from_name: Andrew Dunbar

body:
On 6/8/06, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> Roman Nosov wrote:
> > Regarding UTF-8 support. Perhaps it would be better if I try to
> > explain some of the problems I'm facing. For example I'm not tracking
> > most frequently used English words (a, the, and, or ?). In my opinion
> > every language should be tweaked separately and that's why I'm
> > suggesting to first test it on English Wikipedia.
> > Also I don't have a problem with finding spaces in UTF-8 encoded
> > strings and splitting it there. The problem is that some Unicode
> > characters like ? (letter w with two dots on top, Unicode code 0x1E85)
> > are used to write words and some Unicode characters such as ' (Left
> > single quotation mark, Unicode code 0x2018) are used to separate
> > words. Also I believe these characters could be encoded as HTML
> > entities in Wikitext.
> > As I'm tracking words I need to distinguish between these "character
> > classes" as they are known in regular expressions (i.e. \w word
> > character and \W non word character). If Tim Starling has a silver
> > bullet that can solve these problems feel free to e-mail it to me.
> > However in my opinion implementing that kind of UTF-8 support from
> > scratch can be somewhat tricky business.
> > The bottom line is that problems above *can* be solved but what I
> > suggest is to try on English Wikipedia first to see how it's going to
> > work in general and whether it's a useful feature. Support for other
> > languages could and should be added later on one language at a time.
> >
>
> High-numbered punctuation characters are rare, the approach I took in
> wikidiff2 was to consider them part of the word. I considered all
> non-alphanumeric characters less than 0xc0 as word-splitting punctuation
> characters.

The Unicode character databases actually include information on which chars
are letters, which are punctuation, etc. Some programming languages incorporate
this into appropriate functions such as isletter(), ispunt() or the
like. I believe Perl
has them. I don't know whether PHP has them or not but if it doesn't that might
be considered a bug.

> There are three languages that I'm aware of that don't use
> spaces to separate words, and thus require special handling: Chinese,
> Japanese and Thai. They are the only ones that I was able to find while
> searching the web for word segmentation information, and nobody from any
> other language wiki has complained.

The other language I can think of that doesn't use spaces is Khmer but
it doesn't
have many fonts yet and so very few web sites if any and surely no wikis. Some
other Southeast Asian scripts may fall into the same category.

> Chinese and Japanese are adequately
> handled by doing character-level diffs -- I received lots of praise from the
> Japanese Wikipedia for this scheme. Chinese and Japanese word segmentation
> for search or machine translation is a much more difficult problem, but
> luckily solving it is unnecessary for diff formatting. Character-level diffs
> may well be superior anyway.
>
> For Thai I am using character-level diffs, and although I haven't received
> any complaints from the Wikipedians, I believe this is less than ideal. Thai
> has lots of composing characters, so you often end up highlighting little
> dots on top of letters and the like. Really what is required here is
> dictionary-based word segmentation.

I believe there are free dictionary based word segmentation algorithms
available for Thai. It's also known not to be perfect but I'm not aware of any
free Thai word segmenters that do better than them.

Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail)

> Our search engine is also next to
> useless on the Thai Wikipedia due to the lack of word segmentation. But
> that's not a problem Rowan has to solve.
>
> Putting all that together, here's how I detect word characters in wikidiff2:
>
> inline bool my_istext(int ch)
> {
>        // Standard alphanumeric
>        if ((ch >= '0' && ch <= '9') ||
>           (ch == '_') ||
>           (ch >= 'A' && ch <= 'Z') ||
>           (ch >= 'a' && ch <= 'z'))
>        {
>                return true;
>        }
>        // Punctuation and control characters
>        if (ch < 0xc0) return false;
>        // Thai, return false so it gets split up
>        if (ch >= 0xe00 && ch <= 0xee7) return false;
>        // Chinese/Japanese, same
>        if (ch >= 0x3000 && ch <= 0x9fff) return false;
>        if (ch >= 0x20000 && ch <= 0x2a000) return false;
>        // Otherwise assume it's from a language that uses spaces
>        return true;
> }
>
> Now this might not be sounding "trivial" anymore. UTF-8 support is trivial,
> I'll stand by that, but supporting all the languages of the world is not so
> trivial. But as you can see, language support isn't as hard as you might
> think, because lots of research has already been done.
>
> -- Tim Starling
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

--
http://linguaphile.sf.net


list: foundation-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Foundation-l] Instant Commons : INCORRECT

body:
Gregory,

this is great fun and all, but you know, there's really no point in
now discussing the fine points of InstantCommons with everyone who has
an opinion on it. The specs were announced and RfC'd, the project was
approved, it has funding. Now that it's politically convenient to
criticize the project you can try to find faults with it however much
you like. The point is, it has already undergone the necessary
processes and met the requirements.

My whole argument is that the bureaucracy of Wikimedia cannot even
handle small projects (and you argue that it's even smaller than we
say). If we have the same process - including the free-for-all now -
for larger projects, then Wikimedia is an entirely dysfunctional
organization when it comes to managing such projects. When "the power
of collaboration and openness" becomes "the power of many people to
prevent things from happening", nothing will ever happen.

I will just reply briefly below:

> What is the purpose of having conversion services?

>From my point of view: Offering such services to free content wikis --
and holding shared fundraising drives -- would be a great thing.
Again, this is for Wikimedia to figure out, however.

> What was the point of including technical detail in the proposal when
> it was so poorly considered that we're left saying "Well, we can turn
> it off until it's improved"?

Read the response above -- I disagree that it was poorly technically
considered. But if Brion wanted some failure caching mechanism before
turning it on, then of course we would implement that. Having some
buffer in the development funding helps here.

> What happens when the commons image is deleted but the remote wiki's
> retain the image?

The same that happens when the Commons images about orthodox churches
I pointed out to you are deleted, and the remote wikis retain the
image. It's their responsibility, not ours. As for the licensing
information, it is cached locally.

> Fortunately this is fairly easy to resolve. Carry a copy of the image
> page with it.  A system without such a feature could probably not be
> accepted for use with Wikis outside of the foundation.

See specs: "The description page will use the existing functionality
to load metadata from Commons using interwiki transclusion; however, a
new caching table will be created and used in order to store and
retrieve the returned HTML description once it has been first
downloaded."

> We know commons frequently has content which we can not legally
> distribute, but we're able to address it almost completely. Instant
> commons as proposed will create a situation where we frequently can
> not address it.

This situation already exists. You just fail to recognize it as such.

> I think it's a little disingenuous to call it a 'manual process'.
> Downloading an image from commons and uploading it to the local wiki
> is a manual process. It gives an opportunity for someone to evaluate
> the sanity of the copyright claims.

And as my cited example shows, that makes the situation much worse.

> 5K EUR is almost two man months at the rates we pay our developers.
> If this feature  as outlined will take more than a weeks time,
> complete with debugging and the creation of a test suite then I
> suspect we have over designed it, that we are paying too much, or
> both.

You think? I may have a few 1.25K projects for you then.

Erik


list: wikimedia-l


from_name: Daniel Arnold

body:
Am Donnerstag, 08. Juni 2006 21:34 schrieb Gregory Maxwell:
> Considering that we've had violations persist for months after they
> were tagged and even brought up in a Wikimedia board meeting, I'd say
> that our position is even weaker than napsters.

Well we do our very best. I don't want to go into details why deletion on
Commons is so much more work than in a single wikipedia, you all probably
know it already very good. But one is for certain: We don't need more admins,
we need more active admins and we need a change of mind of the people using
Commons that Commons is more than a wikipedia helper project.

There are also some things that would help Commons much more than you'd
imagine:

Burn all Fair Use images on *all* Wikimedia projects *now*. And I really mean
burn. Just *mass delete* them on sight ASAP without looking back.

I am really sick educating people afterwards that Commons is not en.wikipedia
for example. So many people from wikipedia simply dump their stuff in Commons
and just don't get the difference that Commons is not their Wikipedia.

So please in every local wiki educate people that Fair Use is a clear NO.
Please make this everywhere your most important image copyright policy.

I know that this sounds radical to some of you but it would really help us a
lot and it is worth the trouble (the trouble will quickly decrease after
you're mainly done with fair use deletions).

Arnomane


subject: [Foundation-l] Eloquence #00 - was: Instant Commons : INCORRECT

body:
On 6/8/06, Zack Clark <meta at world1tours.com> wrote:
>  > Wikipedia is an insanely bad idea from a legal
>  > point of view and would never have been started
>  > through _any_ process which we are actually using
>  > in our organization to start things.

> Dear Erik, could you kindly elaborate?
> I'm personally favor the concept of positioning your-
> self out of harms way in the first place rather than
> plunging into some slime pit of leaches just because
> it's the norm. So I sense you have valuable insights
> here that could spare us a world of big hurt & havoc!

See [[John Seigenthaler, Sr.]]. We publish potentially libelous
information alongside a huge collection of well-referenced quality
material, under the same logo, without any distinction for the reader
between one and the other. We make that information available as free
content, and allow anyone to scrape it off our site or download our
database, meaning that the libelous information gets copied all over
the place. Legally speaking, if Wikipedia didn't exist, no lawyer
would ever approve it.

Erik


list: wikien-l

from_name: Ilmari Karonen

subject: [WikiEN-l] Saladin1970 (new thread)

body:
Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
> On Fri, 26 May 2006 14:58:41 +0200, you wrote:
>
>>Most people
>>here didn't know there is a real Abu Hamza that incites hatred and
>>most people wouldn't have cared about his email address unless someone
>>had accused him for it.
>
> You have a citation to back that claim?  I'm sure you wouldn't make
> bold assertions without getting the basic facts straight, right?

For what it's worth, I certainly didn't.  Actually, I still don't know
much about him, since I haven't felt any particular urge to check out
his article, but from what I gather of the references made here, the guy
seems to be only marginally notable outside the UK.

--
Ilmari Karonen


body:
On 6/8/06, Daniel Arnold <arnomane at gmx.de> wrote:
> Burn all Fair Use images on *all* Wikimedia projects *now*.

:-) As we have discussed many times, there are many valid instances of
fair use, from the use of logos or copyrighted characters which will
never be freely licensed, to historical photographs of great
significance. Copyright law provides us with exemptions exactly
because it recognizes the potential educational value of using
copyrighted materials. We should not weaken the position of those who
depend on those exemptions by positioning ourselves against them.

And I really doubt that it would even improve the situation. Yes, we
have many en.wikipedians assuming that en: works like Commons: and
vice versa, in spite of 20 cm high letters telling them that it ain't
so. Well, these people are probably not following existing
en.wikipedia fair use policy either. No amount of policy is going to
stop them. You just have to whack them over the head a few times until
they get it.

What I do think we need to do, and I've said it before, is make sure
that every Wikimedia at least _has_ a sane policy on those matters.
Because I doubt that this is currently the case.

Erik


body:
On 6/8/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
> What I do think we need to do, and I've said it before, is make sure
> that every Wikimedia at least _has_ a sane policy on those matters.
^
.. every Wikimedia wiki ..


from_name: GerardM

body:
Hoi,
Either it is a resource there to used or it is not. You dodge this
questions with arguments that have nothing to do with the point. The
point is: it is there to be used or it is not.

If it is not safe to use, we cannot use it either. Once we have
checked content, we can stamp it with the "Commons stamp of approval"
or we can do whatever. My point is that if Commons is to be a public
resource it should be allowed to be a public resource. It being a
resource that is approached by machines allows people to respect the
license by providing correct license information. At this moment you
are lucky when they attribute Commons and it is rare when all the
relevant info is properly posted.

InstantCommons is one way to improve the fulfillment of the
requirements that licenses define. I could even be so bold and say
that InstantCommons is the best way to ensure that usage of the
Commons material will be properly attributed. I can even be so bold
and say that what you see as the weakness of Commons is the strength
of InstantCommons; We can register where a file was downloaded to.
When this file is found to be a copyvio, people will see that it is
also at Commons and this will allow them to remedy the situation.
Remote Wikis can be informed as to the problematic content they
downloaded.

Yes, Commons is responsive and needs to stay that way. When content is
removed, it is no longer available. When content is marked as
problematic, it needs not to be available for InstantCommons. We can
record what was downloaded from Commons by what Wiki. We can do
whatever. There are two things that should be clear: we can inform a
non-WMF wiki about problematic material but it is up to the management
of this Wiki to take the appropriate action.

Thanks,
    GerardM

Yes, all this is very much a re-hash. Most/All of these things have
been said before.

On 6/8/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/8/06, GerardM <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I do however want to address Amgine's point. There is one important
> > difference between Commons and Napster. On Commons people are actively
> > engaged in ensuring that content is properly labeled and licensed.
> > This is in marked contrast with Napster where the defence was that
> > they were only providing a service and that it was not THEIR content.
>
> Considering that we've had violations persist for months after they
> were tagged and even brought up in a Wikimedia board meeting, I'd say
> that our position is even weaker than napsters.
>
> At least napster was obviously at-your-own-risk.   As things stand
> today I think it would be irresponsible for us to encourage others to
> use content taken from commons automatically.  Yes, people can browse
> commons and upload, but that means at least one person other than the
> uploader has had a chance to consider the copyright impact.  With
> instant commons, some drive-by anonymous editor types in
> [[Image:Cat.jpg]] and you may suddenly have a violation.
>
> > Given that everything is done to make Commons free of copyrighted
> > articles and given that Commons explicitly aims to be a public
> > resource for Free material. It is stupid to suggest that this cannot
> > be because not everything has been 100% checked. Either it is a public
> > resource or it is not. You cannot have it both ways.
>
> I don't follow.   Instant commons as proposed would enable the
> automated propagation of content without any real human oversight.
> That seems quite dangerous.
>
> Consider.
> Sue holds the copyright to a book cover which includes pretty flowers.
>
> John is not bright and uploads it to commons as pretty_flowers.jpg
> tagged as "Public Domain".
> Because our interface is so helpful, his tagging looks well formed and valid.
>
> Over several months various Wiki's pick it up via instant commons.
>
> Sue notices, and asks us to take down this obvious violation. We do,
> but now sue is left playing wack-a-mole with hundreds, if not
> thousands, of sites. Many of whom are still distributing the content
> with a notice that it's public domain.
>
> What a mess.
>
> We've avoided a lot of problems with copyright holders on media by
> simply being very responsive. While we've had instances of people
> quite angry at us over mirrored text that we can't control.  Images
> are an especially weak point for us from a copyright perspective, so
> our ability to be more responsive (due to a lack of mirroring) has
> been fortunate.
>
> > What InstantCommons does is nothing more than make the material that
> > is there as a public resource available in a convenient way.
>
> As proposed it is also a vehicle where any irresponsibility on our
> part can lead to greatly increased harm.  Care should be taken to
> avoid this.
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


body:
Am Donnerstag, 08. Juni 2006 21:48 schrieb Brion Vibber:
> > Considering that we've had violations persist for months after they
> > were tagged and even brought up in a Wikimedia board meeting, I'd say
> > that our position is even weaker than napsters.
>
> Give me URLs and I'll happily bust some heads.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Against_policy

You have two choices:
* Slow deletion with (anymous) unlinking (see CheckUsage tab on top) in all
wikis including RTL wikis (great "fun" for LTR-people like me) and maybe
getting some messages that you should login there and talk to them in let us
say Hindi... And don't forget to check out the user "gallery" of the uploader
(see at his user page the tab "gallery", one copyvio promises 5 more...)
* Fast deletion without unlinking and creating some trouble on Village Pump
and the possibility that someone will reupload it in no time as his favourite
pages are broken. ;-)

So I'd be really happy about help regardless which one of the two choices you
choose... :-)

Arnomane


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Platonides

subject: [Wikitech-l] customising namespace - 2 (Rotem Liss)

body:
They should be placed at http://lmo.wikipedia.org/languages/MessageLmo.php
but you can't write to it. A developer with server access would be needed to
change that file.

"Claudi Meneghin" wrote:
Many thanks: only a question more, please: these language/message  files,
LanguageLmo.php, and MessagesLmo.php. are to be placed at which  URL?

  http://lmo.wikipedia.org/MessageLmo.php or
  http://lmo.wikipedia.org/wiki/MessageLmo.php ?

  Are they compatible with the existing Mediawiki?
  Many thanks.
  Sincerely Yours,
  Claudi


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] blatant state-sponsored copyright violations (by
 Baide Baiku of the PRC)

body:
Fred Bauder wrote:

>No, I did not read every post. But if that is so, I would say
>collecting might be possible. So if the case is slam dunk, if there
>are damages that can be calculated and collection is possible....
>
>
Calculating damages would be a problem since these are based on loss of
revenue.  Seeking statutory damages would be more practical, and one
would then argue that each page which they copy is a separate violation.

The other thing to remember is that a copyright must be registered
before one files a suit.  There should be an active program to ensure
that the copyrights on the database are regularly registered.

Ec


from_name: Mark Williamson

subject: [Wikitech-l] Simplified/traditional Chinese on Commons

body:
The standard Traditional Chinese of Hong Kong and that of Taiwan have
differences in terinology.

I know that Hong Kong used to use different country names, but
post-unification I think they adopted traditional transliterations of
Mainland forms. Boohoo!

But Hong Kong does have soem different ones.

No idea about S'pore, despite my love for the country. NEver was able
to find anythign about it. I do know that many Chinese in Singapore
don't know Mandarin, thoguh.

Mark

On 08/06/06, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher at gmail.com> wrote:
> OK, I didn't really want to open a debate on the merits of traditional
> vs simplified Chinese. Any comments on how MediaWiki treats Chinese?
> Does anyone think it makes sense to have zh/zh-tw/zh-cn/zh-sg/zg-hk
> language choices?
>
> Does anyone have a problem with making that a choice between zh-hans
> and zh-hant?
>
> To the developer-types, how hard is it to change these things?
>
> Brianna
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

--
Refije dirije lanm? yo paske nou posede pw?p bato.


body:
On 6/8/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm not faulting any person, but rather our process causes our product
> to have a fairly low quality from a licensing accuracy perspective.

I'm not aware of any repository of similar size which is better at
policing copyright than Commons, i.e., I think it is the best-policed
general free content media repository out there. It still has very
much room for improvement, of course. But when I compare it to some of
the stuff I've seen in the Creative Commons section on Flickr for
months or years without any visible effort to remove it,  or the
copyright problems a project like Ourmedia is faced with
(user-contributed videos which often have loads of copyrighted stuff
in them), we are extremely careful about copyright. Heck, an example
screenshot I made to illustrate a feature of the MediaWiki software is
about to be deleted because it has a Wikimedia logo in it.

Erik


body:
Jean-Baptiste Soufron wrote:

>I don't think it would be wise for the foundation to take any action
>that would not be correctly backed up by a chinese law firm
>explaining us what we can do, and what we cannot do. As much from a
>legal point of view, than from a PR or a political one.
>
If they are a NASDAQ listed company the US courts would have jurisdiction.

Ec


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Cultural distinctions are accidental? Consensus
	among cultures is bad?

body:
On 6/8/06, Raphael Wegmann <raphael at psi.co.at> wrote:
> I certainly know Al Jazeera and http://www.archive.org/details/mosaic
> but IMHO the news reports of a media networks are far less interesting
> than a "public Wikiconsensus" on "generic" topics like Islam, 9/11,
> Terrorism, Israel, etc.
> Apart from being exciting, those translations whould show how culturally
> biased Wikipedia actually is.

Yeah, but there are so many factors that lead to the way a wikipedia
article is the way it is, and cultural bias is only one of them. The
expertises of the authors, controversialness of the topic, general
interest in the topic, etc all have a huge part to play. You could end
up comparing an article written in the spare time of two retired
academics against an article bitterly fought over for months by
leagues of "pro" and "anti" editors, being forced to source every
edit.

The exercise would have some merit. But if you simply want to
understand "The Arab world's point of view", there are better ways.

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] "refactoring" signatures

body:
On 6/8/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
> 4512/52%
Keep.

> 7474/51%
Keep.

> 3335/50%
Keep.

> 1603/50%
Keep.

> 303/23%
Keep, with guidance.

> 6790/22%
Keep.

> 7447/6%
More info needed. Depends what the other 7000 edits were, and whether
the 400 were all Pok?mon related.

Steve


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Fwd: [Wikitech-l] Special:Contributions: index
	missing?

body:
On 6/8/06, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> What is the point in that question? If it is so database-intensive that
> it needs to be taken down, then surely it should be taken down even if
> it is useful. Conversely, if it is not database-intensive enough to be a
> real problem, then surely it doesn't hurt to have it even if it isn't
> useful.
>
> Besides, it appears that few people have found a really good use for it;
> it can therefore be assumed that it will not be used very frequently,
> and therefore it will likely not have much database impact after all. :)

I use it. But it'd be nice if that, and similar options like "Hide my
edits" on the watch list, could be made persistent across visits to
the page, via a user pref.

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] AFC needs your help!

body:
On 6/8/06, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
> > To others: the whole point of AFC is to help out people who don't want to
> > create an account and still want to submit articles while at the same time
> > filtering out the crap.
> > Allowing anyone to create articles again, would indeed overwork admins who
> > work in deletion.
>
> What difference does that make, given that AfC *also* overworks them?

Eh? What do admins need to do in AfC?

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] AFC needs your help!

references:
<fb7fdd9c0605220024h7fda292ax2c0051fe5f5dbd43@mail.gmail.com>
	<71cd4dd90606030746q7bec3b0erb12fb4c7cbe0132d@mail.gmail.com>
	<e5umr7$jrf$2@sea.gmane.org>
	<71cd4dd90606040733l2edbb4efwc080326291c5fdcb@mail.gmail.com>
	<e6a25i$k6e$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<71cd4dd90606081355o6df68714r25e18ba2cbbebfc1@mail.gmail.com>

body:
On 6/8/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> What's the difference between the system that exists now and the
> system that existed before, other than the fact that it's harder to
> maintain?  The proposed pages are still publically visible and
> editable - in fact they're *more* publically visible.  Why aren't the
> people who were overworked with deleting stuff from the article
> namespace now overworked with deleting stuff from AFC?

Why bother deleting anything from AfC? my understanding of the process
was that the AfC for a given day hangs around for a few days to see if
anyone can find anything redeeming, then the whole lot is flushed down
the plughole. If we're preserving archives of AfC, then we're probably
doing somethnig wrong.

Steve


body:
Note: This post is a long ramble about not much.

On 6/8/06, Ilmari Karonen <nospam at vyznev.net> wrote:
> I would disagree.  The "dablinks" Steve seems to be referring to are
> metadata that just happens to be included in the article text for lack
> of a better technical solution.  Without looking at the actual articles
> in question, I'd say a link at the top of [[en:President]] that says in
> effect "If you came here looking for [[George W. Bush]], he's thataway."
> would be perfectly reasonable if readers of that particular project in
> fact with some frequency do so (which I find plausible enough).

As things turn out, this is not currently the case. However, I note
that [[President]], while being one of our more "internationally
balanced" articles, still has an excessive US bias:
There is a whole paragraph on electoral colleges in the US, while most
other countries don't get more than their name mentioned.
There is another paragraph beginning "The head of a university or
non-profit corporation, particularly in the United States of America,
is often known as president."
A paragraph on the fact that the head of the mormons is known as the
president...I doubt very much this would be interest to anyone reading
the hypothetic Urdu version, for instance.

In fact most of the article is centred around the US and France, with
a bit of Spain. For a Wikipedia article, that's not too bad, and is a
good start. But it's certainly skewed in favour of providing more
information on topics likely to interest anglophone (and in
particular, American) readers.

Is this bad? To me, not particularly, though other information on
other countries, perhaps including the presidential referendum in
Australia, would have been welcome.

Steve


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re : sanger on 'open meritocracies'

body:
Andrew Gray wrote:

>On 31/05/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>Erik Moeller wrote:
>>
>>
>>>On 5/29/06, Andre Engels <andreengels at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>Well, as said, for Wikipedia wiki worked very well. That doesn't mean
>>>>it works as well for other projects. A wiki means several things at
>>>>once, and it is one of them (the wiki philosophy of free editing and
>>>>control afterward instead of in advance) that made Wikipedia work
>>>>where Nupedia did not. Wiktionary would I think work better in an
>>>>environment with the same philosophy but a different technology (more
>>>>database-like rather than marked up text). Wikiquote and Commons might
>>>>well profit from a similar switch. For Wikisource the whole 'free
>>>>editing' concept itself does not seem as suitable, or at least, not as
>>>>necessary.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>Largely true, however, one should never underestimate the advantages
>>>of even the simple technology we have. We take the ability to edit and
>>>improve the description of an image on Commons for granted, but that
>>>is something you only get from a wiki-like system. Similarly, at least
>>>some degree of consistency within our taxonomy can be maintained
>>>because people can add/remove categories as they please. Compare
>>>Flickr's tags, where keywords are rarely consistent across images of
>>>the same type.
>>>
>>>As for Wikisource, I continue to hold that one of its great promises
>>>are free translations of public domain texts, and this is where wiki
>>>becomes quickly indispensable.
>>>
>>>
>>... but the *original source* should be protected at the steward level,
>>which requires a software change.
>>
>>
>Incidentally, this implies we ever have the "original source". For
>most of the material likely to be on Wikisource, by virtue of it being
>comfortably over a hundred years old, we don't; we have a scan of one
>particular edition. Much of that particular edition will have been
>silently altered several times between us and the author; indeed, even
>with contemporary editions, the author may never have seen it since
>manuscript.
>
>And that's even before contemplating the effects of which
>public-domain source (and hence which iteration of expurgation) we
>have used...
>
While this is true to some extent, a Wiki also gives us greater
opportunities to study the evoloution of a text across its several editions.

Ec


from_name: brion at pobox.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki automated test run failure 2006-06-09

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

Running test Table security: embedded pipes (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-April/034637.html)... FAILED!
Running test Link containing double-single-quotes '' (bug 4598)... FAILED!
Running test BUG 1887, part 2: A <math> with a thumbnail- math enabled... FAILED!
Running test Language converter: output gets cut off unexpectedly (bug 5757)... FAILED!
Running test HTML bullet list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test HTML ordered list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test HTML nested bullet list, open tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test HTML nested ordered list, open tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test Parsing optional HTML elements (Bug 6171)... FAILED!
Running test Inline HTML vs wiki block nesting... FAILED!
Running test Mixing markup for italics and bold... FAILED!

Passed 385 of 396 tests (97.22%) FAILED!


from_name: Brion Vibber

body:
Daniel Arnold wrote:
> Am Donnerstag, 08. Juni 2006 21:48 schrieb Brion Vibber:
>>> Considering that we've had violations persist for months after they
>>> were tagged and even brought up in a Wikimedia board meeting, I'd say
>>> that our position is even weaker than napsters.
>> Give me URLs and I'll happily bust some heads.
>
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Against_policy
>
> You have two choices:
> * Slow deletion with (anymous) unlinking (see CheckUsage tab on top) in all
> wikis including RTL wikis (great "fun" for LTR-people like me) and maybe
> getting some messages that you should login there and talk to them in let us
> say Hindi... And don't forget to check out the user "gallery" of the uploader
> (see at his user page the tab "gallery", one copyvio promises 5 more...)

Killed a few, removed apparently bogus notices from a couple. Will revisit
regularly, suggest you all do the same.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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body:
Daniel Arnold wrote:
> Am Donnerstag, 08. Juni 2006 21:48 schrieb Brion Vibber:
>>> Considering that we've had violations persist for months after they
>>> were tagged and even brought up in a Wikimedia board meeting, I'd say
>>> that our position is even weaker than napsters.
>> Give me URLs and I'll happily bust some heads.
>
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Against_policy
>
> You have two choices:
> * Slow deletion with (anymous) unlinking (see CheckUsage tab on top) in all
> wikis including RTL wikis (great "fun" for LTR-people like me) and maybe
> getting some messages that you should login there and talk to them in let us
> say Hindi... And don't forget to check out the user "gallery" of the uploader
> (see at his user page the tab "gallery", one copyvio promises 5 more...)

Killed a few, removed apparently bogus notices from a couple. Will revisit
regularly, suggest you all do the same.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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body:
Daniel Arnold wrote:
> Am Donnerstag, 08. Juni 2006 21:48 schrieb Brion Vibber:
>>> Considering that we've had violations persist for months after they
>>> were tagged and even brought up in a Wikimedia board meeting, I'd say
>>> that our position is even weaker than napsters.
>> Give me URLs and I'll happily bust some heads.
>
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Against_policy
>
> You have two choices:
> * Slow deletion with (anymous) unlinking (see CheckUsage tab on top) in all
> wikis including RTL wikis (great "fun" for LTR-people like me) and maybe
> getting some messages that you should login there and talk to them in let us
> say Hindi... And don't forget to check out the user "gallery" of the uploader
> (see at his user page the tab "gallery", one copyvio promises 5 more...)

Killed a few, removed apparently bogus notices from a couple. Will revisit
regularly, suggest you all do the same.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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body:
Daniel Arnold wrote:
> Am Donnerstag, 08. Juni 2006 21:48 schrieb Brion Vibber:
>>> Considering that we've had violations persist for months after they
>>> were tagged and even brought up in a Wikimedia board meeting, I'd say
>>> that our position is even weaker than napsters.
>> Give me URLs and I'll happily bust some heads.
>
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Against_policy
>
> You have two choices:
> * Slow deletion with (anymous) unlinking (see CheckUsage tab on top) in all
> wikis including RTL wikis (great "fun" for LTR-people like me) and maybe
> getting some messages that you should login there and talk to them in let us
> say Hindi... And don't forget to check out the user "gallery" of the uploader
> (see at his user page the tab "gallery", one copyvio promises 5 more...)

Killed a few, removed apparently bogus notices from a couple. Will revisit
regularly, suggest you all do the same.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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subject: [WikiEN-l] AFC needs your help!

body:
On 6/9/06, maru dubshinki <marudubshinki at gmail.com> wrote:
> Flushing the archives isn't a particularly good idea, because good
> articles *do* get lost in AFC. Now, if we had some mechanism to mark
> each day as "Done", then that would be another thing.

Done is the same thing as "we have extracted all the good articles out
of this mess", isn't it? Marking the page as done would be the same
blanking it.

Steve


from_name: Raphael Wegmann

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Cultural distinctions are accidental?
 Consensus	among cultures is bad?

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 6/8/06, Raphael Wegmann <raphael at psi.co.at> wrote:
>> I certainly know Al Jazeera and http://www.archive.org/details/mosaic
>> but IMHO the news reports of a media networks are far less interesting
>> than a "public Wikiconsensus" on "generic" topics like Islam, 9/11,
>> Terrorism, Israel, etc.
>> Apart from being exciting, those translations whould show how culturally
>> biased Wikipedia actually is.
>
> Yeah, but there are so many factors that lead to the way a wikipedia
> article is the way it is, and cultural bias is only one of them. The
> expertises of the authors, controversialness of the topic, general
> interest in the topic, etc all have a huge part to play. You could end
> up comparing an article written in the spare time of two retired
> academics against an article bitterly fought over for months by
> leagues of "pro" and "anti" editors, being forced to source every
> edit.

Well, the controversialness of the topics I mentioned and the general
interest in them are probably high in both cultures, so I wouldn't
expect any of those articles be written only by two editors.
OTOH the POVs of the administrators can/probably have an
disproportionate weight on the bias as well.

--
Raphael


subject: [WikiEN-l] Psychology of problem Wikipedians

body:
jkelly at fas.harvard.edu wrote:
>
>   Incidentally, I also misread your post.  After reading the first few
> paragraphs, it seemed to me that you were trying to describe what is called
> "pathologizing".  But then, as an example, you gave... a pathology.  So
> whatever point you were trying to make was completely opaque to me as well.

I found his choice of Asperger's as the example quite illustrating,
since there is some controversy over whether (and/or from what point in
the continuum) it should be considered a pathology instead of merely a
personality type, and in particular whether it is useful to view it as
either one to the exclusion of the other.

Given that there exists a continuous spectrum of behavior from normality
via various degrees of Asperger's to full blown autism, it does not
really make much sense that attitudes towards such behavior should
change discontinuously at some point.  Unfortunately, people often do
have such a discontinuity between "normal" and "abnormal".  I don't
believe this was quite the point Karl was trying to make, but it does
seem to me to be the point in his argument that you missed.

(I'm genuinely trying to explain my viewpoint here, since I _did_ find
Karl's post rather illuminating.  I'm not really trying to argue about
which viewpoint is "right".)

--
Ilmari Karonen


body:
Delirium wrote:
> Steve Bennett wrote:
>
>>Is it ok if a link at the top of [[President]] at en directs people to
>>[[George W Bush]], while a link at the top of [[Pr?sident]] at fr
>>directs people to [[Jaques Chirac]]?
>
> Well this one seems like an easy "definitely not" to me!

I would disagree.  The "dablinks" Steve seems to be referring to are
metadata that just happens to be included in the article text for lack
of a better technical solution.  Without looking at the actual articles
in question, I'd say a link at the top of [[en:President]] that says in
effect "If you came here looking for [[George W. Bush]], he's thataway."
would be perfectly reasonable if readers of that particular project in
fact with some frequency do so (which I find plausible enough).

(Sorry for the sesquipedalian sentence.)

--
Ilmari Karonen


from_name: Shinjiman

body:
Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at ...> writes:

> Hoi,
> I assume that what is called zh-cn is actually cmn-Hans and that zh-tw
> is cmn-Hant (Mandarin). I do not really appreciate what I have to
> understand by Singaporian or Hong Kong Chinese. The problem with zh
> (zho) is that in ISO-639-3 it is considered a macro language and it is
> really ambiguous what is to be understood by it.
> Thanks,
>     Gerard
>

Hi,

And don't forget the Unicode character is not only denotes the Chinese
Characters, also these Unicode ideographs also denotes to Japanese and Korean
Hanji. It is not making this as big deal by applying that such converter,
which makes more inconvenience for non-Chinese users. By the way, I hope I can
translate part of Commons content into Traditional Chinese soon. :)

cheers
Man


body:
See also:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:%E4%B8%AD%E6%96%87%E7%B9%81%E7%AE%80%
E4%BD%93%E9%97%AE%E9%A2%98

There's such discussion regarding whether such converter is implemented or not
(this is composed by Vipuser according to the page history), however Node ue
and I disagree with these because there will be some problem if such converter
is being implemented. See also the talk page for Node ue:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Node_ue, and Vipuser argues with
that issue.

cheers
Man


from_name: Matt Brown

subject: [WikiEN-l] Objective oversight needed

body:
I've noticed those guys before.  Unlike many proposed transport
technologies, Personal Rapid Transit seems to be more a political
proposal than a technical one; thus, it seems to be characterised by
relentless publicity pressure and an excessive dedication to burying
any suggestions of its flaws.

IMO, UniModal is a proposal without a hope in hell, and insufficiently
different from other PRT ideas to have its own article.

-Matt


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Fwd: [Wikitech-l] Special:Contributions:
	index	missing?

body:
Timwi wrote:
> Rob Church wrote:
>
>>There's been some discussion on a development mailing list regarding
>>the namespace selector in contributions pages, which is expensive due
>>to our schema arrangement.
>>[...]
>>What is the point of per-namespace contribution feature on live site?
>>What are the applications of it?
>
> What is the point in that question? If it is so database-intensive that
> it needs to be taken down, then surely it should be taken down even if
> it is useful. Conversely, if it is not database-intensive enough to be a
> real problem, then surely it doesn't hurt to have it even if it isn't
> useful.

It may be in the between.  Perhaps the load it causes might be just
enough to make some other useful but nonessential feature infeasible
with the current server resources.  (Or maybe not, just speculating for
the sake of it.)

> Besides, it appears that few people have found a really good use for it;
> it can therefore be assumed that it will not be used very frequently,
> and therefore it will likely not have much database impact after all. :)

I certainly find it useful.  And in any case, it can generally be
assumed that if it's there, it will be used.

It's true that efficiently indexing that in such a way that page moves
across namespaces remain O(1) is hard.  However, it strikes me that, for
most uses of that feature, we presumably aren't really interested in the
current namespace of the page so much as in the namespace it was in when
the contribution was named.  If so, a simple solution presents itself:
add a field to the revision table recording the _original_ namespace
(and maybe pagename, while we're at it) of the revision as it was when
it was created.

(The null revisions resulting from page moves should probably be
considered to belong in the target namespace, especially since another
revision is already created in the source namespace for the redirect.)

--
Ilmari Karonen


subject:
[Wikitech-l] [WikiEN-l] Fwd: Special:Contributions:
	index	missing?


subject: [Wikitech-l] New diff feature for MediaWiki

body:
Rob Church wrote:
> On 08/06/06, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
>
>>It is already confrontational of a programmer to pretend the whole world
>>could make do with Latin-1. It is one of the most devastating and
>>accordingly infuriating assumptions that still prevails despite the fact
>>that Unicode is decades old. We're in the 21st century; it is no longer
>>appropriate to even start programming anything where any user-visible
>>text is restricted to Latin-1 or any other 8-bit charset.
>
> Of course, of course, I clean forgot. Because a quick proof of concept
> has to be PERFECT, doesn't it. Do excuse that little oversight.
>
> It's not perfect yet. Get over it and give some feedback on the idea.

I concur.  If the feature is useful at all, a test version would be
useful even if it only worked in a Cyrillic variant of EBCDIC.

However, responding to the original poster here (I'm pretty sure Rob
agrees), the English Wikipedia is rarely if ever the right place to test
proof-of-concept code.  That'd be like testing an experimental engine
design on the Autobahn during rush hour.

--
Ilmari Karonen


from_name: John Lee

subject: [WikiEN-l] "refactoring" signatures

body:
Fastfission wrote:

>On 6/5/06, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>On 6/5/06, Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>People should be allowed and encourage to develop their personal
>>>identity on Wikipedia
>>>
>>>
>>Why?  Wikipedia isn't a web host, a blog or a social networking site.
>>Those who are looking for such sites will find that there are plenty
>>of those around.  There is only one Wikipedia.
>>
>>
>
>Wikipedia is a project that thrives only because people want to spend
>a ridiculous amount of their time on it. Developing a sense of
>personal identity makes people feel comfortable, feel welcome, and
>feel invested. As long as said sense of personal identity does not get
>in the way of the goal of making an encyclopedia, I see absolutely no
>reason to try and quash it. So far most of the attempts to cut out
>"social" aspects seem to have done more harm than good, in my mind.
>
>I've never seen any plausible evidence that things like userboxes
>actually get in the way of the goal of making an encyclopedia, except
>in the sense that trying to eliminate them takes months and creates
>all sorts of awful falling-outs.
>
>FF
>
>
That is the reason why I am apathetic about userboxes (I couldn't care
less whether they stay or go). Complex signatures complicate
discussions, however, and as a result have a very direct effect on the
encyclopaedia. If our editors can't communicate, or can only communicate
inconveniently, then the encyclopaedia will inevitably suffer.

John


body:
We are discussing its application to Commons, which is a separate
issue. Please read the thread more carefully.

I agree entirely that it is good on Wikipedia -- to have separate
content on Wikipedia is not practical. But on Commons, it is.

Mark

On 09/06/06, Hsiang-Tai Chien <htchien1225 at yahoo.com.tw> wrote:
> Yes, Vipuser is a CN user, however his opinion is been widely discussed on zh.wp and is mostly accepted by many HK / ZH / SG users and admins.
>
> It also forms a policy template in http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Policy-convert
>
> H.T.
> {{User:zh:Htchien}}
>
> Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> ?? It was my view that Vipuser promoted his side because he is a
> Simplified user and so has not had experience with such errors.
>
> Mark
>
> On 08/06/06, Shinjiman  wrote:
> > See also:
> >
> > http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:%E4%B8%AD%E6%96%87%E7%B9%81%E7%AE%80%
> > E4%BD%93%E9%97%AE%E9%A2%98
> >
> > There's such discussion regarding whether such converter is implemented or not
> > (this is composed by Vipuser according to the page history), however Node ue
> > and I disagree with these because there will be some problem if such converter
> > is being implemented. See also the talk page for Node ue:
> > http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Node_ue, and Vipuser argues with
> > that issue.
> >
> > cheers
> > Man
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikitech-l mailing list
> > Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
> >
>
>
> --
> Refije dirije lanm? yo paske nou posede pw? bato.
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>
>  ___________________________________________________
>  ??? Yahoo!?????? 7.0???????????
>  http://messenger.yahoo.com.tw/
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

--
Refije dirije lanm? yo paske nou posede pw?p bato.


subject: [WikiEN-l] "refactoring" signatures

body:
Fastfission wrote:

>On 6/8/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>On 6/8/06, Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Wikipedia is a project that thrives only because people want to spend
>>>a ridiculous amount of their time on it. Developing a sense of
>>>personal identity makes people feel comfortable, feel welcome, and
>>>feel invested. As long as said sense of personal identity does not get
>>>in the way of the goal of making an encyclopedia, I see absolutely no
>>>reason to try and quash it. So far most of the attempts to cut out
>>>"social" aspects seem to have done more harm than good, in my mind.
>>>
>>>I've never seen any plausible evidence that things like userboxes
>>>actually get in the way of the goal of making an encyclopedia, except
>>>in the sense that trying to eliminate them takes months and creates
>>>all sorts of awful falling-outs.
>>>
>>>
>>It probably comes down to this:
>>1. Users work mostly on the encyclopaedia, and spend some time socialising
>>2. The social aspect attracts more users, who spend time in equal
>>measure, creating pretty userboxes and expressing their political
>>beliefs
>>3. This attracts more social users, who spend most of their time on
>>purely social functions and creating noise
>>...
>>
>>Eventually you have to draw a line. For serious contributors to have a
>>bit of social fluff about them is fine. Having people whose primary
>>presence at Wikipedia is social, rather than encyclopaedical does
>>eventually get in the way of building an encyclopaedia, through pure
>>noise.
>>
>>
>
>Social activity on Wikipedia is more than just "socializing", in my
>experience. I spent most of my day-to-day time on Wikipedia either
>reverting vandalism or explaining to people why certain edits are
>better than others. A quick look at my own contributions shows that
>out of the last 50 edits, around 80% were to talk namespaces.
>
>Part of this involved fostering creative collaborations with others,
>getting others on-board with ideas, answering questions, etc. In the
>end all of this does have an effect on article content, but not
>necessarily a direct one.
>
>Wikipedia content is decided by a lot of back-and-forth between users.
>Any time you have lots of communication, disagreement, contestation,
>etc. between human beings you need a lot of social lubricant. You need
>ways to identify others, you need things to put around your head that
>says, "I know about this, I define myself as this, I am a real person
>and not just some name on a screen, and you should treat me that way."
>
>I've nothing against that at all. I don't see any great reason to try
>and root it out. If there are a few freeloaders who are just in it for
>"social" reasons, so be it. As long as they aren't using their
>userspace for anything directly nefarious, then who cares? My time --
>and I assume the time of others -- is better served continuing my own
>business than it is getting into the business of others.
>
>There are always limits to this, of course. There are definite
>mis-uses of Wikipedia resources and I think most people would be able
>to spot them pretty quickly. Copyright infringement on user pages, for
>example, is a pretty straightforward case.
>
>I'm admittedly non-interventionist here. I think it is easier and more
>pragmatic tolerate mild misuse and annoyance than to waste time trying
>to make everyone into ideal Wikipedians. As they say, if it ain't
>(really) broke, don't fix it.
>
>FF
>
>
People who are here to use Wikipedia as a social gathering place do not
belong here. The community is a means to the construction of the
encyclopaedia, not the other way round.

John


body:
Singapore uses Simplified, officially.

Mark

On 09/06/06, Hsiang-Tai Chien <htchien1225 at yahoo.com.tw> wrote:
> zh-cn: Chinese language used in China, Simplified Chinese
> zh-hk: Chinese language used in Hong Kong, Traditional Chinese
> zh-sg: Chinese language used in Singapore, Traditional Chinese
> zh-tw: Chinese language used in Taiwan, Traditional Chinese
>
> Although they are all Chinese, however, they use different terminologies for the same thing due to the culture changes in the areas. It's not just that simple with Han-S and Han-T. Also not a macro language I think.
>
> I know it might not be easy for an non-Chinese to understand this, but it's the language we live with it day by day.
>
> Regards,
> H.T.
> en-wp: [[User:Htchien]]
> zh-wp: [[User:Htchien]]
>
> Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> ?f?? Brianna Laugher wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > I posted this on commons-l a week ago to apparent deaf ears.
> >
> > While browsing in my Special:Preferences today, I noticed that we
> > apparently support no less than five variants of Chinese:
> >
> > zh
> > zh-cn (simplified, as used by the Chinese mainland)
> > zh-hk (Hong Kong, traditional)
> > zh-sg (Singapore, simplified)
> > zh-tw (Taiwan, traditional)
> >
> > Is there a reason these codes have been set up as country codes rather
> > than, say, zh-hans and zh-hant? (Han Chinese, simplified/traditional -
> > these are codes that the Chinese translators on Commons have
> > favoured.)
> >
> > Is there thought to be any distinction between zh-sg and zh-cn?
> >
> > Can the 'automatic converter' thing that zh.wp has be turned on for
> > the Commons, so we can stop this unnecessary 'translation' between
> > scripts anyway? (And then we just offer "zh".)
> >
> > cheers,
> > Brianna
> > en.{wp,wb}|commons|meta:user:pfctdayelise
> Hoi,
> I assume that what is called zh-cn is actually cmn-Hans and that zh-tw
> is cmn-Hant (Mandarin). I do not really appreciate what I have to
> understand by Singaporian or Hong Kong Chinese. The problem with zh
> (zho) is that in ISO-639-3 it is considered a macro language and it is
> really ambiguous what is to be understood by it.
> Thanks,
>     Gerard
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>
>  ___________________________________________________
>  ?????? Yahoo!???????r???? 7.0?????M?W??????????????
>  http://messenger.yahoo.com.tw/
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

--
Refije dirije lanm?? yo paske nou posede pw??p bato.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Category translation

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:

>>Which isn't to say it's perfect, but as far as the potential to be a
>>global, neutral, thorough encyclopedia, I think en.wikipedia is the
>>structurally best placed by far, simply because so many people from such
>>diverse cultures speak English.
>>
>>
>
>You're probably right. I never notice much of an Indian presence
>surprisingly enough...
>
>Steve
>
>
Eh? I've seen lots of Indian editors around, and the Indian community is
very active.

John


from_name: Roman Nosov

body:
Well it looks like my question about why some quotation marks do break
words and others don't will remain unanswered ("rareness" of high
numbered punctuation doesn't make it part of a word) ? Anyway if such
level of supporting UTF-8 is sufficient for Mediawiki then Unicode
issue is "solved". Unicode ?ber alles.

On 08/06/06, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> Roman Nosov wrote:
> > Regarding UTF-8 support. Perhaps it would be better if I try to
> > explain some of the problems I'm facing. For example I'm not tracking
> > most frequently used English words (a, the, and, or ?). In my opinion
> > every language should be tweaked separately and that's why I'm
> > suggesting to first test it on English Wikipedia.
> > Also I don't have a problem with finding spaces in UTF-8 encoded
> > strings and splitting it there. The problem is that some Unicode
> > characters like ? (letter w with two dots on top, Unicode code 0x1E85)
> > are used to write words and some Unicode characters such as ' (Left
> > single quotation mark, Unicode code 0x2018) are used to separate
> > words. Also I believe these characters could be encoded as HTML
> > entities in Wikitext.
> > As I'm tracking words I need to distinguish between these "character
> > classes" as they are known in regular expressions (i.e. \w word
> > character and \W non word character). If Tim Starling has a silver
> > bullet that can solve these problems feel free to e-mail it to me.
> > However in my opinion implementing that kind of UTF-8 support from
> > scratch can be somewhat tricky business.
> > The bottom line is that problems above *can* be solved but what I
> > suggest is to try on English Wikipedia first to see how it's going to
> > work in general and whether it's a useful feature. Support for other
> > languages could and should be added later on one language at a time.
> >
>
> High-numbered punctuation characters are rare, the approach I took in
> wikidiff2 was to consider them part of the word. I considered all
> non-alphanumeric characters less than 0xc0 as word-splitting punctuation
> characters. There are three languages that I'm aware of that don't use
> spaces to separate words, and thus require special handling: Chinese,
> Japanese and Thai. They are the only ones that I was able to find while
> searching the web for word segmentation information, and nobody from any
> other language wiki has complained. Chinese and Japanese are adequately
> handled by doing character-level diffs -- I received lots of praise from the
> Japanese Wikipedia for this scheme. Chinese and Japanese word segmentation
> for search or machine translation is a much more difficult problem, but
> luckily solving it is unnecessary for diff formatting. Character-level diffs
> may well be superior anyway.
>
> For Thai I am using character-level diffs, and although I haven't received
> any complaints from the Wikipedians, I believe this is less than ideal. Thai
> has lots of composing characters, so you often end up highlighting little
> dots on top of letters and the like. Really what is required here is
> dictionary-based word segmentation. Our search engine is also next to
> useless on the Thai Wikipedia due to the lack of word segmentation. But
> that's not a problem Rowan has to solve.
>
> Putting all that together, here's how I detect word characters in wikidiff2:
>
> inline bool my_istext(int ch)
> {
>         // Standard alphanumeric
>         if ((ch >= '0' && ch <= '9') ||
>            (ch == '_') ||
>            (ch >= 'A' && ch <= 'Z') ||
>            (ch >= 'a' && ch <= 'z'))
>         {
>                 return true;
>         }
>         // Punctuation and control characters
>         if (ch < 0xc0) return false;
>         // Thai, return false so it gets split up
>         if (ch >= 0xe00 && ch <= 0xee7) return false;
>         // Chinese/Japanese, same
>         if (ch >= 0x3000 && ch <= 0x9fff) return false;
>         if (ch >= 0x20000 && ch <= 0x2a000) return false;
>         // Otherwise assume it's from a language that uses spaces
>         return true;
> }
>
> Now this might not be sounding "trivial" anymore. UTF-8 support is trivial,
> I'll stand by that, but supporting all the languages of the world is not so
> trivial. But as you can see, language support isn't as hard as you might
> think, because lots of research has already been done.
>
> -- Tim Starling
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


from_name: Phil Boswell

subject: [Wikitech-l] Researcher needs help

body:
Jeremy Dunck wrote:
>
> On 6/8/06, Mark Bell <typewritermark at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I am using a tool called "historyflow" that can read html so let me try
>> the
>> HTML solution.
> You might be interested in this:
> http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/wiki2xml/w2x.php
> You can paste in a list of article and it gives you back various output
> formats.
>
I have installed the History-Flow tool at home but couldn't find any
documentation on how to obtain articles from Wikipedia in an appropriate
format...there was apparently going to be some sort of plug-in which was
dropped because of DOS worries.

Which is the most appropriate format to choose from those available on
Magnus' tool, and is there a HOW-TO which will show me how to load that up
into History-Flow?

TIA HAND
--
Phil
--
View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Researcher-needs-help-t1754475.html#a4791623
Sent from the Wikipedia Developers forum at Nabble.com.


subject: [Foundation-l] Would you consider being on the Board?

body:
On 6/9/06, Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm very surprised that the only people who are interested in a Board
> position are Fred Bauder, Walter van Kalken, Erik Moeller, The
> Cunctator, and the two people who wrote to me off-list.

:-) I doubt that this is the case. It's just that hypothetical
questions like that are unlikely to generate many answers, not to
mention that many people may not be comfortable expressing their
interest in this way. I expect we'll see a diverse group of candidates
if and when one or two open community board seats are actually widely
announced.

Erik


from_name: Zack Clark

subject: [Foundation-l] rsHorning #00 (Donations - Direction...)

body:
On Thu, 08 Jun 2006 20:51:26
Robert Scott Horning replied to
Message-ID: <44880D19.2020202 at world1tours.com>
initially stating:
==================== Quote ====================
While I might have dismissed this posting, there is some things that I
do agree with you here.

There is the point of fundraising, however.  This is unfortunately
necessary as there are physical, tangible assetts that need to be
aquired (in the case of the WMF, there is the server farms) and some
professionals that are required to maintain these servers.  This means
that Wikipedia and the sister projects need to exist in an environment
that requires hard, cold cash.  Paying for internet bandwidth isn't free
either, and for the quantities that Wikipedia uses, normally won't even
be donated by most organizations, for profit or not.  Indeed Wikipedia
gets discounts in terms of value per megabyte simply because of the
volume of data being streamed from Wikimedia servers.  Fundraising is a
necessary evil, and that requires the whole thing of trying to deal with
accountants, lawyers, trademarks, CEOs, and professional staff.
 Considering the size of the volunteer force that is available and
working on Wikimedia projects, this professional component is
surprisingly small, even for similarly minded charitble activities.  And
the value produced per dollar donated to the WMF is quite high, which is
why thousands of dollars have come in simply by sticking out a tin cup
and asking for some donations, with the only real ads for this coming
from the website itself.

That said, I hope that we stick to proven fundraising techniques, and
don't waste too much effort or time into grants that may end up being
more of a hassle than any real value.  A couple of ideas and projects
have floated by that have made me scratch my head a little bit to wonder
just why it was thought up, but at least people are trying to be creative.

..................

--
Robert Scott Horning
================== END Quote ==================
Thanks for a most enlightening response.  Your report on how we keep the 'professional' component so surprisingly small even when compared to similar minded groups (which are likely older & more experienced) is most encouraging indeed!  This plus our unusually high value produced per dollar only encourages my belief that a means can be evolved to 100% eliminate any need for FRNs.  After all, isn't your "hard, cold cash" merely an indirect step to networking hardware, cold computers, and 'professional' services?
    I'm also glad you recognize fund-raising as "evil".  Just quit embracing it as "necessary", and we'll be 98.6% of the way home.  In a like vein, I appreciate you boldly citing the "tin cup" - which bears the following label, "Your continued donations keep Wikipedia running!"  Now while that sentiment may be right on for the redistribution enthusiast, it's hardly an apt message from leading edge, world class value producers.  To convey a better grasp of reality, a more enticing offer would be, "Engage a new dawn of freed intellect with us!"
    In fact, hardware and networking providers who cannot readily grasp the value of supplying WMF with all their needs are likely too inept to remain a dominant market force for long and should be avoided.  A slew of computers or a few bags of bandwidth are cheap prices to pay in order to showcase one's wares in this arena.  Not to mention being an honored part of this century's leading freedom phenomenon.  But just to be extra classy, we should also give them a YeNom celebrating their alliance in forging a freer future.
    That said, I hope that we can open our minds to the creation of options beyond the fund-raising farce.
    I've reviewed past posts to this list to find an exceptional example of the strong kind of thinking that might be supportive of these ideas.  Interestingly, Mr. Horning's email (Message-ID: <448411A9.2030600 at netzero.net>) of Mon, 05_Jun_2006 turns out to be the recommended insight to read.  So I suspect that perhaps Robert fashioned his response to purposely provide me (the new guy) with a good lead-in to my current rant.  In any case, thanks for your generosity.
    Incidently, every time 'professional' is used here, it invariably calls to mind a dangerously diseased whore (the oldest profession).  And when contrasted to our virgin pure volunteers, I fail to see why there is any desire for the former.

Z.Clark

P.S.  Considering that you "might have dismissed this posting".  Could you perhaps enlighten me regarding any reasons why (so that I might respectfully improve my email sent to this list)?


from_name: Anthony DiPierro

body:
On 6/8/06, Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm very surprised that the only people who are interested in a Board
> position are Fred Bauder, Walter van Kalken, Erik Moeller, The
> Cunctator, and the two people who wrote to me off-list.
>
You don't honestly believe that everyone interested in a Board
position saw that message and answered you, do you?


from_name: Kelly Martin

body:
On 6/9/06, Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
> I expect anyone serious about joining the Board this year to be
> reading this mailing list. They couldn't possibly have a thorough
> enough understanding of what the Foundation is about without doing
> that, and for a community representative (as opposed to the outsiders
> who may be appointed), I do expect them to be participating in
> foundation issues before they're appointed, as well as being active on
> the projects.

Actually I think the Board could profit substantially from bringing in
some outsiders with experience in operating nonprofits but unsullied
by exposure to the myriad wrong ways that we do things here at
Wikimedia.

Kelly


subject: [Foundation-l] rsHorning #01 (Donations - Direction...)

body:
On Thu, 08 Jun 2006 20:51:26
Robert Scott Horning replied to
Message-ID: <44880D19.2020202 at world1tours.com>
and finished saying:
==================== Quote ====================
............
I want to thank Jimbo on trying to avoid getting the WMF into any
political mess, including the network bandwidth issue and other seeming
partisian neutral issues.  For crying out loud, there are enough
internal politics going on with Wikimedia projects to last for a
lifetime.  We don't need to turn Wikimedia projects into political
battle grounds any more than [[w:George W. Bush]] already is.

--
Robert Scott Horning
================== END Quote ==================

The above is most interesting, and I'd hopefully be as ready as anyone to recognize gallant efforts to avoid getting into any political messes, etc. My obsession, however, is to always structure things (right from the beginning and as much as possible) so that we are well isolated from such issues as nasty freedom of speech challenges.  This then minimizes any need for later dramatics.
See Subject: Eloquence #01 - libelous info

Z.Clark


from_name: Mark Bell

subject: [Wikitech-l] Researcher needs help

body:
Folks,

I have had success. I need to do a few more tests but then i shoud be able
to post a whole historyflow tutorial on my site.

The pictures are amazing!

M

On 6/9/06, Phil Boswell <phil.boswell at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> Jeremy Dunck wrote:
> >
> > On 6/8/06, Mark Bell <typewritermark at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> I am using a tool called "historyflow" that can read html so let me try
> >> the
> >> HTML solution.
> > You might be interested in this:
> > http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/wiki2xml/w2x.php
> > You can paste in a list of article and it gives you back various output
> > formats.
> >
> I have installed the History-Flow tool at home but couldn't find any
> documentation on how to obtain articles from Wikipedia in an appropriate
> format...there was apparently going to be some sort of plug-in which was
> dropped because of DOS worries.
>
> Which is the most appropriate format to choose from those available on
> Magnus' tool, and is there a HOW-TO which will show me how to load that up
> into History-Flow?
>
> TIA HAND
> --
> Phil
> --
> View this message in context:
> http://www.nabble.com/Researcher-needs-help-t1754475.html#a4791623
> Sent from the Wikipedia Developers forum at Nabble.com.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

--
Mark Bell
http://www.storygeek.com
"The future is here...it's just not widely distributed." - Tim O'Reilly


from_name: daniwo59 at aol.com

body:
In a message dated 6/9/2006 8:05:27 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
beesley at gmail.com writes:

I do  expect them to be participating in
foundation issues before they're  appointed, as well as being active on
the  projects.

appointed?


from_name: Guy Chapman aka JzG

subject: [WikiEN-l] Objective oversight needed

body:
I have been in dispute for some time with a small group of editors
promoting the concept of personal rapid transit
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_rapid_transit), a proposed for
of rapid transit.  The major problem is that the article describes the
features of a wide-scale implementation, but the few pilot projects
have been on a much smaller scale and exhibit few of the features
promoted as inherent by PRT proponents (such as very short headways,
in the sub-second range and very large numbers of cars, to make
waiting times short).

We've succeeded in pruning most of the hyperbole from the PRT article,
but there is a particular concept version, UniModal, which was
redirected once per AfD and DRV (despite massive involvement from new
and anonymous editors, if you get my drift) but which User:Fresheneesz
in particular is keen to have.  It has reappeared again at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UniModal, replete with claims of massive
top speeds, fantastically low build and operating costs etc.  I have
pruned it down to a couple of verifiable paragraphs, but I just know
that the usual war is going to result.

I am always open to the possibility I may be wrong.  It may be that we
*like* to have large articles on hypothetical concepts for which the
originators are vigorously pitching for funding.  On the other hand,
we might not.  My reading of [[WP:V]] says not.  But I'd appreciate
another set of eyes.

Fresheneesz's version is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=UniModal&oldid=57664644

Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


subject: [Foundation-l] Eloquence #01 - libelous info

body:
on  Thu, 8 June 20:43:11 Erik Moeller explained

==================== Quote ====================
See [[John Seigenthaler, Sr.]]. We publish potentially libelous
information alongside a huge collection of well-referenced quality
material, under the same logo, without any distinction for the reader
between one and the other. We make that information available as free
content, and allow anyone to scrape it off our site or download our
database, meaning that the libelous information gets copied all over
the place. Legally speaking, if Wikipedia didn't exist, no lawyer
would ever approve it.
================== END Quote ==================
Thanks so much for your excellent example of the problem.
It leaves me aching to know:
1) How & why was WP structured so fragile in the first place?
2) What can be done to protect WP from this vulnerability?
3) Who is developing plans to address such issues?
4) Is any subject more crucial to our future??
5) What do YOU feel is the ideal solution?

Awaiting with bated breath,
Z.Clark


subject: [WikiEN-l] Objective oversight needed

body:
On Fri, 09 Jun 2006 08:21:26 +0100, you wrote:

On a related note, this diff
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Personal_rapid_transit&diff=57666335&oldid=51200702
shows the difference in tone between my view of it and the PRT
proponents'.  A lot of hyperbole seems to have crept back in while I
was not watching the article.  So much for trying not to [{WP:OWN]]
things...

For example, almost every instance of "are" should be replaced by
"would be" since no large scale implementation has ever existed.

Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


from_name: Fred Bauder

body:
Tight control of "volunteers" is standard operating practice at
almost all nonprofits, a management practice that can only produce
big trouble here. Some insight into how our process works is necessary.

Fred

On Jun 9, 2006, at 6:28 AM, Kelly Martin wrote:

> On 6/9/06, Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I expect anyone serious about joining the Board this year to be
>> reading this mailing list. They couldn't possibly have a thorough
>> enough understanding of what the Foundation is about without doing
>> that, and for a community representative (as opposed to the outsiders
>> who may be appointed), I do expect them to be participating in
>> foundation issues before they're appointed, as well as being
>> active on
>> the projects.
>>
>
> Actually I think the Board could profit substantially from bringing in
> some outsiders with experience in operating nonprofits but unsullied
> by exposure to the myriad wrong ways that we do things here at
> Wikimedia.
>
> Kelly
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


from_name: Tim Starling

body:
Roman Nosov wrote:
> Regarding UTF-8 support. Perhaps it would be better if I try to
> explain some of the problems I'm facing. For example I'm not tracking
> most frequently used English words (a, the, and, or ?). In my opinion
> every language should be tweaked separately and that's why I'm
> suggesting to first test it on English Wikipedia.
> Also I don't have a problem with finding spaces in UTF-8 encoded
> strings and splitting it there. The problem is that some Unicode
> characters like ? (letter w with two dots on top, Unicode code 0x1E85)
> are used to write words and some Unicode characters such as ' (Left
> single quotation mark, Unicode code 0x2018) are used to separate
> words. Also I believe these characters could be encoded as HTML
> entities in Wikitext.
> As I'm tracking words I need to distinguish between these "character
> classes" as they are known in regular expressions (i.e. \w word
> character and \W non word character). If Tim Starling has a silver
> bullet that can solve these problems feel free to e-mail it to me.
> However in my opinion implementing that kind of UTF-8 support from
> scratch can be somewhat tricky business.
> The bottom line is that problems above *can* be solved but what I
> suggest is to try on English Wikipedia first to see how it's going to
> work in general and whether it's a useful feature. Support for other
> languages could and should be added later on one language at a time.
>

High-numbered punctuation characters are rare, the approach I took in
wikidiff2 was to consider them part of the word. I considered all
non-alphanumeric characters less than 0xc0 as word-splitting punctuation
characters. There are three languages that I'm aware of that don't use
spaces to separate words, and thus require special handling: Chinese,
Japanese and Thai. They are the only ones that I was able to find while
searching the web for word segmentation information, and nobody from any
other language wiki has complained. Chinese and Japanese are adequately
handled by doing character-level diffs -- I received lots of praise from the
Japanese Wikipedia for this scheme. Chinese and Japanese word segmentation
for search or machine translation is a much more difficult problem, but
luckily solving it is unnecessary for diff formatting. Character-level diffs
may well be superior anyway.

For Thai I am using character-level diffs, and although I haven't received
any complaints from the Wikipedians, I believe this is less than ideal. Thai
has lots of composing characters, so you often end up highlighting little
dots on top of letters and the like. Really what is required here is
dictionary-based word segmentation. Our search engine is also next to
useless on the Thai Wikipedia due to the lack of word segmentation. But
that's not a problem Rowan has to solve.

Putting all that together, here's how I detect word characters in wikidiff2:

inline bool my_istext(int ch)
{
	// Standard alphanumeric
	if ((ch >= '0' && ch <= '9') ||
	   (ch == '_') ||
	   (ch >= 'A' && ch <= 'Z') ||
	   (ch >= 'a' && ch <= 'z'))
	{
		return true;
	}
	// Punctuation and control characters
	if (ch < 0xc0) return false;
	// Thai, return false so it gets split up
	if (ch >= 0xe00 && ch <= 0xee7) return false;
	// Chinese/Japanese, same
	if (ch >= 0x3000 && ch <= 0x9fff) return false;
	if (ch >= 0x20000 && ch <= 0x2a000) return false;
	// Otherwise assume it's from a language that uses spaces
	return true;
}

Now this might not be sounding "trivial" anymore. UTF-8 support is trivial,
I'll stand by that, but supporting all the languages of the world is not so
trivial. But as you can see, language support isn't as hard as you might
think, because lots of research has already been done.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Jimmy Wales

body:
Kelly Martin wrote:
> On 6/9/06, Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I expect anyone serious about joining the Board this year to be
>> reading this mailing list. They couldn't possibly have a thorough
>> enough understanding of what the Foundation is about without doing
>> that, and for a community representative (as opposed to the outsiders
>> who may be appointed), I do expect them to be participating in
>> foundation issues before they're appointed, as well as being active on
>> the projects.
>
> Actually I think the Board could profit substantially from bringing in
> some outsiders with experience in operating nonprofits but unsullied
> by exposure to the myriad wrong ways that we do things here at
> Wikimedia.

We are considering a variety of options, and will likely do more than
one thing.  We need community people, we need expertise, ideally we will
get both in the same candidate(s), of course, but your point adds
another dimension: not for a majority of the board OF COURSE, but having
serious input at the board level from people who are able to see us from
a distance better than we can see ourselves up close would be valuable.

--Jimbo


body:
Some good points. We definitely want control over what a volunteer
lawyer or public relations person is doing.

Fred

On Jun 9, 2006, at 8:41 AM, Kelly Martin wrote:

> On 6/9/06, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
>
>> Tight control of "volunteers" is standard operating practice at
>> almost all nonprofits, a management practice that can only produce
>> big trouble here. Some insight into how our process works is
>> necessary.
>>
>
> There's a difference between our editors and our volunteers.  Our
> editors are, in many ways, our customers, almost as much as our
> readers are.  Our volunteers are the people who serve on our myriad
> committees, who speak for Wikimedia with the press and with donors,
> the people who handle OTRS, our developers, our server administrators,
> and others working in a Foundation-related role.  It makes sense for
> us to exercise tighter control over these people than we do now, and
> we can certainly do so without impacting the open editing aspect of
> our projects that has been so successful so far.
>
> I'm undecided as to whether the Foundation should exercise more
> control over project administrators; I think this is an issue that
> needs to be discussed in more depth than it has to date.
>
> Kelly
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

subject: [WikiEN-l] AFC needs your help!

body:
Well, what's the point in blanking a page? The history would still be
retained and it doesn't save any space.

Anyway, I want to correct a few misconceptions.
AFC people aren't overworked the way deletion admins would be because AFC
work doesn't require admin abilities. The overworkedness is simply due to
the fact only a small number of people are tending to it. If my initial
message can get more people interested in joining the workload for each
individual person would go down.

Also, good suggestions occasionally get lost when a newbie somehow blanks
the page. I wanted RC patrollers to be on the look out for this to save some
good articles. AFC patrollers are too busy in looking at the entries
themselves that they often don't note blankings. RC patrollers would see
that, but so far never acted.

Lastly, I prefer the current situation to anons being able to create new
pages. It's easier to evaluate a suggestion and post it if it's good than to
spend half an hour deleting unsuitable entries from the main namespace.

Mgm

On 6/9/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 6/9/06, maru dubshinki <marudubshinki at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Flushing the archives isn't a particularly good idea, because good
> > articles *do* get lost in AFC. Now, if we had some mechanism to mark
> > each day as "Done", then that would be another thing.
>
> Done is the same thing as "we have extracted all the good articles out
> of this mess", isn't it? Marking the page as done would be the same
> blanking it.
>
> Steve
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Fixit tasks / bannerization

body:
HTML table fix? Can you explain?

Mgm

On 6/9/06, stevertigo <vertigosteve at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Hello all,
>
> Brion's note about this weeks HMTL table fix going in
> made me wonder if there shouldnt be short one-line
> banner message to let people know. Maybe its already
> in teh works, but I havent seen any other usage of
> bannerspace in a while (other than the funding drive).
> A page describing how to help out would work too.
>
> And since this is primarily a site for editing
> editable stuff, and there are plenty of other things
> to focus people on, why perchance not use the
> bannerspace for other Fixit tasks as well?
>
> Things that come to mind are the things I see all the
> time:
>
> * Self-refs ~ "for more on this topic"
> * In-text external links (usually with a self-ref)
> * Overuse of headers + tiny lede paragraphs
>
>
> * Excess whitespace
>
> Blah blah.
> -Stephen
>
>
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list: commons-l

from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Commons-l] some statistics

body:
Solution A:
Increase the number of admins, which will increase the number of deletions.

Solution B:
Have a bot automatically delete files in certain categories that have
been there since X days.

Solution C:
I would expect that most problematic uploads come from new users.
Disable the creation of new users (or their ability to upload) while the
total backlog is >X files (no pun intended). Have a messaage displayed
prominently to put social pressure on the admins ;-)

(disclaimer: I am not an admin on commons)

Magnus


body:
Hsiang-Tai Chien <htchien1225 at ...> writes:

>
> zh-cn: Chinese language used in China, Simplified Chinese
> zh-hk: Chinese language used in Hong Kong, Traditional Chinese
> zh-sg: Chinese language used in Singapore, Traditional Chinese
> zh-tw: Chinese language used in Taiwan, Traditional Chinese
>
> Although they are all Chinese, however, they use different terminologies for
the same thing due to the
> culture changes in the areas. It's not just that simple with Han-S and Han-
T. Also not a macro language I think.
>
> I know it might not be easy for an non-Chinese to understand this, but it's
the language we live with it day by day.
>
> Regards,
> H.T.
> en-wp: [[User:Htchien]]
> zh-wp: [[User:Htchien]]
>

Generally the language codes ahould be all right, however that should be more
correct form to using the language tags, by defination of language tags, IANA
( http://www.iana.org/assignments/language-tags ):

zh: Chinese, only generally "Chinese" or Zhong Wen (??)

zh-hans: Simplified Chinese language
zh-hant: Traditional Chinese language

zh-cn: Chinese language used in Mainland China
zh-hk: Chinese language used in Hong Kong
zh-mo: Chinese language used in Macau
zh-sg: Chinese language used in Singapore
zh-tw: Chinese language used in Taiwan

zh-hans-cn: Chinese language used in Mainland China, Simplified Chinese
zh-hans-hk: Chinese language used in Hong Kong, Simplified Chinese
zh-hans-mo: Chinese language used in Macau, Simplified Chinese
zh-hans-sg: Chinese language used in Singapore, Simplified Chinese
zh-hans-tw: Chinese language used in Taiwan, Simplified Chinese

zh-hant-cn: Chinese language used in Mainland China, Trititional Chinese
zh-hant-hk: Chinese language used in Hong Kong, Trititional Chinese
zh-hant-mo: Chinese language used in Macau, Trititional Chinese
zh-hant-sg: Chinese language used in Singapore, Trititional Chinese
zh-hant-tw: Chinese language used in Taiwan, Trititional Chinese

Don't forget there are many writing scripts besides the Simplified/Tratitional
scripts and localised scripts ( and don't dorget there's have script language
for Maacau too :) ).

regards
Man


body:
On 6/9/06, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
> Tight control of "volunteers" is standard operating practice at
> almost all nonprofits, a management practice that can only produce
> big trouble here. Some insight into how our process works is necessary.

There's a difference between our editors and our volunteers.  Our
editors are, in many ways, our customers, almost as much as our
readers are.  Our volunteers are the people who serve on our myriad
committees, who speak for Wikimedia with the press and with donors,
the people who handle OTRS, our developers, our server administrators,
and others working in a Foundation-related role.  It makes sense for
us to exercise tighter control over these people than we do now, and
we can certainly do so without impacting the open editing aspect of
our projects that has been so successful so far.

I'm undecided as to whether the Foundation should exercise more
control over project administrators; I think this is an issue that
needs to be discussed in more depth than it has to date.

Kelly


from_name: Jussi-Ville Heiskanen

body:
Let me put this clearly. I will and have *twice*; ran for the board.
Nothing has changed in this regard, except my feeling that I genuinely
can contribute. The first time I was a candidate, I thought the best
contribution would be to stand out and keep the debate of
candidateship on an even keel. The second time I wanted to present a
genuine challenge to the incumbents (both female), without causing
antagonism. The next time, if it comes to be, I will genuinely strive
to get on the board, without regard to who is the other party/parties
involved. Nuff said.

On 6/9/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/9/06, Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I'm very surprised that the only people who are interested in a Board
> > position are Fred Bauder, Walter van Kalken, Erik Moeller, The
> > Cunctator, and the two people who wrote to me off-list.
>
> :-) I doubt that this is the case. It's just that hypothetical
> questions like that are unlikely to generate many answers, not to
> mention that many people may not be comfortable expressing their
> interest in this way. I expect we'll see a diverse group of candidates
> if and when one or two open community board seats are actually widely
> announced.
>
> Erik
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

--
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, AKA. Cimon avaro


from_name: Jesse W

subject: [WikiEN-l] To: Jimmy Wales - Admin-driven death of Wikipedia

body:
On Jun 9, 2006, at 9:44 AM, geni wrote:
> Project hasn't changed much in seven months.

> Deletionist/inclusionist wars have largly ended. Userbox issue has
> appeared.
And, IMO, that's the single biggest evidence in favor of the idea that
the userbox issue is far less a substantive issue, and far more simply
the current Wikipedia-wide "conflict du jour".  Not that there are not
real issues (there were real issues behind the deletionist/inclusionist
fight too), but they are far less important than fighting for the sake
of fighting by the large majority of partisans on both sides.

Jesse Weinstein


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikia's new CEO

body:
Selina . wrote:

>On 07/06/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
>
>>Selina . wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Go to https://sos-res.state.de.us/tin/GINameSearch.jsp and search for
>>>"Wikia" and it says it's "NOT IN GOOD STANDING" - I don't know what that
>>>
>>>
>>>means, but it doesn't sound like a good thing.
>>>
>>>
>>Wow, that is just staggeringly dishonest.  You do know that people can
>>click on the link and look for themselves, don't you?
>>
>>What it actually says is: "THIS IS NOT A STATEMENT OF GOOD STANDING"
>>
>>Wikia is in good standing, but the point this website is making is that
>>this is not where you look that up.
>>
>>
>(Argh it's so annoying that you can't link directly, I tried messing around
>with the form input but it says "Illegal attempt", lol, talk about Assuming
>Bad Faith ;))
>Sorry, I wasn't being "dishonest" (hey, AGF?) I didn't know the difference,
>without the explanation it sounds like the meaning's the same ~shrug~ i.e.
>if the government statement about something is "bad standing" I thought it
>must be talking about the organisation - my mistake -.-
>
Bad faith is normally trumped by ignorance, and the kind of misreading
described could reasonably fall within the wider framework of
ignorance.  It is not unusual for people's reading abilities to be
inconsistent with what appears in print.

I did get the "illegal attempt" response when I first tried to access
the information, and had to restart and accept cookies before I could
get the block capitals message that Jimbo quoted.  I suppose that Selina
also failed to read this boilerplate text: "Additional Information is
available for a fee. You can retrieve Status for a fee of $10.00 or more
detailed information including current franchise tax assessment, current
filing history and more for a fee of $20.00."  Did she pay her $10.00?

>Fred: Read my other post ("I'm not saying anything bad is going on at all,
>but there's no way for the public to know if everything's kept secret."),
>I'm not claiming anything, I misworded that - what I meant is how it COULD
>be used for Wikia and no one would basically know
>
>However I don't think it's that much of a risk I just was surprised it
>wasn't as open as I thought it would be, and worried when I read stuff
>posted on WR which sounded pretty dodgy (that topic I referred to -.-) -
>I've basically satisfied my curiousity and won't bring it up again, it
>sounds like the fears of others (I never posted in the topic, but read it..)
>may just be that, worries :)
>
In situations of this sort perceptions are more influential than facts.
Although it is less important for Wikia decisions, Wikimedia directors
who are also Wikia directors, employees or shareholders should declare
their conflicts of interest and abstain from voting whenever any matter
concerning Wikia comes up to a vote of Wikimedia directors.  This will
go a long way toward dispelling erroneous perceptions.

Ec


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikia's new CEO

body:
Fred Bauder wrote:

>A statement that there is no evidence is not evidence.
>
Absolutely, but try to say that to those who claim that some area of
study is pseudoscience.

Ec


from_name: Traroth

subject: [Foundation-l] Re :  Instant Commons : INCORRECT

body:
Hmm. That's my cat...

Traroth

----- Message d'origine ----
De : Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com>
? : Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l at wikimedia.org>
Envoy? le : Jeudi, 8 Juin 2006, 9h34mn 48s
Objet : Re: [Foundation-l] Instant Commons : INCORRECT

At least napster was obviously at-your-own-risk.   As things stand
today I think it would be irresponsible for us to encourage others to
use content taken from commons automatically.  Yes, people can browse
commons and upload, but that means at least one person other than the
uploader has had a chance to consider the copyright impact.  With
instant commons, some drive-by anonymous editor types in
[[Image:Cat.jpg]] and you may suddenly have a violation.


body:
On 6/9/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> Not really. No one wikipedian could really effect something with that
> much inertia.  With admins picking up increaseing control RFA is one
> of the last ways none admins can really infulence the project.
> Realisticaly you are looking at a cold dead hands situation if you
> want to remove it.

Exactly why it needs to be removed now before it becomes completely
entrenched.  First we started getting people who wanted adminship to
have control, and now they have adminship, and are taking control.  We
should have stopped this a year ago, but we weren't paying attention,
and now we have a lot of bad admins to show for it.

> > I occasionally think about running for bureaucrat, but realize that by
> > doing so I would be implicitly supporting the RfA system, which I have
> > grave objections to and which I think should be reformed or eliminated
> > entirely.
> >
>
> you did run:
>
> [[Wikipedia:Requests_for_bureaucratship/Kelly_Martin]]

That was, um, what, seven months ago?  My attitudes have changed
rather significantly since then, as have those of the project.

Kelly


from_name: Uwe Baumbach

subject: [Wikitech-l] Extension CharInsert

body:
Hi all,

need help/answers for following questions:

1. Where can I find source and doc for extension CharInsert?
2. Is it suitable for 1.5.8 ?
3. Any known problems with it?

We will use it for Geman, English and Netherland localizations.

THX!

--?
Ich?freue?mich?auf?Deine/Ihre?Antwort!

Uwe?(Baumbach)
U.Baumbach at web.de

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