from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikipedia-l] use of a bot (long)

body:
Tomos-
> The main problem with the mailing list is that some archived messages become
> unreadable.
> (Some pointed that it should be the mailing list software. And we will ask
> further help from
> Jason soon.)

I presume this is a problem specific to your list setup.

> -Reading the archived postings is a bit more difficult than reading BBS
> threads. Getting a quick
> overview is especially hard.

One cool feature of Mailman is that you can download the entire archive in
the Unix mail format:

http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/

You can then import this archive into any mail client, probably even
Outlook, for easy local browsing. I cannot imagine any easier way to read
archived postings -- compare with a BBS where I have to click around to
view individual messages.

> -Reading through the archived postings takes time when wikipedia is slow,
> (which is quite frequent
> these days.)

See above -- in any case, the archive should not be slow if you bookmark
it directly, as it does not have to access the database server.

> -Discussion on a BBS (and on pages on Wikipedia) tend to be more focused and
> continuous
> perhaps because they are written with the previous postings in the same
> screen, rather than in
> one's memory. (though this may not always be a disadvantage).

I don't really see the difference between talk pages and a BBS in that
respect, in both cases, the entire text of the thread is visible. Most
good email clients have a thread view which makes it easy to navigate to
prior postings.

> -Because the arrival of the messages are not included in the
> Special:Recent_changes

It would not be difficult to write a bot that puts links to mailing list
threads on a wiki page, but I would recommend giving this task to one or
several human volunteers instead. A similar approach is used by many Unix-
related mailing lists, where there are human-written summaries for the
Linux kernel mailing list, KDE mailing list etc. Once your list gets too
much traffic, this approach has its advantages.

> -Harder to link to pages on wikipedia. (some clients don't support html
> links)

You don't need HTML, you just need a client that's smart enough to turn
http://foo into a clickable link. Most clients are, and if you don't use
one of those, you probably don't care about "clickability" anyway.

Regards,

Erik


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Jens Frank

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Trademarks and user names

body:
Hello,

A new user registered a few days ago using the name "Harry Potter".
Warner Bros and JK Rowling have a trademark registered for this
name.

On the new users talk page ( http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk%3AHarry_Potter ),
MammaBaer posted some concerns about the user name and its legal
status. I'm not experienced in trademark law, so I post this to
the list.

Is the use of a trademarked name as a username problematic?

	Best regards,

	    JeLuF


subject: [Wikipedia-l] I like BBS:es

body:
> Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> wrote:
>> The Cunctator wrote:

>>> 3. Better archives.
>>
>> Better in what ways?

> Searchable.

wget http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l.mbox/wikipedia-l.mbox
grep "Axel Boldt" wikipedia-l.mbox

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikipedia-l] I like BBS:es

body:
> Easily referenceable.

http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2003-May/010061.html

Took me 5 seconds.

> Accessible in the same medium as most recent posts.

No, I didn't have to print it.

Regards,

Erik


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Nick Reinking

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Chat about Wikipedia performance?

body:
On Wed, May 07, 2003 at 08:16:24PM -0700, Hunter Peress wrote:
> nick, you did not reply to my request that you perform php tests of the same materials on your
> computer as it the control environment.

I did, but I'm afraid I don't understand the current code well enough to
do that.  If somebody wants to send me a PHP fragment that can open up a
file and do everything but link checking, I'd be happy to run control
tests.

--
Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Trademarks and user names

body:
> Is the use of a trademarked name as a username problematic?

I don't think so, because it is not associated with the sale of a good or
service.

The relevant US code states:
http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/15/1125.html

-----

(c) Remedies for dilution of famous marks

(1)

The owner of a famous mark shall be entitled, subject to the principles
of equity and upon such terms as the court deems reasonable, to an
injunction against another person's *commercial use in commerce* of a
mark or trade name,...

The following shall not be actionable under this section:

(A)

Fair use of a famous mark by another person in comparative commercial
advertising or promotion to identify the competing goods or services of
the owner of the famous mark.

(B)

*Noncommercial* use of a mark.

(C)

All forms of news reporting and news commentary.

-----

That may not stop stupid people from sending nasty letters, but I think we
can safely ignore them.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: I like BBS:es

body:
Hunter-
> Now i've been ignored 2x in a row, and no one is even *capable* of knowing
> about it.

I've ignored your reference because I checked the meta page and saw
nothing interesting or new there. I see no reason to discuss the same
issue in two different places at the same time. As I said, if you want to
improve talk pages, send us the code. IMO, use of a bulletin board is out
of the question.

Regards,

Erik


body:
On Wed, May 07, 2003 at 09:40:22PM -0500, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
> > (Nick Reinking <nick at twoevils.org>):
> >
> > As far as Quotes.txt goes, ignoring the
s, we get:
> >  [...]
>
> Well that's broken in very different ways from the current code and
> older versions. For one thing, \n should close all open phrase-level
> markup; i.e., '' and ''' should not span lines.
>
> On the other hand, ... IS valid and legal (if
> somewhat redundant) HTML.

As far as the \n closing, I can change it to behave like that, although
it seems clearer to me if it continues to span lines (ala HTML).  It
doesn't bother me either way (other than a bit more coding).  Do a lot
of people not close their ''/'''/'''''s?

This is how it works, based on what seems to be represented on
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AHow_to_edit_a_page

'' ... ''          <----  ...
''' ... '''        <----  ...
''''' ... '''''    <----  ...

That is, it considers ''''' to be entirely different than
''' followed by '' (which is how the current code parses it, but not
how the HOWTO page seems to explain it).

--
Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN


from_name: tarquin

body:
Nick Reinking wrote:

>>>
>>>I'm actually in the middle of a C project to reduce the wikitext
>>>parser to a two-pass parser...
>>>
>>>

sorry to drop in late in the conversation... I'd not been following this
one.

I mentioned a while ago that on Unreal Wiki we completely replaced
UseMod's wikitext parser. It's a Perl module that's OO and very easy to
extend.

I'm sure the guy who wrote it, Mych, would let Wikipedia use it if
interested.

See http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/wiki/Wookee


from_name: julien tayon

subject: [Wikipedia-l] call for speech for RMLL 2003

body:
> I don't know if any of us will be close, but I'm sure you could
> find several volunteers who wou;dn't mind a short trip to France
> if you sent us a ticket. :-)
I have to check if we have a budget for this :), if so I will tell you.
As a matter of fact I'd rather choose european people (Belgium, Germany,
Luxembourg, France) close to Metz so that I can find a place to be
hosted at the same time ;)

I already sent a call for contribution on the fr.wikipedia using the
bistro (the frenche Village pump), I will see the result :)

Jul


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

body:
On Wed, May 07, 2003 at 04:07:00PM -0500, Nick Reinking wrote:
> Also, what format is the
> wikitext stored in the database as?  UTF-8?  UTF-16?

Most in UTF-8. Some in ISO-8859-1 but they should move to UTF-8 at
some point.

> As far as performance goes, with what I'm handling now, with all the
> .txt data files in the testsuite (x256 = 492672 lines), I'm seeing
> parsing speeds of about 86600 lines/sec (in an 18KB executable).

On what hardware ?
What test suite ?
kB/sec would be more useful estimate than line/sec.


from_name: Lee Daniel Crocker

body:
> (Nick Reinking <nick at twoevils.org>):
>
> As far as the \n closing, I can change it to behave like that, although
> it seems clearer to me if it continues to span lines (ala HTML).  It
> doesn't bother me either way (other than a bit more coding).  Do a lot
> of people not close their ''/'''/'''''s?

Wiki syntax is a line-based syntax. There is /no/ wiki markup that
spans lines. It makes editing much simpler: if you make a mistake and
forget to close something, it gets closed off quickly. HTML is not
designed to be human-editable; wiki syntax is.

> This is how it works, based on what seems to be represented on
> http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AHow_to_edit_a_page
>
> '' ... ''          <----  ...
> ''' ... '''        <----  ...
> ''''' ... '''''    <----  ...

Sure, those are the easy cases. The code version before this one did
those right, but screwed up on other cases (like ''a'''b'''c'').
Like I said, half the battle here will be defining exactly what
/should/ be done in all cases.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


list: wikien-l

from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [WikiEN-l] sysop

body:
Erik wrote:
>Kingturtle should be made a sysop. He has made
>many useful contributions already.

I wholeheatedly agree. Kingturtle will make an excellent Admin (I LOVE that
nick, BTW).

Other good candidates that IMO should have their accounts upgraded:
User:Minesweeper
User:Slrubenstein
User:RTC
User:GrahamN
User:Hephaestos
....(probaly more)

--Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: Tony Wilson

subject: [WikiEN-l] Admin status: we are asking the wrong question

body:
The Cunctator wrote: "I'm just going to chime in and say that I think
that the attacks on Fred are
unsubstantiated."

Mate, let's get two things straight:

(1) Fred himself started throwing the mud around.

(2) The evidence of the edit history is clear and entirely unambiguous.
Dishonesty is dishonesty.

Casting this as "the attacks on Fred" is (a) unhelpful, and (b) a wild
distortion of the course of events.

It was *Fred* who launched into a personal attack on a number of
decent, hardworking contributors. I have not troubled to respond to his
attempt to smear me as a Holocaust denier (as some others that he
attacked at the same time have done), but you may rest assured that
they speak for me in this. It was entirely uncalled for.

However, that is not the point here. Fred can call me whatever he
likes, I don't think that anyone takes those sort of offensive ravings
too seriously anyway.

The *real* point is that Fred is asking that we apply a standard of
behaviour to Abe that he is entirely unwilling to apply to himself. We
have *still* not seen an apology from Fred for his repeated marking of
very major changes as "minor" in the "Communist state" entry, despite
the fact that he was asked several times to desist, and despite the
fact that he himself admitted on this list that it is a serious
offence. Nor has Fred given us an undertaking that he will not repeat
the offence in the future.

I would have much preferred to simply let this sleeping dog lie, in the
hope that Fred had perhaps learned to moderate his behaviour.
Unfortunately, Fred has taken it on himself to launch a series of
unwarranted personal attacks on perfectly decent 'pedia contributors.
This is unacceptable.

Tony Wilson
(Tannin)


subject: [WikiEN-l] sysop

body:
Opps! I forgot The Anome in my short list of good to great Admin candidates
(another really cool nick - TA should be promoted just for nick name choice
alone ;).

--mav


from_name: Arwel Parry

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Trademarks and user names

body:
[Hopefully I will now manage to forward this reply to the _right_
mailing list - my first attempt to contribute to the Wiki mailing lists
wasn't too successful!]

In message <20030507205434.GD5102 at jeluf.mine.nu>, Jens Frank
<JeLuF=Mmb7MZpHnFY at public.gmane.org> writes
>Hello,
>
>A new user registered a few days ago using the name "Harry Potter".
>Warner Bros and JK Rowling have a trademark registered for this
>name.
>
>On the new users talk page (
>http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk%3AHarry_Potter ),
>MammaBaer posted some concerns about the user name and its legal
>status. I'm not experienced in trademark law, so I post this to
>the list.
>
>Is the use of a trademarked name as a username problematic?

I wouldn't have thought so if he doesn't try to engage in wizardry. It
may conceivably even be his real name. Even as apparently unusual a name
(in an English-language context) as my own is not unique, as I know I
have had a rugby-playing namesake which used to result in some strange
newspaper headlines appearing on the office noticeboard on a Monday
morning! :)

Arwel Parry


subject: [WikiEN-l] sysop nominations

body:
Yikes! I forgot other people who should be sysoped; user:Someone_else and
user:Mkweise.

IMO the old way of promoting should be expanded to include nominations by
current Admins. And all nominations should be accepted with a single
"seconded" by another Admin unless there is somebody (Admin or not) on the
list that disagrees. <evil>If and when there is disagreement we can just drop
the nomination and not even tell the person that they were nominated.</evil>

We can continue to yell and scream whenever a controversial user asks to be an
Admin (like we are now) but uncontroversial users who tend to almost always
work nicely with others and follow NPOV (like the ones I listed, IMO) should
be promoted semi-automatically via nominations by current Admins.

But we should tell them /right after/ their accounts are upgraded just so they
don't freak-out and think that a developer goofed and made all users Admins.

CRY HAVOC!

Sorry, I'm feeling particularly Evil (TM) tonight.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: John R. Owens

body:
On Wed, 7 May 2003, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:

> Date: Wed, 7 May 2003 23:56:54 -0500
> From: Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com>
> Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Re: Chat about Wikipedia performance?
>
> > (Nick Reinking <nick at twoevils.org>):
> >
> > As far as the \n closing, I can change it to behave like that, although
> > it seems clearer to me if it continues to span lines (ala HTML).  It
> > doesn't bother me either way (other than a bit more coding).  Do a lot
> > of people not close their ''/'''/'''''s?
>
> Wiki syntax is a line-based syntax. There is /no/ wiki markup that
> spans lines. It makes editing much simpler: if you make a mistake and
> forget to close something, it gets closed off quickly. HTML is not
> designed to be human-editable; wiki syntax is.

Not that that's not enough, but of course, lines (that don't continue on
the next one without a *, :, etc.) are also enclosed by (unclosed! grr)
<p> tags, and you can't put a <em> in the middle of a <p> and close it
after the next <p> and call it good HTML.

--
John R. Owens http://www.ghiapet.homeip.net/
Life's full of mysteries.  Consider this one of them.
				--Commander Jeffrey Sinclair


body:
Hi,

By the way working language is french||english
budget is tight, but it will bring you an amount of glory that money
can't buy.

By the way Anther, I meant chaos but the sigle KM is funnier ; does K
stands for K(ch)aos or Knowledge ?

And in my heart you deserve to win ?les troph?es du libre?.

The only point is that Libre Software Community thinks too geek
sometimes, and they only see it is a poor technological innovation (you
don't create a new protocol, you do not a claim for a new paradigm, you
don't even cripple your wiki with bloated fonctionnalities).

I do think that the human part of WP is important, I guess it is related
to libre software, and that you could bring a great contribution to a
libre software meeting in making people remind that animation is the key
point for a libre projet.

Je dis ?a je dis rien :)

Friendly,

--
Julien Tayon
http://www.tayon.net/			       http://libroscope.org/
Si la v?rit? est une femme, essayons de la s?duire avant de la saisir.


from_name: Hunter Peress

subject: [Wikitech-l] MySQL server connections docs please

body:
Lee: could you document all changes that took place when going from 3->4

and provide performance data if possible.

I ask now as its something to have in mind (in case its currently not) while actually doing the
work.
--- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> wrote:
> > (Thomas Luft <tluft at web.de>):
> >
> > it seems that the MySQL server connections are reaching their maximum
> > again. This just happened to me when calling a page on the German Wikipedia:
>
> That's me. I'm in the middle of some upgrades.
>
> --
> Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
> are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
> for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com


from_name: Anthere

subject: [WikiEN-l] sysop nominations

body:
> IMO the old way of promoting should be expanded to
> include nominations by
> current Admins. And all nominations should be
> accepted with a single
> "seconded" by another Admin unless there is somebody
> (Admin or not) on the
> list that disagrees. <evil>If and when there is
> disagreement we can just drop
> the nomination and not even tell the person that
> they were nominated.</evil>
>
> We can continue to yell and scream whenever a
> controversial user asks to be an
> Admin (like we are now) but uncontroversial users
> who tend to almost always
> work nicely with others and follow NPOV (like the
> ones I listed, IMO) should
> be promoted semi-automatically via nominations by
> current Admins.
>
> But we should tell them /right after/ their accounts
> are upgraded just so they
> don't freak-out and think that a developer goofed
> and made all users Admins.
>
> CRY HAVOC!
>
> Sorry, I'm feeling particularly Evil (TM) tonight.

hum Evil Mav (TM), I have an angelic question...(may I
?)

How do you plan exactly this semi-automatic sysop
granting to remain "secret" (unknown) to the candidate
provided that it has to be backed-up by two sysops,
and not to rejected by other sysops ? (hence to be
public somehow)

Hum...is there another list hidden somewhere just for
sysop I am not aware of ? Or is it that being non
sysop, I should not be reading this list ?
:-)))

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikitech-l] MySQL server connections

body:
> (Thomas Luft <tluft at web.de>):
>
> it seems that the MySQL server connections are reaching their maximum
> again. This just happened to me when calling a page on the German Wikipedia:

That's me. I'm in the middle of some upgrades.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [WikiEN-l] Sysop

body:
On Thu, 2003-05-08 at 02:21, JFrost8401 at aol.com wrote:
> For the benefit of an ignorant non-computer expert, what, if anything,
> is the difference between an administrator and a sysop?

"Sysop" is shorter and snazzier. :)

It's all the same thing.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
Cunc asked:
> instead of speaking in generalities, we discuss specifics?
> What are the specific edits and statements that Fred has made that you
> have found objectionable? Links would be appreciated.

Huh? Well, maybe you were out of town or something.  This has already
been detailed in previous posts to this list, and is obvious from a
glance at the edit histories in any case.

Start with:
http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-April/002903.html
Then see the bland admission of guilt without the faintest attempt at
an apology at:
http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-April/002905.html

Follow it up with choice little words of Wikilove like these: "Their
activity is no different from those who think they can deny the
holocaust." You'll find that one at:
http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-May/003068.html

For that long string of major changes over a period of several days,
all dishonestly marked as minor, and despite repeated requests to Fred
that he desist
see:
http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Communist_state&action=histo
ry

I repeat, I'm not out to crucify Fred. I'm simply out to see fairness
and honesty upheld. Fred is the last person on this list to be in a
position to throw accusations at other contributors. If Fred is willing
to reform, to stop directing vile (and demonstrably untrue) accusations
at all and sundry, and to give up his dishonest massive change marked
as minor habit, then that's fine with me. I'll have nothing more to say
on the matter.

If he wants to slander decent contributors though, then we should
measure *his* record by the exact same yardstick. That is fair: same
rules for everyone. That's all I am asking.

Tony Wilson
(Tannin)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: I like BBS:es

body:
Hunter-
> An email-bbs bridge is absolutely the best of both worlds. You get structure
> of a threaded system + emailability for conservatives.

There is already a fairly convenient web interface for *reading* the
mailing list at gmane.org. However, we need to have some protection
against posting to it from a web interface, so as not to be drowned by
spam. If we want to provide such a gateway, it has to use the same or a
similar authentication procedure as the mailing list -- just being
authenticated by your Wikipedia account would not suffice, because the
Wikipedia account itself is not authenticated.

If you wish to provide, or are familiar with a web interface that allows
*posting* to a mailman-based lists with authentication, then yes, that
would be an option.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikitech-l] Error on searching

body:
On Thu, 2003-05-08 at 02:49, Andre Engels wrote:
> When searching on WikipediaNL, I get the following error message:
>
> "1016: Can't open file: 'searchindex.MYI'. (errno: 145)".

Fulltext indexes need to be rebuilt for mysql 4, IIRC...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Error on searching

body:
On Thu, 2003-05-08 at 03:05, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
> > (Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com>):
> > Fulltext indexes need to be rebuilt for mysql 4, IIRC...
>
> English is done. I also had to restart mysqld after setting tempdir
> to /usr/local/mysql/tmp, because /tmp didn't have enough space to
> rebuild the index. I'll start on the others after I get up in the
> morning.

Great. In the meantime, I'm just running a "repair table searchindex" on
the ones that are coming up with errors.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
--- julien tayon <julien at tayon.net> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> By the way working language is french||english
> budget is tight, but it will bring you an amount of
> glory that money
> can't buy.

btw, whose budget is it ???

> And in my heart you deserve to win ?les troph?es du
> libre?.
> I do think that the human part of WP is important, I
> guess it is related
> to libre software, and that you could bring a great
> contribution to a
> libre software meeting in making people remind that
> animation is the key
> point for a libre projet.

Coming back to the human part Jul...I think it equally
important that the human part is balanced. By which I
mean we badly miss some parts of the francophone
humanity, africans for a cultural example or women for
a sexual example (I am sure this is a bad expression,
never mind).

Trying to attract them is no easy work. I think some
articles dealing with quite specific feminin matters
could bring us some incoming traffic (incoming = new
editors).

I am badly disappointed at the willingness some
french-speaking editors show to delete articles
dealing with epilation or swimming suit.
There is a lot to say about these topics. Encyclopedic
mattter I mean.
History of the swimming suit (change of mores,
differences of nudity perception among countries and
cultures)
Origin of the evolution (claimed sex liberation,
freedom of the body, sun tanning...)
Implications (skin cancer, skin aging, pressure to be
thin, pressure to look good, and yes...pressure for
bresilienne or total epilation)

A whole generation pressured by medias to fit in the
mold. To spent money artificially sun tanning in
winter, epilating till one look like a little kid.

I do not get it...this is at least as important than
any article claiming that

"an '''apple''' is a [[fruit]]"

So, why can this one be acceptable as a stub, but an
article on bresilian swimming suit not be ?

Very friendly Jul

Ant (a matriarchal society element)

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com


body:
The point, Cunc, is not the worth of the edit (though it was (a) in the
wrong entry, and (b) grossly one-sided - communist governments tend to
be rather good at somethings, notably health care and education: which
of course, Fred being Fred, he was determined to utterly ignore).

The point is is the dishonesty. Go look at that edit history: it was no
accident, it was repeated 19 or 20 times, with no apology.

Then look at the wild and untrue accusations made about other
contributors on the list.

Did you see *me* yelling? So why am *I* suddenly placed in the path of
this loose cannon on the mailing list?

One rule for all. That is fair. If Fred's actions are acceptable (which
I dispute), then what shred of an excuse does he pin his opposition to
Abe on?

Tony Wilson
(Tannin)


subject: [WikiEN-l] sysop nominations

body:
On Thu, 8 May 2003, tarquin wrote:

> Date: Thu, 08 May 2003 09:46:14 +0100
> From: tarquin <tarquin at planetunreal.com>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] sysop nominations
>
>
> Daniel Mayer wrote:
>
> >Yikes! I forgot other people who should be sysoped; user:Someone_else and
> >user:Mkweise.
> >
> >
> user:JohnOwens unless he is one already.

Haven't looked at the deletion log much lately, have you? ;) Thanks for
the thought though.

I'll happily second for the following:

User:Kingturtle
User:Minesweeper
User:Hephaestos
User:The Anome
User:Someone_else

And Mav, you're still infringing my trademark. ;)

--
John R. Owens http://www.ghiapet.homeip.net/
Sex is nobody's business but the three people involved.


from_name: Jimmy Wales

in_reply_to: <BAY1-F160f6WVY5jVkj000045f7@hotmail.com>; from jtdirl@hotmail.com on Thu, May 08, 2003 at 04:27:58AM +0100

body:
james duffy wrote:
> Whatever about the text's problems, the central one was that it was
> on the wrong page. That page was exclusively to do with a political
> science definition of 'communist state',

But the title of the page is just [[Communist state]], and so your
declaration that the page should be limited to just a techincal
definition is possibly premature.

> Yet he consistently ignored every contributor and reverted to his
> poorly written irrelevant material, burying major changes as minor
> edits, on occasion reverting minute by minute.

I don't condone any of that, and yet, I can't help but point out that
it "takes two to tango" -- every time he was reverting
minute-by-minute, so was someone else.

His text was everything you say it is -- POV, and in the wrong
location (at best), and partly false (perhaps).  And yet, I think that
it's worthwhile for everyone (especially Fred, but others, too) to
take stock of how this might have been handled more amicably.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: I like BBS:es

in_reply_to: <8lSfsz8xpVB@erik_moeller>; from erik_moeller@gmx.de on Thu, May 08, 2003 at 03:13:00AM +0200

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
> If we want to provide such a gateway, it has to use the same or a
> similar authentication procedure as the mailing list -- just being
> authenticated by your Wikipedia account would not suffice, because the
> Wikipedia account itself is not authenticated.

I'm not sure I follow you here.  What authentication is necessary?

We do have the option of "posts only by subscribers" turned on, but
that's solely to prevent spamming, as far as I know.  What additional
reasons for authentication might there be?

It seems unlikely to me that spammers would bother to abuse a
web-posting interface.  It would be a lot of work, and the one thing
spammers like to avoid is work.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: I like BBS:es

body:
Hunter-
>   OR
>   --hack in full and secure email responding into an already existing bbs
> like phpbb (which already supports email notification per topic AND which I
> am already comfortable with, as I've shown this list a patch that I made for
> it  see phpbb-hpmods.sf.net)

The complexity of mailman/PHPBB interaction seems too high, and so would
be the replication of the entire mailman functionality in PHPBB. Keep in
mind that comments should only be plaintext, quotes need to be done email
style (">foo"), linebreaks should be inserted automatically, message
references need to be retained, messages sent to the mailing list need to
appear in the PHPBB etc.

I suggest taking a look at ways to improve the mailman web interface to
allow members to post through it. I have not seen posting functionality at
the Scipy example site you linked to, but it did have search functionality
-- perhaps you could send the patches for that to wikitech-l and ask for
the functionality to be added to our installed mailman package.

> As I have requested many times now, could I please be granted an admin
> account so I can start this work in a most transparent way.

Please be specific in what kind of access you want. A shell account on the
Wikipedia server? Why? If you patch mailman to support the above, it would
be perfectly reasonable to do so by sending a patch. I don't have a shell
account either and have never needed one.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: I like BBS:es

body:
Hunter Peress wrote:
> there has even been a thread about granting everyone on wikipedia
> shell access. Were this idea fact by this point, I would have had a
> shell account 7 months ago.

Wow, I must have missed that thread, but basically I don't think that
would be a good idea.  I don't mind us being pretty open with shell
accounts for anyone who needs them, developers, but "internal"
security, security for users from the command line, is something I'd
rather not worry about too much.

--Jimbo


from_name: james duffy

body:
>I agree.  The text is highly problematic in places, and needs NPOV
>work in many ways, *however* it is certainly not "vandalism" or
>anything of the sort.  It needs softening and formalizing.

Whatever about the text's problems, the central one was that it was on the
wrong page. That page was exclusively to do with a political science
definition of 'communist state', which is to do with a system of government
based on marxism-leninism in which party and constitutional organs of the
state are blurred because of a fundamental principle of marxism-leninism;
put simply that the party is the state and the state is the party. The page
is not a discussion group on communism, there are plenty such pages, but
purely a discussion of a political science definition of the working of a
system that in contrast to pluralist democracies does not separate the means
by which a political elite come to power (the party) and the manner in which
they exercise power  (the constitutional organs of the state). That is all
that page is about. Nothing more.

User after user lined up to tell Fred Bauder that (a) his contribution was
not NPOV (which he admitted, calling it himself 'unbalanced') but more
importantly, (b) even if perfectly NPOV was on the wrong page. Yet he
consistently ignored every contributor and reverted to his poorly written
irrelevant material, burying major changes as minor edits, on occasion
reverting minute by minute. He listened to no-one else, paid heed to no
advice but continually planted irrelevant material on the wrong page. It
took nearly 20 reversions by a list of people, many of whom came to see what
the argument was and immediately agreed that what he was putting on the page
was 100% irrelevant to the content of the page, for him to stop.

If I went to a page on 'Federal Republic' which was simply talking about the
definition of what a Federal Republic is, and plonked in statements about
the United States treatment of native Americans when everyone on the page
kept saying 'stop. This is the wrong page for it' and kept doing it in the
face of everyone else's opposition twenty times, that would rightly be seen
as agenda-driven vandalism. Similarly if I went to 'Constitutional Monarchy'
and in the middle of a page on the legal and constitutional definition of
constitutional monarchy plonked in reference to Prince Charles in a taped
telephone call telling Camilla Parker Bowles he wished he was her tampon
(which he said), or if I went to the page on 'Conferation' and in the face
of universal opposition plonked in references to the collaboration of Swiss
banks with Nazi Germany, that would be seen as blatent vandalism on a page
that was not on that topic.

The issue isn't the content, though there was as Fred Bauder himself
admitted a problem of lack of balance there. The issue is simply and clearly
that in spite of the appeals of people on the talk pages, in spite of the
comments of everyone bar Adam that what he was doing was putting information
on the WRONG page, FB continued to do so and did so nearly 20 times. This
was after he had tried time and time again to remove the relevant political
science definition from the article on China and put in a POV term. In other
words in the space of a few days he had tried to add POV content to two
pages, tried to stop one being linked to the other, and when he failed there
tried to change the whole meaning of the second page to insert his political
agenda into it, even through he was told by everyone that he was
deliberately twisting the contents of a page to put information on it that
was not relevant to that page.

One could argue that he did not understand the meaning of the 'communist
state' page, except that everyone clearly did; those there at the start and
those who came into the debate later on. So either he was unable to grasp
what the entire planet could as to the nature of the contents, or he could
but was determined to ignore the consensus, ignore the definition, ignore
the advice and ignore the evidence on the page and add in his own
propagandistic stuff regardless, having failed to get it accepted on other
pages. If the latter, then given that he made nearly 20 attempts to force
his irrelevant 'unbalanced' add-ons, disguised as minor edits, he was
engaged in the blatent POV vandalism of the article. That is the widespread
view of the people who worked on that page.

Finally, he is now on the w-list accusing people who were simply concerned
with keeping a page on a political science definition focused on the
political definition, not on his broader view on communism, of being like
those who deny the Holocaust, a libelous accusation for which he has offered
no apology. If he manages to rewrite his paragraphs in a NPOV manner, there
are many pages into which it can be included. But it was and will remain
irrelevant to a page that is simply to do with a political science
definition, not a broader analysis of communism. And trying to force his
stuff through 'minor edits' onto a page when everyone tells him it is the
wrong page for that information, and doing so 20 times, is blatent
vandalism.

JT

_________________________________________________________________
The new MSN 8: smart spam protection and 2 months FREE*
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail


subject: [WikiEN-l] administrator's status

body:
Or as we Europeans would say, 'One hundred and seventy-two' :-)
JT

>Perhaps One-seventy-two?
>
>Zoe
>
>--- tarquin <tarquin at planetunreal.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > Jimmy Wales wrote:
> >
> > >Erik Moeller wrote:
> > >
> > >
> > >>now that you've got an idea how things work around
> > here, how about
> > >>signing up with a new name? "172" isn't really a
> > username anyway,
> > >>and people will probably be more accomodating when
> > they do not get
> > >>the feeling that they are dealing with a number.
> > >>
> > >Actually, I think that's a really good idea, but
> > it's up to him, of
> > >course.
> > >
> > Yup, a text-based name is a good idea rather than a
> > number. Even if it's
> > a nickname.
> >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
> > http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
>
>__________________________________
>Do you Yahoo!?
>The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
>http://search.yahoo.com
>_______________________________________________
>WikiEN-l mailing list
>WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
>http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

_________________________________________________________________
Help STOP SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE*
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: I like BBS:es

body:
Hunter-
> Each of those steps would be to make one act more like other. This implies
> developing one of the paths to the point where an acceptable system is
> achieved. As I have shown, there are no worries to be had about this
> potentially precarious process as I have already hacked through phpbb, and I
> am a pythoneer, thus am very comfortable with the internals of mailman.

That's fine. Just keep in mind that the mailing list functionality needs
to continue to operate as it does now.

> I have already presented why:specifically to conduct my research and
> development on the wikipedia machine in a completely open fashion. I have
> monitered the lists here over time, and there has even been a thread about
> granting everyone on wikipedia shell access. Were this idea fact by this
> point, I would have had a shell account 7 months ago.

Wikipedia is not a shell account provider. If you beg long enough, you
will probably get access, but you have to understand that this is a
significantly bigger issue than sysop access. I would not be surprised if
shell users could read LocalSettings.php and read the database server
access settings, for example.

There's nothing stopping you from going to

http://sourceforge.net/
http://developer.berlios.de/
http://savannah.gnu.org/

and setting up a new project for whatever you're trying to do. These all
provide free hosting and CVS for open source projects. BerliOS also
provides a MySQL database. So you can develop all the code openly if you
want to. You can install mailman locally and use the Wikipedia archives
for experimenting. I really don't see why you would need shell access to
accomplish anything you are trying to accomplish.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikitech-l] Error on searching

body:
> (Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com>):
> On Thu, 2003-05-08 at 02:49, Andre Engels wrote:
> > When searching on WikipediaNL, I get the following error message:
> >
> > "1016: Can't open file: 'searchindex.MYI'. (errno: 145)".
>
> Fulltext indexes need to be rebuilt for mysql 4, IIRC...

English is done. I also had to restart mysqld after setting tempdir
to /usr/local/mysql/tmp, because /tmp didn't have enough space to
rebuild the index. I'll start on the others after I get up in the
morning.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


subject: [Wikitech-l] Patch for LanguageDe.php

references:
<3EAFDF29.6090402@corell.dyndns.org>
	 <3EBA3FDA.4020106@corell.dyndns.org>

body:
On Thu, 2003-05-08 at 04:30, Thomas Corell wrote:
> I know all developers are currently very busy, therefore this question. Is
> there a way you would prefere to get the patches or any way I can support
> the patching and activating of those patches? Or is sending the patches to
> this list the best way?

At this point sending to this list is probably the best way; whichever
of us gets a chance to see and apply it first can thus do so.

Note that the patches tracker on sourceforge is a dead end, don't ever
put anything there as it will never be seen. :)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Tomos at Wikipedia

subject: [Wikipedia-l] the japanese language problem

body:
Hunter;

Thanks a lot for your concern. I described the problem at my User_talk:
page. Would you take a look?
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Tomos

I can also be reached by wikimail.

_________________________________________________________________
MSN 8 with e-mail virus protection service: 2 months FREE*
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus


from_name: JFrost8401 at aol.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] Sysop

body:
For the benefit of an ignorant non-computer expert, what, if anything, is the
difference between an administrator and a sysop?

Jim
(aka jimfbleak)
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body:
--- julien tayon <julien at tayon.net> wrote:
> > I am badly disappointed at the willingness some
> > french-speaking editors show to delete articles
> > dealing with epilation or swimming suit.

> I know this guy very well ;)

Yes ? :-)

> I never was against the topic. The day I deleted it
> (a long time ago
> for me), it was unintentionnaly. Aoineko reverted it
> as soon as I told
> him (15 seconds later) and that's the reason why he
> was the apparent
> author of the article, if my memory is clear. I am
> accountable
> for that, and that's the only time I did such a
> thing.

You know what really get me at a loss here ?

How could you delete that article since you are no
admin ???

Sometimes, some questions are better left unasked...

> [...]
> >
> > "an '''apple''' is a [[fruit]]"
> >
> > So, why can this one be acceptable as a stub, but
> an
> > article on bresilian swimming suit not be ?
> There is quite more information in the apple stub.
>
> That is the reason why we use discussion page and
> mailing list : to come
> to an agreement. I think and said that the 10K
> article objective have
> induced a lower average quality. My opinion is
> quality is a better
> way to promote wikipedia than quantity. Being the
> 1st, 2nd or 10th
> wikipedia is a weaker motivation than trying to
> write accurate and
> well written article.

I see no disagreement here between the two of us.

I entirely agree with this. Remind me of the times I
had to battle to keep the integrity of some long
articles by editors who wanted to take the opportunity
of a long article to increase the page counter :-)

> Given the fact we have time, and no constraint to
> publish at a given
> deadline and we claim to be an encyclopedia, where
> the focus should
> really be for you : having 10K articles and a lot of
>  craps, or 5K
> articles with a minimum standard of
> quality/information?

Who are you trying to convince here ? Me ?

Me, who got mad and impolite at some editors for doing
redirects or stubs rather than deleting a truely
non-existant article ?!? LOL

I am not supporting keeping "stubs", I am supporting
keeping "topics".

And notice you are trying to divert the discussion.

What you appear to disagree with is stubs and poor
practice of artificially increase the article number.
Not necessary swimming suits :-)

> Anyway Ant, as long as we don't have an agreement, I
> will
> not do anything else than complain ;).

Sure. No prob. But, what are you exactly disagreeing
with ? Removal of superfluous hair practices or
"esquisses-stubs" ???

> Jul
> Psychology.  Mind over matter.  Mind under matter?
> It doesn't matter.
> Never mind.

Hum...I preferred the previous quote...never mind

Amicalement

Ant (actuellement en plein baby sitting...pour de
l'informatique...je suis maudite, maudite)

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikipedia-l] digression

body:
> > Sure. No prob. But, what are you exactly
> disagreeing
> > with ? Removal of superfluous hair practices or
> > "esquisses-stubs" ???
> Je vais le dire en fran?ais pour ?tre s?r d'?tre
> compris.
>
> Certains article ont ?t? ?crit de mani?re clairement
> non NPOV. Et je
> maintiens que les d?lire de philippe sur les
> homosexuels, transexuels,
> juifs et autres me cassaient les couilles car ils
> n'avaient pas leur
> place dans wikipedia ? ce titre.

Nod. I entirely agree with you. The encyclopedia
should stay crystal clear. I trust wikipedians to keep
it a very clean place, with a zero tolerance of
anything that could disturb our peace. No racism, no
sexism, no faschism, no extremism, no nuclearism, no
anti-joseboverism, no anti-anarchism...pouah, horrible
!

Thank god, we are still allowing sex-related articles
! Good anchor for reality.

Amicalement

Ant

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com


from_name: koyaanis qatsi

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: sysop

body:
Anthere writes:
> How do you plan exactly this semi-automatic
> sysop granting to remain "secret" (unknown)
> to the candidate provided that it has to be
> backed-up by two sysops, and not to rejected
> by other sysops ? (hence to be public somehow)
>
> Hum...is there another list hidden somewhere
> just for sysop I am not aware of ? Or is it
> that being non sysop, I should not be reading
> this list ?

No, there's not another list, and yes, you should be
reading this list (unless you find it boring).  This
list is *not* only for sysops.

About the secret nominations: mav has a lot of good
ideas, so it's fine if he has the occasional bad one,
and this one is a bad one.

What happened to the idea of making people sysop
automatically after a certain number of edits or a
certain length of time?  Yes, it might have made Lir a
sysop, but there are vastly more good contributors
than there are bad.  Also, the threat of making Lir a
sysop just points out that deleting a page is
relatively easy, while undeleting a page is relatively
tedious.

kq

wikikarma: is it too late to cash in on [[Six O'Clock News]]?

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com


from_name: Thomas Luft

subject: [Wikitech-l] MySQL server connections

body:
*Hi,

it seems that the MySQL server connections are reaching their maximum
again. This just happened to me when calling a page on the German Wikipedia:

Warning*: mysql_pconnect() [function.mysql-pconnect
<http://www.php.net/function.mysql-pconnect>]: Can't connect to MySQL
server on '127.0.0.1' (111) in
*/usr/local/apache/htdocs-de/w/DatabaseFunctions.php* on line *28*
Konnte keine Verbindung zur Datenbank auf 127.0.0.1 herstellen

*Can't connect to MySQL server on '127.0.0.1' (111)*

If this error persists after reloading and clearing your browser cache,
please notify the Wikipedia developers <mailto:wikidown at bomis.com>.

Perhaps you should max up the limit again (but I don't know if that
really is the problem).
Regards

Thomas aka Urbanus


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [WikiEN-l] sysop

body:
> I would like to be a sysop to assist in the general maintenance and welfare
> of wikipedia.
> Sincerely,
> Oliver King Turtle

Kingturtle should be made a sysop. He has made many useful contributions
already.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Nick Reinking

body:
On Thu, May 08, 2003 at 01:07:19AM -0500, John R. Owens wrote:
> > > As far as the \n closing, I can change it to behave like that, although
> > > it seems clearer to me if it continues to span lines (ala HTML).  It
> > > doesn't bother me either way (other than a bit more coding).  Do a lot
> > > of people not close their ''/'''/'''''s?
> >
> > Wiki syntax is a line-based syntax. There is /no/ wiki markup that
> > spans lines. It makes editing much simpler: if you make a mistake and
> > forget to close something, it gets closed off quickly. HTML is not
> > designed to be human-editable; wiki syntax is.
>
> Not that that's not enough, but of course, lines (that don't continue on
> the next one without a *, :, etc.) are also enclosed by (unclosed! grr)
> <p> tags, and you can't put a <em> in the middle of a <p> and close it
> after the next <p> and call it good HTML.

A couple things... I guess I don't see it as being too difficult or too
complicated for users to understand that you need to enclose text you
want to place emphasis on with '''.  I know that stopping at newlines
prevents an entire article from being emphasized, but it also prevents
users from having large sections of emphasized text (without putting
emphasis marks on every line).  The Howto page certainly makes it look
like you have to enclose your text, and in all the pages I've edited,
I've never come across a page that leaves open emphasis marks.

Also, there are lots of line spanning constructs in wikitext.  <pre>,
<nowiki>, <tr>, <td>, etc.  Now, I _know_ that (with the exception of
<nowiki>) that these are HTML constructs (and not Wikitext constructs),
but to the average user, they are exactly the same.  So, some things
span multiple lines, and some things don't.  I think that is confusing.

--
Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN


body:
On Wed, May 07, 2003 at 09:31:29PM -0700, Toby Bartels wrote:
> Nick Reinking wrote:
>
> >* Converts < > and & inside <nowiki>

Whoops, sorry.  I misinterpreted what I saw on the howto page.  It's
been fixed.  :)

--
Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN


body:
> > > Wiki syntax is a line-based syntax. There is /no/ wiki markup that
> > > spans lines. It makes editing much simpler: if you make a mistake and
> > > forget to close something, it gets closed off quickly. HTML is not
> > > designed to be human-editable; wiki syntax is.
> >
> > Not that that's not enough, but of course, lines (that don't continue on
> > the next one without a *, :, etc.) are also enclosed by (unclosed! grr)
> > <p> tags, and you can't put a <em> in the middle of a <p> and close it
> > after the next <p> and call it good HTML.
>
> A couple things... I guess I don't see it as being too difficult or too
> complicated for users to understand that you need to enclose text you
> want to place emphasis on with '''.  I know that stopping at newlines
> prevents an entire article from being emphasized, but it also prevents
> users from having large sections of emphasized text (without putting
> emphasis marks on every line).  The Howto page certainly makes it look
> like you have to enclose your text, and in all the pages I've edited,
> I've never come across a page that leaves open emphasis marks.
>
> Also, there are lots of line spanning constructs in wikitext.  <pre>,
> <nowiki>, <tr>, <td>, etc.  Now, I _know_ that (with the exception of
> <nowiki>) that these are HTML constructs (and not Wikitext constructs),
> but to the average user, they are exactly the same.  So, some things
> span multiple lines, and some things don't.  I think that is confusing.

I guess I'd like to clarify one thing.  I don't want to sound pushy, or
"not a team player", or somebody who is just jumping in and disrupting
the good work that everybody else is doing.  And you all are doing a
great job, BTW.  ;)

Anyways, what I want to clarify.  To me, when my mind encounters '' or
''', it thinks, "Ooo!  Quotation marks that make stuff bold!".  My mind
is used to closing quotation marks, so I guess that's why it makes the
most sense for them to span multiple lines until they are closed.  I'm
not sure how quotes work in a lot of other languages, but I know they're
closed in Japanese much the same way (but with different symbols than
quotation marks).

That's not to say that stopping them at the end of a line is a bad idea
- I'm sure it helps a lot to prevent new users from making a bad
mistake, seeing a messed up page, and giving up.

In the end, I'm writing a new parser for Wikipedia, not for myself.  If
everybody thinks it should end at newlines, I can make it do that, and
that will be that.  :)

--
Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN


from_name: sannse

subject: [WikiEN-l] sysop nominations

body:
user:CatherineMunro would be a good sysop too

sannse


subject: [Wikitech-l] Patch for LanguageDe.php

body:
On Thu, 2003-05-08 at 06:34, Erik Moeller wrote:
> Brion, would there be a problem in giving Thomas CVS access?

No problem at all. But you still gotta notify us when you check in if
you want updates installed on the server in a timely fashion. :)

Which reminds me; we really ought to set up e-mail notification on CVS
checkins. Anyone know how to go about doing this?

>  It would
> certainly be preferable to have a nice web front end to the i18n, but that
> might still take a while the way things go :)

*shame*

Yes, on my to-do list. :)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Patch for LanguageDe.php

references:
<3EAFDF29.6090402@corell.dyndns.org>
	 <3EBA3FDA.4020106@corell.dyndns.org>
	 <1052395963.24193.260.camel@frank.vibber.org>
	 <3EBA4774.8000404@corell.dyndns.org>

body:
On Thu, 2003-05-08 at 05:03, Thomas Corell wrote:
> Brion Vibber wrote:
> > Note that the patches tracker on sourceforge is a dead end, don't ever
> > put anything there as it will never be seen. :)
>
> On the Page http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Beobachtete_Fehler there
> is on the top a hint to use the tracker. Should this be removed?

No, cause that's talking about the *bug* tracker, which I at least
actively look after.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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body:
On Thu, 2003-05-08 at 06:58, Nick Reinking wrote:
> The Howto page certainly makes it look
> like you have to enclose your text, and in all the pages I've edited,
> I've never come across a page that leaves open emphasis marks.

That's right. If you don't have both close and open marks, they're left
as literal '' and ''' sequences.

> Also, there are lots of line spanning constructs in wikitext.  <pre>,
> <nowiki>, <tr>, <td>, etc.  Now, I _know_ that (with the exception of
> <nowiki>) that these are HTML constructs (and not Wikitext constructs),
> but to the average user, they are exactly the same.  So, some things
> span multiple lines, and some things don't.  I think that is confusing.

Yes, that's why we should destroy the pseudo-HTML and make things
consistent and happy. :)

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

subject: [WikiEN-l] sysop nominations

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>Yikes! I forgot other people who should be sysoped; user:Someone_else and
>user:Mkweise.
>
>
user:JohnOwens unless he is one already.


from_name: Richard Grevers

subject: [Wikipedia-l] I like BBS:es

body:
On Wed, 7 May 2003 11:46:37 -0700, Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> gave
utterance to the following:

> Axel Boldt wrote:
>> Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> wrote:
>> > The Cunctator wrote:
>>
>> > > 3. Better archives.
>> > > Better in what ways?
>>
>> Searchable.
>
> That's good.  What else?
>
Its not a push medium: you can take it or leave it.
With the ML it is all or nothing - you have to go through the mail, wait,
confirm process each time  you want to go on or off a list.

While talk pages are also non-push, I think they are very ill-suited to
discussions where threads are more than one or two levels deep - and unless
you check the history you don't know if anyone has been edited.
--
Richard Grevers
Let's visit tombs said Tom cryptically


from_name: cprompt

subject: [WikiEN-l] sysop

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>>I would like to be a sysop to assist in the general maintenance and welfare
>>of wikipedia.
>>Sincerely,
>>Oliver King Turtle
>>
>>
>
>Kingturtle should be made a sysop. He has made many useful contributions
>already.
>
>
Seconded.


from_name: Jason Richey

subject: [Wikitech-l] Patch for LanguageDe.php

in_reply_to: <1052411616.25163.5.camel@frank.vibber.org>; from brion@pobox.com on Thu, May 08, 2003 at 09:33:37AM -0700

body:
I don't know about Sourceforge cvs, but this entry in the loginfo file
f CVSROOT worked for nupedia:

ALL ($CVSROOT/CVSROOT/updatedev.pl %s)

it called the given script with the filenames that were committed.
This is an extension of the logging mechanism for CVS.  It allows
logging information to be sent to a script.  That's what we want,
right?

Jason

Brion Vibber wrote:

> On Thu, 2003-05-08 at 06:34, Erik Moeller wrote:
> > Brion, would there be a problem in giving Thomas CVS access?
>
> No problem at all. But you still gotta notify us when you check in if
> you want updates installed on the server in a timely fashion. :)
>
> Which reminds me; we really ought to set up e-mail notification on CVS
> checkins. Anyone know how to go about doing this?
>
> >  It would
> > certainly be preferable to have a nice web front end to the i18n, but that
> > might still take a while the way things go :)
>
> *shame*
>
> Yes, on my to-do list. :)
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

--
"Jason C. Richey" <jasonr at bomis.com>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Cool stats

body:
On Wed, 7 May 2003 15:41:23 -0700, Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> gave
utterance to the following:

> En.wiki has already passed 50 million page views since July 20, 2002. We
> are also getting close to our 1 millionth page edit!
>
> Check out: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics
>
> PS to developers - These numbers are getting big, any chance of adding
> commas?
>
As in "the symbol many countries use as a decimal point rather than a
thousands separator?
--
Richard Grevers


subject: [Wikitech-l] Wiki syntax

body:
I wonder if we shouldn't contact the developers of other open source
wiki software, and convene a by-email "mini summit meeting" about wiki
syntax, and try to formalize a standard that they and we can all
follow.

We've deviated, with good cause and good results, from the traditional
CamelCase method, but there's a lot of syntax that wikis share, but
lots of little idiosyncracies that should probably be ironed out.

Or, we could just create our own standard, publish it, and recommend
that everyone else follow it.  Maybe a bad idea, though.

--Jimbo


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikitech-l] Error on searching

body:
When searching on WikipediaNL, I get the following error message:

"1016: Can't open file: 'searchindex.MYI'. (errno: 145)".

Andre Engels


subject: [Wikitech-l] PHP accelerator

body:
I noticed that PHP Accelerator on pliny was putting out error messages
that it was the wrong version for PHP 4.3.x, so I reinstalled the
appropriate version.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [WikiEN-l] Sysop

body:
Jimfbleak wrote:

>For the benefit of an ignorant non-computer expert, what, if anything, is the
>difference between an administrator and a sysop?

"administrator" is a more accurate term,
and more official to judge [[Wikipedia:Administrators]].
But "sysop" is more cool, especially in my favourite phrase
"secret sysop superpowers" (which hasn't caught on '_`).

-- Toby


from_name: Zoe

subject: [WikiEN-l] sysop

body:
I agree.  Kingturtle is a valuable contributor.

Zoe

--- Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> > I would like to be a sysop to assist in the
> general maintenance and welfare
> > of wikipedia.
> > Sincerely,
> > Oliver King Turtle
>
> Kingturtle should be made a sysop. He has made many
> useful contributions
> already.
>
> Regards,
>
> Erik
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikitech-l] Link tags

body:
On Wed, 07 May 2003 17:01:11 -0700 (PDT), Brion Vibber
<vibber at aludra.usc.edu> gave utterance to the following:

> I've been reading the new draft standard of XHTML 2.0, and in the midst
> of wading through obscure tags that I was shocked to realize have been
> part of HTML for a decade without ever being used but are still there,
> was
> reminded of a couple things we could do:
>
> Interlanguage links should produce <link> tags to go in the <head>
> section, such as:
> <link title="This article in Swahili"
> rel="alternate"
> lang="sw"
> href="http://sw.wikipedia.org/..." />
>
> And also:
> <link title="Printable version"
> rel="alternate"
> media="print"
> href="http://....?printable=yes" />

why waste precious capacity generating a different version of the page for
printing? A print stylesheet (or an @media section in the main stylesheet)
is much more efficient.

> and perhaps:
> <link title="Wikipedia copyright"
> rel="copyright"
> href="http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights" />
>
> Will it have any practical results? I dunno. But it sounds exciting and
> standards-compliant!
>
And there are even browsers which support it these days!
--
Richard Grevers
Confucius say: People having gift for gab know not how to wrap it up


from_name: Lee Daniel Crocker

body:
> (Nick Reinking <nick at twoevils.org>):
>
> Also, there are lots of line spanning constructs in wikitext.  <pre>,
> <nowiki>, <tr>, <td>, etc.  Now, I _know_ that (with the exception of
> <nowiki>) that these are HTML constructs (and not Wikitext constructs),
> but to the average user, they are exactly the same.  So, some things
> span multiple lines, and some things don't.  I think that is confusing.

HTML things span lines; most of those we can eventually eliminate.
We'll probably always be stuck with <nowiki>, but all of the others
you mention above are totally unnecessary. And there will be a much
better way to emphasize whole paragraphs using style elements.

Wiki syntax is an evolving language, but I'm determined to make it
a clean, well-specified, useful, powerful, and consistent one instead
of the current hodgepodge.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Please, try to be kind to one another.

body:
>His text was everything you say it is --
>POV, and in the wrong location (at best),
>and partly false (perhaps).  And yet, I think
>that it's worthwhile for everyone (especially
>Fred, but others, too) to take stock of how
>this might have been handled more amicably.
>
>--Jimbo

I agree. I also tried to moderate the tone on that
talk page but I gave up. Throwing around terms like
"vandal" to describe Fred is, IMO, over the top and
greatly cheapens the word. A certain very longtime
user throws that word around all the time to describe
what he sees as anti-Israeli/Jew POV and the result is
that, I at least, don't take his "vandalism" claims
too seriously anymore (I also tend to stay away from
articles that he edits - lest I become labeled a
vandal). It is also a red herring that diverts
attention away from discussing what to do with POV
text (which can often be made acceptable by
attributing POV and moving it to another section or
even article). The result of name-calling like that is
often a war between egos AND NOT a discussion about
improving the disputed text. This makes compromising
very difficult and it makes it near impossible for the
person labeled a "vandal" to agree with his accusers
that his text was not at all appropriate to begin with
(since by agreeing with that he also implicitly agrees
to being a "vandal").

And since when is an article supposed to be limited to
one POV (in this case the "political science
definition")? If there are other valid POVs on what
the term means then those POVs should be included in a
neutral and fair way (per our NPOV policy). Fred was
just adding what he thought was valid explanatory text
that described the characteristics of a communist
state. This text is, IMO, is a bit biased against
communist states and is also misplaced (it is really
about the characteristics of totalitarian states). But
this is a difference of opinion and NOT vandalism.

If 10% of the effort put into writing kilobyte after
kilobyte of text slamming Fred on the communist state
talk page and this mailing list where put into
improving Fred's text and moving it to a more
appropriate page, then Wikipedia would have a great
article on totalitarian states. But instead we have a
talk page (and two archives!) that would be right at
home in the archives of USENET flame wars.

Also, saying that you putting forth "ironic mockery"
is a cop-out for bad behavior; it is difficult enough
to properly express those types of language and
cultural subtleties in emails to close friends who are
familiar with you, your culture and the way you
express yourself (and who have the same or similar
disposition/temperament). On a mixed list like this,
with people from different cultures, dispositions and
different levels of mastery of English, it is not
possible to be both "ironic" and "mocking" without
coming across as petulant or even mean-spirited. I
know that I'm guilty of being rude at times too, but I
almost always give a real apology after I have my
hissy-fit.

I for one am sick of the low level of discourse on
many talk pages, this list and especially edit
summaries. Talk pages can be archived and forgotten
but we should think about how edit wars will look in a
page's history a month, year, decade or more after the
event. Screaming summaries like "PLEASE BAN FRED
BAUDER FOR CONTINUOUS VANDALISM OF THIS ARTICLE. HIS
VANDALISM HAS HAD TO BE REVERTED NEARLY 20 TIMES HERE.
HE HAS DONE THE SAME ELSEWHERE " can only be answered
by other screaming summaries - and all that is part of
the page forever.

I feel that Wikipedia is a very important project and
that one day there will be historians and
ethnographers mining our page histories, talk pages
and mailing lists to see what made us tick as a
virtual society. So we should all think to ourselves
about what type of legacy we want to leave behind.

Please, try to be kind to one another.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com


body:
> (Nick Reinking <nick at twoevils.org>):
>
> Anyways, what I want to clarify.  To me, when my mind encounters '' or
> ''', it thinks, "Ooo!  Quotation marks that make stuff bold!".  My mind
> is used to closing quotation marks, so I guess that's why it makes the
> most sense for them to span multiple lines until they are closed.  I'm
> not sure how quotes work in a lot of other languages, but I know they're
> closed in Japanese much the same way (but with different symbols than
> quotation marks).
>
> That's not to say that stopping them at the end of a line is a bad idea
> - I'm sure it helps a lot to prevent new users from making a bad
> mistake, seeing a messed up page, and giving up.
>
> In the end, I'm writing a new parser for Wikipedia, not for myself.  If
> everybody thinks it should end at newlines, I can make it do that, and
> that will be that.  :)

There are other reasons to kill them at line-ends. Primarily, the
block-level elements like lists and
s and
s are defined by the
first character of each line; allowing '' to span lines would require
that we close and re-open them at paragraph boundaries to stay valid
HTML, and that's complicated and error-prone. Second, just /defining/
proper behavior requires specifying some maximum scope; otherwise,
things like '' a ''' b '' c ''' d '' ... will just stack up without
closing. If we define them to close at line-end (and I'd further
define them to stack at most two levels), then they're easier to
cleanly specify.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


subject: [Wikitech-l] Patch for LanguageDe.php

body:
> (Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com>):
>
> Which reminds me; we really ought to set up e-mail notification on
> CVS checkins. Anyone know how to go about doing this?

I can set that up, though it might be more trouble than it's worth.
I tend to do "cvs up" frequently, and anytime I see that there's
been a checkin by someone else I look at it. If I got mail, I'd
just ignore it and look at it later anyway. Also, now that I have
the test suite running, I can do more bold changes that affect lots
of files at once, and I don't know how mail handles that.

>> It would certainly be preferable to have a nice web front end to
>> the i18n, but that might still take a while the way things go :)

Boy, I gave 'em the check script and they still want more...

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


from_name: Jimmy Wales

body:
100% endorsed here.  Kindness is so important to what we're
trying to do, it can't possibly be emphasized too much.

Daniel Mayer wrote:

> >His text was everything you say it is --
> >POV, and in the wrong location (at best),
> >and partly false (perhaps).  And yet, I think
> >that it's worthwhile for everyone (especially
> >Fred, but others, too) to take stock of how
> >this might have been handled more amicably.
> >
> >--Jimbo
>
> I agree. I also tried to moderate the tone on that
> talk page but I gave up. Throwing around terms like
> "vandal" to describe Fred is, IMO, over the top and
> greatly cheapens the word. A certain very longtime
> user throws that word around all the time to describe
> what he sees as anti-Israeli/Jew POV and the result is
> that, I at least, don't take his "vandalism" claims
> too seriously anymore (I also tend to stay away from
> articles that he edits - lest I become labeled a
> vandal). It is also a red herring that diverts
> attention away from discussing what to do with POV
> text (which can often be made acceptable by
> attributing POV and moving it to another section or
> even article). The result of name-calling like that is
> often a war between egos AND NOT a discussion about
> improving the disputed text. This makes compromising
> very difficult and it makes it near impossible for the
> person labeled a "vandal" to agree with his accusers
> that his text was not at all appropriate to begin with
> (since by agreeing with that he also implicitly agrees
> to being a "vandal").
>
> And since when is an article supposed to be limited to
> one POV (in this case the "political science
> definition")? If there are other valid POVs on what
> the term means then those POVs should be included in a
> neutral and fair way (per our NPOV policy). Fred was
> just adding what he thought was valid explanatory text
> that described the characteristics of a communist
> state. This text is, IMO, is a bit biased against
> communist states and is also misplaced (it is really
> about the characteristics of totalitarian states). But
> this is a difference of opinion and NOT vandalism.
>
> If 10% of the effort put into writing kilobyte after
> kilobyte of text slamming Fred on the communist state
> talk page and this mailing list where put into
> improving Fred's text and moving it to a more
> appropriate page, then Wikipedia would have a great
> article on totalitarian states. But instead we have a
> talk page (and two archives!) that would be right at
> home in the archives of USENET flame wars.
>
> Also, saying that you putting forth "ironic mockery"
> is a cop-out for bad behavior; it is difficult enough
> to properly express those types of language and
> cultural subtleties in emails to close friends who are
> familiar with you, your culture and the way you
> express yourself (and who have the same or similar
> disposition/temperament). On a mixed list like this,
> with people from different cultures, dispositions and
> different levels of mastery of English, it is not
> possible to be both "ironic" and "mocking" without
> coming across as petulant or even mean-spirited. I
> know that I'm guilty of being rude at times too, but I
> almost always give a real apology after I have my
> hissy-fit.
>
> I for one am sick of the low level of discourse on
> many talk pages, this list and especially edit
> summaries. Talk pages can be archived and forgotten
> but we should think about how edit wars will look in a
> page's history a month, year, decade or more after the
> event. Screaming summaries like "PLEASE BAN FRED
> BAUDER FOR CONTINUOUS VANDALISM OF THIS ARTICLE. HIS
> VANDALISM HAS HAD TO BE REVERTED NEARLY 20 TIMES HERE.
> HE HAS DONE THE SAME ELSEWHERE " can only be answered
> by other screaming summaries - and all that is part of
> the page forever.
>
> I feel that Wikipedia is a very important project and
> that one day there will be historians and
> ethnographers mining our page histories, talk pages
> and mailing lists to see what made us tick as a
> virtual society. So we should all think to ourselves
> about what type of legacy we want to leave behind.
>
> Please, try to be kind to one another.
>
> -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
>
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
> http://search.yahoo.com
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


subject: [Wikitech-l] Patch for LanguageDe.php

body:
> (Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com>):
>
> No, cause that's talking about the *bug* tracker, which I at least
> actively look after.

I look at it too. I haven't /done/ much about it lately...

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


subject: [Wikitech-l] Wiki syntax

body:
> (Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com>):
>
> Or, we could just create our own standard, publish it, and recommend
> that everyone else follow it.  Maybe a bad idea, though.

That's always my favorite approach. There's no better way to win
an argument about software design than "Look, this works, now."

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: I like BBS:es

body:
Jimbo-
> It seems unlikely to me that spammers would bother to abuse a
> web-posting interface.  It would be a lot of work, and the one thing
> spammers like to avoid is work.

Perhaps. But have you ever heard the term "crapflooder"? There are other
problems besides spammers, and I often use the term spam to refer to them
as well. On my weblog, infoAnarchy, I regularly have to deal with people
who think it's fun to post hundreds of nonsense comments. The same is
possible on a BBS. It's not a big deal usually because you can delete the
stuff. But you don't want it to be sent out to users on the mailing list
first.

You're spoiled by wiki. Everything is easy to fix on wiki. But
crapflooding of a mailing list by some banned asshole would be very
annoying. The mailing list confirmation is at least some barrier to entry,
where you can deny access to individuals easily or simply limit new
signups in emergencies, and an equivalent barrier should exist for a
BBS->list interface.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Thomas Corell

subject: [Wikitech-l] Patch for LanguageDe.php

body:
Hi,

I know all developers are currently very busy, therefore this question. Is
there a way you would prefere to get the patches or any way I can support
the patching and activating of those patches? Or is sending the patches to
this list the best way?

I'm just asking in order to reduce your (developers) work with my patches
as much as I can. I have no problem doing some more/other things to get the
patches running.

Smurf
--
-------------------------  Anthill inside! ---------------------------


subject: [Wikitech-l] Link tags

body:
On Wed, 07 May 2003 18:13:48 -0700 (PDT), Brion Vibber
<vibber at aludra.usc.edu> gave utterance to the following:

> On Thu, 8 May 2003, Richard Grevers wrote:
>> > <link title="Printable version"
>> > rel="alternate"
>> > media="print"
>> > href="http://....?printable=yes" />
>>
>> why waste precious capacity generating a different version of the page
>> for
>> printing? A print stylesheet (or an @media section in the main
>> stylesheet)
>> is much more efficient.
>
> Because we want the poor saps who use real browsers to have a clean,
> printable version too? :)  Of course, if they can use the <link> tag,
> their mythical browser probably supports @media sections as well.
>
Last time I checked, IE handles print stylesheets and @media just fine.
Netscape 4 doesn't do @media, and I think that's the only browser with more
than 1% usage that misses out.
And I thought that the #1 problem with the internet was that the poor saps
are NOT using a real browser :-)

--
Richard Grevers
Confucius say: People having gift for gab know not how to wrap it up


subject: [WikiEN-l] sysop nominations

body:
KQ wrote:
>No, there's not another list, and
>yes, you should be reading this list
>(unless you find it boring).  This
>list is *not* only for sysops.
>
>About the secret nominations: mav has
>a lot of good ideas, so it's fine if
>he has the occasional bad one,
>and this one is a bad one.

Actually all I want is to make the process run a bit
smoother than it is now. It is tedious to seek-out
Admin candidates, ask them to apply, and then have
most of them not even bother for weeks or longer. So I
want to cut uncontroversial candidates out of the
selection process by, in a way, auto-sysoping them. So
when I imply a "secrete" proceeding all I mean is that
the candidate would not have to be the one initiating
the process nor would they need to participate at all.
So there is no need for any secrete mailing list or
anything like that.

And a technical means to "auto-sysop" would be a bad
idea; like you said Lir would have been made a sysop,
so would Clutch and maybe even TMC (depending on the
criteria). These users would have been even more
troublesome as Admins and created an even greater
amount of damage (blocking IPs willy-nilly, deleting
pages that should not have been deleted etc).

Some people think that society would be better if
every teenager were given a gun on their 18th birthday
regardless of their mental state or firearms training.
I'm definitely not in that camp of thought.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com


subject: [WikiEN-l] sysop nominations

body:
John R. Owens wrote:

>On Thu, 8 May 2003, tarquin wrote:
>
>
>>user:JohnOwens unless he is one already.
>>
>>
>
>Haven't looked at the deletion log much lately, have you? ;) Thanks for
>the thought though.
>
>
>
... and you say you've been here *how* long?

(kidding, running joke ...  ;-)

today's little piece of Wiki-feelgood:
count how many "problem" contributors we've had since you arrived here.
Now count the number of "top-notch" contributors: people you've noticed
arrive, settle in and make great contributions.
when I do this, the second number is MUCH larger. :-)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Interlanguage links - an intermediate solution

body:
I know this is low on our priorities.
Some time ago, someone suggested a better way of doing interlang links.
The problem is that as more pages are added into a "set", the work
involed to add yet another one increases. By the time you have about 6
languages, there's a high risk of bad linking, and they end up as a
chain rather than a net of links.

I have an intermediate solution which I think would be simple to implement:

: ignore the link made to the *current* language.

ie, on the English wikipedia, ignore an [[en:foo]] link

this would mean the the SAME block of links can be pasted between all
the involved pages. It's not perfect, but it would speed things up for
the time being :-)

See http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czechoslovakia for what I mean.


from_name: Jason Williams

subject: [WikiEN-l] Conventions and movie vs. film

body:
On Sun, May 04, 2003 at 05:57:26PM -0700, Zoe wrote:
> You don't see the irony of saying that because
> Americans use the word, we aren't allowed to us it on
> Wikipedia?  That because it's an Americanims, it's de
> facto wrong?  Sounds like anti-American arrogance, to
> me.  This is really, really, really, getting old.
> Fine, you don't want Americopedia.  What about
> anti-Americopedia?  Why don't you go off to your
> little corner of Europe and start your own?

I think you must have replied to the wrong message
or something, since the one you did reply to bears
no relationship with what you say here. It doesn't
say that "because it's an Americanims, it's de
facto wrong", it says "leave it in whatever language
the original author used". That may or may not be
a good idea, but it's certainly not "anti-american"
in any way, shape or form.

PS, can you not reply at the *bottom* of quoted
    bits? And snip irrelevant bits on your way
    down? It'd make things much more pleasant
    to read.

--
jason at jasonandali.org.uk    http://www.jasonandali.org.uk/jason/


subject: [Wikitech-l] Patch for LanguageDe.php

references: <3EAFDF29.6090402@corell.dyndns.org>	 <3EBA3FDA.4020106@corell.dyndns.org> <1052395963.24193.260.camel@frank.vibber.org>

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> At this point sending to this list is probably the best way; whichever
> of us gets a chance to see and apply it first can thus do so
>
> Note that the patches tracker on sourceforge is a dead end, don't ever
> put anything there as it will never be seen. :)

On the Page http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Beobachtete_Fehler there
is on the top a hint to use the tracker. Should this be removed?

Smurf


from_name: Sean Barrett

subject: [WikiEN-l] sysop nominations

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

| Some people think that society would be better if
| every teenager were given a gun on their 18th birthday
| regardless of their mental state or firearms training.
| I'm definitely not in that camp of thought.
|
| -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

A) Strawman argument; unworthy of you, mav.

B) Who are these tin-plated tyrants that want to make the kids wait
until they're eighteen?

- --
~ Sean Barrett     | When cryptography is outlawed,
~ sean at epoptic.com | bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl.

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from_name: David A. Wheeler

subject: [Wikitech-l] Bulleted items and newlines

body:
erik_moeller at gmx.de (Erik Moeller) said:

> Just because you're currently talking about the parser I thought I
> might bring up an issue which should be fixed in a next
> generation parser:
>
> * foo bar
> foo
>
> Becomes
>
>

foo bar
>

> foo
>
> It should become
>
>

foo bar foo
>

>
> I generally agree that wiki markup should not span linebreaks, but
> here I think it should at least span single linebreaks.
> Otherwise it gets very
> hard to format bullets with long paragraphs...

I agree.  I find the current behavior rather inexplicable,
since in "normal" paragraphs, inserting a single linebreak
and continuing the text simply continues the paragraph... but
if I convert it to a list, I have to suddenly remove linebreaks.
In particular, this makes "diffs" hard to follow.

Consistency is a good thing.  Basically, a single linebreak
should mean nothing UNLESS the beginning of the next line has
a special marker (e.g., *, #).

If this change were done, it might affect some text... but probably
not that much.  A search could find such text and fix it.

One problem is that this would mean that you couldn't have an
embedded list in a paragraph, followed by more text without
switching to a new paragraph.  I guess you could permit
embedded HTML
..
..
 if you wanted to support that.
In general, it would be good to have a more formal definition of
the Wikipedia Wikitext format somewhere.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Search results - please let people know search is disabled.

body:
When I type in a search request, e.g., "Unix" or "Europe",
Wikipedia reports "No article title matches" - even if there's
an EXACT match that "Go" will find.

Can "Search" do the following:
1. Report an EXACT match, if there is one, no matter what?
2. Report that title searching has been disabled (if it has),
instead of reporting that there are no matches?

I understand why it's been disabled (performance), but it
gives new users a MUCH worse impression of Wikipedia's contents
than is deserved.  Currently, it looks like Wikipedia has no
content, and it CLEARLY reports that there are no title matches
even when there are. I suspect many people don't notice the
"Go" button - I didn't until someone else mentioned it
on the mailing list.

I put this in as a Bug report, but I'm not sure I made myself
clear.  Sorry if I wasn't clear.

Thanks.


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Search results - please let people know search is
 disabled.

body:
On Thu, 8 May 2003, David A. Wheeler wrote:
> When I type in a search request, e.g., "Unix" or "Europe",
> Wikipedia reports "No article title matches" - even if there's
> an EXACT match that "Go" will find.

I've gone ahead and re-enabled the title search for now.

It may make more sense to just replace 'search' with the 'go' function at
this point...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [WikiEN-l] sysop nominations

body:
TC wrote:
>Nor am I. But conflating sysop powers on
>Wikipedia with gun usage is silly and wrong.
>Your principled stand against disseminating
>instruments of death has little relevance
>in a discussion about Wikipedia editing.

Same concept, different level. Replace "gun" with
"power over others" and then you should be able to get
the concept without the baggage that comes with the
deadly nature of firearms.

As with most analogies exaggeration is used to make a
point. Oh and I'm not the first person to make an
analogy between sysop powers and deadly pursuits.
Visit [[m:IP Death Squad]]. And banning a user from
ever entering our kingdom again is, at the very least,
exile. In the ancient world exile often was a de facto
death sentence (and was effectively so as far as the
town doing the exiling was concerned - either way they
shouldn't ever have to deal with the exiled person
again).

-- mav

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikitech-l] New server testing

body:
On Thu, 8 May 2003, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
> Is running on the new server, talking to the database on pliny.
> It would be nice if a few of you went there and did some testing
> to make sure I didn't screw up anything major.

http://larousse.wikipedia.org/en/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Sandbox&action=edit
                             ^^^^

Are we going to keep the evil secret subdirectory as /w/ for all wikis, as
before? There are an awful lot of URLs to old versions, contribs links,
etc that are written that way, and I'd hate to break them.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] New server testing

body:
Well, something isn't right. When I make edits to [[Wikipedia:Sandbox]]
from larousse, the new revisions do get made, but they aren't making it
into the recentchanges table.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: julien tayon

body:
> I am badly disappointed at the willingness some
> french-speaking editors show to delete articles
> dealing with epilation or swimming suit.
I know this guy very well ;)

I never was against the topic. The day I deleted it (a long time ago
for me), it was unintentionnaly. Aoineko reverted it as soon as I told
him (15 seconds later) and that's the reason why he was the apparent
author of the article, if my memory is clear. I am accountable
for that, and that's the only time I did such a thing.

[...]
>
> "an '''apple''' is a [[fruit]]"
>
> So, why can this one be acceptable as a stub, but an
> article on bresilian swimming suit not be ?
There is quite more information in the apple stub.

That is the reason why we use discussion page and mailing list : to come
to an agreement. I think and said that the 10K article objective have
induced a lower average quality. My opinion is quality is a better
way to promote wikipedia than quantity. Being the 1st, 2nd or 10th
wikipedia is a weaker motivation than trying to write accurate and
well written article.

Given the fact we have time, and no constraint to publish at a given
deadline and we claim to be an encyclopedia, where the focus should
really be for you : having 10K articles and a lot of  craps, or 5K
articles with a minimum standard of quality/information?

Anyway Ant, as long as we don't have an agreement, I will
not do anything else than complain ;).

Jul
Psychology.  Mind over matter.  Mind under matter?  It doesn't matter.
Never mind.


subject: [Wikitech-l] New server testing

body:
Aha!

Larousse's time zone setting is on Pacific time, so it's inserting all the
wrong timestamps on everything. Ack...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

On Thu, 8 May 2003, Brion Vibber wrote:

> Well, something isn't right. When I make edits to [[Wikipedia:Sandbox]]
> from larousse, the new revisions do get made, but they aren't making it
> into the recentchanges table.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
>
>


subject: [Wikitech-l] New server testing

body:
On Thu, 8 May 2003, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
> > Are we going to keep the evil secret subdirectory as /w/ for all wikis, as
> > before? There are an awful lot of URLs to old versions, contribs links,
> > etc that are written that way, and I'd hate to break them.
>
> What, specifically, uses the "/w" URLs? I couldn't see that the old
> system output them anywhwere.

* editing pages
* history
* printable
* old revisions
* diffs
* contribs
* login
* delete
* undelete
* watch
* unwatch
* changing number of displayed items / start point in many lists
* search

I'm sure I left some out.

> I have the new server laid out more
> sensibly, with international ones in mind. All should use the
> /wiki URL form in all cases.

Then we can't filter them out from crawlers in robots.txt.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [WikiEN-l] sysop nominations

body:
Sean Barrett wrote:
>A) Strawman argument; unworthy of you, mav.
>
>B) Who are these tin-plated tyrants that want
>to make the kids wait until they're eighteen?

And concentrating on the weakest part of my post and
ignoring the rest isn't also beating on a straw man?
;)

My point was that we shouldn't automatically give
people power over others automatically based on some
numerical scheme and that doing so would give
unwarranted power to people who are more apt to abuse
that power (such as Lir, Clutch or TMC). Admin
selection, IMO, should be filtered through at least
some human-controled process. But what I want is for
that process to work faster and for us not to dilly
dally around promoting obvious Admin choices.

That is all - pardon my exaggeration. I was just
trying to make a point.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikitech-l] New server testing

body:
On Thu, 8 May 2003, Brion Vibber wrote:
> Aha!
>
> Larousse's time zone setting is on Pacific time, so it's inserting all the
> wrong timestamps on everything. Ack...

Okay, back to sweet sweet UTC. Looks okay now...

It also looks like NTP is working on larousse now:

# /usr/sbin/ntptrace
localhost.localdomain: stratum 3, offset 0.000028, synch distance 0.08755
zorac.sf-bay.org: stratum 2, offset 0.000571, synch distance 0.04897
clepsydra.dec.com: stratum 1, offset 0.001606, synch distance 0.00159, refid 'GPS'

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [WikiEN-l] sysop nominations

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

Daniel Mayer wrote:
| Sean Barrett wrote:
|
|>A) Strawman argument; unworthy of you, mav.
|>
|>B) Who are these tin-plated tyrants that want
|>to make the kids wait until they're eighteen?
|
|
| And concentrating on the weakest part of my post and
| ignoring the rest isn't also beating on a straw man?
| ;)
|
| My point was....

No, something of the form "of course we have to automatically grant
sysop powers; after all, all the good countries in the world
automatically grant the voting franchise to everyone over a particular
age ... and that's much more important!" would be a straw man argument.

Concentrating on the weakest part of your post is called "concentrating
on the weakest (and potentially most humorous) part of the argument."

I can't attack any other part; I agree with you completely!
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from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikitech-l] Patch for LanguageDe.php

body:
> Hi,

> I know all developers are currently very busy, therefore this question. Is
> there a way you would prefere to get the patches or any way I can support
> the patching and activating of those patches? Or is sending the patches to
> this list the best way?

Can you handle CVS? I for one would have no objections to granting you CVS
access. There are several Windows front ends if that is what you use
(Google for WinCVS). For the command line client, Google for CVS tutorial
and you'll find countless of good introductions. It sounds more
complicated than it really is, with a decent front end, it's a lot like
FTP.

Brion, would there be a problem in giving Thomas CVS access? It would
certainly be preferable to have a nice web front end to the i18n, but that
might still take a while the way things go :)

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikitech-l] Parser: Breaks in bullets

body:
> (Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de>):
> Just because you're currently talking about the parser I thought I might
> bring up an issue which should be fixed in a next generation parser:
>
> * foo bar
> foo
>
> Becomes
>
>

foo bar
>

> foo
>
> It should become
>
>

foo bar foo
>

>
> I generally agree that wiki markup should not span linebreaks, but here I
> think it should at least span single linebreaks. Otherwise it gets very
> hard to format bullets with long paragraphs:

We had a discussion about this a few weeks ago, and while I agree with
your position (that line breaks should not affect block-level markup),
we seem to be in the minority on that.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC