subject: [WikiEN-l] Things that bother me

body:
Jonathan Walther wrote:
> I pick both.  Benevolent dictatorship where the dictator listens to and
> respects the voice of his constituents works quite well.  It amounts to
> concsensus; to retain power, the benevolent dictator has to come up with
> solutions that everyone can live with.

Well, yes and no.  I'm the benevolent dictator here, and I think I do
a good job of listening and trying to work to address a variety of
concerns as best as possible.  But I don't have to do this to retain
power, really, except insofar as if I do a sufficient bad job, everyone
will run away and refuse to play with me anymore.

There are a number of problems with our current model:

1.  Determining when there is a consensus is difficult.  On most
issues, we end up with a solution that approaches unanimity -- this is
the wiki way.  But on some issues, it's sort of hard to say.  People
end up going along because they have a commitment to the overall
*process* (i.e., they like me, and like the job I do generally, to a
degree that they are willing to put up with some decisions that I make
that they don't agree with).

2. Our current process doesn't scale well outside English.  When a
controversy breaks out in English and the noise gets loud enough, I
can spend a few hours going through edit histories to try to determine
what happened.  This gives good people an incentive to be on their
best behavior, because they want to make it easy for me when I have to
judge someone.

But I can't do this in Swedish, so I have to listen to two sides of an
argument where it sounds like both sides have behaved badly at times,
and I can't figure out who started it, who is likely to continue it,
and so on.

> When you have votes on the other
> hand, the will of the majority can make things so unlikeable for
> minorities that they just up and leave.

One of the things that Eric pointed out to me is that thinking of
voting as a simple "majority rules" (i.e. 50% plus 1) is too
simplistic.  I _totally_ agree that 50% plus 1 would be a horrible
rule, and likely to end up being a tool to close out minority voices.

But there are other forms of voting (Condorcet's method, approval
voting, etc.) that don't suffer from all the same defects.

Having said that, I still have grave reservations about using voting,
reservations that derive from the incentives to "political" behavior
that voting almost surely involves.  Under our current system, all
parties are forced to look for solutions that will be satisfactory to
almost everyone, as opposed to merely looking for solutions with a
large enough constituency to pass a voting threshold (and screw the
rest of them!).

> Did anyone ever notice that Kropotkin said Russian villages used to run
> entirely based on consensus, without any voting?  Too bad the communists
> destroyed that lifestyle; I'd like to see firsthand how they managed it.
> I suspect it was because everyone shared a common culture, language, and
> religion, and had known each other all their lives.

And of course this is precisely what we don't have.

Having said all of this, I think that I would find very useful a way
that I could formulate alternatives and have people formally register
preferences, with the understanding that it's an experiment.  A tool
for more formally recognizing consensus.  And then that tool might
eventually (with experience and changes as necessary) be more
formalized.

I'm a big fan of the notion of a constitutional republic.  Majority
rule is morally repugnant.  But some form of consensus voting, with
the protection of a "constitution" or "bill of rights" for all
wikipedians, rights that can't be taken away without some
super-extraordinary voting procedure, will probably be the way to go,
someday.

--Jimbo


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] vera cruz is a troll

in_reply_to: <200301191604.h0JG4E725795@ross.bomis.com>; from koyaanisqatsi@nupedia.com on Sun, Jan 19, 2003 at 08:04:14AM -0800

body:
koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com wrote:
> Vera Cruz posted to mav's talk page a ranting (and quite redundant and
> self-pitying) Faulknerian screed which mav (rightly, I think) refused
> to read.  The interesting thing about this is that she did so while
> not logged in, and from the IP address 172.130.118.81 .  The
> temptation to ban her immediately was quite strong.  Now, this
> morning, I did ban her.

Good.

> It occurs to me that Vera might *also* be user:172.  If so, I'd say
> she's been having us on even better than I thought.  what is the rest
> of 172's IP?

I doubt this, but it's possible I suppose.


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [Wikitech-l] Page rendering

body:
Eclecticology wrote:

>I thought I had a temporary solution, but I guess not.  It just looked
>that way.  In fact even with the left QuickBar, the logo does not
>appear, and everything in the principal frame above the level of the
>lowest QuickBar item is frozen.

Frozen?
I get frozen pages *all*the*time*.
(This is with Netscape 6 on Unix.)
Reloading the page almost always fixes that.
The floating sidebar (which I'd otherwise prefer)
tends to increase the frequency of frozen pages,
so I don't use (although it's fine otherwise).
I've never mentioned it before; now that I now how it works,
it's nothing but the annoyance of clicking the reload button.

-- Toby


from_name: koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] vera cruz is a troll

body:
You Wrote:
>Vera Cruz edited Ed's talk page a few minutes ago. Is she banned or not?

I banned the IP but not the username.  I don't know how to ban the
username, or I'd do that too.

Maybe we could add a short screening process to wikipedia:
[ ] Are you a troll?
[ ] Have you ever been fired for being "a prick in general, and bloody
near useless"?
[ ] Have you been committed to a mental institution within the last month?

kq


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Brion Vibber

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Tic, toc, tic, toc - Approaching 100,000 English
	"articles"

body:
On lun, 2003-01-20 at 09:58, Kurt Jansson wrote:
> BTW, we could need some figures (for the German Wp and Wp-wide): daily
> active users, pageviews, etc. Brion?

Yeah, yeah, I know. I've got to run the stats program again... need to
put that in the crontab...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [WikiEN-l] vera cruz is a troll

body:
You Wrote:
>172.130.118.81  is an aol ip number :
>2 solutions :
>1 Vera Cruz and 172 have the same provider and sometime they get the same
>dynamic ip.
>2 Aol use a proxy/cache....
>
>Ericd

Well, it's been thoroughly discounted that Vera Cruz and 172 are the
same person, so it's probably an AOL proxy then.  And AOL does use
proxies, as I discovered in email with Brion VIBBER about a separate,
unrelated matter.

In other news, I owe everyone an apology for my last message in re:
trolls etc., I was arrogant and dismissive--not attitudes we want to
culture at wikipedia.

best,

kq

wikikarms: [[Luaka Bop]] stub, about to add more Dept. of State info
(not to [[Luaka Bop]] tho)


from_name: Zoe

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Limits to fiction

body:
Ha.  "Well, I was referring to articles about fiction, not articles that *are*
fiction. The latter are generally not tolerated on Wikipedia" -- Then why do we have so many "micronation" articles?
Zoe
 Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> Another possibility, that might mitigate the problem, would be to
> create a separate Wiki site for people who want to post fiction. As
> it happens, I've been toying with the idea of creating just such a
> site. There are people who *like* reading fiction and perhaps
> creating it collaboratively. Give them their own playground, and
> maybe they'll leave Wikipedia alone.

Well, I was referring to articles about fiction, not articles that *are*
fiction. The latter are generally not tolerated on Wikipedia. A separate
fiction-pedia (storypedia?) might indeed make sense, but be careful not to try too
many projects at the same time. It's not like there's any shortage of fiction
on the net ...

Regards,

Erik

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

_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
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from_name: Sheldon Rampton

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Limits to fiction

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>Well, I was referring to articles about fiction, not articles that *are*
>fiction. The latter are generally not tolerated on Wikipedia. A separate
>fiction-pedia (storypedia?) might indeed make sense, but be careful
>not to try too
>many projects at the same time. It's not like there's any shortage of fiction
>on the net ...

Point taken. I guess I misunderstood. I read your posting from a week
or two ago about "micronation fantasies" and got the impression that
people were starting to use Wikipedia as an outlet for their creative
and humorous impulses.

It's true there's no shortage of fiction on the net, but finding
*quality* fiction is comparable to finding quality encyclopedia-like
information.

The impressive thing about Wikipedia, from my point of view, isn't
that it makes it possible to *post* articles. (Millions of web sites
do that.) The impressive thing is that it makes it possible to
collaborative *edit* and *improve* articles. It seems that this model
ought to be applicable to any number of non-encyclopedia applications.
--
--------------------------------
|  Sheldon Rampton
|  Editor, PR Watch (www.prwatch.org)
|  Author of books including:
|     Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities
|     Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
|     Mad Cow USA
|     Trust Us, We're Experts
--------------------------------


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Web stats (was Re: Tic, toc, tic, toc)

body:
On lun, 2003-01-20 at 09:58, Kurt Jansson wrote:
> BTW, we could need some figures (for the German Wp and Wp-wide): daily
> active users, pageviews, etc. Brion?

Okay, still getting these back up...

http://de.wikipedia.org/stats
http://nl.wikipedia.org/stats

Note that the first 5 days of January are missing as I rotated the logs
at that point and haven't yet figured out how to get Webalizer to use
info from two files in the same month. (If you see them by the time you
look at it, then I've got it fixed by then. :P )

Sorry for the wait, Giskart... Individual visitors (insofar as log
analyzers can figure out) should appear under 'total unique sites'. This
will overcount some dynamic IPs on sparse networks and undercount users
behind proxies and dynamic IPs that are used by multiple folks.

More will follow, expect the same URL style as above.

-- brion
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from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Limits to fiction

body:
> Another possibility, that might mitigate the problem, would be to
> create a separate Wiki site for people who want to post fiction. As
> it happens, I've been toying with the idea of creating just such a
> site. There are people who *like* reading fiction and perhaps
> creating it collaboratively. Give them their own playground, and
> maybe they'll leave Wikipedia alone.

Well, I was referring to articles about fiction, not articles that *are*
fiction. The latter are generally not tolerated on Wikipedia. A separate
fiction-pedia (storypedia?) might indeed make sense, but be careful not to try too
many projects at the same time. It's not like there's any shortage of fiction
on the net ...

Regards,

Erik

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


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Re: Censorship at meta

body:
--- Tom Parmenter <tompar at world.std.com> wrote:
> |In the meantime, have you sent a bug report to
> Opera, or posted about
> |it on opera.mac?

euh, no...I would not really know what to say
"when I edit my favorite wiki, it adds weird lines,
and crashes..."

> Opera will make you a beta tester, and send you
> individualized updates
> attempting to deal with any problem you present.

But I like this option *very much*...

My brother was
> having trouble and did this.  (Wimp that I am, Ijust
> quit using Opera
> for editing.)
>
> You might also add notes on your problems to
> [[Wikipedia:Browser
> Notes]].

I will. I think I already put the mac bugs on
Opera 5
Netscape 4.x
IE 4.5
IE 5.5
...

:-)))

__________________________________________________
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from_name: Tom Parmenter

in_reply_to:
<oprjbcy0vdk4g8ki@news.gmane.org> (message from Richard Grevers
	on Tue, 21 Jan 2003 08:41:14 +1300)

body:
|In the meantime, have you sent a bug report to Opera, or posted about
|it on opera.mac?

Opera will make you a beta tester, and send you individualized updates
attempting to deal with any problem you present.  My brother was
having trouble and did this.  (Wimp that I am, Ijust quit using Opera
for editing.)

You might also add notes on your problems to [[Wikipedia:Browser
Notes]].

Tom P.


subject: [WikiEN-l] vera cruz is a troll

body:
Speaking of apologies, I have no information about or interest in
Vera's gender assignment, somatype, or any other personal
characteristic and I am sorry if I inadvertantly gave any other
impression.

Tom Parmenter


from_name: tarquin

subject: [WikiEN-l] vera cruz is a troll

body:
Vera is back --

    * (diff
      <http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=User_talk:Ed_Poor&diff=0&oldid=0>)
      (hist
      <http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=User_talk:Ed_Poor&action=history>)
      . . *M* User talk:Ed Poor
      <http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Ed_Poor>; 15:54 . . Vera
      Cruz <http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Vera_Cruz>


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Censorship at meta

body:
On Monday 20 January 2003 04:00 am, Brion Vibber wrote:
> That is *not* grounds for reverting the changes made, particularly
> without explanation. It wouldn't have been that hard to remove the
> whitespace and note the problem in the talk page, would it?

There were hundreds of lines of whitespace, removing it without resorting to a
revert would have taken at least a half an hour and probably longer.

But yes, I should have explained in as nice a way as possible, just why I did
the revert on the talk page. For that I am sorry.

--mav


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Re: Re: Censorship at meta

body:
--- Richard Grevers <dramatic at xtra.co.nz> wrote:
> On Mon, 20 Jan 2003 13:26:28 -0800 (PST), Anthere
> <anthere5=/E1597aS9LQAvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org>
> wrote:
>
> >
> > --- Tom Parmenter
> <tompar=Jk6FQSss4Zz2eFz/2MeuCQ at public.gmane.org>
> wrote:
> >> |In the meantime, have you sent a bug report to
> >> Opera, or posted about
> >> |it on opera.mac?
> >
> > euh, no...I would not really know what to say
> > "when I edit my favorite wiki, it adds weird
> lines,
> > and crashes..."
> I would offer to formulate a test case, but somehow
> I don't think that my
> Mac (a venerable 75MHz PowerPC) has the horsepower
> to run the version of
> MacOS necessary for Opera6 to run. (Even O5 is an
> adventure in waiting,
> although it's still faster than NS4 and IE5).
>
> Note that it's only the MacOpera team who do such
> individualized bugfixing
> :-).
> --
> Richard Grevers

The test pages I did for Brion didnot lead to any
crashes. Maybe the computer just needed to be
restarted to feel better. Dunno. If Brion finds a idea
for these blank lines, I could drop Mac Opera a word.
I couldnot figure why they sometimes appeared and
sometimes not...

Meanwhile, Opera 5 is still the best in speed ! (and
Opera 6 is a chore in slowlyness). But, tell me, how
do YOU make it to edit the UTF 8 coded pages with your
very old Mac ?!?

__________________________________________________
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http://mailplus.yahoo.com


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Tic, toc, tic, toc - Approaching 100,000 English
 "articles"

body:
>
>
>I support Mav's suggestion of a more stringent definition, imposed
>before we hit 100,000.  We're in no hurry to make "fake milestones" of
>any kind.  Better to have 100,000 next year, even, and have that *mean
>something*, than to have 100,000 now but have them be meaningless.
>
>
So, we'll ignore the "comma count" hitting the 100.000 in, oh, 115 articles?

Magnus


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Censorship at meta

body:
On lun, 2003-01-20 at 16:04, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> On Monday 20 January 2003 04:00 am, Brion Vibber wrote:
> > That is *not* grounds for reverting the changes made, particularly
> > without explanation. It wouldn't have been that hard to remove the
> > whitespace and note the problem in the talk page, would it?
>
> There were hundreds of lines of whitespace, removing it without resorting to a
> revert would have taken at least a half an hour and probably longer.

You clearly need to get a better text editor! That should be a single
search-and-replace operation; change double line breaks to single line
breaks.

In NEdit (http://nedit.org/), that'll be:
paste (middle click)
replace (ctrl+r)
click 'Regular Expression'
enter '\n\n' for 'String to find'
enter '\n' for 'Replace With'
hit 'Replace all in Window'.
select all, then paste it back into web browser.

> But yes, I should have explained in as nice a way as possible, just why I did
> the revert on the talk page. For that I am sorry.

Sorry you got caught, eh? ;)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: sannse at delphiforums.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] vera cruz is a troll

body:
kq wrote:
.....

> Maybe we could add a short screening process to wikipedia:
> [ ] Are you a troll?
> [ ] Have you ever been fired for being "a prick in general, and bloody
> near useless"?
> [ ] Have you been committed to a mental institution within the last month?
>
> kq

Not all us loonies are trolls you know

sannse
(who got out of the mad-house six months ago, and could disapear back in at
any time)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Things that bother me

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Having said all of this, I think that I would find very useful a way
>that I could formulate alternatives and have people formally register
>preferences, with the understanding that it's an experiment.  A tool
>for more formally recognizing consensus.  And then that tool might
>eventually (with experience and changes as necessary) be more
>formalized.
>
>
OK. Proposal (probably number 10^10, but anyway):
* Have a special page (or another project?) for "consensus management" ;-)
* Logged-in people only (just for ease of reading; user names are free...)
* Anyone can create a topic that needs a consensus decision
* Anyone can add solution proposals, as a wikipedia (meta) link, like
"Difficult topic (proposal Magnus)"
* Everyone can add (and remove) himself to the"decision finding" on any
topic
* Options on a topic are all proposals, "I don't like any of this", and
"I don't know yet", the latter being the default
* Anyone can change his vote (sorry: opinion) on the topic any time, and
give a reason for prefering that option
* For a topic, anyone can mark a checkbox "I think we should get this
done now"
* When some criteria are met (example: topic exists for 1 week, more
than 5 people are signed up, more than 70% think it's done now),
consensus is declared.

It has some voting elements (like actually deciding at one point), but
also the "flow" of consensus making. And, we know where the participants
stand at any moment.

Magnus


subject: [WikiEN-l] vera cruz is a troll

body:
Vera Cruz edited Ed's talk page a few minutes ago. Is she banned or not?

Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Erik Moeller wrote:
>
>
>>If Lir is causing trouble again, just re-ban her. We don't even need
>>another trial since, technically, she is still banned.
>>
>>
>
>That's right.  Vera Cruz is welcome to appeal to me with proof of not
>being Lir.  Otherwise, sayonara.
>
>
>
>>Don't count on her to stay away, though.
>>
>>
>
>At some point, I'll be willing to take legal (or similar) steps.
>
>We're crazy tolerant, but not suicidal.
>
>--Jimbo
>_______________________________________________
>WikiEN-l mailing list
>WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
>http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
>
>


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Why not listen to W3C ? Invalid HTML on
	www.wikipedia.org !

body:
On lun, 2003-01-20 at 16:22, Pieter Suurmond wrote:
> Wikipages generated by the server do not follow W3C recommmendations.
> Now that we eventually have an open standard for HTML, why not use it?

Forgetfulness?

> One of the reasons why http://www.wikipedia.org does not validate is that
> the character-set is not specified, you should include a line like this:
>
>  <META HTTP-EQUIV="content-type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">

This is set in the http headers. I assume you were validating a copy
that lacks the header?

> You can easily see what other errors are made, when you type in
> an URI at http://validator.w3.org/. Page "http://www.wikipedia.org/" for
> example is not Valid HTML 4.01 Transitional! Below are the results of
> attempting to parse this document with an SGML parser.
>
>    1.Line 7, column 7: required attribute "TYPE" not specified.
>
>


from_name: Kurt Jansson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Tic, toc, tic, toc - Approaching 100,000 English "articles"

body:
Hi Jimbo, hi list!

> I support Mav's suggestion of a more stringent definition, imposed
> before we hit 100,000.  We're in no hurry to make "fake milestones" of
> any kind.  Better to have 100,000 next year, even, and have that *mean
> something*, than to have 100,000 now but have them be meaningless.

Hmm, isn't it a bit late for this?

I jounalist from Heise (who brought many new contributors to the
German - and I guess also to the English - Wikipedia with his nice wiki
article last week) told me he _might_ be able to write a newsticker
entry on heise.de. This would be really cool, but of course he needs an
occasion. I told him the English Wikipedia might start it's 100,000th
article on the 19th, but you people have been a bit slow the last days
;-)

And please don't forget the psychological side. Many people will feel
disappointed if the counter is set to xx,xxx just a few articles before
we hit the 100,000 mark.

For me the counter is just a good sign to show people that the project
is alive and that it's worth to invest their time in it. Something like
"last month we started x,xxx new articles" on the main page might be
even more impressing. "Scientific" measurements of our articles should
be done on separate pages, with explanations why and how ... (I know we
have already some nice pages there). The "100,000 articles" can't give a
false impression to people, because you can't compare it to anything
else. It would be another case if we said "We have already xx,xxx
articles about topics that are also mentioned in the Encyclopedia
Britannica/Brockhaus/...".

I nearly forgot: If you change the "algorithm" measuring the articles,
does that also affect the non-english Wikipedias? We're writing a press
release at the moment, because we'll have 10,000 articles at the end of
january:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pressemitteilung
Please don't make our counter drop down to 7,000 articles or so. We
really need some press coverage.

BTW, we could need some figures (for the German Wp and Wp-wide): daily
active users, pageviews, etc. Brion?

Kurt


subject: [Wikitech-l] Thanks for W3C-valid HTML 4.01 so quickly!

body:
On lun, 2003-01-20 at 18:53, Pieter Suurmond wrote:
> That's great Brion Vibber!
> Now http://www.wikipedia.org/ is indeed 100% valid.
> The Dutch site still contains some errors but that's
> mainly due to things like "??????????">Russkiy</a>"
> on http://nl.wikipedia.org. I'll try to repair those
> manually...

Another problem is the inclusion of external links with ampersands in
them. Strictly speaking, ampersands in links need to be '&' instead
of '&' because entity interpretation is done before the tag attributes
are; all our generated links take this into account (I think!), but we
don't presently provide such conversion for inline external links in a
wiki page (in part because we don't know what the author intended...)

It would I think not be unreasonable for the wiki parser to
automatically convert &s not followed by an entity body to & ...
should we things that do look like entities to go through intact,
though? Or just escape all &s? (Upside: simple, consistent behavior.
Downside: inconsistent with wikilinks, where entities are allowed.)

> I've another whish: could a script on the wikiserver
> do automatic character-to-entity-conversion like?:
> 	? --> à
> 	? --> ë

I'd rather do the other way around, convert input entities to real
characters and keep them that way; entities are bandwidth hogs and not
really particularly helpful. Text on the Chinese and Japanese wikis for
instance would take about 3 times the bandwidth they presently do using
numeric entities instead of UTF-8.

If you want to see the names of the entities in the textarea (so as to
avoid the editors that damage non-ASCII text), they have to be escaped
again with an &, and any text that uses non-trivial amounts of
non-ASCII characters becomes illegible. As an option and for known
unfriendly user agents it may be helpful, but I'd avoid it if I could.

> Well, I'm only suggesting... Anyhow, thanks
> for fixing the English front page so very quickly!

You're welcome!

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Eric Demolli

subject: [WikiEN-l] vera cruz is a troll

body:
172.130.118.81  is an aol ip number :
2 solutions :
1 Vera Cruz and 172 have the same provider and sometime they get the same
dynamic ip.
2 Aol use a proxy/cache....

Ericd

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jimmy Wales" <jwales at bomis.com>
To: <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
Sent: Monday, January 20, 2003 1:51 PM
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] vera cruz is a troll

> koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com wrote:
> > Vera Cruz posted to mav's talk page a ranting (and quite redundant and
> > self-pitying) Faulknerian screed which mav (rightly, I think) refused
> > to read.  The interesting thing about this is that she did so while
> > not logged in, and from the IP address 172.130.118.81 .  The
> > temptation to ban her immediately was quite strong.  Now, this
> > morning, I did ban her.
>
> Good.
>
> > It occurs to me that Vera might *also* be user:172.  If so, I'd say
> > she's been having us on even better than I thought.  what is the rest
> > of 172's IP?
>
> I doubt this, but it's possible I suppose.
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Censorship at meta

body:
On Monday 20 January 2003 04:00 am, Brion wrote:
> As much as it's tempting to tell people to not come back until they
> upgrade their computer, they're not always willing or able to do so. Not
> allowing them to edit is perhaps not _quite_ as morally repellant as
> kicking a grandmother in a wheelchair down the stairs, but I still
> wouldn't recommend it.

Would you also advocate that that same wheelchair-bound grandmother be able to
drive even though she is blind and senile? Nobody is advocating kicking her
down the stairs - that was a bad (flame bait) analogy. So let's end the flame
there, shall we?

So let me get you straight: we are supposed to follow people around with
hideously broken browsers, revert pages that their browsers destroy and then
spend a lot of time re-creating what they were trying to do? Have fun doing
that Brion - I guess I'll ignore meta too if this is expected.

I'm all for supporting as many browsers and platforms as possible, but when
someone's choice of browser and platform, in spite of our best efforts to be
inclusive, /still/ destroys pages and causes /a lot/ of work for others, then
that isn't fair to the community (who are all volunteers) and slows down the
progress of the project.

Now annoying things like the 32k limit can and should be dealt with by making
sure articles and talk pages don't get too big (a good idea anyway). But what
happened to the article in question was that whitespace was added to each and
every line making it impossible to fix without a revert or spending dozens of
minutes deleting each whitespace (if there is a fast way to do this, them
please tell me about it - that would make this an annoying but /workable/
browser problem).

--mav

This requires a lot of Wikikarma:
http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Scandium&diff=0&oldid=602495


subject: [Wikipedia-l] 100,000th article is reached!

body:
On lun, 2003-01-20 at 19:46, Oliver Pereira wrote:
> Incidentally, I now have the have the unenviable honour of being
> responsible for both the 99,999th article and the 100,001st.
>
> Damn.
>
> I'm going home to sulk now...

Don't worry, there are still some old garbage pages lying around that
need to be deleted. If we delete one with a comma in it, the count goes
down by one and your 100,001st moves back into place. ;)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Censorship at meta

body:
On lun, 2003-01-20 at 19:54, Daniel Mayer wrote:
[an angry tirade]

Please see:
http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2003-January/002177.html

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Apologies (was Re: vera cruz is a troll)

body:
And continuing the apologies, I was being over sensitive - sorry!

sannse


from_name: Rob Lanphier

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Things that bother me

body:
Sheldon Rampton wrote:*
*

>Jimmy Wales wrote:
>>/One of the things that Eric pointed out to me is that thinking of
>/>/voting as a simple "majority rules" (i.e. 50% plus 1) is too
>/>/simplistic.  I _totally_ agree that 50% plus 1 would be a horrible
>/>/rule, and likely to end up being a tool to close out minority voices.
>/>/
>/>/But there are other forms of voting (Condorcet's method, approval
>/>/voting, etc.) that don't suffer from all the same defects.
>/
>No, but they suffer from other defects. In 1952, Kenneth Arrow, a
>professor emeritus of economics at Stanford University, proved this
>using an "impossibility" theorem which showed that no voting system
>is completely free from counterintuitive incomes.
>
I was going to change the subject line, but "Things that bother me"
seems very appropriate. :-)

Arrow's theorem is often trotted out as an excuse to stick with the
status quo. There's a couple things I should point out here:

1. A voting system doesn't have to be "perfect",
2.  Arrow's theorem comes under strain when dealing with Condorcet and
similar systems.  In particular, the "Independence from Irrelevant
Candidates (IIAC)" criteria is arguably too broad.  Arrow classifies
candidates caught in a circular tie as "irrelevant".  It's the rarely
used tiebreaker in Condorcet that fails, not the core method.  While
still disqualifies it as "perfect", it does WAY better than 50%+1 (first
past the post) does against Arrow's criteria.

A more complete rebuttal of Arrow can be found here:
http://electionmethods.org/Arrow.html

Having said all of that, the difference between these systems pretty
much becomes moot when talking about yes/no decisions.  The examples
I've seen on this thread seem to be of that nature.

>I think Wikipedia currently functions quite well, despite never
>having bothered to develop a philosophy of governance. If we want to
>find a word that describes how it actually operates, take a look at
>the concept of "demarchy" coined by coined by Australian philosopher
>John Burnheim. The only difference is that Burnheim imagined that
>"policy juries" would be selected at random. With Wikipedia, the
>"juries" that deliberate about each article are self-selected, not
>random.
>
A more formal version of this would be good for many of the examples
from this thread (deciding whether to ban a member, votes for deletion,
votes for NPOV).  The tricky part is defining the jury pool, and
figuring out when to sequester them.  :-)

Rob


from_name: Mark Wojtowicz

body:
"Daniel Mayer" <maveric149 at yahoo.com>, Saturday, January 18, 2003 6:31 PM:
> The current prediction is that we should hit the 100,000 mark the
> middle of next week. Press release or no press release, that number
> on the Main Page will get some attention (thus the need for a press
> release to explain things).

It appears that [[Louis Theroux]] by Oliver Pereira at 03:36 UTC Jan 21,
2003 is the English Wikipedia's 100,000th article (using our current article
counting system).

--
Mark ("Mrwojo")


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Things that bother me

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>One of the things that Eric pointed out to me is that thinking of
>voting as a simple "majority rules" (i.e. 50% plus 1) is too
>simplistic.  I _totally_ agree that 50% plus 1 would be a horrible
>rule, and likely to end up being a tool to close out minority voices.
>
>But there are other forms of voting (Condorcet's method, approval
>voting, etc.) that don't suffer from all the same defects.

No, but they suffer from other defects. In 1952, Kenneth Arrow, a
professor emeritus of economics at Stanford University, proved this
using an "impossibility" theorem which showed that no voting system
is completely free from counterintuitive incomes. Arrow looked at
voting systems that satisfy two harmless- sounding properties. First,
if everyone prefers candidate A to candidate B, then A should be
ranked higher than B. Second, voters' opinions about candidate C
shouldn't affect whether A beats B--after all, if you prefer coffee
to tea, finding out that hot chocolate is available shouldn't
suddenly make you prefer tea to coffee. These sound like reasonable
restrictions, yet Arrow proved that the only voting system that
always satisfies them is a dictatorship, where a single person's
preferences determine the outcome. But this doesn't mean that a
dictatorship produces an optimum result either, because dictatorship
violates the democratic principle that government should be based on
the consent of the governed. In short, perfect democracy is
"impossible."

While there is no system that works perfectly, the *ideal* of
democracy still has value and is something that can be approximated.

>I'm a big fan of the notion of a constitutional republic.  Majority
>rule is morally repugnant.  But some form of consensus voting, with
>the protection of a "constitution" or "bill of rights" for all
>wikipedians, rights that can't be taken away without some
>super-extraordinary voting procedure, will probably be the way to go,
>someday.

I disagree with the notion that majority rule is morally repugnant,
but the concept of "democracy" doesn't really fit that well with
Wikipedia anyway. If we were serious about "majority rule" for
Wikipedia, we would need to have some system for ensuring the
inclusion of a representative sample of the population being
"represented," and that would mean, for starters, finding some way to
include people who don't have access to the Internet (currently 90%
of the world's population). Obviously, there aren't resources
available to do this.

I think Wikipedia currently functions quite well, despite never
having bothered to develop a philosophy of governance. If we want to
find a word that describes how it actually operates, take a look at
the concept of "demarchy" coined by coined by Australian philosopher
John Burnheim. The only difference is that Burnheim imagined that
"policy juries" would be selected at random. With Wikipedia, the
"juries" that deliberate about each article are self-selected, not
random.

If you want to read a little more about "demarchy," I added an entry
on it to the Wikipedia. I was hoping I'd be able to make it the
100,000th article, but I missed and landed on 100,005 instead. Oh
well...it's still time for champagne, folks!
--
--------------------------------
|  Sheldon Rampton
|  Editor, PR Watch (www.prwatch.org)
|  Author of books including:
|     Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities
|     Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
|     Mad Cow USA
|     Trust Us, We're Experts
--------------------------------


from_name: Pieter Suurmond

subject: [Wikitech-l] Why not listen to W3C ? Invalid HTML on www.wikipedia.org !

body:
Wikipages generated by the server do not follow W3C recommmendations.
Now that we eventually have an open standard for HTML, why not use it?

One of the reasons why http://www.wikipedia.org does not validate is that
the character-set is not specified, you should include a line like this:

 <META HTTP-EQUIV="content-type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">

You can easily see what other errors are made, when you type in
an URI at http://validator.w3.org/. Page "http://www.wikipedia.org/" for
example is not Valid HTML 4.01 Transitional! Below are the results of
attempting to parse this document with an SGML parser.

   1.Line 7, column 7: required attribute "TYPE" not specified.


from_name: elian

body:
Anthere <anthere5 at yahoo.com> writes:

> The test pages I did for Brion didnot lead to any
> crashes. Maybe the computer just needed to be
> restarted to feel better. Dunno. If Brion finds a idea
> for these blank lines, I could drop Mac Opera a word.
> I couldnot figure why they sometimes appeared and
> sometimes not...

To comfort you - I had the same problem with some browsers on MacOS
X. Sometimes there were white lines and I had to cancel the article,
sometimes not.
I suspect (really wild suspicion on no reasonable grounds) that somehow it
depends on what was in the article source before:
could it be that CR + LF get interpreted as two LF's while normal Unix
LF's are counted only one time?

> Meanwhile, Opera 5 is still the best in speed ! (and
> Opera 6 is a chore in slowlyness). But, tell me, how
> do YOU make it to edit the UTF 8 coded pages with your
> very old Mac ?!?

sorry, no idea. Even on MacOS 10.1.5 it was desperating to experience all
sorts of browser bugs (IE, Opera, ICab, Chimera...), I ended up with
Mozilla - at least it doesn't cut articles of more than 32k.

heretic thought: does lynx for MacOS has UTF-8 support?

greetings,
elian


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

body:
On Mon, Jan 20, 2003 at 05:31:02PM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
> That's an error in the wiki page; our parser can correct some errors,
> but isn't smart enough to fix all of them. Fixed.
>
> The front page now validates.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Is it possible to run some script to check all Wiki pages ?
Most of problems will be silly things like missing <tr> and it may help
to fix them.

It will also help for switching to XHTML (+ MathML) some day.
XHTML parsers are much less forgiving than HTML parsers.


from_name: Oliver Pereira

body:
Well, there we have it!

Judging from the counter on the Main Page, the 100,000 article milestone
has just been passed.

The historic 100,000th article turns out to be the perhaps slightly
unglamorously titled "Hastings, New Zealand", posted by... *drum roll*
Lisiate! Well done, Lisiate.

Incidentally, I now have the have the unenviable honour of being
responsible for both the 99,999th article and the 100,001st.

Damn.

I'm going home to sulk now...

Oliver

+-------------------------------------------+
| Oliver Pereira                            |
| Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science |
| University of Southampton                 |
| omp199 at ecs.soton.ac.uk                    |
+-------------------------------------------+


body:
That's great Brion Vibber!
Now http://www.wikipedia.org/ is indeed 100% valid.
The Dutch site still contains some errors but that's
mainly due to things like "??????????">Russkiy"
on http://nl.wikipedia.org. I'll try to repair those
manually...
I've another whish: could a script on the wikiserver
do automatic character-to-entity-conversion like?:
	? --> à
	? --> ë
Well, I'm only suggesting... Anyhow, thanks
for fixing the English front page so very quickly!

Pieter Suurmond
[Let's promote [the use of] Open Standards like W3C]

Brion Vibber wrote:
>
> On lun, 2003-01-20 at 16:22, Pieter Suurmond wrote:
> > Wikipages generated by the server do not follow W3C recommmendations.
> > Now that we eventually have an open standard for HTML, why not use it?
>
> Forgetfulness?
>
> > One of the reasons why http://www.wikipedia.org does not validate is that
> > the character-set is not specified, you should include a line like this:
> >
> >  <META HTTP-EQUIV="content-type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
>
> This is set in the http headers. I assume you were validating a copy
> that lacks the header?
>
> > You can easily see what other errors are made, when you type in
> > an URI at http://validator.w3.org/. Page "http://www.wikipedia.org/" for
> > example is not Valid HTML 4.01 Transitional! Below are the results of
> > attempting to parse this document with an SGML parser.
> >
> >    1.Line 7, column 7: required attribute "TYPE" not specified.
> >
> >


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Things that bother me

body:
Sheldon Rampton wrote, about voting systems:
> No, but they suffer from other defects. In 1952, Kenneth Arrow, a
> professor emeritus of economics at Stanford University, proved this
> using an "impossibility" theorem which showed that no voting system
> is completely free from counterintuitive incomes.

*nod* And this has been one of the central points in my past
opposition to voting systems.

> I disagree with the notion that majority rule is morally repugnant,

O.k., then we're likely so far apart in political opinions that we'll
have a hard time agreeing on very much.  If 90% of a population is
white, and votes in fair and open democratic elections to impose
rights violations ("separate but equal" or worse) on the 10% that is
black, you'd consider that a morally appropriate outcome?  I don't
think so, but that's what I mean when I say that majority rule is
morally repugnant.

> but the concept of "democracy" doesn't really fit that well with
> Wikipedia anyway. If we were serious about "majority rule" for
> Wikipedia, we would need to have some system for ensuring the
> inclusion of a representative sample of the population being
> "represented," and that would mean, for starters, finding some way to
> include people who don't have access to the Internet (currently 90%
> of the world's population). Obviously, there aren't resources
> available to do this.

But this doesn't follow at all.  The relevant population represented
is *not* the entire population of the world, nor the entire population
of the Internet, nor even the entire population of our readers.  The
relevant population is *us*, people active on Wikipedia.  That's who
the rules are for.

> I think Wikipedia currently functions quite well, despite never
> having bothered to develop a philosophy of governance.

I think it's a mistake to say that we have never bothered to develop a
philosophy of governance.  We have.  It's just that the result is that
it has worked very well for us to keep things pretty informal.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] (Re: Tomasz) Running script interactively instead of 'batch-repairing'?

body:
Or build in a wiki/html-validator in the 'interactive' user interface
for authors: show autors html-errors and wiki-code-errros when they
press 'preview page'. This way, writers of articles get 'W3C-educated'
automatically.
One could even consider rejectiing of non-W3C-valid-articles... but that
is maybe too strict. Thank for promoting W3C, Tomasz :-), kind regards,
Pieter Suurmond

Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
>
> On Mon, Jan 20, 2003 at 05:31:02PM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
> > That's an error in the wiki page; our parser can correct some errors,
> > but isn't smart enough to fix all of them. Fixed.
> >
> > The front page now validates.
> >
> > -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
> Is it possible to run some script to check all Wiki pages ?
> Most of problems will be silly things like missing <tr> and it may help
> to fix them.
>
> It will also help for switching to XHTML (+ MathML) some day.
> XHTML parsers are much less forgiving than HTML parsers.
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


subject: [WikiEN-l] Lir II

in_reply_to: <3E2D418C.8080308@planetunreal.com>; from tarquin@planetunreal.com on Tue, Jan 21, 2003 at 12:48:12PM +0000

body:
No, Lir is banned.  I'll make sure everyone knows about it if I change
my mind, but that's increasingly less likely with antics like this.

tarquin wrote:

> Has Jimbo unbanned Lir?
>
> http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Lir_II
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


subject: [WikiEN-l] Things that bother me

in_reply_to: <E079C39257D0D845AC39E2CA261C43E0070453@sm-nyny-xm04.nena.wdpr.disney.com>; from Edmund.W.Poor@abc.com on Tue, Jan 21, 2003 at 09:45:46AM -0500

body:
Well, I don't think we'll make changes anytime soon.

Benevolent dictatorship has worked well so far because people mostly
like me and trust me, or at least my wikipedia persona ;-).  I'm kind
and I listen and I try to make lots of people happy.

But that's a pretty vague foundation to project into the future.

1.  What if I do something really obnoxious?  Not good.

2.  What about controversies in languages that I don't understand?
It's hard for me to figure it all out.

3.  With a relatively small group, figuring out consensus policies and
recognizing that my actions do, in fact, reflect consensus, is not
especially problematic.  But as we grow, situations will likely arise
where it's more difficult to say that.

4.  And finally, there is a class of decisions that weighs heavily on
me, namely decisions about banning.  My pleasant demeanor may not
reveal how much I agonize over these, in *both* directions.  Some
mornings I wake up in a mood to ban everyone.  Other mornings I wake
up in a mood that says that everyone can be saved.  So I have to think
and worry a lot about these.  Despite the difficulty, though, I like
doing it well enough for now.  But someday I might be exhausted by it,
and might prefer a more broad-based procedure.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] Things that bother me

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
> However, as you said yourself, the system doesn't work well for the
> non-English Wikipedias *right now*.  What should we do to decide in
> these conflicts?

I honestly don't know.

One reason consensus works reasonably well here is that we can listen
to different people's proposals and the _nuances_ of their language.
There's a rich web of information communicated in our ongoing
discussions, more rich than any simple set of voting alternatives ever
could be.

Everyone knows that there are certain shared values that we express
through our homegrown slogans (Wiki is not paper, Wikipedia is an
encyclopedia, etc.).

I can plea for translations of what is going on, but that has proven
to be not very successful.

If something happened in de.wikipedia, as an example, I could simply
listen to a few people who I know well enough, who speak German, and
advise them on things, but pretty much leave the tough decisions to
them, backed up by my "official" stamp.  There's you (a German
speaker, right?) and Magnus and probably some others.

In other languages, though, I get long private emails from people who
don't speak English well, accusing each other of various
WikiWarCrimes, and it's just damned difficult to figure it all out.

--Jimbo


from_name: Richard Grevers

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Burn all GIFs?

body:
On 19 Jan 2003 11:13:35 -0800, Brion Vibber
<brion=e+AXbWqSrlAAvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:

> (For why GIFs are bad, see http://burnallgifs.org/ )
>
> At present, when someone uploads a GIF image file to Wikipedia, they're
> told it's "not a recommended format". This isn't likely to stop anyone
> once they've got that far, so they'll probably just hit "Save anyway".
> Plus, we've got a zillion GIF files already uploaded from the olden
> days.
>
> Would it be desireable to do automated conversion to PNG? Or at the
> least, offering a conversion along with that upload warning.
>
> Pros:
> * By eliminating the use of a patent-encumbered file format on our site,
> we support the open/free-content ideals this project is built on.
>
> * Wikipedia and Bomis avoid the potential of a Unisys lawsuit for
> 'contributory infringement' of their LZW compression patent for
> providing download of files that might be compressed with unlicensed
> software.
>
>
> Cons:
> * Animated GIFs can't be converted cleanly (or is that a pro? ;) (Note
> that there is MNG, but it's not widely supported)
>
> * Some browsers don't support transparency in PNGs correctly. These are
> older versions, but still in use.

Like IE6? (Okay, it does one pixel transparency, but alpha-transparent
PNG's can still look embarrasing).

--
Richard Grevers


body:
On Sun, 19 Jan 2003 11:05:25 -0800 (PST), Anthere
<anthere5=/E1597aS9LQAvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:

>> I like how you explain your disagreement with her
>> changes: "REVERT page
>> from utter destruction". Clear as mud...
>>
>>
>> Now, mav, I suggest you apologize to Anthere.
>>
>> Anthere, I suggest you accept the apology.
>>
>> And I will try to find a technical fix for the
>> linebreak insertion.
>
> Thanks Brion
>
> I am sure Mav will apologize, and I accept the apology
> in advance; and I apologize myself for having been so aggressive.
>
In the meantime, have you sent a bug report to Opera, or posted about it on
opera.mac?

--
Richard Grevers


from_name: koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] Things that bother me

body:
Jimbo wrote:
>4.  And finally, there is a class of decisions that weighs heavily on
>me, namely decisions about banning.  My pleasant demeanor may not
>reveal how much I agonize over these, in *both* directions.  Some
>mornings I wake up in a mood to ban everyone.  Other mornings I wake
>up in a mood that says that everyone can be saved.  So I have to think
>and worry a lot about these.  Despite the difficulty, though, I like
>doing it well enough for now.  But someday I might be exhausted by it,
>and might prefer a more broad-based procedure.

This part of it is, to me, really a pain in the ass.  Some people come
to wikipedia with the wrong idea; others come with the right idea but
the wrong delivery, and can be converted, others can't; a few get it
immediately and set about doing excellent work.  An equally few get it
immediately and latch on like a tick.  The trolls and the wackos are
tiresome; banning is imperfect; unending tolerance seems damaging both
to the content and the community; showing too little tolerance
preserves the content but changes both the project and the community.
 I don't want wikipedia to become a tux-and-tails place, but I'd also
respect the decision to toss out the occasional layabout.  In any
case, I don't see any solution.  This is a problem for people smarter
& more experienced than I.

kq

wikikarma:  [[san Marino]] pages


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [WikiEN-l] Things that bother me

body:
I don't think we should use voting. Individuals should take
responsibility and simply carry out the proper action. If the
wishes or ideas of others should be taken into account, the
responsible person should find an ad hoc way of considering
them.

But no formal system of voting is immune to subversion by
determined anti-social forces, so I think we should stick with
"benevolent dictatorship" with Jimbo as wiki-Messiah and all of us
"heavenly citizens" as his loyal subjects.

If Mav, Eric, KQ, et al., make a decision, I trust it!

"Uncle Ed" Poor

P.S. I didn't list all the names, but the people whom I trust
know who they are ^_^)


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Censorship at meta

body:
On Die, 2003-01-21 at 01:35, Brion Vibber wrote:

> You clearly need to get a better text editor!

That would be a good recommendation, but alas, Mozilla currently has a
limit of 4000 bytes for copy & pasting under Linux (or 1024, according
to some), making it very cumbersome to edit large articles externally.
Konqueror also has copy&paste limits (I suspect that the X clipboard
code is terribly broken). Some people have resorted to text editors like
w3m specifically for editing wikis (these usually support calling
external editors), but for most of us, that's not an option. Under
Windows, none of this is a problem, though.

See also my external editor support suggestion:
http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2003-January/002154.html

Regards,

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


subject: [WikiEN-l] Things that bother me

body:
We used a voting scheme for KQ's project of country article
formats (porting from CIA fact book).

My tweak to Magnus's suggestion is to have one page per
issue:

[[Wikipedia:Decision for metric vs. Imperial units]]
[[Wikipedia:Decision for fan fiction policy]]
[[Wikipedia:Decision for banning that annoying Uncle Ed fellow]]

Recent Changes junkies will appreciate having each issue
on a separate page.

"Uncle Ed" Poor


subject: [WikiEN-l] vera cruz is a troll

body:
Adam [name omitted for privacy reasons] as much as admits it on his webpage, 2 days ago, see
http://qwert.diaryland.com/

It says:
>2003-01-19 3:23 PM:
>
>"Well wikipedia banned me again. Its been an interesting study in
>totalitarianism, it is clear to me now that even a "benevolent
>totalitarianism" is to be avoided. It is often argued that anarchism
>is to be avoided due to "mob rule" but in fact totalitarianism is just
>that "mob rule", anarchism is really an overthrow of that mob rule and
>an insistnce on equal rights, something which wikipedia refuses to
>accept. I guess that's their right, it's a shame that so many people
>are unwilling to even attempt to discuss their issues. I guess Ill go
>back to studying chess."

"unwilling to even attempt to discuss their issues" -- I got a chuckle
out of that one -- since that's all we do, some days.. discuss our
issues.  :-)

Since Adam [name omitted for privacy reasons] was never unbanned, the "banned me again" arguably
refers to the Vera Cruz banning decision.

Those interested in the level of intellect that we are losing (high?
low? you decide) by banning this person should review:
http://qwert.diaryland.com/older.html


subject: [WikiEN-l] Banned: was vera cruz is a troll

body:
I banned Vera Cruz.

Ed Poor
Wikipedia Developer


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Censorship at meta

body:
On mar, 2003-01-21 at 00:46, Erik Moeller wrote:
> On Die, 2003-01-21 at 01:35, Brion Vibber wrote:
> > You clearly need to get a better text editor!
>
> That would be a good recommendation, but alas, Mozilla currently has a
> limit of 4000 bytes for copy & pasting under Linux (or 1024, according
> to some), making it very cumbersome to edit large articles externally.

I sometimes have trouble pasting _in_ to Mozilla (workaround: save the
file and open it in Mozilla, then copy & paste between Moz windows), but
never copying out.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Server slow

body:
On mar, 2003-01-21 at 07:35, elian wrote:
> Magnus Manske <magnus.manske at epost.de> writes:
>
> > Is it just me, or is the server slow next to unuseable? Are we overrun
> > by newbies after the press release, or is it something else?
>
> For the sake of speed, could someone please switch off the page counter
> and not really needed stuff on German WP?
>
> We should not disappoint the Techfreaks from Heise ;-)

It's nice and responsive now... but I guess everyone went to bed. :)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: tarquin

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Limits to fiction

body:
Sheldon Rampton wrote:

>
>
> The impressive thing about Wikipedia, from my point of view, isn't
> that it makes it possible to *post* articles. (Millions of web sites
> do that.) The impressive thing is that it makes it possible to
> collaborative *edit* and *improve* articles. It seems that this model
> ought to be applicable to any number of non-encyclopedia applications.

MeatballWiki occasionally flirts with the idea of a wiki site whose
purpose was to create fiction collaboratively. I've been bold and added
a page there, to see what level of interest there is ....

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


from_name: Axel Boldt

subject: [WikiEN-l] Things that bother me

body:
--- Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:

[About Votes for Deletion:]

> That you, as a  mathematician, are satisfied by this imprecise
> process is a mystery to me.

A self-selected sample of naked Yes/No votes only gives an illusion of
precision. Wait what Lir does with that system. Many mathematicians
prefer reasons over numbers.

> As is, the  deletion process is an excellent example for the
> schizophrenia of  "consensus" "decision making".

The only schizophrenia I can detect is that it's called "Votes for
deletion" while it should be called "Arguments for deletion".

Axel

__________________________________________________
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Things that bother me

body:
On mar, 2003-01-21 at 09:38, koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com wrote:
>  I don't want wikipedia to become a tux-and-tails place,

Auggh -- too much Linux for me! Into my head popped an image of a
penguin keeping track of log files...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Taking a vacation from English

body:
My Wikipedia time is a little slim lately, and too much of it is getting
spent twiddling with pages on the English Wikipedia. I'm going to take a
break from it for a few days to work more on getting other languages set
up on the new software, and maybe getting some more articles written in
Esperanto and French.

I'll check in at least once a day to check for things that need fixing,
though...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject:
[Wikitech-l] (Re: Tomasz) Running script interactively instead
 of 'batch-repairing'?

body:
Pieter Suurmond wrote:

>Or build in a wiki/html-validator in the 'interactive' user interface
>for authors: show autors html-errors
>
one reason why we should phase out HTML in wiki text.

>and wiki-code-errros when they
>press 'preview page'. This way, writers of articles get 'W3C-educated'
>automatically.
>
Wiki-markup should not be able to produce invalid HTML -- or rather,
there's not "wrong" wiki syntax -- just something the writer did not intend

>
>
>
>


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Censorship at meta

body:
On Tue, Jan 21, 2003 at 09:46:28AM +0100, Erik Moeller wrote:
> That would be a good recommendation, but alas, Mozilla currently has a
> limit of 4000 bytes for copy & pasting under Linux (or 1024, according
> to some), making it very cumbersome to edit large articles externally.
> Konqueror also has copy&paste limits (I suspect that the X clipboard
> code is terribly broken).

This claim surprised me as I have been successfully copy&pasting
in both Mozilla and Konqueror for ages.

To check it, I just tried some 52kB article, and I can copy&paste it
from Konq to Moz and from Moz to Konq without any problems.

$ konqueror --version
Qt: 3.1.1
KDE: 3.1.90 (CVS >= 20030109)
Konqueror: 3.1.0
$ mozilla --version
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20021226 Debian/1.2.1-9, build 2002122616


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Censorship at meta

body:
On Die, 2003-01-21 at 11:17, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

> This claim surprised me as I have been successfully copy&pasting
> in both Mozilla and Konqueror for ages.

See
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=56219
(and various duplicates thereof)

> To check it, I just tried some 52kB article, and I can copy&paste it
> from Konq to Moz and from Moz to Konq without any problems.

The behavior is very unpredictable and depends on a number of
circumstances (one of which seems to be line length). It happens more
with some applications (gvim->Mozilla/Konq, for example) than with
others. It sometimes happens with PRIMARY, and sometimes with CLIPBOARD,
sometimes with both. I really have no time to document all the instances
where I get a nice result like "?S" instead of the text I supposedly
pasted, and where I get nothing at all. Suffice it to say that the
clipboard under Linux is horribly broken in general, and anyone who says
otherwise hasn't used it much.

Regards,

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


from_name: Anthere

subject: [WikiEN-l] Things that bother me

body:
> But no formal system of voting is immune to
> subversion by
> determined anti-social forces, so I think we should
> stick with
> "benevolent dictatorship" with Jimbo as wiki-Messiah
> and all of us
> "heavenly citizens" as his loyal subjects.
>
> If Mav, Eric, KQ, et al., make a decision, I trust
> it!
>
> "Uncle Ed" Poor

So...something like... "voting" to "elect" people "we"
trust... to take decisions for us ???

__________________________________________________
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body:
On Mon, 20 Jan 2003 13:26:28 -0800 (PST), Anthere
<anthere5=/E1597aS9LQAvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:

>
> --- Tom Parmenter <tompar=Jk6FQSss4Zz2eFz/2MeuCQ at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>> |In the meantime, have you sent a bug report to
>> Opera, or posted about
>> |it on opera.mac?
>
> euh, no...I would not really know what to say
> "when I edit my favorite wiki, it adds weird lines,
> and crashes..."
I would offer to formulate a test case, but somehow I don't think that my
Mac (a venerable 75MHz PowerPC) has the horsepower to run the version of
MacOS necessary for Opera6 to run. (Even O5 is an adventure in waiting,
although it's still faster than NS4 and IE5).

Note that it's only the MacOpera team who do such individualized bugfixing
:-).
--
Richard Grevers


subject: [WikiEN-l] Magnus' consensus management proposal

body:
--- Magnus Manske <magnus.manske at epost.de> wrote:

> OK. Proposal (probably number 10^10, but anyway):
> * Have a special page (or another project?) for "consensus
>   management" ;-)
> * Logged-in people only (just for ease of reading; user names are
>   free...)
> * Anyone can create a topic that needs a consensus decision
> * Anyone can add solution proposals, as a wikipedia (meta) link, like
>
> "Difficult topic (proposal Magnus)"
> * Everyone can add (and remove) himself to the"decision finding" on
>   any topic
> * Options on a topic are all proposals, "I don't like any of this",
>   and "I don't know yet", the latter being the default
> * Anyone can change his vote (sorry: opinion) on the topic any time,
>   and give a reason for prefering that option
> * For a topic, anyone can mark a checkbox "I think we should get this
    done now"
> * When some criteria are met (example: topic exists for 1 week, more
>   than 5 people are signed up, more than 70% think it's done now),
>   consensus is declared.
>
> It has some voting elements (like actually deciding at one point),
> but also the "flow" of consensus making. And, we know where the
> participants stand at any moment.

I like this. It's plainly visible who voted how and why. I would hope
though that the "reason for my vote" is not just a little textbox like
the current edit summary, which many people would leave blank. Often,
you would want to write a paragraph or two explaining your vote and
trying to convince others, maybe to be revised later. So full wiki
power would be nice there.

Axel

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Is it scalable? -- was: Things that bother me

body:
Jimbo needs a daughter to run all his enterprises for him, like Mike Doonesbury has: http://images.ucomics.com/comics/db/2003/db030119.gif

Uncle Ed


subject: [WikiEN-l] Lir II

body:
Has Jimbo unbanned Lir?

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Lir_II


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Re: Re: Re: Censorship at meta

body:
On Mon, 20 Jan 2003 16:11:11 -0800 (PST), Anthere
<anthere5=/E1597aS9LQAvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:

>
> The test pages I did for Brion didnot lead to any
> crashes. Maybe the computer just needed to be
> restarted to feel better. Dunno. If Brion finds a idea
> for these blank lines, I could drop Mac Opera a word.
> I couldnot figure why they sometimes appeared and
> sometimes not...
>
> Meanwhile, Opera 5 is still the best in speed ! (and
> Opera 6 is a chore in slowlyness). But, tell me, how
> do YOU make it to edit the UTF 8 coded pages with your
> very old Mac ?!?

By using my very new PC instead :-) The Mac mainly serves as a monitor
stand, and is occasionally used for processing prepress work for printers
who are unable to accept copy in a PC format (a dwindling number).

--
Richard Grevers


body:
On Tue, Jan 21, 2003 at 11:00:28AM +0000, tarquin wrote:
> Pieter Suurmond wrote:
>
> >Or build in a wiki/html-validator in the 'interactive' user interface
> >for authors: show autors html-errors
> >
> one reason why we should phase out HTML in wiki text.

This is wrong reasoning. We should allow as much HTML we do now,
but make parser understand more of it, so it can fix some mistakes.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Censorship at meta

body:
On Tue, Jan 21, 2003 at 11:41:45AM +0100, Erik Moeller wrote:
> On Die, 2003-01-21 at 11:17, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> > To check it, I just tried some 52kB article, and I can copy&paste it
> > from Konq to Moz and from Moz to Konq without any problems.
>
> The behavior is very unpredictable and depends on a number of
> circumstances (one of which seems to be line length). It happens more
> with some applications (gvim->Mozilla/Konq, for example) than with
> others. It sometimes happens with PRIMARY, and sometimes with CLIPBOARD,
> sometimes with both. I really have no time to document all the instances
> where I get a nice result like "?S" instead of the text I supposedly
> pasted, and where I get nothing at all. Suffice it to say that the
> clipboard under Linux is horribly broken in general, and anyone who says
> otherwise hasn't used it much.

I use it a lot, and even program it sometimes, and IT IS NOT BROKEN AT ALL.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Censorship at meta

body:
On Die, 2003-01-21 at 14:23, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

> I use it a lot, and even program it sometimes, and IT IS NOT BROKEN AT ALL.

Read the Mozilla bug. It works better (but still not good enough, some
clipboard content gets broken) with emacs than with other editors,
apparently because emacs uses different clipboard code. There are
similar, reproducible problems with Konqueror and standard aplications
(where Mozilla doesn't paste at all, Konqueror pastes two random
characters). And there's annoying stuff like Konqueror forgetting
clipboard contents upon closing etc.

I've tested this with various systems and distributions and can say with
authority: The X clipboard is a royal pain in the ass. But you're free
to live in denial ..

Regards,

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


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Server slow

body:
Is it just me, or is the server slow next to unuseable? Are we overrun
by newbies after the press release, or is it something else?

Magnus


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Server slow

body:
> Is it just me, or is the server slow next to unuseable? Are we overrun
> by newbies after the press release, or is it something else?

We're on Heise:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/anw-21.01.03-003/

(to non-Germans: a bit like a German Slashdot, only with real news)

Unfortunately, this probably means no coverage on Heise when the German
Wikipedia reaches 10k.

Regards,

Erik

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


subject: [WikiEN-l] Things that bother me

body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:

>We used a voting scheme for KQ's project of country article
>formats (porting from CIA fact book).
>
>My tweak to Magnus's suggestion is to have one page per
>issue:
>
>[[Wikipedia:Decision for metric vs. Imperial units]]
>[[Wikipedia:Decision for fan fiction policy]]
>[[Wikipedia:Decision for banning that annoying Uncle Ed fellow]]
>
>Recent Changes junkies will appreciate having each issue
>on a separate page.
>
>
That's in my proposal. Sorry if I wasn't very clear about that. English
my second language is ;-)

Magnus


from_name: Kurt Jansson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Server slow

body:
Hiho!

> > Is it just me, or is the server slow next to unuseable? Are we
overrun
> > by newbies after the press release, or is it something else?
>
> We're on Heise:
> http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/anw-21.01.03-003/
>
> (to non-Germans: a bit like a German Slashdot, only with real news)

Wow, I'm really happy now!

But please, please, somebody bring the server back to live!!!

> Unfortunately, this probably means no coverage on Heise when the
German
> Wikipedia reaches 10k.

We'll see. But I guess it was easier to get the news on Heise because
the c't with the wiki article is still purchasable.

Kurt


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Server slow

body:
Magnus Manske <magnus.manske at epost.de> writes:

> Is it just me, or is the server slow next to unuseable? Are we overrun
> by newbies after the press release, or is it something else?

For the sake of speed, could someone please switch off the page counter
and not really needed stuff on German WP?

We should not disappoint the Techfreaks from Heise ;-)

greetings,
elian
--
Microsoft is not the answer.
Microsoft is the question and the answer is NO.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Things that bother me

body:
> Well, I don't think we'll make changes anytime soon.

Jimbo,

we all trust you to do the right thing. It's not very scalable and a bit
slow, but it should suffice for a while, especially when we at least organize
the discussion process better. I do believe that your role will increasingly
expose you to criticism and flames, especially as Larry is no longer there to
play primary target.

However, as you said yourself, the system doesn't work well for the
non-English Wikipedias *right now*.  What should we do to decide in these conflicts?

Regards,

Erik

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


subject: [Wikitech-l] Goodbye to HTML

body:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

>On Tue, Jan 21, 2003 at 11:00:28AM +0000, tarquin wrote:
>
>
>>Pieter Suurmond wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>>Or build in a wiki/html-validator in the 'interactive' user interface
>>>for authors: show autors html-errors
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>one reason why we should phase out HTML in wiki text.
>>
>>
>
>This is wrong reasoning. We should allow as much HTML we do now,
>but make parser understand more of it, so it can fix some mistakes.
>

What do we use HTML for? From what I've seen:
* tables  -- well, most people agree that HTML tables are ugly. we just
haven't yet come up with a good enough alternative.
* erroneous use of <BR> -- if you need a new paragraph, make one. If you
feel you need a "half paragraph-break", then rethink your writing style.
* LI, UL, OL -- people who haven't read the documentation. I suppose we
can keep <LI> as a synonym for *
* aligning images right or left with complex DIV or TABLE constructs --
as above -- we need better syntax.

any other uses I've missed?

>
>


subject: [Wikitech-l] Goodbye to HTML

body:
On Tue, Jan 21, 2003 at 05:04:54PM +0000, tarquin wrote:
> >This is wrong reasoning. We should allow as much HTML we do now,
> >but make parser understand more of it, so it can fix some mistakes.
> >
>
> What do we use HTML for? From what I've seen:
> * tables  -- well, most people agree that HTML tables are ugly. we just
> haven't yet come up with a good enough alternative.
> * erroneous use of
 -- if you need a new paragraph, make one. If you
> feel you need a "half paragraph-break", then rethink your writing style.
> * LI, UL, OL -- people who haven't read the documentation. I suppose we
> can keep
 as a synonym for *
> * aligning images right or left with complex DIV or TABLE constructs --
> as above -- we need better syntax.
>
> any other uses I've missed?

*  and  where parses breaks (happens quite often)
*
* <tt>
*

 for mixed type nested lists
*
 for breaking lines (
 is not the same as
)
*  for size/color changes
* probably a lot more


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Censorship at meta

body:
On Tuesday 21 January 2003 02:57 am, Brion Vibber wrote:
> You clearly need to get a better text editor! That should be a single
> search-and-replace operation; change double line breaks to single line
> breaks.

Just as I thought - it /is/ a technical problem with a technical solution.
Thank you giving me the needed information to relatively easily fix these
types of broken pages. Brion the the rescue again! :-)

Sorry you got caught, eh? ;)

Ha ha - no. I felt perfectly justified in what I did since, in my view, it was
the best thing for the page. I wasn't trying to cover anything up (if that
even is possible in a wiki). The only thing I regret is that I did this in
what can only be described as a cold and possibly heartless mannor: I should
have explained what I did and why in order to prevent Anthere from thinking
that I thought the page was vandalized. For that I am sorry.

--mav (If I post any more often to this list, I'm going to have to work on
Wikikarma for Wikitech-l too. Unfortunately I'm coding illiterate - so I
better just reduce the number of posts I make to this list ;-)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Censorship at meta

body:
--- Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> On Tuesday 21 January 2003 02:57 am, Brion Vibber
> Sorry you got caught, eh? ;)
>
> Ha ha - no. I felt perfectly justified in what I did
> since, in my view, it was
> the best thing for the page. I wasn't trying to
> cover anything up (if that
> even is possible in a wiki). The only thing I regret
> is that I did this in
> what can only be described as a cold and possibly
> heartless mannor: I should
> have explained what I did and why in order to
> prevent Anthere from thinking
> that I thought the page was vandalized. For that I
> am sorry.

Well, thank you for cleaning up my mess Mav. My
apologies for the extra work

> --mav (If I post any more often to this list, I'm
> going to have to work on
> Wikikarma for Wikitech-l too. Unfortunately I'm
> coding illiterate - so I
> better just reduce the number of posts I make to
> this list ;-)

No Wikikarma today, but I'll drop a word about the bug
on the Mac.Opera mailing list for the sake of my soul.
That will be about the biggest technical contribution
I could make ;-)

(along with reporting bugs)

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body:
Axel wrote:

> I like this.

Great, so we can agree on an improved process. That's good. Consensus at
work ;-)

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia vs Slashdot part III: Call out to the Volunteer Fire Department!

body:
Just when you thought you would be able to concentrate on upgrading some other
Wikis Brion. ;-)

http://slashdot.org/articles/03/01/22/0258226.shtml?tid=149

Let the firefighting begin.

--Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

Wikikarma
I was one of probably a dozen people who submitted something to Slashdot. Oh
wait - that requires a triple Wikikarma payment: I added a bunch of events to
[[January 21]] and [[January 22]] and also worked on improving [[gene]].


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia vs Slashdot part III: Call out to the
	Volunteer Fire Department!

body:
On mar, 2003-01-21 at 23:12, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Just when you thought you would be able to concentrate on upgrading some other
> Wikis Brion. ;-)
>
> http://slashdot.org/articles/03/01/22/0258226.shtml?tid=149
>
> Let the firefighting begin.

Hey, that explains why our load average just shot up to 8 in the middle
of the night. :P

I'll go batten down some hatches.

Note: I have class Wednesday morning, and WILL NOT be able to touch the
'pedia until about 11am (that's 7pm UTC). If it breaks too badly before
then, please send e-mail directly to jwales and/or jasonr at bomis.com.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wow! The server is holding and the comments on Slashdot are very positive

body:
There is also a relative lack of trolling and vandalizing so far. I've also
been reviewing edits by anonymous contributors and have been blown away at
their average quality - every other one seems to be a moderate to major
improvement on the article.

Sweet!

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

WikiKarma:
Firefighting duty on Recent Changes


subject: [WikiEN-l] we're slashdotted

body:
Just a note to give everyone a heads-up: anonymous coward submitted a
story about our 100,000 article milestone, and we are now slashdotted.
 Bucket brigade at the ready.  ;-)

cheers,

kq

wikikarma: [[Senegal]] pages.


from_name: Lars Aronsson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: www.wikipedia.org

body:
Magnus Manske wrote:
> But if consensus (why does that word remind me of the Borg? ;-) can not
> be achieved after years of discussion, voting might be a way to actually
> get something done...

With the risk of getting overly philosophical...

Even in a parliamentary democracy, there has to be consensus about
using voting as the method and how to apply it. Otherwise, the method
will be useless. In open organizations (where anybody can become a
member at no cost) such as the IETF and Wikipedia, voting is
problematic, since it is unclear who is eligible to vote.  This leaves
a suspicion that the opposite party cheats by subscribing new voters,
undermining the consensus about voting as a method.

Within the IETF and in some other places, consensus is often hailed as
a better alternative to voting, but they are two methods that have
always been intertwined.  When the IETF hails "rough consensus and
running code" as their successful method, I think "running code" is
the more important part, since the obvious problems with voting leave
"rough consensus" as the only realistic alternative.

--
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  tel +46-70-7891609
  http://aronsson.se/ http://elektrosmog.nu/ http://susning.nu/


subject: [WikiEN-l] we're slashdotted

body:
On mer, 2003-01-22 at 02:15, koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com wrote:
> Just a note to give everyone a heads-up: anonymous coward submitted a
> story about our 100,000 article milestone, and we are now slashdotted.
>  Bucket brigade at the ready.  ;-)

We're still afloat so far. :)  I gotta go sleep now, and won't be free
to check in on the site until after 11 am (1900 UTC). So if the site
breaks completely in the mean time, please give a shout to jwales and
jasonr at bomis.com and ask them to give the server a solid kick or two.

As temporary measures, I've:
- Put up a static HTML copy of the main page for people following the
direct link to http://www.wikipedia.org/ .  (It won't reflect new edits
or login state.)
- Disabled updates to the page view counters. (They can bunch up when
things are really busy and use all available webserver processes,
stalling new connections.)
- Put the heavy special pages that are disabled part of the day into
disable mode full-time (sorry, will re-enable these tomorrow)
- Re-enabled the Alternative PHP Cache, which should speed up page load
times a little bit by bypassing the PHP script parsing.
- Since APC slightly breaks the current RDF spool generator script, I've
disabled updating of the RDF spools.

This is a newer revision of APC which hopefully won't crash so much as
the old one did. :)  If it's problematic, Jimbo or Magnus go ahead and
comment out the APC section at the top of /usr/local/lib/php.ini and
restart apache.

Note that page view counters, main pages, and all special pages remain
enabled on the less-trafficked other languages. Just on the English are
they disabled. APC caching affects all wikis.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

WikiKarma: posts defending our honor at Slashdot:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/01/22/0258226
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [WikiEN-l] we're slashdotted

body:
On mer, 2003-01-22 at 02:15, koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com wrote:
> Just a note to give everyone a heads-up: anonymous coward submitted a
> story about our 100,000 article milestone, and we are now slashdotted.
>  Bucket brigade at the ready.  ;-)

We're still afloat so far. :)  I gotta go sleep now, and won't be free
to check in on the site until after 11 am (1900 UTC). So if the site
breaks completely in the mean time, please give a shout to jwales and
jasonr at bomis.com and ask them to give the server a solid kick or two.

As temporary measures, I've:
- Put up a static HTML copy of the main page for people following the
direct link to http://www.wikipedia.org/ .  (It won't reflect new edits
or login state.)
- Disabled updates to the page view counters. (They can bunch up when
things are really busy and use all available webserver processes,
stalling new connections.)
- Put the heavy special pages that are disabled part of the day into
disable mode full-time (sorry, will re-enable these tomorrow)
- Re-enabled the Alternative PHP Cache, which should speed up page load
times a little bit by bypassing the PHP script parsing.
- Since APC slightly breaks the current RDF spool generator script, I've
disabled updating of the RDF spools.

This is a newer revision of APC which hopefully won't crash so much as
the old one did. :)  If it's problematic, Jimbo or Magnus go ahead and
comment out the APC section at the top of /usr/local/lib/php.ini and
restart apache.

Note that page view counters, main pages, and all special pages remain
enabled on the less-trafficked other languages. Just on the English are
they disabled. APC caching affects all wikis.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

WikiKarma: posts defending our honor at Slashdot:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/01/22/0258226
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: www.wikipedia.org

in_reply_to: <3E2E6828.90109@epost.de>; from magnus.manske@epost.de on Wed, Jan 22, 2003 at 10:45:12AM +0100

body:
> So, if one can undermine both voting and consensus, why is voting worse?

One reason might be that I would automatically discount a flood of
similarly worded messages from people who have never joined the
discussion before.  Consensus leaves me wiggle room to find ways to
make adjustments, based on the rich fabric of information I get from
lots of discussions.

Voting, on the other hand, is manipulable unless I have equal freedom
to simply discount some votes.  And that's fine, too.  Except that it
removes one of the big positives from the voting system, namely that
it's more clearly defined and objective.

One solution that might be greeted with massive howls of protest (or
might not!) would be to someday restrict voting to 'members' who have
contributed at a level of say $20 per year, perhaps with some
oldtimers grandfathered in for 5 years.  There are pros and cons to
this, obviously.

But it is a fairly common way of restricting voting privileges in
nonprofit organizations.

--Jimbo


body:
Yikes!  And I thought that I would get some peace and quiet today.
:-)

Daniel Mayer wrote:

> Just when you thought you would be able to concentrate on upgrading some other
> Wikis Brion. ;-)
>
> http://slashdot.org/articles/03/01/22/0258226.shtml?tid=149
>
> Let the firefighting begin.
>
> --Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
>
> Wikikarma
> I was one of probably a dozen people who submitted something to Slashdot. Oh
> wait - that requires a triple Wikikarma payment: I added a bunch of events to
> [[January 21]] and [[January 22]] and also worked on improving [[gene]].
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


subject: [Wikipedia-l] [chris@nmedia.net: wikipedia page]

body:
I haven't had a change to investigate this yet, I'm just passing it
along in case others haven't seen it.

----- Forwarded message from Chris Cappuccio <chris at nmedia.net> -----

From: Chris Cappuccio <chris at nmedia.net>
Date: Wed, 22 Jan 2003 01:16:24 -0800
To: jwales at bomis.com
Subject: wikipedia page

On http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._plan_to_invade_Iraq
someone changed 'Iraq' to 'penis' all over the page....

--
"Thomas Pynchon on bad acid couldn't dream up the paranoid nightmares now
pouring out of Washington." -- John Perry Barlow

----- End forwarded message -----


subject: [Wikipedia-l] RE: [chris@nmedia.net: wikipedia page]

body:
|I haven't had a change to investigate this yet, I'm just passing it
|along in case others haven't seen it.
|
|----- Forwarded message from Chris Cappuccio <chris at nmedia.net> -----
|
|From: Chris Cappuccio <chris at nmedia.net>
|Date: Wed, 22 Jan 2003 01:16:24 -0800
|To: jwales at bomis.com
|Subject: wikipedia page
|
|On http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._plan_to_invade_Iraq
|someone changed 'Iraq' to 'penis' all over the page....

Already taken care of: I autoreverted the edit 5 minutes after it was posted.
It would have been less than 2 minutes after but the responsiveness of the
site was very sluggish at that point.

-- mav

WikiKarma
Still on firefighting duty


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Tic, toc, tic, toc - Approaching 100,000 English
 "articles"

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> I've said this before and I will say it one more time: Do we want to keep the
> piss-poor definition for automatic article detection?

The idea of an "encyclopedia" consisting of "articles" is based in
three centuries of printed works.  What we're building here is
something new, a dynamic "web" of "nodes".  Perhaps the number of
edits per day is a more interesting measure than the number of
articles.  If we have 200,000 articles and nobody updates them, what
will the value of Wikipedia be?  Should the special:statistics page
show the number of edits and page views per day and per month?

The power of an automobile is still measured in horsepowers, but other
metrics are all new, such as the milage (miles per gallon of fuel).

--
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  tel +46-70-7891609
  http://aronsson.se/ http://elektrosmog.nu/ http://susning.nu/


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: www.wikipedia.org

body:
Anthere wrote:
> Hummmm....then...would anonymous ip... sending you $40
> per year be allowed to also *vote* then ?

I think that provisions could be made for anonymity, yes.  This
strikes me as useless and paranoid, but sure, why not?  And not
sending _me_ $40, I don't want it.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: www.wikipedia.org

body:
> One solution that might be greeted with massive
> howls of protest (or
> might not!) would be to someday restrict voting to
> 'members' who have
> contributed at a level of say $20 per year, perhaps
> with some
> oldtimers grandfathered in for 5 years.  There are
> pros and cons to
> this, obviously.
>
> But it is a fairly common way of restricting voting
> privileges in
> nonprofit organizations.
>
> --Jimbo

Hummmm....then...would anonymous ip... sending you $40
per year be allowed to also *vote* then ?

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.
http://mailplus.yahoo.com


subject: [WikiEN-l] we're slashdotted -- "solid kick"

body:
> Kick! kick!
> the laaaaaaaaag is getting pretty bad out here

yeah

giving up

we should put a ban an advertisment

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.
http://mailplus.yahoo.com


from_name: John Robinson

subject: [WikiEN-l] Get ready folks

body:
Looks like we've been slashdotted.

http://slashdot.org/articles/03/01/22/0258226.shtml?tid=149


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: www.wikipedia.org

body:
Lars Aronsson wrote:

>Even in a parliamentary democracy, there has to be consensus about
>using voting as the method and how to apply it. Otherwise, the method
>will be useless. In open organizations (where anybody can become a
>member at no cost) such as the IETF and Wikipedia, voting is
>problematic, since it is unclear who is eligible to vote.  This leaves
>a suspicion that the opposite party cheats by subscribing new voters,
>undermining the consensus about voting as a method.
>
>
So? I get a dozen new email adresses from freemailers, and "mailbomb"
the mailing list, with each of my new @s saying "I don't agree to
consensus yet", in slightly different words.

So, if one can undermine both voting and consensus, why is voting worse?

Consider this: voting is better, because if, say, 10% of the votes are
bogus, a decision can still be reached. With consensus, we'll keep on
discussing, until we're tired of discussion and the question to decide
just drops dead to the floor. See our mailing list archives for numerous
examples of this.

Magnus


from_name: Fernando Jabonero

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Possibly interesting to WikiPedia

body:
Dear Sirs, I am a spanish programmer and project manager.
I am interested on projects concerning knowledge and voice on IP.
As particular I developed several issues.

I worked on Project Gutemberg contents and developed a web service for this,
now as a beta dev. You can see it in 213.4.20.83:8090/libreria/ , with
spanish interface. You can look for author or work.

Also I did an interface to development of a spanish/english  dictionary with
entonation in english and wav/mp3 generation, audible via web ( better with
Netscape ). You can see it in 213.4.20.83/speaker/. Put aleatory text or cut
and paste any text into the input field. Try it and tell me about. If this is
of interest for your project, I can help you.

Yours, Fernando Jabonero


from_name: buraq

subject: [Wikitech-l] wiki mirrors ?

body:
Hello,

just read about Wikipedia and the Wiktionary this morning in
www.heise.de for the first time and I'm impressed ! Good work.

getting on-topic again, I could not find any information on setting up
mirrors (the How to become a Wikipedia hacker page is a bit incomplete
:) Is there any best-practice way to do it, which avoids transferring
SQL Dumps of the whole database every day ?

Do MySQL or PostgreSQL  have +working+ replication, transmitting just
the changes/additions, has anybody ever used them to replicate Wikipedia ?

cheers,
buraq


subject: [WikiEN-l] we're slashdotted

body:
Seen on slashdot

/I think I'll stick with peer reviewed articles for the moment./

You're a peer, you reviewed it, you found a problem. Why didn't you
correct it?

^^ that was Brion.

ROTFL :-)

>
>
>


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: <br>

body:
On Wed, 22 Jan 2003, Pieter Suurmond wrote:
> Richard Grevers wrote:
> > On Wed, 22 Jan 2003 17:36:07 +0100, Tomasz Wegrzanowski
> > > We should completely forbid </td>, </th> and </tr>.
> > > They are just noise and table is completely unambiguous without them.
> > Except Netscape 4 which will then refuse to display the page at all if
> > there is any nesting of tables!
>
> And therefore, the html-output generated by the wikiserver should include
> terminating -td, -th, and tr-tags automatically.

Our current parser *tries* to do this (insert end tags where they're
missing), but it doesn't do a very good job of it.

Anyone who'd like to rewrite it is more than welcome to do so! Please take
a look at removeHTMLtags() in OutputPage.html. Once you've finished
wiping the tears from your eyes, write up something better. :)  If you can
integrate it with the rest of the markup parsing, so much the better.

> I think Tomasz Wegrzanowski was talking about wiki-source here and
> not about wiki-html-output. These are 2 different things (input and output).

As long as we allow use of the HTML tags*, we should take them both with
and without end tags. We should ideally produce valid XHTML from *any*
given input. If the input is broken, we may not produce what the author
intended, but we *must* produce something that will pass a validating
parser.

*(And if we some day decide not to allow them, we should provide
equivalent functionality and, if possible, automatically convert
articles to use the newer system at the time the change is made. If
automatic conversion is not possible, we should make a conscious effort to
fix anything that's broken.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikitech-l] Goodbye to HTML

body:
On Tue, 21 Jan 2003, tarquin wrote:

> What do we use HTML for? From what I've seen:
> * tables  -- well, most people agree that HTML tables are ugly. we just
> haven't yet come up with a good enough alternative.
> * erroneous use of <BR> -- if you need a new paragraph, make one. If you
> feel you need a "half paragraph-break", then rethink your writing style.
> * LI, UL, OL -- people who haven't read the documentation. I suppose we
> can keep <LI> as a synonym for *
> * aligning images right or left with complex DIV or TABLE constructs --
> as above -- we need better syntax.
>
> any other uses I've missed?

Yes

* Special characters, such as é, ä, š etcetera. - I would
  be much in favor of keeping them.
* <sup> and <sub>. There isn't wiki for them yet, but it could be defined
* Special typefaces like <type>
* font sizes
* People using HTML for things like boldface and headers. Unnecessary, I'd
  say, but it happens a lot.
* I myself have used <blockquote> at least once. (see [[Gall-Peters
  projection]])
* ... and undoubtedly there's still a number I forgot.

Andre Engels


subject: [Wikitech-l] Reasoning

body:
Pieter Suurmond wrote:

>Or at least don't call it 'html', it confuses
>everybody (even people on this list), instead,
>incorporate those tags into the Wiki-syntax and
>define them as Wiki-markup-codes: document them
>and ban all other HTML-markup-codes.
>
>
>
Yup -- stop treating then as HTML to be passed "as is" to the browser --
treat them as wiki tags that must be parsed.
s must be closed

 is deprecated
etc

>
>