from_name: Rob Lanphier

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: <link> elements for interlanguage link
	information

body:
On Fri, 2005-11-18 at 19:09 +0000, Timwi wrote:
> > I think it'd be useful for most multilingual MediaWiki installations
> > that use interlanguage links to have such hidden <link> elements.
>
> Speaking of which - this reminds me of an idea I had a while ago and I
> was wondering if anyone would be interested to hear this. Currently many
> Wikipedia pages in Google search results are redirects (for example,
> Google for "nonogram" and look at the seventh search result). I was
> wondering if there is a <link> element one could use to say that another
> URL is the "real" page? Then the page returned for a redirect's URL
> would tell search engines the URL of the page it's redirecting to.

I'm not aware of any <link> syntax, but one way to do it would be for
MediaWiki to issue an HTTP 301 status (permanent  redirect) to the new
page, rather than returning 200 and giving the content.  That probably
introduces an unacceptably large performance penalty, though (extra
round trip per request).

The "Content-Location" HTTP header is a potential longshot.  I don't
think Google documents their use/non-use of this header, but it's one of
those "can't hurt" kind of things.

http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14.14

It appears it can be tacked on using a meta http-equiv tag in the HTML
head.

Rob


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Daniel R. Tobias

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Arbitration Committee members granted checkuser
	tool

body:
On 20 Nov 2005 at 21:45, Jack Lynch <jack.i.lynch at gmail.com> wrote:

> Those who refuse to consider the option of incentive are violently
> objectionable.

Money isn't the only possible incentive.  And any system not
involving slave labor, in which work actually gets done, obviously
includes incentives sufficient to get the people involved to do the
work.  (Well, I guess slave labor does too, if you consider "keeping
from getting whipped to death" an incentive.)  Are you claiming that,
due to declining the use of paid staff, Wikipedia will end up forced
into acquiring slaves to do its work?

--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Ashar Voultoiz

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: cluster monitoring

references:
<dl09q7$jne$1@sea.gmane.org>	<4374EF03.6020302@nedworks.org>	<dl7gmk$s7f$1@sea.gmane.org>	<43776C59.8040907@nedworks.org>	<dlan22$s3d$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<dlapvb$75c$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
Tim Starling wrote:
<snip>
> I wrote a perl script a while back to poll the gmond XML output from one
> machine and stop or start a process on another machine based on the value of
> a metric retrieved. I didn't use telnet (ick), I read from a socket and then
> used an XPath module to find the metric in the XML. It's probably lying
> around in my home directory somewhere if you want to look at it.

Hello,

I have wrote a little perl plugin for nagios that would let us grab a
given metric for a given host. The plugin implements caching of gmetad
data, caching of xml parse and handle warning / critical threshold.

I have also give a little configuration example for nagios
checkcommands.cfg.

Files are in /home/hashar/gmeta-nagios/ :

  cbg_commands.cfg    The nagios configuration for the plugin
  check_by_gmetad.pl  The plugin itself, use perl
  gmetad-cache.stor   XML Parse cache
  gmetad-cache.xml    XML grabbed from the gmetad host.

So now, it is just pending for a FC3 larousse upgrade and a nagios compile.

> If caching is required, then adding metrics to nagios is obviously not the
> same as adding metrics to ganglia. For ganglia, you run gmetric whenever a
> metric changes, so you can have a loop that sets 30 metrics in each pass if
> you like. You don't give it a plugin for it to invoke at its leisure, you
> make your own daemon.

I will set up a basic nagios installation first, then we can work on
metrics. Memcached instances / errors might be interesting as well as
mysql replication lag for slaves.

cheers,

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


from_name: Jack Lynch

body:
Thank you for your comments, how did you manage to get the quoted text
so mixed up tho? I see your using gmail, as I am...

Jack (Sam Spade)

On 11/20/05, El C <el.ceeh at gmail.com> wrote:
>  -------------------------------------
> Paid adminship: a non issue
> -------------------------------------
> Correct, no interest whatsoever (may I speak for everyone?) in the
> impractical, backwards idea of a corporate-types, *Right*eous (so-called
> non-political) payed admins, bureaucrats and arbitrators idea.
>  > *I wasn't talking about people doing what they believe, I was talking
> about refusing to consider taking on paid employee's > due to philosophical
> or political predispositions. Its rather a non-issue however, since their
> doesn't seem to be any interest in the idea. *
>
>  > *Jack (Sam Spade)*
>  --------------------------------------------
> Trustworthy appeal: higher power
> -------------------------------------------
> To a higher power: Jimbo's wife (or possibly even the Wikipedia community)!
>
> > > *To Who? *
> > >* Jack (Sam Spade) *
>
> >* Jimbo wouldn't have appointed them to the arbcom if he didn't
> believe*>* them to be trustworthy. If you believe he was mistaken, dig
> up the*>* evidence and appeal his decision.*>**>* --Mgm*
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------
> Cite sources? Yes, we can help you with that:
> -----------------------------------------------------------
> Same in my uni and any uni. I'd also grade lower those students who cite
> Wikipedia as I have in the past for other unreliable internet sources (if
> they use diffs, though, they'd get bonus marks).
>   But of course, students gain insights from Wikipedia articles all the time
> without needing to cite them directly, especially when those articles are
> carefuly sourced thereby easily leading to more in-depth works, while at the
> same time, providing a basic, encyclopedic orientation with the given
> material.
>   The point is that knowledge (free or otherwise) is far from limited to
> manifesting itself in such a linear, rigid way. Good students (not to
> mention researchers) are able to adopt creative research methods without
> losing their focus, opportunities which Wikipedia offers in abundance.
>  As for the "professional" or mildly offensive amateur/wannabe academics,
> they also are deep within our midst. As of course are the violently
> offensive commies. Now that's a lot of food for thought!
>
> El_C
>
> >* > The academics at my uni think the wikipedia is mildly offensive,
> in*>* > the sense that they enjoy being paid to write*>* >
> books/journals/whathaveyou, and don't enjoy seeing amateurs giving
> it*>* > away for free. Because of this, and our noticable failings,
> students*>* > are penalised if they attempt to cite the wikipedia as a
> source at my*>* > uni.*>* >*>* > I just now returned from an 8 hour
> seminar wherein we were repeatedly*>* > informed that free,
> non-governmental information on the internet is*>* > dubious at best,
> and should be avoided for anything other than*>* > commercial or
> general knowledge queries. Instead, the online*>* > university
> database was praised (it includes a subscription to*>* > britannica,
> btw ;)*>* >*>* > Jack (Sam Spade)*
>
> >* Well, I'd've gotten penalized for citing Wikipedia too, but I'd
> also*>* have gotten penalized for citing Britannica. However, various
> features*>* of Wikipedia made it much better as a quick study aid than
> the more*>* academically respectable references, and no one was ever
> the wiser.*>* And it is good as a study aid -- but most university
> students I know*>* *need* to be cautioned that not everything they
> read on the internet*>* that looks legit is true. (I love Wikipedia,
> and I am an optimist,*>* but, well...)*>**>* -Kat*>*
> [[User:Mindspillage]]*>* wannabe academic*>**>* --*>* "There was a
> point to this story, but it has temporarily*>* escaped the
> chronicler's mind."  --Douglas Adams*
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Sergey Samoylov

subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikisource dump

body:
Hi there...

Is it possible to get dump of en.wikisource.org <http://en.wikisource.org>
The dump from http://download.wikimedia.org/special/sources/ include just
dump of wikisource.org <http://wikisource.org> which doesn't
contain usefull articles.
Just messages like:

 This page was moved to
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Pioneers_-_Chapter_5

Please do not add anymore english pages to this site.<p>
Thank you
All the best!
Sergey


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Sam Korn

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wiki about every person in the world

body:
On 11/20/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Great!  I'm glad to see that I can include a biography of Erwin G. Ward
> of South Weymouth, MA.  He was a stamp collector whose obituary appeared
> in the "American Philatelist" for December, 1920. :-)

Sounds good to me.

--
Sam


from_name: Angela

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Interpreting merge votes (was Wikipedia's provable
	anti-expertise bias)

body:
> Actually, GFDL quite specifically *requires* that if an article is
> merged into another one, the old title has to be kept as a redirect in
> order to preserve the edit history.

If the old title is bad, the article can be moved to something else in
order to keep the history of the merged information. This was what
done for a lot of "AKFD" articles a while ago since people objected to
the titles more than the content of those pages. If you want to merge
[[Poisonous influences of fruit]] into [[Kumquat]], you can move
[[Poisonous influences of fruit]] to [[Talk:Kumquat/Page history]] and
delete the redirect from [[Poisonous influences of fruit]] without
losing anything as long as you cite [[Talk:Kumquat/Page history]]
somewhere so people can look up the original authors of that part of
the article.

Angela


subject:
[WikiEN-l] need to work out clear policies on MANDATORY and
	OPTIONAL rules on WP

body:
On 11/20/05, Daniel R. Tobias <dan at tobias.name> wrote:
> ...but it *will* seem less professional and more childish if
> outsiders find out about all the silly bickering that has gone on
> regarding this name dispute.

The way round this, of course, is highly possible and very easy, but
highly unlikely: just don't do it.

Concern yourself with more important affairs, ye mortals of the world!

--
Sam


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: <link> elements for interlanguage
	link	information

body:
Rob Lanphier wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-11-18 at 19:09 +0000, Timwi wrote:
>> Speaking of which - this reminds me of an idea I had a while ago and I
>> was wondering if anyone would be interested to hear this. Currently many
>> Wikipedia pages in Google search results are redirects (for example,
>> Google for "nonogram" and look at the seventh search result). I was
>> wondering if there is a <link> element one could use to say that another
>> URL is the "real" page? Then the page returned for a redirect's URL
>> would tell search engines the URL of the page it's redirecting to.
>
> I'm not aware of any <link> syntax, but one way to do it would be for
> MediaWiki to issue an HTTP 301 status (permanent  redirect) to the new
> page, rather than returning 200 and giving the content.  That probably
> introduces an unacceptably large performance penalty, though (extra
> round trip per request).

It's not a performance issue at all, and round-trips for 301s are often
cheap compared to rendering.

It just makes it a lot harder to deal with such pages: if you
HTTP-redirect straight to the target page you're missing the link back
to the redirect page. (And that is *crucial* for editing work and
vandalism cleanup. It is non-negotiable.)

If you redirect to an alternate URL which includes the linkback address,
then a) it's an uglier URL and b) you don't get the alleged benefits of
going to the single target URL in the first place.

We've actually discussed this many times before; please search the list
archives if you wish to comment further. :)

> The "Content-Location" HTTP header is a potential longshot.  I don't
> think Google documents their use/non-use of this header, but it's one of
> those "can't hurt" kind of things.
>
> http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14.14

The spec is sufficiently vague and mysterious that I'd recommend against
using it for any purpose. Since the destination page would not return
the same HTML as the redirect page, it would likely be incorrect and
might cause problems if anything does use it.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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subject: [Wikitech-l] [WikiEN-l] Status of article rating feature?

body:
Magnus Manske wrote:
> Brion Vibber wrote:
>> I'm tweaking, fixing, and reworking various bits of it (display
>> formatting fixes, better code reuse, using revision IDs instead of
>> unreliable timestamps in places, etc).
>>
>> Will try to have it ready to try out tomorrowish.
>>
> *THANK YOU* (imagine sound of released breath :-)
>
> BTW, I used a combination of revision IDs and timestamps, because you
> told me the revision IDs can get out of order through
> deleting/undeleting revisions, and I wanted them in correct order no
> matter what. If revision IDs suffice, great.

They can still be out of sync at times (for some old cases with
delete/undelete this used to happen all the time, but not anymore due to
changes; if history data is imported with Special:Import it may however
still be).

However the main problem is that timestamps aren't guaranteed to be
unique; you will find pages where two adjacent revisions have the same
timestamp (due to some old bugs, or due to merging of history between
pages that have been moved over each other for instance). There were
bits of the code where timestamp was getting used as the index in an
associative array, which would mean that ratings on both those revs
would end up conflicting, possibly vanishing or attaching to the wrong rev.

Sort by timestamp, use id as keys, and things should... hopefully...
work. :D

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikisource dump

body:
Sergey Samoylov wrote:
> Is it possible to get dump of en.wikisource.org <http://en.wikisource.org>
> The dump from http://download.wikimedia.org/special/sources/ include just
> dump of wikisource.org <http://wikisource.org> which doesn't
> contain usefull articles.

http://download.wikimedia.org/wikisource/en/

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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from_name: Brown, Darin

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Wikipedia's provable anti-expertise bias

body:
> Most non-user academics are going to miss the point about hypertext.  An
> area of WP with good navigation can get you in an hour what might cost a
> week of a well-appointed library.

Very true. One thing I never understand when I hear academics (or esp.
librarians) ragging on wikipedia is the notion that the only use of an
information resource is as a citation for a paper or as a hard reference to
verify something. This makes little sense, since I *know* this isn't the
only thing they use information resources for.

One of the most common uses I have for wikipedia is getting a quick,
readable overview of a topic or term which I'm unfamiliar with. The result
may not be ideal or perfect, but it's a heck of a lot better than googling
or trying to wander the stacks aimlessly. Esp. in fields totally unrelated
to training. Imagine you're a math person reading something about painting
or chemistry or history, something slightly above mass popular accounts. You
come to a topic or term that is unfamiliar, so that you can't read on
without seriously losing what is being said. If you try to go to the stacks
to figure it out, you're left with (a) incomprehensible specialist journals,
(b) specialist encyclopedias, (c) textbooks that are either poorly written
or that assume prerequisite knowledge, or (d) mass popular accounts that
assume you're completely ignorant of everything and give too few details or
external references. Even on areas close to research area, it's easy to just
be led on a wild-goose chase through research papers, lecture notes, and GTM
books.

(E.g., read research paper A, come to term X you don't understand, be led to
previous papers B and C, which still don't explain the term or definition
but give a reference to textbooks D, E, and F. But D assumes you've already
read D-prequel by the same author, E has a variant presentation that
requires reading alternate but equivalent account G, and F assumes you've
already familiar with problems Y and Z from another area of math. Pretty
soon, you've got photocopies of 3 or 4 papers, you've checked out half a
dozen monograph or books, but a week later, you still can't explain the damn
thing to yourself or anyone else in your own words.)

I have already used the math part of wikipedia to learn the basics of a
number of topics which would have taken me far more time to sort through at
the stacks.

> But only academics who actually remember
> the mazy, hazy grad student days  of bombardment by things about which one
> should already know will rate that aspect.

Actually remember? I'm still trying to actively forget!! :)

As an observation, shouldn't this really be life-long activity, though?
Hardly anyone can keep up with the amount of stuff being published today.
(Meaning, shouldn't "a sense of bombardment by things about which you should
already know", be a normal part of scholarship?)

> Most popularizing academics will find the tone of WP rather subdued.
(This
> is a good thing.  We have no need to do boosterism. )

At the same time, don't most academics find the tone of most popularizations
rather hypomanic?

darin


subject: [Wikitech-l] some logo updated

body:
Hello,

I have updated some of the logo that were listed on :
 http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_logos

Dont forget to ask for logo protection before filling in a request !

cheers,

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


from_name: Haukur Þorgeirsson

subject: [WikiEN-l] Naming convention under vote

body:
Hi!

There's currently a vote underway at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Naming_conventions_(Norse_mythology)

The proposal under consideration is, basically, to use common English
names - like Thor, Odin and Valhalla - where those exist (as per "Use
English") and to use the original Old Norse forms where no common English
name exists (as per "Use English"). There are also some specific
recommendations regarding representation of alternative forms and some
thoughts on what the "native spelling" should be considered in this case.

Last time around those of us most heavily involved in editing the Norse
mythology articles (Wiglaf and myself) agreed on a convention and slowly
worked according to it for several months. Then this fact suddenly came to
the attention of people who criticized us for not having publicized our
proposal outside of Norse mythology pages and naming convention pages. So,
this time I'm posting notices hither and yon and this is one of them.

What grates me a bit is that there has been very little material
discussion on Old Norse names. Many of those expressing their opinions
simply have a blanket opinion against all non-English characters in
article titles.

So we have oppose votes like these:

"I do not think that article names in an English language encyclopedia
should ever use non-English letters."

"Strongly Oppose the use of exotic non-English characters as if they were
a normal part of the alphabet"

This is, of course, an entirely legitimate opinion but I just wonder if
the larger issue of non-English characters couldn't be settled one way or
another somewhere else.

Anyhow, if you have opinions on the matter - or, *sigh*, if you want to
use this vote as a proxy to express your blanket opposition to non-English
characters in article titles - here's the location again:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Naming_conventions_(Norse_mythology)

Regards,
Haukur ?orgeirsson


body:
FF wrote:

>Ah yes, and I've got good friends who are black... (if I could roll my
eyes through e-mail, I would)

Actually, Charles is one of the few people at wikipedia with significant
life experience both in and out of academia, so he probably is in a good
position to judge how accurate those "ivory tower" stereotypes really are.

I don't think it's an ivory tower parody to say that academics are poor at
popularization. That's how they are trained. A premium is placed on the
ability to write highly technical material for experts and to amass as many
such publications to put on one CV as possible. Who cares if you actually
have something important to say. Relatively little premium is placed on
communicating with others outside one's little research area, or on
explaining the significance of research to the larger citizenry. (And I am
not talking about undergraduate pedagogical issues.) People who focus on
this citizenry aspect of scholarship risk putting their career in jeopardy,
unless they amass a large number of publications or grant money first. At
the very least, they risk getting denied tenure.

(There are some institutions which are exceptions, of course. But there is
no denying that publishing technical papers in research journals is what
most tenure committees and administrators are looking for first and
foremost.)

darin


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Preserving GFDL requirements when splitting articles

body:
2005/11/20, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net>:

> Whether these licenses may be revoked is a dubious prospect. If someone
> revokes the GFDL that he has granted to Wikipedia what is the effect on
> the downstream user who has himself copied the material based on the
> licensing provisions that he found in Wikipedia, and which were
> perfectly valid at the time? Anything but irrevocable licenses could
> lead to serious absurdities.

It seems their rights remain as long as they keep to the GNU/FDL themselves:

You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Document except

as expressly provided for under this License.  Any other attempt to
copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Document is void, and will
automatically terminate your rights under this License.  However,
parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this
License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such
parties remain in full compliance.

Without this, I guess revoking the license would have the same effect on
downstream users as putting a copyright violation on Wikipedia would: They
are technically breaking copyright, but may be considered exempt by the
courts for acting in good faith.

--
Andre Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
ICQ: 6260644 -- Skype: a_engels


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Lauritsen speedy deletion??

body:
Creidieki wrote:

>> [[John Lauritsen]] was recently nominated for speedy deletion by some
>> ignorant moron. SPEEDY deletion. Absolutely unbelievable. How many more
>> cases do we have to show??
>
>I assume you're making an argument against the "no claim of
>notability" speedy criterion?  The current article doesn't state
>notability; it mentions only profession.  Being an activist or
>journalist aren't notable enough to merit automatic inclusion.  So
>[[John Lauritsen]] seems to qualify.

You miss my point. Anyone *remotely* familiar with the topic or the subject
of the article (regardless of their opinions or which side of the debate
they fall on) knows that notability in this instance is trivial. Only people
completely ignorant of the subject would nominate it for speedy delete. Why
is "no claim of notability" a crietrion for speedy delete? Why should it
even be a criteron for deletion? There is difference between CLAIM OF
NOTABILITY in the article and ACTUAL NOTABILITY. In this case, anyone
familiar KNOWS the subject is notable, but just because the STUB fails to
provide evidence, this is considered enough for speedy delete or delete?
What about leaving a message on the original editor's talk page? What about
contacting people who know more and allowing a few days to get a response?
As it is now, such articles can be started by inexperienced users who aren't
aware of the esoteric lawyeristic discussions about AfD, and then the
articles deleted simply because they were unaware of those very esoteric
lawyeristic discussions. Then, when someone comes around to writing it
again, they'll probably say, "well, it was already speedy deleted earlier".
Well, no shit, you never bothered to look into it in the first place.

darin


subject: [WikiEN-l] Lauritsen talk page

body:
>From Lauritsen talk page:

>>I don't know much about this person, but he seems to be real at least
([http://www.duesberg.com/subject/jlbib.html bibliography]) regardless, if
you think he is not notable please use [[Wikipedia:Articles for Deletion]] -
[[User:Cohesion|cohesion]] | [[User_talk:Cohesion|talk]] 06:43, 10 October
2005 (UTC)
* Warning: The bibliographies of John Lauritsen on the internet are widely
speculated to be false.  I think this should be cleared up before an article
is finalized and posted. [[User:Rabryan|Rabryan]] 06:51, 10 October 2005
(UTC)
::I really have no knowledge of this person, if you think it is a candidate
for deletion though you should add it [[Wikipedia:Articles for Deletion]],
it's not speedy deletable though under the [[WP:CSD]] rules. -
[[User:Cohesion|cohesion]] | [[User_talk:Cohesion|talk]] 06:59, 10 October
2005 (UTC)
:::This just ''barely'' scrapes under the speedy deletion criterion "An
article about a real person that does not assert that person's importance or
significance". OK, so he is an "activist and scholar" who "covered AIDS for
the (publication which we do not have an article on)". Is that asserting
importance or significance? Come on, if the guy has published books, at
least mention that. --[[User:Stormie|Stormie]] 23:37, 16 November 2005 (UTC)
::How can a bibliography be false?? The existence of his articles and books
are trivial to verify. I own several of them at home. What a moron (or
troll). [[User:198.59.188.232|198.59.188.232]] 23:01, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

*If bibliographies are false, it doesn't mean they don't exist. It means
they carry false information. - [[User:MacGyverMagic|Mgm]]|[[User
talk:MacGyverMagic|<sup>(talk)</sup>]] 23:27, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

>> (end of talk page)

Now, let's examine what kind of "reasoning" is going on here:

Almost nothing has been written on this article at the moment, (2 lines),
yet someone is already taking pre-emptive measures to assert that this
person's writings (none of whose claims have even been articulated in the
article) are false before the article is "finalized or posted". Just the
wording there tells me this is someone completely unfamiliar with wikipedia.

On top of this, this nonsense about a "bibliography being false", confusing
it with the claims in the elements of the bibliography. You could use this
against anyone. You could say, "well, we shouldn't have articles on
holocaust deniers, because their bibliographies (sic) are false". Their
bibliographies are NOT FALSE -- holocaust deniers may be spouting incredibly
false statements, but the existence of their publications is not "false". I
am shocked at the lack of basic logic and reasoning used at this talk page
and elsewhere.

Note also the fact that the New York Native has no wikipedia is article is
used as "evidence". This is even worse than googling and alexa rankings. As
I've said before, ignorance knows no bounds, and nothing will stop people
from pontificating about things which they're completely ignorant of.

Of course, what do I care. Episodes like this have already driven me leaving
wikipedia for now, creating a new wikicity and consulting wikipedia just to
copy stuff to it.

darin


from_name: Matt Brown

body:
On 11/20/05, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> Issues with mirrors mean that copyvio speedies can only really be done
> in the first couple of days.

Surely the broken practices of mirrors are Not Our Problem?

-Matt


from_name: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason

subject: [Wikitech-l] Extending Wikipedia with Java-based technology?

body:
On 11/20/05, Magnus Manske <magnus.manske at web.de> wrote:
> ?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason wrote:
> > In the current parser that would not be possible, you can't pass
> > template arguments to extensions. Also, if it's inline it's likelier
> > to get updated.
> >
> Funny, last time I checked on my citation feature it worked quite well.
> That has been a few weeks ago, though.

When you make a template at Template:Extension with the contents:
"""
<hook>
arg = {{{1}}}
</hook>
"""

and call it at a page with {{Extension|myarg}} the output is:

"""
arg = {{{1}}}
"""

I.e. the {{{1}}} is not interpolated, calling the parser on it won't
work either as you'll be dealing with a new instance of the parser
which won't replace those variables because as far as it's concerned
it hasn't been called with any.

Now, your idea of having a template wrap it as {{attribute|rain|...}}
would presumably require a template at Template:Attribute with
contents like:

"""
<attr>
weather = {{{1}}}
....
</attr>
"""

And as I've demonstrated that doesn't work, so what exactly did work
the last time you checked it?


from_name: Magnus Manske

body:
?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason wrote:
> In the current parser that would not be possible, you can't pass
> template arguments to extensions. Also, if it's inline it's likelier
> to get updated.
>
Funny, last time I checked on my citation feature it worked quite well.
That has been a few weeks ago, though.

Magnus


body:
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> On 11/20/05, Magnus Manske <magnus.manske at web.de> wrote:
>
>> BTW, I used a combination of revision IDs and timestamps, because you
>> told me the revision IDs can get out of order through
>> deleting/undeleting revisions, and I wanted them in correct order no
>> matter what. If revision IDs suffice, great.
>>
>
> Ee. What happens if we delete a page then restore all but one version?
> Do the validates become off by one?
>
The validation data itself refers to the revision ID only, so no problem
there.

The time plus ID thing is only for the sorting of the revisions. You can
say "merge all may old validations for this article into the current
version". For that, it needs to determine "older versions". That's all.

Magnus


list: foundation-l

from_name: David Newton

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikisource Copyright

body:
Hi,

Le Wednesday 16 November 2005 23:48, David Newton a ?(c)crit :

>It is clear that most of the documents in Wikisource are under public domain,
>because their copyright has expired. A few new documents are under free
>licences (GFDL?or CC) or public domain when the author decided to release
>them in that way.

So it sounds to me that documents do not have to be under the GFDL or
a GFDL-compatible licence, just a licence that allows their
reproduction on the website. Is that what you are saying?

>>I think fair use doesn't apply to any document in Wikisource because these are
>>published in their entirety.

>> >When considering the copyrightability of UN resolutions, or all UN
>> >documents for that matter, what law do you apply?  Is there a UN
>> >Copyright Act?  In the absence of such a law can any UN document be
>> >copyright?

[cut]

>> As for fair use, I have posted in the Scriptorium and the response has
>> disappointed me to say the least. The responses that I have received
>> have been contrary to the policy of Wikisource as set out at
>> [[Wikisource: Copyright]] and they indicate to me that the people
>> concerned do not have a deep understanding of copyright law, or if
>> they do they choose to ignore those bits of copyright law that they do
>> not like. The argument for fair use applying to entire documents in
>> incredibly weak, and no account seems to be take of that fact.

>Agreed.

Given the above what do we do about it? If, as you seem to be saying,
that licences allowing reproduction on the website other than the GFDL
can be used, then we need to get a copyright notice at the bottom of
each copyrighted work on the site setting out the terms under which
they can be reproduced.

>I copy the answer from JB Soufron below:

>"Actually, the texts on the website of the UN are copyrighted by the UN as
>mentionned on [the copyright notice]. It is forbidden to reproduce these
>texts except in the limit mentioned in their [terms of use]. To put it
>simply, this basic license allow people to reproduce the texts but not to
>modify them, which seems normal since these are legal texts and that
>distributing modified versions could induce people in error. I think that
>wikisource could make a good use of these texts if they come with a proper
>disclaimer. --Soufron 11:22, 20 November 2005 (UTC)"

>Personally, I don't see anything useful in copying UN?resolutions on
>Wikisource. The UN web site is certainly as much as available Wikisource, so
>I don't understand why we should copy anything from it, since we can't modify
>anything in these texts anyway.

Actually Jean-Baptiste is incorrect about those terms of use. They
allow people to download the material on the website for their own
personal, non-commercial use. The UN terms and conditions do not allow
redistribution or compliation of the material on their website.

http://www.un.org/terms.htm

That rules out the resolutions being put on Wikisource, which is
exactly why I posted this thread in the first place, particularly the
questions about fair use. The results of the discussion seem to be
that I am correct in my interpretation of fair use at Wikisource and
that the UN resolutions on the site need to go as they are copyright
violations.

I think we also need to reinforce the terms and conditions on the site
to make it clear that fair use is completely banned for the text
itself. At the moment users are wilfully misinterpreting ambigous
terms and conditions. The problem with sites like Wikipedia and
Wikisource is that many of the users of them do not understand
copyright law. Where there is a grey area like fair use then we have
people using wishful thinking to stretch the concept way beyond its
limits. Particularly with the whole texts reproduced at Wikisource we
are exposed to potential legal liability with greater risk than at
Wikipedia.

>Regards,
>Yann

David Newton


list: wikimedia-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikisource Copyright


from_name: Anthony DiPierro

body:
On 11/20/05, Jtkiefer <jtkiefer at wordzen.net> wrote:
> Anthony DiPierro wrote:
>
> >Read clause 9 of the GFDL:  "You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or
> >distribute the Document except as expressly provided for under this
> >License. Any other attempt to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute
> >the Document is void, and will automatically terminate your rights
> >under this License. However, parties who have received copies, or
> >rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses
> >terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance."
> >Wikimedia distributes the Document other than as expressly provided
> >for under the GFDL, and has already had its rights under the GFDL
> >terminated.
> >
> >Wikipedia's use of the GFDL is already absurd.  If you want to make
> >any sense of things you have to look beyond the GFDL.
> >
> >Anthony
> >
> >
> Under clause 9 aren't we already in breach of the license due to the
> fact that many things on wikipedia are multi licensed and despite our
> best efforts the licenses don't always match up with each other totally?
>
> -Jtkiefer

Probably not for that reason.  Aggregating GFDL content with non-GFDL
content is valid under clause 7.  There are some legal grey areas
here, for instance what if a copyright violation is intertwined
directly within the text in a way that can't possibly be considered a
separate work.

The most important point of non-compliance on the site itself is the
lack of a title page listing five principal authors and the name of
the publisher.  There is also the lack of a copyright notice within
the document (although one could argue that the entire project is a
single document with the copyright notice as part of
[[Wikipedia:Copyrights]]), and a less than compliant section entitled
history (the wiki feature doesn't state the title or the publisher).
The history section becomes completely unacceptable whenever anything
is copied or moved from one page to another.  To go further into it
I'd really have to hear a proposal over what is considered the
document, what is the history section, where is the title page, etc.

There are a few different ways you could try to shoehorn these things
into Wikipedia, but I don't see how any of them could be considered
"as expressly provided for" by the GFDL.  I dunno, maybe I'm wrong,
and there's a way to look at Wikipedia so that everything fits.  If
so, it'd be really nice if someone would explain it all.  What are the
documents?  Where are the title pages?  What are the titles?  Has
permission been given to use the same titles?  Where are the sections
entitled history?  Where are the copyright notices?  Who are the
publishers?  I can come up with possible answers to all of these
separately, which come close to compliance, but then the different
answers invariably contradict each other.  Is the document everything?
 All the text?  Is each article a document?  Is Wikimedia the
publisher?  A publisher?

Perhaps the most blantant offender is the current database dump.  That
doesn't even contain a *mention* of all the authors, let alone a
compliant title page and history section.  It's clearly distribution
outside of what is "expressly provided for" by the GFDL.

All of this is really just a mental exercise unless it actually comes
down to a lawsuit.  And then the doctrines of laches and maybe even
abandonment would come into play (plus fair use, implicit license, and
OCILLA).  But in terms of Wikimedia, I really don't see how the GFDL
could be used as a defense, it just isn't being followed very closely.


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Wikipedia's provable anti-expertise bias (was
	Howdidthis happen (comixpedia??))

body:
On 11/20/05, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
> Yes, I know, I already explicitly said I was seeing this as a black and
> white issue. And as I explained, I believe that it fundamentally _is_
> black and white; at the end of the day the closing admin will either
> press the "delete" link or he won't press the "delete" link. Merge votes
> push that decision in the "don't press the delete link" direction, and
> so they look more like keep votes than delete votes to me. This isn't an
> attempt to "appropriate" them, just pointing out what their actual
> effect is. I don't see why this is such a matter of contention.

You may.  I don't.  So don't insist that that is what should be.  That
is what you think should be.  I acknowledge it if I have also been too
stringent in this.

> >I agree that pages that need merging don't need AfD, but sometimes AfD
> >gives pages that need merging.  Are you really going to take the
> >rules-lawyer approach and say that an AfD cannot give a merge
> >consensus?  That is what you might call "rigid officialism".
> >
> >
> When did I ever say that? If an AfD comes along and lots of people
> suggest merging the article into some other article, then it would take
> a pretty strange interpretation of rules to try to forbid merging the
> article after the AfD is done simply because AfD's not supposed to be
> used solely to make those decisions. People also suggest things like
> "clean up spelling" or "remove the bright purple tables" or whatever,
> and those are often good ones too. My point is that if there's an AfD
> and lots of people suggest merging the article, that shouldn't be taken
> to mean that the article should be _deleted_.

Your precise words were "AfD has nothing to do with merging", which
implies exactly what I said.  In the end, we are not really discussing
whether it's a de facto keep.  We're discussing whether it's a de jure
keep.  (At least, I am.)  I don't think anyone has suggested that
merge should mean delete.  I have only ever argued that it should be
considered as "merge", completely separate from keep or delete.

--
Sam


body:
On 11/20/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Sam Korn wrote:
>
> >On 11/20/05, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
> >
> >
> >>They should be voting "merge and delete", then. If they just vote
> >>"merge" then calling that a delete vote is itself putting words into
> >>mouths, whereas keeping is the default.
> >>
> >>
> >Merge and delete is not a possible vote.  People should not have to
> >vote in such a specific way to prevent vote-hijacking.
> >
> >
> People can vote any way they want.  If people vote that way then it's
> possible.  I don't know anything about the "vote-hijacking" jargon that
> you are trying to introduce.
>
> Ec

The suggestion to merge is a vestige from a time when VfD was about
reaching consensus about what to do rather than about voting and
counting votes.  If you want to count votes, then I guess you could
take two positions.  The first, which I'll call the Al Gore position,
is to try to figure out whether the voter intended the merge vote to
mean delete or not delete.  The second, which I'll call the George W.
Bush position, is to throw out the vote as invalid.

I'd like to take this moment to thank the arb com for banning me from
participating in the joke that has become AfD.

Anthony


from_name: Peter Mackay

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Tower of Babel - Voting to ignore MoS,
	NCs for languagereasons.

body:
> From: wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org
> [mailto:wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of Delirium
> Sent: Sunday, 20 November 2005 20:58

> Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
> > Ask 100 people on the street to name as many African
> countries as they
> > can, and how many would include the Ivory Coast under either name?
>
> I don't see how that's relevant.  The relevant question is,
> of people who know of the country under some name, how many
> know it under one versus the other?

It doesn't matter at all. With a redirect from the name we don't use, they'd
still get the information they wanted.

Either name for the main article is fine by me. I'm happy to let those who
really care about this battle it out on the talk page and reach a consensus,
though it seems that this has already been achieved over a year ago.

Peter (Skyring)


from_name: Rob Lanphier

body:
On Sun, 2005-11-20 at 18:39 -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
> Rob Lanphier wrote:
> > On Fri, 2005-11-18 at 19:09 +0000, Timwi wrote:
> >> Speaking of which - this reminds me of an idea I had a while ago and I
> >> was wondering if anyone would be interested to hear this. Currently many
> >> Wikipedia pages in Google search results are redirects (for example,
> >> Google for "nonogram" and look at the seventh search result). I was
> >> wondering if there is a <link> element one could use to say that another
> >> URL is the "real" page? Then the page returned for a redirect's URL
> >> would tell search engines the URL of the page it's redirecting to.
> >
> > I'm not aware of any <link> syntax, but one way to do it would be for
> > MediaWiki to issue an HTTP 301 status (permanent  redirect) to the new
> > page, rather than returning 200 and giving the content.  That probably
> > introduces an unacceptably large performance penalty, though (extra
> > round trip per request).
>
> It's not a performance issue at all, and round-trips for 301s are often
> cheap compared to rendering.

...except for the fact that you are adding a round-trip in addition to
subsequent rendering.  I'll take your word for it that it's not a big
deal in the larger scheme of things, but relative to a single header or
tag, it seems pretty expensive (492 bytes inbound + 778 bytes outbound
in the test I just ran with Firefox <=> standard config Apache).

> It just makes it a lot harder to deal with such pages: if you
> HTTP-redirect straight to the target page you're missing the link back
> to the redirect page. (And that is *crucial* for editing work and
> vandalism cleanup. It is non-negotiable.)
>
> If you redirect to an alternate URL which includes the linkback address,
> then a) it's an uglier URL and b) you don't get the alleged benefits of
> going to the single target URL in the first place.
>
> We've actually discussed this many times before; please search the list
> archives if you wish to comment further. :)

I looked through the archives, and found the old "301's are evil"
discussion from July 2003, which looks more like a misunderstanding than
a productive conversation.

I'd like to point out that there's a third way, which is to set a
cookie, rather than put the original request info in the URL.  I'll
admit that's probably got other problems, but I'm throwing that out
there as a solution.

> > The "Content-Location" HTTP header is a potential longshot.  I don't
> > think Google documents their use/non-use of this header, but it's one of
> > those "can't hurt" kind of things.
> >
> > http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14.14
>
> The spec is sufficiently vague and mysterious that I'd recommend against
> using it for any purpose.

Typical use is in content negotiation, allowing the server to advertise
the direct URL to the content that was ultimately served as a result of
the negotiation.

>  Since the destination page would not return
> the same HTML as the redirect page, it would likely be incorrect and
> might cause problems if anything does use it.

I suppose you're right.  More importantly, there's little reason to
believe that it'd actually solve the problem at hand.  Now that I think
about it, the search engines probably shouldn't imply that the content
location header contains the better URL to use to access the content in
question.  Since they shouldn't, that means it's a bad thing to count
on.

Rob


from_name: Philip Sandifer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Another Webcomics Bit

body:
Just as a heads up, while you were indulging in the usual
masturbatory discussions of whether AfD is deeply flawed again that
seem to follow every time I point this out, Dragonfiend put the
recently concluded Checkerboard Nightmare on AfD. His nomination was,
as far too many nominations in far too many fields are, borne of out
and out ignorance - nobody who is remotely knowledgable about
webcomics would even think to propose Checkerboard Nightmare for
deletion. But, of course, the votes of people who know what they're
talking about continue to have active voice with the people who have
decided that ridding Wikipedia of the scourge of webcomics (or blogs)
(or whatever) is their mission in life.

The article isn't going to get deleted, so don't rush off to find it
and vote to keep - it's fine. But go ahead and have a look at http://
www.websnark.com/archives/2005/11/however_the_ent.html so you can see
Wikipedia take another prominent hit from an important member of the
webcomics community. Compare that to http://www.websnark.com/archives/
2004/11/a_modest_webcom.html a year ago. In the past year, we have
taken someone who was strongly pro-Wikipedia and turned him into
someone who thinks we suck. Someone prominent, influential, and,
frankly, damn respectable.

So, yeah. AfD? Still broken. Still driving people away. Still
generating ill will, bad faith, and bad decisions.

Carry on your fiddling. I'm gonna go get front row seats for when the
Colosseum ignites.

-Phil


body:
Those who refuse to consider the option of incentive are violently
objectionable.

Jack (Sam Spade)

On 11/20/05, Daniel R. Tobias <dan at tobias.name> wrote:
> On 20 Nov 2005 at 4:39, Jack Lynch <jack.i.lynch at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I wasn't talking about people doing what they believe, I was talking
> > about refusing to consider taking on paid employee's due to
> > philosophical or political predispositions. Its rather a non-issue
> > however, since their doesn't seem to be any interest in the idea.
> [top-posting snipped]
>
> Since when is doing things by volunteer effort rather than by paid
> staff "communist" in nature?  Does that make all nonprofit activities
> done without pay "communist"?
>
>
>
> --
> == Dan ==
> Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
> Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
> Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
Actually, in this case the speedy claim was "person never existed."

Which is a terrible deletion reason, especially considering that the
person did exist. Furthermore, the article was tagged within fifteen
minutes of its creation.

We really, really need to put a "And the article is more than 24
hours old" rule for several of the CSD criteria - everything but
copyvio and patent nonsense, basically. This would both prevent the
atrocity of people who delete without checking the history to see if
it's just the current version that's busted, and it would give people
who make their articles in a series of smaller edits (Something many
people do) a chance to actually write the article before the deleting
angels swoop in.

-Phil

On Nov 20, 2005, at 9:45 PM, Brown, Darin wrote:

> Creidieki wrote:
>
>>> [[John Lauritsen]] was recently nominated for speedy deletion by
>>> some
>>> ignorant moron. SPEEDY deletion. Absolutely unbelievable. How
>>> many more
>>> cases do we have to show??
>>
>> I assume you're making an argument against the "no claim of
>> notability" speedy criterion?  The current article doesn't state
>> notability; it mentions only profession.  Being an activist or
>> journalist aren't notable enough to merit automatic inclusion.  So
>> [[John Lauritsen]] seems to qualify.
>
> You miss my point. Anyone *remotely* familiar with the topic or the
> subject
> of the article (regardless of their opinions or which side of the
> debate
> they fall on) knows that notability in this instance is trivial.
> Only people
> completely ignorant of the subject would nominate it for speedy
> delete. Why
> is "no claim of notability" a crietrion for speedy delete? Why
> should it
> even be a criteron for deletion? There is difference between CLAIM OF
> NOTABILITY in the article and ACTUAL NOTABILITY. In this case, anyone
> familiar KNOWS the subject is notable, but just because the STUB
> fails to
> provide evidence, this is considered enough for speedy delete or
> delete?
> What about leaving a message on the original editor's talk page?
> What about
> contacting people who know more and allowing a few days to get a
> response?
> As it is now, such articles can be started by inexperienced users
> who aren't
> aware of the esoteric lawyeristic discussions about AfD, and then the
> articles deleted simply because they were unaware of those very
> esoteric
> lawyeristic discussions. Then, when someone comes around to writing it
> again, they'll probably say, "well, it was already speedy deleted
> earlier".
> Well, no shit, you never bothered to look into it in the first place.
>
> darin
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


from_name: Daniel R. Tobias

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Arbitration Committee members granted checkuser tool

body:
On 20 Nov 2005 at 17:33, El C <el.ceeh at gmail.com> wrote:

>  You're welcome. I post with gmail, I don't usually write my posts in
>  it in
> case it crashes on refresh. I usually get the quotes mixed up, copying
> text from wordpad into gmail does strange things, apperently (this
> time with stars).

A few tips on keeping your replies well-organized so they don't turn
into tangled messes:

* Always leave a blank line between each section of quoted material
and each section of reply, so they don't run together and make it
hard to tell which is which.

* Trim down quoted material to the minimum needed to establish
context.  Snip out unnecessary parts, especially signature blocks and
list footers; there's no need to quote that stuff back.

* Put your answer after the question you are answering instead of
before; this is not the Jeopardy! game show.

--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/


subject: [WikiEN-l] Another Webcomics Bit

body:
On Nov 20, 2005, at 10:03 PM, geni wrote:
>

> You will exuse me while I dowse the front row seats in petrol?

Now now. You've derailed enough discussions of the problems on AfD
with your bad faith and personal attacks. Leave this one to the grown
ups please.

-Phil


body:
On 11/20/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> People can vote any way they want.  If people vote that way then it's
> possible.  I don't know anything about the "vote-hijacking" jargon that
> you are trying to introduce.

Sadly, when a reality exists, you sometimes have to find a word to describe it.

--
Sam


from_name: ABCD

subject: [WikiEN-l] Fwd: Google Alert - Wikipedia

body:
It seems that the BBC likes us now :-).

---------- Forwarded message ----------
> OPEN media to connect communities
> BBC News - UK
> ... Wikimedia has emerged from the Wikipedia, the freely-available, editable,
> open and collaborative online encyclopaedia set up by Jimmy Wales. ...
> <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4450052.stm>


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Fwd: Google Alert - Wikipedia


from_name: Uwe Brauer

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Moodle, newgroups for Threading

body:
>>>>> "Gregory" == Gregory Maxwell
<gmaxwell at gmail.com> writes:

   Gregory> Part of the point is that all pages should have a single
   Gregory> talk area available so that users have a nice consistent
   Gregory> way to discuss the article.  Many pages talks are used
   Gregory> infrequently but they are still used.... a non-wiki talk
   Gregory> page would just become a spam trap as users couldn't
   Gregory> remove spam as they do today.  Personally I don't find
   Gregory> mailinglists or newsgroups any more convenient, and I
   Gregory> think the wiki editing practice is much needed by our
   Gregory> users.

Oops you have not been on wiki-discussion pages say of size 0.2 M,
which frequent comments. Just to add a comment to check whether I have
used the wikipedia syntax correctly is very time consuming (especially
if the connection is slow).

    - I can write this reply change its  format indenting and the
      like at will,

    - and have not to bother whether my reply gets edited

    - and the  list offer me a reasonable  threading such  that I
      can find my posting and the relevant answers in an instant.

And these points you don't find convenient?

Uwe Brauer


from_name: charles matthews

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia's provable anti-expertise bias

body:
"Fastfission" wrote

>In general I think it's a better idea to actually ask academics what
they think rather than just assume for the worst using stereotypes of
the uptight and absent-minded professor. I'd avise against getting too
pulled in into ridiculous ivory tower parodies, especially if our
upcoming Wikimania is receiving so much generous support from a number
of academic communities.

I was in the thick of academia for fifteen years.  I know of what I speak.

Charles


body:
?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason wrote:
> On 11/20/05, Magnus Manske <magnus.manske at web.de> wrote:
>
>> ?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason wrote:
>>
>>> In the current parser that would not be possible, you can't pass
>>> template arguments to extensions. Also, if it's inline it's likelier
>>> to get updated.
>>>
>>>
>> Funny, last time I checked on my citation feature it worked quite well.
>> That has been a few weeks ago, though.
>>
>
> When you make a template at Template:Extension with the contents:
> """
> <hook>
> arg = {{{1}}}
> </hook>
> """
>
> and call it at a page with {{Extension|myarg}} the output is:
>
> """
> arg = {{{1}}}
> """
>
> I.e. the {{{1}}} is not interpolated, calling the parser on it won't
> work either as you'll be dealing with a new instance of the parser
> which won't replace those variables because as far as it's concerned
> it hasn't been called with any.
>
> Now, your idea of having a template wrap it as {{attribute|rain|...}}
> would presumably require a template at Template:Attribute with
> contents like:
>
> """
> <attr>
> weather = {{{1}}}
> ....
> </attr>
> """
>
> And as I've demonstrated that doesn't work, so what exactly did work
> the last time you checked it?
>
Damn, I distinctly remember I ported the fix for this, based on
something I found on bugzilla.

Maybe someone turned it off again because of unpleasant side effects?
I'll keep you posted if I can find it again.

Magnus


from_name: Brian Haws

body:
--- Philip Sandifer <snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:

> Actually, in this case the speedy claim was "person
> never existed."
>
> Which is a terrible deletion reason, especially
> considering that the
> person did exist. Furthermore, the article was
> tagged within fifteen
> minutes of its creation.
>
> We really, really need to put a "And the article is
> more than 24
> hours old" rule for several of the CSD criteria -
> everything but
> copyvio and patent nonsense, basically. This would
> both prevent the
> atrocity of people who delete without checking the
> history to see if
> it's just the current version that's busted, and it
> would give people
> who make their articles in a series of smaller edits
> (Something many
> people do) a chance to actually write the article
> before the deleting
> angels swoop in.
>
> -Phil

I think at least we should be using the "tag and bag"
system for speedies. At least there would be two sets
of eyes on them. They come and go so fast that they
really get no review or accountability....


body:
On Nov 20, 2005, at 10:27 PM, geni wrote:

> On 11/21/05, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
>> We really, really need to put a "And the article is more than 24
>> hours old" rule for several of the CSD criteria - everything but
>> copyvio and patent nonsense, basically.
>> -Phil
>
> Issues with mirrors mean that copyvio speedies can only really be done
> in the first couple of days. Of course I tend to feels the CSD is
> being streached to far full stop.
>
> --

Indeed - I still strongly support doing copyvio in the first 48 hours.

-Phil


subject: [WikiEN-l] Another Webcomics Bit

body:
On Nov 20, 2005, at 10:16 PM, geni wrote:

> On 11/21/05, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Now now. You've derailed enough discussions of the problems on AfD
>> with your bad faith and personal attacks. Leave this one to the grown
>> ups please.
>>
>> -Phil
>
> Please back that acusation or withdraw it. In this case you appear to
> have run into my strange sense of humor (I mean come on if we are
> going to have chaos we might as well go for total chaos).

I am, regrettably, on a laptop for the next week on which I do not
have much of Wiki-EN archived, making finding the posts in which you
made clear your lack of faith and strong disdain for other
contributors. In light of this, I withdraw the accusation for now.

-Phil


from_name: Harald Hanek

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Gollum now in english

body:
Hello,
the gollum homepage is now in english available.

http://gollum.easycp.de/en/

Have fun with Gollum!

Cheers!
Harald


body:
On Nov 20, 2005, at 10:45 PM, geni wrote:

>
> Well going through the critiria for articles:
>
> 1.I've never really understood that one. Defintly needs a 24 hour
> limit though
> 2.no reason to have a limit on that one
> 3.no reason to have a limit on that one(a link is a link)
> 4.not sure
> 5.Can't be done within 24 hours
> 6.if this type get missed by RC patrol (shouldn't happen) I don't want
> to have to waste time taking them through a full AFD
> 7.Definet 24 clause.
> 8.already has a 48 hour clause.

I would say that 3 should have, if not 24 hours, at least some lag,
if only because people start articles in different ways.

-Phil


from_name: Sam Korn

subject:
[WikiEN-l] need to work out clear policies onMANDATORYandOPTIONAL
	rules on WP

body:
On 11/20/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> So now the resolution of the issue depends on who has the greatest patience.

See http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/How_to_win_an_argument

I feel I have fallen into a number of these traps myself.

--
Sam


from_name: Milos Rancic

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Village pump inside of Navigation bar

body:
Andre said that it is not so easy. I used it, but it is impossible to
use for all Wikipedias.

On 11/18/05, Walter Vermeir <walter at wikipedia.be> wrote:
> Milos Rancic schreef:
>
> > What do others think?
>
> That you can use the normal interwiki-language links to find the
> "Village pump" of a other wiki.
>
> --
> Ook een artikeltje schrijven? WikipediaNL, de vrije GNU/FDL encyclopedie
> http://www.wikipedia.be
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Aphaia

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: new project mailing lists

body:
Support Delirium's idea and I concur with Sj.

On 11/17/05, SJ <2.718281828 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/14/05, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>
> > Would it be useful to separate discussion of new projects (incl.
> > languages) to a separate mailing list?  It's currently taking a
>
> I would like that.  In fact, I would go so far as to say that
> proliferation of mailing lists is a positive thing, when done the
> right way... but that we do not currently do it the right way.
> the whole community should take part in..
>
> > disproportionate amount of general mailing list traffic (particularly
> > wikipedia-l and foundation-l), so discussion of improving existing
> > Wikipedias tends to get lost in the mess.  It's also a frequently
>
> Right.  It would be useful to have a new- and minority-languages list.

>From my impression through discussions and testwiki activities on meta,
perhaps it is fruitful to separate general new project proposals and
new language wikis.
The former proposers might be interested in the latter, but not vice
versa assumedly.

--
Aphaea@*.wikipedia.org
email: Aphaia @ gmail (dot) com


body:
>>>>> "Gregory" == Gregory Maxwell
<gmaxwell at gmail.com> writes:

   Gregory> Sure I've been on large talk pages, thought I generally
   Gregory> archive off the inactive sections once they get that
   Gregory> large!

Problem is that sometimes so called inactive sections will get
comments and answers after a while, since it does not make to much
sense to add that comments in new sections

   >> - I can write this reply change its  format indenting and the
   >> like at will,

   Gregory> You can change the indenting on a wikipage, and someone
   Gregory> walking into a discussion later doesn't need to waste
   Gregory> their time seeing 100x duplication of text as people quote
   Gregory> it since there is only one topmost copy.

Yeah but that chance of indent,  adding : is a sort of PITA, because
it is *not* WYSIWYG (as in emails/newsgroups).

As for (mis)quotes in mailing lists it depends what people quote, a
lot just let the text stay end add text which has no reference to the
quote (kill-paragraph is you friend in emacs/xemacs for those things)

   >> - and have not to bother whether my reply gets edited

   Gregory> Sorry, but the communities need to remove spam and to
   Gregory> refactor and otherwise focus conversations trumps your
   Gregory> paranoia about your comments being edited.

_paranoia_ ??? It happened to me 3 times, including once the reply got
lost and could not be recovered. (Spam in say gmane seems not a huge
problem to me)

   Gregory> If we distrust our fellow editors so much that we must
   Gregory> worry about them editing our comments on a system that
   Gregory> preserves complete revision history, then we have already
   Gregory> lost and should just give up.

It has not necessarily be done by bad intention. The wikipage I am
referring to suffers from editing by the participants (I am not talking
about vandalism here)

   >> - and the  list offer me a reasonable  threading such  that I
   >> can find my posting and the relevant answers in an instant.

   Gregory> Whats wrong with searching for your signature or reading
   Gregory> in diff mode?

It is simply far less convenient than a mailing list newgroup thread

   >> And these points you don't find convenient?

   Gregory> I don't think any of them are sufficiently compelling or
   Gregory> unachievable with the existing behavior that a change
   Gregory> would be justified.

So the last and most annoying of all the points I mentioned, is the
speed.

    - I  write that  reply,   run the  spell  checker  (hopefully
      successfully) and sent it away.

    - In  the  wikipedia discussion page,  I   would have to  run
      several  times the preview,  before saving  the page and if
      the connection  is real slow. Roughly wikipedia discussions
      page   are  around  4  times  slower   before the  relevant
      contribution is digested.


body:
On 20 Nov 2005 at 22:11, ABCD <en.abcd at gmail.com> wrote:

> > ... Wikimedia has emerged from the Wikipedia, the freely-available,
> > editable, open and collaborative online encyclopaedia set up by
> > Jimmy Wales. ... <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4450052.stm>

But just what did Jimmy mean by this statement:

"We are not talking about dissidents and being critical of the
Chinese government," he said, stressing that Wikipedia was about
having the tools to promote your culture.

Is Wikipedia (the Chinese version) censoring out any dissident or
government-critical views in the hopes of getting unblocked by the
Chinese (mainland) government?

--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Tom Cadden wrote:

>Tom Cadden <thomcadden at yahoo.ie> wrote:
>
>Ray Saintonge  wrote: Puddl Duk wrote:
>
>
>
>>>I just now returned from an 8 hour seminar wherein we were repeatedly
>>>informed that free, non-governmental information on the internet is
>>>dubious at best, and should be avoided for anything other than
>>>commercial or general knowledge queries. Instead, the online
>>>university  database was praised (it includes a subscription to
>>>britannica, btw ;)
>>>
>>>Jack (Sam Spade
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>Get used to it. As long as we have no validation/review/vetting/rating
>>mechanism we will always be in various stages of dubiousness.
>>
>>
>>
>Yes and no, but that's gradually being worked out.
>
>But we are a long way off from adequate in terms of proper control of articles. I came across one edit that had been sitting in an article for a month. The article had been edited numerous times but no-one had spotted the clanger. I happen to know a bit about the topic and realised immediately it was a totally made up bit of vandalism.
>
> Among stuff surviving in articles which I came across lately were
> * a made up papal encyclical
> * a claim that Diana Princess of Wales believed that her husband was a shape-shifting lizard from outer space
> * a non-existing Irish government department
>
> How could any academic remind a site that allows stuff like that sit there, unchallenged in articles for long periods of time? I recently wrote an article for an Irish newspaper about a topic I had seen on Wikipedia. The article was fascinating but to be on the safe side I decided to double check it. 90% was A1. But there were 4 monster errors, all added in month ago but never checked. I hope that no kid in using that article for an essay quoted any of the errors. For every five good articles there is a dud in WP. And within each good article there seems to be dud facts. In a host of areas we are scarily far off encyclop?dia standard.
>
> Another example: tonight I wrote an article on the Royal Assent in the Irish Free State. I know a lot about the topic and have read the major books on the crown and the Free State. Everything in there is verifiable and anyone who knows the facts will see it is 100% kosher. But how many others on WP would know about the topic? I could have sneaked in made-up facts and who would know?
>
Checking facts is much more difficult and time consuming than initially
writing an article.  It's quite common for people to muddle what they
really know with what they imagine that they know.  Effective editing
requires a questioning mind, and an ability to spot errors which even
experts can miss.  In the example  that you wrote, my first impulse
would be to question an apparent contradiction in term between "Royal
Assent" and "Irish Free State". There may be a perfectly valid reason,
but a good editor should at least ask the question.

Ec


from_name: Timwi

body:
> Yeah but that chance of indent,  adding : is a sort of PITA, because
> it is *not* WYSIWYG (as in emails/newsgroups).

There's nothing stopping you from writing a WYSIWYG editor for Wiki
mark-up. :-)

> _paranoia_ ??? It happened to me 3 times,

What happened to you three times? That a comment of yours was edited?
That is to be expected, and perfectly alright. That it was edited
maliciously and nobody reverted it? That's hard to believe.

> (Spam in say gmane seems not a huge problem to me)

This is because friendly list administrators clean out the spam behind
the scenes so you don't have to. Just because you can't see it doesn't
mean it doesn't exist ;-)

Timwi


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: [WikiEN-l] Status of article rating feature?

body:
> BTW, I used a combination of revision IDs and timestamps, because you
> told me the revision IDs can get out of order through
> deleting/undeleting revisions, and I wanted them in correct order no
> matter what.

You should use IDs (and never timestamps) for purposes of uniquely
identifying a row, not for sorting. You should use timestamps (and never
IDs) for sorting purposes, and never for unique identification. You
shouldn't ever need to use a combination of both for a single purpose.

Timwi


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: DokuWiki -> MediaWiki Konverter

body:
> Ich m?chte von dem DokuWiki (http://wiki.splitbrain.org/wiki:dokuwiki)
> Daten in das MediaWiki importieren. Die Daten sind als UTF-8 Textfile
> gespeichert. Gibt es f?r sowas schon ein Konverter?

Nein, aber es gibt ein Script (importDump.php), welches die XML-Dumps in
die Datenbank importiert. Du kannst dieses Script evtl.
auseinandernehmen und die relevanten Datenbank-Schreiboperationen
"abgucken".

Timwi


body:
Timwi wrote:
>
>> Ich m?chte von dem DokuWiki (http://wiki.splitbrain.org/wiki:dokuwiki)
>> Daten in das MediaWiki importieren. Die Daten sind als UTF-8 Textfile
>> gespeichert. Gibt es f?r sowas schon ein Konverter?
>
> Nein, aber es gibt ein Script (importDump.php), welches die XML-Dumps in
> die Datenbank importiert. Du kannst dieses Script evtl.
> auseinandernehmen und die relevanten Datenbank-Schreiboperationen
> "abgucken".

*sigh* I wish people would keep the same topic within the same thread!


from_name: Bryan Derksen

body:
geni wrote:

>On 11/21/05, Brian Haws <brian at bhaws.com> wrote:
>
>
>>I think at least we should be using the "tag and bag"
>>system for speedies. At least there would be two sets
>>of eyes on them. They come and go so fast that they
>>really get no review or accountability....
>>
>>
>
>The deletion log can be view by anyone. I'm not sure we have the
>rescources to do what you describe.
>
>
I'm assuming "tag and bag" means requiring that one person put a
speedy-delete tag on an article and wait for someone else to come along
and delete it, therefore requiring at least two people to agree that
it's speediable rather than letting just one admin decide on his own up
front. If so, I don't see how that would take all that much in the way
of resources. It's not like having an article tagged for speedy deletion
stick around for a few days or weeks or whatever waiting to be stumbled
across a second time is going to harm Wikipedia significantly, and if
someone wanted to they could do a quick "speedy patrol" going through
the category checking out currently tagged articles.

I've speedied articles occasionally myself, and the only situation I can
think of where it would have been an actual problem not being able to
just click "delete" and be done with it would be when I'm trying to move
an article to a location where there's already another article or
redirect. This situation could be given an expemption to the "tag and
bag" requirement easily. Any other situations come to mind?


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Help needed for helpdesk-l

body:
Angela wrote:
> On 11/14/05, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
>
>>I should clarify at this point that I have no interest in convincing you
>>of anything. I was trying to give some helpful hints as to how to win
>>the volunteers you so desperately seem to need, but obviously nobody is
>>listening, so I might as well stop bothering and not volunteer.
>
> I think you've misunderstood the situation. It isn't the private OTRS
> queue which needs more volunteers right now, but the publicly
> available helpdesk-l, to which anyone can subscribe and help out at
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/helpdesk-l

No, you misunderstood.

There is a need for users to be able to ask questions. You attempted to
cater for this need by creating helpdesk-l. It has become obvious that
people cannot do the task properly in a mailing list, and as a result,
helpdesk-l doesn't fulfill its purpose.

So I suggested a ticket system. Then you said "we already have one" and
linked to it. So I looked at it and noticed it is completely shut off
and private and secret. As such, it doesn't fulfill the task either. I
would have thought making a part of the system public and open would
only be a quick and simple configuration setting, but if it isn't, well
then OTRS clearly isn't the solution either.

Either way, you'll have to come up with something better than helpdesk-l.

Timwi


from_name: Walter van Kalken

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Chinese wikipedia unblocked?

body:
As I was told that we shouldn't do anything so the Chinese wikipedia
would get unblocked I am curious ...... is it still blocked? If so I
feel we should change tactics.

Waerth/Walter


from_name: Sean Barrett

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Arbitration Committee members granted checkuser
	tool

body:
Jack Lynch stated for the record:
> Isn't that what its doing now? I feel rather intimidated by the
> slavemasters whip (arbcom) at the moment...
>
> Jack (Sam Spade)

You think that the enforcement of community rules on a volunteer-run Web
site is comparable with slavery.

/me boggles.

--
  Sean Barrett     | And that's the latest version
  sean at epoptic.org | of the Internet, right?


from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] Another Webcomics Bit

body:
On 11/21/05, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> Just as a heads up, while you were indulging in the usual
> masturbatory discussions of whether AfD is deeply flawed again that
> seem to follow every time I point this out, Dragonfiend put the
> recently concluded Checkerboard Nightmare on AfD. His nomination was,
> as far too many nominations in far too many fields are, borne of out
> and out ignorance - nobody who is remotely knowledgable about
> webcomics would even think to propose Checkerboard Nightmare for
> deletion. But, of course, the votes of people who know what they're
> talking about continue to have active voice with the people who have
> decided that ridding Wikipedia of the scourge of webcomics (or blogs)
> (or whatever) is their mission in life.
>

You can't stop people from listing stuff on afd. You can make a solid
enough case to prevent something from being deleted. It's one of the
effects of wikipedia being a wiki

> The article isn't going to get deleted, so don't rush off to find it
> and vote to keep - it's fine. But go ahead and have a look at http://
> www.websnark.com/archives/2005/11/however_the_ent.html so you can see
> Wikipedia take another prominent hit from an important member of the
> webcomics community. Compare that to http://www.websnark.com/archives/
> 2004/11/a_modest_webcom.html a year ago. In the past year, we have
> taken someone who was strongly pro-Wikipedia and turned him into
> someone who thinks we suck. Someone prominent, influential, and,
> frankly, damn respectable.
>

So some people have fragile egos and rush to judgment. Somehow I don't
think we are going to be able to change basic human traints.
Checkerboard Nightmare was never really in any danger of deletion.
This reminds of that australian jewidh group laying into us  because
one of our articles got vandalised. Yes it happens but if people are
going to judge wikipedia by the actions of one person I don't think
there is away way we are going to be able to keep them happy.

> So, yeah. AfD? Still broken. Still driving people away. Still
> generating ill will, bad faith, and bad decisions.
>

Evidence that this person was contibuteing to wikipedia in the first
place? Even a basic understanding of procedures would have allowed the
person to understand that being listed on AFD doesn't mean much.

> Carry on your fiddling. I'm gonna go get front row seats for when the
> Colosseum ignites.
>
> -Phil

You will exuse me while I dowse the front row seats in petrol?

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] Lauritsen talk page

body:
On 11/21/05, Brown, Darin <Darin.Brown at enmu.edu> wrote:
> Now, let's examine what kind of "reasoning" is going on here:
>
> Almost nothing has been written on this article at the moment, (2 lines),
> yet someone is already taking pre-emptive measures to assert that this
> person's writings (none of whose claims have even been articulated in the
> article) are false before the article is "finalized or posted". Just the
> wording there tells me this is someone completely unfamiliar with wikipedia.
>
> On top of this, this nonsense about a "bibliography being false", confusing
> it with the claims in the elements of the bibliography. You could use this
> against anyone. You could say, "well, we shouldn't have articles on
> holocaust deniers, because their bibliographies (sic) are false". Their
> bibliographies are NOT FALSE -- holocaust deniers may be spouting incredibly
> false statements, but the existence of their publications is not "false". I
> am shocked at the lack of basic logic and reasoning used at this talk page
> and elsewhere.
>

People appear to be being sceptical. You want a facturaly correct
wikipedia that is the price you have to pay.

> Note also the fact that the New York Native has no wikipedia is article is
> used as "evidence". This is even worse than googling and alexa rankings. As
> I've said before, ignorance knows no bounds, and nothing will stop people
> from pontificating about things which they're completely ignorant of.
>

For western subjects the "has wikipedia heard of anthing related to
this guy" is quite a good test. If you ever go through AFD deleted
articles tend to be orphans. While this of course breaks down when it
it comes to non western topics the shear level of coverage of western
topics does make it a vaguely useful thing to cheack

> Of course, what do I care. Episodes like this have already driven me leaving
> wikipedia for now, creating a new wikicity and consulting wikipedia just to
> copy stuff to it.
>
> darin

Fine. As long as you stay within the terms of the GDFL we can still
use anything you produce.

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] Another Webcomics Bit

body:
On 11/21/05, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> Now now. You've derailed enough discussions of the problems on AfD
> with your bad faith and personal attacks. Leave this one to the grown
> ups please.
>
> -Phil

Please back that acusation or withdraw it. In this case you appear to
have run into my strange sense of humor (I mean come on if we are
going to have chaos we might as well go for total chaos).

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Lauritsen speedy deletion??

body:
On 11/21/05, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> Actually, in this case the speedy claim was "person never existed."

Considering the number of articles that link I feel that claim lacks
credibility. Is there a way to add something along the the lines of
"Warning: The page you are about to delete is not an orphan:[[What
links here]]" to the confirm deletion page?
--
geni


body:
On 11/21/05, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> We really, really need to put a "And the article is more than 24
> hours old" rule for several of the CSD criteria - everything but
> copyvio and patent nonsense, basically.
> -Phil

Issues with mirrors mean that copyvio speedies can only really be done
in the first couple of days. Of course I tend to feels the CSD is
being streached to far full stop.

--
geni


body:
On 11/21/05, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> Indeed - I still strongly support doing copyvio in the first 48 hours.
>
> -Phil

Well going through the critiria for articles:

1.I've never really understood that one. Defintly needs a 24 hour limit though
2.no reason to have a limit on that one
3.no reason to have a limit on that one(a link is a link)
4.not sure
5.Can't be done within 24 hours
6.if this type get missed by RC patrol (shouldn't happen) I don't want
to have to waste time taking them through a full AFD
7.Definet 24 clause.
8.already has a 48 hour clause.

Comments?
--
geni


body:
On 11/21/05, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Nov 20, 2005, at 10:45 PM, geni wrote:
>
> >
> > Well going through the critiria for articles:
> >
> > 1.I've never really understood that one. Defintly needs a 24 hour
> > limit though
> > 2.no reason to have a limit on that one
> > 3.no reason to have a limit on that one(a link is a link)
> > 4.not sure
> > 5.Can't be done within 24 hours
> > 6.if this type get missed by RC patrol (shouldn't happen) I don't want
> > to have to waste time taking them through a full AFD
> > 7.Definet 24 clause.
> > 8.already has a 48 hour clause.
>
> I would say that 3 should have, if not 24 hours, at least some lag,
> if only because people start articles in different ways.
>
> -Phil
>

They can recreate it. I can't think of any reason to start an article
by just putting up a link and if they do it's hardly a hudge amount of
work that has been lost. If people want to create articles in a way
that involves them beeing a speedy candidate as some point could they
not do it in their user space?

--
geni


body:
On 11/21/05, Matt Brown <morven at gmail.com> wrote:
> Surely the broken practices of mirrors are Not Our Problem?
>
> -Matt

The problem is that the sandard test for a copyvio is to google it.
After a couple of days you start getting results from mirrors which
makes things more difficult.

--
geni


from_name: Lars Aronsson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Preserving GFDL requirements when splitting articles

body:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:

> Wikipedia's use of the GFDL is already absurd.  If you want to
> make any sense of things you have to look beyond the GFDL.

Dual licensing is not uncommon, with MySQL software often
mentioned as an example.

In a wiki without any mention of a license (I think c2.com falls
in this category, and susning.nu certainly does), the wiki system
itself silently implies that articles can be edited and refactored
by other users, and that an entire text paragraph can be cut out
of one article and pasted into another within the same wiki.
People who save their contribution to any wiki can be assumed to
have agreed to this "implicit wiki license".  In the case of
Wikipedia, this is de facto a dual licensing with GFDL, where the
implicit license includes recipies being moved to Wikibooks,
dictionary definitions being moved to Wiktionary, source texts
being moved to Wikisource, and articles being translated and
reused in other languages of Wikipedia.  Because that is how the
system works, and you better know this when you contribute.

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


body:
On 11/21/05, Brian Haws <brian at bhaws.com> wrote:
> I think at least we should be using the "tag and bag"
> system for speedies. At least there would be two sets
> of eyes on them. They come and go so fast that they
> really get no review or accountability....

The deletion log can be view by anyone. I'm not sure we have the
rescources to do what you describe.

--
geni


from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

subject: [WikiEN-l] Lauritsen talk page

body:
Of course claiming a bibliography contains false information (if I
understood it correctly) is no reason to speedy delete. The existence
of the article is disputed, so it should go through AFD per policy.

Mgm


body:
> lawyeristic discussions. Then, when someone comes around to writing it
> again, they'll probably say, "well, it was already speedy deleted earlier".
> Well, no shit, you never bothered to look into it in the first place.
>
> darin

If something was speedied as no asserting notability it cannot be
deleted for being a recreation. It needs to be sufficiently similar or
there must have been a discussion on AFD which established it
shouldn't have an article at all.

Mgm


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] Another Webcomics Bit

body:
geni wrote:

>On 11/21/05, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>Now now. You've derailed enough discussions of the problems on AfD
>>with your bad faith and personal attacks. Leave this one to the grown
>>ups please.
>>
>>
>Please back that acusation or withdraw it. In this case you appear to
>have run into my strange sense of humor (I mean come on if we are
>going to have chaos we might as well go for total chaos).
>
>
You've already *asserted* your bad faith outright, when you proudly
declared you were systematically removing content from articles.
It's a bit odd you now claim you're entitled to a fresh assumption
of good faith.

- d.


body:
On 11/21/05, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
> I've speedied articles occasionally myself, and the only situation I can
> think of where it would have been an actual problem not being able to
> just click "delete" and be done with it would be when I'm trying to move
> an article to a location where there's already another article or
> redirect. This situation could be given an expemption to the "tag and
> bag" requirement easily. Any other situations come to mind?

with permission images
orphan fair use.
RC patrol when there is a lot of vandalism going on.

--
geni


body:
 "Daniel R. Tobias" wrote
>
> But just what did Jimmy mean by this statement:
>
> "We are not talking about dissidents and being critical of the
> Chinese government," he said, stressing that Wikipedia was about
> having the tools to promote your culture.
>
> Is Wikipedia (the Chinese version) censoring out any dissident or
> government-critical views in the hopes of getting unblocked by the
> Chinese (mainland) government?

Whatever Jimbo did mean, I'm sure he didn't mean that NPOV was on hold.

Charles


from_name: dpbsmith at verizon.net

subject: [WikiEN-l] Expertise

body:
At the risk of pointing out the obvious...

Expertise in a particular subject area does not make someone an expert on
whether a particular topic in that subject area belongs in Wikipedia.

Expertise does not give anyone the right to dictate Wikipedia content.

What it _can_ do is make a person a facile researcher capable of quickly
marshalling evidence on whether a topic meets criteria for inclusion--
criteria that have been established by the _non_-expert Wikipedian community.

If someone were to contribute an article on the Roadshow barbershop quartet,
http://www.roadshowquartet.com/ , it would properly be deleted as not meeting
WP:MUSIC or WP:BIO. The world's greatest expert on barbershop quartets
testifying to their notability in the barbershop community would not matter,
and ignoring his testimony would not constitute bias against expertise.

On the other hand, if someone contributed a scrappy substub on the Buffalo
Bills that failed to mention, say, their Broadway appearance... someone
unfamiliar with them might well nominate the article for deletion.

An expert saying "that's ridiculous, they're notable because I'm an expert
and I say so and anyone who doesn't agree is an ignoramus" would properly be
ignored.

An expert could, however, quickly point out half-a-dozen ways in which they
do meet WP:MUSIC and my guess such a presentation would garner quick support
the article would be kept--because the expert _used_ his expertise, rather
than _asserting_ it.


from_name: Phil Boswell

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Google Alert - Wikipedia

body:
"Daniel R. Tobias" <dan at tobias.name> wrote in
message news:43810980.1469.B786808 at dan.tobias.name...
> On 20 Nov 2005 at 22:11, ABCD
> <en.abcd at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> > ... Wikimedia has emerged from the Wikipedia, the freely-available,
>> > editable, open and collaborative online encyclopaedia set up by
>> > Jimmy Wales. ... <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4450052.stm>
>
> But just what did Jimmy mean by this statement:
>
> "We are not talking about dissidents and being critical of the
> Chinese government," he said, stressing that Wikipedia was about
> having the tools to promote your culture.
>
> Is Wikipedia (the Chinese version) censoring out any dissident or
> government-critical views in the hopes of getting unblocked by the
> Chinese (mainland) government?

My impression of what he was meaning (and I suspect that quote is much
cut-down from his original wording) was that in blocking the Chinese
Wikipedia, the information being suppressed is not just that stuff, which
you wouldn't really be surprised about the Chinese Government wanting to
keep quiet, but also the **other** stuff about general topics.

The block means that people in China cannot see Wikipedia **at all**.
They're not simply prevented from accessing articles which might (or might
not) be critical about their Government, they can't see even articles about
everyday life, utterly non-controversial and often important.

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


subject: [WikiEN-l] Has the <noinclude> bug been fixed?

body:
[please note cross-posting and amend follow-ups as appropriate]

Is it now safe to SUBSTitute templates which have a <noinclude> section?

If so, we can go back and re-insert those <noinclude> sections which were
removed because they screwed up the target articles.
--
Phil
[[en:User:Phil Boswell]]


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Re: Lauritsen speedy deletion??

body:
"geni" <geniice at gmail.com> wrote in message
news:f80608430511201957t789f8ce7y9c255459d19565a4 at mail.gmail.com...
> On 11/21/05, Philip Sandifer
> <snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Nov 20, 2005, at 10:45 PM, geni wrote:
> > > Well going through the critiria for articles:
> > > 3.no reason to have a limit on that one(a link is a link)
> > I would say that 3 should have, if not 24 hours, at least some lag,
> > if only because people start articles in different ways.
> They can recreate it. I can't think of any reason to start an article
> by just putting up a link and if they do it's hardly a hudge amount of
> work that has been lost.

Would they then not run the risk of having their article tagged for Speedy
Deletion on the grounds of "recreating an article which was already
deleted"?

>  If people want to create articles in a way
> that involves them beeing a speedy candidate as some point could they
> not do it in their user space?

Why should people have to jump through hoops simply to avoid impolite people
tromping all over perfectly good articles-in-progress?
--
Phil
[[en:User:Phil Boswell]]


from_name: Jack Lynch

body:
> Those who refuse to consider the option of incentive are violently
> objectionable.

Money isn't the only possible incentive.  And any system not
involving slave labor, in which work actually gets done, obviously
includes incentives sufficient to get the people involved to do the
work.  (Well, I guess slave labor does too, if you consider "keeping
from getting whipped to death" an incentive.)  Are you claiming that,
due to declining the use of paid staff, Wikipedia will end up forced
into acquiring slaves to do its work?

--
== Dan ==

Isn't that what its doing now? I feel rather intimidated by the
slavemasters whip (arbcom) at the moment...

Jack (Sam Spade)


from_name: Nyenyec N

body:
On 11/20/05, Tom Cadden <thomcadden at yahoo.ie> wrote:
>  Another example: tonight I wrote an article on the Royal Assent in the Irish Free State. I know a lot about the topic and have read the major books on the crown and the Free State. Everything in there is verifiable and anyone who knows the facts will see it is 100% kosher. But how many others on WP would know about the topic? I could have sneaked in made-up facts and who would know? Who would know if an expert on science sneaked in dodgy facts into a highly technical article on biotechnology? Might it be weeks, or months before someone with similar knowledge came along, took one look and bellowed 'what the hell?? That is made-up rubbish.' In other words much of what we have on WP we have on trust. On popular pages on popular topics errors can be spotted quickly. But on obscure topics we have to trust that editors are not making up stuff. Or that they are not getting a fact wrong by accident: that a meeting took place on the 6th and not the 7th, that a book title had the word
>   'in'
>  not 'on', etc.

That's what I thought until I spotted a serious mistake in [[Adolf Hitler]].

http://tinyurl.com/bqa4z

-- nyenyec


from_name: Matt Brown

body:
On 11/21/05, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> Does failure to fall drooling at our feet now count as opposition?

I seem to recall, in fact, that a fair number of their experts didn't
find our articles all that awful.  And in at least one case of a
negative reaction (the fashion expert's horror at our [[haute
couture]] page) I'm not surprised - that's a Wikipedia weak spot at
present.

They found what is pretty much the real state of Wikipedia right now;
that we have some excellent articles, a fair number which are OK but
need improvement, and some real stinkers.  We've come a long way, BUT
there's still a long way to go.

-Matt