong, and thanks for the clarification.

Ec


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Something strange with categories on French
	Wiktionary

body:
Thomas Jost wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I just noticed something strange on fr.wiktionary.org.
>
> [[Cat?gorie:Langue fran?aise]] has 13 subcategories, including
> [[Cat?gorie:Pronom fran?ais]] and [[Cat?gorie:Pr?positions fran?aises]].
> ~ "Pr?positions" was listed after "Pronom", which is incorrect. So I
> edited [[Cat?gorie:Pr?positions fran?aises]] and added
> "[[Cat?gorie:Langue fran?aise|Prepositions francaises]]" to fix this
> error. But now, there are 2 "P" sections in [[Cat?gorie:Langue
> fran?aise]]:
> ~  P * Pronoms fran?ais
> ~  V * Verbes fran?ais
> ~  P * Pr?positions fran?aises
> Is this a bug or did I do something wrong ?

I suppose it's a bug; accented letters are alphabetized after the basic
alphabet.

Ec


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: zh.wikipedia.org - having a single unified portal

body:
ruimu uestc wrote:
> I guess that
> in the case of Wikipedia, such exceptions could be handled by special
> markups inside the text. If a simplified sentence is S1 S2 S3 S4 S5 and S3
> conversion is not obvious, one could write something like S1 S2 S3
> <!--#Full=F3--> S4 S5, what would help the conversion tool.

Perhaps a more compact wiki-like syntax would be better. For example, a
single simplified character followed by a traditional character in
square brackets, i.e. S3[F3], would be converted to the appropriate
single character.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Charles Matthews

subject: [WikiEN-l] Long pages

body:
Magnus Manske wrote

><http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_astronomical_topics>]], as an
> example) can be restructured into the category system, while leaving
> unwritten topics.

I think saying that the category system can carry the burden of lists is
dangerous talk.  There is quite a gap in functionality:

- lists can be annotated in various ways
- lists have flexibility of format
- lists can be arranged in ways other than strictly alphabetical
- lists can carry suggestive red links, to promote the writing of new
articles
- lists can be linked to in text
- lists are conventional pages that will appear in search engines on the
same basis as any other.

And so on.  If the astronomy list is too long as it is, it should be
subdivided alphabetically, as has happened in the past to mathematics,
physics (to take allied subjects).

Charles


list: wiktionary-l

from_name: Timwi

subject: [Wiktionary-l] Re: De-capitalisation-isation

body:
Andrew Dunbar wrote:
>
> I'm also convinced proper capitalisation is crucial
> for a dictionary project. But I'm not convinced Timwi's
> solution is the best way to go about it.

This suggests to me that you don't understand what all of this is about.
Apparently many people have misunderstood all of this, which is a real
shame, because now we have loads of "no" votes from people who thought
they are voting against something else.

Currently the software automatically capitalises the first letter of
pages. "kind" automatically becomes "Kind", "isiZulu" automatically
becomes "IsiZulu". As a consequence, we cannot have separate pages for
[[kind]] (Engl. adj.) and [[Kind]] (German noun).

This is *only* about *removing that technological restriction*.

Almost all concerns raised, such as those with the search engine or with
the linking etc.etc., are *irrelevant to this*. They are separate
issues, and many of them *are* already issues that are neither worsened
nor solved by this. This is *not* a miracle cure, and there is *no*
point in opposing it just because it isn't a miracle cure.

I want separate words to be on separate pages if they are spelt
differently. This is currently the case, with the arbitrary exception of
first-letter capitalisation. I want to remove that. I want "Kind" and
"kind" be separate pages. Examples that were given that should remain on
a single page are essentially the same word (such as English "Cynosure"
and German "Rot").

Removing the technological restriction of having it force capitalisation
on us *DOES NOT REQUIRE* us to reparate those out into separate pages.
So don't vote "no" because you don't want that, that's a different vote!

I hope I made things clearer now.
Timwi


subject: [WikiEN-l] Long pages

body:
Magnus Manske wrote:

> I just had a look at the "longest pages" list. It was spearheaded by
> an untranslated article of incredible 243880 bytes. While I blanked
> that one and listed it on VfD, I keep wondering if some of these pages
> shouldn't go someplace else. [[Table of divisors]] and similar would
> IMHO fit better on wikisource. [[List of candidates in the 2004
> Canadian election
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_candidates_in_the_2004_Canadian_election>]]
> would fit nicely into the "election data" section, no? The many "List
> of asteroids" entries could go there as well. Other lists ([[List of
> astronomical topics
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_astronomical_topics>]], as an
> example) can be restructured into the category system, while leaving
> unwritten topics.
>
> To sum this up, I think we could get rid of at least 100 of the 150
> longest pages, without sacrificing any functionality. Shall we try
> this or not?

If it were transferred to Wikisource now at 243880 bytes it would be in
43rd place for length.  Our longest at 1,531,803 bytes is the ever
useful [[Pi to 1,000,000 places]].

Wikisource has accepted the mathematical table type of article, but some
of the length in the Wikipedia article is at least in part due to the
numbers being piped links to articles on the individual numbers,
Someone who moves this should fix the broken links.

Election results are also a part of Wikisource.  The election in
question, however, is scheduled for next Monday.  I would suggest
waiting until the results can be added before making the move.

I see no place on Wikisource for the Asteroids.  I think Wikipedia is
much better for this sort of list.

I do not like the idea of such long articles on Wikisource, but I often
feel that I am fighting a losing battle.  In many of these cases the
material IS properly suited to Wikisource.  Unfortunately it is often
little more than a cut-and-paste exercise that a little editing would
have easily cut down into bite-size pieces.  For someone less familiar
with the topic the clean-up can be a lot of work.

Ec


from_name: Thomas Jost

subject: [Wikitech-l] Something strange with categories on French Wiktionary

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

Hello,

I just noticed something strange on fr.wiktionary.org.

[[Cat?gorie:Langue fran?aise]] has 13 subcategories, including
[[Cat?gorie:Pronom fran?ais]] and [[Cat?gorie:Pr?positions fran?aises]].
~ "Pr?positions" was listed after "Pronom", which is incorrect. So I
edited [[Cat?gorie:Pr?positions fran?aises]] and added
"[[Cat?gorie:Langue fran?aise|Prepositions francaises]]" to fix this
error. But now, there are 2 "P" sections in [[Cat?gorie:Langue fran?aise]]:
~  P * Pronoms fran?ais
~  V * Verbes fran?ais
~  P * Pr?positions fran?aises
Is this a bug or did I do something wrong ?

Thanks !

MagicTom
[[w:fr:Utilisateur:MagicTom]]
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFA2Yqe8qG/0bshvCcRAvm/AJ4gf8fVE31hOgVUDsd/SdM4OACOGwCZAWVg
T94UEnNdEmipnALcGqt2SJs=
=wsTm
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


body:
Andrew Dunbar wrote:

>> I seriously don't see how anyone can seriously
>> be opposed to having a dictionary with correct
>> spellings. :/
>
> Now this statement is pure rhetoric. I'm in favour of
> correct spellings and I'm sure everybody is. But
> there's more than one way to solve a problem and I'd
> like everybody to think this through and consider all
> possible ways to fix it before jumping in and making
> major changes.

You seem to be thinking of this as a much more "major change" than it
really is. Again, this is only about removing an arbitrary technological
restriction.

> 2. Case fold nothing. (Timwi)
Heh, I'll focus on this one if you don't mind ;-)

> Against 2:
>  * People are going to add duplicates thinking their
>    word is not in the dictionary.

Are you thinking of people adding an article on, say, [[malayalam]] when
the correct spelling [[Malayalam]] exists? Again, this is irrelevant to
the discussion, it has nothing to do with the question at hand. People
can *already* create pages at wrong spellings ([[Malaialam]], say). Yes,
the switch would increase the potential, but adding redirects in the
right places reduces it again, and so this is not an argument against.

>  * Quite a large number of entries will have to be
>    changed back to uppercase after the script is run.

Have you read my original mail? Assuming your beloved current workaround
actually works, *no* pages will need to be "changed back". Some might
still need to be moved to lower-case, but only very few. You don't have
to participate in this clean-up process if you don't want to.

>  * Words which differ only by case of any letter must
>    be on separate pages. (proper nouns vs. common nouns
>    vs. abbrevations & acronyms)

This is one major thing where you're going wrong. Why "must" they? They
don't.

>  Because the name of the article is currently always
>  uppercase, all the headings generated by the Wiki
>  software are in uppercase - which is very
>  unprofessional for a dictionary.

Bingo.

> I've read some peoples' opinions that they would
> prefer one entry per page but this is never going to
> work because of homographs anyway.

One could always have article titles like [[kind (English)]] vs. [[kind
(Dutch)]]. This makes linking extremely cumbersome, though.

Timwi


body:
bcorr at neaction.org wrote:

>I've been watching this conversation with great dismay. As someone else has
>said, IMO Mark clearly has a very different vision of the Wikimedia board, and
>an incredibly negative opinion of boards in general.
>
>
It's quite possible that the majority of Wikimedians have a different
view from me of what the board ought to be, but this was never really
consulted in forming the board.  The board was *not* formed because we
thought it would be a good idea to have a board to govern the project;
it was formed because as a matter of the law on non-profits of the State
of Florida, we are required to have a board.  Therefore, we do.
However, that in itself is simply a legal formality.  If we are to hand
over to the board significant powers, not only in the technical sense
that legally they have powers, but in the moral sense that we are giving
them a particular role in running the project, then that ought to be
done explicitly.

My viewpoint, of course, is that we ought to do as much of our
decision-making as possible in the wiki way.  There are many different
viewpoints on how this is best done, and many can be read in depth, with
arguments for and against various approaches, at the meatball wiki
(http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?MeatballWiki).  I have my
particular views on what sorts of processes I think work best, but of
course many others are possible, and I haven't insisted we pick any
particular ones.  However, "elect a board of trustees to make decisions
for the users" is not one of the wiki-style organizational methods I've
run across, though I may have missed it.

Take, for example, the issue of dues.  One way to decide it is to have
the board debate amongst themselves (either online or in person),
solicit input from users, and then make a decision on what level to set
the dues at.  Another possibility is to have a wiki-style discussion it,
possibly on meta (I'm willing to use meta over mailing lists if that's
the preference of most other people).  If a consensus emerges, then we
set the dues at the consensus amount.  If there are strong
disagreements, then we can identify a few of the leading choices and
hold a vote.  Given that we already have voting software that has been
used successfully, this is fairly easy to do.

I don't see any particular reason to favor the top-down decision-making
process, especially given how alien it is to the way we (not to mention
just about all others wikis) have been doing things to date, which has
been rather successful in most respects.

-Mark


subject: [WikiEN-l] Long pages

body:
Charles Matthews wrote:

>Stan Shebs wrote
>
>
>
>>I specifically limited my
>>suggestion to the "list of X topics" lists, which rarely if ever
>>have any useful content or organization and are not used by readers
>>(in fact editors generally ignore them too, most have become woefully
>>incomplete) *and* was only talking about removing the blue links,
>>in the same way that one would remove entries from a wanted articles
>>page.
>>
>
>I maintain around 70 of those.  There are about 7000 lists on WP, I believe:
>so if I'm looking after 1%, that may not make much of an impression.  Still,
>I reject this sort of generalisation, quite radically.
>
It's true that the math lists you maintain have more structure than
a link farm, and I applaud that; those are the kinds of lists that
add value beyond what categories can do, and I think all WP lists
should do that sort of thing. But Google for '"list of" topics', and
you'll see that what you've been doing is the exception rather than
the rule. Look at their histories, and you'll see many have been
abandoned too.

Interestingly, of the more-structured topics lists, the primary
organizational scheme looks just like one would expect of a
subcategory structure. So even those are not adding more value
than would categories (modulo the related changes button).

Please note that I'm not saying to change everything today; it's
just that the availability of additional software support in the
form of categories opens up all kinds of possibilities, one of which
Magnus pointed out at the start of this thread, and we should be
thinking about creative ways to make use of the software, not fold
our arms and insist on doing everything the same old way.

Just as a small example, when I started throwing articles into
the "ship classes" category, a couple jumped out as inconsistently
named, a detail which had long been masked by redirs. It might have
been quite a while before anybody thought to make up a list of ship
classes, and noticed the redirs on it.

Stan


from_name: Robert Graham Merkel

body:
With regards to the discussion I prompted on Video formats, might I
suggest those people interested have a look at

http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_policy

To my knowledge, however, nobody has yet tried to actually add video to the
Wikipedia.

As far as all the charges of excessive idealism at work here in the
existing choice of Ogg Vorbis for sound and (prospectively) Theora
for video, might I just repeat the key point I made on that page:
there are no other open, unencumbered video formats available.
The choice is Theora or nothing.

--
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                           Robert Merkel
                                     robert.merkel at benambra.org
                                        http://benambra.org

"...the moral issues raised by driving a car, both from an
environmental and from a safety point of view, are much more
serious than those raised by sex" -- Peter Singer
--------------------------------------------------------------------------


subject: [WikiEN-l] Long pages

body:
Well, Magnus seemed to think I didn't have enough reasons on behalf of a
list, versus a category, in the stated case of [[list of astronomical
topics]].

I wouldn't claim to have figured out the category system entirely yet.
Another point that would interest me is this: the page history of a list
page would show what had been added (and by whom) and what removed; and in
the case of changes that I didn't like, I could revert them.  The page
history of a category page does something different, it seems.

Charles


subject: [WikiEN-l] Long pages

body:
I just had a look at the "longest pages" list. It was spearheaded by an
untranslated article of incredible 243880 bytes. While I blanked that
one and listed it on VfD, I keep wondering if some of these pages
shouldn't go someplace else. [[Table of divisors]] and similar would
IMHO fit better on wikisource. [[List of candidates in the 2004 Canadian
election
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_candidates_in_the_2004_Canadian_election>]]
would fit nicely into the "election data" section, no? The many "List of
asteroids" entries could go there as well. Other lists ([[List of
astronomical topics
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_astronomical_topics>]], as an
example) can be restructured into the category system, while leaving
unwritten topics.

To sum this up, I think we could get rid of at least 100 of the 150
longest pages, without sacrificing any functionality. Shall we try this
or not?

Magnus


from_name: Andrew Dunbar

body:
--- Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote: > Andrew Dunbar
wrote:
> >
> > I'm also convinced proper capitalisation is
> > crucial for a dictionary project. But I'm not
> > convinced Timwi's solution is the best way to go
> > about it.
>
> This suggests to me that you don't understand what
> all of this is about.

If that's the case, it's only because you haven't made
clear just what you want.

> Apparently many people have misunderstood all of
> this, which is a real shame, because now we have
> loads of "no" votes from people who thought
> they are voting against something else.

I think it's because you have focused much more
on talking about "proper spelling" - which most of us
want, and not explained how. Even now you are mostly
saying "technical change" - just explain what the
technical change is. As I've pointed out, there are
several technical changes which could give us "proper
spelling". I'm sure I'm not the only one who has
assumed you mean a different change, or just not known
which change you have in mind.

> Currently the software automatically capitalises the
> first letter of pages. "kind" automatically
> becomes "Kind", "isiZulu" automatically
> becomes "IsiZulu". As a consequence, we cannot have
> separate pages for [[kind]] (Engl. adj.) and
> [[Kind]] (German noun).

Which means it case-folds it. Which means that it
treast an uppercase letter the same as a lowercase
letter, if it's the first letter in the word.
Which you haven't made clear, and I have tried to make
clear.

I do want isiZulu to have the proper spelling at the
place in the page where everybody will notice it.

I don't see any point in having "kind" and "Kind" on
different pages. For starters, people won't see the
false friend, which is now right there. This is one
thing I like about Wiktionary.

> This is *only* about *removing that technological
> restriction*.

Here you are not spelling out "restriction".

> Almost all concerns raised, such as those with the
> search engine or with the linking etc.etc., are
> *irrelevant to this*. They are separate issues, and
> many of them *are* already issues that are neither
> worsened nor solved by this.

Exactly. I do not see the point in hacking the Wiki
code to fix one issue at a time, in such a closely
related area, when we can look at the big picture, how
we really want it, think what change in this area will
solve the most problems and create the fewest new
ones,
and then implement that one fix. Once.

> This is *not* a miracle cure, and there is *no*
> point in opposing it just because it isn't a miracle
> cure.

Nobody ever mentioned miracles. I understand the
technical issues very well. I know what's possible and
what's miraculous. I know what's trivial and what's
difficult to implement.

> I want separate words to be on separate pages if
> they are spelt differently.

Then this is what you should say as your "vote for
this change" line, instead of "I want proper
spelling".
They are not the same thing, as I hope I have made
clear. You can have proper spelling without putting
the words on separate pages.

> This is currently the case, with the arbitrary
> exception of first-letter capitalisation.

I agree that it's arbitrary. This annoys me also.

> I want to remove that. I want "Kind" and "kind" be
> separate pages.

This is much clearer and should be made clearer on the
wiki page too.

> Examples that were given that should remain on
> a single page are essentially the same word (such as
> English "Cynosure" and German "Rot").
>
> Removing the technological restriction of having it
> force capitalisation on us *DOES NOT REQUIRE* us to
> reparate those out into separate pages.

Please say "making the first letter case sensitive" or
something similar instead of the fuzzy "technological
restriction".

> So don't vote "no" because you don't want that,
> that's a different vote!
>
> I hope I made things clearer now.
> Timwi

Somewhat but not totally, and perhaps not for
everybody.

Hippietrail.

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

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subject: [Foundation-l] Take, for example, the issues of dues

body:
And ... Mark went on...went on... went on...

Take, for example, the issue of dues.  One way to
decide it is to have the board debate amongst
themselves (either online or in person), solicit input
from users, and then make a decision on what level to
set the dues at.  Another possibility is to have a
wiki-style discussion it, possibly on meta (I'm
willing to use meta over mailing lists if that's the
preference of most other people).  If a consensus
emerges, then we set the dues at the consensus amount.
 If there are strong disagreements, then we can
identify a few of the leading choices and hold a vote.
 Given that we already have voting software that has
been used successfully, this is fairly easy to do.

I don't see any particular reason to favor the
top-down decision-making process, especially given how
alien it is to the way we (not to mention just about
all others wikis) have been doing things to date,
which has been rather successful in most respects.

------

http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2004-June/000406.html

Watch-out : this was a sollication for input

With this mail, on this mailing list, a week ago, I
announced a brainstorming page about dues. I also
announced it on the goings-on :
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goings-on

The page in question is here. It is public and non
protected. You can *edit* it :
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Membership_fees

I had no feedback on the mailing list. I had a bit of
feedback on the wiki itself. I had some good feedback
from french discussion. I discussed it in length last
week end on irc (a very cheap discussion medium, neat
when wiki is broken, and very useful for live
discussion). This occured on the english channel and
the foundation channel, most of saturday and sunday.

I also had a couple of private exchanges by mails on
the topic.

I also made additional suggestions 2 days ago on the
foundation mailing list. Suggestion for which I had
*no* comment whatsover.

I contacted Michael for his input, and asked him if he
was willing to participate, for I think he can really
help on this. Michael was on holidays, and just came
back. He indicated he would come and see. I am waiting
for his feedback.

I had a short exchange a few hours ago with Arne, from
the german chapter as well. We planned to discuss this
again (this evening if possible, but we missed each
other).

With the initial feed back I had, I started writing
down some points today, during my lunch time.

Tomos also started posting a resume of our discussion
this week :
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interorganizational_relations_among_chapters

----------

Signature :
The one thing I can say : the one who does nothing but
just whines that decisions are taken without him or
*could* PERHAPS be taken without him, is responsible
of that situation.

Wikipedia is just this : it gives you the ability to
act yourself, this is so great, so take that chance

-----------

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - 100MB free storage!
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail


subject: [WikiEN-l] Long pages

body:
Charles Matthews wrote:

>Magnus Manske wrote
>
>
>
>><http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_astronomical_topics>]], as an
>>example) can be restructured into the category system, while leaving
>>unwritten topics.
>>
>>
>
>I think saying that the category system can carry the burden of lists is
>dangerous talk.  There is quite a gap in functionality:
>
>- lists can be annotated in various ways
>- lists have flexibility of format
>- lists can be arranged in ways other than strictly alphabetical
>
>
None of which is done on the astronomy list I mentioned as an example.

>- lists can carry suggestive red links, to promote the writing of new
>articles
>
>
See your quote of mine.

>- lists can be linked to in text
>
>
Doesn't [[:Category:Stuff]] work?

>- lists are conventional pages that will appear in search engines on the
>same basis as any other.
>
>
If I have a list of links, then each of the linked pages will appear on
the search engine anyway.

>And so on.  If the astronomy list is too long as it is, it should be
>subdivided alphabetically, as has happened in the past to mathematics,
>physics (to take allied subjects).
>
>
I wish we had some way to automatically subdivide them alphabetically -
oh wait, category pages... :-)

Magnus


body:
--- Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote: > Andrew Dunbar
wrote:
>
> >> I seriously don't see how anyone can seriously
> >> be opposed to having a dictionary with correct
> >> spellings. :/
> >
> > Now this statement is pure rhetoric. I'm in favour
> > of correct spellings and I'm sure everybody is.
But
> > there's more than one way to solve a problem and
> > I'd like everybody to think this through and
> > consider all possible ways to fix it before
> > jumping in and making major changes.
>
> You seem to be thinking of this as a much more
> "major change" than it really is. Again, this is
> only about removing an arbitrary technological
> restriction.

Again, spell out the restriction instead of using this
fuzzy language.

Sure changing an "Uppercase first letter" option is
minor from the point of view of implementing it.

And splitting many many pages which are currently
together is a major change. Some of the repurcussions
are also major.

I'ts not "only" about flipping this switch, it's
about all the long-term side-effect as well.

> > 2. Case fold nothing. (Timwi)
> > Heh, I'll focus on this one if you don't mind ;-)

That's what this one is. We currently case-fold the
first letter. This is a major side effect of making it
uppercase.

> > Against 2:
> >  * People are going to add duplicates thinking
> their
> >    word is not in the dictionary.
>
> Are you thinking of people adding an article on,
> say, [[malayalam]] when
> the correct spelling [[Malayalam]] exists?

Yes. And adding the german for "Kind" on the page for
"Kind" because they don't realize it's already on the
"Kind" page. Remember there are going to be hundreds
or thousands of pages which will look like this after
the simple switch is flicked, and people will continue
to copy it.

> Again, this is irrelevant to the discussion, it has
> nothing to do with the question at hand.

It has everything to do with it. People currently do
type in words without regard to the first letter,
sometimes carelessly, sometimes seeing that that's how
Wikis currently work.

> People can *already* create pages at wrong spellings
> ([[Malaialam]], say).

Surely you can't be suggesting that these are the same
problem. You don't have to be a bad speller to
overlook
the change in handling the case of the first letter.

> Yes, the switch would increase the potential, but
> adding redirects in the right places reduces it
> again, and so this is not an argument against.

Wiktionary doesn't work as well with redirects as
Wikipedia. You can't put a redirect on "kind" to
"Kind"
because "kind" is also a word. This is a very common
situation on Wiktionary.

> >  * Quite a large number of entries will have to be
> >    changed back to uppercase after the script is
> run.
>
> Have you read my original mail? Assuming your
> beloved current workaround

The more you use this POV language, the closer I get
to becoming annoyed. Do you mean your original mail in
this current discussion or in the old discussion which
you feel already settled everything?
I have read what others have written. If they have the
wrong impression as well as me, you probably haven't
been clear enough.
Can you provide a link to the mailing list archive or
simply repeat the relevant part in this thread please?

> actually works, *no* pages will need to be "changed
> back". Some might still need to be moved to
> lower-case, but only very few. You don't have
> to participate in this clean-up process if you don't
> want to.

If your script is dependent on my "beloved"
workaround,
then perhaps you are assuming that the workaround has
been implemented on all pages, which it certainly has
not.

> >  * Words which differ only by case of any letter
> must
> >    be on separate pages. (proper nouns vs. common
> nouns
> >    vs. abbrevations & acronyms)
>
> This is one major thing where you're going wrong.
> Why "must" they? They
> don't.

Because they have different case. This is exactly what
your change means.

Unless you mean that we could continue to put "bill"
and "Bill" on the same page. Obviously we could but
it would be absurd to put "Bill" on a page other
than the one titled "Bill" on a system which supported
it.
Or are you going to suggest putting redirects on all
these pages?

> >  Because the name of the article is currently
> >  always
> >  uppercase, all the headings generated by the Wiki
> >  software are in uppercase - which is very
> >  unprofessional for a dictionary.
>
> Bingo.

So we agree on at least some of the symptoms, but not
on the cure. Or at least not on how hastily a cure
should be administered...

> > I've read some peoples' opinions that they would
> > prefer one entry per page but this is never going
> to
> > work because of homographs anyway.
>
> One could always have article titles like [[kind
> (English)]] vs. [[kind
> (Dutch)]]. This makes linking extremely cumbersome,
> though.

Exactly. Hopefully this would never happen.

Hippietrail.

> Timwi
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wiktionary-l mailing list
> Wiktionary-l at Wikipedia.org
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiktionary-l
>

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from_name: Bill Konrad

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Long pages

body:
I agree with Charles that categories are not fully adequate to replace
lists, even in cases where the list is unannotated. One use that I often
take advantage of is the Related Changes feature to check if anyone has
added new articles from a red link on a list (or edited one that I may not
have had on my watchlist). It seems to me (at least presently) that Related
Changes does not work for categories -- it only shows changes to articles
linked to in the text on the category page.

Bill Konrad


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Foundation-l] Bounties and expenses

body:
--- Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> No, the board emphatically should not handle any of those things you
> listed.  These are decisions to be made by the Wikimedia community, not
> a committee.  Top-down committee decisions are not the wiki way of doing
> things.

The 'committees' you talk about will be almost entirely composed of non-board
members. But the board provides the legal and financial backbone. Somebody has
to sign the checks and somebody has to be held responsible for making sure
progress is being made on projects. That is where the board comes in.

> How are they going to come to the users?  Are they going to have
> thousands of meetings?  It would take about 5-10 meetings in the US
> alone to come within range of a decent majority of users, another 10-15
> in Europe, 5-10 in Asia, and so on.

Individual users would travel to the meetings. A day of driving or on a train
can cover a large geographic area. Other international groups also rotate where
they meet in order to cover as much of the world as possible. But creating
these kind of ties is needed for the long-term survival of the foundation.

> No, having local chapters to make tax deductions work more smoothly is
> perfectly fine.

Wow - how very minimal. Like it or not but chapters are going to be much more
than that.

> Real world by definition means only a small group of users will
> participate in the decision-making.

No it does not. Anybody who is interested can help with the work. The trustees
are also elected representatives so they already have the authority to make
decisions as needed and with the consultation of the membership. Again, this is
true if you like it or not.

-- mav

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers!
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail


subject: [Foundation-l] Bounties and expenses


subject: [WikiEN-l] Long pages

body:
Stan Shebs wrote

> Since those kinds of lists are essentially pre-category attempts to
> make categories, I think it's worth using them like we do "list of
> encyclopedia topics" - remove topics as they are categorized, provide
> a link to the category at the top of the list as a hint about where
> the rest of the list went.

Well, again, I want to enter a protest here.  In particular, I think there
should be a very compelling reason, before encouraging anyone to remove any
link from any list.

Charles


body:
Timwi wrote:

> flip the switch (so [[blah]] and [[Blah]] become separate articles)

Hi all.

It seems that I have made a number of wrong assumptions when I started
all of this.

Firstly, I assumed that just about everyone would agree to want to have
article titles lower-case if that is how the word is spelt. I am
indescribably surprised that this is not the case, but oh well, that's
wiki-democracy I guess.

Secondly, I assumed that at least a majority, if not everyone, would
agree with me that engl. "kind" and German "Kind" are separate words and
should hence have separate articles. (I'm sorry for bringing the same
example over and over again, but I got used to it ;-).) Again, I'm
surprised that this does not seem to be the case. Apparently some people
actually *like* to have unrelated words on the same page, which
completely mystifies me.

Thirdly, I assumed people would know what I'm talking about when I said
"case-sensitivity" and "[[kind]] and [[Kind]] should be separate
articles", etc. :-p

Fourthly, I fell into a pitfall that I fell into numerous times in the
past (and, by implication, will probably fall into again numerous times
in the future :-p). What I'm talking about here is that people
emotionally attach to what they've got and what they're used to. There
is a strong opposition to any kind of change, and arguments cannot
change it. Just as long as the current way "somehow works", people seem
to look for only the negative things (the "arguments against") in the
proposal. The people who are in favour of the idea don't defend it as
vehemently as the others oppose it.

Bottom line: It is futile for me to try to be of help with these kinds
of things. I'm only glad I never even started writing that script; it
would have been a waste of time.

Greetings,
Timwi


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Link table corruption due to templates

references:
<40CD966B.70105@cs.ucy.ac.cy>	<40CFECA5.4000702@cs.ucy.ac.cy>	<cb6vr0$vff$2@sea.gmane.org>	<40D70F19.3080409@hackish.org>	<cb7jtj$gnn$1@sea.gmane.org>	<40D7551C.5000701@hackish.org>	<cb83dc$drf$1@sea.gmane.org>	<40D7AE94.5080909@hotmail.com>	<cba0ai$tm2$1@sea.gmane.org>	<40D8E525.90609@hotmail.com>	<cbapql$d7a$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<40D8F480.8020305@hotmail.com>

body:
Tim Starling wrote:

> Timwi wrote:
>
>>> Last time I checked, you had CVS access.
>>
>> CVS access doesn't make me an expert on the source code. :-p
>
> Asking an "expert" to do everything for you is not the way to either
> become an expert or to even get thing in question done.

Tim, I'm very sorry you think of me this way, but I just don't have the
time to become an expert just now. My course ends in August; I might
become an expert then. I've already installed MediaWiki and I can dive
right into it. Until then, however, I'm afraid I'm not sufficiently
interested in unpaid volunteer work that I would jeopardise my result.

Greetings,
Timwi


from_name: Lars Aronsson

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Categories in 1.3beta

body:
Karl Eichwalder wrote:
> The (western) concept of first and surname is just one system and
> [...]
> The surname often changes - tell me the surname of Ludwig Tieck's sister

This problem is bigger than Wikipedia's category system.  Personal
names, especially in older times, are both ambigious and have
different versions of spelling, leading to the need for disambiguation
pages (where one name leads to many people) and redirects (where many
names lead to one person).  I'd be interested in learning about any
wiki that uses a different approach (than Wikipedia's) to this.

One approach could be to assign unique numbers to each person, e.g.
Winston Churchill = [[person 17]], Napoleon = [[person 18]], and
always to link to these, e.g. [[person 17 | Winston Churchill]],
[[person 17 | Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill]] or
[[person 18 | Bonaparte]].  This approach would not be user friendly,
but it would be free from ambiguity.  I don't know any wiki that uses
this particular approach.  Do you?

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


from_name: Rowan Collins [IMSoP]

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Categories in 1.3beta

body:
Lars Aronsson wrote:
> One approach could be to assign unique numbers to each person, e.g.
> Winston Churchill = [[person 17]], Napoleon = [[person 18]], and
> always to link to these, e.g. [[person 17 | Winston Churchill]],
> [[person 17 | Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill]] or
> [[person 18 | Bonaparte]].  This approach would not be user friendly,
> but it would be free from ambiguity.  I don't know any wiki that uses
> this particular approach.  Do you?

No, but I know plenty of *non*-wiki sites that do (h2g2.com and imdb.com spring to mind). I think
it's kind of central to the concept of a wiki that it uses real page names as the unique identifier
for an entry - the whole idea of "accidental linking", and linking to pages that don't exist yet,
arise from the fact that you can predict the location of a page without having to look it up. That's
not to say we have to do it just because it's always been done that way, but I think there are
genuine advantages that outweigh the disadvantages of doing it this way.

This is one of the key points I've been meaning to raise on meta: in response to the various
biography / family tree / etc proposals that have turned up there. If your ideal database includes
500 people called "Dave Gorman", you can no longer use the advantages of the name-as-ID convention;
you could use an arbitrary ID and still have the pages editable, but it wouldn't really be a wiki
any more (IMHO).

--
Rowan Collins
[IMSoP]


from_name: James Marshall

subject: [WikiEN-l] Violation of blocking policy by user "40277"

body:
My IP address is 24.4.202.208 .

Today I added a phrase to an article which clarified an important point.
Two or three people who don't want the phrase there have been deleting it
all day, without giving a reason, and marking their deletion as "minor"
(it's against policy to mark a deletion as minor).  They have also lied,
calling my edit "vandalism" when they know very well it's not (and anyone
can see this for themselves).

I have restored the phrase each time.  Now, without warning, I've just
been told that I've been blocked by 40277.  The reason given is the cutesy
but meaningless phrase "Strike 3 bucko".  Strike 3 of what?  I'm not the
one violating policy here.  Other people are.  (Are they blocked too?)  I
haven't vandalized.  Rather, others have been deleting text with no
reason, which, while not technically vandalism, is much closer to it than
anything I've done.

If I was blocked but the other users weren't, then user 40277 is misusing
her/his blocking authority and violating policy; maybe some things need to
be explained to her/him.  In any case, s/he needs to do a better job of it
than just giving the lame "Strike 3 bucko".

You don't need me to tell you that if the administrators use their power
to promote their point of view, rather than to do their non-biased duties,
then the whole Wikipedia becomes less relevant in the long run.

You can trace some of the dispute here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Ronald_Reagan&action=history

If anyone is in doubt of the relevance of my addition, then I'm happy to
explain it fully and give supporting evidence.  So far, none of the
deleters have cared for that.

James


from_name: Evan Prodromou

subject: [Wikitech-l] Volunteer work

body:
Timwi wrote:

> Tim Starling wrote:
>
> > Timwi wrote:
> >
> >>> Last time I checked, you had CVS access.
> >>
> >> CVS access doesn't make me an expert on the source code. :-p
> >
> > Asking an "expert" to do everything for you is not the way to either
> > become an expert or to even get thing in question done.
>
> Tim, I'm very sorry you think of me this way, but I just don't have the
> time to become an expert just now. My course ends in August; I might
> become an expert then. I've already installed MediaWiki and I can dive
> right into it. Until then, however, I'm afraid I'm not sufficiently
> interested in unpaid volunteer work that I would jeopardise my result.

So, a couple of thoughts I should probably keep to myself.

0) Everybody's time here is valuable. Being respectful of each other's
time constraints is probably a good practice for working together
successfully.

1) It worries me that programmers would avoid making changes to
MediaWiki just because it's hard to figure out where to make those
changes. For my own part, I have to admit that I kind of dread going
into the MW source -- it sometimes feels like a jungle in there.

Whether that complexity is real or if I'm just a third-rate programmer
(more probable) is an open question, as is the question of whether the
complexity may just be inherent to our problem domain.

But if the complexity is real, and not absolutely necessary, the work
put into a code refactoring effort (MW 2.0?) might pay off in having a
more accessible codebase that more people can contribute to. It would be
a _ton_ of work, though, and I wouldn't presume to impose that task on
anyone (see point 0 above B-).

~ESP

--
Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
Wikitravel (http://wikitravel.org/)
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from_name: Brion Vibber

body:
Thomas Jost wrote:
> [[Cat?gorie:Langue fran?aise]] has 13 subcategories, including
> [[Cat?gorie:Pronom fran?ais]] and [[Cat?gorie:Pr?positions fran?aises]].
> ~ "Pr?positions" was listed after "Pronom", which is incorrect.

As you'll see in many places, we don't yet have language-proper sorting.
Characters are sorted according to Unicode position; all accented latin
chars come after the plain ASCII ones.

 > So I
> edited [[Cat?gorie:Pr?positions fran?aises]] and added
> "[[Cat?gorie:Langue fran?aise|Prepositions francaises]]" to fix this
> error. But now, there are 2 "P" sections in [[Cat?gorie:Langue fran?aise]]:
> ~  P * Pronoms fran?ais
> ~  V * Verbes fran?ais
> ~  P * Pr?positions fran?aises
> Is this a bug or did I do something wrong ?

"P" comes after "C" (as in "Cat?gorie:").

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Long pages

body:
Stan Shebs wrote

> The topics lists are not annotated, so they include no information not
> available with a category listing. They are handy for tracking with
> "related changes", which categories ought to be able to do, and don't
> seem to now. But if that's added, then the compelling reason is that
> the lists of topics have to be maintained manually, are error-prone,
> and offer no subcategorization ability.

Well, categories 'have to be maintained manually', too, in the sense that if
no one adds a category to a new page, it won't show up.  Further, as I have
pointed out, the history of a list can show someone what has been added
recently, which is the other thing (besides RelatedChanges) one would really
want in following a topic area.  Also, how does one discern subtle bits of
vandalism/insertion of POV slants in categories, if there is no monitoring
provided?  AFAIK there is no way of monitoring that short of having the
pages automatically added to one's watchlist (and kept there).  Which I
suppose might come in time.

I'm not speaking for the astronomers here.  It's not an area I follow.  I
know the basic maths lists make good use of links to Talk pages, so the
RelatedChanges picks up the talk about everything, too.  That's something
that has been lacking in the software, up to now.

So, categories have been around for a few weeks; and we are hearing already
that the technology is better.  It's not: I should imagine we should want to
have a much longer trial before even being convinced that it is sound for
the intended purpose.

Charles


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Link table corruption due to templates (was
	Re: Setting up for the Greek language)

references:
<40CD966B.70105@cs.ucy.ac.cy>	<40CFECA5.4000702@cs.ucy.ac.cy>	<cb6vr0$vff$2@sea.gmane.org>	<40D70F19.3080409@hackish.org>	<cb7jtj$gnn$1@sea.gmane.org>	<40D7551C.5000701@hackish.org>	<cb83dc$drf$1@sea.gmane.org>	<40D7AE94.5080909@hotmail.com>	<cba0ai$tm2$1@sea.gmane.org>	<40D8E525.90609@hotmail.com>	<cbapql$d7a$1@sea.gmane.org>	<40D8F480.8020305@hotmail.com>	<40D9BE31.80304@telus.net>
	<cbctd6$c4a$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
Rowan Collins [IMSoP] wrote:

> Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>> Tim Starling wrote:
>>
>>> Timwi wrote:
>>>
>>>> CVS access doesn't make me an expert on the source code. :-p
>>>
>>> Asking an "expert" to do everything for you is not the way to either
>>> become an expert or to even get thing in question done.
>>
>> A great comment!  With a much wider application than for life on the
>> Wiki.
>
> Hm. I still don't read Timwi's original comment that way, but there
> you go. Asking a more experienced member of a team for their opinion
> before you spend too much time struggling with an implementation is
> surely the way to efficiency (especially from a team point of view).
> It's all very well learning from your mistakes, but it's a lot better
> if you can learn a bit from those of others as well. But anyway, who
> am I to judge the intentions of others? *shrug*

My response was to Tim's comments, not Timwi's.  Sure some people don't
have enough background to move on; with others it's a case of
confidence.  What I'm mostly criticizing is educational policy that
destroys initiative, and fails to validate the child's natural tendency
to ask questions and to be confident with his own ideas.

Ec


subject: [Wiktionary-l] Capitalisation the Nl: way

body:
Gerard.Meijssen wrote:

>For the method that is being develloped on nl:wiktionary, the method of identifying if existing words are capitalised or not, can be done by the defenition of the word; as a word can exist in a language both capitalised and not, we write the word in bold to start with, then the gender, the translation, then the explanation.
>
>This was done to reflect the impossibility to create words in lower case. As all words start off identifying the language, we can have many defenitions on the same page.
>
The layout of articles has nothing to do with it.  Repeating the word in
each section is only a temporary work-around while we wait for the bug
that forces the first letter of a title to be capitalized. to be fixed.

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] Long pages

body:
RickK wrote

>Woah, wait.  Are you saying that as items are added to categories (or vice
versa), they should be deleted from the list page?  No, that's entirely
inappropriate.  Lists serve an entirely different purpose from categories.
To begin with, they have red links that let users know that an article is
needed.  I really don't think we should be destroying list pages just
because categories are around!

The arguments were a bit more nuanced than that - in particular that a
bloated list might just be acting as a category-surrogate, and the red links
wouldn't be removed anyway.  But on the main thrust, I agree: if we get to
'categories good' - still honeymoon period yet - no way should it mean
'lists bad'.

We seem to need the discussion, anyway.  I can see that categories are more
'wiki': the structure may ebb and flow over time.  I have put in a lot of
time on lists, and _they work_.

Charles


from_name: sannse

body:
Brian said:

>
> I have also just given -- $15.00 US -- for Angela's travel. I have done
this
> as a show of good faith in the board, the individual members, and the
process
> that led to the board's creation and the recent elections.
>
> *However* I hope that this does not set a precedent, and will not make
such a
> contribution again, and I believe that this should be paid for by the
> Wikimedia Foundation -- *not* by individual wikipedians.
>

Absolutely.  This was something I was intending to say in a follow-up mail.
While I've contributed to this (my donation has now been sent to the
foundation via PayPal) that was in order to put my money where my mouth is
and to get things moving for this meet-up.  I firmly believe this should not
be a precedent.  Such expenses should be a normal part of the budget.

By the way - I think someone mentioned the election results as an example of
non-transparency.  However they were given in full on Meta:
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_results  in response to the
criticism - a good example of the way the board is responding to the
community I think.  (This must have been said somewhere or I wouldn't have
known - but perhaps it should have been announced more widely.)

-- sannse


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] Long pages

body:
On 06/23/04 19:24, Rick wrote:

> Woah, wait.  Are you saying that as items are added to categories (or
> vice versa), they should be deleted from the list page?  No, that's
> entirely inappropriate.  Lists serve an entirely different purpose from
> categories.  To begin with, they have red links that let users know that
> an article is needed.  I really don't think we should be destroying list
> pages just because categories are around!

I concur.

Article series boxes, on the other hand ... why can't I find consensus
to have these things shot on sight. Bah.

- d.


from_name: Josip Rodin

subject: [Wikitech-l] Can't delete page

body:
On Wed, Jun 23, 2004 at 01:38:05PM +0200, Magnus Manske wrote:
> I found [[Gaasterlân-Sleat]] on orphaned pages, obviously a broken
> copy of [[Gaasterl?n-Sleat]]. When I tried to delete the former, instead
> the latter (correct) one was deleted, while the broken one remained.
>
> As if we didn't have enough problems on the site right now ;-)

It seems to be a general problem with non-alphanumeric characters in titles.
There are several similar problems already reported at
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.3_comments_and_bug_reports#Comments_related_to_page_title

--
     2. That which causes joy or happiness.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Long pages

body:
Stan Shebs wrote

> I specifically limited my
> suggestion to the "list of X topics" lists, which rarely if ever
> have any useful content or organization and are not used by readers
> (in fact editors generally ignore them too, most have become woefully
> incomplete) *and* was only talking about removing the blue links,
> in the same way that one would remove entries from a wanted articles
> page.

I maintain around 70 of those.  There are about 7000 lists on WP, I believe:
so if I'm looking after 1%, that may not make much of an impression.  Still,
I reject this sort of generalisation, quite radically.

Charles


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Can't delete page

body:
Josip Rodin wrote:

> On Wed, Jun 23, 2004 at 01:38:05PM +0200, Magnus Manske wrote:
>
>>I found [[Gaasterlân-Sleat]] on orphaned pages, obviously a broken
>>copy of [[Gaasterl?n-Sleat]]. When I tried to delete the former, instead
>>the latter (correct) one was deleted, while the broken one remained.
>>
>>As if we didn't have enough problems on the site right now ;-)
>
> It seems to be a general problem with non-alphanumeric characters in titles.

No, it's a general problem with HTML entities in titles.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Can't delete page

body:
Magnus Manske wrote:

> I found [[Gaasterlân-Sleat]] on orphaned pages, obviously a broken
> copy of [[Gaasterl?n-Sleat]]. When I tried to delete the former, instead
> the latter (correct) one was deleted, while the broken one remained.
>
> As if we didn't have enough problems on the site right now ;-)

That's because even if you go to [[Gaasterlân-Sleat]] and click
"delete", if you take a close look at the URL, it gets you to the delete
page for [[Gaasterl?n-Sleat]]. You would have needed to fix the URL
manually (putting in "%26acirc;").

I've done that for you now; though I haven't deleted the page, but
replaced it with a redirect.

Timwi


from_name: Stan Shebs

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Categories considered harmful

references:
<1087773848.40d61c982504f@mail.tu-chemnitz.de>
	<000701c45761$1eff5270$4c136c50@OHGOD>
	<cb7pvh$tmk$1@sea.gmane.org> <40D775D3.6030809@apple.com>
	<40D775D3.6030809-2kanFRK1NckAvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org>
	<40D7898B.50209@thingy.apana.org.au>
	<iankd0djlf7drlb1keelulic5o2imt24lp@4ax.com>

body:
Philip Newton wrote:

>On Tue, 22 Jun 2004 01:21:15 +0000, David Gerard wrote:
>
>
>>On 06/21/04 23:57, Stan Shebs wrote:
>>Anything to kill off those accursed article boxes.
>>
>
>Anything? How about "different article boxes"?
>
>I like them. *shrugs*
>
In case there's any confusion, I'm OK with article boxes, it's
David Gerard who hates 'em. :-)

Stan


references:
<40CD966B.70105@cs.ucy.ac.cy>	<40CFECA5.4000702@cs.ucy.ac.cy>	<cb6vr0$vff$2@sea.gmane.org>	<40D70F19.3080409@hackish.org>	<cb7jtj$gnn$1@sea.gmane.org>	<40D7551C.5000701@hackish.org>	<cb83dc$drf$1@sea.gmane.org>	<40D7AE94.5080909@hotmail.com>	<cba0ai$tm2$1@sea.gmane.org>	<40D8E525.90609@hotmail.com>	<cbapql$d7a$1@sea.gmane.org>	<40D8F480.8020305@hotmail.com>
	<40D9BE31.80304@telus.net>

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Tim Starling wrote:
>
>> Timwi wrote:
>>
>>> CVS access doesn't make me an expert on the source code. :-p
>>
>> Asking an "expert" to do everything for you is not the way to either
>> become an expert or to even get thing in question done.
>
> A great comment!  With a much wider application than for life on the Wiki.

Hm. I still don't read Timwi's original comment that way, but there you go. Asking a more
experienced member of a team for their opinion before you spend too much time struggling with an
implementation is surely the way to efficiency (especially from a team point of view). It's all very
well learning from your mistakes, but it's a lot better if you can learn a bit from those of others
as well. But anyway, who am I to judge the intentions of others? *shrug*

--
Rowan Collins
[IMSoP]


from_name: Nikola Smolenski

subject: [WikiEN-l] Long pages

body:
On Wednesday 23 June 2004 16:59, Magnus Manske wrote:
> >- lists are conventional pages that will appear in search engines on the
> >same basis as any other.
>
> If I have a list of links, then each of the linked pages will appear on
> the search engine anyway.

Why would categories not appear in search engines?

> >And so on.  If the astronomy list is too long as it is, it should be
> >subdivided alphabetically, as has happened in the past to mathematics,
> >physics (to take allied subjects).
>
> I wish we had some way to automatically subdivide them alphabetically -
> oh wait, category pages... :-)

I agree with you. Categories can't replace all list functionality, but they
are ideal for replacing "List of X topics" lists.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Fuzzy Bunny Awards

body:
Anthere wrote:

> I think wikipedia is badly missing opportunities
> to show others we appreciate their work, and making our pleasure visible
> publicly.

Can't you just put something on their user talk page, or even their user
page, or post to the mailing list, or anything? It's not like there's no
way to say something, you know.

Timwi


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Categories in 1.3beta

body:
On Wednesday 23 June 2004 18:44, Lars Aronsson wrote:
> Karl Eichwalder wrote:
> > The (western) concept of first and surname is just one system and
> > [...]
> > The surname often changes - tell me the surname of Ludwig Tieck's sister
>
> This problem is bigger than Wikipedia's category system.  Personal
> names, especially in older times, are both ambigious and have
> different versions of spelling, leading to the need for disambiguation
> pages (where one name leads to many people) and redirects (where many
> names lead to one person).  I'd be interested in learning about any
> wiki that uses a different approach (than Wikipedia's) to this.

If a person (or anything else) is known under multiple names, is it be
possible to add it to categories with them and will it appear there multiple
times? If not, should it be possible?


body:
Ting Chen wrote:

> So, one technical solution could be we save the articles always in
> traditional form in the database. If a user has in his user-setting
> simplified, then the server would convert that article into simplified.
> After his edition, the server can compare the changes and only converse the
> changed part into traditional and save it into database.
>
> This last part is the only place, where the conversion could make failure
> because it is possible, that one simplified character is conversed into a
> false traditional character. But that is no problem, for one, we can place
> some commonly used context related conversions into the program. Second, the
> other users can manually correct the failure.

This is exactly what I was thinking, but I don't know if any traditional
character can unambiguously be converted to a simplified one. Your
message appears to imply this, is that correct? If it is, then yes, this
is the Way To Go?, I think.

Timwi


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Breton Wikipedia

body:
Trocheris Yann wrote:

> Hi
>
> I could not find more than a home page when I tried to start working on
> the breton wikipedia
> I'd rather propose to start a new blank one

Uhm... then why don't you?...


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Theora and video policy...

body:
  > The attitude some have taken against Theora reminded me of Mozilla
> developments attitude towards MNG, which led to its removal from the 1.4
> trunk in favour of Flash (?!), Animated GIF (!!) and SVG.

I know this is drifting off topic (oh, crap, I'm not even subscribed to this list am I - there's too
many!) but I did look through some of the stuff on the MNG controversy. The first thing I want to
say is - since when has Mozilla, or *any* browser, or in fact any software distributed by anyone
other than Macromedia, been able to play Flash files!? I don't know what's so "!!" about animated
GIFs either, they may have recent legal problems, but they've been the standard format since the
dawn of time.

The reason MNG support was dropped from Mozilla was that the existing implementation was seen as too
big, and they've been on a mission to unbloat their code for some time. That no effort gathered
speed to radically rewrite said code is, indeed, partly to do with attitude - but when it's a case
of browser-makers implementing code that no website uses, versus website-makers using features that
no browser implements, it's bound to be a bit chicken and egg. But we don't have to worry about
that, because we're not proposing software to *process* any such media, only distribute it.

----

My view is that the situation is relatively straight-forward. I've more often thought about it with
audio formats (although come to think, the case I'm about to mention does include video too) -
bbc.co.uk includes audio streams (both live and archived), and audio and video clips, all in
RealMedia formats. I have no doubt that this has caused thousands of people to download software
capable of using these formats; I similarly have no doubt that had the BBC standardised on something
else (say, Windows Media, if that had been in existence at the right moment) those thousands of
people would have downloaded a different piece of software. If we are serious about encouraging
multimedia content on Wikipedia, there is no reason the same should not be true for us.

Therefore, we should look at our alternatives - most have some form of legal restrictions attached,
even if it is merely on the processing of data by contributors (e.g. mp3 encoders); the Ogg formats
win here. In terms of user *choice* of software, mp3 playback is probably the most universal, but
Ogg Vorbis must come a close second; as for video, coverage seems to vary enormously as far as I can
make out. In terms of user *convenience*, a large proportion of users will have computers on which
Windows Media Player was pre-installed; thus score one for mp3, wma, wmv, and whatever video codecs
are installed by default.

An additional point that came into my head from the bbc.co.uk example was that there is some benefit
to using a *family* of formats - they use RealAudio and RealVideo because one piece of software
allows both; I would suspect that something vaguely analagous will emerge for Ogg Vorbis and Ogg
Theora, in that players that do audio and video (many do) will come with support for both or neither
- so if we stick with Vorbis, it would make sense to stick with Theora too (possibly).

Geez, I didn't realise this was going to be such a long message. Hopefully it contains something for
someone to think about...

--
Rowan Collins
[IMSoP]


from_name: Michael Snow

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Funding for the newly elected Board Members

body:
hcheney wrote:

>If Angela did go to Paris for a "trustee meeting" it
>would be an invalid trustee meeting unless one of the
>trustees, or the computer hosting the meeting, were in
>the State of Florida.
>
I do not believe this to be a correct statement, and it has already been
cited in discussion on the wiki, so I do not wish to let it pass
unchallenged. Although the Wikimedia Foundation is a nonprofit
organization created under the laws of the State of Florida, I'm not
aware of any requirement that meetings be "located" in Florida. The
bylaws certainly do not require it. The most applicable law I could find
in quickly scanning Florida statutes related to nonprofits is Fla. Stat.
?617.0820 (1), which reads: "The board of directors may hold regular or
special meetings in or out of this state." So unless someone can point
me to information to the contrary, I believe that it is possible to have
a valid meeting of the board in Paris.

--Michael Snow
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body:
hcheney wrote:

>If Angela did go to Paris for a "trustee meeting" it
>would be an invalid trustee meeting unless one of the
>trustees, or the computer hosting the meeting, were in
>the State of Florida.
>
I do not believe this to be a correct statement, and it has already been
cited in discussion on the wiki, so I do not wish to let it pass
unchallenged. Although the Wikimedia Foundation is a nonprofit
organization created under the laws of the State of Florida, I'm not
aware of any requirement that meetings be "located" in Florida. The
bylaws certainly do not require it. The most applicable law I could find
in quickly scanning Florida statutes related to nonprofits is Fla. Stat.
?617.0820 (1), which reads: "The board of directors may hold regular or
special meetings in or out of this state." So unless someone can point
me to information to the contrary, I believe that it is possible to have
a valid meeting of the board in Paris.

--Michael Snow
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body:
hcheney wrote:

>If Angela did go to Paris for a "trustee meeting" it
>would be an invalid trustee meeting unless one of the
>trustees, or the computer hosting the meeting, were in
>the State of Florida.
>
I do not believe this to be a correct statement, and it has already been
cited in discussion on the wiki, so I do not wish to let it pass
unchallenged. Although the Wikimedia Foundation is a nonprofit
organization created under the laws of the State of Florida, I'm not
aware of any requirement that meetings be "located" in Florida. The
bylaws certainly do not require it. The most applicable law I could find
in quickly scanning Florida statutes related to nonprofits is Fla. Stat.
?617.0820 (1), which reads: "The board of directors may hold regular or
special meetings in or out of this state." So unless someone can point
me to information to the contrary, I believe that it is possible to have
a valid meeting of the board in Paris.

--Michael Snow
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body:
hcheney wrote:

>If Angela did go to Paris for a "trustee meeting" it
>would be an invalid trustee meeting unless one of the
>trustees, or the computer hosting the meeting, were in
>the State of Florida.
>
I do not believe this to be a correct statement, and it has already been
cited in discussion on the wiki, so I do not wish to let it pass
unchallenged. Although the Wikimedia Foundation is a nonprofit
organization created under the laws of the State of Florida, I'm not
aware of any requirement that meetings be "located" in Florida. The
bylaws certainly do not require it. The most applicable law I could find
in quickly scanning Florida statutes related to nonprofits is Fla. Stat.
?617.0820 (1), which reads: "The board of directors may hold regular or
special meetings in or out of this state." So unless someone can point
me to information to the contrary, I believe that it is possible to have
a valid meeting of the board in Paris.

--Michael Snow
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from_name: Jean-Christophe Chazalette

body:
Mark,

You've made your point plenty. As a basic and regular suscriber to this
list, I'm getting tired of *your* point of view, not because it's yours but
because I got it enough. When you have nothing to say but to repeat over and
over the same stuff, you're on the verge of spam. Thanks.

JCC
aka Aurevilly on w:fr

PS: not to mention I totally disagree with the fake pragmatism you've
exposed.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Delirium" <delirium at hackish.org>
To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l at wikimedia.org>
Sent: Wednesday, June 23, 2004 11:03 PM
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Re: Bounties and expenses

> bcorr at neaction.org wrote:
>
> >I've been watching this conversation with great dismay. As someone else
has
> >said, IMO Mark clearly has a very different vision of the Wikimedia
board, and
> >an incredibly negative opinion of boards in general.
> >
> >
> It's quite possible that the majority of Wikimedians have a different
> view from me of what the board ought to be, but this was never really
> consulted in forming the board.  The board was *not* formed because we
> thought it would be a good idea to have a board to govern the project;
> it was formed because as a matter of the law on non-profits of the State
> of Florida, we are required to have a board.  Therefore, we do.
> However, that in itself is simply a legal formality.  If we are to hand
> over to the board significant powers, not only in the technical sense
> that legally they have powers, but in the moral sense that we are giving
> them a particular role in running the project, then that ought to be
> done explicitly.
>
> My viewpoint, of course, is that we ought to do as much of our
> decision-making as possible in the wiki way.  There are many different
> viewpoints on how this is best done, and many can be read in depth, with
> arguments for and against various approaches, at the meatball wiki
> (http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?MeatballWiki).  I have my
> particular views on what sorts of processes I think work best, but of
> course many others are possible, and I haven't insisted we pick any
> particular ones.  However, "elect a board of trustees to make decisions
> for the users" is not one of the wiki-style organizational methods I've
> run across, though I may have missed it.
>
> Take, for example, the issue of dues.  One way to decide it is to have
> the board debate amongst themselves (either online or in person),
> solicit input from users, and then make a decision on what level to set
> the dues at.  Another possibility is to have a wiki-style discussion it,
> possibly on meta (I'm willing to use meta over mailing lists if that's
> the preference of most other people).  If a consensus emerges, then we
> set the dues at the consensus amount.  If there are strong
> disagreements, then we can identify a few of the leading choices and
> hold a vote.  Given that we already have voting software that has been
> used successfully, this is fairly easy to do.
>
> I don't see any particular reason to favor the top-down decision-making
> process, especially given how alien it is to the way we (not to mention
> just about all others wikis) have been doing things to date, which has
> been rather successful in most respects.
>
> -Mark
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


body:
Delirium wrote:

>We decided to have a board initially not because anyone thought
>it was a good idea, but because the State of Florida requires
>non-profits to have boards of trustees consisting of five or more
>people.
>
Another incorrect statement, I believe. I'm not sure exactly what the
basis is for saying what "our" reasons were for deciding to have a
board, but according to Fla. Stat. ?617.0803 (1), "A board of directors
must consist of three or more individuals", not five.

--Michael Snow
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body:
Delirium wrote:

>We decided to have a board initially not because anyone thought
>it was a good idea, but because the State of Florida requires
>non-profits to have boards of trustees consisting of five or more
>people.
>
Another incorrect statement, I believe. I'm not sure exactly what the
basis is for saying what "our" reasons were for deciding to have a
board, but according to Fla. Stat. ?617.0803 (1), "A board of directors
must consist of three or more individuals", not five.

--Michael Snow
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body:
Delirium wrote:

>We decided to have a board initially not because anyone thought
>it was a good idea, but because the State of Florida requires
>non-profits to have boards of trustees consisting of five or more
>people.
>
Another incorrect statement, I believe. I'm not sure exactly what the
basis is for saying what "our" reasons were for deciding to have a
board, but according to Fla. Stat. ?617.0803 (1), "A board of directors
must consist of three or more individuals", not five.

--Michael Snow
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body:
Delirium wrote:

>We decided to have a board initially not because anyone thought
>it was a good idea, but because the State of Florida requires
>non-profits to have boards of trustees consisting of five or more
>people.
>
Another incorrect statement, I believe. I'm not sure exactly what the
basis is for saying what "our" reasons were for deciding to have a
board, but according to Fla. Stat. ?617.0803 (1), "A board of directors
must consist of three or more individuals", not five.

--Michael Snow
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body:
For the method that is being develloped on nl:wiktionary, the method of identifying if existing words are capitalised or not, can be done by the defenition of the word; as a word can exist in a language both capitalised and not, we write the word in bold to start with, then the gender, the translation, then the explanation.

This was done to reflect the impossibility to create words in lower case. As all words start off identifying the language, we can have many defenitions on the same page.

One problem is when a word has _many_ translations. 40 is not rare. I think it would be good for a user when he can state what languages to include and what languages to exclude in the presentation of translations.

Thanks,
  GerardM


from_name: Tim Starling

body:
I have sent US$13.71 (A$20) to Wikimedia, as a contribution towards
Angela's travel costs to Paris.

-- Tim Starling